MR. EDISON’S CHRISTMAS (Document Records CD)

MR. EDISON’S CHRISTMAS (Document Records CD)

      As someone who frequents junk stores and so-called antique malls, and who enjoys visiting old “historic” homes and abandoned buildings (I lived within an hour or two of some western Ghost Towns, growing up in Colorado, which gave me a lifelong taste for the abandoned and the discarded), I’ve always been fascinated by the flotsam and jetsam of Christmas Past. Christmas cards to and from strangers that sat in a shoebox in a closet for years before being tossed away by the recipients’ children after Mom and Dad moved on to that endless Golden Corral buffet in the sky….budget-label Christmas albums played once or twice and then put at the back of the stack, now warped and unable to be played, but still being sold for a dollar, and sitting at the junk store year-after-year, as if someday the right customer will stop by and exclaim, “oh, I’ve always been wanting an unplayable warped copy of this Fred Waring Christmas album—how lucky I am!”….unopened boxes of Nutcracker-themed kitchen items that never got a chance to sit on the table next to Aunt Martha’s mince pies….Christmas tree ornaments emblazoned with the logos of businesses long forgotten, congratulating themselves on a successful 1939 or whatever….faded and yellowed Polaroids of awkward-looking children sitting on the laps of department store Santas, probably displayed on the family’s refrigerator for a season or two and then forgotten—-all discarded as quickly as the imitation joy that’s piped into society at large for six weeks every year, like the oldies music that’s piped into my supermarket, providing an aural backdrop as I toss cartons of oatmeal and rice-cakes and dog biscuits into my cart. I would say that all this faux-joy is forgotten on January 2nd of each year, but nowadays as people have fewer, if any, vacation days from work, it’s probably forgotten on the morning of December 26th, and if you work in retail, it’s probably forgotten VERY early on the 26th, because you have to be at work at 5 a.m. to deal with the throngs of people looking to return the presents others gave them or to pick up post-Christmas markdown bargains. There’s not a lot of “peace on earth or goodwill among men” as people fight over parking spaces or step over each other to get places in line to return that chafing dish (whatever a chafing dish is!) given to them by that brother-in-law they never liked.

  I used to listen regularly to Garner Ted Armstrong’s “World Tomorrow” radio broadcasts as a youngster and adolescent, so I was probably permanently poisoned against Christmas by those, as you could guarantee each year that Garner Ted would devote at least two shows in the November and December period to how the celebration of Christmas is completely un-Christian, how Jesus was most likely born in late September or early October, how Jesus never asked anyone to celebrate his birthday and how such a celebration would be totally contrary to what He stood for, etc. Just Google Mr. Armstrong’s name and the word “Christmas” and you too can read or listen to his anti-Christmas diatribes.

    There’s no need to try to get that warped 1950’s Christmas album to play by putting pennies on the tone-arm and hearing the needle gouge into the grooves, when instead you can go even further back and savor vintage Christmas recordings from Thomas Edison’s organization, taken from test pressing cylinders and disks, dating from 1906-1927, collected on this wonderful CD from Document Records, best-known for their exhaustive chronological collections of pre-WWII blues 78’s. They offer a number of releases of historic recordings from the archives of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey. This particular one contains 67 minutes of holiday-themed treasures taken from such legendary Edison recording formats as Blue Ambersol Cylinders and Diamond Discs. The album opens with a 1906 performance by the Edison Concert Band, taken from a Gold Moulded Cylinder, of “Joy To The World,” sounding like the kind of semi-symphonic brass band you might hear coming from a gazebo on a mound on the city square in some cold and windy moderate-sized midwestern town, as you stood there, hands in  pockets, freezing your ass off, doing your best to be festive. You’ll feel like you have come to life on the pages of some lesser-known novel by Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser, sitting unread as a link on the Project Gutenberg website. This is followed by an overly-formal reading of “Silent Night,” with the requisite chimes, reminding you of the stiff formality of the Christmas holiday performances you were forced to sing in as a child. Following that is a tear-jerking violin performance of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” which would be the perfect music to use as the soundtrack for some D.W. Griffith film where Lillian Gish is dying of consumption and her child is starving as she wraps herself and the child in blankets, with no wood or coal for heat…and she looks out the window to see the Christmas revelers out on the street, throwing snowballs and drinking egg-nog. Griffith would probably include some title cards with melancholy passages from the poems of Browning or Tennyson or ironically-presented lines from the words of Jesus. Of course, there are also holiday monologues on this album, delivered in that wonderful early 1900’s stage-y oratorical style you would hear in low-budget indie films during the early sound-film era from actors who’d worked a lot during the silent-era but were rooted in the turn-of-the-century regional stage, actors like William Farnum or Robert Frazer. And perhaps most interesting is a promotional record (see picture) sent to Edison sales-persons and distributors as a Christmas gift that doubles as a reminder to boost sales and be more aggressive in working accounts in 1925, to make it more profitable than 1924. Anyone who’s ever worked in sales will shake their heads in recognition that nothing has really changed in 100 years, only the technology.

    I’ve never liked the film IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, and I’m not likely to tune in to the countless Christmas films on the Hallmark Channel, aimed at stay-at-home Moms whose families earn more than $250,000 per year who enjoy seeing a romanticized version of themselves projected on-screen….so I can’t think of a better way to experience a “classic Christmas” than to play this collection of cylinders and discs from 100 years ago and tap into the ongoing permanence of the Christmas tradition.

    So….let’s all stuff ourselves on Christmas and hope that there’s an Alka Seltzer on the shelf somewhere for later when our gluttony comes back to haunt us. On December 26th, this scuzzy apartment building I live in is still going to smell like sewage, the Grandpa across the hall whose children rarely call him will continue to water down his medicine or cut his pills in half because he can’t afford the full dosage of his medications, and the long-haired stoner down the hall who refuses to work will continue to mooch off the single mom he’s shacked up with and eat the majority of the groceries that she purchases with food stamps, food which is intended for her child. The Christmas message will be as hollow as the foil-wrapped faux-chocolate dollar-store Christmas trees and Santas left outside my door by the garlic-breathed woman in the next apartment who peeks out her blinds whenever anyone walks past the broken-down charcoal grill in the courtyard that birds have turned into a nest and who launches into unwanted and shrill lectures, beginning October 1st of each year, about how some cabal of conspiratorial forces out there are working to take the Christ out of Christmas.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

=================================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

And coming soon in January 2024 will be a new book-length poem, STATIC STRUT (KSE #421)….keep an eye out for it!

PONTIUS PILATE (Italy 1962), starring Jean Marais, Basil Rathbone, and John Drew Barrymore

With Christmas coming soon, it’s time to dust off my copy of a first-rate Biblical epic that doesn’t get much attention or respect, the 1962 Italian PONTIUS PILATE, with Jean Marais in the title role, and in a mesmerizing performance, John Drew Barrymore as Judas…and Jesus. Since my 2005 online review (reprinted below), I’ve acquired an excellent letterboxed copy in English, a significant upgrade, with a few scenes in Italian. Keep in mind that I DID NOT have access to that copy in 2005 when the review was written…

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Sword-and-Sandal version of the times of Jesus–with John Drew Barrymore as Jesus AND Judas!

I finally scored an English language copy of this interesting Italian sword-and-sandal style depiction of the life and times of Jesus, focusing on the career of Pontius Pilate, played by legendary French actor Jean Marais (Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST). I previously had a Spanish language version, but the dubbing sounded like it was recorded in a radio station last week and there were virtually no sound effects. This original English version is MUCH more enjoyable, with both Basil Rathbone and John Drew Barrymore (as Judas, not as Jesus) doing their own voices in the dubbing. The story is structured with a wrap-around sequence where Pilate is on trial in front of Caesar, and Pilate recounts the events of his life. At the end of the film, we pick back up with this trial and we see what Pilate has learned from his life and from his encounter with Christ. Basil Rathbone, doing his own voice, is quite impressive as the Jewish religious leader Caiaphus–he tries to be a faithful spiritual leader to his people, while he understands the political necessities of the day. The scene where Rathbone challenges Marais to take down the Roman insignias off the Hebrew temple is quite impressive. Of course, the “gimmick” about this film is that John Drew Barrymore plays both Judas and Jesus. Let’s start with Judas. This is a role Barrymore was born to play–he was always excellent as a tortured soul or an outcast or a man with a tragic obsession, and in the Judas created by these scriptwriters, the part requires all of these qualities, and Barrymore does a great job. During one of Judas’s most intense scenes, we suddenly start getting angular, Orson Welles style shots of Barrymore that are unlike any other shots in the film! Yes, Barrymore also plays Jesus, but we only see Jesus’ back and side and closeups of his eyes–frankly, had a man of similar build been under the robe throughout the film and it wasn’t John Drew Barrymore, I don’t think I would have known. Also, someone else dubs Jesus’ voice when He speaks, which isn’t very often. Peplum fans will see a number of familiar faces such as Livio Lorenzon and Riccardo Garrone, and the whole film has the look of a sword and sandal film. I feel like I understand more about the political world of Palestine in the days of Jesus after seeing this film, and Barrymore’s unique portrayal of Judas is something I won’t soon forget. As a fan of sword and sandal films in general, I thought PONTIUS PILATE was quite interesting and overall a success.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2005

the great JOHN DREW BARRYMORE in the role he was born to play, Judas Iscariot

THE GEMTONES, Complete Recordings (2-CD set, Super Oldies)

THE GEMTONES—Complete Recordings (Super Oldies), 2-CD set

     The Gemtones, from Moncton in the Canadian Maritime province of New Brunswick, were quite popular as a teen dance band in the Eastern half of Canada from 1961-1966. They released four albums of material on the Banff (Ontario) and Caprice (Quebec) labels between 1963 and 1965, and all of that is included here, along with two radio sessions from 64-65, for a total of 52 songs, 13 of which are previously unreleased.

     The Gemtones began as a mostly instrumental unit, heavily indebted to The Shadows and The Fireballs, doing  Shadows covers and writing originals in the same vein. As a live band, they needed to offer a variety of tempos for the couples dancing and to play the hits of the day, which they did in both instrumental and vocal versions,  easily moving from dreamy instro versions of “Turn Around, Look at Me” or “Michael Row The Boat Ashore” to all-out rockers such as “Reno” and “The Little General,” to frat-rock standards such as “Walkin’ The Dog” and “Hang On Sloopy,” Beatles tunes, and well-chosen covers ranging from Little Eva’s “Turkey Trot” to Dave Baby Cortez’s “Rinky Dink.”

     Like a lot of bands who began in the pre-Beatles era—-The Astronauts, for instance, whom they resemble in a number of ways, but without the surf and hotrod material—-The Gemtones were rooted in late 50’s rock and roll, and one can easily imagine them in their matching suits playing to excited fans at the local CYO dance or Pipefitters’ Union Ball in towns across eastern Canada. Had they been from the US Midwest, they might have recorded for Soma, and had they been from the Northwest, they might have recorded for Etiquette, but production-wise their records don’t sound like anything on those labels. Fortunately, these 52 sides show the band pretty much laying down their live sets in the studio, no clutter, just a working band banging out twangy pre-Revolver teen rock and roll.

     Personally, I can’t get enough of circa-1964 teen dance bands churning out energetic covers of “High Heel Sneakers” and “Glad All Over,” and I love sharp instrumentals in the Shadows/Fireballs vein, so for me, 52 tracks of this kind of material, most of which will be new to listeners, is quite a find…and highly recommended for fans of these styles and this period.

BILL SHUTE, originally published in Ugly Things magazine in 2020

note: all physical releases from Super Oldies have been deleted (and sold out in a few months after their initial release anyway) and the label is now digital-only….you may be able to find a copy of this in the secondary market, but you may well have to find it on a streaming service. It is partially available on You Tube Music, my streaming service of choice, and you can find it 31 tracks of it here:

CANNED HEAT, The Boogie House Tapes (Ruf Records, Germany)

CANNED HEAT, The Boogie House Tapes (Ruf Records, Germany)

    Most of you reading this probably already know whether or not they like CANNED HEAT, the 60’s West Coast “heavy” blues band that’s still around today (with one 60’s member) after 50 years. At their best, the late 60’s version of the band, with Bob The Bear Hite, Alan Wilson, Larry Taylor, Fito De La Parra, and either Henry Vestine or Harvey Mandel on guitar, was an unstoppable force, churning out their grungy brand of high octane blues’n’boogie. Because the guys were blues purists at heart, and the original members were all specialist collectors of blues 78’s, even when they were trafficking in 40 minute fuzzed-out jams, there was always a blues base, and everything was always blues-drenched, no matter how far out they went….and many of their tunes were “extensions” of old 1930’s material.

    Their studio albums tend to be solid, but many would argue that live performance was where the band really excelled, so this 2-cd set of unreleased material from the 1967-1976 period (released in 2000 on the German blues label RUF) really satisfies, prime cuts from the band’s greatest period. Bob “The Bear” Hite is featured on all the material here, with his inimitable soulful growl, and replacement members, as the group evolved into the 70’s, Joel Scott Hill (also in the 70’s Flying Burrito Brothers) and bassist Richard Hite (who later ran the great Memphis Archives label) fit right in to the blues’n’boogie machine as it choogles along. Canned Heat is really a brand as much as a specific band, and as long as whoever is in the present line-up of the band “gets” the concept, they should do fine. This is not a group that emphasizes exactitude, it’s about catching the spirit and running with it, and each performance of any particular tune tends to go in its own direction. There’s also a good chemistry with the audiences, and for me, Canned Heat certainly qualify as a “people’s band” in the broadest and best sense of that term. Everything that’s good about Canned Heat is found here on these rough live tapes in its pure form.

    There are two further volumes in this series, each a 2-cd set, but the second and third volumes contain recordings from later periods. I don’t own those, although I may pick them up if the price is right (the third volume, the least known, usually sells for $25 and up nowadays—the first two can still be found cheap). This first volume is the most essential one, being all earlier recordings featuring The Bear. When they crank up the volume and dig in deep for a jam on some Jimmy Rogers or Sam Myers tune learned from some well-worn 45 or 78 in one of the boys’ collections, you can almost taste the lukewarm malt liquor and smell the harsh burning seeds and stems from the cheap ragweed being consumed by the audience, loaded to the gills. Truly, Canned Heat deliver the goods (assuming you want these goods).

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2018

December 2023 update: since this piece was originally published in 2018, I have acquired Volumes 2 and 3 in this series, and both are highly recommended. Perhaps I will cover them here when I next stumble across one of them in my disorganized collection. I can safely say, though, that anyone who does not automatically reject post-1970s lineups of Canned Heat will find much to enjoy on Volumes 2 and 3.

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MY CASINO CAPER by Edd Byrnes (2014 audiobook)

    Here’s something I didn’t know existed until earlier today….evidently, some time around 1980 actor Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, of 77 Sunset Strip fame, won three million dollars on a slot machine in a Vegas casino, and the whole experience developed into a nightmare for him, sounding like something from a B-movie or a crime TV show in which Byrnes himself could have appeared.

    I’m not sure if this yarn actually happened, or if it is one of those fictional memoirs like Chuck Barris’s CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, but it plays well, and Byrnes is a natural storyteller. Of course, if the story is really true, it’s wild enough to be incredibly entertaining, but it does take a good storyteller to  make it come alive, and a charismatic actor to get us believing in the character and rooting for him. Byrnes has those qualities, so that as he’s dropping his career highlights into conversations or mentioning his sexual prowess in passing or talking about being mobbed by teenage girls and the amount of fan mail he once received, he does it with such a self-deprecating charm that you want to pat him on the back, congratulate him on his success, and tell him he truly deserves to be a star. THAT is quite an accomplishment.

    The format of MY CASINO CAPER is a dramatized audiobook, running about 75 minutes. The frame narrative has Byrnes telling the story to his friend Alan Young (yes, the real Alan Young, of Mr. Ed and The Time Machine fame, who sounds great here and still retains his quick wit and boyish charm, and even re-enacts Byrnes’ favorite scene from The Time Machine for him, in character with a Scottish accent!), and then we are swept away into a well-produced dramatization of the whole affair, acted out for us with sound effects, etc.

    Out of the blue, Byrnes gets a phone call from an old girlfriend he’d dated a decade or two previous, and she suggests the two of them go to Las Vegas for the weekend. He gladly accepts, and while there, she tells him about a particular machine (he’s not much of a gambler himself) that has a potential mega-payout but only when you bet more than the minimum, and he might want to try it. While she plays another machine, he does give it a shot, and he wins the big jackpot of $3 million ($1.8 million after taxes). Rather than be happy for his good luck and perhaps taking advantage of his generosity while he’s in a good mood, she immediately demands half….and then a threatening thug-like figure (well-played by Michael Callan) starts making demands, and claims that he’d rigged the machine with an insider partner and had just gone to the bathroom when Byrnes took over ‘his” machine, and thus the money is his and he wants it all. He threatens and intimidates Byrnes in a number of ways. Byrnes along the way turns to two actor friends—David Hedison (The Fly, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea) and Henry Silva (Rat Pack member and star of many great Italian crime films, the ultimate tough guy)—to play ‘roles’ (one a police detective, the other a mobster) to scare off Callan’s character. There’s another mysterious woman who appears out of the blue—or is it really out of the blue? Various other complications get in the way, and before you know it, the 75 minutes are over, and you’ve had an exciting and fun roller-coaster ride…and realize again what an entertaining and talented man Edd Byrnes is.

    There are enough show-biz anecdotes to satisfy the lover of vintage films and TV. Want to know about the making of Roger Corman’s 1964 Yugoslavian war film THE SECRET INVASION, in which Byrnes co-starred with Silva? Here’s your chance to learn. Wonder what it was like on the Warner Brothers lot during the shooting of 77 Sunset Strip? Get some choice morsels on that here. Of course, with each passing year, the number pf people impressed by name-dropping anecdotes involving Connie Stevens goes down, but if you do still care, as I do, you can get a few vicarious encounters with Ms. Stevens here.

    Alas, Byrnes does not mention the classic 1973 slasher film WICKED, WICKED which was released by MGM and was shot by Richard L. Bare (Green Acres) in a split-screen technique (and thus was not able to get into TV circulation back in the day, so it’s not that well known….I managed to catch it on 50 cent night at the Lakeridge Theater in Wheat Ridge, Colorado,, and loved seeing Byrnes again), but there’s only so much time here, and if TOO MUCH time had been spent with anecdotes about his films and TV appearances, the excitement of the plot would get interrupted and it would come off as more of an ego-boosting memoir than an exciting “caper,” as the title promises  Fortunately, the audiobook gets the mix just right between show-biz and mystery plot. All the celebrities who appear as guests—Alan Young, David Hedison, Henry Silva—come across as excellent actors but also as fun people you’d like to have a beer with.

    The best news of all is that this audiobook, though only a few years old, is presently available for FREE on You Tube, posted by its producer just three months ago. Just search for “My Casino Caper – Audio-Book with Movie Stars,” pour yourself a cup of coffee, and settle back and be entertained by the great Edd Kookie Byrnes. And after that, make a point to search for his three Italian westerns from the 67-68 period, all of which are first-rate and he is great in them. Oh, 77 Sunset Strip IS presently playing on ME-TV in the middle of the night, and I catch an episode or two a month, still finding ones I never saw initially, and Byrnes can be happy in the knowledge that even though he is surrounded by great talent on the show (Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Roger Smith, Connie Stevens, etc.), it’s HIS segment that many of us most look forward to, still, after all these years.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2018

=======================================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

And coming in 2024 will be a new book-length poem, STATIC STRUT (KSE #421)….keep an eye out for it!

RUBBER RACKETEERS (1942), starring RICARDO CORTEZ

Re-watching this film (I’ve seen it 3-4 times over the last 20 years), I’m reminded about the things an hour-long B-crime/action programmer has in common with a rock’n’roll 45—it’s all about the spirit, the tone of the performance, the pace, the mood, the overall effect. Nail those elements, and any number of defects can be forgiven….or actually become irrelevant. The piece itself carries you along….for 2 minutes 30 seconds on a 45 rpm singles, or for 56 minutes with a film like RUBBER RACKETEERS. And like some grungy 1962 R&B cover by a frat-rock band from Washington state, this film delivers the goods (Monogram films usually do) you paid for when you bought a ticket.

This was an early production by the King Brothers, whose story sounds like it came out of the kind of film they would produce. Evidently, they began selling newspapers and shining shoes, and then branched into slot machines and horse racing. They loved movies, though, and knew a number of producers and directors from the racetrack! They had the genius idea to try and make films to be shown on their slot machines, and actually attempted to contact Cecil B. DeMille to see if he’d like to produce a film for their slot machines!!!! Not surprisingly, that did not work out.

They did manage to make a low-budget film for PRC called PAPER BULLETS, famous for being a pre-stardom role for Alan Ladd. The great B-movie gangster actor JACK LA RUE starred in that, as they knew him from the racetrack and he was happy to do “the boys” a favor. They did wind up later making some crime classics, including DILLINGER, GUN CRAZY, SOUTHSIDE 1-1000, and THE GANGSTER.

RUBBER RACKETEERS was released in June 1942, just six months after the beginning of WWII, and the first scene sets the over-the-top wartime tone….we see star BILL HENRY shooting a machine gun into targets with the faces of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo (can you imagine how well that would have gone over with audiences in mid-1942….these King Brothers knew what they were doing!). Henry, in case you’ve forgotten, later starred in the 1953 Republic serial CANADIAN MOUNTIES VS ATOMIC INVADERS, and he was also the comedic heavy in the post-Gorcey Bowery Boys film SPOOK CHASERS, where the Huntz Hall/Stanley Clements version of the Boys help their older pal Mike Clancy (who is filling the slot that would have been filled by Bernard Gorcey as Louie Dumbrowski of Louie’s Sweet Shop fame) when seedy real estate agent Henry sells Mike a “haunted” house that’s actually full of cash from a missing gangster. Henry’s character in RR, a young defense worker devoted to the patriotic cause, has just the right combination of boyish charm and naïve toughness, but the real star here—as happens so often in B-movies and serials—is the villain, a gangster named Tony Gilin, played by the great RICARDO CORTEZ, just out of jail, and now head of a tire-bootlegging operation. What’s that, you might ask? During WWII, rubber was needed for the war effort, so new tires could not be had easily, and even retreads became a scarce commodity. People would even buy a cheap used car just to get the tires (there’s a scene with just that happening here). What Cortez’s crooked crew would do is take bald tires, put a kind of ribbed wrap around them, and cover them with a new black sealant. They looked shiny and new from a distance, but were dangerous to drive on, which unfortunately is proven when Bill Henry’s girlfriend’s brother is killed in an accident due to the bad tires blowing out. This gets Henry and his gal (played by Rochelle Hudson) on the warpath, and they decide to track down who was responsible for making these tires, and the plot follows their steps in the investigation, eventually narrowing down to seedy used car lots owned by Gilin.

It’s a joy to watch Ricardo Cortez in action. A major star during the silent era (he was impressive in D.W. Griffith’s 1926 THE SORROWS OF SATAN), he continued as a leading man in the early sound era, and was Sam Spade in the original 1931 version of THE MALTESE FALCON. In the late 1930’s he directed a number of programmers, and then, as a number of silent leading men had done before him, re-invented himself as a character actor, specializing in heels and crooks (be sure to watch the1950 BUNCO SQUAD, where he shines as the murderous head of a phony psychic racket, conning rich widows out of their money). As an ex-boxer, Cortez never lost his tough-guy edge, though as he’d also worked as a stockbroker before his acting career (and he eventually returned to Wall Street after retiring from acting), he knew how to project a classy image. That combination served him well in his post-leading man period as a villain.

The writer of RUBBER RACKETEERS certainly knew what gold he had in Cortez, and thus gives him many great lines and set-ups which surely would have gotten a laugh out of the wartime audiences. For instance, in the first part of the film, where Cortez’s Asian-American butler announces that he is enlisting in the Army, Cortez flashes an oily smile, congratulates him, slaps him on the back, and says, “everybody’s got to do their bit….and you’ll do mine!” The film is full of that kind of thing, as it should be when the top-billed actor is the bad guy….it’s Cortez people were paying to see. The skimpy Monogram Pictures sets usually work to the films’ advantage in crime films and mysteries, as they have a lived-in look to them, and that’s true here, as Cortez barks orders and makes under-handed deals all the while wearing a tailored suit in a way that makes me green with envy (when I wear a suit, it’s either too baggy, or too tight a la Oliver Hardy) and smokes cigarettes in a classy way, with curling smoke trails, that makes me want to go out and buy a pack of Camels and start the habit again (almost). Although Cortez’s demise near the film’s climax happens quickly, it echoes the way he killed someone else about 30 seconds before, and was surely satisfying to audiences. The film ends with the young couple on the front page of the newspaper after Cortez is killed, and we see a munitions factory with its smokestacks belching, no doubt working three shifts a day toward the war effort.

RUBBER RACKETEERS is in the public domain and can be found easily online. Like a great rock and roll record or crime comic book or YOURS TRULY, JOHNNY DOLLAR radio show, it hits all the right bases, has exactly the right tone and attitude, gets done quickly and efficiently what it needs to do, and leaves you wanting more.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

LAY THAT RIFLE DOWN (1955), starring JUDY CANOVA

From the 30’s through the 50’s, JUDY CANOVA was the queen of country entertainment. Radio, films, records, TV, nightclub appearances, Broadway (she was in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936!), she conquered them all with her brash and outrageous over-the-top cornpone comedy (and her novelty singing, including first-rate yodeling). Her comedy persona was the kind of thing that would later have fit well in something like HEE HAW, and I’m surprised that she never did a guest shot on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES (though according to the IMDB, she did play Mammy Yokum in a 1967 unsold TV pilot of LI’L ABNER, something that would have been right up her alley). She could probably be described as a country version of Martha Raye or Vera Vague, though she looked like neither, being dark-haired, almond-eyed, with sharp features, and sporting the downhome pig-tails and calico look. Look at her picture and imagine the exaggerated “howwww-DEE” greeting, as said by Minnie Pearl.

LAY THAT RIFLE DOWN was the final starring vehicle for her at Republic Pictures, with a run that lasted for 13 films over 15 years. As with her fellow Republic stars Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, after an initial period playing characters with other names, she finally played herself (or her public persona) in the last few vehicles, such as this one.

Republic’s distribution in its waning days was especially strong in moderate-sized towns in the Midwest and the South, and I’d imagine that this film would have gone over well with those audiences. Canova was a known quantity, and she was teamed up with director Charles Lamont, who started off in the silent era doing Big Boy comedy shorts at Educational Pictures (that alone would get him in my Hall Of Fame!), then in the sound era did the majority of Buster Keaton’s fine shorts at Educational, and wound up at Universal doing many comedy classics with Abbott & Costello and with Ma and Pa Kettle. Since Canova’s comedy is very similar to the Kettles, the pairing of star Canova and director Lamont was a match made in country-comedy heaven. Interestingly, the two films Lamont made after this were both entries in successful series that replaced one of the main stars with someone else: THE KETTLES IN THE OZARKS, where Percy Kilbride was replaced by Arthur Hunnicutt, and FRANCIS IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE, where longtime companion to Francis The Talking Mule Donald O’Connor was replaced by Mickey Rooney. Also, to add insult to injury, Francis The Mule was not even voiced by Chill Wills in this film—Paul Frees was “doing” a Chill Wills imitation. I remember seeing that film as a child on TV and enjoying it since Mickey Rooney’s hamminess can take over the screen and make you forget everything else that’s happening other than The Mick and his antics.

The plot here—which on some level doesn’t even matter, since the film is just a vehicle for Canova’s comedy—is a kind of cross between Cinderella and a mystery-crime story. In an early scene, Canova gets in the mail the newest lesson from a correspondence-course charm school, and we see the bumbling Canova character in her room trying to practice the “elegant” prancing and posing described in the lesson. I can hear the audience in, say, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, howling at her antics, and I would have been hooting and stamping right along with them. This scene also reminds me of the late great Jim Varney in his Ernest persona—-one wonders if Varney as a child watched some Canova films on the local Tennessee UHF station. And just in case your heart-strings have not already been pulled by Judy’s working for the mean people at the hotel in a menial position, we find out that she takes the little money she does earn and uses it to keep up an old farm where an older man who drives a beat-up country taxi helps raise some orphan children, and of course the kids provide some country-style Our Gang-ish hijinks themselves. And if that’s not enough, when the kids throw a surprise birthday party for her, on a day that isn’t her birthday, Judy warbles a cute song about how “my birthday is my favorite day of the year,” with glockenspiel as a lead instrument in the orchestral backing. The only thing missing was Captain Kangaroo himself!

The Cinderella aspect of the story kicks in when Judy, who has led the mean-spirited people she lives and works with at the hotel to believe that a “feller” has been writing her, has her bluff called, and she winds up asking the first adult male to get off the bus in downtown “Greebville” to pretend to know her and be her boyfriend so as to shut up the hotel people who don’t believe her. And that “feller” is none other than ROBERT LOWERY! Yes, Batman from the 1949 Batman and Robin serial (my favorite Batman), who was recently championed here in the review of the 1962 Craig Hill film DEADLY DUO. For Judy, Lowery (who has always been good at comedy—his stuffy and bored performance as Bruce Wayne in the Batman serial is a hoot) is the dream date. Posing as Poindexter March III (!!!!), he charms everyone in town and has the meanies at the hotel now treating Judy like a queen, so they can win the favor of March/Lowery.

As you might expect, Judy’s farm isn’t exactly what it’s believed to be, and Robert Lowery had a specific reason to come to Greebville on the bus that magical day, and these elements keep the wheels rolling until Judy manages to put the meanies in their place, get rewarded out of the blue, and in the film’s climax, be toting that rifle referred to in the title. Also, even though Robert Lowery is essentially a swindler, he’s a charming swindler with a heart of gold, or so he shows himself to be as he’s taken away by the police. In the film’s final seconds, when banker Richard Deacon (!!!!) returns the deed to the farm to Judy AND we discover it’s got oil, she passes out, reminding us once again what a fine physical comedian Judy Canova is. She was 42 when the film was made, and her pigtails and girlish “aw shucks” mannerisms remind me of the scenes in the later Bowery Boys movies where the 40 year old Huntz Hall is dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit. This kind of thing exists in some alternate universe….a universe where I want to be!

Judy Canova’s radio show went off the air, after more than a decade, in 1955, the year she appeared in this, her last starring film vehicle. She then moved on to television guest appearances (she was even on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and went back to live performances in Vegas and in nightclubs across North America. It’s a shame she’s not remembered that much today. She carved out her own niche in the entertainment world of the 1930’s-1960’s, and she is able to carry this feature film effortlessly. She’s in virtually every scene, and though her persona is brash, she’s also shy and a wallflower, so the audience is not just laughing at her antics, they are rooting for her as an underdog. 65 years after this film was released, and 85 years after she exploded onto popular culture, Judy Canova is still working her magic on viewers like me!

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2020

great new album from THE GARMENT DISTRICT, ‘Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World’

Left On Coast
A Street Called Finland
Following Me
Seldom Search Arch
The Starfish Song
The Island of Stability
Moon Pale and Moon Gold
Cooling Station
The Instrument That Plays Itself

——————————–

Pittsburgh’s own THE GARMENT DISTRICT

Jennifer Baron: guitar, organ, electric piano, tambourine, vocals
Lucy Blehar: vocals
Alex Korshin: vocals
Dan Koshuter: guitar, vocals
Corry Drake: bass
Greg Langel: synthesizer, guitar
Shivika Asthana: drums
Sean Finn: drums

———————————

Beautiful orange vinyl LP (500 copies) available from Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records:

https://www.hhbtm.com/product/flowers-telegraphed-to-all-parts-of-the-world/

Digital version: https://hhbtm.bandcamp.com/album/flowers-telegraphed-to-all-parts-of-the-world

The album is also available for immediate streaming on You Tube Music and other popular services

---

My life has certainly been elevated to a higher key in the last few weeks with a new album from Pittsburgh’s THE GARMENT DISTRICT, featuring Jennifer Baron. KSE was honored to have released an earlier Garment District album in 2016, LUMINOUS TOXIN (KSE #296), which was one of our most well-received releases ever (generating many rapturous e-mails from listeners wanting another dose of Garment District magic). That release is long out of print–although you can, and should, get a digital version on the Garment District Bandcamp page: https://thegarmentdistrict.bandcamp.com/album/luminous-toxin

Music is a wonderful vehicle for transmitting a transcendent psychedelic experience to listeners, elevating them to a higher-key sacred space. Much music labelled “psychedelic” does not do that at all–and much music not labelled “psychedelic” (an extended raga performance by Ali Akbar Khan, a solo piano performance by Paul Bley, the chamber music of Morton Feldman, the otherworldly sacred music of Washington Phillips) can take one on a trip somewhere beyond, yet within.

The music of The Garment District is pure, it is timeless, it is elegant, it is playful, it has a watercolor-like delicious cloudiness, not unlike in effect the 1950s blotted-line artwork of Jennifer Baron’s fellow Pittsburgh person, Andy Warhol. Like the flowers in the title of the album, from the first note of the first song, this music opens up gradually, seductively, like the petals of a rose, bringing the listener into a kaleidoscopic wonder-world of sound.

Jennifer Baron has the rare ability to create via music a trippy and deep alternative universe that I want to exist within, and her music contains a door of entry for listeners who are willing to let go and fall inside….similar to the effect of the music of, say, Faine Jade, or Kendra Smith, or Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan, or “Kingdom of Heaven”-era Roky Erickson.

Ms. Baron is also a fantastic lyricist, her words embodying the perfect combination of shimmering beauty, trippy ambiguity (so that the listener can keep going back to the same well and tasting different flavors, never tiring of it), and piquant imagery that helps create mind-pictures which complement the higher-key experience. Her lyrics provide just enough pieces of a puzzle to create a scenario from, but with the next listen, you can construct a different scenario from the segments, so thus the songs never get old I also like the fact that The Garment District put some instrumentals on the album as it gives the vocal pieces room to breathe.

There are some vintage instruments and electronics used on the album, but frankly, I couldn’t put a date on this music. It has the feel of something that could have come out on Resonance or 4 A.D. or New Rose in the 1980s, but it also incorporates 21st century moves, and the mixture of elements within the sound-picture is always fresh and exciting–for instance, the instrumental “Cooling Station” starts of with an Eastern European flavor, gets hitched up to a vaguely hiphop-ish rhythm, uses vintage electronics in a way that evokes “Another Green World”-period Eno, and uses whistles in a way that suggests a Brazilian carnival, yet it all mixes together into an atmospheric otherworldly stew that is completely Garment District. There are so many great and haunting riffs throughout the album that I find myself humming and tapping my foot to hours after last playing the songs.

And the album closer, “The Instrument That Plays Itself,” is a languid but insistent musical knot that a million listens could never unravel, and it can’t help but make me want to flip the album over and put the needle at the start of side one once again….the same way I want to listen to Pink Floyd’s ATOM HEART MOTHER again immediately after fading out with the final section of “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast.”

Be sure to go to Bandcamp ASAP and listen to and then purchase your own copy of The Garment District’s ‘Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World’. It’s exactly the kind of soothing but uplifting tonic we need now during these difficult times. The message here is that magic and majesty can be found everywhere, wherever you are.

THE GARMENT DISTRICT, ‘Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World’

https://hhbtm.bandcamp.com/album/flowers-telegraphed-to-all-parts-of-the-world

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As I publish this post, Jennifer Baron’s earlier band from the 90s and 00s, the wonderful LADYBUG TRANSISTOR (who had many of the same qualities which make The Garment District so special), are reuniting for for their most extensive tour in 15 years. The lineup for this tour will be Jeff Baron, Sasha Bell, Jennifer Baron, Gary Olson and Julia Rydholm, and they’ll be playing sets highlighting songs from The Albemarle Sound, Argyle Heir, and their 2003 self-titled album.

The tour kicks off in Brooklyn on November 8 and from there heads to Pittsburgh (playing at the Warhol!), Cincinnati, Kalamazoo, and Chicago.

from “The Starfish Song,” lyrics by Jennifer Baron

You held a golden starfish in your hands
Five long arms each one a distant land to where
The sun’s warm rays the ether deep and free
The waves below where we would dive for dreams

Above the sea the sun flashed bright, the world kept pace
You turned to the pier across an intricate maze
The years are shapes in time, in disguise too late
Into the silver dawn, the leaping white clouds sail on

ALEXIS KORNER—The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (Wounded Bird), 2-CD

TRACK LISTING

• Disc 1 –
  1 She Fooled Me (2:21)
  2 I’m a Hoochie Coochie Man (3:28)
  3 Yellow Dog Blues (4:11)
  4 I Wonder Who (6:24)
  5 Dee (3:46)
  6 Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me (3:25)
  7 Rockin (2:47)
  8 Honesty (9:05)
  9 I Got a Woman (3:37)
  10 Mighty-Mighty Spade and Whitey (4:05)
  11 Corina – Corina (3:08)
  12 Operator (4:38)
  13 The Love You Save (5:40)
  14 Jesus Is Just Alright (3:00)
  15 That’s All (3:20)
  16 Evil Hearted Woman (3:57)
  17 Clay House Inn (2:50)
  18 Love Is Gonna Go (3:52)
• Disc 2 –
  1 Sunrise (4:59)
  2 Hellhound on My Trail (3:16)
  3 Gospel Ship (3:35)
  4 One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer (3:03)
  5 Sweet Sympathy (3:52)
  6 Rock Me (6:30)
  7 Don’t Change on Me (3:46)
  8 You Got the Power (To Turn Me on) (4:44)
  9 Lo and Behold (6:56)
  10 Country Shoes (4:11)

ALEXIS KORNER—The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (Wounded Bird), 2-CD

Alexis Korner had been playing and promoting the blues in Britain since 1949, and through the 1950’s, with his harmonica-playing colleague Cyril Davies, he managed to smuggle the blues out to listeners as a kind of Trojan Horse, working inside movements like trad-jazz and skiffle. With his Blues Incorporated in 1961-62, he became the standard-bearer for everything blues-related in Britain. Korner always put much of his efforts behind supporting other artists, including visiting American blues artists (who often stayed at his home while in the UK) and those such as Herbie Goins or Duffy Power who would sing in versions of Blues Incorporated. Korner eventually did a lot of live work as a duo with Danish guitarist Peter Thorup in the 70’s and 80’s, long, deep, idiosyncratic acoustic blues performances, largely on the continent, until his death in 1984. Korner’s ragged, chain-smoker’s voice is not to everyone’s taste, but neither are oysters or caviar. If authenticity and purity are key elements to any kind of blues music, Korner always had that—he never tried to sound American, and at his best, he is totally engaged in the music, often with an agonized intensity, but one that’s smoldering and understated.

     When Warner Brothers signed Korner in the early 70’s, his actual work was little known in the USA. Because the Rolling Stones were essentially an offshoot of Korner’s band, his name was always dropped here in reverent tones among Stones fans and aficionados of British R&B, but beyond that, his music was talked about rather than heard. Wisely, his debut for Warners, Bootleg Him! , was a career-spanning collection, first-rate blues performances that got freer and jazzier as the 60’s progressed. Everyone from Graham Bond to Charlie Watts to Robert Plant to Dave Holland appears on a track or two, and I vividly remember this album getting a lot of respect upon its release.

     The second album here, Accidentally Borne In New Orleans (issued in Germany on Metronome/Brain and in the UK on Transatlantic), recorded with Thorup and ex-members of King Crimson, is in more of a party-R&B vein with a tinge of gospel—it’s as if Korner were fronting Canada’s Downchild Blues Band after they’d been locked in Allen Toussaint’s studio for a week.

     If you only want to own one Korner album, Bootleg Him! would be a good choice as it’s wall-to-wall amazing. The New Orleans album is an interesting complement, though not the kind of thing that would create a lot of new Korner fans.

BILL SHUTE, originally published in Ugly Things magazine in 2020

EDDIE AND THE SHOWMEN–Squad Car: The Eddie Bertrand Story (Oldays Records CD, Japan)

1 Eddie & The Showmen– Border Town
2 Eddie & The Showmen– Toes On The Nose Border Town
3 Eddie & The Showmen– Squad Car
4 Eddie & The Showmen– Scratch
5 Eddie & The Showmen– Mr. Rebel
6 Eddie & The Showmen– Movin’
7 Eddie & The Showmen– Lanky Bones
8 Eddie & The Showmen– Far Away Places
9 Eddie & The Showmen– We Are The Young
10 Eddie & The Showmen– Young And Lonely
11 The Belairs– Mr. Moto
12 The Belairs– Little Brown Jug
13 The Belairs– Volcanic Action
14 The Belairs– Vampire
15 The Belairs– Kami-Kaze
16 The Belairs– Baggles
17 The Baymen– Bonzai
18 The Baymen– Daybreak
19 The Challengers– Torquay
20 The Challengers– Bull Dog
21 The Challengers– Tidal Wave
22 The Journeymen (4)– Work Out
23 The Baylanders– Surfers Blues
24 The Baylanders– Surfers Rule
25 Thom Starr & the Galaxies– Chiflado

EDDIE AND THE SHOWMEN—Squad Car—Eddie Bertrand Story (Oldays, Japan), CD

It’s been 24 years since the AVI collection of Eddie and the Showmen’s Liberty sides, so the time is right for a new collection of surf guitar pioneer Eddie Bertrand’s work, and this attractive cardboard mini-LP sleeve Japanese album fills the need well.

Inspired by Duane Eddy’s early records, surfer Eddie Bertrand, from the South Bay section of L.A., took up the guitar and joined fellow guitarist Paul Johnson to form The Bel-airs, who had a hit with their hypnotic instrumental “Mr. Moto.” The Bel-airs featured a twin-guitar attack and were quite a local phenomenon. Bertrand eventually left the group as he desired to pursue a more “wet” guitar sound (and he worked with Leo Fender himself to develop a unique amp to achieve that) and created Eddie and the Showmen, including future Standell Dick Dodd on drums, who’d also been in The Bel-Airs.

Eddie and the Showmen issued five singles on Liberty in 1963-64. The first paired the Latin-flavored “Border Town” with the driving “Toes On The Nose,” about which Bertrand said, “with the ascending guitar lines, I visualized as I walked to the nose of the surfboard.” This was followed up with the wailing “Squad Car,” which kicked off with a siren and was a highlight of their live act. The band had a devoted local following through weekly shows at the Retail Clerks Hall in Buena Park, and some accounts from people involved in the local scene back then state that Eddie’s band was a strong challenger to Dick Dale’s and local fans tended to side with either one band or the other. Every Liberty side is equally strong, and only the British Invasion knocked the wind out of the surf instrumental scene. Eddie and the Showmen did adapt to that by recording some vocal sides in 1964, unreleased at the time but eventually showing up on a Moxie EP many years later. Those are not included here, only instrumentals.

The album begins with the ten Showmen sides on Liberty and then six Bel-airs sides including Bertrand. The remaining nine songs are local 45’s by other bands from the South Bay area, including the Journeymen and The Baymen, as well as three 1962-63 Vault sides from The Challengers, whose Richard Delvy had played with Bertrand in the Bel-airs.

All of the Bertrand sides here sound as fresh as the day they were recorded, and the additional material helps to provide a context for the active South Bay scene…a very worthwhile release for the surf guitar fan!

BILL SHUTE (originally published in Ugly Things magazine in 2019)

FIRE AND ICE, LTD. “THE HAPPENING” (Capitol LP, 1966)

FIRE AND ICE, LTD. “THE HAPPENING” (Capitol LP) 

    This 1966 Capitol album (a grey-market CD is available on UK Kismet, although copies of the original LP can easily be found for what you’d pay for a new CD) is for me a classic of the psych-sploitation genre. It contains five trippy jams  ranging between 2:48 and 9:56 (one of which uses Gershwin’s “Summertime” as its basis) with spontaneous beat-poetry vocal interjections (the kind parodied by Kim Fowley on his OUTRAGEOUS album and on the track “Is America Dead” on the DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL album), but not full poems like the immortal Christopher Columbus poem recited by John Drew Barrymore in the film HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL.

    The music mixes beatnik flute, garage-band organ, and trebly guitar riffing not unlike such exploito outfits as T. SWIFT AND THE ELECTRIC BAG or THE ANIMATED EGG. Except for the “Summertime” adaptation, each track takes a basic riff and uses it as a framework for the soloists and vocalists to work themselves in and out of the audio fabric, and then after a certain period, it fades out. In 1967, the tracks would have been longer and more tribal, but this was still 1966, and there is a heavy beatnik vibe wrapped around the whole thing….with 60s garage band organ and guitar swirling in and out of the audio collage. As one era fades out, another one fades in…

    This collective gave at least one public performance, as there are two video clips you can watch at Getty Images with silent footage of a  Fire and Ice, Ltd. “happening” performance on the Sunset Strip in 1966, with a banner of the Capitol album cover in the background (see B&W pic).

    The perfect audience for this album would be someone who enjoys the Velvet Underground’s long Exploding Plastic Inevitable jams and also albums like BEAT OF THE EARTH, but who also has a sense of  humor and enjoys cheapo  exploito-psych cash-in albums like the previously mentioned T. SWIFT AND THE ELECTRIC BAG. Also, if you’ve heard the obscure Louisiana 60’s single “An Experimented Terror” by THE GREEK FOUNTAINS and consider it one of the all-time greats (available on the compilation BEYOND THE CALICO WALL), then you will love THE HAPPENING by FIRE AND ICE, LTD. as much as I do. While it’s clearly a psych cash-in on the part of Capitol Records, it could also be performed at some gallery in Venice, CA, to a “serious” audience sipping espresso or wine (see the 1966 video footage of the live performance mentioned above) who would politely applaud and pronounce it as “exciting and going beyond boundaries” or “an action painting in sound that’s NOW!”, but at the same time, some stoner who stumbled in off the street could jerk his head up and down to it and exclaim, “far out, maaaaaaan” at the climax of some loud passage. It takes a master-stroke to hit all those bases at once. Don’t be expecting The Red Crayola’s FREE FORM FREAKOUT passages or anything transcendent—you could play this album before a screening of the 1966 Spanish-made film THE HALLUCINATION GENERATION with George Montgomery to get the audience in the mood (hey, I should do that some time!). There are probably other performances of this sort documented on reel-to-reel tapes or private press LP’s of the day, but until you find something like that, this major-label COMMERCIAL EQUIVALENT will do just fine.

Fire and Ice Ltd “The Happening” performance on Sunset Boulevard.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

===============================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

And coming in 2024 will be a new book-length poem, STATIC STRUT (KSE #421)….keep an eye out for it!

CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT (Italy 1960), starring Rik Battaglia

CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT (Italy 1960), starring Rik Battaglia

     Coincidentally, the evening I am watching this film is the evening of the Academy Awards, so it’s a fitting FU to the Academy to champion something like CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT, a film in opposition to the pretentious, self-congratulatory jerkoff-session that’s being broadcast on TV.  Welcome to the wonder-world of KSE….where Cameron Mitchell is best actor, Mamie Van Doren is best actress, Al “Fuzzy” St. John is best supporting actor, Christine McIntyre is best supporting actress, Al Adamson is best director, Fred Williamson gets the Life Achievement Award, the best foreign film goes to NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES, and there’s a statue of K. Gordon Murray at the entrance to the auditorium.

     Let’s get the plot out of the way. Years ago, an evil usurper (as he’s called in the dialogue), Dakar (Paul Muller), has taken over the sultanate rightfully belonging the family of Omar, now elderly, who lives with his adopted son Nadir (Rik Battaglia), who knows that Omar and his people have been screwed but not that he himself is the rightful heir. Dakar requires massive and painful tributes from his subjects, who cannot afford them, and during one lavish presentation of gifts, he is presented with a lovely slave girl, Fatima (Irene Tunc). At the same time, at the palace, there is the presence of the sultry and ravishing Dinazar (Gianna Maria Canale), who seems to be the betrothed one to Dakar, but that’s not 100% clear from the dubbed dialogue. Dakar is taken with Fatima and desires her, which causes Dinazar to be quite jealous. Fatima escapes and vanishes into the country, where she is rescued by Nadir. Dakar’s subjects have had enough repression and decide to revolt; at the same time, Nadir rises to the occasion and fights for both the oppressed people and for his rightful position. You guess whether Dakar or Nadir winds up with Fatima.

     Director Tanio Boccia’s name might not ring a bell, but the pseudonym he used on many of his later films will: AMERIGO ANTON. It seems like every other sword and sandal film I saw on low-power UHF stations as a youth through AIP-TV packages was directed by him, and most of them starred KIRK MORRIS: TERROR OF THE STEPPES; ATLAS AGAINST THE CZAR; DESERT RAIDERS (which re-used character names and plot elements from the film under review today); SAMSON AGAINST THE PIRATES. There was also the classic CAESAR THE CONQUEROR (a great performance by Cameron Mitchell), and the old favorite, REVENGE OF IVANHOE. CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT predates any of those, but all the elements were in place. Boccia/Anton tended to like “exotic” settings that are not the Greece or Rome of antiquity (except for the Caesar film, obviously), a kind of generic storybook “near East”. I would dare anyone to tell me what nation this film is supposed to be set in. Oh, the people wear turbans and the occasional character mentions “Allah” in his welcome to someone, but it’s about as culturally specific as a Jungle Jim film, which is great in my book because a film like this exists in a kind of fantasy “Arabian Nights” world. It has elements of the kind of film that might have been made at Universal in the 1940’s and starred someone like Yvonne DeCarlo, but it’s done on a much lower budget and also has more location photography. It’s interesting that there are two DP’s credited on the film: one labelled interiors, one labelled locations. It’s like some pulp magazine “exotic adventure” story that would engage a 12-year old….or someone like me, a 12 year old at heart, reading the “adventure” story on the night shift as a security guard.

    Another curious aspect of this film is that star Rik Battaglia’s voice is dubbed in English by Edmund Purdom, a fellow leading man in Italian historical epics of the day, but someone with an instantly recognizable voice, always with a rich, velvety Shakespearean approach to anything.

As we move further away from the Golden Age of Italian color historical costume epics-on-a-budget of the 1950s and early 1960s, they cast even more of a magic spell on the viewers, because now with their dubbed English dialogue and lack of CGI or other computer effects, they are historical artifacts themselves. I hope that someday that will command the kind of attention and archival reissues that the Eurowestern and Giallo and Eurocrime genres have experienced….and I hope that I’m around to see it.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

==========================================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

TRAIN TO TOMBSTONE (Lippert Pictures,1950), starring Don ‘Red’ Barry, Robert Lowery, Wally Vernon, and Tom Neal

clever Don Barry post-Republic western set on a train–excellent cast!

TRAIN TO TOMBSTONE is one of the films Don Barry made at Lippert after leaving Republic. These films are often a bit different from the norm (Red Desert, for instance…) and usually have excellent supporting casts. Barry wrote the story for this film also, and it’s cleverly constructed as we have a train that throws together a diverse lot of people, PLUS we have the suspense of knowing the someone on the train is a criminal, PLUS we have the added suspense of knowing that the train will possibly be attacked along the way, but we don’t know for sure or when or how or by whom. So there are a few different levels of suspense, yet most of the film can be shot on a small, static set. Barry, considered a young Cagney when he first came on the scene before his western star days, was always one of the better actors among series western stars, and he commands attention well here. Robert Lowery, with added mustache and now in his “supporting actor” days, adds more tension to the proceedings as a marshal overseeing the train (or is he?), comedian Wally Vernon is funny as a salesman trying to sell corsets to Indian women, and Tom Neal plays a doctor, although his character is not really developed very much. While it’s easy to fault the film (there are external shots of bad guys chasing the train, but usually there’s just a mediocre projection screen out the window that looks about as real as the one used in THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, and in one scene the characters are firing guns out the window at the projection screen!), if you come to it with enough willing suspension of disbelief, it’s an exciting ride, and it only takes less than an hour. The same director and four stars also made I SHOT BILLY THE KID the same year–one wonders if they were made back to back, although Berke and three of the four stars were Lippert regulars anyway. Overall, this is solid b-movie entertainment. The train plot device was a nice change of pace, and anyone who has enjoyed Don Barry’s work in other films should check this one out.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2004

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RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube:

new Bill Shute poetry collection PROJECT BLUE (KSE #423) coming in Summer 2024

KSE #423 (poetry book), BILL SHUTE, “Project Blue,” to be published Summer 2024. A combination of pieces from long-out-of-print chapbooks, appearing in book form for the first time, along with the new forty-page open-field poem “Project Blue.” The material ranges from 2005-2023.

A number of the older pieces are reader requests–from both people who own the original chapbooks and want these in book form, and people who have been trying to find a copy of the original chap and want to read the piece. The republished chapbooks include such reader favorites as BRIDGE TO NOWHERE, UP-SIDE DOWN, TEXTURE AND ACCIDENT, SAN ANTONIO GOOD FRIDAY, and my contributions to NEXT EXIT: TWO…as well as a previously unpublished poem from 2005.

The new piece, “Project Blue” (which I’ve been working on for the last month or so) is a bit different from my usual recent output, a bit more casual, a bit more conversational, probably due to the time I’ve been spending with the journals of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the Spring and Summer of 2023.

I’m excited about the new collection PROJECT BLUE, and I hope you will enjoy it, finding it both interesting and worthwhile.

However, there’s another book coming first, at the beginning of 2024…

The recent 100-page poem STATIC STRUT (KSE #421) will be published as a stand-alone volume in January 2024.

As always, thank you for your support over the decades

Be sure to check out my Amazon author page at https://amzn.to/2XRNgjl

UNDERCOVER AGENT (Monogram Pictures, 1939), starring Russell Gleason

no-frills Monogram crime drama, interesting characterizations

Monogram was a wonderful little factory of b-movies, films that delivered the goods week after week for small town and neighborhood audiences. UNDERCOVER AGENT is a typical Monogram programmer, directed by Howard Bretherton, a man who directed many fine westerns and two interesting Columbia serials in the mid-40s, but it contains many small tidbits of particularity and humanity that make it somehow special even today, 60+ years after it was made. The plot involves sweepstakes fraud (I remember a similar plot being used in a 1930’s Frankie Darro vehicle) and Russell Gleason, as boyish as ever, convincingly plays a postal inspector who is put on suspension due to a warranted but technical illegal shooting. He is gradually working his way up the ranks and wants to marry his girlfriend, played by Shirley Deane. One interesting detail in the story is that Ms. Deane’s father, played by J. M. Kerrigan, is a hardcore alcoholic who is seen pawning his daughter’s confirmation ring in the film’s first scene. He is turned down and thrown out of establishments in scenes that echo of TEN NIGHTS IN A BARROOM. The film, like so many forgotten little b-movies of yesteryear, is full of such small details that still work today. Kerrigan’s character, of course, eventually finds redemption (no surprise there!), but the sweepstakes scam is cleverly put together by the criminals, and cleverly busted by Gleason.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2003

===========================

RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube:

UNMASKED (1950), starring Robert Rockwell and Raymond Burr

OK Republic blackmail-murder mystery, with stunning Raymond Burr performance

This Republic crime programmer is an above average b-crime film with an interesting blackmail/murder plot, but what makes it a classic is the stunning performance by Raymond Burr as the blackmailing, murdering, malicious, sleazy scandal-sheet publisher/editor. Burr had a long string of fine performances as villains in his pre-Perry Mason days, but this is one of the three or four best, perhaps because in standard Republic fashion the leads are quite bland. Paul Harvey is superb as the weak-willed theatrical producer whose wife is killed; Hillary Brooke isn’t in the film that much, but she’s quite memorable as the unpleasant Doris King; and Norman Budd is charming as the comedic, bungling, cigar-stealing criminal underling. The two leads, Robert Rockwell as the police detective and Barbara Fuller as Harvey’s daughter, are somewhat bland, although it’s hard to tell if the script or the performers were to blame. This was not uncommon at Republic, where the stuntmen and the supporting players are often more interesting than the no-name leads. Still, Republic b-programmers are always slickly put together and fast moving, and this one is no exception. Those who love Raymond Burr’s early supporting work MUST see this film. Those who like Burr but are not too familiar with his pre-Perry Mason work must also see it–your respect for Burr, which may already be high, will grow much deeper. He was an amazing talent who is sorely missed. There were no small roles for him–if it was a bottom-of-the-bill b-movie that few if any critics would see, Burr still gave the film his full talents. In this film, Raymond Burr passes the ultimate test for a movie villain: you almost cheer him along, wanting to see how much evil he can get away with! Bravo, Mr. Burr!!!

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2003

=============================

RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube:

HAWAIIAN EYE (1959-1963 TV series)

HAWAIIAN EYE (1959-1963 TV series)

    Warner Brothers TV was certainly on a roll in the late 50’s and early 60’s, and among their many successful projects were four shows pretty much cut from the same cloth: 77 SUNSET STRIP, HAWAIIAN EYE, BOURBON STREET BEAT, and SURFSIDE SIX. Basically, you had a detective agency in an exotic locale (LA’s Sunset Strip, Hawaii, New Orleans, and Miami Beach). There were two or three hunky male leads, a female character involved with the agency for them to bounce dialogue off of, and a local character for comedy relief and/or musical asides–in 77 Sunset Strip, it was Edd “Kookie” Byrnes; in Hawaiian Eye it’s Poncie Ponce; in Bourbon Street Beat it was Nat King Cole’s brother Eddie as jazz pianist “The Baron”; in Surfside Six it was Margarita Sierra as Cha Cha O’Brien (!!!!).  Though they had a lot of exotic local color and location shooting, the shows were made on the WB lot and made extensive use or rear-screen projection. WB was a class act and had the best technicians in the business, so unless you are specifically looking for the projection-screen fakery, you would not notice it.

    These shows were incredibly popular in their day and can still be seen in re-runs today here and there (77 Sunset Strip was playing on ME-TV a few months ago, when I was down with the flu and looking for mindless vintage TV to watch while out of it), and they are slickly made and have fast-moving plots (the detective agency base means you can insert almost any content into a show and justify it—they take all kinds of cases). Also, WB got the best guest stars, generally people who were known for film work, so when you figure that each episode of these shows is kind of like a B-movie in itself, each show has charismatic leads, the guest stars are movie-quality actors/actresses, and the whole thing is fresh off the best assembly-line in entertainment (the WB logo is all over the shows….and the narration at the beginning), it’s the crime TV equivalent of getting a top-of-the-line Buick right off the assembly line in Detroit! The shows also all had catchy hook-filled theme songs which you’ll have in your head for days (and you’ll be trying to get them OUT of your head).

  I recently got the complete run of the first two seasons of HAWAIIAN EYE from a grey-market dealer (and he now has the final two seasons available too, so I may take the plunge on that). The core group in the first two seasons consisted of Anthony Eisley and Robert Conrad as the two lead detectives (and while each would be in every show, one or the other would usually be highlighted), Connie Stevens as “Cricket” their assistant and lounge singer at the hotel where they work out of, and Poncie Ponce as the ukulele-playing stringer for the agency who provides comic and musical interludes a few times a show. Grant Williams joined mid-way in the second year, and Anthony Eisley left after the third season. During the fourth and final season the great Troy Donahue (previously on Surfside Six) joined to kind of replace Eisley, but he played the entertainment director at the hotel, not a detective.

    I watched the first two episodes of Season Two for this review, although I’ve sampled other episodes and will eventually watch all of them if suddenly there are 29 hours in a day rather than 24.

    Star Anthony Eisley (known earlier in his career as Fred Eisley, his real name—see pic of him) is everything the lead on a show like this needed to be: handsome, charismatic, both witty and tough, and a solid actor capable of carrying a show. Eisley is known nowadays more for his horror and exploitation films than for his mainstream product—the man worked for Roger Corman, Al Adamson, Ted V. Mikels, David L. Hewitt, and Fred Olen Ray (and having worked with those five he should get some kind of award), and he also was memorable in Samuel Fuller’s THE NAKED KISS and Elvis Presley’s FRANKIE AND JOHNNY and the wonderful Eurospy romp LIGHTNING BOLT, where he did dub his own voice and provided witty sardonic commentary on the events. He worked extensively in television (multiple appearances on PERRY MASON and DRAGNET 1967 among them) in addition to film, but HAWAIIAN EYE was surely his breakout role and the one remembered most by people who were adults during the 59-62 period when he was on the show.

    The first episode I watched, I WED THREE WIVES, features Eisley and is oriented around a smarmy egocentric movie star (brilliantly played by Ray Danton, who was always great at comedy!) who is avoiding alimony and the IRS and his sagging career by hiding out in Hawaii at the hotel where Eisley is the head of security. Danton’s three ex-wives all get wind of his coming to Hawaii, and they get together to head him off there and demand alimony and child support (he’s a deadbeat on those counts, as you’d expect). During the first half of the show, they try to get past security and track him down, and you can imagine the cat-and-mouse game that involves (often played for laughs). When they find him, they kidnap him and take him to a rented house. Danton’s character, being the charmer that he is, manages to melt the objections of each lady—as they watch him overnight in shifts—and win them over. The episode is really a vehicle for Ray Danton—who is always great in anything—who gets to show a wide range of emotions, as well as a wide range of feigned emotions since he’s such a two-faced heel. It’s really a challenge for an actor to pull off, and Danton does it VERY well. While there is a lot of humor on the show, there is real tension and drama and gunplay and the like. Based on this episode, one would have to give the show a very positive rating.

    I also watched the second episode, PRINCESS FROM MANHATTAN, which features Robert Conrad, probably younger than most of us will remember seeing him. This is PRE-Palm Springs Weekend, which was before The Wild Wild West. Conrad is more subdued than we’re used to seeing—remember his TV commercials for Eveready batteries (see pic of ad) where Conrad dared you to knock the battery off his shoulder? He didn’t yet have that persona to the extent that he developed it later, but what he does have is a smoldering kind of intensity that pulls the viewer in and surely must have been VERY attractive to the female viewers of the day. Conrad was a friend of Nick Adams, who helped him get some of his earlier roles, but HAWAIIAN EYE was his star-making part—and that unique Conrad aura is here even in its earlier muted form (by the way, has anyone seen the three films Conrad made in Mexico in the mid-1960’s?). The plot is centered around some Middle Eastern prince who is married to an American (the “Princess From Manhattan” of the title) who is staying at the hotel and thus is provided security by the Eisley/Conrad agency. Conrad’s character actually knew (and dated) the princess before she was a princess. He initially does not want to be assigned to the case because of that past relationship, and asks Eisley to take it, but when “her royal highness” requests his presence, he has no choice but to obey. You can imagine how this scenario plays out, with Conrad and the prince getting to know each other, and Conrad and his former flame, now princess, getting re-acquainted (and she’s still carrying a torch for him, of course). The man playing the prince looks more like Lloyd Bochner (was Bochner not available?) than any person of Middle Eastern background I’ve ever met, but hey, this was 1960’s television. The princess wants to break up with his royal highness and of course involves Conrad in this.

 Oh, did I mention Connie Stevens’ role in these shows? She’s kind of hanging around the office doing work for them, dripping playful charm and sexiness (I wouldn’t be surprised if the writers described her that way in the script!) but also entertains at the hotel nightclub, and in each of the two shows discussed she gets a song. Although the original run of HAWAIIAN EYE was before my time, I did see her in many other things throughout the 60’s and early 70’s, and I must confess to having had a crush on her as a child, a crush I’ve never really lost. To me, she’s always been a class act (and yes, I’ve seen SCORCHY—twice the first week it was out….see movie poster), and I would always go out of my way to catch a guest shot on MURDER, SHE WROTE or whatever. I even watched her home-shopping pitches for her line of cosmetics (and if I had been a woman, I would have bought them). I’m sorry I never got to see her perform in a nightclub—I’m sure she would have had the audience eating out of her hand. There is more back-and-forth romantic banter between Conrad and Stevens than there is between Eisley and Stevens (Eisley is the older partner, the more grounded and serious one), but WB does a good job in making their contract actress Stevens appealing. She also had a successful side career as a pop vocalist (as did a number of WB stars—see the 45 picture sleeve)—giving her a song on many of the shows probably helped her record sales a lot.

    The four WB detective shows mentioned above—all of which ran for multiple seasons—are evidence of what an exciting assembly line of talent and product the studio produced during that period. Executive producer Wm. T. Orr (whose name is always prominent in the end credits) and the anonymous bold narrator at the beginning of the shows who sternly TELLS YOU the show’s name and its stars (since evidently just showing them on the screen is not enough!) created a unique feel so that ten seconds into the show you KNOW it’s WB product. It was truly a Golden Age, and I’d recommend anyone so inclined to catch ANY of the four shows when they are re-run on networks aimed at old people or nostalgia-fans. The world that watched Hawaiian Eye and bought Connie Stevens 45’s is a world I’m comfortable living in.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2018

=======================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

Admit (Stein 2)

Spelled in the long add in the among and childish.

A very great deal of rain makes the ground wet and also makes it be very much better to find flowers than how does it make a difference if three things not broken but an inconvenience. This is why an all makes it be a surplus. The rain changing rapidly to sunshine makes it more agreeable to Helen Mildred Alice Herbert Christian and Joseph and their friends. Their friends are not so particular. They are on a boat. It is extraordinary how many pictured pictured boats are for sale. Supposing everybody looks alike who is taller. James is taller. And why. Because having found having found it he was as well as ever afterwards. In respect to please. To be hoping that in the middle of the afternoon James he and Bertha will be there if invited will be there if invited and led to having been with advise advised advocated plenty and Jenny and William and no names mentioned. Admit a name.

What has happened unfortunately. Only this with that as one of having it next and next. Next door is not applicable if there are two doors to one house.

Telling it as admit admittance.

If not to go to go to come to so to so to go to come to go to so to come to go to go to some to so to come to so to go to come to go to so to go to so to so to go to come to to go to so to so to so to go to come to so to go.

Admit is why it was left about.

She has asked that there should be no airplanes.

And no lack of continuity.

And no arrangement of silks and laces.

And no allowance of build and builder.

And no doubt about with it all.

And admiration and attire.

And leaving it to be here.

She also asked if they might like it.

She also was to be her hoping to be and very likely. To admit.

Now then.

With a willow weeping willow too. A tree. A few. And many more. And for. And with a gain. And much to add. And like it.

Admit.

With it.

And admit.

Text: GERTRUDE STEIN, 1927

Image: Bill Shute, circa 2014

LIPPY THE LION AND HARDY HAR HAR: THE COMPLETE SERIES (Warner Archive)

LIPPY THE LION AND HARDY HAR HAR: THE COMPLETE SERIES (Warner Archive)

      The Warner Archive is now, eventually, getting around to releasing some of the most obscure of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows owned by Warner/Turner, and this gem from H-B’s early 60’s golden age is well worth owning, now that all 52 of the five-minute cartoons from the 1962-63 syndicated run are collected in own attractively priced 2-DVD set.

    These play a lot like comedy shorts, with a duo of outcasts with quirky personalities rambling around, basically going from place to place like hobos, and finding some sort of problem getting in their way, enough to kill the five minutes of the cartoon. Had Lippy and Hardy been humans, they might have had their own shorts at Educational in the 30’s or Columbia in the 40’s, but they are animated animals, so their natural home is at Hanna-Barbera. However, the interplay between the two here is really A LOT like a comedy short, which is of course high praise coming from me.

    Lippy is a kind of blowhard with a twist of WC Fields to his delivery (voiced by Daws Butler). Animation reference websites (whose knowledge is more encyclopedic than mine) state that Butler based the voice on comedian Joe E. Brown and that the voice is pretty much the same of Peter Potamus (who ran at H-B from 1964-66, so Lippy was first—-the Warner Archives put out Peter’s collected works on DVD in 2016). He’s very much a nice guy….lion….and has the same kind of caring one sees between Laurel and Hardy. In fact, if you imagine Lippy as Hardy and Hardy as Laurel, you may get a general idea of what’s going on here.

    Hardy is a worry-wart, who finds the worst interpretation of everything that happens, is paralyzed by fear, and never wants to try anything new or different. He’s voiced by the great Mel Blanc (you’ll also hear Blanc doing other minor characters in these shorts), who is perfect for the hemming and hawing and cynical mumbling the character does non-stop. The irony here is that hyenas are supposed to be laughing all the time—but this is an over-worrying, depressed hyena! Thankfully, Lippy is able to keep him going and encourage him.

I’ve been watching these 52 shorts randomly, but to focus on the first three here, you can see the basic format. In the first one, they are adrift at sea and run into a pirate. In the second one, they are riding the rails on a train and get thrown off by the railroad security heavy (nowhere near as brutal, though, as Ernest Borgnine as Shack in the classic EMPEROR OF THE NORTH, this being a kid’s cartoon) while dreaming of eating some watermelon (Lippy tells Hardy to be happy by thinking of something fun to eat, and mentions watermelon), which they do eventually get. In the third one, they are rambling around the countryside and encounter a mad scientist (the music at one points references the theme song of the Alfred Hitchcock TV show!).

Five minutes is the perfect length for these. A four-year-old could keep attention that long, and for those of us who are older but four-year-olds at heart, the shorts are fast-moving, no scene is played out very long, and there isn’t the kind of “second act” you find in longer cartoons or in two-reel comedy shorts. You can pop this into your player, watch any two of the boatload of cartoons contained here, put a smile on your face, and go on to whatever else you need to do, and you’ve only spent TEN minutes.

Cartoons, like comedy shorts, often provide me with the kind of absurdist “head cleaner” (to use the language of cassette or VHS tapes) I need during a long day or a stressful period. It’s like pushing my own personal re-set button. Hanna-Barbera were at the height of their powers in the early 60’s. Virtually every set of animal cartoon characters they created during this period is now considered a classic which has held up very well over the decades, and one certainly can’t say that about later periods of H-B animation (though they always continued to have at least some worthwhile projects in any era). If you have a taste for this sort of thing, you should definitely score a copy of this fine 2-DVD set, with all 52 (!!!) of the pair’s comedy adventures.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

=================================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD (1947), starring Bing Crosby

THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD (1947), starring Bing Crosby

      One of the old tricks of budget labels is to find material that a famous artist recorded for some small label before becoming famous, slap a few of those tracks onto an LP with the artist’s name prominently featured, and then pump it up to album length with filler from some non-famous artist the label already had the rights to (or could acquire for next to nothing). The Beatles albums on MGM and Atco were like this, with 4 Beatles tracks backing Tony Sheridan, and 8 tracks by others. For a real laugh, why not try Googling the albums ORBITING WITH ROY ORBISON AND BRISTOW HOOPER or SOUL AS SUNG BY OTIS REDDING AND LITTLE JOE CURTIS (see pics), both of which are classics (or anti-classics) of that genre.

    Something like that was also done in the film world from time to time. There was a low-budget crime film made at PRC circa 1940-41 called “Paper Bullets,” starring Jack LaRue, which had the young Alan Ladd in a small role. A few years after Ladd became a huge star with THIS GUN FOR HIRE, Eagle-Lion took the film, placed Ladd’s name above the title, and re-released it as GANGS, INC.  And anyone who’s ever seen the 1936 Weiss family serial THE CLUTCHING HAND has seen an awkwardly inserted title card on a few chapters which reads STARRING JON HALL. Presumably, these prints came from the late 30’s after Hall was a star at Universal. When he made the serial, he was certainly NOT the star of it….in fact, he’d not even changed his name to Jon Hall yet….he was still Charles Locher, and was billed on the cast list as such! I’ve always loved this kind of playful deception—rather than being outraged by it, I admire the daring of the con, and often you get to see or hear some obscure material you would not find normally.

  Astor Pictures was a small, marginal film distribution company which specialized in reissues of once-popular films which still had appeal on some level. Old horror films and things such as the East Side Kids features were re-issued by Astor. They were in business from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. They also released some original material, low-budget all-Black cast films, shot-in-16mm westerns starring Sunset Carson, etc. The company morphed into an art-film distributor in its final days of the early 60’s, releasing such foreign classics as LA DOLCE VITA and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. During their 40’s heyday, though, they were kind of like the film equivalent to a budget label. With legendary exploitation film-maker BUD POLLARD (THE HORROR, GIRLS FOR SALE, THE BLACK KING, Louis Jordan’s BEWARE) on board at Astor, they came up with the brilliant idea of taking Danny Kaye’s comedy shorts at Educational Pictures, which Astor had the rights to at that time, and editing them together into a kind of “feature” that would STAR Danny Kaye (meaning, his name could be put on the theater marquee and bring in the customers). That created the “feature” THE BIRTH OF A STAR. I’m not sure if that’s in circulation—no one on the IMDB has actually seen it. When that worked, they came up with the idea of editing together parts of Bing Crosby’s comedy musical shorts made by Mack Sennett at Educational Pictures in 1931-32, after Crosby had been in the Paul Whiteman film KING OF JAZZ (1930) but before he truly broke as a national star via radio. The four Educational Pictures shorts (which do survive—Grapevine Video was offering them at one time, and they are perhaps better appreciated in their original context than sliced and diced into a “feature”) were I SURRENDER DEAR, ONE MORE CHANCE, BILLBOARD GIRL, and DREAM HOUSE. They are all quite entertaining, and Bing’s self-effacing, self-deprecating, amiable persona really began with these shorts. Gary Giddins, in the first volume of his projected multi-volume biography of Crosby (the second volume will be out later this year), gives a lot of credit to Sennett (who is still much under-rated….especially his later work) for figuring out how to “market” Crosby as a film character who had to carry his own film shorts. Crosby’s charm and excellent comic timing, as well as his bordering-on-hip but still dreamy vocalizing, are very much in evidence in the early Sennett shorts. I love Educational Pictures shorts and always have….if I could, I’d erect a shrine to such forgotten Educational Pictures stars who had their own series of comedy shorts such as TOM PATRICOLA AND BUSTER WEST, TOM HOWARD AND GEORGE SHELTON (later finding fame with the It Pays To Be Ignorant radio show), JEFFERSON MACHAMER (and his “Gags and Gals”), and TIM AND IRENE (Ryan). Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon also did great work at Educational.

    If you’ve ever wondered what Bud Pollard looked and sounded like, you’re in luck….he actually narrates/hosts the film, reading his lines off cue cards, thus looking left of the camera for a while, right of the camera for a while, etc. The gimmick here is that on some level the film is passed off as a “biography” of Bing. This is possible because the shorts have plots about a character who is up and coming, trying different jobs, trying to make it as an entertainer, etc. As the characters he plays are essentially his public persona, this almost works. The title, of course, is meant to echo the successful ROAD pictures what Crosby did with Bob Hope. Astor specialized in small-town and neighborhood theaters which could charitably be called “third-run” houses. Now they could feature a film with a ROAD TO title which starred Bing Crosby and for a modest rental fee. Anyone who was a super-Crosby fan would probably be happy to see these shorts (there was not TV or internet to re-run them back then), once they got over the sting of not getting a Hope and Crosby film. Believe it or not, in addition to Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby, Astor went to that well another time by cobbling together some pre-stardom 1930’s shorts from BETTY GRABLE, and then passed that off as a feature called HOLLYWOOD BOUND—as with the Kaye feature, that does not seem to be in circulation either, unfortunately.

    Thus like both the best budget-label products or exploitation-film scams, THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD was both an outrageous rip-off AND totally entertaining and worth the price of admission….once you got over being taken!

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2018

==================

RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

Elise Surville (Stein 1)

Some are saying of some one that that one certainly has been one that has been helping some one to be one not succeeding in living, to be one coming to be a dead one and that one was one perhaps not coming then to be a dead one. Some are saying of someone that that one has been one in being living helping very many to be ones not succeeding in living. Some are saying of that one that that one is such a one one succeeding in helping very many to be ones not succeeding in living. Some are saying such a thing of some one and some are laughing then. Some are laughing and saying yes this one is one helping every one to be one not succeeding in living, certainly this one helped one to be one not succeeding in living and certainly that one was one who was one who might have been one succeeding in living if that one had not been one who certainly never could have been succeeding in living.

This one the one who was one who some said was one helping any one to be one not succeeding in living was one that some said was like some other one and that some said was not like that other one. This one was one who had been a young one and certainly then had been one who was laughing very often then and singing very much then and knowing very many men then and knowing some women then.

This one was one and every one knowing this one knowing of this one knew this thing, this one was one who had laughed very often more than most any one could be laughing, and had been one needing to be one laughing very much and very often, and needing to be one not needing very much from any one to be one being living and being one being laughing very much and quite often.

Some said of this one that this one was one kind of a one. Some said of this one yes she is of such a kind of them and then later some of them said of this one, any one could be doing as much laughing and as often as this one was doing this thing and not be of such a kind of them, perhaps this one is not of such a kind of them.

This one was certainly one being an interesting one to some. Certainly this one was one going to be an interesting one to some and was an interesting one to some of them and was not at all an interesting one to some of them. Certainly very many were certain that this one would be an interesting one to very many and this one was not a very interesting one to very many. This one was certainly one needing it that this one was an interesting one and needing it that this one needed to be having very little from any one to make of this one a very interesting one. This one was certainly needing it that this one was having very little from any one then one to every one knowing about this one, to this one, to this one inside that one one going to be quite interesting.

Certainly very many could come to know that this one is one being living. Certainly quite a number could keep on knowing that this one was one being living. Certainly this one was needing that this one had not to have much from any one to have it that many should be ones knowing this one was one being living.

This one in a way was one succeeding well enough in living. This one was coming to be one not being a young one and this one was then one succeeding well enough in living as this one was one certainly not then needing any more from any one to make that one be one being living.

This one could be one making a living by working and then this one would not be making a living by doing working. This one could be one making a living be selling something, sometime this one might be one making a living by selling something. This one would be always needing to be one not needing much from any one to be one being living. This one might be one selling something and making a living. This one is certainly one having been quite a long time a young enough one and then quite a long time not quite a young enough one. This one certainly was of a kind in men and women and then always this one was not of that kind of them and always then this was something that some knowing this one were needing in this one so that that one to them was one being in living. This one certainly was of a kind in men and women and then always this one was not of that kind of them and certainly this one to very many knowing this one was one needing filling and one having it that this one was one then not being one being living. Some knowing this one were quite certain that this one was one not being living as being one laughing very much and very often and being for a very long time a young one and needing being one not having very much from any one to be one being living, that this one was certainly not one being living in being such a one. And these then came then to be ones not telling themselves or any one any more about this one being living. There certainly were some telling themselves and other one about this one being living, there certainly were some being quite certain that this one was one being living and in being living was one being one laughing and laughing and being one having been keeping on being a young one and being one not needing much from any one to be one being living.

==========================

Text: GERTRUDE STEIN, circa 1908-1912

Image: ‘Joseph Telling His Dreams’ by Rembrandt van Rijn, circa 1638

WESTERN PACIFIC AGENT (1950), starring Kent Taylor and Mickey Knox

Western Pacific Agent (1950)
textbook example of a b-crime programmer–recommended!!

There are many excellent crime programmers buried within the output of Lippert Pictures, and here is another one. Yes, it’s full of clichés (perhaps I should call them “archetypes”), but it is delivered with such sincerity and style that I was caught up in the story and cared about the interesting collection of characters. Like many Lipperts of this era, the cast is superb. Mickey Knox (who has had a long and interesting career both in Europe and in the USA) is a fantastic cold-blooded killer; Kent Taylor brings his usual touch of class to the title role; Sid Melton, a Lippert regular, is added for comic relief as a near-sighted mail-order detective school graduate (!!!), Robert Lowery (in his supporting actor period, after many excellent starring roles in the 40s) as a local railroad employee who is an early victim, and a very moving performance by Morris Carnovsky (acclaimed actor and also blacklist victim) as Knox’s father, who knows what his son has become yet still loves him and believes he can change. There is a genuinely shocking moment near the end of the film between Knox and Carnovsky. The “wraparound” story seen briefly at the beginning and end of the film is outrageous and would be laughed out of any Screen Writing 101 class, but these filmmakers were not interested in winning Oscars; they were delivering an entertaining and exciting piece of product for the tired working people who put down their money at the third-string neighborhood and small-town theaters that booked Lippert Pictures. 

 If you like unpretentious action films (there are no noir elements here, although Knox’s portrayal of the psycho killer will appeal to many noir fans), this one really delivers the goods. I watched it twice upon getting a copy recently and marveled at how efficiently it was constructed and how professional the end product was. There’s also an interesting subplot involving the hobos who ride the trains and have camps near the train tracks–their society is depicted in a sympathetic and interesting manner. It’s just one way that this film, which on one level is simply a genre crime-film product, is actually a very special piece of work that is far better made than it needed to be in order to fill its niche.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2005

=============================

RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube:

V.A.—The London American Label Year By Year: 1967 (Ace, UK), CD

01 Love Is After Me – Charlie Rich
02 He Ain’t Give You None – Freddie Scott
03 My Girl Josephine – Jerry Jaye
04 Cry Softly Lonely One – Roy Orbison
05 Humphrey Stomp – Earl Harrison
06 Four Days Of Rain – The Raggamuffins
07 My Old Flame – Nino Tempo & April Stevens
08 Life Turned Her That Way – Mel Tillis
09 Can You Help Me – The Knickerbockers
10 Eight Men, Four Women – O.V. Wright
11 Never My Love – The Association
12 Bob – The Willis Brothers
13 Huff Puff – Micky Dolenz
14 Snap Your Fingers – Gail Wynters
15 The Little Black Egg – The Nightcrawlers
16 Billy The Kid – Wilson Pickett & the Falcons
17 Beautiful People – Kenny O’Dell
18 The Ferris Wheel – Sue Thompson
19 I Don’t Want to Fall – The Fallen Angels
20 When You’re Gone – Brenda & the Tabulations
21 You’re The Love – The Sixpence
22 The River Is Wide (UK edit) – The Forum
23 Boogaloo Down Broadway – The Fantastic Johnny C
24 Marryin’ Kind Of Love – The Critters
25 I’m Indestructible – Jack Jones
26 Three Hundred And Sixty Five Days – Donald Height
27 Traveling Shoes – Guy Mitchell
28 Big Boss Man – Erma Franklin

V.A.—The London American Label Year By Year: 1967 (Ace, UK), CD

     In Britain from 1951-1979, “London Records” was the imprint used by UK Decca for its acquisitions from independent American labels that did not have their own British affiliates. Although London released a wide variety of music, it’s best remembered as an important outlet for American rock and roll, offering the output of labels such as Imperial, Chess, Jamie, Sun, Specialty, Cameo, and Liberty during their greatest periods. The label’s heyday was surely in the late 50’s and early 60’s, though it continued to soldier on through the mid-60’s, as many indie American labels made deals with other UK licensees, and London was still keeping to a regular release schedule from the catalogs of labels such as Challenge, White Whale, Kapp, Shout, Hi, Mira, and Hickory.

     This collection presents 28 tracks released on singles by London-American in the UK in 1967, and it’s a wildly diverse collection of material that truly presents “the other side of 1967.” From Charlie Rich’s cover (on Hi) of the Stax classic “Love Is After Me,” through Erma Franklin’s Shout-label cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man,” with stops along the way in soul (O. V. Wright), sunshine pop (The Association), country (Mel Tillis), garage (The Nightcrawlers), folk-rock (The Raggamuffins), nightclub-beat (Nino Tempo & April Stevens), crooners-going-hip (Jack Jones), and a lesser-known Roy Orbison offering, no one could predict what might come next on this compilation—though every track, whatever the genre, is first-rate.

      Although there are a few hits here (that did not become hits in the UK) such as the Association’s “Never My Love” and The Fantastic Johnny C’s “Boogaloo Down Broadway,” most of the material is obscure, even when the artists (The Critters, The Knickerbockers, Guy Mitchell) are not. We’re also treated to a Roulette album track from The Fallen Angels which did not come out on a single in the US but did in Britain, and pre-fame recordings by Micky Dolenz (from Challenge) and Wilson Pickett (from Lupine), issued to capitalize on their success with other labels.

      Listening to this compilation straight through is an odd experience, kind of like being stranded in a bus station in an alternate universe for three hours in late 1967, with nothing around but a dusty off-brand jukebox with unfamiliar records, many by familiar names. Fortunately, though, you’ve got a pocket full of quarters and nothing but time.

BILL SHUTE, originally published in Ugly Things magazine in 2020

==========================================

RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube:

coming in January 2024: new Bill Shute poetry book, STATIC STRUT (KSE #421)

BILL SHUTE

STATIC STRUT

120 pages, perfect-bound paperback

book-length poem, composed June 2022-January 2023

KSE #421

Continuing on in a similar vein from my previous book, NEUTRAL (KSE #420)

This is a long-form open-field poetry work

It should be available in January 2024…the proofs look great and I’m very proud of this book

CHARLIE CHAN SUNDAY COMIC STRIPS, BOOK 1 (Pulp Tales Press)

CHARLIE CHAN SUNDAY COMIC STRIPS, BOOK 1 (Pulp Tales Press)

    The great newspaper comics artist-writer Alfred Andriola, best known today for his later Kerry Drake comic strip, wrote and drew a Charlie Chan newspaper strip in the late 30’s and early 40’s. The B&W daily strip and the separate color Sunday strip had different continuities and ran from 1938-1942. You can find many samples of these strips online, and they’ve had sections published in collector paperback books over the years. Some recent exciting news for fans of Andriola’s Chan strip is that the Library of American Comics (LOAC, who do the wonderful horizontal, large-sized reprints of one year of a daily strip, one day’s strips to each page) is bringing out the first year of Chan’s B&W strip, from October 1938 to November 1939, in a hardcover volume which should be out by the time you read this. That should re-ignite interest in both Andriola’s work and the Chan strip. What I’m covering today, though, is a book from 2015 that contains the first 72 color Sunday strips, starting from the beginning in late October 1938. Pulp Tales Press promised to deliver the complete Sundays in three volumes, but so far, this is the only one to appear. I’ve been trotting it out every year or so to re-read since getting it, and recently I’ve been re-reading it to get ready for the LOAC volume (I do have most of those daily strips elsewhere, but the quality will be so much better and the size much larger in the LOAC edition, it will be like encountering the strips for the first time—I’m sorry I missed the Pacific Comics Club over-sized reprints of the Chan dailies back in the 80’s, which I saw briefly then but could not afford) and thought I’d mention its existence to the newspaper comics fans and Chan fans among the KSE blog readership.

    Although the Chan name would be familiar to almost anyone in 1938, the specifics of his character would not necessarily be known since not everyone saw his Fox movies or read the novels of Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers, so the initial Sunday entries are complete-unto-themselves and introduce the police inspector for the Honolulu Police who is of Chinese background, showing his family, his methods of crime detection, etc. Only after a few weeks of that, to get readers used to Chan and his environment, do we get multi-week story arcs, and those tend to last for a few months each. That allows for plots involving multiple characters/suspects, changes in setting, multiple subplots, etc. and gives the strip more of the feel of a movie, or more accurately, a movie serial. In one of the early Sunday entries, as the readers are being introduced to the character’s methods, we see him solve a theft ON ONE PAGE in one Sunday strip! Thank goodness that technique was not continued! It would be like those “Five Minute Mysteries” radio shows which I’ve enjoyed for decades and which you can find on You Tube and at the Internet Archive.

    Instead of sons Tommy or Jimmy Chan assisting him on these cases, Charlie has an assistant from the police force here, one Kirk Barrow, an athletic blond who would no doubt have been played by some former-male-model heart-throb had this been a film, and Kirk is assisted by Gina Lane, formerly of a Hollywood film crew that was filming in Hawaii in the first multi-week Chan color Sunday adventure, and who fell for Kirk and decided to stay in Hawaii. Charlie managed to get her a position on the force! The cases involve kidnapping, theft, piracy, crooks posing as missionaries, crooked phony-rebels who are terrorizing their home area, and of course, some murders. “Murder, Chan specialty” I can hear Sidney Toler saying in one of the Monogram Chan films.

    Alfred Andriola apprenticed with Milton Caniff on Terry and The Pirates, and with Kerry Drake he became a fine craftsman with his art (and his storytelling). As this book is taken from photocopies of actual yellowing Sunday strips, and not syndicate proofs, and since there is none of the “re-coloring” and “digital enhancement” we see in so many of the reprints of both comic strips and comic books in the last 25 years, and because of the crude color-newsprint reproduction in the 1930’s, a purist might turn his nose up at the reproduction of the art here, but you don’t need a Criterion edition of a PRC or Monogram film, so I’m happy with the quality. Pulp Tales Press clearly put some effort into making sharp and crisp copies of what would have been a bit blurred in the original medium. I’m sure the LOAC edition of the B&W dailies will show every detail of Andriola’s action-packed, vibrant art, so I’m looking forward to that book. Until then, though, this color collection of brisk and mystery-filled Sunday continuities is the perfect company on a lazy evening…like tonight, as it’s 101 degrees here in South Texas in August—-and with the humidity, it’s easy to imagine myself in Hawaii with Inspector Chan!  This is actually my FOURTH or fifth reading of this book, so that in itself tells you how much I like this collection. Just Google the publisher and title, and YOU, my friend, can order the book directly from its maker, and if they sell a few more, maybe they’ll finally bring out the second and third volumes of this series. I’m ready for them!

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

==============================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).