Mill Creek comedy classics #14: "Behave Yourself!" (1951)

Farley Granger wants some of that sweet Shelley Winters action in Behave Yourself!

The flick: Behave Yourself! (RKO Radio Pictures, 1951) [buy the set]

Current IMDb score: 5.6

Director: George Beck (never directed again, but wrote Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! for Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller and scripted a couple of Dobie Gillis episodes)

Henry Corden: Fred #2

Actors of note: Farley Granger, (Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train), Shelley Winters (Lolita, Night of the Hunter, The Poseidon Adventure, etc., etc.), William Demarest (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Sullivan's Travels, played "Uncle Charley" on TV's My Three Sons, etc., etc.), Lon Chaney, Jr. (The Wolf Man, Of Mice and Men, almost 200 other movies), Elisha Cook, Jr. (Rosemary's Baby, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, 200+ more), Hans Conried (The Great Dictator, voice of Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan, voice of Snidely Whiplash on TV's Dudley Do-Right), Sheldon Leonard (It's a Wonderful Life, Guys and Dolls, produced TV shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, Make Room For Daddy, The Andy Griffith Show, etc.), Henry Corden (The Ten Commandments, The Asphalt Jungle; the second guy to voice Fred Flintstone, a part he played on and off for 30 years), Francis L. Sullivan (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist), Margalo Gillmore (High Society, The Trouble with Angels), Marvin Kaplan ("Uncle Pooch" in David Lynch's Wild at Heart; regular on TV's Alice), "Archie" the dog (not a damned thing else, but his IMDb biography is amusing)

Other notables involved: The film was shot by master cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose fifty-year career includes such classics as Seconds, The Thin Man, and the live-action segments of Fantasia, plus a whole lot more. The title song was co-written by (of all people) Buddy Ebsen of The Beverly Hillbillies. It seems like the only non-entity involved with this film was its writer-director!

The gist of it: Poor dope Bill Denny (Granger) needs an anniversary present to appease his demanding wife Kate (Winters) and his even-more-demanding mother-in-law (Gillmore). A stray terrier, Archie (himself), follows him home and... voila! Instant, albeit accidental, anniversary present! Trouble is, Archie is a specially-trained dog who is very much wanted by two groups of crooks (including Kaplan, Corden, Chaney, Sullivan, Leonard, Cook, and Conried) who are very willing to kill to get what they want. What follows is a comedy of errors with a higher body count than the Tate-LaBianca slayings.

The original 1950 edition of Dianetics.

My take: Imagine an Alfred Hitchcock "wrongly accused man" thriller, only filtered through a dog-centric episode of I Love Lucy, and you've got sort of an idea what Behave Yourself! is like. Farley Granger, who memorably starred in two Hitchcock pictures, is the unlucky schmuck here. Throughout the film, his character's story keeps getting wilder and wilder as dead bodies and counterfeit money pile up. Time and again, Bill Denny innocently turns up at murder scenes and then has to explain himself to some very dubious policemen, led by hot-tempered O'Ryan (Demarest), none of whom are interested in his pitiful alibis about a stray dog. The ad campaign for this flick clearly tried to present Granger's costar, Shelley Winters, as a curvaceous sex object. When she wears a dress with a low neckline in this film, her husband compliments her, "You've got the furniture for it!" Indeed, Shelley was a svelte and (by her own account) promiscuous young starlet in the 1940s and early '50s with a string of famous lovers whom she'd later betray in tacky tell-all books. She was pushing 30 when she made this film, and you can just see her becoming the Winters most of us know from her later years: the plump, bossy, hysterical loudmouth who amuses us while driving those around her to distraction. A mere 11 years later, she was the jealous mother of a teen sexpot in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, a woman who would be insufferable if she weren't also tragic. In Behave Yourself!, Shelley's character is supposed to be adorable, I think. She's sort of reminiscent of Lucille Ball here, only more mercenary and materialistic. Who else would marry this woman except the obviously-gay Farley Granger? His character is flustered, sweaty, and tongue-tied for virtually the entire running time, which gets a little wearying for the viewer. I almost wish this film had been made 20 years earlier with W.C. Fields in the lead role. This film's ending is a bit reminiscent of The Bank Dick, and Fields certainly would have been a more formidable adversary for Kate and her mother than weak-willed Granger. Speaking of that mother-in-law, though, there is one truly fascinating little detail in the script that goes by so quickly you might miss it. A running joke is that the mother has a lot of pretentious, trendy interests, and among those is Dianetics, the Scientologist manifesto L. Ron Hubbard had published only a year before! This must certainly be among the first cinematic references to that highly controversial movement. Oh, by the way, feminists and dog-lovers are likely to be appalled by the very last scene. What can I say? It was a different time.

Is it funny: Oh, sure, occasionally. Shelley Winters is her usual pain-in-the-neck self, but I was rather amused by her shameless greed and her casually forgiving attitude when she thinks her husband is a murderer. Considering all the famous character actors in the film, Francis L. Sullivan makes perhaps the strongest impression as rotund yet surprisingly elegant British gangster Fat Freddy, who makes his plans from a bubble bath while resting his head on an inflatable pillow.

My grade: B



P.S. - Nothing even close to a racial stereotype here. Again, no minorities whatsoever.

Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

Hollywood and Vine: You've seen the intersection, now see the movie!

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie), Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty), Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick), Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild), Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor"), Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950), Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met. Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero. Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy. The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle." Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it. By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that. Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak. Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-



P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.