TCM: The Greatest Movie Channel

[Milburn Stone]

1 hour ago, Rinaldo said:

Upcoming: 6 a.m. Sunday, Best Foot Forward. Yet another college musical, but one with a good Ralph Martin score...

Of course you mean Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. (But I like the conflation of the two names into one, kind of a portmanteau. Especially since they chose to put both their names on all the songs they wrote when their partnership was alive, even though most of them were written by only one of them and not the other.)

Hey, maybe you meant to do it. If so, I salute you. :)

[Rinaldo]

No, I was just being a doofus as usual. But I like the idea that on some subconscious level I was conflating the two. (It does seem that of all the songs officially co-written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, all the ones we remember -- except for "Buckle Down, Winsocki" from Best Foot Forward -- were solely Martin's work. Of course, we "know" that mostly because Martin eventually said so.)

[Crisopera]

I'm the one person who saw Sweet Revenge  in the theater - in Paris, no less.  The staid DA was played by Sam Waterston, not Franklin Ajaye.  What little I remember about it was that it wasn't actually terrible, the acting was good, and the plot was confusing. 

[psychoticstate]

I've seen No Man Of Her Own but DVR'd it anyhow since it's been awhile.  

I watched the 45 minute documentary on Gable hosted by Liam Neeson.  Enjoyed it.  Nice photos of Gable as well as film clips and Neeson filmed some of his talking points at the house Gable shared with Lombard and where he lived the last 20 or so years of his life.  Neeson as a host was especially touching given that he too lost his lovely blonde wife to an untimely accident.  

The documentary certainly drives home the fact that stars today are nothing like those of yesteryear.

[Rinaldo]

32 minutes ago, Crisopera said:

The staid DA was played by Sam Waterston, not Franklin Ajaye.

OK, apologies for misinformation - as I said, I haven't seen it and was making unwarranted extrapolations from a still I'd seen and from Waterston not being featured at all in the previews. This way is more what one would expect, of course. Anyway, congrats on having been there in the theater -- I have a few like that I paid a ticket to see when nobody else did (like two musicals that have a certain réclame now but played to empty theaters on opening day, except for me, and were actually jettisoned midweek: The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Pirates of Penzance).

Stockard Channing made a better recovery with her next movie, The Big Bus. Silly as it is, I find it lots of fun.

Edited May 4, 2017 by Rinaldo

[Milburn Stone]

35 minutes ago, Rinaldo said:

Stockard Channing made a better recovery with her next movie, The Big Bus. Silly as it is, I find it lots of fun.

I loved that too at the movies. Haven't seen it since--it doesn't get "revived" on cable nearly as much as Airplane et. al. It ought to!

[Crisopera]

The Big Bus  is hilarious - I'd love to see it again.  And I also saw The Pirates of Penzance in the theater - this time in Bloomington, IN.  I really enjoyed it.  There is a video of the original Joe Papp version, which I saw one night on TV (PBS, probably), which is also hilarious.  Original cast - Ronstadt, Smith, Kline, Rose, and the fabulous Patricia Routledge as Ruth.  If you can find it, it's definitely worth seeking out, even though the picture and sound quality are pretty awful.

Edited May 4, 2017 by Crisopera

[Rinaldo]

That Pirates video from the stage is out on DVD, so those who want it (as I did) can own it. Apparently it was taped for PBS airing at the time, then changes happened and management forgot they had it and never aired it. Then, decades later, it was rediscovered and made available. Patricia Routledge is really something.

[Milburn Stone]

Good news, Big Bus fans--I just headed over to iTunes to see if it's streamable, and it is, for a mere $3.99. In HD yet. It's also available to stream from Amazon Video, same price. So if you've got an Apple TV box, or an Amazon Fire, or some kind of smart TV, you can watch it on the telly anytime. Yay!

[Crisopera]

Thanks, Milburn!

[Rinaldo]

OK, I decided to watch all of Strange Interlude yesterday evening. Oh my. (And, as I said, I've been familiar with the play for many a year.) When you take a story that's already rather overfilled with melodramatic emotion for present-day tastes and squeeze it down to 40% of its full running order, you get very abrupt and immediate transitions. And these actors don't stint on going for the extremes. And then a bit more. I can't imagine how Carol Burnett never made this one of her classic movie renditions alongside "Went with the Wind" and "Rancid Harvest." I suppose it was so seldom screened in the 1970s that viewers wouldn't have known the original. But it just begs for her.

[Milburn Stone]

3 hours ago, Rinaldo said:

I can't imagine how Carol Burnett never made this one of her classic movie renditions alongside "Went with the Wind" and "Rancid Harvest." I suppose it was so seldom screened in the 1970s that viewers wouldn't have known the original. But it just begs for her.

The title alone begs for the Burnett touch. "Weird Interlude," maybe?

Email from TCM describing "season premiere" of the reconstituted Essentials. Sounds interesting.

Join us tomorrow evening on TCM as we premiere The Essentials, hosted by Alec Baldwin and joined each week by one of three very special guests including David Letterman, Tina Fey and William Friedkin. Each week Alec and his guest will introduce a hand-picked classic and share commentary on its cultural significance, its influence on other films, behind-the-scenes stories and their own personal reflections.

We will kick off the series tomorrow as Alec and David share The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) at 8 PM ET.

[Rinaldo]

That's promising, at least in advance. As we're likely to be sharing the hosting duties, I hope they bring back the team of Michael McKean and Annette O'Toole, who brought a fresh point of view to the month they were on.

[ratgirlagogo]

6 hours ago, Rinaldo said:

I can't imagine how Carol Burnett never made this one of her classic movie renditions alongside "Went with the Wind" and "Rancid Harvest." I suppose it was so seldom screened in the 1970s that viewers wouldn't have known the original. But it just begs for her.

I was going to post yesterday that MAD Magazine did a parody of it in the March 1964 issue - combining it with a parody of the TV show Hazel - "A Strange Interlude with Hazey."  I was waiting until I could  find online links to the whole thing, but I can't.  They have a couple of frames of it in this Nitrateville discussion thread:

http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=14773

Note the masks!  Art of course by the great Mort Drucker.  Reminds me of Art Spiegelman's Maus.  Hilariously some of the posters are sneeringly surprised that anyone from MAD would know the original play or have seen the Gable-Shearer film.  As if!  The writers were Frank Jacobs, Stan Hart, and Larry Siegel (the last two of course won multiple Emmys writing for the Carol Burnett Show - so clearly if Carol didn't do it it's not because she COULDN'T have done it).  I suppose it goes without saying that as with many other landmarks of High Culture this MAD parody was my introduction to it.   

Edited May 6, 2017 by ratgirlagogo

[Bastet]

On 5/4/2017 at 3:09 PM, Milburn Stone said:

Good news, Big Bus fans--I just headed over to iTunes to see if it's streamable, and it is, for a mere $3.99. In HD yet. It's also available to stream from Amazon Video, same price. So if you've got an Apple TV box, or an Amazon Fire, or some kind of smart TV, you can watch it on the telly anytime.

I don't, but my parents do, so next time I'm cat-sitting at their house, guess what I'm doing?  Thanks for the info; that's a fun movie I haven't seen in eons and would like to revisit.

[Milburn Stone]

9 hours ago, Bastet said:

I don't, but my parents do, so next time I'm cat-sitting at their house, guess what I'm doing?  Thanks for the info; that's a fun movie I haven't seen in eons and would like to revisit.

We watched it last night, and the further good news is it holds up. The Big Bus predates Airplane! by four years, so I guess that makes it the first disaster-movie-parody movie. And it predates Movie Movie by a year, so maybe it's even the first movie parody of any movie genre. At any rate I can't think of any predecessors.

It has a good deal of the absurdist element of Airplane!, but compared to that movie, it's sweeter, with more character focus. You actually kind of believe in the reality of these comic characters as more than vehicles for the next gag. (Not denigrating Airplane!, just putting this movie into relief in order to illuminate it.) When the characters were in jeopardy, I worried for them, and the climactic scene is genuinely nerve-wracking! (Things I could never say about Airplane!, much as I adore that film.)

A top-flight cast of comic actors (and dramatic actors adept at comedy), including Joseph Bologna, Stockard Channing, Rene Auberjonois (excellent as a cynical priest losing his faith), Sally Kellerman, Richard Mulligan, Murphy Dunne (playing maybe the first parody lounge singer, predating Bill Murray?), and others. Even the music is good. As the main titles came up, I said to myself, "Hey, this music actually has quality!" Was not totally surprised, therefore, to find it was written by a master, David Shire.

Takes a little while to get going (when the movie gets rolling is literally when the bus gets rolling, probably about fifteen minutes in), but then it's a fun ride to the end. And I mean the end; the final shot is perfection.

Edited May 6, 2017 by Milburn Stone

[bmoore4026]

Today's movie theme seems to be "pretty people in togas":  She, Logan's Run, and Spartacus

[voiceover]

20 hours ago, bmoore4026 said:

Today's movie theme seems to be "pretty people in togas":  She, Logan's Run, and Spartacus

When I was a kid, I saw She on TV and was pleasantly, horribly, grossed out by the title character's fate.  I wonder if the animators for Disney's Tangled had that scene in mind when they drew *their* villain's demise.  

[GreekGeek]

21 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

We watched it last night, and the further good news is it holds up. The Big Bus predates Airplane! by four years, so I guess that makes it the first disaster-movie-parody movie. And it predates Movie Movie by a year, so maybe it's even the first movie parody of any movie genre. At any rate I can't think of any predecessors.

 

I was wondering whether this is indeed the first movie parody so I googled "first movie parody." Wikipedia lists a lot of movies practically from the beginning of movie history. Their definition seems pretty broad; more like "movie parodies" than "movie parodies," if that makes sense. The Great Dictator, for example, spoofs Hitler and Mussolini, but does it parody any movies? (Maybe Nazi propaganda films?) Still, there do seem to be quite a few that sound like what we'd recognize as movie parodies. The "Abbot and Costello Meet..." series preceded the "Scary Movie" series by decades. And can any of our British (or other fans of British movies) members discuss the "Carry On" series?

Has TCM ever done a "Movie Parody Day"? If not, they should!

[Milburn Stone]

1 hour ago, GreekGeek said:

I was wondering whether this is indeed the first movie parody so I googled "first movie parody." Wikipedia lists a lot of movies practically from the beginning of movie history. Their definition seems pretty broad; more like "movie parodies" than "movie parodies," if that makes sense. The Great Dictator, for example, spoofs Hitler and Mussolini, but does it parody any movies? (Maybe Nazi propaganda films?) Still, there do seem to be quite a few that sound like what we'd recognize as movie parodies. The "Abbot and Costello Meet..." series preceded the "Scary Movie" series by decades...

I think you've hit on the difference between a movie parody and a movie parody. The former makes fun of (maybe a better verb than parodies is lampoons) something going on in the actual world. The latter parodies a movie genre, and an essential element of parody is a streak of viciousness, with the intention that you'll never be able to take that genre seriously again! For that reason, I don't think the Abbott and Costello Meet... series fits the definition. Those movies had great fun with the genre, but they weren't intended to hold up the conventions of the genre to ridicule, so that you'd never again be able to watch a monster movie with a straight face. The Scary Movie series, on the other hand, does fit, because driving a stake through the heart of the whole psychopath-in-the-house genre was totally the intention of that franchise. I still haven't been able to think of a full-length single-plotline movie example that predates The Big Bus. (The Groove Tube parodied television genres, not movies, and was a series of sketches, not a sustained story. Kentucky Fried Movie came out the year after The Big Bus.)

Edited May 7, 2017 by Milburn Stone

[Rinaldo]

1 hour ago, Milburn Stone said:

The Groove Tube parodied television genres, not movies, and was a series of sketches, not a sustained story.

Ahhh, sudden recovered memory: The Groove Tube. People have been known to think me delusional when I say this, but I first saw it in 1972, before its IMDb-listed 1974 release. As the trivia notes there and on Wikipedia hint, it was first made to be shown on actual TV screens, and while those articles mention only a New York venue, it made it at least as far as Washington DC, where I was in a military band at the time. Seeing an odd-looking ad among the weekend attractions, several of us decided to go for it, drove to the address, and found ourselves in an audience of 20 in the living room of someone's house, paying to watch the TV. Those were the days.

I don't know about the first parody movie historically, but the genre had quite a run about a decade ago, each title becoming a bit more invisible and obscure and direct-to-DVD: Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Another Gay Movie (which apparently had a sequel), My Big Fat Independent Movie, Dirty Movie... and I'm sure there are more. I'm not claiming quality for any of these*, but as they say, "that happened."

(*That said... I did find Independent Movie one bored flu-y day at home, and was amused enough by the title song to transcribe the lyrics. I just discovered that I still have them, so lest a scrap of human knowledge be lost, here they are:)

Quote

Sold my blood to shoot this film on Super-35;

It's an art-house Clerks-meets-Soderbergh in hand-held black and white.

Parker Posey plays a girl who date-rapes Jon Favreau,

In a script by Chris McQuarrie with a score by Cheryl Crow.

There's cameos by Eric Stoltz, Buscemi, and Ed Burns,

With Keitel, Swank, and Harry Knowles all taking their star turns.

Made a mock-doc D.B. EPK, it's shot in natural light,

I want to screen at Sundance, work my way to Telluride!

 

This is my indie movie, my big fat independent movie.

 

We'll hit it big on Ain'tItCool, Film Threat, and IFC,

Lions Gate and Artisan will fight for its release.

They'll make us change the ending and they'll take out all the quirks,

And they'll platform it in theaters in LA and New York.

They'll bus the print from state to state eventually in time, 

They'll sell more seats than Blair Witch did, but we won't see a dime.

We'll interview with Elvis, Ebert, Pearson, and Chris Gore,

Then sell ourselves to Hollywood and do it all once more!

Edited May 7, 2017 by Rinaldo

[harrie]

2 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

I think you've hit on the difference between a movie parody and a movie parody. The former makes fun of (maybe a better verb than parodies is lampoons) something going on in the actual world. The latter parodies a movie genre, and an essential element of parody is a streak of viciousness, with the intention that you'll never be able to take that genre seriously again! For that reason, I don't think the Abbott and Costello Meet... series fits the definition. Those movies had great fun with the genre, but they weren't intended to hold up the conventions of the genre to ridicule, so that you'd never again be able to watch a monster movie with a straight face. The Scary Movie series, on the other hand, does fit, because driving a stake through the heart of the whole psychopath-in-the-house genre was totally the intention of that franchise. I still haven't been able to think of a full-length single-plotline movie example that predates The Big Bus. (The Groove Tube parodied television genres, not movies, and was a series of sketches, not a sustained story. Kentucky Fried Movie came out the year after The Big Bus.)

What about Blazing Saddles (1974)? It parodied just about every single Western/movie cliche in the book.  Young Frankenstein's release year is listed at 1974 too - did they come out that close together? 

If either one has already been mentioned and discarded, never mind. 

Edited May 7, 2017 by harrie

[Rinaldo]

16 minutes ago, harrie said:

What about Blazing Saddles (1974)? It parodied just about every single Western/movie cliche in the book.  Young Frankenstein's release year is listed at 1974 too - did they come out that close together?

Amazingly, they did come out in the same year. And yes, you've found the obvious answers that we were somehow overlooking.

[Milburn Stone]

I agree--those fill the bill. If somebody doesn't come up with an earlier movie than those, the conclusion may be that Mel Brooks invented the parody-movie genre!

[Crisopera]

I watched The Bad and the Beautiful  on The Essentials last night, and Alec Baldwin and David Letterman were entertaining, but they certainly have incredibly high standards for female beauty, since they seemed to agree that Lana Turner wasn't the most beautiful woman in movies, but she would do for the role.  Lana Turner wasn't absolutely gorgeous?  (I have a preference for Ava Gardner, myself, but still...)  I believe it was Alec Baldwin who said, quite dismissively, "She was no Grace Kelly."  I hadn't seen TBatB for years, and enjoyed it greatly.  It's so interesting to try to catch all the bits of Hollywoodiana - Kirk Douglas's character as a combination of David O. Selznick and Val Lewton, Lana Turner as (a successful) Diana Barrymore, etc.  And what a gorgeous movie!  Absolutely glowing B&W cinematography.  I hadn't remembered that Gloria Grahame's Oscar-winning role was so teeny - at least Beatrice Straight in Network had one great scene in her scant screentime.  it seems kind of odd that she won over both Jean Hagen (for Singin' in the Rain) and Thelma Ritter (for With a Song in My Heart).  And, like many movies of its day, while it starts in 1929-30, the women's clothes don't even make an effort - they are all echt-1950s (beautiful, though).

[Rinaldo]

20 minutes ago, Crisopera said:

they certainly have incredibly high standards for female beauty, since they seemed to agree that Lana Turner wasn't the most beautiful woman in movies, but she would do for the role.  Lana Turner wasn't absolutely gorgeous? ...  I believe it was Alec Baldwin who said, quite dismissively, "She was no Grace Kelly."

I'm a little uncomfortable with grading actresses on a beauty scale, though I suppose we the audience do in fact do that to all performers. I don't recall that TBATB requires that she be absolutely the most gorgeous ever, in any case -- "merely" enough to be a plausible movie star, which obviously Lana Turner fulfills. So I don't know what they're on about.

That said, if we're comparing, and making lists, she wouldn't make the tip-top of my own Golden Age pantheon either. I immediately think of Gene Tierney and Vivien Leigh as the supreme goddesses, and then I have to add Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rita Hayworth. After that, however beautiful, they're on human scale (Grace Kelly as well as Lana Turner, for me). But I've been around long enough to know that we all differ on such matters.

[ratgirlagogo]

11 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

 

I agree--those fill the bill. If somebody doesn't come up with an earlier movie than those, the conclusion may be that Mel Brooks invented the parody-movie genre!

 

The Little Train Robbery is usually considered the first movie parody:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000521/

directed by Edwin S. Porter in 1905, the same guy that directed the movie it parodies, The Great Train Robbery of 1903.   At twelve minutes it is one minute longer than the film it parodies so I think that qualifies it as a full-length parody.

I hardly know what to make of this topic.  As GreekGeek said above,  parodies go back to the beginning of the movies.  At least half of the Mack Sennett films were parodies of other things - the Charlie Chaplin Carmen,  Douglas Fairbanks" The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (Sherlock Holmes) and Wild and Woolly (Westerns), all those Ben Turpin things like The Shriek of Araby.  Often I think it's hard for contemporary audiences to make sense of them since so many are of things like Uncle Tom's Cabin, East Lynne, and Ten Nights in a Barroom/The Drunkard/The Face on the Barroom Floor that were filmed many times in the silent era and little known today.

15 hours ago, harrie said:

The latter parodies a movie genre, and an essential element of parody is a streak of viciousness, with the intention that you'll never be able to take that genre seriously again! For that reason, I don't think the Abbott and Costello Meet... series fits the definition. Those movies had great fun with the genre, but they weren't intended to hold up the conventions of the genre to ridicule, so that you'd never again be able to watch a monster movie with a straight face. The Scary Movie series, on the other hand, does fit, because driving a stake through the heart of the whole psychopath-in-the-house genre was totally the intention of that franchise.

[ETA: this quote above is actually from Milburn Stone - I quoted from another quoter and can't fix the attribution in the quote box.  My apologies.]

I don't agree with your definition of parody here.  It's certainly not true of any of the Mel Brooks parodies (which also include in addition to the ones mentioned The Last Remake of Beau Geste and Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother), which are hugely affectionate and I think depend on the audience's knowledge of and affection for the genre in question to be funny.  I think this is also true of Movie/Movie for sure.  Also true of Grease which also is a parody, although not entirely of movies of course.

One that I think does meet your standards of viciousness is one of my own favorite parody movies -  W. C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer which  mocks  temperance melodramas like the three I mentioned above by surreally combining them  with a Survival in the Brutal Frozen Wilderness story.  I can't imagine Fields could feel anything but disgust for these morality tales.

I haven't seen that many of the Carry On films, but of the ones I have seen Carry On Cleo, Carry On Spying, and Carry On Cowboy are pretty specific parodies.  I suspect Carry on Teacher is also a direct parody of British school comedies like the St. Trinian's films, but I don't know those films very well.

On 5/6/2017 at 10:10 AM, Milburn Stone said:

the first parody lounge singer

 Hmm, I'd say Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor.  But seems like there ought to be others before that.

Edited May 8, 2017 by ratgirlagogo

[harrie]

Somehow, thoughts expressed by Milburn Stone were attributed to me above; and while I take no issue with those thoughts, I don't deserve or wish to take credit for someone else's ideas.

[ratgirlagogo]

20 minutes ago, harrie said:

Somehow, thoughts expressed by Milburn Stone were attributed to me above; and while I take no issue with those thoughts, I don't deserve or wish to take credit for someone else's ideas.

I'm sorry, I quoted from the wrong post.  Thank you for telling me.

[Milburn Stone]

18 hours ago, ratgirlagogo said:

I hardly know what to make of this topic.  As GreekGeek said above,  parodies go back to the beginning of the movies.  At least half of the Mack Sennett films were parodies of other things - the Charlie Chaplin Carmen,  Douglas Fairbanks" The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (Sherlock Holmes) and Wild and Woolly (Westerns), all those Ben Turpin things like The Shriek of Araby.

A distinction can be made between movies that are (as you put it) "parodies of other things" and movies that turn inward to parody the clichés of movie genres themselves. In the former category exist many examples going back, as you note, to the beginnings of movies as a medium; in the latter category, not so many, and perhaps none, before 1974. In the Mel Brooks movies mentioned, and then The Big Bus and Airplane! and the entire Scary Movie series and all the other genre parodies cited by Rinaldo with "Movie" in the title, the target of the parody is the done-to-deathness of genre clichés. Or, at least, their popularity. These movies serve to raise consciousness of genre tropes which we have seen so many times that we take them for granted, or else which were so inordinately effective or popular that they cry out to be taken down a peg. (In the latter case, the target is dual: the movies, for trading in clichés, and the audience, for loving the clichés so much.) It sounds like maybe The Little Train Robbery fills the bill. Offhand, one might make the case that some of the Marx Brothers movies did as well. But it seems to me the movie-parody genre only really took off in the seventies, when more signs began showing up that the medium had entered a period of decadence, of feeding on itself, of eating its young, or whatever metaphor you prefer, that continues to the present day.

Edited May 8, 2017 by Milburn Stone

[Crisopera]

Singin' in the Rain has sharp parodies of silent and early talkie movies, but of course, that's not the point of the movie itself.

[Milburn Stone]

1 hour ago, Milburn Stone said:

But it seems to me the movie-parody genre only really took off in the seventies, when more signs began showing up that the medium had entered a period of decadence, of feeding on itself, of eating its young, or whatever metaphor you prefer, that continues to the present day.

On reflection, it occurs to me that 1974 was also the year of the first That's Entertainment! Which is essentially the other side of the very same coin that is Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and The Big Bus. Whether celebrating movies or denigrating them, the commonalities are more interesting than the differences. Just like the parodies, TE! is the product of a Hollywood that has no choice but to turn its lens on itself, because the conditions that gave rise to fresh creativity have all but disappeared.

[ratgirlagogo]

14 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

A distinction can be made between movies that are (as you put it) "parodies of other things" and movies that turn inward to parody the clichés of movie genres themselves. In the former category exist many examples going back, as you note, to the beginnings of movies as a medium; in the latter category, not so many, and perhaps none, before 1974.

Hmm, no, I don't agree with any of this.  While I did use the phrase "parodies of other things" I didn't think I was going to have to explain to THIS group that  the  "things" in question were movies, since all the movies I listed in my post were movies that parodied either specific films or entire film genres.  And again, there are so many in Hollywood history  that I don't have any wish to clog up the thread with them - although I always COULD, of course. :)  Do I really have to do this?  The Chaplin Carmen is a parody of both the Geraldine Farrar Carmen and the Theda Bara Carmen.  Sherlock Holmes  first appeared in movies in 1900 and had been a character in some two dozen films by the time Fairbanks did The Mystery of the Leaping Fish.    By the time Wild and Woolly was made in 1917 both Westerns and serials were movie staples.  As for the Shriek of Araby the sheik-sheba sex trope was incredibly well established in the movies well before 1923 -( hell, Little Egypt had wowed them in the earliest nickolodeon films)- but Valentino as the 1921 Sheik was a huge phenomenon.

 

I do agree that there was a very distinct upsurge in these kinds of films in the 1970's, no argument from me there.  I think in large part because CINEMA was being taken seriously as an artistic form in this time period (i.e., post Psycho, pre Star Wars) in general and the influence of the auteur theory meant the inclusion of highly commercial Hollywood films in this assessment.

 

14 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

target of the parody is the done-to-deathness of genre clichés. Or, at least, their popularity. These movies serve to raise consciousness of genre tropes which we have seen so many times that we take them for granted

 I disagree with all of this.  I  think they highlight tropes that sincere fans have already recognized - it's even more clear in these days of blabby incessant online fandom - but it's something filmakers were aware of even back in the day. 

Let's cleanse our palates for a moment and look at another very early (1914) example of filmmakers using the audience's familarity with what was already an extremely annoying reality in location filming (link to the entire film below):

https://archive.org/details/TheKidAutoRaceinVenice

with Charlie Chaplin in his first film pushily engaging in what people today call photobombing.  The movies are not that old - many would say that they are in their infancy - yet this movie's comedy is based entirely on the assumption that the whole audience will recognize what the Chaplin character is doing.  I'm saying this kind of meta approach arrives quite early in movie history - I think it does in the history of any genuinely popular medium.

Edited May 9, 2017 by ratgirlagogo

[Milburn Stone]

1 hour ago, ratgirlagogo said:

Hmm, no, I don't agree with any of this.  While I did use the phrase "parodies of other things" I didn't think I was going to have to explain to THIS group that  all the movies I listed in my post were movies that parodied either specific films or entire film genres.  And again, there are so many in Hollywood history  that I don't have any wish to clog up the thread with them - although I always COULD, of course. :)  Do I really have to do this?  The Chaplin Carmen is a parody of both the Geraldine Farrar Carmen and the Theda Bara Carmen.  Sherlock Holmes was first used in movies in 1900.  By the time Wild and Woolly was made in 1917 both Westerns and serials were movie staples.  As for the Shriek of Araby the sheik-sheba sex trope was incredibly well established in the movies well before 1923.  Hell, Little Egypt had wowed them in the earliest nickolodeon films.

Here's another way I see a difference between these early films you mention and the parody films of the seventies and later. I hope I can articulate it clearly enough to make my point. These early films presented a comedic take on the genres they aped; they didn't try to put those genres out of business. In a film like Airplane!, on the other hand, you can sense the filmmakers saying, "We are going to ruin these clichés for all time, to make sure nobody makes a serious movie using them ever again!" That impulse to drive a stake through the heart of its model is a big part of what makes the film so hilarious. (I don't contend that Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker were arrogant enough to think they were going to end serious disaster movies for all time--just that they anarchically wanted to!) You sense the same thing behind Scary Movie et. al.--the subversive hope that no one will dare make an endangered-teen-in-a-house movie and hope to be taken seriously ever again. My exposure to parody films from the era you're talking about leads me to think their aims were far more modest.

Edited May 9, 2017 by Milburn Stone

[voiceover]

I always forget how much I love Roscoe Lee Browne's dying/not dying soliloquy ("...forgive me for the men I've killed, and for the men I'm about to kill." -- AWESOME!!).  This is because I only see The Cowboys every three years.

[Rinaldo]

I'm passing along an inquiry that has some friends of mine stumped. In this clip at 0:24 some orchestral music starts up. It sounds exactly like the opening title music from some older movie -- big fanfareish hoohah, then plays around with a big luscious tune without ever quite settling down into the song itself. 

Does anybody recognize this? It's the longest of long shots of course, there are so many movies in existence. And of course we may be all wrong and find that it was composed especially for this purpose. Or we'll never know, which is likeliest of all.

[Rinaldo]

Cover Girl -- That movie just makes me feel good. All the less-than-ideal bits (the long flashbacks with the reincarnation overtones, yet another abandonment at the altar)... they just don't matter, I forget them almost while I'm watching, who cares when we get such joy from Eve Arden, Phil Silvers, Gene Kelly, and especially the indelibly young, gifted, and gorgeous Rita Hayworth. There are few more glorious stretches in musical films than Silvers, Kelly, and Hayworth hoofing through the streets singing "Make Way for Tomorrow." They even had the good sense to toss aside the big romantic clinch for the fadeout, and instead give us a reprise of this trio for our final image.

[Crisopera]

One of my all-time favorite musicals.  What a fabulous score - "Long Ago and Far Away" is one of my favorite songs.  Jerome Kern was one of the greatest American melodists - and the Ira Gershwin lyrics are beautiful as well.  And I love all the numbers - Kelly and Hayworth danced beautifully together. And Kelly's Alter-Ego dance - amazing.  According to Ben Mankiewicz's intro, Harry Cohn wanted to pair them again in a movie of Pal Joey, which Kelly had done on Broadway.  Hayworth would have played the ingénue, Linda.  But it didn't get made for another 13 years, when they miscast Frank Sinatra as Joey and had Hayworth playing Vera, the older woman (she was in fact three years younger than Sinatra). 

And it has one of the greatest collections of high-1940s hairdos this side of a Betty Grable/Alice Faye double-feature.  Ziggurats of hair!

Edited May 11, 2017 by Crisopera

[Milburn Stone]

6 hours ago, Crisopera said:

...and the Ira Gershwin lyrics are beautiful as well. 

Word. For some reason the immediate "free association" of this movie for me is a Gershwin line that isn't exactly beautiful, but wonderful: in "Who's Complaining" (a song about WW2 rationing of meat and other goods) when Phil Silvers sings, "I'll stuff myself with artichokes/Until that Nazi Party chokes."

Edited May 11, 2017 by Milburn Stone

[voiceover]

I've been enjoying the Monster Movie intros more than the films themselves!  I'll have to add Dennis Miller to my list of "Recurring, Please!" guest hosts.  

[Crisopera]

17 hours ago, Milburn Stone said:

in "Who's Complaining" (a song about WW2 rationing of meat and other goods) when Phil Silvers sings, "I'll stuff myself with artichokes/Until that Nazi Party chokes."

"And I can rarely purloin a sirloin."

[prican58]

I'm always curious about newspaper accounts of deaths of famous people so I went looking and found this.

https://www.pinterest.com/carolkeenan581/newspaper-reports-of-famous-deaths/

I would love to be able to read the articles. Is microfilm still used in libraries?

Edited May 15, 2017 by prican58

[ratgirlagogo]

On 5/14/2017 at 7:58 PM, prican58 said:

Is microfilm still used in libraries?

Short answer, yes.  If these newspapers are available digitally (which increasingly is the case) you will find them to be easier reading.  One of the downsides of microfilm is that the machine scratches the film every time it's used - it's incredibly frustrating for readers trying to read heavily used microfilms at NYPL like the Village Voice and the East Village Other from the sixties, for example.  In general microfilm was kind of a crock that libraries fell for back in the sixties and seventies and we're still paying the price for it today.  The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a great book about the whole microfilm scam called Double Fold:

http://www.amazon.com/Double-Fold-Libraries-Assault-Paper/dp/0375726217

Edited May 16, 2017 by ratgirlagogo

[Milburn Stone]

I love that book.

[prican58]

Wow, I did not know that about microfilm. I remember using it in high school and at the NYPL but it' been so long. Thanks for the education!

[bluepiano]

On ‎4‎/‎17‎/‎2017 at 5:41 AM, Milburn Stone said:

I know. I think about that kind of stuff a lot. We who were born in the second half of the twentieth century tend to put dates like 1906 in the same category as 1066, but they weren't that long ago. My theory is that it's the immense amount of change that happened in the twentieth century that makes 1906 seem like ancient history to us. 

Here's another mind-bender, at least for those of us (like me) born around 1950. Gable's San Francisco came out only fourteen years before I was born. Yet 1936 has always seemed like ancient history to me, no less than 1906. Maybe I was 15 when I first became aware of the movie. So that was twenty-nine years after its making. To a 15-year old today, that would be 1988. Which to me feels like yesterday.

Does 1988 feel to today's teenager like 1936 felt to me? That's what I don't know. Arithmetic says it should, but arithmetic could be wrong.

I always think the same thing when watching westerns made in the 1930s. The "Wild West" was fairly recent history, if "history" is even the right word for it. There were places in the country that were still more dependent on horses than cars. Of course some of the first silent movies were westerns, and that was even closer in time to what was being portrayed. There were actual legendary western figures who did appear in silent westerns, sometimes playing themselves.

For me, I think about the World War II movies and TV shows I watched as a kid in the '60s, thinking about that as some long ago time, when it was only 20-25 year before. Like watching a movie now set in 1990.

As for how teenagers today feel, I have some friends who teach junior high and high school. They say that thanks at least partly to the internet and social media, kids live totally in the present, and anything that happened before they were born, or even a few years ago, has little interest to them. Most wouldn't be able to tell you when the Vietnam War happened, or when man first set foot on the moon. Whether it's the Vietnam War, World War II, or The Civil War, it all took place in some hazy, undefined thing called "the past. (Sadly, I don't think it would be a lot different for many adults. As a culture we seem to have really devalued knowing our history).

[voiceover]

45 minutes ago, bluepiano said:

[...]kids live totally in the present, and anything that happened before they were born, or even a few years ago, has little interest to them. 

Eh, depends upon the kid.  Example: Nephew de Voiceover has been introduced to -- and embraced -- the silent film comedians.   We watched Bride of Frankenstein when TCM screened it last fall, and he was stunned to discover that it really freaked him out.  

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

btw: your referencing silent Westerns featuring actual cowboys makes me think of the last line in Tombstone -- that Tom Mix was one of Wyatt Earp's pallbearers ("Tom Mix wept.")

[bluepiano]

On ‎5‎/‎18‎/‎2017 at 0:50 AM, voiceover said:

Eh, depends upon the kid.  Example: Nephew de Voiceover has been introduced to -- and embraced -- the silent film comedians.   We watched Bride of Frankenstein when TCM screened it last fall, and he was stunned to discover that it really freaked him out.  

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

btw: your referencing silent Westerns featuring actual cowboys makes me think of the last line in Tombstone -- that Tom Mix was one of Wyatt Earp's pallbearers ("Tom Mix wept.")

I was generalizing, and obviously there are exceptions. But I still believe that as a culture we have de-emphasized history, which is reflected in school curriculums. And as the old saying goes, those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

I don't know the demographics of TCM viewers, but I like to think that TCM is educating many people about movie history. In my own case, I've always loved "old movies" but tended to undervalue silent movies and early talkies. TCM has given me the opportunity to see and appreciate the artistry in many moves of that era.

[voiceover]

1 hour ago, bluepiano said:

I was generalizing, and obviously there are exceptions. But I still believe that as a culture we have de-emphasized history, which is reflected in school curriculums.

Hey, I know you were generalizing.  You should check out my post in the Murder on the Orient Express thread.  (I recall weeping all the way to my car when I found out none of my college students had ever heard of Agatha Christie.)

But I'm a proud auntie who can rarely resist trotting out the NdVO's resume. So.  I did.

[Milburn Stone]

15 hours ago, voiceover said:

But I'm a proud auntie who can rarely resist trotting out the NdVO's resume. So.  I did.

I'm just glad to find out there's one kid like your nephew. Sometimes one feels there aren't any.

The human race is not doomed. (Necessarily.)