More Cartoons From Me Again For the Second Time

I forgot to put these up for whoever is interested ...

Inhuman Relations # I don't know

How many of these things have I drawn? I can't remember, so here is the latest ...

Betty and Louis

Lately I've gotten to be a big fan of Louis Prima, particularly his later recordings with Keely Smith ("Just a Gigolo" and "That Old Black Magic" are two of my favorites). The man has an unmistakable voice!

So when I watched the following Betty Boop cartoon from 1931, and heard someone singing who sounded a lot (and I mean A LOT) like Louis Prima, I had to Google the situation to find out if my hunch was right or if I was just crazy. Well I guess I'm just crazy, because I couldn't find anything about Louis Prima and Betty Boop together (aside from a fan-made video comparing their different versions of "Just a Gigolo"). So you'll have to decide for yourself if this is really him singing about the Delaware Lackawanna and going insane at the end of this terrific cartoon. What do you think? ...

"Mask-a-Raid" (1931)

Visit Polly and Her Pals

The fine folks at Barnacle Press have posted a large number of Cliff Sterrett's "Polly and Her Pals" daily strips. You should hurry over and take a look!

You should also bookmark the Barnacle Press website, because they have hundreds (if not thousands) of other classic newspaper comic strips available to read for free.

Inhuman Relations #7

Two Catholic school girls walk into a bar, and ...

Inhuman Relations #6

Fun with Income Taxes and Feminine Instincts of Protection ...

"Night Nurse" and Forbidden Hollywood

Yes, after many sleepless nights and painful yearning, "Night Nurse" has finally been released on DVD (with four other movies that are almost as good) ...



... and you guessed it! I'm going to make yet another post about it!

In this new Forbidden Hollywood DVD set, you can see some great profane films from the early 1930s, with provocative titles like "The Divorcee", "A Free Soul", "Three on a Match", "Female", and of course, the best one of all, "Night Nurse", which has been restored to astounding clarity of picture. And anything that gives me a crisp and clearer picture of a young Barbara Stanwyck is Grade A in my book.

Aside from simply being a good movie, "Night Nurse" is also an interesting example of efficiency and leanness in filmmaking. It's only 75 minutes long, but the director and actors give us more than our money's worth in those 75 minutes. There is not one boring frame in the entire film. Another thing about this movie is that there is a startling amount of female flesh on display (for 1931 standards, at least). I suspect that is a major contributor to the film's lack of boringness ...





But what is the movie about (besides nurses being out of uniform), you might ask? OK, even if you already know, I'll tell you just so I can use some picturesque verbiage.

A nice young woman named Lora Hart, whose cup of compassion and humanity runneth over, wants to be a nurse at a big city hospital. After a few obstacles and misadventures (see pictures above) she finally makes the grade, and is assigned a job as a night nurse for two sick little girls in a big mansion. The girls' mother is a hopeless drunk, and the chauffeur is an evil schemer who wants to kill the kids in order to get ahold of the money their late father left them.

Along the way, Lora removes a bullet from the arm of a kind-hearted gangster / bootlegger, who throughout the movie tries to get her to go out with him by swearing he has given up his illegal ways and "gone legit".



She doesn't buy it.

Anyway, as the kids she is caring for sink deeper and deeper into ill health, Lora decides to seek out the boozehound mother, who is partying somewhere in the mansion, to explain to her that her children are dying. Here (for the third time on this blog) is a killer clip from this scene, complete with violence, disgust and uncaged nurse fury. This is the kind of clip that you can't see too many times.



The final verdict: What are you waiting for? Buy this thing!

Inhuman Relations #5

A night out at Maureen's favorite restaurant turns messy ...

Mystery of the Wax Museum!

This is a test I am conducting to see how well embedded movies from the Internet Archive work here on Blogger. So be a good guinea pig and watch this feature-length early Technicolor mystery that will give you many pleasurable sensations (like Glenda Farrell!).



Copied from IMDB:

In London, sculptor Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) struggles in vain to prevent his partner Worth (Edwin Maxwell) from burning his wax museum...and his 'children.' Years later, Igor starts a new museum in New York, but his maimed hands confine him to directing lesser artists. People begin disappearing (including a corpse from the morgue); Igor takes a sinister interest in Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray), fiancée of his assistant Ralph (Allen Vincent), but arouses the suspicions of Charlotte's roommate, wisecracking reporter Florence (Glenda Farrell).

"Mystery of the Wax Museum"

Comic Book Land

Here's a great Terrytoon with Gandy Goose and Sourpuss the Cat, called "Comic Book Land". I actually have a silent copy of this cartoon in Super 8mm format, but it's in black and white and about 3 minutes have been cut to make it fit on a 50 foot reel.

Also watch for some great Carlo Vinci dance animation!

Porky in Wackyland

I can't believe I never posted this cartoon before. Here is Porky in Wackyland, directed by Bob Clampett in 1938 ...

Porky's Railroad

Another black and white Looney Tunes 'toon, directed by Frank Tashlin in 1937 ...

"Porky's Railroad"


Nothing exciting to add about this cartoon, it's just seven minutes of fun.

What Price Porky?

I'm feeling nostalgic for the OLD Atlantic County Cartoons blog, where every day I would put up a classic cartoon for the enjoyment of animation aficionados. Maybe I should try it again? Here is a war-themed Looney Tunes short from 1938, directed by Bob Clampett (as only he could direct it) ...



Leave it to a great director like Clampett to take a generic premise like the one in this short (ducks steal hens' food on Porky's farm, trench warfare ensues), and shoot it to the outermost limits.

Hiya, Baby Face

Since it's my birthday, I thought I'd entertain myself and post up a few words about one of my top favorite Barbara Stanwyck movies, the 1933 film "Baby Face". This is the movie that finally made me notice her after all those years of just hearing her name and confusing her with other actresses (for a long time, I thought she was the girl in "Arsenic and Old Lace"). It's interesting that I'd pick this movie to start liking her, because in spite of its racy reputation, "Baby Face" is actually kind of generic, and is basically a ripoff of an even more generic Jean Harlow vehicle that was made a year earlier, called "Red Headed Woman".



The way I heard the story, Warner Bros. was accusing MGM (who made "Red Headed Woman") of getting away with more risque content in their movies, just because they had more money than the other studios. So Warner's made a conscious effort to outdo "Red Headed Woman" to see if the censors were playing favorites. The head honcho at Warner's at the time, Darryl Zanuck, wrote a story that was similar to "Red Headed Woman" (both lead characters were named Lily, both used sex to climb the social ladder, etc.), but made it twice as bawdy.

A somewhat skeptical Barbara Stanwyck was reportedly lured into the project with the promise of the "glamour treatment", as her fans were "getting tired of seeing her in gingham and flannel". But rumor has it that Barbara was also involved in some degree in the story meetings.



Through the miracle of a fat-free screenplay and direction, "Baby Face" takes us from a sleazy speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania, to the high life of several New York penthouses, to France, and back to New York, in just an hour and sixteen minutes. The trailer will fill you in on the general premise of the story:



You can see that the movie is not novel or very original, and the dialogue ranges from snappy to just adequate. If it was any other actress, the movie would have slipped into oblivion decades ago. But Barbara Stanwyck's presence gives it a booster shot of warmth and humanity, and she alone rescues "Baby Face" from mediocrity, turning it into a powerful film that is rightly remembered today.

This is a clip from the beginning of the film, when she loses her cool, and tells off her father (who tried to pimp her out to a corrupt politician) ...



And this is a clip from the end of the film. She runs back to the only man she ever loved, only to find that he has decided to end it all. This scene knocked me out the first time I saw it, because Barbara doesn't just kneel over her husband's body and do a "theatrical" kind of weeping ... she does a sincere, genuine kick-your-guts-out, "Holy Christ!", kind of weeping that nobody else in the entire history of motion pictures could ever top, even today. I still get choked up whenever I see it (sue me!).



That's all.

"Golden Boy" Revue

This DVD was released two months ago by Sony. The cover is actually not as awful as the ones they have been putting on their other classic movies for the last couple of years. But that isn't saying much. It's still pretty bad. The picture of Bill Holden looks like it was taken around the same time as "Golden Boy" was filmed, but poor Barbara -- somebody fished out a picture of her that looks like it was taken several years after this movie. The bad Photoshop colors didn't help, either.

Here's one of the original movie posters, which would have made a great (and cheap) cover, or at least a better one than what they used ...



If they didn't like that poster, there were many others to choose from ...






(A French edition of an American poster, but you get the idea)

Putting aside the lame cover design, the most important part of the DVD -- the content! -- was one thing that didn't disappoint. My only complaint is that the movie looked dark, as though one of the transfer engineers played with the contrast or something. I have the movie on videotape (from 1984), and there are more lighter shades of gray on the video. On the DVD, the whites were whiter, the light grays became dark grays, and the dark grays turned black. I noticed that this is a rampant problem in "restored" old movies that are being released today. I learned to fix the problem by turning up the brightness on my TV!

Sony must have finally taken a page out of Warner Bros' book, because in addition to giving us the movie, they included a startling number of extra features with it:

* "Kangaroo Kid", a cartoon that riffs on the theme of "Golden Boy".
* "Pleased to Mitt You", a comedy short with a boxing theme, featuring Shemp Howard before he (re)joined the Three Stooges
* "Screen Snapshots", a 1930 newsreel-type film that shows stars of the day mugging and clowning for the camera. Includes a young Barbara Stanwyck learning how to play golf from Ricardo Cortez.
* "Sudden Silence", a half-hour anthology episode from 1956 that marked Barbara's dramatic TV debut.

In other words, there was enough interesting material here to keep me amused for a long time. And I enjoy being amused. If you do, too, I recommend this DVD. So buy it, already!

Inhuman Relations #4

Here is a really epic comic strip that I just finished a couple of hours ago. Click to enlarge (as if you didn't know)!

Antique Perversions: Starring Betty Boop

I'm a big fan of old cartoons, which of course is no secret to all of you out there. But today while I was freeze-framing part of a cartoon from 1930 called "Dizzy Dishes" (which was the first Betty Boop cartoon), I found a surprise.





Here is the cartoon on YouTube, which is unfortunately out of sync, but otherwise OK. If you skip to around 3:12 in the video, you will see a prototype Betty as a cabaret singer. But that's not all you'll see ...









I read somewhere that the Fleischer animators used a lot of their observations about life in 1920s and 30s New York in their cartoons. That's why they are so dark, smutty and entertaining. New York must have been quite a place back then.

Another Gross Study

This week I had a lot of down time at work, so I copied some great pictures out of Milt Gross books ("Dear Dollink" and "I Shoulda Ate the Eclair"). I don't work in an office, so I had to use whatever writing implement or paper that was available, which turned out to be a ball point pen and a dusty legal pad. Not so good for this kind of thing. But here are some of the less bad examples of my efforts ...







The verdict: I'm too "conservative" to be trying to draw Milt Gross! I should stick with Owen Fitzgerald.

Gaston and Josephine, The Little Golden Pigs

I didn't have enough time to scan the whole book, but this should give you a general idea. "Gaston and Josephine" is a Little Golden Book that was published in 1948, and illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky (more of his great work can be found at the ASIFA Animation Archive). When my sister and I were growing up, my dad told us what he remembered about the story of Gaston and Josephine, The French Pigs, and we thought he was a little screwy. Who would write a story about Two French Pigs? It came up in conversation recently and I looked on eBay to try to prove him wrong, but darn it, he was actually right! There was a copy of the book for sale, so I bought it (I bid a little too much on it, but never mind).

If there is any interest, I'll see about scanning more pages from the book. Until then, here is a small sample ...

Coming Soon ... An Art-Related Post!

I keep forgetting the name of this blog is Atlantic County Cartoons, and because it's been a month since my last art-related post, I figure I better get the lead out! All you fans of lushly illustrated vintage Little Golden Books, stay tuned for something cool tomorrow ...