December 21, 1949: "Samson and Delilah" Premieres

Okay, this version of Samson didn't have long hair.

December 21, 1949: The film Samson and Delilah premieres, one of several Biblical stories directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who also narrates. It stars Italian-American actor Victor Mature as the the Nazirite strongman who served as a judge of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, whose tale is told in the Book of Judges, Chapters 13 to 16, allegedly taking place between 1085 and 1065 BC; and Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian actress and scientist, often regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world at the time, as the woman who betrays her on behalf of the enemies of the Jews at the time, the Philistines.

She seduces him, and gets him to tell her that the source of his strength is that he has never cut his hair. So she cuts it while he sleeps, sapping him of his strength. The Philistines are thus able to capture him, blind him, and enslave him. She visits him in his prison cell, and repents. He tells her his strength has returned as his hair has grown, and that he is biding his time, and that she should not go to the temple the next day. She goes, anyway, and dies with the Philistines as Samson breaks the pillars of the temple, collapsing it on them all, including himself.

Among the other actors appearing were future Superman actor George Reeves, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Russ Tamblyn, later to play Riff in the film version of West Side Story, and the last survivor of this film's cast.

Part of Samson's legend is that he wears a lion's skin. As Samson, Mature was asked to fight a lion. He refused, saying he could get killed. He was told the lion had had its teeth and gums removed -- possibly poetic justice, given the Samson story. Mature said, "I don't want to be gummed to death, either!"

He was once rejected for membership in a country club because he was an actor. He said, "I'm not an actor, and I've got 64 films to prove it!" In 1968, he said, "Actually, I am a golfer. That is my real occupation. I never was an actor. Ask anybody, particularly the critics." In 1971, he said:

I was never that crazy about acting. I had a compulsion to earn money, not to act. So, I worked as an actor until I could afford to retire. I wanted to quit while I could still enjoy life... 

I like to loaf. Everyone told me I would go crazy or die if I quit working. Yeah? Well, what a lovely way to die.

By 1980, he had changed his mind somewhat, saying he was "pretty proud of about 50 ,f my motion pictures. Demetrius and the Gladiators wasn't bad. The Robe and Samson and Delilah weren't bad. I made 72 of them and I made close to $18 million. So, what the hell."

In 1984, ABC aired a remake, with Antony Hamilton as Samson, and Belinda Bauer as Delilah. In his last role, Mature played Manoah, Samson's father. He died in 1999; Lamarr, the next year.

*

December 21, 1949 was a Thursday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. There were 5 games played in the NBA:

* The Philadelphia Warriors beat the Baltimore Bullets, 70-60 at the Philadelphia Arena. These Bullets would go out of business in 1954, and the Baltimore Bullets that started in 1963, and are now the Washington Wizards, have no connection to them beyond name. The Warriors moved to San Francisco in 1962, and adopted the "Golden State Warriors" name in 1971.

* The Minneapolis Lakers beat the Washington Capitols, 75-61 at the Uline Arena (now the Washington Coliseum) in Washington. The Capitols folded in the middle of the next season, and the Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960.

* The Syracuse Nationals beat the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, 96-84 at the Wharton Field House in Moline, Illinois. The "Tri-Cities" were said to be Moline and Rock Island, Illinois and, right across the Mississippi River, Davenport, Iowa. Eventually, Bettendorf, Iowa was included, and the metro area became known as the "Quad Cities." The Blackhawks moved in 1951, becoming the Milwaukee Hawks, then the St. Louis Hawks in 1955, and finally the Atlanta Hawks in 1968. The Nationals became the Philadelphia 76ers in 1963.

* And there was a doubleheader at the St. Louis Arena. In the opener, the Chicago Stags beat the Iowa-based Waterloo Hawks, 78-70. In the nightcap, the St. Louis Bombers beat the New York Knicks, 75-52. The following season, of those 4 teams, only the Knicks would still be in the NBA.

And the NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:

* The New York Rangers beat the Montreal Canadiens, 4-1 at the old Madison Square Garden.

* The Detroit Red Wings beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 7-1 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. The Wings got goals from 7 different players: Pete Babando, Joe Carveth, Gordie Howe, Sid Abel, Jim McFadden, Jack Stewart and Jimmy Peters.

* And the Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 4-1 at the Chicago Stadium.

February 7, 1974: "Blazing Saddles" Premieres

February 7, 1974: Blazing Saddles premieres, director Mel Brooks' tribute to, and parody of, classic Western movies.

Hedley Lamarr (played by Harvey Korman) is a railroad executive, and the Attorney General of an unidentified Western territory of the United States. His name always gets turned into that of Hedy Lamarr, a popular actress of the 1930s and '40s. The Territorial Governor, William J. Le Petomane (Brooks), tells him, "This is 1874: You can sue her!" Hedley wants to build his railroad through the town of Rock Ridge, but the residents (who all seemed to have the surname Johnson) won't leave.

So Lamarr sends his flunky Taggart (Slim Pickens) and his goons there, to, as Taggart, says, "go ridin' into town, whompin' and a-whompin'," until the terrified citizens leave. But the move backfires: They are willing to fight for their town, and demand that Governor Le Petomane appoint a Sheriff to protect them.

Lamarr figures out a way around this: Since Le Petomane is an idiot, and Lamarr is clearly the power behind the throne, he convinces Le Petomane to appoint a Sheriff that the people of Rock Ridge will never accept: A black man. This turns out to be a railroad worker named Bart (Cleavon Little). The character's last name is never mentioned. Brooks gave him a badge, but not a surname. I wonder if that was an intentional commentary on racism.

Sure enough, at first, the Rock Ridgers are repulsed, treating Bart badly, and calling him "the N-word." As Jim (Gene Wilder), a former hired gun known as the Waco Kid, who has become his deputy, explains: "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know: Morons." The ending was an ad-lib by Wilder. Little cracked up, and Brooks left it in, because it was funny. As Brooks has said, "The only true sin is not being funny.")

In a flashback, where Bart tells Jim his backstory, he mentions his family being the only black family in a wagon train, and thus at the back of it, as if it was a segregation-era bus. When they're attacked by Indians, the chief, also played by Brooks, tells his braves to give them a break: "They're even darker than we are!"

Jim helps Bart win the town over. So Lamarr sends in his version of a "doomsday weapon": Mongo (former football star Alex Karras), a gigantic man of limited intelligence and words. Lamarr figures Bart wouldn't be able to handle him. As Jim says, when Bart suggests shooting him, "Don't do that. It'll only make him mad!" Well, not only does Bart find a way to handle Mongo, but Mongo defects to Bart's side, respecting him as the only man ever to stand up to him.

Sending Mongo in not having worked, Lamarr sends in another secret weapon: Lili von Shtupp, an overtly sexy German singer (Madeline Kahn, in an obvious homage to Marlene Dietrich), who is meant to seduce Bart. But Bart is a lover as well as a fighter, so she defects to his side, too.

So Lamarr decides he needs total war, telling Taggart, "I want you to round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west. Take this down. I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados! Mugs, pugs, thugs! Nitwits, halfwits, dimwits! Vipers, snipers! Con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits! Muggers, buggerers! Bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes! Train robbers, bank robbers! Asskickers, shitkickers! And Methodists!"

The final brawl breaks the fourth wall. Well, it breaks a wall, as the fighting Wild Westerners crash through the set of a movie musical in the 1930s style of director Busby Berkeley, directed here by Buddy Bizarre (Dom DeLuise). Then it breaks into the commissary at Warner Brothers' studio, resulting in a food fight, a parody of pie fights in old-time slapstick movies. (Blazing Saddles is now older than most of what it was parodying.) Finally, it spills out onto the streets of Hollywood, where Bart shoots Lamarr in front of the famous Chinese Theatre. In perhaps the most meta moment in movie history, Bart and Jim then go inside to watch the rest of the movie that's telling their story.

Back in 1874, the townspeople thank Bart for his service, and he and Jim start to ride off into the sunset, as Western heroes tend to do. (Although neither gets the girl: Lili stays in Rock Ridge.) Then they get off their horses and into a limousine, and are driven off into the desert -- possibly to Las Vegas.

Brooks wrote the screenplay with black comedy legend Richard Pryor, who was supposed to play Sheriff Bart. But Pryor's cocaine habit was out of control at the time, and he became unreliable: The insurance company for the film wouldn't insure him. So it became a starmaking role for Little.

Brooks also wrote the songs for the film, including the title song. Thinking of Frankie Laine's singing of the theme to the TV show Rawhide, and his big Western-themed hit song "Mule Train," both having the sound effect of a cracking whip, Brooks placed an ad in the trade paper Variety, calling for "a Frankie Laine type." Laine himself answered the ad. Brooks didn't tell him the film was a comedy, and he sang it absolutely straight, and it's a great performance.

(There was precedent for this: Ten years earlier, Stanley Kubrick directed Dr. Strangelove, and told half the cast that the film was a comedy, and the other half that it was a drama, with equally stunning results.)

The studio had a lot of problems with the film. There was a lot of usage of "The N-word." In a 2012 interview, Brooks said, "If they did a remake of Blazing Saddles today, they would leave out the N-word. And then, you've got no movie." The purpose was to satirize racism, to show how rotten it is, and how stupid it is. And Brooks got support on it from both Pryor and Little.

There were also objections to Karras punching a horse. And to the beans scene. Brooks pointed out that, in pretty much every movie with cowboys in it, they're eating beans, but nobody hears the sounds that result. But Brooks' contract gave him final content control, and he refused to make any substantive changes.

Times change. When the film is shown on TV today, the N-word is blanked out. And there's a scene near the beginning where Taggart accuses some of the rail workers of "jumping around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!" That word is often called the gay version of the N-word, but the TV version could have used a better rewrite than "a bunch of Kansas City dummies!"

And Kahn's German singer? Her name is Lili von Shtupp. "Schtup" is, basically, "fuck" in Yiddish. So the TV version blanks it out, so it sounds like her name is "Lili von Sh." And yet, her name can be seen on the poster for the concert. But they left in the Indian chief's reaction upon seeing Bart's family, the single word "Schwarzes!" (German, or in Brooks' case, Yiddish, for "Blacks!" In the 1979 vampire parody Love at First Bite, George Hamilton's Dracula said it, but, for the TV version, it was replaced with, "Good evening!")

Wilder, who had previously worked with Brooks in The Producers, agreed to be in Blazing Saddles on one condition: He had a special project he wanted to do, and he asked Brooks to direct it. So they made that movie next: Young Frankenstein. Brooks has said that Blazing Saddles is his funniest movie, but Young Frankenstein is his best.

In 1995, I had a terrible cold, a cough that lasted for weeks, and kept me up nights. One night, I saw that Blazing Saddles was going to be on TV. I'd never seen it before, so I figured, it's a classic that's still being talked about, so, what the heck. Big mistake: Every time I laughed, I started coughing again. I began to wonder who would die first, me or Hedley Lamarr. (I didn't see Young Frankenstein until 2021. At least I didn't have a cold at the time. Shame on me for waiting until then to get over the hump.)

Slim Pickens died in 1983, Jack Starrett (Gabby Johnson, a parody of Western actor Gabby Hayes) in 1989, Cleavon Little in 1992, Madeline Kahn in 1999, Richard Pryor in 2005, Frankie Laine in 2007, Harvey Korman in 2008, Dom DeLuise in 2009, Alex Karras in 2012, Gene Wilder and David Huddleston (Olson Johnson) in 2016, and John Hillerman (Howard Johnson) in 2017.

Amazingly, as of February 7, 2022, Mel Brooks is still alive, at age 95. Also of note in the film and still alive on that date are Robyn Hilton, who played Miss Stein, the Governor's top-heavy secretary; and Rodney Allen Rippy, the former hamburger spokeskid who played young Bart, who grew up and left acting for a successful career in marketing.

*

February 7, 1974 was a Thursday. Basketball Hall-of-Famer Steve Nash was born.

Baseball and football were out of season. There was only 1 game played in the NBA that night: The Detroit Pistons beat the Golden State Warriors, 110-86 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena. But there were 3 games played in the American Basketball Association:

* The Virginia Squires beat the Carolina Cougars, 120-97 at the Greensboro Coliseum.

* The Utah Stars beat the San Antonio Spurs, 86-83 at the HemisFair Arena in San Antonio.

* And the Denver Rockets beat the Memphis Tams, 105-94 at the Denver Auditorium Arena. The Tams were not among the ABA teams brought into the NBA. Correctly anticipating that they would be, and that there was already a Houston Rockets, the Denver team changed its name to the Nuggets after this season.

There were 2 games in the NHL. The Boston Bruins beat the St. Louis Blues, 5-3 at the Boston Garden. And the Philadelphia Flyers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 5-4 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. And there was 1 game in the World Hockey Association: The Jersey Knights, based in the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, beat the Los Angeles Sharks, 7-4 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.