... AND THE BOTTLE, PLEASE

For many years, we've had a tradition at the Ol' Fish-Eye homestead. While we munch on my legendary, lovingly-prepared cheeseburgers, my wife and daughter critique the dresses, jewelry and make-up sported by the actresses on the red carpet leading up to the Academy Award broadcast. 

This is far more important than the awards themselves. For a while, whenever I informed my daughter that a particular awards show was airing, her first question was always, "Does it have a red carpet?" It tended to be spoken in the same breathless tones I would imagine Leon Panetta had when asking operatives if they were sure they located Osama bin-Laden watching porn videos in Pakistan. Not once, by the way, have we ever made it through an entire Oscar® ceremonies. I always want to shut it off at the two hour mark, but the girls always insist on keeping it on an extra 30 minutes. If we lived on the West Coast, where it begins at 5:30, we'd probably have no choice but to watch the whole damn thing, which makes living through Northeast winters worth it.

This year, though, is to be different. No, we're not going to watch the whole thing -- that would be a vesper horribilis. Rather, my daughter will be out with friends while my wife is away for the week. This will leave me in the peculiar position of making good on my annual pronouncement: "If it wasn't for you two, I wouldn't be watching this crap." Well, big boy, whaddaya got to say now?

If I do give in to my weaker self -- something I've been mighty good at for, oh, 58 years now -- I figured I might as well make it that much easier by playing my Oscar® Drinking Game. In fact, you might want to try it yourself. If history is any guide, you should be passed out by the time they get to best Special Effects. So drink a shot for the following:

During the pre-monologue segment, Ellen DeGeneres puts herself into a scene from Gravity. An extra shot if she's joined by an actor other than George Clooney. 


DeGeneres puts herself into a scene from Wolf of Wall Street -- specifically, getting hundred-dollar bills glued onto her. 

DeGeneres puts herself into the "I'm the captain now" scene from Captain Phillips.

DeGeneres puts her voice into a scene from Her.


Random jokes about the California drought, California floods, Alec Baldwin, the polar vortex, shutting down the government, Martin Scorsese, the hairstyles in American Hustle, Meryl Streep's 18 Oscar® nominations over the years, Obamacare and Arizona's "religious freedom" law vetoed by Gov. Brewer.

The orchestra plays "wacky" music during the Best Animated Short segment. 

Standing ovations for presenters Angelina Jolie, Sidney Poitier and Kim Novak.

Oscars® for documentaries about crippled kids and/or the Holocaust.

Inappropriate cutaways during the "In Memoriam" segment. Bette Midler is going to be on the show, so another shot if she sings "Wind Beneath My Wings" during this portion. And although the segment is supposed to be for those who died in 2013, extra shots if they pay tribute to Shirley Temple, Harold Ramis and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Two more shots if Hoffman's image appears last to the biggest applause of the evening.  

Lowly winners getting shooed off the stage after 30 seconds while the big guns (actor, actress, director) get all the time in the world to yammer.

Agents thanked before loved ones.

Standing ovations for any winner of 12 Years a Slave, which makes the white people in the audience feel good about themselves before they return to their gated communities that night, and to work the following morning at the studios run by white males.

(Post-Oscar update: Went to bed at 10:30. I called the jokes about rain in California, Streep and Scorcese; "Wind Beneath My Wings"; Phillip Seymour Hoffman; the lowly winners vs the big guns; agents thanked before loved ones; documentary category; and the standing ovations for 12 Years a Slave. Haven't read anything about a standing ovation for Sidney Poitier and Angelina Jolie, however, but it must have happened.)

 

 

***************

SNOWARD BOUND

I had no idea the school mascot
was a werewolf.

We spent last weekend looking over the University of Pittsburgh, one of the five schools my daughter has been accepted to so far. Yes, we're proud of our little girl. But the question that needs to be asked is, How do I make this story wholly about myself?

That's easy enough. While my mother-in-law winters in Florida, we have access to her car, allowing us to drive to The City With A Smile On Its Face (as Pittsburgh's old slogan put it) for free. I mean, free not including hotel, gas and meals. All I had to do to was take a bus to her apartment in Hackensack, the town memorialized in Steely Dan's "Katy Lied": Driving like a fool out to Hackensack/Drinking his dinner from a paper sack. It's also the birthplace of Debby "You Light Up My Life" Boone and the home of the Bergen County Jail. That's some kind of history, boy.

Now last week, the New York/New Jersey area had some rain and almost got kind of warm; the better, I hoped, to get rid of the snow that piled up in the parking lot where the car is kept. But even if the snow was cleared, there was the chance that sitting idle in the subfreezing weather for over a month might have made it impossible to turn on the ignition. However, being a member of the AAA -- just in case this kind of thing happened -- allows me to get a jump with just a free call. Unfortunately, my cell phone had disappeared sometime from when I woke up that morning to when I was walking out the door after lunch. Usually, all's it takes is a call from the landline to hear the familiar ringtone -- Edvard Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" -- drifting from, say, the inside of my bureau drawer or atop the refrigerator. Not now, however. You know how your parents would have said something like, "Well, it didn't get up and just walk away!" Well, apparently this time it did.

Where do Hackensack dumptrucks dump snow?
In the middle of Main Street, where else?

So I got off the bus in Hackensack with even more trepidation than most people do. As I walked the several blocks to my mother-in-law's building, I couldn't help but notice that the accumulated snow on the lawns went past my knee. This is never a good sign when you need to move a car from a parking lot. My spirits briefly lifted when I walked onto the property and saw every space free of snow... except one. And I don't need to tell you whose. Not only was the space unshoveled, someone had plowed shin-deep snow in front of it. Thank you, sir, may I have some more?

By now, the temperature was around 50, so some melting was going on. But the snow and ice were so thick that I soon realized that just picking up the soot-covered muck and tossing it aside would take the lifetime of a fruit-fly -- which suddenly seemed awfully long. Tenants came and went with a cheery "Hello," as if it was perfectly normal to clear out filthy ice-snow with your hands. It took a guardian angel -- snow angel? -- of sorts to actually provide some help. The people who owned this particular building, she informed me, owned one down the street, where the plow guy hangs out. She was kind enough to give me a lift to the manager's office a few blocks away. 

I told the manager the story I just told you, and initially she didn't appear to care about it, either. Still, she gave a call to the snowplow guy, who unfortunately wasn't picking up. Nor was she able to provide anyone to shovel out the car because, well, that's the tenant's job. That I wasn't a tenant made no difference.

"Can I borrow a shovel?" I asked politely.
The manager sized me up. "Well..."
"What if I put down a deposit?"
"How much have you got?"
I fished out my wallet. Damn, I hadn't gone to the ATM yet! "Uh... how's $20?"
She studied the color of my money. "OK."

Something like this.

A few minutes later, I was shoveling a car out of a parking lot for the first time in my life. And as I did so, a thought came to me: Now I know why guys my age keel over from shoveling. This stuff was heavy. It took about 20 minutes but I finally got the job done without a hint of a coronary. Even better, the engine turned over immediately. (The wheels spun in place for a bit as I rocked back and forth, almost creating the unfortunate scenario of getting out of the icy patch unexpectedly and smashing into the apartment building.) Having noticed that non-tenants weren't allowed to park at the building where I got the shovel, I moved the car to a clear spot before walking to manager's office, retrieving my double sawbuck and walking back to the car. 

I had gotten more exercise that afternoon than the entire winter thus far. Damn, did I feel -- dare I say it -- manly. It actually felt good to shovel out the car, despite the possible fatal consequences. But by the time I returned for the car, the snowplow guy had finally shown up at the parking lot to further clear the space I had vacated, only to get stuck himself. "Get a shovel!" I didn't chortle at him, for he was half my age, twice my size and appeared to lack a sense of humor. He also looked at me as if thinking, Are you the idiot I got stuck for? Manly I might have been, but not stupid.

Yes, yes, that's all very well and good, I hear you saying, but what about your missing cell phone? That's easily explained. While I was in Hackensack, my wife called me... only to have the spooky tones of "The Hall of the Mountain King" drift from her purse. So yes, it did just get up and walk away.

                                                ***********************

RIOT IN THE STREETS

Yesterday's release of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, two members Pussy Riot, from a Sochi prison was considered a blow for freedom by American news executives.

"At last, we feel free to say the name 'Pussy Riot' instead of 'a controversial Russian punk band'," said NBC News president Deborah Turness. "It was a little embarrassing to see Mika Brzezinski turn fifty shades of red while Joe Scarborough and those other pigs on Morning Joe taunted her for censoring herself. Now she can say 'Pussy Riot' with the best of them, so she can now concentrate on more important matters, like bragging about her daughter getting accepted to Temple University and telling viewers not to consume the foods and drinks she herself can't enjoy."

Jeff Zucker, president of CNN News, was equally pleased. "For the longest time, only Anderson Cooper dared to say 'Pussy Riot', but that's because he isn't really a journalist. But the others, like Wolf Blitzer and Kate Bolduan, tried to keep up to the CNN standards of never taking chances. Do you know how many times we had to spell 'Pussy' with asterisks in those news ticker headlines at the bottom of the screen? And it took three weeks for our people to figure out it had five letters, not four. Live and learn!"

Meanwhile Geraldo Rivera promised to cram "Pussy Riot" in every news item. "I'm 70 years old with a weekend talk show on Fox News," he shrugged. "What the hell else can I do to get attention? Keep running 40-year old undercover footage of the Willowbrook mental hospital? I'm gonna ride Pussy Riot into the sunset," he admitted, before throwing a fist of solidarity in the air and shouting, "Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot!" Rivera smiled proudly. "They say sunshine is the best disinfectant, but give me Pussy Riot every time."

                                                    ***********************

EMBRACEABLE, BILLABLE YOU

I'm in the wrong business. That is to say, I've spent my life trying to make an honest buck when there are brain-addled citizens all around who are damn near begging to shovel piles of dough my way if I offer them a service they can get for free elsewhere. Last week, I saw a news report about therapists -- licensed or otherwise -- who give their clients hugs. 

That's it. Hugs. Not conversation or advice like your average shrink. Just... hugs. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who are in need of that kind of comfort which they can't get anywhere else, even if they're in relationships. The fee for these 90-minute hugathons is only $125.

What kindness. What thoughtfulness. What a racket.

Maybe if Dean & Jerry had
hugged like this a little more
often, they'd never have
broken up.

For 125 bucks, these aren't ordinary hugs. No sir, there are many poses, including one called the tandem bicycle. No chains are involved, much to my disappointment. But what they all have in common is that the hugger and huggee lie down on a couch or bed. It used to take me three dates at least for that kind of action, and these guys get it immediately. 

To the best of my knowledge, there's no Doctorate of Huggery, so these quacks can't claim they're charging for what they learned in grad school. No, they picked an outrageous number out of the air because they knew saps would think these hugs were the real deal. In fact, someone did a study that proved people would rather pay a stranger two dollars for a hug instead of getting one for free simply because it had to be better. If my wife finds out about this, I'm cooked.

I considered getting into this hugging business, but had no idea how to promote my talents. It's unlikely that anyone would respond to a photocopied ad reading THERAPEUTIC HUGS -- $125 -- YOUR PLACE OR MINE that's been taped to a streetlight pole. There's always the Yellow Pages, but it would probably wind up in the "Escorts" section. To further justify my fee, I'd have be a specialist. That is, specializing in women under the age of 35 and of runway-quality looks. Trust me, any objection from my wife would be nullified once I start cashing those checks.

Note the credit under the title. Imagine how much the
Beatles could have charged if they hadn't changed the
name to "Help!"

You see, I learned from that news report to practice by the professional huggers' credo: the moment any sexual tension is felt by either person, the session has to stop. As I think back to my single days, that was never a problem. In fact, girls  preferred we stop. Better yet, they thought it best to keep a safe distance from me, like across state lines. Now if I had charged them for a hug, brother, I'd have made out like a bandit and made their cold-fish boyfriends jealous, too.


Although both sexes are in the hugging business, the only clients I saw were women, which makes total sense. Women are forever in need of emotional reassurance, while if men need to hug anything, it's a cold beer. It's our dirty little secret that when women fall blissfully asleep on men's shoulders after they've done the deed, we count the minutes until we can gracefully slip our gradually-numbing arm out from underneath their heads. 

Now if the female therapists want to make a buck off us, they should seriously consider charging guys $125 for the thrill of watching two good-looking women hugging in bed for an hour and a half. They'd make a fortune without having to touch us.

                                                     ******************

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "VOICE IN THE WIND" (1944)

As they still are today, many independent movies of the past were far more interesting than their mainstream counterparts. Something akin to art could be made without the Cerberus-like studio president, publicist and bookkeeper fiercely barking at the director to hurry it up, make it commercial and account for every last penny. Something like Voice in the Wind, an ethereal drama bordering on noir. As the poster warns, it's "A STRANGE NEW KIND OF PICTURE!" And that's a compliment.

Guadalupe, 1940. A mysterious, amnesiac mute known only as El Hombre haunts the waterfront dives, his only means of communication being his beautiful musicianship on the piano. Brothers Angelo and Luigi are certain El Hombre has sunk their boat in which they falsely promised to transport refugees to the USA, only to rob and kill them at sea. (Nowadays, Royal Caribbean merely makes you throw up violently, then gives you a 50% refund. I'm not sure which is better.) While Angelo nonetheless still has a soft spot for El Hombre, Luigi promises to have his revenge.

We learn through flashbacks that El Hombre is really Jan Volny, a legendary classical pianist from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.  Volny puts himself in jeopardy when ending a recital with "The Moldau" by Bedrich Smetana, a Czech composer banned by the Nazis. Knowing he will pay for his "crime," Volny sends his wife, Marya, to Paris for her own safety. While being shipped to a concentration camp, Volny manages to escape and find his way to Guadalupe.

Unbeknownst to Volny, Marya, too, has escaped to Guadalupe with her parents. (Considering I couldn't find Guadalupe on a map, I find their travel smarts very impressive.) Now dying of pneumonia, Marya has heard her husband playing piano in a nearby bar, finding the strength to leave her bed just before she collapses in the street. Volny regains his memory upon recognizing her crucifix around as being similar to the one he's kept locked in a trunk. He's ready to return to her, only to be gunned down by a vengeful Luigi. Angelo, appalled, engages Luigi in a fight that leaves them both dead. Leaving a trail of blood behind him, Volny drags himself to Marya's deathbed where -- and stop me if you've heard this -- he, too dies. The end, brother, and then some.

Obviously, studio fare this was not, especially in wartime when escapism was all the rage. Writer/director Arthur Ripley's bleak outlook was encouraged during his collaborations with film comedian Harry Langdon in the '20s. Ripley immerses Voice in the Wind with darkness, metaphorically and otherwise. 

Other than the flashbacks, the entire movie takes place during one, fog-shrouded evening where even the interiors feel damp. A ghostly foghorn groans every few seconds for an hour of the film's 85-minute running time, while Volny's relentlessly mournful barroom performance of "The Moldau" provides not so much relief but a soundtrack for the gloomy proceedings unfolding. 

Yet this desolation pulls you in like a dream too fascinating to awaken from. It's no surprise that Harry Langdon's wife described Arthur Ripley as "morbid" while fellow-director Edgar Ulmer thought him mentally unsound. Frankly, I find these excellent recommendations for a filmmaker.

Being an independent production (released by United Artists when original distributor PRC considered the final cut a little too outré), Voice in the Wind in its current worn state is a little battered around the edges, the muffled soundtrack occasionally obscuring the heavy-on-the-pepperoni accents of Alexander Granache and J. Carrol Naish as Angelo and Luigi. But there's no mistaking Angelo's inner evil when he viciously slaps a hooker into unconsciousness while Angelo and younger brother Marco laugh appreciatively.

Further disturbing violence is provided by the cold yet effeminate Nazi Capt. von Neubach, beating the senses out of Volny for playing "forbidden" music. The actor, possessing the unlikely name of Howard Johnson, seems to be setting the stage for Christoph Waltz in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

But the movie is held together by Frances Lederer in what must have been an emotionally-draining role, Volny, the mentally-damaged mute who dies twice -- psychologically at the hands of a Nazi, then physically by a sociopath. (No coincidence both sets of killers are Axis representatives.) His is not an easy part, having to sustain a mood of melancholy without ever going overboard. Lederer acts throughout most of Voice in the Wind only with his eyes, a technique almost vanished following the coming of sound.

Called "dark and distressing" by Bosley Crowther in his original review for the New York Times, Voice in the Wind is utterly unlike other wartime dramas, demanding not only patience but a sensitivity rarely found in audiences then or now. It's a subtle, somber film whose moments of hope are as fleeting as, well, a voice in the wind. No doubt many found, and will continue to find, the film a curious evening's entertainment. 

Others might miss the point entirely, like the aforementioned Mr. Crowther, who sniffed that the producers could have "spent more money on lighting their sets. It might help matters slightly if you didn't have to strain your eyes to see what goes on." 

Some works of art demand more than just eyes to see "what goes on." If a movie could also be considered a tone poem, Voice in the Wind is it. 

 

********************* 

DEALING FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE DEKKERS

Thanks to a number of shocking news stories recently -- winter is cold and snowy, Jay Leno is leaving his job for the second time, the three branches of government are run by circus clowns slipping on their own banana peels -- an interview with Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, went unnoticed. Dekkers was talking about Nexavar, his company's drug to fight late-stage cancer of the liver and kidney, which costs patients $69,000 a year. 

Well, not really. Considering that Nexavar improves your life expectancy an average of six to eight months, your bill will be only about $40,000. That might not be a lot of dough to you, but it's a little out of reach in India, where the average annual salary is $1,682. (As you read this, Mitch McConnell is trying to figure out how the U.S. can swing that kind of salary for American workers.) However, as Think Progress reports:

Under Indian patent laws, if a product is not available locally at a reasonable cost, other companies may apply for licenses to reproduce those products at a more affordable price.[...] In 2012, Indian pharmaceutical company Natco Pharma Ltd. applied for just such a license, and it was granted. The company began reproducing the drug at a 97 percent discount, offering it for just $177. 

 

Good news, right? Not if you're the CEO of Bayer it isn't. Marijn Dekkers told Bloomberg Businessweek that such a move was "theft," adding, "We did not develop this medicine for Indians…we developed it for western patients who can afford it." 

Let's allow ourselves a moment to savor this rare candid statement. After so much blather from pharmaceutical titans who only want to "help people" by providing "the best product at the lowest cost," isn't it refreshing to get the real dope straight from the top dope? You cancer-ridden Indians can pound sand. We're going where the money is.

Look, it's not like Americans get all the good stuff anyway. Back in the '80s, Japanese music fans preferred records imported from the U.S. Japan's record industry fought back, ordering all domestically-pressed albums to include at least one song unavailable on the American editions. Imagine all those stateside Debbie Gibson fans missing out on that extra track and you'll understand their pain.

To be fair, Dekkers himself isn't riding all that high. His $8,000,000 salary is a far cry from the $96,000,000 Larry Ellison of Oracle pulls down. Now he can afford Nexavar. While we're talking money, Bayer's profits for 2012 amounted to $58-billion. Maybe they could afford to drop Nexavar's price if they could still manufacture heroin cough syrup like they did in the good old days. No messy needles for the kids to clean up!

Now lest you think all of us Americans are getting a better deal than the slum dwellers of New Delhi, re-read Dekker's quote. Nexavar is for "western patients who can afford it" (emphasis mine). Therefore, unless you have a really generous insurance company or are a CEO, chances are you, too, will go untreated if you wind up with late-stage liver or kidney cancer. So no need to feel guilty on that score. Heroin cough syrup, anyone?

                                                     **********************

MOVIES OF THE DAY: "WHAT! NO BEER?" (1933) AND "A SOLDIER'S PLAYTHING" (1930)

If anyone wants to see the outcome of genius denied, the notorious What! No Beer! provides the perfect tutorial. One of the top-drawer comedic actors in movies, Buster Keaton had forsaken independent production in 1928 to sign with MGM, believing that he would continue to make movies the way he always he had. Instead, he quickly found himself just another cog in a studio factory that had no understanding or appreciation of his style. Faster than you can say "Ars Gratia Artis," Keaton sank into morass of depression, divorce and drinking. And any Keaton fan watching his MGM features will ultimately do likewise. 

Having immersed myself in Keaton's silent movies in the early '70s, I was struck not only by his breathtaking physical comedy -- he once broke his neck without realizing it -- but his strangely-modern deadpan countenance. While optimistic contemporaries like Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were always ready with a smile, Keaton looked defeated even when triumphant. Watching his movies at a time when America was still reeling from Watergate and the Vietnam War, Keaton appeared to tap into a zeitgeist about 75 years before anyone knew what the hell that word meant.

Durante does MGM's bidding by finishing off
Keaton once and for all.

Once talkies arrived, MGM decided the best way to present Keaton was to put him into dialogue-heavy comedies. Make that "bad dialogue-heavy comedies." Because who would want to watch somebody just do stuff when they could hear him talk? Ultimately some studio genius got the bright idea of pairing him with MGM's other new hire, Jimmy Durante, for three movies, each worse than the one before it. Their final picture, What? No Beer?, was the bottle, as it were, that broke Keaton's back.


There's no point in recounting What! No Beer?'s story. Keaton and Durante play a couple of nitwits who become bootleggers during Prohibition's dying days -- that's all you need to know. What's sadly fascinating is how MGM deliberately placed Keaton in a situation that called for little of his comedic gifts, forcing him to simply feed lines to the bigmouthed Durante. Even worse, he plays straight to a trio of hobos-turned-brewers who play their scenes like a flashmob in a cemetery. (I wonder if their roles were originally intended for the Three Stooges, who were signed to MGM at the time.) It's like watching Edward Hopper having to paint generic billboards for Wonder Bread. It's nice he's getting a steady paycheck and all, but goddamn-mighty-damn it's a tragedy to watch.

While always a Durante fan, I nonetheless watched him more stonefaced than Keaton himself ever was. 

Run away, Buster, as fast as you can.

Playing against Keaton, he's the cinematic version of the schoolyard bully, completely overwhelming his helpless partner not with physical but verbal abuse. Only 37 but looking 50, the once-great Keaton is drunk -- I mean really drunk, not acting -- throughout What! No Beer?, slurring his words and and barely focusing his dark, haunted eyes. He gets a couple of chances at his physical comedy -- nobody can slide down a beer-slicked stairway like him -- but those moments only illuminate the sickening dismay that both we and Keaton find ourselves experiencing. It's the original version of Night of the Living Dead.

Gagman Keaton compares notes with the Marx
Brothers on how MGM destroyed their
careers.

To Keaton's horror, the worse his MGM movies got, the more money they made -- more, perhaps, than his good movies in the '20s. (Sometimes it isn't always a good thing to give the people what they want.) Shortly after What! No Beer?'s release, he was fired by MGM for insubordination, sending him spiraling into years of severe alcohol abuse. Ever wake up in Mexico with a woman you had no memory of marrying the previous day? Just another day in the life of Buster Keaton. In a typically vindictive move, MGM would later rehire him as an uncredited gagman at $100 a week. And while he lived another 33 years, What! No Beer? would be his final lead role in an American movie. Hooray for Hollywood, hunh?

A few years earlier, fellow movie comedian Harry Langdon found himself in a similar situation. Having come to movies from vaudeville far later than his contemporaries, he was soon compared favorably to Charles Chaplin. But after firing his writer/director Frank Capra -- a move which Capra never stopped bitching about until, and probably after, he died -- Langdon started to focus more on the dark, bizarre humor that fascinated him. (In Long Pants, Langdon, having fallen for a sexy temptress, spends the rest of the movie plotting to murder his fiance. It's a comedy.) By the end of 1928, he was for all intents and purposes washed-up. Langdon had been in movies for all of four years.

But in 1930, Warner Bros. cast him in a strong supporting role in the World War I comedy, A Soldier's Plaything. Nothing more than a loosely-connected series of comedic vignettes, the 59-minute feature is by no means a classic. A laid-back fan of early talkies might consider it "OK, nothing special" and leave it at that. However, compared to What! No Beer? (how sick are you of reading that title?), it's another Duck Soup. And it's due only to second-billed Harry Langdon.


Although their approach to comedy was different, Langdon and Keaton were similar in two key ways. Unlike the universally-beloved Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Langdon and Keaton even at their best -- especially at their best -- were acquired tastes. Too, their onscreen characters never seemed quite of this world; while Keaton was an unemotional cynic, Langdon was more like a confused seven year-old boy trapped in a grown-man's body. It's no surprise that Langdon and Keaton play better to contemporary audiences than they did to those in the 1920s.

Ben Lyon warns Harry Langdon
to stop stealing the movie from
underneath him.

A Soldier's Plaything allows Langdon to display both the childlike and bizarre sides of his personality. Unfortunately, so dependent is Langdon on his subtle reactions that describing his best scenes really doesn't do him justice. You need to see him mindlessly following orders as he marches through a window, into the general's office and smack into a wall. It's not enough to tell you that he tries wooing a beautiful French woman, only to discover that she's deaf. It's his impossible-to-describe stunned, babbling reaction, climaxed by hitting himself on the head with a bottle, that makes it laugh out loud hilarious and proof that he could have easily reignited his career in A's if given the right material, a sympathetic director and the chance to contribute to his role. 

Alas, like Keaton, Langdon was at the mercy of an industry that just didn't get him. Apart from the occasional supporting role in A-movies, he was relegated to low-budget B's and shorts, a far cry from the days when he was mentioned in the same breath as Chaplin and carried thousand-dollar bills in his wallet for spending money. And again like Keaton, Langdon made it through the lean years as a gagman, working with Laurel & Hardy at the Hal Roach Studios. While Langdon died in 1944, Keaton lived long enough to experience a late-in-life career resurgence thanks to TV and movie producers who let him do what he wanted, which was all he ever asked for.

Louis B. Mayer would be baffled that Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon silents continue to run at museums and film festivals. But they're strange. And they aren't classy like Metro pictures! So the next time you see a preview for a comedy that makes you wonder Who the hell thought this was a good idea and why did they pay this guy $20-million to make it?, say a prayer for the two otherworldly talents cut off at the knees in their prime by studios run by men whose allegiance to the bottom line was equaled only by their fear of genius.  Ars Gratia Quaestus.

                                            ******************* 

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "ALLOTMENT WIVES" (1945)

Allotment Wives is kind of like Rubber Racketeers, only the rubber here would be put to better use than tires, if you get my drift. During WW II, allotment wives were dames who married a soldier or two or three, often simultaneously, strictly to collect the benefits. If the "wives" were lucky and hubby got blown to bits on the battlefield, they'd receive a juicy death payout, too. I know what you're thinking: Where has this nefarious racket been all my life? 

Sheila Seymour, on the surface an upstanding pillar of the community, runs a military canteen for soldiers on leave. They're treated to donuts, Cokes and babes who seduce and marry them before the doll-dizzy doughboys are shipped overseas. That seems a better basis for a reality series than Duck Dynasty.

Shelia tries distracting Pete by wearing
a trashcan lid on her head.

In addition to her harem of cutie-pies, Sheila also commands several stooges who collect the benefit payouts and hire more future "wives" for her marriage factory. Too bad for Sheila, it's all about to get kamakazied. Army Col. Pete Martin is going undercover to bust the gang. One of Sheila's gunsels, Moranto, wants to set up his own harem of allotment babes. And her old childhood chum Gladys helps a hoodlum named Spike to kidnap Sheila's daughter Connie, an ungrateful boarding school bitch who has no idea of Mom's real occupation. What's a gangsteress to do?

How many men out there have gotten this same
you're-so-sweet-let's-not-ruin-it-with-sex crap?

One thing is certain: Sheila Seymour didn't need Sheryl Sandberg to learn how to Lean In.  Allotment Wives is refreshing in that a strong, secure woman runs a business operation with an iron fist. It would make Sheila kind of sexy if she wasn't 40 years old. (Kidding, kidding, kidding!) Indeed, her second-in-command, a dashing older gent named Whitey, is besotted with her, although she doesn't want to hand over the goods to him. Like a 40 year-old has any choice. (Again, kidding!)

It could be that Sheila's nursing a broken heart. When asked if her husband is dead, she replies, "Africa." Either he was killed in combat on the dark continent or she's speaking in a code not even the Enigma machine could break. Tonight when my wife asks me if I brushed my teeth, I think I'll reply, "Antarctica." Let her figure it out.

"If you need me, I'll be hiding behind the wall
near the pedicure bowl."

Collecting military benefits doesn't pay the bills for Sheila's fancy digs, so she uses a beauty parlor for a front. But as usual with B-movie criminals, secret panels and false walls abound, allowing Sheila's gang to come and go without being seen. You'd think the interior designers might have suspected that there was more than shampoo sinks and heel scrubbers at play here. By the way, does anyone outside of old movies have hidden passages at their workplace?

Shelia's daughter Connie has her own issues -- sex, drinking, sex and drinking being the mainstays. She's already played hooky

Momentarily possessed by Satan,
 Connie attempts to suck Sheila's soul
 from her.

from prep school to engage in these activities, but Mom promises to take her on a vacation if she just stays in school until graduation in the spring. But when Spike and Gladys kidnap Connie from her dorm, it's already August. (Where's the continuity girl when you need her?) 

Connie's taken on a bestial three-week spree that, according to an examining doctor, leaves her in a state of "psychosomatic." Someone take away his license to practice English. Col. Martin is no better, using the word "psychohysteria," a word that isn't even in the dictionary. 

"I knew I should have quit smoking!"

A pack of Gauloises (product placement!) is the vital clue linking Sheila to the gang. In order to spare Connie further humiliation, Sheila commits suicide by cop, proving that cigarettes can kill you, especially if you have about five guns aimed at you. Connie can now safely return to her sluttish ways without worrying about getting chewed out by Mom.


On its face, Allotment Wives was something of a comedown for former A-star Kay Francis (Sheila Seymour). On the proto-feminist side, however, it was part of her three-movie production deal with Monogram Pictures, a rare case of a woman calling the shots in Hollywood, then or now. Perhaps the role of a woman bossing a roomful of men resonated with her, even if Sheila was a criminal. At her 1930s peak, however, Kay Francis was Warner Brothers' number one lisping leading lady, possessing a neurotic sexiness I find sickly irresistible. 

Co-star Paul Kelly (Col. Pete Martin) had his own real life brush with the law two decades earlier, serving time at San Quentin for manslaughter (a drunken fistfight over a jane, of course). The woman at the center of the altercation, Dorothy Mackaye (later Kelly's wife) served time as an accomplice. Her jailhouse memoirs eventually became the basis of the previously-discussed Lady Gangster. Everything's connected on this damn blog.

Movies like Allotment Wives and Rubber Racketeers should put to rest the myth that World War II made every American citizen a true-blue patriot who gave all to defeat the Axis. As one cop describes the gang, "They're like Japs and Germans: rotten to the core and incurable!" Sheila's silk pajamas even sport an absurdly large SS monogram for no reason other than to suggest Nazis (unless she likes being reminded of her initials when she's asleep). Good for Kay Francis for sticking her neck out by playing a such a despicable, nasty, unpatriotic woman. Damn, is she sexy.

Personal aside: At one time or another, the original posters for Allotment Wives and Rubber Racketeers graced our dining room wall. You should have seen the look on my wife's face when she first saw them. Talk about psychohysteria! 


                                           *******************
To read about Rubber Racketeers, click here.
To read about Lady Gangster, click here.