Familiar Barn Fight

As you know, I never, ever "blog" anymore unless I read a book with an owl in it or for some other reason. But now I have decided I can "blog" about the TV show THE BIG VALLEY whenever I want. Spurred by Laura Lippman's description of it as "gloriously weird," I decided to revisit THE BIG VALLEY, or maybe just to visit it, because I really couldn't remember anything about it. I remembered a promo in which they put a lot of reverb on the announcer when he said the title: "THE BIG VALLEY-ALLEY-ALLEY-alley-alley-alley!" And I remembered, from the same promo, the description of Barbara Stanwyck's character as "Victoria, a woman of backbone and bite!" All I can say is that was a pretty good promo if I still remember it from when I was a kid. So I watched some of THE BIG VALLEY. When a fistfight started raging in the barn, I thought, you know, maybe I did watch this show when I was a kid, because I felt secure in the knowledge that this was a staple of the show, it was all coming back to me, regular fistfights in the barn. But I can't be sure! I think there was something on the other channel I liked better. But here are some things I observed: 1. It all starts with one of the brothers on a bridge and here comes Lee Majors from the other direction and neither fellow will back up his horse to let the other one pass. So they literally just sit there looking at each other until the bridge falls down! I can't say much for the infrastructure. 2. The introduction of Barbara Stanwyck's character. She swoops into the room where her sons are standing and says (I paraphrase, but only slightly), "You're putting on weight, must you shout, here comes a visitor, I'll see you at dinner." And then she's gone. Like she was never there! She spits it all out like a machine gun and disappears in a flash. I thought maybe she was like Fred MacMurray, who supposedly used to come in and sit in a chair for one day and say all his lines for an entire season of his sitcom MY THREE SONS then get up and put on his hat and leave and they had to shoot around him for the rest of the year. My friend Ward McCarthy told me that about Fred MacMurray and if it's not true it's my own fault, because maybe I'm remembering the details wrong and I'm just too lazy to look it up. 3. Lee Majors kneels down at a lonesome grave (the patriarch has been plopped into the ground in the middle of nowhere, right where he was killed, not unlike the sad case of Meriwether Lewis) and then a young woman rides up on a horse and just casually leans down and starts striking Lee Majors wildly and repeatedly in the face with a leather strap, and she doesn't even know him! That's his half-sister, I guess, as they discover later, but there's an extremely weird vibe they've got going on (pictured). In fact they started making me think of Heathcliff and Cathy a little bit, and Lee Majors's name on the show is Heath, so I wondered whether that was on purpose, but my research methods (as noted above) are far too lazy to confirm or deny. Still, Heath is the brash, mysterious outsider who disrupts family life... for instance when he steals some apples! He's just walking around, trespassing, going through their stuff and finally taking an apple and Victoria catches him. So he takes off his hat. And I thought, oh, this brash, mysterious outsider is going to be respectful for a change! We're about to see the tender, gentlemanly side of this brash, mysterious outsider! But no, he was just taking off his hat to cram it full of all the sweet, sweet apples he could carry. And I was like, gee, Lee Majors sure has a hatful of apples now! He's going to have quite a night eating apples. Meanwhile, Audra (Linda Evans) gets a lot of use out of her leather strap, often with good reason, because they seem to live in a nightmarish hellscape. Right now everyone is shooting each other and I haven't even made it to the end of the first episode yet.

Second Orangutan

"Hey! I just 'blogged' about an orangutan yesterday!" Such was the giddy thought that reverberated through my very soul as I finally had a chance to return to THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON today. There is a scene in the novel in which the last tycoon speaks by telephone to a talking orangutan (!) who is also a double of President William McKinley (!!). Seldom has the phrase "I did not see that coming" been more accurate.

Tentative, Nice

A touching and tender song and this fellow does a decent job with it. At the first few notes, and with his reverb and headphones and all, I thought he might be a pro - and therefore not qualified to be #14 in our homemade Beach Boys cover countdown. But I am glad to say that he switches a few lyrics around right up front and is tentative here and there with the guitar and melody in a way that only makes everything better, seems in fact like a guy by himself who is just putting things out there, which is what we appreciate and enjoy. And he has a nice voice. Oh, and in the fascinating repeated phrases starting about two minutes in, he almost puts us in a musical trance. And I love how slow it is and how dedicated he is to how slow it is.

Carlos Jacott

One highlight of the recent film festival was the comedy HIGHBALL. Elsewhere I have expressed my problems with getting other people to enjoy it along with me, but McNeil was happy - and he is ordinarily a very sullen man. He noted that in the last section of the film, the actor Carlos Jacott (pictured, right, in a role on SEINFELD) was dressed and possibly coifed in the style of Jerry Lewis in the climactic prom scene of THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. In fact, Jacott begins the movie as a boor in the "Buddy Love" tradition and makes the opposite of the Lewis transformation - into an odd, awkward man-child. The scene in which he sits on a couch eating something very crunchy for a very long time is right out of the Lewis playbook. (We had the chance to note several times during the festival that Mr. Lewis enjoys milking a gag past all reasonable limits, often to good effect. One example: he bangs his head on a metal sculpture in CRACKING UP and it reverberates musically for several minutes afterward, rendering an important conversation impossible. Ha ha ha!) And no, we are not just seeing Jerry Lewis everywhere. Earlier in HIGHBALL, Peter Bogdanovich impersonates Lewis - proof, we feel, of purposeful homage.