Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist

dr katz

Editors Note: Dr. Katz is now available on DVD (But sadly not Blu-ray) so you may purchase your copy at the movie seller of your choice. The Midnight Cafe does not condone piracy.

My good friend Jamison recently sent me the entire series of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist on DVD. This has brought much joy to my heart because none of the episodes from this series are yet available on DVD. My friend bought it off of Ebay from someone who essentially put his dubbed off the TV VHS tapes into the DVD format. The quality ranges from really quite excellent to something more akin to rather unwatchable garbage. Most of the episodes have that old VHS tape that’s been sitting in the attic for a bit too long look. But it’s Dr. Katz on DVD and I’ll take what I can get.

The other, quite humorous, but in this collection is that whoever mastered the DVDs didn’t manage to edit out most of the commercials. A few of the episodes are presented commercial-free and look quite professional. The rest retain the commercials, but the creator has done us the favor of fast-forwarding through them. This creates a nice nostalgic effect to the collection, reminding me of my days of recording favorite TV shows and fast-forwarding through the commercials myself. He even does the guesswork on when the commercials will end, and the show will begin. Many times he’ll hit play only to find another commercial coming on. Or he’s a little slow on hitting the play button, fast-forwarding through the first few moments of the show.

The commercials themselves are also quite interesting. Craig Killborn is still hosting the Daily Show, Comedy Central is overhyping their sure-to-be hit show “Bob and Margaret” and Dell computers with 8 megs of RAM and 10 gig hard drives sell for only $2600!

The show itself is classic. It’s one of my all-time favorite television comedies. The set-up for the show has Jonathan Katz playing Dr. Jonathan Katz, a professional therapist (high concept, I know). His patients consist of guest stars who are generally professional comics, whose “problems” are generally bits from their acts. Other characters are Dr. Katz’s perpetually lazy son, Ben (H Jon Benjamin), and his sarcastic secretary Laura (Laura Silverman – how did they come up with these character names?). There is also the bartender and regular customer at a local pub Dr. Katz frequents (Julianne Shapiro and Will LeBow respectively).

Ben: “I’m saying, Dad, that it’s lonely at the top. So if you wanna ride my gravy train, you better hop on, now.”
Dr. Katz: “Why do you think this is the top? I mean, you could be lonely for any number of reasons.”
Ben: “What are you trying to say?”
Dr. Katz: “I’m saying, you’re a lonely guy. … Don’t blame it on being at the top.”

The best part of the show is the interaction between Katz, Ben, and Laura. The three have great chemistry and often feel more like three hilarious friends sitting around trying to one-up each other. I doubt the show ever had much of a script, for it all seems rather improvised on the spot.

Ben: “I bought a, uh, one of those fake fountains. You plug it in, and the water runs constantly.”
Dr. Katz: “A urinal.”

The only problem with the show is when the guests aren’t all that funny. In the early days, the guests consisted solely of stand-up comics. Generally, these guys are spot-on hilarious, doing their best bits. But, sometimes the guest is more annoying than funny (Judy Tenuta anyone?) Since an individual guest’s bits can make up 1/4th of the show, a bad guest could really drag the show down. This is especially true when as the show got a popular, non-comedian to appear. I loved Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Seinfeld, but here she says nothing funny, and her only gag seems to be that she goes to the toilet a lot while she’s pregnant. Katz makes the most of poor guests, though, and milks the material for all its comedy potential.

Dr. Katz: “Hold on one second, Ben, let me play the Devil’s advocate here, just for one minute.”
Ben: “No Dad, don’t, okay please, I don’t like the Devil’s advocate thing; you’re too good at it.”
Dr. Katz: “What about ‘Duck Duck Goose’?”
Ben: “Okay, you got a deal.”

In the last season, the show did what too many television shows do when running out of steam: it tinkered with its own premise and added characters. While in the previous five seasons, the only people with speaking parts were the main characters and the guest patients. In season 6 suddenly there are miscellaneous extras popping up. Why suddenly is there an exchange between Ben and his dentist? Todd, the video store clerk has become running regularly into this season as well. The actor portraying Todd (Todd Barry) had previously been a patient on the show. While the bits between Todd, the clerk, and Ben are usually funny, it is an additional character to a show flooded already with too many characters, and not enough time.

These are minor complaints in what is one of the funniest series to have ever hit the airwaves.

The African Queen by CS Forester

the african queen book

See, I told you I would still write reviews. I’m just eliminating the stress that I had built into them.

The fact that it took me over 2 months to read the mere 136 pages that make up CS Forester’s The African Queen tells a great deal about the quality of the writing. Classic film buffs will note that this is no fault of the story, for it made a brilliant motion picture starring the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. The problem, then, lies in the telling.

In Creative Writing 101 writers learn the importance of showing and not telling. Forester must have been sick that day for he spends his entire novel telling the reader exactly how the characters feel, think, and are. He never allows his character’s actions or words to give the reader an emotional response, he spends his pages telling us how to feel.

There is no chance to gain insight into a character through what they do, for Forester is much too busy telling all the pertinent details. There is no subtlety in the text. If we don’t get something the first time, rest assured, he will repeat himself two or three times.

What will keep the reader reading is the power of the story itself. For many years Rose has been assisting her missionary brother in the heart of the African Jungle. When he dies suddenly she enlists Charlie, a gin-swigging rough and tumble riverboat captain, to ship her back to civilization. Along the way they must traverse deadly rapids, disease-infected hoards of mosquitoes, German soldiers, and a river that is not meant for the sturdiest of boats, never mind the old, rickety African Queen.

Forester fills his tale with plenty of chills and spills. There is enough action to keep the pages turning, and an old-fashioned romance to keep the lovers interested. Truth be told, there is almost too much action. In nearly every paragraph, some new obstacle presents itself that must be overcome. Each obstacle is overcome, of course, and that a bit too quickly. Though the obstacles are fretted over and stressed about, Charlie and Rose seem to overcome them within a few sentences; only to find another one waiting around the corner. It would have served the novel better to have had fewer problems, and more struggle to overcome them.

Forester has a keen eye for mechanical detail. He gives good exposition over the mechanics of making an old steamer like the African Queen keep going. He paints a detailed picture of the African landscape, as seen from a riverboat. The physical details of the boat and its surroundings are all apt, and true. It is the abilities of humans that bring an air of falseness.

Rose, though having never piloted a boat before, in a very short time somehow manages to master the intricacies of sailing a difficult steamer through dangerous rapids. Likewise, she sheds her moral inhibitions like a heavy coat in the sultry African climate. We are led to believe that an innocent, sheltered missionary can suddenly give up all of her beliefs and morals to a dirty, foul-mouthed, drunk all in a matter of days.

Ultimately I would have been better off having just watched the movie again and left the novel on the bookshelf. The movie retains all of the excitement and grandeur of the story and elevates the storytelling to the level of a classic. The book seems flat in comparison.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy

american tabloid cover

Like the supermarket rags in the title, this James Elroy novel is loaded with grandiose stories, half-truths, and more conspiracy theories than an Oliver Stone wet dream. It rewrites history in a manner akin to the Lone Gunmen in the X-Files and is a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

It is filled with wall-to-wall celebrities. There are politicians (John F.and Robert Kenney, J Edgar Hoover), flashy millionaires (Howard Hughes), and mobsters galore (Santo Traficante, Jack Ruby, etc). It retells the rise to power of JFK through a myriad of conspiracies, ending with the ultimate conspiracy, the assassination of JFK.

It is filled with bits of history and fact, but also unproven conspiracies and outright fabrications. I am not a historian, so my knowledge of the time period, while pretty good, is by no means complete. I suspect this is true for the majority of Americans. None of us know exactly what happened the day JFK was assassinated. There are a lot of theories floating around, and they all sort of blend together after a while. Elroy uses this to his advantage.

For example, it is generally accepted that John F Kennedy had affairs. During the Clinton scandals, numerous journalists touted this as absolute truth, though I’ve never once seen any hard data confirming the information. Before anyone sends in the hard data, understand that whether or not JFK did have affairs is beyond the point. As a culture we believe it, it is accepted as fact. There are many more rumors and flat-out lies, that as a culture we know, that we have heard for the umpteenth time, that it feels like the truth. Elroy writes all of these things as hard truths and then kicks them up several notches. Here, JFK not only has a few casual affairs but is an oversexed hound dog. He employs multiple persons to set him up with one-night stands at every campaign stop, for every night of the week.

Likewise, such fascinating conspiracies of the American group mind such as the CIA/Mob collaboration to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the CIA sanctioning of heroin sales to support this collaboration,. Or Joe Kennedy’s mob ties, and Jack Ruby’s collaboration with the JFK conspiracy, are all made concrete facts and punctuated with exclamation marks, ad infinitum.

There aren’t any good guys in this novel. Anybody who starts out with anything close to a normal set of morals has completely lost them by the story’s end. Though filled with real people, it centers around three completely fictional characters. Kemper Boyd carries out a tangled web of undercover work for the FBI, CIA, the Kennedy clan, and the mob. Pete Bondurant is an ex-cop who plays bodyguard for Howard Hughes and then Jimmy Hoffa and has a penchant for bloody violence. Ward Little is an FBI agent hungry for anti-mob activity, who through a series of mistakes eventually begins working directly for them.

Each character is destroyed, destroyed again, and sometimes built up a little before they are yet again destroyed. Nobody walks away clean, or undamaged. The plot gets a little thick and there were moments where I wish it had been supplied with a map and a compass. The subplots are so plentiful and intertwined it’s sometimes difficult to tell where you are at within the myriad of webs. Elroy’s style doesn’t help in this matter, for it is about as hard-boiled as a writer can be. I don’t think there is a paragraph longer than five sentences, and there are a great many consisting of only one line. Many critics have found this immensely annoying and find the novel difficult to read because of it. I had no problem with it. It made the novel faster to read, and made it seem much lighter than it actually is. Although I must say that at the halfway point through the sequel, it has grown quite tiresome.

To supply some of the details left out in the brevity of his prose, Elroy supplies any number of fake documents including tabloid cutouts, top secret documents, and verbatim transcripts of phone conversations.

It is a fast-paced, exciting, often violent book. It is pulp fiction with literary sensibilities. It doesn’t work particularly well as revisionist history, but for fans of hard-boiled crime stories, or those who can’t get enough conspiracy it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Apartment (1960)

the apartment poster

I came to this film expecting a light-hearted romantic comedy. Watching the trailer did nothing to eliminate this idea. The actual film is hardly light-hearted and is really rather sad, and dramatic.

The setup is fairly antiquated and somewhat sexist. Jack Lemmon plays CC Baxter, a quiet gentleman working as a small cog in a very big insurance company. He also happens to have a very spacious apartment to himself. Word gets around the office about the apartment and Baxter’s agreement to not be home on certain nights. Soon enough every male executive in the office is hitting him for use of the apartment for evening trysts.

Though modern audiences probably grimace at such a concept, it is pulled off quite well. For the most part, the comedy remains intact. When I said that it isn’t a comedy, I don’t mean that there isn’t lots of humor to be found. It’s just that the drama is more involved than what we typically consider to be a comedy. There are some truly funny scenes one of which has Baxter getting out his apartment planner, and rescheduling several visits from the office men. In my favorite scene, he cooks pasta with a tennis racket.

The conflict of the film involves one of the top executives of the office, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and a fun-loving elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLain). When Sheldrake begins using the apartment to rekindle his affair with Kubelik, he promotes Baxter at the office. Not knowing that Kubelik is Sheldrake’s love interest, Baxter begins courting her himself.

Tension builds up within the love triangle. Kubelik is not the fun-loving gal she at first seemed. As Baxter gets to know her better we find that she harbors some deep secrets and her actions take a downward spiral. The film becomes rather dark, rather grim. It turns even bleaker when the principal joke wears thin. It seems the only thing holding back every married man from having an extra-marital affair is a nice place in which to have it. There isn’t a man in the cast, except Baxter, who has the slightest moral aptitude.

Billy Wilder is one of the great directors of American cinema, and it certainly shows here. Instead of going for a more slapstick approach, and the material certainly could have been handled that way, he turns it into a more touching drama.

The three characters involved in the love triangle are all superbly acted. Lemmon and MacMurray are both at the top of their game. And MacLain reminds us that she was not always the kooky old lady waxing nutty about past lives. Here she is a beautiful screen presence and holds her own against the two male leads.

What I thought was going to be a light-hearted, fast-paced romp in the vein of Some Like It Hot, turned out to be a rather poignant, sad tale of the complexities of life. This was a little disappointing while watching the film, but after letting it sit inside the recesses of my mind, it has become one of the great films I have seen. This is not to say there isn’t a comedy, but instead of jokes, the comedy comes from within the characters themselves. As in life.

Talk To Her (2002)

talk to her poster

A friend of mine recently lent me her Chinese bootlegged copy of Talk to Her. I have seen a few other Pedro Almodóvar films and expected another tale filled with bizarre violence and kinky sex. What I wasn’t expecting was a rather moving tale of unrequited love.

Talk to Her reminded me quite a bit of the films of Todd Solondz. Like his movies, this film manages to make characters who commit rather heinous acts quite sympathetic. Equally alike, Talk to Her deals with the immense loneliness of its characters.

The story begins with a chance meeting between Marco (Dario Grandinetti) and Benigno (Javier Cámara) at a dance recital. Neither man knows the other, but they happen to have seats that are side by side. They later meet again at a private hospital, where Benigno is the caregiver to a beautiful dancer, Alicia, who has been comatose for several months. Marco is there visiting his girlfriend, a bullfighter who was recently gorged by a bull and is likewise comatose. A friendship builds between the two men, as they care for the women they love, though they cannot be loved back.

The film’s title comes from Benigno’s insistence that Marco speaks to the women as though they could hear him. He urges Marco to open up and tell his lady the intimate details of his life. Benigno is deeply in love with Alicia and treats her as if she was his lifelong lover, though she cannot respond in any way.

The film is very subtle and nuanced in meaning. Both men, though apparently quite heterosexual, spend most of the film in more standard feminine roles. They are the caregivers: washing, cleansing, and taking care of the women. Benigno is a male nurse. They become very good friends, and indeed seem to love each other deeply, yet they are hopelessly devoted to women who are deemed hopeless, doomed to never awaken from their coma.

Neither Benigno or Marco really knew these women in their waking lives. Benigno watched Alicia in her dance classes, from across the street, through his window. Marco had just recently met Lydia, interviewing her for a magazine, and finding the beginnings of romance. It is really only through their caring for these women while they are asleep that they begin to feel love for them.

Almodovar is careful to portray the characters as sympathetic while still tainting their devotions with something sinister, something perverse. As the stories conclude, one character’s actions become slightly horrific, and yet we still feel sympathy for him. Almodovar understands life’s complications and that it is too easy to broadly label people as one thing when reality goes much deeper.

In keeping with the kinkiness of his prior films, Almodovar throws in a sequence with Benigno retelling a silent film he watched recently. It rivals the bathtub scene in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, and inside the cheerleader’s pants scene in the USA Up All Night classic, Getting Lucky. Let’s just say for lovers of perverse, whacked-out cinema, it is a must-see.

Ultimately, Talk to Her is a bizarre, but moving portrait of unrequited love, friendship, and the complexity of human life. It is undoubtedly a difficult film emotionally, but one definitely worth sitting through and contemplating.

Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard

maximum bob

Reading an Elmore Leonard novel is a lot like watching a good, not great movie. There is a lot of style, dialogue that demands to be spoken out loud, and interesting and twisting plots, with great ease in being read. Maybe that’s why so many of his books are made into movies. They read like screenplays.

Maximum Bob was actually made into a television show starring Beau Bridges, but it didn’t last past a season.

What we get here is a breezy, fun novel about Bob Gibbs, a conservative, hard-nosed judge nick-named “Maximum Bob” for his tendency to deal out the full force of the law. Bob begins to fancy a no-nonsense probation officer, Nancy Baker, who is busy tangling with a couple of low-life losers. Things get complicated when a giant alligator shows up on Bob’s front porch scaring his former mermaid-turned-new-age-psychic wife into leaving him for good. Add into the mix Dale Crowe Junior, one of the aforementioned losers, who is plotting to flee from an oncoming prison sentence, and Owen, Dale’s uncle, and recently released ex-convict. The outcome is a wild ride, which is enjoyable to read, but without a lot of depth or staying power.

Leonard is a good craftsman. He has a real knack for creating interesting plots. He is often praised for his dialogue, but I can’t say that I was too impressed with it here. It has that screenplay feel to it, and would probably sound a lot better coming out of an actor’s mouth, than lying flat on the written page. Actually, that’s a good idea. Next time I read a Leonard novel I’ll act out all the parts.

I read the novel in a couple of days while basking in the sun at the local park. It was a good novel for that purpose. It was easy to pick back up after being distracted by the Frisbee players, and the ball-chasing dog, without having to think about what I had just read. It was entertaining enough to get me occupied while loafing for several hours as well. It is also forgettable enough that once I’ve written this review I’ll pretty much never think about it again. Well, at least until I browse the L-N shelf at the library.

28 Days Later (2002)

28 days later poster

The zombies are fast.

It’s true that in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later the crazed, flesh-eating villains aren’t technically zombies. In fact, Boyle has gone to great lengths to qualify them as humans infected with a virus known as RAGE. Yet, to this reviewer at least, the differences seem moot. In traditional zombie pictures, and in this film the creatures are mindless, they carry a real zeal for human flesh, they have a predilection for turning everyone else into their like, and they are fairly easy to kill. Whether the creatures are the living dead so to speak, or infected by an incurable virus doesn’t make much of a difference. Though the zombies here, seem updated from their cinematic ancestors.

These zombies are fast.

Traditional zombies are a slow-moving lot. Having been rotting in their own graves for untold years, their reanimated flesh is a little atrophied, causing them to move at a slow, sluggish pace. This has always been a helpful plot point for the heroes in zombie films, for they are easy to run away from. In fact, zombies are generally able to kill their victims through sheer numbers. Individually they are easy to destroy, but as an oncoming onslaught, the sheer numbers win every time. Boyle circumvented this convenience by allowing his monsters to run at normal human speeds. It is an excellent update to the genre, giving the ability for more scares.

Man, I dug the first half of this movie. Well, except for the very, very beginning. The opening scene gives us the origin of RAGE, with a bunch of Clockwork Orange-inspired monkeys. I’ve never really dug origin scenes in zombie flicks. I think it’s much scarier to just have the zombies running around eating brains, without any reason for their existence. Origins, generally, just seem dumb. And here, with the infected monkeys being freed by some Green Peace types doesn’t really inspire any other feelings. Though, I suspect it was another move to plant this film outside the zombie track.

But after the scene of the dumb origin, things get really good. We’ve got a naked guy named Jim (Cillian Murphy) hooked up to various tubes in a hospital bed. I always like it when there is a bit of male nudity in a flick since there is always so much of the female variety. Anyways, Jim gets out of bed and wanders the streets of London. There are plenty of shots of Jim (fully clothed now) walking by big famous London monuments without another soul around. It seems London has been vacated. It is creepy and effective.

In a bit, Jim clamors into a church figuring to find some sanctuary, or at least have a few questions answered. What he finds is a bunch of dead folks piled up. In a good holy crap moment, Jim says, “Hello” to find a couple of the dead guys not so dead and jumping up. From there until the second half of the film, it is a constant run from the zombies.

The zombies really work in this film. They are fast, furious, and vicious. Jim eventually teams up with some other survivors and they set about trying to figure out what to do. Boyle really does a great job of adding tension to the film and keeping the scares up.

Then the film changes.

The group is rescued by a gang of all-male military types, living in a compound. Turns out the military types are a bunch of psychos and the film turns from being a zombie flick into being a stranded-in-a-compound-with-a-bunch-of-psycho-military-types kind of film. To make sure we know this is no longer a zombie flick, a big group of zombies launches an attack on the compound only to be massacred with machine guns and land mines.

In this half of the film, I don’t dig nearly as much. Zombie flicks always have trouble filling out their whole hour-and-a-half time slot. Even with a good introduction of characters, and a slow build to zombie free-for-all, there is still plenty of filler time. Here, the filmmakers seem to have decided that they might as well dump the zombies and give us some other tension-filled concoction. But, there isn’t really enough time to develop the military end of the story and it feels wrong.

It’s too bad too because that first half was really promising.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

for whom the bell tolls

What can I say about Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 masterpiece For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Read It.

I’ll have to give it a little time to settle, but I suspect this novel will officially enter my favorite top 10 novels of all-time list.

It is written in Hemingway’s usual terse style. Descriptive adjectives are few, replaced by verbs. Lots of verbs. This is not to say that it is a book filled with action. For, in fact, much of the novel consists of waiting, sitting, and talking. In the nearly 600 pages, there are only three scenes of real action: Pillar’s retelling of the beginning of the revolution in her town; El Sordo’s last stand, and the bombing of the bridge. The remaining pages consist of the relationships between those involved in the war.

The war is the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Instead of focusing on the larger aspects of this war, Hemingway decides to focus on a single guerilla outfit fighting against the fascists. The main character is Robert Jordan, an American Spanish professor, who has volunteered to fight against the fascists as well. He has been ordered to destroy an important bridge and enlists the guerilla band of Pablo. In doing so, he details the experiences of the average, normal citizens of a country fighting for its destiny.

With the exception of World War II stories, most retellings of war, come from a perspective that all war is terrible and unjust. Here, Hemingway shows not only the horrors of fighting a war but also the sometimes necessity of it. Yet, he is also able to show the confusion of its participants.

Anselmo, a trusted companion of Jordan, midway through the novel ponders what he would be doing had he been raised with fascist ideals. He truly believes in what he is fighting for but realizes that under different circumstances he would be fighting on the other side of the lines. Many wars are fought by soldiers without any true sense of the ideals behind them. For Whom the Bell Tolls is often called a novel on the death of ideals. And it is true, nearly every idealized truth that is held up by the band seems tarnished and destroyed by the novel’s end.

It is impossible, within the confines of a review, to fully expound upon the greatness of this novel. It is a piece of literature, of art, that should be read, reread, studied, and made mandatory reading for every human being.

Read It.

The Big Sleep (1946)

the big sleep poster

This classic film noir has very few of the characteristics generally associated with noir. It contains no skewed camera angles, it is not overcome with murky, obscuring shadows. The hero is not down-and-out, poor, or desperate. There is no retrospective narration or flashbacks. Yet, The Big Sleep is widely considered to be one of the very best of the genre. It is a cynical, perverse, murderous world filled with loads of confusing action, and unknown motives. It is, in fact, one of the great films from one of the screen’s greatest actors, Humphrey Bogart (for my personal top 10 actors list, click here), and its most talented directors, Howard Hawks.

Hawks was fresh off of the successful pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Becall in To Have and Have Not (1944). The two star here again and it is easy to see why they made another two films together. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, many people complain that this film is incomprehensible. Somewhat famously it is reported that Bogart and Hawks, after arguing over who killed one of the characters, called up Chandler to get the correct answer. Chandler didn’t have the slightest idea, for the novel is rather vague on this point. It’s true that both the novel and film leave many plot points as to who did what to whom more than unclear, but there is so much style in both that it’s hard to make a convincing argument against them.

A good deal of the confusion within the film comes from the production codes in effect at the time it was produced. Chandler’s novel deals with murder, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and pornography. At the time, these things were deemed unfit to show on a movie screen and so Hawks had to hint at them using various subtle methods. For instance, when Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) is found by detective Phillip Marlow (Bogart) in the novel she is completely nude and sitting posed for a hidden camera. Since pornography is explicitly against the code, in the movie she is dressed in a silky, Japanese gown. There is still a hidden camera, and its missing film becomes a catalyst for much of the action in the film. We must infer from the exotic nature of the gown that there was more than just pictures of a woman in a gown going on. There are many similar instances in the film like this. For an audience member who has not read the book, they must pay close attention to the subtext, or the film will seem baffling.

Personally, I am very much a fan of the book, and all of Chandler’s work. While I appreciate that some of the finer plot points are a bit vague in this film, I also understand that the film succeeds not in the details of the story, but in a sinister sense of style. The film oozes with a dark, disquieting atmosphere. Nearly everyone Marlowe meets is hiding something and is of less than upstanding moral character. Hawks does a great job of keeping nearly every scene in the dark or in the rain, or both. There are so many characters coming in and out of the shadows with their own shady character that it is difficult to keep up.

Bogart, of course, does a marvelous job as Marlowe. He seems to understand a lot more information than the audience is ever given. Chandler wrote Marlowe as a detective who sticks by his own set of morals, remaining somewhat of a noble creature trying to stay afloat amongst the muck and sewers of the city. Lauren Bacall does a very good job portraying Vivian Sternwood Rutledge, in a role that is much different than the one in the book. Like many films from this era, they create a romance that wasn’t really in the source material. I don’t mind though, because Bogart and Bacall really sizzle.

What can I say that hasn’t been said before? This is really classic noir at its best. It’s got Bogart and Bacall. It was directed by Howard Hawks, and written by William Faulkner from a novel by Raymond Chandler. What more could a lover of classic cinema want?

Harvey (1950)

harvey movie poster

Towards the end of the 1950 film, Harvey, Elwood P Dowd (played by James Stewart in an Academy Award-nominated role) says this:

“In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

It is a memorable line and one that sums up the film quite well. For the picture is filled with lots of smart people, and a few pleasant ones. It, in fact, seems to be the film’s central theme. Dowd is an alcoholic and mentally ill, all of which creates quite a disturbance throughout the film, but is ultimately washed over because he smiles a lot, allows others to pass through the door first, and speaks in a gentle, even voice.

Perhaps I’m being too unkind myself, it is after all a harmless comedy, slapstick and all. At that, it fairs well enough. The catch of the film, if you’ve somehow managed to not hear it before in the 55 years since its release, or forgot to look at the picture on the front of the DVD box, is that Dowd’s best friend happens to be an invisible 6-foot rabbit, named Harvey. Much of the film’s humor, and a great deal of its heart, come from that rabbit, which the audience never sees.

The conflict comes from Dowd’s sister, Veta Louise Simmons (Josephine Hall), and her daughter Myrtle Mae (Victoria Horne). They have grown tired of Dowd’s antics with Harvey, and the embarrassment of having such a relative has caused untold grief for their social positions. Early in the film they decide to have Dowd committed to an insane asylum. Slapstick ensues when Verta is mistaken for the crazy one.

I found it to be a fine, humorous film. All of the cast members are firing on all cylinders and create a wonderful ensemble cast. Stewart and Hall are particularly fine as Dowd and his sister. The jokes work well enough, at least they are not particularly unfunny, and are pleasant enough. I think this is where my complaint comes in; it is all just too pleasant. Even the Simmons’ are rather sweet and kind while they try to put Dowd away.

It was slightly disturbing to me to watch a man with an obvious mental illness be touted as the film’s hero and a character that we should all emulate. But again, I’m probably being too unpleasant. I realize that the film is more Peter Pan than Awakenings in this aspect. For Harvey seems more fantastical than a hallucination, but Dowd never once hints that the giant rabbit might not be real. I know, I know, I’m being too much the tired cynic at this point. Dowd did give me the same brief desire for improvement that Atticus Finch give me while watching To Kill a Mockingbird. Though Finch never spotted giant rabbits, just a black man served more injustice.

It is difficult to complain about a film that really just wishes we would all be happy and kind to one another. Indeed a brief search of the IMDB’s user comments finds an agreement with everyone that this is a wonderful, joyful film.

It is a heartwarming film, which only managed to kindle a low flame in my heart. This is a weird feeling. It is as if I feel the chastisement of a million fans calling me a cold-hearted son of a sailor. It just failed to make me laugh enough, or move me enough to declare it wonderful. While I don’t have any hard complaints about the picture, it is not something that I’ll be placing on any top films list.