Posted 1:02 PM by Gene

It is a wonder Toenail.com hasn't commissioned some typical devil's-advocate fakery saying there IS no malaise in show-biz -- it's BETTER THAN EVER! That malaise sounds like mayonnaise and has a powerful rep from JIMMAH does not negate its usefulness. Aside from the fact that we're FED THAT BETTER-THAN-EVER LINE ALL THE TIME, there are several reasons why show-biz stinks. Last night, for instance, I could not keep a certain song from playing and replaying in my head -- "Moonlight Becomes You," the work of two HACKS named Johnny Burke and Edward Chester Babcock (Jimmy Van Heusen to you), as done definitively by Glenn Miller, with an all-too-little known baritone called Skip Martin (who had a really thick Italian name and performed with Chico Marx -- yes, Chico Marx had a big band), and the Modernaires with their odd lead falsetto. When Miller, who's chastised way too often for his sweet work, had a superb ballad, you could tell in the arrangement he knew it. We might not put this on exactly the same plane as Schubert or Chopin, but we suspect either genius would have found inspiration in Burke's lyric, as certainly Van Heusen did. (And let us not forget Burke had to write it this way because Der Bingle, who introduced the tune in Road to Morocco, didn't like singing "I love you," three little words that don't appear until towards the end.) We would wager the only difference between this immortal tune and a high-art specimen is that this one was "commercial."

Indeed now we think of the elegy Joseph Epstein wrote for Commentary which contains this stirring note:

In "Writing for the Movies," published in the February 1962 issue of Commentary...[the screenwriter Daniel Fuchs] asked if it was really fitting, in the name of highbrow snobbery, "to pass by so indifferently the work of [Hollywood directors and producers like] Ford, Stevens, Wilder, Mankiewicz, Huston, Zinneman, William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Sam Wood, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming, William Van Dyke, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Chaplin, Lubitsch, Goldwyn, Selznick, Milestone, Capra, Wyler, Cukor, Kazan?” The accomplishments of these men, he argued, had had a world-wide effect, and their achievement was of a magnitude equal to that of the best American architects and inventors. "Generations to come, looking back over the years, are bound to find that the best, most solid creative effort of our decades was spent in the movies, and it’s time someone came clean and said so."

Yes, we know why David Thomson closed his book on the biz' prospects with a chapter titled "That's All, Folks." At least no one can take our huge achievements away from us, and we always have songs like "Moonlight Becomes You" to remind us of when we could be proud of our national culture -- and Burke and Van Heusen worked in the movies too.

P. S. It appears the BEEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH is going to have another justly deserved down weekend, despite the best hopes of those who root for Cindy Sheehan and SLEAZY MOVIES at the same time.

P. P. S. And shucks Size XXXXL for the Size SSSSS guy, looks as if all those tens of millions of movie goers never materialized, unless of course they were GHOSTS, and they paid in UNSEEN DOLLARS.