Well I haven’t done one of these for a while… a combination of having been busy and these things get harder to find once you get past the big names!
Anyway today’s Rhapsody is Bassmelodie’s African Rhapsody (Floreano Remix) From their Rhino Ride album
As a way to recover from a traumatic week, I decided to go with the comfort of musical comedy from 1981. Unfortunately having not done my research as much as I should have wheel these films were musicals they certainly weren’t comedies.
The reason behind this misunderstanding came from my first choice, Pennies From Heaven. I saw Steve Martin’s name and read the briefest description and I went in expecting screwball comedy with a soundtrack. It wasn’t one.
Based on the 1978 BBC miniseries created by Dennis Potter starring Bob Hoskins (not the 196 film of the same name starring Bing Crosby) Potter adapts his own script for the film version.
Steve Martin plays Arthur Parker a struggling salesman in a loveless marriage, living in the great depression. He wants to open a record store but the Bank won’t front a loan unless they get collateral from his wife’s inheritance which she won’t give him. Into this he meets and falls in love with a demure teacher played by Bernadette Peters.
Throughout this we keep drawn into musical fantasies with the cast lip syncing and classics like “Let’s Misbehave” and, of course “Pennies from Heaven” at first this just seems like schtick but as the film continues they become much more beautiful and at the same time ironic as the lives of our characters slowly flow down the drain making the sad reality of the depression even more depressing.
By the end of this became almost hard to watch. Still it was interesting watching Martin and Peters playing against type and the musical numbers were wonderfully done.
I’m embarrassed to say that for the most part all I knew about the Zoot Suit was they were an example of one of 1940s bad taste in fashion mostly seen through Al Capp’s Zoot Suit Yokum Parody. I was not aware of it the racial connotations it had due to it’s popularity amongst Mexican-American, Filipino and Italian-American youth as well as being a symbol of identity in the Chicano movement.
Zoot Suit is is an adaptation of the play by the same name written and directed by Luis Valdez starring Daniel Valdez and Edward James Olmos.
Our story is a dramatization of the events surrounding the events of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, where a group of young Mexican-Americans are charged with a crime they didn’t commit through an almost comically biased trial and the Zoot Suit Riots that happened later .
All of this is done in a wonderfully stylized way that is everything I like in filmed theater.
The best part of this is Olmos as El Pachua, a sort of idealized god of the Zoot Suiters. He is one part master of ceremonies one part narrator and one part conscience to the films lead played by Valdez. Omnipresent he stands unseen making snarky remarks as well as providing advice to Valdez that is frequently as self destructive as it is useful
This is was a fascinating study of ethnic identity which struggles to survive when a larger identity is trying to keep it down.
Because of the election and in a fit of masochism I decided to go with films on the topic (based on this morning’s headlines I found this even more painful.)
I’ve been slowly going through Preston Sturges’s shelf. Mostly for his screwball comedy and when I heard about one of his earliest directing debuts, The Great McGinty a satire about machine politics and corruption,I had to include it.
Funny side note. I couldn’t find The Great McGinty in Sturges’s section when I looked and I was afraid I’d have to choose something else. It turned out this was because I wasn’t the only one who had gotten the whole election theme film and the reason I hadn’t found it was because it had been taken to be played at Scarecrow’s film night. Because of this I ended up watching my selection far earlier than normal at the store.
Dan McGinty, played by Brian Donlevy, is a bum who gets the attention of a party boss, played by Akim Tamiroff, after he votes thirty seven times at different precincts in a rigged election. He is quickly promoted to collector and then alderman and finally picked for the next Mayor. (“Who’s McGinty? someone asks.” “See, he’s perfect. Replies the Boss”) Of course he needs to be married in order to do this. His secretary, Catherine, played by Muriel Angelus, agrees to do this, strictly as a business arrangement.
Eventually they fall in love which leads her to encourage him to do something with his position. When he gets elected governor he decides to stand up to the boss and that one good deed makes everything fall apart.
This was a fun well done film with a great cast. It’s cynical and it is hilarious with Donlevy playing McGinty as a mostly amoral thug who’s not afraid to get into a fist fight with the Boss in the back of his limo.
I first heard about The Candidate a few years ago and all I knew about it was the “what do I do next?” line at the end of the film. At the time this was hitting a little too close to home because this was just when Dubya had won his first election and David Horsey had just done a cartoon with Dubya reenacting that scene. Because of this I wasn’t particularly curious about watching it until now.
So anyway, Robert Redford stars as Bill McCay, an activist lawyer and son of the former governor. He’s head hunted by Marvin Lucas, a political professional, played by Peter Boyle to run as the democratic candidate for the California Senator. His selling point for the cynical McCay is that since he doesn’t stand a chance against the popular Republican candidate he can say anything he wants during the campaign.
This works out for the first couple of months until he wins the primary (he was the only candidate in the primary). But in order to survive the election (not winning is one thing being completely blown out is another thing all together) he is forced to moderate his message. Soon he’s left to just quoting sound bites, alienating his friends and family little more than a puppet for his handlers… It ends up working which brings us to the “What do I do next?” scene.
I’m afraid this film really didn’t work for me, perhaps the satire wasn’t broad or cynical enough for me. But for the most part most of the comedy that is supposedly there was lost on me.
Still it had it’s moments I especially liked some of the set choices especially Lucas’s office that made him look like a spider in the middle of a large web of information and the predatory grin of Mckay’s father when he tells McKay he is a politician now.
After doing Lovecraft last week I figured I’d finish this Halloween series with my other favorite American Horror writer, Edgar Allen Poe as portrayed through the team of Roger Corman and Vincent Price. Corman did a cycle of eight Poe adaptations with Price through American International Pictures with scripts by Richard Matheson. I can’t say this batch were the best of the lot but I persevere.
The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe’s story of cursed families, madness and premature burial was never my favorite Poe story. The last time I read it it left me wondering if anyone ever checksd for pulses in the eighteenth century, but it still has one of the best gothic moods of his work.
In this adaptation, House of Usher, Vincent Price plays Roderick Usher with an aloof cold dignity and arrogance. It is this arrogance that drives the plot of the film including taking his sister to the family crypt and then locking her away in her coffin when her fiancé realizes she’s not quite dead.
Despite it’s inherent cheesiness this was a fun film despite it’s low budget it has a nice aesthetic to it courtesy of wonderfully creepy portraits of Usher ancestors by Burt Schoenberg
The next film on my list, Tales of Terror was done a triptych of three of Poe’s stories, Morella, The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar with an all star cast including Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre.
Most of this film didn’t impress me that much, but I enjoyed the Black Cat sequence. Pretty much that’s all that left of Poe’s Black Cat story is the name and takes much more from the The Cask of Amontillado” with Lorre in the position of the narrator who incases his wife and her lover into the wall (along with the cats)
Lorre and Price have excellent chemistry with Lorre as the murderous drunk and Price at his hammiest as a foppish wine taster and Lorre’s Victim. (It’s mostly played for laughs)
The cat was adorable
I’ve really scraped the bottom of the tupperware and and none of the remaining items on my list seemed worthy for this Halloween Finale. So I kind of cheated and decide to do something based on Modest Mussorgsky‘s Night on Bald Mountain. One thing I didn’t want this to be when I did this was (despite of being a huge Bill Tytla fan) do it as a piece of Fantasia Fan art.
So rather than making Chernobog as merely another name for the devil as he is in the Disney Cartoon, but as the Slavic god of the night.
Since there really isn’t much information left on the subject I only had guesswork to go with… So I kind of went with some sort of brooding bogatyr lord.
Today’s Inktober entry is ridiculously late because I had a very long day that started at six. Anyway the Tupperware said to do the wild hunt. I was kind inspired by Matt Wagner’s take of doing it as a motorcycle gang in Mage to do it as an urban fantasy. I might have made it slightly political because I was being annoyed by a couple of articles about militias, hence doing it as off-road racers other than bikes… anything to avoid drawing horses.
