The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Love’s Labors Lost -With The Tune Weavers’ Happy, Happy Birthday Baby In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Love’s Labors Lost -With The Tune Weavers’ Happy, Happy Birthday Baby In Mind  

THE TUNE WEAVERS

"Happy, Happy Birthday Baby"

Happy, happy birthday, baby

Although you're with somebody new

Thought I'd drop a line to say

That I wish this happy day

Would find me beside you

Happy, happy birthday, baby

No I can't call you my baby

Seems like years ago we met

On a day I can't forget

'Cause that's when we fell in love

Do you remember the names we had for each other

I was your pretty, you were my baby

How could we say goodbye

Hope I didn't spoil your birthday

I'm not acting like a lady

So I'll close this note to you

With good luck and wishes too

Happy, happy birthday, baby

**********

…damn he never should have sent that note, that short, silly, puffed-up cry-baby note trying to worm his way back into Lucy’s arms with memory thoughts about this kiss, or that embrace, about that night down at the beach searching for those elusive “submarines” in the back seat of Jimmy Jenkin’s car or this funny moment at the Fall Frolics dance when they first started taking furtive glances at each other. Worse, going chapter and verse, getting all gooey bringing up old seawall sugar shack beach nights before the step up to back seats of ocean view cars holding hands against the splashed tides, against full moons (which actually impeded any serious fooling around since even some old blind lady could see what they were up to in that light), against tomorrow coming too soon on those submarine nights; double date drive-in movies, speakers on low, deep-breathing car fog-ups on cold October nights, embarrassed, way embarrassed, when they surfaced for intermission's stale popcorn or reheated hot dogs; and, that last dance school dance holding tight, tight as hell, to each other as the DJ, pretending to be radio jockey Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg, played Could This Be Magic? on that creaky record player used at North Adamsville High School dances since his mother’s time, maybe hers too since they had been classmates in their time, ancient Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday times.

Damn, a scratchy, scribbly note, a note written on serious stationary and with a real fountain pen to show his sincerity, and not the usual half- lined sheet, pulled out a three-ring subject notebook, and passed to Lucy during their common study class. Notes the passing of which sometimes got them severe looks from the study monitor, Miss Green, and giggles and taunts, usually some lewd or luscious remarks fraught with sexual innuendo about “doing the do” or what exactly was she doing with her head on his lap from their fellow students, boys and girls alike, about fogged-up cars and trash talk like that who also tried to intercept those precious notes without success. Yah, “the note heard round the world” that would expose him to all kinds of ridicule, endless be-bop jive patter, and snide questions about his manhood from guys, and probably girls too, around the school, hell, all around North Adamsville and maybe already had if Lucy decided to cut his heart out and tell one and all what a square he, Luke Jackson, was when all was said and done.

He could hear it now, and could hear the words ringing in his ears. What a soft guy Luke Jackson really was, a guy known to be a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy, what did he call it, oh yeah, “doing the Eddie,” moving on with no forwarding address and no regrets like his Eddie hero of the Teen Queens’ Eddie, My Love, before Lucy. A guy, a used to be sharp guy who shrugged off more things that you could shake a stick at, not just girls, but guys from other corners who he had, or they had, beefs about, some crazed teacher who thought he had promise yakking about him applying himself, some cop trying to meet his mother quota giving him a ration of crap about his speed, stuff like that, and came back swinging. But who now was getting all misty-eyed and cry-baby just because some dame, a good looking dame in all the right places, yes, a dame all the guys were ready to pursue once he was out of the picture, but still a dame, a young high school dame, when all was said and done, got under his skin, like they were married or something.

Hell, he thought, thought now too late, to himself, that he would have been better off, much better off, if he had just left it at calling Lucy on the telephone every few hours and either hanging up before she answered or when she did answer freezing up. She knew who it was after a while, or should have, but at least he would not have left a paper trail and be the upcoming subject of locker room and lavatory snickers. But that was costing money, serious add up money, since he had had to use a public pay telephone up the street from his house because the telephone service had been turned off for non-payment as his family could not afford to pay the bill the past few months.

Besides it had been getting kind of creepy going in and out of the house at all hours, midnight by the telephone waiting like some lonely, awkward girl, walking up the street like a zombie, half mope, half dope, then hesitating before deciding to make the call, making it, or not, and then scurrying like a rat from the public glare of the booth. Christ, one time the cops looked at him funny, real funny, when he was calling at about midnight. And he had to admit that he might have called the police station a few times too after he looked at himself in the mirror upon returning home.

That note, sent the day before and probably in Lucy’s plotting hands right now, was a minute, a quick minute, brain-storm that he had thought up when he was just plain miserable, just plain midnight telephone tired too, and anyone could make such a rash decision under love’s duress, teenage love’s duress. Right then though all he could think of was all the notes, the cutesy, lined-sheet paper school-boyish notes, that he had sent her when love was in full blossom, full blossom before Jamie Lee Johnson came on the scene, came on the scene with his big old ’59 Chevy Impala, his money in his pocket, and his line of patter and stole his “Sweet Pea” Lucy away from her “Sugar Plum” Luke. And that picture sent him back to thoughts of when he and Lucy first met, when their eyes first met.

“Let’s see,” Luke said to himself it was probably at Chrissie McNamara’s sweet sixteen birthday party that he first laid eyes on her. Hell, who was he kidding, he knew that it was exactly at 8:32 PM on the night of April 25, 1962 that he first laid eyes on her, big almost star-struck staring eyes. Or maybe it was a few seconds before because, to break the ice, he had gone up to her and asked her for the time, asked in his then bolder manner if she had time for him, asked her to dance, she said yes, and that was that. Oh, yah, there was more to it than that but both of them knew at that moment, knew somewhere deep down in their teenage hearts, they were going to be an “item,” for a while. And they were indeed sweet pea and sugar plum, for a while. Although Luke would get mad sometimes, fighting mad, fighting break-up mad, when Lucy teased, no, more than teased, him about his not having a car so that they could go “parking” by themselves and not always be on some clowny double-date down at the seashore on Saturday night (or any night in the summer). And Luke would reply that he was saving money for college, and besides sitting on the seawall (and sometimes in love’s heat down beneath its height), their usual habit, was okay, wasn’t it.

That simmer, that somehow unarticulated simmer, went on for a while, a long while. But Luke had noticed a few months back, or rather Lucy had made her Sugar Plum notice, that now that they were high school seniors sitting on the seawall was nothing but nowhere kids’ stuff and why did he want to go to college anyway, and wasn’t going to work down at the shipyard where he could earn some real dough and get a car a better idea. 

The real clincher though, the one that telegraphed to him that the heavens were frowning on him, was the night she, no bones, stated that she had no plans for college and was going right to work after graduation, and maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t be able to wait for him, wait for him to finish college and maybe he would find some slow-slung college girl who might “curl his toes” like she had been doing, Lucy chancing that she might get in the family way and have to go off to some faked Midwestern aunt and then where would she have been. Even if that had not happened then what about her needs, her need to get out from under her own “from hunger” family household complete with drunken slob father, her need to have a few things before it was too late to appreciate such things. So most recent date nights had been spent not in her “curling his toes” but in arguing the finer point of their collective future. And after a succession of such nights that’s where things started to really break down between them.

Enter one Jamie Lee Johnson, a friend of Lucy’s older brother Kenny, already graduated from North Adamsville two years before and working, working steady with advancement possibilities according to the talk, as a junior welder down at the shipyard making good dough. Making drive-in movies and even drive-in restaurants good time dough, and driving that souped-up, retro-fitted, dual-carbed, ’59 Chevy, jet black and hung to the gills with chrome to make a girl breathless. And before Luke knew it Lucy’s mother was answering the phone calls for Lucy from Luke saying that she wasn’t in, wasn’t expected in, and that she, Lucy’s mother, would tell Lucy that he had called. The runaround, the classic runaround since boy meets girl time began, except not always done over the telephone. And while Lucy never said word one about breaking it off between them, not even a “so long, we had fun,” Luke, although not smart enough to not write that sappy note, knew she was gone, and gone for good. But see she had gotten under his skin, way under, and well, and that was that.

Just as Luke was thinking about that last thought, that heart-tearing thought, he decided, wait a minute, maybe she didn’t get the note, maybe he had forgotten to put a stamp on it and as a result of those maybes he fished around his pocket to see if he had some coins, some telephone coins, and started out of the house prison to make that late night pilgrimage creep, that midnight waiting by the telephone creep. Walking up the street, walking up the now familiar night street-lighted against the deathless shadows Hancock Street he noticed a jet black ’59 Impala coming his way, coming his way with Jamie Lee and Lucy sitting so close together that they could not be pried apart with a crowbar. Luke thought about that scene for a minute, steeled himself with new-found resolve against the love hurts like in the old love 'em and leave ‘em days, threw the coins on the ground without anger but rather with relief, turned back to his house wondering, seriously wondering like the fate of the world depended on it, what pet names they, Jimmy and Lucy, had for each other.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Itch- With Elvis’ One Night Of Sin In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Itch- With Elvis’ One Night Of Sin In Mind  

Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

"One Night Of Sin" was written by Bartholomew, Dave / King, Pearl / Steiman, Anita.

One night of sin, yeah
Is what I'm now paying for
The things I did and I saw
Would make the earth stand still

Don't call my name
It makes me feel so ashamed
I lost my sweet helping hand
I got myself to blame

Always lived very quiet life
Ain't never did no wrong
Now I know that very quiet life
Has cost me nothing but harm

One night of sin, yeah
Is what I'm now paying for
The things I did and I saw
Would make the earth stand still

Always lived very quiet life
Ain't never did no wrong
But now I know that very quiet life
Has cost me nothing but harm

One night of sin
Is what I'm now paying for
The things I did and I saw
Would make the earth stand still

*********A lot of boy-girl things didn’t make sense in the mad world of the iced down 1950s (we will keep ourselves to the boy-girl thing here recognizing except in exotic Hollywood/ North Beach/Village outposts that other now acceptable same-sex relationships were below the radar, below the radar in North Adamsville anyway, except in a titter of faggot/dyke-baiting in the boys’ gym locker room after school). Nobody, or almost nobody, talked about sex in any but very hushed tones except maybe the school tramps and whoremongers who were more than happy to explain the facts of life to innocent youth who got it wrong almost as much as any kid who was clueless except their mistakes wound up in girls going to see faraway “Aunt Ella” for a few months or some irate father ordered up a shot-gun wedding, worse some judge ordered up a hitch in the Army to some hellhole frozen tundra or sweated jungle for the errant guy.  But they, tramps and whoremongers both, were not listened to as a rule even in braggart lavatory between classes time, so that it was up to you to ask your older brother or sister in order to get some information they picked up from the streets. Information to fill in the yawning missing gaps in for you where parents, who after all “did it” and should have been forthcoming with some details but who turned out to be just like their parents leaving them to find out from the street as much misinformation as they could find, with their birds and bees silliness, the church (you name the denomination at your leisure, they were all even the U-Us and Quakers all locked-down on the subject) banned the words and talk of such words as if such acts were done by osmosis or tarot cards as one guy actually explained to one gal one night and she believed him although they backed off after a time worrying about that trip to Aunt Ella or that shot-gun wedding her father would have insisted on, Jesus, or school, locus parentis school and thus as clueless as parents about their charges, came up nada. Empty. 

Of course half, maybe more, of that street talk was wrong, dead-ass wrong coming from sources that barely knew more than those asking the questions. And so there was an epidemic of young women being plucked out of school for a time to visit some forlorn aunt in Topeka (sorry, Topeka).The whole wide world had never known such devotion of wayward young nieces for out-of-town aunts during those times. So when boys and girls started getting attracted to each other, when they touched, when they danced swaying with the big new beat, the rock and roll beat coming out of about twelve sources in the unkempt American Songbook, coming up to grab them out in that red scare cold war night sure they were confused, sure they wanted to know what those tingles were all about up in their night-less bedrooms–and do something about it just like the “he” and “she” of this sketch…     

…she was not exactly sure why she felt that way, felt warm in what all the girls in the before school “lav” called their “honey pot.”  Honey pot a term picked up from some older guys they dated who got it from around jazz clubs, hipster talk from the cool water be-bop boys who blew the high white notes, blew mary jane smoke, reefer, blew away their honey’s honey pot, or who talked fresh to them trying to pick them up around town, yelling stuff out of open air convertibles or two-toned hardback Chevys, and who had picked it up from who knows where, maybe sailors in Scollay Square in  Boston who got it in every port of call, or those older brothers trying to be hip. Some of the rougher girls, the girls who smoked in the “lav” against school rules, drank cheapjack liquor, mainly whiskey, on dates and “did the deed” as some modest girls called the sexual act and they called it “fucking” called that spot other things, pussy/ cunt kind of things which she did not find out until later, much later, and not much before she got married that guys called that spot those words too but she modest then stuck to the euphemism and even saying that term out loud made her blush crimson red.

That warm feeling had come over her lately, since turning sixteen  lately,  whenever she heard the local radio station, WJDA, the station teenagers were now tuned into since the station manager bowing to demographic shifts changed the format from pretty rarified cool water Charlie/Dizzy/ The Monk jazz to what the station called popular music. Or when the kids at Sal’s Pizza Parlor up in Adamsville Center were on the juke-box endlessly playing Elvis’ suggestive One Night With You (suggestive of what she would not find out until later, until Tommy one night tried to have his way with her and she kind of let him, kind of, kind of also did not let him, which she would not explain at the Monday morning before school “lav” talk about what went on over everybody’s weekend except to say they were finished, done as an “item,” no further explanation given).

Someone, Betty Arlen, she thought, one time said it was just her coming into “her time,” although she did not know what to make of that idea since she had that same feeling before and after she came into her time. She had thought Betty meant “got her friend” (translation: began to have her period, her cycle, which was late since at least most of the girls she knew had gotten their “friend” a year or two before her). Betty had giggled and said she did not mean that, that thing every girl had, her “friend” but the time when everything was confused and when a teenager did, or did not, know which way to jump. (Jesus, would no one but tramps and whoremongers use anything but prissy words when speaking of sex and its functions.) A time of teen angst and alienation which created sullen jack-rolling corner boys (guys in white tee-shirts and denims hanging their feet against storefront walls daring said walls to object, formally called juvenile delinquents, or slang JDs), made heroes of hot-rodding “chicken run” kings out on Thunder Road, and icons of “cool” actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Betty said the stuff was news in all the newspapers and her father had mentioned it to her and asked her if she felt alienated. Betty said “no” quickly under the circumstances since “yes” would have probably kept her in the house until her father determined that the epidemic had run its course. All distraught all she knew was she like Betty had turned away from the old songs on the jukebox or radio, the ones that she loved to listen to last year (on that same WJDA that now was formatted for popular music meaning not her parents’ music) Frank, Bing, Patti, Rosemary, did not make her feel that way anymore. Didn’t make her feel that she wanted to jump out of her skin.

One night as she thought wistfully back to when her urges had all began, thought about her now seemingly girlish silliness since she had moved on in her big beat tastes, when Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll came on the radio and she swaying to the beat at Doc’s or up in her room dancing by herself would get warm in her “honey pot.” She also gave a thought about Tommy Murphy from school, from North Adamsville High, from her class, her Problems in Democracy class, whom she had thought might have had a better handle on it, have had a better sense of what turbulence was going on inside her when he told the whole class in Current Events that there were some new songs coming out of the radio, some stuff from down south, some negro guys sound from out of Mississippi plantations heading North, from down in Memphis somewhere, some white hillbilly guys sound from the farms and small towns from that same town, that he would listen to late at night on WJKA from Chicago when the air was just right. Sounds that made him want to jump right out of his skin. (She never dared to ask whether it made him feel warm in his “honey pot” since she didn’t know much then about whether boys had such pots, or got even warm there like she did when the beat jumped). When he said that, said it was about the music, she knew that she was not alone, not alone in feeling that a fresh breeze was coming over the land, although she, confused as she was would not have articulated it that way (that would come later).

As she continued to muse she remembered that she had asked Tommy about it after class and talking awhile both getting animated on the subject agreed to let him walk her home after school. One thing led to another as they found that they had so much in common, and then a few weeks later they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Adamsville Beach and listen to some guys, a band,  The Ready Rockers, play the new music. She had wondered to herself before he picked her up at her house whether she would feel warm again in her honey pot when they danced (she could not speak of such things to Tommy), she had hoped so.

Later, not that night but a few weeks later, when they skipped the dance part and just went to the far end of Adamsville Beach in his father’s car and they listened to the radio and the song that got her going, going strong as Tommy made his moves, was Elvis’ One Night With You which got her fantasizing about him all swaying hips, snapping be-bop fingers, snarl and slicked-back hair and between the beat and Tommy’s hands she let him have his way with her, kind of. The kind of part being that while she let him undress her, partially anyway, she was not sure what he did, not sure if they had done the deed. In any case she got angry at Tommy, got angry assuming that he had had his way with her and that he should have stopped. That night was the beginning of the end of their short romance especially after she had heard at the Monday morning before school “lav” talkfest some girls mention that they had successfully held off their boyfriends who wanted to “go all the way” and she was doubly furious. (Later, much later, she found out that one of those girls who had claimed to have fended off her boyfriend suddenly announced she had to go see an ailing aunt in Topeka or some place like that. More importantly Tommy, as inexperienced as her, had not really done anything, any penetration anyway. Poor Tommy).  

After giving Tommy his walking papers she still got those urges and still wanted to try to figure out what to do about them when Elvis or Jerry Lee came on the radio (and, truth, had secretly thrilled when she thought Tommy had done the deed, had made her a woman, although she believed he really should have stopped and thus the break-up). One night, one Friday night she went with Betty and another girl to the Surf Ballroom to hear the Ready Rockers play. And maybe find another guy, a guy who would respect her. Then she saw Lance, Lance all black hair and brown eyes, slim, dancing up a storm to Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love. Later she went over to see if she could talk to him, to see if the music hit him the same way as it did her and they talked.

Later, not that night, they had their first date and after he picked her up in his ’55 Chevy he suggested they skip the dance and go to the far end of Adamsville Beach. She said she really wanted to but told him he should stop before things got out of hand. Once they got there Lance turned on the radio and turned on his hands. She didn’t resist and while she was not sure which song got her going that night between Lance’s quick moving hands, the moon, the sound of the ocean roar and her own desire Lance had his way with her. And she knew this time from her aching hips and other stuff that he had “done the deed.” Come Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talkfest she was the first girl to tell the group how she had successfully fended Lance off that weekend. 

Let’s tune into Tommy Murphy’s take on the situation now that he is single and lonely.      

… he could hardly wait until the weekend, wait to hear the new sounds coming out of the south, rhythm and blues stuff, rockabilly stuff, that he could hear on his transistor radio up in his room coming on clear nights out of WJKA in Chicago, stuff called rock and roll. It didn’t come in clear every week but when it did he would start snapping his fingers to the beat, the swinging beat that “spoke” to him somehow. He could not explain it but it made him feel good when he was down, was confused about life, okay, okay, about girls, school, and that getting ahead in the world that his parents, his mother especially, kept harping on. Made him think that maybe he would be a musician and play that stuff, play and make all the girls wet. Yeah, as little as he knew, he knew all of that part about girls, about how this music was making them get warm, warm in all the right places, in their “honey pots,” according to George his older brother who knew all about girls and had explained what that term meant (and who really knew all he knew like everybody else from the streets). Make that new girl of his, Susie, warm too. He hoped.

Funny how they met, he and Susie met, or not really met but started out, started out in school of all places, in class. Jesus. In Current Events one week when it was his turn to make a presentation and he chose to talk about that radio station in Chicago and about the sounds he heard that made him want to jump out of his skin. He couldn’t exactly explain why when Mr. Merritt asked about why he felt that way except to say that it made him feel good, made him less angry, less confused. After class Susie had come up to him and practically begged him to tell her his feelings because she had said when she heard Big Joe Turner coming all snapping fingers on the radio on Shake, Rattle and Roll, she felt funny inside. (He knew what kind of funny but he knew, knew because George had told him, not to say that to girls.) That had started it since he walked her home a few times and he found that she was easy to talk to. So before he knew it he had asked her to go see the Ready Rockers at the Surf Ballroom down at Adamsville Beach who were playing the new sounds.


He didn’t know what would happen but he hoped that she would get that funny feeling inside when they danced, he sure hoped so. And she did, but nothing happened that night. A few weeks later, when he had his father’s car and suggested that they skip the dance and head straight down to the far end of Adamsville Beach, he had turned on the radio while they were “making out” (kissing and some fondling of her breasts with his hands moving nervously all over the place and she sighing at the touch) when Elvis came on with his One Night With You and she did not stop him when he took off her underpants and he got on top. He made a bunch of moves but she was not paying any particular attention. Fact was he did not know what to do so he just rubbed his “thing” against her “honey pot” but did not go inside. At least he thought he had not gone inside. After he was done she asked him whether he had “done the deed.” In a panic and not wanting to show his inexperience he said yes. 
She got furious, said he should have stopped and what if she got pregnant and had go visit an aunt. That, in any case, was the beginning of the end of their short romance. She gave him his walking papers that next Monday afternoon saying that he should have been like other girls said their boyfriends did and stopped before anything happened. Tommy had no comeback that would work and so he just walked away, forlorn…                 

Shady Lady In Three-Quarters Time-That Inkwood Dame- Marlene Dietrich’s “Stage Fright” (1950)-A Film Review

Shady Lady In Three-Quarters Time-That Inkwood Dame- Marlene Dietrich’s “Stage Fright” (1950)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By William Bradley

Stage Struck, starring Marlene Dietrich, Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, Michael Wilding, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1950  

[Normally a great if sullied* director like Sir Alfred Hitchcock would be cited in the headline but since this review links tangentially two aspects of Marlene Dietrich’s career she gets top billing. 

* “Sullied” since earlier this year, 2017, during the height of the sexual harassment and sexual crimes by high level powerful Hollywood men and later others in high positions it was revealed by Tippi Hendron who most famously starred in the Hitchcock classic The Birds that he had incessantly sexually harassed her and moreover ruined her career after she had rebuffed him. Greg Green]

******

Sometimes I can’t figure out the how or why of our new site manager Greg Green’s madness in making assignments. Or in the case here linking two different pieces of work only tangentially related together. Here’s what I mean. A few months ago when I was first hired on by Greg to bring in younger writers and give them decent assignments I happened to be headed to Washington, D.C. on other business when he asked me to stop off at the National Gallery of Art on the National Mall and view and review the big Vermeer and friends exhibit (not the official museum title but that is what it is about) of 16^th and 17^th Dutch and Flemish art. (That “younger writers” deserves some additional comment since I am a little older at twenty-eight than the youngest writer Kenny Jacobs but almost two decades younger that what under the old regime, sorry I can’t mention his name under an agreement that we would not do so with Greg, were considered young writers against the old guard who have hovered around since the 1960s-and apparently never got over it-the 1960s that is.)

I did as asked so and did what I thought was a good review given that I didn’t know a damn thing about the subject. The subject of Dutch and Flemish painting which mostly seemed boring and repetitious around family portraits and infinite scenes of fruits, vegetables and game not art in general where my tastes run to the Abstract Expressionists who I don’t know much about either but appeal to my eye. Expressed my like/dislike views and left it at that. I did make a mistake in citing another writer here, an old-timer, Frank Jackman, and his quasi –Marxist views on art and we went back and forth about it as he earnestly tried to “teach” me about this ancient painters and their “milieu,” Frank’s word. You can read that exchange elsewhere under the archival title When Capitalist Was Young….  

That was all well and good. What I had also done on that trip as well was sneak after my business was over to the National Portrait Gallery since it stays open until seven to view some American art that I was interested in when I noticed that there was a photographic display on the career of well-known (and much “drag queen”- imitated) German turned American citizen actress Marlene Dietrich. I thereafter mentioned that exhibit in passing to Greg who must have put that fact in the back of his mind because when he had finished previewing the film under review Stage Fright a thriller by director Alfred Hitchcock starring Ms. Dietrich he cornered me by the water cooler and gave me the assignment. Again I knew nada about Ms. Dietrich other than what I had read at the exhibit not being either a fan of Mr. Hitchcock, hers, or of old time movies. So here it is as good as I can make it without much experience with this kind of film.                              

Marlene Dietrich had a certain style about her, a certain independent don’t give a damn attitude which permeated her role as Charlotte Inkwood, a chanteuse and actress who had both a lover, Johnny, played Richard Todd and a husband she did not much like, wanted to see dead. So, yes, didn’t like much is right if understated like her role here.     That is the drift of the storyline, with that not “much like” unseen husband lying on the living room floor. The first twist and turn of the film which drives it in a certain direction revolved around the very clear implication that Charlotte had done the deed. It sure looked like it as every emotive breath she took when she told lover-boy Johnny about it kept saying guilty as hell. Also in her apparent duplicity looked like she had used Johnny to cover her tracks and make him the fall guy.        

Enter Eve, played by Jane Wyman, a friend of Johnny’s who thought she was in love with him and did everything she could to hide him and who was bewitched by his story that Charlotte had done the deed. Including producing a telltale and fatal bloodstained dress she had allegedly worn to do the deed. By hook or by crook to save darling Johnny Eve directly confronted Charlotte via a ruse as her temporary dresser, an institution in the theater world. Enter Detective Smith, played by Michael Wilding, who turns Eve’s head away romantically from Johnny who made it very clear that he had gone over the edge for Charlotte.

Meanwhile this Smith and his fellow police officers are looking high and low for Johnny boy. Not getting anyway especially since Eve, and her family, not suspecting anything untoward of him were keeping him a step or two ahead of the law. With his help. As things moved toward a climax, toward the capture of on the run Johnny it was revealed via another ruse by the coppers that Johnny, under Charlotte’s cunning bidding had actually killed dear sweet Mr. Inkwood. This revelation occurred while both he and Eve are hiding under the stage of the theater that Charlotte played at. Oh no, Eve was a goner. Not so fast since the clever Ms. Eve was able to put herself out of danger and old Johnny got his just desserts. Of course Charlotte will get hers as well taking as Sandy Salmon says quoting Sam Lowell the big step-off. 

I don’t know if this is a big time Dietrich work although she certainly could emote when the deal went down, could act whatever she needed to act to stay out of the clutches of the law. Perhaps know it all Frank Jackman will give me the same working over he gave me on those freaking Dutch and Flemish painters who grabbed up the great art when they ruled the roost and “teach” me what is what about the legacy of Ms. Dietrich.        

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Her Time, Indeed-With Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle And Roll In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Her Time, Indeed-With Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle And Roll In Mind

Sketches From The Pen Of  Frank Jackman  

Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Well, roll my breakfast 'cause I'm a hungry man

[Chorus:]
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
Well, you never do nothin' to save your doggone soul

Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
You look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice

[Chorus]

I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a sea-food store
I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a sea-food store
I can look at you, tell you don't love me no more

I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know
I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know
The more I work, the faster my money goes

[Chorus]

Shake, Rattle And Roll

 …she had been through it all before, six or seven times now at least,  been through the part about what happened to her when she heard the new music, heard the music that was not some left-over parent music fit for mercifully sleeping through, maybe, on the radio, some called it rhythm and blues, music from the black ghettos of places like Chicago and Detroit from guys who had come up from the South in the great post-World War I migrations to shake one Mister James Crow off their backs, get the jobs in the bustling factories to make some damn money for once to buy Missy what she wanted, came up to get away from what she heard some say was Mister’s plantations sweat all day cotton boll work and his same Mister James Crow legal system (although she understood the sweat work part she didn’t understand that Jim Crow part at all, didn’t understand what it meant, didn’t understand that it affected every legal, social, economic, and political move they made) and turn that country blues of their fathers and other brothers, that down home Saturday night juke joint drinking Jimmy Jack’s homemade liquor on electric-less guitars, into sassy electrified blues for a more sophisticated urban audience ready to dust off their roots. 

Working off the efforts of old preacher-warriors Son House (had heard or read she was not sure that he had warred against the devil against sin and warred against God with the bottle), Charley Patton, Skip James and the guy who made a pact with devil she heard down in some Mississippi sweat-hole highway, Robert Johnson. And they did work, worked the streets for pocket money first and then the little sassy clubs, all smoke, booze and smelling of blood. Guys like sainted Muddy and hell-fire Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, a bunch of James’ first or last name, John Lee, and some others too. Sometimes she would hear the sounds the threading-twanging sounds and get, well, get a little jumpy thinking what it would like to be stage front when old Muddy or Howlin’ Wolf got it on, but she kept that to herself since her parents would have flipped out if she ever took step one in that direction.       

Some called the new dispensation sound rockabilly with good-looking white farm and small town boys named Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee, Warren,    in sexy suits with nothing on their minds except good times, music, and sex who were tired of that Grand Ole Opry hokey stuff and wanted to breakout and dust off their roots too. She thought about being stage front when those guys played too and thought that she too would maybe throw her sweaty underwear up on that heathen stage like she had seen and heard that lots of girls, good girls too caught in the throughs of the moment, but she kept that to herself since her parents would have flipped out if she took step one in that direction. In any case some, more recently, had begun to call it rock and roll after some DJ, Freed she thought the name was from New York City or some big beat city, called it that and it was starting to catch on as the way to describe the beat, the dancing, and the feeling of freedom just being around the scene.

Her parents, her know-nothing parents, just called it the “devil’s music,” called it an abomination against God’s will but they called everything from the “red menace” from Russia, Uncle Joe’s an dhis minions menace, to fluoride in the water some kind of abomination against God’s will so she discounted what they had to say, what did they know anyway, what could they know about what she felt, what she felt in the certain private places of her body when the beat got strong. How could they know never having been young, never having had those feelings. She was not exactly sure why she felt that way if anybody had asked her to explain those feelings (and nobody would, or almost nobody, since they were as clueless about why they felt that way when the music came on as she was), why she felt warm in what all the girls in the before school “lav” called their “sweet spot” with a tittle whenever she heard the local radio station or the kids at Doc’s 

Drugstore over on Atlantic Avenue on the juke-box endlessly playing Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle, and Roll or Warren Smith on Rock and Roll Ruby but she did. (Some of the rougher girls whom she avoided, the girls who smoked, drank and did “it,” so they said, called it other things which she did not find out until later, much later, guys called those things too but she then still preferred the more modest “sweet spot.”) All she knew was that when the beat began to pick up she would start swaying, maybe dancing by herself, maybe with a girlfriend, and get that feeling like she was not in has been dusty Olde Saco but maybe in New York City getting checked out by all the cute boys there whose leers when she swayed would have told her they were interested in having some of her.

Someone, Betty, she thought, a girl that she had grown up and gone to school with,  gone to Olde Saco High with, said it was just her coming into “her time,” although she did not know what to make of that idea since she had that same feeling before and after she came into her time. Got her “friend.”  Betty, or whoever it was who had said it said she did not mean that, that thing every girl had to deal with, but the time when everything was confused and when a teenager did, or did not, know which way to jump. Betty said somebody on the news programs called it alienation, teen alienation, like it was a disease, an epidemic sweeping the nation that needed to be eradicated if we were to beat the Russkies or something like that, but she was not sure what that meant. All she knew was that the old songs on the jukebox or radio, the ones that she loved to listen to the previous year, Frank getting kicks on champagne, Bing crooning about going his way, Patti get all dreamy about ocean-filled Cape Cod making her forget about ocean-filled Olde Saco with its endless textile mills to break the mood, Rosemary telling everybody to come to her house and singing about wanderlust, did not make her feel that way anymore. Didn’t make her feel that she wanted to jump out of her skin.

Tommy from school she thought, thought fondly if anybody was asking although he had not shown a spark of  interest until recently so she might not have told them she thought fondly of him if they had asked, might have had a better handle on it, have had a better sense of what turbulence was going on inside her when he told the whole Problems in Democracy class in Current Events that there were some new songs coming out of the radio, some stuff from down south, some negro sound from down in Memphis somewhere, some white hillbilly sound from around that same town, that he would listen to late at night on WJKA from Chicago when the air was just right. Sounds that made him want to jump right out of his skin. (She never dared to ask, ask even later when she got to know him better, whether it made him feel warm in his “sweet spot” since she didn’t know much then about whether boys had sweet spots, or got warm).

When Tommy had said that, said it was about the music, she knew that she was not alone, not alone in feeling that a fresh breeze was coming over the land, although she, confused as she was would not have articulated it that way (that would come later). And so she asked Tommy about it after class, asked him about what it felt like for him to jump out of his skin when he heard the beat beginning. He explained to her his feelings, feelings that she said she shared with him and he smiled. She agreed to let him walk her home after school and they had talked for a couple of hours on her front porch before he left. This went on most days for a while since neither one was assertive enough to ask for a date for a long time (Tommy as painfully shy as her except she was the first to notice that he looked over her way in class and gave a little smile, really a half smile before that day when they first talked after school).

Then both saw the big full page announcement in the newspaper, in the Friday edition Daily Gazette, for the next dance around town scheduled for a week from Saturday night and that night she called him to see if, ah, they might go to the event together. If she had waited about ten minutes Tommy later told her he would have called her (in her mind though she thought she was right to call since he was, except during Current Events, painfully shy and she was not going to miss a chance to grab him before some other girl did and then where would she be). And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Olde Saco Beach and listen to some guys, a band, play the new music that Tommy talked about some much. She wondered to herself (she could not speak of such things to Tommy) as she prepared for that night whether she would feel warm again in her sweet spot when they danced, she hoped so…         

But let’s catch up with Tommy for a moment and see what he is thinking about (oh, besides her, since we already know a lot especially about that telltale half smile he kept throwing her way).  

… things were different now, different from a few months ago when he was all balled up and thought he was the only kid, guy or female, aged fifteen, who was confused, uncomprehending, misbegotten about how he felt, about his place in the universe and about how he felt so very sorry himself because he didn’t understand what was happening to him, and what spoke to him now that he was no longer a kid. He, Tommy Murphy, could hardly wait until the weekend, wait to hear the new sounds coming out of the south, rhythm and blues stuff, rockabilly stuff, that he kept hearing on his transistor radio up in his room on clear nights out of WJKA in Chicago, stuff that people were starting to call rock and roll because some hip DJ in New York City or some such place a lot of people were taking credit for the term called it that, was starting to catch on. Funny he thought how he could get Chicago on good nights, weekend nights, but not New York City to hear that DJ call out to all the cats to swing to the beat of rock and roll. Mister Gibbs, his science teacher explained it to him and the class one time but the explanation sounded like someone talking to the heathens about heaven.

He couldn’t get WJKA clear every week, damn, but when it did come in Tommy would start snapping his fingers to the beat, the swinging beat that “spoke” to him somehow. He could not explain it but it made him feel good when he was down, was all confused about life, okay, okay, about girls, school, and that getting ahead in the world that his parents, his mother especially kept harping on. Made him think that maybe he would be a musician and play that stuff, play and make all the girls wet. Yeah, he knew all about that part about girls, about how this rock and roll music was making them get warm, warm in all the right places according to George his older brother who knew all about girls. Had them, girls, hanging off of him even though he wasn’t a musician but just a hep cat. Make that new girl of his, Susie, warm too. He hoped.

Funny how he had met Susie, how they had met, or not really met but started out, started out in school of all places, in class. Jesus. He had noticed her before but before she was just part of that all balled up stuff he was feeling, although he had taken a few peeks at her and he thought she might have peeked back once but he was not sure. Then during Current Events in Problems in Democracy class one week it was his turn to make a presentation and he chose to talk about that radio station out in Chicago and about the sounds he heard that made him want to jump out of his skin. He couldn’t exactly explain why and blushed a bright red when the teacher, a cool guy, Mr. Merritt asked him point about why he felt that way except to say that it made him feel good, made him less angry, less confused. A couple of people in the class nodded and he thought Susie had too (although she later said “no” she hadn’t nodded she just was thinking how brave he was to talk like that about his reactions to the music and while looking at him found out something she had not noticed before, he was cute). 

After class Susie had come up to him and practically begged him to tell her more about his feelings, about how the music made him feel,   because she said when she heard Big Joe Turner coming all snapping fingers on the radio on Shake, Rattle and Roll, she felt funny inside. Of course nobody, not even Tommy, who was keen on such knowledge knew that Big Joe was a Negro then, Christ his parents, good Roman Catholics who theoretically thought well of all mankind would have fits if they knew that he was listening to Negros under any conditions just like most RC parents in the neighborhood.  Tommy knew what kind of funny Susie was talking about, her “sweet spot” funny but he knew, knew because George had told him, not to say that to girls. Not modest girls like Susie and maybe not any girl if you wanted to get past first base with them. 

That conversation had started their thing and she asked him to walk home with her so they could talk which they did until they got to her house and just stood there talking for a couple of hours before he left.

He had walked her home a few times and he found that she was easy to talk to but they both seemed to back off on talking about a first date. He knew that he was a little shy in that department and he guessed Susie was too. Then both of them saw an announcement in the newspaper for the next big dance around town and one night she had called him to see if, ah, they might go together. (He somewhat flabbergasted said “yes,” said yes knowing that if he did not some other guy would grab her and then where would he be.) And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Olde Saco Beach and listen to some guys, a band, the Ready Rollers, play the new music. Tommy  didn’t know what would happen as he prepared that night to pick her up at her house but he hoped the music would calm him down and that he would get that funny feeling inside when they danced, and her too, he sure hoped so…      

A Kinder, Gentler Super-hero Takes Up The Cudgels Against The Bad Guys- Michael Keaton’s “Batman Returns” (1992)-A Film Review

A Kinder, Gentler Super-hero Takes Up The Cudgels Against The Bad Guys- Michael Keaton’s “Batman Returns” (1992)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Greg Green

Batman Returns, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, 1992

As I pointed out in a recent film review, actually an anti-review of another film in the seemingly never-ending Batman saga, I don’t, usually do film reviews ever since I became site manager over at the on-line American Film Gazette many years ago although I do preview all films before making assignments. (See archives, dated January 26, 2018 - Yeah, The Dark Night Alright When The World Needed Super-heroes And Psychos To Bring Us Down In The Mud –“The Dark Knight” aka Batman (2008)-An Anti-Film). I refused to assign that The Dark Knight Batman episode since whole thing reeked of over the top gratuitous violence with no apparent reason to exist except for that craziness. I got blow-back on that decision, although not from any readers, at least any that I know of. I got it from Sam Lowell, who used to be under the old regime here the Senior Film Critic before he went to emeritus status. He hit me on two, no, three counts. First why the hell (his crusty old goat term) did I even bother to give any space to the film just let it die after preview. Second why the hell (ditto) did I decide a while back to “appeal” to a younger audience by posting film reviews about comic super-heroes when they don’t read such reviews anyway but once they hear about a new episode are ready to line up whatever the quality of the work, whatever the plot-line. Third, and lastly, since I told him I was going to assign this film Batman Returns to someone on the staff why the hell (ditto, ditto) bother to waste some valuable time trying to counterpoise the “regular” okay violence of this film which he had seen many years ago and had rejected for review out of hand with the so-called gratuitous violence of The Dark Knight.        

   

That last point stung me and so I am taking up my own cudgels again to point out the differences in the films rather that have one of the writers do it. I might mention that no writer was begging me to do this review nor did anybody “complain” that they hadn’t been given The Dark Knight assignment. Frankly they thought that with that last effort I had seen the light and would stop assigning these super-hero balloons and go back to the old policies of only assigning what one wag suggested were “socially redeeming” films that a site devoted to history and its important nodal points should strive to review. I have taken my fair share of heat on this but for now I still see this idea as an important tip of the hat to mass culture which is after all  part of that experience.

I mentioned in that anti-review (see archival reference above) that many films critics had given the film a positive go based on its kind of being a metaphor for what was going on in the real war of gratuitous violence in the post-9/11 world. I dismissed that as so much hokum and bile based on there being nothing else to defend about such non-stop bam-bam action. With Batman Returns  done in kinder, gentler post-Soviet demise world 1992 before the non-stop terrorism entered the daily news cycle that still is a weak argument for a gruesome film but maybe the times do have a say in what a film would impart to an audience, in both cases young audiences in particular. The plot-line, the simple plot-line as in all these super-hero sagas without fail is centered on here Batman, played by Michael Keaton foiling the efforts of the bad guys here, obviously the Penguin, played by humpty-dumpty Danny DeVito, and leading city figure Max Shrenck, played by versatile Christopher Walken and being aided or hindered depending on the scene by new ambiguous figure Cat Women, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

The difference since there is plenty of violence here as well was the saga was done a bit tongue in cheek. No, make that an archness. Arch in as the bad guys cut some of the rough edges off their badness by being rather ironic about the bad things they were doing. Contrast that with the Joker in The Dark Knight who personified evil with every breath. That might be a distinction without a difference but it matters when the deal goes down. Maybe the age of super-heroes is over at least in this space although I am not yet convinced we should avoid this aspect of mass culture but I will have to wait and see how much guff I can take from the wags around the water cooler about “pandering” to their kids, and grandkids.

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong   

By Laura Perkins  

I really wish that one Arthur Gilmore Doyle hereafter Doyle since I refuse to play his three- name monte game like he was some Brahmin grandee out of the 19th century swilling us with his robber baron Heritage, pedigree some kenneled championship dog would get a life, would get some gainful employment other than clipping coupons or whatever the progeny of the robber barons does these days. Apparently after he arose out of his dead faint when I explained that James Abbott McNeill Whistler (four-name Montes are okay as long as you are an artist, once) was paying homage to the Whore of Babylon when he had his girlfriend of the time standing in a white dress with a sexually suggestive wolf’s head under her feet in painting variously titled The White Girl, Symphony In White and Homage To My Current Whore, well maybe not the last one. You would have thought that I had committed something like a mortal sin for having pretended that this great artist was not above some very risqué symbolism back in the days when such signs had to be submerged in polite society to sell to those self-same robber barons by the American ex-patriate (and other artists as well) The gist of Doyle’s argument beyond the now usual hosanna to the saintliness of every artist who put paint to brush back in the 19th century when his robber baron forbears started buying artworks to move into high culture was that I am no art critic. A fact. Real fact which I have been at pains to declare. Doyle then went through some litany of names Johns Ruskin, Clement Devine, Erasmus Land and a few others none of them who I knew from Adam. Nor need to know since what I am about here in this series is showing there are more than two ways to at look ta works of art-sublime and more sublime. Some of them, those other ways while not sublime a word that Doyle used repeatedly to describe what I find more erotic than anything else. In that sense I have staked out some territory that has included sex in the equation when it has been called for whatever prissy Doyle may think. Especially with a guy like Whistler who slept with every one of his models, every woman who crossed his path as far as I have been able to discover. He was sex-addled, I had to smirk to myself when one critic mentioned that Brother Whistler had a heathy interest in woman, oh really, as well as probably was high half the time, it would be interesting to see what kind of drugs he was doing let’s say when he was painting the so-called Symphony in Gray and Black or Etude in Beige and Chartreuse. Here, and this is only speculation not hard evidence, I think from that low-rent paint he was using so no wonder he had strange ideas about women, had called poor Johanna, his Whole of Babylon a lot worse than I have tagged him with. Once the medics revive Doyle again I may have a solution to our impasse.  Here is my plan though which I think might be foolproof. I am moving on to 20th century artists specifically to Edward Hopper in this piece. Since Hopper did not have or use three names for his moniker, and everybody knows once you hit the 20th century even the most pristine abstract expressionists and advanced colorists know that it is all about sex and the unconscious desire to throw it on canvas I should be home free. So that should throw our man off the sense, get him off my ass.

[Originally this is what I had to say about my plan which I have now scaled back. “So I have had enough of this. I have a plan, have been forced to devise a plan I think will work to keep Doyle off my ass. I have decided after three consecutive articles on 19^th century painters which has caused me nothing but grief Doyle only being the most high-brow of the lot. You would not believe what vile things proper evangelicals full to the brim with Bible quotations and the like will utter in the anonymous cyberspace where troll-like they call home. For people who believe in repentance and forgiveness I have been shocked by the language and the vitriolic blasts I have had to endure for simply stating that even Renaissance guys, Leonardo, Fra this and that, definitely Botticelli when he was in his cups, Raphael when the turpentine high was on him only cared about subliminal ecstasy and rapture, ah, sex, when the deal went down. For that I am exiled from the Garden, forced to spend the time until End Times being flogged by dimwits-L.P.]  

Now to Hopper the eternal mope-the guy who pictured alienation in about seven different ways. Really more since every freaking painting is like stab to the heart of modernity like we don’t already have enough nonsense going on without a guy endlessly painting bummers and having real critics like Alice Faye, Clem Devine, Lance Little and a fistful of others yakking about the man and moment meeting in about 1925 when Hopper was in his prime, before he started taking up with womenfolk and seeing where that led. Here is the kick though later on in life after he graced his canvases with alienated and angst-ridden folk he started to think about morality about the great arch of life from birth to death as he reached the age when men and women start to think about their own mortality. No big deal just had a country scene, a big old white house near some forest put an older woman, frail, what did Alice Faye call her, yes, matronly and then a younger woman dressed for the season, summer season and all that means. Beautiful-life and death. Along that same line had  a self-conscious woman young in a summer dress looking cool as a cucumber except for an outsized hat which dwarfed her face looking like some latter-day Genghis Khan, ready to do battle with all to keep her place in the sum. But that was latter stuff, stuff I will detail more in another piece or two for today I want to get that Doyle off my case and need to stay with this alienation and angst business to get him to stop his cyber-madness. (I have no expectations on those troll-like angel pinheads calling End Times on me for we all have our collective crosses to bear, Christian or not).           

That is later stuff when he got into the swing of things, when he had already made a name for himself as the master of the alienated and angst-ridden modern set. Who can forget that famous, maybe too famous, Nighthawks at the Diner where some Joe and Nemo’s crowd is waiting for Godot or somebody after the bars closed for the night and they need a saucer full of coffee and grease-laden hamburgers to set their world right. They might as well have been at the Automat for all the interaction between the lonely people. How about that great dimly lit drugstore with the Ex-Lax (or is it Ex-Lac) saying more about the world than any people-populated piece even though that whole scene is filled with more menace than if he had put a jack-roller over in the back behind that searchlight-like street light. One more to draw my point. How about that famous, or infamous, painting down at the National Gallery, now mercifully reopened, with the two people looking for all the world like they were ready for divorce court and the dog looking like the happiest one of the lot since at least he will land on his feet. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point about Hopper being the king of alienation and angst in the post-Freudian world.     

Naturally as I have done with the previous three artists looked at in this on-going series I have a special presentation, a scoop if you will about the why of Hopper’s mopery, why his people don’t smile. I have had access from the archives to his art school or whatever training he had and have found a very interesting discovery looking over some of his early facial drawings. Hopper, hold onto your hats, never learned to draw faces with people smiling, except maybe ironic closed-mouth smiles. Never could quite get the hang of people opening up their lips in order to smile, hell, or look like they were capable of talking. I thought I was dreaming but then I showed the specimens to Sam Lowell and he agreed that the closest Hopper got to a smile, to an open mouth was some early tooth-decayed grotesque done when he was an illustrator, something hideous which would not reflect modern life, modern angst.      

I am sure that Doyle could care less about such niceties and so I think I am home free, finally got him off my back. Without using the “s” word once in reference to Hopper. Still… 

Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To The Cops-Visions From The Acre Neighborhood-With The Hollywood Version Of “The Mod Squad” (1999) -Social Commentary Disguised As A Film Review

Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To The Cops-Visions From The Acre Neighborhood-With The Hollywood Version Of “The Mod Squad” (1999) -Social Commentary Disguised As A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

The Mod Squad, Claire Danes, Giovanni Ribisi, Omar Epps, 1999  

[Those who have read my film reviews in various incarnations of American Left History and its associated publications or way back

in the early 1970s as a free-lance stringer at American Film Gazette know that at times I have gone off on a tangent when I have something which I think is socially relevant or political to say. Have a few times used the review as a vehicle to get something off my chest. This however is the first time, thanks to site manager Greg Green that I have telegraphed my intentions up front, have stated that this is social commentary fronted by a review of the movie version of the successful and fairly long-running television series The Mod Squad.

My problem as confessed to Greg was that I really wanted to take a swipe at the idea of young “hippie” type felons recruited by the public cops to get into places where a young straight crew-cut cop wearing a plaid shirt and chinos would not dare to go. To essentially for no jail time become civilian snitches. That strange arrangement is so contrary to both my own and a number of older writers here experiences with the cops in our own “hippie” period and more decisively going back to the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where both cops hassling us and us having a code of corner boy honor (which extended to other corner boy groupings as well, even hostile cohorts) to have no truck with them really has my blood pressure up even forty or fifty years later. So be forewarned that this is a screed and that film is just an occasion to vent. S.G]    

******

Hollywood is nothing if not ingenious, or opportunist as the case may be grabbing onto an idea that got its first workout on television which is kind of ass backwards since most of the time it is the other way around. Back in the 1970s after the dust of the 1960s had started to clear somebody got the bright idea that a cop show had to take a different twist if you were going to retain or grab the youth audience. A tough problem when so many kids had been busted for dope, been teargassed and billy-clubbed  for speaking out on a range of issues (then beaten again for mumbling out some answer when they were in the bastinado getting third degree grilling). Got hassled for hitchhiking (hell for jaywalking when they wanted to pull the hammer down) , and a ton of other things that among older more respectable folk would not have gotten them off their duffs at the local donut shop cadging their coffee and cakes and harassing the cute young waitresses who weren’t sure exactly how to respond to such unsolicited crap before #MeToo was not even a dreamed up idea. I will speak more personally on that issue and the growing up absurd ways that we dealt with the police back in the old Acre neighborhood.

For now though some wizard figured out that maybe if you took a clot of young troubled people, three, a manageable number to corral, two white, one black, two men, one women who were in legal distress and you offered them the lifeline of playing copper rather than jail maybe that battered youth nation might be brought back into the fold. I am not sure what the numbers were, the demographics either but the television show was on for a while. Solving crimes real coppers would not get off their duffs at the local donut shop for all while looking very civilian. Then they took their wares to Hollywood or glitter town took their idea and ran with it.

Bullshit. No self-respecting hippie, boy or girl, would be caught dead acting for the coppers, would rather do hard time among honest thieves, black-jack artists, armed robbers, mother murders and worse than be a snitch, which is what these Mod Squad pillars of society were really doing making the cops’ jobs easier for them. I won’t even deal with all the crap the FBI under one J. Edgar Hoover did on the national and local political fronts framing every militant, black or white but especially black when the Panthers raised the stakes and attempted to organize community youth with a very different perspective. Won’t even deal with the massive arrests, sweeps really grabbing everyone in their paths from New York 1966 to bloody Chicago 1968 to May Day in 1971 and beyond. That was the stuff of headlines, of archives. That was the coordination of national, state and local police working up a lather.

What I will mention is about the time the recently passed on Jimmy Higgins was sitting on the side of the road in Todos el Mundo out south of Big Sur in California, just sitting there backpack, rucksack really, in front of him when some Highway Patrol copper stopped and asked him why he was hitchhiking. After some argument, that was Jimmy’s way and not a bad one this time, the copper yanks him in the cruiser and takes him to the police barracks for transport to the clink. Jimmy had no dough, had nobody he knew out there although about a month before a half dozen of the old gang from the Acre neighborhood had been out there checking out the suburbs of the Summer of Love, 1967. I won’t even count the number of times we were hassled or busted by the notorious quota-driven Connecticut staties who would jack us up in full view of passing cars filled with respectables on the side of whatever highway they grabbed us on. Chickenshit drug busts for a simple joint would fill a book, thirty days here, fifteen there. This was life for a not insignificant number of young people, hippies if you will, just trying to break out for a while anyway from the nine to five number that society had hatched for us and would snare a lot of us later when the ebb tide of the times came crashing down around our heads.              

Going back even further No self-respecting corner boy would haul anything but bile for them, for the blood-stained coppers. What a lame excuse for a movie who’s only redeeming quality was that its plot involved getting the best of a bunch of crooked cops who had their hands in the till come drug trafficking time. The Acre reality was that you avoided the cops like black death, even though it seemed that every family that had three or more sons had a cop in one position (the other two, oneot the  of course was the gangster and the other was the boy with the “calling,” going into the priesthood, throw in a sister and you had a nun, or a whore maybe). The idea that you would say word one to a cop, to say hello, was beyond comprehension. Even though everybody knew that some outlier was singing his song to get out from under some serious jailtime (even that was not the same as being recruited to do the coppers’ dirty work for them as against the code as it was and as life-threatening as such a rash decision was if anything happened to anybody due to the ratting out)         

The classic case for how the code of honor worked, Omerta I heard it called in some neighborhoods although not ours even though it was the same thing when Red Riley, the king of the hill of the toughest corner boy crowd over at Harry’s Variety, just because he suspected some guy from some rival corner was “trespassing”  on his turf chain-whipped the guy into a bloody pool and just walked away. When the ambulance and coppers came nobody who had witnessed the scene including me said word one to the coppers. Not even the guy who got chain-whipped. A serious object lesson. (By the way Harry’s was just a front for a protected book-making operation with Red and friends as the protection. The cops? Well they just came in from their police cruisers to make their bets and grab some quick coffee and cakes.) There are a million stories but hey all run to a type. Later when we sort of outgrew the code of honor etched in the old neighborhood we would have rather lost a limp that given anything to the coppers but guff. Making this tale of three kids of no known origin frankly weird.    

Frankly I don’t understand why Freddie Murphy, an Acre product and a guy who had one brother doing time in the state pen and the other doing Hail Marys at Blessed Sacrament Church, about par for the course, who I knew for many years before he turned copper in LA wanted some young kids to see what was happening to the drug evidence boxes that were going out the door at the station house in Hollywood. Hell, even a rookie cop, a cop who had not gotten into the donut shop coffee and crullers groove, knew it was an inside job including protection going pretty far up the ladder, the chain of command. The older guys in the locker room come wash up time were laughing about the poor suckers who were going to have to do twenty and out if some perp didn’t waste them and they would have to not cash their checks. While they bathed on easy street with a couple of big scores, a couple of knock-offs.    

Frank was a funny guy, quirky, until he turned copper, until he broke the pledge, the old corner boy pledge never to say boo to a copper much less be one. But he had this idea, obviously he didn’t hang around the locker room, that it was guys who were running a high end nightclub who were getting a rogue cop to come up with the dope to keep their hipster young and wild crowd high as kites.  So the kids’ idea to get in and see what they could see. But before they could do their work, Frank made the cardinal error of trying to set a trap assuming it was just one bad apple copper-and got wasted out in some LA drainage ditch for his efforts. The boys in the know in the locker room had a big laugh as they put on their ceremonial blues to give Frank his big sent-off.        

        

Here is the funny thing though these kids, and forgive me if I don’t remember their names but like I said one was a holy goof white-bread, a surly black guy with a chip on his shoulder and a young white woman with tracks up her arms and the look of somebody who had worked the streets to support her habit who was trying to break a jones and not having much success decided to find out who killed their  mentor, who wanted Freddie six feet under over this drug stuff. And they did a pretty good job at least as far as they went. They went up a million wrong alleys before they realized that they were looking outside when they should have been looking inside. Looking more closely at that hostile, to them, locker room since they were outside the loop, weren’t anything but rent-a-cops really.

The key was when the young woman who was having an rekindled affair with an old boyfriend found out he was cheating on her, was a junkie with connections to the mob and to the coppers, wired. From there it was ABC to drag the deadbeat coppers out of their lair once they knew that they had to act fast to grab dope and go down easy street-one way. In the end though why did the kids do it, why did they give up their dignity just to find out what they already knew, knew what their mothers told them when they had to do the “talk,” the old Acre neighborhood talk that every mother even with cop sons had to do. The coppers are not your friends.