My Dad At The Movies

Return Of The Blog

Hi to all my readers. Thanks for being patient while the blog went into temporary hiatus due to the passing of my father. Time to get back into the swing of things on here but, for my first return post, I thought I’d post the eulogy which I wrote for and read at my father’s funeral. Normal review service will return tomorrow, with the belated Halloween post which was scheduled to go live before the bad stuff happened.

My Dad At The Movies

From as early as I can remember in my life and up to and including his final week on Earth, my dad didn’t always call me by my Christian name... he often called me Wings. When I was very young I asked him why he called me that and he said it comes from Wings Around The World, from the 1936 Alexander Korda movie Things To Come, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape Of Things To Come. And it would be true to say that the moving image is a huge part of my life, because it was a big part of my father’s life... and because of what he shared with me at a very young age. 

Probably before I could walk he was watching films and TV shows with me on our old black and white TV set and, before I was seven, we were already watching things like the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly musicals, Laurel And Hardy, Tom And Jerry, Abbott and Costello, the James Bond movies, Thunderbirds, Doctor Who, the Universal and Hammer horror movies and, of course, that memorable time when I was waking him back up late at night because King Kong was climbing the Empire State Building.

I remember him getting very excited when, in the early 1970s, the BBC had acquired the rights to the Flash Gordon serials and had edited the first one into a two part double bill, sandwiching a Hopalong Cassidy movie in between it. It would be safe to say our love of the Buster Crabbe serials never diminished and we would watch them again at least once a decade. 

Of course, my dad also had some complaints about the films he watched and, quite often, you would suddenly hear him proclaim “Knickers!” as he would then, at length, go on to explain that in real life, lifts didn’t have magically appearing trap doors in their roofs so the hero could escape from their threatening predicament. Similar exclamations and explanations would also come loudly whenever the main protagonist of a movie crawled into an air vent to circumvent the villain’s well laid plans. “Nope. They’re sealed tight for a reason, have machinery in them and are way too small to crawl through” would be the message there, each and every time somebody in a film would make the same, life saving mistake. 

There are many movie memories I have of my dad, too many to mention here but, suffice it to say, every time Johnny Weismuller comes on in a Tarzan film I will still shout "Ungawa!” like I did with my dad... and I’ll still watch King Kong try to outfox those planes each and every time. 

The Ice Cream Blonde

Todd’s Laughter,
Todd Slaughter

The Ice Cream Blonde -
The Whirlwind Life And
Mysterious Death of Screwball
Comedienne Thelma Todd
by Michelle Morgan
Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 9781613730386

Just a short review of a wonderful book given to me by a good friend for Christmas. Subtitled The Whirlwind Life And Mysterious Death Of Screwball Comedienne Thelma Todd, Michelle Morgan’s tome The Ice Cream Blond paints a compelling picture of the actresses life, doing exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak, in as breezy and entertaining way as possible.

I remember seeing Todd as a co-star in various Laurel And Hardy shorts as a kid (back when they were regularly shown on television throughout the 1970s) but I didn’t really discover her until I took notice of her as a pretty wonderful co-star opposite Groucho Marx in two of the five, absolutely brilliant films starring The Four Marx Brothers (as they were known before Zeppo left the fold) which they did while still under contract to Paramount... which as far as I’m concerned were their greatest films... more so, even, than their first couple of films for Irvin Thalberg at MGM. Those two films being their third and fourth features, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Thelma is pretty brilliant in these two, especially in the former film as a gangster’s moll... she certainly fills the void left by the former and, soon back again, foil Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers’ movies.

I’d heard there was possibly some sinister side to her very early death over the years but, I thought the time was right to finally investigate it. This book lays it all out on the line, beginning with what is thought of to be either accidental death, suicide or, perhaps as likely when you ponder certain post mortem findings... murder. So the book starts at the point when the housekeeper finds her 29 year old dead body, filled with carbon monoxide and with blood on her face, in a car (also with blood in it) in a garage beneath her apartment, by the cafe she co-owned and ran. She then proceeds to tell her story from early life, where many things I didn’t know about the actress were revealed to me for the first time.

Indeed, it seemed that Thelma was no stranger to trauma, having been the sole witness, when she was just four, to her unsupervised seven year old brother being accidentally mangled to death in a machine at her local creamery. It then tells of her going into tomboy mode to please her father in the absence of his son and how she won beauty contests she wasn’t really interested in going in for that much and training to become a school teacher, before accidentally being ‘discovered’ by a husband and wife who wanted her to be in their new show. 

We then follow her as she goes from being one of the first pupil’s in Paramount’s acting school to being one of their most successful graduates... and how she got into films and how much of a beloved star she became while under contract to Hal Roach. I hadn’t realised that he’d set her up in a series of shorts partnered firstly with ZaSu Pitts and then, when Pitts didn’t get the money she wanted to continue after a period of time, in similar films partnered with Patsy Kelly. Indeed, these physical slapstick films were said to be as popular as the ones she made with comedy duo Laurel and Hardy at the time*... I had no idea (although, I will now seek them out now, for sure).

Another interesting thing about her when she was just starting out is her part in Howard Hughes’ famous movie Hell’s Angels, which, due to the very long editing and reshoot process going on for years, eventually ended up with her role falling on the cutting room floor, alas, with co-star Jean Harlow reaping the benefits from that one.

So yeah, lots more besides this and lots of stuff I didn’t know, including what an upbeat, super intelligent and kind hearted person she was. It also talks about her possible gangster connections... or rather connections she didn’t want in her life... as well as a year (the one in which she died) of death threats for money and various other things which were a huge worry to her, involving herself ‘locking down’ for a small period of her life. There’s not really any new fresh, compelling evidence to suggest that her death wasn’t accidental or a suicide but, given the comments by the police and various things said over the years by people who lived through this at the time since the case was closed, it seems a fairly likely possibility that she was murdered for refusing to let the mob start up a gambling racket in her well frequented and very successful cafe. Indeed, it’s strongly implied that director Roland West, who she was having a second, long term affair with and who co-owned the cafe with here, might have either been complicit in her demise or, possibly just hastily covered up for it (with some very contradictory testimonial he delivered in court).

It’s a short book and, if it seems a little bit like a quick read, it’s as much to do with the highly entertaining and enlightening way in which Michelle Morgan has put together and presented all the relevant facts, as much as it is to do with the brevity of Thelma’s existence, to be sure. So, as I said, a short review but, if you are interested in this iconic actress (although much less well known these days, it seems to me) then I would thoroughly recommend The Ice Cream Blonde - The Whirlwind Life And Mysterious Death Of Screwball Comedienne Thelma Todd as a good starting point for both you and your movie related book shelf. A breezy tale about a bright light snuffed out far too young. Give it a go.

*Indeed, they apparently made a cameo appearance in one of her shorts and were at her funeral.

Stan And Ollie

Lorra Laurel Laughs

Stan And Ollie
UK/Canada/USA 2018
Directed by Jon S. Baird
Entertainment One
Blu Ray Zone B

I skipped Stan And Ollie when it came out in cinemas... primarily because I knew I’d probably end up watching it with my dad on Father’s Day and I wasn’t so sure it would be any good, or at least not good enough to sit through a second time. As it happens, now that I’ve done exactly that on Father’s Day, I have to say that this is a beautiful movie, both in content and on a technical level too.

The film hasn’t made a huge amount of money given its budget but it has more than doubled it on worldwide box office and so, honestly, the film has not done that badly. It could... and certainly should... have made considerably more but I can understand why fans of both Mr. Stan Laurel and Mr. Oliver Norvell Hardy would be somewhat horrified that anyone would try and catch their particular brand of lightning in a bottle these days. Also, I’m pretty sure that not enough kids nowadays know about this dynamic, comedy duo who made a gazillion silent movie shorts followed by about another gazillion talkies (and the odd feature film), many of which were remakes of those early shorts, if memory serves.

When I was a kid, Laurel And Hardy shorts were playing on TV pretty much all the time throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. It was almost impossible not to catch at least one Stan And Ollie movie a week and, frankly, that was no bad thing. Everybody loved them. They were as much a fixture of daytime/early evening TV as the abundantly aired Tom And Jerry cartoons which also seemed to have disappeared from our screens around about the same time. And that’s what happened to Laurel And Hardy... they disappeared and suddenly stopped being broadcast due, I believe, to complicated legal wrangling about who owned the rights to the transmission of their films and it’s been only up until recently that they’ve started to be televised again. Alas, modern TV is not the beast it used to be and rather than be bombarded with these wonderful little films like I was when I was growing up, you have to go out of your way to look for these now and get lucky if you want to see one... although there is still the wonderful world of physical media such as DVD and Blu Ray if you want to do them right.

So most of the intervening generations between the 1980s until now just wouldn’t have had too much of an opportunity to be exposed to their films and I suspect this sad fact also played a role in the box office performance of this movie (although personally I think more than doubling your money is more than enough of a good thing).

The film had me right from the opening, it has to be said, with a beautifully designed shot after the opening credits which starts out as a static composition of Laurel and Hardy on the two sides of the screen in front of their make up mirrors during the making of Way Out West, with a void of dead area at the centre of the screen. As the two converse with their backs to the camera, we can see each of their faces reflected in their mirrors talking across the screen from each other. It’s a dazzling shot set up which completely threw me off listening to the content of their conversation at this point but then the shot doesn’t remain static, as the two get up and walk out of their dressing room... and then out and then back in through a studio for a long tracking shot as the conversation keeps going. It’s a gorgeous opening and it all just works really well because... not only is it technically brilliant and more than easy on the eye... it’s also wonderfully performed by the two actors. I’ll get to the performances in a little while.

The film then, after Stan has a brief run in with Hal Wallis (played by Danny Huston), who kind of put the two together in the first place and produced their films, shows us a little of the making of the film’s famous dance scene and then gets a little darker as Stan’s contract runs out and he tries to get Ollie to break his contract and come over to 20th Century Fox with him.

The story then jumps the 1950s and the rest of the movie concerns the two’s originally shaky but ultimately successful triumph on their last theatrical tour of the British Isles, before ill health forces Oliver Hardy to retire, a few years before his death.

The beauty of that first shot is built on throughout the course of the film and there are certain echoes in other shots as the director sets up a few things where reflected surfaces feature heavily in the way you watch the two interact, from time to time. It’s almost voyeuristic in the way it sometimes uses reflection as a distancing device but the ultimate expression of the strong sense of ‘fly on the wall’ effect you get here is in one of the last scenes in the movie, where Stan and Ollie are once again re-enacting the little dance they performed at the start of the film on the stage in Ireland. The director brilliantly keeps panning back from their feet to dwell on the shadows of these two projected behind them before coming back to them and then doing this a few times. It’s amazing how much tension this creates in the movie because, each time the camera slides back to the dancing silhouettes, you feel like this could be the moment Oliver Hardy takes a fall and it would be just too horrible to watch as anything but the visual metaphor of a projected shadow. As it happens, things don’t play out exactly the way I thought they would but, obviously, I’m not going to spoil that experience for you with this review.

So let’s get to those all important performances...

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Steve Coogan so consider me doubly impressed with his performance here. Yeah, everybody will say it’s easy to ‘do Stan’ but it’s really not going to be as easy as people think. Coogan looks, sounds and acts so much like the real Stan Laurel that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. This way of giving the ‘real life’ Stan characteristics which he may or may not have had in real life but certainly had in his on screen characterisations (so probably did, I guess) pays dividends when we get to the actual drama and dark sections of the picture. He’s as believable as you could ever hope for and the same can also be said of the great John C. Reilly. Reilly is always watchable but here he’s also unrecognisable as himself and there’s very little you could latch on to, to try and distinguish him from Oliver Hardy. He’s played absolutely perfectly here by Reilly. Well... wait... my dad did make the comment that he couldn’t look at the camera and treat it like an intimate friend in quite the same way as Oliver Hardy could but, frankly, it’s more than good enough for me to complete the illusion and nobody is ever going to get these things 100% right... that would be impossible.

So yeah, these performances are tip top, as are the more caricature-like cameo performances of past actors such as James Finlayson and Harry Langdon. However, let’s not stop there because, although there’s not much to compare them to, the wives of Laurel and Hardy are equally impressive, with the always wonderful Shirley Henderson playing Mrs. Hardy and the equally enthralling Nina Arianda as Mrs. Laurel. Frankly, it would have been easy for either or both of these two characters to be upstaged by Coogan and Reilly here, given the nature of their performances but... these two do a fantastic job of portraying two wives who don’t really get on that well but who are an absolute rock for their respective husbands. There are so many good acting turns in this movie but these two are definitely two of the best.

The film also has a pretty nice score by Rolfe Kent which does some interesting things. I wasn’t sure about it first as, although the main Laurel and Hardy music that everyone associates with the two characters (The Cuckoo Song) is used only sparingly throughout the film and, pretty much, only as source (or diegetic) music, Kent goes off on a different tack. However, it’s pretty good and what he seems to be doing... and I’m not great at analysing music or expressing it in words so go easy on me here if I’m saying this the wrong way... but he takes the base rhythm of the famous music in a much understated orchestration and weaves that into the fabric of the score to give it a lighter touch than you would expect but, as it happens, it works beautifully and is never heavy handed or inappropriate throughout the film.

So yeah... that’s me done with the Stan And Ollie biopic and, frankly, it’s a great one. Fans of Laurel and Hardy should definitely brave this one, I think, as it’s never once disrespectful of the great men being portrayed and performances, sets, lighting, editing, music and cinematography all come together to compliment each other nicely here. Definitely one for all the family and a very moving film too, as it happens. A wonderful job here by everyone involved.