Laurel and Hardy and Laurel and Hardy

Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 at 10:53 AM

Turner Classic Movies, God love 'em, is running one of the best Laurel and Hardy features on Wednesday morning. Our Relations airs at 10:45 AM on my coast. You can figure out when it's on where you are. It's scheduled for an hour and forty-five minute time slot even though the movie only runs 73 minutes, so that probably means at least one short subject immediately follows. TCM is sneaking in some real treasures this way so you might want to take that into consideration if you set your TiVo or DVR or VCR.

By contrast, the Fox Movie Channel is running what I consider the most disappointing Laurel and Hardy feature — The Bullfighters — early the morning of Saturday, September 30. Then on the following Monday morn, they have The Big Noise, which isn't all that much better. Still, as we say around this website, weak Laurel and Hardy is better than…well, you know.

But getting back to Our Relations…this is a film about which I have two glorious memories which I'll share with you here. If you don't like it, you can go to some other weblog.

Shortly after Stan Laurel died in 1965, a tribute film show was held at Royce Hall, which is on the U.C.L.A. campus: An evening of Laurel and Hardy films with Dick Van Dyke as host. How could any fan of Stan and Ollie pass that up? My parents and I went and I have a very vivid memory of Mr. Van Dyke arriving and taking a seat in the audience not far from us, sitting all by himself like any other attendee. Autograph seekers quickly engulfed him and I think this caused the folks running the evening to notice he was there and, in kind of an appropriate Rob Petrie way, in the wrong place. They scurried over and quickly led him to another seat that had been reserved for their guest speaker. To open the festivities, he made some brief and appropriate remarks, telling the story of how he'd first met Stan, of how much Stan had influenced him, and how Stan had lovingly critiqued a Laurel and Hardy impersonation on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

They then ran two shorts — The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case and The Music Box — followed by the feature, which was Our Relations. If you asked most fans of The Boys about those shorts, you'd hear that Murder Case is one of their lesser efforts and Music Box was them at their best. (It was the only one they made that won an Academy Award.) That night, an audience of mostly adults — but a fair amount of kids — howled at The Music Box but there was even more laughter for The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case. Make of that what you will.

Our Relations is a mistaken identity farce. Stan and Ollie are roaming around town. So are their twin brothers, Alf and Bert, who are seamen in town for the day. Neither set of twins knows that the other is about. The sailors pick up some floozies and later the floozies think Stan and Ollie are their dates…only Stan and Ollie are with their wives at the time so you can imagine what happens. Alf and Bert are also running around with a valuable ring that doesn't belong to them. The rightful owner and some gangster types think Stan and Ollie have it and this is already a lot more than you need to know. You've got two Laurels and two Hardys, plus Jimmy Finlayson and moviedom's eternal drunk, Arthur Housman. How could that not be terrific?

That night at U.C.L.A., it was, it was. I can think of maybe a dozen moviegoing experiences in my life when the entire audience — every single person around me — was totally consumed by laughter. I don't just mean a lot of people thought a movie was funny. That often happens. I'm talking about those too-rare times when it all gravitates to some higher plane and there's that sense of a very magical, special event taking place…something that transcends a mere cinematic experience. You're all part of it together, laughing at the same things at the same times and sharing that sense of giddy, helpless happiness. An awful lot of strangers walked out of Royce Hall that night, feeling they'd been among friends and experienced something memorable.

Four or five years later, I had another of those keepsake "everyone laughing together" evenings thanks to Our Relations. Elsewhere, you may have seen me write of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, which met weekly for a few years in the late sixties at Palms Recreation Center in West Los Angeles. I don't think I've mentioned that some of our members also had a monthly group that was called the Silent Movie Club until the night I am about to describe when we ran a sound film. Thereafter, it was the Old Time Movie Club…and proud of it.

Most meetings, the program consisted of 8mm silent movies from our personal collections of Blackhawk Films and other companies that sold what then constituted home video. I had and still have a bunch of such reels of Chaplin, Langdon, Keaton and others. I no longer have a projector on which to run them or any reason to do so but I still have them. The club's officers — Barry Siegel, Bruce Simon and Steve Finkelstein — had similar collections and you could see all our films at the club if you paid the modest admission. There was even live musical accompaniment, courtesy of a talented fellow named Jeff Gluckson at the Palms Park piano. Every few months, all of this put enough loot in the treasury to rent a 16mm sound feature and give Jeff a night off. When they decided to get one with Laurel and Hardy in it, I recalled that glorious evening at Royce Hall and demanded Our Relations.

The club's only publicity came from a small listing in the Los Angeles Times but that week, it yielded a full house…more than a full house. I think the seating capacity of the room was around 100 and we had at least 150 crammed in there. People were sitting on the floor, on the tables, on each other…and no matter how uncomfy they were, they all loved the film. I was wedged between a wall and an older, somewhat portly woman who was sharing the piano bench with someone and literally crying from laughing so hard. Every few minutes, she'd double over and topple off her half of the bench, falling onto me, all the time giggling so wildly she couldn't get her bearings to get up. There were moments there when I wished we were running The Bullfighters, instead.

Our Relations is a great comedy but it won't seem anywhere near that funny on Turner Classic Movies. You had to be there, had to be with not just an audience but the right audience. That's one of the things I miss with home video. DVDs and the cable channels give us the chance to have our favorite old films in our own homes, more or less on demand. They just don't give us the chance to have them the way the filmmakers intended: With an audience.

Today's Video Link

Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 at 12:07 AM

This one will be better if I don't tell you anything about it in advance other than that it runs a minute and 38 seconds and that like all of the really weird video links, it has William Shatner in it. Go click.

The Truly Amazing Race

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 11:04 PM

I'm not much into following sports but I've finally found one that interests me. Matter of fact, now that I've lost all that weight, I may start training for it. Here's a link to a video of my new favorite athletic endeavor.

And after you watch the video, you can read more about it.

Schnapp To It!

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 10:41 PM

One of the best comic blogs on the web is Dial B for Blog, run by the pseudonymous "Robby Reed." Oh, wait. I probably need to explain the reference here. In the sixties, DC had a comic book called House of Mystery and it featured for a time, a strip called "Dial H for Hero" about a kid named Robby Reed who had a magic device that looked like an old-fashioned telephone dial. Every time he dialed H-E-R-O on it, he was magically transformed into a different super-hero, almost all of which were new and never seen again after the one appearance. The comic was written by Dave Wood and drawn by Jim Mooney.

(Quick aside because if I don't put it here, I'll forget to mention it: Congrats to Jim Mooney, one of the great gentlemen of our business, on his recent and successful cataract surgery. I am told he's regained the use of an eye that hasn't worked so well for many years…and isn't that a wonderful thing to hear? He's probably drawing better than ever now, and he was already pretty darned good.)

Where was I? Oh, yes: Robby Reed. Well, the Robby Reed who runs Dial B for Blog isn't the same guy. I figured this out because the Robby Reed in the comic book was a fictional character. I'm not sure who the Identity Thief is who runs the blog but today, he's posted the first in a ten-part (10!) series on Ira Schnapp, one of the most important figures in the history of comic books.

Who, you may have just muttered aloud, was Ira Schnapp? Well, go read Part One of Ten (10!) and maybe you'll begin to get the idea. This is a long overdue bit of research and, as the saying goes, it about time.

The Gentleman From Arizona

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 8:21 PM

Just watched Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, an HBO documentary about the late senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential candidate. I enjoyed it a lot and would recommend it…in fact, here's a link to a page that tells all about it, including when it airs again.

However, I had the faint sense of maybe (just maybe) witnessing some after-the-fact whitewashing of a man's life; of Barry Goldwater being repackaged for posterity as the somewhat non-partisan elder statesman he became, not as the darling of the extreme right that he was in '64. I suspect, just based on a distant observer's perspective, he would have approved of such refurbishment…and to its credit, the film does give us a good glimpse of the 1964 model Goldwater.

Still, one overwhelming message of the film is that ol' Barry was such an honest, outspoken maverick that even his old enemies loved and respected him. That may be true to some extent — the on-camera interviews praising him are full of Democrats and Liberals — but it's the later Goldwater they loved. They liked the guy who was no longer a force of any note in the Republican party and who said things like "Nixon was no damned good" and that gays should be allowed to serve in the military. They liked him because when he said such things, he couldn't be dismissed by the right as some wacko Liberal. He was, after all, Mr. Conservative, the one-time pin-up boy of the John Birch Society and defender of Joe McCarthy.

In fact, the main theme of the film — apart from the one about Barry being such a swell, candid guy — is that he was Mr. Conservative and those who now represent that movement are not. (This is also the main thesis of the new John W. Dean book, Conservatives Without Conscience, that I just finished. The book, Dean says, started out as a collaboration with Goldwater.) The documentary even offers us testimony from present-day right-wingers like George Will to wish that Conservatism was more like it was in Goldwater's day…though I doubt Will would sign on to every view that Barry voices in the old footage.

My recollections of Goldwater in '64 — and remember, I was twelve at the time — is that he was the poster boy for those who wanted to slow down the advance of Civil Rights (like, to the point of moving backwards) and those who wanted the U.S. to find an excuse to drop serious nuclear explosives on those dirty commies in Russia…or maybe not even to wait for a reason. Those might not have been his views. In fact, they probably were not, but he sure did little to distance himself from that mindset and whatever votes it could bring him.

I also recall thinking his campaign was just plain feeble. There's a skill to running for office…a skill that has nothing to do with whether the candidate is any good or not. It has to do with fund-raising and advertising and presenting the product (the candidate) in a saleable context. Lyndon B. Johnson and his operation were just better at it than the folks marketing Goldwater, especially when L.B.J. was armed with a powerful weapon: A martyred president whose legacy he could claim to be trying to carry forth. (You can hear and read Goldwater's '64 acceptance speech here. It's somewhat less radical now than it was at the time.)

I don't know whether this country would have been better off if it had elected Barry Goldwater that year…probably not if he'd governed as per some of the campaign speeches he made. Once it was clear he'd never get another shot at the presidency, and maybe once it was apparent that Arizona voters would keep him in the Senate as long as he wished to serve, the man changed. He became the iconoclastic, beholden-to-no-one gadfly that the documentary makes him out to be. I wish they'd obtained footage of an appearance he made on The Tonight Show shortly before his death in 1998. Jay Leno was the host then and Goldwater had that wonderful attitude of "I don't care what people think…I'm going to say what I believe." It was a wonderful chat as he bashed Nixon and Jerry Falwell and anyone who opposed gay rights, then turned right around with equally strong words against several prominent Democrats and their efforts. I think that guy might have made a much better president than Johnson.

Alas, I can't think of a single politician today who ever became half as famous and who would absent himself from partisanship that way and just say and do what he thought was right. Which is why I'd like to believe the Barry Goldwater they sell us in Mr. Conservative was the real Barry Goldwater.

Berny

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 6:41 PM

There's a family-submitted obit for Berny Wolf up at the L.A. Times. Animation historians might want to check it out for more details on his long and varied career.

Recommended Reading

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 6:23 PM

Gary Hart says the October Surprise is a U.S. assault on Iran which will be sold as necessary to prevent the mass development of nuclear weapons…but it's actually Step One in a neo-con plan for "regime change" over there.

It seems to me that in the last few elections, there were advance rumors of an October Surprise. Then the October Surprise turned out to be that there was no October Surprise. Anyway, I'm linking to Hart's piece not because I think he's right but because I'm hoping he's wrong.

Comedy Tonight

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 1:02 PM

My longtime pal (of close to 40 years) Bruce Reznick found something wonderful on the web. He sent it to me so I can share it with all of you.

Emerson College is assembling a library of oral histories of comedy. Bill Dana (yes, Jose Jiminez) and Project Manager Jenni Matz have interviewed more than fifty important comedians and comedy writers on videotape and a sampling of this material is available online. You can read the transcripts of interviews with Dana, Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Larry Gelbart, Tom Poston, Bill Persky, Ed Begley Jr., Jay Sandrich, Phyllis Diller, Dick Gregory and Jan Murray. There are also video excerpts of some of the conversations. Here's the link you want. Enjoy…and don't thank me. Thank Bruce.

One More Political Post

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 12:24 PM

Take the time to read this article in The New York Times that says that…well, here. This excerpt will give you a pretty good idea of what it says…

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

Yow. If this is an accurate characterization of that report, then the people we trust to know this kind of thing believe the Bush administration has made the problem worse, not better. And sadly, it's probably true since the report issued last week by the House Intelligence Committee said pretty much the same thing but with only a tad less pessimism. It's hard to fathom why there are still people in this country who back George W. Bush because they think he's made us safer. But there are such people. Five or six of them will now write to me and accuse me of "Bush-hating."

I have to go and work on a script. When I next find time to post, I'll try and make it something about comics or old movies or something more important than this War in Iraq stuff.

Recommended Reading

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 12:07 PM

Andrew Sullivan on how the Bush administration defines torture.

Y'know, I keep reading how military men say that torture doesn't work; that it simultaneously leads to us (in this case) getting information that is questionable at best while also ratcheting up the chance that others will torture our soldiers…and still, the U.S. apparently engages in it and Bush manuevers to keep some form of it going. Has anyone credible yet come forward to argue that, oh no, we get great, accurate information from torture and it doesn't place our troops in any greater physical jeopardy? I don't mean that to be as lopsided a question as it probably seems but I couldn't think of how else to phrase it.

I sense there are some people out there who simply like the idea of us torturing "the enemy" or even anyone who kinda looks like or might be part of "the enemy." These are the same people who are happy when they hear a car bomb went off in downtown Baghdad killing 80 people because they figure the odds are that there were probably a few terrorists or future terrorists in that eighty. Leave those people aside. Is there a sane case to be made for practices that fit a reasonable definition of torture? Has any genuine military authority come forth to make that case? Or is the only controversy here what constitutes "torture?"

Sunday Morning

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 11:27 AM

Their site may be a little busy this morning but Crooks and Liars has posted the first 20 minutes or so of Bill Clinton's interview on Fox News Sunday. I suspect that people who never liked Clinton will enjoy it because they'll see him as rattled and defensive while those who like him will say he did a great job of standing up to the Fox News machine. Some in both camps may enjoy seeing a United States president who can speak without a script and manage to get both a subject and a verb into most of his sentences.

I feel a little (only a little) sorry for the interviewer, Chris Wallace, in all this. I think Clinton is right that Wallace and his Fox News cohorts have done a lot to advance Republican Talking Points of at least dubious accuracy, and haven't put tough questions to the Bush administration in the areas under discussion. But I think he's wrong that he was baited-and-switched with the understanding that the interview would be mainly about his Global Initiative project. The discussion wound up being so much about Osama because Clinton took it that way. Actually, I suspect both men were delighted with how the whole interview turned out. Even though Wallace got spanked a little, he got a newsworthy, highly-promotable piece of tape out of it…and probably a lot of gold stars from his employer. And Clinton got his view out and got a lot of attention.

And you'll probably like it because no matter how you feel about Clinton, there's something in there for you. Give it a look if the link isn't too slow because everyone else is watching it.

All Wet

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 3:39 AM

Thanks to a more conscious public and some sane legislation here and there, some aspects of the environment are becoming a tad more free of pollution and degradation. This is not the case with the tap water in my neighborhood. For at least five years, it's been undrinkable and now it's slowly becoming unshowerable.

Every so often, I run into someone with a mad on for environmentalists…someone who thinks they spread bogus warnings about disasters that are never going to happen and try to inconvenience people or businesses with preventing them. That's certainly so in some cases but not always. The many folks who warned us we were polluting our water supply were 100% dead-on right and the folks who insulted and mocked them were utterly wrong. We're all paying the price for not heeding that warning. There's now a $22 billion industry in this country selling bottled water…and that number doesn't even factor in what's being spent on filtration systems and Brita pitchers. I'm amazed people aren't more upset about this. But then I'm also amazed they don't do much more about high gas prices than pay them and grumble about it.

I resisted bottled water as long as I could…but when the liquid coming out of my faucets began to taste like I imagine kerosene tastes, it was time to go to the bottles.

Like most of you, I've tried just about every major brand. Happily, the one that tasted best to me was one of the cheapest — Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water. The only negative about it, apart from the fact that I have to pay for bottled water at all, is that the largest size it comes in is the one gallon container. You can't buy or have them deliver a big five gallon jug like I need to put on my water cooler. For that, I have Sparketts delivered and it's okay…but most of the time, I swill Crystal Geyser out of half-liter bottles. Cheapest place I've found to buy them is Smart and Final when they run their occasional "buy two cases, get one free" sale. In addition to any health benefits I derive from the water, I get exercise lifting those 36 bottle cartons into and out of my car.

My Crystal Geyser water comes from a spring somewhere on or about Olancha Peak, which is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Other parts of the country get Crystal Geyser H2O that comes from other sources so I'm curious as to what it tastes like. Later this year, I'll be doing some travelling and I'm going to make a point of sampling, for example, the Crystal Geyser water from Benton, Tennessee where there's a protected source adjacent to the Cherokee National Forest, which is surrounded by the historic Blue Ridge Mountains. (In case you can't tell, I'm doing some cutting 'n' pasting from the Crystal Geyser website.)

I like the Crystal Geyser product but I'm sorry I have to pay and lug around plastic bottles to have drinkable water. When people tell me now that we're doing things that are making our air unbreathable, I think I'm going to take them more seriously. I'd hate to have to carry tanks around like I'm scuba diving everywhere I go. I have a feeling even that won't make some people think the environmentalists are ever right but we need to do something.

Today's Video Link

Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 12:39 AM

Hey, whadda ya say we watch a cartoon? The Private Snafu shorts were made between 1943 and 1945, mainly to be shown to our fighting men overseas. Some were a bit educational and some were intended to drill some message into the soldiers' heads…but all were intended to be primarily entertaining. To that end, the War Department allowed the filmmakers to be a little more adult in their humor. Bob Clampett, one of the directors who worked on them, said that they became a repository for many of the jokes they dared not put into the cartoons they were making to be shown in American movie theaters.

Frank Capra had the original idea for the series and Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was their main writer. There is some dispute as to how much of Geisel's work made it to the screen and how much was supplemented by gag writers at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio, aka Warner Brothers. Schlesinger got the contract — which was originally expected to go to Disney — by underbidding Walt, then he turned the project over to his staff of directors: Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin. Mel Blanc supplied the voice of the hapless Private Snafu, who sounded very much like Bugs Bunny.

This one is entitled Booby Traps and it was directed by Clampett and released in January of 1944. The narrator you'll hear is a man named Robert C. Bruce, who usually narrated travelogues for a living, and who was used by the Schlesinger/WB studio whenever they did a travelogue parody, which was often for a while there. The cartoon will teach you a lesson that we all learned well from later Warner Brothers cartoons; that you should never, ever play "Those Endearing Young Charms" because the last note of the first line is always hooked up to explosives. That joke certainly did not come from Dr. Seuss.

VIDEO MISSING

Today's Brilliant Theory

Posted on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 11:12 PM

Several Internet message boards have erupted today with debates on whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. I think he's alive but disguised as Tony Clifton.

Guild Matters

Posted on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 9:03 PM

The Writers Guild has posted a press release about the rally/picketing of last Wednesday. It'll tell you a few things I didn't cover in my reports, either here or here. There's also a link (WARNING: PDF File!!!) to the text of the speeches that were given that day. They were pretty good speeches, especially the one by Phil Robinson. Take a look if you're interested.