You know a television show has run seriously off the rails when your wife turns to you and says, in all sincerity, "This would have made more sense with a llama."
Flu-ridden and snowbound yesterday afternoon, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watched a rerun of Lost in Space on the Family Net cable channel, specifically the infamous "Carrotman" episode, a.k.a. "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." For those of you old enough to remember Lost in Space, the Carrotman needs no introduction. For the rest of you, well, let's just say '60s camp never got any campier.
For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for useless trivia, the part of the Carrotman's sidekick, Willoughby, was originally to be played by a talking llama—yes, the kind with four legs, painted purple, no less. (It does not compute!) But the trained llama kept biting Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith) who finally refused to continue production. Which is a pity, because it really would have made more sense with a llama. But the llama was fired, a human was hired, and the series was cancelled two weeks later.
Oh, the pain, the pain.
You can watch "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" here at the Monkey, courtesy of Hulu.com.
107 years old today, and more highly regarded now as an actor than he ever was during his lifetime. The forty-five years that have passed since his retirement without a worthy successor have proved that, while he may have made it look easy, it most certainly wasn't easy.
Here's a photo of Cary Grant, circa 1934. Katie-Bar-the-Door insists he gets better looking the older he gets. Something for you to look forward to.
... from Katie-Bar-The-Door and the Mythical Monkey.
Postscript: For those of you who've been around awhile, you may recognize this is a re-gift of last year's Christmas Eve post. How Scrooge-ly of me. And where are the substantive posts you've come to expect from the Monkey? Well, I'm working on it. "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." A surprising number of movies from that era are readily available and while watching them, I formed a hypothesis about D.W. Griffith and now I am testing it against the evidence. My friends who have seen me prepare for a court case know I am prone to disappear down this type of rabbit hole from time to time. Nothing to do but wait for me to climb back out of it again.
[Something to tide you over while Katie-Bar-The-Door and I celebrate our wedding anniversary.]
Me, I love Christmas movies—It's A Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Scrooge (both the 1951 and 1970 versions), Miracle On 34th Street (1947 only), How The Grinch Stole Christmas. And I could watch little Ralphie Parker's quest for an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle (with a compass in the stock!) twenty-four hours a day if only some cable channel would think of it.
But a lot of people don't like Christmas or its movies, and that's okay with me. Here are some alternatives which will allow you to acknowledge the season without succumbing to it:
The Thin Man (1934) Nick and Nora celebrate the holidays in the company of gangsters, thieves and murderers. It was either that or another Christmas at the in-laws'.
"I'm a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune." "I read where you were shot 5 times in the tabloids." "It's not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids."
Holiday (1938) Most people think of this as a New Year's Eve movie, and rightly so, but if you do the math, the entire first act takes place on Christmas day. And what a Christmas it is—no tree, no egg nog, no mistletoe, no nothing. No presents, either, unless you care to unwrap a tousle-haired Cary Grant. A romantic comedy as wistful as the season itself, Holiday is my favorite Katharine Hepburn movie.
"When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself what would General Motors do? And then I do the opposite."
Stalag 17 (1953) Christmas 1944: Grown men in longjohns dancing with other grown men in longjohns while William Holden searches for the Nazi spy hiding out among American prisoners of war. Sounds like the one miserable semester I spent as a student at an all-boys school.
"All right then, gentlemen, we are all friends again. And with Christmas coming on I have a special treat for you—I'll have you all deloused for the holidays."
An Affair To Remember (1957) Cary Grant is afraid Deborah Kerr is mad at him, but it turns out she's only paralyzed. Whew!
"My mother told me never to enter a man's room in months ending in 'R.'"
The Apartment (1960) Suicide, adultery, the boss from hell—what man wouldn't gladly suffer it all to spend Christmas in bed with the young Shirley MacLaine. One of the greatest movies of all time, a not-to-be-missed comedy/drama from director Billy Wilder.
"T'was the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring ... nothin' ... no action ... Dullsville!"
The Lion In Winter (1968) Kings and castles notwithstanding, this is what Christmas is like for millions of people—bickering, recrimination and endless disappointment. Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn at their snarling best.
"What would you have me do? Give out? Give up? Give in?" "Give me a little peace." "A little? Why so modest? How about eternal peace? Now there's a thought."
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) Sure, it stars George Lazenby as James Bond, but it also boasts Diana Rigg, the best Bond girl ever. Holiday connection? Telly Savalas doles out the all-time worst Christmas present—a bio-weapon designed to destroy the world's food supply. What, Best Buy was all out of Wii Bowling?
"This never happened to the other fellow!"
Life Of Brian (1979) We came oh so close to celebrating Brianmas every 25th of December, until the three wise men realized Jesus was one manger over.
"He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy!"
Trading Places (1983) Ah, Dan Aykroyd as a drunk, pistol-packing Santa Claus. And he's only, like, the fifth funniest guy in the movie. I don't know about you, but I get hungry for salmon and dirt-matted Santa beard every time I see this movie. Yummy.
"I'll bet you thought I'd forgotten your Christmas bonus. There you are." "Five dollars. Maybe I'll go to the movies—by myself."
Die Hard (1988) Man, that's some Christmas party—Bruce Willis shoots a dozen men, drops another out a 40th floor window and blows up a building. Good thing he's a cop!
"Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho."
L.A. Confidential (1997) Ironically, the "Bloody Christmas" incident that sets this labyrinthine mystery in motion is the least bloody scene in the entire movie. My pick as the best picture of 1997.
"You're like Santa Claus with that list, Bud, except everyone on it's been naughty."
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Tom Cruise's colossal ego threatens his marriage to Nicole Kidman. Thank God it's only a movie! Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut begins at a Christmas party, ends at an orgy. Hmpf. My parties just end in a hangover.
"If you men only knew ..."
The Matador (2005) What do you do when a hitman shows up at your door on Christmas Eve? Why, invite him in for pie and whiskey, of course! Starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis, The Matador was one of the most sadly-underrated comedies of the last decade.
"Come on! It'll be a good time!" "Oh, so now killing people is a good time?" "Can be."
I don't know about you, but I love Thanksgiving. Always have, always will. To me, it's like Christmas only better, an excuse to hang out with the people you love and eat obscene amounts of food without the hassle of buying more junk nobody needs.
But clearly that's just me.
Anyway, there aren't a lot of good Thanksgiving-related movies out there, but here are my picks as the five best:
Miracle On 34th Street (the 1947 version, please)—This is the one Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watch every year as we're sleeping off lunch. The charming story of how Santa Claus came to town and wound up on trial for his sanity, Miracle on 34th Street starts at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and is a great way to kick off the Christmas season (assuming that, like the Monkey, you refuse to acknowledge those decorations that have been up since Columbus Day).
Serve with warm pecan pie straight from the oven.
Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)—Woody Allen's surprisingly warm tale of three neurotic sisters and their equally neurotic love lives, bookended by sumptuous Thanksgiving celebrations straight out of a Martha Stewart wet dream. As a bonus, Woody learns life is worth living while watching the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.
Serve with a nice Bordeaux aged in Anton Chekhov's wine cellar.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)—Roger Ebert's favorite Thanksgiving Day movie, it's a classic odd couple comedy from John Hughes, starring an uptight Steve Martin and the slovenly salt of the earth John Candy as two men desperately trying to get home for the holidays. "How do they know which way we're going?" Tart and funny with all the sugar backloaded to the last five minutes.
Serve with all the trimmings.
Home For The Holidays (1995)—My literary agent, Jill, thinks this is the best Thanksgiving movie ever. It's a comedy filled with hostility, anxiety, irrational grievances and all the unfulfilled familial expectations you could ever want. Not to mention someone gets a turkey dumped in their lap. In other words, it's a documentary of the typical American Thanksgiving dinner.
Serve with bile and battery acid.
The Ice Storm (1997)—Alcoholism, wife swapping, teenage sex—and the best Thanksgiving toast ever. If you grew up in a lunatic asylum or are simply nostalgic for the free-love Seventies, this is the movie for you. Stars Joan Allen and Kevin Kline (sans moustache, and you know what that means).
My post on the best foreign language picture of 1932-33 is well in hand—1300 words and a public domain copy of the film so far with more to come. Mostly it's a question of filling in the blanks at this point, verbs and whatnot. I don't know how you write, but I start by putting down the things I know then filling in later the things I don't know.
For example, this—
... episodic ... as life generally is at the age of ten ... centers around a plot to take over the school during a Commemoration Day ceremony featuring the town's mayor ... but ... playing a toy trumpet with your nose, smoking purloined cigars, mistaking a sleeping drunk for a corpse ...
—will eventually become ... well, something.
In the meantime, apropos of nothing, here is a bit from Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul, one of those British sketch-comedy shows of the sort I used to watch when Katie-Bar-The-Door and I lived overseas. I first saw this on Hey Dullblog, a blog by and for "people who think about the Beatles maybe a little too much" (as if there is such a thing). It answers the age-old question, what if the Beatles had never taken drugs, remained loveable 1964-era moptops and stayed together forever.
Faithful reader hanner_da_nanner of Hanner's Blog Mmkay has tagged me with the latest internet meme called "Tag You're It." The rules are simple: I answer eight questions she asks, come up with eight questions of my own, and tag eight more people. I was going to leave it until after I posted my essay about Paul Muni, but then I started thinking about it, which, of course, is always a mistake.
As the man said, "Don't think, you'll only hurt the ballclub."
Her questions and my answers:
1-Who was your mentor growing up? What about now? I can't say I've ever had an Obi-Wan-Kenobi style mentor, but I've learned an awful lot from people with names like Katie-Bar-The-Door, Mister Muleboy, Bellotoot, Susan, my brothers Tom and Steve, but first and foremost Robert Osborne. 2-If you had a shopping spree at one store, which store would it be? My very favorite store, Amazon.com.
3-If you could own any pet, what would you have, and what would you name it? Why, this little doggie right here ... 4-If you could start any business, what would you start? Monkey Business, of course.
5-Dream vacation spot? Anywhere Katie-Bar-The-Door is. 6-If you started a charity, what would it be for? I'd like to give essays about movies to all the little children of the world. Or food. Food would also be good.
7-What's on your Christmas list this year? After eight straight Christmases on the road, spending Christmas at home. Everything else is icing on the sugar cookies.
8-What are/would you be for Halloween? Rich. And my eight questions: 1) You're walking down the street when a talking penguin asks you for a movie recommendation. Assuming you're wearing your favorite shoes, which pair are you wearing?
2) If you had to live one day from your life over and over again, which musical instrument would you learn how to play? 3) This one courtesy of Eddie Izzard: Cake or death? [see it below]
4) Which is your favorite railroad in a game of Monopoly?
5) Tapas in Barcelona or moules et frites in Paris? 6) If you were nougat, would you want to be covered in milk-, dark- or white-chocolate?
7) If you could be any character from a movie, who would be your co-star? 8) You're coming to bat in a major league game for the first time—what's your theme song?
I don't think I'm allowed to tag hanner back again, so I'm picking the last eight bloggers not named hanner_da_nanner who left comments on my blog. That'll teach you.
I'm putting the finishing touches on the essay about the best actor (drama) of 1932-33. It's going to clock in under 2000 words, reasonable compared to the 12,000 word insanity that was the Marx Brothers.
Unfortunately, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I have to attend a funeral tomorrow. That's three in one year (to go along with one wedding). I feel like I'm making a macabre sequel to an old Hugh Grant movie. But it means I won't be posting the best actor essay until Saturday.
In the meantime, it occurs to me that two of the Carole Lombard movies you're voting on in the current Monkey poll are in the public domain and thought I'd post them here. They are—
My Man Godfrey:
and Nothing Sacred. Just to set your mind at ease, that's not colorization—Nothing Sacred was released in Technicolor.
Now that you've slogged through all 12,000 words I wrote about the Marx Brothers, I'm sure the first question that leaps to your mind is "Why, Mr. Monkey, why? Why would you write a novella about the Marx Brothers and not about, say, Charlie Chaplin or Jean Harlow?"
To which I would reply, "I did write a novella about Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow. See? Look here and here." But I wrote even more about the Marx Brothers—more about them than about anybody else so far—so it's a fair question.
To give you a fair answer, we have to go back a ways, back to my salad days when I was a young lawyer looking for a job and not finding one. I was a good lawyer, or had the potential to be—top quarter of my class, an editor on the law review, a clerkship for the chief justice of a state supreme court. But in the law, it's not what you know, or even who you know, but how much business you can bring into the firm—they're not subtle about asking the question—and the answer in my case, a poor boy who put himself through law school, was "none at all."
While I was clerking for the judge, I spent months looking for a permanent job in my hometown to no avail and then decided to aim higher—Washington, D.C. I sent out 204 (!) resumes, worked the phones, set up a sackful of interviews and flew to the nation's capital to pound the pavement for ten days, determined to come back with a job or else. It was all very old school, Horatio Alger stuff and you couldn't do it now, I don't think, with all the automated internet-driven application processes everybody seems to use these days.
And I interviewed, lots of interviews, but the one I remember is the last one on the afternoon before I flew home, an interview with a guy we here at the Monkey refer to as "Bellotoot." It was so last minute, with him tracking me down through the judge's secretary back home, that when I stepped into his office, I literally had no idea who he was or what he did—by such aimless applications of the Puritan work ethic are law offices and totalitarian regimes staffed—but you know, I needed a job and what the hell.
If you've ever been lucky enough to meet him, you know Bellotoot is a wonderful guy, with one of those rare grins that makes you happy just being in the same room with it. More to the point, he's also a movie fanatic who knows more about them than I ever will, and while he's talking about them, he does marvelous imitations, among them Don Rickles, Jimmy Stewart, Groucho and Chico Marx, and on and on. His "Curly Howard reads the works of Henry Miller" will put you in the floor.
None of which I knew when I sat down to talk to him, and he didn't know me, and for the first five minutes we talked about the sort of things you talk about in an interview. But as I was talking to him, I couldn't take my eyes off a makeshift nameplate sitting on the corner of his desk. "Rufus T. Firefly," it read, and even though I was desperate for a job, I couldn't think about anything else and finally I had to interrupt:
"I can't help but notice—Rufus T. Firefly. That's Groucho Marx in Duck Soup."
Bellotoot's eyebrows went up and that grin split his face. "You know, you're the first person ever to walk in here and know who Rufus T. Firefly is." And for the next forty minutes we talked about nothing but the Marx Brothers. We never did get back to talking about the job. And on the following Monday, he called me and made me an offer.
The rest is history. I moved to Washington, looked up a woman I knew from college—you know her as Katie-Bar-The-Door—we started dating and got married two years later. Bellotoot and I, of course, are still great friends, and he introduced me to the guy who actually made the Rufus T. Firefly nameplate for him, Mister Muleboy of The Mouth O' The Mule, the guy who a year ago buffaloed me into starting this blog. I wrote a couple of novels (unpublished, so don't ask), lived overseas, litigated million dollar cases in federal court, met or renewed friendships with all the other people I hang out with.
Et cetera et cetera et cetera. None of which would have happened without my obsession with Duck Soup and the Marx Brothers. And that's why I wrote 12,000 words about them.
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are back from the Land of Lincoln where we spent four days in Chicago, followed by a weekend in Springfield, visiting friends, museums, eateries, Wrigley, etc. I didn't announce the trip ahead of time—seems like an invitation to come rob stately Monkey Manor—but we're back and I'll be back to the serious business of blogging tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'll kick things off with a series of posts in honor of Thingy at Pondering Life who wants "manly cheesecake" on her dessert menu. I assume she's thinking more along the lines of Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery and the like, and she's going to get all of those and more, but I'll start her off with a photo of one of the greatest of Americans, Abraham Lincoln, known affectionately in these parts as "Lucky Linky."
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are back home at last after a long road trip that included a little excursion down to Nashville for our niece's wedding. I'm sure most bloggers wouldn't let a little thing like the lack of an internet connection stop them from blogging, but I'm not that technologically savvy, and besides, it's not that easy to write brilliant essays while consuming vast quantities of champagne.
But now that I'm back here at Monkey Manor, I've taken a moment to do a bit of blog housekeeping. I've created a stand-alone page with the complete list of Katie-Bar-The-Door Award nominees, with pictures and highlighted links to my essays about the winners. Hopefully, this will make it a bit easier to find out who won and lost without having to wade through a year and half of this jibber jabber.
I should be back to the hard work of blogging tomorrow or Friday with part five of my nine thousand part essay about the Marx Brothers.
Today is Katie-Bar-The-Door's birthday, she of the world famous Katie Awards. She's a movie fan from way back—when Katie was a kid, her mom would take her and her siblings to see revivals of Chaplin and the Marx Brothers and whatnot, with A Night At The Opera making the biggest impression on her.
As a child her favorite sequence from that film was the opera itself—Groucho's speech, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame," and especially Harpo swinging from the scenery rigging. But just try finding it on the internet, uncut and in its proper aspect ratio. Oh, well.
Hopefully, this is the next best thing, the cabin scene from the same movie, maybe the funniest bit in movie history.
A few summers ago, five or six maybe, Turner Classic Movies launched a nationwide tour to promote both classic movies and the TCM brand name. Being a well-to-do mega-community located on the interstate between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (we ranked #2 this year in Money magazine's top 10 places to live), the twin-towns of Columbia/Ellicott City proved to be a convenient place for the TCM crew to set down its circus.
And, man, what a great time! There were games, prizes, souvenirs, photo booths (have your picture taken with John Wayne!) and on-stage contests pitting audience members against each other in a battle royale of movie trivia. Yours truly won a plastic softball with the TCM logo (answer: Joan Crawford), and Katie-Bar-The-Door—well, we'll get to that in a moment.
Like all good tent revivals, though, the point wasn't just to reward the faithful but to convert the non- believers —plant a seed, coax a bud, harvest a crop of new movie fans. And as the grandson of a sharecropper, I can tell you that requires a certain amount of fertilizer.
The most coveted potential converts were teenagers—get when they're young and they're yours for life—and to give a fighting chance to kids who (it became clear as the day wore on) had never so much as heard of Casablanca much less seen it fifty times and memorized all the dialogue, the emcee steered the contests toward "word jumbles"—collections of letters which when arranged in the proper order spell out a word, or in this case, a film title or movie star. And then to nudge things along, he also gave them a cheat sheet with possible answers.
Now, let me tell you, the older you get, the more you know, but you know it a lot slower than you did when you were young and fresh, and while us middle-aged geezers cleaned up on straight trivia, the teenagers kicked our asses on word jumbles.
Especially when close was close enough.
And thus it turns out the star of Queen Christina, Camille and Ninotchka was in the mind of one perky blonde cheerleader, and forever after in this household—
"Gerta Garber!"
"Here," said the emcee, handing her DVDs of Casablanca and Singin' In The Rain, "go home and watch these—and pay attention to the cast lists!"
That was okay with me—as far as I'm concerned, Pete Townshend nailed it when he said "the kids are alright"—and it was okay with Katie-Bar-The-Door, too, until, that is, she found herself tied two-to-two in a best of five face-off with the high school quarterback.
Now, I think of Katie as a kind of cross between Myrna Loy and Maureen O'Hara —the perfect wife and the fiery redhead—except in the case of the latter it would have been Katie who dragged John Wayne five miles and beat up the brother, not the other way around. I mean, her idea of a chick flick is Rio Bravo and she once gave me a copy of The Dirty Dozen for Valentine's Day because for her Jim Brown and a satchel full of hand grenades is romantic. She's a sweet, elegant woman with exquisite manners, but she stands five-foot-two the way Napoleon stood five-foot-two, and when the emcee said, "The tie-breaker will be a trivia question—or should we have another word jumble?" he only thought the choice was his to make.
"No, no, you said trivia," laughed Katie, the way I imagine General Patton laughed just before he destroyed Rommel at El Guettar. "I want trivia!"
I guess I should feel bad for the poor kid on the other side of the stage, but just between you and me, anyone who's never heard of Gone With The Wind—the answer to the question "Which 1939 movie received thirteen Oscar nominations?"—probably shouldn't have been up there in the first place.
"I would have won if it had been a word jumble," he said afterwards.
"Absolutely!" said Katie. "Why do you think I wanted trivia?"
Sorry, kid.
Katie won a copy of the DVD game Scene-It—the TCM edition —a real hoot to play, especially after a couple of gin rickeys. And we discovered a new favorite actress that afternoon, too.
You know a television show has run seriously off the rails when your wife turns to you and says, in all sincerity, "This would have made more sense with a llama."
For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for useless trivia, the part of the Carrotman's sidekick, Willoughby, was originally to be played by a talking llama—yes, the kind with four legs, painted purple, no less. (It does not compute!) But the trained llama kept biting Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith) who finally refused to continue production. Which is a pity, because it really would have made more sense with a llama. But the llama was fired, a human was hired, and the series was cancelled two weeks later.
