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Road Runner, Superman, Tom and Jerry, and Betty Boop cartoons (to name a few) that we’re so used to seeing on TV were originally made for the big screen.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