Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1999), Christopher Lee.

Estelle Marie Carandini and Geoffrey Trollope Lee

This is Christopher Lee's parents, in the only photo he ever knew of wherein they were photographed together.  It was taken before the First World War.  Incredible!  As are bits of this little book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.  Now having read Lee's autobiography, things make a little more sense to me.  Lee's mother was an Italian countess, his father a military man and athlete.  Public-school educated (if not top-rate public school), Lee's father disappeared out of his life relatively early and the family fell on increasingly hard times.  His mother married a banker, but his fortunes faltered.  Yet Lee seems to have been buoyed through life by wealthy connections and by the skills he cultivated that today seem lost and forgotten: social golfing, an appreciation of live classical music performances, the art of conversation.

And Lee readily admits:  he's a bit of a chatterbox.  He enjoys a good story and has plenty to tell.  Paragraph after paragraph has a punchline.  Whose life is a series of events that end in punchlines?  If not consistently light-hearted, Lee's anecdotes are fascinating.  As a child he was roused from sleep to meet the assassins of Rasputin.  He was the first Allied soldier to enter the Vatican during the war, allowed to browse the masterpieces in solitude.  He got a lot of good advice on how to manage passionate female fans from Errol Flynn.

Tall, Dark and Gruesome is heavy on the British slang (the American edition I read would hard bracket translations for all the obscure lingo).  Plenty of this is army slang, as in "jankers" (punishment) and, even better, "Egyptian PT" translated here as "forces slang for sleep, because they saw the Egyptians as having a rather relaxed view of life"!  Hammer fans will only get a slight glimpse behind the curtain of Hammer movie-making as in his telling, these experiences are not those that figure most prominently in his life.  He didn't mind a good remake, which Hammer did twice very well, but very much disliked making endless sequels.  Fair enough!  He does have the kindest words for Peter Cushing, calling him "the gentlest and most generous of men."

Lee has lived so long he had to write a second edition in 1999 (the book was first published in 1977).  And so we don't even make it to The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars II:  Attack of the Clones (both 2002) (during which when I saw it, a friend prayed as we watched him zipping around on some kind of ridiculous hover bike, "Please Lord, don't let this be the magnificent Christopher Lee's last role").  He's currently filming more Hobbits.  Astounding!

Christopher Lee with wife Gitte on their wedding day.  To the left is Sir Richard Jackson, then President of Interpol whose words to the groom were:  "Look after this girl, or it's 50 lashes!"

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983), Michael Weldon.

Having devoured the New Yorker's excellent sci-fi issue (June 4, 2012), I had to run out and buy the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.  In his highly enjoyable Personal History segment "A Psychotronic Childhood: Learning from B-movies," Colson Whitehead describes the book as "proof that even the most unlikely idea had a chance," inspiring him to write his own fiction.  Colson, raised on Z-grade movies aired on TV (pre-VHS, people!) by parents who refused to filter their son's viewing experiences, recalls writing a book report on the novelization of Videodrome for an eighth grade assignment.  He described "Debbie Harry's character jabbing a cigarette into her boob as foreplay" and got an A!  Awesome!  Such exuberant dedication to dreck inspired me to check out his sources.

Like Colson, I hope to check-mark my way through Psychotronic Encyclopedia.  The title comes from Weldon's attempt to fuse weird horror and sci-fi but he later learned the term had already been used as the title to a film about a psychic barber (The Psychotronic Man, 1980).  The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film might really be something best appreciated by a certain generation of film lovers.  I was too young to remember TV pre-VHS.  This was back when TV aired a grab bag of movies and if you were lucky enough, you might catch something unique but then again you might never see it again.  In a strange way, Weldon reminds me of someone entrusted to carry a torch, bringing knowledge from a place of darkness.

I also think maybe I am from the wrong generation to give a crap about some of the type of movies covered in Psychotronic, such as the Elvis and Gidget flicks.  Sure, I'll read about them but there's something that just feels so sealed off and "done" about these gimmicky vehicles.  Maybe I'm just treasure hunting after the weird.  I'd never heard of this made-for-TV movie called The People (1972), even though it stars William Shatner:  "A teacher in a small California town (Kim Darby) discovers the locals are peaceful aliens with powers of ESP and levitation."  Whoa!  Where can I find that?  Oh.  On Amazon, apparently.

This book was sent to me in record time by www.awesomebooks.com - good job, guys.  Is the UK mail system ever better than ours.  Even better, it came with the previous owner's bookmark:

Front

Back

This looks like a little high school love note, and just feels like the right thing to arrive with my new-to-me Psychotronic Encyclopedia.

A History of Horrors: the Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer (2009), Denis Miekle.

James Carreras, Peter Cushing and William Hinds goofing around at the British Premiere of The Curse of Frankenstein on May 2, 1957.

A small post-war British film company manages to wrestle properties like Dracula and Frankenstein out of the hands of American goliath Universal Studios - what a great, still-relevant story in today's world of bloated, CGI-driven and completely dull blockbusters consisting of nothing but sequels, prequels, re-releases and remakes.  I keep wondering when the next Hammer-type evolutionary upstart is going to start making really fun junk that will draw moviegoers away from such not very tantalizing 2012 summer fare as a Matt Damon-less Bourne movie or yet another Spiderman.

Having found Denis Meikle's Vincent Price: The Art of Fear (2003) insightful and clever, I was looking forward to this history of the Hammer film company.  A History of Horrors tackles a larger cast of characters and a longer timeline but somehow Meikle's tone, one of constant disappointment, makes this book less enjoyable.  Appreciative of Peter Cushing (though he wags a finger at disappointing performances), Meikle does not seem to be much of a Christopher Lee fan.  He acknowledges Lee's contributions to the smash hit Horror of Dracula (1958) but reveals little sympathy for the actor's efforts to find more challenging roles beyond the caped seducer.  While he escaped some of the subsequent Hammer Draculas, Lee eventually played the character ad nauseum right up to Hammer's dying days.   

Meikle also casts a joyless eye at failed makeup efforts (I found counting these instances entertaining), from the distinctively un-Karloffian Frankenstein "resembling nothing more than the victim of a road accident," to the lacklustre appearance of Anton Diffring in the film The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) wherein a contemporary critic is quoted as saying "the Hammer make-up man missed a stupendous chance."  This is echoed in observations about costuming efforts for The Gorgon (1964) "The Gorgon head is a construct of stupefying ineptitude," Meikle writes.  "Roy Ashton's mask (with the help from Richard Mills on this occasion) contributes little enough to the mood, but the wig is worse than useless, showing all too clearly exactly what it was composed of:  toy snakes." Hammer's distinctive use of colour is lost on the reader (at least in the softcover version I had) because there are no colour plates within the book - surely a misstep.  I caught Quatermass and the Pit (1967) recently on TV and found the colour even in this lesser Hammer effort quite stunning; (Meikle calls this film "a Technicolor travesty"). 

Meikle must be credited for admirably documenting the rise of Hammer, its blood and guts beginnings and then "t-and-a" phase and final decline.  The book draws on invaluable conversations with those involved during the Hammer heyday as well as the Hammer archive.  But the overall lack of enthusiasm or appreciation even of campy touches (which can be very entertaining, at least in retrospect) does the history a slight disservice.

Variety Club dinner showing Christopher Lee and his gorgeous wife Birgit (L), as well as James Carreras (centre, seated), and other Hammer execs.

An Improvised Life (2011), Alan Arkin.

Alan Arkin, in Catch-22.  Hey, what? I get to choose the photos around here.

Having to drive to work alone over these dark winter mornings I decided to keep myself company with the audiobook version of Alan Arkin's 2011 autobiography, An Improvised Life.  How can anyone stay glum listening to Alan Arkin's voice?  Not me.  Driving over bumpy ice patches I listened to him speak about his life, focusing on how he has developed as an actor, and how acting came to also shape him.  I'm sorry to say that I haven't even seen many of the films that brought Arkin professional recognition such as The Russians are Coming The Russians Are Coming (1966), Catch-22 (1970) or Little Murders (1971). You can put me in the category a generation of people that only came to know his name through more recent works like Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006).  Basically I only knew him as someone's onscreen dad which is fitting, because he says that fatherhood has been one of the real-life roles he has found most fulfilling.

An Improvised Life doesn't let us get too close to Arkin.  There's not a lot of personal details here which seems fitting for a guy who says he's still mystified by the "love"his fans have for him ("Love is a precious thing, and I'd rather discussions of it for people I've at least met," he writes).  But he's unreserved in describing his psychic journey through life starting with analysis and moving through Eastern thought and meditation, all of which informed his approach towards both acting and just simply being himself.  His worldview, which I think I glimpsed in the following passage, is one I can appreciate.  It's about the transcendence we achieve through art, which is so magic it seems to tap into some kind of universal love.  Describing his experience at a Carnegie Hall performance of Beethoven, he writes:

And then by the third movement even Beethoven's agenda was gone, and we were swept up by what he had been swept up by, what lived through him, and all of Carnegie Hall became one living organism, one thing with a couple thousand moving parts.  We had let go, and we lived inside that majestic vision of brotherhood and unity and heroism written over two hundred years ago.  We had become the music.  

Arkin joined Chicago's Second City when it was just newly invented.  At the time, he was convinced that moving to Chicago would be a career killer.  Instead, Second City exploded.  It was somehow perfectly timed to meet the public's needs for irreverence with a touch of intellectualism and politics.

An Improvised Life drifts from autobiography to actor's manual in the final pages, as Arkin described workshop techniques and the joys of teaching improv.  Again, instead of telling anecdotes about himself and the people he knows, he keeps it all very businesslike. As a cubicle creature, I am envious that Arkin's profession (as he sees it) demands continuous self-development and offers the opportunity to continually explore human nature.  For those of us not in the arts, it seems we are often forced to do these necessary things on our own time, outside of company hours.  He makes very amusing observations about the overlap of acting and life, of the acting that even non-actors do in everyday situations.  So hope you don't mind me saying, Mr Arkin, but I love your work and I'm glad you were so happy making The In-Laws. 

Leonard Maltin's Stars-Askew Guide to the Movies

Confession:  I read Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide.  Like it's a real book. I have been doing this since I was a kid.  Because it's not fiction, with characters and a plot and big words, I feel guilty when caught reading it: "oh, I'm just looking something up here, I'll put it down in a minute."  What can I say, it's just an inexhaustible pile of delicious, insane tidbits (all in a Tinkerbell-sized summary)!   Damn, that's succinct writing!  The family Maltin was a legendary (the vintage was 1992, I think).  Duct-taped along the spine, it sat on the coffee table for probably fifteen years before it was replaced.

Last year, I bought myself my own family heirloom:  the 2010 edition.  At least that what I had thought I'd done.  Turns out he's eliminated a lot of 30s and 40s films and put them into a separate book!  Whaaa?  OK, I realize there's a limit to how fat a paperback can get, but I find this a sad compromise.   Maltin's earlier books included lengthy lists of B-serials like the Bowery Boys and Blondie.  Having suffered through a number of Bowery Boys vehicles, I've come to realize that the Maltin star rating system is about as unreliable as a 2002 Ford Explorer transmission.  To test this, I chose a couple gut-wrenchingly awful films I have seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so, to see what the Maltin team came up with.  Keep in mind the maximum number of stars awarded is four.  

Category:  Unnecessary Sequel

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Maltin Rating:  ***
"DIE HARD is effectively re-invented for a post 9/11 world" (!).

Editorial comment:  This is the Die Hard with the "I'm a mac" guy, people!  Now, if it had co-starred John Hodgman....!

Category:  Down and Out Former Oscar Winner

Men of Honor (2000)

Maltin Rating:  ***

Really?

Category:  In Retrospect, The Original Review Could Use a Rethink

Star Wars Episode II: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Maltin Rating:  ***
"The beginning of Lucas' epic saga resembles his first STAR WARS film in both story and tone, with quantum leaps forward in special effects - including computer-generated characters (like comic-relief character Jar Jar Binks) who seem astonishingly real." Dude, what?

Of course knowing that you don't use the Maltin star ratings as the basis for making movie-watching decisions means knowing how to use your Maltin.  You don't also use it as a comprehensive reference! Maltin himself even complains in the Introduction to the 2010 edition that shall-not-be named internet websites can be - gasp - erroneous (oh, IMDB, we are looking at you and your industry-contributed information).  Maltin is proud to say that the fact-checking that went into his guides are far superior, and he's most likely correct.  I also appreciate details such as format availability, length and the Widescreen Glossary.  But the always-included Maltin Guide appendix of certain folks (Halle Berry?) and their film credits feels superfluous these days.  When I am trying to remember where I saw that guy before, it's not usually Clint Eastwood.  Oh, the colliding worlds of analogue and digital when it comes to searching for information.   There's probably a Library Science paper in there somewhere.

On a final note, I'd like to thank (?) Sarah Silverman for forever associating Leonard Maltin with certain talents in her thank-you speech from the Night of Too Many Stars Autism fundraiser (NWSF).

Night of Too Many Stars: Sarah Silverman Wins an Autism Award from Sarah Silverman

Vincent Price: The Art of Fear (2003), Denis Meikle.

Jane Asher and Vincent Price, antique shopping in London while filming The Masque of the Red Death (1964).

I had always taken Vincent Price's place in the Hollywood pantheon for granted.  Yet in his book Vincent Price: The Art of Fear Denis Meikle ably points out that Price was almost a victim of bad timing, maturing as an actor while the studio system he came from was collapsing.  "Like those of his contemporaries who similarly were moulded by the studio system," he writes, "Price's screen persona was larger than life, and he was best suited to roles which were larger than life also... he was not the kind of actor to whom naturalism came easily, and this ensured that he would be sidelined by the horror cinema of the mid-fifties until a vehicle came his way for which he was better fitted."  The acting styles coming into favour during this time period - the method acting of James Dean or Marlon Brando - was in complete contrast to Price's.  This book explores how Price managed his film career in the margins by sticking for so many years with low budget masters like William Castle and Roger Corman.

As I was unfamiliar with his writing, Denis Meikle's assertive, intelligent prose took me slightly by surprise.  For example, I'd never thought of Price as "gangling." "Like many tall men weighed down by their own stature," Meikle reveals, "Price was not a very physical actor and the more strenuous were the requirements of a specific script the more incapable he became of fulfilling them.  He was at his best moving stealthily around a stylish set, relying on gesture and facial expression."  Meikle repeatedly makes sharp-eyed observations that (like his central thesis about Price's genre work) go beyond the cliche.   The relationship between Price and American International Pictures group consumes the most pages and Meikle also devotes attention to the British reception to these films, many of which were filmed in the UK (and many of which were themselves butchered by a British censor unfriendly towards the horror genre).

The book has been thoughtfully constructed: Meikle has bookended his work with essays by Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend; he also adapted many of the Poe works used in AIP films) and Roger Corman.  I'm a strong believer in the value of photographs as supporting documents that bolster good research (especially for books on visual topics like film - it never ceases to surprise me the number of books dedicated to film that seem to take no interest in images!) and The Art of Fear is full of photos, including the delightful one shown above.  I'll be sure to be hunting out Meikle's other books.  I'm really hoping that maybe if I read more Meikle, maybe the ability to construct a smart sentence or think an original thought will rub off on me!

Not the Girl Next Door (2009), Charlotte Chandler.

Who is Charlotte Chandler?

Not the Girl Next Door is a biography of Joan Crawford by New York-based Charlotte Chandler.  It's a quick read, laid out essentially as a conversation between the author and various individuals she's interviewed:  Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Vincent Sherman, and of course Joan herself.  Or, is it? After finishing the book, which was only published a couple years ago, I couldn't help but be curious when the interviews were conducted - and who, if anyone, was still alive?  Crawford died thirty-three years ago; other subjects could plausibly have been alive until recently...

Chandler is the author of a series of biographies of Hollywood stars.  When her 1978 bio on Groucho Marx Hello, I Must Be Going hit the shelves, it received a middling review from the New York Times. "One of the problems," wrote Joe Flaherty, "...is that Miss Chandler, like the studio heads, seems bent on taming her subject."  A year later the Times reported that the book was so wildly popular around the world that the UCLA Film Archive was making an effort to preserve the hand-painted billboard advertising the book - which literally stopped traffic on Sunset Boulevard!

Other biographies followed:  Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini.  It is claimed in a few places online that Chandler is a pen name for Lyn Erhard (which looks amusingly like an anagram).  The publisher, Applause Theatre and Cinema, books provides us no information on the author.  The wikipedia entry on the Chandler (for whatever it matters) implies that she is a big fake: "her work often features loquacious, unfamiliar quotations by deceased celebrities whom Chandler claims to have personally interviewed, although the statements occasionally contradict those already in print."  A stronger reaction appears in a blog post on the fan-based component of the TCM website.  Titled "Charlotte Chandler's Body of Lies," author "macktheblack" completely disputes the veracity of Chandler's claim that she personally interviewed Marlene Dietrich, known to be reclusive.  This point of view is supported by quotations from another Dietrich biographer.  "I bought this book excited to learn," Mack writes, believing he was the victim of a hoax.  "I finished this book delighted to have learned.  But the aftermath of it has proven the most educational.  A smack in the face that left harsh reality ringing in my ears."

I wonder, do classic movie fans really want the truth about studio stars?  Or, are their perfectly lit and luxuriously dressed black and white bodies basically just fodder for our fantasies?  Do these biographies not just give us more details to fantasize to?  There are only so many films to watch, and others are have been lost to history since the nitrate deteriorated.

I find it mildly amusing that out there somewhere a classic movie fan is outraged (outraged!) that they were given a possibly fabricated narrative of a fabricated character, a studio creation known by a name suggested by magazine readers.  Is there anything that can eclipse (or correct) the scathing depiction of her in her adopted daughter's own book, Mommy Dearest?  Sure, some readers may want a more solidly researched biography, one drawing on properly footnoted archival papers.  But I think it is the mystery that infuriates these angry readers yet in some ways, this is what they seek onscreen in the first place from classic movies:  an idealized, constructed and heavenly glowing being.  This book is strangely silent on what it does purport, which that it is a conversation.  "Told me," and "Told us," are used frequently, but we don't know when or where.  (It begs the question whether "Chandler" is still alive, and if not, who is capitalizing).  It's strange to me that the original Groucho biography was never questioned as being untrue; at worst it was described as a bit sloppy.  My theory is that someone has Chandler's notes and tapes and is finishing the work, with or without her help.  (At worst, all this speculation would mean we are all doubting some poor older woman who has done some very interesting interviews.)  Whoever is writing is good - the book flows smoothly and small details are dropped in that characterize the subject in a memorable way.  Joan's first home is condescendingly described as having "a kind of yard-sale elegance." Now, that's just something you'd expect Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to say, isn't it?

The Girl Next Door gives readers exactly what they might want to hear.  Joan was the same girl that she was in her pictures - born into poor circumstances, she clawed her way to respectability and then some.  Joan wasn't a well-informed parent but did her best and certainly was never cruel.  It was Christopher and Christina, Joan's adopted children, who were dysfunctional and profited off the Crawford name.   For a book mainly tempered in tone, the chapter "told by" Vincent Sherman is somewhat shocking, describing Joan Crawford becoming sexually excited watching herself onscreen during a private viewing with Sherman.  Yet it all fits together nicely.  I agree with macktheblack - I had fun reading the book.  Of course I will never know what of it is "true."

I am waiting for the 2015 personal biography of Bette Davis! 

The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine (2005), EJ Fleming.

Bring me either an editor to save this disaster, or some kindling to burn it.  I made a brave effort, but finishing this book was not going to happen.

We have descriptive "facts" repeated differently from time to time:

Page 14:  Laemmle also liked Thalberg because, like him, he was barely above five feet tall.
Page 19:  Thalberg was five foot six and weighed 115 lbs.

Listen, I'm not overly fussy.  I would happily date a man who was five foot six -- but probably not one that was just five feet (sorry).

The first two chapters refer constantly, in an unilluminating way, to the fact that Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg superficially had little in common:

Page 25:  The barrel-chested Mayer and the painfully skinny Thalberg were an unlikely pair.
Page 28:  Mayer and Thalberg were also opposites.
Page 32:  Thalberg was the antithesis of Mayer in every respect.

OK, we GET it.  Yes, that's up to thirty-two pages and well into the second chapter.  You may at this point wonder at what point Mannix and Strickling will make an appearance.

Fleming's storytelling skills are lacking and he repeatedly loses sight of the subject of his study, the potentially very fascinating tale of two men paid to make MGM's problems "go away".  Fleming leaps about in time from the twenties to the fifties and back (however illogically), as though events during the end of the studio era decade had an impact on things around the time sound was finally synchronized.  Nothing unfolds:  chunks of biography are barfed up here and there but do not connect with the surrounding text.  Gossip is just dropped on the pages without analysis, the sources unquestioned. This left me suspicious and distrustful of all claims and of the author's ability to accurately transmit any facts.  The tone of the writing sways from respectable to embarrassing.  When I read that Louella Parsons was described as "a bitchy fat doctor's wife" I had to put the book down for good.  I am no fan of Louella Parsons, people, but where was that comma.  With such a sloppy approach to research and writing, I had no confidence that the author could credibly speak about his topic.

McFarland Press occupies a warm little corner of my heart, publishing unpretentious and generally well-researched books on Hollywood history, but knowing that this amateurish creation saw the light of day despite mis-sized fonts for endnotes and other typos leaves me puzzled and disappointed.  Consider the topic of "the fixers" to remain fair game for others out there to tackle!

The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1963), Hedda Hopper and James Brough.

On the recently divorced Dinah Shore:  "She is a forty-five-year-old woman with two children still in school.  The fact that good men don't grow on trees is something most women don't realize until it's too late."

On Sinatra's distaste for the word "clan" to describe the Rat Pack:  " 'I don't like the word "clan",' Frank once said.  'Did you ever look the word up in a dictionary?' I said.  'It means a family that sticks together, like the Kennedys you're so fond of.  They're the most clannish family in America.  I don't like Rat Pack, but there's nothing wrong with the name of Clan."

On Edward G Robinson's second wife Jane Robinson: "The current Mrs Edward G Robinson would like to be a hostess with the mostest, but she has not attained the status of his former wife, who entertained in great style."

On Harpo Marx: "Harpo, whom I adore, once told me he couldn't understand why he couldn't join a local country club.  'That's easy,' was my reply.  'You belong to a different club, where they don't take in Christians.  So in a way you're sort of even."

On Rosemary Clooney: "Next door is a house of sorrow - Rosemary Clooney and her five children live there with no husband or father to guide them."

On fashions of the 1950s: "The cause is glamour, for which I've been fighting a losing battle for years.  Our town was built on it, but there's scarcely a trace left now.  Morning, noon and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants.  They may be an incitement to rape, but not to marriage."

On Jackie Kennedy:  "When I look at Jackie Kennedy these days, I think: 'If those fellows [Hollywood designers of the 30s] were around today, what they couldn't have done for her!'  She'd be queen of fashion the world over.  Oleg Cassini can't hold a candle to any of them."

On Louis B Meyer.  "The biggest impact I made [as an actress] was on a pudgy little fellow who used to lurk around the set.  When the picture was finished he sidled up to me.  I mistook his intentions. 'I don't want to buy any fur coats,' said I.  'You don't understand,' said he.  'My name's Louis Mayer.  I'm the producer."

Hick flicks: the rise and fall of redneck cinema (2005), Scott Von Doviak.

Oh yeah?

Scott Von Doviak's argument that Days of Thunder (1990) is a soulless, corporate rip off of Stroker Ace (1983) is just one example why Hick Flicks might be the best book of film analysis I've read for a long time.  Days of Thunder is basically a remake of Stroker Ace, not a particularly well-respected Burt Reynolds vehicle.  Von Doviak uses it as an example to show how in around ten years the regional "hick flick" had been replaced by slick flicks.  "[Days of Thunder] is a strictly formulaic Eighties Cruise vehicle that already seemed dated when it arrived on screens in the summer of 1990," he writes, "...unfortunately the picture surrounding [Cruise] is strictly ersatz, making its ostensibly gen-yew-wine touches - like the cameos by actual NASCAR drivers...- all the more unconvincing." With this handy slapdown of Days of Thunder in favour of a bottom of the barrel Burt Reynolds movie - when he was at his Burt Reynoldsiest - Doviak nails it!  High five and pass the Mountain Dew!

Von Doviak limits himself to southern-fried 70s B's -- no to porn, biker movies and foreign fare.  Yes to anything wearing cutoff jean shorts, preferably pushing the speed limit!  His writing style is like listening to an affable yet unpretentious moviegoer.  It's clear he knows what postmodernism and feminist readings are, but mercifully he doesn't feel the need to wow us with academese.  His reasonable, lighthearted approach means that  the easily dismissible genre of "hick flicks"  has been given a fair study.

Boy, do they like their cars and trucks down south.  Hick flicks have NASCAR, truckers, CB lingo, even films that give the cars names and their own credits!  But again, Von Doviak's book goes just the extra inch in giving the historical context and rationale.  The traditions behind all this car-lovin' comes from when, during Prohibition, moonshine was made down south and the fastest drivers raced up north (evading cops enroute) where it would be distributed from bigger cities.  See, I didn't know that!  I also had no idea that in an effort to save on gas, Nixon proposed a reduction of the speed limit to 55 miles an hour for trucks and buses, a move that was not popular with commercial trucking associations.  A little background goes a long way in understanding the overwhelming popularity of Smokey and the Bandit, a movie that in 1977 was second place only to Star Wars at the box office!

This book was so delightful I would like to personally request a prequel.  Sure, Robert Mitchum's Thunder Road is held up as a big granddaddy to the genre, but what came before?  The regional theatres sure played a lot of cruddy "classic era" B's....!

Hollywood Lawyer (1960), Milton Golden.

In 1951, roughneck B-actor and star of Detour Tom Neal gave Franchot Tone a wild beating that left Tone in a coma for eighteen hours.  They had been fighting over actress Barbara Peyton, who later married Tone but was eventually divorced from him when he discovered she had never stopped seeing Neal!  Throughout all of this, there was an invisible character whose only role was to cash everyone's cheques:  lawyer Milton Golden.  

Golden's tell-all book Hollywood Lawyer is cleverly written but doesn't spill enough beans!  Most of the little morality tales are "blinds," which leaves readers guessing who the identity of Mr D- or Miss X. may be.   Maybe back in 1960 it was possible to sniff out who was who, but I was just left scratching my head.  (I wonder if our modern day equivalent, entertainment lawyer Enty from the gossip site Crazy Days and Nights http://www.crazydaysandnights.net/ can help!)  

Here's a sample:  What male Hollywood actor (Golden calls the couple Bob and Cecile De Young)  adopted a baby girl only to unknowingly re-adopt the same child seven years later?  Golden says this was sometime prior to World War II when babies were the "must have" accessory du jour. Bob divorced Cecile, and his next wife "Estelle" retained custody of the child when she then also divorced Bob.  When Estelle was killed in an airplane accident, her new husband gave the child up to his next wife "Shirley," who eventually married Bob De Young!  ....  Is Golden trying to tell me this is Clark Gable?

From the August 18, 1961 Deseret News.

Milton Golden (R) and his client, Tom Neal (1951).

Actor: the life and times of Paul Muni (1973), Jerome Lawrence.

Six of the Seven Faces played by Paul Muni from the movie of the same name (1929).

Realizing that playing "ethnic" was perfectly acceptable (and even a badge of honour) for dramatic actors back in the day now strikes us as baffling, ridiculous, hilarious or simply downright disrespectful.  Reading Actor: the life and times of Paul Muni gave me a new perspective on at least one man's interpretation of this tradition.  For better or worse, author Jerome Lawrence sets most discussions of race or ethnicity in Muni's portrayals aside.  For Muni (according to Lawrence) the goal was simply the most accurate physical depiction of any fictional character or historical personality.  

Understanding that Muni came from an ethnic tradition himself - Yiddish language theatre - is insightful, as is knowing that he was firmly rooted in the tradition of itinerant actors.  His parents, Nachum Favel (Philip) and Salche (Sallie) Weisenfreund earned their meagre living as a two-person troupe, enacting sketches across the Austro-Hungarian countryside.  One routine involved a nudnick and a schlemihl drafted into the Army - a preposterous concept and sure-fire laughs for their Yiddish audience.  ("What was more unlikely than a Yiddish soldier?" asks Lawrence). Muni's father tried unsuccessfully to break into the blossoming Yiddish theatre tradition once the family made its way to New York, but Muni had better luck.  While far more sophisticated than his parents' old world routines, the Yiddish theatre had its own stock characters (rabbis, landlords, not-so-virtuous young daughters).  One strength of Actor is to provide a basic description of the tumultuous world of Yiddish theatre.  Lawrence draws an effective picture of this world, and for appeal of the "uptown" English-language theatres for Yiddish actors.  For some, to perform uptown (as Edward G Robinson did before Muni) was to really make it.

Yes, Edward G Robinson who in his own biography All My Yesterdays grumbles about never having the looks to be a leading man unlike his colleague Muni.  Indeed, in Actor,  actress Sylvia Hoffmann bubbles over with the memory of the "gorgeous" Muni as the last minute replacement for Robinson in a staging of The Fifth Season.  Then there's Paul Muni, whose lifelong tradition was to bury his good looks in fake beards. In almost all his film roles, Muni was slathered in makeup and spirit gum - crafting characters from these substances was a skill he was proud of.  Muni wanted to completely transform into his subject, to be that person.  To look like him, dress like him, to adopt the minutest gestures or tics that made that individual unique.

Actor is a fascinating portrayal of a relentlessly self-flagellating man obsessed with professional perfection, married to a dour wife who was more stage manager / mother than partner.  While written in a chummy style by a personal friend (Lawrence was co-author of the play Inherit the Wind, which helped revive Muni's career), Lawrence's subject seems fussy, rigid and completely unable to enjoy life, success or happiness.  Earning recognition playing heroic historical figures such as Louis Pasteur, Muni dove into ever more serious projects, culminating in the quest to depict Alfred Nobel onscreen with the objective of spreading the message of peace to all mankind (a project he later abandoned when he came to the conclusion that Nobel was probably gay).  Lawrence appropriately chides Warner Brothers for billing Muni as "Mr. Paul Muni" - lending an unnecessarily sombre gravitas to all his performances.  Muni's gravitas became ridiculous as his acting style, described by theatre director Herman Shumlin as "one of those actors who functioned both from an outward realization of appearance, makeup and clothes, as well as an interior examination of the character and his own feelings" grew dated.  By the 50s, wigs were very much out of style -- theatre was innovating and tackling adult themes. Although he felt deeply uncomfortable with these changes and never completely buried his fake beard kit,  Inherit the Wind gave Muni a chance to find success in modern theatre and recapture some of the respect he had earned as the kind of vibrant actor we can still see in I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.  

Paul Muni, Director Mervyn LeRoy and Bella Muni on the set of The World Changes.

Hollywood's Poverty Row 1930-1950 (1973), Gene Fernett.

Gene Fernett's book on Poverty Row movies is a little unfocused, mainly because his sources were so varied:  he interviewed Ted Lydecker, who was employed in building miniature sets for landscape effects.  He also interviewed sound engineers, a couple folks who worked at Monogram, Technicolor and a stuntman.  Sources on low-brow popular culture are often hard to come by, but it seems Fernett was taking a rather eclectic route anyway -- and then the poor fellow was crippled by a stroke, leaving the work of finishing the book to be done with the assistance of others.  

Fernett gets off to a brilliant start discussing theatres.  Who owned the theatres, the variety in quality in theatres and what kind of people went to these movies is crucial to understanding why B-movies even really existed for as long as they did.  He also adds colour to the story of B's by talking about low-brow favourites like Judy Canova, the "queen of the hillbillies".  While serials and westerns have been covered thoroughly, I have yet to come across much on the white-trash thrills early B's had to offer.  Hollywood's Poverty Row ends by returning to the diminished role of theatres after the war and the role of monopolization of companies.  The new appeal of television meant movie ticket sales dwindled.  B-actors and content could now been enjoyed from the couch!

Ad for Quaker Oats Puffed Wheat, Toronto Star 1945.  Somehow celebrating cereal blown out of guns for QUAKER Oats just seems wrong!

A Child of the Century (1954), Ben Hecht.

"I intend to write an autobiography of my mind," is how Hecht begins his massive, 600+ page autobiography.  As though stunned by this concept, and hoping to avoid the readers' expectations of an autobiographer to "be a chronologically-minded fellow, to get himself born, baptized and surrounded by relatives in orderly sequence," Hecht immediately spins off in all directions, devoting small chunks of writing to such thoughts about the inspirational qualities of the Pacific Ocean and whether there is a God.

I had sought out this book because Hecht is the writer of so many wonderful films, starting with the first gangster film Underworld and ending with His Girl Friday.  Hecht is true to his word; this is not a book pitched to movie lovers.  Despite his long involvement writing for movies, he leaves the discussion of his scriptwriting career to the penultimate section of the book, and starts it by declaring that "the movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century."  The clash between Hollywood's hyper sexualized society and hypocritically moralistic strictures for its films were repugnant to Hecht.  His close friend Herman Mankiewicz, who got him into Hollywood in the first place, summarized the Production Code for him this way: "in a novel a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish.  In a movie this is not allowed...the villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants.  But you have to shoot him in the end."  After a moment of contemplation, Hecht decided: "The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, to write a movie containing only villains and bawds.  I would not have to tell any lies."

His remarkable career began as a sixteen year old gofer for the Chicago Daily News;  next desk over was  Carl Sandburg.  It seems that as well as hiring contemplative lefty poets, early journalism practices included just making stories up, like the one about runaway streetcars (which appeared on the front page)!  When the complaints rolled in, Hecht's superior simply huffed back at the streetcar people: "Your organization, sir, is already in sufficiently bad odor with its grafted franchises and boodle politics.  I advise you not to add to your crimes that of libel against the press.  And in conclusion I can tell you, I would rather take the word of any of my reporters than the sworn testimony of all the millionaires of Chicago."  Hecht's newspaper days were a strange education for a wild teenager.  Hecht migrated to New York and eventually to Hollywood.  Never a particularly religious man, Hecht later became a strong Zionist later in life and devoted much of his time promoting postwar Jewish interests.  While I found the book weighed down by dross here and there (he tends to rely on aphorisms and make pronouncements), Hecht certainly can write and A Child of the Century is a vivid portrayal of life in the very exciting first half the twentieth century.  I was glad he loved John Barrymore so much; Twentieth Century fit the world-weary boozehound perfectly.  

Hollywood Babylon II (1984), Kenneth Anger.

Deeply enjoyed thinking about Hollywood Babylon II.  Lavishly illustrated with very revealing photos, it brazenly trumpets, like it's sitting there on the tabloid rack daring you to pick up a copy.  If you're willing to, you'll get more than Star Jones' butt cellulite -- Hollywood Babylon II includes graphic photos of the bisected corpse of the Black Dahlia scattered on the grass of an empty lot, as well as explicit pics of Joan Crawford.  I love you, Kenneth Anger, for throwing it back at me.  

I'm new to Anger, but fascinated.  Known for his own body of "underground" art films, Anger personifies the personal connections we make with movie stars.   "I firmly intended to approach my idols as their equal," he says, in a documentary based on the Hollywood Babylon book series. "After all, I too had once acted in a Hollywood movie.  I was on the fringe of the movie industry and I appeared as a child in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I can still smell the soundstage because it was lit by very hot lights and everything reeked of shellac, because everything was sprayed by Hal Mohr so all the trees would glisten.  And it's a rather intoxicating smell and it was a rather wonderful thing for a four year old kid to work in because for a four year old, it was gigantic."  For the record, there's people out there that simply don't believe that was him in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I don't think I buy everything in Hollywood Babylon II, despite all the photographs, yet I believe in classic movies: they produce a fabulous past in the same way I am promised a fabulous afterlife by religion. "My grandmother had given me her habit of using that genteel euphemism ["passed on"], and I didn't know any better," Anger writes.  "For a long time, like Grandmother, I didn't believe in death.  It was just a transition, a special-effect lap dissolve, and I really believed that when it would be my turn later on, I'd finally get to meet Mabel Normand, Barbara LaMarr and Rodolfo Valentino."  

Bowery to Broadway: the American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema (2010), Christopher Shannon.

Aaaand here comes Christopher Shannon to rehabilitate the Irish.  If this book were a boxty, it would arrive undercooked and leave you hungry.  Its goals as "a study of film narrative" attempt to throw light on the "least represented ethnic group in American film" (Catholic Irish).  Can this be true?  The world did not know the contributions of Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracey et al?  Or is this just blarney?  Shannon begins by bemoaning how the Jewish contribution to film has been well-studied but by contrast "appreciation for those [Irish] stories has suffered from a single-minded scholarly obsession with the Irish Catholic role in film censorship."  Gee, with heavy hitters like nasty old Father Coughlin and Joe Breen I wonder why!

Expostulating on film narrative without the nitty gritty of historical research serves a limited purpose:  it leaves the reader with little beyond the stereotypes described.  Shannon does not clearly identify what he means by the Irish (he casts a wide net and includes not only New York Irish Catholics, but people of Irish extraction born in Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia, surely a different life experience).  As a non-Catholic, I would not know what the Catholic experience, habits or dogma entails and how the Catholic Irish experience would differ from say that of French or Filipino Catholics.  What we do get (as when Shannon explains "grace") is not bad, but certainly doesn't provide me with a good grasp of the major unifying force for this community.  And without details on demographics, or evidence from Irish American primary sources, I do not get a sense that somewhere out there in American theatres there was a living breathing, evolving Irish American community looking for themselves on screen.  Tantalizing tidbits are casually tossed (as in the throwaway line about how some films were marketed specifically to Irish Americans - wait, what?  More!) or are hidden in footnotes.  After reading Bowery to Broadway, I could facetiously summarize its thesis as "we were white, we assimilated pretty quickly, the end."  Brevity - and this includes the paltry number of photographs used - is this book's undoing.

Excluding B-movies from his scope was a mistake, as it is in B's not A's where you are allowed to call a Mick a Mick and laugh about it.  But Shannon is too busy trying to clean up the Irish.  Claims like "Edward G Robinson and Paul Muni, who played the gangster heroes in Little Caesar and Scarface, easily shed their gangster image for other roles...[compared with James Cagney in The Public Enemy]"  are purely laughable.  Paul Muni, yes - but c'mon, man, it's 80 years after Little Caesar and are you telling me Robinson is known for something else aside from a gangster?  Maybe as Dr Ehrlich, the physician searching for a cure for syphilis?  Shannon also misses an opportunity to directly face the issue of the curious relationship between the Jews and Irish in the film industry, and his book's opening words contrasting the two communities, as well as strange claims like the one made about Robinson and Muni only exacerbate the problem.  He cites numerous examples of instances where these former tenement neighbours found themselves together on film sets and scripts.  Cagney spoke a little Yiddish.  Bowery Cinderellas often found themselves with Jewish husbands - yet Shannon does not get too deep into why in Kitty Foyle the character of Mark is cleansed of his Jewish identity while Kitty's Irishness remains. 

Growing Up With Chico (1980), Maxine Marx.

Chico, Maxine and Betty Marx

Maxine Marx's book about her experience as part of the family that gave us the Marx Brothers is deservedly well-known and much loved by classic movie fans.  Her anecdotes are funny, loving and revealing.  In some ways, the book doesn't feels as though it were written by someone in such close proximity to these famous characters, but this jives with her description of the brothers' closeness.  Even the immediate family came after the brothers, and nothing and nobody came between them.  Except maybe money.  

I enjoyed the tidbit describing Sam "Frenchie" Marx's gentle nature, which has a lot to say about women in the Marx family.  Walking home after viewing The Scarlet Letter at the movies, young Maxine asked her grandpa "why they had put the A on the lady's dress."  "Pshaw," he replied.  "Pshaw."  After a bit, he added, "Don't tell der Mamma vhat you saw, yah?"

I knew very little about Chico although he was always my favourite performer in all the movies what with the finger shooting and the  "Attsa boy, make a big slam! Make a big, big slam!"  Now I am in awe of  tough little Betty Marx for putting up with all his shenanigans.  Still, Chico manages to come across as charismatic.   I'm glad the mafia didn't whack him after all.

"The Movies Are": Carl Sandburg's Film Reviews and Essays, 1920-1928 (2000) Edited by Arnie Bernstein.

Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea.  From the heat

of the pavements and the dust of sidewalks, passers-by go in a

breath to be witnesses of large cool sponges, large cool fishes,

large cool valleys and ridges of coral spread silent in the soak

of the ocean floor for thousands of years.

"In a breath," Carl Sandburg, from Chicago Poems, 1916.

Silent movies are to me a strange, hermetic medium.  I feel as though I am entering a different dimension, swimming underwater in a slow moving stream where everything is lovely and exaggerated.  Reading Carl Sandburg's columns on films, which he wrote for the Chicago Daily News in the 20s, I was pleased to realize that even silent movies were once a fun, popular, living and growing medium.  They were also just as lacking in creativity (with umpteen Sheik-a-likes), notorious for overblown budgets, offensive and scandalous as they are today.  Carl Sandburg gave Charlie Chaplin a free pass for life and got fussily irritated when they got Swedish accents wrong.  That a title card can get an accent wrong is kind of wonderful.  He did not view The Jazz Singer as a milestone  because he'd sat through many different kinds of experimentalism before.  Sandburg's prose is delightful and breezy.  I'm quite glad I stumbled onto knowing that such a great poet happily tackled pop culture.  Who do we have covering the 30s?

The Hepcat and the Man: Biographies of Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda

Talk about two different hombres!  Within the last couple weeks, I read the biographies of Henry Fonda and Robert Mitchum simultaneously (Fonda:  My Life, "as told to" Howard Teichmann and Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don't Care by Lee Server).  Fonda's biography has as its focal point Fonda's stage performance in Mister Roberts, a Second World War yarn with an all-male cast symbolizing the virtues of one generation of American males.

Lee Server's book is clearly the superior literary product; its words leap off the page in a playful way and contains a mind-boggling number of interviews including one that was prefaced with, "well who cares, everyone is dead now" (juicy, juicy stuff)!  Server depicts Mitchum fondly but doesn't let him off the hook --  hey, his colleagues either loved or hated him, and even his wife described him as a bachelor at heart.  What do you make of a guy whose ultimate pet projects end up as Thunder Road, a Southern trash movie about moonshine and muscle cars that "would foster a rabid underground following." Or what about the idea of becoming Calypso's "white hope" by cutting an LP titled Calypso - is like so... ?

Is like so... freaking hilarious

And then we have Henry, who upon returning from naval duty in the war showed his son Peter the medal he had earned.  Within twenty minutes Peter had lost it forever somewhere in the long grass in the backyard.  I can just picture the look on Fonda's face, which is usually also the best look in all his movies:  a combination of contempt, moral superiority and silent rage.  Henry Fonda can clear a saloon with one dirty look but I am glad he wasn't my dad.  While seemingly polar opposites this might be the thread that connects these two dudes:  rage.  Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter: Mitchum's uncontrollable rage make both unforgettable.  If Mitchum had been nothing but a lazy doobie-loving cat and if Henry Fonda had been just a starchy authority figure we probably would have forgotten both by now.

Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir (2000) Arthur Lyons.

Arthur Lyons' book Death on the Cheap is a handy reference to the elusive noir genre.  Lyons recognizes the B roots of noir and rightly identifies the B-units of mainstream studios as the starting point for noir, but also dredges through Poverty Row output identifying significant contributions to the genre.   As Gerald Petievich points out in his introductory essay, "thankfully, the terms mise-en-scene, aesthetic reversals and rhetorical form do not appear in his text"; likely because Lyons is writing more of a straight history and not an aesthetic analysis.  Lyons situates these products within an economic context with roots in pulp novels and comics.  He defines a noir as a crime picture, where the characters live in an "unforgiving universe" and all players, even the good guys, are "uniformly corrupt."  The book, which is essentially a listing of key films that came to be associated with the genre, benefits greatly from Lyon's clear-headed description of the beginnings, peak and aftermath (including the re-interpretation) of film noir.