An Inert Man

I saw fifty-three of the films on the 2009 release schedule. I liked most of the films, which is a rarity for a film fan as finicky as I am. I did, however, have my disappointments. I am a big fan of Vince Vaughn but I didn't laugh at all seeing him in Couples Retreat. Other films were so unimpressive that I can barely remember them. For instance, I think that Virginia Madsen was in The Haunting in Connecticut but I could not tell you anything else about that film. The films that were bad were infuriatingly bad. The ten worst films that I saw this year were as follows:

2012
(500) Days of Summer
The Collector
Extract
Inglourious Basterds
Land of the Lost
Paranormal Activity
The Road
The Unborn
Up in the Air

Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air may have won Golden Globes but this isn't enough to keep them out of Tony's Hall of Shame.

I saw The Collector by mistake. One night, my son and I made a last-minute decision to see a movie. The Collector had just opened and I had not heard anything about it. My knowledge of the film came exclusively from a poster on display outside of the theater. I found myself intrigued by the creepy poster art despite the fact that I was not sure what it represented. I later learned that the central image, which was somewhat murky and distorted, was supposed to be a serial killer in an orange ski mask. At the time, though, I assumed that the image was of something more fantastic - a Hellraiser-type demon with a bald, pock-marked, orange head that goes around collecting souls. Yes, I know, this old man is losing his sight. The point is that I would never have seen the film if I realized that it was just another Saw retread. This year, the torture porn of Saw was given a strong moral basis in Law Abiding Citizen and Last House on the Left, both of which were much more substantial and satisfying than The Collector.

The children's films were exceptional during 2009. I saw a number of these films accompanied by an enthusiastic five-year-old boy named Nathan. I was amused, intrigued and sometimes even moved by these films, which included Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Monsters vs. Aliens, Planet 51, Ponyo, Up, and Where the Wild Things Are. I saw a number of entertaining action films, including Star Trek, Angels & Demons and The Taking of Pelham 123. I would like to have seen more human dramas, but the few that I saw were good. This includes Sunshine Cleaning, Fish Tank, Brothers and Disgraced. I enjoyed as my one guilty pleasure the 3D carnage of The Final Destination. The best comedy was, without a doubt, Hangover. Most of my favorite films this year were dark genre films, including Watchmen, Moon, Drag Me to Hell, District 9 and Pandorum.

Avatar was a truly magnificent film, although I have a couple of philosophical differences with writer/director James Cameron. Avatar is critical of the human race for shutting themselves off from the natural world and yet it allows people to shut themselves inside movie theaters with a candy-colored illusion of nature that offers to take the place of the real thing. The film, as journalist Jeet Heer pointed out, "represents both an alienation from nature and a nostalgia for nature." Also, I didn't agree with the portrayal of the military as bloodthirsty murderers. A military colonel is shown to be the ultimate brute of the film when, in fact, the true brutes are the scientists who demand the planet Pandora's mineral stores and have created the horrible weaponry with which it is to be obtained. I am inclined to agree with other criticisms put forth about the film. Some critics found it odd that Cameron used advanced technology to make an anti-technology film. Cameron denies that he is anti-technology. Has he seen his own Terminator movies? Heer found the film troubling because it "rehashes many familiar tropes from the history of European/First Nations contact, particularly the myth of Pocohantas" and "regurgitates the myth of the white saviour." Still, I enjoyed the story and the characters, admired the direction, and was blown away by the effects.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the dentist office and my dentist asked me if I had any plans for the evening. I responded that I was going to see Up in the Air. My dentist didn't say anything at first. But then, at the risk of ruining my plans, he finally spoke up and let me know that I might not want to see this film. He said, "I should warn you, my parents saw the movie and they said it was depressing." I was about to get two teeth drilled and this guy was worried about me being bummed seeing a movie. But he was right about Up in the Air, a painfully depressing story about corporate downsizing in the wake of the financial meltdown and the growing alienation of hip corporate robots in the Internet age.

In the days of the Great Depression, Hollywood producers saw it as their job to make America happy. They found, as the perfect antidote to joblessness and poverty, Shirley Temple, a cute little moppet who sang uplifting songs like "Be Optimistic." Temple, brimming with charm and energy, sang:

Be optimistic!
Don't you be a grumpy
When the road gets bumpy
Just smile
Smile and be happy!

Where's our cute little moppet? It wasn't long ago that Dakota Fanning was a cute little moppet in The Cat in a Hat (2003) and Charlotte's Web (2006). But, before the age of fifteen, Fanning was raped in Hounddog (2007), tortured people as a glam vampire in New Moon (2009), and engaged in lesbian smooching in The Runaways (2010). I suppose that in 2010 it is time to put away childish things and face up to the harsh realities of the world.

Hollywood no longer believes that, in hard times, they need to produce happy escapist films. We, as Americans, have become dispirited by war and downsizing and Hollywood wants to rub our faces into it by giving us depressing films about war and downsizing. It is the art of miserablism. This year, we even got Food, Inc., which is a documentary exposing the foulness that is our food production. The hunters in Avatar respect their prey, comforting them as they die and bidding for the safe passage of their souls. We, as depicted in Food, Inc., needlessly defile and torture our prey before turning them into a Happy Meal.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a passive man in turmoil in A Serious Man. As abuses are inflicted on him, Gopnick cringes, he frowns and, most of all, he questions again and again why this is happening to him. But never does this man put up a fight against his abusers. Sy Ableman, a creepy, pretentious windbag, has seduced Gopnick's wife, who is now determined to divorce Gopnick. Ableman is full of rationalizations to justify the affair and acts towards Gopnick as if they have no reason to be at odds. He talks of them handling the situation in a calm, "adult" manner, doing what makes "eminent sense," and taking "the appropriate course of action." Gopnick fails to react to Ableman's actions as the intolerable aggression that it truly represents. Ableman may tell Gopnick that there's "no cause for discomfort" and he may insist, "We're going to be fine." But Ableman is lying. Ableman, representing himself as a devout Jew, suggests that his romantic relationship with Mrs. Gopnick has not been consummated. Gopnick is more than willing to believe him.

Gopnick's brother, who lives with Gopnick and his family, refuses to deal with people and has withdrawn from world. "I think his social skills have held him back," says Gopnick. But Gopnick's own social skills, in all their refinement, have not proven very useful. Gopnick puts himself at a great disadvantage by following social rules in an effort to be a "serious man" while no one else around him could care less about those rules. Civilization creates much sublimation and deception. Thriving beneath the artifice is the jungle law - "every man for himself," "anything goes," "might makes right," "survival of the strongest" and "eat or be eaten." Gopnick has imagined orderliness where none has existed. The overdeveloped civility that he shows towards others has proven a liability for him. Gopnick has a nightmare where Ableman slams him against a blackboard while shouting, "I seriously fucked your wife." His subconscious mind, unfettered with notions of fellowship and propriety, recognizes the painful truth of the situation.

It isn't much of a story when the protagonist plays no active role in the events that are unfolding around him. Richard Corliss contrasted A Serious Man with Philip Roth novels, including Stern. Corliss wrote, "The men at the center of Philip Roth's novels may rage and flail, but Larry doesn't dish out insults, he takes them." He sees the film as not being about Gopnick but about the actions that surround Gopnick. He found that, in this instance, "action is character."

Gopnick visits three different rabbis in an attempt to make sense of his problems. A junior rabbi tells him about God being in every place in the world and he needs only to open up his eyes to recognize him. He points outside of the window and tells him that God could even be found in the parking lot. He babbles further and, when his speech reaches a fevered pitch, he turns towards the window, sighs, and pointlessly gushes, "Look at the parking lot." It was one of the most ridiculous moments in the film.

Blogger Steven Menashi wrote, "When Larry, standing on his roof, spies Mrs. Samsky sunbathing naked, it recalls 2 Samuel 11, in which David, on the roof of the palace, sees Bathsheba bathing naked." In the Bible, David commits adultery with Bathsheba, who is married to Uriah the Hittite. The Lord, displeased with David's actions, curses David's house with turmoil. In the end, David's son Absalom leads an insurrection against his father that plunges the kingdom into civil war. The film suggests in more than one instance that God will punish wrongdoers, plunging their lives into turmoil if not outright striking them dead. But, for most of the film, Gopnick finds his life in turmoil without having done anything. A scene features Gopnick on the phone with a bill collector working for Columbia Record Club. The bill collector explains at length that records were automatically sent to his home when he failed to return postcards indicating that he did not want the monthly selection. Does this mean that we can invite misfortune simply by doing nothing? The only time in the film that Gopnick finds peace is when he takes refuge next door smoking pot with Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker). Sin, it seems, is the only relief from the tyranny of civilization.

Gopnick's neighbor Mr. Brandt (Peter Breitmayer) is introduced with blood smeared on the front of his shirt and a dead deer tied to the roof of his station wagon. Gopnik looks appalled when he learns that Brandt allowed his young son to take a day off from school to go hunting with him. It is not a surprising reaction from Gopnick, who demonstrates great respect for authority and institution. This civilized man, who spends most of the film dressed in a tie and carrying s briefcase, supports advanced social development represented by schools, businesses and communities. Guns and a blood-stained shirt are, by all indication, repulsive to this modern man. Yet, Brandt may be a good role model. To start, Brandt has a better relationship with his son, who treats his father with respect and obedience. A number of scenes feature teachers giving stultifying lectures in stuffy classrooms. It does not make education look as rich and rewarding as the bonding experience that a father and son could enjoy while spending a day in the woods together. One of Gopnick's harassers, the father of a cheating student, shows up in Gopnick's driveway making threats. Gopnick winces when the grim-faced Brandt approaches with hedge clipper and asks in a threatening manner, "This man bothering you?" It looks as if Brandt is ready, on Gopnick's word, to clip off the man's head. This aggressive, hard-nosed man is a throwback to simpler times when a man relied on personal strength and will to survive. Brandt, who is no passive victim, would be ready if this corrupt civilization were to collapse. He would fit in well with his hedge clipper and hunting rifle in the post-apocalyptic horror comedy Zombieland. Zombie movies are a freeing experience because zombies, as adversaries, lack the pretense that characterizes predatory modern man. Zombies do not hide their predatory natures and we are allowed to dispose of them with a well-aimed shotgun blast to the head. Gopnick, outside of jungles, woods and post-apocalyptic ruins, must engage in futile debate and negotiation that only end up frustrating him.

Gopnick seems to believe that, in the evolution of man, the spine has become a vestigial appendage. I found that this character, in his unwillingness to erupt in rage, was useless to me. Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) of Law Abiding Citizen erupts with great rage after his wife and daughter are murdered during a home invasion. The rage does not come immediately. Shelton, like Gopnick, is initially inclined to trust authority and institution and calmly follow the rules. He is, as the title suggests, a law-abiding citizen. But, then, the criminal who actually committed the murder agrees to testify against his accomplice for a reduced charge, which will put him in prison for a relatively short time. The deal appeals to prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who is unwilling to risk his high conviction rate to take the murderer before a jury with a less than air-tight case. The man whose wife and child were murdered is subject to gibberish from Rice as ridiculous as the junior rabbi's "Look at the parking lot" speech. The film establishes Shelton, the aggrieved man suffering the loss of his wife and daughter, as the protagonist and Rice, an arrogant prosecutor whose career ambitions take priority over empathy and justice, as the lead antagonist. Our highly developed laws, which are too abstract to deal with a social reality as fundamental and blatant as murder, fail to assure justice for Shelton. Shelton sets out to take revenge by murdering the criminals, the lawyers and the judge. Unfortunately, the filmmakers are too cowardly to stand by Shelton once the violence escalates and they abruptly try to make their protagonist and antagonist switch roles in the third act. The turnaround doesn't work and ruins an otherwise gripping film.

Gopnick never takes charge. He doesn't mount his roof with his neighbor's hunting rifle to blast away malefactors like a man battling zombies in a post-apocalyptic world. He does not, in the manner of Clyde Shelton, plant bombs to destroy corrupt social institutions. A Serious Man ends abruptly without a climax or a resolution. The film, in its ambiguity, is open for endless interpretations. In the blogosphere, a number of people have desperately dissected the film for clues as to its meaning. At one point, Gopnick meets Ableman at a restaurant called Embers. The name of the restaurant is stated repeatedly and with great emphasis. Is "Embers" supposed to relate to Gopnick entering the firey pits of Hell? The following dissection appears in the Trivia section of the Internet Movie Database: "In his argument with the Columbia House records employee over the phone, Larry Gopnik repeatedly rejects the album Abraxas by Santana, in a variety of ways. He did not order Abraxas, he doesn't want Abraxas, he won't listen to Abraxas. Abraxas is a Gnostic term for God, particularly a God who is encompasses all things from Creator of the Universe to the Devil, and an etymological root for 'abracadabra.' It is thus implied that Larry Gopnik is vehemently rejecting God and magic." A film that can mean everything risks, in the end, meaning nothing.

Disgraced also features a passive protagonist. Professor David Lurie, a middle-aged, divorced scholar of romantic poetry, is forced to accept the hardship of life after becoming a victim of a vicious criminal assault. After a period of raging and flailing, Lurie resigns himself to the fact that life, with all its brutality and anarchy, is essentially a difficult and often painful experience. Unlike Gopnick, Lurie does not consult a religious authority to ask why he has become a victim. Lurie ends up more passive than Gopnick but he is more admirable than Gopnick in that he has earned his passivity. He arrives at an inner peace only after his struggles have shown him that he is powerless to resist forces much bigger than himself.

Prior to his assault, Lurie found himself in another predicament. Like Gopnick, this college professor found himself entangled in a prickly situation with a student. Also like Gopnick, he came to a distorted view of the situation by looking at it through the prism of his academic speciality. Lurie interpeted his feelings for an attractive student by referring to the work of Wadsworth and Byron. The misbegotten affair brought to his life a passion he so desperately needed. He failed to understand that what he saw as romance was sexual harassment to the student, whose extreme passivity failed to challenge the professor's deluded notions. Gopnick, functioning as a physics professor, struggles to find the perfect calculation to explain his problems. But his knowledge of Schrodinger’s Cat and the Uncertainty Principle are not useful to him in this situation. Physics, with all its mathematical equations, works independent of everyday realities and cannot be relied upon to solve the mysteries of life.

This brings us back to Up in the Air. It is abstract mathematics derived from classrooms that has plunged the world into the current financial crisis, which forms the backdrop to this film. Further dollars-and-cents calculations also create the film's central controversy. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a corporate downsizer, travels around the country conducting employee layoffs for bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. Bingham's boss (Jason Bateman) has been convinced by Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), an ambitious young employee, that the company could greatly cut costs by grounding staff members like Bingham and having the firings done by way of a remote, on-line video conference. Bingham argues that this impersonal new system will not work and asks that Keener travel with him to see how the layoff process works. During his travels, Bingham meets a glib mystery woman in a travelers lounge. After trading banal banter, they go up to his anonymous hotel suite to hop into bed for anonymous sex.

It was not at all appealing spending time with these characters. The characters, worse than being unpleasant, are inconsistent and therefore unbelievable. Keener, despite a purported degree in psychology, does not seem to comprehend the emotional trauma a person experiences losing their job. But she later proves to be an extremely sensitive young woman. I cannot explain where she obtained this sudden sensitivity, tears and all, unless it is something they sell at the duty-free gift shop. Bingham, a cold and detached corporate hatchet man who likens himself to a shark, also makes an abrupt and radical character transformation. One blogger described this transformation as no less than "miraculous." Bingham, who has warmed up to this woman from the travelers' lounge, wants to change his life to pursue a relationship with her. This frequent flier, who has happily been in flight for 10 million miles, suddenly wants to settle down on terra firma with this woman with whom he had a meaningless booty call. The film is, in the end, vapid and dishonest.

Up in the Air has a few obvious plot elements in common with The Messenger. In both films, two characters are at odds as they collaborate in a sad mission to deliver traumatic news to a bunch of regular folk. Both films have a third act that centers around a quandary at a wedding. But these films could not be more different. The Messenger is a film with heart, which is something glaringly absent in Up in the Air.

The Up in the Air tagline - "The story of a man ready to make a connection" - could also apply to Avatar, where an alienated man becomes part of a"people" and develops a strong bond with nature by plugging his pigtails into flora and fauna. Avatar shows that jungle law can be simple and basic and at the same time include fundamental social codes that prohibit savagery. I personally dream of a simple, honest and meaningful existence for myself. It could be for this reason that I see in last year's films conflicts between nature and technology, physics and common sense, and alienation and community. After the stock market crash, we certainly need to look at who we are and get back to community and common sense.

Four Reasons to Buy the new Three Stooges DVD set

1.) Get up close and personal with Larry. Larry took a larger role in the series during this period. After many years, the long-suffering middle Stooge was allowed to deliver his flaky character front and center. Larry even gets to do Brando.

Moe expresses his growing appreciation of Larry on screen. "You're getting to be a smart little imbecile," he tells him. While that's good news for some of Larry fans, other fans might understandably prefer Larry in smaller doses.

2.) Get to see tireless comedy veterans hard at work. You won't find any classic films in this latest batch, but the Stooges are still knocking themselves out and they are still able to be funny when the material is right. The better shorts in the collection are Gents in a Jam (1952), Three Dark Horses (1952), Loose Loot (1953) and Tricky Dicks (1953). Three Dark Horses has a funny scene where the Stooges accidentally tear off a man's toupee and then attempt to glue it back on his head. A wacky chase occurs backstage at a burlesque theater in Loose Loot. A particularly funny moment occurs when the villain catches up to Moe and bites his ear.

Tricky Dicks, which depicts a routine day at a police precinct, is a cross between a Three Stooges comedy and an episode of Barney Miller.

In He Cooked His Goose (1952), Shemp takes on a drenched dog in a routine that originated in silent films. The earliest known version of the routine was performed by Lloyd Hamilton in April Fool (1920) and a less subtle, "go for broke" version was performed by Billy Dooley in The Briny Boob (1926).

Unfortunately, a number of the films, including Cuckoo on the Choo-choo (1952) and Income Tax Sappy (1954), are more strange than funny.


3.) Get to see the Stooges in 3-D. The highlight of the collection is 3-D versions of Spooks! (1953) and Pardon My Backfire (1953). You cannot call yourself a true Stooges fan until you have experienced Moe's finger poke in 3-D.

4.) Get to see clever pre-CGI effects. Little money was spent to show the Stooges leaping into a painting in Loose Loot. The cost of putting Ben Stiller into Eisenstaedt's V-J Day photo for A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) was probably more than what the Columbia short subject department spent on special effects in twenty-five years.

Look at this effect. A dummy stand-in was used for a scene where Shemp falls through a roof. The camera speed was accelerated to a degree where the dummy became undetectable to the human eye. It was cheap effect but it worked. This is truly a fake Shemp.

All in all, I recommend the collection for Stooges fans.

Tough Mann

I found a septuagenarian comedian who was capable of taking a fall. This is a scene from Rock-a-bye Baby (1958) showing 71-year-old Hank Mann being knocked down repeatedly by Jerry Lewis. Mann is first knocked down when Lewis, in his clumsy effort to fix an aerial, smashes up a chimney and sends bricks raining down on Mann's head. One brick strikes Mann squarely in the head and knocks him unconscious.


Lewis is trying to revive Mann when he trips over a high-pressure hose and yanks the hose loose from a fire hydrant. Mann no sooner regains consciousness and gets to sit up then Lewis, unable to gain control of the hose, blasts Mann in the face with a stream of water and knocks him flat again.


I have been doing research on Mann for my upcoming book. I also found this cameo that Mann performed with Snub Pollard in The Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).


Lewis had Mann in a number of other films, although the parts were not always prominent. Mann was cast as a fight manager in Lewis' Don't Give Up the Ship (1959), but viewers never saw more than the back of the actor's head.

I should add that, in The Man of a Thousand Faces, Pollard also took a pie in the face.

A Comedy Team Commits Suicide

The New York Hippodrome dwarfed neighboring theaters when it opened on Broadway in 1905. The theater, with a seating capacity of 5,200, was twelve times larger than the next largest Broadway theater. Elmer S. Dundy and Frederic Thompson, who were the builders and operators of Coney Island's Luna Park, invested $4 million to make the Hippodrome the most magnificent theater in the world. It was, to all who saw it, an architectural wonder. The stage was capable of holding as many as 1,000 performers at a time. Stages could be raised and lowered by hydraulics. The stage included a 8,000-gallon water tank occupied by boats and adorned with a waterfall. Ken Bloom, Broadway historian, wrote, "Over 25,000 light bulbs were used to illuminate the theater and stage. Nine thousand of these were used for the stage, and another 5,000 were arranged in a stunning starburst pattern in the auditorium."

It was only right that the largest and most expensive theater in the world present the biggest show in the world. The idea was to create a theatrical show that would incorporate a full-sized circus. The producers needed a world-famous clown for the show. They hired Marceline, the resident clown of the London Hippodrome. Marceline claimed that, at age three, he crawled beneath a circus tent and was rescued from a lion by an old clown, who came to adopt him and train him in the art of clowning. Marceline, a bewildered-looking clown in an ill-fitting tuxedo, was always tripping and dropping things. Chaplin later acknowledged Marceline as his greatest influence.

The Hippodrome's premiere production was A Yankee Circus on Mars. Bloom wrote, "The star was one of Broadway's favorites, Bessie McCoy, who made her entrance in a gold chariot driven by two white horses. A thirty-foot airship landed on the stage and disgorged a Martian who asked the Americans to bring a circus to their planet." Marceline came out repeatedly to disrupt the circus acts. The ringmaster got angry when Marceline came along during the trapeze act. Marceline got tangled up with the net, causing it to drop on top of the ringmaster.

The Hippodrome's second production, A Society Circus, was designed to be an even greater spectacle than the first. The first show had one star clown and, now, the new show was to have two star clowns. The producers decided to partner the short and stocky Marceline with the tall and thin Frank "Slivers" Oakley. Oakley, the most popular clown of the Barnum & Bailey circus, was excellent at both acrobatics and pantomime. He could thrill an audience by jumping on a springboard and vaulting over four elephants. He could get an audience laughing by performing a one-man baseball game, using his pantomime skills to act out every position on both teams.

A Society Circus involved a rich society woman who falls in love with a circus manager and invests considerable money to put his stranded circus back in business. A cad who intended to marry the society woman for her money orders his servant to kidnap the circus manager and abandon him in the remote wilds of a tropical jungle. Aided by her own servant, the society woman goes into the jungle to rescue her lover. The comic servant roles - kidnapper and rescuer - were specifically written for Marceline and Oakley. The clowns got to team up for comic business in the jungle. At first, the pair performed a burlesque of a prizefight. Later, Oakley hunted duck while Marceline was pursued by a boa constrictor. In a circus scene, Oakley garnered attention for riding around a track on top of two giant lobsters. The show, which was praised by the New York Times for its "vastness, glitter, breadth of conception, and lavish expediture," was an enormous success.

Marceline played the Hippodrome for nine consecutive seasons. He was always the main comic relief in these spectacles. Pioneer Days (1906) showed an attack on a stagecoach by hundreds of Indians on horseback. For Sporting Day (1908), the producers staged a baseball game in center stage and featured a rowing match in the theater's great pool. The hydraulics beneath the stage were used to create tremors for The Earthquake (1910). Under Man Flags (1912) centered on a group of tourists riding a blimp around the world. Oakley reunited with Marceline for another Hippodrome extravaganza in 1910.

In 1913, Oakley's estranged wife died and he was left alone to raise their daughter Ruth. The same year, Oakley fell in love with a young vaudeville actress named Viola Stoll. The two had met in Utica, New York, after Stoll had been stranded by her theatrical company. Oakley claimed that, at first, he simply felt sorry for the young woman and offered her a job taking care of his home and looking after his daughter. It soon became obvious, though, that Oakley had developed an attraction towards the actress. The difference in their ages made the situation awkward for Stoll - Oakley was 42 years old and she was only 16. While Oakley was out of town, Stoll disappeared with $4,000 worth of jewelry that had belonged to Oakley's wife. Oakley filed a complaint with the police and, a month later, Stoll was arrested at the home of her stepfather in St. Louis. At the end of her trial, Stoll was sentenced to three years in prison. Oakley remained infatuated with the young woman even after she went to prison and he pleaded with law enforcement officials to parole her.

The story had been in the press for months before Stoll finally gave her side of the story. "I was down and out when I met Slivers," she said. "He went with me to several managers, thinking his influence would get me a position, but it was the end of the season. Then, he said I could stay at his house. I was desperate and went. I had known him only two or three months and wasn't dazzled by his fame because I didn't know how great he was. I was only 16 and hadn't been in the business long. I didn't steal. I didn't like being with him and said so after two weeks. He wouldn't let me go, but while he was in Baltimore, I ran away, pawned one of the rings and went to my friends in St. Louis." She admitted that Oakley tried to help her after her arrest but the efforts that he made on her behalf did not satisfy her. "He didn't stick to me," she said. "After two months he said he had been thinking it over and didn't care enough about me to disgrace his little girl anymore."

By 1916, Oakley was drinking heavily and he was unable to find work. He heard that Marcelline, who was also having trouble finding work, had opened up a restaurant. He went to Marcelline's restaurant to talk about the two of them putting together an act. Marceline, who found Oakley to be pompous and overbearing, rejected the proposal.

Oakley became distraught when his rent fell past-due and his landlady threatened to have him evicted. Nine months earlier, police had removed him from a boarding house in Detroit for unpaid rent. In the midst of this turmoil, he heard that Stoll was about to be released from prison and went to see her in prison to propose marriage. He told her that he was expecting to get a job with Barnum & Bailey to perform on the west coast. She explained that the conditions of her parole presented her from leaving the state and she was looking to lead a quiet, normal life when she got out of prison. She no longer had an interest in the theater and certainly had no interest in marrying an old traveling clown. Oakley was crushed when Stoll rejected his proposal. Stoll asked prison officials to bar Oakley from further visits and make sure he did not get her forwarding address after her release. The superintendent of the prison wrote a letter to Oakley to notify him of Stoll's wishes.

The following day, on March 8, 1916, police officers were called to Oakley's apartment to evict him. The officers smelled gas as they got to the top of the stairs. A chair had been placed against the door to barricade it and it took the officers a half hour to pry open the door with a crowbar. Oakley was discovered dead on the floor of his apartment. The officers found that Oakley had plugged up drafts from the windows and doors before he turned on the gas jets. The coroner ruled that he had died from gas asphyxiation. It was reported in the New York Times, "The bed and trunk were overturned, and the curtains torn from the windows. Letters and many photographs of the clown in his stage clothes were scattered all over the floor." He had not gone gently into that good night.

In 1918, Chaplin visited the Ringling Brothers circus to see Marceline perform. He later wrote, "I expected that he would be featured, but I was shocked to find him just one of many clowns that ran around the enormous ring — a great artist lost in the vulgar extravaganza of a three-ring circus." Marceline's routines were old and outdated and the public had lost interest in him. Whatever money Marceline had managed to save was lost by the failure of his restaurant and bad real estate investments. As more time passed, he was only able to get work at business men's dinners. He became distressed when he found himself out of money and the rent past-due. He decided late one night to kill himself. He put on the record "Moonlight and Roses." He then knelt down beside his bed and spread out publicity photos of himself across the mattress. He had a pistol in his hand. He must have been trembling hard when he raised the pistol as his first shot missed and hit the wall.

The next afternoon, a maid came into the room and saw Marceline kneeling beside the bed. She assumed that he was praying and left quietly. The maid grew suspicious about what she had seen and returned later with the manager and a police officer. It was later reported in Time magazine, "A man was kneeling by the bed, his hands stiffly and desperately twisted together, his head pushed down against his arms. He did not say anything when the three people came into the room. The policeman touched him, shook him a little, then saw the smear of blood that ran down his cheek from a hole in his temple." Some of the photos that Marcelline had laid upon the bed had slipped onto the floor. The details of the death scene, including the publicity photos scattered across the floor, made this eerily similar to the tableau left behind by Oakley's suicide.

Marceline and Oakley will be forever linked by their sensational partnership at the Hippodrome and the fact that their lives came to similar and equally tragic ends.

The Art of Slosh

I have just completed my book The Man Who Mistook a Carpet Roll for a Woman, and other silent film comedy misadventures. Part of the book deals with a form of comedy called "slosh." A comedy team that specialized in slosh was Lauri Lupino Lane and George Truzzi. Chaplin featured the team in A King in New York (1957). Lane, pictured on the right as the paperhanger, was son of comedy legend Lupino Lane.

Why Mad Men Makes Me a Mad Man

The Eisenhower era is a battleground for liberals and conservatives. The conservatives see this as the time before the world spun out of control. The liberals see this as the time before equal rights were championed and the world was set free. These are both extreme views, more fiction than fact. But the issue of who is closer to the truth is not the matter that concerns me as much as the ferocity with which Hollywood liberals are willing to force their views on others. Mad Men, which is set in the early sixties, has served as a platform for propagandists on the left. Show creator Matt Weiner has said, outright, that Mad Men is a feminist show. He has made it clear that the point of the series is to show how women were mistreated in the past. Weiner became a strong supporter of feminism while a student at Wesleyan. He experienced an awakening from reading the book "The Feminine Mystique" and he wanted this series to give the same awakening to television viewers. It has succeeded in being button-pushing entertainment for the left. A female columnist in The Alligator, a local college newspaper, wrote that the show lets her see how women were oppressed in the sixties and it inspired her to embrace feminism. Reese Dixon, author of the "Feminist Mormon Housewives" blog, described how Mad Men converted her husband into a feminist. She wrote, "[W]e started watching Mad Men together and it’s like he started seeing a whole new side to the world. . . [T]he part of him that was so terrified of feminism just crack[ed] open." A women on the official Mad Men discussion board posted a message about how glad she was that we were no longer living in a male-dominated society. She wrote, "Old white men need to accept that their time is over." I am an old white man. Am I supposed to slit my wrists now? It is only a television show, friends, this isn't hidden camera footage from a secret Allen Funt project.

In the sixties, ad agencies were hungry to produce effective ad campaigns, the messages of which influenced their target consumers to purchase their client's products. The agency executives wanted a campaign to create a sensation and they didn't care if it was written by a man, a woman, or a talking goldfish. Female copywriters were especially valued for their ability to talk to the women who bought so many of the products that they were selling. Shirley Polykoff, an advertising executive, was already a legend in the industry long before Mad Men's fictious copywriter Peggy Olson came along.

I am not entirely sure what it is that offends Dixon or these other woman so much. Sheila Weller, columnist for the Huffington Post, described "looking with veiled horror at those perky secretaries and those pregnant young wives in Christmas-bow maternity get-ups." Since when is perkiness and frilly maternity clothes bad things? Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte wrote, "You. . . see Joan rubbing her skin where her bra strap cuts into it. True, second wave feminists didn't burn their bras - or their girdles or their garters - but the show argues with this visual imagery, that they probably should have." So, the bra is an evil device that men invented to bind and torture women? I suppose that a left-leaning woman just needs to see those old elastic bra straps and it will be enough to send them into a tizzy. I cannot see how women wearing those bras were in worse pain than contemporary women letting their "muffin tops" bulge out of their skinny jeans. Tracie Egan, a writer for the Jezebel blog, thought it was a sign of male oppression that copywriter Fred Rumsen (Joel Murray) felt free to play Mozart on his zipper in front of a secretary. Rumsen's penis was not threatening to come flopping out of his pants. The guy was being silly to break up the monotony of the work day. I thank God for the Rumsens of the world.

Vloggers Beth and Val weighed in on Mad Men recently. They admitted that they approved of certain aspects of the series' version of the early sixties. They liked the "clearly designed gender roles," admitted to sometimes feeling envy for wives who weren't burdened with making decisions, and they especially had a fondness for the clothing ("They all dressed so nicely"). But their one big complaint was that men had too much power. This power was strictly defined as a husband being able to sleep with a mistress without having to worry about his wife questioning him about his suspicious absences. Adultery has never been gender-specific at any time or any place and it hasn't even been gender-specific in the context of the series.

"What a great time to be white men," said Val. "They were kings, every single one of them." The ladies admitted that it isn't obvious in the series that the men abuse their power against women. Their abuse of power, they maintain, is more insidious than that. Insidious or imaginary?

Modern politics have no doubt put blinders on these women and it has made it impossible for them to see that the men on the show are not at all privileged. The men on the show are, for the most part, nail-biting shlubs, living in constant terror of losing their jobs. Blogger Gary Edgerton wrote, "[T]he most striking aspect of Mad Men’s title sequence is the depiction of the male protagonist falling from the top of a skyscraper. The action begins as he enters his office in black silhouette, puts down his briefcase, and watches as his furniture begins to implode, almost melting." That man was supposed to have represented copywriter Harold Crane. It was Weiner's original plan to have Crane, distraught over losing his job, take a swan dive out of a tall window. Men are under a great deal of stress in this world. Fred Rumsen, a copywriter who is suffering from alcoholism, pees his pants before an important meeting and is promptly fired. Don's brother, Adam, commits suicide. A young executive learns that his career has been ruined after he gets his foot chopped off by a dingbat secretary on a rider mower. This is a man's world? The fact is the most tragic character on Mad Men is the show's alpha male, Dan Draper. Draper's horrible childhood has made him a tormented soul.

The women on the show are, in fact, exalted - the glamorous ice queen Betty Draper, the ambitious ace copywriter Peggy Olson, and the sexy office manager goddess Joan Holloway. The show is mostly written by women, who seemed determined to present the women on the show as being superior to the men. It is appropriate that one of the show's main writers is Marti Noxon, who used to write and produce Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After all, Mad Men, like Buffy, is a feminist fantasy.

Mad Men favors style over substance. Weiner uses sex and fashion to lure viewers to the show. He has turned the look of this vintage period, from its sunglasses to its typewriters, into pop art. He titillates his audience with a relentless stream of adulterous affairs. If that isn't bad enough, Weiner, champion of women's liberation, pimps out his actresses to promote the show.


Sexual politics are destructive and irrational. I much rather watch Friday Night Lights, a television series with actual substance. The characters are real. The stories are relevant. Most of all, the show has heart. Friday Night Lights, unlike Mad Men, shows a married couple who love each other, are faithful to one another, and work together to make a better life for one another. Mad Men is, by comparison, vile.

Fun with Stull and Burns

I wanted to share these photos that I found. The photos, which were acquired from the State Library and Archives of Florida, feature Stull and Burns, one of the first comedy teams in motion pictures.