Film blogger and sometimes Turner Classic Movies’ programmer,The Self-Styled Siren, came up with a terrific idea for a movie list: That which we love in filmdom that puts our cool credentials into question (And yes, I do have Cool Credentials. My mother keeps them with my badminton trophies). Siren describes the criteria for the list this way: 

“As always, it’s best to define terms. By uncool, the Siren doesn’t mean “slightly offbeat” or “quirky” or “underrated.” She means “courting hoots of derision from critical colleagues.” Picking a lesser work of a widely admired auteur doesn’t cut it, because after all, even late Hawks is still Hawks. And picking a film that was once lambasted, but is no longer, is also not exactly what the Siren had in mind.”

I would also add that there are certain uncool films that are now cool to like. The work of Ed Wood, for instance. Those choices shouldn’t count, either. We have to go for what’s embarrassing to admit to, and lucky for you there’s plenty to clean out of my uncool closet.

1. Fox Musicals: Everyone loves those big lavish MGM musicals of the forties and fifties, and those triumphs do represent for me the highest level of  artistic achievement we will ever see on film. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the hell out of the musicals Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century-Fox produced to help Americans through a Great Depression. The name of the game was “simple”; simple stories, simple tunes… And not one true classic film emerged from the bunch. These films weren’t about that. They were about innocent, joyful escapism and to help you along were such stars as Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda, Betty Grable, John Payne, Edward Everett Horton, Billy Gilbert, Charlotte Greenwood, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, and Cesar Romero. (more…)

“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”

– John Wayne –

John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.

Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience. (more…)

In keeping with what apparently is the Left’s best argument against any opposition to President Obama’s policies, which is that anyone who disagrees with them is a racist, Bill Maher posted his most recent profanity-laced juvenility on the obviously standardless Huffington Post this weekend, informing President Obama that, in order to best the lying racists he is forced to govern, he needs to become “an a**hole.”

I couldn’t help but remember a favorite story that my wife and I tell on each other from time to time. Years ago, we were going through some counseling about our relationship (we’re totally cured now, of course. Just ask my wife). We had two counselors who were partners, one of whom focused on us, but both of whom knew our story.  After a considerable number of sessions had come and gone with no tangible improvement, one day my wife stormed into their office in an obvious fury to see our guy. His colleague, a wonderfully grumpy man, glanced up at her and offhandedly said, “What’s your problem?”

“My husband’s an a**hole.”

He responded flatly, “Maybe you’re the a**hole.” (more…)

The life story of a Black star in a White world, a man who arguably was the world’s greatest entertainer, will not be coming to a theater near you anytime soon. If ever.

During a recent interview on my radio program “The Andrea Shea King Show”, Hollywood conservative Burt Boyar, longtime friend and biographer of the late great Sammy Davis, Jr., said he’s concerned that the true story about the talented entertainer who fought and broke through racial barriers will never be seen on the silver screen. Two years ago, Boyar had negotiated a deal to sell his two biographies to filmmakers who were all set to tell the story on celluloid.

Reflection: Sammy Davis Jr. snaps a photo of himself and Jerry Lewis posing in the reflection of a mirror.

What entanglements are keeping the former member of the Rat Pack’s compelling life from being made into a movie?  A life studded with Tinseltown’s glittering constellation of stars whose orbits intersected his?   Luminaries like Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, Liz and Burton, Paul Newman, Berle, Bacall, Bennett, Damone… when Hollywood was at its most glamorous?

Who is Burt Boyar? And why does he care?

(more…)