Reviewer: Valpy
-
- September 6, 2005 Subject: St James Infirmary Blues I've read of two conflicting reports of the song's origins.
One says that the song originates from an 18th century English ballad "The
Unfortunate Rake". About a person dying of syphilis on the stairs of St.
James Hospital ("As I lay dying on the stairs of St.
James Hospital ")
The other says that Cab Calloway's wailing rendition of St. James Infirmary adds
a dark and sinister undercurrent to the old Snow White story, a juxtaposition
especially of interest because the song is supposed to be about a girl who died
of a cocaine overdose, and "snow" is another name for cocaine. Leslie
Cabarga has suggested that the Fleischers were unaware of the significance of
this and the other songs that Cab performed for Betty Boop cartoons, but the
cave imagery suggests that the animator, at least, knew what was going on. snow
white
Valpy
Reviewer: judeblack,
bbc -
- May 16, 2005 Subject: Who needs Disney??! We've got Betty, Koko, Bimbo, enough surrealism to satisfy Salvador
Dali and best of all, we have the great Cab Calloway! I joined this
website just so I could hear Cab Calloway and I don't understand why he isn't as
highly praised as Ellington and Armstrong. Don't let Cab go, bless him! Scat
sing his praises or better yet, recommend this site to all your friends and
relations.
Uncle
Walt's treasure chest reveals more of his genius
Critic Leonard Maltin has been rooting through the Disney archives again,
and a result is four more double-disc sets in the limited-edition Walt
Disney Treasures series.
The Treasures collections, which come packed in tin boxes and usually
contain a brochure and a souvenir postcard or two, are aimed at adult
consumers who grew up with Walt Disney on television, or those with a deeper
interest in animation and the history of Walt Disney Productions. Now that
the older Disney cartoons, particularly those in black and white, have
largely disappeared from circulation, the Treasures represent a rare
opportunity to see the formative shorts that led up to the features and were
testing grounds for experimental animation techniques and new narrative
approaches.
There are four sets in the new batch ($32.99 each). The Mickey Mouse Club
Featuring the Hardy Boys collects episodes from the long-running serial
originally broadcast in the late 1950s and is strictly of nostalgic
interest. The Complete Pluto, Volume Two takes Mickey's oddly
disadvantaged animal companion (why is Pluto the only resident of Disneyland
who isn't able to speak?) from 1947 to 1951, and represents Disney product
at its least distinguished, most industrial level.
Far more intriguing are Your Host, Walt Disney -- five episodes from
Disney's weekly television show, all with Uncle Walt -- and, supremely, More
Silly Symphonies, Volume Two, a gathering of work from 1929 to 1938,
most of it very seldom seen.
Disney began producing the Silly Symphonies in 1929 to complement his
immensely popular Mickey Mouse cartoons. These shorts have no recurring
characters and little if any dialogue; rather, they feature Busby
Berkeley-like chorus lines of rubber-limbed figures going through their
paces to a musical score.
The scores were cobbled together by Carl Stalling, the former theater
organist Disney had met back in Kansas City, Mo., when he was first starting
out, and the animation was largely the work of Ub Iwerks, an eccentric
loner, also an associate from the Kansas City days, who had become Disney's
leading artist. (Stalling would gain his greatest fame when he moved to
Warner Brothers to create the unforgettable, free-form soundtracks of the Merrie
Melodies series.)
The first Silly Symphony, based on an idea by Stalling, was Skeleton
Dance (featured in the first Treasures volume of Silly
Symphonies) with a cast of tap-dancing cadavers and low-flying bats.
Though theater owners feared that audiences would be horrified by the
macabre imagery, Skeleton Dance became an enormous success and helped
to draw serious critical attention to the fledgling studio. Included in the
new collection is Hell's Bells, the immediate follow-up to Skeleton
Dance and an even more impressive piece, featuring a jazz band of demons
who play snippets from Funeral March of a Marionette in perfect time.
Hell's Bells is looser and funnier than Skeleton Dance, and it
reveals the strong influence of the Fleischer school: a hipper, more urban
style than Disney's. The Fleischer brothers, Dave and Max, were big-city
boys, whose cartoons were full of sex (the garter-snapping flapper Betty
Boop was their leading character by that time) and often scored by leading
jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. Disney, by
comparison, was Guy Lombardo, piping sweet tunes to a public yearning for
the pastoral.
It's hard today to reconstruct the enormous enthusiasm that greeted the
first Disney shorts. Compared with the work of his (then) better-known East
Coast competitors, the Fleischers, Disney's early efforts seem conspicuously
lacking in draftsmanship and imagination; the Fleischers' Ko-Ko's Earth
Control, from 1928, displays a sophistication in its humor and a polish
in its execution miles beyond what Disney was capable of at the time.
But Disney, as Neal Gabler documents in his new biography, Walt Disney,
had a vision and drive that the Fleischers did not. Where Fleischer films
were animated as silent works and then synchronized to what often sounds
like an improvised music and effects track, Disney films exploited an
ingenious method that allowed animators to time their work to prerecorded
scores and spoken dialogue. The results were much more natural and created
the convincing illusion that voices were issuing from the drawn figures.
Disney trumped the Fleischers again when he signed an agreement with the
Technicolor Corp. that gave him exclusive use of a dramatically improved
three-color process for a period of two years. Vastly superior to any other
color process on the market, three-color Technicolor gave Disney's films a
visual pop unlike that of any others in the field. The color, draftsmanship
and expression of movement seem to grow dramatically from film to film in
the early '30s, as the shaded outlines and depth effects of Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first Disney feature, begin to emerge
in films like The Goddess of Spring (1934) and Three Blind
Mouseketeers (1936).
Gabler's book portrays Disney as a driven perfectionist, often unhappy with
the quality of his product, particularly after World War II, as the industry
started to change and the money available to him began to shrink. That
persistent dissatisfaction was not allowed to surface in "Uncle
Walt," the carefully constructed television personality that Disney
displayed in his weekly appearances. In his television incarnation,
wonderfully delineated in the five specials that Maltin has chosen for the Your
Host, Walt Disney set, Disney seemed to become America's favorite uncle,
presiding over the 1950s with an optimism and a faith in steady
technological advancement, seeming to summarize the decade more than anyone
else.
MovieShame.
There have always been lots of movies that show or exploit sex, but far fewer
that try to explore it seriously, as a rich, meaningful subject, whether
psychological or social...
A Christmas Carol Seymour Hicks plays
the title role of Scrooge in the first
sound version of the Dickens classic about ..
