Comedy icons in conversation: Bob Claster’s “Funny Stuff”

I have stated it before on this blog and on the Funhouse TV show, but the Internet is the perfect digital equivalent to that dark wood where trees are falling everywhere, and no one can hear the sound. Thus I like spotlighting websites that offer troves of rare interviews, as noted here and here. Like, in this instance, Bob Clasters’s archive of interviews from his 1980s KCRW show “Funny Stuff.”

Claster scored interviews with a number of comedy icons, a few of who have left this mortal coil. His interview style was mellow and informal as he moved through his subject’s career chronology. The interviews can be downloaded as MP3s for FREE (that does seem to make all the difference on the Net). A few of his longer chats are among the best interviews I’ve heard with those subjects.

In some cases it is obvious that the subject was there to flog their latest product and was thoroughly willing to review their past if the plug was delivered. Claster used his time with the subjects wisely, and in some cases he aired the interviews as a series of episodes, playing the subject’s “greatest hits” in between the interview segments.

As is the case with possibly the best of his interviews, an in-depth five-episode (!) talk with Stan Freberg. Freberg tends to lead his interviewers where he wants them to go, but Claster gets him to review most of his radio/single/LP work. Stan’s tale of how he was literally discovered by a Hollywood agent fresh off the bus from Pasadena is one of the neatest entry-into-show-biz tales you’re likely to hear, and Claster’s subsequent review of his musical spoofs, from the famous (“John and Mary,” “Day-O”) to the entirely obscure (“Bob Snake for President”), is impressive.

The series of episodes ends up being the single best “101” in Freberg’s work that you’re likely to encounter. As a bonus, Claster has posted a very wonderful bit of Freberg-iana, the August 31, 1956 episode of the CBS Radio Workshop that finds Freberg reflecting on what satire means by spotlighting some of his best bits and offering a stirring tribute to his fellow satirists at the end.

Equally impressive to me is Claster’s 1988 interview with one of the funniest gents that ever lived, Peter Cook. The talk starts with Cook speaking to Bob as his character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling. Given that improvisation by Cook always yielded gold amidst the dross, and Chris Morris worked wonders with the aged Cook, I did wish Claster had kept speaking to “Sir Arthur,” but I can also relate to his wanting to ask Cook questions about his own accomplishments — although I’m glad Cook slipped into his “E.L. Wisty” character at one point and later turned back into Sir Arthur as he said goodbye.

Claster makes the three-episode Cook talk into a career retro that is almost as comprehensive as the Freberg series. Although Cook would clearly rather speak as his blustering alter-ego and seems dismissive of his unnatural talent (“I’m about the laziest person I know in the world”), he was always in rare form when set in front of a microphone.

Thus, you’ll hear him talking about things that were left out of most interviews: a segment on Not Only… But Also called “Poet’s Corner” that found celebrity guests competing with Cook and Moore to keep up a rhyming game, with the loser being (in modern parlance) “slimed.” None of these segments have been preserved, and I’ve never read about them in Cook biographies, but you can find mention of them in online discussions of “gunge” in British culture (supposedly two guests who may have been involved in these segments were John Lennon and Spike Milligan — and these tapes were “wiped”?).

Cook also discusses the very odd Paul Morrissey-directed Cook and Moore version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and his TV sitcom flop The Two of Us. Much more to the point is his discussion of the Derek and Clive sessions, with Cook summing it up as “we ad-libbed this filth…”

One of the biggest “scores” Claster got as an interviewer was the ever-elusive Tom Lehrer — in fact he got two interviews with one of the best humorous songwriters ever. The first talk from 1983 is a lengthy one, punctuated by some of Lehrer’s greatest songs. Claster does revert to fanboy mode (not that I blame him) when he repeatedly asks if Lehrer would ever consider coming back to songwriting and performance.

The rest of the chat is taken up with Lehrer offering opinions about his work and discussing the different versions of the material. I hadn’t realized until listening to Claster’s interview that Lehrer’s last record (minus the stray song or two on a CD collection or radio show) was released in 1965, thus making him, as Bob puts it, “the Salinger of comedy” (Salinger’s last story was published in ’65). Lehrer has continued to teach all these years, but he has steadfastly avoided returning to performance of any kind.

The second interview from 1989 is even more interesting because it occurred in conjunction with two new songs by Lehrer appearing on The Prairie Home Companion. Again, Lehrer shoots down any hopes that he will return to entertaining, and also firmly states his belief that satire can’t alter society: “Satire doesn’t have much effect, except on the already converted… I’ve always really felt that this kind of stuff is not even preaching to the converted, it’s titillating the converted. It makes them feel good, but I don’t think it changes any minds. But I may be wrong — I hope so, it would be nice to be wrong.”

One of Claster’s cheeriest interviews, and the one he recommends on his site as a starting point for newcomers, is his talk with John Cleese and Michael Palin. Recorded in 1988 in conjunction with the opening of A Fish Called Wanda, the pair do provide a number of Python-related anecdotes, some of which I’ve heard in other interviews, but a bunch of which were new to me.

The thing that makes the interview so special is that Cleese and Palin seem genuinely happy to be rehashing the Python era. I attended the 40th anniversary Python gathering in NYC and have seen nearly all the latterday interviews, and in most cases the Pythons seem pleasant but somewhat tired to be telling their tales of the group’s adventures. Claster got Big John and his friend “Mickey” (as he repeatedly calls him) when they were still happy to recount their tales of the (then-recent) past.

Thus they jog each other’s memories and supply stories of the best and worst moments of the Python years, while taking good-natured potshots at each other. A Fish Called Wanda gets its rightful due, as it does stand as one of the final blasts of great Python humor (although only one-third of the ensemble was present).

The two interviews that Claster did in NYC in 1989 are a study in contrasts. One is leisurely, in-depth, and very funny, whereas the other is informative and entertaining, but seems too short. The latter, his interview with Brother Theodore, finds Theodore discussing his monologues — which were humorous, but of a grim, morbid, intellectual, and maniacal kind.

Theodore’s background was indeed singular: he was the only comedian to appear here in the U.S. who had been an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. I have read some print interviews where Theodore spoke of this and have seen the one documentary about him (thus far unreleased on DVD), but had never heard him speak at length about his experiences in Dachau (his family was wiped out).

Bob’s interview with him is thus not just an interesting talk with a comedy legend, it’s bona fide world history, as Theodore briefly sketches how he went from being the scion of a wealthy family to working as a janitor in America, before moving into show business. Unfortunately, Bob veers away from this part of the discussion and “jumps” the chronology to move him into show business.

This is the one Claster interview that I wished was a lot longer. Perhaps there was an external factor, some time constraint, limiting his discussion with Theodore. It’s still a fascinating chat, but it could easily have been twice as long — as it stands, it seems that the real-life darkness that Theodore matter-of-factly speaks about brings the conversation to a hastier end.

There are no problems with Claster’s interview of another “spoken word” legend who came from elsewhere to live with us here in Manhattan, Quentin Crisp. There are some pauses and lulls in the discussion, but they only serve to underscore the conversational quality of the interview and they also make Crisp’s deadpan punchlines a lot funnier.

The Quentin Crisp episode episode may not be filled with comedy history in the manner of the Cleese, Cook, or Freberg chats, but it turned out to be one of the most revelatory for me, as I’ve always respected Crisp but hadn’t bothered to check out his material.  He had a dark outlook on life and death that was similar to Brother Theodore's (who famously said “As long as there is death, there is hope”).

Crisp remarks to Claster, “I hope to die fairly soon. Because I’ve got to die before my clothes wear out or else I would have to buy some more, which would be worrying.” Responding to one of Bob’s chipper queries (what’s the best thing that could happen to him tomorrow), Crisp responds, “I suppose death would be the answer.”

The talk is also oddly “ambient,” since it was conducted in Crisp’s un-air-conditioned tenement apartment on a hot NYC night — the sound of an electric fan and the stickiness in the air seem to give the interview even more “atmosphere.”

*****

It’s hard to improve on the interviews already mentioned, but several of the other Claster “Funny Stuff” chats are worth your time:

—the solo John Cleese interview finds Cleese discussing why the American adaptations of Fawlty Towers didn’t work (he and Bob discuss the one with Harvey Korman, but I believe there were at least two more, including one with Bea Arthur as a female Fawlty).

—as with the Cleese/Palin talk, Bob’s interview with Terry Jones finds the Welsh Python in a good mood and ready to discuss the history of the Flying Circus.

—Billy Connolly, back when he was almost entirely unknown in the U.S.

— the delightful absurdist Douglas Adams, who runs through the whole history of Hitchhiker’s Guide with Bob and his cohost, but also reveals where he’d like to be sent in a time machine (who knew he was such a music freak?) and his stated desire “to be a better writer” (it’s hard to remember sometimes that the HGTTG books were the second version of the tale),

— a very good non-comedy-related interview is Claster’s talk with celebrated musician-producer-arranger-friend of everyone, Van Dyke Parks. The most interesting portion of the interview comes when “VDP” (as he calls himself) brings up a period of depression he suffered after his initial albums had floundered (they were critically acclaimed and are still fan favorites, but died upon arrival).

The single most interesting thing Parks brings up is his tenure as the “director of the audio/visual department” for Warner Bros. Records, making “publicity films” for the artists they had under contract at the time. I don’t know if these films have surfaced on bootlegs of the individual artists’ material, or if they are floating around YouTube, but the list he supplies of artists who were filmed — including Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman — makes the films sound fascinating.

Also noteworthy are Claster’s interviews with Mort Sahl, Barney Miller creator (and Martin and Lewis scripter) Danny Arnold , Emo Philips, Jo Stafford and Paul Weston as their comic alter-egos Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, and June Foray and Bill Scott, the voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Where else can you heard reminiscences of Edward Everett Horton and the inevitable Hans Conreid?

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Thanks to comedy maven, expert, and all-around good guy Jim G. for introducing me to the Claster stash.

L’auteurist americain: Deceased Artiste Andrew Sarris (part two)

The American Cinema remains Sarris’ most important statement as a critic, but he did continue to make some very interesting arguments in the Seventies. Of course, he seemed to remain in conflict with the radical brand of modernism that ran through the best work of that decade. I remember that his review of Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs (1976) read as an apology, since Sarris was throwing up his hands and admitting that he found the movie unpleasant because he had too much liberal guilt to ever praise a movie about the Palestinians, no matter how masterfully it had been constructed.


At the time I began to read Sarris’ column in the Voice on a regular basis he was at war with those who enjoyed the work of Brian De Palma (this was around the time of Dressed to Kill and Blow-Out). His writings on Hitchcock were always inspired, but his take on De Palma was that the latter’s films were just such blatant ripoffs of Hitch that you *couldn’t* like them if you were a Hitchcock fan (he actually that in one column — you could NOT like those films if you liked Hitch’s original thrillers). In this regard, Sarris sounded like the teenage guardian of a fan club — “you can’t love the Stones if you’re a Beatlemaniac!!!”

When I was in high school, I was a “junior intern” for the Voice critic Tom Allen. Tom was an odd gentleman, a Catholic Brother who lived in a rectory but also worked for one of the most liberated alternative newspapers in NYC (at that time) as he adhered to extremely conservative politics (I remember being told once by Tom that Al Haig was the only thing standing between us and a Soviet invasion).

Tom's moods were ever-changing — he could be an exceptionally nice gent one minute, and then verbally cut you to the quick for no apparent reason the next. Tom’s major bailwick at the Voice was to keep a very “deep” collection of Sarris’ reviews, which he was editing down for a potential book of capsule reviews, which was never published. The densely worded capsules appeared in a column called “Revivals in Focus.”

While juggling his two "lives," Tom also wrote for the newspaper you see to your right, The Long Island Catholic (I utilize that image since apparently not a single picture of him appears on the Net).  His other central project in the Voice office was to keep a file cabinet’s-worth of folders containing info on American filmmakers — the ones that had sprung up after The American Cinema and the ones that had been left out (mostly B-level directors, but some who had made very notable films; Lloyd Bacon springs to mind). The reason for this file cabinet was the very necessary and work-intensive “update” of the book that Tom assured me was imminent.

I assume that the debilitating illness that Sarris suffered in the early Eighties distracted him from the long-discussed (by Tom, at least) second volume of The American Cinema. His wife, the critic Molly Haskell, wrote a book about Sarris’ illness (Love and Other Infectious Diseases: a Memoir); she also suffered health problems that consumed him at one point.

As the years went by, I would check in bookstores to see if he had done any appreciable update to the book, and — nothing. The only addition to the later paperback version was an article Sarris wrote for the July-August 1977 issue of American Film magazine called “The Auteur Theory Revisited.” It was written to respond to an anti-auteurist article by Gore Vidal that had appeared in the April issue of that magazine, which had touted the contribution of the scripter (an obvious belief for a writer who worked as a screenwriter at various times in his career).

In the ’77 article Sarris maintains that he wishes he could “reformulate the auteur theory with a greater emphasis on the tantalizing mystery of style than on the romantic agony of the artists.” He maintains that he believes a filmmaker’s statements about his/her film made in interviews should be ignored, and only the work should be considered.

I remain fascinated by the fact that Sarris never chose to return to The American Cinema in the 44 years since its publication. If a volume two wasn’t in the cards, at least a cleaned-up, amplified, and revised version of the initial book could’ve been delivered. Since the book has remained in print, and pages from it are in fact available on Google books, it will be odd to see Sarris’ misguided slam of Billy Wilder go down in perpetuity, when all he had to do was write a handful of new entries, augment some of the older ones, and let Allen clean up the rest.

The only information I could find on the Internet that offered any insight as to why Sarris was content to let his best-known book sit forever as it was is, self-confessed errors intact, appears in the heartfelt and extremely touching obituary written by his friend and colleague Richard Corliss (whose work in print is wonderful, but his pieces written exclusively for the time.com website are truly sublime).

I waited to read Corliss’ take on Sarris until I had this piece completed, and then was interested to learn that Corliss surmises that Sarris eventually looked on the book as “a creature of its time” that was corrected and overwritten by his later articles.

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To put it in the purest metaphorical light, Sarris remains a sort of a father figure for American film reviewers of a certain age. Like Hitchcock, you have to study his work, acknowledge his presence, and then decide if you’re going to use his approach, or fashion a new one of your own. I don’t know if he was ever asked about his criticism being art of a kind, but when he was at his best he wove words in a wondrous way (oh no, I’m surrendering to Sarrisian alliteration!).

Interestingly, one of the nicer tributes to Sarris, on the TCM Movie Morlocks blog cemented the notion that his most influential writing occurred solely in the Sixties — although I *really* love his statement about Aldrich’s women’s wrestling picture All the Marbles (the National Theater wasn’t that bad — but maybe I just like gutter trash). Like many artists, Sarris did his seminal work early on — he remained a brilliant writer, but how many worlds can you change in one career? (One would be sufficient for most of us.)

As noted above, I disagree with a number of Sarris’ stances, but he was the guy who wrote one of the “guidebooks” for writing American film criticism, and, as much as they are/were entertaining, Sarris was always leagues smarter than TV-friendly movie experts like Siskel and Ebert, and that man on the couch, Robert Osborne.

Although I confess that I didn’t keep up at all with what Sarris was writing for The New York Observer in recent years, he has remained a touchstone on the Funhouse TV show and in this blog. I find that I use various expressions of his in my writing and on the show, including “a subject for further research,” the “Mount Everest of modern cinema” comment he made about Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the gangly but incisive “comedy/ha-ha vs. comedy/not tragedy.”

In researching this tribute, I rediscovered that one of the phrases I have always thought was Sarris’ (because I first read it in The American Cinema) is a terrifically pithy analysis he attributes in the book to British film critic Mark Shivas (who edited the magazine Movie and later became a producer of great telefilms for BBC): “Welles is concerned with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people and Hitchcock with the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people.” (A remarkable insight that makes you start thinking about which category your own favorite artists fall into.)

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Since I like to close my DA tributes with clips of the person profiled, I turn once again to the hub of all Net activity, YouTube. The representation of Sarris on that site is sparse but fascinating. First, there are pieces of computer animation like this one that seem to want to make his feud with Kael more exciting (and make him a sexist villain) for a younger generation that probably has no idea who either of them are. (And does anyone have any idea what this piece of stupidity is about, besides inebriation?) 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I only know of one gentleman who ever “played” Sarris: John Candy, in a sketch on one of the earlier seasons of the sublime SCTV. Candy isn’t doing much of an impression here (and they’ve got Sarris hating Gone With the Wind, which was one of his all-time faves), but I guess since Candy was the burliest guy in the cast, and so he got to portray Sarris.

As always with SCTV, the fact that they were even doing a sketch where each member of the ensemble played a noted film critic makes the sketch fascinating as a one-off. (This was the first of two swipes they took at Kael; the second one is even more mind-boggling — her evaluation “Midnight Cowboy, Part 2” on “Monster Chiller Horror Theater.”)

Here is footage of Sarris talking with J. Hoberman and Dennis Lim after a screening of Bresson’s perfect Au Hasard Balthazar. (Again, Bresson was pretty modernist and minimalist, so Sarris was not a massive fan of his work.) By this point in late 2006, Sarris had decided that his three favorite films were Rules of the Games, Ugetsu, and The Earrings of Madame de…. For his part Hoberman mentions being inspired by listening to Sarris’ radio show on WBAI:

There is one very good one-on-one video interview with Sarris. Shot recently, with Sarris seeming to be in somewhat shaky condition (but still brilliant), he states outright that he had abandoned the notion of a pantheon and that his taste had opened up.

When asked to cite a newer filmmaker, he spotlights Funhouse favorite Wong Kar-Wai, which proves he had come very far, since WKW’s heroes are the very filmmakers Sarris had so much trouble processing in the Sixties. Also interesting: his account of writing a screenplay for the film Justine that was never used.

Like all reviewers, Sarris was always at his best when being brutal or writing a reverie. One of the subjects he returned to time and again was Vivien Leigh. She isn’t one of my obsessions, but I thought it would be nice to include one of the many fan-generated video montages to her to close out this piece.

The only one of the literally hundreds of wildly dense capsules that appeared in the Sarris/Allen “Revivals in Focus” column that I can remember found Sarris noting that he’d seen That Hamilton Woman over and over again as a young man, smitten as he was with Ms. Leigh. (I didn’t get it then, I still don’t, but I respected the fixation.)

Oddly, there are tributes to Leigh that are scored to Nat King Cole, Allison Crowse, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Sarah MacLachlan doing the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” the wonderful Belle and Sebastian, and even Eighties fave “Take on Me” (!). I decided to go with this demure and quite nice item scored to classical music:

******

Sarris’ passing brings on a major bout of nostalgia for the days when trend-setting movie critics wrote about films that were destined to be around for a long time to come. These days, with the exception of some wonderful paeans delivered by the likes of Scorsese and Wenders, younger film fans are swayed mostly by the recommendations of filmmakers like Tarantino, who tout genre films that are often superb, but are more often flashy and memorable but devoid of brains or heart.

In The American Cinema Sarris remarked that the auteur critic “risks the resentment of the reader by constantly judging the present in terms of the past. The auteur critic must overcome this resentment by relating the past to the present in the most meaningful way possible.”

His next sentence noted that “fortunately, readers are becoming more… knowledgeable about the past with each passing year.” That is certainly not the case these days, when b&w films are considered a niche affair available on only one cable channel and, though many amazing films are available on DVD, most folks are checking out whatever’s most easily available on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu or…

I’ll close with one last statement of Sarris’ that ranks among the many single-sentence declarations of his that will ring true forever. Trashing Fred Zinnemann, he said, “In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime.”

L’auteurist americain: Deceased Artiste Andrew Sarris (part one)

Critics who argue that technique should not call attention to itself are usually critics who not do wish to call attention to technique.  —The American Cinema, p. 54

The purpose of any truly great film critic is to enlighten as well as enrage, and Andrew Sarris, who died two weeks back at 83, did a hell of a lot of both in his half-century of writing about cinema. Sarris will forever be enshrined as the critic who brought la politique des auteurs to America, but at his best he also had a way of deftly summing up a filmmaker’s entire body of work in a few sentences — their themes, their visual style, and their narratives.

He is someone that all American film fans should know about, but since he was a writer first and foremost and not a TV presence (no “thumbs up” for him) and championed film as an art (no exaltation of the grindhouse, as with Tarantino), he is currently best known by students who are assigned his work, critics who still admire his fine writing, and those of us who are old enough to remember when reading contemporary film reviews was an integral part of the moviegoing experience.

When a recent biography and collection of Pauline Kael’s work were published in tandem, a few “theme pieces” were written to nostalgize about the Sixties and Seventies, when reading film reviewers (and film books!) was what movie buffs did in the hours they were not in movie theaters (no VCRs!). Kael and Sarris have often been linked together in articles of this kind, since they were the yin and yang of American film criticism during that period, most importantly because of their antithetical viewpoints about the auteur theory.

Kael was a top-notch writer, don’t get me wrong — I loved reading her collections when younger. But it was the strength of her writing that made all the difference. I still find it hard to see any kind of sustained viewpoint behind what she liked and didn’t like. Later in his career, Sarris developed into an idiosyncratic critic whose reaction to a particular film was hard to gauge (sometimes even after reading what he had written about it); Kael was always like that, with a few modest exceptions.

Admittedly, Sarris kept that “feud” with Kael alive for a while — she had fired the first salvo with her derisive 1963 Film Quarterly article “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris”; Sarris’ obits carried a bitchy remark she made when declining an invite to his wedding to critic Molly Haskell. But I remember AS making more remarks about PK than vice versa.

Speaking of his fellow critics, it was interesting to see in an online bio that rock critic emeritus Robert Christgau said Sarris seemed “full of himself.” This struck me as odd, because  Christgau’s letter-graded method of rating albums (which is now copied *everywhere*, most particularly Entertainment Weekly) was definitely a variation on his old Village Voice colleague Sarris’s much-debated/love-and-hated notion of assembling Hollywood filmmakers in a pyramid fashion, with a “Pantheon” at top and “Less Than Meets the Eye” auteurs at the bottom.

He first wrote about the “politique” in a 1962 essay in the magazine Film Culture called “Notes on the Auteur Theory” (echoing Truffaut’s “Une Certain Tendance du Cinema Francais”). According to his obits, Sarris spent a year in Paris in 1961 and became friendly with, among others, the critic-filmmakers who wrote for the Cahiers du Cinema. It was no surprise, then, that he was the American reviewer who imported the auteur theory.

I’m assuming anyone reading this blog knows the theory by heart — that the director is in a sense the “author” of a film, and that most filmmakers with any talent rework the same themes, characters, and narrative approaches the way that a great novelist does. In order to write this blog entry, I reread most of Sarris’s seminal 1968 book The American Cinema, which introduced the full range of his categorizing of American filmmakers.

I have very fond memories of the book. A dog-eared copy (which I still own and refer to) was given to me by my high school film teacher John Loose — who didn’t instigate my love of movies (my parents did that), but who was infinitely important in showing me how to look at films intelligently. The book became a key item on my movie-book shelf, along with Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion (does anyone remember that tome?), the Movies on TV collection (which I later contributed to and edited for an edition), and various Films of-type pop paperback collections and profiles of individual personalities and genres.

Another Sarris volume that was important to me, which I borrowed from the library twice, was Interviews with Film Directors, which was one of the few other books Sarris came out with in his lifetime. That tome contained a few dozen fascinating talks with the directors I was discovering as a young film maniac and is rarely found in bookstores these days. (I in fact never have seen a copy sitting around in all my years of going to secondhand bookshops, but am sure some helpful soul has probably scanned it into the big portable library we call the Internet.)

But back to The American Cinema: I consulted it all through my college years as a seminal source of knowledge and information, as well as opinions that made me think “is he outta his fucking mind?” The book nonetheless struck me the way that Breathless and Mean Streets did: as a work that screamed to the rafters, “I LOVE MOVIES!” In the first flush of my film-fixation, that was manna from heaven.

So how does it stand up these days? Very well, because Sarris supplies in the preface, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” all the reasons that the auteur theory is an important and necessary tool for studying film, but he also elaborates at some length the ways in which it *doesn’t* work in various cases —thereby defeating the Kael-ist naysayers in one fell swoop.

The American Cinema was Sarris’ American version of the 1965 Georges Sadoul book Dictionnaire des cineastes, with his own addition, the aforementioned categories of directors (some of which had titles such as “Lightly Likeable” that were obviously intended to piss people off in the way that Christgau’s “grades” did). In the intro he addresses that seminal twentieth-century question: can a commercial work be a work of art?

The auteur theory said yes, that a director working for a cold-blooded, money-driven corporation could still make a personal work that mattered in the grand scheme of things. Sarris’ own twist on the theory was to create the categories and to encourage debate and argument (thus his long career in academia).

The American Cinema is a very odd sort of time-capsule, assembled by Sarris in 1968 just as the studio system was imploding entirely (thanks to the failures of big, awful musicals and the appearance of Easy Rider and the golden age of “maverick” American cinema — a period that Sarris wrote about on a weekly basis in the pages of the Voice). At points, he goes straight for the nearest play on words, as when he notes about Cassavetes that “too much of the time he is groping when he should be gripping.”

Those lines are somewhat cringe-inducing, but the reason the book has remained so important was Sarris’ ability to literally sum up a filmmaker’s career in a single line, as well to situate his visual style within certain traditions, be they that of Murnau and the moving camera, or Eisenstein and the miracle of montage. (I say “his” by the way, because his entry on Ida Lupino is one-stop-shop collection of sentences about every woman director he could think of to that date — except the avant-gardists, whom he never wanted to acknowledge.)

Beautiful examples of Sarris at his most incisive appear in the chapter entitled “The Pantheon,” where he discussed the 14 filmmakers (including the guy he's standing with in the pic above) he thought were the finest-ever to work in the American cinema (two of whom, Renoir and Ophuls, only made a handful of films over here) and in his “Far Side of Paradise” chapter (where the also-rans dwell).

There, in his entry on Nicholas Ray, he contrasts the approaches of Ray and John Huston by noting that, if one compared They Live By Night and The Asphalt Jungle, “one will notice that where Ray tends to cut between physical movements, Huston tends to cut between static compositions. Ray’s style tends to be more kinetic, Huston’s more plastic, the difference between dance and sculpture.”

In this sense Sarris carried on from James Agee, Manny Farber, and Otis Ferguson, the American film critics who would mingle theory and purely emotional statements about the films they loved (the same is true of Godard, Truffaut, and the Cahiers posse, of course). Along these lines, Sarris drops into his chapter on Keaton the fact that a scene in The General, where Buster makes a gesture to choke his girlfriend but then kisses her instead, is “one of the most glorious celebrations of heterosexual love in the history of the cinema,”

This is perhaps Sarris greatest strength as a critic — his emotional connection to the films he wrote about; the underside is the fact that he openly admitted here that he had no emotional connection to animation, documentaries, and the avant-garde. At one point in the book he pretty much cancels out the possible influence of the avant-garde on the mainstream, which means he wasn’t partaking of the then-gestating psychedelic cinema of the Sixties, which drew heavily on the avant-garde. He also couldn’t take into account the profound effect that Kenneth Anger and other undergrounders’ pop-saturated short films would have on future generations of music-videomakers.

The American Cinema is indeed a mixed bag of brilliant insight and sometimes blind devotion to, or misguided dislike of, certain filmmakers. The oddest thing about the book, which I’ll discuss below, is that he chose to never update or revise it. The filmographies were updated a bit (the single best inclusion being the addition of Napoleon to Stanley Kubrick’s filmo), but the entries were never rewritten by him in the forty-plus years since the book’s publication.

In later years, he publicly admitted he had gotten Billy Wilder (whom he put in the “Less Than Meets the Eye” category) horribly wrong. The Wilder entry in the book portrays him as a filmmaker who was too cynical for his own good; Sarris seems particularly irritated by the ways in which he saw Wilder forcing beautiful actresses to act out unpleasant suicide scenarios.

He even discounts with a single phrase Double Indemnity, which is, was, and forever will be, one of the finest film noirs ever made. He was a big enough man to admit that he was dreadfully wrong on the issue of Wilder, but never revisited his book to elevate Billy to “the Pantheon.” (His feelings about Kubrick similarly flipflopped, most notoriously when he finally 2001 when high, and realized it was a far better film than he’d thought it was previously.)

Sarris’ views on comedy were indeed both wonderfully on-target and then hopelessly misguided. In the latter category was his devotion to Blake Edwards, whom he praises to the heavens (and kept on praising throughout the Eighties in his Voice columns), while slamming Wilder, Tashlin, and Quine, whom time has proven were far better and much more interesting comedy filmmakers. (Blake Edwards had his moments, but my god, there was a preponderance of absolute tedious garbage, even in the “golden era” — his encountering Sellers was the miracle.)

On the positive side of the ledger, though, Sarris’ oddball categorical system of evaluating filmmakers once and forever enshrined the great movie comedians as the “auteurs” of their own movies. He conspicuously undervalued Laurel and Hardy, but his evaluations of W.C. Fields, Mae West, and the Marx Bros as “auteurs” of a kind wasn’t just lip service for the cults those comics gods had in the late Sixties. It was an acknowledgment that sometimes a dominant performer was indeed the “auteur” of his/her starring vehicle.

Of course, given my obsession with all things Jerry Lewis, I am still fascinated by Sarris’ entry on Jerry, which is in the form of a list of 12 reasons he doesn’t think Jerry is a good filmmaker. It’s quite a detailed argument — whereas it’s rather obvious that the love or hatred of Jerry (and the odd mixture of the two that some of his modern fans have) is a personal thing that is hard to justify, no matter how much critical acumen you possess. However, Sarris does sum it all up in his last two sentences on Lewis:

He has never put one brilliant comedy together from fade-in to fade-out. We can only wait and hope, but the suspicion persists that the French are confusing talent with genius.

To be continued…

Recent Departures: a Deceased Artiste round-up

Many, many folks of note whose work I’ve loved have been kicking off lately. I hope to offer lengthier looks at three of them in the week(s) to come, but wanted to first offer a round-up of four who most certainly deserve a farewell salute (including the guy to the right).

For instance… the character actor best known for his appearances in the three Beatles live-action fiction films. Victor Spinetti was a Welshman who appeared in numerous stage productions and films that played internationally, including a trio starring his countryman Richard Burton (Becket, The Taming of the Shrew, and Under Milk Wood).

I remember him fondly as a stammering critic who “blames Fellini!!!” in Anthony Newley’s startling ego-fest Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969), as well as (yeah) his three turns with the Beatles.

The oft-repeated story is that Lennon and Harrison visited him backstage when he was starring in the London production of Oh, What a Lovely War. They wanted him for “every one" of their films, because, George claimed, his mother wouldn’t go to see their films without Spinetti (whom “she fancied”).

Whatever the reason was, Spinetti was a seasoned character actor who incarnated nervous bureaucrats and nasty authority figures, as in his wonderfully oddball turn in Magical Mystery Tour:

Spinetti was a “guest” voice on one of the Beatles’ most ambitious Xmas singles (the ’67 one), “Christmas Time Is Here Again,” and also continued his Beatle connection into the music-video era, providing a cameo appearance with the great Roy Kinnear (another Beatle-connected actor) in the Mike and the Mechanics video for “All I Need is a Miracle.”

Beatlemaniacs are extremely good about sharing, and so it’s possible to watch Spinetti speaking about the Fabs on YouTube:

But the single best, rarest piece of footage I discovered on that hub site is a 1968 interview with Lennon and Spinetti when the play version of In His Own Write opened at the Old Vic. Spinetti wrote and directed the play and is quite eloquent about what made John’s writing special. For his part, Lennon talks about the influences on his writing (Lewis Carroll and Ronald Searle) and who he was compared to, but hadn’t read (James Joyce):

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Moving to another character actor who made a great impression — in this case by being a sane person in the land of the insane — sitcom fixture Frank Cady died at the age of 96 two weeks back. Cady was of course “Sam Drucker,” the owner of the general store that served as the linchpin for the Paul Henning “universe” — it served as a backdrop for action on both Green Acres and Petticoat Junction, and was the place the Beverly Hillbillies came back to when they made visits “home.”

Cady had a hell of a resume as a bit actor, showing up in various noirs (DOA, The Asphalt Jungle, Ace in the Hole) and other Fifties classics (Rear Window, The Bad Seed), but he will forever be remembered as being the mellow and uncommonly sensible Drucker character. Here’s an interview he did where he discusses how he failed the audition for the role of “Otis the Town Drunk” on The Andy Griffith Show, but was lucky enough to lose that part and get the Petticoat Junction role a few years later.

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Moving on to music — and yes, a LOT of memorable folk in the world of music have been dying lately — I salute Bob Welch, who was a member for four years in the “interim” version of Fleetwood Mac. FM did have at least one minor hit, “Hypnotized” during his time (1971-74) in the band, but it was when he left and was replaced by the “Buckingham Nicks” duo that they went through the ceiling.

Obits reported that Welch had had spinal surgery and was depressed about the fact that it did not go well; he died of a “self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Another, lesser, depressing fact in his obits was that Welch was one of the only important members of Fleetwood Mac who was not honored when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — he had sued the band for royalties from the albums that he had participated in, so that was most likely the cause for him being left out.

His contribution to keeping the outfit afloat was seminal, in that they were between their British-blues-band and hot-singles-act personas when he was the lead guitarist. Reportedly he did make amends with Mick Fleetwood after the lawsuit (and R’n’RHOF snub). Fleetwood and Christine McVie had indeed worked on Welch’s most memorable effort (in my view), his first solo LP French Kiss, which had both his biggest hit, "Sentimental Lady" (a reworked song from his FM years), and this super-catchy number on it. What a blissfully cheesy “publicity film”!

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One of the most notable TV-related deaths in recent weeks was that of Richard Dawson. Best known as a gameshow host, he also proved himself a capable comedian on both British and American series (including Laugh-In) and brought a note of class to whatever show he appeared on. Dawson first came on the show-biz radar as the comedian husband of sex kitten Diana Dors. The two even hosted a TV show together in England (she was always the main draw):

His first notable appearance on U.S. TV was on the terrific Dick Van Dyke Show. This clip is out of synch, but it shows Dawson doing what must’ve been his act at the time:

He did indeed come over to America as a representative of “swinging London,” but made a name for himself as the character Newkirk on Hogan’s Heroes. The film Autofocus suggests that Bob Crane was jealous of Dawson (perhaps for being effortlessly classy?). Dawson also appeared in a few movies (most notable the Ah-nold-starring Stephen King adaptation The Running Man). Here he is in a goofy 1966 picture called Out of Sight:

Further cementing his cool Sixties image is this Dating Game appearance, where he was “Bachelor No. 1.” Bachelor No. 3 is none other than Bill Bixby, and both gents are dressed to the nines in swinging-guy Sixties wear:

I’ve written and talked on the Funhouse TV show about the celebrities who didn’t care about playing the game shows they were on (my faves being Henry Morgan, his hero Fred Allen, and Ernie Kovacs). Dawson really cared about the games, but mostly so that he wouldn’t be “robbing” the contestants in going for a joke answer. Here he is debating over an answer on the show he lent a major dose of class (and the stray W.C. Fields impersonation) to, Match Game:

Dawson’s longest-running stint in show biz was as the host of Family Feud. Much has been made of his kissing the female contestants — he often defended himself by saying he did it “to wish them luck” as his mother had done with him as a kid (this begs the question of why he did it when the contestants were *leaving* the show, too — if you can get away with it, do it!). He rarely if ever cracked, but occasionally the insanely stupid answers a contestant gave would make him laugh:

 

One of the reasons I think Dawson was so perfect as a gameshow host was that, affectations to the side, he did come across as a genuinely decent guy who really liked the schlubs who were playing these games. This is reflected in two speeches he made on Family Feud. Firstly his goodbye speech for the original run of FF was a nicely delivered salute to those who’d helped keep the show on the air.

The most genuinely wonderful moment of Dawson’s TV career, though, never aired on the show. There was an additional speech he made to the studio answers of FF on the final show that was thankfully taped (but, again, was not included in the broadcast version of the show — they had to leave in more dumb answers!).

Part of Dawson’s personal mythology (that he never personally promoted) was how he was “dumped’ by the screen goddess Diana Dors, and was left alone to raise their two sons. I know nothing of the real Dawson, but this bit of video indicates that he was a genuinely warm guy; the fact that he came back out and delivered this speech knowing it wouldn’t get on the air separates it from all of the “telethon moments” in which someone broke down crying over a handicapped child. His urging people to do what they call in the theology biz “good works” seems positively real and not “for the camera”:

When Dawson retired from TV, he really retired. He did, however, consent to do a long interview for the “Archive of American Television” people, in which he discussed his television career. Here he talks about the infamous “kissing controversy” on FF:

In closing I’ll turn once again to a musical oddity (I do so love novelty tunes). I had no idea that Dawson released records in the Sixties (but was not surprised upon finding it out). He spoke-sang a tune (in the Burton-Harrison mold) for a “Hogan Heroes sing” album, but also released a single in 1967. The A-side, “Children’s Parade,” is pretty awful, but the piece de resistance is the extremely odd B-side. Titled “Apples and Oranges” (having nothing to do with the Syd Barrett/Pink Floyd tune of the same name), it is a another oddly maudlin piece that has an amazing last line. And I do mean amazing: