Paramount Studios released a series of shorts between 1932 and 1934 under the umbrella title of Hollywood on Parade in which they exhibited nearly every star they had in their stables singing, dancing, or playacting. In this particular clip, from 1933, Mae Questel gives a rare on screen performance as Betty Boop, the animated minx she voiced for eight years. She’s set do a song routine with a couple of mannequins but Béla Lugosi, revisting his role as Dracula, cuts the performance a bit short, proclaiming, “Betty, you have booped your last boop.”
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is very much a film that could only have been made in 1920’s Berlin, where the decadence of the cosmopolitan elite rubbed against the struggles of the working man like salt against a razor wound. Where gentlemen clubs existed off of Unter der Linden based around the concept of gang sodomizing, then consuming geese; where helmet-haired starlets pranced naked in winter down Friedrichstrasse, clad only in mink and garters; where the saying went that cocaine replaced water from the flowing faucets of Charlottenberg’s penthouses; and where, beneath all this excess, the working class seethed, wanting some semblance of sanity restored to their lives as they did everything humanly possible to keep their families’ heads above water.
Eventually, this schism between working class and decadence would cause otherwise sensible people to think Hitler’s ultra-conservative (and ultra-crazy) Nazi party might have the right idea. The point is, the film — undeniably a masterpiece — is a sci-fi extrapolation of the times. It isn’t a vision of the future: it is the class warfare of 1920’s Berlin extrapolated to its logical — but not historically accurate — conclusion.
Even if you don’t buy all of that, Metropolis is a classic: a film perfect unto itself, that Hollywood shouldn’t touch. No one else could be Maria than Brigitte Helm. No CGI could be more spectacular than Eugen Schüfftan’s art deco modern cityscapes. And the Moloch Machine should never be touched: it is a mechanical industrialpunk god utterly nonsensical in a computerized age.
But Hollywood has never cited necessity as inspiration for its terrible ideas. So why be surprised that producer Thomas Schuehly (responsible for the execrable Alexander) is planning on remaking Metropolis. And no doubt ruining every single thing that has made the original so timeless. Maybe Hollywood itself is the modern-day Moloch Machine.
This video (and stupidly enjoyable track) must have cost at least a cool million, but the Backstreet Boys didn’t care. They were riding high on Lou Perlman’s buggery adoration, they had legions of teenage girls at their beck and call, and it was the nineties, so nobody bothered telling them (to their faces) how stupid they looked, acted, and sounded.
When you’re that rich, that vaunted, and that young, what can you do? Why, a Thriller rip-off that will live in infamy for a chosen few, of course. Namely, me and the rest of the malcontents who were impressionable youth during that cursed era.
And by impressionable, I mean we thought backflipping werewolves were pretty much the golden apex of comedy. We still think that.
Why am I posting this on Cthursday? Pay attention to the gangly gentleman in the deceptively intellectual glasses, with the briefcase and the obsession with staring away from the camera at exactly a ninety-degree angle. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde manifestation, but his bifurcation is less monstrous than it is piscean. My hypothesis is that some concept artist snuck that one past the board, giggling into his dog-eared copy of the Compleat Works of Lovecraft the while.
But I don’t think backflipping werewolves had to be snuck past anyone.
Behold a cross-eyed dandy lisp his way through the lyrics to “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me” while gently squeezing the scrotum of a drake to provide the plaintive, squawking “Ma!”
The performer? Mr. Gus Visser, vaudevillian extraordinaire, and his incredible Singing Duck. While, at first glance, just a bizarre oddity of the early sound era, this film clip is of actual historical note. It was made by Theodore Case in 1925 as a proof-of-concept for the sound-on-film process he was shopping around an all silent Hollywood… a process that would eventually lead to the birth of the talkie in 1929’s The Jazz Singer.
Oh, to be in that small, smoky film room with those Gatsby-era Hollywood execs when a singing homosexual and his distressed duck flickered brightly across the silver screen to sing them a technologically miraculous duet! I can imagine the huge stogies drooping on kielbasa-like lips, the thick velvet smoke ephemerally curling in the projection shaft into the curlicues of the latter-day Internet acronym, WTF.
Gus Visser And His Singing Duck was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2002 by the Library of Congress as a film of note deserving of cultural preservation. Who could possibly argue against its inclusion?
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
