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.

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.

Mill Creek comedy classics #33: "Never Wave at a WAC" (1953)

American hot WACs: Those dizzy dames won't leave soldiering to the menfolk in Never Wave at a WAC (1953).

"You know the glamour gals have stopped glamorizing. They're working in defense plants, wearing slacks. And some of the fine chicks are cutting out every day, joining the WAVES and the SPARS and the WACs." - Louis Jordan ("You Can't Get That No More," 1943)

The flick: Never Wave at a WAC (RKO Radio Pictures, 1953) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.1

Director: Norman Z. McLeod (The Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers and Monkey Business; W.C. Fields' It's a Gift; Bob Hope's Road to Rio and Paleface; also Topper, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, etc.)

General Omar Bradley

Actors of note: Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday, The Women, the title role in Auntie Mame), Paul Douglas (A Letter to Three Wives, Panic in the Streets, lots of TV anthologies), Marie Wilson (Babes in Toyland, Satan Met a Lady), Hillary Brooke (The Admiral Was a Lady), William Ching (In a Lonely Place, D.O.A.), Arleen Whelan (Young Mr. Lincoln), Leif Erickson (On the Waterfront, Invaders from Mars, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Snake Pit; shot down twice in WW2), Charles Dingle (Little Foxes, Duel in the Sun), Lurene Tuttle (Niagara, Sweet Smell of Success, Parts: The Clonus Horror; played Sheriff Chambers' wife in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho; did an ungodly amount of TV work), Regis Toomey (The Big Sleep, Guys and Dolls, Hitchcock's Spellbound, much more), Louise Beavers (Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus), General Omar Bradley ("the Soldier's General" portrays himself here; famed Army field commander in WW2 and last to receive five-star status; was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time he made this movie), Olan Soule (voice of Batman from 1968 to 1984; ubiquitous film/TV character actor; Hitchcock's North By Northwest, TV's Dragnet and The Andy Griffith Show, literally hundreds more credits)

Other notables: The score was composed by Elmer Bernstein, only his sixth movie. He did a couple hundred more over the next half-century, including Ghostbusters, To Kill a Mockingbird, Airplane!, The Great Escape, The Man with the Golden Arm, National Lampoon's Animal House, Stripes, Trading Places, The Magnificent Seven (probably his most famous score), and too many more to mention. Repeatedly hired by John Landis and Martin Scorsese. Won his only Oscar for Thoroughly Modern Millie, but was nominated ten more times. Worked his way up from Robot Monster to The Ten Commandments in just three years.

Roz Russell

The gist of it: Haughty Washington D.C. socialite Jo McBain (Russell), daughter of a prominent senator (Dingle), joins the Women's Army Corps in the hopes of joining her boyfriend, Lt. Col. Sky Fairchild (Ching), at his post in Paris. The senator promises his daughter she'll be commissioned as an officer, but when she gets to Fort Lee, VA, she finds out she'll be serving Uncle Sam as a regular private. While constantly infuriating her superiors with her unorthodox ways, Jo does make friends with another unlikely recruit, ex-showgirl and pinup girl Clara Schneiderman (Wilson), who wants desperately to bury her past as "Danger O'Dowd" and who immediately takes to army life. Sky promises Jo that she can still get her commission if she'll just be on good behavior during basic training, and for a while, she does try to do just that. But her ex-husband Andrew (Douglas), an ex-Army man and now a research scientist with whom Jo has a combative relationship, shows up at Fort Lee and decides he needs female soldiers for some tests he's running on various fabrics and goes out of his way to make sure Jo is one of the test subjects. He puts Jo through all kinds of endurance tests until she finally snaps. In front of her commanding officers, she slaps Andrew across the face and goes on a tirade about military life. After a hearing in which Andrew sticks up for Jo and places the blame on himself, our heroine is dismissed from service without graduating from basic training. Now "free," she's supposed to marry Sky, but she just can't leave the WACs -- or Andrew, for that matter -- behind her.

Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin

My take: You children of the Eighties might remember Private Benjamin, a 1980 Goldie Hawn vehicle which spawned a 1981-1983 TV series with Lorna Patterson. That hit movie was about a spoiled, silly woman who joins the U.S. Army and drives her superiors to distraction with her antics and general incompetence. People tend to forget that Goldie Hawn leaves the military midway through Private Benjamin and spends the last part of the movie mired in a lame story which has her almost marrying but then jilting total sleazeball Armand Assante. Never Wave at a WAC, its title a reference to two organizations which were created so women could serve during World War II, plays like a 1950s  version of Private Benjamin, only without the unnecessary Assante character. Like Judy Benjamin after her, Jo McBain drops out of the Army and almost forsakes her patriotic duty for marriage, but both women ultimately discover that military service has changed them for the better and that they are now stronger and more independent because of their experiences in basic training. The main difference is that Judy Benjamin is a directionless flake at the start of her movie, while Jo McBain is a force of nature from the moment we meet her. Roz Russell's first big scene in this movie is at a high society party she's hosting for all the movers and shakers in Washington. She glides from room to room, politicking, gossiping and networking like a seasoned professional. This was a few years before Ms. Russell would play her signature role, Mame Dennis in Auntie Mame, both on Broadway and onscreen, and it's easy to see Never Wave at a WAC as sort of a prequel to that famous film. The real fun of a story like this is, of course, the opportunity to see a unique individual whose quirky personality clashes with the rigidity of military life. That same basic idea has been the basis for, I'd estimate, a gazillion other movies, TV shows, cartoons, and comics -- everything from Beetle Bailey to Gomer Pyle USMC to Laverne and Shirley in the Army. Even Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs enlisted for a season of their show! This film is, plain and simple, Auntie Mame Joins the Army. Jo McBain arrives with lots of luggage and her own car at basic training and seems to regard the barracks as a kind of eccentric hotel, with the commanding officers as her personal servants. She calls lots of people "dahhhling" instead of "sir" or "ma'am" and frequently (and loudly) demands to speak to "someone in charge" whenever things don't go her way. In a war, she'd be about as useful as Lovey Howell from Gilligan's Island... until she learns her lesson, of course. I think by now you have an idea of what this film is like. If that description appeals to you, by all means watch Never Wave at a WAC. But you could skip it without missing anything vital. Incidentally, young Elmer Bernstein does establish himself as an up-and-comer with his witty and versatile score for this film. His music here is both comedic and militaristic, a combination which would serve him well many times in the future, particularly on Stripes (1981), another misfits-in-the-service comedy.

Is it funny: Sure, why not? This movie rests almost entirely on Roz Russell's broad shoulders. She is the star around whom the other characters all orbit, and the script seems tailor-made to suit her brassy-yet-refined personality. She's one of the few actresses who can make an air of regal superiority seem vaguely appealing. In the sidekick role, ditsy blonde Marie Wilson is just average in a role that Marilyn Monroe would have knocked out of the park. Wilson's romance with "singing sergeant" Noisy Jackson (Erickson) is largely a laughless, time-wasting enterprise. I suppose the movie's funniest scenes are those in which Andrew puts his ex-wife through test after test in rain, snow, mud, freezing temperatures, etc. Russell proves a surprisingly adept physical comic here. If any image sticks with me from this movie, it'll be Jo McBain tromping around in snowshoes on a treadmill.

My grade: B



P.S. - In terms of stereotypes, Louise Beavers is back as yet another domestic. As far as I can remember, other than a personal assistant, Jo McBain's servants are all black. But this might be reflective of the reality of the time, and the characters are not presented in a demeaning or exaggerated way whatsoever.

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Mill Creek comedy classics #32: "Money Means Nothing" (1934)

Try telling that to a landlord or a loan shark. See how far it gets you.

The flick: Money Means Nothing (Monogram Pictures, 1934) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.4

Director: Christy Cabanne (The Mummy's Hand; uncredited fill-in director on Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ [1925 version]; known for being prolific rather than talented; directed Life of Villa and The Life of General Villa, both featuring the real-life Pancho Villa)

Ford as "Phroso"

Actors of note: Wallace Ford (Harvey; Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and Spellbound; was "Phroso the Clown" in Tod Browning's Freaks), Gloria Shea (The Last Days of Pompeii; B-movie star from 1929-1936), Edgar Kennedy (Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus), Viven Oakland (Mutiny on the Bounty; worked with Laurel & Hardy in Way Out West and A Chump at Oxford), Eddie Tamblyn (Follow the Fleet; father of Russ Tamblyn and grandfather of Amber Tamblyn, who's married to David Cross), Betty Blythe (The Postman Always Rings Twice, My Fair Lady), Tenen Holtz (Nothing Sacred), Richard Tucker (first official member of the Screen Actors Guild; appeared in Wings, the first-ever Best Picture winner and The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie), Ann Brody (Three on a Match), Douglas Fowley (Singin' in the Rain, The Thin Man, TV credits ranging from Gunsmoke to CHiPs, a great deal more), Maidel Turner (It Happened One Night, The Raven)

The hero, heroine, and comic foil.

The gist of it: Against the wishes of her snooty family, rich party girl Julie (Shea) marries working stiff Kenny (Ford), an employee at an auto parts warehouse whose trucks have been getting hijacked an awful lot lately. Julie and Kenny move into a little Brooklyn apartment, where they are constantly being annoyed by their intrusive, overbearing neighbors, the Greens (Kennedy and Turner). Mr. Green happens to be Kenny's boss, so the couple is obliged to be nice to him. One night, Julie's wealthy relatives show up for her birthday, and the Greens invite themselves over for dinner, only to be offended by the way the rich folks treat them. In retaliation, Mr. Green fires innocent Kenny and tells the police he thinks Kenny is the one who's been tipping off the hijackers. His professional reputation ruined, Kenny cannot find employment, and soon the newlyweds are nearly destitute and must pawn their few possessions for food and rent. It's at this dark time when Julie discovers she's pregnant, but she still turns down an offer from her sister (Oakland) to rejoin the family and go to Europe. Kenny takes a job with an ex-coworker, Red Miller (Fowley), who turns out to be the real ringleader of the truck hijackers.

My take: Oh, goddammit. Another truck hijacking movie, Mill Creek? Wasn't The Gang's All Here enough? Money Means Nothing was made by cheapskate Monogram Pictures, so it probably always looked and sounded pretty crummy, but time has been particularly cruel to this thoroughly mediocre film, making the viewing experience even less pleasurable. The DVD version was clearly made from a clumsy VHS transfer, which in turn was mastered from a scratchy, badly faded print. The picture is so faint at times that the actors almost become invisible. But even if this film were given a meticulous, frame-by-frame restoration, it still wouldn't be any good. Apart from one pretty neat tracking shot (all but ruined by the DVD transfer), Christy Cabanne's direction is very flat-footed and unimaginative. Some poor dubbing adds to the film's technical woes. The script, which was "suggested" by a stage play, is very contrived and takes an unwelcome turn into melodrama about halfway through before morphing into a half-assed thriller. The leads are merely adequate. There is no reason to believe that Gloria Shea's vivacious character would fall instantly in love with an uninspiring dullard like Wallace Ford's tire salesman, simply because he makes a few limp wisecracks on the night of their first meeting. In all honesty, the rich girl is making a huge mistake by marrying this man and forsaking the family fortune, and the movie miscalculates badly by turning her into a noble martyr when she started the film as a fun-loving free spirit. In short, this film is a chore to watch. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this movie is that at least the hero and heroine share a double bed. A lot of the married couples in these movies have had separate twin beds... and even separate bedrooms!

The Greens are especially bad neighbors.

Is it funny: Nope. To be fair, Money Means Nothing stops being a comedy for a long, long stretch in the middle of the film and gets all weepy and depressing. Even at its best, though, it never rates any higher than "kind of cute." My favorite scene occurs early on when Julie's brother-in-law (Tucker) discovers that the young lady has spent hundreds of dollars on auto accessories and that one of the family's cars now has about half a dozen horns and all sorts of other unnecessary gizmos. (Further useless car parts are stockpiled in the garage.) The Greens should be a source of comedy in the film, but the nature of their revenge against Julie and Kenny makes them altogether too unpleasant to be amusing. The movie's best comic asset, beloved hothead Edgar Kennedy, is somewhat squandered here. If I could travel back in time and rewrite the script for this film -- and, believe me, that would be my top priority under such circumstances -- I'd completely ditch the truck hijacking angle along with any hint of melodrama and just turn Money Means Nothing into a comedy of manners. If there's any fun to be had here, it's from watching the young lovers deal with their tacky, talkative neighbors. My take on this material would emphasize that element of the script, seasoned with a bit of "culture clash"/snobs versus slobs humor. Even then, Money Means Nothing would probably still only rate a B+, but it would at least be more entertaining than the existing version.

My grade: C-



P.S. - No negative African-American stereotypes, but there are some questionable Jewish stereotypes, the first of their kind in this set. The Silvermans (Holtz and Brody) run a pawn shop where Julie goes to pawn the fur coat she got from her family at that fateful birthday party. The film portrays the elderly couple in a (basically) positive light, which is nice, but these characters border on cartoonish in their speech and mannerisms. So this is kind of a gray area.

"The Jetsons" predicted environmental disaster 51 years ago!

The Jetsons: Happy sci-fi family or harbingers of doom?

Where, exactly, does The Jetsons take place?

If your memory is a little hazy, you might have guessed that the Hanna Barbera animated series (1962-1963; 1984-1987) is set somewhere in outer space, like the vaguely similar, nearly contemporaneous live-action Lost in Space (1965-1968). But that's not accurate. Instead, The Jetsons takes place right here on Earth -- specifically the United States of America, judging by the characters' accents and the money they use. The titular family resides in a fictional and geographically vague locale called "Orbit City." Most sources claim that the events of the series occur in the year 2062, an assertion backed up by this vintage ABC network promo in which the show's main character, George Jetson (voiced by George O'Hanlon), mentions that he and his family live in "the 21st Century." The year 2062 seems logical, as it would be 100 years after the show's original premiere date.

Why so sullen, George?

So what is life like in 2062 America, according to The Jetsons? Most viewers would say that the show provides an overwhelmingly positive view of the future, with sleek architecture, clever appliances and computers which cater to every whim of the human race, and a labor-free, nine-hour work week. What's not to like about this world? Plenty. Though cheerful on the surface, The Jetsons contains some bleak omens for our planet and its inhabitants. When a feature-length film adaptation of the series finally appeared in 1990, that long-submerged pessimism rose to the surface. In other words, the subtext became just plain text. According to the environmentally-conscious script of Jetsons: The Movie, the surface of the earth has become uninhabitable due to pollution. This development should come as no surprise to long-time Jetsons viewers. The clues are all there in the original 1960s series, which debuted only a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The good news is, you don't have to watch beyond the first 60 seconds of any given episode of The Jetsons to find this. It's all right there in the opening credits. Let's examine this famous introduction carefully and consider its implications as we go. The renowned and innovative theme song by Hanna Barbera's house composer, Hoyt Curtain, is lyrically neutral to an almost suspicious extent. It is merely a roll call of the series' main characters.

Meet George Jetson!
His boy Elroy!
Daughter Judy!
Jane his wife!

The Jetsons was conceived, produced, and marketed as a counterpoint and companion series to The Flintsones, but that show's theme promised its viewers "a gay old time." The Jetsons makes no such promises. All its theme song  tells us is the names of four of its characters and their relationship to one another, with the father and lone breadwinner singled out as the hub or nexus of the family unit. That's it.
 
Visually, the title sequence begins by showing the vast, mysterious cosmos, but within seconds, our view settles on a familiar sight: Earth.

The vast cosmos; Earth comes into view.

We move in even closer to Earth and see a rather distorted view of North and South America. The Gulf of Mexico and the Hudson Bay are vastly expanded, while the western coast of South America, once the location of Chile, is submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. Then, suddenly, the screen is filled with arrows and triangles in a sudden cataclysm which suggests an explosion.

A distorted North and South America, then a cataclysmic explosion

Many multicolored fragments or particles now fill the air, seemingly the debris from the explosion we just witnessed. One might call it "cosmic confetti." This transports us to our first view of civilization on Earth: four futuristic-looking, domed buildings built atop what seem to be very tall stilts.

Floating particles; buildings on stilts.

But this world is not unoccupied! The Jetsons, a family of four, enter the frame in their glass-domed flying "aerocar," a miniature spaceship for this world without roads.  The ship/car flies past a cluster of domed buildings on stilts, all tethered to a floating satellite. The blue sky behind them, however, seems to be the same troposphere we humans currently occupy. The Jetsons make a sharp turn and fly past the logo for their own show.

The family's spaceship/car cruises past floating buildings, the show's logo.

Inside the vehicle, the father, George Jetson, places his son, Elroy, into a small, enclosed escape pod or personal transport device. He deploys this like a bomb from the floor of the ship, and little Elroy floats happily away through what still appears to be a normal blue sky.

George places Elroy in an glass bubble, which is then deployed from the ship.

Elroy's pod nears its destination: Little Dipper School, an enclosed building which is on stilts. The small group of trees or shrubs on the right is the only vegetation we have seen or will see, and it appears to be well away from the school. Paint swirls in the background vaguely suggest the outer atmosphere. Meanwhile, back in the Jetsons' rocket car, George presses a button, and his daughter Judy drops through the floor of the vehicle in her own bubble.

Elroy's school is also on stilts; daughter Judy is deployed through the bay door.

Judy's destination is Orbit High School, a free-floating, cantilevered structure with an adjoining stadium. The football field, separate from the main building, is entirely under glass. Meanwhile, George and his wife Jane engage in bit of comedic pantomime in which the wife takes her husband's wallet and, with it, most of his money. This green-colored currency seems to be regular American paper money, further reinforcing the notion that The Jetsons is set in the United States.

Judy's capsule flies toward her enclosed high school; Jane, with George's wallet, is deployed.

Jane's bubble takes her to the Shopping Center. Here, we find more enclosed domes on stilts. George's car finally arrives at his destination: Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc., his place of business. This is the first structure we have seen which is built on the surface of the planet. In the background we can see that other domes on stilts are likewise attached to the surface of our Earth. The terrain is eerily smooth and featureless. There is no nature -- no animals, no trees, only man-made structures.

The Shopping Center is on stilts; Spacely Space Sprockets, inc. is attached to the surface of the planet.

George parks his spaceship on a walkway outside the building. The dome on his car opens, and the driver steps into the open air, which must be at least temporarily breathable, as we see a woman walking her poodle, then various pedestrians, including a mother with a young child. George's car folds neatly into a briefcase. There does not seem to be any room for parked vehicles in this world of elevated, man-made structures.

George exits his car/ship in the open air; the car folds neatly into a briefcase.

A moving sidewalk or conveyer belt carries George, who remains motionless, into the building. His empty, featureless desk awaits him.The actual machinery and computers appear to be built into a wall and not connected at all to George's work station. He doesn't even seem to be supervising the machines, as his desk points the wrong way for that. It appears that George's "job" is to sit at a purely decorative desk and stare stupidly into space all day.

A conveyer belt carries George into his office, where his empty desk awaits.

With no need to move even a muscle, George is carried happily right to his desk, where he puts his feet up, leans back in his chair, and falls asleep. Technology has advanced to the point that he, the human being, is redundant and obsolete. This suits George, who is lazy and without ambition, fine. Throughout this entire sequence, he and his family have been in a state of total, almost unnerving bliss. They literally cannot stop smiling. Have they been lulled into a false sense of complacency? Has there been some kind of mass brainwashing or conditioning by the government?

George reaches his desk, then promptly falls asleep.

George then freezes in this napping position. Recalling the earlier "briefcase" gag with the aerocar, the image itself now folds up neatly. A black bar covers the right half of the screen, then a second black bar approaches from left until the screen is totally blank. It is as if George has been swallowed up.

Like the car we saw before, the image of George is neatly folded until it, too, disapears.

What are we to make of all of this? Earth has succumbed, apparently, to not one but many disasters. Machines have taken over. Humans are their slaves but have been tricked into thinking that they are the masters. Technology is the real ruling party in this world, and the natural world has been utterly obliterated, erased entirely from the globe. As we have seen, the Jetsons and those of this era have not transgressed our normal atmosphere. There is still at least some breathable air, and some (perhaps many) of the buildings are attached to the ground. But the air can't be too plentiful or too healthful, as the residents of this world spend most of their time either indoors or under glass domes. And why are so many of the buildings attached to long stilts while others simply float? My guess is that these were two solutions for dealing with rising ocean levels. At first, architects simply tried to raise the buildings off the ground by building them on these gigantic, precarious-looking columns. But eventually, technology allowed for buildings which would simply float above the earth's surface. Judy's school, for instance, is probably a newer building than Elroy's. In either event, the lone structure at ground level is an industrial complex which resembles a giant air filter. Perhaps Mr. Spacely, George's notoriously tightfisted boss, was too cheap to build a factory off the ground and just stayed where he was despite warnings from scientists and engineers. When the water levels rise, he'll be ruined.

So there you have it, folks? According to The Jetsons, Earth is doomed but we'll all be too artificially "blissed out" to even care. Happy viewing, folks!