Aeolian Vocalion

Ramsay Ames was certainly quite striking. Most fans seem to associate her with her Mummy movie, but I always think of her as the heroine in the Republic serial "G-Men Never Forget" (1948), where she actually rescues the hero a couple of times. Not a particularly good serial, but perhaps the only one that actually has a little touch of 'noir' about it.

Yep, saw Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney on stage when they were touring with "Sugar Babies." She was still dancing up a storm there in her later years. The play was a tribute to old-time burlesque, with musical numbers and comedy blackouts. I remember a gal doing a fan dance.

Wasn't Miller in "Stage Door" (1937) before she was in "You Can't Take it With You" (1938)? I recall her in several RKO items, but it was when she went to Columbia during the war years that she had some nice spotlight roles in some neat little b-musicals.

In the post-WW2 years, the trend in entertainment was towards 'psychological drama,' whether theater, movies, radio dramas, etc. Publishers and producers started to demand heroes to have mental demons to motivate their actions. Before this, your archetypical heroes were straightforward protagonists who stepped in and saved the girl, saved the town, saved whatever, out of a more pure moral sense of right-and-wrong.

But with the psychological backstories, explaining the heroes, the villains, the heroines, etc., everything became more 'inward' looking. More emotionalism, more self-absorption, etc. Drama became more and more defined by this. It really seeped into the culture, and I frankly think it's led to a lot of the weird problems we've seen, going back to the "Me Generation" mentality up to present day craziness.

So, yeah, I think when psychology went from beyond a weird little fringe pseudo-science and was injected into the mainstream by the post-war intelligentsia, a lot of our societal rot really began.

A rare, early example of the genre...

I was thrilled when a nice print of "Deluge" (1933) turned up. For a long time it seemed only an incredibly ratty, almost unwatchable foreign-sourced copy was all that existed of this rare independent production released through RKO. The impressive special-effects footage of NYC being washed away by a flood was re-used in later productions, like serials, but the original film was hard to see. A good spotlight for ill-fated star Peggy Shannon, after she'd blown her chances at Paramount, the film's cast also includes two other favorites of mine, Lois Wilson and Sidney Blackmer. Kino released the film on blu-ray a decade ago.

Yep, remember them very well. Always thought they sort of encapsulated the look and feel of early-to-mid-1970s television. The film stock, the music, the tone, etc. Just the type of thing you'd see during a commercial break while watching a rerun of "Mayberry RFD." I remember Art Linkletter often being a presenter. Didn't know they lasted on into the late-70s or even 1980s. I don't recall ever seeing any that late.

I suppose "Gun Cargo" (1949-?) starring Rex Lease.

It was a real zero-budget mess. I think it started filming in 1930 or so, but didn't get close to being finished. Then in the late-1930s, a producer got the old footage and brought the star back, and filmed new footage, and tried to make sense of the mess, but it was still deemed unreleasable. Finally had some more work done to it in the late-1940s to make it available for early tv-syndication, where it did circulate a little. But the whole mess never makes any sense. It's pretty dire and incoherent. A shame, because there are some folks I;ve always liked in the cast, from star Lease to Smith Ballew and such. Even offers a rare talkie role for silent serial queen Allene Ray.

Last night.

Disc-viewing (dvd, blu) constitutes about 95% of all of what I watch on television. The remaining 5% is probably a bit of news and weather. I don't watch cable, networks, or subscribe to any streaming services. Just discs, of which I amassed a large collection over the past twenty-five years.

I hated when all the individualistic wood-frame or cinder-block mom-and-pop country stores were replaced by crass, fluorescent-light lit quickie marts. The latter growing all the more grubby and bleak via the gradual domination by foreign ownership. Talk about losing cultural and societal fabric.

"Damn Citizen" (1957-Universal), starring Keith Andes.

I've given Fred Allen's radio series over a dozen chances over the years, from his 1937 "Town Hall Tonight" shows to his mid-1940s shows, and they just never amused me all that much.

Yet, in films, I remember first seeing his starring effort "It's in the Bag" (1945) in the early-1980s, and always finding it pretty hilarious. He was darned funny in it. I've revisited the movie numerous times over the years, via an off-air recording I made of it, to eventually the dvd release and then the blu-ray. I've also always gotten a big kick out of his film with Jack Benny, "Love Thy Neighbor" (1940), even though it tends to get mixed reviews. Fred Allen was also quite funny in the breezy Alice Faye movie "Sally, Irene and Mary" (1938). So all in all, I've found Allen to be consistently amusing in his rather scarce movie appearances.

In the late-1990s that Game Show Network began rerunning those old "What's My Line" kinescopes, and the early examples (roughly 1952-55) had Fred Allen regularly on the panel. And he was great fun there, too, bringing a kind of quirky, antique vaudeville humor to the otherwise haughty tone of the show. Probably saw at least 40 or 50 episodes with him. So anyway, I did develop a fondness of Fred Allen and his humor, while still never really caring all that much for his radio shows.