Revisiting The Midnight Hour

I'm pretty sure I watched The Midnight Hour when it first aired in 1985. I don't remember much about that first viewing except an okay-fine reaction. I wouldn't have been watching for deep analysis then, and everything other than a vague notion of its plot pretty much got tucked away in my memory.

I decided to revisit it via YouTube. Because: October. And because the Pure Cinema podcast spoke highly of it fairly recently in an assessment of solid TV movies.

So, what a pleasant surprise a re-watch proved to be.  

In retrospect, it's heavily influenced by the Thriller video, coming down the pike just a couple of years after that event. It even has some of the same creative team involved in makeup and costumes.

But it's otherwise quite a bit of fun with a touch of camp and a sweet love story woven through its undead storyline with interspersed musical numbers and a comic performance by Fridays' Mark Blankfield as a zombie out to grab what he can of past life pleasures.

It also features LeVar Burton, Shari Belafonte, Lee Montgomery of Ben with Jonna Lee as a fifties teen returned to get one more chance at things she missed. Oh, and Kevin McCarthy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the flip side.  

There's one great musical number fronted by Shari Belafonte and one great horror set piece with a vintage '50s auto overrun by the undead. A few other flourishes including Jonelle Allen as a colonial vampire shore it all up. 

Wikipedia reports it received mostly negative reviews in the day. They're wrong or at least not taking everything it is now into full account.

It's not a fully satisfying feature experience for horror fans, but it's still worth a look for the intriguing package that it is. 

Check it out on YouTube here.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady and an Old Household Movie Viewing Mystery Solved

My wife, Christine, loves The Odd Couple original film, something about the combo of Neil Simon's humor and Jack Lemmon's performance as Felix. Anyway, it was streaming on Pluto the other day. I pointed it out, and she settled in to watch the what was left.

And Walter Matthau on screen suddenly reminded me of a conversation with my dad years and years ago. The, I guess, mostly forgotten comedy western A Big Hand for the Little Lady with Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward as the the "little lady" and Jason Robards came on TV, probably on NBC. This would have been the very early '70s.

As the show neared its conclusion, my dad said he'd seen it before. "But it wasn't with Henry Fonda."

An ad for the upcoming broadcast of Cactus Flower popped on the screen about that moment with a tight shot of Walter Matthau's face. "It was that fellow there," he said. 

Seemed weird, but we chalked it up to an odd coincidence or something like that and moved on.

But Walter Matthau--busy with a different set of poker buddies--was on my screen again all these years later via the Internet, which we didn't have in 1971. I thought, why not check it out? Maybe my dad had a point.  

The IMDB entry simply credits Sidney Carroll as the screenwriter, though there are mentions in the trivia of it originally being written for TV along with allusions to an alternate title or two. Big Deal in Laredo et al.

 

Let's Go the the Wiki
I moved on to Wikipedia, and gained clarity. In 1962, Big Deal in Laredo was produced for television as an installment of an anthology called The Dupont Show of the Week. It earned Emmy nominations including one for Matthau. There's even a press photo of him in character out there for purchase.  

Son of a bitch, my old man was right. It's a little thing, but that brought me a bit of joy. The TV show would have aired a month after I was born. 

My old man was a route salesman for a wholesale grocery company. When he came home from work after driving all day from mom-and-pop grocery to mom-and-pop grocery in rural Louisiana, he still had an hour or two of making changes to his price book, a heavy, leather bound thing with semi-circle holes punched for easy removal and replacement.

He would have been working on those changes or pricing order tickets from his customers as we watched anything. That was probably how he watched The Dupont Show years earlier and with a newborn in the house, more focused on the storyline than the brand umbrella. 

It's nice to have little things mined out of the memory, reconnecting with little moments from life flowing along. You never know what's going to matter. 

Some triggers on a quiet Sunday afternoon are good ones.