Oh!

 While in the role of Lizzie MaGuire, Hilary Duff made a habit of squeaking, gasping, squealing or hiccupping the word "Oh!" to express surprise, delight, anger, disappointment, or any number of feelings.  Not the acting range of Meryl Streep, but her little noises became an endearing trademark.  At the time, the It! Girl was the Oh! Girl. 

When Duff got into the movies, a director got upset to hear her making her cute little squeak.  He explained that she wasn't playing Lizzie MaGuire and she didn't need to make that sound anymore.  She told him that the sound was all her own.  When she acted as Lizzie, she said, she was doing little more than being herself.  The director took time out of the production schedule to get Duff acting lessons.  He had special instructions for her acting coach to get rid of the squeak.  Hollywood likes to turn actors into commodities and they often get rid of those little quirks that make an actor special.  Someone should have reminded the director that Julia Roberts had a good career with her whooping laugh.  What about Jimmy Stewart's stutter, or Humphrey Bogart's twitchy lip, or Clint Eastwood's squinty eyes?  Our flaws are part of what make us individuals. 

We need more actors with quirks.  I am unable to tell apart many of the leading men working in films today.  It took me years to figure out the difference between Hayden Christensen and Ryan Phillipe.

Strange Can Be Funny

One of the weirdest and funniest scenes in film history occurs within the first thirty minutes of Mulholland Drive (2001).  The scene depicts a business conference at a film studio.  Executives welcome a mysterious visitor.  We don't know who this grim-faced man is, but everyone is treating him as if he's extremely important and they seem terrified of doing anything to displease him.  One executive apologizes to him for the bad espresso he was served on his last visit, but he assures him they have now found "one of the finest espressos" to serve him.  The man takes one sip of the espresso, gags as if he drank arsenic, and vomits up brown liquid into a napkin.  I have no idea what that was all about, but it was outrageous and unexpected and it made me laugh a lot. 

The Reformed Leland Orser

Let's take a look at the most recent work of actor Leland Orser.  First, we have a scene from Touch in which Orser gets shot in the leg.  Ouch!  Orser looks scared and his voice gets tremulous, but he manages to keep his cool.

Now, we have a scene from Magic City in which Orser plays a ghost who has apparently come to terms with his death.

 

 

The scene ends with Orser calmly striding into the ocean and disappearing below the waves. 

 

But Orser was not always so chill.

I remember when I saw Pearl Harbor in 2001.  It was quintessential Hollywood formula action film.  It was so derivative and predictable that nothing about it left the slightest impression on me.  Well, one scene did leave an impression.  At one point, an injured soldier is rushed into the hospital.  He's had his neck torn open and a nurse has to plug her finger into an artery to stop the guy from bleeding to death.

I enjoyed the scene not because I have a morbid sense of humor or I find blood or hospitals to be joyous things.  No, not at all.  It's that I recognized the actor who played the soldier.  The actor was Orser, who specialized at time in delivering top-notch hysterics to films.  He did it in Se7en (1995).  He did it in Alien Resurrection (1997).  He did it, now, in Pearl Harbor.  He was clawing at the nurse, he was bugging out his eyes, he was delivering his lines in panicked screech, and he was hyperventilating.  Orser was described by an astute blogger as The Panicky Guy.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

It reminds of the days when a character actor could make a good living with a specialty.  For example, a director knew that he could rely upon Billy Gilbert to perform a funny sneezing fit.

Very Bad Things (1998)

It's been years since Orser has had one of his freak outs on screen.  I can understand an actor wanting to move on to play other types of roles, but I still cannot help but miss the old panicky Orser.  I hope that he returns some day.

Talking Bees, A Killer Moon Plant and Curvy Ladies: A Fun Day with The Outer Limits

I watched a dozen episodes of The Outer Limits in one day.  It was a marathon with breaks only for snacks and squirts.  I have to admire the series for its audaciousness.  I mean, I couldn't do anything but laugh at killer moon plants that shoot popcorn and talcum powder.  

My favorite innovation, though, was a bee-to-human language translator introduced in the episode "Zzzzzz."  Once the machine translates bee-buzz into English, it relays the words out of a speaker box in a high-pitched, Mayor-of-Munchin-City voice.  That is funny stuff. 

Marianna Hill and Peter Brocco in "I, Robot" (November 14, 1964)

What makes the series even more enjoyable is the curvy-hipped actresses that share screen time with the robots and the aliens.  I love the fact that, in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, television casting directors favored actresses with a Marilyn Monroe type of physique.  I see this a lot in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  The lead actress would be curvy, the actress with a nonspeaking role as a receptionist would be curvy, and the actress who makes a brief appearance walking out of the bank would be curvy.  It was Planet of the Marilyns.  After Marilyn died, these well-rounded actresses gradually disappeared from the television landscape.  I can think of a number of actresses, including Sue Ane Langdon and Emmaline Henry, who survived the transition by quickly slimming down from Monroe size to Jackie Kennedy size.  The Outer Limits captured the last burning embers of television's Marilyn era.

Here are just a few of The Outer Limits Babes of the Week.

Salome Jens in "Corpus Earthling" (November 18, 1963)

 

 

Barbara Luna in "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork" (December 9, 1963)

Grace Lee Whitney in "Controlled Experiment" (January 13, 1964)

 

Joanna Frank in "ZZZZZ" (January 27, 1964)

 

Dee Hartford"The Invisibles" (February 3, 1964)

Janet De Gore in "Second Chance" (March 2, 1964)

 

 

Constance Towers in "The Duplicate Man" (December 19, 1964)

Elizabeth Perry in "The Brain of Colonel Barham" (January 2, 1965)

Three Chairs for Captain Spaulding!

Sitting down on a chair is a simple process.  A chair is specifically designed with a flat raised surface to allow a person to sit comfortably and take their weight off their feet.  An animal can rest by laying on the ground or cuddling up inside a burrow, but a man is unable to accomplish the simplest task without creating a device to aid him in his efforts.  Unfortunately, these unnatural devices can at times turn on their creators, which comedians are all too happy to demonstrate.  I have no other commentary today.  What else is there to say?  Without further ado, here is a comedian having trouble sitting in a chair.

 Charlie Chaplin in A Day's Pleasure (1919)

Lupino Lane in Summer Saps (1929)

 Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) 

Jerry Lewis in The Patsy (1964)

 

 Jacques Tati in Play Time (1967)

Film historian Dan North was struck by the Play Time scene's "gleaming floors and comfortless furniture."  These same elements were used again by Jerry Lewis in Cracking Up (1983).

Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

 

No comedian liked chairs more than Chaplin.

The Rounders (1914)

 

The Rink (1916)

The Circus (1928)

Modern Times (1936)

The Great Dictator (1940)

I have one last clip.   It is from the Marx Brothers' film that inspired the title of this article.

Animal Crackers (1930)

 

Take my Oyster. . . Please!

The oyster stew routine started out as a monologue joke.  A version of the joke was printed in James Melville Janson's 1899 joke collection, Encyclopedia of Comedy: For Professional Entertainers, Social Clubs, Comedians, Lodges and All who are in Search of Humorous Literature.  The joke went as follows, "And they had oyster stew.  It was the worst I ever saw: small, half-starved oysters, and the water they were in was not hot enough to kill them.  They were alive, and the minute I broke the crackers in the stew the oysters came from the bottom and ate the crackers."  Frank Bush, a popular dialect comedian and monologist, used this joke in expanded form during an appearance on the Keeney vaudeville circuit in December, 1915.  A Variety critic noted, "Bush was among those present with a batch of stories, most of them new, but a few, alas, lamentably old.  In the latter class that hapless tale about the restaurant stew in which the oyster ate the crackers was heartlessly paraded.  The funny thing about this last mentioned gag is that the audience laughed uproariously at it." 

Frank Bush

It was a funny situation to imagine and it was even funnier when Mack Sennett's special effects team got around to creating a physical oyster that could pop out of a bowl of stew and snatch away a cracker from Billy Bevan.  The rest is comedy history. 
 

Dutiful But Dumb (1941)