Reeling and Writhing: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933)

Seldom seen since its 1933 limited release,  ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Paramount's champagne and hashish centerpiece, can stand on its head proudly, for it turns out to be awash in the same surrealist insanity that so scintillatingly varnishes the studio's peak pre-code '32-34 comedy output, i.e. MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, SNOW WHITE, DUCK SOUP and INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933 Paramount was, sez I, the best). For a long time we had to take it on faith that this movie was as boring as those few who saw it said it was. Well, now that it's all pretty as paint on TCM, it turns out those few were wrong.

All I know is that I would have flipped my lid to catch this ALICE on a five AM Saturday morning UHF station as an early-rising kid in the 70s (or an up-all-night acidhead in the 80s catching it on Night Flight). This is its rightful place. For the rest of us, in the age of cable and hydra headed options, we can at least imagine, or if we're old enough, remember back-ack-ack-ack.

Come with me then, back to a time before cable, before even Betamax, a time when there were three main channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) + PBS (Channel 12 in Wilmington Phila, Channel 13 in NY); and then local TV on UHF (a separate dial and antenna) which ran lots of weird stuff like Wee Willie Webber presenting Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot. Kids' TV was a big tent, lack of choices made us all much broader in our horizons. Rising up at the crack of dawn as a kid on Saturday mornings, a 5-AM late night PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE or VELVET VAMPIRE showing would segue into weird Z-grade European 'kiddie matinee' nightmares like RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS before finally morphing into stuff like HONG KONG PHOOEY and LAND OF THE LOST. This was our magic time, a solid three-to-four hour stretch with parents still asleep, sugary cereal creating a special mental space where the lingering images of dreams from mere minutes ago in bed would seamlessly into surreal late night monster movies segueing into early kid puppet show imagery.

And finally seeing ALICE on TCM the other night, I know it would have fit right in there, the living link between Seals and Marty Kroft shows, the Marx Brothers, and Ed Wood. That director Norman Z. McLeod (MONKEY BUSINESS, HORSEFEATHERS), screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz (DIPLOMANIACS, MILLION DOLLAR LEGS) and set designer William Cameron Menzies (CHANDU, SVENGALI) have somehow alchemically combined all those influences and so it makes sense that now, in 2016, it all feels brand newer.

But I still haven't captured the vibe. Let me go back: can you remember when you were a small kid on some haunted house or pirate ride at an amusement Park, when everything was so much bigger and scarier as it was all so much more vividly imagined? You know, the feeling of cozy excitement in the darkness and cacophony? And maybe, like me, you imagined what it would be like to sneak out of your little car/log flume and into the elaborate animatronic forests on either side of the car/log, to get off at the corner and hide there, amidst the robotically moving figures and twisting anamorphic papier mache trees? Well, if there was a 1933 Paramountland, or a Fleischerland, with a ride through Max Fleischer's surreal pre-code classic dioramas, all rendered in black and white, and you were kind of stuck there--and, like Lisa Simpson at Duffworld, drank the acid-spiked water, and were hanging out with a spookily calm and fearless ten year-old blonde who dragged you off the flume long and around to all the little vignettes after the ride closed but the lights and engines stayed on--then you would have this ALICE IN WONDERLAND. And if that sounds like a good time, and if you love cheap rattletrap carnival haunted houses, and miniature golf courses, and psychedelic mushrooms, then with the help of Mankiewicz's absurdist wit, Carroll's trippy source material, McLeod's zippy unpretentious pace, and Menzies' surreal backdrops, this Boopland paradise for you, as it is for all the other acid-addled pre-code Paramount devotees who've had Mystery Cave dreams after too much rarebit or cold medicine.

Flash forward 15 years or so, to my late 80s-early 90s Deadhead/Floyd period --there was no better time of the night for an older kid like me than when the show was finally over, and I and my crew were safely home with the whiskey and VCR and every last parent and wally long tucked away, able to sit down in a comfy chair or couch and not have to stand there, swaying to yet another encore. Still tripping our faces off, but all the anguished paranoia of driving home without getting arrested being finally over, and us safe and able to finally take our shoes off, with hours and (presuming the whiskey stash as flush) and highballs to go before the color bands flashing behind our eyelids would be muted enough for sleep, we needed to watch something that wouldn't bum us out, and I mean we 'needed' it, desperately, for our good trip could still become a bad one with a single ugly scene.

And at those times, when they were needed most, Paramount pre-codes (before anyone knew what that meant)--Betty Boop, W.C. Fields, Marx Bros, and Cary Grant--were like glowing toasty fires in the cold darkness. One look into their crazy eyes and we'd know they could see us watching them, somehow, they would lean out of the mise-en-scene and shoot us sly winks. They "got it." If MGM was the studio of amphetamines and apple pie, Warners of beer and coffee, and Universal of laudanum and black tea, then Paramount was the studio of psychedelics and champagne and thus ALICE IN WONDERLAND was and is their ideal 'literary adaptation.'

That said, there are missteps: fully obscuring Cary Grant's beautiful head in the mock turtle costume, for example. Then again, which Alice adaptation is--for kids' and critics' alike--perfect?  None. Disney's 1951 cartoon version is too literal; Tim Burton's lacks surrealist savvy; Jan Svankmajer's is hallucinatory and uncanny childhood nightmare-level disturbing but lacks class and diction; and all the BBC versions are too much the same other way around. But Paramount's pre-code Alice is sooo wrong on the other hand, it's better than right. It dissolves like a sugar cube under a steady stream of absinthe, maybe a headache will result later but for as long as now lasts, magical. Woozy, weird, dizzy, and then --before it gets older- over.

Anyway, I had trouble getting past the first few minutes that last time it was on TCM, the whole opening bit of Alice back on 'Earth' with her aunt or guardian is zzzz, but this time I came in after the first quarter, half-paying attention and soon there was this crazy mock turtle with a strange yet familiar voice, and I wasn't at all sure it even was Cary Grant inside the shell, until he sings "Turtle Soup" with a bizarro British music hall trill and suddenly there it is, the foundational bedrock upon which 'the' Cary Grant was formed-- the vaudeville pratfalls and "love to be beside the seaside" hoofery that fell below the surface, deep into ocean canyons (surfacing occasionally, as in Sylvia Scarlet) until to provide the bedrock underneath his rising star. So it's rather gratifying to see (or rather hear) this sudden resonant force, returning like the repressed under the safety of this inscrutable sea horse turtle persona. It's so out of character for his usual cool that it made me think of that scene when he breaks down in front of the child services judge in Penny Serenade and you're like whoa, Cary, we never ever see this side of you. It makes us weak in the knees all over again to realize the vast wealth of brilliance and jubilance folded and edited and streamlined until Grant was, as Stanley Cavell put it, "fit to stand the gaze of millions."

Amongst the stand-out sights are a king and queen of hearts perfectly gussied to resemble the English pattern playing deck, the king especially looks exactly like him. We've all seen that face since we first learned 'Go Fish' as a child, and suddenly wham here he is, in black and white and surrounded in a curiously 2-D dream space, as if childhood memory, card game, and fever dream had crashed ceremoniously together, launching us into the primal magic zone from which all the symbols of our lifetime are born. 

Here, though, that gaze is rendered moot, so there's no image of cool to live up to. The turtle shell armors and anonymizes so he cuts loose and large. One wonders what kind of miracles Grant could put into, say, a Pixar film. You won't find, say, Tom Hanks or Will Smith going out on a far limb into madness in their roles, not ever, not like Grant does here. Grant is committed to the madness, like he's reading/acting out a story book for agog infant children while hopped up on mescaline backstage at a 1920's Vaudeville show.

And just when you're wondering why they didn't just make this whole thing a 

cartoon (there was, after all, a Betty Boop version, in 'Blunderland' the following year), 

a Fleischer animation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" shows up, providing a nice break

 from the live action, which by then has settled into miniature golf course tableaux 

connected by all sorts of surrealistic dissolves, implied drug use, and dotted line followings. 

Other familiar faces and voices help navigate the off-putting (and rather flatly lit) weirdness, like recognizing an old friend in a throng of strangers during a bad trip moment at a Dead show and then realizing - whoa, it might not be them! But then... deciding it is, wait - do I even know them, really? So there's old Ned Sparks snarling through his clenched hookah stem jaw as the caterpillar; there's Edna May Oliver, strangely sexy with upturned nose extension as the Red Queen; Roscoe Karns and Jackie Oakie as the Tweedles; Edward Everett Horton singing about the tea-trays in the sky (and waving around saucers to make sure we get the UFO connection) as the Mad Hatter; Charlie Ruggles as the March Hare; Richard Arlen as the Cheshire Cat; W.C. Fields as an exquisitely churlish Humpty Dumpty; Louise Fazenda--looking like a hybrid of Ginger Rogers and the girl in the Eraserhead radiator--as the White Queen'; and Gary Cooper as the vertigo-ridden White Knight.

As Alice, Charlotte Henry is a tripper role model, demonstrating how to keep cool and open-minded in a crisis. Moving from freak tableaux to freak tableaux, size to size, being to being, with an open mind, her deadpan performance never lapses into treacle, camp or obnoxiousness. Where other people would surely cower or freak out or stare rudely or wince in disgust, she just politely notes that things just got "curious." Is it any wonder a nervous sensitive Mad Hatter-type artists like me would worship her? (1)

whoa - I've had childhood 'too much chocolate' nightmares that look just like this!

any similarities to a human ass may be coincidental

This is your dinner on drugs --but  play it cool, bro

It's tempting to be like other lazy critics and dismiss the film for the crime of hiding Cary's and Gary's faces, each then at the peak of their beauty, but instead we should appreciate how, protected from the job of persona-guarding via such anonymity, they show us the character actors they might have been had they not become such huge stars. Grant becomes a music hall maniac, trilling his "sorrow of a sorrow" while a gryphon laughs and chessmen chortle, and Cooper goes deep into his own laconic cowboy persona for the White Knight (below). It's pretty funny to think this tall laconic drink of water could ever fall off a horse, but he does--with great, typically laconic low-key nonchalance--again and again. Unshaken even with his head in a ditch, he tells Alice: "what does it matter where my body happens be? My mind goes on working all the same." Showing Alice his bizarre inventions, like his little box (upside down to keep the rain out), his empty mouse trap, and beehive, he's proud but reticent, like a shy ten year-old boy trying to impress his babysitter by showing off his action figure collection--half shyly, half with little boy bluster.

Gary Cooper, "seated"

But the real selling points for this as the bad acid rarebit fiend K-hole nightmare miniature golf course-cum-carnival-ride childhood fever dream are the grotesque images that linger in the mind afterwards, etched on the soul like dark scars in the thick unconscious muck where nothing ever dries or heals, just festers until it erupts into sudden hallucinations and terrifying vertigo with the right 'trigger'. When I see this big lumbering dude in a mouse costume flopping around in a shallow concrete pool (of Big Alice's tears) as if some plushy Overlook refugee paddling forward in the Freaks climax rain, I feel as if the deep well of my childhood nightmares (which I thought long since paved-over) was flooding up all over the basement couch and soaking my kitchen floor. By the time we get to the scene with the crazy fat mom throwing the baby around while the cook hurls insults and pots and the frog (Sterling Holloway) sits outside, the water's up to my knees. Then Alice holds the baby, who oscillates from an actual baby to Billy Barty (in a baby costume) and back, and then to a plastic doll, and then a real piglet-- the water's up to my neck.

It's over my head and leaking into the above floor for the croquet scene. Ask yourself, are their croquet mallets drugged flamingos who stiffen when they try to play dead, just limpid puppets, or dead flamingos in the process of rigor mortis? Like gramps in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), they waver between all three, and it's in that in-betweenness wherein they become truly creepy. Then there's the way the white queen says "better" over and over like a mantra until the word slowly turns into a sheep 'baaa'-ter and she dissolves into a sheep selling a giant egg, which Alice stares at until it turns into W.C. Fields as a giant Humpty, demanding she stop staring at him like he was an egg, and state her name and her business. At that point the water goes up my chimney and hits the bell. A winna!

At dinner there's a talking roast (it's bad manners, we learn, to slice off a piece of someone we've been introduced to) illustrating perfectly what it's like to eat dinner with your parents while trying to hide from them the fact that you are peaking on an unexpectedly strong and delayed psychedelic trip. Then, Alice is crowned queen, and everyone dances around and the dancing intensifies until they choke her and it all meshes in a swirl like a combination of the big circus FREAKS and BLUE ANGEL wedding dinners and the entirety of Allendro Jodorowsky's canon, boiled and distilled into one black and white raging fever dream bad trip delirium tremens nightmare peak moment. And everywhere we look, things change. The more we stare the more what we're staring at seems to breathe, to grow or shrink.

Our gaze, in a sense, makes monsters cohere from the shadows. Is this not how 'reality' passes itself off as something concrete?

Bringing as he does the same sense of deadpan fluid riffing absurdity that made his MILLION DOLLAR LEGS and DIPLOMANIACS scripts so pitch-Paramount perfect, I'm not sure if adapter Mankiewicz ever tried mescaline or reefer or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had. For he's aces at nailing the freestyle way staring at something long enough turns it into something else, or saying any word more than once or twice renders the words themselves alive and fluid, strange and absurd. Taken as a whole, this 1933 ALICE could be the bad trip counterpoint to YELLOW SUBMARINE and like that film it's also the perfect guide to tripping, offering the same sage counsel employed by any good 'guide':

The sage advice: Don't try to recapture the sense of where you just were, are, or what size you are or where you're 'meant' to be or where you will wind up next. Let go of trying to judge or control anything that happens. Most of all, don't worry what those words someone spoke at you, don't try to nail words to the cross of meaning for they'll wiggle farther away the harder you try. Don't try to reclaim the perception of yourself and the world you had before you started to 'get off.' A wilder weirder more wondrous world is yours as long as you don't try to own it, tie it down, recreate it, or control it. Don't worry some dark corner of Wonderland is going to ensnare you, for the flux of constant change works both ways: Nothing can keep you--whether you want to be kept or not--all things are transitional. Nothing can last or be returned now that you're finally loosened from the bonds of self, language, and linear time. Just accept this truth: when you wind up were you started, you still won't be 'back' - the old 'you' won't be there to welcome you, any more than a spring husk of a summer cicada welcomes or endorses the thing that steps out of it. So if you can let go of needing even a single string back to sanity, if you can throw that last breadcrumb thread into the wind and fall fall fall, then Hole-in-One, baby. You're awake for the first time again, and ready for a whole looking glass country of archetypal forces to reshape what seemed so mundane before you left. It's all real, and you were there, Uncle Gus in your patched pants, and oh Auntie Em, there's no place like home's...
reflection...
in a mirror...
stared at
until the illusion of its 2D space deepens inward
and you can crawl inside
out.

1) NOTES
Longtime readers note one of my graven image idols of worship is the giant Alice statue in Central Park - see Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey

Unironic Ventriloquist Radio: YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN

"They say any idiot can write a book, if that's true I'm their boy."

Call me strange but I've always been a little bothered by concert 'films' -- the idea that the sight of a guy straining at his guitar is of some intrinsic aesthetic relevance to the experience of the music. Maybe I've been to too many Grateful Dead shows while hallucinating but I find the sight of people playing guitars to be fairly obscene. It's dirty, all those phallic necks and jerking strum movements. Sometimes seeing the musician is off-putting to your musical enjoyment, the way going to a reading by your favorite author can ruin his work for you (never meet your heroes). What is the correlation, for example, between watching a Jheri-curled ebony gremlin blowing into a shiny brass cornucopia and the the primordial jazz of Miles Davis in his late 60s-70s electric period? Better the music be seen as the earth's crust cooling and buckling at the dawn of time. What has a bunch of balding white guys in tuxedos with horsehair saws to the music of Mozart? Better an interwoven laser show. How does a fat dude with crazy gray hair wanking a long hunk of shiny purple wood correlate to the spacey noodling of Jerry Garcia, rather than... what... a zonked hippie chick sitting in a puddle behind the stage tracing patterns in the air like her fingertips are invisible sparklers? In the age of mp3s you can love a band and have no idea what they look like, and it's much better that way. I never want to go 'see' my favorite authors read, lest I be turned off by their voices or appearance and lose all love their work - imagine their real voice in my head as I read instead of the hazy matrix of inner voices I ascribe. I get around this by blotting out the author photos on books I own. You won't find a one. I even have doubts about showing my own on this blog and elsewhere, but I try to get around it by wearing dark glasses, beards, and deadpan expressions.

On another note: thanks to the anonymity of the web, mixed media collages that used to qualify for stuffy grants from arts foundations and take years to finish are now set up in seconds by freshmen college kids on their laptops who may have no idea how meta and post-modern they are by watching TRANSFORMERS on mute with a Mash-up remix of Pat Boone and Beyonce playing on their iTunes as a substitute soundtrack, all totally without any idea they can try to connect the interwoven symbolic meanings of it all and discover the joys of post-modernism for a media studies thesis. Meanwhile there are music documentaries or biopics out there that don't even have the rights to the music of their subject and so use muzak that sounds 'roughly' like the band. Authorship as a commodity thus shifts and feints and ducks back through an endless maze of duplication, collage, licensing, advertising 'rips' and adaptation. And you have pop stars now who make their songs on thin square pads and their concert performances consist of them sitting onstage with their little box, and pressing play, and then bravely extending their right hand across the bar for their cash while bewildered kids, too hip to complain, dance uncertainly. Maybe Andy Kaufman would love it... for awhile.  I'm Emperor's New Clothes about it.

Because it's all been done already.

No hay banda!

Artists have continually worked to negate each other, to make their own brand obsolete, and various forms of expression that take lifetimes to learn now become mastered, outdated and forgotten within months thanks to overexposure. We must remember that in 1929 a similar thing to our current 'collapse of the performative sphere' happened when the icons of the silent film era went stepping nervously into sound, unsure how the public would react to their ungainly, sadly human voices--their fans had seen and loved them or so long, god forbid their voice didn't match their expectations - they were ruined overnight if their accents were incoherent or their man's manliness undone by an effeminate whinny. We know about all that from SINGING IN THE RAIN, the fall of Gilbert Roland, "Garbo Speaks!' and Club Silencio in MULHOLLAND DR. (above) but what about the reverse? What about beloved radio comedians moving hesitantly into motion pictures. People seeing them for the first time after imagining faces to their voices the way they'd imagined voices in 1929? What about... ventriloquists on the radio?

In the golden age of radio the 1930s-40s (before TV took over) everyone in America knew the voices of comedians like Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The best material resulted from pretend feuds between them, which provided lots of insult gag opportunities. There was the original east-west rivalry in NYC-based Fred Allen vs. LA-based Jack Benny and one between Charlie McCarthy and W.C. Fields. The latter was more complicated as Fields didn't have his own show, was an established film star, and Charlie was, well, a hunk of wood with a shy not especially charismatic Swede attached. If aliens one day pick up our radio signals in space, some of the first things they hear won't be SETI, but these old radio shows still flying out into space bouncing around in the void, and they'll probably scratch their heads, especially over Edgar and Charlie. A ventriloquist on the radio? What were those Hu-Mans thinking?

 
I got into old radio shows as a kid in the 70s after hearing THE SHADOW Sunday nights on PBS's radio station, which I received on my little clock radio. This was the closest thing, aside from an actual film projector, one could get in the 70s to a VCR. Being able to listen to creepy shows like Inner Sanctum and The Shadow in my bedroom, all the lights off, put the hook in me, and the comedy was reassuring, especially if you were an avid watcher of Bugs Bunny cartoons, then in constant afternoon rotation, as guest voices from those shows constantly showed up, betraying their origins (i.e Foghorn Leghorn based on Senator Claghorn in Allen's Alley; the dopey buzzard based on Mortimer Snerd; Mel Blanc a regular on the Jack Benny show, etc). Still seeing Allen, Gildersleeve and Edgar Bergen and Fibber McGee all for the first time in this one old movie gave me the creeps. It took a long time to forget about that unpleasant frisson and just enjoy as I had enjoyed in my innocence...

The Siamese twin Hilton Sisters in Freaks (1933)

Edgar Bergen and two animate objects

Bergen and McCarthy especially were quite jarring on film, which is strange since the whole reason a ventriloquist act should work is our tendency towards anthropomorphism, the way our minds see a human shape, moving its mouth, and hear a voice, so we link them together. It's unconscious, beyond our control, hence the uncanny frisson; but on radio it's much easier to imagine Charlie McCarthy as a separate entity, existing in a fantasmatic rather than uncanny dimension. In their elder statesman days on the Muppet Show Bergen and his wood fit right in, but muppets are different than human actors or ventriloquist dummies, more colorful and with some level of expression gained through the full range of fingers along the wide felt mouth--and with no handler visible--but Charlie's mouth is kind of robotic, his dead eyes stare right through you and that jaw moves up and down but that's it-- and Edgar is always literally an arms length away. For some reason I still find Charlie terrifying in 'person' and Edgar kind of anemic and 'half' there. The whole issue of the ebony demon with his silver cornucopia comes roaring back when you have close-ups of old wooden Charlie McCarthy, his mouth moving up and down like a macabre robot, his dead eyes refusing all attempts to project emotion. When handler Edgar tries to get it on with a girl and, while explaining to her how ventriloquism works, his dummy keeps talking, sabotaging any attempt at cool, it makes him seem quite dysfunctional, like he's got a kind of projected Tourette syndrome. It's FREAKS-ish, i.e. the scene with the Siamese twins and the frisson-laden idea of loving one 'half' of a whole while the other half hangs around, vibing or cockblocking depending on whether the subject is split or not. Edgar is incomplete on his own, he is not a 'puppet proper.' His persona is diluted and partially externalized into a soft-voiced half-man. If you have  to have a talking piece of wood, saying "why don't you kiss her and get it over with?" before your first meeting is halfway through, you are officially a creep.

My first viewings of Bergen's big starring feature debut with WC Fields, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN (1938) were from an old afternoon UHF TV show, sped up and edited for time (and racism) as they used to do in those days. It was great on a fuzzy small TV screen, the uncanny valley was less uncanny, and I saw it dozens of times and became quite familiar with its comedic rhythms. Years later now, on DVD, the film is stretched back to normal running time, so it seems to move super slow, with dead air moments. Now the picture is super clear and scenes I've never seen have been restored, and now McCarthy's uncanny automaton qualities are much too pronounced to ignore. His close-ups seem like some home movie some devout pagan idol worshiper would make for Andy Warhol... if Warhol was into puppetry.

Fields' scenes were often shot by Eddie Cline, separately from Charlie's, helping the timeless-strange aspect along as Cline had a much better knack for ramshackle comedy than the film's official director George Marshall. Also helping is Field's obvious alcoholism: he staggers through the film in a zig-zag, avoiding the major 'marks' the way his character avoids the process server, preferring to run through his litany of old circus impresario gags from THE OLD FASHIONED WAY, SALLY OF THE SAWDUST, and so on, rather than engaging directly with the material before him.

It's a smart movie because, as a narrative, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN is pure hokum, old hat even in the silent age. And as a romance, it lives and dies in the soft dulcet 'real' voice of Charlie McCarthy's handler, Edgar Bergen, and some anonymous wartime heroine, playing Fields' daughter, bravely trying to seem not creeped out by the fact her love interest can't let go of his wooden 'buddy' even to hold her hand, yet he wants to marry her although he only met her a few hours earlier. Ick. Luckily the scenes with Larson E. Whipsnade doing his timeless but 'off' carny acts (subbing for the bearded lady sharpshooter, etc) are hilarious, like a jazz solo springing off the crusty familiarity of the tune (like Coltrane riffing on "My Favorite Things") and the weirdness of the overall film pays off in a skewed three-prong textual dissolve:

'Textual' Prong #1 - Meta - CHEAT is a relic of a bygone age and I love it largely for my own memories of what was going on in my life (the first warm glow of drink, that golden nectar) when I first taped it, a day I stayed home sick to edit out the commercials and then felt guilty all day as my mom stink-eyed me from the kitchen. I've seen it dozens of times. Dozens. That guilty depressed feeling staying home was almost totally wiped out by years of drinking to it late in the AM, but now that I'm sober that stain remains, and now that it's on DVD and I'm on meds, I get all the various stages of 'me' viewing its earlier 'home-edited' edition as well as this new one. The film's hokey datedness encourages such long term relationships - each new viewing holds surprises.

Prong 2 - Sub - The Brechtian-reflexive schtick with the creepy dual come-on of Bergen and McCarthy to Vicky. Charlie's telling Edgar to tell Vicky he loves her and wants to marry her before he has even kissed her (he can't kiss her because Charlie would be stricken mute, or else Vicky would hear Charlie in her molars). And Fields lamenting when a native steals the cork out of his lunch or daring you to guess whether his lines are intentionally or unintentionally fumbled or written that way.

Prong 3 - Inter - The nostalgia of the early Americana circus film was once a huge part of any sawdust-covered five cent cinema's rotation, especially in the silent era: there was always a sad clown played by Lon Chaney or Wallace Ford, who loves the acrobat but she's under the thumb of the abusive strong man; there was also the rich kid scheduled to marry a stuffy heiress but loves the waif; a poor kid romance 'meller' of the "I'll pay the rent!" variety that careened around the country in Fields' heyday: it's this corny schtick that Fields grew up watching and acting in (he was a long time circus juggler) which he is here lampooning.

In other words Fields is parodying genres of film that most of us have never seen nor would we want to. Most of them are deservedly long gone. HONEST MAN is a 'parody' of the sawdust-soaked cliches of Fields' youth, the innocent abroad with his hankerin' for the city (as Fields lambasts in FATAL GLASS OF BEER), the rich but loveless family of snobs Fields' daughter is willing to marry into if it means getting the circus out of debt: it is not just a parody of turn-of-the-century wealthy snobbery, but of Hollywood's past depictions of same, including Fields starring silent vehicles like SALLY OF THE SAWDUST.

Small wonder then, that Edgar's competition for Field's daughter's hand is the aptly named Roger Belgoode III. The scenes of class clashes and chaste romance were mockable cliches even in the 1930s, and this third prong represents that intertextual nostalgia the film carries for the lost era of full-length bathing suits, opium pipes, theater organs, and flagpole sitters. Back in 1938, this cornball stuff was their That 70s Show. 

CHEAT also grows less stilted once Fields sends Bergen and Charlie adrift in a hot air balloon and they discover Mortimer Snerd has been sleeping in the basket. For some reason, Snerd eases the creepy affect from all the McCarthy close-ups. Watching a puppet open and close its mouth while Edgar talks to himself, phrasing the set ups to his jokes in such archaic language they could only hold punchlines on the other end ("Is you mother living yet?" - "No, not yet") is less creepy for some reason once there are two puppets interacting with Edgar. It helps too that there are no other people around, especially not a girl. It helps too that Snerd is supposed to be dead-eyed and moronic. It's because he's an idiot that this hood-eyed hunk of wood is more relatable than the shark-eyed Charlie.

This was Edgar's feature film debut and he seems nervous and shy. Talking in an effeminate little whisper he's too dependent on his dummy to become a 'leading man' who can believably engage in romantic relations. He would make more films and get a better sense of a separate identity, but here he seems naught but a shadow. Expecting a girl to give up a cozy rich scenario to save her dad's circus in order to fall in love with this split subject wreck is so unreasonable it's kind of insulting.

And yet, the interesting thing about Bergen here is the example of just how fucked a ventriloquist who gets successful is: Bergen/Charlie must now and forever stay split. Bergen's real daughter Candice may know the separate Edgar, her father, without the dummies, but do we? Does Vicky? Bergen's 'own' voice has grown soft and delicate in relation to Charlie's far wider range, the way a couple overcompensates for each other's perceived faults; his eyes stay half-focused on his wooden 'other' as if in a trance. This is his Faustian bargain for success - "he" has become his "other's" puppet. The literal half-man --when he speaks as himself his voice is lowered and soft and girly, as if he has nowhere to throw it because no one will have it. He says his lines nervously, ashamed of his lips moving. This is all done no doubt so Charlie and Mortimer seem louder, but instead their combined split subject performing carries a cold dead air -- not helped by the fact that no one in the circus audiences ever laughs at or enjoys their show. I mean how hard would it have been to add some laughter from the crowd rather than letting the poor chump twist in the wind?

No wonder then that Bergen is such a perfect foil for Fields... on the radio. Similarly mired in a defective ego ideal --the liquored-up charlatan, Fields can duel Charlie with pithy one-liners and simultaneously neither actor need even be 'present' -- Fields stays in his cups and Bergen in his dolls - what their duels have, then, is something beyond acting, a multiplication of interlocked archetype slitters right up there with eerie totem pole sacrifices we see in films like THE WICKER MAN or England's Guy Fawkes effigies.

Fields in one of his many ingenious disguises

 The ultimate difference between Fields and Bergen (now that I'm sober this seems especially glaring) is that while they both effectively hide in plain sight through deceptive means, one is multiplied and the other divided: Bergen's deception is 'thrown' (external); Fields' is 'drunk' (internal), Fields slowly vanishes down a beer tap drain while Edgar multiplies like a hydra until he's neither here nor there, but solely in the interaction between here and there. The romance between Edgar and Vicky is therefore as creepy as incest, since it automatically infers a menage a trois with an inanimate object and ensures you can only marry half a person - and kissing them for any length of time essentially strangles their Siamese other. 

The main love relationship Fields has in his films by contrast is always a chaste paternal one, with a daughter or niece since he is in effect already happily married to gin which doesn't talk but rather is consumed utterly, so Fields in a sense is always in the process of sneaking away in plain sight, drinking his 'other' back into the void, and then being drunk in turn; he mutters to himself under his breath like the very air around him is his dummy, and everything he does or said he had done or said before ("Dragging my canoe behind me!") in his other films is done and said again. As all drunks repeat their stories and sentiments endlessly, so too does Fields repeat his stories and bits from film to film to his straight men, be they A-list stars, poker tables, cigar store Indians, hick extras, or oblivious family members absorbed in their own petty breakfast gossip. So in a sense Fields has an open dialogue not with an external totem of himself as Edgar does, but with a ghost, a half Fields referencing a 1/4 Fields, and so on... until he's so infinitesimally small he becomes bigger than all creation... 

Thanks / for the Lucky Strikes

The title of this blog entry will be familiar to Jack Benny fans, as one of the "commercial song parodies" with which his Sportsmen Quartet slyly ribbed and celebrated their sponsor, Lucky Strike, that fine cigarette that 4 out of 5 doctors prefer... so round, so firm, so fully packed. So free and easy on the draw!

Bob Hope was  a frequent guest star on Benny's show and he was always hilarious, a bundle of energy and joy, sharing a deep-seated sense of ease and beyond-impeccable comic timing with fellow star vaudeville types like Benny or Bing Crosby. There's not much of that kind of rapport in BIG BROADCAST OF 1938, Hope's first big role. But he sings fairly well in the slightly trilly style of the time. He plays a radio announcer/promoter for a cross Atlantic cruise ship race, with WC Fields as his comic co-star (and Fields is not one for lightning fast banter off-the-cuff with upstarts). Fields plays a corporate spy sent to slow the boat down so the other side can win, but he lands his crazy autogyro bicycle on his own cruise line; laughs ensue. Hope meanders around introducing an abundance of weird yet strangely exhausting musical numbers, including a long Die Wulkure aria, replete with Brunhilde in helmet, braids and brandishing a spear (below).

But then, like an oasis of beauty and quiet in a big shrill sporadically funny mess, comes this lovely scene between Bob and his unhappily divorced wife, Shirley Ross. A kind of female Walter Burns in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, Ross has Hope arrested so she can bail him out of jail before the boat sails, and generally employs all the screwball tricks to keep this baggy pants slickster around where she can see him.  It's an old familiar, no-win situation, but what ensues in their "Thanks for the Memories" number, their delicate but cool, unforced and sensitive shy/sly duet, strikes a note of transcendent grace.

An ode to good times that later went bad and the way savvy lovers catch themselves rose-tinting the whole affair when they know full well that there were an awful lot of good reasons why they left each other, this song and they dynamics both actors bring to it will be familiar to anyone who ever still loved--and was friends with--an ex. Hope--later content to be kind of a genial quick-witted leering buffoon--got his start this kind of sensitive smart guy, the sort who could actually wrestle with his fears, face the villain, woo the girl successfully and admirably, and still get off great wisecracks. In films like the following year's CAT AND THE CANARY and THE GHOST BUSTERS (both my favorites as well) for example, he cracks cowardly yet acts continually courageous - a whistling in the dark approach that never backs down from danger ("I'm so scared," he warns a sinister man on the boat to Cuba in GHOST BUSTERS, "if I see a ghost, I'm liable to take a shot at it, silly isn't it?") 

"Thanks for the Memory" captures this same mix of courage and avoidance as the better part of valor, and proves Hope is already a master of working off the energy of his fellow player. He falls completely in-step with the deep pangs of longing coursing through the blithe fatigue of Shirley Ross. Like a good jazz bassist might in a trio, he finds her off-beats and adds shadow and accent to her highlights.

Written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, the song itself stands way, way out from the rest of the songs in the film; it's almost Shakespearean in the way its surface percolates with sophisticated drollery, the "Hurrah for the next who dies!" modernist kind of stiff upper lip emotional denial, the trick we use over drinks to convince ourselves we're better off calling it quits, while just under the skin there's all this  tenderness, longing, regret and--most beautiful all--a genuine love and interest in the other person even if they don't get back together, even if they know it's for the best they don't. Also, the song acknowledges the weird way guilt and regret will fuel the rose-tinting process, the way everything is suddenly perfect just when you're about to finally part. So you stay to try and make it work, and it falls instantly to shit.

Love thrives on absence, and never is love stronger than when you separate ships sail off into separate sunsets. If that strength makes you jump overboard and swim to their ship, the love starts to weaken before you're even dry. Ross and Hope's singing, and the way the drama and push-pull dynamic is only heightened by the words and melody, making this one of my all-time favorite musical moments. Particularly I love the sudden stops into speaking - "That's life I guess / I love... / your dress," he sings/says, the word 'love' causing her to look up expectantly. When he says 'your dress' she looks down at it, her tears temporarily subsided even with the disappointment:

"Do you?"

"It's pretty," Hope says. Before singing some more. That "it's pretty" gets me every time; from the giddy hope of "I love..." to "it's pretty" represents a whole downward facing spiral of relationship dynamics. Ross wont get the words she wants to hear (I love you) but she will get the words she needs to hear (it's pretty).

By the end of the song, Ross is in tears and Hope has re-set the rules by resuming his role as the "distancer" in their codependent pair bond --even if he's weakened by the experience. Things seem already back where they were. So what, then, is love but the contract by which one is humbled into accepting the lesser of two evils? It's like being addicted to war: the pre-WW2 era was all about looking askance at marriage and the conventions of the old social system, flappers and fun, not marriage and kids. Funny how lately the winds of time have so shifted so that we willingly have given up nearly every freedom we won in the years between 1945 and 1979. Soon we will not even be allowed to smoke a Lucky Strike... at all... even outside! Ah, when I first moved to Manhattan in 1992, you could drink outdoors, as long as they were in brown paper bags, and there was dancing in every bar, pimps in fancy cars, drunks and punks and whiteboy funk and junkies with guitars... how lovely it was....

Kansas City is Lost! INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933)

When Hollywood decides to dump cavalcades of stars into one comedy, the results can be over-baked and dreary but INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933) is half-baked, which is just right. I love it so much if I had only one film (that wasn't by Howard Hawks) to bring to a desert island, it would be this. It's my safety net, my life preserver, my drinking companion.... one of the kew few who've earn that admittedly dubious privilege. Alcohol saved my life, then damn near took it away.... but hey - I still have the movies- and watching WC Fields drink in this movie gets me drunk on pre-code Paramount. 

Just so just so... 

He was just a mug

This love story began when I was fourteen years old, it was the early days of VHS, I was hormonal and introverted--I could have sure used a drink then, but it never occurred to me, for I never really put two and two together and equated drinks or food or pills with mood or emotion (I only knew it made parents sloppy, irritating, repetitive and loud). The only guide to what might be worth taping off the then old movie-filled local TV stations, was Leonard Maltin's book. I spent endless hours cross-indexing it with the local TV listings in the old Courier News and NY Times Sunday TV Guide inserts.  As many a 'monster kid' from the era, I had a thing for the classics - 30s Universal, 50s giant bugs and 30s old dark houses. I hated most non-horror or sci-fi old movies, i.e. the musicals and adult dramas, but I was so desperate I went ahead and taped INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, mainly because Maltin gave it ***1/2, and it had my main monster man, Bela Lugosi, in the credits. I was desperate for something new, down to try anything since I had, in my alienated introverted never-go-outside-to-play isolation, exhausted my Marx Brothers, my Universal horror, my 50s big bugs, and was trying to enjoy lesser crap like YOU'LL FIND OUT, THE GORILLA and ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY. I'd watched the good stuff so many times I couldn't concentrate on it, my brain just surging hormonally for some source of easy distraction. 

Even so, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE was a risk. It came on at three AM, my VHS timer was hit or miss. But a miracle happened. It actually worked. And I fell instantly in love with W.C. Fields, Cab Calloway, and the whole pre-code saucy comedy genre in one collective cupid arrow burst. 

The plot occurs over a a few days at the titular first-class hotel in Wu-Hu China, a kind of GRAND HOTEL satire with various musical numbers and comedy bits rotating like a revolving goldfish bowl around Dr. Wong's demonstration and selling of his 'Radioscope' (an early form of television), with envoys from all sorts of companies and countries in town to submit sealed bids to buy it. Wong keeps trying to get the "Six Day Bicycle Race" but he takes what he can get, everything from Cab Calloway doing "Reefer Man" replete with zombified bassman: "Why look at that cat, he looks like he done lost his mind," notes Cab. "He's high!" shouts the band. "What do you mean he's high?"/ "Full of weed!" they shout. "Full of weed!?" And there's Baby Rose Marie, a little girl belting the down and dirty blues with the voice of a 50-year old smoker on her fifth whiskey, and dancing in a dirty frock. Paired together in the mind of writer Nathaniel West, these bits are undoubtedly the inspiration for the memorable dancing moppet singing the "Reefer Song" in Day of the Locust!

A few years later, I brought it of it to college and my drummer and I watched it nightly while pounding bourbon and ginger ale. Decades later and we still have long conversations set to the vaudeville rhythm of Burns and Allen ("You had a raffle for poor old woman!?" And he won. / "You wouldn't say he has flew!" He has flu?) And of course there's W.C. Fields at his most insane; to drink along with him in this movie is to know a rare anarchic joy, and then to pass out.

Waking to a job well done

A lot of the early Fields pictures can get exasperating, even IT'S A GIFT, because of his weird need to play henpecked small-town husbands, but his marvelous Professor Quail in INTERNATIONAL HOUSE is a a whole other breed -- an American bull in China, swaggering around without ever deigning to imagine he might be causing chaos. Perhaps due to not having to carry the film by himself, he's finally allowed to let go completely. A drunken autogyro pilot and reckless adventurer, Quail lands on the roof deck of the Wu Hu, China Grand hotel, sneaks into gold digger supreme Peggy Hopkins Joyce's boudoir, scrounges everyone's leftover floorshow bottles and trashes the front desk, all while swirling about him a veritable cape of American arrogance; gathered guests are bemused but hotel manager Franklin Pangborn throws a hissy fit ("I suggest you get back into that flying windmill of yours and depart!")

Bela Lugosi as the Soviet agent, in town to bid on the radioscope, suspects Professor Quail of being the American representative interested in Wong's invention and, since he's also one of the ex-husbands of Peggy Hopkins Joyce, feels its his right to try and kill Quail at every opportunity. The actual American rep is Tommy Nash (Stu Erwin), whose imagined measles puts the hotel under quarantine. Burns is the doctor; Allen his nurse. Yikes.

As per most pre-code 1930s movies, the illegal drugs are done on the DL (though we never see Cab's bassist actually take a puff, we do see Fields with an opium pipe), but there's plenty of drinking above board, with Professor Quail dropping his empty Muerto Blanco beer bottles onto people's heads as he flees his massive Mexican bar tab, and there's wry gay references, including a quick shot of a Chinese drag king. Throughout though, and this is why I mentioned all the stuff about the alienated teen yet to find the solace in alcohol finding it first here, Field's wild bravado is heartening: "Is this Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri?" When Pangborn tells him he's lost, Fields decrees: "Kansas City is lost. I am here!" This reminds me of what the Sufi mystic Bahauddin once wrote: "A candle has been lit inside me / for which the sun is a moth." It's small wonder that Firesign Theater dubbed their satire of the 1960s counterculture "W.C. Fields Forever."

Hell yeah the Firesign loved this movie!

Like the Paramount Marx Brothers movies, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE is especially good for coming down off acid, since the behavior of every character is so "off", there's no one to bring you down with bad vibes or interminable squareness. There's even exotic fan dancers in faux-Ziegfield number, "The China Tea Cup and the American Mug," with Sterling Holloway as the mug, a US sailor bouncing around on a wire after Lona Andre in full exotica headdress. And there's simply nothing better to hallucinate onto than her shimmering exotica headdress, those skimpy pre-code spangles, and Holloway flying around on wires dressed as a sailor. Shiny = good.

This film then saved my life during two phases I need it to - that 14-16 year-old alienation phase, and the 18-24 booze/psychedelics phase. The reason why is I think that, in each case one is essentially shut out of many 'normal' forms of human interaction--such as registering for a hotel room, applying for a job, talking to your parents or a cop-- become absurd and even frightening. People's expectations have led them into boxes they can't see are all around them. Point out the box by acting free and they fear you, worry about, hate, or demonize you for being "outside the box." And if you manage to fake being 'inside' the box long enough, you may never get out again.

BUT the actions of free-spirit surrealists--such as boldly walking along the registration desk and kicking over the mail slots--are a breath of "normalcy" for the outside the boxers. It's the difference between seeing sleeping souls shambling through habitual rituals, the 9-5 slog through a work week,  vs. running loose with living, breathing, awake people. Such is the effect in INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, which has just enough normal dull "Grand Hotel" style characters to keep the more dysfunctional ones looking even cooler (the same strategy employed with the Marx Bros at the same time). And casting Peggy Hopkins Joyce seals the deal: Margaret Dumont and Thelma Todd rolled into one, the Paris Hilton or Zsa Zsa Gabor or Charro of her day, decency prevents my showing her here.

One of my favorite moments: After getting kicked out of Joyce's bed, Fields winds up sleeping with Dr. Wong, who's mistaken him for the American representative. "I feel like the whole Chinese army's been marching across my tongue with muddy feet," Fields laments the following morn.

Wong's Chinese houseboy asks: "Shall I get you some water?"

"A little on the side," Fields replies. The boy brings a tray with a decanter of whiskey and a soda spritzer. Fields fills a highball glass up to the brim with whiskey, spritzes a light mist of soda atop it, then leaves with the glass, grabbing the decanter as an afterthought. Man, I used to wonder if I'd ever get to the level of my drinking where I'd need to do that in the morning. And I did. Lord help you though, if you don't have a house boy to bring you such a nice tray, if the decanter's empty from the night before and it's a Sunday early in the morning and even the bars are closed.

But that was much later, for both Fields and myself. INTERNATIONAL is from a happier time, in that it's a lifting out of bondage into special delight. I want to live inside it, with just a blast of soda in a gigantic highball of whiskey

And I did. Even as a fourteen year-old loner besotted with the whole fractured business, I knew my fate. Four years later I'd be introducing it as the perfect post-show come-down chillout drug to my bandmates -- one glance at the spoon lady, or that crazy autogyro, and burdensome morning would fade into cozy blackout. Ten years after that and I'd be watching it while convulsing with the DTs, That, as they say, is another story. And now, here we are - it's on DVD and so am I, sparkly and present and fit for any China tea cup! Woo-Hoo!

NOTES:
1. a precursor of sorts in structure--with Fields playing a similar character--would occur in BIG BROADCAST OF 1938 though with lesser cumulative results it's still worth checking out.