WINGING IT

RIP to Dick Gautier, who played Conrad Birdie on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie, and Hymie the robot on Get Smart, passed on at 85. Last night I watched him in an episode of the short-lived sitcom When Things Were Rotten, in which he played Robin Hood, facing off against The Black Knight, played by the recently late and much-lamented Ron Glass.

A Canadian entomologist has named a newly-discovered species of moth Neopalpa donaldtrumpi after our incoming President, on the basis of a similarity in coiffure.

The difference is, it works on the moth. Most becoming.

You can read about it in the Washington Post, although presumably that makes it fake news. Anyway, in the creature's honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...we can hardly do other than to acknowledge Mothra...

...star of the 1961 classic and many subsequent Toho favorites. We'll be lucky indeed if The Moth's Eponym in the White House wreaks no more havoc than Toho's larger but far less repulsive bug.

It was also pointed out to me that Turner Classic Movies is showing the Budd Schulberg-Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd on Inauguration Day.

Great movie, great gesture, but I don't think I can watch it, anymore than I can watch the spectacle itself. That movie came true, and what's heartbreaking is that the tape exposing the character of the real Lonesome Rhodes (far more reprehensible than Andy Griffith's character in the film) surfaced, right on cue, and the public failed to give a shit. As cynical as they always seemed, it turns out that Schulberg and Kazan overestimated us.

ANDYLAND

Happy 4th everyone.

RIP to Andy Griffith, passed on at 86. This is kind of a big one for me—watching that show after school with my brother ranks among the happiest memories of my younger years.

Griffith was a seriously skilled performer, and shrewd enough to know that he’d look better yet if he surrounded himself with terrific actors, then stood back and let them shine. But for all the hilarity that The Andy Griffith Show was capable of, I still think that its real achievement was in the rapport between Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor and Don Knotts as Deputy Barney Fife—what they captured, in the rhythm of their conversation and interaction, may be the most quietly convincing portrait of a close friendship ever committed to film. The famous scenes in which they discuss their laid-back Sunday plans (“Go downtown, get a bottle of pop…”) over and over again are—for me quite literally—heavenly; the sheer tangible savor in their anticipation of these simple pleasures is about as good as American TV comedy has ever gotten. It’s an example for life.

Among the encomia to Griffith of the last day are many mentions of his brilliant performance as the Glenn-Beck-ish reactionary media conman Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s wonderful 1957 A Face in the Crowd.

Well-deserved, but it should be mentioned that Griffith often put his genial persona to sinister, villainous use—he had a great time playing heavies on TV in the ‘70s. A few years ago I was able to snag a VHS copy of the 1974 TV-wheeler Pray for the Wildcats, in which Griffith, leading a cast that includes William Shatner, Robert Reed and Marjoe Gortner, plays a sheer bastard, an unapologetically murderous SOB, and is amazingly convincing and scary.

And if I needed one more reason to love Griffith, there’s this.