Take the ride: Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors”

Leos Carax burst on the film scene back in 1984 with his debut feature, Boy Meets Girl, a quiet, charming work that signaled that a major talent had arrived. In the 21 years since his exquisite third film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Carax has turned out only a short and two features, and each has been highly anticipated by his growing fan base.

His latest feature, Holy Motors, which opened this week, is an incredibly ambitious yet playful work that finds his immaculately talented onscreen alter-ego, actor Denis Lavant, assuming a variety of roles as a mysterious man who tackles a number of “jobs” (each requiring a different identity) in the span of a single day.

Carax structured the film so that his protagonist can move easily from genre to genre. The only information we're given about him at the outset (which may or may not be the reality of his life) is that he's a rich man who is picked up in the morning by a chauffeur (Edith Scob) who transports him to each of his assignments. Thus, Lavant slides into a number of different personas: a pathetic homeless man, an impossibly limber motion-capture model, an urban dad with a shy teenage daughter, an old man ready to die, a hitman, a forlorn lover and, most memorably, a sewer-dwelling troglodyte who terrorizes Paris and claims as his prize a hot model (Eva Mendes).

And there I dispense with plot, as I'm sure Carax wanted to do in the creation of this picture. The list above leaves out an absolutely wonderful musical interlude where, apropos of nothing, Lavant leads a motley (but killer) accordion band through what looks to be an abandoned church. Throughout the picture, Carax connects with a number of movie genres, from Jacques Demy-like romance to Ishiro Honda-inspired city-trashing, having fun all the way. The main virtue of Holy Motors is its wild unpredictability.

Although this is his first feature shot on digital, Carax puts his love of film at the forefront, starting the proceedings with a Lavant-less prologue in which he, Leos, makes up and wanders in his pajamas into a movie palace filled with immobile, seemingly sleeping, patrons. When a filmmaker acknowledges at the outset that the film we're watching is his dream, absolutely anything is possible.

Like the anthology features made in recent years by Wong Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmusch, and Takeshi Kitano, the film plays at first like an “interim” work, which has fortunately spawned some bravura set-pieces that rank with the best of Carax's work. The vignettes each have their virtues, with the troglodyte segment (spun out of Carax's contribution to the anthology feature Tokyo!) being the most feverishly weird and entertaining, and the sequence in which Lavant plays a dying old man feeling the hardest to wade through – especially since its dour tone is shortly followed by two broadly comic moments.

As noted above, the film provides a tour-de force showcase for Lavant. We see him applying and removing makeup in the limo, but once he appears in each vignette, he is fully transformed and demonstrates that he’s a character actor extraordinaire (who can also be a very unconventional leading man). There is literally nothing out of the range of his small frame and visage.

As a further homage to the glories of cinema past, the supporting cast has some very familiar faces. Besides Eva Mendes (whose job as “Beauty” is to simply attract Lavant’s Beast), Carax has scored a cameo by the legendary Michel Piccoli, who costarred in his terrific evocation of silent cinema and the French New Wave, Mauvais Sang (1986). Piccoli is one of the few actors still alive (besides, obviously, Moreau and Leaud) who carries with him a wealth of French cinematic references – from Le Mepris to Belle du Jour and on and on.

Also offering cinematic echoes of her own is the actress playing the dutiful chauffeur. Edith Scob dons a white mask in one of the film’s final scenes, evoking her unforgettable starring role in George Franju’s horror classic Eyes Without a Face (1960). On a lesser level, Kylie Minogue appears in the segment intended to evoke Demy, bringing with her a pop stardom that echoes that of the ye-ye girls and “dollybird” singers who appeared in Sixties comedies and pop fantasies.

What some sour souls may see as the deficits in Holy Motors — its jumps in tone, its expectation that the viewer will follow along from scene to scene, its very odd payoff(s) — makes it one of the most adventurous films to appear in some time (from a director not named von Trier) and a very rewarding head trip.

*****

I’ve been talking about Carax’s work on the Funhouse TV show for several years now. The first episode I did about him was back in 1995. Foremost among the items shown at that time were his musical moments, beginning with this lovely visualization of a number by the “Anthony Newley-era” David Bowie from Boy Meets Girl (1984):

Carax does indeed do miraculous work visualizing pop music (yet has never made a music-video yet, bless ’im). One his best-ever moments is this mega-kinetic celebration of the joy of love, enacted by Lavant in Mauvais Sang (1986):

The film that “broke” Carax in France, but has since become a beloved cult film (and is thus far his masterwork) is the very unique love story Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), aka “Lovers on the Bridge” on American DVD. Here is the trailer (and, yes, that is Juliette Binoche waterskiing on the Seine):

Pola X (1999) was his return to filmmaking after the difficulties caused by Les Amants. It’s the most difficult of his five features (the whole film is available in French here) and contains several moments that are intended to be highly jarring, like this dream sequence:

I interviewed Carax in conjunction with opening of Pola X in 2000. Here is a slice of him meditating on his inability to get films made:

Here is the trailer for Holy Motors:

And I can’t resist adding the German trailer, which is structured around the band-in-church musical sequence:

An echo chamber in his larynx: Deceased Artiste Andy Williams (part two of two)

Since I’ve discussed what was utterly misguided on The Andy Williams Show — but is compellingly watchable in many instances as Sixties TV kitsch — I have to talk about what did work wonderfully. The show’s best element was the many duos and trios that Andy did with singers who were of his “generation” (and older). As a quick fer-instance, he did two incredibly smooth duets with Brazilian singers, “The Girl from Ipanema” with Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the less-often-heard but equally beautiful “Samba de Verao” (Summer Song) with Marcos Valle: 

Given his background as a “boy singer” backing up Kay Thompson, it makes perfect sense that he dueted well with female singers, and that he did with Peggy Lee and the one and only Lady Ella. His duet with Aretha Franklin doesn’t hit the right note, to the point that Andy has to make fun of how un-soulful he is (to see a white variety-show host keep up with Aretha, check out Tom Jones’s wonderful duet with her).

One of my favorite under-appreciated performers was singer-songwriter Roger Miller, who came up with a string of great fast-paced, humorous country singles in the Sixties (and the timeless “King of the Road”). Andy and he dueted on “In the Summertime (You Don’t Want My Love).” Roger handles the humor on that one (replete with eefin’ action!).

More appropriate for Andy are the times he sang opposite other male singers, including the leagues of great male lounge-MOR performers of the Sixties. Like all the other middle-aged balladeers, he had the opportunity to work with the guy who influenced them all, Bing Crosby. He also did a spirited duet with the eternally smooth Tony Bennett on “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” (written by his former mentor Steve Allen, and performed here with the Count Basie band).

The most energetic numbers Andy performed are the show were always in the company of two other male singers (shades of his work with his brothers?). This set-up happened frequently on the show, usually with Bobby Darin in the trio. This occurred with Tony Martin and Eddie Fisher as the third side of the triangle. The oddest combo has got to be Darin and the always-amazing Anthony Newley (who has “long hair” for a 1966 variety show). Both Bobby and Tony seem to be into goofin’ around:

Also of note to me (and Funhouse folk who love this guy’s ultra-lounge-iness) is Andy’s warbling with the always amazin’ Buddy Greco. Trini Lopez is the third side in this instance, doing the full version of “America” (which seems rather odd out of context):

Sammy Davis Jr. was a ubiquitous presence on variety shows, and never, ever gave a less than energetic performance. Here he joins Andy to sing “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”:

And of course, Funhouse viewers know I am fixated by the comedian everyone hates to love and loves to hate, the one and only Jerry Lewis. The most interesting exchange here occurs when Jerry is shouting his lines as usual, and Andy notes, “I’m not used to being yelled at.” Jer’s reply? “That’s how I lost my partner…”

*****

Leaving behind Williams’ variety show, I move back to his recording career and must point out the fact that, after a certain point in time, it seemed like Williams was always singing instrumentals. Perfoming what sounded like a hastily-lyricized vocal version of an instrumental was a staple of most singers’ repertoire at that time, but it did seem like Andy did a LOT of those prefabricated tunes. The MOR station my family listened to during the day, WNEW-AM, was constantly debuting Williams doing a vocal version of a popular instrumental, usually a movie theme.

Thus, Andy could be heard warbling “the Exodus theme,” “A Summer Place,” “Charade,” “More,” his big hit “The Days of Wine and Roses, “A Time for Us,” and the very, very smarmy “Love Story theme.” Probably the last in the decade-plus series of movie themes sung by Andy was the Godfather theme, “Speak Softly Love.” A great movie theme, but a rather lame song (sorry, Al Martino).

One of the sorriest excuses for a lyric has got to be the set of verses written to be sung to the “Love Theme” originally recorded and brought to No. 1 in 1974 by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, a Barry White project. I remember thinking even as a child that it was a pretty sorry excuse for a song – and little did I know there was a disco remix of Andy's version:

The single best adaptation of an instrumental ever sung by Williams was most definitely “Music To Watch Girl By,” which is emblematic of the MOR Sixties in ways I can't even describe. Feast:

******

Like a lot of MOR singers, Williams covered a whole bunch of contemporary songs in order to find a new hit or fill up his albums (most likely both). Many of the songs weren't right for his musical style, but that makes them all the more fun to listen to now.

For a long time it was rumored that the version of “Aquarius” from Hair sung by Andy and the Osmond Brothers was left on the moon by Neil Armstrong as a strange souvenir of planet Earth. This story is debunked in this article on the Check the Evidence site. However, the recording still remains a wonderful relic of the time that “old” met “new” and the result was wonderfully cheesy:

Andy recorded a lot of songs that seem really fucking odd when heard in his echo-y silken style. Among them is the Classics IV hit “Spooky”:

After his variety show left the air, Williams continued to appear on network TV. Some of those appearances made sense (as with the homepsun Xmas specials). And some were very, very strange, as when he sang Randy Newman's “Short People” with singer-songwriter Paul Williams:

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I started this tribute out by noting that there are some Andy Williams songs that make me cringe (“The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”) and others that I never tire of listening to. The two that dwarf all others in the latter category (standing tall beside “Music to Watch Girls By”) are his catchiest pop singles.

The first is “Can't Get Used to Losing You” (1963), written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Covered wonderfully by the English Beat in 1980 (with an echo-ridden sound that seems to duplicate Williams' original, with a great ska backbeat), the song is one of the catchiest and best things Williams ever sang:

And finally, the Williams record that is surely his best-ever serving of “pure pop for now people” (thanks, Nick). It's upbeat, fully orchestrated, and uses Andy's self-generated echo chamber to best advantage. Danny Boyle used it brilliantly in a mocking sense as the end theme for his 1994 dog-eat-dog thriller Shallow Grave (watch it here, but you spoiler-shy cowards may not want to partake before seeing the whole flick).

The song remains a pure delight and a kick-ass bit of an AM radio timewarp :

An echo chamber in his larynx: Deceased Artiste Andy Williams (part one of two)

I've mentioned Andy Williams on this blog before in different contexts. I have a conflict about Andy's mega-mellow, super-easy-listening sounds. On the one hand, certain songs of his (one in particular!) make me cringe; on the other, I could listen to certain of his MOR hits over and over again and never get tired of them. It's all related of course to my chronological “relation” to his music (read: I heard it as a kid, and that music never ceases to have a primal pull on ya). I'll cover both “sides” of the Williams phenomenon, as well as spotlight some of the wonderful clips from his variety show, in this post.

First, for a little context. Much was made about Williams being one of the last “crooners.” Well, he definitely fit in that smooth-as-silk style, but I've always felt that the thing that distinguished him was the fact that his voice sounded like it was emerging from an echo chamber even when he was singing acapella. He was thus perfect for the MOR “sound” on unamplified, impure, and often crackly AM radio, and also on the non-stereo TVs folks had before the Eighties.

So who was this latter-day crooner who never, ever embraced that noisy rock and roll stuff? (Although he experimented with a LOT of pop-rock, as we shall see.) He was born in 1927 in Iowa, attended HS in Cincinatti, and then finally made it to L.A., He and his three siblings quickly landed movie and record gigs (including singing background on Bing Crosby's “Swinging on a Star”) as the Williams Brothers.

He was mentored by the actress-author Kay Thompson, who took a personal interest in him when he and his brothers broke up the act (Thompson and Williams had an affair when she was 38, he was 19). She did enough finagling to get him a lot of important gigs, including the one that broke him for real, his stint as the “boy singer” on Steve Allen's Tonight Show (the other boy singer was Steve Lawrence, who now stands along with Tony Bennett as the very last of a certain kind of male balladeer).

I knew none of this when I saw Williams on TV. I viewed him merely as the host of a number of programs — first a variety series (which ran nine years, from '62-'71), then a number of homespun, family-deified Xmas specials. As a TV host, Williams was slightly hipper (definitely younger) than Perry Como, but his mellowness didn't exactly make him a natural comedian (as Crosby could be when he was with Hope, and as Dean Martin always could be — Sinatra, btw, pretty meager comedian...).

Andy was a devout “square” in an era when rock and roll became common currency. In going through his credits, I was surprised to find that “Moon River,” thought to be his biggest hit, was never a single at the time it was released (1962, after he sang it at the Oscars; Jerry Butler actually had the single hit with the vocal version of the song). He did, however, reach No. 4 on the charts with the pop tune “Butterfly,” which is in the mode of Guy Mitchell's “Singing the Blues.”

To get a serious dose of some pop-rock Andy Williams kitsch, I HEAVILY recommend this sucker, a cha-cha number originally sung by Earl Grant and released by Andy in '58. It will blow your mind, daddio... (it's also catchy as fuck)

But what did I know about this stuff when I was a little kid? I think the thing I enjoyed the most about his show (but also puzzled over) was a bear that wanted cookies all the time (yes, there was an overlap with Sesame Street).

There are two actors listed as being in the bear suit on the show in the IMDB listing, the most prominent being the “furry emeritus” Janos Prohaska. I'm not sure which actor is in the suit in this clip, which also features American instituion (and non-red-hot-mama) Kate Smith:

*****

Williams became inextricably linked in the minds of a lot of Americans with Christmas — and in fact his music is played on mainstream radio *only* at that time of the year these days (but that is because American radio is a sad cadaver that only digs out old music when the Yuletide season comes around). This is where I'll bring in the cringing I sometimes do when confronted with Williams' music.

His Xmas shows were indeed so homespun they could make ya choke, and they definitely overplayed the Currier and Ives adorable Americana aspect. For example, here, with a nice fake blue-screen (it was blue-screen back then) is Andy taking a sleigh ride with his singers.

And then of course there's his many fireside moments with his then-wife Claudine Longet — the two continued to appear together on the later Xmas specials, even though the public knew they were divorced in real life (admittedly, it was less unctuous and pathetic than Sonny and Cher when they returned to the air to argue as a divorced couple in the mid-Seventies).

Longet, who is still alive, is most infamous for having shot her lover Vladimir “Spider” Sabich. Her claim was that the gun accidentally discharged into him when he was showing her how it worked — this was countered by evidence that noted that he was across the room from her and turned away at the time of the shot.

Also, there was a diary she kept in which she documented how the relationship wasn't going well — and thus, in one of those nice quirky twists of justice, she served 30 days in prison and paid a fine (she also got to choose which 30 days she spent, they were not consecutive). How extreme!

Anyway, what the Williams clan showed each Xmas was a united front — Andy and his brothers would reunite, Claudine and the kids would be together with him, and as many other relatives and guest stars as could be crammed onto the roster would appear in one cozy-home setting. But there was also THAT SONG...

Written for Williams' 1963 Xmas LP by Edward Pola and George Wyle (who was the vocal director for Williams' TV show), "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" caught on in the years that followed, thanks to Andy performing it every year on his show, and the fact that it is the single most lying-est goddamned Xmas song ever.

Think about it. “White Christmas,” “Blue Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Christmas Waltz” — most of the modern Xmas songs are pretty down-hearted, but Andy's tune is a celebration of everything that exists purely in holiday-fantasy-land.

It's a catchy, hooky, upbeat Xmas nightmare and it literally HAUNTS the fuck out of all of us each Yuletide. It is a Christmas ritual, and these days I know that shopkeepers have decided the Xmas season is ON (usually the day after Halloween) when I hear this song coming out over a supermarket or convenience store speaker system. Abandon hope, all ye who hear Andy's merry declaration:

*****

The Andy Williams Show was yet another of the mind-bogglingly odd and amorphous variety shows in the Sixties that mixed the “old” and the “new” in stranger and stranger ways. As the “youth revolution” of the time was going on, these shows hugged tightly to the old, familiar ways of show biz.

Let's put it this way — Johnny Cash was perhaps the smartest of all the singers who hosted a variety show when he contracted to appear in no comedy sketches. Aside from Dean Martin (whose sketches ran the gamut from amusing to dowrnight godawful), the singers who hosted variety shows were not good comedians, and their writing staffs were mandated to write family-friendly comedy that was, to be kind, mediocre.

I submit as evidence this clip from The Andy Williams Show that begins with an awesome bit of Jonathan Winters ad-libbing with Andy, but then swiftly degenerates into a terrible sketch about a no-budget local TV station featuring Winters, Ozzie and Harriet, and Karen Carpenter (on drums!). The frame from Jonathan is great, the sketch is just unbelievable:

The clash of the “new” and the “old” was never as jarring and entertaining as it was in this appearance by Bette Davis, who sings a specially-written song to promote Baby Jane (it's a fucking twisting song!). Given that the film is a totally brilliantly deranged horror film/character study, this bit of odd promotion becomes even odder:

And what better to follow that than Miss Davis with the New Christy Minstrels and Andy singing “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.” Variety shows were wildly unpredictable at times:

Andy was indeed awful at comedy, but he did have some good comedians on his show. The only problem was that, for some reason, his producers thought it wise that he stay on the stage with them as sort of a straight man or a talk-show type inquisitor. He stays onstage for the opening of this appearance by Vaughn Meader, and is a wholly unnecessary interlocutor for a young Woody Allen:

This “why is Andy on the stage with these people?” factor also comes up when one watches him singing along with the younger musical acts of the Sixties. His becoming a fourth member of Peter, Paul and Mary kind of works, but him insinuating himself into Simon and Garfunkel is oh-so-pointless.

Add to that his odd musical number with the Carpenters, a rather clunky rewrite of the Beatles “Ticket to Ride” in the first-person plural (“We've got a ticket to ride, and we don't care...”). And what can be said about Andy becoming a part of the Ike and Tina Turner Review, doing a duet with Tina?

One of the cases where Andy was included in a rousing closer number is fascinating, in that he's not completely unnecessary, he's just the “lowest voice” on stage that serves to lead to the louder singers assembled around him: Mama Cass, a young Elton John, and Ray Charles. The last-mentioned duo play piano on the pop-gospel number “Heaven Help Us All”:

Thankfully, the Williams show featured younger performers on their own before they were forcibly detained with Andy. There are memorable turns online by Elton John, The Jackson 5, and Andy's label mates, the utterly awesome Sly and the Family Stone:

Further proof of the wondrous weirdness that was the Sixties is this terrific turn by Tiny Tim singing “I’m a Lonely Little Teardrop":

to be continued... 

Gangsters, dictators, monsters, and a crazy boss: Deceased Artiste Herbert Lom

When Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru, better known as Herbert Lom, died last week at 95, most folks had assumed he had been gone for a while, as he effectively quit acting back in the early Nineties. Lom could be a very menacing and “mysterious” presence on film, but he is best known for doing a phenomenal job as Sellers' harassed boss in the Pink Panther films and for playing in an endless slew of mysteries, thrillers, and horror pictures.

He was born in Czechoslovakia as the son of a count (!) in 1917. By 1939, he'd already appeared in small roles in two Czech films, but he wanted to “make good” and someday meet Greta Garbo (he finally did, but after she had been out of the biz for many years).

His 1939 journey to England with his girlfriend changed his life forever – the trip sadly ended her life, as she was turned back at Dover and wound up dying in a concentration camp (Lom spoke fondly of her in one of the last newspaper interviews he did, nearly six decades after the end of the war). He parents survived the war and joined him in England in peacetime.

Lom had an auspicious debut in British cinema, playing Napoleon in The Young Mr. Pitt (1942); he later played Nap again in War and Peace (1956). He worked steadily in British film and TV for the next half-century, with two of his early roles catching attention elsewhere, as a therapist in The Seventh Veil (1945) and as a refined but dangerous gangster in the wonderful noir Night and the City (1950).

His varied career found him singing onstage as the King of Siam in the West End production of The King and I and writing two novels (about Christopher Marlowe, and the inventor of the guillotine). As noted, he played in a LOT of thrillers and horror films, including not one but two versions of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (the 1974 and 1989 versions; the trailer for the former can be found here).

Perhaps his worst credit (I'm going to take a bet this is the worst by far – and that includes Mark of the Devil, about which more below) – is Going Bananas (1987), a comedy with Jimmie Walker and Dom DeLuise (here's a Lom-less sequence that is mind-boggling).. But let us not dwell on the worst moments of Lom's career, and instead celebrate the finest. Or at least the most notorious...

****

A year before he supported James Mason in The Seventh Veil, the two appeared together in Hotel Reserve (1944). Here you see Lom as an average, ordinary husband – of an all-to-gorgeous babe (start the clip at 2:14):

Lom was a member of two great ensembles in Fifties British films. The first was obviously The Ladykillers (with Guiness and Sellers, 1955) and then Hell Drivers (1957), with Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins, as well as a then-unknown trio of future super-spies: Patrick McGoohan, Sean Connery, and David McCallum.

Those films are a lot easier to digest than a movie that Lom probably made a lot more money doing, namely El Cid (1961). Here he tells off crucifixion victim Raf Vallone (why not?):

Lom played many larger-than-life characters. In Mysterious Island (1961), he inherited the mantle of Captain Nemo from his old castmate James Mason:

In Count Dracula (1970), the somewhat lame adaptation of Stoker by the always-working Jesus Franco, Lom inherited the mantle of Van Helsing from Peter Cushing (and Drac has a mustache – Why? Because it's a Jess Franco film!):

And speaking of Franco, here's the trailer for his lurid (but still not entirely satisfyingly sleazy) women's prison film 99 Women (1969), starring Lom and Mercedes McCambridge amidst all the chicks in chains:

The most notorious of all of Lom's films was the West German horror pic Mark of the Devil (1970), directed by a Brit (Michael Armstrong). The film was promoted in the U.S. with the distribution of “vomit bags” that were given to every person who bought a ticket.

I remember wanting to go to the film as a kid just to get the bag, since it was such a sublimely gross idea. I'm sure the movie would've messed my mind up, but I wanted that bag! I later found an old one laying on the street and was forbidden to bring it home by my mother. Ah, memories...

I've never sat through the film, but the trailer makes it look like any number of cheesy Euro horror flicks. The gore effects were the main thrust of the film, but Udo Kier's piercing eyes are clearly the most important effect for those of us who are mesmerized by Udo:

Lom was SUCH a familiar face that he appeared in a Benson and Hedges “small cigar” TV ad:

In terms of monster-movie mythology, Lom was assigned a very important role in 1962: he was the screen's third Phantom of the Opera. The film is up in its entirety on YT (twice!) and is worth a look. It is not a great horror picture, but Lom does his best as the Phantom and has a very cool full-face mask:

And the last clip has got to be Lom in his best-remembered role as Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films. The character is in all but the first of the series and was the invention of Blake Edwards and coscripter William Peter Blatty for the film version of the play A Shot in the Dark (1964), which was retrofitted for Sellers' Inspector Clouseau character.

Lom was quoted as saying that he did the series for 20 years, but they ran out of good scripts in the first ten years. Actually there were no Pink Panther films between Shot in '64 and The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975 (a boon for both Sellers and Edwards, whose careers were floundering).

The films after Sellers died were godawful. Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), a piece-o-shit collection of Sellers outtakes extended into a feature. The Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) was another awful pic featuring Ted Wass as an accident-prone NYC cop who goes looking for the missing Clouseau. I love the work of Roberto Benigni, but one of his worst-ever vehicles was Son of the Pink Panther (1993), where he plays Sellers' son, who bedevils Dreyfus like his dad did. As I argued in my obit for Edwards, his career was filled with extremely bad, indulgent films among the few great ones.

Here is a fan's wonderful montage of the best Lom moments from the Pink Panther pics. It was put together in 2009 by someone who adopted the YT moniker “Dreyfus fan” and shows exactly how expert a straight man Lom was, and why he will forever be remembered for that role:

The Passing Parade 2: Deceased Artiste Al Freeman, Jr.

Staying with thoughts of characters actors, I turn to Al Freeman Jr., who died a few weeks back at 78, after having had a long career on the stage and in movies and television. I talk a lot about the “high” and “low” on the Funhouse TV, and Freeman’s career embraced both aspects of show business, as some of his greatest triumphs were in important Broadway and off-Broadway productions of the Sixties, but he was seen by the largest number of people playing a regular role as a police detective on One Life to Live.

Freeman’s Broadway work included his debut in 1960 (The Long Dream, a play based on a Richard Wright novel) and the 1965 production of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie. His first important movie role was in the wildly undershown film version of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1967). At least that film has had a DVD release — the interesting-sounding features that Freeman directed (A Fable, 1971, scripted by Baraka) and wrote (the Ossie Davis film Cool Red) have never been released in any home-entertainment format.

While appearing in pioneering works of theater, he dabbled in the mainstream with parts in TV episodes, in series including The Millionaire, The Defenders, and The Trials of O’Brien with Peter Falk. He later had supporting roles in the Hollywood features Finian’s Rainbow (a mess of a musical directed by Coppola) and the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Detective (both 1968).

In 1988, Freeman basically quit acting to teach theater at Howard University. He did appear in a few more TV episodes and films, most notably Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, where he had the plum supporting role of Elijah Muhammad. This was an interesting casting decision, not only because he was excellent in the role, but because he had played Malcolm X in the TV miniseries Roots: the Next Generation (1979).

On to the pieces of Freeman’s career that I was able to find in “public view” on YT. First there is a short slice of him directing students in a theater class. I’m not sure of the date of the class or its location, but it was uploaded earlier this year.

The network TV movies of the Seventies definitely have their own, very strong cults, and one that has a following is My Sweet Charlie (1970), a telefilm about a pregnant Southern girl (Patty Duke) and a NYC lawyer (Freeman) who meet and bond in Texas. The whole tearjerker can be found here (1970).

This has nothing to do with Al, but I also suggest you check out Patty’s Emmy acceptance speech for her role in the film. She’s a little… “off,” shall we say. (It’s wonderful.)

A segment from One Life to Live featuring Freeman as Captain Ed Hall. He was with the show for fifteen years (which is an eternity in daytime TV), won a Daytime Emmy for Best Actor (he was the first African-American to win that award), and directed episodes of the show. This sequence illustrates one of his best assets: a smooth voice that made the dialogue sound realistic (whereas it can often sound like it was phoned in from outer space):


As an ABC star he showed up in various places including an ABC promo ad (with a voiceover by Ernie “Ghoulardi” Anderson) and an appearance on “Soap Opera Showdown” week on Family Feud when it was hosted by Richard Dawson:



During the time that Freeman was teaching, he still did occasionally make appearances on TV and in the movies. His last movie role is one that was worthy of his talent, as the uncle in Maya Angelou’s directorial debut (curiously written by someone else), Down in the Delta (1998):



And I close out with a show that I have fond memories of, but which I haven’t seen since it initially aired (and I was quite young). Since it has surfaced nowhere, I’d need to make an expedition to the Paley Center to see if my memories of it as being very funny are accurate or just rose-colored nostalgia about a show that was deemed "dirty" at the time.

In my entry below about Norman Alden I talked about Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which was a very offbeat show that became a massive hit for a short time in ’76-’77. The preceding year (1975) Lear did another sitcom that was controversial but never got the chance to find an audience. It was a VERY strange project — a TV sitcom version of Lanford Wilson’s play The Hot L Baltimore.

The show only aired for half a season, 13 episodes in total. The characters included a gay couple, two hookers, a con-artist preacher (Freeman), and a very strange unseen character who was an adult baby, cared for by his doting mother (Charlotte Rae). This is the only small bit from that show that has shown up on the Net:

The passing parade 1: Deceased Artiste Norman Alden

Summer is over, fall is here, and now I finally have the time to catch up to the show-business deaths that have racked up in the last few weeks. I take pride in saluting the folks that the mainstream media either notices for a few short minutes when they depart, or ignores entirely. These are individuals whose faces, voices, and talents have been burnt into our brain from hours of watching TV and listening to the radio (when that medium had a central place in American life). Their names are forgotten, but their contributions stick around for quite some time.

I paid tribute to Phil Bruns some weeks back, and one of his Mary Hartman castmates, another veteran character actor, died in the early part of the summer. Norman Alden had a half-century career on TV and in the movies, and was literally everywhere in the Sixties and Seventies.

After serving as a soldier in WWII, Alden came home and attended college on the GI Bill. He studied theater in school, and shortly thereafter began his long career as a character person (a noble profession indeed). The list of his TV credits spans the Sixties in every direction: Richard Diamond, The Untouchables, Honey West, both Kildare and Casey, Batman, The Andy Griffith Show, The Big Valley, My Three Sons, Hogan's Heroes, Mission: Impossible, and The Mod Squad.

The best notices he received for a movie role were for his starring turn in Richard C. Sarafian's Andy (1965), which I have never seen. He also played a very old-looking high school student in The Nutty Professor and had a small role in Jerry's The Patsy as well. One of his later prominent roles was in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (the title of which will be evoked in a later blog entry).

BUT he is best known by TV and movie buffs of a certain age for three roles:

— As Frank Heflin, the scientist friend of “ElectraWoman and DynaGirl” on The Krofft Supershow in 1976. This show seemed to have been on for a few years, but true to the Krofft tradition, there were actually only 16 “ElectraWoman” segments made in that one season, no more. Here is a sample episode where the ladies take on a villain named “Glitter Rock”:

Alden also impressed as the roller derby teammate of Raquel Welch who goes insane in the rink in Kansas City Bomber. I couldn't find his freak-out scene, but he can be briefly seen in the film's trailer:

Although he appeared in countless movies, TV shows, and commercials, Alden is best remembered by many TV fans for his memorable death scene on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The full scene is here, and it is quite as wonderfully dippy as I remembered.