By the Skin of Your Teeth

Originally meant to be a satire... though of a film very few have ever seen nowadays, the Norman Z. McLeod western comedy The Paleface (1948), written by Frank Tashlin about 1929's Virginian, infuriated the man in how it was directed (as a more generic spoof of the western)... but funnily enough, despite the screenwriter’s opinion, until Blazing Saddles (1974) came out, it was the highest grossing western parody of all-time and spawned a sequel in Son of Paleface (1952), while it was also remade as the Don Knotts vehicle The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968). After government agents tasked with tracking down an illegal gun smuggling ring turn up dead, the infamous Calamity Jane (Jane Russell) is secretly broken out of jail by Gov. Johnson (Charles Trowbridge) with the hope that she will take a pardon for going undercover to get to the bottom of this rebel-rousing (similar to rabble-rousing) gang in the frontier land.

Sometimes, even the immediacy of a mesmeric score setting the mood for what is to come tells the viewer that they are likely in for something really special. Case in point, Bernard Herrmann’s intense opening composition for 1962's Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson (Happy Birthday to Me). Produced by and starring Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird; On the Beach), he plays small town attorney Sam Bowden – a well respected family man within the quaint community in Georgia. Soon to be met with a harbinger of much danger, Max Cady (Robert Mitchum – Out of the Past; Where Danger Lives) – who was put behind bars by the soft spoken lawyer eight years ago after he testified at his trial, has made it quite clear that Sam’s wife Peggy (Polly Bergen) and daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) are in just as much danger, if not more.

elebrating its 85th anniversary this year, Arthur Lubin’s Buck Privates started Bud Abbott and Lou Costello on their path to superstardom. Though they had already gained some fame on the vaudeville and burlesque comedy circuits, as well as gathering some traction on the radio (and lest we forget their small roles in their first film, One Night in the Tropics, the year before), things would be wholly different soon after. Combining their very different talents as the perfect straight and funny men (their longtime writer and ideas man John Grant came along for the ride – and would be involved on most of their future movies), it also didn’t hurt that cinema goers found plenty of comedic fun in its topical premise as tensions grew around the fears of the lengthening World War II – making Universal the most money it had ever earned up until that point (four million dollars – a lot of cash when tickets were between ten cents and a quarter depending on the location).

hough today’s feature is immediately sited as a science fiction classic, Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) is perhaps just as well remembered for its majestic original robot and pinup infused movie poster design (that is still, to this day, a costly collectible)... though the art is quite misleading when you know what the movie is actually about. Following a narrative loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, which, for those who do not know, is about a man forced to live stranded upon a magical island with his daughter, until he causes a shipwreck that brings with it possible rescue (and a man who may fall in love with his daughter)... this futuristic feature follows a somewhat similar sci-fi blueprint.

With a most impeccable cast, you would think the modern set western drama The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle), would be best remembered for its acting... though sadly it’s remembered for the tragic deaths soon thereafter of its three main cast members – Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. Written by Marilyn Monroe’s then husband (but soon to be ex) Arthur Miller (the famed playwright of “Death of a Salesman”), the Reno area set story follows the aptly named misfits, including recent divorcée Roslyn Taber (Monroe – River of No Return; The Seven Year Itch), a lonely aging man’s man of a cowboy in Gay Langland (Gable – Gone with the Wind; It Happened One Night), aged divorced landlady Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter – Miracle on 34th Street; A Letter to Three Wives), and widowed tow truck driver Guido Delinni (Eli Wallach – The Magnificent Seven; Seven Thieves) – and they all have one thing in common... abject loneliness.

An over the top, campy kitsch cult classic that plays like a wildly fun rock opera, Flash Gordon (1980), directed by Mike Hodges, and based on the Alex Raymond comic strip first published in 1934, is perhaps most intriguing for attracting the rock band Queen to compose and perform the theme song and score with the help of orchestral scorer Howard Blake (though much of his work was cut in favour of Brian May). Produced by the famed Dino De Laurentiis, this would be his third and final creation of a former comic strip, with the first two being Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik, both released in 1968