Aug. 14 1988
A week ago (Aug.6) the Banner ran an AP story about yet another chapter in the war between the Yahoos and the principle of the free exchange of ideas. This particular illustration concerns the prior censorship of a movie, with people who are pleased to call themselves Christians battling to keep Universal Studios' "The Last Temptation of Christ" from being released, but we could just as well be dealing with the censorship of books, TV, newspapers, or any other form of expression and communication.
The story centers on a United Methodist preacher, Donald Wildmon, who has achieved a long record of activity designed to prevent us from reading or watching what we want, and tells of this man's efforts to lead a national protest against the film.
His aim is to insure that nobody sees it; some of his allies have gone so far as to try to buy the movie from Universal so that it can be destroyed.
And what is Wildmon's motive? Why is he expending so much of his effort and other people's money? Because he doesn't like the way the Christ is portrayed in the Nikos Kazantzakis novel the film is based on. Apparently Pope Leo's fifth century definition of Christ is wholly Man and wholly God doesn't sit well with Wildmon.
So instead of simply not watching a film he knows will offend him, as most of us would, he wants none of us to see it.
If Wildmon were an anomaly, his efforts would be laughable. But Wildmons are all around us, and they see those who don't think like them as a threat. They see different ideas not as exciting, but as dangerous. They are responsible for the insipid, non-controversial programming on TV because they are organized, and frightened advertisers and program managers listen to them. They are responsible for the fact that text book publishers are afraid to mention "evolution" in biology texts, even though Darwin's theory is the driving force behind all modern biology.
I'm amazed we're allowed to teach that the Earth revolves about the Sun. Surely some organized group must be offended.
What truly galls is the arrogance of the Wildmons of the world. What right does some jerk have to tell me what I can watch, what I can read, what I as a thinking adult can do? Why is he interfering in my life? Where does he get off telling me that his morals are better then mine? That his word-view is more accurate than mine? That his vision of the Golden Light is purer than mine? If this be a Christian, bring on the lions!
If you don't want to watch the movie, Rev. Wildmon, fine. But leave the rest of us alone.
*******
Not all TV programming is insipid. Home Box Office has renewed it's fin "Vietnam War Stories" series with all new episodes, and the first one is a corker, Called "The Fragging," it deals with soldiers in a company who hold their commanding officer responsible for the death of 19 of their number through a series of command blunders. To protect themselves, the soldiers in on platoon agree to "frag," that is, murder the C.O. by throwing a grenade into the latrine while he uses it.
The tale with its twice tragic denouement is tightly written for it's half-hour time slot, using an apparently unrelated sub-plot to bring the story to its climax, and the script is so true-to-life that those of us who were lucky enough to not be there think that this must have been how it was.
The superb acting and compelling, convincing art direction put you right there amidst the tension and fatigue, the drugs, the admirable and the hateful. From the opening service with a scratchy phonograph record playing "Taps," to the realization when they take off their tin pots and combat gear that these are KIDS, to the on-screen death of on o f these kids, the images are superb.
If this one doesn't grab you, nothing will.
Too bad it's 15 years to o late.
The next episode, "Separated," runs Sunday at midnight, so snort some NoDoz or kick-start your VCR. If you missed the first episode, HBO has a habit of re-running its original programming every few months.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
I think in this column my dad realized that he could do more then just write reviews.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Videotape Watching in Bennington
Aug. 7, 1988 (Grandmother abbreviated the month)
Given the larger-than-life appeal of a movie house, why is videotape watching so popular? For one thing, it is cheap. A tape can be watched by the whole family for two bucks or less. In my household of six, the damage for movie-going is $27 for tickets alone.
Secondly, there is the matter of privacy. You can drink beer, smoke black cigars, eat caviar and toast, cuddle and snuggle, and swear at the screen. The pause control allows you to answer any type of call while missing nothing.
And you can watch films you'd be ashamed to be seen viewing in public.
And, in two respects, videotape viewing is better than the theater. You can re-watch favorite or confusing scenes, and , with a HI-FI VCR and a decent stereo system, you can hear superior, more intelligible sound then get at our local theaters.
Best of all, you can watch movies that would otherwise not be available, and you can watch them as often as you like.
The town of Bennington has five rental outlets that are primarily just that, plus several retailers who rent tapes as a sideline. The newest of the former is Picaflic, which re-opened on July 2. That day's Banner has an article about its Phoenix-like return from last year's disastrous Main Street fire. Now located at 215 North Street, owners Joe and Beverly Mancini have some 3,350 titles, all VHS. Base rate for "club members" is $1.99, with price breaks for quantity and for children's tapes.
The "club memberships," by which a customer, for a yearly or part-yearly fee gets discounts on tape rentals, are the bootstraps by which rental stores get the starting-out capital they need. Though these "clubs" are being dropped throughout the country, they are still used in three of Bennington's video stores.
Mr. Mancini says one selling point is that he will have lots of duplicate copies of new released, and he has a good selection of non-movie instructional and self-help tapes. Picaflic also rents and sells equipment.
Bennington Video, owned by Mary Cole, has been around for about four years. According to employee B.J. Mattison, it has about 3,000 titles, and the base rate is $2 per night, with discounts available and with no membership scheme. Bennington Video, located in Monument Shopping Plaza on Northside Drive rents VCRs and is one of the two businesses in town that carry Beta and VHS titles. Mattison says that Bennington Video's tape-buying emphasis is on new releases.
The other Beta-carrying store is Crosstown Video on 209 Northside Drive. Alan and Ron Higgins have been there since October of 1986, and have some 1,100 titles, about 35% of which they have in Beta too. Crosstown's basic rate is $1.25 per night, plus quantity discounts and no "club memberships." Alan Higgins says that he stocks what moves, and that he is served by a distributor who replaces 150 titles every couple of weeks. Crosstown Video rents and sells equipment.
The Video Stop owned by Dana and Joan Woods and Managed by Jennifer Pyne, has been in business for four years, has some 3,500 titles, and is located on Route 67A next to Ames. Pyne says that the store stocks "a little bit of everything," and Dana Woods says his store is especially strong in the children's section and in comedy. My own perusal of the racks shows that The Video Stop has by far the most awesome selection of low-budget horror, monster, space opera, kungfu, and other drive-in style films in town. Basic rate is $2 per night for members, with the usual discounts.
The Video Stop sells and rents equipment, and also sells Nintendo video games.
The Record Rack, on 418 Main Street, has rented videotapes for some five years, adding to an existing business that sells photograph records, audiocassette tapes and Compact Discs. The owner Alden Graves, has some 3,000 titles and, in addition to current releases, has a large collection of foreign and cult films, classics and not-so-classics from the '30's on, silents and musicals. "I refuse to stock only car-chase movies," he says, and he puts a "Recommend" sticker on his personal favorites.
The Record Rack's basic rate for "members" is $1.50 per night, and it rents VCRs only.
And because older films are my bag, and because it is right across the street from where I work, The Record Rack is where I shop.
Mac Rush works in the Banner composing room.
I can't help but wonder what my dad would have thought of both "Redbox" and "Netflix"
Given the larger-than-life appeal of a movie house, why is videotape watching so popular? For one thing, it is cheap. A tape can be watched by the whole family for two bucks or less. In my household of six, the damage for movie-going is $27 for tickets alone.
Secondly, there is the matter of privacy. You can drink beer, smoke black cigars, eat caviar and toast, cuddle and snuggle, and swear at the screen. The pause control allows you to answer any type of call while missing nothing.
And you can watch films you'd be ashamed to be seen viewing in public.
And, in two respects, videotape viewing is better than the theater. You can re-watch favorite or confusing scenes, and , with a HI-FI VCR and a decent stereo system, you can hear superior, more intelligible sound then get at our local theaters.
Best of all, you can watch movies that would otherwise not be available, and you can watch them as often as you like.
The town of Bennington has five rental outlets that are primarily just that, plus several retailers who rent tapes as a sideline. The newest of the former is Picaflic, which re-opened on July 2. That day's Banner has an article about its Phoenix-like return from last year's disastrous Main Street fire. Now located at 215 North Street, owners Joe and Beverly Mancini have some 3,350 titles, all VHS. Base rate for "club members" is $1.99, with price breaks for quantity and for children's tapes.
The "club memberships," by which a customer, for a yearly or part-yearly fee gets discounts on tape rentals, are the bootstraps by which rental stores get the starting-out capital they need. Though these "clubs" are being dropped throughout the country, they are still used in three of Bennington's video stores.
Mr. Mancini says one selling point is that he will have lots of duplicate copies of new released, and he has a good selection of non-movie instructional and self-help tapes. Picaflic also rents and sells equipment.
Bennington Video, owned by Mary Cole, has been around for about four years. According to employee B.J. Mattison, it has about 3,000 titles, and the base rate is $2 per night, with discounts available and with no membership scheme. Bennington Video, located in Monument Shopping Plaza on Northside Drive rents VCRs and is one of the two businesses in town that carry Beta and VHS titles. Mattison says that Bennington Video's tape-buying emphasis is on new releases.
The other Beta-carrying store is Crosstown Video on 209 Northside Drive. Alan and Ron Higgins have been there since October of 1986, and have some 1,100 titles, about 35% of which they have in Beta too. Crosstown's basic rate is $1.25 per night, plus quantity discounts and no "club memberships." Alan Higgins says that he stocks what moves, and that he is served by a distributor who replaces 150 titles every couple of weeks. Crosstown Video rents and sells equipment.
The Video Stop owned by Dana and Joan Woods and Managed by Jennifer Pyne, has been in business for four years, has some 3,500 titles, and is located on Route 67A next to Ames. Pyne says that the store stocks "a little bit of everything," and Dana Woods says his store is especially strong in the children's section and in comedy. My own perusal of the racks shows that The Video Stop has by far the most awesome selection of low-budget horror, monster, space opera, kungfu, and other drive-in style films in town. Basic rate is $2 per night for members, with the usual discounts.
The Video Stop sells and rents equipment, and also sells Nintendo video games.
The Record Rack, on 418 Main Street, has rented videotapes for some five years, adding to an existing business that sells photograph records, audiocassette tapes and Compact Discs. The owner Alden Graves, has some 3,000 titles and, in addition to current releases, has a large collection of foreign and cult films, classics and not-so-classics from the '30's on, silents and musicals. "I refuse to stock only car-chase movies," he says, and he puts a "Recommend" sticker on his personal favorites.
The Record Rack's basic rate for "members" is $1.50 per night, and it rents VCRs only.
And because older films are my bag, and because it is right across the street from where I work, The Record Rack is where I shop.
Mac Rush works in the Banner composing room.
I can't help but wonder what my dad would have thought of both "Redbox" and "Netflix"
Watching Fox Oddballs
July 31, 1988
In its effort to grab an audience share, the Fox network is trying something a little different on prime time Sunday nights, an hour of oddball comedy from 9 p.m. Half of it is pretty good.
The Fox network is not a true network in the sense that ABC, NBC, or CBS are. Rather, it is the television arm of Twentieth Century Fox that sells blocks of in-house made programming to independent stations. Thus far, it offers some 20 hours of programming, all on the weekends, a performance it hopes to improve upon. Albany's WXXA on channel 23 is the local Fox outlet.
Thanks to the writers' strike, more re-runs are being run than usual, and this gives me a chance to catch up on what I missed last season. So the "It's Gary Shandlings's Show" at 9, and "The Tracey Ullman Show" at 9:30 are new to me.
"Gary Shandling" is a lightweight delight, with odd characters and odder scripting that relies primarily on breaking the "fourth wall" to get laughs. "Breaking the fourth wall" means that some cast member leaves the fantasy world of the set and talks directly to the audience; it gets its name from the fact that traditionally a set is made up of three walls, and the fourth is where the audience or the camera lens is.
There is nothing new about leaving the fantasy and talking to the audience, it is as old as drama itself; and Thorton Wilder's 1938 "Our Town" with its on-stage "stage manager" is a fine example of the technique.
Screen examples include silent-era comedians winking or shrugging at us, and those who remember the 1950's "Burns and Allen Show" may recall George Burns talking to us through our TV sets while he watches what is going on in his house on TV.
Shandling is a rugged looking, seamed-faced young man with a comically whiney voice that would grate one's nerves over the long term, but is barely manageable for the half-hour. The show is laid back, easygoing and has pretty good gags ("I think you set you hair-dryer on 'stun'"), but but the bulk of the humor comes from the twists of plot as Shandling does such things as walking off the set to check what's going on on the TV monitors (shades of Burns and Allen) or checking with the script girl to see if his girlfriend Nancy (Molly Cheek) will really be scarred for life in scene four as predicted by a psychic.
An amusing tough in last week's show has a distinguished looking actor coming on stage at the start of the show, carrying a huge numeral "I." He announces that this is the start of scene one, and proceeds to describe what is going to happen in the scene. Of course when Shandling begins to depart from the script, the poor fellow shows up at the wrong time with consecutive numerals in hand, accusing the star of unprofessional conduct.
This show may wear thin after a few viewings, but I've enjoyed the three episodes I've seen thoroughly.
"The Tracy Ullman Show" is also odd, but that's about all it shares with "Shandling". Ullman shows a lot of talent, and that is all. The show consists of a series of little skits in which Ullman plays a lead role, rather as in the old "Carol Burnett Show." But Burnett has a comic genius Ullman lacks, a better cast, and first-class writing. The awful, lazy, Hackneyed scripts in Ullman's show result in moralistic little playlets that are neither entertaining, insightful, nor amusing.
Ullman can do great dialects and can squeeze out a tear when necessary, but she is totally wasted in this mess. With a little imagination and some good writing, the playlet format and the cast could work beautifully, but the two shows I have seen were an embarrassment.
I'll watch more Fox shows in the future, but what I have seen so far is basically a rehash o fold forms, and the innovation is truly slight, at least in these two shows. These two efforts, one lightweighted and amusing, the pathetic, show an unimaginative attitude that bodes ill for the Fox network.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
In its effort to grab an audience share, the Fox network is trying something a little different on prime time Sunday nights, an hour of oddball comedy from 9 p.m. Half of it is pretty good.
The Fox network is not a true network in the sense that ABC, NBC, or CBS are. Rather, it is the television arm of Twentieth Century Fox that sells blocks of in-house made programming to independent stations. Thus far, it offers some 20 hours of programming, all on the weekends, a performance it hopes to improve upon. Albany's WXXA on channel 23 is the local Fox outlet.
Thanks to the writers' strike, more re-runs are being run than usual, and this gives me a chance to catch up on what I missed last season. So the "It's Gary Shandlings's Show" at 9, and "The Tracey Ullman Show" at 9:30 are new to me.
"Gary Shandling" is a lightweight delight, with odd characters and odder scripting that relies primarily on breaking the "fourth wall" to get laughs. "Breaking the fourth wall" means that some cast member leaves the fantasy world of the set and talks directly to the audience; it gets its name from the fact that traditionally a set is made up of three walls, and the fourth is where the audience or the camera lens is.
There is nothing new about leaving the fantasy and talking to the audience, it is as old as drama itself; and Thorton Wilder's 1938 "Our Town" with its on-stage "stage manager" is a fine example of the technique.
Screen examples include silent-era comedians winking or shrugging at us, and those who remember the 1950's "Burns and Allen Show" may recall George Burns talking to us through our TV sets while he watches what is going on in his house on TV.
Shandling is a rugged looking, seamed-faced young man with a comically whiney voice that would grate one's nerves over the long term, but is barely manageable for the half-hour. The show is laid back, easygoing and has pretty good gags ("I think you set you hair-dryer on 'stun'"), but but the bulk of the humor comes from the twists of plot as Shandling does such things as walking off the set to check what's going on on the TV monitors (shades of Burns and Allen) or checking with the script girl to see if his girlfriend Nancy (Molly Cheek) will really be scarred for life in scene four as predicted by a psychic.
An amusing tough in last week's show has a distinguished looking actor coming on stage at the start of the show, carrying a huge numeral "I." He announces that this is the start of scene one, and proceeds to describe what is going to happen in the scene. Of course when Shandling begins to depart from the script, the poor fellow shows up at the wrong time with consecutive numerals in hand, accusing the star of unprofessional conduct.
This show may wear thin after a few viewings, but I've enjoyed the three episodes I've seen thoroughly.
"The Tracy Ullman Show" is also odd, but that's about all it shares with "Shandling". Ullman shows a lot of talent, and that is all. The show consists of a series of little skits in which Ullman plays a lead role, rather as in the old "Carol Burnett Show." But Burnett has a comic genius Ullman lacks, a better cast, and first-class writing. The awful, lazy, Hackneyed scripts in Ullman's show result in moralistic little playlets that are neither entertaining, insightful, nor amusing.
Ullman can do great dialects and can squeeze out a tear when necessary, but she is totally wasted in this mess. With a little imagination and some good writing, the playlet format and the cast could work beautifully, but the two shows I have seen were an embarrassment.
I'll watch more Fox shows in the future, but what I have seen so far is basically a rehash o fold forms, and the innovation is truly slight, at least in these two shows. These two efforts, one lightweighted and amusing, the pathetic, show an unimaginative attitude that bodes ill for the Fox network.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
Watching Sherlock Holmes
July 24, 1988
Sherlock Holmes is a back on Public Broadcasting System's Mystery Theater, and for drama and suspense, this series, "The Return of Sherlock Holmes, " is the most effective hour of nonsense on TV during this summer season of re-runs and sriters' strike.
Nonsense? Certainly. In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle introduced one of the earliest , and certainly most long-lived, private eyes to the world. Holmes, who prefers to call himself an "unofficial consulting detective," has the singular ability to solve crimes that baffle others, including the police and his fictional chronicler, Dr. Watson. And he uses two tools in his pursuit of truth: meticulous observation and inductive reasoning.
One cannot fault the former: the ability to find footprints, to analyse smoking tobacco, to spot the unusual hidden amongst the ordinary, these are qualities we visualize as being essential to the police (or private op) work. The man is an authority on criminal behavior and the detection of such, and thanks to Doyle's convincing portrayal of Holmes as hard-working , hard-studying, totally dedicated expert, we accept this foundation with little problem.
The problem lies in Holmes' use of infallible induction, the idea that one can reason from the particular to the general as a precisely as one can deduce from the general to the particular. Deduction, which is what we did in high school geometry, postulates certain rules of existence and creates propositions from them in a closed, knowable system. All mathematics and logic work in this way.
Induction does the same thing backwards, but because the rules are only partly knowable, and the elements, except for those in front of one's face are unknown, the creation of general propositions is problematic. Science uses inductive reasoning, and is a constant process of theorizing, finding that some observation does not support that theory, and then refining the theory, or coming up with another. "Conjecture and Refutation" is what Carl Popper calls science in his book of the same name, and Homes' conceit that such reasoning will lead to irrefutable conclusions is just plain wrong.
What confuses the Holmes reader is that Holmes often calls "induction" "deduction," and when things go wrong, he blames himself for not thinking of possibilities that we know are infinite. In "A Study in Scarlet," Holmes states that "From a drop of water,...a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it." Well, perhaps one could infer the possibility of it, but the Truth of an Atlantic or a Niagara cannot be inferred, it must be observed.
So given the false premise upon which the Homes tales are based, what is their appeal? It has to be plot and character, and it has to be that the false theme is so appealingly written that it doesn't matter that it is nonsense.
How's that for inductive reasoning?
Sherlock Holmes has been on the screen at least since 1903, but it wasn't 'till the sound era that he came into his own, and not until the 1939remake of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," starring Basil Rathbone as Homes, was the character truly defined for the screen. Unfortunately the Rathbone series, featuring the wonderful Nigel Bruce as Watson, portrayed Watson as a bumbling idiot, hardly the sort of person to chronicle Holmes' adventures.
In 1984, England's Granada TV started a series of one-hour adventures, and that is what PBS's Mystery Theater is showing now. Homes fans, and those who don't know him at all, will not be disappointed. The Victorian era of rich and poor, of elegance and squalor, of the traditional and the modern, is nicely captured. The production values, the use of camera and lighting, are more like those of cinema than of TV series. The series looks lush and expensive.
And the characters, ah, what characters. Jeremy Brett plays the title protagonist with a delicacy and a humanity denied Rathbone's Holmes. Rathbone is less sympathetic and more brusque, perhaps more correct to Doyle's original, but such a man unrelentingly cerebral and impossibly cruel, comes across the printed page better than the screen. Brett's character is also cruel, but he can regret, at least for an instant, his thoughtlessness to his fellows. In other respects, he is all you'd expect: austere, tall, clever-minded, a master at what he does.
Edward Hardwicke, who was not a member of the original cast of this series, brings intelligence and common sense to his Watson. No fool he, he simply lacks the ability to observe and induce as Holmes does.
And what truly brings the shows together, aside from fine plotlines and decent puzzles is the relationship between these two friends, for friends they are. Holmes guides Watson through his own specialty as a good teacher would guide a student, but Watson is Holmes' connection with the rest of the world, including us.
Mystery Theater plays on Thursday Evening at 9 p.m. on WMHT Ch. 17, and Vermont ETV, Ch. 79, and at 3 p.m. Sunday on Ch. 13.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
Sherlock Holmes is a back on Public Broadcasting System's Mystery Theater, and for drama and suspense, this series, "The Return of Sherlock Holmes, " is the most effective hour of nonsense on TV during this summer season of re-runs and sriters' strike.
Nonsense? Certainly. In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle introduced one of the earliest , and certainly most long-lived, private eyes to the world. Holmes, who prefers to call himself an "unofficial consulting detective," has the singular ability to solve crimes that baffle others, including the police and his fictional chronicler, Dr. Watson. And he uses two tools in his pursuit of truth: meticulous observation and inductive reasoning.
One cannot fault the former: the ability to find footprints, to analyse smoking tobacco, to spot the unusual hidden amongst the ordinary, these are qualities we visualize as being essential to the police (or private op) work. The man is an authority on criminal behavior and the detection of such, and thanks to Doyle's convincing portrayal of Holmes as hard-working , hard-studying, totally dedicated expert, we accept this foundation with little problem.
The problem lies in Holmes' use of infallible induction, the idea that one can reason from the particular to the general as a precisely as one can deduce from the general to the particular. Deduction, which is what we did in high school geometry, postulates certain rules of existence and creates propositions from them in a closed, knowable system. All mathematics and logic work in this way.
Induction does the same thing backwards, but because the rules are only partly knowable, and the elements, except for those in front of one's face are unknown, the creation of general propositions is problematic. Science uses inductive reasoning, and is a constant process of theorizing, finding that some observation does not support that theory, and then refining the theory, or coming up with another. "Conjecture and Refutation" is what Carl Popper calls science in his book of the same name, and Homes' conceit that such reasoning will lead to irrefutable conclusions is just plain wrong.
What confuses the Holmes reader is that Holmes often calls "induction" "deduction," and when things go wrong, he blames himself for not thinking of possibilities that we know are infinite. In "A Study in Scarlet," Holmes states that "From a drop of water,...a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it." Well, perhaps one could infer the possibility of it, but the Truth of an Atlantic or a Niagara cannot be inferred, it must be observed.
So given the false premise upon which the Homes tales are based, what is their appeal? It has to be plot and character, and it has to be that the false theme is so appealingly written that it doesn't matter that it is nonsense.
How's that for inductive reasoning?
Sherlock Holmes has been on the screen at least since 1903, but it wasn't 'till the sound era that he came into his own, and not until the 1939remake of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," starring Basil Rathbone as Homes, was the character truly defined for the screen. Unfortunately the Rathbone series, featuring the wonderful Nigel Bruce as Watson, portrayed Watson as a bumbling idiot, hardly the sort of person to chronicle Holmes' adventures.
In 1984, England's Granada TV started a series of one-hour adventures, and that is what PBS's Mystery Theater is showing now. Homes fans, and those who don't know him at all, will not be disappointed. The Victorian era of rich and poor, of elegance and squalor, of the traditional and the modern, is nicely captured. The production values, the use of camera and lighting, are more like those of cinema than of TV series. The series looks lush and expensive.
And the characters, ah, what characters. Jeremy Brett plays the title protagonist with a delicacy and a humanity denied Rathbone's Holmes. Rathbone is less sympathetic and more brusque, perhaps more correct to Doyle's original, but such a man unrelentingly cerebral and impossibly cruel, comes across the printed page better than the screen. Brett's character is also cruel, but he can regret, at least for an instant, his thoughtlessness to his fellows. In other respects, he is all you'd expect: austere, tall, clever-minded, a master at what he does.
Edward Hardwicke, who was not a member of the original cast of this series, brings intelligence and common sense to his Watson. No fool he, he simply lacks the ability to observe and induce as Holmes does.
And what truly brings the shows together, aside from fine plotlines and decent puzzles is the relationship between these two friends, for friends they are. Holmes guides Watson through his own specialty as a good teacher would guide a student, but Watson is Holmes' connection with the rest of the world, including us.
Mystery Theater plays on Thursday Evening at 9 p.m. on WMHT Ch. 17, and Vermont ETV, Ch. 79, and at 3 p.m. Sunday on Ch. 13.
Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Missing Flicks
July 3, 1988
A theater may be the best place to watch a movie, but of the tens of thousands of films released over the past 80 years, only a tiny portion are available to local movie houses.
For that matter, local theaters show only a portion of the movies available in a current year, and there are two reasons for this. The first is simply that more movies are made than can be shown and the second is a consequence of the economics of the movie business
Why is it that Woody Allen's "Radio Days," a major and important movie, never made it to Bennington while we are knee-deep in "Superman" and "Friday the Thirteenth" sequels? The reason is that theater owners and managers cannot select what plays in the own businesses. These people are at the mercy of the distributors, the owners of the films. And the distributors call the shots as to scheduling and price.
If a theater wants "Radio Days," the distributor may say, fine, but you have to run it for six weeks. A theater in a large with its large potential audience may easily handle such a deal. But the local manager , who through often sad experience, knows his clientele, may realize that though he could make money the first week, the audience for the this movie would peter out after that . Since he cannot survive by losing money five weeks out of six, he opts for the mass market films wit an assured audience.
The Images theater in Williamstown has more flexibility in scheduling because, not being a first-run house, it can rent films for a few days long after demand in the first run theaters has slackened.
A second problem is that some movies are only distributed regionally. For example, many low-budget exploitation and horror flicks are distributed specifically for the southern U.S. drive-in trade, especially in Texas and southern California. We never see these films, not even in the big cities.
Foreign and "art" movies are never distributed any place except big cities, due to the tiny audience for such films.
And finally, unlike the situation in France, movies in the U.S. are released and then they disappear. In fact, until the mid 1930's, movies were routinely thrown away after a theatrical release to save money on storage - and I'm talking about master negative and all! Except for special cases like "Gone With the Wind" and various Disney classics, most movies are never rereleased, and for good reason: if the theaters were filled with old movies, the market for making new movies would diminish.
So unless one were president or Howard Hughes, a film fan had to settle for the poor quality, terrible sounding 16 millimeter prints in church parishes, or put oneself at the mercy of the local TV station manager, who would think nothing of slicing out essential scenes to fit in yet another commercial.
But the last decade has brought the maturing of two technical and marketing miracles, pay TV, and pre-recorded videocassettes.
And videocassette renting, with an overview of local rental outlets, is the topic of next week's column.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
Does anyone get the idea that my dad was a movie buff?
A theater may be the best place to watch a movie, but of the tens of thousands of films released over the past 80 years, only a tiny portion are available to local movie houses.
For that matter, local theaters show only a portion of the movies available in a current year, and there are two reasons for this. The first is simply that more movies are made than can be shown and the second is a consequence of the economics of the movie business
Why is it that Woody Allen's "Radio Days," a major and important movie, never made it to Bennington while we are knee-deep in "Superman" and "Friday the Thirteenth" sequels? The reason is that theater owners and managers cannot select what plays in the own businesses. These people are at the mercy of the distributors, the owners of the films. And the distributors call the shots as to scheduling and price.
If a theater wants "Radio Days," the distributor may say, fine, but you have to run it for six weeks. A theater in a large with its large potential audience may easily handle such a deal. But the local manager , who through often sad experience, knows his clientele, may realize that though he could make money the first week, the audience for the this movie would peter out after that . Since he cannot survive by losing money five weeks out of six, he opts for the mass market films wit an assured audience.
The Images theater in Williamstown has more flexibility in scheduling because, not being a first-run house, it can rent films for a few days long after demand in the first run theaters has slackened.
A second problem is that some movies are only distributed regionally. For example, many low-budget exploitation and horror flicks are distributed specifically for the southern U.S. drive-in trade, especially in Texas and southern California. We never see these films, not even in the big cities.
Foreign and "art" movies are never distributed any place except big cities, due to the tiny audience for such films.
And finally, unlike the situation in France, movies in the U.S. are released and then they disappear. In fact, until the mid 1930's, movies were routinely thrown away after a theatrical release to save money on storage - and I'm talking about master negative and all! Except for special cases like "Gone With the Wind" and various Disney classics, most movies are never rereleased, and for good reason: if the theaters were filled with old movies, the market for making new movies would diminish.
So unless one were president or Howard Hughes, a film fan had to settle for the poor quality, terrible sounding 16 millimeter prints in church parishes, or put oneself at the mercy of the local TV station manager, who would think nothing of slicing out essential scenes to fit in yet another commercial.
But the last decade has brought the maturing of two technical and marketing miracles, pay TV, and pre-recorded videocassettes.
And videocassette renting, with an overview of local rental outlets, is the topic of next week's column.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
Does anyone get the idea that my dad was a movie buff?
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Watching Movies
June 26, 1988
"...think I'll skip this movie at the theater and wait for it to come out on tape." How often I've heard that phrase, and how often I've rudely said "Wait a minute..."
There are many reasons why, given a choice, I'll choose a theater over a tape on my VCR, and foremost among them is the quality of the viewing experience. Scale is the most obvious of qualities: when watching entertainment on a screen, bigger is better, and no television set can equal the size or consequent involvement of the movie theater screen. Hand in the hand with this matter of size is that of proportion: movies are shot wider than the screen of your television set.
A TV screen has a ratio of width to height of 4 to 3 which, by strange coincidence, happens to be the "Academy" ratio, the ratio of movie projection from before the sound era to the mass distribution of TV sets in 1953. Having already lost ownership of their theaters to a Supreme Court anti-trust ruling, the movie studios responded to the new threat with the wide screen: first with the cumbersome three-camera three-projector Cinerama and then with the more practical Cinemascope and its clones. Movies shot in Cinemascope have a width to height ratio of 7 to 3, and the idea was that the image would extend to our peripheral vision, so the image does not seem cut off on the sides, and that by combining the resulting total visual experience along with stereophonic sound, the theaters of the day could compete effectively with television.
What actually happened was that screens were made shorter to accommodate the new proportions, audiences sat father away so the could see the entire picture without having to twist their necks like tennis fans, and the studios and theaters went into decline anyway.
The result for TV watchers is that most movies made since 1953 do not fit their television screens.
Broadcasters and those who transfer film to tape handle this problem in one of two ways. The rarer, in the United States, is "letterboxing," putting the entire image on the screen with a black or neutral gray band above and below the image. Woody Allen's 1979 movie "Manhattan" was transferred to tape this way at Allen's insistence. The advantage of "letterboxing" is that the entire image is on the screen. The disadvantage is that the TV screen has to be large or the "letterboxed" picture seems eyestrainingly small. Also distracting is that the gray bands seem to lighten and darken as the image darkens and lightens.
The other way to "solve" the problem of mismatched proportions is to "scan" each scene, that is transfer only a portion of a scene, left, right, or center, for broadcast or tape in such a way that the TV screen is filled from top to bottom. For most movies, this works fairly well, considering that as much as half the scene is missing. Most directors put the bulk of the action in the center of the frame and what is to the sides is, in every sense, peripheral. But some directors like to use the entire frame, and this is where one can get such weird phenomena as two noses having a dialogue across a wide table, or a character talking to nobody.
Titles at the beginning and end of a film cannot be scanned, so they are squeezed so we will know the full name of the gaffer or best boy, as well as the stars and director. When action takes place during the title display, things look odd, indeed: limousines are of subaru proportions, and people in fur coats resemble pipe cleaners.
The second visual aspect of theater going versus TV watching is that of visual quality, especially the qualities of resolutions and shadow detail. Resolution is simply the fineness of detail one can perceive - do trees have green blobs or leaves, does an actor's hair have merely shape or does it have individual strands. Film is so much better in this respect that there is no comparison.
Finally, you may have noticed that night scenes, which can be very effective on the big screen, are confused and unconvincing on television. This is because in a darkened theater one can easily see the difference between a black background and almost-black objects. The only way to bring up the "almost-black" or "shadow" detail on a TV is to turn down the black level control, or turn up the brightness control. The problem is that now the background is gray, and night scenes lose their impact.
And isn't "impact" what movies are all about? A movie can never achieve the psychological subtlety of a well written novel, not the emotional delights of a stage play, but it can do things other art forms cannot. A movie can seal one of f from realty and provide an emotional and intellectual reality to take its place. It can make one laugh, cry, or feel fear only as reality itself can. But a decent movie requires freedom from the telephone, from chatter, from other visual stimuli that are so distracting around a TV set.
That is why, given a choice, I choose the theater.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
I have to say one of my best memories as a child was being taken to an Alfred Hitchcock triple feature in Adams MA. Dad wanted us to really enjoy the experience and after all, nothing compares to seeing it at the movies.
"...think I'll skip this movie at the theater and wait for it to come out on tape." How often I've heard that phrase, and how often I've rudely said "Wait a minute..."
There are many reasons why, given a choice, I'll choose a theater over a tape on my VCR, and foremost among them is the quality of the viewing experience. Scale is the most obvious of qualities: when watching entertainment on a screen, bigger is better, and no television set can equal the size or consequent involvement of the movie theater screen. Hand in the hand with this matter of size is that of proportion: movies are shot wider than the screen of your television set.
A TV screen has a ratio of width to height of 4 to 3 which, by strange coincidence, happens to be the "Academy" ratio, the ratio of movie projection from before the sound era to the mass distribution of TV sets in 1953. Having already lost ownership of their theaters to a Supreme Court anti-trust ruling, the movie studios responded to the new threat with the wide screen: first with the cumbersome three-camera three-projector Cinerama and then with the more practical Cinemascope and its clones. Movies shot in Cinemascope have a width to height ratio of 7 to 3, and the idea was that the image would extend to our peripheral vision, so the image does not seem cut off on the sides, and that by combining the resulting total visual experience along with stereophonic sound, the theaters of the day could compete effectively with television.
What actually happened was that screens were made shorter to accommodate the new proportions, audiences sat father away so the could see the entire picture without having to twist their necks like tennis fans, and the studios and theaters went into decline anyway.
The result for TV watchers is that most movies made since 1953 do not fit their television screens.
Broadcasters and those who transfer film to tape handle this problem in one of two ways. The rarer, in the United States, is "letterboxing," putting the entire image on the screen with a black or neutral gray band above and below the image. Woody Allen's 1979 movie "Manhattan" was transferred to tape this way at Allen's insistence. The advantage of "letterboxing" is that the entire image is on the screen. The disadvantage is that the TV screen has to be large or the "letterboxed" picture seems eyestrainingly small. Also distracting is that the gray bands seem to lighten and darken as the image darkens and lightens.
The other way to "solve" the problem of mismatched proportions is to "scan" each scene, that is transfer only a portion of a scene, left, right, or center, for broadcast or tape in such a way that the TV screen is filled from top to bottom. For most movies, this works fairly well, considering that as much as half the scene is missing. Most directors put the bulk of the action in the center of the frame and what is to the sides is, in every sense, peripheral. But some directors like to use the entire frame, and this is where one can get such weird phenomena as two noses having a dialogue across a wide table, or a character talking to nobody.
Titles at the beginning and end of a film cannot be scanned, so they are squeezed so we will know the full name of the gaffer or best boy, as well as the stars and director. When action takes place during the title display, things look odd, indeed: limousines are of subaru proportions, and people in fur coats resemble pipe cleaners.
The second visual aspect of theater going versus TV watching is that of visual quality, especially the qualities of resolutions and shadow detail. Resolution is simply the fineness of detail one can perceive - do trees have green blobs or leaves, does an actor's hair have merely shape or does it have individual strands. Film is so much better in this respect that there is no comparison.
Finally, you may have noticed that night scenes, which can be very effective on the big screen, are confused and unconvincing on television. This is because in a darkened theater one can easily see the difference between a black background and almost-black objects. The only way to bring up the "almost-black" or "shadow" detail on a TV is to turn down the black level control, or turn up the brightness control. The problem is that now the background is gray, and night scenes lose their impact.
And isn't "impact" what movies are all about? A movie can never achieve the psychological subtlety of a well written novel, not the emotional delights of a stage play, but it can do things other art forms cannot. A movie can seal one of f from realty and provide an emotional and intellectual reality to take its place. It can make one laugh, cry, or feel fear only as reality itself can. But a decent movie requires freedom from the telephone, from chatter, from other visual stimuli that are so distracting around a TV set.
That is why, given a choice, I choose the theater.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
I have to say one of my best memories as a child was being taken to an Alfred Hitchcock triple feature in Adams MA. Dad wanted us to really enjoy the experience and after all, nothing compares to seeing it at the movies.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Home Cinema Viewing
July 17, 1988 (grandmother accidentally dated this one "1888")
The most unexpected result of the marketing of the videocassette recorder has to be the rise of the home movie viewing industry, and of the 27,000 videotape rental businesses that have given a new generation of entrepreneurs a shot at the American Dream.
The home videocassette recorder, commonly known as the VCR, was not intended on it's introduction to be a medium for watching movies at all; that honor was to go to the videodisc, the video equivalent of the phonograph record. The movie industry and U.S. television manufacturers saw the videodisc as ideal: the discs would be strictly a playback format, so the film and TV industries would not be threatened by copyright piracy and time-shifting, and the discs, unlike tapes would be stamped out like cookies, cheaply and quickly.
As a bonus, the film producers would have ultimate control over the sale of their product, and they visualized customers supplementing their movie-house going with large libraries of discs at home.
As we know, it didn't work out as planned. Two discs technologies were actually brought to market in our country, R.C.A.'s Selectavision from the U.S., and Pioneer's Laservision from Japan. Selectavision was an underdeveloped technology, using a needle in a groove in the same way a phonograph record does. The image and sound were of fair quality, but even though the discs were sealed in hard plastic cases when not in use, dust would get in the grooves causing extremely annoying skips, pops, and the repetition of single frames. By the time R.C.A. had solved these problems and had added stereo sound, it had lost half-a-billion bucks and gave up.
Laservision, using, you guessed it, laser technology, had more promise. The laser pickup did not actually touch the disc, so there was no wear. Static free digital sound was later added, and the pictures were sharp and clear and in theory, skip-free. And the discs were still relatively cheap to manufacture, though not so cheap as R.C.A.'s But the players were a thousand dollars, manufacturing problems resulted in huge quantities of defective discs, and although cheaper players are now available, Laservision remains a minor player in the video movie game.Sony of Japan, meanwhile, introduced the Betamax, a machine that could both record and play back sound and images on magnetic tape. The Betamax had a built-in clock so that it could record unattended, and was sold as a "timeshifting" device, that is, a device that allows one to watch TV programs that one would otherwise miss, or to watch two shows that are broadcast at the same time. What Sony didn't count on was that purchasers wanted to tape broadcast movies and that their machines could only record for one hour.
The giant Japanese Victor Company, or J.V.C., already miffed at Sony's "take it or leave it" attitude toward licensing its Betamax system, grabbed the opportunity and announced it's competing Video Home System (VHS) which could record and play for two hours, and was cheaper to manufacture. VHS sales took off and in spite of such innovations as Beta II, Beta Hi-Fi sound, and SuperBeta, Sony's market share dwindled.
With the market ripe for pre-recorded movies, and with the price of VCR's tumbling thanks to the competition between Beta and VHS, the major studios had no choice but to sell videotapes. And then, in what has to be the most bone-headed marketing ploy since the Edsel, they priced their movies at $60 to $80, more then any but the wealthy could afford.
In 1978 a failed businessman named George Atkinson opened a video rental business in Los Angles to serve the non-buying public, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
Just a quick note to add that I've already messed up the order and missed two pages, so I have to back track. Ah well.
Even more amusing then my failure to spot two pages stuck together, I remember the movie discs, we had a machine at home. The lifespan was incredibly short and my dad called it an incredible lack of judgement on his part to not see the potential the VCR would have in the modern market. The first movie we owned was "The Great Muppet Caper". A classic no matter how you chose to view it.
The most unexpected result of the marketing of the videocassette recorder has to be the rise of the home movie viewing industry, and of the 27,000 videotape rental businesses that have given a new generation of entrepreneurs a shot at the American Dream.
The home videocassette recorder, commonly known as the VCR, was not intended on it's introduction to be a medium for watching movies at all; that honor was to go to the videodisc, the video equivalent of the phonograph record. The movie industry and U.S. television manufacturers saw the videodisc as ideal: the discs would be strictly a playback format, so the film and TV industries would not be threatened by copyright piracy and time-shifting, and the discs, unlike tapes would be stamped out like cookies, cheaply and quickly.
As a bonus, the film producers would have ultimate control over the sale of their product, and they visualized customers supplementing their movie-house going with large libraries of discs at home.
As we know, it didn't work out as planned. Two discs technologies were actually brought to market in our country, R.C.A.'s Selectavision from the U.S., and Pioneer's Laservision from Japan. Selectavision was an underdeveloped technology, using a needle in a groove in the same way a phonograph record does. The image and sound were of fair quality, but even though the discs were sealed in hard plastic cases when not in use, dust would get in the grooves causing extremely annoying skips, pops, and the repetition of single frames. By the time R.C.A. had solved these problems and had added stereo sound, it had lost half-a-billion bucks and gave up.
Laservision, using, you guessed it, laser technology, had more promise. The laser pickup did not actually touch the disc, so there was no wear. Static free digital sound was later added, and the pictures were sharp and clear and in theory, skip-free. And the discs were still relatively cheap to manufacture, though not so cheap as R.C.A.'s But the players were a thousand dollars, manufacturing problems resulted in huge quantities of defective discs, and although cheaper players are now available, Laservision remains a minor player in the video movie game.Sony of Japan, meanwhile, introduced the Betamax, a machine that could both record and play back sound and images on magnetic tape. The Betamax had a built-in clock so that it could record unattended, and was sold as a "timeshifting" device, that is, a device that allows one to watch TV programs that one would otherwise miss, or to watch two shows that are broadcast at the same time. What Sony didn't count on was that purchasers wanted to tape broadcast movies and that their machines could only record for one hour.
The giant Japanese Victor Company, or J.V.C., already miffed at Sony's "take it or leave it" attitude toward licensing its Betamax system, grabbed the opportunity and announced it's competing Video Home System (VHS) which could record and play for two hours, and was cheaper to manufacture. VHS sales took off and in spite of such innovations as Beta II, Beta Hi-Fi sound, and SuperBeta, Sony's market share dwindled.
With the market ripe for pre-recorded movies, and with the price of VCR's tumbling thanks to the competition between Beta and VHS, the major studios had no choice but to sell videotapes. And then, in what has to be the most bone-headed marketing ploy since the Edsel, they priced their movies at $60 to $80, more then any but the wealthy could afford.
In 1978 a failed businessman named George Atkinson opened a video rental business in Los Angles to serve the non-buying public, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
Just a quick note to add that I've already messed up the order and missed two pages, so I have to back track. Ah well.
Even more amusing then my failure to spot two pages stuck together, I remember the movie discs, we had a machine at home. The lifespan was incredibly short and my dad called it an incredible lack of judgement on his part to not see the potential the VCR would have in the modern market. The first movie we owned was "The Great Muppet Caper". A classic no matter how you chose to view it.
Watching "Our Century"
Just a side note, the album I'm working out of was put together by my
grandmother Jane Gilbert (Smith) Rush, who carefully saved years worth
of my dad's column. The dates are recorded on each article in her own
handwriting.
July 10,1988
Yes, I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for historical documentaries, from the vapid, though beautifully scored "Victory at Sea" to the voice of doom "World at War." But the Arts and Entertainment Network has introduced such a superb one, judging form the first episode, that I have to postpone my promised column on videotape renting to tell you about it.
"Our Century" is its name, and last Monday's debut was an hour-long history of World War I. As Edward Herrmann, who introduces the show, says, this particular episode was made by French filmmakers in collaboration with the French Ministry of defense, and so the perspective is French. And, as I'll point out, a one hour documentary can hardly do a four year tragedy justice But "Our Century" comes close, thanks to the simplicity and rationality of Jean Claude Dassier's narrative, and especially to the incredible quality and editing of its images.
My sole quibble is that many shots, filmed 70 years ago at speeds slower than the now standard 24 frames-per-second, are projected at modern speed, making the motion too fast.
The battle footage is beautiful in a fascinating, horrifying way. Somehow, dedicated courageous camera operators with their clumsy, hand-cranked machines took wonderful shots of young men living, working, dying and being buried under conditions that would make a trench rat sick. We see the boredom, the action, such innovations as armored wheelbarrows, barbed wire blowing up, soldiers from as far away as Indochina, kites to mark artillery, men entertaining themselves behind the lines because there was no regular leave, and Colonials of all stripes caught up in a slaughter that had no interest for them.
We see body blasting artillery, and the horror of gas that made men die "like flies, choking and vomiting, their throats on fire."
We see the joy of civilian life contrasted with the mind-deadening fatigue of military life.
We see ships blowing up, submarines being hunted, and men helplessly floundering about in the water before going under. We see horses used en mass for the last time after thousands of years of warfare.
And most of all, we see mud. Because if war had any one theme besides blood and rotting flesh, it had to be the insect infested, rat-tracked, clinging, stinking mud.
And when it was over, and it was never over for the grieving and the horribly wounded, we said, "Never again..." for yet another time.
"Our Century" is shown on the Arts & Entertainment network on Monday at 9 p.m. and early Tuesday morning at 1 a.m. Next week's chapter is on the Russian Revolution.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
July 10,1988
Yes, I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for historical documentaries, from the vapid, though beautifully scored "Victory at Sea" to the voice of doom "World at War." But the Arts and Entertainment Network has introduced such a superb one, judging form the first episode, that I have to postpone my promised column on videotape renting to tell you about it.
"Our Century" is its name, and last Monday's debut was an hour-long history of World War I. As Edward Herrmann, who introduces the show, says, this particular episode was made by French filmmakers in collaboration with the French Ministry of defense, and so the perspective is French. And, as I'll point out, a one hour documentary can hardly do a four year tragedy justice But "Our Century" comes close, thanks to the simplicity and rationality of Jean Claude Dassier's narrative, and especially to the incredible quality and editing of its images.
My sole quibble is that many shots, filmed 70 years ago at speeds slower than the now standard 24 frames-per-second, are projected at modern speed, making the motion too fast.
The battle footage is beautiful in a fascinating, horrifying way. Somehow, dedicated courageous camera operators with their clumsy, hand-cranked machines took wonderful shots of young men living, working, dying and being buried under conditions that would make a trench rat sick. We see the boredom, the action, such innovations as armored wheelbarrows, barbed wire blowing up, soldiers from as far away as Indochina, kites to mark artillery, men entertaining themselves behind the lines because there was no regular leave, and Colonials of all stripes caught up in a slaughter that had no interest for them.
We see body blasting artillery, and the horror of gas that made men die "like flies, choking and vomiting, their throats on fire."
We see the joy of civilian life contrasted with the mind-deadening fatigue of military life.
We see ships blowing up, submarines being hunted, and men helplessly floundering about in the water before going under. We see horses used en mass for the last time after thousands of years of warfare.
And most of all, we see mud. Because if war had any one theme besides blood and rotting flesh, it had to be the insect infested, rat-tracked, clinging, stinking mud.
And when it was over, and it was never over for the grieving and the horribly wounded, we said, "Never again..." for yet another time.
"Our Century" is shown on the Arts & Entertainment network on Monday at 9 p.m. and early Tuesday morning at 1 a.m. Next week's chapter is on the Russian Revolution.
Malcolm Rush works in the composing room of the Bennington Banner.
Watching Roy Rogers
June 19, 1988
One of the great pleasures of having cable TV is the opportunity it affords to see the great "B" film heroes of one's childhood, and aside from Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers was my favorite. Born in 1912 as Leonard Slye, Rogers broke into films in 1935, was a star during the late '30's, '40's, '50's and had his own half hour TV show from 1951 to 1956. He still appears on talk shows, especially "Christian" programs, and at 75 is still easily recognizable, unlike his chunky contemporary, Gene Autry.
The "B" Western was the backbone of many small and medium sized studios from the Silent Era through the '50's and heros such as Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Autry and Rogers galloped across our young imaginations, shooting at (but never killing) the bad guys with pistols that never rant out of bullets, harmlessly knocking out tough guys with fists that never bruised, and chastely winning the loving admiration of lovely culotte-wearing equestriennes.
"B" grade movies were the second-billed movies in the days of the double features, and were the low-budget training ground for producers, directors, writers and actors. Many thousands graduated from the "B"s to the "A"s as their careers advanced, but many more stayed and some, Rogers among them, became true stars of the genre.
Rogers' films are contemporary Westerns, Westerns with cattle and rustlers, horse-mounted posses and shootouts, alongside telephones and jeeps, pickup trucks and aircraft. The movies are essentially remakes of each other, with similar plot and theme: the bad guy is cheating his fellow citizens, usually for financial gain, and Rogers saves the situation and rescues the girl. He is usually aided by George (Gabby) Hayes and his backup singing group, The Sons of the Pioneers.
Because, you see, Rogers never mends a fence or punches a cow. Rogers is a singing cowboy, a phenomenon first popularized by Gene Autry.
The direction of the films is workmanlike, the outdoor scenes are really filmed outdoors, the acting is more then fine for the limited, unimaginative scripts, and all these films are extremely watchable, even late at night on commercial channels whose plethora of ads breaks the continuity of the films but is not fatal to them.
The ads are a wonder themselves, usually trying to sell ghastly music collections of country or white gospel sung by people nobody's ever heard of, or absurd small appliances. A nice touch, though, is that Rogers and his wife and sometimes co-star Dale Evans discuss these old movies during the commercial breaks. They discuss the problems of shooting low budget film, his love for Trigger, his horse and companion for 33 years, and their museum which features, among other things, Trigger stuffed.
The films feature overacted villains, superb bar brawls, ghastly "Irish" singing by Hayes and quite good singing by Rogers and his group. But the core of these movies is that Rogers himself. He is handsome, boyish, an athletic moral fellow who makes one recall fondly the all-American hero.
HappyTrails Theatre, which is the program that inclues a movie and Rogers' commentary, is shown at various times on the Nashville Network and other Stations.
Malcolm Rush works in the Composing room of the Bennington Banner.
One of the great pleasures of having cable TV is the opportunity it affords to see the great "B" film heroes of one's childhood, and aside from Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers was my favorite. Born in 1912 as Leonard Slye, Rogers broke into films in 1935, was a star during the late '30's, '40's, '50's and had his own half hour TV show from 1951 to 1956. He still appears on talk shows, especially "Christian" programs, and at 75 is still easily recognizable, unlike his chunky contemporary, Gene Autry.
The "B" Western was the backbone of many small and medium sized studios from the Silent Era through the '50's and heros such as Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Autry and Rogers galloped across our young imaginations, shooting at (but never killing) the bad guys with pistols that never rant out of bullets, harmlessly knocking out tough guys with fists that never bruised, and chastely winning the loving admiration of lovely culotte-wearing equestriennes.
"B" grade movies were the second-billed movies in the days of the double features, and were the low-budget training ground for producers, directors, writers and actors. Many thousands graduated from the "B"s to the "A"s as their careers advanced, but many more stayed and some, Rogers among them, became true stars of the genre.
Rogers' films are contemporary Westerns, Westerns with cattle and rustlers, horse-mounted posses and shootouts, alongside telephones and jeeps, pickup trucks and aircraft. The movies are essentially remakes of each other, with similar plot and theme: the bad guy is cheating his fellow citizens, usually for financial gain, and Rogers saves the situation and rescues the girl. He is usually aided by George (Gabby) Hayes and his backup singing group, The Sons of the Pioneers.
Because, you see, Rogers never mends a fence or punches a cow. Rogers is a singing cowboy, a phenomenon first popularized by Gene Autry.
The direction of the films is workmanlike, the outdoor scenes are really filmed outdoors, the acting is more then fine for the limited, unimaginative scripts, and all these films are extremely watchable, even late at night on commercial channels whose plethora of ads breaks the continuity of the films but is not fatal to them.
The ads are a wonder themselves, usually trying to sell ghastly music collections of country or white gospel sung by people nobody's ever heard of, or absurd small appliances. A nice touch, though, is that Rogers and his wife and sometimes co-star Dale Evans discuss these old movies during the commercial breaks. They discuss the problems of shooting low budget film, his love for Trigger, his horse and companion for 33 years, and their museum which features, among other things, Trigger stuffed.
The films feature overacted villains, superb bar brawls, ghastly "Irish" singing by Hayes and quite good singing by Rogers and his group. But the core of these movies is that Rogers himself. He is handsome, boyish, an athletic moral fellow who makes one recall fondly the all-American hero.
HappyTrails Theatre, which is the program that inclues a movie and Rogers' commentary, is shown at various times on the Nashville Network and other Stations.
Malcolm Rush works in the Composing room of the Bennington Banner.
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