REMEMBERANCE OF CHRISTMAS PAST 5

Lest anyone think that toys were the only things I got for Christmas when I was a kid, I present this. 

Published by Whitman, this hardcover novelization of the 1963 Walt Disney animated feature film is one of my most cherished treasures. In fact, pictured above is MY copy which I still have in my collection. Written in ink and in my mother's hand on the inside is the following: "To Frank Christmas 1963 from Mother & Daddy".

Priceless.

REMEMBERANCE OF CHRISTMAS PAST 4

THE FLINTSTONES debuted in prime time on ABC-TV in 1960. I was four years old at the time and I loved it. The show was immensely popular and it didn't take long for a slew of Flintstones related toys to hit the market.

 I had this one. Manufactured by Marx in 1962, this mechanical Dino the Dinosaur was a favorite plaything of mine. The battery operated Dino would move courtesy of wheels on the bottom of his feet. His body was dyed plush fabric over a mechanical frame while Dino's head was rubber/hard plastic. Fred was made of pressed tin. 

More Flintstones toys to come. Stay tuned. 

...THIS CAT SHAFT IS A BAD MOTHER....

For the record, there are two songs that I want played at my funeral (whenever that day comes and hopefully not for many, many years). The first is EL PASO by Marty Robbins. The second is Isaac Hayes' THEME FROM SHAFT. 

I'm not kidding.

For some reason, I never saw SHAFT when it was first released in1971. I've since seen it twice now and I love every minute of it. It's not a great film, in fact, far from it, but it's a landmark in the American cinema of the '70s, qualifying as the first of the "blaxploitation" film trend that dominated urban and inner city movie screens for much of the decade. I'm a huge blaxploitation fan and SHAFT is the grandaddy of them all.

Richard Roundtree stars as New York City private detective John Shaft. He's all leather jackets, turtle-neck shirts and .38 police specials. As the title song indicates, Shaft is indeed a ladies man, bedding both an African American woman and a white woman he picks up in a bar. He maintains a rat hole of an office for his private detective business, which must be profitable, since he has a cool apartment (complete with a  reel-to-reel tape machine and a spiral staircase). Shaft has a love/hate relationship with the NYPD and he's constantly being squeezed by Lt. Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi) for information about what's going on with the criminal gangs in Harlem.

What's going on is that the daughter of Harlem crime lord Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn), has been kidnapped and held for ransom by the Mafia. Shaft is the only man Bumpy can trust to get her back which Shaft does with the help of a group of radical young men led by Ben Buford (Christopher St. John). 

Roundtree owns the film from start to finish. He struts and swaggers around Manhattan with cool to spare, gleaning information from a variety of sources. When the action comes, he's tough enough to take a couple of slugs and keep going. That's right, this cat Shaft is a bad mother....

Hayes' Oscar winning title track is one for the ages, as is the rest of his score, which served as the template for countless other '70s detective films and television shows. Director Gordon Parks and cinematographer Urs Furrer have a real feel for the New York City locations and the whole production has that unmistakably '70s gritty look and flavor. 

Roundtree returned as Shaft in two sequels, SHAFT'S BIG SCORE ! (1972) and SHAFT IN AFRICA (1973) and played the detective in the short lived SHAFT television series on CBS-TV in 1973-1974.

 As an urban crime film, SHAFT is pretty routine. But as the opening salvo of the blaxploitation film trend, the introduction of a legendary screen hero and as a time capsule of NYC in the '70s, SHAFT can't be beat. 

Thumbs up.

I BLAME IT ON THE HOT PANTS

I recall seeing BILLY JACK (1971) a couple of times at the old Varsity Theater on the Drag in Austin when I was in high school. The first time was in the company of a young lady named Diane Howerton whom I went out with a few times. I remember that she wore a pair of the then popular "hot pants" shorts and I found it exceedingly difficult to keep my adolescent mind focused on the film. 

But when I did focus, I found BILLY JACK to be an amazingly profound film, full of messages about social justice, peace and love versus violence and hate, young vs. old, progressives against conservatives, hippies vs. straights, the generation gap, spirituality and way cool exhibitions of martial arts at the hands (and feet) of star Tom Laughlin. By the way, Laughlin also wrote, produced and directed BILLY JACK (there's an unsubstantiated rumor that he also made and served sandwiches to the cast and crew during lunch breaks). Produced on a shoestring budget, BILLY JACK grossed a pot load of money, making it one of the most successful independent films of the 1970s. And the biggest demographic buying those tickets were impressionable kids like me who thought the movie was an instant classic, ranking alongside WALKING TALL (1973) as one of the films that practically everyone at Austin High saw at least once. 

BILLY JACK was actually the second Laughlin production to feature half breed, Vietnam vet, martial artist and peaceful warrior Billy Jack. The first film, THE BORN LOSERS (1967) was marketed as a biker flick but it made enough money to allow Laughlin and his wife (and co-star/co-writer/co-producer) Delores Taylor to make BILLY JACK. The film was initially going to be an American International Pictures production and you can well imagine how that final product would have turned out. Next, the film was in production through 20th Century Fox whose executives  wanted to dictate creative terms to Laughlin, who would have none of that. Warner Brothers finally agreed to back the film and I'm sure they were glad they did. Two sequels followed, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (1974) and BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON (1977). I've never seen any of the other three Billy Jack films but I watched the 1971 entry this afternoon for the first time in forty-seven years.

You'll have to forgive my fifteen-year-old self for thinking that BILLY JACK was a profound film. I simply didn't know any better and was probably caught up in the buzz among my classmates about how great the movie was. I was for sure distracted by those hot pants, which left an, as you can tell, indelible impression upon my memories of the film.  BILLY JACK is one hot mess of a movie, a strident, preachy, rambling, overly earnest effort with a patchwork narrative and horrible acting (by both professionals and amateurs).

 The action scenes aren't nearly as well staged as I remembered them (any random episode of KUNG-FU had better martial arts fights) and the film is endlessly and needlessly padded with lame comedy improvisation shticks, bad "folk" songs, plot points that go nowhere (what the hell was the whole Billy gets bitten by a rattlesnake ceremony about?), a Chevy Corvette that survives being completely immersed in a mountain lake only to ride high and drive in the next scene, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't gun rack in a vintage pickup truck and on and on. 

The story, such as it is, concerns a pregnant young runaway, Barbara (Julie Webb), who takes refuge from her abusive father, Deputy Mike (genre veteran Kenneth Tobey) in a freestyle "school" on an Indian reservation. The school, in which literally everything and anything goes, is run by Jean Roberts (Taylor) and protected from the bigoted townsfolk by Billy Jack. The stakes escalate when Jean is raped by the son of a powerful local business man. The son, Bernard (David Roya), later kills Martin (Stan Rice), a young Indian boy who is in love with Barbara. All of this ugly violence pushes Billy Jack past the breaking point. He kills Bernard and Deputy Mike and prepares to make his final stand in an abandoned church with Barbara at his side. 

While I found BILLY JACK to be a truly terrible film, I have to give props to Laughlin and Taylor for having the courage and determination to take control of this franchise from start to finish and bring their vision, no matter how cockeyed, to the screen. I dunno, maybe things got better in the third and fourth films but for my money, one BILLY JACK movie is enough for this movie watcher.

Thumbs down.

REMEMBERANCE OF CHRISTMAS PAST 3

Remco's FASCINATION game debuted in 1961 so I got this electronic maze game for Christmas of either '61 or '62. Designed for two players, the object of the game was to get all three of the ball bearings out of the maze and into the holes at the top of the hand held playing surface. First player to land all three balls would cause the light on the tower (pictured in the middle above) to turn on and a buzzer to buzz. A lot harder than it looks and I don't recall that I ever mastered it. It took a lot of body English and you had to hold your tongue between your teeth just right. Spent hours playing it though. 

THE BIG HEAT

William McGivern's 1953 crime novel, THE BIG HEAT, is one of several McGivern books I've read over the last couple of years. I've thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of them and have reviewed several of them here on my blog. 

It's been years since I first saw Fritz Lang's 1953 film version of the material. I caught up with the film again this afternoon and found it to be a first class film noir, full of brutal violence, misogyny and nihilism.  

The film opens with crooked cop Tom Duncan committing suicide, a death that sets off a chain of events that will soon "blow the lid off of the garbage can". When homicide detective Sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), investigates, he discovers that the cop had connections to underworld kingpin Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), who also happens to "own" the police commissioner (Howard Wendell), a city council man and other men of influence. Lagana's right hand man is Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), a vicious thug who imports hit man Larry Gordon (Adam Williams) in from out-of-town to help tie up loose ends.

Those loose ends include B-girl Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green), a bar floozy who was having an affair with the now dead Duncan. She's brutally killed in order to keep her quiet. But Duncan's widow, Bertha (Jeanette Nolan), has already cut herself in for a piece of the action, using a letter left by her husband as blackmail material against Lagana. 

As Bannion continues his investigation, the heat starts to rise. Lagana and his hoods come after Bannion with multiple threats which climax with a car bombing in which Bannion's wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando), is killed. Bannion becomes a soulless automaton, a man with only one purpose in life: revenge. He's taken off of the police force but that doesn't stop his quest for bloody justice. He falls in with Stone's mistress, Debby Marsh (noir icon Gloria Grahame), who seeks protection from her murderous beau. When Stone finds out Debby and Bannion spent time together, he throws a pot of hot coffee in her face in the film's most infamous and shocking sequence. 

The horribly scarred Debby is now out for revenge of her own and things reach a violent climax in a penthouse apartment shoot-out between Bannion and Stone with Debby caught in the crossfire.

The affection Bannion has for the wounded Debby allows him to come out of his near-fugue state of single-minded revenge. The crime syndicate is exposed and Bannion resumes his place in the police department but he's paid a high price for his actions. 

But not as high as the price paid by every one of the four female characters in the film. The first to die is Lucy Chapman, followed by the innocent Katie Bannion. Then blackmailer Bertha Duncan is gunned down while Debby, the bad girl with the heart of gold, of course has to die at the film's climax. Lang, along with screenwriter Sydney Boehm and cinematographer Charles Lang (no relation to director Fritz) create a universe of corruption and violence in which human life is cheap and the price of redemption steep.

THE BIG HEAT came late in Lang's career in the United States. It was followed by HUMAN DESIRE (1954), MOONFLEET (1955), WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (1956) and BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (1956). Lang returned to Europe in 1959 and made a handful of films there. 

Such veteran actors as Paul Muni, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson were originally considered for the part of Bannion when the rights to McGivern's novel were owned by producer Jerry Wald. The powers that be at Columbia studios at the time wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part of Debby but 20th Century Fox, who had Monroe under contract, wanted too much money for the loan-out. Grahame, a much better choice, got the part. 

There are, of course, differences between McGivern's novel and Lang's film but both are extremely well done and well worth your time to read and watch. THE BIG HEAT ranks among the best of  '50s film noir. Highly recommended.

REMEMBERANCE OF CHRISTMAS PAST 2

SUPERCAR, the British kid-vid sf/action/adventure syndicated television series debuted in the United States in January 1962. Which means I must have gotten this jewel for Christmas of that year.

Produced by Gerry Anderson, SUPERCAR used the then cutting-edge "Supermarionation" puppeteering process that brought a fuller range of movement to characters and vehicles. Of course, I could still see the wires/strings making the puppets and various props move but after a few minutes I got used to it and gave myself over entirely to the story being told. SUPERCAR was just that, a "super" car that could travel on the land, in the air and under the sea. It was piloted by Mike Mercury and his weekly adventures held me spellbound as a youngster.

This toy version of Supercar had three wheels, with the rear two being fixed while the front, third wheel (barely visible in the picture above), rotated a full 360 degrees. Supercar was battery operated and came with a half dozen or so little plastic discs that contained various movements and maneuvers for the vehicle to execute. When you loaded the appropriate disc, Supercar would do such things as turn in a circle, run in reverse, move forward, spin in place, and other simple movements.

Alas, none of the discs made the car actually fly or be safe submersed in water but I nevertheless had a helluva lot of fun playing with this beauty.