Small roles in a B-movie.

I'm catching up on my film noir watching on Netflix. It's fun to watch these movies from the 1950s. I enjoy the slower paced storytelling style completely devoid of big explosions. Last night's movie was The Asphalt Jungle, a 1950 crime thriller directed by John Huston.


After watching the movie through once, I decided to watch a little more with the commentary playing. The commenter was a film professor yakking away, mainly interested in why a crime drama would be made at MGM. What struck me was the difference between credits in films then and now. The cast list at the beginning of the film only had eight names. Brad Dexter, who plays a small but pivotal role, is not one of them. His name is in the list at the end of the film, a list of about twenty names on a single card. Dexter was a journeyman actor best known for playing Harry Luck, the trustworthy but avaricious gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven.

Nowadays, the end credits take five or six minutes to roll by and everybody down to the accountants and craft service company is given a moment of on-screen glory. It was a very different situation sixty years ago.


Also at the level of no credit in the pre-film list but on the final cast list card is Marilyn Monroe. She plays Angela, the mistress of the character played by Louis Calhern, the high living attorney who is asked to bankroll the caper at the center of the story. The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer, and Marilyn is important enough to get mentioned there. She was by no means a star yet, just a featured player under contract at MGM. This is one of five movies she worked on in 1950. The biggest role she had that year was as Miss Casswell in All About Eve. She wouldn't be a star on her own until she left MGM and went to Fox a few years later.


And then we get to the uncredited roles. Early in the movie, the main character Dix, played by Sterling Hayden, is picked up by the cops and put in a line-up. A night clerk who saw him commit a crime is asked to identify him.

The guy who gets a few lines as the night clerk is Frank Cady, known best to audiences as Sam Drucker on Green Acres. This is very common when watching 1950s movies. Many people who became regulars on TV in the 1960s were bit players at the movie studios in the 1950s. There were a lot of cast members I didn't recognize, even some who got billing before the movie started, but there were a couple of tiny roles filled by actors on their way to bigger things.


Which brings us to the line-up. The cops bring in two guys to be in the line-up with Hayden that look nothing like him. Hayden is extremely tall, listed at 6'5", the other two guys are an average sized guy who is very swarthy and has a mustache, and a tiny, fidgety kid brought in on a dope charge. None of the actors in the line-up get a line during that scene, but the fidgety kid is played by Strother Martin. Martin is one of the great fidgeters in Hollywood history. On another film, he had a scene with Jimmy Stewart. After the first take, Stewart said, "Okay, he can have a pen or he can have a clipboard, but he can't have both. No one is going to see anything else that happens in this scene if you let this guy have two props."

He had no props in this scene. He just adjusted his collar uncomfortably. Still, it was just enough time for a trivia nut like me to say, "Oh my God, that's Strother Martin!"

Let me say for the record that the yakking film professor in the commentary track did not note the work of either Frank Cady or Strother Martin. It makes you wonder what they are teaching kids at those fancy schools.

You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.

I was wandering around the interwebs this weekend and came upon two pieces of bad news. Actually, there's a lot more than two pieces of bad news, but here are the two I will comment on.

The website Superdickery has gone blank. This makes me sad.

If you were looking for evidence that Superman was a dick, this was the place to go.

If you wanted to know if Wonder Woman got tied up a lot, you could get the scoop here.

If you were trying to make the case that Batman and Robin had mutual interests other than fighting crime, many were the examples on Superdickery.

And if you want to know why comic book readers about my age really hate DC for being ridiculously hackneyed, you could see case after case of the cheese they put out in the 1960s.

But this great repository of knowledge has gone dark. The world is a smaller and sadder place.


Last year, I was giving updates on the progress of Frank Summers, a student at Laney who then went to UNLV and was signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers last year. He failed to make the cut to the main team, but he is still on the practice squad. If there is a serious injury and a player is put on the disabled list, Frank may get another shot at NFL glory. Right now, it's in a watch and wait situation. I wish my former student all the best.

Liberal victory week comes to a conclusion:Civil rights

As we look around at the culture in 2010, there are conflicting signs of just how successful and just how much of a failure the civil rights movement of the 1960s has been. We have a black president, who beat a white war hero soundly both in the popular vote and the electoral college. African Americans have been Secretaries of State, four star generals and achieved many other honors and ranks undreamed of fifty years ago. Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh may brag about their clout, but Oprah Winfrey could crush them like itty bitty bugs if she put her mind to it. On the other side, blacks are still regularly lower in test scores and higher in dropout rates than other races and both the military and prisons are over-represented statistically by blacks. Some blacks have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams from fifty years ago, but there is still a long way to go for the vast majority.


Some conservatives, usually young and ignorant ones, will talk about how much of the opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 came from Democrats. They do not expect people to remember what a revolution the Democratic party in the South underwent in the late 1960s.

Here is the electoral map from 1956. Eisenhower was the biggest war hero to enter politics since Grant, and he had brought the bloody Korean conflict to an end with a quick armistice. The economy was good in 1956 and even Joe McCarthy, the Republican's most divisive figure, was becoming a dim memory. Look at the states Adlai Stevenson won. He did not win these because he was the most liberal candidate and these were the most liberal states. He won because Eisenhower the war hero had the same party affiliation as Abraham Lincoln, dead more than 90 years but still the great enemy of all things Southern. It wasn't until after his second victory in 1957 that he sent troops into Little Rock to enforce desegregation. This is just a small example of the intractability of the Southern Problem, a large region of our country who make heroes to this day out of traitors to our country and our way of life.

What is noticeable to someone my age is how much conservatives have stopped openly fighting the culture war over civil rights and now pretend they were always 100% behind equality for all citizens under the law. I remember when Muhammad Ali lit the torch at the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics. There was certainly some pity involved for his plight battling Parkinson's, but he was treated as a beloved figure, not as the cocky and divisive person he was in the the 1960s and 1970s. In this week's episode of Mad Men, the historical event playing in the background is the second fight between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay, who then wanted to be called Muhammad Ali. Don Draper, who for all his faults is not a racist, dislikes Clay both for the name change and for his big mouth. It was a very common opinion at the time.


But if the alleged universal love for Muhammad Ali is difficult to reconcile with the historical facts that are in my living memory, it is the theft of Martin Luther King, Jr. by modern conservatives that is much more surprising and appalling. The buffoonish huckster Glenn Beck says without apparent irony that the conservatives must "take the civil rights movement back", as though it was well off white suburbanites that made the difference in Montgomery and Selma. King was reviled as a communist on the floor of the Senate, and as recently as twenty years ago, the dead and unlamented Evan Meacham of Arizona could score political points by refusing to have a paid holiday in Martin Luther King's memory.

If some conservative wants to list the conservative victories of the last fifty years that have made a lasting impact on our culture, I'd be glad to hear them. I don't think they have a week's worth of material, especially if they aren't allowed to pull the "Reagan won the Cold War" bullshit. That would be like saying Truman won World War II. He's just the guy in office when it ends. There are plenty of liberals who were fierce Cold Warriors as well.

They've got nothing for the people. All their victories are for the corporations and moneyed interests. As I said during the Clinton years, I'd rather have a president that disappoints me than one who disgusts me. Even as I get older and hold positions more conservative than I used to hold, the definition of conservative is moving much faster to the right than I am.

Liberal victory week continues:Women's rights

Of all the struggles for human rights by groups denied full citizenship, the struggle for women's rights can be said to have come the farthest distance in the shortest period of time. Technically, former slaves were citizens when the 14th Amendment passed, which means the law said black males had the vote back in 1868. We know full well how that law was hamstrung and rendered moot, but it wasn't until 1920 that women of all races were given the franchise. To put it in personal perspective for me, when my grandmother was born, she did not have the simplest right of a citizen in a democracy, but by the time she came of age, that right was hers. My analogous story is that when I was born, it was fully expected that I would be drafted if my country was at war. When I came of age, my country was at war but the draft was gone.

The vote is one thing and equal opportunity is another. The power vested in all male private clubs, which when I was a lad included many of the nation's most prestigious universities, was very slow to be dismantled. In the 1970's, women fought to get an Equal Rights Amendment, but it failed to be ratified by enough states. Some conservative scholars said it was completely unnecessary because women were citizens under the 14th Amendment. In many court cases, liberal advocacy called their bluff, and there were victories as well as defeats.


One of the most remarkable victories of the women's movement was spear-headed by Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to be elected to the House of Representatives, a second generation Japanese American woman from Hawaii. She was one of the authors of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which after she died was renamed the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. The most important section of this law reads as follows:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...

It made no specific mention of sports, but that is where Title IX made its most notable impact, increasing the funding of women's athletics and turning the United States into a perennial leader in any of a number of women's sports worldwide.



When a very large group is empowered, the law of unintended consequences goes immediately into effect. Consider Sarah Heath, the tough as nails point guard on the 1982 Alaska state high school championship Wasilla Warriors. She had opportunities given her by people like Patsy Mink, people she has happily spit upon throughout her life. She became Sarah Palin, and the myth of the tough point guard has followed her throughout her life, when as an adult, she is without question the whiniest little bitch on the public scene today, making political pronouncements on Facebook and Twitter like some snotty little 14 year old.

Years ago, I read a sports writer who said that there would be real equality between the races in sports when mediocre black players could see the same opportunities that mediocre white players saw. It took no particular courage for a general manager to sign someone like Willie Mays or Frank Robinson or Jim Brown. These guys were as good as it got, and if you wanted to win, you wanted guys like that on your team. Real equality was black journeymen players like A's second baseman Shooty Babbitt, or when the over-hyped lousy quarterback could be black Jamarcus Russell instead of white Ryan Leaf.

In 2010, we are seeing real signs of equality between the sexes in politics. There was a time that to be a successful idiot, you had to the son of a rich powerful man, much like the story of George W. Bush. Now, women who were incompetent as business leaders can try to have a political career like Carly Fiorina, and women who are genuinely dim like Palin, Sharron Angle and Jan Brewer have a chance to have a serious political career.

You've come a long way, baby, but you should have brought a GPS.

Random 9, 9/3/10 Padre Mickey rule invoked

Flower's Grave Tom Waits
Rider in the Rain Randy Newman
Enchanted The Platters
Reconsidering Our Love Matthew Hubbard and Michael Dresbach
Your Mind Is On Vacation Mose Allison
Ramon Laurie Anderson
The Golddigger's Song (We're in the Money) Fred Astaire
Children Will Listen Bernadette Peters
September Gurls Big Star

Kind of a quiet mood from the Random DJ this morning. Surprising how many songs aren't up on The You Tubes for late 2010. I didn't expect that Hubbard and Dresbach thang to be there, but Laurie and Fred are big stars and they should be represented. Speaking of big stars, Big Star shows up with a song more jangly than the rest of the Random 10, but the title fits the date so well, I'm going to invoke Padre Mickey's rule and make this one a Random 9.

Liberal victory week continues:Gay rights

It was the wee small hours of a Saturday morning, June 28, 1969. The police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Such raids were common, because the Stonewall Inn was a gay bar and cops rousted the patrons every few months for wanting to meet people with whom they could have sex. The Stonewall was owned by the Mafia, but they had no interest in stepping in to protect their patrons. This was just part of life even in sophisticated, cosmopolitan New York and homosexuals who went to bars would just have to get used to it.

But for whatever reason, the patrons of the Stonewall decided not to take it quietly that night and they fought back. In retrospect, many people consider this a turning point in the gay rights movement.

It was not a national story. I went to the library to check what my local papers, the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, reported on the incident. Nothing. No story on Saturday or Sunday or Monday. There were lots of riots back then. The Chronicle did mention in the Saturday edition that there were riots for the third night in a row in Newark, New Jersey, and even reported on riots in Buenos Aires and Naples. Both papers noted that on Friday, there was a large public memorial in New York for Judy Garland, who passed away earlier that week. Many people who write about the Stonewall uprising believe Garland's death was a contributing factor to the anger of the patrons that night.

In much the same way, Rosa Parks' arrest wasn't a national story, but it was the catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott, which did grab national headlines. Gay pride marches and demonstrations began in New York, Chicago and San Francisco on the weekend of the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

Like many other movements of the disenfranchised in this country, the courts were instrumental in moving forward their demands for equal protection under the law. As unmarried couples began to enjoy some of the same rights as married couples by extension of the 14th Amendment, so gay unmarried couples who were willing to come out also were given those rights. In large cities, many corporations unwilling to lose valued employees extended benefits to unmarried partners both straight and gay.

But all this slow progress might easily have subsided except that the bigots, the vast majority of them proudly conservative, went for a bridge too far, the so-called Briggs Initiative in California. The proposition was put to the voters that any professed homosexual could be fired as a teacher from the public schools.

Anyone with two functioning brain cells could see this was an open invitation to widespread blackmail. While I call this a liberal victory, and President Jimmy Carter made it clear that he was against the initiative when he did not need to have an opinion at all, the person whose opposition to the Briggs Initiative was likely the last nail in the coffin was Ronald Reagan.

Score one point for men married to fag hags.

Again, I am hesitant to call this a liberal victory because of the lukewarm support the left has given this cause. Of course the churches railed against gays, but when I was a kid, even the "liberal" psychiatric community labeled homosexuality a mental disorder. The gay political movement survived being blamed for the scariest plague of modern times, HIV/AIDS, and it is still vilified by the right to this day. "New York liberal" is code for Jew, "San Francisco liberal" is code for gay and "Hollywood liberal" is code for both.

We stand now at a crossroads where laws against gay marriage may be struck down as unconstitutional. No longer will the majority get to decide at the ballot box if a minority is allowed rights. Once again, the Constitution may be interpreted as saying that bigots do not have a Constitutional right to not be offended and people who do no one harm may live their lives in peace and enjoy the fruits of liberty all Americans claim as their birthright.

Wednesday Math, Vol. 126: Calling bullshit on the Huffington Post's numbers

Today on the HuffingtonPost, there was a report on the nine most polluted places on earth. One was London, England, which may or may not be true. The story showed pictures and had a paragraph length cation on each. One of the claims in the London paragraph was "The life expectancy of Britons has been reduced by nine years due to air pollution."

Hmm, I thought. That seems high.

So like any good mathematician, I wanted to see if that number checked out. I went to the C.I.A. World Factbook to see what they said. (I know, since when does a commie pinko like me trust the C.I.A.? As far as I can tell, they don't paint a rosy, pro-American with these numbers, and for comparing countries, this is as good a place to start as any.)

According to the C.I.A., the average life expectancy at birth in the U.K. is 79.02 years. This puts them behind the large Western European countries. France, Spain, Italy and Germany are all better than the Brits. So are Sweden, Norway and the Low Countries. In Western Europe, the Danes are worse at 78.30 years, as are the Irish (78.24) and the Portuguese (78.11). (For comparison, the U.S. is at 78.11. It's pretty common for the States to trail all of Western Europe in quality of life statistics.)

The real problem with these numbers is the "nine years". Adding 9 to 79.02 would give us an average life expectancy of 88.02 years. There is no country on earth that has those kind of numbers. Right now, Macau leads the world with an average life expectancy of 84.36.

If the statement had been nine months instead of nine years, it might be possible to argue the validity of this. Not to minimize the effects of bad air and water on human life, but just as with the numbers on life expectancy of football players, somebody took some data and twisted it way out of shape.

There's the very odd colloquial saying "Don't kid a kidder." I'm not a kidder, but don't bring that weak shit into my house, because when it comes to the numbers, I don't play.