Warning... this is an adult site. If reading or viewing things about what gay men do sexually with one another bothers you - you should not read this blog. This blog is a reflection of my adventures and thoughts. Some are fun, some not so pretty. I won't name names, or kiss and tell... but I will live to tell. And baby, trust me - I am gonna spill it all over your pretty little party dress. Enjoy!
Oh, hell... I am always a day late and a dollar short.
Looks like this dropped on YouTube on October 2nd.
And it looks like Janet is getting some use out of that old Scream set.
But that is not the only thing being revisited here.
Seems our girl is picking up where she should have never let off. This has a surprisingly fun, joyous sound reminiscent of some vintage All For You era Janet.
Yes, she's got her sexy back, and playing it oh-so coy.
So, the fun with today's selection of movies is that you never know who might show up. Yes, some surprisingly big names are involved, or actresses with ritzy pedigrees and a bit of dirt under their fingernails
So, pull up to the table for a taste of this week's line-up.
It all makes for the most delicious dish.
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Ladies They Talk About
(1933)
(This film is based on the play Gangstress, or Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles. In 1928, Mackaye, Prisoner #440960, served less than ten months of a one- to three-year sentence in San Quentin State Prison. Unlike many future films in the genre, in Mackaye's stories, there's not an innocent broad to be found.)
(Remade in 1942 under the title Lady Gangster, starring Faye Emerson.)
(Lillian Roth has a featured role in this film. Roth's life story and battle with alcoholism was told in the 1955 film I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which she was portrayed by Susan Hayward, who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress for her performance. Sober, Roth went on to become a popular night club singer and entertainer.)
(Barbara Stanwyck was orphaned at the age of four and partially raised in foster homes. She lived to work, and was the favorite actress of numerous directors, including Frank Capra, Fritz Lang, and Cecille B. DeMille. She made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television to extend her career. She was nominated for Best Actress four times, but never took home an Oscar, until she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986. Television was a different story: she received three Emmys - for her work on The Barbara Stanwyck Show, The Big Valley, and the mini series, The Thorn Birds.)
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Lady Gangster
(1942)
(Starring Faye Emerson, who would go on to earn the nickname 'The First Lady of Television'. She led an interesting life. This was her first starring role. From 1944 to 1950, she was married to Elliott Roosevelt, son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt - a union encouraged and made possible by Howard Hughes. She and her husband would live with Eleanor Roosevelt. It was Emerson's second marriage, which by 1947 had begun to fall apart. After having made her Broadway debut in The Play's The Thing, Emerson attempted suicide on Christmas Day 1948 by slitting her wrists, and was hospitalized. She returned to film, appearing in one crime drama after another. Later in life, she went on to host her own series of popular late-night talk shows and married one more time before retiring from show biz and moving to Europe. She died in Spain at the age of 65.)
(The film features a young Jackie Gleason.)
(It also features South American hotel heiress Ruth Ford, sister of bohemian surrealist Charles Henri Ford. Ruth was a popular model and a member of Orson Wells Mercury Theatre. She married twice, both film actors, and had one daughter. When she died in 2009, she owned two large apartments in New York City's famed Dakota building. She left both to her housekeeper/cook, cutting her daughter and granddaughter out of her will completely.)
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Violent Women
(1959)
"Women barred from the men they hunger for.. take a last stab for love and freedom!"
(Five female prisoners murder an informer, then escape through a drainpipe into the streets of New York.)
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7 Women From Hell
(1961)
"Secret until now!"
"The truth about those camps and the barbed wire nightmares."
"Women... captured and enslaved, forced to submit to the inhuman demands of barbarian conquerors!"
(In New Guinea, in February of 1942, the Japanese army invades a community, sending seven women with nothing in common to a war camp in the jungle.)
"At last! The whole shock by shock truth about what happens to women... at the mercy of barbarian conquerors!
"Slaves of their every desire... victims of every hell a woman can know!"
(The film features a pioneer of female superheroes,Yvonne Craig. She was an actress and ballet dancer best known for her roles as Batgirl/Barbara Gordon in the 1960's television series Batman, Dorothy Johnson in the 1963 movie It Happened at the World's Fair and as the green-skinned Orion slave girl Marta in the Star Trek episode Whom Gods Destroy.)
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Women Of Devil's Island
(1962)
(In the late 18th century, a group of French female convicts - among them streetwalkers, murderers, and revolutionaries - are shipped to Devil's Island penal colony, where they are forced to pan for gold for King Louis XVI of France and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette.)
(The film sported an international cast: Guy Madison from the US, Michèle Mercier from France, Swiss-born Paul Muller and Marisa Belli of Italy.)
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House Of Women
(1962)
"Secrets of the cells! Shame of inmates! Babies born in jails! Innocents thrown in with female bully-boys!!!!"
"Let Sophie, Erica, Candy, and all the rest tell you about the nation's most notorious women's prison!"
(An infatuated, unethical Warden keeps an innocent young mother behind bars, blocking her attempts for parole.)
(Shirley Knight heads up the cast. During her long career, Knight was nominated twice for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress: in 1960 for Dark At The Top Of The Stairs and in 1962 for Sweet Bird Of Youth.)
"The bombshell of truth that blasts through the concrete and steel fortress of the..."
"This is home sweet home to the most shock-proof women you'll ever meet!"
"Scandal beyond belief!"
(The cast also features two soap opera greats: Constance Ford from Another World and the formidable Jeanne Cooper from The Young And The Restless.)
(Director Crane Wilbur was brought on board ten-days into the shoot, when the original director was suddenly fired.)
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99 Women
(1969)
AKA: The Hot Death
"One soul hungered to touch another!"
"Whisper to your friends you saw it!"
(An international production featuring an international cast, led by some big names in the industry: French actress Maria Schell, American Mercedes McCambridge, Italy's Luciana Paluzzi, Austria's Maria Rohm and Czech actor Herbert Lom.)
(McCambridge remains one of my all-time favorite actresses. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her screen debut in 1949's All the King's Men and was nominated in the same category for 1956's Giant. She also provided the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist. But my personal favorite is when she locks horns with fellow rancher Joan Crawford in 1954's Johnny Guitar.)
(McCambridge's personal life was marred by tragedy. Her son became a futures trader for a large holding company. She gave him her money to invest. He opened up a false account in his mother's name, in which he deposited all profits he made for the company, while posting all losses on the company's ledger. When discovered, the company said they would keep the matter private if McCambridge would cooperate and return the money. She refused. The scandal so distressed the son that he murdered his wife and two children before killing himself. He left his mother a note:"Initially you said, 'well, we can work it out' but NO, you refused… You called me a liar, a cheat, a criminal, a bum. You said I have ruined your life… You were never around much when I needed you, so now I and my whole family are dead - so you can have the money… 'Night, Mother.")
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Women In Cell Block 7
(1973)
"What makes a nice girl die in a place like this?"
(Believed to be the very first Italian 'women in prison' film.)
(Contains the classic line: "Get back to the sack, you rotten lesbo!")
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Women Behind Bars
(1975)
(Spanish director Jesús Franco' career spanned from 1954 to 2013, during which time he wrote, directed, produced, acted-in, and scored approximately 173 feature films - many of which starred his wife, Lina Romay, who also worked under the names Candy Costar and Lulu Laverne.)
"Welcome to prison, ladies...!"
"Unfolds with brutal fury...!"
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Women In Cellblock 9
(1977)
AKA: Flucht Von Der Todesinsel/Escape From Death Island/Tropical Inferno
(Another Jesús Franco film - a Swiss production featuring several sex scenes and lots of sexual violence. It remains banned in the UK, chiefly because one of the actresses was only sixteen at the time of filming.)
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Women In Fury
(1984)
AKA: Amazon Jail
(A young woman is jailed for murder in a Brazilian prison where she is brutalized by the inmates and guards. The young handsome prison doctor, convinced of her innocence, works behind the scenes to obtain her freedom.)
(Brazilian actress Suzane Carvalho began her career at the age of two, appearing in commercials. She began appearing in films at the age of fourteen. After appearing in the Brazilian version of Playboy, she did several films like Women In Fury, but by 1989, had a change of heart. She abruptly quit acting and became a race car driver, competing worldwide to this day.)
I've been vacillating back and forth recently; one week it's a ballad, the next week something upbeat... but I am in the mood for something a little different - a little retro.
This is also a tale which clearly demonstrates exactly how corrupt the entertainment business was back in the day.
My Boy Lollipop (originally titled My Girl Lollypop) is a song written in the mid-1950s by Robert Spencer of the doo-wop group The Cadillacs.
An infamous record company executive by the name of Morris Levy agreed to buy the song from Spencer. Now, even though Levy and his crony, mobster Johnny Roberts, had nothing to do with the writing of the song, they still listed themselves as co-writers, at one point going so far as to remove Spencer's name altogether. At a later date, when confronted, Levy would claim that Robert Spencer was a pseudonym he frequently used when writing songs. So, for a period of time, the song was credited to Spencer, Levy and Roberts. Credit has since reverted to Robert Spencer, the real writer of the song.
My Girl Lollypop caught the ear of music mogul Gaetano 'Corky' Vastola, who'd recently discovered a 14-yearold singer named Barbie Gaye, after hearing her sing on a street corner in Brooklyn. Vastola took the young singer to meet infamous radio disc jockey Alan Freed. She sang a couple of songs for him and Freed was duly impressed. On Freed's recommendation, Vastola signed Gaye on as a client and became her manager. He then requested a copy of the song My Girl Lollypop from Levy and gave it to Gaye, telling her to be ready to sing it the following week.
Gaye, with no further instructions, took the song home, changed the title, added a few non-lyrical utterances, reassigned lyrics to notes, played with the meter and chose certain lyrics to repeat. The day they were scheduled to enter the studio, Gaye cut school and took the subway to a studio in Midtown Manhattan, where she met up with three musicians. She sang what she'd come up with and the musicians created an arrangement to match Gaye's vocals. It was decided to incorporate into the arrangement what was then a relatively new sound - a style of R&B music called 'shuffle.'
The quartet entered the studio and laid it all down in one take.
For her efforts, Gaye was paid $200.
In late 1956, the song was released as a single on Darl Records. Alan Freed was right on board, putting it into high rotation. By November of that year, it had became a highly requested song on his show on WINS, New York. This, combined with healthy sales, secured Gaye a slot on Freed's annual Christmas show at New York's Paramount theatre. She opened for Little Richard and later toured with Little Richard and Fats Domino.
The song did quite well in a number of markets, however... due to Vastola's habit of counterfeiting his artist's music, flooding the market with off-label copies, accurate sales records have proven impossible to verify.
One of the markets it did well in was that of the Jamaican Sound Systems. Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, played a part of those efforts. Despite the fact that the song was not being sung by someone of African descent, My Boy Lollypop still managed to become quite popular among sound system patrons.
In a 2010 interview, Blackwell told how he came to choose My Boy Lollipop for singer Millie Small's second British single:
"I would go to New York now and again and buy records and sell them to the sound system guys in Jamaica. One of these records was the original version of My Boy Lollipop. But I'd make a copy of each one on a reel-to-reel tape - it was before cassettes - and when I brought Millie over to England I sat down trying to work out if we can find a song for her and I found this tape which had the original version of My Boy Lollipop and I said, 'that's the song we should do', so it was really really lucky that I found the tape."
For Small's version, Blackwell altered the title from 'Lollypop' to 'Lollipop.' He also incorporated a very similar shuffle beat (Ska), and released it as a single in 1964. It quickly climbed the charts, making the unknown 17 year-old singer an international star almost overnight.
Small's version would peak at #2 in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the US, while reaching #1 in Ireland and #5 in Germany. It is considered to be the first commercially successful Ska song. It went on to sell over 7 million copies worldwide, helping to launch Blackwell's fledgling Island Records into the mainstream of popular music.
And that's the whole story.
Now? On to the competition.
The Song: My Boy Lolly Pop
The Competition: Gaye vs. Small
My Boy Lollypop - Barbie Gaye
My Boy Lolliop - Millie Small
Barbie Gaye
I just adore vintage records like this. The pop of the vinyl. The thinness of the vocal sound; piercing, with no bottom. And the band plays beneath, just chugging along.
This is charming. And cute. And I would never guess this girl was only 14 years old!
This is an assured reading. Gaye certainly knew what she wanted to do with this.
It's easy to imagine bobbysoxers dropping nickels into the jukebox at the local soda shop to hear this one.
Gaye's voice comes from the back of the throat, backed up by quite the set of lungs. She's got an interesting vibrato, very in control, and I love how she occasionally swallows her sound to bring all sorts of interesting little hiccups to the proceedings. She very much brings to mind a young Brenda Lee.
That is a big fat sax honking, with the rhythm section holding things in place.
That's cute; the interplay between Gaye and the sax on the playout.
Gaye's vocals are not always very musical or tuneful, but they sure are energetic fun. And... keep in mind... they did this in one take!
Millie Small
Oh, see what spending a little more time can produce? But that's not the only difference here. Recording technology had advanced considerably in the years since Gaye popped into the studio. Also, this has a much more sophisticated sound - the influence of Herb Albert is present as is that of Burt Bachrach.
That's a great horn chart, charismatic all on it's own.
Small's voice sounds incredibly polished for a 17 year-old. You can hear that giant smile in her voice. So bright sounding, it's infectious.
Even with the stilled tempo, this has a bounce to it that the original does not. I also love how Small plays off the horns.
Small's enunciation and intonation is a bit problematic; words become very pointed and needle-like at times. But then, what she does with 'fire' and 'desire'? That creates a sort of aural hook that listeners love to glom onto.
Do you hear the jew harp-like sound filling in the background on 'I love you, I love you, I love you so...' Interesting, subtle touch.
And a harmonica instead of a sax? Not sure I like it as much. But, it was of the time (Dylan.) Fortunately it doesn't overstay it's welcome.
This thing absolutely bops.
Oh, and by the way... the other thing I adore about songs from these eras? They're rarely more than three minutes long. In fact, this one hit the two minute mark on the dot and Gaye's version is over at 2:13. Perfect little slices of pop fun.
The Verdict
I think you have to give it to Smalls just due to the polish and the bop. That horn chart makes all the difference.
They are both charming. And you have to give Gaye a ton of credit for going in, grabbing this one by the horns and wrestling into shape in the limited time she had to work with the band and in the studio.
But Gaye's version sounds a tad unfinished to my ears, while Smalls skates away with it with that beatific smile in her voice.
So, for me... it's Small's for the win.
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And that's enough of me.
Your turn. You know what to do.
Leave your choice and opinions in the comments section. I love to hear about what you are hearing!
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