FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #115

Ray Milland #2

Ten Ray Milland movies you really ought to see - in no particular order, as usual, and over two posts for a change...

The Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder, 1942): a strange, complicated screwball comedy where former scalp masseuse Susan Applegate (Ginger Rogers) manages to pass herself off as both a precocious 12 year-old and her own mother before eventually wedding Major Philip Kirby (Milland), who had initially taken her for a frightened child who needed his help after she had boarded a train with only a child’s ticket and had been caught smoking! Wilder had been in Hollywood for nine years and made a name fro himself as a screenwriter, working with Charles Brackett (who co-scripted this film too), but this was the first movie he directed. Initially, he and Brackett had Cary Grant in mind for the role of Philip Kirby, which wouldn’t be the only time Milland took a role intended for him: twelve years later, Grant wanted to take the role of the husband in Dial M for Murder, but the studio thought audiences would not accept him as someone who arranges for the murder of his wife. Supposedly, Rogers, coming off an Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle, chose both the director and Milland.

“Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?"

The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1947):a romantic gothic tale with a pervasive sense of genuine menace - in the Rebecca mould, but with real ghosts. One of the best filmed ghost stories and one which, thankfully, isn’t over-reliant on special effects. Superbly photographed by Charles Lang, who won the Oscar for Best Black and White Cinematography.

"They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It’s just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them."

Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944): a Hitchcockian-style, tense ‘spy-noir’ based on a novel by Graham Greene, set in London during World War Two, in which our hero is on the lam from Nazis and finds himself accused of murder because of a strange string of events kicked off by winning a cake at a village fete.

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945): Milland stars as a New York writer battling alcoholism in this sharp social drama. Allegedly, Wilder wanted to direct this after having worked with the alcoholic Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity (1944). Although he had played serious roles, the public's view was that Milland was generally a light comedy actor, but Wilder clearly saw more in him and his Oscar-winning performance marked something of a watershed in his career because it changed the movie industry’s perception of his ability and range.

“And out there in that great big concrete jungle, I wonder how many others that are like me. Poor bedeviled guys on fire with thirst. Such comical figures to the rest of the world as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree.”

Panic in the Year Zero! (Ray Milland, 1962): a post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie exploiting the cold war anxieties of the era. After a nuclear attack destroys Los Angeles, Harry Baldwin (Milland) and his family head for the hills to wait for a return to some kind of order, but mob rule takes over and Baldwin must fight force with force to survive, though the film stresses the idea that there must be no end: only a beginning.

Michael Atkinson, of The Village Voice, wrote admiringly: "This forgotten, saber-toothed 1962 AIP cheapie might be the most expressive on-the-ground nightmare of the Cold War era, providing a template not only for countless social-breakdown genre flicks (most particularly, Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf) but also for authentic crisis—shades of New Orleans haunt its margins...the movie is nevertheless an anxious, detail-rich essay on moral collapse.”

Ray Milland #1

Occasionally dismissed as exuding the impression of a cut-rate Cary Grant, but lacking his more obvious good looks and comedic touch and having a career that was nowhere near as consistent, Welsh-born Hollywood actor Ray Milland was a hugely underrated actor and director.

Born Alfred Reginald Jones in Neath, Wales, on 3 Januray 1907, he took his stage name from the Millands area of his home town of Neath. Joining the Household Cavalry as a young man, he became an expert shot and a member of his company's rifle team, winning many prestigious competitions. After his four-year duty service was over, he tried his hand at acting and made several films in the UK.

He appeared as an extra in Picadilly (1929), using the name Spike Milland, but his first proper role was in Castleton Knight’s thriller, The Flying Scotsman (also 1929), which was one of the earliest sound films. Like Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), it was originally intended to be a silent movie and the decision to include diegetic sound was made during production, with the result that there is dialogue only twards the end of the film, the rest of the story being accompanied with title cards and music,. There is a question as to whether the film was originally released without sound; some historians think its use of sound predtaed Blackmail, but the BFI database currently indicates that sound was added for a re-release in 1930.

Milland relocated to Hollywood after a talent scout spotted him on the stage in London. He initially featured in supporting roles for at various studios such as films like The Bachelor Father and Just a Gigolo, both made in 1931 at MGM; The Man Who Played God and Blonde Crazy, both 1931 at Warner Brothers; The Glass Key (1935) at Paramount; Next Time We Love (1936) at Universal. He gradually made his way up the cast list and signed a contract with Paramount in the late 1930s.

During the prodiction of Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1941), Milland was forced to have wavy hair and he later claimed the curling tongs caused his hair to fall out and as a result, he received fewer male leads. However, all his better roles date from that time, not before it.

A cursory glance at his filmography shows his career was rich and varied, working with a number of major directors and taking in a vaiety of genres and styles and in roles that encompassed the heroic, the romantic, the sympathetic amd the macchiavellian; for example, there were Westerns: John Farrow’s Copper Canyon (1950) and Allan Dwan’s The River’s Edge (1957); horror movies like Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited (1944) and Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial (1962); film noir: Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948); spy films like Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944); thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) and Allen’s So Evil, My Love (1948); romantic screwball comedies like Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942); science-fiction: Corman’s X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963); social drama such as Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945), for which he won the best actor Oscar, and George Stevens’ Something to Live For (1952); action adventure: DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind (1941); in 1952, he even starred in the experimental thriller with no dialogue, Russell Rouse’s The Thief.

While still starring in films, in the 1950s, Milland began to act and direct on televsion ansd was the star of two shows. Meet Mr McNulty (also known as The Ray Milland Show) (1953-55), was a sitcom about an English professor at a girls’ college. From 1959-1960, he starred in Markham, as the eponymous private detective and attorney.

After leaving Paramount, he also turned his hand to directing some of the films in which he starred: the taut Western, A Man Alone, and the spy thriller, Lisbon (both 1955); a British crime drama, The Safecracker (1958); his chilling vision of a dog-eat-dog apocalyptic America, Panic in the Year Zero (1961. His final work behind the camera was a British-made courtroom drama based on a play he had starred in on Broadway, Hostile Witness (1968).

In later life, the quality of most of Milland’s film work dipped considerably with some dire horror fare like Frogs and the bizarre social drama, The Thing with Two Heads (both 1972). In the latter, he plays the wealthy racist Dr. Maxwell Kirshner, who, when he discovers he is dying, demands his head be transplanted onto a healthy body and it is - onto that of a black death row prisoner. He still occasionally appeared in a quality film like Jack Gold’s Aces High and Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (both 1976); however, easily his mosty succesful film from this period was Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970), in which he played the Ryan O’Neal character’s father.

The author of 100 short stories, he completed his entertaining autobiography, Wide-Eyed in Babylon, in 1974. One of the tales he recounted recalled his time in the Household cavalry when, after a night of drinking, he was unable to control his horse during a pocession in front of the King of Afghanistan and it bolted:

“I went right through the mounted band, who were helpless because their reins are fastened to their stirrups. The drum horse, who was at least nineteen years old, ended up in the memorial fountain, and I finished up in Buckingham Palace courtyard, alone and without a friend in the world.”

His last movie was the straight-to-video The Gold Key (1974), but he continued working in televsion, mostly in guest star roles, but he won an Emmy for his work in Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976. His last televison role was as the Home Secretary in Roy Ward Baker’s Sherlock Holmes television film, The Masks of Death (with Peter Cushing as Holmes and John Mills as Watson) in 1984.

Milland died of lung cancer in Torrance, California in 1986, aged 79.

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/57315

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_milland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Milland_filmography

http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2009/02/x-man-with-x-ray-eyes.html

Loudo Sings Pirate Songs

Donald Fagen remembers Phoebe Snow

PHOEBE SNOW 1950 - 2011

Last week, the extraordinary singer Phoebe Snow died from complications of a severe stroke she had last year. Phoebe and I were pals ever since my wife persuaded her to come along on a New York Rock and Soul Revue tour in 1991. We had a number of things in common. We were close in age; we both had an early passion for African-American music, i.e., jazz and R& B; and we were both of the genus North Jersey Jewish Hippie. Species: Neurotic. Also, we each had a sense of humor that was way over on the dark side.

I really liked to make Phoebe laugh because she was my best audience. Many people respond to my humor with incomprehension, if not actual abhorrence. With Phoebe, though, it was as if she was a long lost cousin who shared the same family history and the same inside jokes.

Born into an artistic family, Phoebe was exposed to music as a child, everything from tin pan alley to Delta blues. By her teen years, she had become expert at folk and blues guitar. Gifted with a phenomenal voice, perfect pitch and a four-octave range, she developed a completely original style, soulful and austere. She's probably best known for her early compositions including the1974 hit Poetry Man. The following year, when her daughter Valerie was born with serious brain damage, she famously elected to let the career slide and devote herself to her care. She gradually started performing and recording again and, when Valerie died in 2007, she attacked her grief by throwing herself back into working life.

In the 90s, when she began to study operatic technique, she started to use the full power of her voice to subvert her earlier style by indulging in a kind of willful excess: she channeled the force of her uncontained emotion into an array of screeches and squeals. At the end of a ballad, she knew she could secure a standing ovation with one of her wild, extended improvised cadenzas. She loved playing for the crowd.

Like a lot of ultra-talented singers, Phoebe was subject to bewildering mood swings. She had a rocky childhood, and the fact that she could wipe out everyone else on the stage with one number didn't make her any less insecure. She was the most energetic hypochondriac I've ever come across, searching out alternative doctors and gurus, traveling to Mexico to receive sheep embryo injections, all that stuff. Certainly, she had to deal with some bona fide ailments. But her frequent disquisitions on her medical condition left no doubt that she felt herself to be a prisoner inside her own body, a predicament she usually bore (in public, anyway) with cheerful stoicism. Some years ago, she was staying at our house in the country where we had to rehearse something or other. One morning, she came down the stairs, smiled, pulled up her shirt to expose her abdomen and announced in her knife-edged contralto, "Mold Spores" ! For her, that was fun.

That said, when Phoebe bopped in the door, her authenticity and sweet nature always made the room feel just a bit cozier, and anyone who ever saw her perform knows what I'm talking about. She was a mighty spoonful of soul, and I'll miss her.

DF 6/17/2011

http://donaldfagen.com/writing_items.php?itemID=135

Robert Weaver

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #114

Anna Massey RIP

Anna Massey, who has died of cancer aged 73, made her name on the stage as a teenager in French-window froth. She then graduated, with effortless and extraordinary ease, to the classics and to the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and David Hare. In later years, she became best known for her award-winning work in television and film. What constantly impressed was her fastidious intelligence and capacity for stillness: always the mark of a first-rate actor.

Born in Thakeham, West Sussex, she was bred into show business although, in personal terms, that proved something of a mixed blessing. Her father was Raymond Massey, a Canadian actor who achieved success in Hollywood; her mother was Adrianne Allen who had appeared in the original production of Noël Coward's Private Lives. Anna's godfather was the film director John Ford.

She married the actor Jeremy Brett in 1958. The marriage was dissolved in 1963. In 1988 she married Uri Andres, a Russian metallurgist at London's Imperial College. She is survived by Uri; her son, David, from her first marriage; and two grandchildren.

Michael Powell's lurid Peeping Tom (1960) provided Anna Massey with her second, and most significant, film role in a 50-year career on screen. Massey gave a wonderfully sympathetic performance as the naive downstairs neighbour of a psychotic landlord (Karlheinz Böhm) whom she finds both repellent and attractive. More often, Massey, with her cut-glass English accent, conveyed a cold and repressed character on screen.

She had made her feature film debut aged 21 in Ford's uncharacteristic Gideon's Day (1958) as the daughter of a Scotland Yard inspector played by Jack Hawkins. In Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), she was a nervous teacher. In 1969, she seemed content to play Anthony Hopkins's frustrated wife in The Looking Glass War and, in De Sade, a plain-looking woman married to the naughty marquis (Keir Dullea), while he romps around with her sexy sister.

In Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), she was strangled by the "Neck-Tie Murderer", bundled into a sack full of potatoes and thrown on to a moving truck. Somehow it was as if Hitch wanted to make amends for her being spared from death in Peeping Tom.

The following year, in an episode entitled Midnight Mess from the portmanteau film Vault of Horror (1973), she was murdered by her brother (played by her real-life sibling Daniel) for her inheritance, although she turns out to be a vampire who serves her murderer tomato juice in a restaurant which happens to be his blood. By way of contrast, she also appeared that year, with Hopkins and Claire Bloom, in A Doll's House, adapted from Henrik Ibsen's play.

Variously cast in roles such as nannies, nuns and nurses, Massey starred in dozens of British and American films, including The Importance of Being Earnest (as Miss Prism, 2002) and Possession (2002) and, in particular, television productions, which were far more rewarding. The most prominent of these were literary adaptations which offered roles such as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964), Lucetta in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), a creepy Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (1979), Aunt Norris in Mansfield Park (1983) and Miss Pross in A Tale of Two Cities (1989). Massey also had parts in the TV series The Pallisers (1974), Couples (1976), The Diamond Brothers (1991) and Midsomer Murders (1998, 2009) and as Lady Thatcher, opposite Derek Jacobi, in Pinochet in Suburbia (2006).

Perhaps her greatest triumph on television was her Bafta-winning performance as the lonely crime writer on holiday in Switzerland in Hotel du Lac (1986), Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel. It was the sort of role in which Massey was supreme: placid on the surface, with passion deep within her.

Loudo!

Last night's set lists

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

Mellow My Mind
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Never Be Anyone Else But You
Heart Of Gold

Long May You Run
Love Song
Love (Lennon)
Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Don't let It Bring You Down
Find The Cost Of Freedom
Unknown Legend
Mind Your Own Business

On approaching the bar I was accosted by one Jim McCullough who was in town to celebarate the birthday of his sweetheart Carole. I was gobsmacked! This was after receiving nourishment chez Toole, so I was somewhat refreshed on arrival.

I'm sure I played more songs than this but I just can't remember.

Harry Redmond RIP

Harry Redmond obituary
Creator of film special effects who turned an 18-inch model ape into King Kong

Ronald Bergan
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 28 June 2011

In the history of cinema, many children have followed their mothers or fathers into the film business, but few offspring pursued the path of a parent more slavishly than Harry Redmond Jr, who has died aged 101. Like a master craftsman, Harry Redmond Sr passed on the skills of his trade to his son, the trade being the creation of special effects for films. Most notably, they worked together on King Kong (1933), in which a giant gorilla captures an actor, Ann Darrow, played by the "scream queen" Fay Wray.

The Redmonds were important members of the King Kong technical team under the supervision of Willis O'Brien, the pioneer of model animation. Part of their job was to integrate the stop-motion models and animatronics into live-action sequences by means of back projection and travelling mattes. Although the model of the giant ape was only 18 inches high, Kong appeared to be about 24ft tall, looming especially large among the New York skyscrapers.

"Special effects" have existed in cinema since the Lumière brothers' The Demolition of a Wall (1895), although they were not named as such. The term dates from 1926, the year that Redmond Sr and his family moved from New York, where he ran Metropolitan Studios, to California to take up an invitation to join Warner Bros to work on the Douglas Fairbanks extravaganza Don Juan, the first feature to have sound effects and a full musical score. At the same time, 17-year-old Redmond Jr started in films, in the prop department at the new First National Pictures studio in Burbank, where his father was working.

Four years later, the younger Redmond had learned enough to work on special effects alongside his father on Allan Dwan's Changes (1931), a first world war drama starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Much of the film's challenge lay in the flying sequences, which were later superseded by those in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939), to which the Redmonds contributed greatly.

They also helped create the extraordinary aerial sequences in the first Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical, Flying Down to Rio (1933), that featured about a dozen chorus girls dancing on the wings of a fleet of aeroplanes above Rio. At one stage, a girl falls off a wing but is caught on the wings of a plane swooping below. The film was made for RKO, the studio the Redmonds joined in 1932, where they brought their expertise to bear on some of their most memorable movies, above all King Kong, directed by Ernest B Schoedsack.

The Redmonds worked for the same director on The Son of Kong (1933), with a cute 24ft albino ape in the title role, and The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), for which they provided an impressive eruption of Mount Vesuvius. But by the mid-30s, Redmond Jr had already begun to carve out a career on his own as a freelance for various studios.

Among his first solo efforts were Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937), with its preliminary plane crash and the walk of the survivors across the snow-covered Himalayas towards Shangri-La. In the same year, while working on The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), for David O Selznick, Redmond met Dorothea Holt, who had just been made head of the art department of the same producer. They were married in 1940, and later worked together on three films. For one of these, The Bishop's Wife (1947), Redmond supplied Cary Grant, who plays an angel, with supernatural powers, able to get a typewriter to write a letter without being touched, a Christmas tree to be decorated in a trice, and a wine bottle to keep filling miraculously.

In The Stranger (1946), for Orson Welles, Redmond was technically responsible for the thrilling denouement played out in the clock tower when the villain (Welles) is impaled on the blade carried by a rotating figure. He also realised the opening sight gag in the Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca (1946) when Harpo, leaning against a wall, is asked by a policeman, "What do you think you're doing, holding up the building?" Harpo nods vigorously and then, as he walks away, the whole structure collapses.

In 1952, with Storm Over Tibet, into which footage from Lost Horizon was incorporated, Redmond began a long and fruitful working relationship with the Hungarian-born producer Ivan Tors. Like many sci-fi movies of the 50s, the two produced by Tors on which Redmond did the special effects were pervaded by cold war concerns, but that didn't spoil the mechanical fun. The Magnetic Monster (1953) tells of a new and highly dangerous radioactive element that draws energy from its surroundings, doubles its size regularly, and could throw the earth out of orbit, while the title role of Gog (1954) is played by a huge robot who is controlled by a thinking machine in a vast lab beneath the New Mexican desert.

Soon after, Tors and Redmond moved into television, with Science Fiction Theatre (1955-57) and Sea Hunt (1958-60), the latter distinguished by the extra-special underwater effects. The pair also co-produced Flipper (1963) and Daktari (1966). Redmond's final credit, before retiring from show business, was on the superior sci-fi series The Outer Limits (1963-64), which began with the warning: "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission."

Redmond, whose wife died in 2009, is survived by a son, Lee, and a daughter, Lynne.

• Harry Redmond Jr, special effects creator, born 15 October 1909; died 23 May 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun/28/harry-redmond-obituary?INTCMP=SRCH

A great site on special effects: http://nzpetesmatteshot.blogspot.com/

Early Days of the FNB #4

Swinging Sixties FNB

Leon Russell at The Sage, Gateshead - eview by Terry Kelly

Leon Russell
The Sage Gateshead

JOURNALISTS tend to overuse the phrase 'musical legend,' but Leon Russell is the real deal.

The Oklahoma-born piano hero worked as a session musician for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Doris Day to Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys.

But his solo glory days came in the early 1970s, with his timeless originals Delta Lady and A Song for You.

Now 69, Russell has recently emerged from commercial oblivion, thanks to a collaboration on last year's album, The Union, with long-time admirer Elton John.

While age and brain surgery have certainly taken their physical toll on the once-vibrant performer with the famous white beard, who now walks gingerly with a stick for support, Russell's rock and roll spirit still burns bright.

Stationary but bolt-upright on his piano stool throughout his 90-minute set, Russell, backed by a bluesy and brilliant four-piece band, tore through his illustrious back catalogue for a small but appreciative audience.

Opening with Delta Lady - a huge hit for Joe Cocker - Russell wrapped his raspy tonsils round the country classic Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms, Honky Tonk Women, Kansas City, Baby What You Want Me To Do - complete with a funny story about blues great Jimmy Reed - Georgia On My Mind and even a countrified version of The Beatles' I've Just Seen a Face.

But the undoubted highlight of the show was A Song for You - his finest song - Russell tugging at the heartstrings while fixed in a single spotlight.

The only regret was the number of empty seats - fans really did miss a musical legend.

Terry Kelly

Last night's setlist

At the Big Jug, Durham: -

Heart Of Gold
Tennessee Waltz
Things We Said Today
Mellow My Mind
Tell Me Why
Mind Your Own Business

A raw, but enjoyable evening.