Wise: Zzzzzzz...
Werth: Wake up, Wise. It's time for Gab.
Wise: Sorry, work has been crazy and with the holiday season in full swing, I've been running myself ragged.
Werth: You should relax. Make yourself a hot chocolate and curl up with an old favorite book.
Wise: I tried that. But I just nodded off.
Wise: Then maybe you should watch a favorite old book movie like The Hobbit which opens in theaters today. When I was a kid, Tolkien's book was all the rage and became a big screen cartoon starring the voices of John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Hans Conreid.
Wise: Popular childhood books always seem to make their way to the big screen. Published in 1952, Mary Norton's The Borrowers became an instant hit both in Great Britain and in the U.S. The book features Arrietty, the adolescent daughter of Pod and Homily Clock, and her struggles as part of a tiny race of people known as Borrowers who live inside the walls of houses and make their living by "borrowing" from human "beans." Their home is behind a hall clock inside an estate deep in the country, populated only by bedridden old Great Aunt Sophy and a cantankerous housekeeper and gardener.
Arrietty longs for companionship—the house is empty of little people except for her family—and she strikes up a tentative friendship with a human boy who has been sent to his great aunt in the country to recuperate from an illness. Eventually, their friendship is discovered by her parents who insist she give it up and by Mrs. Driver, the cook, who enlists an exterminator to take care of what she thinks of as "vermin."
Werth: I wish she would take care of my downstairs neighbor.
Wise: In the end, the Clocks must abandon their home and flee across the fields in hopes of finding other Borrowers who emigrated years before. It's something of a melancholy end to a book about loneliness, displacement and fear of the unknown. The book's cliffhanger ending inspired four sequels and at least a half dozen film adaptations, each of which is more or less enjoyable, although none equal the original in emotional heft. The book shares with a lot of other juvenile British classic a concern with the isolation of childhood and the fear of parental abandonment. The films are mostly about special effects.
Werth: Yeah, The Borrowers doesn't exactly lend itself to cinematic realism.
Wise: One of the earliest adaptations premiered in 1973 and starred Eddie Albert as Pod and Film Gab favorite Judith Anderson as a very tipsy Aunty Sophy. Largely faithful to the book, the film suffers from an overly stately pace plus an expansion of the adult roles that leads to a lot of preening overacting by Albert that relegates Arrietty's longings to a subplot.
Perhaps it's just as well because Canadian child actor Karen Pearson seems to have been cast more for her resemblance to Arrietty in Beth and Joe Krush's illustrations than for her acting ability. Dennis Larson as the boy she befriends is even less compelling, although to be fair, both youngsters shared most of their scenes with a green screen instead of another actor.
Werth: Judging from their IMDb movie resumes, I don't think we can blame the green screen.
Wise: The 1997 Borrowers may be much less faithful, but it is filled with eye-popping special effects. Exchanging Norton's late-Victorian setting for a storybook version of post-WWII England filled with late 20th century American product placements, the film is obviously attempting to capture the gross-out humor/kid revenge vibe of the Home Alone films. John Goodman stars as Ocious P. Potter, a nasty lawyer invented for the film who is attempting to swindle away the house of the hapless Lender family.
Arrietty (Flora Newbigin) is joined by her screenwriter-invented younger brother Peagreen (a whiny Tom Felton before he went platinum and menaced a more famous Potter), and together they attempt to stop the villain with a lot of bathroom jokes and booby traps that tend to splatter. Luckily, in this version Pod is played by Jim Broadbent who brings eager nobility and daft humor to help save the day.
Werth: Jim Broadbent's daft humor always saves the day.
Wise: There is also an adaptation written by animation genius Hayao Miyazaki for his Studio Ghibli that I haven't yet seen, although I've heard that it may come closest to capturing Norton's classic tale.
Werth: While you're Netflixing that, some of my favorite books to read when I was a kid were about the ancient Greek myths. Like super-hero soap operas from antiquity the stories of the Greek gods were a constant source of drama, lust and gore. And in 1981 director Desmond Davis brought all that fun to the big screen in Clash of the Titans. Clash tells the tale of Perseus, who starts off life being chucked in the ocean in a box with his mother because she had a baby out of wedlock.
Wise: Wow. I would think the ocean would have been full of boxes with babies and mamas.
Werth: Luckily for Perseus, the baby daddy is none other than king of the gods, Zeus (none other than king of the actors, Laurence Olivier). Zeus saves the boy and his mother and Perseus grows to be a strapping, bare-chested, pillow-lipped Harry Hamlin.
Wise: Pillow-lips seem to run in that family.
Werth: The plot of Clash, like the Greek myths it borrowed loosely from, becomes very complicated with Perseus' quest to save the beautiful Andromeda (Judi Bowker) taking him all over Greece. Perseus tracks down Stygian witches, battles Medusa, jousts with giant scorpions and faces off with the Kraken.
All this while a menagerie of gods bicker and vengeful ass-face Calibos (Neil McCarthy) does his best to kill the mighty hero. It's all great fun with a wonderfully campy crew playing Greeks and Olympians including Olivier, Maggie Smith, Ursula Andress (they gave her one line), Sian Phillips and Burgess Meredith playing the Greek version of Mickey Goldmill.
Wise: Better Mickey than the Penguin.
Werth: But the real star of this film is legendary special effects god, Ray Harryhausen. Using good, old-fashioned stop-motion puppetry, blue-screens, and matte painting, Harryhausen brought all the fantastical creatures from myth to life, and while none of them
look realistic by today's CGI-obsessed standards, Harryhausen's pets were good enough to strike terror into kids' hearts everywhere—especially a certain kid whose worst ophidiaphobe nightmare is a snake chick who has more snakes for hair.
Wise: I'm surprised you survived your initial viewing.
Werth: Harry Hamlin's gams kept my eyes off Medusa. Clash earned a bucketload for MGM and was even resurrected in 2010 for a more tech-savvy audience. It is one of those films that holds a revered place in my heart, because whenever I see it, I'll always be the myth-obsessed nine-year-old who wondered what it was like to be a hero... or a lady with snake hair.
Wise: Well Werth, I'm officially relaxed.
Werth: Good, but don't get too relaxed. You have to be ready next week for Film Gab's Christmas Spectacular!
Wise: Hello, Werth!
Werth: Hello, Wise.
Wise: I see you've donned a fright wig.
Werth: I thought it was the least I could do to honor the passing of film and television comedienne Phyllis Diller.
Wise: Just don't start calling me "Fang."
Werth: Diller wasn't really that big a movie star, but she definitely gave women a presence in the comedy culutre that helped those who came after her become silver-screen laugh queens.
Goldie Hawn could have been just another pretty face, but in 1968 she proved on TV's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In that she could take the dumb blonde routine to a new level.
Wise: It takes a special talent to round up belly laughs with just a giggle and a bikini.
Werth: While still performing on Laugh-In, Hawn jumped into the movie pool and almost immediately won an Oscar for her role in Cactus Flower (1969). That success was followed by second-billing in There's a Girl in My Soup (1969) and $ (1970) until 1972 when she became the top-billed actress in hits like Butterflies Are Free and The Sugarland Express (1974).
After playing second-fiddle to stars like Warren Beatty (Shampoo (1975)) and George Segal (The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976)), Hawn would return to the first position in 1978 with the mega-hit comedy/thriller Foul Play.
Wise: Not to mention Overboard (1987).
Werth: Foul Play is basically a romatic comedy homage to mystery-thrillers with some obvious tips of the cap to Hitchcock classics Vertigo, Dial M for Murder and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hawn plays divorced librarian Gloria Mundy who decides to try and be more outgoing by picking up a hitchhiker on her drive back to her home in San Francisco.
Wise: I know picking up total strangers always makes me loosen up.
Werth: Unfortunately this hitchhiker winds up being murdered, tossing Gloria into an intrigue-filled plot to assassinate the Pope involving a man with a scarred face, a scary albino named Whitey, and a hitman known as "The Dwarf."
Wise: I assume he busts kneecaps.
Werth: Gloria's knight in corduroy armor is disgraced detective Tony Carlson (the almost lecherous Chevy Chase), who seems to be spending more time wooing Gloria than figuring out how to stop the assassination.
And rounding out this randy cast is Dudley Moore in his breakthrough American performance as diminutive perv, Stanley Tibbets. The film isn't as whacky as a Marx Brothers movie nor as action-filled as a Lethal Weapon. Underscored by a sappy Barry Manilow tune, Foul Play takes a really comfortable middle-of-the-road route bewteen comedy and thrills and creates a satisfying, but not altogether transcendant experience.
Its charm emanates from its lead, with Hawn taking her dumb blonde act to more palatable levels by putting her in situations where she's not dumb—she or the person she's talking to just doesn't know what the other person is talking about.
It leads to a comedy of misunderstandings that allows for such fun moments as a Burgess Meredith vs. Rachel Roberts karate fight and a multi-car race across San Francisco. All-in-all Foul Play isn't foul at all, playing coy at a time when having an old lady use the F-word in a Scrabble game was risqué comedy.
Wise: Comediennes don't have to be dumb blondes to be successful at comedy. In fact, being a fast-talking, savvy brunette can also lead to big laughs. Rosalind Russell hit it big in screwball hits like His Girl Friday (1940) and The Feminine Touch (1941), but it is her performance in Auntie Mame (1958) that has become perhaps her most iconic comedic performance.
Werth: I know you weren't going to continue without mentioning her side-splitting turn in 1939's The Women.
Wise: Of course not. Based on the novel by Patrick Dennis (actually a fictionalized memoir of author Edward Everett Tanner III's nom de plume), Auntie Mame presents the life of orphaned, ten-year-old Patrick once he goes to live with his bohemian aunt Mame Dennis (Russell).
Mame's outsize personality transforms the sober little boy, and eventually comes to the rescue when Patrick's Ivy League education threatens to pair him up with a shallow, social climbing bride (Joanna Barnes deploying a really top drawer Locust Valley lockjaw).
Werth: One of my favorite scenes is when Mame gives the Upsons the what for.
Wise: Surrounded by a cadre of eccentrics—Broadway doyenne and heroic tippler Vera Charles (Coral Browne); lecherous Irish poet Brian O'Bannion (Robin Hughes); Texas oilman Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside (Forrest Tucker)—Russell holds her own. Having originated the role on Broadway, Russell's performance has an appropriate theatricality about it, but her background in film informs the quieter moments when the camera lingers in closeup.
At its heart, this is a film about finding love, and the tenderness that Russell exhibits when she realizes how much Patrick means to her anchors the film's oddball delights.
Werth: Not to mention the eye-popping array of gowns created by Orry-Kelly.
Wise: While Russell is the chief pleasure of Auntie Mame, the film is crowded with hilarious turns by gifted actresses. Coral Browne's Vera has all the grande dame-ness of Bette Davis in All About Eve, but leavens the part with her penchant for booze. Lee Patrick's daft society matron reveals how dangerously close the suburban set is to bigotry.
But perhaps best of all is Peggy Cass as Mame's secretary Agnes Gooch. The socially awkward frump was already something of a cliché by the time Auntie Mame hit theaters, but Cass not only takes the requisite glasses, dumpy cardigan, and sensible shoes to their stereotypical heights, she also gets her very own bombshell moment when she follows Mame's exhortation to "Live! Live! Live!"
Werth: Sounds like all these funny ladies followed that good advice.
Wise: As long as we all follow the laughs to next week's Film Gab.
