Waking Ned Devine

(1998)
 Written and Directed by Kirk Jones
Starring Ian Bannen, David Kelly, Fionnula Flanagan, Susan Lynch, James Nesbitt, Eileen Dromey

I'm a sucker for charm, and for farce. Waking Ned Devine has both, a quiet little Irish comedy that leaves you laughing.

In the town of Tullymore (population 52) on the Irish coast, word gets out that someone from the village has hit it big in the lottery.  But who? Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen) and Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly), two old moochers, want to know, figuring they can cadge a bit of money from the winner.  After a diligent bit of reasoning, they realize the only person it can be is Ned Devine (Jimmy Keogh).

Sure enough, he has the winning ticket.  Unfortunately, he is dead -- of shock at learning the news.

Ned has no family.  The lottery money would go back to the state. Which Jackie and Michael think is a shame.  So the concoct a plot to pose as Ned and take the money from the lottery claim agent.  The entire town gets involved, planning to split the money.

But there's a fly in the ointment.  Lizzy Quinn (Eileen Dromey) refuses to take part in the scheme.  And she can get a 10% reward if she turned everyone in for fraud . . .

There is also a subplot about Pig Finn (James Nesbit) and Maggie O'Toole (Susan Lynch).  Pig (who raises pigs) want to marry Maggie, since he's the father of Maggie's son Morris.  Maggie refuses, and Pig tries to change her mind.

The movie is funny from start to end.  Ian Bannen and David Kelly are great as the conniving Jackie and David, with Kelly especially good (he's probably best known to American audiences from his part of O'Reilly the carpenter in Fawlty Towers).  Both turn on the charm in especially winning roles.

Dromey is also great as Lizzy Quinn. The final resolution of her situation is one of the comic highlights of the film.

Director Kirk Jones later helmed the delightful Nanny McPhee and seems to be working on a film now with Robert DeNiro. This was his first feature, and he brings out plenty of sweet and quirky performances.

It is. ultimately, a tall tale, but one shown with such charm as to be irresistible.

Dick

(1999)
Directed by Andrew Fleming
Written by Andrew Fleming and Sheryl Longin
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams, Dan Hedaya, Will Ferrell, Bruce McCollough, Terri Garr, Dave Foley, Harry Shearer
IMDB Entry

There's a particular unnamed genre that I'm quite fond of.  Not alternate history, but alternate explanations for actual history. It's fun to come up with with a plausible story that fits closely to the facts (one reason conspiracy theories are so popular -- it's the same game).

One of my favorite in this sort-of-genre is Dick.

It is about the Watergate scandal. Betsy Jobs (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (Michelle Williams) are to helium headed teenagers who just happen to live in the Watergate. When rushing out to mail a letter to the "Meet a Date with Bobby Sherman" contest, the run into a strange man in the stairwell.  Later, at a White House tour, they see him again:  G. Gordon Liddy (the always great and always underrated Harry Shearer).  Liddy takes them to President Nixon (Dan Hedaya), who charms them and, to buy them off and keep an eye on them, tells them that they are now his official dog walkers.

It then starts to get even funnier.  One my favorite moments is when Arlene -- now with a mad crush on Nixon -- takes Rosemary Wood's tape recorder and records a confession of true love to him.  For 18 1/2 minutes.*

The movie plays out in this vein. The Watergate scandal mysteries are all explained (like the identity of Deep Throat) in ways that are always both logical, surprising and very funny.

Dunst and Williams are great as the clueless teens who bring down the president, but the real bravura performance is that by Dan Hedaya.  Hedaya is a busy actor in character roles (his best known one was as Carla's husband in Cheers and its spin-off TheTortellis). This is one of his few major roles, and he makes the most of the chance.  His Nixon is almost as clueless as the girls, but with a sinister edge.

The film flopped at the box office.  Maybe the concept was too esoteric, or the combination of highbrow and lowbrow (much is made of the word "Dick") not appealing to either group.  In addition, if you didn't know the history, you'd miss a lot of the jokes.

Director Fleming (who had created some interest with The Craft) has worked sporadically.  His best known film was the pointless remake of The In-Laws.

Most of the other actors, though, did fine. Williams is working steadily and Dunst went on to film icon status by kissing Spider-Man.

But if you know anything about Watergate, the film is the second-best made on the subject (after All the President's Men)

*If you're familiar with Watergate -- I lived through it -- that number is hilariously significant.

McDonald and Giles (music)

(1971)
Ian McDonald (organ, clarinet, flute, guitar, saxophone, piano, vocals)
Michael Giles (Drums, vocals)
Peter Giles (bass)

Progressive rock has gotten a bad rap, criticized for being self-indulgent and bombastic, and pretty much having died out by the let 70s, killed by disco and especially by punk and New Wave.  Punk was especially scornful of the musicianship and instrumentation, since their entire raison d'etre was to go back to basic (and, following the Ramones, with musicianship not considered important).

But in the early part of the decade, it was considered the direction that rock was going in, using classical and jazz structures and allowing the musicians to expand their horizons. Granted, there were some self-indulgence, but the attitude today is that if you write a song longer than five minutes and it's too long. That's a ridiculous limit -- classical composers routinely had their music go on for ten minutes or longer, as did jazz musicians. Even today, one of the major names of progressive rock -- Pink Floyd -- is often categorized as psychedelic, partly because progressive has a bad name.

McDonald and Giles comes out of the progressive tradition. Both McDonald and Michael Giles were part of the first incarnation one of the earliest progressive rock successes, King Crimson. Peter played with his brother and Robert Fripp (also of King Crimson). 

They decided they didn't like where King Crimson was going, so broke off to record their own album.  It's a charming bit of music, led by two main pieces:  "Suite in C" (a group of songs linked by their key) and "Birdman."  The latter filled the second side of the LP, a rock mini-opera about a man who wanted to fly, a tale similar to Brewster McCloud. The songs are generally light, showing off McDonald's multinstrumental abilities.  Giles is different from any other drummers, with a unique sound.

The album never went anywhere, mostly because the songs, while good, didn't have the type of hooks needed to make a splash.  The group broke up, McDonald eventually joining Foreigner (that's his saxophone on "Double Vision") and Michael Giles becoming a sessions drummer. 

It was unlikely from the start that the group would ever have been a major success, and it seems as though McDonald and Giles wouldn't have lasted very long.  But the put out one nice little album that shows talent and humor.

Young and Innocent

(1937)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood , andAnthony Armstrong, from a novel by Josephine Tey
Starring Derreck de Marney, Nova Pilbeam, Edward Rigby.

I'm a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock, so when I saw a DVD set at Wal-Mart of most of his early British films -- for $5 -- I snapped it up.  With movies like The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Sabotage, it was a steal, and if any of the other films were worthwhile, it would be gravy.

I've already written about The Skin Game, but there are other gems on it.  One of the most fascinating of these was Young and Innocent.

Hitchcock is famous for his "running man" films, where an innocent man is suspected of a crime and has to clear his name.  The Thirty-Nine Steps made his reputation, and he reached perfection of the theme in North by Northwest, but on the way there were others.  I've written about Saboteur before, but Young and Innocent was new to me -- and quite a good film.

Robert Tisdale (Derrect de Marney) discovers a dead woman washed up on the beach, strangled by the belt of a raincoat. When he goes to get help, others discover the body, and notice him running away.  He is arrested -- he knew the woman and stood to benefit from her will. Knowing he has little chance of the court system, he makes a break, using Erica Burgoyne's (Nova Pilbeam) car. Erica, who is the daughter of the of the local chief constable, wants to take Tisdale back to jail, but he manages to convince her that he is innocent and needs to find his old raincoat -- mysteriously stolen -- and produce the the belt to prove his innocence. 

Hitchcock gives this theme his full attention.  There are plenty of great scenes, sharp dialog, and bravura direction. The shot where Hitchcock reveals the murderer is justly famous, a long slow camera movement across a ballroom until it goes to close-up on the man's face.

The leads are quite attractive. Most of their work doesn't seem to have traveled to the US, but both handle their roles with a lot of charm.  Nova Pilbeam is especially good in showing the conflicts she has -- she wants to trust Tisdale, but, as a policeman's daughter, knows where her duty lies.

It's always nice to see more of what you love about a director. Young and Innocent is a real treat for Hitchcock fans.

Land of Gorch (TV)

(1975-76)
Starring Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Alice Tweedy, Fran Brill
Full history and transcripts.
Muppet Wiki Entry

Jim Henson was a genius, creating the Muppets and turning them into a worldwide phenomenon. Though they had appeared on TV shows from Ed Sullivan to The Jimmy Dean Show,* they made their mark when the started appearing on the kid's show, Sesame Street. So, when NBC started a new late night sketch comedy show, Saturday Night Live, they asked Henson to create characters for it.

Given a late night time slot, Henson evidently decided to break away from the blandness of Sesame Street** to create something more in line with a late-night, adult audience.  The result was The Land of Gorch.

This was a series of short sketches that aired during SNL's first season.  Gorch was an alien planet with a desolate landscape, ruled over by King Ploobis (Henson) and his wife Pueta (Alice Tweedy). Ploobis was something of a womanizer, lusting after the maidservant Vazh (Fran Brill). His lackey was Scred (Jerry Nelson), who had a thing for Queen Pueta. The group also worshiped their god, the Might Favog (Frank Oz), a stone statue that came to life wanting various sacrifices.

These were Muppets for adults, and I remember being fascinated when I first saw the sketches. It was quite the undertaking:  our local NBC affiliate didn't show SNL, preferring to run old Sherlock Holmes movies. Instead, I had to pick up the signal from a station 90 miles away.  It was weak, and the images snowy (and I only had a black and white set), but the sight of Muppets having sex in the bushes was something to behold.

Yes, this was a long way from Sesame Street.

The skits were generally good, and it took a few of them until the show reached its stride. As time went on, it began to focus more on Scred, who got most of the funny lines and who managed to be both funny and sweet. The most famous bit was his duet with Lily Tomlin.

 

This was one of the few of the Gorch sketches that made it into reruns; they were usually the first things cut for syndication. This works well, but most people seeing it have no idea of Scred's backstory.

The sketches raised controversy among the SNL staff.  Half loved it (Chevy Chase, who substituted for them once when the performers couldn't make it, and Gilda Radner); half hated it (Writer and original Not Ready for Prime Time Player*** Michael O'Donoghue famously snapped, "I don't write for felt").

In addition, the Muppets had other things going on. Henson went to the UK to start The Muppet Show and didn't return for the next season. The rest of the puppeteers went with him. There was only one final skit -- set in the Muppe Morgue -- with Lily Tomlin, who obviously loved the characters.

So the denizens of Gorch were shown no more.  Not even Scred, who could have been spun off and used elsewhere, showed up anywhere after the sketches were canceled.

Fans have been wanting a DVD of the Gorch episodes, but it's clear that NBC isn't interested. You'll have to make do with the Tough Pigs transcripts (which doesn't capture such things as the sound of the Mighty Favog's voice, which was hilarious) until them. It's a real shame that this aspect of Jim Henson's career has been lost.

*Yes, the guy who sells sausages.  Before getting into the meat business, he was a successful country singer.

**Bland because it was designed as an educational show for children. While the Muppets could be interesting on the show, they had to fit it into educational lessons (which, I hasten to add, they did quite well).

***From the first show.  But O'Donoghue's comedy is extremely violent (as he said in a sketch, "just random acts of meaningless violence") and after a few months he went behind the scenes.

Klaatu (music)

Web Page on the Group
Official web page
My Space Page

There's an old saying in show business:  "There is no such thing as bad publicity."  But it doesn't always hold true. You can ask the members for Brinsley Schwartz, for instance.*

Klaatu was victim of ill-conceived publicity, and paid a hefty price for it.

The group (named, of course, after the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still) released its first album in 1976.  With its spacy cover and songs, it looked like a throwback to the psychedelic era, and the fact that the musicians were not listed added a bit of mystery.

Too much mystery. Steve Smith, an writer for The Providence Journal wrote an article asking "Could Klaatu be the Beatles?"

The songs, especially their single "Sub Rosa Subway," were Beatlesque enough to give the rumor traction.  The Beatles didn't comment, nor did the record company.  It worked to get the album onto the charts.

But, though the question was asked, most people who heard the songs figured out the answer was "no" (I remember listening and knowing at once it wasn't the Beatles).  When the actual musicians were revealed --  Canadian musicians Terry Draper, John Woloshuk, and Dee Long -- the backlash set in.  Album sales dropped off as people felt the group was just making the claim to hype their sales (even though the claim sprung up independently).  Later albums never went anywhere.

But there was some good stuff on the album.  "Sub Rosa Subway" is a fine little song, and their "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" was later covered by the Carpenters and made the charts. There album isn't perfect, but, if not for the publicity, the group may have had a moderately successful career. As it is, they have a core of fans, but are otherwise forgotten.

*A British group featuring Nick Lowe. Their record company planned a big splash, flying a group of British music critics to a special show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The flight was a disaster -- almost literally.  The plane developed engine trouble and barely made it to New York.  The critics were drunk (from free drinks on the plane) and nasty when they arrived and it didn't help that the group had visa troubles and couldn't rehearse until they went on stage.  They were trashed in the press and their album sunk.

October Sky

(1999)
Directed by Joe Johnston
Written by Lewis Colick, from the book Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper,  Laura Dern, Chris Owen, William Lee Scott,  Chad Lindberg
IMDB Entry
Watch the entire movie at Hulu.com

Some directors get typecast.  They make films of similar natures with similar subjects. Sometimes this is good, when you're Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford. Sometimes it is not. But what's especially interesting is when a director breaks out of the mold and makes a totally uncharacteristic film.

Joe Johnston is a case in point.  He's best known for action adventure films like The Rocketeer, Hildago, or Jurassic Park III and children's films like Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Pagemaster, and Jumanji. But the one film that is not like the others is ultimately his best:  October Sky.

Homer Hickam (played Jake Gyllenhaal in the film) was a coal miner's son living in West Virginia in 1957, who was inspired by the Russian Sputnik launch to become involved in making his own rockets and eventually ended up working at NASA. His memoir, Rocket Boys, was adapted into the film. Hickam wanted to keep the title, but was overruled (possibly because it sounded like a sequel to Johnston's flop, The Rocketeer) and the title was changed to October Sky, referring to Sputnik's October launch. It's also an anagram of Rocket Boys.

In the film, Homer gathers together a group of friends who start launching small rockets. It becomes more than just a game as the groups experiments and learns how to make increasingly sophisticated models taking off.  With the help of a teacher, Miss Riley (Laura Dern), they get together to enter the science fair and try to win scholarships.  But Hickam's father (Chris Cooper), a coal miner, is hostile to the entire endeavor.

It's not a film with a lot of conflict, of course, and it's pretty clear how it will end up.  But the characterizations are all first-rate and you can see how the idea of rockets was so exciting. These are real people, and Homer sees the rockets as a way out of the mines, while his father sees no reason for his son to leave.

It's a quiet film, with little action and no laugh out loud humor (though the reaction to one of their stray rockets is pretty funny), but with a feeling for the time and place that is unmatched. If you want to see how Sputnik changed America, this is one place to see it.

Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (Comic)

By Silas (Winsor McCay)
Wikipedia Article

Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend probably is less funny than any humorous comic strip in history.  And that's why it's one of the greatest of all time.

Winsor McCay is one of the giants of newspaper comics, his reputation secure by Little Nemo in Slumberland, the adventures of a young boy in the land of dreams.  Each episode, he would find wonders in the dream world, only to wake up in the last panel.  The dreams often continued for weeks, taking up where he woke up the week before, filled with sumptuous imagery and striking use of color.  It's a landmark of comic book history.

But Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend is nearly as good, and is definitely overshadowed by Nemo.  It was a dry run for the other strip: each week, someone would have weird and terrible nightmares due to eating a rarebit.*

The strip -- a full page -- was funny, of course.  People (there were no recurring characters) would dream absurd dreams, only to wake up in the end. Their reactions and the reactions of the people in the dream were comically overstated:  An alligator handbag becomes a real alligator, a minister starts drinking rum by the barrel (without putting in a glass first), a hair restorer works a little too well, a man is chased by a talking moose.  A small problem in the first panel becomes a major disaster in the last one.

But what really makes the strip rise above is the nature of the dreams. McCay seems to have been working through his own nightmares and fears.  And, on second reading, you can see them:  fear of death, fear of public speaking, fear of falling, fear of sex, fear of being caught in adultery, fear of moving to Brooklyn (just wanted to see if you were reading -- it is a funny strip since it's the most understated one).  In many ways, McCay was a precursor to Freud (I don't know if Freud knew of McCay, but in his Wit and the Relation to the Unconscious, Freud reprinted a German comic that was pretty much a panel-by-panel ripoff of one of the Rarebit fiend strips**).

The strip only ran a short time.  Once McCay exorcized his demons, he moved on to eventually create the wonderland of Slumberland. But the strip he left behind is a fascinating and funny look into human fear.

*More properly known as Welsh rabbit, it's usually a cheese sauce with beer and various spices, served over bread or toast..  The name was a joke, alluding to the fact that the Welsh couldn't get real rabbit. At some point, someone who had no sense of humor decided it couldn't be rabbit, since it had no rabbit and decided the word was really just a corruption of "rarebit," though that construction was never really explained or even logical.

**In McCay's version, a man grew so overheated that his perspiration caused a flood; in the German version, a man's urination does exactly the same thing.  What this says about the character of German humor, I leave for the student to derive.

Roald Dahl (author)

Yes, I know Roald Dahl is an extremely successful author of young adult books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, and Matilda. That Roald Dahl is hardly forgotten.

But I'm taking about a different Roald Dahl. Or rather a different incarnation that seems to have been forgotten and, for my money, is even better.

Dahl also wrote stories for adults. They are often classified as mysteries (and he ended up winning three Edgar Awards), but they really are hard to classify. I first discovered him when a college roommate of mine said that Dahl was the best writer out there. I picked up a collection, and, at first, didn't quite get him.  Then it clicked and I realized just how great he was.

What makes his stories really stand out are his endings.

Dahl was the master of the twist ending.  He would play upon your expectations and then pull the rug out from under you in the last paragraph, doing it so deftly that you never saw it coming. He also regularly did something that few authors have ever managed at all: the anticlimax ending. It's a twist that makes the entire story seem anticlimactic, yet, in Dahl's hands, it's extremely satisfying.

Some of my favorites include:

• "Lamb to the Slaughter." This is his most famous story, about a woman who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, and then has to dispose of the weapon.  It was dramatized on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (and actually directed by Hitchcock, who liked Dahl so much the he directed four episodes adapted from Dahl's stories). When I mention the name of the author, people are surprised.
• "The Man From the South." A man wagers his lighter can work ten times in a row.  If it does, he gets a car.  If not . . .
• "Poison." A man living in India wakes up to find a deadly poisonous snake on his chest.
• "Taste." A man wagers he can identify a wine down to the exact village, simply by tasting it.
• "Dip in the Pool." Another man wagers (a  lot of Dahl stories involved betting) on how far the steamship he is on will travel. When he discovers he may lose everything in the bet, he comes up with a solution.
• "The Great Switcheroo." A man devises a way to sleep with his best friend's wife, while his friend sleeps with his. The twist here is hilarious.
• "Bitch." Yet another man develops an aphrodisiac perfume, and sets up a plot to embarrass the President. This has one of the best final lines in all of literature. It also causes problems for Roald Dahl web pages, since they can't discuss it in front of the children.

Dahl's output was relatively meager -- 51 stories -- and fewer and fewer as his success as a children's author grew. The end of anthology series on TV also helped speed his stories becoming obscure (he hosted Tales of the Unexpected in 1979, a show originally devoted to dramatizing his stories, but it was primarily successful in the UK), as did the fact he didn't have any success as a novelist (his one adult novel, My Uncle Oswald, is pretty much an expansion of Bitch, but isn't all that good -- if your forte is twist endings, then a novel is not going to let you do what you do best).

Nearly all of Dahl's short fiction has been collected in his Collected Stories. It's a fine place to discover on of the best adult fiction writers of the 20th century.

Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol

(1972)(TV movie)
Directed by George McCowan
Written by Stanley R. Greenberg
Starring Martin Landau, Jane Alexander, Brock Peters, Martin Sheen, Pat O'Brien, Forrest Tucker

In the 60s and 70s, most made for TV movies were crappy.  This was before the miniseries, and the networks, desperate for content and seeing how well theatrical movies did for them, started making their own. But without the budget and talent. Every once in awhile, someone thing might reach the level of not half bad (e.g., The Questor Tapes), but most had a long way to go to reach mediocre (e.g., Genesis II, Planet Earth).

It may be faint praise to say that Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol was one of the best, but it was a pretty good movie on its own merits.

Johnny Bristol (Martin Landau) was a released Vietnam war POW, who had managed to stay sane by remembering his life before the war in his home town of Charles, Vermont.  When released, he heads home.

Only there is no Charles, Vermont. Bristol has reason to believe that the government has done something to hide the town and all records of its existence.  Of course, they portray him as a psycho Vietnam vet, but he refuses to accept their story and goes to find the truth. Anne Palmer (Jane Alexander) is a nurse who begins to believe he may be on to something.

The story was one of the first to focus on returning Vietnam veterans. And while it seems to fit in with the "crazy Vietnam vet" cliche, it transcends this by Martin Landau's fine performance. His Bristol is like Fox Muldur, who knows the truth is out there, but is frustrated in his attempts to find it.  Landau was best known for this point as being Rollin Hand from the original Mission: Impossible (as a guest star in each episode due to contract considerations), and this was one of his first roles after that.

It also had some things to say about the difficulties transitioning to life after Vietnam.  I've seen it compared to The Best Years of Our Lives in that respect (though I can't be sure the person who called it such ever actually saw Johnny Bristol).  The story is ultimately about Bristol's readjustment and the mystery of Charles, Vermont, though solved in the end, it less important than Bristol's learning to cope with life after being a POW.

CBS aired the show in January of 1972.  Like most TV movies, it got very little notice and was quickly forgotten (I couldn't find an image of it on the Internet).  There may be DVDs, but they're scarce, too.

Few made for TV movies reached this level, so it's a shame that it's so hard to find. If you can see it, by all means give it a shot.

Mrs. Henderson Presents

(2005)
Directed by Stephen Frears
Written by Martin Sherman, from an idea from David and Kathy Rose
Starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Christopher Guest

You'd think a movie about female nudity might be able to do OK at the box office (then again, with Showgirls, possibly not). Mrs. Henderson Presents is a charming little comedy drama about how nude women came to be on the British stage in 1937, and true story about how a the little theater that dared to do it became an British institution.

Mrs. Laura Henderson (Judi Dench) is widowed at the age of 70s and wonders what she can do with her life. Eventually, she discovers a decrepit old theater and decides that this would be far more interesting than embroideries and fundraising, so she buys it and hires Vivian* Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) to manage the theater. They form a testy relationship with Henderson asking the impossible and Van Damm trying to stick with the possible.

The Windmill Theater struggles along until Mrs. Henderson comes up with a new idea:  why not include "tableaus" of famous paintings.  Famous paintings of nudes, where women played the part of the women in the painting.

Van Damm thinks it's a ridiculous idea. There was a censor, the Lord Chamberlain (Christopher Guest), whose job it is to make sure the theater remains decent.  Mrs. Henderson meets with him and, in a very funny scene, comes to an agreement.  Since the paintings are on public display, the tableaus can be displayed -- but only if the women in them never move.

And so the theater begins to succeed, though not without troubles along the way.  There are constant fights with the Lord Chamberlain over how the woman can appear. It comes close, but Mrs. Henderson and Van Damm always find ways to keep things going.

I don't have to say that Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins are excellent; neither is capable of even a mediocre performance.  Dench's Henderson is a woman who knows what she wants, and who can find an answer to anything, and she handles it with great wit and depth. The scene where she reveals why she was so intent on showing the tableaus is quite touching.

Hoskins is bristly and irritated by Henderson's requests, but does show a nice respect for his boss.  And Christopher Guest is as funny as he's ever been as the Lord Chamberlain, a man so repressed he cannot discuss the issues at hand with Mrs. Henderson.

Stephen Frears has made a bunch of movies that were great but forgotten; I'll be talking about a few of those soon.  He was hired on after the movie was cast, but did a fine job here.

And there really was a Windmill Theater. The tableaus were only a small portion of each show, which was designed like a vaudeville show, with a series of acts all through the day (it ran all day), but they were what made the show popular (including with US GIs in London during World War II).

The movie didn't do particularly well in the box office, but got a couple of Oscar nominations. After that, it vanished away. But pick up the DVD and prepare to be entertained.

*Often a male name in the UK, as my hero Vivian Stanshall attests.

Cordwainer Smith (author)

Wikpedia Entry

In 1950, in an obscure and soon-to-be-almost-forgotten magazine called Fantasy Book, a story appeared with the memorable title "Scanners Live in Vain":

Martel was angry.  He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stumped across the room by judgment, not sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not.

This was intriguing stuff back in 1950 (it's still pretty intriguing now) and word of the story got out, talking about a bright new talent in science fiction going by the odd name of Cordwainer Smith. People wondered what his next story would be.

They kept wondering. Fantasy Book folded, and no other magazine seemed to get any stories from Smith. "Scanners" was anthologized and readers looked avidly for more work, but there was none. It was assumed that the name was a pseudonym (who would name their child "Cordwainer" (an archaic word meaning "shoemaker")?), but whose?

Five years later, H.L. Gold, the legendary editor of Galaxy, managed to track down Smith and persuade him to write more.  The second story by Smith, "The Game of Rat and Dragon," was even better than the first.

A major new short story writer had arrived. And since science fiction in the 50s (and beyond) was pretty much a short story medium, it meant a major SF writer was discovered.

Smith's real name was Paul Linebarger.  He was a political scientist who taught at Johns Hopkins and an expert on Far Eastern affairs (he was a close friend of Chaing Kai-shek and had Sun Yat-sen as a godfather) and psychological warfare. Some accounts indicated he devised a way for Chinese soldiers to chant "honor," "duty," and "humanity" and the phrases would sound like "I surrender" in English, allowing them to give up while saving face (I checked an online Chinese dictionary, and found that "duty" and "humanity" do come out as "zi-ren-dao," which does sound pretty close to "surrender")

But he wanted to be a writer, too, and submitted many failed stories until Fantasy Book (which is only known at all because of him) took him on -- and never actually paid him for it.

Smith's stories were generally set in a particular future history, called the Instrumentality of Mankind. There were connections, and a real historic timeline. The world was filled with baroque wonders. The most notable were the underpeople, people created from animal stock and who faced strong prejudices there was stroon, the santaclara drug, which conferred immortality, and which made its producers on the planet Norstrilia (or Old North Australia) very rich indeed.

Smith was a master at portraying a strange, decadent society, and often used Chinese methods of storytelling in his work.  He was the master of weird and evocative names and titles, with characters like C'Mell, Dolores Oh, Prince Lovaduck, Lord Jestocost, and many others. Even the story titles are strange and exciting:

• The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal (I love the story, though some of its assumptions are highly offensive today).
• Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh!
• Mother Hittons Litul Kittons (click on link to read)
• The Ballad of Lost C'Mell
• A Planet Called Shayol

Smith's only science fiction novel was Norstrilia, but was made up of two shorter works joined together (he wrote a couple of other in other genres under other pen names). He seemed to have preferred the short story format, and back in the 50s and 60s, that was enough to make a name for yourself.

Alas, Smith died in 1966, with just over ten years of productive work. He never won any SF awards and his work was primarily in magazines and anthologies. Since fewer readers read short stories, they don't see him all that often. Most of his works are in print. If you like weird and wonderful science fiction, the name Cordwainer Smith should be part of your vocabulary.

Replay (book)

(1987)
Written by Ken Grimwood

Replay is based on an idea we probably have all had:  what would I do if I could live my life over?

Ken Grimwood takes that and gives it a wonderful twist:  what would I do if I could live my life over and over and over and over?

In the book, 43-year-old Jeff Winston, unhappy with his marriage, suffers what he thinks is a heart attack.  And waked up back in time, as an 18-year-old with all the knowledge of what will happen in the future.

Jeff quickly does what you might expect:  bets on sporting events and turns himself into a millionaire. It's handled quite well:  Jeff doesn't remember all the winners and sometimes doesn't bet because of it.  He also ends up making a hash of his personal life.  And when he gets to be 43, it all happens again.

Grimwood plays through the variations with a lot of thought and a great deal of interesting detail. The world changes each time Jeff travels back, due the choices Jeff makes. He even finds that someone else is going through the same thing, a woman whose presence he discovers when movies are made that had not been made in his timeline,  and they spend lifetimes together because they are the only people who can share the secret.

And things advance; it's clear very early on where things are going, but the ending goes back to the original scene, and pulls out a wonderful and fascinating twist that reflects back on the entire experience.

It's also a damn good read.  I picked it up and finished it in a weekend and found it to be a book I just couldn't put down.

Replay ended up winning the World Fantasy Award, and is on many best fantasy book lists, but does not have the fame it deserves.

Grimwood took his time following up and it was eight years before his next novel, Into the Deep, was out. It didn't make a particular mark (I didn't much care for it), and two others after that also made little impression.  Sadly, Grimwood died young at age 59.  Even sadder, he was working on a sequel to Replay when he died.

(Note. I had hoped to include a picture of the original hardcover edition, but I can't seem to find it on the web.  This is from a later paperback.)

Me and You and Everyone We Know

(2005)
Written and Directed by Miranda July
Starring Miranda July, John Hawkes, Brandon Ratcliffe, Miles Thompson, Carrie Westerman, Tracy Wright.
IMDB Page

))<>((

That's the secret password.  If you recognize it, you've seen this movie and, like most people who have seen it, were delighted by it.  It made many critics' top ten lists in 2005, a strange little comedy-drama that stays with you a long time.

Christine Jesperson (Miranda July) is a video performance artist who had a hard time forming relationships.  She starts to become interested in Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), whose wife has left him and his two boys Peter (Miles Thmpson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliffe). Left alone while their father works as a shoe salesman, Peter hangs out with the neighborhood girls, who all have issues of their own.  Robby is only six, and spends much of his time in adult Internet chatrooms, where he runs into art curator Nancy Herrington (Tracy Wright), who finds his childlike attitude more sexually significant than Robby could ever understand.

The movie is about making connections.  No one really seems to know how to go about it.  Christine fantasizes and puts it on video; a neighbor writes puts sexually suggestive notes in his window and ends up, to his horror, seducing teenage girls; the teens, who know about sex, but have no understanding, try to use it as a way to grow up.

Sex plays a major role in the film, but not just bedroom antics. It concentrates more on the preliminaries and psychological meanderings that are colored by a world where sex is out in the open. It's the big issue that hangs over any attempt to get close, and the movie shows people dealing with it.

This is a movie filled with discovery and delight.  It's not a smooth ride -- some scenes are very creepy, but then, often life is that way. Things take on meanings that you never would have imagined. And, ultimately connections are made.

All the characters are vivid and wonderful.  You can sense all the kids feeling they are in over their heads trying to deal with connecting with others, but the adults are hardly better.  It's a very natural acting style for everyone.

Miranda July is excellent as Christine.  Since she wrote and directed the movie, you'd expect that she makes it a showcase for her talents, but she has the talent and self-confidence to stand back and tell stories that have nothing to do with her.  Christine is trying to deal with life as an adult, and fumbles along in setting up the relationship, sometimes saying the right thing, sometimes doing something horribly wrong, and going home to incorporate the best parts in her fantasy.

But all the actors are just fine. These are real people, and you can see their foibles.  And ultimately, when the movie ends, you come out of it with an appreciation of life. 

The movie made a minor profit -- keeping it on a small budget helped -- but it probably did less business than next week's flop opening.  Nor was the type of film do attract a big crowd.  But box office never was a guarantee of quality.

July hasn't made another feature (this was her first), but it's only been a couple of years. I look forward to see if she can continue with writing and directing such a deep slice of humanity.

))<>(( forever.

The Magician (TV)

(1973-74)
Created by Bruce Lansbury and Joseph Stefano
Starring Bill Bixby, Keene Curtis
IMDB Page
Article on the Series.

I was a fan of Bill Bixby since I first saw him in My Favorite Martian. And I suppose people nowadays think of him more as Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk. He also had a decent run starring in The Courtship of Eddie's Father.

But I have a special liking for his show, The Magician.

The concept was not entirely original, but still a good one:  a magician who fights crime. But Bixby's Anthony Blake was a real magician: he used stage magic to help him out. So when he was captured and put into handcuffs, he would use his escapology skills to set himself free. Bixby even performed his own illusions.*

Blake had been falsely imprisoned and used his knowledge of magic to escape, and then went around helping out others.

Bixby had a strong idea of how the show should be plotted.  He did all the illusions himself, and tried to set a tone for the series.

But there were problems.  A writer's strike made it difficult to set the tone, and the show never really caught on in the ratings.  It made changes -- later episodes showed Blake using the Magic Castle in L.A., where other magicians would show up for small bits. But nothing helped and the show was canceled.

It's still remembered fondly in some circles, and I'd love to see it again.

*Tricks are something whores do for money -- G.O.B. Bluth

The Skin Game

(1931)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Revelle, based on a play by John Galsworthy
Starring C.V. France, Edmund Gwenn, Helen Haye, Phylis Constam, Edward Chapman, John Longden

The director hated it. The deadly scandal that leads to tragedy wouldn't raise a shrug today. The class assumptions made little sense in the US then, and probably not even in England now. And, despite the fact it's mentioned a couple of times, the meaning of the title is hard to figure out.

But The Skin Game is a surprisingly good film.

Alfred Hitchcock directed, from a John Galsworthy play. It was clearly not his type of film: no suspense, little action, a mystery throughout most of it (Hitchcock always preferred suspense to mystery*).

But the original stage play has a lot going for it.

It's the story of old money vs. new money. The Hillcrists have owned land in their town for generations and the head of the family, John Hillcrist (C. V. France), thinks of himself as a man who is upholding traditional values (and -- in modern terms, the environmentalist). The Hornblowers (led by Edmund Gwenn, an actor I always like) are the owners of a pottery works, and are buying up land in order to expand their factory and destroy the land.

Hornblower is cocky and sure of himself, a self-made man who knows what he wants and will do whatever is necessary to get it. He wants a particular tract of land, partly for practical purposes, but also because Hillcrist snubs him for being common. The land goes up for auction, and the problem escalates.

But Hornblower's daughter-in-law Chloe (Phyllis Konstam) has a dark secret in her past. Mrs. Hillcrist (Helen Haye) gets wind of it from their sleezy agent Dawker (Edward Chapman) and uses it to get what they want. But the result is tragic.

Hitchcock complained about the actors, but, really, I've never seen Edmund Gwenn (who I've written about elsewhere) put in a bad performance. He brings some nice depth to Hornblower, who starts out as a crude and uncaring land developer but who is slowly revealed to be a decent man who wants what's best for his family and, ultimately, the community.

France is decent as Hillcrist, but the real villain in the piece is Helen Haye's** Amy Hilcrist. She is the class system at its worst, vicious to those who cross her, and perfectly willing to toss another person's life into the meat grinder if it gives her what she wants.

But a real tour-de-force is Phyllis Konstam as Chloe. She tries her best to patch things up between the families, but her past is the ultimate wedge between them, and brutally suffers the consequences. She is a pawn, and no one is bothered that they sacrificed her for a small advantage.

There are a few Hitchcock moments. The auction scene is genuinely suspenseful, and the Hornblowers are introduced by literally doing what their name says. But it's clearly not a Hitchcock film.

Don't hold that against it. Ignore the director's name, and you'll find a surprisingly good tragedy.

*With a mystery, a solution to a puzzle is revealed; it's based upon keep things from the audience. With suspense, the plight of the characters is known to the audience -- while the characters don't realize their danger.

**Not Helen Hayes. What a difference an apostrophe makes.

Barnaby (comic strip)

Words and art by Crockett Johnson Barnaby Home Page

Barnaby to my mind is one of the top five comic strips ever written. While the others -- Krazy Kat, Pogo, Doonesbury, and Calvin and Hobbes are still well known (or known with just a little bit of digging into comic history), Barnaby is pretty much unknown except to a few. It ran for only a short time in the 1940s and collections are hard to find.

The title character is a boy of about five or so who one day wishes he had a fairy godmother. What he got instead was a fairy godfather -- J. J. O'Malley, a man about his height with pink wings and a cigar as a magic wand. Equipped with The Fairy Godfather's Handy Pocket Guide, he tries to help Barnaby out. To Barnaby Mr. O'Malley is a wonder, but the reader noticed quite soon that he hilariously overstates his talents, usually creating more problems than he solves in the rare cases when his magic actually works. O'Malley is a charming braggart and blowhard, who's all too willing to help Barnaby out -- to disastrous results -- when he isn't spending his days at the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes & Little Men's Chowder and Marching Society. Some have compared to him to W.C. Fields (Fields didn't think so, though he liked the strip enough to write a blurb for one of its collections).

O'Malley leads Barnaby into various adventures, often by taking what Barnaby wants and then mistaking things to a hilarious level. In the meantime, Barnaby meets a wonderful gallery of fantasy characters. Gus the Ghost, who's afraid of everything; McSnoyd, the sarcastic invisible leprechaun; Gorgon the talking dog; Atlas, the mental giant; and many others. Barnaby is joined by Jane, a girl his age is who a bit more skeptical of O'Malley's talents. Barnaby's parents, meanwhile, keep trying to get to forget about his imaginary fairy godfather (they always miss meeting O'Malley in the flesh -- and he them).

The strip had some features that made it different:

• Simple drawing style. In a time when things were always cross-hatched and filled in, the drawings were usually outlines, with splashes of pure black for depth. In style, it anticipated things like Dilbert.
• Typeset word balloons. The balloons were also rounded off squares. Johnson did this because the strips had lots of dialog, and this let him fit more on a page.
• Humor that built up over the course of an adventure. The strips were funny on their own, but they were all part of longer stories, and the more you read, the funnier they became. Johnson threw in plot twists and outrageous events that fit in perfectly; he was one of the best continuity plotters in comic strip history.
• Implied humor. Many of the jokes come not from what was said, but what was not said. For instance, O'Malley saying, "I don't boast about it, m'boy, but I've had a hand in more treaties and confabs than you can shake a stick at -- Versailles, Geneva, Munich -- " (all in one word balloon). Once you realize that even then, those conferences were considered failures, you get an idea of the style.

Johnson (real name: David Johnson Leisk) only worked on Barnaby from 1942 to 1946. It was a critical success, and did well enough to be marginally successful (only 55 papers), but he had other things on his mind. He left the strip to a couple of assistants and started a second career as a writer and illustrator of children's books. In that light, he's best known for Harold and the Purple Crayon and other books starring Harold -- who looks very much like Barnaby.

The others tried -- with direction from Crockett -- but the strip was discontinued in 1952, after a short ten-year run. Johnson returned for the final continuity, and tried to revive the strip in the early 60s, to no avail.

During its run, there were two collections. And in the mid-80s, science fiction editor Judy-Lynn Del Rey announced they would publish the entire run -- one of the first times that was planned. Alas, Judy-Lynn died in 1986, but not before six volumes were produced, which, luckily, covered all the strips while Crockett Johnson was working on it. The books are now selling used for upwards of $30.

Barnaby was one of the greatest delights of the comic strip, and deserves to be as well known as strips like Calvin and Hobbes.

Cushlamochree!

Second City Television

Original Cast: John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, and Dave Thomas as the Beaver.
Other Cast members: Rick Moranis, Martin Short, Tony Rosato, Robin Duke.
Website

In the early 70s, a sketch comedy show appears on late night American TV that showcased a group of talented performers (who went on to greater success after they left the show) and which revolutionized TV comedy.

No, not Saturday Night Live.* Second City Television (SCTV for short).

SCTV was, of course, named after the famed Second City comedy troupe. The original cast got their start in the Toronto version of the troupe, with the idea of turning the skits into a TV series. The show was set in a low-budget TV network -- SCTV -- located in Mellonville. The premise was a useful one. It allowed for all sorts of skits satirizing TV shows, moves, actors, and genres. One nice thing was that you could keep a comic idea going for as long or as short as necessary. A one-joke idea would be turned into a one-minute promo instead of being dragged out for ten minutes. In addition, the "low-budget TV network" concept helped because the show had a very small budget.

So they had to do what great talent does when denied resources: they concentrated on the writing. The show was produced in Canada for the CBC, but quickly syndicated in the US.

What was also fun was the many recurring characters each actor played. John Candy did Johnny Larue**, a hard living big star with shady connections. Harold Ramis was Moe Green, the sleezy station manager. Eugene Levy was idiot TV host Bobby Bittman and incompetent newscaster Earl Camenbert, Joe Flaherty was both newscaster Floyd Robertson (who had to put up with Earl's manias) and Count Floyd (host of Monster Chiller Horror Theater, whose films never seemed to be scary at all, with things like Ingmar Bergman parodies). Andrea Martin was Edith Prickley, Moe Green's replacement, dressed entirely in leopard skin. Catherine O'Hara was Lola Heatherton, the insufferably perky singer. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas were the Mackenzie Brothers***, who ended becoming something of a spinoff, with their song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" ("Beer . . . in a tree"), a movie, and essentially a revival of the characters as moose in Brother Bear.

The actors were all great at portraying other celebrities, so they could skewer them at will. Or even take on something like Sesame Street.

Of course, the success of the people in the show was also remarkable. Some names you know -- Candy, Moranis, Short, and now Levy have become comedy stars. O'Hara has played someone's mother in dozens of films, and -- along with Levy -- is part of Christopher Guest's stock company (Best in Show is her most notable role). Ramis turned to directing, with films like Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This and acted, most notably in Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters. Andrea Martin has been a busy character actress, but her biggest success has been on Broadway (she's currently playing Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein).

Of the original group, on Flaherty hasn't had many recognizable roles, but he's been working steadily as a writer and actor since the show ended (most of the people in the cast wrote at least some of the skits, and ended up winning a couple of Emmys for it).

SCTV was a true forgotten landmark of television.

*Back at the time, one TV critic around here said the real reason to watch SNL in those days is to stay up and watch SCTV, which was on right after it.
** When Hill Street Blues came on the air, one character was also called Johnny LaRue, and it took me a little time to take him seriously.
*** Supposedly created when the Canadian Broadcasting Company (who produced the show) required there be more Canadian content.

In Memory of Anthony Minghella

My earlier review of Truly, Madly, Deeply.