Congrats to R.C. Harvey who has posted the 200th edition of "Rants & Raves," a website feature that covers comic books, comic strips, editorial cartoons and other venues where grown men and women draw silly pictures. I've been a subscriber for some time and have always enjoyed his views and reporting. There's some free stuff to be read over at his website but you really oughta subscribe.
About once a month, I check my Spam filter to see if it's caught anything that shouldn't be in there.
I didn't count but it actually looks like I've received more messages in the last few weeks trying to sell me Windows Vista than I have from folks who want me to buy Viagra from them.
When you think about it, they're kind of the same thing.
Showtime is running How To Murder Your Wife, a 1965 movie that Jack Lemmon, it is rumored, very much regretted making. It's kind of an interesting film because it has a good, fun feeling and a lot of great performances. Terry-Thomas is quite splendid as Lemmon's "Man" (i.e., butler-valet) and Eddie Mayehoff, a very underappreciated comic actor, walks off with every scene he's in. Lemmon twinkles, Virna Lisi is stunning, the music is great...and somehow, the whole thing falls apart from a stupid story with a stupider resolution.
Lemmon plays a comic strip artist who's a confirmed bachelor. His art imitates his life and vice-versa so when he accidentally gets married to Lisi, his comic strip character (Bash Brannigan) gets married in the strip. Both creator and creation undergo changes, not necessarily for the better, and the cartoonist finally decides to murder the wife in the comic strip...only this gets confused with murdering his real wife. When the real wife runs away, Lemmon is charged with her murder...and in order to make that part of the story happen, screenwriter George Axelrod and director Richard Quine have to just ignore how the actual judicial system works. For example, it is somehow decided that Lemmon can be charged with First Degree Murder even though there is no physical proof that anyone has been killed, thereby suspending habeas corpus years before anyone had ever heard of Alberto Gonzales.
Lemmon goes to trial — and I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending in the next paragraph because it's so lame, so consider this your SPOILER ALERT...
Lemmon goes to trial and decides that his only chance of not being sent to the electric chair is to (a) confess to a murder that never happened and (b) convince a conveniently all-male jury, in a five minute speech, that murdering your wife is a good thing. I was thirteen years old when I saw this movie and even I was sitting there going, "Come...on!" Easily one of the silliest scenes ever to appear on the screen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The whole film, if you think about it with the slightest bit of logic, is quite ridiculous and it's a testimony to Mr. Lemmon's charm (and Mayehoff and Thomas) that it's still almost worth watching...once.
Cartoonists love it, not for the plot but for the absurd life style of one of their own, and the occasional shots of comic strips and of "Lemmon's" hand drawing them. Obviously, a real artist had to be engaged to do this and when Mr. Lemmon was signed, he told the producers that as a kid, his favorite comic book was a strip called The Sub-Mariner and he wondered if they could get that feature's artist. They tracked down Bill Everett but he was then coping with too many alcohol-related health problems and he reluctantly declined the job.
Instead, they hired the great Alex Toth and his first assignment, which he did, was to whip up several newspaper-style strips that ran in the Hollywood trade papers to announce various signings and the upcoming commencement of filming. Toth was also supposed to "stunt double" Lemmon's drawing hand for some shots in the film until someone noticed a teensy problem: Lemmon was right-handed and Toth was a lefty. Alex also began arguing with the producers over something-or-other (Alex was always arguing over something-or-other) and he walked off the project. His replacement was Mel Keefer, who did all the artwork in the film and played Jack Lemmon's drawing hand.
At least, this is the way Alex told me the story. Mel Keefer told me a slightly different version years ago and we'll be discussing both accounts, along with his extraordinary career as a cartoonist in strips and comic books, when I interview Mel at this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. He's a Guest of Honor and it's about time.
In the meantime, you might want to watch How to Murder Your Wife on Showtime, February 5, 9, 13 and 16. Each airing is in the middle of the night so the scheduling folks obviously know this is not a cinema classic. They're right.
There's a Broadway show currently playing called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. As part of each performance, at least one person is summoned out of the audience to become a participant in the on-stage spelling competition and whenever possible, it's a celebrity.
At the January 30 performance, one of the audience members who was dragged up on stage was Julie Andrews, and they gave her a word that she had to spell. The word was "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." To her eternal shame, she got it wrong.
Wanna get real depressed today? Read the summary of the National Intelligence Estimate, which is titled, "Prospects for Iraq's Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead." Then, if you have a gram of optimism left in your soul, get rid of it by reading the new U.N. Report on Global Warming issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Two more foreboding, troubling documents have never co-existed.
Here's a quick summary of The N.I.E. Report: Things over there are a mess. The Sunnis and the Shiites are killing each other (and our guys) in record numbers. There's no solution, there's no flicker of light at the end of any tunnel...and — oh, by the way — that "surge" thing isn't going to work.
Here's a quick summary of the U.N. Report: Things everywhere are a mess. We must act now but even if we do, glaciers will continue to melt, oceans will continue to rise and there will be disastrous effects everywhere and for everyone.
You can read the N.I.E. paper in PDF form at this link. You can read a summary of the U.N. report, also in PDF form, at this link. And then you can go hide under your bed for the next month or three, hoping they're both wrong. Or at least, that they're making two bad situations sound worse than they are.
A lot of Republicans and Democrats have announced they're running for president, even including some people you've heard of. How many of these people actually think they have even a 1% chance of getting elected? I mean, come on. Mike Huckabee will get as many electoral votes in 2008 as I will.
I'm not even talking about people like Mike Gravel who seem to be running only for Harold Stassen's old position as perennial laughingtock candidate. I mean folks who are actually in or around government like Dennis Kucinich or Tom Vilsack or — over across the aisle — Tom Tancredo or Tommy Thompson. How many of these folks really think they have a shot at going the distance and how many are merely candidates the way Pat Buchanan sometimes is, the way Al Sharpton always is, the way Ralph Nader persists in being?
There's obviously a value to running. Mr. Buchanan, to pick one of them as an example, enhanced his fame and raised public awareness of his causes by running for an office he could never come close to winning. He may even have forced some electable Republicans to pay more attention to his issues or lean a bit in their direction. People who believed in his message donated millions of dollars to Buchanan's candidacy and there were reports that via legal means, he found ways to direct much of the cash into his personal accounts. Even if he didn't, I'll bet running for president raised his fees as a speaker, commentator, author, etc. In short, it was a good career move and I don't believe he ever thought he'd win a single elector, let alone 270. Sharpton obviously doesn't but he runs.
The distinction matters, I think. One of the many moments when Ross Perot seemed to take a solid running start and leap the shark was when, in 1992, he seemed to believe he was not only going to win but that he was going to carry every single state. Near as I can tell, all Perot got out of that run for the White House was a brief moment in the spotlight. He didn't enhance a political career, advance a political cause or increase his income. Many of those who won't win in '08 will achieve one, two or all three to some extent.
We all know they aren't going to win. What I wanna know is how many of them know it?
See those covers above? The issue of Adventure Comics came out in 1939 and the Detective Comics was two years before that. Both covers were drawn by Creig Flessel, a fine gentlemen who is 95 years old today. Congrats and good thoughts to Mr. Flessel.
Here's one more George Carl clip. This one's from The Hollywood Palace and it's his dance routine, which he sometimes did when he wasn't getting himself tangled up in microphone cords. This is from an episode hosted, as you'll see, by Jimmy Durante. It aired on December 10, 1966 and you can view a ticket for its taping over on this page at our sister site, Old TV Tickets.
February 3, 2007
