22nd
Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Nov. 23-29, 2009
Hollywood Party (TCM, 5am, Wednesday, Nov. 25)
Included in the book Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies is an essay I co-wrote with Larry Johnson about the stereotype of the nouveau riche Oklahoma tycoon in films of the early 1930s. One of the pictures we used to illustrate our points was the 1934 comic farrago Hollywood Party. It’s a perfect mess of a movie that went through seven directors, including Sam Wood and George Stevens, before poor Roy Rowland got stuck with taking screen credit.
Either a grab bag of mixed results or a Dada masterpiece, the film stars Jimmy Durante as a movie star whose franchise character is Schnarzan the Conqueror (Durante was famous for having a huge nose, or schnozzle). Audiences are tiring of seeing Schnarzan battle the same moth-eaten lion in every picture so he throws a party to impress a guy from whom he wants to buy a new lion. He’s also being pressured by Liondoro (George Givot), a cut rate movie Tarzan who crashes the party and begins flirting with the silly and vain wife (Polly Moran) of the Okie millionaire (Charles Butterworth). And that’s pretty much it for plot.
What makes the movie watchable—maybe even memorable, depending on your taste and level of maturity—is the lineup of comic cameos the film contains. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, with the beautifully timed assistance of the beautifully shaped Lupe Valez (the Mexican Spitfire), perform their egg routine. Mickey Mouse appears with an animated song sequence, and even the Three Stooges pop up as obnoxious autograph hunters. The opening musical number, in all its woo-hoo pre-Code glory, was written by Richard Rodgers (of Oklahoma fame) and his first and best collaborator Lorenz Hart.
It’s all absolute anarchy of a kind no one would dare present to the multiplex public today. See it with your kids and watch their little jaws drop open with incredulity. — Doug Bentin
Raising Arizona (IFC, 4:35 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 26, 10:15 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 29)
Surely, this Coen brothers film is something to be Thankful for as we head into the holiday season. As Nicolas Cage roars into theaters with his Werner Herzog-directed, crazy-ass, bad-ass Terrence McDonagh in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, let us take a moment to appreciate this child of the House of Coppola in one of his sweetest roles. Cage’s H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona (1987) shows the actor at his most appealing and amusing. The only character who comes close to this same kind of peculiar charm is Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck, which opened the same year. Cage is always a bit off, a bit weird, but at his offest and weirdest best he captures truths about the human condition more profound that any thespian playing Hamlet could discover and display. He and the equally wonderful Holly Hunter as Edwina “Ed McDunnough capture the intense longing of the childless for a child in a movie that’s all about family. The good guys are great, but the bad guys are even greater and just as much about family. With names right out of Faulkner, Gale and Evelle Snoats (John Goodman and William Forstythe) steal everything, including every scene they are in. Quotable quotes abound, but really only if delivered in the voice of the actor who delivered the line originally. A sampler: H.I.’s “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House. I dunno. They say he’s a decent man, so maybe his advisers are confused,” or Ed’s “Gimme that baby, you warthog from hell” or Ed’s barked-out “Turn to the right” as, snapping H.I.’s mug shot, she falls in love. —Kathryn Jenson White
The Notorious Bettie Page (IFC, 7:30pm Sunday, Nov. 29; 12am Monday, Nov. 30)
“Venus on the spike heel,” is how sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison described Bettie Page, the queen of the 1950s-era pin-ups. “She is lust on an ice cream cone (two scoops), enthusiasm in the whisper of nylon, post-pubescent rambunctiousness in the beat seat of a Studebaker Commander.” It’s a testament to the sparkling 2006 biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page, that it captures Bettie’s sexual playfulness without lapsing into caricature. Director Mary Harron (American Psycho) uses the Bettie myth to canvas the winking early days of pornography and its comparative innocence (!) to what it has become. Gretchen Mol fully inhabits the title role, conveying the pin-up model’s sweetness and almost supernatural absence of guile. A surprising gem. — Phil Bacharach
