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!