Friday, January 17, 2025

Blood Of The Vines - Michael Schlesinger Week

Pairing wine with movies!  See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies and many more at Trailers From Hell.  This week, we remember a guy who was hard to forget. We have wine pairings, too, for the inevitable toasts to his name.

The late film exec and TFH guru Michael Schlesinger was a connoisseur of fine film. The 1963 madcap comedy, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, was one of his favorites. It stars Spencer Tracy, backed up by an all-star cast featuring Edie Adams, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Dorothy Provine, (lemme catch my breath), Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, (did I say Dorothy Provine?), Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters and about 200 other notables in cameos.  Mr. Winters was enough to grab me as I was already a huge fan by the tender age of eight years. This movie puts the mad in madcap, the screw in screwball, the slap in slapstick and the road in road comedy. To be precise, it puts four mads in madcap. 

The characters all scramble to be the first to discover the hiding place of $350,000 in stolen cash.  Jimmy Durante spills the beans about the money before dropping dead.  For his "the gold...it’s in the…" moment, Durante tells the assembled mob only that the treasure is under a big W. Let the money madness begin. 

Director Stanley Kramer was reportedly none too happy about the studio ripping out footage like a drywall demo team. Apparently nobody told him that Hollywood didn't need any three-hour comedies. Even with more than a half an hour of celluloid on the cutting room floor, the movie still ran 161 minutes. To quote Robert Vaughn from Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., "That's too long."

Nowadays the movie runs well over three hours. For some people, that's a lot of Terry-Thomas. So, just open three bottles of wine to get through the viewing. Try Madcap, a red blend from British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. The winery, Fairview Cellars, is described as being "on the Reed Creek alluvial Fan at the North end of the Benches of the Golden Mile." I think there may be too many capital letters there, but that's how they wrote it.

2015's The Adventures of Biffle and Shooster uses the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy as a touchstone, right down to the ill-fitting suits and schemes you just know are never going to work. Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster (Nick Santa Maria and Will Ryan) are a vaudeville duo who supposedly ran afoul of Hal Roach's good graces over their copycat film shorts. These efforts are set in 1930s black and white, with jokes that seem about that fresh.

It's all done in great fun, however. The handful of shorts are directed and written by Schlesinger with the love of a true cinephile, not the snarky snickers of someone who doesn't get the source material to begin with.

If you consider Biffle and Shooster a knockoff of Laurel and Hardy, how about a Knockoff Chardonnay from Replica Wines? They say they reverse-engineer their winemaking to imitate the qualities of other, high-priced, wines. Don't know who their sights were set on with the $16 2018 Knockoff Chardonnay, but they say it has a buttery kick to it.

1937's Sh! the Octopus was another Schlesinger fave. The movie is as weird as the title. Warner Brothers mainstays Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins serve as the sort of detectives you would expect to find in a '30s comedy-mystery set in a lighthouse and featuring a giant octopus. If, indeed, you have any expectations that fit those parameters. 

This movie proves that every now and then, we need a wine with an octopus on the label. Extra points if it's a really great wine. Holus Bolus to the rescue. The Santa Barbara County artisan outfit has a mollusk on its Grenache, Syrah, and my beloved Bien Nacido Vineyard Roussanne, all for $40 each. I'd suggest an eight-pack. 


Follow Randy Fuller on X and BlueSky 

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