Kent's Delightfully Obscene Pantomime

I was up at the City Grocery Bar regaling everyone for the millionth time about that thing James M. Cain said when the interviewer asked him what he thought about what the movie studio had done to his novel MILDRED PIERCE and he said something like, "Why, they didn't do anything to it, it's sitting right here on the shelf." And Kent said, "Why, my dear, they didn't do anything to it, it's right over... WHAAAAA??????" And then he pantomimed the unspeakably obscene thing that he imagined James M. Cain might have seen being done to his book at that moment. We ate at Gus's Fried Chicken yesterday and that reminded Kent of the time that he was in another city wolfing down awful cubed-chicken hotel nachos and when he walked outside there was A GUS'S FRIED CHICKEN RIGHT THERE! RIGHT OUTSIDE THE HOTEL! But it was too late. Kent was already full of terrible nachos. "It was heartbreaking," Kent said.

Lemon Air

Hey I went out of town again and jotted notes about everything I did, who cares? But the day before I went on my trip I was in the doctor's office - a new doctor. He had CIGAR AFICIONADO in the waiting room. I thought that was a weird magazine for a doctor to have in his waiting room (see also). And the first two letters to the editor in CIGAR AFICIONADO were about some readers' disappointment with CIGAR AFICIONADO's take on the Kennedy assassination! But mostly it was pictures of cigars. Ron Perlman, who does the voice of the Lich on ADVENTURE TIME, was on the cover of CIGAR AFICIONADO. I believe the cover said RON PERLMAN: DREAMING BIG. But he just looked disgruntled about something! After I had looked at all the pictures of cigars I picked up Martha Stewart's magazine, which contained this phrase: "Peanuts take a sinister turn when sprayed with diluted black food coloring." It was a Halloween snack tip which I found fascinating and disturbing. I kept muttering it aloud because I wanted to remember it and didn't have a pen. "Peanuts take a sinister turn when sprayed with diluted black food coloring." I said it a lot, out loud there at the doctor's office. "Peanuts take a sinister turn when sprayed with diluted black food coloring." I started to think (realize?) that "sprayed" and "diluted" are the most awful words in the sentence. It is awful to picture someone "spraying" peanuts with "diluted" black food coloring. Sure, I would have "blogged" about the doctor's office magazines that day, but I was late for an ADVENTURE TIME video conference. So I had to come straight home and jump right into that. Late! Late for a meeting the first time ever. No time for "blogging"! After the meeting I had to take care of a few things and go to bed. Up bright and early for a trip to California for more ADVENTURE TIME doings! Allow me to describe it for you in agonizing detail you won't ever read, as transcribed from my precious little notebook of precious observations. Okay! On the way to the Memphis airport I saw a motel sign advertising "CHITTERLINGS" in the space where they usually say "FREE HBO." Now the first thing I know you're dying to hear is what I read on the airplane. Well, Ace Atkins recently talked Megan Abbott into reading her first novel in the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald. Megan said the book had "wit and soulful women" in it. And so I recalled that McNeil had given me a Travis McGee paperback 20 years ago at least... maybe 30 years ago! And there it has sat, neglected, on various shelves, most recently the drugstore spinner in my home office. Like Megan, I never made the leap to Travis McGee. But now I am finally reading that book McNeil gave me so many decades ago. Ha ha, I am just going to keep typing, though we are only on page one of my notes and I am already bored with my own life. This may be my longest "post" ever! Because I am also going to tell you what I ALMOST read on the airplane but didn't: SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser. Dr. Theresa has raved about it for years. And once when we were visiting Laura Lippman, those two bonded over their love of the book. Later on I discovered that Megan loves it too. Now, this is the same trio who finally got me to crack open MILDRED PIERCE, a masterpiece. But Dr. Theresa's paperback of SISTER CARRIE is mutilated with affection and scholarship: folded, cracked, dog-eared, marked-up, annotated copiously by hand... altogether too physically complicated for casual airplane reading. Ha ha I love how boring I am being right now. I had to get up early - well before dawn - to make it to the plane, and fell into a deep slumber on the runway. When I awoke, I asked my seatmate, "Are we there?" I really thought we had landed at LAX. He had to tell me we still hadn't left the ground in Memphis. What shenanigans! Pen and Kent picked me up at the airport in a white 1951 Bentley! This was the only way for them to top their previous luxurious joke of picking me up in a stretch limo. "How are you going to top yourself now?" I asked Pen. "We're not doing this again," he said somberly in a way that made me believe him. Now here is an amazing coincidence you won't care about: Pen and Kent took me straight to a restaurant I had just read about in a magazine in my doctor's office the day before... in a beer lover's magazine called DRAFT. That's right, my doctor had magazines about cigars AND beer in his office. As we waited for our food there was some saucy music playing and Pen said, "I could teach you how to rhumba." And it turns out he wasn't kidding! (Although we didn't rhumba.) Pen used to be a dance instructor, I learned. Pen said, "Old ladies would occasionally proposition you." ("Click" here to read the interview I did with Megan Abbott when we talk about how Billy Wilder used to be a "taxi dancer," likewise popular with the ladies! Though Pen never went the Billy Wilder route and took any old ladies up on it.) For dinner, Leslie Wolfhard and her husband Steve and Kent took me to the soothingly dark Tam O'Shanter, where Walt Disney used to have lunch every day. I found out that Leslie's favorite movie is NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and that she lived in Atlanta during some of the same years Dr. Theresa and I did. So we got to be nostalgic about the Majestic Diner and stuff like that ("click" here for an interview where I get appallingly mawkish about Atlanta). They put horseradish in the deviled eggs at the Tam O'Shanter. Unless I am nuts, I have never before run across that welcome innovation. Everyone else had prime rib, but I went the more healthy route of corned beef and cabbage. Ha ha ha! But really, I ate all my vegetables and ordered some "mixed peas" on the side. And I even left a little corned beef on my plate, in honor of what I knew would have been Dr. Theresa's wishes (ha ha, she would have commanded me to "order fish" - WHAT! Oh well). For I knew that the next night I would be dining at the steakhouse where Bob Hope used to eat ("The Smokehouse") where I always go, I can't help myself. The Tam O'Shanter is where I drank the first of many negronis on this trip. It was all negronis all the time, brother! I am not sure why. I never had one before. But just before I left, I saw Dr. Theresa and Megan throwing them back at the City Grocery Bar and I guess I thought they looked pretty good. (Well, I did have half a beer at the restaurant from the doctor's office beer magazine, and a small glass of Amontillado [just for the Poe associations]- after a negroni - at a fancy dinner [see below - ha ha, you'll never make it!]) After the Tam O'Shanter I called Dr. Theresa and she said they had been filming a commercial next to our house. Here I am in Hollywood and they're filming a commercial at our house in Mississippi, ha ha ha, what a country. The following morning, in the Starbucks where I once saw the guy from Tenacious D who is not Jack Black, I was reading the New York Times and there was a quote from our friend and neighbor Richard Howorth on the front page of the Arts Section. A welcome and unexpected touch of home! Hey, it looks like I really am going to type up all my notes! I usually skip some of them. I went to my first comic book convention, Wondercon in Anaheim, to be on an ADVENTURE TIME panel. Jesse Moynihan explained that it's not really a "comic book convention." He explained what it was, but I can't remember. All I know is I saw Lou Ferrigno sitting in a booth next to the guy who played the "Soup Nazi" on SEINFELD. They were both selling their autographs for cash, which I guess is something I knew went on, way in the back of my mind. I wondered if it was demoralizing for the "Soup Nazi" to sit under a big banner with the word "Nazi" on it all day. I also spotted Sergio Aragones, which was thrilling! He was a big part of my childhood, drawing all those little comics in the margins of MAD magazine. A bunch of us from ADVENTURE TIME sat at a long table and signed hundreds and hundreds of posters for hundreds and hundreds of people (not for money). Some people wanted me to draw them a picture, not realizing I don't draw at all. So I tried a few pitiful Finns and a BMO ("He's just a rectangle!" I encouraged myself) and once, upon request, a Lady Rainicorn (see also!) who turned out looking like a snake who had been through some unimaginable tragedy. Speaking of posters, Cole Sanchez and Jesse bought me a thoughtful and awesome present at Wondercon... an original poster from the 1973 Clint Eastwood movie where a groovy free spirit teaches a craggy old square businessman all about love... BREEZY! They knew of my obsession with it. (You can see a video of the presentation by "clicking" here. And "click" here for a little more about BREEZY.) Then some super serious and professional and brisk and unsmiling security people hustled us through a bunch of SPINAL TAP-style back rooms and passages and freight elevators and corridors to get us to our panel, where there were - I have to believe - thousands of people in attendance! Above you can see the panel members... from left to right that's Kent, Pen, Andy Ristaino, Adam Muto, me, Steve (with Jessica Dicicco, who plays the Flame Princess on the show, standing in front of him), Jesse, and Kumail Nanjiani of TV's SILICON VALLEY, who plays Prismo on ADVENTURE TIME. We took a shuttle back to Burbank and Kent took me to my hotel and we sat in the lobby and I drank a negroni and Kent ordered some wings. "Yeah!" I exclaimed. "I want to see you eat some chicken while I'm here." Because Kent loves chicken, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! What a country. Then I went to the steakhouse where Bob Hope used to eat and ordered a negroni and my usual, the "Steak Sinatra." And one of my tablemates said, "I used to know one of Bob Hope's mistresses." So that was exciting! My fellow diners included Joey Lauren Adams and my friend "The Hollywood Producer" - I honestly can't recall why I originally thought I needed to cloak him in anonymity but I'm going to stick with it. It's a tradition! I will say he has lost 50 pounds and looks like a superstar! Next up, karaoke. Joey wanted me to sing "Stagger Lee" with her. She said I had introduced it to her, in the Lloyd Price version, on a 45 at my house, and she had loved it ever since, so how could I say no to a duet tinged with such tender associations from the good old days when Joey used to live in town? Rash decision! Management, it turns out, has a foam cannon standing by with which to express its displeasure. Joey and I were deluged in torrents of punitive foam for whatever desecration we were perpetrating on the venerable tale of Stagger Lee. And by we, I mean me. I nobly intercepted the majority of the foam, keeping Joey unscathed - except in her heart! It occurs to me that I was perhaps the sole intended recipient of the foam and not "protecting" Joey at all. Terrible revelation! Joey and the H.P. were just trying to recreate the incredible joy of a previous occasion, The Smokehouse followed by karaoke in the same spot... but YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. We had fun anyway! And the karaoke place made pretty great negronis. But when I got back to my room, my iPod, set to shuffle, was playing "Wrong 'Em Boyo" by the Clash. Out of 20,000 songs. That's the one that quotes liberally from "Stagger Lee." Technology is sentient. And hurtful. The next day I saw my brother and most of my nephews... one of them was off somewhere petting ducklings. While I was hanging out with the others, a picture came (to my brother's phone) of my absent nephew holding a duckling and I had to admit it looked like he had made a solid choice.

That evening, sitting in my hotel lobby waiting for the cab that was to take me to Laraine Newman's house (!) I read my Travis McGee. One of the "soulful women" Megan was talking about said of an evening on the town that she had had "a lovely, lovely time up until I went owly." Went owly! That's one I never heard before. And so I was able to add to my big long list of books with owls in them. Laraine and her husband Chad took me out to an incredible dinner I can't describe and won't forget. Infinite tiny courses. Tapas is a weak word. Brussels sprouts came with "lemon air." I said lemon air! I guess it is an exhalation that someone gently coaxed from a lemon. Not only was I in great company but the service was down-to-earth and accessible amid the weird splendor of the surroundings and the potentially daunting array of dishes. I had sea urchin for the first time, which I think I am right in describing as "the peanut butter of the sea." Then I went back to their place and watched GAME OF THRONES with Laraine Newman! During the sexy parts I was like - silently - "Oh no I am watching sex stuff with Laraine Newman... and her husband... and their dog." The cabbie on the way back to the hotel wanted to compare the natural disasters of California and Mississippi. He said, and I wrote it down, "Compared to tornados, earthquakes are candy. So your window rattles. A tornado, your house gets up and goes to another state." My flight home was the next day! So I went to the bar and ordered a negroni to take up to my room to help me pack. The bartender said, "That's a man's drink! I could never drink that." I was surprised. I really thought it was "a woman's drink." I associated it with Dr. Theresa and Megan. But maybe he was just angling for a tip. Though I could imagine Bob Hope and Nixon knocking back a few negronis in the Oval Office. Dressed for bed and drinking my Final Negroni, I caught sight of myself in one of the full-length mirrors they put cruelly all over hotel rooms and could not help but note my disturbing psychological resemblance to Martin Sheen at the beginning of APOCALYPSE NOW but, you know, fat. Now we're back to the airport! Seated across from me as I waited to board was a guy dipping extremely "fragrant" chewing tobacco and spitting it into a large clear plastic cup. I'm sure it's perfectly legal and happens in airports every day as far as I know. On the plane they tried to give me a "molasses clove cookie." WHAT! First of all, cloves in a cookie? Maybe that is normal and legal too. But the worst offense was trying to substitute a "molasses clove cookie" for a Biscoff, America's greatest airplane cookie. You may be sure I put up a fuss (i.e., asked politely) and got my Biscoff. On the way back home from the airport, I called Mom to let her know I got back okay. She said how much she had loved the ADVENTURE TIME season premiere and I realized I hadn't seen it yet because of traveling. "It had my favorite character," Mom said. I asked her who that was. "I don't know," said Mom. "She's a peach or a potato." Mom meant Tree Trunks, who is an elephant.

Mildred Pie

Dr. Theresa made a peach pie in honor of Mildred Pierce last night and Megan Abbott came over and we all ate some peach pie in honor of Mildred Pierce and Dr. Theresa and Megan Abbott talked about Mildred Pierce and I was a lucky kind of preview audience of one because DR. THERESA AND MEGAN ABBOTT ARE GOING TO TALK TO EACH OTHER ABOUT MILDRED PIERCE IN PUBLIC ON FRIDAY AND YOU CAN COME SEE IT HAPPEN. Their talk is compellingly called "Fine, Wet and Beautifully Made: Mildred Pierce's Pies and James M. Cain's Working Woman." It's all part of the "Women, Work and Food" Symposium put on by the Sarah Isom Center (of which Dr. Theresa is the assistant director) and the Southern Foodways Alliance. You know those guys! You can read the whole schedule by "clicking" here. You know, it occurs to me I have been mentioning Megan here lately like it's just a normal thing to hang out with her, which I guess it is now, but maybe it's confusing, as I have never given you proper notice that she is the new John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence, so she has come down from NYC to live here for a year or so and we're happy to have her. Walking Megan home late last night through the dark and empty Sunday streets, we spied a melancholy pom-pom lying in a vacant lot with some kind of David Lynch spotlight on it.

Real Sandwich Talk

Kent Osborne took a little trip to Chicago. "I ate meat," he said of his visit. "DID YOU HAVE ANY CHICKEN?" I shrieked hysterically, because Kent never gets tired of me reminding him in a humorous fashion that he loves to eat chicken. "One day I had fried chicken for lunch and chicken wings for dinner," Kent replied. He loves chicken! We talked about a hot dog Kent ate, then he sent me a picture of it, seen here. I tried to tell Kent about delicious sandwiches that Dr. Theresa and Kelly Hogan and I had in Chicago in October of 2002, wondering if he had enjoyed a similar one during his visit, but I did a poor job of describing them because Kent said, "Muffuletta?" And I said, "No..." Wrong sandwich region! Coming from the Gulf Coast, I am quite well acquainted with said muffuletta! So I knew that wasn't it. Well, I sent a message to Hogan, asking her the name of the memorable sandwich (she was the one who guided us to it), the juiciness and flavor of which have stayed with me for over a decade now, but I haven't heard back yet so I did a little "internet research" and the type of sandwich I am thinking of is called an "Italian beef." You should get one! "Click" here for a wikipedia article about it. (See also. For further reading: "The Osborne Sandwich.") I want to recommend the novel MILDRED PIERCE to Kent if he hasn't read it: it is the novel guaranteed to make you hungriest for chicken! On the other hand, it could drive him into a dangerous frenzy. Because he loves chicken so much. Loves it! Chicken. He loves it. Kent loves chicken.

Big Shoe Drop Any Minute Now

Finally getting around to reading AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD by Laura Lippman. It's not fair to call it my favorite Laura Lippman novel because I'm only on page 86 but I THINK IT MIGHT BE. You know that expression "waiting for the other shoe to drop," right? NONE OF THE SHOES HAVE DROPPED. But there is every indication that somebody is holding tons of shoes over our heads and those shoes, some with spikes on them, are going to start dropping like crazy any minute. I refuse to compare AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD to Balzac, mostly because I have no idea what that means. I barely know what "waiting for the other shoe to drop" means. But AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD has a sharp eye on society from its first mesmerizing page. And were I asked to blurb it - ha ha! on what planet? - I'd rank it all the way up there with MILDRED PIERCE as a novel about business.

A Piercing

Hey I put MILDRED PIERCE back on my ol' recommendation shelf yesterday and by coincidence I find Laura Lippman and Megan Abbott chatting about MILDRED PIERCE over there on Laura's "blog." Check it out!

The Role of Pie in American Literature

Man! Jack Kerouac sure does like apple pie and ice cream. ON THE ROAD does for apple pie and ice cream what MILDRED PIERCE did for chicken. She baked good pies, too, of course. I think a lot about that crabapple number she made to butter up Bert. But for me, in the end, Mildred Pierce is all about the chicken.

Saps

Laura Lippman has written down some good, insightful thoughts for you to read about James M. Cain's MILDRED PIERCE (different than the earlier Slate magazine essay of hers on the same subject, which you can find after a few "clicks" here). Here's a sample sentence: "The not-so-secret dirty little secret of hard-boiled fiction is that it’s awash in sentiment; those tough guys, for all their intelligence, can be the biggest suckers of all." See, that is close to something I have been pointing out to my hardboiled fiction class... so often your hardboiled protagonist (especially in a traditional detective novel) NEEDS to be a sap for the story to work. How often does the detective with an ill-advised soft spot end up working for a client who has no money? How often does the client who starts the book betray the detective's tender trust? I will tell you: EVERY TIME! I mean, how often does our hero fall hopelessly in love with a photograph (Sughrue in THE LAST GOOD KISS) or painting (McPherson in LAURA) of an alluring young woman who is presumably deceased? Forget sentimentality! Half the time we're practically wallowing in gothic romance. Hardboiled fiction is as full of ghosts and castles and raging thunderstorms that reflect the wildness in the characters' hearts (see MILDRED PIERCE!) and vampires as anything. Isn't Veda a vampire? Doesn't she blossom as her once-vibrant host is reduced to a shapeless, worn-down shadow, "a panting, dumpy little thing in a black dress"? Lippman's point is about the comparative lack of sentimentality in Cain (as opposed to Chandler, for example), a true observation, but even tough, practical Mildred is a sap where Veda is concerned. (Bled dry! Fed upon! "Sapped"! Vampire!) And I guess Captain Ahab is a sap for Moby-Dick. Can't you see what literature is trying to tell us? We're all a bunch of saps!

Treats Within Treats

Say, do you like MILDRED PIERCE? Well, Megan Abbott has written a nice "post" about MILDRED PIERCE, and within it are nestled some reflections on "blog" fave Jack Carson AND a "link" to another MILDRED PIERCE piece by Laura Lippman! It's like the delicious Tootsie Roll center hidden in your Tootsie Pop brand snack treat!

Hardboiled Chicken Dinners

Dr. Theresa told me and Laura Lippman told me and Megan Abbott told me too: now I'm finally reading MILDRED PIERCE for myself and finding out how great it is. But NOBODY told me that it would make me hungry for chicken all the time. Yes, even more so than I, THE JURY, this is the novel by a hardboiled author that is most concerned with the deliciousness of a chicken dinner - and Cain could really teach Spillane a thing or two on getting it across. Hey, doesn't "hardboiled" look better without a hyphen? My dictionary discourages me, but Megan Abbott encourages me. Even when I run across the word in a novel by Chandler or Cain there's a hyphen, but nowhere in Megan's insightful academic study THE STREET WAS MINE: WHITE MASCULINITY IN HARDBOILED FICTION AND FILM NOIR is there a hyphen (to the person who "recalled" that book and made me bring it back to the library yesterday: Phooey!). I say Megan is right. Hard-boiled eggs need a hyphen; hardboiled yeggs do not.

Also There Was a Monkey

In the grand tradition of such hilarious "post" titles as "Arnold Stang in the Membrane" and "Tremain on the Brain," we had fully intended to entitle this "post" "Cain on the Brain" for your pleasure and enjoyment. But in the long run, we got off track, as you are about to see. Last night I finished reading HARDLY KNEW HER by Laura Lippman, an excellent collection of suspense stories that often put me in mind of Lippman's fellow Baltimorean Edgar A. Poe, because of a shared sense of dread and predestination, and characters just THIS CLOSE to being pushed over the edge. And then they are! Pushed over the edge, I mean. I thought about some of the darker Thurber stories, too, like the one about the whip-poor-will... stories of domestic suffocation. I was also reminded, while reading Lippman's absolutely masterful collection, of a blurb I've seen several times on Ross MacDonald's detective novels, saying that MacDonald writes not about crime, but sin. The same could be said of Lippman. Every time I finished a story in Lippman's book, it became my new favorite! So after I finished "Scratch a Woman," the terrific novella that concludes HARDLY KNEW HER, I read Lippman's afterword, in which she acknowledges her debt, particularly in the novella, to MILDRED PIERCE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY by James M. Cain. And as I was reading that, Theresa was lying right there next to me reading MILDRED PIERCE by James M. Cain! She's teaching it here at Ole Miss this semester. Not only that, but McNeil has made the leap from the major American delivery service to teaching a college course in film noir. He's teaching both the film and the book DOUBLE INDEMNITY. And he told me the other day that the book is even better than the movie. That's really something, coming from McNeil. So Cain is everywhere, I guess. Speaking of McNeil and movies, Theresa and I just finished watching a pretty crazy Mario Bava opus entitled 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON. What the title means, I still have no idea. But all the way through the movie, I kept saying to Theresa, "McNeil would love this furniture!" Yes, it contained just the kind of furniture that McNeil always admires in a Jerry Lewis movie. Scads of it! One scene reminded me of a particular segment from Lewis's CRACKING UP: there's a big fight in 5 DOLLS during which a bunch of decorative glass balls are knocked off a table and onto some shag carpet. They roll down a flight of stairs, across some slick red tile and (here is where the comparison with Lewis ends) into a large bathtub that happens to be the scene of a murder. Otherwise, I might lazily describe 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON as a cross between Antonioni and Matt Helm... Antonioni because it features a bunch of Italian characters (or people dubbed in Italian, anyway) aimlessly wandering around an island, and Matt Helm because of a prominently featured motorized round bed. Finally, not to bring things all the way back around (the way a motorized round bed might), I would like to confirm that yes, as predicted in our last "post" on the subject of Laura Lippman ("click" on her name, above), today's chapter of her serial in the New York Times magazine contains a beautiful summary of the film WHAT A WAY TO GO!, which we now quote in part: "Also there was a monkey. This struck Tess as the most trenchant bit of film criticism that she had ever heard from her father, something that could equal Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory. She would run this past Lloyd, the film student, the Tess Monaghan theory of awfulness in movies, summed up by one line: Also there was a monkey." Aside from the obvious typo (she must have meant "awesomeness," not "awfulness") the summation of WHAT A WAY TO GO! is well worth reading in full. Check it out! There are lots of spoilers, in case you care. But they are tantalizing ones, if you ask me! (Pictured, a scene from Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Fans of meaningless coincidence will wish to note when "clicking" on the previous "link" that the last time we mentioned Billy Wilder was EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO TODAY! [Remember when I "blogged" about Max Fleischer and then "blogged" about him again exactly one year later? Holy cow! Sometimes I start typing and can't stop. I think it's a recognized medical condition, no kidding. For example, now I'm going to tell you that according to that same Billy Wilder "post," we apparently watched an Italian horror movie one year ago today! But it was directed by Fulci, not Bava.] "Also there was a monkey" in Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD, but it was a dead monkey, so I wonder whether Tess Monaghan would make an exception.)

Nutty

After MILDRED PIERCE was over, we turned off the DVD player and on came the TV as if by magic, tuned to TCM. Came in midway through the transformation scene in the original Jerry Lewis version of THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. Let me tell you, yanked out of context like so, the transformation scene in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR is as disturbing, disorienting, and surreal as Bunuel... Jerry's face blue then red then fish belly white as he writhes in splatters of primary colors and his mynah bird grows a human head... and the two scenes after that definitely inspired some Scorsese techniques in GOODFELLAS... first the camera POV stuff and fluid tracking as everyone marvels at the transformed Jerry, then the crass and complete intimidation with which Jerry takes over the bar (a la Pesci, or any number of Scorsese would be smoothie thugs). And the colors in the bar scene most assuredly inspired Godard's PIERROT LE FOU. Two more plusses for THE NUTTY PROFESSOR: "blog" "fave" Stella Stevens AND one of the greatest character names ever devised in any medium: Buddy Love. Jerry! Lewis! Yeah!

Sweet Sap, Shady Sleaze

MILDRED PIERCE is on. Theresa's watching it for her class. She's going to show those lucky kids choice scenes from MILDRED PIERCE, DISCLOSURE, and 9 TO 5. But anyway, watching MILDRED PIERCE gets us to thinking about Jack Carson, one of our favorite actors in the Pendarvis Building. Mr. McNeil and I have discussed his virtues several times, generally agreeing that any movie with Mr. Carson in it is worth watching. He was typecast, but not as the usual single character over and over. He would play either a sweet, vulnerable, dimwitted sap OR a shady, carnivorous sleazeball con man. He could do either one! And I believe those are virtually the only two roles he ever played, direct opposites. In MILDRED PIERCE, he's on the creepy side. But he was ideally suited for the former kind of part as well. What a strange kind of versatility. Go out and rent a Jack Carson movie today. And tell 'em the"blog" sent you!