jules feiffer - The Screengrab

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Four)

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (1965)

There's been plenty of fine animated entertainment on television over the years (Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons, South Park, King of the Hill, The Grinch What Stole Christmas, Davey & Goliath, etc.), though for our purposes here today (and with the exception of shorts that later became TV staples, like "Duck Amuck"), this list mainly celebrates more festival-friendly fare. And yet, a celebration of classic cartoons without A Charlie Brown Christmas just seems downright un-American somehow, considering how deeply the characters, dialogue, plot and Vince Guaraldi score have embedded themselves in our collective national sense of childhood and the holiday spirit...though not deep enough, sadly, to shift the overall landscape of "family-friendly" animation from blaring, consumerist junk food to the quiet, thoughtful humanity of writer Charles Schulz and director Bill Meléndez's depiction of what even the most cynical among us would have to admit ain't such a bad little tree.

Famous Last Words: Round 1 Finale... or is it?

In its initial Broadway run, Jules Feiffer's pitch-black satire Little Murders lasted a grand total of seven performances. Likewise, Alan Arkin's big screen adaptation, his feature debut and the source of last week's quote, was a box-office flop. However, time has been extremely kind to the film, a hilariously nasty piece of work. Little Murders boasts a perfect early-seventies cast, starting Elliott Gould as the near-comatose antihero Alfred, who takes perhaps the most darkly funny subway ride ever. The ensemble also includes Gould's MASH costar Donald Sutherland as a blissed-out preacher, Arkin himself as a typically Arkinesque police detective, Marcia Rodd (who thereafter worked primarily in television) as Gould's girlfriend Patsy, and Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson as Patsy's bizarre parents. It's Wilson who gets to deliver that last line, which only sounds like something out of Norman Rockwell. Congrats to those of you who guessed it.

Video of the Day: "Little Murders"

In the first flush of his stardom, Donald Sutherland was a counterculture hero: the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, a key participant in the anti-Vietnam "F.T.A." shows, and the movies' only stoned-hippie-World-War-II-tank-commander in Kelly's Heroes. It must say something about the culture, though God knows what, that he now plays a white-maned capitalist lion in the TV series Dirty Sexy Money. The show is pure cheese, but Sutherland is terrific in it. (We don't know what ABC is paying him, but whatever it is, he deserves twice as much just for continuing to report to work, knowing that every week Peter Krause is going to refer to him, in the explanatory voice-over that precedes each episode, as "Tripp, the empire builder.") In the most recent one, he walked his much-divorced, sexy-airhead daughter (played by the peerlessly glassy-eyed Natalie Zea) down the aisle yet again, a chore that he prepared for by getting and staying good and plowed the whole day and night, the better to dull the pain when she made her inevitable announcement that this marriage, too, just wasn't working out. It was hard not to watch the wedding scenes without remembering one of the funniest moments from the blazing youth of everybody's second-favorite lanky, now-elderly Canadian hippie. (A.: Neil Young, dummy.) We refer of course to his cameo in the 1971 Alan Arkin-Jules Feiffer film Little Murders, where he presides over the nuptials of his M*A*S*H co-star, Elliott Gould. It made us laugh the first time we saw it, and it's still all right. Everything is all right! — Phil Nugent

Posted Nov 19 2007, 12:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: phil nugent, kelly's heroes, robert altman, peter krause, neil young, natalie zea, donald sutherland, dirty sexy money, alan arkin, little murders, jules feiffer, m*a*s*h, elliott gould