Cartoons to feature presentations - bring back the roster

Celebrating Warner Bros.' 100th anniversary all this month on Turner Classic Movies has given us an enjoyable twist in their programming, and most especially for the showing of the famed Warner Bros. cartoons.

Many of us are old enough to remember Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, et al., as staples of Saturday morning, along with our cereal, until we could recite the dialogue verbatim.

I wish more cartoons could be shown on TCM showcasing the work of different studios.  It would be a nice experience, I think, to have for at least one morning or evening programming a slate that might be similar to the movie theater experience from the 1930s through 1950s, somewhat in the vein of the PBS program from the 1980s called Matinee at the Bijou (which I discussed in this previous post).

As we know, one did not just see a feature film, whether in the neighborhood movie house or the grand movie palaces downtown.  Before Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis came on the screen, there was some other business to attend to.  First, as if to whet the appetite before the main course, the audience was given appetizers:  a cartoon, a newsreel, a short subject, a serial, a B-movie, and then the feature.  

(And the roster was continually repeated -- one could walk into a movie in the middle of the feature and just stay to watch the whole thing all over again when the projectionist rewound the whole business and showed it again.  For ten cents, or fifteen, or twenty-five, one could stay in the theater all day and night.)

If TCM could reproduce this roster of the old-time movie theater experience perhaps once per week, that would be great.  If they could find a way of delivering popcorn through the TV, that would be nice, too.  And uniformed ushers to kick us out of our living rooms in case we get rowdy. Just a suggestion.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. 

TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Canada Carries On - Proudly She Marches - 1944

For Canada Day today, which celebrates the 1867 founding of the Canadian Confederation, we have a view of Canada's women service personnel during World War II in this National Film Board newsreel Canada Carries On, an episode called "Proudly She Marches" (1944).

It shows the varied duties and training of the women in Canada's different uniformed services, where ex-salesgirls, librarians, teachers, and students helped win the war.  It took everybody to get the job done.

Happy Canada Day to our neighbors to the north, and thank you to a generation of ladies who kept fascism off our continent. 

Happy Independence Day

Happy Independence Day.  Have a look at this link for the scene in "Holiday Inn" (1942) which features the above Bing Crosby in a musical salute to the day.   Below, have a look at a 1942 rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians.  Don't forget to stand.

(And don't forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and pause the music so you can hear the video.)

Horror Movies - May 1945

Newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps were “generally received by audiences in silence or with muttered expressions of outrage,” according to the New York Times May 2, 1945. It was the first time these films were shown, and the first time the most of public had become aware of the mass exterminations.

The film was shot by Army Signal Corps cameramen accompanying the Allied armies now pouring over the Rhine and liberating these camps at Nordhausen, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, and Hadamar as they went.

“…Piles of the dead, pitiful specimens of the ‘living dead,’ the crematoriums in which victims were disposed of and other bodies exhumed from graves for identification…”

Some of the reels were preceded by warnings to the audience not to look “if you are susceptible to gruesome sights.” Most people, thankfully, are sensitive to cruelty, but many in these audiences still had the courage and the determination to look.

“There were no indications that many persons took refuge in shutting their eyes, and the response apparent in theaters indicated that the patrons were determined to see.”

Radio City Music Hall opted out of showing the newsreels, where the manager explained that he did not want to shock or sicken the large proportion of women and children among his patrons.

Adolf Hitler, who evidently feared criminal punishment worse than he feared hell, committed suicide only a couple days before, and what was left of the Nazi military government would surrender in another five days. V-E day followed next, a wild day of celebration over much of the world, but these newsreels of the death camps put perhaps even the celebrations into perspective.

For many after seeing these newsreels, as for the astonished and disgusted Allied soldiers who stumbled horror-stricken upon the extermination camps, it was not so much “hurray for us, we’re number one!” like fans of champion sports teams who overturn cars in a “Bizarro World” simulation of V-E Day. For these liberators of the camps, and the sensitive audiences in the movie theaters watching the newsreel, it would always be a spine tingling, sweat-soaked realization of what the world would have been like if we had lost.

“They are probably the most frightful pictures of death and woe ever exhibited in American newsreels.”

Before television, before the Internet, movie theaters were more than just a place of escapism. They were the spirit of their communities, and a gathering place for shared human experience, and sometimes even the conscience of the neighborhood that led the blood drives and the bond rallies and the Red Cross donations.

And the feature films that followed the newsreels and the B-movie, and the cartoon ever after this would have a bit more realistic viewpoint to them, a grittiness borne of wretched experience, a cynicism the result of innocence lost. Even the old movie monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man seemed like foolish creatures from fairy tales.

We had seen real monsters now. There was no comparison.

The Hindenburg Disaster (1937)

Before nightly broadcast news coverage, let alone round-the-clock cable television news coverage, film news events were delivered edited in the can to movie theaters after the event was over. The Hindenburg disaster, which occurred 70 years ago on May 6, 1937, was one such event.

Five companies sent cameramen to Lakehurst, New Jersey, where the German airship “Hindenburg” was to land after a two-and-a-half-day Atlantic crossing. The luxury zeppelin was in its second year of service, had made many safe crossings to the US and to South America from Germany, and this particular landing in New Jersey was considered to be routine. Fox, Hearst, Pathe, Paramount, and Universal were on hand, but nobody was prepared for what happened.

There had been warnings to the German Ambassador that a bomb was planted on the airship and would go off after it passed New York City, but there remain several theories in the controversy of the “Hindenburg’s” crash.

What we remember most is the frantic reporting from radio announcer Herbert Morrison. His graphic descriptions of the fireball were so graphic because he was a radio man. His account of the incident was not played until the next day, on radio. It was not originally part of any film footage. That came later, when Morrison’s audio was tacked onto the film footage, and became what we know as the Hindenburg film.

Here are a few links to the various stock footage of the disaster. One can see the difference Morrison’s audio adds to the film.

This is the Paramount (British) footage:

http://newsfilm.bufvc.ac.uk/article.php?story=2005100819530388

This is the Pathe version with Herbert Morrison’s audio tacked onto it:

http://www.signalalpha.com/html/historical_audio___video.html

Another version with Morrison’s audio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDU2MWJwJDc

Here is Morrison’s audio version alone:

http://www.otr.com/hindenburg.shtml

Comparing the versions of Mr. Morrison’s live account with those that have the narration dubbed in, we instantly see a difference between live news and canned news, and how much less exciting it is to be told an event after it has happened than to hear of it while it is occurring. To be sure, the audience in the theater already knew that the “Hindenburg” exploded and crashed by the time they saw the film, but if you have Morrison’s audio along with it, it seems as if you are there.

Impressive is the sight of the airship flying over the skyline of New York City, an over 800-foot long football with a swastika on its tailfin, gliding slowly over the skyscrapers like something out of Buck Rogers, or so it must have seemed, very futuristic to folks on the ground looking up. Thirty-six people died when it crashed a little while later. One of the most affecting comments Mr. Morrison made in his audio description of the event was that most personal, most subjective remark in the form of a choking sob, “I’m going to have to step inside a minute…Honestly, this is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed!”

His reporting and this disaster have been parodied a lot, but one cannot help but still be affected by the footage, both audio and video.

That’s it for this week. See you Monday.