When you get caught between the moon and New York City...

[frameofmind6]

Just watched the movie Arthur. I came around to it because I was at the bookstore yesterday, and I stopped by the DVD section to buy myself something fun to accompany the not-so-fun book I was buying (Grant Writing for Dummies), and I came across a copy of Beyond the Fringe. (I know this doesn't make sense yet -- keep reading.) Beyond the Fringe was a comedy revue written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller that played in the West End back in the early sixties, and sort of sparked the British satire movement. It was one of the things that strongly influenced the Pythons -- and in fact, the Fringe folks (minus Dudley Moore, who was in Hollywood by this time) teamed up with a bunch of the Pythons and several other Oxbridge comedians of the era in the late seventies to do a series of benefit shows for Amnesty International. Anyway, I had seen clips of Beyond the Fringe in interviews and documentaries, and I had seen a couple of the sketches from the show as they were adapted for the Amnesty shows, but I hadn't realized that there was a full version of the entire show of Beyond the Fringe available out there. Needless to say, given my weird obsession with accumulating and devouring everything even remotely related to things I'm interested in, I was dying to see it. The fact that the description on the back of the DVD case happened to mention The Daily Show and Monty Python in the same breath was the last straw.

So anyway, I watched that (it was hilarious, btw -- I could definitely see the beginnings of later things in it, though it made me very curious to see some examples of the kinds of things it would have contrasted against at the time. It's hard to tell what all was so earth-shattering about it without more context) -- and the thing is, although I had seen some of the sketches before, and although I had heard of Dudley Moore and knew of some of the movies he'd done, it occurred to me that I had never actually seen him in anything before. So that got me thinking of the movies I knew of his (which, frankly, I've always thought of as sort of cheesy and second-rate, even though I've never seen them), and that sent me to Netflix to look for Arthur -- which just happened to be available for streaming. So I watched it. Actually, it was rather good. I mean, the music was a little cheesy (just can't hear the song "The Best That You Can Do" without cringing/laughing), and Dudley Moore's way of playing drunk struck me as a little obnoxious (I thought he was much more interesting when he was being sober), but the writing was actually surprisingly clever, and the movie was funny. Weirdly, Dudley Moore started to remind me of Michael Hurst (Iolaus, from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) after awhile -- I think maybe it was the hairstyle. And his sort of quippy, bouncy energy. And his height (*grin*). Liza Minnelli is another one I have trouble taking seriously, just because she's...Liza Minnelli. But she was alright. And I loved how they worked in a little bit in the middle for Moore to play the piano -- the bit he did, where he was sort of pretending to play classical pieces, only to slip right into old pop standards like "Blue Moon" was very reminiscent of some of his bits in Beyond the Fringe. Actually, that was one of the most surprising things I discovered in watching Fringe, is that Dudley Moore is actually a fantastic musician with a beautiful voice. He was being funny, of course, but he really knew his shit. Apparently he was a musical prodigy as a child -- who knew?

If only they'd enlisted him to pick the soundtrack for the movie. (*sigh*)

When you get caught between the moon and New York City
I know it's crazy...but it's true...