Category Archives: Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada #1

Rod Serling

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel):

The Golden Age of American Television – a personal history of vintage dramatic TV and a review of the Criterion Collection’s DVD set of live TV drama

I was first introduced to vintage American and British programming by virtue of the fact that my hometown of Winnipeg was so remotely situated in the Canadian Midwest that there was no cable television during the 60s. Eventually, one side of the mighty Red River got cable, but I not only lived on the wrong side of the river, but the wrong side of the tracks in the Eastern European enclave of Winnipeg’s North End.

Via rabbit-eared antennae, our Dominion’s national public network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), was responsible for domestic product that was mostly dreadful or, at best, watchable as kitsch. Especially pathetic were game shows where grand prizes often amounted to pen and pencil sets, or Hymn Sing with its array of spiritual music, or Don Messer’s Jubilee, a variety show devoted to East Coast fiddling and trilling Irish tenors. Happily, CBC programmed some American shows as Wonderful World of Disney and, thank Christ, The Beverley Hillbillies.

The real magic was CBC’s acquisition of British programming. Before the Dominion of Canada had its own formal constitution, it was overseen by England through the British North America Act. In fact, during childhood, each school day ended (as did most public events) by singing ‘God Save The Queen’. (The Dominion, is frankly, still subservient to the monarchy, but slowly and unhappily, British traditions in Canada are now so much dust in the wind.)

Prior to the 80s, British programming on Canadian television was especially memorable, with substantial helpings of Sir Francis Drake, Til Death Us Do Part (eventually remade in America by Norman Lear as All in the Family), Danger Man (with pre-Prisoner Patrick McGoohan), the Danger Man spin-off Man in a Suitcase, all the various Gerry Anderson sci-fi puppet extravaganzas, the cooler-than-cool Roger Moore in The Saint and my favourite of all, The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring the inimitable Richard Greene and sporting a catchy theme song (parodied on Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the Dennis Moore sketch). In later years, I discovered Robin Hood had been shot entirely in 35mm with scripts written by blacklisted American writers like Waldo Salt and Ring Lardner Jr. For a brief period in the 70s and early 80s we were even treated to a portion of that magnificent explosion of British sitcoms that included Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, Man about the House, Up Pompeii, On the Buses and Steptoe and Son. A key thing to note here is that while many of the programmes were contemporary, just as many of them were vintage productions made years earlier, but we assumed they were all new shows.

Amusingly enough, the Dominion of Canada was always protectionist about shielding Canadians from American culture and instead exposed us to British programming on domestic TV. The Dominion of Canada deemed anything remotely British as ‘Canadian Content’. This went a long way in suggesting to Bohunk immigrants and the born-in-Canada Bohunk progeny of said Bohunks that this is what it means to be Canadian.

Having to always deal with the demands of Lower Canada (Quebec) and smatterings of voyageur ancestors dotted across the Dominion, Canada needed to institute an all-French-language broadcast service – thus yielding a beast known as French CBC. It was pretty useless to Winnipeggers as nobody other than the French people who lived on the other side of the Red River in the voyageur enclave of St Boniface actually spoke French. However, the one great thing about French CBC was that it played French movies. Many of these pictures offered glimpses of nudity, which, of course, was of utmost importance to 7-year-old boys (of all ages).

Television nirvana finally reached Winnipeg in the form of KCND, a tiny independent American TV station 100 miles south, on the other side of the 49th parallel. The Dominion of Canada had plenty of advertising revenue to spend and business-owners in Winnipeg lined up to feature their commercials in tandem with the razzle-dazzle programming of ‘Uncle Sam’. KCND was strictly bargain basement and not affiliated with any major network though to kids, tired of fiddlers from Newfoundland and joyful Canucks winning useless pen and pencil sets on stupid Canadian TV, KCND was… AMERICA!

All the station could afford to show were syndicated packages of older American TV programming from – you guessed it – the ‘Golden Age’ of television (50s-early 60s). Just as tantalising were packages of B-pictures – mostly horror movies on a great show called Chiller Thriller or endless Bowery Boys, Ma and Pa Kettle, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Charlie Chan, Mr Moto and other glorious second features. An entire generation of Canadians in Winnipeg, no less, were treated to Perry Mason, The Donna Reed Show, Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Mr Peepers, Mr Ed, The Untouchables, The Rifleman and Death Valley Days.

Many continuing American dramatic series (including sitcoms) had an anthology flavour. In one episode, you could parachute anywhere in the run and know exactly who all the main characters were. What counted were the individual anthology-styled dramas. One-off guest characters fuelled the drama. Their story was the one that often counted.

It was, however, pure anthology series linked thematically that really caught my attention – every episode had a different story and different characters, occasionally introduced by their creators. (I often wonder if anthologies were closer to feature film that way and if this accounts for my distaste in TV drama that forces us to follow a story and character arcs over more than one season.) My favourites were genre pieces like Rod Serling’s ground-breaking The Twilight Zone, the nasty and often darkly humorous Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspense and the always terrifying monster-fest The Outer Limits. Many episodes of these pure anthology series were corkers of the highest order and corkers are what I value most in drama. I need to be whacked across the face with a two-by-four. I want my insides pummelled into pemmican. I want my eyes and ears to be dazzled. Most of all, I want greatness.

For me, good became and now is, simply not good enough.

I’m a junkie.

Every fix must be more intense than the last.

There was, however, something I had yet to experience.

It was live.

And it was drama.

From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, a unique form of TV drama gripped America – live dramatic broadcasts. Some were adaptations of literary classics such as Wuthering Heights, Julius Caesar and The Turn of the Screw, but the properties that captured the imaginations of the public, critics and, most notably, sponsors were the live dramas based on original material or daring adaptations of contemporary American literature.

The productions themselves were initially based in New York and rooted in the East Coast tradition of American theatre. Sponsors assisted in substantially underwriting the costs of production. Many of the regular anthology programmes bore the names of corporations keen to align themselves with the best in cultural programming. These were companies devoted to cranking out junk food bereft of nutritional value and manufacturing products that not only contributed to the destruction of the environment, but also to the acceleration of global warming. The makers of Kraft Dinner (dried egg noodles, powdered cheese and flavour-enhancing monosodium glutamate) and Cheese Whiz (glass jars full of easy-to-spread processed cheese loaded with deadly, but delicious trans-fats) delivered Kraft Television Theatre. The largest maker of tires (when you’re done with them, just burn them or toss into ditches in the countryside) endorsed drama on The Goodyear Television Playhouse. The purveyors of a product that only Superman could bend (but needed to emit billowing clouds of poison into the air to create it) conveyed first-rate drama on the US Steel Hour.

The list goes on. (It might be of some interest to note that the great Playhouse 90 was based in Hollywood and was financed not by a single sponsor, but several. This worked nicely until the national lobby group representing all the companies supplying the fuel needed for most of the gas ovens in America decided to advertise on the live broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg. This forced the network to bleep out references to ”gas ovens” and ‘gas chambers’. Sponsor-based censorship was finally rearing its ugly head and soon, this programme became the last live dramatic anthology series.

Live TV drama offered much in the way of greatness and especially developed a way of creating drama that was unique and exciting and, which, due to its high costs, will probably never happen again. In its heyday, the live TV production team and cast had anywhere from two to six weeks (and anywhere in between) to extensively rehearse performance, blocking, lighting and camera moves, and then… on whatever night the broadcast was to happen, with frayed nerves all round, the drama was performed live – replete with all the brilliance and glitches that come from the immediacy of such performances.

One of the special features on the Criterion Collection DVD The Golden Age of Television is a John Frankenheimer interview. He notes that every director he knew personally during the period, including himself, suffered severe back problems for the rest of their lives due to the indescribable tension a director went through during a live show. Directors, in spite of the extensive rehearsal, were responsible for making decisions regarding the camera switching (almost always three cameras). Standing at the ready, the directors needed to allow for actors not hitting marks, dropping lines or even taking advantage of miraculous moments that happened when the camera was rolling and a look, a gesture and/or a shot nobody counted on was too astounding NOT to be captured.

When a live show would prove to be extremely popular, it required a complete re-mount weeks or months later (in order to preserve the purity of a live performance). Due to the substantial time differences between the East and West Coasts of America, the Western audiences were provided with a kinescope of the live production. The kinescope was created when a 16mm camera was aimed at the best monitor available and the live programme was literally filmed off a TV screen.

Thank God for kinescopes. These live broadcasts were seen once and once only. In fact, after the initial broadcast and subsequent West Coast kinescope presentation, these works of art were never seen again – at least not until the 80s when the Public Broadcasting Corporation of America (PBS) secured, re-mastered and presented kinescopes on a limited series entitled The Golden Age of Television.

This PBS series also featured introductions from American actors and interviews with many of the living participants of the original live dramas (included on Criterion’s DVD, with new material also). Criterion is making these shows available to audiences who will see these masterpieces for the first time ever.

For my money, there isn’t a loser in the bunch.

Blending radio drama with live theatre and cinematic techniques (along with those of live television itself), the productions are a perfect example of cusp-period artistic expression. As Guy Maddin explores in his continued re-imagining of that glorious cusp-period of film history – the part-talkie – we are, with these live television dramas, reminded of the fact that so many vocabularies of visual storytelling were never quite given an opportunity to last long. While one is grateful they didn’t overstay their welcome, one also wonders how many great works were NOT made in the mediums of film and television due to rapid technological advancements leaving certain approaches to storytelling behind in favour of offering something ‘new’ and ‘improved’.

In this Criterion package, one of the best examples of cusp-period technique is Bang the Drum Slowly. Adapting Mark Harris’s novel, it tells the story of Henry (Paul Newman) and Bruce (Albert Salmi), respective pitcher and catcher for the New York Mammoths baseball team. Henry is a dreamboat-star of the highest order – equally beloved by fans and players alike – and geeky Bruce is the object of derision from most of his fellow players. When Henry learns Bruce is dying from an incurable disease, he is obligated to keep it to himself (lest Bruce be dropped from the roster), thus allowing his pal to finish out the rest of his short life with dignity and on the baseball diamond.

From the beginning, scriptwriter Arnold (And the Band Played On, Tucker: The Man and His Dream) Schulman and director Daniel (A Raisin in the Sun, Fort Apache – The Bronx) Petrie had their work cut out for them. How to translate a tale that spans two baseball seasons, numerous locations (including dugout action) and a huge cast during one live hour of drama is the challenge. Ultimately, it’s handled with the kind of originality and efficiency that only this cusp-period method of visual drama could tackle.

The beginning of the drama is pure simplicity. Henry approaches the camera and speaks directly into it – introducing himself as the ‘writer’ of the story about to unfold, politely informing the audience of its scope and asking them to use their imaginations in order to run free with the drama to truly appreciate it. All of this is delivered in character and as the drama progresses; Henry is our guide through the story. While his eyes become our eyes, he still holds his own as a character of complexity. And most of all, I love the idea of a drama literally telling us to use our imaginations – a brave, bold move I wish we could see more of.

The performances are first-rate. Albert Salmi as the dying catcher finds just the right balance between good humour, earnestness, dopiness and down-home likeability – he’s Lenny from Of Mice and Men, but armed with a catcher’s glove (and playing off perfectly against Henry, who is equally Steinbeck-like, a pragmatic, yet compassionate ‘George’ figure).

It’s no surprise how impossible it is to keep one’s eyes off the smouldering Paul Newman. It’s a star-making turn but the very cusp-medium approach allows us to behold Newman deliver a stunning monologue after Bruce dies. Newman is so moving, that I dare anyone to experience this final address direct to the camera and not shed more than a few tears – not just for the gorgeously rendered words he speaks, but the sheer virtuosity of his performance.

A Wind from the South, also directed by Daniel Petrie, features an exquisite performance from Julie Harris as the spinster-ish Shevawn who contentedly runs a guesthouse in the Irish countryside, living vicariously through the lives, travels and adventures of all those who pass through her doors. When a disillusioned, American business executive makes a stopover, they both discover their mutual passion and need for love. Harris is so warm, lovely, delicate and controlled that she commands the screen for the full hour. She also handles writer James (Love among the Ruins) Costigan’s rich romanticism with exactly the sort of restraint necessary to bring it into the realm of the poetic.

A different sort of poetry is displayed in No Time for Sergeants, a strange little comedy featuring the screen debut of Andy Griffith as a naïve, dim-witted, corn-pone philosopher who gets drafted into the army with a cheery optimism that borders on a pathological refusal to acknowledge anything that is in the least way negative. Griffith, prior to this, was performing in live one-man shows that were part stand-up comedy and part semi-autobiographical performance art. To place someone with no on-camera experience in a live drama beaming to millions was especially daring, but it paid off beautifully. It made Griffith a star and he followed this up with his astounding performance in A Face in the Crowd and the long-running television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. The screenplay adaptation by Ira (Rosemary’s Baby) Levin, allowed for the main character to walk right up to the camera and address the audience face to face. What is often looked upon as a cheat and/or lazy writing is, in fact, as visually compelling as the flashiest camera pyrotechnics.

Delbert Mann’s live television direction of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty is also revelatory in displaying the simple power of great writing and acting. Rod Steiger plays a lonely butcher who lives with his mother. He has no prospects of ever marrying. When he meets a plain young woman in a dance hall, they hit it off and, for the first time, he might have found love.

Many live TV dramas were remade as theatrical features and the Academy Award-winning version of Marty starring Ernest Borgnine is what most people are familiar with. While that picture is not without merit, it’s this version that brings out the best of Chayefsky’s writing – so much so that the humanity and tenderness of the characters and dialogue makes us wonder why he never explored this side of himself in addition to his usually acerbic sledgehammer satires (Network, The Hospital). And, while to some, this might be blasphemy, one also wonders why the makers of the theatrical feature version didn’t do everything in their power to retain Rod Steiger in the title role.

One of the things that make this TV version work is Steiger. Sure, Borgnine is Borgnine, but in addition to his girth and everyman qualities, he also has that lasciviously tongue-wagging butt-ugly mug that’s more suited to a Peckinpah picture. Each time Borgnine comes on screen, he looks like he’s more interested in taking the lead on a train pull or gang rape. Steiger, on the other hand, with his soulful eyes, beefy jowls and hangdog expression is the epitome of Marty.

To see this sad schlub, sitting at home, waiting for the phone to ring (a brilliant reverse on the usual female version of this scene), breaks our hearts. When Steiger, on the verge of tears, holds back sobs when he talks about his need for love, he is so truthful that I was compelled to squirt geysers of tears at the telly. This production, once again, perfectly represents the power of live television drama – it’s often about the writing and the performances.

Direction, however, never takes a back seat. It’s the directors who ultimately shine in terms of using this unique cusp-medium to bring out the best in the material and their actors. The legendary John (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, Birdman of Alcatraz) Frankenheimer interprets JP Miller’s astonishing screenplay for Days of Wine and Roses with such mastery that seldom have we been dragged through the horrifying depths of alcoholism as we are in this production. Blending live studio action with pre-taped sequences, we bop around between Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, detox sequences and harrowing booze binges.

Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie are riveting as the married couple who seek solace in booze – desperately trying to claw through the muck of their marriage, swinging back and forth from sobriety to drop-dead drunkenness. Watching in flashback, we see the ultra-successful ad executive who uses booze to entertain his clients to a point where booze becomes his one true love. This is astonishingly frank, even by contemporary standards. Seeing him hook his young wife to the bottle so she can share in his joys of inebriation is positively horrific.

Frankenheimer delivers a rollercoaster ride of despair using techniques that seem to be striving for cinematic, big-screen qualities – making the drama lifelike by being bigger than life. This production is, in fact, so great, one can only wonder why the mediocre Blake Edwards was entrusted with the eventual film version, which is not without its moments (notably in Jack Lemmon’s interpretation of the role handled by Robertson in the TV version), but lacks the verve of Frankenheimer’s rendering.

Frankenheimer also delivers the goods with the revelatory production entitled The Comedian. From a novella by Ernest (North by Northwest, Sweet Smell of Success) Lehman and powerfully adapted by Rod Serling, this is, without question, one of the most harrowing dramatic show business exposés ever committed to film/tape/kinescope. Again, it is the simplicity of the basic premise that creates layers of complexity for both director and cast to drag us through the muck of nastiness and corruption.

Using everything at his disposal, Frankenheimer pulls off some kind of miracle. Bouncing from location to location and including – I kid you not – montage and the horrendous visual anchor of an oversized photo of the leering monster of the title, Frankenheimer is indeed a director at the pinnacle of his power. The opening sequence is a rehearsal of a live comedy broadcast and cuts between the performance itself, the master control booth and behind-the-scenes action. Within a live TV drama, Frankenheimer actually recreates the making of a live TV extravaganza. How cool is that?

Mickey Rooney plays Sammy Hogarth, a hugely popular TV comic making the leap from a half-hour show to a full 90-minute special. Hogarth demands more than perfection – he demands worship from all his collaborators. He is, without question, one of the most grotesque, repugnant characters in 20th-century drama. Much of this is due to Rooney. His performance is truly a revelation. While I always admired his work as a child actor in the numerous Rooney-Garland musicals and his moving portrait of the wartime telegram delivery boy in The Human Comedy, nothing could have ever prepared me for his performance in this mean-spirited drama. Rooney’s hurricane-like command of every scene he’s in is so powerful that even when he’s off-screen, his influence over all the supporting characters is not only felt, but it’s as if he’s in the same room with them – poking, prodding, cajoling, haranguing and tearing strips off everyone’s back.

The people most susceptible to his nastiness are his long-time gag writer with a bad case of writer’s block (Edmond O’Brien, the revenge-bent everyman from the great noir D.O.A.) and his brother, a weak, whining simpleton – originally promised the job of producer, but reduced to Sammy’s slave and bearing the biggest brunt of the comic’s ire.

Playing Sammy’s brother is the legendary crooner Mel Torme, whose career in movies was mostly reserved for second banana roles in musicals. Torme is downright snivelling, so pathetically subservient to his older brother that we initially feel sorry for him, but his subsequent actions are so appalling that he ultimately appears as little more than a cretin. It’s a great performance and one can only wonder why we never saw more of Torme on the big screen in roles to rival this one.

Kim Hunter (Stella in Elia Kazan’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire and, lest we forget, Zira, the cute female chimp in Planet of the Apes) plays Torme’s long-suffering wife, who is fed up with how pathetic her husband is and demands he stand up to Sammy. Like everyone in this drama, though, she eventually puts herself in an utterly degrading position to get what she wants.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Edmond O’Brien’s character is so desperate to drag himself out of his writer’s block that he plagiarises the un-used work of a dead comedy writer?

Well, here’s the other revelation – this is ultimately the story of an utter monster who turns everything and everyone around him into bottom-feeding, soul-bereft plankton and yet, like so many live dramatic television broadcasts of the period, the programme sizzled in terms of audience and critical response.

It was based on a work by Ernest Lehman that bears more than a passing resemblance to the nasty feature film Sweet Smell of Success, but at least that story had Tony Curtis’s charming press agent Sidney Falco. Nobody, but nobody, has anything resembling charm in The Comedian. (Interestingly, veteran character actor Whit Bissell delivers a great performance in The Comedian as sleazy gossip columnist Otis Elwell, a character from Sweet Smell of Success.)

Within the Criterion special features, Kim Hunter unfairly suggests that Serling’s writing for men was far superior to his writing for women. Looking at the Serling pieces in this collection, I take strong exception to this. Granted, Serling was obsessed with exploring the innate warrior heart of men in a contemporary peacetime setting, and given the era these pieces were written, it makes perfect sense. The female characters offer support rather than take the lead, but the writing is rich and vibrant. And certainly, The Twilight Zone features some of the strongest female characters of that period.

Serling’s primary interest, it is true, was telling two-fisted tales of men on the battleground of life. Decidedly two-fisted was his script Requiem for a Heavyweight. Nicely directed by Ralph Nelson, Serling etched the story of boxer Mountain McLintock (Jack Palance), a former contender for Heavyweight Champion of the World who is so punch-drunk that the Boxing Commission doctor informs his manager Maish (Keenan Wynn) that he can’t allow Mountain to fight anymore. Maish is devastated. He’s secretly placed a bet against Mountain with the mob, betting his boy will fall in the third. Alas, for Maish, Mountain takes seven rounds of punishment and Maish is into the mob for thousands of dollars.

Mountain is at wit’s end; boxing has been his whole life. When he visits an employment office he pours his guts out to a sympathetic job counsellor (Kim Hunter) who sincerely believes Mountain can contribute to society working with kids in the field of athletics. Maish, however, has other plans for our hero. He decides to commit Mountain to a series of pathetic wrestling matches. It’s easy money, but hardly a dignified way for a former heavyweight contender to earn a living.

Thanks to both Serling’s brutal dialogue and Jack Palance’s visceral, moving performance, Requiem for a Heavyweight is extremely harrowing. Mountain faces a life drowning his sorrows in booze and trading exaggerated fight tales with other punch-drunk (and just plain drunk) former boxers. We’re forced into Mountain’s perspective as he peers through a beer glass into a mirror that shows how the rest of his life could be spent. It’s a story of exploitation, loyalty and finally, seeking a way out, and so doing, finding both redemption and a new future.

As dark as it is, Serling deftly wends his way to an ending replete with hope – it’s neither cheap, nor shoehorned. It’s perfectly natural, and for once, we get a story that has its cake and eats it too – dragging us through muck, but subtly pointing to a glimmer of a new life. There’s a slight ambiguity to it, but by the end, we’re grateful that Serling has not drowned the heavyweight in complete and total despair. There is, at least, a chance to clamber out of the pit, and that, ultimately, is worth its weight in gold.

Last, but surely not least, this truly great Criterion Collection of live dramas leads us to even more gold. Rod Serling’s script for Patterns might be the most savage work in the bunch. Set against the nasty backdrop of corporate roulette, we are witness to the decimation of a kindly, old-fashioned company man, Andy Sloane (Ed Begley), at the hands of Ramsey (Everett Sloane), a fierce CEO bent on tossing out the old and bringing in Fred Staples (Richard Kiley), the new, a lean up-and-comer to replace Andy.

We watch in horror as the shark-like Ramsey unrelentingly berates Andy in front of everyone. However, when fresh-faced rookie Staples realises the worth of the old man, he decides to work with him instead of against him. Not only does this raise Ramsey’s ire, but it forces him to manipulate things so old Andy looks bad while Staples shines.

When Staples moves in for the kill he rips Andy limb from limb, leading to the ultimate deathblow. Young Staples, appalled and in protest, resigns. Ramsey will have none of it. What poor old Andy refused to do was fight back, but what Ramsey wants is an executive who will fight him tooth and nail and, if necessary, slice his throat as handily as he sliced Andy’s. This, according to Ramsey, is what makes good business.

Staples considers, then agrees to stay, but only if the terms of his right to decimate Ramsey are written into his contract, including the right to fulfil old Andy’s dream to physically beat Ramsey to a pulp. Ramsey, looking like he has the biggest hard-on of his life, agrees. These are, after all, the patterns of manhood, the patterns of business – teamwork based on warfare and pure warfare for the good of the corporation.

Serling is on a soapbox, but the script never obviously betrays this fact. The dialogue crackles with authenticity and like the best of these dramas, Patterns is pure post-war American nastiness. The desperation, so common in post-war film noir, transforms into vicious warfare.

The work of artists like Serling, who had seen military action, is fraught with the sort of raw-edged, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude. (A short list of such filmmakers would include Samuel Fuller, Sam Peckinpah, Frank Capra, Oliver Stone and John Ford – good company!) Having served in the Philippines during the Second World War – where death surrounded him constantly – Serling used his life experience and writing skills whenever he could to promote social consciousness (and certainly, his obsession with death was more than apparent in his brilliant anthology series The Twilight Zone).

Patterns, of course, deals with a number of issues – the most important being the shift from old-style corporate ethics and responsibilities towards workers and consumers to the bottom-line mentality of protecting the corporation’s profits and garnering the widest possible margin for the shareholders. Within these thematic concerns lies the true drama of the piece – an old man being repeatedly scavenged like so much carrion, yet with a few breaths left, he holds, so desperately with dear life, to a mere shred of his dignity. The drama of Rod Serling’s Patterns becomes so harrowing one can hardly believe such emotional truth and maturity could exist on a television screen.

Yet it does.

At least in that twilight zone called The Golden Age of American Television.

From the Dominion of Canada,
On the northernmost tip of the Bruce Peninsula,
I bid you a hearty:

‘Bon Cinema!’

Greg Klymkiw

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada above the 49th Parallel

Bruce Peninsula

Dearest Cineastes of the Celluloid Ecumenical Order that is Electric Sheep:

I launch this colonial report on the art of cinema from the northern-most tip of the Bruce Peninsula in the Dominion of Canada above the 49th Parallel. Since landing on these remote shores of the Niagara Escarpment, I have borne witness to a wide array of fine cinema in addition to the flora and fauna of this magnificent UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. I am touched by the spirits of my long-dead Brethren of the Holiest of Orders when they, with their Black Robes and Rosaries, first traversed this grand Peninsula and penned their anthropological tomes oft-referred to as The Jesuit Relations.

With one road in and one road out, it is here, where a thin layer of soil allows some of the oldest trees to rest atop rock formations chiselled by the Great Spirit during the last Ice Age, that I can peacefully experience all that cinema has to offer. Like my Jesuit brethren, my flesh and soul will be pierced – not by implements of aboriginal torture, but rather through the feats of technology that deliver a means of experiencing cinema of the highest and lowest order. Nailing my feet to the floor of my rustic cabin, I attempt, for the umpteenth time, to sit through Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó as white-tailed deer feed upon lichen and moss affixed to boulders; magnificent orbs dotting the terrain like fossilised pellets expunged by the prehistoric Lepus americanus.

And just as the Jesuits experienced the wrenching pain of flagellation, I too alternately experience the Heavenly heights of pure orgasmic pleasure when at dusk, with the newly re-mastered Blu-ray of North by Northwest cued up, I notice a bulky figure on hind legs dining greedily from the bird-feeding trough. Hungry blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) fret needlessly as their convenient source of nourishment is snorted back. ‘Fear not, little ones,’ I call out, ‘The delectable treats will be replaced by morning and the noble Ursus americanus will retreat into the forest and out of the gun-sights of the locals (Hosers bobus dougus mackenzieus Canadianus) who, ensconced within the venerable Royal Canadian Legion Hall, prepare for the Great Hunt over a breakfast of rye shooters and Molson Canadian beer chasers’.

A strange brew, indeed!

Aptly, I pen my exploration of cinema from the village of Tobermory, a hamlet in Upper Canada that was named by its Irish, Scottish and British pioneers after the town in the Hebrides where Powell and Pressburger’s film classic I Know Where I’m Going was set. Coincidentally, the colonial namesake played host to the North American premiere of the aforementioned picture in the late 1940s wherein hundreds of peninsula denizens journeyed via ox-cart to celebrate the picture’s entry into our Dominion above the 49th Parallel.

When I first happened upon this Garden of Eden during one of its six weeks of summer, throngs of vacationers bloated the population of 300 to 30,000. Due to the overwhelming number of churches on the Peninsula, I had automatically assumed this was a pious community, but an overwhelming joy enveloped me when a sign hanging from a local business caught my eye as a beacon of unimagined permissiveness – ‘GS Watersports’. With salacious elation, I was most familiar with ‘GS’, an acronym for ‘golden showers’ and ‘watersports’, also in the quaint parlance of avid fetishists at such délicieux newsgroup cyber-hideaways as ‘alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.sex.fetishes.golden_showers’.

I approached a seemingly friendly and comely young lass at a souvenir and ice cream stand on the sidewalk near ‘GS’, pointed to the sign and queried her regarding the village’s spécialité de la perversion. She curtly informed me that Tobermory is – due to clear water, unfathomable depths, ancient rock formations and hundreds of shipwrecks – one of North America’s most sought-after scuba diving locales. I furthermore asked her why transport companies in the early days of the colonies used the tip of this deadly peninsula as a key port. Alas, a horrendously porcine American family who wished to order triple scoops of frozen dairy product interrupted her and she was unable to provide an answer. The question regarding so many ships going down in an obvious death trap is a mystery to me, but current residents seem grateful to the long-ago-drowned and rather boneheaded seamen, whose sacrifices provide locals a livelihood beyond hunting, trapping, fishing, fucking and boozing.

The joys of cinema and nature are ever so boundless on these far Commonwealth shores. As I write these words of welcome to this regular column for Electric Sheep, I prepare to view a magnificent new Criterion Collection DVD entitled The Golden Age of Television and look forward to providing you next month with a personal history of American anthology television and a detailed review of the above mentioned masterwork of home entertainment – small screen gems worthy of a large screen.

And this then, dear readers, is how I plan to explore the world of cinema from these colonies. Armed with Blu-ray, DVD and laserdisc players, a battery of remote controls, my trusty laptop, a strong satellite wifi signal courtesy of the Canadian Coast Guard, a roaring fire in my stove, a Baikal semi-automatic shotgun on my lap and picture-window views to remind myself of the flora and fauna when I briefly avert my eyes from the high definition screen, I hope – in this quiet paradise of our fine Dominion – to illuminate, inform, tantalise, engage and perhaps, to entertain you in the wonder of what was, over one hundred years ago, wrought by the immortal Brothers Lumière – when moving images first passed through light, and magic appeared, as it always should, larger than life itself.

Greg Klymkiw

Next month: The Golden Age of American Television