Waterfronts

I’ve seen the 1954 movie On the Waterfront several times.  Marlon Brando plays a longshoreman and former prizefighter who ends up testifying against union racketeers.  It won quite a few Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brando. (This was the same year he played the biker in The Wild One.) It was based on a true story, except that in real life the racketeers won!

Elia Kazan directed it from a Budd Schulberg script.  He’d recently testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named suspected communists, destroying their careers to save his own.  Some people view the movie as an apologia for his informing on them!  It wasn’t easy for Brando to do the film:  his sister Jocelyn had been an actress herself, until she became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. (There was controversy decades later when they gave Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar.)

What do I think of the movie?  On the one hand, parts of it are great.  The most famous scene is the one with him and his brother Rod Steiger in the back of a car remembering the fight where Brando was pressured to take a dive.  But my favourite scene is the one on the rooftop with Brando and Eva Marie Saint.  I like the detail where he tries on her glove.  What makes the Brando character interesting, paradoxically, is that he isn’t very articulate. (When a character gets too articulate, he becomes the writer’s mouthpiece.)

On the other hand, parts of it are lame.  Leonard Bernstein’s score is surprisingly weak.  The priest played by Karl Malden is pretty hard to take.  The dialogue isn’t perfect.  There’s a line, “You know how a union meeting works—you go in, you make a speech, you go out and the lights go out.” It’s a memorable line, but unfair to the union movement, at whose meetings they’ve often discussed important things.  And I could do without this exchange:

“My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel if I squeal!”

“How much is your soul worth if you don’t?”

And then there’s that conclusion where he says to the racketeers “Without a gun, you’re nothin’!” The racketeers give him a beating, but that just turns the longshoremen against them.  So a bloodied but unbowed Brando leads the others into work.  Instead of beating him, those racketeers would have been smarter to ignore him.  Then they would have won, like in real life.

But overall, it’s pretty good. 

UFOs

 

I’ve never seen a UFO. (I don’t look at the skies much.)

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s there was a UFO craze connected to Cold War paranoia.  One example is the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, combining science fiction with film noir in a story of aliens who come to earth and take over people’s bodies.

I remember seeing this 1960s British puppet animation show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons when I was young. (The same people did Stingray and Thunderbirds and Joe 90.) The Mysterons were a people on Mars who’d kill earthlings and take over their bodies.  Fighting against them were a secret agent organization called the Spectrum, where every agent was named for a colour, like Captain Blue or Captain Green. (They were commanded by Colonel White.) Captain Scarlet was an agent whose body the Mysterons tried to take over, but he wasn’t quite dead, and he ended up indestructible.  So every episode he’d get shot or crushed or blown up or something, but he’d be back in the next episode.  Sort of like Wile E. Coyote.  There were also these lady pilots called Angels who’d fly off to rescue the agents.  And there was Captain Black, an agent who did get taken over by the Mysterons.

It had a theme song that went:

Though the Mysterons plan to conquer the earth,

This indestructible man will show what he’s worth!

There was something odd about these British puppet dramas.  You know brutalist architecture, like the Robarts Library?  These were like the brutalist school of kiddie cartoons.  Captain Scarlet would feel at home in the Robarts Library…

You know the Hong Kong action movie star Chow Yun-fat?  Something about him resembles Captain Scarlet!

Anti-communism

  Remember Diane Keaton’s 1970s movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar?  One review called it “anti-religion, anti-women, anti-sex, anti-everything!”

You could say I’m an anti-anti.  I’m anti-antianger,  anti-anti-Muslim, anti-antidivorce, anti-antihiphop, anti-antirevolution, anti-antipacifism, anti-antipermissiveness…

And anti-anticommunist!

I recall back in the 1990s an interview with Saul Bellow in The New Yorker. (This was The New Yorker under Tina Brown, who’s always been deferential to The Big People.) Bellow got pretty self-indulgent in his later years, and in this interview he said he couldn’t imagine what motivated the anti-anticommunists, except for residual Stalinism.

A few weeks ago my history movie watch party showed a movie about Dalton Trumbo, showing the lives ruined by the anti-communist Hollywood blacklist.  I guess that Saul Bellow had no empathy for those people, not to mention the victims of Washington’s anti-communist crusade in places like My Lai and El Mozote.  One might ask, what motivated anti-antianticommunists like Bellow, if not residual McCarthyism.  What it comes down to is that Bellow wanted communism to be the issue and not anti-communism…

In 1981, at the time when the Polish government cracked down on the Solidarity labour movement Susan Sontag asked “In the early 1950s, which gave a more reliable picture of the Soviet bloc, Reader’s Digest or The Nation and The New Statesman?” Yet The Nation and The New Statesman didn’t mislead their readers about the communist order, they just ignored the communist atrocities that the rest of the American press were pointing our. (Reader’s Digest reported what the rest of the press was saying, because that’s their job!) Big deal…

What’s far more important than that is that Reader’s Digest got anti-communism wrong, while The Nation and The New Statesman got it all too right.  When Reader’s Digest ignored anti-communist atrocities, they often weren’t ignoring something that the mainstream press was reporting on anyway.  In many cases, they’d only be reported by magazines like The Nation and The New Statesman.  

Unlike Saul Bellow, I think that anti-communism should be the issue.  Stalin and Mao may have killed tens of millions, but the USA’s anti-communist crusade killed millions in places like Vietnam and Central America, and some estimates surpass 10 million.  Notice that while the Soviet Union and China largely murdered their own people, Washington largely murdered people in the Third World—out of sight, out of mind.  And don’t let people present the Cold War as a World War II-style “good war”:  the Soviet Empire collapsed largely because of its internal weaknesses.

The Cold War left a noxious legacy in the USA itself.  Blacklistees weren’t the only victims, the very rule of law was undermined!  Ronald Reagan clearly should have been impeached, but Washington let him get away with his war crimes. (I’m not just referring to the failure of Congress; in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations the mainstream press launched a big attack on… the Democrat candidates to succeed Reagan, whom they nicknamed “The Seven Dwarfs.”) The legacy of Reagan getting away with it is that successors have repeated his offences!

Anti-communism created much of the ugliness in today’s world.  The anti-communists have a lot to answer  for and shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind “The communists were worse”!

THE GREAT RACE

 

The other day at my Friday night watch party for historical movies, I showed The Great Race.  It’s a 1965 slapstick epic directed by Blake Edwards, which I first saw in a cinema when I was four. (We were living in Brighton, England, and saw it on my brother’s birthday.) It isn’t the first movie I saw—I’m certain I’d seen the Disney comedy The Monkey’s Uncle several months before—but it was one of the first.

The story goes literally all over the place:  it’s very loosely based on an actual 1908 automobile race westward from New York City to Paris.  It features the cartoonishly dashing daredevil hero Leslie the Great (Tony Curtis, in a parody of his past hero roles), the cartoonishly sour villain Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon, cast against type), and the cartoonishly militant suffragette reporter Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood—this was a time when a woman demanding equal rights with men was considered comedy gold).  Leslie wears White and Fate wears black, and their cars are the same colors.  Leslie and Maggie get into a “battle of the sexes” comedy, which you don’t see much today—the last one I recall is Julia Roberts’ The Runaway Bride, and that was over twenty years ago!  (No points for guessing they’re in for a romantic ending.) Peter Falk has the funniest role as Fate’s often-unreliable stooge.

The story structure isn’t complicated.  After the race starts they head west to a frontier town, leading to a big saloon-fight set piece. (Filming a large-scale brawl has the same problem as filming an orgy—they have to be staged and filmed in an orderly way, so they’re bound to look like something staged and orderly.) Then they cross from Alaska to Siberia on an iceberg.  

Then they come to a Ruritanian kingdom where Fate’s resemblance to a feckless king about to be crowned (Lemmon has a double role) leads to his getting kidnapped by a baron and a Prisoner of Zenda-Graustark type adventure.  We’ve seen all this before, but that’s kind of the point.  It all culminates in a huge pie-fight set piece. (Maggie spends most of this sequence wearing little more than a corset—Hollywood movies in the mid-1960s were a bit on the meretricious side.)  In the end, when they reach Paris, Leslie proves his love for Maggie by letting Fate win the race, but Fate proves a sore winner and uses his car’s cannon to knock down the Eiffel Tower.

How good is the movie?  Well, it’s all quite cartoonish. Some of the gags are funny but it’s very hit-and-miss, and the overall tone is frantic and shrill. (The movie’s dedicated to Laurel and Hardy, who did a lot more with a lot less.) Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines came out about the same time and does that epic slapstick more successfully.  That version benefited from having Terry-Thomas as the villain, and this movie could have used Terry-Thomas as Fate or even as the Ruritanian baron.  The real stars are the classic cars driven by Leslie and Fate.

I’ve seen it several times, but I probably wouldn’t be interested in it except for what I remember seeing that first time.  The opening credits sequence is done in the style of early silent movies, and I remembered that it opens with a card saying “Ladies, kindly remove your hats.” (At the age of four, I could already read!) Early cinemas actually had cards saying that, because back then ladies often wore big hats that obstructed the view of those sitting behind them.  The crowd in the opening fairground scene looked really huge to someone my age.  And the scene where Leslie sneaks into the baron’s castle and has a sword fight with him scared me witless!  I’m the sort who treasures early memories…

I wish I could forget...

  Is there anything you wish you could forget?  There’s a famous horror movie, Night of the Living Dead, which I haven’t seen myself, but one critic warned, “Afterward you may wish you could forget the whole experience.”

I wish I could forget The Flintstones.  That was an animated Stone Age sitcom from the early 1960s, which has had a very long afterlife in syndicated reruns.  It was produced  on a low budget by Hanna-Barbera Studios, and the animation was terrible!  The sort of thing where a car would drive along and pass by the same three or four buildings again and again, as if it were going around in a circle…

The writing was terrible too.  The main characters, of course, were knockoffs of the characters on Jackie Gleason’s far superior show The Honeymooners.  Ever see Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert?  That’s the one where they wanted to go to a Shriners-type convention but their wives wouldn’t let them, so they pretended to be sick and go somewhere else for recuperation, but their wives found out the truth… Anyway, The Flintstones redid that story again and again!  In one story the wives found out from a talking parrot who kept saying words like “convention”; in another the husbands were caught on a Stone Age version of Candid Camera. (The running joke was that everything in the 1960 world had a Stone Age equivalent…) There was another episode that redid Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero, complete with the unconvincing happy ending.

One story I remember in particular had Wilma becoming a hand model (like George on that Seinfeld episode), and they wanted to put her in a TV commercial, but only showing her hand.  Fred got in a prideful huff and wouldn’t let her do it, because the story would have no point otherwise.  In the end, Betty made the commercial instead, and they saw the commercial on stone age TV, and they showed Betty’s face as well as her hand!  Terrible, terrible writing.

And TV cartoons at the time weren’t all as bad as that.  Rocky and Bullwinkle had the same marginal animation, but the writing was nice and sharp!  I’ve rewatched the show on video in recent years, and it holds up pretty well.  I like the relationship between the sinister spies Boris and Natasha, and how Natasha ended up doing all the work!  My favourite part was Bullwinkle as Mr. Know-It-All, who’d do subjects like “How to get into a movie theatre without buying a ticket.” (This was before cartoon characters had to be good role models…)

I’m ashamed that there was a time when I liked The Flintstones and actually wanted to watch it.  When we look back at our childhood, we notice that we had no taste back then!

GOOD TIMES

 

I used to watch Good Times in the 1970s, the Norman Lear sitcom about an African-American family struggling to survive in the Chicago housing projects.  It was a curious mix of cheesy sitcommery, preachy social consciousness and jive-talking shtick.  Jimmy Walker as the oldest son JJ had the catchphrase “Dy-no-mite!” (He started out as a supporting character but advanced to become the show’s star, like Henry Winkler as Fonzie on Happy Days at the same time.) The youngest son Michael was in his mid-teens and out to advance Black Power. (His nickname was “The Militant Midget.”)

I remember an episode where the father was tempted to go off and work on the Alaska Pipeline to make real money for a change. (He said, “We are poor—and that’s the last thing anyone wants to be, except for sick and dead!”) But the mother wasn’t happy about him leaving her and the family behind.  Meanwhile, Michael was with this group of boys out to promote Black Power, but they got attacked by a street gang.  He mentioned that they were going to attack them in retaliation, and the father responded by making him leave the group, taking away the jacket that showed he was a member.  Then he said “Want to discuss it?” while making motions with his belt. (In other words, “One more word and you’ll get a beating!”) He said “No!” and walked away, and the audience laughed.  Then he decided he should stay in Chicago, saying with a smile and a wink that he had to keep his son on the right path.

That “Want to discuss it?” moment made me laugh too, but something about it bothered me.  It isn’t that I’m an anti-spanking fanatic; I’ve never raised children, and I don’t know that I could completely avoid resorting to physical violence.  But threatening violence just to cut off the discussion is unacceptable to me, especially when  dealing with teenagers.  That’s bullying your kid, and it’s teaching him to be a bully too!  Of course, a show like Good Times was short on subtlety:  a father solving the problem through subtler means wasn’t something they expected viewers to have the patience for.  It’s a common cliche on TV shows:  if you want to get through to someone, confront him!

Another cheesy aspect of the show was how they were often giving JJ a new girlfriend who’d make a single appearance to illustrate a new social issue.  One was pregnant—JJ wasn’t the father, of course—and another one had venereal disease.  And there was one two-part episode where JJ got engaged to a girl he didn’t realize was a drug addict! (Happens all the time…) Near the end someone says that drugs will always be a problem, and the father retorts, “President Kennedy said we’d put a man on the moon in ten years, and we did it.  So why can’t we get rid of drugs?” Big applause from the studio audience.  In hindsight, that bothers me too—a serious, complicated issue dealt with through rabble-rousing triumphalism!

And don’t get me started on Norman Lear’s other African-American sitcom The Jeffersons!

Being late

  I remember in Grade 3 when a girl came into class late, and the teacher told us all to turn around and look at her!  That was rather mean…

Yesterday I went to my singing group in the East End.  I’m often late to it because I live near the West End and buses are less frequent on Sundays.  And it goes from 1:00 to 3:00, too late for lunch afterward.  On the other hand, I’m not a morning person, especially on Sundays, so I often have breakfast at 10:30 or so, and since I have to leave by noon I don’t always have time for lunch beforehand.  Sometimes I’ll have lunch in the East End just before going to the group, if I think I have enough time.  

Yesterday I thought I had enough time, so I stopped at A&W and ordered a sausage and egg muffin.  But I ended up waiting half an hour, because my order had fallen through the cracks!  So I was half an hour late. (Fortunately, several others were also late, though not as late as me.)

I was telling Carolyn the group leader about it afterward, and she told me of the time she took her mother to a hospital for medical treatment and they ended up waiting five hours because her mother’s medical file had fallen off the table!  We’re both a bit too patient…

But there was one good thing to come out of this.  I was afraid this would be one of those weeks when I can’t think of anything to write, but this gave me something to write about!