I mean it. I liked the show when it first aired, when I was in the sixth grade in 1966, but, looking at it fifty years later, it is just awful. The only thing the show had going for it was the theme music. As an aside, Sherwood Schwartz, the show's creator, wrote the theme just as he did for Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. In my view, he should have stuck with music. He would have made far less money, but he wouldn't be remembered today as being the Sultan of the Vast Wasteland.
I will try to get through the show, but it is going to be hell to do it.
On a better note, the other television DVD I got was 1957's Decoy, which was a syndicated series set and filmed in New York City. Unique for its time, it focused on women in law enforcement, with Beverly Garland playing the protagonist. Her character was the first television female character to be the main character of a series. It is a really good show, with stories, like Dragnet, based on real cases. It has almost a documentary feel to it. Since it was filmed in New York, one gets a good look at how the city appeared in the late 1950s. There is also a booklet with the DVD explaining the history of the series and how that series helped pave the way for women in law enforcement in that city. It was dedicated to the women who worked for NYPD.
I also picked up a DVD collection of seven Jean Harlow films, which I won't review here today because I don't feel like it. However, instead of buying a DVD of David Stenn's 2007 documentary, Girl 27, I downloaded the film to my Kindle Fire because the DVD is out of print and damned expensive to get used (about 70 bucks from Amazon.com sellers). David Stenn is a writer whose work I am familiar. He wrote two biographies (edited by Jacqueline Onassis when she was an editor at Doubleday before she died in 1994): one of Clara Bow and one of Jean Harlow. I have both of these books, which were praised by critics and considered definitive works. Stenn always does his homework when he writes books. When he was researching the Harlow book (called Bombshell), he came across the rape scandal at MGM where a young dancer named Patricia Douglas was raped by an MGM salesman when she left a drunken party as part of a convention that was held by the studio in 1937 to celebrate its record sales. She tried to get legal help and was stopped every single step of the way. MGM owned not just a studio and its stars, it owned every single apparatus in Hollywood and L.A. County including the district attorney's office and the police department. If people think women in Hollywood have it bad now, and they do, it was much, much, much worse years ago. The casting couch reigned supreme, with the likes of Darryl F. Zanuck being the very worst of these louses who promised starlets they could be famous if they gave him what he wanted during his lunch breaks. Douglas was raped by a salesman out of Illinois, I think it was, after he dragged her from the party into a parked car and beat her up on top of raping her. She was only twenty years old at the time (she died in 2003), but she was very, very sheltered when it came to men. The rape destroyed her life and her relationships with others, including straining her relationships with her mother and her daughter. Stenn befriended her, wrote an article about her, and a few years following her death at 86, released Girl 27.
I always prided myself a bit for knowing quite a bit about classic Hollywood, but I had never heard of this case at all. That is how successful MGM was in obliterating it from the public conscious. No studio would get away with this now, but it was a different era.
I think the fact there is all this emphasis now on sexual harassment in Hollywood and other areas of public life that the movie has been reexamined and more people have bought used copies, thus inflating the price on the second-hand market. I always prefer the DVD version, but I have to take what I can get.
Some have criticized Stenn inserting himself through the film, but in a way it was like a true-life mystery story, with him being the "investigator" trying to track down the seemingly elusive Douglas. He found her in a small apartment in Las Vegas, where she had lived for many years. Still sharp mentally, she recounted the horrors of the evening, the futility of trying to get justice, and the tragedy of her life. At first she resented the intrusion, but she grew to like and trust Stenn enough to open up about the rape, which she called "the attack."
Good movie, well worth seeing.
And that is all I am going to say about anything today. I am trying to get my strength back up for work tomorrow.
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