Ghost Town (1988)

 

The Andy Williams Christmas Show (1966)

    I have very little use for Andy Williams personally and that’s not even taking into account his later descent into Republican batshittery. I do have to admit that he comes off as a perfectly decent person in this special. This is actually an episode from his television series ‘The Andy Williams Show’ which ran from 1962 to 1971. He’d been in the business since the late 30’s, starting from when he was eleven having formed a quartet with his three older brothers and done the Midwest radio circuit. They eventually made their way to Hollywood before striking off with Kay Thompson to form a very successful nightclub act. Thompson was one of those industry figures whose list of accomplishments becomes ludicrous at some point. She ran the gamut from being the lead vocal arranger at MGM to the creator and writer of the Eloise children’s books. Her long-term impact on the career of Williams, with whom she had a long-standing affair starting when he was 19, cannot be overstated.

    Starting in the 50’s Williams became a recording artist after he and his brothers parted ways and by the late 50’s he was both a chart-topping artist as well as an intensely familiar face to television audiences having appeared on shows with Perry Como, Steve Allen, Dinah Shore, as well as serving several stints as guest host of ‘The Tonight Show,’ which lead to his own television specials and eventual show.

I don't think the screen border has enough going on.

    Being another episode of an ongoing series, albeit a special one, the only real guest stars of note are also regulars of the show, The Osmonds. Lorrie Morgan apparently also appears but I haven’t been able to tell which person she is. Just about everyone else is a relative of Williams including his parents who adorably just cannot act. His children aren’t quite talking yet so appear only sporadically (a lesson Bing Crosby should have learned), his brothers were still pretty well known, and the only other featured performer is his then-wife, Claudine Longet, a Parisian some fifteen years his junior. They would eventually separate and amicably divorce, which is where I’ll end her life story, Google exists if you really have to know.

    Airing on December 18^th, 1966 the show opens with a much-too long rendition of ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ as Williams and company sit in a fake car and make bobbing motions in front of some of the worst green-screening I’ve ever seen. While it does go on for too long I have to admit that Williams gets to sing this song as much as he wants as it was first recorded and released in 1963 on ‘The Andy Williams Christmas Album.’

    They arrive onto the set of a small little town covered in show and various Christmas stuff happens. You’ve got a Santa ringing a bell, people putting up decorations, he helps a lady who’s dropped her wreath, that kind of thing, all the while singing ‘We Need a Little Christmas.’ This was actually a brand new song in 1966 having been written for the musical ‘Mame’ and first performed on stage earlier that year by Angela Lansbury. Which is interesting.

I mean just cannot act.

    He meets up with this brothers and they discuss whether one brother spent too much on a Christmas tree. The audience is loving this reunion. He runs into his parents who just bought him a present. He bets he can guess what it is and over their objections he shakes it. The fakest and most over-the-top glass shattering sound is played and his parents awkwardly deadpan that his present is a broken shaving mirror. This sets up an amusing enough runner where whenever Williams gets close to a present he’s immediately warned away.

    Next he meets up with his wife who is, as I said before, much younger and French, and if you know that this scene plays fine but if you don’t suddenly Williams is pawing all over a 24-year old woman with a strong French accent and I’m sorry I wasn’t expecting this from 1966. The jokes they banter back and forth are not the worst I’ve heard. Then The Osmonds show up as tree-sellers and now that I know what to look for I can tell the smallest is Donny and the whole thing feels a little weird. The entire town joins in to finish off ‘We Need a Little Christmas’ and drops us into commercials.

Still not as bad the little dancing nightmare puppets from the Crosby special.

    What follows is one of those borderline acid-trip sequences that apparently were just normal back then. The Osmonds see a castle set in a toy store window and suddenly full-sized toy soldiers (all dressed as male soldiers but many quite obviously women) are doing a kind of martial dance number. They make way for The Osmonds who are dressed as ... I have no idea what they’re dressed as, they’re wearing shirts and hats with pink polka-dots and white overalls and do a variation/mash up of ‘Heigh-Ho’ and ‘Whistle While You Work’ from Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ about making toys and being lazy and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The whole thing takes about six minutes of screen time and doesn’t involve Williams at any point, which I guess means it served its purpose.

Ba-whuuh??

    Next we’re back at what we’re supposed to buy as the Williams house where he gets teased by his mother about breaking presents and not being able to play the piano, which much have been something from the show because the audience is laughing right on cue. It contains one of the longest and least subtle takes to camera I’ve ever seen. His mother teases him about practicing his singing so he pulls a face to camera for a full solid five seconds. That doesn’t seem like a long time but go ahead and count it out and you’ll see how that’s far too long a reaction time. He does a soft little solo version of ‘The Christmas Song’ which is very nice but is slightly ruined by his mother being in the background for the entire number just kind of vaguely paying attention.

    His wife and father come in for some more hijinks before Williams and Longet sing ‘Love in a Home.’ Longet does not have a bad voice but it does not go with Williams at all. She’s got that kind of thin, breathy 60’s French voice that belongs on a Serge Gainsbourg track, not on American television screens.

Genuinely funny bit.

    Next up is Williams and his brothers in a reunion they seem to have repeated fairly often. The four of them are in matching outfits and run through a number of Christmas standards. They sing well and very much have an early Beach Boys sound to them, like from around the time of ‘Pet Sounds,’ which would make sense as that was also released in 1966. They trade some jokes about how they’re getting up there in years and generally seem like nice enough guys. They top it off with ‘Carol of the Bells’ where they actually have little hammers and supposedly hit some chimes in time with the song but as they’re big, free-swinging metal chimes it turns very quickly into them trying to keep up with the song and also avoid the swinging bells. It’s actually a fairly well done bit of physical comedy. It’d be perfect if The Muppets did it.

    We’re back in the fake Williams house as Longet sings ‘My Favorite Things’ from ‘The Sound of Music,’ supposedly accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar. Williams joins in and again their voices just do not mesh, she always seems like she’s about to segue into the chorus of ‘Ballade de Melody Nelson’ when he comes in with his flat American vowels and it just clashes. There’s a nice little flourish at the end where she seems genuinely proud about how well she performed, which is nice.

She's 1960's French which is the most French a person is allowed to be.

    After some hijinks where she keeps hinting she wants a fur coat for Christmas they hear people outside and he lets a rather ludicrous number of people onto the set. He tells them they’re going to watch some home movies of their kids then transitions to the exact same set with a lot of the same people which made absolutely no sense until I realized that the kids featured were all under the age of five and must have been a bitch to film so this must have been their explanation for watching something so clearly pre-taped. Which, fair enough. It is rather adorable to watch Williams almost absently switching between English and French while talking to his kids. For their part the children are super-affectionate with their parents, grandparents, and each other and the audience frequently chuckles as they make faces or mess with each other during the subsequent songs.

You got cute kids there, Williams.

    For once we don’t end with a stupid medley, instead we have Williams in a fake church singing ‘Silent Night’ all solemn-like. He then wraps things up with a plug for his next episode featuring a full skating rink set and Peggy Fleming, which, yeah, I’d have probably watched that in 1966. He wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and we’re out.

    So, yeah, Andy Williams. He’s one of those voices you can’t escape from when the radios switch to be entirely Christmas songs. It’s moderately interesting how involved he was in popularizing what are now considered standards but were relatively or even completely new in 1966. He’s got an awkward quality that does a lot to humanize him even if he still has that same easy-listening singing voice that Como and Crosby had (and that Cash definitely didn’t, don’t think I’ve forgotten about him). I rather like the lack of guest stars beyond The Osmonds, who were practically regulars by that point of the show, and his family who clearly had appeared before. Aside from the one peppermint hallucination sequence this was a fairly straightforward “here are some light antics and some songs” and wasn’t in any way trying to be ‘hip’ to the kids of the day. Maybe my impression of him would sour on repeated exposure but I’m perfectly content with having seen this one special of his once.