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Originally Published July 10, 2000 |
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MY GUILTY PLEASURES |
 One of Ron's favorite "retro" country albums |
What's A Guilty Pleasure?
Liking something un-cool
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
As I look back from the perspective of many years, I realize an awful lot of my favorite things have been "guilty pleasures"--things that most other people consider really uncool.
However, the older you get, the less you seem to care about being uncool, which is why I'm ready to come out as a genuine bottom-feeder in the category of cool.
Now that doesn't mean I'm one of those guys who walks into biker bars and orders sarsparilla. I may be uncool, but I'm not un-sane. Nor am I quite ready to put on a "John Tesh 1997 World Tour" tee-shirt or write a fan letter to Regis Philbin either. You may not believe it after reading this column, but I still have SOME standards.
Anyway, here's my top 10 list of the "guilty pleasures" of a lifetime:
1. Roy Rogers & Dale Evans.
In my boyhood, I thought it was perfectly natural for movie cowboys to sing. That's because most of them did when I was a kid. I wasn't too fond of Roy Rogers back then because his pictures often were in color and I thought he looked like he was wearing lipstick or something. Besides, all the girls in the neighborhood liked Roy best, which was like the official kiss of death for a cowboy. I think one girl even had a Roy Rogers bicycle with buckskin fringes on the handlebars and several girls had Roy Rogers & Dale Evans lunch boxes. Yuck! You wouldn't catch Jimmy Wakely or Monte Hale or Tex Ritter putting out stuff like that. Their movies were in black and white like they were supposed to be. But not too long ago, I started looking at Roy Rogers westerns again and really liking them. I discovered his really lively black and white westerns from the early 1940s and got into them bigtime. I also discovered Dale Evans was a fox back then and not the church lady she matured into later on. Check her out in "The Cowboy and the Senorita." These are a lost art form: action musicals! That's why, when I finally met Roy Rogers in the 1990s, I could truly say, "Hey, Dude, You really were the freakin' King of the Cowboys, weren't you?" without wincing. And, wouldn't you know it, he turned out to be a great guy. So, I guess the girls got it right after all.
2.
Books & Movies About Dogs
I love dogs -- all kinds and varieties. I've owned a chain of
mutts since little "Buddy" came into my life in grade
school. When I got married, I assumed joint custody of "Bandito,"
my wife's dog, and loved him even after he ate my contact lenses
in 1962. We later owned a beloved pair of pedigreed Pembroke
Welsh Corgis whose names were too embarrassing to print here.
Now we live with Casey, a pit bull who came to us as a foundling
that nobody else wanted and stayed like the canine equivalent
of Sheridan Whiteside, the pooch who came to dinner, rearranging
our lives to suit his. As you might expect, that also means I've
always been a sucker for dog movies and dog books. I cry through
all of them. I love even the obscure dog movies, like "The
Biscuit Eater." My all-time favorite dog books are "Lassie,
Come Home," "Nop's Trials" and the best ever,
"Beem" by Gavril Troyepolsky, first published in Russia
in 1971 when it was still the Soviet Union. Speaking of Lassie,
both my wife and I have had personal "moments" with
the famous movie/TV collie. As a youngster, she had a bit part
in MGM's "The Sun Comes Up" and actually petted the
canine star on screen. My "moment" came many dog generations
later when I visited the 1990s "Lassie" at home for
an interview and the dog became so excited to see me that it
peed on the sofa, much to the chagrin of his trainer. If that
isn't a guilty pleasure, I don't know what is.
3. 'New
Faces': The Movie
In 1954, 20th Century-Fox released "New Faces," based
on Leonard Sillman's Broadway musical/comedy revue, "New
Faces of 1952." It was the fourth film in the studio's new
CinemaScope widescreen process and essentially was just a filmed
version of the stage production. Critics yawned or grumbled.
One even suggested the title should be "New Feces."
Filmgoers stayed away in droves. Except for me, of course. I
went back and saw it every night it was in town. I thought it
was hilariously funny
and the songs irresistibly hummable. To this day, I can play
most of them on the piano from memory: "Love is A Simple
Thing," "Penny Candy," "I'm in Love with
Miss Logan," "Lucky Pierre," "The Boston
Beguine," "Monotonous," and that incredibly silly
pair of masked ball numbers, "Waltzing in Venice" and
"Take Off the Mask." I still think I was right and
everybody else was wrong. Just look at the stars who came out
of that show: Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Ronny Graham, Carol Lawrence,
Robert Clary, Alice Ghostley -- and a wickedly comic writer named
Mel Brooks. You know, I think I'll play the video tonight!
4. 'The
Undersea Kingdom'
Serials from the 1930s are considered dog stool by serious critics,
but I love 'em, dumb as they are. The king of them all is still
"The Undersea Kingdom," an epic 1936 serial from Republic.
(No, I'm not THAT old. I saw it in the early 1950s when our neighborhood
theater revived it.) It starred Ray "Crash" Corrigan
as a daring
adventurer who winds up on a test run of a new deep-diving submarine
that's mysteriously drawn into an undersea tunnel leading to
a lost civilization living in what amounts to a giant cave with
its own air supply. The mad ruler of the "undersea kingdom"
is about to attack the "upper world" with robots, a
"juggernaut" tank, rockets, ray guns and his curiously
old -fashioned sword-bearing cavalry when "Crash" arrives.
I can't wait for somebody to remake this with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
5. Budget Musicals of the 1940's and 1950's
It's cool to worship RKO's Fred & Ginger musicals, the Busby Berkeley and Doris Day musicals from Warner Bros., the Alice Faye musicals from Fox, the Bing Crosby musicals from Paramount, the Deanna Durbins from Universal and virtually every musical MGM ever made. But I'm passionate about the low-budget musicals nobody else remembers, especially ones from Columbia and the "poverty row" studios like Monogram and Republic. Some favorites: Paramount's "The Stars Are Singing" (1953) with Rosemary Clooney singing "Lovely Weather for Ducks"; Columbia's "Bring Your Smile Along" (1955) with Frankie Laine, which was Blake Edwards' debut as a director, or "Cruisin' Down the River" (1953) with Dick Haymes, Billy Daniels and the Bell Sisters; Columbia's "Reveille with Beverly" (1943) with Ann Miller, Frank Sinatra, the Mills Brothers and Count Basie; Universal's "Ride 'em, Cowboy" (1942) with Ella Fitzgerald singing "A Tisket, A Tasket" and Dick Foran crooning "I'll Remember April." I'm afraid nobody loves these movies anymore, but me.
6. Smilin' Ed McConnell and His Buster Brown Gang
My
favorite radio kid show from the late 1940s, sponsored by Buster
Brown shoes, featured an amiable fat guy named Ed McConnell as
the host. (Andy Devine took his place on the TV version when
McConnell died in 1954). I fondly remember the rest of the cast,
which was non-human: Midnight the Cat, Squeaky the Mouse, Grandie
the Piano and, best of all, Froggy the Gremlin. I can still hear
the obnoxious kid from the shoe commercials with his barking
dog: "That's my dog, Tige. He lives in a shoe. I'm Buster
Brown. Look for me in there, too!" I still love my memories
of that show, but I don't think I ever bought any of their shoes.
7. Doris Day Before She Became A Virgin
John Stanley and Roger Ebert love Doris Day, too, so maybe this isn't as guilty a pleasure as it used to be. I fell in love with Doris in the late 1940s when that beautiful, bell-clear voice first started getting lots of radio airplay in our house and I saw her sing "It's Magic" in her first movie, "Romance on the High Seas" (1948). It was magic, all right. She was smart, sassy and beautiful--and there has never been a voice to equal hers on the pop music scene. Her early WB musicals are classics and I loved even the minor ones, like "Starlift" (When is THAT ever coming out on video?) and "The West Point Story." She also was a first-rate dramatic actress, too. See "Young Man with A Horn," "Storm Warning" and "Love Me or Leave Me." I started losing interest when she started doing those fluffy comedies where she tried to save her virtue from the likes of Rock Hudson (No contest!), Cary Grant and James Garner at an age when they had to start throwing her into soft focus to hide the wrinkles. In reality, I think Doris always knew about sex and that whole latter part of her career was just one giant wink. Now that I've been in soft focus myself for quite a few years, Doris looks better and better. And she loves dogs, too!
8. Retro Country-Western Music
My dad's side of the family was pure country. He was a truck drivin' man, so you can figure we heard a lot of Grand Ole Opry around the house when I was growing up. I guess it got into me, all right. Though I went through my "outlaw" phase and, in the course of my work, wound up meeting Willie, Waylon, Johnny, Kris and all those cutting edge country stars who shook up Nashville in the 1970s and early 1980s, I've finally recognized there's still a whole lot of hayseed in me. I still think the original Hank Williams is The King and Elvis the impostor. I still like Lefty Frizzell ("Always Late"), Kitty Wells ("It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels"), Webb Pierce ("It's Been So Long"), Hank Snow ("Spanish Fireball"), Patsy Cline ("I Fall to Pieces") and even Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys ("Faded Love"). My loving wife just bought me a double CD of vintage cowboy hits from the 1940s. You should have seen the look on her face when I popped it into the player in our car and she suddenly realized she was going to have to listen to it all weekend.
9. The Victoria's Secret Catalog
I'm not sure I want to go into this too deeply, but I truly enjoy looking at pictures of pretty girls in their underwear, especially if it's not woolen and has no trap door in back. I believe this goes back to a distant point in time when I believed the sexiest sight in the world was a pretty girl in her underwear. That was, of course, before I saw my first pretty girl who didn't wear any. I believe this is the most widespread guilty pleasure in the male universe. I also believe that Victoria's Secret knows who really studies its catalog most closely and has made a fortune out of working our fantasies. I'm hoping you will not repeat what I've just told you. What would people think?
10. Ricky
Nelson
This is very hard to explain. As a rule, I think all teen idols
should be used as shark bait. Though I used to watch "The
Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet" on TV, I quit watching
by the time little Ricky had grown up enough to hold a guitar.
I loved "Rio Bravo," but I thought Nelson was the only
unwatchable part of it. As an actor,
he was the essence of Limburger cheese. I had no positive personal
connection to him. In fact, the only time he ever agreed to do
an interview with me, he reneged at the last minute after I'd
logged a load of unpaid overtime hours. And he certainly wasn't
much of a role model with his drug habits and carousing lifestyle
as an adult. But after underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger used
Nelson's hard-driving "Fools Rush In" as the theme
for his homo-sadistic biker film "Scorpio Rising,"
I realized The Rickster had found a rockabilly voice of his own
after all those teen idol years, so I became a devoted fan and
Ricky collector. This was some years before "Garden Party"
made a few serious critics start taking him seriously, too. But
then my guilty pleasures always
were ahead of their time.
© 2000 by Ron Miller
The CD cover with Lefty Frizzell is copyright 1991 by Sony Music Entertainment. "The Undersea Kingdom" poster is copyright by Republic Home Video.
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