Newsletter48
The Ass Crack of Dawn
It’s 4:57 AM and it’s already hot outside. It’s going to be another scorcher.
An old Hollywood expression is, “It’s hard to make a good movie, and it’s hard to make a bad movie.” Movies are just hard to make. Making a good movie, meaning the film is well-received and highly respected, doesn’t happen very often. But to make two good movies in the same year is extremely rare. In 1974 Francis Coppola released “The Godfather Part II” and “The Conversation,” both of which were nominated for Best Picture. In 1948 John Huston released “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Key Largo,” both of which won Oscars in various categories. But the director with the best two films in one year was Victor Fleming. In 1939 Fleming directed both “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.” No director has had that good of year before or since.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got the great honor of having seen all of the nearly 200 Three Stooges’ shorts. The forgotten Stooges shorts are between 1956-59 with Joe Besser, who was a talented comedian, unlike Joe DeRita who replaced him. Within that span are the Stooges sci-fi shorts. One takes place on Sunev (Venus backward), where they are attacked by a monster, played by a very young Dan Blocker, who would go on to fame in “Bonanza.” Also making their first film appearances in Stooges’ shorts were: Walter Brennan as a train conductor in one of their earliest shorts in 1934 (in the next six years Walter Brennan would receive three Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, a record), and in one of the Stooges’ best shorts, “You Natzi Spy,” where they are electricians in a house full of Nazis (I just chuckled because that in and of itself is funny), and they manage to screw up the phone lines. There is a montage of people whose phones have gone haywire, and among them is a ridiculously young Lloyd Bridges saying in to a phone, “Hello, operator, operator.”
In the 1962 film, “The Music Man,” Robert Preston gets on a streetcar and sings a song. Also in the reasonably small streetcar set is a very obvious, very blond, Robert Redford as an extra.
On May 4, 1904, in Manchester, England, two local businessmen were introduced to each other, “Henry Royce, I’d like you to meet Charles Rolls.” In 1906 they formed one of the early car companies called Rolls-Royce. At that same time over in America, Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the airplane. The very first model of airplane that the brothers sold out of their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, was the called the Wright Flyer I. One of their first customers in 1910 was Charles Rolls, who had the wonderful contraption shipped to England. Charles Rolls then became not only the first aviator in England, but since he promptly crashed the plane and killed himself, he was also the first man killed in an airplane accident in England.
The sky has an orangey glow portending hot weather. Given a choice, I’ll take hot over cold.