"I love 'Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond' by Paul Sherman"

2022-09-16 01:27:29

'Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond' by Paul Sherman 1 City. 250 Movies. 1 Book.LinksThe Joe Bob Report:::...Lebowski Fest...:::Folkstreams » The Best of American Folklore FilmsRick Prelinger ArchivesA/V Geeks - Have 20,000+ films. Will Travel.The Coolidge Corner Theatre | Your Not-For-Profit Independent TheatreThe Brattle TheaterWest Newton CinemaMassachusetts Film OfficeBostonSci-Fi.com | Home of Boston's 'Other' Marathon!Independent Film Festival of BostonZippy the PinheadWaffle HouseTiki IslandSociety for Commercial ArcheologyWMBR 88.1 FM : WMBR, CambridgeMendon Drive-InOld Orchard BeachClam Box of IpswichUniversal Hub | All Boston, all the timeCinema Treasures -- MassachusettsSurviving Grady March 29, 2019 Another obscurity that eluded the bookLike The Carey Treatment, this other film I missed for Big Screen Boston is obscure. Even more obscure than Carey. The Tattooed Police Horse is a 1964 live-action Disney featurette that has never been released on video or DVD, and only recently became available on streaming services.     As with its length, TPH’s story about a harness-race-horse-turned-police-mount also has an in-between quality, mixing a documentary style with a fictional narrative and characters, and actors with people “playing” themselves. It’s clunky, with much dry narration. Like a lot of Disney, suited more for forgiving kids than adults (alas, some of the cast I assumed to be “real people” turned out to be actors who are merely clumsy). But it offers a nifty glimpse of a Boston that no longer exists. The story here is about a harness race horse, Jolly Roger, who can’t conform to harness racing’s trot stride. Time after time, he breaks into a gallop and gets himself disqualified from races.     The initial story traces Roger from the breeding farms of Kentucky and, after his owners (Shirley Skiles, William Hilliard) give up on his racing career and sell him to a stable hand (Charles Seel), to Arizona, where there’s some condescending treatment of the local “Injuns.” For our purposes, things get more interesting once stable hand Ben sells Roger to a horse broker, who brings the horse east, where Boston Police Department Captain Martin Hanley (Sandy Sanders) purchases him in an auction.    The cool thing about the subsequent Boston action is the dinginess. What we see is mostly in the Back Bay, which we never think of as dingy today. But, in the 1950s and early 1960s, you could have made the case that the dissipated Back Bay was as worthy of demolition as the New York Streets and West End neighborhoods that were bulldozed for urban renewal, but that the Back Bay survived because, however rundown, it was not an immigrant neighborhood that was easily marginalized. Here, the mounted police unit is described as being in a “dim Boston alley”–and it turns out it’s between Boylston and Newbury Streets, behind the old Division 16 police station. Pretty swanky territory by today’s standards.     Roger’s arrival causes one of the fellow cops to exclaim to Capt. Hanley, “Mahty, he’ll make the best-looking hoss on the police foss.” Other local color comes from  Roger’s training, which includes a walk around the block and trips further afield, including to a Bunker Hill Day parade. You can glimpse the Exeter Street Theater, Haymarket and the under-construction Prudential Center, among other things. Real locations like this, as well as those in Arizona and Kentucky, are the saving grace of The Tattooed Police Horse. Roger’s trip to another real location, Foxboro race track, turns out to play a crucial part in the story’s resolution.    If you can’t conceive of Back Bay as dingy, this is an interesting watch. Disney released TPH in theaters in 1964, then aired it on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1967. The latter version is the one Turner Classic Movies showed a couple of years ago, and the streaming version appears to be the same length. I have not been able to determine whether this version is the same that played at moviehouses in 1964. Posted at 12:14 PM in Film | Permalink| Comments (0) Tags: Back Bay, Big Screen Boston, Disney December 26, 2012 The one that got away: 'The Carey Treatment'The Carey Treatment (1972) slipped through the cracks of Big Screen Boston. It had never come out on VHS in the U.S. and didn't come out on DVD until late 2011, and the claims of Boston locations on the unreliable IMDB couldn't be investigated when I was writing the book. I finally checked it out recently, and it was indeed shot in Greater Boston.     At least it's obscure for a reason: no one liked it and no one wanted to take responsibility for it. According to my handy Motion Picture Guide, director Blake Edwards disowned it, writers Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frankm Jr. and John D.F. Black insisted a pseudonym (James P. Bonner) replace their names in the credits and the book it's based on, A Case of Need, is itself a pseudonymous publication by Michael Crichton. Like Crichton's Coma, a later Boston movie, this is a medical thriller, and it's pretty preposterous, with "cool" West Coast doc Peter Carey (James Coburn) moving to town to work at a big, powerful hospital, and finding all sorts of chicanery and corruption going on at the tightly wound insitution.     Unfortunately, the characters are one-dimensional, if that, from the title character to his undeveloped lover (Jennifer O'Neill) and the various adversaries our hero confronts (hospital honcho Dan O'Herlihy, swaggering cop Pat Hingle among them). The most remarkable thing about Carey might be the central roles for James Hong, so often typecast as a marginalized Asian, and for Michael Blodgett of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.    Area locations include Storrow Drive and Soldier's Field Road, the BU Bridge, Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Hill, with Mass. General most likely being the exterior of Carey's workplace. There is also a sequence that appears to be the North Shore, perhaps Marblehead. Perhaps the most interesting use of locations is in the South End, with the ever-popular Orange Line El appearing as well as several (presumably) Washington Street businesses. It's hard to know whether such places as Finlay's Photo Studio, Lincoln Cafe and Callahan's Gym, all seen in the movie, were real. At one point, the action cuts from the real South End to a studio backlot for a car stunt--so certainly putting up a few fake signs or putting a camera shop in an empty store could have easily been done by the production. Posted at 01:57 PM | Permalink| Comments (0) February 26, 2011 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' visit (twice)Peter Yates' thriller, based on George V. Higgins' novel (the font of all the Boston noir that has followed), is getting screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts (through tomorrow) and the Somerville Theater (March 11-13). It's still the best movie made in Boston. Posted at 11:48 AM | Permalink| Comments (1) |TrackBack (0) June 27, 2010 Unslayed by "What Doesn't Kill You"I finally caught up with What Doesn't Kill You. Being filmed (as Real Men Cry) as I was putting together Big  Screen Boston, it was one of the few movies made since the introduction of Massachusetts filming tax credits that had hopes of being good. I have had no interest in seeing movies shot in Greater Boston that were set elsewhere (like Pink Panther 2) or were simply generically located (like many of the lousy comedies that have come out in the past two years).    What Doesn't Kill You had more going for it. Like many of the best Boston movies, it had local involvement in its creation, since director/co-writer Brian Goodman is a local. And like many of the best American movies, period, it's in that fertile middle ground between independent movies and studio films. But the movie's distributor, the short-lived Yari, went belly-up before What Doesn't Kill You had a national release and it went on to have a very quiet DVD release.    It's hard to see this as too much of a cinematic tragedy, though, because What Doesn't Kill You is a fairly forgettable crime drama. Mark Ruffalo plays the Goodman surrogate, a Southie native who starts out as a thieving teen and soon becomes a soldier for a local crime boss (played by Goodman, in the middle of the photo above), eventually enduring a crack addiction and a stint in prison. While the movie uses South Boston locations to achieve its grim mood, its reach simply exceeds its grasp, and it seems as if much of the set-up, including the teen-years opening, should have been jettisoned to beef up its latter dilemma, when the protagonist struggles to stay straight after getting out of prison. There's just not very much that's distinctive here: the locations add some, but not a whole lot, of specificity, to the action; the characters never get too interesting (Ethan Hawke is also here as a partner-in-crime and Amanda Peet as a long-suffering wife); and the storytelling lacks imagination, especially in the wake of Scorsese's The Departed. It just kind of sits there.To order Big Screen Boston: Posted at 11:17 AM | Permalink| Comments (1) April 06, 2010 Get your kicks on... Tremont Street? Big Screen Boston doesn’t cover TV series, but had I seen them in time, the three Route 66 episodes shot in eastern Massachusetts would have definitely rated a mention in the book’s introduction. They offer some of the best location shooting in the city at that time.      I don’t think I’d ever actually seen a complete episode of the series before this; for the uninitiated, the premise is a bit like the original The Fugitive, though the wanderlust captured isn’t because the law is looking for the heroes, it’s more the result of youthful, post-On the Road restlessness. Those heroes, once-wealthy Tod (Martin Milner) and more streetwise Buz (George Maharis), hit the road in Tod’s Corvette, tackling socially conscious issues as they crisscross the country.Two of these episodes from the show’s second season (1961-62) take place in Boston, one in Gloucester. The Gloucester episode (“Once to Every Man”) offers a rather generic seafaring backdrop and a romance with headstrong heiress (Janice Rule) character for Tod. The two Boston episodes are much more distinctive. The best (“Bird Cage on my Foot”) features Robert Duvall (seen above on the Common, with Park Street visible behind him). As great as Duvall’s subsequent movie career has been, episodic TV offers the only opportunity to see him play young men (by the time he got significant movie roles, he was playing middle-aged guys, as he did in The Godfather). Now, we all know how foolish TV dramas can be when they try to present someone “strange.” Writer Stirling Silliphant’s abstract rants for the heroin addict Duvall plays could have easily drifted into unintentional comedy. But, in Duvall’s hands, they most definitely do not. He’s just someone who’s slipped off the rails a bit; not a caricature. Similarly, the earnestness of the plot—in which idealist Tod tries to help the addict, but is too naive to do so (that’s where Buz comes in)—never drifts into issue-of-the-week formula.Another thing that’s immediately apparent in the Duvall episode is that, for the most part, it’s geographically true. At its start, Tod and Buz drive their Corvette down Storrow Drive, take the Back Bay exit, turn right on Beacon Street and stop at a friend’s apartment. And that’s where much of the action takes place, with action also in the Public Garden and Boston Common (which it melds into one place).There’s a similar geographic veracity in the other Boston episode (“To Walk with the Serpent”), which starts at Bunker Hill Monument and climaxes at the North End’s Paul Revere Mall, as well as another dose of socially conscious drama. This time, the FBI convinces our heroes to infiltrate the inner circle of a fascist activist (Dan O’Herlihy of Fail-Safe). Although this expose of a John Birch Society sort of group occasionally drifts into caricature—do they really need a “Seig Heil” sort of salute?—this is another fine mix of issues and character-based drama.     In other words, I’d recommend checking these episodes out for some well-written drama and an effective glimpse at the city nearly 50 years ago. And the cool theme song, of course.To order Big Screen Boston: Posted at 07:18 PM | Permalink| Comments (0) February 24, 2010 BPL's "Made in Massachusetts" series I haven't posted anything about the Boston Public Library's year-long "Made in Massachusetts" series (at the Copley main branch), because I'm pretty ambivalent about it. On one hand, it's an ambitious collection of several dozen movies. On another, I doubt any of the movies are being shown on film and the series includes several (such as The Last Hurrah, Captains Courageous and The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming) which were not shot here and include, at best, just stock exteriors of the Boston area, if that. For instance, when I interviewed Carl Reiner years back, I asked him if the Cape-set Russians filmed locally. No, he said, they just put pointed roofs on the seaside homes in California.I also cautiously wonder what will comprise May's "focus on local filmmakers." Will it do justice to the city's long history of indie and documentary moviemaking?Anyhow, here's a thumbnail of the flyer to click on and see the schedule. Judge for yourself.To order Big Screen Boston: Posted at 06:47 PM | Permalink| Comments (0) |TrackBack (0) February 23, 2010 The all-important how-to-order-the-book linkTo order the book: Posted at 07:06 PM | Permalink| Comments (0) |TrackBack (0) January 30, 2010 R.I.P., Karen SchmeerSad news out of New York City, as Boston editor Karen Schmeer has been hit and killed by a car carrying robbers making a getaway from a CVS. Schmeer edited many of the most prominent documentaries covered in Big Screen Boston, including Martha Swetzoff's Theme: Murder, Errol Morris' Mr. Death (she was Morris' regular editor), Robb Moss' The Same River Twice and Lucia Small's My Father, the Genius. She was only 39. Posted at 09:12 PM | Permalink| Comments (3) |TrackBack (0) January 26, 2010 Everybody's tryin' to get into the act... It seems as if spoofing Boston has become a cottage industry in the last week, what with The Daily Show's priceless coverage of the special Senate election, 30 Rock's Boston episode (with Julianne Moore's intentionally[?] overblown accent), and, now, the AMC Blog's take on bad Boston movie accents. It's actually only a so-so list, leaving out a major offender (Anne Bancroft in Malice) and including some characters (Kate Winslet's in Little Children and Joe Pesci's in With Honors) who are, if memory serves, never even established as being from Boston. Besides, would anyone really want to sit through two hours of Joe Pesci trying to do a Boston accent? That'd be retahded! Posted at 01:09 PM | Permalink| Comments (0) |TrackBack (0) January 25, 2010 New class at BCAE on moviemaking--local and Hollywood A heads up for those that might be interested... The relationship between Boston and Hollywood is the topic of a new class at the Boston Center for Adult Education called How Hollywood Works: Getting Into the Movies, which meets Feb. 4, 11 and 18. Charles Hoyt, who is teaching it, knows his stuff--he's even showing an episode of Route 66 that was shot in Boston during the first class. Depending on my schedule, I may be joining him during that meeting. Guests at other classes come from such places as the Mass. Film Office and Emerson College. Posted at 10:24 PM | Permalink| Comments (0) |TrackBack (0) Next» About Subscribe to this blog's feed Blog powered by Typepad March 2019 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 ArchivesMarch 2019December 2012February 2011June 2010April 2010February 2010January 2010October 2009August 2009May 2009More...Recent PostsAnother obscurity that eluded the bookThe one that got away: 'The Carey Treatment''The Friends of Eddie Coyle' visit (twice)Unslayed by "What Doesn't Kill You"Get your kicks on... Tremont Street?BPL's "Made in Massachusetts" seriesThe all-important how-to-order-the-book linkR.I.P., Karen SchmeerEverybody's tryin' to get into the act...New class at BCAE on moviemaking--local and HollywoodRecent CommentsJohnny Sullivan on Book excerpt: "The Dark End of the Street" -- showing 5/21 @ West Newton Cinema, 6:45 pmonline propecia on R.I.P., Karen Schmeerbuy viagra on R.I.P., Karen Schmeerelliptical reviews on Boston Noir series at the Brattledivx movies on Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'pharmacy on R.I.P., Karen SchmeerPaul Sherman on Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'Gp on Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'TMiles on Book excerpt: "The Dark End of the Street" -- showing 5/21 @ West Newton Cinema, 6:45 pmRPS on 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' visit (twice)