Carving Magic (1959)

 

Cast: William Kerwin as Charlie; Harvey Korman as Al

Ephemeral Waves

 

An educational film about how to cut meat, I had always presumed Carving Magic was a Herschell Gordon Lewis directed short, alongside the connect of Blood Feast star William Kerwin as Charlie, a man proving he has learnt how to carve a turkey. It would be befitting to imagine Lewis filming the cutting of various meats with a variety of utensils like his gore scenes.

Not a film for vegans/vegetarians, it is weirdly ritualistic even for meat eaters. Ephemeral filmmaking is a phantom zone of curiosities made for all types of subjects, no matter how weird they are as topics, and this is the same, set around Charlie telling a friendly couple at a dinner how he became a good carver, introducing his meeting (as part of a film production) with Martha Logan, a Home Economist and expert on carving. That you could even still take advice from this film in the modern day adds an odd edge too, as most of these methods of carving meat would benefit many people even if the portions were smaller. The figure of "Martha Logan" is a real one too, though with a curious touch that, part of the company Swift &Company, they employed many female Home Economists who took on the name as a persona¹.

Do we archive cooking writing and materials? The cooking books of Martha Logan can be found second hand online, but so much, from these recipes from the fifties to those from the 19th century, was made and with no sense that history preserves them unless integral to museum exhibits. I have looked at vast racks in bookstores in the cooking section, and been in so many second hand stores, to know that truly ephemeral material, disposed of, has to include cook books among the list. Carving Magic because of the Lewis connection has, ironically, been preserved more often, even though it a strange piece to be watching in hindsight. A film where you see meat lovingly being cut on teal shaped boards at one point, on a kitchen set for a film-within-the-film, set to the charming instructional movie music playing of light orchestra jauntiness, films like this with an attempt at playful aesthetic (and even a micro narrative of Charlie schooling his male friend Al) are curious to witness.  

Witnessing the anatomy of a lamb joint in precise detail, like the shank, does cause one to reflect on our connection to meat even beyond the ethics of eating other animals, just in terms of the rituals of preparing these objects of corporal flesh separate from the beasts of the land. In this aesthetic chic, still of the fifties with its traditional values of the at-home housewife, this is made even more pronounced, particularly as it raises questions of what is historical of the era or fabricated absurdities. Who had all these giant slabs of meat we see, including in Charlie's fictional home, and is this why American refrigerators and freezers as big as they are? How much did this once cost, and how time consuming was it, in hindsight, to prepare and cook this food, let alone cut it, when it takes a couple of hours just to cook (from experience) a simple pork joint for two people for Christmas? You can see fifties into early sixties Americana as a different place, where steak was a more common meal, and different from now where everyone has to work rather than be at home, not only feminism a factor nowadays but also economic reasons. One can be asking oneself whether it is possible for people to nowadays find the time, and if they are tired or lack the resources, to finely slice a rack of beef off the ribs. Noam Chomsky could have written a treatise on this if he had bothered.

Carving Magic, which already has the odd structure of being a film-within-a-film, as Charlie breaks out a projector and screens the film he helped made about how to carve meat, is also fascinating like so much of this ephemeral material in what you can read between the lines. That, despite being the world of housewives, masculinity is proven by being able to cut a turkey, which this all in its micro-plot actually boils down into. It is the kind of short, in its apparent squareness, which is inherently compelling even as a historical item. That I have not even mentioned that Al is Harvey Korman, in his first role, a comedian who would have a career long past this between voice work in The Flintstones to Blazing Saddles (1974) as Hedley Lamarr, among many Mel Brooks films, just adds among the odd little aspects in this short.

 

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1) One example, Thora Campbell, is talked of HERE.