British humor 2: Chris Morris

Chris Morris honed his humor not as a standup but as an extremely experimental radio personality. His work is best described as “humor” and not as “comedy” because Morris takes incredible chances with his material, underplaying it with the assumption that his audience is intelligent enough to get what he’s doing and that if they don’t, they’ll just move along.

As with all of the people I’m going to profile in this series, Morris’ work is not known in America. He has been incredibly influential in the U.K., though, thanks to three of his series, all of which did the comic concept of “fake news” to a very fine turn. There are a number of reasons these shows worked so perfectly — top-notch professionals in front of and behind the camera; the deadpan, fully authentic tone; the emphasis on odd concepts rather than jokes or puns — but the key factor in my view is that Morris has a way with words.

The best British humor, from Carroll, Swift, and Lear to the Goons, Beyond the Fringe, and the Pythons, has contained an element of really inspired wordplay, dare I say whimsy? (A word that sounds very coy but is indeed accurate.) Morris’ ability to manufacture nonsense language is daunting, as is evidenced by the “feedback reports” he produced for his radio shows — man on the street interviews that asked members of the public about non-existent concepts (“spherical cows” and the like). The passersby who responded to his questions were obviously thrilled to be on the air, and so they went along with Morris’ earnest absurdist queries, even as he altered his voice to signal it was all a game. (He was fond of replaying one old man asking him why he had changed his voice just then — the only gent who had actually paid attention to what was going on!)



Two of Morris’ heroes are all-time Funhouse favorites Peter Cook and Vivian Stanshall. He worked quite superbly as a sarcastic “straight man” for the former before he died, and attempted to work with the latter. I think it is safe to say — and this is a major compliment, given the unfettered genius of those icons — that Morris belongs in their company, although his brilliance is more controlled and he clearly lacks the self-destructive tendencies that plagued those comic deities.

For Morris is nothing if not a perfectionist. He worked for years on radio, using his various stints as a DJ as a kind of comic laboratory for the ideas he was developing. There is an incredible amount of wonderfully entertaining material on the Morris fan site Cook’d and Bomb’d. However, since he began writing and starring in TV comedy in 1994, he has crafted only 25 half-hour episodes (26 if you count the Nathan Barley pilot, which was later cannibalized for episodes of the show). To consider that most American series crank out 20 episodes per season and go on to jump the shark in painfully awful ways, Morris deserves additional praise for pulling the plug when his series were still inventive and on-target.

Morris’ radio work does indeed dwarf (in quantity, not in quality) his work in other media. The folks who run Cook’d and Bomb’d have collected hours and hours of this material, and I was stunned how radically weird Morris was on mainstream stations in England, parodying the music-radio format while also conjuring up some esoteric “theater of the mind.” It’s hard to pick the single most outlandish moment, but a good nominee is the show in which his hapless sidekick, Peter Baynham (of Fist of Fun and later a screenwriter on Borat and Bruno) “kidnaps” a baby and then he and Chris watch it float to the ceiling of the studio.

One of Morris’ finest radio creations was top-40 DJ Wayne Carr, whose best moments are collected here. He also read “heartrending” letters asking him for musical requests:



Baynham wasn’t Morris’ only radio sidekick. He also recruited an intrepid gent named Paul Garner to do odd or irritating things in public settings, usually airports or hotels. Here Garner takes commands from Morris as he enters a cab:



The union of two men with brilliantly strange imaginations: Chris interviews Peter Cook as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling. In this installment, Morris throws a concept to Cook that he had introduced on his own radio show during the Christmas season, namely that “the fossilized remains of the infant Christ” had been discovered, and that Christ could reproduce himself like larvae:



Many of the segments that Morris crafted as a DJ were patently bizarre, but his lightning-quick nonsense news flashes showed his talent for spouting absurdity in a genuine-sounding manner. And so producer-writer Armando Iannucci made Morris the star and head writer of On the Hour, a flawless radio send-up of news shows that ran for two seasons of six episodes each (ah, that magic number!) and can be found on YouTube and other sites.



Morris brought his alter-ego Wayne Carr onto On the Hour to discuss back-masking in rock records:



In 1994, the show was rather effortlessly transformed by Iannucci and Morris into The Day Today, the landmark fake-news TV program that spotlighted an ensemble of versatile performers, including Doon Mackichan as an unflappable (and incomprehensible) financial reporter:



The show's longest-lasting contribution to TV comedy was clueless sports reporter Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan), who later became a clueless talk show host in Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge and then a clueless show-biz has-been in I'm Alan Partridge. A sample of Alan in his earliest incarnation:



The Day Today contains a number of references that only Brits will understand, but most of its six-episode run needs no footnotes, as with this short but potent bit about Sinn Fein:



Or this brilliant encapsulation of what cable-news networks are all about:



In 1997 Morris came back with an even more brutal satire on TV news, Brass Eye. The program lampooned TV news magazines and specials that claimed to decry social issues but exploited them in the process. Morris himself played most of the male news anchors in the six themed episodes, and the concepts introduced in the shows were even more outlandish than those he had presented in his "vox pop" (man on the street) interviews on radio. Among these was a made-up concept called ”heavy electricity.” Two other segments that showed off Morris’ perfect comic timing found him insulting a gay audience member for having “bad AIDS” and coming on to a teenage incest victim.

The most elaborate idea Morris created for the series was "cake," a fashionable and lethal party drug that was addicting British youth. In the course of several interviews he convinced well-meaning but dunderheaded celebrities (proof again that a camera pointed at someone makes them ask no questions!) to do PSAs against the drug, and recruited politicians to speak against it publicly, which one proceeded to do in parliament. Watch the segment here. Brass Eye took the concepts created by Morris and Iannucci in The Day Today several steps further, to the point where earnest British newscasters acknowledged that Morris' presenter characters were spot-on and that his spoofs had made them, the real newscasters, feel odd about affecting a super-earnest pose on-air — but they continued to do so anyway (hey, satire can only do so much).

For me the height of Morris' art is Blue Jam, a startlingly original radio show that aired from 1997-99 in a late-night slot at Morris' request, as he wanted the show to seem like something dimly heard while one was half awake. The show is like nothing else that has ever appeared on radio (the closest thing we ever had over here was the early "Mr. Mike"- produced National Lampoon Radio Hour).

There is no way to describe Blue Jam, except perhaps to call it "Ken Nordine meets Terry Southern and David Lynch" with "trance" music and a decidedly British deadpan tone. The show aired in three series of six episodes, and the entire run (including an episode that was pitched off the air for making fun of the Archbishop of Canterbury) is available at the Cook'd and Bomb'd site. If you want to sample some bits of the last series, a poster on YT has uploaded a few of the shows from late in the first series.

The indispensable Morris biography Disgusting Bliss: the Brass Eye of Chris Morris by Lucian Randall (who also wrote the even more indispensible Ginger Geezer about Bonzo supreme Vivian Stanshall) includes quotes from Morris that explain his approach to comedy in general and Blue Jam in particular. The two most important quotes are Morris' remark that he likes to "bury the humor" in the work he does, and that he feels that Blue Jam was different from other comedy in that there were "no cues" (meaning comedy cues, not musical ones) in the show. On that note, I should emphasize that Morris' TV series have never had laugh tracks or even live audiences supplying the laughter — again, he trusts that the home viewer either gets what he's doing or they don't.

One of the hallmarks of the show were sex sequences in which the lovers cry out odder and odder things at each other (possibly the finest being “whack my bonobo!”):



Blue Jam appears to be a free-form exercise, but a careful listen reveals that Morris' "dream comedy" (my phrase — his own was "ambient stupidity") was very carefully constructed. Hypnotic music, from Gainsbourg, the Beatles, and Eno, to Beck, Bjork, and Mercury Rev, is played in between dark-humored sketches which dealt with Morris' comic staples — animals, doctor visits, sex, and children in peril, among others. Morris himself delivered monologues that had the feel of nightmares and usually involved his character getting caught up in modern art or entertainment events.



After Morris ended Blue Jam — which, at 18 episodes, lasted three times as long as any of his TV series! — he reworked some of the material in the radio show for the TV series Jam. His own monologues were gone (except for one), the songs were obviously eliminated, but the weird, disturbing tone of the sketches was reproduced visually by Morris with the aid of several disjunctive film techniques, plus the odd device of having the actors in some instances lip synch to the original radio sketches to make things seem a little more distant and bizarre.

One helpful YT poster has again posted the entire series, but there are some clips I definitely can recommend as stand-alone samples of the show:

A couple ask their friend for a heavy favor:



A busy doctor answers his phone while tending to a patient:



Morris plays a man who has decided he’d rather live outside:


And a couple tries to get the cable man to deal with their “lizard problem”:



In 2001, Morris came back with a final Brass Eye episode, which qualifies as one of the most daring and funny TV shows of all time. If you’ve read this far in this entry and have the slightest interest in Morris’ trailblazing work, please take a little time and check out his really stunning creation “Paedogeddon!” on YouTube. It is a brutally accurate attack on news-media hypocrisy, and once you’ve watched it, everything else pales in comparison. The owners of the material, Ch. 4 in England, have deemed that it can’t be embedded on a blog, but you can click through and watch it.

“Paedogeddon!” became the subject of immense controversy over in England, where the tabloids were horribly offended by Morris “making fun of pedophila” — ignoring, of course, that what he was utterly decimating was the news coverage of presumed pedophilia. The show was a landmark in British TV history in terms of news coverage condemning it, but it remains a comedy masterwork, a piece of satire that delivers its point in numerous ways, all of them condemning the mainstream media for its insane mawkishness and hypocrisy.

To date, Morris' last excursion into TV was the sensory-assault sitcom Nathan Barley (2005). Co-created with Charlie Brooker from a character Brooker created for his website TV Go Home, the show follows a supremely obnoxious young trust-fund hipster who runs an "alternative" website (the issue of where Nathan gets his cash from was explored in the series’ source matter, but never addressed in the series itself). The nominal storyline involves the hipster's interactions with his journalist hero (Julian Barratt, from the comedy team "the Mighty Boosh") and the journalist's sister, a documentarian who is the only sympathetic character in the series. The show has the sublimely abrasive tone that drove Mike Leigh's early telefilms, and it also savages the annoying quirks of the modern hipster. As is so often the case, the entire series can be found on YT here

Two segments that give a feel for the show are the introductory reading of the article “The Rise of the Idiots” by Barratt’s character:



and the anti-incest music video “Bad Uncle”:



After having been an agent provocateur and master satirist on U.K. TV, Morris has now chosen to work in film. His first short, based on a Blue Jam monologue, had the unwieldy title My Wrongs #8245–8249 & 117. It is, like all of his other best work, a relentless mindfuck.



Morris' first feature, Four Lions, opened in May of this year and played to good reviews in England; it is set to open in the U.S. in November. I look forward to watching Morris operate on the "larger canvas" that is the movie screen, and am glad that his search for topics that you just can't joke about — the film concerns incompetent Muslim terrorists — continues apace….

British humor 1: Stewart Lee

American comedy is in quite a neat little rut these days. There are a handful of standups and regular TV series that I think represent actual quality and innovation, but for the most part there are arena-filling standups (the “Blue Collar” comics, Dane Cook) and the “alternative” comedians, a few of whom are brilliant, but most of whom are looking toward a really lucrative movie deal, no matter what the script is (lookin’ at you, Zach Galifianakis). The pleasant but exceedingly dull Judd Apatow (Spielberg with vulgar teen jokes!) and the absolutely heinous Lorne Michaels (guilty at this point of several decades worth of horrendous TV and movie comedy) shape most of what passes for mainstream American comedy these days, so we really need to look elsewhere for something new….

Thus, my recent immersion into British humor, which has its own share of mainstream crap, but also has fostered an incredibly talented group of standups and humorists who are totally unknown over here. I detailed my discovery and deepening fascination with a few of these gents here, but I felt that a few personality profiles and clip “surveys” might be in order. Thus, I complement my recent “summer of British humor” on the Funhouse TV show with a trio of entries, which will undoubtedly be followed by more in the near future. I start off with the standup whom I’ve become the most fascinated by in the last year, Stewart Lee.




Lee began his career as a half of a writing-performing team with Richard Herring. The duo played their sardonically wiseass straight man (Lee)/smut-minded troublemaker (Herring) roles for more than a decade, to best effect in a radio and subsequent TV series called Fist of Fun. Thankfully, for all of those who weren’t in the U.K. in the Nineties, some devoted fans have posted pretty much the entire radio archives of Lee and Herring at fistoffun.net.

I highly recommend their sketch series Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World with L&H and Armando Iannucci (the producer-writer-performer who has been involved in a significant amount of influential BBC comedy shows, including I’m Alan Partridge) and Rebecca Front (a versatile actress who starred in Iannucci’s Thick of It series); also the Fist of Fun radio show. Lee and Herring also were also among the writers who scripted On the Hour, the trendsetting fake-news radio show starring Chris Morris and produced by Iannucci that spawned the Alan Partridge character (for whom L&H wrote some original segments).

A fan-favorite clip from the Fist of Fun radio show:



Lee’s official website also offers a busload of good material, including links to every episode of the two seasons of Lee and Herring’s Fist of Fun TV series and their subsequent TV show This Morning with Richard Not Judy

Here’s a great explanation of the “theory of relativity” from Fist of Fun:



Fist of Fun wasn’t a major hit when it was on, and it has never been issued on DVD or VHS in England, but it was very influential on the teens and twentysomethings who watched it. The Lee and Herring team did score one more BBC series, a two-season-long Sunday-afternoon mock chat show, This Morning with Richard Not Judy, that was mellower in is approach than Fist — in fact, I was surprised watching it how mellow (but still bitingly sarcastic) Lee became around this period. The show’s best bits were the duo’s deconstructive abuses of lazy journalistic clichés.



and also lazy comedy clichés:



Lee and Herring amiably severed their partnership in 1999, but Lee had already served something of an extended “apprenticeship” as a standup comic, performing both on his own and as the solo opening act at L&H gigs. His material was both sarcastic and slightly surreal, due to his deft use of repetition.



Lee has admitted that his very unique style is an outgrowth of his youthful fascination with “alternative” comedians who challenged and provoked their audience, foremost among them a guy named Ted Chippington, an “anti-comedian” who seemed intent on pissing his spectators off. Lee interviewed him a few years back for an arts TV show:



Lee’s standup was not catching on post-Lee and Herring, so he began going in other directions. He wrote a very good “road” novel called The Perfect Fool, about a bunch of disparate eccentrics looking for the Holy Grail in the modern era. The book has a wonderful overlay of “alt” pop-culture references, with one character being a Roky Erickson-ish burnt-out psychedelic musician, and the main character accumulating a full collection of Jack Chick comic “tracts” (dear to our heart in the Funhouse).

The most important project Lee worked on when he wasn’t doing standup was the experimental and downright strange musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, which got great reviews, won British theater awards, and attracted large audiences, but underwent constant protests from fundamentalist Christian groups because of its really provocative second act, in which Springer is dragged down to hell to moderate a debate between Lucifer and Jesus (and Mary — all singing!).



The Jerry Springer: the Opera experience inspired Lee to return to comedy with a vengeance in 2004, and at this point he became a “road warrior,” working on his material with constant gigs all over the U.K. Like Rodney Dangerfield and Jackie Mason over here, Lee has continued to do the sort of material he had done as a young man, but has found a bigger, more receptive audience as a (slightly) older person. Perhaps it’s because he looked like a sarcastic punk in his 20s, and has now acquired more of a “cranky uncle” look in middle age. Perhaps it’s also a result of his honing his work impeccably, and finding what I hear as almost musical refrains in his dogged repetitions and brilliant asides.



He is a social commentator of the first order, whose work links him to Will Rogers and Mort Sahl, both of whom I’m sure he wouldn’t count as influences. But the material he’s doing is not observational, nor is it the deeply personal “open wound” dissections of self common among American “alternative” standups. Lee eviscerates political, religious, and show-biz figures, and openly mocks everyday truths in a quiet but lethal fashion. Here’s a great bit about Americans’ lack of curiosity:



One of the most entertaining, and I’m not going to say post-modern, aspects of Lee’s standup is his acknowledgement of the form itself. Most comedians will mention when a bit is bombing, but Lee discusses how he’s reusing and reworking older material. He also takes the chance of deflating a whole routine by footnoting it, or noting how it does or doesn’t fit with what he’s been talking about.

In his terrific Comedy Vehicle series, which is basically a half hour of standup punctuated by short silly sketches, he has also taken to “melting down” for comic effect. Unlike American comics who yell for emphasis, though (from Bobcat and Kinison to Lewis Black), he only does it once per show. The result is disjunctive, since Lee ordinarily speaks in such a deadpan manner, but the meltdowns are highlights of the Comedy Vehicle eps (with Stew most often riffing on the phrase, “what is it you want?”).

As a final, personal reflection, I should note that as a comedy fan I’ve always wound up becoming a camp follower of those whose work I’ve loved over the years. The way it used to be, years, and in some cases decades, passed before I had gotten ahold of all their recordings, films, or writings. As a teen, when I was following Carlin and Pryor (and later, Lenny Bruce), it took many years to acquire and thread through their work (admittedly, they were still making the recordings at that point). In this new digital/cyber era, a fan can literally acquire and absorb an entertainer’s body of work in a matter of a few months (or a few days, if they’ve just popped onto the scene).

Thus, I discovered Lee somewhere late in 2009, and in a year’s time have heard the bulk of his radio and CD recordings, watched literally hours of his standup and British TV appearances, and read his rockcrit journalism, his novel, and a passel of print interviews. Being around Lee’s age myself, I’m always dazzled by the ability to delve so deeply into someone’s work through their official site, fan sites, the invaluable YouTube, a few of the “off-road” download locations, and the vendor sites.

I look forward to Lee’s new material as it appears (a new book and CD have just appeared, for which I’ve put in orders, and a second season of Comedy Vehicle has been commissioned by the BBC for 2011). True to the bottomless well that is the Internet, and especially YouTube, I continue to discover “new” old material, and offer this blog post as a “101” for those who have never heard of this Stew fellow.

The single best intro to his work is the 41st Best Standup Ever concert DVD which has been uploaded to YouTube in its entirety by a fan. Pick any segment and you’ll be seeing prime material. The references may be specific to the U.K., but Americans don’t need to think too hard to find U.S. equivalents:



Another routine that has become a fan favorite is this item about comedy theft where Lee rifts about a comedian named Joe Pasquale:



The Comedy Vehicle TV series offers Lee holding forth on a number of topics, from the skewed reality offered in March of the Penguins…



…to the atrocities of Andrew Lloyd Webber:



Most of the six Comedy Vehicle episodes from the show’s first season are up on YouTube in their entirety, but I would heartily recommend first and foremost the “Toilet Books” episode (which a certain YouTube poster put up alongside a bunch of horror movies and an Andrew Dice Clay concert vid — no comment):



And as final offering, the “Religion” episode which includes some beautiful slams on Pope Ratzinger, as well as an exploration of how one can (or can’t) tell jokes about Islam and a magnum reworking of a classic Lee routine:

The media and people being rescued from holes: an extremely brief history

I watched a short bit of the minute-by-minute coverage of the Chilean miners being rescued this week, and began to wonder about the phenomenon of wall-to-wall cable news coverage of people who are stuck in holes in the ground. I mean, it is great the miners were rescued, but what was fascinating is that America “was holding its breath” for Chilean citizens, and we were watching every single move that was being made to save these gents — but none of the same coverage, or much of any TV news coverage at all, was given to Chile back in the Seventies when lots and lots of Chilean citizens were killed by Pinochet after the U.S. backed his military coup (a fate that's a bit worse than being stuck in the ground when your job is to be... stuck in the ground). Oh, I know, I know… that requires too much memory, too much perspective, and wouldn’t make a nice “reality show” moment on the air.

In the meantime, let us recall the first-ever person-falling-into-a-big-hole American news story: cave explorer W. Floyd Collins’ burial in a cave in central Kentucky back in 1925. Collins died after fourteen days, but the Louisville reporter covering his story, William Burke Miller, won the Pulitzer Prize for his stirring coverage of the story.

Then there was the first big-time TV person-in-hole rescue attempt (which was adapted by Woody Allen for his Radio Days): on April 8, 1949, little three-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell in a well in San Marino, California, and the rescue attempts — which were carried live on KTLA in what is described on Wikipedia as a “watershed” in TV news coverage — didn’t succeed. The little girl fell in on a Friday afternoon, was taken out of the hole by Sunday night, but was declared to have most likely died soon after she fell in. Now that kind of dramaturgy would be a massive downer for a cable-news story.

I wasn’t around for the Fiscus rescue, but I do remember the heavy-duty TV coverage of the “rescue of Baby Jessica” story in October 1987. In that case, an 18-month-old kid named Jessica McClure fell in a Midland, Texas, well, and she was retrieved alive two days later (now there’s your reality show happy ending!). I remember being amazed by how much time and emotion people were devoting to the story of one kid who was admittedly in a terrible situation — although folks around the world were also starving, being persecuted, and dying every day. I guess the Freudian notion that this one kid could indeed be saved (who wants to take the time to think about an entire populace that is pretty damned doomed?) was the kicker in terms of TV news.

As a film buff, though, what immediately sprang to mind during the endless coverage of the rescue of the Chilean miners was Billy Wilder’s cynical masterpiece Ace in the Hole (1951). The film follows Kirk Douglas as a New York reporter whose misbehavior has exiled him from NYC to New Mexico. He soon finds the ultimate story that he can build a path back to Manhattan on: a local man getting trapped when a cave collapses. The movie is a brilliant, prescient view of the “big carnival” (the film’s other, happier title) that surrounds the cave-in as the media comes to town to cover the rescue attempt. The film is jaded, nasty, and never really ages, in terms of its view of how absolutely phony “sympathetic” media coverage really is:



This doesn’t contain my single favorite line in the movie (From Jan Sterling: “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.”), but it does contain another winner at the opening. The movie was Wilder’s biggest flop, but it’s now recognized as one of his most perceptive — albeit thoroughly, wonderfully nasty.

A cynic among the dreamers: Deceased Artiste Claude Chabrol

In the last few years, I’ve spoken on the Funhouse TV show about the sustained brilliance of the eight or so filmmakers who comprised the “French New Wave.” They have continued to make exquisite films well into their 70s and 80s, and remind us that artists can remain vital and inventive as they grow older. 

With the death of Eric Rohmer, the “eldest brother” of the Cahiers quintet who are considered the core of la nouvelle vague, the group finally began to diminish (to that point, only Truffaut had died). And now the most commercial filmmaker of the group, Claude Chabrol, has died at 80. 

Chabrol was the most remarkably prolific member of the group (as relates to full-length theatrical features) and was also by far the most uneven in terms of quality. His meager project-for-hire films are without question the most unabashedly “commercial” movies ever made by an New Waver (although, true to form for this group, even these were mighty strange and slower-paced affairs), but his masterpieces are far more despairing in tone than anything produced by even the resolutely serious Alain Resnais and the masterfully paranoid Jacques Rivette. 

Chabrol’s two heroes were Hitchcock (about whom he wrote Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films with Rohmer) and Lang, and, like those masters, he doted on the cruel side of human nature. In his best films, Chabrol showed how random violence can be, and how it is cruelest when it comes with a betrayal of trust. One article that can be found online clearly defines the five “periods” of his work, the weirdest being the time in the Sixties when he made colorful but low-budget spy thrillers for a few years to keep his hand in as a studio-backed craftsman.

Thankfully that and his other oddest period, which found him making a slew of mediocre international coproductions, were “broken” by brilliantly conceived features — Les Biches (1968) in the former case and Violette (1978) in the latter. Chabrol was thus akin to Dylan and Brando — every few years (usually following absolutely dreadful work), the artist emerges with a masterwork, as if to say, “I bet you thought I had lost it, didn’t ya…?” 

The most analyzed period of Chabrol’s career is 1968-’73, when he made a brilliant series of thrillers that critiqued bourgeois society, showing us the comforts and rituals of that strata of society, as well as (you guessed it) their petty cruelties. 

I have decided to dedicate this blog entry to his first four films, however, since they show the genesis of his style and display that style in its rawest form. The resulting pictures still have the power to disturb the viewer and are incredibly memorable — my least favorite movies from Chabrol’s last twenty years of work were the ones that one could barely remember as one exited the theater. 

The first four features are also most interesting because two have been MIA on American DVD and VHS; the other two are currently available on disc in pristine condition from Kino Lorber. Chabrol swore in later years that “films with a message make me laugh,” but he definitely had something to say about the sudden, swift cruelty that is an intrinsic part of daily life. 

His first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958), is an extremely downbeat tale of a young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial hometown to recover from an illness, only to find that his old friend (Gerard Blain) is now a far-gone alcoholic. Brialy falls for a young woman in town, played by the wonderfully sexy Bernadette Lafont (The Mother and the Whore).

 

The film revolves around the fact that Brialy is shocked by the mean behavior in his hometown — perhaps the film’s nastiest twist comes when a scummy old man finds out that his daughter is not biologically his, so he rapes her. The act occurs offscreen but the emotional violation is forefront of the narrative. Here the father character threatens Brialy:

 

Beau Serge provides a good introduction to Chabrol’s elegant, fluid camerawork as well as his blending of “light” material with the ramifications of harsh acts of violence. With his second film, Les Cousins (1959), a collaborator entered the scene who received important mention in the better-researched Chabrol obits: screenwriter Paul Gégauff. 

Works on the New Wave that mention Gégauff note that he behaved like a fascist in public around his Cahiers/nouvelle vague friends and was a flagrant womanizer. His professional side was exemplary: he cowrote the classic René Clément film Purple Noon (1960) and collaborated with Chabrol on fourteen movies (thirteen features and a short), including some of the filmmaker’s finest.

The story about Gégauff that is most often repeated is how he wore a Nazi uniform to a screening of a British war film in 1950s Paris to shock members of the audience. He is most often depicted as a sort of macho inspiration for Chabrol and Godard (who supposedly modeled all of their early womanizing antiheroes after him); he has been called Chabrol’s “model of cynicism and amorality.” 

Chabrol was a self-professed Communist who hung around this provocative character (whom he said “posed as a fascist”) for quite a while, and definitely Gégauff helped mold Chabrol’s filmic worldview, as he collaborated on six of the first eight Chabrol features. In one interview, Chabrol praises Gégauff as having “extraordinarily courageous” ideas, but he also noted that: “He fascinated me by pushing at the limits of self-destruction, by his taste for extraordinary paradoxes and his real elegance. But he also showed me just how far this could take him into self-destruction.” 

This penchant lead to his end — Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second, Norwegian wife in 1983. Rohmer said in an interview: “Gégauff influenced all of the New Wave, with the exception of Truffaut. Or we, at least, all employed ‘Gégauffian’ characters.” The most fondly remembered characters in early Chabrol are definitely “Gégauffian,” particularly the “dandies” played by Jean-Claude Brialy. 

Gégauff’s first script for Chabrol, Les Cousins, is an utterly tormented (but curiously glamorous) affair about a young man from the country (Gerard Blain) who visits his cousin (the very decadent Brialy) in the city; both are students studying for their final exams. The film is filled with “debauchery,” or what was categorized as such in 1959 — and that includes wild parties (where Mozart and Wagner are played!), sexual liberation, and an un-fucking-believeable bachelor pad (see below).

 

The film is a masterwork of the French New Wave, and shows Chabrol to truly be the most cynical of the group. Rivette’s impeccable debut feature, Paris Nous Appartient (1961) offers an incredibly paranoid, existential vision of Paris at the turn of the Sixties, but Rivette’s approach is that of the “disappointed idealist” whose characters continue to dream even as they are circled by unknown forces.

Chabrol’s early work is severely bleak and the characters are amoral, thus offering a look at Paris “from the outside in,” where if we do identify with anyone (Blain in Les Cousins, the shop girls in Les Bonne Femmes), they are bound to be victimized — in Les Cousins, a gun that Brialy owns is shown more than once earlier in the film, so one awaits its use in the third act. But, in the meantime, everyone parties!

 

 

Chabrol was in fact very fascinated by hanging around right-wing types, and reportedly based the party scenes in the film on his experiences fraternizing with them between 1947 and ’49 (he was the “token” left-winger among them, perhaps because he was such a pleasant type…. or perhaps because he was a decadent sot himself?). Among the partiers he knew was the womanizing, binge-drinking French National Front party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who lost his position as head of the law students when he interrupted a church service.

Chabrol was annoyed by critics who labeled Les Cousins a “fascist” film, since he felt the message was that fascists were still alive and well in France. He said, “at the time people didn’t believe that there were Fascists in France. It was as stupid as that. So they thought I was a Fascist, because they didn’t want to think that the characters on screen were.”

It should be noted, however, that while Blain is a thoroughly virtuous character, Brialy is the one most viewers remember best (if only for his decadent lifestyle). 

The contribution of another Chabrol collaborator, cinematographer Henri Decaë, also can’t be overstated. Decaë worked on many of Melville’s finest (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge). This sequence from the latter part of Les Cousins shows his subtle lighting in the bachelor pad, as Blain attempts to kill his debauched cousin. (This is the anti-climax, not the film's finale.)

 

The deceitful and treacherous go unpunished in Les Cousins, and Chabrol continued this theme in Á Double Tour (1959), his first color feature and first thriller. The film, which is available in the U.S. from Kino Lorber, offers more incredibly cruel dialogue from Gégauff:

 

It also is an unusually constructed work that springs its flashbacks on us with no telegraphed “memory” introductions. The rich family at the core of the film is empty and shallow, and so we begin to “attach” to the family’s sexy maid (Bernadette Lafont), the father’s foreign mistress (Antonella Lualdi), and her Hungarian friend, played by a scene-stealing Jean Paul Belmondo, who appeared in Á Double Tour around the time he made Breathless (the film was released right before Godard’s film made him a star).

 

Chabrol later said he regretted devoting so much of the film to Belmondo’s character (I notice he didn’t regret showcasing the ladies’ physiques), but when Belmondo isn’t on screen, Decaë’s exquisite imagery is commanding our attention. The plotline isn’t very involving as a result, but when one has Belmondo, Lafont, and Lualdi to watch, who really requires a compelling and logical plotline? 

Chabrol’s brilliant and disturbing fourth film, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), also available from Kino Lorber, is arguably his best, and was the one that he referred to as his favorite. The film’s plot is very simple: four young shop girls deal with the rigors and pleasures of daily life in Paris. Chabrol and Gegauff create charming and sympathetic portraits of the ladies but, as the film moves on, we become aware of how the men around them control their every move. It first becomes apparent in comic scenes:

 

 And time capsules like this one where exotic dancer “Dolly Bell” performs:

 

The film’s tone changes as it moves along, from a seemingly innocuous and infectiously lively portrait of Parisian nightlife at the turn of the Sixties to a far grimmer drama about a young woman whose trust is tragically misplaced. Scenes like this one reflect the change in tone:

 

Like Hitchcock, Chabrol was known to make darkly humorous comments in interviews. On the subject of men dominating women, he said in one seminal interview conducted by Dan Yakir:

If there are men, women are the victims. This I admit quite willingly given what the poor things have to bear… Women in a modest milieu suffer terribly. It’s not amusing at all. It’s a cliché, but if they work all day in a factory and at night have to cook and wash — it’s terrible! We men are monsters [laughs uncontrollably] It’s funny… If women don’t laugh, I understand, but I find it funny….

On the other hand, he talked about Les Bonnes Femmes in some depth in another interview that can be found here:

I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid…. I don't think that it's a pessimistic film. I'm not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live. When we wrote the film the people were, for Gégauff, fools. It was a film about fools. But at the same time we could see little by little that if they were foolish, it was mainly because they were unable to express themselves, establish contact with each other. The result of naïvety, or a too great vulgarity. People have said that I didn't like the people I was showing, because they believe that you have to ennoble them to like them. That's not true. Quite the opposite: only the types who don't like their fellows have to ennoble them.

He added that “the girls aren't shown as idiots. They're just brutalized by the way they live.” The question of whether Chabrol and Gégauff were sketching realistic characters in order to show their eventual entrapment, or simply observing victims-to-be for the sheer thrill of watching the final trap spring shut, brings one back to the eternal question surrounding Hitchcock’s work: is it sadistic, sympathetic, or both? 

The lead quartet in Les Bonnes Femmes undergo numerous things that qualify the film as either a thoroughly sexist vision or a thoroughly feminist one — depending upon which lens you’re using. One can definitely see the sympathetic side in this scene beautifully depicting the boredom of the work day:

 

In the two films that followed Femmes — Les Godelureaux (1961) and L’Oeil de Malin (1962) — one is presented with an array of completely unsympathetic characters; thus, one is certain that Chabrol/Gégauff are showing society as filled with deceptive, unpleasant types (in articles of the time that condemned Chabrol, he was most often compared to Billy Wilder and obviously liked the comparison, as he used Wilder’s trademark tune “Fascination” in more than one picture). 

Les Bonnes Femmes does paint a sympathetic portrait of the shop girls, as in this scene, which does much to change the tone of the film. It is lengthy and uncomfortable to watch:

 

Watching some of Chabrol’s later films, I often felt that he should’ve veered sharply away from the influence of Hitchcock — much as I think some singer-songwriters desperately need to break their Dylan records and rely on their own original talent. 

However, early on, Chabrol used his fan-obsessions with Hitchcock and Lang to brilliant effect. In Les Bonnes Femmes one could argue that the camera takes an omniscient viewpoint on events, and the filmmaker is taking a certain glee in showing how arbitrarily cruel the world can be to the clueless innocent. 

Instead, Chabrol follows the film’s final outburst of violence — which I will not spoil here, and I urge readers not to watch the scene on YouTube if you haven’t seen the whole film — with a memorable scene involving a new young woman, not yet seen in the film, who just might end up like our unlucky shop girl. Or she might find companionship and love in the very cool, and very cold, world that is Paris. Hope continues to exist in this colorful but sad universe. 

Chabrol was indeed a diehard cynic when compared with his dreamer-friends Godard and Truffaut (and the “Left Bank” New Wavers Resnais, Varda, and Marker), but in his finest works he also offered sympathy for those trapped in situations that were definitely a good deal more menacing than anything found in the average whodunit. 

Thanks to the Claude Chabrol Project and Paul Gallagher for the Chabrol interviews.

No more late nights watching the Jerry Lewis Telethon...

The end of an era is upon us. This week the MDA announced that it would be cutting the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon back to a six-hour program. The reasons cited for the move are that the MDA would like the show to be seen on more stations, attract bigger-name talent, and persuade more people to donate.

For those of us who grew up watching the program, and for whom it’s been an annual TV event that signaled the end of summer and the coming of fall, this is a sad little moment. As I noted before on this blog, the telethon belongs to the Sixties and Seventies, the era when variety shows still filled the networks’ schedules, and stars would indeed show up out of the blue on “spectaculars” that mixed the “old” and the “new" (sometimes brilliantly, sometimes ridiculously — but that’s why we loved ’em).

In NYC Joe Franklin leaving the airwaves (both radio and TV) was perhaps the first sign that “nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Then The Joey Reynolds Show was dropped from WOR-AM. Now, Larry King is being replaced on CNN (and god knows, his show has been one of the only forums available to "show biz veterans" for years now — who else would spend a full hour with a chuckling and very hyper Liza Minnelli?). With the telethon turning into a six-hour TV “special,” one of the very last outposts for older singers and comedians (and various bizarre “specialty acts”) has now become a show that will most likely try to focus solely on getting guest appearances (very likely on tape or satellite feed) from Vegas headliners and American Idol-style performers (read: pitch-perfect but boring beyond belief!).

It’s not clear from the press release what role the local stations will have in this new “special” shortened version of the telethon. I do hope they will keep the local NYC arm of the show, but I have the feeling that Tony Orlando’s joyous “oldies party” gatherings that have been making the show so much fun in the past few years are now at an end. Which means yet another bit of old-fashioned fun has been killed off. And one thing is definitely for sure: Staying up all night to watch the Jerry’s unpredictable, rambunctious behavior is now a thing of the past.

Fifties Guys with Great Hair: Deceased Artistes Tony Curtis and Eddie Fisher

So what did Eddie Fisher and Tony Curtis have in common, besides dying within a week of each other? Well, first and foremost they became famous in the Fifties (Tony’s fame continued on into the Sixties, with diminished box-office returns). They both had famous acting daughters (Carrie Fisher and Jamie Lee Curtis). They both were children of Jewish immigrants and served in the Armed Forces (Tony in the Navy during WWII, and Eddie in the Army in the early Fifties). They both had memorable marriages to movie stars, with Tony having one (Janet Leigh), and Eddie having two (Debbie and Liz). What is the most significant link between these guys for me, however? Good freakin’ hair!

For me, Tony Curtis was a function of the 4:30 Movie here in NYC on Channel 7. A lot of Tony’s bigger (and lesser) features I first saw shoehorned into that ridiculous timeslot (about 70 minutes of movie, give or take — you wouldn’t believe how calm Deliverance was on the 4:30 Movie….).

I also have always been amazed at Tony’s resilient heterosexuality, as Janet Leigh was perhaps one of the prettiest starlets in Fifties Hollywood, and yet he cheated on her a lot (by his own admission) because he felt that acting with someone gave him license to sleep with them (again, his own statement on talk shows). He famously said his love scene with Marilyn in the completely perfect Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot was like “kissing Hitler,” but then somehow came up recently with the “confession” that he slept with her (he said they had an affair when she was a starlet in 1949 or so, but how come this never came up before?).

Also, the Bob Woodward book Wired reveals that Curtis was watching TV with John Belushi and found out that an actor “of his generation” had died an accidental death — I’m thinking it was William Holden — and he said something to the effect of “less competition!” The oddness of Curtis thinking that Holden was still competition at that late a date — and in fact Holden was still starring in items like Network and S.O.B when Tony was starring in The Bad News Bears Go To Japan.

But let us not remember the guy only when he was older and stranger. Well, let’s…





Let us celebrate his great movie work, but first a very strange video I discovered:



and of course the amazing Skip E. Lowe:



Two of the more enjoyable items that showed up regularly on the 4:30 Movie:




The whole movie can be found here.

And, without question, his finest performance, as Sidney Falco:


The whole movie can be found here.

Now, as for Eddie, I just had to pay tribute to him because he was my Mom’s own Justin Bieber. My mother was one of the two members in the Astoria, Queens, chapter of the Eddie Fisher fan club back in the early Fifties. I asked her this week what the club did — did they wait outside Eddie’s hotel room, attend his concerts, haunt toy stores for doll-like effigies of him? No, this was a far calmer time (Sinatra and Martin and Lewis to the contrary), so she and her friend just listened to Fisher’s records and got together and watched his TV show Coke Time, which ran a total of four seasons from 1953 to ’57.

According to different obits I read, Fisher had anywhere from 35 to 50 Top 40 singles during his heyday (1950-56). He is best known, however, for two of his five wives, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor (who formed with Fisher the original Brad/Jen/Angelina guy/wholesome [dull] girl/sexier girl trio). Eddie, of course, was then dropped by Liz in favor of Richard Burton, and he continued on as a singer and a guy “who lost Liz.”

Time to revisit his wholesome tunes for a bit. Here is his big hit “Anytime,” which was popularized decades before by Emmett Miller (biographized in the amazing Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches):



Eddie’s biggest hit, the (let’s be honest) corny but wholesome “Oh My Papa”:



A boppin’ tune (but god knows, not really rock ’n’ roll), “Dungaree Doll”:



An example of the selfsame Coke Time that my Mom enjoyed back in the early Fifties. This ep finds Eddie singing the always-mellow Perry Como’s “Mama Loves Mambo” and joining (gulp) Florence Henderson for “Fanny”:



Eddie in his Army uniform on What’s My Line?, which I still miss incredibly in the late evening hours (curse you, Game Show Network!):



Two Sixties variety show appearances by Eddie. First, on The Andy Williams Show with Bobby Darin:



And on The Dean Martin Show:



I close out with two of my favorite Eddie discoveries. A goofy Xmas tune from Spike Jones that really doesn’t sound like a Spike Jones recording. The title? “I Want Eddie Fisher for Christmas”:



Oh, yes, Eddie kept recording in the Sixties. Here he is, doing the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill”:

Too fast, they go...

This is not strictly a Deceased Artiste blog, but since I coined that phrase in the mid-90s on the Funhouse TV show I’ve felt a sort of obligation to pay tribute to those who’ve kicked off whose work I’ve loved.

This week has been insanely busy in terms of dead film-folk, so I thought I’d just move through three of the recent departed quickly. Gloria Stuart means nothing to me in terms of Titanic (I got no feelin’ for that kinda stuff, though I have indeed sat through it), but she is important as a starlet in the 1930s, and also as the wife of Arthur Sheekman, a Marx Brothers writer in good standing and the only person who actually did ghost-write some of the magazine pieces credited to Groucho. Ms. Stuart can be seen to lovely advantage (read: pre-Code “scanties”) in this scene from the James Whale 1932 classic The Old Dark House, which can be found in its entirety here:



Next, I salute Arthur Penn, who was a director whom I appreciate most for his participation in the absolutely miraculous “maverick” period in American film that lasted from the late Sixties through the mid-Seventies. He made one historically important pic that I like but don’t utterly love (Bonnie and Clyde), one great hippie pic (Alice’s Restaurant), a fairly good insane Western (The Missouri Breaks), and two great “revisionist” Seventies films (Little Big Man and the terrific, low-key Night Moves).

I feel, though, that his true masterpiece is not Bonnie and Clyde, but Mickey One, his almost indescribable 1965 modernist drama featuring Warren Beatty as a standup comic on the run from crooks. It’s a film that was obviously influenced by what was going on in European cinema at the time (it resembles nothing less than Alphaville, which came out the same year). Here’s the dynamic trailer for the film, but actually the film’s opening is an even clearer look at how radically weird it was for its time (unless, of course, you’d been watching European films….).



As ridiculous as it is to consider Beatty as a stand-up comic (his finest performance will always be McCabe and Mrs. Miller), Mickey One makes everything it presents believable — or is that entirely incredible? (It also seems to heavily prefigure the astoundingly perfect TV series The Prisoner.) Penn had one really good movie after his “maverick” period, the thriller Dead of Winter. I’m not gonna talk about Penn and Teller Get Killed.

And, to finish off this little grouping, and move onward to the Fifties gents with great hair, I offer a tip of the fedora to Joe Mantell, a character actor who died at 94 and is best known for playing Ernest Borgnine’s friend in Marty, and also for playing Jake Gittes’ sidekick and uttering one of the greatest closing lines in movie history:

Pvt. Zimmerman checks out: Deceased Artiste Mickey Freeman

I know very little about Mickey Freeman, but had to pay tribute to the gent because I deeply love The Phil Silvers Show (aka You’ll Never Get Rich and, of course, Sgt. Bilko) and enjoyed his regular appearances on the “Jewish hour” on The Joey Reynolds Show, which WOR unceremoniously cancelled a few months back (and I haven’t listened to that bastion of right-wing idiocy since — thanks, Buckley family!).

Freeman was a Borscht Belt comic who was a “human joke machine” in the manner of Morey Amsterdam or the mighty Henny Youngman. He could, in others words, summon a joke for every topic, and did so on the Reynolds show. He had a few acting roles (mostly NYC-based, like the immaculate Naked City TV series), but was best known in the business as a gag-meister who appeared at numerous Friars Club events.

He was a regular on Bilko, but didn’t often have lines as the character described in various places online as “the diminutive Pvt. Fielding Zimmerman.” He did get a featured part in the fan-fave episode called “Doberman’s Sister”:



Freeman doesn’t seem to have guested on too many TV comedy shows as a standup, so his act is sadly lost to history. However, two small clips appear on Youtube. The first finds him opening a segment on the 100th anniversary of the Friars Club:



Here is the best bit of Mickey, seen guesting on Pat Cooper’s Internet comedy show. Pure shtick!:



If you’d like to hear him to best advantage (and catch a damned good NYC radio institution that is sorely, sorely missed), WOR has indeed kept up its page of Reynolds’ shows. The “Jewish hour” lives on, here.

John Cassavetes says "Television sucks!"

… and he never even saw “reality TV”! I was completely blown away in March of 2008 by the discovery of a Dick Cavett Show episode featuring John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk promoting Husbands (now sadly removed from YT), so I was very happy this week to catch the extremely rare bit of a Cassavetes interview seen below. Presumably intended to air on TV (on a local news or entertainment show?), John is in rare form as he sits with Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara in a restaurant to promote his film Opening Night (1978).

It’s great to see him here, confident that he has made a great film and clamoring to trash mainstream moviemaking and TV. What’s interesting to consider, though, is that he has total faith in Opening Night at this point, and then he proceeded to hide it from public view for years. Of the eight masterful “personal” films he made he owned five outright (all of which have now been made available). Those five were effectively out of circulation in America for several years before Cassavetes’ death, since the only way to get ahold of them was to contact his neighbor (this is documented in one of the many books on JC by Ray Carney) or to borrow/view the library copies owned by MOMA (which Cassavetes had donated).

It’s never been fully explained why the films remained out of distribution and were so hard to obtain in the U.S., but were readily accessible (at least to rep theaters and museums) in Europe. One can only assume that the passionate, perfectionist Cassavetes had some misgivings about the pictures; he had in fact retooled each of them, and variant versions with different running times existed for four of the five titles.

The issue of whether Cassavetes would’ve wanted people to see the variant versions has been answered by Rowlands and other representatives of the family — they say that only the “finished” versions should be seen (but in fact, there were actually two finished versions of Killing of a Chinese Bookie both edited by the man, and thus those are out on Criterion together). Strangely, though, he donated a print of the original version of Shadows to a college library, and, although he edited Faces down to 130 minutes, he made sure to allow a transcript of the full three-and-a-half version to be released as a mass-market paperback when the film was released. (I have the book, and it counterpoints the longer version with the released version by having the script of one on the right hand pages, and the other on the left.)

I actually have my own misgivings about Opening Night, which is the only one of the eight JC “personal films” that I don’t think is a perfect work in its own way (it centers around a play that appears to never have been fully conceptualized by Cassavetes, and thus we're never sure what the characters are fretting over). Its strongest suit (besides the obviously brilliant lead performance by Rowlands and strong supporting work by Joan Blondell, Gazzara, and JC himself) is its “fantasy” plot element, in which Rowlands is haunted by a dead fan. This kind of “magical realism” touch was done to a finer turn by Cassavetes in Love Streams (which I think is messy but wildly underrated).

In any case, this piece of interview footage is raw and brilliant and terrific, as was the man himself.



And here is another snippet from the same chat. I love his assertion that “the world is comprised of people who have opinions and lack emotion.” I wish the whole tape was available somewhere for public consumption.



Thanks to the wonderfully talented indie filmmaker Amos Poe for pointing out this clip.

G'bye, Marty Morgenstern: Deceased Artiste Harold Gould

I love to say farewell to character people who depart "this mortal coil," and Harold Gould was certainly a prime example. An urbane and sophisticated performer, he was burned into the public’s retinas playing dads, lawyers, and friendly (but often austere) authority figures.

His best-remembered role is probably Rhoda’s dad on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, but the guy was on everything, once he quit his drama teacher job in the Sixties and became a full-time performer. His movie credits include a number of memorable Seventies comedies, including The Sting and Silent Movie, and he kept going until the 2000s, appearing as the grandfather in the Jamie Lee Curtis-Lindsay Lohan remake of Freaky Friday. His TV credits included The Twilight Zone, Mr. Ed, The Untouchables, Get Smart, Green Hornet, Wild Wild West, and the always delightful Columbo. (Not forgetting flops like Needles and Pins with Louis Nye and Norman Fell, and The Feather and Father Gang with Stefanie Powers.)

But what did I think of when I heard he had died? His part as an uptight nobleman who challenges Woody to a duel in the just-perfect Love and Death. The entire film is on YouTube (as are a few other key Woody pics), and here is the segment that includes the duel with Gould. The challenge occurs at the 8:00 mark with this Marx Brothers-like exchange:

Gould: Her seconds will call on you.
Woody: Seconds, I never gave her seconds…
Gould: As her fiance, my seconds will call on your seconds.
Woody: Well, my seconds will be out, have them call on my thirds. If my thirds are out, go directly to my fourths.

God, I love Woody. And Gould was a perfect straight-man foil. The duel itself follows in Part 5:

Werner and Errol talk filmmaking... and strange images

There are few things better than listening to Werner Herzog talk, but one of them has to be him chatting with his one-time “protégé” (and the man he ate a shoe for), the great documentarian Errol Morris. Here they are last week, doing a sort of mutual interview onstage at the current Toronto Film Festival. They discuss their love of each other’s movies, unusual reading matter, “madness in the landscape” (take a guess who introduces that subject), and their friendship: