I Miss Madeline Kahn

This is for Oscar, my buddy.  Recently, he messaged me that a big snub regarding that Hollywood golden boy called "Oscar" is that Madeline Kahn did not get a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her fabulousness as the controlling and annoying Eunice in the screwball comedy, What's Up, Doc?  In her 1972 feature film debut, for director Peter Bogdanovich, she made movie history as one of the few people (if not the only one) who stole scenes from superstar leading lady, Barbra Streisand.

Madeline Kahn was marvelous.  As the stiff and uptight fianceé to Ryan O'Neal's Howard Bannister, you could have hung freshly-ironed business shirts on her hairdo.

Audiences loved her.  The love affair continued.  She added two Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations to her list of career achievements after she made her big screen debut as Eunice.  The first time I sat in a movie theater to see What's Up, Doc?, I looked at Madeline Kahn and vividly recall saying to myself, "There's that really funny actress I saw in film class!"  One of my favorite university teachers and courses was the Film as Journalism class I took.  James W. Arnold, a former newspaper film critic, taught the class.  He was terrific.  The professor taught me how to look at films in a fresh and deeper way and to discover the spirit in them.  He showed us Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.  Then he devoted a class to short subjects.  He began by screening a parody of Ingmar Bergman classics.  It was called De Düva:  The Dove.  This 1968 short featured an unknown actress named Madeline Kahn.  Our packed 1970s college classroom howled with laughter at her comic acting.  Here's the short subject. Click onto the link.

https://youtu.be/c3JEIQk4mZQ.

Kahn's star quality and extraordinary comic gifts were evident in that brief cigar-smoking role.  The Dove got an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Subject.

Directors Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich had the ability to distill the essence of Madeline Kahn, the same way Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor did with actress/singer Judy Garland.  One of Kahn's Oscar nominations came for her spoof of Marlene Dietrich in 1974's Blazing Saddles.  In a riff on Dietrich's sexy saloon entertainer in 1939's classic western, Destry Rides Again, Kahn was hysterically funny as Lili Von Shtupp.   Her "I'm Tired" number in Mel Brooks' western is one of the comedy high points of 1970s Hollywood movies.  Madeline Kahn was a bright screen comedienne.

Who can forget Miss Lili offering the new sheriff more schnitzengrüben for breakfast?

Not since Mae West in the 1930s had any American actress made sex so funny.  Another comedy she did for Mel Brooks was his brilliant Young Frankenstein, also in 1974.

Again, audiences erupted into laughter at her work as Elizabeth, the doctor's no-sex-before-marriage rich fianceé.  Her attitude changes when she's kidnapped by Dr. Frankenstein's gifted monster.  Kahn's operatic training came in handy here.

Her other Oscar nomination came for Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon.  In this 1973 hit, she was the shapely 1930s hootchie mama, Miss Trixie Delight.  She's out to use her "big tits" to hook a sugar daddy during the hard times of the Great Depression.  We laugh at this floozie carnival dancer, yet she also breaks our heart.  Trixie realizes that she doesn't have a very long expiration date.  Like Judy Holliday, Best Actress Oscar winner for Born Yesterday, the film version of Holliday's Broadway success, Kahn could have you doubled over with laughter at her ditziness and then move you with the depth of her poignant, revealing moments.  We see that so clearly in the light of Paper Moon.

Ovarian cancer took her away from us when she was only 57.  Madeline Kahn's final big screen performance graced an independent film not known by many.  But the dramatic performance is one of her best and makes you wish we could've had more time with her.  She's a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the 1999 movie Judy Berlin.

Edie Falco, of TV's The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, has the title role.  Ms. Falco is very fine indeed as the schoolteacher romantically attracted to Arthur, the school's principal.  Arthur is unhappily married to Alice.  Madeline Kahn is quite memorable and touching as Alice.  After I saw the film, hers was the performance that lingered in my heart and mind.

See it for yourself.  Judy Berlin is available on DVD.  Madeline Kahn -- what an original.