The Jazz Musician (and Fan) as Character 1951–1961

Characters who play or love jazz turn up in many films that aren’t about jazz itself. Hollywood loves the colorfully seedy milieu, and all that feeling jazz folk put into the music. In the 1950s, jazz folk turn up all over: in film noir, musical, sex comedy, cartoon, social-issue “problem picture,” and on TV. A representative sampling is discussed. Also, the 1950s saw the emergence of rock-and-roll, whose partisans display hostility to jazz fans in Blackboard Jungle and Jailhouse Rock. Three screen narratives in which Tony Curtis plays a jazz musician are briefly recounted, also one where he torments a jazz musician. The nominally “crummy” all-woman band in the period comedy Some Like It Hot is defended, and placed in the context of other women’s jazz bands. Actor/director John Cassavetes plays a TV jazz musician/detective on Johnny Staccato, and a few episodes are examined.

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps

Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet and Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals model the role comic books can play in fostering important civic conversations. Both draw inspiration from exploitation cinema genres (the women-in-prison film, the sex comedy) but reimagine them to embrace alternative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Both also construct “community pages” that inspire and support “uncomfortable conversations” among their fan base—DeConnick’s Non-Compliants and Fraction’s Brimpers. These exchanges construct what Michael Saler describes as “public spheres of the imagination,” communities brought together around periodical publications that create intimate conversations among strangers that use reflections about fictional worlds to contemplate real-world issues. These comic-book publics inspire future developments within these series but also hold the potential to inspire real-world activism.

The Bon, the Bad and the Others

The Bon, the Bad and the Others: Some Remarks on the Phenomenal Success of Bon Cop, Bad Cop in Quebec This article discusses some aspects of the phenomenal box-office success in Quebec of Bon Cop, Bad Cop directed by Eric Canuel, released in 2006. Let me first refer to some statistics: within nine weeks or so from its release in early August of 2006, Bon Cop, Bad Cop was a few thousand dollars short of equalling the box-office success of Porky's, the all-time Canadian box office success from the early 1980s, a raunchy Florida-set sex-comedy that made 11.2 million in Canada. Ninety percent of the box-office, however, came from the home province ticket sales of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, leaving far behind such recent viewers' darlings as Les Boys from 1997, La grande seduction and Les invasions barbares, both from 2003 and above all, Seraphin, the historical drama from...