Happy New Year!

The Streets Will Run Red With Santas

My Favorite Performances By An Actress In The Sixties (A Baker's Dozen)

Monty of All Good Things is once again hosting his annual Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament this March. We here at the Monkey are proud to be handling the 1960s bracket.

To get into the mood, here's an idiosyncratic list of my favorite performances by an actress in the 1960s (in alphabetical order):

Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins). I could have also gone with The Americanization of Emily and The Sound of Music. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, indeed!

Doris Day (Lover Come Back). I prefer this pairing with Rock Hudson even over Pillow Talk.

Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany's). Charade is another personal favorite, but the scene where Holly Golightly crawls through the window into George Peppard's bed puts this over the top.

Sally Ann Howes (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). A doll on a music box.

Carolyn Jones (Television's The Addams Family). Katie-Bar-The-Door and I have modeled our marriage on Carolyn Jones' Morticia and John Astin's Gomez. Without the seven-foot butler.

Shirley Jones (The Music Man). Serves me right for not being musical.

Angela Lansbury (The Manchurian Candidate). Boy, and you think you've got mother issues ...

Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment). Probably my favorite performance from the 1960s.

Misfit Dolly (voiced by Corinne Conley) (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Who among is so hard-hearted not to be moved by the tears of a doll? Especially a red-headed doll?

Julie Newmar (recurring role on TV's Batman). Julie Newmar's stoner Catwoman and Frank Gorshin's speed-freak Riddler are two of the greatest comedy villains of all-time.

Paula Prentiss (Man's Favorite Sport?) I'd go fishing with Paula Prentiss any day.

Diana Rigg (On Her Majesty's Secret Service). You should also check her out in Theatre of Blood, a Vincent Price masterpiece.

Tippy Walker (The World Of Henry Orient) One of the most poignant performances of the decade. Read about this great lost talent in The New Yorker (here).

John Stephenson, The Voice Of My Childhood

Katie-Bar-The-Door and I have been watching old Perry Mason episodes on DVD the last week or so. Nothing like a little angst-free locked-room mystery (not to mention the coolest-looking lawyering job ever) to wind down at the end of the day.

In addition to trying to solve the mystery (I just point to everybody as they come on screen and say, "He did it!"), one of the games we wind up playing is "who is that guy again?" Everybody was on Perry Mason at one time or the other, faces you recognize but can't place the name. You know how it is. Our parents used to drive us nuts with this sort of thing, now we drive each other nuts.

Tonight, one of the suspects was a face that for once we didn't recognize—but that voice! We knew that voice. The actor's name was John Stephenson. Do you recognize his face?

How about if I told you he was the voice of these classic cartoon characters?

Mr. Slate (The Flintstones)

Dr. Benton Quest (Jonny Quest)

Fancy-Fancy (Top Cat)

The Sheriff (Scooby Doo, Where Are You!)

... and a whole lot of other voices. He was also the "In a minute, the results of that trial" narrator at the end of Dragnet. In fact, John Stephenson was pretty much the voice of my entire childhood. And the good news is, he's still out there, alive and kicking, still doing voice work. If my math is correct, he'll turn 90 on August 9th. How about that!

I don't know about you, but I feel just a little bit younger knowing he's still with us.

Mr. Stephenson, we here at the Monkey salute you!

Alexandra Petri's New Oscar Categories (Taken More Seriously Than She Intended) (Part Three)

(What is this? Read here.)

Best Performance in a Quentin Tarantino Movie
In case you haven't noticed, this is actually a pretty tough category. Several actors and actresses have given career performances in Tarantino's films—Michael Madsen, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Uma Thurman ...

Any one of whom would be a great choice. But I'm going with Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. Smart, smarmy, sinister, he might be the only actor in history who could make you sweat bullets simply by eating a strudel.

Best Performance With a Serious Disease
Oscar loves this sort of thing, but generally speaking, the Monkey doesn't. If a cartoon character's performance counted, I'd go with the two-part breast cancer episode of FX's spy spoof Archer. But that's television and we're talking movies, so I'm going with Greta Garbo in Camille. She makes dying look so beautiful and stylish, I almost wish I had tuberculosis.

Best Performance Where You Do a Lot of A-C-T-I-N-G and Arm-Waving
Meryl Streep owns this category, but I'll be honest with you—outside of her latter-day comedies, Meryl Streep's not really my cup of tea. Acting may indeed be hard, but I've always thought the best actors made it look easy. I'll take Cary Grant over Laurence Olivier any day.

I do enjoy some of the great ham actors of history—particularly John Barrymore and Wallace Beery—but among cinema's more serious-minded scenery-chewers, I'm quite fond of Kirk Douglas. And my favorite Kirk Douglas performance is that of bottom-feeder tabloid journalist Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, quite possibly the most cynical movie ever made.

Best Performance Where You Just Sit There and Your Eyes Get Sad
Usually with a pop tune playing in the background—a staple of bad television. But at the risk of enraging Douglas Fairbanks, I have to say Lon Chaney, the silent era's man of a thousand faces, did more acting with his eyes than nearly anyone I can think of. Being buried under all that makeup, he had to.

He gave many great performances, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, but maybe the one that depended the most on "sad eyes" was Laugh, Clown, Laugh, the story of an aging circus performer who raises an abandoned girl as his own only to find to his horror and his shame that when she grows to young womanhood he is falling hopelessly in love with her. A brilliant performance.

Best Performance With a Lot of Nudity That Was Probably Unnecessary But Not Unwelcome
The 1970s was the era of gratuitous nudity—at least one scene casually featuring bare breasts was pretty much de rigueur back then, especially in films that aspired to hip sophistication—but looking back at it now, the whole trend seems sexist, exploitative and even a bit creepy. So I'm jumping forward two decades to 1997's Titanic, a film that grossed something like a billion dollars, won the Oscar for best picture and has completely faded from my memory except for Kate Winslet's nude scene.

Bluenosed video store owners excised the footage from VHS copies of the movie without realizing Winslet's shapely bosom was the only part of the movie worth watching. I hope they at least had the good sense to stitch all that discarded tape together into a single endless loop.

Tomorrow: explosions, cross-overs, aging, manly tears and Citizen Kane.

40 Years Ago Today: The Debut Of Schoolhouse Rock!

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!

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1988)

A great year for Japanese anime. In fact, I think the two best pictures of the year were both animated features from Japan—Grave of the Fireflies, Isao Takahata's wrenching story of a brother and sister orphaned by the Allies' relentless fire bombing at the tail end of World War II; and on the other end of the emotional spectrum, Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro, a magical tale about a girl and her not-so-imaginary imaginary friend.

If you don't know Miyazaki's work, you've really shortchanged yourself. His film Spirited Away deservedly won the first Oscar for best animated feature back when that category was introduced in 2002. In addition to Totoro and Spirited Away, check out any of the following: Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, Ponyo ... actually, it's a pretty long list. You really can't go wrong with any Miyazaki.

It was also a great year for comedy—we got Bull Durham, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beetlejuice, The Naked Gun, Big and my pick, A Fish Called Wanda. All of them are better than any film I have penciled in for best drama.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Dangerous Liaisons (prod. Norma Heyman and Hank Moonjean)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: A Fish Called Wanda (prod. Michael Shamberg)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) (prod. Toru Hara)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Jeremy Irons (Dead Ringers)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Tom Hanks (Big)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Jodie Foster (The Accused)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jamie Lee Curtis (A Fish Called Wanda)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Isao Takahata (Hotaru no haka a.k.a. Grave Of The Fireflies)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Hayao Miyazaki (Tonari no Totoro a.k.a. My Neighbor Totoro)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Kevin Kline (A Fish Called Wanda)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being

SCREENPLAY
winner: Ron Shelton (Bull Durham)

One Hundred Years Of Chuck Jones

The great Chuck Jones was born one hundred years ago today.

My favorite of his cartoons:

Circus Polls, Circus Bunnies, Circus Movies

The results are in from the latest Monkey poll. By a one vote margin, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus is your favorite movie set in a circus.

The Elephant Man was second, Disney's animated classic Dumbo was third, and Tod Browning's cult classic Freaks was fourth. The Greatest Show on Earth and the Marx Brother's At the Circus finished far behind.

One commenter, however, "Anonymous," aka "my little brother," argues that the best circus movie of all time wasn't even in the poll: "I have a write-in candidate for greatest circus movie - "Big Top Bunny" - starring Bugs Bunny and Bruno, the high-flying trapeze artist bear - blessed with the gift of speech (with a Russian accent no less). Now THAT's quality my friends...."

As always, we here at the Monkey encourage you to judge for yourself:



Indeed, if you really want to judge for yourself, Erik Beck (of the Boston Becks) has alerted us to Turner Classic Movie's Sunday evening schedule which is devoted to circus-related movies. TCM kicks off the proceedings with none other than the Chaplin film that won our little poll.

From TCM's website:
Sunday, July 24, 2012

8:00 PM The Circus (1928)
In this silent film, the Little Tramp joins a circus to hide from the police.
Dir: Charles Chaplin Cast: Charles Chaplin, Merna Kennedy, Betty Morrissey. BW-72 mins

9:30 PM The Big Circus (1959)
A ringleader tries to keep his circus on the road despite the efforts of a saboteur.
Dir: Joseph M. Newman Cast: Victor Mature, Red Buttons, Rhonda Fleming. C-108 mins

11:30 PM The Circus Clown (1934)
A young man defies his father's wishes to join the circus.
Dir: Ray Enright Cast: Joe E. Brown, Patricia Ellis, Dorothy Burgess. BW-65 mins

12:45 AM Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928)
In this silent film, a circus clown falls for a young innocent in love with another.
Dir: Herbert Brenon Cast: Lon Chaney, Bernard Siegel, Loretta Young. BW-74 mins

2:15 AM La Strada (1954)
A traveling strongman buys a peasant girl to be his wife and co-star.
Dir: Federico Fellini Cast: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart. BW-108 mins

4:15 AM Merry Andrew (1958)
An archaeologist's search for Roman treasure gets him mixed up with a circus troupe.
Dir: Michael Kidd Cast: Danny Kaye, Pier Angeli, Baccaloni. C-103 mins Letterbox Format

The three I'd really encourage you to see are The Circus, Laugh, Clown, Laugh and La Strada, classics all. Hey, and now that Mad Men is done for the season, you have no excuses, right?

The Silent Oscars: 1912

For my money, the best of the early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.

The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:


Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.

PICTURE
winner: Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (prod. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov)
nominees: How A Mosquito Operates (prod. Winsor McCay); The Land Beyond The Sunset (prod. Edison Company); The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (prod. Biograph Company); Richard III (prod. J. Stuart Blackton and M.B. Dudley)

ACTOR
winner: Elmer Booth (The Musketeers of Pig Alley)
nominees: Martin Fuller (The Land Beyond The Sunset; Max Linder (The Pathé Frères Comedies)

ACTRESS
winner: Dorothy Bernard (The Girl And Her Trust)
nominees: Lillian Gish (The Unseen Enemy and The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Mary Pickford (The New York Hat); Ynez Seabury (The Sunbeam)

DIRECTOR
winner: Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Harold M. Shaw (The Land Beyond The Sunset)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Dorothy G. Shore (The Land Beyond The Sunset)
nominees: D.W. Griffith and Anita Loos (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)

SPECIAL AWARDS
G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (Cinematography) (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley)