They call it the Bo Diddley Beat. That’s Bo Diddley doing the Bo Diddley Beat. Bo didn’t want you to get confused about who was doing what, and let the audience know right off who was who. Hey Bo Diddley! If Bo ever had a publicist, I’ll bet he didn’t have to work overly hard. Bo was always a vertically oriented entertainment complex all by hisself.
That beat has a lot of names. Many people call it: shave and a haircut, two bits. If you’re playing in a band below the Gulf of Mexico, er, America, um, well, south or east of the Bay of Campeche, anyway, you might call it the clave rhythm. Some people call it The Hambone. It’s basically straight out of Africa. Others might have done something like it before him, but Bo made it his own thang, and rode it for all it was worth. He was the iPhone and the kleenex and the frigidaire of the beat.
Lots of other guys mined the same ore. There are too many to list. Here are some notable ones.
Buddy Holly
Johnny Otis:
The Miracles:
It’s even buried in the middle of these two, though you have to listen a little harder to hear it:
Bo had unusual tastes in guitars. He played cigar box guitars at first, and made them himself. When he got some notoriety, he started having others made for him, including a “twang machine,” built in the same square shape, but from a solid piece of wood with a neck bolted on, and a regular pickup configuration. I was in Gruhn Guitars in Nashville back in the day, and they had one of his twang machines for sale. If I’d have bought it, I could sell it and retire tomorrow. I think it’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art nowadays. I bought a Stratocaster instead because I was a broke-ass loser.
The guitar Bo’s playing in the video is his own design as well. Eventually, he had a guy who was laid off or retired or quit or fired or something from Gretsch guitars build the guitars for him. They had custom bodies with Gretsch necks bolted on, and Gretsch hardware. He called them Jupiter Thunderbirds. Bo gave one to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and you can often spot him playing one. Although I doubt he’s still playing the original much. In 2005, Billy convinced Gretsch to throw in the towel and started making Bo’s design in their factory. They call it the Billy-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird.
That’s Norma-Jean Wofford playing her own Jupiter Thunderbird, singing, and shimmying in the Bo Diddley video up top. Somehow I’m reminded of this quote: Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.
So Gladiator was a real good movie. Gladiator II is a real bad movie. Let’s look back and see how Hollyweird used to tease out a sequel for a popular sword and sandal movie. First, there was The Robe. Then there was Demetrius and the Gladiators. The contrast between them and the recent Gladiaterz movies couldn’t be starker.
It’s easy to overlook the influence of The Robe on American life from our vantage point of 75 years later. It’s a bit of a slog, compared to Demetrius. It was a big budget spectacle, the first movie to use CinemaScope to fill up a wide screen. Richard Burton plays the angry young (Ro)man who has trouble coming to grips with his feelings of regret for nailing the son of God to a tree. He’s lost in the part, though, and the love story between Marcellus (Burton) and Diana (Jean Simmons) gets kinda lost in the sword and sandal sauce. The fight scenes are rather lame, as Burton really didn’t have the frame to project real force.
But the movie isn’t bad, and was a smash hit. Jay Robinson as a mincing, freaked-out Caligula was a hoot. He was easily the creepiest thing ever set to celluloid at the time, and even managed to take it up a notch and break the knob off when he returned in Demetetrius. Until Frank Thring showed up a few years later with his Saturnine Deputy Dawg face, Robinson set the standard for off-brand villains.
The Robe made 36 million on a 4 million budget, and numbers like that turned Hollywood into a Biblical epic factory. They made Demetrius at the same time as The Robe, and released it a year later, and it was even more popular than the first movie. We’re all too young to remember any of this in real time, but we’re generation-adjacent enough to observe certain facts. Why do you think Blutarksy is dressed in a toga in the basement of the Animal House?
The Robe did that. It spawned a cottage industry of biblical and biblical-abutting entertainment that dwarfs today’s Marvel movie industry. High school clubs built their own chariots and had races with their track teams pulling them around the football fields. Pretty soon moms were wearing diaphanous Greco-Roman muu-muus around the house, and their daughters all wanted their hair in a Jean Simmons ponytail. Why do you think that old crone behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles still wears garish blue Cleopatra eyeshadow? Chess clubs and Radio clubs in high schools were later joined by God Squads, impressionable kids who decided going to church dressed as hippies was cool again. They eventually made a fertile pool of victims for all the Jay Robinson priests who decided that the church was suddenly cool, too.
But The Robe isn’t great entertainment. Screenwriter Philip Dunne really knew his business, but the script became a bit of a hash as it went through a lot of hands, including the execrable Leonard Maltz, the kind of people who wanted their “subtext” to be printed long form right on the movie posters. Dunne wrote Demetrius by himself, and while it has a wide scope, it’s a missile of a story line. It’s still a blast to watch.
In Gladiator 2, the gladiatorial scenes aren’t just stupid; they’re ridiculous. They’ve got gladiators fighting CGI monkeys that look like a cross between pit bulls and leftover props from Scott’s Alien movies. They leap around like Spiderman wannabees. I half expected a second set of teeth to pop out of their mouths. Then they have a guy, get this, riding, riding, mind you, a giant rhinoceros into the arena. A rhino that had more than a hint of The Banana Splits in its appearance.
Let’s review. Back in the mid-fifties, they had no access to special effects like they do now, or even the same kind of money for costumes and props. But they built a real arena, and a real guy wrestled real tigers in it, poking them a bit with his rubber knife. It’s still kinda awesome to watch it. Director Ridley Scott didn’t screw up his first picture with CGI Snuffleupagus rhinos. He copied the original and kept the real tigers, and even took the hand to hand fighting up a notch or two:
Man, that’s great stuff there, and reason enough to watch Gladiator every once in a while. You won’t watch Gladiator II twice. If you make it all the way through the first time, I mean.
Back to the fifties: The first scene in Demetrius is just the last scene of The Robe. Dunne puts you right up to speed with that reference, and basically ignores The Robe after that.
Poor Ridley doesn’t have that kind of sense, or that able a writing staff. They keep trotting out stuff from Gladiator into Gladiator2, over and over, trying to explain the inexplicable, and simply reminding anyone who’s paying attention that the first movie was great, and the sequel isn’t even a middling muddle compared to it. In writing drama, stuff like two people talking about what a third person was doing is called exposition, and is to be avoided at all costs. Apparently a $310 million budget isn’t enough to count as “all costs” these days, and the constant flashback balogna highlights the paucity of the fresh material.
It’s funny, but the modern movies are desperate to shoehorn black actors into weird places, but it’s Demetrius that has the only fully-formed, non-totem, well-played, believable black character in these movies. William Marshall plays Glycon, a gladiator who is eventually freed from the arena, and then freed from mental bondage by the words of Christ. And holy cow, compared to the nancy boys popular as action stars today, the guy was a unit. He was 6′-5″, handsome as hell, and had a basso voice that made James Earl Jones sound like Tiny Tim. He saves Demetrius from the other gladiators, and Demetrius eventually returns the favor. But when Demetrius loses his shit, rejects Christ, and starts humping Susan Hayward’s leg like a great Dane, Saint Peter can’t make any headway with him. It’s Glycon that has the stones to stand up to him, and shame him into considering larger issues again.
Victor Mature was a great, big, lovable clown. He had a good sense of humor about himself, and was easy in front of the camera. I heard a funny story about him. He was a good golfer, and tried to join a tony country club near Hollywood. They told him they didn’t allow actors to join. He answered that he wasn’t an actor, and had 42 movies he could show them to prove it.
But you know, Mature really did look like he could hold his own in an arena. And like Susan Hayward would dump the future emperor of Rome for him, because he exuded a boyish fun. And Victor always did his best when he was working. His look of rage when he stops being a Christian and decides that the other gladiators got something coming for molesting his girlfriend in the slave quarters is quite believable, and more than a little scary.
So the story of The Robe, and especially Demetrius, has a direction that makes sense. It starts out somewhere, and ends up somewhere else. The Gladiator movies wander around, looking for a reason for all the mayhem, and never sniffing it out, because it’s in their blind spots and they can never acknowledge it. The Pauline Christian church was the answer to the degenerate Roman hierarchy, and the only thing that could bring any real meaning to their empire. Once they adopted (co-opted) it, the Empire had another 1,000 year run or so until the Ottomans curbstomped Constantinople.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. It was the answer to everything, that The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators discovered, and that the Gladiator movies didn’t even have the sense to look for.
There’s something about the personality type who fixes cars that leads to bad music selection. But it’s a minor quibble. I’m sort of in awe of this whole thing.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Ship of Theseus, I explained it here a year or so ago. A 1955 Porsche is a very valuable thing indeed, but the one in the video has deteriorated to the point where the iron atoms are barely holding hands. Normally, restorations like this one aren’t attempted, because the car is too far gone. Then again, the customer is in Switzerland. Even the town drunks in Switzerland own distilleries, so I assume they could afford to pay some Britishers and French dudes to go the whole nine yards on the thing.
I think more things and more people should be like what you’re seeing in the video. Autos and many other large and small dollar things should be made to be less disposable. People should get very good at what they do, and should be paid to do it. And people should try to fix what’s broken before buying anything new.
And someone in Switzerland should adopt me. Say dad, can I borrow the car?
Before CGI, filmmakers found people who could actually do stuff, and pointed cameras at them. In the flawed masterpiece, The Big Country, Chuck Connors and a few stuntmen showed Gregory Peck and Carroll Baker how to ride horses:
There’s a great mix of humor in this drama. The cowboy who can’t get his boot on at the beginning of the chase, and then can’t get on his horse, is a nice touch.
The director of the first 3/4 of this movie was William Wyler. Wyler was something of a legend in Hollywood by the time he made The Big Country in 1958. He ended up with three best director Oscars, and had thirteen nominations total (tied for the most). He drove actors up the wall, making them do forty takes, but they all wanted to work with him anyway. Henry Fonda wondered why Wyler wanted another take. “It stinks.” Charlton Heston asked for direction. “Be better.” Gotta love that kind of management.
Wyler made all kinds of movies well. Hell, he made 32 silent movies just to warm up. He did westerns and dramas and comedies and sword and sandal epics and musicals and they’re all still pretty entertaining to watch. The Big Country was a big hit, although the critics mostly thought it was pretty meh. Eisenhower was still president then, and loved it, and had the movie screened four straight nights in the White House.
If you’re in the know about cinematography, you probably know about this movie. Wyler and Gregg Toland developed and perfected what’s called deep-focus cinematography. The lenses they used could keep everything in the frame in focus, no matter what the depth of field was. Nothing on the screen was blurry, no matter where it was.
Lots of directors hated widescreen. There was too much area to cover, and it was easy for the actors to look lost. But movies like The Big Country embraced all that screen square footage. The scenes of the actors pounding across the measureless prairie are amazing. I don’t think you would have Lawrence of Arabia four years later if David Lean hadn’t seen how Wyler used the landscape in The Big Country.
Wyler used the landscape as a metaphor. The fight scene in the same movie is unexcelled, because of the moonlight mood and the tiny men struggling to settle a meaningless score in a gigantic void of featureless grass:
They gave Burl Ives an Oscar for this movie, but I don’t know why. He’s sorta eating the scenery through most of it. But the real problem with the movie is Wyler was incredibly in demand for his work, and he had to ditch The Big Country to go to Italy to make Ben Hur. The movie was finished by a different director, and squanders the vibe that built up throughout the first part of the film. It just sort of fizzles out at the end.
It matters who directs a film. People used to know how to do things, but not everyone knew how to do it like William Wyler.
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I’m not sure we’ve settled on a name for Artificial Intelligence stuff, probably because it really isn’t very intelligent. It’s mostly a massive version of autofill, which is useful enough, I suppose. If you don’t want to (I don’t), you never have to look at Gargle again.
Some call it LLM, for large language models, but that doesn’t encompass what the script kiddies are doing with images and video. Gargle has settled on “generative ai” for non-textual stuff, but their stuff is so locked down they’re not going to be where the action is. If you head on over to Hugging Face, or whatever Stable Diffusion is calling itself nowadays, you’ll see tinkerers tinkering with all sorts of speech to image, image enhancement and melding, music generation,and general messing around with probabilities. The Wikiup likes the term “deep learning,” Deep learning being a subset of machine learning being a subset of artificial intelligence.
Whatever you want to call it, the usual suspects are taking the ball and running with it. First and foremost, they want to use everything they can lay their hands on to have fun. This sure is fun: How about a movie trailer for Alien, as if it were a 1950s movie?
Another outfit did the same with Aliens:
The limitations of the amount of video you can produce in a single snippet isn’t a problem when you’re making a film trailer. They’re almost uniformly stitched together from two or three second images. Every once in a while, you see what has been called a “hallucination.” That’s the term for when the generative AI wigs out a bit, and just inserts any old thing for reasons obscure. They have an especially hard time with hands, but then again so did Van Gogh.
There are a hearty handful of people churning out these homages. They’re all sort of fun. But the funny thing about them is that while the kids are getting the CGI (for want of a better term) right, they don’t really know anything about the 1950s, and they get the text, voiceovers, and fonts all wrong for the era. Even the vibe is off. Here’s a real 1950s movie trailer to compare:
Movies from the 1950s didn’t have CGI, or machine learning. Hell, they didn’t always have color. But they made the chariot race in Ben Hur, and Marilyn Monroe’s dress blow up on a subway grate, among many other terrific bits of entertainment, and without much doctoring to the film. With better tools, you’re supposed to be able to do a better job. I’ll raise my hand when you get there, kids. Keep going.
Tag: 1950s
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