A Girl and a Gun: FROM MASON DRUCKMAN

August 24, 2005

FROM MASON DRUCKMAN

George Fasel, Film Critic

[Note: as you see from his post, Mason Druckman is a colleage and friend of George, long standing. George named his son after him.]

The game went something like this. I would say "Regis Toomey." George would answer, "Charles Winninger. "I would offer, Ïlka Chase." George would counter with "DeForrest Kelley" or "Jack Conrad" or "Flora Robson," or any of hundreds of second- and third-tier Hollywood actors, mostly American, whose names he and I strained to dredge up from memories forged over three decades of (in my case at least) unsystematic movie going. It was the 1960s; George and I were assistant professors at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; and over a glass of house red one rainy night we discovered we had a mutual interest in this minute aspect of film trivia.

How interest evolved into competition I cannot recall, but the attempt to outdo one another in coming up with obscure (but not entirely unknown) figures from the bowels of b-moviedom grew from something of a passing fancy into a kind of professorial pissing contest from which we derived enormous pleasure. I might pick up my phone and hear, Ärt Baker" (George's voice), then, "click." I would leave a note in Geroge's faculty mailbox saying only "Fay Bainter." One of us might receive an unsigned letter (we lived seven minutes apart) that read "J. Carrol Naish" centered on an 81/2 x 11 piece of stationery. The game came to an end after several months only when we fixed on the actor whom George regarded as the exemplar of what, whether we knew it or not, we had been striving for: our nominee for the most often seen, littlest known and least memorable performer on the silver screen, the one, the only, Paul Kelly.

Paul Kelly, the soft-spoken, jut-jawed, closed-mouth, tough-looking studio regular who showed up in 130 films over a career that ran from 1911, when he was a child artist, to 1956, the year of his death, who was listed as "Tuck, another detective" in "Special Delivery"(1927), as "Jimmie Fields, pilot" in "Tarzan's New York Adventure"(1942), and who played General George Armstrong Custer in "Wyoming"(1940) and Lt. John Hudson in "Springfield Rifle"(1952). I agreed with Geroge that Kelly was our man, and it was clear that a pair of Ph.D.s from two prestigious West Coast universities had, through the strenuous exertions of their combined intellects, reached a pinnacle in the pursuit of a category that truly could be said to be utterly without significance. For us, however, it was a pinnacle, and having reached it, we were content to leave it and move on.

But in George's case, not very far. Towards the end of our game I mentioned that between halves of a Celtics game I had caught Kelly palying a rebel officer in a Sunday afternoon flick on television. With some heat, George replied, "What? Kelly was on and you didn't call me?" I knew then that George was much deeper into film than I would ever be; although we agreed on the fact that Kelly had extraordinarily little talent and would be remembered by almost no one, he had been a long-lasting survivor in the evolution of the film industry, and , for George, nothing about the history of the industry could be uninteresting, unimportant or negligible: however inconsequential Kelly might be in the big picture, if he was showing on the tube, George did not want to miss him.

Its now the early seventies. Geroge and I have left Reed, he for the University of Missouri's history department, I for the editor's office of "The Oregon Times,"an alternative monthly of news and opinion published out of Portland. George is the magaziné film reviewer.

You could not (at least in those days) review films playing in metropolitan Portland from halfway across the country, and Geroge didn't really try. Although occassionally what he was viewing in Columbia, Missouri might intersect with what "Oregon Times" readers were scheduled to see locally, thereby giving him a chance to express opinions on current offerings, these were rare, and for the most part - at $25 per column- for four years George was left free to deliver a series of erudite and lucid commentaries on some of his favorite cinematic topics, past and present. What follows are a few excerpts from some of these. Regular viewers of this blog may recognize the George Fasel whose views so many of us respect and admire.

On Woody Allen's "Play It Again Sam"- July 1972

Things picked up toward the end, mostly, because we got more of Bogey - who is done with such skill by Jerry Lacey that we stop marveling at the impersonation almost at once and go al0ng with the gimmick. (It did look, however, as though Lacey were smoking king-size filter tips, a sissification in which the real Bogey would never have indulged.)

On porno movies - September 1973

Personally, I put pornographic films in the category of entertainments which, for me, is also occupied by ballet. Both are capable of demonstrating unusual physical prowess, both occasionally display moments of inventiveness and wit.

Still, as long as these remain voluntary diversions, I see no reason either to attend them myself or restrict others from doing so - provided of course, that someone does not emerge from a performance of Swan Lake crazed with lust and force me to perform a pas de deux against my will.

On Robert Altman - September 1974

Altman seems always to be asking, "Why are these people doing this?"And when we answer disapprovingly, he seems to ask us, "What makes you so much better?" He is constantly questioning, wondering, laughing - at us and at himself and at anything laughable - but always with a straight face. It has been written that all of Altman's characters are striving for freedom, and this is probably true. But what of us, his audience? Does any thinking person ever emerge from an Altman film truly liberated? The gamblers in California Split come out with their money. But how free are they? Not very. And you?

On Japanese director Yazujiro Ozu - December 1975

His conservatism was more than a matter of film technique. For all that he explored the foibles and frailties of the Japanese family, he plainly looked upon it as something like a sacred institution. He was wholly committed to traditional Japanese culture and looked with wry humor at such interlopers as television and golf. His films usually end with a parting - a death, a marriage of a final child - which is treated with a mixture of regret and resignation. Ozu accepted the inevitability of separation as one of those irresistable processes of nature. Perhaps we are at a point where to say that " life goes on" is so trite and banal and obvious that we not longer recognize its abiding importance.

George himself was a conservative in the Ozu sense: in a life given to intellectual endeavor, concern for family - who they were and what lay in store for them - was always on his mind. Now, despite feeling that George died well before his time, his family will go resolutely on with their lives, in a process which, as George's beloved Ozu instructs us, is entirely natural and inevitable.

Mason Druckman

Berkeley, California

August 24, 2005 at 01:16 PM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

August 24, 2005

FROM MASON DRUCKMAN

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