Once again, instead of working on something worthwhile, I've come up with another ridiculous comic-book script, this time for a super-villian whose power comes from Bic lighters-- a bad man to meet at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.

PANEL ONE:
Picture of our villian in costume, posing.
TITLE CAPTION: "The Origin of Lighter-Fist!"
BOTTOM CAPTION: He can blow up the world!

PANEL TWO:
Picture of an ugly, somewhat pinheaded dolt, "cigarette" dangling from his mouth, inspecting the lighter in his hand.
CAPTION: One day while lighting a reefer, low-life and criminal Vaclav Skrota learned a fact that changed his life.
SKROTA: "Warning: This lighter has the explosive power of one stick of dynamite." Geez, and it only cost 59 cents!

PANEL THREE:
Skrota burns with sudden realization.
SKROTA: Wait a minute-- with cheap dynamite at my command, I could blow up anybody or anything that got in my way. I could rule the world! Or at least fuck it up!

PANEL FOUR:
Another super-heroic, er, -villianous pose in costume and mask, holding his lighter high.
CAPTION: Overnight, Vaclav Skrota was transformed into LIGHTER-FIST-- the most explosive super-villian who ever lived!

PANEL FIVE:
Lighter-Fist at a bank-teller's window, brandishing his fist at the poor wage-slave.
CAPTION: He immediately goes on a crime spree!
LIGHTER-FIST: Give me all your money or I'll blow your head off!
TELLER: But-- but I only look gay!
BANK GUARD (running up behind him, gun drawn): Hey, buddy, drop that Bic and spread 'em! I am gay!

PANEL SIX:
Lighter-Fist turns on the guard and swings, in Jolly Jack Kirby style (if Jack had drawn characters with lighters).
LIGHTER-FIST: You asked for it, my homo-erotical friend-- behold the power of LIGHTER-FIST!

PANEL SEVEN:
A mighty cloud of "Ka-Pow" covers the area where fist meets skull.
CAPTION: The impact of the explosion was heard across the room!
GUARD: Yaaah! My head!
LIGHTER-FIST: Arggghh! MY HAND!!

PANEL EIGHT:
A policeman takes away the defeated Lighter-Fist, whose right arm now comes to a burnt point.
CAPTION: Unfortunately for Lighter-Fist, the impact of his mighty punch also destroyed his own hand.
LIGHTER-FIST: Shit! I never thought of that!
POLICE-MAN: When we get in the car, hang your arm out the window-- it stinks!

THE END OF LIGHTER-FIST . . . or is it??

As they say, deaths come in threes, and following Don Knotts and Darren McGavin comes the news that Dennis Weaver has passed away at the age of 81. He was a better actor than many people might think, and I will always love him for his hilarious portrayal of the marijuana-phobic motel manager in Touch of Evil. ("Ah'm the night man!") Adios, amigo.

P.S. Here's a link to the five-part on-line interview with Weaver from the archives of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Ralph turns 72 today, and the new documentary about him, An Unreasonable Man, sounds great, and I can't wait to see it. Yours truly is now 52, which feels like the number of miles-per-hour I'm zooming down the other side of the mountain. Call me morbid, but I can't forget the words of the 92-year-old woman who was offered a deal on magazine subscriptions: "At my age, I don't even buy green bananas."

How about another detective movie, one that's set in the same basic era as The Maltese Falcon but made nearly half-a-century later. (Another hint: unlike the pic below, the movie is in color.) Name the film that features people who look like this:

If you know it, send me an email with the title by late Sunday night. If you're correct, expect to see your name in next week's four-color winner's circle.

When Roger Ebert's right, he's right, and his pithy assessment of last week's quiz movie, The Maltese Falcon (1941), nails it: "The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style." And man, what style! Even considering its source-- one of the finest, most enjoyable novels ever written, no matter what the genre-- director John Huston made a movie so dazzling that, as Ebert also points out, it "accomplished things that in their way were as impressive as what Welles and Gregg Toland were doing on Citizen Kane."

He couldn't have done it, however, without one of the most striking casts of all time, character actors all, including Humphrey Bogart in the role that helped define the rest of his career. Playing Sam Spade as anything but a nice guy, he's alternately hilarious and explosive (much like the movie's blend of dialogue and action), and it's a credit to the rest of the cast that he doesn't command attention at all times.

Of course, much of the rest of that cast played some of the gayest characters the movies had ever seen outside of Franklin Pangborn-- Sydney Greenstreet (in his first film) is always putting his hand on Bogie's knee, and his relationship with his young "gunsel," Elisha Cook, Jr., is also suspect. (In fact, "gunsel" was a slang term of the day with homosexual implications; today he'd be called a "bottom," which, considering Greenstreet's girth, must have been a fate worse than death.) And the gardenia-scented Joel Cairo, played to perfection by Peter Lorre, is more of a lady than the film's femme fatale.

If the film has any flaw whatsoever, it's the casting choice of Mary Astor. As Steve Perry pointed out in his email, as a sex symbol, she just wasn't that hot. (Astor in real life was another story, as her diaries attest, and her hands-on affair with George S. Kaufmann is well documented in Hollywood Babylon.) Rewatching the film, I was more impressed by Lee Patrick as Spade's secretary Effie-- later in her career, she played plump, nervous old biddies like Topper's wife on TV, but here she's likeable and attractive.

(The best actor in the film has only one line and gets no screem credit: the character of Capt. Jacobi, who staggers into Spade's office with the falcon and then dies, is played by the director's father, Walter Huston.)

Enough. If you know the film, you know it so well that you don't need me to tell you any more about it, and if you don't know it, for God's sake, get thee to a video store! So congratulations and a Mickey Finn to the following quiz winners: Wayne Palmer, Mark Gisleson, E. Yarber, Christina O'Sullivan, Corey Anderson, Jim Youngdahl, Bill Hearne, Hank Parmer, and Kevin Musolino.

P.S. Mr. Yarber also provided a personal Hammett-related story that, with his permission, I'm going to share: "I read the novel in one sitting while taking a bath in my then-new San Fransisco apartment. Hammett was very clear on the buildings and addresses mentioned in the story, and I quickly found myself identifying places I passed every day. (The villains all lived in ritzy places I would never be able to afford). In fact, as the story came to a climax, I found myself growing increasingly nervous... the action was getting closer and closer to the very spot I was at!

"I had a very strange feeling upon finishing the book, and soon discovered that Hammett had written it (as well as most of his other Black Mask stuff) at a small apartment across the street from where I was living! He'd made this apartment Spade's, just as Spade's office was in the same building where Hammett had worked writing copy for a jewelry store (the local Pinkerton offices were there, too)."

I always feel bad about stealing Mr. Marcus' dormant gimmick (although not bad enough to quit, obviously), but I feel worse than usual this time because I have even less than usual to offer. You'll see.

1) Dick Cheney's "Shotgun Boogie." Listening to Dick Dead-Eye coldly demote his victim from "good friend" to "just an acquaintance" within seconds, I thought how lucky Patrick Leahy was that Cheney wasn't armed during their Senate showdown. I was surprised that the Veep of Darkness didn't take the same mea culpa approach he took to explain the Leahy incident: "I don't think I shot him-- I don't remember doing it, anyway. I may have done it, I probably did. Anyway, it was long overdue and I'm glad I shot him." And while Harry Shearer started his radio show this week with a bang (nyuk nyuk) by playing "Shotgun" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, no one seems to have played the perfect song: the lovely ditty by Tennessee Ernie Ford mentioned (and linked) above. It even has an appropriate verse about meeting "a purty gal" who impresses Ernie with the size of her gun.

2) The above reminds me . . . When the author of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire died (coincidentally, almost 13 years ago, on Feb. 24, 1983), a New York anchorman-- don't know who-- told his audience that the theatrical world had just lost a giant: the great playwright, Tennessee Ernie Williams.

3) My own mea culpa. Sometimes, you miss having an editor. Okay, no, you don't, but I wish somebody had told me before I posted my comics script last week that "Dog on Fire" is not only the name of a song by They Might Be Giants, but that the song is the theme for The Daily Show! Shit, I suppose I'll find out next that I also didn't make up the name "Couch Pundit." (Actually, Steve Perry came up with the name-- too bad he didn't know the Giants song, either.)

4) I still love Beaver. I'm finally getting around to the DVD set of Leave It To Beaver, and it's so nice to see the shows without the time-compression they get from TV Land, which makes faces look like they're swimming around on the kids' heads. The earliest episodes are the best, when Jerry Mathers' cuteness and Tony Dow's earnestness were completely genuine. Here's a sound clip from one of my all-time favorites, "Beaver Gets 'Spelled," where Wally forges a note from Mom. The last voice in the clip is that of the steely Doris Packer, the toughest TV prinicipal ever.

(From the unaired episode "Wally's Secret Underwear")

5) I turn 52 next Monday. And every birthday, I have the same question: How is it possible for the years to fly by, yet the days just drag . . .

If you actually made it to the end of this, I'm sorry, but you have to admit: you were warned.

A very easy-to-identify movie from the '40s this week, made only slightly more difficult because the clue is a cast photo, not a still from the film. But it's one of the most famous and recognizable casts of all time, even in a weird pose like this:

Of course you know who they are! (But it was just too good a pic to waste.) So send me an email by late Sunday night with the title of the film they starred in, and if you're correct, expect to see your name in next week's winners circle, which, I predict, will be record-breaking.

Hollywood doesn't make many deal-with-the-Devil movies any more, which is odd, since the old adage is "Write what you know." It's also odd that the best of the bunch, last week's quiz movie The Devil and Daniel Webster, hasn't been remade a dozen times, because it's the kind of classic they love to ruin.

So far, only Jennifer Love Hewitt has challenged the magnificent Walter Huston in the role of Mr. Scratch (or, in Jennifer's case, just "The Devil"). I don't need to see her interpretation to know that it's nowhere close to the scenery-licking performance of Huston's as he reels in the soul of a money-grubbing young farmer. Co-star Edward Arnold wasn't in Walter's league as an actor, but his inherent stuffiness worked well for the character of Daniel Webster, patriotic windbag.

(By the way, the role of Mr. Scratch was also played by none other than Michael Berryman, on an episode of Michael Landon's turgid-angel TV show, Highway to Heaven. I didn't see it, but I'm sure all it lacked was Jennifer Love Hewitt.)

I knew I'd be amused as always by Huston, but re-watching the film, I was impressed by the performance of James Craig as the protagonist, Jabez Stone. He does a good job of playing the change in the character after his devil's bargain has been sealed. This is also the other great Simone Simon movie (Cat People, of course, being the other). Here she plays a part that is basically Hell's own whore, and she looks fantastic.

I liked the way the movie's mood goes from folktale to fantasy to horror movie, and some of the spooky scenes (well-directed by William Dieterle) must have influenced Roger Corman and Mario Bava. The supporting cast is filled with great golden-age Hollywood regulars, and there isn't a pretty one in the bunch (especially Jane "Ma Joad" Darwell), making the later scenes with their ghostly, distorted faces seem genuinely eerie.

So congratulations and a second chance to the following quiz winners: Hank Parmer, Wayne Palmer, Joe Rosenberg, E. Yarber, Christina O'Sullivan, and Kevin Musolino.

Myron Healey slaps Joyce Jameson around in the 1954 feature Gang Busters, based on the radio program

I'm still surprised by how violent some of the old radio shows were, like the Lights Out! clips I posted awhile ago. Lately, I've been enjoying a crime show from the '40s and '50s called Gangbusters, and when the show was "on," it was a riot. And also tough as hell, even more surprising when you consider that it was primarily a kids' show. Here are a couple excerpts (1, 2) from an episode called "The Case of Blackie Thompson." Blackie is a typical Gangbusters serial killer, gunning down a carload of cops with gusto and teaching his girlfriend about the wonders of pigskin gloves.

Since my Saturday traffic is about 3 or 4 people, all of whom I know personally, I thought we'd continue in the vein of last week's Shadow posting and keep it comics-and-nostalgia related. But this week's entry isn't from the past-- it's a brand new comics script by yours truly. Sorry, but I have no idea why I did it.

PANEL ONE
TITLE: "The Adventures of Dog-on-Fire"
(Picture underneath title of a very miserable-looking, blazing canine.)

PANEL TWO
(A happy-looking dog, ala Tramp from Lady and the ..., trotting down the street.)
CAPTION: Meet Lothario, a happy, horny mutt from the other side of the tracks. He has dozens of girlfriends and hundreds of kids-- life is fuckin' sweet!

PANEL THREE
(A flaming ball falls from the sky and onto Lothario, knocking him flat.)
CAPTION: One night, a meteor falls from space and lands on Lothario, causing him to spontaneously combust!

PANEL FOUR
(Bigger but similar picture like panel one, with the dog in a mock superhero pose.)
CAPTION: The meteor turns him into . . . DOG-ON-FIRE!!
DOG: Yelp! Yipe! Whine!

PANEL FIVE
(A mansion is burning and two men are on the sidewalk in front, watching. In the house, an old man is in a front window, waving his arms.)
CAPTION: Meanwhile, the old Osbourne place has mysteriously caught fire.
OLD MAN: Help! Help!
MAN ON SIDEWALK #1: Old Man Osbourne is trapped in the house! He'll be burned alive!
MAN ON SIDEWALK #2: But the fire's out of control. No one could possibly save him!

PANEL SIX
(Dog-on-Fire runs by and the men point to him.)
MAN #2: Hey, that dog's already on fire! Let's send him in the house!
MAN #1: Go get 'im, boy! Go rescue the old prick!
DOG: Yelp! Yipe! Whine!

PANEL SEVEN
(Dog-on-Fire drags the old man out of the house with a firm jaw-hold around the old man's neck.)
MAN ON SIDEWALK #1: He's doing it! He saved the old man!
DOG: Grrrrr! Yipe! Yowl!
OLD MAN: Aaargghh! My t'roat!

PANEL EIGHT
MAN #1: Let's hear it for Dog-on-Fire! Our hero!
MAN #2: May he rest in peace.
(Close up of Dog-on-Fire, flat on the sidewalk, burned to a cinder.)

THE END