SATURDAY NIGHT'S ALRIGHT

Check out my short review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Saturday Church, a sweet coming-of-age film featured at this weekend's Desperado LGBT Film Festival at Paradise Valley Community College.

With Peter Rabbit opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...here's the rabbit that menaced Uncle Walt (Kevin McCarthy) in 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie...

THE MAN OF A THOUSAND CREDITS

Well, hundreds, anyway…

Just this past weekend I was watching one of my all-time favorite movies, 1954’s Them! and I mentioned to The Wife that William Schallert, who has a small part as an ambulance attendant early on, was one of the few members of that great cast who was still alive. Then yesterday we learned that Schallert has passed on, at 93.

Best known for his regular role as Patty’s Dad on The Patty Duke Show—who would’ve thought he’d outlive his TV daughter?—and his recurring role on Dobie Gillis, Schallert was one of the most ubiquitous faces in American movies and TV in the second half of the 20^th Century. He appeared in movies ranging from The Man from Planet X to The Incredible Shrinking Man to Pillow Talk to In the Heat of the Night, and his dizzying list of TV roles includes everything from Twilight Zone to The Andy Griffith Show to The Wild Wild West to Get Smart to Gunsmoke to The Partridge Family to Kung Fu to the disagreeable Federation official in the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” among many, many others.

Schallert, who also served as the President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1979 to 1981, slowed down a little after the ‘90s, but only a little. He was still making fairly regular TV appearances in stuff like My Name is Earl and True Blood and Medium until just a couple of years ago. RIP; his legacy with rerun junkies will not fade anytime soon.

RIP EMC

RIP to Donna Douglas, passed on at 82. It’s hard to get my head around the idea that the sweet, gorgeous, guileless, critter-loving Elly May Clampett from perhaps the funniest American TV comedy of all time, The Beverly Hillbillies, is departed. It’s harder, almost, to get my head around the idea that she was 82 years old.

In her honor, this week’s monster is…

Monster-of-the-Week: …Donna Douglas, in probably her second-best-known TV role, in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder.” She’s monstrous, in her own eyes, because after reconstructive surgery she emerges from her bandages looking like this…

…but in the strange alternative reality world where she lives, people are supposed to look like this…

Here’s a picture of a doll—sorry, I mean an action figure—of this guy, given to me by a kind friend a few years back...

MOSS APPEAL

RIP to the titanic Richard Kiel, passed on at 74. The 7-foot-plus fellow is of course best remembered as the indefatigable and curiously endearing “Jaws” in the Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, and as the title caveman in the 1962 laugh-riot Eegah, but he played innumerable other towering menaces, including…

Monster-of-the-Week: …Pere Malfait, the mossy giant of Cajun lore in “The Spanish Moss Murders,” a 1974 episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker…

This murky still does little justice to the creature’s creepiness in the show.

HEY MICKEY

RIP to Mickey Rooney, passed on at 93.

The veteran of everything from the Andy Hardy flicks to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to Twilight Zone to Carroll Ballard’s masterpiece The Black Stallion, among countless other film and TV credits, Rooney also did plenty of stage work. I saw him as Professor Marvel/The Wizard in a touring production of The Wizard of Oz more than a decade ago, and I’ll never forget his entrance: The lights came up on him as Professor Marvel, the crowd stood up, the applause went on and on, and finally he oh-so-reluctantly dropped character, rose and put his hands on his heart and oh-so-humbly acknowledged the crowd with gestures and expressions indicating he was astonished by, and regarded himself as unworthy of, our adulation. In this way he was able to keep the ovation going quite a while longer, and when  at last he sat back down and started the scene, it of course didn’t matter what he did from there on. I remember thinking that I was seeing a piece of showbiz skill from another era, and feeling privileged to witness it.

RIP also to comedian and actor John Pinette, passed on at 52—not nearly as long-lived as Rooney, alas.

GOOBER PEACE

RIP to George Lindsey, best known as Goober on The Andy Griffith Show, Mayberry RFD and Hee Haw, passed on at 83.

Lindsey also appeared in films like Ensign Pulver and Cannonball Run II, and on episodes of Gunsmoke, M*A*S*H, Fantasy Island and, for a change of pace, as the nasty racist deputy in the Twilight Zone episode I Am the Night—Color Me Black. But many of us will revere him for his ace Cary Grant impression: Judy Judy Judy Judy Judy!