Unless you count all the stuff about the presidential election, I haven't posted anything really, appallingly trivial for a little while. This would qualify.
The other day, I finally got around to watching With Six You Get Eggroll, a 1968 movie starring Doris Day and Brian Keith, directed by one of my favorite people, the late Howard Morris. Howie did some wonderful things as a director — if you ever get the chance to see Who's Minding the Mint?, don't miss it — and I have the feeling I'd have enjoyed this one more if I'd seen it in '68. It is — shall we say? — rough going today.
But I'd never seen it and Howie told me many, many stories about the making of it. He seems to have been the only person in Hollywood, except maybe Doris, who didn't detest Ms. Day's then-husband, Marty Melcher. He was also very proud to have directed the film debut of a clean-shaven kid named George Carlin. George sometimes cited this as the experience that convinced him he didn't have much future as a full-time actor and that he ought to make his stand-up act his primary line of endeavor…but he's really no worse than anyone else in this movie and better than some seasoned pros.
Overall, I didn't care for the film (sorry, Howie) but I enjoyed seeing scenes he'd told me about and it's always good to see Brian Keith, who I always thought was a terrific actor. He and Howie were close friends and I once saw them doing The Sunshine Boys, with Keith in the Jack Albertson/Walter Matthau role and Howie directing and playing the Sam Levene/George Burns part. Mr. Keith did things with the script that I've never seen any other actor do. This was partly due to his basic uniqueness as a performer, partly due to the fact that he wasn't Jewish, and partly due to the fact that he forgot about every third line. It was quite an interesting evening…and I mean "interesting" in every sense, positive and negative.
He was good in With Six Your Get Eggroll, too. Just about everyone was but the sum of its parts was somewhat tedious. It's a fine movie for trivia, though…like in a scene where Doris Day runs into two "hippie" types. I did a frame grab of them and that's it up above. The actor on the left is easily recognizable. That's Jamie Farr, who was in dozens of movies and TV shows (including many directed by Howie) before the M*A*S*H TV show, which came along a few years later. But you see that guy next to him, playing the other Hollywood-style hippie? That's William Christopher, who played Father Mulcahy on M*A*S*H.
It's just one of those little movieland coincidences, the two of them being "teamed" in this movie a few years before they wound up in the same classic TV show…and their association didn't end there. For a long time after M*A*S*H, Farr and Christopher toured America with a bus-and-truck production of The Odd Couple, with Farr as Oscar, Christopher as Felix. It wouldn't surprise me if they went out with The Sunshine Boys, too. Neither one of them's Jewish either, but they couldn't do an odder interpretation of that play than Brian Keith.