Movies

The Earth Dies Screaming (1965) A very small end of the world movie, with half a dozen baffled survivors in a British village facing enigmatic alien robots and blank-eyed remote-controlled corpses. It's full of slow-moving threats from which people are unable to escape, since they hide by running into a room and leaving the door open. This is one of a number of similar British films at that time, such as Night of the Big Heat, based on the novel by John Lymington, who made a career of writing novels about a small group of people trapped in a village by a mysterious force. Doesn't live up to its title. 4/10

Wonder Bar (1934) One evening's events in a high-class nightclub in Paris. I had read that this film contains some of Busby Berkeley's most spectacular work but I didn't know why it wasn't readily available. Now I know. It must have been incredibly expensive to produce, with huge numbers of dancers, costumes, forty-foot moving pillars and other props, and some scenes are shot in a closed room walled with gigantic mirrors, creating a vast space filled with moving forms. Al Jolson stars, and he gives an amazing performance of songs, offhand gags and vaudeville routines. Dolores Del Rio is resplendent in a backless lame' gown and metallic satin jacket with mink sleeves. Every dress is completely nuts - even the dowagers were wearing eye-popping attire. Dick Powell sings, Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert drink and try to evade their wives. The plot is mere filler between insanely elaborate spectacles. What killed the film for television is not the gay joke or the sadistic gaucho dance, but the astounding production number in which Jolson rides to blackface heaven on a mule. I don't think any other movie contains so many blacked up white folks as this, not to mention the relentless depiction of the most painfully obvious stereotypes. Blackface heaven contains Lincoln worship, porkchop trees, an automatic chicken roasting machine, and of course free watermelons in the blackface heaven version of Harlem. Even his dog and mule end up with tinfoil wings in blackface heaven. I think everyone ought to see this, just so they can see what kind of bizarre and deranged stuff was once considered perfectly normal and acceptable entertainment. This is the sort of screwed up thing I pick for Family Movie Night. 10/10 for being one of the damnedest things I ever did see.

THIS IS BAD. DON'T DO THIS:

Marse Linkum is patron saint of Blackface Heaven

Blackfaces love watermelon.