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Casper Star-Tribune from Casper, Wyoming • 49

Location:
Casper, Wyoming
Issue Date:
Page:
49
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

WyomingT Tom and Jerry make their big screen comeback Used people, romantic images By ROGER TAYLOR When I reviewed Chris Columbus' "Only the Lonely" several months ago, I mentioned the reluctant love affair between Maureen O'llara and Anthony Quinn. Quinn was an aging Greek who still managed to grow flowers in his garden despite the need to wear a heavy coat to ward off the cold and the presence of snow clinging to the edges of the street curbs. Then he cut the flowers and gave them to the neighbor, his love, O'llara. O'Hara, an Irish matron who thought all a Greeks were dirty, usually rejected Quinn's love offerings loudly and angrily but secretly smiled to herself when no one was looking. Such mismatched lovers are a romantic staple in film.

The general plot line goes much as the subplot in "Only the Lonely." They fight and squabble until they realize that they have their loneliness in common. The standard line is "Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl." There is even an old movie by that title with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. Hollywood's constant reworking of this basic formula plot is a testament to what American viewers wish upon themselves. The fact that two unlikely people often ugly or twisted either physically or emotionally can fall in love is a fundamental mythos of society. Viewers want to see it happen on the screen to reinforce the notion that it just might happen to them.

Whatever the reality of such Tom and Jerry: The movie By VINCENT CANBY 1993 N. Y. Times News Service Fifty-three years after they made their debut in the M-G-M short "Puss Gets the Boot," Hanna-Barbera's great cartoon characters, Tom, the raffish cat with the demonic grin, and Jerry, a mild-mannered, fast-thinking mouse, co-star in a feature-length musical, "Tom and Jerry: The Movie." Unfortunately, Tom and Jerry here spend less time tormenting each other with golf clubs, mousetraps, mallets and other weapons than they do acting in concert to right the world's wrongs. The principal beneficiary of their good work: Robyn, a sweet but drab, yellow-haired girl mistreated by her wicked guardian, Aunt Figg, after her father, an explorer, is presumed dead in a Himalayan avalanche. Though mayhem is their natural metier, Tom and Jerry are adaptable creatures.

They not only talk (something they avoid doing in their short films, in which they communicate almost exclusively via lethal combat), but they also sing and dance. The score (music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Leslie Bricusse) has a pleasantly old-fashioned feel to it, as docs the attractive artwork in which a house is a house and a tree is a tree. Among the supporting characters are Puggsy, a mutt, and Frank da Flea, the street characters who befriend Tom and Jerry after their house is knocked into kindling by a wrecker's ball. There are also a brazenly aggressive bunch of alley cats, who sing about the joys of being mean and dirty; a not so kindly fellow who kidnaps animals for ransom, and Captain Kiddie, a down-on-his-luck carnival man, and his parrot, a hand-puppet named Squawk. The most entertaining villain is Aunt Figg.

With a voice supplied by Charlotte Rae, she has the face and ample form of Florence Bates, the great M-G-M character actress who made her debut in "Rebecca," playing Joan Fontaine's employer. Also entertaining is Lickboot, Aunt Figg's lawyer, who recalls Vincent Price at his hammy rotten-est. Nearly everyone in the film has his or her own song. The best: "Friends to the End," sung by Tom and Jerry and their street pals, and "What Do We in which the alley cats celebrate anarchic slovenliness. It really was a golden age." The golden age ended in the mid-'50s, as that kind of lavish animation went out of fashion and the more stylized and inexpensive "limited animation" came into vogue.

"When limited-animation cartoons like Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing started winning Oscars," said Barbera, "people began to figure, 'Why spend five times as much money on a Tom and Jerry?" The studio system was also dying, and MGM was dying harder than the rest of the pack. "We had all these artists under contract, and no money coming in," said Barbera. "One day I got a call from the front office telling me to fire everyone. Just like that.

It was scary. I thought, 'What am I gonna do with myself? All I know is Tom and What he did, of course, was form Hanna-Barbera Productions and go into television, where he embraced the "limited animation" that had largely killed the MGM animation department. His company created Johnny Quest, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, the Flint-stones, the Jetsons, Quick Draw McGraw and Scooby Doo. Today he is the elder statesman of American animation, and his art form which seemed to be dying a slow death in the '60s and '70s is having an unprecedented surge in popularity. "Almost every other weekend there is a new animated feature," said Barbera, "and people are lining up to see it.

It's the most amazing thing." He said this long-overdue recognition originated in Europe. "In Germany and France, particularly, animation has always been celebrated as a serious art, and not just something for kids. Now people finally seem to be realizing that in this country as well. We certainly never intended 'Tom and Jerry' as something for children. Those cartoons were made to Barbera said much of the problem was that the rights were owned by MGM, which was in chaos during most of those years and had muddied the waters with two abortive attempts to revive the series in the '60s without Hanna and Barbera.

accompany movies that played at night to an adult audience." In fact, "Tom and Jerry" has been so popular in Europe for so long the subject of numerous retrospectives and whole volumes of criticism it seems odd that they stayed retired for so long. Platte River Parkway Presents mismatched love, it is the belief that gives the viewer a sense of completeness. That is the subject of another recent film which suffered a poor release and only minor notices. The film is "Used People" (19921 16 mins) by first time director, Beeban Kidron. In all respects, this is a minor film with some big names and some really nice, warm fuzzy feelings.

The Berman family in Queens, New York, is the stereotypical dysfunctional Jewish family. Jack Berman has just died, leaving his wife, Pearl (Shirley MacLaine), with two grown daughters who are unable to manage their own lives. One, Bibby (Kathy Bates), has left her husband and moved back home into Pearl's cramped apartment with her children. The other, Norma (Marcia Gay Harden), has recently suffered the loss of a child through accidental death. To escape her own pain, Norma emulates in dress and mannerisms the popular females of the times, successively going through Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch," Audrey Hepburn in "Moon River," Faye Dunaway in "Bonnie and Clyde," and a few others I couldn't identify.

Pearl herself is the uptight Jewish matron who stoically passes through life, accepting its unfair burdens, and refusing to grow. Mixing everything up completely is grandmother Freida (Jessica Tandy) who, more than anyone else in the Berman family, seeks her own independence while facing the prospect of a nursing home. The year is 1 969, the summer that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, so the time is ripe for change and, of course, love. Into Pearl's life on the day of Jack's funeral comes an unlikely visitor, Joe Maladandri (Marcello Mastroianni), from the neighboring Italian district. Joe is as out of place at the Berman funeral, but he insists on seeing Pearl.

With the Jewish men clustering around in cthnocultural concern, Joe boldly makes a date with Pearl. These are two of Hollywood's most unlikely lovers. Pearl, with her compressed lips, suspicious eyes, and painfully formal dress, is critical of almost every one of Joe's words and deeds. Joe, on the other hand, with his liquid heavy lips, almost sleepy eyes, and casual Italian suit, tries to extend every courtesy. They are so opposite they have to fall in love.

The reason for Joe's request for a "date" was to explain to Pearl that, one night in 1946, Jack Berman had come into Joe's Lucky Horseshoe Bar and gotten drunk with the intention of leaving Pearl. He was fed up with a life without romance. Joe talked him out of his plans and taught him how to dance with Pearl. If he wanted romance, he had to put it into his marriage himself. Joe then took Jack home and stood outside while Jack took the stoically disgruntled Pearl in his arms and danced to "The Sky Fell Down When I Met You." Since love and romance were never big factors in her duty to Jack, Pearl is unimpressed.

Joe, startled to find a person so impervious to kindness and feeling, finds that his efforts to convey the idea of love 23 years earlier are only half fulfilled. The rest of the story is the rocky road to discovery and change for not just for Pearl but for everyone in her family. Bibby, so called because she was the youngest daughter, demands that Pearl treat her like an adult, starting with calling her by her real name, Barbara. She then promptly moves to California to establish her own life away from the ethnic and family restrictions of Queens. Norma finally acknowledges the death of her baby when she nearly loses the living son she has been ignoring.

Casting away her character roles, she finally begins dressing for own individual identity. And Pearl's facade finally breaks down and she accepts the lessons of romance that Joe has to teach. There are some fun moments along the way. At one point the Maladandri family invites the Berman family over for a good Italian dinner. It's a disaster.

The Maladandri matriarch has a face that would turn nonbclievcrs to stone, complemented by the excessively large wooden cross on her chest no doubt to impress the Jews. The Italians gobble the food, the Jews pick. And finally the evening is topped when Norma and Bibby break into a bitter quarrel which spreads throughout the room and all those present. The best part of such movies, of course, is the agonies these peo- filc go through before they finally find meaningful romance in their ives. Romantic images are usually prevalent.

In this film, one of the most memorable is of Mastroianni and MacLaine kissing while standing in a wading pool. Roger Taylor leaches film at Western Wyoming College. By WILLIAM ARNOLD 1993 Seattle Post-Intelligencer LOS ANGELES Here's a good movie trivia question: What series of animated cartoons won more Oscars and more overall critical acclaim than any other during the Golden Age of Hollywood? The answer may surprise you. It isn't Bugs Bunny, Road Runner or even Mickey Mouse (though he won his share). It's Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer's long-standing cat-and-mouse act, Tom and Jerry, who chased and outsmarted each other through 114 shorts between 1939 and 1957.

Yes, this unlikely duo won an astounding seven Oscars of 13 nominations before fading into toon obscurity the least revived and certainly least merchandised of all the great cartoon characters of the studio era. But they're coming out of retirement Friday, when Miramax and Turner Entertainment release "Tom and Jerry The Movie," the pair's first feature film. If successful, it will be followed up with a string of sequels and a blitzkrieg of licensing that could put Tom and Jerry in the same merchandising league as Bugs, Mickey, Donald Duck and the rest of their cartoon contemporaries. One man has fought hard to see this happen: Joseph Barbera, who with his longtime partner William Hanna created Tom and Jerry in 1939. They worked on the MGM animated series exclusively for more than 1 7 years, before going on their own in the late '50s to create the famous, TV-based Hanna-Barbera animation empire.

A dapper, energetic man of 82, Barbera sat in a corner table of a Universal City restaurant recently and said that a feature-length Tom and Jerry movie had never been off his mind for the past 30 years. "I pitched the idea till i was blue in the face," he said, "but I guess the circumstances just weren't right until now." Born in New York City to Sicilian parents, Barbera went to New York University with plans to be a banker before being sidetracked by his love of drawing. After selling a cartoon to Collier's magazine, he worked briefly for two East Coast animation studios, then came west hoping to work for the Disney Co. "Disney didn't hire me, and it's a good thing," he said, "or I would probably still be in Burbank drawing Mickey Mouse to this day." Instead, in 1937, he went to work for MGM, Hollywood's biggest studio. "Metro had started a modest animation operation in the early '30s, but it didn't amount to much.

When I came along, Louis B. Mayer who always wanted MGM to be the best at everything wanted to beef up his animation department, and develop some popular recurring characters like the other studios had. "Bill (Hanna) and I put our heads together and decided it would be different to have two equal characters who were always in conflict with each other. We originally thought of a fox and a dog, before deciding on the cat and mouse. When we presented the idea to Fred Quimby, the head of the shorts department, he hated the idea, but he let us go ahead and try it." The first Tom and Jerry cartoon, "Puss Gets a Boot," was released in 1940.

The cat was named Jasper (the names Tom and Jerry were later chosen in a contest among studio personnel) and the physical appearance of both would later change, but the cartoon established the basic Tom and Jerry formula that never varied. "It was nominated for an Oscar, which surprised Mayer, who was not used to getting that kind of acclaim for his cartoons," said Barbera. Over the next two decades, Hanna and Barbera turned out what noted French critic Patrick Brion called "a succession of masterpieces." In his definitive history of Hollywood animation, "Of Mice and Magic," Leonard Maltin called the '40s Tom and Jerrys "the Hollywood cartoon at its best that set quality standards that have never been recaptured." The films, which ran between six and eight minutes long, often involved a formula chase, but within this ritual the films could be enormously inventive and even psychologically complex. (One critic has even advanced a theory that Jerry was actually a female mouse, and that much of the pair's underlying conflict was sexual in nature!) "Making the films was never a streamlined process," Barbera recalled. "We only turned out five or six cartoons each year, and the studio budgeted them at about $50,000 a cartoon an immense sum in those days.

So we took the time to get it right. It's hard to realize today hat a luxury that as to have hundreds of artists devoted to nothing but Tom and Jerry. TRIATHLON RIVER FESTIVAL SATURDAY AUGUST 14, 1993 -Casper, Wyo Support the continued development of the Platte River Parkway by joining the competition! We're looking for 30 business teams at $100 each, and numerous solo and team competitors. CALL 577-1225 OR SIGN UP BELOW COMPETITION COURSE DESCRIPTION Biking 30K road race from Casper Events Center to Ormsby Road to Crossroads Park Running 7.5K Race from Crossroads Park to North Platte River Park to Amoco Park Boating 7 Miles Downriver Race from Amoco Park to Evansville Park RECREATION COURSE DESCRIPTION Biking 10K Race from Casper Events Center to North Platte River Park to Crossroads Park (12 paved, 12 dirt) Running 3.7K Race from Crossroads to Amoco Park Boating 7 miles Downriver Race from Amoco Park to Evansville Park IndividualTeam Captain. Address City, State.

Sponsored by: HILLTOP a- Member F.D.I C. Casper IHar-CTribune Wyoming Padlo Station C30KTUO RAOO Phone Number CLASS Check Otic AMOUNT ENCLOSED Entry Fee (includes T-shirts) MOUNTAIN wBPOCTTS Additional T-Shirts $10 1(2. Tetevtston Great Radish Famine and The Minstrels; The Haunting of Castle Ctorg: Dark and Stormy iJight and The Secret Society of Poobahs (all from Jim Hcnson, all cost Comedy Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, with Maaulay Culkin. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern (Fox, S24.9X). How Like Me Now, with Sal-li Richardson (Universal, There Goes the Neighborhood.

with Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara (Paramount, Drama American Friends, with Michael Palin(Vidmark. Cheatin' Hearts, with Sally Kirkland and Kris Kristoffcrson (Vidmark. Dres. Grav, with Alec Baldwin. Hal Ilolbrook (Warner, Hidden Obsession, with Jan-M it had Vincent (Universal.

Actionadventure Nowhere to Run, with Jean-Claude Van Damme (Columbia TriStar, Wildcard, with Powers Boothc and Cindy Pickett (Universal, Animation Bugs Bunny's Hare-Brained 'tits; Elmer Fudd 's Sc hool of Hard Knmks; RoadRunner and Wile E. Coyote 's Crash Course; Sylvester and Tweety Tale Feathers; Taz-Maniac, with "Taz. the Tasma-nian Devil; Taz-Manimals. ith "Taz." the Tasmanian Devil; Yosemite Sam 's Yeller Fever all from Warner all cost Children Meet the Fraggles: Beginnings and A Friend in Seed; Fraggle Fun and Doozer Doings: All Work and All Play and The Preachifi-cafion of Convint ing John; The Fraggles Search and Find The $25 Competition Solo $45 Competition Team $45 Competition Mixed Team $100 Competition Business Team $25 Recreational Solo $45 Recreational Team $45 Recreational Mixed Team $45 Recreational Family Team $45 Recreational Junior Team $100 Recreational Business Team Total Make Check or Money Order Payable to: Tlatte River Parkway P.O. Box 1228 Casper, WY 82602 307-577-1225.

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