At CINEMA REBORN - CJ Johnson's introduction to the Sydney screening of ONE HOUR WITH YOU (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932

Editor's Note: CJ Johnson has introduced a number of films at our Cinema Reborn seasons. CJ has been a resident critic on ABC radio since 2008 and lectures on cinema at the Art Gallery of NSW. In October he will be leading a tour presented by the AGNSW to the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon and participants will have the opportunity to discover the birthplace of cinema and attend one of the cinematic world’s most prestigious annual events. Experience highlights of the week-long Lumière Film Festival, one of the largest international festivals of classic cinema, in Lyon, home of the Cinematograph and where cinema was born. Wander through the Musée Lumière and learn about the Lumière brothers, the fathers of cinema and inventors of the revolutionary camera and projector. Enjoy day trips to the surrounding countryside, with its rolling vineyards and charming medieval villages.

• Attend the internationally renowned Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, the cradle of cinematic history.

• Visit the Musée Lumière and discover the various inventions of the Lumiere brothers, the fathers of cinema.

• Uncover the secrets of filmmaking at the Musée Cinéma et Miniature.

 Click here for more information  

Renaissance Tours 
Tel 1300 727 095 
info@renaissancetours.com.au

ONE HOUR WITH YOU has encore screenings at the Ritz Cinemas Randwick and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn on Wednesday 13 May at 11.00 am. Tickets available at the door of both cinemas. Just click on the cinemas names to go through if you wish to book in advance.

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Two years ago I had the great pleasure of introducing Mitchell Leisen’s delightful screwball comedy Midnight, from 1939, for Cinema Reborn, and when I did I questioned, and attempted to answer, why Leisen was not remembered, watched and celebrated in the same way that Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch continue to be. Self-evidently, I don’t need to answer that question about Lubitsch. Lubitsch is the sex comedy OG. 

For those of you who weren’t into early 90s Gangsta Rap, ‘OG’ means “Original Gangster”, which you might translate as ‘first great pioneer.’ The OG doesn’t need to have invented the artistic form in question, but rather to have been the earliest pioneer of most defining impact. There is no doubt that, for sex comedy, and romantic and screwball comedy, worldwide, that was Lubitsch. Here’s the thing: with many art forms, once the OG has set the basic template, the artists in their wake tend first to imitate, then build upon, the OG style. Gangsta rap changed radically over the years, from an upbeat party sound to a grittier, more autobiographical, and ultimately brutally violent record of Black American urban life. It grew more radical. 

But the OG of sex and romantic and screwball comedy, Ernst Lubitsch, brought the radical from the get-go. Instead of future practitioners pushing the boundaries of the form, Lubitsch’s followers evolved towards the mainstream, to the point that, ultimately, screwball died off, and sex comedy absolutely died off, leaving the much more middle-of-the-road form of Romantic Comedy as the enduring legacy. Lubitsch’s work was both the pioneering and the radical forms of itself, and very few have managed to match it for its subversive, ground-breaking, rule-breaking joie de vivre. 

Lubitsch really went to town in 1932 and 1933, for he gave us today’s film in 1932, followed in 1933 by Design for Living, the greatest movie ever made about thrupples. Thrupples, for those who may not be aware, are romantic partnerships of three people. Design for Living is about a thrupple. It ends with Miriam Hopkins in the back of a limousine with her two loves, Frederick March and Gary Cooper. They’re heading off into their fabulous new life together. First, she deeply kisses March, then she turns her head and deeply kisses Cooper. Then they all smile and giggle before the screen fades to black. They’re off to have a good time. 

We can have a good time thinking about their good time, even though most of us would find it tricky to emulate in real life. Jack Thompson did, and not only that, he did it with two sisters, for fifteen years. Lubitsch would have loved that. He could have made a very funny film based on that. In Lubitschland, thrupples are funny! 

While Design for Living pushed sexual and societal norms, One Hour With You also pushed filmmaking ones. From the very first scene, which isn’t a song but is spoken in rhyme, this film stands out as radical. When a Parisian police chief instructs his officers in rhyme, something is up. There aren’t that many rules yet and Lubitsch is simultaneously creating and breaking them. The very next scene, he takes another rule - don’t look at the camera - and smashes it. He allows Maurice Chevalier to turn to camera and speak directly to us, the audience. In Chevalier’s hands it feels natural; indeed, he’d done it a few times before with Lubitsch, and it wouldn’t be the last time: famously, 26 years later, Chevalier opens Gigi the same way, extolling the virtues of grooming little girls so that when they come of age you can be ready to pounce. 

Chevalier has always been cast as the classy sleaze, and that’s his role here. His opening monologue to camera, broken down, is basically saying, “Can you believe how young and hot my wife is? My god, I have to tell you, I love sleeping with her and I do it as much as I can.” His wife is played by Jeanette McDonald, who was 29 to Chevalier’s 44, so you can appreciate his enthusiasm. It’s not the world’s biggest age difference, and  certainly not by Hollywood standards, but it’s enough for the policeman in the park scene to assume, and assume very confidently, that these two could not be husband and wife. 

So about that park scene, the second in the film, right after the police chief instructs his officers in rhyme: let’s decode it, let’s all get on the same page, which is to say, on Lubitsch’s page. The police chief, at the beginning of the film, after reminding his cops that the tourists who flock to Paris are coming for one thing and one thing only - sex - instructs them to basically let all the tourists get away with whatever they want, except for making love in the parks after dark. It seems the fabled Parisian cafés are losing customers once night falls, because they’re all going off to root in the bushes, and it’s up to the constabulary to root them out of the bushes and back into the cafés. So in the next scene, the cops do exactly that. 

The production code, that hideous studio agreement designed to appease the Catholic League of Decency and keep federal government censorship at bay, was created in 1930 but barely enforced until 1934. This self-muzzling set of restrictions is the reason that the rest of the world, watching American movies made between 1934 and about 1960, thought that American married couples slept in separate beds or even bedrooms, that there was no interracial romance, that there were no homosexuals except self-loathing or homicidal ones, that people didn’t bleed when they got shot, that nobody swore or blasphemed, that adults wore pyjamas, that all adultery ended in punishment, and that nobody went to the toilet. (It’s true - Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 was the first American mainstream release to show a toilet bowl.) 

Films released in 1932, like One Hour With You, are considered ‘pre-code’, which allowed them a great degree of naughtiness but not, perhaps, some of the explicit imagery of the silent era. One Hour With You is pure pre-code; just as Design for Living is a celebration of the joy of threesomes, so too One Hour With You is a hearty endorsement of adultery. In this film, it doesn’t wreck your marriage, it makes it more fun. But that doesn’t mean that Lubitsch was able or willing to show a parkfull of grunting fornicators, so he encoded it. When the cops raid the park, what you’ll see on screen is a lot of couples making out on park benches. But what Lubitsch wants you to see in your mind’s eye is those same couples gleefully humping al fresco. So have that locked and loaded, and make it as filthy as you like. That’s what Lubitsch would want you to do. 

This is a film that is completely, unashamedly, joyously about one thing: sex. It’s about sex in the park and sex with your wife and sex with your wife’s best friend. Credits. Indeed, the key to having the most fun with Lubitsch is simply to remember this: every time you think you’re hearing a dirty double-entendre, you are hearing a dirty double-entendre, and in any given moment, vocal inflection, cutaway shot or simple gesture you can decipher a possible sexual metaphor: bang! You’re right on the money. Every possible lewd interpretation is the right interpretation. That’s part of the Lubitsch touch! 

Marurice Chevalier was all about sex. His persona was very clearly established in the public’s perception as ‘randy Frenchman’. In one of his previous collaborations with Lubitsch and leading lady Jeanette McDonald, The Love Parade - 1929 - his character is a diplomat who has to be reprimanded by The Queen because he’s been bonking everyone at the Embassy including the Ambassador’s wife. Then, right before One Hour With You, Lubitsch directed him in The Smiling Lieutenant, which may as well have been called The Horny Lieutenant. That film, full of Chevalier winking and raising his eyebrows before walking into ladies' bedrooms, was Paramount’s biggest hit in 1931, and Chevalier’s reputation as a lascivious continental was truly cemented. 

All of which is important to know to fully appreciate what’s going on in One Hour With You. Chevalier’s speech directly to the audience at the beginning of the film is a big in-joke. The subtext, which would have been clear to all audiences in 1932, was that Chevalier was a man who was always on the make, regardless of anyone’s marital status, so his declaration that he was married, deeply in love with his wife and enjoying plenty of monogamous sex with her, was risible, an ironic metatextual gag. “Chevalier? Married and monogamous? Pah! Pull the other one!” That’s the set-up. We know that’s not his true character and in a way, we’re now put into the position of waiting for him to be tested. It doesn’t take long. But in the early stages of the film, as he valiantly tries to resist the allures of the extremely eager Mitzi, the fact that this is Chevalier, the man who cannot resist the primal urge, raises the comedic stakes. It would be like opening a film with W.C. Fields claiming that he had gone sober and then locking him into an unattended liquor store overnight. 

Chevalier’s trademark was a straw boater hat and bow tie, and the fact that he wears these accoutrements in the film, as he did in most of his films, makes it even clearer that we’re meant to bring our Chevalier baggage with us into the movie. Like W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers and others, although Chevalier plays different characters in his different films, he is also always playing ‘Maurice Chevalier’, and ‘Maurice Chevalier’ is a lecherous horndog. That was his reputation in real life, too: Jeanette McDonald called him ‘the quickest derrière pincher in Hollywood’.  

Supposedly, and certainly to do with that derrière-pinching, Chevalier and McDonald did not get along too well, but you’d never know it from their four films together. They had fabulous on-screen chemistry, and that is integral to One Hour With You. We can believe that these two are enjoying a good marriage and are attracted to each other romantically and sexually, and that makes the dramatic and comic tension of Chevalier’s almost inevitable philandering all the stronger. That, and the fact that we don’t want to see McDonald get hurt. Her Colette is the most sympathetic, likeable character in One Hour With You, and McDonald gives perhaps her best performance among her four collaborations with Lubitsch. 

Lubitsch himself did not have a reputation as a groper, lech or adulterer; he was married twice but there is no existing evidence of the kind of sexual adventurism he celebrated in his films. There’s a great quote from critic Michael Wilmington: Lubitsch’s films “were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well.” And that is a huge part of what came to be known as ‘The Lubitsch Touch’. It was a light-hearted, joyful and hugely permissive approach to sex that allowed us to laugh along with things like adultery rather than be shocked or offended by it. In Lubitschland, sexual desire is omnipresent and unregulated: the Parisian cops encourage it, just not in the park. There are no priests tut-tutting, and certainly no children weeping as their parents engage in bitter custody disputes. Sex is free and easy and, most importantly, fun. It’s something to be looked forward to. 

In One Hour With You, the eager Mitzi, played very coquettishly by Genevieve Tobin, schemes to be visited by Chevalier’s Andre, and when her maid confirms he’s on his way over, she moans, falls back on her divan, kicks off her shoes and wiggles her feet in lustful anticipation. She can’t wait to knock Chevalier off this silly, sanctimonious ‘monogamy’ kick he’s on, and neither, quite frankly, can we. You can’t have a sex comedy without sex, and married sex, especially in Lubitschland, is just not very funny. Thrupples are funny. Adultery is funny. And if you can get on board with that, there’s nothing in One Hour With You to shock or offend or disgust or appall you. Lubitsch isn’t trying to provoke you. He just wants you to have a good time. 

Enjoy.

On Criterion 4K UHD and 2K Blu-ray - David Hare discovers "A perfect rescue of a perfect movie" - TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

 Criterion's new 4K disc of Trouble in Paradise is a giant step up from the screening of a "new" restoration from Universal which I saw back in 2017 at Bologna. It was good, certainly better than the older UK and US Blu-ray discs. But it had quite a few work-in-progress problems. All the opticals - and they are very many - tanked the grain and density. The new print (I recall it was screened on 35) had tramline emulsion scratches through 80% of the picture, and there were sundry other problems. But it was good enough to bring the very youthful house that day to its feet in what must have been for them the first discovery of a total, seamless masterpiece, a perfect movie, and for me, a joyous reunion after first seeing it in a lovely 16mm print at the Trinity Church Wall Street Sunday cine club Screening Nites way WAY back in December 1971.

When Criterion announced this I wondered how much further they might go with restoration. In the interim Universal did a superb 4K restoration of Leisen's 1939 Midnight (another perfect Paramount 30s film) which played to a knocked out full house at Sydney Cinema Reborn back in 2023. That superb 4K was curated from a previously wrongly identified dupe nitrate safety fine grain and other elements which had been lying around mislabelled as safety 35 copies at the Library of Congress until Universal dug it out and discovered to their surprise near-pristine material.

Unfortunately Criterion released a Blu-ray of Midnight only back last year which was hugely underwhelming displaying massive grain reduction to near zero grain, lowered black shadow detail, softer edges and overall a really shitty encode. I had hoped Criterion would release Midnight as a 4K but given such a mediocre master like this what was the point. Maybe someday another label will risk the budget and coax a reliable 4K master for disc encoding out of Universal.

The story for Trouble in Paradise is the total reverse of Midnight. Universal appears to have gone full hog on this and Criterion has stepped up to what looks like a perfect 4K encode with a flawless 4K disc AND Bluray/2K disc. Everything sings. It's unbelievable, especially for a pre-1935 slower-speed-neg-film and faster lenses era.

The softness now is totally supported without a hiccup through the grain which while always visible is a part of the images' "lifeblood." One of the biggest surprises is not a whisper of density bumps in the opticals all of which flow seamlessly. Grayscale is total, whites and deep black perfect, silver and reflective jewellery and glass shimmer with nitrate sparkle.

A perfect rescue of a perfect movie. Essential to life.

CINEMA REBORN – JANUARY NEWSLETTER ANNOUNCING THE FIRST TITLES and MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT VOUCHERS

 

Shirley MacLaine, Artists and Models

Cinema Reborn 2026 is off and running with screening details announced of our first four titles. We’ve taken over the Classic Matinees and Make it Musical weekend time slots at the Ritz (1-10 May) and the Lido (8-17 May) and we’ll be presenting four Australian premieres of four films from Hollywood’s Golden Age all in beautiful new 4K restorations. We’re also announcing here details of our multi-ticket concession price passes which you will be able to buy and use to book these titles as well as the eighteen titles to come. 

The Heiress (Dir. William Wyler, USA, 1949)                                                                               

‘It’s a peerless, super-controlled movie … Wyler’s greatness here is that he can hold the elements of the film in his palm without constricting the actors. He frees them.’ – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

‘It’s immaculately acted and crafted – it’s one of the finest films ever made about nineteenth-century America.’ – Martin Scorsese

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, the timid and ungainly Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) lives with her wealthy father (Ralph Richardson), who spitefully measures her up against his beloved late wife. When Catherine is courted by the beguiling but fortuneless Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), her father’s resistance leads to grievous revelations about the true feelings of both men. 

Montgomery Clift, Olivia De Havilland, The Heiress

Based on a stage play adaptation of the 1880 Henry James novel Washington Square, William Wyler’s elegantly mounted character study is a prime example of classical Hollywood filmmaking and among the director’s finest achievements. It was the biggest winner at the 1950 Oscars, taking home awards for art direction, costume design, Aaron Copland’s score and de Havilland’s performance.

For session times and bookings at the Randwick Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Hawthorn Lido click here

Only Angels Have Wings  (Dir. Howard Hawks, USA, 1939)

‘A completely achieved masterpiece … drawing together the main thematic threads of Hawks’s work in a single complex web.’ – Robin Wood

‘The most amiable great movie ever made.’ – Michael Sragow, The Criterion Collection

Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Only Angels Have Wings

In South America, a group of intrepid pilots led by the laconic Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) navigate treacherous conditions to deliver airmail across the Andes, facing the possibility of death with every flight. Director Howard Hawks drew from his own experiences with aviation in creating this seminal adventure drama, which represents a masterful synthesis of the themes of his 1930s output. Co-starring Jean Arthur as spirited outsider Bonnie Lee – whose emotional openness contrasts Geoff’s stoicism – alongside Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth in her first major role, Only Angels Have Wings is perhaps the quintessential demonstration of Hawks’s unparalleled ability to balance existential preoccupations with dazzling action sequences, humour and warmth.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

Artists and Models (Dir. Frank Tashlin, USA, 1955)

‘Provided the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis duo with its finest screen hour … a dizzily reflexive play on movie illusion.’ – Adrian Martin

Comic book addict Eugene (Jerry Lewis) has lurid dreams about the adventures of avian superhero Vincent the Vulture. In waking hours, his favourite character is sexy crime fighter Bat Lady; unbeknownst to Eugene, however, not only is the comic strip’s creator Abigail (Dorothy Malone) living in the very same apartment block, but Abigail’s flatmate – and model for Bat Lady – Bessie (Shirley MacLaine) has taken a shine to him. Meanwhile, Eugene’s own roommate, self-assured painter and ladies’ man Rick (Dean Martin), has his sights set on Abigail – and, thanks to Eugene’s habit of talking in his sleep, an idea for a sneaky new business opportunity … 

Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Artists and Models

Shot in glorious VistaVision and featuring colour schemes that only Hollywood could invent, Frank Tashlin’s musical romantic comedy Artists and Models satirises mid-’50s moral panics over the supposedly corrupting influence of comic books while offering a sublime canvas for Martin and Lewis’s legendary double act.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

One Hour With You  (Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

‘This charming, richly detailed film is a jewel in the director’s crown, and one of the finest musical comedies of the early sound era.’ – Wheeler Winston Dixon, Senses of Cinema

Maurice Chevalier, Jeannette MacDonald, One Hour With You

Even though this pre-code reimagining of his 1924 silent film The Marriage Circle was originally handed to a young George Cukor to direct, Ernst Lubitsch stepped back in midway through production to take the reins, lending his inimitable style to this comic tale of a loving couple simultaneously encountering opportunities for infidelity with each other’s unscrupulous friends. Brightened by a dash of Viennese operetta, some Parisian boulevard humour and recurring fourth-wall breaks from male lead Maurice Chevalier, Lubitsch’s musical also benefits from the gorgeous voice of fellow star Jeanette MacDonald and eight songs mostly composed by Oscar Straus and Leo Robin. Nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, One Hour With You is a fine example of the slyly subversive sex comedies that Lubitsch and his contemporaries perfected in early 1930s Hollywood – the likes of which would shortly be wiped out by the arrival of the censorious Motion Picture Production Code.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT PASSES

We are responding to public demand by introducing a discount pass for those who want to see the maximum of Cinema Reborn at the lowest possible price. Five ticket passes are $80 and ten ticket passes are a super-bargain at $140. Each ticket allows a maximum of two redemptions per session.

To buy a pass for sessions at the Ritz click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

To buy a pass for sessions at the Lido click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

Volunteers

Cinema Reborn always has a need for volunteers to help on our information desk and to monitor the door at the screenings. If you would like to know more send your name to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and mention which city you are in and your availability (Nights, Weekends, Daytime). If you would like to know what it’s like to volunteer then here’s a glowing testimonial from one of those who worked on the 2025 program.

“I’m happy to share that I’ve been involved as a volunteer with the Cinema Reborn film festival 2025. Over the course of the festival, I assisted with the smooth running of ten film sections, welcomed audiences and supported venue operations. Grateful to be part of a passionate community celebrating film heritage and restoration. Special thanks to Grace Boschetti and Kevin Cassidy for creating a warm, supportive environment for all the volunteers; it made the experience even more memorable! Looking forward to more opportunities like this in the future!

If you know a young person who might enjoy being involved in the presentation of Cinema Reborn don’t hesitate to pass this newsletter to them and suggest they contact cinemareborn2025@gmail.com to make known their interest.

Charitable Donations

The major cost of presenting Cinema Reborn comes from the screening fees paid to archives and producers. Since our inception supporters have understood the need for continuing support to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations.

Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us pay these fees and keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size,  from large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

"You Like What You Like”: Part Two of Tom Ryan’s 2003 interview with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer- Comedy, Lubitsch, Chuck Barris, A MIGHTY WIND

Editor's Note: This is the second part of a transcript of an afternoon spent by Melbourne's Sunday Age film critic Tom Ryan and a trio of American funsters Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean who were in town to promote their latest movie A Mighty Wind. If you wish to read Part One CLICK HERE

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Part Two: Looking Back 

 

[The orders have been taken, the food is being prepared and we return to the interview.]

 

TOM RYAN: Who are your inspirations?

 

MMcK: For film or music?

 

I was actually thinking in terms of your acting.

 

CG: We’re probably all gonna have the same answer.

 

MMcK: Some of the same answers.

 

CG: The first thing that I remember as a child are Laurel and Hardy. My father took me to see Laurel and Hardy. I also remember when The Golden Age of Comedy came out. 

 

MMcK: Robert Youngson!

 

Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy

CG: And it was a compilation of Harold Lloyd and all the others. That was my first experience of that. And then later Peter Sellers was very much the person in terms of comedy. Michael and I were studying what was supposed to be serious acting at an acting school in New York City. But as far as comedians go, Peter Sellers was the one.

What about in terms of filmmakers?

 

CG: I think Truffaut was the first one that I connected to the most when I became aware of that job. Those films had a sense of humour. They weren’t pretentious. They were funny.

What about the classic era of Hollywood comedy? Preston Sturges…

 

CG: Some. I think I didn’t get into that until a little bit later. I wasn’t a film buff or a film student really until…

 

MM: You haven’t buffed anything really.

 

CG: Actually, not in days, no.

 

HS: So you’re not working on your prostate?

 

CG: No. 

 

HS: Personally, I’m sad to say that I think Sturges is a bit overrated. Or maybe I’ve just not seen the one Preston Sturges film that’s gonna change my mind.

 

Palm Beach Story?

 

HS: You see, I’m not a big fan of that. I’m much more of a fan of Ernst Lubitsch.

 

MMcK: Yeah.

 

Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Charles Halton
To Be or Not to Be

HS: Lubitsch is much more ‘it’ for me. When you get to a movie like To Be Or Not To Be! I started my show business career working for Jack Benny, so…

As a child?

 

HS: As a child. 

 

MMcK: Well, I was a child too.

 

CG: Child-like at least!

 

MMcK: Yeah.

 

HS: So that was inspiring in every way, including that he actually hired me. But to see To Be Or Not To Be where a guy takes maybe the direst situation people knew about in the 20^thcentury and makes a comedy, a mordant, smart, wonderful comedy. Well, that’s it.

 

MMcK: Pretty good leading lady too!

 

HS: Yeah. A pretty good cast all the way through.

What about you, Michael?

 

MMcK: As far as performers go, I gotta share Laurel and Hardy with Guest here, as well as Sellers. But also Alec Guinness, who I think is maybe the greatest actor I’ve ever seen. I had a chance to see him on stage. I saw him play Dylan Thomas on Broadway…

 

Alec Guinness as Dylan Thomas

HS: Who won?

 

MMcK: Dylan by a hair. By a little curly hair. And I love a lot of people who are working right now. We were talking about Steve Buscemi before you turned on the tape, who’s one of those very watchable, wonderful actors. You know, a lot of those people who are maybe not big movie stars…

But I like some big movie stars too. As far as filmmakers go, I remember seeing two films in the space of a couple of weeks when I was a teenager…

 

HS: The Robe?

 

MMcK: Not The Robe, Harry. Sorry. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Tony Richardson, which I still think is one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. And Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. For me, if they’d stopped making anti-war movies after that, I would have gotten the message pretty clearly, at that point. So those are two of my top filmmakers. But later on I also got to know the work of William Wyler and Howard Hawks and William Wellman. I said William Wellman twice, didn’t I?

 

(CG, HS and TR): No William Wyler.

And Billy Wilder!

 

HS: And Billy Wilder! Yeah. 

 

MMcK: I’m crazy about Billy Wilder. Yes.

Stanley Kubrick ( second from left) directs
Dr Strangelove

 

HS: I was gonna add Stanley Kubrick. When I was in college I saw Strangelove. That was an amazing concept.

 

MMcK: Still is. Every bit as good today. Even a little scarier.

 

What about the musicians? Who are your musical reference points? I was actually reading this magazine while I was waiting, a review of Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind, about Chuck Barris. Apparently he wrote “Palisades Park” for Freddy Cannon and…

 

MMcK: I don’t think that’s true.

 

HS: There is so much bullshit being blown around about Chuck Barris, including the whole CIA story. But before you…

 

I checked my single and I found his name on it.

Chuck Barris

MMcK: Mmm.

 

HS: But I highly recommend, before you take anything about Chuck Barris at face value, go and see The Gong Show Movie…

 

Alright.

 

HS: Which is a movie he wrote and directed about himself.

 

Really?

 

HS: Yeah. And see if you can keep your food down after seeing it...

 

MMcK: Yeah. He’s dangerous in the sense that an ugly throw-rug is dangerous. 

Your musical influences?

 

MMcK: Mine? 

 

Yeah. By the way, congratulations on that acapella you all did last night.

And from nowhere. That was wonderful.

 

MMcK: Oh, it was not from nowhere. It was from 10 years ago.

 

CG: Yes. But we hadn’t rehearsed it. We just started it and….

 

MMcK: Actually, sometimes we start Tap concerts with that. Before the lights come up, we throw ’em that as a bonus.

 

CG: And then they throw it right back as a bonus.

 

MMcK: And then we throw it back with a microphone with some gum stuck to it. I think the first music that really turned me on to what folk music was about, and also what songwriting was about, was a guy named Jimmie Driftwood, who wrote tons of songs and discovered tons of other songs. He’s most noted for one called “The Battle of New Orleans”…

Oh, I know it as a Johnny Horton song!

 

MMcK: It was a world-wide hit. And “Tennesse Stud” which was written by Eddie Arnold and other people. But Driftwood was a high school teacher and he wrote “The Battle of New Orleans” to teach his kids about the battle of New Orleans. It became a big hit, and he made a bunch of albums for RCA Victor. My father was working for RCA Victor at the time and I became this huge fan. I just loved his music.

 

CG: And he was a high school teacher? ‘Mr Driftwood, can I please go to the bathroom?’

 

MMcK: Absolutely. But it was Mr Morrison! His real name was Jim Morrison.

 

CG: Oh, God!

 

MMcK: I’ve always loved show music. And I’ve loved music that made me laugh. Like Ray Stevens’ stuff. He became kind of awful later on, but he wrote some very funny songs early on. And later The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who. Mostly The Beatles and The Kinks. And these days I love Bela Fleck and the Flecktones…

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

 

What’s their style? They sound like they should be doo-wop.

 

MMcK: No, no. Blue-grass, jazz, classical. He’s a banjo player. Get a hold of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, especially a recent live album called “Live at the Quick”. He also employs three of the greatest musicians alive today. It’s ridiculous! Jeff Coffin, Victor Wooten, an insane bass player, and Future Man [real name, Roy], who is Victor’s brother and who invented a new instrument to replace the drums. It’s a phenomenal record.

 

CG: I think the first music I heard was swing music: ’30s, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, who was earlier, in the late ’20s. The first thing that really electrified me was hearing Bill Monroe, who was a bluegrass mandolin player. I saw him live in 1963 for the first time and started playing that kind of music. And bee-bop has been an influence…

 

HS: What about C-bop?

 

CG: It’s funny, but it never caught on. It should have. It was great. Right now, it’s very eclectic. 

I still listen to a lot of classical music. I studied as a classical clarinetist. I went to a school where a lot of people were playing classical music and that’s what I was there for ostensibly. But I’m drawn now to mandolin music... And rock’n’roll.

 

HS: I grew up in a classical music family. That was the first music my parents exposed me to. My dad was trained as an opera singer. So I listened to that all the time and learned to recognize that music from very early on. The first music that I came to on my own was Frank Sinatra, Ella, Mel Torme. 

John Michael Higgins (left)  A Mighty Wind

John Michael Higgins, who is in A Mighty Wind  and is a wizard vocal arranger, has the same ear as I do, even though we’re separated by years growing up. But our ears were always attracted to arrangers, so when I listened to jazz I was always attracted to guys who were writing wonderful arrangements, like Marty Page or, for Sinatra, Nelson Riddle. 

So it took me a long time to be able to even focus on soloists because I wanted to hear ensembles play. I wanted to hear voicings and movements and harmonies. And I was very anti-rock’n’roll until “A Hard Day’s Night”. That whipped me around and changed my life.

The album?

 

HS: The film and then the album. And then the whole thing, the whole Beatles thing. And now I listen to a lot of eclectic rock’n’roll and a lot of Brazilian music and New Orleans funk. You know we all come from so many different kinds of music.

 

That’s really interesting. Where do The Folksmen [the group in The Mighty Wind] come from then? Are you drawing on your personal histories with the Kingston Trio and …

 

MMcK: Well, obviously The Kingston Trio were kind of an inspiration because…

 

CG: Because they were a trio…

 

MMcK: That’s right. And they all have the same shirts. But they didn’t have a stand-up bass player. We cribbed that from The Limelighters. It was a commercial folk entity from the late ’50s. When people were expecting rock’n’roll to die at any minute, they were looking for what was going to replace it and there were a lot of folk hits in the late ’50s and early ’60s, which is kind of a starting point in the film.

TR: What about the others in the film?

Mitch (Eugene Levy) & Mickie (Catherine O'Hara)
A Mighty Wind

 

CG: Mitch & Mickey! We wrote those characters based on again…. There were so many husband-and-wife teams: there was Mimi and Richard Farina. He was a poet at that time where it was a big thing. As were Ian and Sylvia…

And Dick and DeeDee?

 

MMcK: Well, that was more rock’n’roll. But there were others – Jim and Jean – and invariably there was some kind of scenario in which their marriage would be imperilled in some way.

 

The Captain and Cookie? 

[Guest raises his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Who?’] 

You created them for Best in Show. Is that where the idea for doing something like A Mighty Wind comes from? 

 

CG: Well, no. The idea came from the fact that I knew this kind of music, the fact that we had played as this group before, and I wanted it to do some music in film and I knew this cast was extremely musical. I knew they would probably be able to bring something like this off. This era had never been touched in terms of film, so that’s how it happened.

 

Some of the criticism of the film has said that you ignore the protest movement.

 

CG: Yes. But I’m not ignoring it. I chose not to have it in and it’s more of a mathematical problem than anything else. The protest singers were usually solo artists and to add that person would have unbalanced the film that was written for these people. Eugene and Catherine were going to be the duo. We had to have a duo. We had the trio and I thought it would be funny to have this big group. To have added another person would have thrown the whole movie off. And it’s not about that.

 

MMcK: Also all of the three acts in Irving Steinbloom’s stable were all not political. They were all very much motivated by the charts…

 

HS: And if you look at the pre-Bob Dylan world of folk music as it existed in America, it was never worried about politics. The Kingston Trio’s most political song was “Charlie on the MTA”, a protest about the inadequacies of the rapid transit system in Boston. Wow.

 

But Dylan was drawing on a range of…

 

HS: Yes. He was harking back to a much earlier era. He was harking back to Woody Guthrie. And he was political.

 

MMcK: And The Weavers were very political.

 

HS: But Dylan was specifically a reaction against this more commercial music that was dominating the world of folk music back then. And then it got more complicated because Peter, Paul & Mary started covering Bob Dylan’s songs and that changed the sound of those songs. Them doing “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a very different version of the song.

 

HS: And the vast majority of Peter, Paul & Mary songs were not political. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” is a very sentimental song.

 

MMcK: But there’s the question of jet fuel and the prices and the whole…

 

HS: Oh, yeah. Right.

 

MMcK: I read that into it, I guess.

(To Be Continued)