Whipped Cream Difficulties

Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over an obit from Military.com for Jack Holder, who died February 24 at the age of 101.

Mr. Holder was a WWII veteran and a survivor of Pearl Harbor.

The young sailor survived that day by diving into a ditch between airplane hangars to avoid getting strafed by a Japanese pilot.
He went on to fly as a flight engineer on a PBY at Midway, scouting for Japanese forces with squadron VP-23. He later flew missions over Guadalcanal, retrained on the new B-24 and completed his WWII service flying missions over the English Channel. All in all, the young man had himself quite an eventful war.

He wrote a memoir, Fear, Adrenaline, and Excitement which you can get from Amazon.

On the occasion of an honor flight that celebrated his 100th birthday in December 2021, Holder announced that the secret to his long life was “good heart exercise and two scotch and sodas every night.”
There was a party after the 2019 “Midway” screening at the STK Restaurant at the W Hotel, the kind of hip, contemporary joint that makes a lot of folks over the age of 50 uncomfortable. Holder was right at home and was one of the very last people to leave as the night wound down.
The Jack Holder I met was slyly funny, incredibly enthusiastic about meeting new people and very excited about the chance to talk to younger women. The bonus for him was that almost every single woman he met qualified as a younger woman.

The Notorious B.I.G. “B.I.G.” in this case is Bert I. Gordon, who passed away yesterday at 100. THR.

For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Gordon was a monster movie impresario.

Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive.

I’ve actually never seen that, but I have the impression that it is pretty good.

In “Beginning of the End” (1957), a scientist (Peter Graves) uses radiation to make giant fruits and vegetables to end world hunger, but a plague of giant grasshoppers that has eaten the food invades Chicago and starts feasting on people. Lured into Lake Michigan with an electronic mating call, the grasshoppers drown. Mr. Gordon did the special effects in his garage, filming 200 grasshoppers jumping and crawling on photos of the city. Reviewers called the special effects absurdly obvious and the screenplay ludicrous.

Elements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”

We watched the MST3K version of this one fairly recently. It is not anywhere near as good as the NYT makes it sound.

Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.
Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”

His autobiography on Amazon.

All this was fodder for the hosts of the comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which brought the Gordon canon to a new audience. “I watched it one time, and I didn’t like them making fun of [his work],” he said. “I take my films very seriously.”

Left out of most discussions I’ve seen: “Tormented”, which we also watched the MST3K version of. I don’t think it is as bad as “Village of the Giants”…

(Yeah, I might be a little unfair in referencing the MST3K versions. But for the ones I’ve seen, I’ll steal a line from Gene Siskel about another movie: “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.”)

Chaim Topol, or just “Topal”, of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame. THR.

Other credits include both “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance”, “SeaQuest 2032”, “For Your Eyes Only”, and he played Dr. Zarkov in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2023 at 12:14 pm and is filed under History, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.