American Film comedy

For the past few weeks, I have been showing some friends examples of American film comedy. We began with silent comedy - Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle, and Chaplin. Then we sampled the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Screwball Comedy, and Bob Hope. I wrote short notes for the evening's viewing. Anyhow, this week we are sampling Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The film is Artists & Models. We also begin with a cartoon. Here are the notes for this week's viewing. Shall I post the other notes?

Puss ‘N Booty (1943)

            This is the last black and white cartoon made by Warner Brothers Studio. Leon Schlesinger was the producer. He first had his own studio and then came to run Warner’s cartoon unit. The Director of this film is Frank Tashlin who had worked with Schlesinger for some years. Tashlin would later go on to make live-action features such as The Paleface with Bob Hope and Artists & Models with Martin and Lewis. Tashlin made a number of films with Jerry Lewis. His films had something of a cartoon sensibility. Puss “N Booty is notable for its deviation from the standard cat-stalks-canary story line. Here the cat has actually eaten a canary, and we get to know something of its personality before the usual series of attacks on the bird cage. Tashlin keeps changing direction in the film. We have the opening search for the missing canary (feathers let us know that the cat has eaten the canary), the impatient wait for the arrival of the next canary, and the attempt of the cat to catch and eat this new canary. Then the “surprise” ending.

The Comedy Team

            For reasons that elude me, comedy likes to come in teams of two. Wheeler & Woolsey, Olson & Johnson, Allen & Rossi, Rowan & Martin, Tommy and Dick Smothers, and of course the better-known duos: Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Crosby & Hope, and Martin & Lewis. These are just a fraction of all the comic duos we have had on stage, on radio, on film, and on television. Typically the comic twosome consists of the gagman and the straight man. The straight man is the worldly one, experienced and serious; the gagman is the innocent, a child confronting a dangerous world. The straight man is also the ladies man, the good-looking one, whereas the comic foil is the jester, the clown, the funny-looking one. The straight man sets up the jokes or provides relief from the comic moments. In the case of Martin and Lewis, Dean Martin is usually the one who gets the girl (occasionally each of the comic team gets a girl – e.g. Artists & Models), and he is also the one who does the crooning. Dean is a singer, the Bing Crosby to Jerry Lewis’s Bob Hope. But Jerry is quite unlike Bob Hope in his infantilism. Jerry plays the boy to Dean’s adult. Jerry’s comedy relies on bodily and facial expression, voice, and physical contortion. He is a very visual comedian. His humour often relies on mime (see his film The Bellboy in which he does not speak at all). Early in Artists & Models, Jerry mimes eating a meal beginning with one bean and some ketchup. In fact, as a team Martin & Lewis began over time to focus more on the antics of Lewis than on the charm of Martin. After a 10-year partnership the duo separated in 1956. Lewis went on to make a series of films in which he gained more and more control and experimented with film form in interesting and comedic ways. As for Dean Martin, he went on to become an important recording artist and an actor in dramatic films.

Artists & Models (1955)

            1954 saw the publication of a book that has since become infamous: Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham’s book is an indictment of comic books and the comic book industry. It argues that comic books are destroying the moral fibre of America’s youth, inciting disobedience against parents, violence in schools, sexual deviance, and even smoking. The book was sufficiently influential that the government instituted the Comic Book Code, a form of censorship meant to ensure the moral purity of comic books. This bit of historical information informs the story in Artists & Models. In the film, Rick Todd (Dean Martin) is a comic book artist with aspirations of becoming a “real” artist. His roommate, Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis), is captivated by comics, especially comics with the character, Bat Lady. His infatuation with comics generates the first catastrophe in the film. Rick and Eugene have neighbours who also work in the comic book industry, two women, Abigail Parker (Dorothy Malone) and Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine). The plot involves the two women connecting with the two men. The names of two of the characters let us know who will pair with whom (Fullstack and Sparrowbush are obviously meant for each other).

The comic book industry is notable for the lurid nature of its products. Much of the action turns on Eugene Fullstack’s dreams. These dreams provide sensational material for Rick’s comic books, but they also contain secret military information. This part of the plot gathers in another topical theme: the cold war and the fear of the Communist Menace. Espionage enters the plot. The year Artists & Models reaches the screens of America is the year, roughly, that the McCarthy paranoia abates. It abates, but it does not by any means disappear. The film is a spoof of earlier anti-Communist films such as The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954).

            The opening scene of the film involves a giant billboard with huge lips. (Why does this remind me of La Dolce Vita?) The play with this (at the time) high-tech gadget is clever and prurient. The jokes here are deeply embedded (as it were) to escape the censors. Indeed, much of this film skirts with censorable material. Probably the reason for this is the direction of Frank Tashlin. Tashlin began his career as a director of cartoons and when he graduated to live-action films, he brought his cartoon sensibility along with him. Artists & Models is noteworthy for its colour (something we will not fully appreciate in the washed out copy that we will see). The film is extremely colour conscious, as you might expect in a film about an artist. The comic book has always been a colourful medium (at least it has been so since the advent of inexpensive colour reproduction in newsprint and paper). The film, like comic books, is colourful. The first scene with those red lips and the three cans of paint that topple onto the big wigs draws attention to colour right at the beginning. This is a colourful film with flamboyant characters, lively songs, and zany antics.

            A side note: Jerry Lewis plays an aspiring children’s book author in the film, and the director Tashlin was himself a writer of children’s books.

I haven't been here for a while. Here is an old piece on a film I like.

Repo Man (1984)

"The life of a Repo Man is always intense." (Bud)

The strangeness of this low budget film is not its off-the-wall sensibility in evoking the world of Punk youth in the early 1980s, but rather its use of the repo man as the focus of critique and hope. The job of repossessing cars from people who cannot maintain their payments is about as sleazy a job as we can imagine. The film makes this clear in its vision of the Helping Hand offices, the environment of burned out Los Angeles, the violent and crude behaviour and language of the people who work in this job, and the general malaise of city life. The repo man is just a shade above the criminal in his way of doing business, as we see the first time Otto meets Bud. Later Bud tells Otto the repo man code; he may have a code, but he still takes cars from people without asking and without seeking the aid of law enforcement. His code is akin to the code of the west; it is a frontier code tested in fights and flights and conflicts. The repo man is a creep. And yet in this film, one repo man ends up flying high in a mystic Malibu. The older man lies dying while the younger man, the protégé, leaves the ground with the shamanistic grounds keeper, named Miller.

The film influenced the style and tone of such films as the Coen Broithers’ Raising Arizona and Scorsese’s After Hours. In turn, it shows the influence of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and a host of teenage angst films from Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause to Arnold’s High School Confidential. It also shows the influence of Weekend and other surrealist films by the likes of Bunuel, Kubrik, and even John Carpenter (his Dark Star has something of Repo Man in it, or I should say that Repo Man has something of Dark Star in it).

But what is the film about? Most definitely this is a Cold War film. It begins with the shot of a map showing Los Alamos in New Mexico where the Atomic Bomb was first created, and it follows a car with dead aliens in the trunk. This might make us think of Roswell, New Mexico, cite of alien encounters. The driver speaks of the neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact. We see what he means when a couple of people open the trunk only to be burned to nothing, leaving just their smoking boots behind. The dead aliens raise the theme of the alien, and we have enough characters in the film who are “aliens” that we get the point. The whole punk sub-culture is an alien culture. Teenagers are aliens. Otto, whose name reminds me of a guy named Otto Binder who wrote books about flying saucers when I was growing up, tries to enter normalcy by getting a job in a grocery store, but he discovers that normalcy is a rare commodity. Most people are aliens, when you get right down to it. Then he meets Bud who works for the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation. All Bud’s associates have names associated with beer (Bud, Oly, Miller, Lite). Bud takes Otto under his wing, so to speak, teaching him the repo man code. Then the two of them get caught up in the chase for a 1964 Chevy Malibu worth $20,000. Also looking for the car is Agent Rogersz who has a strange metal hand, and the Rodruiguez brothers, rival repo men. Meanwhile, Otto’s parents, refugees from the 1960s, spend their time (and money) watching the Reverend Larry on TV and smoking dope. The film’s plot has many coincidences with characters turning up in ways that suggest the world is smaller than we might think. TV screens show a world of televangelism and imperialism in Central America (Nicaragua). The implication is that consumerism, hucksterism, and downright greed have pretty much taken over spiritual and political life. Repossession is the order of the day in a world gone rotten. The metaphor that best communicates the modern world empty of spirituality is the lobotomy (remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest). The driver of the Malibu has had a lobotomy and now he feels much better than he did. Otto’s parents have lobotomized their brains with dope and fundamentalism. (The lobotomy is like another metaphor for modernity’s zonked out mind meld – zombieism.) About the only spiritual person in the film is the grounds keeper at the Helping Hand, a character named Miller who does not drive because too much driving makes you less intelligent. He spouts a cracker barrel philosophy and speaks of a cosmic consciousness, something the film may invoke at the end when he and Otto go for a drive in the hot (literally) Malibu. The end quotes the end of Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Otto looks out at the city below and an array of coloured lights form a display in front of him. We have here the splendor of new hope associated with raised or cosmic consciousness. The other intertext here is Spielburg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which aliens offer Richard Dreyfus an escape from the mundane. Before he goes for this cosmic drive, Otto’s girl friend, Leila, asks: “What about our relationship?” And Otto replies: “Fuck that.” And off he goes. The stuff of everyday youth rebellion and youth activity pales alongside the beckoning shimmer of the mystic Malibu. This film, like Weekend and perhaps even like others we have seen (Freaks, Johnny Guitar, The Searchers) has its apocalyptic aspect. Apocalypse means “revelation” and “uncovering.” We usually associate apocalypse with a cataclysmic change – the end of one way of being and perhaps the beginning of a new way of being (a new Heaven and a new Earth). The paradox is that the revelations we experience are mysterious. “He muttered underneath his breath/Nothing is revealed” (Dylan’s “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”). Apocalypse is that explosive moment when everything is revealed and nothing is revealed. Apocalypse is the opposite of what happens when a neutron or a hydrogen bomb falls. For Otto, apocalypse is raised consciousness, a consciousness that rises above the degenerate state of modern Los Angleles. For Bud, apocalypse is a belly ripped open by bullets.

In short, Repo Man is a film about disaffected youth in a world ruled by the cash nexus (represented by the context of Reaganite and Thatcherite conservatism). It catches the anger of the punk sub-culture by challenging the sensibility of viewers who look for mainstream film. This film is “popular” by virtue of its willingness to be as rebellious as the youth it champions. It refuses to exonerate a youth that tries to lay blame on society for youth alienation; Otto tells Duke that he is “just a suburban white punk.” The film blends genres; it is a combination of Sci Fi, youth rebellion, buddy, coming of age, western, and gang films. It mixes all these elements in a series of scenes that are largely self-contained. Early in the film, we see one of the Punks wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt that uses the line from the Paul Anka/Frank Sinatra song, “I did it my way.” This is a song that Johnny Rotten famously spit out. The line, “I did it my way,” strikes me as a nice encapsulation of Alex Cox’s film. He made a film his way. The film somehow manages to make a statement about human desire for meaning in a world largely divested of meaning. As in Weekend, the car becomes a focal point for desire. People want cars, and they get them even when they cannot pay for them. Everyone wants the Malibu in this city of angels.

What best typifies this film is the absence of brand names on various products we see: beer is Beer, cereal is Corn Flakes, and so on. We have generic products, for the most part, packaged in white boxes or cans with blue borders. Supposedly, the reason for this has to do with keeping the cost of making the film low. However this may be, the generic packaging reminds us of generic lives, lives lived according to stereotypes (the Punks, the hippie parents, the blond generic CIA agents, the mad scientist, etc.). The generic packaging draws our attention reminding us of consumerism, emptiness, branding, homogeneity, and blandness. Intensity is what makes the life of a repo man different. Intensity is what separates a life lived and a life accepted. Only by transforming the car into a shimmering center of energy can the repo man inherit the intense life that is his to experience.