I’ve posted the same video with some additional commentary on this attempt at a generational crossover hit, at Premium Hollywood.

(This post is also featured at Premium Hollywood)

Like all character actors, Karl Malden never got quite the same level of attention as costars like Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Michael Caine, and George C. Scott. Even the seventies TV series he starred in, “The Streets of San Francisco” found him being overshadowed in the eyes of the teenybopper set by his young punk of a male ingenue costar, Michael Douglas. That was largely because Malden was the kind of performer who understood that acting is a team sport. His best scenes were like great duets with near perfect communication between him and his scene partners. The exception were American Express travelers’ checks; those, he wiped off the screen.

Karl Malden died today at age 97, having been more or less fully retired since appearing in a 2000 episode of “The West Wing.” While he was never precisely an A-lister, he was a go-to actor for secondary leads, president of the Motion Picture Academy, and as far as I can tell a universally respected figure among actors and everyone else associated with the movie industry. He was also married to the same woman for seventy years, a rare enough Holllywood achievement to merit it’s own special Oscar. Not a bad life.

Below the fold is a video tribute I found that, from the misspellings, I gather may come from Serbia. (Malden, whose real name was Mladen Sekulovich, was the son of a Serbian father and a Czechoslovak mother.) The image quality could be better and some of the clips are a little too brief, but it does give you an excellent overview of his truly diverse film career, which included work with some of the greatest Hollywood directors including Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer, and Alfred Hitchcock. It also includes some interesting moments from two oddball spy films, “Murderer’s Row,” which I haven’t seen, and the underrated “Billion Dollar Brain,” which included some pretty amazing scenes between Malden and Michael Caine as his old spy buddy, Harry Palmer, as well as Françoise Dorléac as his treacherous spy girlfriend (though he’s pretty tricky himself).

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People are keeping me busy. Anyhow, I’m mostly here through 6/28.

And I’m posting regularly about it here.

Originally posted at Premium Hollywood. This is actuallly the second clip in a series of posts, the first of which features a pretty great clip featuring Cynda Williams from Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues.”

Continuing our A Blog Supreme-inspired series of great jazz-on-film moments, here’s a sequence featuring Barbara Stanwyck and legendary jazz/swing drummer Gene Krupa — pretty much the Keith Moon of his day — from one of my personal favorite classic-era comedies, Howard Hawks’ 1941 “Ball of Fire.” You’ll also notice Gary Cooper in there, playing an extremely sheltered professor researching the urban slang of the time.

One hallmark of classic era films is that you can be watching a noir mystery, a western, or a non-musical screwball comedy, and sometimes things will just stop for a song. As you’ll see here, that wasn’t a bad thing if the right talent was available. And, whatever you do, don’t stop watching before seeing what Krup could do with a matchbook cover, starting at about 4:17 or so.

In case anyone’s wondering, no, that’s not Ms. Stanwyck singing. The terrific vocals are by Martha Tilton.

And here’s a bonus — Krupa with the Benny Goodman band in an amazing performance of their signature tune, Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

Given that many of his films reflect what you might call the broad sweep of black history, a way-too-clever writer might try to compare Denzel Washington – exemplary family man, matinee idol with a conscience, two-time Academy Award winner and the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar – to our current president. A smarter writer, however, might compare him to other actors, perhaps including those of other ethnicities.

Washington is, among other things, an old-fashioned movie star. Trained on the stage, he confesses to being influenced by “the method,” yet his acting has none of the emotional fetishism that is so common in the post-Marlon Brando movie world. Indeed, his complete ease before the camera and his low-key joy of performance is probably most similar to Spencer Tracy. The stocky, un-pretty Tracy was nearly the physical opposite of Washington. Still, the relaxed charisma, the ability to generate a laugh or a shiver with a simple expression, and Washington’s awe-inspiring commitment and confidence mirrors the ability of the classic era great, whose only advice to young thespians was to learn their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture.

Indeed, as the meticulously handsome Washington steps into the shoes of slob par excellance Walter Matthau in director Tony Scott’s remake of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3“, it’s an opportune time to take a look at some of the lesser-known films from the actor’s back catalog. They’re quite an assortment, sometimes messy and imperfect, but always worthy of your attention. Denzel Washington rarely makes a boring choice.

CLICK HERE FOR TEN FROM WASHINGTON’S BACK CATALOGUE.

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Special FtY Not Really Exclusive Bonus: Denzel Sings!!!!!

Best known as Louis Prima’s great saxophonist, Sam Butera was a terrific singer and bandleader in his own right and really the musical backbone of the Prima act for years as the arranger of such classic recordings as “That Old Black Magic” and “Just a Gigolo”/”I Ain’t Got Nobody.” (Apparently, he received nothing from the David Lee Roth version, which pretty much lifted his arrangement whole, that was a massive hit in 1985.)

Butera was also a credible entertainer in his own right. Sometime in the late eighties, I was fortunate enough to see him and his great band, the Wildest, performing with the wonderful Keely Smith, doing a variation on the old Prima-Smith nightclub act at, where else?, the Desert Inn in Las Vegas…and it was definitely the next best thing to actually being there during their fifties heyday. (Their onstage banter so closely followed the old Prima-Smith shows, which I knew little about at the time, that the pair actually had me convinced that they were also a couple. I also understand that “gullible” is not in the dictionary.) It was a night of truly great entertainment, all for the price of a couple of screwdrivers.

Anyhow, here’s the L.A. Times obit and another from NPR. And now a video of Sam with Louis Prima on Ed Sullivan.

Character actress Lorna Raver starred in the year’s best reviewed horror film, and all she got was this lousy button.

Being in the same general ethnic/religious cohort doesn’t give me the right to speak for writer-director Sam Raimi and his co-writer brother Ivan, but this Jewish kid was just a little bit traumatized when he first learned about the traditional Christian concept of hell. Judaism has no hell other than guilt and death, so learning about the fire, the pitchforks, and the eternal torment – and that millions believed that, by virtue of my non-Christianity, I was going to suffer all of it – was a little traumatic. I hadn’t even done anything bad enough yet to be grounded.

In “Drag Me to Hell,” Raimi and company fashion what is in some respects an only slightly less unjust universe, in which the failure to perform a single mitvah (usually translated from Hebrew as a good deed, but in reality it means the act of obeying a commandment) is transubstantiated from Jewish recrimination into Catholic punishment of the pre-Vatican II variety. In this case, a single selfish choice lands loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) in serious danger of eternal damnation after being cursed, Gypsy style, by Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), easily the least attractive woman of any age in Los Angeles. It gets worse; the woman has very sharp and very ugly dentures, and she’s not afraid to use them, right alongside the supernatural abilities available to all Romani movie females over age 60. Naturally, poor Christine’s relationship with her understanding psychologist boyfriend (Justin “I’m a Mac” Long, playing straight man for a change) will be somewhat strained as she is subjected to one bizarre supernatural attack after another – including surprise visits in her car, a projectile nosebleed (at least a pint’s worth), and the old eyeball-in-the-“Harvest Cake” trick.

READ THE REST AT BULLZ-EYE.COM

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Huffpo has the very sad and strange news of the late David Carradine’s apparent suicide. All I can say is that the world lost more than a terrific actor with a dry sense of humor, and a member of one of the nation’s premier acting families, it lost something else too — a real onscreen badass mofo. That means more than being to pull off some martial arts moves, it means presence and Mr. Carradine certainly made those Carradine genetics work for him. He’s even memorable as a soon-to-be-dead drunk in Scorsese’s Mean Streets.

My Premium Hollywood/Bullz-Eye colleague/sometime boss Will Harris, who interviewed Carradine, has a personal remembrance and a whole lot more, and Glenn Kenny briefly recalls a few of Carradine’s more interesting mid-career performances, including his work as Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory, all of which I’ve seen…but not for a very long time. (Well, Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg was more recent, but I’ve kind of struck from my memory on purpose…not my, or anyone else’s, favorite Bergman film…but still, isn’t it cool that Carradine worked with Ingmar-f*cking-Bergman?). The invaluable David Hudson also has much more info.

And finally we have a great deleted scene from Kill Bill, Volume II that shows that, even in his late sixties, Carradine still had the badass mofo mojo down and knew how to impress a killer lady, versus no less an opponent than Michael Jai White (Spawn, Black Dynamite). I don’t want to get spiritual here, but Carradine had long ago achieved B-movie nirvana, at least.

Considering that it’s among the most influential of all Hollywood westerns and the last great film directed by the ultimate American classicist, John Ford, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is quirkier and darker than you might expert. It features two great stars playing characters initially decades older, and later decades younger, than their actual ages, and has a moral and political point of view that resonates with the most complex moments in American history, including the one we’re in now. Coming from a director famed for awe-inspiring vistas, it is so small in visual scope that it is often referred to as a “chamber western.” Though it was made at a point where color had become the Hollywood standard, it was shot in black and white – and had to be. For one thing, the nearly absurd age differences between the two male leads, and their characters throughout the film, would have been ruinously obvious in color – but also because black and white has always somehow been appropriate for portraying films about moral gray areas, and that’s where this tale lives.

Adapted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck from a story by Dorothy Johnson, “Liberty Valence” opens sometime near the turn of the 20th century. The aging and highly distinguished Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), who rose to fame for a now legendary moment of heroism, and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles, “Psycho”), return to the western town of Shinbone. They are there for the funeral of an old friend, a little-known resident who died penniless. After the Senator is accosted by a self-important newspaperman (Denver Pyle) demanding to know the significance of the deceased, the bulk of the film is told in flashback as a much younger Stoddard’s stagecoach is waylaid just outside of Shinbone….

READ THE REST AT BULLZ-EYE.COM

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A nicely student-sweded scene from the film. They don’t have Ford, Stewart, or Marvin, but they’ve got moxie.

I was so taken with the beautiful performance in this post, I kind of felt the need to provide some more….

From the Smothers Brothers Show….

A trailer for a film about Harry…

Can anyone tell me why this documentary is not available and has, I think, only been shown in a few places. Another music clearance clusterfrak, perhaps?

Anyhow, here’s some more Harry. Among the very best and still all but unknown.