Yesterday, I wrote about how it was little-known that Frank Loesser wrote the lyrics to the classic song "The Boys in the Backroom," which is largely known for Marlene Dietrich's performance.  You may known the song from Destry Rides Again," which starred James Stewart, but you most certainly know the parody of it in the Mel Brooks comedy, Blazing Saddles.  That's when Madeline Kahn did her take-off of Dietrich and sang, "I'm Tired."  (The song itself didn't exactly parody the original, but the whole scene did.)

Since the song is fairly known, but most people haven't likely seen the original film sequence, I thought we'd correct that here.  So, here it is, with music by Frederick Hollander and lyrics -- before he began writing his own music and heading to Broadway -- by Frank Loesser.
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Back in 2006, the Turner Classic Movies channel produced a documentary about Frank Loesser, titled Heart & Soul.  I don't recall if I wasn't aware of it until a few days after it was on, or if I knew but missed the airing, figuring I'd catch up with the the next time.  In any event, I didn't see it – and to my continued surprised, as far as I can tell they didn’t repeat it.  At most, they repeated it once that same day or the next, and I missed that.  But I'm pretty certain that that's been it, because I’ve been checking ever since, to see if they’d have it on their schedule, or if it would show up on Netflix.  And it never has.
 
On Friday, I had a brain storm to do a search for it online, in general, just to see if there was any information about it where it might be tracked down.  (I don't know why I didn't have this belated brain storm until Friday, but my best excuse is that I felt certain that TCM would indeed air it again -- I could see no reason why they wouldn't -- or sure it would eventually be available on Netflix, so there was no need to check elsewhere.  Except that after a decade, it finally became clear that there now, at least, was a need.)  Well, to my amazement, I not only found some very good information about it (for one thing, I found out the full name of it, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser), but there was a website that has the full documentary embedded for viewing online!  So, that night, I finally got to watch it.
 
It's quite enjoyable – not great, but done well enough, with of course great material.  It's largely on positive, though not a puff piece since at least, to its credit, it touches on his dark side, which I'd heard reports of, a pretty explosive temper.  Mainly, it celebrates some really wonderful songs, from his early days writing the lyrics only in Hollywood through his Broadway year with both words and music.  

Among his movie songs, for which he only wrote the lyrics are such classics as "I Don't Want to Walk Without You, Baby" and the number Marlene Dietrich made famous, "The Boys in the Backroom," that Mel Brooks parodied with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles.  

​If you never saw the documentary (which is probably highly likely), or want to see it again, unfortunately I can't embed it, but happily you can watch it all here.

One thing I'll add is that I was always a bit surprised by the title of the documentary, since the song "Heart and Soul" was written by Hoagy Carmichael.  Or so I wrongly believed.  But it turns out that he only wrote the music, and the lyrics were written by...Frank Loesser!  In fact, there's a very funny sequence in the film about how arguably the most-famous song by the man who wrote the scores to Guys & Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Most Happy Fella and the movie Hans Christian Anderson is a number that most people have no idea he wrote -- including (in a very amusing on-camera interview, Frank Loesser's oldest daughter, who talks about playing the song and "Chopticks" all the time when growing up at piano recitals and parties, and even she did not learn until much later that it was written by her father.)

So, in honor of perhaps his most-famous song (lyrics only...), here's what has now probably become the most-famous version of it, (music only -- except for one word, "Madly" at the 1:20 mark...) performed on their feet by Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia from Big.
 
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But, okay, that's just the music, and this is about Frank Loesser who wrote the lyrics.  So, to be fair and to round the whole thing out, this is the original version of the song, "Heart and Soul" -- words included.  It's from the 1939 Paramount short, sung by Bea Wain and with Larry Clinton, who I assume is the bandleader -- music by Hoagy Carmichael, and lyrics by...Frank Loesser.
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As I've written here in the past, the wonderful Nell Minow wears many seemingly-incompatible hats.  Beyond being one the leading world experts on corporate governance, testifying before Congress on occasion, she also writes movie reviews, as The Movie Mom.  (Though the hats may be incompatible, it makes her very stylish.)

Well, as life would have it, she's been packing lately, and shuttering her Movie Mom site that's been hosted by Beliefnet, and moving her online work back to Chicago, electronically speaking and will now be writing for RogerEbert.com, officially as of today.  I don't know yet if she'll have her own section there, but for the moment she's busy unpacking her pencils and stash of Milk Duds, so we'll have to give her time meeting the other kids.  Updates as they occur.  Operators are standing by.

This new situation doesn't come wildly out of the blue.  Nell has a long history with Roger Ebert -- the fellow himself, not just the eponymous website.  She filled in for him once in a while, writing some guest reviews for his Chicago Sun-Times column, and was hired by Ebert as a correspondent on his last TV series.  So, it's sort of like old home week.  Just with the "week" being a whole lot more long-term.

So, hat's off!  No matter how seemingly-incompatible they may appear.

Years back, when I worked in P.R. at Universal Studios, we released a film that starred Roger Moore -- who passed away today at the age of 89 -- which was a huge flop and remains little-known in his portfolio.  But it was great fun and one of my favorite of his works.  It was an adventure film with the terrible title, ffolkes (which was the characters last name, down to the lower case spelling).

What made the move so fun is not so much the story (which is fine, but flawed), but that although it was an action-adventure, with Moore playing an expert called in to resolve a hostage situation on an oil drilling platform in the North Sea, and came right in the middle of his run as James Bond, it was a role that called for him to play against type.  The character was an action hero, but one with a scraggly beard who was reticent, almost a recluse in his family castle, who was stiff, stilted, an overt and non-apologetic misogynist, and great lover of cats, who had assembled and trained his own team.  And Moore seemed to revel in the role.

It had a pretty nice cast, with Anthony Perkins as a bad guy, and James Mason.  The film wasn't great, but an enjoyable popcorn film.  But above all, it was worth having been made if only because it gave rise to one of my favorite lines in our department after the opening weekend box office figures came in and we had our Monday Morning meeting.  The head of the department gave the dismal reckoning and then added, "Well...I guess all that's left to be said is -- That's all, ff-ff-ffolkes."

When it later got released on TV, the name was changed to, I think, North Sea Hijack, so if you ever see that playing, it's actually ffolkes.

Here's the trailer.  It's lousy and doesn't give much a sense of the humor and adventure, and the video quality is poor.  (And this description has the spelling wrong.  It's lower case "f", for goodness sake!)  But here it is --
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Oh, okay.  As long as I'm writing about ffolkes, and you have a slight idea of the film, I might as well post two other videos that are far-better quality and give a better sense of the movie, thought would have made little sense out of context.

This first comes early on and has the character explaining his misogyny.  And what he does love.
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And this is the very end of the film.  If you don't want anything given away -- on the off-chance that you may see this one day (highly unlikely) -- don't watch.  But if you're watching the movie and can't figure out how the end basically gets resolved, you're not trying very hard.

A couple of notes.  The title used below -- "Esther, Ruth and Jennifer" -- are the code-names of the oil drilling platform and two rigs he's been sent to rescue, or something close to that, if I recall correctly. 

And the woman you see below is one of the the team who helps ffolkes, much against his wishes (in one of the funnier scenes of the movie), and yet she earns his admiration for her great work during the mission.

I'm planning a trip to back Chicago in next month, so I wanted to check what theater is going on in the city, since it's usually so vibrant.  There are some interesting productions, including the Lyric Opera putting on a My Fair Lady (which is probably a wonderful stage, though I thought it was an odd choice when they announced it last year), and the Court Theatre putting on Harvey, one of my favorites.  And two of their companies that have won Tony Awards for Best Regional Theaters have interesting productions -- the Goodman Theatre has Pamplona with Stacy Keach as Ernest Hemingway and the Lookingglass Theatre is putting on Moby Dick.  (This must be their year for doing adventure shows about the ocean, since later in the season they have a stage version of, of all things, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  No word yet if they will be providing the audience scuba gear.)

But it's another of the city's Tony winners for Best Regional Theatre, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater which has a play that most intrigues me.  Not just for what it is, but that it's an ideal venue for it.  A stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning film, Shakespeare in Love.  This isn't a premiere -- it opened in the West End of London, and played at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival in 2014.  But as far as I know it's the first production in the U.S.  The stage version was adapted by Lee Hall, whose many works include the films War Horse and Billy Elliot, which he adapted for the stage musical.

I don't know if I'll be able to make it to any of these shows -- or elsewhere -- since my schedule isn't all worked out yet.  But here's a trailer of sorts of Shakespeare in Love, which got a very nice review by the Chicago Tribune's , critic who had also seen the show in Canada and hadn't liked the staging there but found this version much more lively.  

This week on the 3rd & Fairfax podcast from the Writers Guild of America, the guests are Robert and Michelle King, who talk about their shows The Good Wife and The Good Fight, as well as other good things.

I've known Robert and Michelle for a couple of decades.  In fact I served on a couple of Writers Guild committees with Robert (the editorial board and the committee to select candidates for the Guild's governing board), and was also business partners with him in an online venture that about a dozen Writers Guild members started, called the PAGE BBS -- back in the days when "bulletin board services" predated online chat groups which were just coming into prominence.  It was an online meeting place for professional writers, not just WGA members -- indeed, the acronym stood for The Professional Authors Group Enterprise.  (We had decided on a different name, but for some reason, PAGE, popped into my head just before the final approval vote.  Everyone loved it -- except the guy who had suggested the other name -- and it was passed.)

My funniest memory of the time with PAGE is that as we were developing the site before it went online, we did a lot of testing, and Robert was always our guinea pig.  That was because he was basically a technical Luddite, and we knew that if Robert could understand how to maneuver throughout the site, anyone could.  To put this in perspective, Robert at the time was working more in feature films than creating TV shows, and very successfully so:  he'd written the movies, Clean Slate, Red Corner, Speechless, Cutthroat Island and a lot more -- and for all that success, the way he typed his screenplays bewildered the rest of us, to the point of hysterics.  It wasn't that he didn't use the normal touch-typing  with all 10 fingers-- he didn't even use the old "hunt-and-peck" style, where you use both your two index fingers to tap across the keyboard.  No, Robert typed all these major studio movies with a single index finger on his right hand.  Single letter-by-single letter.  It was hilarious to watch in action.  But the screenplay results he ended up with were sure awfully good.

Eventually, Robert moved into television, wrote some TV movies, and then his wife Michelle collaborated with him to develop the TV series, ​In Justice.  Here's the interview.
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This is just too funny -- or terrible, depending on your point of view -- and major credit goes to whoever it was on the staff of The Tonight Show that caught it.  On the broadcast last night, they edited together clips from two speeches to show their extremely solid similarities.  And those two were Trump's commencement address at Liberty University the other day -- and the commencement address by 'Elle Woods' in the movie, Legally Blonde.  Right down, unbelievably, to the last chant, which has the studio audience in hysterics.  

Honestly, I don't know if this is plagiarized.  Commencement speeches have a lot of cliche in them.  But -- the similarities here are striking, particularly the last moment which is unique.  And it's not like the administration is known for its intellectual curiosity.  Nor is it known for its honesty.  And this wouldn't be the first time they plagiarized a speech.  For all we know, they brought in the writer of Melania Trump's RNC speech and had her spruce things up a bit.

The comparison comes at the 1:30 mark.

For our part here, we celebrate it by posting a list of the greatest train movies.  These are films in which trains are absolutely central to the story.  Where a train is the driving force of the tale, without which you can’t properly describe the plot.

(Think of it like the classic and beloved Santa Claus song, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  Santa Claus isn't actually in the song at all.  He hasn't even shown up yet.  In most ways, it's about "you" and what you should do -- or better not do.  But even though there's not a hint of Santa Claus even appearing in the song, without Santa Claus...there's no song.)

This relates to the fun part of the day, when the inveterate Chris Dunn goes totally mental, unable each year to grasp the concept, trying annually to explain unsuccessfully why Bridge on the River Kwai is supposedly not a train movie, yet Throw Momma from the Train is.  He's wrong on both counts, but it's still fun to watch.

Every year, he always spins out of control in disorderly circles trying to make his point, that Bridge on the River Kwai is not about trains.  And as I say every year -- he's right, it’s not “about trains.”  But then I never said it was – just that it was a “train movie.”  And more to the point, specifically a great train movie.  Not merely a film with a train in it, but one where a train is the driving force of the story, without which you can’t properly describe the plot.  Where you can only tell the story of Bridge on the River Kwai  by saying:
  
The train is coming – we have to finish the bridge before it gets here.  The training is coming – we have to destroy the bridge before it gets here.  The train is coming – it’s what drives Alec Guiness to madness.  The train is coming, the training is coming.  It’s the core foundation of what affects everything in the story.  The train is coming.

By contrast, Throw Momma from the Train could just as easily be Throw Momma from the Funicular.  Or you could probably even tell the story cutting the train sequence entirely and instead write in some other scene to bridge the plot points.  No pun intended...  For 98% of the movie, it's about something entirely separate from trains and has absolutely nothing to do with trains, other than have the word in the title.   It certainly deserves consideration as a train movie -- though hardly an all-time great train movie -- but like some retired baseball players hoping to get in the Hall of Fame year after year even though their career statistics don't change, it just doesn't measure up against the competitions.  Sometimes, some players do finally make it in the Hall after a dozen years on the ballot, as their statistics get more deeply-analyzed against the growing perspective of time...but Throw Momma from the Train, still just doesn't measure up.

The point isn't a list of movies that have trains in them, whether briefly or at length.  It's about Great Train Movies.

I note here that Throw Momma from the Train has finally moved up a notch and is now on the Honorable Mention list, making it there last year -- in part because it does have the word "Train" in the title and a train sequence so, given the perspective of time, it does at least support that limited standard, and in part as a salve to Mr. Dunn, so that he would be able to get some rest rather than spend another completely feverish week.
 
We've also added a new movie to the list of Great Train Films, an interesting train movie in the full sense, Emperor of the North, about a hobo challenging a cruel railway detective for authority, as he tries to hide on a train trip during the Depression.  And to give total credit where due, the film was suggested by...Mr. Christopher Dunn.

I should note, which I think is likely very obvious, though I haven't stated it before in these annual columns, I love train movies.

 
Around the World in 80 Days
Back to the Future 3
Bridge on the River Kwai
The Darjeeling Limited
Emperor of the North
The General
The Great Locomotive Chase
The Great Train Robbery
The Lady Vanishes
Murder on the Orient Express
The Narrow Margin
North by Northwest
Northwest Frontier
Night Train to Munich
Polar Express
Runaway Train
Shanghai Express
Silver Streak
Source Code
Strangers on a Train
The Train
Transsiberian
Twentieth Century
Union Pacific
Union Station
Unstoppable
Von Ryan’s Express
 
Honorable Mention
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
The Greatest Show on Earth
Go West
At the Circus 
Cat Ballou
Throw Momma from the Train 
Trading Places