Let's All Rock Out In The Lobby! --- Part One

Among stone tablets disgorged from studio vault recesses, few are so bewildering as those vanguards, now largely unwatchable, of rock-and-roll’s dawning era. It’s now one half a century since R&R took exhibition and its biggest target audience by storm. By way of evidence as to how potent an elixir this was, I submit wired-up teens shown here awaiting passage to see Rock Around The Clock at the Gopher (no kidding!) Theatre in Minneapolis one wintry night in March 1956. Those aren’t tennis balls descending from above --- it’s snow. How many of us brought along guitars and accordions to movie shows? I’d assume the musicians were management plants, but this impromptu swing-a-thon in the lobby bespeaks crowd spontaneity I experienced not once over years of ingressing and egressing the Liberty. High school student councils and newspaper editors were appreciative of the harmless quality of this youthful exuberance, said local press, though parents were less approving of similarly exuberant exhibitors with their round-the-clock rocking that kept flowers of youth standing on line way past reasonable bedtimes. Circling around the Paramount Theatre when they should be home and asleep inspired Miami gentry to seek mayoral intervention lest matters get out of hand. Five thousand kids jammed the house over a thirty-eight hour schedule at a dollar a head to see Rock Around the Clock, those sturdiest among cats and gators comped to coffee and doughnuts for the Saturday 7:00 am showing. We just let the kids have a good time and yell their lungs out, said manager Charles Whittaker. They are only young once, and maybe the rock and roll fad will last only as long as Davy Crockett. Dancing in aisles was not uncommon during engagements of Rock Around The Clock. Exhibs not yet hip to the revolution still called it jitterbugging, and yes, they drew a line at seat-slashing and screen-aimed missile launches, but when was the last time showmen had houses packed during off-days and sluggish matinee berths? Rock and Roll woke everyone up to a new day for selling movies. Mom and Dad were largely retired to their Philcos, and from here on, boxoffice negotiations would be conducted with their offspring.

Eight or so rock and roll features turned up on TCM recently. Most were from Columbia. They’d been on the slagheap since days long past when local channels filled off-hours with black-and-white cheapies they had to buy in order to get crowd pleasers like On The Waterfront and The Caine Mutiny. Teenagers who’d once waited on line to see Rock Around The Clock must have been stunned by latter-day televised reunions with such a drab little picture. These encounters no doubt increased appreciation for progress made since. Watching them now provides insight into just how starved 50’s kids were for helpings of the new sound, deluded though it was by penurious budgets and a tentative approach to still radical and possibly controversial music. Rock and roll was a kid phenomenon as seen through the eyes of cynical adults. Our (intended) emotional investment isn’t with teens and their problems, nor bands and their ambitions. Writers clearly flummoxed by entertainment demands of new youth reroute emphasis toward world-weary agents, jaded managers, and fighting to survive producers, characters inspired by selfsame hucksters trying to harness and exploit this peculiar, if frightening, movement. Rock Around The Clock belies its title by focusing instead on former swing promoter Johnny Johnston, mature beyond the point of being overly impressed with Billy Haley or his Comets, except inasmuch as he’s able to peddle them to gullible (and mostly offscreen) teens. Primary conflicts revolve around Medusa-like agent Alix Talton setting her cap for the agent, while romantic rival John Archer, increasingly puffy and careworn since mopping up Cody Jarrett's gang seven years before, waits patiently in the wings. Sets are cramped to a point of suffocation. Guest artists aren’t treated as such, being shoved into soundstage corners and coming off like so much stock footage from other movies. Haley’s band is depicted as a freak find in a podunk town, while legendary deejay Alan Freed operates an impoverished nightclub catering rock acts to a handful of overaged extras for whom music like his would surely be an unknown quantity.

Columbia’s get-it quick scheme was duplicated the following year by a Warners release, Jamboree, itself little more than a feature equivalent of Scopiotone reels strung together to fill 75 or so minutes of running time. The negative cost of $50,000 was exceeded by as many WB short subjects that year, though domestic rentals of $532,000 (with foreign $210,000) and eventual profits of $506,000 make you wonder why they didn’t do a peck more of these things. Maybe Warners didn’t want to associate themselves with such flashes in the pan. Again, it’s agents and their competition occupying center stage, a tedium interrupted by assorted bands and singers on and off as though appearing on Dick Clark’s Bandstand. He’s on board as well for a screen debut, along with numerous record spinners from radio markets nationwide --- all photographed against flatly lit, seemingly cardboard backdrops. Did any feature film talent get less respect that year? Jamboree highlights Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, with beginner Frankie Avalon bringing up the rear. Focal point agents and handlers are of the customarily unsympathetic, seen-it-all variety, their indifference toward rock and roll artists mirroring that of writers and producers stuck with turning out these ten-day cheaters. Let’s Rock was Columbia again. This time balladeer Julius LaRosa resists the transition to R&R, but career reversals, and the influence of lovable kook Phyllis Newman, eventually bring him around. Maintaining resolute determination not to deliver the goods, Columbia indulges an entire first half of LaRosa singing precisely those tunes his audience proposes to reject, while guest bands tilt backward toward forties swing as opposed to the rocking out kids were there to see. Paul Anka, The Royal Teens, Della Reese, and The Tyrones represent a mixed bag of the newly hip and vaguely retro. TV personality Wink Martindale tells LaRosa he’s too square for kids at his taping, then sends the crooner out to do yet another ballad. Rock Around The Clock and its follow-up, Don’t Knock The Rock, had each done 1.1 million in domestic rentals, anticipating a miles-long ribbon of adolescent sucker bait, though diminishing returns were inevitable as the fad ran aground with increasingly weak product. Pictures like Let’s Rock were being rushed to market before workable formulas could be ironed out. Would kids go on enduring such disappointment, even as things got worse with Juke Box Rhythm, a 1959 release boasting George Jessel as m.c. for threadbare acts that would have been strictly persona non grata on the lowliest small market TV dance party? The title refers to a stage extravaganza for which Brian Donlevy (in cut-rate Warner Baxter/42nd Street mode) seeks funding, his featured act being a Spike Jones inspired geriatric team called The Nitwits, members of which, according to imdb, were born in the early 1900’s. This is what teenagers wanted in 1959? Decades old Vitaphone shorts might better have reflected musical tastes of that year.

Twentieth-Century Fox moved in at the end of 1956 to demonstrate what money and production values could do to elevate lowly teen fodder, but whatever good intentions The Girl Can’t Help It started out with were soon frustrated by studio personnel too hopelessly square to realize what rhythmic gold they were mining. Again, musical acts are segregated from principal players, despite sumptuous staging and rich color denied these same artists at Columbia. Startling indeed to see The Platters, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and Fats Domino perform before anything other than simple curtains draped along soundstage walls. Director Frank Tashlin was forty-three here. The youthful and anarchic spirit of two decades before would have been ideal to capture the vitality of rock and roll, but now he prefers highlighting mainstream songstress Julie London, lovingly photographed in a fantasy sequence with leading man Tom Ewell that shows all too clearly where Tashlin’s preference lay. As with Columbia leads, Ewell plays surrogate for behind-the-camera veterans baffled by kids and their musical tastes. He’s a hard drinker and longtime combatant vis-à-vis women of London’s (mature) wiles --- hardly an identification figure for teens lured by rocking names on the marquee. Disdainful of the big beat when he bothers to listen, Ewell’s caught up in the travails of Little Caesar-inspired gang chieftain Edmond O’Brien and pneumatic bombshell Jayne Mansfield. Other than oddball child wonder Barry Gordon, his trailer featured song cut from the finished print, there are no young people among the principals in The Girl Can’t Help It. Comedy is of a leering sort that would probably have embarrassed teenage girls with their dates. Indeed, these situations play like wish fulfillment for tired organization men dreaming of Playboy models as they pour that second highball. O’Brien finally grooves with the band for a last reel tie-up, but his song, despite its humor and energy, is a withering putdown of rock and roll’s perceived (by middle-aged producers) excesses. The Girl Can’t Help It endures less for musical landmarks it captures than for adult attitudes it reflects. Tashlin and the writers seem hell-bent on telling their kind of (old-fashioned) story in spite of the overpowering cultural movement they’ve been commissioned to portray (if not exploit). This is one instance where youth’s takeover of Hollywood a decade later might have actually served a useful, if more profitable, purpose had it occurred instead in 1956. As it is, The Girl Can’t Help It realized much of an $896,000 profit from patrons anxious to check out Jayne Mansfield, her formidable image dominating ad art and relegating the rock acts to near-microscopic cameo status around the margins.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Elizabeth Taylor

Liz Taylor wrote a book (that is, one published under her byline) on how fat she used to be, and another about her fee-abulous jewel collection. There were in-person stops behind perfume counters (as nearby as Charlotte!) hawking concoctions to arouse passions fervent as those once inspired by 007 after-shave (imagine the sensory implications of dabbing oneself with both!). So how come she never talks about the lawn party (here) with Lou Costello, Bob Mitchum, and heaven knows who else? That’s the book I’d surely bound across Borders bargain bins to bag (or at the least click on Amazon used). Unfortunately, ours is not (yet) a world of Greenbriar-inspired trend-setters, so Dame Elizabeth won’t likely cash Simon and Schuster advances to look back upon work with Nigel Bruce, Harry Davenport, and C. Aubrey Smith (his arthritic, yet knowing hand forever squeezing my then-trim, but muscular, seventeen-year old thighs --- oh well, as Jerry Colonna used to say, we can dream, can’t we?). Daryl Hickman recently told Robert Osborne how much fun he had playing tackle football with budding tomboy Liz on the MGM lot back in the mid-forties. Had afternoon practice been like this at my P.S., we’d have all made varsity freshman year! Liz and Dick were unavoidable growing up, particularly for those of us canvassing magazine racks seeking Mad or Castle Of Frankenstein. They seemed to be on the cover of everything. There was one day my mother, sister, and I were in Winston-Salem, just across from the Carolina Theatre’s marquee with its glittering invitation to come see the newly married team smolder in The Sandpiper, a 1965 tamale best handled by adults with asbestos hands (but surely not ones with eleven-year olds in tow!). Well, they couldn’t leave me in the car after all, so we all three ventured forthwith to catch the Burton’s latest steam bath (sister being eighteen and presumably wise in such ways of the world). My senses were soon rivened by what I swore (and still do!) was a glimpse of Taylor’s unfettered breasts being captured in oils by artist/bohemian Charles Bronson. Yes, she covered them quickly as Dick entered from stage left, but one or two frames left permanent imprints upon my boyish mind, and I emerged from the Carolina’s auditorium that day forever changed. Our friends at Warners recently offered up The Sandpiper on DVD. My fast forward moved as if possessed to that scene. Did it live up to memories? Damn it all, no! Must surely have been cut, just like that spider fight in The Incredible Shrinking Man. Why don’t these movies ever play like they used to?

Consider that had she been born but a few years later, Liz would have been a fifties teen queen rather than a forties one. Instead of National Velvet and A Date With Judy … Rebel Without A Cause or maybe Jailhouse Rock. A Natalie Wood career perhaps, or a Gloria Talbott one? Forties teens seemed not teens as we understand them. Our concept of adolescence was forged with James Dean and has ossified since. Roddy McDowell and Scotty Beckett were teens once too, but who wants to be gawky, sexless, and so determinably respectful of authority as these one-time courtiers of youthful Liz? A look at any Metro musical/family comedy will find its youth well harnessed and submission to parental controls assured. Elizabeth Taylor might have, at the least, become some sort of sexual threat elsewhere, by looks if not temperament. Imagine her doing Fox noirs. Other girls in their late teens did. Movies let ingenues grow up faster then. Liz was just too adult/gorgeous to go on playing with Lassie dogs and as second fiddle to Jane Powell. Elsewhere she might have co-starred with Burt Lancaster or the aforesaid Mitchum. Post-war dictates wouldn’t tolerate ongoing girlhood for fruit so ripening, as a grown-up pairing (at seventeen) with Robert Taylor demonstrated in Conspirator. A schism developed here between that which fan magazines published and what people saw on screen. The high-school kid of proms and pinafores walked (an uneasy) hand-in-hand with the overnight screen siren. Again, it was looks as opposed to temperament, for beneath a throbbing bodice lay girlish naivete (as least as presented in Conspirator) and a voice seemingly developed at the Margaret O’Brien school of whining elocution. Still, the vault from early adolescence to adulthood was sudden and irreversible, a transition slowed only by the necessity of a ritual screen wedding that had less to do with story demands of Father Of The Bride than a nationwide readership’s hunger to see Taylor in her wedding dress going down the aisle, a scene she would shortly (and unwisely) duplicate in real life.

Favorite Taylor vehicles include those she made as an old-fashioned studio system collapsed around her. Things like The Girl Who Had Everything and Rhapsody were throwbacks to simpler forties days when all they needed was a star to show up and be beautiful. Teenage girls cut out her photos and pasted them lovingly in scrapbooks. Lots of these turn up on Ebay --- so many as to confirm the huge following Taylor had among those still willing to be starstruck even as merchandising wheels gathered rust within studios dumping contracts and their players seeking independence. Her sustained popularity in the face of such nothing pictures is itself tribute to whatever something she had, and a public’s patience waiting for her to display it. George Stevens was alone in having channeled real star magic, but it had been five years since A Place In The Sun, and now, to the rescue again, he directed Taylor in Giant. Finally she had a picture wider audiences might take an interest in seeing. A stalwart friend to those tormented or with something to hide, she kept secrets on behalf of Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, and was rewarded with felicitous leads opposite them all. The shattered wreck of Clift reteamed with Taylor in Raintree County and showed what a delicate mechanism sex symbolism could be. Maybe it was his tragic example that resolved her to become serious about acting. Suddenly, Last Summer pointed the way, but skittish Columbia ignored Tennessee Williams in favor of publicity (indeed, their whole campaign) built around Liz crouched in the surf wearing a cling-tight bathing suit. Respect comes hard to women with looks like hers. Husband complications qualified Taylor for scarlet roles. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8 represented a summit, though as late as 1966, her steam quotient was such that a combo-ed reissue of the two (again) inspired posters heavily weighted toward the sex angle (as shown here), and thus generated way above-average encore business (both topped domestic rentals of $700,000).

Whatever was left of fan mags in the sixties weren’t napping. They’d long since given over to full-time scandal mongering, and no one sold like E.T. and her offscreen Delilah ways. Eddie Fisher was the husband stolen from Debbie Reynolds, this after Taylor losing just previous mate Michael Todd to a plane crash and winning short-lived tabloid sympathy thereby. Nearly dying herself may have helped as well (constant medical crisis became part of her ongoing drama). She was the biggest star not getting out pictures between 1960 and 1963, but the slow cooking Cleopatra was worth its weight (and wait) in hot press coming off European locations. The latest purloined mate was her ultimate prize, for co-star Richard Burton might have been a Barrymore were he born fifty years sooner. As it is, there was at least a finish not unlike poor Jack’s, with Taylor a higher profile modern equivalent of Elaine Barrie, but no less destructive to Burton's prestige and sobriety. Actually, the shows they did together aren’t half-bad in a sixties-hangover from what was left of the Code fifties way --- that transition between The VIPs and The Sandpiper to Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf is indeed a shocking one. I well remember schoolyard recitations of once forbidden profanities exchanged between ultra-deglamorized Burton and Taylor, and when I finally grew into seeing it a few years later, there was sure enough a newly seasoned actress in evidence. Few could have played that slattern part so well. Tab readers assumed it merely reflected what went on in hotel rooms between these volatile two, and sure enough, poor Burton was run ragged from one jeweler to another, spending fees he’d earned in slumming movies to buy moonrock sized finger ornaments for an increasingly difficult-to-satisfy wife. Exhibitors, particularly those in small towns, dreaded their ongoing team efforts, though it’s hard to imagine any ready audience for Boom, The Comedians, and Hammersmith Is Out. Taylor’s solo career went the way of discarded fashion and a culture so changed as to make her kind of movie star look like the second coming of Norma Desmond. Burton(s) spoofing in a 1970’s Here’s Lucy episode emphasized what viewers already knew. We’d never again believe in them as anything other than their outrageous selves --- and to think Taylor has lived another thirty-seven years beyond this. With acting at least a generation in her past, you’d have hoped she’d sit down and review that amazing career, not to mention remarkable personalities she worked so closely with. The only one she seems willing to talk about is Montgomery Clift (once for TCM, again for Paramount’s DVD of A Place In The Sun). What of William Powell, Larry Parks, and yes, even C. Aubrey Smith? Only a McFarland Press or university publisher would permit such obscure dredging, but I’d spring for a copy. Chances are those reflections would endure longer than silly tomes about weight loss and diamonds she’s worn. Won’t likely happen even if mainstream book sellers were interested, for this is a woman so often betrayed by media as to make candid cooperation a near impossibility, and we’re all the poorer for that, as Elizabeth Taylor’s nearly the last big-name survivor who could fill gaps on the studio system in its final flowering.

New images on Joan Blondell, Don Juan, and Mabel Normand in the Greenbriar Archives.

From Small Screen To Big

I may have seen episodes of the original Dragnet around age five, but not since. Universal’s got them locked up tight as Dick’s hatband. One of the 60's seasons came out on DVD a while back, but the fifties group shows up, if at all, on public domain releases culled largely from 16mm. TCM recently gave us a rare peek via their broadcast of the Dragnet feature released in 1954. So what’s more dated than a police show from five decades back? Viewers would opt for yet another Law and Order over 276 black-and-white dead sea scrolls filmed on cramped sets, but Law and Order never had Jack Webb. Like George Reeves and Superman, this man was Dragnet’s whole show. For me, nothing about Jack dates. You could say he’s so out he’s in. If Webb had eternal life, I’ve no doubt Joe Friday would yet be pushing a beat on some network. His kind of directness never loses its cool. We’re made to understand early on that Friday has no life outside his work, nor seeks one. You have to admire the man’s absolute single-mindedness. There’s a scene in the feature where Joe and sidekick Frank wait around a Natural Science museum to grill the curator. Frank points out an exhibit, but Joe’s indifferent. It’s only about the job for him. War Of The World’s Ann Robinson is the policewoman going (shallow) undercover, and there’s a moment when it looks as though Friday might have a personal interest there, but we get nothing beyond a tease. Joe and Frank do hallway repartee about crummy food they’ve eaten --- on-the-fly of course --- and this is close as we get to exploration of personal lives. Weekly viewers thrived on all this. Wish I’d been one of them. By the time Webb brought back Dragnet in the mid-sixties, he was older, jowlier, less given to patience. Hippies and dopers always got his goat. Jack/Joe was locked outside the counterculture, but this guy never wanted in. He preferred turning a key on the whole lot. A young Joe Friday had at least the hope of getting a girl and (maybe) entering the mainstream. Sixties Joe was too late and maybe bitter about it. The Jack Webb trajectory is one of the great dramas of movies and television walking hand-in-hand through the fifties and sixties. He was a genius thriving on overwork and cigarettes. Law enforcement organizations lionized him (as shown here, and yes, that's Jack Warner with Webb). He made police procedure everybody’s business. Jack was the first producer/director to put us inside the station house. Others had ventured close. Detective Story on stage and Naked City on screen were admirable, but Webb made us an ongoing part of the investigation, and he never allowed for distraction. To give Joe a life would have been slacking. We needed to keep our mind on the case at hand. I remember one color show where Friday shot a guy in the Laundromat, not so novel a thing in itself, but fairly startling when I realized Joe was there to wash his clothes, a process necessary to us all, but seemingly not a thing this character would have (or take) time to address. It was actually reassuring to know the job followed Joe wherever he went. Once he signed on for continuing education (in an uncharacteristically casual sweater as I recall) at one of those radical-infested campuses Webb despised, and it’s barely commercial time before he’s got cuffs on a student for brandishing reefers in class.

Here’s one for Ripley. The Dragnet feature ended with more black ink than anything else Warners handled in 1954, except The High and The Mighty. Webb shot it like a TV show, and finished for crumbs. That negative cost at $567,000 was nearly a third less money than WB spent on an average Randy Scott, but how many oaters brought back $4.4 million in domestic rentals? The profit of $3.3 gave impetus to a slate of Webb-directed experiments --- none conventional, all worthwhile (seen The D.I.? --- it’s terrific). Dragnet’s in Warnercolor. That’s all the concession Jack would make to a bigger canvas. No Cinemascoping for him. Imagine a flat picture coming out in the first year of wide screens based on something they could get free at home --- and it’s a smash. Tells you something about the popularity this man enjoyed. His format’s largely unchanged. It was 9:10 AM. I was working bunco (not really, but I like that word). The boss is so-and-so (actually, Richard Boone). I’ll bet theatergoers recited much of this along with Webb. Modern crimefighting equipment includes recording devices big as steamer trunks and even more complicated than my cordless phone. The metal detector they use looks like something Klaatu left behind. Director Jack shoots upward through the bottom of an ash tray for one scene. Bet Orson Welles went for his note pad upon seeing that. Judging by a donny-brook staged in the second half, Webb might as well have been composing for 3-D, for every punch here is comin’ at ya. The story was dug out of police files --- words like procuring are bandied about to let us know it’s real asphalt we’re smelling. Always great to hear Webb machine gunning dialogue. He fires off rejoinders to put modern-day ironists to shame. Polite with civilians, surly to suspects, Friday’s got a short fuse for witnesses that chicken out on line-ups. I wonder why there weren’t more Dragnet movies. Michael Hayde would know. He wrote a fantastic book about Jack Webb and all his works. I wish there were more Jack Webb movies. Of course, that would have meant an increase on the twenty-hour days he was already working …

That Lone Ranger’s so virtuous as to be nauseating. I wish he’d just once beat a confession out of a miscreant, but you’ll wait till next millennium for that, and I dare say his pants are ever less likely to split upon alighting the saddle, despite every law of physics that dictates they should. Was Clay Moore a good actor? One might better ask if that matters, for I wonder how many fans are left for this character (guess I’ll find out in the comments section). The Ranger makes with speeches every time he corners a heavy. You wish he’d at least have brought slides. I prefer my western heroes shoot first and save questions for later. The Ranger babbles on about federal marshals, warrants, and gathering evidence while bad guys make tracks out of town. This man’s plain dogmatic when it comes to do-gooding. Gene Autry looks positively anti-heroic beside him. You’ve gotta stack the deck to let this saintly masked man overcome combined villainy on the part of Lyle Bettger and Robert Wilke. They’ve both got him clearly outclassed. If backshooter Bob consulted the Ranger rulebook, he’d know his opponent could never gun a man on any account, making it easy to knock over such an impotent force for good, but damned that script for letting L.R. prevail over heavies stronger, and actors better. It’s actually Bettger and Wilke that got me through The Lone Ranger, as while both are slumming, they're game yet to give of their best even amidst this kiddie’s sandpile. The Lone Ranger is actually a good feature. Warners released it in 1956, although the negative eventually reverted back to Jack Wrather's company (explanation perhaps for the indifferent DVD we’re heir to). Action moves fast and those are real rocks the Ranger's passing, unlike papier-mâché mock-ups he camped among in the vid series. Exciting stuntwork punctuates fight scenes. I never saw so many guys plunged off cliffsides. Must have used gallons of mecurichrome on this show. The Lone Ranger was Junior’s treat to a western movie now that "B" series were phased out. Better he look at this than one of those neurotic exercises where guys shoot holes through Jim Stewart’s open palm, though the risk of insulting eight-year-old intelligences loomed occasionally. Since when did cowboy stars play both stalwart hero and dagnabit sidekick? Clayton Moore does, and I could do with less of that overripe coot he impersonates whilst among unsuspecting townsfolk. This disguise was donned on the series as well. Could it be one of the reasons I seldom watched? Moore Gabbys things up with bowed legs and stooped posture --- old pros Bettger and Wilke seem like Olivier and Gielgud by comparison.

Seeing The Lone Ranger also enables that revival viewing of Dodge City you've neglected on TCM, for virtually every money shot derives from this and other late thirties Technicolor outdoor specials. How many times have we seen those same wagons reflecting off the river as they pass? Trees felled in Valley Of The Giants would do so again in dozens more Warner westerns as narrators intoned the march of civilization, while I’m fairly certain Errol Flynn was sitting in long shot on a fence rail during The Lone Ranger’s mass cattle sequence. I actually wish they’d released a movie about the campaign for this one, as Midwest folk swarmed over Clayton Moore at every junket stop. This CBS camera in Jacksonville, Florida recorded a last minute Ranger rescue of WMBR’s tied-up kid show hostess, while theatre front appearances in Dallas found Moore surrounded by moppet admirers. You’re all at liberty to print and paste this keen Tonto headband to serve your own tracking and/or scouting needs. Just be careful using scissors and don’t apply scotch tape where it will show. The General Mills cereal box tie-ins raise but one question --- do any of these still exist? That is, original boxes from 1956 --- sealed --- with cereal still in them? Must be highly collectable if they do. The Lone Ranger feature was produced for a bargain $899,000, earning domestic rentals of $1.4 million. Foreign provided another $1.2 for a worldwide total of $2.6 million. The final profit of $1.1 million equaled the performance of Warner’s same year Helen Of Troy and Baby Doll. A second Lone Ranger feature, for United Artists release, found him seeking The Lost City Of Gold, but this time rentals ($506,099 domestic) totaled less than half what WB realized in their collaboration with the Wrathers. Television’s Ranger series had a shelf life extended by virtue of episodes (though not all) having been shot in color, while Clayton Moore continued wearing the suit to whatever super-markets needed opening, substituting dark glasses for his mask when courts forbade appearances in character. This 1979 showdown occurred as result of Wrather efforts to replace Moore’s ongoing (now elderly) persona with a thing called Clinton Spilsbury (their would-be feature successor), latterly an object of ridicule and derision among Ranger disciples. Updating a figure so venerable as T.L.R. for twenty-first century palettes would seem dicey at best (and what of faithful indian companion Tonto?), but with westerns now in their fourth decade of (more or less) commercial decrepitude, how likely are we to experience a Ranger encore?