In her first appearance in today’s comic, here’s Sophie Claus! That’s right, Mrs. Claus. Well… actually no. She’s Santa Claus’s daughter in law. We’ve actually met her husband a few times, though we’ll do that introduction properly later this week.
She generally finds herself in management positions and runs a tight ship. She certainly doesn’t take any guff from obsequious pixies!
For this week’s entry for this year’s Christmas Marathon, I watched classic Christmas comedies featuring some of the old school comic actors.
First on my list was George Pal’s The Great Rupert, directed by Irving Pichel, tells the story of an animal trainer who is down on his luck and behind on his rent. When he can’t get anybody interested in his trained squirrel act, he releases the squirrel, Rupert in Central Park. On the way out of the park, he runs into his old friend, the Amendola family led by father Louie, Jimmy Durante, move into the abandoned apartment themselves. Meanwhile, the apartment owners had just gotten a windfall of an annual of a weekly dividend check. Not wanting to Have to pay taxes on it, he hides the money a hole in the wall. Meanwhile, Rupert has returned to the home and does not like the idea of somebody shoving green paper into his bedroom. He throws it out where it falls into the Amendola household. Since it happens when Mrs. Amemdola is praying. It is perceived as a Christmas miracle.
Growing up all I knew about Jimmy Durante from cartoon parodies, so I could recognize his voice. Later I saw him in a two-minute cameo in the film It’ as well as some of his radio shows and found him far better than the parodies. For the most part, he’s what makes the film worth watching. The rest of the film is mostly fluffy Hallmark card material, and hardly worth watching. After Durante the best thing about this film is Rupert. Rupert is done in Pal’s Puppetoon style animation, which is surprisingly convincing.
In the next film, Sidney Lanfield’s The Lemondrop Kid, based on a short story of the same name by Damon Runyon, Bob Hope plays the titular character a small-time conman who makes his living by touting horses at a Florida racetrack. When he accidentally screws up a mobster’s bet. He finds himself having to pay the mobster 10,000 dollars by Christmas. Can he come up with a scan good enough to make this work?
While Hope’s performance is mostly solid I really don’t have much to say about this film. Mostly what it can be remembered for is this is the origin of the Christmas song “Silver Bells.”
Well ’tis the season, so It’s time for this year’s Christmas marathon. Starting things out are a pair of spy thrillers that just happen to take place during Christmas.
The first on the list, Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight, Gina Davis plays Samantha Caine a woman who showed up eight years ago pregnant with no memory. Over the years, she tried to find out who she was with the help of a private investigator, Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson) with no luck. Fortunately, she’s managed to adjust to her new life and has decided to move on. Her first step is to attend the Christmas parade as Mrs. Claus. Her face is seen on TV where she is recognized as an assassin named Charly Baltimore. Soon people from her past are coming to kill her and she has to remember or die.
This film was okay, with some good action. Samuel Jackson is as good as ever.
In the next film on my list Sydney Pollocks 3 Days of the Condor Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA analyst whose job is to read books to see if nobody is unwittingly revealing CIA plots and if there are any useful ideas. One day he comes back from work to find that everyone in his office has been murdered. Now he has to avoid the killers while trying to find out who ordered the hit.
This was a wonderfully suspenseful film. My favorite part was where Turner narrowly avoids being killed only to find himself sharing an elevator with his would-be killer, wonderfully played by Max Von Sydow.
I continued my break from anything too heavy in my film viewing and decided to mix two favorite genres, Musicals and Science Fiction. This didn’t go as well as I’d like. It was slim pickings, to begin with, and for once Scarecrow video was not guaranteed to have them. In the end, what I had can charitably describe as Fantasy Rock Operas.
The first on my list, Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone tells the story about a family who lives in a ramshackle old house with a Hellmouth in the basement. This leads to a strange zone that is very likely hell. For obvious reasons, the parents have forbidden the rest of the family too so much as go near the zone. Despite this people keep slipping, tripping and falling into the zone. Hilarity ensues.
To my surprise, I did know one thing about this film. It turns out that Elfman’s brother, Danny, who made his composing debut in this movie, recycled the film’s soundtrack for the soundtrack to the Dilbert Cartoon. This film is a strange tribute to Cab Calloway and twenties animation done on a shoestring budget. I’d like to say it’s terrible but since it’s obvious that this is all done on purpose I think I’ll reluctantly call this a Dadaist classic.
It’s fun, and frequently deliberately offensive, but like a train wreck, you can’t turn away.
The next film on my list, Menahem Golan‘s The Apple, tells a familiar story about a dystopian future where the government is controlled by a record label and all anyone cares about is a music contest. A wholesome duet from Moose Jaw Saskatchewan enters the contest. Technically, they win but the game is rigged. The Label contacts them anyway leading a path to corruption and damnation.
If it wasn’t for the hippie clan as the heroes I’d have written this off as Christian propaganda. It still comes close following the usual checklist, including the eponymous apple and the heroes getting raptured in the end. For the most part, it reminded me of a live-action version of The Devil and Danial Mouse. (which was better) Nothing to write home about but at least the music was good.
My selections for this month had been pretty heavy in content. Because of this, I decided to clear my pallet with some nice fluffy comedies. The trouble was, that beyond not wanting to take another dive into screwball comedy I really didn’t know what I wanted to see. Not knowing where to go I started with the archetype of the fool, as in the kind who stumbles through life unscathed. Going through a list of film examples I stumbled over The Tall Blond With One Black Shoe…(Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire) In the same info dive, I found another film The Man With The Red Shoe. While studying them enough to see if they’d fit as a possible theme of “Comedies With Shoes” I discovered one was the remake of another.
So instead I had the opportunity to do another “Old Vs New”, even better.
So in Yves Robert‘s The Tall Blond With a Black Shoe a French drug smuggler has been captured with a car full of heroin. (I’m tempted to hypothesize that this makes it an indirect sequel to The French Connection from three years before.) He is immediately tracked back to French Intelligence. The Director suspects a department head but doesn’t have quite enough evidence. To flush out his rival and his followers out, he tells a subordinate in a bugged room that he shall be picking up a super-spy at the airport the next day at 9:30. After they are out of earshot he tells him that it really doesn’t matter who he meets at the airport, he just wants someone for the rival department to waste a couple of days following. So, just pick up anybody at random. Given a handful of promising choices, the subordinate a tall man with blond hair (Pierre Richard) who for unknown reasons is wearing one reddish-brown shoe and one black shoe.
The rest of the movie consists of the rival factions trying to keep the tall blond under surveillance but because they’re too busy fighting each other the blond goes through what he thinks is a slightly weird day, completely oblivious to the chaos going on around him.
This was a really fun film. Richard is an incredibly versatile comic actor who owns every shot he is in. The rest of the crew are no slackers providing wonderful comic moments, my favorites consist of one agent methodically taking apart a babushka doll while they are ransacking the blond’s house and another scene where the blond is under surveillance, with a honeytrap agent who has been set up with him (and falls in love with him) The people watching the date, and eventual lovemaking, unconsciously mimicking the pair’s actions.
The Stan Dragoti‘s Man With A Red Shoe, with Tom Hanks playing Richard’s place in the titular role, follows the original storyline loyally, serving as an American translation of the original film. Based on this everything is bigger with the whole CIA after our hero, and in this case, I do mean hero. The film goes out of its way to present that everything going up against our hero rather than what in the original film where nothing is personal and everything seems more like especially bloody office politics.
The biggest difference between the two films is unlike the original film where doesn’t notice anything. Hanks does discover he’s being targeted and reacts in the end.
This week I decided to watch some of the great western epics that both deconstruct the genre of the Western and in the process essentially do a biopsy of the end of an era.
The first on my list, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch tells the story of the eponymous band of ruthless bandits led by Pike Bishop, (William Holden) who commit what they believe is going to be their last place. This turns out to be a trap by some tragically incompetent bounty hunters led by Pike’s old partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). This ends up with the Wild Bunch shooting their way out of town with half of them dead with numerous townsfolk killed in the crossfire. Now they have to run for their lives and to make matters worse the silver shipment they thought they’d successfully stole was just useless bags of dowels that just baited the trap. Desperately they cross the border finding themselves in the middle of the Mexican Revolution and working for one of the generals.
I first heard of Sam Peckinpah in a Monty Python skit where they ruthlessly parody the violence of his films with a blood-soaked version of “Salad Days”. I’ve been curious about his films, or at least his notoriety ever since. Despite all this, I’ve never actually gotten around to watching any of his films. I found Wild Bunch to be very well done and to be honest by our modern standards, the violence wasn’t half as bad as I thought. (Though to my knowledge, I think this is the earliest film I saw anyone using squibs in the actor’s back to show just how much damage that bullets use. Having said that I found the films bleak outlook where any allusions of high plains chivalry are dismissed as the myths they are, and there are only shades of grey. The only reason we can root for our band of murderous thugs is they are nothing compared to the sadistic, uncaring, army they are up against.
The next film on my list, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in The West, begins with some hired guns wait at a dilapidated train station waiting to kill the man who gets off the train. This man turns out to be a mysterious harmonica-playing gunfighter (Charles Bronson) who manages to kill all of them.
Meanwhile, a family of homesteaders is preparing a wedding celebration for the father’s mail-order bride. They are slaughtered by a murderous gunfighter named Frank (played by a deliberately miscast Henry Fonda). Frank is working for the railway. They just wanted to scare the family to give up their land, but as Frank says, “’people scare better when they’re dying.”
A day later the bride, Jill McBride (Claudia Cardinale) arrives just in the time for the funeral and has no choice to take up where her husband left off. Can she survive with the odds so seriously against her? And will the mysterious harmonica player be any help at all?
While I don’t think I’ll ever like this quite as much as the “Dollars” trilogy, this film is Leone at his best. Using every trick in his toolbox from extreme closeups tight pacing, and Morricone’s haunting leitmotifs, he creates a haunting, mythic operatic setting, that with the coming of the railroad, will soon be gone.
