Cynical Cinema

“Hi-yo Silver, Awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay” 

There is something so cheesy, so calculated, so…focus-grouped about the Lone Ranger that it really irked me when I started watching the program.  Now, I’m not a kid, it’s not the 1940s, and I just started watching the program yesterday, so I’m clearly not the target audience.  But the Lone Ranger appears to me to be obnoxiously heroic, in a way only a character of the 40s and 50s can be.  Even John Wayne, in his movies of the era, showed some serious negative qualities on screen.  He’s either a racist and possible murderer (The Searchers) or a drunk (True Grit) or a belligerant, bellicose bully (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). 

But the Lone Ranger is a perfect man.  He shoots a gun better than anyone in the history of television or movies.  He shoots only to disarm, grazing the gun-arms of the bad guys but never killing them.  He is always pure of heart and mind and never makes a wrong move.    This all drove me absolutely nuts.  You see, I had begun watching The Lone Ranger:  75th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, out December 2nd from Alliance Films.  The set includes the first two seasons of the television program, seasons that ran in 1949 and 1950.  Starring Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, the first two seasons make up twelve discs in a massive box.

But it’s the other stuff in the box that’s really fantastic.  And I should have opened this stuff before beginning to watch the series.  There is an 88-page booklet tracing the history of the Lone Ranger, from it’s days as a radio serial, moving on to television and film serials.  The most well-known incarnation of the Lone Ranger, today, is of course the TV version, the one starring Moore and Silverheels.  The one contained in this massive and awesome box set.  The booklet comes with some terrific historical tidbits.  Like the kids who would write letters to the Lone Ranger, ratting out the other kids who were in the fan club, the kids who were doing things against the Lone Ranger code, like buying a brand of bread that was not made by the sponsor company.

Truly, the power of advertising has waned in the intervening years.  We are now inundated by advertising to such a degree that this kind of thing would not cut through today.  But in the 50s, advertising must have been amazingly powerful, if it could get kids to rat out their friends for buying the wrong bread!  Throughout the Lone Ranger booklet in this box set, the sponsors of the radio and TV program seem to be as important as the show itself.  Silvercup, Bond Bread, Broadcast Corned Beef Hash.  The list goes on and on.  It’s a chronology of the sponsors, even more so than a chronology of the program itself.  Amazing!

And I found out that in fact, the Lone Ranger was, indeed, created by a focus group!  A radio station, trying to revive their flagging ratings, created a serial.  And they brought in a focus group.  Everything about the man was focus-grouped to death.  The mask, the identity as a former U.S. Ranger.  The name of his horse - silver.  The colour of the horse - white.  The colour of the hat - white.  The Indian sidekick Tonto.  His horse, Scout.  Originally, Scout the focus group decided that Scout should be a white horse as well, and he was for the first little while.  Later on, another focus group decided they ought to change the colour of Scout, and they made him a spotted Appaloosa.  Everything, down to the silver bullets used by the Ranger, was decided by one focus group or another. 

Even his catch phrase, “hi-yo Silver, awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!” was focus-grouped to death.  They first discounted phrases like “Yippee!”, or “Giddy-up!”  True story.  According to this fascinating little booklet.  In the end, they decided on a phrase which today, would seem awfully lame.  I suspect that in the 1940s, it seemed lame to a few people as well, but again I was not around to know for sure.  But it is certainly better than “Yippee!”

And they directed everything toward kids.  The unfailing honesty and goodness.  The loyalty and perfection that was the Lone Ranger was designed to make kids want to get their parents to buy the things the Ranger was advertising.  And they did.  The litmus test came when the radio station ran a promotion.  How powerful WAS the Lone Ranger as an advertising tool?  On one program, the Ranger announced that he would be giving a free popgun (boy how times have changed, eh?) to the first 300 kids who wrote in and asked.  The station was flooded with mail - more than 24,000 letters poured in.  It appeared as though the Lone Ranger program was an excellent advertising tool!

And then there is the other awesome, 1940s-era stuff in the box.  An “autographed” Clayton Moore glossy black-and-white photo.  A comic book that tells the entire story of the Lone Ranger, a story that plays out a lot like those of Superman or Batman, in it’s heroic origins.  A great series of colourized “Lone Ranger Colour Picture Trading Cards”.  An envelope so that you, too can write the Lone Ranger.  (Part of the address on the envelope - “care of Merita Bakers, Atlanta Georgia”.)  And the coolest thing of all, a membership card in the Lone Ranger Victory Corps!  That one comes with official guidelines as to the best way to promote Victory responsibility, Citizenship, Safety and Health. 

The rules told me to save my pennies to buy defense stamps.  And to make certain that at least one defense stamp is purchased each week by one of my little friends.  In emergencies, I am to obey my Air Raid Warden (and other officials).  But of course, most of the specific instructions to the members of the Lone Ranger Victory Corps will be given over the radio during the program, and I ought to make sure I tune in for instructions.  I looked up online to find out whether the Lone Ranger had ever instructed his loyal army of child followers to convene in a corn field in a town called Gatlin and murder all the adults, and whether the Lone Ranger, during that episode, had perhaps changed his name to “He Who Walks Behind The Rows”.  But I have yet to find out whether or not this actually happened.  I suspect it did.

The series itself does not exactly hold up over time.  It is dated, and awkward, and Tonto as a character is questionable at best in a kids’ program.  But when I think back to my childhood, I know for a fact that should a He-Man box set become available, that came complete with that He-Man slime pit that I was never allowed to get as a kid, I would be all over it today.  I would play with that slime pit.  And I would play little games with the Skeletor and He-Man action figures.  For at least six minutes.  And I would watch at least two episodes of the show.  But the point is, I would BUY it.

And I suspect that if I was a child of the 50s, a kid who grew up watching The Lone Ranger and longing to be a part of the Victory Corps, I would be all over this box set today.  There is such a wonderful historic nostalgia that comes with this set, that anyone who grew up with this would be ecstatic to have it.  What am I saying?  I grew up thirty years later, and I’m still ecstatic to have this.  The show is useless.  The box set is amazing!

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing three absolute classics on November 11th, and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is the best of the bunch. Sadly for the film, it was only the second-best movie released in 1950, and it lost out on the Best Picture Oscar to the magnificent All About Eve. It still managed to pick up three Academy Awards, for Art Direction, Score, and Story and Screenplay. Over time, Sunset Boulevard has become known as one of the greatest movies ever made. And it is. Do yourself a favour, and pick up this film today. It’s one of my absolute favourites, and it remains as brilliant today as it was in 1950.

Gloria Swanson gives one of the greatest performances in film history as Norma Desmond, a character who has, in the last fifty years, become a favourite impression for drag queens. When you see her for the first time, you understand. She fits the bill for a drag queen - flamboyant, gaudy, and just a little bit insane. While it may seem at first, to a modern audience, that Swanson is totally over-acting, she isn’t. You see, she’s playing a faded star from the silent film era, a woman who misses the limelight so badly that she has the delusion that she’s still in it. And being a silent screen actress, she maintains the tradition of silent film actors of flamboyant over-acting. Huge flashy gestures, overly dramatic facial expression and the striking of sudden poses was all part and parcel of acting in silent movies, before the addition of sound meant that you didn’t have to tell the story entirely through action.

The casting is a huge part of the classic appeal of this movie. William Holden is fantastic in one of his first major roles as a down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter who gets trapped by Swanson in a bizarre world from which he can’t seem to escape. But it’s the other actors who are most important. Swanson herself was Norma Desmond, the character she portrays. Although of course she wasn’t as nutty or as deluded, she was a silent film star who had disappeared from the movie industry for years before appearing again in Sunset Boulevard. Her strange, confusingly devoted butler Max is played by Erich Von Stroheim, a director of some classic silent films, most notably Greed. He too had been out of the film world for a while, left behind with the advent of talking pictures, much like Gloria Swanson. And Norma Desmond.

There is a wonderful scene in the movie that uses both of them perfectly. Norma is so self-obsessed that when she shows a movie in her house, it is of course one of her own. The movie that Billy Wilder has Norma watch is actually some footage from a film called Queen Kelly, which was Von Stroheim’s last silent film. Most major studios had lost faith in him, and his huge-budget movies by the time he made Queen Kelly, and it was only through the financial help of the star of the picture - Gloria Swanson - that the movie was able to be made. The scene in Queen Kelly of Swanson praying at an altar became the most famous moment in the film, thanks almost solely to it’s inclusion in Sunset Boulevard. And a brief but fantastic later scene in the movie re-unites several of the silent screen stars who had faded into obscurity, among them Buster Keaton.

Other inside Hollywood jokes permeate the film - one of the best is a recurring joke, where the characters keep returning to Schwab’s Pharmacy. This was a very inside joke - Hollywood legend had it that Lana Turner had been discovered there, sitting at the counter drinking a milkshake. In the intervening years, the veracity of this tale has sort of faded away, unverified. For movie nerds and classic Hollywood buffs, the inside jokes in Sunset Boulevard are moments of great interest, and they are also quite funny. Paramount Studios let Billy Wilder have a lot of leeway on this movie. For a film that is one of the most bitter ever made about Hollywood and the people who populate it, it was remarkable that Paramount would allow Wilder to use their logo, their sets and their studios to make this point. Also remarkable is Cecil B. DeMille, the director of some of the biggest movies of the day, who portrays himself in the film in a fairly unflattering way.

But this film is one that works on every level, not just for rabid film buffs and nerds. It is set up like some of the classic film noir of the era - William Holden does a voiceover the whole movie, the way many detective flicks did at the time. We first hear Holden’s voice describing the victim of a murder, who is lying facedown in a pool. In a classic sense of ironic detachment, he comments about the poor sap always wanting a pool, and says “well, in the end, he got himself a pool”. It’s a remarkable opening scene, and while the final scene remains the most famous from Sunset Boulevard, the first scene deserves a lot of credit as well. Holden’s voiceover has a sense of understanding throughout the film that his character himself lacks. The disembodied Holden gets what’s happening, whereas the flesh-and-blood version sometimes doesn’t see the whole picture until he’s already stuck.

The dialogue is terrific throughout. Billy Wilder, while he had a sense of the way people talked, still made a lot of the language sound poetic. When describing the local shoeshine man, Holden says “Rudy never asked any questions about your finances. He just looked at your heels and knew the score”. As the movie begins, Holden is running from bill collectors and repo men. He hides out on the grounds of a gigantic mansion, one that he thinks is deserted. When he catches a glimpse of a woman in an upstairs window, he immediately makes a reference to Charles Dickens’ character Miss Havisham, from the classic novel Great Expectations, not realizing right away how apt that comparison actually is. It turns out that the mansion is owned by Norma Desmond, the former silent movie superstar. Holden recognizes her, and says “you used to be big!” One of the great lines in movie history is her response. “I AM big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

Before long, William Holden is stuck in that mansion. Intrigued by the offer of money, then seduced by the wealth, and finally trapped by immense guilt, he finds it impossible to escape. For most people, the sight of a mortician showing up at a house to bury a monkey might have been a signal that it was time to go. But Holden stays, lured by the promise of money. Despite the monkey burials. And the creepy tennis court. And the creepy swimming pool, the creepy bed, the creepy house, and the lighting that Billy Wilder often uses to make Gloria Swanson look like Mothra in a Japanses monster movie. This leads, inevitably, to a conclusion that I won’t give away, but one that ranks among the greatest final scenes in the history of cinema.

The special edition DVD of Sunset Boulevard, part of Paramount’s Centennial Collection (they’re getting a bit of a jump on their 100th anniversary celebration, which is still four years away), has a ton of good special features. And a few great ones. On the “Collector’s Edition” of Sunset Boulevard, released several years ago, there was a terrific feature-length commentary by Ed Sikov, the biographer of Billy Wilder. That commentary is included on this new set, and it is very much worthwhile. It features almost all of the interesting movie-world tidbits that I have mentioned here, and hundreds more.

There are also a bunch of new special features, all on a second disc. Sunset Boulevard: The Beginning, Sunset Boulevard Becomes a Classic, and The Noir Side of Sunset Boulevard are all short documentary pieces that are terrific. Also great is the featurette Two Sides Of Ms. Swanson, and Mad About the Boy: A Portrait of William Holden. Although there is a better feature on Holden on the Paramount DVD of Sabrina, also released today. That one is called William Holden: The Paramount Years, and it is a longer, more in-depth look at one of the great actors of all time.

Sunset Boulevard is funny, it’s sad, it’s dark, and it’s even scary at times. Gloria Swanson is the most unlikely femme fatale in screen history, alternating between looking quite attractive, and looking…like Mothra. Her performance really is one of the greatest in movie history, and I would suggest that Erich Von Stroheim and William Holden more than hold their own playing opposite this raving maniac. This film is deservedly called a classic, it is deservedly mentioned among the greatest movies of all time, and it is certainly going to be the best movie released on DVD today. Pick. It. Up.