It’s Brando’s birthday! In celebration, Criterion are boosting an extract from my ONE-EYED JACKS video essay here.
Meanwhile, Daniel Riccuito, over at The Notebook, sings the praises of a MUCH more significant thespian — Dead End Kid Frankie Darro. I have contributed a few words, and as usual, readers are invited to see if they can separate my wheat from Danny’s other wheat.
There’s a new article at The Notebook by Daniel Riccuito and me.
Here.
We’ve evolved a strange method of collaboration. Daniel pesters me on Facebook, asking for paragraphs, or thoughts or examples of cinematic phenomena he’s exploring. I’ll churn out a hundred words or so on the topic at hand, and he’ll simply drop the passages into his works in progress, occasionally, I presume, massaging the surrounding text to make it seamless, or seamless-seeming. Not easy, I suspect, for anyone to identify who wrote what.
Illustration: Allen Jenkins by Tony Millionaire
By Daniel Riccuito with David Cairns
Art by Tony Millionaire
Vengeance is a tool for the powerless.
And what better revenge could a 1930s movie-going public muster than the absurdist act of turning stars into nourishment? Take that vision of hate and spittle, Ned Sparks, pulling faces never before seen on the front of a human head. Sparks was the Great Depression’s favorite specialty item: a purple carrot.
Arguably a sweet onion, Frank McHugh had bone-weary audiences drooling in the aisles.
John Litel made a fine rutabaga.
Hand-carved parsnip, Edward Everett Horton, gave our pre-Code vegetable garden nuance. But mainly we craved cartoon food — entertainment that mixed problem-solving and problem-salving for a seventy-five to eighty-minute span. We liked excitable, doughy screen personas as stand-ins that brought our truth to new lows.
Coming Soon!
Pat O’Brien as Spud.
Shadowplay