10/3/07: Leave It To Beaver (1997)Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of
Leave It To Beaver’s debut on network television—but if the popular media notice, it’ll only be with a sense of contempt. We don’t have anything to say on that topic that we haven’t already said
in defense of
Father Knows Best. But allow us to complain (
again) about an article the
New York Times once published about the realistic set design on the old
Roseanne sitcom. The article was accompanied by a large photo of the living room from
Leave It To Beaver, with a caption assuring us that nobody ever really lived in such a house.
Of course, the living room looked exactly like the one in which I was raised.
Anyway, that’s the kind of attitude that killed the big-screen
Leave It To Beaver. We knew the film’s fate while sitting down to a particularly sparse screening, as one film critic loudly announced that she’d rather be watching
Leave It To Beavis. Tee-hee-hee.
Leave It To Beaver turned out to be one the most daring films of the ’90s. It’s a Merchant/Ivory film for guys, providing a stirring pastoral meditation on kids just being kids. The recent
Brady Bunch movies had ridiculed innocence, but this
Beaver—also set in the Clinton era—celebrates the youthful innocence that blooms before Viacom starts corrupting the little darlings. The Beaver sums up the plot while talking to the school psychiatrist: “I’m a normal kid, and I like to do normal stuff.” In contrast, the teen villains are X-Treme Sports types from broken homes. That’s the kind of truth that sends folks like Oliver Stone scurrying into the shadows.
The only hip thing that
Beaver had going for it was hidden in Janine Turner’s cleavage. As June Cleaver, Turner uses her naturally shiny psychosis to put a sexy glint into her role as Beaver’s mom. Eddie Haskell ceaselessly flatters her as a real babe, but you can’t call him insincere. The film doesn’t skirt the sex, either: Chris McDonald’s reliable version of Ward gets turned on by the sight of a woman in pearls using a vacuum cleaner.
The filmmakers keep it subtle, though, which reminds us that
Roseanne’s small-screen screeds were never subversive. No lesbian-kiss episode could ever compete with the kinky references between Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers on
Step By Step.
Sadly, Jerry Mathers isn’t marking Beaver’s anniversary from Broadway. He’s been replaced in the cast of “Hairspray” by Jim J. Bullock. The good news is that he's outlived Shelly Winters. That would’ve been the natural course, but it still seems
particularly fitting.
Make it your own: Nobody’s career benefited from the big-screen
Leave It To Beaver. At least Barbara Billingsley (who’s also still alive) got one last prominent big-screen role after stealing the show in
Airplane! (Ken Osmond also shows up as Eddie Haskell, Sr.) The DVD can be
had for cheap—but our rare copy comes in the packaging when DVDs were also being marketed in the same size as your average CD case. Ah, nostalgia.
