Late in 2013 our tour of SISTER ACT: THE MUSICAL spent a week or two in Las Vegas.  One of our backstage dressers (wardrobe people) there in Sin City was a tiny, giggly, little old lady (“old” meaning that she was probably several years younger than I am right now.) She always smiled and said ‘hi’ but I had little to do with her.

Then one night (October 20, 2013 to be really painfully exact), she came up to me backstage and said (actual direct quote): “I worked with Joe Maher at Manhattan Theater Club years ago. I thought he was wonderful and I think you’re wonderful too.” Then she patted me on the shoulder, smiled and walked away. 

Uhhh…………..what?

This seemed maybe the strangest thing anyone had ever in my life said to me. What on earth did it mean? What possessed her to say it? I knew that Joe Maher was an actor, but … so what? Tom Cruise was also an actor. As was Tom Hanks. And Henry Fonda. And Henry Irving for that matter. What the whaaaaat? I was utterly mystified. It occurred to me--swear to God it did--that the little lady might actually be cracked.

Then, many weeks later, long after we’d escaped Las Vegas and long after I’d forgotten the dresser’s comment, it popped into my head, a flash out of the blue. --  In the movie SISTER ACT, Joe Maher had played the same role I was playing on tour. 

Oh. Okay. Now I get it. Thanks, little not-that-old lady, you’re wonderful too.

BOND-A-THON: Reality or Good Intention?

My plan for this year--and you know how it goes with plans--anyway, my hopeful plan is to rewatch all the James Bond films in chronological order. Of course, it's now mid-June and I haven't started this, still hope springs eternal, ya know. I’ve done this once before a few years back and I think it’s time for a revisit and a reappraisal.

I’m a big Bond fan, have been since 1964 when GOLDFINGER dazzled me on the big screen, and I’ve seen all the films multiple times except for SKYFALL and SPECTRE which I’ve seen only once each. Definitely time to watch those again.

The listing below shows my own current ranking of all 25 of the 007 movies. I feel confident in the top few and the bottom few, but the 15-20 in the middle will probably see some shuffling about after I take another look. 

You will note, if you care to, that I’ve slotted the two non-canonical Bond films off to the side where they would fit into the ranking were they included. And yes, I’ll be rewatching those two as well.

I dearly love me some Bond and a series rewatch will be a genuine pleasure. With maybe a couple of dips in the journey.

BOND FILMS RANKED

1. GOLDFINGER

2. CASINO ROYALE

3. SKYFALL

4. DR. NO

5. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

6. LICENSE TO KILL

7. GOLDENEYE

8. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

9. NO TIME TO DIE

10. THUNDERBALL

11. TOMORROW NEVER DIES

12. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

13. ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

14. OCTOPUSSY

15. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

16. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

17. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

18. SPECTRE

19. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

20. LIVE AND LET DIE

21. QUANTUM OF SOLACE

21.5.  NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN

22. A VIEW TO A KILL

23. DIE ANOTHER DAY

23.5. CASINO ROYALE

24. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

25. MOONRAKER

It looks to me that the breaking point in the list can be found around number 17, THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. Movies 1-16 are all movies which I kinda love, to one degree or another. From #18 down, we find movies which range from “okay but disappointing” to “lousy”.  THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS could fall either way. I’ll let you know after I’ve watched it again.

                                                           FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Fifty Years Ago Today was Saturday, June 9, 1973 … The Belmont Stakes run today proved to be one of the most astonishing events in sports history as Secretariat won the Triple Crown by beating his world-class rivals by an almost supernatural 31 lengths… 

British writer John Creasey died in England. He wrote crime, science fiction, westerns, and romance. In all he produced over 600 novels under 28 different pseudonyms…

Fright Night on Channel 41 offered up a fun double feature this night—KILLERS FROM SPACE and NIGHT MONSTER. But they were both movies I’d seen before and enjoyed. Matter of fact my memories of the first viewings of both of them were fond indeed. 

I’d seen KILLERS FROM SPACE after school on the 4pm movie when I was 10 years old so how could I not love it? NIGHT MONSTER had come to me in 1962 on a Saturday night Shock Theater. My mother, brother, and I had watched Shock every Saturday throughout that year so, again, how could I not love it?

But I’d seen both of those (and I may have watched them again tonight, can’t remember), so my movie of the day came elsewhere.

Today’s movie was sort of a white whale for me. A teeny, puny, underweight  white whale, but still… Here’s how that came about…

When I was a kid, we had a local movie theater called The LeRose. It was a last-run sort of place which featured recent releases on their last legs and lots of fillers from the back catalog, whatever rented cheap. At the LeRose, from 1960-1963, I saw dozens and dozens of movies. Some westerns, some teenage rebellion flicks but mostly sci-fi and horror, tons of ‘em. Bright colorful new things like the early Hammer classics and plenty of those grainy, black-and-white, fun-in-spite-of-themselves sci-fi and monster epics from the ‘50s. It was great.

But not always great, I guess. Because there was a much too long break in the midst of my attendance years and I missed lots of movies I’d have love to have seen. There are a couple of possible reasons for that long-ago, months-long absence from the bijou. But…too long, too boring, not going into it now.

In November of 1960, I was a 10-year-old 5th grader at Ingramville Elementary School and I was smack in the middle of my strange hiatus from the LeRose. I’m gonna guess it was November 7 or 8, when my good friend from 6th grade, Steve, stopped me in the school hallway with exciting news.

There was a mouth-watering triple feature scheduled for the LeRose on the coming Saturday. Surely, he thought, I’d be first in line for such a three-headed wonder.  Steve was clearly excited as he told me about it. And it did sound great. It sounded like, very likely, the greatest triple feature in the history of movies. Showing that Saturday afternoon would be KING KONG, THE WASP WOMAN, and BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE.

I was still pretty new to the world of monster movies at age 10, but I knew that KING KONG was a really big deal. The other two were unfamiliar to me but those titles certainly sounded like the real deals. 

So, yeah, I should have been all over this but, for the undisclosed reasons mentioned above, I told Steve, “No, I can’t go.” Or something like that.

Steve was understandably dumbfounded. How could a monster loving kid resist such treasures? How could anyone resist them for that matter? He tried, Steve did, to lead me to the righteous path, to make clear to me that this was an unmissable matinee. And he was right, of course, but I was not to be swayed. He didn’t understand and, frankly, I really didn’t either, but that’s the way it went. 

Steve went to the triple feature that Saturday. I didn’t. I would catch up to KING KONG on the late show about six months later. It would take me about another six years to reel in THE WASP WOMAN. But the third movie I wouldn’t get to see until, yes…FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY!

On this day, Channel 32’s late movie gave me, finally, a chance to see …

BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE

And what did I think of my white whale that night? Well, it had certainly gone gray. I found it boring, cheap, insubstantial, and with almost no meat on it for a growing Monster Kid. I saw the movie a couple more times over the years and it didn’t get better. But maybe this time will be different.

——————————————————————————————-

Despite the fact that I am in the front guard of the Legion of Colorization Haters, I watched this in a colorized version this time. I didn’t feel good about it but there was a reason. Every time I’d seen BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE it looked so washed-out, so fuzzy, that it was often tough to even make out what I was seeing. So I thought maybe the colorization, however evil, might at least make things easier to see…

Right away, I notice that the dialogue is actually pretty good. Surprisingly crisp and natural…

After an opening ten-plus minutes of no BEAST, and no sign of a HAUNTED CAVE or a HAUNTED anything, the LeRose audience of which I was not a part probably got a mite fidgety…

It’s weird how the colorization makes genuine, beautiful locations look like oversized soundstage sets…

The colorization, by the by, she’s no good. It is amusing that faces frequently flip from pink to yellow with no notice…

One of the bad guy’s henchmen is always eating something. I know that trick well—a character trait which is a shortcut substitute for an actual character…

All that deep, genuine snow must have made filming difficult, especially on what was probably a 6-day shoot…

The BEAST, when we finally see it, is both laughably cheap and makeshift, and also kinda creepy at times…

I’m sure the snow made it tough, and the colorization probably didn’t help, but the day-for-night stuff here is ludicrously bad…

I just realized why this story seemed to fresh and familiar to me. I just saw THUNDER OVER HAWAII (aka NAKED PARADISE) a few days ago, and this is the exact same story, just subbing snow for sun and sea. Even some of the dialogue is direct from the other movie…

The kitchen and other interiors of the cabin couldn’t possibly fit into the cute mountain hideaway we see from the outside…

                     Here they are sitting around the ol' cabin. Lots of sitting around in this one.

The BEAST looks like a mix of mummified corpse, giant spider, and a truckload of asbestos…

Well…it’s cheap and embarrassingly derivative, and has lots of other flaws, but it is very well-directed, pretty well-acted, and has a script which, though simple, is pretty much devoid of howlers. It’s biggest problems are that it’s kinda static and its monster is a wispy thing which is just sort of dropped in on occasion to justify the title. It’s no classic, but it is much better than I’d ever thought it to be. Why, I might even watch it again sometime.

                                                                    Bye Bye, BEAST!

YES, THERE WAS ARITHMETIC IN 1958

One day in 2nd Grade, back when dinosaurs still roamed, Mrs. Callahan threw us into some arithmetic

races. She would call two kids to the front of the room, give each a piece of chalk and call out some

three-digit numbers. “842…184…533” and the two kids would write the numbers in a column on the

blackboard. As soon as the last number was written, the race was on. Whoever could more quickly and

correctly add the numbers was the winner. The loser would go sit in an eight-year’s-old shame, and yes,

that is painful indeed. The winner stayed at the blackboard till defeated.

Early on it became clear that a little girl named Gale (I think) was awfully good at this. She beat

opponent after opponent, most of them quite handily. It seemed that most of her inadequate competitors

were boys. Very quickly the whole ordeal became a fierce boys vs. girls thing, as it so often did in 2nd

Grade. As it too often does throughout life.

And then all the girls were cheering Gale on as if it was the Super Bowl (which didn’t even exist

yet! See how long ago that was?!) The boys mostly just growled and groaned…until they remembered

their not-so-secret weapon, their weapon of math destruction.  Me.

My early years specialties were reading and spelling, but my arithmetic was pretty solid too, and

everybody knew it.

So the boys started calling, “let Rickie do it!”  “Mrs. Callahan, call on Rickie!” Just Rickie Rickie

Rickie all day, all the time. Got to admit--it felt pretty good. 

But Mrs. Callahan was not so easily wooed, and two or three more Rickie-less rounds passed as

Gale continued to vanquish all comers.

Finally, Mrs. Callahan called, “Rickie”, and the boys all cheered. The girls’ chorus went silent.

I stood and--oh, I can’t say that I sauntered to the front of the room. But, yeah, I probably did.

Gale stood at the left side of the blackboard, I stood at the right. We wielded our chalk and waited.

Mrs. Callahan read off the numbers and we hurriedly scrawled them on the board. As soon as the final

number was spoken, the intense, high-speed calculations took off.

I was absolutely flying through the numbers, brain at peak efficiency, fingers moving too fast to be

seen, I was on fire! And Gale beat me without breaking a sweat.

The girls cheered louder than ever, the boys moaned in supreme disappointment. I guarantee that

I did NOT saunter back to my seat. The word “slink” comes to mind.

This was the first of my many life lessons in humility. Thankfully, they never took.