A movie icon turns 60 this year. This genuinely iconic figure has made appearances in both A and B-pictures and acted with some of the best names in the industry: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Nolte, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, Sylvester Stallone… the list goes on and on. Born in the Soviet Union immediately after the Second World War but more popular now than ever, this stellar performer’s full name is Автомат Калашникова образца 1947 … but is more commonly known as the AK-47.

You know the design – as distinctive as the Mont Blanc pen or a sleek Mercedes Benz. The AK-47 was created by Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov. Born of peasant stock in 1919, Kalashnikov was shamed as a child by his family’s exile to Siberia and vowed at an early age to make himself useful to the Motherland. As a tank commander during World War II, Kalashnikov was wounded in the October 1941 battle of Bryansk, in which a Red Army poorly equipped with single-shot rifles fell before German troops armed with automatic rifles. While recuperating in the hospital, Kalashnikov began to imagine a submachine gun with which his comrades could repel the invading Hun from their borders. The AK-47 was the result of several intense years of designing in state-financed workshops and took a top Soviet prize upon its completion in 1947. Manufactured by Izhevsk Mechanical Works, the AK-47 would become standard ordinance for the Soviet Army in 1950 and is celebrated (and feared) today as the best (most lethal) automatic assault weapon in the world. The design is so simple and intuitive that even a child can operate the thing. Awarded both the Stalin and Lenin prizes, its inventor became a national hero… but his country's applause fell on deaf ears, as Kalashnikov gave his hearing to perfect the killing machine that would forever bear his name.

While the Soviets armed the Viet Cong and Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the weapon, the United States sent AKs from China and Egypt to Afghanistan in the 1980s as a bulwark against Communism… and US troops are still ducking the ricochets. Marking the weapon’s 60^th birthday in The New York Times, columnist C. J. Chivers writes “Every self-respecting Communist revolutionary and even allies of convenience, from Fidel Castro to Yasir Arafat to Idi Amin, eventually had their Kalashnikov stockpiles and Kalashnikov poses, never mind the body counts.”

Like any Hollywood product, knockoffs proliferated from countries all over the world. The AK-47's original run was relatively short-lived and that original design has been updated numerous times in the intervening decades but the basic design remains unchanged… classic, you might say. The AK-47 and its variants were a primary weapon for at least one side in nearly all the wars of the last decade. For a time the Soviet Union’s key export, there are now ten times as many AK-47s in the world as there are American M-16s. Most commonly seen in Africa and the Middle East, AK-47s can be seen in such films as The Deer Hunter (1978), Under Fire (1983), Red Dawn (1984), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Rambo III (1988), Last Action Hero (1993), True Lies (1994), Goldeneye (1995), Tears of the Sun, (2003), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Lord of War (2005) and most recently in Blood Diamond (2006). In 1983, Sean Connery and Roger Moore wielded AK-47s as competing James Bonds in Never Say Never Again and Octopussy (Moore wins points for firing his while sliding down a marble balustrade). In Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), Samuel L. Jackson’s profane arms dealer paid the weapon its most quoted compliment: “AK-47… the very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every m*********-er in the room. Accept no substitutes.”

Love it or hate it, the AK-47 is here to stay.

Lovers of buxom, beautiful B-Movie goddesses will no doubt be tuned in tomorrow late night for Zombies of Mora Tau starring the splendid Allison Hayes.  Ms. Hayes, who is probably best known for her turn in The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, was a hard-working and talented veteran actress with a come hither look that just didn’t let you get away.

After some early beauty pageant wins, Allison came to Hollywood and began her career in minor – very minor – roles, but progressed to supporting roles in both movies and on TV.   No doubt her striking dramatic good looks and a demeanor that was both haughty and inviting made her an ideal candidate for the perhaps melodramatic but seldom boring parts she got in a handful of minor horror movies, titles which ensure Allison Hayes’ continued fame today.  The Undead, Zombies of Mora Tau, The Unearthly, and The Disembodied from 1957,  Attack of the 50 Foot Woman from  1958,  and The Hypnotic Eye from 1960 were just a small percentage of her credits, but are the titles that cemented her niche in pop culture. 

As a kid I was completely entranced and probably psychologically damaged by repeated viewings of The Hypnotic Eye, and of course Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was another big favorite.  One reason my sisters and I loved it so much was that the main guy in the film, the husband of the giant gal, was named Harry, which was my Dad’s name.  Much merriment always occurred in our house when she goes rampaging over the countryside calling out “Harry!” over and over again.  Allison isn’t bad at all in the movie, and in fact you have to have great sympathy for her.  She’s embroiled in a terrifying alien abduction, really, by that huge outer space giant in a diaper, and I’m sure that fans of the movie can recall every creepy moment when she’s walking around his ship, with that eerie beeping sound and other disorienting effects.  Sure, the movie is probably a piece of crap to some people, but Allison’s tortured portrayal of a woman who finally gets her revenge on the men who have cheated on her and disbelieved her is a genuinely empathetic one, no matter how far out the circumstances.

Even more interesting, perhaps, than Allison’s onscreen adventures is the weird and sad saga of the decline of her health.  She either seems to have had leukemia, or else was gradually poisoned by a health food store vitamin supplement which had been contaminated by lead.  Allison evidently endured years of misdiagnoses, hundreds of medical tests and the condescending skepticism of countless doctors who refused to believe that the actress was really sick.  She ended up her life needing to take regular blood transfusions to keep her alive, and it worked until late February 1977, when Allison succumbed to her mysterious illness at the age of 46. 

While watching So Long at the Fair (1950) on TCM last week, I was reminded of one of director Alfred Hitchcock’s best pre-Rebecca (1940) thrillers The Lady Vanishes (1938), which will next air on the channel this October 20th. There are major differences, but the plots’ core elements are superficially the same – one of the characters introduced at the film’s beginning disappears, but only a comely young woman notices, and everyone else treats her like she’s mistaken (even crazy, for mentioning it) until a single compatible male artist (who’s smitten by her) helps her to uncover the mystery; the story was most recently borrowed to make Flightplan (2005) with Jodie Foster. In Hitch’s original, Margaret Lockwood is assisted by a musician, played by Michael Redgrave (Dame May Whitty plays the title role) and, in the latter British-made movie, painter Dirk Bogarde helps Jean Simmons locate her missing brother (David Tomlinson). Given the current climate in Hollywood, which shuns originality in favor of remakes, big screen versions of television series and remakes of big screen versions of television series, deja vu is a common experience at the movie theater.

If you’ve seen thousands of movies, you’ve probably become accustomed to seeing the same stories (and cliches) over and over again – there are only so many plots – such that “what stands out” are the ones which are unique. But what’s really unusual is when two movies with nearly identical yet substantially original fiction are released within the same calendar year:

For instance, sixty-seven years ago in 1940, Columbia Pictures released Too Many Husbands (1940) in March of that year and two months later RKO Radio Pictures released My Favorite Wife (1940), which is airing tomorrow night (7/19) as part of TCM’s salute to Star of the Month Randolph Scott. Both stories feature a spouse that returns home after being missing at sea, to the point that they’d been declared legally dead, to find that their mate has fallen in love and has remarried another. While each was similar to Lord Tennyson’s seventy-five year old poem Enoch Arden, the latter was unique enough to earn a Best Writing, Original Story Academy Award nomination for its writers: husband & wife team Sam & Bella Spewack and producer Leo McCarey.

The Columbia movie stars Jean Arthur, who’d already remarried her “ex” husband’s best friend and publisher business partner Hank (Melvyn Douglas) after the Coast Guard had made the legal determination that her first husband was no longer alive. But he, Bill (Fred MacMurray), had been stranded on a desert island for the past 18 months, so that when he’s rescued and returns home, Arthur’s character finds herself having to choose between her two husbands! Her father, played by the ubiquitous character actor Harry Davenport (whose film debut had been in a silent feature bearing the same name, but not the same plot, twenty-six years earlier), is no help at all. Writer Somerset Maugham’s play was the basis for this comedy’s ironic story, which includes two husbands that had neglected their wife – Hank, because of his workaholic tendencies, and adventurer Bill due to his constant travel – yet find themselves competing for her affections. The better known McCarey comedy, directed by Garson Kanin, features Irene Dunne as Ellen (in lieu of Enoch) Arden and it is she that had been shipwrecked (seven years prior) and stranded on a desert island (with SOTM Randy); when she returns home, Ellen finds that her husband (Cary Grant) had made a too quick decision to have her declared legally dead in order to remarry Gail Patrick’s character … so it is Grant’s character that must choose (per the title, though not really) which is his favorite wife.

Also airing tomorrow is another Columbia picture that was released within the same year that a strikingly similar movie debuted; unfortunately, Harry Cohn’s studio ended up with the short end of the stick yet again. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) arrived in theaters in January whereas Columbia’s (Sidney Lumet’s) Fail-Safe (1964) wasn’t available until October of that year, and their timing couldn’t have been worse. Not only do both films deal with a precursor to World War III scenario, during the heart of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, in which a U.S. nuclear missile is dropped on Russia, but the former is a black comedy whereas the latter is a serious (if flawed) drama. Another similarity is that the plots feature telephone calls (e.g. between the White House and the Kremlin) which are classic. Despite the improbable (even ludicrous) decision that the POTUS, played by Henry Fonda, makes near the end of Fail-Safe (1964), one has to wonder if it would be better known, even revered, today if it hadn’t followed the widely popular spoof on the same subject, which makes taking it seriously all the more difficult (unless one somehow hasn’t already seen Kubrick’s masterpiece).

I’d like to say that I was inspired by TCM’s Spielberg documentary or recent airings of Jaws (1975) but, no, I decided to revisit Grizzly (1976) last week for no other reason than the dvd had been sitting on my shelf for almost a year and I was about to go camping. The dvd had been an impulse buy from the bargain shelf at a local bookstore, only $5.95! (Obviously this was not the recent 30th anniversary double-disc special edition – alas.)

My parents claim that when they took me to see Grizzly as a kid, upon its theatrical release, I was so queasy afterwards that when they said the word “blood” I just lost it and barfed. I’d like to think it was just a case of too much soda-pop and candy, but who knows? Maybe the “18 feet of man-eating terror” really did get under my skin. I’m pretty sure Stephen Colbert saw this as a kid too. He’s only a few years older than me and always going on about how bears are our number one threat.

Grizzly gets points for being one of the first Jaws knock-offs out the gate, and it also ended up being one of the bigger financial hits for 1976 – and certainly director William Girdler’s most financially successful film. But that was then. Now it barely gets four out of ten stars on IMDb. Actually, most of Girdler’s films seem to hit this mark, but I remain undeterred. Day of the Animals (1977), here I come…

In Grizzly, the Jaws template is faithfully transposed from the ocean to the mountains. The new locale delivers a crowded forest full of backpackers, forest rangers, hunters, and other tasty treats for what we later find out is a violent and direct descendent of a prehistoric killing machine. Ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George) has the Roy Sheider role and environmentalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaekel) is a bit of a fusion between the characters played by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss. And, just like Jaws, Grizzly also had a malfunctioning mechanical beast that was used far less than originally planned. One interesting discrepancy is that while both were theatrically released with PG ratings (ah, the seventies!), Jaws would re-surface on dvd with a PG-13, while Grizzly got tagged with an R even though it is nowhere near as gory. Such is the influence that Spielberg wields. Also: Girdler wasn’t around to fight for a break – in 1978 he’d been tragically killed in a helicopter accident in the Philippines, just after completing The Manitou.

As has been oft noted, revisiting films as an adult that scared the pants off of you as a kid can result in heartbreak. Time can be rather unkind and the zippers to the monster suit are more readily spotted. And casting can bring unexpected baggage too. Jacob’s Ladder (1990) is a great, and still chilling, reworking of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) but, seeing it again recently, there are some faces in there whose iconic power from later works sometimes undermines the intended mood. In the case of Jacob’s Ladder, you have: wartime horrors, demons, a seedy and dirty ‘70’s New York and… the “Home Alone kid” (Macaulay Culkin) and “George from Seinfeld” (Jason Alexander). That kind of casting can put a kink in the good ol’ suspension of disbelief many of us crave when watching a scary flick. Of course, there’s not much a director can do to keep an actor from going on to bigger and better things, short of maybe killing their careers.

Back to Grizzly: it did not suffer from distracting casting choices and my inner child was not disappointed. Sure, the adult in me could nitpick over the goofy soundtrack and inane dialogue, but there were no zippers; a real bear was used – eventually. And until that climactic appearance the “less-is-more” approach is utilized and it includes lots of bear-P.O.V. shots, swinging paws, flying body parts, and other forms of unruly commotion. Nobody is safe. Not even kids. And, yes, there’s a lot of blood. Girdler doesn’t skimp, which makes sense since he got his start doing drive-in horror fare such as Asylum for Satan (1975) and Three on a Meathook (1972). Mainly, though, I realized that what I really liked about it was the exterior shots. It had lots and lots of exterior shots of the mountains. (The film was shot in Georgia.) This, perversely, really made me want to go camping. Which is not to say the film no longer had power on my psyche, because I will admit that once I did find myself in the middle of nowhere and about a three hour hike to the car, I heard a twig snap and saw a patch of brown fur and, for a brief moment, I forgot that Colorado only has small, cute, cuddly black bears. In a panicked moment I asked myself if “Something is Out There” (to use the alternate title for Day of the Animals). And something was, indeed, out there; a peaceful and majestic moose.

My two month-old son is not yet sleeping through the night and I get up to give him a bottle at some point between 11:00 pm and 4:00 am. I’ve got it down to a science. When my wife and I turn in between 10:30 and 11:00, I leave a big pillow on the couch, my eyeglasses ready to be slipped on, the TV remote at hand and our cable box tuned to Turner Classic Movies, volume low. (I don’t mean to shamelessly plug my home station or anything, it’s just my go-to place, my first stop.) I like this time of night. It’s dark, quiet, calm. While my wife and daughter are safe and sleeping in their beds, Little Victor Smith and I man the night watch.

The other night we caught a little of Henry Hathaway’s Johnny Apollo (1940), with that gorgeous black-and-white photography by Arthur C. Miller, who later shot The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). From Frame One (where Power meets cabaret singer Dorothy Lamour outside the office of mob lawyer Charlie Grapewin) I was hooked. Vic drank his bottle dry and I went back to bed reluctantly – I wanted to see how it ended. (Don’t tell me!) Not so long ago TCM ran an evening of Val Lewton movies and we watched The Leopard Man (1943) from the cemetery murder to the end. It’s not considered one of the better Lewtons but I have a soft spot for it. When you’re half awake, those desert vistas have a mesmeric quality, as if you could walk right into them and feel the hot sand on your bare feet. You couldn’t ask for a better late night companion than Val Lewton.

Some nights I’m more tired than others and our entertainment passes in the fragmentary fashion of a dream. We caught some of Easy Rider (1969) like that last night… no narrative, just shots of American roadsides and an even trippier cemetery sequence near the end (“We’re all aglow!”). I’ve “seen” dozens of movies in this way recently and gotten up the next day with only the vaguest recollection of them, moments studded in my waking consciousness like burs picked up after a walk in the woods. I’m remembering back when I first started staying up late to watch movies, when I was 12 or 13. I saw all the classic Universal monster movies back then: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), all their sequels, The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935) and borderline horror stuff like Black Friday (1940), The Cat Creeps (1946) and The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934). I kept awake for most of these but occasionally I’d nod off and the veil between real life and reel life would split, making my dreams a two-way street in which I walked with those ghoulies and ghosties and haunted their castles and dungeons and badly landscaped graveyards. When I was a kid I imagined that movies played out differently after you’d fallen asleep… King Kong lived, Rick and Isla flew away together, and James Whitmore got out of the sewer alive. You can never see these versions… you just have to have faith that they exist while you sleep.

I wonder what Little Victor Smith will remember of these late nights bathed in that monochrome wash of classic cinema. Probably nothing… but maybe he’ll retain an image or two that will haunt him, like shadows on the wall that catch your eye and then are gone. Some day he'll understand the particular magic of cinema, that some moves you watch… and some movies watch you.

Besides Breaking Away (1979) and The Swimmer (1968), the other two features that I would want to program – if selected to be a guest of Robert Osborne on TCM – would also deal with disillusionment. One stars (swimmer) Burt Lancaster’s frequent co-star Kirk Douglas, also as a corporate executive, in a similarly unusual and introspective drama that lacked wide box office appeal, and the other features terrific performances by two lead actors that had previously earned Academy Award recognition: Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn. Ironically, both of these selections received an award as the Best Foreign Film from the Cinema Writers Circle in Spain, a fact that I learned while doing research for this article.

The Arrangement (1969) is a somewhat overlong melodrama about a businessman’s mid-life crisis and, given the year that it was released, it was one of the first movies to deal with this subject, giving an insightful view of what has now become a rather cliche topic. Elia Kazan produced and directed this film, based on his own popular novel, which on some levels is not unlike Federico Fellini’s personal 8 ½. I admit that it’s a chore at times to slog through this one, but it does contain an element of truth if you’re patient enough to wait nearly two hours for it. Douglas plays a rainmaker advertising that appears to have everything going for him, including a beautiful loyal wife (played by Deborah Kerr) who tolerates his extramarital indiscretions. She’s especially tolerant of his relationship with Faye Dunaway’s character (not a lot different from Dunaway’s Best Actress Oscar winning role as William Holden’s muse-mistress in Network (1976)), even when she’d realized that it was more than just physical. But Eddie (Douglas) disrupts his seemingly perfect life when he attempts to commit suicide and then refuses to go back to work. This baffles his bosses, but his wife thinks that it’s because of Gwen (Dunaway); she’s right, but her assumption that her husband wants to be with his mistress instead of her is wrong. Gwen had helped Eddie to realize that he’d sold his soul to the devil for his multimillion dollar client, a tobacco company whose cigarette advertisements play constantly on every radio and television station, so his suicide attempt was more about self loathing than the demanding mistress he’d left more than a year earlier. Another of Eddie’s demons is a dysfunctional relationship with his father (Richard Boone), an immigrant and a self-made successful merchant that had wanted his son to assume the family business. The plot develops slowly and the story is told out of sequence at times, which is also a fundamental characteristic of my last choice:

Two for the Road (1967) is an insightful mature look at marriage told in a nonlinear way as a road picture (the couple is always traveling) by director-producer Stanley Donen that stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as the titled two. If you haven’t been married for a dozen or more years, you probably won’t appreciate how truthful this comedy romance drama is. The story of the couple is told as a series of vignettes, brilliantly edited together non-sequentially, to detail a twelve year relationship between the Finney and Hepburn characters. It includes their beginning (e.g. how they met & fell in love), their hilarious honeymoon road-trip across Europe with another married couple (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron, who plays Finney’s first love from his college days!) that overindulges their precocious six year old, their first two years of marital bliss, their child rearing years (he’s an overworked architect with a demanding boss that’s struggling to make a name for himself while she’s a near single mother), his successful career years which is a disillusioning time for both of them and, ultimately, their acceptance of one another – as “bitch” and “bastard” – which enables their reconciliation. Frederic Raphael (Darling (1965)) earned his second and last Academy Award nomination for his Original Story and Screenplay, Written Directly for the Screen. Note that nonlinear movie stories have been around for more than forty years and are not, as some would have you believe, a new phenomena.

Each of these two choices should be in the TCM library, though I’ve never seen the former on the channel before, and all four of my picks could be packaged together for a disillusionment theme night!

One more thing:

Happy (posthumous) Birthday to Marjorie Rambeau, no relation that I know of, a character actress that earned two (supporting) Academy Award nominations during her career (for Primrose Path (1940) and Torch Song (1953)), which began in silent films. I have to admit that I haven’t seen a lot of her movies; she did appear in Min and Bill (1930) with Marie Dressler (her Oscar winning role) and Wallace Beery. Rambeau played Bella Pringle, who learns Min’s secret and therefore must be silenced; she also appeared with Clark Gable in Hell Divers (1931) and as Mrs. Harlan in the hilarious My Man Godfrey-like screwball comedy Merrily We Live (1938).

Here are five more movie endings that refuse to give audiences the expected closure or satisfaction of the typical Hollywood feature. By some coincidence and not design, three are from 1968 – something was definitely “in the air” then or maybe it was the water.

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"I keep this job by doing it well." from Bury Me Dead

Who knows where I first saw Charles Lane… he was just always there, I always knew him. He was a part of my childhood, like the angry old man next door, the one who was always yelling at you to get off his lawn, the one whose lawn you went on because you wanted him to yell at you, because for a scrappy little guy Lane had a voice on him that boomed across the land like a summer camp public address system. I've lived most of my life wanting Charles Lane to yell at me.

As a working actor, Charles Lane made his living playing civil servants of every stripe – district attorneys, office managers, physicians, process servers, desk clerks, stage managers, news reporters, salesmen, pharmacists, train conductors, judges, sea captains, press agents, publishers, detectives, and then – once he’d been in the business long enough – a series of minutely nuanced, slightly different cranky old men. If you knew Lane was in a movie, you kept an eye out for him, as if waiting for a friend. We live ever more these days in an age that prizes celebrity at any price yet one of the simple pleasures with which we've lost touch is that of finding a familiar face in the crowd.

Charles Gerstle Levison was born in San Francisco on January 6, 1905 and was, until the time of his death last week, one of the few remaining survivors of the 1906 earthquake. His father’s association with the San Francisco Symphony sparked the young Charlie Levison’s interest in the arts. Though his professional career began in the insurance business, he spent his off-hours dabbling in local theatrical productions. Relocated to Los Angeles, Lane studied at the Pasadena Playhouse where he appeared in plays by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov. He made his uncredited film debut, still calling himself Levison, as a hotel desk clerk in the Vitaphone Corporation’s Smart Money, starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney in their only on-screen pairing. Officially Charles Lane from 1936 on, the whippet-thin, balding, beak-nosed and bespectacled actor plowed ahead through hundreds of films and TV appearances through an almost 70-year career. No, that’s not a typo – a 70-year career. Charles Lane was a rare Hollywood character actor who could make John Carradine look like a dilettante.

Take a gander at Lane’s IMDb page and marvel at the titles: 42^nd Street, Twentieth Century, Broadway Bill, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, In Old Chicago, Coconut Grove, Blondie, Miracles for Sale, You Can’t Take It With You, Golden Boy, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Cat and the Canary, Johnny Apollo, Edison the Man, I Wake Up Screaming, Ball of Fire, Tarzan’s New York Adventure, Pardon My Sarong, Arsenic and Old Lace, It’s a Wonderful Life, Bury Me Dead, Call Northside 777, State of the Union, Mighty Joe Young, The Sniper, I Can Get It For You Wholesale, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Music Man The Carpetbaggers, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Ugly Dachshund, The Wild, Wild West, Green Acres, The Gnome Mobile, The Aristocats, Sybil… the list does on and on. From the 1950s on, Lane devoted himself largely to television (I Love Lucy, Perry Mason, The Real McCoys, The Twilight Zone, Mr. Ed, Dennis the Menace, The Lucy Show, Get Smart, Petticoat Junction, Mork & Mindy, Lou Grant, Soap, St. Elsewhere) yet still popped up in the odd feature. How weird was it to see him among the cast of the out-of-left field horror movie Strange Behavior (aka Dead Kids, 1981), written by Bill Chicago Condon? For me… very weird. But I was happy to have him. Growing up, I had gotten used to having Charles Lane around and I missed him when he wasn't there.

Not only did Charles Lane work steadily for over six decades but he was lucky in love, too. He married Ruth Covell in 1931, the year of his Hollywood debut, and that union lasted until her death in 2002. Honored at a TVLand awards ceremony marking his 100^th birthday, Lane brought the house down announcing in as booming a voice as he could muster “I’m still available!” He lived out the remaining years of his life among people who loved him and appreciated his work. Charles Lane died in Brentwood, in the home he had shared with his wife of 71 years, on July 9^th, 2007. He was 102 years old. You Know the Face (2007), a documentary dedicated to his life-well-lived, is in postproduction.

The oldest have borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

After my trip down memory lane with aliens, robots soon popped into my mind.  Those of us who feel in love with movie extraterrestrials also became acquainted with loads of movie robots, from sublime to silly, but all hold a warm place in our hearts, I’m sure.  Though today’s movie robots and mechanized creatures are no doubt better made and slicker in CGI, give me a man in a silver suit anytime.

The granddaddy of my movie robot memories is Robby from Forbidden Planet, and I’m sure I’m not alone in my affection for this charming character.  Urbane, no-nonsense, helpful and nifty-looking, Robby is a true icon in the Robot Hall of Fame, the robot by which all other movie robots are measured.  Both Robby and the beloved robot from TV’s Lost in Space – real name B9 — were designed by veteran Hollywood Art Director Robert Kinoshita, and all robot lovers owe him big thanks for his visionary creations which have inhabited our dreams for decades.  (Robby and B9 appeared together on the small screen in an episode of Lost in Space.) (Also, I received a Robby the Robot toy for Christmas when I was probably four years old, as documented in home movies.  Wish I had that toy now!)  Forbidden Planet is airing Friday, July 13th at 6:15p eastern, btw.

For sublime and supremely silent robots, we can look to The Day The Earth Stood Still’s Gort, a tall and stately presence patrolling the galaxy alongside Michael Rennie’s wise Klaatu.  Powerful and potentially deadly, Gort walked softly and carried a really big stick, in the form of a deadly ray that shot from his upraised visor.  Just don’t get him mad, and don’t muck up the galaxy, whatever you do, and you’ll be okay around Gort.

As a kid, I was traumatized and fascinated by the blocky but brutally effective giant robots patrolling the deserted streets of mid-1950s Los Angeles in Target Earth.  Maybe it was because I grew up fifteen or so miles away from downtown L.A., but the movie seemed pretty realistic to me and it’s a wonderful example of what we should call Robot Noir.  The robots are filmed as moodily as any sardonic gumshoe, or rather the suggestion of robots.  I recall you mostly see the shadows as they roll through the concrete jungle, but it’s enough to make you lock your doors and duck down, lest they spot you, too.  The multi-armed Dalek-like robot from Gog also impressed and creeped me out, too.

In terms of grandeur, the tall and stately Colossus of New York rules.  Created when a brilliant scientist was killed and his brain inserted into a robot, the Colossus is tortured and horrified by his very existence, and takes it out on the United Nations.  Outfitted like a gigantic metallic Hamlet, in the best scene he trudges across the bottom of the Hudson river to seek his revenge, his robes flowing behind him in the murky water.  Another great feature of this unusual and dare I say haunting film is the weird solo piano musical score, insanely melodramatic and yet absolutely perfect for this unsettling movie.  I love it. 

There are so many other robots, of course, but these are some of the ones whose images have stuck with me.  Obviously the ones we see as children have incredible lasting impact far beyond their technical merits, but one Gort is surely worth a million computer generated mechanicals from the recent I, Robot, I’m sure you’ll agree.