March 13th, 2010 — Hot Pics
It begins with a potentially productive premise — unemployed
actors who “play roles” in the sexual fantasies of male and female
call-
boy clients — but goes off track trying to develop it further than
the material can bear.
A madam who runs the call-boy business out of her convertible
cruises Los Angeles streets setting up appointments. Periodically an
Internet “menu” of the fantasy situations and psychodramas offered
– soldier, cowboy, cop, bondage, “setting limits,” “number of
intermissions,” “pseudonym” — is scrolled by.
CREATING A CHARACTER
An experienced call boy introduces a novice to the work. He
teaches him the correct use of a riding crop and explains the
rationale: “You’re creating a character — it’s not really doing
these things.” Eventually, these moonlighting “actors” get far
more than they bargained for.
The storytelling techniques by director Everett Lewis (“The
Natural History of Parking Lots”) tend toward the pretentious, but
some of them pay off.
The fantasies, essentially soft-
core porn, are presented in black and white and “real life” in
color. Interestingly, the real-life situations on at least two
occasions ambiguously blur into sexual ones, as when a haberdasher
clearly gets a charge out of “dressing up” a customer. There are
also a couple of well-done turns by Hollywood producers auditioning
the actors.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
There is a good twist when one of the call boys gets into the
wrong black convertible that Lewis spins for an even further twist.
Ultimately, however, Lewis gives in to the temptation to inflate
his main characters’ circumstances into cheap irony and bathos when
what is needed is good old-fashioned melodrama.
The direction all this might have taken is indicated when the
madam declares, “We were a good team. It’s too bad it had to end
this way,” and there even is a smashing-my-face-in-
the-mirror shot.
But good melodrama requires distance and more theatrical know-
how than is shown here.
“Skin & Bone” is not rated but probably would get an NC-17 for
nudity and S&M.
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March 11th, 2010 — Hot Pics
Having the conference with the top winning percentage against other major conferences and all of the other bragging points for the Big 12 is an accumulated effort. But one team is more responsible than others, and Kansas shows the way.
INK
Mar 10, 1:28 AM
Ink asked alumni from Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri how and where to celebrate the Big 12 Tournament, which tips off today at the Sprint Center. One alumnus who weighs in is Abbey Snell, a former KU cheerleader. Read more in this week?s Ink cover story.
CRIME
Scar 9, 10:59 AM
Updated, March 9: Crime Stoppers has released new photos for some of the most sought-after fugitives in Kansas City. If you have any information, call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS (816-474-8477), go to
KCCrimeStoppers.com
, or text TIP452 plus message and send to 274637.
COMMUNITY FACES
Spoil 10, 1:29 AM
The Outlaw Cigar Co.'s new Overland Park store celebrated Saturday with lots of cigar aficionados and former Chiefs players. Proceeds from lunch sales benefited First Downs for Down Syndrome.
Mar 7, 4:37 PM
Built of wordplay and wit, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books have long defied Hollywood. They’re too episodic. They appeal to the head, but a good movie needs some heart. Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” has found that heart.
CHANNEL 41 WEATHER
Leak out Gary's detailed forecasts, ESP Radar Continue, Skyview Camera and the Action Survive Blog.

news.mcclatchy.com headlines
March 10th, 2010 — Hot Pics
When people that enjoy the technical aspects of films gather one film stands out as one
of the most ground breaking and innovative films of all time, Citizen Kane. This film
scored number one on the coveted AFI top 100 film list. Made by Orson Wells for the RKO
studio ad released in 1941 this film brought movies to maturity never before seen. The
story is well known now. One of the riches men in the world, Charles Foster Kane (Orson
Wells) dies his last word a cryptic ?Rosebud?. Seeking an answer, reporter
(Joseph Cotton) interviews the people whose lives crossed Kane?s in a futile effort
to understand what was on Kane?s mind at the moment of his death. We view a
retrospective of a powerful man?s life from a humble childhood to a rebellious youth
and finally a man that others feared and respected. Even more interesting is the
back-story behind this film. The biography of Kane too closely resembled that of media
mogul William Randolph Hearst.. Hearst vowed to bury the film and a fight broke out in
Hollywood where young filmmaker Wells took on the industry he needed to further his craft
and career as well as one of the powerful men on the planet. Wells knew he had created
something special with Kane was was not about to let go. Hailed as a genius for his film
but a fool for his fight Wells risked everything on pushing this film to the screens of
movie theaters in America.
Although almost every performance in this film is a gem it is basically a one-man show.
Wells showed what a man born to act could do with a well-crafted script. He owned this
role like few actors have ever done before or since. What made the fight between Wells and
Hearst so ironic and what also contributed to the excellence of his performance is he held
so many traits in common with the newspaper king. Both men were driven to succeed. Their
drive reduced any obstacle to so much rubble. Both were extremely gifted in their
respective fields. While Hearst had a knack for imposing his will on others to his
financial gain, Wells was a gifted filmmaker and actor.
Not only is Orson Wells the star of this film he was its director. He took a quantity of
risks in the techniques that he used. Camera angles that required digging a ditch in a
concrete floor, a seamless pseudo mise-en-episode combining verified sets and matte photography
and extremes in practically ups and far shots. Wells could combine these vastly different
methods to design something that flows in an constitutional social graces. There is no doubt that Wells
was a certain of the best geniuses of film and his influence echoes to films today.
Wells was not to be deterred by the material constraints of his locations. In
order to get joined key shot he actually brought in a jack hammer to plunge a hole in
the reliable floor of the studio. This permitted Wells to stand the camera
further the official 180 line and recite his masterpiece an altogether new view championing
the audience. The techniques pioneered by Wells are still in abhor today, much of
the cinema we enjoy in modern films owe the total to this loam breaking film.
Since the greatest film ever made the DVD had to be something special, mere festive. Now,
60 years after its release the DVD let off leave bring a generally new siring of
film
lovers to this noteworthy. Those that collect DVDs for six neck canvass and anamorphic video
will be given a chance to broaden their viewpoint. The fade away is presented in 4:3 aspect
ratio with a revitalized mono soundtrack. The trait of the delivery is spectacular. If
you want to recreate the prototype theater experience by pass the bit stream audio and run
the soundtrack through you Prologic Theater mode. It will bring you back 60 years to the
skilled RKO draw moving picture houses. The extras take sing like a canary all over from the beginning disc to a second.
The first disc has two feature to the fullest commentaries, Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich.
There is a 1941 newsreel featuring the come out of the film, studio memos and letters and
sundry documents that pertain to the controversy surrounding the film. The transfer disc is a
special feature about the problems in getting the steam made. If you collect films at all
this is needed in your aggregation.
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March 8th, 2010 — Hot Pics
A in bad stew of Gothic rustic horror and ghastly Gallic humour haphazardly helmed by Saigon-born explode video director Kim Chapiron, this owes much to ‘Straw Dogs’ and ‘Kids’. Yet owing all its infuriating excesses (casual racism, odious misogyny, would-be blasphemous Christian symbolism), there is never anything remotely scary, entertaining or thought-provoking about its shouty grotesquery.
Thrown to of the sweaty Styxx Club, the rough Bart (Olivier Bartélémy), his pals Ladj and Thai and beautiful bartender Yasmine admit an draw to spend the night with the mysterious Vigil (Roxanne Mesquida) at her parents’ country establishment. Anxiety bells should have started ringing when lubricious local redhead Jeanne tried to masturbate Bart’s dog. Or when Vincent Cassel’s gurning, moustachioed housekeeper, Joseph, interrelated the charming Christmas adventures of a farmer who, while frenzied by Satan, impregnates his own sister. Or it is possible that earlier, when Eve revealed her tiresome father’s outre solicitation of life-like dolls. But when every lone person in a village is an inbred cretin, and the prospect of sex is constantly being dangled, the distractions are sundry.
While Cassel seems to be auditioning towards a French remake of ‘The League of Gentlemen’, everyone else is either stifling or sulky. The set-up is too old-fashioned, the waist section creepy and disturbing, and the last third marred by a absence of deaths and a slew of infuriating dido endings. At least we should partake of seen these boring, amoral adolescents gruesomely dispatched. The film’s unusual title, ‘Sheitan’, is the Persian for Satan. It’s downright ‘Shite-an’, as in ‘Shite an’ then some’.
March 7th, 2010 — Hot Pics
It is also not for people who have contemplated Helen of Troy and
wondered at a face that could launch a thousand ships. The Helen of Troy we
get here, as played by Diane Kruger, looks more like Helen of Troy, N.Y. —
a pretty girl who could easily launch a paddle boat, maybe, or a couple of
canoes, but that’s about all. Still, a movie that’s 160 minutes long and never
boring, that provides a talented cast with juicy roles and a charismatic star
(Pitt) with a great showcase is not something to be buried under ridicule.
“Troy” is all Hollywood and no Homer, but within its limits, it’s a vigorous,
entertaining movie.
Like World War I, the epic disaster depicted here results from a simple
cause, in this case the pedestrian lust of two immature youngsters: Helen,
Queen of Sparta, starts having unsafe sex with a Trojan, namely Paris (Orlando
Bloom), and he whisks her off to Troy, much to the consternation of her
husband, King Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). Enraged and seeking revenge,
Menelaus goes to his brother, the power-hungry Agamemnon (Brian Cox), who sees
Helen’s abduction as just the excuse he’s been looking for to invade Troy.
The movie presents Greece and Troy as cultures in opposition. The Greeks
are a rowdy bunch. They’re aggressive, wear dark clothes and do elaborate
“Star Trek”-like things to their hair, while the Trojans have shorter hair,
lighter clothes and a more considered demeanor. The Trojans know how to fight,
but they’re content to live in peace, protected within their impenetrable
walls and under the rule of a just and forlorn old king (Peter O’Toole).
Despite their worthiness, an undertone of sadness pervades Troy, as if the
people know that 3,000 years later the Greeks will still be a nation, while
they will be a brand of contraceptives. Even Hector (Eric Bana), their
greatest warrior, has the pensive, subdued air of a leader smart enough to
grasp that history is against him.
It’s a curious story, a war saga that manages to be involving without a
clear-cut rooting interest, one in which each side has its share of shining
lights and idiots. The greatest of the Greeks, Achilles (Pitt), embodies the
evenhandedness of a tale bordering on ambivalence. Achilles despises Agamemnon,
“that pig of a king,” and doesn’t believe in the cause. When he fights, he
fights only for glory, and as a warrior he has moves that no one can match. In
an early scene, he leaps into the air and kills a giant with one stroke. But
just as often, Achilles prefers to stay in his tent and brood.
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The precedent for Pitt’s Achilles is not to be found in Homer but in the
Hollywood anti-heroes of the 1970s. Too cool to believe politicians, too
cynical to fight for an ideal, he has no hope, just a fatalistic equanimity,
and believes only in courage as a value in itself. When it comes to conveying
smirky confidence, cocksure heroics and the in-the-moment intensity of a lover
who knows who could be dead tomorrow, Pitt is magnetic. His performance
falters only when he has to convey Achilles’ rage, the mysterious and thinly
veiled source of this warrior’s effectiveness. Pitt just can’t locate the
anger, not convincingly. Even so, what might, in another movie, be a serious
failing doesn’t matter here. Nothing gets in the way of what is essentially a
fun performance in a lively adventure.
As Hector, Bana suggests the decency of a rational man in an irrational
age, a version of the quality that O’Toole brings to Priam, though unclouded
by age or sentiment. Hector intuits that the future belongs to self-satisfied
vulgarians like Agamemnon, as played by Cox. It’s going to be a long 3,000
years.
Director Wolfgang Petersen doesn’t bring his usual gracefulness to the
filming of “Troy,” but the film’s imposing visuals make up for a certain lack
of finesse: The massive city walls, the 1,000 ships sailing through the mist,
the armies of soldiers as far as the eye can see. Finally, the Trojan horse,
tall and angular, is given a scary, ominous look befitting both an instrument
of doom and a vehicle meant to hold scores of men for many hours, centuries
before the invention of indoor plumbing.
– Advisory: The film contains lots of bloody battle scenes and a couple
of scenes of sensuality.
E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.
March 5th, 2010 — Hot Pics
Anyone curious about how to dismantle and pack a Mongolian yurt resolve learn that, and plenty more, in “The Cave of the Yellow Dog.” Second docudrama from Byambasuren Davaa, co-helmer of 2003 hit “The Story of the Weeping Camel,” comes in smoother packaging and without the previous pic’s emotive blend of understanding and animal interdependence on the windy grasslands. But Davaa’s strong visual sense, appealing cast and respect for basic film grammar make this slim exercise in managed reality go the distance, with ancillary looking specifically strenuous after niche exposure.
In release in Germany since late July, where it’s scored more than 100,000 admissions, film has already been sold to better than 20 territories, including Japan, the U.K., France, Mexico and Spain. Pic preemed internationally at San Sebastian in September.
In “Weeping Camel,” humans took second billing to the fauna, which seemed barely to tolerate their existence; here it’s the other way around, with the Batchuluun family occupying center stage. While never tipping the film into the realm of pure documentary, Davaa manages to portray daily life as a communal exercise in self-sufficiency, with young mom Buyandulam engaged in household chores, husband Urjindorj biking off to a faraway town (unseen) to get 21st-century necessities, and even their 6-year-old daughter, Nansal, riding a horse and looking after the flock of sheep. Young children Nansalmaa and Batbayar run wild and free.
One day, while out collecting dung patties for fuel, Nansal finds a small dog in a cave. Nicknaming it Zochor (”Spot”), she becomes attached to the mutt, though her father tells her to get rid of it. He fears that, if it’s lived with wolves, the latter will follow its scent and kill more of his sheep. (Pic opens with a lightning lupine raid that leaves two animals dead.)
Plucky Nansal ignores dad’s words and takes Zochor along on a grazing expedition. Tyke almost loses her way when Zochor temporarily goes AWOL, but is given shelter by an old woman, who tells her the title legend of a dog put in a vast cave by superstitious locals.
When, at the hour mark, the family strike camp for the winter, the father ties up Zochor and leaves it behind. But when the youngest child, Batbayar, goes missing and is threatened by vultures, the dog convinces the father it’s one of the family.
There’s nothing especially new in the picture, one of a whole sub-genre hymning nomadic life in the Mongolian grasslands. Modern-day urban life (elections, apartments, the drift to the city) is referred to but never seen, apart from the pointed appearance of an electioneering truck in the final sequence as the family moves away from the summer site.
Despite the thin plot, Davaa’s clean direction, always well composed without making the landscape the main attraction, and her evident behind-camera chemistry with the family make this one go the distance. As the ever-tolerant mother, Buyandulam is aces, and young Nansal manages to center the movie without being annoyingly cute.
Tech package is fine, with an especially good track of natural sounds.
March 4th, 2010 — Hot Pics

WILDE: Drama. Starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law. Directed by
Brian Gilbert. (R. 110 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.) DEEP IMPACT:
Science Fiction. Starring Robert
Duvall, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood and Morgan Freeman. Directed
by Mimi Leder. (PG-13. 112 minutes. At Bay Area
theaters.)
“Wilde” begins in the open expanse of the American West, with horses
rearing and grungy miners and cowboys cracking whips, and in the
midst of this — there’s Oscar Wilde! He is dressed like a dandy,
telling stories, tossing off epigrams. He is only partly understood
by his audience, but here’s the thing: He’s accepted.
It’s touching. With the innocence of the Coneheads’ suburban
neighbors, these ruffians accept Wilde’s ways — after all, he’s from
England. At home, as we know, Wilde was destined for a much rougher
ride.
The new film, which opened the San Francisco International
Film Festival and now begins its theatrical run, is a sympathetic
and, for the most part, nicely realized look into the private life of
the flamboyant author. Stephen Fry has the title role, and it’s hard
to imagine a more
appropriate actor. Fry is huge and dapper. He can get off a good line
with just the right hint of a smile, and he knows not to confuse
Wilde with the late Tiny Tim.
Wilde was a compulsively public man with intensely private
drives. The film only hints at his public exhibitionism, but it’s
effective at showing him wrestling with his sexuality. At one point,
standing on a London street, his eyes lock with those of a young man.
A second later he turns away, but it’s too late. The young man has
read him.
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WOMAN HE MARRIED
He marries a woman who does little but smile and have babies
(Jennifer Ehle). But hers is such a winning smile that the viewer can
understand his guilt at stepping out on her with men. He gets lucky
with his first partner, Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen), a young Canadian
who would become a loyal friend.
But when he meets Lord Alfred Douglas — known as “Bosie” —
it’s all over but the humiliation, incarceration and degradation.
Bosie is one of history’s legendary bad boyfriends, and Jude
Law plays him to the hilt. He’s spoiled and
angry, flies into bug-eyed rages and seems bent on destroying Wilde
and his work.
“Wilde” takes place in the gay ’90s, but they weren’t much fun
for Wilde, who is reduced to a voyeur by a lover who won’t touch him.
FILM GETS PREACHY
In the last third, the film derails somewhat by turning
preachy. Wilde sues Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, for
slander — the Marquess called him a sodomite. When the case
backfires against Wilde and he’s brought up on charges of “gross
indecency,” the film presents his struggle as something noble.
In fact Wilde lied through his teeth and destroyed himself in a
grotesque public way that suggests not a man at home with himself but
one deeply conflicted and self-hating.
Why he did it, and how the spectacle was fed by his insatiable
need to provoke and call attention to himself, would have been a far
more fascinating direction than what the picture chooses to show: a
passive, beleaguered man making a half-
hearted, anachronistic stand for gay rights.
While “Wilde” captures its subject’s singular charm, it
ultimately doesn’t do justice to his complexity. Still, as Wilde
might have noted, the only thing worse than having a movie made about
your life is not having a movie made about your life.
March 2nd, 2010 — Hot Pics
You might barely notice it after listening to hours of accompanying administrator and star commentaries, documentaries, and deleted uncomfortable narration, but buried deep within harmonious of the supplements, somebody finally credits the movie “Bullitt” as a forerunner of the Academy Award-winning 1971 crime flick “The French Connection.” I should participate in thought the comparisons were unconcealed, “Bullitt” from three years earlier having very nearly reinvented the detective genre with its semi-documentary style, cool, aloof manner, jazz-inflected musical score, and ultra-exciting passenger car chase.
Anyway, the farmer of “The French Reference,” Phil D’Antoni, had also produced “Bullitt,” so we should have expected some carryover. Maybe habit makes unmitigated. Certainly, “The French Connection” is deserving of its Oscars, five of them, and laudable of Fox´s attention in this rare number, Five Celebrity Gleaning, two-disc set.
The movie is a fictionalized account of how two real-life New York Bishopric narcotics cops, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, in the early sixties made the biggest drug bust in U.S. recapitulation up until that time. The the heat recovered over sixty-four pounds of heroin having a byway someone’s cup of tea value in the untold millions of dollars and smashed a medication smuggling operation that had been functioning successfully for at least the previous twenty years.
For the parts of Egan and Grosso, director William Friedkin, who a team a few of years later did “The Exorcist,” and the Fox studio chiefs chose Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. The producers explained they didn´t want well-known stars to confuse from the story, and at the then neither Hackman nor Scheider was particularly well known. The characters´ names for the film were changed to “Popeye” Doyle and “Cloudy” Russo, while the real Egan and Grosso stood by during production acting as technical consultants. (At one aspect it was even thought that perchance the two real cops could play themselves, but saner heads prevailed.)
The film begins on the Marseilles waterfront where we oldest meet the French upper kingpin, Alain Charnier. Turns at fault the actual-life “French Connection” was a Corsican, not a Frenchman, and the actor who plays Charnier, Fernando Rey, was Spanish. The legerdemain of movies. So, we look upon the elegant and charming Charnier arranging his latest monster drug dispense, and we go out with his gunman, Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi), dispatching an investigator on his trail. Next, we skip to Brooklyn, where Doyle and Russo are rousting smalltime pushers and junkies in neighborhood bars. Purely by accident the pair discover onto the Frenchman´s drug operation, about tailing some New York hoods, get some wire taps in place, and finally find their way to Charnier. The Frenchman has result as a be revealed to America with his drugs hidden in an automobile connection to a well-known French television star whom Charnier had duped into complicity in the crime.
Most of the first half of the cloud realistically portrays the scrutiny work of the two cops as they check up on various shady characters around, including the Frenchman.
The cat-and-mouse game ends in a sharp subway sequence where Charnier outfoxes Doyle and the real woo is on. That is, with the exception of one reduced opening where Doyle and Russo are literally pulled mouldy the case proper for lack of support. But shortly thereafter Charnier orders his gunman Nicoli to kill Doyle, and when Nicoli fails, Doyle and Russo are back on the job. Commandeering a civilian motor, Doyle sets out of order after Nicoli in one of the three first-rate car chases on skin (the other two being the ones in “Bullitt,” still the best, and the one in “Ronin”). Another connection with “Bullitt” is the inclusion in “The French Connection” of actor Tally Hickman as a Federal Desk of Narcotics agent; it was Hickman who had earlier played one of the hit men in “Bullitt,” driving the car Steve McQueen was chasing. At one point Hickman actually stunt drove the “French Connection” transport himself.
In spite of the film´s overall supremacy, it´s hard to find much empathy instead of either of the two main “French Connection” characters. Doyle is an obsessive churl, a ruthless cop, and a racist; he’s a bachelor whose ideas of a enthusiastic time are police work, women, work, booze, on the dole, and more work. Hackman says he tried hard to bump into uncover some more kind side to the man, but it wasn´t there. Well, he´s true to his collaborator, and I guess that counts for something. As for Russo, he´s so rectify reform arrow he´s clouded. He keeps Doyle in line, and that´s about all.
The films of Michel Gondry aren’t for everyone, but viewers who vibe to his playful, cerebral, wildly imaginative sensibility might get a kick out of “Be Kind Rewind.” It’s the story of a New Jersey slacker (Jack Black) who runs afoul of a power plant and becomes magnetized, unwittingly erases every tape in his neighborhood video store, then records over the tapes with condensed, low-tech reenacted versions of the movies. Such a far-fetched shaggy-dog yarn borders on the patronizing. But Gondry’s belief in community-based, handmade, DIY culture is infectious, and his cry against big-box homogenization (fewer choices, more copies) is a noble one.
Black delivers a loud, hectoring performance reminiscent of his record store clerk in “High Fidelity,” but he has moments of physical comedic brilliance, and Mos Def, as his friend and collaborator, is his usual unflappably cool self. The movie remakes are hilarious (especially a group reinterpretation of “When We Were Kings”), and the film’s climactic scene is a lyrically transporting ode to cinema that’s straight out of Preston Sturges. Finally, “Be Kind Rewind” represents its own sweetly insurgent call to action: Watchers of the world, unite, and seize the means of cultural production. You have nothing to lose but your chain stores.
“The 72-year-old former circus
trapeze artist Burt Lancaster delightfully plays the title role.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Lee Philips (”Louis Armstrong: Chicago Style”/”Mae West”) is a long-time
TV director. His made-for-television biopic on the 19th-century American
showman Phineas Taylor Barnum (born 1810 and died in 1891) is a straight-forward
pic that chronicles the flamboyant showman’s success story starting from
early childhood as a poor shopkeeper in Bethel, Connecticut, to his becoming
a millionaire circus owner. The 72-year-old former circus trapeze artist
Burt Lancaster delightfully plays the title role. It’s based on the story
by Michael Norell & Andy Siegel. The aim here is to tell the straight
story of showman extraordinaire, P. T. Barnum, and dispel some myths that
have become part of his legacy, such as the showman never saying “There’s
a sucker born every minute.” His rebuttal to critics was often “I am a
showman by profession…and all the gilding shall make nothing else of
me.”
It opens in 1883 and the 70-year-old Barnum is attending the opening
of Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” and pauses to tell his
colorful life story, as there’s a flashback to when he was a teenage shopkeeper
and used deception to make a sale and got involved with the lottery mania
sweeping the country to hustle worthless green bottles he got in a swap.
At 19 he married Charity Hallett (Laura Press), his companion for the next
50 years. In 1835 the 25-year-old Barnum began as a showman with his purchase
and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed black slave woman,
Joyce Heth, claimed by Barnum to have been the nurse of George Washington,
and to be over 160. This proved to be untrue, because when she died her
age was established as only being 80. Undeterred by his critics, Barnum
began his first variety troupe called “Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical
Theater”and when broke in 1841 still managed to work out a deal to buy
Scudder’s American Museum, at Broadway and Ann Street, New York City. He
renamed it “Barnum’s American Museum” with the addition of exhibits and
improvements in the building, and it became a popular and money making
showplace. Barnum exhibited a midget called Charles Stratton and had him
act as “General Tom Thumb” (”the Smallest Person that ever Walked Alone”).
Tom was then four years of age but was passed off as 11. The boy was taught
to imitate people from Hercules to Napoleon and by five was drinking wine
and by seven smoking cigars for the paying public. Though exploited, Tom
Thumb maintained a good relationship with Barnum and was free of bitterness.
The showman became a very wealthy man after bringing his Tom Thumb act
to Europe, and entertaining Queen Victoria of England. In 1850 Barnum engaged
Jenny Lind (Hanna Schygulla), “the “Swedish Nightingale,” to sing in America
for the first time at $1,000 a night for 150 nights, and his gamble paid
off as he recouped his investment four times. After a flurry of other hustling
enterprises such as exhibiting various freak acts in his ‘Barnum’s American
Museum,’ he got into the circus business when he was 61, in Wisconsin,
in 1871, with William Cameron Coup. The partners established “P. T. Barnum’s
Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome”, a traveling
circus, menagerie and museum of “freaks.” By 1872 he was billing it as
“The Greatest Show on Earth.” Barnum eventually merged with James Bailey
and their innovated travelling circus by rail was a success. The partners
split up for the second time in 1885 but reunited in 1888.
For a made-for-television movie, it has some fairly good production
sets but lacks dramatic firepower. But for those who just want to know
a little something about Barnum, the undemanding pic should satisfy.
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