Valhalla Cinema: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Source:The New Democrat

I saw Anatomy of a Murder last week on TCM and Robert Osborne described the movie as a very serious, or deeply serious, or something to that effect. But if you are familiar with Jimmy Stewart and a lot of his movies, his movies tend not to be that serious. Similar to Cary Grant because of how spontaneously funny they both were especially with improvisation. Sure Anatomy is about a very serious topic which of course is about a man accused of murdering a man who just raped his wife. An Army Lieutenant at that and very important person in his community. But there’s a lot of humor with funny people all throughout the movie.

And I think that is what I love most about this movie. They deal with very serious subjects which are murder and rape of course. But sex in the late 1950s when the country was about to change dramatically culturally and you could already see signs of that change by 1959 with the Rock and Roll Generation. And that is what this movie deals with which are very serious subjects, but they take a very humorous look at them with a lot of sarcasm and wisecracks. Including with the judge played by Joe Welch and the two lead attorney’s played by George Scott the lead prosecutor and Jimmy Stewart the lead defense lawyer.

Anatomy of a Murder at least a first is about a rape. But they don’t show that part. A women played by Lee Remick having a good time at a bar and ends up walking home and offered a ride by the owner of the bar and he ends up raping her. Her husband finds out about it later that night and goes to the bar to confront the man about it. And ends up shooting and killing him for it. Under most circumstances that would be a clear case of first degree murder, or at least second degree murder. But Paul Biegler played by Stewart goes with a temporary insanity plea and that becomes his main defense.

I first saw this movie about a year ago and it is already one of my favorite movies of all-time. Seen it three or four times since because of the versatility of the movie. Dealing with very serious subjects in the movie and yet everyone plays a comedian at least at some point in the movie. Which is typical for a Jimmy Stewart movie and this movie has a great cast as well. With George Scott, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, Arthur O’Connell and many others. And this movie gives its viewers a very good lock at the court system and what it is like to be on trial. And try such a big legal case.

Stereo Oldie: Experiment in Terror (1962)

Source:The New Democrat 

Experiment in Terror is one of the best action/thriller mystery/suspense movies that I’ve ever seen and perhaps is ahead of its time. At least as far as how the bad guy the terrorist in the movie was able to get so much intelligence on his potential victims. How he intimidated them and how he also used them. Ross Martin plays the terrorist in the movie and he’s not someone who blows up banks, airports, houses, what have you. But is someone who has a very simple and basic goal. Rob a bank to collect somewhere around hundred-thousand dollars, but only uses one employee to get him the money.

The terrorist uses Kelly Sherwood played by Lee Remick who is a bank teller at this San Francisco bank. And tells her, “you rob the bank for me and get me the money, or I’ll kill you and your sister”. He has so much information already on Kelly Sherwood and her sister Toby played by Stefanie Powers, before he puts this terrorist act into action. Kelly is young women working at the bank. Toby is still in high school and the terrorist knows all of this and even what high school Toby goes to.

The terrorist Red played by Ross Martin, tells Kelly that if she goes to the police or FBI, that he’ll kill her and her sister. He underestimates her and the amount of intelligence and courage that she has and she calls Red’s bluff, (no pun intended) goes to the FBI anyway behind his back so he doesn’t know about it, but he figures it out anyway, but doesn’t come through on his threat at least right away. So Kelly is playing along with Red and not really giving him anything, while the SF FBI led by John Ripley tracks down the terrorist. This is a great movie and I’ve seen it several times.

Oscars: Network (1976) ‘Win Original Screenplay: 1977 Oscars’

Source:Oscars- Paddy Chayefsky, accepting an Oscar for Network (1976) in 1977.

Source:The New Democrat 

“Paddy Chavefsky wins the Oscar for Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen–based on factual material or on story material not previously published or produced) for Network at the 49th Academy Awards. Norman Mailer presents the award; hosted by Jane Fonda.” 

From The Oscars 

I got more out of Paddy Chayefsky in this fourteen-minute video than I can put in this blog. But I’ll do my best, but he made the point in a brilliant and entertaining way, that I can only hope I can come within miles away about how I critique especially the American news media and entertainment industry. Why does TV and Hollywood make so many violent films and shows back then and still today? Because it is what sells and what is what the audience in America wants to see. What sells is what makes their stockholders and their companies money. The power of the private not free market in America. The consumer decides what sells and what doesn’t.

What he showed with his Network movie from 1976 is exactly what the American media, news and entertainment is about. Which is what makes them money which is based on what people watch. You want to know why hard news doesn’t sell as much as tabloid news especially today and why CNN sometimes looks like ugly twin sister of E or Bravo, is because hard news simply doesn’t sell as much as tabloid news. CNN would make a hell of a lot more money covering Kim Kardashian’s wedding or her arriving at some airport, than they would covering the jobs report or the budget deal reached by Congress and the President. Because the tabloid news is what sells in America, because that is what Americans buy.

And if you go to the entertainment divisions of the networks, where the real entertainment is supposed come from and not the news divisions, it is soap opera whether it comes from an actual soap opera, a sitcom, a cop show, or any other law enforcement show, or it is violence. Car chases, someone getting the hell beaten out of them, who the hot detective or new person on the show is seeing or wants to get involved with, or so-called reality TV. Why? Because that is what sells and that is what the people buy to the point you now have so-called hard news shows covering tabloid stories like George Zimmerman and the trouble that some hot celebrity is in, or what is supposed to be hot in technology.

All Paddy Chayefsky did with Network was to open up millions of Americans eyes to why network TV shows the programming that they do. And give us a preview of what network news would like twenty-five-thirty-years later. When news would be combined with entertainment and so-called reality TV. Why because that is what Americans are buying. If it was hard news they were interested in, those shows would get a lot more time than they do. 60 Minutes would be on three nights a week instead of once on Sunday, to use as an example.

Classic Movie Trailers: The Naked Gun (1988) Starring Leslie Nielsen

Source:The New Democrat

To get The Naked Gun and the two or three sequels that came after, you have to first get the humor of the Zucker brothers. They produced these movies, the Police Squad series and the Airplane movies from the early 1980s. I don’t have a single word for their humor. Perhaps, “Accidental humor,” would do. These movies tend to feature klutzes, who are accident prone, in major roles. They save the day, often, by making an unintended mistake.

I was looking for this word yesterday when I wrote a blog about Airplane and the best I came up with was “literal.” Practically everything that is said in these movies is taken literally by all the characters. They are very funny people and yet they take everything that is said completely literally. There’s a scene in Ricardo Montalban’s office with Lieutenant Drebin (Leslie Nielson). Montalbano holds a box of cigars up in front of the lieutenant and says, “Cuban”, offering a Cuban cigar. Drebin replies, “No, Scotch-Irish my father was from Wales,” apparently thinking that Montalban was asking him about his ancestry and not noticing the Cuban cigars that are right in front of his nose.

The Zucker brothers humor is also accidentally sarcastic, which is tough to explain. Sargent Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) gets shot early in the movie during an undercover operation and the Captain (George Kennedy) tells Drebin that Nordberg has a ninety percent chance of recovering from the gun shot wounds. Then he says there’s only a fifty percent shot at that. They are talking about boxers and one of the guys says “I know Kid Cleveland, he fights out of Minneapolis, and the Texas Tornado fights out of Chicago.”

The Naked Gun is about a corrupt Los Angeles businessman (Ricardo Montalban) who uses his legitimate business as a cover for his criminal organization. He has a big drug shipment coming into Los Angeles. Police Squad, a big shot division of LAPD is all over it. Sargent Nordberg is shot during their investigation. Drebin and his team are investigating the drug shipment while the Queen of England is visiting Los Angeles.

Montalban and his crew want the drug shipments to go through and to assassinate the Queen of England. Police Squad has inside information that someone is trying to kill her. Drebin and company have to investigate and stop that from happening. All of these accident prone people taking everything that is said literally make for an hysterical action comedy.

Video Detective: Airplane! (1980)

Source:Video Detective- A Nun, trying to comfort jive-ass dudes. 

Source:The New Democrat

When I think of the 1970s, I think of a depressing decade that got better as the culture, entertainment and fashion improved. We went from hippy culture and bell bottoms to flares in the early and mid 1970s to tight, designer, dark wash denim jeans and disco by the late 1970s, with all sorts of horrible things in between.

Airplane 1980 shows you a lot of this in a ninety minute film. It is a satire about a very strange decade and captures many of the cultural details. The movie itself has to do with food poisoning on an airliner that affects all three of the flight crew leaving no one to fly the plane except for a passenger who was a combat pilot in some made up war. It suggests never eating airplane food and thanking God (unless you’re and atheist) for food courts at airports.

The movie has references to Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, early on. There’s a disco scene involving Robert Hayes and Julie Hagerty. Leisure suits, flare pants and bell bottoms are in evidence. A women suffering from food poisoning says that she’s hasn’t felt this bad since she saw that Ronald Reagan movie. A women in her seventies serves as a translator for two African-American men who apparently only speak jive (which would be called Ebonics today).

Of course there is the great Cohen brothers humor of people doing really dumb things because someone gets the wrong idea about something. Someone asks a ground crew member signaling the pilot of a plane to its gate with his light wands where the fork lift is. Without thinking, the crew says, “Over there,” and points to the side with his wands. The pilot of the taxiing plane follows the direction of the wands and crashes the plane into the gate.

The humor of the Cohen brothers, expressed in Airplane is spontaneous which is my style of humor. Part of it is based on taking everything that people say absolutely literally. Dr. Womack (Leslie Nielson) says to Ted Striker (Robert Hayes) that if they don’t land this plane soon several passengers will die from food poisoning. Striker says, “Surely, you can’t be serious.” Womack replies, “I am serious and don’t call me Shirley.”

Airplane 1980 is a, sort of, spinoff of more serious airplane disaster movies of the 1970s, starting in 1970 with Airport. Parts of each of these movies appear in Airplane 1980. The end result is hysterical.
Source:Video Detective

Flanagan: Network (1976)

Source:The New Democrat

Anyone who’s interested in modern network news should watch the movie Network from 1976. It’s almost forty years old now and except for the modern technology, the new players and the new stories they’d be hard pressed to see any differences between the two eras. Shows in both address what people will watch and assume that hard news is boring and that most people get the news in which they are interested from their smart phones (today, anyway). They work long days, come home and are only interested in what some celebrity did at some party, what they wore or some other celebrity gossip.

Network is about a struggling TV network called United Broadcasting System (UBS) and its struggling news division, UBS News. Their lead news anchor, Howard Beale (the great Peter Finch) has a nervous breakdown live on his nightly newscast, perhaps because of his awful ratings (the movie does not make that clear). He starts swearing on national network TV back when cable TV was just getting going and not yet a major medium.

The news executives and other network executives conclude that Beale has to be taken off the air completely but give him one last newscast to say goodbye to his audience (the two people remaining outside of UBS) because of his long distinguished career in journalism and with UBS News. Beale takes this opportunity to continue his rant and tell his audience that the whole world is bullshit and that people should be mad as hell and not stand for it anymore.

Well, to get Network you have to first understand the times. This movie takes place in, I believe 1975, even though it came out in 1976. America was going through a rough recession combined with high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, high costs of living and everything else that makes life expensive. Beale, here, is presenting this to his audience and saying that they shouldn’t stand for it anymore.

Fay Dunaway’s character is a program executive at UBS who sees a big opening for herself and a way to profit from Beale and the malaise that the country is suffering. She gives him his own new show, a nightly rant about everything that sucks in the world. The show is a hit, at least at first, This is one of the first instances of network news becoming a money-making business first and public service second.

Network foretold CNN, MSNBC, FNC and all the so-called reality TV networks 30-35 years before their time. I’m not aware of a movie before or since that was so prescient. With its great writing, cast, and humor it is one of the best movies of all time and one of my personal favorites.

Fishy Paw: Airplane (1980) Julie Hagerty: ‘Everything is Fine Up Here: Oh by the Way, Can Anyone Fly a Plane?’

Source:Fishy Paw- Julie Hagerty playing the head stewardess in Airplane.

Source:Real Life Journal

“Is there anyone onboard who knows how to fly a plane?”

From Fishy Paw

Everything is fine up here in the cockpit. Oh by the way can anyone fly this plane so we do not crash? That’s right, the only problem that we have in the cockpit of this commercial passenger plane, is that we don’t have anyone who can fly the plane.

Which is no worst than doctors who are about to perform brain surgery on someone so they can save that person’s life, but do not have anyone who knows how to perform brain surgery. Or an English teacher who doesn’t speak any English.

Other than these issues, there’s nothing to be worried about. No reason to panic, I mean seriously what is the worst thing that could possibly happen with one being able to fly a plane that is already in the air, the plane crashing? I mean come on! The plane is already insured, so the money there will to replace the plane. And most of the passengers are wealthy anyway, so they probably have life insurance.

I mean seriously, these passengers didn’t have to get on this plane to begin with.

Movie Clips: Airplane! (1980) Crash Positions

Source:Movie Clips- in case anyone is still wondering: this is from a movie. It's not real life.

Source:Real Life Journal

“CLIP DESCRIPTION: Striker (Robert Hays) tries his best to land the plane despite little help from everyone around him." 

From Movie Clips

Damn! I would hate to land an airplane with a crew like that to work with. Especially with a bomber on the plane with his bomb going off. Not sure what to take away from Airplane! Was this a movie of passengers busy people who need to get from Los Angeles to Chicago? Was this a movie of mental patients including the crew that are being transported from Los Angeles to Chicago where they can get the care that they need, or be treated at a cheaper facility, or a movie that just happened to have every screwball in Los Angeles and decided to try to deport them to Chicago.

Maybe I have it now: Airplane was a movie where the City of Los Angeles decided that they simply had too many screwballs in their fair city (and of course it only took them fifty-years to figure that out) but we’re talking about Los Angeles here where cults are fairly common, at least back in the 1970s and 60s. This movie was made in 1979-80 and screwballs are fairly common there and L.A. figured that out and decided to try to send as many screwballs as they possibly could and try to send them to Chicago.

BTRO: Airplane! (1980) Food Poisoning Scene: Good Reason Not to Eat Airline Food

Source:BTRO- Leslie Nielsen, Julie Hagerty, and Peter Graves, in Airplane! (1980)

Source:Real Life Journal 

“Here’s my Second Favorite Scene from Airplane! Airplane! (titled Flying High! in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, and the Philippines) is a 1980 American satirical comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and released by Paramount Pictures. It stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lorna Patterson. The film is a parody of the disaster film genre, particularly the 1957 Paramount film Zero Hour!, from which it borrows the plot and the central characters The film is known for its use of absurd and fast-paced slapstick comedy, including visual and verbal puns and gags.” 

From BTRO

One of the funniest scenes in the movie which is really saying something because the humor in this movie was so ironic and not very obvious or cookie-cutter that most of the humor in this movie came from this movie. Rather than using lines and humor that we’re used a lot in other movies and the movie was done so well, that they could make what seem like little jokes or comments seem hysterical. Because a lot of silly things were taken literally in the movie.

Like the Robert Hays line: “This is a totally different way of flying all together.” With the Leslie Nielson and the stewardess repeating:“This is a totally different way of flying.” Because Hays said that and also said all together.

But if this scene doesn’t get you to pass up airline food on the plane, perhaps you have suicidal tendencies that need to be addressed and looking for options in how to kill yourself. Food poisoning, or dying in a horrible plane crash.

When your food is so bad that it makes the food that prison inmates look like first class meals at expensive fancy restaurants and it poisons your pilots, you know you have a food quality problem. It’s hard to do worst than prison food. If you are familiar with any of those documentaries and hearing about prison inmates getting sick because of what they are forced to eat. But it looks like Airplane found a way to do worst than the food people get in prison.

Movie Clips: Airplane! (1980) 'Oh Stewardess, I Speak Jive'

Source:Movie Clips- Thank God, the old lady speaks jive! LOL

Source:Real Life Journal 

"When a flight attendant struggles to understand her jive-talking passengers, a friendly old lady (Barbara Billingsley) steps in.”

From Movie Clips

Just to sort of be serious for a minute and then I’ll go back to being an asshole: I’m just glad this movie and scene was made in 1979-80 instead of lets say thirty-years later. Why? Because it wouldn’t of gotten made in today’s political correctness universe and Hollywood.

Could you imagine how MSNBC, Salon, The Nation, AlterNet and others would react to a Hollywood movie making fun of Jive and what is today called Ebonics. All of the charges of racism that would come as a result with perhaps hundred of thousand or so far-left wing protesters protesting against Hollywood studios.

But of course it is perfectly okay with the so-called leftist political correctness community to make fun of rednecks and rural Americans in general, just as long as they are Anglo or Caucasian or both and not female. Because according to the Far-Left in America that is where all the ignorant people in America live and that is what all of them look like.

Just tells you how ignorant the Far-Left is in America. I think only Bill Maher and his supporters on the Left, let’s say the true Liberals would for one find this scene funny today on the Left. And defend the people who created it.

Now far as the scene goes, it is classic Airplane and how this movie represented the times, the late 1970s and that decade in general and what America was like as far as the whole movie in general and what the country was going through.

The Cohen brothers just did in better satiric form than perhaps anyone else when a couple of African-American men flying on the same plane together and apparently they only speak what was called then Jive. Perhaps they’ve only spent five-minutes outside of the ghetto their whole lives and this is the only way they know how to talk.

So what does Airplane do, but have an older, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon woman (played by Barbara Billingsley) who was in her mid-60s at this point as the only person on the plane besides these two men who can speak and understand Jive. This is classic Airplane and why they were so ahead of their times as far as talking about the times and putting it an entertaining way that everyone can understand and not take offense at.