Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Favorite Year,’ As a Film Idol Returns to a Favorite Haunt)

Alan Swann [played by Peter O’Toole]: “We'll be two for dinner. Telephone the Stork Club.”

Alfi [played by Tony DiBenedetto]: “You sure you mean the Stork Club, Mr. Swann?”

Alan: “Certainly. It's been a year and a half. Surely they've repaired the wall of the bandstand by now.”— My Favorite Year (1982), screenplay by Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo and based on a story by Palumbo, directed by Richard Benjamin

It had been over 40 years, during its original release, since I’d seen this rollicking comedy, inspired by young TV writer Mel Brooks’ attempt to keep the rambunctious Errol Flynn (the “Alan Swann” character) safe and sober before his appearance on Your Show of Shows. 

Watching the movie again on TCM was like revisiting an old friend, with plenty of smiles and memories abounding.

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, Dreaming That ‘Greece Might Still Be Free’)

“The mountains look on Marathon—
    And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
    I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.”— English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), “The Isles of Greece” (1821)
 
Two centuries ago today, Lord Byron died of a fever in Missolonghi, contracted while participating in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire.
 
In some ways, his demise was filled with the kind of ironies that would have amused the creator of the mock epic Don Juan: Despite using his own fortune to raise an army to fight for the Greek cause, he was able neither to win any battles outright himself nor reconcile opposing factions; and he died not on a battlefield but at the hands of doctors whose bloodletting technique fatally weakened him against his fever.
 
At the same time, by focusing international attention on the Greeks’ struggle for autonomy, he brought an attention to the fight that it might not have received otherwise.
 
He is still remembered as a hero in that nation to this day, even though in his native England his reputation is more ambivalent, with respect for his enormous writing skill sometimes obscured by a private life that might charitably be termed complicated.
 
For more on Byron’s full-throated advocacy of freedom and liberalism at home and abroad, I urge you to read Paul Trueblood’s essay in the January 1976 issue of The Byron Journal.
 
The eight-year Greek War of Independence is examined in this fascinating online exhibit, coinciding with the conflict’s bicentennial, from the University of Michigan Library.
 
Byron’s involvement in the conflict occurred in the context of Britain’s diplomatic maneuvers, which the exhibit discusses here. America’s “Greek Fever” also forms part of the exhibit.

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Humor)

“Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.”— French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Democritus and Heraclitus,” in The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, edited by William Hazlitt, translated by Donald Frame (Everyman Library, 2003)

Quote of the Day (Aristotle, on Shame and Shamelessness)

“We now turn to Shame and Shamelessness; what follows will explain the things that cause these feelings, and the persons before whom, and the states of mind under which, they are felt. Shame may be defined as pain or disturbance in regard to bad things, whether present, past, or future, which seem likely to involve us in discredit; and shamelessness as contempt or indifference in regard to these same bad things. If this definition be granted, it follows that we feel shame at such bad things as we think are disgraceful to ourselves or to those we care for. These evils are, in the first place, those due to moral badness. Such are throwing away one's shield or taking to flight; for these bad things are due to cowardice. Also, withholding a deposit or otherwise wronging people about money; for these acts are due to injustice. Also, having carnal intercourse with forbidden persons, at wrong times, or in wrong places; for these things are due to licentiousness. Also, making profit in petty or disgraceful ways, or out of helpless persons, e.g. the poor, or the dead-whence the proverb 'He would pick a corpse's pocket'; for all this is due to low greed and meanness. Also, in money matters, giving less help than you might, or none at all, or accepting help from those worse off than yourself; so also borrowing when it will seem like begging; begging when it will seem like asking the return of a favour; asking such a return when it will seem like begging; praising a man in order that it may seem like begging; and going on begging in spite of failure: all such actions are tokens of meanness. Also, praising people to their face, and praising extravagantly a man's good points and glozing over his weaknesses, and showing extravagant sympathy with his grief when you are in his presence, and all that sort of thing; all this shows the disposition of a flatterer. Also, refusing to endure hardships that are endured by people who are older, more delicately brought up, of higher rank, or generally less capable of endurance than ourselves: for all this shows effeminacy. Also, accepting benefits, especially accepting them often, from another man, and then abusing him for conferring them: all this shows a mean, ignoble disposition. Also, talking incessantly about yourself, making loud professions, and appropriating the merits of others; for this is due to boastfulness. The same is true of the actions due to any of the other forms of badness of moral character, of the tokens of such badness, etc..: they are all disgraceful and shameless.” —Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), Rhetoric, Book II, translated by W. Rhys Roberts (350 B.C.E.)

Well, that is quite a list that Aristotle has compiled of the traits of a shameless person. It’s so vast, so wide-ranging, that under normal circumstances, it would be hard to find one person who met so many. 

(Even George Santos, pictured here, has been brazen in his lying and in pledging an all-volunteer comeback campaign for Congress—but he doesn’t fit the bill for the “licentiousness” mentioned by Aristotle.)

But we don’t live under normal circumstances these days, so I can think of one person who does meet these criteria. In fact, he’s very much in the news right now.

Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on One Advantage of a Low Salary)

“My salary as bookkeeper in the hardware concern kept at a distance those ills attendant upon superfluous wealth.” —American short-story writer William Sidney Porter, aka O. Henry (1862-1910), “Confessions of a Humourist,” in Waifs and Strays: Twelve Stories (1917)

This Day in Film History (Death of Wallace Beery, Oscar-Winning Lovable Lug)

Apr. 15, 1949— Wallace Beery, whose burly frame and gruff voice propelled him from supporting roles to an Oscar-winning box-office mainstay, died of a heart attack at age 64 at his Beverly Hills home.

The character actor, one of the busiest of the silent and early sound eras, started in the entertainment industry at age 16 with Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant to the elephant trainer, then transitioned to musical variety shows before heading west to Hollywood in 1913.

Over the next 15 years, he appeared onscreen 150 times, chiefly at Keystone, Universal, and Paramount Studios, before the arrival of sound led the industry to a virtually wholesale liquidation of much of their talent.

Beery was looking for work when “Boy Wonder” MGM producer Irving Thalberg sensed potential in the actor. 

It was a shrewd guess: Within a year, the illness and death of Lon Chaney opened up an opening for a plum role as a three-time murderer in jail for life in The Big House, and screenwriter Frances Marion, noticing Beery eating spaghetti at the studio’s cafeteria, reminded her of San Quentin prisoners she’d interviewed during her research for the movie.

Beery was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the role, and he would win it for playing a washed-up prizefighter desperately providing for the son he loves in the 1931 movie The Champ (remade, to far less box office and critical acclaim, in 1979 with Jon Voight).

Throughout the Thirties, MGM did everything it could to milk their suddenly hot property for everything he was worth, in such films as Mexican outlaw Francisco Villa in Viva Villa!, grasping capitalists in Dinner at Eight and Grand Hotel, and Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

The last three roles could be at best edgy and at worst treacherous. But the studio assembly line that emphasized typecasting increasingly frustrated the actor so that, by the end of the decade, his acting “took on the boozy self-consciousness of a department store Santa with a chronically overdeveloped sense of his own charm,” according to Tom Sutpen’s February 2006 post from the blog for Bright Lights Film Journal.

Audiences couldn’t get enough of the actor. With his lined face and beefy build, he looked like one of them, and film fans weren’t as besotted with physical perfection as they would become in later decades. They were disinclined to believe that someone seemingly so earthy and easygoing could be unprofessional and perhaps violent away from the cameras.

It did not become known till years later, then, after MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer and his PR crew were no longer around, that the reality regarding Mayer was quite different.

There seems little doubt, for instance, that Beery couldn’t stand juvenile actors, because they had the unconscious habit of stealing scenes from them. As adults, Dickie Moore, Margaret O’Brien, and Jane Powell all described him as abusive, and O’Brien even accused him of stealing her lunch!

But the youngster who seems to have suffered the most at Beery’s hands was Jackie Cooper. The success of The Champ led the studio to pair the two in three more pictures that must have been absolute agony for the youngster.

The extent to which Beery wreaked havoc on adults is just as egregious as his conduct towards juveniles, if more disputed. One of the more persistent stories that emerged after his death was that he and two friends got into a drunken brawl in 1937 with Ted Healy that resulted in the death of the creator of The Three Stooges.

Details have varied over the circumstances surrounding Healy’s death, and I am inclined to believe that Jon Ponder, in this “West Hollywood History” blog post, disproved the story.

But it says something about both Beery’s dark side and MGM’s fabled ability to fix scandals that so many industry observers were ready to credit the tale.

At the time of Beery’s death, he was involved in a paternity suit, charged by actress Gloria Schumm with reneging on an agreement to give her child his first name. The court dismissed the proceedings after the actor’s death.

The other unseemly tale involving Beery and adults concerned Gloria Swanson, who claimed that, on the night of their wedding (which fell on her 17^th birthday), he returned from the hotel bar to rape her. When the future Sunset Boulevard star became pregnant, she wrote in her autobiography, he gave her a concoction that induced an abortion.

The marriage only lasted two years. It would take six decades, but Swanson would finally have revenge of a sort on her ex in her memoirs. 

She related in its opening pages the story of his mistreatment of her. Combined with the other stories that others have come out with, it makes laughable the Los Angeles Times obituary that observed that he was “soft spoken, unexcitable and entirely lacking in temperament at home.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘30 Rock,’ With ‘Country Jenna’ Foreshadowing ‘Country Carter’)

Jenna Maroney [played by Jane Krakowski]: “Did you hear what happened? I am so upset.”

Liz Lemon [played by Tina Fey]: “Oh, no. Okay, let me explain...”

Jenna: “I came in here to shoot these tennis promos, and they had blue gels on the lights. You know that makes my teeth look see-through. You weren't here to do your job, Liz.”

Liz: “Okay, well, Josh quit.”

Jenna: “Who? Jack's counting on Country Jenna to save the show, but I just want to understand what it is that's distracting you from the one thing you've been told to do.”

Liz: “Really? You wanna know what I've been doing?”

Jenna: “Yes, Liz. Enlighten me.”

Liz: “Jack is hiring a new cast member.”

Jenna [Screaming at the top of her lungs]: “If it is a blonde woman, I will kill myself!” — 30 Rock, Season 4, Episode 1, “Season 4,” original air date Oct. 15, 2009, teleplay by Tina Fey, directed by Don Scardino