The Docking Pilot

 

Soviet space art, Google

A relic from the 70s, when I'd been doing weird late-nite radio for only a few years.  The piece at the end is Ilhan Mimaroglu's Prelude Number 16 from "Face the Windwills and Turn Left" on Finnadar Records.

 The Docking Pilot (4:39)

The F Production

Tex Avery, 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)

 

American Fantasy

 Here's a leftover shot from last week, "All Through the Night" (1942): Dame Judith Anderson kissing her dog.

 Aww...Even Dame Judith loves her doggy.  I happen to admire Dame Judith, for her imperturbability.

 

 

She's got as much cool as George Sanders, if not more.  But people do love their dogs.  Thomas Jefferson used to take his dog to work.

 

 

Which brings us to today's bit.  I try to stay away from political stuff, because of the expiration date (anyone want to hear this stuff about W?)  But I was thinking about politics in popular culture, and contrasting today's atmosphere with the sort of lionization our founders received in Radio's Golden Age.  What if they'd been faced with a successful Benedict Arnold?  It might have gone something like this...

 

American Fantasy (5:23)

Old TV: "All Through the Night" with Peter Lorre's personal face illuminator

 "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.

 

 

This effect, of course, was used all the time to enhance scariness, especially in chiaroscuro epics of the 30s and 40s, where direct light is pretty scanty.  It seems to raise the emotional heat, especially around cold-fish killers like Pepi, here.

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)-

 Which blows his cover with Pepi, and his light-

 - and they both rush upstairs to tell Conrad Veidt.

 Who has a crazy idea, even for a Nazi, of attacking the battleship with a speedboat filled with TNT.  Pepi's reaction is predictable:

 "You stupid eediot!"  

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.  

 

 

Oceans 11 (1960), Main Titles

 

Frank Sinatra's film, Nelson Riddle's music.  Plus exploding credits by animator Saul Bass.  This has to be the 60-est movie intro of all time.  

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. 

Saul Bassified-version (2:53)

Just the Band (1:37)

Mrs Housewife

 

(1:33) Living chemistry through better.  If I do one of these every week, maybe we'll get enough for an Old Time Cutup Radio stream.  

Play

Speed of G

 (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.

Play

 

Old TV: The Masonic Movie Rating System

 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.

 

 

William S Burroughs birthday, 2025

 

February 5, 1914.  This year's offering was originally created for late-nite radio.

Play (4:48)

Auf Der Hop

 

(2:29) A mashup of "At The Hop" by Danny and the Juniors with a version in German recorded by Ralf Bendix.  The fact that the German version is pitched lower creates some unintentional harmonizing.  It's a mess but the incredible energy of this fantastic song seems to be unaffected. Some things are just inspiring to work with.

(Google Translate tells us that "At The Hop" in German would be "am Hopfen."  "Auf der Hop" translates as "On the Hop."  Which seems more appropriate.)

Play

Crystal Ship Shortwave

 

(2:35) This is an experiment in applied noise.  Part of Radio's magic was always voices and sounds flying through the air, and sometimes they pick up audio flotsam that lends an effect of its own.  I noticed this while working on pirate radio collected on the Internet Archive a few years ago, but the phenomenon of vast soundwaves colliding in the ionosphere, throwing off ozone and whatnot, it's like Synchronicity pooping out of the sky.

The noise here has been articulated a little.  It's a recording of a shortwave broadcast.  One version is reverbed-up, the other is split into two independent channels, for an attempt at stereo weirdness.  The original track by the Doors is also in there.  I actually put a little work into it, but it might be an Audio Fractal: too much like itself to be anything else.  It happens from time to time.  You might hear more on headphones.  

Play

Old TV: Blake Edwards and Bond

 

It's the second Sunday of the month, so we're taking a break from audio to cover the second topic of this blog, the Old TV Guys and Gals who can be found, pending recognition, at your local internet aggregator.

Even after a lifetime of spotting these characters, a routine dip into archival television can yield one or two faces, still unnamed, recognizable on the fringes but barely acknowledged- up to now.

I was watching Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie for maybe the tenth time, and realized I'd seen that TV director before-

Maybe some flash of recognition, from him being cranky?  Have I seen this guy getting mad?  Maybe even playing a TV or movie director?  Being really irate at somebody?

Well, yes-

Herb Ellis, as the irate movie director in Blake Edwards The Party.  A look at Mr Ellis's resume made me surprised I hadn't caught his name before, in the last 60-some years; he started in 1950 and was regularly on the programs I watched from infancy. 

I think it's because he belongs to a special class of Old TV Guys, who possess a mastery of obscurity.  A few weeks ago, I discussed Tony Regan, the silent bystander in scores, hundreds of productions.  Mr Regan is an exemplar of the craft, but the industry is full of actors who could modulate their sparkle down to a dull glow, and pass basically unrecognized for their entire careers.

It's not quite the same group of actors who, while also playing secondary (or lower) characters, stand out and sometimes rise into full-fledged celebrity- the Burt Mustins and Katie Freemans, instantly recognizable, adeptly playing the same character each time.  

This group is almost as anonymous as the ones who never speak.  It's their faces that stand out, and a director who casts for faces will usually find interesting ones for these jobs- interesting to us because of where else we might have seen them,

Another Blake Edwards' film of that era, A Shot in the Dark, has a few of these guys, who turn up, farther in the background, in James Bond films.  (Of all places.)

Cato (Burt Kwouk)

is the Chinese Guy in Goldfinger

 

The Butler

is also in Goldfinger, Mr Solo of Chicago-

And the desk clerk at the nudist colony

is some sort of government expert in Thunderball.

Also, the second butler is in an Avengers episode, but now that's really getting obscure. My point is, I've seen all these films many times.  It might seem like there's no surprises.  But these are all recognitions I've caught only in the last few years.  There's always, it seems, more to be made.  Keep watching the Shows.

Audio Fractals

 

(3:55)  A fractal is an image made up of copies of itself.  Not sure how that applies to audio.  Maybe it happens on this piece but I suspect not.  

Play