You come up to a ramshackle treehouse with a rope ladder. As you ascend the ladder, you notice a sign on the door: "FANZ OF THE 60S ONLEE - ALL OTHERS R POOPOO HEADS!!!". If you're not game for a blast of late-60's nostalgia, turn back now. For those of you still left, come on in - the Cinerama is warm tonight.
Lionpower from MGM is an unusual entry for this blog - it's a 27-minute promotional reel of MGM's 1967-68 season, only shown to distributors and exhibitors. I saw it as a filler short on TCM the other night and it blew me away, and I watched it again tonight with and equally wide grin fixed on my face. I've always had a soft spot for late-60's movies ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this is one of the best payloads of late-60's Hollywood hooey I've ever seen. The studio system was falling into a state of crisis, as the introduction of the ratings system, the growing counterculture, and the phasing out of short subjects were all radical changes to how movies were made and marketed. One of the treats with these kinds of promotional reels is how well its content has dated, and this particular selection of films is heavily conflicted, at once readying for the future and clinging desperately to old models - and man is it a hoot.
The lineup is split into five seasons: the usual four of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer, and a fifth "season" of roadshow movies, meaning they got a limited big-city release before a wide release and required reservations (a practice phased out in the 70's). It's narrated with glorious cheesiness by Karl Weber (Search for Tomorrow, Perry Mason) and initially set to music from the 1950 movie The Magnificent Yankee, fixing MGM's grasp of promotion squarely in the past. He boasts the most "creative filmmakers" and the "biggest stars", and doesn't lie in either claim - not only are directors like John Frankenheimer and Stanley Kubrick in the roster, nearly every movie has a huge, blockbuster star at the helm, some of them baffling in their combinations (two in particular I won't dare spoil, but be forewarned that David Niven and Raquel Welch are embarrassing themselves). This short also makes for a fine drinking game, wherein the viewer takes a shot for every movie they've actually seen - the majority of them have fallen into obscurity, with a few popping up in the recent wave of big-studio on-demand DVD-R releasing catalogs (and a couple of those may show up on this blog in good time).
The transitions from film to film are hysterical, such as the transition from Fall's Point Blank (a stylish thriller starring Lee Marvin) to Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Your Teeth are in My Neck: "From murder...to madness...and biting comedy at its best!" A George Hamilton heist flick, Jack of Diamonds (never released to video, more common than you'd think in this lineup) has the narrator stating, "Excitement is another breed of cat - a cat burglar who dares danger at every height!" Another fall movie, Our Mother's House, is another never-on-video movie that I've been seeking for ages, and if you know where I can find it I'd give you 12 million Mickey Mouse monies for the privilege. Fall tops off with the bloated-looking Sophia Loren/Omar Sharif historical romance More than a Miracle, and then Winter "surges ahead on Lionpower!". Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton headline - "People...politics....passion...in heat...in Haiti...in Graham Greene's The Comedians!" David MacCallum fires guns in the go-go-riffic Sol Madrid (which I've got to see, but is not on video, much to the dismay (or is it relief?) of fellow stars Rip Torn and Telly Savalas). Dark of the Sun is the serious-sounding filling to an unbelievable dud sandwich of The Biggest Bundle of Them All (whose VHS is available for the low, low price of $84.99 on Amazon) and The Extraordinary Seaman (mercifully never released to video), both of whose segments must be seen to be believed. Also MIA for the home market is another go-go inflected thriller, A Man Called Dagger, and the Charles Bronson co-starring-western Guns for San Sebastian has a VHS for the comparatively modest price of $47.96 when compared to the aforementioned Bundle.
"Lionpower springs into Spring", and I'll bet that most of you forgot that Hermans' Hermits even had a movie, much less that it had the portentious title Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter. If your eyes recover, the mysterious force of The Power, another George Hamilton flick but seemingly much better than Jack of Diamonds, will knock them right out (or turn them upside down, or whatever happened to that one guy strapped in the g-force chair...). Once Lionpower "roars into summer" the viewer is subjected to an Elvis movie, Speedway, here paired with the comparatively poor singing voice of Nancy Sinatra in a year when these movies should have been dead for a long time. Surprisingly, the Richard Burton-helmed Where Eagles Dare doesn't even have footage ready, and the spot is illustrated through delightfully cheesy "animation".
However, it's not nearly as cheesy as Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, with Doris Day heading up an embarrassed cast trapped in a chintzy living room and stock sex komedy krap. Ice Station Zebra is another big hit in the lineup, but beforehand we get a glimpse of the Sunset Boulevard-esque psychological drama The Legend of Lylah Clare. Now come the two Roadshow pictures, both well-known now: Far from the Madding Crowd, which gets the longest segment of them all, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, which the narrator doesn't elaborate upon in terms of plot or stars. Instead, all we see is one of Douglas Trumbull's slit-screen effects and some stars while Karl Weber talks about "all the stars of the solar system".
The most curious portion is a parade of cartoon teasers for movies yet to be produced, done in the same minimalist 60's style of the Where Eagles Dare bit, as nothing had been shot yet. Some of them are remembered fondly, such as The Shoes of the Fisherman, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Phantom Tollbooth (not released until 1970 and done in a completely different art style from the one in the bit).
Some others are less well-known, such as The Fixer from the novel by Bernard Malamud, Tai-Pan (not released until 1986), James Michener's Caravans, released ten years later by a different studio, and The Appointment, an apparently terrible Sidney Lumet movie that features the funniest piece of animation:
The most unusual are a trio of movie that were never made, two of them: Cornelius Ryan's WWII history The Last Battle, James Eastwood's totally forgotten mystery The Chinese Visitor, and The Tower of Babel, a Middle East-set political thriller to be directed by Peter Glenville (whose last film turned out to be The Comedians). Announcements rise and fall all the time, but it's odd to see promotion for movies that never came to be, and it's impossible to tell if those would have been any good.
Whatever your tastes, the short is a ton of fun, and most of the films will be new on you unless you're a near-masochistic freak for 60's pop culture. If you've got TCM they may play it again as an interstitial, but I have no idea how often they do it. It's the exact kind of thing that'll never get a video release, so don't hesitate if you get the chance to see it in high quality. For those of you who don't care about clarity of picture, here's a generous YouTube upload, which is where I got all those screencaps. I guarantee you'll laugh, cry, or puke no matter which movie you're rooting for.
~PNK
Some others are less well-known, such as The Fixer from the novel by Bernard Malamud, Tai-Pan (not released until 1986), James Michener's Caravans, released ten years later by a different studio, and The Appointment, an apparently terrible Sidney Lumet movie that features the funniest piece of animation:
The most unusual are a trio of movie that were never made, two of them: Cornelius Ryan's WWII history The Last Battle, James Eastwood's totally forgotten mystery The Chinese Visitor, and The Tower of Babel, a Middle East-set political thriller to be directed by Peter Glenville (whose last film turned out to be The Comedians). Announcements rise and fall all the time, but it's odd to see promotion for movies that never came to be, and it's impossible to tell if those would have been any good.
Whatever your tastes, the short is a ton of fun, and most of the films will be new on you unless you're a near-masochistic freak for 60's pop culture. If you've got TCM they may play it again as an interstitial, but I have no idea how often they do it. It's the exact kind of thing that'll never get a video release, so don't hesitate if you get the chance to see it in high quality. For those of you who don't care about clarity of picture, here's a generous YouTube upload, which is where I got all those screencaps. I guarantee you'll laugh, cry, or puke no matter which movie you're rooting for.
~PNK
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