"Feet! My favorite part of the human anatomy!"

"I've got two million ways of handling feet!" Thus speaks the Joker, played by the always incredible Hans Conried, in this equally incredible early 60s industrial safety film for the American Bridge Division of United States Steel. The Joker posits that a tights-wearing imp, presumably from Hell, causes American steelworkers to daydream about dames and speedboats, thus softening them up for gruesome "lost time accidents" involving punch presses and grinding wheels. The film makes it quite clear that at US Steel, crucial safety gear such as safety glasses and metatarsal shoes were entirely discretionary and to be paid for by the employees. The film even blames whimsical imps for such things as crumbling concrete factory floors ("which the Joker has kept from the front office"). As is to be expected, Hans Conried is wonderful as the Joker, prancing from department to department, egging on blue collar workers with visions of shrewish wives and bowling championships (so very, very sad), and then laughing with venomous glee as their fingers are scissored off or their feet are crushed. Unexpectedly, Conried even manages to make his jester/demon vaguely sympathetic in a scene in which the Joker expresses regret after a steelworker is crushed flat by a giant I-beam. "To tell the truth, I don't like it to turn out that way.." he says, sadly, raising the question of what, exactly, constitutes going too far when you're an industrial accident-causing sprite from Hell. Incidentally, Hans must have been one heck of a sport, given his costume. If you ever wanted to see a middle-aged Hans Conried frisking about in tights, this film is for you. It's available on volume 4 of Something Weird Video's Health and Safety Scare Films series along with Sid Davis's classic The Dangerous Stranger and the vomit-strewn An Outbreak of Staphylococcus Intoxication.

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The Third Banana One Year Anniversary/100th Post/Halloween Spectacular!

One year! One-hundred posts!! Halloween!!! And that all spells one thing!

HANS CONRIED!!!

Well, it does.. when you think about it. And so I'm happy to present (courtesy These Records Are BenT!) Hans' 1959 monster-themed novelty album Monster Rally. This album must have taken only days to record and Hans was probably in the studio for only one of those. The tracks are actually split between Hans, an RCA studio vocal ensemble billed as "The Creatures", and the nasal-voiced Alice Pearce. Pearce is best remembered today as the original Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched ("ABNER!!! LOOK!! On the Stevens's roof!!"), but was once an acclaimed Broadway and nightclub comedienne in her own right and even had her own TV variety show on ABC in 1949. The album is really just an excuse to have Hans sing Sheb Wooley's "Flying Purple People Eater", the original recording of which was number one for six weeks the previous year, but the rest of his tracks are just as much, if not more, fun.. especially "Not of This Earth", a smooth lounge ode from Hans to his extraterrestrial lover.

Her lips are formed with tempting grace.
I only wish that they were on her face.

Hans gets the science fiction-themed songs while Alice gets the horror stuff.. and, for some reason, it all seems very appropriate. You'll find Monster Rally here.

And dig this, hepcats.. The very first cartoon Hans ever contributed voice work to, Dick Lundy's Sliphorn King of Polaroo (1945). Funny or not, the Walter Lantz studio was far and away the jazziest cartoon studio of the 1940s (the Fleischers held the mantle during the 1930s with contributions from such talents as Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong). Jack Teagarden himself is responsible for the trombone solos in Sliphorn King. Conried was at Lantz for just a short while, contributing voice work to this and one Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Woody Dines Out (1945) before being drafted.



And why stop there? It take it back that a first anniversary/100 posts/Halloween just spells Hans Conried! It also spells

ADMIRAL HALSEY!!!

And, to a slightly greater degree

BELA LUGOSI!!!

Bela was, of course, every comic's favorite straightghoul during the 1940s and early 50s. Always grateful for work, Bela was more than happy to lampoon his horror image, ultimately closing out his career with a comedy revue at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas in 1954 (four shows a night!!). In movies, he appeared most famously opposite Abbott and Costello in 1948, but he also made appearances with the East Side Kids (twice), the Ritz Brothers, Brown and Carney (twice), Mitchell and Petrillo, Jack Haley, Arthur "Old Mother Riley" Lucan, and, whether you consider him a comedian or not, Kay Kyser. It has to be said that Lugosi was much better suited to self-lampooning than Karloff whose performances never left any doubt in your mind that he was an actor through-and-through.. from London, no less. Lugosi's dark looks and exotic accent, given a further boost from the spooky tall tales he delighted in telling reporters about his dark Hungarian past, gave Lugosi an air of mystery that Karloff simply lacked. For many, it really did seem as though Bela had a touch of the grave about him and so, under the best of circumstances, the lampooning automatically had a bit of an edge to it. But that's under the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, Bela probably returned to that particular well a few too many times. It was as if Richard Nixon not only did the "sock it to me!" gag on Laugh-In!, but came back the next season as a regular castmember. At any rate, Lugosi had it both ways on radio, doing the vampire shtick alongside Fred Allen and Abbott and Costello and turning in solid performances on Suspense and Crime Does Not Pay. His greatest opportunity in radio was Bela Lugosi's Mystery House which sadly never made it past the audition disc. Recorded sometime in the late 40s, Bela Lugosi's Mystery House is like a "Monogram Studios of the Air" and even features John Carradine in support! The story, "The Thirsty Death", was announced to be the first of a series of adaptations of plays from the Grand Guignol in Paris, although I have serious doubts that it's a genuine Guignol play. Nonetheless, Lugosi is absolutely terrific, turning in a wonderful blood-and-thunder performance that is well suited to the material. You can listen to Bela Lugosi's Mystery House here. And if funny Lugosi is more your speed, here he is on the Fred Allen Show in 1943. And get a load of this 1949 clip of Bela with Milton Berle on the Texaco Star Theater! Bela is clearly having a blast! If Ted Healy had been alive, he would have sued Berle for stealing his personality.

And can anyone establish the provenance of this 1950s snapshot of Bela? Is this a shot from the Dragnet spoof from the aforementioned Bela Lugosi Revue? In its own way, this is the scariest image of Bela ever to see print. Never forget, folks.. Comedy is where the real terror is. Happy Halloween, everybody!

BLON-DIEEE-EE-E!!!!!!!!!

I finally finished watching all 28 of the Columbia Blondie features last night and, after scooping my brain from the floor with a dustpan, I have to admit to some mixed feelings. Columbia's venerable cash-cow has many, many standout moments and even a few entries that I consider B-comedy masterpieces, but the low-points of the series are pretty appalling, even for disposable Columbia product. Columbia's tendency to wring every last drop from a property is on full display here. While Chic Young's comic strip made a game of stock situations and formulas, Columbia rather inevitably turned that game into a scheme to cut corners. By the end, tossed to former sound man and shorts director Ed Bernds, the Blondie films were being handled as carelessly as any late-era Three Stooges short.

First, let me say that I'm a big fan of Chic Young's original strip which was at its creative peak when Columbia purchased the screen rights in 1937. Only four years prior, Young had converted his run-of-the-mill flapper strip into a mini-saga about lower middle-class family life and was soon running in over 250 papers, making it one of the most widely read strips in the nation. Despite whatever overtones of Americana the strip has picked up over the decades, Blondie was a far from idealized portrait of American life, with the flighty and hapless couple forever besieged by bottom-feeding vultures ready to strip them of what little cash and dignity they had. Even the Bumstead's friends and neighbors always seemed to have an axe to grind with the family (sometimes with good reason but more frequently out of a need to kick downward). The film series latches on to Young's somewhat cynical view of humanity from the start, but undercuts the effectiveness of this man-against-the-world theme by interpreting Dagwood as a bumbling and near-defenseless halfwit. Whereas the Dagwood of the strip could be easily identified with by readers, Arthur Lake's Dagwood is an extraterrestrial, and his victimization subsequently becomes less a comment on human cruelty than on Dagwood's intelligence. This is certainly not to say that Lake isn't entertaining. He's the series' raison d'etre, a classic clown, and the series would never have lasted 12 years without him. But he is not, in any way, Young's Dagwood, and whatever potential there might have been in bringing Young's humor to the screen was lost with his casting (Penny Singleton, on the other hand, was well-cast despite Bosley Crowther 's assertion that she played Blondie "less as a woman than as a composite statistic.").

Be that as it may, the series has some pretty unique qualities. While it can claim a certain fidelity to the strip, more importance is placed on the series' fidelity to itself. The key sets, the Bumstead home and the offices of the Dithers/Radcliffe Construction Company, remained the same for 12 years giving the movies, in that regard at least, a heightened sense of realism. Similarly, a decision was made to allow actors to "own" their roles, thus, when Jonathan Hale left in 1946, his character of J. C. Dithers was replaced rather than recast and an entire story written to introduce Jerome Cowan as Dagwood's new boss, Mr. Radcliffe. Likewise for Danny Mummert who played Alexander Bumstead's best friend Alvin Fuddle from the beginning in 1938. When Mummert was unavailable in 1945 due to his appearance in It's a Wonderful Life (along with Larry "Alexander Bumstead" Simms), his role as the sarcastic neighbor kid was taken by Bobby Larson as egghead Tommy Cooper. Stock motifs brought over from the strip, such as Dagwood bowling over the mailman while rushing to catch his bus, are shot nearly identically for each film allowing for some fun variations when Blondie or Alexander repeat the pattern. Less fun is the increasing dependency on stock formulas in the plotlines. By 1945, virtually every Blondie film ends in precisely the same way, with Blondie using some incredibly unlikely advantage to force Dithers or Radcliffe to give Dagwood his job back with a raise and a bonus (both have inevitably vanished by the next picture). Even the loose rules of farce comedy are stretched to the limit by the collections of brain-bendingly impossible coincidences that constitute the stories for such entries as Leave It to Blondie (1945). The bottom falls out the franchise soon after Ed Bernds takes over the director's chair from Abby Berlin in 1948. Cheap slapstick replaces character comedy and it suddenly seems as though no character can leave a room without knocking his or her head against the door. The final two Blondie films, both 1950, show the series in total collapse. Blondie's Hero clumsily shoehorns the cast into a hack service comedy as Dagwood bizarrely decides to join the Army reserve on a whim (the possibility of his being sent to war is brushed off with the claim that wars will end if everyone joins the reserve). Blondie and Dagwood's ride in a surprisingly fragile runaway tank is intended to be the film's comic centerpiece and bears more than a passing resemblance to any sloppy stock footage sequence from a Jules White short. Beware of Blondie is the heartbreaker, a story half written and half scraped from a wad of used Kleenex. Dagwood, left in charge of the firm (huh??) by Mr. Dithers (where Mr. Radcliffe vanished to is never explained) is immediately conned by a woman posing as an expected client. She ends up grabbing a set of pre-signed blank checks that Dithers has insanely left behind for Dagwood's use. An hour's worth of (weirdly confusing) incident revolving around the stolen checks is abruptly nullified by a late night phone call from the back of Mr. Dithers' head. "I didn't realize what I was doing when I left those checks.", says Dithers. "They're worthless! I closed my account in that bank months ago!" THE END (in other words, "There was no monster...").

Ignoble end aside, the series' highlights are plentiful, chief among them (in my mind) being Hans Conried's wonderful, showy appearance in Blondie's Blessed Event (1942). Conried nearly shoves Lake, Singleton, et al from the screen in the role of eccentric playwright George Wickley who takes up Dagwood's invitation to "drop by anytime" and ends up commandeering his household. Another standout entry, Blondie Goes Latin (1941), is a full-blown musical that allows Penny Singleton to display her much-neglected (post-Blondie) talents as a singer/dancer, and gives Lake a rare opportunity to show off his skill as a drummer.