CineFile Video

Here we have two recent films that both deal in depravity: “The Salton Sea” (2002) has Val Kilmer tumbling headlong into the world of meth addiction, and “Feed” (2005) has a “Silence of the Lambs”-like serial “feeder” force-feeding a fat woman chained to a bed while he feverishly masturbates.

The “Salton Sea” cover came first, but I honestly can’t figure out how the image is supposed to accurately reflect what the movie is about. “Feed” came way later, and therefore it’s possible that whoever designed the cover was very aware of “The Salton Sea” — but what’s missing from the “Feed” cover (from the American DVD release, at least) is that the tattooed guy’s left arm that reaches here out-of-frame is supposed to be holding a sandwich (the British DVD cover of the film shows it more clearly.) This is a more direct and effective way of visually presenting the theme of the film — but that’s not how Danger After Dark, the American home video distributor of the film, chose to present it. Looking at these two covers side by side, it’s hard to say whether or not it’s a simple rip-off case, although in the end it doesn’t matter, since both films are probably total shit anyway.

Verdict: undecided

“The voice of grassroots wisdom.”

Andy Griffith in his first and finest role as Lonesome Rhodes, the jailhouse drunk turned popular balladeer turned political demagogue of “A Face in the Crowd.” Here, the ravenously ambitious Rhodes has leveraged his fame for his own “Face the Nation” – “The Lonesome Rhodes Cracker Barrel Show,” a “Hee-Haw” prototype staged on a general store set with patented rustics to curry favor and soak up some raw power.

While writer Walter Matthau and producer Patricia Neal watch helplessly from their barstools, Rhodes plays host to Senator Worthington Fuller – rechristened “Curley” for his audience.

“I wish you’d give me the real cotton-picking truth about how you feel on the subject of more and more and more Social Security,” says Griffith’s curdled populist.

“I’m glad you asked me that question, Lonesome,” says the Senator. “I’d say that people today are obsessed –”

“Huh?” interrupts Rhodes.

“I mean, real gone for security,” says Fuller. “They want protection, coddling, from the cradle to the grave. I say that weakens the moral fiber. Why, Daniel Boone wasn’t looking for unemployment insurance and old-age pension. All he needed was his axe and his gun, and a chance to hew a living out of the forest with his own hands.”

George W. Bush couldn’t have said it any better – and doesn’t on a regular basis, still trotting out the selfsame schtick five decades later.

Scripted by Budd Schulberg from his novella “Your Arkansas Traveler,” Lonesome Rhodes was a cross between Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Arthur Godfrey, a folksy ukelele-wielding variety host whose inner fascist slipped out when he fired singer Julius LaRosa live on-air without warning for missing the show’s compulsory dance lessons. (Will Rogers was also an alleged model.) But it’s Bush who comes quickest to mind, the affable confidence man barely able to contain what writer Mark Crispin Miller calls “the great glowering Nixon inside.”

As it so happens, I had a chance to query Schulberg, now 92, on this very topic – at a rare L.A. appearance in Beverly Hills last year. As recounted in the L.A. Weekly, I praised the film and posed the question from the floor, “Having lived this long, do you feel like you accidentally scripted the current President of the United States?”

He took a moment before answering. “I think I might have been prescient about a few other occupants of the White House as well,” he said.

Here we have two recent somber Italian dramas, both directed by people whose last names start with the letter C (Cristina Comencini and Sergio Castellitto). The DVD releases were put out by two completely different companies (Lions Gate and Wellspring). The original Italian titles are completely different, but the English translations come out to “Don’t Tell” and “Don’t Move”. The DVD covers are remarkably similar, with the male leads reaching for the female leads’ faces (an iconic type of image in the first place).

Verdict: synchronicity

Here we have two recent Chubby Checker films from the 1950s (”Twist Around The Clock” and “Don’t Knock The Twist”), both issued on DVD for the first time by Sony in a two-pack. Both use the same Photoshopped image of Checker in the same pose, only in the case of “Don’t Knock The Twist”, it’s supposed to look like he’s dancing “with” his co-star.

Verdict: shameless

Did you catch the line about Mae West? Crimeny. I saw this clip from The Stand-In, directed by Tay Garnett (Postman Always Rings Twice), while checking out some of the New Arrivals over the weekend, and was pleasantly shocked by the scathing humor of this scene, among others. It reminded me of a particularly dark review of Wee Willie Winkie written by Graham Greene:

“The owners of a child star are like leaseholders - their property diminishes in value every year. Time’s chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a matrimonial squabble? Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after “The Littlest Rebel”). In “Captain January” she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in “Wee Willie Winkie,” wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy.

Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square; hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised; watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen -respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. ‘Why are you making Mummy cry?’ - what could be purer than that? And the scene when dressed in a white nightdress she begs grandpa to take Mummy to a dance - what could be more virginal? On those lines her new picture, made by John Ford, who directed “The Informer,” is horrifyingly competent. It isn’t hard to stay to the last prattle and the last sob. The story - about an Afghan robber converted by “Wee Willie Winkie” to the British Raj - is a long way after Kipling. But we needn’t be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole Hollywood’s is the better.”

This fine piece of prose garnered Greene a libel lawsuit, which he promptly lost–supposedly complaining to a friend in private, “I’m gonna have to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple.” Now, most critical observations tend to be autobiographical in nature; I have doubts that all men want to sleep with their mothers, but I’m pretty sure Freud wanted to sleep with his mother, if you know what I mean. But the repetition of certain observations tends to lend them a kind of credibility. So, is it a coincidence that the Stand-In was released in 1937, the same year that Graham Greene wrote this infamous bit of film criticism? Regardless of whether either piece of commentary informed the other, or if this is just a case of parallel observations, they go well together. This clip from the The Stand-In plays like a kind of horrifying visual proof to Greene’s point.

There’s plenty of other good humor in The Stand-In, and not just in the ‘Day of the Locust’, rotting Hollywood dream factory mold. Leslie Howard and Joan Blondell have some good ‘owl & the pussycat’ chemistry in their screwball comedy scenes, including a kiss so memorable I was tempted to excerpt that instead –but I had to leave you something to look forward to (I wasn’t too worried about the above clip, which one can gigglingly gasp in horror to, again and again).

Unfortunately, while the jokes are sharply written by screenwriting duo Gene Towne & C. Graham Baker (who also penned Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once), they’re never able to work a clean story out the novel by Clarence Budington Kelland. Kelland also wrote the source material for Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and both films use the viewpoint of an innocent to explore the seamy inner-workings ofcapitalism—in this case substitute Hollywood for New York City. However, in the Stand-In, the plot mechanics collapse about halfway through, and by the end, and you can feel the writers trying to brutely wrench the film back on course to it’s patently false, pseudo-commie happy ending.

But not every movie’s a complete classic, and if you’ve already been a good little boy or girl, and seen all of your Preston Sturges and Frank Capra, this one should sate your appetite for a night.

Tired of the long lines, frantic shoppers, & rampant consumerism?! FIGHT BACK! & watch some good old television . . .

XMAS excerpt


Films from the archive that you can rent:
“PeeWee’s Playhouse Holiday Special”
“He-Man & She-Ra Christmas Special”
“The Boy Who Loved Christmas” *Sammy Davis Jr.’s LAST film
“Pacman Animated Series” *Santa Claus episode
“Richard Pryor Show” *final episode of his censored series
“Elves”
“Trolls & the Christmas Express”
“Captain Kangaroo’s Christmas Special”
“Santa Claus Meets the Easter Bunny”
“Fat Albert & the Gang Christmas Special”

Chanukah excerpt

More from the archive:
“Chanukah at Bubbe’s”
“PeeWee’s Playhouse Holiday Special” *Chanukah portion
“South Park” ep.812

This clip from Elves (1990) probably defines the film better than any other, and single-handedly earned it a place in our “Holy F*cking Sh*t” section. I particularly love the exasperated tone he strikes as he explains the nazi-elf connection (”What are they teaching in public schools today?!”). And, yes, that is Dan Haggerty (aka Grizzly Adams) as the ex-police dectective turned department store Santa who must protect the town virgins from the evil Nazi elves.  And I thought the only totalitarian elves were the ones at the end of Polar Express. Happy Holidays!