THE GREAT RACE

 

The other day at my Friday night watch party for historical movies, I showed The Great Race.  It’s a 1965 slapstick epic directed by Blake Edwards, which I first saw in a cinema when I was four. (We were living in Brighton, England, and saw it on my brother’s birthday.) It isn’t the first movie I saw—I’m certain I’d seen the Disney comedy The Monkey’s Uncle several months before—but it was one of the first.

The story goes literally all over the place:  it’s very loosely based on an actual 1908 automobile race westward from New York City to Paris.  It features the cartoonishly dashing daredevil hero Leslie the Great (Tony Curtis, in a parody of his past hero roles), the cartoonishly sour villain Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon, cast against type), and the cartoonishly militant suffragette reporter Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood—this was a time when a woman demanding equal rights with men was considered comedy gold).  Leslie wears White and Fate wears black, and their cars are the same colors.  Leslie and Maggie get into a “battle of the sexes” comedy, which you don’t see much today—the last one I recall is Julia Roberts’ The Runaway Bride, and that was over twenty years ago!  (No points for guessing they’re in for a romantic ending.) Peter Falk has the funniest role as Fate’s often-unreliable stooge.

The story structure isn’t complicated.  After the race starts they head west to a frontier town, leading to a big saloon-fight set piece. (Filming a large-scale brawl has the same problem as filming an orgy—they have to be staged and filmed in an orderly way, so they’re bound to look like something staged and orderly.) Then they cross from Alaska to Siberia on an iceberg.  

Then they come to a Ruritanian kingdom where Fate’s resemblance to a feckless king about to be crowned (Lemmon has a double role) leads to his getting kidnapped by a baron and a Prisoner of Zenda-Graustark type adventure.  We’ve seen all this before, but that’s kind of the point.  It all culminates in a huge pie-fight set piece. (Maggie spends most of this sequence wearing little more than a corset—Hollywood movies in the mid-1960s were a bit on the meretricious side.)  In the end, when they reach Paris, Leslie proves his love for Maggie by letting Fate win the race, but Fate proves a sore winner and uses his car’s cannon to knock down the Eiffel Tower.

How good is the movie?  Well, it’s all quite cartoonish. Some of the gags are funny but it’s very hit-and-miss, and the overall tone is frantic and shrill. (The movie’s dedicated to Laurel and Hardy, who did a lot more with a lot less.) Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines came out about the same time and does that epic slapstick more successfully.  That version benefited from having Terry-Thomas as the villain, and this movie could have used Terry-Thomas as Fate or even as the Ruritanian baron.  The real stars are the classic cars driven by Leslie and Fate.

I’ve seen it several times, but I probably wouldn’t be interested in it except for what I remember seeing that first time.  The opening credits sequence is done in the style of early silent movies, and I remembered that it opens with a card saying “Ladies, kindly remove your hats.” (At the age of four, I could already read!) Early cinemas actually had cards saying that, because back then ladies often wore big hats that obstructed the view of those sitting behind them.  The crowd in the opening fairground scene looked really huge to someone my age.  And the scene where Leslie sneaks into the baron’s castle and has a sword fight with him scared me witless!  I’m the sort who treasures early memories…

I wish I could forget...

  Is there anything you wish you could forget?  There’s a famous horror movie, Night of the Living Dead, which I haven’t seen myself, but one critic warned, “Afterward you may wish you could forget the whole experience.”

I wish I could forget The Flintstones.  That was an animated Stone Age sitcom from the early 1960s, which has had a very long afterlife in syndicated reruns.  It was produced  on a low budget by Hanna-Barbera Studios, and the animation was terrible!  The sort of thing where a car would drive along and pass by the same three or four buildings again and again, as if it were going around in a circle…

The writing was terrible too.  The main characters, of course, were knockoffs of the characters on Jackie Gleason’s far superior show The Honeymooners.  Ever see Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert?  That’s the one where they wanted to go to a Shriners-type convention but their wives wouldn’t let them, so they pretended to be sick and go somewhere else for recuperation, but their wives found out the truth… Anyway, The Flintstones redid that story again and again!  In one story the wives found out from a talking parrot who kept saying words like “convention”; in another the husbands were caught on a Stone Age version of Candid Camera. (The running joke was that everything in the 1960 world had a Stone Age equivalent…) There was another episode that redid Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero, complete with the unconvincing happy ending.

One story I remember in particular had Wilma becoming a hand model (like George on that Seinfeld episode), and they wanted to put her in a TV commercial, but only showing her hand.  Fred got in a prideful huff and wouldn’t let her do it, because the story would have no point otherwise.  In the end, Betty made the commercial instead, and they saw the commercial on stone age TV, and they showed Betty’s face as well as her hand!  Terrible, terrible writing.

And TV cartoons at the time weren’t all as bad as that.  Rocky and Bullwinkle had the same marginal animation, but the writing was nice and sharp!  I’ve rewatched the show on video in recent years, and it holds up pretty well.  I like the relationship between the sinister spies Boris and Natasha, and how Natasha ended up doing all the work!  My favourite part was Bullwinkle as Mr. Know-It-All, who’d do subjects like “How to get into a movie theatre without buying a ticket.” (This was before cartoon characters had to be good role models…)

I’m ashamed that there was a time when I liked The Flintstones and actually wanted to watch it.  When we look back at our childhood, we notice that we had no taste back then!

GOOD TIMES

 

I used to watch Good Times in the 1970s, the Norman Lear sitcom about an African-American family struggling to survive in the Chicago housing projects.  It was a curious mix of cheesy sitcommery, preachy social consciousness and jive-talking shtick.  Jimmy Walker as the oldest son JJ had the catchphrase “Dy-no-mite!” (He started out as a supporting character but advanced to become the show’s star, like Henry Winkler as Fonzie on Happy Days at the same time.) The youngest son Michael was in his mid-teens and out to advance Black Power. (His nickname was “The Militant Midget.”)

I remember an episode where the father was tempted to go off and work on the Alaska Pipeline to make real money for a change. (He said, “We are poor—and that’s the last thing anyone wants to be, except for sick and dead!”) But the mother wasn’t happy about him leaving her and the family behind.  Meanwhile, Michael was with this group of boys out to promote Black Power, but they got attacked by a street gang.  He mentioned that they were going to attack them in retaliation, and the father responded by making him leave the group, taking away the jacket that showed he was a member.  Then he said “Want to discuss it?” while making motions with his belt. (In other words, “One more word and you’ll get a beating!”) He said “No!” and walked away, and the audience laughed.  Then he decided he should stay in Chicago, saying with a smile and a wink that he had to keep his son on the right path.

That “Want to discuss it?” moment made me laugh too, but something about it bothered me.  It isn’t that I’m an anti-spanking fanatic; I’ve never raised children, and I don’t know that I could completely avoid resorting to physical violence.  But threatening violence just to cut off the discussion is unacceptable to me, especially when  dealing with teenagers.  That’s bullying your kid, and it’s teaching him to be a bully too!  Of course, a show like Good Times was short on subtlety:  a father solving the problem through subtler means wasn’t something they expected viewers to have the patience for.  It’s a common cliche on TV shows:  if you want to get through to someone, confront him!

Another cheesy aspect of the show was how they were often giving JJ a new girlfriend who’d make a single appearance to illustrate a new social issue.  One was pregnant—JJ wasn’t the father, of course—and another one had venereal disease.  And there was one two-part episode where JJ got engaged to a girl he didn’t realize was a drug addict! (Happens all the time…) Near the end someone says that drugs will always be a problem, and the father retorts, “President Kennedy said we’d put a man on the moon in ten years, and we did it.  So why can’t we get rid of drugs?” Big applause from the studio audience.  In hindsight, that bothers me too—a serious, complicated issue dealt with through rabble-rousing triumphalism!

And don’t get me started on Norman Lear’s other African-American sitcom The Jeffersons!

Being late

  I remember in Grade 3 when a girl came into class late, and the teacher told us all to turn around and look at her!  That was rather mean…

Yesterday I went to my singing group in the East End.  I’m often late to it because I live near the West End and buses are less frequent on Sundays.  And it goes from 1:00 to 3:00, too late for lunch afterward.  On the other hand, I’m not a morning person, especially on Sundays, so I often have breakfast at 10:30 or so, and since I have to leave by noon I don’t always have time for lunch beforehand.  Sometimes I’ll have lunch in the East End just before going to the group, if I think I have enough time.  

Yesterday I thought I had enough time, so I stopped at A&W and ordered a sausage and egg muffin.  But I ended up waiting half an hour, because my order had fallen through the cracks!  So I was half an hour late. (Fortunately, several others were also late, though not as late as me.)

I was telling Carolyn the group leader about it afterward, and she told me of the time she took her mother to a hospital for medical treatment and they ended up waiting five hours because her mother’s medical file had fallen off the table!  We’re both a bit too patient…

But there was one good thing to come out of this.  I was afraid this would be one of those weeks when I can’t think of anything to write, but this gave me something to write about!

Epitaphs & Losing your marbles

Back in the ‘70s I recall listening to the CBC radio comedy Dr. Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show.  One skit they did was about pet funerals!  One of the lines was “Have you considered an appropriate epitaph—something like ‘He ain’t around, he’s in the ground.’”

William Butler Yeats’ epitaph is his own lines “Cast a cold eye/On life and death,/Horseman, pass by.” Remember Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s sister who married an English nobleman and was killed in a plane crash? I’ve always liked her epitaph “Joy she gave, joy she has.” I also like Cecil Day-Lewis’ own epitaph “Shall I be gone long?” Robert Frost suggested for his epitaph “He had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” And Dorothy Parker suggested “Excuse my dust.”  Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph is lines he wrote when he was young:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer

Like the Cover of an old Book

Its contents torn out,

And stript of its Lettering and Guilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms,

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ’d,

Appear once more

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and amended by the Author.

I think I’d like a Chinese-style “tree burial,” where they cremate you then plant a tree over your ashes.  If they want to put up an inscription plaque it should be the Chinese proverb “Our ancestors planted trees, we sit in the shade.”

Our other subject this week is “Losing all your marbles.” Just now I’m reading Alexandre Dumas’ mega-novel The Count of Monte Cristo.  It’s about a guy who gets framed and becomes a political prisoner for fourteen years.  Then he makes an incredible escape and finds a huge treasure.  Eventually he sets about getting even with the people who got him sent up.  He does that by cleverly manipulating things so that they ultimately destroy themselves!  The worst of his enemies has the worst fate, going insane in the end.  You’re bound to wonder, Is what the hero does to him worse than what he did?  In one of the Kill Bill movies, the Japanese sword-maker warns a vengeful Uma Thurman, “You may think of revenge as a road, but it’s more like a forest.” That movie came out about the same time as 9/11, which prompted a pretty rash vengeance campaign by the American government… 

The Trans-Canada Highway

 

I grew up in the town of Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick.  The nearby Trans-Canada Highway came near there around the time I was born.  It was just a few lanes wide and didn’t get expanded into a freeway till the mid-1990s, by which time I no longer lived there.

Driving west, you’d ascend Beech Hill and go a length through the woods to Memramcook, where the road descended to a river valley with a gravel quarry.  Then you’d go back uphill and soon get to the Moncton area, where you’d enter the city or go even further, on routes that took you to west to Fredericton and northwest to Quebec, or southwest to St. John and west to Maine.

Driving east, you’d go past the Tantramar River with its tidal dam, and a group of radio towers that were used by the Canadian Northern Service back then for shortwave broadcasts. The land is flat and marshy there, and the railway runs parallel to the road.  Then you’d climb a ridge to Aulac.  The National Historic Park at Fort Beausejour was there, along with a tourist information centre and a place that sold apples every fall. (I think they have an EV charging station there now!)

There one branch of the Trans-Canada Highway goes east to Northumberland Strait.  Our summer cottage was in that direction, and further on was the ferry to Prince Edward Island. (There’s a bridge there now, but it was only built after I left.)

The other branch goes south to Nova Scotia.  You’d descend to more of the marshy flatland, and the Missaguash River that forms the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Then you’d climb another ridge to where Fort Lawrence was, and another tourist information centre.  This was in the Amherst area where you could enter the town. (In the late 1980s, we often went to Amherst to rent videos.  There was also a Dairy Queen there.) But you could go further south to Truro, and from there south to Halifax or east to Cape Breton Island, which we regularly visited in the summer.

That was then, this is now.  I never learned to drive, but now I live in a big city near a streetcar line.  My household went carless ten years ago.  The Trans-Canada Highway doesn’t even reach Toronto!

Favourite job

I don’t have much job experience, but sometimes I think about jobs I’d like to have.  I would have made a good town crier in the old days.  I have a loud voice and like telling people what I know.  And in Africa they have a guy called a kafo whose job is to keep a community’s records in his head, sometimes going back for centuries!  I think I would have liked doing that.  I read a book about America after a nuclear war and they had professional remembers who basically did that.

Other jobs that appeal to me are more fanciful.  I think I’d like to have a job introducing American movies to Chinese audiences and explaining their context.  Or introducing famous paintings in London’s art galleries to tourists and giving them my perspective.

There’s an A.A. Milne poem “Cherry Stones” that goes,

Tinker, Tailor,

Soldier, Sailor,

Rich Man, Poor Man,

Ploughboy,

Thief —

And what about a Cowboy,

Policeman, Jailer,

Engine-driver,

Or Pirate Chief?

What about a Postman — or a Keeper at the Zoo?

What about the Circus Man who lets the people through?

And the man who takes the pennies for the round-abouts and swings?

Or the man who plays the organ, and the other man who sings?

What about a Conjuror with rabbits in his pockets?

What about a Rocket Man who's always making rockets?

Oh, there's such a lot of things to do and such a lot to be

That there's always lots of cherries on my little cherry tree!

Earworms

  For some people the summer of 1994 was the summer of Forrest Gump.  For me, it was the summer of The North China Herald.  Back then I was researching my Ph.D. thesis on the British community in the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing, and that was one source I spent a lot of time on.  The North China Herald was an English newspaper published in Shanghai’s British concession, with correspondents in all the treaty ports, so I went through all the reports from Chongqing.  It took a long time, and in the last four years before the newspaper closed after Pearl Harbour, there was a big increase in Chongqing reports because the Nationalist government moved there.  It’s a bit like Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon:  not far from the finish there’s a hill that runners have to ascend first!

Anyhow, in the later part of my work I started to hear music going around in my head, from our record album The Royal Family of Opera.  Both were Wagner pieces:  Elsa’s Dream from Lohengrin and the Prize Song from Die Meistersinger. Elsa’s Dream is what the heroine sings when she’s accused of witchcraft and faces the stake, and all she can talk about is this dream where a knight came along to save her.  And I’ve heard that Die Meistersinger is a pretty boring opera, but if you can sit through two hours, you’ll hear that wonderful aria, which the hero sings to win a music festival prize.  It’s odd about Wagner—he composed great music, but whenever I’ve gone to one of his operas, there always seems to be a point where I have trouble staying awake…

Earworms are funny.  Some of the songs that get into my head are genuine keepers, like those ABBA songs in the 1970s.  Others are just silly, like Melanie’s “Brand New Key.” And of course, some are commercial jingles or TV series theme songs, which I’m ashamed to admit I remember.  But I’d rather not say any more because if I start thinking about them, I may be unable to stop…

The Lincolns

I've always been interested in Lincoln.  Just now I’m translating a Korean children’s book about him.  And I recently saw the documentary Lincoln’s Dilemma about how the abolition of slavery came about.  It seems like everything in his life contributed to the eventual legend, like his meeting his future wife Mary Todd at a ball and dancing badly with her. (Our image of Lincoln is a country boy not gifted with social graces…)

When I was little I read a children’s book about him, in English.  I learned about all the difficulties in his life, how his store went broke and left him in debt, and one of his sons took sick and died while he was President.  He often suffered from depression, and they’d be afraid to nominate him for the Presidency now, but it arguably made him a better leader.

My mother was interested in Lincoln too.  She felt sorry for his unstable wife.  Back in Illinois she’d been a big fish in a small pond, but when they came to Washington the capital’s social elite viewed them as hillbillies.  She was a shopaholic and wore lots of fancy clothes during wartime, which many thought inappropriate. (She wore jewelled rings over her kid gloves, which the elite considered low-class.) After being widowed, she actually spent some time in a mental asylum!

He had an unusual talent for succinctness:  he said the sort of things that would cause my mother to say “Nobody could have said it better.”  Like in his Gettysburg Address, where he said “We’re here to dedicate a cemetery to the war dead, yet they’ve already dedicated it with their actions in a way our words can’t match.  All we can do is draw inspiration from them and continue their fight.”

The more I read about Lincoln, the more I admire his shrewdness.  He famously wrote in an open letter, “If I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would; if I could save it by freeing none, I would; if I could save it by freeing some and not others, I would.” This may seem indecisive, but in fact he’d already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and was waiting for the right time, which came the following month.

There have been some good movies about Lincoln.  There was the one with Daniel Day-Lewis a few years ago.  And there’s an old one, Young Mr. Lincoln, with Henry Fonda as Lincoln arguing a legal case in his early years.  There’s a great moment at the end where he says “I’m going to the top of the hill!” and walks off into a storm…

Sleep

“Death is something that makes men weep,

Yet one-third of life is spent in sleep!”

—Lord Byron

I like to sleep with the window open when the weather is warm enough. (I heard that Pierre Trudeau also did, but his wife Margaret didn’t like it.) Sometimes there’s noise outside, especially on Wednesday nights when they pick up the trash, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

On Wednesday morning I woke up to my open window and there was a funny smell in the air, a bit like someone was burning tar or barbecuing nearby.  It was the smoke from the wildfires reaching Toronto!  I closed my windows for several days, though now I’ve opened them again.

I’m hoping that this smoke in big cities like New York will be a turning point, and we’ll finally get serious about slowing down climate change.  Maybe this will turn out to be another “Where were you when…” moment, like 9/11 and the onset of covid.  Someone on Twitter was saying that supporters of a Green New Deal aren’t serious, and I responded, “Is it more serious to do nothing and hope that things work out?”

I was in London a decade ago and went to Roger Rhys’ one-man show talking about Shakespeare and such.  I’m afraid I dozed off during the show!  I sure hope Roger didn’t notice…  I also got sleepy watching the Greenland movie The Journal of Knud Rasmussen.  Something about those snowy Arctic locations makes me feel like hibernating!

Do you like lullabies?  I recently realized that many of my favourite musical pieces are berceuses.  I remember when the FM CBC had an afternoon music show titled Disc Drive and they’d sign off with the berceuse from Gabriel Faure’s Dolly Suite.

Empty nest

"In every parting is an image of death”—George Elliot

I come from a fairly close-knit family.  You know how most kids daydream at one time or another that they’re the offspring of other people and just got adopted into their current family?  I never had that fantasy!

I remember seeing a TV ad for long distance phone calls when I was young.  It showed a young woman leaving a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to catch the bus that would take her into the city, with her rather old-looking parents smiling and waving goodbye.  I found that commercial really, really sad!  The point was that she wouldn’t be completely cut off—she could still speak with them on the phone sometimes—but that went over my head.

Another long distance commercial I recall showed a young woman sitting around on a Sunday afternoon with time on her hands and looking glum, with sad guitar music.  But then her phone rings and she answers it all smiles!

Ever see the movie Born Free?  It’s about a gamekeeper couple in colonial Kenya who adopted three orphaned lion cubs.  Two of them got sent on to zoos, but they decided to wean the third off them and make her an independent mature lioness.  I remember the first time they left her alone, and when they came to check up on her she’d barely survived and they had to return to Square  One!  I saw it just a few weeks before I lived on my own for the first time…

In my late 20s and early 30s, I spent a couple of years living on my own but often visiting home, then lived at home again for a couple of years, then moved to Toronto with my sister for three years, then at 33 I spent eight months completely alone in London, England—the best eight months of my life.  But then I came home to Toronto and my parents had moved in with us, and I’d live with them for the rest of their lives.

My mother left us about 10 years ago, my father about three years ago.  Don’t I wish I had a phone line sufficiently long-distance to speak to them now!

Growing older

“Upon the hoary head is placed the crown of wisdom”—Book of Proverbs

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.  Ol’ rocking chair’s got me!  Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. 

There’s a fairy tale where the Good Lord handed out  a span of life to each species. (It’s in the Grimm Brothers collection, but I think it goes back to the Middle East!) He was going to give everyone thirty years, but none of them were satisfied.  The Horse, the Dog and the Monkey had hard lives and wanted fewer years, while Man was just getting started and wanted more, so God took some years from the others and gave them to the human race.  So Man lives his own life for the first thirty years, where he’s young and carefree; then for eighteen years he lives like the Horse, working hard and receiving little gratitude; then for twelve years he lives like the Dog, barking and annoying everyone; and for his last ten years he lives like the Monkey, a plaything who receives no respect and gets  ridiculed and put on the shelf.

I’ll say this much for growing old:  it’s a problem that I know I can’t do anything about, and I prefer that to problems where I have a sense that I should do something, but I’m not sure what…. (It’s the same with the weather.)

What are the good things about getting older?  One is that it’s easier to ignore things.  Bill Cosby said, “You know you’re getting old when your glasses are fogged up, and you don’t care!” And it gets easier to say, “I just don’t know.” When you’re younger it feels wrong to be passive and bemused; you’re supposed to be proactive and figure things out!  When I look at something like the Ukraine War, I wouldn’t claim to know what to do about it.  I guess I accept sending weapons to Ukraine to defeat an aggressor like Putin, but I’m not ready to actively support that policy.  I just don’t know enough about it.  Anyway the policy doesn’t require popular support, just acceptance.

I turned sixty last year. Yes, I’ve always looked younger than my age.  I’ve been thinking about the people who were that age when I was young—by now the great majority of them have passed on.  I remember seeing Ray Bolger on Front Page Challenge, talking about The Wizard of Oz and mentioning “Judy Garland, who is no longer with us.” Now that’s a classy euphemism for someone being dead!  Some of those old movie stars were so classy—like Dorothy Malone, who won an Oscar for Written on the Wind and kept it in storage!  (If you ask me, she should have won the Oscar for The Tarnished Angels instead, but I digress…)

It’s odd how age can affect your taste.  Ever see Charlie Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator where he appeals to the people of the world to work together to create a world where dictators aren’t thriving on division?  As I get older, that speech gets to me more and more.  Just the other day I was listening to it again and it brought me to tears!  It has “from the heart” sincerity and a certain desperation:  the movie was released in 1940, when World War II was already underway, effecting even greater horrors than people feared, and a messy aftermath that we’re still living with today.  It’s like a message for future audiences.  Someone on YouTube took a TV ad from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and combined its visuals with that speech—they went together surprisingly well.

So how do I feel about old age?  I think I’m actually getting better at life!  I’m still hoping for a girlfriend someday.  But what would please me the most is finding something to work at, where I could really contribute to society and give some return for all the benefits I’ve received.  It’s a paradox that I want to start working at a time when so many are anticipating retirement.

In The Once and Future King, Merlin tells the boy who’ll become King Arthur, “Whenever you feel down about life, learn something new.  That always helps!” That’s a good approach to old age too.  You aren’t too old if you’re still learning…