Visiting and Revisiting: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) Pt. 1

This is Part I of a two-part article in which my good friend Aaron Lowe (Working Dead Productions) and I discuss the 1977 film version of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. To read Part II, click here. 

Rik: The 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau was the first film that I ever saw by myself in a movie theatre. My craving to see the film led to my mother dropping the twelve-year-old me off at the Fireweed Theater in Anchorage, Alaska, while she and my brothers went shopping. At the time, we lived in Eagle River, about fourteen miles outside of Anchorage proper (which is considered to be a "suburb" of the bigger city, but growing up there, we always thought of it as a town unto itself since there is no real physical connection). It was also a very different time, and while I do recall being a little weirded out at being all alone in a movie theatre with random strangers about me, all of that went away when I realized that I was in my element. I had finally found my church. It is a mood that has stuck with me the rest of my life.

What fired me up about seeing the film was a book. Not THE book. Not the novella written by H.G. Wells in 1896, but rather a novelization of his famous story, built around the screenplay for the film. I had picked up a copy of it on a visit to a Mom-and-Pop bookstore in Eagle River (I do not remember the name, but it was same store where I first purchased my Marvel Star Wars comic books that summer). I had seen the trailers for Moreau on television as well, and those had me pretty excited, but the book in my fingers not only had pictures of all the characters on the front and back covers, along with movie credits, but there was also a generous supply of black-and-white plates in the middle of the book mainly featuring photos of the "humanimals" (the trademarked name for the half-human creatures in the film) and some behind the scenes shots as well.

I had not read the original story at that time, though I had read several Wells novels like The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. And truthfully, I forged through the book not realizing it was a novelization (by Joseph Silva, which does appear on the lowest part of the back cover and on the title page, but not anywhere on the front cover). It was certainly not in Wells' style I knew at the time, but I loved it all the same, and immediately began demanding that we go see the movie. Of course, while just a PG film, it was definitely not material for the younger set, so I totally understand why I ended up on my own at the theatre without my little brothers. [Just to set a time frame a little more, the film that I got to see at the movies in faraway Anchorage before this one was Star Wars, with the whole family (sans my divorced father), and the next film I would see would be The Spy Who Loved Me, which my mom and I took in, sat in the front row, snuck in Doritos and shaky cheese, and watched all the way through the second feature, Won Ton Ton: The Dog That Saved Hollywood.]

I remember being both scared of and awed by the creatures in the film, and fascinated by the story itself and its lead actor, Burt Lancaster, who plays the mesmerizing Dr. Moreau, a scientist obsessed with creating his own race of beings by fusing man and beast together in various combinations. I knew Lancaster mainly from one film at that age, another of my favorites, The Crimson Pirate. Being that there are exactly 25 years between the films, I don't believe that I caught on to the fact they were the same actor until it was explained to me. I just thought Dr. Moreau was an incredible character, though his methods shocked me as I was fanatical at the time about becoming a veterinarian. That said, I find his portrayal of the doctor to be the most humane version at the outset, where he doesn’t appear immediately insane or outrageously flamboyant as in the other versions. You can believe he is a serious scientist deeply involved in research that he believes will better mankind.

Aaron, this is your first time with the movie. What is your history with the film? Did you remember hearing or knowing about growing up, and is there a specific reason why you waited so long to see it?

Aaron: I don’t really have a history with this film, and I can’t think of any specific reason I never saw it, other than the fact that I just wasn’t ever around it. I don’t recall seeing it on the shelves of the nearby Video City that became my second home for many years, though it’s likely that I just kept passing over it on my regular perusals. The first time I really remember seeing the movie on a shelf was when I worked at Suncoast in the early-to-mid 2000s. The DVD featured a menacing Burt Lancaster holding a hypodermic needle, a screaming Michael York, looking rather ridiculous in both facial expression and in the mid-metamorphosis makeup he’s wearing, and a few of the humanimals looking concerned in the lower corner. It was not the most interesting cover, and made the film look like any number of hokey, brightly colored ‘60s/’70s fantasy films.

But then I’ve never had much of a history with H.G. Wells, either. I’ve read a couple of his novels, and of course have a longstanding love of all things War of the Worlds (even the bizarre musical version from Jeff Wayne, featuring members of Thin Lizzy, The Moody Blues, and Manfred Mann), and yet as a writer he’s never been a favorite. I like his plots, and I think he has great striking ideas, but I find his writing at times to be too clinical and detached. Although The Invisible Man has some great moments of dry humor in it.

Or possibly it was my memories of another H.G. Wells adaptation from the same period, and actually part of the same cycle produced by AIP: The Food of the Gods. [Editor’s note: The third film of that cycle is Empire of the Ants.] Now, The Food of the Gods is a film I actually do enjoy, though I think that owes more to the age at which I first saw it, back when I was young enough to not recognize the trickery that went into creating those giant rats and bees. I didn’t think of miniatures or rear projection; I thought they had actually found a giant chicken to menace those people..

There’s also something about a bad movie from the ‘60s or ‘70s that affects me unlike a bad movie from any other decade. While I can find some genuine enjoyment, and even some form of comfort, in a schlocky “B” movie from the ‘40s and ‘50s, or even the ‘80s and ‘90’s, a bad film from the ‘60s and ‘70s will often strike me as unpleasantly cheap and seedy, with an ever-present air of anger and violence. It’s no secret why that is; that period’s rage and frustration made its way into every genre of film, and probably most explicitly in horror films. But while I admire and enjoy that subtext in films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, I see those as standouts in the field. The period is often called a great turning point in American cinema, and rightly so, but it’s probably my least favorite period for horror. That being said, the movie truly started to win me over only once some of that seediness and anger began to push its way to the forefront, or perhaps I’m just grasping at straws there.

Rik: Aaron, I believe that not that long ago, if I remember correctly, you first saw the far superior 1933 version called Island of Lost Souls when Criterion Collection released it on Blu-Ray. I saw Souls after this one when I was in my teens, and it blew my mind. I had read the real novel by that point, and even though there were naturally some changes, I felt it stuck closer to the true spirit of what Wells intended (though Wells apparently hated the more horrific sequences). How do you feel the two versions stack up? And feel free to riff on the 1996 Brando/Frankenheimer abomination if you wish.

Aaron: That is correct, the first experience I had directly with this story was through my purchase of Island of Lost Souls on the absolutely essential Criterion disc. Just by virtue of my addiction to pop culture I was pretty familiar with the underlying Moreau story, and yet Souls really surprised me. Not only was the violence disturbing, but the sexual content was absolutely shocking. Laughton’s portrayal of Dr. Moreau is less a scientist, and more a vile, leering hedonist, even before he begins pushing Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) into having sex with his animal women. Laughton’s Moreau doesn’t seem to be interested in any real scientific advancement, only in casting himself as a Greek god in reverse, coming down in human form to mate with the animals.

Obviously my heart lies with Island of Lost Souls. I find it has an eerie, slightly unwholesome power, almost immediately from the first frame. That’s not something I would say about the 1977 version, which I found to be a bit dull for the first half. Maybe it was overfamiliarity with the plot (at this point I’ve seen both of the other versions, and, in the case of Souls, multiple times), but this version seemed to have the least personality at the outset. Burt Lancaster is indeed the most humane, and believable, Dr. Moreau in all the films, and while I love him as an actor and enjoyed him onscreen, I think the character needs more of a touch of madness, certainly more than Lancaster brings to the role for most of his screen time. And then you can look at the infamous 1996 version, where Marlon Brando went way too far with the character’s madness, to the point where it just doesn’t seem believable that this guy would have the presence of mind to figure out, and implement, a method for turning animals into humans. I don’t have a lot to say about the 1996 version, because I’ve only seen it the once and better writers than I have already dissected (or should it be vivisected?) that film completely. I will just say it’s the worst of the three versions. I usually love crazy, extravagant fiascos that get batshit insane, and the ’96 Moreau surely fits that bill, but it’s also too meandering and lazy to be entertaining.

Rik: I am so with you on the Island of Lost Souls, sir. For me, it is not just one of the best horror films of the 1930s, but one of the greatest and most perverse of all time. It is truly twisted in a way that is impossible to believe could be achieved in those days. The John Frankenheimer version in ’96 is also a mind-melt, mostly due to Brando’s machinations, but it is also regrettably an unpleasant, sweaty, and uncomfortable experience. It is not the film the already immensely successful Frankenheimer signed on for after the dismissal of original director/screenwriter Richard Stanley (battles recounted in the rich documentary from 2014, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau). It really got out of his hands.

Getting back to the 1977 version now, Michael York plays the lone human protagonist, Andrew Braddock (Edward Prendick in the true novel), who ends up on Moreau's island after being lost at sea. Watching the film again, I am shocked at how thin (though still muscular) York appears, and this may be purposeful since he is supposed to have been at sea with no food or water for a considerable period. I knew York from The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, where he played D'Artagnan, and York was somewhat of a hero of mine at that age. I suppose my swashbuckling fanaticism at that time was another reason I was able to convince my mother to let me see the film, but I am fairly unsure of that point.

Aaron: I believe this is the only version of the story where the Prendick/Braddock character falls victim to Moreau’s experimentation, and it’s through that subplot that my true enjoyment in this film originates. For a while it seems like Braddock might be coming around to Moreau’s way of thinking. If he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with the experiments being carried out in the compound, he’s at least decided to not rock the boat. That changes when Moreau and Braddock hunt down a humanimal who has shed blood, which is strictly against Moreau’s law. This is punishable by a trip to the House of Pain, where Moreau’s hideous and painful experiments take place. The humanimal is injured in the chase, and pleads with Braddock to kill him instead of hand him over to Dr. Moreau, and Braddock complies. This is in violation of the Law, and Dr. Moreau must punish Braddock for his transgression, or ignite distrust and anger in the population of humanimals. That’s open to debate, of course, because Moreau is such a godlike figure to these creatures that he likely could have avoided punishing Braddock. It actually seemed to me like Moreau was simply curious as to whether he could turn a man into an animal, instead of the other way around. And why wouldn’t he be? It’s something I’d always asked myself while watching the other versions of this story, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been repeated in any of the other iterations of this concept. 

This section of the film was the most compelling to me, and the most chilling, as Moreau calmly describes to Braddock the changes his body and mind will be going through. His thoughts begin to break down and words are replaced by images and instinct. His screams of pain seem to inspire even the sympathy of the humanimals, who certainly know better than anyone what he’s going through. It also inspires the sympathy of Moreau’s right hand man, Montgomery, who opposes Moreau’s decision only to get shot for it. This angers the humanimals, who witness Moreau breaking his own law, and sets the stage for the final confrontation when the beasts storm Moreau’s compound. There’s a nice touch in this section, after the humanimals have killed Moreau, where Braddock and Maria string Moreau’s body up over the compound’s gates and try to convince the humanimals that Moreau is still alive. This actually works, for a few seconds, and I thought that was a nice detail that shows how animalistic the thinking of the humanimals was, and how high Moreau’s stature was in their eyes. He wasn’t another animal, he wasn’t even mortal, he was a god to them, and even seeing their lifeless god hanging from a rope was intimidating.

Rik: This version really downplays the fact that in the original novel, Moreau is a vivisectionist who experiments quite messily to achieve his results in creating the Beast-Men. Once again, I didn't know this at the time, and did not even know the term "vivisectionist," so I suppose if they stuck to the original intent, I would have been even more shocked than I was by Moreau's domineering behavior. Here, the doctor mainly sticks his subjects with a syringe; using some sort of serum he has developed using human genes that can somehow transform the animals into human beings. What a rotten turn for the animals. They were certainly better off before.

Part II of this discussion can be found on The Working Dead Productions blog by following this link: http://bit.ly/1PDclpe.

Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout! [Pt. 2]

[To read Pt. 1 of this article, click here.]

As I mentioned in Part 1 of the Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout, I had basically cut my eyeteeth on the catalogue of films that aired after midnight on The World's Most Terrible Movies and its followup, Son of Terrible Movies, in Anchorage, Alaska back in the late '70s. And, as such things tend to go, it would have been relegated to a dim but delightful memory for the rest of my life had I not written about in a passing way on The Cinema 4 Pylon a decade ago.

When I first created The Cinema 4 Pylon in 2005, I naturally started writing about the things that had influenced me the most in my youth, and chief amongst them was The World's Most Terrible Movies. A couple of years later after posting that reference, it was found online by Richard Gay, who turned out to not only be the fellow in charge of promoting the The World's Most Terrible Movies when he lived in Anchorage in those days, but he was also the one responsible for the concept and content of the show.

Richard (who had relocated to Seattle in the intervening years) emailed me and we struck up a wonderful conversation, filled with his reminisces of those bygone days. The conversation eventually led to Richard sending me a disc filled with the old promotional clips and intros used for the show when it aired.

Some of the clips were separate, but most were included in a huge hour-plus block of clips and short films Richard had produced in his time at KIMO-TV. Not all of them were useful for my purposes (though interesting to anyone who grew up watching television in Alaska in those times), so I went through the block and edited out the pieces I needed for the website. Richard had given me permission to use them as I might online, since I had the particular obsession with the show.

I initially threw a few of The World's Most Terrible Movies promos up on Vimeo (though most of the individual film promos themselves were actually for Son of Terrible Movies), but somewhere in the midst of completing the project, that old demon Depression took hold of me and I stopped working on the blog almost totally for the next few years.

To be continued...

Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout! [Pt. 1]

In the beginning there was The World's Most Terrible Movies...

If you lived in Anchorage, Alaska and its environs in the 1970s and liked to stay up super late on Saturday nights, then you might remember the above clip. You also may well remember The World's Most Terrible Movies (and its spinoff, Son of Terrible Movies) which ran late nights on weekends on Anchorage, Alaska's ABC affiliate, KIMO-TV (Channel 13) in the 1970s.

The clip above is one of the opening segments used for the show, which ran older horror and sci-fi films, including many Hammer horror classics and Ray Harryhausen adventures, when I was a teenager. While I had many influences in my youth, The World's Most Terrible Movies is probably the #1 reason I became a fan of fantastic films of all types. [To learn more about the show and how I obtained these clips, click here.]

My interest in fantastic films was already apparent when I was relatively young, but seeing those Hammer and Harryhausen flicks on Saturday evenings blew it up huge for me. The World's Most Terrible Movies is where I met Christopher Lee's Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and Fu Manchu, where I first watch cowboys attempt to snare Gwangi in their lassoes, where I saw Sinbad and Jason fight animated skeletons, and where I learned who Peter Cushing, Barbara Steele, and Paul Naschy were. Most importantly, it's also where I fell head over heels for Raquel Welch in a fur bikini.

I guess we all have those moments in our youth where the mind expands after we have discovered something that perhaps we probably shouldn't have. For some people, that might be drugs, alcohol, or adolescent sexual stirrings that get taken farther than they should at the time. And for some of us, we find the cinema of the bizarre, of cult directors, under-appreciated actors, and twisted genres. I think we are the smarter and luckier group.

Vampires, giant monsters, wolfmen, robots, go-go girls, mad scientists... they act interchangeably as our priests and our demons. Movies move far beyond a mere entertainment for our kind. We recognize early on that, when the rest of the world denies us, the movie theatre is where we can go to submerse ourselves in other worlds for comfort. (But not guidance... no, that is probably not the wisest thing.) And once we have walked through those doors, we can't go back. The mind changes immeasurably. Things cannot be unseen. Or as Pauline Kael put it, "I lost it at the movies."

More than anything, movie showcases like The World's Most Terrible Movies held open those doors for me. And I have never gone back, nor have I tried. And through horrid jobs, a bad first marriage, moves across the country, and frustration at nearly every turn in my life (like all of us have), I know that I can make the pain go away by the simple push of a button or the purchase of a ticket. And when I hear the sounds of the opening fanfare that announce the film is starting, I might just as well be back in my living room in the pitch darkness at age 12, covering every inch of my body with a giant blanket except a small slit in front of my eyes through which I can watch the television screen, waiting for The World's Most Terrible Movies to begin.

To be continued later this month...

Chopped into Pieces by "The Editor"

The Editor (2014)
Dir: Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy
TC4P Rating: 7

"A woman’s eyes weren’t meant to see such things, you understand?"

Ah, giallo! If you are not already a fan of these peculiar psychological thrillers from Italy (chiefly made between the late '60s through the '80s), then you will probably miss a lot of the fun in The Editor, a loving tribute to this odd and extremely misogynistic subgenre from Canadian filmmakers Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy.

Giallo, which is the Italian word for “yellow,” is meant to conjure up an image of old pulp magazines (often with yellow paper) that contained generally lurid tales of murder, detectives, and the mysteries they were solving. The Italian directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento are most often cited as the godfathers of the genre on film, and while the giallo subgenre has largely wilted into obscurity for the most part, there have recently been a handful of cinematic homages to the spirit of giallo.

A pair of films, both of which I admire, from French filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have led the charge. The first, Amer, released in 2009, is a wildly surrealistic and largely plotless fantasy that recounts the coming of age of a young woman, albeit using the sex, violence and gore that are hallmarks of the giallo tradition. The second, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears [L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps, 2013], is equally as colorful and wildly rendered, but attempts (not completely as a success either) to marry more of a plotline to the gorgeous photography and extreme violence. Both films are remarkable for their imagery, but they chiefly use elements from giallo to incredible effect without actually existing as true examples of giallo.

In 2012 came Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, which takes place in a studio in Italy that produces giallo films, and which tells the tale of a sound engineer from England (played by Toby Jones, who is near perfection in the film) forced to work on the sound effects of a film, who finds himself losing control of his sense of reality. The film is stunning simply as a horror film, outside of subgenre, but does gain a lot of atmosphere from the plot relationships to the world of giallo.

Even playing off of the same influences as those other tributes, The Editor is a different breed of cat. While the film is has as amazing a color palette and brilliant cinematography as the other recent homages to giallo, The Editor's attention is focused doubly on two things, not mutually exclusive of each other: outrageous violence and laughs.

Rey Ciso (played by co-director/co-writer Adam Brooks) is a veteran editor who had a mishap while making an attempt at editing the world's longest film for a legendary film producer. He accidentally chopped off four fingers on his hand with a paper cutter, and now wears wooden replacement fingers. Married to a former film star (played by a very icky Paz de la Huerta), Rey is unhappy, potentially suicidal, and is stuck working on a very low-budget giallo film. Suddenly, actors in the film are being cut down by a maniacal killer, and the only evidence they have in common is that the same four fingers from their hand that Rey chopped off of his are being left on the ground at each murder scene.

Enter Lt. Peter Porfiry, played to the hilt by the film's other co-writer/co-director Matthew Kennedy. (He is described by one character in the film, appropriately, as a young Donald Sutherland.) Porfiry is convinced from the start that Rey is his man, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary (and there is plenty of it) in his lust to bring Rey to justice. Rey himself is being tempted by the unbridled adoration of his comely assistant editor, Bella, who is also obsessed with finding the murderer. But the murders keep piling up, and Rey is ever so swiftly heading towards another nervous breakdown of the sort that once landed him in a mental hospital.

The producers within the film are insanely casual about each loss to the cast and crew, and are always ready almost immediately to insert an even less talented replacement. Even with the film, this is not unnoticed. The editor asks his producer at one point, “Where do you find these people?” One can only imagine the ultimate horrid end product of these recasts, as the film they are making is seen to be ridiculous from the start, though only slightly less silly than the “real world” the film proper projects.

I like that when a new editor is brought in to complete the film, he consults the index of a textbook on film editing for help while working on a scene which contains a tarantula. “Ah, here it is. Tarantulas and film editing.” Of course, he is about to be attacked by one of those very same spiders just before the killer feeds his guts through the editing machine, but at least he had the right book at hand.

The Editor hits the ground running with outlandish lines, both in the film they are making, and in the world in which the story exists. The big gimmick here is that the entire movie is dubbed poorly intentionally so it plays like the real giallo films are in actuality. The actors give straight-faced line readings of dialogue like "And if you scared me to death — the lead actor — how then would the film be finished?" and "I’ve heard these old studios are full of ghosts, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let myself see one!," and they get away with it. And the lines keep coming, left and right, straight through to the end of the picture.

It’s a world where the fraternity of men is far more important to the characters than their relationships with their women. When one character attempts intercourse with another’s wife right in front of him, but then has to leave, he gets up, pats the husband on the shoulder, and says “Sorry about that. Bye” A casual crossing of mutual paths in the locker room ends with "That’s an excellent penis you have.”

And then there are the slaps, the truest sign that you are in a film from the 1970s. In The Editor, they are almost always to the face of women, and the women generally respond with passion, tacit acceptance of their fate, or both. In a brilliant bit of satire in a restaurant, Rey’s wife starts reprimanding him, and her raised voice brings to Rey the unforgiving glares of nearly everyone else in the room, especially the women, for not keeping his own woman in line. Then Inspector Porfiry unexpectedly springs into the room, slaps Rey's wife twice, and tells Rey to not make Porfiry slap Rey instead. "A man slapping a man, imagine that,” he says. And then Rey’s wife agrees with him. "He’s right. What am I supposed to do, slap myself?"

It’s a hard act to maintain faithfully, however, and points to how thin the material within the giallo realm can wear even to adherents. References to Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy start to drift into The Editor, in much the same way that Argento drifted away from the giallo form into supernatural horror only to wander back here and there. Black magic books and spells in Latin appear, and the film leaves earthbound concerns for quick excursions into a dream-state netherworld. They also go Canadian instead of Italian briefly in their allusions when they work in what has to be a riff on Videodrome, even though Cronenberg’s twisted classic has nothing whatsoever to do with giallo.

The mocking but loving tone is maintained almost perfectly throughout, backed up by some surprising and eye-popping visuals. The blood and gore expected in such an exercise is in abundance, as are ample amounts of nudity for both sexes. The special effects work is outstanding and seamless, especially given that it is working within multiple levels of existence (and therefore, excellence) within the film.

In the end, while The Editor is miles apart in style from the other films I mentioned at the start of this article, it is more than their equal in paying tribute to the same crazed cult subgenre. That it is also one of the funniest films I have seen in recent years is a delightful bonus.

The Creeping Revenge of "Recorded Live" (1975)

Amongst the films, albeit short ones, that I have seen the most times in my life, there is the seeming trifle, Recorded Live. As much as I like to recount the scores of times I watched the likes of Alien and Mad Max over and over in the early HBO days in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (shown on Anchorage, Alaska’s single cable network titled Visions), I saw this goofy short, animated by S.S. Wilson, even more. Wilson created this film as a student at USC in 1975, and he would eventually go on to write (with his partner and fellow USC alum Brent Maddock) the Short Circuit films, *batteries not included, Heart and Souls, and, most importantly for me, the Tremors film series. (I will mention, purposefully parenthetically, that they also wrote the screenplays for Ghost Dad and Wild Wild West, and the less said of this, the better.)

I stated that Recorded Live is seemingly nothing but a trifle, but its influence over my behavior has been longstanding, and proves that the film is anything but that in my memory. This is because this movie, as fun and silly as it seems, scared the crap out of me in those days, even as an adult. Maybe it was because I was constantly surrounded by videotape, but I often imagined coming home and finding out that my entire collection of tapes had banded together, decided they were hungry for blood, had quite enough of my shenanigans, and had elected me as the entree for dinner. And while the film may not look scary to today’s jolt-scare and Ghost Hunters-influenced crowd (both so goddamned stupid), but to me, sometimes the silliest of images can dig under your skin and get to you in ways you never expected. Often, and to this day, it is the very sense of the absurdly out of place that worked my psyche far more than the mere intended scare. It spoke of a universe seriously out of whack, and there is nothing worse to combat than a universe that refuses to play by the rules.

This is why the Land Shark on Saturday Night Live scared me far more than Bruce the Shark on the movie screen. This is why I had a serious problem with a simple clothing advertising campaign back in the day which would show a men’s suit in a closet, but which was being worn by a sheep standing within that closet, with an uncaring, thousand-yard stare plastered on its woolly face (the way sheep do). It did not take much more to fuck me up than a simultaneous listen to Pink Floyd’s song, “Sheep,” wherein the titular creatures rise up against their masters (in this case, the dogs prevalent throughout the storyline of the rest of the Floyd's Animals album, who are clearly a stand-in for the men who are their true oppressors) and exact their revenge. (“Have you heard the news? / The dogs are dead!”) The fact that I did not wear suits had nothing to do with it. I was scared of opening closet doors for a good while after that, and also triggered a similar response any time I saw images of animals dressed in human clothing. (But, strangely, team mascots have never scared me but always amused me, though I will say I mostly enjoy it when they screw up or get injured on the field, or engage in multi-mascot slapstick violence or pranksterism, like in ESPN commercials.)

Back to Recorded Live, placing aside the obvious link to the first two Blob films, another connection that stayed with me through the years is the distorted, growling voice of the mass of videotape, which itself I found as frightening as the images of renegade videotape hunting down and devouring an entire human being. I remember distinctly being reminded of the videotape’s voice when the reel-to-reel machine is found in the basement in the original version of The Evil Dead. I have no idea if Recorded Live had any pull over Mr. Raimi and his pals, but it is not hard to imagine they might have seen this film when they were also beginning to make their own early slapstick shorts (somewhat famously inspired by The Three Stooges).

I know that I recorded Recorded Live at some point (actually, at multiple points), but somehow, even with the number of early tapes I still possess, one with a copy of Recorded Live has not made it to the present, and it had been many, many years since I had seen the film. Watching it again on YouTube this morning, everything rushed back to me immediately: the way I felt when I first saw it, instances where I watched it in conjunction with other films, the chill I used to feel from the violence in the film even while I was laughing at it, and the uneasiness I would get from the sound of the voice of the videotape. 

It also made me think of other short films I used to watch all the time back then, such as Hardware Wars, Vicious Cycles, The 2000-Year Old Man, Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind, etc, and how much I used to enjoy the live-action short film format, though I would rarely make time for them in my frantic feature film-watching schedule. I recently spent a couple of days playing catch up with a few dozen Oscar-nominated and/or Oscar-winning shorts (some of them also documentaries and animated films), so I have already begun to delve back into this format. But I am really hoping to make them a far more regular occurrence in my viewing life. Seeing a truly enjoyable film like Recorded Alive again is a good way to get started on this course.

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 3: Oh yeah, that's a really good one...

I was lost in a cinematic un-wilderness of my own creation, so I threw myself into senseless social networking in order to run away from the painful notion that I was not really a horror fan anymore.

And then someone brought about the added notion that perhaps I wasn't even a movie fan at all.

It wasn't intentional on the other person's part. It was merely a simple question that led me to this state: "Surely, you've seen The Last Detail?"

For those out there who have never seen The Last Detail, it is an Oscar-nominated 1973 film directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid, in which two MPs show a naval prisoner one last good time before they escort him to prison for what they consider to be an unfair sentence.

And no, I have never actually seen it. Never more than twenty minutes or so of it, and actually, what I had seen was the ending of the film when I ran into on cable by mistake. "What's this? Oh, it's Jack Nicholson with a properly folded Gilligan hat. Must be The Last Detail." I knew of the film. I just had not seen it all the way through.

But what I said to this person was, "Oh, yeah, that's a really good one. Nicholson... Quaid... Great film!"

What I was not prepared for was their followup, which began, "Well, you know that scene where they...," at which point I blanked out, because I knew then I had committed myself to a series of nods, grunts, more mutterings of "oh yeah," and the eventual admittance that "it had really been a long time since I had seen it, so I really don't remember the details of The Last Detail that well." I then sell the wimpy pun on the title with a self-amused chuckle, and then we start to riff on further puns on the word "detail" or of a naval variety, and the moment gets lost in the haze of mid-afternoon buffoonery. I crawled out of the wreckage of poor conversation once more, but this time, there was scarring. Luckily, though, there was also a form of resolution at hand.

We have all performed this little act -- pretending to have seen something we haven't -- whether you wish to admit it or not. Ofttimes it is used to keep the conversation moving, such as when one does not wish to keep talking to that person any longer than one has to, or especially in party situations when someone has just been introduced to you, and you'd much rather move on to the cute girl over there rather than keep speaking to the boring movie ponce directly in front of you. (And, ofttimes, I am that boring movie ponce... but we all reside on both sides of this fence.) And many times, it is just used to keep the peace: "Sure, I've seen that!" Assimilation, conformity, or just getting through another spirit-crushing workday... call if what you will. But we all have done it at some time or another. No harm, no foul. Little white lies to keep the small talk small.

And experience in this area should have better prepared me for the follow-up that seems to arrive about six times out of ten, that bit with the scene in question. Despite knowing this query will arrive at some point more often than not, you think I could have a better answer in reserve than, "Oh, yeah, well, er, um, yeah... isn't that the bit where they... (throw in whatever scene you might happen to know is in the film)?"

The actual bit with The Last Detail wouldn't have bothered me so much if it hadn't come so quickly on the heels of three other inquiries (from at least two other sources in addition to the fellow above) as to whether I had seen a particular film or not. Save the Tiger, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and A Guide for the Married Man had all whacked me full in the face in the months previous to this question, and I was already smarting pretty badly. I've never gotten near seeing Save the Tiger, despite the fact that I love Jack Lemmon and it is one of his pair of Oscar-winning performances. For years, I saw a copy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz sitting on the shelf at Video City, and just couldn't get past what I perceived to be an annoyingly pretentious title. I just passed by the cover time and again, thinking about renting it because back then Richard Dreyfuss was still interesting to watch, and then choosing something more along the lines of Hell Night or Graduation Day instead, solely because they were horror movies and there might be a good chance that I could see tits in one of those.

And A Guide for the Married Man? I ran into it on cable all the time, and I had considered watching it because of Walter Matthau, but seeing just a couple of minutes triggers my "Sixties Defense": an automatically triggered, impenetrable shield that drops down about me anytime I am confronted by what appears to be cheesiness from the '60s and early '70s. Beehive hairdos, too much fringe, gorillas on motorcycles, a preponderance of non-ironic hippie behavior, extended go-go or cocktail party sequences, pornstar-style mustaches, shag carpeting, lapels that are far too wide, Ali McGraw... these are all triggers for my Sixties Defense, though there are many more items that can do it. (I suppose it needs a better name, since that same mood -- and Ali McGraw -- also spills over the '70s.)

It's odd that this arose in me, especially given that I was born in 1964, and the last time I checked, I lived through both of those decades. Clearly, this defense mode developed out of a need to blind myself to the times in which I was raised. Perhaps it was also a side effect extending from my parents' divorce and my general unhappiness. And such a defense mode really doesn't make sense when you consider that there are so many films from those decades that I love very much. But, when you examine the films, it becomes obvious. Most of the ones I do love from that time don't take place in those times. Westerns, science fiction, historical epics; if any details from the times in which they were created slipped in, I seem to have been able to chalk it up to casual sloppiness. Hardly any films from that era outside of the aforementioned genres, though, that took place at the time of their making, show up on my "love" list, except maybe Dog Day Afternoon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

There are always exceptions to any self-imposed rule. We are all hypocrites on some level here and there. Horror movies, though, were different. I loved so many of the '70s horror films, and yes, they tended to be more modern, but the beauty was that the defense was built right into them. It didn't matter what people wore or how they did their hair or how their apartments were decorated or how many hippies showed up... they would all most likely die within the framework of the film. Perfect. Even though my love for horror began with Hammer, Universal and AIP, once I began to grow up a bit and was able to watch them, the '70s suddenly became a more interesting decade to me, but only through the horror lens.

Then again, personal evolution has always been what I am about, and it has been my major theme since I moved to California. It had been dawning on me for a while that perhaps it was time to put away some of the pastimes of childhood -- the monsters, the aliens, the gore -- for a little while, at least, and evolve just a tad more in the cinema department. And the negative obsessions as well. It was time to put away the "Sixties Defense" and finally confront all of the films from my youth that I have spent most of my life avoiding, which has only resulted in creating ego-shattering moments like the one involving The Last Detail.

My life has been filled with small attempts at expanding my horizons. Why not make a major one, and finally research all of these filmmakers from the '60s and '70s, people within the framework of my lifetime, that I have largely dismissed? Sure, I have never shied away from a Truffaut, Godard or Kurosawa film -- I have always quite liked foreign films of any type, just to make myself believe even for a moment that I was more cultured than I actually am. It's for the same reason you occasionally hit a museum and stare at paintings that you have no hope of ever understanding, at least not without a little research and practice. Despite being fully aware of your intellectual limitations, you still convince yourself of your artistic sensitivity.

As an example, I own and have read an entire biography on Rainier Werner Fassbinder, the German director who fiercely burned through the '70s like no other (or so I read), and yet I have only seen one of his films. Why have I not followed up on this? If I found his life interesting enough to read about for a whole week, why would I not seek out his films, even though they are all so readily available for rental? Why have I always had this block on pursuing avenues where I could actually learn something about quality filmmaking, and instead crawl back into my comfortable hole full of familiar demons, killers and monsters? As I said, I make small attempts at breaking out and expanding my view. Why can't I make the transition stick?

People tend to think of me as a bona fide movie nut, but sometimes, I am more sure of the nutty part and not so much on the supposed realm of my expertise. So, am I a poser?

It is a daunting question, and a hard one for people to actually ask of themselves. Who wants to expose themselves to ridicule purposefully? Isn't life hard enough to get through? Isn't dealing with other people, even your friends, family and neighbors, already enough of a mindfuck than to openly invite everyone to see that you might not be what you have served yourself up to be all along?

And isn't this what we all do on the internet now anyway?

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 4...)

Some Gigantic, Turned-On Ape... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 3]

[Before traipsing deeper into the jungle, read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2...]

A side-trip to another Kong: As I hinted at briefly before, something else happened in the summer of '77 that didn't start out as having anything to do with King Kong, but ended up furthering my giant ape obsession regardless. Star Wars fever had slammed into the earth like a meteor, and my brothers and I were no exceptions to the rest of humanity that year. I had already read the paperback novelization (with the original, purplish Ralph McQuarrie-painted cover released the winter before, not the gold-colored movie poster-draped cover that was in circulation that summer) five times, I had the first couple issues of the comics, and was already buying the trading cards. I was a primed and raring-to-go convert to the Lucas cult before I had even stepped into the theatre.

Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for our parent's pocketbooks, we lived in a town without a movie theatre. In fact, we lived a good fifteen or so miles from the nearest movie theatre, and thus our sojourns into the big city were far and few between; we only saw new movies maybe four or five times a year, if we were lucky. So, when we went, we made sure that we were seeing something we really wanted to see. Usually, it would be, due to our tender ages, the newest Disney flick (like the Witch Mountain movies) or the latest in the Pink Panther or James Bond series (thankfully, my mother was a fan of both). I had started to push things a little more as I reached my teen years, and was able to convince them to see new science-fiction or fantasy movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. So, it was not even a light certainty that we would get the opportunity to see this movie that well-timed mass merchandising had already brainwashed us into believing that we had some sort of moral imperative to go see.

This story would have no purpose if we hadn't gone to see it, and yes, after a small amount of pleading and begging, my brother Mark and I eventually wore down my mother's resolve. Meanwhile, my best friend Rusty and his little brother Rodney worked a similar magic on their mom, and thus, we found ourselves crammed into one vehicle one Saturday afternoon, heading into the "big city" of Anchorage, Alaska to make our acquaintance with R2-D2 and the rest of that motley crew of rebel heroes. It would have been a sad situation if the movie had sucked, but even if it did, we did not possess the critical faculties to say so, inexperienced in the ways of movies as we were at that time, and really, we were kids. If someone in the media had convinced us watching paint dry was the hottest and greatest new fad, we would have adopted the consumer lock-step and marched to the nearest house, staring at freshly-brushed walls all summer. So, whether Star Wars was actually any good was beside the point. It's just a happy coincidence that it actually was good.

So, where do you take five sugared-up, buzzing kids who have just spent the late afternoon and early evening watching droids, aliens, lightsaber fights, spaceships, and laser blaster battles? To the local ice cream parlor to get them even more sugared up and buzzing! The parlor, in this instance, was a local establishment (and failed attempt at franchising) called Soapy Smith's, named after the ever so-popular Gold Rush gangster and conman Jefferson "Soapy" Smith. (Because, if there is anything that goes perfect with a banana split, it is extortion and murder. "Would you like a cold case of murder with your strawberry parfait?") But, sugared-up and buzzing Star Wars fanatic kids aren't worried about such ironies; we just wanted more candy and ice cream. As I recall, the plan was actually to get us to eat some actual food, and I do remember having a hot dog, followed by the previously mentioned and murderously intentioned banana split. But I also had five dollars to spend on candy, and because I was deep in the early throes of a both a burgeoning card collecting habit and movie fandom, I bought a couple packets of Topps King Kong trading cards from the candy counter.

These cards were not for the 1933 version that had somewhat recently begun not just my Kong obsession, but also my jonesing for Fay Wray, a woman 57 years my senior. No, these were for the 1976 Dino de Laurentiis version, a film which I had not been given the chance to see (though in a couple years I would get a chance to see it and regret it highly). But standards of quality were not a factor that evening, instead it was the simple fact that I had the opportunity to purchase an item that had a snarling, roaring Kong on the wrapper, and the hope that inside of that wrapper, I would see numerous cards featuring dinosaurs galore. This hope reared its head only because I was unaware that Mr. De Laurentiis did not see fit to loading his Skull Island up with prehistoric beasts, but rather merely with a giant python. (And the man's name is Dino? Talk about not living up to your billing. Tsk tsk...)

So, I bought the cards, but did not open them until we were in the darkness of the car ride home, where Rusty and I began flipping through the cards, the only illumination provided by our pocket flashlights and intermittently glowing streetlights that our vehicle passed. What we discovered, to the complete opposite reaction of horror, was that we had in our hands little cardboard pieces of what to our parents' eyes would have been damn near pornography: a progression of images of a young and scantily clad Jessica Lange being drenched with a waterfall and in various other states of undress that seem like nothing now, but were certainly provocative enough for a couple of young boys at the time. Especially of interest to me was the "waterfall" card, where Kong douses Dwan to wash the mud off of her. Dwan sits with her legs under her on the palm of the giant gorilla's hand and takes her shower. On the card, while it is clear that she is wearing garments, it was easy enough to trick one's mind just enough to convince oneself that she was completely nude. While I have never been that into the Jessica Lange type, at the time, she worked for me just fine.

I said that our parents (or at least one of mine; my mom would have been fine with it) "would have" considered those cards nearly porn, but they never hard the opportunity. We never let our parents see the more intriguing cards, and we managed to keep our cards to the same level of secrecy that our little neighborhood gang eventually managed to keep our fairly well-stocked Playboy collection, which we obtained through means of having sharp little eyes always on the lookout for displays of female pulchritude. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Genesis, Nugget, High Society, Hustler... we had them all. Never to be discovered by the elders of the village, our "comic book" collection was revered by the neighborhood boys. If you heard us say to one another, "Hey, you want to read some comics?," three out of five times we were heading off to look at titty mags.

But that was in the very near future; that collection would come about in the next year or so. For this moment, all that we had were these, for all purposes, completely innocent trading cards in our pervy little hands. I managed to keep my set of those cards -- completely innocuous by even the standards of that day, but that didn't matter to me then -- hidden from my parents. And I still have each of those cards today. [The images on this page are from my collection.]

It is always astounding to me the moments that stick with you as you shuffle through life. Embarrassing moments, squandered opportunities, and early small perversions all seem to exist in the same file cabinet in my head, while what most people would consider the larger, more important events in a life, like weddings and such, seem to have filtered out of my brain almost as soon as they happened. Somehow, this whole Kong card thing, along with most other movie-related "trivia," has convinced my gray matter that it is of far more revelatory importance to me than those other mislaid events. Somehow, this reveals more of my eventual character than I would realize at the time. And it is probably right.

[To be continued in Pt. 4 here...]

A Magnificent Display of Effusion...

There was a morning a couple weeks back, after I had woken up before 4:00 a.m. to take care of an emergency that was rather liquid in fashion (and to also feed my cry-baby of a cat, who always picks the most inopportune times to whine about something, i.e. usually the middle of the night... the jerk), when the TCM announcer informed me that the Marx Brothers' classic Animal Crackers was about to come on the air. Settling back in bed, I sighed a deep sigh of comfort and happiness, assuming that I would be swept back into Dreamland with the antics of my favorite comedy team glowing across the bare white walls of the bedroom.

This would have been a great plan if I had fallen asleep before the movie had actually started, because once it did, any thought of drifting mellowly back into slumber went away swiftly. It wasn't even the Marx Brothers that did the deed: it was the film's opening six minutes, from the opening credits and music, Robert Greig addressing the bellhops, Margaret Dumont and Louis Sorin setting up the plot, cutie pie Lillian Roth being adorable, and then Zeppo singing... every line, every pause, every sound served to keep me awake. The worst part was that I wasn't even watching the screen; I slept on my side, as I always do, facing away from the television, but everything that was occurring on the screen was fresh within my mind, and everything said was passing through my lips by rote. And Captain Spaulding had yet to even make his entrance.

And when the esteemed Captain did glide into the hotel lobby, I knew that I only had two options: watch the entire damn film again, or change the channel. (Turning off or turning down the TV are not on the option menu. While I usually prefer total darkness and silence, Jen uses the TV like a singing nightlight, requiring both the light and a decent sound level to lull her to sleep.) I started out, as expected, with the first option, sitting up in bed and singing quietly along with the full Captain Spaulding number and the first appearances of Chico and Harpo. But as soon as Harpo's gun battle with the statuary occurred, I knew that sleep was a far more important course to take (I did have a rather important meeting later that day), and that my affection for the Brothers Marx would not be hurt by this minor betrayal. And so, for the first time in my life, I turned off a Marx Brothers film.

This was tempered by the fact that, while I did already own a DVD copy of Animal Crackers, wending its way in the mail to me was the Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, a Universal DVD compilation of the first five (sound) films of the Marxes' oeuvre: The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and my hands-down favorite Marx film, Duck Soup. This purchase, bought through the auspices of a very nice and timely gift certificate given to me by my boss, was something I had been putting off for a longer time than I wished, as I was not buying films for most of a year until I got established in my new locale, and it would finally complete my Marx film collection. (Jen had given me the Warner/MGM Marx Bros. Collection the previous year.) Thus, while it definitely hurt my heart to turn off Animal Crackers, much-needed sleep was the issue, and soon I would be wallowing in as much of the Marxes' silliness as I wished.

When my parents took my brothers and I to our first Marx Brothers film, which just so happened to be Animal Crackers, it was 1974. I was ten years old when our family drove the twenty miles or so from our home in Eagle River to the Polar Theatre in Anchorage. The Polar Theatre at the time had only one screen, but would eventually switch to a multi-theatre set-up, with one large screen and two postage stamp ones. The Polar was the theatre where I saw The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in their original release, and where I also saw Blue Velvet, Re-Animator and The Evil Dead (amongst many others) for the very first time. A few years before I left Anchorage, the Polar was shut down and was cruelly converted into an alternative school which was named, in a very taunting fashion that I just know was solely directed at me to piss me off further, Polaris. 

Our appearance there was due to the fortuitous national re-release of Animal Crackers that year, thanks to a particular rabid Marx Brothers fan named Steve Stoliar. Having recently seen a much degraded copy of Animal Crackers at a revival house, the UCLA student enlisted the aid of none other than Groucho Marx himself, then in his dotage, to whip up wild support and begin a campaign to have Universal release the picture nationally. The Marxes were exceedingly popular among college students of the day. While only Groucho and Zeppo were alive at the time, the counterculture had picked up the Marxes as anarchist symbols, and Groucho did nothing to dissuade the resulting adoration. He used the attention to tour the country nationally and quite successfully, releasing several books, and making numerous appearances on television. The eventual outcome of all this would be an Honorary Oscar in 1975, but in 1974, all I knew about the Marxes was what I knew from television and my mother.

I knew who the Marx Brothers were before that day: I had certainly beheld many clips of their films on television for years, and it had been explained to me that the voice that Alan Alda on M*A*S*H would break into on many episodes was an impression of Groucho Marx. I also owned a series of audiocassettes of old radio shows that I would listen to at night, and one of those tapes was a solid hour of "You Bet Your Life", which I had pretty much memorized by that point in time. (It was my favorite after Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?", of course, which was my choice by default, owing to my baseball obsession.) So, to be honest, I did have some exposure to the Marx family before this trip to the Polar Theatre.But I didn't know exactly what was going to happen to me after that trip. I recall that Animal Crackers was shown in conjunction with a Ma and Pa Kettle film, the actual title in that series I don't remember. In fact, except for a flash of pickup truck careening down a backroad that is still stuck in my memory, I don't remember anything else of that movie. I'm sure that I laughed at the Kettle flick (my parents certainly loved it), but the world stopped for me when Groucho and his brothers hit the screen.

And once Animal Crackers started, and those same opening six minutes I described above in that modern TCM showing came to life on the screen, I almost died of boredom. I knew nothing at that age of musicals, of plot development (such as it is), of setting up characters or scenes later in the film. To this day, I have almost zero interest in the plot of any Marx film. Yes, there are films like A Night at the Opera, where the plot seems to be a well-considered component of the total film, but I personally can do without its intrusion. I just wanted to see the Marx Brothers... where the hell were they? Well, Zeppo is there in those first six minutes, but I really did not know him by sight then. No, it wasn't until Groucho was carried in by his African porters (complete with a separately carried gun rack) that I perked up in my seat. From the moment he first spoke -- and especially when he sings his famous Hello, I Must Going song -- I was hooked.

Truth be told, and this is no surprise to any of my longtime friends who have had to suffer through thirty-odd years of my poor imitation of the fellow, it was actually Harpo Marx that won my heart in that first film. Harpo is the one that kids automatically identify with the most, and I was no exception. As much as Groucho and Chico carry the story along with their taunts and jibes, it is Harpo who was the true spirit of anarchy in the film. He is the bratty child unleashed, and there are little or no consequences for him to pay for from his silly though often violent or shocking actions. 

Groucho is more of a bratty adult; he might act at times like a child, but he is very recognizably an adult playing at children's games, relying more on adult wit (and his abuse of the wits, or generally lack of it, of others), and he is only as wild as the plot allows him to be. An example would be in the opening musical sequence, where he will be goofing on some piece of Marxian business, but the story demands that he has a line to sing, and it snaps him momentarily back into accepted civilized behavior, but only until the demand is met and then he is off again skewering the snobs. Groucho, however much he jokingly sneers at society, because he is the closest thing to an adult in the team, is our sole anchor to whatever plot there is in the film. (Zeppo seems to be the adult, but he is hardly necessary to the plot at hand, even when they try to force the issue.) 

Harpo, on the other hand, is barely controllable even by his brothers, and almost entirely a creature of destruction (except for the harp solos, which are the sole evidence of Harpo having, well, a soul), ruled completely by his id, and is flat-out a large-sized child (albeit with some very lecherous tendencies towards blondes). Chico seems to maintain the middle ground between the other two brothers, jumping from bits with Groucho to bits with Harpo with ease, playing the punning pinhead in the first and then jumping to almost straight man status for the mute, frenetic Harpo. Zeppo, though I have more of a appreciation for him than most people I know, is practically furniture when the other three are in the room together. He does well in his verbal sparring with Groucho in their famous "Take a letter" scene, but when all is said and done, Zeppo is Zeppo.

So Harpo won out that day, though this may be due to my being most familiar with Groucho already. He was less of a surprise to me, and Harpo did mostly physical comedy that I could try to replicate badly on my own. Eventually, Groucho would win out with me. His verbal wit, whether on screen, radio, or in his numerous books (all of which I would own eventually) would be hard for most others to match, even Harpo and Chico. If any angel guided me in my often angry but more often frustrating battle against the forces of society throughout the rest of my life, it has been Groucho.

But, at the age of ten, when I saw the Marxes unchained and on a big screen for the first time, satire, surrealism and anarchy were unknown concepts to me. Fears of the adult world to come were not a concern yet. I was only a child, and even with my limited world view and experience, I just knew that the Marx Brothers were the funniest people in the history of our planet. And to me, no matter how much comedy I had seen or read since then, no matter how much I grew to revere Chaplin or Keaton or Lloyd or Fields or Kaye in the following years, the Marxes are still at the top of the heap.

Which is why I was completely delighted when my boss Jonathan asked me recently to loan him a couple of Marx movies, so that he may introduce his young children to them for the first time. I gave him my original discs of Animal Crackers and Duck Soup, and when he asked which one to let them watch first, naturally I gave him only one choice: Animal Crackers. To find out the next day that, like me, they were a little confused and bored at first, but completely ecstatic about the brothers by the end of the film and begging to see Duck Soup, made this Grinch's heart grow three sizes that day. I suddenly had some small hope for the future of mankind.

And wishing that I were Jonathan's kids watching the Marxes for the very first time? I don't need to wish for that time back. All I need to do is watch Animal Crackers again... and I am there.

[This article was updated and re-edited slightly on April 14, 2016.]