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Champs-Elysées? I wonder what they taste like
Tonight ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I attended Black Cat Rescue Benefit Night at Flatbread. We did not adopt our cats through Black Cat Rescue, but we like supporting their brethren: we ordered pizza, bought raffle tickets, got my mother a magnet that reads "KEEP CALM AND LOVE CATS." I was handed a pair of dangly earrings with little black-and-silver pawprints. Then we came home and watched a delightful cartoon oddity off TCM.
Animated in a variety of styles drawn from French Impressionism, Gay Purr-ee (1962) is a classic romantic melodrama set during the Belle Époque—a beautiful, restless ingénue leaves her little town in Provence for the electric-lit, decadent gaiety of Paris, falls in with a slick-talking scoundrel who promises to make her the toast of Paris while really planning to sell her as a mail-order bride to a millionaire in Pittsburgh; her rustic but true-hearted lover follows her to the big city, crosses paths with the villain and gets shanghaied to Alaska, but by a stroke of luck makes a fortune in the gold fields and returns to Paris just in time to rescue the now disillusioned heroine and reunite with her in a whirl of high life and true love. It's a musical, with songs by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. Starring voices are provided by Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Red Buttons, Paul Frees, and Hermione Gingold, with backup from Mel Blanc, Morey Amsterdam, and Thurl Ravenscroft and the Mellomen. Also, in case the title didn't give it away, everybody in this story is a cat. Garland's Mewsette is slender and white with an expressive plume of a tail and eyes as blue as butterflies, Goulet's Jaune Tom is a lanky green-eyed barn cat with sharpshooter mousing skills, Buttons' Robespierre is a little tuxedo kitten with a cynicism all out of proportion to his tadpole spike of a tail, Frees' Meowrice is a rakish tuxedo tom with devilish ears and whiskers that he waxes into points suitable for twirling, and Gingold's Madame Rubens-Chatte is a zaftig pink Persian whose so-called brother really should have known better than to try to cheat her with a bouncing check. Meowrice's henchmen are four spindly, yellow-eyed cat-shadows who slither and tapdance and occasionally stick together into one skinny eight-eyed supercat like the blocky-shouldered goons from Sylvain Chomet's Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003). I wouldn't have called the score immortal, but at least two of the songs—"Paris Is a Lonely Town" and "Little Drops of Rain"—made it into Garland's concert repertoire. It was her only animated film and Goulet's first appearance in the movies. Frees can't sing, but he talks his way through his villain number, "The Money Cat" (the money cat knows where the money tree grows), with such sepulchrally voiced smarm that nobody cares. The animation is genuinely beautiful and full of gonzo sight gags. Jaune Tom spies a mouse and his entire body turns into a ginger-furred targeting system fueled by a firecracker fuse of tail; the mouse squeaks and scrambles and finally resigns itself, whipping a tiny white blindfold out of nowhere before bravely presenting its chest to the firing squad of Jaune Tom's claws. (Jaune Tom then trots proudly back to Mewsette with the live mouse in his mouth because they are cats, after all. Mewsette's dreams of Paris include the beautiful food—the champignons, the Champs-Elysées. Champagne is obviously the sophisticated Parisian term for catnip. I appreciate these concessions to reality.) At one point the devious Meowrice decoys a homesick Mewsette by taking her to all the cafés of Paris, where there are ballet dancers à la Degas and cancan dancers à la Toulouse-Lautrec and there in fact in the front row sits an absinthe-green feline Toulouse-Lautrec sketching away on the tabletop. As Mewsette's Parisienne grooming nears completion, Meowrice has her painted by the leading artists of the day, providing a neat little lesson in the styles of Monet, Seurat, Rousseau, Modigliani, Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso . . . I have absolutely no idea who the target audience of this movie was, other than cat-lovers who also like French Impressionism and future generations of furries. I can only assume it was a passion project for Chuck Jones, since working on the script with Abe Levitow at UPA got him fired from Warner Bros. along with his entire unit; I think it paid off, if only in sheer purring WTF, but I'm not surprised it was a critical and commercial disappointment at the time. Nowadays, my husband informs me, it has a fandom. Autolycus stuck his head over the top of the screen during an action sequence and batted at the screen; he was helping. This pre-Aristocats peculiarity brought to you by my ailurophilic backers at Patreon.
derspatchel and I attended Black Cat Rescue Benefit Night at Flatbread. We did not adopt our cats through Black Cat Rescue, but we like supporting their brethren: we ordered pizza, bought raffle tickets, got my mother a magnet that reads "KEEP CALM AND LOVE CATS." I was handed a pair of dangly earrings with little black-and-silver pawprints. Then we came home and watched a delightful cartoon oddity off TCM.Animated in a variety of styles drawn from French Impressionism, Gay Purr-ee (1962) is a classic romantic melodrama set during the Belle Époque—a beautiful, restless ingénue leaves her little town in Provence for the electric-lit, decadent gaiety of Paris, falls in with a slick-talking scoundrel who promises to make her the toast of Paris while really planning to sell her as a mail-order bride to a millionaire in Pittsburgh; her rustic but true-hearted lover follows her to the big city, crosses paths with the villain and gets shanghaied to Alaska, but by a stroke of luck makes a fortune in the gold fields and returns to Paris just in time to rescue the now disillusioned heroine and reunite with her in a whirl of high life and true love. It's a musical, with songs by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. Starring voices are provided by Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Red Buttons, Paul Frees, and Hermione Gingold, with backup from Mel Blanc, Morey Amsterdam, and Thurl Ravenscroft and the Mellomen. Also, in case the title didn't give it away, everybody in this story is a cat. Garland's Mewsette is slender and white with an expressive plume of a tail and eyes as blue as butterflies, Goulet's Jaune Tom is a lanky green-eyed barn cat with sharpshooter mousing skills, Buttons' Robespierre is a little tuxedo kitten with a cynicism all out of proportion to his tadpole spike of a tail, Frees' Meowrice is a rakish tuxedo tom with devilish ears and whiskers that he waxes into points suitable for twirling, and Gingold's Madame Rubens-Chatte is a zaftig pink Persian whose so-called brother really should have known better than to try to cheat her with a bouncing check. Meowrice's henchmen are four spindly, yellow-eyed cat-shadows who slither and tapdance and occasionally stick together into one skinny eight-eyed supercat like the blocky-shouldered goons from Sylvain Chomet's Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003). I wouldn't have called the score immortal, but at least two of the songs—"Paris Is a Lonely Town" and "Little Drops of Rain"—made it into Garland's concert repertoire. It was her only animated film and Goulet's first appearance in the movies. Frees can't sing, but he talks his way through his villain number, "The Money Cat" (the money cat knows where the money tree grows), with such sepulchrally voiced smarm that nobody cares. The animation is genuinely beautiful and full of gonzo sight gags. Jaune Tom spies a mouse and his entire body turns into a ginger-furred targeting system fueled by a firecracker fuse of tail; the mouse squeaks and scrambles and finally resigns itself, whipping a tiny white blindfold out of nowhere before bravely presenting its chest to the firing squad of Jaune Tom's claws. (Jaune Tom then trots proudly back to Mewsette with the live mouse in his mouth because they are cats, after all. Mewsette's dreams of Paris include the beautiful food—the champignons, the Champs-Elysées. Champagne is obviously the sophisticated Parisian term for catnip. I appreciate these concessions to reality.) At one point the devious Meowrice decoys a homesick Mewsette by taking her to all the cafés of Paris, where there are ballet dancers à la Degas and cancan dancers à la Toulouse-Lautrec and there in fact in the front row sits an absinthe-green feline Toulouse-Lautrec sketching away on the tabletop. As Mewsette's Parisienne grooming nears completion, Meowrice has her painted by the leading artists of the day, providing a neat little lesson in the styles of Monet, Seurat, Rousseau, Modigliani, Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso . . . I have absolutely no idea who the target audience of this movie was, other than cat-lovers who also like French Impressionism and future generations of furries. I can only assume it was a passion project for Chuck Jones, since working on the script with Abe Levitow at UPA got him fired from Warner Bros. along with his entire unit; I think it paid off, if only in sheer purring WTF, but I'm not surprised it was a critical and commercial disappointment at the time. Nowadays, my husband informs me, it has a fandom. Autolycus stuck his head over the top of the screen during an action sequence and batted at the screen; he was helping. This pre-Aristocats peculiarity brought to you by my ailurophilic backers at Patreon.
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Paul Frees! Andrew and I first consciously noticed him as the introductory narrator in a series of audio SF adaptations, and for a while referred to him as "Faux-Orson," since he was so obviously being used as a Welles substitute.
ETA -- just found the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVYQH218G84) on YouTube and it's the Chuck-Jonesiest thing I've ever seen.
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He also does faux-Orson in The War of the Worlds (1953), reporting live on air during an unsuccessful counterattack against the Martians. Just because of his often uncredited ubiquity, I know I must have heard Frees all over the place before I had any idea who he was, but I noticed him for the first time in one of his rare live-action roles, playing one of Frank Sinatra's henchmen in the incredbly strange presidential assassination thriller Suddenly (1954). I really can't recommend the movie on its own merits, but Sinatra is amazing in it and his performance almost singlehandedly drags the story into moral complexity. The rest of the film is offensively, almost programmatically bad, bludgeoning the audience with the most toxic clichés of American masculinity and '50's conformity; Sinatra's Johnny Baron is live and dangerous, a contradiction the script doesn't seem to know it's written itself into. It tries and fails to reduce him to an easy social explanation, this deeply damaged hired killer who embodies the cognitive dissonance of the American second amendment debate. Paul Frees is a solid, unflamboyant accomplice who gets a nice unexpected chase scene in the third act. After that I knew what he looked like, which did me no good at all.
ETA -- just found the trailer on YouTube and it's the Chuck-Jonesiest thing I've ever seen.
"Who else could sing like that but Judy Garland?"
Oh, good, it's got the opening credits! I love the Impressionist pastiche portraits of the actors morphing into their cat-characters. Hermione Gingold and Paul Frees look great as seedy denizens of Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge. You see also I was not making up the blindfolded mouse. What the trailer is missing is a lot of the artier sequences, which are most of the movie. You can see it a little in the backgrounds and the clip from "Little Drops of Rain."
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Okay, it seems I find that hilarious.