The Sting is fifty years old — fifty! — which means I'm even older. I saw it in a theater with my dad and little brother when it came out. Maybe my all-time favorite movie-going experience was hearing my dad groan at what was then the entirely predictable end of the movie then him laughing with pure pleasure when it turned out not to be. For years prior to that — thanks to the suffocating morality of the Production Code then the hipster nihilism of the New Wave — caper films always ended the same empty way. The Sting was something new.
Of course, now the end of The Sting is predictable and the nihilism of postwar noir feels fresh. These things run in cycles.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I wasted most of Sunday afternoon writing a long essay explaining why I'm not nominating Marlon Brando this time around for his performance in Last Tango in Paris, and then I realized I didn't care — and if I don't, why should you?
Suffice it to say, it's a lousy performance in a terrible movie, and what the likes of Pauline Kael once saw in it eludes me. (You can read her infamous review here.) As Andre Soares put it in his review for Alt Film Guide (here), "the film will feel erotic only to those who can't spell the word 'sex.'" The disturbing revelations about Tango's production history (recounted here) only underscore my distaste for this repellent product.
Brando's work in Tango still has its champions (here), and if you're a fan, I say good for you, but twelve of the fifteen alternate Oscar sites I follow fail to mention him at all, and as great as Brando often was, this performance rightly belongs in the dustbin of cinema history.
By the way, if you're wondering how the votes I am not revisiting turned out, The Sting won the alternate Oscar for best picture in a squeaker; Liv Ullmann won best actress for Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage; Ingmar Bergman won best director for the same two movies; and Harriet Andersson edged out Valentina Cortese for best supporting actress.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a . Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Note: Tatum O'Neal won best supporting actress for Paper Moon despite being on screen for all but something like 3 minutes of the movie, so I put her in the lead category where she belongs.
1973 was as good to the ex-Beatles as 1972 was rough. Paul went to Nigeria and found his mojo, George released his underrated followup to All Things Must Pass, and Ringo finally recorded a rock n roll record and knocked it out of the park. Only John was having a down year, beginning the drunken odyssey now known as "The Lost Weekend" — a weekend that lasted eighteen months.
The Beatles Solo: 1973
SIDE ONE
● Band on the Run – Paul (5:13) (After a series of critical pastings, Paul was looking to get out of town and chose to record his next album at the EMI studios in Lagos, Nigeria, for no real reason other than that it wasn't as far away as China. Just before leaving for Africa, two members of the band quit — guitarist Henry McCullough because he was tired of Paul telling him how to play; and Denny Seiwell because he didn't want to make the trip. Rather than the funny, sunny vacation Paul envisioned, Lagos was all rain, biting insects and a mugging at knifepoint. But maybe the unpleasantness gave the sessions some urgency because it was McCartney's best record yet. A #1 hit in the U.S., the title track was stitched together from three song fragments including one based on George Harrison's promise to give away all his possessions if he could escape yet another interminable business meeting. As an ex-lawyer, I feel his pain.)
● Jet – Paul (4:09) (Named for a black lab and rhymed with suffragette for no real reason at all. The first single released from Band on the Run, "Jet" hit #1 hit in the U.S., #7 in the UK.)
● I Know (I Know) – John (3:14) (After the critical and commercial failure of Some Time in New York City, Lennon retreated from music and politics for over a year. He finally returned to the studio, perhaps embarrassed that Yoko had recorded not one but two albums during the break. John later poo-poo'ed the resulting album, Mind Games, but it did make it to #9 in the U.S. charts. I don't mind the heavy reverb Lennon laid on top of the record as much as some critics, but I think the acoustic demo version of this song — which some hear as an apology to McCartney for "How Do You Sleep," others as recognition that his marriage to Yoko was falling apart — is clearly superior to the album version. From the John Lennon Anthology box set.)
● Don't Let Me Wait Too Long – George (2:59) (Overall, I think All Things Must Pass is the best of George's solo albums, but I actually prefer the four songs I've selected from 1973's Living in the Material World to anything on the former.)
● Oh, My My – Ringo (4:17) (Ringo's return to the studio after three years spent making movies. All four Beatles worked on Ringo, but not all at the same time, the closest they ever got to a reunion. The third single released from the album, "Oh My My" was a top five hit in the U.S.)
SIDE TWO
● Mind Games – John (4:15) (Originally written as "Make Love, Not War," Lennon had grown wary of political sloganeering after the Some Time debacle. You know, you want to be self-conscious enough to work hard, but not so self-conscious you don't work at all. Which somehow reminds me of a post-game conversation Washington quarterback Kirk Cousins had with New England legend Tom Brady yesterday after the Patriots beat-down of the R'Skins. In so many words, Cousins asked him when do you know you've made it, and Brady told him he's still working on it. Which probably explains the four Super Bowl victories. Well, that and the cheating. I kid.)
● Mrs. Vandebilt – Paul (4:42) (Only today did I realize that McCartney had misspelled "Vanderbilt" on this track. What, they didn't have auto-correct in 1973? First added to his live shows in 2008 when it topped a Ukranian poll of song requests before a free concert in Kiev.)
● You're Sixteen – Ringo (2:48) (An ex-Beatle rides a wave of nostalgia for all things pre-Beatles and scores the biggest hit of his solo career. It's here because it was #1 with a bullet, even outperforming the original by John Burnette, but from the vantage point of 2015, the notion of a 32 year old man singing a song about playing tonsil hockey with a 16 year old girl is creepy as hell. Not to mention illegal. By the way, that's not a kazoo on the recording, but Paul McCartney vocally imitating a saxophone.)
● The Day the World Gets Round – George (2:54) (Harrison had mixed feelings about the Concert for Bangladesh — happy so many people pulled together to make it happen, angry that it had to happen at all, disillusioned by the tax and legal wrangles afterwards. This song came out of that.)
● Let Me Roll It – Paul (4:51) (McCartney doing his best post-Beatles Lennon imitation, with heavy reverb and lyrics about finding love in the palm of your hand. A playful pastiche, loving spoof, or brutal boot-stomping depending on what your ears hear.)
● Out the Blue – John (3:21) (Lennon later dismissed this as "nothing special" but I am especially fond of Ken Ascher's piano solo. Written to celebrate his love for Yoko about ten minutes before she kicked him out of the house for a year and half.)
● Photograph – Ringo (3:57) (Another #1 hit for Ringo who was a hit machine there for a while. Credited to "Harrison-Starkey," the pair wrote it during the Cannes Film Festival two years earlier.)
● Bluebird – Paul (3:25) (Never one of my favorite songs, but I was outside Nationals Park when Paul played it for the sound check before the show there and I thought, in the words of somebody else, the worst you ever gave me is the best I ever had.)
● You Are Here – John (4:12) (The title is from Yoko's 1968 London art exhibition, the lyrics are a reworking of Kipling's maxim "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," and the music is what Lennon called "a Latinesque song in a ballad tradition." There's also a nice version on the John Lennon Anthology box set.)
SIDE FOUR
● I'm the Greatest – Ringo (3:22) (By now maybe you've noticed that each of the four "sides" of this cd collection kicks off with the first track from an ex-Beatles' 1973 solo record. Lennon wrote this one then gave it to Ringo, thinking critics would otherwise take it too seriously. John's demo shows up in the John Lennon Anthology box set.
● Helen Wheels – Paul (3:48) (A standalone single issued before Band on the Run, hitting #10 in America, Capitol Records insisted it also appear on the album in the U.S. to improve sales. Must have reminded Paul of the old days when Capitol carved up all the Beatles' records prior to Sgt. Pepper to make more sausage out of the same amount of meat.)
● Aisumasen (I'm Sorry) – John (4:44) (That's "Sneaky Pete" Kleinow on the steel pedal guitar.)
● Be Here Now – George (4:11) (The music came to George while he was drifting off to sleep, the title from Ram Dass's introductory text on Hinduism.)
● Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five – Paul (5:29) (McCartney came up with the first line — "No one ever left alive in nineteen hundred and eighty-five" — then took months to come up with a second. Ends with a reprise of "Band on the Run.")
Total running time: 79:31.
That's seven McCartney songs, five Lennon's, four Harrison's and four Starr's. The running total: Paul has pulled ahead with 30, John's in second with 28, George has 18 and Ringo 7. Under the rules of the game, though, Lennon and McCartney have to tie, so John has a little work to do on the last cd.
1972 was not a good year for ex-Beatles. John and Yoko's double album, Some Time in New York City, was a commercial and critical disaster. Paul had bottomed out following the disappointment of late-1971's hastily written and recorded Wild Life LP. Ringo had a hit with a single recorded the previous year but was otherwise silent. And George didn't record anything at all.
Altogether, about ten solid minutes of music.
But instead of skipping the year altogether, I swept up all the uncollected singles, B-sides and songs leftover from other albums, and with a handful of songs that appeared in 1973 but were written earlier, cobbled together a sort of Odds and Sods/Anthology. I mean, you gotta put "Cold Turkey" somewhere.
The Beatles Solo: 1972, sort of
SIDE ONE
● New York City – John (4:29) (From Some Time in New York City. The lyrics are lazy and the production values are sloppy, but otherwise this is a pretty good rocker. John and Yoko actually opened their double album with "Woman is the N***** of the World" — I can't bring myself to post its full name — which was something Yoko muttered to herself when first confronted with the misogyny of the London art world. I know Lennon thought he was making a point when he wrote a song around the sentiment and he doubled down by releasing it as a single, but it turns out it was the same point Ben Carson made when he compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery, i.e., that he's an idiot. I figure that by 1972 John was so accustomed to success that without someone of the stature of Paul, George or Ringo to say "no," he had grown to believe he could blow his nose and find 24-carat gold nuggets in the handkerchief. John was shattered when the critics and record-buying public apprised him otherwise. You know, there's nothing wrong with devoting yourself to a cause — thank God somebody does — John's problem was investing so much of his self-image in the assumption people would open their wallets and celebrate the effort because his name was "I Used To Be A Beatle.")
● John Sinclair – John (3:29) (Upon arriving in New York, Lennon's new-found pals requested a song in support of a local poet jailed for possession of marijuana. John later dismissed this effort as uninspired craftsmanship, but it's actually the best thing on Some Time in New York City. You can put your politics in a song — you can put anything in a song — as long as it's a good song. See, e.g., "Revolution" "Imagine" "Working Class Hero." Hell, even "Come Together" started as a political song.)
● C Moon – Paul (4:35) (The flip side of the single "Hi Hi Hi," released in time for Christmas 1972.)
● Hi Hi Hi – Paul (3:09) (This McCartney single, like "Give Ireland Back to the Irish," was banned by the BBC, here because of overt drug and sexual references. In protest, he recorded and released "Mary Had a Little Lamb," which in retrospect was the most offensive of the three.)
SIDE TWO
● Live and Let Die – Paul (3:13) (The theme song from the 1973 James Bond film, this was recorded in 1972. A #2 hit in the U.S., I can say from personal observation, it makes for a fantastic live performance.)
● Gimme Some Truth – John (3:17) (A leftover from Imagine, it fits right in with the rest of the agitprop.)
● Tomorrow – Paul (3:27) (In an overreaction to the critical beating the highly-polished Ram album took, McCartney taped Wild Life in one week, with five of the eight tracks recorded in a single take. John used to complain that Paul would work his songs to death in the studio trying to refine the sound he heard in his head, but while Lennon's songs often drifted farther and farther from his original vision with each take, McCartney's benefitted from the effort. Not everybody works the same way.)
● Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple) – John (4:12) (This was recorded in 1973 and released that year on Mind Games. But Lennon first recorded a demo of this in 1971 and, again, it fits with the political nature of his other 1972 releases.)
SIDE THREE
● Power to the People – John (3:19) (Recorded in October 1970, released as a single in March 1971, it hit #11 on the U.S. charts. I have to agree, though, with Hunter S. Thompson's savage assessment of the song which appears in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "John Lennon's political song, ten years too late. 'That poor fool should have stayed where he was,' said my attorney. 'Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.'" Of course, this was long before John's canonization as a secular saint. No doubt the good doctor's opinion mellowed over the years. You know, like the good doctor himself.)
● My Love – Paul (4:09) (After the critical failures of Ram and Wild Life, McCartney really had no idea what to do next. He spent most of 1972 recording what was going to be a double album called Red Rose Speedway, but in the end he cut it down to a single LP and even that only had two good songs on it, this and "Big Barn Bed." He released "My Love" as a single and it was a #1 hit in the U.S. It's polished enough to appear on Abbey Road while everything else on this c.d. sounds like it was recorded in my garage ...)
● If Not For You – George (3:33) (... well, except for George's numbers. He definitely did not record this in anybody's garage.)
● Isolation – John (2:53) (From Plastic Ono Band, this would have concluded "side one" of my 1970 collection if it had been a 90-minute cassette tape as originally envisioned.)
● Big Barn Bed – Paul (3:50) (From Red Rose Speedway, "Big Barn Bed" is perhaps the most obscure of McCartney's classic songs.)
SIDE FOUR
● Give Peace a Chance – John (4:54) (A single recorded in 1969 during John and Yoko's Bed-In Peace protest, it hit #14 in America, #2 in Britain.)
● Beware of Darkness – George (3:49) (The last of the songs I've raided from All Things Must Pass, fourteen in all. It's only now I realize that all fourteen are from disc one of the double cd, with none of disc two — four studio numbers and a live jam session — making the cut.)
● Bip Bop/Hey Diddle – Paul (3:37) ("Bip Bop" was the sort-of highlight of Wild Life, with this very off-the-cuff rendition appearing on Wingspan.)
● Early 1970 – Ringo (2:21) (The flip side of "It Don't Come Easy," Ringo made it clear with this open letter to his former band mates that he really, really, really wanted the Beatles to get back together.)
● Cold Turkey – John (5:01) (Part of me would like to think Paul made a big mistake turning down John's suggestion in the Fall of 1969 that "Cold Turkey" be the next Beatles single. Lennon's response was to quit the band and put the song out under his own name. How might have things played out if McCartney had said yes? But the fact is, at least three of the Beatles had been chaffing under the band's yoke since even before India. Lennon had wanted to put out "Across the Universe" "Revolution No. 1" and "Cold Turkey" as singles, Paul wanted to start playing live again which was a non-starter for his bandmates, and George offered up about half of All Things Must Pass only to have all those songs thumbed down. The Beatles were the most inventive, creative band in music history but the moment they started saying, no, we can't do that, they were done, put a fork in it. And put a fork in it, they did. The rest, as they say, is non-Beatles history.)
Total running time: 77:57.
Eight by Lennon, nine by McCartney, three by Harrison and one by Starr. In total now, Paul finally catches John at 23, George has 14 and Ringo 3.
Caught Theatre of Blood on the big screen at the AFI-Silver the other night. Starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg, Theatre of Blood is the story of a hammy Shakespearean actor (Price) who with the help of his daughter (Rigg) re-purposes various murder scenes from the Bard's works to take revenge on the critics who skewered him.
Vincent Price is at his most Vincent Price-y, Diana Rigg shows off both her very fine acting chops and her very fine legs. Also features supporting performances from a veritable who's-who of British character actors: Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Robert Morley, Dennis Price, Coral Browne, Milo O'Shea.
If you're an American of a certain age, surely you remember the series of educational short films that played every Saturday morning on the American Broadcasting Company from 1973 to 1985. Collectively known as "Schoolhouse Rock!", the series made its debut with "Three is a Magic Number" on this day forty years ago.
The series was the brain child of advertizing agent David McCall who was irked that his son knew the words to all the current pop songs but couldn't remember his multiplication tables. He called in Bob Dorough, a jazz pianist and occasional jingle writer, to come up with something. Dorough wrote most of the classic Schoolhouse Rock! jingles, and along with Jack Sheldon, sang many of them.
The series eventually expanded beyond math to include grammar, history, science, computers and economics.
Now, I have to admit that as a kid I was skeptical at first. There had been a move afoot for a couple of years by that point to tame Saturday morning cartoons, transforming them from the pure entertainment of Bullwinkle, Jonny Quest and Looney Tunes into bland nuggets of wholesome goodness—and trust me, kids weren't fooled one bit. As (I think) Shakespeare once said, that which sucks, sucks regardless of whether it's "good" for you or not.
Besides, who's to say that the cynically witty "Fractured Fairytales," for example, didn't serve me better in the long run?
But despite my initial resistance, Schoolhouse Rock quickly won me over and as with many kids my age, became a permanent part of the cultural flotsam and jetsam bobbing around in my brain.
If you don't know Schoolhouse Rock, or even if you do, here are three of the best:
The jazzy "Conjunction Junction":
The classic civics lesson, "I'm Just a Bill":
And a personal favorite, "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here":
Haven't had enough? You can catch all the Multiplication Rock videos here and Grammar Rock here. And I'll bet the rest are floating around out there, too!
If it had been in French instead of in English, if they'd called it L'arnaque instead of The Sting, we'd be talking about the best movie of 1973 in the same breath with Rififi, Bob le Flambeur and Le Samourai instead of dismissing it as mere escapist entertainment, nice for the masses but not worthy of our serious attention ...
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
Posts
