I Saw MOONLIGHT

I was so moved by MOONLIGHT.  There were feelings of hurt and anger and confusion onscreen that echoed those just like the ones I had in my youth when I realized I was different.  This movie made tears stream down my face. MOONLIGHT is a remarkable film.  It's powerful, poetic, moving and memorable.  Director and screenwriter Barry Jenkins has given us one of the best films I've seen this year.  We follow the boy-to-manhood growth of a fatherless male named Chiron (pronounced Shy-rone). He's a boy who grows up in a tough section of Miami in 1980s.  He's jackknife slim and a good student who has a soulful, rightfully wary face.  He's quiet.  He's gay.  He's bullied and in need of kindness.

Chiron is dark-skinned.  He is, like grown-ups on my block in South Central L.A. used to say when I was kid, "so black he's almost blue."  In the film, there's a story about that same kind of observation that gives the film its title.

MOONLIGHT is significant.  It's real.  There's violence, there's tenderness.  It's intimate and compassionate.  It's a cinematic door opened that makes a way for other fresh voices and new images in film.

Chiron grows into tough manhood.  He's a muscular man who knows the mean streets and can survive on them.  He has power.  This is not the Hollywood stereotype of the black gay male.  We will see how the dysfunction of Chiron's early home life with his troubled single mother coupled with his rough days as a schoolboy have made him the young man he is -- and how that could change.

That's all I'm telling about about the story.  I want you to experience the rest for yourself.  I will tell you that Mahershala Ali as the black/Latino drug dealer who becomes a gentle father figure to young Chiron is absolutely outstanding.

                                              
The dinner table scene in which the sad, loner schoolboy asks his father figure what a faggot is will break your heart with its poignancy, its painful truth.  That is a memorable scene, beautifully written and performed.  Young Chiron really doesn't have a vocabulary to express his loneliness, to express how unconnected he feels to the world around him.  I remember that feeling.  Mahershala Ali is exceptional in this simple yet complicated scene.  Here's a clip in which his character, Juan, encounters Chiron's mother for the first time.

I really started paying more attention to Mr. Ali when I saw him as a regular on HOUSE OF CARDS with Kevin Spacey.  He was the best thing about FREE STATE OF JONES starring Matthew McConaughey earlier this year.  Ali as Moses in that Civil War drama is the film's highlight.  Singer Janelle Monae will have to balance film work with her music career.  She's got the right stuff for film acting and she's very good in this as the girlfriend to Chiron's caring but imperfect father figure.  The whole cast of MOONLIGHT is good -- especially the three actors who played Chiron in the three stages of his life that we experience.  Here's a trailer.

In Hollywood films, the experience of the black gay male has been pretty much ignored.  For the most part, Hollywood has portrayed black gay men as stereotypes and second class citizens if you will.  We didn't get the main roles like Tom Hanks in PHILADELPHIA, Philip Seymour Hoffman in CAPOTE, Sean Penn in MILK, Colin Firth in A SINGLE MAN, Greg Kinnear in AS GOOD AS IT GETS, Ian McKellen in GODS AND MONSTERS, Ed Harris in THE HOURS and TOMMY LEE JONES in JFK.  All those actors got Oscar nominations for playing upscale gay men in those films.  The first three actors listed won the Best Actor Oscar.  Black actors in Hollywood films haven't traditionally received such substantial roles as gay characters.  Hollywood has yet to embrace that diversity.

MOONLIGHT shows how independent films make bold steps to bring in diversity and fresh stories, stories that Hollywood would be foolish to ignore.  This touching tale of self-discovery deserves Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.

Note to actors:  Notice how actor Trevante Rhodes as adult Chiron eats when he goes to the diner.  Look at how he holds his fork.  That is an excellent, accurate detail for a young man who's traveled the life road that character has in the last few years.  That is exactly how Jamie Foxx should have held his fork in DJANGO UNCHAINED.

Hollywood Birthday Pairs

Here's a trivia post on pairs who shared movie screen credits and birthdays.  It's Saturday, November 19th.  Born on this day in show biz history, two stars of one of Hollywood's best and nastiest Manhattan murder mysteries. The nastiness is covered up by deluxe apartment furnishings, sophisticated clothing and swanky cocktail parties.  But it is definitely there.  The story with all this elegant seediness is played terrifically by Clifton Webb and the gorgeous Gene Tierney, the stars of LAURA.  In addition to being the stars of this 1944 classic, they also shared a November 19th birthday.

Joining Clifton Webb and Gene Tierney in the cast were Dana Andrews, excellent as the detective, Vincent Price as the big city freeloader who's not above banging an older babe for a few bucks, and Judith Anderson as an older babe.  Otto Preminger directed the film.  Preminger and Vincent Price would go on to play villains on the kooky and colorful ABC TV series in the 1960s, BATMAN, starring Adam West.  If you're into classic film noir from Hollywood and you haven't seen LAURA...make it an immediate DVD must-see.

Clifton Webb was a stage veteran by the time Hollywood gave him his first major film role.  That role was in LAURA and Webb got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance as the brilliant and spiteful columnist, Waldo Lydecker.  That kicked off a fabulous film career for Webb that went on well into the 1950s.

Did you know that Clifton Webb was a Broadway song and dance man?  As a matter of fact, he introduced the Irving Berlin song "Easter Parade."  Clifton Webb performed it in a 1933 Irving Berlin Broadway musical.  The song was sung by Bing Crosby in the hit movie HOLIDAY INN, for which Irving Berlin won an Oscar for Best Song of 1942.  The song he wrote for Bing to introduce in HOLIDAY INN was "White Christmas."  The Easter song became the title and was sung by two of MGM's top stars in a classic movie musical.  Judy Garland and Fred Astaire were the stars of 1948's EASTER PARADE.  Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade" was also sung by Don Ameche in ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND.  This highly entertaining 20th Century Fox musical was a 1938 release, full of the Irving Berlin catalogue.  The stars of this Irving Berlin musical were Alice Faye as the brassy singer who's given sort of a Pygmalion makeover by Alexander, played by Tyrone Power.  He's the classy leader of a band who hires her.  Of course, the mouthy singer falls in love with the bandleader after the makeover.

Alice Faye and Tyrone Power shared screen credits in a couple of films.  My favorite pairing of theirs is in ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND.  And they also shared a May 5th birthday.

When I was new to New York City in the mid 1980s, I arrived to accept an on-air job for WPIX TV, New York City's local Channel 11.  One of the first celebrities I had the great privilege to interview on our weekday magazine show was Alice Faye.  Oh, man, she was sensational!  She was in town to promote an appearance.  We had a 5-minute interview but then we hung out for about fifteen minutes just chatting about life and her movies.  She was eager to chat more off the set when she realized I was classic film fan who knew him films and the names of songs she'd introduced in them.  She was proof that you can be over 60 and continue to be really hip.  I loved her attitude.  I still laugh at her comment about Fox studio head, her boss, Darryl F. Zanuck.  She could not stand him.  I think the lusty studio head tried several times to get his star in a "grand horizontal" and she wasn't having it.  Said Alice Faye, "Kid, I had one prayer and one prayer only at Fox: "Please, Lord, let me live long enough to see him die first."

Darryl F. Zanuck died in 1979.  Alice Faye died in 1998.

2-time Best Actress Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland celebrated her 100th birthday in July of this year.  Her second Academy Award came for her extraordinary performance as sweet, unsophisticated young woman jilted by a fortune hunter in THE HEIRESS.  Montgomery Clift starred as the handsome fortune hunter who pretends to love the heiress.

Master director William Wyler guided de Havilland to her second Oscar victory.  Not only did the star and the director share screen credits....

...they also shared a July 1st birthday.  They took time to cut a cake on the set.  That's co-star Miriam Hopkins on the right.

Can you think of any other films that had a pair of contributors to it who celebrated a birthday on the same day?

HIS GIRL FRIDAY Restored

You know the movie.  This classic is a gender-bender remake starring two actors in top form.  HIS GIRL FRIDAY starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell slamming across comedy performances that are just as fresh today as they were in 1940 when the film was released.  Grant was a master at screen comedy.  He was nominated for two Oscars.  Both nominations were for dramatic work.  Rosalind Russell racked up four Oscar nominations in her career.  HIS GIRL FRIDAY provided Russell with one of her signature roles.  But it didn't bring her an Oscar nomination.

THE FRONT PAGE, an early 1930s film version of the play, had two male leads in the newspaper story.  The Howard Hawks remake changed them to a bickering divorced couple -- the manipulative newspaper editor and his ace reporter who is also his ex-wife.  She's engaged. She plans to leave the journalism life and just be a housewife.  But an innocent man is scheduled to be executed and she's the right reporter to help the editor break the true story wide open.  If he can convince her to cover the story and delay her wedding to a big sweet dud played by Ralph Bellamy.

What a blessing it is for us classic film lovers to be in an age of film preservation and restoration.  When I was a kid in Los Angeles, the country wasn't wired for cable then.  We didn't have hundreds of cable channels and 24 hour TV programming.  We didn't have VHS, DVDs and DVR then.  We had the three senior networks -- CBS, ABC and NBC -- plus their local network affiliates. We also had a few local independent stations.  There were some old movies that aired a lot on more than one channel because they were "public domain."  The copyrights had not been renewed for whatever reason.  During summer vacations from school, three movies the aired a lot on local stations during those months were IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, HIS GIRL FRIDAY and Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE.  However, back then, Wilder's movie had been renamed THE BIG CARNIVAL because it was such a flop at the box office. And with unenlightened critics.  The prints of these movies were always grainy, scratchy and often edited down a bit to make room for commercials.  In my late teens and early adult years, those three films were constantly booked on revival movie theater schedules and we young baby boomers loved them.  I'm so proud that my generation so enthusiastically appreciated IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and ACE IN THE HOLE that it led to those works of art getting the love they deserved.  No longer are they public domain movies on VHS in the bargain buckets of drugstores.  They've been rescued, remastered and restored to mint condition.  They have prestige.

Come January 10th of next year, HIS GIRL FRIDAY gets love from the outstanding Criterion Collection.  That's the date for the Criterion release of HIS GIRL FRIDAY.  This Howard Hawks gem was on TCM one morning this week.  I had never, ever seen such a pearly print of that film.  It was gorgeous.

It's that's the quality we can expect from Criterion, that DVD package will make one fabulous belated Christmas gift.

In her autobiography, LIFE IS A BANQUET, Rosalind Russell had nothing but love and praise for Cary Grant -- and added that she really had to keep on her toes with Grant because he was such a comedy master.  She even had a couple of "ad libs" written for her to keep up.  And, yes, Hawks intended the machine-gun pace of their dialogue delivery.

She also wrote that, considering the zippy pace of the story coupled with the corrupt city politics Hildy Johnson (Roz) and Walter Burns (Cary) are hurriedly out to expose in the newspaper, she was worried about her character not showing a soft, feminine moment.

Hawks told her that moment would be when Hildy, in a slower and softer voice, interviews the unjustly convicted prisoner in his cell.  She offers the hopeless convict her cigarette and apologizes for the lipstick.  Watch that moment and you'll see just what director Howard Hawks meant.  And you'll see what Rosalind Russell expertly delivered.

Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell never won competitive Oscars but both performers received special awards from the Academy in the 1970s.  In 1940, moviegoers saw Cary Grant in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE WIFE and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY.  For Rosalind Russell, her "career girl" role as ace reporter Hildy Johnson followed her comedy breakthrough performance in 1939's THE WOMEN. 

So...for you HIS GIRL FRIDAY fans...look for the Criterion Collection release on Jan. 10th.
Criterion.com

In Judy Garland's Quartet

I needed a Judy Garland musical comedy yesterday.  One aired on TCM.  Most of my weekend TV viewing had consisted of news programs focused on the new team moving into the White House.  Personally, I'm starting to feel like Michael York's character during the "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" number in CABARET.  The Statue of Liberty must have tears streaming down her face ever since the election results were announced.  That's why I want to lighten my mood here and write about an actor who was lucky enough to dance with Judy Garland in one of her most entertaining MGM musicals.  I love her in this 1949 feature, one that teamed her with Van Johnson.  It's IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME.  Switching the action from Budapest to Chicago, this was a musical remake of the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch classic, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER.  Judy Garland and Van Johnson played the bickering co-workers who are secretly and anonymously personal ad pen pal sweethearts.

Judy Garland and Van Johnson recreated the roles originally played onscreen by Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart.

Some of the best acting you see on TV and in films is done by folks whose names you don't even know.  They are bit players and otherwise non-stars who fully commit to their characters, take a small role and give it their all.  Often, you don't know their names but you remember their performances.  Such is the case with actor Charles Smith.  For classic film fans, that name may not be recognizable but you know his face.  Ever since I was a kid watching old movies on TV, I have loved seeing Charles Smith pop up in classic films.  He was one of the jitterbug teens who meets the middle-aged George M. Cohan in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY.  Cohan teaches them the meaning of the "Stix Nix Hix Pix" headline on Variety.  He is very touching as the sad young GI on leave who breaks down crying in joy when he hears from his mother in the World War II fantasy/drama A GUY NAMED JOE.  He's not even on screen for five minutes but you remember his telephone booth scene.  For IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME, his assignment was musical.  He was a member of the quartet that performs the "Play That Barbershop Chord" number with Judy.  Here he is right above Judy.

Here's Charles Smith again -- on the upper left of Judy.

This was a very cool booking for Charles Smith and not solely because he got to sing and dance with a Hollywood legend.  He was in that bright musical remake -- and he was also in the 1940 original.  The younger Smith was so warm, innocent and boyish as Rudy in the final scene of the Lubitsch film.  The store owner, played by Frank Morgan, was despondent after learning his wife had cheated on him.  At the end, we see that young Rudy will become like a son to the kind and lonely store owner, giving him a reason to smile again.

The next big screen remake of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER was a big box office hit in the 1990s.  It was the romantic comedy YOU'VE GOT MAIL starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Starting in the 1930s, 20th Century Fox hit on the successful movie formula of following three females as they seek love and rich husbands.  Come the 1940s, this formula was a great format to showcase the studio's Fox Blondes.  Betty Grable starred in MOON OVER MIAMI (1941) which highlighted her vivacious song & dance skills coupled with her famous pair o' great gams.  Fox used the formula again for HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (1953) which highlighted Grable comedy chops and showcased a new Fox blonde named Marilyn Monroe.

Another musical comedy utilizing that Fox formula was 1946's THREE LITTLE GIRLS IN BLUE.  This film introduced moviegoers to blonde Broadway musical star Celeste Holm.  Blonde June Haver co-starred.

Charles Smith is in THREE LITTLE GIRLS IN BLUE.  He was paired with dancer Vera-Ellen.  Although both their singing voices were dubbed, they still stand as the two film actors who introduced a new song written for the movie.  A good song, it didn't really click with the public until Frank Sinatra recorded it about ten years later. 

Here are the dubbed Charles Smith and Vera-Ellen introducing it.  Charles Smith -- he was never a star but, man, he did some great stuff with the roles he got.  He was really proof of the old saying, "There are no small parts...only small actors."  Enjoy the song.  It's "You Make Me Feel So Young".

Kirk Douglas in POSSE

Is this 1975 western starring Kirk Douglas up there with his best work such as SPARTACUS, LUST FOR LIFE, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, ACE IN THE HOLE, PATHS OF GLORY and LONELY ARE THE BRAVE?  No.  But it's not bad.  I was up late one night this week and POSSE came on a cable station.  I watched it.  It was my first time seeing POSSE.  On camera, Kirk Douglas starred as the shady Texas lawman, Marshal Howard Nightingale.  He's short on scruples.  If you love Kirk Douglas, POSSE is a movie that will make you love him even more.  Specifically for what the Hollywood legend did behind the camera.  He was a mensch.  (Look it up.)

If Marshal Nightingale can capture and hang an outlaw bank robber, that outlaw's dead body could be the marshal's stepping stone to a seat on the U.S. Senate.  Bruce Dern played the killer gunslinger, Jack Strawhorn.

James Stacy was a handsome and popular actor on a network TV series.  The TV western was called LANCER.  Tragedy struck in 1973.  Stacy was riding his motorcycle when he was hit by a drunk driver.

The accident left him physically disabled.  He lost an arm and a leg.  Two years after the accident, he was cast as a newspaper editor in POSSE.  Kirk Douglas had the supporting role written into the screenplay specifically for the disabled actor.

Kirk Douglas could do that because, not only was he the star of POSSE, he was also the director and the producer.  Kirk Douglas showed Hollywood that a physical disability did not mean an actor should be excluded from employment.  James Stacy was still an actor who could hit his marks and deliver dialogue.  We need big stars to push like that for the hiring of disabled actors in today's Hollywood.

"You're too ambitious, Marshal," says the honest newspaper editor to the marshal who has blood on his hands.  In the opening moments of the story, we witness Marshall Howard Nightingale order the merciless killings of bank robbers as they slept.

This 1975 film marked James Stacy's return to acting after the 1973 accident that made him an amputee.  Stacy even went to get an Emmy nomination for a performance as a disabled Vietnam vet.

As for Kirk Douglas, he was also a generous director with Bruce Dern.  He not only shared the spotlight with the much younger actor, he lets Dern shine in solo scenes.

One more thing:  It was really strong of Kirk Douglas, a major movie star, to cast himself in an unflattering role and be truthful to the character.  That's what gives POSSE its balls.  When one character says, "Honest men stay honest as long as it pays," we see that thanks to Douglas' work as director.

The movie has plenty of action and some excellent stunt work. The screenplay is above average and has entertaining substance.  Dern's character is a terrorist whose execution could benefit a glory-seeking, hypocritical public servant who's hungry for a political career. 

James Stacy had been married to and divorced from actresses Connie Stevens and Kim Darby (star of the original TRUE GRIT).  Reportedly, he retired from acting in 1991.

Stacy died in September of this year at age 79.

Actor, director, producer, humanitarian Kirk Douglas will be 100 next month on December 9th.

James Earl Jones as President

My father had a paperback copy of it.  You see Mia Farrow reading the paperback in the first 20 minutes of ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968).  THE MAN by Irving Wallace, published in 1964, was a novel that got big attention.  During the brutality and beautiful accomplishments of that Civil Rights decade, he wrote a novel about a black man rising to the office of President.  This story by Irving Wallace would later develop into a project that would be another credit for the second black man in history to be an Oscar nominee for Best Actor.

Come the 1990s, whenever we saw a movie in which a black man could or did become our Commander-in-Chief, it was either played for laughs (Chris Rock in 2003's HEAD OF STATE, Terry Crews in 2006's IDIOCRACY) or it was in a sci-fi disaster film (Morgan Freeman in 1998's DEEP IMPACT).  Irving Wallace's novel was a serious story about the social and political effects of a black politician being appointed President of the United States.

Sidney Poitier was the first black man to be an Oscar nominee for Best Actor.  He won the Oscar for 1963's LILIES OF THE FIELD.  Two of the biggest box office hits of 1967 starred Sidney Poitier.  Come the following year, GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER and IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT would be two of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 1967.  IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT won.  Poitier was a top box office star of the 1960s.  A first for a black actor.  Did a major Hollywood studio snap up the big screen rights to THE MAN and adapt it into a deluxe major motion picture for Sidney Poitier?  Apparently not.

Broadway Tony winner JAMES EARL JONES was the second black man to be an Oscar nominee for Best Actor.  He was nominated for recreating his Tony-winning dramatic performance as a championship boxer in the early 1900s fighting bigotry in THE GREAT WHITE HOPE (1970).

THE MAN got a modest production budget and was adapted into what was basically a 90-minute made-for-TV movie that aired on ABC in 1972.  Rod Serling, the TV visionary who gave us THE TWILIGHT ZONE, wrote the script.  You can tell the budget was modest. The Forum in Inglewood, California passes for a building in Washington, D.C.  I grew up in Los Angeles and recognized the Forum's exterior right away.  James Earl Jones got the part of President Douglass Dilman.  He is remarkable in the role.

Despite the low budget, THE MAN drew some top talent into the cast to join James Earl Jones.  Veteran Hollywood stars from the 1930s & 40s are in it.  There's Burgess Meredith, Lew Ayres and Patric Knowles ("Lindsay" in AUNTIE MAME).  I felt that those movie veterans really bit into their roles with gusto because they were denied that kind of honest social material with an interracial cast in the old days of Hollywood's Production Code.  Janet MacLachlan is very good opposite Jones.  The late actress played the First Daughter.

Is this an excellent made-for-TV movie?  No.  But it's rich with excellent performances.  A memorable moment, one that highlights the brilliance of actor James Earl Jones, is the moment he realizes he is now President of the United States.  It's a small, truthful reaction from such a man.  Keep your eye on the glass in his hand.

Hollywood should've had more lead role opportunities for James Earl Jones so he could gotten a second Oscar nomination. And more.

James Earl Jones won his second Best Actor Tony Award for the original 1987 production of August Wilson's FENCES.

People were slapped in the face with the harsh reality that America did not instantly become "post-racial" when President Obama was elected to his first term.  We've really seen it in the President's second term and during the campaign of a candidate (R) out to replace him.

THE MAN is worth seeing now as we look at what America accomplished electing Barack Obama to the White House, it's worth seeing for where we are now and it's worth seeing for the extraordinary James Earl Jones.  God bless America, land that I love.  Enjoy THE MAN while he's here.

Song & Dance Man, Claude Rains

Singer Kay Starr, quite popular in the 1950s, died Thursday at her home in the posh Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles.  Her big hit record, the one that became her signature tune, was "Wheel of Fortune."  Kay Starr was 94.  She was so popular in the 1950s that she was a special guest star in a network TV special.  The production marked the musical debut of a cast member. The cast member was four-time Oscar nominee -- Claude Rains.

Yes, that Claude Rains.  The classy character actor who was seen in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, THE INVISIBLE MAN, Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS, NOW VOYAGER and CASABLANCA.

The show that featured Claude Rains in a musical spotlight was a network special for kids in 1957.  THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN starred Van Johnson doing double duty as a townsman in the medieval German village and as The Pied Piper.  This musical put Van Johnson in tights and gave him the kind of hat one would usually see on Claudette Colbert.    

It may be a medieval German village, but Van Johnson still sounds like he did at MGM in BATTLEGROUND, BRIGADOON and IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME with Judy Garland.  Also, it's obvious that he does not do his own athletic ballet-based dancing when we first meet the charismatic Piper.  This fantasy story, a morality tale about the misuse of authority and power based on a famous poem, is performed in verse like the Robert Browning poem.  Modern lyrics were added to the classical music of Edvard Grieg.  Although Van Johnson is the star, Claude Rains steals the whole production as the mayor who needs to rid his village of rodents.  The mayor also wants to eliminate school and play.  He finds children a bother.  Especially at dinnertime.  There's Rains on the right in the photo below.

About fifteen minutes into the show, there's a jaunty number called "Prestige" performed by Claude Rains as the medieval mayor and two of his councilmen.  Rains talk-sings like Rex Harrison in MY FAIR LADY.  He keeps the beat, obviously has fun with the number, and does a little dance bit on the table.  This TV special was made when the actor's big movie days were behind him and he was doing mostly television work.

The above photo is from the "Prestige" number.  The performer to the left of Claude Rains is Doodles Weaver.  Weaver was a tall, comic entertainer.  He was popular at the time and worked on NBC.  Actress Sigourney is the late entertainer's niece.  His brother, Pat Weaver, was the top NBC executive who created the TODAY show in 1952.

In the last half hour of the 90 minute telecast, Kay Starr has a brief acting role as a mother.  Her child, along with all the rest of the village's children, disappears after following the Pied Piper.  Kay has a number called "A Mother's Lament."

When I was a kid,  THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN was in syndication and aired frequently on an independent local station in L.A.  Mom would have my little sister and me watch it because it was good for kids and it was an introduction to some classical music.  THE WIZARD OF OZ this show is not.  At times, it has a better than average community theater look.  Keep in mind this is a production from the early days of TV.  But it sure is fun to see Claude Rains do a spirited song and dance.  What a fabulous surprise.  I found THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN online.

As for late Kay Starr -- what a solid singer she was.  My favorite recording of hers is one I play a lot every Christmas season.  I totally dig "The Man With the Bag"!  Here 'tis.