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.

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.

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.