Old Charlie's Angels

I was sitting here with Charlie's Angels, the old '70's TV series on. It was so bad. So very, very bad. 

I read somewhere that film schools focused on the wrong things. The writing, the acting and the music were more important than the directing.  I wonder if that's true. The show was so poorly made, would better music have helped? Maybe better or more idiosyncratic content would have compensated for the terrible form.

In this show, the girls were driving around in Ford Pintos and Mustang II's, and Bosley was driving one of those enormous Ford's.

Just better cars would have been a vast improvement. Emma Peel drove a Lotus Elan on The Avengers. Mazda later based the Miata on the Elan.

And Bosley---it wasn't his fault, but he was terrible. 1970's clothing was too tight. It looked uncomfortable and if you were the least bit overweight it looked REALLY uncomfortable. Bosley would have been better wearing comfortable clothing made from natural fibers and driving a midsize car he could easily park or turn around in. And if he were a different person. 

They put no thought into anything. They all had snub-nosed .38's. They could have broken that up. Given them a variety of revolvers and automatics.

And why were the women so helpless? They showed one of them learning police Jiu-Jitsu in the opening credits. They couldn't put in fake TV karate fights? Again, Emma Peel should have been their model.

I haven't watched many episodes. There was one where one of the girls goes undercover in a women's prison. The scene where she's first brought to the prison was filmed in what looked like the waiting room in a dentist office with the bad art hanging on the walls. The scene in the prison yard was filmed at a public swimming pool. You know how swimming pools have high fences topped with barbed wire so drunks won't climb over at night and drown? I guess they figured this would work well enough as a prison, but they made no effort to conceal the fact that there was a swimming pool. One of the angels gets into a cat fight with another inmate and knocks her into the water.

It was terrible, but you'd think zero budget filmmakers could show the same---well, I wouldn't call it creativity exactly. 

A 1952 murder case

There was a murder about twenty minutes down the freeway from here 67 years ago.

I had gone digging through microfilm for the local newspaper at the library. I was looking for a theater review from 1952. I didn't find it but I started reading the local news. Back then, a married woman with a baby was sentenced to sixty days in jail for drinking a beer because she was under 21, a blind couple got five years for writing bad checks, and a sixteen-year-old boy got six months for vagrancy.

I was shocked at how expensive things were. A clock radio cost $50 ($485 today). I looked at the classified ads. A lot of people lived in single rooms and, adjusting for inflation, rent wasn't cheap even in a small city.

I guess gas wasn't all that cheap then. There were ads for a brand of English car I never heard of and its only selling point was gas mileage.

At the university, frat-boys staged a failed panty raid, but it inspired a charity clothing drive.

And a 15-year-old was the youngest person in state history at the time to be charged with first degree murder. His name was Elmer.

I read the news that Elmer was found guilty of the crime first. It disturbed me because law enforcement and juvenile justice must have been terrible back then. I wondered if he really did it. So I looked at the newspapers from several days earlier and read about the trial.

The victim was an 18-year-old girl named Mary. She lived on a farm near the defendant's home. She was deaf and mute. She had never gone to school because of her disabilities. She was pregnant and had been shot in the back of the head with a .22 caliber pistol while she was picking flowers.

I don't know what made them suspect Elmer, but the evidence against him was that the girl was shot with a Colt Woodsman pistol that belonged to his father and footprints made by his boots were found in the mud. The boots were later found stuffed in a hollow tree trunk.

Elmer was the only defense witness at the trial. His attorney asked him a question to get him started and he told the story.

He said that he and another guy were doing some farm work, hauling something in a Model A truck. The engine quit. He started working on getting it started again. While doing this, a mean-looking old man came walking up behind him. He was startled and almost jump two feet.

Your father got any guns? the mean-looking old man asked.

Yes, sir, he does, Elmer replied.

Go get me one!

Oh, no, sir, Elmer said.  I'm not allowed to touch any of the guns.

But the old man looked really mean, so Elmer went in and got one.

Now gimme them boots! the old man said.

Elmer gave him his boots. The old man put them on. He walked off to Mary's house. Elmer saw the old man motion to Mary who was inside. She came out. They walked off. Elmer heard a shot. Then the old man came walking back. He gave Elmer the gun and told him to put it back where he got it, gave him boots back and told him to get rid of them and warned him to tell no one about it or he would kill him, too.

He said he didn't know who the old man was at the time, but now he knew that it was the victim's grandfather.

The prosecutor ripped him apart on cross examination.

Elmer was convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison. He went to regular adult prison. He would be eligible for parole in seven years and people thought he'd probably be released then.

There was an editorial in the paper after his conviction. They speculated about what would become of him in prison. "He will probably become a homosexual," it actually said.

It was probably twenty-five years ago that I read about that case. I've told a few people the story over the years. I thought it was funny how stupid this kid was, but the story just seems depressing now.

I started thinking back to it for some reason. I googled it and with some effort was able to find the old newspaper articles online.

The only new thing I found in the news about Elmer was published three years later. When he was eighteen, it was reported that he had escaped from prison. This turned out not to be the case. He was in the prison hiding in a pile of hay to avoid going to the dentist the next day. I imagine that would have kept him in prison longer.

Obviously he wasn't the brightest guy in the world.

I did some google searches. It's surprising how many people there are with the same name, but I found him. I don't know when he got out of prison, but he was living in Idaho. He died about ten years ago at 72.

I did some more searching on an ancestry site. He had two siblings who died in infancy, his grandfather was born in Kentucky and moved to Oregon and was in the Spanish-American War. His paternal grandmother died at a young age. I got the impression that his family wanted to forget he existed or at least wanted other people to forget. I found obituaries for other members of his family and he wasn't listed as one of their survivors.

According to the newspaper, his mother cried when he was convicted, but, really, did she want to take him home after that?

If you're going to have guns in the house, at least lock them up.

Mr Rogers Neighborhood

The only times I watched Mr Roger's Neighborhood was in pre-school. A couple of times they'd roll a TV in and turn it on. It started out great, with the miniature houses and the toy cars. I wanted to see more of that, but instead we have this guy changing his sweater and his shoes. The puppets were terrible.

It was no Sesame Street. Sesame Street was flashier, tried to use advertising tricks to teach phonics which probably isn't all that great either. Which was more cerebral?

I never liked Captain Kangaroo, either. I didn't like his hair and the stuff on it wasn't interesting or amusing. I guess I watched it enough that I knew they had a moose and Mr Greenjeans. They had a clown who would sweep up spotlights on the floor which was funny for about two seconds.

And then there was Art Linkletter. I watched his show only once in preschool. He was interviewing children, asking them each the same question. This must have been around 1967. He asked them, "What do your mommy and daddy hit you with?"

I'm sure this new movie about the guy is fine, though. Fred Rogers always seemed like a nice guy.

New Cats musical cost $300 million

They could have made one and a half MCU movies for that!

There was a time when musicals were considered educational for some reason. Maybe they thought they were expanding the limits of your attention span by making you sit through three solid hours of that crap.  I got dragged off to see Oliver! There was The Sound of Music, of course, but I only remember seeing that on TV.

But now Cats is a motion picture. Has actors with computer generated fur. And word is that the thing cost just under $300 million.

I don't know if this formula still applies when you get into absurdly expensive movies, but in general, they have to gross two and a half times their budget just to break even. In theory, this thing will have to gross $750 million or it will lose money. Nothing on Broadway is THAT popular.

What is it about, anyway? Does it have a plot of any kind?

It's something comic book fans can wave in your face next time anyone brings up the vast sums thrown away on idiotic superhero movies. They should start working out carefully crafted arguments now.

For those making the case against comic book movies, when their fans bring up Cats, just say, "That's whataboutism!"

Polanski movie doing pretty well in France

I don't know what this means or to whom this is some kind of victory, but Roman Polanski's movie, An Officer and a Spy, is doing pretty well in France in spite of the accusation that Polanski raped an 18-year-old actress in France in 1975. The gross is between $8.7 and $11 million. They've sold

I don't know how big the French market is or how most French movies do there. I don't know if doing well in France is enough. Maybe the French are more open-minded, or maybe there's not much else to watch, or maybe movies in general don't perform especially well there.

From Variety:

Ticket sales for “An Officer and a Spy” grew over the weekend. Eric Marti, general manager for Comscore France, said the uptick was a sign that the film is enjoying strong word-of-mouth and will likely continue to perform well in the weeks to come.

“‘An Officer and a Spy’ has enough legs to sell between 1.2 million to 1.5 million admissions (and gross between $8.7 million to $11 million) in France, slightly more than Polanski’s 2010 film ‘The Ghost Writer,'” Comscore said.

But Marti said the film would have done substantially better without the controversy surrounding Polanski, whom former actor Valentine Monnier recently accused of raping her in 1975, when she was 18.

Polanski's Pirates was his biggest hit in France selling two million tickets. It was in English like a lot of Polanski movies, but the French are open to dubbing.

I just saw a dubbed movie on Netflix. I don't know what it was and I didn't watch it all. But I'm tired of reading subtitles. I want to watch movies on TV like it's TV, so you can watch it while sitting on the computer, reading a magazine, doing some housework or whatever else people do with the TV on. I don't want to have to sit there with my eyes glued to the set so I don't miss what's going on. The dubbed version was fine.

Now, there was Luc Moullet's New Wave French western A Girl is a Gun. Perhaps getting into the spirit of bad dubbing, Jean-Pierre Leaud's dialogue was dubbed in a deep voice that was nothing like his. And I've seen dubbed foreign films where thirteen-year-old boys sound like middle-aged cigarette smoking alcoholics. But this thing I saw, whatever it was, was great. I wasn't used to seeing stuff dubbed so it took me a second to realize it was even through they weren't that careful matching up the syllables. Which is good.

I saw this old Italian crime movie. It was awful. But judging from the opening credits, one of the three stars was an American and was presumably speaking English, so I watched their mouths trying to tell which one was English dubbed in English, and I couldn't tell. The dubbing was so well done it could have been any of them.

Which is why I didn't trust it. I want them to translate for accuracy, not to get the syllables to match.

Back in the days before video, there were books on film making which argued passionately for dubbing. You could change lines, you could hire actors for looks and have real actors dub their voices, you could use any camera even if it wasn't normally suited for live sound, you don't have to worry about background noise and the director could talk to the actors while they film the scene.

And, really, with digital video, you'd still have those advantages and do-it-yourself dubbing would be easier now than in the old days when you had to figure out how to dub dialog without the projector noise.

Something I read

I read an attack on Jojo Rabbit. I guess it was an attack. I don't remember.

But they pointed out that, in the movie The Producers, the play "Springtime for Hitler" that becomes an unintentional hit comedy wasn't actually funny.

And now that I think back to it, what exactly were they laughing at?

The Hunting Party (1971)

I was watching an episode The Rifleman. It was directed by Don Medford.

"Who's that?" I thought.

I googled him.

Don Medford was a TV director who also directed a couple of movies one of which was The Hunting Party, a 1971 British/US co-production filmed in Spain. Oliver Reed is head of a large band of outlaws. They kidnap Candice Bergen because they think she's the schoolmarm and Oliver Reed wants her to teach him how to read. They don't say why he wants to become literate and I don't think school teachers in the Old West had any special skills back then. They knew how to read but I doubt they knew much about teaching.

Candice's wealthy impotent sadist husband (Gene Hackman) was out on a hunting trip with his business associates. He bought them each a high powered rifle with a long old-timey telescopic site that gives it a range of 800 yards. When they get word that his wife has been kidnapped, they go after them. They figure they'll find the band of outlaws and pick them off from a great distance so they can't shoot back.

The movie was lousily received. Everyone hated it. Starts with Oliver Reed and his friends cutting up a cow they killed. They eat raw meat fresh from the cow.

There's something they warn film students about. Don't use toy guns in your movies. That goes for airsoft guns and BB guns, too, although I've seen movies where people used them and they worked fine. But in this movie, the rifles with the long telescopic sites were obviously fake. They clearly didn't weigh anything. You could see that the barrels were light tubes rather than heavy gun barrels.

The gimmick with the rifles might have been better if they didn't all have one. They don't explain why Gene Hackman didn't simply kill Oliver Reed---he could have done it a couple of times but didn't bother.

There just wasn't much of a plot.

The emotionally repressed British and an American TV director tried to make their own overwrought Italian western, but it just wasn't in their nature.

You know how, in old episodes of Barnaby Jones they always tried to build up to a big dramatic conclusion and it never, ever came out anywhere near as good as they thought it would? Same thing here.