July, 2005
THE RETURN OF THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY
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I’ve been busy during the past few months working on a variety of DVD projects, all of which will see fruition by the end of the year: four new entries in the Walt Disney Treasures series (The Chronological Donald Duck, Volume 2... Walt Disney Rarities, including all of Walt’s one-shot cartoons and a handful of his silent Alice comedies... the complete first season of Spin and Marty, including the entire Mickey Mouse Club episode in which the serial was introduced... and Legendary Heroes: Elfego Baca and the Swamp Fox, taken from the Walt Disney Presents TV series)...the Harold Lloyd comedy library, set for release this fall from New Line Home Entertainment... and the films produced by John Wayne’s Batjac company. The first and most highly anticipated of the Wayne movies, The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky, are coming to DVD on August 2 from Paramount Home Video.
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The High and the Mighty has been one of the most-requested titles not available on video for the past twenty years. I don’t think anyone who remembers the 1954 hit will be disappointed; it’s still a big, entertaining movie, and the thundering Dimitri Tiomkin music is great to hear.
The High and the Mighty and other Batjac films (including non-Wayne movies like Wellman’s Track of the Cat and Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men From Now) are finally coming back into public view because Gretchen Wayne, the widow of John’s son Michael, has decided that it’s time. She’s been incredibly tenacious in making sure the films look and sound as good as today’s technology can make them, and on July 12 Paramount Home Video and AMC hosted a digital screening of Mighty that was a knockout. I can’t imagine a 35mm print looking any better than this widescreen presentation in the spacious Paramount theater.
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Among the attendees that night were people who worked on this and other Batjac movies, plus William Wellman Jr., who discusses his father’s work with both knowledge and passion on the commentary tracks of both Wayne movies.
The real discovery for me was Island in the Sky, a smaller-scale film made in 1953 by the Wellman and aviator/screenwriter Ernest K. Gann. Although it had some TV exposure many years ago, I’d never seen the film until I worked on this DVD project, and I think it’s a forgotten gem. Bill Wellman Jr. told me that although his father was very pleased with the success of The High and the Mighty, he felt even more closely connected to Island, which is a more intimate (and inspirational) story of flyers.
Part of the fun of preparing these DVDs has been talking to some of the films’ cast members, including Karen Sharpe, Pedro Gonzales Gonzales, Darryl Hickman, Harry Carey, Jr., and Jimmy Lydon, all of whom have interesting stories to tell.
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FROM THE RIDICULOUS TO THE SUBLIME...
I don’t know anybody who’s fond of blatant product placement in movies, but there’s a new variation that’s become my personal pet peeve.
In Disney’s Herbie: Fully Loaded the big race is covered by ESPN... a network owned by Disney.
In Paramount ’s War of the Worlds Tom Cruise encounters a reporter from CBS2 New York ... a station owned by Paramount ’s parent company Viacom.
In 20 th Century Fox’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, whenever a television set is on, it’s tuned to a Fox News Channel.
Even in Cinderella Man, set in the 1930s, the ringside radio broadcaster covering Jim Braddock’s fights is speaking into an NBC microphone...as in NBC Universal.
I understand corporate synergy, and if I were one of the bosses of News Corp. or Viacom I’d probably be looking for every opportunity to promote my various divisions, but these blatant corporate plugs are taking me out of the movies instead of blending seamlessly into the background.
I don’t suggest that Macy’s should promote Gimbel’s, if you know what I mean, but I’d rather see a make-believe TV network in these cases than endure more of this heavy-handed plugola.
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While I’m at it, I might as well spout off about postmodernism. I’ve had it with the cool, arm’s-length, self-reflexive attitude of so many filmmakers. Why offer something sincere and direct when you can strike a pose and show how hip you are?
The public has shown indifference to the new Bewitched movie, perhaps because they’re onto the game by now. They’d rather watch reruns of the 1960s TV series, with actors who actually embodied and cared about their characters, than a 21 st century riff on that show.
Perhaps the much-discussed “box-office slump” of 2005 can be attributed, at least in part, to movies no one actually wants to see, like Guess Who and Miss Congeniality 2, films based on premises or ideas rather than solid scripts by storytellers. OK, I’ll shut up now.
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People sometimes ask me what got me so hooked on movies when I was young. The answer has a lot to do with television, which in the 1950s was a living museum of movie history. Even the enormously popular Howdy Doody show ran old silent comedies all the time. That whet my appetite, and Robert Youngson’s 1958 compilation feature The Golden Age of Comedy sealed my fate. I wanted to see more of these films and learn more about them. (How lucky for me that Charlie Chaplin reissued his films in 1959; my mother took me, at the age of eight, to see Modern Times, which remains my all-time favorite Chaplin feature.) I also went to my local public library and checked out my first movie book, Mack Sennett’s autobiography King of Comedy.
Many years later my good friend, the late Herb Graff, had an opportunity to purchase a library of 16mm silent comedies which, it turns out, had been used on the Howdy Doody show. They were mostly unidentified, and they filled eight huge boxes. I volunteered to catalog the entire collection, just to have the chance to watch the films. Many were poor, some were good, and some mediocre comedies might yield one precious moment—an ingenious gag or idea—that made the whole project seem worthwhile.
I’ve been discouraged that so few people seem to share my love of silent comedy until recent years, when a groundswell of enthusiasm has erupted in a new generation of fans and aficionados. One of them, Paul Gierucki, has made his mark with his outstanding Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle DVD collection (see the Leonard’s Picks page); among his compatriots who contributed to the program booklet and commentary tracks are Richard M. Roberts, Bruce Lawton, and Steve Massa.
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Another hearty group is about to stage the third annual Slapsticon in Washington , D.C. on July 28-31, an event I’d love to attend but haven’t been able to so far; I wish it weren’t three thousand miles away. To learn more about this ambitious event and its perpetrators, go to www.slapsticon.org. I wish them every success.
If you’re interested in silent comedy but only know the work of the great masters I encourage you to check out a terrific series called Slap Happy, put together by Larry Stefan and Paul Lisy, with research by Richard M. Roberts.
Originally packaged in half-hour segments for use on PBS stations, the entire collection is now available on DVD at www.slaphappycomedies.com. Normally I wouldn’t be recommending excerpts from films instead of the complete titles, but what this canny team has done is to showcase dozens of silent comedies in a peppy, highly watchable format that makes the viewer want to see more. They’ve used exaggerated sound effects and vintage music as recreated by various retro bands (like Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks) to add to the fun.
While the films of Keaton and Chaplin are readily available, the work of many other silent clowns—even the original Our Gang kids—is much harder to find. Moreover, the Slap Happy series prunes the best moments out of one and two-reelers from Christie, Educational and other studios that might be difficult to wade through at full length. (I know; I’ve done it.)
Slap Happy is a slick, entertaining package. Many other silent comedies are now being offered by amateurs and entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of computer technology and the Internet to produce and distribute their own DVDs, which vary sharply in quality. Mark Roth’s www.reelclassicdvd.com offers a variety of titles, and while his enthusiasm is clear, the same can’t be said for all of his source material. I checked out a Harry Langdon disc that has some nice Mack Sennett titles, but the print quality is adequate at best. If you’re eager to have some of the rare silents in his catalog and are willing to settle for less than perfect quality, you may find these home-grown DVDs satisfying.
I’ve also tried out a few releases from www.sunrisesilents.com and been generally pleased. The entrepreneurial Rich Olivieri has prepared entire silent-film programs, accompanying a feature film with a comedy and a serial chapter, and even glass slides of coming attractions, and treating his 16mm prints with lots of t.l.c. (tinting, soft-edged windowboxing to shrink the entire image into the TV frame, original music scores).
If we lived in a perfect world, the major studios and the world’s leading film archives would be releasing vast quantities of silent films on DVD , but that is not the case, and not likely to be in the foreseeable future. The question then becomes one of pragmatism: is it better to see a decent print of a rare and charming film like The Eyes of Julia Deep (1915) with Mary Miles Minter from Sunrise Silents or not see it at all? I think avid film buffs will choose the former. (Olivieri is also doing something I’ve never seen before, reproducing rare fan magazines from the silent era in CD-R form, enabling one to “read” a 1915 or 1921 issue of Photoplay or Motion Picture Magazine on one’s computer screen.)
The best news of all in this domain: the Harold Lloyd collection is finally coming to DVD this fall from New Line Home Entertainment. I’m happy to report that I’m involved with the preparation of bonus material for the package.
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It’s genuinely disheartening to open the newspaper to the obituary page every day and see another familiar name in the headlines. I feel so fortunate that I got to know some of these people, even if just a little bit. Paul Winchell loomed large in my boyhood, and getting to chat with him in recent years was no small matter.
Ernest Lehman was one of the giants among screenwriters, and a very entertaining conversationalist to boot. I happened to see him as he was leaving the Academy Award ceremony in 1990, and he was genuinely proud of his honorary Oscar—the first ever awarded to a writer!
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Then there’s June Haver, one of the kindest, loveliest people I’ve ever met, a woman with a perpetual twinkle in her eye. Her daughters Katie and Laurie approached me at an event some years ago to thank me for a tribute I paid their father, Fred MacMurray, upon his passing. They then offered to introduce me to their mother, who was standing nearby. Seeing that twinkle, I ventured to tell her that she adorned the wall of my guest bathroom, hoping she’d find that funny—and she did. Years later, I led her to that bathroom and she squealed with delight, having forgotten the earlier conversation. Here is photographic evidence of that moment.
June was a deeply religious person, and I know she’s now free from pain and reunited with the love of her life. It’s the only consolation one can take when someone so warm and generous leaves our midst.
One final note: I recently hosted an evening in celebration of the late Joe Grant, put together by my friends and animation buffs Howard Green, Charles Solomon and Scott Johnston. It was inspiring to see how many people were touched by Joe’s creative spirit, right to the end of his life.
But I found the best epitaph in an unlikely place, the underground parking garage at the Disney animation building in Burbank . Joe had the best spot in the place with a special placard declaring “Reserved for Mr. Joe Grant.” Following his death, someone added some words at the top, so it now reads, “ A Place in Heaven is Reserved for Mr. Joe Grant.” Amen to that.