Charles Strouse Movies

Jerry Herman is a singer and songwriter who rose to fame on the strength of several hit Broadway shows, launched at a time when the rise of rock and roll was leading many to doubt the future of the American musical theater. Born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey to parents with a love of musical theater, Jerry Herman staged his first show while he was in college in 1955, and shortly after graduation he wrote music and lyrics for an off-Broadway show that ran two years. But it was 1964's blockbuster hit Hello Dolly that made Herman a big name on Broadway, and his next show, Mame, was nearly as successful. While many of Herman's subsequent shows were critical successes, they failed to enjoy the same level of success, and the film versions of both Hello Dolly and Mame failed to capture the magic of the stage versions. But Herman enjoyed a surprise comeback with 1983's La Cage Aux Folles, and today he's regarded as one of the last great figures of Broadway's golden age. Filmmaker Amber Edwards pays homage to Herman and his songs with Words and Music by Jerry Herman, a documentary which features performances of some of Herman's best known songs along with stories of his career in music. Among the interview subjects and performers are Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury, Leslie Uggams, Michael Feinstein, Charles Nelson Reilly, Fred Ebb, Marge Champion and many others. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Experience the music of Broadway from an insider's perspective as composers Charles Strouse and Arthur Schwartz settle in for an intimate evening of song and story that brings the magic of the theater home in style. From his very first, Tony-winning Broadway musical Bye, Bye, Birdie to his score for Bonnie and Clyde and unforgettable theme to All in the Family, musical treasure Strouse performs a variety of his best loved hits while charming a captivated audience with some of his best show-business memories. Later, twice Oscar-nominated composer Schwartz offers a nostalgic walk down memory lane as he ponders his rewarding career and performs a series of hits including "Dancing in the Dark", "Something to Remember you by", and the enduring showbiz classic "That's Entertainment". ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

One of the most expensive of Don Bluth's animated cartoon features, All Dogs Go to Heaven was also among the most successful. Set in late-'30s New Orleans, the story centers upon a roguish German shepherd named Charlie B. Barkin (voice of Burt Reynolds), who is killed early in the proceedings by his business partner, Carface (voice of Vic Tayback). Charlie travels to Heaven, and is promptly warned that if he heads back to Earth, he can never return; he does decide to go back to Earth, however, to exact revenge on Carface, who has kidnapped Anne-Marie, a little orphan girl who can talk to Animals.
The film also includes the vocal skills of Dom DeLuise, Charles Nelson Reilly, Vic Tayback, Melba Moore, Loni Anderson, and a host of others. All Dogs Go to Heaven was the first production of the Dublin-based Sullivan Bluth Studios. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This family classic is adapted from the Broadway musical, which was based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. During the Great Depression in New York City, a plucky red-haired scrapper named Annie (Aileen Quinn) is the voice of hope for her fellow orphans who live under the supervision of drunken floozy Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett). Annie's spirit is fueled by the belief that her real parents dropped her off at the orphanage with a half of a locket, promising to return for her with the other half. One day, the dingy orphanage is visited by the sophisticated Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), personal secretary to conservative politician Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney). In order to improve his image, Grace brings Annie to the Warbucks estate for a weeklong visit. Annie quickly wins the hearts of servants and politicians alike, eventually even bringing her song of hope, "Tomorrow," to President Roosevelt in Washington. Warbucks and Grace even go so far as to perform a public search for Annie's parents, creating an opportunity for Miss Hannigan, Rooster (Tim Curry), and Lily (Bernadette Peters) to scam their way to the reward money. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

"The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show -- in a mature fashion -- just how absurd they are." With this carefully worded disclaimer, the CBS television network ushered in a new era of television comedy on January 12, 1971, with the premiere of All in the Family. Inspired by the British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part, the series was proposed by producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin in early 1968, and a pilot episode titled "Those Were the Days" was commissioned by ABC. From the beginning, Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were "set" as leading characters Archie and Edith Bunker (original last name: Justice), though two unknowns were cast as the couple's daughter, Gloria, and son-in-law, Mike Stivic. Also from the beginning, it had been decided to retain the controversial nature of the original British series, with bigoted hard-hat Archie forever at odds with his flaming liberal son-in-law. Alas, ABC had just been burned by the hostile reception afforded another hot-potato project, Turn-On, and had lost its taste for controversy, even when Lear and Yorkin toned down the venom in a second pilot. But in 1970, CBS, in desperate need of a hit for its sagging Tuesday-night lineup, decided to take a chance on "Those Were the Days," which by now had been christened All in the Family, and had added Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner to the cast as Gloria and Mike. Worried that audiences might be unkindly disposed to Archie Bunker's incessant harangues against "hebes," "spics," and "coloreds," CBS prefaced the first episode with the aforementioned disclaimer. Though the opener ended up an anemic 54th in the ratings (due primarily to the decision by several affiliates not to air the program, or to reschedule it to a "fringe" time slot), the first All in the Family was the topic of conversation in virtually every household and place of business in America before the week was out.

By the time the series began in its second season in the fall of 1971, All in the Family was CBS' top-rated program, a status it enjoyed for the next five years. Archie Burnker, a loading-dock supervisor who resided at 704 Houser Street in Queens, NY, was a firm and immovable believer in America, right or wrong (but mostly far, far right). Offsetting Archie's racial slurs, antediluvian political beliefs, and incessant malapropisms was his somewhat foolish but fundamentally good-hearted wife, Edith (or "Dingbat," as Archie designated her); his budding-feminist daughter, Gloria; and Gloria's long-haired, radical husband, Michael Stivic (aka "Meathead" and "Polack"), who while attending graduate school lived with Archie and Edith, and all but ate them out of house and home. In virtually every episode, an Issue (with a capital "I") was brought to the forefront -- gun control, the sexual revolution, homosexuality, religion, integration, rape -- with Archie taking the diehard conservative viewpoint, Mike assuming the liberal stance, Gloria siding with Mike, and Edith sitting on the sidelines making inane (but sometimes surprisingly sensible) comments. Usually, Archie would be hoisted by his own bigoted petard, but sometimes Mike would be trapped in the morass of his good intentions. Whatever the case, All in the Family tackled subject matter that only a few years earlier would have been rejected out of hand on network television, using language that likewise had seldom if ever been heard on the small screen. In this respect, All in the Family can be regarded as the single most influential situation comedy in television history.

Over the years, Archie's character mellowed a bit, but fundamentally he remained the same opinionated jerk he'd been in the first episode. Through it all, however, one never doubted that the members of the Bunker family all loved one another dearly and intensely. In addition to the "core" regulars, several other recurring characters paraded past Archie's beloved easy chair: Lionel Jefferson (Mike Evans), a black friend of Mike and Gloria's who, much to Archie's dismay, became their across-the-street neighbor (Lionel's upscale black family would later be spun-off into their own series, The Jeffersons); Irene and Frank Lorenzo (Betty Garrett and Vincent Gardenia), who were every bit as broad-minded as Archie was not; Bert Munson (Billy Halop), an employee at the cab company where Archie moonlighted; Archie's co-worker and lodge buddy Barney Hefner (Allan Melvin); and Tommy Kelsey (Brendan Dillon, and later Bob Hastings), owner of Kelsey's Bar, Archie's favorite hangout. At the beginning of the 1975-1976 season, Gloria and Mike moved next door to Archie and Edith, and in December of 1975, Gloria gave birth to her first child, a boy named Joey. During the 1976-1977 season, Archie met yet another sociological opponent in the form of Puerto Rican boarder Teresa Betancourt (Liz Torres). And as the 1977-1978 season began, Archie made the momentous decision to quit his job and purchase Kelsey's bar, which he renamed Archie Bunker's Place. This season ended with Mike, Gloria, and Joey bidding farewell to Archie and Edith when Mike landed a teaching job in California. The Stivics' former sleeping quarters were taken over in 1978 by Stephanie Mills (Danielle Brisebois), Edith's niece, who had been abandoned by her ne'er-do-well father.

All in the Family per se came to an end with the final episode of the 1979-1980 season; thereafter the multi-award-winning series was known as Archie Bunker's Place. In addition to its prime-time run, All in the Family was seen in rerun form as part of the CBS daytime lineup from December 1975 to December 1979; and in 1991, selected episodes of All in the Family were run in tandem with a newer but much (much) less successful Norman Lear production, Sunday Dinner, which debuted and wrapped within a month. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Narrator Rudy Vallee announces that he knows we are a "real high class audience," thus he has "some swell story to tell." Thus begins The Night They Raided Minsky's, set in the rarefied world of burlesque in the 1920s. Amish girl Rachel Schpitendavel (Britt Ekland) comes to New York in hopes of securing work as a dancing interpreter of religious stories. She gets a job at Minsky's burlesque house, where the dance numbers are "Biblical" only when some gum-chewing stripper performs Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils. The many subplots leading up to Rachel's accidental invention of the striptease during a midnight Minsky's show involve many: top banana Chick Williams (Norman Wisdom) and womanizing straight-man Raymond Paine (Jason Robards Jr.); Billy Minsky (Elliot Gould), whose efforts to stage girlie shows at the National Winter Garden are looked down upon by Minsky Sr. (Joseph Wiseman), who holds the lease on the theater; gangster Trim Houlihan (Forrest Tucker), who intends to shut down Minsky's if he can't get a piece of the action; Ekland's preacher father Harry Andrews, who shows up in New York just in time to see his daughter bare all in front of a cheering audience; and Vance Fowler (Denhom Elliot), self-appointed protector of public morals, whom Paine hopes to embarrass by having Rachel perform her religious dance. A straightforward adaptation of Rowland Barber's novel The Night They Raided Minsky's would seem to be called for here, but novice director William Friedkin and film editor Ralph Rosenblum seem determined to turn the film into a kaleidoscope Hard Day's Night clone. Happily, producer Norman Lear is able to accommodate several nostalgic re-creations of such burlesque chestnuts as "Crazy House" and "Meet Me Round the Corner," as well as six delightful in-period songs penned by Bye Bye Birdie's Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, the best of which is the ribald "Perfect Gentleman." Bert Lahr makes his last appearance on screen in the role of washed-up funnyman Professor Spats; he died during production, and had to be extensively doubled throughout. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A more appropriate title for this animated 60-minute special might have been Alice in Hanna-Barbera Land, since the cartoon producers have eschewed the original Lewis Carroll text and John Tenniel illustrations for something that more closely resembles The Jetsons or Scooby Doo. Updated to the 1960s, the story begins as Alice, a precocious suburban youngster, escapes the wrath of her stern father when she and her dog Fluff follow the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland. In standard Hanna-Barbera operating procedure, several of the familiar Wonderland denizens are redrawn to resemble the actors providing their voices: thus, The White Knight looks and talks like "Jose Jimenez," the Hispanic character created by comedian Bill Dana (who also wrote the script), while the Queen of Hearts is a visual and verbal clone of Zsa Zsa Gabor. In a similar vein, some of the characters have been completely overhauled to be more "relevant" to Sixties viewers: Humpty Dumpty is now Humphrey Dumpty, with his Bogart-like voice provided by Allan Melvin; the Mad Hatter has a female counterpart, Hedda Hatter, voiced by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (famous for her bizarre headwear); and the Caterpillar has suddenly grown two heads, who look and sound exactly like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. The songs, by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse of Bye Bye Birdie fame, are pleasant but forgettable, with the exception of "What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing In a Place Like This?", sung by the Cheshire Cat (his "hipster" voice supplied by Sammy Davis Jr.). In fact, it is obvious that Hanna-Barbera thought that they had a hit on their hands with this song, the title of which is used as the "subtitle" of this irreverent but entertaining cartoon romp. Alice in Wonderland first aired March 30, 1966, on ABC. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide