George arrives in a small California gold rush town where the librarian suspects the brother of the town’s patriarch of trying to poison him for a newly discovered treasure.
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Nora is all out night, and breaks a mirror, and asks another man to marry her. Nick suspects she’s been drugged. Things get even more serious when they find a corpse.
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By the time the 1990s rolled out, Bill Cosby was huge. He’d had many great efforts in television and other forms entertainment. He was supercool superspy Alexander Scott in the groundbreaking I Spy series. He was producer and host of the award-winning Fat Albert Series. However, his greatest success was the Cosby Show, which provided 1980s family friendly comedies that had gone missing for so many years (and have since disappeared again.)
Cosby in the 1990s brought two classic TV concepts back to the American screen.
The first was Groucho Marx’s classic, You Bet Your Life. Cosby was a huge fan of Marx and considered him one of the four best comedians of all time along with Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, and W.C. Fields. Unlike the other three, Cosby actually got to know Marx a bit. More than anything else, he’d admired Marx for You Bet Your Life. Cosby had even met the old producers of You Bet Your Life to get a chance to do it and been turned down. In the 1990s, on the heels of the Cosby show and becoming a $90 million man, Cosby could pretty much get any project he wanted and so he got to follow in the footsteps of one his heroes in the 1992-93 version of You Bet Your Life.
The show may have been a little too early. A revival of You Bet Your Life could have gone well in the reality TV era, but alas made it only one season in syndication, and was not widely viewed or known. The only video clips available are from those folks sharing appearances by their relatives on the show. These two clips from the show are priceless comedy, although they go on a little long, it’s worth a viewing:
Cosby wasn’t done bringing classic concepts to a new audience. In the late 1990s, he revived another vintage TV concept. Art Linkletter did his House Party show for 24 years over CBS radio and television, and had been best remembered for its Kids Say the Darnedst Things segment.
Cosby once again revived a classic concept as he took his turn questioning kids and hearing the surprising answers they gave.
The big difference between You Bet Your Life and Kids Say the Darnedst Things is that Art Linkletter was still alive and in fact Linkletter worked with Cosby on the program. When I watched Kids Say the Darnedst Things for the first time, I was very curious as to who Linkletter was. I had no idea, growing up.
Cosby introduced Linkletter to a new generation. Most episodes of Kids Say the Darnedst Things featured some footage of some of Linkletter’s most hilarious moments. Linkletter, in his mid-80s at the time, appeared frequently on the show. Cosby always showed a warm regard for Linkletter and never illustrated it better than with a touching surprise tribute to the man on CBS:
Those who saw Linkletter and Marx in their prime feel that Cosby’s efforts were not as good. There’s certainly something to it as both Linkletter and Marx performances were definitive.
I don’t think the point of Cosby’s effort was displace either of these two legends. Rather, Cosby did the shows because he enjoyed and loved the originals, and his efforts helped to bring awareness of the originals back into the public mind. And there’s nothing better for a top entertainer to do than that.
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Scotland Yard has a suspect in the murder of a wealthy man, but no murder weapon, and the case begins to look think when another murder done in the same way takes place while the alleged murder is in jail.
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George investigates the case of a boy who told his mother that he tended the wounds of an injured man, only to claim he later made the whole thing up. The boy has had a long series of unfortunate “accidents” that his mother alarmed.
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A woman comes to Wolfe to help her recover $10,000 from two swindlers who cheated her father. Wolfe becomes suspicious when the conmen return the money too eagerly.
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A man Nora brought home is murdered. When Nick refuses to believe her because she refuses to believe his story about him solving a crime with the help of an ex-girlfriend Broadway starlet, Nora sets out to solve the case alone.
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I’d never heard of Going My Way until I was searching through my instant watch queue on Netflix, though I’d heard of its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary.
Going My Way stars Bing Crosby as Father Chuck O’Malley, a young priest from St. Louis who has been given the task of setting in order a troubled New York City parish on the verge of bankruptcy and with many of its youth involved in crime. Father O’Malley must do so without hurting the feelings of elderly priest Father Fitzgibbons (platyed beautifully by Barry Fitzgerald.)
While Crosby was one of the most talented singers and showmen of his generation, his performance as Father O’Malley was anything but showy. Father O’Malley comes off as a “right guy” who is humble and graceful. While technically, he’s been put “in charge” of the parish by the Bishop, he refuses to assert himself, but respects the work of Father Fitzgibbons.
Barry Fitzgerald was equally masterful with Father Fitzgibbons. His portrayal of Father Fitzgibbons is as a stubborn man set in his ways, but with a kind heart and dedication that has kept him at his parish for 45 years, seperated from his aging mother.
What makes the movie work is the chemistry between the two characters. In these type of films, it’s often tempting to play up a sense of rivalry between the old minister and the young one. Yet, Going My Way takes an entirely different tact, as the old man the young one grow to love and respect each other.
It’s a bit of a misnomer to call this film a musical, as the characters rarely sing in this two hour film. Crosby does sing a few times, and when he does, it’s powerful. Perhaps one of the most informative scenes was when Father O’Malley was advising a young singer who was gesturing as she sang. Father O’Malley criticized the gesturing and suggested that she needed to was to put more emotion into her singing.
And that’s what made Crosby’s singing is the film so memorable. Whether, it was, the soft and mellowtitle song or the debut, “Swinging on a Star,” he delivered it with just the right emotion.
My favorite scene was the one in which Father O’Malley put Father Fitzgibbons to bed after the older priest to bed. They’d talked about their mothers and how Father Fitzgibbons hadn’t seen his 90 year old mother in 45 years. Father Fitzgibbons asked if O’Malley knew “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra” and Crosby sang it beautifully:
The film wasn’t perfect. At two hours, it could have been quite a bit shorter without some extraneous plot elements such as seeing the Metropolitan Opera perform one scene from Carmen, and the budding romance of the banker’s son. However, the latter subplot did provide one of the film’s best scenes.
However, these are very minor shortcomings in a great film, and the featured attraction is the warmth of Crosby and Fitzgerald to create a timeless classic.
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Enjoy a blessed and a happy Thanksgiving, and here’s a little Thanksgiving Old Time Radio music. This is from the House of Squibb. Original Air Date: November 24, 1943.
George isn’t interested when a woman wants to hire him to find out if her husband based a steamy protagonist in his novel on a real life mistress, but changes his mind when someone takes a shot at the husband/author.
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