Friday, March 22, 2024

 The Twilight Zone: Steel 

(This post is part of the 10th Annual Favorite TV Show Episodes Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

In real life and otherwise, happy endings are rare in boxing. 

It’s 1974 and professional boxing between humans has been banned, with androids now taking their place in the ring. Steel (Lee Marvin) is an ex-prizefighter and manager of Battling Maxo, a robot boxer whose best days are behind it. Steel, his partner and Maxo have traveled by bus from Philadelphia to Kansas for a fight, lured by the promise of a $500 payday – money that be used for new parts and patches for Maxo. 

While running Maxo through its paces before the bout, an internal spring breaks, leaving the android useless. His back against the wall and desperately in need of the cash, Steel disguises himself as Maxo, darkening his hair and taking on the blank look and stiff posture of an automaton, to climb into the ring against a far superior boxing robot. 

Steel takes a pounding from his android opponent and since the fight barely lasts a round, the promoter will only fork over half the prize money. Afterwards, a battered and exhausted Steel begins to recalculate how to make it back to Philadelphia and repair Maxo with less money. 

Steel first aired in October 1963 amidst an air of unease about boxing. On a nationally televised fight in March 1962, Emile Griffith backed Bernie Paret into a corner and pounded him with 29 unanswered punches. Paret collapsed, fell into a coma and died ten days later from massive brain hemorrhaging. In a 1963 televised bout, Sugar Ramos staggered opponent Davey Moore, who fell into a rope, injuring his brain stem. Moore died 75 hours later. 

Moore’s death immediately became a cause célèbre. Editorials cried out for boxing to be outlawed. Pope John XXIII called the sport “barbaric” and “contrary to natural principles.” Bob Dylan wrote “Who Killed Davey Moore,” taking the voice of Ramos: “I hit him, I hit him, yes, it’s true/But that’s what I’m paid to do/Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say kill/It was destiny, it was God’s will.” 

It also led toy designers Marvin Glass and Associates to abandon development of a toy featuring two metal boxers facing off in a ring, their actions activated by control buttons. But when it was suggested using boxer robots that fall apart rather than human figures that fall over when hit, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots was born, hitting toy store shelves in 1964. We’ll likely never know if the airing of Steel somehow influenced it.


Steel is probably the best known of several Twilight Zone episodes that revolved around boxing. Rod Serling had a lifelong passion for the sport, as participant (17 Golden Gloves matches) and author (Requiem for a Heavyweight). 

While the episode’s underlying theme of man vs. machine resonates in these days of AI, Serling’s elegy at the end of Steel is a positive and hopeful statement about the human spirit that transcends boxing: “No matter what the future brings, man's capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any and all changes made by his society.” 

Given that, maybe Steel is a boxing story with a happy ending.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Crayons to perfume 

The World of Henry Orient was outdated the moment it premiered in March 1964. Not that the film doesn't have lasting merits. It does. Essentially, it’s an R-rated Disney movie about a couple of just-barely teenage girls who develop an obsessive crush on Henry Orient, a goofy avant-garde pianist. But the film also underscores the cultural reality back then that young girls had some slim pickings when looking for cute, non-threatening guys with which to channel their teenage infatuations. 

16 Magazine was the Dow Jones Index of teenage heartthrobs, and a quick review of its covers from late 1963 shows a true bear market. There was the bland (Paul Petersen of The Donna Reed Show) and the blander (Johnny Crawford from The Rifleman), and a group of actors whose ages might have made them old enough to parent a 16 Magazine reader: George Chakiris (31 and maybe a bit too swarthy), Russ Tamblyn and Richard Chamberlain (both 29). 

Pop stars? Bobby Vinton had a couple of huge chart hits with Blue Velvet and There I’ve Said It Again, but he wasn’t someone to fantasize over, a decade before he became the Polish Prince. Bobby Rydell was 21 and at the absolute end of his career as a pop star. The editors of 16, with a hint of desperation, began padding things out with features about nice-girl role models like Patty Duke, Shelley Fabares and Hayley Mills. 

The World of Henry Orient was filmed between July and October 1963, and the girls in the movie, played by Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker, are filmed in slow-motion jumping, skipping and running around Central Park and Greenwich Village with a kind of soaring innocence and optimism that maybe the country – feeling good enough to describe itself as Camelot – was feeling up till then. 

By the time the movie opened on March 19, 1964, an “eternal flame” burned over John Kennedy’s gravesite in Arlington Cemetery and the Beatles, heretofore unknown, owned the first four spots on Billboard’s Hot 100. 16, meanwhile, kicked off its own golden age, beginning its breathless monthly coverage of the Beatles, then the Dave Clark 5, Peter & Gordon, the Monkees, Mark Lindsey, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy and finally the Osmonds. 

The World of Henry Orient, having spun off its axis, was gone forever.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Sophisticated Boom Boom 

Nearly forgotten in the sixty years since their first hit, the Shangri-Las hit the news this past weekend when Mary Weiss, their blonde lead singer, died at age 75. 

The Shangri-Las’ musical coming of age came just as Beatlemania was crashing the shores and the Brill Building girl group sound began to falter. Four teenagers from Queens, sisters Mary and Betty Weiss and twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, cut “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and it went to #5 in July, 1964. Even in a year with so many great records – “Dancing in the Street,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “She Loves You,” “Oh Pretty Woman” – “Remember,” with its doomsday piano chords, seagull sounds, finger snaps and Mary Weiss’ emotional vocal still holds up its end quite well. 


I was just a kid, so older girls were a mystery, but I’d watch the Shangri-Las lip-synching on Clay Cole’s dance show, and they seemed to have a worldliness about them, like the high school girls I’d see at the Woolworth’s downtown, shopping for make-up and wearing their boyfriend’s oversized blue and gold letter jackets. 

The Shangri-Las’ label wasted no time with a follow-up. “Remember” was still in the top five when “Leader of the Pack” was released that October. By the end of November it hit #1. 

This video tells you all you need to know about how seriously adults, especially variety show directors, took the record: 


The song starts as every parent’s bad dream – their daughter in love with a dropout from the “wrong side of town,” a J.D. who’s convinced her that he has a shy, vulnerable side (“They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad’). But it shifts gears and becomes the teenager’s nightmare when dad tells her to dump the loser; he pulls off recklessly onto the rain-slicked road and crashes his motorcycle. Jimmy’s dead! And it’s dad’s fault! 

Shangri-La records were equal parts innocence and toughness, moody teenage melodramas. And musically adventurous: sassy vocals in “Sophisticated Boom Boom,” Iron Butterfly psychedelic overtones of  “The Sweet Sounds of Summer” or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata playing underneath “Past, Present and Future,” they were all groundbreaking in their own way. 

Shadow Morton wrote "Remember" and co-wrote "Leader of the Pack." He produced the Shangri-Las and captured all that angsty teenage attitude before going on to produce the Vanilla Fudge, whose over-wrought vocals and arrangements squeezed every bit of drama possible from their Motown and Beatles covers, and Janis Ian. Think of  “Society’s Child” as essentially a Shangri-Las record with a wider worldview. 

Growing up, Bruce Springsteen surely internalized some of these sounds. His arrangements of “Jungleland” and “Backstreets” owed a lot to Morton. And when he sang, “I know your daddy don’t dig me, but he never did understand,” the Leader of the Pack couldn’t have said it any better.

Friday, January 12, 2024

A year of movies 

Last year, I watched 186 movies, mostly recorded off TCM, a few off lesser cable movie channels and one in an actual movie theatre. Here’s a couple of random thoughts. 

The Bowery Boys made 48 movies and I watched 21 of them last year, much more than any human should endure. If you’re looking for continuity within the Bowery Boys Cinematic Universe, forget it. What drove me crazy was the character of Gabe (Gabe Dell), whose personality and occupation changed from one movie to the next, anything to move the story along. He’s a private detective, or a washing machine salesman, a naval officer (with a French wife), muck-racking radio commentator, then he crosses over the tracks to play a hoodlum. And that’s just what comes to mind immediately. 

Bewildered
It also dawned on me that Huntz Hall plays his character Sach like the hophead Hall was in real life (he was arrested in 1948 for marijuana possession): the always-bewildered look, the stream of non-sequiturs and a fascination with the mundane. He was scoring more than just banana splits at Louie’s Sweet Shop. 

Here are the five unexpectedly best movies I saw last year: 

Stray Dog (1949) was directed by Akira Kurosawa and stars Toshiro Mifune as a detective whose service revolver is stolen and used to kill someone in a robbery. He and his partner track the killer in post-war Japan (which looks a mess, all rutted roads and shacks, people crippled with disillusionment), conducted during an oppressive heat wave that almost becomes another character. On a night when thunderstorms threaten, you know that the heat wave, and the case, are about to be cracked. 

Saw Godzilla (2023) in the theatre. You’d expect a sci-fi movie made in 2023 to have great special effects and this one doesn’t disappoint. What you wouldn’t expect is a compelling subplot about the redemption of a failed war hero, a kamikaze pilot who had second thoughts. 

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is a heist film nor full of betrayals and bad blood, with a all-star cast of character actors -- Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Marc Lawrence, John McIntyre, James Whitmore, Louis Calhern and Jean Hagen, not to mention Marilyn Monroe in an uncredited role as lawyer Calhern's kept woman. With a perfect dream-like ending that takes place hundreds of miles from any asphalt jungle. 

On the surface, the premise of Metropolitan (1990) doesn't sound all that promising: A group of privileged white kids participate in the gala debutante season. As unsympathetic and pretentious as they sometimes seem, between earnest discussions about Jane Austen and dancing in conga lines, several of them, played by amateur actors, do a lot of growing up in the movie as the film takes several poignant turns. 

A hitman is assigned to knock off an overly ambitious crime lord during the Christmas holidays. That's the plot of Blast of Silence (1961), filmed guerilla style without permits on the Staten Island Ferry, Queens, the Village, Harlem and Rockefeller Center. It offers glimpses of a long-gone New York City: a hotel with a sign welcoming “transients” and street views of bookstores, record stores and what used to be called stationery stores that sold newspapers, magazines, cigars and candy. A good punchy story too.

Monday, January 1, 2024

Are you a mouse or a monkey?

The news that the earliest version of Mickey Mouse (silent, and in black and white) was moving into the public domain effective today, coupled with the holiday season, resurfaced my lifelong obsession/fascination with the Mickey Mouse character in March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934) going back many decades to when I first watched the movie one Thanksgiving morning on WPIX Channel 11.

For years I thought it was a puppet, before I realized, or was told, that Mickey is played by a monkey wearing what appears to be a suffocating rubber head over its own, which may account for some of its drunken stumbling:

There’s no listing for the mouse in the film’s credits, but March of the Wooden Soldiers was directed by Hal Roach, the film studio head responsible for The Little Rascals, and this scene from 1931 might reveal the monkey behind the mouse in an earlier role.


Internet research says that there was a Jocko, a Joe and a Josephine, all monkeys that appeared in dozens of film shorts and movies around this time. They may have also all worked under different stage names, trained by a former organ grinder named Tony Campanaro, who also trained The Little Rascals’ dog Petey.

Walt Disney was notoriously stingy about copyrights, but since he and Hal Roach were country club buddies, he granted Roach permission to not only use Mickey, but also snippets of music from Disney’s Three Little Pigs cartoon, released in 1933, in March of the Wooden Soldiers.

The scene where Mickey throws the brick at the cat isn’t quite copyright infringement, but “borrowed” from Krazy Kat and Ignatz the Mouse, a popular comic strip and cartoon at the time.

With the early version of Mickey Mouse now in the public domain, you can probably expect the character to appear in some horrible pornography (Minnie Mouse is joining Mickey for public use) or bloodthirsty video games; nothing as innocent as March of the Wooden Soldiers.


Monday, December 18, 2023

Christmas Number One 

The British have this peculiar tradition of coronating whatever song is at the top of the charts on Christmas as that year’s “Christmas Number One.” People used to flock to the record shops to buy it (now done online) and the anticipation was enough that bookmakers began taking bets on which song would make the top of charts Christmas day.         

Nobody would ever describe any glam band, all of whom worked very hard at looking and sounding over-the-top, as shy and unassuming, so it's no surprise that in 1973 Slade and Wizzard deliberately released holiday songs in an effort to reach the top of the charts at Christmas. Slade won. 

Wikipedia says that more recently, the Christmas Number One has been mostly holiday novelties or songs recorded by reality TV personalities in a bid to stretch their minute of fame into two. Even without hearing any of this, it just seems like the dregs of the eggnog. 

Of course, here in the U.S. we’re much too sophisticated to give any time to anything so cheap and exploitive but just for the heck of it, here are the number one singles on the U.S. Billboard charts each Christmas morning for ten years starting in 1964: 

1964: I Feel Fine – Beatles

1965: Over and Over – Dave Clark Five

1966: I’m a Believer – Monkees

1967: Hello, Goodbye – Beatles

1968: I Heard It Through the Grapevine – Marvin Gaye

1969: Someday We’ll Be Together – Supremes

1970: Tears of A Clown – Smokey Robinson & Miracles

1971: Brand New Key – Melanie

1972: Me and Mrs. Jones – Billy Paul

1973: Time In A Bottle – Jim Croce 

Not a bad group of songs overall, although it takes a downturn, predictably, after 1970. “Over and Over” had perfect timing, hitting the number one spot for just this week in 1965 by bumping the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” to #2. The following week, “The Sounds of Silence” would be on top. 

With a week to go until Christmas 2023, Billboard lists Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” recorded 65 years ago, as #1 on its U.S. Hot 100 and streaming charts. Thanks to streaming, social media or getting licensed for television, older songs get a major bump in the charts nowadays (see “Running Up That Hill” earlier this year). Brenda Lee made a video of the song with a couple of popular country singers, then took it to TikTok, where it picked up 15 million views. 

It’s how to make a number one single in the new old-fashioned way.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Act Naturally

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce may not be the first entertainment/pro football power couple, but they’re certainly the most boring.

In 1963, Detroit Lions defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane married jazz singer Dinah Washington, his second marriage, her sixth. Less than six months later, Lane discovered Washington dead at their home from an apparent overdose of prescription pills.

Dallas Cowboys receiver Lance Rentzel married Joey Heatherton, a storybook wedding we were told, in 1969. Two years later he was charged with indecent exposure in the presence of an underage girl and Heatherton filed for divorce.

Atlanta Falcons receiver Andre Rison had a rocky relationship with R&B singer Lisa Lopes, complete with several domestic violence allegations. In 1994, she angrily lit a pair of his shoes on fire, and in the process burned down his house.

And what about Oakland Raider defensive lineman John Matuszak and Debra Winger?

No, that never actually happened and I’m guessing that they never even met, but Matuszak was sure enthusiastic about her.

I interviewed Matuszak in 1981 when he was promoting Caveman, a film in which he co-starred with Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach. Not only was he the largest person I’ve ever met at 6’8”, 285 – when he answered the door of his hotel suite in New York City, he just filled the entire doorway – but also someone with a single degree of separation from a Beatle.

The interview went well, even if some of his answers were canned, like quoting the lyrics to the Beatles’ Act Naturally (a Ringo-sung Buck Owens cover), about being the biggest fool that ever hit the big time and all he had to do was act naturally.

He did, however, seem genuinely pleased when I brought up this pivotal scene from his first movie, the cartoonish football film North Dallas Forty (1979) and he was more than willing to talk about its inspiration (directing his anger at a former coach of his, Hall of Famer Sid Gillman).



I really don’t remember how it came up, but it was his turn to ask a question: Had I seen Urban Cowboy yet? He saw it the night before and apparently his head was still swimming with visions of Debra Winger in this scene:


Possibly overstepping my role as interviewer, I suggested that since they were both in the movie business, he might meet her someday. He grunted something that seemed to say, yeah, I don’t think our paths are ever gonna cross, and I knew the interview was over.

Different paths? Matuszak’s next films were The Ice Pirates and The Goonies. Winger went on to be nominated three times for the Best Actress Academy Award.

Matuszak’s path also included an ex-wife trying to run him over with her car, and an accidental overdose after mixing multiple beers with Valium during which his heart stopped. He died in Hollywood in 1989 at age 38 from what was later ruled as a heart attack brought on by drugs and alcohol.