Starting tomorrow night, the NY Museum Of Modern Art will be trotting out its genuine film prints of silent comedy rarities, acquired in the 1970s and 1980s by former curator Eileen Bowser, for its series Lame Brains And Lunatics: Cruel And Unusual Comedy, Part 4.
Associate Curator Ron Magliozzi, historian Steve Massa, author of Lame Brains and Lunatics: The Good, The Bad, And The Forgotten Of Silent Comedy and historian/accompanist Ben Model have joined forces on this latest series.
There will be lots of films from the usual silent comedy suspects - Hal Roach, Sennett, L-Ko, Fox, Vitagraph and Educational.
Headliners run the gamut from Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle to satirist/actor Will Rogers to Ziegfeld Follies star Bert Williams to the inimitable Edward Everett Horton to mucho malevolent Henry Lehrman L-Ko Comedies scoundrel-star Billie Ritchie (the man who put the "low" in "lowbrow") to such lesser-known but screwy comedians as Hank Mann, Larry Semon and Marcel "Tweedy" Perez.
MoMA presents Cruel & Unusual Comedy
Program 1: Love Sick: Mating Rituals
Program 2: Movie Mania: Fun In The Dark
Program 3: Food Fights: Chaos รก La Carte
Program 4: Police Brutality: Wrong Arm Of The Law
Program 5: Leisure Time: Recreational Hazards
For showtimes and further info, check out the Museum Of Modern Art website.
Available now: Steve Rydzewski's highly entertaining book on the dashing, the suave, the debonair, the leading man of leading men. . . Ben Turpin!
Turpin was one of the funniest guys in the history of movies and still makes us laugh more than 100 years after his 1909 screen debut as the cross-eyed cad in Mr. Flip.
Also out now: the awaited tome by film historian and Slapsticon curator/programmer Richard M. Roberts on the Hal Roach studio, Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter, his first in a series of books. It's very welcome - Roberts has penned excellent comedy film history articles for Classic Images and other publications for many years.
More fantastic film history books will be out later this year. Available for pre-order and officially out in stores on December 16, Marilyn Monroe: Her Films, Her Life by Australian author Michelle Vogel, known for, among many biographies, her book on another great actress-singer-comedienne, Lupe Velez. Since the iconic Marilyn was, in this blogger's opinion, also among the greatest of silver screen comediennes and an under-rated actress, this will finally give her onscreen legacy the respect it deserves.
Officially out in just a few days, on September 16: The Charley Chase Talkies by James L. Neibaur.
Both in front of and behind the cameras, Mr. Chase (A.K.A. Charles Parrott), remains one of the all-time comedy kings. Since Chase's death at 46 in 1940 literally denied the producer/director/writer/comedian the credit he was due for decades, so this study of his starring vehicles in talkies by diehard classic comedy buff, film historian and prolific author Jim Neibaur is long overdue.
Comedian-actor-writer-director Edgar Kennedy, ubiquitous presence in classic films and unequalled Jedi Master Of The Slow Burn, is a favorite of this blog, so we're pleased to learn that Minneapolis film historian and curator Ron Hall has spearheaded The Edgar Kennedy Restoration Project.
The restoration project, A.K.A. The Slow Burn Challenge, aims to find, restore and release all 103 of Edgar's classic RKO comedy shorts in a new series called The Edgar Kennedy Show, duly noted on the Cafe Roxy and Matinee At The Bijou websites. The project also has a Facebook page.
Having made his screen debut in 1911, the same year as Nestor's popular team of Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran, Kennedy numbers among the very first American screen comedians, following Ben Turpin, Augustus "Alkali Ike" Carney and Roscoe Arbuckle.
His career with Mack Sennett's Fun Factory goes back almost as far as that of Fred Mace, Madcap Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling, the very first Keystone players.
Edgar, as does hard-working stock company actors St. John and Joe Bordeaux, seems to turn up in every single Keystone comedy in 1914. And, as Sennett veterans St. John, Hank Mann and Polly Moran did, Edgar also worked in Fox Sunshine comedies.
After busy stints with L-Ko, Fox and Universal, Kennedy found his comedy mojo in a big way, both as actor and director, at the Hal Roach Studios, starting at the end of 1927.
He worked with Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, Charley Chase and Max Davidson in a good many of the greatest comedy films ever made.
Mr. Kennedy, of course, not only made a smooth transition from silents to talkies, but would offer his inimitable slow burning presence to films involving everyone from Wheeler & Woolsey and The Marx Brothers to Dick Powell.
It would be quite the understatement to say that Edgar made frequent guest appearances as character actor, comedian and all-purpose nemesis in feature films.
Some of Edgar's best roles in features were near the end of his career, in the films of comedy writer-director-playwright-wunderkind Preston Sturges. In The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock, Edgar's the bartender who serves milquetoast Diddlebock (played by offscreen non-milquetoast Harold Lloyd) his first highball. It's a drink that would make W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Buster Keaton AND Lloyd Hamilton stop in their wobbly tracks.
Edgar has also one of the most important scenes in Sturges' masterpiece, the very under-rated Unfaithfully Yours, as a classical music maven: enters at 1:50.
The very busy Edgar, in addition to doing a gazillion guest shots in silent and sound features, also headlined the "Mr. Average Man" series, 103 comedy shorts produced by RKO Radio Pictures from 1931 to 1948. It's an expertly written and performed prototype for the TV sitcom, with Edgar inexorably and invariably driven to the "slow burn" by his loony family.
At first, the "Mr. Average Man" comedies were written and directed first by series creator Harry Sweet, then subsequently by George Stevens and a number of other directors, including Hal Yates in the 1940's.
Does Mr. Blogmeister have a personal favorite Edgar appearance, besides the "Handle Handel" bit from Unfaithfully Yours? Yes - and that would be this fantastic production number, "Let That Be A Lesson To You", from the comedian-packed WB musical Hollywood Hotel. Watch the whole clip and see Dick Powell and Ted Healy (in his last screen appearance) mimic "the slow burn" - enjoy!
Classic film buffs: take the
Slow Burn Challenge!
Friends, Romans, countrymen, animation buffs and Los Angel-inos, leave work early on Monday to see the premiere of Mark Kausler's new cartoon Some Other Cat.
Some Other Cat will be in Monday afternoon's all-animation program at the L.A. Shorts Festival in North Hollywood and shall mark the second appearance by the jaunty feline star of It's A Cat, Mark's 2004 cartoon.
Nobody is more knowledgeable about animation than Mark and Greg, nobody, not even the lifelong cartoonologist and Michael Maltese worshiper who writes this blog.
The L.A. Shorts Festival holds forth at the Laemmle Theatre, Noho 7, 5240 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood, CA 91601: phone 310-478-3836. Don't miss it!
To commemorate Labor Day, we ask what's the last word on work songs? The answer: this bit from Blazing Saddles: screenplay and story by Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
After swilling cheap booze, furtively chain-smoking cigarettes and reading The Best Of NOIR CITY Magazine cover-to-cover, one requires some apropo music to stay in that chiaroscuro mood.
And whenever watching vintage film noir, I'm invariably positively dumbstruck by the superb soundtrack music surrounding the netherworld of gumshoes, hoodlums and femme fatales.
The Burt Bacharach-Hal David song "The Desperate Hours", recorded for the hard-boiled movie of the same name by the great Mel Tormรฉ, remains my all-time favorite noir tune.
For those craving distinctively corrosive amalgamations of quarter-notes, straight out of 1947, many good choices can be found deep within the asphalt jungle of film music. Some can be found via the Soundtrack Collector website.
Others that are not quite noir but have soundtracks with similarities to those of hardboiled thrillers, for example,
Bad Day At Black Rock, I Want To Live and
The Subterraneans, can be ordered from Amazon.
To recommend just a few albums close to Philip Marlowe's heart:
Carlos Franzetti & The Prague Philharmonic: Film Noir
Chansons Et Musiques Des Films Noirs
Classic Noir Themes - Royalty Free Music Library
Crime Scene USA: Classic Film Noir Themes & Jazz Tracks
Film Noir
Film Noir To Accompany Your Sleepless Nights- Angelo Badalamenti
Jazz On Film: Film Noir
Legendary Film Noir Movies
Murder Is My Beat: Classic Film Noir Themes And Scenes
Rare Film Noir Music Of The 1940's (download)
White Heat - Film Noir
For further info, check out Robert Cumbow's article on the origins and development of film noir music, The Sound of Film Noir.
Since this blog loves David Raksin's music, UPA's cartoons and Art Heinemann's animation art - and the gifted writer/illustrator/raconteur Ludwig Bemelmans remains Madame Blogmeister's favorite author - a posting involving UPA's adaptation of Bemelmans' Madeline is as inevitable as sub-freezing temperatures in Verkhoyansk, Russia. UPA pulled off the impossible here: adapting a children's book into a successful movie that respects the source material.
Known in particular for the ubiquitous standard and film noir theme Laura, Mr. Raksin was also an eloquent and prolific author. David Raksin Remembers His Colleagues: Hollywood Composers includes interviews with the giants of film music - Aaron Copland, Hugo Friedhofer, Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Miklรณs Rรณzsa, Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin and Franz Waxman. Although a hard copy of this remains out-of-print, it's well worth scouring friendly public and academic libraries for a copy. Excerpts are available on the American Composers website.
For more the career of David Raksin in radio, movies, stage and television, check out the composer's YouTube tribute channel, as well as Film Score Monthly and The Film Music Society. The latter has re-broadcasted Raksin's essential oral history of film composing, The Subject Is Film Music, and posted the following biography on its website.
Between classic animation and music, it's tough to say what Your Blogmeister loves more - only "Sneaky Pete" Kleinow, who played blazing pedal steel guitar AND created stop-motion magic with Art Clokey, could lay a claim on both - but pianist Bill Evans invariably tops the list, whether covering other composers or playing his own great songs.
Not only does Bill sound fantastic: along with saxophone genius Rahsaan Roland Kirk, he was among the exceptionally rare master jazz musicians to tackle the deceptively complex pop songcraft of Burt Bacharach.
The 20th of the month has come along, so it is, indeed, this blog's designated Burt Bacharach Day. And who is responsible for some of the greatest, most thoughtful and musically satisfying covers of Burt Bacharach compositions? Of course, Mr. Evans himself. Take it away, Bill!
Bacharach's music invariably conceals a harmonic/melodic wallop within those 1960's velvet pop trappings. Bill knew this. So did Rahsaan. R.I.P. - and there aren't enough thanks!
2013 marks the 100th anniversary of Joop Geesink's birthday - and that means the Dutch filmmaker and illustrator joins Frank Tashlin and Bob Clampett among those animation luminaries whose centenary is being celebrated this year (and yes, this blog is definitely a tad late with this - the stop-motion animation guru was born in The Hague on April 28, 1913).
Joop Gessink and the intrepid artists of Amsterdam's Dollywood studio are right there with Emile Cohl, Charley Bowers, Ladislaw Starewicz, George Pal, Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Jiri Trnka and Art Clokey as powerhouses of pixilation - as well as the artistic and spiritual predecessors of the Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmejer.
Working actively to restore the Joop Geesink films has been Leenke Ripmeester of the EYE Film Institute in the Netherlands.
The Dollywood Studio produced puppet animation films from the 1940s into the 1980's.
Fortunately, many classic animated films by Joop Gessink and stop-motion guru George Pal have been posted to YouTube by the Dutch Vintage Animation website.
At its height, the studio employed a staff of more than 150 animators, cameramen, doll makers, set designers, woodshop gurus and visual artistes of all kinds.
It could be said that Dollywood, which produced thousands of short animated shorts and advertising films, was the successor to George Pal's studio. After her father's passing in 1984, voice-over actress and artist Louise Geesink, in collaboration with illustrator Wil Raymakers, has carried on the creative torch, reviving the studio and its characters in books for children, comics, merchandising, ideas for television series and other projects.
The Geesink Studio can be reached at info@geesinkstudio.nl.
