I was just starting the Patrick McGoohan RIP below this when I saw the news that another seriously underrated and really interesting actor with an extra dose of geek appeal had passed on. And sad news it is.

The Spy Kids have lost a grandpa. Capt. James T. Kirk has lost his showyest and most poetic adversary and the LAPD’s Frank Drebbin is sans  his suavest foe. Fantasy Island is without a leader, and Corinthian leather will never, ever be quite as rich. Ricardo Montalban, the kind of wonderfully dignified ham actor who gave overacting a good name — sometimes a great name — has left our earthly sphere at the age of 88.

What I love and genuinely respect about Montalban was his embrace of artifice, which became more effortless and enjoyable over the years, whatever kind of movie (and there are more than I can possibly recall) he was in and whether the quality was outstanding or, as in the case of Fantasy Island, pretty much beneath contempt. As per Wikipedia, it was actually “soft Corinithian leather” the Mexico-born Montalban spoke of in that notorious car commercial…and said leather was actually produced in New Jersey.

That’s show business and few performers have expressed such a smooth grasp of the unreality of dramatic reality. Of course, he emerged in an era where, for a minority actor, a certain stealy determination to do anything was probably needed. It worked. Starting his U.S. career as a 1940s “Latin lover” (relieved only by occasional dramatic turns, like Anthony Mann’s eternally topical Border Incident), Montalban transformed over the decades into one of Hollywood’s most reliable utility actors and undoubtedly the best known Latino thesp of his generation (though Fernando Lamas was always snipping at his heels).

The geeksphere will no doubt be celebrating his twin Star Trek appearances as Khan Noonien Singh in one of the best regarded episodes of the series as well as the most popular of the many films in the franchise (and others are still obscessing about the provenance of his apparently miraculous sixty year old physique in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan). But, as much fun as his performance is there, it’s not my all-time favorite Montalban role. I’ll take his supporting part as an egocentric but basically decent Italian-like film star in that FtY favorite, Sweet Charity.

He neither sang nor danced in that film, but he did both in a number of lightweight MGM musicals and comedies he appeared in during his first flush of stardom alongside Cyd Charisse, Jane Powell, Esther Williams and others where he showed he could hold his own as hoofer alongside pretty much anyone. Like any minority actor in his day, he had to be three times better and more professional than the typical Anglo performer, and he was. Sometimes four or five times better.

As he aged — and he aged about as well as any human — Ricardo Montalban was a link to another time. Sillier, of course, but also in many respects more courtly, elegant, stylish and fun than our own era of entertainment. As a person, L.A. Times obituary writer Lorenza Muñoz reminds us of traditional religiousity as well as his activist side on behalf of Mexican and Latino actors — he was irritated that he rarely played actual  Mexicans (his enormous IMDb listing includes the character of Nakamura in Sayonara).

All in all, Mr. Montalban was a gentleman of the old school, and that’s something to celebrate.

I don’t know what’s going on this Christmas day, but the incredibly smart and witty performer who proved that sex kittens can have brains, courage, and sharp claws when needed, has passed on at age 81.  Though a lot of us young geeks first knew Eartha Kitt as the Catwoman on the third season of the Adam West Batman television show  — where  the sudden dropping of the Bat on Cat flirtation that had flourished both with Julie Newmar on TV and Lee Meriweather in the sixties Bat-movie gave a lot of us an early education in media racial/sexual politics — she was first and foremost a live performer and an icon of the lounge era, and involved with a lot more than her once semi-obscure, now-iconic Xmas hit, “Santa Baby.”

The highlights and dramas of her career are probably well known to a lot of you — and can be read about via both Greencine and at the Huffington Post….Her comments on Vietnam in front of Lady Bird Johnson in which she experienced a harsher version of what later happened to the Dixie Chicks, and a big compliment from Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” was followed by being bitten by the ever voracious actor-director, who apparently mistook her for a blintz one night while she was playing Helen of Troy to his Faust. Whatever happened to her, she was an indomitable force who was never around enough for my taste, but who also kept working and never went away, until now.

There’s no doubt about it — she was one gutsy talent. Still, what I love about Ms. Kitt is the humor and ability to reach out to an audience as both an actress, and especially as a singer and cabaret performer. Lounges were made for the likes of her.

And we end on a slightly seasonal, slightly appropriate note. Everything really does change, but few of us hold the line better than Ms. Kitt did.

H/t Greencine/David Hudson.

As reported by my hometown’s local rag, a fixture of my television-dominated childhood, who was still working in conservative radio until just a few months ago, has passed on at age 94 . Though he was a force in Los Angeles area news television for decades, its possible that he will longest be remembered as the main inspiration for Ted Baxter — though it’s also true that Putnam would have eaten Baxter (and definitely Rod Burgundy) for lunch. Wonderful as it was, the late Ted Knight’s intepretation lacked Putnam’s John Wayne/George C. Scott-style machismo.

Admittedly, most of my memories of Putnam are hazy — I didn’t get a chance to be outraged by him until I was a teenager and, by then, watching less television. As a child, I likely thought he was correct. Probably because my parents could best be described as either Rockefeller Republicans or Nixon Democrats, I thought of myself as a moderate, anti-dove Republican, until roughly the end of elementary school when Watergate and the growing realization that the Vietnam war was killing thousands of civilians and soldiers for no particular reason helped flipped me over permanently to the other side of the fence.

Putnam, who described himself as a conservative Democrat, was part of a now increasingly forgotten nucleus of show business conservatives who really did stand athwart the late sixties and early seventies culture revolution and yell “stop.” Naturally, they were ignored by millions of youth who continued to smoke pot and have premarital sex (as opposed to drinking and committing adultery), while many of the rest correctly mocked them. By far the best known and most accomplished member of this group was the talented actor-producer-director Jack Webb who certainly wasn’t afraid to put his particular political stamp on his best known product, TV’s Dragnet.

Others in this crowd — who existed before the right wing made “Hollywood” wrongly synonymous with “liberal,” — included my second favorite DJ at the time, big-band-playing Dick Whittinghill, who regularly warned against secret drug messages in Beatles tunes while having professional fake-drunk and future Branson, Missouri mainstay Foster Brooks as a regular. (Bob Crane also turned up on the show and was an occasional substitute host, but I guess that’s another story entirely.)

Putnam, Webb, and Whittinghill all paid obeisance to another conservative (and by “conservative,” I mean “ape-shit”) Democrat, Mayor Sam Yorty. Suffice it to say that, even as a youth I dispised Yorty. “Mayor Sam” was beloved by this group, but to me he remains the genuinely despicable pol who, at first successfully, battled the first serious African-American candidate for the mayoralty of Los Angeles by painting a moderate ex-policeman as somehow tied to the Black Panthers and other radical groups. (Sound familiar?)  The very day “Mayor Sam” announced he had registered as a Republican, I announced to an uncaring world that I was now a Democrat.

What does any of this have to do with Putnam? No idea. Also, I’m not sure what it means that I can do a pretty decent impression of the closing of his commentaries, when he stepped out of his newsman role into the role of a pre-Rush pundit, “That’s one reporter’s opinion, I welcome yours.” Or the fact that, after going to a seminar for high school newspaper editors at the L.A. Times, me and my Venice High cohorts saw Mr. Putnam walking out of a bar with a buddy or two and, then, seeing us, straighten himself up for a typically stentorian, “Hello!” (Note: It is absolutely impossible to write about Putnam without using the world “stentorian.”)

He was a blowhard, perhaps a hypocrite on sexual matters (see his obit for who he’s survived by and then see the videos below), and his politics in general were from the stone age, and that’s probably a kind way of putting it, but he was also friendly face. Also, like another lovable troglodyte/genius, Pat Buchanan, he opposed the Iraq war. So, there’s that. I’m sorry I didn’t know he’d been on the radio all this time and I’m sorry he’s gone now.

A Memento

And a Remix….

In honor of Jeff Ignatius (a.k.a. Culture Snob) and his gloriously self-celebrating Self Involvement Blogathon, I’m calling his self-involvement and raising with laziness by “contributing” the first of two repostings of FtY classics of self-involvement — and by classic, I mean a post from nine months back that people actually went to the trouble of posting comments and attracted, like, scores of visitors — scores, I tell you. (You can see the original post. originally written as an addendum to Rob Humanick’s 31 Days of Zombie blogathon, here.) 

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So just what was I, a grown-up person of usually quite moderate habits, doing bombed out of my skull watching (or sort of watching) George Romero’s legendary zombie spectacular, Dawn of the Dead?

I suffer from an ailment that can be most embarrassing for a putatively with-it, genre-loving cinephile like myself: gore-phobia. I like classical horror quite a bit, but have always been slow to see the strongest stuff. It took me decades to get over the hype and finally see The Exorcist — technically not gory, just throw-uppy and weird-makeupy — though I was glad that I did. (And I swear it was just a coincidence that I was in the bathroom during the spinal tap sequence.)

But my problem has always been gore more than horror. I’ve never been one to think that something not shown is more disturbing than something that is shown; I’d much rather imagine a zombie eating a brain than actually see a zombie eating a brain. I’m not like most people.

So, everytime an interesting horror film comes out that also seems like it might have a fairly high gore factor, I’m in a movie quandary. I’ve skipped a lot films I might have otherwise enjoyed, starting with Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, a few odd earlier David Cronenberg films, almost the entire oeuvre of Takashi Miike (I dug his musical black comedy, Happiness of the Katakuris, however.) There are also several non-genre “serious” films , like Irreversible and Man Bites Dog, that I’ve wound up avoiding not because I expect them to be Hershel Gordon Lewis-style gorestravaganzas, but because, after reading scads of reviews, I’m not sure just how far they go and it’s not like having my faith in humanity destroyed is my idea of a fun night at the movies. Well, not usually.

As for so-called “torture porn,” forget it. To me, there’s something inherently wrong with any torture scene that goes longer than a few seconds or minutes. (Anyone remember when the now-somewhat quaint and brief little torture scene in Reservoir Dogs was causing some people to flee screenings?) I even skipped The Passion of the Christ, which I really should see for political reasons — though that’s a special case because, among other issues, its approach sounds about as edifying as spending ninety minutes watching Socrates gag on hemlock.

On the other hand, I’ve seen my share of films that raised hackles over their bloody violence only to be surprised at how un-bothered I was by any of it. Eastern Promises only got a wince or two out of me, and I’m still wondering what all the fuss was about the Turkish bath scene, but that may be because I’ve been working on my gorephobia for years.

During those efforts, I’ve found that alcohol can be an effective tool. That started when I sneaked an airplane bottle of vodka into a (morning) showing of Kill Bill, Vol. 1. The booze helped me get over my initial nerves caused by all the ink its bloody violence had generated. I wound up a fan, give or take a nether-regions impalement and a super-fast black and white plucked eyeball. (Damage to eyes is especially disturbing to me, which I learned at age 14 via The Andalusian Dog.)

More recently, I found I had no problem with the mostly silly-gross parts of Grindhouse after just one of those same airplane bottles. (I had meant to take in three bottles…it’s a long movie!) And, well before that, I had even begun to put my big toe into the deep red waters of the Italian giallo masters Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Lately, I’ve taken to bringing those little bottles into movies even when there was no fear factor at all. It’s not a bad start to watching a movie.

But cannibalism in particular is an issue for me and I wondered whether enough alcohol has been manufactured to get me through the zombie classics. Like Dennis Hopper in the Land of the Dead trailer, those guys really do freak me out. I had to practically be tied into a chair and force-fed beer to watch a mid-eighties MTV broadcast of Romero’s relatively mild (but truly frightening) zombie original, Night of the Living Dead.

But lately this has made me feel increasingly silly. When Manohla Dargis can call 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake “good zombie fun,” and with cannibal zombies becoming such frequent sources of humor in all types of media, being too scared to watch anything dreamed up by a nice guy like George Romero, even if it’s pretty graphic, seems a little wrong. And it’s not like I’m all that squeamish even when cannibals are involved — sure, I wimped out on Hannibal (Ray Liotta’s brains served up like it’s Babette’s Feast…that may still be a problem for me), but Silence of the Lambs is almost movie comfort food for me.

Besides, parts of the original Dawn of the Dead did sound like my kind of entertainment — combining western tropes, sci-fi, and social satire is very much my idea of a good time at the movies. How different is that, really, from Serenity? Okay, pretty gorram different, but it’s not like Romero makes truly dire video nasties along the lines of Cannibal Ferox or Bloodsucking Freaks. From what I understand, Romero is a master of restraint compared to reputed gore-wallower supremo Lucio Fulci, so how bad could it be?

All this, plus 31 Days of Zombies, added up to a kind of a dare. Now was the time. I had to watch Dawn of the Dead or risk losing all self-respect.

Still, one thing about having a movie as your personal mountain to climb — unlike an actual mountain, there was no reason I couldn’t scale it with the aid of some well administered cocktail courage. Heck, I thought, a couple of martinis — three max — and the thing should be a breeze, I told lied to myself.

How did it all work out? I’ll tell you right after a word from our sponsor.

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