[Slapsticon, the greatest film event of the year, has been canceled this year.  To grieve it, I am devoting the entire month of July to posts about slapstick comedy.]

I love Thelma Todd.

A lot of others do too. There’s quite a cult built up around this lady–being a luscious blonde who died young under mysterious circumstances will tend to do that. But even if none of that salacious stuff were true, she’d be a compelling figure for the simple reason that she is funny. There’s a lot of discussion today about the rise of female comedians, and the extent to which a woman can be funny while also being traditionally beautiful and feminine. It’s nice to remember this is not a recent debate, and that generations before Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Anna Farris, or Kristen Wiig, there were women like Thelma Todd proudly standing up next to Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Charley Chase, and Groucho Marx (to name a few of the male comedians she upstaged).

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Few horror movies scream summer quite like FROGS (1972). Released in the spring of 1972, the film was poised midway between Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-revenge-of-nature thriller THE BIRDS (1963) and JAWS (1975) but took its direct inspiration from WILLARD (1971), in which rats wrecked havoc at the behest of a societal malcontent. WILLARD beget its own sequel, BEN (1972), and the snakes-on-the-loose flick STANLEY (1972), in which snakes wrecked havoc at the behest of a societal malcontent. That same year, domesticated chimpanzees and gorillas took back the night in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and before long mankind had to watch its back around insurgents of all stripes and spots, from more snakes in SNAKES (1974) to big rabbits in NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1974) to teeny tiny ants in PHASE IV (1974) to dogs in DOGS (1976) and creepy crawlies in KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977) and hookworms in SQUIRM (1976), the odd oversized GRIZZLY (1976) and assorted PIRANHA (1978) before the bargain package of DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1978) left us deeply unsure of whom to trust… pet-wise. Although the revenge-of-nature film limped on for a few more years, the success of HALLOWEEN (1978) put the slaughter onus back onto the bipedal. With societal malcontents content to do their own slashing through the 1980s, an appreciable something was lost to the horror genre… namely horror! READ MORE

Joan Crawford in TORCH SONG (1954)

Today marks the end of TCM’s annual look at “Race and Hollywood.” This year TCM has focused on Arab Images on Film, which has generated some heated debates on the TCM message boards. Fighting a war in the Middle East for the last 10 years has obviously had a profound impact in shaping the way that many perceive Arab Americans and this timely topic couldn’t be more pertinent. I’m always deeply appreciative of TCM’s efforts to expand the conversation about “Race in Hollywood” so I thought I’d share the outcome of a recent discussion about the topic that began on the social networking site, Twitter between myself and some TCM viewers.

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Occasionally, I hear people (very foolish people indeed) complain that a movie doesn’t have an ending.  Of course, this is nonsense.  Unless the film in question has an infinite running time, it has an ending.  When the credits are done and the lights go up, trust me, the movie is over.  Nevertheless, just a few short years ago, when No Country for Old Men (2007) was released, many of the same complaints were heard again, even if they were easily dismissed by anyone actually watching the movie with open eyes.   You can even find websites with “Movies with No Endings” lists (though I won’t link to such garbage here) that find such movies troubling.  In the end, literally, it’s a matter of how the viewer wants it to end, on the tonic, so to speak, but not every movie goes down that path.   Now, I’m not here to provide a list of every movie like that but there are three movies I saw several times growing up that defined the non-traditional ending for me, and if I ever get around to making a feature film, all three of these will play a definite role in how I end it.

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Rebecca Yancey (Kathryn Grayson) taps into popular sentiment with the modernist anti-landscape above. The second daughter of Cap’n Bob Yancey (Frank Morgan), longtime district attorney in Lynchburg, Virginia, Rebecca is trying to escape the role of a proper lady, with the suffragettes’ equal opportunity rhetoric ringing in her ears. Set in 1913, Frank Borzage’s The Vanishing Virginian (1941) is equal parts bittersweet nostalgia and progressive optimism. Just released on DVD from Warner Archive, along with Borzage’s follow-up, Seven Sweethearts (1942), it is a lovely bit of propagandistic Americana, released two months after the U.S.’s entry into WWII.

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During post-WWII Hollywood, film noir emerged to reflect, represent, and even romanticize the corruption, dissatisfaction, and cynicism lurking beneath the veneer of normalcy and optimism that America so desperately clung to after a hard-fought war. A pessimistic genre that is dark in theme and visual design, film noir critiqued or challenged America’s social institutions—law and order, the justice system, marriage and family—in contrast to most genres, which support or propagate them. But, the world of film noir is a man’s world; the male protagonist investigates crime outside the home, through the dark streets, and into the seedy clubs and businesses of the city. His prowess as a man and his judgment as a detective are challenged as the genre plays with traditional gender roles and reveals an unstoppable social and political decay; in other words, if the corruption doesn’t get the ill-fated protagonist, the femme fatale will.

With its similar visual style, casts of twisted individuals, and perverted male-female relationships, postwar melodrama is a kind of doppelganger genre to film noir. The primary differences are in the settings and in the gender of the protagonists. I had never really compared the two genres until my friend Lisa Wright and I took a class this summer titled “Home Noir: Domestic Melodramas of the 1940s.” The class was part of Facets Film School, which offers a variety of six-week film courses on specific topics, and it was taught by film scholar Therese Grisham. Therese was terrific at offering just the right amount of lecture to stimulate the class’s powers of observation and interpretation, so the discussions after the movies were lively, spirited conversations. As Lisa noted, “. . .we live in a time where we are used to seeing films mostly alone or with a friend or spouse. Getting so many interesting and diverging opinions about what we saw enhanced the enjoyment.”

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There are certain movie titles that make you pause and consider the mystery, allure or absurdity of their meaning. They can promise so much and deliver so little like BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966) or SHE GODS OF TIGER REEF (1958). Or they can overdeliver on their promise to an astonished but grateful audience as in Russ Meyer’s infamous FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! They can also mislead and confound you with wording so vague or fanciful that you have no earthly idea what it’s about as in LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966), THE DAY THE FISH CAME OUT (1967) or ALL THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS (1960), which inspired the name of the Brit pop trio that had a hit with “She Drives Me Crazy.” Then there are those completely frank and unambiguous titles that reveal the pure essence of the film in a no-nonsense manner – TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE (1959). Or titles that are so much fun to say that you simply love saying them out loud just to hear the sound of them rolling off your tongue like RAT PFINK A BOO BOO (1966) or PUDDIN’ HEAD (1941).

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[Slapsticon, the greatest film event of the year, has been canceled this year.  To grieve it, I am devoting the entire month of July to posts about slapstick comedy.]

A Woman of Paris. Not a title that stirs your soul, is it? Maybe you’ve never even heard of it. Or you’ve heard of it but just never cared. Or like me you cared but still avoided it because you thought it was the movie equivalent of spinach–something good for you, but not fun.

Well, I’m here to testify. Brothers and sisters, I was once like you, but then I saw the light.

And I’m here to tell you, you need to put this movie high on your to-watch list. And I’m gonna tell you why.

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It’s summertime, and the perfect opportunity to pull out some photo albums — no groans, please — and take a look at Hollywood behind-the-scenes from my stash of old news photos.  It’s a nutty mixed bag, but that goes along with these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, right?

Here’s Jimmy “Schnozzola” Durante and the highly respected actress Ethel Barrymore together, with Jimmy supplying the hilarious ham.  They had appeared together in radio and on TV, on Durante’s show, even recorded together, and this photo shows their unlikely but delightful collaboration.

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