Netflix Update No. 5: “I Remember Mama”
April 11, 2009
We watched the 1948 movie “I Remember Mama,” a masterpiece directed by George Stevens. I started to watch this on TMC a few weeks ago, but it would have ended at 2 a.m., so I gave up and put it in the Netflix queue. This film was based on Kathryn Forbes’ novel, a fictionalized memoir titled “Mama’s Bank Account.” The novel inspired a play that ran on Broadway for two years. The play led to this rather expensive movie, and the movie led to a successful television series – “Mama” – and an unsuccessful musical play, the last work of Richard Rodgers.
In all cases, the story concerns a Norwegian family living in San Francisco shortly after the turn of the 20th century. The central figure is Martha Hansen, the “Mama” of the title, played in this film by Irene Dunne and in the TV series by Peggy Wood. Irene Dunne was perfect in the role – as was Peggy Wood – and Dunne’s contributions were complemented by the fact that the rest of the casting was just as highly inspired. That included Barbara Bel Geddes as one of the Hansen daughters – Katherine – who narrates the film. Other choices that turned out to be strokes of genius were Rudy Vallee in the poker-faced role of a doctor who performs mastoid surgery on young Dagmar Hansen and Edgar Bergen in the comical role of a funeral director who courts one of Martha Hansen’s sisters.
ELLEN CORBY
That sister, Trina, was played by Ellen Corby, who later played the grandmother on the TV series “The Waltons,” and appeared in nearly 230 movies and TV shows. In this film, she is charming in her earnestness and naievete. A pivotal member of the cast was the prolific Austrian actor Oskar Homolka as Chris Halverson, the blustering uncle of Martha Hansen and her three sisters – but, it turns out, the most complex figure in the film. Dunne, Homolka, Corby, and Bel Geddes were nominated for Oscars for this film, and Nicholas Musuraca won the award for black-and-white cinematography. He certainly deserved that for the evocative images of both turn-of-the-century San Francisco and the intimacy of a work-a-day home.
Everything about this film was carefully done. It deals with the most commonplace of issues, but does it with profound insight. The story is a reflection on the resources of the human spirit, presented in a manner that is both uplifting and convincing.
Who’s that knocking?
April 10, 2009
One of my literary disappointments was Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” which I thought was one of the clumsiest works of fiction I had ever read. I came to it sort of in mid life. I read more non-fiction than fiction, but when I finally got around to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” I was enthralled, and I naively thought I’d have a similar experience with “Dracula.” It was not to be. The book is awkwardly written with unnatural dialogue and none of the philosophical depth of Shelley’s work. Of course, the idea that Stoker’s work should have any of those qualities originated only in my own mind, so I suppose I was disappointed more by myself than by the writer.
Maybe it was because of that experience that I find myself on the outside looking in at the current fascination with vampires, especially among young people. Obviously, I’m missing something. NPR this week ran a review by John Powers about a Swedish film “Let the Right One In,” that was intriguing. Powers calls it “the best vampire movie in the last 75 years.” It had only limited release but is now available on DVD, which was the occasion for the review. The principal characters in this film are a 12-year-old boy who is alienated from his parents and rejected – even tormented – by his schoolmates, and his new next-door-neighbor, the lonely girl Eli, who has been 12 years old for the past 200 years. Their mutual isolation draws them together into a relationship that apparently succeeds artistically on several levels.
It was a coincidence that I happened to hear that review, because vampires have been on my mind for several weeks, since we heard Michael Smith give a concert in Morristown. One of the songs he performed that night was “Vampire,” and it’s been churning around in my mind ever since:
Your life’s too short and love is gone too soon
Come with me and fly the dark of moon, the dark of moon,
Life’s not life if you must lose it
Death’s not death if you refuse it
Who can blame you
If you choose the vampire
Forever young
Forever young
Forever
As with most of Michael’s songs, this one means far more when you hear him deliver it – plaintive, chilling, moving.
Excuse me. I think I hear someone at the door.
Michael Smith’s lyrics: http://www.artistsofnote.com/michael/lyrics/vampire.shtml
NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102909283&ft=1&f=1008
“The pipes, the pipes are calling”
April 8, 2009
DANNY THOMAS
The Los Angeles Times is reporting today that of the 71 scripted pilots that are contending for spots on the broadcast schedules of five TV networks, 33 are half-hour comedies. The television industry evidently thinks we need a good laugh. How many good laughs we’ll actually get remains to be seen. The kind of writing that has characterized shows like “Taxi,” “Seinfeld,” “Frasier,” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” is hard to come by, and many television series are obvious at best and vacuous at worst. I wonder if folks more than 50 years from now will enjoy re-runs of “Surviving Suburbia” the way they do re-runs of “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners.” In fact, I wonder if folks next week will watch an original episode of “Suburbia.” Chuck Barney, writing in the San Jose Mercury News, said it for me: It’s not that this is a horrible show or even the worse sit-com on ABC. “It’s just that it has no real reason for being. It’s a series that looks and feels like hundreds of other sit-coms, with the same kind of tone, the same forced one-liners and the same ridiculously annoying laugh track.”
Why has television comedy declined so much? It might have something to do with the form. A couple of playwrights have told me that they wouldn’t write sit-coms no matter how much it paid, because they refuse to force a story into a shape predetermined by the schedule of commercials. I wonder if it also has to do with the backgrounds of the producers, writers, and actors, many of whom have grown up in television. I was talking with Marlo Thomas last week about her upcoming appearance at the George Street Playhouse, and that naturally evoked some conversation and even more memories of her father. Danny Thomas had a genius for humor, but he also had a chance to refine his technique in nightclubs, on the radio, and in movies before he ever went before a television camera. He understood comedy – understood that it had to have structure, consistency, and an underlying sympathy – all of which were factors in the success of his own show, “Make Room for Daddy,” and in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” which he later produced.
MARLO THOMAS
Marlo Thomas – who has her own package of insights when it comes to entertaining people – opens at George Street next week in Arthur Laurents’ new play, “New Year’s Eve.” She told me her father used to say, “Do you know what I would have been if I hadn’t been a comedian? A pain in the ass.” “And I think he really meant that in the deepest sense,” she said. “He would have had no outlet. He would have been a butcher driving everybody crazy trying to make jokes about the lamb chops.” That compulsion to be a storyteller – as opposed to the compulsion to fill a half-hour time slot at the expense of some nearly bankrupt auto manufacturer – may have been more at work in those who created television programming during the medium’s first three decades than it is now.
Stand back – there’s nothing to see here.
April 7, 2009
FARRAH FAWCETT
I probably should know better, but I usually have Fox 5 News on while I’m waiting for the nightly “Seinfeld” rerun, and that’s often the source of agita. Last night, for instance, anchor Dari Alexander began a report on the recent illness of actress Farah Fawcett by saying that Fawcett’s friends “deny that she’s at death’s door.” Think about it. What is that – wishful thinking? The story, when Alexander got around to telling it, was that Fawcett’s doctor reported that the actress had been hospitalized because of a blood clot that was a side effect of recent cancer treatment. In fact, producer Craig Nevius did say yesterday that Fawcett was “not at death’s door,” but Nevius wasn’t quoted in the Fox report. (The Fox web site does have a full AP story – with a tasteful lead – on its web site.) Real journalists know the connotation of a word like “deny.” Fawcett isn’t accused of a crime; she’s sick. It might make her feel better if the turkey buzzards weren’t so gleeful about it.
Klavan. Any relation to Cliff?
March 31, 2009
RUSH LIMBAUGH
Andrew Klavan, the fiction writer and journalist, makes an interesting point in his “Limbaugh Challenge” column making the rounds this week. Klavan suggests that many people he characterizes as liberals, who are dismissive of Rush Limbaugh, probably have never listened to Limbaugh’s show and know what he says only through excerpts and sound bites – which Klavan maintains are edited precisely to make Limbaugh sound bad. When I was a fulltime journalist, readers often complained that I was a knee-jerk liberal, and I’ve also heard that complaint a few times with respect to my preaching. Those who made such judgments had never talked to me, and therefore had no way of knowing that I have many views that are hardly liberal. So I have a little context for this discussion from my own experience. I have a little more context from the fact that I have listened to Rush Limbaugh’s show many times, just as I have listened to Michael Savage and Sean Hannity. Truth be told, these fellows and I disagree on many if not most things, but I have found common ground with all of them at one time or another. Moreover, listening to them gets me to at least re-examine some of my own ideas, which I think is Klavan’s point. At the minimum, I suspect that Klavan is correct in his suggestion that people who publicly excoriate Limbaugh have only a cursory idea of what the man thinks and says. Limbaugh deliberately presents himself at times – as Lewis Grossberger once put it – as a “political vaudevillian,” and that makes it easy to simply write him off. But he represents and influences the viewpoints of too many earnest Americans to be dismissed simply as a clown.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-klavan29-2009mar29,0,5456892.story
Got a light?
March 29, 2009
The federal government’s April Fool’s joke on smokers will be the largest increase ever in the tax on tobacco. As of Wednesday, the federal tax on a pack of cigarettes will go from 39 cents to $1.01. There will be comparable increases in the tax on other tobacco products. Not that they’re a cynical lot, but cigarette manufacturers, anticipating that this tax increase will have a negative impact on sales, raised prices a few weeks ago to make up for their expected losses. This is all for a good cause. The government’s object is to raise $33.5 billion over 4 1/2 years to finance an expansion of health insurance for children. Those who campaign to discourage smoking hope this tax increase, particularly in the midst of a recession, will inspire some people to reassess their priorities and give up the habit.
The connection between smoking and health insurance for children may seem obvious, but it is in fact selective. There are plenty of things that are potentially damaging to children’s health – carbon emissions and some fast food, for example – that the government could tax more heavily to finance the insurance program. Tobacco is the most convenient target, because the nation’s significant shift away from smoking has given smokers the aura of lepers; no one will come to their defense. This is hypocritical, because the same government that depends on tobacco as a safe source of revenue, the same government that makes manufacturers warn their customers that the product might be lethal, the same government that bars cigarette advertising from radio and television, in effect sanctions the sale and consumption of tobacco products by not prohibiting them by law. Smoking is a legal activity, but government would rather impose what amounts to a punitive tax on folks who smoke – which doesn’t include me – than make a serious effort to finance health insurance and other necessary programs by eliminating chronic waste in the federal budget.
One of the current brouhahas in San Francisco has to do with the annoying custom – or business practice – known as tipping. The city wants the restaurants in town to either provide health-care coverage for their employees or pay a fee to the city so that the employees can be covered by the universal health-care program. The restaurant owners are suing the city over that issue, but they have a counter proposal: A “tip credit” that would reduce the minumum wage paid to wait staff by the amount they earn in tips. Don’t you love it? The minumum wage in San Francisco is $9.79 an hour, by the way – a far cry from the federal requirement, but hardly the stuff of which fortunes are made.
Tipping is one of my pet peeves. One of the reasons I like visiting Iceland is that tipping isn’t practiced there. Restaurants charge what they need to in order to pay the staff a living wage and still make a profit, and customers don’t follow up a meal by analyzing the quality of the service and the personality and repartee of the server. Civilized people, those Icelanders – although, there is the whole whaling thing.
”Whaddya think? Fifteen percent? Well, he did bring more coffee. OK, what? Eighteen? Twenty?” Just the thing to encourage digestion.
George Weber: Requiescat in pace
March 26, 2009
GEORGE WEBER
Barry Nelson, a fine actor, once gave me an unanticipated lecture about judging other people. I had asked Nelson – in the context of our conversation – whether he felt responsible for the content of films or television shows or plays in which he appeared. I asked him specifically if he would decline to appear in a property if he felt the content was, say, pornographic. Nelson said he would not necessarily decline to appear in a property because of its sexual content and that, in a broader way, he didn’t feel that appearing in a property meant that he was making the writer’s viewpoint his own – or, to put it another way, that he was giving approbation to a viewpoint that the writer had expressed in the script. Nelson didn’t stop there. He went on to caution me that each person has his own needs and has to find his own ways to satisfy them. Not everyone is attractive, Nelson said. Not everyone has good social skills and can draw to himself friends and lovers. Not everyone can easily obtain the intimacy that is a fundamental requirement of a healthy human spirit. What I might reject as pornography, Nelson said, might be providing another person with release or comfort or excitement that he would otherwise live without.
BARRY NELSON
I could have spent the rest of the day debating the definition of pornography and the connection between pornography – in at least some of its definitions – and activity that ranges from degrading human nature to criminal. However, I think Barry Nelson used pornography as his talking point only because I myself had raised it. His broader point about judging other people’ s needs and behavior had the impact I think he intended. That conversation took place many years ago, and it came to mind this week while I was reading about the death of George Weber, the radio newsman who was murdered in his Brooklyn apartment. According to the news accounts, Weber contacted a disturbed teenager via the Internet and offered to pay him $60 to engage in rough sex. The encounter spun out of control, and the teenager, John Katehis, stabbed Weber multiple times. Police say Katehis admitted to that.
My initial reaction was revulsion to the idea that Weber had sought out a teenaged stranger for a sexual thrill. The bare fact, if it is a fact, that he would exploit a boy of that age – never mind one who seems to have had deep-seated problems of his own – is inexcusable. I still think so. But over the past few days, I have been thinking of the loneliness and the compulsion that may have, must have, contributed to this catastrophe in two lives. My moral judgment about decisions that George Weber made doesn’t matter, except to me. Like tens of thousands of other people, I heard George Weber’s lively, good-natured voice many times, never having a reason to wonder about the heart and soul that fed it. If I wonder now, Mr. Nelson, it’s only because I mourn his death and regret whatever emptiness he was trying to fill in his life.
George Weber’s blog: http://georgeweberthenewsguy.blogspot.com/
“Smoke, if ya’ got ’em.”
March 24, 2009
BARBARA EDEN
The Daily Star in Beirut is running an ad on its web site for hookahs and tobacco. If I’m not mistaken, that’s Barbara Eden in the ad. It certainly doesn’t look like any Lebanese women I know. I guess the agency figured that since “I Dream of Jeannie” is still in vogue in the United States – well, it’s one of the series that gets re-run ad nauseam while better ones stay on the shelf – then Barbara would be a good image for this campaign. I’ve been told that my grandmother, Selma Aoun, whom I never met, smoked a hookah, which the Lebanese and Syrians call something like arghille. (I have pictures of my grandmother; she looked more like Salma Hayek than like Barbara Eden.) Another common Arabic term for the water pipe is shisha, which evokes one of the materials a person might smoke in such a device. I have never smoked more than a few cigars, but I have always envied the image of the smoker. Not the crowd I recently saw huddled outside the back door of a restaurant in Morristown, but the thoughtful pose of the Edward R. Murrow. I have always wanted to place a Meerschaum between my teeth during a conversation and nod from behind the blue haze as though to say, “Hmmmmm. I’ll have to see what Spinoza had to say about that.” According to family lore, my grandmother’s arghille had several pipes, so that she could share it with her visitors. I fantasize about getting out that fez I bought at the Moroccan restaurant at Epcot, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and squinting through the smoke at two or three men in dark glasses as we plan the raid on Aqaba. Of course, even if I could sit cross-legged on the floor at my age, I couldn’t get up without assistance.
“Hello, I must be going.”
March 20, 2009
BARACK OBAMA
The television networks are getting impatient with President Obama’s requests for prime time. He’s holding a press conference on Tuesday, and that will mean – among other things – that “American Idol” will have to shift to a Wednesday-Thursday schedule. More than that, the networks will again lose top-dollar revenue that they can never recoup. Doesn’t the economic recovery program apply to them, they ask. I had a fleeting thought that the problem could be solved simply by moving Obama’s prime-time appearances off the major networks; that would separate the men from the boys, as it were, when Neilsen reported how the president did when he was up against Adam Lambert. I’d like to cast the networks as villains in this, but I can see their point even if I don’t think their revenues are more important than a public well informed on what the president is thinking in the present circumstances. I don’t have to balance their books. What concerns me more is that Obama is already overexposed, and the public may get weary of him and stop listening in the same way that it stopped paying attention to the color-coded terrorism alerts from the previous administration. As it is, expectations were unreasonably high when he took office, and the weeks since then have disabused most people from thinking they’ll see postive results overnight or in a week or a month or a year. His live TV appearances – especially following on an administration that avoided such exposure – may still be raising expectations, but that is likely to wear off. I read somewhere today that Obama is considering a series of much shorter appearances – something along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s radio addresses.
That reminds me of the movie “Room Service” and a scene in which Groucho Marx is trying to convince a playwright to go home to Oswego, appealing to the young man to picture his mother waiting by the fireside. “We don’t have a fireside,” the playwright says. “No fireside?” says Groucho. “How do you listen to the president’s speeches?”
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