Thirty-second season

1593.) Vintage: I say a final farewell to Bernardo Bertolucci with the fifth and last of my tributes to his work. In this case I discuss, and give the American TV premiere to, scenes from his last film, You and Me (2012). Based on a young adult novel, it is a film that encompasses themes from his earlier pictures and has imagery and plot developments that seem derived from a film that clearly influenced his work, Les Enfants Terribles, written by Cocteau and directed by Melville. A teenage boy decides to avoid going on a school ski trip and instead inhabits a storage area in the basement of the apartment building his family lives in – finally alone with his imagination and his devices, pets (an ant farm), and books, until his junkie step-sister invades his secret hideaway. The film is a well-made character study that avoids the sentimentality found in so many films for teens and ended Bertolucci’s career on a very positive and (thankfully) small-in-scale note. One of its bonuses: a touching scene set to the rare single “Regazzo Solo, Regazza Sola” (Lonely Boy, Lonely Girl), the unusual Italian rewrite of “Space Oddity” (having nothing to do with space travel or Major Tom), sung by Bowie himself.


1594.) Vintage: To celebrate mine birthday, I always dig up something that you can potentially see somewhere else (the majority of Funhouse offerings being pretty damned rare items for U.S. television). This time out, as I turn “one year older and deeper in debt,” I salute again the wonder that is Massacre Mafia Style, Duke Mitchell’s crime opus. The film was restored beautifully for a Blu-ray/DVD package a few years ago (after having only been available on VHS as “The Executioner”) and even played two or three times on TCM, but then was mysteriously pulled from circulation on disc (as was its successor in weirdness, but more on that in a future show). Thus, this week I’ll be showing scenes from “MMS” and also giving you a glimpse at one supplement, a doc which offers a rather candid (and at times damning) view of Mitchell, who was known as “Mr. Palm Springs” and made his bones primarily as a nightclub entertainer in that city. So, join me for simulated violence, jaunty Italian-American songs, and protracted speeches about the position of the Italian mobster in American society, courtesy of the auteur who had previously met a Brooklyn gorilla.


1595.) Vintage: I return to the topic of cult actor-singer-moviemaker Duke Mitchell this week again – this time to do the first of two episodes about his mind-bendingly weird film Gone with the Pope (shot in ’75; edited and released in 2010). The most significant thing about the film is that it is, hands-down, the best restoration job done on an exploitation film, ever. That is due to the fact that Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski assembled the film (which was completely shot but never assembled by Duke himself); for a method of comparison, Murawski went from assembling Pope to being the main editor on the creation of Orson’s Other Side of the Wind. There are several striking things about Pope – the flat acting, use of stock footage to simulate a trip to Italy, long monologues by even minor characters – but the single most unique is the fact that the films actually has three plots (or “movements” if you want to get highfalutin’ about it). The second one is the most talked about – it involves Duke and his chums kidnapping the Pope and demanding a ransom of 50 cents from every Catholic in the world. That said, it’s not a comedy, although it has some comic touches. Duke Mitchell was very convinced of his own skills as an actor, writer, and director – when one watches Pope, one marvels that there’s not a minute where Duke doesn’t think he’s making a gangster-movie masterpiece.


1596.) Vintage: The third and last of my episodes saluting the cinematic efforts of one Duke Mitchell covers the startling “third act” (startling in that it makes little sense) of his Gone with the Pope. I discuss the film and show clips from both the feature – assembled by master-editor Bob Murawski, who graduated from assembling a Duke Mitchell unfinished feature to an Orson Welles unfinished feature (Other Side of the Wind) – and the home-video extras. These extras include stories from the cast, crew, and Duke’s close friends, behind-the-scenes footage of Duke directing (listen to him feed words to a non-actor who doesn’t speak English well). The most stunning of these revelations is that Duke attempted to make a hardcore porn reel that would overlap with Pope (he was nothing if not confident in his abilities in all areas, but this didn’t work out, to put it mildly).


1597.) Vintage: Can you discuss Roman Polanski’s films without discussing his life? I’ve decided to attempt this by discussing his work he did in the 2010s, which began with his creation of two “filmed plays,” one of which (Venus in Fur) I believe was the best thing he’d done since The Pianist and Bitter Moon. The third film never played in the U.S. because of the MeToo movement (although it should be noted that the victim in Polanski’s statutory case, now a grandmother, has asked all parties everywhere to move on, has accepted his privately-made apology to her, and in fact even advocated on behalf of him winning the Oscar for Pianist). It’s a thriller called Based on a True Story that some great moments of suspense but its All About Eve-ish script (cowritten by Olivier Assayas) is not all it could be. The lead performances by Emmanuelle Seigner (Mrs. Polanski) and Eva Green are great, though.


1598.) Vintage: Going on a glorious tangent off the work of Jacques Rivette, this week I present a discussion of and scenes from the debut film by Argentinean filmmaker Eduardo de Gregorio, who co-scripted The Spider’s Stratagem with Bertolucci and Celine and Julie Go Boating for Rivette. The film discussed here, Surreal Estate (1976), is a sort of odd spin-off of Celine and Julie, as it finds stars Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier in an old mansion that seems to be spawning its own narratives. Corin Redgrave stars as a blocked novelist who discovers the house and figures that he can write a novel about its occupants (including a dominant servant, played by Leslie Caron) – but soon finds that the house controls its denizens, rather than the other way around. de Gregorio made four later features, but this one is the most intriguing, as it deals with storytelling and sexuality, and is itself a sort of “hallway” running alongside Celine and Julie.


1599.) A vintage episode, airing to note the passing of Gena Rowlands: From spring 1996, my phone interview with Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel. The chat was conducted to promote the first-time-ever debut of Cassavetes’ Shadows and Faces on home video (on VHS). We discussed those films at the outset, but since I had the opportunity to speak to two of the people who were closest to Cassavetes, I made sure to bring up the things I had always wanted to talk about with his intimates: his love of character people, the fantasy elements that appeared John’s last few works, and the different cuts of several of his films (Faces being the one that was cut down the most between its film-festival debut and its commercial run). Also, for bonus trivia points, find out which Fifties comic book Gena wrote for!


1600.) Labor Day continues to be Jerry Day in the Funhouse. I thought I couldn’t top last year’s Jerry/Clown-related discovery but a few months back I came across a “Pageant” magazine from 1960 in which the happily liberated Dean Martin reflected back on being Jerry’s straight man for a decade. What he said was quote-worthy, and so I’m reading from the article on this year’s Jerry show. The rest of the episode features a look at the Dean and Jerry relationship through their appearances on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” from 1950 to 1951 — I’ll cover ’52 through ’55 on an upcoming show. What must be kept in mind when watching these clips is that Dean was asked by a British interviewer when he stopped having fun being in the act and his instant answer was “1950.” Which means that watching the Colgate shows is essentially seeing a two-man team where one guy’s ego is inflating to crazy proportions, while the other guy is dying to go out on his own and stop providing “set-ups” for his partner’s antics. In the process I discuss the current releases of the Colgate shows versus the old public domain tapes and discs that contained the episodes (edited very differently) and also the other talents who appeared on the Colgate shows, from the future A-listers (who I had no time to show in this compilation) to Funhouse favorites (including one long-ago interview subject). The best part of all this? The clips get even more starkly illustrative of how the team were dying to break up in Part 2!


1601.) Part 2 of my Martin and Lewis TV retrospective shows the team’s movement away from each other, even when performing on the same stage or in the same sketch. In this episode I present clips from the “Colgate Comedy Hour” episode from 1952-55, in which there were certain odd signs that there was no longer a “unified front” in the M&L comedy team. For one thing, Jerry demanded to have “in one” sequences where he could perform several minutes of solo comedy (presumably because he wanted to “balance” Dean’s songs with even more screen time for himself), which usually consisted of some musical shtick — all of the sequences were underwhelming, with the exception of one pantomime bit that was so successful that Jerry kept performing it for the rest of his life (after having it fine-tuned by Frank Tashlin). The other interesting element, besides the fact that both Dean and Jerry were starting to perform in sweaters and other easygoing, non-tux outfits (reminiscent of Crosby, Como, and Hope), were the songs the duo sang to convince the public that they would “partners forever,” each of which had special lyrics written by Sammy Cahn. By the last episodes the sketches function as if Dean was guesting on Jerry’s show, or vice versa. I tried to balance the “distance” between the duo here by inserting some of Dean’s songs (which did indeed get catchier and catchier as the years went on, reflected in the fact that “That’s Amore” hit the Top Ten and found him singing more original, non-movie tunes) and Jerry’s musical mime that he continued to perform until the 2000s onstage.


1602.) Again offering stuff you ain’t seein’ anyplace else, this week I present another visit to the world of William Klein, noted photographer/filmmaker, this time in documentarian mode. The film in question, “William Klein aux grands magasins” (William Klein at department stores), was made in 1964 for a French TV show called “Les femmes aussi.” It features profiles of various women who shop (and one who works) in a Parisian department store. Klein may be mentioned in the title, but the biggest name who worked on the project is the woman who conducts the interviews, namely Simone Signoret (already a star for a decade and a half). Klein has Signoret not only speak to the women inside the department store, he also has her eat with them in their homes. As an addition to the proceedings, he interviews Signoret herself midway through the proceedings, asking her about her work and her relation to stores at this point in her career. (As onlookers gather to see the interview occurring in a cafe, we realize that Simone’s statement that she generally avoids department stores has some heavy basis in fact, and fandom.)


1603.) I return to the work of the great Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson in this episode. This time out it’s an obscure short he made around the time his style had changed from a more conventional one into the all-in-one-tableau style he adopted for his shorts and commercials, and his later darkly comic feature films. This particular short was quite very different, as “Something Happened” (1987) began life as a PSA about AIDS and ways to protect oneself from the virus. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare funded the film, up until Andersson decided to include scenes that reflected on the derivation of the virus – or, more accurately, the racist stories about how it had begun in Africa and made its way to Europe and America. At that point the National Board bowed out of the film, so Andersson funded it himself with money from his work on commercials. In this episode I show scenes from the short film and also discuss how its darkly satiric sequences reflecting the question of the virus’s origin tackle the very important (and to date, never truly resolved) question of where AIDS came from – and by extension, bring up questions that arose around a later pandemic (which also had a racist derivation story at its core). As it stands, the film is a key work in Andersson’s filmography, predating his 1991 short “World of Glory” (in which a similar narrative about governmental control of the populace emerges out of a series of darkly comic vignettes) and his blissfully satiric feature films of the 21st century.


1604.) The temptation to sum up decades in culture has existed for quite some time, but it reached its first peak in the second half of the 20th century. Witness this week’s focus, a variety TV “spectacular” that CBS aired called “The Fabulous Fifties.” The show, which aired in January 1960, was directed by soon-to-be feature director Norman Jewison and Charles and Ray Eames (yes, the couple who designed furniture) and featured a bunch of segments about the past decade, ranging from the recounting of straight news events to comedy sketches and musical numbers. I discuss the show’s rather odd structure, its at-times stern demeanor (conveyed by hosts Henry Fonda and Eric Sevareid), and shameless promotion of CBS shows over those of the other networks (and Elvis as the one-person representation of rock ’n’ roll). But the entertainment portions of the program are memorable, thanks to the talent hired. Dick Van Dyke (a year and a half before his sitcom debuted) does a salute to popular Fifties dances, Shelley Berman gets put in a sitcom bag in a sketch about a father and son, Rex Harrison does a tune from My Fair Lady, and Nichols and May are wonderfully tongue-in-cheek in two sketches (a conventional N&H two-hander and a deftly-handled ad for GE refrigerators). Add to that a catalog of both famous faces and a necrology of the famous who died during the Fifties.


1605.) Vintage: Taking a break from the high art for a week, I hereby introduce another no-budget, sincerely clueless auteur. Neil Breen is a deadpan actor-director-writer-producer who works in the Las Vegas area and produces drama-crime films-fantasies that have ambiguous characters, overloaded plots (all info supplied in a voiceover and much of it rarely mentioned ever again), really poor acting, and a pace that is at best uneven, at worst slow beyond even the wildest imaginings of the most laidback experimental filmmaker. Breen has acquired an Internet cult that takes his bloated features and cuts them down to “just the funny parts” – what I do on this episode is to tackle his first film Double Down (2005) with both a verbal review and my own “super-cut” that not only supplies some unintentionally humorous scenes (Breen gets a phone call indicating a young girl he knows has died of brain cancer, interrupting with “I’ve got to take this other call…”), but also some moments that indicate the “longueur” of his work. In the case of this film that meant including alternate takes of various scenes, so dialogue and action is repeated. And the plot – well, it’s at base level the story of a super-spy-turned-terrorist who will “take down the Vegas strip,” but don’t expect that to happen anywhere in the picture. His films are NOT Christian, but they have the sincerity of Christian entertainment, which is all I need say….


1606.) The Deceased Artiste department makes a return, as I pay tribute to the first decade of Shelley Duvall’s career by discussing and showing excerpts from her work with Robert Altman. Duvall was discovered by Altman while he was making his very unconventional comedy Brewster McCloud (1970); she went on to feature in his work up to 1980, when she costarred in Popeye (the film that was labelled a “box office bomb” but actually was a big success money-wise in the U.S and worldwide, and one of Altman’s biggest grossers). Sure, she had two side gigs, one small (Annie Hall) and one that loomed large in her legend (The Shining, where Stanley clearly decided he had to treat her the way Jack treated Wendy), but the films with Altman were her greatest legacy. They found her playing more and more complicated roles, from the hippie chick of McCloud to the failed “Cosmo” reader of 3 Women (1977) who ends up the leader of a family of women. In the process, Shelley established herself as an excellent actress who was also one of American cinema’s more unconventional beauties. As a bonus, I include a post-Altman clip of Duvall acting for premier fantasist (and Funhouse fave) Guy Maddin in the late 1990s.