Saturday, 17 January 2015
Friday, 16 January 2015
Kim Fowley RIP
Kim Fowley: The punk before punk, who called himself a 'necessary evil'
Kim Fowley, who has died aged 75, was calculating and cynical – but still helped make an outrageous amount of great music
Alexis Petridis
Friday 16 January 2015
You don’t have to look far into Kim Fowley’s background to work out how he turned out the way he did: a serial, mercurial opportunist who worked with everyone from Berry Gordy to GG Allin; an often brilliant, occasionally appalling figure whose view of rock music was shot through with a cynicism that set him at odds with the 60s counterculture, but made perfect sense in the glam and punk eras. “I don’t understand how he continues to earn a living, but he does,” complained the rock critic Robert Christgau, who would have been less puzzled about Fowley’s survival instinct if he’d examined the man’s childhood.
On the surface, Kim Fowley – who has died at the age of 75 – was an archetypal Hollywood brat. His father was a B-movie actor, his mother a Goldwyn Girl and Warner Brothers contract player; he went to school with Nancy Sinatra and James Brolin and enjoyed a brief career as a would-be delinquent in the company of Ryan O’Neal. But his childhood wasn’t quite as gilded as it looked.
His mother abandoned him to a foster home when she remarried. According to Fowley, admittedly not always the most reliable witness, his father rescued him so that the six-year-old might act as a lookout when he was scoring opium, and he helped his dad procure women at Sunset Strip clubs: “I would go up to a girl and I’d say ‘Could I talk to you, pretty lady?’ ‘Oh, what a cute little boy!’,” he told the journalist Michael Walker, “and then I’d take off and he’d move right in”. His father abandoned him again when Fowley’s ever-increasing height and a limp occasioned by a bout of polio left him “an Ichabod Crane/Scarecrow of Oz”, unable to charm potential conquests.
Forced to live on his wits, he became a petty thief and a male prostitute “for old desperate women”, before spotting an opportunity in the world of rock’n’roll as a manager and producer: “when you’re 19 and you’ve already done 13 years of opium runs with dad and been a kind of seduction advance man, you know how to talk to people.”
His early hits tell you a lot about the way rock’n’roll was viewed in the pre-Beatles 60s. They were novelty records, designed to squeeze quick money out of a fly-by-night phenomenon that might already be on its last legs, but – in what was to become something of a recurring motif in his career – they occasionally turned out rather better than you suspected Fowley had really intended. For all his cynicism, he couldn’t stop himself from being genuinely entertaining.
Friday 16 January 2015
You don’t have to look far into Kim Fowley’s background to work out how he turned out the way he did: a serial, mercurial opportunist who worked with everyone from Berry Gordy to GG Allin; an often brilliant, occasionally appalling figure whose view of rock music was shot through with a cynicism that set him at odds with the 60s counterculture, but made perfect sense in the glam and punk eras. “I don’t understand how he continues to earn a living, but he does,” complained the rock critic Robert Christgau, who would have been less puzzled about Fowley’s survival instinct if he’d examined the man’s childhood.
On the surface, Kim Fowley – who has died at the age of 75 – was an archetypal Hollywood brat. His father was a B-movie actor, his mother a Goldwyn Girl and Warner Brothers contract player; he went to school with Nancy Sinatra and James Brolin and enjoyed a brief career as a would-be delinquent in the company of Ryan O’Neal. But his childhood wasn’t quite as gilded as it looked.
His mother abandoned him to a foster home when she remarried. According to Fowley, admittedly not always the most reliable witness, his father rescued him so that the six-year-old might act as a lookout when he was scoring opium, and he helped his dad procure women at Sunset Strip clubs: “I would go up to a girl and I’d say ‘Could I talk to you, pretty lady?’ ‘Oh, what a cute little boy!’,” he told the journalist Michael Walker, “and then I’d take off and he’d move right in”. His father abandoned him again when Fowley’s ever-increasing height and a limp occasioned by a bout of polio left him “an Ichabod Crane/Scarecrow of Oz”, unable to charm potential conquests.
Forced to live on his wits, he became a petty thief and a male prostitute “for old desperate women”, before spotting an opportunity in the world of rock’n’roll as a manager and producer: “when you’re 19 and you’ve already done 13 years of opium runs with dad and been a kind of seduction advance man, you know how to talk to people.”
His early hits tell you a lot about the way rock’n’roll was viewed in the pre-Beatles 60s. They were novelty records, designed to squeeze quick money out of a fly-by-night phenomenon that might already be on its last legs, but – in what was to become something of a recurring motif in his career – they occasionally turned out rather better than you suspected Fowley had really intended. For all his cynicism, he couldn’t stop himself from being genuinely entertaining.
B Bumble and the Stingers’ Nut Rocker, essentially a version of Tchaikovsky’s March of the Toy Soldiers from The Nutcracker, which Fowley had the chutzpah to take a writing credit for, is brilliantly, irresistibly stupid. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, a song he talent-scouted for the Rivingtons, became a trash-rock classic, performed by everyone from the Beach Boys to the Muppets, and given a second lease of life when it was transformed into Surfin’ Bird by the Trashmen, and later covered by the Ramones and the Cramps.
The arrival of the Beatles should theoretically have meant the end for Fowley: another of his productions, the Murmaids’ Popsicles and Icicles, made it to No 3 in the US in January 1964, but sounded hopelessly passé next to I Want to Hold Your Hand, released the same month. Instead, Fowley flourished, his career based on two skills.
One was an understanding of spectacle. He worked with PJ Proby at the height of the singer’s trouser-splitting notoriety and apparently invented a deathless gig tradition when he encouraged the audience at the Toronto Rock’n’Roll Revival to hold lit matches and lighters aloft to welcome a nervous John Lennon to the stage.
The other was a talent for spotting other people’s talent. The author of Popscicles and Icicles was David Gates, later frontman of Bread; early on in their careers, he worked with the Soft Machine, Warren Zevon and Slade. More puzzling was how he parlayed that into a recording career of his own, despite possessing what his friend Michael Des Barres described as “no musical ability”. Even so, his releases occasionally came up trumps, almost despite themselves. His 1965 single The Trip is not only way ahead of the curve when it comes to referencing LSD in pop, it’s a kind of sneering, contemptuous assault on the values of the nascent hippy movement. His 1968 album Outrageous – the record that so upset Robert Christgau – offered more ur-punk attitude (“Dirty, filthy, sneaky, horrible”, he intoned gleefully on Animal Man, “I’m gonna kill you – are you straight?”).Bubblegum had a killer garage rock riff so good it was subsequently covered by Sonic Youth. Motorboat, his 1974 glam single as Jimmy Jukebox, is flatly brilliant, a ridiculous confection of camp, ennui-laden vocals – “Mondo deco! Punk rock fugitive!” – Duane Eddy guitars and Fowley impersonating the sound of an outboard motor.
Given that it was an exercise in trashy flamboyance, outrage and chutzpah, it was no wonder Fowley understood glam perfectly: he turned up on The Old Grey Whistle Test explaining Alice Cooper, for whom he wrote. In fact, the 70s were the decade that suited him best. He was perfectly placed to tap into the early 70s obsession with nostalgia for the rock’n’roll era, working on the soundtrack of George Lucas’s American Graffiti. As the lyrics of Animal Man and Motorboat suggested, he was on to the idea of punk before punk really existed. In 1973, he produced Jonathan Richman’s visionary protopunk band the Modern Lovers; the following year, he put together the Runaways. His tenure as the manager of the all-girl band was controversial: it was Fowley that insisted on the band’s “jailbait” image, with frontwoman Cherie Curie obliged to perform onstage in lingerie, while his desire to appear as a svengali-like figure in total control of the band made them easy to disdain by a music press never afraid to be sexist in the first place. But he co-wrote their awesome single Cherry Bomb, a record perfectly balanced on the cusp between glam and punk.
The Runaways fired him in 1977, and Fowley never quite captured the zeitgeist in the same way again. But whatever subsequently happened on the LA music scene, Fowley was frequently to be found on its fringes, being Kim Fowley. He had a stab at 80s AOR with Steel Breeze, attempted to muscle in on the Sunset Strip hair-metal scene via a band called Shanghai, dabbled in post-White Stripes garage rock with Muck and the Mires, and gained the mind-boggling credit of “artistic consultant” to GG Allin, a punk singer who ate his own excrement on stage.
He never lost his capacity to outrage: invited to perform at London’s Dirty Water club a decade ago, he succeeded in so offending the audience that one of them grabbed the microphone from him. “I don’t care who you are or how many great records you’ve made,” she shouted. “Why don’t you just fuck off?”
Fowley’s response was unrecorded, but given that he described himself as “a necessary evil”, it seems more than likely he took it as evidence that he was doing his job.
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
Noir of the Week #4: The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951)
The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951)
Frank Black
Frank Black
14 January 2015
This tightly-scripted gothic suspense thriller, based on the
book 'The Frightened Child' by Dana Lyon, was directed by Robert Wise, the man
often dismissed as the man who cut The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) behind
Orson Welles’ back while the latter was on a jolly in South America. In reality,
Wise was an accomplished director who worked successfully across number of genres
and, it is fair to say, several of his films are now regarded as classics: West
Side Story (1961), The Haunting (1963), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951),
The Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Somebody
Up There Likes Me (1954), for example.
Wise worked with Welles not only on The Magnificent
Ambersons, but also on Citizen Kane (1941) (where he was nominated for an Oscar
for editing), and for a studio, RKO, that seemed to encourage cinematic
experimentation, such as the use of deep focus. He also worked for producer Val
Lewton, noted for his psychological, expressionistic horror dramas and Wise
would take and develop these motifs in his own work, particularly his horror
and noir-based work – including his noir-Western, Blood on the Moon (1948),
with quintessential noir-star, Robert Mitchum.
Wise’s touch, working in collaboration with cinematographer
Lucien Ballard, is clear to see in The House on Telegraph Hill, a complex noir
in which Victoria Kovelska (Valentina Cortese), a Polish survivor of a Nazi
concentration camp, takes on the identity of dead inmate Karin Dernakova. After
the war, she heads to San Francisco
to be reunited with ‘her’ son, Chris, who is too young to know any better, in
the rather grand house on Telegraph Hill. Although she falls in love with and
marries his guardian, Alan Spender (Richard Basehart), she perceives a sense of
darkness about the place and, moreover, is haunted by the events of her past
and the knowledge that she escaped what others couldn’t. Chris has inherited
his aunt Sophie’s estate but there is tension in the air because his governess,
Margaret (Fay Baker), attached, Mrs Danvers-like, to her former employer, is in
love with Alan too.
Initially, with her adoption of Karin’s identity and her
deception of Chris and Alan, the film seems to be setting up Victoria, haunted
by her past, as the femme fatale, but in a reversal of the gender roles and
with shades of Gaslight (and I prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson version, if
you’re asking), Alan is the duplicitous character, determined to do away with
Victoria and Chris to inherit the money and property for himself. Desperate for
help, Victoria turns to Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), a lawyer friend of
Alan’s who had met her while serving in the war and who clearly has a thing for
her, but in the end, after discovering that Alan killed Sophia, she outsmarts
him all by herself in a tense scene that alludes somewhat to Alfred Hitchcock’s
Suspicion (1941) and Peter Godfrey’s The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947).
There is some startlingly effective use of location shooting
and studio work, with several scenes sticking in the mind, not least the
opening: a flashback to a concentration camp shortly juxtaposed with the image of the
titular house for sale, while we hear Victoria’s grieving narration about her
relationship with Karin and the story of her son. Another scene in which
Wise excels with his stylised visuals occurs when Victoria
encounters Alan while she explores the eerie ruins of Chris’ playhouse, which
has been damaged by an explosion. She is so afraid that she almost falls to her
death through a hole in the floor. In his filming of Victoria
in the runaway car down Telegraph Hill Boulevard
and Lombard Street West , the director seems to be looking forward to Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968) – indeed, when the
car rounds the corner from Chestnut into Leavenworth ,
it is foreshadowing Steve McQueen’s exact move by seventeen years.
Most of us remember Richard Basehart hurling himself from
one side of the set to the other as the admiral in Irwin Allen’s 1960s science
fiction television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; in fact, though most
of his films were hardly classics, he had a rich and varied film career inlcuding Federico
Fellini’s La Strada (1954), John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) and Hal Ashby’s
Being There (1979). He was not first choice to play Alan – Dana Andrews, James
Mason and Richard Conte had all been considered – but he is convincing in the
role. A much undervalued actor, he had played other edgy characters such as the
killer in Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann’s superb thriller, He Walked by Night
(1948) and the man on the ledge in Henry Hathaway’s Fourteen Hours, released only
two months earlier than The House on Telegraph Hill. He married his co-star Cortese
later that year.
Tuesday, 13 January 2015
Brian Clemens RIP
Brian Clemens obituary
Writer and producer of popular TV shows such as The Avengers, The Professionals and The Persuaders!
Toby Hadoke
Monday 12 January 2015
The writer and producer Brian Clemens, who has died aged 83, was responsible for hundreds of hours of escapist television entertainment, including such enduringly popular programmes as The Avengers and The Professionals.
Even though he did not create The Avengers, Clemens was involved in the show from its first episode, in 1961, which he co-wrote. The series was originally conceived as a straightforward action-adventure vehicle for Ian Hendry, whose character, David Keel, was assisted by the mysterious John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee. When Hendry left after a year, an increasingly debonair Macnee was paired with Honor Blackman as the leather-clad Cathy Gale and a more offbeat tone emerged. After this successful transformation, and in order to be sold to America, the series began to be made on film, with Clemens becoming associate producer thanks to his experience in the medium. This caused some resentment among his colleagues, and, despite casting Diana Rigg as Emma Peel and turning the series into a global brand, Clemens was eventually fired.
He felt he could have written Rigg’s part more effectively, but the role made her a star and, thanks to him, the show’s mix of action and adventure was augmented with a witty, knowing tone. It also had a unique visual template, fusing an old-fashioned, mythical but recognisable Britain with the progressive fashions and ideas of the 1960s.
Writer and producer of popular TV shows such as The Avengers, The Professionals and The Persuaders!
Toby Hadoke
Monday 12 January 2015
The writer and producer Brian Clemens, who has died aged 83, was responsible for hundreds of hours of escapist television entertainment, including such enduringly popular programmes as The Avengers and The Professionals.
Even though he did not create The Avengers, Clemens was involved in the show from its first episode, in 1961, which he co-wrote. The series was originally conceived as a straightforward action-adventure vehicle for Ian Hendry, whose character, David Keel, was assisted by the mysterious John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee. When Hendry left after a year, an increasingly debonair Macnee was paired with Honor Blackman as the leather-clad Cathy Gale and a more offbeat tone emerged. After this successful transformation, and in order to be sold to America, the series began to be made on film, with Clemens becoming associate producer thanks to his experience in the medium. This caused some resentment among his colleagues, and, despite casting Diana Rigg as Emma Peel and turning the series into a global brand, Clemens was eventually fired.
He felt he could have written Rigg’s part more effectively, but the role made her a star and, thanks to him, the show’s mix of action and adventure was augmented with a witty, knowing tone. It also had a unique visual template, fusing an old-fashioned, mythical but recognisable Britain with the progressive fashions and ideas of the 1960s.
The show struggled without Clemens and he was quickly reinstated, continuing to oversee the show (now with Linda Thorson playing a new character, Tara King, in Rigg’s place) until it ended in 1969. He also worked on other glossy, action-packed and glamorous escapist fare, such as The Baron (1966-67), The Persuaders! (1971) and The Protectors (1972-73).
Having formed his own production company with a fellow Avengers producer, Albert Fennell, and the composer Laurie Johnson, in 1976 he launched The New Avengers. This British-French- Canadian co-production ran for two series, but never quite reached the critical or popular heights of its predecessor. Nevertheless, worldwide sales were healthy and it helped to establish Joanna Lumley (as the high-kicking agent Purdey) in the national consciousness.
Clemens had a gift for channelling the zeitgeist, and when he sensed the public’s desire for grittier fare, he conceived The Professionals (1977-83). Martin Shaw played the ex-policeman Doyle and Lewis Collins a former SAS soldier, Bodie, working under Gordon Jackson’s no-nonsense Cowley. They represented the government department CI5, created to deal with threats the conventional forces would struggle to tackle.
Though the series was hugely popular and ran for five series, it has often been charged with political incorrectness (women are leered at, for example, and black characters are often pimps and criminals). Clemens did not aspire to political depth and simply used what he saw as the prevailing attitudes of the time to tell entertaining stories. Later, he was executive producer on a short-lived 1999 relaunch entitled C15: The New Professionals, with a new cast including Edward Woodward.
He was born in Croydon, Surrey, the son of Susanna (nee O’Grady) and Albert, the latter an engineer who also worked in the music halls. Clemens left school at 14 and, after national service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, worked his way up from messenger boy to copywriter at an advertising firm, writing in his spare time. His script Valid For Single Journey Only was accepted by the BBC in 1955 but he really learned his screenwriting trade when he joined the production company Danzigers, literally writing to order. With tight deadlines and plots often based on the availability of existing sets, props or location, he churned out scripts for B films and TV series with a fast turnover that had to be both thrilling and economical (“I started to think as a producer very early on,” he said). So prolific was he during this time that he used the pseudonym Tony O’Grady when writing for other companies on series such as Dial 999 (1959) and HG Wells’s Invisible Man (1959).
His gift for juggling the practical as well as the creative side of scriptwriting was honed during a stint as unofficial story editor in 1960-61 for early episodes of the Patrick McGoohan spy show Danger Man. Although he spent much of the early 60s with commercial companies, he did find time for a brief stint scripting episodes of the BBC’s Adam Adamant Lives! in 1966. He created the Bafta-winning comedy My Wife Next Door (1972) and the popular anthology series Thriller (1973-76). In later years, he continued to be prolific on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote for Bergerac (1983), Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (1984) and The Secret Servant (1984), and created Bugs (1995-99) in the UK. In the US, his credits included The Father Dowling Mysteries (1990-91) and Perry Mason (1991-92).
Although Clemens flourished on television, his hero was a master of the cinema, Alfred Hitchcock. His own forays on to the big screen included screenplays for Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980), and a sole directorial credit, for the witty and swashbuckling cult Hammer film Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974), which he also wrote.
He was appointed OBE in 2010, the same year that the British Film Institute featured a retrospective of his work: he was visibly shocked and moved by the standing ovation he received.
He is survived by his second wife, Janet, whom he married in 1979, and their sons, Samuel and George.
• Brian Horace Clemens, screenwriter and producer, born 30 July 1931; died 10 January 2015
Monday, 12 January 2015
The Marx Brothers at the BFI 2015
A whole lotta relephants: the enduring delights of Duck Soup
Filled with jokes about tin-pot dictators, the Marx Brothers’ 1933 film Duck Soup resonates with the politics of the time, but it’s the wonderful non-stop puns that drive this classic comedy
Craig Brown
Friday 9 January 2015
It is the rat-a-tat-tat speed of their delivery that distinguishes the Marx Brothers from their contemporaries, and stops them growing old. Other comedies from that era now seem sluggish and laborious: Duck Soup is alive and kicking.
Harpo, was, of course, the silent one, but the scenes in which he appears are generally far louder, and more perilous, than any of the others. He is a bundle of anarchic energy, targeting the pompous and the self-regarding, like all the vengeful characters in Struwwelpeter rolled into one. Always taking out his scissors and going snip-snip-snip, he snips off the ends of Chico’s frankfurter and Firefly’s quill pen, he snips off the peanut vendor’s apron, the ambassador’s tail coat and the soldiers’ fancy plumes. Instead of speaking, Harpo grins like a madman and honks his horn. Having broken into a house, he tries to open the safe, but he twists the volume dial of a radio by mistake. It starts to blare, so he has to smash it. Whenever he is on screen, even the most inanimate of objects cannot be trusted to stay quiet. At one point, he shows Groucho a tattoo on his stomach of a house. As Groucho takes a closer look at the tattoo, a dog pops out of it; when Groucho says “Miaow!” the dog starts barking.
The most celebrated scene, and the most sublime, revolves around another visual pun: a mirror that is not a mirror, a reflection that is not a reflection. Harpo, disguised as Groucho, tries to fool Groucho into believing that he is looking at himself in a mirror. Groucho, suspicious, executes a random series of increasingly ludicrous movements in the hope of catching him out. But whatever movement he makes, however daft, Harpo anticipates him and does just the same. Even when Groucho walks into what should be the mirror, and out the other side, Harpo does the same, but in reverse. Eighty years on, that visual gag is still going strong: in an episode of the gloriously perverse American cartoon series Family Guy, the baby-man antihero Stewie is transported back to 1930s Berlin, where he disguises himself as Adolf Hitler. Then Hitler himself comes into the room, and Stewie has to convince him that he is looking into a mirror.
The world in 1933 was becoming increasingly overpopulated with tin-pot dictators. Is Duck Soup a political satire? Many intellectuals and academics have argued as much, though they tend to belong to the school of criticism that likes to stamp all the jokes out of comedy so that they can praise its high seriousness without fear of contradiction. A New Yorker cartoon once showed a Professor of Semiotics saying “The tautology of their symbolism thus begins to achieve mythic proportions in A Day at the Races, Duck Soupand A Night at the Opera”. As is so often the case with New Yorker cartoons, it veers from reality only by a couple of degrees.
Over the years, Duck Soup has been praised for its understanding of paranoia in international diplomacy and of the economics of warfare. It is full of gags about the futility of war and its financial advantages. At one point, Groucho is told of a peace plan and replies, “It’s too late, I’ve already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield.” At another, Groucho puts his hand on Harpo’s shoulder and tells him, in ringing tones, “You’re a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking life and limb, through shot and shell, we’ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.”
This joke was echoed, 30 years later, in Beyond the Fringe (“I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage”) but, taken as a whole, Duck Soup is too explosively nonsensical to let itself succumb to the discipline of satire, which might loosely be described as comedy with an agenda. (Nonsense is not an alternative version of sense, but rather its negation.)
On 14 November 1933, three days before the release of Duck Soup, Harpo took a ship to the USSR, via Hamburg. He was to be the first American artist to perform in Moscow since the US, under President Roosevelt, had recognised the Soviet Union. Without realising it, he was about to enter a real-life looking-glass world, where draconian decisions are taken for all the wrong reasons.
In his otherwise delightfully breezy autobiography Harpo Speaks, he says that in Hamburg he saw “the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen – a row of stores with Stars of David and the word ‘Jude’ painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn’t know what hit them and didn’t know where the next blow would come from”.
On the train out of Warsaw, he bumps into a fellow American, who tells him he’ll have to pay for excess baggage at the Russian border, and kindly lends him a hundred roubles, saying it will be cheaper to pay in roubles than dollars. But when Harpo offers roubles to the Inspector, mayhem ensues. “Bells rang. Buzzers sounded. Boots clomped all over the place as guards came running.”
Harpo is hauled off to a shed, where he is cross-questioned. “Where did I get the rubles? A guy on the train lent them to me. What was his name? I didn’t know his name. I was lousy at remembering names. I was lying, the Russian colonel said. Tell the truth now: where did I get the rubles? I gave him the same answer.
“A squad of guards lugged my trunk and harp into the shed. ‘Open the trunk, please,’ said the officer. I unlocked it and the Russians began unloading it. When at first they only found a raincoat and an assortment of pants, shirts and ties, they were obviously disappointed.
“Then they hit the jackpot. From the trunk they removed 400 knives, two revolvers, three stilettos, half-a-dozen bottles marked POISON, and a collection of red wigs and false beards, moustaches and hands. More bells rang. More buzzers sounded. Whistles blew. More officials and more guards came clomping into the shed.”
Harpo is grilled. “Would I please explain why I was transporting weapons and disguises? I told them they were all props for my act. Act? What act? I said I had come to Russia to put on a show. Americans do not entertain in Russia, they said. I had better tell the truth.”
They ask what is in his harp case. A harp, he tells them. They order him to play something. “This would have been my salvation any other time, any other place, but in an open shed when it was 30 below zero. I was so stiff from the cold that I couldn’t get my gloves off. All I could do was run my gloved hands up the strings a couple of times and pray that somebody there would recognise the professional touch.”
But no: a guard gets the same noise out of the harp. The officials shake their heads and smirk. Harpo fears imprisonment, or worse, and begins to yell about his rights, but all to no avail. It is only when his fellow American pops up on the scene, and they accept his explanation, that Harpo is allowed to board the Moscow express. “The train was unbelievably crowded, ten and twelve people to each six-passenger compartment, and it stank of disinfectant, but I thanked God I was lucky enough to be on it.”
His show is a terrific hit with the Russians, who love clowns, but, on the way back to America, Harpo can’t shake off the awful feeling that for the past eight weeks he has been watched wherever he goes, “by eyes I couldn’t see. I never, not for a minute, felt I was really alone. I was a stranger who had stumbled into a deadly conspiracy, who had to be kept from finding out what the plot was all about.”
But one thing above all strikes Harpo about the USSR. “I never saw anybody do anything just for the hell of it. I never saw anybody pull a spontaneous gag.” Rationality, he feels, is the only acceptable justification for everything in Stalin’s USSR: something can only be funny if it has a reason to be funny. And this is why Duck Soup is so funny: because it has no reason to be funny.
• The Marx Brothers film season begins at BFI Southbank, London SE1, on 14 January. bfi.org.uk.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/09/craig-brown-on-the-delights-of-duck-soup
Filled with jokes about tin-pot dictators, the Marx Brothers’ 1933 film Duck Soup resonates with the politics of the time, but it’s the wonderful non-stop puns that drive this classic comedy
Craig Brown
Friday 9 January 2015
A pun is a word that doesn’t mean what it says, or rather, means what it says but also means something else. It is a signpost bearing the same destination, but pointing in two directions.
The longest pun-free period in Duck Soup is at the beginning, after the unsettling opening shot of ducks paddling in a cauldron over a hot fire. We are in the majestic council chamber of the government of Freedonia. A meeting is in session. Zander, the president, is asking the wealthy Mrs Gloria Teasdale, widow of the late Chester V Teasdale, for a further $20m, so that he can announce an immediate reduction in taxes. Mrs Teasdale, played by the redoubtable Margaret Dumont, complains that she has already donated half her fortune, and will only lend more money if a new leader is put in place.
It is already a minute in, and there is still no pun in sight. Instead, the language of negotiation fills the air: this could be any political film, at any time, dealing with the usual problems of borrowing, taxing and spending. You almost feel that, if you looked very hard, you could spot George Osborne or Vince Cable in the background, beavering away.
“In a crisis like this, I feel Freedonia needs a new leader,” declares Mrs Teasdale. “A progressive, fearless fighter, a man like … Rufus T Firefly!”
Firefly is, of course, Groucho Marx, but we have still not had a glimpse of him. Instead, the scene switches to an absurdly lavish ballroom, its vast staircase flanked by overly plumed guards and trumpeters with exceedingly long trumpets. It is the reception for His Excellency Rufus T Firefly, who has yet to arrive. After various formal introductions, a troupe of ballerinas enters, scattering flowers along his projected walkway. Everyone choruses:
His Excellency is due
To take his station,
Beginning his new administration
He’ll make his appearance when
The clock on the wall strikes 10!
We’ll give him a rousing cheer
To show him we’re glad he’s here!
Hail, hail Freedonia!
Land of the brave and free!
In 1933, when Duck Soup was first released, this deadbeat song with its patriotic lyrics would have brought to mind the forced jubilations of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany; even today, it remains the prototypical song for countries such as Azerbaijan and North Korea, speaking of order and shared purpose, of a population pointing in the same direction. And still no sign of a pun.
The minutes tick by, and the ceremony keeps on stopping and starting as His Excellency fails to appear. All eyes are on the entrance when Groucho Marx finally lollops in from the side, unseen. Finally, he is greeted – “I welcome you with open arms” – by a clearly besotted Mrs Teasdale. The moment he enters, the puns come thick and punishingly fast, with no letup. The more Mrs Teasdale coos, the more he undermines her with his crazed wordplay. “You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t leave in a taxi you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.” These quick-fire speeches have a topsy-turvy logic all their own, each word changing its meaning the moment it is uttered.
Everything about Groucho was a pun. His father was called Simon, not Sam, and Marrix, not Marx; his mother’s real name was Miene Schönberg, but her stage name was Minnie Palmer. Groucho was born Julius; he only transformed into Groucho in a break between shows, when a fellow comedian allotted nicknames to each of the Marx Brothers: Milton wore rubber boots, hence Gummo; Leonard chased women, or “chicks”, hence Chico, and Adolph played the harp, hence Harpo. And as for Julius, he carried a small drawstring bag known as a “grouch”.
Groucho’s most visible characteristic is itself a sort of pun. It is both a moustache, and not a moustache. Instead, it is a painting of a moustache – ceci n’est pas une moustache– that he first daubed on his face with greasepaint in 1921, having arrived late for a performance, with no time to glue on his artificial whiskers. Before long, his eyebrows followed suit. Between them, they were to become the great symbol of the Marx Brothers, loved by low-brows and high-brows alike.
The world of Freedonia is a world built on order. Everything is where it should be and does what it is meant to, before the Marx Brothers send it all haywire. After their arrival, nothing is allowed to remain in its rightful place, or to be what it is meant to be. Everything is transformed into something else. The world has become a pun.
Amid much bugling, successive guards announce “His Excellency’s car!” But even the car is not a car: following another fanfare, Harpo appears on a motorcycle. “I’m in a hurry,” cries Groucho, stepping into the sidecar. “To the House of Representatives! Ride like fury. If you run out of gas, get ethyl. If Ethyl runs out, get Mabel. Now, step on it!” And with that, Harpo accelerates off, leaving the sidecar firmly in place. “Well, it certainly feels good to be back again,” says Groucho, having got nowhere.
When Harpo next appears, he is with Chico. They arrive at the Ambassador’s door as his appointed spies, both wearing bearded masks and hats, with Harpo’s eyes whirling round on springs. But the mask itself is then unmasked: Chico turns Harpo round; his real face is on the other side of his head. The pair are double agents, or human puns.
And so it goes on, order overturned, conformity unravelling, idiocy at the gates. Later – I was about to say much later, but the whole film lasts barely an hour and 10 minutes – we are in a courtroom, with the two spies on trialfor selling Freedonia’s secret war code and plans. “Sure. I sold a code and two pair of plans,” chips in Chico. Under the pressure of the courtroom, the puns bubble over, particularly when Chico turns turtle on the prosecutor:
Chico: Now, I ask you one. What is it has a trunk, but no key, weight 2,000lb and lives in a circus?
Prosecutor: That’s irrelevant.
Chico: A relevant! Hey, that’s the answer. There’s a whole lotta relephants in a circus.
Judge: That sort of testimony we can eliminate.
Chico: ’At’s-a fine. I’ll take some.
Judge: You’ll take what?
Chico: Eliminate. A nice cold glass eliminate.
Firefly: Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
One pun leads to another: they bounce with the speed and precision of a polished stone skimmed across a lake.
Minister of Finance: Something must be done! War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes!
Chico: Hey, I got an uncle lives in Taxes.
Minister of Finance: No. I’m talking about taxes – money, dollars.
Chico: Dollas! That’s where my uncle lives. Dollas, Taxes.
The longest pun-free period in Duck Soup is at the beginning, after the unsettling opening shot of ducks paddling in a cauldron over a hot fire. We are in the majestic council chamber of the government of Freedonia. A meeting is in session. Zander, the president, is asking the wealthy Mrs Gloria Teasdale, widow of the late Chester V Teasdale, for a further $20m, so that he can announce an immediate reduction in taxes. Mrs Teasdale, played by the redoubtable Margaret Dumont, complains that she has already donated half her fortune, and will only lend more money if a new leader is put in place.
It is already a minute in, and there is still no pun in sight. Instead, the language of negotiation fills the air: this could be any political film, at any time, dealing with the usual problems of borrowing, taxing and spending. You almost feel that, if you looked very hard, you could spot George Osborne or Vince Cable in the background, beavering away.
“In a crisis like this, I feel Freedonia needs a new leader,” declares Mrs Teasdale. “A progressive, fearless fighter, a man like … Rufus T Firefly!”
Firefly is, of course, Groucho Marx, but we have still not had a glimpse of him. Instead, the scene switches to an absurdly lavish ballroom, its vast staircase flanked by overly plumed guards and trumpeters with exceedingly long trumpets. It is the reception for His Excellency Rufus T Firefly, who has yet to arrive. After various formal introductions, a troupe of ballerinas enters, scattering flowers along his projected walkway. Everyone choruses:
His Excellency is due
To take his station,
Beginning his new administration
He’ll make his appearance when
The clock on the wall strikes 10!
We’ll give him a rousing cheer
To show him we’re glad he’s here!
Hail, hail Freedonia!
Land of the brave and free!
In 1933, when Duck Soup was first released, this deadbeat song with its patriotic lyrics would have brought to mind the forced jubilations of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany; even today, it remains the prototypical song for countries such as Azerbaijan and North Korea, speaking of order and shared purpose, of a population pointing in the same direction. And still no sign of a pun.
The minutes tick by, and the ceremony keeps on stopping and starting as His Excellency fails to appear. All eyes are on the entrance when Groucho Marx finally lollops in from the side, unseen. Finally, he is greeted – “I welcome you with open arms” – by a clearly besotted Mrs Teasdale. The moment he enters, the puns come thick and punishingly fast, with no letup. The more Mrs Teasdale coos, the more he undermines her with his crazed wordplay. “You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t leave in a taxi you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.” These quick-fire speeches have a topsy-turvy logic all their own, each word changing its meaning the moment it is uttered.
Everything about Groucho was a pun. His father was called Simon, not Sam, and Marrix, not Marx; his mother’s real name was Miene Schönberg, but her stage name was Minnie Palmer. Groucho was born Julius; he only transformed into Groucho in a break between shows, when a fellow comedian allotted nicknames to each of the Marx Brothers: Milton wore rubber boots, hence Gummo; Leonard chased women, or “chicks”, hence Chico, and Adolph played the harp, hence Harpo. And as for Julius, he carried a small drawstring bag known as a “grouch”.
Groucho’s most visible characteristic is itself a sort of pun. It is both a moustache, and not a moustache. Instead, it is a painting of a moustache – ceci n’est pas une moustache– that he first daubed on his face with greasepaint in 1921, having arrived late for a performance, with no time to glue on his artificial whiskers. Before long, his eyebrows followed suit. Between them, they were to become the great symbol of the Marx Brothers, loved by low-brows and high-brows alike.
The world of Freedonia is a world built on order. Everything is where it should be and does what it is meant to, before the Marx Brothers send it all haywire. After their arrival, nothing is allowed to remain in its rightful place, or to be what it is meant to be. Everything is transformed into something else. The world has become a pun.
Amid much bugling, successive guards announce “His Excellency’s car!” But even the car is not a car: following another fanfare, Harpo appears on a motorcycle. “I’m in a hurry,” cries Groucho, stepping into the sidecar. “To the House of Representatives! Ride like fury. If you run out of gas, get ethyl. If Ethyl runs out, get Mabel. Now, step on it!” And with that, Harpo accelerates off, leaving the sidecar firmly in place. “Well, it certainly feels good to be back again,” says Groucho, having got nowhere.
When Harpo next appears, he is with Chico. They arrive at the Ambassador’s door as his appointed spies, both wearing bearded masks and hats, with Harpo’s eyes whirling round on springs. But the mask itself is then unmasked: Chico turns Harpo round; his real face is on the other side of his head. The pair are double agents, or human puns.
And so it goes on, order overturned, conformity unravelling, idiocy at the gates. Later – I was about to say much later, but the whole film lasts barely an hour and 10 minutes – we are in a courtroom, with the two spies on trialfor selling Freedonia’s secret war code and plans. “Sure. I sold a code and two pair of plans,” chips in Chico. Under the pressure of the courtroom, the puns bubble over, particularly when Chico turns turtle on the prosecutor:
Chico: Now, I ask you one. What is it has a trunk, but no key, weight 2,000lb and lives in a circus?
Prosecutor: That’s irrelevant.
Chico: A relevant! Hey, that’s the answer. There’s a whole lotta relephants in a circus.
Judge: That sort of testimony we can eliminate.
Chico: ’At’s-a fine. I’ll take some.
Judge: You’ll take what?
Chico: Eliminate. A nice cold glass eliminate.
Firefly: Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
One pun leads to another: they bounce with the speed and precision of a polished stone skimmed across a lake.
Minister of Finance: Something must be done! War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes!
Chico: Hey, I got an uncle lives in Taxes.
Minister of Finance: No. I’m talking about taxes – money, dollars.
Chico: Dollas! That’s where my uncle lives. Dollas, Taxes.
It is the rat-a-tat-tat speed of their delivery that distinguishes the Marx Brothers from their contemporaries, and stops them growing old. Other comedies from that era now seem sluggish and laborious: Duck Soup is alive and kicking.
Harpo, was, of course, the silent one, but the scenes in which he appears are generally far louder, and more perilous, than any of the others. He is a bundle of anarchic energy, targeting the pompous and the self-regarding, like all the vengeful characters in Struwwelpeter rolled into one. Always taking out his scissors and going snip-snip-snip, he snips off the ends of Chico’s frankfurter and Firefly’s quill pen, he snips off the peanut vendor’s apron, the ambassador’s tail coat and the soldiers’ fancy plumes. Instead of speaking, Harpo grins like a madman and honks his horn. Having broken into a house, he tries to open the safe, but he twists the volume dial of a radio by mistake. It starts to blare, so he has to smash it. Whenever he is on screen, even the most inanimate of objects cannot be trusted to stay quiet. At one point, he shows Groucho a tattoo on his stomach of a house. As Groucho takes a closer look at the tattoo, a dog pops out of it; when Groucho says “Miaow!” the dog starts barking.
The most celebrated scene, and the most sublime, revolves around another visual pun: a mirror that is not a mirror, a reflection that is not a reflection. Harpo, disguised as Groucho, tries to fool Groucho into believing that he is looking at himself in a mirror. Groucho, suspicious, executes a random series of increasingly ludicrous movements in the hope of catching him out. But whatever movement he makes, however daft, Harpo anticipates him and does just the same. Even when Groucho walks into what should be the mirror, and out the other side, Harpo does the same, but in reverse. Eighty years on, that visual gag is still going strong: in an episode of the gloriously perverse American cartoon series Family Guy, the baby-man antihero Stewie is transported back to 1930s Berlin, where he disguises himself as Adolf Hitler. Then Hitler himself comes into the room, and Stewie has to convince him that he is looking into a mirror.
The world in 1933 was becoming increasingly overpopulated with tin-pot dictators. Is Duck Soup a political satire? Many intellectuals and academics have argued as much, though they tend to belong to the school of criticism that likes to stamp all the jokes out of comedy so that they can praise its high seriousness without fear of contradiction. A New Yorker cartoon once showed a Professor of Semiotics saying “The tautology of their symbolism thus begins to achieve mythic proportions in A Day at the Races, Duck Soupand A Night at the Opera”. As is so often the case with New Yorker cartoons, it veers from reality only by a couple of degrees.
Over the years, Duck Soup has been praised for its understanding of paranoia in international diplomacy and of the economics of warfare. It is full of gags about the futility of war and its financial advantages. At one point, Groucho is told of a peace plan and replies, “It’s too late, I’ve already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield.” At another, Groucho puts his hand on Harpo’s shoulder and tells him, in ringing tones, “You’re a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking life and limb, through shot and shell, we’ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.”
This joke was echoed, 30 years later, in Beyond the Fringe (“I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage”) but, taken as a whole, Duck Soup is too explosively nonsensical to let itself succumb to the discipline of satire, which might loosely be described as comedy with an agenda. (Nonsense is not an alternative version of sense, but rather its negation.)
On 14 November 1933, three days before the release of Duck Soup, Harpo took a ship to the USSR, via Hamburg. He was to be the first American artist to perform in Moscow since the US, under President Roosevelt, had recognised the Soviet Union. Without realising it, he was about to enter a real-life looking-glass world, where draconian decisions are taken for all the wrong reasons.
In his otherwise delightfully breezy autobiography Harpo Speaks, he says that in Hamburg he saw “the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen – a row of stores with Stars of David and the word ‘Jude’ painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn’t know what hit them and didn’t know where the next blow would come from”.
On the train out of Warsaw, he bumps into a fellow American, who tells him he’ll have to pay for excess baggage at the Russian border, and kindly lends him a hundred roubles, saying it will be cheaper to pay in roubles than dollars. But when Harpo offers roubles to the Inspector, mayhem ensues. “Bells rang. Buzzers sounded. Boots clomped all over the place as guards came running.”
Harpo is hauled off to a shed, where he is cross-questioned. “Where did I get the rubles? A guy on the train lent them to me. What was his name? I didn’t know his name. I was lousy at remembering names. I was lying, the Russian colonel said. Tell the truth now: where did I get the rubles? I gave him the same answer.
“A squad of guards lugged my trunk and harp into the shed. ‘Open the trunk, please,’ said the officer. I unlocked it and the Russians began unloading it. When at first they only found a raincoat and an assortment of pants, shirts and ties, they were obviously disappointed.
“Then they hit the jackpot. From the trunk they removed 400 knives, two revolvers, three stilettos, half-a-dozen bottles marked POISON, and a collection of red wigs and false beards, moustaches and hands. More bells rang. More buzzers sounded. Whistles blew. More officials and more guards came clomping into the shed.”
Harpo is grilled. “Would I please explain why I was transporting weapons and disguises? I told them they were all props for my act. Act? What act? I said I had come to Russia to put on a show. Americans do not entertain in Russia, they said. I had better tell the truth.”
They ask what is in his harp case. A harp, he tells them. They order him to play something. “This would have been my salvation any other time, any other place, but in an open shed when it was 30 below zero. I was so stiff from the cold that I couldn’t get my gloves off. All I could do was run my gloved hands up the strings a couple of times and pray that somebody there would recognise the professional touch.”
But no: a guard gets the same noise out of the harp. The officials shake their heads and smirk. Harpo fears imprisonment, or worse, and begins to yell about his rights, but all to no avail. It is only when his fellow American pops up on the scene, and they accept his explanation, that Harpo is allowed to board the Moscow express. “The train was unbelievably crowded, ten and twelve people to each six-passenger compartment, and it stank of disinfectant, but I thanked God I was lucky enough to be on it.”
His show is a terrific hit with the Russians, who love clowns, but, on the way back to America, Harpo can’t shake off the awful feeling that for the past eight weeks he has been watched wherever he goes, “by eyes I couldn’t see. I never, not for a minute, felt I was really alone. I was a stranger who had stumbled into a deadly conspiracy, who had to be kept from finding out what the plot was all about.”
But one thing above all strikes Harpo about the USSR. “I never saw anybody do anything just for the hell of it. I never saw anybody pull a spontaneous gag.” Rationality, he feels, is the only acceptable justification for everything in Stalin’s USSR: something can only be funny if it has a reason to be funny. And this is why Duck Soup is so funny: because it has no reason to be funny.
• The Marx Brothers film season begins at BFI Southbank, London SE1, on 14 January. bfi.org.uk.
Sunday, 11 January 2015
Anita Ekberg RIP
Anita Ekberg, star of La Dolce Vita, dies aged 83
Swedish actor, who created one of Italian cinema’s most famous moments in Fellini’s 1960 film, dies in Rome after series of illnesses
Rosie Scammell and Associated Press in Rome
Sunday 11 January 2015
Swedish actor Anita Ekberg, star of La Dolce Vita, has died at the age of 83.
Ekberg’s lawyer, Patrizia Ubaldi, confirmed she died in Rome on Sunday morning following a series of illnesses. She had been hospitalised most recently after Christmas.
Ubaldi said that in her last days Ekberg was saddened by her illness and advancing age. “She had hoped to get better, something that didn’t happen,” she said.
Ekberg created one of cinema’s most famous moments, wading into the Trevi fountain in Rome in the 1960 classic La Dolce Vita. Her character in the Federico Fellini film, temptress Silvia, was followed into the waters by Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni after a night of revelry in the Italian capital.
The scene instantly made Ekberg a cinema icon, although she was unable to maintain such a level of success and had few high-profile roles in her later career. She went on to be picked for the 1962 film Boccaccio ’70, along with Sophia Loren, and a year later appeared in 4 for Texas alongside Frank Sinatra.
Malmö-born Ekberg carved out her cinema career after becoming a magazine pin-up and model, winning the Miss Sweden competition in 1950 before seeking fame in the US. She was soon working with Hollywood greats including John Wayne, and in 1956 made the cover of Life magazine. Her move to cinema came the same year with King Vidor’s War and Peace, in which Ekberg acted alongside Audrey Hepburn.
Although Ekberg was seen as basking in the limelight, she took a tough stand against the paparazzi in 1960 when she threatened photographers with a bow and arrow.
But all appeared forgiven when La Dolce Vita secured Ekberg’s place in cinema history. “It was I who made Fellini, not the other way around,” she said of the film’s Italian director.
She was married twice, first to Anthony Steel in 1956. They divorced three years later. Her marriage to Rik Van Nutter lasted from 1963 until 1975. Her love affairs attracted widespread attention and she was once rumoured to be involved with Fiat chief Gianni Agnelli.
Ekberg rarely returned to Sweden, choosing to remain in Italy. In recent years, media reported that she had moved to a care home close to Rome.
Despite global praise for her Trevi Fountain scene in La Dolce Vita, taking a dip at the monument is strictly prohibited. Some film fans have however defied the ban, with one shirtless man diving in last May only to be chased by angry police officers.
The authorities are guaranteed some respite from such antics, as the fountain is undergoing 18 months of restoration funded by fashion house Fendi to the tune of €2.18m (£1.70m).
Swedish actor, who created one of Italian cinema’s most famous moments in Fellini’s 1960 film, dies in Rome after series of illnesses
Rosie Scammell and Associated Press in Rome
Sunday 11 January 2015
Swedish actor Anita Ekberg, star of La Dolce Vita, has died at the age of 83.
Ekberg’s lawyer, Patrizia Ubaldi, confirmed she died in Rome on Sunday morning following a series of illnesses. She had been hospitalised most recently after Christmas.
Ubaldi said that in her last days Ekberg was saddened by her illness and advancing age. “She had hoped to get better, something that didn’t happen,” she said.
Ekberg created one of cinema’s most famous moments, wading into the Trevi fountain in Rome in the 1960 classic La Dolce Vita. Her character in the Federico Fellini film, temptress Silvia, was followed into the waters by Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni after a night of revelry in the Italian capital.
The scene instantly made Ekberg a cinema icon, although she was unable to maintain such a level of success and had few high-profile roles in her later career. She went on to be picked for the 1962 film Boccaccio ’70, along with Sophia Loren, and a year later appeared in 4 for Texas alongside Frank Sinatra.
Malmö-born Ekberg carved out her cinema career after becoming a magazine pin-up and model, winning the Miss Sweden competition in 1950 before seeking fame in the US. She was soon working with Hollywood greats including John Wayne, and in 1956 made the cover of Life magazine. Her move to cinema came the same year with King Vidor’s War and Peace, in which Ekberg acted alongside Audrey Hepburn.
Although Ekberg was seen as basking in the limelight, she took a tough stand against the paparazzi in 1960 when she threatened photographers with a bow and arrow.
But all appeared forgiven when La Dolce Vita secured Ekberg’s place in cinema history. “It was I who made Fellini, not the other way around,” she said of the film’s Italian director.
She was married twice, first to Anthony Steel in 1956. They divorced three years later. Her marriage to Rik Van Nutter lasted from 1963 until 1975. Her love affairs attracted widespread attention and she was once rumoured to be involved with Fiat chief Gianni Agnelli.
Ekberg rarely returned to Sweden, choosing to remain in Italy. In recent years, media reported that she had moved to a care home close to Rome.
Despite global praise for her Trevi Fountain scene in La Dolce Vita, taking a dip at the monument is strictly prohibited. Some film fans have however defied the ban, with one shirtless man diving in last May only to be chased by angry police officers.
The authorities are guaranteed some respite from such antics, as the fountain is undergoing 18 months of restoration funded by fashion house Fendi to the tune of €2.18m (£1.70m).
Anita Ekberg
Philip French
Sunday 24 January 2010
Sociologists and cultural historians agree that the 1950s was the decade in which the United States fetishised the breast. Jane Russell, for whom Howard Hughes had devised a special bra in the mid-40s, truly came into her own, and she was joined by Marilyn Monroe for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953, the year Playboy was launched. In 1952, Anita Ekberg was a Lookmagazine cover girl; by January 1956, she was on the cover of Life.
Born in Malmö, the sixth of a blue-collar worker's eight children, Ekberg was voted Miss Sweden (her official vital statistics were 39-22-36) and went to America in 1951 for the Miss Universe competition. She didn't win and she spoke little English, but she got a movie contract with Universal, and though she took little interest in the dramatic coaching they offered, she found herself in demand for minor roles at other studios, for pin-up photographs to adorn lads mags and subsequently to appear on TV shows (Ed Murrow's Person to Person among them). In 1955, Time magazine published its notorious report on "Sin and Sweden", and this voluptuous, publicity-seeking Swedish blonde with her succession of celebrity lovers came to represent the new, liberated Scandinavian sexuality.
Ekberg made a couple of Hollywood films with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (both involving Frank Tashlin who'd written bosom gags for pictures featuring Russell and Monroe and later directed Jayne Mansfield's best-known pictures) and another couple in Britain. But it was in Italy that she found acting fame playing the devious Hélène Kuragin, unfaithful wife of Pierre (Henry Fonda) in King Vidor's War and Peace (1956), shot in Rome's Cinecittà.
She returned there to appear as the visiting film star Sylvia in La dolce vita, which opened 50 years ago next month and made her an enduring legend, most famously for her celebrated scene with Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain. Her only truly memorable role thereafter was Fellini's segment of the portmanteau comedy Boccaccio '70 (1962) where she plays a 20ft version of herself with cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon, stepping down off a hoarding advertising milk to terrify a Roman prude.
Fellini was to give her a couple of walk-on roles as herself, but from the 60s onwards she began to ignore her weight, balloon out (42-27-38 by 1982), and appear in rapidly forgotten Italian films, giving occasional rather sour interviews. But not before featuring with the first Bond girl Ursula Andress opposite Dean Martin in a slack Robert Aldrich western with the suggestive title 4 for Texas (1963), and she became an honorary Bond Girl the same year by way of From Russia With Love. In Fleming's novel, Bond shoots an assassin as he flees via a secret escape hatch in an enormous poster of Monroe in Niagara. In the film, he's killed as he appears through Ekberg's mouth in a giant ad for Call Me Bwana. "She should have kept her mouth shut," Connery quips.
Ekberg on Fellini "It was I who made Fellini, not the other way around."
Ekberg on Sweden "How can I know who's prime minister or in government in Sweden? It's been 40 years since I moved abroad."
Ekberg on her embonpoint "I'm very proud of my breasts, as every woman should be. It's not cellular obesity, it's womanliness."
Philip French
Sunday 24 January 2010
Sociologists and cultural historians agree that the 1950s was the decade in which the United States fetishised the breast. Jane Russell, for whom Howard Hughes had devised a special bra in the mid-40s, truly came into her own, and she was joined by Marilyn Monroe for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953, the year Playboy was launched. In 1952, Anita Ekberg was a Lookmagazine cover girl; by January 1956, she was on the cover of Life.
Born in Malmö, the sixth of a blue-collar worker's eight children, Ekberg was voted Miss Sweden (her official vital statistics were 39-22-36) and went to America in 1951 for the Miss Universe competition. She didn't win and she spoke little English, but she got a movie contract with Universal, and though she took little interest in the dramatic coaching they offered, she found herself in demand for minor roles at other studios, for pin-up photographs to adorn lads mags and subsequently to appear on TV shows (Ed Murrow's Person to Person among them). In 1955, Time magazine published its notorious report on "Sin and Sweden", and this voluptuous, publicity-seeking Swedish blonde with her succession of celebrity lovers came to represent the new, liberated Scandinavian sexuality.
Ekberg made a couple of Hollywood films with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (both involving Frank Tashlin who'd written bosom gags for pictures featuring Russell and Monroe and later directed Jayne Mansfield's best-known pictures) and another couple in Britain. But it was in Italy that she found acting fame playing the devious Hélène Kuragin, unfaithful wife of Pierre (Henry Fonda) in King Vidor's War and Peace (1956), shot in Rome's Cinecittà.
She returned there to appear as the visiting film star Sylvia in La dolce vita, which opened 50 years ago next month and made her an enduring legend, most famously for her celebrated scene with Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain. Her only truly memorable role thereafter was Fellini's segment of the portmanteau comedy Boccaccio '70 (1962) where she plays a 20ft version of herself with cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon, stepping down off a hoarding advertising milk to terrify a Roman prude.
Fellini was to give her a couple of walk-on roles as herself, but from the 60s onwards she began to ignore her weight, balloon out (42-27-38 by 1982), and appear in rapidly forgotten Italian films, giving occasional rather sour interviews. But not before featuring with the first Bond girl Ursula Andress opposite Dean Martin in a slack Robert Aldrich western with the suggestive title 4 for Texas (1963), and she became an honorary Bond Girl the same year by way of From Russia With Love. In Fleming's novel, Bond shoots an assassin as he flees via a secret escape hatch in an enormous poster of Monroe in Niagara. In the film, he's killed as he appears through Ekberg's mouth in a giant ad for Call Me Bwana. "She should have kept her mouth shut," Connery quips.
Ekberg on Fellini "It was I who made Fellini, not the other way around."
Ekberg on Sweden "How can I know who's prime minister or in government in Sweden? It's been 40 years since I moved abroad."
Ekberg on her embonpoint "I'm very proud of my breasts, as every woman should be. It's not cellular obesity, it's womanliness."
Saturday, 10 January 2015
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