The Good Fairy (1935)
Prescription: Murder (1968)
We discussed Wonder Man this past Tuesday night at the Hoopla Classics discussion session. I put in my best effort at defending the film, but the Danny Kaye hatred was undefeatable. The vote was 'junk', which was the most disappointed I've been since The Disorderly Orderly was voted junk. Kaye. Lewis. Comedy.
“There are two things you can’t argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn’t make you laugh, no one can tell you why it’s funny, and it’s difficult to reason someone out of an erection.”
-Roger Ebert
I had seen The Good Fairy years ago. It was enjoyable then. It was enjoyable a couple of days ago when I screened it in the library basement. It is a pleasant film. It is sometimes funny, it is sometimes clever, but it never made me smile or laugh like Wonder Man did.
Wyler's a great director, of course. If I had to extract a clip from one of these two films and play it on repeat, forced to watch it over and over and over, I would pick the foxine mirror scene from The Good Fairy.
I sometimes get the idea to start very specific projects.
This morning, I'm thinking about picking a single director at a time and watching through all of their Westerns chronologically. I like Wyler doing Lubitsch. But what I really want is to re-watch The Westerner, to finally watch The Big Country, and to catch up on Wyler's early silent Westerns.
Speaking of self-imposed projects, I've got a DVD set of Everything Columbo that I picked up at a thrift store a while ago. I have finally started watching it.
Prescription: Murder was the first Columbo TV movie in 1968, based on a stage play. There are some minor ways in this deviates from the refined Columbo formula, but mostly it's all here right at the beginning.
Falk is the reason to watch, but everyone does a great job and there is some excellent deliberate filmmaking on display. After spending some time in the past couple of years with Obayashi's TV work, watching Soviet films that only played on TV, and watching and discussing something like Stalking Laura, now coming back to Columbo, I'm convinced that we've all lost something wonderful with the loss of made-for-TV movies.
I remember growing up thinking that "made-for-TV" meant worse. "Direct-to-video" meant worse. We all knew that there were exceptions, but this was just the way it was. TV meant lower budgets, lesser talent, smaller screens and smaller ambitions. This was unfair then and it's unfair now. Today, I'm grateful for everyone who has recorded, saved, and shared so many forgotten old TV movies.
Now, in the age of streaming services in which everything is direct-to-the-rectangle-in-your-pocket, the hand-crafted television films of the past are a welcome antidote to so much slick garbage on offer today.
Part of this is also, admittedly, the fact that there were still standards of decency on television. The murder in Prescription: Murder is shocking and violent without gross-out gore. The conversations in the film are adult and serious without being vulgar and ugly. I miss serious adult shows that weren't gross in the same way that I miss 'vaudeville'-style comedy variety shows.
It turns out that I find past 'mainstream media', movies and TV, both funnier and more serious than their contemporary counterparts.