Charlie Chaplin, Chinatown, All That Jazz...Read More!

Hey all you film buffs out there, you know who you are. Look what I have for you..read more! 

Dr. Wes D. Gehring, prolific film scholar and Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at Ball State University, has published 36 books, all of them focused on American film comedy, be it romantic comedy, screwball comedy, dark comedy, populist comedy, parody, or personality comedy. Most recently, his focus has been dark comedy, resulting in his late 2014 study,Chaplin's War Trilogy: An Evolving Lens in Three Dark Comedies, 1918-1947, now followed in 2016 with Genre-Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s: Twelve American Films.  

Chaplin's War Trilogy, selected by the Huffington Post as one of the "Best Film Books of 2014," traces dark comedy elements throughout Chaplin's oeuvre, but with special focus on three war-related films: SHOULDER ARMS (1918), THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940), and MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947). It was Pablo Picasso's "Guernica," through which the painter expressed his shock and outrage over what was happening in the Spanish Civil War, that inspired Gehring to examine Chaplin's work from a similar perspective. What he found was that, the master filmmaker had used dark comedy in three different ways over the years. That is, with SHOULDER ARMS, Chaplin had used it to help the US, Great Britain, and their allies win World War I; with THE GREAT DICTATOR, he used it to try and stop World War II; and with MONSIEUR VERDOUX, he used it to condemn, by implication, business interests which provoked international wars in order to profit from them. Choice (the go-to reference for library purchasing in the US) wrote that, "This tribute to Chaplin is both a brilliant analysis and a cultural history...Gehring remains supreme in film comedy scholarship."

A key theme in Chaplin's War Trilogy (one of many books Gehring has written about that director's life and career) was how contemporary audiences and critics alike were put off by THE GREAT DICTATOR and MONSIEUR VERDOUX, unable to find humor in the death and destruction of World War II, or in the charming menace of a serial killer, much less to see through the dark comedy haze into what Chaplin was actually saying. As the author points out, it was not until the 1960s, with the success of films like Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE, that both reviewers and filmgoers finally caught up with what Chaplin had been doing in the 1940s and rediscovered his previously under-appreciated dark comic masterpieces of that decade. Gehring also came to understand how the national tumult of the 1960s (e.g., urban riots, political assassinations, and especially the Vietnam War) led American movie directors to make dark comedy a pivotal, and often commercially successful, film genre of the 1970s. 

After lecturing on the subject of his latest Chaplin book at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2014, Gehring decided to turn that larger insight into a new book titled Genre-Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s, in which he would focus on twelve dark comedies released over the course of still another turbulent decade. The twelve films in question are Robert Altman's MASH (1970), Mike Nichols' CATCH 22 (1970), Arthur Penn's LITTLE BIG MAN (1970), Hal Ashby's HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971), Bob Fosse's CABARET (1972), George Roy Hill's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1972), Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN (1974), Woody Allen's LOVE AND DEATH (1975), Milos Foreman's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975), Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL (1977), Hal Ashby's BEING THERE (1979), and Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ (1979). 

Gehring opens the Epilogue for Dark Comedies of the 1970s as follows: "From the comic to the sublime, cinema has always had dark comedies. But the genre finally came into its own during the 1960s. Besides new dark comedies like Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) and the reissuing of previously underappreciated ones like Charlie Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) and MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947) the genre was finally receiving the recognition which it deserved. Yet most of these examples smacked audiences right between the eyes with their mood, such as Chaplin's use of Hitler for humor. The full ambiguous blossoming of the genre would occur during the 1970s, fueled in part by many of the factors delineated in the prologue, including TV's gutting of old school Hollywood, a betrayed trust in feel-good Capraesque people by modern McCarthy populism, New American Cinema cannibalizing the French New Wave, and the promise of Kennedy's New Frontier quickly collapsing...into the violent discord and distrust leading to Watergate." 

Taking what he learned from the pioneering dark comedies of the 1940s and 1960s, Gehring now examines these twelve darkly comic and deeply thought-provoking films of the 1970s, a period in which American filmmakers rebelled and matured precisely in sync with members of America's Baby Boom generation, the perfect audience for some of the greatest - and darkest - comedies ever made. 

Because dark comedies were so abundant in the '70s, Gehring went out of his way to pick several films not normally thought of as being of that genre (illustrated below).

Dr. Wes D. Gehring's Chaplin's War Trilogy: An Evolving Lens in Three Dark Comedies, 1918-1947 and Genre-Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s: Twelve American Films are both now available from McFarland & Company, Inc. 

Killing Jimmy Hoffa

Killing Jimmy Hoffa comes to DVD July 21st The real story of the Teamsters boss told through exclusive interviews, news footage, and photographs  Remember the saga of Jimmy Hoffa? I do...he is one of the most prolific figures in American History. So much so that there was a 1992 movie starring Jack Nicholson directed by Danny DeVito simply called: "Hoffa" Fascinating stuff...

Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance and probable murder is one of the great crimes of the century. Despite a massive Federal investigation spanning 4 decades and hundreds of suspects, only the general contours of the crime are known. In the American mythology Hoffa is both hero and villain; a self-made man who ran the nation's largest union and was so beloved by the rank and file Teamsters he represented that they supported him as union president while he was under indictment and even in prison. Hoffa also moved in the highest circles of organized crime. Among his closest friends and business partners were members of the national Mafia commission, men he was forced to align with during the violent and chaotic early days of union building when corporations deployed armed goons and police to attack workers in the street, and unions battled each other to control the workforce.  Hoffa's chief nemesis was US attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and the two men developed a deep hatred for each other. In the long aftermath of President F. John Kennedy's assassination Jimmy Hoffa's name swirled in the aether of conspiracy theories, and his close Mafia associates Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante are at the center of the most plausible theories about Kennedy's death. The two men Hoffa thought he was going to meet on the day of his disappearance have the most ironclad alibis of any suspects in the case. All the FBI's other leads came from informants and unreliable witnesses. In the years after the case the FBI has dug up farms, investigated waste dumps, and debriefed numerous Mafia turncoats that purported to have information on Hoffa's death, but they all turned out to be ephemeral. The only physical evidence is a single piece of Hoffa's hair found in Mafia enforcer Tony Giacalone's son's car. Frank Sheeran, a Teamster ally and Mafia enforcer, made the claim that he personally killed Hoffa in a house in Detroit and his story became a national best seller. But the veracity of Sheeran's story is undermined by his previous attempts to get a book deal centered around the claim that Richard Nixon had Hoffa killed, and his use of a forged document purportedly signed by Hoffa that validated his story.  "Killing Jimmy Hoffa" covers the life and times of Hoffa and explore all the theories about his disappearance. In analyzing the suspects we will take a tour of America's 20th criminal landscape and see how the Hoffa hit was the final act in the nearly 50 year reign of La Cosa Nostra as a shadow government that wielded chilling power and control over America. Finally, we will unveil a previously unknown, and the most likely, account of the events of July 30th, 1975, the day James Riddle Hoffa vanished. Jimmy Hoffa was a Shakespearean character. One of the last of the self-made American men to rise out of the working class, he was born fighting. To seize and maintain the power he so obviously craved Hoffa had to embrace the corruption of the world he inhabited. Corrupt businesses, corrupt politicians, and the very essence of corruption: La Cosa Nostra. He was a Caesar surrounded by many Brutus'. He lived to see his great nemesis, the golden boy Robert F. Kennedy, die before him, but also lost his greatest possession-the Teamsters union itself. In the ultimate insult, whoever killed him got away with it; Hoffa's soul forever un-avenged. Why do we still think about him? It must be that he reminds us of something about America, he reminds us that it wasn't always so easy, that it wasn't always so slick and clean. We know that he is dead, but the important question is: Who Killed Jimmy Hoffa? The cast of characters in the saga of Jimmy Hoffa is quite a menagerie. His peers were the most powerful men in America, on both sides of the law. The Kennedy brothers, Mafia strongmen like Detroit's Giacalone brothers and the murderous Carmine Galante, hard-nosed union men, CIA spies, and the captains of American industry. Hoffa was at the center of such a complex web of relationships, plots, and conspiracies that eventually he could no longer manage them and found himself taking a ride that he would never return from. At the height of his fame, his face was more recognizable than a movie star, he was more loved than Mickey Mantle. Just as the Kennedy's were the Golden Boys of the aspiring classes, of the college students , James Hoffa was the Golden Boy of the all those Americans who worked for a living, even if he was just as flawed as Jack and Bobby. The Hoffa hit was the last great flexing of Mafia power on a national scale. While the government didn't charge anybody, all the prime suspects received significant prison sentences soon after, unlike in the assassination of JFK, where they got away fairly cleanly. Starting in the late 80's many of the top Mafia chiefs were sent to prison for lengthy terms, and their ability to pull off crimes right in the public eye diminished. What we saw was an end to a period of extreme corruption in the American economic, political, and social systems that began during Prohibition. The era of assassinations, Watergate, etc. Corrupt politicians, corrupt police, corrupt leaders. Hoffa was a man of his times. Hoffa's disappearance was the capstone of 15 years of psychic trauma and shocking events that started with JFK's assassination and continued through the murders of MLK , RFK, and Watergate.