Wedding Bell Wackiness Double-Feature: BALL OF FIRE and OSCAR

This post is being published as part of the CMBA Comedy Classics Blogathon from January 22nd to 27th, 2012.

Love is a funny thing, especially in the movies, so Vinnie and I have donned our Team Bartilucci romantic screwball comedy caps to spotlight two of our favorites!

Dorian’s Pick: Ball of Fire (1941)

“Once upon a time — in 1941 to be exact — there lived in a great, tall forest — called New York — eight men who were writing an encyclopedia. They were so wise they knew everything: The depth of the oceans, and what makes a glowworm glow, and what tune Nero fiddled while Rome was burning. But there was one thing about which they knew very little — as you shall see…”


How could I not fall in love with Ball of Fire (BoF)? To borrow a line from Foul Play, it was fate, Fergie — kismet! The star team of Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, reunited from Meet John Doe that same year, was a tantalizing draw, plus I’m a sucker for stories set in my hometown, New York City. But I was also interested in BoF because I like comedies about characters who appreciate wordplay and learning (Pygmalian/My Fair Lady, anyone?). I’ve loved reading, writing, and generally having fun with the English language ever since I learned to read at the age of three (during a family vacation in the Bahamas, but that’s a story for another time). My older siblings used to show me off by having me read passages from The New York Times out loud; granted, I didn’t always understand what all the words meant, but somehow I figured out what they sounded like phonetically. For another thing, on an even more personal note, BoF’s sassy heroine Katherine O’Shea goes by the name “Sugarpuss,” or “Shugie” for short. As luck would have it, our daughter Siobhan’s nickname happens to be “Shugie”!  (For the record, “Shugie” is pronounced like “sugar” ending with “ee” instead of “er.” For those of you who’ve never heard the name “Siobhan,” it’s pronounced “shuh-VON.” Those who pronounce it ‘SIGH-oh-ban’ will be asked to leave the Internet.) Mind you, this was long before we watched and loved BoF; up till then, we had nicknamed Siobhan “Shugie” in honor of Shaggy’s baby sister on the animated TV series A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (yet another story for yet another time. We’ve got a million of ’em)! Our Shugie thought the name “Sugarpuss O’Shea” was the most hilarious name she’d ever heard!

Professor Potts digs NYC’s sub(way)culture!

Taking good notes for research is important!

Sweetening the entertainment pot further, other talented people behind BoF included director Howard Hawks; Samuel Goldwyn, producing BoF for RKO; screenwriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who based their story on Wilder and Thomas Monroe’s From A to Z; and versatile Director of Photography Gregg Toland, who got an Oscar nomination that year for Citizen Kane. To qualify for the 1941 Academy Awards, BoF played a week-long engagement in Los Angeles, then officially opened at the Radio City Music Hall in January 1942. Set in the then-contemporary New York City of 1941, BoF is a breezy comic take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (more about that shortly). In New York City’s Central Park, we meet our hero Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper in lovable naïf mode), the youngest of eight brilliant, endearing professors taking a constitutional in Central Park on the first sunny spring day of the season. Prof. Potts’ colleagues are played by a great cast of beloved character actors: Oskar Homolka (Hitchcock’s Sabotage and the Harry Palmer spy thrillers Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain) as Prof. Gurkakoff; Henry Travers (Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, It’s a Wonderful Life) as Prof. Jerome; S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall (Casablanca, Wonder Man) as Prof. Magenbruch; Tully Marshall (Scarface, Grand Hotel) as Prof. Robinson; Leonid Kinskey (Duck Soup and The Man with the Golden Arm, and he’s a Casablanca alumnus, too) as Prof. Quintana; Aubrey Mather as Prof. Peagram (Jane Eyre, The Song of Bernadette); and Prof. Oddly (Team Bartilucci fave Richard Haydn, known for voicing animated characters as well as his supporting roles in live-action films). These men have virtually cloistered themselves in the house they all share at The Daniel S. Totten Foundation. They’re in their ninth year of writing their encyclopedia of slang. Man, these boys need to get out more! More to the point, they need to get their slang encyclopedia finished pronto, because even though Miss Totten (Mary Field from The Dark Corner and Dark Passage — so much dark in such a lighthearted movie!) has a crush on Potts, the Foundation’s lawyer Larsen (veteran character actor Charles Lane, back when he was actually young!) is pressuring our boys to “slap it together” and finish already. Potts firmly replies that “we are not the slapping-together kind…If our work goes slowly, it’s because the world goes so fast.” Well, Potts and company had better hang onto their hats, because their world is about to go a whole lot faster, not to mention funnier! (By the way, there isn’t a real-life toaster inventor named Daniel S. Totten that we know of, though there are electric toasters!) Fun Fact: According to the TCM Web site, Wilder and Brackett picked up authentic slang for the script by visiting the drugstore across the street from Hollywood High School; a burlesque house; and the Hollywood Park racetrack.
 

The happiest fellas in Brainiac Land!

Just as our eight professors aren’t seven height-challenged miners pitted against a wicked witch and a poisoned apple, nor is our heroine a sweet, demure princess. Instead, we have beautiful, brassy nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O’Shea, a.k.a. Shugie (Stanwyck). She’s introduced to us in smart, snappy style, performing “Drum Boogie” (her singing was dubbed by Martha Tilton, bandleader Tommy Dorsey’s lead singer), accompanied by the great drummer Gene Krupa (as himself)! Seems the D.A. is convinced that Shugie’s gangster beau Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews, before Laura made him a star at 20th Century-Fox) just might have knocked off one of his fellow hoods. Ol’ John Law wants Shugie for questioning, since the D.A. has an incriminating receipt for a pair of pajamas she’d once given him as a gift. With a “subpeeny” nipping at her heels, Sugarpuss goes on the lam, and we don’t mean the Little-Bo-Peep kind! But Lilac’s henchmen Duke Pastrami (Dan Duryea) and Asthma Anderson (Ralph Peters) see the business card from Potts that Shugie had left behind after initially nixing his invitation to join his slang symposium. The thugs get ideas: first, if Lilac marries Shugie, he’ll be safe because as Mrs. Lilac, she wouldn’t be able to testify against him. Second, who’d think to look for Shugie in a quaint old house infested with bookworms? Asthma and Pastrami give Shugie incentive to go along with their scheme by giving her a ring with a diamond almost as big as the one at Yankee Stadium! Potts and his colleagues are plenty book-smart, but something tells me they’ll also be street-smart by the time Shugie gets through with them!

If Shugie’s the new neighborhood Avon Lady, we’ll take one of everything!

BoF’s sprightly plot and snappy patter had me smiling from the start. Cooper and Stanwyck have marvelous chemistry together as Shugie shakes up Potts and Company’s scholarly existence for the better. While the versatile Stanwyck is always awesome in both dramas (such as my own favorite, Double Indemnity) and comedies, I particularly enjoy seeing her funny flag fly in films like BoF and The Lady Eve. It’s a joy to see Stanwyck’s impeccable comic timing in BoF, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s as beautiful as she is hilarious. With Edith Head costuming her, whether Stanwyck is wearing sequins or a simple shirtwaist dress, you can’t take your eyes off her, especially with the confident, panther-like way she walks. I was touched at the sight of “Potsie’s” modest engagement ring above Joe Lilac’s huge rock, undoubtedly the best ring Potts could afford on his academic salary, bless him. His proposal to Shugie touched me even more, especially: “Dust piles on our hearts, and it took you to blow it away.” Shugie finds herself growing increasingly fond of her “eight wise idiots,” and slowly but surely falling in love with Potts and regretting her commitment to Lilac and the con job she agreed to.

Mr. Looper, er, Hooper, lilac’s not really your color!

But the professors climbing out of their ivory tower aren’t the only outstanding supporting character actors in BoF. There’s Will Lee as Benny the Creep, one of Lilac’s henchmen, long before he became the beloved Mr. Hooper on TV’s Sesame Street; Charles Arnt from My Favorite Brunette as Lilac’s lawyer; and Allen Jenkins (his many roles included George Sanders’ sidekick in the Falcon films and the voice of Officer Dibble on Hanna-Barbera’s animated series Top Cat, another Team Bartilucci fave) as a garbage man who enlists the professors’ help in winning a radio quiz show so he can take his sweetie out on the town — but let him tell you in his own words as Potts tries to keep up with all these new-to-him words and phrases:

“We’ll be steppin’, me and the smooch, I mean the dish, I mean the mouse, you know, hit the jiggles for a little rum boogie?...Brother, we’re gonna have some hoy-toy-toy!” In turn, the delighted professors roar, “Hoy-toy-toy!” The garbage man adds, “If you want that one explained, go ask your papa.”

 As Miss Bragg, Kathleen Howard is the very model of an uptight, narrow-minded den mother type who, to slightly paraphrase a line from Witness for the Prosecution, has just had an egg-beater thrown into the wheels of her Victorian household. Miss Bragg may mean well in her stick-up-the-butt way, but I couldn’t help hoping someone would belt her one, so I couldn’t help approving when Shugie did just that — that is, until I read on the TCM Web site that while shooting the fight scene with Howard, Stanwyck accidentally connected too hard with a punch and broke Ms. Howard’s jaw — yikes! Just goes to show sometimes it’s unwise to go too far for your art!

Is this what they mean by “stopping on a dime”?

Of all the lovable professors, the one I found myself most fond of was Richard Haydn’s Prof. Oddly, who gets so into whatever he’s examining that the other professors have to whistle for him like a dog. A widower, Prof. Oddly is the only one of the group who’s been married. When Shugie and the professors set off for New Jersey for the wedding, unaware that Lilac and his goons are setting the boys up, it leads to a funny and truly touching scene as Prof. Oddly suggests fatherly advice to Potsie, sharing his fond remembrances of happy times with his late wife Genevieve and the popular old song by that name, with all the professors poignantly singing along. With the help of a loose room number on the motel room door, it leads beautifully to both comedy and sweet love, though not without bumps along the way. It all ends in our guys dashing (in every sense) in top hats and tails to New Jersey to save the girl and the day in a finale that only our astute octet could have pulled off, and it had me cheering! It’s no wonder that, according to the TCM Web site, BoF ended up being the 25th highest-grossing film of 1942, taking in $2.2 million at the box office (which was serious coin back then). Between the success that year of both BoF and the Oscar-winning Sergeant York (1941), it was a mighty fine year for Gary Cooper, who ranked seventh at the box office for 1941 — no small feat considering all the films available back then, decades before TV and so many other forms of entertainment created competition for fans’ attention. Another Fun Fact: In 1942, Barbara Stanwyck joined her Remember the Night co-star Fred MacMurray for a radio version of BoF broadcast on Lux Radio Theatre in 1942, and of course, they would eventually reunite for Double Indemnity and There’s Always Tomorrow. On a related note, as a fan of Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, I’d like to check out A Song is Born, their musical remake with Hawks, even though I hear it’s not as good as the original. I sympathize; improving on the perfection of BoF is a tall order indeed!

Things that make you go "Yum-yum!"

Nothing perks up symposiums like a conga!

One ring to rule them all, one ring to bind her!

Before Witness for the Prosecution’s Monocle Test, there was Prof. Gurkakoff’s Reflector Test!

Hope is the thing with feathers — perfect for tickle torture!

Vinnie's Pick: Oscar (1991)

To simplify greatly, there are three types of people; those who have never seen Oscar, those who love Oscar, and those who have never forgiven John Landis for Vic Morrow, and refuse to give any of his work since a fair viewing.

It's a comedy, something that star Sylvester ("Stop or My Mom Will Shoot") Stallone is not well known for. Specifically it's a screwball farce, based on a French film from 1967 Director John Landis and his writing team turned it into a period piece, following many of its trappings religiously. It takes place largely in one location, the palatial residence of gangster Angelo "Snaps" Provolone, who has promised his father (a hiLARious cameo by Kirk Douglas) that he'd go straight. On one madcap day as he prepares to invest in a bank and fulfill his promise, he learns that his head accountant "Little" Anthony Rossano (Vincent Spano) is in love with his daughter, Lisa (Marisa Tomei) (except he's not), who is pregnant from another man, the titular Oscar, their chauffeur (except she's not), planned to marry her off to his dialect coach, Dr. Thornton Poole (Tim Curry) who is also in love with her (except he's not), and at random times, 100,000 dollars plays a shell game among three black satchels that make their way about the house.

Snaps, Connie, and Aldo  keep it all in the Family

Landis keeps the film going at a breakneck pace - characters and situations fly in and out of the house at ramming speed, the dialogue is fast and laced with period slang ("Nix the underwear, Doc, it never happened"). With all the questionable characters (and black bags) that come and go, it's no surprise Lt. Toomey (Kurtwood Smith, a guy who's a LOT better at being funny than people realize - we're still all remembering Clarence Boddicker) is sure something's up in the Provolone home. Like so many tributes to past genres, it's as good as you remember 1930s madcap comedies were, but so few actually were. Another recent example is Down With Love, which featured more bedroom comedy tropes per capita than any actual films of the genre.

The meat of the plot is from the French original, the comedy of errors about the people in love and the bags, but Landis added a whole layer of comedy by making it a comedic Prohibition-era period piece. Lots of wordplay comedy, many new characters, and the whole plot about the bankers and Lt. Toomey's insistence that things are not as they appear. And oh, those bags... A classic plot point of comedies, whether used as the McGuffin to get the spies after the wrong guy, or a devious way to hide the diamonds, it's been seen in endless films, in recent years, most famously What's Up Doc?

Lisa and Thornton's budding romance
is by the book!

Both Stallone and Landis surrounded themselves with friends - there's lots of folks in the film who'd worked with one or the other in past films. Peter Reigert and Mark Metcalf return from Animal House, as does scoremeister Elmer Bernstein. As opposed to the tack they took in Animal House, where Bernstein wrote a deliberately serious score that worked perfectly against the on-screen goings on, they went for a patently comedic soundtrack here, based on the opera The Barber of Seville.

A couple of important first major breaks in the film as well - It's Marisa Tomei's first major role, and while she got a Razzie for it, The Wife and I knew right away we'd be hearing from her again, and I don't mean a postcard. One year later she grabbed an ACTUAL Oscar for her role in My Cousin Vinny. Similarly, lovable lunkhead Connie was played to slack-faced perfection by Chazz Palmintieri, who just a year before had played a very different kind of mobster in his self-written one-man play A Bronx Tale. Combining this with similarly comedic gunsel Cheech in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, and he quickly became one of our favorite comedic gangster actors. So when we later saw him in things like The Usual Suspects and the film version of A Bronx Tale, we were blown away by the diametric opposite performances.

"So, boss, which satchel has the secret
Government underwear?"

Tim Curry had just premiered his older, slightly puffier look in the previous year's The Hunt For Red October, and had already shown staggering ability for madcap comedy in another sadly underappreciated film, Clue. His timing here is flawless, his face a wild set of earnest expressions and a perfect upper-class twit of a voice.
But in honesty, the shining jewel of performances is Stallone himself. In later comedic performances like Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, he's more parodying himself, but here he plays a note-perfect comedic gangster in the Damon Runyon tradition. He shares the screen with some heavy hitters, but holds his own expertly. "Snaps" remains exasperated throughout, and some of his best lines are when his emotions get the better of him. As he tries to explain a small part of his day to his wife Sofia (Ornella Muti), including mention of a daughter Theresa, she responds "We don't HAVE a daughter Theresa!", to which he gaspingly replies, "Do you think I don't KNOW that?"

Going to the chapel and they're gonna get married...

Few films got as bad a rap as this one in its time. In those pre-Internet days, it was able to be the number-one film for two weeks before the reviews started making the rounds and and people suddenly were educated as to how bad a film it was. It's gained a big following thanks to video, one it seriously deserves. See it.
Expeditiously.

There’s Something About LAURA

Welcome to the House of Spoilers! Enter at your own risk!

Private investigator Sam Marlow: “Dana Andrews was swell in Laura, but what if Bogart had played Lt. McPherson? Yeah, Bogart... smoking a cigarette and looking up at that portrait, thinking Laura was dead, but still in love with her. What a love scene. And neither of them naked!”
The Man with Bogart’s Face by Andrew J. Fenady

When Vera Caspary’s romantic suspense tale Ring Twice for Laura proved to be a popular serial in Colliers in 1942, Houghton Mifflin published the serial as a best-selling novel, now simply titled Laura.  In 1944, the movie version of Laura hit the silver screen, fated to be movie bait against all odds (more about that in a moment)!  The film and David Raksin's haunting theme song were so popular, they were affectionately parodied with much gusto in many ways, including a spoof by no less than Spike Jones and his City Slickers, an honor akin to Weird Al Yankovic's song parodies (much beloved here at Team Bartilucci H.Q.).  

The film starts off on an appropriately ominous note with the voiceover, “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” These are the words of Waldo Lydecker, a waspish New York columnist (blogs hadn't been invented yet :-)), played by scene-stealing former silent film actor/ballroom dancer/stage actor Clifton Webb in the role that made him a full-fledged movie star and Oscar nominee. In case you had any silly notions that Waldo was the shy retiring type, he allows Detective Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) of the NYPD to grill him as he sits in the bathtub of his opulent bathroom. (Perhaps Waldo hoped Mark might want to take a dip in the tub himself, the old slyboots!) Waldo multitasks, typing one of his devastatingly sharp columns on a tray in his bathtub while answering Mark’s questions about lovely, smart advertising executive-turned-murder victim Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), found violently killed with a double-barreled shotgun blast at close range
.

Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) is glad to assist Det. Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), as long as it doesn't interfere with his daily ablutions. Good thing electric typewriters weren't invented yet; we can't have Waldo accidentally electrocuted so early in the movie!

But by all accounts, to know Laura was to love her, and why not? Even her maid Bessie (the uncredited but memorable Dorothy Adams) adored Laura, not only “on account of the thousand sweet things she done for me; it was because she was so sweet herself!” Laura was as winsome as she was beautiful; sophisticated, yet hard-working and down-to-earth.  Who’d want to kill her? Someone who loved her too much, perhaps? Maybe Waldo, her longtime mentor and friend? Or could it be Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price, then best known as a stage actor; his great horror films came later), Laura’s fiancé and colleague at the advertising firm Bullitt & Company (how eerily appropriate, considering how she died), who Waldo sneeringly characterizes (not unfairly) as “a male beauty in distress”? Mark’s investigation brings him into Laura’s glamorous world, and quickly discovers it’s also a world of ambition and danger, obsession and desire. In spite of himself, tough detective Mark realizes he’s getting so deep into the case that he’s falling in love with Laura—her portrait, anyway, all that’s left of her. Or is it? When Mark falls asleep while on stakeout in Laura’s apartment, he’s awakened by Laura herself! But if the shocked, bewildered Laura isn’t dead, then who is? (Fun Fact: The famous portrait of Laura was originally painted by the wife of Rouben Mamoulian, who’d been chosen to direct before producer Otto Preminger opted to direct as well. The portrait was touched up to make it look more like an actual painting of Tierney.)

"Now that is aht!"

It turns out the murder victim was Bullitt & Company model Diane Redfern, who dropped by Laura’s apartment for a heart-to-heart with Shelby while our heroine was away in the country trying to thaw out the cold feet she’s developing about marrying him. I don’t blame her, considering Shelby was apparently two-timing Laura (in his Southern-gentleman way, the rake!), as well as the ever-awesome Dame Judith Anderson as Laura’s aunt, Ann Treadwell (Susan Treadwell in the novel). Ann may or may not have an agenda of her own, considering she’s only too happy to “lend” Shelby large sums of money at the drop of her stylish hat, and she can obviously afford him. I guess that’s what happens when you know too many good-looking layabouts with too much time on their hands—get a job, you moochers! But now that Laura’s not dead after all, the police consider her a suspect in Diane’s murder!  Can Mark get the real culprit, as Waldo would say, “trundled off to the hoosegow” before it’s too late? Come to think of it, why is Waldo so eager to get his grandfather clock back ASAP? Funny how it’s just the right size to hide a double-barreled shotgun….

"Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies..."

It amazes me that nobody wanted to make this witty, suave, suspenseful adaptation of Caspary’s classic mystery novel! Even when it got the green light, it was initially slated to be a throwaway “B” picture for 20th Century-Fox. I’m also flabbergasted to hear that the bewitching Gene Tierney, who had the amazing ability to be at once approachable and exotic, wasn’t the first choice to play the title role; Jennifer Jones and Hedy Lamarr both turned it down. Their loss! It just goes to show what the right polish and the right talent can do, with Tierney and tough-yet-tender Andrews up against that fabulous cast. Like Witness for the Prosecution and other favorite films of mine, discovering who really dunnit doesn’t spoil the fun of watching Laura again and again, especially with those beautiful clothes, the Oscar-nominated set design/decoration, and of course, listening to composer David Raksin’s rapturous music (which also deserved an Oscar nod, if you ask me)! Indeed, if you pay closer attention to real killer Waldo on a second viewing, you’ll catch more of the clues to his true nature that you were having too much fun to notice the first time around. For example, during Waldo’s flashback-laden dinner conversation with Mark about Laura, you suddenly realize how truly obsessed and self-centered Waldo really is. Note that everything he says about Laura really ends up being more about him than about her: “She deferred to my tastes...the way she listened (to me) was more eloquent than speech….” 

"Mark, get me away from these wackos!"

As Waldo, acid-tongued Webb’s bon mots are so delightful you want to commit them to memory. He steals the show with his viciously witty lines—and just as important, the angry heartache underlying them. (He does this to superb effect in The Dark Corner, too.) If I start quoting Webb’s best lines, I’ll be transcribing almost every word out of his mouth! Still, the great nest-of-vipers cast hits all the right notes in Preminger’s spellbinding adaptation of Caspary’s novel. The book told the tale from the respective perspectives of Waldo, Shelby, Mark, and eventually Laura herself. In the movie, like in all the best book-to-film adaptations, Laura stays faithful to the novel while keeping it tight to fit the movie’s sleek 87-minute running time—89 minutes in the restored version on DVD, with Waldo narrating over a montage of Laura being made over into a society glamor girl. Supposedly, that footage stayed out of the film for years because the studio was afraid the sequence’s allegedly “decadent” focus on luxury wouldn’t sit well with 1944’s wartime audiences, who were doing without many things they’d once taken for granted. (Suddenly I’m imagining Laura and Waldo double-dating with Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson and Judy Barton after Judy gets Madeleine Elster’ed!) Webb, Price, and Anderson make wonderful wolves-in-chic-clothing among Laura’s circle of friends and hangers-on. Andrews and Tierney’s chemistry sends sparks flying even before they actually share the screen after the Act 2 twist. Tierney is quite convincing as a sophisticated yet soft-hearted young woman whose kindness almost does her in; as Andrews aptly points out, “For a charming, intelligent girl, you’ve certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”  Amen to that! On a related note, this might sound odd, but I’ve often felt that Laura is almost a dark precursor to the 1998 modern comedy classic There’s Something About Mary! Think about it: both films are about magnetic women who don’t realize how much their looks and charm drive men mad, sometimes literally.

Laura was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Director for Preminger; Best Supporting Actor for Webb; Best Adapted Screenplay by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt, with an uncredited assist by Ring Lardner Jr.; and Best Interior Decoration.  But it was Director of Photography Joseph LaShelle who went home with an Oscar for his atmospheric black-and-white camerawork. Incidentally, Tierney and Webb were reunited in The Razor’s Edge (1946), for which Webb earned another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Webb didn’t win, but co-star Anne Baxter snared a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, four years before her Best Actress Oscar nomination for All About Eve.  No nomination for Tierney, alas; she got her only Best Actress nomination earlier for the psychological thriller Leave Her to Heaven (1945).

"I coulda been a contendah!"
Laird Cregar, The Man Who Would be Lydecker

I must admit there’s only one thing about this otherwise perfect romantic suspense film that makes me think, “Oh, what could have been!” When Rouben Mamoulian was going to direct the film, he wanted Laird Cregar to play Waldo Lydecker! (I can hear my fellow Cregar fans sighing and squealing longingly even now!) Much as I adore Clifton Webb’s performance, I must admit Cregar would have been fabulous, too, with his silky voice and imposing bulk; the nattily-dressed fat man (yes, Waldo was indeed described as fat in the novel, unlike whippet-thin Webb in the movie) hiding his resentment and heartache under a veneer of venom-tipped quips. Alas, Zanuck ultimately decided that since Cregar was already best known as a smooth-talking yet physically imposing villain, casting him as Waldo might have tipped off the audience to his true evil too soon. Yeah, I see their point, but still….  In any case, Webb and Laura’s screenwriters re-teamed in 1946 for The Dark Corner, which had enough elements in common with Laura to be considered as sort of a Laura 2—and I mean that as a compliment!

By the way, Carly Simon does a gorgeous live rendition of David Raksin's Laura theme:
http://youtu.be/Baj5Q7H5q6s

Armageddon Outta Here! INDEPENDENCE DAY and CRACK IN THE WORLD

This week, my husband Vinnie and I are again putting on our Team Bartilucci caps—and Hazmat suits, because our currently topical topic is disaster films: why people like them (or don’t), and our own particular favorites. Let’s start with a Vin’s-eye-view:

After the horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan, well-meaning busybody Graeme McMillan wrote a piece for Spinoff Online which basically asked Hollywood to stop making disaster movies. His argument was that since we have had so many REAL disasters, disaster movies are insensitive to people who have lived through them.  Happily, the replies (mine and The Wife’s included) skewed more to the “Get off your high-horse, you politically-correct crybaby” variety.

Disaster stories are a staple of entertainment.  The Bible is rife with them—The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, not to mention the entire book of Revelations.  People love seeing and reading about shit blowing up real good.  Real disasters do not reduce that interest.  Some disaster films are pure fantasy, like the endless alien invasion films, one of which will be dissected below.  Others are intended to be “warning” films, attempting to alert people as to what might happen if we “go too far”; examples include The Day After Tomorrow, a film that far too many people think is a documentary.  Another category is a more direct exploitative variety of the second, using some topical event as the catalyst for the chaos that is to follow.  Day of the Animals is a film about beasts of the field run amok, caused by a patch of the ozone layer breaking loose and falling to Earth, driving the poor little four-leggers mad.  Quite often, disaster films are allegorical; Godzilla was a physical manifestation of the danger of “atomic” power, as were so many giant animal films of the 1950s. 

We’ll never see the end of disaster films, and that’s a great thing.  So this time around, we’re taking a look at the (usually destroyed) world of the Disaster Film.  Dori, it’s your turn!

Dorian’s Disaster Flick Pick: Independence Day (1996)

1996 was a banner year for us here at Team Bartilucci H.Q. First, I had just begun my third trimester of being big with child, an exciting and nerve-wracking time in itself. Siobhan, our literally bouncing baby girl (we went to see the percussion-heavy Off-Broadway show Stomp, you see. No, really!) was finally born on October 30th, and bless her, she still hasn’t stopped bouncing! The second bit of excitement that summer was the release of Independence Day (ID4, as it was dubbed in the movie posters). A far more exciting follow-up to Stargate, the 1994 SF collaboration between director Roland Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin, ID4 was an uber-blockbuster, the cinematic rollercoaster ride of the summer of ’96, eventually pulling in a cool $817,400,891 worldwide. This rock’em-sock’em science-fiction action-adventure further confirmed the stardom of both Will Smith, then best known and loved as a popular rapper and the star of TV’s Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Jeff Goldblum, the endearingly quirky character actor who’d stolen the show in Jurassic Park (1993) and had been one of Team Bartilucci’s longtime faves ever since he’d co-starred with Ben Vereen in 1980’s playful but unfairly short-lived private eye TV series Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. Frankly, Goldblum was my first teenage celebrity crush (not to be confused with my childhood crush on Danny Kaye). Admittedly, I’ve always gone for the so-called offbeat types, including my own dear hubby…but I digress! J 

An eye-popping, nerve-wracking rendition of the classic trope “Alien Invaders Try to Take Over Earth and Drain our Natural Resources Dry Before We Humans Beat Them To It,” ID4 was like an Irwin Allen disaster movie updated for the 1990s. Oh yes, I absolutely meant that as a compliment!  ID4 grabs the audience and runs with it, supplying warmth and human interest in addition to the action, suspense, and cool F/X, even when the action reaches “Oh, come on!” levels. For example, Vivica A. Fox as Smith’s sweetie Jasmine, the world’s most wholesome stripper, saves her kid and their dog just in time to avoid alien annihilation. But hey, with a flick like ID4, that’s part of the fun; it’s a thrill ride, not a documentary!  That said, I’ll admit the New York City scenes and its shots of the World Trade Center, have become doubly poignant since 9/11, especially for those of us who are native New Yorkers. 

As Captain Steve Hiller and science whiz David Levinson, Smith and Goldblum end up as a fine buddy team, and the other actors in the large ensemble cast are impressive, too, including Bill Pullman as the beleaguered President Whitmore; Mary McDonnell as his endangered First Lady; Brent Spiner as the wild-eyed but well-meaning chief scientist in the fabled Area 51; Randy Quaid as the drunken pilot who’s seen the aliens and gets his shot at redemption;  Harvey Fierstein as David’s panicky boss; Margaret Colin as David’s ex-wife, who’s also President Whitmore’s most trusted advisor; and my favorite, Judd Hirsch’s underrated seriocomic performance as David’s elderly dad. When ID4 first hit theaters, it seemed like our family and Entertainment Weekly film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum were the only people who didn’t take offense at the portrayal of the unabashedly Jewish senior Levinson and his Bronx-by-way-of Omsk accent. (Fun Fact: According to the IMDb, Goldblum and Hirsch improvised quite a bit of their dialogue.) Come to the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where our family lived for many years, and to this day you’ll still find plenty of old Jewish guys like Hirsch’s character hanging around the neighborhood schmoozing with each other!

Vinnie’s Disaster Flick Pick: Crack in the World (1965)

Recently, a news item appeared about a scientist’s plan to drill down to the mantle of the Earth to get unpolluted samples of magma and other scientific discoveries.  As most of my thought processes are directly connected to films and TV shows I saw as a child, my first thought was “Oh, geez, we’re gonna have a Crack in the World scenario.” 

Crack in the World (CinW) was a classic “Science Gone Wrong” movie.  The idea was to drill to the mantle and use its incredible energy as a heat source for generating electrical power, as well as gaining access to already-melted minerals and ores.  And it was going well, until Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews, alumnus of too many sci-fi films to count) planned to use a A-Bomb to burn through the last layer of the crust.  Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore) disagrees, claiming it will cause the crust to fissure.

Wanna guess whose theory holds?

The titular crack appears, ripping across the surface of the Earth like a run in a fat chick’s nylons.  They attempt to stop it in its tracks by setting off (now get this) ANOTHER A-Bomb, in the hope of creating a sort of firebreak.  It fails spectacularly, and now there’s TWO cracks, cutting a big divot out of the planet which, if Sorenson is right, will cause a massive chunk of the planet to pop off like a bottlecap, releasing the pressure.

Sure, NOW he gets it right...

Despite an ending that will deplete your suspension of disbelief for three days, the science and terminology of the film is fairly well-grounded.  The concepts sound plausible enough to keep your OH-COME-ON buzzers from going off; indeed, they go to such lengths to explain the science and their plans, the film drags a bit at times.  The special effects are well done for the time, a combination of on-set work, miniatures and some pretty solid animation as the crack rips across the firmament.  Kieron Moore works better as a romantic lead than a scientist — he’s got a body that seems genetically bred to stand on an outcropping, arms akimbo, wearing a jaunty come-hither smile.  Andrews does well as the guy who knows he’s screwed the pooch, and is doing everything in his power to fix it, before his own personal issues (he’s dying of an undisclosed cancer-like movie disease) catch up with him. 

As opposed to most “End of the World” films, they don’t fix the problem.  The two cracks meet, back at the science lab that spawned them of course, the geographic trepanation flies into space, forming a second moon, and the planet has a massive wound, the mantle exposed, with presumably trillions of gallons of seawater pouring into it.  But because the romantic leads, Moore and Janette Scott (playing the far-younger wife of Dana Andrews), escape from the lab before it’s popped off into space, it’s viewed as a happy ending.  There they are, at the edge of the explosion, exposed to hellish temperatures and the shock wave of a portion of the planet being blown into the stratosphere, and they’re perfectly fine, save for an attractively torn shirt and dress and a bit of dirt on their faces.

Ah movies, where you can survive an atomic detonation by jumping into a ditch (or refrigerator), and radiation is only dangerous if you touch it. You don’t see that happen in too many of these types of films, you usually get that timer clicking down to one second and everybody getting saved.  When Worlds Collide is another example of that type of film; from square one, they know there’s no way to stop a fabulous evening’s apocalypse, so they spend the whole film simply trying to find a way off beforehand.  In both cases you’re spared having to think about the countless deaths caused by the events of the film, so long as the people you’ve been paying attention to are okay.

CitW is a solid film, just recently released on DVD and worth an evening’s viewing.