The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.
The Yuletide season weighs heavily upon us all — if depression didn’t exist, the holidays could singlehandedly create it. One cable network, however — which I had condemned last year for dropping their library of wonderfully entertaining b&w shows into oblivion — has decided to give nostalgia buffs a little present for Xmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever you choose to celebrate.
As of this past Monday, GSN has decided to throw those who’d like some representation of vintage TV a bone by restoring the channel’s “b&w hour” from 3 to 4:00 a.m. (midnight–1:00 a.m. West Coast). They’ve started out with the most entertaining (and awesomely guest-filled) shows, What’s My Line and I’ve Got a Secret. The former was the most silly-yet-sophisticated game show ever, and the latter was the most wittily pointless — the game never mattered, and if we thought it did, the gold-standard curmudgeon, radio humorist Henry Morgan, reminded us that it didn’t.
IGAS has been resumed in 1960, when its longstanding panel (Cullen, Myerson, Morgan, Palmer) was firmly in place. WML has been joined in the mid-’50s, when the sour-faced comedy god Fred Allen was on the panel (“new” sensation Jayne Mansfield was the Mystery Guest last eve, if that makes it easier to situate the period).
I still like to promote the notion that if the folks running TCM would like to bless us with a classic TV channel, there’d be brilliant b&w comedy, drama, and genre weirdness being seen again for the first time in decades, making the cable "choice" truly that — a choice. No more having to surf past mounds of awful sports programming, rancid, recent-vintage TV movies, and mind-destroying “reality TV.”
UPDATE: The eagle-eyed souls on the GSN message boards have noted that this is indeed a two-week “Xmas present” from the folks who run the network and want to push their most recent anodyne crap product and acquired garbage (every known iteration of Family Feud! The 2000-era game shows that no one wants to rewatch! The Newlywed Game retread with Carnie Wilson!). Enjoy while you can — classic, classy TV is about to be buried again….
As my second birthday honoree, I want to salute once more Funhouse deity Jean-Luc Godard, aka “Uncle Jean” (from his indelibly eccentric character in the perfect First Name: Carmen). He turned 80 years old on December 3rd and, thankfully for us, is still crafting provocative, brilliant, and gorgeously poetic films.
There are entire bookshelves’ worth of Godard studies out there, but nothing compares to just watching the films themselves. The most common entry point is, of course, his groundbreaking first feature A bout de souffle, which turned 50 this year, thus earning him an honorary Oscar that the Oscar folks don’t deem worthy of inclusion in the telecast for more than a few seconds. I would argue that any of the “classic 15” — his fifteen narrative features from 1960-68 — serve as a great introduction to his style, as do the first three “comeback” films of the early Eighties (Sauve qui peut, Passion, and First Name Carmen).
Godard’s recent films have shown he has lost none of his uncanny grasp of the medium, his perceptive view of the ways in which men and women communicate (and quite often fail to communicate), and his ability to beautifully articulate how the cinema entices/deceives the viewer.
What is impressive about Godard’s work from the last 30 years is its blend of conceptual thinking, intelligent dialogue, and absolutely beautiful imagery. The result is, and I’m not using this term as mere hype, filmic poetry. This was illustrated by the fact that when he made his scripts available to the French publisher P.O.L., they were published as books of poetry — no parenthetical notes, no set-ups, no identification of the characters speaking. Since Godard sometimes quotes numerous authors and filmmakers in his dialogue, there is always a list of sources in the back of every book.
It’s extremely rare that a filmmaker’s work can be so essentially cinematic and yet also function as literature. It also works musically, which is why the music label ECM has released CDs of the complete soundtracks to certain of his features and the epic video masterwork Histoire(s) du Cinema. There is a beautiful article contained in the booklet of the Nouvelle Vague CD set that finds a blind writer offering her experience of Godard's dense sound mix in the film.
As a measure of Godard’s cross-cultural fame and his fans' justified devotion, I refer you to these folks, who decided to create a new JLG font to celebrate Godard’s 80th birthday. (Thanks to RC for passing this on.) Here is the lowdown on it.
Now that I’ve made the case that the man is a fucking artistic genius, let us wallow in his most “accessible” moments, those involving music. Basically any of the Godard-cut trailers for any of the “golden 15” films functions like a music-vid. All of these trailers are on YT, so they merely need to be searched out by title. Here is my personal fave of longstanding, from 1966:
His “comeback” film Sauve Qui Peut (la vie) (aka Every Man for Himself, 1980) recently was re-released in America and will hopefully be out on DVD sometime soon. It has some fascinating moments in which Godard uses electronic music:
A unforgettable mixture of image and sound, as Tom Waits’ “Ruby’s Arms” is used to underscore a scene of impotence in Prenom Carmen (1983):
One of my all-time fave bands, the French duo Les Rita Mitsouko, were studied in Soigne Ta Droite (aka, Keep Up Your Right, 1987). I put this up on YT when Les Rita mastermind Fred Chichin died:
One of Godard’s 21st–century triumphs is the film Eloge de l’amour (aka In Praise of Love, 2001). Here, a gorgeous b&w scene is underscored by a song from Vigo’s timeless L’Atalante:
In closing I offer you the union of our two birthday-salute recipients: Woody Allen as directed by Godard in the wildly uneven King Lear (1987):
And the only onscreen meeting of both filmmakers, in the Godard interview video Meetin’ WA (1986), where a very reserved Uncle Jean meets a very reserved Woody. There are no English subs for Godard’s narration here, but you do have the actual interview between the two in English. This is must-see for anyone who likes either filmmaker (or both):
I regularly do Deceased Artiste tributes on this blog, but I also want to occasionally salute those artists and entertainers whose work I love who are still alive. In this spirit, I say happy 75th and 80th birthdays (respectively) to two great filmmakers, whose work has been important to me personally over the years.
The first is Woody Allen, who turned 75 last week. The party line on Woody is that he’s a great comedian and filmmaker who hit his stride with Annie Hall and Manhattan, and that his latter-day films aren’t “entertaining.” I would defend him based on several levels of fan and critical appreciation. First and foremost, what Woody has carried off in the past thirty years since those twin masterworks is nothing short of miraculous, especially as an American filmmaker, since, as we know, over here you’re only as good as your last picture’s box office. He has displayed a dogged determination similar to that of one of my utter filmmaking heroes, Robert Altman, who never stopped making fascinating work even when he was totally “disinvited” from filmmaking here in his home country.
Woody has maintained a steady output of features since the turn of the Eighties and, yes, a few of them were wildly underwhelming (if I had to vote, I’d say Hollywood Ending was the lowest ebb by far), but others have been resonant works that have shown him growing and transforming as an artist.
Woody's work is indeed a sort of "doorway" to arthouse fare: I grew up watching his films, seeing his absolutely perfect comedies as a child (the sex and death references I didn’t get, but what did that matter?). I came of age as he was making his most trendsetting pictures, and then saw every single one of the Mia Farrow-era pictures in theaters. For every two or three ambitious but bloodless missteps (September, Another Woman, Shadows and Fog) during that period, there was a film that was absolutely wonderful (the superb Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and the very underrated Husbands and Wives).
What is most important for me about his work on a personal level, though, is its quotability — not just in terms of the one-liners from his three terrific standup comedy LPs or his first few wildly funny movie comedies, but his humorous (yet pretty damned wistful) reflections on relationships. "We need the eggs..." indeed. All I can say is that work like that is never going to date.
The other party line about Allen is that he is “much more popular in Europe,” which is a major put-down in America, as it equates him with Jerry Lewis — a comedian he’s said very nice things about, but whom he’s worlds away from in terms of filmmaking. The fact that he has turned to producers in other countries to fund his films has once again shown that, no matter what they say at the Oscars, artistry really isn’t appreciated too much around Hollywood (and particularly not when the filmmaker has kept to the East Coast and not cast Leonard DiCaprio in a series of wildly commercial projects — Woody did use him in Celebrity but didn’t feel as compelled as Scorsese has to keep using him as star-bait to make exceedingly un-personal features).
The ties to Europe have also reinforced Woody’s devotion to the arthouse cinema of the Fifties, in particular Bergman and Fellini. It has often been noted that Woody’s visual style is inconsistent, largely the result of whichever cinematographer he’s working with at the time — this is indeed true, but as a screenwriter and director of actors he has proven himself to be a true auteur returning to the same themes over and over again, even as he moves from country to country to get his small-in-scope character pieces made. In recent years I’ve felt that a strong comparison can be made between his more serious works and the films of Eric Rohmer, although he is never cited as an influence by Woody.
When Bergman died, I remember that Woody was asked by an interviewer if he felt that he himself had influenced any contemporary filmmakers. He stated outright that he hadn’t, but I think he was thinking only about drama and forgetting (or perhaps wanting to forget) that his best films have become the models for most contemporary urban neurotic comedies and love stories in the movies and particularly on television. When he used Larry David as a lead in Whatever Works (2009), he was closing a circle, as Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm owe a massive debt to this work. On the other hand, Woody’s best work also has inspired Nora Ephron’s thoroughly meager imitations — but don’t blame him for that.
It’s hard to say what are the “funniest films of all time,” but one of Woody’s funniest (and smartest) comedies was Love and Death (1975):
Feeling down around the holidays? This scene from Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) reminds me what is important, and that the Marx Bros. can stop ya from throwing in the towel:
A left-field move that was very underrated, Sweet and Lowdown (1999):
Another reinvention that was very much welcome. Woody tackled the class-conscious British drama with a really attractive looking set of younger leads in Match Point (2005):
And finally, his most recent return to this city, which he still has the capacity to seem magical. Owing something to his life-affirming speech in Hannah… is the finale of Whatever Works (2009):
There’s been a dearth of foreign film distribution over here since the Reagan era (that is pretty much when the country closed in on itself), and this comes to the fore when you consider a career like Mario Monicelli’s. This legend of Italian movie comedy made almost 70 features and kept right on making them until 2006 (when he was 91), but we barely saw a solid dozen of his pictures throughout the years, and were certainly not gonna see ’em after the xenophobic Eighties kicked in.
Monicelli died on November 29th of this year when he leaped from the fifth-story window of a hospital where he was being treated for prostate cancer. He was 95 years old and, according to one obit I read, chose the method of suicide used by his father (that still needs verification, as Wikipedia likes to put it).
He began steadily directing features at the turn of the 1950s, and scored his first hits with the great Italian comedian Totò. Totò also starred in his best-remembered and most well-distributed comedy, the ultimate “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” caper film I Soliti Ignoti (1958), which translates as “The unknown thieves” (reportedly titled after the “usual suspects” line in Casablanca).
The film was better known over here as Big Deal on Madonna Street, and remains one of the greatest Italian comedy movies ever. Not a single scene can be found with English subs on YouTube (presumably because it is now out on Criterion — although at one time “public domain” videos of it were available over here), but I think this clip showing the would-be crooks figuring out how to bust through a wall is indicative of the film’s wonderful humor. Among the many leads were Vittorio Gassman and a young Marcello Mastroianni:
Monicelli was hailed critcally and popularly for the comedy The Great War (1959) with Gassman and Alberto Sordi, and the drama The Organizer (1963) (both unseeable in the U.S. these days). He also had an entry in the anthology film Boccaccio ’70 (1962), which featured short films by De Sica, Fellini, and Visconti. There is an English-language trailer (very Sixties, of course) on YouTube for this film, but I won’t link to it, as it was the Joseph E. Levine-trimmed version of the film that was missing the Monicelli segment (his short didn’t feature a “name” actress, so Levine decided to keep the segments that featured Loren, Romy Schneider, and Fellini’s uber-fetishy "Amazing Colossal" version of Anita Ekberg). Here is the Italian trailer that includes Monicelli’s segment:
If you’re getting the impression that we didn’t get to see a lot of Monicelli’s work, well, you’re right; currently only Big Deal is available on DVD in the U.S. Thus, we won’t be seeing what was hailed as one of his best films, My Friends (1975) with Tognazzi and Noiret, anytime soon, but we can at least troll YouTube for wonderful moments like this bit from Monicelli’s Casanova 70 (1965) with the one and only Marcello cuckolding none other than Funhouse fave Marco Ferreri. There are no subs on this scene, but you don’t need ’em. When a horny wife strays from the marital bed for a late-night tango with Marcello, what else do you really need to know?
I will close out by saying that I saw one of Monicelli’s meagerest comedies late one night on local Ch. 5 back in the Eighties. Shot mostly in English, La mortadella (1970), renamed Lady Liberty, is a dippy comedy that finds Sophia Loren not being allowed into the U.S. because she insists that she must carry an Italian sausage (the titular mortadella) into the country (don't ask). Along the way, as she is held in detention by immigration officials, she meets characters played by William Devane, David Doyle, a much younger Danny DeVito, and the gorgeous straight-outta-Joe Susan Sarandon. I don’t have the clearest memories of the film, except that it belabors its premise and it ain’t funny.
Monicelli appeared in a minor role as an actor in the Diane Lane film Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). Given the depressing circumstances of his death, I’ll refer you to the rousing quote utilized in his Variety obit, on the subject of the future of film: "Cinema will never die, it was born and cannot die. The cinema hall will die perhaps, but I definitely don't care [about] this."
I realize the vast majority of folks reading this blog haven’t seen or heard of the Manhattan cable program I’ve been doing for the past 17 years with the same title as the blog. I definitely recommend you check out the Media Funhouse channel on YouTube and the four complete episodes I put up as representative samples of the show.
I did want to put up a sample of the episode-length Deceased Artiste tributes I’ve done on the show, of which I’m very proud. Thus I’ve uploaded the entirety of my Ray Dennis Steckler episode, which aired a few weeks after the man who gave us Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies hit the great divide on Jan. 7, 2009.
I’ve broken the show up into three parts, and uploaded it to Daily Motion, since YT does not tolerate the human body (no nudity please, we’re American and tryin’ ta pretend we’re moral…). The first part of the show includes my verbal overview of Ray’s career, plus some choice clips:
And the third and final part features a few more clips and my farewell, plus a bonus: a short tribute to two other Deceased Artistes who died around the time that Steckler did: Bettie Page and the sacred psycho-billy himself, Lux Interior of the Cramps:
I’m indeed proud of this show (and yes, I did actually sit through Ray’s demented and very unsexy pornography!). I am glad to offer it up to the fine, discerning viewers who like weird and inexplicable cinema.("Incredibly strange" indeed...)
The Yuletide season weighs heavily upon us all — if depression didn’t exist, the holidays could singlehandedly create it. One cable network, however — which I had condemned last year for dropping their library of wonderfully entertaining b&w shows into oblivion — has decided to give nostalgia buffs a little present for Xmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever you choose to celebrate.
IGAS has been resumed in 1960, when its longstanding panel (Cullen, Myerson, Morgan, Palmer) was firmly in place. WML has been joined in the mid-’50s, when the sour-faced comedy god Fred Allen was on the panel (“new” sensation Jayne Mansfield was the Mystery Guest last eve, if that makes it easier to situate the period).
