Wishing You a Merry Val Lewton Christmas

It's hard, slaving over a hot keyboard during the holidays--Christmas isn't a time for brandishing Activist causes, it's the season for peaceful classic-movie-watching on earth, and goodwill to studios, even to crazy, neurotic, spin-doctoring, Blu-ray-genocidal studios that banish every old classic movie to their MOD Archive like Mad King Ludwig.

I just wanted to find a nice sentimental Christmas-movie cause to stick up for.  I was feeling too good to bring up my old nails-on-chalkboard grudge about people who have never seen Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby in 1942's "Holiday Inn" because they think Crosby sang "White Christmas" only in the corny fading-studio 50's-G.I. Danny Kaye/Rosemary Clooney movie where, like, it's in the title, and it's Technicolor...Next year, definitely.  (Although with the stage show on Broadway for the season, maybe a few movie-illiterate folk will have heard of it now.)

It was too much work to do a post sticking up in defense of 1985's "Santa Claus: the Movie", in praise of the Alexander Salkind days when big-budget movies spent their money making big REAL soundstage-and-matte sets of Santa's workshop...

And I didn't see any point in digging up the already Internet-beaten fan debate about whether the first 1988 "Die Hard" (back when Bruce Willis played hip "regular guys", and still had hair and an actual working sense of humor) is a, quote, "Christmas movie", since to my mind, there is no debate:  It is.

But, with the smells of a fresh ham roasting in the slow-cooker, I decided to take it easy on the column this week, and save my holiday time for putting my feet up with the old Blu-rays and vintage DVD's.

And one that I always reserve for Christmas--or at least always tell people I do, just to see the look on their faces--is the heartwarming family holiday warmth of Robert Wise's The Curse of the Cat People (1944), from the director of "The Sound of Music".

Okay, cue the people saying "The What of the Who?"  And thereby hangs a tale to send you to the library's video section.  (Or to Mad King Ludwig's dungeon of the Warner Archive.)

To explain why, to the uninitiated, goes back to Jacques Tourneur's original Cat People from 1942:  In the story (later remade into overbearingly pretentious and point-missing kinkiness by Paul Schrader and Natassja Kinski in 1982), our hero Kent Smith meets mysterious foreign Irena, played by Simone Simon...But she tries to avoid marriage, claiming her ancestors were under an ancient were-panther curse.  Smith humors her "delusions" but when he turns to attractive co-worker Alice Moore to get Irena some help, Moore discovers--in one of the most film-school studied scenes in horror movie history--that jealousy has claws.

The creepy, atmospheric B/W thriller became a huge hit for RKO, and, like many a studio today, the studio now thought they had a franchise.  Every Hollywood studio hoped for a new "horror" line, now that Universal had broken the supernatural envelope with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and RKO thought they had a new horrormeister in producer Val Lewton.  The chief moguls at RKO pitched one cool Horror-Sounding Title after another at Lewton, hoping lightning could strike as many times as they wanted, starting with a sequel to their big studio hit.

But here's where kicks in what could be called "Val Lewton pranks RKO":  Lewton was a producer of eerie atmosphere, B/W shadows and lurking fears left to the imagination, and he didn't want to do lurid studio Universal-envy monsters...So, he found a way of sabotaging them by making stories in own style, and justifying the titles so the boss didn't complain.  When RKO threw "The Leopard Man" at him, he delivered the story of a circus performer who owns a leopard (which escapes into a sleepy border town), and when they pitched "I Walked With a Zombie", Lewton put George Romero aside to deliver a romantic potboiler set against Jamaican voodoo--"Jane Eyre in the Caribbean", unquote.

Lewton had been hoping to move on to "Amy & Her Friend", a heartwarming family picture about a little girl and her imagination.  But, when RKO's moguls pitched the "next hit followup, 'Curse of the Cat People'", Smith, Moore, Simon, and Lewton-regular Calypso singer Sir Lancelot had all been contracted.  So, Lewton simply changed the names, inserted his usual strategic justification-line in the script ("Ever since his first wife, it feels like there's been a curse on this house...") and the hit Cat People sequel was now the heartwarming story of Amy and her Friend for parents and children alike.

In the now-altered "sequel", Kent Smith is married to Alice Moore, after Simon met her end (or did she?) in the first film.  He's too busy with his job designing boats than to look after his shy young daughter Amy (played by a realistically sullen Ann Carter), who's misunderstood by the other kids at school and retreats into her overactive imagination.  In fact, whereas most dads might play along with their little girl's fantasy lives, Smith frustratedly seems to rage at Amy's pretend view of the world--"She's just like Irena was, believing things that aren't true!"...There, see how we got more of the "sequel" into the script?

Amy's only friends seem to be a reclusive grandmotherly ex-actress in the mysterious house nearby (and whose colorful senility about the past seems charming at first, but soon develops a dark Lewtonian edge, like seeing Norma Desmond played by Angela Lansbury), and Amy's claims of a beautiful princess in white who's become her "imaginary friend".  From child-perspective, we don't see Amy's friend onscreen at first, until she sees an old photo of Simone, and says "'But that's her!  You know my friend, too!"'

How could she have known, Smith wonders?  Hehehh...But since the story is mostly from Amy's fantasy POV, we're never allowed to know just quite how imaginary her "imaginary" friend might actually be.  

(As I described the story to one newbie, "Imagine if Val Lewton had remade 'My Neighbor Totoro', and turned it into a spooky B/W 40's RKO film."  Complete with a Totoro-style climax where Amy's parents search for her in a Christmas blizzard, and things still take an eerie, even if family-friendly, Lewton turn...)

Which brings us to our scene, for Season's Movie-Activist Greetings:  

As the parents welcome their upper-middle-class upstate-NY friends in on Christmas Eve for a caroling party, Amy lives the bane of all our neglected childhoods...The Grownups' Party.  

Until Irena (or is it Amy's imagination?) comes to the rescue:

Yeah.  Like the spooky hot French imaginary might-be-ghost babe says:  Merry Christmas.

A Thanksgiving Memory: When Friday Wasn't Black

The Thanksgiving holiday brings back so many memories every year, I can still feel a "Thanksgiving morning" when I get up first thing on Thursday  Even if I'd spent the entire Mon-Wed. forgetting to look at the calendar, even when it's only me in the apartment expected to do my own sage-and-thyme cooking, and not stressfully throwing myself out of the kitchen and telling me to stay out until the turkey's in the oven, unless I wanted to help peel potatoes.  I still feel the gray nip of probably-going-to-snow in the air--gray skies were the Color of Thanksgiving, to go with all the harvest-browns--and want to rush to the TV to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade plug all the NYC family Broadway shows on the street before the parade started.  As we used to joke, we'd "Start preparing the turkey when the parade officially got going, and baste it every time an NBC soap star appears on a float lip-synching 'Winter Wonderland'".  

More to the point, Thursday and Friday were important days for TV, if you didn't have that personal alma-mater college-football Bowl game to watch:  One is that networks knew the kids would be home from school that day, and any that didn't have football would be using the time wisely, with bonus Saturday-morning cartoons and Hanna-Barbera's Kenner Classic Tales (with plenty of commercials for Kenner Toys).  And the second, tying in with the first, was that the local area stations that owned movies wanted to give their employees the weekend off, and would line up big three-hour blocks of all their family and first early holiday movies to fill time all afternoon, while you snacked on the chips-and-dips and carrot sticks that were being left out for company.  One of our Boston stations still owned George Pal's 1962 "Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm", which was three hours of family-demographic enough to end up on my all-time favorite lists, as well as a rotated holiday movie.

Ask some people to name "Thanksgiving movie", and on generational knee-jerk reaction, they'll say "Planes, Trains & Automobiles", because you're, like, supposed to watch it.  Depending on how far back in the generations you go, however, some will remember the days when TV networks actually showed a movie in the evening (preferably a three-hour one, also to give their employees the night off)--And you can probably judge how old, if they say either "Home Alone", "E.T." or "The Sound of Music".  Me, I go even farther back, and if I'm not using my ancient VCR to watch my last tape copy of Pal's Grimm, my conditioned reflexes expect a network or local station to be showing three hours of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang".  It seems heresy to watch it any other day of the year.

The Friday after Thanksgiving was also a very important holiday--We called it "The Friday After Thanksgiving".  It didn't HAVE a name, because it wasn't supposed to.

It didn't exist for any reason except that most businesses thought it was cheaper not to open again just for Friday, and turn a three-day weekend into a four-day one.  That meant you didn't have to do anything, except sleep late, lounge in pajamas, snack on cold turkey, cranberry and stuffing for breakfast, while Mom tried to be domestic and boil the turkey skeleton and thigh leftovers hoping that Soup would come out, like in the old days of low-tech homemakers before her.  (Uh, that's not how you make soup, Mom, we'd say, but no one would listen.)  

The original day after Thanksgiving--what do we call it, "White Friday"?--still had an important purpose in holiday commerce, however:  In those days, it was considered tasteful to hold off on Christmas marketing until Thanksgiving, so, as every kid knew, White Friday was the official Starting-Pistol of the great Getting Excited About Christmas dash...Annnd, they're off!  No early jump-starts, contenders, or you'll be disqualified!

Local stations continued to want to give their employees the day off, but with fewer Thanksgiving football bowl games to air, that meant movies...The Christmas movies, this time, now that it was allowed.  You might find a station showing "Miracle on 34th St." (while we were still in a Macy's mood), but most started getting the cheap public-domain classics ready, while they dug the more "hardcore" Christmas movies out of the back for later in December--By the end of White Friday, you knew at least one station would start the ritual monthly showings (plural) of "It's a Wonderful Life", and one might be brave enough to start showing the Alastair Sim "Scrooge" early.  And if you lived in the broadcast area of the NYC stations, White Friday was annual Laurel & Hardy "March of the Wooden Soldiers" day.

Shopping?  Oh sure, White Friday was for shopping, all right.  You just didn't camp out at midnight or search the Internet for sales flyers about what big-ticket purchase you'd been holding off all year for, though.

You went to the mall because, by three or four o'clock, a day and a half of cabin fever had set in, and you didn't want to enjoy Christmas starting-pistol preparations from a distance.  The Christmas lights would just be starting to be put up at the mall, and the holiday Muzak, of Nat King Cole's "Christmas Song" and Darlene Love's "Christmas, Baby, Please Come Home", would finally be allowed to be played over the loudspeakers.  If you lived within range of the Big City (Rochester NY, for me, before we moved to within a commuter ride of Boston), the family urge might be to look at the big department stores, and maybe end up with taking the whole family to a movie (theaters weren't conveniently at the malls back then) or the Christmas show at the science-museum Planetarium that wondered whether the Star of Bethlehem was really a 4 BC comet.

Point was, shopping was to put us in the mood for Christmas shopping--and hope to brainstorm present ideas we hadn't thought of yet--and was still recreational.  It wasn't something you trained to knock yourself and/or others out for.  When you got to the mall or parking lot and discovered every other person in a twenty-mile radius had the EXACT SAME White Friday holiday-sentiment urges as you did on the exact same afternoon, that's when it might suddenly hit you what a stupid idea it was, and that's one thing that's the same today as it was then.  Believe me, that didn't change.

So, you're probably asking yourselves--come on, start asking:  What caused the change?  When did the glorious holiday-tinged sloth and family time-off of White Friday turn moldy, and mildew into the predatory, kill-or-be-killed competition for the sake of sales figures once it turned Black?  And how did a name that was humorously given by news media, to explain the problems of stores and malls that had to deal with a mass-sentiment perfect storm of holiday urges, become ACCEPTED, and have its name now hailed as the center of American trade?  When did we think that Black Friday wasn't enough, that it should be a "week" instead, that it be lobbied to be declared a "national holiday" to help stores or employees, or that Saturday and Monday deserved their own names as well?  The historical cutoff point might be found in the Cabbage Patch.

In the 80's, Amazon didn't exist.  There was no "online" to order things--which is why you were deluged in paper snail-mail catalogues all month--and if you wanted to find the hot toy that season, you had to go to Toys R Us, because Target wasn't a wide chain back then, either.  And the big news story in November 1983 was that the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, which had first started as prestige dolls from a small independent maker, were going national, causing parents to storm malls, empty shelves as if they were Wonka Bars, and do incredibly cynical media-happy stunts (like buying three or four, and hoping to auction one off for $1000), trying to find them.  That itself wasn't such a big deal, except that we'd had TWO similar manias the year before in 1982, with parents trying to find ColecoVision videogame consoles, and those with older or no kids trying to find a remaining copy of that new "Trivial Pursuit" game that a couple of smart guys in Canada had just thought up and were sending to us southerners.

But it was the Cabbage Patchers that stuck in our cultural heads.   Even when we similarly stampeded each other trying to find a Tickle-Me Elmo doll in the early 90's, the news talked of a "Cabbage Patch craze", and we knew in exact detail what they meant.  It was such a media-friendly story, because the obnoxious cuteness of the dolls was symbolic, you see, of frustrated parents having to spend money on their worthless children every year...Making the act of cynically fighting your friends and neighbors either a self-deprecating display of how much better a parent you were, or how cynically you were willing to knock yourself out once a year in December.  Eh, the holiday's for the kids anyway.

And that was the problem:  It was a neato story, but it didn't happen every year. It would be nice if a hurricane or earthquake happened once a year that we could put on our calendar, so we could all have fun preparing for it, and the news stations could have fun building up for the disaster coverage...But they're forces of nature, so they don't.  They just happen, unless they don't happen.

And when they didn't happen to happen in '85, or '86, news media tried to MAKE them happen.  It's now a tradition to say, not what will be the hot-selling toy or Christmas item, but, quote, what will be the next Christmas "craze".  What new item will we fight each other for, that store chains can count on to make up for any losses they might have incurred the other eleven months of the year?  
Usually, its what $200+ high-tech item, like the latest smartphone, will be groomed to be the next "craze", as a ColecoVision was more expensive than a Tickle-Me Elmo, and you don't have to be a greedy, cynical parent to buy one, you could be a Millennial 18-24, too.

So, with the jollity every year, we come to Black Friday.  A day devoted to treating the entire national consumer like deranged, greedy, cynical idiots like ravers at a rock concert.  Because idiots are easier to predict, and thus easier to manage, than intelligent, tasteful customers, that might do anything unpredictable.

When you see "Doorbuster Sales!" at Target, Wal-Mart, Sears and Best Buy (well, some Best Buys now close over the holiday weekend to give their employees a break), ask yourself:  What "doors" are we expected, even encouraged to "bust", and why?  A Doorbuster Sale is not asking us to be polite in our shopping, because polite shopping to them means we're probably not buying anything--Instead, they are literally asking that we create another 80's Frenzy-Stampede craze out of thin air, even if we or they don't know what we're crazing for, and risk fights, injuries and possible vandalism, to help out the chain stores annual holiday-quarter and year-end sales projections.  What thirty-three years ago we shook our heads at as greed, tragedy and self-serving dark-side, we now chuckle at as tradition, and hope such mindless turning-against-each-other-like-jackals will happen again, because we've been told it's such a rich evocative part of the HOLIDAY.

For those who want to start a new holiday tradition, here's my Thanksgiving present, from the Movie Activist to you:

This year, take the day off and celebrate old-fashioned White Friday, like your parents did.  Do nothing--you don't have any reason not to, after all--and savor an extra day off from the Thursday that you were probably too busy working in the kitchen, or driving to visit other friends' or relatives' kitchens, to enjoy.  Go look at the Christmas lights if you have the urge, and browse for the sake of browsing, not bargains, but if the parking lots are too crowded, don't worry, they'll thin out by Cyber Monday or Spent-Out Tuesday.  (Now that they all have christened names.)

Of course, the old tradition, of sitting home and watching TV try to fill time with holiday filler, isn't around anymore, now that stations have no more obligation to create local programming besides news.  Fortunately most of us probably have at least one of our favorite Christmas movies or iconic specials on disk...That's what they're for, after all.

So, for those of you who DIDN'T grow up within broadcast range of WPIX-11 NYC as a kid, a chance to enjoy an old-fashioned local-station public-domain White Friday the way we remembered it in the days before 1983:  Laurel & Hardy in "March of the Wooden Soldiers"  (And yes, badly colorized, as every cheap public-domain B/W movie on local channels was in 1982.)

You'll have to provide your own cold turkey, leftover pretzels, thin homemade turkey-peas-and-water soup and 5 lb. holiday tin of cheese-caramel popcorn.

Leave the Poor White House Alone! Blow Something ELSE Up This Weekend!

You'll see the question if you hang around enough forums, fan sites, or other hangouts where movies are a small handful of cult titles folks in their twenties or under remember from just past their own lifetime:

What's the ONE movie you have to watch every holiday?

Christmas, that's easy--Everyone says "It's a Wonderful Life" on reflex, except for the kids who were hypnotized by Ted Turner into believing "A Christmas Story" is a classic, and the smartaleck/doods who say "Bad Santa forever, woo!"

Thanksgiving has become our national observance of "Planes, Trains & Automobiles".  Valentine's Day will usually be the 90's romantic comedy Sleepless With Sally, or whatever that movie was with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal where she did that thing in the restaurant, they chatted on AOL, and finally met on top of the building.  

Halloween?  You tell me.  And Memorial Day will be everyone's favorite war movie, until someone starts the argument about whether it should be for Veteran's Day.

And July 4?  "Well, duh--'Independence Day'!  Y'know, like Bill Pullman, when he makes that big speech in the climax!  It's totally symbolic of our American spirit!"  (Yes, and thank you for reminding us of all those Brexit politicians who thought it was now a political victory to quote the Pullman scene, just because the dopey sequel was opening in theaters the same day.  They thought they were being cool.)

Ah.  So, it's the title.  Good reason.  Of course, you'll also find those open-minded folk who say "No, that doesn't have to do with the holiday, like Mel Gibson in 'The Patriot', that's history!"  And then the showoffs who still remember Al Pacino in "Revolution"--that's real-looking history--despite the fact that the movie was considered unreleasably awful by its own studio when it almost didn't play theaters.

Here's an idea:  Remember that last post, that suggested "Surprise yourself" with a movie you haven't seen?  Those who have seen it are faithfully and ritualistically ahead of me on this one, with their July 4 pick that's almost considered as sacred as, well, The Ten Commandments is to Easter:

1776.  Directed by Peter Hunt, 1972, from Peter Stone's Broadway musical.  (Well, they almost had a bicentennial, there.)  Now available on Blu-ray and on digital rental from Vudu and Amazon.

You want history?  How about John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin arguing over a "declaration of independence" in Philadelphia?  And singing about it.

It's history they don't usually tell you:  John Adams was a frustrated ball of irritation.  Thomas Jefferson's cool intellect heated up around his wife.  And Ben Franklin loved to live up to his reputations, bad or otherwise.  It's all good musical-comedy fun, until they start discussing the big British elephant in the room, and the debates among all thirteen colonies turn so tense, heated and divisive, a "United" States isn't starting to look all that likely.  But somehow, at the last minute, it happened.

Some, of an earlier generation, remember being shown it in school as history--like the great Schoolhouse Rock songs, we remember the names of the five men in the Declaration drafting committee by earworm song lyrics--and the infectious fun comes from the fact that many of the literate one-liners in the movie actually come from real-life quotes and letters by the real persons involved.  (Yes, the real-life Mr. Adams did reportedly say "History won't remember our achievements, it'll be 'Ben Franklin did this' and 'Ben Franklin did that'...'Ben Franklin struck the ground with his walking stick, and there arose George Washington, on his horse.'")  I remember the field trip of our fourth-grade class walking the four blocks to the corner theater to see it, but that's a story to be told later.

The musical's had a recent reawakening of popularity with a new generation of fans who've discovered the appeal of old-school Broadway musicals.  And to the reason they like them, I'll answer ahead of time the first question they'll always ask:

No, Alexander Hamilton is NOT in the movie.  He was nowhere near Philadelphia at the time.  QUIT ASKING, and watch other musicals!

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For other history, Disney's Johnny Tremain (d. Robert Stevenson, 1957, now available on DVD and for rent on Amazon and Vudu) technically isn't July--it's July-ish, even though it captures the December event of the Boston Tea Party and the April events of Paul Revere's Ride and the Battle of Concord & Lexington, and converts them into family-friendly legend.

From the future Mary Poppins director who knew how to make 50's-60's live-action Walt-era Disney look classy and give them G-rated earnestness you could completely buy into at that age.

I confess I missed out on the Esther Forbes children's book growing up--Even though I lived in Worcester, MA at one point, that one day had a city-sponsored participatory reading of the book for the local-author-made-good day, that bit of Newbery summer-reading-list escaped me, and my middle-school class had gone for the musical version of the Revolution instead.

As a Disney fan, I remember talking with one European fan who wanted to visit Disney World and thought Frontierland would be the "American" experience.  I tried to explain that Liberty Square--which Walt wanted to add to his parks just based on the atmospheric Tremain sets of pre-revolutionary Boston--was "more" American than the Wild West everyone else knows for, but it's hard to explain why.

Here, as the young title apprentice wanders in and out of intrigue surrounding Boston's most successful silversmith (who's also pretty good on a horse), we get a basic Disney Version of the first three stories everyone knows, that somehow hadn't quite been filmed yet.  And you realize, why should our history not be a "legend" to other countries as much as a Hollywood French Revolution epic is to ours?

For all the Republicans' mythologizing of "the Tea Party" as an angry rabble-rouse, we see it historically recreated more or less realistically as the relatively simple business-minded bit of organized intimidation and protest that it was...Although I don't think we had quite as much of the clean-cut singing back then, though:

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A little harder to find, but still available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive and for rental on Amazon is the one that made the AFI 100 list of Just Plain Darn Great American Movies to See Before You Die (and went up two points on the second list):

Yankee Doodle Dandy, d. Michael Curtiz, 1942.

Like the others, most will probably rent it for the title.  Or, because for those who do bad James Cagney impressions, the second most quoted Cagney trope behind "You dirty raaat..." will be "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dannn-dee..." Well, that one, at least, he did say.

Cagney was one of Warner's biggest house-brand stars as the gritty "Studio of the streets", but even as far back as 1933's "Footlight Parade", the studio knew they not only had the toughest mug who ever shoved a grapefruit in a moll's face or hit the top of the world, ma, they also had one incredible tap-dance hoofer.  Tough Guys Do Dance.

And a flag-waving big of mid-wartime WWII morale-propaganda for the studio brought Cagney back in a showbiz bio of song-and-dance-man George M. Cohan, who wrote just about every single July 4 song we remember, and put most of them into his big show "Little Johnny Jones":

It's not just that this movie sings patriotic songs, although the upbeat flag-waving by 1942 standards could dislocate an arm.  It's that this movie is like watching five showbiz bios rolled into one.

According to the movie, Cohan had a very long and colorful career from childhood vaudeville up until the 1930's, and the movie doesn't stop giving us colorful Hollywood songwriter-bio tropes about the days of variety shows and Tin Pan Alley.  There's some subplot or musical number going on every minute.  EVERY.

The framing device has old retired Cohan invited to the White House to meet...gosh, we'd swear it sounds like FDR, but we never see his face for sure!...and in the climax, on his way out the door, Cagney improvised one last happy bit of Yankee once-a-hoofer rebelliousness:

How anyone could make it through the holiday without these three movies, I'll never know.  There are many choices to go On Beyond ID4 (and just where the heck did the "4" come from, anyway?  Never could figure that out), but it's a question of whether you see the holiday as about history, or about a bit of picnic flag-waving and fireworks.

All I know is, it's not about the Old Jewish-Stereotype Guy, the Whiny Jeff Goldblum Guy, or the Crazy Crop-Duster Guy.