THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 30

If I were single, I'd cancel the cable and streaming services but keep YouTube. Not that it carries everything I watch, but it's mostly what I watch. Alas, being married keeps me connected to the rest of the world. But who needs the world when there's entertainment like the following four examples to luxuriate in?

SHOOT TO KILL (1947): Somewhere in Shoot to Kill's low budget heart, there's a really good movie foundering. A car driven by
criminal Dixie Logan, with Assistant D.A Lawrence Dale and his wife/secretary Marian Langdon as passengers, goes off a cliff while being chased by police. While Logan and Dale are killed, Marian survives and tells reporter George Mitchell what happened. Dale had been in cahoots with a trio of gangsters who essentially hold the city under their thumb; all four men framed Logan for a crime they  committed. Marian started working for Dale shortly afterwards. What Dale didn't know is that she was Logan's sweetie, and out to get the dirt on her new boss, going so far as to stage a fake wedding with him. When Logan found out what Marian was really up to, he tried to put his three gangster friends in the slammer by double-crossing all of them in order to make himself look innocent of any criminal activity. If only Dixie Logan hadn't escaped from prison to gum up the works.

There are plenty of other twists and turns in Shoot to Kill's 64-feels-like-120 minutes. A janitor getting tossed down an elevator shaft. The priest "marrying" Logan and Marian being Dixie Logan in disguise. Dale ordering a hit on two shmucks who provided the phony evidence that sent Logan up the river. Had this been a more prestigious studio picture rather than a B from the declassee Screen Guild Productions, Shoot to Kill likely would have had a less generic title, a superior script, and definitely a better reputation. 

There's no point in namechecking the leads; you've never seen them in anything else. In fact, Shoot to Kill is one of those movies where the supporting actors onscreen for two minutes are more recognizable. Guys like Vince Barnett as the doomed janitor and Nestor Pavia as the one of the gangsters -- and you probably don't even know them.  While not a bad movie, it's just a shame Shoot to Kill cops out at the very end when reporter George Mitchell, who's gotten the scoop of the year from Marian's confession, kills the story while Logan's boss destroys the evidence. This is what happens when a reporter has a crush on his source and the top District Attorney doesn't want the public to know he's got lousy judgement when it comes to hiring people. 

BONUS POINTS: Joe Devlin, who appears near the end, also played Benito Mussolini in Hal Roach's The Devil with Hitler and Nazty Nuisance.

JOHNNY STOOL PIGEON (1949): Our first of two movies directed by William Castle in his pre-horror days. Federal agent George Morton springs Johnny Evans from Alcatraz in order to get help infiltrating a heroin ring and bring down its main players, starting with dealer William McCandless. With McCandless's slut girlfriend Terry Stewart tagging along, Morton and Evans make their way to Tucson to visit the supplier, Nick Avery, whose cover is being the bespectacled, glad-handing manager of a dude ranch in Arizona. When Avery learns the truth about his guests' identities, Morton finds himself on what looks to be a one-way trip to Mexico, with Evans in charge of punching his ticket. 

As with pornography, I can't define "film noir" but I know it when I see it. And Johnny Stool Pigeon isn't it. However, this doesn't negate the movie's quality, seeing that it's a 75-minute programmer with a fine group of actors spouting crunchy dialogue, throwing punches, and firing guns. While Howard Duff has the lead role of Morton, his lowkey style allows the co-stars to take charge whenever they're onscreen. As Evans, Dan Duryea, who never disappoints, positively seethes with contempt at Morton; he's helping to bring down the drug ring only because his junkie wife fatally overdosed. Shelly Winters trots out her usual screechy, trashy floozie routine as Terry. The absolute surprise of Johnny Stool Pigeon is John McIntire's Nick Avery, whose initially howdy-folks demeanor eventually gives way to his real cold-blooded self. If you ever wondered what "underrated" meant, both McIntire and Duryea's performances in Johnny Stool Pigeon are good examples. 

Then there's 24 year-old Anthony Curtis in his third movie role as a mute gunsel named Joey. Under contract to Universal-International, Curtis was still a year away from changing his first name to Tony and becoming one of the most popular leading men of the '50s. Did the studio cast him as a mute so that his heavy New York accent wouldn't seem out of place in Arizona? It doesn't matter, because he looks like a guy who'd talk like that, making him just one of a dozen or so reasons to watch the briskly-paced Johnny Stool Pigeon -- even if its bizarre happy ending not only makes no sense considering what happened to two of its characters minutes earlier, but looks imposed by the studio after a sneak preview with a disgruntled audience.

BONUS POINTS:  If Johnny Stool Pigeon really is a film noir as some people claim, it's the only one that takes place in San Francisco, Vancouver, and a Tucson dude ranch. 

HOLLYWOOD STORY (1951): It's a rare thing when a movie you've never heard of
turns out to be great. So it's nice when you're able to settle for "Hey, that was pretty good!" Hollywood Story fits the bill, with its ace cast of character actors and interesting story. Movie producer Larry O'Brien (Richard Conte) decides to make a biopic of Franklin Ferrara, a director whose murder has gone unsolved since 1929. Shortly after hiring Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull), Ferrara's favorite scriptwriter from the silent days, to pen the movie, O'Brien is warned by several people, including Ferrara's daughter Sally, to drop the project. Even his business partner, Sam Collyer (Fred Clark) and agent Mitch Davis (Jim Backus) are antsy about going forward with it. An errant gunshot directed at O'Brien and the killing of an informant make him only more determined to solve the Ferrara murder.

Obviously based on the still-unsolved 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor, Hollywood Story also feels like Universal-Interational's attempt to cash in on Sunset Boulevard, released a year earlier. But Hollywood Story is more respectful in its portrayal of the movie industry's early days; unlike Sunset Boulevard's Gloria Swanson, none of the characters here from the old days are whack jobs. Oh, washed-up scripter Vincent St. Clair is an alky who speaks more floridly than any character in Shakespeare, but that's how all movie writers were portrayed then. The closest anyone comes to appearing really off-kilter is Richard Egan as Police Lt. Bud Lennox, whose weird, constant grin can only be described as shit-eating. 

As with Johnny Stool Pigeon, William Castle directs Hollywood Story with efficiency. He was also good enough to round up four former stars of the silent days -- Francis X. Bushman, William Farnum, Betty Blythe and Helen Gibson -- to play themselves. (Oddly, the still-popular Joel McCrae briefly shows up as himself, too.) Paul Cavanaugh -- a former leading man who was now a supporting player -- plays Roland Paul, a former leading man who's now a supporting player. (I guess that's what they call drawing from real life). However, it's the quartet of great character actors -- Conte, Clark, Backus, and Hull -- who make Hollywood Story such an entertaining watch. As with actors who were established before The Method, these guys don't dig into themselves to bring their characters to life. They're being paid to do their usual shtick, and leave the customer satisfied.

BONUS POINTS: Hollywood Story is one of the few movies where Jim Backus underplays his role; at no moment does he sound like Mr. Magoo or Thurston Howell III. And the aforementioned Paul Cavanaugh was in The Sin of Nora Moran. I'm going to keep plugging that movie until you run out and buy the Blu-ray.

TURN ON (ABC-TV, February 5, 1969): Judging by audience reactions, the most
shocking moments in television history are 9/11, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Turn On, the only series cancelled by a network affiliate in the middle of its first episode. Other affiliates refused to air it all; those who did were bombarded with angry phone calls. ABC, having gotten the message, pulled Turn On within days of its debut/finale. 

Created by George Schlatter, Turn On was very much like his other series, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, only for overcaffeinated viewers with ADHD. The concept is that a computer has been programmed to spew out brief comedy sketches, some lasting less than 10 seconds, while the occasional "funny" messages pass by on the screen. (One of the messages, ISRAEL UBER ALLES, is more prescient of today's antisemitism than whatever joke they were going for.) Topics center around sex, police, sex, drugs, psychiatry, sex, police, sex, drugs, sex, psychiatry, sex, as well as now-dated, stereotypical humor involving Asians, Mexicans, and blacks. Outside of the recurring appearance of a sleazy pitchman, there was one bit I found funny: "Where's the capitol of South Vietnam?"  "In Swiss banks." You gotta grab your chuckles where you find them.

I can boast (if that's the correct word) of seeing Turn On's original airing 45 years ago. Not yet 13, I thought that most of the material was silly, lazy, and, too often, on the same intellectual level of my hornier 6th-grade classmates. (Sample: a sexy woman in a lowcut negligee says, "Now that he's president, Richard Nixon is the titular leader of the Republican party.") The one sketch I remember best -- because it was, at roughly 60 seconds, the longest -- featured Tim Conway and one of the female cast members engaging in a mimed conversation while the word sex reacted to their unheard dialogue. Even as an adolescent, I thought it was sophomoric. People claim that Turn On -- now available on YouTube -- was ahead of its time. Nope, it's definitely of its time, in all the bad ways late '60s "far-out" humor was. Fortunately, one of its writers, Albert Brooks, went on to much better things.

BONUS POINTS: The one interesting facet of Turn On is that the credits appear on and off throughout the entire episode, rather than all together at the end. (I can hear you ask, That's interesting? On a show like this, yes.)

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