Posted 4:16 PM by Gene

A soundtrack blogger whom the authorities have "harassed" for posting a few too many in-print recordings (including some Elvis albums) is shutting his site down today -- you'll know who he is if you have that interest -- and today I am frenziedly downloading stuff I don't have, and the cumulative effect is mind-bending: all these third and fourth-rate films, most of which have languished in vaults since their release, from outfits like Lopert Pictures (the smutty ahthouse division of United Artists), often with poster art showing sex-crazed men chasing beauties in bath towels -- and the most sensational covers front the most banal or lachrymose music -- and starring the work of Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini and others who have not aged well, and you could not pay people to hear these soundtracks, let alone to see the movies; but even in this purposeless hyperactive ennui one can learn a little something, in this case from the back cover of one item I will not identify, a PR0N with pretensions whose blurbs hopelessly slime it as a period piece and the cri-TICS as blind nose-in-the-airs:

"May the bluenoses leave it lay [SIC!] for the pleasure of those whose taste it is. Stands photographically head [SIC!] and shoulders over [a competitor I will not name]...and more varied! [Punctuation SIC!] The first ten minutes achieve Modigliani tones. The cast is enthusiastic... [Punctuation SIC!] [The lead, er, actress] makes a mark on your emotions!" [Punctuation SIC!]
--Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE [Capitalization SIC!]

"The most technically polished erotic movie. Bizarre, explicit, imaginative artistry. It's not a film for the "Sound of Music" - Radio City Music Hall - Reader's Digest audience. But for those who constitute the obviously very large audience for Erotica [Capitalization SIC!], it's certainly the more imaginative."
--Kevin Sanders/[Punctuation SIC!] WABC-TV

The Most [Capitalization SIC!] interesting film of its kind to date because it dissolves the distinction between sex films and art films. [The lead, er, actress]'s performance was remarkably persuasive! [Punctuation SIC!]
--Charles Michener/Newsweek

"The photography is good, the music even better...." [Italicization SIC!]
--Bernard Drew/Gannett Syndicate

We must stop here as it wearies us to have to go back and forth typing. We will say this goes on forty years ago and both movee and cri-TICS would today be laughed out of the business as they should have been nearly forty years ago. Certainly nobody has heard of Judith Crist in AGES (and rightly so) -- and she got ample TV face time and was a rival of the "great" Pauline Kael's. And who, many will ask with a grimace, was SHE? Of the others we will say nothing except that we are not surprised at this hack Michener's insight as some writer once lambasted his rag's now forgotten lead theater revuer Larry Krill or Jack Dull or whatever his name was for complaining about the lighting in nude scenes. Nor are we surprised that a GanNETtoid would be so interested in music. The next time an IDIOT rends his scalp over the demotion of movie revuers remember this example, and the hacks who need glasses for their MINDS let alone their EYES.

P. S. Tex Beneke playing music from The Alamo!