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Brick City

Checking In

I haven't gone AWOL, exactly, but instead have been trying to gather and clarify my thoughts about recent events, which have largely outstripped my ability to write anything coherent or meaningful about them. I hope to get it together soon, In the meantime, I have done this recent work at The A.V. Club:

The Ricky Gervais Show

Pioneers of Television

Medium

Top Gear U.S.

House

Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?

Also, one of my personal heroes, who I met online a decade ago at Salon's old Table Talk chat board and whose talents I have envying ever since, has been doing his thing onstage and posting the results online for the enrichment and amusement of those of us who live out of town. This is just a taste; you can find more at YouTube if you want to, and you will:

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Beyond Scared Straight

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My recap of the season premiere of Winter Wipeout Those of you who've grown deathly sick of the indiscriminate mingling of high and low culture, and of Nazi references, will be relieved to hear that it wasn't until several hours after I'd posted my copy that I started to think of Leni Riefenstahl jokes.

Weird Sights of the Week Round-Up

Yesterday I was watching a rerun of Soul Train from 1976--thank you, Centric, featuring a live appearance by Bloodstone, the lovably mediocre, pre-MTV vocal group best remembered for the stoned-on-love falsetto classic "Natural High". They themselves were not the weird sight, though I do think that the guy who was built like a refrigerator would have been better advised to not be part of the half of the group who were not wearing shirts underneath their heavy-looking red jackets. The weird sight was the selection of clips from a movie that the fellows were said to be starring in, as well as doing the music for, and, from the looks of it, recording for posterity with the brand new portable home movie camera their manager got them for Christmas. I was curious enough about it to do some online sleuthing and was shocked to learn that the "movie" was actually completed, and exists in some format or other, under the title Train Ride to Hollywood. Here's the plot summary from IMDB:

Harry Williams, member of the rhythm & blues band, Bloodstone, is about to go onstage for a concert when he is hit on the head. The rest that follows is his dream. The four band members become conductors on a train filled with characters and (impersonated) actors from the 1930s, such as W.C. Fields, Dracula, and Scarlett O'Hara. Various songs are featured. The singing conductors are obliged to solve a mystery; Marlon Brando is murdering Nelson Eddy, Jeanette McDonald and others by suffocating them in his armpits. A wacky funeral, a fight with a gorilla, and the threat of being turned into a wax museum figure are all part of Harry's dream.

From the sound of it, this is a late addition to the films I know about that belong to a genre once dear to my heart, what I will call, for lack of a pithier phrase, unreleasable but high-spirited low-budget labors of love made between 1968 and 1979 by people who made their modest fortunes in some area of life outside movie production. I know about more such films that I could have possibly learned if I'd had a sex life in high school and college, and have seen more of them than can be good for me, but this is one more of them that's going on the wish list.

First runner-up, and possible indicator of what economic life in 21st-century America is like: a TV commercial I saw the other night, on prime time network television, in which an interracial but unthreatening-seeming couple, who I take to be meant to be happily married and financially comfortable, extol the virtues of Walmart as their place of choice for cashing their "paychecks, government checks, or tax refunds-- for only three dollars!" "We used to pay eight dollars at other places," says the husband, who looks a little like Viggo Mortensen's simpleton little brother; the wife looks as if she might be the brains in the family, but either she's trying to make her husband feel smart or she's even dopier than he is, because she assures us that "Jeff did the math, and it so happens we could save a lot"--thus giving the viewer visions of Jeff sitting up all night, crunching the numbers, triumphantly emerging from his study in the morning to boast that he's looked into it from every angle is now ready to commit to the idea that, in most cases, pissing three dollars down the toilet costs less than pissing away eight dollars. The clothes and living space have that kind of white-on-white, vaseline-on-the-lens plushness that are meant to convey whatever level of upper-middle-class comfort that whoever's watching at home can project themselves onto, imagining it to represent whatever is the next level above their own, which they shall surely reach themselves someday if we can just keep the Bush tax cuts in place a little longer. I remember an episode of Law & Order in which Chris Noth, interviewing the manager of a check cashing place, asked if he had seen someone who happened to be white. "White people don't come here," the guy said. "They have banks." As a matter of fact, there was a time in my life, back in New Orleans, when I did frequent one of those places, and when I did, my living space didn't look anything like the one in this commercial.

Late-breaking addition: the birther in the gallery at the House of Representatives who livened up the Gurneyesque reading of the U.S. Constitution by yelling "Except Obama, except Obama, help us Jesus!" when they got to the part about how only a natural-born American citizen can become President. As Steve M. has pointed out, the heckler was a crackpot in good standing who's been written up in admiring profiles and has long maintained a presence online with a series of incomprehensible websites, yet I've already seen a meme forming at right-wing comments boxes to the effect that she must have been a plant, installed by Democratic plotters so that she could pretend to be crazy and make it look as if, well, the people who agree with what she barked out are crazy, or at least rude. (Sample evidence of proof: she herself is "a woman of color", so how could she not be an Obama supporter?)



I have one small point to make about the reading itself, which has been criticized by some Democrats because the Reps went with an "abridged" version of the Constitution that omits those parts that no longer apply, such as Prohibition and the rule that determined how much a slave's life counted towards deciding how many seats a state had coming to it in the House. Republicans have countered that this is just pissy, that it only makes sense to celebrate the document in its perfected form. The problem is, unless I've misunderstood what's been the thrust of Republican and Tea Party argument these past couple of years, the whole point of this exercise was to underline the degree to which they've fetishized literal adherence to the written Constitution. They've talked about it the way that religious fundamentalists talk about the Bible--some of them have even described it as divinely inspired--while using that idea to shoot down any law or idea they disapprove of as "unconstitutional", simply because it isn't specifically cited in the Constitution itself.

By going with what might be called the perfected version, as it stands now, the Republicans actually showed that they agree with the idea that it's a work in progress, cobbled together by people who, whether in the name of political compromise or out of misguided conviction, included some indefensible things in their first draft of a plan for America. Not that they see it that way, of course. The Republican attitude seems to be, mistakes may have been made--by well-meaning white people who it would be cruel and insane to judge by contemporary moral standards--and now that they've been corrected, let us never speak of them again, but let us also agree that now that they have been corrected, things are perfect and nothing will ever be changed again. Or to put it another way: Na na na na, I have my fingers in my ears, na na na na, I can't hear you...

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My two cents on the Southland season premiere.

Shanghaied

Tonight, Turner Classic Movies is kicking off the first work week of the new year with a full night of films directed by Josef von Sternberg. The schedule includes his first Hollywood picture, the nifty Morocco (1930), in which a high-kicking, woman-kissing Marlene Dietrich gets French Legionnaire Gary Cooper all hot and bothered; it also includes some of his more obscure (and sorrier) later pictures, The King Steps Out and the Howard Hughes-produced Macao, starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. (Finding von Sternberg difficult to control and not fully committed to maximum commerciality, Hughes fired him in mid-production and replaced him with Nicolas Ray. That reminds me of the one about Mitchum being fired for drunkenness and general unmanagability by director Otto Preminger during the filming of Rosebud and, upon learning that his replacement was to be Peter O'Toole, saying, "That's like replacing Ray Charles with Helen Keller.") However, the greatest attraction of the evening is Shanghai Express (1932), which, in a truly classy move, TCM is using to kick off prime time, instead of sticking it on at 3 A.M. or something. Last time I checked, Shanghai Express was not available on home video, and it must have been a while since TCM ran it, because I haven't seen it in a while, and whenever TCM runs it, I try not to miss it.

Shanghai Express is one of those golden delights that caught everybody involved at just the right moment. Von Sternberg was still working with Dietrich, as God intended. Just as importantly, the director was at the peak of his mastery as a visual stylist, an unparalleled desert chef when it came to the creation of eye candy, but had not yet gotten it into his head that to spin eye candy by itself, cut off from anything like wit, action, or proper blood circulation, was the highest cinematic artistry that one could achieve. Later he would get to that point with such cult classics as The Scarlet Empress, an exercise in silken shadows, zombified stars and circus freaks, boasting enough twinkly junk jewelry for a month's work of QVC. It is a movie that is decadent in exactly the wrong way. Shanghai Express, which clocks in at a fleet eighty minutes, is all pulp romance and thrills, with the screenwriter Jules Furthman's sexy wisecracks and smoldering melodrama dressed to the nines thanks to the black-and-white chiaroscuro cinematography for which the credited cameraman Lee Garmes won an Academy Award, though anyone who's seen von Sternberg's other work can easily imagine him setting up the lights himself and then attacking Garmes with a chair if the earnest yeoman tried to adjust it. Offhand, it's about as good an example I can think of as to what popular entertainment ought to be.

The film stars Dietrich as the notorious courtesan who, encountering her old true love, Doc (Clive Brook) on the titular locomotive, fills him in on what she's been up to since they parted ways by telling him with a smile, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shangai Lily." "So," murmurs Brook, "you're Shanghai Lily." He sounds like someone trying his best to appear interested in an old friend's description of how her kid did on his SATs, and still just barely managing to not yawn in her face, but you can tell that inside, he's dying, dying! All of China is falling apart around everyone's ears, but the real gripping drama boils down to: will Shanghai Lily and Doc be able to contrive to fall into each other's arms without either giving an inch in their struggle to keep their fires properly banked, with his stiff upper lip chiseled into his face and her smile like a pussycat's daring you to guess at its true loyalties? He gives just the barest suggestion of how deep his commitment to their relationship really is when, having learned that Dietrich has volunteered to stay with the villainous rebel leader to appease his blood lust lest it be turned against that man of hers, he turns to someone and brusquely enquires, "H've ya got a gun?" The villain is played by Warner Oland, the Swedish actor who, for some reason, is only remembered by moviegoers for how he looked in yellow face. He was to become the best known screen incarnation of Charlie Chan, which certainly gives an edge to the image of him advancing on a bound captive with a hot poker. Between the pop camp elements and the smart lines and acting, the part of Shanghai Express that is funny by intent keeps fighting the part that is funny by accident before the two halves decide to move in together and split the rent.




Shanghai Express is not to be confused with The Shanghai Gesture (1941), which is also on tonight. Gesture was based on a scandalous play set in a Shanghai brothel presided over by one Mother Goddam. By the time von Sternberg was assigned the task of bringing the material to the screen, the pre-Code Hollywood movie environment through which Express had cantered gaily had evaporated, so that the villainess (played by Ona Munson, Rhett Butler's favorite hostess in Gone with the Wind) was now named Mother Gin Sing and had to make do with running a den of games of chance. Walter Huston is also in the cast, but the romantic leads available to von Sternberg were not Dietrich and Clive Brook but a confused-seeming Gene Tierney and Victor Mature in a fez. At times, von Sternberg manages to create a visual atmosphere that seems so glitteringly decadent that you can guess at what the characters would be doing if the Hays Office would just let them do it; however, there are also moments, especially when it would have benefited matters if someone had clarified what was left of the plot, when you wonder if the director has left a pizza delivery boy in charge of the set while he goes to call Marlene's answering service one more time and ask why she isn't returning his messages. Gesture's mixture of suggestiveness and cluelessness made it a midnight movie favorite in the '70s, and though it doesn't exist in the same universe as Express, it is probably the most enduring of the von Sternberg pictures that, in the age of posterity, will have to get by almost solely on camp appeal.