1948: Television's Year

There was something special about 1948. That was the year people started buying TVs, though they were still called "television sets" and built into elaborate cabinets with swinging doors (sometimes incorporating a radio and a small refrigerator). The feeling was that the big, naked glass eye was going to see right into the living room unless it was covered up. At very least, all that exposed glass was somehow disturbing. In the ads for Dumont television sets, which were state-of-the-art, an attractive woman always walked into the frame and CLOSED the cabinet doors, instead of opening them dramatically to display the set. Something odd about that message: see how you can hide the whole thing!

Like so.

People didn't watch TV then: they "looked at television", a sort of parallel to "listened to the radio". The programming was primitive, the picture quality dark and smudgy. We must take into account, however, that there was no videotape then, and all we have left from those spookily magical times are kinescopes, filmed directly off the cameraman's monitor which was probably small, dark and unstable (a good description of the shows and their stars).

Variety shows ruled. This was a hangover from vaudeville that carried on into the late '60s with shows like Ed Sullivan and Hollywood Palace. But these programs were not much more than radio with pictures. In some cases, as with Jack Benny and Milton Berle, they were performed on a stage with curtains, and even with an announcer holding a microphone. 

Not that I remember any of that. No, I really don't.

This looks like satire, but it isn't. It's an example of the kind of programming you'd see during the day - filling time, mostly. Note, at the end of this, there's a little blurb for Kovacs on the Corner - one of Ernie's earliest TV incarnations. He had to fill four or five hours of air time a day, and did radio "on the side". 

This is a strange one, an example of the way TV had NO IDEA how to handle visuals. The opening credits are just a primitive, probably hand-cranked crawl with blocky white letters on grey. Carlton Emmy and his Mad Wags sound particularly frightening. And those 50 Olsen and Johnson Punchinellos sounds like about 48 Punchinellos too many.

This is interminable, but I include it just for that reason: people's attention spans were much longer then, and/or they read much more slowly. The fact that after all that waiting and waiting and waiting, we get. . . SUSPENSE. . . seems a bit ironic. And what is that Auto-lite thing anyway?

Until I find a stranger one, this is the strangest: Okay Mother, starring. . . Dennis James? A transvestite, perhaps, sort of like Mrs. Doubtfire. And three sponsors for what might have been a 15-minute show (a common format then)?

I never know where all these come from (though I make them from YouTube videos). There's something called the Prelinger Archives that must have gazillions of them, and an Internet Archive that has never made a damn bit of sense to me. Maybe people kept them in their basements? Some people buy old VHS tapes at flea markets and at auction in hopes there's something good on them. Do I miss the good old days of VHS, or, in our case, Beta? No. I love my DVR and would never go back. But Smudgeville has its charms. 

This logo is a prime example of "don't worry, folks, TV is really just your old familiar radio in a new form". The huge microphone receiving, then blasting out sound waves, the telephone pole emitting - whatever it is emitting, lightning bolts? - almost seems like a reassurance that this is something we already know. Sort of.  Just keep it covered up when you're not looking at it.

I have a thing for logos, so I'll include this particularly dull one. The three-note chime was held over from the radio, though it took quite a while for NBC to come up with a good visual to go with it.

The NBC peacock in all its glory, before they dumbed it down into its current dull form.

Please Stand By.

(Uhhhm . . here are some more, from just a couple years later, perhaps 1950 - '52. Most of these are based on a YouTube series by MattTheSaiyan called Classic Commercials for Defunct Products. There are, so far, 119 videos, so you may be seeing these for some time.)

Though these look like animated cellphone prototypes, I think they're supposed to be dancing cameras. Though they could also be remote controls. Early TV animation was primitive, not to mention strange in its concepts.

If you look carefully at this  Dumont TV commercial, a rare instance of the cabinet opening rather than closing, you'll notice the "zoom" wobbles in a way that looks suspiciously like the cameraman is walking towards the TV. The bleary distorted picture is state-of-the-art and meant to inspire ooohs and ahhhs.

A particularly delightful ad for a hair-care product, Toni Home Permanent. The ads in this era showed women with lacquered, military-helmet-like hair which was touted as "soft and natural". The do-it-yourself perms, always described as quick and easy, were a mass of "pin-curls" all over the head which would be impossible to do on your own. The real irony here is that in the "before" pictures, the women have hairstyles much closer to what we see today,

Yes, yes, I know I devoted at least one entire post to Pream commercials. But this reaction is hands-down my favourite.

I love the element of surrealism here.

This is a riff on Jack and the Beanstalk, an example of bizarre early-TV animation. Dancing oat flakes are a new one on me.

That's All I Can Remember

GOD! It took me a long time to find this. It's a song I remember from childhood, when we owned every album Burl Ives ever made. I kind of underestimated him, I think - I thought he was just this bulky, dorky folk singer who sang kiddie songs and once in a while showed up in a movie. But this song, which I hadn't heard in - God! I hate to say, perhaps 50 years - stuck in my head. It was about a man who had been executed for a double murder and thus was singing to us, not from Heaven Above, but that other place.

YouTube just burgeons constantly, a never-ending joy and source of fascination for me, but I sure had to wait a long time for this. Ives was a unique singer with an extremely subtle and expressive tenor voice. He "undersang" rather than belted, didn't even project very much at all because he had a sort of silvery quality, like moonlight.  Even though we get to experience the horror of the electric chair directly ("they turned on the juice. . . "), he sings almost tenderly, and without a trace of anger or self-pity.

It's a damn good arrangement, and I love the smokily subtle chorus, though there are other versions such as this one (which I posted a couple of years ago) that take a slightly different approach. I don't know who Cowboy Copas is, or was, because I loathe country music more than anything. But some artists transcend genre, and this version is compelling in its own way.

Or is it the fact that I'm just bloody morbid? I've always had a fascination with death and the macabre. Death-in-life. I have seen friends of mine drop off the planet one by one, and I wonder where they go. People younger than me, I mean, and some of them even healthy, seemingly destined to live another 30 years. And then -

For many years, I was adamantly against the death penalty. We don't have it in Canada, and I am just as glad, but there are cases, particularly child murder - let's just say my views have changed, at least under particularly horrendous circumstances. People are more likely to murder their families, the people they "love" the most, than anyone else. It stretches our capacity to believe that human nature can really be that dark.

Stay gay!

Man imprisoned for being gay to get posthumous pardon from Trudeau

'It’s great that the young Trudeau is finishing the work that his father started,' lawyer says.

CBC News Posted: Feb 28, 2016 4:06 PM ET Last Updated: Feb 28, 2016 8:25 PM ET


The Klippert case stoked considerable media and political interest in Canada and prompted the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau to introduce a bill in 1967 that, among other things, called for the decriminalization of private, consensual homosexual acts between people over the age of 21.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intends to posthumously pardon Everett George Klippert who, because he admitted to police in the 1960s that he was gay, was deemed a dangerous sexual offender and sent to prison.

"The prime minister intends to recommend that a pardon under the authority of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy be granted posthumously to Mr. Klippert," Trudeau's office said in a media release.

The move was cheered Sunday by gay-rights advocates.

"It's fantastic that he'll get a posthumous pardon," lawyer Doug Elliott told CBC News.

As well, the statement said the Liberal government will also look to see whether pardons are "warranted" after reviewing the cases of other individuals who in the past were convicted on charges such as gross indecency and buggery.

"As Canadians, we know that protecting and promoting fundamental human rights must be an imperative for governments and individuals alike, and this includes gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation," the weekend statement said.

Trudeau's office credited Klippert's case for being "instrumental" in Canada's decision to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults.

Indefinite prison sentence

Klippert was questioned by the RCMP in 1965 during an arson investigation in Pine Point, N.W.T. He wasn't involved in the fire, but voluntarily said he'd had sexual relations with four men. He was charged with four counts of gross indecency, all for consensual, private, non-violent acts.

In 1966, Klippert was visited in prison by a Crown-appointed psychiatrist who concluded that Klippert's homosexuality was "incurable," and that he therefore met the criteria regarding dangerous sexual offenders.

A judge agreed and sentenced Klippert to preventive detention, meaning an indefinite term in prison.

The sentence was backed up by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1967, although Chief Justice John Cartwright suggested the laws regarding homosexuality be clarified, and that incarceration of harmless homosexuals was not their intention.

The Klippert case stoked considerable media and political interest. Just six weeks later, Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal government's justice minister (who would later become prime minister) introduced a bill that, among other things, called for the decriminalization of private, consensual homosexual acts between people over the age of 21.

"It's great that the young Trudeau is finishing the work that his father started," Elliott said.

Before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, people were routinely charged with gross indecency — a charge almost always applied to homosexuals — but rarely for private, consensual acts.

Klippert was released from prison on July 21, 1971. He was 69 when he died in in 1996.

"I never understood: Why didn't Pierre Trudeau let him out in 1969 when they decriminalized gay sex?" Elliott said. "They kept the poor guy who was responsible for shining a light on this issue in jail for another couple of years."

Last week, the prime minister confirmed he will march in Toronto's Pride parade on July 3, a move that would make history with Trudeau being the first sitting PM in Canada to take part in the event.

BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. So why this? Why now? When I saw this article, I groaned - groaned that anyone was ever imprisoned for consensual sex of any kind. Consenting adults in private - isn't that the deal? Shouldn't that have been the deal even then? I guess not.

I also groaned at the word "pardon". It means "forgiveness of wrongdoing", which isn't exactly what we're after here, is it? It's like saying "I forgive you" to someone who hasn't done anything. It doesn't go down too well with me. I've been "forgiven" for shit THEY did to ME.

But the worst were the comments: 84 of them, and nearly all of them extremely negative, vilifying Justin Trudeau for wasting taxpayers'dollars/our precious time. Of those who commented, practically no one showed any sensitivity at all for the plight of this man and the countless others who did serious time because of their sexual orientation. The vast majority believed it was an irrelevant issue that belonged in the musty vaults of the past.

I think it's time i stopped reading , watching and listening to the news . the lunacy of our current and recent governments is just getting too much for me .

This Guy wont stop anywhere to scrape out an extra vote. .What has happened happened you cant turn back time but the Liberals think all you have to do is throw taxpayer money at any situation..

Nothing more important to d than pardoning dead people? This is like the ministry of truth in 1984 rewriting history.

Oh for God's sake please don't ! . Do we not have enough problems here in Canada to deal with now as it is ?? with out having to go digging up old dead skeletons ?? next thing you'll hear is how some folks are going to be demanding "compensation" for being wrongly convicted decades ago. This will only lead to further strain on our already collapsing economy .

This is what our Prime Minister is focusing on?

The insanity continues... How about dealing with what is happening in Canada now?

I cannot believe he has to delve into the past when seniors are close to eating dog food and they are throwing $1700 a month to each member of a Syrian family stuffed into a hotel room in Toronto. JT please .....

Why do the important business of the nation when you can do stuff like this.

That figures. No surprises there.

My dismay at this story just grows: as was usually done back then, this guy was "examined" and deemed "incurable" by a psychiatrist. So what is that supposed to mean? It shook loose some pretty disturbing memories: all sorts of shit came pouring back into my mind. I used to read a great deal of crap - now I have no idea why, though most of it fell under the guise of "self-help". I guess I thought these "experts" knew better than I did about how to live my life.

One of my favorite psycho-babblers was one Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, one of those New York psychoanalytic types who got into writing simplistic bestsellers like The Angry Book and The Thin Book by a Formerly Fat Psychiatrist. Everything was pathologized in his books, including anything sexual that didn't fit within the bounds of holy matrimony, in the missionary position, not more than once or twice a month.

Here is one of his pronouncements on homosexuality:

“Homosexuality is a symptom of emotional disturbance. Emotional disturbance can be remedied and the homosexual can become heterosexual, but the psychotherapeutic process is long and quite often painful… This means in effect, changing the relating habits of a lifetime—no easy matter. Few homosexual people have the extraordinary motivation required to take on this great effort—but some do and are successful.” (Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, The Winner’s Notebook, New York: Pocket Books, 1969, p. 53)

Just the fact that this is in a book called The Winner's Notebook (and I - gasp, gulp - remember reading it and in fact might still have a copy floating around) takes a distancing, poking-with-a-sharp-stick approach to "homosexuality", as if to say, "We know none of this applies to us, because we're Winners. But not everyone is in that category. Some of these people are so emotionally fucked-up that they can't even make themselves straight, the way they could and would if they were motivated and really tried."

This book came out in that pivotal year, 1969, when Pierre Trudeau, father of our current Prime Minister, decriminalized gay sex with the famous statement, "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But it took another two years for Everett Klippert to be set free, and no doubt he carried a criminal record, not to mention deep emotional scars, for the rest of his life.

Anthony Perkins, best-known for the Hitchcock thriller Psycho, was a fine and sensitive actor/human being who was forever questing for truth. He also strove personfully to give up his own natural orientation in order to get married and have kids: in other words, to make himself straight. But in this impossible goal he was influenced hugely by his analyst, Mildred Newman, the author of the famous/ infamous 1970s bestseller, How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

“Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.”

Though Tony was widely viewed as one of Newman's "success stories", mainly because he had a long-suffering wife and managed to stay married, he died of AIDS in 1992, weighed down with guilt and shame that he had not been able to live up to the pressure to "go straight".

If a man had consensual sex with a man (for women didn't seem to be included in the equation), it was a criminal act, and it stayed that way for a very long time. People went to jail for it the same way they would for child sexual abuse. But thanks to "experts" like Rubin and Newman, homosexuality was converted from a crime into a serious mental illness, a pathology. For this, these therapists were viewed as compassionate humanitarians deserving of praise, if not awards. The underlying agenda was that you had to act straight, no matter how you really felt. Stay married. Keep it hidden. This is where the expression "in the closet" originated.

There might have been a time in my life that I didn't "get" all this. And I will never get it the way someone who has lived through it would. But things are different, there has been a shift. I had very mixed feelings about this pardon, because as far as I am concerned the man did nothing wrong. How do you pardon something that isn't a crime? The reasoning is, it was a crime THEN and so it needs to be pardoned retroactively. This is sad, but not as sad as all those ranty ugly comments, the dozens and scores and even hundreds of them, from people who seemed to feel we were wasting our time on all this stuff and should just forget about it. Because the guy is dead, or because it's a "gay issue", it isn't worth the public's concern.

It's the same attitude that says, those aboriginal people should just get on with it! This is 2016, they can't have a pow-wow and try to get all that land back, because it belongs to US now. It's just a waste of taxpayers' dollars. As a relative of mine likes to say, "Awww, why not just shoot 'em."

Our culture does not understand reparation. It doesn't. It barely understands any sort of attitudinal shift and why it needs to happen. There are a great many people keeping their mouths shut because they don't have the courage to come out with what they really believe. Instead, they slap ugliness all over the newspaper comments section UNDER ALIASES, saving themselves any sort of repercussion. It's the most cowardly act I can think of for a writer not to sign a piece of their work.

Back in the Stone Age when I wrote for newspapers (and I spent 25 or 30 years doing so and wrote literally thousands of columns and reviews), the paper phoned me if I wrote a letter to the editor to verify my identity. I had to provide my phone number and full address if my letter was even to be considered for publication. Now the most toxic spews appear under full protection of anonymity, so that people can savage the article, the editor, the paper itself, and all the other people submitting comments, not to mention all those politically-correct types who keep wasting our time and money. So long as the comment isn't "defamatory" (and by whose standards, I do not know), it gets posted. This is considered a "valuable public forum" and a place for people to air their grievances and express their disagreements. That's the worst pile of shit I have heard of in my life.

So hatred has a new place to hide. This crap never gets solved or healed, never goes away - just goes underground. This makes reading/watching the news so depressing that I am increasingly avoiding it. It's grim, oppressive and does not do anyone any good, and it does not improve my increasingly low opinion of the human race.

I like to think that being happy is an act of resistance - one I must work on daily to avoid a tidal wave of soul-destroying depression. And I don't always make it. But I will be damned if I will let these bastards take from me the things and the people I hold most dear. I won't let them have my compassion, or my intelligence, or my joy. But my God, I wish sometimes that it wasn't such an interminable and exhausting battle.

http://www.homosexuals-anonymous.com/

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Excerpt)

By OSCAR WILDE

He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men

In a suit of shabby gray;

A cricket cap was on his head,

And his step seemed light and gay;

But I never saw a man who looked

So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,

Within another ring,

And was wondering if the man had done

A great or little thing,

When a voice behind me whispered low,

"That fellow's got to swing."

Dear Christ! the very prison walls

Suddenly seemed to reel,

And the sky above my head became

Like a casque of scorching steel;

And, though I was a soul in pain,

My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what hunted thought

Quickened his step, and why

He looked upon the garish day

With such a wistful eye;

The man had killed the thing he loved,

And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

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Baby, get your gun!

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Toddler shooting tragedies could be prevented by arming 2 year-olds, insist NRA



http://newsthump.com/2014/12/31/toddler-shooting-tragedies-could-be-prevented-by-arming-2-year-olds-insist-nra-2/

After a two-year old tragically shot his mother using her legally concealed weapon, the NRA have insisted such tragedies could be prevented if all two-year olds were given their own guns.

The incident took place in Idaho in the US, where children are forced to wait until their 8th or 9th birthday before being given a gun of their own.

The NRA have been quick to offer a solution to such tragic incidents, insisting there is only one way to prevent them in future.

NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre explained, “It might have been an accident, but would this toddler have reached into his mother’s bag for a gun if he had already been holding his own gun? Almost certainly not.”

“If the toddler had pointed his own gun at his mother, she would still have had her own gun at hand and would have been able to defend herself, saving an American life right there.”

“Some in the liberal media would say targeting a small handgun called ‘My First handgun’ at children as young as two is dangerous, but I would say the only danger is not targeting them younger.”

“Once again a disarmed American is killed in an incident that could have been prevented had there been more guns available.”

NRA shooting solution

Idaho residents have called the dangerous lack of guns in their young child’s livesan ‘accident waiting to happen’, whilst gun manufacturers have announced a new toddler line being added to their range this summer.

Gun salesman Chuck Williams told us, “You know, ‘My First Handgun’ is great product for the first grader, but it’s too big and bulky for your average kindergarten attendee.”

“We’re working on a new design that comes in baby pink that fits nicely in the palm of your average baby.”

“You don’t even need to be able to walk in order to be able to use it.”

“God bless America!”

BLOGGER'S NOTE. This is yet another example of my stealing an article, but it's too important not to steal, satire or not. Hey, I'm a Canadian and have neither seen nor heard a gun in my entire life. The only person I have ever known who owned guns had an antique rifle collection, and he never fired them. Maybe the majority of Americans are the same. Aren't they? God, how I hope so.

I watched an old Dateline last night in which one man shot another in a Walgreen's parking lot, because he found out the guy was diddling his wife. When he explained the whole thing to police, he said something like, "No, I never meant to shoot anyone. I saw this guy coming for me so I pulled out my gun, and then he pulled out HIS gun. . . "

Like pulling out "my wallet", or "my keys". "My gun". "His gun." The thing I carry around with me all the time. . . for self-defense, of course.

Because this guy was carrying around His Gun as a regular accessory, he had a deadly weapon instantly at hand, so his rival lay dead a couple of seconds later. If neither of these guys had been armed - if they had been dumb old Canadians meeting in a Tim Hortons parking lot to have it out over a love triangle -  this deadly incident would have amounted to a whole lot of  sweater-pulling and missed head-punches, like in an NHL game where the blows don't connect because of the ice. (Come to that, there probably WOULD be ice.) 

We're not "better", but this attitude of arming everyone to "stop gun violence" - I've never heard of it around here. Ever. We feel sadness about all this, along with a lot of distaste. And fear. We fear being swallowed up, as we always have.

Canadians are often denigrated and our nation labelled third-rate. But look at the dynamics here. Canada is almost 100 years younger than the United States. Where was the States in 1876? Not exactly where they are now, at least in cultural sophistication. Canada's population is roughly 1/10 of the States - you heard that right, it's 10%, spread over a much wider geographical area, with a limited number of concentrated areas of population. It's a different setup altogether. Our history is vastly different, and vastly boring, with virtually no bloodshed, at least not among civilians. One of our greatest writers, Robertson Davies, was famously quoted as saying, "Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution". Not wishing to fight, these Loyalists and crazy Quakerish types just pulled up stakes and left. Headed North, like a lot of people do.

Thus, celebrities are already planning their escape to Canada if Trump becomes President. It could happen. Escaped slaves from the American South found safe haven in Canada (though I never learned my own city was a hub of such sanctuary until years and years later: the school system seemed to think there was something shameful about it). And what about the draft dodgers? I know people who are still living here who escaped the draft in the 1960s. "Hey-hey-hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

We're culturally different, and though (of course) there is violence, there are gangs (who get their hands on guns no matter what), murders, and so on, people are more apt to use clumsy methods like knives and clubs. Not exactly civilized, but a bullet is a bullet: when aimed just right, it is instantaneous death.

Don't arm the kids. Don't arm the men, or the women. Put down your weapons, beat your swords into ploughshares. Listen to us before it's too late. Dorky, powerless, boring old Canada, the nation without an ego, might just be on to something after all.

POST-BLOG REVELATIONS: Yes, there IS violence in Canada! But this is all I could find, one short article that was repeated over and over again. Somehow, "fighting for his life" had morphed into "serious but stable condition" by the end of the article. As far as I know, both men were OK, eh?, but boy were they pissed at each other until the cops got them to make up, and one guy bought the other guy a "donut" and a double-double.

KINGSTON, Ont. — One man is charged with attempted murder and another is fighting for his life in hospital after an early morning knife fight at a Tim Hortons on Tuesday.

Police were called to the coffee shop just after 5 a.m.

They arrested a 30-year-man near the scene with a slew of charges, including attempted murder, weapons dangerous and two counts of breach of weapons prohibition order.

The 39-year-old man taken to hospital with stab wounds is in serious but stable condition, police said.

Police have not released names or what they thought was behind the early-morning coffee shop brawl.





BONUS STORY! No guns in this story at all! (Promise!)

JIM MOODIE, QMI AGENCY

May 22, 2014, Last Updated: 3:06 PM ET

It's the kind of story as Canadian as maple syrup - a northern Ontario man found a two-day-old baby moose on the side of the highway, picked it up and took it to Tim Hortons.

"She still had the umbilical cord and was still wet when I found her," Stephan Michel Desgroseillers of Copper Cliff, Ont., told Shirley Erkila, who posted a video of her petting the calf outside the coffee shop near Sudbury, Ont., on Monday.

"The wolves would have got to her," Desgroseillers said.

In a posting on the radio station Q92 Rocks Facebook page, Desgroseillers said he was the one who picked up the small calf and took it to the Wild at Heart Animal Shelter in Lively, Ont., but not before having to keep it for the night.

On his own Facebook page, he said the moose calf was "the sweetest thing ever except for the crying."

(I think I know how she feels.)

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The Baby Jane Quiz (for pretentious film students only)

You might not think so, boys and girls, but you are, you ARE in film school, or you wouldn't be reading this, and you will be taking this quiz or I won't bring you your din-din.

Everyone has seen the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford classic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And if you haven’t, how can you call yourself a film student? This is the movie in which Bette Davis proves, once and for all, that she can mop the floor with Joan Crawford and act rings around her, rings that are every bit as dizzying as the donuts Blanche turns in her wheelchair when she discovers Jane has served her a large rodent for dinner.

(From the production notes: the rat is actually a capybara imported from Argentina.They'll work for scale, whereas rats charge an exorbitant amount to lie still for that many takes). 

This will by no means be a comprehensive exam, because that would mean too much work for me, I saw this film for probably the twelfth time last night and was struck once again by how it’s Jane who gets our sympathy. As in Gone With the Wind, in which we're supposed to love and admire Melanie for being so selfless and sweet, we just keep rooting for Scarlett. Want to know why? There are reasons, brutal ones, but true nonetheless - which you will discover as you wrap your enfeebled brain around this quiz.

1. Why do we feel so much sympathy for Baby Jane the screaming banshee/harridan/flaming bitch on wheels, who tears up the scenery, kills the maid with a hammer, and kicks her sister in the head, and so little for Blanche, the sweet, helpless paralyzed sister who sits upstairs in her room incessantly pressing a buzzer?

(a) Bette Davis gives a layered, nuanced performance incorporating vulnerability and heartbreak into even her most drunken, violent, abrasive behaviour.

(b) Joan Crawford is mainly good at bulging her eyes out.

(c) We’ll never forgive or forget TROG.

d) Crawford's reaction to the dead capybara is seriously "off", failing to touch a chord of sympathy. Nobody notices her reaction anyway because they're too busy groaning with delight as Baby Jane cackles her brains out.

e) With true generosity of spirit,  Jane wistfully states at the film's conclusion that the two sisters "could have been friends", if only Blanche had kept her foot off the accelerator. 

2. If the Baby Jane doll could talk, what would it say?

(a) "Really? Did she like it?"

(b) "I was cleaning the cage and it flew out the window."

(c) "Isn't that how I was conceived?"

(d) "Just a few questions, ma'am."

3. Describe Edwin's role as a gay icon, taking into account the socio-psycho-sexual mores of 1962 and the damaging effects of the illegality of certain sexual acts. Speculate on Jane Hudson's true feelings for Edwin as a potential partner: is he merely a boy-toy/"walker" who could escort her to premieres and other social events as she makes her second debut? Elaborate on the socio-psycho-whatever significance of the fact he still lives with his Mommy. Essay answers to be graded on word count only.

3. Why is it our business whether Edwin is gay or not? What possible bearing could it have on the movie’s plot? Why do you think it matters, given the fact that the REAL issue is his inability to tear himself away from his niggling, naggling, annoying, utterly irritating mother? Discuss in three words or less.

4. What are the chances of Baby Jane making a real comeback?

(a) Very low (her act is so completely out-of date);

(b) Very high          "            "            "                   ;

(d) Middling, if she aims for a middle-aged/middle-brow crowd;

(e) Dead-certain! Have you no knowledge of film history at all? She has already MADE an unforgettable comeback which will live in cinematic history forever!

5. Of the two sisters, who has the really rotten deal? 

(a) Blanche, who  gets to watch herself on TV and get flowers from the neighbors and all sorts of fan mail, get her meals brought to her on a tray, etc. etc., or

(b) Jane, who gets doodlysquat from anybody, has to forge signatures just to get her liquor, hauls her sister around to the bathroom, the bathtub and the bed, trundles her meals upstairs (though granted, those meals may be a little unusual), and receives no glory at all for her forgotten career, with which she supported the whole family for years and years and kept them all in ice cream.

"All this time, we could have been friends."

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