Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Daffy Duck Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1962 Good Noose, directed by Robert McKimson.
Due to the scenes of Daffy being strangled on a noose and being locked in a trunk for ten days, this cartoon has seldom aired on network television out of fear of impressionable viewers imitating the dangerous stunts.
Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour found these incredibly charming stop motion videos from the artist, India Rose Crawford. She doesn't have a lot of embeddable videos but we did enjot this one - Frog makes a pie for Toad -
We're amazed and impressed with her meticulous care and attention to details in her videos.
We've picked another entry from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. Today's film is the 1968 political allergory, If ..., directed by Lindsay Anderson, and starring Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, and Robert Swann, and Linda Harrison. Over the years, critics have stated that If…. reflected the year of its release; after all, 1968 would see youth-led uprisings in both Paris and the USA. However, If…. was, of course, conceived much earlier than 1968. Therefore, one could also argue that its political messages merely arrived at the right time to spark interest among critics and journalists. Much like another film starting Malcolm McDowell, A Clockwork Orange, the film was the subject of controversy at the time of its release, receiving an X certificate for its depictions of violence. Paramount had deep reservations about the film when they saw it and tried to remove it from screening. However, one of their tentpole films, Barbarella, turned out to be a spectacular flop so they needed to replace it in theatres with something else. Reluctantly, they rolled out If... and were astonished to see it turn into a big critical and commercial success. So please join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour and sit back, get comfortable and watch If... .
Contrary to the story that says some scenes of the film are in black-and-white instead of color because the production company was running short of money and saved money by having some scenes processed in monochrome, according to interviews with Malcolm McDowell, Lindsay Anderson and the cameraman, they first shot the scenes in the school chapel in monochrome because they had to use natural light that came in through the big stained-glass window, requiring high-speed film. The high-speed color stock they tested was very grainy and the constantly-shifting color values due to the angle of the light through the stained glass made it impossible to color-correct, as well. So they decided to shoot those scenes in monochrome, and, when he saw the dailies, Anderson liked the way that it "broke up the surface of the film", and decided to insert other monochrome scenes more or less at random, to help disorient the viewer as the film slipped from realism to fantasy.
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