I'm not one of those people who has seen KING KONG 100 times, or THE WIZARD OF OZ 150 times, or--God forbid--TWILIGHT 7000 times. I have seen many movies multiple times. Great movies, good movies, or movies that just hit you right should be viewed and re-viewed as often as they still uplift, educate, or entertain. I just have never watched any movie on occasions numbering three digits.

I do know, definitely, which movie I've seen more than any other and it is...

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN... which I have seen, at best guess, 30-35 times. Well, it's a great movie!

After that, I'm almost certain the next few on the most-viewed list would all be old horror movies. I am, and have been all my life, a true Monster Kid. So, popping THE WOLF MAN into the electrical machine would be a regular, unsurprising event with me. Even old horror movies I'm not crazy about, like THE MUMMY'S HAND, I've still seen many times.

So let's eliminate the old horror movies. On that basis, which movies have I seen most often? Oh, I dunno. Really. There would be a long list of movies I've seen 10-20 times, but which one or two or so I've seen the most, I cannot say. Here are some likely candidates.

THE GODFATHER

PATTON

DUCK SOUP

TOP HAT

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN

AIRPLANE

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

THE PRODUCERS

BANANAS

HORSE FEATHERS

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE

SUPERMAN (THE MOVIE)

...and probably quite a few more. Kinda wish I'd kept track of the numbers. Oh, well. Gotta go now and rewatch some movies.

FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Fifty Years Ago Today was Saturday, May 4, 1974… no one was saying “May the Fourth Be With You” today because STAR WARS, introducing “the force,” was still three years in the future… An all-female Japanese team reached the top of the Himalayan mountain Manaslu in Nepal, becoming the first women to climb an 8,000 m (26,000 ft) peak…. Cannonade, ridden by jockey Ángel Cordero Jr., won the 1974 Kentucky Derby, the 100th running of the event, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky….

I was living in Louisville at the time, with my girlfriend. We decided that, at least once in our lives, we should experience the Kentucky Derby in person. Unfortunately, we picked this year. The 100th running. The same year that EVERYONE else decided to go.

Seating at the Derby comes in two forms:  the rich folk sit in the stands, like human beings. The lesser peons crowd into the infield, the grassy area within the track itself. Being decidedly lesser, that’s where we were. 

Normally, the crowd in the infield is estimated at about 100,000 people. That’s a lot already, but this year--being the 100th running after all-- the infield crowd was about 250,000. Of which, the girlfriend and I constituted about .000008 percent. Was it crowded in there? Need you ask?

It took us a long time just stumbling around to find a free spot to roost. And “free spot” doesn’t really cover it. We were able to place our picnic blanket on the ground, but had to sit on it squeezed together, with our knees drawn up to our chins. But that’s all right because I spent very little time there. Almost immediately we decided that I’d better hustle off and find us some hot dogs and beer. So off I went. It was much, much later when I returned. Thankfully, I’d been smart enough to make a careful judgment of just where we were in that mass. Still, I wandered a bit.

But we had our yummies as the day’s races proceeded. We couldn’t see a thing from where we were. Horse racing was only an unlikely rumor. Too many heads and bodies between us and the track. 

Pretty soon I figured if we wanted to get a bet down on the Derby, we’d better do it soon because it was going to take a while to get to the betting booth (thankfully this did not require crossing the track and entering the grandstands because temporary booths had been erected in the infield). 

So off I went, and, yeah, it took quite a while. But eventually I reached the booth and … stood in a humongously long line. Ultimately, decades later, the bets were placed and I headed back to our blanket, arriving there just before Derby time. By craning the neck and jumping up and down, I got a millisecond glimpse of a horse’s head zipping along. I’ve always believed that I saw Cannonade, the eventual Derby champ, but I can’t swear to it.

Immediately after the Derby, the infield emptied almost as if by magic. By the time the next, and last, race of the day was run, we had a clear uninterrupted view. Of a race nobody gave a fig about. 

Hey, but we were at the 100th Derby, so…ya hoo. And, no, I didn’t bet on the winner.

Today’s movie, courtesy of cable TV, came from Channel 4, Indianapolis-Bloomington. This station, along with Cincinnati’s Channel 19, were the clear winners of Best Monster Movie Provider, cable TV division.  Channel 4 was the home of long-long-running horror host Sammy Terry, but he held sway generally on Friday nights. For this Saturday we were flying solo with….

THE FROZEN DEAD

Yessir, a Nazi zombie movie. Probably the first of breed. And didn’t it spawn such a lovely lineage??

Ladies and Gentlemen! Presenting Dana Andrews, shining star of the silver screen, hero of  LAURA and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES in his newest, greatest  screen sensation--THE FROZEN DEAD!! 

Well, I mean…Joseph Cotten went from CITIZEN KANE to LADY FRANKENSTEIN. Henry Fonda from YOUNG MR. LINCOLN to TENTACLES. John Carradine went from GRAPES OF WRATH to..well, you pick ‘em.

I did meet Dana Andrews once…but that’s a story for another day. Eat your heart out, peasants..

Honestly, I have zero--as in ZERO--memory of watching this movie that night. It was on Channel 4, I definitely would have tuned in, and I did enter it on my glorious list of monster-movies-seen. So, yeah, I watched it. And, no, I don’t remember it. So this is either going to stir long-frozen memories, or, more likely, it’s going to seem like a true first-time watch. Ooooh, exciting. Let’s find out.

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Dana’s scientific wonder is called “Instant Freeze”.  Hmm, I sense commercial possibilities…

A question more likely for a refrigerator commercial than for a horror film: “What of your recent defrosting successes.”...

Dana’s assistant, Karl, is a master of laboratory busy work. Nothing needs to be done, but there’s just so much to do! …

Aside from the unavoidable frozen Nazis idea, some of the science sounds almost credible…

How does Anna Palk (who dat?) rate top billing with Dana Andrews?  Did they think she was about to blossom into another Julie Christie? Was she somebody’s girlfriend? I dunno. I mean she’s not a bad actress and she’s quite pretty but still…

Gee, do ladies really wear push-up bras to bed? How cinematically thoughtful of them…

The movie actually gets off to a moderately interesting start, but about 25 minutes in it assumes a snail’s pace and never really recovers…

The detached arms hanging on the wall are less an homage to Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST than an insult to that classic wonder…By the way, I once played an arm sticking out from a wall. Well, I guess my arm played the arm, but… Another story for another day…

Between this and BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE, we now have proof positive that all living, severed heads have telepathic powers. W.H. Donovan didn't even need a whole head…

The American doctor is a surprisingly willing accomplice. And really terrible at keeping a secret. And not much of an actor. And he looks less like a romantic lead than Eb from GREEN ACRES…

I’ll grant you, though, that the pale blue head in a box is genuinely kind of creepy…

For your horror film bingo card:  living head

  Nazi zombies

  Evil lab assistant named Karl

Overall, it’s not a good movie (SURPRISE!!), but it’s also better than expected. Certainly better than it has any earthly right to be. And that IS a surprise. Still--not good.

 

Standing desks? Standing…desks…? I don’t get it. It’s always been so clear to me that the best thing about a desk job--maybe the only good thing about a desk job--is that you can SIT DOWN!

So…standing desks. What the what? What’s going on here? What the hell is wrong with people? HEY! SIDDOWN!

Take a load off, fer cryin’ out loud. I’m gettin’ tired just looking at ya.

 

A quick follow-up to the last post in which I revealed how little notice I take of movie music...

I just read a comment elsewhere in which it was stated that OPPENHEIMER had a "wall-to-wall" music score, that it was a movie with barely a single unscored moment. I'm assuming that's true.

But I have to admit, I didn't notice any music at all. I did see OPPENHEIMER, in a theater, with speakers blaring. I didn't fall asleep, didn't take a bathroom break, was attentive and relatively entertained throughout.

But if you'd told me that OPPENHEIMER had NO music score whatever...I'd have believed you. I genuinely did not notice a single note of music in the movie.

I guess this is on me, but maybe Ludwig Goransson or Christopher Nolan should shoulder some of the responsibility too.

ME AND THE MUSIC OF THE MOVIES

Basically, it's wasted on me.

I'm not good with movie scores, to put it mildly. 90% of the time I don't even notice that the

movie has music at all. Occasionally, a brief segment will make aware of the score, but

usually these are negative moments. It's either, "wow, that music doesn't fit what's on screen,"

or, even worse, "good lord who wrote that lousy music and why does it exist?"

Occasionally, the music is so powerful that it's undeniable: PSYCHO, 2001: A SPACE

ODYSSEY, ROCKY, some others.

But most of the time, it just slides right past me as if it wasn't even there.

So, of course, I recently took a YouTube "Identify the Movie by Its Music" quiz. Of course

I did.

60 movies were included in the quiz and I had seen every one of them. I identified exactly

13 by the music sampled. That was actually better than I'd expected, but, truth be told, the

quiz included some particularly famous or memorable themes.

These are the titles I got: JAWS, JAMES BOND THEME, TITANIC, ROCKY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, GHOSTBUSTERS, PSYCHO, EXORCIST, GODFATHER,

HALLOWEEN, BRAVEHEART, THE THIRD MAN, THE SEARCHERS.

Here, plucked from a long list, are a few I did NOT get:

     STAR WARS (after listening to about one second of music, I shouted, “SUPERMAN!”

Of course I quickly recognized my error, but too late. I got it wrong)

    THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY (knew it was a spaghetti western, guessed

the wrong one.)

    SHREK

    INCEPTION

    HARRY POTTER

    HUNGER GAMES

    LORD OF THE RINGS

    AVATAR

    UP

    and to my eternal shame, THE SHINING.

I also didn’t get DR. STRANGELOVE, but I don’t count it against myself because

it was a cheat. They played a rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, a

song which is definitely integral to STRANGELOVE, but the version they played was

not from the movie and had a much different sound.

And, possibly worst of all, I half-heartedly guessed that the SCHINDLER’S LIST

music was actually from…YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.

So sue me.

 Entering this year I decided I needed to read more books by female authors. When I actually considered  the situation, I realized that, apart from a zillion Agatha Christies, I'd read very few books written by women. Surely less than 10% of all books read, maybe less than 5%, were by women. And so far this year, I've made a decent dent in the problem. A Jane Austen here, a George Eliot there, a great novel by Maggie O'Farrell, and a few others. Not bad.

But now I'm thinking that I need to read more western novels. As in, you know, cowboys and Indians and bad guys stuff.  I can only remember reading 5 westerns ever, though I might be forgetting one or two. And the average quality of those 5 is extremely high.

The least of them is BLAZING GUNS ON THE CHISHOLM TRAIL by Borden Chase. It's actually quite good, and was the basis for the classic film RED RIVER. But still, good as it is, it's the least of this small selection I've read.

Next would be SHANE by Jack Schaefer. Another excellent novel which spawned an even better movie.

The last three I hesitate to separate or rank in any way. All three are superb. Classics. They are...

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.  Powerful, beautiful, and so damn depressing. Seed for yet another great movie.

TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis. This one gave us two terrific movies, both of which were smart enough to retain much of Portis's dialogue. 

LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry. This could "only" lead to a TV miniseries, but that was the right way to go. There's a lot of story in these 1000+ pages.

All these are great. I think TRUE GRIT and LONESOME DOVE, at least, are among the very best novels--of any type--that I've ever read.

So, yeah, based on this history, I should read more westerns. Unfortunately, the preponderance of male authors is probably more dominant in this genre than any other so I may have to double up on the Jane Austen to balance things.

 Here we have this month's candidate for Greatest Movie Close-Up Ever.

Of course, it helps a great deal that Bogie's close-up follows immediately after this...

 

Here's a scoop for you-- Stephen King has written a lot of books!  I know! Who would have guessed?

Just how many he's written is not so clear. He's written, or co-written, 63 novels. I think. And he has several short story collections, a couple of non-fictions, other stuff. It's the other stuff that brings some questions.

I mean...CREEPSHOW? Is that a book? He did some rewriting on THE GUNSLINGER after it was first published, so does that make it two books?  For that matter, does THE STAND count as one, two, or maybe even three books?  Of course, CHARLIE THE CHOO-CHOO is a big ol' bucket of arguments.

But my count, which is the only one that matters to me, is that Stephen King has written 83 books, total. You can have your own number, but I'm going with 83.

Just a couple of days ago, I finally finished reading THE DARK TOWER saga, by conquering, uhh, THE DARK TOWER. 

Of course, King has another book (a short story collection), coming in the Spring and I'll read it right away. I mean, now that I've conquered the mountain top, I don't care to be knocked off.

I'm not going to get into best and worst and suchlike. Not now. Maybe later. For now, I'll just bask in the glory of having read all them big ol' books.

And thank you, Mr. King.