February's Underappreciated Music: the links

The monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you reader/listeners of....



Patti Abbott: Tuesday Night Music; Saturday Night Music; Opening Credits and Theme Songs

Bill Crider: Song of the Day; One-Hit Wonders

Brian Arnold: some favorite cover versions of Beatles songs


Lalo Schifrin Orchestra: from Bullitt


Heather Drain: Gleamng Spires

Martin Edwards: Crime and Romance: Melodies for Valentine's Day

Jerry House: Darlene Love;  Leonard Cohen;  Eric Von Schmidt;  "Ragtime Cowboy Joe"; Hymn Time 

Fairport Convention: "Eastern Rain" (composed by Joni Mitchell)


George Kelley: Royalty of Soul: Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding box sets

Aimee Mann (with Howard Kramer and Kulap Vilaysack): Who Charted?

Todd Mason: Lee Hays in the Weavers and the BabySitters; 3rd Stream Music;  More 3rd Stream, for Valentines;  hits, in their compass: funk and related

Tara McGinley: Lydia Lunch and The Pharmacy

Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

Charlie Ricci: Chicago 16

Aimee Mann: "I'm Cured"

new links and content: Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links (Bhob Stewart memorial edition)

Two Weeks in Another Town

Below, the links to reviews and citations, to what seems to me an unusually rich haul of a/v items this week (relatively few of the reviews below are warnings, at least not in entirety)...along with Find a Witness delivered today by Evan Lewis, a few more have been added as I found or became aware of them (please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's)...as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...and I've added a quick review of Herblock: The Black and the White below...

Robert "Bhob" Stewart, 1937-2014  (his blog)

Bill Crider: Higher Ground (1988 telefilm/pilot episode)  [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Continental Divide

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Comedy Film Nerds: Oscar Preview with Doug Benson

Dan Stumpf: Rangers of Fortune

Dave Zeltserman: Touch of Evil

David Vineyard: adaptations of The Three Hostages by John Buchan

Ed Lynskey: Guilty Bystander

Elizabeth Foxwell: Stolen

Evan Lewis: Find the Witness

George Kelley: Flash Gordon (2007 television series) 

Greg Proops Film Club

How Did This Get Made?: Winter's Tale

Iba Dawson: the Lincoln Motion Picture Company; Samuel Goldwyn

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Jim Backus Show: Hot Off the Wire (1960 syndicated tv sitcom)

The Far Country

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "A Woman's Help"

Jackie Kashian: Eric Lampaert on evolution and other matters

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Murder She Wrote: "Reflections of the Mind"

Jake Hinkson: Norman Foster

James Reasoner: The Far Country

Jerry House: Twelfth Night (1910 film)

Police Python 357

John Charles: the serials Secret Agent X-9

Juri Nummelin: Valhalla Rising; The Reflecting Skin

Kate Laity: "Äppelkriget" (aka "The Apple War"); George Harrison as Pirate Bob (Rutland Weekend Television)

Kliph Nesteroff: Jack Benny's Bag (1968 NBC comedy special); Tars and Spars; Late Night with David Letterman: "Harold Ramis"

Veronica Cartwright

Laura: The Wind Rises; The Slipper and the Rose

Lucy Brown: The Bishop's Wife (1947 film)

Martin Edwards: Se7en

Marty McKee: Griff repackage: Death Follows a Psycho

Michael Shonk: television series one can see on YouTube...and not on "legit" dvd, so far...(this time, for sure)

Mystery Dave: A Man Called Adam

Patti Abbott: Topper (1937 film...and, incidentally, the 1950s tv series)

Dorothy M. Johnson...

Prashant Trikannad: 5 Rediscovered Movies

Rick: The Midnight Special (television series); Veronica Cartwright

Rod Lott: The Company of Wolves; Drive-In Madness!; House of Whipcord

Ron Scheer: The Hanging Tree; Gravel in Her Gut and Spit in Her Eye: The Life of Dorothy M. Johnson 

Your Show of Shows

Sergio Angelini: Police Python 357 (aka The Case Against Ferro) (based on The Big Clock)

Stacia Jones: Night of the Comet; Two Weeks in Another Town

Stephen Bowie: long takes in dramatic television

Yvette Banek: Your Show of Shows

Todd Mason:

Herbert Block, or Herblock

Herblock: The Black and the White is, to say the least, an interesting example of filmmakers, one hesitates to actually call them documentarians or the film a documentary, getting in their own way and doing perhaps half their self-set task very well indeed, punting the other half. Herbert Block was probably the most influential and certainly the most lauded of US political cartoonists during his lifetime (1909-2001)...so how to get that across? Let's first synthesize a narrative for actor Alan Mandell to monologize, in character as Block with no indication that we are not witnessing some remarkably well-shot footage of Block himself,  and then let's invite the commentary of a range of Block's colleagues on The Washington Post (pretty good idea, since Block apparently

Alan Mandell as Block

all but lived in his office there during the workweek, and enjoyed interacting with the other staffers there as peers, many of whom were starstruck at first and remain grateful that he enjoyed engaging with them thus)...and then get some input from cartoonists (three that I recall...Paul Conrad [I believe it was] is on and off in a flash, Jules Feiffer, who is a proper historian of cartooning as well as a peer of similar influence, and Robert Mankoff, most famous in these years as cartoon editor at The New Yorker) and then bring in such lightweights as Ted Koppel and Tom Brokaw to provide typically blow-dried economia, insisting (among other non-insights) that somehow Block Could See the Future of a Republican Party overrun by its right wing, as if this hadn't been the continuous history of the GOP over the past century, the latter decades of which these ninnies had supposedly spent careers covering as responsible journalists; consistent tool Brit Hume (imagine an ever-callow, dull-witted version of William F. Buckley, Jr. if you don't recognize the name from his career at ABC News and now the Fox News Channel) sullenly recalls how Block, a Republican who looked upon the actions of the FDR Administration as a better response to the needs of the nation than the inaction of the Hoover Admin, supposedly was always so much kinder to Democrats; as this has just come after and in the midst of a series of caricatures of the duplicity of LBJ, the incompetence of Carter, and Clinton's inability to keep himself in check, this typical self-pitying whine is rather deftly skewered in context, a deftness

Caption usually invisible as shown in film.

writer/director Michael Stevens (scripting with writer Sara Lukinson) fails to demonstrate in most of the rest of the film, even down to failing to correctly frame many of the Block cartoons put on display for the likes of Lewis Black and Carl Bernstein to react to, in their cases usually sapiently...too frequently, and for no obvious reason, the frame cuts off the cartoons' captions, for example.  Much is made of Block's independence at the Post, where he lands after World War II military service, without noting till nearly the very end of the film how much stock Block controlled in the Post's parent corporation. And the re-enactments of Block's childhood are not only out of place in a documentary but so saccharine as to put the casual viewer off, much less the remotely skeptical.  All told, it's good to hear from some of these folks, and good to have further evidence of how blinkered and pompous supposedly wiser heads in the News Industry remain, and a real pity the job wasn't done better.  Herblock's books remain (if as out of print as his daily panels), as does the testimony of other peers (such as Walt Kelly) to the quality of his work...they may become obscure, but I suspect this film will become more obscure much more quickly.

Saturday Music Club: all the hits, all the time

War: "All Day Music"


The Undisputed Truth: "Smiling Faces Sometimes" (with Rose Royce)


Stevie Wonder: "Fingertips"


Miriam Makeba: "Click Song (Qongqothwane)"

Monday Michiru: "Sands of Time"


Operation Ivy: "Freeze Up" 


Janelle Monáe: "Cold War" (at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, 2011)


Tom Jones: "If I Only Knew"


The Ides of March: "Vehicle"

FFB: COLLEGE PARODIES edited by Will and Martin Lieberson (Ballantine 1961) (and a bit about I, LIBERTINE by Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine)

Ballantine Books was always ready to be an innovative publisher, in the years that Betty and Ian Ballantine were in charge...sometimes the execution was less impressive than the inspiration, but they had smashing successes with publishing collections of the first years of Mad comics, while Harvey Kurtzman was still editing and mostly writing the title, and such famous comic hoaxes as I, Libertine by "Frederick R. Ewing" (where Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine wrote a novel in a marathon session, to quickly publish after New York City-based radio host/storyteller/comedian Jean Shepard asked his listeners to go ask booksellers for a nonexistent book, to see if they could get a nonexistent joke onto then as now corruptly assembled "bestseller" lists; Shepard and Sturgeon did a first edition signing in a drugstore). So, it was only natural that other such projects should arise, such as Harvey Kurtzman's

Jungle Book...and this volume, collecting mostly magazine parodies from the college humor magazines that had preceded Mad into existence, and in fact had already been gleaned for a 1920s newsstand magazine, College Humor, a spiritual though not direct ancestor of the current website of that name. Although The Onion began as a UW Madison-based publication, the Harvard Lampoon has been probably the (otherwise) most famous and the most durable of these campus magazines in the U.S., as well as the direct inspiration for the National Lampoon in the 1970s, which has left a legacy at least as large as that of its parent, which survives it (and Harvard staffers have certainly gone onto post-collegiate comedy careers in an old-grads-club, usually old-boys' sort of way, particularly on the writing and production staff of  various television series; a slightly amusing prefiguring of future interaction occurred at Harvard when future NBC television CEO Jeff Zucker, as head of the campus paper the Harvard Crimson, had

A 1973 collection/special issue from HL

Lampoon editor Conan O'Brien arrested for a prank the magazine staff played on the Crimson staff and their product). But certainly most colleges and universities of any size or wherewithal were likely to have at least a mayfly humor magazine from time to time; the UC Berkeley Pelican published Ron Goulart's piece "Letters to the Editor," a parody of a letter column in an sf pulp, that was reprinted in an early issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as Goulart's first professional sale, and the Yale Record and any number of other titles managed to flow, with no lack of sophomoric humor usually wrapped around any gems, through the last century (the tradition is even longer in the UK, unsurprisingly, where it gave early training to staffers for Punch and so many other magazines and other entities over the decades).  Not long before Borders Book Stores folded, the were carrying the current Harvard Lampoon on their newsstands, and sadly, it wasn't brilliant, for the most part...but, then, I haven't been a fan going back at least as far as their Bored of the Rings, the parody of Tolkien reprinted widely in mass-market paperback in the wake of JRRT's massive success in the latter '60s onward. 

A certain lack of brilliance also afflicts College Parodies, as fitfully amusing as it is (and was even when I first read it as a young teen and Mad enthusiast), and as interesting as a curio of its era (it mostly reprints 1950s items from the various campus magazines, with perhaps a few earlier parody bits); it's a sort of fun to see what's mocked (complacency, manfulness, "corn") and what isn't (homophobia certainly rules OK) in the assembled humorous critiques of mass-market culture (from a period when the magazines parodied were somewhat more central to the popular culture than they are today, even if the websites that are their heirs or even sometimes their direct legacy are somewhat similar in influence now). Some of it remains on-target, at least for me..."Normal Wellwell" and the Charles Atlas ads fairly begged for the treatment they receive...even when it could've been better. But often these were early, even the first attempts to make some of these points this way, or nearly this well...definitely a book to look at if this kind of thing holds interest for one as a student of our popular culture, rather than a book to seek out as a Laff Riot, and not worth pursuing if expensive. 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

For more on parody and humor on this blog, very much including the comics tradition (in at least two senses), please see this post, which collects most of the others published so far.

The Panther Books (UK) paperback

Contribution from the Fitzgeralds...CH did have to
Keep Up with The Smart Set and the original Life,
the humor magazine, after all...

Frank Kelly Freas's cover for the Ballantine paperback, annotated. Courtesy FlickLives.com

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

A Polaroid selfie: Perfect Sense

Below, the links to reviews and citations (and a couple of short reviews below those), currently including only the early links I've come across at this hour...more will be added as I can find them or become aware of them (please let me know in comments if I've missed yours or someone else's)...as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...

The Prize

Bill Crider: The Prize [trailer]

B.V. Lawson: Media Murder

Comedy Film Nerds with William Elwood; with Mike Schmidt

Dan Stumpf: Curtain at Eight

Three Strangers

Ed Lynskey: Side Street

Elizabeth Foxwell: Three Strangers; With Good Reason: "Brooks Hefner on S. S. Van Dine"

Evan Lewis: Hubley Colt .45 capgun video

George Kelley: RoboCop (2014); "The Death of College as We Know It"

Iba Dawson: Fed Up; 31 Days of Oscar

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Flamingo Road; Possessed; The Damned Don't Cry; The Mark 

Glass, Funches, Varney and Kashian

Jackie Kashian: Todd Glass, Janet Varney and Ron Funches at SF Sketchfest; Chris Mancini on PS3 Games

James Reasoner: Eisenhower and Lutz

Jeff Segal: Horror/exploitation -film documentaries and videotape nostalgia: The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry, Slice and Dice, Rewind This! and more; Thriller (1970s UK series): "Screamer"

Jerry House: "Scientology: The Final Countdown"

John Charles: It's Alive! (1969); In the Year 2889

Juri Nummelin: Winter's Tale

Kate Laity: Women in Horror Month

Kliph Nesteroff: The Red Buttons Show with Eartha Kitt; Hiya Chum!; A Gentleman at Heart; Bracken's World

The Skin I Live In

Laura: The Tall Stranger; The Stand at Apache River

Lucy Brown: The Paradise

Martin Edwards: The Skin I Live In

Marty McKee: Aspen; Destination Inner Space; The Time Travelers; Scotland Yard Inspector; Pier 23; The Case of the Baby Sitter

Mary Robinette Kowal: conventional sexism (also: Rebecca Watson)

Michael Shonk: television series one can see on YouTube...and not on "legit" dvd, so far...

Mystery Dave: Beetlejuice

Doctor at Sea

Patti Abbott: Sugarfoot

Paul Gallegher: Writers in Conversation (at ICA, London):  "J. G. Ballard" (the post's header image is borderline NSFW)


Prashant Trikkanad: "We Are the World" and related projects;
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Richard Metzger: Seizure

Rick: CBS Agatha Christie telefilms; Doctor in the House and its sequels

Rod Lott: Hellraiser: Hellworld; Man Beast; The Ultimate Degenerate

Chase a Crooked Shadow

Ron Scheer: Gravel in Her Gut and Spit in Her Eye: The Life of Dorothy M. Johnson

Sergio Angelini: Chase a Crooked Shadow

Stacia Jones (et al.): Six Films: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three et al.

Stephen Bowie: Peyton Place: the day Mia Farrow cut her hair

Todd Mason: Perfect Sense; The Big Day (2001; aka We Met on the Vineyard): please see below.

Walter Albert: The Cockeyed World

Yvette Banek: Sid Caesar;  Mapp & Lucia

Two solid "smaller" films: Perfect Sense; The Big Day

Perfect Sense is a BBC production, from their film arm, in tandem with a number of northern European units; the Scandinavian presence is about as great as the Ingmar Bergman influence

The most blatant nod to Bergman in the cinematography...
Green and McGregor

is felt, atop being a film solidly in the recent spate of end-of-the-world films with British flavor, ranging through 28 Days Later and Children of Men to Sean of the Dead; however, this film about an unstoppable disease which robs its human victims of their major senses one by one is less prone to galumphing stupidity than most of those others (very much including 28 Days Later, where the action-film nature of it might allow one to forgive, and Children of Men, where such forgiveness is less likely given its supposedly more serious nature...even given how much of an improvement the film is on its source novel).  The film is built around the lives of an epidemiologist (Eva Green) and a high-end chef (Ewan McGregor) who meet in part because her apartment building is next to the back entrance and "smokers' lounge" of his restaurant, and he takes an opportunity to bum a cigaret from her one afternoon, just as the first signs of the coming outbreak are beginning to puzzle her working group. As the disease progresses, one first is overcome with a quick bout of severe depression and the sense of smell is lost; eventually the next step is a brief, uncontrollable urge to eat anything around one's self that can be seen as remotely food-like, then a loss of the sense of taste; as Green's character notes, these are the chemical-interaction senses, and there is a hope that since they are linked, they'll be the only ones affected. Meanwhile, our principals are both relatively closed-off personalities who find themselves more vulnerable than usual in the face of this plague, the chef obviously (like most people) trying to find ways to cope with the new necessity to make food attractive without flavor or scent; Green's scientist among those working hard to find any sort of handle on the disease, even as its effects are highly disruptive to civil society and their work. And then the next stage becomes apparent...the film is deftly put-together, the relation between the two somewhat bitter or at best self-involved careerists (they refer to themselves self-mockingly as "Mr. and Mrs. Arsehole" at one point) is believable, and while there are flaws (not quite enough is made of her research life, as opposed to his, cuisine being rather easier to present by film types than

At a street-performer's impromptu eulogy for lost senses.

microbiology; no attempt is made to make Green believably Scottish nor to explain why her sister [Connie Nielsen] is rather acceptably a Scot), they are made up for by the virtues. Including such offhand bits of interest as a point at which some of the lab animals are out of their cages, and we see the first interaction between rabbits and a monkey I'm aware of in film (the rabbits are very curious about this apelike creature, the monkey gentle but slightly spooked by their attention); readers of John Varley's novella "The Persistence of Vision" will find the ending a rather interesting variation, sadly relevant to the suddenness of the characters' predicament, vs. the sufficiently prepared-for lives of the characters in the Varley. It's good to see Green in a genuinely good film; Cracks was as close as she'd come in my experience previously.

Ivan Sergei and Margulies as the couple.

Even more flawed, and somewhat slighter, but still more deserving of one's attention than most of the last decade's wedding comedies (even the rather decent ones such as Jumping the Broom and Bridesmaids) and serio-comic drama (such as the mixed bag that is Rachel Getting Married), The Big Day (2001; working title We Met on the Vineyard) finds a large cast adroitly running through aspects of a wedding delayed in part by an errant groom, rather childishly acting out after first hearing on the morning of The Big Day that his fiancee and his brother once had a meaningless tryst well before the engaged couple met (his behavior is given Just Enough explanation by the film's resolution). The brother, being in AA, thought he'd choose that morning to Make Amends by telling him so. While the film does stray briefly into some rote sitcom and farce tropes while the best man attempts to save face for everyone by spinning barely credible excuses for the groom's delay, and the mother of the bride (Dixie Carter) is clearly more interested in the social coup the wedding is for her, than in any question of happiness for her daughter (Julianna Margulies, and it's a bit of a stretch to see Margulies as Carter's daughter) or guests, the effect

...a little joke on tightly-wound relatives...

of the film as a whole is charming and reasonably clever and realistic, particularly in the interplay between the bride and her sisters and friends, and the best man and brother of the groom.  If Perfect Sense owes something to the likes of Bergman's Shame, The Big Day has taken valuable lessons from Robert Altman's work, without replicating his obsessions nor overindulging in his penchant for heavily overlapping dialog. The cast of The Big Day is full of recognizable and fine character actors (including the screenwriters Nancy Banks and Andy Buckley), obviously having a good time in this indy production; I shared some of that fun as a viewer, and this very obscure item (playing this month on Showtime's "multiplex" channels and available only as an out-of-print US or in-print Dutch import dvd--unless one prefers the OP US VHS tape) deserves an audience.

Overlooked Films and A/V guest post: Jeff Segal on his recent horror and suspense film documentary and tv viewing...and videotape nostalgia

Recently, I watched The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry, a swiftly-paced documentary on ham-fisted yet sincere monster-loving actor/writer/director Paul Naschy's life and career, with

from The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry

plenty of comment on the prolific King of Spanish Horror Cinema from the likes of his wife and brood, as well as director-turned-commentator John Landis, Mick Garris, the unflappable Jack Taylor (a somnolent chap who squeezed many cult/exploitation/horror film roles in between international vacations), Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue director Jorge Grau, and many more, plus behind-the-scenes photos and footage, film clips, etc. Highly recommended to the Naschy fan and general Eurotrash scholars.

I've also recently caught the Brian Clemens' Thriller episode, "Screamer," featuring Legend of Hell House and The Innocents actress Pamela Franklin as an imperiled American (!) in backwoods Britain (sadly, the winsome Franklin suppressed her lovely British accent for the part and was saddled with an unflattering 'do). Clemens was known for his clever scripting of The Avengers and sundry twilight-era Hammer horrors but his 1970s UK Thriller anthology show, which I've never previously seen, has taken plenty of heat over the years. Clemens previously co-wrote and produced the suspenseful original version of And Soon the Darkness, which also starred Franklin.

I've seen Slice and Dice, a clip-packed documentary about slasher films which included footage from Michele Soavi's Stagefright, Mario Bava's Bay of Blood and the black-gloved, straight razor-filled giallos that flooded the market between them. The production runs through the expected slasher-film antecedents: Psycho, Peeping Tom, the Italian gialli titles and Black Christmas, then gleefully plunges into the genre proper. I've also watched From Romero To Rome, another British doc charting the influence of the original Night of the Living Dead, the rise of Spanish zombies with Tombs of the Blind Dead and Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (though they neglected the numerous Iberian Paul Naschy movies that involved traditional or Romeroesque zombies), and the effect of Dawn of the Dead and Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters on the genre; a good sampling of subsequent Italian movies, including Fulci's increasingly surreal oeuvre, are addressed by, among others, writer and cinema scholar Kim Newman.

from Rewind This!

I've watched Rewind This!, one of several documentaries dedicated to the rise and fall of the video market, which also includes the perspective of the Japanese as well as, included in the DVD's "special features," bits on the British Video Nasty debacle. This production should be pure nostalgia for many who read the Horror discussion lists (the psychological narcotic of nostalgia is a topic that turns up in those special feature segments as well). Rewind This! dedicates a lot of its running time to the horror and exploitation market, with veteran huckster Charles Band and others chiming in; the makers of the documentary acknowledge that the horror/exploitation market may not be the only points of interest for the retro-video fans but they are some of the most visible. 

I borrowed, rented and traded videotapes through the 1980s and much of the '90s and only began purchasing them new late in that decade, at a time when the writing on their wall was "Goodbye obsolete format, signed, DVD." During the first decade of the 21st century, I began picking among flea market vendors for a few videotape-only rarities and even ordered  VHS titles from online vendors, for those films not yet on DVD....