The recording here is based on a 1899 composition by the "King of the Ragtime Composers", Scott Joplin, born in Marshall, Texas in 1868. Joplin, was underappreciated in his own lifetime. "Maple Leaf Rag" was his biggest hit in his lifetime and it aforded him time to work on other rags and two operas, neither of the latter being a success. The song title came from "The Maple Leaf Club", dubbed " a not -too respectable establishment in the red light district" of Sedalia, Missouri, than a thriving community where Joplin also went to music classes at the local college.
His groundbreaking musical pieces finally got the recognition he deserved--fifty-sixty years too late for Joplin, who died in 1917-- when his work was used in the 1973 Oscar-winning film "The Sting" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as savvy con-men in the 1930's. (Why music from the turn of the 20th century was used in a film set decades later in Depresion America puzzled me when the film was released.)
But to more important matters:
Scott Joplin bridged the improvised syncopations of ragtime with the composition style of other types of concert and dance music. He traveled all over America as a young man, a prolific piano performer and composer, later making St. Louis his home.
Joplin first composed what was called "jig music" in Taxarkana, Texas and Sedalia. It was called "jig" because the infectious rhythms caused people to break into a jig. It combined the harmonies of black music with the marches and dances of the Old World that white Americans were used to.
Thirty years on, Sidney Bechet's jazzmen took the waltz-y elements out of the tune and made it pure hot jazz. Hope you enjoy!
Simon Winder writes a very entertaining book for those grew up on the cinematic fantasies of the James Bond films. The fact is that he never proves in this book that James Bond or Ian Fleming or Sean Connery of the producers of the original films (Albert Broccoli, Harry Saltzman) save Britain or, really. that pop culture "saves" at all.
What makes this book worth reading is Winder's sardonic and very witty takes on all matters of the Bond books (from Fleming's passion for food, especially smoked salmon and all sorts of drinks, to his obsession with kinky sex and violence combos). Also, the movies (in which I'm afraid he rather undervalues the latter films, although some of them like "License to Kill" (1989) , "Goldeneye"(1993), and "The Spy Who Loved Me" (1977) are really quite good for their genre and anyone who went to those movies expecting a cinematic experience on par with "Raging Bull" or "The Sorrow and the Pity " should have stayed home and read a good book.
Here's a bit of Widner prose style. He's rather good I think.
"As the 1960s progressed, Bond’s ability to maim and kill foreigners became a great consolation to millions of embittered and confused people whose traditional world picture had changed with alarming speed. Bond in fact became in the 1960s pretty much the only British national capable of damaging anybody at all.’ "
"We can argue almost indefinately about which Bond film is the worst---but in the end it is an argument that sullies us all. The very fact of having to recall, say, Roger Moore dressed as a clown in "Octopussy" or Blofeld in a wheelchair being tipped down an industrial chimney in "For Your Eyes Only " makes everyone feel uncomfortable."
Until the more childish fantasies of the "Star Wars" series knocked it off its perch in 1977, the James Bond films were cutting-edge, cool films for young people old enough to get off the Walt Disney feature treadmill and see more adult fare. My first Bond film was "Gold-finger" (1964) and I was hooked on its formulas, even with the cuts made for its US television premiere. Of course the James Bond style was already familiar to me thanks to programs like "The Man From UNCLE", "The Avengers" and spy spoofs of secret agent gadgetry and competence like Don Adams mostly-hapless Maxwell Smart in the "Get Smart" series. The real deal, the Bond movies, were off limits to me thanks to parents who thought violent Westerns without sex were better for me than the "kiss kiss bang bang" stuff that played and was revived over and over again at the local drive-in theaters about Santa Clara County.
A few months later "Live and Let Die" (1973) hit the local screens and could see any film I could get myself into. I found the film risque, funny, inventive and enjoyable, even though older viewers around me in the dark no doubt lamented the loss of Sean Connery, the lucky fellow who got to play Bond when it was fresh and the best of the Fleming material was just waiting to be adapted.
"Live and Let Die", features the more pedestrian actor from television, "The Saint" (the amiable but less dangerous Roger Moore) subbing for Connery, the latter taking his personal mix of suave danger and pub-brawler grit off to more challenging roles.
Still Moore's film efforts, with a couple of wrong turns like "The Man With the Golden Gun", had the same successful mix of adventure, Men's Magazine style casual sex, outlandish action, fantasy violence with foreign baddies with bizarre names, more than a dash of sadism, some exotic travel locales , beautiful women, and the inevitable showdown with a diabolical mastermind in his trend-setting Ken Adam-designed high-tech lair just as the earlier ones.
It seemed it that era (roughly 1964--1975) that all spy films either aspired to be Bond films or went out of their way to go in a more unBondian direction. In that way, the series had very much the same impact that Ernest Hemingway's writings had in Americ, with aspiring fiction writers either copying or loathing his spare, telegram-inspired style.
The main focus of this book is on the novels of Ian Fleming whose first James Bond book, "Casino Royale", came out in in 1953 a few months after a tragic "killer smog" in a London winter has caused hundreds of deaths and seems as good a landmark as any to summarize a long era of post-war drabness under Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, and Harold MacMillan. By the time "Doctor No" came out in 1962, Britain had a new post-war generation looking for their own adventures at the pictures. Just as John Kennedy--a fan of Fleming's work--represented a new era in America, a new Britain was emerging in the high culture plays of Harold Pinter, the pop culture triumphs of rock and roll groups, and the outlaw cultures of protest and youthful idealism.
Perhaps these movements "saved" Britain in some way on the home front. I'll leave that to some otherreviewer. Most Americans went to the Bond films or read the books I'll wager because it was cool to do so and seemed like a escape. And, yes, an English guy in a dinner jacket seems more likely to carry off a dangerous near -suicidal assignment with aplomb than, say, an overeager American stud with a small vocabulary and a big blowtorch.
Indeed, Winder goes back and forth, especially in the early part of the book between major British economic, political and military events and compares them with the fantastic world of Bond and his international der-ring-do and high-living and hedonistic lifestyle. The Bond adventures, he maintains, became a sort of palliative not only for young male readers looking for some spicy bedtime reading, but also for a older and generally conservative reading public which wondered where Britain stood in the post-war world.
Other books I've run across focus on the origins of Ian Fleming's characters and how they evolved into the hottest film series of the 1960's and early 70's, treating Bond as divorced from the larger society he represented. Winder reclaims Fleming, a former intelligence officer at the Admiralty, scion of privileged and ex-pat "swell" living mostly in Jamaica in his last years as a flesh-and-blood man, without lionizing him but giving him a certain left-handed tribute.
The book provides insight into how the Bond character came to be seen as a reaction to the momentous changes Britain, for good and bad, Britain underwent after World War II and how it dealt with a slow but steady economic decline starting in the 50's with a few ramped-up years here and there, followed by the doldrums of the mid-70's when the UK settled to being a major European rather than an international power thanks to the debacles of the Suez Crisis, decolonization and the rise of the USA in manufacturing,to DeGaulle's rejection of his old ally from the European Common Market and to Japan as rivals for the spoils and underpaid labors of the earth.
Somehow, though, as least in Flemingland if not England, all was well in hand by the climax of the latest adventure, a series which keeps going.
Be that as it may, this is a fun book if you're a Bond fan.
When this film came out in 1979, "The China Syndrome" caused some sensation. Some of this was due to the fact that it was a well-crafted thriller that seemed to many viewers to create a plausible scenario for a nuclear "event" that could conceivably contaminate large stretches of the surrounding area of such a crippled plant. Such an "event" would force a complete evacuation of all residents and workers, with tremendous loss of life and long-term radiation effects in the atmosphere and ground water. It could render an area uninhabitable for decades.
The film was released shortly before the biggest nuclear accident in American history caused a partial evacuation around the Three Mile Island Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
I remember seeing this movie in a crowded multi-plex theater one evening in Berkeley, California, shortly after the Three Mile Island incident and the concerns that the power companies in question (General Public Utilities/Metropolitan Edison) were covering up the worst of what happened. When one of the characters in the film, a nuclear physicist, is viewing some secreted footage of a power plant control center team trying to stop a nuclear core meltdown, his reply was something to the effect that this sort of accident "could have left an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable."
Many in the audience--who had not heard the line reported in the media previously--gasped aloud. Suddenly a mainstream Hollywood movie was not just a work of suspense with a political bent; it was the stuff of prophecy! Believers in a Divine Creator (of which I wasn't at the time) might have forgiven for thinking that Someone-From-On-High was trying to tell us folks something.
The film feature a powerful performance by Jack Lemmon as a plant supervisor who becomes a reluctant whistle-blower after realizing that a number of falsified documents have compromised the safety of the plant. The problem is that the plant itself is a billion-dollar project and the company managers do not want to lose their jobs by shutting it down.
This, along with the reluctance of a television station to release such gripping and unsettling news from a on-air "light news" reporter and her free-lance cameraman (played by Jane Fonda and Micheal Douglas, respectively ) from the core of the story.
The film ignited an already simmering controversy in California (and the nation at large) about further support of nuclear power plants. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth on both sides of the issue that continues today. It is clear though to this blogger that, in the wake of the accidents in Chernobyl in 1986 and the three nuclear reactors at the Fukichima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in northern Japan most recently, that this is a technology with little margin for error.
A recent article in "Time" magazine lays out more of what we didn't know about the Three Mile Island Reactor accident and its damages and also what we still don't know about the ongoing Japanese disaster, a tsunami-triggered occurrence from three months back that is still ongoing.
Eight months after the Three Mile Island accident, "an Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist declared, 'Little, if any, fuel melting occurred, even though the reactor core was uncovered. The safety systems functioned reliably.' A few years later, robotic sorties into the area revealed that half the core -- not 'little, if any' -- had melted down."
(left to right) actor Dustin Hoffman, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodard,and actor/producer Robert Redford at the premiere of the movie in 1976 in Washington, DC.
While perhaps not the best finest political film ever made in America, the Alan J. Pakula directed "All the President's Men" (1976) might have been the most widely anticipated... and the least disappointing.
The 1974 book on which it was based came out a few months before Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9th of that same year. Leading up that point were eighteen months of subpoenas, lies and denials from official sources inside the White House.
It was the investigation of a late-night "third-rate burglary" on the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972 and the eventual tie-in to Nixon and his minions behind the special secret "plumbers unit" of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, also known as "Creep) that led to "the greatest Constitutional crisis in America since the Civil War."
The movie itself sets about detailing how two unheralded journalists opened a crack in the inner sanctum of power by establishing a connection between the Mafia-like operations of secret money exchanges and secret slush funds in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These monies were clandestinly diverted to, among other things, financing "The Plumbers" operations. Nixon knew directly about the break-in a few day later, and instructed H.R. Halderman, his trusted aide, to get the FBI off investigating the case "for the good of the country".
Once the burglars were caught by the police and put on trial, money was needed to buy their silence in court about who they worked for, in effect suborning perjury in a criminal case. Nixon had no problem with that.
"We could get that. On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is, Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?" -- Nixon to John Dean, March 21, 1973.
In the most ironic twist of that era, all was revealed on the audio tapes that Nixon himself made of his phone calls and meetings in the Oval Office
By early 1973 the rest of the media (and, lo and behold, even the Congress!) had begun to sit up and take notice. Senate Hearings were held, chaired by the amiable Democratic Senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin. I recall they made for much more interesting viewing in the Summer and Fall of '73 then any programing of game shows and local news I'd even seen.
After numerous denials by the inner circle of the White House that the powers-that-be knew anything about a secret money laundering and black-bag operations, one man, Nixon's personal lawyer, John Dean, came forward and spilled the beans on his boss. A lot of other things fell into place after that. Soon Special Counsels appointed by Congress (Harvard professor Archibald Cox and later Leon Jarworski) demanded some of those White House tapes and transcripts be made available for the public to see just how deep in the scandal the White House "men" were.
Nixon fired Cox during the famous "Saturday Night Massacre" on a weekend in October of 1973 and also had to fire two of his Attorney Generals who refused to do the deed. No matter; the wheels of justice ground on. Eventually the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over all documents related to the scandal, including the tapes, a system revealed under oath by Presidential aide named Alexander Butterfield.
Nixon's taping system had "hoisted him on his own petard", as Shakespeare might have said, repeating himself from "Hamlet". Many of Nixon's men went to jail. The Man himself was pardoned by his appointed vice-President Gerald Ford a month after leaving office. Nixon was one step ahead of losing his office (and his pension and other perks) when he quit and likely facing jail before being pardoned. The system had worked, and at least a certain amount of justice served.
But the narrative of this fine film only goes up to the beginning of Nixon's Second term. No matter. Everyone seeing it like me in a theater in 1976 knew what the ending would be already. The end of "Nixonland" in the USA was broken down in a series of camera shots of headlines spiting out on a telex machine--headlines ending with Nixon's resignation as the last piece of news in the film.
I wonder if the modern media really goes in much for investigative journalism these days if there's not a sex scandal involved? Certainly more could have been done to refute the case for the war in Iraq in 2003 for instance. But this film reminds us at least that there was one time in American politics, to quote the newsman Jimmy Breslin, that "the good guys finally won."
Here Robert Redford (as reporter Bob Woodard) gets a strong idea just how far into the Executive Branch this story of five burglars caught at the DNC headquarters might go.
It's perhaps the greatest irony of the whole "Watergate Crisis" that the Democratic party challenger for the top job, the ill-starred Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, or any other nominee would likely have lost the campaign anyway thanks to Nixon's trip to China and the ending of the direct American role in the War in Vietnam.
But Nixon didn't know alll that in 1971, when he unleashed his goons and employed illegal money schemes to try and ensure himself another four years of power.
Eddie 'Fingers' Coyle: "I shoulda known better than to trust a cop. My own goddamn mother coulda told me that."
Treasury Cop Dave Foley: "Everybody oughta listen to his mother."
"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" is an ultra-realistic crime drama from 1973 that recently was released on DVD by Criterion Video. It had been quite a while since I had seen Peter Yates' gritty R-rated "film noir" classic. I first saw it sneaking into a restricted movie theatre as a lad, and at the time I was somewhat confused by the way the story didn't allow for the "hero" to bust loose and take down all his enemies the way that 70's movies featuring Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen usually did. These actors also made gritty urban films, but in Robert Mitchum's case he was playing a character closer to reality, closer to the bone of what it was that goes into a real crime figure. I sensed that about the film but i still wasn't pleased on that first viewing. It was only later that I saw how Peter Yates had taken a realistic novel and shot it free of the romance and the daring and gratuitous action scenes that Hollywood movies usually served up then and now. I was pleased to see this little gem holds up well.
The film is truly a look at the seamy underbelly of urban American life. The films features Mitchum as a two-time loser Eddie Foyle, a small-time gun-runner who looking at a long stretch in prison in New Hampshire for smuggling untaxed whiskey across the border from Canada. He's too old to take prison lightly and is not happy with the idea of his wife and two teen-aged kids having to go on welfare. This leads him to try and bargain with the cocky young Federal cop Foley (Richard Jordan) to put in a good word with him with the District Attorney or the judge to get him off from going down for the whisky job.
The problem is that Eddie is small-time, essentially a middle-class criminal who lacks enough clout with the underworld to get information that would satisfy the Feds. Nor do his "friends" in the underworld cares one way or another about him personally--they want his untraceable guns, and he's reliable. But they also know he's about to be shipped off to a Federal cooler and he's in no position to bargain the way he once did.
Eddie's "friends" are not very friendly, and this prevailing sense of hope ebbing away for this "odd man out" is at the heart of the two threads of storyline that run through the film. The other thread are the three bank robberies depicted in the film---all done with a minimum of dialouge and shown in straight-forward detail. Yates work in the British film "Robbery" (1967) with Stanley Baker and Joanna Pettet and the classic "Bullitt" the next year with Steve McQueen all served to give him to assureance he shows in these scenes.
"Film Noir" movies have been a rich part of American popular cinema, and the Boston area--where all of this film was shot-- has sported some very good crime dramas of late. Ben Afflack's "The Town" and Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" being the most recent examples. Each of these films I would say owe something to Yates' spare and minimalistic style of film-making. And to the excellent supporting performances by Jordan and Peter Boyle as a rat-fink hit-man who hints that guys like Coyle are "gentlemen" from the past whose time has run out.
The film is also a testament to how underrated Robert Mitchum was to American film critics and those of his peers who voted out awards to their favorites. Despite the fact that Mitchum is off the screen more than half the time in this movie he dominates the proceedings thanks to scenes like this one below. Director Yates (in the DVD commentary) describes show Mitchum inhabits the role of this middle-aged Boston hood, right down to the stillness and the economy of emotion he puts into this scene where he meets for the first time with fellow gun-runner Jackie Brown (Stephen Keats). Warning: this clip has strong language:
Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) comes home after "another case is solve-ed", only to find a big surprise from a seductive Russian agent, played by Lesley Anne Down.
Classic final scene from "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" (1976), with Sellers, Down, and Burt Kwouk.
Carl Orff - Musica Poetica-01 "Gassenhauer" (1895 — 1982).
This is a piece of classical music I've always found engaging. I came across it shortly before hearing it on the soundtrack for the movie "Badlands". It is a color film, but still has the essense of the post-war emergence of "film noir" movies inspired in part by the experiences millions faced in the Second World War and the rootlessness and urbanization that began to characterize American life after the dust began to settle on a more prosperous but anxiety-filled nation.
The violence and controversy of The Vietnam War, racial tensions and the rise of teenage culture in America gave these newer 1970's "noir films" an added boost of nihilism.
Here's the trailer for the film:
'Badlands" I feel owes some of its hypnotic power to other road films of the time such as "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), "Easy Rider" (1969) and the lessviolent but disturbing "Five Easy Pieces" (1970).
All these films show characters who somehow don't fit into society and face a journey we know will not end with a rosy sunset and a new start in life.
Terence Malick's--a director who has only made a handful of features since--captured the underbelly of American life in a very unflinching way.
In the film Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek playing a pair of young Midwestern misfits--he a young adult man, she barely a teenager-- who go on a killing spree in 1959 Kansas. It was based on actual events.
A story about an outlaw couple is nothing new in itself, expect that the characters remain fully dimensional if totally reprehensible in their actions. The development of the movie is flawless in my view. This is what makes the mayhem and murders in it all the more disturbing.
Part of the reason the film works is contained in the soundtrack, which incorporates this Carl Orff masterpiece at key moments in the film.
But, of course, the music stands alone and can be appreciated by itself, which I hope you will find on display here.
I watched the Academy Awards last night although I had not seen either of the two films ("Avatar", "The Hurt Locker") that were the main contenders for Best Picture. The show is always diverting to me because its basically a live show and people sometimes use the "Oscar Awards" to make some interesting political or social statements about their work. (It also gives me a chance to see which documentaries and short subjects might be worth renting at the local DVD store or looking up here on the computer.)
My favorite Oscar moment goes back a long time. I saw it when I was thirteen and involved that impeccable actor, author and chat-show raconteur David Niven. At the time, for whatever reason, a lot of people were involved in "streaking" in America. They would cast off their clothes and dash about in a public place like at a football game or a college graduation ceremony. It was like the last embers of the 1960's freedom movements dying out before the popular culture turned away from controversy to conformity.
Anyway this is the bit that Niven contributed to that telecast seen 'round the world.
This film came out the same year as George Lucas' magnum box-office hit, "Star Wars" (the popcorn-popular "Avatar" of its day) and, although this was hardly a "sleeper", this film encompasses a more subtle and spiritual theme about humankind and the dream of finding someone to communicate with over a vast universe than the more famous saga of Darth Vader and a certain Skywalker clan.
Richard Dreyfuss' character, Roy Neary, is a midwestern utility worker whose ordinary life is completely undone by a vision that drives him apart from his unbelieving wife and children and ultimately sends him out on a mission to understand a compulsion that is either a great discovery or a symptom of personal encroaching madness.
Luckily for him, a small group of other people totally unrelated to one another have this vision as well. A child has been kidnapped from his mother; fighter planes missing for thirty years suddenly reemerge in a desert hindreds of miles from their last reported position, in perfect working order. Thousands of people in India and China are experiencing visions that lead authorities to more questions than answers.
The US intelligence community and other international military and scientific groups are trying to keep a lid on these matters. Not knowing what to do with such a potential threat, governments mount a campaign of fear and secrecy to try and contain information. Fear of the Other is the crisis, not the aliens themselves.
This is a film with suspense and charged drama but, unlike most every science fiction film I had ever seen until this one, it presents extra-terrestrial life not as a "War of the Worlds" or "Star Wars" struggle of forces but as a scientific quest where life on other planets is not a conflict but a source of "contact" between beings no longer separated from the vacuum of space.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
Directed by Steven Spielberg Produced by Julia Phillips Michael Phillips Written by Steven Spielberg Starring Richard Dreyfuss François Truffaut Melinda Dillon Terri Garr Music by John Williams Cinematography Vilmos Zsigmond Editing by Michael Kahn Distributed by Columbia Pictures Release date(s) November 16, 1977 Running time 135 minutes
Glenda Jackson, one of my favorite actresses, is best known in America for winning two Academy Awards for Best Actress in the frank (for its time) adaptation by KenRussell of "Women in Love" (1969) and in the well-received romantic comedy "Touch of Class"in 1973.
She had a reputation for fearlessness in the theatre and I suppose that comes across as well in her current job as MP for Hampstead and Hammersmith in the Labour Party. ( Where she reportedly given grief to the government over the Iraq War.)
Here she is in the film version of "Mary, Queen of Scots" (1971). playing Elizabeth, a figure she had already done well with in the BBC television version, "Elizabeth R". Here she and Venessa Redgrave have it out queen to queen in an encounter that is not based on historical accuracy but calls out for in a story about two strong women having a bit of a tiff over ruling the odd kingom or two.
Here she is taking on a slightly more modern role, as a smart and urbane Londoner having a serious and ultimately unworkable affair with a rather obnoxious American businessman (George Segal). Not one of her "great' roles" but this is the best non-comic scene in the film.
Here she is on a morning talk show, "Today" , with a brief clip of her from a 1988 Broadway production of "Macbeth". There are several other interesting films she appeared--John Schesinger's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1971) which is one of the earliest films that depicted homosexuality in a mature light, as well her fine work as a loner united with another animal lover to free a pair of sea turtles from a zoo in "Turtle Diary" (1972) with Ben Kingsley, as a lady with a bit of a problem with pistols in "Hedda Gabler" (1975) alongside Alan Bates as a shell-shocked soldier renewing a lost love in "Return of the Soldier" (1985).
"Harold and Maude" is a 1971 satirical film written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby. It was a flop when it first was released, but began to attract attention when it came out as the second part of twin-bills a year after its first run. The result was a film that defined the term "cult film". Its off-kilter and counter-culture styling made it a treat for repeated viewings. (The second-run theaters I attended with friends used to have a lot of double features and "Harold and Maude" was a favorite, not least of which being much of it was shot in the San Francisco Bay Area and had a spark of the irreverence against convention that was floating about for young people at that time.
The story concerns Harold, a rather sensitive 20-year old man (Bud Cort) who is fixated on the idea of killing himself and also attending the funerals of complete strangers. His rich parents try to bring him out of his lethargy and morbidity with a variety of schemes, including psychoanalysis, self-help books, some prodding from the commandant of a military academy, and even pointing a very young, swank, and willowy blond debutante with the unusual name of Candy Gulf in his general direction as the Ultimate Distraction Therapy.
But Harold isn't buying. He goes on freaking people out by fake gruesome "deaths".
It's only when he meets 79-year old Maude (Ruth Gordon), a fellow funeral crasher, that Our Hero comes out of his shell and sees that life holds opportunities and choices beyond what his parents or their stuck-up strata of society offers. Maude is a concentration camp survivor from World War II. A critic of the film summed up the difference in their situations in life.
"Harold is part of a society in which he is of no importance, existentially he is without meaning. Maude has survived and lives a life rich with meaning. It is in this existential crisis, shown against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, that we see the differences between one culture, personified by Harold, handling a meaningless war, while another has experienced and lived beyond a war that produced a crisis of meaning." [from Wikipedia] This song, written and sung by Cat Stevens (later Yusef Islam) sums up Maude's--and the film's--philosophy--life is a gift; use your free will, and see what it offers while the time you have lasts. Even if you've never heard of the film, you gotta listen to the song!
We don't police things. We're not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun." --Sweet William, Hells Angels Member, 1969.
"When I think about that kid getting murdered at Altamont, I think, it could have been me."--Mick Jagger
From an article by John Burks in a February 1970 issue of "Rolling Stone" magazine, called "Rock and Roll's Worst Day" (December 6, 1969).
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The violence," Keith Richards told the London Evening Standard, "just in front of the stage was incredible. Looking back I don't think it was a good idea to have Hell's Angels there. But we had them at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead. "The trouble is it's a problem for us either way. If you don't have them to work for you as stewards, they come anyway and cause trouble. "But to be fair, out of the whole 300 Angels working as stewards, the vast majority did what they were supposed to do, which was to regulate the crowds as much as possible without causing any trouble. But there were about ten or twenty who were completely out of their minds -- trying to drive their motorcycles through the middle of the crowds.
"Really, the difference between the open air show we held here in Hyde Park and the one there is amazing. I think it illustrates the difference between the two countries. In Hyde Park everybody had a good time, and there was no trouble. You can put half a million young English people together and they won't start killing each other. That's the difference."
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Of course, most of the 300,000 spectators who came to Altamont--a rundown racetrack about forty miles from San Francisco in a large bowl surrounded then by grassy hills of no particular visual allure-- that weekend weren't involved in any violence, and there was no fatalities caused by violence at the major music festival near Woodstock, New York, in the Summer of that turbulent year, 1969. A difference--the major difference--between Woodstock and Altamont was the presence of several chapters of the San Francisco Bay Area "Hell's Angels".
The Hyde Park Concert, a memorial of sorts for founding Stone member Brian Jones who died mysteriously a few months before the "Gimme Shelter" Tour--utilized a British chapter of the biker club. But the American chapter was much more savage. The Stones had seen some rough business at their concerts before--their first band manager, Andrew Oldham, used to try to get people in an uproar by sureprticiously knocking a policeman's hat off to incite other members of the crowd to get rowdy (as if Mick Jagger's star power and theatricality weren't enough.) But even the police in America wanted little as possible to do with these bad asses. Whoever recommended the Angels to "The Stones" or The Grateful Dead group--who ok'ed the presence of the gang as some type of security, then refused to show up after the violence broke out--made a terrible mistake in thinking that a beer-soaked and hard-drug addled bunch of self-proclaimed outlaws with Nazi insignias tat-toed on their bodies-- would mix well with a group of free spirited rock lovers and hippies.
Dozens of people--men and women-- were clubbed and beaten by the Angels and one man, Meredith Hunter , was stabbed to death after he foolishly brandished a long-barreled gun. (A jury in Oakland, California, later determined that the man accused of the killing had acted in self-defense. Two others died after being run over by apparent accident, one man was found drowned in an irrigation ditch.
A later friend of mine, who had hitch-hiked fifty miles to the concert while being all of fifteen, saw the dead man being pulled from the water. Luckily she was far enough away from the stage to not experience the extreme behavior of the Angels.
She is still a major Stones fan, and saw them play on their last US tour when it stopped in the Bay Area.
The last time I drove by the Altamont Pass area there was nothing there but a jagged cluster of giant turbine windmills catching a bit of natural power on the treeless hillsides. You wouldn't anything had ever happened there--all Altamont is a little bit of boring wind-blown nothingness. Were, for many, that it had always been so.
This one stayed on the pop charts for three months for Texas-born, African-American recording star Dobie Gray (1940--), reaching up to # 13 on the Billboard List for that year. Gray also had a big comeback hit in 1973, with "Drift Away". Many artists and groups have performed this song, including The Ramsey Lewis Trio, Joe Jackson, Petula Clark, Quincy Jones and even Alvin and the Chipmunks.
The clips here are from the movie "Quadrophenia" (1979), a film about Mods and Rockers. Back then, the song was a favorite of the latter group.
It was Saturday Night in the Bay Area some time ago, 1971 to be exact, that I first came across the buttoned-down, low key television persona of Bob Wilkins, the host of "Creature Features". He worked on a local independent television station (KTVU-2) out of Oakland/San Francisco, hosting a program called "Creature Features". The locally-produced show would present a newer horror film in the 9-11 pm slot, followed by an older, often classic horror film from the Universal or Hammer film catalog around 11. What made Mr. Wilkins memorable was the way he presented these movies.
Those old enough to remember the horror movie craze that was directed at teens and pre-teens at the time probably recall television hosts who dressed up like characters out of "The Munsters" or "The Addams Family". The generally hammed it up mercilessly while selling commercial products and introducing movies they played off as "scary" or "chilling". Their were probably dozens of these local part-time "ghouls" in major markets, trying to scare up some ratings with the younger crowd not yet able to go out on Saturday Night.
Wilkins was decidedly different. For one thing, he presented the films dressed as what one critic called "The Nerd-Hipster": the sort of television host who was a cross between comic intellectual Dick Cavett and the Anglo-American swell, Alister Cooke, of "Letter From America" and "Masterpiece Theater" fame.
Here's some idea what I'm talking about:
Wilkins was famous for beginning his programs with admonishments if the film chosen for that evening by the program director was less than top-notch. "Don't stay up tonight," the host would warn. "It' not worth it". I remember being quite amused one weekend night as a kid when he opened up a copy of the tube-junkie's bible, "TV Guide" and began reading aloud to viewers what was on other channels in the Bay Area and how discerning viewers would be better off checking out other option besides the trashy 'Dracula Vs. Frankenstein' (1971) film that was on for that night.
How did Wilkins get away with this and stay on the air? It was because he was honest about what he presented and, because of that, people who didn't normally watch horror films tuned in just for his ironic sense of wit and humorous asides to the main features. The ratings for his shows were through the roof compared to other independent television offerings, according to a recent article in San Francisco's "Metro" magazine. He also offered some interesting interviews with minor and sometimes major stars and directors and f/x people from the horror and fantasy side of the television and film industry.
The 9:00 showing, as I said, was usually the newest and often the lesser of the double feature. I'll spare you the bad previews and show one I remember that was on one night and was pretty good, 1973's "The Legend of Hell House", starring a good cast with a screenplay by top notch science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. (Warning: the following contains scenes of "bad, bad kitty" behavior and the breaking of nice crockery.)
The later show was the one I usually looked forward to. Not all of them were classics, but they were films made by better and more experienced hands than those who cranked out flicks from the 50's and 60's with titles like "The Horror of Party Beach" and "Attack of the Mushroom People". And the photography was certainly better, as this video tribute to early sound horror films proves:
When Halloween comes around, I remember fondly all the movies I saw as a youngster, some scary and some silly. But, since he passed away this year at age 76, I also fondly recall the sarcasm and good humored fun that Bob Wilkins brought to the presentation of these "creature features."
Pictured below: Northern California's favorite Saturday night horror film host, the inimitable Bob Wilkins, interviewing Christopher Lee on the set of "Creature Features" sometime in the 1970's.
No, he's not dead and its not his birthday, and, yes, he's said some really stupid things about hitting women if they dare remind him to use a fork when he eats his entree at a fancy restaurant or whatever, but this clip proves Sir Sean Connery is a master of screen acting.
"He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was."--The Great Gatsby
This is a novel I find myself going back to every so often. I first read it at fifteen. I had seen the film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, respectively, two one-time sweethearts from the time of World War One who are reunited briefly and not coincidentally seven years or so later in an affluent part of the suburbs of New York City, along the green glades and postcard-pretty little private harbors and estates of Long Island.
The movie was okay. I didn't understand the hullaballo about it actually. Then I read the book on my own. It was like a light going on in my head. I could imagine how great the movie SHOULD have been but somehow wasn't.
Jay Gatsby is a war hero, a newly-rich provocative shadow of the Long Island party set, and an apparent shady background as to how he acquired his money. (I love how Fitzgerald slowly brings the reader details of the the real Jay Gatsby and slowly dis-spells the various legends about him that the guests at his lavish parties have of him.) Only one man gets to know the real man--Nick Carroway, the narrator of the book. At the end of Gatsby's life, he is also Jay's only friend. Jay Gatz (his real last name) is trying to get back the one thing that money and medals and social popularity can't buy for him--the love of Daisy. She is married to the more patrician Tom Buchanan, a polo-playing former college football hero with decidedly backward views on race and snobbish views of social position. He is also a violent cad of the first water,and his own mistress is just a doormat to him, or she better behave that way if she knows what's good for her. By the end of the book it is clear that Daisy has fallen in love again with Gatsby, who has bought an estate near hers and gives lavish parties for the sole reason perhaps of attracting her away from Tom and into his life. But is Daisy really in love enough to leave Tom for Jay? She says she is at one point in the novel, but I wonder...
In between Jay and Daisy--besides Tom--is Nick, a Middle Westerner (like Fitzgerald himself) who is Daisy's cousin and the one person who Gatsby trusts to arrange a private tea with her at Nick's bungalow. (Nick is no millionaire--he's a bond salesman on Wall Street in the heady pre-Depression stock market.)
Many critics have commented on the "tragedy" of Jay Gatsby. I'm not sure he really is a tragic character, but he is a romantic. I think this self-made man truly believes he can reassemble his past and get a second chance with the person he believes is his soul-mate. What he can't see---and what rereading this novel again recently shows to me, is that he is chasing after a mirage, a idealized view of his beloved that Daisy--or perhaps no woman--could ever hope to sustain as a real flesh-and-blood human being. There is a short passage where Nick sums it up:
"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion."
Scott Fitzgerald knew something about creative passions, and his own life took some near-tragic twists with alcohol, professional failure and his wife's madnes. But he was a great writer, and he proves it in his early short stories and in this novel. His dialogue here and in other works is always some of the best I've ever read. Those who have read this short novel even once probably already know that. It's one novel I'd take with me to a desert island. Perhaps you too have a similar feeling about a novel or a collected group of stories you'd like to share.
Seeing some of my Multiply pals post some great skits from Monty Python films and television episodes got me to thinking about the first British comedian I saw who struck me as being distinctly "off-the-wall". That honor belongs to Marty Feldman (1934-1982) and the show I remember was a half-hour sketch comedy on called The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine" (1971) which was on for one season in America in 1972-3.
It was clear after watching this program that, for me, Feldman was not only funny but truly bizarre and more than a little subversive by American standards of television comedy. I didn't know anything about Surrealism and such as twelve-year old, but it was clear this guy was coming on as if he had landed from another planet. Actually, his "alien in a strange land" persona did have an American precedent; Feldman was a big fan of the work of Buster Keaton. In a very real way, although he had other influences, Keaton was almost reborn in Feldman's capacity to mix imaginative situations on film with extreme physical risk.
Keaton was a major hero for Feldman. According to writer David Waddle in a "Sight and Sound" magazine article, he kept a photo of Keaton in his dressing room wherever he went. "To remind me of my roots," he said. One of the sad things is that he had been working on a script for a film about Buster, but it was never produced due to Marty's death from a heart attack down in Mexico while finishing up a role as a pirate in "Yellowbeard".
It was much later, after reading about "Monty Python Flying Circus" that I discovered how much Feldman's format on his earlier shows in America and the UK had influenced the Python group (John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, et al) most of whom had worked with and were mentored by Feldman as young writers him during the 1960's on shows like "The Frost Report" and "At Last the 1948 Show".
Marty had become a comedian in front of the camera in Britain for several years by the time 'The Comedy Machine" appeared. My defining memories of the show included was the bizarre animation material that opened and closed the show (done by yet another Python, Terry Gilliam ). and also the funny and socially daring skits--the funniest as I remember being something called "Stalking the British Aristocracy". The sketch was filmed in what looked like a park and showed a bunch of working-class city people driving around in cars and shooting at men and women--presumably titled gentry--dressed from feet to neck in giant grouse costumes and making weird bird noises. (Marty was one of the hapless and earth-bound birds, primed to be shot!)
What could have been simply cold-blooded was made actually quite silly--on the surface--by those bird costumes. I wish I had that skit to play, but this other one gives an idea of how unusual and inventive he could be:
Most non-British film-goers probably remember Marty as Igor in "Young Frankenstein"(1934), a film generally recognized to be the best of Mel Brooks' cycle of film parodies. Here he channels another famous American comedian from the past:
In the first movie Feldman both directed and co-wrote, "The Last Remake of Beau Geste" (1977) he assembled an excellent cast of comedic and dramatic actors to make a quite funny film. Some of it was in the vein of his work with Mel Brooks, but many scenes were far beyond what Brooks could come up with as far as surrealism and drawing from older films to make not just a spoof, but a homage to great films (and tired action-movie cliches) of the past. Here is a Keatonesque scene from the film, where Marty (as one of the Geste brothers) is helped to escape from prison so the villains can get a hold of a diamond they believe he might have stolen.
Although honored as a filmmaker over more than four decades , Woody Allen would have had no trouble making a living as a stand-up performer. Here he is in an appearance on "The Dean Martin Show" from the Sixties. What is exceptional about Allen is how well he weaves together all kinds of issues from the milieau of the period into a seamless tableau of humor that is neither preachy nor condescending to MIddle American prejudices. He is operating in a field somewhere between Lenny Bruce and Bob Hope with a mind for linkages all his own.
Allen's first feature films ("Take the Money and Run" 1969, "Bananas" 1971 ) are funny but a bit ragged around the edges. In the 1973 classic "Sleeper", his abilities as a director take a quantum leap. Here he plays around with popular culture again--this time as a former Greenwich Village Health Food Store owner, Miles Monroe, who suffers a hospital mishap during a ulcer operation. He is "frozen" in a suspended state by nervous hospital administrators and wakes up 200 years later. America has turned into a totalitarian police state with little knowledge of its 20th Century past. What might be a standard science-fiction allegory is turned into a series of funny sequences. Here a scientist asks him about the world he inhabited---a perfect vehicle to drop in some wild flights of intermingled fancy as well as take pot shots at a certain egotistical writer, a well known preacher and a couple nasty politicians or two.
The last clip is from 1975's feature "Love and Death". A spoof of Ingmar Bergman films and Russian Literature, the movie is the closest Allen has made to an epic. Shot in Yugoslavia, it's also a unusual film in that most of the writer-director's later work will set in and around New York City until declining financial returns from his films forced him to make films in Europe, where his stature is somewhat higher. "Love and Death" is also, to me, one of the funniest films ever made--as this trailer shows. Perhaps it helps that I was studying Russian novellas like "Notes From Underground" in High School and seeing some of Bergman's bleak, existential films about when this film first opened.
The number two song in my countdown of hits from 1978 includes these gentlemen--it's one of their best and most popular and peaked at Number 4 on the USA charts.
One of the most beautiful pieces of incidental music from any film I think. Sorry this doesn't include a clip of the film, which is a visual treat as all Maestro Fellini's mature films are. Nino Rota's other credits included a little American film called "The Godfather".
