George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973)

Screened with:
Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood" (1943)

Your Humble Commentator would like to talk about cartoons. Over the last few weeks, we here at the BCFS have been celebrating the classic cartoon as much as classic films. Back in the day, every movie was preceded by a short cartoon. The older Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Superman, Tom and Jerry, and Betty Boop cartoons (to name a few) that we’re so used to seeing on TV were originally made for the big screen. And on the big screen the gags are funnier, the painstaking hand animation more impressive, the original scores more thrilling.

Perhaps we don’t ask ourselves often enough: what makes a great cartoon? The techniques used to create the cartoons we’ve shown here at Blake are mostly gone now, replaced by computer animation, or slowed to fewer frames per second, or filled with stock animation, or saddled with limp anonymous music. We’re not knocking Japanese animation (in fact, we’re big Miyazaki fans) or the recent boomlet in nouveau animation like “Batman: The Animated Series,” “South Park,” “Duckman,” and all those “Ren & Stimpy” or Japanimation knock-offs on the Cartoon Channel. But what you’ve been watching at the BCFS are examples from the golden age, started by Winsor McCay and his “Gertie the Dinosaur” and perfected into the demanding, distilled six-minute format by masters like Ub Iwerks (Mickey Mouse), Otto Messmer (Felix the Cat), Dave Fleischer (Popeye and Superman), Chuck Jones (WB), Bob Clampett (WB), Friz Freleng (WB and Pink Panther), and Tex Avery (MGM).

The immortal Mr. Jones once said that the way to tell a good cartoon is to turn the sound off. If, he said, you can still tell what’s going on and what the characters are feeling, then it is well made. (This works. Try turning the sound off on an old “Scooby-Doo” episode. If every episode weren’t exactly the same, it would be impossible to tell what was happening or why.) Jones was a master of the silent test, and even incorporated it into some of his gags, like when Daffy and Bugs are trapped under a glass bowl in “Beanstalk Bunny” and Daffy mimes a fit until Bugs produces a glass cutter.

It also works for Tex Avery’s “Red Hot Riding Hood,” this week’s cartoon, with its iconic tribute to the comic “take.” While you may not have seen this cartoon before, you know all its moves – the inflated, bugged-out eyes, the red carpet tongue, the steam out the ears, the wooden mallet to the head. If you remember, Chuck Russell pays homage to all these moves in his comic book-into-movie version of The Mask, starring Jim Carrey. But we are proud to bring you Avery’s original, which so many cartoons and cartoonists have stolen from for so many years.

And oh yeah, we’re showing The Sting, winner of the 1973 Academy Award for Best Picture. The Sting has the distinction of being the first film Your Humble Commentator saw more than once during the opening run. This was four years before Star Wars made the first question when you got out of a movie not “what did you think?” but “how many times have you seen it?” The Sting was worth repeated viewings, and we sincerely hope you enjoy it, as much as we’ve enjoyed presenting the entire film series to you. Be seeing you! (YHC salutes audience by laying a finger to the side of his nose and doing that Henry Gondorff/Johnny Hooker thing, then walks off into the sunset. Somewhere a limousine is waiting, but that’s another classic movie …)

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Feed the Kitty" (1952)
Mark Har's "My New Life" (2003)

Consider the thriller. The world can be a terrifying place, yet most of us feel an inexplicable and irresistible pull to sit in a dark movie theater and watch a film that terrifies us. Whether it’s watching Mike Myers (not that Mike Myers) stalk a nubile Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or gelatinous acid ooze from an alien’s interior mouth just before it attacks in the Alien films or a shadowy government conspiracy threaten heroic FBI agents in "The X-Files," we love to be scared.

In those examples the protagonists face overt, vicious monsters. (Yes, Your Humble Commentator just compared secretive, unaccountable government cabals to serial killers and blood thirsty aliens.) Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, dealt in a more subtle form of suspense, the thrill of watching ordinary people mistakenly get caught up in a life-threatening situation. In Rear Window (1954), Jimmy Stewart is “Jeff” Jeffries, an action photographer cooped up in his apartment with a broken leg. When he’s not fending off the marital advances of his girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly), he spends his time staring out his back window at the residents of the various apartments across the courtyard. And in one of the apartments, a man’s wife suddenly disappears. Jeff suspects foul play. Or is it all a product of his over-active imagination?

Say what you will about the suspense in this film, there’s a lot going on in addition to a few cheap thrills. Hitchcock, for instance, seductively doles out the minor melodramas of Jeff’s neighbors in a way that turns us into voyeurs as much as it does Jeff. It is just like Hitch to suggest impishly that the act of going to a movie is a form of voyeurism, especially if that film includes any form of intimacy. Think about that the next time you laugh when Peter Seller’s character Chance in Being There says “I like to watch.” Don’t we all?

Another form of fear we indulge in for entertainment is the urban legend. And while that may evoke images of sitting around the campfire, telling the one about the escaped one-armed psychopath and the hook hanging off the car door handle or the one about your friend who knows someone who went to a bar, passed out and woke up without a liver, local filmmaker Mark Har has put a little urban legend up on the big screen with his short "My New Life." Coincidentally, Har’s 15-minute film, which was shot in the Twin Cities area, has the feel of an episode of … "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or perhaps "Tales from the Crypt." In the end, we here at Blake Classic Films are happy to give you the opportunity to gratify that funny little penchant you have for artificially encouraged fear. No doubt it’s a welcome relief from the real life fear of taking your AP exams.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936)

Screened with:
Dave Fleischer's "Mechanical Monsters" (1941)
Max Gold's "La Lengua de Pandora (2004)

So you’re sitting in a dark theater, watching Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Something strikes you as very odd. First, someone must have left the print out in the sun; it’s faded to the point where there’s no color. It’s all, like, gray. And what’s more it’s got a soundtrack but you can’t hear what anyone says – instead you have to read what they say. Whassup with that?

You check the date on the movie: 1936. Didn’t they have color yet? (Yes.) Hadn’t “talkies” been invented? (Yes, in 1927 with The Jazz Singer.) Oh, man, is this, like, one of those OLD movies?
Yes it is. Your Humble Commentator has a soft spot for two things considered shockingly primitive and barely museum-worthy by modern movie-goers: silent film and black and white cinematography. Whoa.

There are so many reasons to see this movie. For one, it’s funny. Here again (and for the last time) is the Chaplin’s Little Tramp, stuck in Depression-era America, wandering into one pitfall after the next, always happily going wherever he's kicked, always bearing with guileless dignity each humiliation that comes his way. For another, the Little Tramp has become an internationally recognized figure, with his bowler hat, cane and splayed feet in over-sized shoes. We here at the Classic Film Series feel it is always worth seeing the original of something that has been ripped off by countless others, to see the originator of a particular style before one yaks about the comic genius of Roberto Benigni. Third, this is a film with a conscience. Modern Times is a critique of capitalism that is as scathing as it is sentimental, and – as Chaplin’s final silent film (with title cards but also with sound and some spoken dialogue) – it's also a fond farewell to an era of cinema. In short, Modern Times has a grace and quality to it not necessarily absent from but different from the modern film-going experience. Watch enough movies like this one, and you’ll come to miss it.

Speaking of the qualities of yesteryear, seeing Disney’s recent Home on the Range, purported to be their last animated film using traditional hand animation, we thought it might be worth honoring one of the great, but unheralded, cartoon studios. Y’all know about Warner Bros. (Chuck Jones et. al.) and MGM (Tex Avery w/ Tom and Jerry), but in the 1930s and ‘40s there was also Fleischer studios (originally famous for their Popeye cartoons). Today we bring you Dave Fleischer’s 1941 Superman cartoon “The Mechanical Monsters.” Note the warmth and depth of the animation, the sense of style, the radical perspectives, and dynamic use of illustrated lighting effects. We’re not knocking computer animation, and we acknowledge the difficulty and astronomical expense of hand animation in a bottom-line world. But it will be a shame when cartoons like this one are completely a thing of the past. Fleischer only made 17 of these Superman toons, but each is a six-minute masterpiece. Enjoy.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" (1953)

Your Humble Commentator remembers being ten years old, some time ago, sitting at home on summer Sunday afternoons in his basement watching classic sci-fi B-movies on his family’s black and white TV: Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking Man. All great; all part of his current video collection. But the best of them all? That would be Fred Wilcox’s 1950s space epic Forbidden Planet. Perhaps that’s because the screenplay was taken from a script by some guy named Will Shakespeare.

Wait, you think, Shakespeare never had robots or spaceships or Anne Francis in a really short skirt in any of his plays! Well, no. But Forbidden Planet falls into a category that Shakespeare-on-Film critics call an “unfaithful pop culture adaptation.” That means it dumps Shakespeare’s language, borrows the plot of one of his plays and reuses it in a genre film more in keeping with the tastes of modern film-goers. Hence Taming of the Shrew can become a teen sex comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You or Macbeth can become a foul-mouthed mafia flick like Men of Respect or Hamlet can become an animated morality tale like The Lion King. (Yes it is. Yes it IS.)

So what? Watching this 1956 film you’ll probably notice more parallels to the not-too-distant cultural happening known as Star Trek than the vague allusions to Prospero (Morbius), Miranda (Altaira), Ferdinand (Commander Adams), and Caliban (Robby the Robot). And reveling in the B-movie effects and cheesy ray guns and flying saucer vision of space travel and terrifying monster will no doubt drive out any thoughts of Forbidden Planet as a cultural lens through which we can reflect on Shakespeare and Captain Kirk at the same time. Yet what we have here is a movie that aspires to the same cultural greatness – an entertaining, swashbuckling tale that rises above the common B-movie fare by singing a captivating song not of the aforementioned accoutrements of Eisenhower-era sci-fi films but of the more complex elements of human frailty and pride. Will you hear it? Good, for “the hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey and be attentive.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "One Froggy Evening" (1955)

If you only know of Woody Allen as a recent, sad, old whiny character, badly miscast in his own movies (Curse of the Scorpion, anyone?), and you are not familiar with the younger Allen, who invokes the early film clown Buster Keaton and infuses his spirit with neurotic absurdity, then you're in for a treat. 1973's Sleeper finds Allen still working his stand-up comedy roots into his film, but beginning to develop a more socially astute work.

Here he plays Miles Monroe, a man cryogenically frozen in 1973 and revived 200 years in the future into a totalitarian society where he is adopted by a rebel underground in their struggle against a Big Brother-like ruler. While this sounds like a drama, Allen takes the typical dystopian vision (think Brave New World or 1984 or A Clockwork Orange) and turns it into satire.

The result is a great movie, full of images that have stood the test of time -- the "orb," the orgasmatron -- and raucous gags. Mike Myers, in his first Austin Powers movie, even blatantly plagiarized Allen's scene where Miles is revived. In the film world, it's considered "homage," and it's a way of recognizing a director's iconic touch.

Your Humble Commentator even thinks this film deserved an award. The Academy, however, tends to favor the dramatic over the comic. (Quick: Of the ten Best Picture Academy Awards in the 1970s, name the one comedy awarded.*)

And in 1973, the Best Picture Oscar went to George Roy Hill's The Sting. We here at Classic Films Central feel that comedy is overlooked too frequently. After all, which is more worthy of our notice -- drama, which helps us deeply explore the serious aspects of our lives? Or comedy, which helps us laugh at the serious aspects of our lives? This is not a rhetorical question.

Woody Allen once said, "Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all." For you, seeing Sleeper should solve that problem.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

*Answer: Woody Allen's comedy Annie Hall won in 1977.