Author: Michael H. Price

Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite Shuffle, by Michael H. Price

Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite Shuffle, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • June 15, 2008

Something of a preamble, here, so sit tight and now dig this: The comics-censorship ruckus of the post-WWII years had begun to peter out, if only just, as the phobic 1950s gave way to the larger struggles – expression vs. repression, in the long wake of the Depression – of the presumably more free-wheeling 1960s. All were rooted in a popular urge to embrace the freedoms that the close of World War II was supposed to have heralded; a contrary urge to confine such freedoms to a privileged few was as intense, if not necessarily as popularly widespread.

Everybody wants freedom, but not everybody wants freedom for everybody: Hence the entrenchment of Oligarchy within Democracy, like that essential flaw in Green Lantern’s otherwise limitless Power Ring.

(Some handy background: Van Jensen’s ComicMix commentary, “Was Frederic Wertham a Villain?”)

The comic-book flap was an element of a larger insurgency-and-putdown cycle that pitted, for example, Cavalier Hollywood against a Roundhead Congress in the purges of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Within the microcosm of Hollywood itself, struggles erupted over whether individual films – such as Dore Schary’s production of a pacifist fable called The Boy with Green Hair (1948) at hawkish Howard Hughes’ RKO-Radio Pictures – should convey instead a war-preparedness message in those days when much of America was still looking for another Axis to whip.

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Popeye and the Langridge of Heroism, by Michael H. Price

Popeye and the Langridge of Heroism, by Michael H. Price

The breakthrough of the season, as far as superhuman heroism goes, might lie beyond such big-screen spectacles as Iron Man and the June 13 opening of The Incredible Hulk. The watershed lies, in part, in a set of Popeye the Sailor cartoons that have gone largely unseen – in authentic form, anyhow – since the late 1930s and the earlier 1940s.

A companionable development is a new series of hardcover books reprinting the original Popeye comic strips of writer-artist E.C. Segar. The current volume is Popeye Vol. 2: “Well, Blow Me Down!” (Fantagraphics Books; $29.95). A third collection is due in the fall. The elaborately packaged Fantagraphics shelf commences at the commencement with Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam.”

The books qualify as near-architectural marvels in their own right – towering, heavy-stock packages with die-cut front-cover windows and an interior design that showcases many days’ worth of the newspaper feature with each spread. A full-color section devotes a page to each of what originally had served as Sunday-supplement episodes, complete to the extent of reproducing Segar’s subordinate feature, Sappo, about a household in perpetual turmoil.

The stories in Vol. 2 include a wild Frontier Gothic pitting Popeye’s entourage against a mob of cattle rustlers; and a scathingly funny commentary upon charity-vs.-greed, in which Popeye attempts a banking career in defiance of all practical sense. There surfaces a gemlike example of Segar’s gift for mangling and/or improving upon the langridge: When Popeye uses the adjective liberous, does he mean “liberal,” or “generous,” huh? Neither – he means liberous, and So There. The book also sports a touching tribute to Segar from Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker.

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An Unprecedented Perspective on Edgar G. Ulmer, by Michael H. Price

An Unprecedented Perspective on Edgar G. Ulmer, by Michael H. Price

I had mentioned Edgar G. Ulmer, the Grey Eminence of Old Hollywood’s Poverty Row sector, in last week’s column, attempting to draw a thematic similarity between Ulmer’s most vivid example of low-budget film noir, 1945’s Detour, and a newly opening picture called Stuck, from the dramatist-turned-filmmaker Stuart Gordon. The cause-and-effect response here was an urge to take a fresh look at Detour. Right about that time, the mail brought a copy of Gary D. Rhodes’ new book, Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (Lexington Books; $85).

Gary Rhodes is a colleague of long standing, a filmmaker, educator and journalist whose work has intersected with mine on several fronts. Such Rhodes volumes as White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film and Horror at the Drive-In relate strategically to the Forgotten Horrors books that George E. Turner and I originated during the 1970s, and Gary and I have long acknowledged a shared interest in Ulmer (1904-1972) as a talent essential to any understanding of maverick moviemaking.

With Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row, Rhodes takes that interest to an unprecedented extent. Editor Rhodes and a well-chosen crew of contributing writers consider Ulmer in light of not only his breakthrough film, 1934’s The Black Cat at big-time Universal Pictures, or such finery-on-a-budget exercises as Bluebeard (1944) and Detour (1945), but also Ulmer’s tangled path through such arenas as sex-hygiene exploitation films (1933’s Damaged Lives), Yiddish-language pieces (1937’s Green Fields), well-financed symphonic soap opera (1947’s Carnegie Hall), and ostensible schlock for the drive-in theatres (1957’s Daughter of Dr. Jekyll).

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Stuart Gordon’s ‘Stuck’ Unstuck, by Michael H. Price

Stuart Gordon’s ‘Stuck’ Unstuck, by Michael H. Price

 

A general release has been too long in coming for Stuck, Stuart Gordon’s mordant and mournful film about a traffic accident and its criminal aftermath. I began picking up on the raves shortly after a film-critic comrade, Joe Leydon, caught the picture at 2007’s Toronto Film Festival and published a favorable review in the show-biz tradepaper Variety. Joe suggested a “carefully calibrated theatrical rollout” but added: “… difficult to tell whether [the] sardonically edgy pic will reach many mainstream auds before fast-forwarding to homevid.”

Now comes word of a Dallas opening, June 6, for Stuck – three months after a well-received showing at the American Film Institute/Dallas Festival. ThinkFilm, the distributor, keeps hedging about an opening in nearby Fort Worth. I have pressed for a film-fest slot or a commercial engagement in Fort Worth because that is where my newspaper’s core readership dwells. And because Stuck owes its dire inspiration to a real-world ordeal that took place in Fort Worth.

“Why, we couldn’t show a movie like that in Fort Worth’s very own film festival,” one leading light of the FW-based Lone Star Film Society told me last fall after I had recommended Stuck as a centerpiece for a November 2007 event. “We’re here ‘To Preserve and Present the Art of the Moving Image’ – just as our Mission Statement declares – not to dredge up any horrible memories.”

“Yeah, well,” I answered – once that “yeah, well” injunction kicks in, any such exchange is doomed to deteriorate – “an occasional reminder might do us all some sobering good. And besides, the film uses the local case only as a springboard. Changes the locale and fictionalizes a lot. More an inspiration than an explicit reflection.”

“I’d be careful how I used that term, ‘inspiration,’ if I were you,” came the reply. “Anyone who would find inspiration in such a ghastly occurrence has no business being allowed to make movies.” (Guardians of the Culture, take note.)

 

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Women In Comics – Etta Hulme, by Michael H. Price

Women In Comics – Etta Hulme, by Michael H. Price

During 1992–1993, my newspaper-of-record became a sponsor of a traveling exhibition of art tracing the centuried history of editorial-opinion cartooning in Texas. Curators Maury Forman and Bob Calvert, seeking to preserve the display as a book, enlisted me to edit their program notes into manuscript form. The finished result, Cartooning Texas (Texas A&M University Press; 1993), has outlived the exhibition by a good many years – but of course could use an update by now.

One timely offshoot was that our expo-opening ceremonies involved such working cartoonists as Ben Sargent, of the Austin American-Statesman, and Etta Parks Hulme, of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in panel discussions and sketch-demonstration sessions that served to bring the exhibition into the here-and-now. Or the there-and-then, as it were. Etta and I officed within shouting distance of one another at the Star-Telegram, and I had been pressing the Powers That Did Be for a couple of years about devoting a Telegram-spinoff book to her cartoons.

The leverage of the exhibition proved sufficient, if only just, to encourage a Hulme book from the Star-Telegram. More of a pamphlet, actually, but it rounded up a fairly generous selection of ’toons, with a page for each piece. I had suggested that we call the thing Ettatorials, but the newspaper’s marketing office preferred UnforgETTAbly Etta.

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Child Brides of the Ozarks and Beyond, by Michael H. Price

Child Brides of the Ozarks and Beyond, by Michael H. Price

Sixty-five years after a double-edged sword of a movie called Child Bride of the Ozarks professed to indict the custom of underage marriage – while courting a leering, voyeuristic audience, naturally – the issue remains urgent. Last month’s raids upon a polygamist sect in Texas demonstrate that such persistence, involving girls scarcely into their teens, belongs as much to the presumably Civilized World as to the more thoroughly well-hidden corners of the planet: The Yearning for Zion Ranch had hidden in plain sight, a Third World concentration camp, bunkered in alongside Mainstream Amerika.

Meanwhile in the Dominant Culture, a Florida-based plastic surgeon named Michael Salzhauer has published a cartoon-storybook testament to female objectification called My Beautiful Mommy (Big Tent Books) that purports to “[guide] children through Mommy’s [cosmetic] surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way” – nonthreatening, that is, until one grasps the deeper message: Looks are everything, and you get what you can pay for. The greater objective would appear the preconditioning of a next generation of face-lift addicts: Better start saving up now, girlie, and maybe develop an eating disorder as a prelude.

So which sector, or sect, is the less civilized? The backwater zealots who propose to wait out the Apocalypse in round-robin conjugal confinement with “brides” young enough to be their granddaughters? Or the proponents of glamour-at-a-price?

Dr. Salzhauer’s idealized Beautiful Mommy, as pictured on the cover of that scrofulous little book, calls to mind nothing so much as an over-glamorized Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus, perhaps a Bratz-meets-Barbie: Never too young to aspire to such artificiality, never too old to lay claim to it, given a loaded checkbook. Photographs from the Yearning for Zion round-up suggest nothing so much as some 19th-century agrarian-society re-enactment, but the forcibly modest attire of the young women involved conveys an aspect more ominous than bucolic.

About that movie…

My lingering impression of Harry Revier’s Child Bride of the Ozarks has hinged more upon featured player Angelo Rossitto (1908–1991) than with any social-agenda implications. Rossitto, a pioneering dwarf player of Old Hollywood, had reminisced fondly about Child Bride during a series of late-in-life interviews for the Forgotten Horrors film-history books. George Turner’s and my chapter on Child Bride in Forgotten Horrors 2, in turn, deals as much with Rossitto as with the picture itself.

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Ian Shaughnessy Emerging, by Michael H. Price

Ian Shaughnessy Emerging, by Michael H. Price

From V.T. Hamlin in the 1920s and Etta Hulme during the mid-century, through the Superman books of Kerry Gammill in times more recent, Tarrant County, Texas, has long yielded a wealth of storytelling artistry to the comics industry at large.

An ambitious new representative of that regional-breakout scene is graphic novelist Ian Shaughnessy, of Arlington, Texas. Shaughnessy’s books for Portland, Oregon-based Oni Press – including an edgy comedy-of-errors called Shenanigans, with the Canadian illustrator Mike Holmes – bespeak a childhood fascination with comics, filtered through a lifelong love of language and an interest in taking the words-and-pictures medium to provocative literary levels more commonly associated with the present day’s independent filmmaking sector.

“I find myself writing under the direct influence of Billy Wilder,” says Shaughnessy, 24, invoking the name of a great screenwriter-director whose career spanned from 1929 into the 1980s. “I discovered Wilder during the 1990s with The Apartment [1960], then with Double Indemnity [1944], and found myself very inspired – in a lasting way.

“With Shenanigans, I found myself attempting to honor the spirit of Billy Wilder – that mastery that he had of romantic tensions, with finding the humor in awkward situations – as a key influence.”

Any such talent needs a practical springboard. With V.T. Hamlin, the creator of a famous comic strip called Alley Oop that has survived him by many years, the springboard was a cartooning job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Hamlin spent much of the 1920s at the daily paper, generating such local-interest attractions as a serialized feature about a formidable minor-league baseball club, the Fort Worth Cats. (A retrospective collection of Hamlin’s Oop-prototype Panther Kitten cartoons is in preparation, along with an earlier Hamlin gag strip called The Hired Hand, whose booklet edition has been out of print since the 1920s.)

For Etta Hulme, the Star-Telegram’s signature opinion-page cartoonist since 1972, an early breakthrough lay in a post-WWII comic-book series about a cowboy critter named “Red” Rabbit. Graphic designer and Web publisher Kerry Gammill spent the 1980s and earlier ’90s as an illustrator with Marvel and DC, then moved into motion-picture conceptual art on such productions as 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000 and 1999’s Storm of the Century.

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Amos ‘n’ Andy ‘n’ Independents (sic), by Michael H. Price

Amos ‘n’ Andy ‘n’ Independents (sic), by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • April 27, 2008

An earlier installment of this column had examined a 1931 gorillas-at-large movie called Ingagi as an unlikely long-term influence upon the popular culture as a class. Ingagi, a chump-change production built largely around misappropriated African-safari footage and staged mock-jungle sequences, tapped a popular fascination with apes as a class even as it fostered a generalized anti-enlightenment toward natural history and racial politics.

Strange, then, that the film should have inspired a sequel (unofficial, of course, and certainly in-name-only) from a resolutely Afrocentric sector of the motion-picture industry. The production resources behind 1940’s Son of Ingagi stem from white-capitalist niche-market corporate interests – but the screenwriter and star player, and his supporting ensemble cast, all represent a trailblazing movement in black independent cinema.

From momentum that he had developed beginning with Son of Ingagi at Alfred Sack’s Texas-based Sack Amusement Enterprises, Spencer Williams, Jr., attained recognition that would lead him to a role-of-a-lifetime breakthrough in 1950, with his casting as Andrew Brown on a CBS-Television adaptation of a long-running radio serial called Amos ’n’ Andy. Though created by white-guy talents Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Amos ’n’ Andy needed black artists for its on-screen representation. (Gosden and Correll had gotten away with blackface portrayals in 1930’s Check and Double Check – the tactic would not have borne repeating by 1950.) The partners hired a pioneering showman of the pre-Depression Harlem Renaissance period, Flournoy E. Miller, as casting director for the CBS-teevee project, and Miller came through with such memorable presences as Williams, Tim Moore as George “Kingfish” Stevens and Alvin Childress as Amos Jones, Andy Brown’s business partner.

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Prowling for “Sh! The Octopus,” by Michael H. Price

Prowling for “Sh! The Octopus,” by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • April 20, 2008

In his frank and provocative “Writing under the Influence” commentary at ComicMix, John Ostrander speaks of imitation as “the starting point for what you eventually become” as a storyteller: “Nothing is created in a vacuum,” John avers.

Writing may often seem the loneliest of professions – and certainly so, if one lacks a reality-check communion with one’s customers and kindred souls in the racket – but who has the time to wallow in loneliness when besieged by the insistent Muses of Narrative Influence? Derivative thinking can make for an ideal springboard, given an ability to narrow the onrush of influences and a willingness to seek new tangents of thought and deed.

I have spent the past several months – with a stretch yet ahead – on a 20-years-after return to a comic-book series called Prowler for ComicMix, starting with a digital-media remastering of the original Eclipse Comics stories (1987-1988), moving into a short-stack file of unproduced scripts and raw-material ideas from that period, and settling in at length with a new novel-length Prowler yarn that will tie up some raveled plot-threads from the Eclipse episodes and then head off in other directions.

The reunion of the primary creative team (Timothy Truman, John K. Snyder III, and Yrs. Trly.) re-summons the influences with which we had sought to develop 4Winds Studios’ 10 Prowler books as a Mulligan Stew of such persistent interests as ancient Hebraic Law and American frontier vigilantism; the Deep Southern blues and gospel-music traditions as a response to repressive social and economic conditions; the now-horrific, now-heroic irrationalities of Depression-era pulp fiction; and the bizarre extravagances of Old Hollywood’s low-budget horror-movie factories.

Tim Truman and John Snyder had defined two vigilante Prowler figures, each representing a distinct generation of indignant humanity, by the time I signed on with the project, late in 1986. While Truman and I were sharing a bookstore tour to promote our respective titles at Eclipse – Tim, with Scout and Airboy, and my ownself with the movie-history book Forgotten Horrors – Tim came up with the idea of twisting the plots of some of those 1930s-period Forgotten Horrors titles to accommodate the early-day exploits of the Prowler.

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Skipalong Rosenbloom, by Michael H. Price

Skipalong Rosenbloom, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • April 13, 2008

“In the days before the cultural faucets of radio and television had become standard equipment in each home,” wrote the social critic Gunther Anders in 1956, “the [American public] used to throng the motion-picture theaters where they collectively consumed the stereotyped mass products manufactured for them…

“[The] motion-picture industry … continues the tradition of the theater,” added Anders, “… a spectacle designed for simultaneous consumption by a large number of spectators. Such a situation is obsolete.”

Anders’ influential gadfly manifesto, The Phantom World of TV, came fairly late in the initial outcropping of a Cold War between movies and teevee. Earlier during the 1950s, the movie industry had begun arraying such competitive big-screen ripostes to television as widescreen cinematography, three-dimensional projection – and such passive-aggressive lampoons of television as Arch Oboler’s The Twonky and Sam Newfield’s Skipalong Rosenbloom.

Anders’ perception of obsolescence for moviegoing has proved no such thing over the long stretch, of course – despite many movie theaters’ best efforts during the past generation to render the experience overpriced, inconvenient and unsanitary with cheapened operational standards and automated film-handling procedures. And yet film exhibitors as a class continue to raise the question, “Is moviegoing dead?” This, as if the post-WWII threat of mass-market television had never gone away despite a sustained détente between the big auditorium screen and the smaller home-viewing screen.

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