Living close to the seashore as we do, you can't beat walking through a Wal-Mart parking lot accompanied by the squawking, hysterical laughter of seagulls......we can't tell if they're laughing at us for thinking we're going to find a worthy movie in Wal-Mart, or if they're asking for directions to Tippi Hedren....
And what a gloriously eclectic mix of direct-to-DVD cinematic gems await us there.......sweeping Asian swordplay epics, cuddly little faith-based stories of kids who find God at horse ranches, slimy-monster-hiding-under-your-bed movies, star-studded action-adventure movies that either the studio lost confidence in or never had any to begin with, primitively animated stuff for the kids, no doubt assembled from do-it-yourself CGI software kits purchased at Office Depot going-out-of-business sales......
All this goodness laid out for us.....along with the 587th Steven Seagal movie......(with Big Steve lookin' only slightly more mobile than Gort the robot...)
Surprise, surprise! In the midst of all these disparate items, we find a colorful collection of old titles exhumed from the Universal Studios vaults, festively re-packaged with outer sleeves featuring the films' original poster artwork.....and at those beloved Wal-Mart prices....(you could buy three of them for less than the cost of an IMAX ticket)
Of special interest to the BQ were some of the Universal 1960's titles, for which film buffs have been clamoring for a DVD release for decades. We greedily snapped 'em up and here's the first one we couldn't wait to set spinning in our player......
"The Brass Bottle" pursued a peculiar strategy of Universal Studios in the 60's and into the 70's....in which their feature films and TV shows didn't look all that much different from each other...
Slickly machine-tooled, photographed in cotton-candy Technicolor, a Universal feature film of that era might offer big movie stars.....but visually would have all the atmosphere and style of a 'Leave It To Beaver' episode.....(not surprising since the movies and TV shows all filmed on the same Universal backlot, Irony of ironies.....the studio's first attempt at making a feature length film specifically for television, Don Siegel's "The Killers" was deemed too violent for the tube and went into theaters anyway....)
This breezy comedy, in which an uptight architect (the inventor of uptight, Tony Randall) copes with an corpulent Arabian genie (Burl Ives) who upends his life, plays like a 90 minute pilot for a TV situation comedy.........which is eventually what happened to it, transforming, more or less, into "I Dream Of Jeannie", with Randall's architect turned into Larry Hagman's astronaut and Ives' genie greatly improved and slimmed down into the lovely Barbara Eden (who happens to play Randall's perplexed fiance in "The Brass Bottle".
Naturally, much innocent fun and magical hijinks beset Randall, after Ives comes swirling out of Randall's recent engagement gift purchase, a huge ornamental bottle that appears left over from a Pier 1 Imports closeout sale. We got some unintentional laughs watching that distinctly Americana hambone Ives plowing through vast amounts of mock-Arabian dialogue, reciting it as if from off-screen cue cards.....he gets to declare "Verily!" a whole lot. And we're always glad to see Edward Andrews as Randall's future father-in-law and disapproving nemesis......Andrews ruled as the epitome of the stuffy, outraged, upper middle class guy......younger viewers might only recognize him as one of Molly Ringwald's embarrassing grandparents in "Sixteen Candles"....
Though a mere trifle off the Universal Studios assembly line (which rolled out movies at an even greater speed than the chocolate belt in the "I Love Lucy" episode), "The Brass Bottle" charmed us as only a kinder, gentler mid-1960's comedy can. Tony Randall's precise comedic timing combined with the wildly miscast Burl Ives, they had us at 'open sesame'......we conjure up 3 stars (***) for Tony, the Genie (and TV's future Jeannie)......and promise to cover more of these delightful Universal rarities in future posts.....
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