Nikki Nicholson drank Captain Patrick Hendry under the table and the two woke up married after a brief ceremony in the hold of a cargo plane. Despite the whirlwind nature of the courtship, it appeared to be a match made in heaven—Nikki thinks Hendry's legs are "pretty" while Hendry has a thing for girls in fur pants.
They're currently honeymooning at a scientific outpost north of the Arctic Circle.
Meanwhile, a desperately hungry Ned Scott has become obsessed with wild blueberry muffins and continues to radio anyone who'll listen, asking for the recipe. "Keep watching the skies," he pleads, "also food blogs and the Cooking Channel—maybe Rachel Ray or the Cake Boss! Somebody's gotta know!"
And the self-styled "Disco Inferno," James Arness, is still smoking hot after his fiery entrance yesterday.
"Satisfaction, ooo hoo hoo hoo," he said later in an interview on CNN, "came in the chain reaction. I couldn't get enough so I had to self destruct, ooo hoo hoo hoo. The heat was on, rising to the top, huh! Everybody's goin' strong, ooo hoo hoo hoo, and that is when my spark got hot! I heard somebody say, 'Burn baby burn!—Disco inferno!'"
No word yet on whether his insurance company will cover the damages ...
Well, the final four is set and there are a couple of surprises.
As I would have guessed, Alfred Hitchcock continued his dominance of the Classic Hollywood bracket, soundly defeating Howard Hawks, 38-11.
And Akira Kurosawa easily dispatched Stanley Kubrick, 29-16, in the Art House Favorites bracket.
Of course, as Erik Beck of the Boston Becks pointed out, different seeding would likely have given us entirely different results.
The other two brackets resulted in mild upsets, at least in terms of the early Vegas betting line. Woody Allen edged Martin Scorsese by a single vote, 26-25, to win the Modern Era bracket. I confess, as a Woody Allen fan, I'm not unhappy about the result. Just mildly surprised.
In the Silent Era bracket, D.W. Griffith defeated one of my personal favorites, the always popular Buster Keaton, 24-22—and right after the Great Stone Face's birthday, at that! Personally, I didn't think Griffith had a chance. But if you've read my posts about him, you know I've come to the conclusion that Griffith belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of film directors, The Birth of a Nation notwithstanding.
All that aside, it's time for the Final Four matchups:
Alfred Hitchcock versus D.W. Griffith Akira Kurosawa versus Woody Allen
You have until Sunday, October 23, to cast your vote.
We ran into a headwind on our flight down from the scientific outpost near the North Pole and arrived a little after dawn.
Our pilot, Captain Hendry, had smashed through the plane's landing gear again ("An unavoidable accident," he said) and Ned Scott had forgotten his toothbrush, but other than that, we made it safely.
The party had been going since midnight and we were eager to join the festivities. Couples were dancing to the sensuous rhythms of Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, with Valentino and Pola Negri wrapped around each other in a particularly provocative tango. Others sipped champagne by flickering candlelight or were locked in intimate embrace in the ballroom's deep shadows.
It must have been colder out than I thought for our entrance was greeted with shouts of "Close the door!"
Our own group looked fabulous, if I must say so myself. Nikki Nicholson was daringly dolled up in diamonds and little else, Dr. Carrington had dressed down in a double-breasted blazer and turtleneck, and the Air Force contingent was in crisp dress uniforms. Dipping back in time, Katie-Bar-The-Door had selected a curve-hugging Givenchy gown from the Audrey Hepburn collection while I had opted for a classic black tuxedo.
"No one can see you dance in cyberspace," Katie insisted as she dragged me onto the floor. "Not to mention [our hostess] Tess Kincaid said that at the Willow Manor Ball, everybody dances like Astaire and Rogers—whether they do or not."
"Yeah," I said, "but what if that just means we do the same dance over and over again until we bleed into our shoes?" But she wasn't listening.
Meanwhile, our companions, scientists and Air Force officers alike, attacked the buffet table with a vengeance, filling their plates with delicious hors d'oeuvres, pastries and savories before smashing the dishes and sideboards with machine guns and axes.
Not only was the moment publicly embarrassing—and privately expensive—but Crew Chief Dewey Martin (see photo above) finished off the last of the goat cheese bruschetta before I got so much as a taste, much to my chagrin.
"Dr. Carrington," complained Ned Scott, who had been at the end of the line when the assault started and wound up going hungry, "I'm not gonna stick my neck out and say you're stuffed absolutely clean full of wild blueberry muffins, but I promise my readers are gonna think so."
"Oh, but I am," Carrington said. "They were delicious," then added, "Their development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors."
"Huh?"
"Who wants some coffee?" chirped Nikki.
Despite the socially-awkward incident with the buffet, things were going swimmingly until the James Arness ice sculpture thawed out and leapt off the center table. No wallflower he, Arness was determined to set the dance floor on fire—literally. "I'm a disco inferno!" he yelled. "Gangway!"
Gangway, indeed.
Tess was a good sport, as all good hostesses are, but we knew it was time to leave and with the appropriate apologies, we hustled out of there.
It must have still been cold as we left, though, for all we heard ringing in our ears were shouts of "Close the door!"
... and One Shock of Recognition Runs the Whole Circle 'Round"—Herman Melville or Art Linkletter or possibly even Hunter S. Thompson, but certainly not me.
Not that anyone has ever mistaken me for a genius—least of all me (I myself subscribe to Henri-Frédéric Amiel's definition which is that talent does easily what most people find difficult, while genius does easily what talent can't do at all)—but that process of an idea passing on from hand to hand is a pretty apt description of the internet, and is one of the happiest reasons for blogging.
In this case, once upon a time, Danny Peary wrote a book called Alternate Oscars ...
... which I bought and took to heart and started my own alternate Oscar list, which I e-mailed to mister muleboy who in turn announced at The Mouth O' The Mule that I would be starting a movie blog of my own ...
... which would lead me to eventually post about Mary Pickford's performance in My Best Girl which would inspire a comment from the host of Carole & Co. pointing out that Carole Lombard had had a bit part in Pickford's movie ...
... which led Carole & Co. to send an e-mail asking me to participate in Carole-tennial+3, which led to my inclusion of this photo of Carole in my post for the blogathon ...
... which indirectly inspired this sketch by Alex Ashman, an illustrator/animator and longtime follower of the Mythical Monkey living in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Now if The Mouth O' The Mule or Carole & Co. or, for that matter, Danny Peary picks up on Alex's portrait of Carole Lombard and re-posts it, the shock of recognition will have run the circle 'round ...
Starting today, the Monkey has an occasional new gig, writing about the history of "shaving in the movies" for Sharpologist, a new online magazine devoted to shaving and grooming for men. Sharpologist is the new project of Mantic59, whose Shaving Journal blog has been touted as essential by the likes of Money magazine.
What is Sharpologist? Why, let's ask Mantic59 himself:
Why does Sharpologist exist? To pass on to you what your father didn’t teach you about grooming and style.
That means clear, well-written tutorials on grooming (particularly traditional wet shaving) and reviews of products you need to know about. We promise not to take ourselves too seriously, though: we’ll also include the occasional “off topic” article. Men who care about the topics we’re passionate about also like gadgets and toys and other stuff that makes our significant others’ scratch their heads. (At least ours do.)
And while we advocate certain products and techniques, we promise not to get too preachy on you. We’ll build a community based on mutual assistance, a sense of humor and rock-solid advice from men in the know.
Sharpologist: Look sharp. Feel sharp. Be sharp.
Anyway, the point is, I have an article there called "Shaving in Hollywood: You Can Learn A Lot About Shaving From The Movies (Some Of It Even Useful)." I promise it's the sort of Monkey jibber-jabber you're used to, only more concise.
On Wednesday, October 12, Tess Kincaid of Life at Willow Manor is hosting the fourth annual Willow Manor Ball, a swinging cocktail party held entirely in cyberspace. All you have to do is grab a date and your dance card and stop by the comments section of her blog any time on October 12 to become eligible for fabulous "door prizes."
Hey, I'm up for anything that doesn't require me to get off the couch.
I, of course, will be attending with Katie-Bar-The-Door, but we're crashing the party with the entire cast of The Thing From Another World, be they scientists, military men or the cute-as-a-button Margaret Sheridan as Nikki Nicholson, one of the all-time Hawksian babes.
We've even invited the Thing himself, James Arness—he's promised to stick to lemon drop martinis and keep the bloodletting to a minimum.
In honor of Carole Lombard's 103rd birthday today, Carole & Co. is hosting the "Carole-tennial+3 blogathon." This is my meager contribution.
I'll be honest with you. When I signed up to write about Carole Lombard's career in silent movies—she made 36 between 1921 and 1929—I'd hoped to pass along to you a sense of a star in the making, a talent in training, that sort of thing. I figured I'd write something about how when we think of the transition from silent films to talkies, we focus on the careers that were destroyed—John Gilbert's, for example—but that there were also actors whose careers took off once the public could hear them speak (William Powell, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper). And then I'd slot Carole Lombard into that list and go from there.
But after watching all of what little of her silent work is available, what I came away with instead was both a sense of frustration at the abysmal state of film preservation in this country and a wonder that Carole Lombard had a film career at all.
Born in Indiana as Jane Peters, Carole Lombard moved to Los Angeles with her mother at the age of eight when her parents divorced. In 1921, Alan Dwan (who would later direct Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima) spotted her playing baseball and cast her on the spot as a tomboy in A Perfect Crime. She was twelve years old.
The role seems in retrospect a presciently appropriate one—although she was one of the most beautiful actresses of her generation, Lombard was at heart a boisterous, small-town tomboy who swore like a sailor, and preferred duck shooting and fly fishing to fancy clothes and big parties.
"I can't imagine a duller fate," she once said, "than being the best dressed woman in reality. When I want to do something I don’t pause to contemplate whether I’m exquisitely gowned. I want to live, not pose!"
Lombard wouldn't appear in another film until 1924, when she signed a contract with the Fox Film Corporation where she languished in uncredited bit parts in forgettable movies. Few of these efforts survive and those that do don't tell us much of anything about Lombard's early career.
I watched her three surviving films from this period—Dick Turpin, The Plastic Age and the classic Ben-Hur—and I can tell you, she is completely invisible in all of them, playing roles that don't even rise to the level of a bit part. She was literally just a figure moving around in the deep background, less significant to the plot than a potted plant or a picture on a wall.
In fact, I must have blinked when she played these blink-and- you'll-miss-it parts, because despite my best efforts, I missed her in all of them. (Indeed, some Lombard fanatics have decided she's not even in Ben-Hur, based both on the absence of any still photos of her in the movie and her own assertion that she wasn't in it. You can't prove it by me one way or the other.)
In 1926, the eighteen year old Lombard was involved in an automobile accident that required multiple surgeries and left a permanent scar running from her nose to her left cheek. Fox canceled her contract, leaving her out of work and her career in jeopardy.
In desperation, she joined Mack Sennett's stable of "bathing beauties" that graced his low-budget comedies. Although by 1926 Sennett's career as the "King of Comedy" was in decline—he was notoriously cheap and stubbornly devoted to a style of comedy that had been out of date for a decade—he still had the unparalleled eye for talent that had led to his discovery of Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson, and many others.
In the course of making nineteen two-reel shorts for the old master, Lombard learned to play comedy, a skill that would later define her. Potential disaster had turned out to be divine providence.
Although by and large these films survive, most are squirreled away in various archives and remain unseen by the public. Of course, we here at the Monkey tracked down what we could and this is what we learned:
Lombard tended to play athletic coeds who preferred—in the words of one title card—"Romeos, Roadsters and Rollerskates" to studying, serving in such films as The Campus Vamp and Matchmaking Mama as a distinct contrast to the good girl played by Sally Eilers, who at the time seemed destined to be the much bigger star. Top-billed in these comedies was usually Daphne Pollard, a 4-foot 9-inch, pear-shaped comedienne with a 6-foot personality who got laughs playing an authority figure while staring up at her younger charges.
Lombard features most prominently in Run, Girl, Run, in which she plays a "star athlete who once ran a mile in almost nothing—and was nearly expelled for it," while Pollard plays her oddly asexual coach who stops at nothing to keep her charge away from boys. The comedy mostly turns on coded references to lesbianism—homosexuality was almost always treated as a punchline in early Hollywood—with Pollard slipping into Lombard's bed to keep an eye on her and later kissing her on the lips when she wins a track meet (and then to prove how truly exciting the win is, Pollard kisses a boy, too).
I'll point out one other brief appearance Lombard made in silent films—Mary Pickford's My Best Girl, which I wrote about at length here and here—and then finish by saying that at this stage of her career, Lombard was just one of a parade of pretty girls who passed through Hollywood, nothing special. Without the benefit of her breathless voice, the stark contrast between her refined beauty and her raw, unaffected personality was largely lost, and it was only with the coming of sound that she blossomed into a star.
Even then, it's clear from her early sound films that Hollywood didn't have a clue what to do with her. Directors liked her personally, and I think they put her in movies because they liked having her around. But when it came time to cast her, they didn't think to offer her anything other than the role of a generically beautiful woman. Granted, she was never going to play the girl next door type—unaffected isn't the same as innocent—but the fact is, while Carole Lombard was a beautiful women, she never really figured how to play one on screen. She had no sense of entitlement, none of the slack indolence or rapaciousness, that was required to play the parts she was offered.
It was Howard Hawks who first had the wit to see that a beautiful woman who didn't mind making a fool of herself on camera was a rare commodity, and during the dark, bleak days of the Great Depression, a highly-marketable one. Lombard's breakthrough didn't come until 1934 when he cast her in Twentieth Century, the first of four classic comedies (including My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and To Be Or Not To Be) that today largely define her screen appeal.
On the occasion of Buster Keaton's birthday, here is a reprint of my essay on his classic comedy, Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Born Joseph Frank Keaton VI into a family of traveling vaudeville performers, legend has it he was dubbed "Buster" when escape artist Harry Houdini saw the infant Keaton take a fall down a flight of stairs and bounce up unharmed. Whether he was born with it, or developed it doing "knockabout" routines on stage with his father, if Keaton wasn't the most talented pratfall artist in movie history, I'd like to see the guy who survived long enough to be a better one. He did stunts that rivaled those of Douglas Fairbanks, and when he was done, he doubled for his co-stars and did their stunts, too.
"The secret," he once said, "is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat."
Keaton made the leap from stage to screen in 1917 after meeting Roscoe Arbuckle who invited Keaton to shoot a scene with him in an upcoming short, The Butcher Boy. The rotund, expressive Arbuckle and the slender, deadpan Keaton proved to be a highly-successful team, making more than a dozen films together before Keaton struck out on his own, directing himself in the classic short One Week, which was just last year included in the National Film Registry.
Soon after, Keaton formed his own production company, and in 1923 made his first feature-length film, Three Ages, beginning a run of classic comedies that included Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman, a body of work that for pure laughs—no song, no dance, no sentimentality—surpasses even Charles Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. Which is saying something considering the number of Katie Awards I see in the future for each of those acts.
Like Chaplin, Keaton in the Silent Era was virtually a one-man act, writing, producing, directing, editing and starring in all his movies. One difference between Keaton and Chaplin, however, was Keaton's very un-modern reluctance to take credit where credit was due, often as with Steamboat Bill, Jr., slapping names like Carl Harbaugh on movies that he had, in fact, written and directed himself. (Of Harbaugh, Keaton later said, "He didn't write nothing. He was one of the most useless men I ever had on the scenario department." When asked why Harbaugh then received sole credit for writing Steamboat Bill, Jr., Keaton said, "Well, we had to put somebody's name up that wrote 'em ...")
Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). The son soon becomes a pawn in his father's battle with the town banker for control of the local riverboat trade. In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl.
Keaton conjures up an endlessly inventive series of gags—involving hats, collisions, chewing tobacco, a baby stroller, a jailbreak, an umbrella on a windy day, and many more—mostly turning on his misfit persona, his odd-couple relationship with his dad and his cheerful determination to succeed despite a preternatural inability to understand what it takes to do so.
One of my favorite early bits centers on the father's effort to give his son a makeover. After two deft flicks of a barber's razor remove Keaton's pencil-thin moustache, the father marches his son into a hatters to replace Keaton's beret with something he deems more suitable for a steamboat captain's son. Keaton tries on a number of hats, including his own trademark pork pie (which he immediately rejects) before settling on an overly-large Panama. He and his father step into the street, a gust of wind blows the new hat into the river, and when his father turns around, Keaton is again wearing that same silly beret. (The Three Stooges later recycled the scene to great effect for their 1936 short, 3 Dumb Clucks, with Curly Howard and a touring cap substituting for Keaton and the beret.)
Keaton delivers all of these comic moments with the understated deadpan style that made him famous and earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face."
"I developed the 'Stone Face' thing quite naturally," Keaton said later. "[E]ven as a small kid, I happened to be the type of comic that couldn't laugh at his own material. I soon learned at an awful early age that when I laughed the audience didn't. So, by the time I got into pictures, that was a natural way of working."
It's this understated approach to comedy coupled with an utter lack of sentimentality that makes Keaton seem so modern.
The most unfor- gettable sequence of Steam- boat Bill, Jr., maybe the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through.
"First I had them build the frame- work of this building and make sure that the hinges were all firm and solid," Keaton explained. "Then you lay this framework down on the ground, and build the window around me. We built the window so that I had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder, and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches. We mark the ground out and drive big nails where my two heels are going to be. Then you put that house back up in position while they finish building it."
It was actually a gag he'd first used in the short One Week but in this case, not only were they dropping a finished wall (rather than an open frame) on top of him, they were doing it during a simulated cyclone using six wind machines that proved powerful enough to accidentally blow a truck into the Sacramento River.
Most of the crew walked off in the set in protest, certain the stunt would kill him. Keaton himself declined to practice the stunt first, saying he knew it would work. "You don't do those things twice."
This attitude was in keeping with Keaton's standing order to his cinema- tographer to keep the camera rolling until he said cut or was killed. But it also gave his stunts a realism that puts your heart in your throat even as you're laughing at the gags.
Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
Despite his legendary prowess as a stuntman, Keaton landed wrong when after the release of Steamboat Bill, Jr. he jumped from producing his own films to signing on as a contract player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was a move that pretty much wrecked his career.
"[T]hey were picking stories and material without consulting me," he said, "and I couldn't argue them out of it. They'd say, 'This is funny,' and I'd say, 'I don't think so.' They'd say, 'This'll be good.' I'd say, 'It stinks.' It didn't make any difference; we did it anyhow. I'd only argue about so far, and then let it go."
After a promising start at MGM with The Cameraman, which I have nominated for best picture, the studio forced Keaton into a series of second-rate productions. Always the perfectionist, Keaton drowned his frustrations in alcohol, a habit which soon became a problem in and of itself. Always an acquired taste, what little popularity Keaton had soon faded and MGM released him from his contract in 1934.
The same story, incidentally, played out for any number of directors and actors at more studios than just MGM. The money men who ran the studios didn't seem to grasp that sound movies were something other than just silent movies with a song and a little talking thrown in. Care was needed to create a new medium—talking pictures—that was the equal to what directors such as Keaton, Chaplin, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang had created during the Silent Era. Care was something few producers were willing to invest.
Keaton continued to work after leaving MGM, most memorably in Chaplin's 1952 comedy Limelight, but he never again reached the heights he'd attained during the Silent Era. He did live long enough to see a revival of interest in his career and was directly involved in the restoration and re-release of his silent comedies. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1960 in recognition of "his unique talents which brought immortal comedies to the screen." His last movie appearance, a supporting role in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, was released eight months after his death in 1966.
Today, we here at the Monkey are taking a break from our usual focus on classic movies to participate in Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.'s blog-a-thon honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the network premiere of one of America's greatest television sitcoms, The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In case you don't know the basic set-up of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) is the head writer of The Alan Brady Show, a fictitious comedy-variety television series airing weekly on one of the major networks. Working out of their Manhattan office, Rob and his staff (Buddy and Sally, played by Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie) crank out a script full of the sort of sketch comedy that dominated American television in the 1950s and '60s. Meanwhile, Rob's wife Laura, a former USO dancer turned stay-at-home mom (Mary Tyler Moore), wiles away the hours as best she can with their son Richie (Larry Mathews) in New Rochelle, an affluent suburb of New York City.
Rob's often futile attempts to juggle the demands of work and home provide the backbone of the series' humor.
Carl Reiner, who created Dick Van Dyke and wrote most of its episodes, based the series on his own experiences as a performer on Sid Caesar's Your Show Of Shows, a popular comedy-variety series of the early 1950s, with Rob a midwestern version of himself, Buddy modeled on fellow writer Mel Brooks, Sally a lovelorn version of raspy-voiced writer Selma Diamond, and Alan Brady (played by Reiner himself) a tart combination of Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason.
"My Part-Time Wife"
In the specific episode I've chosen to write about, "My Part-Time Wife," Rob reluctantly hires Laura to sub for Sally as the office's resident "lady writer"/typist when the latter scores a plum supporting role on a late-night talk show. "I have a lot of time on my hands, like most every day," Laura says, pleading her case, "and I wanted to do something constructive."
"We could use a new garage," suggests Rob, who prefers to keep his "marriage partners" separate from his "business partners."
"But don't you realize," says Laura, "that in the office, you'd be the boss?"
After Rob fires his fourth secretary in as many days, he finally gives in and Laura is thrilled. "Mr. Petrie, I love you!"
"Yeah, well," he grumbles, "we'll soon put an end to that!"
And he very nearly does, though not, as you might suspect, because Laura is bad at the job. No, she's good, maybe too good—so good he'll have to give her the job permanently—and Rob goes into a full-blown panic as his carefully-compartmentalized world starts crumbling around him.
"I feel like a schoolboy on Parents Day with my mother peeking over my shoulder."
"My Part-Time Wife" isn't the best or best-known episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show (that would be "It May Look Like A Walnut!"), but it is very funny and it highlights those aspects of the series that make it worth another look fifty years on—its depictions of the workplace and of the home front.
Dick Van Dyke At Work First and foremost among the series' strengths was the show's emphasis on the workplace. Although sitcom characters had of course had jobs before—Ralph Kramden was a bus driver, Ricky Ricardo was a band leader—Dick Van Dyke was the first that routinely sent us to work with them; and even on the "work-coms" that followed (including, I might add, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a highly successful series in its own right), the office is usually a place to screw up, fill space or manage fractured personal relationships—Homer at the nuclear plant, George Costanza sleeping under his desk at Yankee Stadium, Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin flitting around Rockefeller Center.
On The Dick Van Dyke Show, however, we see Rob Petrie and his talented team of gag writers put together a show nearly every week, hammering out an hour's worth of sketch comedy, trying out ideas, rejecting some, improving others. Admittedly, this formula is often an excuse for the stars to reel off one-liners, do impressions and even break into song and dance, but by my count, at least a quarter of the series' episodes focused on the day-to-day reality of holding a job: deadlines, burnout, salary disputes, crazy bosses, crazier clients (in the form of Alan Brady's guest stars), and above all, the general anxiety associated with earning a living in a field (entertainment) where unemployment is the norm.
The show is also one of the few to capture the hard work and pure joy of creating for a living. Think of all those Hollywood movies about artists and entertainers—Walk The Line, Ray, and a hundred others—that wind up relying on a cliched story arc of addiction and redemption without ever really capturing that precarious balance of inspiration and craftsmanship, and of euphoria and despair, that is at the heart of the creative process. Sure, we see the byproduct of that process, but how often do we actually catch a glimpse of the artist capturing the lightning in the bottle that made him or her famous in the first place?
Dick Van Dyke showed us the bottle nearly every week and let us watch Rob and Buddy and Sally struggle to fill it before their deadline ran out. Sometimes they filled it with lightning, and sometimes, by their own admission, they filled it with lightning bugs, but that's the way it goes when you create for a living.
Dick Van Dyke At Home The other great narrative engine driving the show's success was the relationship between Rob and his wife Laura. Rather than the traditional portrait of white-bread suburban bliss—Ward Cleaver smoking a pipe and dispensing wisdom, June doing housework in high heels and pearls (never mind her barely-repressed longing for the obsequious Eddie Haskell)—The Dick Van Dyke Show weekly gave us a look at an affectionate but deeply-neurotic couple who would have kept a team of marriage counselors busy for years.
Most participants in this blog-a-thon will surely point to the palpable chemistry between the two leads, rare for a show of that era, but the fact is, if you take their actions at face value rather than as the simple machinations of a sitcom plot, Rob and Laura undermined each other and their marriage at least every other week. No mere Nick and Nora banter here—Rob and Laura lied, played games, kept score, backstabbed, nursed grievances, publicly humiliated each other, and, in a mere five years, accused each other of infidelity on at least fourteen separate occasions.
If the Petries weren't so obviously nuts about each other, I'd put theirs on a list of the most dysfunctional sitcom marriages ever—it lacks only the constant threat of spousal abuse that characterized the Kramdens' marriage on The Honeymooners to claim that dubious honor—a bitter truth that Laura's tight-cut Capri pants and Rob's goofily-grinning face cannot hide.
Nor are they very good parents, the last desperate refuge of an unhappily married couple. Their son Richie often disappears for weeks at a time, unnoticed and unlamented, and even when he is there, he rarely spends time with his parents; instead he's shuttled off to his bedroom without even a PB&J while Rob and Laura dance the night away hosting wild cocktail parties for New York's entertainment elite.
In the episode in question here, "My Part-Time Wife," Laura takes a job in downtown Manhattan without a single thought reserved for Richie's well-being. Now maybe I'm misinformed, but for every other family I've known with two working parents, child care is a major issue. What do Rob and Laura expect their eight year old son to do, forage for food like a wild animal? (although I confess, the thought of Richie rummaging through the neighbors' garbage cans like a raccoon really appeals to me).
In retrospect, Dick Van Dyke isn't so much a rom-com valentine to a perfect couple as it is Revolutionary Road with a laugh track. They even filled out papers once for a Mexican divorce.
That Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore squeezed so many laughs out of this connubial nightmare is a testament to their wit, hard work and irresistible charm. No wonder the show won 15 Emmys during its five year run.
Zeitgeist: A Fancy Word For What We're Feeling Other than the most generic cookie-cutter fluff, every work of art winds up saying something about its creator and the world he lives in, often things the creator himself doesn't recognize until long after the fact. Although writer Carl Reiner strove to eliminate any cultural references that would date the show—no mention, for example, of Kennedy, Vietnam or the Beatles—because he routinely gleaned story ideas from the ongoing lives of his cast and crew, inevitably their concerns became his concerns.
And one of their biggest concerns was the ever-changing role of women in American society.
The Sexual Revolution (also known as the "second wave" of feminism, following the early 20th century's suffragette movement) had no clear beginning, but the seeds of that revolution were planted during World War II when millions of women were pressed into service in war-related industries and (non-combat) units of the military. After the war, government, business and entertainment leaders aggressively pushed for a return to the prewar status quo—they didn't want women competing with returning service men for scarce jobs—but the fact is, once they've seen the factory, how are you going to keep them down in the kitchen? Even as they returned to lives centered on home, husband and children, women chafed at their limited opportunities. In 1963, Betty Friedan's groundbreaking study of their discontent, published as The Feminine Mystique, became a controversial and influential bestseller.
Reiner certainly didn't set out to write a commentary on what Friedan called "the problem that has no name," but he did know how to spin real life into comedy, and dozens of episodes, including "My Part-Time Wife," wound up turning on conflicts arising either from Laura's discontent with her role as a suburban housewife or from Rob's doubts about his role as the primary breadwinner and traditional patriarch in a male-dominated society. Both are inherently unsuited for the parts they are required to play and profoundly insecure about their ability to pull off the charade. Rob puts on his gray flannel suit and hustles for a paycheck while Laura shops and sorts neatly-typed recipe cards—the roles America's intensely-conformist postwar society has assigned them—but at heart, he's a song-and-dance man, she's the daughter of Rosie the Riveter, and both ache for a new balance between the sexes that will allow them to express aloud their true selves.
Of course, we're not meant to take any of this seriously, and even now I'm laughing just thinking of Mary Tyler Moore's quavering cry of "Oh, Rob!" or Dick Van Dyke's physical contortions as he tries in vain to live up to the title "man of the house." Still, I think that's why Annie Leibovitz's S&M photo of Rob and Laura, with the latter gleefully topping the former, works so well—we laugh at first because it's unexpected, but we keep laughing because deep down we know it's true.
Rob and Laura, happy at last. Glad they finally made it. Glad we all did.
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?
... the rest of our group is still recovering from a wild time at Tess Kincaid's justly famous Willow Manor Ball.
Meanwhile, a desperately hungry Ned Scott has become obsessed with wild blueberry muffins and continues to radio anyone who'll listen, asking for the recipe. "Keep watching the skies," he pleads, "also food blogs and the Cooking Channel—maybe Rachel Ray or the Cake Boss! Somebody's gotta know!"
And the self-styled "Disco Inferno," James Arness, is still smoking hot after his fiery entrance yesterday.
"Satisfaction, ooo hoo hoo hoo," he said later in an interview on CNN, "came in the chain reaction. I couldn't get enough so I had to self destruct, ooo hoo hoo hoo. The heat was on, rising to the top, huh! Everybody's goin' strong, ooo hoo hoo hoo, and that is when my spark got hot! I heard somebody say, 'Burn baby burn!—Disco inferno!'"
No word yet on whether his insurance company will cover the damages ...
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