TCM recently aired a seven part documentary on the foundation of Hollywood through 1970 that covered about eighty years of film history. This impossible task was a nice change of pace for the network and hopefully will spark a follow up series. However, taking on so much history in such a short amount of time forced the show to grossly oversimplify certain elements and leave other crucial happenings completely out of the picture. Sure, there were more conservatives in Hollywood in 1940 than today, but the political landscape was different (conservatives and liberals joined against Fascism and Socialism, for starters).

Big Hollywood’s John Nolte, who certainly knows a thing or two about classic Hollywood, recently caught up on Moguls and Movie Stars and was not happy. His criticism was that the series dwelled on the idea that the Studio System, complete with a self-censoring office, held back the full potential of the film industry. Nolte makes a great point in telling us that this doesn’t mean that Hollywood’s full potential is necessarily better. The same reason I argued that conservatives love TCM is why so many people prefer classic films over the new garbage spewing from Tinsel Town. Nolte notes that the series constantly reminds us of why the moguls and their politics were in the way, which is far from the truth:

“Most importantly, these were the men who created, oversaw, guided, and managed an industry that earned the affection of the free world for decades through the bringing together of all the arts — performance, design, dance, music, lighting, the written word — into works that still capture our imaginations. Compare that to today’s Hollywood, an industry that’s now a culturally divisive punch line in jokes about sequels, remakes, spoiled celebrities, and self-importance.”

The truth is that Hollywood would be nothing without men like Jack Warner, Walt Disney, Adolf Zukor, Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick and many, many more like them. Sure, most of these guys were conservative (leftist historians constantly remind us of this but forget these moguls, many who were immigrants, embodied the American Dream), but the truth is what they did worked. Thomas Schatz, author of the excellent study on the Studio Era The Genius of the System, explores how the system wasn’t perfect, “but somehow it worked, and it worked well.” The nature of the Studio System was conflicted, but it was also drastically more collaborative than most of today’s productions.

While I enjoyed Moguls and Movie Stars, as a film historian it was frustrating to see the single network dedicated to classic filmmaking show such ignorance to some of the most important aspects of the system. They didn’t explain why it worked, only that the conservative moguls were tyrants who oppressed actors and filmmakers. On some occasions they did, but it doesn’t come close to the whole picture. Even director Peter Bogdanovich, who was interviewed for the series, explains that another seven hours or more is necessary to get a better picture of Hollywood. While Bogdanovich (who is also a film historian) may approve of the historical slant of the series, I assume he realizes the oversights that were made.

It takes much more than a matter of hours to understand the depth of the Hollywood Studio System. I have been studying film history for many years and am still continually digging into this magnificent and engaging era. Anyone who loves classic movies and is told that the Golden Age was only full of oppression, censorship and blacklisting needs to do further research on their own. It is impossible to picture Martin Scorsese without Raoul Walsh, John Hughes without Frank Capra or the Coen brothers without Billy Wilder. The Golden Age demanded excellence and has earned eternal respect from anyone who takes the time to see the whole picture.

Remember, the Studio System was a success not a travesty. More people will be appreciating classics like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and It’s a Wonderful Life than will be watching Avatar, Harry Potter, or even good films like The Social Network in the next year. Why is this? Because the Studio System continuously churned out great pictures by the month instead of by the decade. Films of the Golden Age were driven more by what the public wanted and less by political ideology, the greatness of this era will no doubt trump today’s Hollywood for many years to come.

More of this, please…

Deadline Hollywood Daily:

Warner Bros is trying to ready its DC Comics stalwart Superman to soar again on the Big Screen, and the studio has turned to Chris Nolan to mentor development of the movie. Our insiders say that the brains behind rebooted Batman has been asked to play a “godfather” role and ensure The Man Of Steel gets off the ground after a 3 1/2-year hiatus. Nolan’s leadership of the project can set it in the right direction with the critics and the fans, not to mention at the box office. Besides, Nolan is considered something of a god at Warner Bros and has a strong relationship with the studio after the success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Though he wasn’t obligated to do so, he gave the studio first crack at his spec script Inception, and Warner Bros was able to buy it before other studios even got a sniff. While Nolan completes that Leonardo DiCaprio-starrer for a July 16th release, he’s also hatched an idea for Warner Bros’ third Batman installment. Now his brother and frequent collaborator Jonah Nolan, and David Goyer who co-wrote Batman Begins and penned the story for The Dark Knight, are off scripting it.

Let us emphasize that Superman 3.0 is in the early stages of development. And we doubt Nolan would direct. This wouldn’t be a sequel to Superman Returns but a completely fresh franchise.

Read the full piece here.

Born in 1916 in Brooklyn, Gleason was no stranger to tragedy. His sickly brother died when he was three, and his mother died when he was nineteen. But it was his father vanishing that gouged the biggest hole in his soul. “I was about nine when one day my pop didn’t come home,” Gleason said in later years. “A few days before, my mom and he had a violent argument and he took every picture out of the house that had him in it. That should have been the tip-off, but I was too young to know.”

The sudden loss sent both him and his mother into an emotional tailspin. “On Christmas Eve, Mom and I went to midnight mass at Our Lady of Lourdes church. I prayed that Pop was still alive — and that he would come back to us. I was scared to death.” But all the prayers came to naught, and his dad’s disappearance haunted him for the rest of his life:

If he had only dropped by once to say hello. Surely, he must have seen me on TV. Everybody else in the country did. I never was angry about Pop leaving us. I figured there must be something between him and Mom that I didn’t know about. He always was OK with me. He had a great sense of humor, that I do remember.

If he had just dropped by once. Just once.

Gleason’s school years were rebellious, but performing in an eighth-grade play changed his life. At one point a microphone tipped over and the school principal ran out to set it aright. Almost without thinking Gleason looked out at the audience, pointed at the departing principal with his thumb in classic Ralph Kramden fashion, and quipped, “That’s the first thing you have ever done for this school.” It brought the house down, and on the way home his Mom gave him his first review: “You were good — but too damn fresh.” At that moment he knew he wanted — needed — to be on stage.

He began emceeing local auto shows, and by age twelve was frequenting billiard halls and developing into a competent pool shark, a skill that would lend authenticity to his Academy Award nominated performance in The Hustler decades later. After his Mother died he went to downtown New York and began seeking out gigs at bars and nightclubs, and quickly he realized that he was far funnier drunk than sober. Alcohol would become a crutch, a salve, and a joy for the rest of his life.

Through dogged perseverance he clawed his way up to Broadway shows, and eventually caught the attention of Jack Warner, head of the Warner Brothers movie studio, who signed him to a Hollywood contract. Bit parts in movies followed, but it was the budding medium of television that really sent his career into high gear. A series of increasingly successful shows led him to his career triumph, The Honeymooners:

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The now-legendary program was a perfect storm of talent and genius. Various lines from that show and others — “And away we go!”, “How sweet it is!”, “Do you wanna go to the moon?”, “POW! Right in the kisser!”, “Baby, you’re the greatest.” — all became a part of the national vernacular. Gleason became known as a fun-loving carpe diem celebrity and a comedian nonpareil. But by the Seventies, his glory days were long behind him.

Then one day he got a script in the mail from Hal Needham.

The part as written was small and fairly nondescript, but Needham promised he could improvise — every word if need be. Gleason, an improv master who disdained following scripts, was intrigued. Here was a rare, late-career chance to build a character from the ground up, just like in the old days. Just about any other screenwriter/director would have balked at letting an actor toss out the screenplay, but Needham figured that “You’re messin’ with perfection when you try to tell Jackie Gleason how to be funny.”

The movie’s other big star agreed. Since both actors lived in Florida, Burt Reynolds paid his elder a visit. When he asked the old master how he thought the sheriff should be played, Gleason replied with an emphatic, “I see him as talking filthy!” According to Reynolds, he then “did an impression of a Southern sheriff that caused me to fall down laughing. Overly polite to women, Jackie explained, those sheriffs would get the man and say, ‘Look, you sumbitch, what the f*** you think you’re doin’?”

“I knew when Burt and Hal Needham the director wanted me to play that sheriff, I had to come up with something different,” Gleason said later. “The redneck sheriff had been done too often before. That’s why I drew the pencil mustache and came up with the expression ‘sumbitch.’”

There’s a perception among many critics and even fans that Buford T. Justice is a ridiculous clown of a character unworthy of the same respect Gleason gets for earlier roles like Ralph Kramden, Joe the Bartender, and Reginald Van Gleason the Third. In truth, the performance is hardly one-note, or even particularly outrageous. Far from being a hopeless doofus, Sheriff Justice starts out as a formidable adversary. His opening scene shows him (aside for the antics of his dumb son) expertly handling a bunch of kids stripping his son’s wedding car. Throughout the film he veers between the outward politeness and decorum expected of a respected officer of the law, and explosions of frustration at barely missing his wily quarry. It’s a character that has a surprisingly realistic core despite the lunacy of the stunts and the high-octane chases, just as Ralph Kramden could get caught up in the silliest situations and yet always come across as a true, emotionally resonant personality and not a cartoon.

Of course, just like with his past great characters, Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit gave audiences a host of new lines of dialogue to add to the pop-culture vernacular:

“What we’re dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the Law.”

“Put da evidence in da car.”

“I’m gonna barbecue your ass in molasses!”

“Where are you, you sumbitch!?!”

There are comic moments in this movie that have seldom been equaled, and I can still remember the thunderous explosions of laughter that erupted from 1977 audiences watching Gleason on screen. At one point, when a rival sheriff tells him that something “isn’t germane to this situation,” Gleason replies with a seething, “The goddamn Germans got nothing to do with it!” At another juncture, as a long funeral procession has temporarily halted the pursuit, Gleason reluctantly stops his car, removes his hat in a sign of respect, and growls under his breath: “If they’d cremated the sonofabitch, I’d be kickin’ that Mr. Bandit’s ass around the moon by now.”

All of these lines, great and small, were improvised by Gleason on the set, frequently accompanied by gales of laughter from the cast and crew. No expert comedy writers, no years of developing drafts — just a grandmaster bringing forty years of experience to bear on a role with no interference.

“Jackie was brilliant on his own,” Reynolds says, “For instance, it was his idea to have the toilet paper coming out of his pant-leg when he left the Bar-B-Q, which put me on the floor.” A master improviser himself, the younger actor expertly played straight man to Gleason, letting him get most of the big laughs and in the process becoming Gleason’s finest comic foil since Art Carney’s Ed Norton from The Honeymooners. “I have always prided myself on being able to make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” Reynolds says with typical self-effacement, “but Jackie can make it into cordon bleu.”

Smokey and the Bandit helped Gleason as much as Gleason helped it, but it was for all practical purposes his last hurrah. The next year, he suffered a heart attack on stage and had a triple-bypass. He kept acting for another decade, a period that included two terrible Smokey sequels. Smokey II did well (even the thoroughly awful Smokey III made a bit of money) but his other movies flopped, and his health deteriorated with them. He died in 1987, on the heels of his final role, Nothing in Common, with a young Tom Hanks.

In all probability, history will primarily remember him for two roles: Ralph Kramden (there’s even a statue of Gleason as Kramden in front of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey bus terminal) and Buford T. Justice. Of course, not everyone agrees with this assessment. In the single worst biography on Jackie Gleason (and, not coincidentally, the one most embraced by critics and fans on the left), the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author William A. Henry III provides us with an uncharitable description of the aged comedian during the period of his Smokey and the Bandit renaissance. Deriding the often-sweet Bandit as “a coarse movie,” Henry sees the sixty-year-old Gleason as

a pathetic sot. Trapped in the lifestyle and bad habits of the forties while living in a society obsessively self-absorbed with the health consciousness of the eighties, this Gleason was merely a clown, the only interesting element about him the hint of willful self-destruction in his sprees.

With a sneer, Henry goes on to reluctantly grant that, “Gleason claimed to have improvised much of his role, which is not implausible given the general state of the script, and he inspired Burt Reynolds to describe him as the greatest genius Reynolds had worked with (one must note that Olivier, Gielgud, Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman do not adorn Reynolds’ resume.)”

Yes, “one must note,” mustn’t one? This line of attack always cracks me up. Which great American actors, pray tell, have Bergman and Kurosawa adorning their resumes? And are Laurence “Clash of the Titans” Olivier and John “Arthur” Gielgud really not to be spoken of in the same breath as (to take a sampling from Reynolds’ resume) Lee Marvin, Dana Andrews, Darren McGavin, Harry Dean Stanton, Howard Keel, Ossie Davis, Melvyn Douglas, Yul Brenner, Jon Voight, Woody Allen, Gene Hackman, Lotte Lenya, Myrna Loy, Pat O’Brien, Charles Durning, David Niven, Jessica Tandy, Julie Andrews, Clint Eastwood, and Hal Holbrook?

The truth is that Jackie Gleason was a genius, Reynolds’ pride in starring alongside him is perfectly valid, and it is a truly uncharitable soul who sneers at the “lifestyle and bad habits of the forties.” At one point during the filming of Smokey and the Bandit, Gleason was well into his lunchtime cups (friends recall his usual noon repast as being “six double scotches with no ice, no soda, no water, and no food”). Suddenly there was a loud crash — Gleason had fallen backward in his chair, upending it and tumbling to the ground. Heart attack? Stroke? Reynolds and the rest of the crew rushed over. There was the fallen chair, with Gleason’s two legs sticking up in the air behind it and one arm stretched skyward like the Statue of Liberty, holding aloft a cup brimming with booze. From behind the wreckage came muffled laughter and a slurred cry of triumph: “I didn’t spill a drop!”

They called him The Great One for a reason, folks.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we dig into the production of Smokey and the Bandit, and look at how a neophyte director and a largely improvisational cast managed to create a comedy classic.

Previous posts in the series “Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds and Smokey and the Bandit”:

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Jackie Gleason in Modern Drunkard magazine: One of the joys in researching Gleason was discovering this wonderful journal. Part serious effort to turn back the relentless encroachment of the nanny-state where drinking and fun are concerned, part Mad Magazine/National Lampoon laugh-fest, editor Frank Kelly Rich clearly has a blast tweaking the tender sensibilities of the humorless, life-crushing, nightmare Utopians on the Left. But under the jokes and parodies lies a serious and principled defense of basic freedoms and one’s right to engage in a healthy enjoyment and relish of life. Definitely read his excellent overview of Jackie during his prime, and also check out the hilarious “Clash of the Tightest” elimination tournament staged to determine the greatest boozer of all time. You think Gleason has a chance to take the title from the likes of Hemingway, Poe, Bukowski, Thomas, Fitzgerald, Byron, Burton, Ruth, and Bogart? Click on the link to find out.

Here’s a rare YouTube video showing Jackie Gleason coming out for Richard Nixon for President in 1968, at the very height of the hippie madness. “How sweeeet it is!”:

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There’s tons more Gleason material on YouTube — interviews, television clips, even musical numbers he composed. Grab a cocktail and happy browsing.

For some reason Serling presents that twist as though it’s a bad thing. I don’t know, sounds like a plan to me, and  if there’s one movie-world on this list that I would want to transport myself into it would be “Christmas in Connecticut.”

This 1945 Warner Brothers’ charmer is as light as the souffle Barbara Stanwyck’s magazine writer, Elizabeth Lane, pretends she can cook for thousands of magazine readers and now will have to in reality if she’s to keep her job. Using recipes from her Uncle Feliz (the terrific S.Z. Sakall), Lane has crafted an identity for her readers and employers that doesn’t exist. Everyone believes she’s a Connecticut housewife with a newborn baby living on a storybook farm when in reality she’s single, childless, can’t boil an egg, and living in a cramped New York City apartment. As expected, topsy soon goes turvy and for the Christmas holidays her boss (an absolutely delightful Sydney Greenstreet) decides to offer a returning soldier (Dennis Morgan) a Christmas weekend with Lane on her storybook farm. Oh, yes, and the boss would like to join them.

You can see how the story will unspool from here but it doesn’t really matter because the fun is in watching these immortal players bounce around the effortless plot complications and somehow work it all out in the end.

But at the center of it all is the stunning Stanwyck, whose screen presence was a trifecta of perfection: Brains and incredible sex appeal without ever losing that girl-next-door quality — though that’s not the only reason I would like to live in this movie.

What a wonderful place to visit: America in 1945, the war all but won, in Manhattan and the countryside with a splendid group of character actors … and my only competition Dennis Morgan, who I’m pretty sure I could eliminate as competition for the luminous Stanwyck with a frying pan from behind.

As the greenies would say, that’s unsustainable. Comic books used to be common. If you went in any kids house in the 50s or early 60s you would probably find some. Not so much anymore. Comics once sold everywhere magazines were sold. You could buy them in drug stores, supermarkets, seven-elevens, newsstands, even some liquor stores. But the so called “newsstand market” was a hostile place to comics publishers, and a shrinking one.

These days, it’s hard to find comics anywhere outside of the comic book store. That means that comics have become a “destination product.” It’s something you need to know where it’s sold, you have to physically go there and if you’re lucky, they might have what you’re looking for. However, most comics retailers order to sell out. So the odds are, you may be unlucky if you don’t come on “comics day,” the day the books come in from the distributor.

And that’s another problem with comics these days. There is only one distributor. When I got in the business in the mid 80s, there were around ten distributors. But over the years they all went under leaving Diamond Comics as the sole place publishers can distribute through to the “Direct Market,” as we call it. It’s like government run health care, if there’s only one place to go for your needs, you have to like their terms.

To complicate matters, the stresses of running a comics distributor in this economy has hurt the last remaining company. They have had their share of layoffs and warehouse closings. If that wasn’t scary enough for comics pros, Marvel just got bought by Disney, DC just reorganized under Warner Brothers, and long time publisher Paul Levitz was moved out. There is now a Hollywood person running DC. The future of the direct market may be uncertain at this point.

Marvel and DC are what we call the “Big Two.” They are the largest and oldest publishers in the business. They drive the industry. If they decided to pull out of the direct market for some reason, they would effectively be turning out the lights on the rest of the publishers. There are many other comics publishers, but they can’t live on the book store market alone.

This situation is reminiscent of the industry in the late 70s. Newsstand distribution for comics was dying off and Marvel and DC were on the ropes. DC was looking to go to reprint material. No new stories. But a couple things happened that saved comics at that point, the birth of the “direct market” and the success of “Superman: The Movie,” and a few years later, the movie “Batman.” These re-energized the business in a big way which lead to a new boom in the early 90s.

Besides distribution, the other problem with comics now is the cost. You used to easily be able to sample new comics because they were so cheap. Now, if you can find them, they cost so much it’s hard for the average person to give a new book a try. That makes it extremely hard for new books to make it. And the industry needs to ideas. It can’t rely purely on old characters to keep going.

Enter the digital age. When music downloading became popular, fans started scanning comic book pages and uploading whole comics series online to torrent sites. In Japan, they started making comics (aka manga) available for download on your cell phone. And many comics started to run exclusively on the Internet. Marvel even started making their books available on the web by subscription to the service.

Print is dying, not just for newspapers and magazines. The cost of printing and paper, the problems with accounting for sales and waste in the newsstand business is what made it unviable for comics. Newspapers, magazines and books have been feeling the pinch for years. But the digital age is showing them a new path to future growth.

Digital book readers like Amazon’s Kindle started to grow in popularity. Sony’s Reader looked to be a threat, but now Apple’s rumored tablet PC may become the iPod for readable media.

Tablet PCs will be the future of the personal computer, being lighter than laptops, having touch screen interfaces, it will be like having a notepad you can take anywhere and work on. Except it will have Internet access, it’ll be a computer and you’ll be able to use it to read any book or comic. You can read in bed, on the beach, the toilet, everywhere you can take a book or magazine.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, major publishers may even be working with a software company to bring comics to that medium. And this can be a game changer.

Like iTunes was to music, electronic publishing on a tablet PC will be much more appealing than reading a comic on a computer monitor. With a tablet PC, you aren’t stuck to your desk or a heavy laptop. The tablet PCs will be as light as a book. Lighter even.

But even better, the two strikes against current comics will be removed. They will no longer be “destination products.” You will be able to get them anywhere, download them from the net right onto your tablet. And they will no longer be cost prohibitive. You might even see the return of the 25 cent comic. Imagine that.

Books, magazines and newspapers will more than likely follow suit.

And the tablet won’t be the only place you can get your comics. Marvel has just signed a deal with a company called Panelfly to bring comics to the iPhone. Expect to see the software or a competitor migrate to Google’s Android, as that open source platform will become more ubiquitous than Apple’s.

So if the “big two” decide to bail on the direct market (which we all hope they don’t), there are still plenty of places comics can go to survive. If anything, the future of comics looks bright if they can escape the shackles of print media.

For traditionalists who like the old printed form, there will always be collected trades. Those are increasingly available in book stores which is the other place comics have migrated to.

As it happens, I’m acquainted with Scott Peters who developed and wrote the remake of “V” for ABC.  Mr. Peters was also the creator and executive producer of “The 4400” and a writer for “The Outer Limits.” As far as I know Mr. Peters has only made one mistake in his career and that was directing me in the low-budget film “Don: Plain and Tall” back in 2003. It was the story of my friend comedian Don McMillan’s life as a comic. I played myself in the film and the part was horribly miscast. 

When I started reading some of the rumors and theories about Mr. Peters’ latest show and the behind-the-scenes politics, I laughed out loud.  Let me try to shed some light on the “V” controversy.

The script was not written as a roman a clef or allegory for the Obama administration. The script was written by Mr. Peters during the Bush administration and started before Mr. Obama clinched the nomination. The author, Mr. Peters, is not some evil sleeper right-winger/Obama hater. Mr. Peters, besides being a talented writer and director is a gay man, legally married in California, very liberal politically and a dedicated supporter of the President’s campaign. If he’s a mole for some right-wing conspiracy he may be the most committed spy ever. Mr. Peters, who was born in Canada, recently became an American citizen; a process he tried to expedite so he could vote for Mr. Obama, a deadline he missed by two days.

Unfortunately for Mr. Peters, this isn’t the first time in his career that fans or critics saw things in his work he didn’t intend. Some fans of “The 4400” saw hidden meaning in those episodes too. At first, Mr. Peters would try to respond, but eventually he had to quit paying attention as the theories got more and more bizarre.

Mr. Peters’ replacement as showrunner by Scott Rosenbaum isn’t due to some political move at ABC. From reports I’ve received from informed sources, Peters is well-liked by the network. The show’s being produced at Warner Brothers and there appears to be some friction between the network’s vision for the show and Warner Brother’s. Mr. Peters’ replacement was being worked on well before the show aired and became a hit.

Sometimes we all, left and right, get it wrong. So next week just try to enjoy the show because to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a TV show is just a TV show.

[Editor: This post was updated to correct a factual mistake. Mr. Peters did not donate to Barack Obama's campaign before becoming a U.S. citizen.]

Jimmy Cagney in the early 1930s

Produced in 1949, within just a few minutes “White Heat” announces itself as something unlike anything that came before starting with the introduction of Verna Jarrett (29 year old Virginia Mayo), a striking, almost regal beauty shown fast asleep in a close up. Walsh immediately knocks the bark off his perfectly groomed leading lady by having her snore like a sailor after a three day bender. The message is clear: don’t believe everything you see. In just a few more minutes things will move even further beyond normal and straight into disturbing.  

You know something, Verna, if I turn my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there’d be a hole in it.

Verna’s 50 year old husband is Cody Jarrett (Cagney), a thumb-shaped psychotic holed up in the middle of nowhere with a half-dozen cabin-fevered gunsels eager to split the loot they scored in the opening sequence, an audacious train robbery that ended with Jarrett shooting two conductors in cold, grinning, steel-eyed blood. Jarrett’s five-foot-nothing stature means nothing. Swaggering brutality is his currency and though outnumbered he looms over his mutinous gang with the promise that any challenge can only end in death, very likely theirs. They back off.

I told you to keep away from that radio. If that battery is dead it’ll have company.

But the stress of confrontation brings headaches, horrible ones, migraines that throw Cody in a disoriented spin of suffering. He mewls like a cat, bounces off the walls and finds comfort in only one place: the lap of his aged mother (a ghoulish, shark-eyed Margaret Mycherly). Pouty and feeling sorry for himself, he sits there like a toddler with a boo boo as she rubs his ailing head.

Creepy can’t begin to describe the haunting scene of a middle-aged man cradled in the arms of his cold, manipulative mother. The staging of the moment is what makes it so effective and memorable. Nothing prepares you. No score or camera movement announce anything out of the ordinary and the actors play the scene as matter-of-factly as a walk down the street. The net effect is to make you feel like the unlucky witness to something very, very wrong.

Top of the world, Son.
Don’t know what I’d do without you, Ma.

“White Heat” has a whole lot of plot to get through so not much time passes before the cops find Cody and he lands in the Big House. Only thing is that he outsmarted them coppers with a pre-planned alibi to avoid a murder-one rap and the electric chair. Jarrett confesses to a nothing crime he set up in another state and in return receives an air-tight alibi and a two-year stretch. The Los Angeles Treasury Department is on to Cody, however, and arrange for undercover agent Vic Pardo (Edmond O’Brien) to befriend Cody as his cellmate.

And that’s all the plot you’re getting from me.

The Mighty Cagney and The Mighty Edmond O’Brien

Cagney is so good, so overwhelmingly, blazingly good that you have to watch the picture a few times before the greatness around him can come into focus and receive the appreciation deserved, starting with an outstanding story loaded with exciting, unpredictable turning points and paced with precision. Much of the production is filmed on location with a number of impressive shots of downtown Los Angeles.

It’s always “somebody tipped them.” Never “the cops are smart.”

Better still, ‘White Heat” takes you deep into the gears of the then-modern world of investigative procedure and does what great movies do, shows you around on a tour of how things work. The Treasury Dept. uses all kinds of interesting stuff to locate and track Jarrett: Fingerprinting, facial casts, this coolio gizmo called a spectrograph, and this even cooler thing called an oscillator that’s about the size of a toaster and works as an automobile tracking device.

Yes, on top of all that flinty dialogue, elaborate heisting, a visit to the Big House, and Cagney at his menacing, charismatic best, you’re watching “CSI: Fedora.”

You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood, would ya?
No, I’ll let ya warm up a little.

Max Steiner is his usual genius setting the proceedings to a score that enhances without ever getting in the way and as Verna, Virginia Mayo gives the performance of her career as the worst of the bunch. Other than her own pleasure, Verna is loyal to nothing and no one – just a beautiful, dangerous, not very bright, bundle of relentless need.

Edmond O’Brien – an Oscar-winning character actor who deserves more recognition – plays it cool and professional, an excellent plan for any actor hoping to not get swamped by a Jimmy Cagney who excelled at scene stealing, and was never above using a prop to do so. One of my favorite actorly moments is a scene where as soon as his lines begin Cagney grabs O’Brien’s prop (a stick). Believe me, Cagney understood the power of an actor fiddling with something, which brings me to that chicken leg…

There are three unforgettable scenes, my personal favorite being Jarrett’s cavalier revenge-killing of a man locked in a car trunk.

How ya doin’, Parker?
It’s stuffy in here, I need some air.
Oh, stuffy, huh? I’ll give ya a little air.

As Jarrett gives Parker a little air with four bullet holes through the trunk, he munches a chicken leg – the kind of touch that adds a vibrant dynamic to the scene whether you consciously notice it or not.

Remarkably, Cagney wasn’t even nominated for his now-iconic work here. Not to begrudge those who were but did any one of these nominees carry off a moment even close to this?

Or this?

“White Heat” remains as powerful and entertaining sixty-years on because the goals of its creators are grounded in the modest, timeless idea of gathering together the most gifted of artists to tell the best story possible. That might sound like an old-fashioned concept among the sophisticates, but long after the intellectual fad of postmodernism joins the hula hoop and the lava lamp, Cody Jarrett will live on.

Reese Witherspoon voices Ginormica, a 49-foot-tall woman with an awesome figure. More to love. But her fiance is a sleazy weatherman from Modesto, as if there’s any other kind. Ginormica is the straight person in the adventure; she carries the hero’s burden of bringing any kind of depth or drama to a 90 minute farce. Her comedy relief side-kicks are fish man, cockroach man, a big Mothra maggot and the show stealing gelatinous B.O.B. voiced by Seth Rogen.

I can’t say my take on the movie is unbiased, in that I know half of the animators on the project and am a huge fan of Dreamworks animation. I’ve met director Conrad Vernon and am a huge fan of Katzenberg.

Folks might make the mistake of comparing Dreamworks’ features to Pixar works. These are completely different companies and they appeal to different aspects of the broadest audience. Like the classic Disney animation model, Pixar’s works are richer, subtler, and more technically accomplished. But Dreamworks Animation calls to mind classic Warner Brothers’ cartoons that were low-brow, sarcastic, and populist. “Monsters vs. Aliens” is blue collar entertainment and as I looked around at the audience of happy families, I was very thankful that these kinds of movies are still being made. With most of Dreamworks animated features selling north of $250 million at the box office, they help keep family entertainment profitable and viable.

As a fan of monster movies, ’50s sci-fi, and Godzilla flicks, “Monsters vs. Aliens” offers layers of jokes on top of tributes on top of some unashamed clunkers. I always admire a guy who can tell a joke he knows is stupid but isn’t trying to impress with his I.Q. when he’s trying to share a laugh.

The 3D movie experience felt like an unnecessary gimmick–usually I found myself thinking about the layered effects instead of the story.  The movie trailers for a bunch of other 3D movies coming out didn’t show any real promise either.

Finally, on the way home I turned around to Edward and Ahmi and asked, “Thumbs up or thumbs down?” They both smiled and put their thumbs up. They already requested the DVD when it comes out.