 |
| NW Hounded Police |
This week's post is from Classic Television- The FBI, with Efrem Zimbalist, jr. (The announcer always said it so we wouldn't confuse him with other Efrem jrs running around out there.) And Philip Abbott, with the most obvious "credits" joke in TV history. And special guest stars.
The F Production (1:51)
Here's a leftover shot from last week, "All Through the Night" (1942): Dame Judith Anderson kissing her dog.
"All Through the Night" (1941) is a Humphrey Bogart film, where a gang of Runyonesque sharpies uncover a plot by Nazi saboteurs to mine New York harbor and blow up America's newest battleship, right under our noses. (Don't ask me how it got there.) It was made between "The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca", and cast Peter Lorre as a Nazi enforcer who goes around with his own scary face light.
The effect is so strong- something like that Twilight Zone episode, "The Purple Testament"- it illuminates his face when all around is normal light,
My guess is, the light's attached to his waist somehow, it sticks out about a foot or two, and has a little reflector, angled up, like a teeny photographer's light.
Ohh, kids, highly scary!
Uh-oh, now it's on this guy! Maybe the Nazis are just really into mood lighting.
Nazi-mood lighting.
So, the Nazi saboteurs have a big meeting, where Pepi scopes out the crowd in his inconspicuous way (the guy with all the light up in his face)-
Bogey pretends to be one of them, and catches wise to the plot (on account of, the whole meeting being in English)-
I'm not sure whether to include the ending, but I will say that Evil meets its fate in an appropriately-illuminated way. They invented Technicolor, and chiaroscuro was wiped off the Silver Screen.
Bye-bye, and buy bonds.
I'm including the more-or-less complete credits for their full Saul Bass effect, but if you just want to hear them blow the roof off and keep playing on top of it, I recommend the second one. The energy is more direct, and that clarinet is crazy.
(0:45) Continuing to play out the string of old bits while trying to establish a routine that delivers fresh audio every week. This one was up a decade ago, might have made it onto the Bandcamp collections. Or not. Kind of running out of this stuff.
No picture this week because Google's started asking for special cookie access, and I'm already a little weirded-out by their map change to The United States of Bonerland-- no, that was Bart Simpson. Anyway, changes may be coming. But you may rest assured that Cutupsound will continue to post, if not new audio, extremely unfamiliar audio, every Sunday around noon. (Except for Old TV Guy Day, second Sunday.) And now, this week's bit.
Hello and welcome to today's experiment. Today we'll attempt to discover what, if any, use there may be for a movie rating system incorporating the number of times the actors appeared on the CBS Television series, Perry Mason (1957-1966). 271 episodes of this program were produced at the height of Network TVs glory years, ensuring a high-quality procession of the working actors of that time and, perhaps, turning into an indication of heretofore unrealized movie types and flavors.
I first noticed this while watching Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (1956), which has 13 Masonites. (Their names are followed by the number of times they appeared on Mason.)
Morris Ankrum, 22
Larry Blake, 3
Donald Curtis, 1
Thomas Browne Henry, 3
Clark Howat, 6
Harry Lauter, 1
Hugh Marlowe, 6
Alan Reynolds, 1
Grandon Rhodes, 16
Bert Stevens, 1
Frank Wilcox, 8
John Zaremba, 5
Dale Van Sickel ("Man Crushed Beneath Wall"), 1
Ankrum and Rhodes were judges. Thomas Browne Henry was that TS Eliot-looking guy who played generals. Hugh Marlowe, Mr L-7 himself. And Frank Wilcox was everywhere.
So, some big names, and about 3/4's smaller fry. What about other films from then?
Classic Hollywood: The Caine Mutiny (1954) = 16
Claude Akins, 1
Don Anderson, 3
Herbert Anderson, 1 (aka, "Dennis the Menace's Dad")
James Best, 2
Whit Bissell, 4 (Yeah, name something he wasn't in.)
Robert Bray, 3 (he was the Angry Astronaut)
Steve Brodie, 3
Don Dillaway, 4
Don Dubbins, 7
Arthur Franz, 5
Roy Jenson, 1
Kenneth MacDonald, 32 (did you know he was in a 3 Stooges film?)
Steve Pendleton, 1
Bert Stevens, 1
Tom Tully, 2
May Wynn, 1
Western: Day of the Badman (1958) = 20
Chris Alcaide, 2
Edgar Buchanan, 2
Peggy Converse, 2
Christopher Dark, 1
Ann Doran, 3
Robert Foulk, 4
Don Haggerty, 1
Chuck Hamilton, 1
Skip Homeier, 2
I. Stanford Jolley, 2
Jess Kirkpatrick, 1
Tom London, 1
Kenneth MacDonald, 32 (yay!)
Robert Middleton, 1
Hank Patterson, 1
Jack Perrin, 1
Harry Tyler, 3
Lee Van Cleef, 1
Joan Weldon, 1
Marie Windsor, 5
Science-Fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) = 13
Whit Bissell, 4
Virginia Christine, 3
Bobby Clark, 1
Richard Deacon, 1
Ralph Dumke, 2
Everett Glass, 1
Tom Fadden, 4
Dabbs Greer, 8
Frank Hagney, 3
Robert Osterloh, 2
Kenneth Patterson, 2
Guy Rennie, 1
Jean Willes, 2
and no Kenneth MacDonald
Conclusion: if these films are statistically average representations, we find that Masonites tend to congregate in westerns, instead of noirs as might have been expected. This is probably due to the fact that Hollywood quit making noirs by the late 50s, but they're always making westerns. And the lunchbucket workaday yeoman actors who populated Mason ended up there. It also looks like a steady dozen or so appear in your average sci-fi.
These conclusions might be undone by further research- I don't think anyone's considered it on this level, and I might, later. I'll try to start writing it early enough to include some pictures next time.