One Trick Pony

Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was one of the last in a string of rock-star movie vanity projects, drug and/or ego-driven spectaculars like Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles), Renaldo and Clara (Bob Dylan), A Poem is a Naked Person (Leon Russell), Journey Through the Past (Neil Young) and 200 Motels (Frank Zappa). No matter how surreal, artsy or faux documentary, once the vibe of self-indulgence escapes the bottle, it’s difficult putting it back.

One Trick Pony, written by and starring Simon, is a straightforward narrative about an “aging” rock star attempting to fix a broken marriage, keep his band on the road and record a hit that’ll get back him into the big time.

The idea of rock stars growing older was a thing in 1980 as Lennon and Dylan approached 40 and Woodstock was more than ten years in the rearview mirror. Classic rock (when it was still just plain “rock”) was gasping for air and couldn’t keep up with the energy and zest of punk and new wave.

Simon plays one-hit wonder Jonah Levin, lucky enough to stay off the oldies carousel as he continues to tour and write new music, a lifestyle that ultimately busted his marriage. “You get to a certain age and rock and roll is sort of pathetic,” scolds his wife (Blair Brown).

Sure, she’s bitter but Jonah is performing songs with titles like How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns and God Bless the Absentee. He’s not exactly Ozzy Osbourne or Lux Interior.

One Trick Pony may reveal more about Paul Simon than Jonah Levin. If Art Garfunkel could have an acting career working with hotshot directors like Mike Nichols and Nicolas Roeg, why not Simon? And if Artie could unveil his pale scrawniness in Carnal Knowledge (1971) and in the originally rated X and released a few months before One Trick Pony, Bad Timing (1980), why couldn’t Simon? In One Trick Pony we get two bathtub scenes, bedroom sex with Brown and, most embarrassing of all, Simon’s naked torso with tight jeans, more Burt Reynolds than sensitive singer/songwriter.

The one time when Simon allows himself to be filmed in an unflattering light is when he and his band walk through an airport: he looks to be nearly a foot shorter than his fellow musicians, and with his perpetual oversized baseball cap and solemn look comes off like a Little Leaguer braving a stomachache.

Simon’s acting is serviceable, much better than the wooden line readings he gave in Annie Hall (1977). Jonah’s band, an all-star group of studio musicians, cook during the live concert numbers, the only time Simon seems to come alive. A collegiate looking Lou Reed plays a record producer and when Jonah agrees to appear at a “salute to the sixties” event, there’s some exciting footage of Sam & Dave, plus a reunited Lovin’ Spoonful. And Tiny Tim wearing this cool custom suit.

If anything, One Trick Pony is notable today as possible source material for This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Harry Shearer has a brief role as Jonah’s manager, a member of Jonah’s band offhandedly mentions "the bigger the cushion, the better the pushin'" and the band shows up for a three-date gig only to find the club shuttered after the owner ran off with the money. Jonah’s band also plays Cleveland’s Agora Ballroom, obviously successfully navigating the “little jog to the left” and finding the stage.

Clocking in at two and a half minutes, Paul Simon wrote one of the best songs about the ups and downs of a traveling musician on the road, Homeward Bound. There was no need to stretch it out into ninety minutes.

The Incredible World of James Bond

On November 26, 1965, the day after Thanksgiving, NBC fittingly pre-empted The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to run The Incredible World of James Bond, an hour-long documentary that, given its sweep and licensing rights to all the Bond films made up till then – Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger and the upcoming Thunderball – survives as the definitive statement on a cultural phenomenon.

I watched the show when it originally aired, an eleven-year-old already stuck in the snare of Bondmania (not to mention Beatlemania and lurking around the corner in just four months’ time, Batmania) and it was a trip watching scenes from Goldfinger – the Aston Martin, Oddjob’s electrocution, the laser beam aimed at Bond’s family jewels – in our living room.

The full movie wouldn’t air on network television until September 1972.

The Incredible World of James Bond also gave us a rare glimpse of the very proper Ian Fleming wandering about Goldeneye, his Jamaican estate, in a safari jacket, cigarette holder clenched in his mouth, with a reminder that Fleming didn’t look any farther than his bookshelf for a name for his fictional spy, a nature guide titled Birds of the West Indies by ornithologist James Bond.

A segment on Bond tie-in merchandise included the elusive, only-rich-kids-can-afford-it 007 Road Race set and the 007 attache case, plus a line of men’s wear, perfect for lounging about after consuming the Bond’s room service breakfast in From Russia with Love (and shown in a segment covering his refined tastes) of green figs, yogurt and coffee, very black.

What recently triggered all this was the sudden appearance on YouTube of this ad which ran during the program and suckered me right in:

Here’s my original copy of the album, delivered on January 14, 1966 (according to my childish scrawl).

Adjusted for inflation, a single U.S. dollar in 1966 had the purchasing power of about $10.19 today, making the record, and factoring in the purchase of a bag of Fritos, a bit of a ripoff for the kind of budget LP found in supermarkets and bargain bids, but it seemed well worth it at the time.

The record found a place in my collection and came in handy when I made tapes for road trips in my 1973 Toyota Corona – standard model, no ejector seat – as one of my favorite tricks was to fade out the Bond theme into Johnny Rivers’ Secret Agent Man.

The album would have also made excellent background music while I watched the slot cars in that road racing set go around and round. Anybody who could afford the racing cars wouldn’t have thought twice about spending another buck on the record.

The Outfit

This post is part of the Robert Duvall Tribute Blogathon hosted by 

Taking Up Room – Reviews. History. Life.

Writing as Richard Stark, Donald Westlake authored 24 novels about a career criminal named Parker (just Parker), who has been described as ruthless, amoral, cold, methodical, efficient, murderous and humorless.

They all fit.

Ranking the movies adapted from Parker novels, at least those I’ve seen, the less said about The Split (1967) with Jim Brown the better. Payback (1999) with Mel Gibson is Parker as superhero. The best is Point Blank (1967) with Lee Marvin and The Outfit (1973) with Robert Duvall.

In The Outfit, Parker is renamed Earl Macklin, who learns upon his release from prison that there are contracts out on him, his brother Eddie and their partner Cody (Joe Don Baker) as payback for a bank the three robbed, not knowing it was a front for the Outfit crime syndicate.

Thugs kill Eddie and threaten Macklin’s girlfriend Bett (Karen Black), leading Macklin to decide that the Outfit owes him $250,000 – “to make things right” – and until he gets the money, he plans to rip them off of whatever he can.

Macklin and Cody knock off a series of Outfit operations, getting the attention of its boss Mailer (Robert Ryan), who agrees to the $250,000 payoff. An arranged meeting is an ambush that Macklin and Cody barely escape and that, plus Bett’s death during a bogus police traffic stop, sets into motion a seemingly suicidal plan to attack Mailer’s heavily guarded compound.

Robert Ryan and Robert Duvall 

Having Bett around is something new for Macklin, and Cody upon meeting her, makes his mistrust known to Macklin: “You start worrying about the girl, you forget your work.” Maybe Cody was spooked by her beret-style headwear reminiscent of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, knowing full well how that ended.

And unlike Bonnie and Clyde, there’s nothing romantic about Macklin and crew. They move around between crummy motel rooms, Macklin and Cody living in a foxhole, wiling away the hours with trivial small talk, sharing cigarettes and bottles of beer.

Robert Duvall as Macklin: "Cold and ammoral"

Director/screenwriter John Flynn adds some terrific hardboiled dialog. “I don’t talk to guys wearing aprons,” says Macklin to a bartender blocking him from speaking to an Outfit goon. At one point an exasperated Mailer barks, “I want (Macklin’s) ass wrapped in cellophane!”

Along with Ryan, the supporting cast includes film noir veterans Elisha Cook Jr., the always scary Timothy Carey, Jane Greer and Marie Windsor, plus familiar faces Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, Joanna Cassidy and Henry Jones. In a nod to The Maltese Falcon, Carey refers to Macklin as a “gunsel,” Humphrey Bogart’s name for Elisha Cook.

The Outfit was one of Ryan’s last movies. He died of lung cancer three months before the movie opened.

The grand finale siege of Mailer’s compound involves lots of shooting and explosions courtesy of a bundle of dynamite sticks, complete with timer and suction cup attached to the bottom of a table, right out of a Roadrunner cartoon. Flynn ends the movie with a cheesy Starsky & Hutch freeze frame of Duvall and Baker laughing, an adrenalin rush after beating the Outfit (and which doesn’t quite fit the Parker image).

That's a wrap. Roll credits 

Duvall’s Macklin allows himself moments with Bett specifically when talking about his grandfather where he comes off as human and nearly sentimental, but those are the only glimmers of daylight in an otherwise dark existence. Macklin is grimly professional and intense, and there’s very little that’s likeable about him. But that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Flipside (2023)

In the feature documentary Flipside (2023), filmmaker Chris Wilcha tries making sense of a spaghetti plate of unfinished film projects left hanging when he made the transition from documentary maker to television commercial director.

Flipside is Wilcha’s attempt at tying these loose ends together while seeking answers to bigger mid-life questions about the purpose of work and about letting go of a lifetime of accumulated stuff. Yeah, these are third-world problems and at times the narrative grows a little too self-absorbed, but Flipside’s main attraction is its documentary-within-a-documentary about the record store Wilcha worked in as a teenager, Flipside Records in Pompton Lakes, N.J.

Chris Wilcha outside Flipside Records

Shopping at Flipside, which I sometimes did way back when, took persistence as you worked your way through its overwhelming crush of inventory. Described in the film as a “hoarder’s runaway train,” if Flipside Records was a Brooklyn storefront instead of in suburban Pompton Lakes, vinyl freaks from throughout the tri-state area would be beating a path to its door.

The store, as Wilcha says, preserves a piece of the world that’s gone and it’s no surprise that Uncle Floyd Vivino, the New Jersey entertainer with one foot in the modern world and the other in a long-lost land of vaudeville and pre-war American pop, was a Flipside customer. He’s shown kibitzing around the store and, dramatically lit, improvising a Flipside Records theme song; a touching moment now that Floyd has left us.

Uncle Floyd improvises

(At one point Floyd comes across an ancient-looking Sesame Street busy box sitting among the records and wonders out loud when the toy was last cleaned. I took my three-year old son to Flipside once – he’s 35 now – and I swear the owner brought out the same toy for him to play with).

By movie’s end, Wilcha has found new homes for much of his childhood and teenage stuff and weaved together a satisfying ending to several of the parallel storylines and unfinished projects that have plagued him over the years. As we watch him close the closet door on his childhood bedroom, it’s a literal and figurative closet cleaning.

(Tellingly, when he sells off his record collection it’s not to Flipside, where he fears his records will be lost forever, but to a rival shop also located in Pompton Lakes).

I’ve been making steady progress on also reducing a lifetime of accumulations which, as he says, “can “transport you back but simultaneously make a suffocating mess that reminds you of how much time has passed,” says Wilcha.

I can totally agree. Recently I sold more than 300 LPs that I’d been hunting and gathering since middle school. It took more than a year to clear that mental runway, but when I was ready, I didn’t hesitate. Now to face down the four cartons of old sports magazines in the attic.

C.C. & Company

The following is part of the So Bad It's Good blogathon hosted at 

Taking Up Room – Reviews. History. Life.

It’s never good when the best part of a movie is its first five minutes.

C.C. & Company (19700 starts with Joe Namath, as a member of an outlaw biker gang “The Heads,” pretending to grocery shop while actually making a sandwich for himself by taking food from the shelves (and resealing packages as he goes along – the golden age of product tampering), washing it down with a stolen pint of milk, then helping himself to a napkin and a package of Twinkies, begging the question, do biker gang members use napkins? Or eat Twinkies?

Never underestimate the importance of a nutritious lunch 

From that point forward, C.C. & Company unfolds like an R-rated Elvis movie, with Namath as the loner with a chip on his shoulder but a heart of gold. He even gets a cool Elvis character name, C.C. Ryder. And like many Elvis movies, C.C. & Company ends with a climactic alpha-male competition where the hero wipes the smirk from his rival.

(There’s no way Presley would have signed on for C.C. & Company. There’s beer guzzling, disrespect for authority, a biker chick skinny-dipping, a couple of blurred nude biker asses and Ann-Margret telling a biker to fuck off).

Namath, at the time one of the most recognizable people in America, got the call. When his New York Jets upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, he was everywhere. Books, magazine covers, a syndicated talk show, commercials. The path led, inevitably, to movies.

After their not-so-cute first meeting – C.C. steps in to stop two of his motorcycle buddies from raping Ann (Ann-Margret) when her limo breaks down in the desert – C.C. wins first prize in a motorcross event and leaves The Heads, pocketing the prize money instead of tossing it into the gang’s beer fund, angering head Head Moon, played by the always menacing and excellent William Smith. Other Heads include notables Sid Haig and Bruce Glover, all of whom, in the golden tradition of biker movies, generally behave like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It also leads us to wonder how clean-cut C.C. ever got mixed up these guys. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and while the rest of the Heads are acting up, he works on his motorcycle. Marlon Brando = the Wild One, C.C. = the Mild One.

C.C. quits The Heads, trades in his motorcycle jacket for track suits and striped bellbottoms, and hooks up with Ann. They hit a club where, in an ultra-meta moment, the bizarrely coiffed Wayne Cochran and his band, the C.C. Riders sing the blues/rock standard See See Rider.

Wayne Cochran gets ultra-meta

That’s followed by a Hallmark moment “falling in love” montage, C.C. and Ann feeding ducks and riding a pedal boat as Today: The Love Theme from C.C. & Company sung by Miss Margret provides a suitable soundtrack.

But the Heads are still trying to reclaim the money C.C. took. They kidnap Ann from her huge glass-walled home – we’re not sure what she does for a living. At one point it’s said she owns a New York City “fashion house,” but she also seems to art direct photo shoots and write news releases.

All of it leads up to the big motorcycle race/duel to the death between C.C. and Moon seemingly lit with a flashlight.

Namath is personable, self-deprecating and laid-back. He isn’t given much in the way of dialogue (or at least many lines of dialogue strung together) so there’s no need for any emotional heavy lifting. Ann-Margret and William Smith handle that department.

As biker gang movies go, C.C. & Company is pretty tame. It’s worth checking out, but if you switch to something else after the sandwich scene, it’s understood.

Dreaming of an Off-White Christmas: Blast of Silence

Off-White Christmas films exist when the sights and sounds of Christmas are woven into the plot, but the holiday is only peripheral to the story, a Christmas tree in the corner towering over the proceedings. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), Lethal Weapon (1987) and The Silent Partner (1978) all fit the description as does Blast of Silence (1961).

In Blast of Silence, hitman Frankie Bono (Allen Baron, who also co-wrote the screenplay and directed) is contracted to knock off a secondary, but overly ambitious mob boss during the Christmas holiday. Bono’s work requires keeping a low profile, but a childhood friend recognizes him in a bar and invites Bono to a Christmas party, where he’s reunited with an old flame, Lorrie (Molly McCarthy). That’s when things start to go wrong.

He awkwardly tries to reignite his relationship with Lorrie and gets rejected. Bono buys a gun with a silencer from low-life Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), whom he eventually kills when Ralph realizes who the target is and tries to shake down Bono.

Maybe it’s just holiday disillusionment settling in from his brush with his past, but Frankie tries – unsuccessfully – to back out of the contract. Instead, he’s given a New Year’s Day deadline to get the job done.

Bono kills the target, goes to a dilapidated marshland dock to collect his money and now, because he tried to renege on the contract, has become a mob target, is killed.

Challenged by a minimal budget, Blast of Silence was shot in stark black and white on the streets of Manhattan without permits, offering a Cold War-era visual time capsule: Greenwich Village and Harlem, the Staten Island Ferry, Rockefeller Center decorated for Christmas. A seedy hotel with its sign welcoming “transients.” Independent, family-run stores selling books, hardware, shoes, records. Soda fountains. A billboard advertising Knickerbocker Beer. No corporate signage; not a McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts in sight. No boarded-up storefronts or graffiti. Vibrant and yet because it's a world long gone, heart-breaking.

Frankie Bono takes in Rockefeller Center

The film’s interiors are raw and authentic. Cramped apartments, a narrow jazz club, Ralphie’s slovenly basement room which he shares with caged white rats, barely lit stairwells.

Baron, still around today at age 97, was an aspiring comic book artist who drew several romance comics in the late forties before moving on to acting. His screenplay, co-written with the blacklisted Waldo Salt (credited here as Mel Davenport) includes growling narration by actor Lionel Stander, a cold, unforgiving inner voice rattling around Bono’s head: “You were born full of hate” and after he's been rejected by Lorrie, “Now that you got Christmas out of your system,” being two prime examples.

Given its noir overtones and New York City locale, Blast of Silence was a pioneer for the “grim and gritty” street dramas that came into vogue a decade later: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Serpico (1973) – both also written by Waldo Salt – The French Connection (1971) and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), with shots of Frankie walking the streets, often in a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers and sightseers and, in one long continuous shot, walking the length of a city block at dawn toward the camera.

Strolling Manhattan at dawn

There’s also a long scene that’s as representative of noir as any: Frankie sitting on his hotel bed lovingly preparing his gun for the hit: oiling it, spinning the bullet chamber, taping the silencer to the barrel, all against the soundtrack of a melancholy trumpet solo, reminiscent of the main theme of Chinatown (1974).

If Blast of Silence was a true holiday flick, that scene would’ve been accompanied by Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow. For an Off-White Christmas, the solo trumpet works pretty well.

Cortez the Killer

Not counting greatest hits compilations, live records and archival projects, Neil Young has recorded 45 albums since 1968. Zuma – released 50 years ago this week – is still his best.

The songs on Zuma are essentially about a busted relationship (his marriage to Carrie Snodgress had ended) and unconsciously – because Young’s work often doesn’t seem premeditated – move from denial to anger to depression to acceptance.

The one song that doesn’t explicitly fit this cycle is Cortez the Killer. Young typically downplayed its lyrics when he told an audience in 1996, "One night I stayed up too late when I was goin' to high school. I ate like six hamburgers or something. I felt terrible, very bad... and in the morning I woke up and I'd written this song."

Okay, so the best thing you’ve ever written was the product of indigestion.

The song isn’t so much about Cortez and his geographic and spiritual conquest of Montezuma’s Aztec empire in the 16^th century as it is an idyllic vision of the Aztecs as a primitive society making love not war, laying around the beach chewing coca leaves and wearing colorful clothes, almost an idealized view of the hippie culture.  And with the coming of Cortez – Madison Avenue, Time magazine – it becomes an allegory about the death of sixties innocence.

Aztec washing day

(David Crosby’s Renaissance Fair, released by the Byrds in 1967, treads similar ground, using a medieval marketplace as a metaphor for hippiedom).

What lifts Cortez into the stratosphere are the final lyrics and the unexpected shift from the drone-eye view of the Aztec civilization to the first person, from tourist to participant: “And I know she's living there/And she loves me to this day/I still can't remember when/Or how I lost my way.”

Now it’s Young as flannel-shirted time traveler committing one of those conundrums of time-travel fiction, falling for someone of a past era and then before the butterfly effect takes hold, returning to his own era alone.

With the closing notes of the song, the time machine swoops away and splashes into a cosmic liquid light show.

Ironically, or maybe not, Cortez the Killer, and much of Zuma, was recorded in a studio near Zuma Beach, Malibu and Point Dume, the same location where the Statue of Liberty scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) – a film about time traveling astronauts displaced into the future – was shot.

Young’s guitar took on a new tone in Zuma, a sound that has since become his electric trademark, crackling at times with controlled feedback. The finished version of Cortez is a first take, a rehearsal jam with a dreamlike, psychedelic, at times ominous vibe, Young not letting on to Crazy Horse that the tape was rolling. It was a keeper, a rare example of first thought, best thought.

Wild and crazy, 1975

Last year, Young released another version of Zuma, called it Dume, replaced the last track on the original, Through My Sails (the acceptance song), added a few other songs that had nothing to do with the break-up theme, then rearranged the track order, placing Cortez first.

Of course, it’s his work and he can do whatever he wants with it, but I’ll stick with the original. First version, best version.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Big Bopper and Dion’s “Winter Dance Party Tour” was a terrible idea – zigzagging across the upper Midwest in the dead of winter – made horribly worse by the plane crash in poor weather conditions that killed all three except Dion, who stayed on the tour bus. On January 31, 1959, four days before Holly’s death, 17-year-old Bob Dylan saw him perform at the Duluth Armory.

Here's a theory: As an impressionable kid, this might have been a haunting experience for Dylan and one wonders if the Rolling Thunder Revue was his belated response, an attempt to get it right this time.

In autumn 1975, Dylan rounded up Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg, put together a backing band and toured New England by bus and campers playing mostly theatres and college auditoriums. Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot joined for a few dates.

A film crew accompanied the tour, Dylan directing the musicians and some inner circle friends for an impromptu movie he envisioned. (At four hours, the mostly improvised Renaldo & Clara is for Dylan completists only).

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) rescued the best of that footage and includes interviews with Dylan, Baez and McGuinn, among others. When released, some criticized Scorsese’s use of several fictional talking heads (hence the title, A Bob Dylan Story), although none add much to the overall narrative.

Dylan seems energized playing to smaller rooms and performing new material from Blood on the Tracks and the upcoming Desire. Off-stage, he’s not the guy with the shades, amused by private jokes only he understands in Don’t Look Back (1967), the documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Here he’s more the avuncular dad on family vacation, even taking the wheel of an RV to drive to the next tour stop.

The band, made up of mostly spare parts, has a sound that sometimes verges on punk or metal, driven by the unlikely choice of Mick Ronson on lead guitar. Formerly with David Bowie, Ronson may have felt relieved to not have a lead singer simulate fellatio on his guitar during a solo.

Like other rockumentaries, the film looks to frame Rolling Thunder in a historical context, namely the upcoming bicentennial and the perceived country’s mood at the end of 1975 (“people lost their sense of conviction,” says Dylan). Scorsese shuffles several presidential clips, including one from Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech: “We have a country that in Bob Dylan’s words, is busy being born, not busy dying.”

It felt like an optimistic time, particularly for my generation, today’s detested Baby Boomers. Nixon rightfully left office, Vietnam and the military draft in the rearview mirror. We had our choice of FM rock stations, and something called Saturday Night Live debuted on NBC that October, a kind of Rolling Thunder Revue itself in presentation and values.

Rolling Thunder concerts ended with a cast rendition of This Land Is Your Land. Today, its lyrics seem more distant, and the sound of rolling thunder isn’t that of the wheels of a traveling caravan of musicians; it’s likely something a little more ominous.  

Help!

Absent the happy glow of Beatlemania, Help! has not aged well.

Help! premiered sixty years ago this summer, an anniversary that has allowed the internet to resurface all that stuff about it being a James Bond spoof (aside from some incidental music that comes close to the 007 theme, it’s not) or that the band were the new Marx Brothers (no, but taking that premise further, John = Groucho, George = Chico, Ringo = Harpo, leaving poor Paul as Zeppo).

The breathless enthusiasm and charm – especially the charm – that made A Hard Day’s Night such fun has, just one year later, vanished in the haze, leaving the band seemingly disinterested in their own movie, vacantly working their way through a live-action Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Maybe the most memorable scene in Help! is the Beatles’ groovy pop art pad, four outside entrances that lead into one room, the perfect metaphor for this brotherhood – four individuals so close that at one point they investigated buying an island off Greece and building four separate compounds on it for their family and friends.

Paul waves hello from his door

But one scene, one word really, undermines that groovy feeling. A cage falls from a ceiling to trap Ringo. George says, “I’m off,” and runs out the door. Someone (it sounds like Paul) says, “Typical.” Kind of a cutting comment and typical of what exactly? Was George always running off in real life whenever a religious cult trapped Ringo? Stupid scriptwriting that betrays the band’s entire ethos.

I’m guessing the band was too stoned or tired to fix it. Or that they even noticed.

Filling the gaps and moving things along is a veteran supporting cast: Leo McKern before he became a household name (at least in the homes that favor PBS), Eleanor Bron, and Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear as mad scientists, forerunners of Dr. Forrester and Frank on Mystery Science Theatre.

The musical sequences hold Help! together. The threatening outdoor weather during I Need You and The Night Before. The dramatic backlighting on You’re Going to Lose That Girl, Ringo’s cigarette smoke giving it a noirish atmosphere. The band looking miserable “romping” in the snow during Ticket to Ride (a sequence that could have served as a pitch for entire Monkees TV series). An added plus is seeing them perform in cool mod clothes and not their usual suits.

You're Going to Lose That Girl

The rain falls on Salisbury Plain

Two other scenes have taken on a kind of prescient eeriness over the years. The fight in the Beatles’ home with the cult members and mad scientists feels a little disturbing today given all the knife flashing and gun wielding, then remembering what lies ahead for George and John.

Second, when the band disguise themselves with fake beards and glasses, we get a glimpse into the near future, George looking disturbingly as he would on the Sgt. Pepper album and John circa his Abbey Road look.

A look into the future?

With the release of the Help! soundtrack, Rubber Soul, We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper and Yesterday, 1965 marked the point where the Beatles’ uncanny musical maturation spun into orbit. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep a similar pace when it came to video. Which is all right. That would be asking a lot of any four performers.

Tarzan's New York Adventure

(The following is part of the Adventure-a-Thon hosted by the friendly folks at Cinematic Catharsis and Realweegiemidget Reviews)

Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) is a movie of milestones: the final MGM Tarzan film before the franchise moved to RKO and Maureen O’Sullivan’s last appearance as Jane. It has a lot more going for it as well.

When a plane lands in the escarpment that Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller), Jane (O’Sullivan), Boy (Johnny Sheffield) and Cheeta call home, Tarzan finds a hunter (Charles Bickford, three-time Best Supporting Actor nominee) trapping animals for a circus in the U.S. Tarzan, naturally, has a problem with this and gives him until the next morning to leave.

But Boy is fascinated with this visit from the outside world and despite Tarzan’s warnings, goes out to the plane. Bickford sees Boy as the ultimate circus attraction and under the distraction of an attack from local natives who trap Tarzan and Jane in a brushfire, kidnaps him, the plane miraculously taking off out of the jungle without benefit of a runway.

Desperate to find Boy, Tarzan and Jane trek across Africa to the nearest city where they learn that the plane’s destination is New York City. Paying in gold nuggets, they trade their loincloths for tailored clothes and leave for America, Weissmuller’s shoulders even more impressive in a double-breasted suit.

The “stone jungle” they encounter is the 1940s Hollywood vision of Manhattan: swanky nightclubs, people employed in jobs that barely exist today, like taxi drivers, or not at all: bellhops, cigarette girls, hat-check attendants. All that’s missing is a reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jane takes charge and helps Tarzan navigate through modern conveniences like radios, mirrors, telephones and, memorably, walk-in showers.

The other fish out of water is Cheeta, who adapts to city life easily and gets plenty of screentime, including a “soliloquy” running amuck in a hotel room. Based on her performance, I would have supported the superstar chimp’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Tarzan and Jane’s attempt to get Boy back through the legal system hits a roadblock when Jane admits under oath that she and Tarzan are not his true parents. Tarzan, chafing from that suit and from listening to lawyers, chooses jungle justice over a Kramer vs. Kramer custody battle.

Tarzan breaks free from the courthouse, and leads the police on a one-sided, if exciting, rooftop chase, a daring climb up the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and a death-defying 200-foot plunge into the East River.

(Some online swear Weissmuller really took that leap – pure suicide in reality – when it was all done with rear projection, editing and a dummy tossed into an MGM water tank. The bigger question is how did Tarzan figure out he was swimming toward Long Island, where Boy was being held, and didn’t wind up in Jersey City?)

A group of circus roustabouts (including Elmo Lincoln, who played Tarzan in three silent films) overtake Tarzan and lock him in a lion cage. But with the help of a herd of circus elephants, wise in the universal animal language spoken by Tarzan, he defeats the bad guys and gets Boy back.

Placing Tarzan outside of his world provides context for him to explain the unspoken philosophy of the jungle: “Jungle laws easy. In jungle, man only kill bad animals. In civilization, men kill good men,” a message that may have resonated with audiences in May 1942 when the movie was released, America having entered World War II just a few months before.

Tarzan movies will always be subject to modern-day criticisms about racial and gender stereotypes, but at the same time, viewing this film made more than 80 years ago reveals a progressive tale about the power within non-traditional families, bound not by blood, but by love and commitment to each other.

As with the movie, Cheeta gets the last word

Tarzan’s New York Adventure is a bite of the Big Apple that leaves a sweet taste.