My friend Mary decided to “take the challenge” at a strawberry shortcake restaurant near her home in Florida. The deal is simple — eat twelve pounds of strawberry shortcake within five minutes and the dessert is free.
Mary managed the feat with only seconds to spare. “I don't even remember eating those last few pounds,” she said. “I was just on automatic pilot at that point.”
As a run-up to National Strawberry Shortcake Day next Tuesday, my friend Paul decided to go into training early.
Next Tuesday, as everyone knows, is National Strawberry Shortcake Day. Stores all over the country are already running short of the berries and the fixings as folks scramble to stock up for the big celebration.
Restaurants which specialize in the magnificent treat, like the one in Florida whose sign is shown above, are gearing up for the biggest crowds of the year.
There's a reason that millions agree — National Strawberry Shortcake Day is the most delicious day of the year!
Captain At Sea by Anton Otto Fischer . . .
A Moment Of Pleasure
Strawberries — yum!
A Kiss Goodbye
As I recall, they were all pretty much like this — though it's possible my memory is playing tricks on me . . .
[Image by Glen Orbik]
1931.
Be still, my heart.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Most B-movie Westerns were done as parts of series featuring a star and
recurring actors in supporting roles, often a comic sidekick but
sometimes a musical sidekick, if the star wasn’t himself a singing
cowboy. The bad guys and the female romantic leads changed from
picture to picture.
When RKO set Tim Holt up as the star of his own B-Western series in the
early 1940s, they gave him a comic sidekick and a musical sidekick.
Even when a B-Western star didn’t have a musical sidekick, musical
numbers were usually a part of the formula in the 1930s and 1940s, and
they were usually anachronistic — Western Swing numbers written for
the films rather than authentic cowboy songs.
Along the Rio Grande, from 1940, is the first film in the new Tim Holt B-Western
collection from The Warner Archive which features Holt in the starring role. It was, I believe, the third B-Western in which he starred. (He had earned his spurs before this playing second leads to more established B-Western stars.)
These early Holt Westerns play like variety shows rather than dramas.
Dramatic exposition and action sequences alternate with musical numbers
and comedy bits in a regular pattern. In a way they harken back to the
Western arena shows of the 19th Century, which were essentially variety
shows with a Western theme, mixing staged dramatic spectacles — mini-narratives, like the attack on the stagecoach, on the settler’s cabin — with self-contained acts featuring theatrical displays of marksmanship and horsemanship, all knitted together with musical
interludes.
A little something for everybody was the idea in most B-Westerns, too — all of a simple and unsophisticated nature, reflecting the primary audience for these films, kids
everywhere and older folks in the smaller towns and rural areas.
The variety is what keeps the films enjoyable even today. The
conventional plots and merely serviceable acting couldn’t sustain them
as works of drama, but (as was true in vaudeville, or Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West) you always knew there was going to be a change of pace soon
— another routine by the comic sidekick, another song, another awkward
but charming interchange with the leading lady, another thrilling chase
on horseback.
There’s usually a lot of entertainment packed into these short films —
modest, perhaps, but pleasantly varied. The horsemanship is always
first-rate, though, and if all else disappoints, you rarely have long
to wait before someone says, “We’ve got to head them off at the pass!”
. . . at which point the screen will explode with beautiful images of
beautiful animals galloping through scenic landscapes, with heroic
figures in the saddle, bent on righting one wrong or another. If for
nothing else than this, the B-Western remains a delightfully dependable
form of amusement.
Many people know The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli's classic melodrama about the film business, from 1952, produced by John Houseman and starring Kirk Douglas, with a script by Charles Schnee, based on a story by George Bradshaw.
Ten years later, Minnelli, Houseman, Douglas and Schnee tackled the same subject again, in their adaptation of Irwin Shaw's novel Two Weeks In Another Town. The second film is much darker, and less well known — it flopped at the box office and was only released on DVD this year, by The Warner Archive.
Long known as a kind of lesser pendant to The Bad and the Beautiful, it has nevertheless found champions among admirers of Minnelli's work, and is by far the greater film — one of Minnelli's masterpieces.
I have written before about my problems with The Bad and the Beautiful (above) — for my views on it click here — but they boil down to my mistrust of the film's self-congratulatory message. It displays a gallery of glamorous but despicable characters, lets us relish their savaging of each other, but ultimately asks us to admire them as noble monsters for their dedication to the art of film. The Bad and the Beautiful all but suggests that their egomania and meanness are required attributes for those who serve the celluloid muse.
When artists excuse the bad behavior and character flaws of artists in this way, we have a right to be suspicious of their motives, to resent the self-serving nature of the enterprise, which may be telling us more about the artists who actually made the film than about the nature of artistic creation.
Two Weeks In Another Town is a much more mature and honest work. It's a descent into the hell that the film business really is — a hell in which personal betrayal and selfishness serve only as tokens of power, not as the means of artistic accomplishment. It charts the personal cost of the industry's meanness, not to its obvious victims, the system's losers, but to those who exercise their power for show, to demonstrate prestige — in short, to the “winners”.
All the industry professionals featured in the film have shriveled souls, live in a state of existential terror. As they howl on the margins of nonentity, they look about desperately for one last target, one last peer to hurt and humiliate, as though they might recover their sense of self in the act.
It's truly terrifying, and only two people escape from this version of the wreck of the Pequod — a young actor embarked on a self-destructive binge and the older actor who jerks him out of the whirlpool at the last minute, because he's been there himself and knows what it feels like to drown.
Kirk Douglas, in one of his greatest performances, plays the older actor. We meet him as he hovers near rock bottom as a man and an artist, his life and his career in shambles. Finally hitting rock bottom on location in Rome, in a desperate bid to salvage his career, is what saves him. It's when he gives up on recovering his past that he finds a way to the future. It's a powerful tale, but not very pleasant, and one can see why audiences rejected this look at the dream factory without illusions. We really don't want to see too much of that man behind the curtain, especially when he turns out to be a vicious jerk.
Two Weeks In Another Town may be the best movie ever made about the film business, and it's definitely one of Minnelli's most beautifully crafted films, with consistently inventive use of the Cinemascope frame and of lurid colors that mirror the lurid recesses of the Hollywood soul. The acting is uniformly fine, even from George Hamilton doing a pretty good impersonation of James Dean. Minnelli got Edward G. Robinson to give a restrained performance, and Cyd Charisse an unrestrained one — extraordinary accomplishments. Charisse has an episode of hysterics in a speeding car that will chill your blood.
The Bad and the Beautiful is more satisfying, the way a lie can be more satisfying than the truth — for a while, anyway. The later film is two weeks in another town altogether — the real town of Hollywood, which can't escape itself even when it goes on location in Rome.
From the days when it was still made with cane sugar . . .
Click on the image to enlarge.
Of the many pleasures B-Westerns can deliver, not the least of them is incoherence — both narrative incoherence and conceptual incoherence. These movies were made quickly, to fill out release schedules. “Elements” — stars, character types, action sequences, themes, locations — were taken from an existing pool and sometimes thrown together illogically, just to get something in the can and out to theaters in time for next Saturday's matinee.
The results can be oddly exhilarating.
A case in point is the second film in the recently released Tim Holt collection from The Warner Archive, The Law West Of Tombstone. Holt plays the second lead here in a film starring Harry Carey (above). Carey was a big Western star in the silent era, most famous for his collaborations with John Ford, and he still had enough of a following to allow him to carry a B-Western well into the 1930s, but he was getting too old to play a traditional leading man by the time this film was made, in 1938.
The solution was to make Carey a kind of featured character actor, and to let the much younger and more vital Holt handle the romance and the big action sequences. It was all part of a process — Carey's name and his reputation as an authentic Western star sold the picture to aging fans of the genre, even as Holt was being groomed as a Western star in his own right, someone who could appeal to the younger fans.
The sequences featuring Carey and the sequences featuring Holt have not been fully integrated with each other. You get a sense that they were conceived separately and then cobbled together without regard for dramatic consistency. Carey is introduced in New York, running an improbable scam on a wealthy Easterner, then shuttled back to the West where he's soon sentenced for another scam, and given a reprieve in return for bringing the “Tonto Kid” to justice.
Holt plays the Tonto Kid, and the Carey character has no intention of bringing him to justice — he actually wants him to marry his daughter, who doesn't know she's his daughter. The daughter is engaged to marry the Tonto Kid's partner in crime, who's a genuine bad guy. The Tonto Kid kills him in self defense in a bar fight, but the daughter thinks it's a case of murder. “You killed him!” she screams at Holt. “Yeah,” Holt says, with a casual “so what?” look on his face.
At this point, the plot transforms itself into the tale of a range war between some local ranchers and a tribe of Indians being manipulated by corrupt agents. Did I mention that the Carey character has a pet monkey?
It's all quite mad.
In the midst of the muddled melodrama, there's a train robbery, preceded and ended by stunning shots of the robbers, Holt and his partner, boarding and escaping from the train — off of and onto the backs of horses running beside the train. These are shot from the platform at the back of the train in single takes, without stunt doubles. The images are incredibly exciting and beautiful, and when you're watching them you just don't give a damn about the plot anymore. On some level they justify the whole film.
Fans of Josef von Sternberg's silent films will be tickled to see Evelyn Brent, who starred in two of them, featured in The Law West Of Tombstone in a
supporting role as an aging gold-digger, who's an old flame of the Carey character — another nod, perhaps, to the audience's nostalgia for the silent era. There are echoes within echoes in the Western genre here. In von Sternberg's film Underworld, Brent plays a character called “Feathers” (above), the nickname given to the Angie Dickinson character in Rio Bravo in homage to the earlier film, from which Hawks also borrowed the spittoon gag in the opening scene with Dean Martin. And in the last shot of The Searchers, John Wayne delivers one of Carey's signature gestures, grabbing on to his left arm with his right hand, as an homage to the late Western star. Carey's son Harry Carey, Jr. appears in many Westerns by Ford and other directors, including Hawks, and Carey's widow Olive Borden appears in The Searchers.
If The Law West Of Tombstone had been made last year, we might be tempted to read it as a deconstruction of the B-Western form, and to find the exercise extremely witty and sophisticated, charmingly surreal. Audiences of the time may have experienced it in much the same way, as an incoherent but delightfully demented compilation of familiar elements — a kind of freewheeling jumble with its own bizarre integrity, like a pile of pieces from a disassembled jigsaw puzzle. You enjoy each element for what it is, and your enjoyment becomes the film's organizing principle, in the absence of any other.
Just another ordinary night in Las Vegas . . .
Click on the image to enlarge.