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Some drive-ins are barely hanging on as it is, but now with the death of film and the requirement that theaters switch to digital projection, are we going to see the last of these American icons?
I don’t want to think; I want to drink.
Before the 1970’s, there are few films with all African-Americans. There were ‘race’ films that were produced especially for a black audience in the 20’s and 30’s. There is an informative article about it HERE on the Amoeba Blog.
But there was a time when if there was a black character, there was a possibility that the film would not even get shown in the South. It wasn’t until the success of CARMEN JONES and PORGY AND BESS that there was a market for films with primary all-black casts but with stories that appealed to the mainstream white cinema-going audience. Somewhere lost in time is this very bizarre film ANNA LUCASTA.
ANNA LUCASTA started out as a play by Philip Yordan. (Yordan had a varied career in films writing screen plays for JOHNNY GUITAR, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, DETECTIVE STORY and DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS). The plot concerns a young girl who is thrown out of her home by her father. She then becomes a prostitute. Years later her family, trying to get the dowry of a rich man, takes her back in order for her to seduce him into marrying him. It’s a poor man’s Eugene O’Neil opus that probably played well on the stage in the forties. Every character is given a chance for a monologue and a chance to tear at the scenery, throw a punch, scream and yell and generally overplay their parts.
Eugene O’Neal Meets Amos and Andy
The play was filmed once before in the late 1940’s with Paulette Goddard playing the lead and the characters changed to a Polish-American family. I was surprised to learn that the play was written for an all-black cast, because my first thought was that it must have been written for an Italian family. The story has a universal appeal that could play to any ethnicity. In fact, it was remade in the 1970’s with a Greek cast.
However, as probably a concession to the studio, most of the cast are very light skinned, to the point where Anna’s rich suitor looks more Latino or Middle Eastern than black.
The too-good-to-be-true gentleman caller…
Overall, the production is first-rate, with some nice deep focus black and white cinematography and a constant and bizarre score by Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein’s score switches from frantic jazz to bizarre circus music to snippets of what seem like leftovers from ON THE WATERFRONT. Sometimes the music matches what is going on the screen, sometimes its just seems to playing for another movie.
There is a disturbing unspoken subtext that the father had been seduced by Anna.
The one and best reason to see this film is to see the one-of-a-kind Eartha Kitt. It is a shame that she didn’t have a bigger film career. She is a natural, modern actress. In fact, the film falls flat on its face whenever she is not in it. The other highlight is a good dramatic turn by Sammy Davis Jr. as Danny the no-good, good-time sailor. With a better director this film might have risen above the melodrama, but Arnold Laven (THE CREATURE THAT CHALLENGED THE EARTH) doesn’t seem to know if he is directing Tennessee Williams or an episode of Sanford and Son. The film shifts back and forth between the goofy family and Anna’s noir existence so haphazardly that I was dizzy; Some moments are bleak and dramatic, some moments felt like they were missing a laugh track.
But rising above the whole thing are Eartha and Sammy. One highlight is when they go out on the town on a bender and suddenly the film becomes a dipso dream with Eartha hallucinating a musical dance number with Sammy. It comes out of no where and is classic 50’s cinema.
Sammy dances
I’m surprised that this film hasn’t gotten more attention, if only for historical significance.
Despite its many faults ANNA LUCASTA is definitely worth a streaming look.
A new Tired Old Queen at the Movies… I’ve not seen this film. Looks like a classic.
Recently I was reminiscing about the days before the Internet when if you wanted to see a movie or hear a song you had to either take pot luck with what was on television or save up your pennies and buy a recording. Nothing instant. Favorite film viewings were treasured experiences. I recall getting the TV Guide each week and my mother and I would circle the films that we wanted to watch. Hers in red; mine in blue. I was lucky to have parents who didn’t care when I slept. I would stay up all night watching movies on our giant 19-inch Panasonic black and white television set. If the movie was something really special, I would take our reel-to-reel tape recorder and capture the audio by putting the microphone to the tiny speaker. Over and over I would listen to the soundtrack of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, THE HAUNTING, and the Marx Brothers’ HORSE FEATHERS, acting them out and memorizing every line. (You should have seen the pillows fly during the ship capsizing scene!)
Photo from LegendaryJoanCrawford.com
After years of instant cinema gratification with DVDs and the Internet, I think we should reflect on how lucky film buffs are today. Decades before I was even born, the only way someone could revisit a film was either through a re-release of the feature, which was done for only really popular films such as GONE WITH THE WIND or FRANKENSTEIN, was to hear a dramatization on the radio.
Lux Radio was a weekly anthology program that recreated for radio the films of the day. Most of them we now regard as classics. Starting in 1935 on NBC with Cecil B. DeMille as the host such films as THE AWFUL TRUTH, DARK VICTORY, STAGE DOOR, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, ALL ABOUT EVE, LAURA, were all adapted for radio. There were several other programs that did this as well, including Academy Award Theater and Screen Director’s Playhouse. Whenever possible, the original cast was brought back to recreate their original roles.
These Reader’s Digest versions of these films are treasures. In the early 1970’s Chicago was blessed to have Chuck Schaden living in our city. He was a collector of old radio programs and he started his Those Were the Days radio program. It was my first time experiencing many of these classic films. And with my trusty tape recorder, I was able to capture many of them and re-listen multiple times to LIFEBOAT, W.C. Fields in POPPY, and LOST HORIZON. I had known these titles as radio productions years before I watched the actual films.
If you haven’t listened to one of your favorite films, you are missing a treat. May I recommend the website www.otrcat.org. I’ve been shopping from this site for years and it’s got the most complete collection of radio shows around. Click HERE to be brought to their Lux Radio Theater page and listen to the radio version of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL with Michael Rennie and Jean Peters in the Patricia Neal role.
YouTube has many shows that you can easily access. Here below, is Alfred Hitchcock directing a radio version of his film LIFEBOAT, with Tallulah Bankhead and Jeff Chandler.
Here Lionel Barrymore introduces the original cast of LAURA
Enjoy them on the big screen in your mind.
1965 was a pivotal year for music. The British Invasion had just hit, the cultural revolution was right around the corner, and the country was still reeling from its loss of innocence with the assassination of JFK.
Floating on top of all of this was a new genre of film, Beach Pictures. THE GIRLS ON THE BEACH is Paramount’s feeble attempt at competing with the far superior American International entries that were being made at this time. Without the benefit of big stars, this movie relies on the musical talents of The Beach Boys, Leslie Gore and The Crickets, who seem to only know one song, an Americanized version of La Bamba.
Lesson learned: You can see The Beach Boys for free but you have to pay $5 to see The Beatles.
Leslie sings “Leave Me Alone” and everyone does…
The plot is interesting as a time capsule. A sorority house needs $10,000 because their house-mother took the treasure to pay for poor people’s medical bills. The girls all band together and plan to get the money back by entering contests and planning a big show at the local hangout and changing $5 to get in! Meanwhile some nasty boys want to get to third base with the girls so they tell them they are best friends with celebrities.
Duke: Fellows I’m telling you the next time we come down here we’ve got to bring Rock.
So the wackiness ensues when the boys convince the girls that they know The Beatles and they will come down and play for their show. The interesting thing is this is a movie where everyone talks about The Beatles for nearly an hour; meanwhile the Beach Boys and Leslie Gore are just floating in the background waiting to do their next number. Leslie’s songs “Leave Me Alone” and “It’s Got to Be You” are the highlights of the movie. Along with The Beach Boys singing “Little Honda” at the top of their custom car sound.
As an added treat is Linda Saunders, Bobbie Jo on ‘Petticoat Junction’ as the girl who really lets go when she hears bump and grind, belly dancing music.
Overall, THE GIRLS ON THE BEACH is not great, and it’s really not even good. But it does have a few camp moments and a couple of good musical numbers. However, it is so square and most of the characters are a drag that it seemed way longer than its 80-minute running time.
Speaking of drag… here the boys play dress up.
Lesson learned: Don’t you know all girls wear wigs.
Netflix Streaming Quality: C+ (it’s pretty low resolution)
Audience Reaction: C+
Spoiler Alert: Guess what?…The Beatles aren’t in this movie… They were too busy being famous and changing music history. And The poor Beach Boys they aren’t even mentioned in the trailer! But the Crickets are!
I read that the weather was going to cool down this weekend, so I thought I’d invite people over and show two BluRays that have been sitting on my shelf.
Normally, when I have movie nights I like to show films that might be a little out of the ordinary and hard to see on cable; but this time I wanted to show two classics that I never get tired of seeing. I had a full but not packed house with just enough room so that most people got a comfortable chair or were able to lay about on the floor.
The first feature was The Night of the Hunter. I was surprised that several people who had come over had never seen this masterpiece of a film. Part Film Noir, part fable. It truly is like no other film.
Best moment of the night is during one of the suspenseful chase scenes where the children are hiding from Robert Mitchum, the doorbell rang. Gwen from down the block was late because she couldn’t get a sitter. I told her as she came in, ‘You scared everyone half to death when you rang the doorbell!”
I found the BluRay print beautiful, but its almost too clear with a lot of film grain showing during some of the scenes. Overall, its a stunning restoration.
I then showed Scarlet Street. Scarlet Street is one of my top ten favorite films. Great performances by Edward G Robinson, Dan Duryea and especially Joan Bennett. If you haven’t seen it; you are really missing one of the best of the Film Noir genre.
The print of this is outstanding. For years I’ve only seen it in Public Domain copies; the best thing about the restoration is the sound is so crisp that although I’d seen this several times it was as if it were a new experience.
Overall, film group watching. Night of the Hunter is a much more visceral film experience. Whereas Scarlet Street is a little quiet and and too long for a second feature starting after eleven. However, it still one of my favorite viewing parties I’ve had in a long time.
I’ve been revisiting some Jerry Lewis films that I haven’t seen since I was a child. Some hold up, some are just terrible. But the one thing that has struck me was that Jerry Lewis was a pretty handsome guy. A YouTube poster thought the same thing and wondered what would it be like if Jerry had been James Bond…
Kudos to the creator for matching the saturated colors that seem to be shared in both Bond and Jerry Lewis movies.
Gizmodo featured this video by the band Willow that uses projectors to create whole world in a box. I recently saw a Hardy Boys episode where a mad scientist was trying to invent a hologram system that would create realistic hologram armies so she could take over the world because no one would know what was real.
I think we are soon going to have hologram rooms where we can sit in a cafe in Paris or be at the Academy Awards watching from the audience. I remember when I first set up my projector and I had a sheet going from the ceiling to the floor. I showed a silent film and I remember thinking that it looked like I could walk right into the picture….
Soon we’ll be able to.. It’s a comin’…
One of my favorite group movie nights was one that fellow HP blogger Dave hosted a few years ago. He showed the film Zero Hour! Then the classic comedy Airplane! Which took the first film and with only a slight tilt of perspective made it one of the funniest films of all time.
One of my favorite movie blogs did a fantastic job of showing the similarities.
Click Below:
One of the problems with having a projection system is that if the video isn’t in high definition it can look pretty dingy. However, sometimes visual quality doesn’t matter. I use a Roku to stream my video to my projector. I love the wide array of channels, many for free. The best of the lot is a channel called Pub-D-Hub.
Pub-D-Hub specializes in all things Public Domain. From movies to radio and television shows, and even industrial/school films such as ‘How to Date’… A lot of these films are available on YouTube and Archive.com, but Pub-D-Hub categorizes them and makes them easy to scroll through.
This Saturday I ventured into their Television section. Along with old episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and Beverly Hillbillies were a bunch of shows that I’d never heard of… some for good reason. I had a few people over, so I decided to play ‘let’s watch a random television show’. First Dan saw a show he hadn’t watched since he was a child in the 1960’s. “Sky King“.
This show goes by the premise that you can make a cowboy show, except instead of a horse our hero flies a plane. “Songbird”. The one we watched moved quickly and was about a couple of vicious but inept highway robbers. High jinx ensues with our Sky King having to fly Songbird through a valley of mountains with no gas. “Look out for that mountain…’ Sky King’s sidekick warns. Video quality: C-minus; Crowd pleasing scale: B-minus. Although it is entertaining, its still a routine cowboy show.
We then watched Ding Dong School.
Ding Dong School was the ‘nursery school of the air’. One of the first children shows of its kind that tried to teach as well as entertain. The school’s head teacher Miss Francis shows how to blow bubbles, make rabbits out of handkerchiefs, and most of all tells us that we need to tell our Mommies to buy us Kix cereal for breakfast. Fellow viewer Dean was not a good student and thought it was horrifying. I but I was transfixed by the complete calmness of Miss Francis who really seemed to want to teach children how to blow bubbles.
Video Quality: B+. Crowd Pleasing Scale: C-minus. Historically interesting, but at 30 full minutes you can only hear about how good Kix is for so long. The commercials were at least one-third of the show.
We then watched Stump the Stars. One of the most frustrating game shows I’ve ever seen.
In this show, Jeanne Crain and Ed Begley were the guest stars with regulars, Beverly Garland, Hans Conried, Ross Martin, Ruta Lee, Sebastian Cabot. Viewers write in a charade phrase that the stars have to guess in 120 seconds. This is Olympic style charades. The have to figure out not just the name of a book or play, but riddles, puns, parodies, and even a viewers address. The game moves so fast that I found it unbelievable that anyone could have gotten anything right. But how many chances to get to see Ruta Lee play charades with Hans Conried.
Video Quality: B. Crowd Pleasing Scale: B-minus. It was interesting for about ten minutes, then it just became exhausting. It just comes down to that charades is not fun to watch.
But I urge you if have a Roku to check this station out. Lots of fun video to dig through.
About four years ago I took the InFocus projector off the shelf and brought it to my friend Gary’s to watch an outdoor movie on Labor Day. I thought about what would be the best end of the season film; It dawned on me that the quintessential Labor Day film is Picnic (1955).
It was a perfect, perfect night weather-wise, and in the back of Gary’s apartment was a covered deck that we turned into a mini-movie theater for the night. Stacy and his boyfriend even brought a cake with the names of the film’s stars on it.
As a child my parents let me watch everything with them, so I had a vague recollection of seeing Picnic when I was eight or ten. But seeing it again, outside, and on Labor Day, it really hit home how the film captures that feeling that summer is over, school is going to start. I think after generations of starting school in September we are conditioned that the time for new beginnings is September, not the new year or birthdays. The Human Resources director where I worked claims that people change their jobs more often in September. Everyone wants a new start.
The wide-screen Technicolor drama looks beautiful projected and the characters are bigger than life. I could go on about how beautiful Kim Novak is, or how handsome and wonderful William Holden is (even though he’s a bit long in the tooth for the role), but the one reason to see this film is the tour de force performance of Rosalind Russell as Rosemary, the spinster school teacher. She’s her performance is hysterically funny, then turns into a drunken melodrama that shows how she fears growing old alone; it’s a performance that is Oscar worthy. However Picnic only picked up awards for Best Color Art Direction and Editing.
The high point of the film has to be the picnic dance in which Holden and Novak dance to Moonglow, which segues into the Picnic theme song. It’s a magically moment of theater. If you watch this scene, a bit of trivia: Holden was so nervous about dancing on camera that he was drunk while filming this… The film also has a gorgeous score by George Duning.
The Picnic Dance
This movie also has bittersweet memories, because it was the last evening that everyone got to be with our dear friend Bob Lesh who passed away the following month. Endings, beginnings. Fall is here.
The Picnic Trailer
For a really comprehensive review of Picnic I highly recommend watching Steve Hayes (Tired Old Queen at the Movies)
Several years ago I held my own personal one-person film fest through Netflix. One day after watching The Odd Couple, I put in every single film that starred Walter Matthau or Jack Lemmon. Even though a fraction of Matthau’s 104 Jack Lemmon’s 97 film or television appearances were on DVD and available it still took months to watch them. It was a great film adventure which got me to watch some wonderful films with Jack Lemmon such as Glengarry Glen Ross, Missing, Tuesdays with Morrie; and Walter Matthau in Charlie Varrick, House Calls, The Laughing Detective, Hopscotch.
After I’d squeezed every last bit out of my queue my conclusion was that Jack Lemmon movies were overall better films, and Walter Matthau was in a bunch of terrible films, but always seemed to rise above the materal.
So I was a little surprised to run across Walter’s craggy face on Netflix streaming in a movie called Movers and Shakers (1985). It went to the top of my list of must sees; it has a pretty interesting cast: Charles Grodin (who wrote it), Gilda Radner, Vincent Gardenia, Bill Macy (Walter from Maude), Tyne Daly. It clocks in at just an hour and twenty minutes. I figured this had to be a quick wild romp.
Let me tell you, its a very, very long eighty minutes! This movie falls flat on so many levels I don’t know where to start… But I must start with the star and writer whose shoulders this leaden so-called comedy must fall. I’m sure Charles Grodin is a smart guy; I read one of his auto-biographies and found him to be funny and insightful, so how could he write a movie that doesn’t have one solid laugh in it?
The plot goes like this… Matthau plays an executive at a major studio, Gardenia is dying and tells him to make a movie out of a sex manual called Love and Sex. Grodin is a writer who hasn’t had sex in years because his wife Tyne Daly just stares into space when he talks, Bill Macy is an insane director and Gilda Radner is his cheating girlfriend. 
Gilder Radner screams at her agent for putting her in this movie.
Like Luigi Pirandello’s Seven Characters in Search of an Author, all our players just wander around from scene to scene, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in groups; they sit in a conference rooms and talk about what ‘positions’ should be in the movie, they go walk along the beach, eat ice cream, go for a ride in a limo, sit and watch old movies. Maybe Charles Grodin is a genius, because he wrote a pointless, humorless, flop film desecting the process it takes to make terrible movie. The moral of the story is that its amazing that any movies get made at all because everyone is so incompetent.
Steve Martin is one wild and crazy guy whose name isn’t in the credits
One of the high (low points) in the film is where all the characters go visit an aging silent movie star named Fabio, played by an uncredited Steve Martin. Steve wears a Bea Arthur wig and a smoking jacket and does his ‘wild and crazy guy’ voice while getting Guava juice for everyone. Meanwhile, Penny Marshall in a negligee runs through the scene shreeking and ordering everyone out of the house. This is ten minutes of the running time of the film. Why do they visit him, who knows, he’s not going to be in their movie, he’s just there and then he’s gone. Then Grodin and Macy run along the beach, Tyne Daly reads a book. Gilda makes funny faces. All the while holding this mish mash of random plotlines together is the droning voice of Charles Grodin a la Blade Runner explaining who everyone is, what they are doing, and why we should be interested.
The voice over is non-stop.
Seriously non-stop!
Tyne Daly demonstrates the audience reaction to Movers and Shakers
And as if to throw salt on our wounds the film ends with a musical montage of Charles and Tyne being playful on the beach while Stephen (Tootsie) Bishop sings “Can’t We Go Home Again” which must have been in the thoughts of the poor audience members who saw this stinker in an actual theatre.
However, riding the wave of this cinematic equivant of a flooded basement is Walter. He smirks delivering his lines like a wise, old owl, while thinking, ‘I don’t know why I’m saying this inane dialogue, but I got top billing and a check!’.
And speaking of check. Check one more off my Walter Matthau list…
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