Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Who’ll turn out the lights (in your world tonight)

2017-09-30T21:30:00.000-04:00

It’s the last day of September in 2017, and tomorrow (October 1), Thrilling Days of Yesteryear will officially move to its new home at WordPress. If you make it a point to stop by in an ever-so-casual fashion, you’ll notice that there’s been quite a bit of activity taking place at the blog’s new home; a little over 600 posts both old and new have already settled in and made themselves comfortable by calling dibs on the bunks.

Since switching from Salon Blogs (a venture that, in retrospect, I regret…because I have nothing to show for it, unless I want to fire up archive.org’s Wayback Machine) to Blogspot nearly a decade ago, I have to say things were pretty swell here. Oh, occasionally there would be a minor problem to iron out but such inconveniences were few and far between. To be completely honest, except for the Herculean task of transferring the content from old to new blogs, I’ve really been impressed with the look of the new WordPress TDOY. I like the big pictures that start off each post, something that I have developed an infinity for since I started penning the Radio Spirits blog in May of 2012. You’ll find that more than a few “classic” TDOY posts have spiffy new presentations in pictures; that’s what I have been enjoying about the transfer the most.

During my stay here at Blogspot, I racked up over 3,000 posts. A large percentage of those…well, I never was all that good at math but let’s just say a buttload of them were “meat by-product.” I posted a lot of personal rants, comic strips, and political cartoons back in those days…and they have not aged at all well, so I vetoed bringing them over to WordPress. They have been released into the wilds of the blogosphere or taken upstate to romp around on someone’s farm (unless the material I posted had some relevance afterward in the post). I’ve also erased many of the TV-coming-to-DVD announcements, Coming Distractions, and notifications of movies/TV shows on sale because, again, all of that was in the past and it’s not going to do anyone any good now (I’m betting a lot of that stuff has expired). What’s past isn’t always prologue, I suppose.

I’ll be leaving a few items at the old Blogspot apartment for a while until I can figure out how I want to work them into the WordPress environs, namely the serials I did for Serial Saturdays and two of the blog’s signature features, Mayberry Mondays and Doris Day(s). In the case of Mayberry, I’d like to go back and do some new screen grabs for the first season episodes seeing as I still have Season 1 of Mayberry R.F.D. on DVD. (I want to go back and do screen caps for some of the older serials, too.) So, if you get an R.F.D. jones, you’ll need to use the key I’m leaving under the mat…if you get a Google Chrome message that reads “Don’t play in that old house or you’ll put your eye out” I don’t know what to tell you.

At the WordPress blog…well, there’ll be a change or two in the works. For a time now, I’ve set aside days for certain features: Overlooked Films on Tuesdays, B-Western Wednesdays, silent movies on Thursdays, etc. I think that with the exception of Overlooked Films the new TDOY policy will be “I’ll-write-about-this-movie-whenever-I-darn-well-please.” I’m really hoping to boost the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly content of TDOY once I get settled in, and if I’m not tied into a whole “Gee, I’d like to post something about this film but it’s out-of-sync with what usually goes here” thing it’ll work out for me so much better.

With all that out of the way, let me step inside the confessional and own up to this: the post I had planned for Monday is going to be postponed for a day or two because I’m still making my way through the material; I didn’t get a doggone thing accomplished after Tuesday of last week due to deadlines for other projects and outside irritations. I’m really going to get better at a regular posting schedule, so if you’ll just hand me my ten Hail Marys I’ll be out of your hair.

Thanks for making the Blogspot Thrilling Days of Yesteryear one of your usual haunts…and I hope you’ll do the same for our new home at WordPress. If you haven’t updated our new address on your blogroll, please do so as a solid to me.

Holding pattern

2017-09-15T13:38:00.003-04:00

Since I’m at the halfway point before Thrilling Days of Yesteryear makes its official move to the brand-spanking-new WordPress blog in October, I thought I’d post this to let you know why TDOY went silent this week.

I had planned to have a few reviews up but the post I penciled in for Monday got pushed to the side due to a Radio Spirits liner notes project I was trying to complete. That activity took place all weekend, the time I utilize to plan what will go up on the blog for the week. With my RS assignment completed, I had to further postpone posts because of that Irma thing (we were a lot luckier than some of our fellow Georgians in that our electricity didn’t go on vacation during the storm…but it did come and go a few times, interfering with the movie I was trying to watch) …and then a pair of doctor appointments (for the patriarch of Rancho Yesteryear, mi padre) ate up some more time. I finally said ta heck wid it and vowed to get back to the blogging thing Monday.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing a little hammering-and-nailing at the new site; there are close to 300 classic TDOY posts up there now, some with new photos added and a few tweaks and edits here and there. I’ve also been doing a little pruning here at the old blog; I’ve made some editorial decisions about what to transfer and what to destroy—so if it looks as if the old blog has lost a little weight that’s the reason. It’s simply going to be too Herculean a task to transfer everything to the new site, and some past posts will have to sit in the waiting room (most appropriate in light of the medical appointments this week) while others will simply vanish into the blogosphere, accessible only for those patient to sift through archive.org.

So that’s how things stand—come back by next week and I’ll have a thing or two to bend your ear about. Have a great weekend, cartooners!

Please permit us to pause…

2017-08-17T07:00:00.000-04:00

I really hate to put the brakes on the ol’ blog while I was going great guns (more or less), but it’s going to be silent for the rest of the week. My sister Kat is in town, and she brought along with her my favorite nephew…who’ll be occupying much of my free time here at Rancho Yesteryear. (Kat and Mom left him with Dad and I while Mom is at her doctor’s appointment….so the old man and I are gonna get Davis a tattoo.) Normal blogging will resume Monday, so until then—make the most of your weekend, cartooners!

Book Review: Hollywood Obscura: Death, Murder, and the Paranormal Aftermath

2017-08-14T07:00:00.000-04:00

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear goddess Thelma Todd had her motion picture career cut short by a mysterious death in 1935 that continues to mystify fans and provoke endless speculation even today. Was the “Hot Toddy” murdered…or was her death merely a tragic accident? There is no shortage of suspects for the murder theory (her ex-husband Pat DiCicco, business partner/lover Roland West…even mobster “Lucky” Luciano) but however you choose to explain Thel’s demise there’s certainly no argument that we lost a truly amazing talented actress-comedienne.

Thelma Todd with Charley Chase in
The Nickel Nurser (1932)

After Todd’s death, many witnesses have claimed to see her spirit floating around her old haunts (pardon the pun): the building that housed her restaurant, Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, is the site of several sightings, in addition to the garage where her body was discovered, presumably after passing out from the deadly carbon monoxide resulting from her Lincoln Phaeton running inside. (Not to mention a few bruises of unexplained origin.) There are even reports that the yacht once owned by Roland West, the Joyita, has a rather cursed history—linked to Thelma’s demise (there are those that speculate that possible murderer West croaked Thelma on the boat before bringing her to the garage and setting it up to look like an accident). If you have a strong interest in the supernatural, you’re going to enjoy reading Brian Clune’s Hollywood Obscura: Death, Murder, and the Paranormal Aftermath—a book due out this month that examines a handful of Tinsel Town deaths (George Reeves, Marilyn Monroe, Ramon Novarro, etc.) in page-turning detail and relates accounts of folks spotting these celebs still tooling around despite a change of address in The Great Beyond.

Author Brian Clune

Speaking for myself: I’m a tremendous skeptic when it comes to the paranormal. To paraphrase Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion: “I don’t believe in spooks…I don’t believe in spooks…I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.” So I was a little leery about the ghost aspect of the book…but even those who remained unconvinced about such phenomena will enjoy Hollywood Obscura, a refreshing read by an author whose other works include California’s Historic Haunts (co-written with Bob Davis) and who’s contributed to such TV shows as Dead Files and Ghost Hunters. Brian Clune is also the co-founder and historian of Planet Paranormal Radio and Planet Paranormal Investigations, the website for which can be found here. His book is well-documented, and I was particularly tickled by the fact that he drew on material from some of my fellow classic movie bloggers including fervent Shirley Temple disciple Page at My Love of Old Hollywood (where a lot of the Thelma Todd biography was borrowed—odd, in that I’d think Pagey would be a natural for Ramon Novarro) and the now-defunct The Silent Movie Blog, once owned and operated by Facebook compadre Christopher Snowden (now blogging at Television Diary).

The Los Feliz "Murder Mansion"

Hollywood Obscura isn’t all about celebrities. It features chapters on would-be celebrities, like the legendary Black Dahlia, and some semi-celebs who achieved fifteen minutes of fame, as in the case of the notorious Manson family. There’s even a section on the infamous Los Feliz “Murder Mansion,” a case whose particulars I was not familiar with, so it made for a pretty riveting read. Rounding out the book are chapters on “Bugsy” Siegel, John Belushi, Tupac Shakur/Biggie Smalls, and recent TCM Star of the Month Natalie Wood. (Since I’m one of those people convinced that Wood’s husband—Robert Wagner—introduced Nat to a deeper part of the ocean, I don’t mind telling you I was a little uncomfortable watching R.J. and daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner chat it up in between those Wood movies showcased on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™. But I digress, even though this theory of Wagner's possible complicity is touched upon in the book.)

Hollywood Obscura is a most diverting tome, one you’ll navigate it very quickly (I took it with me when my fadduh had to have some tests done at Athens Regional and had it finished by the time they were done poking and prodding him) while being thoroughly entertained all the same. Published by Schiffer Books, a family-owned independent based out of Atglen, PA, Hollywood Obscura is also available from fine bookstores (Barnes & Noble) and those not so fine (you know the behemoth I’m talking about). Many thanks to Meghan Schaffer for sending the review copy my way.

Rage against the (Windstream) machine

2017-08-09T14:00:00.000-04:00

The fields went fallow on the blog for nearly a week for one simple reason: our internet provider is terrible, and isn’t planning on improving their behavior anytime soon. I’m not shy about naming these poltroons; we get our crappy service from Windstream, and in a just world the company would be brought up before a tribunal to answer for their crimes…and once found guilty by a not-at-all-impartial judge of my own choosing, sentenced to one of those islands where they used to quarantine lepers, plague victims, and other unfortunates of society. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Windstream—at least in my neck of the woods—has been wedded to DISH, since they both deserve one another.

The trouble started around 4:30pm last Wednesday, when I noticed the little yellow triangle symbol superimposed over the internet connectivity icon on my laptop. This meant that the system was down, and though I was mildly annoyed (I was working on a post for the Radio Spirits blog) I decided to be cool and wait to see if the problem would be quickly worked out. Two-and-a-half hours later, and still no internet, I phoned Windstream with that sinking feeling in my stomach pit that they were going to make me run what I call “the Internet Obstacle Course.” (This is where I’m required to unplug and re-plug cables, the modem, etc.—which I wouldn’t have a problem with except my mother insists that they be relegated to a space behind the TV (an area where a person of my girth has difficulty accessing) because she doesn’t like the sight of wires.

Before I called Windstream, I ran the Course ahead of time to make sure the problem wasn’t on my end. It wasn’t, and I had suspected as such. So, once I’d made it past their infuriating phone tree, I explain to the customer service representative that the system is out. She’s convinced the problem is on my end, since no one else has complained, and lets me know she’s writing up a ticket so a technician can fix the problem. He’ll be there Saturday.

I’m ticked off at this, because that means we’ll be offline for two entire days…and I won’t be able to get this post done. I phoned my editor at Radio Spirits, and she lets me know that if I can get the piece to her Monday morning (assuming the tech fixes the problem on Saturday) she’ll give it a quick read, make the necessary changes, and have it back at me so I can schedule the post.

I should have known the technician wasn’t going to be at Rancho Yesteryear Saturday. Oh, we got a phone call from Windstream at 11:15am informing us he’d be there between 11:15 and 3pm, but I end up calling them back at 3:05 to find out that the problem is worse than they originally estimated and that we may not be back up until Monday morning. Monday afternoon, I’m having to call them back to find out where the hell the guy is, and they’re telling me it’s not going to happen until the next day. I gave the person a bit of pranging about this, and they finally acquiesce to my demands, promising the work will be done by five that day. When I wound up having to call back at 5:05pm to ask why they insist on lying to me every time I phone, we got a call on our other cell phone line…telling us the technician will be at the house between 8am and 12 noon.

Substitute "Windstream" for "AT&T" and you'll get the idea.

Since confession is good for the soul, I’ll come clean here. I have a bit of a temper. But I’m even-keeled for the most part—the only time I start approaching Hulk status is when someone can’t be straight with me. They couldn’t be forthright and tell me that the problem with our internet connectivity was that some idiot installed some switches wrong, and it apparently took them all that time to find out just exactly what that individual screwed up. My mother ran into the technician as she headed out the door Tuesday morning as he was just pulling up. I had discovered by that time that our internet was back, but he wanted to check on our status. He told her the story of what happened (I believe I was asked by both my parents not to come into contact with him for fear that something terrible might happen) and she replied matter-of-factly, “That person needs to be fired.” The technician, looking out for his own, tried to explain that “it’s not his fault” and Mom just dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

That’s the sordid story of why there’s been nothing new to read on the blog for over a week, and because I had to get caught up with some other assignments there may not be any new material until next Monday (I wanted to at least get a new Crime Does Not Pay up—I’ll try my best, but my eye appointment tomorrow may interfere with that). If your situation is like mine in that Windstream is your only option for internet access…I feel your pain, brother. If you’re looking for a provider and are considering Windstream…don’t. Run fast, run far.

“Well, thank you, Harvey! I prefer you, too…”

2017-07-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

For ten seasons on TV’s The Carol Burnett Show, comic actor Harvey Korman was not only one of the hardest working second bananas in the variety show bidness but one of the funniest. Korman left the series before its eleventh and final season to pursue projects that would allow him to take center stage (he was offered a contract by ABC-TV and did a self-titled sitcom in 1978 that came and went) and while he never quite captured the stardom he sought he had plenty of laurels to rest on as far as his boob tube legacy was concerned (not to mention his sidesplitting turn in Blazing Saddles [1974]). During his stint on the Burnett show, Harvey was nominated six times for an Emmy (and he won four trophies) and four times for a Golden Globe (he won in 1975). “He was fearless: he sang, he danced, he ad-libbed, he pranced, and he made TV audiences roar with laughter,” observes a Time Life press release for a DVD due to be released tomorrow (August 1): The Best of Harvey Korman.

My chum Michael Krause at Foundry Communications was good enough to slip me a screener, and while people may quibble what constitutes Mr. Korman’s “best” there’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of with regards to the material on this disc. There are four telecasts (three of which haven’t been seen in 40 years) present, with the first a very funny show that closed out the first season of Burnett’s series on May 13, 1968. Carol has no guest stars on this telecast; it’s billed as a “family show,” and focuses on her talented ensemble—Vicki Lawrence performs Best of Both Worlds and Lyle Waggoner does a not-too-shabby By the Time I Get to Phoenix—including a hilarious sketch where Harvey ducks into his dressing room to avoid his “fan club” (the women who comprise that aggregation reminded me of the same matrons who were gaga for Jack Benny) and fantasizes about being a Hugh Hefner-type. There are funny segments of “Carol and Sis” and “The Old Folks” on hand, and a sprightly version of Together by the cast just before the wonderful closing featuring Carol’s charwoman character.

When Carol's Molly suggests the two of them "go inside and turn on Lawrence Welk" Bert cracks: "I didn't think that was possible."

Carol, Harvey & Vicki as Patty, Maxene & Laverne

A November 18, 1968 episode is unusual in that it was taped during a musician’s strike…which necessitates Carol having to hum her show’s opening theme and sing the familiar I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together close with choral accompaniment. A telecast without an orchestra might be a handicap if Ella Fitzgerald is your musical guest (Ella could have just scat-sang a couple) but the First Lady of Song, Carol explains later, lip-synched to previously recorded numbers…and demonstrates by doing her own lip-synch to The Trolley Song (which experiences speed problems during the playback, and Burnett’s facial expressions are hysterical). There’s also a lip-synch performed to the Andrews Sisters’ Bei Mir Bist Du Schön…executed by Carol, Vicki, and Harvey (in drag) in a “Carol and Sis” sketch.

In the "Carol and Sis" Andrews Sisters sketch, Isabel "Weezy" Sanford plays a cleaning lady...

...and Elaine Joyce turns up in another skit as the sexy neighbor from next door.

Carol gives Harvey a Miranda warning. (Sorry about that...
I've been hanging out on Facebook with Andrew "Grover" Leal
too much.)

Carol Burnett and her writers were classic movie fans, and many of her show’s best-remembered sketches were hilarious parodies of movies. The November 18th show features Carol and guest Sid Caesar in “Mrs. Magnificent” (Mrs. Miniver), and as much as I revere Sid he’s forced to take a back seat to Burnett’s antics as a stiff-upper-lip British woman who’s unsettlingly nonchalant about being shelled by the Germans during WW2. (Sid reprises some bits from Tars and Spars in the show’s opening Q&A segment, and he’s much funnier there.) A September 29, 1969 show with guests Bernadette Peters and Nancy Wilson teams the two guests with Carol in a big musical number split in three parts: Wilson does a kind of Casablanca parody, and Peters is the novice who’s going out a nobody but coming back a star in a send-up of Warners’ Depression-era musicals. In between these two, Carol apes Carmen Miranda and completely loses it when Harvey slips and falls on his Gazoo during the number. (At one point in the song Korman ad-libs “I suppose they’ll want the Emmy back,” breaking Carol up.)

A reminder of CBS' commitment to programming in color.

Look who's in the audience! Mr. and Mrs. Ross Martin!

A spoof of Summertime (the 1955 Katharine Hepburn film) is the highlight of the fourth and final show on The Best of Harvey Korman, a telecast from October 27, 1971 with guest stars Tim Conway and Diahann “Julia” Carroll. Tim does his shuffling old man character in a sketch about a jewel robbery (Harvey manages to keep it together for the most part despite a couple of lapses into hysterics) and Carol and Diahann do the number that you see Carol perform with Lucille Ball in that segment that Burnett narrates on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™, Chutzpah. Carol Burnett fans will want to nab this very entertaining DVD for their shelf—a fitting reminder that whether he was supporting Carol or Danny Kaye, Harvey Korman was the yardstick by which second bananas should be measured.

Crime Does Not Pay #11: “Soak the Poor” (08/21/37)

2017-07-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

This week’s entry in our Crime Does Not Pay series features two actors in the opening credits that would go on to bigger and better things in the motion picture bidness. The first is Leslie Fenton, a British-born thespian who made an impression in silent pictures (Lazybones, The Road to Glory) before smoothly transitioning to the talkies and appearing in such features as The Public Enemy (1931), The Guilty Generation (1931), and Boys Town (1938). Fenton later walked around to the other side of the camera and became a director, starting out with shorts (he even helmed a pair in the CDNP franchise) before graduating to feature flicks, notably Tomorrow, the World! (1944) and Pardon My Past (1945). (If it happens to swing by The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ sometime in future, I highly recommend Tell No Tales [1939]—a great little B curio starring Melvyn Douglas…believe me, I am not a fan of Douglas in his “leading man” days but he’s positively first-rate in this one.)

The other familiar personage who gets a nod in the opening credits is Leon Ames, a hardy character actor whose was billed as Leon Waycoff early in his picture career (Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Famous Ferguson Case) before he changed it to the more familiar handle and cemented his cinematic immortality with memorable turns in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Peyton Place (1957). Ames would later channel William Powell in a boob tube version of Life with Father (1953-55) and Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride (1961-62) before landing the role he was born to play: Wilbur Post’s (Alan Young) next-door neighbor (and former commanding officer) Gordon Kirkwood in Mister Ed (he replaced Larry Keating’s character when Keating died in 1963). Ames continued to work even into the 1980s; he’s got a nice bit in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), his cinematic swan song.

“But, Ian,” I hear you saying. “What of our old friend, the MGM Crime Reporter?” Well, Philip Trent must have called in sick that day because the Crime Reporter is played by an unidentified actor…who looks like he might also have a sideline in the funeral parlor game. He introduces Leon Ames as “Mr. Stanton” (no first name), a “special investigator of the Crime Prevention Bureau.” (Don’t tell me they didn’t make that up.)

STANTON: The federal government in our several states met the challenge of unemployment and hunger during the Depression years by creating the Home Relief Bureau…hundreds of millions were distributed during the first few months of direct home relief…

Hundreds of millions of what? This sounds like that government cheese thing. I also like how Stanton refers to “the Depression years”—according to my father, they lasted until 1962 (the year he got married).

STANTON: …twice a month, each needy family received a relief ticket…exchangeable at authorized neighborhood grocery stores for food…

A precursor to food stamps, in other words.

STANTON: Then without warning, something went wrong…

I’m guessing Blue Dog Democrats got elected to Congress?

STANTON: …relief became a national nightmare…

Nailed it! Okay, I’m just jinkin’ ya. Stanton is going to illustrate an unsettling example of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as we are whisked away to a humble grocery store (not the one owned by Herbert T. Gillis, sadly enough) to find its proprietor humming a happy tune. Without warning, a pair of rough customers enter the store and send the grocer to the floor of his establishment courtesy of a sock in the jaw.

FIRST HOOD: This is the last time we’re gonna tell ya to get into line…

SECOND HOOD: You know what happened to Belvin…

FIRST HOOD: He didn’t want to do business with us either…

Well, when you go around punching people in the jaw it’s bound to effect customer relations, Mr. Henchman. I’d try the soft sell approach. The second goon in this little morality play goes by “Mac” (I wish it could have been something more colorful, like “Monty the Gonif”) …but we recognize him as Ben Welden, a character great who played more hoodlums than you’ve had hot dinners. (I think that scar across his left eye is a nice touch):

The scene shifts to yet another grocer getting a shakedown…and it’s none other than character veteran Byron Foulger! My very good friend Cliff “Sugarball” Weimer, who carefully measures out the fountain soda machine syrup with utmost precision In the Balcony, once joked that he had probably seen more movies featuring Byron than Foulger’s immediate family…so I (un)officially made Mr. Foulger the mascot of ITB’s Facebook page. An unidentified hood puts the squeeze on Grocer Foulger:

THIRD HOOD (counting pieces of paper): Sixty-four dollars’ worth of relief tickets…

GROCER FOULGER: You’re grabbing forty cents out of every dollar…how do you expect me to keep goin’?

THIRD HOOD: Quit beefin’…you’d have to wait sixty days down at relief headquarters for your dough…we give you cash on the line…

So, what seems at first glance like unsavory criminal activity is just a concerted effort to cut through bureaucratic red tape.

GROCER FOULGER (after counting): Hey—this is thirty dollars’ short…even the way you figure…

THIRD HOOD: Last week you sneaked over to the relief office yourself with a flock of tickets…we’re taking our cut just the same…don’t try that again…

I retract my earlier statement. With all this lawlessness rampant in the welfare system, eventually there are going to be courageous men who say, “Enough is enough” …and they just decide to opt out of the program. Such a man is played by Harry Hayden, and this time the (always reliable) IMDb gets the identification right.

GROCER HARRY: I’m all through—I’m washed up with this relief business…

FOURTH HOOD (grabbing the sign): Yeah? This ain’t your business you’re throwin’ out…it’s ours…you know, accidents happen to guys who put up signs…well, come on, come on…let’s have what you got…

If the henchman that shakes down Harry the Grocer looks familiar…it’s because it’s an incredibly thin Horace McMahon, the character actor who later appeared on the right side of the law as “Lt. Mike Parker” on the TDOY television fave Naked City. McMahon’s thug returns to Hoodlum Central, where he tells the second-in-command of the operation (identified as “Slim”) that Grocer Harry was all set to back out of the Relief deal until he was told it would be a shame if someone were to set fire to his store.

FIFTH HOOD: Nobody wants to handle tickets anymore!

FOURTH HOOD: We’re takin’ all the gravy!

DARLA HOOD: A lot of grocers are gonna fold up on you, Slim…

SLIM: You guys gettin’ soft? Just get me the tickets, that’s all…

Slim takes up the tickets collected by his hard-working “staff” and takes them to the headquarters of the operation’s Big Boss, a charming snake named Nick Garvey (Fenton)—we’ll meet him in a second. First order of business: Slim hands out stacks of tickets to a quartet of grocers who will, in turn, cash them in at the Relief Bureau for sweet, sweet moolah. One of the merchants, a human-weasel hybrid named Schultz, is portrayed by a character stalwart named John Butler—who will appear in later entries in the Crime Does Not Pay series but I always remember him from appearances in several Robert Benchley shorts (How to Watch Football, Opening Day).

SCHULTZ: Say, Slim…

SLIM: Yeah?

SCHULTZ: I haven’t got much of a store…they’re gonna wonder at relief headquarters, turnin’ in this many…

SLIM: Why. Schultz—you’re the first guy I ever saw who didn’t like big dough…

Suddenly, a terrible smell permeates the office…which can only mean Nick Garvey has entered.

GARVEY: You haven’t had any trouble up to now, have ya?

SCHULTZ: No, I haven’t, Nick…but I…

GARVEY: Then forget it…your job is to take those tickets over to the relief office and bring back the dough…let me do the worrying—I’ll take care of you…

This is what is known in the two-reeler business as “foreshadowing.” Meanwhile, Nick wants to see Slim in his personal office.

GARVEY: I understand you’re having trouble with some of your grocers…we gotta keep them from going out of business…

SLIM: Let ‘em try it…I’ll shake their ears off…

GARVEY: Now no rough stuff, Slim…we gotta give ‘em back their profits…

Um…I’m pretty sure this isn’t the way capitalism is supposed to work…

SLIM: Whaaaat?

GARVEY: Tell every grocer in town to raise his prices forty percent…

(Wiping brow) Whew! You had me worried for a sec…that’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

GARVEY: The people on relief are getting something for nothing…let them pay…

Nick Garvey, noted Republican economist, seems to have forgotten that everyone pays in this system.

I guess we should have expected those headlines. What follows is a montage of grocers jacking up their prices to satisfy the parasites running this racket. Ten pounds of potatoes: formerly 25 cents…now 35 cents. Bread rises (no pun intended) from ten cents to twelve cents a loaf. And milk—children’s milk, Mandrake!—sees a two-cent increase from eleven to thirteen cents! Madness! Superimposed over these rising prices are angry crowds of men, women, and chillun…who are all too aware that getting by on what they normally get on relief is a tragic set of circumstances at best.

As a small mob of relief holders loudly protest the rising costs of groceries, Hastings, a representative from the Home Relief Bureau attempts to address the situation:

HASTINGS: Please…please…we must have order here or we can’t do anything…remember…we’re here to help you…all of you… (Crowd mutters in anger) We’ve stretched our present budget to the limit…but we hope for increased appropriations any day…

FIRST MAN: Well, that’s what you said yesterday!

“Well, yesterday I was convinced Congress would do something…apparently I suffered some sort of head injury…”

SECOND MAN: If we had jobs, we wouldn’t be here!

FIRST WOMAN: Why don’t you go after the grocers!

SECOND WOMAN: I just can’t keep my family on four dollars a week…I can’t do it, I tell you…

HASTINGS: We’re doing everything that we can to get prices back to normal…

FIRST MAN: Well, when?

SECOND MAN: That’s what I say…when?

THIRD WOMAN: You’ve got to do something now!

“We plan to convene a committee this afternoon to address the matter…and a report with their findings should be out sometime in 1939…” Helpless as only a government bureaucrat can be, Hastings has called in Our Man Stanton to examine the situation.

HASTINGS: It’s the same thing every day, Stanton…

STANTON: That’s one of the reasons I’m here…

HASTINGS: Oh…is that so?

“Well, that and to justify the taxpayers ponying up for my obscene salary…” The state muckety-mucks have asked Stansy to consider why there are only four grocers getting compensation from all the relief tickets. Hastings is convinced everything is on the up-and-up, but he asks Stanton if he wants to look at the cashier records. As the two men head inside another office, Stanton stops…because he recognizes Schultz, who’s collecting his ill-gotten welfare gains.

STANTON: Is that one of the four grocers?

“No—I believe that’s one of the Four Freshmen.” Schultz asks the clerk if any checks came through, and when he’s told “no” tells the man he’ll see him tomorrow. Hastings assures Stanton that Schultz is one of the “four grocers” and the two of them walk over to the clerk’s area so Stanton can get a gander at the tickets Schultz turned in. Stanton finds it peculiar that many of the tickets are from addresses that are not normally in the vicinity of the store, and his observations are heard by this nosy parker:

Stanton tells Hastings that he’s going to look into the peculiarity of people shopping from as far as ten miles away, and he signs a receipt for some of the tickets he’ll use in his investigation. Nosy Parker offers to file the receipt…but what he’s really planning to do is phone Nick Garvey to let him know some flatfoot is sniffing around his operation. He gives Nick the names of the relief customers, and in turn Nick issues orders for Slim to send his confederates out for damage control. One of the people on the list goes by “Briggs,” and he’s played by another familiar face…

…it’s George Chandler, whom has a movie and TV resume as long as your arm—he’s “Chester” in the classic W.C. Fields comedy The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), and on television he played “Uncle Petrie” on Lassie (and “Ichabod” on the sitcom Ichabod and Me). Briggs is a bit of a nervous Nellie when Stanton comes a-callin’…but that’s easily explained…

…some of the Garvey mob (shame on you, Ben!) are hovering over Briggs’ family ready to work over La Familia. Another individual who’s reluctant to talk is Mrs. Clark, who tells Stansy that even though she and her husband “do without” it’s not enough to keep her sick daughter healthy—the child’s not getting enough to eat. When Stanton asks about Schultz, Mrs. Clark becomes upset: “You’re the third man who’s been here today…Schultz…Schultz…Schultz! That’s all I hear! I’m sick of it! I can’t stand anymore of it! Get out! Get out!”

STANTON (on the telephone): Why, these people are scared stiff, Hastings…somebody’s been ahead of me browbeating them…there must be a leak in your office…

HASTINGS: What? Anything I can do?

STANTON: No, I just wanted to warn you—hereafter, we’ll meet in Captain Burke’s office…we’ll get together after I’ve looked Schultz over…

“And in the meantime, I can put that new guy—Scaramucci—in charge of plugging the leaks.” There’s a scene shift to Schultz’s grocery, where a clerk informs a “Mrs. Flynn” that she’s just twenty-eight cents over.

MRS. FLYNN: Oh, well…uh…couldn’t you take it out of our next week’s ticket? It’s only three days off…

SCHULTZ (interjecting icily): We don’t give credit on relief tickets…

MRS. FLYNN: All right…take out the sugar… (The clerk starts removing items from the sack) And the butter…

“The milk…eggs…bread…vegetables…” Schultz, spotting Stanton in the store, asks what he can do for him.

STANTON: I’m from relief headquarters…I’d like to see your tickets…

SCHULTZ: Oh—what for?

STANTON: We’re checking up on some families who are getting luxuries instead of necessities…

“You know, sugar…butter…milk…eggs…bread…vegetables…” Stanton looks over the tickets from the customers he visited, and everything appears to be in order—he bids the smug Schultz adieu, while Slim emerges from a nearby corner. Schultz starts to file the tickets away but is stopped by Slim: “Hey, just a minute—those go back where they came from…” The old-substitute-relief-ticket ploy (thanks, Nosy!) …and Stanton fell for it.

Stanton, Hastings, and other assorted underlings are having a meeting in Captain Burke’s (Davison Clark) office:

STANTON: Schultz was all primed…we’re dealing with fast workers, and they’re ruthless…

I wonder where Ruth is? (Love the Firesign Theatre.)

STANTON: …to break this case by ordinary methods, it might take three months…but we haven’t got time—people are starving…

You’ve also only five minutes left in this thing. Stanton decides to go for broke: he hands out court orders to his deputies to serve on the four grocers—a little surprise audit! “Bring me back a telephone number…a scrap of paper…or a name…anything! Something that will give me a clue as to who’s behind this thing…”

Schultz is saying good night to his employees when one of Stanton’s men enters with the court order, asking to look at his books. Schultz tells him “Help yourself,” but when he heads toward his safe to close the doors he’s told to leave everything open. And then this happens:

DEPUTY: Just a minute—you can’t do that!

SCHULTZ: You’ve no authority to go through my private papers! That’s my own personal box…I’ll be right back…

“I…forgot to program the DVR for that Michael Phelps/Shark thing.” The deputy waits for a few moments, but Schultz does not return. (Because he’s all ass and elbows, headed for the state line—that’s my guess.) He phones Stanton at Burke’s office and gives him the lowdown about Schultz locking the box—“I’ll jimmy it if you say so.” Stanton, in a rare display of adhering to the Fourth Amendment, tells his man he’ll need a witness…so he’s on his way.

At Nick’s headquarters, Garvey is reading Nosy Parker (his real name is “Joe,” for the curious) the riot act for not tipping them off about the court orders…and Parker emphatically tells his boss they didn’t come from the relief office. Schultz bursts in, sweating in a way that would make Edmond O’Brien jealous:

SCHULTZ: They jumped my books—you gotta get me out of it!

SLIM: Well, keep your shirt on…

SCHULTZ: But you don’t understand—he’s got a court order! He’ll go through everything!

GARVEY: Whaddya mean, everything?!!

SCHULTZ: He’ll go through my safe…

GARVEY: What’s the matter with your safe?!!

SCHULTZ: Well, I…that is…

GARVEY (grabbing him by the lapels): Come on! Spill it! What’s in that safe?!!

Schultz lets it be known that there’s a little book inside that safe…one that he kept the relief records in. I know what you’re thinking right now—“That seems kind of stupid.” (Not nearly as stupid as writing “The Real Relief Records” on the cover of the book, of course—he’s not a complete idiot.) Schultz assures his “friends” that he’s locked it up and though Nick is telling him to make like a tree and get out of there, Slim beseeches his boss: “He’ll squawk!”

As Schultz backs up toward the evidence he plaintively screeches “You said you’d take care of me! That’s what you said! You’d take care of me!”

“We’ll take care of you,” declares Garvey. Say what you want about Nick and his associates—but they make good on their word. As Schultz is ducking down alleys like someone trapped in a noir nightmare, he’s gunned down by the Garvey mob…though not before the studio gets in a plug for their current release of The Good Earth (1937) starring Paul Muni and Luise Rainer—based on the novel by fellow Mountaineer Pearl S. Buck!

On the poster behind him.

By this time, Stanton and his man have opened Schultz’s private box (well, in all fairness—it’s not like he’ll be needing it anytime soon) and have found the grocer’s book with the incriminating evidence (he even took the time to write Garvey’s name in it!). As Stanton gets on the horn to contact Captain Burke and have him raid Nick’s headquarters, several members of the Garvey mob pull up outside the store and relieve the deputy of some ledgers and papers he’s carrying out. What follows is a scene in which Stanton conceals the incriminating book inside a desk drawer as the hoods tear apart the store looking for it. It’s pretty much all over but the shouting…but I did get a hearty chuckle at this blatant bit of product placement:

I'd like to buy the world a Coke...

...and use it as a deadly weapon!

Garvey grabs The Pause That Refreshes, breaks it across a store display and starts toward Stanton with it. Stanton tells him the book is in the cash register to stall for time, but by that time the jernt is swarming with cops ready to escort Nick and his chums to The Grey Bar Hotel.

STANTON: Nick Garvey and his killers went to the electric chair…the grocers who hid their greed behind respectable storefronts received no mercy…and were sentenced to jail for terms long enough to realize that crime does not pay…

Oh, puh-leeze. They’re white collar criminals—I’m guessing they pleaded to a lesser charge and fines were involved. Next time on the blog: Crime Does Not Pay rips the lid off phony charity rackets with Give Till It Hurts (1937)! G’bye now!

Book Review: Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy

2017-07-24T07:00:00.000-04:00

“Since the launch of Playboy magazine in 1953, two elements have been remarkably consistent: the first is the celebration of nubile, female flesh and the second is Playboy’s involvement in the music scene. The Playboy experience was never just about sex but about lifestyle, and music—particularly the finest jazz, a personal passion of Hefner’s—has always been an essential component of that lifestyle.” So states the biography of author Patty Farmer, acknowledged to be the expert on the entertainment side (performers, television, etc.) of the legendary magazine that introduced the phrase “I only read it for the articles” into the American lexicon. Farmer chronicled “the rise, history, and cultural impact of the Playboy empire, including the magazine, clubs, music festivals, and television shows” in her book Playboy Swings—published in 2015 after the success of The Persian Room Presents (2013), a history of the Plaza Hotel’s famed nightclub.

Lenny Bruce

Patty’s follow-up to Swings—which will be released August 3—is Playboy Laughs, a book that concentrates on the comedic side of Hefner’s empire. (You don’t need to be familiar with the earlier book to enjoy Laughs, because there are some stories repeated here.) I should be honest—when I requested a review copy (many thanks to my Facebook compadre Jeff Abraham at Jonas PR, who slipped me the freebie) of this book I thought it was going to be a little out of my wheelhouse at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear. I’m pleased to admit that I was stupendously wrong, for Farmer’s exhaustive history of the funny men who entertained appreciative audiences since the first Playboy Club opened in Chicago in February of 1960 is crammed with wonderful anecdotes about such comedy greats like Joe E. Lewis and Lenny Bruce, and first-hand accounts from stand-up practitioners as Professor Irwin Corey, Phyllis Diller, Tom Dreesen, Jackie Gayle, Shecky Greene, Dick Gregory, Joan Rivers, and Larry Storch. Laughs is one of the best books I’ve read on stand-up since devouring my pal Kliph Nesteroff’s amazing The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy.

Milton Berle

Playboy Laughs is one of those books where you want to keep a notepad nearby while reading it so you can jot down anecdotes and relay them back to like-minded friends interested in the history of laughter. One of the anecdotes that leapt out at me concerns “The Thief of Bad Gags” himself, Milton Berle—who had a bit of a reputation of being a putz where his contemporaries were concerned. Comedian Lou Alexander relates that when he was just starting out in the business, “Uncle Miltie” took an interest in him and his act, telling him: “I’m going to come to your show once a week and I’m going to heckle you, but before the show I’ll go to your dressing room and tell you what I’m going to say. This way you can think of things to say back to top me.”

That’s what this great man did for me. He came in once a week and heckled me, and I’d have all the toppers—the comebacks—and I’d kill him. He’d put on this act: “Look at this kid, he’s got me again.” And after a while, maybe two months, it was all over town that there’s some schmucky kid killing Milton Berle at the Interlude. I loved him. I loved Berle. We became very good friends. He was a great guy, a very kind, sweet man.

The Vagabonds

Another memorable passage from the book that has a tenuous connection to a recent post here at TDOY concerns the comedic vocal group known as The Vagabonds, who certainly made their presence known in the 1946 feature film People are Funny. I’m not quite as enthusiastic as Farmer about the aggregation (she describes their People antics as “scene-stealing”—we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one) but she did provide me with some information with which I was not aware, in that the quartet were favorites on the nightclub circuit (they even owned and operated nightspots in Frisco and Miami) and made quite a few appearances on shows telecast during the medium’s Golden Age (The Colgate Comedy Hour, Ed Sullivan, etc.). “With the Vagabonds, even tempo was funny,” she writes. “Sometimes they’d go so fast they left the audience breathless; other times, they’d drag out a song at such a snail’s pace that listeners would sweat with suspense. It was as if they were comic masters, always carefully calibrating their punch lines. And of course, that is exactly what they were.”

Jack Cole's famous comic book creation

Farmer’s wonderful stories about the people and personalities that either started their careers at the Playboy Clubs or benefited from those venues after already establishing themselves comprises a goodly portion of Playboy Laughs…but there are also chapters dedicated to those artists who created the cartoons that dotted the pages of the magazine. One of particular interest to me was a nice little history on Jack Cole—which I’ll need to set up here. I knew of Cole because I owned a copy of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes as a kid (coincidentally, Feiffer also contributed cartoons to the magazine and has some wonderful stories in Laughs) as a kid and knew Jack as the creator of Plastic Man. My father, on the other hand, was more familiar with Cole’s post-Plastic Man career as—you guessed it—a prolific contributor to Playboy. (I admit—my opinion of the old man gained a few points that day after finding out he used to read the mag.) Other cartoonists discussed in the pages of Patty’s book include Doug Sneyd, Shel Silverstein, Dean Yeagle, Arnold Roth (whose work I knew from TV Guide—his stories about assisting Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on Little Annie Fanny are priceless), and Al Jaffee (the legendary MAD artist was a contributor, too).

Hugh Hefner and author Patty Farmer

Farmer does a bit of a sidetracking with histories on Playboy artists like (Alberto) Vargas and Olivia (De Berardinis); a little beyond the scope of a book on both humor and cartoons, in my opinion…but it won’t detract from your enjoyment—and it’s always nice learning about something you didn’t previously know. As someone who actually did read Playboy for the articles (I had a subscription while I was in college—born to be mild, baby) I enjoyed Patty’s concluding take on Hugh Hefner (an informative history on the man and his pajamas) because anyone who put as much time, money, and effort to restore the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films my mother loves to watch is aces in my book. Classic movie fans might get a kick out of this observation of Hef in Playboy Laughs: “At ninety, he carries on the tradition he started decades ago of hosting weekly dinners followed by movies. One night a week is set aside for a current film, another for a classic film noir, and sometimes a third is added for one of his favorite Chaplin movies.” Gooble, gobble, one of us!

Crime Does Not Pay #10: “It May Happen to You” (06/05/37)

2017-07-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

This week’s Crime Does Not Pay outing has been discussed previously at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear…but since our Friday excursions into MGM’s popular series of shorts allow me to go into a bit more comprehensive detail I’ll apologize in advance for the rehash. CDNP not only provided work for character veterans, it also served as a showcase for future stars like Robert Taylor (starring in Buried Loot), Barry Nelson, and Cameron Mitchell. The big name in It May Happen to You (1937) straddles the cinematic worlds of stardom and smaller character actor fame—it’s “that celebrated actor,” J. Carrol Naish, a two-time Academy Award nominee for his supporting performances in Sahara (1943) and A Medal for Benny (1945). I use the term “celebrated actor” in a tongue-in-cheek manner because that’s how announcer Bob Lemond always introduced him in his starring role on radio’s Life with Luigi (like how I reverently refer to Mister John Dehner in recognition of his billing on radio’s Have Gun – Will Travel).

Philip Trent—last seen as “the MGM Crime Reporter” in The Public Pays (1936)—is back for this entry, but he doesn’t do much outside of introducing this week’s faux law enforcement official, Captain John Mallory—“chief of the larceny squad of the Metropolitan Police Force.” Mallory is portrayed by character veteran Guy Usher, who appeared in a couple of chapters of The Green Hornet (1940) as an odious criminal type named “Lynch” (nice to see Trent and Usher together in this short, by the way). Usher’s credited work includes such films as Penguin Pool Murder (1932), This Day and Age (1933), It’s a Gift (1934), and The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935—an Ellery Queen film where he plays Inspector Queen).

MALLORY: Police and the city health department often have to work close together to smash the activities of vicious racketeers…human rats worse than the carriers of bubonic plague…

Hey…hey…there’s no need for name-calling here.

MALLORY: If you think that criminals live in another world that can’t affect you, consider this case…recently, the state highway patrol was fighting a wave of truck hijackings…

There’s a whip-pan to a truck tooling down the road, with “Lathrop Canning Co.” displayed on the back. (“When…it…says…Lathrop’s, Lathrop’s, Lathrop’s/On the label, label, label/You will like it, like it, like it/On your table, table, table…”) A car follows the truck, and inside the vehicle are a gang of no-goodniks comprised of Bunco (Emmett Vogan), Torpedo (Eddie Marr), Musclebound (Dick Rich) …and our “celebrated actor” as their fearless leader, J. Carrol Naish as “Moxie.” (“Make Mine Moxie!”) Moxie instructs Bunco (who’s at the wheel) to “kill the lights,” then to pull up beside the truck as Torpedo gets out on the running board, smashes the truck’s passenger window, and orders the driver to turn off onto a side road. Fortunately for the Lathrop employee, a couple of uniformed motorcycle patrolmen are nearby to witness what will surely be some major criminal activity…and after coasting down to where Moxie and his stooges have positioned the truck, shine their headlights to scatter the mob like cockroaches reacting to turned-on lights in the kitchen. There’s a bit of gunfire exchanged, and Bunco takes some shrapnel before the crooks beat a hasty retreat.

A scene shift, and Moxie is at a pay phone talking with this gent:

Yes, it’s character legend Clarence Hummel Wilson—the beloved hatchet-faced thespian who’s been in countless shorts and features…but around Rancho Yesteryear, we remember him for roles in several Hal Roach-produced comedies (Our Gang’s Shrimps for a Day [1933], Charley Chase’s Public Ghost #1 [1935], etc.). This is Wilson’s last CDNP outing (he was previously seen in Alibi Racket), and while we are unquestionably saddened by this he gets a great showcase here as the “brains” of the operation, Van Buren “Pop” Sheafor.

MOXIE: Bad news, Sheafor…that job fell through tonight…

SHEAFOR: Fell through? How come? (Pause) All right—meet me at the warehouse in one hour…

MOXIE: Right…

As he hangs up the phone and exits the phone booth, we see that Moxie phoned “Pop” from a gymnasium…and that his fellow goons are whiling away their copious crook time watching a pair of amateur pugilists have at it for a few rounds. Torpedo tells his boss that Bunco’s “slug went through his hand—but he’ll be okay.”

MOXIE: From now on we lay off the highways—those state cops are gettin’ too smart…we gotta figure out a new way to work…

TORPEDO: Gettin’ so a man can’t earn his livin’ no more…

Nice little laugh line from Marr—who had a most prolific acting career on radio (The Lux Radio Theatre, Suspense) in addition to motion pictures. Moxie’s gang takes delight at watching an amateur (Arthur Rankin) display his unique boxing style, which consists of him hitting the other fighter’s glove repeatedly with his face, then falling to the mat. Musclebound jokingly refers to him as “Horizontal Eddie.”

MOXIE: Why…that guy don’t look like a fighter…

MUSCLEBOUND: He ain’t! He works for a livin’…checks out trucks at the Cassidy Meat Packin’ Company…

MOXIE: Meat packin’ company?

MUSCLEBOUND: Yeah…

You can almost see the wheels a-turnin’ inside Moxie’s cranium as he begins to devise an eevillll scheme…he then visits young Edward in one of the locker rooms at the gym…

MOXIE: That’s a wicked left you got, kid…

EDDIE: Thanks…

MOXIE: I’m Moxie…

EDDIE: Yeah—I heard about you…

“Don’t get any ideas about my sister, though—she’s off-limits!”

MOXIE: Whaddya trainin’ for?

EDDIE: Oh…I just need to make a little extra money…

MOXIE: Well, you sure picked yourself a tough way to get ten bucks…

Moxie knows all about Eddie’s job at the meat packing company, of course—but he’s coy about it until Eddie brings it up. The racketeer then goes to work on his mark’s financial insecurity: “Those joints never pay anything—even when you work up to somethin’.” He’s got a little proposition for the money-minded young lad, and while there’s a fade-out as Moxie goes into the details, we get the gist of what he discussed with Edward in a conversation with “Pop” Sheafor.

MOXIE: …every morning he helps load those big refrigerator trucks and sees that they’re locked before they leave the plant…kid’s workin’ for peanuts—crazy about dough…it’s the perfect setup…

SHEAFOR: Hijack meat?

MOXIE: Why not? Hah! There’s big dough in fresh registered beef…

SHEAFOR: How are you gonna work it?

MOXIE: Never mind about that…if I get the stuff…can you sell it?

SHEAFOR: Sure! I got several sellers on the east side who’d be glad to get some cheap…

Moxie asks Sheafor if he wants it brought to his hideout, and “Pop” is adamant about scotching that scheme. “The health department inspectors are always nosing around the warehouse,” he explains. Not a problem—Moxie will just need to take it to “the old garage” and “pile it up—throw some ice on it.” I suppose I don’t need to tell those of you who don’t have extensive experience in food storage why this is not going to end well (there’s a reason why sides of beef are always stored in freezers, kids). But I’m getting ahead of the short.

The next morning, Moxie is waiting for Eddie as the enterprising young soul leaves his modest apartment on his way to an early shift at the plant. Eddie has given Moxie’s proposal a lot of thought, and he’s in—all he’ll need to do is slip Moxie the key to the lock on the truck headed for the nearby burg of Gardenia, and provide the proper info on what route that truck will be taking. Eddie does have some misgivings, though:

EDDIE: Suppose they miss the key at the plant?

MOXIE: Well, they won’t for ten minutes…and that’s all I’ll need it for—I’ll get copies made by a guy I can trust… (Eddie hesitates) Now—what’s the matter? You said you were interested in easy dough…

EDDIE: Well, I don’t know…I…

MOXIE: All right…forget about it…you’re the kind of a sucker who likes to work for a livin’…

Don’t you just hate those guys? Moxie starts to walk off…but Eddie asks him to wait a minute, then gives him a big grin. Looks like Eddie’s going to be kicking in on the tolls dotting the road to perdition.

The Great Beef Robbery goes according to plan. As the driver (Jack Pennick) complies with a stop sign, Musclebound emerges from some bushes to puncture two of the truck’s tires, leaving the driver flat. (I make leetle joke.) Bunco then pulls up in a sedan, and when Driver explains the situation to him he offers to give him a lift to a phone so he can contact a tow truck. As Bunco’s car drives off, Moxie, Torpedo, and Musclebound pull up in a truck of their own and help themselves to that sweet, sweet Cassidy beef once Musclebound unlocks the refrigerated section with that duplicate key. There is then a scene shift to the plant, where the driver is being questioned by Cap’n Mallory as to the details of the theft.

DRIVER: …and when I got to Gardenia and opened the truck—it was empty…

MALLORY: Were the doors locked when you got there?

DRIVER: Yes, sir…

MALLORY (to the plant manager): You sure that truck didn’t go out empty?

MANAGER: These men loaded it…

He leads Mallory over to where a couple of plant employees are standing—Eddie is in the vicinity as well, seated at a desk.

MALLORY (to Eddie): What’s your job?

EDDIE: I check the load…and see that the doors are locked…and that the driver gets the invoice…

MALLORY: Were the doors locked?

EDDIE: Yes, sir…

Well, he was honest—he just left out the part about “…and then I gave the key to some greaseball hood who made himself a copy.” Mallory is baffled by this case. All the men at the plant have good records. There are no discernible fingerprints on the truck (what prints do exist are all smeared) and “no jimmie marks on the locking devices.” “Most hijacking is done at gunpoint or by violence,” muses Mallory. He surmises that it must be an inside job, and he tells his man Reed (William Royle) to pore through the employees’ records with a fine-tooth comb. A “Dr. Rexford” (Frank Dae) at the Health Department should also be contacted.

As the scene changes, a grocer (Rollo Lloyd) who answers to “Joe Mollock” is on the horn with Sheafor—salivating at the prospect of buying some cheap beef:

MOLLOCK: Three cents better than market?

SHEAFOR: Cash deal…and quick dough for both of us…

MOLLOCK: Quick dough, huh? Okay—send me fifteen sides!

Getting off the phone with Mollock, Sheafor is one happy black marketer—crowing “Oh, what a racket!” and making me choke on my beverage.

MOXIE: It’s a pipe, isn’t it?

SHEAFOR: And easy to sell! I’ve got orders for half that load already!

MOXIE: Where’d ya peddle it?

SHEAFOR: Outside of Joe Mollock, I’ve got three jobbers on the east

side I can trust—Ward, Wesley, and Britton…only they don’t want delivery before Thursday…so we’ll have to hold it for them before then…hope that stuff keeps in the garage for a couple of days…

“Torpedo! Head out to the 7-11 for another bag of ice!” Sheafor tells Moxie that he could use another load next week, and he asks his chief henchie if he can trust Eddie. “I don’t trust him…I just keep an eye on him—he’ll do what I say” is his reply. Sheafor suggests that Eddie pilfer some invoices from the Cassidy company—that way they can give them out to the “jobbers” and everything will be legit.

A scene dissolve, and Moxie and Torpedo are paying Eddie off at the gym…where Moxie asks the young criminal-in-training to score some “billheads.”

MOXIE (handing him $100): Bet that’s the easiest century that ever came your way, huh?

EDDIE: You said it! It’s going right down on a yellow sport roadster…

You’re not even in the crime business a day, Eddie…and you’ve forgotten about sending some money home to your poor, gray-haired old mother. Bad Eddie. No hotrod.

MOXIE: Take it easy, kid—you don’t wanna start lookin’ too flush…we’re pullin’ another haul next week…

EDDIE: Sure…anytime… (He laughs) Simple…the cops don’t know where to start…

Rut roh, Raggy. You see, Edward neglected to tell his hoodlum friends that the gendarmes paid the Cassidy people a visit after the meat robbery and started asking a lot of questions…this does not sit well with Moxie, though it’s Torpedo who grabs the little mook by the lapels, slamming him up against the lockers.

MOXIE: What did they say to you, Eddie…?

EDDIE: Oh, they just asked me a couple of routine questions…was the truck locked when it left? I told them yes…and they asked me what I did…they questioned several other guys at the plant, too…don’t worry about it!

MOXIE: We’re not worried about it, kid…only watch your step…go on, beat it…

Well, we’re at the halfway point here and as you can tell by the newspaper headline—a couple of bags of ice is insufficient to keep meat from going bad. Dr. Rexford informs Cap’n Mallory in one of the hospital wards that there’s been close to 200 cases of ptomaine—with four deaths—from “bad beef.” “Forty-seven butcher shops and seven restaurants…had some of that spoiled beef,” he intones, adding that that’s why he’s called Mallory in on the case. The three “jobbers” that handle Cassidy beef—Ward, Wesley, and Britton—have been vouched for (ha!) by Cassidy, and the plant has received a clean bill of health after being thoroughly inspected.

A distraught woman bursts out in tears as she is led out of the ward by an intern—sounds like she received some bad news. “We’ve got to find the rest of that poisoned beef before it gets to any more people,” declares Rexford firmly. “There’s no time to lose.” What started out as a simple case of hijacking has turned into “a death threat.” Mallory is still convinced that it’s an inside job…but since he’s had no luck with the leads, he turns to the Fourth Estate to flush the miscreants out. Meanwhile—back at the hideout:

BUNCO: It’s no use…I can’t get rid of any more of that beef…the Health Department’s got the jobbers buffaloed…

MOXIE: How can the beef be bad—we got ice on it, haven’t we?

“Damn it, Jim—I’m a hoodlum, not a nutritionist!”

MUSCLEBOUND: Yeah…them headlines is just a copper’s gag…

BUNCO: We better drop it…maybe it is spoiled…

MOXIE: Now, listen—we got dough tied up in this! Plenty!

SHEAFOR: That’s right…and we’re gonna sell it! (To Moxie) We’ll make that beef look fresh with some chemicals…then we’ll re-stamp it with the Maxim Company stamp!

BUNCO (sarcastic): Oh—will that make it good?

MOXIE: Well, what’s the difference…as long as we get our dough!

Strategy session in a major corporation or powwow amongst the criminal element? You make the call! Moxie orders Musclebound to get his ass over to the garage and start preparing the beef… but he’s interrupted by the arrival of Torpedo, who produces this cherce headline:

“When that kid sees how bad it is…he’s gonna spill all over what he knows all over headquarters!” wails Sheafor. “That’s what I’m thinkin’,” confirms Moxie. Besides, Eddie has violated the “code” by buying that car after explicitly being told not to. Ordinarily, an infraction like this would result in loss of supper and detention in one’s room the rest of the evening. But the Moxie Gang plays for bigger marbles, and Moxie orders Bunco to grab a taxi and collect Eddie, who’s due off from work in twenty minutes. “Tell ‘em we’re gonna let him in on a big job,” Moxie explains…then he adds “The heat’s on.”

Because Cap’n Mallory has also learned that Eddie’s become quite the plunger of late, he’s had the kid shadowed by Reed—he’s on the job observing that Bunco is waiting for Eddie in Eddie’s car when the whistle blows.

BUNCO: Moxie wants to see you…

EDDIE: Hey—what for?

BUNCO: He wants you to meet the Big Boss…they’re gonna bring you in on a real job…

“Gloriosky! That sounds neat-o keen!” Bunco has Eddie drive to Sheafor’s, where the kid can hardly contain his excitement that his friends will be taking him for a ride. Moxie holds back to tell Bunco: “Take the kid’s car to the Dutchman…get what you can for it, and tell him to break it up…today.” Reed can’t help but notice that Bunco drives off in Eddie’s car and so he follows the henchman…sadly, in taking his eye off Eddie he can do nothing when Torpedo later sends the kid to The Happy Hunting Ground while the hoods drive along a country road.

Eddie did not die in vain. (It was more like in B.F.E.) Since Reed told Mallory about the kid and Bunco arriving at Sheafor’s, it’s given the police a vital lead in that they leap into action to question those individuals who do business with “Pop” …and that leads them to the weaselly Joe Mollock, who “handled fifteen more sides of beef than his refrigeration allowed last week.”

REXFORD: You handled more meat than your refrigerators can take care of…

MOLLOCK: All right…I’ll pay the fine…

MALLORY (enraged): Say—you can’t settle this with a fine…

“Who do you think you are—Goldman-Sachs?”

MALLORY: …two hundred people have been sick, four have died, and one was murdered because of the hijacking of some poisoned beef—and you handled fifteen sides of Cassidy’s beef that you can’t account for!

MOLLOCK: None of my meat poisoned anybody! I never got a kickback!

MALLORY: No, but the health department did…you’re in a spot, Mollock…

MOLLOCK: I tell you that beef was okay!

MALLORY: Yeah? Say, maybe we’ll slap a manslaughter charge on ya…we’re gonna close all your stores and hold you for investigation…

B-b-b-bad to the bone.

“Only if I don’t sing like a canary…and I’m going to do some warming up exercises right now!” Mollock comes clean and confesses to the cops that he got the beef from Sheafor—still insisting the meat, however, was perfectly okay. It’s all over but the shouting, cartooners—Moxie and the boys make separate deliveries to all three of Mollock’s stores (he won’t take the beef otherwise) and at each establishment, the cops are waiting to collar them (even Sheafor). It’s all terribly anti-climactic, though I did chortle when they rounded up Bunco because he remarks “I had a hunch this was coming!” as he’s being slapped into handcuffs. (Mama said there’d be days like this.) When they arrest Musclebound at the same store, Rexford removes the tarpaulin from his truck and remarks of the beef: “Enough to kill a city…okay, pour the kerosene over it.” (Yes, I was kind of surprised by this—I half-expected them to dole out the food out to the poor.)

Take us home, Mallory my man!

MALLORY: Moxie was right…the criminal can’t win…Bunco turned states’ evidence…Moxie and Musclebound went to the chair for Eddie’s murder…

I should point out that it was Torpedo who popped a cap in Eddie…but he was gunned down as the cops swarmed in on him at one of the stores. (“He asked for it.”)

MALLORY: …Sheafor drew fifty years to life…and Eddie the working boy—who wanted to run with the so-called big shot gangsters—did not live long enough to find out that crime does not pay…thank you…

No…thank you, Captain Mallory. Next time: a short with a title that’s just plain irresistible to a left-wing scalawag like me—Soak the Poor (1937)! G’bye now!

Adventures in Blu-ray: Abbott & Costello Rarities

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Thunderbean Animation has firmly established itself in the Blu-ray/DVD field as the go-to label for classic cartoon releases, ranging from the oeuvre of Willie Whopper and Cubby Bear to their current project of restoring all 27 shorts from the Van Beuren Studio’s Rainbow Parade series (1934-35). It’s a labor of love for Thunderbean CEO Steve Stanchfield, a cartoon historian and film preservationist dedicated to hunting up the best existing 16mm/35mm materials for these outstanding sets. In May, Thunderbean’s long-anticipated Abbott & Costello Rarities—an outstanding collection of odds and ends spotlighting the great comedy duo—finally hit the streets, and if you’re as big a fan of Bud and Lou as your humble narrator, you need to track this down with all deliberate speed.

Lou, Bud, and Kate

I’ve had to cut back on the significant amount of DVD-age purchased for the dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives of late, so I was most fortunate to score a free copy of the Rarities Blu-ray/DVD combo from a longstanding member of the TDOY faithful (he asked me to keep his identity secret so as not to interfere with his sideline of bringing maniacal supervillains to justice). There’s something for everyone in this collection…but I’ll come clean and admit that my favorite features were those of the audio variety. Rarities includes a March 10, 1938 excerpt from The Kate Smith Hour (the boys do a variation of the “betting parlor” routine that was later recycled in 1943’s It Ain’t Hay) and the July 3 premiere broadcast of their 1940 summer stint as replacements for Fred Allen’s show (I was only aware of one other It’s Time to Smile program in collector’s hands). Another uncirculated broadcast is from November 4, 1943—the night that Lou returned to radio after he recovered from rheumatic fever…and the same night he learned of the drowning death of his infant son “Butch” earlier that day; Lana Turner is the guest, and Bud informs the audience of Lou’s tragedy at the end of the broadcast. A rare recording of their Saturday morning series (The Abbott & Costello Children’s Show from June 20, 1948) is also included among the audio gems (audience warm-ups, actualities, etc.).

Bud and Jerry Lewis

The Rarities collection includes trailers from some of Bud and Lou’s classic film comedies (Buck Privates, In the Navy, etc.) and “blowups” (bloopers) from others like Pardon My Sarong and Little Giant (I really got a kick out of seeing the outtakes from Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, my favorite A&C vehicle). There are newsreel clips, excerpts from Lou’s home movies, and an amazing collection of footage (Kodachrome) from the team’s 1943 war bond tour (where they sold nearly $85 million worth of bonds). A favorite highlight of mine is an unearthed November 1, 1953 telecast of The Colgate Comedy Hour, in which Bud must work solo in Lou’s absence (Costello is ill) with an assist from Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis. The program includes clips from previous Colgate shows featuring Lou—one their famous “Rubdown” sketch (with stooges Sid Fields and Bobby Barber) and another hilarious skit where the duo goes to great lengths to get rid of a stolen necklace (the two men have difficulty keeping it together before the finish). In addition to Dino’s singing (both solo and comedy songs accompanied by Jer’s clowning with Al Goodman’s orchestra), Peggy Lee does a few numbers (including the Halo shampoo jingle) and Gene Nelson dances (I kind of fast-forwarded through this).

Another favorite from this set: Lou, Bud, and Charles Laughton (as Bud's chauffeur!) make a plea for Christmas Seals.

Chris Costello, whose outstanding biography of her father (Lou’s on First) was written up for the blog in October of last year, provided much of the material for this release…and I’ll admit, the content more than surpassed my expectations (I was expecting a lot of the public domain A&C filler that’s been previously released). At the risk of sounding like a parrot…this is a collection that Abbott & Costello fans will want for their bookshelf—a more-than-justified reward for those who have waited patiently all these years to see it come to fruition.

Crime Does Not Pay #9: “Torture Money” (01/02/37)

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Torture Money (1937), the ninth short in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay franchise, would win the studio back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel) …and while the CDNP folks would garner five additional nominations in that category before the series ended in 1947, I’m not convinced I would have been so willing to hand over a statuette for this entry (1939’s Drunk Driving, another nominee, is a much better short…and a more deserving winner, IMO, than Warner Brothers’ sappy Sons of Liberty, which took home the prize that year). The man responsible for the previous CDNP Oscar winner, The Public Pays, also wrote the story and screenplay for Money—John C. Higgins. Oh, and Torture Money does have this little mash note at the beginning contributed by James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis (though he signs it without the “Two-Gun”), the L.A. Chief of Police at the time of Money’s release:

Aww…wasn’t that sweet of him? Before you break out the stationery for an RSVP to accompany your candy and flowers, leave us look at Chief Davis’ entry on Wikipedia: “Under Davis, the LAPD developed its lasting reputation as an organization that relied on brute force to enforce public order. It also became very publicly entangled in corruption. Members of the LAPD were revealed to have undertaken a campaign of brutal harassment, including the bombings of political reformers who had incurred the wrath of the department and the civic administration.” Bad cop. No donut.

I can’t be 100% on this, but I believe this is the first CDNP entry in which the narrator identifies himself as “the MGM Crime Reporter” (he just goes by “the MGM reporter” in previous shorts). He is not, sadly, identified at the [always reliable] IMDb so if you know the actor—operators in the comments section are standing by.

REPORTER: Once again, as the MGM Crime Reporter, it is my privilege to bring you another episode in our “Crime Does Not Pay” series…may I present—Captain Michael Karnahan, chief of the Bunco and Pickpocket detail of the Metropolitan Police Force…

Great Caesar’s Ghost! That’s John Hamilton (nice soup strainer, Johnny!), the veteran character actor fondly remembered as Daily Planet Editor Perry White on TV’s The Adventures of Superman…which is why the “Great Caesar’s Ghost” gag will get quite a workout here at TDOY, since this will not be the last time we see Hamilton portraying faux law enforcement officials (Torture Money is his CDNP debut). (I mean, seriously—what is up with this “Metropolitan Police Force” nonsense?)

KARNAHAN: Criminals devote all their time and cleverness to devising new ways of making a living through terrorism and fraud…

Well, really—if you don’t innovate, how are you supposed to stay ahead of the competition?

KARNAHAN: The average citizen stands idly by…shrugs his shoulders…is totally indifferent…”What of it?” he says…”As long as they don’t touch my family or my property it isn’t my problem…they’re not getting anything out of me” …

I was completely unaware the “Me decade” began back in 1936.

KARNAHAN: Don’t fool yourself, my friends…whether your home is robbed or your neighbor’s—you pay for it!

Cap’n Karnahan is referring to “one of the most cruel rackets in America”—insurance fraud—and in showing us “the inner workings,” we are whisked away to a traffic accident involving this unconscious man:

That’s character veteran Murray Alper, whose cinematic resume includes such movies as Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935) and The Milky Way (1936)—chances were if there was a cab driver in a movie, it’s even money Murray was playing him—but is best remembered here at Rancho Yesteryear as the truck driver who gives fugitive Bob Cummings an assist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942—I love his monologue about his wife’s fondness for new hats and “moon pitchers”). Alper’s character is “Little Davie Barkell,” who’s the “victim” in this phony accident (there’s also a guy who claims to have broken his nose on the taxicab’s meter) engineered by this unscrupulous representative of the legal profession:

Meet Milton Beecher (spelled “Beacher” at the IMDb—but my spelling is confirmed in the short), a shyster who’s having to commit insurance fraud on a phenomenal scale because television hasn’t yet been invented to continually showcase his annoying ads during noon newscasts on WSB-TV. Beecher is portrayed by character great Edwin Maxwell, who will also be a recurring player in the CDNP series. (Around Rancho Yesteryear, we know Maxwell as “Dr. Egelhoffer” in His Girl Friday [1940]—Edwin’s also in the Ernst Lubitsch-directed Ninotchka [1939] and The Shop Around the Corner [1940].)

BEECHER: I think that $5000 for a fractured skull, bad bruises, and a broken arm is little enough, Mr. Carmathy…and a $1000 for the cab passenger who suffered a broken nose…

Milt is doing some good old-fashioned haggling with Alex Carmathy (Jason Robards, Sr.)—claim manager for the Universal Accident Insurance Company. When Carmathy’s counteroffer for damages is rebuffed by Beecher, the insurance man remarks that perhaps this matter would best be settled in court—particularly since “We have a witness who reported that it looked as if the victim threw himself in front of the cab.” Beecher seems most reluctant to pursue that remedy…and so he revises his earlier offer, which satisfies Carmathy.

CARMATHY: Very well…soon as I get a release from your clients…

BEECHER: Oh, that’s all right—I have complete authority to handle everything…

"Beecher."

Beecher hands Carmathy a document that Barkell signed granting him power of attorney…which means Beecher is either a most efficient little legal eagle, or there’s something screwy in St. Louis. We find out it’s the latter in a following scene, as we see Miltie counting out a wad of cash:

BEECHER: I always like those Universal Accident Company checks…the bank never turns them down…here you are, kid—you did a good job…

Beecher hands some money to the cab driver (Roger Moore—not the guy who played James Bond), who starts to protest because he was promised a C-note and he’s only been given fifty bucks. “Fifty’s what you get—take or leave it,” Beecher snarls, threatening him with being fired from the cab company and tossed in the sneezer if he squawks. “Whaddya think of that—he’s got larceny in his soul and he squawks like a sucker,” Milt complains as he hands the Broken Nose Guy his cut. (Evil help is so hard to find these days.) Beecher also ladles out payment to the “witnesses,” of which a female witness remarks “Any time at all, Mr. Beecher.” See—some employees are grateful for what they get.

One of Beecher’s henchmen, Red (Mel Ruick), asks how “Little Davie” is doing…and Beecher responds that Barkell is still in the hospital. The two of them enter a side room where another goon, Doc (Norman Willis), is praised by his boss for his “work” on Little Davie.

DOC: Well…these “accidents” have to be real…

RED: Ah, nobody’ll ever get onto this…too smart a set-up…

BEECHER: I know, I know—I wouldn’t be in this racket if I didn’t leave all the exits open…

You’ve seen enough movies to witness that when supervillains start to boast, sooner or later the hero brings about their downfall and sanity returns to the world. In fact, Mr. Carmathy is tattling to Karnahan about his latest experience with attorney Beecher while the bad guys are high-fiving themselves:

CARMATHY: All of Beecher’s cases against us were unbeatable—he’s collected over $100,000 from Universal alone…

KARNAHAN: Well, your investigators and doctors verified the claims, of course…

CARMATHY: Yes…here is a chart prepared by the Insurance Index Bureau…

We don’t need to look at no steenkin’ charts to see this Beecher guy is a menace to capitalism—having run this sweet, sweet racket in Salt Lake City, Denver, St. Louis and Chicago—and he must be stopped!

CARMATHY: …and in almost every case, the driver involved had taken out insurance a few days or a week before the accident…Beecher always has plenty of witnesses…yet when his last claim in Salt Lake was denied, he didn’t take it into court…instead, he moved to Denver…he collected many claims there…his last was denied…still, he refused to take it into court…he had several witnesses against us in this taxicab accident…but when I suggested fighting it out in court, he backed down…why?

Could be cowardice. Or that he’s a sh*tty lawyer. It’s all rhetorical, of course, because the District Attorney has taken an interest in all this…and the man who’ll be doing the investigating is Larry Morgan (identified as “Martin” at the…well, you know), played by (Peter) George Lynn (Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, Adventures of Captain Marvel). The write-up for Money at the IMDb suggests that Lar is some sort of reporter—which is how Leonard Maltin identifies him in his entry in Selected Short Subjects. I kind of got the impression that Morgan was more of an undercover cop, though Cap’n Karnahan does tell Larry as he heads out “I can guarantee you the full assistance of the police department.” Could he be a Fed? Quien sabe?

First step in his investigation—confirming that “Little Davie’s” injuries are real. A Dr. Kelsey (Charles Trowbridge—last seen in Alibi Racket) confirms that Barkell isn’t “shamming” the company, so Larry asks if it would be possible for him to see Barkell “without him seeing me.” Since they just doped Davie up a few minutes ago, a Nurse Barry (Mary Howard) takes Morgan into Barkell’s room…and Larry removes a drinking glass from the nightstand. A fingerprint check reveals that “Little Davie” is not an individual of particularly sterling character:

In a following scene, Nurse Barry and an orderly bandage up Larry for the purpose of placing him in Barkell’s room so he can spy on him. The doc explains that Mr. Morgan “has been struck by a hit-and-run driver…and knocked unconscious” and that they are to “place no other patients in there.”

LARRY: If my roommate has any questions, why…just shake your head and act serious…and when I give three rings on the call bell, come in with the operating stretcher and wheel me out…

When the orderly gets a little carried away and starts to bandage Morgan’s ears he gets a sharp rebuke: “Don’t cover up my ears—they’re not unconscious.” (No, but your sense of humor is.)

The playing-possum Morgan is wheeled into Barkell’s room, where Little Davie has been perusing a gossip magazine.

BARKELL: Whatsa matter with the guy?

NURSE: Hit-and-run driver…he’s been unconscious for several days—we had to move him up here from another ward…

BARKELL: Unconscious, eh? Tough…

Peek-a-boo! There’s a dissolve, and when Nurse Barry returns to Little Davie’s room he says to her: “You better check that guy—he never moves.” Barry assures Barkell that the “patient” is still breathing, but Davie would like a transfer—“He gives me the creeps.” “Mr. Barkell” is interrupted by visitors—Beecher and his mugs have stopped by—and though his guests are concerned about the bandaged Morgan, Davie assures him he’s out like a match. “Talk to this unconscious guy when he comes to,” Milton tells Barkell, always drumming up bidness in true lawyer-style—“We might make a case out of it.”

BEECHER: Brought you some money, kid…

BARKELL: Cashed in already, eh?

RED: Sure…he settled out of court…

BARKELL: That old fracture of mine sure fooled ‘em again!

BEECHER: Shut up—you talk too much…leave a message at my office if you want me…

“Or you can find him at my place,” Doc chimes in as the trio prepare to hit the gift shop. With the departure of Beecher and Company, it looks as if Larry has the goods on those evildoers…and so he rings the call button thrice to signal to Nurse Barry she needs to rescue him with the operating stretcher. But there is still more work to do as the crack medical team liberates Morgan from his bandaged prison.

LARRY: Now I’ve just died on the operating table…tomorrow I’m coming to life as a hospital orderly… (To Barry) Now you hint around to Little Davie that I’m a jailbird…that I have a police record…and that I’ve served time in another state…can you act mysterious about it?

“It’s the role I was born to play!” The scene shifts to some nice gentlemen enjoying a leisurely game of craps. At least that’s what it looks like at first glance—it’s actually the method that Milton Beecher, Shyster at Law uses to select the individual who will be portraying the “victim” in the firm’s next insurance scam. A luckless Joe rolls “boxcars”…

…and is told by Beecher he’s going to be the next pats…er, hero. This gentleman is played by character veteran Raymond Hatton—previously seen in Desert Death—but he’s not particularly jazzed about the assignment:

RAYMOND: But, Boss…I gotta…I gotta weak heart…

BEECHER: A weak heart’s better than one that’s stopped altogether…I don’t allow anyone that’s yellow to work for me…come on, boys—take him there…this isn’t the bridge club…

RAYMOND (as Doc and Red drag him off): No! On the level…I tell ya, I can’t take it…

His pleas for help are soon cut off by the sound of a sap hitting his skull, and with a dissolve he’s deposited at a street corner by Doc and Red as the car speeds off. But the car is simply making a trip around the block so that it can return with full force (Ray’s looking a little disheveled and covered in contusions).

Beecher’s criminal enterprise hadn’t counted on a lovely little girl who’s wandered into the scenario—carrying a single loaf of bread to take home to her 12 brothers and 11 sisters, no doubt. (Well, it’s MGM—gotta put a little heart into this.) She says to Hatton: “Oh, gee—you’re hurt.” Ray motions for the little sprat to get out of the way…but the driver comes barreling down the street like a bat out of Heck and…

RAYMOND: Look! You hit the kid!

DRIVER: Lie down, you fool!

He lays Hatton out with a haymaker, and then he kneels in front of the car as the camera pans over to slices of bread all over the street. RIP, Little Bread Girl.

The scene shifts to Little Davie’s hospital room, as he interrogates Larry the Orderly as to the whereabouts of his little unconscious bandaged friend. “He kicked off a couple of days ago,” Morgan tells him.

BARKELL: …the nurse was tellin’ me about you…

LARRY: Yeah…what’d she say?

BARKELL: Ah, it’s nothin’…don’t worry about it…everybody gets in jams…

LARRY: Yeah…

Barkell gives him a drag off his cigarette, then asks Larry if he’ll give him a shave later—“I’m gettin’ out of this morgue today.” Nurse Barry interrupts their conversation by telling him the hospital superintendent wants to see him…but he’s really been summoned by a phone call from Cap’n Karnahan.

KARNAHAN: There were three more bad smash-ups last night…the drivers are going to be questioned by the accident investigation bureau…just how much longer do you intend looking them over?

LARRY: Till one of that gang shows up…

Larry moseys on down to police headquarters, where he spots Red in another office and identifies him as one of the gang. “He ran down a man and a little girl,” Karnahan informs him. “She’s badly hurt…if she dies, we’ll slap a second-degree murder charge on him.”

But not now, argues Larry—Red must be turned loose lest the rest of the mob get suspicious. Karnahan reluctantly agrees, and Red gets a visit from his attorney:

BEECHER: The kid died this morning…

RED: Ah…I figured she’d seen too much…maybe she’d squawk…

BEECHER: Well, forget it…she’s dead…

“F*ck it, Dude—let’s go bowling…”

BEECHER: …I’m handling the case for her mother, and we’re going to collect plenty on it…

RED: Yeah, but what about me? I’m not takin’ any manslaughter rap…

BEECHER: You won’t…you won’t…the coroner’s inquest will clear you…now, remember…the police think it was just an ordinary accident…and I’m here to get your deposition on how it happened…

I’m no legal expert…but that sounds a little like conflict of interest to me. Beecher is shrewd enough to operate his insurance racket outside the confines of his legitimate office. Larry wants to learn the location of his lair, and he explains to Karnahan that he’s going to cozy up to Little Davie (he knows Barkell hangs out in a pool hall) and see if he can infiltrate Beecher’s mob. He waves off Karnahan’s insistence on having one of his men “shadow” Larry, but of course cops are by their nature a little slow on the uptake:

KARNAHAN: Well…Little Davie…workin’ the ol’ pickpocket gag with a bandaged arm, eh?

BARKELL: It’s busted…on the level…I just came from the hospital… (Pointing to Larry) Ask this guy!

LARRY: That’s right…copper…I work in the same hospital…

Okay, technically that’s a teensy fib—since Larry has moved on, arranging to have himself “fired” to join the Beecher outfit.

KARNAHAN: Okay…I just want you to keep straight, Little Davie… (He leaves)

BARKELL: How did you know he was a flatfoot?

LARRY: Eh, I can smell ‘em a mile off…

“It’s the tantalizing aroma of…bacon…”

BARKELL: Good cop…that guy…

LARRY: Yeah, all the good cops are in coffins…

Larry’s decidedly anti-police stance is later relayed by Little Davie to Beecher; Barkell points Morgan out as the two men stroll past the pool hall. Learning that “he has a police record and he hates cops,” Beecher tells his stooge to “send him around.”

Beecher’s mob gathers around for another round of “craps” as Little Davie explains to Larry that they roll to see who the next “hero” will be. We witness a bit of chicanery as Red switches the dice on Larry…

…and he rolls the dreaded “boxcars”. Larry is told to “come into the office,” and then there is a brief cutaway to Karnahan at headquarters, where he worries himself that Morgan hasn’t reported back in. Back in Beecher’s hideout, he explains to Larry and a woman (Bernadene Hayes) identified at the IMDb as “Debbie” that the pair of them will be the accident victims—and that there’s no fear of really getting plowed down, because the driver “can stop on a dime and still make change.” Debbie decides she wants out—so Beecher threatens her into compliance by telling her he’ll “wire the Nevada police—you know they’re very anxious to find Daisy.” (Whether “Daisy” is an alias used by Debbie or maybe her child goes unexplained.)

BEECHER (to Larry): You’re not turnin’ yellow, too—are you?

LARRY: No…I need the dough too bad…

Maybe this guy really is a reporter. Beecher will have a couple of his men planted as witnesses, and all Larry and Debbie will have to do is be ambulanced to the hospital—he’ll take care of the rest. Beecher has the two sign the power of attorney statements, and after doing so Debbie asks “Well—what time should I come back?”

“You’re not leaving,” Beecher answers her. “Go into that room—both of you.” Once inside, Debbie cries out in terror…for it’s in Doc’s “office” that we see some of the interesting devices he utilizes to simulate injuries:

This goon observes: "This makes a great bruisin' machine!"

In the other room, Little Davie turns on the radio and cranks the volume to drown out the expected screams while Doc orders Debbie over to a table to get “a few abrasions” with the help of a cheese grater. We got a taste of this in the previously reviewed Accidents Will Happen (1939) when the insurance scammers had to break our pal Clinton Rosemond’s arm to insure reality…but this is some pretty cold-blooded stuff for a two-reel short.

When the job is done, Milton is once again filled with admiration for Doc’s “good night’s work.” “Anything to help a couple of kids get along,” he replies modestly. “Remember on this accident—we take two ways: we take the city for big damages, and we take the insurance company,” his boss reminds him.

“That’s what the city gets for being careless,” Doc editorializes. The plan is to stage an accident near Sunrise and Garland, where the unnamed metropolis has dug up some of the street—the bad guys will wreck an automobile at the site, and then Larry and Debbie will place themselves in the excavation, crying “Lawsuit!” But despite his injuries (he looks like those gorillas broke his arm), Larry manages to get to a telephone he spotted earlier and contact Karnahan (after subduing Red with a knock to the noggin), who’s ready to swoop in with some men before the “accident” can commence. (I liked the presence of men with cameras, taking pictures with flash bulbs popping.) Karnahan takes charge of rounding up the rest of the mob in Beecher’s hangout—as a barely conscious Red is dragged out, he barks at the henchman “We want you for murder!”

KARNAHAN: Larry Morgan’s testimony secured an all-around conviction…the sentences of this mob totaled more than 200 years…consider that—if you think crime pays!

Okay, take a victory lap, Michael me boyo—I guess you earned it. Next time: It May Happen to You (1937)—with that “celebrated actor,” J. Carrol Naish! G’bye now!

We laugh to win!

2017-07-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

In 1925, a group of expatriate Broadway thespians who had moved to the West Coast for film work decided to establish a social club where members could fraternize and enjoy each other’s fellowship. It would be known as The Masquers Club, and its members included at various times such classic movie icons as Joe E. Brown, Frank Morgan, Pat O’Brien, Charley Chase, Edward Arnold, and Charles Coburn. It’s still going strong today—you can even check out the club’s website when you get a notion.

The Masquers Club decided to capitalize on the talent present in their membership and get into the motion picture production business in the 1930s with a series of two-reel shorts produced at RKO. They weren’t the only outfit to express interest in making their own movies; The Lambs Club did a similar series for Columbia (among the familiar faces were Lynne Overman and Leon Errol) while the Thalians (featuring the likes of Franklin Pangborn and TDOY fave Grady Sutton) cranked out shorts for Universal. But the Masquers Club’s movies were, in the opinion of Leonard Maltin in Selected Short Subjects, “easily the best of these shorts”:

If these two-reelers had one consistent quality, it was that they tried awfully hard. There was a conscious striving for offbeat humor, which at times was overbearing, but which often paid off. In Rule ’em and Weep (1932), the sound effects are always wrong. In a duel that runs through the film, every time the guns are fired, different noises are heard. And when a horse-drawn carriage pulls up to the country of Bulvania, where the story is set, the sound effect of a train slowing to a halt is heard.

Director Mark Sandrich poses with Dorothy Granger and
Eddie Borden on the set of Thru Thin or Thicket (1933)

Alpha Video has issued a fun collection of these bizarre two-reel comedies in The Masquers Club: The Pre-Code Comedies Collection. The set kicks off with an entry described by Maltin as “one of the wildest in the series”—Thru Thin or Thicket; or Who’s Zoo in Africa (1933). (Many of the Masquers shorts had double titles, something reminiscent of many episodes of Rocky & Bullwinkle.) Wealthy dowager Mrs. Chyzzlebottom (Grayce Hamilton) is financing an expedition in Darkest Africa on behalf of Professor Backwash (James Finlayson), who hopes to locate (despite some skepticism) the famous “Tarzan” of motion picture fame. Instead, the party—with the help of reporter Scoop Skinner (Eddie Borden)—learns that that neck of the woods is ruled by the “Queen of the Jungle”—one Tarkana (Dorothy Granger), whose “yell” resembles in Len’s words, “a combination of Andy Devine and Johnny Weissmuller.” Mr. M isn’t just whistlin’ Dixie when he says this is a wild short; it’s got some gut busting gags and wacky situations (Tarkana has a “homing pigeon” that’s a pelican) written by Ben Holmes & Walter Weems and directed by future Astaire-Rogers helmer Mark Sandrich.

"Youse is a viper!" declares Barbara Sheldon to villain Sam Hardy in Stolen by Gypsies (1933), who responds: "I hope she don't mean an old windshield viper." (Okay, I didn't laugh at that so much as I did the reference to the classic Billy DeBeck comic strip Parlor, Bedroom, and Sink.)

Eddie Borden has a bit role in another short on the Alpha set—one that I found wonderfully amusing entitled Stolen by Gypsies; or Beer and Bicycles (1933). (Borden figures in a running gag with June Brewster as the couple’s attempts to get in a little passionate necking are interrupted by various characters throughout the two-reeler.) Stolen by Gypsies would the final short in the Masquers’ brief series; the best-known of their efforts (according to the [always reliable] IMDb) is the 1931 classic entitled The Stolen Jools (spoiler alert: the IMDb is wrong), which has been in the public domain for so long everyone’s seen it (if you haven’t—here it is). A promotional short that sought to raise funds on behalf of the National Variety Artists’ campaign to combat tuberculosis, Jools spots an all-star cast in a funny tale about the hunt for some stolen bling belonging to Norma Shearer. (Included in the cast are such TDOY favorites as Buster Keaton, Edward G. Robinson, Our Gang, Laurel & Hardy, and Wheeler & Woolsey.)

Stolen Jools isn’t in this collection, but the remaining shorts that are provide intermittent laughs and classic film celebrity wattage like Laura LaPlante, Walter Byron, John Sheehan, and Olaf Hytten in Lost in Limehouse; or Lady Esmerelda’s Predicament (1933—a funny melodrama that spoofs both Sherlock Holmes and Hairbreadth Harry-heroics) and Mary Carr, Russell Simpson, Lucile Browne, Russell Hopton, and Frank McGlynn, Jr. in The Moonshiner’s Daughter; or Abroad in Old Kentucky (1933—a feud between the Ratfields and Catfields in a tale from the hills). My personal favorite is The Wide Open Spaces (1931), which features Ned Sparks, Antonio Moreno, Dorothy Sebastian, William Farnum, George Cooper, Claude Gillingwater, Frank McHugh, Tom Dugan, and George Chandler. Moreno is a suspected bandito who’s smitten with heroine Sebastian…but she’s being pursued by crooked sheriff Sparks (as “Jack Rancid”). When Dorothy agrees to marry Ned to spare Antonio’s capture (this is decided over a game of checkers), the two of them are about to be “spliced” when the justice of the peace (Gillingwater) asks Sparks to produce the ring. Ned pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and a buttload of rings in various sizes falls to the ground. Laughing, Judge Claude observes: “You’ve been ridin’ a merry-go-round!”

If Mack Swain is pourin'...I'm buyin'. (Mack's the bartender in Wide Open Spaces.)

Brian Krey of Alpha Video provided me with a screener for this most entertaining compendium of classic film shorts…and I think fans of both two-reel comedies and those stars from the bygone days of Tinsel Town will want to add it to their bookshelf. To quote Br’er Maltin: “Familiar faces and far-out humor were the order of the day in the Masquers Comedies. They tried very hard to go off the beaten track. Often they succeeded and sometimes they did not. But the ingenuity that went into them always shines through.”

Rage against the (Hopper) machine

2017-07-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

“Those opposed to DRM contend there is no evidence that DRM helps prevent copyright infringement, arguing instead that it serves only to inconvenience legitimate customers, and that DRM helps big business stifle innovation and competition. Furthermore, works can become permanently inaccessible if the DRM scheme changes or if the service is discontinued.” – Wikipedia

Well, as I initially suspected, Thursday was the last day of our receiving the Buzzr channel at Rancho Yesteryear with our DISH “Flex Package.” What made me wary that it would be a temporary thing was that we experienced something similar when DISH added the Grit subchannel a while back; when I noticed that they added a few “new” reruns to their lineup—one of them being The Californians, which I was curious to check out—I went to program the DVR only to discover it had completely vaporized from our system.

I recorded reruns of To Tell the Truth, What’s My Line?, and I’ve Got a Secret from Buzzr for two purposes—the most important being that I had planned to use these episodes as “filler” whenever I dubbed a ninety-minute movie to a DVD-R. (I’m kind of anal about that sort of thing. Please do not look upon me with bewilderment and pity.) Friday afternoon, I decided to get started with the dubbing and as I set up the first installment of Truth…I get an onscreen message telling me that I can’t watch this recording because I’m not subscribed to the channel.

This is not the first time this has happened. My Mom had the same trouble watching Gone Baby Gone (2007), which I snagged during a Starz “freeview” some time back. (I had already managed to dub this one off onto a disc, and offered to run it for her but she waved me off.) The peculiar thing about all of this is that we never experienced these difficulties until DISH uploaded a new “interface” for their Hopper DVR about two weeks ago. I got an earlier heads-up about this from Andrew “Grover” Leal, who told me he could no longer watch a movie he DVR’d from HBO a while ago. (He’s also been experiencing trouble programming his DVR since the changeover.) I checked out an HBO recording I made—I believe it was The Sixth Sense (1999)—and it seemed to play fine, so I didn’t think much more about it.

But the Buzzr situation really got me steamed. It angered me because the recordings were only a month old, if at that—I could understand it if I had DVR’d these last year but this just seemed to be one big clusterfudge. I decided to call someone at DISH about this nonsense.

You’d think when you get to be the age I am now you’d learn that anytime you must contact a cable or satellite company about a problem it’s not going to end well. There is a simple reason for this. These companies are staffed by people working for human-weasel hybrids. (I used to think that everyone employed there was some sort of half-human, half-weasel until I further contemplated on the matter and decided that it was probably just upper management—the rest of the proles were unhappy humans forced to work for the company to afford luxuries like food, clothing, and shelter. This does not, however, resolve them from any of the evil their masters do nor their tireless efforts to see just how high they can raise my blood pressure.)

When we moved into Rancho Yesteryear (the Winterville edition) in July of 2015, we didn’t have many options re: TV service; although our mailing address is Winterville, we’re technically outside the city limits…where no cable installer has gone before. So, it came down to DISH or DirecTV, and after hearing a few of my friends bitch about how DirecTV loves to raise their rates more than they love their children I decided to go with DISH as our provider. (Plus, there was already a DISH dish in the yard. I figured it would make things easier.) Since that foolish decision, DISH has gone above and beyond the call of duty to keep me in a continually ulcerated state.

It started when Mom and Dad were upset because they couldn’t watch Braves games on the weekend; the channel (Fox Sports South) that televised the games would have a notice onscreen that the outing they wanted to watch had been blocked in our area. I called DISH to ask what the dealio was and the rep I spoke with swore on the lives of her children that this was completely out of the company’s hands.

Yes. This woman flat-out lied to me, thinking smugly: “This guy sounds too dumb to even look it up on the Internets.” Because here’s the thing: it’s bad enough that you’ve aroused my ire by doing this kind of sh*t in the first place (although it was really more of my parents’ ire…since I had no f**ks to give regarding the televised games) but then you compound this by not being straight with me. All she would have had to say is: “Yes, we’re too cheap to pay Fox for the weekend games. I know you, as a customer, probably don’t agree with what we feel is a principled stand…but we really don’t care because you have no other options regarding TV. Have a nice day, asswipe.” (Sure—I still would have been angry…but it would be an honest anger.)

Let’s get back to the present. Before DISH instituted its new “interface”—there was never any problem with my DVRing movies from freeview weekends and then watching them when I had the time. After the changes, however—this crap starts happening. Now—I know that believing correlation equals causation is a logical fallacy…but it just seemed odd that this kind of problem would rear its ugly head after DISH changed their Hopper/Joey. I had an online chat with a rep to find out what was going on.

I should have foreseen that this person was not going to give me any sort of honest answer—that she had, in fact, been conditioned by her human-weasel masters not to get sidetracked from the official story (I’m guessing it was a combination of snakes and live electricity). She kept prattling on about it being a DRM (digital rights management) issue—that practice that companies have adopted to, in the words of Wikipedia, “restrict usage of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works.” Since I wasn’t subscribed to Buzzr, I couldn’t access any programming I might have recorded…and if I did record a show, it would expire after a 24-hour period. (“What’s the point of having the DVR if I have to watch this stuff before that time limit runs out?” I asked to no reply.)

This made no sense to me whatsoever. What she was saying was, if I was subscribed to Buzzr—I could continue to access the programming I had legitimately recorded…but how would that stop me from “piracy”? (Wikipedia: “Proponents of DRM argue that it is necessary to prevent intellectual property from being copied freely, just as physical locks are needed to prevent personal property from being stolen, that it can help the copyright holder maintain artistic control, and that it can ensure continued revenue streams.”) The most infuriating part of the conversation was that she steadfastly maintained that this had nothing to do with the new interface…even though these “piracy” threats were not a problem with the old interface.

My favorite part came at the end, when she acknowledged that this might not have reached a satisfying conclusion but was there anything she could do to “better the experience”? My response was no, there was not. “You are doomed to spend eternity in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, along with politicians and pedophiles,” I explained to her. “I couldn’t do what you do for a living because I have a conscience.” All she would have had to say to me would be: “Yes, unfortunately one of the side effects of the interface change is that it puts the screws to people who like to record movies. Here’s a coupon for the inconvenience.” (The ‘rents would have liked that part.) I guess if there is a bright side to all this I now have some space cleared on the DVR because I had to delete all the movies I grabbed during the freeview weekend as well as some TV episodes I obtained from the Encore Westerns channel. (Oddly enough, there were a couple of movies I could continue to access…though those might be history by the time this tirade posts.)

And they wonder why people despise cable/satellite companies so much. Okay, rant over. Back to business tomorrow.

Crime Does Not Pay #8: “The Public Pays” (10/10/36)

2017-07-07T07:00:00.000-04:00

As the blogosphere goes wild for the triumphant return of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s critically-acclaimed dissection weekly of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts (hoo boy), we learn this week that while crime may not pay the public certainly does. (Says so in the title. They do need two forms of I.D., though, if they’re paying by check.) The Public Pays (1936) won the CDNP franchise its first of two Academy Award statuettes for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel); the series would garner seven nominations in total during its twelve-year run on motion picture screens. (Props to veteran scribe John C. Higgins, who wrote the story and screenplay, and would later work on such cinematic concoctions as He Walked by Night [1948] and Big House, U.S.A. [1955].)

William Tannen—the actor who played the “MGM Reporter” known as…Jim—will no longer be narrating our Crime Does Not Pay series; he has been replaced by Philip Trent (the actor would play another familiar-to-the-blog reporter in “Jasper Jenks” in the 1940 serial The Green Hornet) …though Tannen will return to CDNP, only in various bit parts.

REPORTER: How do you do, ladies and gentlemen…

Boo! You suck! Bring back Jim!

REPORTER: …once again, as the MGM Reporter, it is my pleasure to bring you another episode in the series entitled “Crime Does Not Pay” …may I introduce to you John Allgren of the Federal Department of Justice…

You could introduce us to him…but since I know that he’s really actor Edwin Stanley—who’s been in more serials (The Phantom Creeps, Mysterious Doctor Satan) than Carter has little liver pills—what would be the point? (I’m going to warn you right now: Allgren comes across as someone who had a humor-ectomy as a kid.)

ALLGREN: The problem I have to present to you is not a nice one nor an amusing one…I’m not going to quote figures and let it go at that…I’m not going to lay the problem in your laps…I intend to throw it full in your faces…

Mental note: scratch this guy off the guest list for the end-of-year TDOY party.

ALLGREN: The problem is this: the robbery of our nation…the systematic and organized plundering of your country…of yourselves…

Oh! You mean capitalism!

ALLGREN: Our department estimates that many industries are paying tribute to racketeers who have formed fake protective associations and fake unions…

Note that Allgren is careful to emphasize “fake” unions—otherwise that would be the end of this movie series as we know it. (“Build your own goddamn set!”)

ALLGREN: …businessmen and workers are frightened into joining, and once they do the prices go up…and the consumer pays…which means everybody in this audience…

“Except for that couple seated in the back. I have it on good authority that they steal for a living, and some of my men will be picking them up once the main feature is over.”

ALLGREN: Ten cents of every dollar you spend goes into the pockets of crime…and that’s a dime for which you get absolutely nothing…

Kind of a bargain when you stop to consider how much of every dollar I spend goes into this country’s obscene, bloated military budget…for which I also receive absolutely nothing. But I digress.

ALLGREN: Those dimes add up to two thousand million dollars a year to criminals…

What have you got against the small businessman, Allgren? Laughing Boy then goes on to tell us that these same crooks were even evill enough to infiltrate the milk business, and he brings out the chief of police of “a Midwestern city” (later identified as “Clayburne City”), John Carney, to narrate this sordid story…

…except that Chief Carney is instantly recognizable as character great Cy Kendall…who, coincidentally, plays the chief bad guy in the Green Hornet serial. I’ve seen Kendall in a great many flicks—you’ll remember he was in one of our previous CDNP shorts, Hit-and-Run Driver (1936)—and because the characters he portrays often tend to represent the opposite side of the law I kept waiting for him to be eventually revealed as working in tandem with the gangsters in this short.

CARNEY: We were confronted with a dangerous crime situation usually confined to large cities…we were invaded by a gang of extortionists…they posed as businessmen from Detroit…

There’s a dissolve, and then we pan up this impressive skyscraper…and to be honest, I was kind of confused because I got the impression that when Carney mentioned “usually confined to large cities” Clayburne City would be the last burg to have a building this imposing. (“We shot our wad with the money from the general fund—but it was worth it!”)

Four “Detroit” men are being shown office space in that building by a landlord (character veteran Eddy Waller)—Moran (Paul Stanton), Bartley (Emmett Vogan), Kelly (William Pawley), and a fourth identified only as “Moran’s hood” at the (always reliable) IMDb …but played by yet another veteran thesp, Frank Puglia. Also, according to the IMDb, the “office” used in this short was a set seen in the Clark Gable-Jean Harlow-Myrna Loy picture Wife vs. Secretary (1936).

LANDLORD: Uh…what business did you say you were in, Mr. Moran?

MORAN: I didn’t…but it happens to be milk…

LANDLORD: Milk?

KELLY: Yeah…the stuff they feed babies…

LANDLORD: I know a reporter on The Clayburne News…if you’d like a little free publicity…

BARTLEY: No, no, no…no publicity, my good man…we get our own publicity in our own way…

“Try this on for size: got milk?” Bartley shoos away the landlord while asking him for “a first-class sign painter”—and this is the result:

The goon—who walks with an umbrella and a bit of a limp—pays off the painter and ventures back into the office, where the others—having received the “papers of incorporation”—are all set to take Clayburne City’s milk money. (I make leetle joke.)

BARTLEY: Here’s a list of the independents…

MORAN: Well, their independence is over…the ones with the checks in front are the weak sisters…with a little talk, and they’ll join—that’s your job, Bartley…

The ones who have “x’s before them” will need “a little mild persuasion”—and that’s the jurisdiction of Mr. Kelly. As for the Umbrella Man? It’s pointed out that there are “a couple of Italian names” on the list, and since the guy with the bumbershoot seems to share that ethnicity he’ll handle those accounts. The goon enthusiastically points his umbrella at the screen…

…and opens it, much to the consternation of his associates. (I couldn’t initially figure out if it’s because it will serve a sinister purpose later or because they’re superstitious about opening an umbrella indoors.) Moran and his bunch have hired a bunch of “boys” to assist them in their persuasion, and is informed by Kelly that “they’re over at the gym, taking a workout.”

MORAN (to Kelly): Now remember…you’re a trainer in town, with a stable of boxers…don’t make any attempt to phone here…nobody must connect those bruisers of yours with the Creamery Betterment Association…Incorporated…

First stop: Mr. Moore’s (John Dilson) dairy.

MOORE: Naturally, in the interest of good business I’d like to see the price go up…but…uh…

BARTLEY: But what?

MOORE: I started such an organization myself a couple of years ago…but it didn’t work…

BARTLEY: Don’t worry, Mr. Moore… (Hands him a piece of paper) This one will…now if you’ll just sign that…

Moore puts his John Hancock on the paper, and hands it back to Bartley. That’s when he learns that Bartley is an administrative assistant to Beelzebub, and that he’s just signed away his immortal soul! I’m kidding, of course; but Moore does learn that the price of milk is going up three cents…and that “The Creamery Betterment Association” expects to get a penny per bottle of cow juice sold.

MOORE: A cent on every bottle! Why—that’s outrageous! You know how much that amounts to?!!

BARTLEY: Yes…we know…but don’t forget in a few days the price goes up three cents…and it stays up…now you’ll save that extra profit just by organizing…

MOORE: But I can’t afford to pay that much!

BARTLEY: But you don’t pay it—people who buy your milk pay it…

"Why didn't I think of this before?"

This is, hands-down, the funniest bit in the short—because Moore gets this look on his face as if he’s just now figured out how capitalism works (it never occurred to him to squeeze the customers), and he’s beside himself with joy at the notion of screwing over his clientele.

The thug with the umbrella pays an Italian dairy owner named Simonelli (George Humbert) a visit by telling him the CBA (Creamery Betterment Association) is “an American outfit and you have been chosen to join,” skillfully appealing to his immigrant sense of patriotism. Mr. S “don’t want-a no trouble,” and he sells his soul easier than a milkshake through a straw. Dickman (Frederick Vogeding) of Baltic Creamery, on the other hand, proves a bit of a tougher sell when Bartley comes a-callin’.

DICKMAN: No, thank you…not interested…I’m making a fair profit…and business is getting better…but I don’t believe in banding together to get the price up…

Now I know this must be a movie—this guy is too good to be true! Bartley is not discouraged; he throws his business card on Dickman’s desk and remarks that by noon tomorrow he’ll probably need it. There’s a brief scene where Moran orders Kelly to put the heat on Dickman’s outfit…but curiously, he comments on Bartley’s habit of popping little white pills like they were Tic-Tacs. I thought they introduced this into the story so that they could come back to it later (“We found an empty pillbox near one of the milk trucks, Inspector!”) but nothing ever develops—I think it’s just in there to give Bartley a little color. Some of Kelly’s “boys” block one of the Baltic trucks on a country road, and when the driver gets out he’s punched out by one of the goons while the rest of them dump the milk on the ground.

To no one’s surprise, this induces Mr. Dickman to become a fervent supporter of CBA—though Moran warns him he’s letting him off easy despite Dickman calling the cops about the incident. The scene shifts to a milkman making a delivery for Markowitz Dairy (lot of dairies in Clayburne City) while an unknown miscreant adds a little something extra to the milk via syringe…

We don’t learn what’s in the milk until a following scene, when a little boy takes a swig of his morning milk cocktail and complains to his mother “there’s something funny about this milk.” Mama downs a bit of it, and noticing the odd tang sniffs it—declaring “Why, it smells like kerosene!” While the mother announces that “that’s the last milk we’ll get from them” and goes off toward the telephone to give them a tongue lashing, a little girl also seated at the table has a slash and makes a face. Yes, I laughed at this. {“What is this kerosene-in-the-milk bullsh*t, Ma…gaahhhhhhhh!!!”)

The secretary (Barbara Bedford) to Mr. Markowitz (Karl Hackett) informs her boss in the next scene that customers have been bitching left and right about the new ingredient in the milk. “I can’t understand it,” she laments…but Markowitz has figured it out; he hands her a business card and resignedly says “Call that number—tell them I’ll sign their agreement.”

As she turns to leave, he adds: “Tell MacMillan that milk goes up three cents.”

As you can see by this edition of The Clayburne News, every dairy in the area has knuckled under to the strong-arm tactics of the CBA except for Paige Creamery—whose president, Charles Paige (Ivan Miller), will no doubt be getting a visit from one of their friendly reps soon. In the meantime, the audience witnesses for itself the devastating effects of CBA’s reign of terror. A woman purchasing two bottles of milk from a grocer (Harry C. Bradley) must put one back after she’s informed of the price hike. And a poor family gets a visit from a woman from the relief bureau is informed that their daily ration will be slashed from two quarts a day to a quart-and-a-half. (Milk, Mandrake? Children’s milk?) By the way—the relief bureau lady is played by Bess Flowers, “Queen of the Dress Extras.”

Paige has taken all he can stands—he can’t stands no more:

PAIGE: Now get this straight, John—Paige Company is not knuckling under to these grafters…I’ve spent twenty years building up the biggest creamery in this city and I’ll fight ‘em…with or without your police department!

Looks like it’s going to be without. Carney behaves pretty much like every pusillanimous public official—there’s nothing we can do, I’m just marking time until I collect my pension, yadda yadda yadda.

CARNEY: We have no evidence connecting the outrages with the racketeers…extortion’s very difficult to prove…I’ve got to have some evidence that a good jury can set its teeth into…

PAIGE: Swell…meantime these thugs take over the milk business and skyrocket prices!

CARNEY: Yeah, I know…

“F*ck it, Dude—let’s go bowling…”

CARNEY: I don’t blame the creamery companies for giving in…they’ve got too much at stake…they can’t risk spoiled milk…interrupted deliveries…families and hospitals have got to have their products! The crooks have got the milk dealers right over a barrel…

More like a carton. Paige still insists he’s going to hold out and that he’s itching for a scrap. “We’ll be right beside you, Charlie,” promises Carney, “as soon as we get something on them.”

Back at the CBA, the officers lament that Paige Creamery still won’t play ball and that they’re going to soon start asking for three cents per bottle from its august members. (This is how real bidnessmen are supposed to act!) Kelly enters to tell Moran that Paige is still being stubborn—it’s speculated that the president’s reserve is due to his working his way up through the ranks, starting out as a humble milkman. “He’ll go in with us or go into bankruptcy,” declares Moran. The word is out to put on additional pressure, and in this next scene…

…not the best screen capture but the actor playing “Drunken Hood Who Knocks Over Milk Wagon” (thank you for that, IMDb) is B-western/serial veteran Richard Alexander (you might know him as Prince Barin the first Flash Gordon chapter play). Dick and his fellow tipplers take the horses from the milk wagon, and when the driver objects he’s laid out with a roundhouse…then his wagon is pushed over, spilling the precious kerosene-laced beverage all over the ground. A following sequence has two CBA goons crashing into a Paige truck on a busy street, also knocking the vehicle on its side. But Paige continues to hang tough, despite a visit from Moran, Kelly, and Umbrella Henchman. As they’re ordered out of his office, Bumbershoot Goon sees a photo of Paige’s wife and kids on his desk. “Nice family you got…” (“Be a shame if someone were to set fire to them.”)

Paige’s secretary (Betty Ross Clarke) informs him that Chief Carney has come to visit, and that’s when Paige announces he’s had enough.

PAIGE: I’m giving in, John…those crooks have threatened my family…

“I may be a captain in the homogenized industry—but my family means the world to me.”

PAIGE: Oh, I stuck it out while they smashed my trucks…beat up my drivers and made them quit…destroyed raw milk and apparently everything accidental…but this is too much…I’m through, Carney…

Carney pleads with Paige to “stick by me” even though the long arm of the law is completely helpless where these racketeers are concerned. (“I was this close to stepping up my efforts to do completely nothing!”) All he needs is another week—and in the meantime, he’ll do whatever it takes to protect the Family Paige.

“The police department is going into the milk business,” Carney declares to Paige. He rounds up a considerable number of his fellow flatfoots (you wouldn’t think a city would need that many—but what do I know?) and disguises them as common garden variety milkmen. As a couple of CBA shakedown artists approach one of the undercover cops with milk mayhem on their agenda, the cop gives one of them a judo flip…

A uniformed cop recognizes one of his fellow boys in blue (Robert Homans) in a milkman’s getup and assumes he’s gotten into another line of work. No, me boyo, he tells his friend…and as Carney approaches, the milkman informs his captain he’s got a couple of guys ready for the hoosegow on top of his wagon:

The officers with the CBA are not amused.

MORAN (to Kelly): You dumb cluck…

KELLY: Well, how was the boys to know that every one of them milkmen was a cop?

MORAN: How could they know anything with such a dumb leader? How many did they lock up?

KELLY: All of them…but don’t worry, Chief—they won’t talk…they know you’ll spring ‘em in a couple of days…

MORAN: These hick cops think they can stymie our racket, do they? Okay…well, it’s Paige’s funeral…maybe the police department’s, too…

The Creamery Betterment Association proceeds to detonate a small thermonuclear device inside Clayburne City—which finally makes the police sit up and take notice. Okay, I’m just kidding—Moran’s hood finally gets the opportunity to use his umbrella when the car he and a few of the “boys” are riding in passes a Paige truck alongside a country road. The umbrella is actually a high-octane shootin’ weapon which pierces the tanks on the truck and spills the milk all over the ground. (I haven’t seen umbrella action like that since that rerun of The Avengers.) The man (Russ Clark) behind the wheel of the truck is unhurt…and he’s also an undercover cop, who spills the news of the event to Carney. Carney knows that simple ballistics is all he’ll need to convict those evil-doers—particularly if he catches them with the umbrella gun. There’s an unintentionally humorous bit where Paige starts bitching about the damage to his truck—estimated at $30,000—and demands of Carney: “What kind of police department are running here?”

“A good one!” is Carney’s response. (Eye roll.) The gendarmes quickly surround the building that houses the CBA, and they plan to flush out the gang by printing some “fake news”:

Spoiler: the driver was not killed. The racketeers manage to make it to their vehicle and hightail it out of town…but they’re stopped by Clayburne’s finest—who shoot out the tires and make the car come to a screeching halt. Umbrella Dude is gunned down…

…and back in the lab, the technician proves that the bullets found in the milk truck are an identical match to test slugs fired out of the umbrella. “Umbrella or not—these fellas didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain,” he observes. If this was a sitcom, everyone would be standing around laughing about now…

Okay, I'm starting to lose all feeling in the gluteus maximus (though I’m working on a remedy for next week)—let’s cut to the chase:

"And don't forget to drink your milk, you little bastards!"

ALLGREN: On the strength of the ballistic findings, Moran, Bartley, and Kelly were sentenced to fifty years each in state prison without possibility of parole…in such manner was the power of the milk racketeers broken in Clayburne City…extortion demands good organization, clever brains, and much money…but extortion cannot operate against a brave man who faces down these parasites and goes to the police for help…he cannot be robbed!

A still from The Public Pays

Um…you’re sort of forgetting that the cops kind of sat on their hands until the last five minutes of this thing. That’s all for today, kids—but before I go…whoever has been "donating" the screen grabs for these write-ups to the (always reliable) IMDb I am most flattered. I'm a little apprehensive about the IMDb crediting Alonzo Price with portraying “Captain Halliday” in last week’s entry, Foolproof (1936), only because it was merely an educated guess on my part. (They’re still crediting Harry Hayden with playing “Stewart Walden” even though Facebook compadre Andrew “Grover” Leal has pointed out that is not the guy “serving the big dinner” in The Killers [1946]. And I still think that's Esther Howard as "Mrs. Layton.") As always, thanks for encouraging my behavior.

Next time: Crime Does Not Pay wins its second and last Oscar with Torture Money (1937)! G’bye now!

Adventures in Blu-ray: When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922)

2017-07-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

The Kickstarter project from March of 2016 to raise funds to restore the 1922 Marion Davies feature film When Knighthood Was in Flower came to a most gratifying conclusion on the first of this month, when I received the Blu-ray/DVD combo that was my reward for tossing a few coins into the guitar case. (There were 317 backers, and a total of $11, 928 was raised; the project’s goal was attained eight hours within its initial Kickstarter posting. Yowsah!) We have silent film accompanist Ben Model (and Undercrank Productions—in association with Greenbriar Picture Shows) to thank for this beautiful restoration; Ben availed himself of a 12-reel 35mm nitrate print of Knighthood’s “road show” release in the collection of the Library of Congress…so if you’re saying to yourself right now “Oh, I saw this already on YouTube” you really haven’t seen it the way silent movies are meant to be seen and enjoyed.

Ben Model

For starters, the refurbished Knighthood sports digitally reinstated tints and tones; the LOC print (which includes a reel from a nitrate print courtesy of the Michael Yakaitis Collection at the Academy Film Archive) was in black & white, but the indications for the tinting and toning were printed into the first and last frames of most of the reels, which proved quite a help in the restoration project. The final reel, which features the film’s protagonists being pursued by soldiers wielding weapons and torches, digitally replicated the hand coloring (thanks to Jack Theakston, the torches give off an orange glow that is amazing to look at) of the original release. Knighthood also boasts a brand-new theatre organ score composed by Mr. Model, and a most informative liner note booklet written by the woman who trims the hedges at Backlots—Marion Davies biographer and fellow CMBA member Lara Gabrielle Fowler.

Lyn Harding, Marion Davies & Forrest Stanley

Based on the 1898 novel by Charles Major (under the pseudonym Edwin Caskoden—one of the film’s characters amusingly borrows this name) and the 1901 play by Paul Kester, When Knighthood Was in Flower is a romantic melodrama set against the background of England’s Tudor period. King Henry VIII (Lyn Harding) wishes for his sister Mary to wed French king Louis XII (William Norris) …though it’s more of a merger than marriage. Alas and alack, Mary has become quite taken with Charles Brandon (Forrest Stanley)—a commoner who makes her poor heart go lub-dub from the moment she meets him at a jousting tournament. Chuck’s lower societal caste dictates that any coupling between him and the princess is RIGHT! OUT! —so when Henry exiles Charles to “New Spain,” Mary insists on running off with him disguised as his brother.

The male masquerade of Marion Davies’ Mary isn’t any more convincing that the drag she donned in Little Old New York (1923); she and Charles are quickly rounded up by all the King’s horses and all the King’s men. Charles is to have a date with the executioner…but Mary agrees to marry Louis XII if her brother will spare his life. The scrofulous old fart (Louis) has his card punched when he attempts to behave like the young lover he’s convinced Mary wants and needs…and with the King’s death, his skeevy nephew Francis (William Powell—billed as “William H.”) decides to put the moves on the Widder Tudor. Fortunately for Mary, Charles comes to her rescue…and King Henry VIII provides the obligatory happy ending.

A title card that produced a hearty guffaw. (Why would she be dressed like a wonton?)

Davies & William Norris

With the help of her producer-patron—newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst—Marion Davies had already headlined fourteen feature films by the time When Knighthood Was in Flower hit theatre screens in 1922. Flower would be the movie that cemented Davies’ stardom; it was a big budget costume epic, produced at a cost of $1.5 million (about $21 million in today’s dollahs) and believe you me—every penny of it shows in its lavish attention to detail (costumes, sets, etc.). The 1922 version of the Major novel-Kester play made quite a few “best” lists (in addition to being the sixth biggest box office hit that year); it had been previously filmed in 1908 (though it is believed to be lost) and would see another adaptation in 1953 with Walt Disney’s The Sword and the Rose (the U.S. title).

William (H.) Powell

The more of Marion Davies’ cinematic oeuvre that I am exposed to the more I enjoy, though I’m firmly in the camp that believes that she was showcased best in comedies like The Patsy (1928—still my personal favorite) and Show People (1928). Her talents as a comedienne are on display in Knighthood though, in very brief glimpses; I laughed loudly at the face she makes at one of the foreign ambassadors giving her the once-over on behalf of their marriage-minded monarchs, and when she and Stanley are hiding out at an inn while on the run from King Henry she does a funny backwards stagger into a fireplace as she cavorts in her male masquerade. Knighthood started out kind of slow for me (I’m not much of a costume epic guy) but became more engaging as it built up a head of steam toward the finish. It was also a treat seeing William Powell (in his second film…and in tights, even) as the lecherous Frances; a note at the (always reliable) IMDb states that despite both Davies and Powell being stars at MGM in the 1930s this was the only film they appeared in together.

The restoration of When Knighthood Was in Flower is beautifully done and a round of kudos go out rewarding the hard work that went into this Blu-ray/DVD. It will be made available for general release July 25, 2017 (according to the listing at Amazon), and if you’re a silent movie buff you’ll want this one for the shelf…if you’re a Marion Davies fan, you’ll definitely have to have this. Knighthood is also scheduled for a showing on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ when Marion Davies is one of the thirty-one stars feted during Tee Cee Em’s Summer Under the Stars in August. (It airs at 8pm EDT on August 29th; two other recently restored Davies vehicles—Enchantment [1921; 9am EDT] and The Bride’s Play [1922; 10:30am EDT]—are also in the lineup.)

Don’t touch that dial!

2017-07-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

If you were going to request that a “coffee table book” be written on old-time radio, I can’t think of a more suitable author than my fellow Radio Spirits contributor and nostalgia expert Martin Grams, Jr. I’ve joked in the past that my pal Martin is “the Isaac Asimov of OTR books,” due to his prolific output of tomes on that subject. Honest to my grandma, every time I’m in communication with the guy he seems to be in the middle of writing yet another invaluable pop culture reference contribution. You’ll find many of his books—ranging on topics from radio’s Duffy’s Tavern to TV’s The Time Tunnel—for sale at his website…and this November 1, he’ll add another title to his overstuffed bookshelf with The Top 100 Classic Radio Shows, co-written with Radio Spirits founder Carl Amari.

The end papers for the book. To paraphrase A Date With Judy's Oogie Pringle, "they look sna-a-zzy!"

(Someone once asked me to explain the Asimov reference—I got the idea from M*A*S*H actor Alan Alda, who, after encountering the science fiction legend at a social gathering, jokingly asked: “Shouldn’t you be writing a book somewhere?”)

When Ann Rutherford took over for Penny Singleton on
Blondie in March of 1949, she adopted Penny's bleached-blonde
tresses, too. At left is Arthur "Dagwood" Lake and in the
middle is Jeffrey Silver (as son Alexander).

Coffee table books, as a rule, are rather simple in content (they serve mostly to show off photographs and/or illustrations), and serve as light reading for the occupants of the home or visitors to same—though they can be pressed into service to jump-start a little conversation at a party or get-together. You’ll get much, much more with Top 100 Classic Radio Shows, however; it’s packed to the rafters with important history on a range of radio favorites from Abbott & Costello to X-Minus One, and includes loads of trivial ephemera to go along with its profuse presentation of photographs.

The book is split into six sections: Comedy, Drama, Mystery & Detective, Sci-Fi & Kids, Variety, and Western & Adventure. For each show, the reader is provided with a cast list, airdates, and additional program background; many of the shows discussed also feature a “Did You Know?” section which offers up tantalizing trivia for those of us who eat that sort of thing up with a spoon. Included with Top 100 Classic Radio Shows are three CDs with vintage old-time radio programming (not dissimilar to the bonus disc that accompanied Leonard Maltin’s The Great American Broadcast) and a website where you can download additional broadcasts (mentioned in “call-outs” in the sections of the shows listed) for additional hours of listening enjoyment.

Martin was swell enough to send me a .pdf proof of the book (I don’t have a coffee table—just an ottoman) and what I saw in that digital copy convinced me that fans of old-time radio will not want to be left out when the big book hits the streets in November. Simply put, it strikes the perfect balance between essential and informative OTR reference material and page-turning pictorial. (And really—how many more nature books can you fit on your table anyway?) Pre-order this one at an Amazon near you.

“…the problem here is that...my little brother, this morning, got his arm caught in the microwave, and uh...my grandmother dropped acid and she freaked out, and hijacked a school bus full of...penguins, so it's kind of a family crisis...”

2017-06-30T07:00:00.000-04:00

I hadn’t planned to use the “Harold Lloyd More to Come” screen grab so soon but…there will be no Crime Does Not Pay this week. A combination of outside interference (mi madre wanted me to accompany her to Kroger Nation so I could lift and tote several cases of bottled water) and just plain laziness (my old friend!) conspired to fill me with overwhelming ennui—so I decided to shelve it and do it next week. (Blog godmother S.Z. is probably wreaking havoc as you read this, stealing high schoolers’ lunch money and selling reverse mortgages to seniors.) But fret not: Thrilling Days of Yesteryear will return next week with…stuff. Have a great weekend, cartooners!

Kennedy for me

2017-06-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

From 1931 to 1948, beloved character veteran Edgar Kennedy starred in over 100 two-reel comedies for RKO, as part of a franchise originally titled “Mr. Average Man.” Kennedy was hands down one of the finest second bananas in the history of the movies, brightening even the dullest film by merely being in it. He worked for Mack Sennett’s fun factory at the start of his movie career (he often played a Keystone Kop, and worked on a few occasions with Charlie Chaplin), and later freelanced in the 1920s before joining Hal Roach’s “Lot of Fun” toward the end of the decade as a supporting player in the classic comedies headlined by Our Gang, Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and so many more. Edgar even got an opportunity to demonstrate his talents behind the camera, directing such Stan and Ollie romps as From Soup to Nuts (1928) and You’re Darn Tootin’ (1928).

Harry Harvey, Florence Lake & Edgar in Contest Crazy (1948)

Edgar passed away in November of 1948, about a month after his last RKO two-reeler, Contest Crazy, was released to theaters. But the studio continued to release shorts from that backlog for years after that, and while it’s not possible to hit one out of the park every time at bat the “Average Man” comedies have an admirably consistent batting average in the laughs department. Much of their appeal to audiences today lies in the fact that the shorts were a template for what eventually became the television situation comedy. The plots of the comedies were simple and straightforward—dealing with everyday subjects as going on vacation or celebrating an anniversary—and they eschewed the kind of frantic zaniness that was the modus operandi of Columbia’s two-reel comedies, like those featuring The Three Stooges. The Kennedy comedies didn’t skimp on the physical slapstick, but it was always grounded in a world of believability, only slightly exaggerated for comedic effect.

The reason why even the weaker “Average Man” comedies generate a chuckle or two is due to Edgar Kennedy, who was the undisputed master of short-fuse stack blowing. His signature was called the “slow burn,” a gesture where he would wipe his face in frustration in a futile attempt to hold his temper before exploding in rage. Edgar worked alongside many of the great mirthmakers: Joe E. Brown (When’s Your Birthday?), Eddie Cantor (Kid Millions), W.C. Fields (Tillie and Gus), Raymond Griffith (Paths to Paradise), Harold Lloyd (The Sin of Harold Diddlebock), The Marx Brothers (so memorable as the lemonade vendor who tangles with Chico and Harpo in Duck Soup), Olsen & Johnson (Crazy House), and Wheeler & Woolsey (Diplomaniacs), to name just a few. He makes feature films such as Twentieth Century (1934), San Francisco (1936), A Star is Born (1937), It’s a Wonderful World (1939), It Happened Tomorrow (1944), and Unfaithfully Yours (1948) a joy to sit down with a bowl of popcorn.

Alpha Video has been releasing several volumes of Kennedy’s RKO shorts to DVD as part of their “Rediscovered Comedies of Edgar Kennedy” series. (I know that for many they’re not technically “rediscoveries” in that film fanatics like the TDOY faithful are well-acquainted with how delightful they are—but since they don’t make the rounds on any of the classic movie channels on a regular basis some movie mavens may not be familiar with them.) Volumes One and Two came out in 2010, with Volume Three following three years later and Volume Quatro released this past April. Brian Krey was kind enough to shoot me a screener for Volume 4, which contains ten of Edgar’s two-reel efforts from 1934 to 1946. Some of these are the very textbook definition of “doozy.”

The DVD kicks off with In-Laws are Out (1934), a sidesplitting outing that has Edgar returning home from a business trip to learn from his neighbors that wife Florence (Florence Lake) is kicking him out of the house. The reason? It’s Ed’s hair-trigger temper, which is always activated by his interactions with his sponging mother-in-law (Dot Farley) and brother-in-law (Billy Eugene). Florence makes her husband promise that he’ll keep his anger managed…otherwise he’s out the door. His in-laws scheme to make him blow his top, so between those two and a mantle clock he’s purchased that refuses to chime properly, Kennedy’s disposition is continually challenged. One of the best gags in this comedy (directed by Jules White’s brother Sam and co-written by Arthur Ripley) has Edgar trudging up the stairs in his house with a priceless vase and some blankets blocking his view of what’s ahead of him…and Eugene placing a stepladder at the top of the staircase, resulting in Edgar’s continued climb. The first time Kennedy makes the trip he’s stopped by Florence before he falls off the ladder…but on the second go-round, he falls right through the floor and emerges (somehow with the vase intact) from a room below the staircase landing.

Florence & Jack Rice scheme behind Edgar's back

Before his RKO series got underway, Edgar Kennedy appeared in an Educational two-reeler entitled All Gummed Up (1930), in which Florence Lake (Arthur’s sis) was cast as his wife. Lake would continue in that capacity with the “Average Man” series, playing the delightfully dizzy Mrs. K. Florence left the studio in the mid-30s, and while she returned for the occasional assignment in the Kennedy comedies she didn’t permanently return until the mid-40s, whereupon she finished out the franchise until it ended in 1948. Rice was an integral part of the Kennedy comedies, and when she’s not around to chatter a mile-a-minute in her incredible fashion I find I don’t enjoy the shorts as much as I should. They brought in a few actresses to play Mrs. Kennedy in the 1940s comedies—notably Irene Ryan and Pauline Drake—with Sally Payne even going as far to completely mimic Lake (the DVD features Payne’s turn in Inferior Decorator [1942], which is not one of Edgar’s stronger efforts) in her turns as Mrs. K.

Florence, Paul Maxey, Dot Farley, Jack, Harry Strang & Edgar
in Brother Knows Best (1948)

I think In-Laws are Out is a delightful short, but in it you can detect one of the handicaps of the Kennedy comedies as noted by Leonard Maltin in his reference book The Great Movie Shorts: “Where the series often failed, however, was in straying too far from credibility, usually in the antics of Edgar’s meddlesome mother-in-law, played by Dot Farley, and his no-account brother-in-law, first played by William Eugene and then by Jack Rice. In most cases, one could accept their obnoxious nature, and the fact that Edgar was forced to live with it since his wife was devoted to them; but when they blithely wreck a car in Quiet Please, “borrow” Edgar’s life savings in Brother Knows Best, or engage in one of the sundry get-rich-quick schemes in which Edgar always loses, it’s a bit hard to take.” The pair (Farley and Eugene) deliberately connive to piss off Edgar so he’ll lose his temper in In-Laws, and while this was no doubt done to generate sympathy for his character I think more than a few of us would be practicing our curb kicks.

Edgar & Florence in Poisoned Ivory (1934)

In Poisoned Ivory (1934—a Christmas-themed short!), Florence thinks she’s accidentally poisoned Edgar and Brother (Rice this time) phones the doctor (William Augustin) for help. Brother knows that Florence didn’t really poison her husband, but he suggests to the doc that he get a little payback for an argument that he and Edgar had the night previous. The doctor approaches pranking Ed with relish (so much for that Hippocratic Oath) by telling his patient there’s nothing he can do for him…and that he’ll probably shuffle off this mortal coil with a yawn and a yearn to go beddy-bye (he gives Edgar a sedative before telling him this). Ivory is another gem of a Kennedy comedy; even though I had serious reservations about anyone participating in that kind of foolishness there are some very funny moments in the short including Edgar’s waking up from his sleeping pill and, as his eyes focus, seeing his family and physician. “And I thought I was going to Heaven,” he mutters.

Edgar Hamlet (1935)

Edgar Hamlet (1935) is another entertaining outing, with Edgar and Mother having an argument over a line of Shakespeare (she’s convinced it’s in Hamlet—he insists it’s Macbeth) that leads to his decision to take the family to see a performance of Hamlet to prove he’s right…but he gets distracted by such simple tasks as getting ice out of the icebox and unwrapping a new dress shirt. This one is a lot of fun because you get to hear Kennedy recite Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (“To be or not to be…”) in the way that only he could. “I overact,” he once observed of his performance style. “I know I overact. But at least I do try to act, and it’s easy enough for a director to say ‘Easy now,’ and I know what he means and calm it down.”

Edgar & Vivien Oakland

Comic actress Vivien Oakland replaced the departing Florence Lake as Mrs. Kennedy in many of the shorts, and in Maltin’s opinion “was rather subdued as Edgar’s wife.” Three of her efforts appear on the Volume 4 disc; Bad Housekeeping (1937) is a so-so entry (it’s the old “wife-takes-husband’s-place-at-work-while-he-wrecks-the-house” plot) that benefits largely from an appearance by Franklin Pangborn as a piano tuner who proves to be no help when Edgar gets his tie caught in the washing machine or is buried under a bed that falls apart as he attempts to change the sheets. (The windup gag has Pangborn pleased as punch at the job he did on the Kennedy’s baby grand—all the keys sound the same!) A Clean Sweep (1938) is a definite improvement; Edgar can’t bring himself to tell Vivien he’s lost his job at the bank and that he’s become a vacuum cleaner salesman…until one of the houses where he tries to peddle his wares is hosting a housewarming party with Vivien in attendance!

An interesting trade ad for A Clean Sweep (1938): Edgar doesn't have a mustache in this short, and the other male character (Eddie Dunn) never interacts with Vivien's Mrs. K.

Underrated silent comedian Billy Franey appears in Sweep as Edgar’s buddy; he asks Ed why he lost his bank job and Kennedy explains it was because he was rooting for the Giants. (“Oh…he’s a Yankees fan, eh?” Billy asks. “Nah…it just happened that he was at the ballpark the day I was supposed to be at my mother-in-law’s funeral” is Edgar’s reply.) Franey also graced several of Edgar’s shorts as his father-in-law, of which Mutiny in the County (1940), included on this set, is an excellent example. Edgar must appear in court after losing his temper with a neighborhood kids’ ballgame results in his throwing a baseball into the window of a cop car (the gendarmes are James C. Morton and Fred Kelsey). His trial coincides with the town’s annual “Boys’ Day”—which means the little jamokes who were playing ball are now the judge and prosecutor! It’s a most diverting short, and what continually make me titter was a running gag in which Franey keeps getting hit with doors as Edgar stomps off in frustration.

Vivien looks over the mess the Kennedy clan made in her kitchen in Home Canning (1948), the penultimate short in the Edgar Kennedy "Average Man" series.

The interesting thing about Vivien Oakland is that once Florence Rice returned to play the Kennedy wife Oakland continued to appear in the shorts, usually as a dowager or upper-crust matron. That’s the case with the last short on the Alpha set, Social Terrors (1946)—her daughter (Phyllis Kennedy) becomes Brother’s fiancée when Edgar tries to stave off being evicted by the landlord (Chester Clute). The landlord can’t sleep in his apartment because of some awful woman who sings off-key in the adjacent apartment, and since Brother neglected to tell Ed they’re being chucked out (he received the notice 30 days ago) Kennedy schemes to marry off his in-law, which will free up a room in their house for the landlord to stay in. The Kennedy clan dines with Brother’s future in-laws (character great Paul Maxey plays the father) with hilarious results, and after dinner his intended decides to serenade everyone with a song. (I don’t have to tell you who the irate neighbor is at this point, do I?)

All the shorts on this must-own collection are worth watching except for The Hillbilly Goat (1937), one of those “mountain folks” comedies that always grates on this proud son of The Mountain State. Hopefully I’ll get around to watching some of the earlier Edgar Kennedy volumes (I’ve been collecting them from Alpha since they’ve been putting them out) soon and writing them up for the blog—thanks again to Brian for making my Wednesday afternoon an entertaining one!

“Heeere's Johnny!”

2017-06-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

“And I hope when I find something that I want to do and I think you would like and come back, that you'll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been…I bid you a very heartfelt good night.” Those final words rung down the curtain on Johnny Carson’s thirty-season stint as host of NBC’s The Tonight Show (or The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as it was officially known), when “The King of Late Night” officially retired on May 22, 1992. Sadly, Carson never returned to TV save for a small vocal contribution (as himself) on an episode of The Simpsons and a cameo on Late Show with David Letterman in 1994; he left this world for a better hosting gig on January 23, 2005 at the age of 79. (Correction: I wrote too soon; Mark Murphy e-mailed me to let me know that Johnny also did a monologue on a 1993 NBC special feting Peacock institution Bob Hope on his 90th birthday. Thanks, Mark!)

Johnny...we'd hardly know ye.

I’m a little fuzzy on the exact time frame, but I remember I was on my way home from my night auditor gig at The Landmark Inn a year or two before Carson’s passing. I took a taxi that day (I didn’t want to wait for the bus), and the cabbie was listening to a couple of radio jocks holding forth about how The Tonight Show just wasn’t the same since Johnny’s departure and that Jay Leno couldn’t carry Carson’s jockstrap. One of the hosts—who claimed to know people who know people who know Carson—explained that Johnny had not made a return to the small screen because…well, he kind of danced around the reason but the implication was that the former talk-show host had really “let himself go” (see photo at left). Then came the observation that he (the jock) would rather watch an obese, bloated Carson drooling all over himself than that poltroon Leno any day of the week. I’m not proud of this—but I laughed like a hyena at his remark.

Those of you who get the substation Antenna TV in your area are aware that they added reruns of Johnny Carson (the retitled Tonight Show) to their schedule in August of 2015 (the shows from 1972 on, since only a handful of the pre-1972 Tonight Shows have survived due to “wiping”), and occasionally a segment surfaces on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ (their presentation, Carson on TCM, went great guns at first before eventually doing a slow vanishing act). Time Life has released several DVD compilations—notably the 22-disc Johnny and Friends (SRP $199.95), with 61 hours of material—and next Tuesday (July 4) they’ll roll out a new-to-retail DVD collection of nine classic Carson telecasts (on 3 discs—the SRP is $29.95) with the emphasis on appearances by comedians Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy.

My good friend Michael Krause at Foundry Communications graciously gifted me with a screener for this upcoming release, which not only features these telecasts in their entirety (the musical guests are often excised from the Antenna TV repeats for copyright reasons) but the original network commercials as well. This appealed to the old-time radio fan in me (I love to listen to broadcasts that have the commercials intact), though I admittedly only watched one of the shows with commercials (you have the option of watching without—something that I’m sure would please my father if Carson reruns were his particular meat). That would be the oldest show in this collection, a July 21, 1976 telecast on the disc spotlighting Steve Martin. For an hour-and-fifteen minutes (the Carson show was a ninety-minute program from 1966 to 1980) I got to reminisce about taking the Nestea plunge and how Heinz ketchup is “slow good” (voiceover by Casey Kasem) …not to mention seeing familiar faces like Betty White (plugging Spray ‘n Wash) and Doris Roberts (a Glade air-freshener commercial—she won a Clio award for those spots).

I cannot come up with the name of the actor playing Doris' husband in this commercial, and it's nagging at me because I've seen him in so many other things. (It's hell getting old.)

Wild and crazy guy.

In high school, I thought Steve Martin was the funniest man to walk the planet. I owned all four of his stand-up albums, mimicked all of his routines (“Excuuuuuse me!”), and relished every time he hosted Saturday Night Live. With the passage of time, however…well, I find myself pondering what the hell I thought was so funny about the guy. (Now I know why Los Parentes Yesteryear looked at me so strangely…though that may not have entirely been all Martin’s doing.) His 1976 appearance on Carson features much of his “wild-and-crazy-guy” shtick, and to be honest, I enjoyed the other guests on that particular telecast more—Jimmy Stewart, plugging The Shootist (1976) but also reminiscing about It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and Karen Black…who seemed to be on some sort of narcotic that night but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it was. A May 21, 1982 program brings Steve back along with Sylvester Stallone—both stars plug their current movies (Sly’s Rocky III; Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid) but again, because I’m just weird this way, I got more of a kick out of the “Stump the Band” segment…because one of the songs suggested to stymie Tommy Newsome and the NBC Orchestra (Doc Severinsen, amusingly enough, was out of town—performing a concert in my home town of Charleston, WV) was Sunday Driving, a novelty tune recorded by Jerry Lewis. The last show on the Martin DVD is the most fun: a December 19, 1991 outing that allows Martin to plug Father of the Bride (1991) and it also features one of my favorite funny ladies, Cathy Ladman, along with singer Leon Redbone (performing Christmas Island).

Nice threads, Eddie.

The third disc in this collection highlights three 1982 appearances from Eddie Murphy, who at that time was wowing SNL viewers weekly with his shtick—the July 30th telecast mentions that Murphy is working on his first feature film (the one that put him on the map), 48 HRS. I’m quite fond of many of Eddie’s movies—48 HRS., Beverly Hills Cop (1984), The Golden Child (1986—don’t think I can’t hear you judging me out there)—and enjoyed many of his SNL characters (prison poet Tyrone Green never failed to make me fall to the floor), but his stand-up always left me stone-faced, particularly the homophobic Honeymooners bit he did in his 1983 HBO TV special Delirious. (Try explaining it to both of your parents, who decided to watch with me.) A February 10, 1982 appearance has him starting his routine by encouraging the audience to shout out the N-word…and I don’t mean “Norbit.” (Edgy!) If you’re a Murphy devotee, you’ll enjoy seeing the twenty-year-old trading yuks with Johnny on the cusp of Murphy’s phenomenal stardom; his January 1, 1982 debut on the Tonight Show is presented in this collection in its entirety.

Robin Williams, circa 1984.

If you need a solid reason to pick up this collection, the second disc—featuring three shows with the manic Robin Williams as guest—more than justifies the purchase. Just as I prefer Eddie Murphy in movies, I thought Williams was at his best when he was simply turned loose on The Tonight Show, where his machine-gun stream-of-consciousness would always reduce the host to helpless laughter. (It’s no surprise that Robin was the guest on the penultimate Carson Tonight Show telecast, along with Bette Midler.) Williams’ April 3, 1984 appearance allows him to plug what I think is his finest film comedy, Moscow on the Hudson (1984—this and the 1983 movie he did with Walter Matthau, The Survivors, are my favorites) and his co-guest Phyllis Newman reminds the audience multiple times that her husband is lyricist-playwright Adolph Green (something that both Robin and Johnny start to mock after a fashion). A January 10, 1991 show (with Steve Lawrence) coincides with Robin’s turn in Awakenings (1990); Williams relates the incident where he accidentally hit co-star Robert DeNiro in the nose while filming and it’s hysterical.

Comedy greatness.

The final telecast on this disc is a September 19, 1991 free-for-all that allows Williams (plugging 1991’s The Fisher King) to riff alongside his one-time Mork and Mindy co-star (and acknowledged influence) Jonathan Winters. Honest to my grandma, I laughed so hard during this show I was literally in tears. Winters enters the stage wearing a Union uniform (his first words are “We lost the fort—the Indians were sober…we were drunk this time.“) and when Park Overall (of Empty Nest) comes out and asks Johnny “Why is he wearing a Yankee uniform?” Jonathan comes back with “Cause I’m a Yankee—we’re gonna go through Chickamauga twice!” It is classic comedy, and while I’m not a religious or spiritual individual, I like to think that if there is a better world after this one these two mad geniuses are cutting up in the afterlife to thunderous appreciative laughter and applause. Thanks again to Michael for the screener—if you’re a fan of Johnny Carson, you’re going to want this one for the DVD shelf.

Addendum: Both the Mayor of Toobworld (Dr. Tobias O'Brien) and member of the TDOY faithful Mark Murphy have identified the actor with Doris Roberts in the Glade commercial as character veteran J.J. Barry. The blog is grateful for their tireless efforts in small screen research.

Please permit us to pause…

2017-06-26T07:00:00.000-04:00

I had originally planned a review of an upcoming Time Life DVD release in their The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson series for this space today…but unfortunately, I ran out of weekend before I watched the last disc in the 3-DVD set. I’ll have it up on the blog Wednesday, so don’t go nipping out to the kitchen, putting the kettle on...buttering scones...or getting crumbs and bits of food out of those round brown straw mats that the teapot goes on. Once again: normal blogging will resume tomorrow. (The screen grab above is from a May 21, 1982 telecast that also featured “More to Comes” with Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, and Mae West.)

Crime Does Not Pay #7: “Foolproof” (03/07/36)

2017-06-23T07:00:00.000-04:00

Well, after all the hassles with my health and the health of my computer, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear returns with our critically-acclaimed dissections of the two-reel shorts in MGM’s long-running Crime Does Not Pay series. (Spoiler: they are not critically-acclaimed.) This week’s entry, Foolproof (1936), comes to us via the team of Marty Brooks (story) and Richard Goldstone (screenwriter); both men collaborated on previous entries in the CDNP series (Alibi Racket, A Thrill for Thelma) but Goldstone had the more prolific show bidness career in that he made his way through the ranks of MGM’s shorts department as a producer (he’s credited with several Our Gang one-reelers) before graduating to feature films like The Yellow Cab Man (1950) and The Tall Target (1951). Dick later went to work for 20th Century-Fox, and in the 1960s was a producer on programs like Adventures in Paradise and Peyton Place.

Oh, and director Edward Cahn gets a separate screen credit. That should count for something.

Our MGM Reporter (William Tannen)—the man known cryptically as…Jim—is also back with us; they decided to stick him behind a microphone so he would look more reporter-ish. (He needs it, as you’ll learn in a few.)

JIM: A few months ago, I was seated in the office of Frederick Halliday—who is Captain of Detectives in a large middle Western city…

Even the names of the burgs have been changed to protect the innocent. The (always reliable) IMDb doesn’t technically identify the actor who portrays Cap’n Halliday, but since Alonzo Price is listed among the players I’m gambling it’s him because a) his name is also listed prominently among the cast in the entry for Foolproof in Leonard Maltin’s Selected Short Subjects, and 2) the IMDb does list his place of birth as Boston, MA (me sainted mother’s birthplace!) …and Alonzo has an accent as thick as clam chow-dah.

JIM: Captain Halliday, I’ve been sent to you to obtain a case history of crimes from your files for presentation to the motion picture public…

HALLIDAY: I think I can do better than that, Jim…the coroner’s jury is just doing an investigation of a very interesting case down the hall…maybe we can sit in on the proceedings…

“But…I’m not properly dressed!”

JIM: Fine—what case is it?

HALLIDAY: The Anderson case!

JIM: Say—that sounds like a mystery thriller…

Or something Anderson drank. Halliday and his guest are lucky to find a couple of seats up front as the inquiry gets underway. The actor playing the part of the judge at the inquest is easily identified…

…it’s Stanley Andrews, the character veteran (Meet John Doe, The Ox-Bow Incident) best remembered as “The Old Ranger” on the long-running TV western Death Valley Days. Andrews’ judge is questioning one of the major witnesses in “the Anderson case”—another TV favorite…

…George Cleveland, who played George “Gramps” Miller in the early seasons of Lassie before his passing in July of 1957. Cleveland also had plum roles in such TDOY faves as It’s in the Bag! (1945—“Compliments of the management!”) and The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (1947), and he turns up in the Crime Does Not Pay series often, notably in 1941’s Sucker List…which I covered previously on the blog. Here’s the thing: at the time I wrote about this short in December of 2010, Cleveland’s credit at the IMDb hilariously read: “Old Man Not Beaten Up.” I swear I’m not making this up—except if you look at the entry now, the “Not Beaten Up” portion has been removed. I don’t know if I had anything to do with this or not…if on the off-chance I do have that much influence on the Internets, I offer my sincerest mea culpa because I thought it was funny as hell.

Back to the particulars of “the Anderson case.” Cleveland, as Mr. Hanson, testifies he was mowing his front lawn when a moppet named Frances came running up to report that her mother Rita (Donrue Leighton) had been hurt. Hanson finds Mrs. A bound and gagged in the bedroom, and after untying her he runs to another room to discover her husband Frank is really most sincerely dead. (And someone’s responsible!)

The coroner identified the presence of “anesthetic in the victim’s lungs” as a contributory cause of his demise… “though not in sufficient quantity to kill him.” “Apparently the drug was administered to stupefy him…after which, the murderer strangled him,” he remarks. Further study showed that traces of that anesthetic were present on the gag in Rita’s mouth, which apparently put her out for about six hours (the marks on her wrists and ankles bear this out as well). Detective Whalen testifies further:

WHELAN: A routine checkup revealed no fingerprints—nor any other clues…Mr. Anderson’s pockets had been emptied…his watch and wallet were both missing…so were Mrs. Anderson’s jewels…all windows and doors were in perfect order, except the front door—where apparently the burglar made his entry by filing through a chain lock…

The Widder Anderson then testifies as to her version of events—she and husband Frank returned home from an evening soiree and as she prepared for bed in front of her dressing table, she was attacked by the assailant from behind and (presumably) chloroformed with the anesthetic (she doesn’t remember anything that happened afterward until Hanson came to her rescue). That screen grab above reminds me of the lyric in Tom T. Hall’s Ballad of Forty Dollars: “You know, some women do look good in black.”

The dowager who threw the affair that the Andersons attended, Mrs. Layton, is identified at the IMDb as an actress named Lelah Tyler—but you can’t tell me that’s not Esther Howard (Leonard Maltin thinks so, too). (The comments section awaits dissenters.) Anyway, Layton’s testimony reveals that there was a small disagreement during her party between Frank Anderson and a sebaceous individual named Terry Spencer (Stephen Chase), who starts to get a little handsy where Mrs. Anderson is concerned.

SPENCER: Come on, Rita…how’s about a little kiss?

RITA: No, no, Terry…please…Terry, please stop…

FRANK (approaching the couple): What’s the idea, Spencer? That’s my wife…

SPENCER: Yeah…I’ve often wondered about that…

(He turns his back to Anderson)

FRANK (spinning him around): Just what do you mean?

SPENCER: I’d bet you’d like to know…or maybe you wouldn’t…

The donnybrook is just about to commence when a party guest (Niles Welch) who’s been watching the argument starts to step in and settle things…before being stopped by Rita. He’s later identified as “John Harwood,” though I should strenuously point out he is not the same guy who’s CNBC’s editor-at-large. Mrs. Layton, who describes Mr. H as “a friend of Rita’s,” assumes that’s to whom Spencer was referring when he made that cryptic “maybe you wouldn’t” statement. Judge Ranger presses her a little more, and gets her to reveal that “John thought a lot of Rita…but so did Terry Spencer!”

What amuses me about the above screen grab is that Halliday is furiously taking notes while Jim—who claims to be a “reporter”—does nothing of the sort. The first name in Halliday’s notebook, by the way, is “Spencer Walden”—the third suspect in la affaire Anderson due to his uncomfortable encounter with the victim earlier at the party:

WALDEN: Frank…I…I just haven’t got the cash to meet your note…can’t you give me a little time?

FRANK: Why, I’ve given you enough time already…

WALDEN: But you don’t understand…I’ll be wiped out!

FRANK (finishing his drink and getting to his feet): Sorry, Walden…I didn’t come here to talk business…

He seems nice. As you can see by the headline, the inquest turns out to be a bust…but that doesn’t mean that Cap’n Halliday can call it a day. (Particularly since he now appears to be doing Jim’s reporter job for him.) He questions all three suspects…

…and learns that “getting that note extended” was of vital importance to Mr. Walden—providing plenty of motive for Stew to croak Frank. Walden claims he was home in bed:

Jim will have to leave the room as soon as Halliday breaks out the oranges and pillowcase.

WALDEN: …I came home early that evening…

HALLIDAY: Can you prove that?

WALDEN (after a pause): Certainly I can…if I’d have come home later than midnight the clerk would have seen me…I would have had to waken him to get in…

Next up is non-CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood, who works for some sort of chemical outfit as head of the sales division. Halliday has difficulty pronouncing John’s last name due to his Boston accent; it sounds as if he’s saying “Howard” throughout most of this short.

HALLIDAY: Harwood…do you know of any reason Frank Anderson should have been jealous of you?

HARWOOD: I most certainly do not…

“Well, unless you want to include the fact that I was shtupping his wife.” Johnny’s got an alibi, too—he was staying at a hotel the night of Anderson’s murder, and the next morning he went over to his company’s warehouse to supervise a shipment. When the greasy Terry Spencer is brought in for questioning, he, too, has a story—he was in a poker game at a roadhouse outside of town, one that broke up at 3:30am.

JIM: They certainly all have airtight alibis, haven’t they?

HALLIDAY: Well, I didn’t expect them to come unprepared…

Yes, I chuckled at that.

JIM: What are you going to do next?

HALLIDAY: Let’s see…I think we’ll assign a man to check on Walden…I want to find out exactly what shape his business affairs are in…as for Terry Spencer…I want to know just who he plays poker with every Sunday night…

As for “Howard,” Halliday assigns a couple of plainclothesmen, Finney and Jorgensen, to pose as salesman so that they can infiltrate Harwood’s “sales force.” Two more detectives (one a female who watches Spencer with her makeup mirror) shadow Spencer in a nightclub, where’s he witnessed paying off a couple of goombahs from a large wad o’money…

As for Walden, still another dick gets the information on Walden’s business from a mousey bookkeeper who’s told not to mention anything to the boss. Walden becomes the chief suspect after Cap’n Halliday has had a look at his records:

HALLIDAY: In going over his books, we find that his business is going to the wall…a thirty-day extension on the Anderson note might have saved him…a delay, for example—caused by Anderson’s death and the settlement of his estate…and that isn’t all…Walters reports that he’s been putting his affairs in order…it looks as if he’s going to blow town…

I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou. The only thing Walden is going to blow is his brains out, a delicate little matter that Halliday stumbles upon when he and Jim (I guess he’s going out on police calls now) pay Walden a little visit at his modest digs. While it looks at first glance as if Stewie committed suicide, Halliday soon rules that out since the bullet hole was in his forehead and the Captain believes it’s a little awkward shooting yourself that way (most suicide attempts occur at the temple, he tells Jim). “Guess that’s why he was putting his affairs in order,” notes Jim inappropriately. (The Walden family is gonna love him at the funeral.) Halliday also observes that Walden was killed at nearly the same time on the same day as the unfortunate Frank Anderson—“I don’t think that’s a coincidence at all.”

So, the finger of suspicion is redirected back to Spencer and Harwood. Halliday has a funny line when talking to the detective who’s been birddogging Spencer; the dick tells him that everyone in the suspect’s poker game will swear he was there the entire time and the Captain cracks: “That don’t mean much—those guys will swear to anything.” (Terry is quite friendly with “the mob” …though that could also describe the Chamber of Commerce, to be honest.) But “Jorgy,” in conversing with Halliday, mentions that Harwood’s first stop on his sales route is in a town with an airport…and that gives Freddie an idea…

Halliday and Jim pay the Widder Anderson a visit, where the Cap’n tells Rita that they’re closing in on the man responsible for killing her husband. “I can assure you an arrest within 24 hours,” he informs her. Rita is concerned that the assailant will get away, but the cocky Halliday tells her not to fret. “He’s completely surrounded.”

He had a reason for telling her this—he now knows it’s Harwood, and he further knows that Rita was in on the caper from the beginning when she foolishly calls John to tell him to be careful and your friendly neighborhood police department has tapped her phone.

Harwood is picked up in the same fashion he utilized when he murdered Anderson and Walden. He snuck out of his hotel room and hid in the back of one of the company’s truck, covering himself with a tarp that he instructed the warehouse guys to place over the shipment beforehand. When the truck made its first stop, he exited the back of the vehicle and took a plane from the airport to Marion, where both Anderson and Walden lived. In the case of Frank, he instructed Rita that he would knock her out with the anesthetic so it would look like a home invasion—though when she’s confronted by the police she swears she had no idea John was going to send her hubby to The Happy Hunting Ground. So why did he kill Walden? “Like all criminals, you couldn’t stop at your first crime,” sneers Halliday. Just like Lays’ Potato Chips—you can’t eat just one. (Rita and John killed her husband for the insurance—the oldest game in the Big Book O’Crime.)

JIM: Rita Anderson was sentenced to twenty years in the Women’s State Penitentiary…

Presumably under the supervision of the happy-go-lucky female warden in A Thrill for Thelma.

JIM: …John Harwood is in the death house now…

When he’s not hosting Speakeasy with John Harwood on CNBC Digital.

JIM: …waiting for the law to exact the final penalty for his foolproof crime…for foolproof it was, only in the sense that it proved an ingenious criminal…a fool…

Sorry I cut this one so short this week…but my ass was starting to get numb. Next time, Crime Does Not Pay goes to the Academy Awards with the first of two Oscar-winning entries in the series, The Public Pays (1936). G’bye now!

Lubitsch of Arabia

2017-06-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

Janaia (Pola Negri) is a breathtakingly beautiful dancer who travels with other performers in a caravan…and who’s attracted the attention of a Bagdad slave trader, Achmed (Paul Biensfeldt). Achmed has been commissioned by Zuleika (Jenny Hasselqvist), the current favorite in a harem maintained by “The Mighty Sheikh” (Paul Wegener), to procure women for her hubby…because she no longer wants to be the favorite, preferring instead the romantic attentions of Nour-Ed Din (Harry Liedtke), humble (and handsome) clothes merchant. His Sheikhness, learning of Zuleika’s perfidy, condemns her to death…but she is spared when the Sheikh’s son, Sheikh, Jr. (Carl Clewing), pleads for her life. Janaia is not so fortunate—the cruel despot bumps off both her and Sheikh, Jr. (they were having a little thing on the side) but before he can add Zuleika and Nour-Ed Din to the body count he is dispatched to the Great Beyond by the hunchbacked Abdullah (Ernst Lubitsch), who’s avenging the murder of Janaia.

All this palace intrigue has been condensed into a fifty-minute cut-down of Sumurun, a 1920 melodrama directed by Ernst Lubitsch before he emigrated to the U.S. and exhibited “the Lubitsch touch.” (“Sumurun” is the name of the Zuleika character in the original German movie.) The movie would be released in America the following year and retitled One Arabian Night; the (always reliable) IMDb lists the movie’s running time as a longer eighty-five minutes (another DVD version clocks it at 105). The 50-minute version is from an Alpha Video release that came out in mid-May.

The shorter running time on the Alpha DVD really hurts the viewing experience, sad to report. It makes One Arabian Night confusing and often difficult to comprehend, which is a shame because I had heard a good many positive things about the picture and I was looking forward to sitting down with it. It’s not entirely unrewarding; it’s interesting early Lubitsch (his later themes of infidelity and naughtiness are on full display in this tale based on the pantomime by Friedrich Freksa), and it also showcases the appeal of Pola Negri, who would go on to a prolific career as a silent screen siren. It was with the success of Night in the U.S. that Mary Pickford was encouraged to invite the director and his star to make movies in Tinsel Town. Lubitsch would continue to direct classics like Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Ninotchka (1939) until his death in 1947 (his valedictory feature, 1948’s That Lady in Ermine, was assigned to Otto Preminger after Ernst died during production) but Negri, despite box-office hits like Forbidden Paradise (1924—directed by Lubitsch) and Hotel Imperial (1927—the only other Pola film I’ve seen), went back to Europe to work toward the silent era (her thick Polish accent would have been a problem)—only resurfacing in two later American films, Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and The Moon-Spinners (1964, her final movie).

Sadly, Lubitsch abandoned a promising career in front of the camera with this film (he made cameo appearances in a few of his talkies and in the Ed Sullivan film Mr. Broadway [1933]; he’s also in the trailer for The Shop Around the Corner)—he’s quite good as the sympathetic hunchback who pines for Negri’s character from afar, then later gets an opportunity to be a hero at the end. I’ve mentioned on the blog before that while I have a tremendous admiration for Ernst as a director his movies just aren’t my particular cup of Orange Pekoe (it’s not him—it’s me) save for To Be or Not to Be (1942), which I will watch at the drop of a hat. (In Milt Josefsberg’s The Jack Benny Show, he includes an anecdote from his famous boss in which Lubitsch “acted out” how he wanted Benny to play Josef Tura in To Be…so the director never got performing completely out of his system.) Lubitsch fans will want to check this one out if they haven’t already; many thanks to my friend Brian Kray at Alpha Video for providing me with the screener for this review.

“Is it bigger than a breadbox?”

2017-06-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

The night that I wrestled with the meshuggeneh desktop computer—the one that eventually had to be hauled into the repair shop so that the hard drive could be replaced—I was stuck for something to do while the diagnostic tests were running, so I grabbed the bedroom TV remote and started in with the channel surfing. Imagine my delight when I learned that DISH has added a new channel to its lineup: BUZZR (channel 245), the Fremantle Media-owned subchannel that offers up classic game shows to those couch potatoes jonesing for a fix of Match Game or Family Feud. Wikipedia says that DISH added BUZZR in May of this year but I’m still a little skeptical about that only because I go “round the horn” on a frequent basis if I can’t sleep at night, looking to see if I can find anything that won’t require a lengthy time investment. It seems to me I would have come across BUZZR sooner, but…what the hey.

I’m not a big game show fan as a rule. I watched a lot of them as a kid, and then eventually grew to understand that most of them are vacuous, insipid, and a clear threat to my logging as many classic movies under my belt before I’m summoned to that Great Movie Palace in the Sky. Still, I have a soft spot for the panel shows of the classic TV era like What’s My Line?, I’ve Got a Secret, and To Tell the Truth…because there are celebrities on these vintage telecasts that are idolized by your humble narrator like Fred Allen (a panelist on Line from 1954 until his death in 1956) and Henry Morgan (Secret). The Game Show Network used to run these repeats in the 1990s until Sony’s contract ran out…but by that time, GSN was starting to shift toward their own homegrown programming anyway. (This resulted in people of my vintage reclining in our porch rocking chairs and grumbling about how great things used to be “back in the day.” “Remember when AMC and TVLand used to be good? Those were the days…”)

I can’t quite put my finger on it…but something tells me that unless you subscribe to one of DISH’s major packages (America’s Top 200, America’s Top 250, etc.) BUZZR isn’t going to be around Rancho Yesteryear for long. (We have the Flex package, see, which—thanks to member of the TDOY faithful Barry—allows us to get channels we’ll actually watch and insulates the ‘rents from any potential danger resulting from my succumbing to The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ withdrawal and running after them with a butcher knife. Okay, I am kidding about that. Nobody runs in my family unless we’re chased.) So I am currently DVRing every episode of Truth, Secret, and Line that I can lay my hands on; it will make marvelous filler for when I’m dubbing off movies to discs. That’s three down and seven to go…Arlene?

From beautiful downtown Burbank…

2017-06-19T07:00:00.000-04:00

When Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In premiered as a one-shot NBC-TV special on September 9, 1967, several of the show’s best remembered cast members were already on board: Judy Carne, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley, and Ruth Buzzi, to be precise. Larry Hovis also appeared in the special, taking a sabbatical from his regular gig as Sgt. Andrew Carter on Hogan’s Heroes (he would return to Laugh-In later in the show’s run, along with his Heroes castmate Richard Dawson), as did Barbara Feldon—who might have become a Laugh-In regular if her Get Smart duties hadn’t limited her participation to a handful of the early telecasts. What you may not know (then again, if you’ve read my Facebook compadre Hal Erickson’s book you might) is that Ken Berry was also in the pilot. Just imagine. If they had kept Berry in the cast, we might have been spared Mayberry R.F.D. (Just can’t catch a break.)

If you’re curious as to my sudden interest in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, it’s because I received an e-mail last month from my good friend Michael Krause at Foundry Communications that the iconic comedy hour—which aired over NBC from January 22, 1968 to March 12, 1973, and was television’s #1 show in the 1968-69 and 1969-70 seasons—has made its home video debut in a ginormous DVD collection available from Time Life and Proven Entertainment. All 140 telecasts are present (including the final season, which until they recently resurfaced on the Decades channel had long been MIA) and accounted for in this 38-disc set, along with scads of bodacious extras and a 32-page collectible booklet—Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In: The Complete Series can be ordered right now at www.timelife.com/laughin: the tariff is $249.95 (for the budget-minded, there's a 40-episode "Best of" set priced at $99.95). (Fans of the show have my permission to discard their “Best of” Rhino DVDs they may own—eBay operators are standing by.)

The cast of Laugh-In (1968-69)

Like most couch potatoes of my generation, I dropped in on the show’s legendary “cocktail party” from time to time…though admittedly, it was in the show’s declining years, when most of its famous cast members had moved on to bigger and better things and Laugh-In was having to rely on the high-wattage comedy contributions of Moosie Drier. I’m more familiar with the whittled down half-hour version of the program which aired for a time on Nick at Nite (the series’ original hour-long syndication package consisted of 70 hours culled from the first three seasons, along with the pilot and a few Season 4 installments) but to be honest—I never could figure out what all the fuss was about. I think Laugh-In’s reputation for hip irreverence is somewhat inflated; creator-producer George Schlatter describes it as “a free fall of television without a net. It was dangerous. It was controversial. It was totally unpredictable and always funny.” Well, not really. It was little more than sped-up vaudeville hokum—a mixture of the irreverence of Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’ and the technological wackiness of television comedy innovator Ernie Kovacs. (Schlatter was and still is married to Jolene Brand, a cast member of Kovacs’ show.)

Creator George Schlatter (holding sign) and the Laugh-In writers

Laugh-In was critically praised for its “representation of the counterculture” …but in this superb article by Kliph Nesteroff (who recycles some of this material in his indispensable The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy), the argument is convincingly made that the show was nothing more than The Establishment’s idea of The Counterculture (if you read Kliph’s piece, you’ll learn that Laugh-In head writer Paul Keyes played a large role in making Richard Milhous Nixon palatable to TV audiences). “Laugh-In is commonly considered a reflection of the late sixties youth sensibility, but closer examination reveals a much different picture,” Kliph writes. “It was, in essence, an establishment show, profiting from the anti-establishment sentiment running through America. Moderated by the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Laugh-In was old in style, but draped in the popular fashion of the day. It effectively garnered a genuine hippie aesthetic, but any actual connection to the counterculture was mostly smoke and mirrors. The bulk of Laugh-In consisted of eye-catching vaudeville bits that mostly ignored the war, the riots and the protest. It embraced the look and sound of the hippies and had no problem making references to getting high, but generally glossed over political issues.”

"Sock it...to me?"

This assessment goes a long way in explaining why I experienced disappointment with Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In as I got older: I was looking for something that was never there in the first place. So I need to temper my criticism from the previous paragraphs with this caveat: if you’re looking for the biting political satire of such 60s shows as That Was the Week That Was or The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, you’re not going to find it on Laugh-In; its humor was more of the toothless Jay Leno-Tonight Show variety. (In fact, if you read Nesteroff’s article in its entirety you’ll learn that hosts Rowan and Martin eventually bought out producer Schlatter’s interest in the program because the two stars “were very heavily into Nixon. They actually had a quota of Daniel Ellsberg jokes, a quota of anti-New York Times jokes, and a weekly segment on the [left-wing] distortion of the news.”) Yet if you look at the series through the prism as one of those classic television variety hours that they sadly don’t make any more, Laugh-In can be pretty amusing from time to time. (Television to me has become a vast repository of “reality shows” …which you can actually lay the blame for at Schlatter’s feet for creating the successful Real People in 1979.)

Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley and Goldie Hawn in a Season 3 sketch

The “big names” on the show had already vamoosed during the period I watched Laugh-In although Lily Tomlin was still on the show; she joined in the show’s 1969-70 season, and became phenomenally popular with her characterizations of Ernestine (“Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”), Edith Ann (“And that’s the truth…thbthh!!!”), and Mrs. Earbore, the “Tasteful Lady.” Tomlin probably enjoyed the biggest post-Laugh-In career—she garnered an Oscar nomination for her performance in the 1975 film Nashville, which also featured Laugh-In alum Henry Gibson—save for Goldie Hawn, who took home her Academy Award trophy (for Best Supporting Actress in 1968’s Cactus Flower) while she was still performing on the show. (I’ve watched a few of the early telecasts featuring Goldie, and was amused that her persona of the giggly blonde ditz took a show or two to develop—in her early appearances she plays it perfectly straight. Also hooty: Hawn was on the show at the same time her Private Benjamin co-star Eileen Brennan was also a regular.) Laugh-In featured some truly funny comic actresses: Judy Carne (the “Sock it to me” girl who would be doused with water or dropped through a trap door whenever she uttered the show’s phrase), Ruth Buzzi (“I just want to swing!”), and Jo Anne Worley (“Bo-ring!”), who only has to start in with that infectiously goofy laugh to make me chuckle (“Is that a chicken joke?”).

Buzzi and Arte Johnson as Gladys & Tyrone

On the distaff side, there was Henry Gibson (the poetry guy with the flower), Gary Owens (the old-style announcer with his ever-present hand cupped to his ear), Alan Sues (sidesplitting as “Uncle Al, the kiddie’s pal”), and Larry Hovis (I loved his David Brinkley-like newscaster). I didn’t find Arte Johnson as hilarious as some of my contemporaries (his German soldier shtick—“Verrry interesting”—got old quickly) though I did like his interactions with Buzzi’s Gladys Ormphby (“Care for a walnetto?”). (Actually, the funniest thing about the old man was that his official name was “Tyrone F. Horneigh” …though they had to pronounce the last name as “Hor-NIGH” for obvious reasons.) And I still have a soft spot for Dave Madden, who made me titter as the dour deadpan guy who threw confetti as a reaction to punchlines…because his “Reuben Kincaid” on The Partridge Family is one of my role models.

Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In has been released to DVD to coincide with the commemoration of the show’s 50th anniversary, and while I couldn’t score a screener of the set I did receive a wonderful consolation prize that I’ll discuss in a bit more detail in a future post. What I could sample was a delightful surprise in that the show still manages to be entertaining despite the inevitable dating of the material, and I would not hesitate to recommend a purchase for true Laugh-In diehards—it’s timeless TV. (You bet your sweet bippy!)

Well—that was easy…

2017-06-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to commenter Rick Robinson and a few other Facebook denizens for their moral support during The Great Computer Crisis of 2017. I took it into Reboot Computer Friday morning—shortly after they opened—and they had the hard drive replaced and ready to rock ‘n’ roll three hours later. (Same day service, baby!) If you live in the Classic City (Athens) or in the surrounding area, I’d highly recommend them—we’re probably going to take one of our troublesome laptops in later when we have a few extra shekels. Thrilling Days of Yesteryear will resume as normal Monday, so make an appointment, hoo-kay?