There's Sometimes a Buggy

This time on the podcast, journey back to August 2018, when your faithful panelists projected their hopes and fears onto the post-Midterm landscape. After 38 minutes' worth of our deathless political prognostication, journey back even further to yet another lackluster late-1930s Dick Powell film. Ol' Dick must have considered the Gipper a jinx - most of his non-Reagan films are so much better (at least Dave thinks so - Gareth and Romy were far more favorably disposed toward Going Places). Everyone did agree on one thing: Louis Armstrong dominates the proceedings and naturally generated the lion's share of the discussion.

  We also found a little time to delve into William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions (which was roosting at Warner Brothers by 1938) and reflect back on that miserable magnate's malign militarism (inspired by a little Maine-based "fake news" gloat planted in this film). Also discussed: the star-crossed life of that "Dirty Little Rat Nunheim" (Harold Huber), Ladies Love Cool (Allen) Jenkins, Dorothy Dandridge's debut, and the deathless Johnny Mercer classic "Jeepers Creepers". Meanwhile, an ebullient (if perfunctory) Dutch gets another chance to dazzle us with his play-by-play patter.             Novel suggestion: Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

A momentous episode this week, as Elise traces the root of her superhero fandom to a childhood encounter with The Passion of Starfire (Perez's exquisitely Paglian cover to issue #23). 'Nuff said!  

 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

This week on the podcast, a little-seen Pine-Thomas "Far-Easter" that has been identified (by one or two dreamers - i.e. 20% of the living people who've watched it) as an antecedent of the Indiana Jones films. Why? Well, there's the hat. You need more than that to hang a theory on? You might be out of luck. HONG KONG reunites the Gipper with friend of the podcast Rhonda Fleming during the last days of the Maoist revolution. The film takes its name from the British-occupied city, but a lot of the action takes place within civil war-ridden China itself. It's got a bit of a Cold War feel to it (Reagan says "Commies"), but, ultimately, the narrative pulls back from such grandly geopolitical concerns to tell a sub-Hitchcockian story of child-abduction and chicanery perpetrated by a grotesquely caricatured Chinese antique dealer/criminal played by Marvin Miller (later the voice of Robby the Robot and never, incidentally, a person who should be playing Asian characters). 

  We take a little time to consider the "Solid Citizen" Reagan persona (as it was understood by 1952 audiences) and ponder its long-ranging political impact. Gareth and Dave also take a little detour into the history of the Pine-Thomas production company, while Romy takes a phone call. We close out the 'cast with a review of the 20 films we've covered so far. Quite a clambake!  

 

Novel suggestion: Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

The specter of Zandia returns to bedevil the book once more in issues #21 and #22, prompting your hosts to ponder how a Madame Rouge Regime would have handled the menace of... Brother Blood! The Titans themselves show no signs of being up to the task - initiating very possibly the least successful cult infiltration operation in the history of comics, and then playing right into the hands of proto-Fox News psychopath Bethany Snow on national TV. Also notable this month is what's missing: i.e. most of Dick Grayson's clothing.

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

We've got a watershed moment in the Gipper's career for you this week. In fact, it's two watershed moments in one - Reagan's first substantial role in a commercial hit film and our protagonist's first pairing with the Greatest First Lady Manquée of them all, Jane Wyman! Your humble panel takes enthusiastic note of these facts (and of Jane's stellar performance as Claire Adams); however, that enthusiasm dries up pretty quickly when they consider the puerile military college hi-jinks documented by Brother Rat. A matchless Warner Brothers ensemble cast (including Priscilla Lane, Wayne Morris, Eddie Albert, Louise Beavers, Olin Howland, Jane Bryan, Henry O'Neill, William Tracy, and Johnny "Scat" Davis) can only do so much with these jackbooted animal house antics.

It is striking, however, to observe the American officer class at play (and on penalty tours) during the final days of the country's irrelevance as a global military power. In line with the buffoonish expectations set by Sergeant Murphy (along with other Warner "service comedies" of the 1930s like Flirtation Walk and Shipmates Forever),  the film provides a glimpse of a time when no viewer would ever have believed (or hoped) that the United States was just a couple of years away from world domination.  We also consider the ways in which this film brings the Reagan persona into focus - was it just a fluke that Dutch was cast as the most grounded "rat"? Or can we already see intimations of his Avuncular/Grandfatherly Decider Telos just one year into his half-century as a public figure.    

Novel suggestion: Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

This time on the podcast, Dave and Elise examine issue #19, wherein our intrepid group trips up "The (Dr.) Light Fantastic", with a little (very little) help from guest-star Hawkman (who, apparently, isn't enough of a stellar enticement to appear in person on the cover). Then, in issue #20's "Dear Mom and Dad", we get a New York Times op-ed style take on life in the superhero community from "normal" (i.e. white, male, upper middle-class, Republican) speedster Wally West. 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

*** Fair Warning - the first 29 minutes of this episode are devoted to a rather lengthy discussion re: whether Toronto really is the worst city in the world, or just another typically terrible blight on the late capitalist landscape. Feel free to skip ahead - although, if you do, you'll miss out on the ballad of whining Beaches resident Viola Bracegirdle.***

Conventional wisdom may hold that Reagan's political career began with his sociopathic campaign encomium to Presidential-Not-Too-Hopeful Barry Goldwater in 1964, but true Gipperistas know that the Great Communicator's first speech of note came 12 years earlier, in the closing moments of She's Working Her Way Through College. On that august occasion, RR (playing deep-thinking Lit Professor John Palmer) raised his voice in favour of accessible higher education for all and against society's prurient micromanagement of women's bodies. If only Prof. Palmer had run for office in 1980.

 

Directed by Bruce "Lucky" Humberstone and co-starring (well, actually, starring) Virginia Mayo, She's Working Her Way Through College is one of the strangest remakes in history - transplanting 1942's prescient College Red Scare comedy The Male Animal into the barren political ground of the McCarthy Era. Naturally, all mentions of anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti have been excised from the script - instead, we get the initially-promising tale of a burlesque dancer who dreams of trading in her gams for iambs under Reagan's tutelage (until the college's scuzzy dean, an erstwhile admirer of Mayo's stage act, tries to throw her off the campus before he gets mid-century me-too'd). Our panel members agree that Mayo's pretty great in the role, but her story gets lost somewhere along the way, among too many of the wrong scenes imported wholesale from the original (presumably in an effort to demonstrate, once and for all, that Ronald Reagan, much as we love him, is no Hank Fonda). In keeping with the lobotomized spirit of 1950s political thinking, any systemic problems raised in the original film (starting with Nuremberg style campus football rallies) are reduced to accidents of history that can be resolved by firing (or, in this case, merely humbling) one villainous Administrator.

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"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

This time on the podcast, meet a mother not even a mother could love in issue #17's "The Possessing of Frances Kane" and learn the terrible secret of Wally West's Young Republican leanings in issue #18's "A Pretty Girl is Like a -- Maladi!" Elise pitches her take on Marv Wolfman as the Rod Serling of superhero comics and Dave anathematizes the anemic political culture of Late Cold War America. 

  All this and Gar Logan getting thunked in the chin by an ocean liner!
 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

It's a mixed bag week on Ben Days of Our Lives, as Elise & Dave slog through the Devolution Pool of Wolfman/Perez's incoherent Doom Patrol/Zahl/Rouge/Brotherhood of Evil/Mento arc finale (what the hell did anyone want with Zandia again?) before finding safe storytelling haven in the pathos-charged pages of issue #16's "Starfire Unleashed". 

Special bonus: full coverage of the 16-page preview of Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw's "Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew" (starring Roger-make-that-Rodney-Rabbit and Superman).  

 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

We've got a bona fide Foy Unit gem for you this week on the podcast - courtesy of screenwriter Crane Wilbur, director William C. McGann, and a personality-studded cast which includes studio up-and-comer Jane Bryan, show fave Sheila Bromley, Sig Ruman in The Wedding Night  demon patriarch-mode, lovable contract players Elisabeth Risdon, Dorothy Peterson, and Henry O'Neil - plus wildcards Susan Hayward & Esther Dale. Girls on Probation is an archetypal late-30s Warner Brothers programmer, a tale of sinners and saints in the hands of an angry class system - with nothing but the emerging New Deal agencies to keep our protagonist out of the flames.     It's not all progressivism and light, though - not by a long shot. For one thing, there's something awfully wrong with the film's condemnatory attitude towards Hilda Engstrom's matriarchal family - an observation which affords the panel an opportunity to heap opprobrium upon Philip Wylie and his mid-20th century Jordan Peterson-style stunts. Other topics include: Dickie Jones/Dickie Moore, what might have been for Jane Bryan, and our collective sense of the rapidly crystallizing Reagan persona: the brashly virtuous Midwesterner whose path to success-without-regrets is greased by Ideology. 

Also: Gareth discusses Michael Rogin's Ronald Reagan,' the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987) 

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"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges