10 Things 5
Zero Mostel, MAFS and Curb Your Enthusiasm
1/ The IPL is still on.
2/ Vale Jack Clarke, former chairman of Cricket Australia. Jack was a nice bloke, and a man who loved his job more it would be harder to find - he’d have found the recent two-year period in which CA went through four chairmen inconceivable. But he did used to remind me of Malcolm Speed’s joke about the difference between a shopping trolley and an Australian cricket administrator: ‘You can get more food and grog in an Australian cricket administrator.’
3/ According to The Australian, Nine’s Married at First Sight ‘is more than a TV show’; rather is it ‘a cry for help about the state of gender relations in this country.’ I can’t enlarge on the reasons for this because I’ve long since cancelled my subscription to the national daily, but, y’know, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Because MAFS is exactly a TV show, with all that that involves: it is cheap, artificial, manipulative, drawn out, brilliantly edited, utterly phony and also completely addictive. Who couldn’t relish the transformation of Jono from ‘boring robot’ to love rat, even as Lauren’s bizarre face melted from laughing clown into raging virago? Give me excess of it!
4/ But by far my favourite participant was Tori, who so visibly chafed against ‘The Experiment’ throughout, continuing to express steadfast belief in Jack even as the producers conspired to show their relationship in the least flattering light. By being prepared for MAFS to show her as deluded and Jack as an asshole, she reminded us of our dependence on the show’s heavy narrative hand. MAFS is a twelve-week campaign to extract telegenic stress from total strangers under the tutelage of unnamed relationship ‘experts'. Anyway, who laughs last etc: yesterday on the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, I saw Tori on the back of Jack’s jetski in Goldy flaunting her ‘toned derriere.’ Go Tori! Meanwhile, The Australian can start preparing its solemn take on The Farmer Wants a Wife as a commentary on the woke erosion of rural resilience.
5/ Curb Your Enthusiasm, meanwhile, has concluded in a courtroom, in a reprise of Seinfeld. Which reminded me that many of my favourite comedies, from Woody Allen’s Bananas to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, have wrung courtrooms, a staple of serious drama, for their comic potential. Who can forget Judge Reinhold in Arrested Development? Above all The Producers, which I watched again a few weeks ago.
6/ ‘And we’ll never do it again,’ says Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) at the conclusion of his trial for attempting to blow up the theatre in which their musical Springtime for Hitler has become a raging success. The problem with this is that he and his confederate Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) have sold 25,000 per cent of the profits; they had intended Springtime to ‘close on page four’, on account of its utter tastelessness, allowing them to pocket the funds invested. Alongside them, swathed in bandages, is playwright Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars), a runaway Nazi. It’s too good.
7/ ‘We find the defendants incredibly guilty,’ says the foreman of the jury (played by Bill Macy, later Walter Findlay in Maude) with delicious relish for the line. Because nobody curbs their enthusiasm in The Producers. Writer-director Mel Brooks had brought his Show of Shows skills to what’s essentially a sequence of very tightly-written sketches, and every role is played to the hilt. Christopher Hewett’s portrayal of Roger de Bris is inspired by the king of camp Ed Wood; Andréas Voutsinas was told by Brooks to play Carmen Ghia as looking like Rasputin but behaving like Marilyn Monroe; even Ulla, the decoratively inarticulate Swedish secretary played by Lee Meredith, is superb. Bloom, nearest thing to a straight man, only plays mildly because of the surrounding antic energy.
8/ The comic pitch is set, of course, by Mostel, who lands every one of Brooks’ endlessly quotable, almost epigrammatic lines: ‘Shut up, I'm having a rhetorical conversation’; ‘You have exactly ten seconds to change that look of disgusting pity into one of enormous respect!’; ‘I'm condemned by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure’; ‘This pin used to hold a pearl the size of your eye. Look at me now. Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!’; ’Leo, he who hesitates is poor!’ Plus, of course, the maxim that got him into Bartlett’s Book of Quotations: ‘That's it, baby, when you've got it, flaunt it, flaunt it!’
9/ The irony is, according to Jared Brown’s biography of Mostel, Brooks regreted his decision to cast the reluctant stage veteran. They feuded endlessly on set. According to the movie's editor Ron Rosenblum: ‘On one side was the enormous booming actor wth a presence, a range, and an inclination to go overboard with semi-comic ad-lib insult….On the other a short, sinewy, panther-eyed director whose operating temperature was each day rising closer to closer to the flash point. “Is that fat pig ready yet?” Mel would sputter. “The director?’ said Zero. ‘What director? There’s a director here? That’s a director?” ’ In this context, Liebkind’s line to Springtime’s star LSD (Bill Shawn) takes on an additional resonance: ‘You are ze actpr, I am ze writer. I outrank you!’
10/ Producer Joseph Levine also regretted his involvement in The Producers and was notoriously loath to release it. The film was condemned by Jewish organisations, banned in Germany, and subject to savage reviews: John Simon in New York magazine thought The Producers ‘a model of how not to make a comedy’ and Pauline Kael in New Yorker deemed it ‘amateurishly crude’, while Renata Adler in the New York Times condemned Mostel’s performance as ‘a violently mixed bag’, some of it ‘shoddy and gross and cruel’. In 1968, The Producers struggled for attention against prestige projects like Planet of The Apes, Oliver!, Romeo and Juliet, Bullitt, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Lion in Winter and The Thomas Crown Affair, while the year’s Oscars were dominated by 2001, Funny Girl and The Odd Couple (by Brooks’s colleague on Show of Shows, Neil Simon). In other words, a film about a musical that succeeded in spite of itself succeeded in spite of itself to the degree that, twenty years ago, it became a musical - in which the role of Max was taken by none other than Larry David. So those seeking antecedents for Curb, comedy with the courage of its cringe, would do well to revisit The Producers, and rejoice in, for example, the jubilant shamelessness of Max’s appeal to Franz: ‘That's exactly why we want to produce this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler with a song in his heart.’
Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: ‘I mean how many fathers can give a nine-year-old daughter a car? I'm just happy I'm in a position where I can do something like that.’
I tell the supermarket trolley gag about non executive directors (I am one) but I think a better punch line is “they both hold lots of food and drink but at least the trolley has a mind of its own”. Cheers. Mike S .
I understood very little because I live in a cocoon and don't know about the cultural things referenced here but I loved this post way too much to care about how stupid I would look by commenting like this. Grateful to you chief!