Vital Viewing (Fall Guy Edition)

 

 

Actor John Ritter was born on this day in 1948 (and died at the all-too-young age of 54 in 2003.) He's best known for the late 1970s-early '80s sex farce sitcom Three's Company, on which he played culinary school student Jack Tripper, who shares an apartment with two attractive young women while having to pretend he's gay so the landlord won't think any hanky-panky is going on. The funny thing--literally so, as it was the primary source of the show's humor--is no hanky-panky ever did go on, though the main characters often thought otherwise. 3C may have been the sexiest network series of its time, but it was all talk, no action, much innuendo about nothing:

 

Real sex wouldn't have been nearly as funny (though arguably still attention-getting.)

Ritter talks about the sitcom that made him a star and other things in this 1997 interview with Conan O'Brien:

So what was that Don Ohlmeier "in-joke" all about anyway? Ohlmeier was the head of NBC Entertainment, the network O'Brien was on at the time, and the highest rated network throughout the 1990s. The lying-in-the-snow wisecrack could have been a reference to Ohlmeier's alcoholism. Perhaps not a nice thing to joke about, but Ohlmeier was arguably fair game. He had been accused of sexual harassment shortly before going into rehab, and a cynical attitude toward the man was beginning to take shape. The cynical attitude wasn't lessened any by Ohlmeier's friendship with O.J. Simpson, who had recently been found not guilty of murder, though few people outside the jury box believed he was innocent. In fact, a battle of sorts was brewing between Ohlmeier and Saturday Night Live Weekend Update anchor Norm McDonald over anti-O.J. jokes the latter was making on the air, a battle McDonald would eventually lose when he was fired from SNL--WAIT A SECOND! This post is supposed to be about John Ritter, not Don Ohlmeier.

Conan mentioned that John Ritter fell down quite a bit on Three's Company. Though I didn't want the man to hurt himself, I would say that was a good thing, as Ritter was one of the great physical comedy actors of his generation. See for yourself:

  

Watching Ritter comically stumble and bumble his way around Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers, you might not guess that this man was in actuallity a classically-trained actor, would you? Well, here's the proof as Ritter takes a dramatic turn opposite Billy Bob Thornton in 1997's Sling Blade:

No slapstick, though Ritter's character may have put his foot in his mouth.

Vital Viewing (Great Depression Stimulus Package Edition)

 

Actress Jean Harlow was born on this day in 1911 (prone to bouts of influenza at a time when penicillin was not yet widely available, she died of kidney failure at age 26 in 1937.) Let's start out with a few home movies:

Watching the above you might get the impression Harlow was a silent film star. In fact, she was a major star of early talkies, as well as a major sex symbol of early talkies. In this scene from 1932's Red Dust, she tries her best to break the ice by talking up dairy products with a major male sex symbol of early (as well as later) talkies, Clark Gable (speaking of which, Gable's behavior at one point probably wouldn't pass a present-day #MeToo test, but keep in mind it's not the present day but 92 years ago):

Red Dust was a drama, though the above scene was obviously one of the film's lighter moments. Now, while I won't pretend it was the first and foremost reason she or later blond bombshells as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were such box office draws, Jean Harlow was in fact very good at comedy. Here's a comic scene from another movie that was otherwise dramatic, 1933's Dinner at Eight. I've shown it before (in a post about Marie Dressler, who also appears) and it never fails to make me chuckle:

 Take that, Sam Altman!

Quips and Quotations (High Crimes and Misdemeanors Edition)

 

All I really know is, I got a check...And then all hell broke loose.

--Stormy Daniels

In total, 34 false entries were made in New York business records to conceal the initial covert $130,000 payment...Further, participants in the scheme took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the reimbursements.

--Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg

Minutes before he's arraigned on charges in New York, Trump was dealt his latest significant defeat in the Jan. 6 special counsel investigation.

--Kyle Cheney, Twitter

A federal appeals court in Washington rejected an emergency bid by former President Donald Trump to block several top aides from testifying in the special counsel investigation of his effort to subvert the 2020 election.

--Kyle Cheney, Politico

Honesty is the best politics.

--Stan Laurel, Sons of the Desert

 

 

 

Vital Viewing (Team Player Edition)

 

Stella may have told this magazine, but since I only have the cover and not the insides, I can't tell you why she posed in the nude. What I can tell you is that like fellow nude models Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Stella Stevens possessed actual acting talent, particularly when it came to comedy acting. To prove my point, I've enlisted the aid of...

...these two guys.

First up, Jerry:

The Andy Griffith Show fans will have recognized Ernest T. Bass himself, Howard Morris, in the above clip. Note how uncharacteristically subdued Jerry seems. He may have met his match in Morris.

But back to Stella...

...this time with Dean:

A very earthy woman. Dino could have done a lot worse.

1938-2023

Quips and Quotations (Sexual Revolutionary Edition)

 

1940-2023

 

My family was very conservative, and I had a traditional upbringing. I was not brought up to be a sex symbol, nor is it in my nature to be one. The fact that I became one is probably the loveliest, most glamorous and fortunate misunderstanding.

--Raquel Welch

If a man were going to become a woman, he would want to become the most beautiful woman in the world. He would become Raquel Welch.

--Robert Fryer, producer of the film version of Gore Vidal's novel Myra Breckinridge

 I can't recall what Gore Vidal thought of Raquel Welch in Myra Breckinridge, his transgender comedy, though he wrote off the film itself as "an awful joke." The movie managed to piss off everyone including the White House which demanded that old clips of Shirley Temple be excised from the movie because it demeaned her position as a delegate at the United Nations. So it had that going for it. Still the film seems even more relevant to our time than the late 60s.

--Jeffrey St. Clair, journalist

Raquel and an up-and-comer

  

 Fame is a fickle food

Upon a shifting plate

--Emily Dickinson 

 

Internalizing Behavior

 

Good advice. 

Just don't become...

  

...friends with a shoplifter.

Fangmate of the Month

I wonder if the late comedienne Phyllis Diller's penchant for wisecracks about her own homely appearance would fly today. Here's one example: "A Peeping Tom was outside my house. He asked me to pull down the shades."  A person of such low self-esteem is in obvious need of a life coach. Is Tony Robbins available? Don't bother. In the middle decades of the last century Diller figured out that the best way to unleash the power within was by subverting the outwardly powers that be. With her electromagnetized hair/wig, ink blot mascara, tubercular laugh, conducting baton-length cigarette holder, and baggy Sunday funny pages-colored minidresses, Diller took the old comic hag stereotype and gave it an updated, consumerist, quasi-countercultural twist that made her one of the more memorable figures of 1960s-and-early 70s comedy and a backdoor American original. If she was self-loathing, then she loathed herself all the way to the bank. Diller was hot enough and hip enough by 1966 that the then-popular girlie magazine Playboy came to her with what must have been a rather surprising offer: a nude photo shoot. That she said yes may have been even more surprising. The whole thing was meant to be a joke, a way for the magazine to show that it could make fun of itself with the help of a woman famous for making fun of herself. Laughter, not titillation, was the goal. Diller, a veteran of the Playboy Club stand-up comedy circuit, seemed to enjoy the opportunity to appear in front of a camera wearing nothing but a Victorian-style bedspread. Unless its Hugh Hefner's beach towel. You decide:

The above photo was never published. Playboy ended up scrapping the whole idea. While a partially nude Phyllis Diller may not have been Jayne Mansfield, neither was she, when it comes to getting laughs, Phyllis Diller. And that Peeping Tom just might have kept right on peeping.

Irresistible, You Fool

Dancer/choreographer/singer/actress Gwen Verdon was a mainstay of The Great White Way for decades, but she actually got her start on the other side of the continent as a "specialty dancer" in Hollywood musicals and even nonmusicals that nonetheless needed a dance scene. Generally, a specialty dancer appeared in only one scene, or sequence, and wasn't seen again for the rest of the film. Some specialty dancers, such as Cyd Charisse and Ann Miller, went on to become full-fledged movie stars. That didn't happen in Gwen's case, so the Californian native went east, where she became a full-fledged Broadway star, first in the 1954 show Can-Can, and, more decisively, the next year in Damn Yankees, for which she won a Tony. When it came time to turn Yankees into a motion picture, Gwen was a shoo-in to repeat her role as the satanic seductress Lola, though you might get the opposite impression from the above headline that appeared in the 1950s tabloid Tempo News. In fact, you  might have thought Hollywood was through with her. Why, exactly, was she "too hot"?

Well, according to the article, written in the wake of her Broadway success in the baseball-and-Beelzebub musical, Gwen "can't get to home base with Hollywood umpires", meaning that her scenes were either trimmed or cut out of a movie altogether by censors. Gwen herself is quoted as saying that "Boston has never seen me", but she was "...allowed in...cities where there was progressive education." The latter quote reminded me of the "communities standards" test the Supreme Court once invoked in an obscenity case. I must tell you, I was a bit surprised when I came across this article. I never knew that Gwen Verdon was once thought of as only appealing to the "prurient interest", to borrow another memorable Supreme Court phrase. She was undeniably sexy, and remained sexy for quite a long time (when she was 50, she appeared on stage wearing an outfit much like a bikini in the original 1975 Broadway production of Chicago.) But this article is from the same decade that saw the rise of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Ava Gardner, and Gina Lollobrigida. Those ladies didn't exactly come across as Taliban charm school teachers. I wonder if the whole thing wasn't written by some press agent, which was a common practice back then. Of course, censorship was a genuine threat during the homogenized 1950s, in particular, and, at the time, famously, in Boston (the joke went that the city's library system had an extra branch just for all the banned books) and the movie studios did have to be careful. However, the well-publicized threat of censorship, but one that was nonetheless successfully dodged (except in Boston), well, that could fill up those theater seats that were being increasingly abandoned in favor of television. So it was a fine line Hollywood had to walk, and someone like Gwen had to dance.

The line was often walked religiously. Literal religion. Until the advent of the beach movie in the 1960s, the greatest number of scantily-clad females could be found in biblical pictures, and 1951's David and Bathsheba is where we find then-specialty dancer Verdon, her red hair hidden beneath a black wig, playing a slave girl (as were most professional dancers in 1000 BC, at least according to Hollywood): 

       

 
Now for something a little less devout (unless you're a disciple of Anton LaVey.) In this scene from the 1958 film version of the aforementioned Damn Yankees, Lola presents a ballpark figure to Tab Hunter, who, in a brilliant bit of acting, looks as though he's just been hit with a line drive: 

Gwen Verdon, at her sexy, and, lest we forget, talented, best. As controversial as the above two clips may have been in the 1950s, were they being shown now for the very first time, I doubt there would be any calls for censorship. But even if there were...

 ...Boston can now be easily detoured.

 

Graphic Grandeur (Tortured Adolescence Edition)

Cartoonist Bob Montana, best known for the comic book and comic strip character Archie Andrews, was born on this day in 1920 (he died in 1975.) A few weeks ago Montana was honored by the town of Meredith, New Hampshire, where he spent much of his adult life:

Now let's take a closer look at this goofy teenage boy, who, for reasons I've never quite understood, is the object of a fierce rivalry between two of Riverdale High's hottest female students:

The above examples are from the 1940s and '50s. The phrase "raging hormones" had yet to be coined, but clearly needed to be.

Though Montana continued to draw the newspaper comic right up to his death, around 1960 or so (dates vary), a very fine cartoonist by the name of Dan De Carlo became the head artist of the Archie comic book line, and remained so for the next four decades (he died in 2001.) His style was a bit different from Montana's, more streamlined, less rambunctious (and the red-headed leading man finally got that overbite taken care of.)  However, the gang of Riverdale teens...

...weren't any less amorous. In fact, they may even have been more so.

Now that I think of it, didn't they start teaching sex education in schools around 1960 or so?