Red Hot Hope

Film I've just returned from The Hope Street Festival, a day long event featuring farmers market, exhibitions, crafts and music. One of the delights was the chance to see a selection of MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons on the big screen at the Philharmonic Hall. The auditorium was filled with families and kids pleasingly captivated by these films, some of which were made over sixty-years ago. Even with babies crying it was still fun to have just a little taste of what it must have been like all those years ago seeing them as part of the Friday night cinema programme in the big city screens of America.

For the interested, here are some of the things that were shown..

Magical Maestro
Red Hot Riding Hood
A Corny Concerto
Mouse in Manhatten
Draftee Daffy
The Cat Concerto

I didn't actually look at the list before going in so that I could be surprised by what I saw. Most of the prints were bashed to pieces, which scratches and dirt all over the place, but this made the hair gag in Magical Maestro even funnier because when the singer finally pulls it from the frame it had looked like a real fault.

I knew there was going to be trouble when Red Hot Riding Hood flashed up on screen. I'd never seen this but knew its reputation. The short begins as a simple retelling of the fairy story, until the three main characters, Red, the Wolf and Grandma go on strike until they get a say in this plot:

"The annoyed narrator cedes to their demands and starts the story again in a dramatically different arrangement. Now, the story is set in a contemporary urban setting where Red is a sexy adult nightclub entertainer, the Wolf is a debonair skirt chaser, and Grandma is an oversexed man-chaser."

Where there had been laughs (even during the marginally racist Magical Maestro), whole entire families sat stony faced and some, including the group in front of me, got up and walked out. It's a gentle reminder that when originally produced, these shorts were not made y'know for kids. The story reaches a crescendo when:

"It features the wolf getting away from Grandma and returning to the nightclub. There, disgusted with women because of the experience he had with Grandma, he proclaims that he will kill himself before he looks at another babe. When Red comes back out, the wolf, true to his word, blows his brains out. His ghost then gets back up and continues with the same catcalling as he did when he first saw Red."

But most of these films were fairly subversive choices; in Draftee Daffy the duck does everything he can to avoid getting a draft letter for World War II until he actually blows himself up, finds himself in the pit of hell and is still handed the letter.

Thrilling subversive stuff for lunch time on a Sunday at the Phil...