Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

A certain holiday approaches. As always, thanks to all the contributors of reviews and citations linked to below, and to you readers...if I've overlooked your A/V write-up, please let me know in the comments. There might well be further additions over the course of this very busy day...and, happy (post!-)Channukah, and (pre-)Christmas, (and the solstice and other solstice holidays!) to their celebrants...this will be back next week, but I won't be surprised if some of the regular contributors will be otherwise occupied.

Bill Crider: Will Penny [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Cuento de Navidad (aka The Christmas Tale)

Elizabeth Foxwell:  Please Murder Me

Evan Lewis: The Stranger (1946)

George Kelley: Batman: Gotham Knight; Justice League: The New Frontier

Iba Dawson: Holiday (1938)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Arch Oboler

James Reasoner: The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

Jason Zinoman: Maria Bamford (and Jackie Kashian)

Jerry House: 30-Second Bunnies version of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

John Charles: Destination Moon

Juri Nummelin: Django

Kate Laity: Broadpod

Laura: Lady in the Dark

Mike Tooney: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Not the Running Type" (script by Jerry Sohl from a story by Henry Slesar)

Patti Abbott: Send Me No Flowers

Prashant Trikannad: Detour

Randy Johnson: The Left-Handed Gun

Richard Pangburn: Merry Christmas, 2116 and other Bradbury drama and prose

Rick: Steve McQueen

Rod Lott: Saint Nick

Ron Scheer: The Red Pony (1949)

Scott Cupp: Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!); Going Postal

Sergio Angelini: Stalag 17

Stacia Jones: The White Shadow (1924; directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Walter Albert: A Date with Destiny (aka The Mad Doctor)

Yvette Banek: Five Quirky Christmas Movies

Peanuts (Charlie Brown et al.) Xmas reunion in the style of LOUIS (the Louis CK/Szekely sitcom)

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: more links

American Gangster

As always, thanks to all of the contributors of reviews and citations below, and to all you readers of them...there are likely to be additional links added over the course of the day, and if I've overlooked yours or someone else's review, please let me know in comments. It's a crowded day, but we shall persevere!

Bill Crider: Operation Petticoat  [trailer]

Brian Arnold: A Pinky and the Brain Christmas; "It's a Bad Brains Christmas, Charlie Brown"

Hi-Life

Dan Stumpf: Hi-Life (1998)

Ed Donovan: Street of a Thousand Pleasures (NSFW video image at bottom of post--then again, Rot Lott's header for Flick Attack is not safe in very uptight workplaces, probably)

Elizabeth Foxwell: Ivy

Evan Lewis: Bulldog Drummond Escapes

Francis Nevins: Ellery Queen on radio, and elsewhere

George Kelley: Dark Crimes

Phantom Lady (included in Dark Crimes)

Iba Dawson: Bachelor Mother

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: miscellany 

Jackie Kashian: Craig Shoemaker

James Reasoner: American Gangster

Jeff Flugel: River of No Return

Jerry House: W. C. Fields, Ray Bradbury, and Kenny House

John Charles: Hellraiser: Inferno

Kate Laity: Short Films from Alan Moore;  "Then Little Joe the Krampus Met"

Laura: Deep Waters

Michael Shonk: TV Crime Drama Themes and Opening/Credit Sequences

Patti Abbott: Crusader Rabbit

Beware, My Lovely

Randy Johnson: Beware, My Lovely

Rick: The Questor Tapes

Ron Scheer: Nevada

Scott Cupp: Quatermass (1979);
Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!)

Sergio Angelini: The Spiritualist (aka The Amazing Mr. X) 

Stacia Jones: Ten Laps to Go

Todd Mason: What Really Happened to the Class of '65? (television series)

Yvette Banek: Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas

FFBradbury: Sturgeon, Brackett, Bloch; Bradbury; Knight, Matheson, Beaumont, King...some notes about RB's mentors, peers, legacy

Ray Bradbury. I've finally gotten around to reading "Skeleton," having meant to do so for decades, one of the early stories, published in Dorothy McIlwraith's Weird Tales for September, 1945. Here's the UNZ.org reprint of that issue's Table of Contents:

Novelettes

• The Skull of the Marquis de Sade by Robert Bloch, pp. 6-16 - PDF
• Take Back That Which Thou Gavest by Seabury Quinn, pp. 42-56 - PDF

Short Stories

• The God-Box by August Derleth, pp. 17-21 - PDF
• Night of Impossible Shadows by Allison V. Harding, pp. 22-31 - PDF
• Skeleton by Ray Bradbury, pp. 32-40 - PDF
• Votaress by Emil Petaja, pp. 58-62 - PDF
• The Dark Brothers by Harold Lawlor, pp. 64-73 - PDF
• Mr. Lupescu by Anthony Boucher, pp. 74-76 - PDF
• Outbound by Paul Ernst, pp. 77-81 - PDF
• The Thing from the Barrens by Jim Kjelgaard, pp. 82-91 - PDF

Verse

• Remorse (Verse) by Page Cooper, p. 57 - PDF
• The Sorcerer To His Love (Verse) by Clark Ashton Smith, p. 63 - PDF

• Superstitions and Taboos by Irwin J. Weill, p. 41 - PDF
• The Eyrie and Weird Tales Club, pp. 92-98 - PDF

• Cover by Pete Kuhlhoff, - PDF
 

What this doesn't tell you is that this was one of the first dozen or so contributions by Bradbury to the magazine, in the company of the third by his friend, the Finnish-American writer Emil Petaja,  and the first by Jim Kjelgaard, perhaps best remembered these days for the YA dog novel Big Red. Aside from fairly important stories in the careers of Robert Bloch and Anthony Boucher, both of whom were already friendly with and influential on Bradbury, a closer look reveals that the correspondence-oriented "Weird Tales Club" inducted Don Thompson, who would go on to  be a hugely influential co-creator of organized comics fandom, and Jack Murtagh, the New Zealander projectionist and collector who managed to preserve some of Hitchcock's earliest silent footage and other material feared lost. (Also notable: Bradbury, one of McIlwraith's discoveries for WT, is already getting cover credit on equal footing with Seabury Quinn, who had been the most popular contributor during the previous editorial regime of Farnsworth Wright, eclipsing the likes of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, who has a poem in this issue.)

Dark Carnival, Bradbury's first collection (from August Derleth's small press Arkham House) features "Skeleton" as its second story, in its first edition (the story leads off the much later Gauntlet Press reprint), though the reshuffled and more common variation on that first collection, The October Country, slips the story more toward the middle of the book. Typically for a Ray Bradbury story from these early years, it displays the lessons he was learning by assiduously studying Theodore Sturgeon's contemporary early fiction, even down to echoing some of Sturgeon's more effervescent rhythms (perhaps more than a bit of early exposure to Thomas Wolfe is in play here, as well--even in this early work, Sturgeon's growing control over his own prose is, in Bradbury, instead given over to attempts to let the language run free, less consciously controlled...somewhat less effective, but also sharing an often attractive sense of abandon). Also, where Sturgeon's protagonists, early on, were often young men, increasingly as parts of the families and other extended social groups they gathered, Bradbury's characters were, and largely would remain throughout his career, children...sometimes  superannuated children, but still recognizable as such...see such late, relatively important stories of his as "Gotcha!" (Redbook, August 1978 and collected in his major retrospective The Stories of Ray Bradbury and dramatized on Ray Bradbury Theater).

This, of course, tended to make his work even more irresistible to young readers than that of many of Sturgeon or Bradbury's other peers and models...and it helped ease his path into such general-interest slick magazines as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, along with the likes of Will F. "Murray Leinster" Jenkins, Robert Heinlein, and the similarly young Kurt Vonnegut and John D. MacDonald, who would reserve their spikier and more uncomfortable work for the fading pulp magazines, their insurgent digest-sized heirs, and such important but still "little" magazines as American Mercury, as well as the university reviews and the likes of Story, more completely focused on literary art.

 Contrast "Skeleton" with, for example, Sturgeon's "It," (Unknown Fantasy Fiction, August 1940) and the imagination inherent in the stories (which in basic concept are almost inverse to each other) is comparable, and Sturgeon is already ahead, in a comparable point in his career, in deftly generating empathy and in the simple elegance of his prose...but the perfervidness of "Skeleton" is almost as compelling in its way as the devastating incident and close observation of the Sturgeon. I suspect that Bradbury was taking a lesson in part from Robert Bloch here, who, one can hardly fail to note, has his own haunting bone story in the issue, and who was already rather engaged in the work, taking, like his peer and fellow younger "Lovecraft Circle" member Fritz Leiber, the kind of existential horror fiction that H. P. Lovecraft pushed to the center of his own work , as a springboard for his own explorations...Bloch's often in the ways that we destroy ourselves through hidden Others within ourselves, a key aspect of, of course, Psycho among much of his other work, and one of the refinements on Lovecraft Bloch would hugely influentially undertake. Meanwhile, Damon Knight, who was influenced in part by Bradbury's audacity and clear joy in taking premises outre even by the standards of fantasticated fiction and running with them, makes a good case (in a review collected in his In Search of Wonder) that this story particularly, and other early Bradbury horrors, begged to be made into genuinely terrifying animated film.

Because, as with Roald Dahl and to a lesser extent John Collier, so much of Bradbury is so much about children of all ages, it's only natural that such impressive YA-oriented collections as R is for Rocket and S is for Space and the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (the last spun largely out of the Weird Tales short story "The Black Ferris") would tend to gain lifelong fans for RB from among their readers...even as the nostalgia for youth, explicit or implicit in work ranging from much of The Martian Chronicles through Dandelion Wine, would tend to catch up adult readers first coming across them as well as the younger; notable also that another of the most nostalgic of major fantastic-fiction writers of the 1950s, Jack Finney, would publish consistently good work, frequently of similar appeal, in the SEP and Collier's before turning primarily to novels as those markets faded. 

And, of course, Bradbury also as noted published a fair amount of sf from the beginning of his career, along with the horror fiction, often in Planet Stories, the magazine most devoted to "space opera" and "planetary romance" fiction, where Bradbury's friend and mentor and occasional collaborator Leigh Brackett was doing some of the best work this kind of exotic adventure fiction would see (Bradbury completed Brackett's "Lorelei of the Red Mist" for publication in part because she was called away to the better-paying gig of adapting The Big Sleep for the film Howard Hawks meant to direct, along with co-scenarists Julius Furthman and a relatively unproductive William Faulkner). Bradbury would also place a fair amount of his sf with Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, which under 1940s and '50s editors Samuel Merwin, Jr. and then Samuel Mines sought to steer an eclectic course between the the exotic adventure emphasis of Planet and Ray Palmer's more sensationalistic Amazing Stories and the polemical and often, but by no means exclusively, tech-flavored Astounding Science Fiction. When Anthony Boucher co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy, becoming The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with its second issue, in 1949, Bradbury would place with it such stories as "The Exiles" (which Boucher and his co-editor Francis McComas worked with Bradbury to considerably improve, as noted in the anthology drawn from the contents of the magazine's first half-decade and related editorial correspondence, The Eureka Years edited by Annette Pelz McComas); similarly dealing with censorship and anti-intellectualism in the McCarthy era was "The Fireman," which Bradbury placed with the new, founded 1950, Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, where the aim was for accessibility of the fiction for the "slicks" wed to a cultural sophistication surpassing the best of the extant sf magazines. This would be the core of Bradbury's most popular novel, Fahrenheit 451; Sturgeon's most popular novel, More Than Human, would similarly be built around a novella published in Galaxy at about this time, "Baby is Three."

Bradbury's first comics adaptations, initially plagiarized, were appearing from EC Comics not long after, and the influence of Bradbury was profound on such writers as (particularly) a knot of California-based prose- and screenplay-writers often tagged "the Little Bradburys" (including Richard Matheson, who also often seemed to be doing work based in the same sort of exploration that Robert Bloch had been doing before him...and, as with Bradbury's relation to Sturgeon, Matheson seemed less likely to seek to control his prose as carefully as Bloch did, not tucking in his corners as thoroughly...something which, for a variety of reasons, didn't seem to hurt the popularity of his work)...Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson and others...Beaumont, particularly, seemed in some ways in his short life and career engaged in creating more sophisticated work than Bradbury usually attempted.  And, of course, Bradbury and Matheson, as slightly more devil-may-care students of the controlled innovation of Sturgeon and Bloch, and perhaps partly as a result more popular as writers, were also even more direct influences on than their models on Stephen King, the often prolix and, at his worst, very derivative writer...and in the running for the most popular writer in English in the last century. There are several lessons in that. 

For more on Bradbury, and others' books, today, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Dave Brubeck, December 6, 1920-December 5, 2012

The last studio album, devoted to original compositions (save a reunion album they would record in 1976 for A&M), that the Paul Desmond/Joe Morello/Gene Wright quartet would record, 1966. This was the most famous and successful quartet, performing from 1958-66.

Dave Brubeck: “They Said I Was Too Far Out” by Ralph Gleason — 8/8/1957 An Exclusive Online Extra

A live recording of the quartet's arrangement of music from his oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness...one of the reasons for the end of the Desmond/Morello/Wright quartet, so that Brubeck could write some of his longer works, most with some spiritual import.


Iola Brubeck was the usual lyricist for her husband's songs...such as this from the song cycle, The Real Ambassadors. Louis Armstrong sings lead, supported by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross on "They Say I Look Like God."


An instrumental version of a work written in response to the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, Truth Is Fallen. This piece of the longer work is called, simply "Truth." Gerry Mulligan was actually not a "guest" here, but a regular member of the Brubeck/Mulligan quartet, with Allen Dawson and Jack Six.


The Octet was made up of largely of jazz players who were fellow students of Darius Milhaud, as Brubeck was, and was sort of a West Coast parallel to what the Gil Evans/John Lewis/Gerry Mulligan "Birth of the Cool" group was doing in NYC.


Brubeck and his sons performed for a while as Two Generations of Brubeck...this is an even larger, if slightly less purely Brubeckian, assembly.


A latter-day quartet version of one of the movements from Howard Brubeck's Dialogues.


And from the initial recording of Dave Brubeck's brother's composition, by the Brubeck Quartet and the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.


The final track from the suite Miro Reflections, the lp having been released as Time Further Out...my default choice as a kid for my favorite record.


Teo Macero on how "Take Five" became a hit.

Tuesday's Overlooked A/V: more links and THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE; THING X; Oliver Stone's blithering about America...

The Crimson Petal and the White makes for a fine, if grim, three and a half hour BBC television adaptation of  the novel by Michel Faber, with screenplay by Lucinda Coxon. Broadcast in the UK in 2011, it was imported by the cable channel group Encore for US audiences shortly thereafter (I saw it on Thanksgiving weekend on on-demand), and has a similar feel to the other recent import, Call the Midwife (visible in the US on PBS); instead of midwives and nuns coping with life in the post-WW2 slums of London, Crimson deals mostly with the experiences of late Victorian-era prostitutes and madams in and around those same slums, and particularly one bright and literate prostitute named Sugar, and their johns, notably a youngish (but no longer young), reluctant heir-apparent to ownership of his aging father's soap-perfuming and toiletries company, one William Rackham (played by Chris O'Dowd). 


Rackham having hired Sugar for a night, becomes enamored of her and buys her way out of her mother's brothel, setting her up as his kept mistress. She, in turn, not only couples with him but starts to hesitantly fall for him, and helps him in taking on the responsibilities for the business, with the accounting as well as innovating the advertising and marketing of the products. Rackham seems a pampered but lost soul at first, a frustrated writer; Sugar is also a writer facing a different sort of frustration, taking out her anger at her clients and her lot in life by writing a long narrative of revenge, in which her analog-protagonist is an inversion of Jack the Ripper, serially murdering johns. As she grows fonder of Rachham, and the vast improvement of her own living conditions, she sets the narrative aside; but Rackham proves to be a weaker character even than he appeared at their first encounter, with a family he, childishly self-absorbed, ignores when he doesn't inadvertently torment. His wife, Agnes, is mentally ill (agoraphobic and acting out whenever forced into social circumstances), a circumstance which is not improved by her doctor's "care" (part of his "treatment" for her hysteria is to clinically, ritually rape her on a regular basis, to which she tearfully acquiesces without further protest); eventually, Sugar is installed in the main house as the new governess of the Rackhams' much-neglected daughter, and Sugar is able to improve the daughter's life considerably, while feeling ever more her "place" as both quasi-maternal and sexual servant...while also feeling increasingly alienated from her old friends back in the ghetto.

It's a bit of a post-Shaw Pygmalion story, with Sugar doing most of her own "self-improvement" in terms of emotional rather than intellectual growth--she was already a literary intellectual by the time she met Rackham, who was almost as enchanted by her artistic acumen as her sexual skills--and while this main plot and the several interactive subplots, usually about the romanticism, snobbery and self-delusion of the characters causing themselves and each other needless and usually unintentional  suffering, and the upper-class characters arrogantly sure of their assertions of what is right and proper, the lower-class characters too often assuming only what's basest in humanity is what's true.  Thus, the greatest problem with the series is that it doesn't present us with anything particularly new; you'll feel the resonances of the likes of Tipping the Velvet or Educating Rita, and every expose of the horrible conditions of Whitechapel before the turn of the century you've come across, even though their recapitulation is well-mounted here. Romola Garai, pushing thirty when the series was shot, is not convincingly nineteen, even given the aging effects her character's circumstances might take out of her; otherwise, she is as impressive as the rest of the cast, not least Richard E. Grant as the doctor, all well-meaning pompous grimness, manfully taking just enough sadistic pleasure in "helping" the ailing, tensely beautiful Mrs. Rackham (Amanda Hale), and impatiently concerned about his sister (Shirley Henderson), who contracts consumption (as tuberculosis was known then) through reformist outreach to the city's prostitutes...and who has her suspicions about the previous occupation of the Rackhams' new governess. An almost gaunt Gillian Anderson commits to her portrait of hard-hearted bitterness as Sugar's mother and pimp  (parents don't, on balance, come off well in this teleplay). Worth seeing, but not what you'd call cheerful, even given the slightly improbable and perhaps too vague ending.

The late-night programming block on the Cartoon Network cable channel, Adult Swim, has decided that Funny or Die (and such lower-profile players as Chill.com) shouldn't have all the shortform comedy video attention on the web, so has expanded their efforts, with the help of some of the staff of  The Onion, with the site pages Thing X...or perhaps that's all in the past tense, as the ads that brought Thing X to my attention during Adult Swim programming show the staff in various ugly degrees of having been murdered, and the site, which debuted in October, has a December 3rd farewell message on it. I suspect we are being put on, but we'll see how long you can see this embed, with Paul F. Tompkins answering some odd questions with reasonable wit and charm:


Speaking of ugly murder, Oliver Stone has been allowed to attempt historical documentary by Showtime cable, with Oliver Stone's Secret History of America, a ten-episode series that is about as useless, irresponsible and a waste of opportunity to do something good with an important subject as his dramatic films are. Relentless apologizing for Stalin's simultaneous brutality and ineptitude in conducting the business of his government, not least the Soviet theater of World War 2, is only the start of what's wrong with the bootless attempt at muckraking and re-evaluation on display here, with readings of documents and (often very questionable) hearsay "quotations" faked up by actors, but also subjected to sound effects to make them sound as if they are radio transcriptions or newsreel soundtracks, manage thus to go Ken Burns one farther in intellectual dishonesty...even when Stone is right, he manages to be wrong. However, if he can get over his Christopher Walken-esque cadences, he might, like Rod Serling, find a side career as a narrator, as his hammy affectation here doesn't completely obscure the quality of his speaking voice.

And the links:

Bill Crider: ten overlooked tv biopics; Soldier in the Rain [Chris Noel interview segment]

Brian Arnold: The Gift of Winter

Dan Stumpf: The Vampire

Ed Gorman: Capricorn One

Elizabeth Foxwell: "You'll Be the Death of Me" (The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) based on a story by Anthony Gilbert

Evan Lewis: The Shadow Strikes

George Kelley: Paula Poundstone in concert

Iba Dawson: Holiday Affair

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: television notes; January on TCM

Jackie Kashian: Julie Hoverson and 19 Nocturne Blvd.

James Reasoner: My Favorite Wife (1940 film)

Jerry House: great television comedians

John Charles: Radar Men of the Moon

Juri Nummelin: The Way of the Gun

Kate Laity: outsider art; what's funny

Lawrence Person: vague movie descriptions

Laura: That Signature Style: The Films of Mitchell Leisen; February TCM

Michael Shonk: Cool Million

Patti Abbott: The Glenn Miller Story

Prashant Trikannad: innovative Sony televisions...and their ads

Randy Johnson: Long Live Your Death! (aka Viva la muerte...tua!)

Rick: The ABC Movie of the Week: Tribes; Duel; The Cat Creature

Rod Lott: Terminal Invasion; Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990

Scott Cupp:  Mongolian Death Worm; Quatermass (1979)

Sergio Angelini: The Mind Benders

Stacia Jones: movies to watch for on cable in December; 3:10 to Yuma (both films); Who Bombed Judi Bari?

Yvette Banek: Contraband (1940) 

As frequently through the course of the day, there might well be additions to this list of links; if I've missed yours or someone else's please feel free to let me know in comments. And thanks to all the contributors and to you readers...