Monday, August 21, 2017

Jerry


Old viper John Simon once joked that Jerry Lewis could cure muscular dystrophy overnight if during his next Labor Day telethon Lewis announced he would disappear forever if everyone watching sent in 25 cents. One of the worst of the two billion degradations in our current pop culture is that far more people think of Lewis in terms of "his kids" and that annual telethon than think of him as one of the great movie directors of his age. Which he was.

Lewis's movies are deep and complex and necessary, movies
which are especially beautiful to look at, with amazing and ever-changing pace. And it is here where we begin to understand just how deeply and devoutly Jerry Lewis believed in the magic and in the transformative possibilities of movies themselves. His Total Filmmaker is one of the best (and funniest) filmmaking books around.

The Ladies Man (1961) with Jerry's commentary.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Listen

Tonight's guest, that star of stage, screen, and radio. . . . Lee Oswald?



The second part (36:00), recorded several days later, is a marvelous job of mousetrapping and just a taste of what Lee would get a few months hence, on his way toward oblivion.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Roving


Oz and best friend Thorny argue about a series of books called The Rover Boys (Ozzie claims there was no Rover Boys Go to Treasure Island while Thorny insists there was). Having absolutely nothing in the world to do, Ozzie rushes to his nearest library and there runs into son David's English teacher. When she asks Oz what he's looking for -- ashamed to mention the Rover Boys -- he grabs the nearest book at hand, a 25-pound version of The Peloponnesian Wars, Volume One. Astonished at this scholarly taste, the teacher invites Ozzie to lecture on Ancient Greece to her PTA book club -- an offer David's dad cannot refuse. This all happens quickly and soon we're into the near-entirety of the episode: Ozzie struggling through four massive volumes of Sir Henry Parkinson's unread masterpiece. Strangely, Thorny's also going through the books, even though he wasn't even invited to attend the lecture. Eventually, Harriet saves the day by calling the English teacher and telling her Ozzie is sick.

A mind-boggling 23 minutes (wish I could find the uncut version) composed of less than 50 shots -- average shot length over 30 seconds. (The average Curb Your Enthusiasm, for modern example and a show not editorially-retarded, runs 28 minutes containing over 500 shots.)

Ozzie Nelson is the Carl Dreyer of television!

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Orchids

Besides the greatness of Rick Nelson, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet is best remembered for its astonishing longevity (14 seasons, 435 episodes!) and for the equally astonishing moribund irrelevance of its later years (1960 and beyond). At its best, however, it was great. Under the total creative control of Ozzie Nelson (who it's said made Otto Preminger seem like a pussycat on set), it was the original "show about nothing." Ozzie never had a job, seemed to have no plans for the day, was considered a boob by everyone, and was surrounded by friends, relatives, and neighbors who also had pointless, jobless lives. (What a refreshing change from the CV-obsessed garbage of modern television!) Yet everyone was happy, warm, relaxed, and gentle -- without a hint of smarm or calculation.

One of the wackiest early episodes is called "The Orchid and the Violet," from April of '53. Oz is mistaken for a bum (as he should be) by a florist and his wife, hysterically played by the great Alan Mowbray and by Orson Welles's own Jeanette Nolan, reprising her role here as Lady Macbeth.

Crazy, man!

Monday, August 14, 2017

Enthusiasms

One man is looking for a little girl's doll; the other for a cone of tutti frutti ice cream.


Cops, a druggist, his wife and best friend, the store manager, telephone operators, his sons: all do what they can to help Ozzie Nelson find that tutti frutti ice cream. Meanwhile, Oz plays cards and cooks hamburgers at four-in-the-morning, files a false police report about being lost, raids a 24-hour supermarket, wakes up his sleeping wife after having a tutti frutti nightmare, wakes up a sleeping druggist, throws rocks at his neighbor's window in order to wake him up in case he has the ice cream, is woken up by the same neighbor (played by the great Parley Baer) who now also has the tutti frutti bug, wakes up the boys and tries to fob off some cherry ice cream mixed with fruit cocktail as tutti frutti on them -- with no one in sight having a care in the world as morning approaches. . .



Larry David's L.A. is a city of gargoyles: racists, liars, assholes, cheats: amoral psychopathic egoists -- a place where one is naturally murdered by tire-iron for honking a car horn at a driver who has backed into you. In the first few seasons, David's character is a rather befuddled and passive Joe who, like Ozzie, rarely works and who, unlike Oz, gets into deeper and deeper trouble the more he tries to do the right thing. Everyone he meets outside his closest circle (and sometimes within) treats him with dishonesty, loathing, suspicion, condescension, arrogance: so-called friends, cousins, his receptionist, his dentist, co-workers, other drivers -- everyone. It's amazing the character hasn't gone postal (yet). But midway through CYE's run, Larry David changed character: thereafter, David becomes the instigator of most unpleasantnesses; and seems to get off on them. When this wrongheaded shift originally occured, I figured it was prelude to the ending of the Davids' marriage -- 'cause who wants Larry to be just another schmuck victim of a betraying wife? But the marital split didn't occur until the end of Year 6, so no. A strange choice, and while probably a leap toward what the "real" Larry David is like, the show lost its Everyman quality and has too often been "this week's politically incorrect kick in the teeth to": Orthodox Jews, kamikaze pilots, gay Barneys workers, the deaf, devout Christians, Lesbians, blacks blacks blacks, pregnant women, little girls, and Koreans who eat dog. Still -- as Ozzie represents the giddy "what me worry?" exhilaration of Eisenhower's suburban white Eden -- Curb Your Enthusiasm embodies the prick heart of 21st Century America, as well and as consistently as anything in the pop culture.



And oh yeah. . .

Saturday, August 12, 2017

All Time



RIP, Glen Campbell.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Swells

Under the hand of Vincente Minnelli.