We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
She was indeed.
I am of an age that my first introduction to Jane Russell was during her stint as a foundation undergarment spokesperson "for us full-figured gals," as she put it. I was a little too young to understand what part of her figure she was referring to. Later I figured it out. Hubba hubba.
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
"They held up The Outlaw for five years," she said later. "And Howard Hughes had me doing publicity for it every day, five days a week for five years."
Russell didn't appear in another film until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
I know everybody remembers Marilyn Monroe's signature performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," but personally, give me Jane Russell.
Voting begins this morning in the March Madness tournament over at All Good Things. 64 of the best actresses in movie history paired off in single-elimination competition. Today is the Silent/1930s Era bracket with some tough first round action—Jean Harlow versus Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard versus Ginger Rogers, and number one seed Greta Garbo against Norma Desmond herself, Gloria Swanson.
Get on over there and vote. It's fun, it's free and it lasts all month.
We've all heard of the Monkey's uncle—surprised people have been claiming to be him since before I was born—but today it's the Monkey's nephew I'm interested in.
Which one, you might ask—at last count, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I have eight of them between us. But while each of them is "special" in his own way, it's the son of my older brother I have in mind. I've mentioned my older brother before in various contexts—traveling salesman, Auburn resident, Burns and Allen fan—and while these are all valid ways to define him, in the circles I run in the fact that my brother saw the Beatles play live on his 19th birthday makes him The Man, and even if I were to win the Pulitzer Prize for movie blogging, he's still going to be The Man.
That's him there on the left:
Distinguished, ain't he.
Anyway, he has two children. His daughter, Plain Chicken, has a blog of her own, devoted to cats and recipes (though as far as I know, no cats in recipes) (check it out). His son makes his living in the movie business, primarily as a grip or rigging electrician. He's worked on a variety of movies—Zombieland, We Are Marshall, several Tyler Perry comedies—as well as television (e.g. The Walking Dead and Good Eats).
How about that.
I happen to be thinking about him because one his latest efforts opens today, the Farrelly Brothers' Hall Pass. Is it any good? I don't know. Roger Ebert gives it 2 1/2 stars, Entertainment Weekly predicts a number one spot at the box office. We'll see.
Anyway, it seemed to me that if I can write about the likes of Zeppo Marx, I can give my nephew a plug on opening weekend.
Postscript:Oh, I should also mention that the Monkey's nephew is quite a talented photographer. Check out his work here.
"You have to go back to Lancelot Link's piano player to find anyone this ineffective at a keyboard."
He was referring specifically to a reporter for the New York Times but he could have been talking about me. I'm 171 movies and 4000 words into this essay about the film years 1906-1914, but I'm not any closer to being done than I was a week ago. I think what I'm going to do is throw in the towel and publish my notes bullet-fashion, the way I did for an unfinished essay about innovations in the use of sound back in 2009.
It's either that or stop blogging for the next six months. I don't see any other way.
In the meantime, does anyone else remember the Saturday morning kids show Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp? It was a live action show about a chimpanzee spy named Lancelot Link. He worked for the Agency to Prevent Evil ("APE"), had a girlfriend named Mata Hairy, and battled a parade of villains including Dr. Strangemind, Baron von Butcher, and other henchmen of CHUMP.
Here's a clip of their band, The Evolution Revolution:
Bonus Trivia: Lancelot Link was played by the same chimp who played the Bloop on television's Lost In Space.
Faithful reader Erik Beck (of the Boston Becks) has demanded a poll on the question of the best drama of 1932-33 and we here at the Monkey aim to please. I promise the results of the poll will be binding on my choice of best picture in the category of a drama, providing of course that the results jibe with the essay I'm already writing. Otherwise, we'll just call it another frustrating exercise in democracy, what in America is known as an "election."
I'm working on a new project for the blog and have been very distracted lately. As soon as I post the essay on the best drama of 1932-33 and then a brief recap of the year's Katie Award winners, I plan to spend the rest of 2010 writing capsule summaries of each movie year from 1915 to 1927, retroactively awarding Katies to the best movies and performances of the silent era, the "Silent Oscars," if you will.
Which means fans of Harold Lloyd, Theda Bara and Musidora should be very happy.
Then because I like this drama-comedy split I've been using for 1932-33 so much, I'm going to fill in those years I've already covered (1927-1932) with my picks in the categories of drama, comedy-musical and foreign language—e.g., it looks like Luis Buñuel will finally pick up a long overdue award. (Don't worry, it'll make more sense when you see it in action. Or not.)
Finally, I've been out of town a lot lately and have been playing catch-up, blog-wise. If you've recently become a follower of the Mythical Monkey and for some reason I'm not following your blog, drop me a line in the comment section and let me know. I enjoy following the blogs of those following me, whether you write about movies, fashion, music or the rain in Spain that stays mainly in the plain, and I don't want to miss out on the action.
I'm back from my long, long road trip with my brother and three nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie, or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly), and as expected, I didn't do any work on the blog. I know most people these days remain in constant contact with i-phones this and i-pads that, but not the Monkey—when I travel, I travel like Christopher Columbus, that is to say, alone, out of the reach of civilization, ready to sail blindly off the edge of the earth into the celestial abyss.
It's the only way to fly.
But I'm back now and I don't anticipate any more interruptions, at least not for the rest of 2010. With any luck, I can respond to some of the comments you fine, fine folks left while I was gone and after that, I'll post my essay on the best comedy/musical of 1932-33.
Faithful reader hanner_da_nanner of Hanner's Blog Mmkay has tagged me with the latest internet meme called "Tag You're It." The rules are simple: I answer eight questions she asks, come up with eight questions of my own, and tag eight more people. I was going to leave it until after I posted my essay about Paul Muni, but then I started thinking about it, which, of course, is always a mistake.
As the man said, "Don't think, you'll only hurt the ballclub."
Her questions and my answers:
1-Who was your mentor growing up? What about now? I can't say I've ever had an Obi-Wan-Kenobi style mentor, but I've learned an awful lot from people with names like Katie-Bar-The-Door, Mister Muleboy, Bellotoot, Susan, my brothers Tom and Steve, but first and foremost Robert Osborne. 2-If you had a shopping spree at one store, which store would it be? My very favorite store, Amazon.com.
3-If you could own any pet, what would you have, and what would you name it? Why, this little doggie right here ... 4-If you could start any business, what would you start? Monkey Business, of course.
5-Dream vacation spot? Anywhere Katie-Bar-The-Door is. 6-If you started a charity, what would it be for? I'd like to give essays about movies to all the little children of the world. Or food. Food would also be good.
7-What's on your Christmas list this year? After eight straight Christmases on the road, spending Christmas at home. Everything else is icing on the sugar cookies.
8-What are/would you be for Halloween? Rich. And my eight questions: 1) You're walking down the street when a talking penguin asks you for a movie recommendation. Assuming you're wearing your favorite shoes, which pair are you wearing?
2) If you had to live one day from your life over and over again, which musical instrument would you learn how to play? 3) This one courtesy of Eddie Izzard: Cake or death? [see it below]
4) Which is your favorite railroad in a game of Monopoly?
5) Tapas in Barcelona or moules et frites in Paris? 6) If you were nougat, would you want to be covered in milk-, dark- or white-chocolate?
7) If you could be any character from a movie, who would be your co-star? 8) You're coming to bat in a major league game for the first time—what's your theme song?
I don't think I'm allowed to tag hanner back again, so I'm picking the last eight bloggers not named hanner_da_nanner who left comments on my blog. That'll teach you.
Now that you've slogged through all 12,000 words I wrote about the Marx Brothers, I'm sure the first question that leaps to your mind is "Why, Mr. Monkey, why? Why would you write a novella about the Marx Brothers and not about, say, Charlie Chaplin or Jean Harlow?"
To which I would reply, "I did write a novella about Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow. See? Look here and here." But I wrote even more about the Marx Brothers—more about them than about anybody else so far—so it's a fair question.
To give you a fair answer, we have to go back a ways, back to my salad days when I was a young lawyer looking for a job and not finding one. I was a good lawyer, or had the potential to be—top quarter of my class, an editor on the law review, a clerkship for the chief justice of a state supreme court. But in the law, it's not what you know, or even who you know, but how much business you can bring into the firm—they're not subtle about asking the question—and the answer in my case, a poor boy who put himself through law school, was "none at all."
While I was clerking for the judge, I spent months looking for a permanent job in my hometown to no avail and then decided to aim higher—Washington, D.C. I sent out 204 (!) resumes, worked the phones, set up a sackful of interviews and flew to the nation's capital to pound the pavement for ten days, determined to come back with a job or else. It was all very old school, Horatio Alger stuff and you couldn't do it now, I don't think, with all the automated internet-driven application processes everybody seems to use these days.
And I interviewed, lots of interviews, but the one I remember is the last one on the afternoon before I flew home, an interview with a guy we here at the Monkey refer to as "Bellotoot." It was so last minute, with him tracking me down through the judge's secretary back home, that when I stepped into his office, I literally had no idea who he was or what he did—by such aimless applications of the Puritan work ethic are law offices and totalitarian regimes staffed—but you know, I needed a job and what the hell.
If you've ever been lucky enough to meet him, you know Bellotoot is a wonderful guy, with one of those rare grins that makes you happy just being in the same room with it. More to the point, he's also a movie fanatic who knows more about them than I ever will, and while he's talking about them, he does marvelous imitations, among them Don Rickles, Jimmy Stewart, Groucho and Chico Marx, and on and on. His "Curly Howard reads the works of Henry Miller" will put you in the floor.
None of which I knew when I sat down to talk to him, and he didn't know me, and for the first five minutes we talked about the sort of things you talk about in an interview. But as I was talking to him, I couldn't take my eyes off a makeshift nameplate sitting on the corner of his desk. "Rufus T. Firefly," it read, and even though I was desperate for a job, I couldn't think about anything else and finally I had to interrupt:
"I can't help but notice—Rufus T. Firefly. That's Groucho Marx in Duck Soup."
Bellotoot's eyebrows went up and that grin split his face. "You know, you're the first person ever to walk in here and know who Rufus T. Firefly is." And for the next forty minutes we talked about nothing but the Marx Brothers. We never did get back to talking about the job. And on the following Monday, he called me and made me an offer.
The rest is history. I moved to Washington, looked up a woman I knew from college—you know her as Katie-Bar-The-Door—we started dating and got married two years later. Bellotoot and I, of course, are still great friends, and he introduced me to the guy who actually made the Rufus T. Firefly nameplate for him, Mister Muleboy of The Mouth O' The Mule, the guy who a year ago buffaloed me into starting this blog. I wrote a couple of novels (unpublished, so don't ask), lived overseas, litigated million dollar cases in federal court, met or renewed friendships with all the other people I hang out with.
Et cetera et cetera et cetera. None of which would have happened without my obsession with Duck Soup and the Marx Brothers. And that's why I wrote 12,000 words about them.
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are back from the Land of Lincoln where we spent four days in Chicago, followed by a weekend in Springfield, visiting friends, museums, eateries, Wrigley, etc. I didn't announce the trip ahead of time—seems like an invitation to come rob stately Monkey Manor—but we're back and I'll be back to the serious business of blogging tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'll kick things off with a series of posts in honor of Thingy at Pondering Life who wants "manly cheesecake" on her dessert menu. I assume she's thinking more along the lines of Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery and the like, and she's going to get all of those and more, but I'll start her off with a photo of one of the greatest of Americans, Abraham Lincoln, known affectionately in these parts as "Lucky Linky."
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are back home at last after a long road trip that included a little excursion down to Nashville for our niece's wedding. I'm sure most bloggers wouldn't let a little thing like the lack of an internet connection stop them from blogging, but I'm not that technologically savvy, and besides, it's not that easy to write brilliant essays while consuming vast quantities of champagne.
But now that I'm back here at Monkey Manor, I've taken a moment to do a bit of blog housekeeping. I've created a stand-alone page with the complete list of Katie-Bar-The-Door Award nominees, with pictures and highlighted links to my essays about the winners. Hopefully, this will make it a bit easier to find out who won and lost without having to wade through a year and half of this jibber jabber.
I should be back to the hard work of blogging tomorrow or Friday with part five of my nine thousand part essay about the Marx Brothers.
Something I stumbled across on YouTube—it includes the famous last exchange between Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler. A minute and a half appetizer. The main course can be purchased here.
The final part of my essay on Jean Harlow should be up by tomorrow at the latest.
A Mythical Monkey and his niece Plain Chicken, that is.
In case you haven't checked out her blog, she writes about recipes—and quite well, too. Plain Chicken is one of the few bloggers I've ever heard of who actually makes money at it.
Not to mention she's a hoot when you get a couple of drinks in her.
I wish I could say the occasion that allowed us to hang out together this past weekend was a happy one. But in fact, my mother passed away recently after a long illness and we were in Nashville for the service.
As you no doubt know, I don't write about personal matters except to the extent that my insights into movies are colored by my own experiences. It's not that kind of blog. But in this case, I think I would be remiss not to mention my mother's passing, given the influence she (and my father, who passed away when I was a lad of eighteen) had on my movie-watching habits.
Obsessions start somewhere and my obsession with movies started in childhood. Both of my parents believed that a person can't be considered really literate unless they know something about the landmark movies that helped shaped our culture—not to mention they thought movies were fun. My mother especially was a devotee of classic movies from the 1930s and 1940s, and it was she, for example, who introduced me to both Cary Grant (with His Girl Friday) and the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business).
Not to mention she was also the only woman I've ever known who unabashedly adored the Three Stooges.
I should be back to the business of movie blogging in a day or two, first with a post commenting on the results of the latest Monkey Poll, and then with the long overdue essay about the best actress of 1932-33 (comedy/musical).
In the meantime, enjoy this free and legal copy of His Girl Friday. This future Katie award winner comes to us with limited commercial interruption courtesy of Hulu.com.
The Monkey will be busy with family matters for the rest of the week. Rather than rush the essay on the best actress of 1932-33 (comedy/musical), I'm declaring a brief hiatus from blogging. But fret not. I should be back with another indigestible three thousand word nugget on Monday.
In the meantime, I leave you with the last big screen appearance of the great Douglas Fairbanks, the 1934 comedy The Private Life Of Don Juan. Directed by Alexander Korda and co-starring Merle Oberon, it's the story of an aging legend not quite sure how to fill the hours now that he's retired.
To the untrained eye, half of what the Mule says is gibberish (and the other half is nonsense), but to those with a discerning eye, The Mouth O' The Mule is nothing less than the finest performance blog around. By trade an actor, musician and, God help him, lawyer, the Mule plays a variety of character roles to explore the fractured world around him and communicate his findings to the rest of us. Like watching a drunken Abe Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address in pink polka dot boxer shorts, the result is by turns amusing, contentious, pedantic, bawdy, reflective, occasionally nauseating, but always thought-provoking.
Until yesterday, June 8th was known nationally as "The Monkey's Birthday," but after yesterday it will forever be known as "Strasmus"—and a happy Strasmus it was.
For those of you unfamiliar with such things, Strasmus was the major league debut of much-ballyhooed Washington Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg. For those us who sat in near-empty stadiums watching back-to-back 100+ loss seasons while stumblebums I'm too polite to mention by name made you despair of ever seeing professional baseball in the nation's capital again, Strasmus was the first day of Spring after five years of nuclear winter.
"Anything different would be good," said Phil Connor after reliving three thousand consecutive Groundhog Days. And different it was. Fourteen strikeouts in seven innings, including the last seven batters in a row, no walks, and a 5-2 win. Bang zoom go the fireworks, a curly W is in the books!
That Strasburg not only lived up to the hype but exceeded it is regarded in these parts as nothing short of the Second Coming.
We'll soon be returning to the blessed business of writing about movie history, but we here at the Monkey wanted to take a moment to celebrate the truly important things in life. Amen.
I am working on the essay for best picture of 1931-32. Eight hundred words and I've only just cleared my throat—wait until I really get going!
Been busy lately. Not only was Monday opening day, with Katie-Bar-The-Door and I joining Mister Muleboy, The Amazing Ms. M, Bellotoot and Yodel Heidi to take in the ongoing disaster that is the Washington Nationals, but I've been preparing for the next go-round of Katie Award nominations. 1932-33 wasn't just the single longest award season ever covered by an Oscar ceremony—encompassing all movies released during a seventeen month period running from August 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933, as the Academy prepared to abandon its nutty split-year scheme—it was also one of the richest periods in movie history, with classics such as King Kong, Duck Soup, Trouble in Paradise and Dinner at Eight leading the way.
I've watched no fewer than fifty movies in the process of coming up with a list of nominees, which is great fun but takes time away from writing. Hopefully you'll agree with my choices—or more to the point, you'll know where to look to find your own choices.
In the meantime, here's a picture of Jean Harlow and Clark Gable from the classic adventure-romance, Red Dust.
We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
