GUEST REVIEW: PIN-UP GIRL

Here is another guest review from a friend I truly miss Bruce Kogan. He is reviewing the light hearted Betty Grable musical - Pin Up Girl...

With the title of Pin Up Girl this film could only star Betty Grable. As the GI favorite in World War II only Rita Hayworth ranked up there with Betty and those legs.

With a plot thin as a Gillette razor blade and a leading man who is the definition of bland Betty and the rest of the talented musical cast carry this one. But make no mistake she's box office draw.

Betty is a USO hostess in Missouri and she and friend Dorothea Kent get the call to serve as typists in the Navy Department. But that's after first going to New York and appearing in Joe E. Brown's nightclub and scoring a big hit. Betty's also a big hit with John Harvey, medal winner from the South Pacific now on shore duty.

But after getting a lecture from another desk bound sailor Eugene Palette, Harvey thinks Betty's just using him as a career booster. So what does Betty do? She puts on a pair of glasses and fools Harvey until the final moments of the film that she's someone else. It does work for Clark Kent and as I remember also for Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman.

But with all those numbers from folks like Martha Raye, Charlie Spivak's Orchestra, the Condos brothers, but most of all Betty who really cares about a truly silly plot. Pin-Up Girl cleaned up at the box office, made a lot of money for Darryl Zanuck and 20th Century Fox.

The last number with Betty drilling the WACS was a thinly disguised attempt to hide her pregnancy. She hated the number and everyone else did including me.

No deep thoughts here, just sheer entertainment...

BRUCE'S RATING: 6 OUT OF 10

MY RATING: 7 OUT OF 10

MEL BROOKS MEETS CARY GRANT

Aside from his ex-wives, most people really liked Cary Grant. He wasn’t a controversial figure on-screen or off. For nearly five decades, he was the Platonic ideal of what a male movie star should look like. He was suaveness personified. Even Ginger Rogers said he was one of the greatest dancers she ever shared a floor with, and that’s coming from a person who made ten movies with Fred Astaire.

Not everyone in Hollywood was susceptible to his charm, though. Sometime around the late 1950s or early ‘60s, after he’d left the Sid Caesar Show, Mel Brooks was in Hollywood writing a movie. The building he was working in happened to be across the street from Grant’s production company, Granart. He couldn’t believe his luck. The Cary Grant was right next door, and he might even get a chance to see him in person.

One afternoon, Brooks bumped into the actor, and it turned out that the admiration ran both ways. “Mel Brooks,” the North By Northwest star said, “I’ve bought all your albums. You made me poor.” Brooks panicked but managed to strike up a conversation with him. Grant invited him to lunch, and the comedian thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

He remembered thinking it was odd that the actor only ate a hardboiled egg for lunch. They chatted, but the conversation was relegated to the type of small talk that most people – even extroverts – absolutely shudder just thinking about. They discussed their favourite colours (at least in Brooks’s memory). They discussed their favourite cars. For the record, Grant said Rolls Royce, which, if you think about it, was really never a question. They parted ways at their respective buildings, and Brooks assumed that was the end of it.

The next day, Grant called his office and invited him out for lunch again. The process repeated, right down to that single hardboiled egg. The same thing happened the next day. Finally, after a few days of these lunches, Brooks had had enough. The phone rang, and he told his secretary to tell the silver screen legend that he wasn’t there. “I had nothing more to say to him,” he said. “I said my favourite colour. I said my favourite car. There was nothing more to talk about.”

It would have been interesting to have heard Grant’s side of the story. Presumably, he would have had a different perspective on how that friendship blossomed and withered, and he might even have taken issue with the colour Brooks identified as his favourite (yellow). The comedian has told the story many times over the years, including several times on The Johnny Carson Show, but it’s much harder to find instances in which Grant talks about Brooks, positively or otherwise.

He was, it should be noted, not a complete dullard by most accounts. Anyone who has seen any of his movies will notice that he made romantic comedies look easy. He had perfect comic timing and never overplayed his hand as an actor. Even Clint Eastwood was a fan of his work. Sadly, however, it seems that his love for Brooks was unrequited...

NEW PATSY CLINE RECORDINGS UNEARTHED

Detective work locates dozens of recorded live performances, including 15 songs the late country icon never released.

As improbable as the news may seem, it's true: More than six decades after her much-too-soon death, new music by country legend Patsy Cline is being released!

On Saturday, a limited-edition two-LP set of brand-new recordings will go on sale nationwide in celebration of Record Store Day. The full collection, entitled Imagine That: The Lost Recordings (1954-1963), is also set to be released as a two-CD set next Friday, which is the same day that the digital download will be available.The 48 tracks, all retrieved from live performances, feature 15 never-released songs, as well as new renditions of such iconic Cline classics as “Crazy,” “I Fall to Pieces” and “Walkin’ After Midnight.”

This is no historical footnote, assures Cline discographer George Hewitt. “It’s a dream come true,” says the lifelong collector, who co-produced the project for the Elemental Music/Deep Digs label. Cline’s fans worldwide will be rejoicing over the news, but no one is happier than Julie Fudge, Cline’s daughter, who was just 4 years old when she lost her mother in a private plane crash in 1963.

“It’s just so real,” Fudge, 66, says of the new music. “A lot of people — when you lose someone — you don’t have all these different avenues to remember them. The fact that it’s been more than 60 years and to still have her in our lives every day is quite an accomplishment. It’s been such a blessing."

The older of Cline’s two children, Fudge has been the family’s keeper of the Cline flame for many years. But it’s really been the singer’s enormous fan base who’s done the heaviest lifting to carry forward her musical legacy. Key among them is Hewitt, who oversees the authoritative website dedicated to the Cline catalogue. He also provided the spark for the new record project after a Washington, D.C.-area man reached out to him a couple of years ago seeking more information about a Cline acetate disc he’d found in his parents’ vinyl collection. Each side of the 78-rpm record featured song titles that Hewitt had never heard on any other Cline recording, and as he writes in the album notes, “I nearly jumped out of my skin.”

The discovery quickly inspired him to enlist sound engineer Dylan Utz and producer Zev Feldman in the hunt for more treasure, and their meticulous search dug up far more riches than they had ever anticipated. The three men, joined by Fudge, told their story on Wednesday during a panel discussion held at Grimey’s record store in Nashville. The sources for the album, they explained, were varied: Several derived from the collections of hobbyists, who snagged amateur recordings off original broadcasts. Others were found in the deep recesses of archives and storage vaults. The Grand Ole Opry, for instance, was able to provide four new performances from its collection. All told, the songs span Cline’s entire career and sonically track her rise to fame.

“It really demonstrates how Patsy adapted as an artist and refined her artistry over time and almost reinvented herself in the short period of time she had on this planet,” Hewitt said during the panel discussion.

Among the album’s many highlights are the contents of that original acetate 78, two demos that are now believed to be Cline’s earliest recordings, likely made in September 1954. Though Cline wanted to release Christmas music, she never did, and the new album remedies that. Among its tracks are two holiday favorites, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow” and “Winter Wonderland,” both duets. Cline never released a duet or other collaboration, and the new album features nine, including one with Cowboy Copas, who perished in the plane crash with Cline (along with fellow Opry star Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cline’s manager, Randy Hughes).

Cline was only 30 years old when the single-engine plane went down in bad weather in a forest outside of Camden, Tennessee, on March 5, 1963. The four, all killed instantly, were on their way home to Nashville from a benefit concert in Kansas City, Kansas; Hughes was at the controls...

WHAT A CHARACTER: LAWANDA PAGE

LaWanda Page, was born Alberta Peal, was born on  October 19, 1920.. Best known for her role as Aunt Esther in the popular 1970s television sitcom Sanford and Son. She later reprised this role in the television shows Sanford Arms and Sanford.

 
LaWanda Page and Redd Foxx, who portrayed Fred Sanford, were very close friends from the time they were pre-teens, having attended school and growing up together in St. Louis. Eventually, both entered the field of comedy separately and performed their own stage acts. During her tenure as a stand-up comic, a career she continued into the 1990s, she often was billed as "The Queen of Comedy" or "The Black Queen of Comedy".

Page recorded several live comedy albums for the Laff Records label in the late 1960s and early 1970s under her LaWanda Page stage name. Other than the relatively clean Sane Advice album, released two years after the run of Sanford and Son, Page's albums and stand-up material was raunchy blue comedy in nature. She was one of the few women who performed extended spoken word pieces in the black signifying or toasting tradition.

One release, a gold-selling album called Watch It, Sucker!, was titled after one of her Aunt Esther character's catchphrases in order to capitalize on her newfound television fame.

On Sanford and Son, Aunt Esther was the sister of Fred Sanford's late wife Elizabeth. Page had been performing her comedy routine in nightclubs in St. Louis and then Los Angeles for several years, but had planned to leave show business to move back to St. Louis to take care of her ailing mother. When Redd Foxx was offered a sitcom in Los Angeles, he brought his childhood friend Page to the attention to one of the show's producers, who was already familiar with Page and her act. Foxx subsequently asked Page to read for the role of Aunt Esther; she auditioned and was offered the role. However, prior to taping, producers became concerned when Page, whose experience was limited primarily to nightclub stages, seemed to have difficulty working in a sitcom format. Eventually, one of Sanford and Son's producers told Foxx that Page would need to be fired and that another actor would need to be cast before the show could begin taping. Foxx responded by insisting that Page keep the part, even threatening to walk away from the show if Page were fired. The producers relented, and Page's Aunt Esther went on to become one of the most popular TV sitcom characters of the 1970s.

Page's Aunt Esther was a combination of devout churchgoer and tough-as-nails realist, unafraid to state whatever was on her mind. While her relationship with Foxx's character Fred Sanford was usually confrontational, she betrayed a tender side through her love of her nephew Lamont. Common issues between brother- and sister-in-law were his lack of business success and his lukewarm religious faith. Sometimes, primarily because of their shared love for Lamont and the late Elizabeth, the two adversaries managed to find common ground. Although "Sanford and Son" was clearly Foxx's vehicle, Page's Aunt Esther could hold her own against the show's star. (Ironically, the church-going Esther was a great contrast to the raunchy, expletive-filled material of Page's live act and records.)

In the early 1990s she appeared on several tracks of the debut album by RuPaul entitled Supermodel of the World, most notably the hit song "Supermodel (You Better Work)." She also appeared in several music videos from the album. Shortly before her death she appeared in a series of comical Church's Chicken television commercials featuring the catchphrase "Gotta love it!"

Page died of complications from diabetes on September 14, 2002. She is interred in an outdoor crypt at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.Her daughter, the evangelist Clara Estella Roberta Johnson, died on June 4, 2006, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 69...

STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO: RED SKELTON

 April 10, 1958 – "The Day Red Skelton’s World Shattered" was the headlines in the paper. This sad photo I almost didn't publish. More than 65 years after it was taken you can still feel the pain and heart ache.For a man who made the world laugh, this was the day that brought him to his knees. On this day, Red Skelton lost his beloved son, Richard, to leukemia. He was just 10 years old.

Red had searched the world for a cure, hoping that his fame and fortune could save the life of his little boy. But even the greatest love a father could give wasn’t enough to stop the inevitable. The same man who brought joy to millions now faced a sorrow no words or stage could ever heal.

From that day forward, his laughter carried a quiet pain, his performances masking a grief that never left him. Though the world remembers Red Skelton as a legendary comedian, those who truly knew his story remember him as a father whose heart broke on April 10, 1958. A man who, despite unimaginable loss, continued to bring light to others—even hile carrying darkness within.

SCANDAL AT STEEL CITY CON

This past weekend from April 4 - April 6 was the annual Steel City Comic Book convention in Pittsburgh. I have been to the event before, and the convention in Pittsburgh brings all walks of people to get rare merchandise, dress up in their favorite costumes, and meet and greet some of their favorite celebrities. Most of the celebrities that appear are at the end of their career, but some big stars to appear from time to time.

A surpise announcement was made on Friday that actor Kevin Spacey would be appearing. For a long time Spacey was one of the most celebrated actors until scandal rocked his career. In 2017, Spacey faced several allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment. On October 29, 2017, actor Anthony Rapp was the first to accuse Spacey of sexual misconduct. In the following weeks, other accusers came forward, including actor Roberto Cavazos, filmmaker Tony Montana, Richard Dreyfuss's son Harry, and at least eight people who worked on House of Cards.

In the wake of these claims, Netflix cut ties with Spacey, shelving his biopic of Gore Vidal and removing him from the last season of House of Cards. His completed role as J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott's film All the Money in the World (2017) was reshot with Christopher Plummer. Spacey has denied the accusations and was found not liable in a 2022 civil lawsuit filed by Rapp in New York. In a separate criminal case in London, he was acquitted by a jury of sexual assault charges in 2023.

Spacey is now unable to find regular film work, and his home recently was foreclosed on. Steel City Con made the announcement quickly and abruptly. Some vendors backed out of their appearance, and according to the vendors Steel City Con officials said those vendors will not be allowed back. My concern is there are a lot of children that go to the convention. Personally, I would not let anyone younger than a teenager go, and even though Kevin Spacey has only been accused of the misconduct, I don't feel he is a person that should be making an appearance at a convention like this.

I wrote to Steel City Con requesting an interview. I received no reply to the interview, but I told them this would make me not want to go to their convention in the future. Their reply back to me was "We looked you up and can not see that you have bought a ticket to the convention in the past". So it looks like the convention does not care about it's vendors and customers, they just look at the potential money they will make from having a controversial star like Kevin Spacey appear. Who is next - Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein?

DAVID DUNCAN'S HOLLYWOOD: SHOW BOAT