Author: UncaScroogeMcD

There is a funny passage in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen. It’s in Chapter One, and it’s when everyman Hollis Mason (The Night Owl) and the neurotic, combative Laurel Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) go out to dinner. In word balloons, the pair discuss part of the attraction of being a superhero was the costumery. “Why did we dress up like that,” she asks. “The Keene Act was the best thing that ever happened to us.” It’s clear from Hollis’s reaction that he doesn’t share Laurel’s views on superhero costumery.

The passage hints at the fetishistic lure of fighter costumes, that at root the comic’s adventure story exists to offer an excuse to draw and view women in tight leather and thighboots.

And that is exactly what is wrong with My Super Ex Girl Friend. Here, director Ivan Reitman and costume designer Laura Jean Shannon ( Elf) had a marvelous opportunity to turn on every comic book nerd in the world (and increase their film’s revenues). They had at their disposal one of the most beautiful women in the world. She is about two heads taller than most everyone else in the film, and she’s got a gene pool to die for (there is a statue of her mother back in the homeland). And how do they dress her up? Like a Swedish schoolmarm’s idea of a super heroine. Shannon could have done it: several years earlier she made Lena Olin hotter than hot in Romeo is Bleeding in heels and stockings.

Of course, there are some scenes when Jenny Johnson (Thurman) is in “disguise” as a workaday Manhattan girl with a job in an art gallery and a prim way of warding off strange men on the subway. There it makes sense that she should have buttons up to her neck, lace collars, and a generally sexless exterior.

But when the clothes come off, underneath should be – a super hot superhero costume. I’m talking tight go go boots, shiny leggings or stockings, flexible lycra, a form fitting top that pushes her bosom up enough to distract even the most stolid robber. She should move through the air and stride down the street with domineering authority. Her costume should have the iconic necessity of Lara Croft’s. When G-Girl first appears in combat at the start of the film, she looks like someone out of a Pat Benatar music video with half-stockings and high heeled shoes rather than authority-inducing boots, far from the mode of a superheroine.
But that is the diffence. My Super Ex Girlfriend is not a superhero comedy. It is a romantic comedy with a superheroine in it.

To that end, it follows the lite New York romantic comedy. It begins with the corniest of New York movie openings, an arial view of the city with a sprightly if unmemorable soft jazz tune behind it. Then we’re in the midst of a crime, with jewel thieves thwarted by the mysteriously named G-Girl. And then we are plunged into the subway, where Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), a designer, is on his way to work, when he tries to pick up Jenny. From then on it is all love, love, love, with Matt a forgettable nebbish who manages to find himself looking down on the needy, neurotic Jenny.

The real love of his life is co-worker Hannah Lewis (Anna Faris), but she dates a handsome underwear model. And Matt’s best friend is Vaughn (Rainn Wilson, of TV’s The Office), i.e., that type of best friend in youth comedies such as EuroTrip who is really a nemesis with all his arrogance and bad advice. Before the film is a trailer for John Tucker Must Die. In it is the 100th iteration of a scene also replicated in Super. There, an experienced girl teaches a nerd girl to kiss; here, Vaughn gives Matt advice on how to break up with Jenny, even holding his hand. The fact that his character is named Vaughn may be a vague salute to Vince Vaughn.

Matt dates Jenny, and then learns that she is the mysterious G-Girl. He has great sex with Jenny, and even meets her supervillain nemesis, Professor Bedlam, aka Barry (Eddie Izzard). But in the end, he really loves Hannah. Well, try to break up with someone whose PMS is even of superhuman proportions.

All this being said, in the end, despite inconsistently erotic apparel for Thurman, Super ends up being enjoyable in its modest way. The plot is reasonably well structured, if predictable (I knew the ultimate pair offs as soon as a certain flashback started; in fact, I would have delayed that part of the flashback until the last 15 minutes), and laugh out loud funny more times than not (of special note is the “land shark” sequence). In spirit is is probably more like Galaxy Quest, a gentle ribbing of comic book fantasies by people who aren’t all that familiar with the subject, but just enough to score a few points.

Thurman is very, very good in what is in reality a second lead. The pressure off her, she seems to flower. What’s funny is that in the background are actresses who are presented as much sexier than her. The character whom Vaughn is constantly trying to pick up, a bartender, is played by Margaret Anne Florence in what appears to be her first movie, and she is a total fox. And even the girl who plays teenaged Jenny (Tara Thompson) is “sexier” than Thurman. It’s nice to have them in the film, but for the sake of narrative tension the sexual emphasis should be on Thurman in costume.

Essentially, Super is a cartoon comedy, with some wised up elements. But I also like the cartoony special effects. They had speed. In the best special effects, especially when a superhero is throwing something big, like a truck, the object rarely move with the speed you’d expect. They are weighted, possibly because the animators want you to see and appreciate their handywork, even in defiance of physics. Here, such as during a catfight at the end, the effects move like lightning, as they should. Also, I really enjoyed Luke Wilson, who here acquires a sort of early Jack Nicholson every manquality, mixed with a Jack Lemmon nebbish. His closeups in the R-rating skirting sex scenes, with a powerful super girlfriend scraping the floorboards with the bed thanks to the power of her thrusts, are hilarious (and will put certain oldies in the audience in mind of  Wonder Warthog).

By the way, it’s clear that there was a scene deleted from the movie. When G-Girl rescues Matt from the Statue of Liberty, there is an obvious opportunity for a dialogue between them in a nearby park (this is before he knows who she really is), but we don’t see it, even though there are many photos on the ‘net taken of Uma in the park that day. Expect that scene to pop up on the DVD.

 

Consider these two opposed statements. 

“Pain don’t hurt.”

“Kinda hurts, don’t it.”

Both are uttered in Road House, at opposite ends of the narrative. The first is spoken by Dalton (Patrick Swayze) as he is about to be sewn up by Dr. Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch). The second sentence is uttered by Dalton’s mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), who has come on the scene late in the day to help Dalton out of a jam.

 

 

Dalton is a “cooler,” a lead bouncer in a club. He’s been lured by Frank Tilghman (Kevin Tighe), owner of Double Deuce, to clean up his night club, located near Jasper, Missouri. What Tilghman fails to mention, however, is that more is wrong in the town than just some hooligans who get drunk and break out in fights. It’s is like one of those western towns where corruiption is allowed to flourish because it is more profitable, the citizens are mere pawns in the financial grip of the .

The DD is one of many victims of town gang lord Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), who used to date the local doctor (Lynch), who is herself the niece of the local car parts shop owner (Elvis acolyte Red West). Dalton soon learns that not only does he have to clean up the bar, he has to clean up the whole damn town, and to that end he eventually summons his best friend Wade Garrett (Elliott).

I guess if you were a responsible film reviewer you’d have to say that Road House is a junky movie. But as the years go by, and its reputation on cable TV, video, and now DVD mounts (the film turned into a real cash cow for MGM), one can give into one’s inner feelings and admit, as Lynch does on the new DVD, that Road House is a really great drive in movie. I am proud to admit, however, that when the film was first released, and I was working at a local “alternative” weekly, I gave the film one of the rare rave reviews it received in the country. Road House was originally released in May of 1989, putting a capper on what Lynch refers to on the new DVD as a bad decade, and made a respectable amount of money. The film originally came out on DVD in February of 2002, and fans everywhere were disappointed that the film did not receive the DVD respect it deserved: yak tracks, makings of, and so forth. MGM, or its remnant shell of a company, has rectified that mistake, with its new Deluxe Edition, published on June 8th, 2006 for $1995, in conjunction with a negligible but entertaining straight-to-video sequel, Road House 2. 

So, does pain hurt, or doesn’t it? Well, it depends on the attitude. If you are zen philosopher like Dalton, no (or if you are trying to impress a hot doctor, no). If you are Garrett, yes it does, because you have dispensed it to highly deserving victims, and you don’t have time to philosophize about it while in the heat of action.

Road House is the great post-Hawks Hawksian movie. It’s about men who live by a code. It is post Hawksian because the men talk about the code, and also because, in a more highly urban modern society, the men are more transient. In a quintessential Hawks movie, the pattern of the narrative is that the characters do something exciting, retired to their home base – a camp fire, a sherif’s office, a pilot’s bar – plan the next move or relax, then set out to do something else exciting, retire to the base and reflect again, then set out for another adventure, and so forth. This alternating rhythm creates a soothing and reassuring affect for a typical Hawks film, the stability beneath the chaos that the characters are fighting. The films aren’t essays on violence. Violence is a fact of their lives, and the characters simply deal with it. In the self-conscious 1980s and beyond, you have to have a philosophy about violence, because half your battles are going to be with people who oppose resorting to it.

Dalton is “the best damn cooler in the business,” and in case you didn’t know it, in the 1980s bar bouncers, like bike messengers (Quicksilver) and arm wrestlers (Over the Top), had a cult around them, Road House is here to tell you so. Everyone is in awe of Dalton, whose reputation precedes him. And he is presented as the perfect man. He can stitch his own wounds and change his own tires. Everyone likes him, from the farmer he rents a room from to the patrons of the club he helps “cool.” He performs tai chi in the dawn light and reads Jim Harrison in his off hours (Swayze has a wonderful actorial moment when his attention is pulled from the book to the pool orgy raging across the pond from his room. He has to drag his eyes from a page, a gesture one sees in real life all the time, but which I’ve never seen in a movie before).

There are many things to love about Road House. One enjoyable component is an impossibly blonde Kelly Lynch as the foxy ER doctor. Another is venerable sage Sam Elliott as a weathered bar bouncer. And until the film descends into a messy last sequence straight out of a Phil Karlson film, Road House is an enjoyable revenge genre story with a despicable villain or two with remarkably clever dialogue, credited to screenwriters David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin. Dalton explains that “Nobody ever wins a fight,” and Garrett works in as a bouncer in a bar whose patrons are so dumb that the bathroom “has a sign hanging over the urinal that says, ‘Don’t eat the big white mint.’” And this film may be the first instance in the history of American culture in which the phrase “It’s my way or the highway” was uttered.

Road House was made back in the day when films rated R actually had nudity and violence in them. But the film’s roots stretch back much further, to redneck noirs such as Thunder Road and Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story, and his later revenge fantasies Walking Tall and Framed, tales of a lone man who must clean up a town (themselves premises that hark back to western clichés) or best a racketeer. In this film, Gazarra has Jackie Treehorn status, lazily controlling the town with an oddball gang of misfits. It’s not entirely clear how Wesley manages to hold such sway over the citizens, but one thing is sure: villains have never before cackled with sadistic pleasure over their misdeeds as they do in Road House. And it is nice to see a villain who actually enjoys his villainy and the hedonistic fruits of his labors.

Patrick Swayze is the embodiment of the fact that in movies dancers make the best movie fighters. Think back on how lovely Elvis looked when he was engaged in a brawl, or how smooth and elegant Brando, who moves like a dancer, appears when he is punching some scum-sucking pig. Think of all the West Side Story gang members. That’s what’s missing from modern action movies, the sense of violence as a ballet rather than the definitive blowing up of snarling villains.

Road House comes in a fine widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) and numerous sound options (DD English Surround, French Surround, Spanish mono, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles).

 

 

All the extras are fun. “On the Road House” (that title doesn’t make sense to me) is a retrospective making of in which you come to realize how hilarious Kelly Lynch happens to be, but also get a survey of the film’s impact on its makers. “What Would Dalton Do?” is a group interview with a bunch of bouncers, and the film also has a celebratory text only Trivia Track, that serves as a continual reminder of the worse cultural excesses of the 1980s. There are two commentary tracks. The first is by director Rowdy Herrington, which is highly informative. The second is my favorite kind of track, one provided by people who, though not associated with the film, happen to love it. Such tracks are few and far between. In this case, the yakkers are Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, who know the film in and out. Perhaps the best part of their track is when they wonder out loud why guys like fight films especially when, as these two admit, they’ve never really even been in a fight of consequence nor ever want to.

 

These extras are fun, but in addition I would like to have heard from the screenwriters, if they happen to have been available. Otherwise it’s great stuff.

There is also a sneak peak at Road House 2: Last Call (though it is called only Road House 2 on the print itself). On its own disc, which hit the street July 11 for $24.95, 2 is an enjoyable attempt to recapture some of the glory of the first film, with the now dead Dalton’s son (we learn that Dalton was his last name and that his first was James) Shane Tanner (Johnathon Schaech, who also wrote the script; and yes, his name has both a “j” and an “n”) returning to his home town to help his mentor (Will Patton) out or a jam. The story borrows elements from movies such as Lethal Weapon 2 as well as the first Road House, but the villains are not as comical or ruthless as in the original, and there are no zeitgeist defining lines of dialogue.

Finally, on the Road House disc there are also trailers for the James Bond Ultimate collection, Population 436, and Freedomland. For the original Road House theatrical trailer (1:55), hold on to the previous DVD.

 

 

 

Of perhaps only historical interest,  An Early Frost, made in 1985, comes out of that Hallmark school of filmmaking, which strives to make you feel good about yourself despite the quotidian trials of life, and out of that American tendency of cultural elites to instruct their inferiors: this is how we must act in the face of the AIDS crisis. As a Emmy winning TV movie that was heralded as the first film to openly deal with AIDS it must be saluted for its bravery; but as an instruction manual it is out of date. 

It is one of the strategies of the film to sprinkle the cast with cinematic nobility in the form of old Warner Bros. star Sylvia Sidney, as the family matriarch, and Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands as the parents of the AIDS victim, even though their roots are in the tough New York school of acting and the harsh documentary naturalism of John Cassavetes’s films, whose uncompromising aesthetic An Early Frost‘s reassuring palliatives stand opposed to in nearly every way. Aidan Quinn as the handsome son is very good in the role but one wonders if his casting had more to do with his preternatural and exploitable thinness, like Steve Buscemi’s in the competing AIDS-crisis movie  Parting Glances (1986). Gazzara and Rowlands add an actorial heft in a film that in many ways avoids too much drama, not to mention the outward trappings of gayness. The film lacks a kiss (of any persuasion) much less a trip to a gay bar or a telltale tube of Vaseline near the bed-stand. It’s the most prophylactic gay movie, in all ways, since  Never Too Young to Die (1986).

An Early Frost first aired on NBC on November 11th, 1985, and was produced and written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, who later went on to do the American version of  Queer as Folk. Their work has the olive brach quality of the talents behind films such as  Making Love and  Claire of the Moon, seeking to minimize the differences between gay and straight culture for the edification of the straight half. Earlier explorations of gay culture such as  Boys in the Band, by vocalizing inner tensions uninhibitedly, ceded half the battle for acceptance to the “enemy.”  Curiously, though, An Early Frost subscribes to some of the most retrograde psychoanalytic views of homosexuality’s basis. Nick Pierson (Gazzara) is a successful businessman, running a lumber company with firm generosity. His wife Katherine brings the art to the household, teaching legions of small town American boys how to play the piano. The script suggests throughout that Nick is the tough but distant patriarch and Katherine the smothering, babying queer-maker. Their son Michael is manufactured from the nexus of their opposing developmental philosophies. Yet later, Michael’s boyfriend Peter (D. W. Moffett, Michael Douglas’s aide in  Traffic) argues on Michael’s behalf to the unaccepting Nick that Michael can’t help being what he is. This runs counter to the notion, inscribed in the film, that with a little familiar rejiggering, Michael might not have been gay. This reliance on psychoanalytic voodoo unintentionally opens the way to expensive sessions with somnambulant shrinks and summer vacations at a Christian conversion camp.

The film follows the template of previous slow death TV movies such as  Brian’s Song, with the added garnishes that determined all subsequent AIDS-themed movies, such as the references to bloodwork, group sessions, the battle between anger and acceptance. In fact, it is interesting to see how similar the film is to  Philadelphia, in that Michael has just made partner in a law firm, though with  Frost stopping way short of the lawsuit plot. Instead,  Frost is about gentle acceptance. For all its earnestness and didacticism, the film is still heartbreaking in its near-final shot of Michael smilingly telling his parents that he loves them – both of them – through the window of a taxi (the mirror image of an opening scene when life was good), as he is about to be driven off, presumably to die.

An Early Frost also stars  John Glover, Terry O’Quinn as a sympathetic doctor, and Bill Paxton as Michael’s brother-in-law. QuickStopEntertainment was provided with a screener disc that was not street ready. It had the trailer, and the film sans chapter breaks, but no menu, no “Living with AIDS” documentary, and no commentary track featuring Quinn and writers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman. Wolfe Video’s An Early Frost hits the street on July 18, 2006, and retails for $19.95.

 

Some Like it Hot breaks all the comedy rules. For one thing it is too long. Whereas most comedies are 90 minutes or less, Hot goes on for over two hours. The first 15 minutes or more is all back story and set up. The film’s real star, Marilyn Monroe, isn’t introduced until 25 minutes in. It quotes a lot of other movies, from Billy Wilder’s own Seven Year Itch and Sunset Boulevard to A Night at the Opera. Much of the film isn’t even comedy. It’s crime story, with murders, gangsters, revenge, and machine guns. And it’s amazing what this film got away with for its time. Look for the line, “Do you pluck?”

Some Like it Hot, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s highly esteemed hit from 1959 about two ’20s era Chicago jazz musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) seeking to escape the mob by joining a girl’s jazz band in disguise, began life as a 1935 French film directed by Richard Pottier called Fanfare D’Amour, itself remade in Germany in 1951 as Fanfaren Der Liebe. Wilder remembered it, and pitched the premise first to his writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, and then to his new movie producing partners, the Mirisch brothers (precursors of sorts, to the Weinsteins), who released movies through United Artists. Some Like it Hot became the second film from the Mirisch Company, and the first in a long string of hits for them by Wilder, who was still fleeing Paramount after a dispute with management over the distribution of Stalag 17.

 

 

This ur-Hot was going to star Frank Sinatra, Mitzi Gaynor, and Tony Curtis. When Sinatra stood up Wilder for a luncheon date the director remember a good young funny actor he saw in another movie, named Jack Lemmon, and when Monroe called to tell Wilder she wanted to work with him again, Gaynor was out. (Some have said that Danny Kaye and Bob Hope were also under consideration, even Jerry Lewis, and that Anthony Perkins auditioned for the role.)

Once finished it was a hit, but over the years gained an even greater reputation as the top comedy ever, resting at No. 14 on the AFI’s best movies ever list and No. 1 on its comedy list, followed by another cross-dressing comedy, Tootsie. It has been mimicked in shows such as Bosom Buddies and the Sister Act movies, and remade a few times, most recently unofficially as Connie and Carla, experiencing a sex change of its own. Like several other of Wilder’s films, it was converted into a stage musical, in this case Sugar. Now it has emerged for the third time on DVD (this disc supersedes a dual release in May 2001, one a special edition, neither enhanced for wide screen TVs).

The first thing to be say about the new Some Like it Hot (MGM, 1959, 122 minutes, black and white, two single sided dual-layered disc, 1.66:1 (enhanced), DD stereo in English, DD 5.1, mono, original audio, and mono in French, with English and French subtitles, audio commentary track with Paul Diamond (son of Izzy), Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, and including oral history quotes from Lemmon and Curtis, plus on the second disc a new making of, “The Legacy of Some Like it Hot,” and carried over the the previous special edition, “Nostalgic Look Back,” with Tony Curtis interviewed in the Formosa by Leonard Maltin, Memories from the Sweet Sues,:” a “Virtual Hall of Memories, the original pressbook, and he trailer, animated musical menu with 22-chapter scene selection, eight page insert, post cards, dual keep case in a cardboard sheath, $24.95, released on Tuesday, July 18, 2006) is that it bears a better transfer than its predecessor. Though not perfect, it is anamorphic. Released in tandem with Wilder’s birthday, which is June 22th, and which was “celebrated” last month on TMC, the two-disc set adds a few more extras over the previous release, and though it doesn’t increase our understanding of the film (scholars are mostly left out of the extras even though several have written good books about Wilder in recent years) it’s good to have the new transfer.

 

 

For more in depth appreciation of the film, one can turn to Some Like it Hot – the book. (Some Like it Hot, edited and annotated by Ann Castle and Dan Aulier, Taschen Books, 2001, $200 hardback, 384 pages, ISBN 3-8228-6056-5).

This Taschen book of Wilder and Diamond’s highly esteemed script comes covered in Banana yellow faux suede with red lettering and is stored in an orange box. It weighs about 11 pounds, and is shaped like a CinemaScope screen. And it is also at least the third time that the Wilder-Diamond script has been published.

There was a Signet paperback in 1959, and Premiere magazine published the script as part of a short-lived publishing venture in 1994. Do we need another iteration of Wilder and Diamond’s brilliant screenplay, especially one offered as an expensive coffee table book?

Editor Dan Aulier has an answer for that: “It’s one of the best screenplay’s I’ve ever read.” Aulier, who had already done two books on Hitchcock and who was approached by publisher Benedikt Taschen not long after Aulier published his book on Vertigo, took a year and a half to complete the volume. One of the main reasons, he says, was meeting Wilder. Admitting to some nervousness in facing the sharp-tongued director, the editor says that nevertheless that “was the principle reason for doing the book. Who would turn down a chance to talk with Billy Wilder – and to do so for eight weeks?”

 

 

Production on Some Like it Hot, the film, began before the screenplay was done. Yet the finished movie doesn’t show any sign of incompletion or evidence of being rushed; the film’s climax is a natural extension of the beginning. Aulier accounts for that by citing “the extraordinary professionalism of both Wilder and Diamond.” On the DVD, Diamond is presented as saying that he and Wilder usually began shooting a film before the script was finished, though that didn’t mean that they didn’t know what was going to happen. The rest was just “paperwork.”

Aulier and co-editor Ann Castle, a Paris-based artist, have done a sumptuous job. Even though the volume sits as comfortably in the lap as an airplane wing, it is certainly the most supplement rich version of the script ever published. With its interviews with then-still-living participants, its array of ad slicks, posters, articles in fan magazines, publicity photos, on-set snaps, and frame enlargements, the book comes with a lot of material that augments the DVD. In fact, all that’s missing from the book is the DVD.

It’s hard to imagine who’s going to be able to read it, though. It’s doubtful that citizens will be able to check the bulky book out of a library. And with a prohibitive price tag of $200 dollars, it’s not likely to find its way to Christmas celebrations or birthday parties. Publisher Benedikt Taschen himself doesn’t even seem to care if the book recoups its expenses. In a charmingly clumsy afterward, he writes, “If it doesn’t sell, we will have great gifts to give for years to come.” This is unfortunate, because from its campy cover to its attached Billy Wilder caricature bookmark, Taschen’s Some Like it Hot is a treat.

Taschen is the prolific German photography and art book publishing house with a sideline in fetish erotica. Lately, however, it seems to have strayed into movie book publishing. Dr. Jurgen Muller’s Movies of the 90s inaugurated a whole slew of film books, that have evolved into director career summaries.

 

 

Aulier’s book contains the complete screenplay of Some Like it Hot in facsimile form, dated November 12, 1958; interviews with Wilder, Jack Lemmon, and others; reproduced pages from the script’s first draft; the Billy Wilder bookmark, along with an illustrated Wilder filmography; an international survey of posters and lobby cards; and most interesting of all, a facsimile of Marilyn Monroe’s small prompt book, with her annotations, which recently sold at auction for $60 thousand dollars, presented here in the form of a pull out booklet tucked into the volume’s inside back cover.

Taschen is basically an art publisher, and the real raison d’être appears to be the 600-plus frame enlargements from the film. They are beautiful. Great attention has been lavish on the background of the film’s production and on the presentation of the frame enlargements in tandem with the pages from the script. The only problem with the book is that it doesn’t seem to have been made to actually be read.

At the time of publication, Aulier offered no hints as to whether Taschen would tackle another script with similar intensity, but noted that there are several movies that might qualify. “Maybe Vertigo. Citizen Kane. The films of Bunuel and Cocteau lend themselves to this kind of treatment, too.” In 2005, Taschen followed up the Wilder book with a career survey of Kubrick’s art, with material from the Kubrick archives.

On the DVD, most of the holdovers are from the previous special edition disc. The new stuff includes the edited audio commentary track, with host Paul Diamond (who says he insulted Monroe as a young tyke on the set by calling her a fat lady; Monroe was pregnant before the shooting began,but lost the baby toward the end of the shoot). He surpervises recorded oral history comments by Lemmon and Curtis, and chitchat by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The two writers are appropriately appreciative of the film, but say wrongly that it has no theme or meaning. They are good on practical comedy aspects, such as pointing out that when they change into women, Curtis holds back and Lemmon goes nuts, the reverse of their “male” identities. They also maintain that this long movie only has three acts (even Diamond says that in his archival footage) when it most clearly has the more classic four act structure. At 1:35:02, the screenwriters announce, “The third act begins.” No, in reality it is the 4th act.

Like most of Wilder’s films regardless of whom he wrote them with, Hot is about a louse who changes. Here the louse is Curtis’s Joe, a womanizing and gambling con man who uses everyone, including Jerry, who is more or less in love with him (to him Joe is “some kind of terrific”). In the tradition of Hollywood, Joe changes his ways when he falls in love with the incredibly forgiving Sugar (Monroe), and they go off together in the end. But for a louse who doesn‘t change, turn to the also recently double dipped Stalag 17 (Paramount, 1953, 120 minutes, black and white, one single sided dualred layered disc, full frame, DD restored mono in English, mono French, with English subtitles, commentary by actors Richard Erdman and Gil Stratton and co-playwright Donald Bevan, “Stalag 17: From Reality to Screen,” “The Real Heroes of Stalag XVIIB,” photo gallery, 14-chapter scene selection, keep case, $19.95, released on Tuesday, March 21, 2006). William Holden is the louse here, Sefton, a POW who traffics in whatever the market will bear. He is obviously feeding off the needs of his fellow soldiers, but has no regrets and even a cogent justification. Based on a popular stage play, Stalag 17 is mostly static and talky, but when the film returns to the main plot about who is betraying the soldiers it is precise and executed admirably. Sefton ends up acting heroically but for a louse’s reasons. He remains true to himself to the end.

This disc supersedes a bare bones platter from 1999 with some restoration work and more extras. From the yak track we learn that comic actors Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck hated each other and caused some disharmony on the set. An attempt to replace Lembeck with Cy Howard before production proved a failure. The retrospective making of features writer-director Nicholas Meyer, and Wilder biographers Bob Thomas and Ed Sikov.

 

To everyone else in American the magazine artist they looked forward to was Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post. But like a few thousand sick and twisted horror fan kids around the country my “Rockwell” was Basil Gogos. He did the covers for most of Jim Warren and Forrest J. Ackerman’s magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. In fact, looking back, I have to say that the best thing about the mag was the covers; the insides were on cheap newsprint and featured stories that were mostly excuses for horrific puns. 

Gogos was a mainstream magazine “super realist,” like Rockwell. But he also had a vivid sense of color, and a flair for the dramatic pose. I love his cover image of Gorgo, with its rich deep midnight blue background, for example.

Now, thanks to the new book Famous Monster Movie Art Of Basil Gogos (Vanguard, 160 pages,$24.95, ISBN: 1 88759 171 0), I am suddenly aware that Gogos, who is still alive, permeated the whole of pop culture, including work for men’s adventure magazines, book covers, and movie posters, and I know a lot more about how Gogos did his art. This oversized paperback is a career survey of Gogos, with many fine reproductions and a fine if somewhat cursory biography. Vanguard specializes in books on artists, including 

 

I say cursory because there is no mention (that I could find, anyway) of the terrible tensions between Warren and Ackerman. But then, they may have been irrelevant to Gogos’s work for the publication. On the other hand, there is a lot of detail about Gogos’s covers and interior illustrations for many men’s magazines, an unknown terrain to most readers. The book is written by Kerry Gammill and J. David Spurlock, with an intro by Rob Zombie. It tracks Gogos from the 1950s when he was an up and coming commercial artist, through the Warren and mens’ mag years, to now, when he does special private commissions, works on charcoal and the occasional cover. There are extensive quotes from Gogos, who says at one point that his career making alliance with Warren was formed because no one else at the agency where he worked and which Warren contacted “was cut out for it, or cared to do it.”

There are also numerous testimonials from fellow artists. James Bama, for one, who did the Doc Savage paperback covers, said of Gogos that his work is “second to none,” which is high praise indeed. And there is also lots of detail about Gogos’s technique, from his imaginary quartet of colored lights which sometimes gave his subjects the hues of a Francis Bacon, to his transition from dyes to watercolors to casein to acrylics. He even experimented with silkscreens, long after the medium had been dropped by everyone else, but which for him led to some great covers, such as for the the cast of Tales of Terror.

The book is loaded with tidbits. For example, I learned that both Gogos and Bama used the same model, a guy named Steve Holland. The stolidly handsome Holland was both a thousand adventurers in men’s mags for Gogos, and Doc Savage for Bama. It’s too bad that when they came to make a movie of Doc Savage they didn’t use Holland, who as it happens already was an actor, appearing as Flash Gordon on TV.