Harvey Lembeck

Stalag 17 (1953) starring William Holden, Otto Preminger

[Opening narration]

Cookie: I don’t know about you, but it always makes me sore when I see those war pictures… all about flying leathernecks and submarine patrols and frogmen and guerillas in the Philippines. What gets me is that there never w-was a movie about POWs – about prisoners of war. Now, my name is Clarence Harvey Cook: they call me Cookie. I was shot down over Magdeburg, Germany, back in ’43; that’s why I stammer a little once in a while, ‘specially when I get excited. I spent two and a half years in Stalag 17. “Stalag” is the German word for prison camp, and number 17 was somewhere on the Danube. There were about 40,000 POWs there, if you bothered to count the Russians, and the Poles, and the Czechs. In our compound there were about 630 of us, all American airmen: radio operators, gunners, and engineers. All sergeants. Now you put 630 sergeants together and, oh mother, you’ve got yourself a situation. There was more fireworks shooting off around that joint… take for instance the story about the spy we had in our barracks…

Not Yet He Ain't - Burgess Meredith as The Penguin

The Penguin Goes Straight / Not Yet, He Ain’t – Batman season 1

The Penguin Goes Straight – March 22 1966

After his recent release from jail, The Penguin has started his own protection agency. He thwarts small time hoodlums everywhere he goes. Is it all a con? Do you really need to ask?

Pajama Party (1964) starring Annette Funicello, Don Rickles, Buster Keaton

In short, Pajama Party is an Annette Funicello beach party movie. But in addition to the gyrating young girls in bikinis,Pajama Party adds large amounts of clown-level zaniness as well. The basic story has 3 intertwining plots – a Martian invasion (led by a clean cut, inept Martian teenager and managed by Don Rickles), a beach party complete with teenage angst, and some inept crooks (including Buster Keaton as an American Indian, still wearing his traditional pork pie hat — with a feather in it). There’s a lot of humor in the movie, with slapstick that borders on the Looney Tunes. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it and hope you do as well.