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Sonny King
I Cried for You
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Vic Damone
Lost and Found
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Finally, The Cad casts its hat into the quotidian ring with The Daily Mirror. Here you 'll find the same hodgepodge hastily thrown together commentary and shoddy journalism provided by the major dailies, but without all the fly-in advertising! And we even check our facts the same way, meaning if we don't find them on Wikipedia, we simply keep googling words till a random post in a far-flung forum corroborates our story. Bookmark The Cad Daily Mirror now and receive our RSS feed; it'll keep you up to date with all the sporadic content we intend to offer.
Swank Film Classics.
SUNDAY IN NEW YORK
Released November 13, 1963 Stars Rod Taylor, Jane Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Robert Culp, Jim Backus, and Jo Morrow
Gothamites seemed to have always lived for their Sunday afternoons. After a Saturday night on the town, there’s a brunch to be had, The Times to be read, and a stroll to be taken. Eventually, they end up at museums or department stores - anyplace that can be passed off as idly constructive - or sometimes they duck out of thunderstorms and into cozy apartments; this is where trouble usually begins.
And so it does for Eileen Tyler and Mike Mitchell (Fonda and Taylor), strangers who find themselves drying off in uptown digs. Fed up with her boyfriend’s demands for sex, the inexperienced Eileen had that morning stolen away from him and Albany by showing up on brother Adam’s Manhattan doorstep. Unfortunately for airline pilot Adam, his own girlfriend was already on her way over with bagels, lox, and a Sunday morning libido. Yet, to save face and salvage the day, he and the galpal step out to find another suitable love nest. Out on Fifth Avenue, Tyler and Mitchell meet by literally getting themselves tangled up on a bus, and by mid-afternoon, Robert Culp appears as the suddenly lovestruck boyfriend who barges into the apartment to find them in robes. There’s a mistaken identity, scattered clothes are quickly collected, and the Peter Nero score swings throughout.
The number of pairings that have actually worked in the history of the Hollywood romantic comedy is certainly a lot fewer than the public wishes to believe. Even in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day vehicles, remembered more for their chemistry rather than comedy, it’s never made clear as to why these two characters fall in love. Do they share the same aspirations? have the same philosophy? Rarely does the romantic comedy script delve into the psyche of the characters – pacing and time constraint simply preclude it - and it’s for this reason there’s a preponderance of genre-specific criticisms that cry ‘no spark.’ This, however, is usually an unfair criticism of the actors’ talents, and the blame needs to be shifted to the entire premise of the genre itself. Volition is the power plant of every actor, so how can actors generate sparks when their characters have no volition?
Thus, Fonda and Taylor work together about as well in Sunday in New York as any other duo has worked in 99% of the romantic comedies that have ever been made. They hit their marks and say their lines; for some unknown reason, their characters fall in love. The audience needs to accept that and move on, and once it does, it will find that Sunday in New York is a very enjoyable picture. Amongst the cast, Cliff Robertson stands out as the alternatively frustrated, seething, and confused brother, and though they share perhaps all of fifteen minutes screen time, the real chemistry is between Robertson and Taylor, for Taylor suddenly comes to life when he has to cover his tracks before Robertson. Volition will do that for an actor.
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Shot on location, Sunday in New York might prove to be a difficult viewing for nostalgic New Yorkers as the hour-forty-five film is a mournful reminder of a city once sharp inhabited by denizens once sharper. Rockefeller Center and the skating rink seem pristine in the crisp early spring of 1963, and Central Park is remarkably devoid of bare-chested men in cargo shorts. As for Adam Tyler’s apartment, veteran set decorators Henry Grace and George R. Nelson created a living space that is both unbearably swank and cozy. Usual to the romantic comedies of the era is the high-rise, terraced, dimly lit, absolutely-perfect-down-to-the-molding bachelor pads occupied by the likes of Dean Martin in the Matt Helm series, but Tyler’s apartment, with its exposed radiators and 19th century (rather than mid-century Kiva) fireplace, is a creative mix of Danish modern and New York realism. Sure, front and center is the iconic Eames 670/671 chair and ottoman, and there’s a circular staircase that leads up to a bedroom loft, but instead of the photogenic colored walls and cabinets, we get the realistic off-white that’s very common to New York real estate. The decorators also thought to add a fair amount of clutter to Adam’s apartment, so along the brick wall there is a desk fraught with papers, maps, and pilot paraphernalia, and there are far too many mugs and cups hanging behind the bar. This all makes Tyler’s apartment look lived-in and real, which in turn makes Eileen’s slinking about the sofa real. We therefore identify with Mike Mitchell far more than we do with Matt Helm or any other character to occupy a push-button bachelor pad, for the latter space connotes mechanical sex (after it’s over the girl leaves or gets shot), while Tyler’s apartment connotes a very real and 'possible-for-everyman' lazy afternoon of eating bagels, having sex, pouring a drink, having sex, jonesing for some Chinese food but settling for the other half of that bagel, having sex, and then wrapping it all up toward seven o’clock by getting stuffed into a pair of trousers and heading out to buy smokes. Certainly, as the 1963 audiences left showings of Sunday in New York, men had to be craning their heads in search of their own Eileen Tylers, their single thought being, that could happen to me right now.
Not officially released on DVD, Sunday in New York can be found on several websites in DVD-R format. It occasionally airs on Turner Classics.
A new feature of The Cad is Swank Film Classics. First up is...
BOEING BOEING
Released December 22, 1965 Stars Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, and Thelma Ritter
With the current award-winning revival on Broadway, critics are finally starting to (having to?) backpedal on Boeing Boeing, but far from ever admitting they had all these years been wrong about the play, their reviews are littered with escape clauses like ‘creaky farce gets makeover’ and ‘the forgettable film version with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis.’ Forgettable? Never mind the natural delivery between old friends Curtis and Lewis, to claim Thelma Ritter’s beautifully deadpan performance, John Rich’s fast-paced direction, Neal Hefti’s bouncy score, and Edith Head’s vibrant costumes as forgettable is to say, ‘I’ve never actually seen the picture, so I'll rely on Googled reviews to write my column' To be sure, those who don’t know history are doomed to trash it.
The smooth and witty bedroom farce concerns the troubles of Bernard Lawrence (Curtis), a foreign correspondent assigned to the Paris desk. He’s got himself a luxury apartment, a weary but dutiful housekeeper, and three lovely live-in fiancés, all stewardesses that he adeptly juggles by way of airline time-tables. This arrangement seems to have been going rather swimmingly for Bernard, but as progress is wont to do, it mucks things up as jets get faster and the world gets smaller: with the girls in the air less and less, Bernard’s margin for error is getting wider and wider. For a few days, the near misses keep piling up in Lawrence International, and gloating over his troubles is Lewis as Robert Reed, a colleague waiting for the whole enterprise to blow just so he can assume the operation: the apartment, the maid, and, of course, the girls, or some facsimile thereof. The dialogue is as fast and sharp as any Billy Wilder comedy (short of One, Two, Three perhaps) and Ritter's resigned service to the three girls is remindful of Hattie McDaniel's brilliant performance in Alice Adams.
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That Boeing Boeing failed to garner praise in neither its film nor original Broadway version (it ran for only 23 performances when originally staged in 1965) is part of the documentation of America’s wholesale rejection of swank in the mid-sixties. Had it been filmed immediately on the heels of the successful 1962 London stage production, it might have been better received and subsequently earned its rightful place as a classic film comedy, but with the cult of youth pushing on to full steam in ’66, everything in pre-Beatles America – cocktail lounges, tuxedos, the foxtrot - needed to be dismissed as hokey, or, yes, even creaky. With the success of the new stage production, Boeing Boeing will probably see its official release on DVD, one as long overdue as the return of airline stewardesses as lovely as Mr. Lawrence’s.
Well, it's been a few years now since Thom Browne introduced his short suits, and despite the hoohah from the press, we still don't see them on anyone. True, publishing The Cad keeps us behind the typewriter for a fair number of hours these days, and we're not in the office environment as much as we used to be, but we should think that our travels about Manhattan Island would produce more than one or two sightings of this supposed fashion phenomenon. Yes, we've been drinking and dining in Soho and West Village, areas that are said to be hubs of Thom Browne activity, but the only TB suit we've seen around in the last two months is the one in the window of Tokio, a second hand clothing store in the East Village. At a price of $2,500, there are no takers.
The accompanying article is from The Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1958. The 'matador pants' referenced in the highlighted paragraph immediately caught our attention and set us off on a hunt for some archival photographs or illustrations. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be, and so we have to presume that whatever design house that offered this first genesis of the Thom Browne look never brought them to market. Thus, it can now be said that the matador look has achieved that difficult rank of timeless style; they've been dismissed by men generations apart.
Being both a fan of Jerry Lewis and rude boy style – the Jamaican ska look of the sixties notably revived by bands like Madness and The Specials in the seventies – it would seem natural that I would have long taken to the combination of white sock and black loafer. I hadn’t. As a kid, I had raided the local thrift stores for sixties mod and continental suits to emulate my heroes, but as for their footwear of choice, I had this complete psychological block that precluded my venture into that realm. It was one of those styles that I knew looked better on someone else and that if I tried it, the results would be nothing less than disastrous. Like that devil-lock I would sport for about six months in the eighties. I had been thinking Glenn Danzig but it came out…No, it’s too horrible to describe, so let’s just say that even The Misfits would have screamed in terror from that haircut of mine.
Over the years, I did take to light colored socks: powder blue, cream, yellow, tan, and even a screaming red, but never white, till this week. My nephew said he was in need of new trousers and I needed to get away from the typewriter for an hour, so on Monday afternoon, I got the car out of the garage and we took a little drive down Queens Boulevard to Macy’s. He picked out a few things to try on and while he did, I picked up a few necessities like t-shirts and socks. Of the latter, Gold Toe were going three pair for twenty-one bucks, but being that I had enough blue and grey, and that I rarely wear brown, I desultorily selected three pair of black. When my nephew returned from the dressing room, I was in the middle of an epiphany. ‘You know what,’ I said to him. ‘I’m going to try white,’ and he raised his brow. Sure, Why not? They were there on the rack, they looked crisp and clean, and what did I have to lose if I didn’t like them? Seven bucks? I had been feeling like I needed to try something new in my wardrobe anyway, and this was a quick and cheap way to do it.
Yesterday seemed right for taking them out for a spin. I had some research at the library to perform, but with the heat I was going to go casual: a vintage 50s turquoise short sleeve shirt, the narrow black trousers available through our Kingston 66 line, a pair of black brogues, and, of course, the white socks. As soon I was all rigged out and looking in the mirror, I realized I had been, for all these years, missing out on a really sharp style. With a lift of trouser from shoe, those socks popped - much more than the yellow, much more than the powder blue. I felt jaunty in them. Rude boy cool, and, as such, my second thought was that while the wingtips looked good with them, I might have to go out next week to find a pair that would really mate with this new addition to my wardrobe. Hmmm… Dare I try loafers? We’ll just have to see what’s out there.
Have you been wondering what you'll do when called upon to enter dangerous places? Some places think guns are a bad idea, and others won't countenance tasers, mace, tear gas or even the simplest anti-tank rocket. And even if you are allowed to carry something, there are all the difficulties in making sure your tailor accommodates whatever 'little friends' you choose to take with you.
But now we have the answer - an indestructible umbrella designed for stick-fighting!
Behold, and wonder!
Personally I'm waiting for them to start making the thing with a whangee handle.
Mulatto Supremacist Movement Quietly Comes and Goes
by Jack Newcastle
Atlanta, Georgia: ‘We are the best of both worlds,’ fired the Reverend Rondhu Silverstein, his billowing brown and white cassock allowing him to take full command of the room, ‘and it’s time for us, once again, to proudly – proudly - call ourselves mulatto.’
Before the turn of the twentieth century, mulattos – those usually good-natured offspring produced from the union of African-Americans and Caucasians - considered themselves a race unto their own, and for the last six months, the Reverend Silverstein has been busily at work on a manifesto calling not only for governmental recognition of his people but for his people to, if necessary, take up arms in order to secure that recognition.
‘Our history and heritage is unique in that we can lay claim to the accomplishments of black and white. If there is any doubt to our superiority, just look at all we’ve done for humanity. It is we who have invented the telephone, the radio, the P-Funk All-Stars, and the polio vaccine. Tell me, what other race can say that?’
His argument brought a thunderous applause from the some two-hundred plus crowd, followers coming from as far as Toronto to attend this first rally for the World Mulatto Movement, though a few expressed reticence in actually taking to arms.
‘We first heard about the Reverend through the internet,’ said Ed Begley Jr., a non-mulatto and quasi-actor who supports the cause, ‘and we thought, this is something special. This is something we need to be part of. I’m just unsure if violent action is the right methodology.’
The Reverend Silverstein disagrees. ‘We gave the government a chance,’ he said. ‘Only small demands were made: our own check box on forms public and private, for example. Go fill out an employment application anywhere in Atlanta, and they’ll have listed Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Eskimo. Eskimo! When was the last time you saw an Eskimo working the Slurpee machine in Atlanta? But they got them on the form and we’re not. So now it’s time for rebellion.’ When asked about his chances for success for government overthrow, the reverend quickly replied, ‘Fifty-fifty.’
For the better part of an hour, Reverend Silverstein held his audience captive, but then just as swiftly as the movement began, it ended.
‘Mulattos,’ he charged, ‘need to keep the race pure. No acts of miscegenation will be tolerated. Mulattos do not mix with blacks. Mulattos do not mix with whites. Mulattos must only marry and procreate with other mulattos.’
And then came a hand, uneasily raised from the audience. It belonged to a Mrs. Shaniqua Antonini of Austin, Texas. ‘But, Reverend,’ said Mrs. Antonini, ‘when two mulattos produce a child, wouldn’t that child technically be a quadroon?’
Taken aback by the question, Reverend Silverstein opened and closed his mouth a few times, gathered up his notes, and announced ‘Thanks for coming.’ A stunned audience filed out of the auditorium in a somewhat dejected manner.
Fifteen minutes later, the Reverend’s wife, Edna, issued a statement on his behalf. ‘My husband has decided it’s not in his best interest to pursue this line of thought and will be busying himself with other projects,’ one of them reportedly being a spec script for How I Met Your Mother.
I've never been to an orgy, but I can imagine a good rule of thumb is ‘Pace Yourself'; there's a lot of ground to cover and certainly you'll be tempted to cover it all within the first ten minutes. It's the same temptation succumbed to by the creative team behind Swingtown, the CBS summer entry about open marriages in a 1976 Chicago suburb.
Jaws, 8-track tapes, a complaint about the soaring cost of meat, we get all of this in the Swingtown pilot, along with a clip from The $10,000 Pyramid (with who else but Tony Randall as the guest?), and kids scrambling to hide dad's porno mags, and Harvey Wallbangers, and Quaaludes, and coke-snorted through a rolled-up twenty, and ¾ sleeve baseball shirts, and an introduction to a virile and mustachioed airline pilot named Tom, and the blonde stewardess he seduces (named Tammy, natch, as in the old National Airways campaign a ‘I'm Tammy, Fly Me') and, my favorite, no less than a rather grand money shot of a can of Tab, presumably because either Coca-Cola paid a good price for the placement of its iconic 70s product or the prop guy couldn't find a can of Diet Rite at the local bodega. Seeing all these 70s clichés crammed into a forty minute script, I had to ask 'What? No mood rings or Pet Rocks?' but, no, wait, there they were, turning up in the opening credits of episode two.
So, on to the plot. It's the Bicentennial, Fourth of July, 1976, and, along with their teenage kids, still-young-themselves couple Susan and er...(Joe? Bill? Frank? Pick one, I've now watched four episodes and I can't remember the name) are moving to larger digs in a better part of town, and right away we have to ask, who the hell moves on the Fourth of July? And especially the Bicentennial Fourth of July at that? The excitement of the coming celebration began an entire year before. Television was littered with daily history lessons (‘Two hundred years go today, George Washington had a mild case of agita...') people spent months painting fire hydrants and telephone poles - dyeing their poodles - red, white, and blue, a whole big explosive winding of a celebration was planned from coast to coast with sailboats and battleships and fireworks and block parties and parades, and these numbskulls, Susan and...(Steve? Milton? Gary?) decide they just had to, just had to, get a moving van and haul their crap across town on this day of all days. Really? Are these the sort of weirdoes you would invite to a barbecue? Yet, that's exactly neighbors Tom and Trina do.
Oh yes, that's right. Explanation: neighbor Tom is the very same mustachioed Tom Skerritt/William Devane pilot that not only seduced the high-flying Tammy but also took her home to wife Trina for a roll in the sack, for you see, Tom and Trina are also the swing-a-dingiest ringleaders of the set of swingingest swingers in Swingtown and even have the ‘rumpus room' basement to prove it. It's the puritanical Janet - good friend and former neighbor of Susan - who is shocked by the goings-on in that rumpus room, but my first thought was, when swingers swing, and then go home, who cleans up the mess? I mean, is there some sort of service these people call? And even if there were, with half the neighborhood swapping fluids all over your furniture and carpet every weekend, you should think the bills would begin to add up and the whole project would quickly be deemed unprofitable. Again, I don't know squat about the life, but all in all, it sounds very involved and complicated, and more headache than it's worth. Each according to his needs and assets I suppose.
Other doings in Swingtown include the involvement of Susan and...(Al? Winston? Bruce? Bruce! That's it...) Bruce's daughter with her summer school teacher (another gaping hole of logic here. The daughter is supposed to be this great brainiac, seventeen and able to spout rhetoric on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. So why is she in summer school? Well, I guess that's what you get for being born to a family of Fourth of July movers), and then there's a would-be teen runaway befriended by the younger sibling. For readers who weren't around in the 70s, the runaway teen is another 70s cliche. A frequent sight around New York and Hollywood, they were kids who got sick of their parents bourgeois lifestyle and set out to make their own bourgeois lifestyle. According to Afterschool Specials and The ABC Tuesday Night Movie, this life usually centered on eating hamburgers left in restaurants by just as bourgeois but somehow happier families, considering teen prostitution but running off when the first john inevitably turns out to be an overweight, cigar-chomping, middle-aged garment manufacturer in striped boxers, and more often than not, taking the receipt of a ‘Hey you,' by the elderly corner grocer who looked up in time to see that eight-cents worth of apple had just been liberated from his fruit-stand. We don't hear much about teen runaways as we used to, primarily because parents, no matter how much they beg and plead, can't seem to get rid of their kid these days. ‘You're thirty-two years old!' weary mothers now cry. ‘Leave! Time to go! Bye-bye! Shut off the Grand Theft Auto and get out! Oh my God, when is he going to go? My God, Harry, when is he going to go?' That's the problem with kids today: no initiative.
Though I don't watch more than a few hours television each week, my 70s childhood had me going over to CBS.com to check out Swingtown. It isn't as terribly written as I expected, nor as terribly acted, but for sure it's going to be cancelled. Admittedly, I have no idea what passes for entertainment any more, but I can't imagine how the story line of Susan and Bruce's foray into the swinging world can be stretched out for a few seasons. That's too bad, because I'm kind of looking forward to having The Sex Pistols show up on an episode, or at least having the kid watch that episode of C.P.O Sharkey with The Dickies, and I think it would also be kind of cool to have an episode where the entire cast buys C.B. radios or waits on line for three days to see Hooper. (Because there's nothing like the life of a Hollywood stuntman). Speaking of which, semi-regular appearances by Burt Reynolds seem like a natural extension and would probably generate interest in the show, but perhaps what the producers really need to attract attention is - like in all great 70s shows - a catchphrase. Out of all the lines in the script, personally, my choice would be 'I hope she gives you the crabs.'
Being both a fan of Jerry Lewis and rude boy style – the Jamaican ska look of the sixties notably revived by bands like Madness and The Specials in the seventies – it would seem natural that I would have long taken to the combination of white sock and black loafer. I hadn’t. As a kid, I had raided the local thrift stores for sixties mod and continental suits to emulate my heroes, but as for their footwear of choice, I had this complete psychological block that precluded my venture into that realm. It was one of those styles that I knew looked better on someone else and that if I tried it, the results would be nothing less than disastrous. Like that devil-lock I would sport for about six months in the eighties. I had been thinking Glenn Danzig but it came out…No, it’s too horrible to describe, so let’s just say that even The Misfits would have screamed in terror from that haircut of mine. 
I've never been to an orgy, but I can imagine a good rule of thumb is ‘Pace Yourself'; there's a lot of ground to cover and certainly you'll be tempted to cover it all within the first ten minutes. It's the same temptation succumbed to by the creative team behind Swingtown, the CBS summer entry about open marriages in a 1976 Chicago suburb. 
Though I don't watch more than a few hours television each week, my 70s childhood had me going over to CBS.com to check out Swingtown. It isn't as terribly written as I expected, nor as terribly acted, but for sure it's going to be cancelled. Admittedly, I have no idea what passes for entertainment any more, but I can't imagine how the story line of Susan and Bruce's foray into the swinging world can be stretched out for a few seasons. That's too bad, because I'm kind of looking forward to having The Sex Pistols show up on an episode, or at least having the kid watch that episode of C.P.O Sharkey with The Dickies, and I think it would also be kind of cool to have an episode where the entire cast buys C.B. radios or waits on line for three days to see Hooper. (Because there's nothing like the life of a Hollywood stuntman). Speaking of which, semi-regular appearances by Burt Reynolds seem like a natural extension and would probably generate interest in the show, but perhaps what the producers really need to attract attention is - like in all great 70s shows - a catchphrase. Out of all the lines in the script, personally, my choice would be 'I hope she gives you the crabs.'