When I was a kid I was captivated by a series of children’s’ books that came out under the aegis of The Golden Press. They seemed mostly to be adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen stories but it wasn’t the narratives that grabbed me, it was the illustrations – particularly the covers. I guess nowadays we’d call them 3D covers but the technical name is lenticular animation. Lenticular animation involves the interlacing of strips of one image with another. The left eye sees one image and the right eye the other and the illusion of depth is created when the viewing angle changes. Lenticular novelty cards were sold as Cracker Jack prizes for years and the medium is even more widely used now then it was when I was a kid. I know now that those children's books were Japanese and traceable to a company called Shiba Productions. Shiba was founded in 1958 by director Tadasu Iizawa and puppet maker Kihachiro Kawamoto. Kawamoto had gotten his start in the Japanese film industry in the postwar years at Toho Studios, future home base of Godzilla. Kawamoto was a protégé of pioneer Japanese stop-motion animator Tadahito Mochinaga. In 1963, he traveled to Prague to study with Czech animator Jiri Trnka. Before founding Shiba, Kawamoto created stop-motion puppets for Japanese TV commercials.

I never owned any of the Shiba books, I just saw them in waiting rooms and at other kids’ homes. I think that distance made them even more magical to me. I could stare at those covers without ever cracking the books themselves, just drinking in that atmosphere. By the time I came of age in the late 60s and early 70s, realism had overtaken magic and life’s color palette ran toward earth tones, golds, browns, raw umbers. My world was ugly to me when I was a kid and I wanted so badly to be able to step into those books to the make-believe worlds they promised.

I had occasion to think of the Shiba books when my family sat down to watch the Danny Kaye musical Hans Christian Andersen (1952). This was one of my wife’s childhood favorites and I can see why. Kaye is at the top of his puckish game, Frank Loesser’s songs are catchy, the kids (among them, Spider Baby’s Beverly Washburn, to whom Kaye sings “Thumbelina”) adorable… and the art direction of award-winning set designer Richard Day is pure magic. (Day did wonderful things in Technicolor and his production design for Hans Christian Andersen netted him one of many Academy Award^® nominations but he tended to win for his work on gritty black and white films such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront.) As much as I enjoy Kaye’s performance here, it’s the backgrounds that catch my eye. As when I was a kid, I want to step through the TV screen and live in this fantastic realm of meandering country lanes, endless stone walls and infinite wonder. The sky is too blue, the grass too green, the water unnaturally turquoise – nothing is real and everything is appreciated. It’s fake, patently fake, and to quote Kaye’s cobbler-cum-storyteller “full of the magic I need.”

Of course, I lost my innocence, as all kids do. Like all snotty teenagers, I learned to laugh at exposed wires and wrinkly cyclaramas and yell “Fake!” at the screen. But I was just going through the motions, passing for cool. Faking it. For even as I embraced more graphic, dark and violent fare I kept a place in my heart for magic. I think that’s why I loved the Universal monster movies of the 1930s, with their debt to German Expressionism. I owe Universal my undying thanks for leading me to such magical silent films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu and to earlier stuff, like the work of Frenchman Georges Méliès. It’s also why I loved Britain’s Hammer Studios. Those sets, those miniatures, those matte paintings! The Hammer horrors admitted that we live in troubled, frightening, monstrous times… but insisted that the world was still full of the magic, full of the magic we need.

My oldest child is just old enough now to be drawn in by movies and she danced a bit during Hans Christian Andersen. I’m already envying her that first awareness of the magic that’s just around the corner for her – envying her those nights of lying in bed and thinking about Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen or Brigadoon or Visaria or Oz or whatever fake, studio-built movie hamlet she likes best. There’s time enough to be slapped in the face by the pettiness and cruelty of this world and never enough time for faraway kingdoms where evil exists only to fail and everything works out in the end, exposed strings and all.

I owe a debt of thanks to Crafty McGee , who put me on the trail of the mighty, mighty Kihachiro Kawamoto. There's a great interview with Kawamoto at the Midnight Eye website.

Once a B Monster Movie lover, always a B Monster Movie Lover.  I can’t imagine ever outgrowing my fascination and appreciation for countless atmospheric, low-budget horror movies that were always my movies of choice growing up.  With an old black-and-white console TV in my bedroom from a very early age, and at least five excellent independent TV stations running tons of old movies day and night, I was in heaven.  I saw my share of important classic movies, too, but hands down, give me a cheapie monster movie and I was, and still am, completely content.  One of my favorites is the William Castle shocker Mr. Sardonicus from 1961, a sorta-sadistic, sorta-silly scare fest that once seen, truly cannot be forgotten.

Mr. Sardonicus popped back into the public eye, more or less, with its DVD release in 2002.  Before that it was mostly a movie caught by accident on TV, or perhaps more likely not seen at all for many years.  Sometime back in the early ‘90s I saw it at the Atlanta High Museum of Art – in fact, I was a guest programmer and picked it to host, and we had a packed audience, to boot – and it went over like the creepy champion that it is.  One of the thrills of that night was that the lovely actress Audrey Dalton, who played the wife of the titular Sardonicus, happened to be in Atlanta that night and attended the screening, receiving a tremendous ovation.  It was wonderful.

Those of you already familiar with Mr. Sardonicus will, along with me, brook no criticism of its possibly less-than-lush evocation of some obscure fictional European location.  Certainly there’s nothing lacking in the work of veteran cinematographer Burnett Guffey – who won Oscars in his career for From Here to Eternity and Bonnie and Clyde – as he photographed this bleak black-and-white morality tale with an eye for the creepy detail and the gruesome reveal.  And Ben Lane’s completely memorable make-up for Baron Sardonicus is one-of-a-kind and literally unforgettable.  Go ahead.  Try and get it out of her mind.  Impossible.

Plot-wise it’s nothing special perhaps, but has many fascinating elements.  It’s the story of a poor peasant who is cursed, or traumatized, with a horrible facial affliction after defiling the grave of his father in search of a winning lottery ticket.  The now-wealthy Baron Sardonicus (so-named after his deformity) seems to have some good points but ultimately gets his kicks promoting torture and scaring the villagers.  He has a loyal servant who loves nothing more than putting leeches on nubile young maidens, a beautiful wife who is repulsed by him, and an overwhelming desire to cure himself of his problem, which is why he has his wife’s scientist ex-boyfriend brought over from London to try out some revolutionary muscle paralysis-reversing techniques on him.  You’ve got a bad case of greed, a creepy castle, grave-robbing, a rotting corpse, a vat full of leeches, weird medical procedures and an overwhelming sense of sadness, really, when you consider the poor Baron’s ultimate fate. 

Much credit must be given to actor Guy Rolfe’s mournful visage.  With his mask on he’s merely mysterious, but once seen in the explanatory flashbacks, and then when revealed in his horrible glory, his sad eyes peer out in agony.  I always thought he looked like a chastised hound, misunderstood but driven somehow to act badly even though he knows it will only make people hate him.   (In deference to folks who haven't seen the movie, I won't post a pic of the make-up here, though it's so tempting.) 

What can I say?  It’s an effective little thriller, courtesy of the dead-on instincts of master manipulator William Castle, whose trademark was the clever marketing gimmick.  In Mr. Sardonicus, it’s the Punishment Poll, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote card that was supposed to be tallied at each showing. You got to choose whether Sardonicus deserved punishment or mercy, and according to movie lore, Castle, understanding only too well the tastes of the masses, only bothered to film the punishment version of the conclusion.  I myself would have voted for the mercy.  I just couldn’t bear to see the poor Baron unable to enjoy all that wonderful food on his dining room table.  He may have been a sadistic bastard, but everybody deserves a little roast beef, at least in my book. 

With the exception of boxing (and to a lesser degree golf), individual sports stories are under served by Hollywood. I wrote about the dearth of tennis movies in a June article, but also listed horse racing among the most popular sports related films in a couple of postings late last year. It can be argued, however, that horse racing is a team sport (after all, the four-legged animal can’t compete without a jockey, and vice versa); at the very least, it’s not an individual sport. If you take a minute to think, I’ll bet that you can name several team sports movies – from baseball, football, basketball or even hockey and soccer. But given twice as much time, you’d probably struggle to remember a single movie about a track (or field) athlete, except this Academy Award Best Picture winner.

I think we’ve been spoiled by Bud Greenspan, who writes, directs and produces those wonderful documentaries about Olympic athletes for whatever TV network is hosting the Games every other year. He captures their behind-the-scenes stories and the drama (& magic) of their events so well that perhaps Hollywood film-makers are intimidated by the eight-time Emmy Award winner’s work (the Directors Guild of America voted to give Greenspan a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995; two years later he received a Peabody). Television producers are willing to take the chance, but only on the ones with a sensationalistic angle (Shattered Glory: The Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan Story (1994), Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story (1997) etc.), which is a shame.

I ran track (120 yard high hurdles, 180 yard low hurdles) and did field events (high jump, triple jump) in high school, so I feel fortunate that Chariots of Fire (1981) came out shortly after graduation (while I was still emotionally connected to the sport). Before or after receiving our diplomas, some teammates and I traveled east from St. Louis to the NCAA Championships that year, and we were in the stands at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when the University of Maryland’s world record holding high hurdler Renaldo Nehemiah became the first man to break the 13 second barrier (12.98) in a 110m HH race.

Unfortunately, his result was deemed wind-aided, so his feat wasn’t official until he ran .05 seconds faster in 1981; a record that stood for nearly 8 years. Many years later, I also witnessed (in person) Michael Johnson smoke the 17 year old 200m world record when he ran the distance in 19.66 seconds at the U.S. Championships (Olympic Trials) here in Atlanta, only months before he would lower the record for good (to 19.32 seconds) in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games 200m Final, which I saw live on television from our hotel in Virgin Gorda (in the British Virgin Islands) … but I’ve digressed.

Chariots of Fire (1981) is the kind of movie that Academy voters love to recognize, even though it may not have been the most memorable among the nominees (Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), On Golden Pond (1981)) that year. In addition to taking home the gold for Best Picture, it won Oscars for Colin Welland’s original Screenplay, Costume Design (Milena Canonero just won her third Oscar for Marie Antoinette (2006)), and its unforgettable Score by Vangelis (who hasn’t really been heard from since he dropped his Greek surname Papathanassiou). The great character actor Ian Holm received his only Supporting Actor nomination (two years after he helped Alien (1979) make an unforgettable debut). Director Hugh Hudson and Editor Terry Rawlings were also nominated. The British film also earned BAFTA’s for Best Film, Costume Design and Holm; it was nominated in several other categories including Film Music, Cinematography (fwiw, Reds (1981) won the Oscar over Pond, Raiders, and two others while Chariots was inexplicably left out of the running), Direction, Screenplay, Editing, and Supporting Actor Nigel Havers, who played the high hurdler character, a Lord (loosely based on a real person).

The story is a fictionalized account of the real miraculous achievement by Great Britain’s male Olympic sprinters (e.g. over the favored U.S. team) at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, France. There are two religiously-based background stories which stay above melodrama (if barely): Ben Cross plays a Jew battling anti-Semitism – his situation is complicated by the controversy of his having hired a professional trainer (Holm) for his quest to become the fastest man in the world (e.g. the 100m champion) – and his Christian opponent, Ian Charleson as Eric Liddell, who runs for the glory of God and thus refuses to run a heat on the Sabbath; Liddell competed in (and won) the 400m instead. The cast also includes some recognizable Britishers John Gielgud, Nigel Davenport & Patrick Magee, and a post-Breaking Away (1979) Dennis Christopher and a post-Midnight Express (1978) Brad Davis as American sprinters.

As a former hurdler, I found the scene where Lord Lindsay was running high hurdles across the expansive grass lawn of his estate – there was a champagne glass on each standard and his challenge was to run the gauntlet without spilling a drop – to be nothing less than absurd (even if he really did train that way; I don’t know), especially after a hurdle-smashing Roger Kingdom literally broke his way through Nehemiah’s long standing world record several years later. However, I am glad that a more serious cinematic hurdling scene exists, especially since the only other one I can think of involves John Travolta’s Danny Zuko character leaping one, then another before tripping over the third to fall flat on his face while trying to impress Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy character in Grease (1978).

To the mind of a 10 year-old boy, there may be no more perfect film title than Dr. Blood’s Coffin (1961). It has everything. OK, there wasn’t all that much blood and no coffin to speak of but there was a zombie and a dilly of a zombie too—moldy, shuffling, and mad as Hell. The star of Dr. Blood’s Coffin was Kieron Moore, a strapping Irish actor I had also seen in Day of the Triffids (1962), as a lighthouse keeper fighting off the title bogies with lashings of sea water. There was something rock-like about Kieron Moore, a rigidity that made him distinctive, unavoidable. You knew him when you saw him. That’s what made Dr. Blood’s Coffin such a good movie: the guy looked like a standard, broad-shouldered, lantern-jawed varsity hero. He was clean-cut, well-spoken, athletic… and a sick bastard at heart,

reanimating the corpse of his girlfriend’s late husband. In a word… wow!

Born Ciaran O Annrachain at Skibbereen in County Cork on October 5 1924, Kieron Moore was the son of an Irish Nationalist writer who forbade the speaking of English in the home. The family relocated to Dublin, where Moore was educated at a Christian-run Irish language school and where he later studied medicine at University College. At the Little Peacock Theater, he appeared in Gaelic language plays and was invited to join the prestigious Abbey Theater. In London, he honed his craft with more stage work. As Kieron O’Hanrahan, he made his film debut playing an IRA gunman in love with his adopted sister in The Voice Within (1945) but changed his name at the behest of producer Alexander Korda. Signed with London Films, Moore flew to Naples to play a handsome but untrustworthy Italian concierge A Man About the House (1947), singing and playing guitar for the enjoyment of a pair of English spinsters. In Mine Own Executioner (1947), he was an RAF headcase and a year later was Count Vronsky to Vivien Leigh’s Anna Karenina (1948).

Through the 1950s, Moore made the rounds, playing tall, dark and handsome types of strong or compromised virtue in David and Bathsheba (1951) with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, in the foreign legion adventure Ten Tall Men (1951) with Burt Lancaster and as a blind deaf-mute murder suspect in The Green Scarf (1954). Moore turned up in a couple of pre-horror Hammer productions – Mantrap (1951) with Paul Henreid and Lois Maxwell and The Steel Bayonet (1957) with Leo Genn. He got a rare chance to play an Irishman in Disney’s charming Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1957) but was cast most often in crime films: as a Russian anarchist in the fact-based The Siege of Sidney Street (1960), as one of Aldo Ray's gang in They Robbed the Bank of England (1960) and as a closeted homosexual blackmailed into participating in a bank robbery in The League of Gentlemen (1960).

I didn’t know any of this when I first clapped eyes on Kieron Moore. For years, I only knew him from Dr. Blood’s Coffin and Day of the Triffids and for all I know now those movies may have killed his career. He did get one more great (in my 10 year-old estimation) role, as the sweaty hero of Crack in the World (1965), with Dana Andrews and his Triffids costar Janette Scott. Moore continued another ten years in films and on television, but his dark complexion doomed him to playing Arabs (Arabesque), American Indians, (Custer of the West) Greeks and Frenchmen. He eventually moved to France, where he created a weekly series for himself, Ryan International. The show ran for less than a season in the fall of 1970 but provided paychecques to a lot of British actors Moore likely knew from his salad days.

Kieron Moore retired from acting in the 1970s and got involved with the charity CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development), associate editing the church newspaper The Universe, visiting hospitals and traveling to Third World countries to make documentaries on the subject of poverty for Irish television.

Through his career, Moore got stuck with the annoying footnote that he never fulfilled the big studios’ expectations for him and I say hang all that. Kieron Moore lived and loved and loved his life. He seems to have done whatever he wanted and he devoted a good deal of his life to helping others. With wife (and Mine Own Executioner costar) Barbara White, he fathered four children. He died in France on July 15, 2007, at age 82.

Slán leat, Ciaran O Annrachain. Go dté tú slán.

While it’s hard enough to develop an original story for a novel or movie, regardless of the genre, surely it’s just as difficult for a writer to give his characters their names. Sometimes, it’s clearly an afterthought but, since a name can become revered or reveal character, it’s frequently evident that a great deal of thought went into naming the protagonist, villain, and other supporting roles. Whether for comedic effect like the names given to Bond girls (or repeated ad nauseam, from Ward Willoughby to Denny Crane) or to indicate a depth of evil so vast that persons fear the mere mention of his name (Voldemort), the practice continues today. Like many oft-repeated expressions and figures of speech, some monikers have become so ingrained in our culture that their origins are unknown, or they’re used as descriptive labels in lieu of other words (Scrooge). Close your eyes and try to think of some classic movie characters whose names have transcended their films.

Of course, some of the easiest to remember surnames are those which are found in the titles of their movies – from Kane to Kong, Rocky to Rambo, Shane to Strangelove, (Indiana) Jones to (Josey) Wales, Robin Hood to Topper, or even The Wild Bunch. There are those notorious names which conjure up images of evil, cruelty, treachery or acts of horror in one’s mind – Norman Bates, Travis Bickle, Captain Bligh, Corleone, Cruella De Vil, Mrs. Danvers, Johnny Friendly, Eve Harrington, Cody Jarrett, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Mr. Potter, Rico, Tommy Udo, Uncle Charlie, and Darth Vader – and to a lesser degree – Norma Desmond, J.J. Hunsecker, Harry Lime, Duke Mantee, Commander Queeg, and Willie Stark (some because we pity them).

 From flawed heroes – Harry Callahan, Popeye Doyle, Ethan Edwards, Terry Malloy, The Ringo Kid, and Jonathan Shields – to more genuine ones – George Bailey, Rick (Blaine), Nick and Nora (Charles), Rooster Cogburn, Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia, Klaatu (and Gort?), Father O’Malley, Ripley, Jefferson Smith, Sergeant Stryker, and Virgil Tibbs – and those that are hard to categorize (Inspector Clouseau, Stanley Kowalski) or are inhuman (HAL) or non-human (Lassie and Rin Tin Tin). For the most part, I’ve tried to list names which were made famous cinematically versus those (like Atticus Finch, from Charles Dickens or horror tomes – Dracula, Frankenstein et al) which held a place in our lexicon before their respective movies, and tried to include only those for which the film’s name is quickly recalled vs. those that are familiar but don’t instantly evoke their movies (e.g. Roger Thornhill and Phillip Vandamm, or Christine Vole).

What are some of your favorite iconic (primarily) movie character names which are as easily identifiable as their parent films are (not real people like Gandhi and Patton, but reel people)?

I read something Jeff wrote a few posts back that reminded me of my own strange experience 12 years ago. On a European trip in 1995 I visited the Pathé Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam. The Tuschinski was built in 1921 with a mix of Art Deco, oriental, and other influences that Wikipedia notes were “designed to help people get a feeling that they were being led into an illusion.” It’s a tremendous building, and when I walked into the opening foyer I remember it stretching out in all directions in an explosion of gold and red (the carpet was redone using the original thread from Morocco and had to be flown in on a special flight). I bellied up to the concession stand and saw they had Heineken on tap, and this they served me in a frosted glass! Even the ticket stubs had nice color and interesting graphics.

The main auditorium is a massive space that originally had a Wurlitzer-Strunk organ that played music before films, with1200 seats. In later years the main auditorium was reduced to 740 seats to make room for three smaller screening rooms. Unfortunately for me on the night I was there, in the big auditorium they were showing Casper (1995) – a film my job in cable acquisitions (at the time) had already paid me to see. As much as I love soaking in a film in the big movie palaces, there was just no way I could pay good money to sit through this one again. So I opted, instead, for one of the titles in the smaller screening rooms. The only one I had not already seen at that point was Michael Bay’s feature-debut, Bad Boys (1995).

Checking their website today it’s not surprising to see most of their programming still swallowed up by Hollywood blockbusters such as (again) Michael Bay’s latest. But they do have a smattering of independent art-films. And now the Tuschinski has been given a new wing with three more screening rooms, and in the main auditorium there are love seats where you “may order wine and small meals to your private box.” For purposes of comparison only, I include here a photo I took a few months ago from a “movie theater” found at a tourist resort in Cozumel, which had some fold-up chairs and a comically small screen dangling a few feet away from ceiling digital projector. But I digress…

Back to that night in 1995: Having arrived early I bought tickets and it was then that I noticed that I had been given an exact seat number. I told the ticket-seller that I liked to show up early precisely so that I might take my own preferred, close to the screen. I was looked at as if though from Mars and informed that I’d have to wait until the movie had started before moving from my assigned seat. This did not seem to be a problem, as it appeared that my date and I were the only ones in the theater. The seats were sold from back-to-front, so we, being the first there, were located in the very back row by the aisle.

The lights were turned down, the curtains opened, and we were still alone. And that’s when the commercials began. At first I was amused. If memory serves, there was an ice cream commercial that featured a close-up of a naked woman’s breasts straddling a melting ice-cream cone. There was a lot of jiggling, so she may have been bouncing on a trampoline. And, apparently, ice-cream was also very popular with women who were in the middle of a wet-t-shirt contests. And jogging. It was as if though Russ Meyer had been unleashed into the world of ice-cream marketing. There was no attempt at subliminal advertising here, and I wondered if they were showing the same commercials in front of Casper.

And the commercials went on, and on, and on. And as they did, people arrived in the theater, obediently sitting in their assigned seats and slowly filling the place up from back-to-front. I was stunned at how methodical people were, and also realized that they knew enough to show up a half-hour late so as to skip most of the opening commercials. Then there were film trailers, and when the film finally started only the front two rows remained open. I waited a few more minutes and then made my break for the front.

Finally, I could relax and kick back for the brand of nonsense one had come to expect from that then production power-team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. But about an hour into the film something surreal happened in the middle of the buddy-cop banter and mindless spectacle. It happened in mid-sentence just as a car-chase or explosion or fight-scene was happening: A static shot of palm trees. Blowing in the breeze. On a beach. Blue skies. Slowly, ukulele music was cued up. And people in the theater started to leave! And then the scene with palm trees revealed itself to be another commercial! This one dropped smack-dab in the middle of the film on a random reel change. A forced intermission.

Dazed, I made my way to the concession stand for another Heineken and there saw a packed lobby of people smoking, drinking beer, and eating ice-cream (hmmm…). About 20 minutes went by and when this concession-intermission was over, people filed back into their seats and the film picked up right were it had left off. This was back in 1995, at which time I wondered: “how can people deal with all these commercials?” But similar incursions have been made here at home, albeit I have yet to see an abrupt intermission, meant purely to move concessions, one that suddenly cuts a film in half. But given all the product placements in films these days, why bother? The films themselves have become the commercial.

Look at the film Michael Bay has screening in cinemas right now: Transeformers is a toy commercial, it’s a car commercial, why the whole bloody mess is nothing but a big, loud, and hysterical commercial. Commercials are everywhere now, it’s nigh unbeareable. Well… unless they feature naked women bouncing on trampolines while balancing several scoops of ice-cream in a waffle-cone – those are bearable. (If you like that kind of thing.) But even those commercials are only slightly tolerable insofar as they afford me the time to get another frosted glass of beer. And maybe some ice-cream.

There has been a lot of ink spilled on the subject of actors who are better than the parts they play. Stage actors like Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier agreed to headline big studio films that boosted the wattage of their star power at the expense of their craft, while strong, edgy actresses such as Ida Lupino got pushed into harridan roles by an industry that didn’t know what else to do with them. It’s an old story.

I often think of Joanna Cassidy. My whole family fell in love with the Haddonfield, New Jersey-born actress nearly thirty years ago when she costarred in the short-lived ABC adventure series 240-Robert, as a helicopter-flying Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputy. The show only ran for a year or so before Cassidy and castmates Mark Harmon and John Bennett Perry got cut loose but we loved every moment shared with sexy Deputy Morgan Wainright, who had the dirtiest laugh imaginable. She was tough but not like the caricature tough women cops on TV today, who are all hair and makeup… you could tell Cassidy could scrap if she had to and drink you under the table and then drive you home.

Joanna Cassidy’s signature role is probably the android Zhora in Blade Runner (1982). It’s a good performance but not a great part… Zhora doesn’t get much to do and has only one memorable scene before she dies in a blaze of glory. Still, she’s tough as nails and undeniably sexy. Wet from her work as an exotic snake dancer, Zhora commands Harrison Ford “Dry me” and he does – but only because we in the audience couldn’t breach the screen to beat him to it. Blade Runner is a cult favorite but not my favorite. My favorite Joanna Cassidy film is Under Fire (1983).

Under Fire had one of the last great adult romantic triangles of the movies: older newsman Gene Hackman, brash photographer Nick Nolte and hard journalist Joanna Cassidy, all bopping around Managua at the time of the Nicaragua revolution, falling in and out of love and running for their lives amid the rise of the Sandinistas. Compare this to the recent Blood Diamond (2006) and see how Andy Hardy the relationship is between mercenary Leonardo DiCaprio and photojournalist Jennifer Connolly. I don’t mean to bash the younger actors – they’re both good at what they do – but their relationship here is baby stuff compared to Under Fire’s lived-in, rough-hewn, scotch-fueled ménage a guerre.

Scan Joanna Cassidy’s IMDb page and drink in all of the unconscionable crap she’s had to do in order to pay rent: The Glove (in which she’s a real estate agent cum gambler’s moll… I think), episodes of Fantasy Island, Enos, Love Boat, Kaz (remember Kaz?), Roger Vadim’s Night Games (1980), the TV movie Wheels of Terror (about a mysterious child molesting car), the Eddie Murphy vehicle Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), the mind-bending mess of John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001). Occasional film roles were worth her while – as a terrorist in The Fourth Protocol (1987) and Bob Hoskins’ girlfriend in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) – but I can’t be the only one disappointed by the use of her as a hand-wringing yenta in Grudge 2 (2006), a part that could have been played just as readily by a rake. Even on five seasons of Six Feet Under, Gleason’s randy society monster Margaret Chenoweth rarely rose above light comic relief, as if the producers were less interested in delineating that character than just relying on Cassidy to do her patented shtick. She deserves better.

Acting may be the only medium in which we can take refuge from the failure of the art form in an admiration of its raw materials. That doesn't happen in music or sports and only occasionally in politics. The enigma of Joanna Cassidy points to the primacy of personality over attitude but that's a hard lesson to get across in Hollywood, and an even harder sell today than when Cassidy started out with bits in Bullit (1968) and The Laughing Policeman (1973). 98% of what she has done is absolute garbage (no, really... it was a child molesting car) but she is still loved and not just by me. Joanna Cassidy is a force of nature. She turns 62 next week and she’s still got a hell of a lot of life and game in her. Let’s do something about that.

I caught one of my favorite – or at least I watched it many times –  movies when I was a young girl this morning on one of the other classic movie networks (yes, there are a few out there other than TCM).  1959’s Blue Denim, starring Brandon De Wilde and a young and lovely Carol Lynley, is the story of a couple of innocent teenagers who find themselves facing the uncertainty and terror of an unplanned pregnancy.  Hard to imagine, and rather sad, really, that the problems these kids faced back in 1959 are almost on the verge of making a comeback.  But that’s politics, right, and this is about the movies.

Blue Denim was first seen on Broadway in 1958.  It was written by William Noble and  James Leo Herlihy (who would later go on to write Midnight Cowboy), and it was a critical hit.  Carol Lynley played the curious and slightly sexually precocious Janet on stage and when it was brought to the movies, but Burt Brinkerhoff, the original stage Arthur, was replaced by veteran young movie actor Brandon De Wilde.  De Wilde had already starred in several big movies, including The Member of the Wedding and of course Shane, with Alan Ladd.  Both De Wilde and Lynley also were veterans of many TV shows of the 1950s, and in fact Brandon had his own series for a while.   (But don't feel sorry for Brinkerhoff; he's had a fantastic career as a director.) 

Also brought in from the Broadway production was actor Warren Berlinger as Arthur’s best friend Ernie, a tough-talking mini-blowhard who is not quite as worldly-wise as he makes out to be.  Berlinger started his career in live TV then he transitioned to movies and later to hundreds of television show appearances.  The comically-inclined Berlinger, who in fact was Milton Berle’s nephew, is a brash and wise-guy presence in Blue Denim, but he shows his dramatic chops towards the end when the going gets sticky and he comes down hard on his pal Arthur.  It’s a memorable performance.

In the original stage play Janet does manage to get an abortion, though when it was adapted for the screen this solution was not permitted by the codes in practice at the time and she was packed off on a train to have her baby elsewhere.  And just for good measure, Arthur hops on board just in the nick of time to promise to stand by his little lady.  Cute, perhaps, but does it qualify as a happy ending?  That’s open for discussion.  More effective and chilling were the scenes of Janet being whisked off to the doctor, blindfolded in a big sedan, with stern but rather business-like and not-in-the-least-monstrous members of the underground network ready to care for her.  The only real creep in the bunch is the smarmy smart aleck front man, Berlinger's contact when he helps Arthur set up the operation, and who gets beat up (off-screen) by one of the teenagers' fathers. 

The issues in Blue Denim, while also continuing to simmer on the national political scene, are front and center in a couple of movies currently out, Knocked Up and Waitress.  In both movies, young women are faced with unplanned pregnancies, and both go ahead with them.  There’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that there’s no real consideration of terminating the pregnancies in either of these movies (I haven’t seen them yet), but of course we all realize that there wouldn’t be a movie then.  Does it also reflect a capitulation to certain political factions out there?  Is it easier to go along with the baby-making sentiment, after all?  Does it reflect a change in attitudes, or just reflect some male fantasy, as in Knocked Up, that a beautiful woman will bear your child, no matter how unlikely the prospect may be or how unsuited you are to each other.  I wouldn’t bet against that.  

Interesting then, that this year’s top prizewinner at the Cannes Festival was a Romanian drama about athe struggle to obtain a secret illegal abortion in that country.  And a couple of years ago Vera Drake was a critically acclaimed drama about a no-nonsense British housewife who took care of young women who had gotten themselves in trouble.  In America, at least, it seems that we are as conflicted onscreen about the subject as we are divided politically – into the rabid and the tolerant – on the national stage.  There are those who would have us return to the days of Blue Denim – the movie version – but let’s hope that these issues don’t get decided – or unduly influenced – by what’s playing at the local multiplex. 

Hypnosis may or may not work in real life, I don’t know. My mind doesn’t seem to be willing to allow me to be hypnotized, at least not in the ways that one sees in the movies. I guess I’m not willing to abdicate control of myself to anyone else; perhaps it’s a matter of trust. In any case, its use appears in many stories that one sees onscreen, whether it’s a technique used: by Dracula to get his victims under his power, by a psychiatrist (or psychologist) in an attempt to elicit a suppressed memory or to assess a person’s mental health or, of course, for laughs in a comedy. Since The Seventh Veil (1945) is part of tomorrow’s lineup of Bob’s Picks on TCM, I thought I’d recall a number of films which feature hypnosis (or psychiatrists/psychologists) centrally in their plots.

Secrets of the French Police (1932) – David O. Selznick was the executive producer of this RKO B drama that stars Frank Morgan, and features Gwili Andre as a woman that’s hypnotized into behaving like the missing Russian princess Anastasia in order to fool the Grand Duke Romanoff.

Carefree (1938) - Fred Astaire playing a single psychiatrist is just one of the many funny aspects of this musical comedy which also stars his frequent collaborator Ginger Rogers; she is engaged to Ralph Bellamy, who asks his friend Astaire to help him with their relationship problems. But while she’s under hypnosis, Ginger falls for Fred (and Bellamy finds that he’s the third wheel, as he so often did throughout his career).

Kisses for Breakfast (1941) - this humorless B comedy features Dennis Morgan as an amnesiac who finds himself married to two women at the same time; he’d forgotten that he already had a wife when he meets and marries Jane Wyatt’s character. The situation’s resolution begins after his first wife engages the family doctor to hypnotize her husband (to help him to remember her).

The Seventh Veil (1945) – After talented concert pianist Francesca (Ann Todd) attempts suicide, she forgets her identity; she remembers it (and the movie story is told in flashback) with the help of a psychiatrist (Herbert Lom) that restores her memory. Then, she must choose between her Svengali & Pygmalion-like guardian (James Mason) and her first lover (Hugh McDermott).

Possessed (1947) - similar to The Seventh Veil (1945) in that it begins with a woman (played by Joan Crawford) that’s incoherent, for the same sort of love conflict reasons, unable to articulate her past until a psychiatrist uncovers it using patience and drug treatment; her story is told via flashback sequences. See it during TCM’s Summer Under the Stars series; Crawford's day is August 3rd.

Shadow on the Wall (1950) – future first lady Nancy Davis (she would marry Ronald Reagan less than two years after this movie’s release) played the psychiatrist that helps Gigi Perreau identify her stepmother’s killer (Ann Sothern) in order to free her falsely accused and convicted father (Zachary Scott) from prison and the death penalty, in this above average B thriller.

The Yellow Cab Man (1950) - the late Charles Lane appears (uncredited) in this comedy which features Red Skelton in the title role; the accident prone Skelton (who’s denied coverage by the casualty company agent that Lane plays) invents an elastic glass product that a creepy lawyer (Edward Arnold) schemes to steal by having a phony doctor (Walter Slezak) hypnotize him into revealing its secret formula. Airing on the channel this October 24th.

Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959) - this Jerry Lewis comedy features Dina Merrill as a Navy Ensign named Benson; using a sort of hypnosis, she helps him to recall and recount what happened to a World War II ship, which had been under his command during the war, that is now missing.

Marnie (1964) – Tippi Hedron (in the title role) doesn’t understand her kleptomania or frigidity, which is more humorous in this Alfred Hitchcock thriller than the director’s other cold blonde characters because her husband is played by the overtly virile Sean Connery, who also appeared in his third James Bond feature (Goldfinger (1964)) that year. Her recollection of the incident that she’d repressed is not psychiatrically induced, but since I’d failed to mention Hitch’s other psychological drama – Spellbound (1945), which includes a dream sequence by Salvador Dali that helped it earn a Special Effects Oscar nom – I thought I’d include it here.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) – no less than Sigmund Freud (played by Alan Arkin) is engaged by Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) to hypnotize the famous detective Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) in hopes of bringing him out of the irrational paranoia and obsession with his nemesis Dr. Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) brought on by his measured (referred to in this crime mystery’s title) use of cocaine.

I can think of at least ten more related (e.g. psychological and/or psychiatrist driven plots) films which don’t involve hypnosis, but I think I’ll save them for a (possible) future article.