The Party (1968)

I had so much fun reading American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller, that I decided to briefly write about some of my favorite comedies.  So it was a double bit of serendipity to learn that the 1968 cult hit The Party recently made its way to Blu-Ray and DVD.  If you have not seen this film – and it’s unlikely that you have – get yourself a copy.  You will not be disappointed.

The Party is the only collaboration between Peter Sellers (1925-1980) and director Blake Edwards (1922-2010) that was not a Pink Panther film.  In fact, after shooting the second Panther film, the hilarious A Shot in the Dark (1964), both men vowed never to work with one-another again.

Edwards then conceived a film that would be a tribute to the great silent clowns of his boyhood.  According to Edwards, his childhood was largely an unhappy one, save for the moments of transcendence afforded by such clowns as Buster Keaton (1895-1966) and Harold Lloyd (1893-1971).  He often allowed this silent-screen era slapstick sensibility to creep into his work (look, for instance, at the epic pie fight in The Great Race), but a strictly silent film was a challenge he wanted to set for himself.

Always contemptuous of the Hollywood scene, Edwards conceived of a silent film about an incompetent and accident-prone actor, blackballed by Hollywood but inadvertently invited to a swanky soiree where he wreaks havoc.  The initial screenplay was little more than 60 pages long, and was mostly the set-up for gags that would be improvised on the set.

But who would star in it?

After much internal debate, Edwards decided to bring the project to Sellers, who instantly fell in love with it.  Edwards encouraged Sellers to create a character – a fish out of water who was basically decent, but inherently accident-prone.  Out of whole cloth, Sellers fashioned Hrundi V. Bakshi, the world’s worst actor.  The Party opens with Sellers as Bakshi starring in desert opus Son of Gunga Din, ruining take-after-take and unexpectedly demolishing the key standing set. 

However, his ends up on a party list rather than a kill-list, and from that simple premise, Edwards and his cast improvised the movie, shooting in sequence to ensure that the story flowed properly.

The Party is a remarkable film for its time, and for ours, as well.  The story is so lose and improvisatory, and the narrative arc, such as it is, so fluid that one could easily mistake it for a French comedy of the era.  That Edwards was able to get away with such a high-cost gamble is quite an achievement, and it seems unlikely that something similar would happen again today (unless it involved ray guns or superheroes). 

In addition, it is, for all intents and purposes, a silent film.  Though there is dialog, very little of it moves the story forward, and most of it would take up some three single-spaced pages of text.  It’s not surprising that so many people have been either confounded or disappointed in The Party; it’s the world’s only all-talking silent movie. 

The root of its genius is that both Edwards and Sellers understood on a deep and profound level physical comedy.  They were able to mine gold from simple set-ups.  Here is perhaps my favorite sequence in the film:  Bakshi desperately needs to relieve himself, and finally finding a lavatory, struggles with his environment:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tByH1uM_fnI.

The film resided in limbo for a while, never really finding its audience.  I was lucky enough to see it on late-night television in my boyhood before it seemed to vanish completely.  Since its release, it has acquired something of a cult following, with many ardents of both Sellers and Edwards championing it as their best film.  We wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is something very special, off-the-beaten-track, and splendidly funny.

Happily, Sellers is surrounded by a talented supporting cast.  Special kudos must go to Steve Franken (1932 – 2012) as the drunken waiter – who nearly steals the film with hardly a word spoken.  Franken was a familiar face in both movies and television, and this film will make you wonder why he was never a bigger star.  His comedic timing is flawless, and one wishes a follow-up movie would be built around his character.  Former screen Tarzan Denny Miller (1934 –2014) is especially fetching as cowboy-western star “Wyoming Bill” Kelso, and J. Edward McKinley (1917 – 2004) as the host deadpans superbly.

Fans of period cinema would find much to savor, as well.  Few films scream a 1960s sensibility more than The Party.  Its Henry Mancini (1924-1994) score will either charm or repel you; in addition, the romantic lead is Claudine Longet (born 1942), who is one of the great mysteries of the 1960s.  Quite popular as a singer and actress, she has evaporated into well-deserved obscurity.  Why was she so popular?

Though not to all tastes, The Party comes highly recommended.

Don’t Believe What You Hear: The Lone Ranger is Quite Terrific

So, it’s time to admit something of my age and say that I grew up during the great Nostalgia Craze of the 1970s.  The Marx Brothers were heroes on college campuses around the country, W.C. Fields was cultural touchstone, interest in vintage films and television seemed inexhaustible, and people reconnected with the glories of the Golden Age of Radio.

And not just adults!  No, in the 1970s just as many teenagers could identify Bela Lugosi or Myrna Loy as could hum lyrics from The Rolling Stones or The Bay City Rollers.  This sense that Pop Americana was a smorgasbord from which we could pick the most tasty morsels is all but dead – many of my students would rather be skinned alive than watch a black-and-white film, and the current zeitgeist demands that anything “old” (that is, prior to about 1980) is somehow “camp.”

The one anomaly to this current dismissal of Pop Culture Past is the fetishizing of superheroes – figures that actually pre-date the grandfathers of most contemporary film-goers.  So it is completely understandable that Disney would bankroll a big-budget retelling of one of the grandest myths of the Great American Century, The Lone Ranger.

The Lone Ranger was created by writer Fran Striker (1903-1962), first appearing in 1933 on radio station WXYZ, owned by George W. Trendle (1884-1972).  Trendle later claimed credit for creating the Ranger, which is not surprising considering how successful the program became.  The show was an enormous hit – it was geared towards kids, but more than half of the audience was made up of adults.  The radio show would last until 1954, and moved to television show from 1949 to 1957.  The Lone Ranger was also the subject of two movie serials, three motion pictures, and one execrable TV movie.  He was also fodder for writers and marketing-empire-builders, with eight novels by Striker, countless comic books and Big-Little-Books, and toys and games beyond number. 

These fueled the daydreams of countless boys.  I came across the Ranger myself when I was 10 or so and the local radio station, WRVR.FM, started a series of weekly radio rebroadcast five nights a week: Gangbusters, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet.  I loved them all – and was hooked on the Ranger for life.

Though the mythos has often been tweaked over the past 80 years, the basic origin of the Lone Ranger remains the same.  He was one of a band of Texas Rangers who were ambushed in Bryant’s Gap by the notorious Butch Cavendish gang.  All the other rangers died in the attack; their bodies found by an American Indian named Tonto.

Tonto buried all of the rangers, and also made a fake grave for the surviving ranger, so that Butch and other bad men of the West would not seek him out and finish the job.  As Tonto said, “you only ranger left; you Lone Ranger.”

This is – essentially – the story that the new Lone Ranger film sets out to tell.  As my readers probably know by now, the film has been a colossal bomb for Disney, rivaling last year’s disaster that was John Carter (based on the John Carter of Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs).

However, we here at The Jade Sphinx (let me break this gently) absolutely loved John Carter.  It was a thrilling evocation of all that was great about American pulp fiction.  Surely the Disney’s Long Ranger could not be all bad?

In short, it’s not.  It is something of a glorious mess; there is so much going on, and it is a rich and interesting film, asking more questions and demanding more imagination than the average summer junk film.  If anything, it’s a film crammed with too many ideas rather than just bland CGI action effects. It is faithful to the overall ideals of the Lone Ranger mythos, but also effectively transgressive. Though it will not be to everyone’s taste, I recommend it highly, despite its many failings.

Where to begin?  The film opens in 1933 at a carnival, where a child obsessed with the radio Lone Ranger finds the now-ancient Tonto (Johnny Depp, in the most interesting performance of his career) in the sideshow.  Tonto, in his dotage, initially thinks the boy is the Ranger himself, but, once he is set right, tells the boy the story of how he and the Lone Ranger came to be.

However, the story, in the telling, is full of holes and frankly incredible incidents of Native American mysticism.  Is the old Indian lying…?  Or is this how he remembers it?  Or does he simply imagine it all?  The film never fully answers these questions, and the viewer is invited to decide for himself.

In this telling, Cavendish (a vile-looking William Fitchner) is not only an outlaw, he’s in the pay of an unscrupulous railroad executive.  These Big Business interests are supported by the US military, and the whole fetid stew of corporatism, the military and organized crime connive to blame the Indians for various depredations as an excuse for moving them from their land to make way for the railroad.  (As one of the chief tells the Ranger before his group is decimated by a Gatling gun, “we are ghosts already.”)

Before John Reid (Armie Hammer) becomes the Lone Ranger, he is a young district attorney, ready to bring the rule of law to the West.  His brother (a convincing James Badge Dale) is a Texas Ranger on the trail of Cavendish, and the brothers are together during a horrific ambush, leaving all the rangers dead, except for our hero.  In an especially gruesome touch, Cavendish is part cannibal, eating a piece of his victims.  He munches on the heart of the Lone Ranger’s brother before making his escape.

Much of the humor of the film is found in how the Ranger and Tonto learn to work as a team – yes, it is a buddy movie, as well, with all that entails.  Hammer’s Ranger is the ultimate square – like Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he’s a by-the-book law-and-order type, who believes that law and justice are the same things.  He is uncomfortable outside of his frame of reference, and he is all too often incompetent at heroics.  In fact, Tonto thinks that the Ranger’s brother would’ve been much more effective as an avenger, and claims that kemo sabe means “the wrong brother.”  Hammer and Depp work wonderfully well together, but the comedy is too forced, and the jokey banter between the two of them hurts the overall tone of the film.

In fact, tone seems to be the main problem of The Lone Ranger.  By turns The Lone Ranger is a serious revenge picture, buddy comedy, meditation on the corrupt complicity of the military and Big Business, an action spectacle and a damnation of this nation’s treatment of its indigenous peoples.  There are needless plot points (there are two sequences with Helena Bonham Carter as a wooden-legged madam with a gun in her heel that can excised without notice, saving perhaps 20 minutes of running time), and sometimes the sense of overkill boarders on the grotesque.  But there cannot be bounty without excess, and our unreliable narrator somehow makes these disparate parts work as a whole.

The screenplay, by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio is an intentional funhouse mirror of our cinematic Western tradition.  The movie has echoes of everything from One Upon a Time in the West to The Searchers to Little Big Man to They Died With Their Boots On to The Iron Horse – taking images, ideas and concepts from all of these films and throwing them back at us in a purposely distorted vision.

It is only in the film’s final act, as the Lone Ranger and Tonto hijack a train under the control of railroad magnate Latham Cole (the excellent Tom Wilkinson) to the stirring strains of The William Tell Overture that we have standard Lone Ranger heroics, as the duo ride horses atop the train, dangle from couplings and perform stunts that would do Buster Keaton proud.

Just as science fiction is always about the present and never really about the future, the Western film is always about the modern world and not our mythic past. Each generation gets the Western it deserves, and The Lone Ranger does not paint a pretty picture of America in 2013.  The Ranger comes to learn that the rule of law does not hold for Big Business or the military, and that the lives of the poor or disenfranchised are considered exploitable and expendable by the establishment.  Tonto presses the mask upon the Ranger throughout the film, but it’s only when the Ranger realizes that there is plenty of law but very little justice that he decides to embrace it.  “If this is the law,” he says, “then I guess I’ll be an outlaw.”

The Lone Ranger is a film, I think, that the viewer takes con amore or not at all.  I was hooked in the opening moments – director Gore Verbinski creates images in the carnival (and throughout the film) of remarkable beauty and richness.  Sadly, when I saw the film at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater, we were two of perhaps 12 patrons for the evening show.  The film is flop of monumental proportions and, if you will, I have a thought on that as well.

It’s not that The Lone Ranger is a bad film – perhaps not a coherent action picture, but it’s an elusive and subtle pastiche that is satisfying on many, many levels.  The real problem, in terms of box office, is simply that people don’t want it.  The West is not part of our increasingly urban zeitgeist, and, to it’s credit, The Lone Ranger even tries to address past political injustices by making Tonto the most important and complex character.  True to his code (and unlike the current Superman), the Ranger never deliberately takes a life, strives for a high standard and believes in the rule of law.  Perhaps, there is just no place for the Lone Ranger in contemporary America.

One last parting note – readers interested in Western films from the 1950s (and there were two Long Ranger films that decade) could do no better than visiting Toby Roan’s indispensable blog 50 Westerns From the 50s.  You can find it here: http://fiftieswesterns.wordpress.com/.  It’s a treasure trove of information for the Western film buff.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore – the Book Version

It should by now come as no surprise that we at the Jade Sphinx think writer, illustrator and animator William Joyce is a genius.  His magnificent drawings and water colors (so evocative of the Golden Age of Illustration), his delicious sense of whimsy, and his uncanny knack for finding the word that is the most fun have positioned him as the pre-eminent children’s entertainer of the early Twenty-First Century.  In an age when so much of children’s entertainment is violent or “dark,” the Joycean oeuvre is a welcome shaft of brilliant sunlight in what is often a very shadowy room.

So we approached the book version of Joyce’s Oscar-winning short silent film, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, with something bordering on trepidation.  (Joyce co-directed the film with Brandon Oldenburg.)  Why … when the film was so enthusiastically reviewed in these pages?

My initial hesitation was mainly because of the ambiguous and mystical qualities of the short film.  Surely a print version – dependent on text as well as visuals – would rob the story of some of its alchemy?

Well, I’m happy to report that the book version of Morris Lessmore is as beguiling as the video-version and the downloadable app.  If anything, the book version is more mysterious than the film version – with ambiguities of equal power and subtlety.

To recap the story – reader Morris Lessmore has his life thrown into chaos by a violent tornado.  Walking through the wreckage, he sees the vision of a beautiful girl carried away by books as if lifted by balloons.  He enters a magical library, where he spends the rest of his life caring for the books and sharing them with the world.  (Visitors to the library enter in black and white and leave in glorious color.)  After decades in the library, an elderly Lessmore leaves as a young woman comes to take his place.

While the film is dense with mystical passages, the book provides different conundrums.  With snappy pacing and retro visual style, we watch Lessmore spend his life tending books in a massive library.  But while he is caring for the books there – and sharing them with people in need of the curative powers of fiction – he also closes each day by writing in his own journal.  As Joyce writes, The days passed. So did the months. And then years.  When an elderly Lessmore finally leaves to join eternity, he leaves behind him his own book.  As Joyce writes, His life was a book of his own writing, one orderly page after another.  He would open it every morning and write of his joys and sorrows, of all that he knew and everything that he hoped for.  The contents remain a mystery to the reader, but the question must be asked: is the library really a metaphor for our lives, with each book representing every life lived?  Or is Joyce saying that each and every life is a book of blank pages, to be filled with deeds good or bad, as our final contribution to the great library of the world?  Or is Joyce saying that we must leave books of value (or lead lives of value) for those who will come after us?  (A typical Joycean detail is that the top of Lessmore's pen forms a question mark.)

The very malleability of the story is one of its great satisfactions, along with the Joycean habit of including references to beloved pop culture touchstones, including everything from Winsor McCay to Buster Keaton to The Wizard of Oz.  It is no wonder that Lessmore spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists – and as the holidays near, it would make an ideal gift to a young person starting on the personal, life-changing journey of reading.  The art (in collaboration with Joe Bluhm) is transcendent — a visual feast for young and old alike.  More important, after sharing Morris Lessmore with a child (or lucky adult), it is interesting to ask the listener, what do you think it means?

In other Joyce news: two new volumes in his ongoing Guardians of Childhood cosmology are just arriving in bookstores now: Toothiana, Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies, is a young adult novel, and the picture book The Sandman: The Story of Sanderson Mansnoozie.  Expect reviews in the weeks to come.

Laurel and Hardy

It’s perhaps reasonable to say that American cinema’s Golden Age of Comedy occurred in the 1920s and 30s.  Silent clowns, such a Buster Keaton (1895-1966), Harold Lloyd (1893-1971) and Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), changed the very language of comedy during the silent era, and such diverse talents as W.C. Fields (1880-1946), Mae West (1893-1980) and the Marx Brothers gave voice to that language.

But few comedic talents have a more devoted following than Stan Laurel (1890 – 1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892 –1957).  To this day there are organizations nationwide operating under the umbrella group The Sons of the Desert (named after one of the team’s most famous films), with ‘tents’ in most major cities.  For sheer mania, Laurel and Hardy buffs give devotees of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who and Star Wars/Trek a run for their money.

This fanaticism is understandable.  There is a certain alchemy to Laurel and Hardy; at their best, the team could bond with viewers in a deep and emotional manner impossible to their equally famous colleagues.

I was thinking a great deal about Laurel and Hardy while reading Stan and Ollie; The Roots of Comedy; The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy -- an excellent book on the duo saddled with two unpunctuated subtitles.  Once I was finished, I could honestly say that I wish I knew them.

The author, Simon Louvish (born 1947), does a fine job of detailing the story of their lives.  He promises upfront not to gloss over the very human failings of the two, and present a warts-and-all biography.  That he does, but the warts are not very disfiguring and both Laurel and Hardy emerge as fallible human beings who remain lovable.  And while Louvish may not be the most limpid stylist, he gets the job done.

Stan was a jobbing vaudevillian born in the UK to a theatrical family.  Ollie was born in Harlem, Georgia, to a near-do-well father and working mother.  As a boy, Ollie became fascinated by the possibilities of moving pictures, starting as a projectionist.  Stan traveled to the US as part of a comedy troupe (which included Chaplin!), and made several solo comedies that did not register much with audiences.

The pairing came about almost by accident, but after the first handful of their 107 co-starring films, the bare essentials were cemented and their screen personas set.

At this point, it’s essential for you to have had a taste of Laurel and Hardy (if you haven’t!) before proceeding.  Jump to YouTube and look for any of the following: Laughing Gravy, Beau Hunks (both 1931), Helpmates, The Music Box (both 1932) or watch the boys dance in Way Out West (1937).  If it were possible to crystalize joy, it’s this graceful and lovely dance!

Now, with that behind your belt, let’s see if we can analyze this magical combination.  I have a few ideas of my own:

Laurel and Hardy are not just a team or a duo, they are a couple.  It’s amazing how often they end up sharing the same bed, consoling one-another, protecting each-other, jointly raising surrogate children or caring for pets.  It is almost silly how all close male relationship are now read for how they are ‘coded’ either hetero-or-homosexual, but I read the onscreen Stan and Ollie as homosexual in the purest, nonsexual sense.  They loved one-another.

At heart, both Stan and Ollie are children.  Yes, Ollie is often more intelligent and given to greater attempts to master the situation; he is the senior child of the two, but that does not make him less of a child.  It is this engaging innocence (even when they’re being brats!) that so many people respond to.

This eternal childhood often makes them more (or less) than human.  As such, they don’t change and seem subject to different physical, social and intellectual laws than we.  It would seem as if the two great clowns were denizens of some alternate reality rather than our own prosaic surroundings.  They are, first and last, their own unique selves.   They are impervious within the protective cocoons of their own strangeness. 

Yet, for all of the strangeness of Laurel and Hardy, the recurring note is one of sweetness.  The couple had a core of sweetness – the kind of sweetness that comes from an innocent, inner benevolence.  Even at their worst behavior (which often results in massive destruction of property), there is that core of kindliness.

As film historian Randy Skretvedt has written: The world is not their oyster; they are the pearl trapped in the oyster.  Their jobs hang by a rapidly unraveling thread.  Their possessions crumble to dust.  Their dreams die just at the point of fruition.  Their dignity is assaulted constantly.  At times they can’t live with each other, but they’ll never be able to live without each other.  Each other is all they will ever have.  That, and the hope of a better day.

Though I enjoyed Stan and Ollie a great deal, I can’t help but feel that reading about great comedians is never as satisfying as watching them.  Fortunately, Laurel and Hardy are readily available online and in a new DVD collection gathering their best films.  Many of their later films, such as Air Raid Wardens (1943) and Nothing but Trouble (1944) are despised by purists, but I find them watchable still for the inescapable benevolence of the duo.  Make yourself happy – watch Laurel and Hardy.

Tomorrow:  W. C. Fields

Oscar Pick: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

It is quite possible that 2011-2122 will be remembered as banner years for author, illustrator and animator William Joyce.  First, Joyce made a triumphant return to illustrated books with The Man in the Moon and followed that with his first young adult prose novel, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King.  In addition, he released his first animated short, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, created by his own company, Moonbot.

What does 2012 promise?  Morris Lessmore is nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, and later this year DreamWorks animation will release Rise of the Guardians, a feature-length animated adaptation of his Guardians of Childhood mythos.  On top of that, the second book in the Guardians series, this time featuring a monocle-wearing rabbit, will be out in time for Easter.

It is perhaps fitting that just as Joyce returned to books the first animated short from his studio should focus on the redemptive powers of storytelling.  Though Joyce has been involved in several large-studio productions (including Robots and an adaptation of his own book, Meet the Robinsons), there has yet to be a screen adaptation that completely captured his unique vision.  Morris Lessmore is the first animated work that completely looks like a William Joyce creation, complete with bright pastel colors and shiny Americana.  Working under his own Moonbot banner, Joyce, and co-director Brandon Oldenburg, were able to create a haunting vignette without an interfering studio inserting by-rote funk music and fart jokes.  (Morris Lessmore is also an iPad app, turning the short into an interactive ebook of sorts.)

Where to begin with Morris Lessmore?  Our main character is a beautifully animated homage to silent movie clown Buster Keaton.  Morris is a masterpiece of recreation; Joyce and Oldenburg completely nail Keaton’s persona.  Some of the physical jokes hark back directly to Keaton’s films, but, more importantly, they have captured Keaton’s magical facial expressions and dance-like movements as well.  Captured, too, is Keaton’s underlying melancholy: though Chaplin often strove for pathos, he himself was seldom a tragic figure.  Not so Keaton, whose face was chiseled in stone but his eyes were those of a wounded angel.  There is an incredible amount of tenderness in the animated Morris, and it is his face that echoes once the short is over.

The plot is surreal and allegorical: Morris, reading, is pulled by a hurricane into a magical realm.  There, he becomes guardian over an elaborate mansion of books, caring for them, healing them when ruined, and sharing them with people as if he were a celestial librarian.  Many years later, his life over, he spirits away towards heaven, young once again, buffeted by a bevy of airborne books.

With so simple an outline, Joyce and Oldenburg manage to cram into 13 minutes some of the most wistful, affecting and moving animation I’ve seen in years.  Morris is befriended by a book version of Humpty Dumpty, and in a witty animation in-joke, Humpty moves when the pages of his book turn, much like early efforts at animation.  The score is simplicity itself – mostly Pop Goes the Weasel hauntingly played on a piano heavy with vibrato.

In addition, we are treated to notations in Morris’ own notebook, penned in a simple hand.  One page reads: My further investigations have turned many of my long held opinions into mush.  The many and varied points of view I have encountered do not confuse, but enrich.  I laugh.  I cry.  I seldom understand things, but it…

On another page, Morris writes, I go round and round the mulberry bush.  Why does the weasel go “pop?”  Does it matter?  If life is enjoyed, does it have to make sense?

Like all allegories, what most people will find in The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is what they bring to it.  However, I cannot escape the sense of both irrepressible joy and gentle sadness found in the film.  One of the recurrent themes threading through Joyce’s current work is the sense of stewardship, and it’s no mistake that Morris is a Guardian as much as the other fairy tale and folklore figures he is using in his Guardians of Childhood series.  Nor can it be completely accidental that Morris’ key confident is Humpty Dumpty, who was once broken and is now rebuilt.  For this correspondent, it’s impossible to watch Morris Lessmore without a sense of melancholy and loss.  It is a unique note to find in an animated short, and the film is all the more interesting, and, yes, profound, because of it.

Whether The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore wins the Academy Award or not is mostly irrelevant.  The achievement of Joyce and Oldenburg will survive either a loss or a win.  Interested readers can see the film here:  http://vimeo.com/35404908.  It’s 13 minutes you may never forget.