More Jack Davis: ‘The Impossible Years’

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Jack Davis poster art for an archaic Boomer comedy no one dares to release on DVD. If my memory’s correct, David Niven kicks in a lot of television sets in it. Note how his name almost blends in with the top border.

More Jack Davis: ‘One More Time’

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The only film directed by Jerry Lewis in which he does not appear, One More Time (1970) sits waiting for a cult to germinate. The 1960s were chockablock with cinematic weirdness, but few pushed the envelope as far or in as many unexpected directions. It was a sequel to a static faux Rat Pack movie, Salt & Pepper (1968), where a young Richard Donner laid the groundwork for his oeuvre of mediocrity. It starred Peter Lawford as ‘Pepper’ and Sammy Davis, Jr. as ‘Salt’ (yuk! yuk!…get it?), two swingin’ cats operating a swingin’ nightclub in a swingin’ London decidedly void of mods and rockers. The hepcat geezer fever dream continued in One More Time, with Jerry shaping their relationship into a clone of his long-since-deceased partnership with Dean Martin — Peter as Deano, Sammy as Jer. The screenplay by Michael Pertwee (The Mouse on the Moon, Strange Bedfellows) was wrung dry for both maudlin pathos and bizarre slapstick, putting Sammy in the unenviable position of transferring the bipolar situations in a performance that glides uneasily from weepy insincerity to something hideously abstract (re: “Here come da judge, here come da judge, here come da judge…”). Upon seeing this the first time, I believed a lengthy (albeit insane) thesis could be composed on its daring and… brilliance? But who in their right mind would believe me?

Movie poster art by Jack Davis

Self portrait copyright © by Jack Davis

In the 1960s, Jack Davis was the first movie poster artist I knew by name, thanks to his contributions to Mad magazine. His style embodied the wacky spirit of that decade and its bipolar craziness which ranged from suburban Camelot and materialistic gluttony to civil rights, drug use and Vietnam. You can read more about Davis at Wikipedia and at Crazy Campsongs. He also illustrated a ton of record album covers, which are on display at The Endless Groove. The following movie posters, some of them icons of their era, click to enlarge:

Essential viewing for anyone old enough to remember single screen movie theatres (with curtains!) before the dawn of homogenized multiplexes and the antiseptic environs of home video, The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) afforded Davis this equally small assignment that sidesteps the picture’s subject matter in favor of kartoon kleavage and a ‘come hither’ stare. In the film, young couple Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna inherit a dilapidated old Bijou, complete with its antiquated staff (including Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers) who introduce them to the magic of cinema. Travers and McKenna were married in real life. She became popular in Britain for playing WWII heroine Violette Szabo in Lewis Gilbert’s Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), a performance relayed almost entirely through her quivering lower lip, one of the strangest acting tics I’ve ever seen. She and Travers later shot to international fame in Born Free (1966).

One of the most popular movies of its time, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) was originally promoted with poster art by Saul Bass, which was fitting since he also designed the film’s opening credits. As the film continued to play theatrically well into the next year, United Artists launched a new ad campaign with Jack Davis art — which he’d lampoon in his cover for the Mad paperback, It’s a World, World, World, World Mad. When the picture was re-released in the early ‘70s, Davis modified the design, as seen here.

When I was a kid, I kept hearing about how funny Bob Hope was. I’d see him on TV and draw a blank (was I too young to appreciate the droll irony?); I’d go to his movies and think, hey, this guy is in a lot of garbage (these were the days of Call Me Bwana and I’ll Take Sweden… not that his earlier pictures were all that funnier). But the poster for 8 on the Lam (1967), a movie I last saw in first run, was one of the highlights of my personal collection. I had this masterpiece tacked on my bedroom wall for years. Yeah, yeah, I know: that explains a lot now, doesn’t it?

Davis captured the chaotic tone of Blake Edwards during the filmmaker’s prolific run in the ‘60s. Although not directed by Edwards, Waterhole #3 (1967) bears his influence, that sense of fatalism peppered with sarcasm that’s prominent in Edwards’s The Days of Wine and Roses, The Pink Panther, Darling Lili and The Party. The line in this poster about “the good girls lose” refers to a scene in which rape is waved off as “assault with a friendly weapon.” Only in the ‘60s…

I’m slightly disappointed in Davis’s murky art for Edwards’s The Party (1968). It seems that the design was going for the crisper look of Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny strip from Playboy, a series that fit hand in glove with Edwards’s wild parties in films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Great Race and S.O.B. The Party, of course, is a 99-minute extension of that, a catalog of hit-and-miss gags, pratfalls, double entendres, birdie num num, all of it culminating in a huge bubble bath and Henry Mancini’s hip, rockin’ theme.

To be continued…

Flickhead on stage

An acquaintance of mine from back in the day has graciously posted some old pix on their Facebook account, including this one of me (far right) in a 1975 high school production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with (left to right) Steve Rogers, Wazoo, and John McKeon as R.P. McMurphy. (Then in my salad days, it was merely a stepping stone to my illustrious film career.) Rather than perform it in the school theatre, the director, Jeff Bennett, thought it would play better if presented in the study hall/lunch room annex for a more ‘institutionalized’ feel. Click to enlarge.

Hammer and Niall

The Snorkel

All my life I’ve wanted to see The Snorkel (1958). Well, maybe ever since 1966 when I was eight-years-old and found it in Steven Scheuer’s The TV Key Movie Guide (Bantam, 1966), an ancient paperback bible predating Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies by a couple of years and my first link to cinemaphilia. For surely if Mr. Scheuer spent all that time reviewing all those movies (his capsule format was copied by Maltin), I could not be alone in my passion. And an odd title like The Snorkel can haunt you if you’re that young, as can the unconventional name of its star, Peter van Eyck, whom I’d later regard as The Poor Man’s Karl Boehm — who, to belabor the digression, could be considered The Poor Man’s Hardy Krüger. Now with Hammer Films: The Icons of Suspense Collection, a six-film, three-DVD set, The Snorkel makes its debut on home video only to have me realize that I had seen it… decades ago! I’m not certain when or where, but the image behind the opening credits is impossible to forget.

    Best known for their Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee horror movies, Britain’s Hammer Films dabbled in sundry mysteries and thrillers, many of them done on modest budgets with b-level stars. Without Dracula or Frankenstein or some crazed monster lumbering about, these smaller pictures afforded their makers a degree of creative indulgence. In reworking Gaslight down to the toxic air itself, The Snorkel transforms a farfetched murder story into a cat-and-mouse dance between van Eyck’s icy dad and his suspicious stepdaughter (Mandy Miller). What they lack in depth as human characters is rectified by a screenplay (co-written by Peter Myers and Jimmy Sangster) which breezes through a series of outrageous situations. We may not care much about the girl’s dodgy mental state or deep personal losses, but her pursuit of the killer is handled with blind conviction by director Guy Green, a hired gun who made one of my guilty pleasures, Once Is Not Enough (1975), late-period Jacqueline Susann swill featuring Alexis Smith and Melina Mercouri as a pair of lesbian lovers.

    Although a viewer’s interest (or tolerance) for the collection could depend on their sex and date of birth (male Baby Boomers may have an advantage), there are a couple of nuggets here of historic and aesthetic significance. A film I doubt either Leonard Maltin or Steven Scheuer ever reviewed in their books, Never Take Candy From a Stranger (1960) stands as a potent exploration of child molestation, mob mentality, capitalist corruption, the flawed legal system (complete with cult favorite Niall MacGinnis as an unscrupulous barrister), psychological trauma and the loss of innocence. How this ever got made or released fifty years ago is anyone’s guess. Felix Aylmer plays the queer duck patriarch with a hankering for pubescent girls, fumbling around like a post-breakdown vision of Michael Powell’s dad from those creepy home movie scenes Karl Boehm groans over in Peeping Tom.

    The crown jewel of the set, however, is These Are the Damned (1963), also new to DVD. Joseph Losey directed this loosely structured parable of post-Hiroshima, pre-Armageddon Britain faced with growing apathy and violence, under a government eager to send the human race into a radioactive future. (Watch it back-to-back with Kiss Me, Deadly and blow your mind.) Bearing no relation to the popular SF movie, Village of the Damned (1960), the script by Evan Jones, from H.L. Lawrence’s novel Children of Light, is a tossed salad of metaphors, bookended by Macdonald Carey’s drifting American hedonist and Viveca Lindfors’ East European abstract sculptor, with punchy asides to teddy boys (fronted by a suitably dour Oliver Reed), incest (Oliver’s a tad too fussy over sis Shirley Anne Field), impotence and living dead children under the watchful eye of Big Brother Alexander Knox and a song extolling the virtues of black leather. Whew! You gotta see this one.

Happy birthday Angelina (b. 6.4.75)

My friends were buying the latest by The Beatles, The Stones, The Dave Clark Five. But my very first record album purchase was in 1965, John Barry’s soundtrack of Thunderball. His music has stayed with me ever since. No one else quite captures the pang of late night melancholy, of unrequited love. You can hear it in obvious choices such as Frances or Out of Africa, as well as some unexpected ones like Moonraker and The Legend of the Lone Ranger. Lately I’ve been watching (and re-watching) and falling in love with the film Playing By Heart (1998), a multilayered study of romantic souls struggling to find the right words, played by an exceptional cast: Gillian Anderson, Madeleine Stowe, Gena Rowlands, Sean Connery, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Ryan Phillippe, and a very fine and beautiful and lovely and effervescent Angelina Jolie. There are two soundtracks to the film, one with the pop tunes used as background filler, the other Barry’s instrumental compositions with welcome trumpet work by Chris Botti. Buy the latter. It’s slightly repetitious, but few other contemporary composers feel 2am bourbon and cigarette blues as acutely as Barry. His music enhances the film immeasurably, reminding me of a time when soundtracks had their own aura and composers ‘dressed’ a picture with melody, sounds you could remember and hum or whistle weeks after seeing the movie, an art that has sadly skidded into extinction.

Sun music: “Naturale”

Debi Nova

Free music - Naturale

“Naturale” by Debi Nova from Americano