Please Note: In Tribute to Jackie Cooper, on Friday, May 13th TCM will broadcast nine of the actor’s films, which are listed here.

Jackie Cooper, who was an Oscar nominee for Best Actor in a Leading Role when he was only nine,  died on May 3rd at the age of 88. His shy smile, seemingly artless candor, and innate ability to suggest an overwhelmed child’s desire to make everything all right in the world continues to make those who stumble on his films smile in recognition.

If your most vivid mental image of Jackie Cooper is still as one of the ragamuffins in Hal Roach’s The Little Rascals, or the boy pleading with The Champ (1931-King Vidor) to rise again, or the privileged child befriending a kid from Shantytown in his Oscar-nominated performance in Skippy (1931-Norman Taurog), that’s understandable. Despite the fact that his early performances are eight decades in the past, his wonderfully natural portrayal of boys on film are still painfully fresh and have an evergreen realism at their core. In the darkest years of the Great Depression audiences felt a connection to that innocent, lion-hearted kid on screen whose life wasn’t going any more smoothly than their own. I like Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Freddie Bartholomew very much. I’ve been astounded by Mickey Rooney’s seemingly boundless talent. Yet to me, Jackie Cooper was one of most natural child actors, even though he had a different, understandably complex perspective on his own work. “I wasn’t great,” he claimed. “The directors were great. I was just a kid who did what he was told. And what I wasn’t told to do was done for me.”

His son, Russell Cooper, commented that his father “was a fascinating guy who really did everything, from all different aspects of the business. You can’t really say that about many people.” Looking back at Cooper‘s long life, when he acted in over a hundred movies, plays and television shows, and directed and produced over 250 TV projects, it seems that he may have done everything but sweep up the stage–and, as an apparently down-to-earth person–he probably did that at least a few times.

Much of Cooper‘s acting has a similar, recognizable quality, as he personified a kind of ragged moxie laced with a guileless intensity. Even when the stories were schmaltzy, he was not. As he grew up, and seemed likely to succumb to the neglect and adulation that early fame often breeds, he eventually approached his later problems with a similar ingenuousness as he struggled to become an adult in real ways. As he later pointed out about his childhood career, “I was trained to be a professional, not to be a person.”

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This year’s summer movie season was inaugurated by the gentle guttural drawl of Vin Diesel in Fast Five, the latest iteration of the jokey car fetishist franchise. Listening to Diesel’s lazy growl battle The Rock’s aggressive, crystalline enunciation offers more diversionary pleasures than most Hollywood money-grabbers. But the most fun I’ve had this year is watching a minor hit from the summer of 1939, the movie serial Daredevils of the Red Circle, which I picked up a $.99 VHS copy of on Amazon. The history of the summer blockbuster is usually traced to Jaws and Star Wars – in which Steven Spielberg and George Lucas filmed B-movie scenarios with A-level budgets and cemented the studios’ preference for the holy teen demographic. Lucas has previously stated that the Flash Gordon serial was one of the influences on Star Wars, and both men further indulged their serial fantasies with the Indiana Jones franchise. While  Spielberg and Lucas continue their attempts to recapture their sense of childhood wonder, always undercut by a winking self-consciousness, the originals are still around, providing unpretentious pleasures their wildly successful descendents have never quite been able to match.

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“My name is Victoria Winters. My journey is just beginning. A journey that I am hoping will somehow begin to reveal the mysteries of my past. It is a journey that will bring me to a strange and dark place. . . to a house high atop a stormy cliff at the edge of the sea. . .to a house called Collinwood.”

So began the first episode of Dark Shadows, a gothic soap opera with supernatural plotlines that ran from 1966 through 1971. I remember racing home from school each day to catch the show at 4:00pm, sandwiched between the traditional soap opera General Hospital and Dick Clark’s daily rock ‘n’ roll show, Where the Action Is.  Viewers of my generation will be setting their Tivo and home-recording devices for this Wednesday, May 11, at 3:00am EST, because TCM is airing House of Dark Shadows, the feature film based on the soap’s most popular character, vampire Barnabas Collins.

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Today is the second Sunday in May. Mother’s Day. As I’ve had the Sunday shift for several years now I’ve already been able to write on the ways my mom contributed to my passion for cinema during my early years. (For further Mother’s Day homages look no further than R.H. Smith’s recent post.) Mother’s Day is also an important date for gardeners in my midwest region because it marks the official start of when you can finally plant various seeds without having to worry too much about a vicious cold snap freezing the seedlings dead. With that in mind, I’ve decided to plant a few seeds of my own that chronicle the Modern Movie-Going Punishments of our day. I do this with the hope that it might help nip bad behavior in the bud, allow more pleasant movie-going experiences to flourish and, in general, make a trip to the movies less punishing. (Tip of the hat to my friend John Adams for providing the accompanying illustrations.)

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One of the things that can be fun about watching remakes is the insight it gives into what constitutes directing.  Take two movies with essentially the same script, and the differences between them become more clearly the work of the different directors and actors interpreting that script.

Having said that, it’s pretty much impossible to evaluate the directorial style of Rudolph Maté from his work on 1948’s The Dark Past, because the film is a virtual clone of an earlier Columbia thriller, Charles Vidor’s Blind Alley (1939).  Maté’s choices = Vidor’s choices.  Where The Dark Past does differ, it differs by being a deracinated and miscast work of mimicry.  Which isn’t to say it lacks its own merits—The Dark Past has an interesting meta-irony that deserves some notice, and we’ll come to it in due course.

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With Mother’s Day fast approaching, I’ve been thinking about my own Mom lately and all the movies I made her watch with me over the years. We’ve always been a very visually-stimulated family. We have dozens of albums of photos and a ton of home movies (thought, curiously, we never crossed over into video). We’re always looking at something. I have very specific movie-related memories attached to all of my family members… sitting with my Dad and a copy of Clyde Jeavons and Michael Parkinson’s A Pictorial History of Westerns listening to his stories about seeing Buck Jones and Bob Steel movies as a kid, watching GEORGY GIRL (1966) and FATHER GOOSE (1964) with my sister Lisa (who subsequently became my ride to the local drive-ins, for peeks at everything from DIRTY HARRY to MANDINGO to DON’T OPEN THE WINDOW to DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY), tape recording TV broadcasts of DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936) and THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936) with my other sister Cheri (my regular companion at the movies for a few key years, with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK being the last we ever saw together) and the Sunday night movies I cajoled my Mom into watching with me long after we both should have gone to our respective beds. These experiences would end, invariably, with my Mom hoisting herself off the couch with a disgusted “You did it to me again!” And I’d laugh — Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

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Even though I wasn’t able to attend TCM’s Classic Film Festival I did make time for Terence Stamp’s special appearance at the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival this year. It was a somewhat spontaneous event that was only announced a week before the actual festival took place and it didn’t receive any mention in the official festival catalogue. I only learned about the event after word got out on the social media site Twitter that Stamp was going to be in the Bay Area to receive the prestigious Peter J. Owens Award as well as take part in a special Q & A Event and film screening at the Castro Theatre. Rearranging my schedule on such short notice wasn’t easy but I was determined to see one of my favorite actors discuss his work in person so I immediately made plans to attend.

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In a bit of home video serendipity, the films Fritz Lang made in Hollywood and Germany from 1956 – 1959 were all recently released on DVD. The Warner Archive put out re-mastered versions of his last two Hollywood films While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), while the UK Masters of Cinema label produced a luminous edition of his two-part Indian epic, The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and The Indian Tomb (1959). All four films snare their main characters in webs of malevolent fate. The first two pin their characters inside geometrically arranged compositions, granted the illusion of motion in a world constantly boxing them in. This is garishly illustrated in the Indian Epic, as seen above, with elaborate imagery of imprisonment emerging from the set design. They use strikingly different methods to pursue similar ideas of fate and desire, from threadbare pulp to embroidered imperialist myth.

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Fans of An American in Paris must be enjoying the musical’s high profile this year, which is its 60^th anniversary. Last Thursday, a restored version of the MGM musical opened this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, and for those of us not lucky enough to attend the fest, the movie aired on TCM on Saturday. Closer to home, I recently presented An American in Paris at a local Chicago arts organization. I have seen the film many times, but researching and preparing my remarks provoked new insights into an old favorite.

Much has been written about An American in Paris as one of MGM’s classic musicals from its famed Arthur Freed Unit. Freed, a lyricist turned movie producer, gave Hollywood its longest-running series of musical blockbusters. Freed had produced musicals during the 1930s, including several Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland vehicles, but those made by his so-called Unit were large-scale, Technicolor integrated musicals. They began in 1942 with Gene Kelly’s first film, For Me and My Gal, and ended in 1960 with Bells Are Ringing starring Judy Holliday. Arthur Freed’s Unit of stars, directors, and other crew members remained consistent over the decades and included directors Vincente Minnelli , Stanley Donen, Charles Walters, Busby Berkeley, and George Sidney; screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green; choreographers Robert Alton and the team of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly; stars Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, and Cyd Charisse; and musical associate Roger Edens.

THE SECOND TIME JERRY AND LISE SING "OUR LOVE IS HERE TO STAY," THEY ARE IN SYNC AND IN LOVE.

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