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HOW 100+ YEARS’ WORTH OF TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, CRAFTSMANSHIP, CREATIVITY AND GENIUS LED INEXORABLY TO THE INVENTION OF NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE

News travels slow in Leapsternet land.

Just the other day I stumbled across the fact that in 2004 a certain broadsheet of record had released a book entitled “The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made”.

(As opposed to the greatest 1000 movies never made, presumably – a more innovative concept for a book, but difficult to get picture material on.)

You can see a partial list of these movies at:

New York Times Best 1000 Movies List

What I liked about it straight away was that with 1000 movies to play with, the critics evidently felt there was enough free-range stretching room to include a number of vivid, idiosyncratic, full-blooded movies that never get within parking distance of a mention on the usual, brain-squelchingly conventional “100 Greatest Movies of All Time” lists. (Such as the annual, and annually slightly depressing American Film Institute selection.)

It was nice to see “Sleeper”, W.C. Fields’ “It’s a Gift”, “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “The Sweet Smell of Success”, “This is Spinal Tap”, “What’s Up Doc?”, a classically tough boxing picture of the 40s, like “The Set-Up”, “Goldfinger” (Why not? – a very near perfect ‘Big Entertainment’ type picture with unforgettable set-pieces, leavening black humour and a ton of style), “Cabaret”, “Dead of Night” and the early Sam Peckinpah movie “Ride the High Country” ushered in from the critical cold for a change. And the compilers at least deserve some credit for bravery in attempting the resurrection one of Ralph Bakshi’s 1970s animated pictures (“Heavy Traffic”). Not to mention a medal for someone finally getting around to rescuing “The King of Marvin Gardens” with Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern.

The first five Disney animated features are in there, and they probably should be too – not just because of technical and artistic considerations, or pioneering work in feature-length animation, but because they are all outstanding examples of involving motion picture storytelling taken to the point of near-hypnosis. (Well, “Fantasia” isn’t, but “Fantasia” had a range of other charms, attributes and effects working for it, as it still does.) The usual “100 Greatest” list doesn’t have room for all of them, and the usual routine of handling this is just to insert “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and just let it stand for the rest of the Disney features in code.

The downsides of the selection – well break out a deckchair and a preferred beverage and I’ll sing you an extended Bob Dylan style 63-verse ballad of emotional pain and gastric discomfort, in electrified print.

Basically this breaks down into three categories.

(1) The USUAL SUSPECTS

Not the movie of that title, although, astoundingly, it’s on the list, much to my crusty, gavel-wielding, Lifesavers-smashing chagrin.

Of course, what I’m referring to is all the ‘usual suspects’ movies that inevitably turn up on all the standard-issue, “We already printed the forms so why change the stationery now?” critical lists of “All-Time Great Movies”. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site, (in the review of “Edge of the City”), you get the impression with some of the more superannuated items that nobody’s bothered to take a look at some of these babies in about four or five decades, because if anyone had, they wouldn’t be coming within a basketballer’s femur’s distance of any list that wasn’t headed: “Return to Store, Insisting on Full Refund”.

I guess there are still people who think that, for example, “The African Queen”, “Bringing Up Baby”, “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” (Homer Simpson-flavoured revulsion-shudder on that last one) play like the greatest movies of all time NOW, but you’d have to picture most of them in nursing homes. They’re all good and memorable movies (well, three of them are) but time hasn’t been conspicuously kind to any of them, and after their robotic inclusion on every single list of this type in mortal history, you get to resent the equally valid or better choices that the sheer bloat of the kneejerk choices force out of contention.

“Key Largo” is arguably a better Bogart picture than “African Queen” – actually it’s arguably better than all these movies. It’s also not on this list. Any number of routinely greatest list-proof Marx Bros and W.C. Fields pictures of the 30s and 40s may well play much funnier to audiences now than the frenzied ‘takes’, mannered rhythms, and gimmick dialogue of “Bringing Up Baby” and its generic screwball ilk. (“Animal Crackers”, “Monkey Business”, “Horsefeathers”, and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” all omitted – the latter one of the greatest comedy movies ever made.) “Bad Day at Black Rock” is a powerful but powerfully dated ‘issue’ picture. “The Best Years of Our Lives” is soap, and not that good at it either. Anyone that would put “Marty” in a list of “greatest movies” hasn’t seen it recently. The not dissimilarly-themed “Requiem for a Heavyweight” plays a lot tougher, truer and tighter now, but will never make “Best x-hundred movie” consideration, presumably because of the ‘TV-stink’ of being derived from Rod Serling’s teleplay.

“The Apartment”, even as a 1960 comedy, now seems like such an antediluvean conception of comedic sexual sophistication, that you suspect it probably starts with a crank. And it’s right there on the New York Times list, dead on schedule.
Etc etc

(2) TOO NEW FOR SCHOOL

The end-product of all these types of lists, right across popular culture, but with a particular eye to both movies and pop/rock/contemporary music, has long since convinced me that the practice of sporting halls of fame should be followed, and contemporary movies/albums/whatever should be barred from consideration until they’ve survived some sort of test of time. Perspective is not like instant coffee – you just can’t add water and gargle the finished product right away. Attempts to ignore this most basic of precepts invariably result in choices whose only possible merit abides in the considerable face-flushing embarrassment they must later inflict on the nurks who included them, not to mention the generous hilarity afforded to all onlookers. About a 15 year moratorium sounds right to me, although you can probably whittle me down to 10 in a good mood.

Selections which strongly suggest the NYT 1000 list might have benefitted from this policy, in terms of raw sanity, include but are not limited to:

“The Usual Suspects”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Apollo 13”, “The Full Monty”, “Gangs of New York”, “Ghost World”, “Groundhog Day”, “L.A. Confidential”, “The Hours”, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Shakespeare in Love”, “Amelie”, “Hamlet” (2000), “Chicago”, “Adaptation”, and I view with the greatest suspicion any movie listed from 2000 on, including the ones I haven’t seen, because of that little matter of perspective – what hits the cerebral sweet-spot for one reviewer right now might look like last century’s fruit platter in just a couple of years’ time. It’s amazing how often that is exactly the case. I even liked some of those movies, but none of them struck me as undeniably “Pick me! Pick me!” indelible ink choices as great films when I saw them. As light sparkling mineral water entertainments, “Groundhog Day” or “Shakespeare in Love”, might have legs, but let’s give them an extra 5-10 years to prove it, presuming they ever do. (And I’m struggling mightily with the notion that there haven’t been one thousand better films made in movie history than “Groundhog Day”. Or 5,000 for that matter.) Charlie Kaufman’s pictures are fun, gimmicked up, rollercoasters for smarter children in the class, (well “Malkovich” was fun) but for me right now, that’s about the extent of the sandwich. I’d like to see who’s talking about them in 20 years’ time. Also, some of these are just plain old generic-wrapper El Crappo choices. Which brings us to…

(3) WHAT ARE YOU, INSANE?

The way the NYT 1000 Greatest Movies list breaks down for me goes approximately a lot like this. A bunch of people get together for a long, long lunch that lasts several weeks, and they’re movie critics, so there’s a lot of talking with their mouths full, tuna/onion bagel breath, and resultant food stains on clothing and all surrounding staff and draperies. They had the usual 100 movies that always go on these lists, and they rubber-stamped those right in there. Then there was the 100 other movies they could all kind of agree on and tickle each other to giggling point about how daring they were, what with putting 100 movies in there that aren’t in the official, time-capsule, “No Earthquake Can Shift This” regular 100 list.

Then they did some solid and exhaustive circle work with a ‘J’, where they all gave in with varying degrees of ill-tempered bemusement to each other’s more bizarre choices, and each squeezed in about two or three Professor Weirdstein choices apiece, while they all congratulated themselves on the thoroughgoing eclecticism of their collective choice, awarded each other sundry doctorates and academic tenure, and accidentally spat flecks of beetroot in everyone’s eyes.

That left them around 700 movies short, which was when they gave up entirely, hit the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide, and started frantically grabbing at anything on display where the book fell open to make up the numbers, with the chief critical guiding principle that they wanted to get out of the meeting before the baseball season was over. That’s as near as I can read it anyway.

It’s also the only way to explain some of the inclusions on this list. Let me dance you through a few fistfuls of examples:

“Amadeus” – a nice movie. Has anyone (and I mean on the planet) watched this since it won the Best Picture Oscar?

“Back to the Future” – One presumes that at least two of the National Lampoon “Vacation” pictures were also shortlisted.

“Beetlejuice” – Loved it all those years ago. Imaginative design, entertaining picture. Shouldn’t be here in a million years.

“Being There” – Not then, not now, not ever. Whoever put it in should be required by law to sit down and watch it now, all the way through, with no breaks for entertainment.

“Beverly Hills Cop” – I liked it, but its listing here is the funniest thing about this picture by a long chalk.

“The Big Chill” – Much like when a Warner Bros cartoon character turns on a washing machine, the result was a mess of soap. Smug, sloppy, soppy, half-cocked and fully drab. Great soundtrack though. The good version of this movie was called “Return of the Secaucus Seven” and I wouldn’t put that in a top 1000 movies either.

“The Big Red One” – They’ve now gone nuts on Sam Fuller pictures – there must be half his career on the list – but I’ve seen this one, and though it’s good, and game, it’s not one of the 1000 best pictures ever made.

“Blue Velvet” – cult suck-up movie of the time, well made and modishly sick, but who watches it now? “Eraserhead” as weird as it is, is the David Lynch movie with the courage of its convictions – the rest – at least of the early ones – look pretty mannered now.

“Body Heat” – Lawrence Kasdan. Really?

“Boogie Nights” – I doubt it.

“Breaker Morant” – Your superior BBC drama-like thoughtful, respectable dramatic entertainment, which is all fine and dandy right up to the point where you try and force that kind of square-block into this round-hole-oriented greatest MOVIES type of list.

“The Breakfast Club” – Ah, the magic of time and place. This is a more interesting choice than some of the others though.

“California Suite” – Ok, someone was really desperate to get home and pay the babysitter.

“Chariots of Fire” – See “Breaker Morant”.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” – Yes, I had one with the insides of my eyelids. Portentous, ominous, voluminous sleepwear.

“Crumb” – Hi-impact documentary on a subject both worthy (Robert Crumb) and jaw-droppingly discombooberating (Robert Crumb and his family), but one of the all-time great documentaries? Who knows. Another decade’s worth of fermentation in the common movie gene-pool would give us a lot better idea.

“The Crying Game” – right, does this hold true for every viewer after 1992, who all, by definition, are aware of the trick ending?

“Dead Calm” – At least one half of this movie’s title was spot on the money. Had to read a synopsis to remind me that this profoundly suspense-resistant thriller was kind of a mini-“Cape Fear” set on a fairly small boat. As I remember, Nicole Kidman was too young for the part but not horrible, Sam Neill has been less starchy almost everywhere else, and Billy Zane probably would like to wipe this one off the resume – if he’d have had two more legs and a coat of varnish, he could have passed for a table. A flat-out bad movie from a good director (Phil Noyce), and one of the most inexplicable brain-explosions on the New York Times Best 1000 movie list.

“Dead End” – No, not now. Skid row soap that plays around gingerly with gangster elements, and less gingerly with what they used to call “bathos” and highly predictable bathos at that. For this they left out both versions of “Scarface”?

“Dead Ringers” – I like Cronenberg, particularly doing horror, but I think they’re stretching here.

“Diary of a Chambermaid” – A lot of Bunuel’s pictures are overrated, some aren’t, and this one takes the cake and entire bakery. Long-winded, labours like a draft-horse, and to me is evidently inferior to the equally bizarre but a lot shorter Renoir version of the same material.

“Die Hard” – Dunno. Not convinced it belongs.

“Diva” – another cult-sucker timepiece. The chocolate box was lovely, and the contents seemed mostly like chocolate flavoured air. I doubt time has been kind.

“Down by Law” – more cult-sucking material. Probably dates better than the others cited, but I’m still struggling.

“Dracula” – love this, Bela Lugosi is my boy, but it’s half a great movie and half a fabulous night’s sleep. Horror movies of that time like “The Black Cat” and “Island of Lost Souls” play a lot better now, and weren’t included on the list. Has undoubted and inestimable historical value, but historical value is another list entirely.

“Driving Miss Daisy” – Are you sure?

“The Elephant Man” – See “Breaker Morant” and “Chariots of Fire” and factor in a memorable lead performance and suave manipulation of German expressionist silent movie iconography (and a great shooting job by Freddie Francis) and you still don’t have a great movie.

“The Entertainer” – Love the showbiz-gone-sour theme and the tatty British seaside setting, but didn’t quite get there as a whole movie for me. Kind of had that grittier-than-usual upmarket telly play feel to me, and I thought the actual later telemovie version with Jack Lemmon wasn’t that far off this. Not the worst choice on the list though.

“ET – The Extraterrestrial” – Well, it’s a better choice than “Close Encounters”. Actually as a piece of pure Spielberg storytelling and manipulation with a touch of the old-school Disneys, I never really had a problem with it. I put it here, because I think some other people might. Maybe the last flowering of Spielberg form and good judgement, ahead of grabbing hold of the helium tank of grimly serious subject matter, and pumping himself full of it. The Spielberg movie that should be on here is “Duel”.

“Fatal Attraction” – It certainly provided convenient memorable iconography for cheating men who are scared of women, and definitely did us the service of introducing the clinical expression ‘bunny-boiler’ to the language. And give or take Glenn Close being an excellent actress, which she pretty much always is, what else has it done for anyone lately? Or ever. Sometimes the right movie hits the right previously unexposed nerve at the right time, provoking widespread knee-jerks. This is a no-doubt invaluable medical service but has got very little of anything to do with being a great movie.

“The Fisher King” – Gilliam’s conventional feel-good picture, which was his worst right up until he went out of his way the last five or ten years to make every new film his worst. Aging badly as we speak.

“The Fly” (original) – Well it stood the test of time and it’s entertaining, but there must be one or two hundred better horror movies than this.

“The Fortune Cookie” – Theme remains contemporary, great comedy cast, all-time great director, and nothing funny going on in the city.

“Frenzy” – Later Hitchcock with keynote moments, that probably plays way too loose in the crotch these days.

“Full Metal Jacket” – can think of two Vietnam War movies of the time that were a lot more well-rounded, atmospheric and complete as movies than this. It’s good, but might struggle to make Kubrick’s top five pictures.

“The Full Monty” – Everyone likes a lolly now and then, but you wouldn’t necessary take up plate-space with one when ordering your last meal.

“Gallipolli” – I’m going with the “Breaker Morant” deal again on this one.

“GoodFellas” – Does it hold the attention? Does it fold, spindle and mutilate the attention for that matter? Big-time yes on all counts. With major stunt-performances to stake a career on. But Scorsese has made a lot better movies than this. “Casino” should be on the list. “GoodFellas” to me was always over-rated, and I’ll wear the extreme-minority opinion tag on that with beaming, well-meaning equanimity. He raised the bar, or at least laid the foundations and completed the remodelling on updating the “Godfather” model of crime family depiction to the modern-day template (“Sopranos” et al) and that’s significant, but significant doesn’t necessarily make a great movie. A great show-reel maybe. Kind of your extended gangster MTV music video.

“The Graduate” – Maybe the whole older sexy woman as a potential shag thing was more of a revelation back then, in the halcyon swingin’ sixties days of a previous century. In the context of more modern popular culture/real life “Everybody shags everything” values, this seems quaint. Beyond that, there’s not enough funny in the comedy.

“The Grapes of Wrath” – As long as I don’t have to watch it. Influential, important in its time, and both book and particularly movie seem grindingly pious, long-winded and backdated now.

“The Grifters” – Everyone dressed up nice for the occasion, and there’s some appealing players there, the only problem is, it just was never that good.

“Hair” – I’m presuming that while everyone was on a toilet break, someone slipped this in as a joke. One of the worst movies ever made – musical or viewable – worth seeing as inadvertent comedy now, with a resoundingly salami-like lead performance by Treat Williams that will leave no thigh unslapped. Even his name is funny.

“Hannah and Her Sisters” – One of the ‘acceptably serious’ Woody Allen later-middle-stretch zzzz-friendly pictures that coffee-table intellects with no sense of humour seemed to find more trustworthy than his earlier, funnier pictures. Most of these are messy, pretentious, laugh-resistant and dull, no matter the quality of performance and craftsmanship, and this is emphatically no exception. Five minutes of small-scale Woody comedies like “Zelig” or “Radio Days” are worth 58 movies like this. Let alone his earlier, funnier films.

“Henry Fool” – With most people they’d probably get away with slipping this one in quietly, but unfortunately I saw it. Unlike most of the cult-suckers, had a theme (and an intriguing one too, on the subject of creativity), some actual content as opposed to picturesque sleaze and cool people in offbeat clothing, substituted a good dose of gloom for the usual conceptual post-modern arse-bargling about, and Parker Posey. And diddled around forever before falling away into the usual cess-hole of general death and depression. Not entirely valueless, but pretty much your standard issue art-house mess in the end. Not a great picture’s arsehole.

“Husbands and Wives” – AKA “The Year My Brittle Dialogue Broke”. Woody Allen runs out of ideas and funny, and rotates through every verbal, plot and stylistic cliché of his “We’re all grown up now so let’s talk dysfunctional relationships in an exceptionally dull manner” period to the point where it becomes like a comedy sketch parodying Woody Allen, thus providing the only entertainment value of the enterprise. What he was thinking with the early 60s Godard like camera/editing jiggery-pokery will forever remain a secret between Woody and his shrink, but it’s no bargain on our side of the screen. A complete mess. I can no longer remember if I actually walked out on this, or just fantasised about it in a catatonic state with my mouth and eyebrows frozen in the classic, disbelieving Skipper-reacting-to-Gilligan arrangement throughout. He’s made films nearly as dull (most of the ones without him in them) and he’s made movies that were at least as much of a brutally ill-conceived luncheon spill (“Hollywood Ending” comes roaring to mind) but he may never have combined both qualities on the one pizza like this. Was, should and will be remembered solely for Judy Davis giving one of the greatest performances ever seen in a cripplingly shitty movie. Seriously, if a scientist could create a scale that goes low enough and is finely enough calibrated, it might be possible to prove that this movie is even worse than “Hair”.

“I Know Where I’m Going!” – Lovely, warm-hearted, atmospheric and it has Wendy Hiller in it, one of the most joyously playful and idiosyncratic female leads in movie history – but it’s probably bound to come over as long, repetitive, predictable, and sentimental now. Patronising in its attitude to the headstrong female main character too, which won’t make it play any better. It’s the Paddle Pop that hits the spot on a summer walk, rather than the sit-down Beef Wellington you look for in an all-time great banquet.

“Jailhouse Rock” – Great movie? Or they wanted to get one Elvis picture in there. Probably a better choice than “Fun in Acapulco”..

“The Jazz Singer” (1927) – Other than seeing Al Jolson in some facsimile of his stage heyday (and possibly including that) the value here is exclusively historical, and as mentioned before, that’s a different list.

“Jerry Maguire” – Maybe, I don’t think so, and I’d prefer to give it another ten years and then suck it and see.

“The Killing Fields” – No. See “Breaker Morant” scenario above and add in a budget.

“Kramer vs Kramer” – Thought it was upmarket soap then in its Oscars-destroying heyday, and who’s watched it since?

“National Lampoon’s Animal House” – What in the name of God and John Belushi were they thinking? If you’re going to put a gross-out-heavy teen comedy in there, which is all this is, prototype or not, “Caddyshack” was more varied, inventive, had a better array of comic talent, and was funnier. And that probably shouldn’t be in here either.

“The Pink Panther” – As hysterical a performer as Sellers was, and as emblematic of its times (or the aspirations of certain people within those times) as this movie was, someone really ought to take a look at it now. Long dull stretches of plot obscuring the comedy movie, too much David Niven, far from the funniest Pink Panther movie.

“Playtime” – The two other Jacques Tati movies on the NY Times list (“M. Hulot’s Holiday”, “Mon Oncle”) absolutely belong there. As much as I love the character, as good as some moments are, this unravels under pressure of exceptionally slow pacing, and doesn’t deliver enough by way of pay-off to justify that. He was a great movie-maker who made two great feature films.

“Poltergeist” – A proficient entertainment, and that’s all she wrote.

“The Purple Rose of Cairo” – Woody Allen’s extended, soft-hearted and headed fudge-around with territory Buster Keaton already nailed decades earlier in “Sherlock Jr”. Even a lot of his light, middling kind of pictures (which are really only ‘middling’ by the giddily high standards of his best stuff anyway) , like “Broadway Danny Rose” have a lot more guts and laughs than this. It’s a less atrocious choice than the ones mentioned above, but “Radio Days” and “Zelig”, not to mention “Bananas”, “Take the Money and Run”, “Play It Again, Sam”, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” and “Stardust Memories” should all have been in way ahead of this. (And are all missing in action. “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” surprisingly made the cut, as did the obvious choices that followed those movies. The non-Allen directed (but Allen-starring) “The Front” is an insane omission – just the kind of thing that leads to spontaneous conflagration of the dander in comparison to some of the frankly idiotic choices that did make the cut.

“Quadrophenia” – The only problem there is that the original double-album is a better movie than the movie version. Well, that’s not the only problem, as atmospheric as “Quadrophenia” was in certain moments. Again, this is probably one of those “time and place” type selections.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark” – The only part that stood out for me, in terms of the guy making it really working up a lather, was the weird, angry Old Testament stuff about the Nazis. Otherwise you might as well put in an old Flash Gordon movie serial.

“Re-Animator” – Liked it a lot (in a slightly disgusted sort of way) and Stuart Gordon is or was a pretty interesting talent, but no, not really. If you’re picking a Stuart Gordon picture, it’s his version of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and that even deserves to be on this list, even if no-one has heard of it. Even Oliver Reed, late in his career, was good in it.

“Repo Man” – Modish cult-sucker of the day with better torque than most of the species. Can’t see it not being dated now. Don’t know of too many who do see it now.

“Robocop” – I’m struggling with it in this context.

“Saturday Night Fever” – Where is the queue for people who weren’t marks for disco?

“Saving Private Ryan” – Plot contrivances up the wazoo and some hilariously stereotyped storytelling contrivances. I’ll never forget my stomach skipping the down elevator and plummeting 37 floors in freefall with that scene with the war-ravaged French town, the soldiers lounging around the patios, and the gramophone someone finds and cranks up with that frikking Edith Piaf song. Spielberg’s natural storytelling facility surfaces fitfully, attached to absolutely nothing of any significance. One of the most over-rated films of all time – the WWII equivalent of the equally shifty, slimy and hopelessly cliché-infested “Platoon” .

“Shaft” – Good entertainment, and holds up as such, but there were better blaxploitation pictures than this. “Across 110th Street” seems like the obvious omission here.

“A Shot in the Dark” – Funny, but the 70s yielded two funnier Pink Panther movies, and “The Party” is an inexcusable omission from the list.

“Stop Making Sense” – I think they just did. Well, I guess yesteryear’s art-school grad crowd got their licks in, what with this and “Henry Fool”.

“10” – OK, clearly we’ve changed the premise of the list now. Going by the Kevin Kline movie from earlier and this one, the criterion is now movies featuring one or two big boobs.

“Tootsie” – If Americans had lived through all those “Carry On” movies presumably they wouldn’t have got quite this worked up about a pretty routine drag comedy with a tediously drill-pressed message. At least it wasn’t “Mrs Doubtfire”.

“Total Recall” – Interesting choice, but no. Not even close really. “Blade Runner” you could have made a case for.

“The Trouble with Harry” – The black comedy odd-one-out from Hitchcock’s “golden” total-control US period. It’s long-winded, tediously arch and not funny. Anyone who’d actually troubled to look at it in the last 50 years could have worked that out for themselves.

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” – Whatever the technological achievements, whatever the historical value of reviving classic Hollywood characters in full animation (and in unprecedented teamings of those characters), whatever its value in returning theatrical feature cartoons to the production mainstream, it pimped on the characters it purported to love, and sublimated them (in a way that perverted the gleeful unfettered anarchy of those great comedy archetypes) to a morbid, third-rate and thoroughly annoying crime story. The degree to which it misunderstood the vintage characters it exploited was the only thing about the movie which was epic. The only place it flirted with greatness was in the animated Roger Rabbit short that opened the movie, and was at about the level of a decent Tom & Jerry MGM theatrical cartoon. That’s no insult, unlike the rest of this overrated clod-heap.

“Woodstock” – As a greatest MOVIE? Again, the historical and musical value of what’s in it (and even how it was shot) is incomparable, but I’ve never thought of it as a great movie as such. How do you compare it to something like “The Conversation”, or “The Wizard of Oz”? Great documentary? Well, hmmm, with an extra mmmm. It’s a music movie, isn’t it? I’m not sure concert movies should be in there at all. I found “Gimme Shelter” just as odd a choice.

And that ought to about do her for now.

Those who check out the New York Times list via the above link will see that there were plenty more inclusions worth questioning, but I left out the ones I hadn’t seen, or had only partially seen, or couldn’t remember clearly. Also I covered the bases on the most gorge-raising, risible choices, and left even the more ropey of the partially defensible ones alone.

Another time I might go into some detail on the movies which, amazingly, with a thousand places going begging, somehow managed to fly under that particular radar, but for now, it’s “Kirk Out”.

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(One thing I noticed when first reading the NY Times list, which I decided not to include in the blather above for simplicity’s sake, but now feel that I should mention, for clarity, and because it indicates a specific, and large, exclusion zone within the NYT “Best 1000 Movies” parameters that is implicit but not specifically mentioned at the website reference given above (although the preface to the NYT book that you can access at the same interweb address does mention it in passing) - the list includes no movies from the silent era at all. Everything prior to “The Jazz Singer” is excluded. That certainly will kick around the potential parameters for a “greatest movies” list, if you head in that direction. Since the book was a collection of old New York Times movie reviews, maybe they just didn’t have a comprehensive selection of reviews from those days, or at least nothing they wanted to reprint in 2004.

It still seems like a peculiar way to go about the enterprise. It’s difficult not to feel that for every D.W Griffith, Chaplin or Keaton picture on there, there would have been at least been one “Hair” or “National Lampoon’s Animal House” squeezed out. It’s also ignoring a fairly substantial chunk of movie history, and formative history at that. One possible assumption is that silent movies were omitted with an eye to making the end-product more commercially viable. Since I didn’t see any other explanation in the preface or introduction available on-line - and it may very well be in the book (well, you’d hope) - I can’t readily conjure up any better reason.)

THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH (1947)

Sometimes credits give you more information about a movie than you might have expected, and possibly more of a “Mr Wisdom’s Whopper”-style puzzle than you’d packed a lunch for.

For example, in The Woman on the Beach, there’s a credit for a “Dialogue Director”. The perfectly logical question which may well hiccup to mind is: “Why does a movie which already has a perfectly good director and an assistant director also need a dialogue director?” Not only is this not such a dumb question, but as it happens the answer to it may well stumble across the reason why this is such a nuthatch of a movie. *

The director of The Woman on the Beach was Jean Renoir, who as you may well surmise, was by way of being French. Accounts of his degree of facility with the English language during his Hollywood days vary, ** and at this distance, it’s probably impossible to determine how fluent he was in English, whether reading, writing or whatever.

However there are two strong pieces of evidence highly pertinent to The Woman on the Beach. One is that it had a dialogue director. The other is that Renoir co-wrote the script, and the dialogue is 250 kilos of exploding lunatic soup. It sounds like something two clinically addled teenagers came up with on a brief tram ride after sniffing paint.

Considering how painstaking other aspects of the production are, you get the impression Renoir had very little idea how the dialogue sounded, or he would have done something to fix it. Burning the script and then dancing frenziedly on the smouldering ashes comes to mind.

The other possibility – and one not entirely mutually exclusive of the previous one – is that Renoir didn’t CARE about the dialogue.

(Actually you wonder whether the dialogue coach cared about the dialogue. Given the raw material on hand, and the evidence on screen, you figure they really might as well have got in a football coach.)

RKO’s The Woman on the Beach is a pure mood piece, of the exact kind that every Hollywood studio including RKO would have run hundreds of miles over splintered hardened bagels to avoid at the time.

It’s a sustained, brooding contemplation on the subjects of love, fear, ensnarement by the past, and the balance of good and evil in human personality. (Clearly they would have struggled to get a musical-comedy starring Esther Williams out of this material.)

That’s how Renoir rigorously lays it out, and that’s what he’s interested in, to the clear exclusion of such considerations as sane dialogue, incidental storytelling detail, or conventional plot; to the point where it’s something of a shock when a woman actually turns up on the beach, just like in the title.

Robert Ryan plays a commanding officer in the United States Coast Guard, Mounted Division. (Yeah, on horses – who knew?) He’s a mainly manly kind of man, but mentally toe-stubbed by a terrible event in his past – being on a ship that was blown up, apparently – resulting in highly psycherligical nightmares.

He’s got a fine gal (Nan Leslie) who is not only regulation Hollywood beeyoodiful, but she’s so down-home that she wears checked shirts and does woodwork for a living. (Well, we see her cut a piece of wood in two using a bandsaw while looking nervous, and even then Robert Ryan takes the pieces over to the shelf for her, but it’s all the evidence of master carpentry I needed.)

But then he meets a Woman on the Beach (Joan Bennett). She is a similarly damaged soul, affected by some (as yet unrevealed) tragedy in the past. They share an instant (and I mean INSTANT) mutual understanding that you have to give the actors all the credit in the world for conveying, in the face of halting, lurching and thoroughly intermittent dialogue which suggest that every so often someone would drop a few pages of the script, they’d blow away, and then nobody would bother to replace them.

Unfortunately, there is a Mr Woman on the Beach – a blind, embittered former artist, if all of that doesn’t involve a tremendous amount of tautology. There probably aren’t a ton of uproariously happy blind former painters kicking around, when you think about it.

Thus begins the triangle of love, morphing characters and shifting power relationships which so steadfastly haunt this determinedly gloomy picture. Todd the painter, (Charles Bickford), lonely and bereft of mental stimulation, aggressively seeks to befriend Scott the lieutenant. Scott the lieutenant is getting the idea that he’d very much like to befriend Peggy the mysterious woman, only not in exactly the same way. Peggy the mysterious woman, even though she’s apparently had about two gutfuls of Todd the painter, seems torn on more or less an even-money basis on whether she should get a good befriending (and stimulation) from Scott the lieutenant. Eve, the sunny-bright girlfriend, eventually gets an inkling that she better step out from behind the particle board and jigsaw and do some marital befriending of her own, lest her lieutenant slip through to the proverbial ‘keeper.

All this seems the stuff of roaring, splattered eggplant high melodrama, which is almost exactly what this film isn’t. It’s a kind of fatalistic, brooding pageant of interwoven internal struggles – something that is almost film noir without the crime element. However even crime-less noir requires plot – in the sense of a story where things happen, and personal reactions result from those things. This movie doesn’t do that stuff, it does the reverse. All events just seem to happen, purely as a function of what the characters are. It’s not so much a case of patchwork continuity, or poor continuity, as continuity apparently not having been even a remote consideration.

To put it more plainly, it’s like when a young kid tells you a story, and since where the story is going is much more important to them than the paltry details of how it got there, they kind of skip most of the transitional detail out. You know, “Princess, Frog, Kiss, Castle, Happily Ever After – Now let’s go and play on the swings.” The dialogue in The Woman on the Beach is approached in exactly the same way. Who cares if it makes sense, or even if it’s all there – let’s just get that frog into the fershlugginer castle.

One result of this is some of the most dizzyingly clunky dialogue ever committed to film, accompanied by rampant dementia of the plotline. Another is, almost, a very brave and successful movie tone-poem about an inherent tendency of love toward misery, and the deep-rooted flaws in even the best of human nature, sustained as a pure mood piece, with a story told purely in terms of characterisation.

“Almost” because of a hilariously obvious tacked-on happy ending, which jolts at a tangent from every straight-line conclusion the director has been driving towards to deliver a concluding shot of a previously mutually homicidal couple gaily walking arm in arm into the sunset like school-chums. If you can ignore this boldly cavalier slash of apparent studio tailoring, and keep your liver internalised during some of the more uproariously idiotic dialogue, there’s plenty worth watching in this picture, especially in the main performances.

Stuff to watch out for:

- My personal favourite piece of script-malpractice occurs during a scene where the blind painter guy is unwell, and Robert Ryan waits outside with a fellow member of the Coast Guard. The young guy starts a touching little story about how when he was at school, the local schoolteacher explained gently to the kids that even though the famous painter was now blind, he was a very gifted man, and over time he would find another way to communicate his unique vision to the world. Apart from being a nice piece of background detail on the local town, and adding a bit of shading to a minor character, this is poignant to us and Robert Ryan, because we have seen that Todd the blind painter is a bitter man, locked in the past, who has never been able to break free and find another creative outlet. And it’s right there that the kid blurts: “Gee, I hope he isn’t dead!” This kind of thing happens all through the picture.

- Mr and Mrs Woman on the Beach live in near-poverty in a tumbledown shack right on the water, big enough only to contain them, a few items of tatty furniture, and apparently thousands of dollars worth of the latest in spotless billowing-sleeved Hollywood couture, since the missus turns up in a different shimmering outfit in pretty much every change of scene.

- Even as ear-cloutingly obvious studio process shots go, the big fight on the fishing boat between Ryan and Bickford is a lulu. They may as well have had the studio hands who were tilting the boat and throwing buckets of water in the air come right into shot, and saved wear and tear on the cinematographer.

- There are some amazing undertones of sexuality in there, at least by the standards of the time. When the Charles Bickford character is talking about the joys of deep-sea fishing, the language chosen suggests fairly emphatically that we’re all going to need a smoke after that particular boat sails back into harbour. Also you might want to keep an eye out for some “inadvertent” “distracted” hand-work Joan Bennett does on a convenient piece of metal tubing during a protracted conversation with Robert Ryan outside the beach-house. Any professional pole-dancer would be highly impressed.

- If you ever wondered what Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies (Irene Ryan) looked like when she was young, you can find out here – she looked like a younger version of Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. No “amazing undertones of sexuality” to report in this case.

- A chap called Harold Palmer is credited with “Montage” which presumably refers to two unusual dream sequences of the Ryan character. The first is more your typical psycherligical casserole of the time, although not without imaginative visual content. The second is quite something, particularly in the perfectly processed “forming” of Bennett’s face from both fire and water effects. As great highlights in psychopathology on film go, this one may well stick with you.

- The pick of the plot-gulfs probably comes when Ryan suddenly turns up at the beach-house door one morning and asks Bickford’s character to come out fishing with him, because he’s booked a boat for that afternoon. Bickford has already explained earlier on that he wasn’t really into fishing, he just made that stuff up. Nonetheless Bickford says “Yahoo, let’s go” or words to like Shakespearean effect, and insists on setting out right away. Ryan agrees.

Now, he already said he booked the boat for that afternoon, so unless they plan to swim out to the fish, you’d be forgiven for wondering exactly how they’re going to get there. Also, there’s no particular reason for this to happen right there, other than Renoir wants to get the characters out there on that boat, right in front of the process screen. In fact there’s every indication that Ryan only wants to take Bickford out on the boat to kill him, and when they’re out there Bickford even admits that he knew that, although omitting to clearly explain why he then decided to come out for a jolly old day on the water anyway.

That Ryan is trying to kill him now is something we suspect, and is confirmed when we get out on the boat. WHY Ryan is trying to kill him now – when he’d already expressed sorrow over almost killing him by accident (kind of) earlier in the picture – is a motivational question apparently deemed excess to requirements by the scripting consortium.

Just to make officially make all this as clear as egg custard, the weather is rugged, the sea is ugly, Bickford’s character has already stated twice that it’s a terrible day for fishing (even though he knows nothing about fishing by his own prior admission), we’ve been deliberately informed that this unique department of the US Coast Guard OWNS NO BOAT, which even if you accept that piece of passing lunacy makes you wonder – presuming your brain hasn’t boiled to a vapour under the pressure of sheer concentrated inanity – how exactly Robert Ryan found a local so profoundly and clinically knot-headed that he was happy to rent out a boat for fishing on (a) a day when there obviously was no fishing, and (b) a day where the seas were pitched at such insurmountable Noah-friendly levels that he was pretty much London-to-a-brick-on not to get the boat back at all, as well as being responsible for the deaths of two locals in a small community.

Quite frankly this one relatively brief sequence has more implicit plot-holes than most movies have plot. And to suggest this was an isolated example would be a vast-underestimation of the imaginative powers at play in this movie.

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The usual critical tapdance on Renoir’s Hollywood period is that he was forced by the ee-vill studio mavens to make more conventional pictures, so unlike his pure, untrammelled, Born-Free non-US movies, you can safely ignore these. Since to me this implies a certain strain of movie-going dyslexia, let me say to those critics, I deg to biffer.

I don’t know how you could make a movie more “different” than The Woman on the Beach, at least without running Hot Wheels track through the camera instead of conventional film. It’s not like his version of The Diary of a Chambermaid (containing both Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies and the Penguin) is exactly “Hey Gang, Let’s Put on a Show!”-type conventional Hollywood fare either.

Though any resemblance to a plot-line is purely coincidental, and the dialogue should have come packaged with an antidote, The Woman on the Beach is a monument to fiercely individualistic movie-making, a sustained emotional painting in various shades of brood, and falls only one scene short of being a radical and convincing argument that the fallacy of the human condition resides in the inextricably entwined futility and necessity of love. (Pause for typing breath.)

Or to put it another way, The Woman on the Beach is like a high quality sinus medication – it gets up your nose, works five ways internally and has powerful sustained effects that last for hours.

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(8 out of 11 on the internationally-endorsed MPHOAH scale)

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* (Another credit conundrum from The Woman on the Beach. Hanns Eisler is listed as being responsible for the music, but there’s also a credit for an orchestral arranger, as well a guy called Bakaleinikoff who rejoices in the title “Music Director”. Presuming you were thinking about this kind of stuff as the credits rolled gently by, instead of what you’re more likely to be doing – i.e. wrangling stray choc-top fragments around the pants area, or launching an investigative finger-safari into the wild nostril – you might well wonder there what a “Music Director” would do when there’s already a guy to compose the music, and another guy to blot it neatly out for the orchestra musicians.

Then you might actually listen to the score, and wonder why some bits of it sound like pretty decent minor-league ballet music from the B-Team of Russian composers, Class of circa 1900, while other bits sound like Dvorak on a gypsy kick, and then occasionally the whole orchestra farts in distress like King Kong just walked onto the screen, in a manner that has utterly nothing to do with the rest of the music at all. Then you might think back to the credits and figure that Bakaleinikoff guy probably stuck his oar in on the compositional and maybe arrangement side here and there. If you happen to know that C. Bakaleinikoff - and I’d like to think the “C” stood for “Count” - also got music credits on a lot of movie serials, then you can also probably hazard a reasonable guess as to who dropped the massive orchestral suspense farts in at moments of allegedly high tension, with a cavalier disdain for any conception of the movie’s dramatic tone that may have occurred to the director.)

** (One of those possibly apocryphal Hollywood stories that I prefer to believe is 100% true is that, on his leaving the employ of one studio, they threw Renoir a kind of party. Supposedly in his speech at that event, Jean-boy responded: “I’m very pleased to have worked at 15th Century Fox.” Of course some, including meem, have taken that as a goodbye kick in the teeth to employers who screwed around with his pictures. However supposedly, when later asked about the remark, Renoir said that he was sorry, he’d enjoyed his time at that studio, and that he had misspoken because of his lack of a command of English.
Y’know, I don’t think it’s out of the question that Renoir’s facility with English, even as late as 1947, might have been limited at least to the extent where he couldn’t have separated truly, outstandingly pretzel-spasmoid dialogue from run-of-the-mill scripting that would just about get the job done. I also don’t think that it’s out of the question that, compared to other goals he had in mind for The Woman on the Beach, he just didn’t care that much about the dialogue at all. However I have to pull up at Credibility Gulch at the implication that someone could live and work somewhere for a few years and not have absorbed the necessary lingo to count up to 20. Even an Australian blotnik who spoke very little French and no German – and I am that blotnik – could conceivably count up to 20 in either language without the inconvenience and shipping charges of having lived in either place. Kids have been able to manage that for years, courtesy of Sesame Street. I’m going to take courage in both hands here, and suggest that when Renoir said “15th Century Fox” he meant “15th Century Fox”.)

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THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH (1969)

One of the more puzzling quirks of the movie past, at least looking back with decades’ worth of 20/20 hindsight, is that arguably the best animation department in studio history – the various director-led cartoon units working for Warner Bros – never produced an original feature film in its heyday. That they had the popular characters and the assembled talent to make a viable feature-length cartoon seems reasonably evident. It’s also difficult to believe that Warner Bros studios didn’t have the money, as costly as feature animation production was in the days before you could tickle the whole thing up on computer. *

And yet, in what is not exactly a poorly documented area of Hollywood studio history, I’ve never come across one shred of information to suggest that there was even so much as an abandoned Warners cartoon feature project, or even something that got left marooned at the discussion stage.

There were some reasons for this, not the least of which were probably the two WB cartoon producers of record, Leon Schlesinger and Edward Selzer. **

Some sort of change in the weather was apparent by the mid-60s, when the old studio system was also displaying early cracks in the wall ahead of the wholesale change in Hollywood that was to come a few years later.

Long time Tom & Jerry directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera left MGM, formed their own studio and went off to make sausages for television. Chuck Jones left Warners, taking most of his WB cartoon unit, formed his production company and mostly made sparkling-looking but oddly lifeless Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM. DePatie-Freleng productions took care of whatever reputation Warners animation had left by that stage, supplying a stream of frankly depressing cartoons possibly even more disoriented and eerily anaemic than the Warners-generated cartoons of the early-middle 1960s that had preceded them. ***

Somehow, in the 1960s, Chuck Jones ended up involved with a couple of animated features, without having at his disposal such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Marvin Martian, either Road Runner or the Coyote, any or all of which could have conceivably been helpful in sustaining audience interest in a feature length cartoon.

The first was a 1962 UPA Studio cartoon musical about love-struck pussycats in Paris, unappetisingly titled Gay Purr-ee, for which Jones merely received co-writer credit, along with his wife and two others. (It was directed by long-time Jones associate Abe Levitow, whose work often resembled Jones’ visually, but not so much in terms of generating energy or laughs.)

The second was 1969’s The Phantom Tollbooth, a presumable labour of love for Jones, based on arguably one of the least-known genuine classic children’s books, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

This time the Jones production company was responsible, in collaboration with MGM, (that major studio’s first ever animated feature), and Jones was on-board as co-adaptor, co-director of the animated material that makes up the bulk of the movie, and overall creative supervisor.

Beyond the contractual non-availabilty of his greatest characters, the other major problem was, Chuck Jones wasn’t Chuck Jones anymore, at least not the Chuck Jones whose Warner Bros cartoons pleasurably bent the heads of so many people in childhood (and way beyond childhood, although not everyone cares to admit it.)

I don’t think it diminishes in any degree the phenomenal contributions Chuck Jones made to cartoons, comedy or motion pictures in general in his long golden period, to suggest that in the mid-1960s (and 70s, and 80s and 90s) with a very few highly honourable exceptions, he just didn’t have it anymore when it came to making funny pictures.

His approach became increasingly arch, tiresomely self-referential, drearily chatty – what once had been briskly punctuated was now dazingly long-winded. The famous Jones extreme character poses which had previously been set-up or punchline were now set adrift in peculiar isolation, apparently intended to generate laughs off their own bat. In crept a kind of ossified intellectualism, accompanied by the creeping preachies, and, increasingly, in both character design and scripted content, a terminal case of the cutes. Boffo gags – seldom detectable.

His films still looked good, not to mention distinctive – every frame seemingly hand-drawn and signed by Chuck Jones, just like in the heyday. But the content – she not there.

The Phantom Tollbooth is not entirely devoid of charm, although it seemingly makes more effort to be so than was entirely necessary. In fact it’s worth a look, mostly because of how it looks. The movie is perhaps most kindly thought of as one of the signature visual creations of Jones long-time Warners layout guy, Maurice Noble, here rightly credited as production designer.

Noble’s astounding design work for cartoons like Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century and some of the Marvin Martian cartoons remains firmly lodged in the minds of anyone who’s ever seen them, but some of the stuff in Phantom Tollbooth makes those layout jobs look like Classic Elizabethan Mickey Mouse. Neither Noble or Jones shied away from the idea of being genuinely, wildly experimental here when they had the opportunity, and to say the look of this movie is fanciful is like saying an axe-blade in the neck could cause mild discomfort.

The Phantom Tollbooth is the story of a Milo, a young and amazingly zest-free boy who sees little reason for interest, much less wonder, in everyday life. One particularly dreary afternoon, he receives a huge, mysterious package which turns out to contain a magical tollbooth. (And, in the movie version, a car too. In the book, the clearly non-underprivileged Milo already owns a miniature electric car. Why the difference? Well, as a character once memorably observed in the vintage Hollywood comedy Hellzapoppin: “This is Hollywood – we change everything here.”)

Going through the tollbooth, he enters a strange world he’s never heard of, the former “Kingdom of Wisdom”, now hopelessly divided along sectarian lines between the followers of numbers (Digitopolis) and letters (Dictionopolis).

(At tollbooth’s point is where the movie, after diddling around tediously for a while on the transition, moves from live-action to animation.)

He meets some bizarre, memorable characters, each with their own flaws, limitations and subtle message to impart (not in the movie – they beat you over the head with them there) and eventually finds himself drawn into the main quest, and mystery of the story – his attempts to locate the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason, and restore the kingdom to its former, unified glory, in the face of the expected, but amusingly and originally personified, ee-vill opposition.

I suppose if you had to boil it down to something simple, the basic impetus of the story is that there is real magic and inherent value in both learning and experience. That’s kind of a dull message laid out like that there.

Why Juster’s book is anything but dull is due to the gently ironic and just faintly distanced tone of the telling, along with a matter-of-fact yet bizarre way of looking at the world – a kind of intermittently farcical humorous approach pretty reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. When it comes to messages, he leaves the reader to take what they like out of it. If it’s a funny, imaginative fantasy story you want, you can leave holding nothing but that particular showbag. If it’s a different, highly original way of looking at the world of knowledge you’re after, you can bring that back with you too. Or anything in between.

Its final, and arguably key, message is delivered in a kind of throwaway line dropped in deceptively desultory fashion halfway through the second-last chapter. It’s the solution to the mystery and a great punchline that’s funny and chilling, and a perfect resolution.

And the Jones movie version left it out entirely.

In its determination to batter you over the head with the Great Lessons to be Learned Here, the movie becomes every bit as dull as my earlier one-sentence summation of the story’s intent. In sacrificing the entertainment value to do so, it loses the most effective weapon the book had in terms of driving the “message part” home.

And Jones’ characters frequently burble indigestible aphorisms of wisdom at incoherent speed. If I can play back lines five times and still barely understand them, what hope does a ten year old have? Let alone, what possible interest?

Characters which seemed intriguing, funny and a little scary in the book are often flat and rote here. The ones that survive best are usually those closest to the spirit of the Jules Feiffer cartoons in the original. Most of the life in the characters is directly attributable to the participation of some of the best voice talent in Hollywood, including Mel Blanc, Hans Conried, Daws Butler and June Foray.

Probably the most telling difference is in the lead character, Milo. In the book, he’s drawn (and written) as a curiously mid-Atlantic type – a slump-shouldered, thin, ascetic, with an appealingly wide-eyed look of either imminent dismay or glumly impenetrable boredom. He’s a good soul, but a bit lost for the moment, kind of a gentle comedy figure – a believably off-centre variant on the classic bright but enervated kid who fervently believes there’s “nothing to do”.

In the movie he’s drawn as the classic big-eyed, cute Jones American Everyboy – he’s annoyingly perky in the animated stuff and a whiny spoiled brat in the live-action material, so that would be the quinella there. Probably Butch Patrick (yes, Eddie Munster) could have done a great job playing one of Bambi’s chucklesome woodland friends in an earlier decade, but he’s just too apple pie to play a slightly off-kilter male variant on Alice here. That’s exactly what the book supplied, and the movie needed.

There’s some good full animation here, but it only turns up intermittently, and then barely for a coffee-break. Usually everyone just talks for ages in the one place, we get plenty of chance to take in the crazy design work, then there’s a bit of showpiece animation, and then more talking etc. What’s worse is that virtually none of it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Some of the saddest moments involve Jones harking back deliberately, and with an unappetisingly telegraphed knowingness, to past glories which seem more distant by the passing second. The Dodecahedron character has Bugs Bunny’s voice, and precisely none of the appeal. One female character is a strong reference to Jones’ Warner Bros character Witch Hazel (with the same voice, supplied by June Foray). Again, Witch Hazel was funny. Most tragic in the attempt, he raids the storage locker from perhaps his last really great Warners cartoon, Baton Bunny, and no less than three times, with two different characters, reprises the Bugs Bunny burlesque of classical conductor Leopold Stokowski, (hair swept back springs forward again, eyebrow-raise/furtive-furious look left, eyebrow-raise/furtive-furious look right), without getting a single laugh out of it.

It doesn’t help that it’s a musical, although this could have been worse. Only a couple of the songs are truly abominable, the most violently upchuck-inspiring of them unfortunately occurring right at the beginning of the picture. Pretty much ALL of the incidental music is truly abominable – they couldn’t have done worse using stock music.

The live action footage, shot by David Monahan ****, looks like a 70s telemovie, which is to say, flatter than the late Andre the Giant’s mattress. The idea was doubtless to make for a contrast with the animated fantasy world, but it didn’t have to look this dull. Actually the opening material shot to establish Milo missing the amazing everyday things happening all around him is timed and edited to better make its point (quietly) than the animated stuff does, but it looks ordinary as all get-out and your attention-span is fighting the horrendous opening song throughout this sequence as well.

Enough magic barely survives from the book, that with the imaginative look of some of the movie, some great voice-work, and the odd fleck of quality animation from one of the greatest ever exponents of the craft, Phantom Tollbooth is still worth a once-over, if you happen to be filing past the telly when it happens to turn up on cable. If you want to see the best of Chuck Jones, check out some of the DVDs mentioned below – the best of his Warner Bros shorts are as good as cartoons, comedy and movies get. He’s one of the greatest directors of all time, beginning and end of story. It’s just that Phantom Tollbooth is not an example of that.

If you want to check out a great version of The Phantom Tollbooth, read the book. If you want a great movie version, you’re still going to have to wait for someone to get around to making it.

What someone like Jones at the height of his powers, with the might of the Warners cartoon units backing him, could have done with material like this is, on the one hand, a moot point – The Phantom Tollbooth didn’t appear in book form until 1962, when the Warner cartoon studio was effectively already in its dotage.

On the other hand, imagine those talents, say in the 1950s, with a storyline even half as imaginative or aptly crafted, using the characters they had at their disposal, working flat-out to make the funniest animated feature they were capable of. It’s one of the great hauntingly lost opportunities of Hollywood history.

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(After more than the usual 15 seconds thought, a rating of 7 out of 11 on the MPHOAH scale.
It’s worth about a 9 for certain visual elements, somewhat less for others, and roughly a 5 or 6 for general content considerations, so I had to come to a rough consensus amongst myself.)

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* (Most of the major – and minor – studios baulked at feature-length cartoon production. Only Disney Studios were able to consistently produce long-form animated movies and have sustained [or any] success. The Fleischer Bros [independent producers for Paramount distribution] had two brave stabs and just about put themselves out of business. MGM had the talent, the production values and the budget, but not so much the depth of characters. Tom & Jerry were their obvious candidates, but for some reason there was no feature during the studio system heyday. Most of the other cartoon producers were frankly too under-funded or cheap to do it. And even if Walter Lantz had had the inclination, which he presumably didn’t, and had been able to get the money out of Universal, which, he presumably wouldn’t, can you imagine enduring Woody Woodpecker at feature-length?)

** (Leon Schesinger was a heavily money-oriented, bottom-line type guy, operating as an independent producer for Warner Bros. Feature-length production would have seemed like an hilariously ridiculous risk to him, and he probably didn’t have the operating cash anyway. The former part of this assertion would seem to be backed up by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising – his earlier creative talent – having already walked out of the studio after a long-running dispute over getting Schlesinger to allot more money for production of the short cartoons.

Schlesinger’s creative philosophy is perhaps summed up in the quote later attributed to him by long-time Warners cartoon story-man, Michael Maltese:

“Disney can make the chicken salad, I wanna make chicken shit. I’ll make money.”

That seems unambiguous.

After Schlesinger sold his entire interest in the cartoon studios to Warner Bros, Edward Selzer was assigned as “producer” of the Warners cartoons. Like Fred Quimby in the analogous role at MGM, he had no knowledge or interest in animated cartoons and virtually no creative input whatsoever into their production. Warners director Chuck Jones has cited that, under the Selzer regime, in the 1950s, if one of his short cartoons required more time to complete – and thus, effectively more money – they would have to crib time from another cartoon to make the production schedule average out, effectively a fudge so that Selzer wouldn’t notice any additional expense on the books and kick up a stink. Thus Selzer probably also wasn’t the kind of guy with either the vision or inclination to fight for a feature-length production under the Warners aegis.

That Quimby at MGM was cut from the same kind of bargain-basement sackcloth seems evident from virtually every piece of anecdotal evidence to emerge from his former employees since. According to one former MGM animator, Quimby mysteriously emerged into the motion picture world via osmosis after having something to do with promoting a (former world heavyweight champion of the early 20th century) Jess Willard fight. He turned up at MGM at some point, and when no-one else there knew anything about producing animated cartoons, was given the job, apparently on the basis that he also knew nothing about producing animated cartoons. The consensus view at both studios seems to have been that the best quality of both Selzer and Quimby was that, other than purely budgetary considerations, they mostly stayed right out of the way.)

*** (Other than a couple of Chuck Jones experiments at MGM, and one or two slightly more honourable Warners efforts at the very beginning of the 1960s, the only Hollywood animation worth the effort in this period was probably the original material produced in 1960 – unfortunately in black and white – for the [US] ABC-screened The Bugs Bunny Show, which featured the “classic” Warner Bros characters supervised by Jones, Freleng and McKimson. Disney would be a big exception, of course. Some might also except UPA. But for the big studios other than Disney, you could make a strong case, based on the material produced, that this particular era of Hollywood short cartoon production, died effectively with the last strong Warners studio efforts of 1959.)

**** (I had no idea if this was the same Dave Monahan that used to work in the Warners cartoon department decades earlier. According to the Internet Movie Data-Base – imdb.com – it is the same guy. It seems odd that he has no other listed credit as live-action director, even on television, and was not a director in animation either, generally working on story. If it’s the same guy, there must be a story behind him getting this job, but I sure don’t know what it was.)

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Historical detail in this piece is derived from (at least) the following sources:

(NOTE - Any conclusions which seems more like drawing a long bow, or frankly wacky, are mine, but the quotes, detail and more factually-oriented general impressions were generally extracted from these.)

PRINT

Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons – Leonard Maltin

Tex Avery: King of Cartoons – Joe Adamson

And also some print material by some of the original animation critics of the 1970s, including Richard Thompson among others, stumbled across in various long-forgotten film fan magazines of the past, and also material in The American Animated Cartoon edited by Gerald and Danny Peary.

VIDEO

Tex Avery (1988) – Documentary by John Needham

(Available for viewing on YouTube, whether legally or not I have no idea)

Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vols 1-5 – interview and commentary extras on DVD sets

(Official WB releases available in Australia as single-DVD release titles)

RADIO

Interview with WB animator Charles (Chuck) McKimson, and Robert McKimson (Jr), the son of WB director/animator Robert McKimson – conducted by LLL

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EDGE OF THE CITY (1957)

Some movies seem to grow in stature with the passing of time. The impact of others expands “with the times”, which is not quite the same thing: for example, oddly prescient-seeming movies with a theme or themes that resonate with contemporary audiences many years later, even when the particulars of technology depicted have dated.

Examples of the latter include:

- Citizen Kane (the study of an iconic media czar by media means – it’s immaterial that newsreels as an actual method of news dissemination went out with spats, hats and automats)

- Ace in the Hole (exploitation of media frenzy over a breaking story that captures a nation’s interest – anyone who caught any of the blanket media coverage of that story a while back about those two guys stuck down a mine in Tasmania and wasn’t reminded of this movie has never seen this movie)

- The Fortune Cookie (right to this day you could still pitch a story about a TV employee hurt while working on a major sport event, leading to general insanity on all levels after an ambulance-chaser lawyer shysters him into suing for millions)

- Touch of Evil (vital involvement of surveillance equipment in climax of this crime thriller)

This doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily great movies, only that aspects of them seems strangely contemporary now. *

The reputation of other movies dwindles with time, of course.

And then there’s a third category of pictures, which seem to fall through the cracks and escape any significant re-evaluation, remaining on the books as “classics” despite the possible contention that, much as with Liza Minnelli, the Richmond football club and the comedy stylings of Rowan and Martin, the decades have not been especially kind.

A movie like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) – a perennial item on “greatest films of all time” lists – seems to exist in its own portion of DC Comics’ Phantom Zone. Seen as a contemporary dramatic bombshell about the impact of servicemen returning to society – and the impact of the war on them – in the time just after World War II, (which was obviously the perfect time for it), it comes over a lot like a stranglingly conservative coagulated soaper now and probably has for roughly three decades at least. It just seems like nobody noticed. Either none of the critics have watched it since then, or they had the words of the original critics in mind and accepted it as a “made” classic, or they’ve never heard of it. Six of one, half a dozen of your mother.

So it, and some other acknowledged classics exists in a kind of Leonard Maltin limbo where the original **** opinion and reputation stands in books and lists, never to suffer the cruel slings and Aerogard of modern-day revisionism, probably mainly because nobody ever watches those movies anymore.

So, welcome one and all to the uncomfortable, blinking reappearance in the light of day of Edge of the City, no battle-scarred titan of the “All Time Greats” lists like Best Years of Our Lives, but still referred to, right here in 21st Century Central, in such terms as “Sombre”, “Realistic”, “****” and “Masterfully acted”. (Thanks Leonard Maltin book.) It’s the sort of movie they used to refer to as “Searing”, without intending to make you think of chops.

Well old party-pooper Larry is here to tell you that this is the classic mild-leftie intellectual hamstring-pull of the period. Not a single cliché is omitted to spare the audience’s aching sides. It’s set down on the gritty docks. You’ve got your racial themes. You’ve got your young, wayward protagonist who’s alienated from his parents. He seems a good guy, but poverty and circumstances might see him go either way. (Once folks have seen five minutes of this movie, you won’t be able to make book with anyone in the room that he’s going to end up going over to the dark side, even if you were offering odds of plasma TVs to peanuts.)

You’ve got your controversial (a million years ago in Rhubarb Springs, Georgia) interracial friendship. You’ve got your inherent nobility of the working man. Of course, there’s also the brutality of the older, not so nice working man. There’s the working man’s inherent distrust of the authorities. There’s the inevitable growing tension between the nice black guy and the evil racist docks foreman. You know there’s going to be a climactic fight. (With grappling hooks, yet. Well, there’s one innovation.) If you can’t work out who’s inevitably going to die in the end , you probably haven’t seen a lot of movies, and ought to start with the basics, like a Pluto cartoon. You know something about the climactic fight will make our young wayward protagonist finally make a stand and do what’s right.

And neither director Martin Ritt or writer Robert Alan Aurthur let you down on one single thud as the blocks clunk into place with a weary fatalistic quality that has all the inherent joy and surprise of transporting large quantities of wood over a designated route.

John Cassavetes, doing a kind of performance art museum of method-acting varying from James Dean to Brando, is pretty hilarious. The dialogue’s doing nobody any great favours most of the way, but his attempts to climb into the very soul of a young, working guy, or whatever the hell he thought he was doing here, could put a current audience into cardiac arrest.

Sydney Poiter’s naturalistic breezy performance is certainly a study in contrast to Cassavetes’, even working around the cheese-board dialogue. The star power is pretty darn obvious. In fact you could probably use it to blast for oil.

I think it was kind of going for a semi-doco look, with plenty of location footage, but it just looks grainy, grey and washed-out, like institutional laundry. You know how sometimes when you watch an old picture you’ve never seen before, location or studio-soaked, with that gritty city setting, and the hard blacks and whites of the movie’s look zap your peepers like dynamite, as old as it is? Well, Edge of the City isn’t that movie.

There are plenty of movies from the 50s and 60s that had the leftie, brain-case, thinking-person’s magazine subscription, stamp of approval of the day, and aspects of even some of the biggies may well date as a result, but not like Edge of the City. This dates like uncollected kitchen refuse in a sustained garbage strike.

Trust me, On the Waterfront it isn’t. For that matter Splash Introducing Daryl Hannah it isn’t, and I think that movie and Edge of the City would battle to a hard-fought tie for searing gritty dockside reality, or however you want to term it.

By the time they get to Cassavete’s tentative faltering romance – and attendant dialogue resembling large irregular chunks of hardened mortar – you’ll be lamenting your lack of knitting needles and strong yarn so you could manufacture yourself a handy hanging rope.

Again, apart from Sydney Poitier’s performance, the only reason anyone could rate this movie higher than the underside of a low-slung deckchair is that nobody’s seen it in 50 years. Actually, that’s the one part they got right.

(5 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap)

* (Citizen Kane and Ace in the Hole are great movies, the latter still under-seen and underrated. The style of comedy dates The Fortune Cookie, but not as much as the fact that not a lot of the comedy is conspicuously funny. Touch of Evil looks like a mess on a storytelling level to me, not to mention acting that is absolutely all over the shop. But the use of the covert surveillance equipment and the essential nature of its deployment in the plot stands out like Prince Charles’s ears next to other movies of the time, despite the fact that the “sophisticated monitoring device” looks like something out of an Unca Scrooge comic book.)

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