Good News (1947)
June Allyson makes quite an elderly university student, she made this film when she was 30 years old, only Mel Torme was close to college age — 23. They cut him out of a couple of songs because he’s funny lookin’ —even though he has the voice and musicianship of an angel. When Peter Lawford and June Allyson are fighting over a French lesson, Mel just happens sing ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free’ in the next room, and Lawford starts singing it to June Allyson in French, and unless you have a heart of stone, you will melt. It’s a very silly movie that now and then lives up to its silliness — as when June Allyson is trying to convince Pat Marshall (the vain, pretentious gold-digger) that Peter Lawford is not worth chasing, and she puts on a performance with the cook (the staunch Connie Gilchrist, reliable as ever) and announces “the pickle king has gone bankrupt due to a cucumber blight.” I think it’s probably Betty Comden and Adolph Green that made this sometimes unbearably light bit of confectionary edible (as they wrote the screenplay). According to Wikipedia, Good News is a remake of 1930 pre-Code movie filled with “sexual innuendo and lewd suggestive humour.” Since this movie is basically a sanitised remake of one that I wish I'd seen -- and beause this project was originally intended for her and Mickey Rooney -- I’m going to use it as an excuse to talk about a star who June Allyson was essentially a sanitised version of — Judy Garland. Everything Judy Garland should have been, June Allyson was. (After all, she lived to be 88.) But we loved Judy because of what she wasn’t. What great performers bring to us are their damaged selves, which doesn’t require that they be especially damaged, because we are all damaged. The only difference between them and us is that they need to show us that damage for some reason. This is emotional exhibitionism — and it attracts like a car accident. We are all characters in J. B. Ballard’s Crash —symphorophiliacs — i.e.we have a fetishistic sexual obsession with car crashes. You may deny any desire to stage a car crash and wank off -- as symphorphiliacs do -- but the fact is you craned you neck and slowed down the car, didn't you? Just to have a look? No need to be ashamed; it’s human, we are all just a little bit interested in death, because of our own. And why shouldn’t we be? What we want most is to get as close as we can to death without actually dying. The moment Garland appears, it only takes a second to realise she is a taut wire stretched to it’s limit that may, at any moment, break. We all know what it is like to feel like that occasionally, (if you don’t that’s your problem). But Garland knew what it was like to live like that all the time. But more than that, she desperately wanted to lay it all before us — to say 'See, look here, look at my ugliness, my idiocy, my pain.' I am not one of those who feels sorry for her, though I know I’m supposed to. And that’s not because I think she didn’t suffer, but because those who pity her are enjoying just the tiniest bit of schadenfreude — ‘That’s not me! I’m not a drug addict, my weight didn’t go up and down like a yoyo, I'm not married to some idiot half my age, I don’t collapse onstage in an drug induced stupor after abusing the audience.' I know you don’t do any of those things, but why is that something to be proud of? Your pity just tells me seeing her makes you feel pleased with yourself that you haven’t succumbed to the disease of living. You have been lucky, or you have been stupid enough to keep a distance from life — and anything that might harm you. Which brings us to Sweden. I mean, we haven’t heard very much about Sweden lately, have we? I wonder why? How is Sweden like Judy Garland? Well those of us who say we don’t care much for what’s going on in Sweden will be there, gobbling it up, when the country goes down. Sweden, in case you didn’t notice, has done the exact opposite of what we have done, in terms of COVID-19. There is no discernible lock down (no huge gatherings, no high schools or universities open, that’s pretty much it). Their leading epidemiologist Anders Tegnell says COVID-19 is a highly infections disease that is not particularly lethal (a fact) and that the best thing to do is to let it play out in the population (another fact) and ultimately, just as many people will die in Sweden as will die in countries that have lockdowns (also a fact). So far he is right, and since he is dealing in facts not fear, I so no reason to get in a huff about it. But that doesn’t stop people from eagerly waiting for masses of Swedish people to die of COVID-19 — and if they do, many will be dancing in the streets (wearing face masks, of course). I know this from being an AIDS radical in the 90s. I and several others dared to suggest that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. Then the head spokesperson of our group Rob Johnston — who was a kind of a perfectly beautiful good man — died (of what? not sure…) and people were happy and wrote bitter celebratory epitaphs for him. The problem was clearly only this: if we didn’t believe in AIDS in exactly the way they did, then people hated us, because they suspected we were having more fun than them, so it was only right and just that we should die ugly, painful deaths. But you see there are 'no innocent victims.’ We are either all of innocent, or all of us guilty — and not only just because nobody gets out of this game alive. Have you not seen it happen? When Aunt Mildred dies people start clucking and saying ‘Well you know, she didn’t take care of herself and she was rather overweight, she really brought it on herself.’ Well, it’s natural, we feel safe when we do that, so it’s human, but it’s also despicable. When Liza Minnelli first sang ‘Cabaret’ — I saw her do it on the tonite show (she was auditioning on every talk show in town to play Sally Bowles in the movie) it sent shivers down my spine, because of the way she said ‘old chum!’ No one else said the word ‘chum!’ like that. They just sang ‘chum’ — and there was no sadness in it, no regret. She spoke it, with a painful longing. Because there is always sadness in that word 'chum.' And I think now of all the friends I am going to lose over COVID-19; because they will know that I managed to have fun, that I didn’t stop living from fear. Later in life when people were worried about her health (and they had good reason to worry) Liza changed the lyrics of 'Cabaret' from “And when I go, I'm going like Elsie’” to “And when I go, I’m NOT going like Elsie.” Shame on you Liza. And on everyone who judges another’s life.
