Mill Creek comedy classics #37: "The Perils of Pauline" (1947)

Perils of Pauline: You know you've made it when you get your own funnybook! Congrats, Betty Hutton!

The flick: The Perils of Pauline (Paramount, 1947)

Current IMDb rating: 6.6

Director: George Marshall (Destry Rides Again; directed "Railroad" segment of How the West Was Won; episodes of TV's Daniel Boone and The Odd Couple)

Billy De Wolfe

Actors of note: Betty Hutton (brassy, oft-divorced "blond bombshell" singer/actress of the 1940s and '50s; The Greatest Show on Earth; title role in Annie Get Your Gun; had own TV show in 1959-1960), John Lund (High Society, A Foreign Affair), Billy De Wolfe (popular vaudeville and burlesque clown; voiced the Professor in TV's Frosty the Snowman), William Demarest (again?!? really?!?), Constance Collier (Hitchcock's Rope, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages), Frank Faylen (Dobie's dad on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; appeared in It's a Wonderful Life, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, and more) Chester Conklin (a Keystone Kop; appeared in Chaplin's Modern Times and The Great Dictator; considered himself one of the four greatest pioneers of movie comedy alongside Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, and Mabel Normand), James Finlayson (the "d'oh!" guy from All Over Town), "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom (Nothing Sacred), Ray Walker (Goodbye Love), Tom Dugan (Palooka)

Other notables: The gowns were designed by Edith Head, the most famous and honored costume designer in film history (eight Oscars, 400+ credits). Edith inspired the "Edna Mode" character in The Incredibles and the song "She Thinks She's Edith Head" by They Might Be Giants. The songs for this movie were written by Frank Loesser, the tunesmith behind Guys & Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and a familiar Christmas song which some people say advocates date rape.

Perils of Pauline sheet music.

The gist of it: Early 1900s, New York. Plucky, talented Pearl White (Hutton) works as a seamstress in a sweatshop for pervy cheapskate Mr. Gurt (Faylen), but she'd rather be in show business. One day, she delivers a costume to a theater and ends up joining the theatrical troupe of handsome, conceited Michael Farrington (Lund). She travels with the troupe from town to town and is befriended by two of her fellow actors: matronly Julia Gbbs (Collier) and shamelessly hammy Timmy Timmons (De Wolfe). The newcomer also falls in love with her boss, Michael, who keeps her at arm's length. Pearl works her way up from bit parts to leading roles in the company, but one night she suffers a cold and flubs her lines onstage, causing the audience to become riled. Michael berates Pearl after the show, so she quits the troupe, taking Julia with her. Some time later, Julia gets an undignified walk-on part in the newfangled "moving pictures," but it's tagalong Pearl who becomes the star when her fearlessness and natural charisma are noticed by director "Mac" McGuire (Demarest). Pearl becomes the heroine of a serialized adventure story called The Perils of Pauline, doing her own dangerous stunts, and finds jobs for old friends Julia and Timmy in the cast. Michael, meanwhile, has been reduced to a carnival barker. Pearl invites him to become her leading man in the Pauline movies. He accepts, though he considers the movies beneath him and longs to return to the stage. Eventually, after a misadventure in a runaway hot air balloon, Pearl and Michael admit their love for each other and are engaged. But Michael can't stand being a second banana in such a lowly enterprise, and he leaves a heartbroken Pearl to return to acting. His theatrical career soars, while Pearl's popularity wanes as the old-fashioned "serials" fall out of favor with the American public. Pearl moves to Paris, where they love her stage act and her films, too. Michael follows her, but mere hours before they are supposed to reunite, Pearl is gravely injured during a performance and is seemingly paralyzed from the waist down. Ignoring the orders of her doctors, she meets up with Michael, and they reaffirm their love for one another and agree to marry.

The real Pearl White.

My take: Nobody expects Hollywood biopics to be accurate or realistic, and true to form, The Perils of Pauline bears little resemblance to the sad, abbreviated, and fascinating existence of actress Pearl White (1889-1938). This is a glossy, cotton-candy musical which heavily fictionalizes and romanticizes her eventful life. A great deal of the melodrama is wholly manufactured for the screenplay. There were no real-world counterparts of the characters played by Billy De Wolfe or Constance Collier, and the original Perils of Pauline was directed not by a brash American like the one William Demarest portrays here, but by Frenchman Louis J. Gasnier, the auteur behind Reefer Madness. Pearl White's second husband, Wallace McCutcheon, Jr., was an actor and a war hero like John Lund's "Michael Farrington" character in this film. But Pearl and Wallace's marriage lasted only two years, and the despondent man killed himself after their divorce. Pearl did move to Paris after her screen career cooled off, but there she suffered a nervous breakdown and cirrhosis of the liver, not the spectacular on-stage accident we see in this film. She'd been dead of alcoholism less than a decade when this fanciful screen biography appeared. Some of my favorite films, including Amadeus and Ed Wood, are based on real people but take enormous liberties with the facts. I suppose my main problem with this film is that it betrays Pearl White but doesn't come up with a better, more satisfying narrative of her life. Flawed as she was, Pearl was quite the pioneer when it comes to women in film, and it took a lot of guts to do the stunts she did. (The injuries she suffered led to the fatal alcoholism later in life.) But the whole point of this movie is that Pearl ultimately learns to be dependent upon a man, Michael, who has treated her shabbily for years. And we're supposed to feel good about that? By the end, Michael is literally carrying the helpless Pearl in his arms, while she agrees with him what a lousy actress she's always been. Does her character ever recover and learn to walk again? Who knows? Who cares? She's got a man to haul her around, so I guess she doesn't need working legs. To be blunt, both Michael and Pearl are silly, unsympathetic characters. He's a pretentious, peevish, jealous snob with all the charm of a pile of wet laundry. What does Pearl see in this guy? Why do her supposed "friends" keep nudging her toward him? Pearl has major problems of her own. Whenever she's given any kind of criticism, she immediately wilts, crumples her face all up, and becomes weepy and whiny. But she has the attention span of a mayfly and can go from "completely despondent" to "absolutely elated" in mere seconds. Her naive "golly gee willikers" enthusiasm was a bit much, too. I didn't buy it. Meanwhile, Frank Loesser's songs are clever and pleasant, but they're not on a par with his best work. By the way, Pearl White's first husband was an actor, too. His name was Victor Sutherland, and he lived to the age of 79. His last recorded role? Guest starring on (I should have known) The Betty Hutton Show.

Billy De Wolfe as Frosty's Professor Hinkle.

Is it funny: Sometimes it is, but The Perils of Pauline isn't strictly a comedy. It's a biopic, a musical, and a love story, too. There are long stretches of the film which are dramatic or melodramatic rather than comedic. Betty Hutton struck me as a female equivalent of Danny Kaye in that she uses every atom of her being to entertain the audience and is kind of overwhelming and hard to take in large doses. If she's in a humorous scene, she bludgeons you half to death with zaniness. Picture Lucille Ball on steroids. Similarly, Billy De Wolfe was a familiar comic actor for decades but never quite made it in movies because his voice and mannerisms were simply too "big" for the screen. Little wonder that his most famous role was in an animated special. Hutton and De Wolfe have some nice moments together, as when Timmy gives Pearl lessons in diction like a downmarket Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. However, I can't honestly say I laughed all that much at their antics. The one character, surprisingly, who made me laugh a few times was "Mac," the reckless, self-centered film director who seems to feed on chaos and calamity. All this guy cares about is movies. When World War I breaks out, all "Mac" cares about is how it's going to affect the plot of his next picture. That made me chuckle.

My grade: B




P.S. - Oh, golly, is this film rife with racial stereotypes. For one production with the Farrington Players, Pearl portrays a mammy, complete with blackface and "Negro" dialect, while "Dixie" plays on the soundtrack . This goes on for several minutes of screen time. The only actual black people in The Perils of Pauline are either extras in a cheap "jungle" flick or maids. The world was very different just a few decades ago, folks.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 1: The Early Years (1948-1953)

Ed appears in one of his own commercials, circa 1949.

When Edward D. Wood, Jr. arrived in Hollywood in 1947 at the age of 23, he'd already had plenty of what we might call "life experience." The young man had seen heavy combat action in World War II and been decorated for gallantry in action, traveled with a freak show as a "half-man, half-woman," and studied the dramatic arts at the prestigious Frank Lloyd Wright Institute in Washington, D.C. The son of a mailman and a jewelry buyer, Ed was born in Poughkeepsie, NY on October 10, 1924. His otherwise-unremarkable childhood was distinguished by two interesting factors which forever changed the course of his life: his father's gift of a movie camera at age 11 and his mother's tendency to dress him in girls' clothes as a peculiar form of punishment throughout his formative years. The camera fueled Eddie's obsession with cinema that had begun with his viewing of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi in 1931. The cross-dressing, meanwhile, became a lifelong habit for Ed and a major theme in his work as both a director and writer. One could argue that the fetishizing of all things feminine -- not only women's clothing, but their hair, makeup, jewelry, movement, physiognomy and physical contours -- is the defining characteristic of Ed's films and novels. While a few of Ed's characters dealt with the issue of transvestism directly (e.g. Glen in 1953's Glen or Glenda?), many more had an obsession with "feathers, furs, and fluff," to borrow a phrase from Ed's script for Orgy of the Dead (1965).

Ed Wood's birthplace, 115 Franklin Street in Poughkeepsie, NY, appears boarded up in this Google Maps image.

Patriotic and hungry for action, Ed joined the Marines at the age of 17 in 1942, America's first full year as a belligerent in the Second World War. Only a timely case of pneumonia kept him from being among the first wave of Marines who were totally wiped out by the enemy in that great conflict. Once deployed, Ed saw action at Tarawa, an atoll in the Central Pacific, and Nanumea, a Polynesian atoll just south of the equator. His bravery in combat would earn him the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart and more, but his experiences in the Central and South Pacific would cost him most of his teeth, and he was forever haunted by memories of killing Japanese soldiers. But the war had not extinguished the romantic, movie-loving side of Ed Wood's personality. Far from it. He was still an enthusiastic "idea man" and a handsome, dapper young gentleman in the Errol Flynn tradition when he made the trip west to California to pursue his show business aspirations in the late '40s. With no connections whatsoever in Hollywood, Ed began his new life as a stage actor. Within a year, he had made two very important professional associations: one with Monogram Pictures cameraman Ray Flin, who would become the first major cinematographer of Ed's career, and the other with fellow actor John Crawford Thomas, with whom Ed briefly formed a production company. It is with Flin and Thomas that Ed made his first film in Hollywood (he'd made home movies as a child, but nothing of significance), so it is there we begin our journey into the filmography of Edward D. Wood, Jr.


CROSSROADS OF LAREDO (1948)

Wood regular Don Nagel is no-good gunfighter Tex in Crossroads of Laredo (1948). Ruth McCabe comforts him.

Alternate title: The Streets of Laredo

Availability: The Haunted World of World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Image Entertainment DVD, 1996) [buy it]

The backstory: As a child, Ed was especially interested in cowboy movies and attended them regularly, so it is natural that his first attempt at filmmaking would be in the Western genre. Ed wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in this feature, but it would never be completed or released in his lifetime. Ed shot the film without sync sound and, according to all participants, got every bit of footage he needed to tell the story. He intended to add, according to Rudolph Grey's book, "cowboy ballads and sparse dubbed dialogue" on the soundtrack, but this was never carried out. Stories differ as to why. Actor Chuck La Berge, who played the Sheriff in the film, claimed that producer and financier John Crawford Thomas was "nutty as a fruitcake" and "on dope" at the time. Thomas says that he simply ran out of money (which embarrassed his family) and that Ed just left the fledgling production company without even saying goodbye. Though Eddie was proud of Crossroads and would speak of it often to friends and associates, this film would not see the light day for nearly half a century. In 1996, the "completed" Crossroads of Laredo, assembled into its final form by Thomas, finally surfaced as a special feature on the DVD of a documentary about Ed. To the existing silent footage, Thomas added a credits sequence, an introduction featuring himself and Dolores Fuller, Ed's longtime girlfriend and occasional star, plus a new soundtrack with a few sound effects, narration by country singer Cliffie Stone (who died just two years later) and a few songs written by Fuller and sung by the eccentric Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr., who claims to be the illegitimate child of Elvis Presley.

An effective image: Tex's death.

The viewing experience: Crossroads is very primitive and somewhat of a chore to watch, even at 23 minutes. One commentator, director-actor Ted Newsom, astutely observed that, while filmed in 1948, the production looks like it was made in 1918. Very often, Cliffie Stone's folksy voiceover is the only thing which gives the film any narrative cohesion at all. It feels like someone showing home movies of a family vacation and trying to explain the footage to people who weren't there. Viewers will probably be most interested in the participation of two actors who would become regular members of Ed Wood's repertory company. The hero, Lem, is played by Duke Moore, who would turn up in five more Wood films, with very prominent roles in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Final Curtain, and Night of the Ghouls. Nagel would return in Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, and more. Unlike Moore, Nagel actually got acting jobs outside of Ed Wood's films, appearing on episodes of The Bob Newhart Show and The Rockford Files. The basic plot revolves around a conflict between Moore and Nagel's characters. Nagel is Tex, a murderous thief who marries sweet Barbara (Ruth McCabe) and has a child with her but then ignores her and spends all his time boozing and womanizing at the saloon. Moore is Lem, the honest man who truly loves Barbara and despises Tex. Lem kills Tex in a gunfight, then must go into hiding. He boldly appears at Tex's funeral and is taken into custody. Just as he's about to be hanged, a witness corroborates Lem's story that Tex drew his gun first, and Lem and Barbara walk into the sunset together. Clumsy as the film is, there are one or two effective shots. I liked, for instance, an image of the dying Tex on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from a wooden door, and there is a nice moment near the end when Barbara stands alone and is silhouetted against the Western skyline. While the musical soundtrack is well-intended and a sweet attempt by Fuller to pay tribute to Ed Wood, the electric guitars and synthesizers are all wrong for a 1948 production, as is the Las Vegas crooning style of Presley, Jr. These songs should have been performed in a traditional cowboy style with only acoustic guitar as accompaniment. It is perhaps significant that the character name "Barbara" would be reused in Wood's 1953 feature debut, Glen or Glenda?, and that part would be played by Dolores Fuller herself.

Undeterred by the failure of Crossroads of Laredo, Ed Wood returned to the stage until his next screen venture and the next stop on our tour...

THE STORY-AD FILMS (1949)



Availability: YouTube [link]

The backstory: Not much is known about Ed Wood's advertising career, but Rudolph Grey's book does contain a September 18, 1949 article from a Poughkeepsie newspaper about it. The piece claims that Wood "has just completed negotiations with Rene Lenoir of Switzerland, Robert Ganon, photographer of the Nazi war trials and Jack Ganon, sound technician, for the incorporation of 'Story-Ad Films,' in Hollywood, Calif. Mr. Wood, the quarter owner of the new firm, is the writer and director of all films produced by the establishment. He previously has done custom work for such national sponsors as the Dudley Steel Corp., The Aluminum Body Works, and the Crosley automobile manufacturers." Given Ed Wood's reputation as a notorious "bulshitter" (in the words of his own wife, Kathy), it's impossible to know how much of that story is true. But at least four commercials do exist from this era. You'll notice that they conspicuously avoid mentioning mentioning any actual brand names.

The viewing experience: These are a lot of fun -- eccentric, inventive, and naive in the best Wood tradition. Wood has made tremendous technical advances from the Crossroads of Laredo days, though the dialogue and acting are stilted in that strange way of seemingly all Ed's projects. True to the name of the company, these commercials tell miniature stories, and each has its own title. There are four little vignettes: Surprise (for used cars), Treasure and Curves (jewelry), The Bestest (footwear), and Magic Man (men's clothing). The last is the most intriguing, as it features Wood himself in the role of a dapper magician, clearly having fun with the role. But there are amusing little details in all of them. Note that the bride-to-be in the first film is named Babs, a variation on Barbara. Treasure and Curves has a band of all-female pirates, led by the brash "Captain Kitty." And then there's The Bestest, yet another Western with yet another Tex. In this one, though, instead of fighting over a girl, the two cowboys ditch the girl and go off to the shoe store together! By the way, I recognized some of the stock music in the background as having also been used by the great radio comedy team of Bob & Ray during their many soap opera parodies of the 1950s and 1960s.

The success or failure of Story-Ad Films is undocumented. I'm guessing it was a flop, since Ed's next big project would be a brief made-for-TV drama two years later....

THE SUN WAS SETTING (1951)



Alternate title: The Sun Also Sets

Availability: YouTube [link]

The backstory: Wood wrote and directed this 13-minute piece at KTTV Studios at the corner of Sunset and Van Ness in Los Angeles during the week of December 17, 1951. Ray Flin returned as cinematographer. The cast included Phyllis Coates, soon to portray Lois Lane on TV's The Adventures of Superman, in a supporting role. The lead was played by Angela Stevens, actress and sometimes model of the 1950s and early 1960s, who went on to play minor roles in two iconic films, From Here to Eternity and The Wild One (both 1953) and even appeared in one of my favorite Three Stooges shorts, He Cooked His Goose. For serious Wood-oligsts, though, the most important cast member is ultra-bland Tom Keene, billed here as "Richard Powers," a former second-tier movie cowboy who had changed his name when his Western career fizzled out. Wood, a fan of Tom's, would later have the actor revert to his old name and appear as the star of Crossroad Avenger and as a supporting player in Plan 9 from Outer Space. By the way, Ed Wood fans will instantly recognize the stock music which plays over the opening credits from its use in Glen or Glenda? That music has become so synonymous with Wood that Howard Shore even incorporated it into his marvelous score for Ed Wood (1994).

A much sexier Angela Stevens.

The viewing experience: This short film is claustrophobic and more than a little depressing, though it marks another step up in terms of technical proficiency. Angela Stevens plays June, a young woman who is confined to her New York apartment because of an "infection" and who has only a few months to live. She is visited first by her boyfriend, Paul (Keene), who is willing to marry her but is not willing to take her out clubbing or to Chinatown since that would kill her. They argue, and he leaves. Later, June is visited by her best friend, Rene, who wants to take June to dinner and a movie but, like Paul, refuses to take her out for a wild night on the town. Paul then returns and agrees to take June anywhere she wants, leading to the sad, ironic final twist. Coates and Keene are both quite flavorless and unmemorable here, but Stevens digs into the part of June with a certain ferocity. The Sun is Setting is talky and slow-paced, sort of like the soap operas of that period, and the mood is very dispiriting and joyless. In short, this isn't much fun. June seems perfectly healthy, and the idea that this woman needs to be confined to her apartment at all times seems silly. The sets and costumes, to me, were completely inappropriate for the plot. Turn off the sound, and you'd never even know that June was sick. Those looking for quirky Wood-ian touches will want to take note of a couple of intense closeups of Angela Stevens which are rather awkwardly edited into the film and disrupt the continuity. Vintage photos reveal that Angela Stevens was quite the dish back in the 1950s, but she's given a frumpy hairdo and outfit here which spoil her appearance. Darn.

Ed would spend the rest of his film career concentrating on theatrical features, including his notorious and celebrated 1953 debut. But along the way, there was one last (or last-ish) attempt at a television-length Western...

CROSSROAD AVENGER (1953)

Dull, handsome Tom Keene was to be the star of Ed Wood's proposed TV Western.

Alternate titles: Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid; supposedly, this film and a second (now lost) TV pilot called Crossroad Avenger Returns were edited into a 50-minute feature called The Adventures of the Tucson Kid (1953). All that exists today, though, is this single 25-minute pilot.

Availability: Big Box of Wood (S'More Entertainment DVD boxed set, 2010) [buy it]

Nine-fingered Harvey B. Dunn

The backstory: Westerns were a huge TV fad in the early 1950s, and this was Ed's failed attempt to cash in on it. Ray Flin was back as Ed's cinematographer, this time working in color! Ed wouldn't get to direct a full-length color feature for over a decade. For his star, he brought in the old reliable Tom Keene, who had starred in about 50 low-budget Westerns before his studio dropped him and he changed his name to "Richard Powers." He'd been "George Duryea" at the beginning of his screen career in the 1920s and would go back to "Richard Powers" after his days with Ed were through. According to Nightmare of Ecstasy, Ed Wood maintained that this pilot "was passed up in favor of Wild Bill Hickok with Guy Madison." While this can't be confirmed (par for the course with Ed Wood), what is unmistakable is that Crossroad Avenger is a virtual Rosetta Stone for the rest of Ed Wood's 1950s films. Here, you will find many members of Ed's stock company: stalwart character actor Lyle Talbot; D-list Western baddie Kenne Duncan; seedy, withered actor-stuntman Bud Osborne; rotund, jovial Harvey B. Dunn (who had one finger missing on his left hand), and the aforementioned Don Nagel. For the role of a deputy, Wood was able to recruit another one of his cowboy icons, Tom Tyler, who was nearing the end of a 30-year-plus career.

The viewing experience: Although Keene is altogether too vanilla to be the center of attention in a weekly TV series, Crossroad Avenger is a pleasant diversion. I'm not sure why Ed Wood thought this would make for a thrilling series, but Keene's character, the Tucson Kid, works for an insurance company and makes inquiries (with his gun) when a claim seems suspicious. Somehow The Lone Insurance Investigator doesn't quite have the right ring to it. In this installment, Keene rides into a town where a saloon has burned down under fishy circumstances. He almost immediately finds himself framed for murder by Lyle Talbot's character, who perpetrated the original insurance fraud. Our hero just barely escapes hanging, which doesn't say much for the legal system of the time. Lots of people are gunned down in these 25 busy minutes, including Dunn as a friendly but loopy "desert rat" who might have made an interesting sidekick to Keene if this had been picked up, but eventually the Tucson Kid's job is done and he can ride off to the next assignment. Competently made but not outstanding, Crossroad Avenger has plenty of violence but very little of the trademark Ed Wood insanity. Completists and cowboy fans are urged to give it a watch, though.

And that does it for this survey of Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood. Join us here next week for coverage of Ed's first two features: Glen or Glenda? (1953) and Jail Bait (1955).

New feature starting tomorrow: Ed Wood Wednesdays!

A lobby card from Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda?, a movie which affected me tremendously at age 17 for obvious reasons.

I'd been reading about them for years, but the first time I actually saw one of Ed Wood's movies was October 30, 1992. I was 17 years old at the time and a senior in high school. The occasion was "A Tribute to Edward D. Wood, Jr.," a retrospective of his work being held at Mott Community College, a school in Flint, MI where my mother worked as an English teacher. She would be dead within four months of that fateful night, her cancer having returned with a vengeance, but I had no idea at the time. All I knew back then was that I was finally getting the opportunity to see the work of a director I'd read about in books like Cult Movies by Danny Peary and Midnight Movies by J.Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, not to mention the numerous movie review guides I'd been collecting and studying since early adolescence. I've always been attracted to "infamous art" in all fields, and I knew that the name "Edward D. Wood, Jr." kept coming up again and again in my research. This was before the Internet made everything available instantaneously. All I knew about Wood's movies was what I'd read about them. That fateful Halloween Eve, I saw four of his films: Bride of the Monster (1955), Glen or Glenda? (1953), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). I liked them all -- even Ghouls, which played last on the bill and pretty much cleared the room -- but it was Glenda that had blown my mind. I'd never seen anything remotely like it. A few of my classmates were there that night, too, and for weeks afterward we were quoting it. "Beware... take care... beware!" and "Puppy dog tails and big fat snails" became instant in-jokes for us.

Grey's book: The turning point.

Two years later saw the release of Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, which never reached the Flint area theatrically and which I finally saw through a second-hand used VHS copy procured at the local Meijer store. I watched it innumerable times. By then, I'd managed to collect a few of Ed's original movies on tape as well and pored over them with a seriousness normally reserved for the Torah. I wanted to know as much about the director of these incredible films as I could, so I scoured bookstores and libraries. I'd find an article here or a chapter there, but the breakthrough was when I found Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood. Jr., the oral history by Rudolph Grey which had been used as the basis for Burton's film. Grey's book not only has quotes from Wood's friends, relatives, and professional associates, but also the most complete Wood filmography I'd seen to that point. The range of films Ed worked on is mind-boggling. Though they were always low-budget, independent films, they encompassed any number of genres from Westerns to sexploitation to film noir, plus the science fiction and horror for which he was best known. Meanwhile, in the main body of Grey's book, the people who were closest to "Eddie" (as many call him) often contradict each other with their testimony. Naturally, I was left with a nagging question: "Who exactly was Edward D. Wood, Jr.?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So here we are, twenty plus years after that first movie marathon, and I find that my interest in Edward D. Wood, Jr. has not abated. Over the years, I've acquired as many of Ed's films as I could track down. There's no way to be an Ed Wood completist the way you can be for, say, Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese, respectable directors whose careers have been documented and preserved much more carefully. Ed worked in various capacities (writer, actor, director, assistant) on any number of films under any number of names over the course of a 30-year career. Some of his work has been lost forever, and much has gone undocumented. Grey assembled what he could from the best sources available, but there is no way of knowing how many films employed Mr. Wood's services. No two Ed Wood filmographies are the same. The IMDb  has its list, Grey has his, and Wikipedia has a third. It can be dizzying, frustrating, and even maddening to try to assemble it all into one "definitive" list. Pictured below is my personal "Ed Wood" stash:

My ragtag assortment of VHS tapes and DVDs comprising much of Ed Wood's film work.

Foolish as it may seem, I have decided to try and make sense of the man through his work and then document my findings here on my blog. This new, limited-run series beginning tomorrow, July 10, has a self-explanatory title: Ed Wood Wednesdays. Each humpday for roughly 10 weeks, maybe more, I will be looking at the films of this eccentric and inscrutable man. As I've said, there's no way to be definitive about this, but I've managed to arrange the films I can find into a roughly chronological order. The first article, to be published on July 10, will cover Ed's earliest work from 1948 to 1953. I very much hope that you will join me as I make my way through his filmography.

Mill Creek comedy classics #36: "Palooka" (1934)

"And there's where Lupe Velez bought the toilet she drowned in! - John Waters on The Simpsons

The flick: Palooka (An Edward Small/United Artists Picture, 1934) [buy the set]

Current IMDb score: 5.8

Director: Benjamin Stoloff (maker of "B" Westerns and comedy shorts; directed Soup to Nuts, a 1930 film featuring the film debut of the Three Stooges before Curly joined the act)

Lupe Velez

Actors of note: Jimmy Durante ("The Great Schnozzola"; famed musical comedian of radio, film, and vaudeville known for his oversized nose, rumpled hat, gravelly voice, and numerous catchphrases; Smiler Grogan in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the narrator of TV's Frosty the Snowman), Stuart Erwin (Heading for Heaven), Lupe Velez ("The Mexican Spitfire" of '30s and '40s "B" comedies; married for five years to Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller; committed suicide at 36 and inspired a nasty urban legend), Thelma Todd (The Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers and Monkey Business; died mysteriously at the age of 29 the year after this movie came out); Louise Beavers (Never Wave at a WAC; Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus): Fred "Snowflake" Toones (Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington;  Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, much more; mainly a shoe shiner or bootblack in "B" Westerns), Mary Carlisle (Grand Hotel), Marjorie Rambeau (Man of a Thousand Faces), Robert Armstrong (King Kong), Tom Dugan (The Best Years of Our Lives, To Be or Not to Be); William Cagney (lookalike brother of James Cagney; did a little acting in the '30s and producing in the '40s and '50s, including Yankee Doodle Dandy)

A Joe Palooka comic

The gist of it: New York, circa 1914. Boxer Pete Palooka (Armstrong) becomes champ but can't keep away from cheap blondes like Trixie (Todd), so his wife, Broadway singer Mayme Palooka (Rambeau), leaves him and takes their little son, Joey, with her. Twenty years later, Mayme lives on a farm with a now-grown Joe Palooka (Erwin), a dim but likable lug who's dating sweet country girl Anne (Carlisle). Pete, who never actually divorced Mayme, travels around the world on his ship and sends postcards* to the farm occasionally. One day, purely by accident, Joe meets boxing manager Knobby Walsh (Durante) and impresses him by knocking out a professional fighter with one punch. Knobby signs the novice to a contract and promises to turn him into a champ. Knowing his mother is bitterly against the fight game (and with good reason), Joe tells Mayme that Knobby's in the "leather business." The country boy then goes to New York City to follow in his old man's footsteps. Joe's hopeless as a boxer and immediately loses his first match, but his lack of skill lands him a second fight against the obnoxious champ, Al McSwatt (Cagney), whose manager is looking for bums that his man can slaughter. But McSwatt doesn't take the fight seriously and arrives drunk with his mistress, nightclub singer Nina (Velez). Joe manages to beat the inebriated McSwatt for the championship, becomes a highly-paid celebrity overnight, and very quickly acquires a swelled head, while scoring Nina as his new girlfriend. Knowing Joe's no boxer, Knobby pays a series of fighters to take dives against him. But McSwatt tricks him into a rematch, which puts Knobby in a tricky situation. Both of Joe's parents arrive in NYC -- Mom to try to talk him out of it, Dad to train him for the fight. It all builds to an action-packed climax at Madison Square Garden.

* The postcard we see in this film has an uncensored picture of topless native girls on it. The censors were apparently fine with this. I guess it's an example of what Roger Ebert called "the National Geographic exception."

Jimmy Durante's famous profile.

My take: I was looking forward to Palooka for a number of reasons. First, it was based on a comic strip, Ham Fisher's phenomenally successful Joe Palooka, which lasted from 1930 to 1984. Fisher himself only lasted until 1955, when failing health caused him to take an intentional overdose of medication and die. He'd been through a bizarre and bitter feud with fellow cartoonist Al Capp, whose Lil' Abner also became the basis for a movie in this series! Just as Skippy is mostly remembered for inspiring a brand of peanut butter and Buster Brown a line of shoes, Joe Palooka's lasting contribution to our culture was making the word "palooka" a synonym for "boxer" or, more generally, any big, dumb bruiser. Hitman John Travolta uses it to express his utter contempt for washed-up fighter Bruce Willis in the bar scene from Pulp Fiction. In his heyday, Joe appeared in newspapers and comic books, plus a number of feature films and a radio show, while inspiring all kinds of merchandise from board games to watches. I was curious to see what the fuss was all about. It's a little hard to tell from this film, which is very similar plotwise to The Milky Way, the Harold Lloyd flick I reviewed just five days ago. Even more enticing than the franchise was the cast. I already knew amiable lunkhead Stuart Erwin, who's passable if not too exciting as the title character, from Heading for Heaven, but I was much more intrigued by the presence of Jimmy Durante and Lupe Velez, two performers whose outsized personalities are actually much more famous than the films they made. A bundle of energy, Durante is the engine driving this movie. Imagine his character, Knobby, as a sort of deranged, joke-cracking version of Burgess Meredith from the Rocky series. He doesn't show up for the first few minutes of this film, and the opening suffers for it. I mentioned being disappointed by the workaday nature of the crooks in The Nut Farm. Well, this film finally offered me the desperate, shameless, half-genius, half-lunatic kind of conman I wanted in the form of Knobby Walsh, a manager so unethical he makes Don King* look like a choirboy yet who has such a zest for life that we can't possibly dislike him. (Though one scene in which he high-pressures Nina may make contemporary women uncomfortable. The expression "no means no" hadn't been invented yet.) If I mention Durante's name, you probably think of the song "Inka Dinka Doo." Well, he performs his signature ditty in one gratuitous but entertaining scene which has him break a store window while in a drunken stupor and serenade a mannequin. If that's not enough "Inka Dinka Doo" for you, the song plays as an instrumental in the background at least three more times. If you want one of Durante's other catchphrases -- "Hot cha cha cha cha!" -- you'll have to wait until the very end. I'll warn you, though, that the context for that line in this movie is particularly disturbing and might cause you nightmares. (Hint: then- 41-year-old Durante, who looks 60 at least, is dressed as a baby when he says it.) Much more aesthetically pleasing is Ms. Lupe Velez, a very sexy Mexican-American actress whose film career has possibly been overshadowed by a lurid story about her which avant-garde-filmmaker-turned-gossip-monger Kenneth Anger included his infamous and frequently-banned book Hollywood Babylon (1965). Fans of that book and of old-school Hollywood scandal in general will also be intrigued by the presence of Thelma Todd in this film. Thelma's death -- possibly murder, possibly suicide -- is one of those stories perfect for speculative basic-cable documentaries.

*Oddly, Al McSwatt's loss to Joe Palooka was echoed in real life by Mike Tyson's unexpected defeat at the hands of flash-in-the-pan Buster Douglas.

Is it funny: For a long stretch in the middle, yes! And that's mostly thanks to Durante, though Lupe Velez gets in a few good lines and Marjorie Rambeau is fun as Joe's mother, a broad who's been around the block a few times and who brooks no nonsense. The big Velez-Rambeau confrontation is a highlight of Palooka. As I mentioned earlier, the movie gets off to kind of a sluggish start but is given a jolt by the addition of Knobby Walsh. Joe Palooka himself is kind of an empty vessel. It's sort of fun to watch him become an arrogant and free-spending jerk (the scene in which he poses for ads is another high point), but a better actor than Erwin might have gotten a bit more comedic mileage out of this. The climactic fight between Al McSwatt and Joe Palooka starts as comedy, but then becomes action/suspense and ends as drama. The movie's tone is downbeat for quite a bit, and it has the effect of letting the air out of the tires right when the humor should be building. When the film tries to shift back into "comedy mode" for the last few minutes, it all falls a little flat. I suppose that's appropriate, since our titular pugilist spends a fair amount of time falling flat himself.

My grade: B



P.S. - Yes, I'm still looking for racial stereotypes in these films. Louise Beavers plays yet another domestic, this time on Ma Palooka's farm. Her role is not terribly demeaning, though, and again Beavers' talent and humanity shine through the cliched part. At one point, though, she says that the only rooster she wants to see is "a black one strutting down Lenox Avenue." (Evidently, she worked for Mayme back in the New York days.) Fred Toones, billed only as "Snowflake," has a good amount of screen time as some kind of assistant to Knobby or Joe, but I don't think he speaks a solitary word. In the opening credits, Beavers and Toones share the screen when their names appear, but they don't have any scenes together in the movie. It's debatable whether Lupe Velez's character constitutes a negative Mexican stereotype. She seems to have made a career of her ethnicity and definitely exaggerates the accent for comic effect. The movie treats her as kind of a slut, the "bad girl" to Mary Carlisle's blonde-haired "good girl." For balance, though, the movie also has a blonde slut character. Progress!

Mill Creek comedy classics #35: "The Nut Farm" (1935)

The Nut Farm's title has both a literal and a figurative meaning... which the script brings up many, many times.

The flick: The Nut Farm (Monogram Pictures, 1935) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Melville W. Brown (directed an Amos n' Andy vehicle called Check and Double Check; died three years after this movie of a heart attack at age 50)

Actors of note: Wallace Ford (Money Means Nothing), Betty Alden (uncredited bit part in Captains Courageous), Florence Roberts (Babes in Toyland, The Life of Emil Zola), Spencer Charters (Lonely Wives), Bradley Page (The Marx Brothers' The Big Store, Freckles Comes Home), Oscar Apfel (Manhattan Melodrama, aka the movie John Dillinger saw before he was shot outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago in 1934)

The gist of it: Bob and Helen Bent (Apfel and Alden) decide to sell Bob's business for $40,000 (the equivalent today of $680K) and move to California, where they stay at the home of Helen's mother (Roberts) and her brother, Willie Barton (Ford), an "assistant director" who hasn't worked in six weeks. Bob and Helen have different plans for the forty g's. Bob wants to buy a 50-acre nut arm, but Helen wants to give the money over to smooth-talking Hollywood hustler Hamilton T. Holland (Page) who swears he can turn Helen into a movie star if she'll just finance her own starring vehicle. Willie, who knows Holland's a fake, tries to talk Bob and Helen out of it. But they sign their money over to Holland anyway, and Mr. Sliscomb (Charters) -- Willie's landlord and future father-in-law -- puts in an additional ten grand. Willie agrees to direct the production, a terrible desert romance called Scorching Passions, to see that things don't get too far out of hand. However, the resulting picture is a disaster, and it looks like Bob, Helen, and Sliscomb have lost their money. The day is saved when Willie overhears one patron say that Scorching Passions is funnier than most comedies, which gives the young director an idea so crazy it just might work!

Isn't it cool? The highlight of the movie.

My take: The words "Monogram Pictures" do not exactly fill me with confidence at the beginning of a movie. Thus far in this series, Monogram has produced some of the films I've liked the least, and the closest thing they've gotten to an endorsement from me was a generous grade of B- awarded to The Gang's All Here, namely because that movie had a positive Asian-American character and also featured the guy who did the voice of Lampwick in Pinocchio. This one, The Nut Farm, got off to a good start because it was the first of the Monogram films I've seen to feature the company's fanciful animated logo, in which a plane and a zeppelin soar over a très moderne art-deco city while state-of-the-art trains pull the words "Monogram" and "Pictures" onto the railroad tracks. The film is a letdown from there, though. Like Hollywood and Vine and The Groom Wore Spurs, it's a behind-the-scenes Hollywood satire, but all three movies could have been a lot sharper and, to put it bluntly, nastier. Bradley Page's character is an obvious crook with his honeyed tone of voice and gift for insincere flattery, but he's not a shameless, tasteless, brilliant-in-his-own way conniver like Zero Mostel's Max Bailystock. Likewise, Betty Alden -- who never really did make it in Hollywood after all -- is mildly diverting as a deluded housewife who thinks she's Hollywood's next big thing, but this character could have been played much more broadly and crazily. Wallace Ford is back as the hero, and just like he demonstrated in Money Means Nothing, his comedic arsenal largely consists of dry wisecracks and a few self-satisfied smirks. Seemingly, every movie in this collection needs at least one curmudgeon who loses his temper on a regular basis, but Oscar Apfel's would-be nut farmer, Bob Bent, is one of the milder examples of the species. Ditto Spencer Charters as the semi-obligatory "dotty old-timer" character. The movie sets up its conclusion well in advance of the actual ending of the picture. Yeah, we get it. Scorching Passions is "so bad it's good" and could be marketed as a comedy. But first we have to endure several interminable and unfunny contract-signing sequences which spoil the movie's momentum. The credits say things thing was based on a stage play. I hope the live version was a little... uh, livelier than this. Incidentally, Melville W. Brown's IMDb biography claims he was a member of Charlie Chaplin's stock company in the late 1910s, but I could find no confirmation of this. I did, however, find this ancient issue of Variety which apparently deemed it noteworthy that Brown was "finishing the fist Al St. John comedy at the Astra studio in Glendale." I can find no record of any such film ever being completed or released.

Is it funny: Sort of, from time to time. I liked Lorin Raker and Arnold Gray as Hamilton Holland's sleazeball cronies, two unemployable creeps passing themselves off as a "writer" and an "actor" respectively. And Bradley Page has a few nice moments as Holland himself, a gentlemen thief with an excuse for every occasion. Watch the deft way he handles it when Helen shows up at his office the very moment the furniture is being repossessed. But certain surefire comic set pieces, like a sequence in which Raker reads his script to the potential backers while Charters makes constant corrections and criticisms, just don't have the oomph they should have. And, really, we should have gotten to see more of Scorching Passions. I mentioned Max Bialystock earlier, and in his case, we in the audience do get to watch a good-sized chunk of his anti-masterpiece, Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgarden, so we know what the audience is laughing at.

My grade: C+



P.S. - No stereotypes here. Move along, folks.

Mill Creek comedy classics #34: "Nothing Sacred" (1937)

That means The Merry Suicide. The French really know how to sell a picture, huh?

The flick: Nothing Sacred (Selznick International Pictures, distributed by United Artists, 1937) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 7.3

Director: William A. Wellman (The Ox-Bow Incident, The Public Enemy, A Star is Born [1937, won Oscars for writing and directing]; known as a hell-raiser who hated actors; married four times; made 83 movies in 38 years)

Margaret Hamilton; Billy Barty

Actors of note: Carole Lombard (aka "the Profane Angel"; starred in To Be or Not to Be, My Man Godfrey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, much more; died in a plane crash at age 33), Fredric March (Oscar winner for The Best Years of our Lives and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; nominated three more times; starred in Inherit the Wind, Seven Days in May, a great deal more), Charles Winninger (Destry Rides Again, State Fair, Show Boat), Walter Connolly (It Happened One Night, Libeled Lady), Sig Ruman (Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and The Fortune Cookie, the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, and A Night in Casablanca), Frank Fay (Vaudeville star; was married to Barbara Stanwyck), "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom (Hall of Fame boxer; appeared The Bellboy, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, etc.), Margaret Hamilton (two years from playing The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz; appeared in Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud, William Castle's 13 Ghosts, much more), Raymond Scott and his Quintette (TV's Your Hit Parade; recorded "Powerhouse" and other music featured in Warner Brothers cartoons and The Ren & Stimpy Show), Billy Barty (Willow, Legend, UHF, The Bride of Frankenstein, Foul Play, too much more to mention), Troy Brown, Sr. (The Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races), Hattie McDaniel (Goodbye Love), Charles Lane (The Milky Way), Hedda Hopper (B-movie actress turned infamous gossip columnist; known as "Queen of the Quickies"), Tenen Holtz (Money Means Nothing)

Other notables: Original music by Oscar Levant (eccentric pianist, composer, noted wit, and member the Algonquin Round Table). Among those who contributed to the screenplay: Ben Hecht (so-called "Shakespere of Hollywood" and the credited screenwriter), James H. Street (given a "story by" credit), Moss Hart, Ring Lardner, Jr. (member of the Hollywood 10), George S. Kaufman, Budd Schulberg, George Oppenheimer, plus Wellman himself and producer David O. Selznick.

Big faker Carole Lombard

The gist of it: Hotshot Morning Star reporter Wally Cook (March) is in the doghouse with his temperamental editor, Oliver Stone (Connolly) after his latest discovery, a supposedly wealthy Eastern "potentate," turns out to be a plain old shoe shiner named Ernest Walker (Brown). Wally, Oliver, and the Star are the laughingstock of New York. But Wally promises his boss he's found his next great story -- a young Vermont woman named Hazel Flagg (Lombard) who's dying of "radium poisoning" from the local factory. Wally takes the first train to Hazel's hometown, Warsaw, to meet her in person. Meanwhile, Hazel's frequently-soused doctor, Enoch Downer (Winninger), has made a terrible discovery: Hazel isn't dying of anything. This upsets Hazel greatly, since she was looking forward to spend her life savings to finally get out of Warsaw on a big farewell spree. Unaware of this new diagnosis, Wally catches Hazel as she emerges in tears from Dr. Downer's office and vows to take her and the good doctor back with him to New York. They agree, and soon Hazel is the toast of New York, gracing the cover of the Morning Star every day with gigantic headlines and inspiring tributes from all corners. Everywhere she goes, Hazel is treated as one of the greatest heroes in American history for her bravery in the face of death... even though she's not actually dying. Everything is going swimmingly until Wally, who has fallen in love with Hazel, brings in another doctor, the eminent medico Emil Eggelhoffer (Ruman), to examine the supposedly doomed girl. Desperate to keep her secret, Hazel will try anything, including faking her own suicide or feigning the symptoms of pneumonia, to keep from being exposed as a fraud. And once he learns the truth, Wally has no choice but to assist Hazel in perpetrating a public fraud.

Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole

My take: A comedy about the phoniness of the newspaper industry in particular and fraudulent media sensations in general, Nothing Sacred reminded me a bit of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), in which Kirk Douglas's unscrupulous reporter needlessly prolongs the rescue of a man trapped in a mine simply for the publicity and money it's generating. But Wilder's film, which was remade on The Simpsons as "Radio Bart," is much darker and is genuinely dismayed at human nature, while Wellman's film takes mankind's dishonesty as a given and cheerfully shrugs it off. Many tears are shed in this film over Hazel Flagg, and Nothing Sacred scoffs at every last one of them. On The Simpsons, fictional urchin "Timmy O'Toole" (actually Bart playing a prank) is treated like a hero simply for falling in a well, just as Hazel is elevated to the status of a goddess for contracting "radium poisoning." In an incredible bit of timing, the previous article I wrote for this blog discusses "Hearts and Flowers," the song used in movies and television to denote false sympathy or mock tragedy. And, sure enough, that very tune plays on the soundtrack when a weepy Ernest, a fraud himself, reads Hazel's phony suicide note -- a document he discovered while ransacking her hotel room! The movie tells us that we pretend to mourn for public figures because it makes us feel better about ourselves, not because we really care about them. The closest this movie comes to sentimentality is in its depiction of Wally and Hazel's improbable love for one another, but even here, Wellman does not overplay his hand. Our lovebirds are never allowed to get cozy and romantic, at least not for long, before some new calamity arises. Besides, both characters are such utter goofballs that we don't really take them seriously as romantic figures.

Drew Friedman''s portrait of Raymond Scott

Beyond its parody of media sensationalism, Nothing Sacred is mainly interested in being a non-stop three-ring circus of entertainment. This is zany, fast-paced, sketch-comedy style humor which leans toward cartoon-like exaggeration rather than naturalism. The tone is set during the opening credits, which feature hand-painted, three-dimensional caricatures of the movie's four main actors. These grotesque figures are not unlike the Spitting Image puppets of the 1980s. It's no surprise to learn that the film's daffy, anything-goes script was used as the basis of a Martin and Lewis remake, Living It Up, seventeen years later. While there's an escalating narrative throughout the entire film, Nothing Sacred also works as a series of vignettes, as when Wally arrives in Warsaw and is given the cold shoulder there by the tight-lipped townsfolk (including Margaret Hamilton) who mainly limit their responses to "yep" and "nope" and expect to be paid for their time. Then, there's a scene at a wrestling match (featuring Rosenbloom) which satirizes the staged phoniness of the sport -- tame by today's standards but ridiculous nevertheless. At one point, the wrestlers stop what they're doing for a ten-second moment of silence in Hazel's honor and then pick right back up again where they left off, which is to say knotted up in a human pretzel with the referee! Possibly the most bizarre sequence is one set at a nightclub, where there is a musical tribute to the greatest women of history in Hazel's honor. While Raymond Scott and his band, unseen but unmistakable, play "novelty swing" arrangements of songs like "Yankee Doodle" and "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," showgirls dressed as Lady Godiva, Catherine the Great, and Pocahontas parade across the stage in a garish, tasteless spectacle. Honestly, the participation of Raymond Scott in this movie excited me more than that of Carole Lombard or Fredric March. Though I'd been unwittingly exposed to his melodies for years thanks to Warner Brothers cartoons, I truly learned to appreciate Scott's oddball style of jazz through The Ren & Stimpy Show, which employed Scott's original recordings. It's nice that this eccentric musical innovator was able to enjoy a resurgence in popularity (including CD reissues of his work) before he died in 1994. More troubling, though, is the fate of Carole Lombard, who died only five years after this movie. The whole plot is predicated upon the fact that Ms. Lombard has a long, healthy life ahead of her. Unfortunately, we in the audience know otherwise.

The three-dimensional caricatures from Nothing Sacred. Compare these to the Spitting Image puppets.

Is it funny: Yes, for the most part. This is one of those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink movies, so some scenes are bound to work better than others for you as a viewer depending on what you find funny. For instance, I found it quite amusing when a group of schoolchildren gather outside Hazel's hotel room door while she's terribly hungover and serenade her with a rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," whose lyrics have been changed in her honor. But the ending of that scene, in which a squirrel crawls out of one boy's pocket and finds its way into Hazel's bed, didn't work for me. I tend to enjoy fast-paced newspaper comedies with cranky editors, so I got a lot of laughs out of Walter Connolly's character, Oliver, who is so fed up with Wally that he threatens to remove him "from the land of the living" and reassigns him to the obituary department. Then again, some Swedish dialect comedy with a fireman (actually played by Canadian John Qualen) who comes to rescue the faux-suicidal Hazel didn't even raise a smile out of me. As for the film's violent comedic climax... well, it's tough to say. Without spoiling anything, I can say that I was genuinely surprised by it, possibly too shocked to actually laugh. It's a joke you'd never see in a modern live-action comedy, but it would be par for the course on Family Guy or an Adult Swim series. It's no coincidence that I keep making references to animation in this article. Nothing Sacred is that kind of movie.

My grade: A-



P.S. - This film starts with a heaping helping of racial stereotypes in the form of "shoeshine boy" Ernest Walker, whom Wally once refers to as "Old Black Joe" and whose exposure as a fraud causes Oliver to be serenaded with "Dixie" wherever he goes. Hattie McDaniel, two years from her Oscar-winning role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, plays Mrs.Walker, who shows up with her children at a gala event where her husband is pretending to be a foreign dignitary and shouts, "That's my husband!" as he bestows his benevolent blessing on the crowd. Later, Ernest will attempt to steal flowers from Hazel's hotel room to bring back to his wife. (He tells her he's getting the flowers "wholesale.") To be fair to Ernest, he does experience genuine sorrow when he discovers what he believes to be Hazel's suicide note. But for the most part, this is a dishonest, slow-witted, and buffoonish character. And it doesn't end with Ernest. There's an Uncle Tom's Cabin joke, too, and a rendition of "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground." So maybe this isn't one to play during Black History Month.

Name That Tune: Six more songs you didn't know you knew

Tom Kennedy hosted the 1970s version of Name That Tune.

One of the stated goals of Dead 2 Rights has been to give its readers exactly what they want, and I've noticed that among the most consistently popular articles in the blog's history is this piece about tough-to-identify songs. It seems to generate traffic every month, and since this happens to be a particular interest of mine, I am more than happy to bring you a sequel. I once thought about devoting this entire blog to the issue of "song identification," but instead I decided to limit it to these occasional updates. Hopefully, you'll find this one interesting and informative. "But hey," as Marty DiBergi (aka Rob Reiner) once memorably declared, "enough of my yakkin'! Whaddaya say? Let's boogie!"

1. "Hearts and Flowers"

Bugs Bunny feigns death.

This maudlin melody (the famous part kicks in at 0:19), written in 1893 by Theodore Moses-Tobani and based on a melody from Hungarian composer Alphons Czibulka, has an extremely specific function in popular culture: mock sympathy. It is used, normally in cartoons (especially Looney Tunes, where it was used to underscore those "Ya got me, doc!" moments when Bugs Bunny pretended to be shot) but sometimes in live-action comedies (such as A Christmas Story, during the sequence when Ralphie imagines himself as a blind beggar) and even occasionally in real life, to belittle someone else's misfortune or imply that a person is overstating the nature of a supposed "tragedy." When people do that "world's smallest violin" joke by rubbing their thumb and index finger together, this is likely the melody they will hum in accompaniment. Modern listeners may have the mistaken impression that "Hearts and Flowers" was used frequently in silent films, but this does not seem to have been the case.

2. "Hernando's Hideaway"

Billy Crystal as "Fernando."

I said in the last article that if people knew just one piece of tango music, it's "La Cumparsita." If they know two, the second is likely "Hernando's Hideaway." (The part you know starts at 0:45.) Ironically, the latter is not an authentic South American tango at all, but rather a Broadway showtune written by Jerry Ross and Richard Adler for the 1954 musical The Pajama Game. "Hernando's Hideaway," which has words but is often performed as an instrumental, has been recorded by a whole host of artists from Ella Fitzgerald and Mantovani to Homer & Jethro and the Everly Brothers. The version I'm including here is by 1950s pop-jazz bandleader Dick Schory, who is still veactive today and with whom I have played many shows as part of the Glenview Concert Band. And, yes, this song did provide the inspiration for "Fernando's Hideaway," a popular recurring skit on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1980s, featuring Billy Crystal as a silver-haired Latin talk show host modeled after Fernando Lamas. This sketch, which used "Hernando's Hideaway" as its theme, introduced Crystal's famous catchphrase, "You look marvelous!"

3. Minuet from String Quartet in E Major, Op. 11 No. 5

Krusty with typical snob.

This minuet, composed in 1771 by Luigi Boccherini, is another piece of music with a very particular cultural connotation. Specifically, it evokes the stuffy, old-fashioned gentility of the moneyed upper class. For whatever reason, this particular piece of music has become the anthem of the snobs in countless "slobs vs. snobs" comedies. In movies, you'll hear it at fancy restaurants, exclusive country clubs, and refined cocktail parties. It doesn't represent sophistication so much as it represents a silly parody of sophistication. Very often when you hear this tune, an uncouth buffoon is about to show up and spoil the rich folks' tranquility with his crude language and gross behavior, causing a gray-haired matron to put her hand to her chest and declare, "Well, I never!" Because of this music's sissified nature, furthermore, it is often used by comedians in a sarcastic or ironic way, i.e. the coda to "Heavy Duty" by Spinal Tap. Elsewhere, this music turns up in Family Guy, Date Movie, Animaniacs, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Witless Protection with Larry the Cable Guy, always used in pretty much the same way. Sorry, Luigi.

4. "Chicken Reel"

The sheet music.

You might not even think of "Chicken Reel" as being a song or guessed that it was ever written by anyone. It's so deeply ingrained in our culture as a signifier of rural life in general and farming in particular that we may not even notice it. But, yes, it was written by Joseph M. Daly in 1910 as a reel, i.e. a two-step folk dance which had originated in Scotland but had traversed the Atlantic and found favor in America and Canada. "Chicken Reel," then, was the 1910 equivalent of what we'd today call a club banger. This was a tune designed to get people out on the dance floor. This particular reel, as you might guess from the title, was meant to imitate the sound of chickens clucking in a barnyard. It was given lyrics by Joseph Mittenthal in 1911 and has been covered and rearranged many times over the last century, including versions by Leroy Anderson and Les Paul. Its real legacy, though, lies in innumerable cartoons, movies, and commercials where its presence instantly suggests we are "down on the farm." You'll hear it in A Christmas Story in scenes involving the hound dogs owned by the Parkers' "hillbilly neighbors," the Bumpasses.

5. "Sleep Walk"

"Sleep Walk" was memorably used in the 1987 film La Bamba. So memorably used, in fact, that people mistakenly believe it was recorded by that film's subject, the late Ritchie Valens. It wasn't. "Sleep Walk" -- and, officially, the title is two separate words -- was instead the creation of an Italian-American brother act called Santo & Johnny, who took the dreamy, otherworldly tune to #1 in 1959. Originally called "Deep Sleep," it was the slowed-down simplification of a jazz standard called "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise." The brothers wrote a set of lyrics for the famous melody, which Besty Brye included in her cover, but their hit version was an instrumental. That's why the title of this tune is not as well known as it ought to be. I can't imagine how many people have bothered record store clerks over the years by singing or humming this song because they didn't know the name. Santo, the innovator of the family, played the melodic line on the steel guitar, while brother Johnny accompanied him on a standard electric guitar. They made the Top 40 just once more with a similar-sounding follow-up called "Teardrop." Santo's retired now, but Johnny still tours with a new band. "Sleep Walk," meanwhile, has been covered by axemen ranging from Brian Setzer to Carlos Santana.

6. "Dance of the Knights" (or "Montagues and Capulets")

A smelly ad.

One of the most sinister, foreboding pieces of music I have ever heard, "Dance of the Knights" or "Montagues and Capulets" was written in 1935 by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev for his popular ballet, Romeo and Juliet. But Sergei didn't write that famous fantasy overture about Shakespeare's doomed couple. That was Tchaikovsky about 65 years earlier. And he didn't write the couple's hit love theme either. That was Henry Mancini about 34 years later. Prokofiev's famous piece comes from Act I, Scene 2 of his ballet and was intended to create an ominous mood during a scene in which it serves as the somber accompaniment to a dance by Juliet's family. The creepy but catchy tune has been adapted by many rock bands, ranging from Iron Maiden to the Smiths, which is one hell of a range. In England, it's the theme music for The Apprentice, and it's been used to sell everything from Egoiste perfume to the movie Caligula. I'm sure that's not what Sergei would have intended or wanted for this particular piece, but that's the way the historical cookie crumbled, so to speak.

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So there you have it! Six more musical mysteries solved. If you'd like to see more articles of this type, please let me know in the comments section below. Believe me, I have a bunch of 'em! And I'm open to requests, too.  Don't be shy! Speak right up!