The Intruder vs. To Kill a Mockingbird

THE INTRUDER VS. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A tale of two movies, both from 1962 and both dealing with racism.

Other than their year of release, some of their subject matter, and their being filmed in black-and-white, the films are worlds apart in virtually every other way, including how they have been received by the establishment and the general public.

Roger Corman directed and co-produced (alongside his younger brother Gene) THE INTRUDER for $80,000 and it was filmed on location for three-and-a-half weeks in Southeast Missouri towns East Prairie, Charleston, and Sikeston. William Shatner stars as race hate inciter and outside agitator Adam Cramer and the young Canadian actor was still years away from becoming a household name for “Star Trek.” THE INTRUDER takes place contemporaneously with the civil rights movement and school integration; Charles Beaumont adapted his screenplay from his own 1959 novel of the same name and he even plays school principal Mr. Paton in the film.

Robert Mulligan directed TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD behind a $2 million budget and major studio backing with a screenplay by future Pulitzer Prize winner Horton Foote adapted from Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name that had already become an institution even before a prestigious film adaptation. Gregory Peck, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor four times before his most famous role (THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM, THE YEARLING, GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH), stars as noble lawyer Atticus Finch. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD filmed on Hollywood back lots and sets designed to recreate the Monroeville, Alabama of Lee’s Great Depression youth.

THE INTRUDER premiered May 14, 1962 in New York City and it would be reissued as I HATE YOUR GUTS and SHAME. In other words, it flopped and Corman has never quite made another picture like THE INTRUDER again. His later exploitation productions hid and obscured their social commentary behind and beneath protective layers of nudity, sex, and violence.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD debuted Dec. 25, 1962 and just like the Lee source material, it became an almost instantaneous social institution and beloved classic. It received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won three, including Best Actor for Peck. It has been a longtime staple of the American Film Institute: No. 34 on the 1997 “100 Years … 100 Movies” list and No. 25 on the 10th Anniversary list and the AFI voted it the No. 1 courtroom drama and Atticus Finch the No. 1 hero on its list of the 100 greatest heroes and villains.

I watched both films in close proximity of each other (both for the first time) and THE INTRUDER absolutely shames TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

Sorry, folks, Adam Cramer presents a far more interesting character than Atticus Finch and Shatner’s incendiary performance blows away Peck and its relentless note of nobility.

Cramer, a non-Southerner decked in a bright white suit, rides into the fictional small Southern town of Caxton and quickly comes on strong as a gentleman. This clever conman and charlatan then goes to work and preys on the racist, anti-integration sympathies of many of the residents to meet his goal of inciting a race war town-by-town. Cramer’s a master manipulator and rabble-rouser who also sets his sights on a high school girl and a frustrated housewife. His manipulative powers lead to one of the black students, Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), being falsely accused of rape by a white girl. That, of course, ties in with the absolute worst nightmare of a racist, one infinitely worse than integration. In a chilling final scene, the inflamed mob interrogates Mr. Greene about this rape. The mob believes it has become judge, jury, and executioner.

Fact and fiction must have blurred for novice actor Charles Barnes, a 19-year-old young man from Charleston (one of the three towns used in filming) whom Corman instructed to draw from real-life experiences attending an integrated high school in his hometown his senior year. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a story on Barnes in May 1962, headlined “Negro Actor’s Reel Role Too Real for Whites … And He Has to Leave Hometown.”

THE INTRUDER plays real, and that sealed its commercial doom and consignment to the dustbin (at least the margins) of cinematic history.

On the other hand, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD plays like a series of pat moral lessons for two hours, interrupted by youthful shenanigans and occasional voice-over narration to put us in a proper nostalgic mood.

Enter “To Kill a Mockingbird moral lessons” into a search engine and it returns 1,340,000 hits.

Is that why so many people love TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD?

Are fans of the film made to feel virtuous watching it?

Just asking for a friend.

Atticus Finch comes across so darn noble maybe because an older Scout Finch, his daughter, narrates the story.

She begins, “Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning; ladies bathed before noon, after their 3 o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go and nothing to buy … and no money to buy it with. Although Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself … That summer, I was six years old.”

The narration put me off right from the start and it all translated as “Grandma, tell me about the good ole days.”

Between the narration and the sets and the characters, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD feels like experiencing a show called “The South 1932” at Universal Studios Hollywood. LOOK! It’s a one-dimensional racist white trash caricature! LOOK! It’s busybody neighbors! LOOK! It’s a crotchety old bag! LOOK! It’s a sheriff named “Heck Tate”! FEEL GOOD ENTERTAINMENT! I don’t know why I need to pay money to see that when I could experience all that for real somewhere in Small Town U.S.A. Never mind, I’ll pass on both.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD stitches together multiple narrative threads, some more successfully than others.

— Scout (Mary Badham), her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford), and her best friend Dill (John Megna), and their larger-than-life misadventures.

— Scout and Jem and their relationship with Atticus, as well as their black maid Calpurnia (Estelle Evans).

— Atticus defends Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man falsely accused of rape by Mayella Ewell (Collin Wilcox) and her father Robert E. Lee “Bob” Ewell (James Anderson), during a trial when the odds are stacked dramatically against both men. Before the trial, townspeople — including Scout’s school mates — call Atticus a “nigger lover” and some of the most concerned citizens form a lynch mob.

— The children’s obsession with Boo Radley (Robert Duvall).

Badham and Alford both give very good performances and their rapport with each other and Peck forms the strongest part of the movie. Badham’s debut performance received a well-deserved nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. I understand why multiple generations of young women have responded so favorably toward TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. (Mulligan later directed Reese Witherspoon in a similarly affecting performance in the 1991 film THE MAN IN THE MOON.)

On the race level, though, that’s where TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD fails and it fails miserably.

The black characters remain predominantly in the background, Tom Robinson dies offscreen, and Bob Ewell belongs to a movie racist tradition called “Ku Klux Klown.”

We also have quite possibly the only mob in history ever talked down by a 6- or 7-year-old girl.

By comparison, in THE INTRUDER, a mob burns a cross in a black neighborhood, blows up the local black church and kills the preacher in the blast, and severely beats up the white character who takes a stand alongside the blacks and encourages them to return to school after the bombing. This conscientious white character gets so beaten that he receives broken ribs and loses one eye.

Nobody lays a hand on Atticus.

Meanwhile, only Peters and Evans received screen credit among the black actors in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

All the others were not credited.

That includes William “Bill” Walker in the small but pivotal role of Reverend Sykes, who delivers the famous line “Miss Jean Louise? Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” Peck himself said this scene — where all the black people in the balcony stand up for Atticus Finch after he defended Tom Robinson — wrapped up his Academy Award for Best Actor.

To be fair, some of the white actors, including Kim Stanley as the narrator, also were not credited.

By the point late in the movie when Bob Ewell attacks Jem and Scout and Boo Radley comes to their rescue, it was basically too little too late for this viewer. I was just ready for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD to be over.

Ray Harryhausen Special Effects Titan, Corman’s World and That Guy Dick Miller

RAY HARRYHAUSEN SPECIAL EFFECTS TITAN, CORMAN’S WORLD AND THAT GUY DICK MILLER
It’s often been said that Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation creatures are the best features of their respective films, everything from “Mighty Joe Young” and “Earth vs. The Flying Saucers” to “Jason and the Argonauts” and “Clash of the Titans.” He became the auteur.

It’s not often that a visual effects artist overshadows both directors and performers, no offense to Nathan R. Juran (“The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”), Don Chaffey (“Jason and the Argonauts”), and the all-star cast in “Clash of the Titans,” Harryhausen’s grand finale.

In fact, in reviewing “Clash of the Titans” a while back, I wrote that it amounts to Harryhausen vs. nominal star Harry Hamlin. Harryhausen wins. Every. Single. Time.

Then again, maybe not. Not when People Magazine featured Hamlin as the “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1987 and it felt like taking a potshot or two at “Clash of the Titans.”

“And there’s always the possibility of doing a remake of ‘Clash of the Titans.’ ‘I brought my toga home,’ says Harry, raising hopes of another glimpse of those knees. He’s kidding, of course. Frivolous flicks are a thing of the past for The Sexiest Man Alive. Besides, says Harry, laughing, ‘I used the toga to wash my car.'”

While pretty boys are a frivolous matter of the past, even in the present, Harryhausen’s creatures will live on forever.

“Special Effects Titan” allows us the opportunity to hear who and what inspired Harryhausen, his thought and work process on his creations, what challenges he faced, and to see the actual models used. Harryhausen (1920-2013) kept the most minute details in his garage.

— Roger Corman, who turned 94 a month to the day before I watched this documentary, has accumulated 415 producer and 56 director credits over a 65-year period. American International and New World produced some of the best exploitation films ever made along with a ton of schlock (some enjoyable, some not so much).

Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Kaplan, Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Pam Grier all had their start or their break working for Corman and most of them appear in “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.” Several more big names also appear in “Corman’s World,” but I would like to move on to the next paragraph.

We see Corman working on location as producer on the 2010 TV movie “Dinoshark,” which instantly calls to mind previous Corman productions like “Piranha” and “Humanoids from the Deep.” Near the end of “Corman’s World,” we also see the Hollywood outsider receive an honorary Oscar for “his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing an environment that no film school could match.” It’s only fitting, though, that “Corman’s World” goes out with a set of clips scored by the Ramones’ explosive title song from “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School.” That’s more in the Corman spirit than any award, as Riff Randell blows up Vince Lombardi High School.

“Corman’s World” reminds me that I should watch “The Intruder” (Corman’s most atypical directorial entry, called “one of the most brutal, honest, and unflinching examinations of American racism in cinema history” by Wheeler Winston Dixon in “Senses of Cinema”), thankfully touches on New World’s distribution of films by Bergman, Truffaut, Kurosawa and Herzog, and shows us Jack Nicholson crying over Corman.

Nicholson made his film debut in Corman’s 1958 production “The Cry Baby Killer” and most of his credits before 1969’s smash hit “Easy Rider” are Corman productions, including most famously “The Little Shop of Horrors” and “The Terror.” Corman productions “The Wild Angels” and “The Trip” paved the highway for “Easy Rider.”

Matter of fact, Corman laid a lot of pavement for the road ahead.

— I generally prefer character actors over stars and that group of character actors includes Sydney Greenstreet, Margaret Hamilton, John Cazale, M. Emmet Walsh, Harry Dean Stanton, Brad Dourif, and, of course, perhaps my all-time favorite Dick Miller, who the Academy Awards left out of their “In Memoriam.” Miller died Jan. 30, 2019, at the age of 90.

Miller began his career in Roger Corman productions in the 1950s and he became director Joe Dante’s favorite actor. No matter the size of the role, whether it’s starring like “Bucket of Blood” (the immortal Walter Paisley) or just one scene like “The Terminator” and “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School,” I fondly remember Miller. Sure many of us movie lovers of a certain persuasion do.

— Miller played Murray Futterman in both “Gremlins” films. In “Gremlins,” World War II veteran Futterman keeps going on and on ’bout foreign cars, foreign this, that and everything, and especially “gremlins” before they even attack the fictional upstate New York town of Kingston Falls. Futterman drunkenly rambles, “They put em in cars, they put em in yer TV. They put em in stereos and those little radios you stick in your ears. They even put em in your watches, they have teeny gremlins for our watches!”

— Miller ad-libbed his “They’re ugly. Ugly, ugly people” line about the Ramones in “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School.” Apparently, that’s what he actually thought when he looked at Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Marky.

— Miller originally had aspirations to be a screenwriter and his writing credits are “Four Rode Out,” “Which Way to the Front?,” and the immortal “TNT Jackson.” Miller predominantly stuck to acting, thankfully, with 184 credits listed at IMDb. He played a character named “Walter Paisley” several times. He left behind a tremendous body of work.

RAY HARRYHAUSEN SPECIAL EFFECTS TITAN (2011) Four stars; CORMAN’S WORLD (2011) Four stars; THAT GUY DICK MILLER (2014) Four stars

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

KISS ME DEADLY (1955) ****

Sometimes, it seems that like no author ever liked any film adaptation of their work. It feels that way every time I read up on a film based on a novel.

For example, British novelist Roald Dahl (1916-90) hated WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, though he’s credited for writing the screenplay. David Seltzer rewrote Dahl’s original script and the original author hated the changes like a different ending and the addition of musical numbers. The choice of Gene Wilder to play Willy Wonka also did not jibe with Dahl.

Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of THE SHINING. “I have a real problem with THE SHINING and Stanley Kubrick knew that I had a real problem with THE SHINING. I had a discussion with him beforehand. He said, ‘Stephen, Stanley Kubrick here, don’t you agree that all stories of ghosts are fundamentally optimistic?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said ‘Well if there are ghosts it means we survive death and that’s fundamentally an optimistic view, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Mr. Kubrick, what about Hell?’ and there’s a long pause on the telephone line and then he said in a very stiff and a very different voice, ‘I don’t believe in Hell.’ I said to myself, ‘Well, that’s fine, but some of us do and some of us believe that ghosts may survive and that may be Hell.’” King called THE SHINING “a cold film” with “striking images” and compared it to a “beautiful car that had no engine.”

Now, we get to the classic 1955 apocalyptic film noir KISS ME DEADLY directed by Robert Aldrich (1918-83) and written by screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides (1908-2007) and an uncredited Aldrich from Mickey Spillane’s 1952 novel.

Spillane (1918-2006), of course, did not find the film adaptation of his novel to be “classic.” Apparently, Bezzerides felt the same about the source material.

“I was given the Spillane book and I said, ‘This is lousy. Let me see what I can do.’ So I went to work on it. I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it. … I tell you Spillane didn’t like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn’t like me.”

Why not?

Bezzerides added espionage and the infamous nuclear suitcase (“The great whatsit”), plot details not in Spillane’s novel. On top of that, Bezzerides made detective protagonist Mike Hammer a narcissistic bully of a very high degree of creep. Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, pushes anti-hero to its most extreme limits. For whatever reason, Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog” comes to mind, mainly that “Now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch” chorus.

The appropriately named Hammer makes his living (predominantly) by blackmailing adulterous husbands and wives and he’s appropriately named Hammer because he’s always dropping the hammer on somebody in his way. Assorted thugs and sordid contacts, of course, but also a coroner not wanting to part with a key and a clerk not wanting to cooperate because Hammer’s not a member. Hammer’s friends and associates also pay dearly for their association with the detective.

I love Bezzerides’ dialogue.

One thug waxes poetic, “Dames are worse than flies.”

That’s as great as “I don’t pray. Kneeling bags my nylons” from Billy Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE and Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech from Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN.

KISS ME DEADLY prepares us for what lies ahead from its very first scene and then its opening credits, both stating that it will be a film like none other. What’s that old Cole Porter song? Yes, “Anything Goes.”

First scene: A frightened young woman. Dressed only in a trench coat, and she’s also in her bare feet. She’s flagging a ride as the motor cars zip past on a highway. She’s desperate, so desperate that she finally places herself in front of the path of one of the zipping cars. That car just happens to be driven by none other than Hammer. His first line, “You almost wrecked my car! Well? Get in!”

Opening credits: They scroll backwards. All the while, we hear the cries of the frightened young woman (Cloris Leachman).

Christina Bailey, the frightened young woman, tells Hammer, “Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me. If we don’t make it to the bus stop. … If we don’t, remember me.” Needless to say, Miss Bailey does not make it to the bus stop and Hammer (and by extension, we) go down the proverbial rabbit hole. All roads lead to the atomic suitcase and one helluva explosive finale.

Every film noir seems to have at least one femme fatale and KISS ME DEADLY gives us Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), who’s compared to Pandora and Lot by one character she guns down late in the picture. She then greets Hammer, “Kiss me, Mike. I want you to kiss me. Kiss me. The liar’s kiss that says I love you, and means something else.” She unloads on Hammer, too.

Yes, she’s arguably the most fatal of any femme.

From her profile on “The Female Villains Wiki,” “Lily often has the manner of a slightly flaky adolescent, which doesn’t seem to be all assumed for the deceptive role she’s playing in the early scenes. When her true identity and character are later revealed, it’s clear she’s one of the most black hearted, deadly female villains ever put on screen. … She kills people easily, with no ethical concerns whatever evident. She smirks after she’s done it. In the last scene in which she appears, we see she’s more than just a greedy, callous killer, very pleased with herself, she’s also a sadist.”

Lily meets her maker in one of the great cinematic deaths. There’s a shot during the apocalyptic ending in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK that’s a dead ringer for one in KISS ME DEADLY. Gotta love that Spielberg.

In the alternate ending, the one that was seen for many years, even Hammer goes down in flames. Nihilism and its variants have been used to describe KISS ME DEADLY many times, 639,000 in fact according to Google.

Aldrich later directed WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, THE DIRTY DOZEN, and THE LONGEST YARD, but he already outdid himself with KISS ME DEADLY.

All we need to know is that the Kefauver Commission named KISS ME DEADLY as 1955’s No. 1 menace to American youth. That would have included an 8-year-old Steven Spielberg and look how he turned out.

Fiend Without a Face (1958)

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) ****

The 1958 British independent horror production FIEND WITHOUT A FACE contains everything this science fiction and horror fiend wants from a film of that era: a square but likeable hero (Marshall Thompson), a shapely heroine (Kim Parker), a mad scientist (Kynaston Reeves), townspeople who blame everything on the wrong people, atomic fallout, and horrible, terrifying stop motion animation monsters (created by the special effects team of Flo Nordhoff and Karl-Ludwig Ruppel) that are loads of fun.

It also has an evocative title.

The final 20 minutes or so of FIEND WITHOUT A FACE are phenomenal and push this film into the stratosphere.

The fiends of the title are floating killer brains who started as one brain materialized from the thoughts of Professor R.E. Walgate, a man who specializes in telekinesis. The nearby airbase’s nuclear power radar experiments have dire consequences and the original fiend escapes from Walgate’s lab and wreaks murder and mayhem on the surrounding community. The fiends replicate themselves through attacks on humans (looting their brains and spinal cords) and they remain invisible until the final 20 or so minutes after they crank up the nuclear power to DANGER! They must be stopped!

These fiends are one helluva brainstorm, literally. They have antennae and tentacles, and one can see their influence on later creature features creatures. (The ALIEN films leap to mind. George Romero must have watched at least the last 20 minutes of FIEND WITHOUT A FACE before he made the first NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.)

When the fiends are shot in the brain (love that concept), they naturally gush out this great-looking brain glop and I honestly wish these death scenes lasted another 20 minutes. They are so much fun, and it’s just as great when our hero breaks out an axe. The fiends (love that word) finally turn into goo after our hero blows up their great power source real good.

When the fiends are in their invisible stage, we hear slurping sounds when they strike their victims’ brains and spinal cords. Awesome, totally awesome, because it’s not happening to us, of course.

Credited director Arthur Crabtree (reports have it that star Thompson worked on the film himself after Crabtree walked off the picture because directing sci-fi proved to be too much for his fragile little mind) and his team did a fantastic job with the fiends when they’re invisible or visible. FIEND WITHOUT A FACE pulls off the nifty little trick of building up high audience expectations toward a great final act, then it delivers the goods and maybe even exceeds expectations during that final act.

Believe it or not, FIEND WITHOUT A FACE apparently caused quite a storm of controversy when it was first released in early July 1958. The British Board of Film Censors demanded cuts be made before it would be certified for release and the picture still received an ‘X.’ It’s lucky to not have met the same fate as banned-for-many-years pictures like BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1926-54), FREAKS (1932-63), and ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932-58), for example.

Legend even has it that British Parliament discussed why the censors allowed FIEND WITHOUT A FACE to be released.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that I love 1950s horror and sci-fi: THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, HOUSE OF WAX, GODZILLA, THEM!, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, FIEND, THE H-MAN, THE BLOB, THE FLY, HORROR OF DRACULA, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, BUCKET OF BLOOD, and THE KILLER SHREWS all have made personal top 10 lists for their respective years and the decade also featured at least five of Hitchcock’s best works (STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, REAR WINDOW, THE WRONG MAN, VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST) and other films that are horrifying in their own distinct ways, like film noir KISS ME DEADLY and war film FIRES ON THE PLAIN.

Fat City (1972)

FAT CITY

FAT CITY (1972) ****

I would not be surprised if writer and director John Huston (1906-87) had the nickname “The Great Adapter.”

Huston directed 37 feature films from 1941 through 1987 and his films adapted from works by Dashiell Hammett, Ellen Glasgow, Robert Carson, B. Traven, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sylvester, W.R. Burnett, Stephen Crane, C.S. Forester, Pierre LaMure, Claud Cockburn, Herman Melville, Charles Shaw, Romain Gary, Alan LeMay, Philip McDonald, Tennessee Williams, the Book of Genesis, Carson McCullers, Ian Fleming, David Haggart, Hans Koningsberger, Noel Behn, Leonard Gardner, Desmond Bagley, Rudyard Kipling, Flannery O’Conner, Zoltan Fabri, Harold Gray, Malcolm Lowry, Richard Condon, and James Joyce.

Huston co-wrote some of those adaptations, but it was Gardner himself who adapted his own novel, “Fat City,” for the big screen.

In a 2019 interview with the Paris Review, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his novel, Gardner spoke about Huston and the film adaptation.

“Before I started to write it (the screenplay), he invited me to come over to his place in Ireland for a couple of weeks for a discussion about how it was going to go,” Gardner said. “He was a funny guy. He trusted me, I think, because we didn’t talk all day about the script. We talked maybe a half an hour. Then he wanted to paint. He was always painting.

“He’d been an amateur boxer. It was lucky because my objection to boxing movies back then was that they were all the same. It’s a fixed fight and the hero won’t take a dive and maybe they break his hands afterward. I thought there needed to be a boxing film done another way. He was all for it.”

FAT CITY set itself within the city of Stockton, California, population over 100,000 at the time of the making of the film. The scenes are played out in skid row bars, restaurants and living spaces, work on a migrant labor farm, bowling alleys, a boxing gym, and boxing venues in a gritty, street-level fashion. Huston and Gardner definitely created a boxing film that’s done another way.

Stockton, now with a population above 300,000, received a dubious recognition from Forbes Magazine in 2012: “The Most Miserable City in the U.S.”

“I think that this is such a rough place that people who are highly educated use it as a springboard to get jobs in other places, and what it leaves behind is not the cream of the crop. The really smart people don’t want to stay here. They don’t want to be here with the violence and the crime and everything,” said substitute teacher Ronald Schwartz in a story for PBS News Hour.

So things only seemed to get worse in Stockton since 1972.

Creedence Clearwater Revival released the song “Lodi” as the B-side to “Bad Moon Rising,” the lead single from their third album “Green River,” in April 1969. Farrar, Straus & Giroux published “Fat City” in 1969.

Lodi is approximately 15-20 miles north of Stockton.

Creedence songwriter John Fogerty has said that he picked Lodi because it had the coolest-sounding name. The song’s refrain “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again” has truly stuck with Lodi for more than 50 years, unfairly or not.

FAT CITY utilizes Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and the lyrics and the way Kristofferson sings them suit FAT CITY perfectly. Kristofferson said that he got his inspiration for the song from an interview with Frank Sinatra, who said “Booze, broads, or a bible … whatever helps me make it through the night.”

Any of the characters in FAT CITY could have said that.

We follow two boxers in FAT CITY: 29-year-old Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) and 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Tully meets Ernie in a Stockton gym, sees potential in the young man after they spar, and encourages him to get into the fight game. Tully recommends manager and trainer Ruben (the great character actor Nicholas Colasanto).

Keach and Bridges play off or against each other perfectly. Bridges, in his early 20s and on his fifth feature overall, fits the part of a promising up-and-coming talent like a glove; Bridges had already received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. Keach’s own struggles to get a part like Billy Tully infuses his characterization of a washed-up boxer clawing and scratching (and drinking) his way through life; for example, Mike Nichols fired Keach from CATCH-22 a week into rehearsals. Keach’s propensity for overacting and Bridges’ for underacting factored in.

“FAT CITY is a good film,” Keach said in Dennis Brown’s “Actors Talk: Profiles and Stories from the Acting Trade,” “but 20 minutes were cut. Twenty minutes longer, FAT CITY is a great film, a classic. Unfortunately, 20 minutes longer made it 20 minutes more depressing.”

A theory: All good films are not depressing and all bad films are.

Boxing takes Ernie away from the pressures of a young wife (Candy Clark) and the start of a nuclear family. Tully, a shell of himself since his wife left him and since his defeat in the ring in Panama City, takes up with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a character described as a “woozy boozy floozy” in the New York Times. Booze initially lubricates their relationship, of course, but it fizzles out spectacularly down the home stretch.

Tully tells Oma “You can count on me!” so many times that you wonder if he’s attempting to get himself to believe that more than even this woman.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975 / 1998)

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975 / 1998) Four stars

Imagine a mystery ending unsolved.

That’s the challenge for readers of Joan Lindsay’s original 1967 novel and viewers of the 1975 Australian film adaptation by screenwriter Cliff Green and director Peter Weir.

Lindsay’s editor Sandra Forbes made the suggestion to remove the final chapter and Lindsay did so before publication. In 1987, three years after Lindsay’s death, “The Secret of Hanging Rock,” the infamous final chapter, Chapter 18, finally appeared.

Weir’s 1998 Director’s Cut trimmed eight minutes from the original film, 115 down to 107 minutes.

In turn of the 20th Century Australia, three Appleyard College school girls and one teacher do not return from their picnic at former volcano Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon in Victoria. The girls’ curiosity about exploring Hanging Rock obviously gets the best of them. One of the girls, Irma, returns every bit as mysteriously as she disappeared one week earlier and she’s no good for answers in the heart of the picture, “I remember — nothing! Nothing! I remember nothing!” Irma’s fellow characters become every bit as frustrated with her as we do in the audience, because all of us (they and we) demand a solution and an explanation. People desperately want rationality in an often irrational world.

School girls Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) and Marion (Jane Vallis) and Miss McGraw (Vivean Gray) remain missing, despite the best efforts of both official and unofficial search parties. For example, there’s Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard), a young man who becomes obsessed with finding Miranda.

Seems like virtually everybody’s obsessed with this Miranda, who Mlle. De Poitiers (Helen Morse) describes as a Botticelli angel before her disappearance. The film is very suggestive and hints at terrible, unspeakable events. Imaginations may run wild, as they do within the film.

Miranda provides a line vital to understanding PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, “What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream,” a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 poem “A Dream Within a Dream.” It is quite possible that Poe (1809-49) would have admired PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if Hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Guess we should discuss this Hanging Rock, which becomes a character and even more of an impenetrable mystery in its own right than the central mystery. Australian New Wave films — like PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK — received (and deserved) much praise for their depictions of the natural landscape.

Hanging Rock quickly becomes mythical, powerful, before we even take one look.

Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) builds it up within our minds in an early scene, “The rock itself is extremely dangerous. You are therefore forbidden of any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lowest slopes. I also wish to remind you, the vicinity is renowned for its venomous snakes and poisonous ants of various species. It is, however, a geological marvel.”

Miss McCraw contributes, “The rocks all round — Mount Macedon itself — must be all of 350 million years old. Siliceous lava, forced up from deep down below. Soda trachytes extruded in a highly viscous state, building the steep sided mamelons we see in Hanging Rock. And quite young geologically speaking. Barely a million years.” These dialogue passages remind one of how Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) played up Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN.

The watches of coachman Mr. Hussey (Martin Vaughan) and Miss McGraw both freeze at the stroke of noon. They speculate about the magnetic powers of Hanging Rock.
That’s before the girls decide to go explore Hanging Rock.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK derives considerable power from the juxtaposition of the young women and Hanging Rock. Also, Hanging Rock itself cannot be interrogated about what happened on that fateful day or explain how one girl returned. What did Hanging Rock do to and then with these women?

Hanging Rock remains a marvel and tourist hot spot today.

Check out the sales pitch: “Where else in Australia will you find the Black Hole of Calcutta, The Eagle, The Chapel and Lover’s Leap … let the secrets of Hanging Rock unfold before your eyes as you wind your way up to the pinnacle where spectacular views await” and “The unexplained disappearance of a group of schoolgirls at Hanging Rock in 1901 is just one of the legends of this mysterious area, and many visitors say they can feel the spirit of the girls as they climb the Rock. Joan Lindsay’s book and Peter Weir’s film about the ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ ensures that the mystery lives on. …”

No evidence has been found to prove the novel and the movie are based on a true story.
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK sticks with many viewers, just like the surviving characters are haunted.

The technical aspects are first-rate: cinematographer Russell Boyd, editor Max Lemon, art director David Copping, costume designer Judith Dorsman, makeup artist Elizabeth Mitchie and makeup supervisor Jose Luis Perez, composer Bruce Smeaton, and musician Gheorghe Zamfir, in particular.

Zamfir’s pan flute later influenced Ennio Morricone’s work for Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.

After writing this review, I know that I want to watch PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK again.

Park Row (1952)

PARK ROW (1952) Four stars

I finally watched for the first time PARK ROW, Samuel Fuller’s self-financed labor of love and love letter to newspapers, newspapermen, and the revolutionary concept of a free press.

Of course, Fuller produced his love letter decades before many newspapers became downsized, outsourced, strip-mined, gutted, and homogenized into bland soggy vanilla wafer cookie cutter clone drone carbon copies of all the other papers owned by the same media company. Fewer days printed, earlier and earlier deadlines, fewer pages (less content) because of declining ad revenue and increased printing costs, more delivery issues, and price increases at every level all factor into a worse product, more unhappy customers, and ultimately fewer subscribers, as well as fewer employees, in a vicious cycle. Less (newspaper) for more (money) will not cut it.

That once family-owned small town newspaper … once the beacon, pride and joy, and watchdog of a community (and possibly region) and once housed inside a buzzing building populated by wordsmiths and word slingers, photographers, editors of various persuasions, proof readers and fact checkers, pressmen, inserters, and many others in a diverse work environment … has been reduced over time to a skeleton crew of employees who hear the grief for the sad state of a formerly great paper. They hear the grief because the power players are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Good luck reaching them.

Not that journalism majors and college paper staff members are forewarned a million times before their graduation about newspapers being a dying industry. It’s not a natural death, though, and it’s both maddening and saddening for the lover of the printed word to see what’s happening to so many papers.

PARK ROW inspired thoughts, reactions, and reflections by the bushel.

People with a vision and the character and personality necessary to carry it out have been replaced by number-crunching, bean-counting, penny-pinching, character- and personality-deficient, machine-like men and women in many decision-making positions in the newspaper industry. Just like protagonist Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans) says in PARK ROW, “The press is good or evil according to the character of those who direct it.”
Remember that classic line from John Ford’s 1962 western THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE? Something like “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s just what we shall do with PARK ROW, written, directed, produced, and financed by Fuller. That’s right, Fuller himself put up every dollar spent on PARK ROW: $200,000 since the other $1,000 of his life’s savings went toward cigars and vodka.
Fuller (1912-97) became a copy boy at the age of 12 for the New York Evening Journal and a crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic at 17. He quit his newspaper gig three years later and hitchhiked the U.S.A. with the occasional freelance job. In 1934, Fuller took a temp crime reporter job for the San Francisco Chronicle and then editorial writer for the San Diego Sun. Fuller returned to New York in 1935 and published his first novel, “Burn, Baby, Burn.” Fuller wrote more novels and branched out into screenplays for Hollywood, including one from 1938 with a catchy title, GANGS OF NEW YORK, directed by James Cruze and starring Charles Bickford and Ann Dvorak. Fuller enlisted for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor and he served in the 26th Regiment, Third Battalion, Company K or the Big Red One for the rest of the war (his experiences inspired his 1980 movie THE BIG RED ONE). Two screenplays were filmed and his mystery novel “The Dark Page” was printed during World War II with Fuller overseas. Back stateside, Fuller directed his first film, I SHOT JESSE JAMES, in 1949 and his 26 films are informed by his background in newspapers and novels.
Fuller’s older brother Ving (1903-65) provided the editorial cartoons for PARK ROW. Ving worked as a newspaper cartoonist, among other gigs including animation and gag writing, and his best known work is the mad scientist comic strip “Doc Syke” from 1944 to 1960.
PARK ROW starts with a scroll through the names of the 1,772 daily newspapers in the United States circa 1952. Bold letters proclaim “ONE OF THEM IS THE PAPER YOU READ.” A few seconds later, “ALL OF THEM ARE THE STARS OF THIS STORY.” About one minute in, “DEDICATED TO AMERICAN JOURNALISM,” with “AMERICAN JOURNALISM” in much bigger letters just like a front page headline for a major news story. That sure as all get-out beats what we see and hear today, you know, all that “evil liberal media” and “fake news” hyperbole. Why, just a couple years ago Walmart sold online, through a third party seller, T-shirts featuring “Rope. Tree. Journalist.” Below that, “Some Assembly Required.” Walmart pulled the shirts after a complaint from the Radio Television Digital News Association.
As of 2016, the number of daily papers in the United States had dropped to 1,286.
After that scroll and a brief Samuel Fuller Productions fanfare, PARK ROW gives us voice-over narration, “This is Johannes Gutenberg, who invented movable type 500 years ago and printed the first Bible. Recognized as the father of modern printing, Gutenberg stands on Park Row, the most famous newspaper street in the world, where giants of journalism mixed blood and ink to make history across the front page of America. Our story takes place in the lusty days of the Golden 80s [1880s] when Park Row was the birth place and graveyard of great headlines, the street of America’s first world famous journalist, a printer’s devil who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers, Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of Park Row … and it is the street of Phineas Mitchell.” I’m already reeled in less than three minutes into the picture.
By the way, newspapers chose their location on Park Row because of the proximity to City Hall and the police department.
PARK ROW belongs right up there with CITIZEN KANE on the list of my favorite newspaper movies. I found myself inspired by Fuller’s depiction of media wars in 1886, of a small rogue newspaper started by an editor (Mitchell) warring against the very newspaper that fired him because he questioned their moral scruples. The Star’s cutthroat heiress publisher Charity Hackett (Mary Welch) does everything in her power to destroy the start-up Globe, a ragtag team put together on the spot in a saloon right after Mitchell’s firing and that succeeds through initiative and ingenuity, of course much to the chagrin of Hackett.
For example, The Globe prints its first edition on butchers’ paper.
Mitchell and Hackett, though, are strongly attracted to each other. The film’s poster shows them kissing with the caption “she had blood in her veins … he had ink … and guts.” Other hype on the poster: “Street of rogues … reporters … and romance!” and “The picture with the page one punch!”
PARK ROW wins for the best use of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a motion picture. Now, maybe, just maybe, I’ll go back and look at “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” although I prefer “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Both are on the nearby shelf.
I have a bias favoring newspapers, because, for one, I learned how to read from one. I love the reaction people have when I tell them I learned to read by the age of 4. Grandpa sat me on his lap and read me the paper. I picked it up from there and have been a passionate newspaper reader ever since.

Kingpin (1996)

KINGPIN (1996) Four stars

Over a period of a couple years in the late 1990s, there were two great bowling comedies released: The Farrelly Brothers’ KINGPIN and the Coen Brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI. Granted, there’s far more to both movies than bowling.

A few of my friends and I watched these movies time and time again. They both played a central role in nearly a decade of regular Friday or Saturday or Sunday night bowling adventures at the Holiday Lanes in Pittsburg, Kansas. Alcohol helped too, although when the bowling alley banned outside cups, college student attendance dramatically took a dip. Eventually, though, our group sucked it up and put the money down on the watered down bowling alley beer.

A couple times during my writing career, I have mentioned KINGPIN. I reviewed ZOMBIELAND for the college newspaper and reunited Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray gave me an opportunity to reference their dueling comb-overs in KINGPIN. I just laughed thinking about it. I named KINGPIN one of my 10 favorite sports movies for The Morning Sun.

Harrelson plays Roy Munson from Ocelot, Iowa, the 1979 Iowa state bowling champion who embarks on a professional bowling career early on during KINGPIN. He’s a promising young bowler, but, unfortunately, he runs afoul veteran bowler Ernie McCracken (Murray), who cons rather than mentors the younger bowler. McCracken hated the fact that Munson beat him in bowling and in a con gone tragically bad, a gang of amateur bowlers take it out on Munson after they find out both he and McCracken are pros. McCracken gets away, of course, and leaves Munson to reap the consequences. Munson loses his right hand in a scene that’s very, very, very rough for a PG-13 comedy. It plays like a scene from a Scorsese gangster pic.

Seventeen years later, Roy Munson’s a real born loser in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Man, talk about down on his luck. He’s got a prosthetic hand and a major drinking problem. He sales bowling supplies, rather unsuccessfully, since nobody wants novelty gags in the men’s room any more. Munson is perpetually behind on his rent and that means his creepy landlady harasses the former pro bowler. They work out a debt solution I do not recommend and work in a Mrs. Robinson parody for tremendous sport Lin Shaye.

Speaking of sports, KINGPIN parodies the genre. Munson takes on a managerial role for Amish bowler Ishmael (Randy Quaid) and they decide to work their way to Reno for a $1 million winner-takes-all tournament to save Ishmael’s farm. Along the way, they gain Claudia (Vanessa Angel) and Roy and Claudia assume the roles with Ishmael that Jack Nicholson and Otis Young did with Quaid in the 1973 film THE LAST DETAIL. Needless to say, Ishmael gets hurt on the eve of the tournament in Reno, Munson makes his bowling comeback, and Munson and McCracken eventually battle for $1 million and comb-over superiority.

I find myself laughing throughout most of KINGPIN. Like the comedies of the Z-A-Z boys and Mel Brooks, or for that matter the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, I laugh twice at some of these jokes, a second laugh at the fact that I laughed in the first place. For example, I am laughing right now just thinking about Roger Clemens’ cameo playing a redneck named “Skidmark” and I have already mentioned Harrelson’s and Murray’s comb-overs.

Harrelson, Quaid, and Murray all have no problem looking absolutely ridiculous on screen, something they demonstrate time and time again for nearly two hours in KINGPIN. The Farrelly Brothers and the actors will stoop just that low for a laugh.

Murray has made a parallel career for himself with supporting roles and cameos, ever since CADDYSHACK. He’s done it with TOOTSIE, ED WOOD, SPACE JAM, WILD THINGS, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, and, of course, KINGPIN, where he appears near the beginning and near the end of the picture. He just about walks away with the movie. Ernie McCracken is a real piece of work, crass, vile, womanizing, on down the line, but he seems to be a beloved figure within the movie. Of course. We love Murray and McCracken, and it’s the way he reads lines like “It’s a small world when you’ve got unbelievable tits, Roy.”

Of course, McCracken’s talking about Claudia, played by the lovely Angel. She is the discovery in KINGPIN, because we have seen Harrelson, Quaid, and Murray be funny before in several movies. At the same time, Angel could be seen on TV during her run on “Weird Science,” playing the character first essayed by Kelly LeBrock. She plays some of the same notes in both roles, with her delightful English accent and her sarcastic wit. It’s a joy watching her sock it to Munson and McCracken. It remains a mystery why Angel has never become a bigger star.

I recently talked about enjoying few comedies as much as NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE. Well, I just spent over 800 words on one of those few.

National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)

NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE (1978) Four stars

There are few comedies I have enjoyed as much as NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE.

I have watched it many times over the years and that’s not even counting all those times on TBS, because, let’s face it, one misses so many “good parts” of a movie like ANIMAL HOUSE when it’s been edited for TV. It warped my fragile little mind seeing it on video the first time and I lost count of how many times I watched that VHS tape I bought circa 1997.

I loaned it to Brad Rich so he could watch Bluto’s infamous “Germans bombed Pearl Harbor” speech and remember it verbatim for his high school speech class. Mr. Rich earned an ‘A’ for his performance. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to watch him act it out, though, fortunately, Mr. Rich returned the VHS tape. Bonus points for him.

College friend Don Stephens came over to my house about once a week to watch ANIMAL HOUSE it seemed like after Mr. Stephens joined a fraternity at Pittsburg State. Mr. Stephens and I started living ANIMAL HOUSE just a little bit so the viewings of the movie decreased significantly, especially after I continued my educational career in 2000 at Pitt State. Mr. Stephens eventually returned to the ranks of the independents and I remained one throughout both tours of college.

There was that one night when Mr. Stephens played Otter and I was Boon: “Hi, Don Stephens, damn glad to meet you,” then I hit ‘em with “Hi, that was Don Stephens, he was damn glad to meet you.” We only used it that one night, especially since it seemed like nobody got the reference. That’s when I started losing faith in the youth of America and have ever since.

Another time, Mr. Stephens and I went on a Thanksgiving break pilgrimage to Wichita to meet two young women (sisters) and, ahem, spend the night at their house. At some point, I believe it was early on at the bar, my date said that I was just like that Bluto guy from ANIMAL HOUSE, since I told her I’d been in college seven years. You win some, you lose some, and another time I’ll tell you about the six years off-and-on I knew my date from Wichita, although, to be honest, I really don’t want to do that.

Enough about that: ANIMAL HOUSE made a tremendous impact on the movie industry.

Every year, we get at least one raunchy, R-rated, gross out comedy.

ANIMAL HOUSE paved the parade route for PORKY’S, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, DAZED AND CONFUSED, AMERICAN PIE, OLD SCHOOL, WEDDING CRASHERS, and HANGOVER.

Every time I watch ANIMAL HOUSE, it holds up and it remains better than its followers.

First and foremost, it is superbly acted up and down the cast.

Tom Hulce and Stephen Furst (1954-2017) make a successful entry point into this world, as one snooty sorority sister calls them “the wimp and the blimp.” Tim Matheson and Peter Riegert play off each other so well as ladies man Otter and wing man Boon that we believe their characters have been friends for several years. James Daughton and Mark Metcalf, especially Metcalf as Niedermeyer, create thoroughly detestable characters that we love to hate.

Speaking of characters that we love to hate, Canadian actor John Vernon (1932-2005) had a knack for playing them better than just about anybody else. We enjoy every single appearance made by his Dean Wormer in ANIMAL HOUSE, every single time he gets his comeuppance, and especially every single time Vernon sinks his teeth into lines like “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son” and “Put a sock in it, boy, or else you’ll be outta here like shit through a goose.” Vernon later played a similar character in KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE, retaining that bias against college kids.

John Belushi (1949-82) exploded into stardom with the success of ANIMAL HOUSE, one of the biggest hits of 1978. Outside action heroes Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Steve McQueen, we don’t find star-making performances built around fewer words. Belushi’s Bluto makes us laugh mostly through classic physical comedy and he irritates the comic villains every bit as effectively as the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges did in their heyday.

Bluto definitely puts the animal in ANIMAL HOUSE, smashing acoustic guitars, downing full whiskey bottles in one fell swig (actually iced tea), pouring mustard on himself, starting food fights (by popping “zits”) and nationwide dance crazes, and peeping at cute coeds. Bluto’s predominantly silent act pays off with his big speech late in the pic for the Delta troops. It’s not quite George C. Scott as George S. Patton at the start of PATTON, but it’s close, real close in memorability.

Bluto has been described as a cross between Harpo Marx and the Cookie Monster.

Just about everybody has a memorable character in ANIMAL HOUSE, from Kevin Bacon in his motion picture debut (“Thank you sir, may I have another?”; how dare I forget a softball practice where I made every teammate who wanted another grounder hit their way ask that very question) to the lovely Karen Allen also in her debut, as well as Verna Bloom (1938-2019) as the ready and willing dean’s wife, Donald Sutherland as a hip professor, and DeWayne Jessie lip syncing his way through Otis Day on “Shout” and “Shama Lama Ding Dong.”

John Landis began a string of winners here, followed by THE BLUES BROTHERS, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, and TRADING PLACES over a few years. Universal wanted Chevy Chase to play the Otter role that went to Matheson, but Landis felt Chase was not right for the part and the director played a little Jedi mind trick by telling Chase that ANIMAL HOUSE would be an ensemble pic. That disinterested Chase, who instead made FOUL PLAY. Landis contributed to the anarchic atmosphere of ANIMAL HOUSE by throwing things at the actors, like an early scene when Bluto leads Flounder and Pinto into the Delta house and they’re greeted by a couple flying bottles.

Harold Ramis (1944-2014), Chris Miller, and Douglas Kenney (1946-80) combined on the screenplay and contributed their own collegiate and fraternal experiences.

George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI famously asks “Where were you in ‘62?” ANIMAL HOUSE, released almost five years later to the day by the same studio, also takes place in ‘62 and Lucas, Ramis, Miller, and Kenney obviously had different answers to where they were in ‘62 and these different answers inform their respective movies and characters.

Both smash hit movies inform us what happened to their main characters. For example, in AMERICAN GRAFFITI, we’re told Terry the Toad is reported missing in action in Vietnam in December 1965. Meanwhile, in ANIMAL HOUSE, we read that Neidermeyer’s own troops kill him in Vietnam. Yes, indeed, they fragged Neidermeyer. Maybe even Terry the Toad took part in it.

Shrek (2001)

SHREK (2001) Four stars

I recently watched SHREK for the who knows how many times and it was every bit as fun as it was the first time all those years ago.

Watching it was just like catching up with an old friend who you have not seen in a long time. Sometimes, that’s a delightful experience as two people do not miss a beat despite the passing of time. Once in a while, it’s just two people in a room who have nothing to say to each other one way or the other. I connected with SHREK all over again.

There’s so many great characters, old friends if you will, in SHREK and I think that, more than anything else, is the secret to its success.

We might as well as start with the title character. The name Shrek itself calls to mind the surname Schreck, the German actor who played Dracula in the F.W. Murnau silent classic NOSFERATU (1922). Schreck means “a feeling of fear or alarm.” Ogre means a man-eating giant in folklore and a cruel or terrifying person in reality. None of those definitions fit the title character in SHREK, who thankfully is more of an ogre with a heart of gold than a man-eating giant. Granted, Shrek would just rather be left alone in his swamp, at least at the beginning of the picture. His privacy’s besieged upon first by a single annoyance and then by a slew of fairy tale characters who have been driven from their kingdom. Eventually, he takes on the assignment of slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess from an outsourcing overlord.

Princess Fiona is not the average princess and, for that matter, Dragon is not the average dragon. Of course, this is not a Disney picture, it’s a DreamWorks extravaganza, and the scene where Fiona unleashes her inner martial artist on Monsieur Robin Hood and his Merry Men proved to be a game changer for animated princesses. I could have lived without the MATRIX reference, since it seemed like every other picture made in the early 2000s referenced THE MATRIX, but it was a pleasant surprise to see her kick ass. She has even more surprises in store, especially for Shrek.

Surprises are SHREK in a nutshell, which puts entertaining and fresh spins and variations on durable storytelling traditions or that’s just another way of saying that SHREK breathed fresh life into fairy tale stories. It will remind viewers of THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

In other words, at times, SHREK absolutely skewers fairy tales. I mean, there’s the delightful scene where antagonist Lord Farquaad tortures the Gingerbread Man for information about the whereabouts of all his fellow fairy tale brothers and sisters. What will it take to make him crack? Lord Farquaad makes a move toward the Gingerbread Man’s gumdrop buttons and that’s going way, way, way too far. That’s a fun scene, and there’s probably about 50 more fun scenes in SHREK.

Children and adults both enjoy SHREK, and that’s because there’s jokes only more experienced viewers will understand. For example, when Shrek observes that Lord Farquaad must be overcompensating for something, we adults know what’s that something. SHREK is a film truly for the entire family, capable of placating the smart ass teenager, the lover of fairy tales and/or musicals, and the grumpy old man to name three demographics.

We have mentioned Lord Farquaad a couple times already in this review, and he makes for a great villain. He’s voiced by John Lithgow, who brings his expertise from live-action villainous roles in BLOW OUT, RAISING CAIN, and CLIFFHANGER. He’s one of those actors who we love to hate. This is also the same Lithgow, by the way, who released “John Lithgow’s Kid-Size Concert” on VHS in 1990, advertised on the box as “Award winning actor JOHN LITHGOW sings and strums his favorite songs for kids.”

If there’s a hero (and a leading lady and a villain), invariably there must be a loyal sidekick for the hero and that’s filled in SHREK by Donkey, voiced by Eddie Murphy. Donkey, of course, exists in sharp contrast to Shrek, meaning that he’s a motormouth who eventually wears down the resistance of the big ogre. Donkey even finds himself a very unlikely love interest.

Until now, I have skipped Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz, who voice Shrek and Princess Fiona. They were not the original choices. Nicolas Cage passed on the title character at one point and Chris Farley recorded nearly all of his lines as Shrek, but Farley died of a drug overdose before he could finish. SHREK paired Farley with Janeane Garofalo as Princess Fiona, but she was fired without an explanation after his death. Shrek and Fiona each received a rewrite and personality changes after the personnel changes to Myers and Diaz, and Myers finally decided upon his trademark Scottish accent for one of his three iconic characters (Wayne and Austin Powers the other two) … hard to imagine Shrek without one at this point. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Myers, Diaz, Murphy, and Lithgow not voicing their respective characters.

SHREK spawned a new wave of computer animated pictures built upon pop-culture references and just being too darn clever for their own darn good, including its own increasingly lackluster sequels (I stopped at SHREK THE TURD, er, SHREK THE THIRD). Apparently, there’s a reboot or sequel named SHREK 5 slated for 2022.