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THE DVD SHELF: Another "Muppet Show" Season, Plus Four Screwball Comedies
By Steven Suskin
14 Jun 2008
This month's column discusses the third season of "The Muppet Show," featuring some theatrical guest stars, plus comedies from Sturges, Wilder and Mae West.
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Buena Vista has brought us their annual release of another season's worth of Kermit, Miss Piggy and Co. Here comes The Muppet Show: The Complete Third Season. Twenty-four episodes from 1978-79, featuring the usual host of favorites (along with that frog, who indeed was the host of favorites). The Muppets were filmed here on the West Side, which resulted in perhaps more of a theatre sensibility than they might have had on the West Coast. Into the studio came a wide range of guests, some of whom don't fit easily in the same sentence (and, needless to say, were not on the same episode). Roy Rogers, Pearl Bailey and Jimmy Coco? Danny Kaye, Alice Cooper, and Liberace? Enough of this; suffice it so say, Kermit made them all feel perfectly at home in company with all those furry Henson creatures.
Also on hand are the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Roy Clark, Gilda Radner, Helen Reddy, Harry Belafonte, Lesley Ann Warren, Leslie Uggams, Elke Sommers, Roger Miller, Cheryl Ladd, Spike Milligan, and Lynn Redgrave. Which makes quite a group. Bonus features include "Muppets on Puppets," a 1969 hour-long educational-TV program hosted by Jim Henson and Rowlf. What's more, they give us four Purina Dog Chow commercials from as early as 1962, featuring Rowlf the dog and his sidekick Baskerville (who sounds suspiciously like Kermit).
Sylvester Stallone, Raquel Welch, and Jean Stapleton, anyone?
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Viewers who have been inspired by the rollicking hilarity of Broadway's sparkling revival of Boeing-Boeing might want a funny movie to watch just now, and Hollywood has obliged with four DVD's they call "Universal Cinema Classics: Screwball Comedies." This time, the label is properly descriptive. While these might not all be classics in the proper sense of the word — like Plato or "War and Peace" — they ought to be. Two or three of them, at least. And as for screwball comedy? Well, they are mighty, mighty funny.
It is not too hard to come up with the pick of the crop. I have always been partial to Easy Living. Don't know it, do you? Well, here's one you ought to run for. This is what the great Preston Sturges was doing back in the days before they would let him direct his own films, 1937 to be exact. Mitchell Leisen did it for him, and the results are right up there with "My Man Godfrey" and "It Happened One Night." In hilarity, at least. Jean Arthur is a poor, working girl; riding down Fifth Avenue in an open-air bus, a $58,000 sable coat lands on her head and immediately changes her life. The coat has been thrown from the window of a mansion by millionaire Edward Arnold ("the Bull of Broad Street"), and Arthur is soon tied up with Arnold and his son Ray Milland. It is all too Sturgian to recount here, but the pleasures are myriad; these include an hysterical scene at the Automat, and the entire sequence in the "Imperial Suit" with Mr. Louis Louis, of the Hotel Louis. (This is Louis pronounced "Louie," played by the delectable Luis Alberni.) The film is full of familiar faces from the Paramount lot; what would a Sturges movie be without William Demarest and Franklin Pangborn? All told, a breezy delight. Continued...
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