Author: Brian J. Noggle

Well, after I read Surely You Can’t Be Serious and watched Kentucky Fried Movie, of course I was going to watch this again (even though I just watched it in spring 2021).

I watched it without my boys this time. So I didn’t watch it with the will they get this? double-effect viewer.

And, as I said in reviewing Kentucky Fried Movie, these films do sort of represent a sea-change in what you could do with a comedy film. I mean, we’ve always had romps like Casino Royale, but the jump cut gag in there almost just for the purpose of the gag seemed to start with Airplane!. Or perhaps Airplane! had the benefit of being fresh when the home video market took off, which gave it more reliable playback and availability for cult-movie worship than you would get with a film relegated to repeated but widely scheduled showings on television or cable (whose existence predates the home video revolution, but whose widespread adoption occurred about the same time), which would lead it to being a more dominant memory than other films with similar pacing and philosophy.

It was a pleasure to rewatch it with Surely You Can’t Be Serious in mind. The book certainly explained the presence of the character played by Stephen Stucker, the wacky control tower guy, who was wacky when everyone else was playing it straight–he was an important member of the Kentucky Fried Theater troupe, and they generally just let him go nuts with improv on stage, so they sort of recreated that here.

You know, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Airplane! 2: The Sequel. It must have been on Showtime or something as I’ve seen it several times and don’t seem to have it in the Nogglestead library. Perhaps I should organize the Nogglestead video library. Certainly that would be a less daunting task than to organize the record library, the CD library, or, heaven forbid, the book library which was briefly almost organized–at least the reference and read books shelves were–about 1,200 read books ago. A project for anever day.

This film came out the year after I was born, but I was aware of it and of the presence of “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin in it (I eventually learned it) and because I had a Cracked magazine parody of it at one time, which must have somehow meant I obtained an older copy of the magazine or that they were still parodying the film in the early 1980s when I would have been buying Cracked magazine at the little drug store next to the neighborhood grocery store. A neighborhood grocery store? How old am I? In one of my local newspapers, I read about a woman retiring from the local grocer after forty-three years, and she talked about having to memorize sale prices in the paper because they didn’t have scanners. You know, I came to work in a grocery store, a small almost neighborhood grocery store, in 1990, and we were just at the tail end of the scanners–we still had price sticker guns in the produce department for some applications–which means, mein Gott, I am getting old, and I can only tell you of the way things were in the last century. Younger people will hear, but not understand.

In the film, a couple of small grifters in Joilet, Illinois, roll a man using a scam to swap his money for a bundle of paper. They think they’ve made the big score, but they only got so much because it was a mob courier they scammed. When the heat comes down and his partner is killed, Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) goes to Chicago to learn the “big con” from his former partner’s contact Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), who is hiding from the FBI. They target the mob figure responsible for Hooker’s partner’s death, and the film details how they build a story that Gondorff runs an off-track betting parlor (betting on horse races), and Hooker is his disaffected henchman. Gondorff out-cheats Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) at cards on a train ride and sends Hooker to collect his winnings at Lonnegan’s, and Hooker indicates he’s willing to turn on Gondorff if Lonnegan will give him a good role. So he, Hooker, indicates that he has a connection who can give horse race results before they become available–an elaborate setup of having a fake announcer at the betting parlor holding race results for a couple of minutes so they can tip Lonnegan which way to bet. When they ultimately clean him out, they stage a fake FBI raid on the parlor and Hooker and Gondorff are shot during the raid. After a crooked cop leads Lonnegan off, Hooker and Gondorff walk off into the Casablanca fog extolling the beginning of their beautiful friendship (although I might be confusing that with the ending of another film).

It’s a period piece, a costume drama, and it features title cards and “bumper” music between acts for a little extra throwback flavor. Additionally, it’s clever in the heist’s execution and the dialog rings true. And one gets a bit of a sense who the characters are beyond their spoken lines. My goodness, gentle reader, was this the anachronism of depth in acting? I believe so. Of course, perhaps the modern shallow acting technique merely mirrors the expressive but brief and shallow emotions modern people, bred, educated, and conditioned by small screens, feel (citation needed).

I understand there’s a sequel, but I am not sure I’ve ever seen it in the wild. The copy I have is on VHS, which I presume means it was bought by a consumer before DVDs were popular. Most of the DVDs one finds in the wild come from films from the years after, what, 1986 (along with some earlier blockbusters/classics/Disney reissues)? So a 1983 lesser facsimile of a smash from 1973 might fall into that dead zone of eras. I suppose I could do some research on it and publish a paper, but to what end? I’d never become president of a major university based on my scholarship in twee and unimportant, impractical matters.

It took me three nights to get through this film which I have seen before and think might be Kevin Smith’s best film. I popped it in on an evening where my resolve to watch a film was wavery, and I only got a couple of minutes into it before deciding I wanted to do something else. The next night, I watched another couple of minutes of it before thinking that some of the sexual talk was a little more frank than I’d like my boys to see if they passed through the room while I was watching it. But on the third try, I gutted through and watched the whole thing. And I still think it’s Kevin Smith’s best film, or perhaps it’s the one that spoke and speaks most to me. But I guess we’ll get to that by and by.

The film deals with a comic book writer/artist named Holden (obvious, and played by Ben Affleck) who has a successful indie comic Bluntman and Chronic based on the adventures of Jay and Silent Bob. He works with his lifelong friend Banky, played by Jason Lee, and he meets an attractive fellow comic book artist played by Joey Lauren Adams. He thinks it’s going well, until he discovers that she’s a lesbian. So they become good friends, which strains the relationship with Banky (who might have homoerotic feelings for his friend). The relationship between Holden and Alyssa does blossom into love, and they become a couple, but his discomfort with her sexual history leads to the end. And maybe he learns something at the end of the film.

Yeah, brother, in 1997, I was steeped in the sexual culture of the 1990s, where anything went. I mean, I came out of a university’s English program, where the young ladies were often, erm, tarts. I was friends with Mike, and his exploits were then-legendary and then-fresh. But I was not an active participant in that culture because I guess I was the original “Yes, m’lady” fedora-wearing chump. So it was pretty much a given that anyone whom I met coming out of the English-degree or coffee house millieu that I wanted to get serious about would have more of a history than I did, and I would score myself against those previous lovers whose prowess I could only imagine. So, it hit me then right in the sexual insecurity spot.

But, twenty-six years later, it can still hit one in the generalized insecurity spot.

I don’t know if kids these days would understand–they’re relationships and world view are so much altered by the instanet, and Boomers had their own intra-personal courtship rituals from which we in Shampoo Planet Generation X (isn’t it funny that I’ve read one or the both of them, and I cannot remember their plots much but they’ve named a whole generation) were rebelling, sort of, in our slacker way. So maybe this movie only can appeal to Generation X, or as we can be thought of now, those eligible or about-to-be-eligible for the senior discount. I dunno. All I know is that I’ll rewatch Mallrats sometime, and Clerks. But not likely Dogma. And I haven’t seen anything from Smith since. No, wait, I saw Jersey Girl in the theaters, and it wasn’t bad. So I might rewatch it sometime. And I will probably pick up Zack and Miri Make a Porno sometime (although I could have had it this year for fifty cents). So maybe my relationship with Kevin Smith movies is complicated.

After reading Surely You Can’t Be Serious, I went back into the Nogglestead media library looking for this film. I came up with Hamburger: The Motion Picture and hoped I had not conflated the two. But I recognized some of the descriptions of the skits from the book, so I kept on, and I found it. I probably watched it shortly after I bought it in 2007, but not since. I don’t rewatch and rewatch things frequently except for maybe Christmas movies these years.

I asked my youngest if he wanted to watch a film with me, and he demurred, and to be honest, I am kind of glad I did. For although I knew it had sexual humor to it, I had not remembered the sheer number of boobs this film contains. He would have been mortified. I would have been mortified. So, instead, I will leave it on the Nogglestead video library unhidden for them to discover. I am kidding–they are of a generation who does not watch films on physical media. And they’re remarkably uncurious–they have not even discovered that I have numerous gentlemen’s magazines. Maybe they’re of a generation uninterested in boobs at all. But I digress.

The film is a collection of skits that riff on evening news, movie promos/trailers, commercials, and even movies–the longest segment is a riff on kung fu movies called A Fist Full of Yen which I remembered a bit of (“Take him to…. Detroit!”). It features cameos by different recognized actors–including Bill Bixby and George Lazenby, more recognizable contemporaneous to the film than to today–which lends it a little bit of verisimilitude. Of course, in the last two decades of the 20th century, this material would seem a little familiar–the typical Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker fare appeared by then, as did imitator Amazon Women On The Moon, but this is the film rather broke the old mold and introduced some of the tropes.

I enjoyed re-watching it, but I’m old enough to know what they’re making fun of with their skits. Younger audiences would not be so lucky. And they might be shocked and appalled by the women’s upper carriages which were a staple of comedies of the time.

I forget where I recently read that this film introduced the song “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (perhaps it was not on a blog, but on the front of the box). So I decided to pop in this film which I bought last month the night after White Christmas.

Okay, so it’s a little romance with singing (although it includes a dance number to “Skip to My Lou”). Judy Garland plays the middle daughter in a family of five children. The oldest son is going off to college; the oldest sister is hoping that a boy going to Yale is going to propose to her; the older younger sister is played by Joan Carroll who in the next year would have a meatier role in The Bells of St. Mary’s; the youngest is five years old and definitely gives off a creepy vibe as she says her dolls have fatal diseases and then has funerals for them and buries them. They live with their folks in a nice (real nice) house in St. Louis. And the bulk of the film is Judy Garland singing about the boy next door. Their father announces that he will be running a new New York office for his law firm, throwing the family in disarray.

The movie covers almost a year in the life, with a section for each season starting with summer 2003 and going to the opening of the World’s Fair in 2004. The winter/Christmas scene seems longest and does, in fact, serve up a wistful “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as the youngest daughter laments leaving St. Louis. But, as a romance, it all wraps up with happy couples in the end staying in St. Louis.

Not an unpleasant couple of hours; probably better if you’re into the genre. You know, I lived in the St. Louis area for, erm, 20+ years on and off from 1983-2009, and World’s Fair memorabilia was still a thing at that time. The centennial was a bit of a big deal. But I was too young to get into it. I’m sure this film grafted some of that onto a new generation in 1944 and beyond. This film was a period piece when it came out; it’s doubly so now, being an artifact of its time as well as an idealization of the time it depicted. I mean, if they made period pieces now set forty years ago, they’d be set in the 1980s. Oh. But the times have not changed quite as much in the last 40 years as in the period between 1904 and 1944. But perhaps I am merely old enough to have that perspective, being that I remember not having cell phones and social media as normal in a way that kids these days would not.

The movie also introduces two new songs which have become American Songbook standards: “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song”. I associate them with Stacey Kent as they both appear on her album The Boy Next Door. Perhaps it’s the familiarity with Kent’s versions that make me prefer them over Garland’s.

Alright, alright, alright. Now, do I dig out The Bishop’s Wife or go right into the action-oriented Christmas movies? Stay tuned!

Well, after watching Holiday Inn, of course I put this videocassette into the VCR the next evening. The label on the video indicates I paid twice as much for it as Holiday Inn, but they both look like church youth group garage sales. Probably different years. They haven’t had one of those sales in years, which explains why have accumulating boxes of “donations” in my garage.

This film starts with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire Danny Kaye putting on a show near the front in France, 1944. It’s Christmas Eve, and their division is about to move up, so they want to give the guys something pleasant before they do. And they want to honor their outgoing General Waverly who is being replaced with someone straight from the Pentagon. After the show, Phil Davis (Kaye) pulls Bob Wallace (Crosby) from a falling wall, saving his life. When they meet in the hospital, Wallace expresses his gratitude and offers to do anything for Davis–and Davis responds by showing him a song, which is a duet–although Wallace claims he works alone, he now has a partner.

A decade later, they are a successful act on tour with their show when they meet two sisters, Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera-Ellen) Haynes, a sister act whose brother served with Davis and Wallace. When the girls announce that they’re heading to Vermont (and have to get out of town fast), Davis gives the girls their plane tickets and stalls the local law while the girls escape. He then connives a trip to Vermont with Wallace with the girls, and they discover that the inn where the girls are to perform is owned by General Waverly. The inn might as well be closed: with no snow in Vermont this year, no guests are staying at the inn. But Wallace and Davis bring their show to the inn for rehearsals and then call their old service mates to come see it to support the old man. And finis!

Watching them on consecutive nights leads one to compare the two, and I definitely prefer Holiday Inn. The songs are better, and this film has a couple or three song-and-dance numbers just grafted onto the narrative under the pretense that they’re parts of the show being rehearsed. One, the “Choreography” number, laments that the talents of individual singers and dancers are being lost to the large song and dance numbers that are merely synchronized movements of masses. Crosby and Clooney share a good number that fits into the plot as does “Snow”, but they’re almost exceptions.

The film has Vera-Ellen in the role of the young attractive woman. Too young for Crosby’s character, she pairs up with Kaye. How does she compare to Marjorie Reynolds?

Continue reading “Movie Report: White Christmas (1954)” →