Entertainment.LoveWhat.com

America. Dream America, daydream nation. Where do we go if we want to understand this country? The news won’t be much help. Our news media in the U.S. is so closely tied to both the corporate and political structures as to be useless. You’ll get plenty of information. Of course, it will only be the information that either the Whitehouse or Phifzer wants you to see.

What else is there? History books? Aside from a few brilliant but marginalized voices such as Howard Zinn, Cornell West and Noam Chomsky you’d be hardpressed to find much of value. The version of history we teach and have available to us tends to be a one-sided stream of cardboard cutout stereotypes displaying America’s ‘great achievements”. So, where do we go? We crave meaning. Human beings are wired to seek out meanings and patterns. Our eyes can’t rest on an object for more than a few seconds without seeking out how it fits into our schema or understanding of our experience.

I’d put forth that if you’d like to get a glimpse of what makes America tick you could do worse than spending some time at the San Diego Museum of Art’s new show, “Andy Warhol’s Dream America”. Andy puts it best; “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

I don’t think Andy’s being coy there. Well, at least not entirely so. Surfaces are what his work is all about. I know we often identify the surface of things as not having much to do with depth. ‘You can’t judge a book by it’s cover” and “Beauty is only skin deep” are two of our timeworn responses to surface. But in Warhol’s work what surfaces there are! Shadows made from ink mixed with diamond dust. Ultra-vivid greens, purples and red popping off of canvas and paper. Repeated faces of celebrities in every color imaginable. Green Marilyn Monroes pouting at blue eye shadow wearing Chairman Mao’s. Cotton candy pink and silver electric chairs nestled amongst day-glo cow heads. These pieces are a miracle of color and line.

The technique is so clean and masterful that if that were all, it would still be worthy enough to warrant our contemplation. This isn’t to say that Warhol’s meaning is cheap, shallow or easy to understand.

At the exhibit I sat watching the long, single-take film portraits of various New York undergroundites called, “Screen Tests” when a lady cautiously approached. She’d been by a few times and had finally decided to ask me a question. Why she chose me, I have no idea. Perhaps she figured that as I sat there seemingly enjoying these films, I must be able to help her.

“Is something going to happen?” I looked up not entirely sure what she meant. “I mean does something come on or change?”

I explained that these were called “Screen Tests” and that Warhol made them of almost everyone he met but that no, nothing else would actually happen on the screen. I said that they were sort of film portraits that revealed a lot by doing very little. She nodded and said, “So, there’s no biographical information coming up?” As I answered no she walked off with a disappointed look. I don’t add this to make fun or stand above. Sometimes the hardest things to see are right in front of us.

America is all about surfaces. Walk through any city and you’ll see it. Shiny glass and mirrors echo every move. What space isn’t reflective is cluttered with repeated logos and advertisements. So perhaps Andy Warhol’s art can fill us in on the most prevalent features and details of this country. It’s all there; the deaths, the ads, the old west, the celebrities, the surface. In a sense walking through this exhibit of Warhol’s work is a photorealistic portrait of life in America, Dream America, Daydream Nation.

Tags: Andy Warhol, art show review, dream america, san diego museum of artAndy Warhol, art show review, dream america, san diego museum of art

Share This

In the Fall of 1961, CBS first aired The Dick Van Dyke Show, one of funniest sitcoms in television history. Similar to I Love Lucy, but featuring more docile and less eccentric characters, the show became a mainstay in the top 10 Nielsen ratings for its first four seasons. When the show’s ratings slipped in the fifth season, the network cancelled the show. But in the four decades since, The Dick Van Dyke Show has continued to entertain its fans and their children (and their children’s children) via syndicated re-runs

The Dick Van Dyke Show is centered around the life of Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke), a family man living in suburban New York. As the head writer for the fictional “Alan Brady Show,” he works with co-writers Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally Rogers (Rose Marie). Rob’s work life is always interesting given Buddy’s constant wisecracks, Sally’s never-ending search for a husband, and the trio’s unified harassment of Alan Brady’s brother-in-law, Mel Cooley (Richard Deacon). At home, Rob’s loving yet overly-nervous wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) stays at home with the couple’s son Ritchie (Larry Mathews). Surrounded by all these unique characters, Rob is always embroiled in someone’s scheme, fantasy, or shenanigan

The Dick Van Dyke Show (Season 4) DVD features a number of hilarious episodes including the season premiere “My Two Show-Offs and Me” in which Rob, Buddy, and Sally are interviewed as part of a magazine article on the “Alan Brady Show” Other notable episodes from Season 4 include “Four and a Half” in which Rob tells the story of how he and Laura met Lyle Delp (played by Don Rickles), and “The Impractical Joke” in which Buddy thinks that an IRS visit is part of a practical joke by Rob

Below is a list of episodes included on The Dick Van Dyke Show (Season 4) DVD:

Episode 95 (My Two Show-Offs and Me) Air Date: 09-16-1964
Episode 96 (My Mother Can Beat Up My Father) Air Date: 09-23-1964
Episode 97 (The Ghost of A. Chantz) Air Date: 09-30-1964
Episode 98 (The Lady and the Babysitter) Air Date: 10-07-1964
Episode 99 (A Vigilante Ripped My Sports Coat) Air Date: 10-14-1964
Episode 100 (The Man from Emperor) Air Date: 10-21-1964
Episode 101 (Romances, Roses, and Rye Bread) Air Date: 10-28-1964
Episode 102 (4 1/2) Air Date: 11-04-1964
Episode 103 (The Alan Brady Show Goes to Jail) Air Date: 11-11-1964
Episode 104 (Three Letters from One Wife) Air Date: 11-18-1964
Episode 105 (It Wouldn’t Hurt Them to Give Us a Raise) Air Date: 11-25-1964
Episode 106 (Pink Pills and Purple Parents) Air Date: 12-02-1964
Episode 107 (The Death of the Party) Air Date: 12-09-1964
Episode 108 (Stretch Petrie vs. Kid Schenk) Air Date: 12-30-1964
Episode 109 (The Impractical Joke) Air Date: 01-06-1965
Episode 110 (Brother, Can You Spare $2,500?) Air Date: 01-13-1965
Episode 111 (Stacey Petrie: Part 1) Air Date: 01-20-1965
Episode 112 (Stacey Petrie: Part 2) Air Date: 01-27-1965
Episode 113 (The Redcoats are Coming) Air Date: 02-03-1965
Episode 114 (Boy #1, Boy #2) Air Date: 02-10-1965
Episode 115 (The Case of the Pillow) Air Date: 02-17-1965
Episode 116 (Young Man with a Shoehorn) Air Date: 02-24-1965
Episode 117 (Girls Will Be Boys) Air Date: 03-03-1965
Episode 118 (Bupkis) Air Date: 03-10-1965
Episode 119 (Your Sweet Home is My Sweet Home) Air Date: 03-17-1965
Episode 120 (Anthony Stone) Air Date: 03-24-1965
Episode 121 (Never Bathe on Saturday) Air Date: 03-31-1965
Episode 122 (100 Terrible Hours) Air Date: 04-14-1965
Episode 123 (A Show of Hands) Air Date: 04-21-1965
Episode 124 (Baby Fat) Air Date: 05-05-1965
Episode 125 (Br-rooom, Br-rooom) Air Date: 05-12-1965
Episode 126 (There’s No Sale Like Wholesale) Air Date: 05-26-1965
Episode 127 (A Farewell to Writing) Air Date: 09-22-1965

About the Author

Britt Gillette is author of The DVD Report, a blog where you can find more reviews like this one of The Dick Van Dyke Show (Season 4) DVD.

Tag: dick van dyke show season 4 dvd reviewdick van dyke show season 4 dvd review

Share This

“Bogie and Bacall” may have been America’s most popular movie star couple, with its genesis in the 21940sthe era of film noir. Along which Peter Lorre and Joan Crawford, this quartet set the tenor for that genre of film. Though there were others who were as popular during that timeparticularly James Cagney, Bette Davis, et al. It was the aforementioned foursome who best personify that era. Bogart was the tough-as-nails deective or every man, torn between being a mobster and a man abiding by a moral decision. Bacall was the rare combination of vamp and girl next door. Her dimples, almond-shaped eyes and flowing locks made her as big a female actor as her contemporaries, of which Crawford was one. Between 1932-36 Crawford was one of the four biggest box office draws in movies and Lorre was typecast as the consummate villain.

Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899, in New York City. His parents were Belmont Maud Humphrey, a surgeon and a renowned commercial artist.

After an uncredited bit part in “Life” (1920), Bogart appeared in 21 Broadway productions between 1922 and 1935. Bogart won his first starring role ten years later in, “Up the River.” Bogart’s film resume is second to none, having starred in the classics, “Angels With Dirty Faces” (1938), “The Maltese Falcon” (1941, a part turned down by George Raft), “Key Largo” (1948), “Casablanca (1942),” “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), “The Roaring Twenties” (1939, with James Cagney), “The Big Sleep” (1946), “Dark Passage” (1947), and “The Caine Mutiny(1954).” However, he won the Oscar for Best Actor just once, for his performance as a tough-talking, but soft-hearted boat captain in “The African Queen” (1951) opposite Katherine Hepburn.

Bogart often played characters caught between the allure of the gangster life, but conflicted by moral concerns. This was also a concern of his in real life. His Wikipedia biography states, “Bogart was proud of his success as an actor, but the fact that it came from playing a gangster weighed on him. He once said, ‘I can’t get in a mild discussion without turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of voice, or this arrogant face. Something that antagonizes everybody. Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that’s why I’m cast as the heavy’.”

Bogart’s voice was often comic fodder for impressionists, Louise Brooks, author of “Humphrey and Bogart “wrote, “His handsome face was made extraordinary by a most beautiful mouth. It was very full, rosy…he both loved and hated his beautiful mouth. America, in the Twenties, was exclusively Western in its ideas of beauty and vulgar people made fun of Humphrey’s ‘nigger lips’.” Nonetheless, Entertainment Weekly magazine named him the number one greatest movie legend of all time. In 1997 he was ranked 9th in the British magazine “Empire” among the “Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time.”

Of the American Film Institute’s “100 Greatest movie Quotes“, six are attributed to Bogart. They include: “Here’s looking at you, kid” (No. 5), “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” (No. 20), “We’ll always have Paris” (43rd), “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” (67), “Round up the usual suspects.” (No. 32, all from “Casablanca”); and “The stuff that dreams are made of” (No. 14, from “The Maltese Falcon”)

Bogart was known as a heavy drinker and pushed himself through the making of “We’re No Angels.” He had cancer of the esophagus, having it removed in 1956, but by then the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes and ribs. He died in 1957. In his eulogy of Bogie (a nickname bestowed upon him by friend Spencer Tracy), John Huston said succinctly, “He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.”

Peter Lorre was born Ladislav Lowenstein on June 26, 1904 and was known as the consummate villain, over a career that spanned - years. He had been an onstage actor in several foreign productions before Fritz Lang cast him in his classic thriller, “M.” (1931). The film is best known for its ending, where Lorre’s character pleads for his life. Following “M” he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s, “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” (1934). In 1940 Lorre found his niche, playing a killer in “Stranger On The Third Floor,” which many consider Hollywood’s first film noir vehicle.

Lorre went on to star with Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), “Casablanca” (1942) and the anti-Communist drama, “All Through The Night.” (1942). But he was perhaps best known for his portrayal of Japanese detective Mr. Moto, a series which ran from series (1937-1939).

Later in his career Lorre suffered through ill health and made more television appearances than film. He died from a stroke on March 23, 1964, just months after his final film, “The Patsy”. The film starred Jerry Lewis and was a movie Lorre was reluctant to do.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in New York City on September 16, 1924. She is the daughter of William and Natalie Perske and is also the cousin of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

In 1942 she adapted the stage name Betty Bacall (the surname a reworking of her mother’s maiden name, ‘Bacal’). She was a model who was discovered by director Howard Hawkes, who later cast her in “To Have and Have Not.” He suggested she change her name from Betty to Lauren.

During the 1940s Bacall became one of the biggest and arguably sexiest stars of the silver screen, but may be best known for being Bogart’s wife. She and Bogie worked together on 1944’s “To Have and Have Not,” where she seductively cooed one of the greatest lines in movie history: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow” (No. 34 on AFI’s “100 Greatest Film Quotes”).

While Betty Davis’ eyes” might have inspired a song, Bacall’s almond-shaped orbs enchanted many a moviegoer, and even Bogart who met her on the set of “To have and Have Not.” He divorced his wife Mayo Methot, and despite being 25 years Bacall’s senior, wed her a year later. It was her first marriage but his fourth.

They also worked together in the classics, “Key Largo (1948), “The Big Sleep” (1946), and “Dark Passage” (1947). The two were married for 12 years, until Bogart’s death in 1957. It has been written that his last words to her, “Goodbye, kid.” He was a legendary boozer and once said, “The trouble with the world is that it’s always one drink behind.” It is rumored that his last words were, “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.”

Bacall was briefly engaged to Frank Sinatra, then married actor Jason Robards for 8 years, until they divorced due to his alcoholism.

She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in
“The Mirror Has Two Faces,” losing to Barbara Hershey (”Portrait of a Lady”). However, she did win a Golden for her performance.

Joan Crawford was once to have said, “I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty, in every form.” A post-mortem bestseller by her stepdaughter Christina which was later turned into a major motion picture, painted a portrait of Ms. Crawford that was quite the opposite. However, no one could argue with her talent, beauty and screen presence.

She was born Lucille Fay Leseur, in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1906. Crawford grew up a poor girl, her father having deserted the family shortly before her birth. But like her character Ethel Whitehead in the movie “The Damned Don’t Cry”, she was ambitious almost to the point of obsession. The family moved to KC when Joan was but 10, and upon her graduation she went to Chicago.

She began her career as a member of a Chicago dance troupe and was discovered by a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scout. She was invited to Hollywood for a screen test and afterward was signed to a six-month deal. She became so popular with the studio’s head, Louis B. Mayer, who believed her last name sounded too much like “sewer.” Being that he had grown fond of his new hire, Mayer launched a national contest to find her a new name. After becoming Joan Crawford she soon after became one of the movie industry’s biggest stars. She was teamed with Clark Gable in eight films including their only musical, “Dancing Lady” (1933), a film noted for being Fred Astaire’s film debut and also featured the Three Stooges. Despite the success from this film, Crawford worried that “talkies” would ruin her career.

Feeling underappreciated, and believing that she was being passed over for better roles in favor of Bette Davis and other actresses in the MGM stable, Crawford left MGM in 1942. MGM believed her popularity was faltering and let her go without acrimony.

Her heyday was during the 40’s when she produced some of her best work, “A Woman’s Face” (1941), “Mildred Pierce” (1945, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress), and “Possessed” (1947). Years later, when she was considered “washed up” she stunned audiences with her turn in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” (1962), where she shared screen time with her arch-rival Davis.

She landed at rival Warner Brother Studios where she nabbed the title role in “Mildred Pierce”, a movie about a working woman who rises to the top of her field, but whose spoiled daughter steals her husband and eventually is pinned for his murder. A year later she made “Humoresque,” where she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but lost it to Loretta Young for “The Farmer’s Daughter.” The same result would befall her in 1952, when she lost to Shirley Booth for her performance in “Come Back, Little Sheba”.

She died in Manhattan in 1977, of a heart attack. Sadly, she may be forever remembered as a sadistic stepmother with an extreme disdain for wire hangers.

Sources:

Humphrey Bogart profile, Wikipedia

Lauren Bacall profile, Wikipedia

Joan Crawford profile, Wikipedia

Peter Lorre profile, Wikipedia

Louise Brooks, “Humphrey and Bogey,” Sight and Sound, Winter 1966-67, Vol. 36, No. 1

Tags: 1940s films, Actresses, Bacall, Bogart, Famous Actors, Film legends, Film noir, Joan Crawford, Lorre1940s films, Actresses, Bacall, Bogart, Famous Actors, Film legends, Film noir, Joan Crawford, Lorre

Share This