Well, dear readers, it is 5:48 on a Friday morning and I am up. I could not sleep. I have arisen and am sitting, bleary-eyed at my handy-dandy laptop computer writing these here notes because what the hell else am I going to do at 5:48 on a Friday morning? I suppose I’m still hung-over from yesterday’s rather amazing celebration. So much Diet Coke, so many cheese slices and ham chunks, so much dancing of the Hora and the Mashed Potato. I feel like a mashed potato. First of all, I was feeling ever so much better – I’d actually won the fight and hadn’t really gotten full-on sick. Then, yesterday, I started feeling bad again – same exact symptoms. I don’t know if it’s just my allergies or if something more sinister is afoot, or even aknee, but I’m damn tired of it and I am hereby putting my ill-feeling on warning: Stop this now, you ill-feeling, or there will be hell to pay and haven’t we already paid hell enough? Yes, as Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer so eloquently put it, Enough is Enough.
In honor of it being 5:48, perhaps I’ll go read the marvelous short story The 5:48 by Mr. John Cheever. No, I will not do that because it is now 5:49 and Mr. John Cheever did not write a story entitled The 5:49. If I had a handy-dandy swimming pool then I could go swimming and then read the marvelous short-story The Swimmer by Mr. John Cheever. However, I do not have a handy-dandy swimming pool, hence I will not be reading the marvelous short story, The Swimmer. Oh, well, I guess Mr. John Cheever shall go unread this fine Friday morning, at least by the likes of me.
Did you know that Mr. Michael Todd, Jr. passed away? I will always have a fond place in my heart for Mr. Michael Todd, Jr. for it was Mr. Michael Todd, Jr. that gave the world the one-and-only feature film made in his marvelous patented process, Smell-o-Vision. Oh, yes, there was a competing smell process called AromaRama, but it couldn’t hold a candle to Smell-o-Vision. Movies that smelled, of course, did not catch on with the public, because usually the public can smell a movie before it ever gets to the theater, especially a stinker. But I saw the one-and-only feature made in Smell-o-Vision and I’m here to tell you that I loved it, loved it, do you hear me? It was called Scent of Mystery, and it starred Denholm Elliot as Lucky Larker, with Diana Dors (who could not love a woman called Diana Dors), Peter Lorre and Paul Lukas in support. There was also a “mystery woman” who we never see, except from the back, and she is always wearing the Scent of Mystery perfume. At the end of the film, the mystery woman is revealed to be the one-and-only Elizabeth Taylor. The film was stunning to look at, all shot on location is Spain in Todd AO, with astonishing six track stereophonic sound. So vivid is my memory of this film that I can tell you that the overture started with horns honking from all around the theater. In the first scene of the film, the camera follows a butterfly as it flits to and fro and fro and to and hither and thither and yon, until it finally swoops down into a rose garden and we, the audience, are treated to a beautiful smell of roses. Each seat in the theater had a tube beneath it and that is how the smells were piped in – in the projection booth was a huge machine which held all the smells and those smells were triggered by the film itself. There has been much speculation that the reason Smell-o-Vision failed was because they couldn’t clear the smells out in time for the next smell and smell confusion ran rampant. But that is not so, dear readers, they cleared those smells just fine and there was no smell confusion. Plus, if you had a good sense of smell, you could solve the mystery in Scent of Mystery. Being an aficiando of this sort of thing, I also saw the competing smell movie in AromaRama (it actually beat Scent of Mystery into the theater by a week, damn their smelly eyes), entitled Behind the Great Wall. What those cheeseball exploitation mavens had done was to buy a cheap documentary about China and add smells to it. I remember there was a prologue with either Chet Huntley or David Brinkley, in which they explained the process of AromaRama, in which the smells were blown in through the air-conditioning unit of the theater, in this case the Four Star on Wilshire Blvd (literally two blocks from where Scent of Mystery was playing at the Ritz). At some point, Mr. Huntley or Mr. Brinkley cut an orange in half and suddenly we were treated to the smell of an orange. It was not nearly as effective as Smell-o-Vision, because the smells were not instant and it did take forever to clear the air.
Scent of Mystery had an interesting fate. It was a huge flop, and then it was recut, shortened by almost an hour, narration was added to keep the story coherent, and it was shown in Cinerama theaters as Holiday in Spain. It is, as far as I know, the only Todd AO (or any other 65mm film) that has never been printed down to 35mm, so it is almost literally a lost film. It was shown once on television, almost twenty years ago under the title Scent of Mystery, even though they showed the cut version, Holiday in Spain. Viewers could purchase scratch ‘n sniff cards at 7-11 and recreate the thrill of Smell-o-Vision in their very own homes. But the print they showed literally looked like it had been videotaped off a movie screen, which it may well have been. It was totally faded and just awful. I would love to see the original cut restored to its Todd AO glory, but one doubts that will be happening any time soon.
What am I, writing the whole of these here notes in the first section? I can’t do that, that is unseemly and I will be bitch-slapped at 6:10 on a fine Friday morning. So, let’s all click on the Unseemly Button and be done with this section.
I caught up on some DVD watching last night and I must say that it was disappointing that nothing that I watched was in Smell-o-Vision. First I watched the remake of Ocean’s 11. It was certainly enjoyable in a surface kind of way, but sloppily written and plotted. I do love heist films (eight years ago I told David Wechter that we should write one, because no one had done a classic heist film in twenty years and I knew the genre would come back – boy, has it come back) so I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, but all these heist movies today are so busy being high-tech that they just totally lose all believability. I mean the crooks in these heist movies today have billions of dollars worth of the most incredible theft equipment ever put on earth, so why do they need to steal anything? They could just not buy all those billions of dollars worth of high-tech equipment and they’d have plenty of money. In the true classics of this genre, Riffifi and Topkapi and their like, the crooks have to use their home-grown skills and wiles, which I find more interesting. In any case, the cast is clearly having a good time, and I’ll watch any film set in Las Vegas.
Then I watched a true classic of 50s filmmaking, Alfred E. Green’s supremely wacky, Invasion USA! Is there a stranger film than this? It is mesmerizingly awful, but you sit there and watch, unable to turn it off. Great B cast, including Gerald Mohr and Peggie Castle, as well as Dan O’Herlihy who is great as a mysterious character named, wait for it, Mr. Ohman. This film is about communists. Not only communists, but a communist takeover of this here country, the United States of America. It is a frightening cautionary tale and the communists are terrifying, more terrifying even than Godzilla or Rodan. There is nothing more terrifying than communists and this movie is the living proof. It is a lovely transfer from Synapse Films and I recommend it without reservation, if you are a fan of this sort of thing.
What am I, Ebert and Roeper all of a sudden? Tomorrow, I will be doing our very own handy-dandy The Broadway Radio Hour. Mr. Donald Feltham has asked me to pick out my twelve favorite showtunes, whether original cast versions or cover versions. I’ve decided to limit myself to original cast versions, because the whole thing is too daunting for me to muck it up with cover versions. Choosing just twelve things is very difficult indeed – one can’t simply get all their favorites in, so I’m trying to be interesting and particular in my choices. Anyway, it should be fun, and unless I’m mistaken, I think that show will go up on Sunday.
Don’t forget, tomorrow we will have our handy-dandy Unseemly Trivia Contest question and we do hope that all of you will play along so that you have a chance to win a sparkling prize. And just think – that sparkling prize might just be in Smell-o-Vision. In fact, I think these notes should be in Smell-o-Vision, don’t you, dear readers? Wouldn’t that be exciting? Wouldn’t that just be too too? To not only read these here notes, but to smell them? That would just put us into a whole new sphere, popularity-wise. For example, if I say “I was sitting on my couch like so much fish” suddenly you would smell fish. I love this idea. If I said, “Let’s do the butterscotch pudding dance” you would smell butterscotch pudding”. And if I said, “Let’s do the Coprophiliac’s Joke Book” you would smell…
Oh. Well, maybe we shouldn’t go there.
Well, dear readers, perhaps I shall go back to bed and try to get an additional two hours of sleep so that I don’t look like a wizened old YodaJew. Today’s topic of discussion: Yesterday we discussed favorite trashy movies. Today let’s discuss favorite gimmick or exploitation movies. I’ll start: Anything William Castle did, but especially The Tingler. I also am quite partial to Freaks, Marijuana (the film, not the plant) and Reefer Madness (maybe those are the same film), Rudy Ray Moore’s brilliant Dolemite, Mr. Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels, and Russ Meyer’s masterpiece of strangeness, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Starring the luminous Tura Satana. Your turn.