I feel like a bit of a blogging shitheel. I got a head’s up about the Early Howard Hawks Blogathon from its instigator, Only The Cinema’s Ed Howard, quite some time ago, and filed it, and…forgot, and today I get a reminder that it starts…yesterday.
The concept is both nifty and self-explanatory—soliciting blog considerations of Hawks films made between 1928 and 1936. This encompasses such already well-known and it would seem thoroughly explicated classics such as Scarface and Twentieth Century, as well as distinctly more obscure items such as Today We Live, The Road To Glory, and the co-helmed-by-William Wyler Barbary Coast, featuring a period Eddie G., seen below, bidding a cranky farewell to Miriam Hopkins.
I expect a good deal of great stuff to emerge from the project, and I am contemplating a contribution of my own, of which I will reveal no details, except to say that it will likely be titled “In Search Of Ancient Stumpys.”
I also feel rather bad, or peculiarly bad, for letting two recent deaths go by unremarked-on. Ray Dennis Steckler and Claude Berri could hardly be more different—or could they? Steckler, who died on January 7 in his long time home of Las Vegas, was an energetic schlockmeister, a cameraman on Timothy Carey’s legendary The World’s Greatest SInner, and one of the brains behind (and performers in) the equally legendary The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies. Berri, whose directorial debut was the sensitive but bracingly straightforward The Two of Us, had a remarkably multi-variegated career as a director, writer, producer and actor, at one point gaining reputation as “The French Woody Allen” for his seemingly autobiographical sex comedies. Recent years saw him as one of the producers behind the incomprehensible-to-American-audiences Euro blockbusters based on the Asterix and Obelisk comics. It’s clear, when one reads accounts of the two men’s careers, that they were relentless cineastes—moviemakers who never stopped, until they had to. I didn’t go into Berri because I didn’t have as firm a grip on his work as I would have been comfortable with. In the case of Steckler, it was a lack, finally, of anything meaningful to say. To be perfectly honest, the reason I’ll never forget seeing Incredibly Strange Creatures at the Beacon Theater in 1980 (yes, as part of The World’s Worst Film Festival—I knew Michael Medved when) has more to do with Lester Bangs’ introducing it than the movie itself. Still…
Thanks for the announcement, Glenn. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
Can I still look forward to your Westlake remembrance…?
It’s ‘Come and Get It’ which is the Wyler co-helmer — a so-so picture overall but with some real magic moments. One of which is that breathtaking opening sequence (composed out of second-unit footage) that details the whole beginning-to-end process of logging — a precursor to the meticulous examination of the engineering behind the pyramids (tombs ‑and- death-traps) in ‘Land of the Pharaohs.’
craig.
I could say a few meaningful things about Ray Steckler because he was a friend of mine. Not a close friend, necessarily, but more than an acquaintance. Although I’d been familiar with his work since the early ’60s (when I caught Ron Haydock’s writeup on INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES in an issue of FANTASTIC MONSTERS OF THE FILMS), I didn’t actually make contact with Ray until 1994, when I was liquidating the estate of a long-time film collector. Steckler was himself a film collector, and from the estate he bought 16mm prints of several vintage “B” Westerns starring the likes of Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, and Bob Steele. I first met him several years later, when he attended the Lone Pine Film Festival. We saw each other several times after that and stayed in touch by phone and e‑mail. I last heard from him just a few months ago; he wanted me to review his latest (and, as it turns out, last) film, a half-assed, shot-on-video sequel to CREATURES. The thing was so bad that I couldn’t possibly submit a review to my editor, whose indifference to the title I blamed for my failure to get Ray some ink.
Ray was an interesting guy. A bit of a nut, but interesting nonetheless. He knew a lot more about movies and moviemaking than his oeuvre might suggest.