The Moon Is Blue -***

There is nothing more insignificant than a revolutionary bad film. It’s like if a hermit up in the Himalayas sets himself on fire to protest world hunger. The goat smelling your demise might care, but aside of that what point did you make?

You can make a movie containing the cure for cancer and if it was starring Steve Guttenberg it wouldn’t matter because no one would see it.

I understand that guys like Otto Preminger and Stanley Kramer like to buck convention and stick it to Hollywood’s self-appointed Naughty Police (The Breen Office), but if you want to make a farce about how stupid the NPs are, than why not make a good movie at the same time.

For example, a popular misconception is that the shower scene in Psycho is one of the most violent in film history and many were at the time surprised it got past the censors. Well, it got past the censors because the blood was actually chocolate syrup and the knife never made contact with the skin. The power of that scene is in the editing and the music. Period. Hitchcock made his point in a witty and powerful way.

I had this argument with Otto around 1950 something-or-other while shoveling down drinks at the Copacabana in New York. Otto said he had a great idea to tweak the code by adapting the hit Broadway play A Moon Is Blue with Bill Holden and David Niven. See, the Moon Is Blue used words like “Virgin” and “Pregnant” and other such thing that lead to the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

Intrigued by this I decided to take in the play, and Otto was right. The actors did say those words. After watching the play, my discussion with Otto went something like:

“Were you offended?” Otto said grinning.

“Yes,” I responded.

“Really? You never seemed like the squeamish type on issues like this. Which words bothered you?”

“Everything between Act 1 and The End. You’re seriously going to waste Niven and Holden on that piece of garbage?”

The whole production was on the cusp of horrible. Screw the words; the whole play was offensively bad.

It wasn’t just the writing, the acting, the directing, the set design, the music, but the concept as a whole. Here’s the pitch – a girl meets an architect on the Empire State Building and turns his live upside down eventually involving him in a love triangle. It’s basically a weaker episode of “That Girl” expanded to two painful hours. I mean I’d go into more detail, but that’s about it and if you can’t figure out the ending on your own please close this web page and don’t come back.

At least Otto had the decency to shorten the movie to 90 minutes, but the film was just as bad despite having Holden and Niven in it. I refused to watch the talented Maggie McNamara for years because I always associated her with this. You’d wish you were that hermit in the Himalayas by the time this film’s over.

To this day and I don’t know why, but I’m just absolutely positive that the movie had a laugh track. I’m not saying it actually had one, but I just seem to remember it. Not a normal laugh track either, but like the one that DeNiro had on in the background while he was doing his bits in his mother’s basement during the “King of Comedy.”

I told Otto at the time that he might take some grief for it for a little while, but don’t worry about it. In 20 years everyone would forget this movie had ever been made. I was wrong. It was forgotten

If you want to make a statement or you want to change the world, you better be good and articulate, because if you can’t keep Sam Goldwyn’s ass from itching for two hours, then it doesn’t matter what you say. You’ll be forgotten.