Posted 5:41 PM by Gene

It's easy to think today's cineastes invented the notion of totally excluding common sense from the movies. I frequently succumb to this notion; it's hard not to. Today shuffling through the worthless LPs at Philadelphia Record Exchange I came across several soundtrack albums that demonstrate conclusively this isn't so. First a double-album including snippets from Words and Music, the noxious biography of Rodgers and Hart that couldn't tell the truth about Larry Hart's life because you couldn't do such things then, and (we now know) Dick Rodgers wouldn't have permitted it anyway. It ends with Mickey Rooney dying by wandering off in the rain. And the tragedy is MGM was sitting on all these wonderful songs! And Mickey and Judy Garland sang "I Wish I Were in Love Again", the best thing they ever did. The mess seems to have been inspired by Warner's Night and Day, with Cary Grant as Cole Porter [!!!!!]; it was so bad even Porter could laugh at it. Perhaps Arthur Freed was thinking of his rapturous first encounter with Shirley Temple when he made it.

Then I happened across four copies of a masterpiece of 26 (!) years ago: a two-disc set of Pennies from Heaven. This is odd, I thought; it's a soundtrack album -- and it's mostly old music! Then I remembered; this was a WUHK by the CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED DENNIS POTTUH, the HERR DOKTOR SONDHEIM of TV, based on his mini-series in which people with lousy lives lip-synched to thirties hits, the whole point to make fun of all those stupid wretched songs. Imagine being Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters and having to lip-sync to fifty-year old recordings! Of course it bombed, it bombed because it was a cheat, a pretentious cheat, the kind of movie designed to give people a bad time. I wonder if that's why no one but "African-Americans, gays and upscale whites" crowded into places like the "Zeigfield Theater" to see Singin' in the Rain; who wants to be beat over the head to fourth-rate music?

P. S. Wikipedia tells us Mistuh Pottuh came to believe "'every line that dripped from his pen was a work of genius'", which would definitely put him in the realm of EINSTEIN. He wasn't all bad, however; as he was dying of cancer he called his illness RUPERT, after -- YOU-KNOW-WHO.