Gone With The Wind

The irony of TCM showing a documentary last week called Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession wasn’t lost on anybody paying attention. During a week in which five TCM executives were fired and staffing cut, jeopardizing the channel’s existence, showing a documentary about a cable channel devoted to airing, without commercials, an eclectic mix of overlooked and under-appreciated movies, foreign films, six-hour director’s cuts – essentially films that weren’t being shown anywhere else, felt like a cautionary tale about history repeating itself.

With nearly 100,000 subscribers in Southern California at its height in the mid-1980s, Z Channel became embroiled in lawsuits, then sold to Cablevision and NBC in March, 1989. Three months later, it was off the air.

TCM is still here and on the surface seems to be running the same as ever. For now, we have the assurances of several TCM hosts on social media that things aren’t changing. Spielberg and Scorsese, among others, have both spoken out loudly about the need to keep TCM alive, including personal calls to the guy ultimately calling the shots here, the same Warner Bros. Discovery CEO who rebranded HBO to Max and hired the exec – since fired – who attempted to make CNN more appealing to conservatives. That Trump town hall went really well, didn’t it?

The Z Channel documentary was originally made in 2004 for the Independent Film Channel. Originally a commercial-free service devoted to airing independent films, today it’s known as IFC where you can catch repeated airings of Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3 through most of the day, followed by six-hour blocks of Everybody Loves Raymond and Three’s Company.

My all-time greatest albums, Part 4 

With the understanding that the music you’re exposed to when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, this is part four of my truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list.  

When Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was released in 1971, I was in my early teens and beginning to question the eternal wisdom of parents and teachers, and especially, institutional beliefs. 

Ian Anderson always claimed that Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, and he’s right. While one side is a travelogue through some of the more threadbare neighborhoods of London, side two is a diatribe against organized religion. And while everybody dug side one, and Martin Barre’s awesome guitar on the title song (the opening riff and the fantastic solo), it was on the flip side, which Anderson conveniently titled on the record label, My God, that he got down to some heavy-duty axe grinding. 

Essentially, his thesis that organized religion is a crock comes down to two lyrics: “He is the God of nothing/if that’s all that you can see/You are the God of everything/He’s inside you and me,” and “He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.” Heavy stuff when you’re a high school sophomore. 

Some random thoughts about Aqualung: 

When Aqualung was recorded, Ian Anderson had only been playing the flute for three years. 

Once rock and pop began to diversify and add new instrumental colors, flute solos were all over the charts, gracing You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, California Dreamin’, There Is A Mountain and Spill The Wine, among others.  

The artwork on Aqualung are watercolors done by an American artist named Burton Silverman. The original paintings were stolen decades ago. 

The early 1970s were a golden age of album cover constructions: Déjà Vu, with its “leather” photo album look; Sing It Again, Rod (shaped like a shot glass); L.A. Woman (die-cut center); and Through A Glass Darkly (octagon shaped). The cover of Aqualung was manufactured with the texture of an artist’s canvas to show off Silverman’s paintings. 

There was a kid in my high school who took the portrait of Aqualung on the album cover to heart, with long hair, scraggly beard and wearing an old overcoat that I’d bet once belonged to his grandfather. 

Ian Anderson had a distinctive style when playing the flute, sometimes noisily taking in air – which added another “voice” to his music – and (something I learned from a flutist message board) rolling his tongue the way the Spanish do when pronouncing their “Rs.” 

Rock and pop songs that charted on Billboard during the late winter and spring of 1971 when Aqualung was released: George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord; Judy Collins’ version of Amazing Grace; two songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the title and I Don’t Know How to Love Him, which can go either way, secular or religious; that trilogy of happy-hippie soft-headedness, One Toke Over the Line, Put Your Hand in the Hand and Signs; and Aretha’s gospel version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Somehow, TIME magazine missed running a cover story on this “trend.” I’m sure it would have been positioned as “disillusioned with drugs and meditation, today’s youth find new kicks from the Old Testament.” 

Decades before – heck, lifetimes before – critics were praising Nirvana and the Pixies for their “soft/loud/soft” aesthetic of playing a quiet passage, then blasting (with great dramatic effect) huge electric guitars, it was the central sound of much of Aqualung, with several songs building from quiet to loud and back again. The electric guitar that erupts in the quietly acoustic second verse of My God is like the thunder accompanying the delivery of the Ten Commandments.

Ian Anderson also drops in a reference to a “plastic crucifix,” and when you’re questioning the sincerity – and the brains – of those who embrace Christianity, dime store crap like a dashboard Jesus or lenticular portraits of Jesus, seemed an apt symbol. 

George Carlin on The Tonight Show in 1974: “If God is like us … big trouble, man.”

Kick-ass stoicism 

What was Jim Brown thinking when he quit football for acting at the end of the 1965 season? 

He was never going to compete for the black leading man roles that went to Sidney Poitier. Nor was he going to sit still for the types of roles that characterized the career of another former pro football player, Woody Strode, playing African warriors or Pompey the handyman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And Brown wasn’t about to work at honing his craft doing summer stock performances of The Glass Menagerie on Cape Cod. 

Riding the tailwinds of The Civil Rights Act, he barreled into Hollywood as one of The Dirty Dozen (1967) where he only needed to keep his head down while scenery-chewers like John Cassavetes and Telly Savalas did their thing. In Empire of the Sun (1968), he played a mercenary soldier, mostly Tonto to Rod Taylor’s Lone Ranger. Brown’s first leading role was in The Split (1968), a disappointing mess that failed even with a cast that included Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, Julie Harris and Diahann Carroll. 

It wasn’t until Hollywood got the idea of casting Brown with attractive white actresses, and in doing so tapping into white America’s fears of interracial sex and miscegenation, that Brown’s career really took off. 

There’s a strong undercurrent of sex in The Grasshopper (1970) with Jacqueline Bisset and El Condor (1970) with Marianna Hill. 100 Rifles (1969) received a major publicity push, including lots of hot stills of Brown and Raquel Welch, but the film didn’t stand up to the hype: it’s mostly average. Brown’s twelfth film, Slaughter (1972), a terrific tale of vengeance, fired up the taboo meters and delivered the goods thanks to his on-screen (and reportedly in real life) groping with Stella Stevens. 

As cynical and dark as this trend seems, it reached its inevitably violent peak in Fingers (1978) with Brown playing a scary pimp (whose name is Dreams; it might as well have been Super Spade) who brings a “romantic interlude” with two white women to a brutal end when they refuse to kiss each other. 

Brown’s acting was often described as “wooden,” although he became noticeably better with time. But what he was best at was displaying the same kick-ass stoicism he brandished as the greatest football player of his era: inflicting as much punishment as he received before walking back slowly to the huddle with unemotional indifference.

My All-Time Greatest Albums, Part 3

With the understanding that the music you’re exposed to when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, this is part three of my truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

Frank Sinatra’s Love Is A Kick (1958) is a compilation of previously released tracks from 1944 to 1952, recorded when he was still with Columbia Records.

The songs cover the young Sinatra’s usual Hoboken waterfront of “she’s here and I’m giddy in love or she’s gone and I’m no longer giddy in love,” but the songs on the album, even those about lost love, are upbeat. Saturday night may be “the loneliest night of the week,” since his girl left him, but there’s hope: “Until I hear you at the door/Until you're in my arms once more.”

Sinatra’s voice is youthful, and he sings with power and feeling. And the big-band arrangements swing. The track Bim Bam Baby – the title alone tells you everything you need to know – flat out rocks, maybe the closest Sinatra ever got to recording something that felt like it belonged with the early R&B band sounds of Louis Jordan or Johnny Otis. Elvis Presley should have covered it.

Love Is A Kick was the only Sinatra record we had around the house for years, so it got played a lot, or at least until we bought our first rock & roll album, the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night (1964). But for a kid like me, whose favorite song up to that point was Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans, Love Is A Kick prepared me for the Beatles by introducing what could be called the language of popular music. Universal belief in, and acknowledgement, of certain feelings. The emotional tone. The beat.

And the use of personal pronouns to make the music more impactful and build connections with the listener. Love Is A Kick included You Do Something To Me, My Blue Heaven, When You’re Smiling and Should I. A Hard Day’s Night is the 101 class on the subject: I Should Have Known Better, If I Fell, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You, And I Love Her, Tell Me Why, Can’t Buy Me Love and I’ll Cry Instead.

It all felt like a single river flowing into the same sea. If I could envision Elvis singing Bim Bam Baby, certainly Sinatra could take a swing at I’m Happy Just To Dance With You or And I Love Her. A Hard Day’s Night was the soundtrack to the film, so it included instrumental versions of several Lennon-McCartney songs that were used as background music in the movie. Again, one river, and we never skipped those tracks when we played the album.

To use up all my water metaphors, it wasn’t until rock began to fragment and take on some gravitas, that popular music felt more like a network of tributaries, each bound for different regions.

Love Is A Kick is a forgotten album. Released only in mono, it never made the leap to CD. The soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night, on United Artists, was discontinued decades ago in favor of the British version, which didn’t include the instrumentals. To this day, if it isn’t the best pop album ever made, it’s certainly in the running. 

Seen on the Screen blogathon: The Killers in Hackensack, N.J.

 

The Killers (1946) earned three Oscar nominations, introduced Burt Lancaster and served as Ava Gardner’s career breakout. It may also be the only film noir set mostly in New Jersey, with its pivotal plot point a daring daytime robbery in Hackensack. 

Yup, Hackensack, New Jersey, located some 12 miles west of midtown Manhattan and my hometown. Mostly residential and with a thriving retail scene when I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s, the name Hackensack has a rhyme and rhythm to it, and as such, has lent itself to the lyrics of popular songs for decades, written by the likes of Cole Porter, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne and Billy Joel. 

But this is about The Killers. Its one-sentence TV Guide synopsis might read, “A former boxer gets involved with a gangster’s moll.” But there’s much more to it than that. Within the first ten minutes, Lancaster as “the Swede,” is gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why. 

What he discovers is that people were lining up to kill the Swede under the belief that he was aware of the location of a $250,000 payroll stolen years before from the "Prentiss Hat Company", located in Hackensack. 

The film is mostly told through flashbacks as Swede and three others walk through a factory gate wearing faked employee badges before they storm the payroll office and make off with the cash. 

While plenty of pre-war architecture still existed in Hackensack when I lived there, it’s safe to say there was nothing resembling the Prentiss Hat Company. With its arched gated entryway and central road running through the site, if anything it resembles the familiar look of the entrance to a movie studio lot – which it probably was. 

In real life, the only factory in Hackensack that came close to what’s depicted in The Killers was a sprawling throwback, built in 1896, that at its peak employed a few hundred people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, with all the loading dock doors open, we’d ride our bikes past the site and hear the machines punching out soles or stitching. 

After making off with the payroll, the gang meets later at a farmhouse eleven miles away to divide up the loot. There’s some discussion about the “hick roads” they’ll take to get to the place, leading one to think this is a totally rural area. 

Downtown Hackensack, circa 1960s

In 1940, the countryside outside Hackensack was fairly rural; there were scattered farms with apple orchards and small-scale cornfields, but nothing like the desolate farmhouse with its dirt roads pictured in The Killers. Even in the 1940s, the residential boom was beginning to eat up the available farmland. 

In the two brief scenes that take place in Hackensack, handy and somewhat generic buildings stand in for the real thing. Which is fine. Anthony Veiller’s Oscar-nominated screenplay at least treats Hackensack like something other than an old vaudeville joke. (Unlike Superman: The Movie (1978), where Hackensack was ground zero for a nuclear missile launched by Lex Luthor – more of a punchline than a destination). 

It’s probably worth mentioning one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster looks up at the blue summer sky and marvels, “It’s beautiful, as if we’re on the bow of a ship – Lisbon, Naples, Istanbul,” to which a neighbor flatly adds, “Hackensack.”

 

Someday We’ll Be Together

Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Someday We’ll Be Together sent me back to Diana Ross & the Supremes’ original, a song that I misread when it came on the radio at the tail end of 1969.

Up to that point, it was difficult to think of the Supremes as “soulful.” Their records were hooky little sugar cookies, but Ross’ vocals often seemed a little too cool, emotionally detached. What grabbed me about Someday We’ll Be Together was that male voice in the background, distant enough that he sounds like he’s standing in a hallway outside the studio, and like something out of a black church sermon with his echoing “say it” and “sing it.”

My misconception was that I always thought it was one of the Temptations; after all, hadn’t the two groups cut an album together with the unwieldy title, Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations?

Turns out the “preacher” is Johnny Bristol, one of the song’s three co-authors. His idea was to sing with Ross to push her a bit and get her into the right mood. When an engineer accidentally recorded Bristol’s words of encouragement, the Motown brass thought it added something and kept it in. Bristol’s coaching seems to have worked as Ross' vocals gets a little more heated as the song goes on.

The record was originally intended to be her first solo single, so neither Mary Wilson or Cindy Birdsong are on it (which might also help account for the song's different feel from what they’d recorded before). One of the background singers is Merry Clayton, a first-call singer when white rockers were looking for a little touch of gospel (see Neil Young’s The Old Laughing Lady, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama and especially the Stones’ Gimme Shelter). And just to stretch these connections even further, Clayton was married to jazz saxophonist Curtis Amy, who played the smoking solo on the fadeout of the Door’s Touch Me.

Ross’ first solo single instead, released in early 1970, was Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand), a song choice more in line with the Las Vegas/Copacabana aspirations Berry Gordy had for her.

Someday We’ll Be Together remains one of the songs from the time period that wasn’t specifically about Vietnam, but could certainly be interpreted that way, along with I Say A Little Prayer, Last Train to Clarksville and Leaving On A Jet Plane. It was also the last number one hit of the 1960s, hitting the top spot on the Billboard chart dated December 27, 1969. For those keeping score, the first #1 single of the decade was Marty Robbins’ El Paso.

 

Favorite TV Show Episode Blogathon: 

I Spy: Home to Judgement 

The Story 

Government agents Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott are on the run. They’ve botched an assignment, been captured – likely tortured – and escaped. Now they scramble through cornfields and countryside as silent, faceless enemy agents track them. Kelly wears a shackle around one ankle. He’s wounded and feverish. 

They stumble across a farmhouse that Kelly realizes belongs to his Uncle Harry (Will Geer) and Aunt Alta (Una Merkel), whom he hasn’t seen for 27 years. He and Scott hide out in a hayloft. 

Kelly is in bad shape, and as he recites the names of the comic strips he read during his teenage summers on the farm, Scott comes out of hiding and offers to help Uncle Harry with his chores in return for food, which he sneaks back to Kelly. Their trackers, meantime, are closing in. 

Will Geer and Robert Culp

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta realize something is amiss and Kelly is discovered. Uncle Harry, suspicious of these two strangers, tries calling the sheriff, but the telephone is dead. He asks his wife to bring the car around; he’ll drive them to the sheriff himself. Kelly stops his aunt, and a search confirms that the stalkers have wired dynamite to the car’s starter. 

AUNT ALTA: Who are you? What’s your name? 

KELLY: It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t possibly know me. If you remember me at all it would be as a child – who doesn’t exist anymore. (Holding up the dynamite sticks). This is what I am now. And this is what I brought you. 

With the farmhouse now completely cut off, the truth is that the enemies coming after Kelly and Scott will wait until dark, then storm the house and kill everyone. 

Taking inventory of his uncle’s firearms, Kelly asks about a .22 that once belonged to him, and in doing so, reveals himself. 

KELLY: It was mine. But I couldn’t take it back to the city with me and boarding school, so at the end of summer, I left it here, with you. 

UNCLE HARRY: Kelly? Why, it’s Kelly. 

KELLY: You put two nails on the wall in the kitchen. And your 30-30 (Winchester) was on it, for me to take down, when I was tall enough to reach it. The next summer. I would have made it too, because I was tall and skinny the next summer, but that winter my mom died. Next summer never came. And now I’ve come and wished I hadn’t. 

Aunt Alta tears up and Kelly chokes back a sob. His training won’t allow for emotional breakdowns, but what’s implied is that the price for “swingin’ on the Riviera one day,” as Johnny Rivers sang on Secret Agent Man, is emotionally immense. “We’re poison,” Kelly says. “Everything we touch gets contaminated.” 

But it’s getting dark, and this isn’t a time for self-reflection. Working with what’s on hand – two hunting rifles, some barbed wire, homemade explosives in plastic bags, hurricane lamps, fuses for blasting tree stumps and the dynamite sticks taken from the car, Kelly, Scott, Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta prepare to defend themselves. And wait. 

It’s night and the sound of the cicadas give way to footsteps on the roof and in the storm cellar. 

As the intruders try to break into the darkened house, the climax of Home to Judgement is a crescendo of violence and intensity – as much as the networks might allow back then. Electrified barb wire. Explosions. Gunshots. Lit by car headlights or flares. Even the family Dalmatian gets into the action going up against a snarling hound used to hunt down Kelly and Scott.  

Since this is network television, you can guess the outcome. In the final scene, Kelly and Scott walk back to the highway, Kelly holding the rifle his uncle promised him as a teen. He’s smiling for the first time. You can go home again. 

The Script

Robert Culp’s script for Home to Judgement was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in a Drama.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta are based on Culp’s own grandparents, whose farm was in Idaho. “The story Kelly tells about the two rifles is true,” Culp said. “My children and grandchildren will always have this little magic carpet to take them back to a better time, the way I remember it.”

Synchronicity

Home to Judgement was broadcast as the networks’ fascination with secret agents was running on fumes. One week after it aired on Jan. 8, 1968, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. broadcast its final episode. I Spy survived until April 1968. 

One of the comic strips Kelly remembers in the hayloft is Terry and the Pirates. At the time of his death in 2010, Culp was working on a film adaptation of Terry and the Pirates that he was to direct. It was his favorite boyhood comic strip. 

Straw Dogs

Culp originally wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct Home to Judgement. They had a long relationship working on television projects together. 

One could guess that Peckinpah saw Home to Judgement and may have had it in the back of his mind when he directed Straw Dogs (1971). Both share a common reference point of a violent finale of homemade traps in a darkened house and a hero redeemed. 

You can also draw a straight line from Home to Judgement, through Straw Dogs, to Home Alone (1990). While they take different routes to get there, they share similar final acts, even if the violence in Home Alone is more along the lines of a living Warner Brothers cartoon. A crew member on Home Alone said, “I kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”