High culture in Mason City, Iowa

Below, an unusual double bill playing in Mason City, Iowa, 70 years ago (August 1949): The Burning Question (which we all know better as Reefer Madness) and The Hairy Ape. Perhaps one of the few times a "drug scare" movie shared a bill with Eugene O'Neill. Two "high" culture movies for the price of one!

Gay comedy, 1969 style

The Gay Deceivers (1969), opened 50 years ago this week in New York City. Just re-watched this recently (my earlier blog review is here). It's campy and engages in some old-fashioned stereotyping, but it's still fun at times, and has a surprisingly downbeat ending for the straight boys who masquerade as gay to get out of the draft. The second ad is from an engagement in Miami in November; it evokes Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and Neil Simon.

One of the guys is Lawrence Casey who starred in the TV show Rat Patrol which I am currently working my way through). First pic is from the TV show, second is from Gay Deceivers.

 

What was playing while men walked on the moon 50 years ago?

First, from a few years earlier, a couple of movies that imagined moon voyages: 1958's From the Earth to the Moon, based on a fanciful Jules Verne novel. It had big names (Joseph Cotten, George Sanders) but was rather boring (and it imagined a 19th century trip, not a more realistic modern one) and there's not even a moon landing scene.

Then my personal favorite, 12 to the Moon (1960) with the beefcakey Ken Clark as the commander of a multicultural crew. It's not a great movie, but it's schlocky fun. It played on a double feature with Battle in Outer Space, as the black & white newspaper ad shows.

Of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is more known for its cosmic psychedelic sequence set near Jupiter, but an important part of the film is set while going to, and on, the moon. This ad is for its premiere in Columbus on June 12, 1968.

What was playing in Columbus during the week of the moon landing (July 20, 1969)? Nothing much to do with the moon: True Grit, The Wild Bunch, Funny Girl, Doctor Zhivago, Sweet Charity, and a soft-porn movie called Meeting on 69th Street.

 

Moon landing, fake vs. real

In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing (which, as I was 12 years at the time, I vividly remember), here are two movies that have related content. Capricorn One was playing in Columbus in June of 1978. I always think of this as a fake moon landing movie but it's actually a fake Mars landing movie. But really, at heart, it's a fake moon landing movie, built to appeal to those conspiracy theorists who thought man was incapable of reaching the moon. (A more recent film, Operation Avalanche, was about a "real" fake moon landing.) Of course, we did get to the moon, but I admit there is an appeal in a story that we didn't. I re-watched it last night and it has plotholes galore and it's about a half an hour too long. But it has 2 of Barbra Streisand's husbands in it--James Brolin and Elliott Gould.

In 1990, a documentary, For All Mankind, was playing--the ad below is from its Los Angeles engagement. It's got some good footage, but it combines film from all the moon missions, not differentiating between them, or telling us which astronauts are speaking, so it's less than ideal as a historical document. The current Apollo 11 film is much better and visually dazzling. 

Summer of horror, 40 years ago: part 2

Four more horror movies which were playing in Columbus and around the country in the summer of 1979. Alien was the granddaddy of big-budget sci-fi horror, though there were certainly lower-budget precedents in the B-movie realm including It: The Terror from Beyond Space in 1958, The Thing from 1951, and even as far back as The Invisible Ray in the 30s. I suppose even 2001: A Space Odyssey could count as one. I saw Alien at Cinema East, one of the last of the single-screen movie houses in the city. We knew the manager and he let us sit all by ourselves in the balcony which was typically closed off. I didn't think much of it at the time, dismissing it as just a haunted house movie in space, but now, compared to some of the junk that has come later, it looks like Oscar material.

Dawn of the Dead was the first sequel to Night of the Living Dead. Gory and funny and creepy, with the scenes of zombies at the mall making a particular impact.

Frank Langella as Dracula, one of the first sexy vampires--though I would argue that David Peel in Brides of Dracula (1960) was kinda hot, and apparently Bela Lugosi was considered to have some heat by 1930s standards.

The Wicker Man, the best pagan horror film ever. It was first released in England in 1973 but didn't get a major American release until 1979. If you haven't seen the remake, DO NOT!

Summer of horror, 40 years ago

The summer of 1979 was a summer of horror in Columbus, Ohio: The Amityville Horror, Prophecy, Phantasm and Nightwing were all playing in June and July of 1979. The first ad for Amityville is for a sneak preview (June 22) the week before it opened. I saw it that next week, on opening night at Loews Southland Triplex. It was packed, and they ended up showing it in two auditoriums. We were herded all the way through one packed house, and wound up with practically the last three seats in the second house, in the front row. My neck got sore from looking up, but it did enhance the scariness of the movie. 

 Never saw Nightwing but I think I read the book

Saw Phantasm during this engagement at the Westerville theater. A B-movie marketed like an A-movie. Not bad.

I've never seen this, unless I did and it fell between my memory cracks.

For good measure, here's Star Crash, a sci-fi cheapie that, inexplicably, features Christopher Plummer in a role that probably took him 2 days to shoot.

Independence Day, 50 years ago

Below is a hodgepodge of movies playing on or around July 4th, 1969, a couple of weeks before the Apollo 11 moon landing: In Columbus, The Maltese Bippy, which killed the movie career of TV's Rowan and Martin before it really had a chance. I've seen it; it's pretty dire.

The Swedish movie, I Am Curious (Yellow), which was one of the first adult films to play in respectable theaters--in Columbus, it was at the local art houses which alternated between showing foreign movies and porn.

Goodbye, Columbus, based on a Philip Roth novel, and Bob Fosse's first movie, Sweet Charity.
 

Also in Columbus: True Grit, How to Commit Marriage, and a second-run of Funny Girl

In New York City, a couple of less-remembered melodramas: 3 Into 2 Won't Go and That Cold Day in the Park (notice the description of the "32-year-old spinster"; that would never fly today.

Finally, a classy ad for True Grit, at Radio City Music Hall, complete with splashy live stage show, which I'm surprised they were still doing. Apparently, the live shows continued right up until they closed down as a movie theater in 1978.