May 29, 2009
A Cat's Pajamas Flashback
This is enough to make a grown man cry. Since Issue One, Page One of my publication eight years ago, I've seen fit to discuss "The Cat's Pajamas" at any available opportunity. Coming of age in the 1980's, "The Cat's Pajamas" was my induction into the "late late show" experience. This all-night show, broadcast from WGRZ (Buffalo's NBC affiliate), usually ran two films every night, interspersed with commentary from the affable host (and WGR weatherman) Barry Lillis. There would even be old television shows, "Our Gang" shorts, newsreels, and regular news updates from Bob Gist at News Centre 2.
Finally, someone in Cyberspace has posted a clip from this show (this one dates from 1983-- two years before I was a viewer). What strikes (and thereby endears) me most about this segment is how lo-fi it is-- very off-the-cuff (Barry stubbing out a cigarette, reading from lined paper), in a non-descript lounge area, without pretension or over-the-top delivery. It's as low-key as a late-night conversation would be, as that friend in the box is speaking to you this moment from downtown, saying "I know you're out there-- I'm here to help." All of these 25 year-old feelings of identification come flooding back in two minutes of video.
And either I had forgotten or didn't know, there was actually a Cat's Pajamas Fan Club (see Barry welcome new members!) and they gave out T-shirts! (I'm checking eBay for those!) The end credits by the way, come from the 1940 film, The Mortal Storm.
Enjoy. And if anyone out there has more Cat's Pajamas video, please make it public!
May 28, 2009
Jane Randolph (1915 - 2009)
ABOVE: (l-r) Jane Randolph, Simone Simon and Kent Smith in Cat People.
Jane Randolph began as a bit player in Warner Brothers pictures (Manpower; The Male Animal) -and was reportedly an ice-skating model for Bambi- before accepting second female leads in RKO programmers. Her swansong was in the Universal classic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein before marrying businessman Jaime del Amo and retiring from the screen. But of all her twenty film appearances in eight years, her enduring fame rests largely on two of the greatest horror sequences in the 1940's.
Cat People (1942) was the first of many Val Lewton-produced horror pictures of its decade, which suggested much of their supernatural elements through sounds, shadows and offscreen imagery (a budgetary consideration that became a lovely aesthetic). These classy RKO films, while perhaps a bit too talky today, were a nice alternative to the Universal monsters, who had become degenerated for an increasingly juvenile audience.
In this classic, Jane Randolph is Alice Moore, whose co-worker Oliver has a jealous wife Irena (Simone Simon), whose lineage is of ancestry that can also change its form into a panther. One night Alice is being followed by Irena. The clicking of sandals become a deafening silence, the shadows in the streets loom ominously, and then suddenly we hear a huge ROAR.... from a streetcar that Alice nearly collides with. Then she goes to the spa to have a dip in the pool. While she is in the water (in a dark room eerily illuminated by the ghostly, rippling reflections from the pool) strange sounds occur from offscreen, and she lets out a scream. The lights come back on, and she is safe for now, but then finds that her street clothes have been ripped to shreds.
Jane Randolph reprised her role in the excellent, underrated sequel The Curse of the Cat People (1944) (more of a modern Gothic fantasy than a horror film), whose lonely daughter has an imaginary friend.... Irena. (For my money, this and The Seventh Victim are the best of the Lewton cycle.) While her legacy is small, Jane Randolph left classic movie fans some memorable screen moments.
May 3, 2009
The Third Floor Drive-In: Season 5, Episode 3
Tonight's film: Ghetto Freaks (1970)
(preceded by trailers for The Pusher and The Hard Road)
It was an unusually cold night at The Third Floor Drive-In ® . We were shivering in our blankets, quivering while sipping coffee as Ghetto Freaks unspooled. As it turns out, the conditions couldn't have been more appropriate to view such a film. This hippie exploitation avoids the usual locations of sunny California in the "summer of love", and displaces the action to wintertime in Cleveland as these long-haired kids hand out pamphlets on the streets while freezing to death. The production history of this movie is as interesting as the onscreen shenanigans. This was originally titled Love Commune (and far more accurately at that), but it was re-released as Ghetto Freaks with two minutes of a silly hippie cult initiation scene, in which the African-American member of the commune . It was directed and co-written by Robert J. Emery, perhaps better-known for his later string of Florida-produced exploitation (Ride In a Pink Car was in an earlier season of The Third Floor Drive-In ® .
By the time of its release, there had been many films made about the counterculture, yet this one is one of the best-- both an exaggerated caricature and plain presentation of the hippie movement. Witnessing the sex orgy scene (with anamorphic lenses, great bad rock music and well-endowed flower children) might make you want to tune in, turn off and drop out too, but otherwise shows that hippie life isn't the soft-focus Utopia evoked by Laszlo Kovacs' lens in Psych-Out. These long-haired kids are constantly harassed by fascist cops (reminding us once and for all about the turmoil of the decade not recalled in K-Tel compilations), get bugged by gangsters wanting to push their drug cartel into the scene, and eke out a living hustling underground newspapers on the street. All fifteen of them live in one apartment, and are led by a guru named Sonny, who looks twenty years older than he ought to be (but didn't they all, in these hippie flicks?). In one amusing scene, all the kids get on one bus with the same bus pass that is circulated by handing it out the window to the next person to board the vehicle-- doesn't the bus driver notice? Among the vague linear threads of this fascinating time capsule is the burgeoning yet tragic relationship between Sonny and the newest commune member Diane, a runaway from her upper-class but ultra-conservative upbringing.
Ghetto Freaks is an interesting contradiction. On the surface it attempts to be a gritty expose, and largely succeeds thanks to Paul Rubinstein's docu-like photography (the numerous street scenes seem off-the-cuff) and the likely improvised, overlapping dialogue between the pothead protagonists. But no film with such an overlong drug-trip sex-orgy sequence can be taken as "the real thing", and it also has a strange Brechtian device a la Godard, where in one protest sequence, a film crew is clearly in view. What at first seems to be a mistake occurs again after the shocking finale- actors and crew stand around movie lights at the previous location while the credits roll, as if to say "up yours", much like the early scene where a hippie gives the viewer the peace sign and the finger in a single shot.
Are we to presume that the movie was just a big put-on? Ghetto Freaks thusly (and perhaps carelessly) raises more confusions than conclusions, but only makes this flick more thought-provoking than was intended. The cameras finally become turned upon the viewer forcing one to consider how we as a society have been portraying the movement in media. I'd be interested to know what -if any- response this perplexing picture received in its theatrical runs. People probably just wanted some sex and drugs, which it does deliver, plus a whole lot more bang for their bong.
View the groovy trailer for Ghetto Freaks here:
(preceded by trailers for The Pusher and The Hard Road)
It was an unusually cold night at The Third Floor Drive-In ® . We were shivering in our blankets, quivering while sipping coffee as Ghetto Freaks unspooled. As it turns out, the conditions couldn't have been more appropriate to view such a film. This hippie exploitation avoids the usual locations of sunny California in the "summer of love", and displaces the action to wintertime in Cleveland as these long-haired kids hand out pamphlets on the streets while freezing to death. The production history of this movie is as interesting as the onscreen shenanigans. This was originally titled Love Commune (and far more accurately at that), but it was re-released as Ghetto Freaks with two minutes of a silly hippie cult initiation scene, in which the African-American member of the commune . It was directed and co-written by Robert J. Emery, perhaps better-known for his later string of Florida-produced exploitation (Ride In a Pink Car was in an earlier season of The Third Floor Drive-In ® .
By the time of its release, there had been many films made about the counterculture, yet this one is one of the best-- both an exaggerated caricature and plain presentation of the hippie movement. Witnessing the sex orgy scene (with anamorphic lenses, great bad rock music and well-endowed flower children) might make you want to tune in, turn off and drop out too, but otherwise shows that hippie life isn't the soft-focus Utopia evoked by Laszlo Kovacs' lens in Psych-Out. These long-haired kids are constantly harassed by fascist cops (reminding us once and for all about the turmoil of the decade not recalled in K-Tel compilations), get bugged by gangsters wanting to push their drug cartel into the scene, and eke out a living hustling underground newspapers on the street. All fifteen of them live in one apartment, and are led by a guru named Sonny, who looks twenty years older than he ought to be (but didn't they all, in these hippie flicks?). In one amusing scene, all the kids get on one bus with the same bus pass that is circulated by handing it out the window to the next person to board the vehicle-- doesn't the bus driver notice? Among the vague linear threads of this fascinating time capsule is the burgeoning yet tragic relationship between Sonny and the newest commune member Diane, a runaway from her upper-class but ultra-conservative upbringing.
Ghetto Freaks is an interesting contradiction. On the surface it attempts to be a gritty expose, and largely succeeds thanks to Paul Rubinstein's docu-like photography (the numerous street scenes seem off-the-cuff) and the likely improvised, overlapping dialogue between the pothead protagonists. But no film with such an overlong drug-trip sex-orgy sequence can be taken as "the real thing", and it also has a strange Brechtian device a la Godard, where in one protest sequence, a film crew is clearly in view. What at first seems to be a mistake occurs again after the shocking finale- actors and crew stand around movie lights at the previous location while the credits roll, as if to say "up yours", much like the early scene where a hippie gives the viewer the peace sign and the finger in a single shot.
Are we to presume that the movie was just a big put-on? Ghetto Freaks thusly (and perhaps carelessly) raises more confusions than conclusions, but only makes this flick more thought-provoking than was intended. The cameras finally become turned upon the viewer forcing one to consider how we as a society have been portraying the movement in media. I'd be interested to know what -if any- response this perplexing picture received in its theatrical runs. People probably just wanted some sex and drugs, which it does deliver, plus a whole lot more bang for their bong.
View the groovy trailer for Ghetto Freaks here:
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