Breaking Slowly

I'm still slowly making my way through Breaking Bad on Netflix. I'm now up to the halfway point of Season 3 and I'm constantly amazed by the plot twists and intricate character psychologies of this series.

I don't get the concept of binge-watching. I would think that in watching any really good TV show you would want to take time to savor each episode instead of burning through a bunch of shows in one sitting. That's especially true with a show like this where every installment has some sort of twist or revelation that I need to think about after I watch. The writers of this show are particularly brilliant at misdirection. You think you know where a plotline is going but then presto! it goes somewhere completely unexpected. And these turns never feel forced or contrived. As crazy as they can sometimes be, they always so far turn out to have a logical if occasionally bizarre progression.

The whole of Season 2 was a great example of misdirection. Throughout several episodes there were flash forwards to scenes of a hazmat team retrieving burned debris from the White swimming pool.  Considering that this show is about an ordinary high school teacher slipping deeper and deeper into the drug trade you think these scenes indicate one thing.  Then in the final episode of the season, "ABQ", they pull the rug out and those shots turn out to mean something completely different. Similarly in Season 3 so far, one of the background plotlines has been about twin Mexican hit men out to kill Walt. In the episode I just saw, "Sunset",  that story takes a sudden detour that makes me even more curious about what happens next.

I know that the final episodes have begun airing on AMC and I'm trying like hell to avoid reading anything about the show online. I ignore anyting about it on the Grantland website and stay away from posts on other blogs. I know that all the main characters, Walt, Skyler, Jesse, Walt Jr, Hank and Marie survive into Season 5. Other than that I don't want to know anything that happens before I actually watch the episodes. I'm just enjoying the uniformly great acting and writing of this amazingly creepy saga about a man's fall into darkness. Also I know Bryan Cranston has won several Emmys for this show but he also deserves some kind of award for his pizza tossing.

Karen Black

Jack orders toast. Karen looks away.

She always had a somewhat exotic look and there are times in later films when her performances bordered on the bizarre but in her time Karen Black could be incredible. She was fortunate enough to come along in the era when American films briefly seemed to come to full artistic maturity and she excelled in some of the greatest works of the 70's. There was Nashville and Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean for Robert Altman. There was Cisco Pike, Easy Rider and The Day Of The Locust. Some people will probably remember her best for the Dan Curtis TV-movie Trilogy Of Terror but for me the indelible memory of her is as Rayette Dipesto, Jack Nicholson's sad little country singer girlfriend in Five Easy Pieces. 

Most of the other members of that BBS crew are still around somewhere. Peter Fonda still shows up in movies from time to time, Jack Nicholson is Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern received the Best Actor Award at Cannes last spring. Black came down to smaller and smaller roles in tiny genre films before her cancer took control but at her best she exemplified the bruised, damaged feminine response to the macho lust for freedom that dominated those films. Karen Black was a great actress.

Movie Roundup #20: Music, Maestro, Please!

Garden Of The Moon (1938)

Some time ago I posted  the production number "Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish" from the movie Garden Of The Moon because it's one of my favorite movie musical bits. Last week I finally got to watch the entire movie again and it still held up.

This film is a typically efficient, rapid-fire Warner Brothers comedy of the late 30s' concerning an ongoing battle of wits between the leader of a dance band and the manager of the ritzy Hollywood night club he's playing at, The Garden Of The Moon.  Pat O'Brien plays the scheming manager in the same fast-talking manner he used whenever he wasn't playing a priest in those days and the bandleader is played by John Payne long before he became known as a dramatic actor in thrillers and westerns. The movie is directed by Busby Berkeley, the last musical he would direct for Warners and while there are none of the elaborate dance numbers of his heyday, he did manage some inventive staging of two musical numbers by the band, "Dervish" and "The Lady on the Two Cent Stamp".  (That's not a typo. Once upon a time stamps did cost two cents.)

Watching the film for the second time I was surprised to notice more and more familiar faces in the cast in early parts of their careers. There was Payne, of course, but there was also Penny Singleton, who would later gain fame in the Blondie movies, in a small part as a singer forced onto the band by O'Brien.  Then there are the band members who do much of the singing in the musical numbers. Trumpeter Johnny "Scat" Davis worked in several Warners films in this period but the bug-eyed trombone player with the handlebar musctahe is none other than Jerry Colonna a few years before he would become famous through Bob Hope's radio show. The shock for me was seeing a balding, portly violinist in the group. That was Joe Venuti, one of the earliest jazz violin soloists. Here's "Dervish" again.  Venuti is the guy who screams "Alligator! That's the ticket!" at the end.

Carolina Blues (1944)

Garden showed up on  TCM as part of an all day session of movies featuring big bands. Besides Garden I got to catch most of Carolina Blues, a film featuring bandleader Kay Kyser and his orchestra.

Kyser and his guys made a group of decent little comedies for RKO in the Forties but this came out after that and was made by Columbia Pictures.  It wasn't the same. This film had too many plot lines going on and dragged out interminably to the point where I bailed before the end.  In one storyline, Kyser's singer, Georgia Carroll, was quitting the band to get married and a girl, played by dancer Ann Miller, kept trying to replace her. At the same time Kyser's band is trying to go on vacation but he's trying to get them to stay together to play fundraising concerts to finance a battleship that would be named after his hometown, Rocky Mount, North Carolina. On top of all this Ann Miller's character and her gambler father, played by Victor Moore, are pretending to be rich to impress Kyser but he thinks because Miller's rich, she doesn't have the drive to stick it out in show business.

You see how complicated this gets? And that's not even mentioning the big all-black dance number in the middle of the picture, "Mr. Beebe", featuring Harold Nicholas and the Four Step Brothers, that has no relation to the rest of the movie or the momentary appearance of Doodles Weaver as a Kyser lookalike.

The one thing I really couldn't get my head around is that in the movie Carroll, the actual singer for Ksyer's band, was supposed to be quitting to marry a serviceman but in real life she was already married...to Kay Kyser! Yet here he was in this picture making goo-goo eyes at Ann Miller often with his wife in the same scene.

Also there was a great opportunity lost considering what stuidio this movie was made at. One of the featured comedian-musicians in Kyser's band was a trumpeter who called himself Ish Kabibble. He was known for a black bowl haircut that looked just like the hairdo of a certain member of a comedy team who worked for many years at Columbia. This picture would have been made for me if there had been a scene where Larry Fine and Curly Howard approached Kabbible from the back and said "How ya doin', Moe?"  At the very least I hope somebody at least thought of it at the time.

The Un-Tony: Gandolfini and Stewart

Welcome To The Rileys (2010)

When James Gandolfini passed away recently most of the attention naturally went to his work as Tony Soprano especially since he didn't live long enough to do a lot of other lead roles. Welcome To The Rileys was one of his few post-Tony films that deserves some recognition.  In it Gandolfini plays Doug Riley, a business owner who, along with his wife, is still feeling the effects from the death of his teenaged daughter in a car wreck several years before.  On a business trip to New Orleans he meets Mallory, an underage stripper and prostitute with a defiant attitude and gets it in his head to stay in New Orleans for an indefinite time to help the girl get her life in order while also trying to make up for his own loss.

The story is basically predictable but it works because the work of the three lead actors is so good. Gandolfini, as hie did in The Sopranos,  lets all his emotions play across his face and body and makes his character's exhaustion and sorrow feel very real.  Kristen Stewart as Mallory comes off sad and pathetic but able to respond to kindness and shows some innate dignity that comes through when she rebels against the Rileys trying to take over her life.

The most searing acting, though, comes from Melissa Leo playing Mrs. Riley. At the beginning of the film she is so traumatized by her daughter's death that she refuses to leave her house. As the movie progresses however she exhibits a lot of nervous but determined resolve as she drives to New Orleans alone and reunites with her husband and comes to grips with the idea of having an instant foster daughter.

This is Lifetime Movie material played with restraint and ambiguity.  Mallory does not end up in the bosom of the Rileys at the end of the story but the feeling comes through that all three people come out of this experience a lot more healed than they were before. It's a quietly effective little film that shouldn't be overlooked when discussing Gandolfini's career.

Movie Roundup #19: The Other Side

The Most Beautiful (1944)

Thanks to companies like Criterion and Kino Lorber today we have access to many movies that were never intended to be shown to an audience outside their home country.  For example Akira Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful, the second film he ever directed, is a World War II propaganda movie about the efforts of young female factory workers supporting the troops on the front lines. There is a message of sacrifice and support for the war effort that you have to mentally put into context to enjoy the film.  Still it's blessedly more subtle than it could have been and still shows early signs of Kurosawa's lifelong humanism.

The protagonists are teenage girls who live and work in a factory making lenses for the bombsites of Japanese planes.  The factory manager, played by Takashi Shimura, an integral Kurosawa player in later films, pushes the girls to up their quota which they happily do although eventually the work takes its toll, leading to illness, breakdowns and arguments.

Despite this plot there's never a sense of hard sell in the movie. The factory bosses are all very solicitous of the girls' health and they happily plunge into their work even if it means shutting themselves off from their families and home life. In the banners shown around the factory there is a quiet acknowledgement that the war is not going well for their side but that's just supposed to spur the girls on to greater effort.  Kurosawa gets enough into the personalities of these young women to make them human even though from our viewpoint today, what's going on may look tragic. We know now that their efforts went for naught and that the army they were supporting weren't always the most noble or humane of warriors, but confined to this time and place the story works.  At the end Watanabe, the girl who stays up most of the night rechecking lenses because she thinks she didn't inspect one properly, is looked on as the shining example of dedication and sacrifice but in Kurosawa's hands she's as much person as symbol.

Then again he may have other reasons for making that character shine. Watanabe is played by a young woman named Yoko Yaguchi who became the off camera spokesperson for the actresses and constantly squabbled with the director during the filming. Just like an old romantic comedy, this bickering led to Kurosawa and Yaguchi marrying in 1945. They were together until her death forty years later.

The Far Country (1955)

This is the fourth in the series of Western collaborations between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann but it lacks something of the dark edge of their other films together.  Stewart plays Jeff Webster, a cowboy who drives a herd of cattle into the Yukon territory with his partner played by Walter Brennan and runs afoul of a crooked lawman named Gannon who steals gold mining claims from prospectors in a small mountain town.  Stewart's character is constantly out for his own interest even when he sees the townspeople bullied by Gannon but as you might expect he comes around in the end.  The character is supposed to be a hard-bitten type but oddly Stewart does not play him that way.  He plays the role quietly with little of the mean edge he brought to Winchester '73 and the other Mann westerns. Also the role of the villainous judge is played by John McIntire,  who comes off slippery enough but without a really mean edge.  In addition there's not a lot of complexity to the plot.  It's pretty obvious how things are going to play out as the movie runs, even to the point of having the movie's "bad girl" get fatally wounded helping Stewart during the climactic shootout.  

As usual for 50's studio Westerns there is a huge number of familiar faces in the cast.  Brennan, Jack Elam, Royal Dano, Harry Morgan, Jay C. Flippen, Robert J. Wilke and Ruth Roman all play various supporting characters. Corrine Calvet is a bit grating as an ingenue with a pouty French accent. It's a good, professional Western but misses the drama of some of its contemporaries.

Cream: Royal Albert Hall (2005)

When I first started listening to rock music in 1970, one of the first groups I got into, along with Procol Harum and Traffic, was Cream.  I loved everything about the group, the speedy complexity of the music, Jack Bruce's barking vocals and Eric Clapton's whining guitar.  By the time I heard them they had already broken up but I still got all of their records (I'm proud to say I still own my old vinyl copes of Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire) and they were my entry point into British jazz and jazz-rock. From Cream I went to Jack Bruce's solo records to Colosseum, the Soft Machine and the other Canterbury bands. Then I went on  from Keith Tippett and the Brotherhood Of Breath to John Surman and Mike Westbrook and so on. 

I was happy to hear in 2005 that they were getting back together for a reunion concert at the Royal Albert Hall, the same place they had played their farewell show thirty-seven years later.  I waited for the CD of the concert to come out but by the time it did, I never got around to buying it.  I've finally seen the film of those reunion shows and after a couple of numbers I began to remember why I loved this band so much.

The three members, Clapton, Bruce and Ginger Baker, of course were older, their tempos were slightly slower than before and Bruce couldn't hit all the high notes he once did, but their musiccal prowess was  greater than ever. They locked together on all their old blues and rock standbys like a speeding engine, Clapton fireballing, Bruce nimble on the bass and Baker a pistoning rhythm machine.

The film moved back and forth over the four nights of their May 2005 engagement and the trio played almost all of the old songs from their records. "Tales Of Brave Ulysses" and "I Feel Free" were missing but "Politician", "Sweet Wine", "N.S.U.", "Born Under A Bad Sign", "White Room" and all the rest were there. There were even a few surprises in songs they seemed to have never played live before, like Clapton's "Badge", his feature song from their final album, "We're Going Wrong", a moody Disraeli piece they worked into a swirling live epic and incredibly "Pressed Rat And Warthog", Baker's deadpan recitation of a Lewis Carroll-like nursery rhyme.   Even Baker's infamous drum feature, "Toad", was called out. He paced himself more than the old days as he went around his kit, working in African rhythms and making sudden tempo changes, but still came to a wild climax.

Jack Bruce's voice may have lost a bit of range but it was still powerful and Eric Clapton reminded that he has matured into a great singer in his own right when he traded verses with the bassist. This show also proved something to me about Eric Clapton. Hearing his old hits like "Pretending" and "After Midnight" over and over on classic rock stations it's easy to take the guy for granted but hearing him peal out spellbinding solo after solo here, you're suddenly reminded he's one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time. His slow blues solo on "Stormy Monday" here is amazing. After that number Bruce tells the audience what a privilege it is to play with Clapton. You know he meant it.

The show ended with an encore of their biggest hit "Sunshine Of Your Love" winding off into a long jam. In the interviews in the DVD Clapton mentions how he'd like this revival to keep going and have Cream even play some dates in America.  It's now been eight years since those concerts and though, theoretically the three guys could still get together again, it now looks as though that reunion was a one time thing.  Still from the recorded evidence Cream's return to the Royal Albert Hall was incredible.

Bad Company

Walter White, schoolteacher

I have an instinctive aversion to hype. Many times when I start reading about how some new TV show is the most awesome thing in the history of mankind, I'm immediately skeptical and avoid it for a long time, catching up long after the initial fuss has died down if then.  I've heard such things about the show Breaking Bad over the years and I paid little attention. It seemed as though every other new show coming out on cable the last few years shared this one's storyline of a decent person being corrupted by something or other. The very plot line of this show, a suburban parent getting mixed up in the drug trade, was paralleled by another program, Weeds. Still I saw that Breaking Bad seemed to scoop up awards every year so there looked to be something to it.  Recently I noticed that the show was available on Netflix Instant so a few days ago I finally sat down and began to watch the first episodes. My initial impression is...Holy Crap!

This show is about Walter White, a chemistry teacher living quietly in a New Mexico suburb with his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son. He is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and immediately starts worrying about what he's going to leave for his family when he dies. When his brother, a DEA agent, starts telling him about how lucrative the local drug trade is,  he decides to join forces with Jesse Pinkman, one of his former students who's now a small time drug dealer, to make and sell crystal meth. They try to sell the stuff to a bigger local dealer and things go very badly with Walter ending responsible for the deaths of two people  and an hitherto pent-up dark side starting to emerge.

I'm only four episodes into the first season so far and I'm really impressed by the focus of the storytelling and the depth of the characters.  I can already tell that Bryan Cranston deserved every acting award he's gotten for playing Walter White. Without often saying anything he expresses through his face and body a world of swirling emotions like horror, anguish, and rage. He looks like a man totally out of his depth most of the time but when pressed, there's an anger and potential for violence that takes less and less prompting to emerge. It's probably going to be significant that so far he has gone from beating up a high school jock making fun of his son and killing a drug dealer in self defense to destroying a man's car just because he's an obnoxious loudmouth. All the scripts so far have been by creator Vince Gilligan and I love the way that he has neither Walter nor any of the other characters give long soliloquies explaining their actions and thoughts. Most of their inner feelings are conveyed through gesture and expression.

This also applies to the Jesse Pinkman character played by Aaron Paul.  At first the guy is practically comic relief, a white suburban B-boy wannabe who talks in thick hip-hop slang and has a whacked out response to everything Walter says or does. As the episodes go on though, he starts to ripen into a real person.  In the last program I watched "Cancer Man"  he spends some time in his parents' house after running from his own place in a paranoiac, drug-fueled panic and it's poignant to see his futile attempts to connect with his parents and highly achieving kid brother.  You get the feeling there is basically a good man inside him and I have a feeling that knowledge is going to become wrenching as things go along.

I know I'm catching up with this show late. I'm just up to the point where Walter has told his family and friends about the cancer and he starts using the money from his one (and supposedly only) drug deal for his treatment.  Five seasons have been broadcast and the sixth and last starts in August, so I've got a ways to go.  I've heard a couple of general plot developments, that Walter gets deeper and deeper into the drug trade, his cancer goes into remission and his wife finds out what's he's doing.  Other than that I don't know any of the rest of the story and I don't want to yet. I have no idea what happens to the son, the drug cop brother-in-law or anyone else who comes into the plot.  I'm just very confident this show is going to be one hell of a ride.

Bobby Blue Bland

Damn. Another of the great ones has gone. R.I.P., Bobby.

Movie Roundup #18: Building A Mystery

Mystery House (1938) / The Patient In Room 18 (1938)

These two obscure b-movies were put together on a DVD for one of Warner Archive's mystery collections with good reason.  They're both derived from the books of mystery novelist Mignon G. Eberhart, specifically ones that featured the recurring characters of nurse Sarah Keate and detective Lance O'Leary.

Patient was actually the first movie released and came from Eberhart's first book.  The movie told the story of O'Leary being sent to a private hospital for a rest cure and getting involved in the murder of a wealthy patient and the theft of some valuable radium. I've never read Eberhart's books and don't know their tone but this film comes out as a standard romantic comedy-mystery featuring constant bickering between Keate, played by Ann Sheridan, and O'Leary, played by Patric Knowles, who happens to be her on again-off again boyfriend. Knowles tries to be the flippant smartass sort typical of the period but he ends up just this side of annoying. The mystery itself is intriguing but not too difficult. I figured it out pretty early on the simple principle of which character seemed to have the least motive.  The cast has a couple of familiar faces but is devoid of any colorful members of the regular Warner Brothers stock company. It's an okay picture but not really memorable.

The romantic comedy approach must not have brought in an audience because the other Eberhart adaptation, Mystery House, from the novel The Mystery Of Hunting's End, did things a little differently. Here Sheridan played nurse Keate again but O'Leary this time was played by Dick Purcell who is as suave and debonair as a block of wood. His character did not show up until the middle of the movie and was prone to getting knocked out every so often.  Somehow though he did eventually solve the film's mystery of murders at a snowed-in hunting lodge. The supporting cast was even more watered down and anonymous this time around though there was one familiar face, William Hopper who twenty years later would be wearing loud sport jackets and helping Raymond Burr solve crimes on a certain TV show called Perry Mason.

It's never a good sign when the detective hero gets second billing.

The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935)

This film came out a couple of years before the Warners pair from Republic Studios and was the first screen adaptation of an Ellery Queen novel.  I'm a Queen fan but I haven't read this particular novel.  From reports though this treatment follows the book pretty well despite dialing down a few lurid details. It has Queen leave New York for a vacation in California only to encounter the corpse of a man sitting on the beach clad only in an opera cape and swim trunks.  There is good creepy atmosphere to this film but also a few aggravating elements like a terminally unfunny comic relief police chief. Donald Woods, who I know mainly from playing James Cagney's older brother in The Public Enemy, does a good job capturing the studious, pontificating side of Queen but the script also has him being a totally out-of-character skirt chaser. When not sleuthing he spends his time flirting with top-billed Helen Twelvetrees, an early talkies star whose fame seemed to be on the decline by the time of this movie.  The movie's a little schizophrenic in tone but still entertaining overall.

The Fire Within (1963)

As I watched this Louis Malle film I felt like I was having one of those "deja va all over again" moments.  The film concerns a man who is living in a detox clinic while dealing with alcoholism.  He is estranged from his wife who lives in New York and is having suicidal thoughts.  He leaves the clinic for the day and spends it trying  to reconnect with old friends and find a reason to go on living but in the end goes back to the clinic and shoots himself.

With some changes that is also the basic plot of the Norwegian film Oslo August 31st which I found so unpleasant.  That's because both movies come from the same source, a 1931 French novel called Le Feu Follet.  Despite having the same bleak ending I liked Fire Within a bit more than Oslo. In that film the protagonist's life is on a constant downward spiral. His sister abandons him, his friends tell him things are hopeless and he sabotages his own job interview.  In Malle's film the protagonist is more the victim of his own alienation and inability to deal with a vibrant, lively world.  He has friends who care about him and try to talk him off the ledge but t's his own internal despair that does him in. Things may end badly for the guy but at least hope is out there as an option in this film.

The film, made during the early flowering of the French New Wave, has some of its style in jump cut editing and visual digressions and feels really alive (no pun intended). Maurice Ronet projects a convincing integrity as the main character and the supporting cast of people in his life, including Jeanne Moreau as an indolent, opium-smoking artist, is convincing. This film has real depth and drama to it. It's not an exercise in cheap nihilism..

Movie Roundup #17: "...and looking very relaxed, Adolph HItler on vibes..."

The Bonzos

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - 40th Anniversary Celebration (2006)

It usually strikes me as a bit sad when members of an ancient rock band that split up many years ago decide to reunite and take their greying bodies out on a concert tour, trying to revisit all the familiar songs they had when they were much younger and really cared.  This DVD is not one of those sad cases.

This marks a reunion concert by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a British unit of the late 60's and early 70's who specialized in satiric humor and psychedelic rock tunes crossed with 1920's jazz and pop.  They were very popular in England in their day and their wacky, surrealist humor really made them popular among other well-known cultural icons. Paul McCartney produced their one hit single "I'm The Urban Spaceman" and the band performed their song "Deathcab For Cutie" in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film. After they broke up, one of the band's lead singers and writers, Neil Innes, fell in with Monty Python, writing songs for most of the Python movies as well as doing the music for and starring as one of the Rutles in Eric Idle's Beatles parody All You Need Is Cash.

For this one off 40th anniversary show all the living original members returned.  Innes, Roger Ruskin Spear, "Rhino" Rodney Slater, Vernon Dudley Bohay Nowell, Sam Spoons, "Legs" Larry Smith, and Bob Kerr were all grayer and scragglier than they once were, but still up to playing their old songs and running about the stage with crazy props and costumes doing wild old vaudeville gags.  Innes played MC and did most of the singing, still possessed of the great shouting tenor voice he always had. The most glaring absence was Vivian Stanshall, the band's other lead singer and the most mericliess satirist, who passed away in 1995.

Bolstered by a few extra musicians the band started out with the 20's songs they played in their early days like "Whispering" and "The Sheik Of Araby" featuring spoons and musical saw solos.  Then they slid into their original work,  Innes cheerfully belting his great old songs like "The Equestrian Statue" and "We Are Normal".  This part of the show was titled heavily towards Stanshall's more comic numbers and since he wasn't there to do them, several popular British comedians, all from the generation that would have grown up with the Bonzos, enthusiastically filled in. Adrian Edmondson grunted his way through the operatic attack on suburban life "My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe" and ran around in a parrot costume for "Mr. Slater's Parrot".  Stephen Fry got to do the more upper class monologues like "Rhinocractic Oaths", Paul Merton, a new name to me, sang "Monster Mash" and Phil Jupitus, a round presence I also didn't know bellowed out the bodybuilding song "Mr. Apollo" and rolled on the floor while moaning the Elvis sendup "Canyons Of Your Mind".

I bought all of the Bonzo albums back in the day after the group had broken up and never saw them in their heyday.  It was a pleasure to finally see them perform, older but still full of crazy energy.

Carnegie Hall (1947)

When someone says "They don't make them like that anymore." this movie is a prime example.  Actually a two hour plus film concentrating on classical music is something they rarely made  even in 1947.  Back then high musical culture in the movies usually meant having someone like pianist Jose Iturbi play a classical piece in some MGM musical then come back later in the picture and play some boogie woogie to show he's really a down to earth guy.

 This independent production is a different animal, being full of unadulterated performances by the leading classical starts of the time like Rise Stevens and Artur Rubenstein.  These come in the services of a simple plot about a mother who works at Carnegie Hall and raises her son to be a classical pianist.  Unfortunately he encounters a pretty girl singer and dance bands and goes off to make his way in the popular music world.  He does this by joining the band of singer Vaughan Monroe, a stiff baritone vocalist remembered today if at all for "Ghost Riders In The Sky".  It's a bit odd today to see him regarded as a symbol of hip modern music but he's probably the best the producers could afford after shelling out for all the high-priced classical talent. Harry James shows up and plays trumpet near the end so that's an improvement.  The dramatic parts are wel carried well especially by Marsha Hunt as the mother, playing her more loving than domineering. William Prince is the son and Frank McHugh, sporting a bushy mustache and an Irish accent, is around as a family friend. It's a decent show and an interesting showcase for a lot of great classical names.

Actually, "jail bait" in this film refers to a gun, but the producers had other things on their minds.

Jail Bait (1954)

Thanks to Tim Burton and Plan 9 From Outer Space Ed Wood has come to be seen as the patron saint of bad movie making but all of his movies weren't as outlandish as the famous ones that featured cross dressing, Tor Johnson and a fake Bela Lugosi.  Jail Bait is a good example of that, a cheap little crime film that on the whole isn't too hard to take. Its plot concerns the son of a prominent plastic surgeon who falls in with a small time gangster and goes out to rob a theater. The robbery goes badly and the gangster ends up going to the surgeon to get a new face. As you might expect that doesn't end well.

Outside of the presence of Wood regular Dolores Fuller as the surgeon's daughter and some odd, stilted dialogue there is nothing that marks this as what has come to be known as "an Ed Wood film".  There are familiar players of the period like Lyle Talbot and Timothy Farrell in the leads and the production looks low budget but that's par for the course in this kind of cheapie.  The oddest features are what was recycled for this film. The music score was a repetitive guitar and piano theme by future Hanna-Barbera composer Hoyt Curtin that was used the previous year in the film Mesa Of Lost Women. Even odder, when a excerpt of the theater's stage show is shown, it's actually a comedy routine from the minstrel film, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones. Otherwise the film is most notable for being the screen debut of future Hercules Steve Reeves.  It's not a great movie but it's not long enough to be an obnoxious groaner either.