Sunday Rerun: Forget About It

  The Statler Brothers had a catchy song called "Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott," which contained a very true line: "Everybody's trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears...'True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years." 

We like to watch old old movies on Turner Classic Movies, and the other night we hit on one which, while not the greatest movie you'll ever see, did a least say a lot about the times in which it was made.

The picture was called "The Housekeeper's Daughter." It came out in 1939, a comedy directed and produced by Hal Roach, who had previously produced Laurel And Hardy and "Our Gang" movies. The stars were Joan Bennett and  Adolphe Menjou, and it featured the film debut of Victor Mature, a man famous for saying many years later, "I can't act, and I have 140 movies to prove it."

The brief rundown goes like this: Joan Bennett plays a gangster's girlfriend who goes home to her mother, who runs the house for the high-class Randall family, but all but one Randall goes away, leaving Robert Randall, who wants to be a newspaper reporter, so he gets a job through connections and stumbles on a murder case which is a huge scandal and leads to the police converging on the house and people shoot off firecrackers and the gangsters think it's gunshots and Robert winds up with Joan Bennett.

OK, I left out some minor details, but the point is this. We look at movies like this, 80-some years later, and we shake our heads.

There were others, called "screwball comedies," around that time. Try to spend some time watching "You Can't Take It With You" sometime and see if your head doesn't spin. That's the one with a crazy family whose normal daughter falls in love with a normal boy and the families get together and all hell starts popping.

There was a movie called "Hellzapoppin' " a couple of years later which was nothing but crazy antics without the barest semblance of a plot.

But think about the times: the Depression was still going on. People were either out of work or just eking out a drab existence, and the only reasonable entertainment was the neighborhood movie theatre where for a nickel or dime ticket, you could take your mind off your troubles and not worry about next month's rent or another night of cereal for dinner or the storm clouds of war menacing Europe (Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, leading to France, Australia and the United Kingdom declaring World War II.The US was inevitably drawn to the conflict on December 7, 1941, with the invasion of Pearl Harbor.) Tough times call for at least an hour or two of diversion.

And at the Bijou or the Rialto or the Towson Theatre, all that trouble seemed far away  for a while as people, in the pre-television world, watched their favorite stars sing and dance and act, with the exception of Victor Mature.

Victor Mature (l) and Joan Bennett

The days of people going to the movies two or three times a week are long past, but today we download movies to take our minds off what's out there.  And with Victor Mature gone, we still have problems to forget about, and that's why we have Will Ferrell.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 28, 2026

 

The old county jail in my hometown of Towson, Maryland, no longer holds miscreants of any type. But rather than tear down a historic building, the county had a developer with an appreciation for history take it over. They lease space in there now to a variety of firms, and can you just imagine having an all-hands meeting in this room? It makes me feel all Shawshanky!

I don't think you can call these tasteless discs "candy," any more than you can call liver "meat" or non-alcohol beer "beer," but since they've made them since 1847, clearly someone is buying them, and, against all odds, eating them.

You can blow up the picture if you don't believe me, but all of this drawing is made up of little tiny cartoon people faces!

This machine rides around the streets somewhere in Germany, and if the driver is going too fast, just holler, "Hang on, Snoopy!"

I can see people getting a big print of this made up and framing it and hanging it on the wall so they can always feel like they're at the pier in Huntington Beach in California.

I think we begin to mature at the very moment we understand how true this is. We learn to cope by succeeding in spite of this truth.

When they held auditions for the replacement for the Gorton's fisherman, one applicant seemed to have all the qualifications!

They will be glad to hem your pants, if you catch my drift...

For some people, it takes a little while to realize retirement means their Wednesday can be your Saturday any day of the week...

Next week! Try the deep-dish olive pie!

Ouch!

Well, I never dreamed it would come to this, but here we are. In Florida (where else?) some people got into a tussle following a sporting event at a country club, and it wound up with one player slugging his opponent's face and beating him right down to the ground.

The sport in question here is the deadly game of pickleball.

The guy, the slugger, is a 63-year-old, and he stands charged with with two counts of felony battery on a person 65 or older (hey cool! It's a whole separate crime to beat on a senior!) His 51-year-old wife also joined the fight in Port Orange, and she has one single count of felony battery on a person 65 or older hanging over her head, which is not as gray as nature intended, I assume.

Here's where the fracas began: they were taking on another married couple but they began arguing about shots being made in what pickleballers call the kitchen (a marked-off zone on either side of the net.) The rule was you can only hit the ball there once it has landed; otherwise they must avoid it like I avoid pickleball entirely.

Well, you know how these things go. The players started insulting each other, and then the slugger insulted the other player's wife, and then words led to fisticuffs.

And then! At least twenty oldtimers  members of the club got into it. It must have been as glorious as when Morty Seinfeld clobbered Jack Klompus over that astronaut pen on "Seinfeld."

I'm printing this out and carrying it around in case anyone is crazy enough to try to get me to join a country club, or a game of pickleball.

"But I'm famous, don't you understand?"

Please come along with me as I add to my collection of famous people putting on the "Don't You Know Who I Am?" routine.

Today's special guest is Justin Timberlake, arrested in June, 2024, in Long Island, NY, for DWI.

First of all, let's get this straight: He is a talented performer, no denying that. But he is also 45 years of age now, way past the point where we can say, "Oh, he's just a big KID!" 

He left a restaurant and was observed running a stop sign and failing to stay in his lane. This sort of thing tends to attract the attention of police, who are supposed to be taking drunks off the road before they kill people with their cars.

Timberlake's hi-priced attorney, Edward Burke, Jr, maintains that Justin was not intoxicated, and was able to negotiate a plea deal in which JT copped to a lesser offense.

He was not charged with being a preening jackanapes, however. Should have been, wasn't.

I'm not sure why the video of his arrest is just surfacing, but it's chock-full of foolishness. Such as when the officer asks him about his car, and he says it's a rental, and the officer, not recognizing him, asks what he's doing in that part of the woods. JT says he's following his friends back to their house, and that he is "on a world tour."

You know what, when you think about it, we are all on world tours. Some just go farther than others, and most do it while sober. But when the officer asks what the devil he's talking about, Timberlake says: "It's hard to explain ... umm ... I'm Justin Timberlake."

Busted! He was taken in and booked, and the matter was settled in court, but recently, the tape of his most famous appearance since he walked around with his noodle in a box came to light.

So it was that he filed a petition on March 2 in Suffolk County Supreme Court, claiming that if people saw how he acts while cruising the streets it would be bad for his image.

“Public dissemination of this footage would cause severe and irreparable harm to [Timberlake’s] personal and professional reputation, subject [Timberlake] to public ridicule and harassment, and serve no legitimate public interest,” the petition states.

I have to disagree. As a member of the public, my legitimate interest in laughing at people like Justin Timberlake was served quite nicely.

Red-rimmed eyes tell no lies.

 

He gave us "Werewolves Of London"

I'm going to share three words of advice I just read, advice from the marvelously witty songwriter and performer Warren Zevon. Warren died in 2003, leaving behind a colorful life full of ups and downs, periods of success in performing and writing, and periods marked by drug and alcohol abuse. He was only 56 when he died.

It's noteworthy that he was famous for recording other peoples' songs, and having other record his. See him here on the Letterman show singing Prince's "Raspberry Beret"...and Linda Ronstadt had the hit version of his song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me."

But 56 years on earth is plenty of time to reflect and share what one has learned. Once he learned that his death from mesothelioma was inevitable, he let his mordant, thanatotic side out to play...recording a final album called "My Ride's Here," in which he posed for the album cover looking out the passenger window of a funeral limousine.

The reason I bring all this up is to share his thought that he passed along to David Letterman. Those two really appreciated each other. And in his final months, he appeared on the Late Show and gave this advice to one and all:

Enjoy every sandwich.

When I saw that written somewhere last night, I wondered about how foolish we are to race through life without stopping to think about the farmers who grew the wheat and threshed it for us for someone to make bread...the arborist who raised raspberries for use in making jelly...and the farmer down in Georgia whose peanut crop turned into a jar of Skippy.

Don't get me wrong! I'm not writing because I got some bad news. I didn't! Why, just last week my personal physician assured me there is no reason I won't live to be a hundred and some. (I've got great insurance!) That's a lot of years left, and believe me, I am going to feel and express appreciation for the people, places, emotions, and sandwiches that come my way. 

Some gotta win, some gotta pout

 Something really distressing is going on with young male athletes, and of course it comes right back to their raising.

We're talking about competitors refusing to shake hands. You see it in high school and college football games, where the captains meet at midfield for the coin flip before the game. One team's leaders will reach out their hands for a shake with their opposite numbers, and the other guys just lock their elbows, maybe shake their heads.

It's a trend...

See the guy in the Iowa wrestling uniform? That's Mikey Caliendo, up until now the pride of Geneva, Illinois. In the past weekend's NCAA wrestling tournament, Mikey lost again to Penn State wrestler Mitchell Mesenbrink. Mesenbrink's record against Caliendo now stands at 9-0. But the really bad thing is that instead of congratulating Mesenbrink on earning his second individual national title on Saturday, callow Caliendo spurned the handshake he was offered by the winner, keeping his paws in his pockets and not even acknowledging Mesenbrink.  

If I could talk to young Caliendo, and right now I don't think I'd care to, I would tell him to pull himself up to his full 5'8" height and act like somebody. It might take decades, but the chances are he will grow up one day and look back with regret on the day he had the chance to be a man and instead acted like a petulant boy. Right now, he has the irritating countenance of a spoiled brat who has always been told he's the best and demands a recount if he loses, "because it was rigged." 

If I could talk to his coach, I would tell him that "Mikey" needs additional training in areas far off the mat. 

"It's a new armoire!"

 I've heard the good advice "Never meet your heroes," and I have to throw an asterisk * in there, because if you were ever fortunate enough to meet Brooks Robinson, you felt like you were in the presence of a true nobleman.

However, after seeing the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels episodes on E! television concerning the way Bob Barker treated people during his time atop the game show world at "The Price Is Right," I am taking another big old head off my personal imaginary Mt Rushmore. The show says that after Bob's wife died, he made a beeline for the boudoir (or dressing room) of Dian Parkinson, where he urged her to Come On Down. She grew tired of playing Plinko and was pushed out of the show.

Bob then turned to picking on Holly Hallstrom, my favorite of all the models. He picked on her weight, as if she had any extra to worry about. This all started when she refused to back him up in court over the lawsuits filed by Parkinson. That did it, and she found her stuff packed up and herself shoved out the door with it.

Holly and Bob in happier days

The show said Bob demanded 100% loyalty, and was sexist and racist as well. And that he kept in place a producer who grabbed other people where they sit down, and ruthlessly bawled employees out over the smallest things. OH! and that CBS instituted a "ten-second rule," meaning that male employees were only allowed to ogle females on the staff for ten seconds, after which, presumably, their eyeballs were supposed to retract into their sockets.

Parkinson eventually withdrew her suit, saying that the pressure of all that was too much for her, but Holly Hallstrom filed suit also, and she did not back down, although it went on for years and years, and although she had to sell her house and car and couch-surf with friends, her courage paid off in a nice settlement, which did not compensate her for the misery she went through, but still.

As someone who told his fourth-grade teacher that "being a game-show host is the highest calling known to mankind" (and meant every word of it), I tended to agree with Bob, whose dressing room door was labeled "WGMC" for "World's Greatest Master of Ceremonies," but, sadly, it's possible to be that and simultaneously be a filthy dirtbag. 

So, let's see, I still have Brooks, and the Obamas, and Ernest Tubb. Do not tell me anything bad about them, or my Mt Rushmore will have to rush more new ones up there. Think about that for ten seconds!