Reviews

Both the 9-1-1 shows tend to be unpredictable structured, with no such thing as a "typical" episode. This one continued the tradition, with some oddball emergencies, and a resolution for the Iris arc.

By the way, in the 1859 CME event, the aurora borealis was visible in Mexico, Cuba, and Hawai'i, so the guy snarking on that point is just plain wrong.

I chanced to catch this on US television many years ago, under the title of "The Treasure of Swamp Castle", and was astounded as I watched it to realize that it was an alternate version of a live show that I'd been in in New York in 1984. It's based on the novel "A cigánybáró" (1885), by Mór Jókai, which is also the source of the operetta "Die Zigeunerbaron" ("The Gypsy Baron") by Johann Strauss, II. Although it is not an operetta, much of Strauss's music is used as underscoring, most amusingly when the famous Pig-farmer's Song ("I've no time for learning writing. / Breeding pigs is too exciting.") is adapted as a formal gavotte.

The film is in the style of animation known as "International", and a tad surreal. Some bits of the plot seemed a bit vague, but perhaps that was the English translation.

It really doesn't matter how old you are; if you are not allergic to fantasy, you can enjoy "Just Add Magic". The cast is first-rate, and the writing displays a level of craft that is all too rare on American television. Episodes flow from one to another, and characters do not behave foolishly just to advance the plot. There is a strong mythology behind this tale, but, even after two seasons, there are still a good many questions left unanswered.

In some ways, "Just Add Magic" reminds me of "Babylon 5", and not just by the presence of the remarkable Mira Furlan in the cast. The good guys have been known to make mistakes, the bad guys are given serious motivations for their actions, and sometimes it's difficult to be quite certain just who the good guys and bad guys are in the first place. The adult actors are especially to be commended for their commitment to telling this story, and not letting the fact that it's aimed at kids be an excuse for half-hearted performances.

Emmerich Kálmán (in his native Hungarian, Kálmán Imre) was the most successful operetta composer of the Viennese Silver Age (defined as from the 1906 opening of "The Merry Widow" to the Anschuß in 1938), and his operettas are at the top of the heap in Europe to this day. He is not so well known in the USA because his works generally require performers who can sing like opera and dance like Broadway, and we don't, as a rule, grow those in America. It also doesn't help that, before about 1980, when he was produced in America, it was in watered- down versions, with substitute music and rewritten plots.

"The Circus Princess" is from his middle period, when he knew that his name would automatically sell tickets, and he was deliberately writing shows that were as big as possible, to give jobs to a maximum number of people. This one takes it to an extreme by adding a small circus to the cast, and this Russian TV movie takes full advantage of what Kálmán gave them. Though it sometimes reveals that it is only a TV budget, it is a very large TV budget, and makes a great effort to be a gorgeous as possible.

Unlike most operetta films, most of the original music is here, and most of it sounds the way it was written, except that lots of songs lose their second verses. I don't understand Russian, but the translator seems at least to have paid closer attention to sounds and rhymes than German shows normally receive in English. The plot is also more or less as in the original, except for the last act, where there is a lot of subplot that I can't follow, because it's not in the original show, and, as I said, I don't understand Russian.

The stars all give first rate performances. Especially to be remarked is Igor Keblušek as "Mister X". He was a young student from Czechoslovakia with no intentions of ever becoming an actor when he was drafted into the production, even though his spoken dialog and singing had to be dubbed. But the things he does with his face and his eyes are extraordinary, and make you wish that he had gone into acting as a career. After over thirty years, he is still regarded as a huge star in Russia.

Limbo sets, cheap costumes, Kálmán's brilliant orchestrations replaced by arrangements suggestive of Las Vegas in the 60s (or, occasionally, the Benny Hill Show), and excruciatingly bad sound, with dialog scenes that seem to have no room tone at all (I half suspect the whole thing was shot MOS and then looped—or dubbed—in a dead room), contrasted with musical numbers that all seem to have been taped in a hockey arena with the microphones ten feet away from the singers.

I might add that Mister X's world-famous circus routine is mostly a perfectly ordinary trapeze act, but with a grand finalé that is physically impossible.

At least the ingénue is cute.

If you don't mind it being completely in Russian, the 1982 version is far superior—if you can find it.

I can't tell you why, because it would be the biggest spoiler ever, but the reveal at the end of this episode is the only time in my life I was truly, literally rolling on the floor with laughter.

This is one of the many episodes in the series that went back to the time that Rob and Laura met, fell in love, got married, and settled into married life. In this episode, little Ritchie is born, and, after a number of mix-ups at the hospital, Rob becomes convinced that the baby has been mixed up, too.

I suppose the resolution doesn't seem as funny today as it did in 1963. As an old Greek philosopher said, you can never step into the same river twice. Time goes by, and society changes, and things that were hilarious to our ancestors merely puzzle us. But as long as people still live who remember America in the age of Eisenhower and Kennedy, some of us will recall this episode, and how it made us guffaw until we had to gasp for breath—and how it gave us all a little hope when we badly needed it.

My wife and I met doing a professional production of "The Merry Widow" in 1982 -- in English, but a straight translation.

Only the very basic skeleton of the original plot is visible in this "adaptation". Most of the characters have been deleted, along with the entire B plot, and all but one of the characters remaining have been renamed. Most of the characters in the movie aren't in the operetta, either. The action has been moved from Paris to, at first, Washington, DC, and then to the fictional country of Pontevedro, which the movie has renamed "Marshovia", and only later to Paris. The net result is that we don't reach the beginning of the original play until about 45 minutes in.

And the main source of tension in the plot is deleted, too. In the original, years before, Count Danilo and the heroine were very much in love, but his family refused to allow them to marry because she was poor; it's his broken heart that has rendered him a careless playboy. Now that, as a widow, she's the richest woman in the world, she still loves him, and he still loves her, but his pride won't let him admit it to anyone, even himself, and she must spend three acts playing mind games to break him down. The trope of the aristocrat with money problems who won't admit that he's in love with a rich woman for fear of what people will think supplied the main plots of a substantial fraction of Viennese operettas for decades after the 1906 "Widow". In this movie, they've never met before, which rips out not only the heart of the whole thing, but nearly all the comedy.

Lamas does a pretty decent job, though.

An interesting musical point is that several times we hear a snippet or so of "Trés Parisien", an extra song written (in English, despite the title) for the London première, which was not, as far as I know, usually found in American productions until the 1980s or so.

It seems that not everybody remembers the world in 1967.

To begin with, there was no such thing as no-fault divorce. A divorce had to involve one "guilty" party, and one "innocent" party. Two "guilty" parties would just be blown off with "You two deserve each other." And it was regarded as standard good manners for the man to offer himself up as "guilty", unless the woman was a complete slut or psycho. (See "The Gay Divorcée" for an example of a man who /doesn't/ follow this social rule, because he's a pig.)

Now, also during this period, the usual rule was that the wife got the kids, and the wife and kids were entitled to be just as well off as they had been before the divorce. (Remember, as far as the Law was concerned, she and they were officially innocent victims of the Big Bad Man.) So alimony could be very high indeed.

As to her getting a job....

There was no such thing as professional daycare. If a divorced woman were poor, she could probably leave the kids with a neighbor, because poor folks have been doing that for thousands of years, but for a middle-class divorced woman to do that would have been regarded as shameless freeloading.

There were relatively few jobs for women, and even fewer that paid decently. A woman could be a secretary, but shorthand and typing take years of practice. (There were no personal computers then; few people could type except for writers and secretaries.) And secretaries didn't make much more than minimum wage, anyway. The same for stitchers in clothing factories (America had clothing factories back then). Beautician? Cleaning woman? Hotel maid? Nurse? None of them paid all that well. There were a handful of woman doctors, lawyers, and the like, but the closest pointer to the future was that there have always been quite a few women in computer programming. But you couldn't just walk in and ask for a programming job if you'd never done it before.

In short, this movie makes the usual exaggerations you expect in a comedy, but it is nowhere near "preposterous" or "ridiculously unrealistic". It's pretty solidly grounded in 1967 reality.

Now, on the other hand, I can't say I like the movie all that much. I guess I'm too romantic to take divorce as a joke. But the performances are sound, and I have to say that Van Dyke and Reynolds both had guts to tackle this script at all. Both of them have always been typecast as "lovable".

First of all, there is no "real" story of Arthur except that there's about a 51% chance that someone called (not necessarily named) Arthur lived in the 5th century, and helped hold off the invasion of Britain by the Saxons for several generations. The rest of it is fiction, and maybe it all is. Some of it is from legends that were floating around the area of modern Ukraine hundreds of years before Arthur, but somehow got attached to him, but most of it is from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when every writer in Europe wanted to write a better Arthur story than the last guy. (Without copyright laws, no one can say what is "canon" and what is "fanfic".)

"Modern guy finds himself in Camelot" is a very old idea; it's been done dozens of times, and a lot of the attempts have been dumber than this one. At least the young hero has some idea of what's happening to him, instead of being the brainless slacker I expected.

"The Excalibur Kid" is an agreeable time-waster at the worst.

A very funny parody of a very stupid book, "The Norman Rockwell Code" should be seen by everyone. Mike Walsh's impression of Don Knotts has been praised by many, but I was also impressed by Danica Carlson's performance as "Sopha Poisson of the Quebec Secret Service"; this is a young actress to watch, and I'll never again be able to think of a crème brûlée or a meringue without being reminded of her.

And despite the absurdity of the "great secret" of the "Norman Rockwell Code", at least it doesn't contain as many howlers as Dan Brown's ignorant hackwork did.

The location photography, by the way, is excellent, showing New England as it truly is, a rare film achievement.

Noel Coward, who wrote both the words and the music of the original 1929 operetta, called this movie "a nauseating hotchpotch of vulgarity, false values, seedy dialogue, stale sentiment, vile performances, and abominable direction." He found it so offensive that he never again allowed Hollywood to have anything to do with his musicals, and put a clause in his will to that effect.

I entirely agree with his evaluation. No one who has had the chance to see the brilliant and heartbreaking original play can look on this bastard tinsel and frou-frou offspring without feeling first incredulity, then disgust, and finally a deep personal hatred for everyone involved in the nasty thing.

By the way, the connection between this movie and "Maytime" is complicated. You see, some Hollywood suit didn't like the original show, "Maytime", but wanted to use the title, and so they ripped off the plot of "Bitter Sweet" and combined it with lots of songs that aren't from either "Maytime" or "Bitter Sweet", apart from just one actual "Maytime" song, and called the result "Maytime". (Eddy and MacDonald's movie called "The Chocolate Soldier", similarly, is the plot of the play, "The Guardsman", mixed with some of the songs from "The Chocolate Soldier", but none of the plot.) So when they decided to make "Bitter Sweet", they kept the same basic plot, but dumbed it down, creating this abortion.

Where to begin....

Yes, there is a connection between Arthur and the Sarmatians. But the idea of Sarmatian boys being drafted in their homeland is all wrong. A whole retired regiment of Sarmatian mercenaries was settled in Britain in the 2nd century, and they continued to live there as a distinct cultural enclave for two hundred years that we know of, and probably into the Arthurian era. Their original commander was named Lucius (personal name) Artorius (family name) Castus (sub-family name). A descendant of his /might have been/ the real Arthur. On the other hand, it's also possible that his name became a word for "General" among the British Sarmatians.

If the "Woad People" are supposed to be Britons, it's wrong; the Britons were Christian and Romanized by Arthur's time. If they're supposed to be the Picts, it's still wrong; the Picts were just as bad as the Saxons, attacking the Britons from the north while the Saxons attached from the east. (Yes, the east; if you sail from the Netherlands and/or Denmark to Britain, you don't normally arrive in Scotland.)

Pelagius, as far as we know, died a natural death, and was not condemned as a heretic in his lifetime. And the movie's notion that Pelagius's theological ideas concerning free will are somehow related to Jeffersonian notions of political freedom is so confused as nearly to constitute a pun.

Most of the knights named (Lancelot, Galahad, Dagonet....) are almost certainly creations of French literary works, not found in the early legends. And Dagonet was Arthur's /jester/. Bors is very likely a Sarmatian name, though.

Add to this a jumpy plot, clumsy cinematography (the layout of the land at the climactic battle is incomprehensible, and the action is shot from both flanks, a gross cinematic sin), bad continuity (giant gates that need to be turned by Clydesdales in one scene apparently open and close by sheer magic in another scene), scenes that go nowhere.... It's a mess.

Now understand, it's not absolutely disgusting. You can watch it, as long as you don't take it too seriously. And it /is/ truer to what probably really happened than any other Arthurian movie I know of. And Keira Knightley is a total hottie. But "King Arthur" is still a mess.

Alexandr Volkov's 1939 book "Volshebnik izumrudnogo goroda" is not too well known in the US, although in the former Soviet bloc it is generally regarded as a great classic of children's literature. The reason that it is not so well known here is that its title translates as -- ahem! -- "The Wizard of the Emerald City". (The author admits he had a little help from an American named Baum.) Volkov, in fact, went on to write a number of original sequels (they show in spots that he must have read some of Baum's sequels, but chose to write his own, instead). These sequels were continued after his death, as Baum's were in the US, and there is now a _third_ set of sequels being written, also in Russian, said to be "more Russian and less Soviet" than Volkov's.

Anyway....

This film is a fairly charming stop-motion adaptation of Volkov's version, quite faithful to Volkov's text, which diverges from Baum's in places, though it is much more faithful to Baum than the Judy Garland movie is. The copy I saw was not of the best quality, though, as with most old videotape. Songs, of course.