Roku has all kinds of stuff, lest I feel tempted to subscribe to cable TV. But I look at very little of it. Netflix and Pandora get 98% of my TV time, and the latter only because I don't have a stereo. Now and then though I browse through the collections of old B movies. Indeed, the other day one of the B-movie collections led me to Beyond the Time Barrier, a wonderfully cheesy sci-fi flick from 1960 that I can only remember the name of by going to IMDb and looking up Blue Hawaii. How's that work? I know the leading starlet was in that cheesy Elvis flick, so I go there to get her name (the lovely Darlene Tompkins), and then find this one in her credits. It was a riot of low-budget stupidity shot by Edgar Ulmer in about two weeks.
This digression aside, browsing the Dieselpunk station yielded me a wonderfully patriotic film about America that was produced by the Greyhound Corporation in 1956. Freedom Highway served up highway scenes from the '50s, simplistic if not untrue history lessons, affecting subplots, and an America that was as white as Ward Cleaver's underwear except for rampaging Injuns and the smiling bus boy at the bus station. But there was a lot to love really. The fact that middle class Americans used to see some of the country when they went from West Coast to East rather than just fidget for a few hours on a jet plane is a major point. The guy going from SF to Phillie to sign with the Eagles (who might actually be the Packers' Bill Roberts playing himself, I haven't confirmed), the grieving father going from Portland to Washington to collect his son's posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, little Jimmy going to his first Scouting Jamboree -- all on the bus. Oh, and a delicious young Angie Dickinson too, derailed from her plans to marry a solid New York office worker by the dashing football player. ("This is America, where a woman has the right to change her mind." I wonder how she felt about that after a few years living with a man trained to use violence to meet his goals.)
Jimmy -- who actually says "Gee whiz!" while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge -- absorbs history lessons all along the way, delivered mostly by a mysterious man in a dark suit who seems to know everyone's secrets. The great Tex Ritter pulls a guitar from under his seat and sings of the Alamo -- "Hi-i-iyup! Santa Anna, we're killing your soldiers below, so the rest of Texas will know, and remember the Alamo!" -- while the father whose only son died in Korea decries all the senseless violence, to the disapproving looks of his fellow passengers. But his cynical anti-war outlook is corrected at the end when the dark suit takes him to Gettysburg to hear President Lincoln's reading of the Gettysburg Address, reminding him of the cost of freedom, and the rest of us too, South Korea having turned out such a shining example of same, not to mention 1840s Texas.
An impressive aspect of this little travelogue was the high-quality of the historical reenactments. Whether wagon trains descending the steep declivities of the Rockies on their way to Californy, the people of Chicago splashing into Lake Michigan while their city burns behind them, or pirate ships battling with fat merchantmen off the Keys, they were really quite good. I suspect they were scenes taken off the cutting room floor of some big-budget Hollywood studio, and rightly so.
But the real star of this show (besides Angie Dickinson, mmmm, in a pearl necklace no less) was the brand new bi-level Scenicruiser motorcoach, cruising so smoothly along the two-lane highways. The best road scene of all was this silvered behemoth motoring up Highway 40 with Donner Lake in the background -- it was going the wrong way for a trip east from San Francisco, but we all know from that bridge scene in The Graduate that visual appeal trumps geographical accuracy.
Freedom Highway! Take it. Live it. Love it. Or leave it.
2 comments:
So Roku is set up kind of like Sirius XM, in that there are "channels" to which you "subscribe" and then you can see the content listing, like unfolding a directory?
I finally succumbed to getting Netflix again after a trial subscription I let lapse a long time ago. I wasn't, previously, finding content that appealed to me for $8/mo.
Then I dumped my satellite TV, which was up at $80/mo and got back with Netflix. Since my last subscription they started putting on original shows that are acclaimed. And they have a beefier collection to peruse, although it still disappoints a bit.
Like you, I dig some of the old flicks. Wanted Citizen Kane. No joy. Found a 1995 version of. "Of Mice and Men", however, with John Malkovich as Lenny.
I like Steinbeck. I like the novel. I had recently read a Stephen King novel that referenced it, in fact, and had been meaning to find the movie or the book or both.
Yes, it's a tragedy. And I'm not entirely certain the morality play it presents is a good one, but I don't pretend to watch moving pitchers with the expectation that I will learn something, or raise my consciousness in any significant fashion. I go for the story. I go for the characters to suck me into their lives and make me cry or laugh or be amazed, or to fall in love, for at least 90 minutes. Mice let me do that. Well, not fall in love, although the puppy was cute.
Loewy did design the SceniCruiser.
I took The Dog from Kansas City to San Francisco in 1966, and it was several times more interesting and less boring than the equivalent 2013 airplane flight, and there is nothing else like the taste of a freshly lit Marlboro mixed with diesel fumes. If I close my eyes . . . .
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