Harpo Out of Hell: MIAMI BLUES (1990)

There's a time to play Monopoly and a time to kick over the board and throw the play money in the air like we're motherfuckin' Scarface (i.e. when we're losing). The Alec Baldwin-goes-nutzoid "Florida Noir" classic, Miami Blues (1990) is for that time. Those of us who've done that, we may be normally sane, but we have our moments, and we get how liberating it can be to kick back and watch your unrestrained id run amok. We can only really do that when we 'wake up' in a dream. But what is film if not a dream and yet how few are those characters who 'waken up.'  That's why Junior (Baldwin) is so precious, the herald of the mid-90s id, the missing link between Harpo Marx and Mickey and Mallory Knox, Wendy Kroy, Hannibal Lecter, Tommy in Goodfellas, Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, Lisa in Girl, Interrupted. Before they all popped up from our moldy floorboards to kick the cobwebs of moralistic 80s self-censorship from our sleepy heads, there be Junior. He spooked some critics at the time. I remember reading a savage condemnation of it in the Syracuse student newspaper (I guess the uptight journalism major was taking it on himself to nip an amoral/openly violent cinema in the bud) but for those of us who saw it, especially we of the drinking class of 1989, we loved it. We needed it. Tarantino needed it. Paul Thomas Anderson needed it. Abel Ferrara needed it. Blues was the herald of their brand of amoral, violence-positive cinema, the kind that trusted the audience not to riot in an orgy of bloodlust just because the lesbians got away with murder.

That manic early 90s phase is long gone now, but for awhile cinema was a bonfire full of toothsome, fanged chestnuts. And way up atop the flickering flames there was Junior... blazing extra white before cracking open and spattering nut bits all over the living room. Sure it makes a mess and doesn't really thrill you (since you're the one who has to clean up), but damn wasn't that a fine bang?!

Adapted from the Charles Willeford novel, and directed by that shaggy dog beachcomber director George Armitage, Miami Blues is a violent Marx Brothers opus writ large in the Miami pastels of the post-Miami Vice era. The book is one of a series chronicling the adventures of hangdog cop Hank Moseley (here played by a perfectly-cast Fred Ward), loping after Junior for a bullshit manslaughter charge after he breaks a Moonie's finger at the airport. Jennifer Jason Leigh co-stars as the dimwitted prostitute Junior plays house with, and the trail Junior leads Mosley on features random crimes of utmost ballsiness, especially after Junior breaks into Mosely's bedroom and steals his dentures, gun, and badge. 

Thus begins Junior's deadpan adventures in cop impersonation. Even going so far as to stop crimes when he stumbles on them (there's nary a store not being held-up when Junior is not in earshot), Junior shows that in some cockeyed way he has ethics. He robs crack dealers with a miniature plastic Uzi; rolls pickpockets for the wallets they just stole; knocks over bookies by playing cop with Mosely's stolen badge, and so forth. There's no visible rhyme or reason to Junior's actions, but everything is logical because he acts on our expectations, based on what we see him see. If we see him in a convenience store during a robbery in progress, we naturally assume he'll try to stop it, as most heroes do in these kind of movies, so he does, even if all he has for a weapon is a jar of spaghetti sauce. If the security guard seems a little too cocky with his shotgun at the pawn shop, it's natural Junior will shoot him as soon as his back is turned, even if there's no real motive except to stay in the playful Joker/Marx-like fluidity of the moment, regardless of consequences.

There's no other way to contextualize the anarchy at work here--the only precedent is the Marx Brothers, which the author/s are well aware of, signaled by the in-joke of Junior's initial alias, Herman Gottlieb. i.e. Sig Ruman's ever-fuming, Mrs. Claypool-courting Baroni-signer in MGM's Night at the Opera (1935), a film I saw so many times as a kid that its textures and rhythms cloak me still in a kind of cinephile temple garment. And it's that very same garment that holds the secret to the madness of Baldwin's maniacal character, his crazy Marxian "life is but a dream so row-row yer way straight out the Truman Show" way of being. Forever caught in an old world (pre-WW2) bourgeois slow burn harrumph as Groucho dances verbal circles around him and Harpo sets his shoes on fire, it's only natural that old Mr. Gottlieb would eventually get his wallet lifted and identity stolen by a light-fingered Harpo out of Hell. How else might we measure the high crusting curves of the madness at work?

The real Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman) center, and driving the bus top right

 

But Armitage doesn't rely on this id-fulfillment to the point his film ceases to be entertaining or to function successfully as Leonrard-esque (*) Florida noir comedic crime thriller. He knows that if Junior's unleashed id is too self-serving, or sadistic, the result will cease to be fun and become instead merely lurid and disturbing (Killer's Moon, Clockwork Orange);  if too anarchic, the result would derail our narrative immersion (Daisies, Weekend). If it's juuuust right, then you got the Marx Brothers (in their first seven films), Bela Lugosi in The Raven, Timothy Carey (in everything)... then... who else is left?

Then the answer come a-back: Alec Baldwin. He's left. And now that Blues is on a crisp, gorgeous Shout Blu-ray it's not just a chance to remember how goddamned charismatic and hirsute old Alec used to be, it's a comforting sign that true anarchic Harpo Marx madness shall not perish from the screen... Baldwin--a classic film lover (and TCM regular commentator), he clearly gets it.

HERE'S TO DEAR OLD BALDWIN:

Most guys as good looking as Alec are, let's face it, dull as chalk; they never had to develop a personality, so never did. Occupied with making sure their hair is perfect, their best angle facing the camera, their neck long and their eyes twinkly, they forget to accrue depth. No emotion registers on their face lest wrinkles appear. As a result, they come across often as drugged narcissist automatons drained of all wit and regular guy who-gives-a-fuckitude. They become empty aquariums, dusty with the kind of self-righteous petulance they're convinced is the height of butch charisma. The only time they come alive is when they see a mirror. 

Not our Baldwin.

With his balanced Irish-American boxer stance, Baldwin comes off as real, a real guy, even when he's acting the part of a charming actor who knows he's fake. No easy feat, he makes Junior a true a cipher without being a bore about it; charming without being cocky, crazy without being aggravating, cool without being pretentious, beyond the need for phony sentiment but brave enough not to run from a real emotion should it ever breezes past. Best of all, he has the glint of real madness in his eyes, the kind you can't fake.

The SHOUT BLU-RAY:

A lot of us kids who grew up obsessively watching all the Marx Brothers and the Lugosi movies we could tape in the early 80s, naturally fell in love with Repo Man in 1984, but were left in the cold at the end of the 80s. In the pre-Tarantino-verse of 1990, Blues stood alone. We fans had a tracking-issue VHS dupe of it, taped off cable, and we had long grown used to the blurry pastel streaks of the decor and sky the fuzzy short hair cuts of both Junior and Susie reduced to a blurry halo. With the new Shout Blu-ray its all sharp and clear, with a nice lovely sparkle to the sea and sky and deep 3-D blacks to every sun-dappled shadow. The 80s pastels are darker, more textured,  and the transfer is so sharp you can smell the salt of the sea. The extras include recent interviews with Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who both admit really enjoying themselves with the project, the characters, and each other, and it shows then and now.

As I said earlier, the film had its detractors, some of whom declared it emblematic of a rise in nonsensical nihilism. Those critics were clearly pretentious twits, the type who mistakes bitterness for acumen, their minds hardened with dogmatic readings of western dialectical philosophy. Today they're probably going to see the flaccid remake of Far From the Maddening Crowd at some UWS theater with their embittered wives. Fuckin' A.

In other words, the average petit-bourgeois New York Times-perusing filmgoer will not approve of Miami Blues, which seems like an open invitation to the underclasses to rise up and boot them out of their condos. But it's the reverse, really: Junior lets us release our anger vicariously. Out it comes in gushing waves of joy, an air pocket of tyrannical childhood, that playing Godzilla rampaging the building block city catharsis, that which lies beyond good and evil now rising like an oil gusher, lifting us up off the surface of our becalmed flat stoned moviegoing consciousness.

One wild man performance is worth three movies worth of 'importance' or 'meaning.'

We see Junior's kind of kinetic free-form insanity so seldom, especially in today's nanny state clime, that when it comes along in the form of dear old Baldwin it's like a precious little match in the Hans Christian Anderson blizzard of sanctified sanity His is the flammable madness that takes that fluttery match and lights up the sky for just long enough to let us see the vastness of heaven. And then the match is out, the sky is dark, the house lights come back up, the veil of paralyzing self-consciousness descends once more like a clingy Psycho shower curtain, and not even Fred Ward can be held accountable for what we do to try and get that fire back. We wind up in rehab, or as deranged loners, buried deep in our bomb shelters, watching our Night of the Opera tape over and over 'til the tracking button can fix the worn streaks no more... and the last packet of powdered bourbon is long ago thrice soaked.
--

* (I haven't read Willeford's work so I keep referencing Leonard, as the style seems similar, forgive me, Charles

ADDENDUM:

And if you know you're in a dream, that nothing is real, why wouldn't you do all the things you never had the nerve to do in reality? An old friend of mine (through another friend) from the Princeton Blues Traveler days, Fisher (not his real name), lived that way. He was living legend amongst the local mix of debauched upper dregs at the 80s hippie-music-Princeton Record Exchange / Hoagie Haven / searching the ground and trash outside the Princeton Reunion parties for admission badges to crash in and drain their kegs and dig their Dixieland bands / pre-fame Blues Traveler (next time you see them, say hello from "Boot in his Hair!" --the name they gave me the morning after Max's 1988 New Years party ( I don't remember anything about that night between around 11 PM and the next morning but I woke up with dried vomit in my hair, then drove them all home) / Althea gave me her last double purple barrel (call me, Althea! I love you xoxo)- contingent. Princeton!! 

That 'Fisher' he a some boy all right.

I thought they were just making Percheur up, like Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan until I finally met him at a big outdoor bonfire keg party somewhere in the wilds of Princeton towards the back end of my 'tenure', so to speak. He seemed pretty normal, drinking, as we all did, talking about people I didn't know to people I sort of knew, but as the night wore on he spied some other dude he kind of didn't like from the other side of the bonfire. 

The party was kind of relaxing and dull but, at one point, suddenly Percheur fell to his knees and in an overhand pinwheel motion, his head down, facing down (looking in the opposite direction of his target), in a seamless falling motion as if the bottle was released accidentally--his half full Bud tall boy soared high into the air out of sight into the darkness.

If you've ever flung a half-full tall boy straight up in the air backwards you know it's not easy to get either distance or accuracy and this toss seemed like he just lost balance (no one but me was even watching him), upon releasing it he fell forwards, rolled and hid behind a car fender. The ca landed with pinpoint accuracy, face up, straight atop the guy's head, and-- with a thonk-- bounced off onto the ground, and landed face up. I don't even think a drop was spilled. 

I pretended not to notice and refrained from looking directly at either Percheur or the guy on the other side of the fire once he got hit, but I clocked him as this huge motherfucker in a frat jersey, who looked right over in Percheur's direction, and walking angrily, almost through the fire, right towards where he hid. But when I turned to look, Percheur had disappeared; the guy ran past me, and took off after him into the dark surrounding forest. Fisher spent the rest of the party on the run, coming back to the keg periodically for a refill, suddenly glancing past me and running off; the guy entering frame a moment later in pursuit - not friendly pursuit, either, but seriously aching for a huge party-crashing bad vibe fight. Not sure if he ever caught him, but to this day it's the single most amazing throw I've ever seen.

But that story is nothing, Max shrugged it off as but lesser Percheur amidst the man's storied mythic annals. I asked about him recently (20 years or so later). and Max said last time he heard of him was when--inspired by Miami Blues, which by then had become a huge cult favorite down there--he stole a fireman's badge and was pulling over cars on the road to fuck with them and/or steal their drugs. 

And from then on they called him 'Princeton Blues.'
---

Soon after of course the neighborhood was altered by Blues Traveller's success, and while they were on tour, the rest of the crowd would be smoking crack and watching pre-code WB gangster movies on TCM, which I respected. I still have the tape their manager Dave Martin they made me of Two Seconds, Picture Snatcher and Beast of the City. (TCM was rarity back then - my neighborhood didn't have it - few did - so he hooked me up). But where are any of them now? Who knows. My buddy got married. Drugs, fame, motorcycle accidents, and age took the rest. But hey, like they do in pre-code Warner's gangster films and like Junior does in Miami Blues, the free man alone may soar to the heights the burdened only dream of, until

Oops he fell. 

As we all did. 

But hey, you have to be high before you can splat --that's the arc of a gangster. It ends and it's time for teeth to be returned to the ground floor Mosleys. Walter Brennan in Red River asking for them back 'come grub' after losing them in a poker game to Chief Yowlachie, now called 2-Jaw Quo.

Detective Gummo, your teeth had never ground so free as they did in this man's hand; he carried them above the clouds, atop the spirit sky frog he could not refrain from biting.

"come chow, you get"

10 Great Movies for a New Years Day Hangover

Damn but you made a mess of things last night --I mean you must've since you don't remember and your girlfriend's on the couch instead of in bed with you and you're fully dressed, under the covers, waking up now in late afternoon, bleary and a mess, to reach with shaking hand for that warm foam-crusted highball on your nightstand, swilling it down before the gag reflexes can kick in, before you can get sick from the pain of hangover. You choke it down, which gives you strength to pop up and make a gin and juice 50/50 juice glass full. Bliss. And then... floating through another blackout day.

Then... waking up again, a messier mess of things, blearier, shakier hand, for that warm... wait where the fuck is it?

When did I start to lose you in that last paragraph? The crusty highball hand-reach? Well, we can't all be 'blessed' with alcoholic genes. For the rest, a hangover on New Years Day is as close as you're gonna get. Let's say you wake up, you'll give me that at least? And it's January first, and it's getting dark all ready or so it feels- you're not used to getting up in late afternoon... And it's cold, and you don't have to work tomorrow, so there you are.

It's time to watch TV and recuperate. That's where I can help.

Here are some important DON'Ts  for hangover or detox recovery movies (Because you are very sensitive to noise and unpleasantry):

NO: gross-outs: eating, bodily humors, bathroom incidents (you'll literally gag)
NO: bugs, jungles, tropics (you'll sweat in sympathy)
NO: Cruelty and ugliness (all your sense are amplified)
NO: Loud sudden shocks, screaming, banging on pots, or playing harmonica
NO: Shouting, yelling, blue collar misery (you have enough of that just in your dry mouth)
NO: factories (ugh!)
NO: TV commercials (so watch TCM or DVDs)
-----------
Here are some recommended DOs:

YES: Sexual heat, with good rhythmic second chakra breathing (realigns the dilated nerves)
YES: cold climates, snow, ice (shrinks inflammation)
YES: Youthful love and tragic romance (you're very emotional)
YES: people talking in low, conversational voices (shhh)
YES: the sweet freedom of cheerfully facing immanent death for a noble cause (allays your guilt over trashing today through yesterday's revelry).

SO.....

1. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969) Dir. Peter Hunt

The main thing here that's good for the alcohol-poisoned penitent is the length of the film and the cold atmosphere: the frozen, snowy on-location Alps raced around in by hard-to-shake bad guys in pursuit of our boy Bond--Lazenby, who's just dull but not obnoxious, so it's quite all right. The trip to Blofeldt's mountaintop lair is itself an amazingly cohesive journey, from car to helicopter to cable car, up, up, up. And then some girls girls girls who aren't afraid to write their room numbers in lipstick on Bond's naked thigh, and the amazing Telly Savalas laying out his big plan, cigarette in hand, or saying "you love chickens...." with that great nasal smoker delight in his voice, through a light-sound hypnosis machine. And then down down down, via cable car, skis, one ski, ice skates, car, and on and on, chased by actual professionals who can't easily be brushed off, for a change. By then your pulse will be slowing and the relative leisurely composition of the first half of the film will ease you into the hair-raising second half. Bond is always comfort when detoxing, but nowhere near as comforting for the alcoholic in recovery than when sheathed in snow and supported by Mrs. Peele herself, Diana Rigg. She's so forgiving of his momentary fear, and his gratitude for her managing to be in the right place at the right time is so touching, and her fearless ability drive aggressively when he's just too worn out, is so palpable it's like she's our own AA sponsor.

2. TITANIC (1997)

Dir. James Cameron

See above for importance of cold and length. You need long cold movies, because being without a movie to watch, or pick next or figure out something else to do after an hour and a half is terrifying. Loneliness or the terror of being dragged out to another overpriced club are always beckoning. Also, your heart is like those icebergs, melting now with remorse, and other things. I saw this in the theater the day after New Years Day, which I spent getting royally sick as my girl tried to get me to stop booze cold turkey. She wouldn't even give me no weed! It would have helped with the nausea. That bitch. But the next day we went to see TITANIC and leaving the theater I could barely walk, my dilated nerves and heightened volatile emotions were so carried aloft in the grandeur and sweep and blue light ice farewell, I was a sobbing mess. My cold turkey girlfriend sneered at me for crying but that didn't bother me. The film's got everything a good hangover movie needs: ice, love, and in-the-moment live for today-no tomorrow philosophy. I could have done without the framing device. but hey, I guarantee that if you're in that dilated nerve ending brutal hangover state, the movie will work for you too, and now you can FF-right past Bill "I never let it in" Paxton, if you want, though you won't have the wherewithal to do so so just SUCK IT UP!

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1944)

Dir. Jacques Tourneur / Prod. Val Lewton

You wouldn't think a movie set in the Caribbean would fit this list but this isn't the 'real' Caribbean. No one sweats on the isle of San Sebastian; it's a Caribbean of the mind, cool and dry as a thigh bone rattle, and full of windy mystery as experienced through the eyes of a smitten nurse (the always soothing Frances Drake). I love the spiderweb latticework shadows of potted ferns and porch struts and harp strings, and through it all blows a gentle insistent leaf-rustling wind which builds to a thrilling, satisfying chill in the midnight through-the-cane field walk, the wind calling them through skull sign posts and dry cane stalks and a skeletal Darby Jones guarding the way. When we were young, brother and I watched this and Cat People nearly every night on a back-to-back tape every late night for an entire summer, the fan roaring in front of the TV, amazed how well such apparently slight 'everything to the imagination' films like these could hold up under such heavy repeat viewing. I watched it again recently and was floored about how so little happens, and so quickly. I love the beautiful opening with the Canadian snow outside the window and a Frances Dee voiceover, through to the end with a local black wise man's voiceover on St. Sebastian, offering a prayer for the dead. Where did that guy come from? We don't see anyone with that voice, but it works - he's St. Sebastian himself, perhaps... either way it's as soothing and lovely as a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice for breakfast.

NADJA (1994)
Directed by Michael Almereyda

This was made by someone with a clear love of the genre, as it's structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, DRACULA'S DAUGHTER with shades of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, and BLOOD AND ROSES (i.e. CARMILLA). It's full of beautiful black and white film compositions, with occasional lapses into pixelated imagery culled from a then-the-rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera. With a bad hangover you wont mind the blurriness of these stretches, which add a dreamy surrealist patina, and the rest of the film is de-gorgeous (a phrase we used back then, as Deee-Lite was pop queen of NYC night life). I couldn't get more than 45 minutes into the over-baked unoriginal pomp of Jarmusch's overpraised ONLY LOVER'S LEFT ALIVE but this film really knows its classic horror movies and has some interesting things to say, with great Gothic shots that wondrously fuse the downtown grit of NYC and the lighthouse expressionism of the old world. Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) is weary of her jet set life and longs to love her latest victim, a girl with a great East Village apartment. The cast is gorgeous, and soothing to the eye. Unlike, say, so many Duplassy mumblecore types, these actors are both gorgeous yet intelligent, witty yet not snarky. And hangovers can be soothed by the beauty of Galaxy Craze as Lucy--a kind of Molly Ringwald divided by Deborah Kara Unger. There's also the beautiful Martin Donovan as Harker, a once-beautiful Peter Fonda as a hippie Van Helsing, and a surprisingly sexy Jared Harris as a punk rock ill brother Nadja harbors weird incestuous desire for, and Suzy Amis as his nurse whom Nadja wants out of the way. It's clear in every frame and spoken word that the Gothic expressionistic blood of Karl Freund, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the downtown cool of Abel Ferrara cohere and flow through Almeyerda's venis. I even like his 1998 film THE ETERNAL (Aka TRANCES), a weird Irish bog mummy tale that plays out like a hybrid SHINING-SZAMANKA coupled to that old Bram Stoker chestnut "Jewel of the Seven Stars," filmed once by Hammer in the 60s as BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB. Like NADJA, also good for a hangover.

5. SPRING BREAKERS (2013)

Dir. Harmony Korine

A homage to film noirs like GUN CRAZY or THE BIG SLEEP, molded halfway into a Lite Brite money chute that's intoxicatingly dangerous, its measured sexual breath energy is perfect for second chakra-alignment. I haven't had drugs on my person in years but suddenly I felt the cops coming in through the window, or through my skin, watching Korine's movie with my headphones on. The cold feeling in the blood it created made me realize, for the first time, I never knew that blood 'running cold' is a literal thing. It reminds me why I never liked cocaine -- I'll gladly sacrifice the sexual gyrating moment by moment heavy breathing tactile intensity to not feel the blood run cold pit of the stomach disappearing empathy response. But BREAKERS glows like the secret chamber in a TWIN PEAKS bordello. Once the Jesus freak girl goes home, this shit really gets good, turning into a badass bizarro world version of CHARLIE'S ANGELS with James Franco inhabiting the role of a southern fried gangsta rapper Charlie--singing Britney songs on his outdoor piano, fellating a gun and squabblin' with his childhood buddy, the reigning (black) king of St. Pete. Hear it with 'phones for maximum ASMR drugginess; it will contextualize and heal and soothe your hungover brain... and ease your woeful remorse.

6. THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957)

Dir. Douglas Sirk

Like Harper is a grim sequel to The Thin Man, which itself was a sequel to The Big Sleep (i.e. Nick and Nora are what happened after Marlowe married heiress Vivian Rutledge), so The Tarnished Angels can be imagined as a sequel to those 30s MGM barnstormers, with Robert Stack as the Clark Gable daredevil pilot, and Jack Carson as the Spencer Tracy dog fox gone-to-ground mechanic. Then there's Dorothy Malone in the Harlow role, so smoking hot and well-lit you join the crew of leering sleazebags that pay to watch her parachute down in a fluttering skirt. It's based on a Faulkner story and you will finally believe Rock Hudson can act as he plays a tipsy reporter smitten by Malone and in quiet awe of Stack's daring, but Stack needs flight "like an alcoholic needs his drink," and when his plane crashes out from under him he pimps out his wife to get a new one.

The flight races are spectacular, some truly amazing barnstormer flying going on. It's in black and white Cinemascope, a rarity in itself, but you eventually get sucked in, especially with a decent DVD transfer, which you can get via the TCM Archive and maybe nowhere else. Expensive, then, but worth it... Even if you come away from it all feeling a bit down on life as a whole, you're sure one thing: these three leads show so much power they all but crack the film apart. The best scene occurs with Stack and Malone crashing on Hudson's floor and couch. He comes home a bit drunk, Carson is asleep, and there she is, awake and whispering to him. Sirk's decadent black and white lighting shining through her white nightgown as she spreads herself along the couch, and it's so hot you almost pass the fuck out. Looks like we're... closed for the evening. I'd give Stack a plane too, and so would Rock, if we could have for ourselves even for a night the Malone in this film --and we hate ourselves for being so vile, and so does she. But that just makes her all the sexier. That and the whispering and the live-for-the-moment all make it an ideal hangover movie.

7. ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)

Dir. Victor Heerman

Few consider ANIMAL CRACKERS to be the Marx Brothers best film (most go for either NIGHT AT THE OPERA or DUCK SOUP), but much as I love all their Paramount work and their first two movies at MGM, for my acid viewing, nothing beats 1930's ANIMAL CRACKERS. It's their most psychedelic and unforced. When Groucho does his STRANGE INTERLUDE impression and steps out of the action to directly address the camera in a dreamy poetic rhythm, trippers freak out thinking he's talking directly to them across time and space. It's also the second and last Marx effort based on an actual a priori stage play (so all jokes are time-tested), and it has a great George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart script. It takes its time and spreads out and was filmed out on Long Island and the Brothers radiate a zany ease only proximity to their hometown NYC can provide. Make sure to see it from the beginning, when it starts it looks like it's going to be the most boring musical ever made: Seems 'yawn' Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) is giving a party on her Long Island estate. Oh great, you think with inner sarcasm, this is gonna be super boring and can ease my pain by offering no suspense or guilt whatever; then... Captain Spaulding arrives --and we get a rare chance to see Groucho wow the crowds with some truly original leg dancing. All worries vanish into a haze of giddy laughs and bourgeois tolerance, even when they occasionally drown you in puns. And your dilated nerves will be glad to hear Harpo's absolving harp interlude and will gently trill at the bare Norma Shear shoulders of the younger ladies, and will be assured by the imperious gullibility of Margaret Dumont no permanent harm can happen here; and there's also future alcoholism survivor Lillian Roth, rolling her eyes like she's too good for it all--and we certainly agree she's too good for Hal Thompson as the earnest wooer whose rank imitation has the "the soul of the Bogard." Truly, that battered MacGuffin canvas heals the broken misery of life.

8. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

It's regal, it's lovely, its gray flannel and blue train color schemes soothe the spirit, and of course Cary "No mother, they didn't give me a chaser" Grant forgives us all trespasses. He soothes a scene just by being in it. Wily agent Eva Marie Saint is soothing, too, never speaking above a purr. Even the bad guys (James Mason and Martin Landau as his fey henchman) never shout but rather use their words in silken eloquence. The only loud behavior comes from Bernard Herrmann's aggro score. It's a Bollinger mimosa of a movie, and long enough that it counts as three refills-- enough to uncoil your misery.

9. MACBETH (1948)

Dir. Orson Welles

I'm partial to this film from days of watching my streaky VHS dupe over and over during my last alcoholic relapse, drawing pangs of solace from Macbeth's inconsolable guilt, his sense of letting ambition and his wife's venomous viper words (she's the equivalent of the demoness in the bourbon bottle) draw him farther and farther into the morass. This is the movie for when you're trying not to think about the horrible mess you made of your night, and nervous system. And now thanks to Olive's Blu-ray you can see the dirt on the stage sky - the vast cavernous set--with jagged mountainsides fresh from Republic westerns, like a spirit world, neither indoors no out, neither onstage, no off, with the thick atmosphere seeming to breathe and thrive, even when the Scottish brogues are so thick you can barely understand a word... but who cares? You can savvy enough to be moved and to have your emotional state of remorse and guilt reflected in great Elizabethan poetry, the feeling of eternal night and fog and Welles' voice as absolving and dissolving in its mellifluent baritone as an Epsom salts bath.

10. THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)

Dir. Frank Tuttle

With her soft dream-like voice like she's trying to not wake up your angry girlfriend, Veronica Lake is a great salve for any hangover. Her chemistry with the equally soft-voiced Ladd is palpable, and sublime enough to forgive the endless contrived coincidences the plot hinges on. There's a weird thick layer of quiet in this film, perfect for hangovers or guilty consciences. Topping it off, the great Laird Cregar as the most silken of villainous stooges, his whole elegantly large form trembling at the thought of the violence he must inflict on his captive, he brings it all into perspective; it's just another night after all... you'll live. No matter what you did last night, Veronica Lake forgives you. Have a peppermint. (See: Veronica Lake Effect).


Erich Sez: When in doubt pick quiet, dark movies w/ devouring hotties

Now if you decide, wisely, to drink more the morning after, i.e. the hair of the dog, to cure your hangover, may I suggest the films mentioned below? A highball glass filled halfway up with gin and topped off with grapefruit juice, no ice, will dissolve the pain and you'll feel the glorious flush of rapture that only the true benders know, and these films will let you know you made the right choice. Just remember to leave a half-full glass of the same concoction by your bedside, because the hangover is going to be substantially worse the next time you wake up, though chances are you won't have time to even make it to bed. You'll just wake up on the couch, the DVD menu on eternal repeat and hopefully that half-full drink will be there. Down it quick, hit play again, and now you'll really be on a bender.



W.C. Fields says go for it!

I stopped drinking before the advent of DVDs, so I woke up to a rewound videotape, but either way the effect is the same. Hit play before you have a chance to second guess your decision. Movies can be watched over and over and over when you're on a bender! I saw SPECIES (1995) a hundred times that way. It's got everything you need: a soothing blonde beauty -- Henstridge is so achingly hot (and unaugmented) she actually seems alien. There are explosions, an escape onto a train, and any sexually frustrated male in the throes of delirium tremens can appreciate her need to mate fast, before the blue devils hot on her trail come a-cockblockin'. These devils are a bunch of sweaty losers played by Oscar luminaries like Forest Whitaker, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley, led by Michael Madsen as a tough guy. He can barely keep a straight face as the tough guy but his late inning tryst with Marg Helgenberger is a stealth bolt of proof grace. Two confident mature people coming together with nothing but carnivorous respect? I'll drink to that. (See: Natasha Henstridge Vs. the Coordinated Cockblock Quintet).



But in the meantime, you're an outlaw now, so enjoy that giddy flush of freedom that comes with the pall of death hanging over it, the rare Marx Brothers-ish joy when you know the ship has sailed and you're not getting back to land until you jump in the ice cold water and try to swim to shore. And the longer you wait, the farther the boat sails out to sea, and the longer and colder the swim. So why not stay aboard for another day?

See also the good folks at Modern Drunkard, who originally published my Guide to the Bender article (later reprinted in Daedalus Press's Decadent Handbook), and who have lots of great film reviews. Of course anything by W.C. Fields is golden, particularly INTERNATIONAL HOUSE and NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. There's also THE THIN MAN, APOCALYPSE NOW, and of course, I would imagine since again I got sober before it came out, but GHOSTS OF MARS. One look at this great, terrible, magnificent film - and I knew... I knew. Mars, in the company of Natasha Henstridge and her stash of 'clear.' A matriarchy and Joanna Cassidy from BRADE RUNNA? What better way to drink through the dawn?


In the words of Desolation Williams, "Come on, you Martian motherfuckers!"



PS - In honor of hangovers and seeing double we've answered sporadic requests to change the white on black print we've used since the beginning of the site. The result is you can read longer without feeling dizzy, we hope. It's still being tinkered with and we welcome feedback. (--erichk9@aol.com)

PPS - By 'we' I mean me, of course. But it sounds like there's a whole staff that way. See? Honesty, that's the resolution.... Happy New Years!

Cuspidor of Greatness: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)

The red man was the big man

and then came the great big white man 

a white man? / that's the right man.

The whites got the reds and the reds got the blues, 

and the red white and blue was born. 

The above is a snatch of song sung by Wheeler and Woolsey, with dancing Native American maids all in rows, and while sardonic as fuckall it's rather callous, as if casting a bloody stain on America's conscience is the same as patriotism, and no one really seems to care, because now Native Americans have oil wells and gambling and educated spokespersons. But where exactly do Wheeler and Woolsey fit in? In DIPLOMANIACS (1933),  Woolsey can best be imagined by picturing a lipless George Burns aiming for Groucho Marx's arrogance and way with a cigar; Wheeler is like Nathan Lane pureed together with Frank McHugh, and slid under Charlie Chaplin hair oil. Always, always there's the sense that these guys are really stage show vaudevillians more than film stars.

Some great comics like W.C. Fields, Mae West (pre-code) and the Marx Brothers (at least pre-DAY AT THE RACES) have stood the test of time. They are eternal. Others, popular in the early dirty turn-of-sound 30s---Eddie Cantor, Jolson, Wheeler and Woolsey--have not been so lucky. They have faded into niches were only freaks like me do scrounge. But thanks to the Warner Bro. Archives, a horde of their surreal pre-codes are finally available on DVD, and man you can learn a lot about the era's social stigmas and stigmatisms and all the things the code would wipe away. I've already written about one such eye-opener, WONDER BAR (1934). Why? How do I know? I follow my bliss, and online reviews: my hunger for pre-code surrealism is, however, always accompanied by my liberal PC brainwash afterburn.

Open the closet door!

DIPLOMANIACS (1933) came out the same year as, and is very similar to, the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP, and was co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote W.C. Fields' MILLION DOLLAR LEGS the year before, and that it can be compared to them is an honor, for Wheeler and Woolsey have not aged as well as Fields or the Marxes. Unless you like both the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy you might find yourself put off by the freaky squareness of these boys, even if only in some uncanny way you can't explain. Me, I don't care for the grotesque infantile tantrums of Laurel and Hardy. Something about them creeps me out. And there's something similarly sticky about Wheeler and Woolsey, some uncanny quality that makes their resemblance to other comedians of the day most disturbing.

And man do they love to play dress up. Wheeler and Woolsey share the same sense of infantile queerness as Laurel and Hardy --is that why they creep me out? They lack the amok heterosexuality of the Marxes, or the singleminded pursuit of oblivion that elevates Fields. Woolsey does get drunk in one scene but he's really more interested in..... ugh.... soup. By the second time he asks for more soup in the first class dining room I'm feeling the polar opposite of watching Fields grab all the table service bottles on his way off the roof of INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933). Booze = funny. Soup= yuck! Why? Because food, like life, is gross. Drunkenness, divine. And as someone with near fifteen years sobriety, I should know!

That said, if DIPLOMANIACS landed on the college revival circuit the way the Marx Bros. and Fields films did back in the late 60s-80s, it too might have garnered a hipster cult. The pair do, after all, go for the weird with unhesitating brio, as in the still above where they're sent aloft by being tossed up in a Native American blanket (from here on in I'm switching to 'Indian' for reasons that will be made clear) en route to the Lausanne peace conference or when they battle a tribble-like crawling scalp. Fans of Broadway shows like THE PRODUCERS, or revivals like ANYTHING GOES (which I saw in London in 04) will probably feel themselves on very familiar ground here. Some of the numbers have a lived-in, well-rehearsed feel, especially the big shipboard number where Wheeler tries to shake a lovestruck vamp named Dolores (Marjorie White).  A definite scene stealer, she arrives in villain Louis Calhern's stateroom wrapped in plastic after the following bizarre and racist exchange between him and Hugh Herbert as Calhern's Fu Manchu sidekick, trying to pass Yiddish off as Chinese:

Calhern: I need a vamp
Herbert: What kind?
Calhern: ...a female vamp!
Herbert: What color?
(...)
Calhern: A white one.
Herbert: White ones get dirty much too quickly
Calhern: Well, for this job she'll have to get dirty.

It's funny thanks to Calhern's robust delivery of the phrase "have to get dirty." But of course they make a mistake in presuming the boys are straight rather than ensconced in an infantile, closeted misogyny, which renders any vamp's come-ones powerless to sway them. They have the closeted queer's malice towards straight sex, presuming brusque burlesques of hetero courtship will satisfy doubters as to their manliness. The boys sleep in the same bed, and Woosley is clearly the top, you can tell by his big erect cigar and Wheeler's BIRDCAGE-y nightgown (below). And then rather than getting their morning drink on like real men they're more concerned with mani-pedis. "If we can get away with wearing these pants we can get away with anything," notes Woolsey, and when someone overhears him whispering that something's a secret, he asks "What's a secret?" and he replies "A secret is something you tell everybody, confidentially," you know he means the celluloid closet! (1)

Working in the film's favor is the feeling that the filmmakers just saw the amazing LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932) and presume the audience has too. The song sung during the boys' first Parisian morning clearly apes the famous opening montage of Parisian noises that ends with Chevalier saying "Pariee / you are too loud / for me," and shutting his window. Here the lyrics include, "from the taxi honks/ it might be the Bronx but no / this is Paris." (also Wheeler sings a bar of "Isn't it Romantic" while rushing through a montage of lyrics). Another favorite moment occurs after the bulk of first class passengers leave the dining room, and the captain of the Geneva-bound ocean liner gravely addresses the remaining gentlemen at his table: "As we are men of the world, let us consume alcohol." I knew that if I was seeing this with my fellow Fieldsian Max while splitting a 1.75 of Ten High, we'd have looked at each other in stunned delight, but he's married now with a kid, I'm long sober, and these guys are lightweights. Where's my Sean Regan?

That all works maybe, though, in the context of the film, which I saw by myself at three AM high only on herbal tea and cigarettes, after finishing my big previous post on isolationist themes in the films of John Monk Saunders. For if nothing else this film, like MILLION DOLLAR LEGS is really about America's post-WWI contempt for Europe, and the buffoonery of defeated nations still bristling against the post-WWI border alterations and expecting us to give a shit.

What is being satirized in short, is the world political scene immediately prior to the Nazi's re-mobilization, a build-up contingent on that very same weary unwillingness of the allies to step in again. So these films provide an illuminating time capsule look at something that no longer exists, a sense of out-of-touch posturing in Europe that American comics saw as a great chance for satirization, and Hitler saw as a perfect chance to defy restrictions. When a bomb goes off at the Geneva conference in DIPLOMANIACS it just turns into an excuse for a crazy blackface musical number, one of the reasons maybe this doesn't get screened very often, and an insight into the idea of 'deathlessness' in comedy, ala Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, wherein explosions and accidents that would kill or cripple or kill a normal man just leave one with blackface and maybe an exploded cigar. Wishful thinking like that kept us neutral!

The second vamp is named Fifi and her kisses make men literally smoke under their collars and fall to earth a burned-out mess. We're supposed to believe that one kiss from the lipless Woolsey's makes her smoke and fall to the ground, too. More believable is the concept that a mincing French attendant is considered too oafish when the boys get their hair and nails done in Paris, and overall there hangs some horror movie oddness to the caricatures, reminding us that an element of the grotesque was alaways assumed in pre-code comics. For an example just dig the monstrousness of below poster, the eyes of all of them bugged maniacally or shadowed with lewd conspiracy. DUCK SOUP also satirized war, but it bombed; by then, apparently, the ominous tom-tom of a second world war wasn't comical.

Then there are the other odd reminders of the pre-WWII sense of anything goes, As Dreamland Cafe (from where I lifted these images) points out:

"One of the unnerving aspects of the film for a modern viewer is that there are several swastikas in the Indian costumes. Apparently swastikas were actually common in Southwest Indian design work until WWII. The Nazis had come to power in Germany by 1933, but it doesn’t appear that the film-makers were associating swastikas with them, even if the threat to world peace was on everybody’s mind."

World peace was on everyone's mind, and it's important to note that swastikas weren't just Native American (and Buddhist) symbols, but universal good luck charms (in 1931 Joan Blondell sells swastika key chains in BLONDE CRAZY).

The strange thing about the celluloid closet is that by hiding in plain sight and 'passing' their racist, misogynist mincing off as American straight, gay Hollywood broadened the scope of what 'straight' was. Now such business--prancing, mincing, jumping into one another's arms, avoiding women like the plague but presuming they could get one to fall for them no problem if they cared to-- seems pretty queer - when we see that behavior in contemporary film and TV (ala Sal in MAD MEN) we spot it right off and it causes a shudder of realization about the parameters of 'masculinity'. These characters/actors might be unconscious even of their own closetedness; it happens, and probably happened an awful lot back then. But there's a side effect of the recent decades of positive social change: men still afraid of seeming gay can't do half the things they used to do, like mince and sleep in a negligee in the same bed as their best buddy. They also can't be racist, sexist, or crude without catching instant PC flak. Everything is, in short, reversed. Depending on what state you're in, of course.

It's not that I'm PC myself, just trained like a bird dog to sniff and point. Thus Wheeler and Woolsey linger on the lip of the cuspidor of greatness, alongside Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, defeated in the end from draining down into the pot of cine-hipster rediscovery by their own propensity for blackface and closeted mincing.

Well, thanks probably to Mankiewicz, at least their politics are hilariously bleak, the script sharp, lyrics clever,  the men very old, the women warm, the champagne cold, but over all lingers the presumption that hetero masculinity will continue to encompass this kind of infantile feyness in the century to come instead of delineating certain attitudes and actions as either gay or straight, and either choice preferable to the double blind sneer of the unconscious closet. And so it has come to pass that what was once a good luck charm is now a symbol of racism so vile it's permanently stained the fabric of our conscience, and our PC evolution has rightly rendered blackface and 'red man' tomfoolery accessible only via Warner's DV-R archive by those brave few willing to shell out for the strange and dubious privilege. But there is justice in popularization: The Marx Brothers (2), Mae West, and Fields deservedly endure in the mass produced DVDs and if that's in part from avoiding racism, closeted queerness, fascism, and misogynist objectification through most of if not all their films, well, I'll drink to that any day... So Oooga Booga to you too, you upstart! And if there is such a thing as a tartuffle, then you are just that thing!

NOTES:
1. I should say at this point that I find an out gay person is a thing of joy and beauty, but a closeted 'lover' unaware of the vile misogyny underwriting his straight burlesque is most dispiriting (see also: MONTE CARLO)
2. Since posting I've been thinking about the moments of blackface in Marx Brothers films but they are brief and serve the story: in DAY AT THE RACES they cork up to hide from the cops, but it's after a big dance number that basically expands the "All God's chillun got guns" section of SOUP's "Going to War" number, where are all the black people come to the rescue of the brothers, and sing and dance wondrously and are at least legitimately black. Racist or not it gives work to a vast stock of blazingly talented and legitimately black singers and dancers and one senses throughout a kinship between the black cast and the Jewish Marxes --a well documented simpatico extending even to Al Jolson. And one need only watch the sassy black maids sashaying after Mae West as she struts around her apartment in I'M NO ANGEL, and hear her rich bluesy voice to know that in other circumstances West could be their maid, and not feel at all chagrined by the reversal. W.C. Fields splits a bottle of whiskey with an Indian, appears in blackface only to hide from a constable (in a scene edited from TV prints), and means Native Americans when he talks about carving through this wall of human flesh, carrying his canoe behind him. None of it seems 'unconsciously' racist --it is indirect, and more to paint Fields as a scalawag and mountebank full of nosegay, than as a tool for enhancing one's sense of Aryan superiority. Amen. 

ADDENDUM. Don't let this rant stop you from seeing DIPLOMANIACS! Woolsey might be a lipless freak but Manckiewicz wouldn't let you down. I'll even sell you mine! xo