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Frasier (1993) s04e18 – Ham Radio
Ham Radio relies heavily on the situation in situation comedy; it gets some good laughs, but because of who’s in the episode—and how it’s written for those particular guest stars (specifically Edward Hibbert). But the David Lloyd-credited script only advances by one-upping itself, trying to appear chaotic but always coming through linearly and predictably. Not to mention the episode relies way too much on cheap jokes. Not easy jokes, cheap ones. Like Dan Butler doing a very racist Chinese accent and then a humdinger of an ableist joke mixed in with some hard-core misogyny.
It’s frustrating because it really is a great idea for an episode (albeit entirely built around the situation). The radio station is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary so Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) wants to do a live mystery radio play; he’ll direct, the other radio station hosts and staff will play the other parts. The first scene sets up the special show and forecasts some of the drama via David Hyde Pierce’s concerns about Grammer’s “Orson Welles complex.”
As Grammer gets things arranged at the station with Peri Gilpin’s help, lots more foreshadowing of his eventual nitpicking, while also setting up Hibbert and Butler’s participation. There’s a table read sequence at Grammer’s apartment, which has guest star Richard Easton playing a “Man of a Thousand Voices” covering six of the parts. So it’s just a funny sequence of Grammer slowly getting more and more controlling, first towards Jane Leeves—who is helping time the rehearsal—then pretty much everyone. It’s good, well-directed by David Lee, minus the Butler joke with the Chinese accent, which gets an appropriate condemnation after the joke is made.
Later on when everyone makes fun of Butler’s girlfriend, Hope Allen, it’s just funny he’s dating a dyslexic stripper. Ha ha. She can’t learn her lines.
But all of the eventual disasters with the special show are pretty obvious, just none such a combination of icky and mean. But someone’s got novocaine, someone else gets mad about Grammer over-directing, someone else is mad about script changes—by the end of the episode, when Grammer’s peak megalomaniac director, it’s unclear why various people are even mad at him. Specifically. In general, sure, but specifically.
Patrick Kerr shows up for the first time in a while as the station technician; he helps with the sound effects. There are some funny set pieces with them and good recurring gags.
Hyde Pierce’s performance is probably the best, with Hibbert delightful as well. Everyone else is good, just no one quite excels, which isn’t great given it’s ostensibly spotlighting various actors throughout.
The Lee direction helps. But it’s never as funny as it ought to be and the missed opportunity hurts Grammer in particular.
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Frasier (1993) s04e17 – Roz’s Turn
I’m still waiting for the great Roz episode for Peri Gilpin. It’s actually her second one in the last handful of episodes but, just like before, she gets upstaged by a guest star. This time it’s going to be it’s going to be Harriet Sansom Harris as agent-from-Hell Bebe Glazer and not the voice of Darth Vader.
Harris shows up in the second half of the episode, throwing a wrench in Gilpin’s plans to apply for to do her own show—with Kelsey Grammer’s full support—and while the episode still manages to give Gilpin a lot to do… it’s as support for Grammer. It’s a deft move (Jeff Keenan gets the writing credit) and it leverages the heck out of Harris (who once again I’m shocked didn’t ever get an Emmy for this part). But it still takes episode away from Gilpin, who gets a lot to do until she all of a sudden doesn’t. But, that initial takeaway is to showcase Jane Leeves and John Mahoney doing things they don’t usually get to do—and giving David Hyde Pierce a chance to play so horny he could die (while maintaining decorum)—but it’s still a downgrade.
The cast is helping Gilpin prepare her demo tape—a call-in show without being boring like Grammer’s, basically—and so everyone gets to do a persona. Mahoney’s a Casanova, Leeves is a vixen. It’s all really good showcasing. Keenan’s got funny stuff. It just doesn’t have a good narrative flow. Because once Harris shows up, nothing can compete. The material isn’t even the best, the delivery’s what matters and Harris is great.
We even get to see what Harris’s office looks like (her machinations end up being the A plot, more than anything stemming from Gilpin’s audio tape).
It just would’ve been nice if the episode had tried a little harder and didn’t just rely the cast being able to make the material sparkle. There have been easy episodes before, but this one just seems a little bit too easy. Like Keenan (and the room, obviously) did a fine job plotting, just not refining. If everything in the front half is just going to be prologue to a Harris tour-de-force, maybe don’t have it be one where the gags are all relying a little too often on silly absurdity. Again, Harris is awesome—and everyone’s good, with the great Mahoney and Leeves spotlights (and Hyde Pierce)—but it’s a little too self-satisfied.
Some great one-liners though. Just awesome. It’s a mixed bag with a lot of good candies.
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Fixed Bayonets! (1951, Samuel Fuller)
About two minutes after I had the thought, “Oh, no, what if the morale of Fixed Bayonets! is ‘it isn’t the generals who are the heroes but the men,’” the film reveals the morale to be it isn’t the generals who are the heroes but the men.
The film opens with a title card establishing the setting and the direct involvement of the U.S. Armed Forces. The first scene has two enlisted guys waxing poetic about how generals are super cool and they could never be generals because generals are super cool. Stuart Randall plays the general. He’s terrible. For his entire scene, it’s pins and needles whether the rest of the film is going to have such atrocious acting. And ham-fisted exposition. There’s going to be exposition later, but it thankfully won’t be ham-fisted. In fact, the opening scene is such an outlier to the rest of the film for a while in the second act it seems like Bayonets is going to end up a dark, satirical tragedy.
It has all the pieces. Leave out some of the patriotic music, get rid of the voices lead Richard Basehart hears (even the good ones), and without making any changes to the edit, Bayonets would be very different. The patriotic music and Basehart’s reassuring voices turn it into wartime propaganda. It assures the homefront the fellas are a-okay, even if it’s more a war than a “police action.” Heck, even the screwups get another chance over there. So it does end up being a tragedy, just not in a good way.
Because the second act of Fixed Bayonets! is phenomenal. Director Fuller is always ambitious with the action. The film mostly takes place at this pass Basehart and his platoon are defending; they’re the rear guard, trying to fake out the Chinese they’re actually the advance because everyone else has pulled back. There’s a big set of the pass, which lets Fuller and cinematographer Lucien Ballard do a bunch of great crane shots while things explode. It’s technically solid—particularly the photography—but it’s dramatically inert. Good pyrotechnics, but a string of booms, nothing else.
So when Fuller all of a sudden starts doing these amazing sequences in act two, after one of the squads has taken shelter in a very convenient cave, it’s a bit of a surprise. And then when it just keeps getting better and better, including the exterior sequences with the fighting and not just the pre and post-fighting scenes where the soldiers humanize… Fixed Bayonets gets really good, really fast, and for a significant portion of its runtime. If it weren’t for the finale, you could almost convince yourself the studio took the picture away from Fuller and tacked on the pro-Army intro. Especially since it would mean Fuller’s not responsible for Randall.
It also helps the acting is best in the second act. There’s no Randall, but there’s also a lot less Craig Hill. Hill’s the lieutenant. He’s not just bad, he’s annoying at it. Fuller gives him a bunch to do and Hill can’t do any of it. He’s mostly in the first act, immediately after Randall’s scene, so Bayonets isn’t off to a good start with its actors. Second act, focusing on Gene Evans’s squad in the cave, is when the acting gets better; the actors aren’t just better, they also have a lot better material from Fuller (who also scripted). Second act is when Fuller starts caring about the performances—and he cares a lot, but that first act is rough and not easily forgotten or forgiven. But they do it. Fuller, Evans, Basehart, Ballard, and especially editor Nick DeMaggio (after a routinely edited first act, Fuller goes on to almost entirely rely on it to create suspense and drama, something DeMaggio excels at executing). They get Bayonets to a great place and then the third act hits and it slides down into the muck. It’s not even jingoistic muck, it’s very specifically redemption through Armed Forces service muck. It doesn’t help Basehart’s performance goes to pot either. Evans tempers Basehart but when they need to do things separately, Basehart can’t hack it.
Some of it’s the part, some of it’s Fuller… actually, Basehart might be off the hook. There’s really no better way to play the recruitment ad portion of the film.
Evans is great. You know what, actually, no, Basehart’s not off the hook. He definitely should’ve incorporated some of sergeant Evans’s Obi-Waning.
But Evans is great.
Michael O’Shea’s decent as one of the other sergeants—uncredited Henry Kulky is hilarious as the third and final sergeant; otherwise the supporting cast is mostly indistinct. You can spot James Dean really easily if you keep your eye out.
The middle of Fixed Bayonets! is a beautifully made film, combining various techniques to slow down and inspect the emotions of its characters during moments of crisis and tension. There’s a very clear change in the film’s tone when it starts, very clear change when it stops. It’s not quite foreshadowing but it does involve the same character. It’s really unfortunate the third act is such a disaster. Even without the aspirational, jingoist finish, the action in the third act is mostly bad too. I guess it’d be worse if the first act were better, because then it’d seem like a nosedive instead of a return to original form.
But when Fuller excels, it’s something very special; thanks, obviously, in no small part to Evans, Ballard, and DeMaggio.
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East of Eden (1955, Elia Kazan)
As intentional as Kazan gets with his direction of James Dean, he’s orders of magnitude more intentional on Julie Harris. Harris is top-billed and the natural protagonist, but Dean’s a supernova. He’s the lead, he’s the star, he’s dynamite, a press agent’s dream. Only he’s got a really quiet part for most of the movie; he’s an extrovert we only ever get to see as an introvert because the movie’s from 1955 (and about 1917) and when he’s not being a top-notch farmhand, he’s bedding every Hispanic girl in town. The film manages to find some honesty in how racism is playing a factor, but it can’t exactly address it.
It’s not just it’s 1955… men are men, after all. And East of Eden is a gloriously turgid mix of toxic masculinity, chauvinism (in both senses), and some kind of religiosity. The religiosity is mostly in the ground situation and revealed backstory; it’s important and it informs everything, but more in how it protects Dean’s twin brother, Richard Davalos, and their father, Raymond Massey, from ever having to take personal responsibility. Massey’s been a single dad since they were born—their mother died in childbirth, he told them—and he’s parented with the Bible. Except Massey’s a very kind, empathetic, curious person—Massey’s performance is startling in its earnestness and warmth, even when he’s being a complete jackass to Dean—so he’s had to arrange his life a certain way. It works with Davalos, who models the piety of his widower father as a way to navigate through as well—masking his core-deep insecurities and jealousies—but not with Dean. Because Dean’s the same as Massey, only Massey wants Dean to be like dear departed mother, Jo Van Fleet.
Who, it turns out, lives just a train ride away.
Van Fleet is a successful madam in the shitty coastal town, while Massey and sons live in the more Christian in-land farming community, where you can meet a nice girl like Harris.
The film opens with Dean following Van Fleet home, where she sends out Timothy Carey to deal with the lurking teen. Carey might be looped; he’s uncredited and Eden’s full of looped audio (quite obviously because Kazan wanted something just right; the film’s exquisite in its precision); either way he’s awesome. He runs Dean off, with some exposition to at least foreshadow and establish this plot line with Dean and Van Fleet. It’s a great sequence.
Once Dean’s back on the right side of the mountains, the film introduces Davalos and Harris. They’re a morally upstanding teenage couple, very chaste, very appropriate; Harris finds Dean concerning—so peculiar he’s scary—while Davalos just thinks his twin is a hilarious goof, at most a prankster.
Davalos and Dean is Eden’s most complicated relationship and the one the film gives the least amount of time. The film’s about Dean getting up the courage to confront Van Fleet, but more about how the many-layered revelation of Van Fleet affects Dean’s relationship with Massey. And, unintentionally, Davalos and Harris. They become collateral damage in this brewing family drama no one realized was brewing. Van Fleet’s the catalyst for the explosion, which is appropriate as she’s the one who got it brewing in the first place.
At least, the way the men see it.
Once Dean has a heart-to-heart about his parents with sheriff Burl Ives (who’s phenomenal in this picture), he starts trying to play the good son. And those attempts—the successes of those attempts—are going to bring ruin to everyone. Some more ruined than others. And there’s enough ruination going around it’s not all Dean’s fault. He is, after all, a sixteen or seventeen year-old kid who has a lot going on in his life and the easy access to alcohol. Massey’s good and evil dichotomy runs Dean and Davalos’s lives, with Harris’s outsider perspective and questioning starting to make Dean ask some questions. In conjunction with the rest of the world making Dean ask some questions too.
War’s almost on and Dean has a profiteers take on it. Davalos and Massey are devout pacifists, but Dean’s a mercenary. Only he’s not because he doesn’t understand what’s going on because he’s a kid. He’s a drinker and a fighter and a lover, but he’s still a kid, something Van Fleet sees in him and is willing to help him too. The relationship with Dean and Van Fleet, Dean and businessman Albert Dekker, with sheriff Ives, they’re all helping push his character development. Right up until we remember Adam had two sons (literally, of course, Adam is Massey’s character’s name) and then everything explodes. Even though we’ve only ever seen Davalos from Dean’s perspective and in Dean’s scenes… he’s had his own subplots brewing and boom.
The third act is then this tightly constrained melodrama where Kazan does everything he can to max out the intensity without getting too loud. And it’s where that direction of Harris gets so important.
Harris has figured out what’s going on with this family and she knows how to fix it but she has to get Dean, Davalos, and Massey to do that work. So it’s not just Dean’s going to be a golden god and get all the camera’s attention, it’s also the story doing it too. It’s treating Harris as a function.
Kazan doesn’t let it.
He, cinematographer Ted D. McCord, and editor Owen Marks figure out this way to showcase Harris, especially in the second half, when it becomes obvious she ought to be the protagonist of this story. Except men.
Harris is great. Dean is singular. No one’s made the adjective. Massey’s great. Ives, Van Fleet, Dekker. Davalos is fine. He functions. Lot of help from Kazan. With everyone else, it’s Kazan figuring out how to best convey his actors’ performances; with Davalos… he’s making it work.
Lois Smith is excellent in a small part.
Technically, it’s almost perfect. There’s a repeated shot of Dean riding the train back to the bad town two scenes and a few hours after we saw it used for him coming home to the good town; it’s now night, the shot’s day. It’s bewildering. Kazan and crew make up for it. He and McCord do a lot with camera angles, including some really awesome showy stuff; the repeat footage gets a pass.
And Paul Osborn’s script. Like, East of Eden has got to be a pain to adapt, but Osborn finds a chunk of the story (presumably the end, I’ve never gotten through it) and writes this great family drama; when I said earlier Kazan had to defend Harris against the script, it’s not Osborn working against her even, it’s the plot. Osborn makes sure Harris has excellent material. It wouldn’t work otherwise.
It’s just not easy to contend with Dean and his presence in the film, visually onscreen and then in general with the plot. He’s so exceptionally good and the film’s able to do so much more because it can leverage him.
East of Eden’s exceptional. I think I’d forgotten just how exceptional.
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