Here it is, fans of Jackie “The Great One” Gleason, the wait is finally over: Otto Preminger’s weirdo comedy curiosity item Skidoo is now available on DVD.  While it came out before counter-culture exploded into mainstream cinema with Easy Rider, Skidoo was an attempt to tap into the hippie audience of the late sixties, even going so far as to feature a soundtrack by Harry Nilsson, as well as a script by Brewster McCloud scribe Doran William Cannon.  The cast of the movie is easily one of the daffiest ever assembled, including not only Gleason, but names like Frankie Avalon, Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, John Phillip Law, Mickey Rooney, Carol Channing, Richard “Jaws” Kiel, Fred Clark, and Slim Pickens.  Oh, and Groucho Marx appears here in his final screen role, playing God, a casting decision that somehow seems more absurd than George Burns, and yet infinitely more palatable.

Skidoo has been seen as something of an oddity in Preminger’s body of work, a director primarily known for heavier films like Laura, Exodus, and The Man With the Golden Arm.  The film was largely panned upon release as a cynical attempt to pander to a hip crowd, Preminger even brought in a young Rob Reiner to do uncredited rewrites on the script, reportedly telling him to “write scenes for the hippies.”  This DVD release marks the first time that this movie has even gotten a home video release, it’s current advent to video being probably due to the cult appeal it’s gained playing late nights on Turner Classic Movies’ TCM Underground, where bizarre not-quite-classics of yesteryear find their modern audience.

The DVD details on this one are virtually non-existent, though I can happily report it’s being released in it’s original anamorphic widescreen, and not a cropped frame.  Other than that though, we get no special features to speak of.  Given that this is the first and only release of Skidoo available to date, those of us wanting to own it will have to as our current President commands of we his subjects: shut up and eat our (Preminger) peas.  Though, really, this movie had me at Jackie Gleason and Harry Nilsson.  Sold.

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NY Post’s Lou Lumenick:

A petition is circulating to stop an outdoor screening of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” next month at a Brooklyn Park. The beloved romantic dramedy starring Audrey Hepburn, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in October, has long been considered problematic by many because of the bucktoothed, splenetic and bumbling Japanese character played by Mickey Rooney — an ethnic stereotype that was outdated even in 1961, and seems much more offensive than funny today.

A planned outdoor screening in Sacramento in 2008 was replaced by “Ratatouille” after a public outcry.

You do know this is just the beginning with these neo-fascists, right? After “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” they’ll go after “Gone With the Wind” and all the rest. And they and their ilk won’t stop until every film that offends everyone except white, Christian male conservatives disappears entirely — just like “Song of the South” has.

It may take years, decades or even generations, but the Left never stops. Never ever stops.

Orwell called this memory-holing.

Mickey Rooney’s Japanese character in “Breakfast” is way too over-the-top to ever be considered funny (I also think the movie is overrated in general), but if we’re going to start banning and making lists of “offensive” characterizations, I’d like to start with every portrayal of a Caucasian Eddie Murphy has ever done. And what about Archie Bunker? Talk about ethnic stereotyping.

See how that works?

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Hollywood, during its Golden Age, was a dream machine spinning images of adventure, glamour, and most of all, romance.

MGM’s roster of female stars constituted the greatest collection of beautiful and talented women the world has ever known.

One of the greatest was Ava Gardner.

Ava Gardner in “The Killers,” her breakthrough role, 1946.

As an emerging starlet in the early 1940’s, before she made a single movie the breathtaking Southern beauty was the talk of the town.

Mickey Rooney was MGM’s golden boy, a versatile star equally adept at musicals, comedy and drama. His signature role as the small-town youngster Andy Hardy made him something of a cash cow for the studio. The Hardy movies were cheap to produce and earned enormous profits.

In his compulsively readable autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney claims that his mother worked as a prostitute in order to put food on the table during the depths of the Depression. Thus, it’s not surprising that Rooney pursued women with an obsessive compulsion, seeking affection and love in all the wrong places: call girls, ambitious actresses and mature women—including Irving Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer—smitten by Rooney’s brash boyish charm. (more…)

From KGET Bakersfield, CA:

Mickey Rooney has made more than 200 movies during his long career as an actor, but when the limelight faded a shadow was cast over his personal life in the form of elder abuse. He says his stepchildren Chris and Christina Aber took his identification cards and denied him basic necessities like medicine and food. He says he even suffered physical and verbal abuse.

1. Four time Oscar-nominee and WWII veteran (The Mighty) Mickey Rooney celebrates his 90th birthday today.

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2. Lame Celebrity Tweet of the Day: Seth MacFarlane:

I wonder if anyone called him “Andrew Breitfart” in high school.

MacFarlane, radio host actress Amy Holmes, and Breitbart will meet this Friday night at the roundtable on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

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3. Fugitive child rapist attracts A-list cast

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4. “International human rights and climate change advocate” Bianca Jagger wants Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to stop an execution. I’d listen to her. She is a international human rights and climate change advocate. (more…)

Thirty years after Judy Garland-”Dorothy”-first publicly performed “Over the Rainbow” on June 29, 1939, previewing the soon-to-be-released Wizard of Oz, this quintessential girl-next-door reached for more sleeping pills and hoped-for sleep, only to be, mercifully, granted eternal rest.

She always wanted to be “glamorous,” forgetting her far-surpassing appeal as the very essence of America. 

Her story, the final earthly chapter ending forty years ago today, embodies American triumph and tragedy.  

Born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, her life nearly ended in 1921 after her parents’ marriage was rocked by revelations of her father’s homosexual infidelity. 

But, family physician Dr. Marcus Rabwin told Frank Gumm, “you go back to your wife and tell her I said she must have this baby.”  The “powerful” Garland “force field,” as fellow MGM star Ann Miller put it, was evidently already at work.  (more…)

The crime is complete. Judgment has been passed. The killing stones are in hand. As per the harsh stoning penal code of Iran’s Islamist thugocracy (for however long that lasts) where the crime took place, my stones are not so big as to kill right away, not so small you can’t call them stones. And I’m winding up like Nolan Ryan. Feel free to pick up a stone of your own. But wait for it!

And let me make this perfectly clear, even if they do say Jehovah!

Sentence must be read before being carried out. And unlike Soraya M., the board members of the Asylum of Motion Picture Airheads and Stooges will deserve every rock that’s thrown their way. I also believe that, in light of events in Iran today, the following commentary will stand out in much starker prominence than it did when I first started reporting on them in early March, when Team Oscar first set off for the Unfriendly Skies of Islamist Iran. (more…)

John Wayne walks the walk in Hondo, 1953.

It’s in the walk.

Think of Mae West, hands caressing her Rubenesque hips, head tilted, not just sauntering, but oozing forward, the exaggerated female.

Elbows cocked and angled at his hips, moving with concentrated energy, Jimmy Cagney looks like a coiled spring about to explode.

Joan Crawford, leading with her linebacker shoulders, like a tank on the battlefield, determined, dangerous, unstoppable. (more…)

This clip is from the finale of “Babes In Arms,” the first of four extremely entertaining, black and white, “Let’s put on a show” musicals Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made over just a few years.

The context of the clip is what’s fascinating. The year is 1939, two years before Pearl Harbor, so this is not a studio humorously and affectionately saluting a wartime president. In fact, FDR’s New Deal was well into its fifth year but still the Depression raged. Even more interesting is that MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, was a staunch and active Republican who opposed FDR and loathed his Big Government solutions. (more…)