MONDO 70: A Wild World of Cinema

A lot of bologna: NOW PLAYING, JAN. 27, 1962

2012-01-27T19:32:00.000-05:00

I have to admit: when I first scoped this ad for a Gadsden AL theater, I thought that the theater was offering free bologna to young moviegoers. Instead, a free kiddie movie show apparently served as the incentive to get kids to eat the stuff, or at least convince their parents to buy it.

The thing about a kiddie show was, you didn't really have to be too specific about what you were offering. As long as you promised cartoons you had some folks hooked. Then you made your money at the concession stand -- unless the kids brought their own bologna, that is.

For older children, drive-ins like this one in Sarasota offered value for money: a racing-themed quadruple bill.

I confess to batting 0-for-4 on these pictures. Green Helmet is a British racing film with Ed Begley Sr. as the token American. No trailer for that one, but here's one for Johnny Dark, uploaded by grhacker2001.

And here's Thunder in Carolina, from surfink1963.

As for Born to Speed, the Trail had to reach all the way back to 1947 to get that one -- but they aren't telling you that. I imagine many carloads left early to dream their way home behind the wheel, and most likely they all made it.

Now Playing: JAN. 26, 1962

2012-01-26T20:01:00.001-05:00

Something unusual in Toledo OH: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone opening under an alternate, more exploitative title -- though the print ad hedges the bet by identifying the source.

An alternate title is often a sign that a film has already flopped but the studio's trying again. I can remember it being done on TV simply so viewers wouldn't recognize the Movie of the Week as an infamous dud. Never saw Roman Spring so I can't guess what happened with it. By the way, that "funniest of color cartoons" is a Bugs Bunny short with Yosemite Sam as a viking that suffered censorship for, you guessed it, violence!

Down in Miami, Roger Vadim's jazz-fueled 1959 modernization of a much-filmed 18th century novel opens in two theaters.

Americans may recall the rival English language versions, both of which reverted to the period of the novel, that appeared in the late 1980s. They may remember Vadim as the future director of Barbarella. Or they may not: all that was long ago.

A different kind of foreign film opens in Reading PA, probably in a different kind of theater.

This is Sergio Leone's stab at the sword-and-sandal genre, and while cowboy actor Rory Calhoun is a hopeless lead, Leone definitely demonstrates a precocious eye for spectacle. Here are a few hints in a trailer uploaded by maloyko (via TCM).

It may be big, but it's still only one movie. At a Charleston drive-in, you'd get three.

What do we have here? First, via mirkodamian:

Second,-- check it out auf deutsch from godzilla2664:

Third,from the director of Doctor Blood's Coffin -- but there's no trailer available. Awwww....

Pre-Code Parade: THE BOWERY (1933)

2012-01-25T23:56:00.000-05:00

In prime time, the dear old Fox Movie Channel succumbs to evil and transforms into FXMovies, sporting recent dreck and commercials through the night. But by day the channel is its old self, which was never on a par with Turner Classic Movies -- its library is simply too limited -- but still airs old movies without ads. Last Tuesday morning it featured an infamous and exemplary Pre-Code item from Darryl F. Zanuck's Twentieth Century Pictures, the production company that took over Fox Film to give us the Twentieth Century-Fox everyone knows today. Raoul Walsh's The Bowery is exemplary because it shows Pre-Code's occasional tendency to reduce humanity to cartoon status. It can't help reminding you of cartoons: Popeye and Bluto reenacted the battle between Chuck Connors (Wallace Beery) and Steve Brodie (George Raft) for the right to fight a fire, while Brodie and his legendary leap off the Brooklyn Bridge later figured prominently in a Bugs Bunny short. The Bowery's violence is cartoonish across the board. Tiring of one woman's emotional neediness, Connors knocks her out with a blackjack, leaving her to be dragged out by a waiter. Jealous of her male companion's attention to a singer, a woman breaks a bottle over his head. This merry misanthropy makes it hard to take offense, as we may feel we should, at the racism displayed in the picture, if not expressed by it. The late Jackie Cooper, here in his childhood glory, already an Oscar nominee at age eleven and more beloved than ever as Beery's sidekick in The Champ, plays an urchin with an irrepressible compulsion to throw bricks at Chinese laundries. Reprimanded by Connors, "Swipes" tries to minimize the offense by explaining that the victims were "only Chinks." Later, his mischief causes the conflagration that rages out of control, with Chinese denizens trapped inside, while the Connors and Brodie factions fight it out in the street. You the viewer are to sympathize with Swipes none the less. The Bowery revels in its transgressiveness. I'm sure that Walsh and his writers (including master character actor James Gleason) knew what they were about when the first shot of the film proper, following an introductory title card, is a shot of a saloon brazenly labeled "Nigger Joe's." Again, the idea isn't to disparage black people, who are actually conspicuously absent from the movie compared to the Chinese, but to show off how chip-on-the-shoulder wild and crazy Bowery people were back when Walsh was but a lad. Some of the original publicity emphasized how much tougher than the gangsters of 1933 the likes of Connors and Brodie supposedly were. That may have been true in the cartoon tough-without-a-gun sense, but the main point is that Pre-Code Hollywood could imagine a past more outrageous and sinful than its own semi-legendary present. Nearly twenty years earlier, or halfway between The Bowery and the time it portrays, Walsh had filmed one of his first features, Regeneration, on the actual New York strip. That film is neorealism compared to The Bowery, and the comparison leaves you wondering exactly how far film art, as opposed to film technology, had actually advanced in the interim. I don't mean to say conclusively that Regeneration is the better movie, but I do wonder about Walsh's changing priorities.

If audiences were invited to see The Bowery as a retro gangster picture with comedy and sentiment, the actual subject of the movie seems to be celebrity. Brodie in particular has no apparent ambition except to be famous, the most popular man on the Bowery. To do this, he must surpass Connors at every opportunity. Strangely, there doesn't seem to be any political context for their rivalry, unless you count their status as captains of volunteer fire companies. As Brodie, Raft gives the liveliest performance I can recall seeing from him, bursting into soft shoe occasionally as a personal trademark to remind us that George Raft was another Jimmy Cagney, a tough guy who did dance. That combination made both men emblematic Pre-Code performers, though Cagney continued to flourish through the Enforcement era while Raft floundered with proverbial cluelessness. The combination also brought both actors close to cartoonishness as they approached the early sound cartoon's inhuman ideal of the thoroughly syncopated man in a syncopated world. The Bowery's nostalgic setting takes some of the edge off that inhumanity, especially after the story settles down to a more sentimental level, with Connors and Brodie vying for the affections of both Swipes and gamine Lucy Calhoun (Fay Wray). Brodie's quest for fame leads him to hire no less than the great John L. Sullivan to box under a mask in order to humiliate Connors's latest prospect and win a $500 bet. It also inspires the famous bridge stunt, about which Walsh strives to keep us guessing. He shows Brodie planning to hoax it by throwing a dummy off the bridge, but we see his scheme go awry and the man himself on the bridge pursued by cops. Can we trust our eyes afterward? I won't say, but Brodie's rise from the water is Connors's fall from grace, which he avenges over an extended, clumsily authentic climactic brawl. Beery and Raft do their own fighting for the most part and it looks just as you might expect -- like a Toughman bout, the fighters flailing and flinging each other about with primal gusto. It's the opposite of fight choreography, and it works for this film. Unfortunately, the film fritters itself away afterward, ending without closure as Connors and Brodie go to war with Spain, as if Walsh intended to loop backward in his own career and reimagine What Price Glory? as a sequel to The Bowery. It can't sustain the breakneck pace and brazen audacity of its first half, but that fraction is practically worth watching in its own right as a high-water mark, or a nadir for oversensitive viewers, of Pre-Code transgression.

Now Playing: JAN. 25, 1962

2012-01-25T18:46:00.002-05:00

In Charleston again, a Thursday opening for a British comedy from the house of horror itself -- Hammer Studios.

Despite the advertising, IMDB reviewers describe this film as "clean," "family-friendly" and "non-offensive." No trailer available online, but Hardtofindvideos2 has uploaded the U.S. credits and jazzy opening scene, which teases more suspicious goings-on.

Hope that tides you over until tomorrow's more extensive listings, but I might get another review in before that.

Now Playing: JAN 24, 1962

2012-01-24T19:01:00.003-05:00

Were double features programed for compatibility, diversity, or for no good reason. The double-bill opening in Charleston leaves me wondering. The second feature is a British comedy from the previous year and a riff on the Brewster's Millions theme. The main attraction is a Steve Reeves action film.

Scant evidence exists online for Three on a Spree, clips abound for the Reeves film. In lieu of more ads tonight, I'll square up with some dancing girls, courtesy of zrxxu.

On the Big Screen: HAYWIRE (2012)

2012-01-23T18:58:00.000-05:00

Here is Gina Carano in her element: the fenced confines of the mixed martial arts battleground. The video was uploaded by ginacaranodotorg.

A star was not born last weekend after Steven Soderbergh's Haywire opened weakly at the box office. It was telling that more people wanted to see Kate Beckinsale fight than went to see a real woman fighter -- but who goes to movies to see a real fight? Soderbergh's error in thinking he could make a star of Carano, at least in the film Lem Dobbs wrote for her, becomes apparent when we think about movies and mixed martial arts. MMA has been the backdrop for several films by now, but Haywire may be the first non-exploitation, non-straight-to-video movie to cast an MMA fighter as an action hero. While MMA promoters would like you to imagine the sport as a constant battle of kicks and punches, most people realize by now that grappling and "ground and pound" prevail much of the time -- and ground-and-pound just isn't cinematic. Granted, Soderbergh doesn't film Carano using much ground-and-pound technique, though she does get to choke out at least one of her co-stars. Nevertheless, the director is part of the problem. He undercuts Carano's credibility somewhat by resorting to heavy editing, perhaps to accommodate such opponents as Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor. Watching it reminded me of the way insensitive directors of musicals disrupt the virtuoso flow of dance by impulsively cutting within a number. If you think about it, people like Hermes Pan and Yuen Woo-ping are in the same business. Like dance, cinematic martial arts is all about choreography, but Soderbergh, perhaps out of some misguided commitment to realistic fight techniques, gives us fight sequences with occasionally impressive bursts of Carano's indisputable power but none of the sustained physical spectacle that make great martial-arts scenes memorable. Again, doing that might not have been true to Carano's true talent, but that brings us back to the question of MMA's cinematic potential, and around to the larger question of whether Soderbergh, despite his stated intention of making this MMArtist a star, actually meant to make a "martial arts" movie.

Soderbergh and Dobbs last teamed up for The Limey, and like that film Haywire is a revenge story. But while the earlier film's title Brit was avenging a lost daughter, Carano's Mallory Kane is only avenging herself. She's an "added value" operative for some sort of private espionage contractor hired to rescue a kidnapped Chinese dissident journalist in Barcelona. Moving on to Dublin, she learns that the same journalist has been murdered, and she's been framed on the assumption that she won't leave Ireland alive. As in The Limey, this is all told in flashback. The film actually opens somewhere in upstate New York with the shock sight of personable Channing Tatum throwing a cup of fresh hot coffee in Carano's face. The subsequent flashbacking explains how she got there, though Tatum's role (he was one of her partners in Barcelona) remains ambiguous. Echoes of The Limey persist in the hilltop mansion of Mallory's military-buff dad (Bill Paxton) and a climactic confrontation on a beach. But Haywire has none of the gravitas Terence Stamp brought to Limey because we know next to nothing about Mallory Kane's past, how she got to be (and got to be accepted as) a super-agent fighting machine, while neither the dissident's death nor the collateral corpses that accumulate along the way weigh on the heroine's conscience the way the Limey's daughter's death did on his. Nor does Soderbergh ever really give Carano the kind of awe-inspiring badass spotlight that shined on Stamp. Her story is simply too irrelevantly complicated. I found myself not caring who was ultimately to blame (McGregor? Antonio Banderas? Michael Douglas?) for setting Mallory up. Once the story proved uncompelling, the film's shortcomings as martial-arts spectacle became more glaring. What this film needed above all was a scene in which Mallory faced someone we could believe as her equal or possible superior. It never happened, and if we were to understand that the Tatum or Fassbender characters are her martial peers, Soderbergh does nothing to establish their credentials.

Haywire is a weak rather than bad film. It's technically competent and well-acted overall -- Carano herself is at least adequate for her role. You might not gripe if you don't have to pay first-run prices to see the thing. It may be a victim of misplaced expectations, since I may have been expecting a different movie from the one Soderbergh intended. But if you declare your intent to make Gina Carano a star, that creates a certain expectation immediately whether Soderbergh realizes it or not. The most I can say is that I saw enough of Carano onscreen to think she should get another chance. It's a shame that people might leave the multiplex this week thinking that Kate Beckinsale could kick Carano's ass. But in a medium where Beckinsale can do what she does in her movies, that outcome might be inevitable.

MISS ROBIN CRUSOE (1954)

2012-01-22T18:04:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you can't trust your cable guide. Mine told me that Turner Classic Movies was going to be running Luis Bunuel's Oscar-nominated version of Robinson Crusoe starring Dan O'Herlihy. Apparently I'll have to watch that here if I really want to see it, because what TCM ended up showing the other day was something that might well have appealed to the arch-surrealist of cinema: a gender-bending adaptation of Defoe raging with sexual subtext.

After teasing us with a male narration of the logbook of a doomed vessel, a woman's voice takes over to inform us that she, Robin Crusoe (Amanda "Miss Kitty" Blake), a young woman who got aboard in male drag, and one wretched man survived the shipwreck to reach an apparently deserted island. The man instantly attempts to force himself on Robin, claiming to have never been fooled by her imposture, but she manages to shove him off a cliff after he chases her up a hillside. Robin settles into her new routine as queen of a realm of one, proving quite a competent survivor and builder. A monkey is her sole companion until the inevitable day when black tribesmen appear to carry out an execution. They intend to put two women to death -- for what offense??? -- by tying their legs to bent tree limbs and tearing them in half. Robin manages to rescue one of the women (Rosalind Hayes) while the executioners focus on their first victim. She then fends off an attack on her treehouse by the aggrieved men with her musket and pistol, the woman joining in by chucking back some of the spears the men have flung at them. Like her literary model, Robin names her new companion Friday, noting the day's connotation as a day of freedom -- did Friday Foster get he name for the same reason?

Robin retains enough eurocentric civilization to take offense when Friday performs a mysterious death ritual over their foes, brandishing (freshly?) shrunken heads on sticks, but the black woman responds with servile gratitude (at least) when reprimanded. They teach each other skills, Friday warning Robin off the island's poisonous fruits, for instance. Eventually, Robin starts work repairing a rowboat so she and Friday can strike out for civilization, but the project is hardly under way when a second shipwreck deposits a sole, male survivor on the island. Robin wastes no time letting Jonathan (George Nader) know who's boss, reminding Friday -- who may have needed no reminding -- that "All men are bad." Ms. Crusoe suspects that Jonathan will try to steal her tools or her boat, and her suspicions make Friday violently hostile toward the man. She nearly kills Jonathan when he sneaks to the Crusoe place to borrow her saw, then gleefully watches him chomp on some that poisoned fruit. Stumbling on the scene, Robin is horrified and urges Friday to whip up the natural antidote that fortunately exists. An uneasy truce settles in as the women nurse Jonathan back to full health, neither fully trusting him but each, perhaps, tempted by him. Friday seems quick to adopt Robin's new opinion that this man, at least, is "good."

A very awkward courtship ensues as Jonathan tries to win Robin to womanly ways, wondering whether she always has to be the captain of everything. She despises girlish affectations, informing Jonathan that she's wearing flowers in her hair "only to please Friday," -- but she quickly clarifies that her friend considers them a good-luck charm. But Jonathan, despite his hopeless chauvinism, proves still more tempting in what looks like blue store-bought swim trunks. Things come to a head when Friday lights a huge bonfire and performs a ritual of uncertain significance -- at first I thought that she had burned the rowboat -- while Jonathan seems insanely to swim out to sea, only to return to shore. Robin watches both spectacles, confessing a strange attraction to Friday's "savage" spectacle. What might otherwise be written off as director Eugene Frenke's incompetence creates a very ambiguous moment when you can't tell whether Robin is going to go to Jonathan on shore or Friday by the fire. She opts for Jonathan and a From Here to Eternity moment -- but the next morning he and the rowboat are gone.

By themselves again, Robin seethes and Friday tries to console her, subtext rising its closest to the surface when Friday strokes the sleeping Robin's hair. From there, events rush to their climax, Jonathan returning and setting a big fire on shore just as the tribesmen return, apparently after vengeance on the women. Robin is ready to kill Jonathan, who has wisely armed himself for his return visit -- and has the drop on him when she hears Friday's screams. To spoil things for the sake of closure, Robin and Jonathan rescue Friday and the trio fight off a small army of tribesmen until a naval vessel appears to investigate the bonfire and scatter the savages. At the darkest moment, Robin promises to marry Jonathan, and appears to fulfill that promise by the end -- but it's worth noting that, despite all my expectations, Friday does not die and is presumably still around in England as our heroine's body servant or in some related capacity, if you get my drift....

Miss Robin Crusoe is a triumph of content over form, which is fortunate considering how often the form stinks. Frenke, more often a producer (he made a more reputable desert-island picture, John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, in that capacity), was directing for the fourth and last time, and it makes you dread the first through third attempts. Nicely photographed locations are laughably integrated with the fakest-looking soundstage sets, while Frenke has difficulty ending scenes. Many end with an abrupt blackout, as if footage had suddenly been excised. Apart from the score by Elmer Bernstein, who was helping films as bad as Robot Monster punch above their weight musically, this is a clumsy affair. But sometimes, especially in the Code Enforcement era, it was the films lacking in classical smoothness that allowed repressed ideas to crack the surface of cinema if not break through entirely. Did Frenke mean for this film to have so much lesbian subtext, or was the whole movie a sort of Freudian slip? I won't venture an answer right now, but at least I can say that Miss Robin Crusoe more than made up for missing the Bunuel. I'm sure it'll prove inferior on every level once I see the film I originally wanted, but it was entertaining as hell.

Now Playing: JAN. 22, 1962.

2012-01-22T17:15:00.001-05:00

From New York City, the first of two adaptations of major American plays by director Sidney Lumet to appear this year. His take on Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night will come later.

The film had actually held its world premier in France three days earlier, having been financed with European money. For more on the source play, check here. For more on the movie, watch the whole thing here.

Down in Daytona, the first name in "Adult Entertainment" is Brigitte Bardot, opening tonight in a film by the director of The Wages of Fear and Diabolique.

Despite Bardot, La Verite didn't enter the canon as the two other Clouzot films have. I'd like to find out why for myself someday. Someone has the film up on YouTube, but it lacks English subtitles. The "co-hit" is a 41 minute featurette from 1956 with an international cast. During its original release, it was touted as an experiment in short-form "documentary fiction," but I don't know if any of the follow-up experiments predicted in this New York Times report were made. For all I know, the rest of you read it here first.

Now Playing: JAN. 20, 1962

2012-01-20T18:58:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the poor reproduction quality, but you work with the archives you have. Here's something opening in Baltimore this weekend fifty years ago.

Of course, the Italians had a more interesting title for it. They called it "The Scimitar of the Saracen," approximately. Director Piero Pierotti seems to have specialized in period adventure films, while star Lex Barker is an erstwhile Tarzan enjoying Euro stardom -- American audiences would be seeing him in La Dolce Vita around this time. This clip uploaded by SapphoPEPLUM makes the show look a little like the Ziegfeld Follies. Take a look:

The second feature on the Regent double bill is something I've actually seen: purportedly the first martial-arts movie made in the United States.

Something Weird Video released this one back in those halcyon days when their mass-market DVDs could be found in any -- sob! -- Borders bookstore. It's predictably primitive, but a wartime flashback of the hero going berserk and karate-chopping his enemies has a memorable charge. If you can't quite make it out, the ad is promising "A new powerful dimension in TERROR!" Unfortunately, there isn't any unmarred footage available to embed here, but I could recommend the film to people with a historical interest in the genre. Overall, it looks like an interesting night at the movies back in the day.

ONCE A THIEF (1965)

2012-01-19T17:02:00.000-05:00

In what country -- on what planet? -- are Alain Delon and Jack Palance brothers? The answer proposed by director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter Zekial Marko, who adapted his own novel, is long-disputed multicultural Trieste, where the presumably Slavic-heritaged Pedaks would speak fluent Italian. Walter (Palance) is a full-time criminal, but Eddie (Delon) has gone straight after a stay in stir for shooting a cop, also from the old country (Van Heflin) in mid-robbery. The cop still carries a grudge against Eddie, so when someone driving a car that matches the description of Eddie's vehicle, and wearing a coat that matches the description of Eddie's garment, robs a Chinatown corner store in San Francisco and kills the owner's wife, Inspector Vido's natural assumption is that Eddie is to blame. But the way the robbery was filmed automatically tells us differently. In any event, Vido's suspicions lead Eddie's arrest at his warehouse workplace and his losing his job. Without a job to support his wife (Ann-Margret) and daughter, and too proud to let his wife work as a scantily-clad waitress, Eddie's ready to listen when Walter proposes robbing the warehouse where millions in lightweight platinum are stored. A modest caper ensues, involving tapping the phone line from the warehouse and intercepting a call from purposefully spooked security guards so Delon and an accomplice can show up in cop costumes and get let in. By this time Vido is starting to realize that Eddie had been framed for the grocery job, but can he and Eddie trust each other to get Eddie and his family out alive as Walter's gang falls apart and one sinister accomplice (John David Chandler) decides he doesn't want to share the loot with anyone?...

Once a Thief marked Delon's first job in Hollywood. Studio publicity touted his Gallic rebellious streak, reporting that he'd scandalized M-G-M veterans by smuggling wine into the studio commissary. In a more peculiar bit of publicity, gossip columnists reported that Delon and Ann-Margret had briefly feuded after he had hit her too hard for one of several slapping scenes. The Frenchman reportedly resolved the situation by sending the actress flowers, but there followed an item reporting that A-M was vetoing cheesecake publicity shots for the film on the ground that those undercut the film's dramatic vibe. Seems like an unhappy experience for her, and probably not too happy for most involved in the picture.

Nelson's picture -- his follow-up to Lilies of the Field and Father Goose -- arguably qualifies as a late-noir or neo-noir picture. It boasts nice location cinematography (apart from the occasional process shot) by Robert Burks and obvious noir situations, from the ex-con victim of circumstance to the obsessed, misguided, bullying cop. It adds a sheen of Sixties sleaze with explicit references to lesbians and the aforementioned outbursts of Delon's macho brutality. The worst of those comes when Eddie invades the club where his wife is waitressing. He slams her into a wall, then tries to rip her costume off, saying: "Don't cheat your customers, show them everything!" before dragging her into the street. This comes with the territory of the story but there's something slightly gratuitous about it as well. It means to be a nasty movie -- Chandler's character comes across as a crypto child molester, for instance, -- but it also wants to play for pathos by putting a child in jeopardy and becomes merely pathetic in the mawkish sense at the end.

Apart from Chandler, who is effectively creepy, no one's really in top form here. Heflin's performance is by-the-book predictable. Palance has little to do and is so eclipsed as a villain by Chandler that you wonder finally which character actually framed Eddie. Ann-Margret's response to the rough circumstances of her role is to ramp up her performance to unmodulated hysteria for the final reels. As for Delon, his foreigner's English is adequate as usual, but the role seems wrong for him, especially in hindsight. Nelson clearly saw him as a stereotype fiery Mediterranean type and set him to work chewing scenery, whether when whaling on A-M or in a showoff scene at an unemployment office that seemed better suited for Jack Nicholson. You could have sent Once a Thief to Jean-Pierre Melville before he shot Le Samourai as a primer on how not to use Alain Delon in a crime movie. The cool that Melville did so much to make part of Delon's persona is simply not there. But I'm probably exaggerating my disappointments a little because this whole package clearly had the potential to be much better, and I think people who come across Once a Thief without the high expectations I had for Delon, Palance et al might find it not so bad. Crime film fans with an eye for the genre's evolution will probably get the most out of it, but most people should get at least a few good jolts out of it.

Now Playing: JAN. 18, 1962

2012-01-18T18:43:00.000-05:00

Opening wide this weekend is a romance picture from Delmer Daves, who had switched from western specialist to women's picture purveyor with 1959's A Summer Place. Daves first teamed Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens in Parrish, and the teaming apparently clicked, as this ad from Salt Lake City indicates.

I like most of Daves's westerns but haven't tried his romances.This trailer, uploaded by TheViewMonster, really exploits the success of Parrish and is a document of its time in its own right.

A different kind of picture opens in Rochester.

It took a little effort to track down something more than basic cast-and-crew info on this picture from the director of The George Raft Story, but here's the dirt on it. And in lieu of a trailer, here's a link to the complete picture -- so long as Congress still allows it. Still more obscure is the second feature, a 60-minute wonder starring Gene Nelson and directed by Jack Leewood. "20,000 eyes could not see this 'perfect crime,'" a poster reads -- and neither can we, online at least.

Opening in Charleston is this manly-seeming action picture co-starring Orson Welles.

At least it gave Welles work and probably helped finance one of his movies.Fortunately, he doesn't play The Pirate Yen; that honor goes to Anglo-Indian professional wrestler and British genre stalwart Milton Reid. Many moviegoers in January 1962 could also see Reid in The Wonders of Aladdin, which was in wide release that month. No trailer available, but vciguy76 uploaded a quick, colorful clip.

Be sure to come back; there'll be more movies yet this weekend.

Now Playing: JAN. 17, 1962.

2012-01-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

Let's start in Milwaukee -- we could also start in Schenectady -- with the biopic everyone was clamoring for.

How to account for this? Well, The Untouchables was still a hot series, and anything evocative of the golden age of gangsters was thought a potential draw. Also, biopics of troubled or fallen stars were a common sight in theaters in those days. I just wonder whether they dramatize Raft talking himself out of all those roles that made Bogart a superstar. That'd be the stuff of tragicomedy. Oh well, I'll let Allied Artists pitch it to you, with an assist from horrormovieshows.

Moving right along,here's another Twist movie arriving in Moran, KS.

This one has to make do without Chubby Checker, but does feature Joey Dee's "Peppermint Twist." Here's the trailer via Dailymotion.

Hey let's twist! by Gatorrock784

On to Eugene, OR for a curious double-bill: Ray Harryhausen's latest FX epic, plus...?

Hand in Hand proves to be a lesson from Great Britain in religious tolerance for children. Couldn't find a trailer, but would you believe? Someone uploaded the entire film to YouTube just three days ago. That should keep you busy until tomorrow's next smashing chapter of 1962!

THE ARTIST (2011)

2012-01-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

Seventy-five years after Charles Chaplin's last stand, silent film appeared to find its avenger in the form of Michel Hazanavicius, a French director best known in America, if at all, for his two OSS 117 spy-parody films. In The Artist, Hazanavicius hasn't just made a new silent film, but dares to make a silent film (in black and white) about the coming of sound. His specific subject is a fictional silent star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who commits career suicide by refusing to speak on screen. Valentin is a carefully imagined archetypal figure, designed to be evocative of a number of movie stars. He most closely resembles Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who starred in dashing adventure films and defiantly produced a silent film in 1929 (albeit with introductions to the several acts spoken by him) in which he enacted, as Valentin does, his own death. But Fairbanks made talking pictures for the remainder of his career and never faced the financial ruin Valentin suffers. The identification is so close that Hazanavicius edits footage of Dujardin into the Fairbanks film The Mark of Zorro to suggest that it was Valentin's film instead. Yet the character's name also suggests one of the great what-ifs of movie history: what if Rudolph Valentino had not died prematurely and had to face the challenge of sound. Valentino was transitioning to swashbuckling fare at the end of his life and thus could also be seen as a model for Valentin. But Valentin has his own distinct screen persona. He seems to play the same Fantomas-like masked and top-hatted character in a series of spy films (A Russian Affair, A German Affair), has his own pet dog as a sidekick, and can dance well enough not to embarrass himself in live appearances. He's apparently the top star of Kinograph Pictures, a studio behind the curve on sound. Studio head Al Zimmer (John Goodman) doesn't even suggest that Valentin talk until 1929, more than a year after The Jazz Singer opened. But mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was similarly reticent in real life, not releasing the first talkers of Lon Chaney, Greta Garbo and Buster Keaton until 1930. Zimmer shows Valentin a clearly though not audibly disastrous sound test by his Lina Lamontish regular co-star (performing a scene from Romeo & Juliet a la John Gilbert and Norma Shearer in The Hollywood Revue of 1929), but before George can laugh his way out of the screening room, Zimmer tells him his turn is next. George refuses outright, claiming that he doesn't need to talk to retain his audience. He breaks with Kinograph over the matter (echoing Louise Brooks's estrangement with Paramount over her refusal to do sound retakes for The Canary Murder Case) and strikes out as an independent producer-director. His Tears of Love, an African safari adventure with a quicksand finish, is a box-office disaster. That may be because no one wants to see silent movies (though Chaplin would disprove this with City Lights in 1931), but it may be because his picture is opening against The Beauty Spot, the talking debut of his protege Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). Whatever the cause, the stock market crash proves the coup de grace. George loses all the money he didn't sink into Tears of Love, and his continued refusal to talk renders him useless to Hollywood. By 1931 his wife has left him, he's had to fire his doggedly loyal chauffeur (James Cromwell) and auction off most of his personal effects. He keeps the dog and copies of his films, but burns them (not the dog) in a fit of rage after watching his Zorro footage. Hospitalized after the dog summons a cop in classic melodramatic fashion, George has hit rock bottom.

Re-enter Peppy Miller, once merely a fan who parlayed an accidental encounter with her idol into an extra job at Kinograph and shot to stardom from there. She has never ceased idolizing George and has helped him out behind the scenes, buying much of his estate to keep him afloat and preserving it as a personal museum in her own mansion. She finds George at the hospital and brings him home to care for him. But when he eventually discovers the shrine and realizes how dependent he's become on her, his pride drives him toward a rash act, while Peppy drives recklessly to his rescue. Can she save his life and revive his career?...

In her dotage, Kim Novak has incited a small controversy over The Artist. She has equated Hazanavicius's use of some of Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo, her great performance for Alfred Hitchcock, with a rape of her "body of work." Her complaint is a matter of aesthetic ethics only, since Herrmann is duly acknowledged in the end credits. Of course, in silent movie days, if the studio didn't provide an official score or cue sheet it was up to the theater orchestra or lone pianist to score the picture on the fly, often resorting to familiar themes that hopefully fit the mood of the picture .Hazanavicius and composer Ludovic Bource are doing no different -- and the Vertigo music is appropriate. It scores the scene when George discovers his stuff in Peppy's mansion, and the music sells the sense that Peppy has been trying -- hoping, really -- to transform George into the person he used to be. She doesn't exactly make him wear his old clothes or cut his hair differently, but Hitchcock fans should get the general idea. Vertigo plays on during the climax, quite effectively, as Peppy careens through traffic while George contemplates ending it all. The suspense of this scene hearkens back to D. W. Griffith rather than Hitchcock, and the resolution hearkens back to Mack Sennett, but the Herrmann music has inspired Hazanavicius to stage and edit a terrific melodramatic climax, and that should be justification enough. Novak argues that a good filmmaker shouldn't need to use another film's music to achieve his effects, but that horse left the barn a long time ago, and it's not as if Hazanavicius needed to make a silent film in 2011 to recount the coming of sound, either. He paid to use Vertigo, and that gives him sufficient artistic license.

So confident is Hazanavicius in his silent pastiche that he can throw off a Hitchcock homage as almost an afterthought. His technical success has been overstated somewhat, some reviewers reacting as if The Artist as a whole looks exactly like a 1927 movie. Maybe I've misunderstood what they meant, but since the film covers a period of at least four years beyond 1927, there'd be little point to making the whole thing look like the opening year. I agree, however, if the point is that when he shows us footage from the films within the film, whether fluid late silents or stodgy early talkies, they usually look like authentic products of their times. Hazanavicius is proficient at both narrative and pastiche, but his film ultimately betrays some ambivalence about the silence it celebrates. The Artist is a vindication of silent film only insofar as the director proves that an ingenious, engaging film can be made silent in modern times. But it doesn't argue for the superiority of silence over sound. George blusters against sound, but it becomes clear soon enough that there's no theory behind his protest, just defensiveness. But what is he defending against? What is he afraid of? The end of the film appears to give a simple answer, but I'm not so sure. To explain, I have to spoil things in the next paragraph. Feel free to skip that and come back for the finale.

* * *

The Artist is maddeningly coy about why George refuses to talk on screen. It even plays with tying his resistance to emotional communication problems in his personal life. In an idiomatically perfect moment for a foreign filmmaker, Hazanavicius has George's wife tell him, "We need to talk," in a scene charged with multiple meanings. Does George suffer from some failure to open up, as his resistance to Peppy's ministrations also suggests? Is there an essential disconnect between his star persona and the real man, as the Vertigo business hints? The film seems to offer a prosaic explanation. Remembering George's skill as a dancer, Peppy suggests that Kinograph rehire him as her partner in a musical (echoing Garbo's demand that M-G-M cast her erstwhile lover John Gilbert, arguably Hollywood's most famous martyr to sound, as her leading man in Queen Christina). The dancers tear the house down in a rousing tap number that seems to set them up as a surrogate Rogers and Astaire. It ends with them audibly panting from exhaustion and the punch line of a request for another take. Confident once more, George replies, with the voice of the French actor who plays him, "Wizz pleasure." Is that it? Has he refused to talk all this time because he's a foreigner with a heavy accent? Then why has neither he nor anyone else at the studio, nor his wife, nor his protege, nor his chauffeur, -- what the hell: nor his dog -- noted this fact before??? A silent movie doesn't mean that people don't explain themselves to each other; that's what the title cards are for. In fact, a film from the silent era might give the game away by spelling out George's lines in dialect, "zee" instead of "the" and so on. There's really no good reason for Hazanavicius to withhold this information from the audience -- which leads me to wonder whether the denouement is as cut and dried as it looks. Is Dujardin's accented speech a punchline, or merely incidental. Is Dujardin's actual speaking voice the voice we're supposed to imagine George Valentin having? Is a point possibly being made about what's lost in sound, when Dujardin can't convince us once he speaks that he's just a regular fellow American, after he had convinced us before, or given us no reason to doubt it? There need not be a single answer to these questions, since The Artist really means to be playful about the whole business and succeeds wonderfully at that.

* * *

Besides being an entertainingly evocative portrait of an era, The Artist may also advance a theory of cinematic evolution. Hazanavicius implies that something of the silent spirit survives, ironically enough, in the musical. George Valentin's existence is thoroughly scored and he's a dancer of sorts. Silent film liberates movement from natural sound and opens it to different kinds of choreography. George's nightmare induced by the prospect of talking pictures is full of more or less natural noise, but two things are conspicuously missing: George's own voice -- he imagines himself trying to talk but failing -- and music. His last chance for redemption comes when he's cast in a musical, where he'll be a dancer more than a singer. As many people now realize, silent film was never silent. It was almost always accompanied by music. Hazanvicius may believe that film set to music preserves something of the essence of the silent aesthetic. I don't necessarily agree, but it's an interesting proposition to close a film on and it closes this movie on a tentatively redemptive note.

The film looks and sounds terrific. Guillaume Schiffman's black-and-white cinematography is beautiful, and he also illustrates the different look of late silents and early talkies quite convincingly. The production design is practically impeccable. The lead French performers are engaging -- Bejo (aka Mme. Hazanavicius) especially, and the Americans have been well cast for their expressive faces. The dog Uggie is a phenomenon; he makes you wonder why George couldn't still make a living loaning his pet to the studios in the age of Rin Tin Tin. Overall, it's a film that'll keep you guessing whether it'll end up tragic or triumphant -- either way would be just as appropriate -- and my quibble about the finish is just that. I'm not yet prepared to call The Artist the best film of 2011 -- I still have a lot of contenders to see -- but I'm more willing to say that it's that year's most entertaining film for me. If it wins more awards I won't complain.

Now Playing: JAN 16., 1962

2012-01-16T17:00:00.003-05:00

Opening today in Baltimore.

Turner Classic Movies is showing this film at 4:00 A.M. on Jan. 18, 2012 as part of their month-long tribute to fourth-billed Angela Lansbury. According to Bret Wood on the TCM website, Baltimore actually got this film before New York, which in this era usually meant that the film was a dud the studio didn't want the metropolitan critics to see. TCM has a trailer available as well.

The second feature has a Swedish cast but is directed by classic Hollywood helmsman John Cromwell, with Patrick O'Neal as a token American. The New York Times gave it a mixed review. "If only the picture had stuck to sex," Howard Thompson laments.

Lexington, KY: Paul Anka in a film about juvenile delinquents.

Here's a positive review from a film-noir blogger, and here's a trailer uploaded by brutallodotcom.

Tune in tomorrow for more!

Now Playing: 14-15 JAN. 1962

2012-01-15T21:02:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time it was illegal in some places to show any movies on Sundays, just as it was illegal to stage live shows. By 1962 some theaters could open new programs on Sundays, with consequences in some places, like Miami, that might have confirmed the moralists' worst fears.

Lucky Pierre is another pre-gore manifestation of the industrious Herschell Gordon Lewis and is considered the seminal "nudie cutie" picture. The second feature has a more respectable German cast with familiar names like Gert (Goldfinger) Frobe, but this is just more proof of how fine the line was separating arthouse from grindhouse.

In some markets, like Daytona, exhibitors stuck with the proven product, and nothing was more proven than Mom and Dad.

The main attraction that Monday had been playing pretty much non-stop since 1945. It is now part of the National Film Registry, making its preservation a government imperative. As for the second feature, Something Weird has an unrevealing trailer up on YouTube.

Check in through the week for more amazing attractions from across the country.

FILM SOCIALISME (Socialisme, 2010): Homage to Concordia

2012-01-15T00:06:00.000-05:00

1. The Last Voyage. Jean-Luc Godard's latest and possibly final feature film immortalizes the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship where he filmed much of the movie, which has disastrously run aground on the Tuscan coast this weekend in a real-life sequel that might boggle even the mind of the old new-wave master. The film itself is a final statement only potentially, in a chronological sense, less a summation than a continuation or repetition of the themes and tropes that have dominated Godard's discourse for the majority of his career and the aftermath of his popularity. He has added a blatant obfuscatory device for Anglophone audiences, subtitles composed by himself (I presume) in what he insensitively calls "Navajo English," a telegraphic pidgin that reduces sentences or sometimes paragraphs of French dialogue to nouns, proper nouns and the occasional compound word. The gimmick would be more interesting if it also appears in French prints, since it would make the same point for the director, calling attention to his inevitable selectivity in both inclusion and exclusion of detail. As it stands, the "Navajo" subtitles seem like a continuation of the Godard tendency to use words and names for evocative or representative rather than communicative effect. He uses people the same way, having cast radical philosopher Alain Badiou in the picture to no real purpose that I could perceive except to show off his own erudition. Veteran rocker Patti Smith may serve the same purpose. Just about everything in the picture is meant to illustrate Godard's narcissist doubt of the capacity of his own chosen words and images to convey ideas cinematically, an anxiety that reaches back across time to contemplate the utility of Egyptian hieroglyphs but is occasionally forgotten in the impulse to sincerely sloganeer about Palestine and other causes. The unreliability of cinematic communication and the imperative to communicate are Godard's great themes, but rather than rendering his films pointless they encourage his fans to see them as his act of thinking through montage and mise-en-scene, a personal drama made worthy of attention by the director's heritage of narrative innovation and pictorial inspiration. In other words, this is a film of interest only, comprehensible only to those familiar with and sympathetic to Godard's career. To indict it for its almost complete failure as entertainment is to waste effort, since it was never meant to entertain or introduce newcomers to the thought of Jean-Luc Godard. Its only true audience is those who want more from Godard and know what they're going to get.

2. The Navigator. I invoke Buster Keaton because I want to talk about Jacques Tati and Tati never set a film on a cruise ship. Yet while watching Film Socialisme's Concordia scenes, including scenes of a lone jogger on deck that may well have been inspired by Keaton's ocean-liner film it struck me that a cruise ship would have been a great setting for a Hulot film and that the movie Godard was most reminding me of initially was Tati's Playtime, if only in a negative way. Film Socialisme can be seen as an antithesis of Playtime's comic holism, Tati's effort to capture an entirety of society in long takes. Godard refuses Tati's holism and its comic harmony; hence his resort to montage and a variety of recording materials to emphasize an essential separateness of experience ironic in a film named after socialism unless intended to show the opposite of socialism in cultural rather than economic terms. Godard's refusal to unify the various character threads playing out on board the ship, or his resistance of the temptation, gives his movie such conceptual drive as it has before it gets off the boat and (with apologies to this weekend's real-life victims) runs aground.

3. Potemkin. Godard is actually quite obvious about identifying the Concordia with the battleship Potemkin, the historically mutinous Russian naval vessel and floating protagonist of Sergei Eisenstein's landmark silent film. He drives the point home with clips from Eisenstein and a visit by the Concordia to Odessa itself, home of the "Odessa steps" immortalized by Eisenstein and trod most likely heedlessly by Godard's tourists. The battleship was named after that official for whom "Potemkin villages" are also named, and Godard might not object to describing all or most of his films as Potemkin films, pretty facades hiding harsher truths despite his own efforts to problematize his own aesthetic instincts. The Concordia is arguably a kind of floating Potemkin village in more than one sense, as this weekend's tragedy may only confirm. Socialism as well as Tsarism has promoted itself with Potemkin villages of some sort, but I'm not sure whether this is relevant to Godard's title. He certainly hasn't made a utopian film, and I doubt he ever had one in him. His vision of socialism today may be closer to that of thinkers like Badiou or Slavoj Zizek who downplay any promise of harmony and warn of perpetual conflicts of irreconcilable elements. Godard's filmic socialism is a cacophony of juxtapositions and seemingly-random interventions of sound and image, an excess of otherness intruding by invitation on any hint of easy comprehension or passive aesthetic pleasure. It is illusory to the extent that it remains the idiosyncratic vision of a master auteur who scripts his actors and tells them where to go and what to do, though some skeptics would say that makes Godard a typical socialist.

4. E la nave va. I watched Film Socialisme on Netflix last Thursday. By Friday I had a plan to review the film in chapters using the titles of films set on ships. I wanted to include Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, not out of any great love for that film but just to continue the theme in a name-dropping manner Godard might appreciate. I wanted to use the original Italian title to keep things obscure in the Godardian spirit. But of course, as of tonight the ship -- the Concordia -- does not sail on. Except that it will every time someone starts the Netflix stream. Ironic, too, that more people in America will probably see Socialisme via this ultimate commercial tool than by any other means. Does the medium change the meaning? Does the new fact that Godard shot the movie on board the "doomed" Concordia change anything? It does and it doesn't. Will more people watch it now out of morbid curiosity? It wouldn't surprise me. Godard thus becomes a footnote to the history of maritime disasters, and a maritime disaster becomes a footnote to the history of cinema. Film Socialisme itself is a footnote as an exercise in "late style" instead of a breakthrough statement. It's a typically digressive essay film with a little bit of the incorrigible Mondo spirit and a lot of loss of focus in the second half. It's a film for Godard fans only, if that's not too vulgar a term, and it definitely shouldn't be anyone's first Godard film. I wouldn't call myself a fan -- I haven't seen enough of his films -- and I wouldn't want this to be his last word. He's a New Waver and they're a long-lived breed, so I hope he keeps trying.

Wendigo Meets DRACULA: THE VAMPIRE AND THE VOIVODE (2009)

2012-01-13T22:38:00.003-05:00

When I told my friend Wendigo about a new Dracula documentary available for streaming on Netflix, we both felt it would be interesting to check it out as a kind of update of the 1970s book tie-in documentary In Search of Dracula. That earlier film was virtually a Mondo Dracula from the golden age of exploitation documentaries that could be sold as a virtual horror movie thanks to Christopher Lee's participation. The new film from Michael Bayley Hughes is both more modest and more ambitious, claiming to be the first movie that tells the true stories of both Bram Stoker and his subject. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller appears on screen frequently and was a script consultant; her participation made it credible for Wendigo, who has corresponded with Miller. There's still something of the Mondo method to this movie. It travels to the novel's locations, from the Borgo Pass to Whitby, and lingers in Romania to investigate the Dracula-centered tourist industry that's grown there since In Search of Dracula was made and Communism fell. Like many a Mondo movie, it has an eye for the tellingly tacky and sometimes salacious detail. Those bits may make the film entertaining for those who find its main storyline a little dry.

Wendigo wants to send a shout-out to his virtual friend Elizabeth Miller.

Under Miller's influence, Hughes takes the anti-In Search of Dracula approach, refusing to equate Stoker's character with the historical voivode Vlad Tepes. He emphasizes the shallowness of Stoker's research and his creation of a fantastical Transylvania that Romania has a hard time living up to. Hughes practices biographical criticism on Dracula, stressing how Stoker's personal experiences before his research for the novel shaped some of its scenes and moods. Wendigo found a lot of Hughes's interpretations tentative or merely conjectural. The filmmaker proposes that many events "may have" influenced Stoker without really nailing down any proof, from a legend about poet Christina Rosseti's wondrously preserved corpse to the mummies kept in an overrated state of preservation in a church near one of his homes. This sort of stuff is inevitable in almost every literary biography these days, but Wendigo was at least happy that Hughes got the key point right about Dracula and Vlad.

Bram Stoker is remembered by a Whitby re-enactor (above) and a Romanian hotel (below)

But there wouldn't be much of a movie if they didn't talk about Vlad at all. Wendigo found the Romanian half of the picture "interesting but odd." Again, Hughes scrupulously distinguishes the fictional vampire from the famous voivode. It seems, however, that the Romanian tourist history makes no such distinction. Stoker draws tourists there, and they honor the author with a statue for that, but they exploit the interest in Dracula by selling Vlad paraphernalia. Wendigo finds that a sad way for Romania to sell out their own history, and we suspect that Hughes shares Wendigo's point of view. The director focuses on the vulgar in time-honored Mondo fashion, from voivode knicknacks and mugs to the Miss Transylvania beauty contest in Bistrita. There's also some of the same sort of peasant footage we got in In Search of Dracula, with Hughes stressing how the peasantry is still largely unchanged since the Seventies.

Faces of Transylvania

Overall, Wendigo was underwhelmed by Vampire and the Voivode as a movie. It's informative enough, especially on Stoker, but given the film's own ballyhoo it has surprisingly little to say about the actual writing of Dracula. Hughes neglects to mention one of the by-now best known tidbits about Stoker, his modeling of the vampire on his employer, the Victorian master thespian Henry Irving, and ignores Stoker's own account of an erotic dream that inspired the episode of Dracula's brides. We both objected to the claim that no other work of Stoker's endures, when movies have been made of at least two other novels -- and more than one from The Jewel of Seven Stars. Visually, Hughes went easy on re-enactments. His attempts are so minimal as to be funny, consisting of a guy dressed up as Vlad striking poses and an elderly, confused-seeming man wandering around with a candelabra in a supposed recreation of a scene from the novel. The picture is heavy on talking heads, some adding to the amusement by dressing in costume like Harry Collett as a Whitby coachman, but few apart from Miller really added to its credibility.

Wendigo found V&V in many respects less scholarly than In Search of Dracula, if more respectable in its conclusions. He would have liked more readings from Dracula or from chronicles of Vlad, but for whatever reason V&V was surprisingly lacking in these. Intellectually, Wendigo's more in a agreement with this movie, but he still considers In Search Of the more entertaining film. Either way, the definitive documentary about Dracula as a historical and cultural phenomenon remains to be made.

Elvis vs. Frankenstein: NOW PLAYING, Jan. 13, 1962

2012-01-13T16:48:00.003-05:00

January 13 was a Saturday, not a Friday, 50 years ago, so the date doesn't explain the explosion of exploitation events in movie theaters around the country that weekend. Perhaps the most enterprising, making the most of the movies they had without live accompaniment, is a theater in Wadesboro, NC, whose concept I've already given away.

Elsewhere, moviegoers can take in good old-fashioned live spook shows -- except that Washington, PA adds a modern twist -- not the dance craze, that is.

In Alabama City, the show's so big it took two snips for me to capture it in proper detail.

Would you rather just watch a movie?For that matter, do you like gladiator movies? Well, race down to Daytona for a muscular triple bill.

Here's a Giant of Marathon trailer uploaded by brutallodotcom

And a fragment of the Goliath and the Dragon trailer uploaded by peplumz.

That's it for now. There ought to be more ads later this weekend and there'll definitely be reviews. Keep a lookout for a Dracula documentary, Godard's Film Socialisme and who knows what else in the wild world of cinema....

Now Playing: JAN. 12, 1962

2012-01-12T15:29:00.001-05:00

A movie and a 45 rpm single? How can you go wrong? The people who've actually seen this movie or heard Jimmy Clanton sing will have to tell us.

Clanton was actually 21 when the film was released in 1961. That's closer than some actors come. Here's a clip of that title song, uploaded by SirBasildeBrush.

In Reading, PA, we have our first encounter with the extensive marketing campaign for the West German horror import The Head.

I've actually seen this one, but The Brain That Wouldn't Die actually handles the same concept in more entertaining fashion. You can watch the whole public-domain thing online with little effort, but here's a clip from horrorsnark.

Also in Reading, a new film in wide release from director George Marshall, taken from a Richard Condon novel.

There are harsh words for this one over at IMDB, but I've never seen it for myself.This is as good a point as any to mention that, while I 'm not really reviewing most of these circa-1962 movies, I definitely welcome comments from anyone who recognizes something they remember in these posts.

I'll be back tomorrow with an emphasis on live exploitation across the country. Can you bear to miss it?

Now Playing: JAN. 11, 1962

2012-01-11T18:49:00.000-05:00

Charleston, SC: A local arthouse welcomes a comic fantasy by Ingmar Bergman.

And here's a "message from hell," courtesy of of luvgod on YouTube.

The line separating art from exploitation was often fuzzy in 1962, but this announcement from Franceville, IN may help illustrate the difference.

The lead feature is the pre-gore debut film of Herschell Gordon Lewis.The second feature is a 1958 portrait of a nymphomaniac -- and for that, Something Weird Video provides a clip.

Is there no family-friendly fare anywhere? Do not fret:Nevada, MO is your refuge tonight.

What we have here is a 1956 West German biopic, predating even the stage version of The Sound of Music, though it didn't reach the U.S. until after the Rodgers & Hammerstein show had hit Broadway. Here's some unexpected Americana from the film, provided by Jairdan.

No disrespect to Canada, but calling a film The Canadians does not raise expectations. On the other hand, Burt Kennedy directed it and Robert Ryan stars, so I'd probably give that second feature a look if given a chance. And that's all for today ... but there's more tomorrow!

BELLE STARR THE BANDIT QUEEN (1941)

2012-01-10T22:34:00.000-05:00

"The usual conception of Belle is all wrong. She was a beautiful southern girl whose recklessness ran away with her."

- Irving Cummings, 1941.

We last encountered Belle Starr in the appealing form of Jane Russell in Allan Dwan's 1948 oater Montana Belle, but you'd hardly recognize the lady in Irving Cummings's more ambitious 1941 epic. Neither version of Ms. Starr hews very closely to the known facts of her outlaw career, but the 1941 model, a Twentieth Century-Fox production, has a distinctive archetypal parentage. While the Dwan model is a generic female outlaw, the Cummings version shows the influence of two popular films from two years earlier: the same studio's Jesse James and the Selznick superproduction Gone With the Wind. While the film is supposedly based on a Burton Rascoe novel of the same name, its Belle Starr is the bastard offspring of the movie James and Scarlett O'Hara, and comes off more like Jesse James as some modern writers see him, as an anti-Reconstruction terrorist, than like the nebulous Belle Starr of history. Belle Starr the Bandit Queen is a highly romanticized tale that employs top studio talent -- the Technicolor cinematography is by Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, and Alfred Newman is credited with the score -- in the service of outright evil.

Something will sound familiar to classic film fans as soon as the movie starts. The title music is taken from Newman's score for John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln -- or at least that's where I first heard the particular piece of music I think of as the Ann Rutledge theme. Take a break to check out this scene from the Ford film to hear what I mean. prlosolvidados uploaded it to YouTube.

Call me sentimental, but using this music as the theme to Belle Starr the Bandit Queen strikes me as just a bit blasphemous. But Cummings goes for the tears right from the start. He opens in romantically desolate fashion with a black man and his son (or grandson) plowing a field in what used to be the yard of a Missouri mansion, shadowed by the ruins of marble columns. The plow digs up a long-buried rag doll, and the old man guesses it must have belonged to Belle Starr when she was a little girl long ago. Who is Belle Starr? the boy asks. Why, she's what white folks call a "leggend," the old-timer explains, and a "leggend" is someone who never really dies.
We then travel back in time to see the mansion in its old-time splendor, when it was the home of the well-to-do Shirley family. The Shirleys have survived the Civil War in good shape and their faithful Mammy Lou (Louise Beavers) has stayed on. Still, vivacious Miss Belle Shirley (Gene Tierney) resents the Yankee occupation, except for an old beau of hers, Major Tom Crail (Dana Andrews). She resents even more the arrival of carpetbaggers, black and white. We see her disgust when she goes to town. Because the status of slave marriages is in doubt, hucksters are selling their services to perform marriages for a price so freedpeople won't be living in sin. That's the least offense. White men are promising the former slaves that the white estates will be broken up and the land given to the blacks -- and that blacks will be able to walk on the same sidewalks as whites. Cummings cuts to a shot of three fairly attractive black women done up in arriviste fashion giving the camera come-hither looks. He presents them as if their presence were outrageous or obscene -- as if that's how we're supposed to feel about it -- and some 1941 audiences certainly did.

Going on her haughty way, Miss Belle observes a wanted poster offering a reward for the capture of Sam Starr, an unreconstructed reb carrying on guerrilla warfare against the occupation. She applauds Starr's efforts within earshot of one of the outlaw's incognito comrades (Chill Wills), and before long Sam himself (Randolph Scott) is presenting himself at the Shirley mansion -- on the same night that the family is having Major Crail and other officers over for dinner. Belle insists on having a place set for Starr, whose men eventually take Crail hostage to ensure Sam's safe exit. However, a white trash lurker about town, Jasper Trench (Olin Howard), has seen this and tipped off the federal troops. A complicated situation ends with Crail reluctantly carrying out an order to burn any home that harbors outlaws. With the Shirley mansion put to the torch, Belle vows revenge and joins forces with Starr's guerrilla band. She proves useful in many ways, not least by being a natural crack shot. She demonstrates this by daintily putting a bullet dead-center through the leaf of a tree, then knocking the leaf off its stem with the next bullet. Starr is practically goggle-eyed, or as nearly goggle-eyed as Randolph Scott can get, by this display of prowess.
Belle is soon riding at Sam's side, taking the fight to the carpetbaggers. By way of illustration, Starr's band is shown chasing wagonloads of defenseless black people across a bridge. In a slapstick moment, one utterly victim falls off a wagon and has to scramble aboard another before he's run down. Sure, they go after the occasional federal supply train as well, but it looks like Belle's default mode of resistance is ethnic cleansing. Call me a PC killjoy, but the thought of audiences applauding these scenes is chilling.

To the writers' credit, the script has Belle begin to question her war against the Yankees -- not because of any atrocities perpetrated upon blacks, of course, but because Sam, her new husband, has started recruiting riffraff into his band, most notoriously the Cole brothers, who are living off the land by robbing ordinary (presumably white) Missourians. That's beyond the pale -- not what Belle was fighting for, but Sam writes it off as wartime expediency. His attitude seems to confirm the suspicions Belle's brother had expressed earlier about Sam's character -- perhaps an echo of the fact that the real Sam Starr was a Cherokee Indian. Belle quits the fight and gives Sam his ring back, but when she learns that Sam and his men have been set up for an ambush, she drops everything to ride to his rescue -- only to be shot from behind by Jasper Trench. Spoilers follow for those who care...

Belle Starr is dead for practically the final reel of the picture, which is dedicated to the making of her "leggend." Trench brings the body in to claim the price on her head and wants to buy everyone drinks before he cashes in, but word of his unchivalrous act has spread quickly and no one will share his cheer. The bartender won't even serve him. Even the black shoeshine boy regards him with contempt. Meanwhile, Tom Crail has possession of the body, but won't confirm that it's Belle, for whom he still carries a torch. He wants family members to identify the body. He gets Mammy Lou and Sam Starr, who arrive together -- whether Sam is surrendering or offering an implicit truce is unclear. Sam looks at the body, and says it isn't Belle. Mammy Lou looks, and says the same thing. Jasper is apoplectic and sees the truth of the matter, that no one, not even the Yankee officer, wants him to have the reward for backshooting a lady. But there's nothing he can do. Tom allows Sam a last moment alone with the "anonymous" corpse, on whose finger he replaces the wedding ring. He looks out a window and sees two black men in the town square talking of how Belle Starr apparently cheated death. One mentions to the other that the whites are already calling her a legend. Again, what does that mean? The answer in this case is that Belle can change her shape; she can turn into a red fox and slip away when the soldiers think they have her cornered. Sam regards this scene with approval and the film ends.

The insistently lachrymose tone of Belle Starr the Bandit Queen only makes its ugly aspects more grotesque. It reflects the then-prevalent consensus among American historians that Reconstruction was a "tragic era" of unjust exploitation of a defeated South, and the racist consensus that freed blacks were self-evidently unfit to participate in government at that time. Just like The Birth of a Nation, the filmmakers probably think they're doing blacks a favor, and getting themselves off the historical hook, by spotlighting Louise Beavers as a good Negro, a role model of servile loyalty. But it's no good even to write the script off as a product of its time -- this was the New Deal era, after all, and more should be expected from its artistic output. More so even than Gone With the Wind, which after all takes a somewhat critical view of its heroine's adaptation to modernity, Belle Starr idealizes a bathetic nostalgia for an utterly vanished (not to mention deservedly destroyed) world and makes a martyr out of its idealized femininity. It's also not very good as a movie. It's meant as an early showcase for Gene Tierney -- while Randolph Scott is actually top billed, she gets a title card all to herself after the lead players are introduced -- but her early Vivien Leigh impersonation never hardens into a convincing hellcat bandit. Had she brought her later Leave Her to Heaven game to this picture everyone might well tremble, but as contemporary critics noted, the picture doesn't really give her much to do once she turns guerrilla. She doesn't even come as close to being a female action hero as Jane Russell did years later; it's as if they wanted to preserve a certain saintliness in the character that might be sullied if she were shown actually shooting people. That's the horrific thing about this movie: everyone involved actually seemed to see their invented Belle Starr as some sort of avenging-angel martyr-saint for the Lost Cause -- at least one early reviewer equated the character with Joan of Arc. That's just sick, but that tone gives Belle Starr the Bandit Queen a retroactive transgressive charge that may give viewers a strange thrill today. They may even feel a little dirty afterward. Whether that's a recommendation or not is up to you.

Now Playing: 10 JAN. 1962

2012-01-10T11:21:00.001-05:00

A promising triple-bill in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Not a bad choice at the Oriental, either.

Meanwhile, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, evidence that January was a boom time for horror just as it is 50 years later. Only we don't have Megascope.

This is actually none other than Hammer's Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, rattling around the U.S. since May 1961 and presumably retitled to look less familiar to discriminating horror fans. Here's a trailer under the original title, uploaded to YouTube by valthrudnir.

There's something new opening somewhere tomorrow -- don't miss it!

VENGEANCE IS A GOLDEN BLADE (1969)

2012-01-08T21:05:00.001-05:00

No, vengeance is not a golden blade -- or so you might be forgiven for concluding after sitting through most of Ho Meng-hua's scenic swordplay picture. The golden blade -- to be precise, the Golden Dragon Blade -- can hardly be an instrument of vengeance when it spends most of the film in the possession of the villain. It belongs to Li Ching Shan (Ching Tang), who runs one of old China's ubiquitous security services for caravans. His main business rivals are the Vicious Long Brothers, who seem perplexed at their lack of trade and blame Li for it. The head of the Longs, Zhentian (Li Pengfei) wants everything of Li's -- his business, his wife and his invincible Golden Dragon Blade. By the time Li comes back from his latest business trip, his rival has the wife and expects the rest to follow. Discovering her infidelity, Li orders his wife to kill herself, but she contrives to poison his washbasin. It's just enough to hinder his vision and reflexes, but that's just enough for the Longs to beat him down, drive him out and take his sword. His daughter and a faithful retainer escape with him, but Li suffers a laming leg injury in the process. They're rescued by an herbalist who shelters them as the girl Xiaoyen (Chin Ping) grows into your standard wuxia heroine and falls in love with the herbalist's kid, while Li toils away for years on the blade that actually seems to be vengeance, the Hanglong Blade, alone capable (somehow) of defeating the Golden Dragon. It's going to be up to Xiaoyen to get revenge due to dad's lameness, but the concerned parent doesn't want her to make a move until he feels she's ready. He's understandably a controlling father, but once all his remaining friends cajole him into letting Xiaoyen go to town for the first time, events evolve beyond Li's control.

Well, something is a golden blade, and Ching Tang has got it -- at first.

By the very end, we can concede that maybe vengeance was a golden blade after all, but the apparent untruth of that assertion over most of the picture seemed consistent with Ho's overall determination to defer if not deny gratification for martial-arts fans. Golden Blade is more character-driven than action-driven, though Ho makes up for the slow middle with a dynamic final half hour. Like many of the wuxia films I've seen, this one has more personality and visual sweep (letterboxing always helps) than the small-scale kung fu movies I was used to from youthful TV watching. Golden Blade has a lot of attractive location work, and I'll give the special effects department credit for at least trying to make their soundstage brush fire scene look attractive. The quality of the fighting may not be that great (I'm not especially qualified to judge) but the action scenes are usually framed quite nicely and generate good momentum for the final reels.

The great outdoors (above) and the less-great indoors playing the outdoors (below).

The film seems compromised, however, by some discomfort with the idea of a female heroine that could be rooted in realism or sexism. Without spoiling too much, after constant reminders from Li that Xiaoyen that she isn't ready to take revenge on the Vicious Long Brothers (not to mention her own mother), you expect the heroine to refute him convincingly. But Ho and his writers ultimately take Li's side, proving that she wasn't quite ready after all. Usually when that's the case, the film will wait patiently while the hero or heroine gets ready and gets his or her revenge. But Golden Blade closes on that slightly sour note -- the consequences aren't too grave -- of Xiaoyen's unreadiness. Apart from that, Xiaoyen's right to take revenge is thrown into question by an abrupt plot twist. The bad guys remain bad and the good good, but her redefined relationship to the bad guys seems to make her revenge worse than the original offense. The twist also complicates the already more complex than normal character of Li, whose determination to shelter Xiaoyen from the world takes on a different complexion. There's also an unusual emphasis on the personal sacrifice involved in dedication to the martial arts in the suggestion that Li is less than what he seems and what he could have been.

Ready or not, Ching Ping leaps into action.

Ho seems to have aimed at a more mature or nuanced consideration of the standard revenge imperative, and the dominant message of his movie is that vengeance, no matter how sharp or what color, is more complicated than people assume. That doesn't necessarily sit well when you expect a rip-roaring swordplay picture, but it does make Golden Blade stand out as a story while it still delivers much of the goods.

1934: The courtship of Myrna Loy and William Powell

2012-01-07T21:40:00.001-05:00

There are two film couples who set the tone for the era of Code Enforcement -- the years when Hollywood adhered more strictly to the moralistic strictures of the Production Code under pressure from religious groups. One couple is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who grounded musicals in virtuoso performance and marriage plots after an epoch of orgiastic abstraction and pre-Code cartoonishness. The other, as you can tell from the headline, is William Powell and Myrna Loy, who became a double-act at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the Enforcement year of 1934. They didn't transform a particular genre, but set a tone by being themselves transformed and gradually domesticated to the point when Loy, previously typed as an exotic vamp or snooty bitch, became known as the "perfect wife" of movies. Powell's evolution was less drastic; he could play heroes as well as heels in the past, and casting usually split the difference by making him a likable rogue much of the time. Still, a domestication took place, and we see it beginning before 1934 is over.

M-G-M knew how to put over a new romantic team. The studio paired Powell and Loy in two May releases. The more famous of the two as a film is, of course, W. S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man, the adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's final novel that launched a series of six films over thirteen years. The earlier release of the two is famous as a footnote to the history of American crime. Also directed by Van Dyke, Manhattan Melodrama is best known (and was quickly advertised) as the film John Dillinger was watching at the Biograph theater in Chicago while Melvin Purvis's G-Men waited outside to kill him. One wonders what Dillinger thought of the picture, whether he though Clark Gable's gangster an ideal antihero or some sort of sap. This is Gable's movie, with Loy and Powell paired in support, she switching affections from gangster to Powell's prosecutor. Romance takes second place to bromance here, however. Gable and Powell were orphaned as boys by the 1904 General Slocum disaster (believe it or not, Mickey Rooney grows up to be Clark Gable), and raised as brothers by a Jewish survivor who'd lost his own boy. They continue character trajectories already established, Gable becoming a gambler and gangster, Powell a lawyer and crusader against crime. But there are rarely hard feelings between the two, and Gable proves a recklessly selfless criminal. He wants Powell to succeed in his career no matter what peril that puts his racket in, and at one point commits murder to protect him from fellow crooks. At the end, he refuses Governor Powell's offer of a commutation of his death sentence, because he knows it'd hurt Powell's political career. Melodrama is a film that critiques itself. Powell gets a speech acknowledging that Prohibition and Depression circumstances had encouraged a glorification of gangsters, yet this movie has possibly the most glorified gangster of all, a criminal apparently unmotivated by malice, resentment, or even self-preservation -- an ultimate free spirit who freely lays down his life for the good of society. That's the pre-Code aspect of the movie, as you can see by comparing it with the similar Enforcement-era epic Angels With Dirty Faces, in which the charismatic criminal must play the coward in the death chamber, one way or the other, rather than appear a martyr as Gable does. Loy is little more than a love interest here, but the important thing is that she's a good girl -- not foreign, not snobbish, not decadent, and that makes her a fit mate for Powell, not Gable.

The Thin Man is the first Powell-Loy vehicle and is naturally shaped by the Hammett novel, which I haven't read. The movie is a sort of screwball mystery, the whodunit element taking second place to the booze-fueled banter of Nick and Nora Charles. A year after Repeal, Thin Man revels in heroic drinking. Arriving late at a club, Nora orders a marini and asks Nick how many he's had. Since he's had six already, she orders five more martinis to be set up side by side at her table. An unknown number of martinis later, he has to carry her to bed. But as a rule, both Nick and Nora can handle their liquor, which mostly makes them playful. You can see why this film made Powell and Loy a star team, because the characters clearly enjoy each other's company. They can tease each other like a couple of kids and not look obnoxiously silly. This being a transitional film, the Charleses still seem to behave in an irresponsible if not amoral way, but that seems to be okay in this film's context because they're safely rich. Pre-Code disturbed many critics because it so often spotlighted the survival ethics of the poor. Screwball comedy calmed critics (whether they liked the actual films or not) because the whims of the wealthy weren't seen as a threat to anyone, except for the occasional hapless bourgeois swept up in their wake. Nick and Nora would grow more domesticated within a couple of films, but the real domestication of Powell and Loy as a couple act came in their next, rather darker teamup.

Six months after the films above, the third Powell-Loy film appeared. William K. Howard's Evelyn Prentice has a plot worthy of a pre-Code picture. Loy is the title character, the neglected wife of defense attorney Powell. She starts a relationship with another man who proves a manipulative, mercenary gigolo. When the gigolo ends up dead, another of his girlfriends is accused of the murder, and Powell defends her, but we have reason to believe that Loy is guilty. This sets up a sequence of courtroom climaxes, including Powell's heartbroken examination of Loy on the witness stand, a late revelation that throws our understanding of what happened into question, and a summation in which Powell continues to defend the original defendant. A lot of higher-law buncombe comes into it, the premise being that a gigolo deserves death for messing with women's affections and so on. Howard films it as effectively as was probably possible, and the stars contribute carefully modulated performances with an emphasis on mutual regret. The key new element here is a child, the protagonists' daughter. Prentice alternates between intense mature drama and would-be heartwarming scenes of father and/or mother with the little girl. One scene of the whole family doing their morning exercises really seems to set the tone for the future, encouraging fans to see Powell and Loy as a family rather than merely as a couple. The child as center of moral gravity would shortly domesticate Nick and Nora, just as it would domesticate Tarzan and Jane in the most notorious example from the Enforcement era. The kiddie scenes in Prentice are pleasant but don't quite fit the overall tone of the story. The kid is arguably superfluous if you believe that the love of the star characters is strong enough to keep them together, but M-G-M seemed to consider the girl necessary to close the deal, representing a perhaps preferably non-sexual bond keeping the couple together. Fortunately, the stars invest the conclusion with enough emotional truth for me to feel that the girl was superfluous.

Powell and Loy were helped immeasurably in 1934 by the fact that all three of their pictures are entertaining films. The Thin Man is the best of the three, but fans of the two stars will find all of them rewarding, even if Manhattan Melodrama renders them subordinate to Gable. They're all interesting as transitional films, with Evelyn Prentice perhaps the most interesting in that problematically historical sense. These films retain a pre-Code charge that will most likely be lacking in their later work together, though I'll take recommendations from the audience. These three I can recommend flaws and all.

Wendigo Meets CAPTAIN KRONOS, VAMPIRE HUNTER (1974)

2012-01-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

It's not a good sign for the movie, I suppose, when the DVD box cover forgets to show you the title character, and that's where Wendigo and I started with the now-remaindered Paramount DVD of Brian Clemens's would-be tentpole picture from the dying days of the Hammer studio. With Dracula played out and the Karnstein act already growing tired, the home of the vampire made this last stab at infusing some novelty into the bloodsuckers, making sure to make Captain Kronos a tangental sequel to the Karnstein series (here pronounced "Karn-steen," Mel Brooks style) while pointing toward new directions that were never actually taken.

A Van Helsing for the Swaggering Seventies, Kronos (Horst Janson) is a sword-swinging, often-shirtless, cheroot smoking stud on a mission from God. The way Wendigo sees it, Kronos was to Peter Cushing's Van Helsing what Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing was to all other respectable vampire hunters: a floundering attempt to be more cool on all levels. At this point, Hammer thought it was better to look good than to talk good, giving us a very Germanic, very wooden star. Nor, under Clemens's direction, does Janson look very good as an action hero. The director doesn't direct action very well and has difficulty maintaining the balance he seeks between horror action and tongue-in-cheek fantasy. The climactic swordfight between hunter and vampire, waged while everyone else stands in mesmerized stillness, looks ridiculous, but not in a good way, and much of the action is like that.

Hammer clearly wanted Kronos to stand for something new in vampire movies. The script stresses that there are as many varieties of vampire as there are animals in nature, with different modes of attack, different vulnerabilities, etc. For this introductory outing the studio tries to spice up its usual gothic formula. The vampire doesn't drain its victims of blood alone, but of youth above all, leaving the usual pretty Hammer victims dessicated old ladies. It slinks about by day, albeit concealed in black robes that keep the predator's true identity a mystery until the end. It drains the life even from the landscapes, plants withering in its shadow. It can be trailed in obscure ways; plant a dead toad in a box beneath a road, for instance, and the poor croaker will come back to life if a vampire passes over. Wendigo assures me that this is authentic folklore, but that only shows that folks will believe all manner of lore. In one blackly comic scene, Kronos and his hunchbacked assistant struggle to figure out the right method to kill a more-or-less compliant subordinate vampire, trying the usual stake and the unusual expedient of hanging before literally stumbling upon the solution of applying blessed steel to its flesh. This inspires the forging of a sword from a steel crucifix while Kronos gets all spiritual and meditative like the martial-arts masters he was probably meant to emulate. These eccentric details are most of the best things about Captain Kronos in Wendigo's opinion.

Above: Shadow of the vampire -- or shadow of Gumby?

Below: a crucifix was no help to this victim.

The other best thing about the movie, of course, is Caroline Munro.

Munro is an icon of Seventies genre cinema, the Vampirella that never was and a mesmerizing presence in everything from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad to Starcrash. Sadly, she's underutilized and at the same time overutilized here. She isn't given much to do but service Kronos after he frees her from the stocks (she'd been sentenced for dancing on Sundays), but Clemens always cuts to her reaction shots as she makes saucy and sardonic faces in lieu of actual commentary on the action. Wendigo is compelled to admit that she's little more than eye candy here -- but he doesn't mind indulging his cinematic sweet tooth every so often. He's always regretted that she didn't have as many substantial roles as she deserved -- and that she didn't do nude scenes. He treasures what we do have of her just the same. She effortlessly eclipses most of the cast, from John Cater's learned hunchback to Wanda Ventham as a poor man's Ingrid Pitt.

Dr. Grost's Zoology: Dead toads are our friends;

bats are not.

Wendigo thinks that Captain Kronos could have become the series Hammer hoped for -- if it had a different director and star and had come out in a period when people hadn't grown bored with vampires. As it turned out, Clemens's Kronos was the wrong film at the wrong time. Would it be worth trying again now? Again, Wendigo notes sadly that Stephen Sommers's abominable Van Helsing is, for all intents and purposes, a Kronos remake. He presumes that any attempt to literally redo Kronos would end up sharing all of Van Helsing's flaws and excesses. The simplicity of a hunter stalking a single master vampire and deducing the right method of killing it probably wouldn't satisfy 21st century audiences -- but you never know. People who are interested in alternate approaches to vampires and vampire hunting -- and people interested in Caroline Munro -- might be satisfied with the Captain Kronos we have, but the whole remains less than the sum of its parts.

Here's a trailer uploaded to YouTube by TheCultMovieReview.

Now Playing: 5 JAN. 1962

2012-01-05T20:00:00.000-05:00

From Lewiston, ME: the sleeper hit of 1961 -- all three hours of modern Italian decadence -- arrives for the first weekend of the year.

Federico Fellini's film was a high-water mark of the European invasion of American screens in the postwar era. According to the October 17, 1961 issue of Show Business Illustrated, La Dolce Vita had been the number-two film at the U.S. box office over the previous week, surpassed only by The Guns of Navarone. Does that say something about the American movie audience of fifty years ago, compared to us? For the record, Astor also released Plan 9 From Outer Space. I couldn't find a trailer for the Astor release, but here's a rhythmic montage of still images from the Italian trailer, as uploaded to YouTube by UmbrellaEntAU.

Meanwhile, opening in Youngstown, OH is a film probably better known now for its theme song than its actual content. Like La Dolce Vita, this one was dubbed "adult" entertainment.The second feature You Have To Run Fast is a crime picture from the redoubtable Edward L. Cahn, a director better known

I'll let Paul Frees explain Town Without Pity, with help from lookprettyappealing's YouTube channel.

On to Pittsburgh, where the ancient custom of promoting dance crazes with movies, a practice that would go out with the Lambada, is honored with one of at least two Twist movies circulating through the country.

Chubby Checker himself testifies to the nationwide extent of the craze in this movie clip uploaded by JohnnyKidd1966.

Look out for more attractions this weekend.

SUPER (2011)

2012-01-05T14:22:00.001-05:00

Common sense would seem to tell us that a movie about a real-life or real-world superhero -- one without actual superpowers or a billionaire's resources -- can end only one way: with the abrupt demise of the would-be crimefighter, especially if he or she plays by the conventional comic-book rule and eschews firearms. On that expectation, a "realistic" superhero movie will not be a long one unless the majority of the film builds to the hero's first (and last) night out or his first (and last) confrontation with superior numbers or firepower. Are there such movies? Their absence shouldn't surprise us, since comic books themselves echo the mentality of movies. Both media tap into a common tradition of burlesque slapstick violence as well as universal power fantasies. That aside, who'd want to see a movie that has nothing to say but, "Don't try to be a superhero; you'll be killed?" Yet we do see movies that try to split the difference by showing us ordinary or less-than-ordinary people emulating comic-book heroes and usually, however improbably, succeeding. We want to see someone make an ass of himself in a superhero costume, but then we want to see him win after all, reversing the old comedy formula of rooting for the transgressor against boundaries but also laughing at his inevitable comeuppance. That results in movies like Kick-Ass, in which the cinematic fantasy of a child killing-machine belied the creators' presumed commitment to the "real" world. It also results in James Gunn's Super, which can be seen as a still-more realistic, raunchier version of Kick-Ass, but would be more accurately described as a cross between Taxi Driver and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo.

Instead of a kid, Super has a grown-up loser for a hero. Frank (Rainn Wilson) is traumatized when his wife Sarah, a recovering addict (Liv Tyler) runs off with Jacques (Kevin Bacon), a glib sleazeball with a posse who we can tell right off is more dangerous than Frank initially realizes. Helplessly enraged, he wants the police to arrest Jacques for "stealing" Sarah when it was self-evident that she left of her own (albeit drug-addled) will. Frank is already deeply disturbed and emotionally stunted: he watches tentacle porn and a Christian superhero show as he broods on his loss. He has a mad vision of alien tentacles removing the top of his skull so he can receive a touch from the finger of God, a visit from the Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion), the TV hero, and the idea for a mask and a logo. He becomes the Crimson Bolt, initially weaponless but soon armed with a pipe wrench after a clumsy first fight. The Bolt simply whales away on an array of malefactors caught in the act -- drug dealers, child molesters, people who butt in a ticket line -- but the news media and the police see his interventions as random attacks on innocent people. His career is endangered by the fact that anyone who's ever met the tall and pathologically awkward Frank will immediately recognize him under his mask, but some simple plot complications serve to put the cop who suspects the truth out of action. One person who doesn't see him as a criminal is Libby (Ellen Page), a comic-shop clerk who proves something of a cosplay fetishist with an untapped violent streak. When Frank is forced to reveal his secret to her -- she had already suspected, given his "research" at her store -- Libby dumps her boyfriend and declares herself the Crimson Bolt's sidekick, Boltie, complete with homemade costume. Together, after much convincing of a wounded and worried Frank, the costumed team escalates their war on crime with a trip to the gun shop before a climactic assault on Jacques's mansion, where Frank has learned that a major drug deal will go down and where Jacques uses Sarah as a test subject for dope and entertainment for the dealers....

Taxi Driver is such a part of our collective movie consciousness that Gunn may not have realized how much he'd imitated its structure here. Super may be the most alarming variation on Taxi Driver to date, thanks to its ultimate assertion that the Crimson Bolt's bloody rampage against crime was somehow therapeutic for Frank. At some point, the script evolved from a mockery of superhero wannabees to something symbolic. When the Bolt tells Boltie that though "we'll never be ready" to assault Jacques's compound, they have to do it sometime and preferably now, the film seems suddenly to be teaching us life lessons about taking chances and accepting risks. Although the ending doesn't prove quite as happy as Frank may have wanted at first, Gunn seems to want us to accept that Frank is a better person for having stood and fought, and even for having loved and lost. The last scene, in which Taxi Driver's news clippings are echoed by Frank's drawings of his modestly happier life, could still be seen as proof that Frank is a profoundly disturbed person -- which would make Super still more an echo of the Scorsese film. But I don't think Gunn means us to see them that way. He might concede that Frank is still weird, but I think we're meant to agree that he's weird now in a way less threatening to himself or others.

Since I don't watch The Office, Super is my first real encounter with Rainn Wilson, and I was impressed. He does the most to make Frank's superpowered evolution from infantile inhibition to relative well-adjustedness plausible and amusing, and as a husky man he makes you believe that the Crimson Bolt starts with a minimal fighting chance against his enemies. Gunn's script helps him out considerably; just when you're asking how a wretch like him could have won a Liv Tyler, Gunn delivers flashbacks illustrating Sarah's emotional neediness as a recovering addict and Frank's availability as a co-worker and AA sidekick. Ellen Page comes off less well; her Libby/Boltie is an unconvincing jumble of impulses. She's undermined a little by the art direction of lack of it that gives no indication in her apartment of how much of a superhero geek the character is, but the script doesn't really do much to motivate her sudden violent streak. Super's dependence on actual living spaces also raises some questions about the economics of Frank's city. He and Sarah were apparently able to afford a house on the salaries of a short-order clerk and a waitress, while Libby has a halfway-decent apartment to herself (she can host parties there) on her earnings as a comics-store clerk. Somehow these details seem nearly as unrealistic as the Crimson Bolt's resilience in action. Finally, regarding actors, I have to say that this was Kevin Bacon's best performance as a comic-book villain in a 2011 release. He was cluelessly miscast as a mutant Bond villain in X-Men First Class, but fills the bill nicely here as a nervy scumbag who only confirms the movie's own essential comic-book nature by taunting an injured Bolt instead of finishing him off.

Super arguably outdoes Kick-Ass on the ultraviolence scale, though the gore and other practical effects are almost always used for laughs. Bolt and Boltie giddily massacre Jacques's bodyguards with fire, bullets, bombs and "Wolverine" claws, and we're always meant to laugh, except when Gunn occasionally reminds us of the severity of the stakes for our heroes. There's at least one moment when a character dies violently when we're clearly not supposed to laugh, and that moment probably best illustrates the contradictory messages sent in Super. It's frequently a very funny film, but sometimes you wonder what you're actually laughing at or laughing with. That's not necessarily a bad way to leave this picture. I'm sure Gunn meant it to be funny and disturbing, and whatever other impressions it makes, he succeeded on both counts.

Now Playing: JAN. 4, 1962

2012-01-04T14:34:00.000-05:00

A double-feature from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The main event is not your typical Phil Karlson movie, while the second feature is a bit of British bawdiness with Claudia Cardinale as a bonus.

Here's a trailer for Upstairs and Downstairs, courtesy of vciguy76.

Next,from West Palm Beach, the 3-D event of 1961 spills over into the new year. Mondodigitl uploaded the trailer to YouTube.

Come back tomorrow a weekend's worth of attractions, including the foreign film sleeper hit and the dance craze of 1961

Now Playing: JANUARY 3, 1962

2012-01-03T18:54:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the first of a year-long series of almost purely pictorial posts featuring newspaper clippings from fifty years ago -- a year widely recognized as one of the richest in quality in Hollywood history. Mondo 70 will be marking the golden anniversary of a number of landmark films throughout 2012, while illustrating the diversity of moviegoing experience available across the United States. By 1962 nearly every city of respectable size had an "Art" theater dedicated to anything from prestigious foreign fare to blatant exploitation, depending on the marketplace. We're sure to see many now-immortal international pictures advertised along the way, along with hoped-for-hits that haven't withstood the test of time as well. We'll also see many an American film that's barely remembered today, but was pitched like the last word in entertainment. I'm not quite old enough to remember the year, but I've long had an appreciation for the pop culture of the period and the way it promoted itself, and I'll be choosing ads that express that self-promoting vitality most vividly and evocatively. I hope it proves as entertaining for you, the reader, as gleaning the ads has been for me.

For the first weeks of 1962, of course, we'll be seeing the last films of 1961 arriving in smaller markets, while the big roadshow attractions of that year remain reserved-seat exclusives in the biggest cities. Fifty years ago today the holiday attractions on their way out were pictures like Rodgers & Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song and Frank Capra's final feature, Pocketful of Miracles. Starting today, I hope to post something for every day that some picture opened somewhere in America.

Nationwide releases weren't as common in 1962 as they are today, but scan enough dailies and you'll see which pictures are going wide. Frank Tashlin's Bachelor Flat apparently has the distinction of being the first Hollywood release of 1962, opening in some cities 50 years ago today. Here's how they sold it in Milwaukee.

If Bachelor Flat wasn't salacious enough for you, some cities had other options. Here's some spicy alternative entertainment for Miami moviegoers of 50 years ago tonight -- and it's educational, too.

There's more tomorrow, folks, so be sure to check in again. When resources permit, I may even throw in trailers.

GOING PLACES (Les Valseuses, 1974)

2012-01-02T21:30:00.001-05:00

Bertrand Blier's picaresque sex comedy was imported into the U.S. with an arthouse audience in mind. That's probably why Les Valseuses comes to us under the relatively innocuous title "Going Places," though the poster designer had the right exploitative idea (see left) instead of the more idiomatically literal and thematically appropriate "Balls." If an American studio had released a film called Balls in the 1970s, people would have a pretty good idea of what they were getting, and Valseuses would mostly fulfil that expectation. It's what we'd call a road movie, but without benefit of a car most of the time. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere -- the former became a star with this picture, back when he was a relative hunk rather than an absolute hulk -- play a couple of boneheads who seem to be led through life by their peckers. My first impression as they chased and groped women was that this must have been the original for Dumb and Dumber, down to the ugly hair on the men. The French title becomes painfully literal when the Dewaere character gets his balls grazed by an angry hairdresser's bullet and suffers impotence for some time afterward. But just as he gets better, the film somehow manages to grow on you. You stop waiting (or hoping) for the guys to get killed and you begin to feel a little sorry for them as they wander through a strangely barren landscape. Their original obnoxiousness remains somewhat obnoxious, but is increasingly exposed as a kind of endearing neediness. If they seem like cases of arrested development, their environment of grocery store parking lots, empty resort towns and deserted beaches seems to be partly to blame, along with the unresponsive, uptight majority of the French population.

Even as a baby (above), Depardieu was fairly husky, but he grows fast in Les Valseuses and is soon getting around all by himself.

Indeed, Blier probably goes too far in suggesting that Jean-Claude and Pierrot are a life force that France may need to revitalize itself. Their perpetual horniness -- at one point Depardieu seems likely to take it out on Dewaere -- is a kind of lifeline extended to a variety of unhappy women, from Miou-Miou's frigid yet frequently naked hairdresser to Jeanne Moreau's suicidal ex-con to, perhaps most alarmingly for Americans, Isabelle Huppert's 16-year old virgin. This last encounter, with Miou-Miou assisting, is staged like a literal rite of passage and treated as indisputably a positive event in the girl's life. The girl had impulsively run away from her parents with the trio who had stolen the family car, and is left by them on the road to hitchhike afterward.

It's all good, though -- though Blier has the maturity to remind us that sex can't solve everything. A threesome with the two oafs fails to revive the Moreau character's spirits, and she suicides by shooting herself through her vagina -- an unexpectedly gruesome sight that sends the boys running away like scared children to sob in Miou-Miou's bed. Even then, I suppose it could be argued that the woman had a last moment of pleasure, a blessing from the knucklehead nature gods.

Watching this as a foreigner, I had the impression that Blier intended his heroes to embody something essentially, folkishly French. The music contributed to that impression; instead of the rock soundtrack you might expect in the equivalent American film, Blier's soundtrack is performed by the jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, whose music sounds as unmistakably French to me as anyone's can. Are these essentially innocent boors the soul of France? The French themselves may have thought so; they made the film a hit and Depardieu a star -- and they didn't type him as a moron, either.

Visually, Valseuses is very reminiscent of those American films of the Seventies that utilize landscape and cityscape to expose vulgarity and highlight personal alienation. You get plenty of pretty countryside, but you get a lot of grocery stores and bowling alleys as well. In either case it's our heroes who bring emptiness to crass yet hearty life. The cinematography of Bruno Nuytten consistently nails the mood Blier wants and makes this a movie of memorable images. Ultimately, it's a subtle, tricky picture that you can take either way, either as a satire or a celebration of a certain incorrigibility that's only human. It's the sort of film in which Miou-Miou can rush out rejoicing to tell the boys that she's finally achieved orgasm, only to have them throw her into a pond -- twice. If you can laugh at that, you should enjoy the rest of the show.

On the Big Screen: WAR HORSE (2011)

2012-01-01T22:55:00.001-05:00

It may be a new year in the real world, but it'll still be 2011 in movie theaters for at least another week, and probably for longer in the arthouses. To celebrate the holiday I took a walk to the Spectrum, Albany's cultural treasure, where Steven Spielberg's newest film (a matter of months or days, depending on where you live) received a heartfelt round of applause once the lights went on and the credits rolled. I note this to concede the objective fact that War Horse will move people exactly as Spielberg intended, however unmoved I remained. Let's make clear upfront that the great man has made a tearjerker. That fact alone is a bit of a disappointment to me, given that this is the first full Spielberg film since Munich, his brutal terror-vs-terror historical thriller of 2005. Since then, of course, he made Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an act of loyalty or charity, depending on the object, and more recently released the motion-capture Adventures of Tintin, which I haven't seen yet. War Horse is his first live-action movie on his own terms in six years, and while I'd rather he didn't revert to tearjerking I want to stress that I don't dislike it because of that. It doesn't fail as a tearjerker. Its failures are matters of form rather than content.

Spielberg's War Horse is the latest adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel, following a radio play and stage version. The title character is Joey, a semi-thoroughbred steed purchased on impulse by Farmer Narricott (Peter Mullan) despite his unsuitability for ploughing. Narricott's boy Albert (Jeremy Irvine) has had a sort of crush on Joey since the colt was foaled, which I assume factors into his dad's otherwise daft decision. He outbid his own landlord to get the horse, paying far more than any plow horse is worth and putting his farm's finances in jeopardy. Unless Joey can be trained to plow a rocky field for turnip growing, the Narricotts will lose their farm. Suffice it to say that Joey succeeds with a little help from nature, but what nature giveth, nature taketh away. A timely rainfall softens the earth for the plow, but a later torrent washes away the soil. It looks pretty bad for the Narricotts, but fortunately for them, Great Britain declares war on Germany and the Army is buying horses. Poor Albert can't bear being parted from Joey, especially with the horse being sent to war, but a friendly officer (Tom "Loki" Hiddleston) assures the lad, who's nearly fighting age himself, that he'll take good care of his new steed.

What follows might be described as Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar with explosions. Bresson's 1966 classic follows the tribulations of a donkey as it passes from owner to owner. Just so, Joey soon loses his rider -- cavalry charges even in the earliest days of World War I are not a good idea -- and passes through many hands, military and civilian, German and Entente. There are animal lovers on all sides, but despite everyone's best efforts Joey (after receiving several alternate names) ends up on hard duty haulign heavy artillery. Meanwhile, Albert has gone to war and suffered hardships of his own. As this is a motion picture based on a children's book, the odds of Joey reuniting with Albert are a lot better than you'd think. Indeed, since Joey has a Ben-Hur like tenacity, surviving practically the entire war in the thick of the action, I suppose anything else could happen....

Horse, schmorse, sez I. I went to this movie to see what the director and cinematographer of Saving Private Ryan would do with World War I. Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski are inherently limited by the director's desire for a PG-13 rating, but on the other hand realistic gore isn't the point of War Horse. What we get is a nicely staged cavalry attack on a German encampment, a bit of business that reminded me of the several raids on Indian villages staged in John Ford's westerns as horses charged through lines of tents. In a twist on the Ford formula, the enemy simply retreats to the edge of the forest, where their machine guns are waiting. At this point, Spielberg opts to evoke carnage rather than show it directly. We see horses and riders charging. We see machine guns firing. We then see riderless horses leaping over the gun nests. Something seemed unreal about this -- weren't the horses taking bullets, too? -- until an after-battle long shot clarified matters. A similar decorative reticence prevails throughout the picture, most notably when two deserters are executed in the shadow of a windmill. One of the blades gets in our way just as the squad fires, only to reveal the two dead soldiers. The artistry is too obviously designed for concealment to have the eloquence Spielberg hoped for, but the overall reticence isn't a crippling weakness. Since this is the story of the horse, we needn't dwell as much on the suffering of men as we might on another occasion. The highlight of the picture shouldn't be any combat of men but, as it actually is, Joey's sudden flight from retreating Germans into No Man's Land. We've already seen men fight here, and that's served to underscore Joey's peril. While the stunts Joey must perform in long takes inevitably require the use of a CGI horse, and the situation itself is fantastically unrealistic, the scene is still electrifying as Joey smashes through lines of barbed wire in his race for freedom as shells burst around him. This is the climax of the film, and one of the big problems with War Horse is that there's still about half an hour to go, and Spielberg makes that time seem even longer.

War Horse is a failure of pace, shockingly so for Spielberg. It suffers from an interminable first act and an insufferable human protagonist. Albert Narricott has no other attribute apart from his unconditional love for his horse. Nothing is done to make him interesting before he sees the colt born, and nothing is done afterward to make him seem anything but monomaniacal in his obsession with the animal. There has been no such devotion on film since Buster Keaton fell hard for a cow in Go West -- and Keaton meant it as a joke. I wanted to laugh when Albert vowed to find Joey in almost the exact same language Natty Bumppo uses for his beloved in Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans, but I doubt whether Spielberg would have shared my mirth. War Horse would be a better story had Spielberg left Albert behind and simply followed Joey from owner to owner -- or caretaker to caretaker. But that would mean less tearjerking and less fidelity to the source novel ... though speaking of which, Spielberg may have made a fatal error by attempting to naturalize a story that was originally told from the point of view of the horse. I can't say, however, whether Spielberg and his writers or the orginal author is to blame for the way the film limps to its finish. I noted the film's climax a paragraph ago. To pick up the story (I'll try to keep spoilage to a minimum), Joey doesn't quite make it out of No Man's Land; he's still alive and upright, but sort of stuck. This becomes known to both the British and German forces, who in an utterly ridiculous scene attempt to entice the horse to one side or the other by whistling and clucking at it. Once they figure out the trouble, a friendly competition ensues to free the horse from its predicament. The novel may say differently, but cinema logic seemed to require that Albert be here. There's a good reason why he isn't, but that's a detail Spielberg should have tweaked. We have to endure another cliffhanger behind the lines before a reunion is even possible, but even from there the film stumbles from false climax to false climax as at least one of Joey's erstwhile caretakers (Niels Arestrup, the "Corsican" from Un Prohete) comes back for a bitter encore before our remaining heroes are safely settled back in Hobbitown -- I mean Devon. My confusion is somewhat excusable, given how Spielberg and Kaminski turn their rustic location into a pastel fantasy land. I had the awful feeling that Spielberg's Devon was a re-enactment village dedicated to classic Hollywood cliches -- emphasis again on the Fordian mode -- and that the director had no actual empathy for farming or village life. My alternate explanation is that Spielberg was really only interested in the war stuff and did the first and last parts on autopilot.

Here it's only fair to remind you of that applause I heard in the theater, though I'm no more bound to defer to it than I was when a Spectrum audience loudly protested the end of Meek's Cutoff. Flaws and all, this film moves people, and some of those people might not see the flaws I saw as flaws. Maybe my problem is that I'm not an animal lover and can't empathize with Albert Narricott. Even if I concede that, the fact remains that there's nothing to him but his love for Joey, which means that you either have the temprament necessary to enjoy War Horse, or you don't. If you do, you may well enjoy it in spite of its narrative handicaps. I'll write it off as a warm-up for the Lincoln movie Spielberg has wanted to make for some time and is only now shooting. The current picture has predictable moments of pictorial genius, but those aren't enough for me to recommend it. You can take my word for it or infer the opposite from other people's applause. It'll be no crime to like War Horse, but I want Spielberg to do better next time, and I hope you will, too.

RIFIFI (Du Rififi chez les hommes, 1955)

2011-12-31T00:03:00.002-05:00

"Don't strain your brain and grumble. All it means is rough-and-tumble." I paraphrase the English translation of the title song of Jules Dassin's French jewel-robbery thriller. The title is either gangland slang ("the battle cry of every real tough guy") or a nonsense word invented by the novelist Auguste le Breton, whose work Dassin adapted. The song, performed by a nightclub singer -- a glimpse of a floor show came to be obligatory in French crime cinema -- doesn't really represent the overall tone of the film. Dassin was American; he had made Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway and Night and the City before being blacklisted. The blacklisters aspired to global sway, reportedly striving to stop Dassin from directing in Europe before Rififi launched his second career as a popular import for American arthouses. A crime story unconstrained by American censorship sounds like a golden opportunity to break boundaries, but Rififi is more a narrative breakthrough than a milestone of explicit frankness.

It does become clear pretty early that we're not in America anymore. You can tell when our protagonist Tony, aka "Le Stephanois" (Jean Servais), an ex-con jewel thief, reunites with his girlfriend. Turns out she'd formed new attachments while he did his time. The new boyfriend lavished her with jewels and furs, which Tony orders her to strip off. Not satisfied with humiliating her, Tony proceeds to beat her with a belt. To repeat: this is our hero -- but this is also a milieu where women willingly take their lumps as part of the rififi in order to partake of sexual paradise later -- or so the song claims. It's also a milieu where the men often end up taking what they dish out.

Freshly embittered, Tony reconsiders his refusal of a proposed jewel heist, except now he wants to up the ante. Instead of a smash-and-grab through the display window, he wants to take the safe where the good stuff is kept overnight. That means putting together an expert team and planning the operation in painstaking detail. After casing the place and identifying its security system, the four-man gang obtains an identical device so they can figure out how to disable or simply muffle its ultra-sensitive alarm mechanism. Confident of their ability to beat the alarm, they embark on the scene that made the film famous and influential: a step-by-step break-in through the ceiling, presented without unnecessary dialogue or music. Can they break in from above without setting off the alarm? Will their scheme to disable it work? Will they be able to break into the safe and get out before daybreak? Will the flics on the beat outside notice anything amiss? This is standard thriller stuff, but Dassin filmed it that way for the first time here, and Rififi has been a model for moviemakers and burglars ever since.

We may be in France rather than America, but crime still doesn't pay. In the U.S., the Breen Office dictated that result; in France it was a matter of fatalism, much as it was in many American films noirs. One of the gang gives a girl too ostentatious a gift and the sharks smell blood. To unify the plot threads, the lead shark is the same nightclub operator who stole Tony's girl. Methodically he breaks down the gang, forcing one to rat out another, killing the latter, kidnapping the kid of a third and demanding the loot as ransom. Here's where Tony most likely redeems himself for his misogynist violence early on, taking it upon himself to rescue the boy and rid himself of his rival once and for all. He takes a bullet in the process, setting up Dassin's second inspired sequence: a delirious drive through Paris as Tony rushes to get the kid home before he passes out, or worse, at the real. Dassin resorts to rapid-fire editing, compiling a disorienting montage to approximate Tony's reeling consciousness as he tries to keep his eyes on the road while losing blood, as all the while the brat treats it like a joyride. It's as brilliant in its own way as the break-in sequence, and it closes the film on a nice note of irony.

Dassin apparently couldn't resist a bit of American-style moralizing late in the picture, having a character question Tony's tough-guy standing by suggesting that all the downtrodden people who don't turn to crime are the real tough guys. It's an exceptional false note in an otherwise toughminded movie. Tony's execution of a stoolie was supposedly Dassin's way of venting against the blacklist and his Hollywood peers who ratted on him, but it's such a conventional scene for crime cinema that you could easily miss the personal political context and hear no axes being ground. Working with a much smaller budget than he was accustomed to as a Hollywood director, Dassin gets results nearly as slick and sleek, with huge help from cinematographer Philippe Agostini and production designer Alexandre Trauner. He's working with tawdry source material -- he apparently cut out lots of racism and other atrocities -- but infuses it with the vitality of the location noirs he pioneered in America. Rififi is more hard-boiled than noirish in many respects, and isn't quite as good as Dassin's best American noirs (Night and the City is his best), but it's not unfitting company for his work for the country that scorned him. If you're in a hard-boiled mood you could do a lot worse.

Pre-Code: THE WET PARADE (1932)

2011-12-29T23:03:00.000-05:00

In American history, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is often portrayed as Upton Sinclair's nemesis. When the muckraking novelist, best known to this day for The Jungle, his epochal expose of the meatpacking business, won the 1934 Democratic party nomination for Governor of California with a program to "End Poverty in California" (EPIC) by taking over shuttered factories, the "Tiffany studio," spearheaded by boy-wonder producer Irving Thalberg, made fake newsreels portraying hoboes waiting to swarm the state as crushing propaganda against Sinclair. Two years earlier, M-G-M had put money in Sinclair's pocket by buying the movie rights to his latest novel. Having done that, the studio seemed unsure of how to promote the resulting Victor Fleming production. They could sell it as an all-star production, albeit cast more with up-and-comers than with established idols. They could emphasize its current-affairs relevant without letting on what side they took. Sinclair himself promoted the picture by staging a debate on Prohibition between infamous evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (pro) and Wet Parade star and future satan Walter Huston (anti). People could figure out the context from the title, of course. Do a Google News Archive search of "Wet Parade" for 1932 and you'll get more references to the campaign to repeal Prohibition than you will reviews of the Sinclair movie. For the author, the phrase clearly meant something else, since his novel reaches back before World War I to show the ravages of American alcoholism and portrays the movement to ratify the Prohibition amendment, as well as the resistance that followed ratification. The novel's long out of print but not in the public domain, so it's hard to compare it to Fleming's movie the way we can weigh Sinclair's Oil! against There Will Be Blood. It seems likely, however, that the movie takes a more ambivalent stand on Prohibition than Sinclair did.

Sinclair was something we may find hard to imagine today: a left-wing Prohibitionist. There were many like him; it's worthwhile to remember that women wanted the vote, in many cases, so they could elect politicians who would ban liquor, though as it happened the deed was done before most women had a chance to vote. Prohibition wasn't part of every self-styled progressive's agenda, but it was one of the elements that gave progressives a reputation that persists to the present day as busybodies hostile to personal freedom. Sinclair wasn't impressed by the personal-liberty argument. There's a pointed scene in the movie when Huston's alky ward-heeler makes a Democratic stump speech (from the back of a truck) warning his 1916 audience that Republican busybodies were conspiring to take away their personal liberties. In mid-speech, Fleming cuts to a Republican orator (John Wray) making the exact same charge against the Democratic party. The point is obvious: in both cases the rhetoric is nothing but cant. In the novel (I was able to scare up some extracts) Sinclair remarks that neither party was as concerned about personal liberty when the government banned cocaine and similar substances. He may have explained this in the book, but the movie doesn't make the comparison and doesn't address what I suspect was Sinclair's main argument -- that wealthy, greedy capitalists made money off booze and so made sure that politicians opposed banning it. The film only hints at the link between capital and liquor in one scene, an organizational meeting for a national crime syndicate in which the ringleader gives the local thugs their marching orders, then visits with a group of more respectable men to thank them for their investments and promise them a quick profit. The overall message of The Wet Parade seems to be that greed alone allowed people to poison themselves -- but the movie emphasizes a point that may have seemed ironic to Sinclair, or else only underlined his main point: the cure of Prohibition was in some ways worse than the disease.

The movie oddly echoes The Birth of a Nation in its attention to the intertwined destinies of a Southern and a Northern family. Fleming opens down south with the declining fortunes of Col. Roger Chilcothe (Lewis Stone), who attempts to swear off alcohol at the urging of his daughter Maggie May, aka "Persimmon" (Dorothy Jordan) when she sees how it's ruining his health. He can't resist the temptation of sociability, however, and goes on an epic bender, gambling away most of his wealth in the process. He's finally brought home, despite a bartender's protest that he still has a few dollars in him, only to suffer the DTs ("I'm in Hell!") while begging Persimmon for a drink. It's a defining pre-Code moment to see the future Judge Hardy, the iconic paterfamilias of the Code-Enforcement era, meeting his end face down in a pigsty as his faithful colored retainers wail with grief. The Colonel's son, Roger Jr. (Neil Hamilton) is an aspiring author and a follower in his father's staggering footsteps. His own path leads to the big city, where he takes up residence in the hotel operated by the family of Mr. Tarleton (Huston), the aforementioned rummy spellbinder. Tarleton's long-suffering son Kip (Robert Young) really runs things, and hates booze for what it's done to his dad and many of their tenants. That makes him a kindred spirit for Persimmon when she moves up north to join her brother, who sets up a lavish society speakeasy (on the strength of whatever literary success) once Prohibition takes effect. The signifier of his decadence, as is often the case in pre-Code cinema, is Myrna Loy, bottle-blond here as his sneering consort.

Prohibition hangs over the characters' heads like a Damocles sword for many years. Tarleton passionately opposes Republicans (and appears, unlike other pols, to believe his own rhetoric) because he assumes that they'll ban booze; he and his tenants celebrate Woodrow Wilson's last-minute re-election by dancing ring-around-the-rozy like kids. When Prohibition comes (on Wilson's watch, spurred by wartime restrictions on grain use), the last day before the new regime is an epic pub-crawl, with four identically dressed mourners as our tour guides ordering every bad to play "Auld Lang Syne." The new law doesn't compel anyone to renounce liquor; instead, people empty out liquor stores and hoard as much as they can. Kip Tarleton's blithe assumption that they'll all go dry within a year proves profoundly mistaken.

The Prohibition section of the movie feels the most like an Upton Sinclair story. That's because the real exploiters come to the fore: the bootleggers who exploit newly-illicit desires by pouring any compound into a bottle and counterfeiting familiar labels. An impressive montage illustrates the process with the kind of muckraking realism that made Sinclair's name. Instead of drying people out, Prohibition has only driven them to literally poison themselves, though the movie leaves you wondering how anyone survived, since every bootlegger seems to be bottling poison. Old Man Tarleton is driven mad by the bad stuff and beats his wife to death when she smashes his last jug of hooch. Chilcothe Jr. literally drinks himself blind on rotgut procured by his bellboy. When he bemoans his loss of sight, Loy silently slinks away; chasing her, he falls down a flight of stairs. Outraged by the horrors he's witnessed, Kip Tarleton becomes a Volstead agent -- and speaking of horrors, he's teamed with ace agent Abe Shilling, a master of disguise who is himself but a thin disguise for the dreaded Jimmy "Schnozzle" Durante. Known today as the elderly cartoon narrator of Frosty the Snowman, Durante lives in movie infamy as the motormouth sidekick inflicted by M-G-M on Buster Keaton, but The Wet Parade proves that you don't need to feel sorry for Keaton to feel bloodthirsty toward "Schnozzle." Under normal circumstances, this might be called a "rare dramatic role" for Durante, but that would be false advertising; the comic simply employs his familiar shtick incessantly ("Hot-cha-cha!" "I got a million of 'em," etc) until a bootlegger mercifully puts him out of our misery. I am tempted to recommend The Wet Parade to anyone who has ever wanted to see Jimmy Durante killed, but alas, he doesn't suffer enough, nor does he die quickly enough. Instead, he expires in Kip's arms, after reassuring him: "You know how cats got nine lives?...[wait for it]... I've got...a million...of 'em..." While Durante's character may have been inspired by the real-life "Izzy and Moe" team of Prohibition enforcers, I suspect that Upton Sinclair wrote no scene in which an agent infiltrates the Chilcothe speakeasy disguised as a Bulgarian diplomat with a beard that was probably saved for the Russian aviators of A Night of the Opera three years later. If part of the studio's purpose for this picture was to promote Robert Young as a star, they did him and themselves no favors by yoking him to Durante for the final section. And by that point the movie's message has been muddled. Like many a pre-Code crime film, it pleads for a stronger crackdown on gangsters. At the same time, it practically concedes, in the year before Repeal, that Prohibition was a failed experiment, without accounting persuasively or even coherently for the failure.

However you interpret it, Fleming's Wet Parade is an often-entertaining ensemble piece, with Huston standing out as a lovable rogue whose roguishness becomes less and less lovable. Like many pre-Code pieces, its primary interest is probably as a historical document, especially since it's one of the apparent minority of films (M-G-M's Marie Dressler vehicle Politics is another) that actually endorses Prohibition, whether with Sinclair's full vehemence or not. The fact that M-G-M adapted a Sinclair novel two years before declaring war on him -- the only other adaption of Sinclair I'm aware of between this one and There Will Be Blood is Disney's The Gnome-Mobile (!) -- definitely marks The Wet Parade, whatever its politics, as a pre-Code event. At almost two hours, it's an epic by early-talkie standards, as probably befits Sinclair's expansive vision. I probably shouldn't recommend it on its own terms, but no survey of pre-Code cinema is likely to be complete without it.

Wendigo Meets THE COUNTESS (Die Graefin, 2009)

2011-12-27T22:58:00.000-05:00

In modern folklore, Erzsebet Bathory is the female Dracula, the "Blood Countess." In history, the Hungarian noble was accused of shedding the blood of innocent girls to retain or regain her youthful beauty, not by drinking the stuff but by bathing in it. In fiction, she has been imagined countless times as a blood-drinking vampire, a force of evil persisting into the present day. In cinema, the past decade has seen a point-counterpoint debate over the historical countess's character. Juraj Jakubisko's Bathory, which Wendigo and I haven't seen yet, portrays its heroine (according to reviews) as a misunderstood Renaissance woman and a victim of chauvinism and superstition. In the following year, Julie Delpy, best known in the U.S. as the co-star of Beyond Sunrise and Beyond Sunset, released her version, an all-out auteur attack -- she wrote and directed the film and composed its score while playing the title role, -- that has it both ways to an extent. Delpy's Bathory is a victim, but also a victimizer, an aristocratic woman of her time if not ahead of it. We watched it last weekend on a Netflix stream.
In Delpy's account, Erzsebet was acclimated to cruelty at an early age, compelled to watch peasants being beaten and convinced that people deserved harsh punishments. It's not a big deal while she stewards her husband's lands (and apparently enjoys the love of a local witch) while he fights the Turks, but upon his death she begins to feel anxious. She's courted by another powerful noble, Count Thurzo (William Hurt), who covets her lands, but she covets Thurzo's son (Daniel Bruehl). The boy seems to love her sincerely, or at least with the naive ardor of youth, but dad's having none of it and sends the kid off to Denmark. He convinces Bathory that the boy had abandoned her for another, younger woman, making her hypesensitive about her looks.

Erzsebet takes her frustrations out on her servants -- and after beating one girl with a hairbrush she becomes convinced that the blood splashing on her face has softened her wrinkles. Her witch companion sees no such improvement, but the countess won't be dissuaded. Delpy has shown us that she saw an image of exaggerated aging in her mirror before; now the compensatory illusion launches her on a course of infamy. While the film is narrated by young Thurzo, who tells us only that he has heard or read many stories, we seem to be getting Delpy's objective account of what happened. In that account, Bathory becomes a torturer and murderer, but you can also see how the pressures of her political situation (she must keep an army in the field without compensation from the twittish King of Hungary) and the habits of aristocracy molded a woman who might have turned out differently in other circumstances. Delpy takes the legend to its conclusion, with the condemned countess walled into her bedroom, and adds a closing twist: the only time Bathory actually bites someone to draw blood, the victim is herself....

While The Countess is no vampire film by any stretch of imagination, Wendigo wanted to make it part of the series exactly because of Bathory's close linkage to vampire lore and literature going back to Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla and beyond. Dracula maven Raymond McNally has even argued that Bathory, rather than Vlad Tepes, may have been more influential on Bram Stoker's imagination via Carmilla. Delpy briefly teases that a decadent aristocrat who seduces, then submits to Bathory may be a real vampire -- his family is at least the subject of vampiric speculation -- but she isn't out to foreshadow any future vampiric career for the Countess. Nevertheless, since Bathory is a proto-vampire in the popular mind, any Bathory film is virtually a vampire movie.

Since we haven't seen the Jakubisko Bathory, our only point of comparison with an all-out Bathory movie is Peter Sasdy's Countess Dracula, and Wendigo considers Delpy's Countess superior to Sasdy on just about every level. Delpy is obviously more concerned with fidelity to history than Hammer was, though the sparsity of the record compels her to speculate at times, but even conceding artistic license to Sasdy Delpy outdoes his picture in script and direction. The most Wendigo will grant the Hammer is that Ingrid Pitt looks and sounds more like his mental image of Bathory, and may have been a better actress in the role overall than Delpy was. Wendigo thinks that Delpy may have bitten off more than she could chew in writing and acting a script in what to her is a second language -- English, that is. While she's given herself an out by emphasizing how cold Bathory was, her delivery too often seemed rushed and uninflected, as if she wasn't the best judge of her own line readings, though she's usually expressively convincing. What she does conveys effectively, and most impressively for Wendigo, is Bathory's complete failure to understand that she had done anything wrong. Delpy gives herself a speech like something out of Monsieur Verdoux in which the Countess complains that she's condemned for killing, but warriors are lauded -- but Delpy the director handles the speech just right, showing herself as self-righteous if not self-deluded.

As a director, she labored under some budgetary limitation that kept her from really showing us this mighty army Bathory's husband had created and the Countess herself maintained. Instead, Delpy gives us symbolic images of the husband fighting and chopping heads, then sitting on a pile of corpses -- one of the first hints of gruesomeness to come. Lack of extras aside, she makes excellent use of costumes, locations and sets to give a convincing picture of Bathory's aristocratic milieu.

Delpy must have realized that a Bathory movie would most likely be seen as a horror film, whatever her intentions. She doesn't flinch from violence and gore, including mutilated corpses and some alarming self-mutilation. One hair-raising early moment comes when she cuts her breast open in order to insert a lock of young Thurzo's hair -- that can't be healthy! She's also liberal in showing us mutilated corpses and suggestive scenes of torture, but she never really crosses the boundary into bad taste and silliness. The Countess is less torture porn than kin to the "history of cruelty" pictures I've reviewed on my own, where torture and bloodshed are emphasized to illustrate the injustice of the past. For today's audiences, however, it may prove neither fish nor fowl. The gore in it may be just enough to repel Delpy's usual American fans -- The Countess didn't get a theatrical release here -- but it may not go far enough over the top to meet the expectations of exploitation film fans.

Wendigo thinks that Delpy succeeded in her stated intention to show "the psychology of human beings when they're given power." Her Bathory is a product of her culture, where nobility as a class thought themselves divinely privileged and entitled, but treated each other just as ruthlessly as they treated peasants. Wendigo also detected some defining insecurity, if not self-loathing, in Delpy's Bathory, who after all starts cutting herself before she bleeds others. The insecurity may have come with her status as an aristocratic widow with an army whom the King owed money. As Wendigo notes, she was an inconvenient woman whom enemies might want to get rid of on the least pretense. There's also, ultimately, insanity -- a chilling scene inside her final prison when the Countess prays to God for vindication, and for blood. Worst of all, there's an utter absence of compassion, best illustrated for Wendigo when Bathory watches her most faithful lackeys brutally executed without batting an eye. That lack of compassion, which may simply have been bred out of her at an early age, belies her sanctimonious griping against double standards at the end, and in showing this Delpy is at her best as both actress and director.
While The Countess doesn't count as a vampire film, Wendigo would recommend it to vampire-film fans, who may imagine themselves familiar with the Bathory legend, as an introduction or approximation of the real "Blood Countess." It might be an object lesson. Erzsebet Bathory was not a supernatural monster, but this film's Bathory is indisputably evil without any redeeming glamour. Her life and career, at least as Delpy renders them, are sufficient material for a horror movie.

BATMAN RETURNS (1992): a film for Christmas

2011-12-24T20:47:00.001-05:00

It'll be twenty years and one month, approximately, after Tim Burton's second Batman movie opened when Christopher Nolan's third will roll out. Nolan's idea of a Christmas present to the moviegoing public has been a limited-release IMAX prologue to The Dark Knight Rises featuring his and actor Tom Hardy's interpretation of Bane, while the less fortunate can settle for a trailer that throws some of the spotlight on Anne Hathaway's turn as Selina Kyle. Some people have already chided Nolan for daring to stage a scene between Hathaway and Christian Bale at a costume party, as if the idea could only have been borrowed from Batman Returns. If so, it's probably the only thing Nolan will borrow from Burton's sequel. Watching Returns again for the first time in a while was a stark reminder of how different Burton and Nolan's visions are. The starkest reminder of all has probably been the year of hype for Rises. If a Batman fan felt that Nolan had one great task to do after his second film, that task would most likely be to give us his Catwoman. Yet Nolan has appeared far more interested in Bane, a preference he justifies (without disparaging or really saying anything about Catwoman) by his desire to give his Batman an antagonist actually capable of beating him up. I haven't been able to shake a feeling that Catwoman is an afterthought for him, and maybe even something imposed on him by the studio. Nolan keeps his cards close to his vest, however, and for all we seem to know about Rises much remains mysterious. Consider the speculation raging among comics fans that "Miranda Tate," the character played by Marion Cotilliard, must really be Talia, the daughter of Ra's al-Ghul and Batman's other great love interest in the funnies. We probably won't know until someone sees the finished film. My own view was that, had Nolan openly introduced both Talia and Selina Kyle in the same film, his film could have been an anti-Twilight, with fans of the two femmes fatales forming "Teams" to assert each favorite's superior worthiness as a Bat-mate -- though I must acknowledge that, for many comics fans, Batman's ideal woman is "None of the Above." In any event, Nolan has little interest in simply reproducing comics mythos -- no more than Burton had. His purpose has been to translate the Batman mythos into an almost-real 21st century context, which means going in the opposite direction from Burton. I could probably go on about Nolan, but I'm going to save most of that, and many of my thoughts about Batman and Catwoman, for next July. We have a film for Christmas to look at first.

Actually, I can't leave Nolan behind for the moment without questioning whether he'd ever want to set a film at Christmastime. By comparison, Batman Returns can be seen as the middle film of a Tim Burton Christmas trilogy, following Edward Scissorhands (in which immortal Edward assures Winona Ryder of a white Christmas every year) and the more obvious Nightmare Before Christmas. So there's probably more of a point to setting Returns at Christmas than there was for Die Hard, to offer at least one similarly set summer movie. While there's some of Burton's sometimes tiresome epater le bourgeoisie attitude in play, the most obvious motivation I can see is that Christmas is a season when lonely people are likely to feel lonelier -- an ideal time for the revenge tragedy Burton stages. At the same time, there's something almost subliminally blasphemous about Burton's Christmas story. Apart from the mockery of the Moses legend, Returns can be seen as pitting Batman against a collective, trinitarian antagonist -- three aspects of evil or sin.

1. The Father.

This is Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), in name an homage to the star of Nosferatu, in image an homage to The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. A department-store magnate and aspiring energy monopolist, Shreck is "the man who runs things," Gotham City's "mover and shaker," a Langian supervillain with the power to lift the accursed subterranean into the light of day and cast souls from the heavens, as well as a concerned parent. Evil incarnate otherwise, Max is always ready to sacrifice himself to protect his son Chip, if only because the youth is his legacy, his only continuity after death. He's a pharaonic figure in the movie's mock-Mosaic context, but his menace is undercut by his underwritten role. Walken's dialogue is sometimes literally reduced to a shrug, and as with all the villains, Shreck is too often reduced to speaking flippant if not infantile one-liners that make them sound stupid rather than sinister -- his response to one taunt from Bruce Wayne is "Yawn." I've always felt that Walken could have done a lot more with the part if Waters and Burton didn't turn Shreck into a moron at crucial moments. His behavior at the climax defies common sense; having just learned the secret identities of both Catwoman and Batman, and having his life threatened by the former, he might be expected to sit back and let Bruce Wayne eliminate the main threat, and then blackmail Wayne into compliance with his power-plant plans and perpetual stoogery thereafter. Instead, he shoots Wayne, wasting a bullet that might have saved his life if aimed elsewhere. Maybe Shreck ends up weak just because he's a Langian villain in what is, despite appearances, not a Langian film, thematically speaking.

2. The Son.

I remember reading an interview in which Burton confessed to being frightened as a kid by Charlton Heston's transformation from prince to prophet in The Ten Commandments. It's not hard to see Batman Returns as the byproduct of that primal fear, as its top-billed villain, The Penguin (Danny DeVito) is a child cast upon the waters, only to return with an agenda of biblical revenge upon his fellow firstborn. As a manufactured hero and candidate for mayor (a trope borrowed from the 1960s TV show) Oswald Cobblepot arguably becomes a kind of antichrist, with Max Shreck as his satanic sponsor. Early versions of the script established Shreck and Cobblepot as brothers, but the writers made the right call by turning Shreck into a kind of substitute father figure for the malevolent mutant. Burton's vision of the Penguin is a drastic departure from the dapper, fussy figure of the comics. You can dress him up to look like Dr. Caligari, but he remains an animal, cold-blooded but comically randy. Waters writes contradictory dialogue for him, sometimes utterly vulgar, sometimes verbally pretentious, that seems appropriate for Burton's stated theme of duality -- maybe Schreck pales in comparison because there's no real duality at play in him.

In any event, the Langian Schreck is eclipsed by Cobblepot, who despite his Caligarian formalwear is a classic Lon Chaney Sr. villain -- the grotesque outcast with a grudge against society and an occasional hint of a soul. There's not much hint of a soul in Burton's Penguin, but the director does make him an object of absurd pathos throughout, never losing sight of Cobblepot's desperate desire for acceptance (and sex) while reminding us that probably only the penguins ever really loved him. De Vito gives a performance worthy of Chaney, working the suit and the makeup for all they're worth. Even though he was certainly cast for his physical attributes and abrasive persona, he succeeds in making Cobblepot a distinct personality, or at least an ideal embodiment of Burton's dualist-animalist vision.

3. The Holy Ghost.

A few weeks ago I bought the Japanese ghost story Kuroneko during a Barnes & Noble Criterion Collection sale. I haven't watched the film yet, but the synopsis was a twenty-years late "a-ha!" moment. In Kuroneko a mother and daughter are raped and murdered by marauding samurai, but are revived by -- you guessed it -- cats licking their wounds. In the Japanese film, apparently, it's clear that the the women are undead, animated by cat spirits but retaining their human memories. We can assume that Burton, Waters or Sam Hamm either saw this 1968 film or were aware of the cat-spirit concept from Japanese folklore and applied it to Selina Kyle. Michelle Pfeiffer's character is an even more drastic departure from her comics template, since the movie's Penguin is at least still the leader of a criminal gang. Burton's Catwoman is an all-out avenger, even pausing before her campaign against the Shreck empire to play vigilante, if only to rebuke the victim-to-be for being a version of her own former mousy self. Burton seems uninterested in crime as such, the nearest thing to a conventional criminal in Returns being the businessman Shreck. But his approach allows him to cut to the quick in the matter of Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne. He can dispense with the questionable notion that opposites (criminal and crimefighter) attract. As Bruce Wayne himself says, he and Selina are essentially the same. His tragedy is his failure to realize that their exact sameness makes a happy ending impossible. They're both "split, right down the center," but the split makes it impossible for either, despite Wayne's own desperate proposal, to go home to a fairy-tale castle together -- leaving aside the likelihood that Selina doesn't even belong on this earth, that her kingdom is no longer of this world.

In a way, neither does Bruce. His commitment to his avenging path had already cost him a lover before Returns even starts, and it has left him a kind of living ghost -- not the strutting playboy Christian Bale has portrayed -- brooding in darkness before the Bat-Signal stirs him into action. His romance with Selina belies his claim that his romance with Vicki Vale failed because she couldn't accept the "two truths" that define him. Selina comes to understand them all too well. If anything, she's split more profoundly than Bruce, as her crudely sewn and instantly fraying costume illustrates. After indulging a cruel streak we'd seen even before her trauma, she interrogates herself in a shop window, asking, "Why are you doing this?" In the end, she sees no choice but to do it. When she says she couldn't live with herself if she accepted Bruce's proposal, does she mean only that she can't accept leaving Shreck alive or, worse, that she doesn't deserve the happy ending Bruce self-deludingly offers? A supernatural reading of Returns would require her to follow through and destroy Shreck, that being her sole mission on earth as the wrath of God. An animalistic reading of the sort that Burton preferred at the time -- Selina as essentially a cat -- wouldn't be inconsistent with the supernatural reading of her as a cat-spirit. The dualistic reading is tragically pessimistic about the possibility of harmony between any two people. A part of each of us yearns for it, but another part always seems to want something else. That's why Bruce ends the first Burton film alone atop a tower while Alfred chauffeurs Vicki below -- and why Selina ends the second equally elevated and equally alone (in a late yet appropriate addition) while Bruce rides dismally in the limo. Christmas only heightens the pathos, but Burton's refusal of reconciliation, his insistence that love can't conquer all, makes Batman Returns an anti-Christmas movie, as might befit a June release -- unless indulging your pity is your idea of a holiday exercise.

Christopher Nolan's great project has been to modernize Batman, to release the character from the grip of retro sensibilities. If the beloved animated series that began shortly after Batman Returns seemed to lock Batman in a film-noir world, albeit with superscience enhancements, Burton's sequel looked further backward to the sensibilities of silent cinema. Apart from some early CGI (including a well-publicized "stunt Batman" for flying scenes) and a song by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Returns may as well be eighty rather than twenty years old next year. It's a monumental relic of the era of massive handmade sets -- Bo Welch's cityscapes are an improvement on Anton Furst's Oscar-winning abstractions. Too much CGI in the intervening generation gives me an even greater appreciation for the craftsmanship on display here. Danny Elfman's music should be making the transition from dated to timeless any year now. He was practically a musical genre in his own right for a while, if not a cliche, and the Returns score remains one of his best. Speaking of The Ten Commandments, did anyone else ever notice a similarity between Elfman's four-note Batman motif and Elmer Bernstein's Wagnerian opening notes (DUH, duh duh-DUH!) for the DeMille film? Finally, I can't leave the subject of Burton's Batman without doing justice to Burton's Batman. Cating Michael Keaton was a casting masterstroke, making clear that Bruce Wayne would not fight crime primarily with brute force while investing the character with that tense introspection of which comedians are often capable. I also happen to think his Returns gear is the best movie Batman costume to date. Keaton is the actor least burdened with clunky one-liners here, and his scenes with Pfeiffer in and out of uniform are extraordinary. The "two truths" speech is especially good and Keaton leaves an enduring impression of a deeply troubled, if not disturbed, yet essentially good man -- despite Burton's neglect of Batman's traditional code against killing. It's too bad that Keaton never got many acting opportunities afterward. I've never bought the idea that he or Bale have been eclipsed by their more flamboyant co-stars, and despite all the attention I've given to his antagonists Returns is still essentialy a film about Bruce Wayne, what defines him and differentiates him from his apparent peers, and why he'll remain as we found him here.

Returns is still my favorite Batman movie (Nolan's Dark Knight is the runner-up), sometimes in spite of itself. Waters's clunky dialogue pales in comparison to the screenplay's awkwardly edited chronology. Consider this: Selina Kyle has to go to Max Shreck's office at night to prepare the paperwork for Shreck's meeting with Bruce Wayne the following morning. That night, Shreck throws Selina out the window and she becomes Catwoman. The next morning is when Shreck stages the kidnapping and Penguin's rescue of the mayor's baby. We see Bruce Wayne watch news reports of the event. Penguin is set up at the Hall of Records to research his parentage, and one night a now-suspicious Batman cruises past the place. In another daytime scene Cobblepot visits his parents' graves and talks to the press. We see newspaper coverage of the scene. That night, presumably, Catwoman makes her first appearance to save a woman from a mugger. The following morning is when Bruce Wayne finally arrives at Shreck's office. Between the night of Selina's "death" and "next morning," an unlikely minimum of four days have passed, and it was probably quite a few more. How hard would that be to fix? For a long while, and maybe still, narrative wasn't considered Burton's strong suit. Returns often moves forward by laborious contrivances. Why, in the middle of a fight with Catwoman, does Batman remark that "mistletoe is deadly when you eat it?" The answer is that Burton needs a way for Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle to discover each other's secret identities at the same moment, and the mistletoe couplet (answer: "A kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it") provides that. This is not a well-made plot, but the payoffs often justify the contrivances. The Max-querade Ball scene, where Bruce and Selina are the only guests not wearing masks, yet are unmasked to each other via the mistletoe couplet, is a poignantly devastating moment, no matter what it took for Burton to get us there. Burton's purpose was to give us visual and emotional spectacle, and against the odds he succeeded on both counts.
Compared to Nolan, Burton had what now seems a healthy reticence toward making Batman relevant to the contemporary world. Burton's Batman films are unrepentant fantasies unbound by any reality principle. Nolan has done great things with the concept, but he seems to sacrifice a lot of its potential in doing so. The two directors have profoundly different notions of what Batman is all about, and that's bound to influence each man's notion of what Catwoman is all about. For Nolan, time will tell and the clock is ticking. Burton has set the standard, but let's reconvene in seven months and consider this all again. For now, come what may, Merry Christmas and goodwill toward men ... and women.

Straight from the source -- WarnerBrosPictures presents the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises.

OSSOS (1997)

2011-12-23T19:19:00.003-05:00

Pedro Costa is probably the best director in Portugal under the age of 100. I first started noticing his name a few years ago when film critics were touting his Colossal Youth as one of the greatest yet little-seen films of the decade. That film is now canonized in the Criterion Collection as the final installment of a trilogy of films set in the impoverished Fontainhas section of Lisbon. That trilogy began with Ossos ("Bones"), which reminded me in content of the tales of lowlife youth made by the Dardenne brothers in Belgium. It's the story of the people caught up in a young, poor couple's crisis over a newborn baby. Neither mother (Mariya Lipkina) nor father (Nuno Vaz) has any real idea of what to do with the baby, whom Costa often shows lying around like a piece of junk or mislaid clothing. The most the dad can think of is to carry it around as a panhandling aid. He begs for money to get food for the baby, then spends it on booze. The baby ends up in a hospital, pried by force from the father's hands, and its treatment brings a nurse, Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), into the story. She's more capable and probably more willing to take care of the baby than either of its parents, but the father is determined to make money off the transaction. If he can't sell it to Eduarda, he'll try someone else. The plot is such that the young mother ends up working a day as Eduarda's cleaning lady, finishing her shift by attempting suicide via the kitchen oven. The compassionate nurse tries to befriend this wretch, only to discover the connection between the girl and the guy with the baby who uses her apartment as a crash pad. This connection is already all too well known to the girl's friend Clotilde (Vanda Duarte, a real-life slum dweller and heroin addict who would play herself in Costa's follow-up film), who also figures out that oven's destructive potential....

It's squalid stuff, but Costa aestheticizes it to an almost alarming degree. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel have maximized the slum's picturesque potential; you can tell that they've combed every corner to find the best camera angles, the most cinematic colors and textures of buildings. Ossos has a paradoxical beauty that's perhaps intended as an aid to compassion, and the actors often become icons of mood, frozen in long, mute close-ups. Costa clearly has a powerful pictorial sense, but his film left me wondering whether his painterly compositions honestly represented the experience of living in Fontainhas or the way its people see their slumscape. A rougher, less thoroughly composed style might have been more appropriate, but that depends on Costa's ultimate purpose. Whatever my qualms, Ossos was a beautiful film to look at, and often effectively so. Costa works in a European style that requires attentive viewing, and his direction is assured enough that your attention is usually justified. It's also worth suggesting that Costa himself may have had second thoughts about his approach, since the later Fontainhas films, In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, abandon the widescreen format while reportedly retaining a distinctive aesthetic identity. I was impressed enough by Ossos to see how those other films look.

This trailer uploaded by CineLuso is much more edit-happy than the film itself -- those opening shots of the guy walking down the street are from one long tracking shot -- but it does give you an idea of what goes on in the film. Check it out.

DRUM BEAT (1954)

2011-12-21T22:05:00.000-05:00

Among fans of 1950s Westerns, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher have their multitudes of champions, so I always like to say a word for Delmer Daves. If not their peer, Daves was definitely the third master to emerge during the genre's golden decade. Like Mann and Boetticher, Daves's western work was chronologically specific to the decade, spanning from Broken Arrow in 1950 through The Hanging Tree in 1959 before he switched to romance pictures like A Summer Place. Often his own writer, Daves was arguably more of an auteur than his peers in terms of creative control, and his name meant enough to be placed above the title of his big-budget Cinemascope western, a star vehicle for an Alan Ladd fresh from Shane and a kind of perverse do-over of Broken Arrow. But while that film established an archetype of a noble Indian in Jeff Chandler's Cochise, Drum Beat gives us Charles Bronson as an intransigent monster who predictably steals the film from Ladd and captured Daves's imagination in a way that muddies whatever message the director meant his movie to have.

"The phrase or slogan of 'peaceful co-existence' is fastening on the public mind in a drum-beat sort of way, beginning softly, slowly, and increasing in tempp and force....The slogan needs exact definition. 'Peaceful co-existence,' conceivably, could become peace-at-a-price -- any price!

The Milwaukee Sentinel, Nov. 18 1954.

The metaphor is just a coincidence -- the sort of thing you get when you search for "Drum Beat" circa November 1954 on the Google News Archive -- but it gives you an idea of the political environment in which Drum Beat was released, with the Cold War still going strong despite Joe McCarthy's fall from grace. Daves had made a film about a peacemaker. In 1872, Johnny MacKay (Ladd) has been summoned to Washington by President Grant. In an interestingly awkward scene, a guard outside the White House invites McKay to stroll right into the Executive Mansion. In the lobby, an old man notes his gun and knife and asks if he means to shoot the President. The oldster goes on to joke about Grant's smoking and drinking before identifying himself as the President's father. Grant himself ushers McKay into a lavish sitting room, where he commissions MacKay to negotiate peace with the Modoc tribe in the Lost River valley. There's already a treaty, but war chief Captain Jack (Bronson) refuses to acknowledge it. MacKay will have to deal with Jack despite the skepticism of a pacifist minister who champions Indian rights. Jack calls himself a captain because he collects pieces of army uniforms and decorates himself with medals plundered off military victims. Not all Modocs agree with him, while some are even more extreme than he, but he bullies and blusters his way to power. He also seems to have some white settlers under his control, having provided them with Indian wives. There's an air of appeasement in the valley that might make 1954 viewers see Captain Jack as a stand-in for the Commies, and his success as an insurgent against incompetent army attacks also makes him a kind of prophecy of the Vietcong and other guerrilla foes of America. But the message of the movie seems to be that we should never stop trying to negotiate peace with hardcases like Jack, no matter how risky it becomes -- and in Jack's case, it's very risky for an erstwhile Indian fighter like Johnny MacKay, who upholds the President's policy despite demands for violent reprisal from hothead whites, one of whom (Robert Keith) starts a war with a vengeance shooting of the Modoc who murdered his wife.

For the record, Daves didn't write Broken Arrow. It's possible that his Drum Beat screenplay is a critique of what was probably still regarded as his greatest triumph as a director. He seems to consciously retreat from the noble-Indian archetype, forefronting a savage enemy who talks in the still-convention pidgin Injun lingo. Indeed, Daves stages scenes in which Captain Jack confronts the brother-sister team of good Modocs, Manok (Anthony Caruso) and Toby (Marisa Pavan) in a Modoc camp -- and they all talk what Jack calls "Boston English" at each other. Jack even tells his supporters at one point to talk amongst themselves in Boston English so the rest of the Modocs won't know their plans. It's especially embarrassing to see Bronson talk this way after seeing him play a chief without the dialect in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, but his whole performance here (apparently in his first role under his new stage name) is wildly over the top, yet unfocused. Most of the time Jack is a Magua-esque villain, but there's an odd moment when he's nearly convinced to negotiate peace sincerely, only to be bullied back into intransigence by one of his underlings. Finally, after presenting Jack as an iredeemable monster through most of the picture, Daves stretches out the finish after MacKay captures Jack alive so Ladd and Bronson can have a scene comparing their visions of the afterlife and the two men can shake hands before Jack is hanged, as if the "Captain" had been a noble adversary all along. It's as if Daves didn't know what to make with the character after Bronson was through with it, and the auteur's confusion makes Jack's symbolic role, if he really has any, even more unclear. The only clear message that survives the story is the idea that individuals, not entire populations, are to blame for war. This point is made when MacKay criticizes calls for all-out extermination of the Modocs made after Jack had treacherously attacked McKay himself and other negotiators. Daves may not be as sensitive as his Broken Arrow collaborators, but he doesn't want to be seen as an Indian-hater either. He even teases a Broken Arrow style romance between MacKay and Toby, though the hero's heart ultimately belongs to a white girl, and Toby gets her head bashed in with a rock.

When Daves later cast Alan Ladd in The Badlanders, a Westernization of The Asphalt Jungle, the star promptly had the picture stolen from him by Ernest Borgnine. The record suggests that Daves had little more idea what to do with Ladd, for different reasons, than he had for Bronson. Part of the problem with Drum Beat is that the picture has a story, but not a plot. That is, Johnny MacKay never develops after that promising scene in the White House, and Ladd quickly reverts to his typically inert self. If you wonder why he never really capitalized on Shane, here's part of the proof. More might have been made of the romantic triangle, but Daves is so mesmerized by Bronson's rampage that Pavan interacts with him more and Audrey Dalton, as the white girl, practically disappears from the picture. If Drum Beat is about the difficulties created by an intractable leader, that character itself created crippling difficulties for the picture. That insoluble problem wastes Daves's characteristically scenic location work -- a few soundstage scenes notwithstanding -- but then again Encore Western's typical pan-and-scan presentation was a waste of the film's pictorial splendor and some of its dramatic energy. It might suffice as an outdoor adventure -- Ladd and Bronson have a nice little fight while being carried down a rushing stream and there's a neat portrait in futility as the army storms Jack's hilltop stronghold and is shot to pieces -- but Drum Beat is the weakest Daves western that I've seen so far and regrettable proof that while Daves still deserves recognition as the third master of Fifties westerns, he's not really the equal of the other two.

THE MEDUSA TOUCH (1978)

2011-12-19T19:24:00.000-05:00

"I have a gift for disaster," says Richard Burton, late of Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Klansman, among others, and from that point -- probably as soon as the trailer started playing -- Jack Gold's movie was a sitting duck for reviewers. Burton plays John Morlar, a man seen mostly in flashback after his head is bashed in (shades of The Assassination of Trotsky!) to start the picture. Euro-detective Brunel (Lino Ventura) has to figure out whodunit as a comatose Morlar clings to life. Fortunately, Morlar left plenty of notes. These lead Brunel to Dr. Zonfeld, whom he's shocked to discover is a woman (Lee Remick). Sacre bleu! Are they that backward in France? But in Brunel's defense, Zonfeld was a man in the source novel by Peter Van Greenaway. In any event, the doctor describes a tragic nut who had grown convinced that he had somehow willed the deaths of his parents, a hateful schoolteacher, and so on. Fine, but unless someone believed him, why would anyone try to kill him? There are more plausible suspects, like the client attorney Morlar got convicted thanks to an insulting, unpatriotic rant in court. There's a neighbor who just might blame Morlar for his wife jumping out a window. On the other hand, could Morlar do what he thought he had? To find out, Brunel learns about telekinesis and American and Soviet experiments along those lines. If Morlar had such powers, some superpowers might well be interested in him. But was he telekinetic, merely clairvoyant, or simply insane? If he did have powers, his jumbled notes might prove far more menacing than they seemed at first, especially since they seem to refer to an upcoming royal event. The more Brunel learns, the more that knowledge appears to establish the motive for murder -- and the more tempted he is to become complicit in murder....

Telekinesis was the secular diabolism of the 1970s, a variation on the devil's power to make bad things happen without the baggage of God and his inevitable victory. For every Exorcist or Omen or Holocaust 2000, it might seem, there was a Carrie, or The Fury -- or The Medusa Touch. Marvel Comics was ahead of the curve here, having cast a telekinetic in its X-Men comics in the 1960s, and that may have been just one expression of the idea of telekinesis as a mutation of modernity. Whatever its sources in pop culture or pseudoscience, telekinesis was a godsend, secularly speaking, to Seventies cinema. But it didn't guarantee you an entertaining movie, and Medusa Touch goes out of its way to diffuse the potential excitement. The flashback investigation format is deadly as Ventura, presumably dubbed and cast on the strength of a similar investigative role in Francesco Rosi's Excellent Cadavers, plods from informant to informant to pick up each discrete anecdote of Morlar's career. It's a rare but perhaps predictably lifeless performance from a hero of French crime cinema, but no less lifeless are Remick as the doctor and Burton himself as Morlar. Supposedly sober at this time, if I remember the biography correctly, Burton still seems disoriented and confused here, but a script that's too coy about whether Morlar is innocently crazy or ultimately malevolent may be to blame. But while it's always good to have stars' names on the poster, acting is secondary to set pieces of death and destruction, from an out of control car flinging a couple off a cliff to a jumbo jet ramming a skyscraper. The effects are hit and miss, but at least the production made an effort, especially for the big climax at the cathedral. Harry Andrews proves more heedful of dire warnings than he would be in Superman, but despite all his efforts as a security man you can't do without a disaster, so down comes the masonry on the early arrivals -- Her Majesty was fortunately warned off in time. The collapsing goes on for maybe a bit too long -- it has to accommodate Ventura dashing to the hospital to confront the supposedly moribund Morlar -- but it's at least carried on with the typical apocalyptic enthusiasm of the era. I was also amused to see how extensive the TV coverage of the cathedral event and surprise disaster were. When Ventura catches the coverage on a hospital set, the camera angles are exactly the same (including views from the ceiling) as those we'd already seen in "real time." The omniscient TV cameras common to movies (and TV shows) are a minor pet peeve of mine, but they come with the territory. If Jack Gold and writer John Briley could have built things up with the same enthusiasm as they smashed things, Medusa Touch might have been more enjoyable throughout. Instead, it's a curio of Seventies genre cinema and more proof of Burton's unlucky talent for disaster during the decade.

Here's a trailer uploaded to YouTube by hideseek124.

R. (2010)

2011-12-18T18:56:00.000-05:00

Time for a change of pace -- so how about a Danish prison film? This debut film co-directed by Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm is as dark and merciless an entry in this genre as I've seen in a while, an uncompromising descent into hell. R stands for Rune (Pilou Asbek), who's in trouble as soon as he's left in his prison "house" because he'd stabbed a friend of one of the skinheads inside. He's hardly settled before he has to beat up "the Armenian" and bash the man's teeth in against a set of stairs in a suggestively sickening bit of violence -- the victim's face is wrapped in cloth so we don't see the worst. That still leaves Rune the low man on the totem pole, subject to constant humiliation and menace. A neat freak, he's soon put to work by the convicts cleaning toilets and the like while they mess up his "house" and draw obscene cartoons on photos of his girlfriend. Asbek's face is locked in a glower of perpetual desperation that seems entirely appropriate to his situation.

But R also stands for Rashid (Dulfi al-Jabouri), a Muslim con close to Rune's age who came in on the same transport and is stored with other Muslims on the level below Rune and the skinheads. Co-workers on the kitchen staff, Rune and Rashid figure out their own toilet-delivery system involving the shells of Kinder Surprise eggs to make themselves useful to the intra-penitentiary drug trade and lift some of the pressure off their heads. Theirs seems an unlikely alliance across ethnic and religous lines, but similar alliances are possible for the purpose of preying on the young convicts and betraying whatever group solidarity exists behind bars. The film demonstrates with grim certitude that it would make no difference had we followed Rashid rather than Rune through the entire picture, as their fates prove all too similar.

You could believe that Noer and Lindholm intended their movie as a corrective to Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete, the French film hailed as the best prison film of the past decade. Without disparaging Audiard at all, his tale of a young con's unlikely rise to power in prison looks like a melodramatic adventure tale compared to the miseries of R. While Audiard was working with a larger context of demographic change in the French underworld, Noer and Lindholm make their drab prison a nightmare of perpetual bullying adolescence. The banal decorations -- potted plants in the halls and such -- give the Danish pen a dormitory look that invites comparisons between the sufferings of Rune and the hazings of a private school. The cruel genius of the story is the way the directors present the intense Asbek as a ticking bomb, but thwart our expectation of release through some ultimate explosion. At a crucial moment, the focus shifts from Rune to Rashid to emphasize their commonality rather than either man's exceptional potential.

Even more cruel, perhaps, is the co-writers' determination not to reduce the trouble with prison to racial or religious conflict. Instead, they give us ample evidence that humanity itself, in the stunted form that flourishes in stir, is the essential problem, and that race or religion offer no real security to anyone, except possibly at the top of the parochial food chain. R's spiritual cruelty may turn off many viewers, but it's also the film's chief virtue -- take it or leave it. For the writer-directors it's a formidable debut, and considerable credit is also due to cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck and set decorator Holger Vig for creating a suitably bleak, often evilly banal environment for the story. Noer, Lindholm and Asbek won the big Danish movie awards this year, and without seeing their competition I feel confident that they earned them.

Here's a trailer -- with regrettably censored English subtitles, uploaded by NewTrailersUK.

Pre-Code Parade: Edward G. Robinson Roundup

2011-12-16T22:30:00.002-05:00

As long as TCM keeps dishing 'em out, I'll keep lapping them up. Last Monday was Edward G. Robinson's 118th birthday, and the Turner channel served up a daytime marathon of mostly lesser-known items from the filmography, ranging from his breakthrough year of 1930 through the late-noir period. For this occasion, let's look at four pre-Code pieces, two with Robinson in archetypal gangster mode, two in something closer to the Edna Ferber style, tracing the rise and fall of titans of enterprise.

Less than two months before the January 1931 release of Little Caesar, Robinson was the gangster heavy in Eddie Cline's THE WIDOW FROM CHICAGO. He's second-billed under lead actress Alice White in this peculiar comic revenge story from the co-director of many of Buster Keaton's classic silent short subjects. The set-up isn't exactly comic: White's cop brother is gunned down in a drive-by courtesy of Dominic (Robinson), nightclub owner and bootlegger supreme. The cops can't build a case against Dominic, so White takes steps on her own. Her brother had just conveniently told her about the daring escape from a moving train off a bridge made by supercrook Swifty Dorgan, who has been unseen ever since. Taking Dorgan's swastika-covered grip with her, which poor brother had kept as a trophy, White poses as Dorgan's widow, hoping that sympathy and her own good looks will earn her a job at Dominic's club and enable her to get dirt on the gangster. The plan works until Dorgan (Neil "Commissioner Gordon" Hamilton) makes good on his reputation by turning up alive. He can expose White's imposture, but since Dominic will only accept the wife's word as proof of Dorgan's identity the master crook goes along while planning a big hotel robbery for Dominic. White's vengeance scheme threatens to go off the rails when she shoots a cop in the back to protect Dorgan, but there may be a method to her madness.

Robinson doesn't exactly steal the film from White, but did steal top billing in some markets.

White is impossible to take seriously as an avenger, even when the film insists, and Cline maintains a comic, almost hysterically hard-boiled tone throughout -- practically every other line is an insult of some sort. Robinson is effortlessly domineering but relatively unthreatening; the overall comic tone allows him to be taken alive so he can make more wisecracks on his way up the river. The highlight is a gun battle between Dominic and the cops after they've raided his club and he's dimmed the lights. As the patrons panic the cops bring in searchlights, but when you know the lay of the place like Dominic, a cop turning on a light only makes himself a target. Even this nicely staged and shot action scene is interrupted by shots of Frank McHugh (in what must be one of his first turns as a comedy-relief lackey) seeking shelter and stoically slinking away from the spotlight. Widow is odd and awkward, as a star vehicle for a failed and forgotten star often is, but it retains historical interest as an early-draft version, albeit one of the latest, for the Warner Bros. gangster genre.

Once Robinson was established as a star, Warners guessed that the rise-and-fall gangster formula was translatable into other genres. In a period when big businessmen were still thought of as "robber barons," turning Robinson into a morally-conflicted entrepreneur seemed like a good idea. The first fruit of this transformation was Alfred E. Green's SILVER DOLLAR, released in December 1932. In this "based on true events" saga, Robinson is Yates Martin, a Colorado pioneer who accepts shares in a silver mine as payment for groceries from his store. He's practically forgotten about it when the miners return from making a strike and making Martin rich. Though it takes him a while to figure out the difference between silver and gold, he soon builds on his investment to become a silver tycoon, a philanthropist and a political force in the young state. He's naively ambitious in an almost lovably stupid way -- when asked to run for lieutenant governor he tells his wife he's just been made governor -- but begins to feel that the wife (Aline MacMahon) is a drag on his aspirations, especially after he's fallen for another woman (Bebe Daniels). The film won't be complete, however, unless the Robinson character falls and falls hard. Just as he's striving to corner the silver market the government establishes a gold standard, drastically reducing the value of silver and bankrupting Yates Martin in one stroke. While future films of this sort might be described as rise, fall and rise, this film and the next one end with the fall, without redemption or reconciliation. They play on the pathos of Robinson as a broken man, Silver Dollar ending on a Wagnerian note as he collapses in delirium on the stage of the grand opera house he built in Denver, with the reconciliation left to his two wives at the funeral. The film has decent production values reflecting the studio's desire to put the star over as a great and versatile actor. He's likable enough to make you regret Yates Martin's fall, but his performance and the film as a whole pale in comparison to Robinson's next effort in this line.

Green took the Silver Dollar formula to further extremes in I LOVED A WOMAN, released in September 1933. The title acquires bitter irony as the story progresses. Despite the poster art to your left, this is another period piece, reaching back to the early 1890s. Robinson plays John Mansfield Hayden, the young heir to a meatpacking fortune called home from his grand tour of Europe when his father dies. Young Hayden is something of an aesthete and contemptuous toward the business practices of his father's rivals. He's more concerned with becoming a philanthropist and indulging the charitable whims of his wife (Genevieve Tobin), the daughter of one of his new rivals. They appear to share a contempt for the corner-cutting that inflicts "condemned" meat on consumers, but Mrs. Hayden seems crestfallen as hubby's principled practices put his business further behind the pack. His own complacency is slapped silly when he falls hard for glamorously ambitious opera singer Laura McDonald (Kay Francis), who sees how inhibited he is and urges him (in a speech that could have been uttered in Baby Face) to become utterly ruthless in pursuit of his dreams. Hayden abandons all his scruples, scrambling to sell any meat he can sweep into a can to the troops bound for Cuba in 1898, earning a face-to-face rebuke from Teddy Roosevelt. To impress Laura, he becomes king of meatpackers while Mrs. Hayden seethes with hate. Hiring a detective to catch him in flagrante with Laura, she discovers before he does that Laura has been cheating on him all along with a younger man. The artiste's idea of love had never included fidelity, it seems, and she feels that Hayden still owes her, since he'd needed her to motivate himself to succeed in business. In his fury, he vows to become bigger than ever to prove that he never needed her -- and proves his point by becoming a war profiteer on a megalomaniacal scale, purchasing land and cattle around the world to feed the armies of World War I. The only problem is that the war eventually ends, and the sudden cancellation of so many orders leaves him short when the bills come do. He ends up a senile exile -- a strange prophecy from Robinson and Warner Bros. of Al Capone's end -- failing to recognize Laura when she visits him in Greece, where the film began. He doesn't even get the dignity that comes with death, as the film fades out on him lapsing into troubled sleep. As in Silver Dollar, the refusal of any real redemption makes I Loved a real downer, and the sweeping character arc Robinson describes from idealist to pathetic criminal makes this film a somewhat soul-crushing experience. I Loved passes a judgment more bleak than we'd get in the crime-does-not-pay era of Code enforcement, when Hollywood would rather reward virtue than punish hubris. The pre-Code era's greater willingness to countenance tragedy is probably another point in its favor.

Curiously, while Robinson played businessmen in tragic mode, his gangster character turned comic in Roy Del Ruth's THE LITTLE GIANT, released in between Silver Dollar and I Loved A Woman. This is one of Warner's pro-FDR propaganda films of 1933, though the political stuff is dealt with quickly at the onset. The movie opens with a news montage illustrating two recent revolutionary events, Roosevelt's election and the repeal of Prohibition. Following the news closely is John Francis "Bugs" Ahearn (Robinson), who reads the writing on the wall and quits organized crime. Arguably, Little Giant is the first "end of an era" gangster film, though the effect isn't elegiac but comically optimistic as Robinson embodies the nation turning a corner toward a new deal. His abandonment of crime symbolizes the nation's commitment to follow FDR on the path to renewal while leaving open the question of injustice. This becomes clear as Ahearn heads to California to retire in luxury amongs the horsy set, only to learn that some criminals are still operating in broad daylight. These are the criminals of high finance, represented by the predatory Cass family, who ironically see Ahearn as an easy mark. The really ironic thing is that they're right; the reformed gangster is so eager to make an impression on the rich that he guilelessly walks into a trap, stamping him even more as One Of Us. Pretty Polly (Helen Vinson) is the lure to catch Bugs's money, which the Casses hope he'll invest into their shady investment bank, which has been issuing bad bonds for some time. Bugs is so hot to go legit that he blindly buys into the scheme, against the advice of his friendly realtor (Mary Astor), whose family fortune was wiped out by the Casses, reducing her to renting out her mansion, without admitting her desperate ownership, to Ahearn. Finally realizing what a sucker he'd been, Bugs fights back the Chicago way, within limits, in an amusing reversal of the vigilantism usually directed at gangsters in 1933 movies. Probably the most "pre-Code" of all these films, Little Giant is a testimony to how beloved Robinson had become among moviegoers as a gangster. He never has to answer for whatever misdeeds he perpetrated as a bootlegger, and never seems in danger of prosecution once Time magazine exposes his presence in California, except for holding the bad Cass bonds. In this film, the New Deal and Repeal are a kind of amnesty for the movie gangster, freeing him to take the fight to the economic royalists and ripoff artists who arguably made many more people's lives miserable. Robinson has a ball with his fish-out-of-water role and the charismatic challenge of playing a tough guy and a sap in one person. He forms a weird little pre-Code triangle with Astor and Russell Hopton, who plays Bugs's loyal sidekick Al. There's something virtually homoerotic about Al's devotion to Bugs ("Where papa goes, mama goes too" he says of himself) and a sense of damaged goods about the overall character that makes him more sympathetic than creepy. He gets the Pre-Code Line of the Film when Bugs invites him to admire an abstract painting he's just acquired. When's the last time you saw something like that? Ahearn asks. "Just before I quit cocaine," Al answers. The film goes a little too far into physical comedy, closing anticlimactically with Bugs's Chicago buddy wreaking havoc on a polo field, but it charms you into forgiving this indulgence. While Silver Dollar and I Loved A Woman demonstrate Warner Bros' feeling that Robinson was destined for better things, Little Giant suggests more persuasively that pre-Code audiences already loved Eddie just as he was.

To close, a trailer double bill. First, Warner Bros. uses every promotional device at its disposal, from rave reviews from contract players to the mailed fist of persuasion, to put over I Loved A Woman. BadMoJos uploaded this frantic preview to YouTube.

And here's a Little Giant trailer straight from TCM.

Wendigo Meets GANJA AND HESS (1973)

2011-12-14T22:38:00.005-05:00

My friend Wendigo is a vampire-movie fan but not necessarily a cult-movie fan. When I mentioned that Bill Gunn's notorious (and in some quarters admired) black vampire film was being shown on TCM last weekend, he confessed that he had never heard of it. Obviously a DVR appointment was in order, since for all that I'd heard of it, I hadn't seen it either. Except for seeing it on TV instead of in a theater, this would be an optimum presentation: letterboxed and uncut -- including full frontal male nudity for the finale. We could obviously have done worse. After its failed New York premiere (which followed a triumphant world premiere at Cannes), Ganja and Hess was cut down drastically, retitled several times over and marketed for exploitation. Now, however, there would be no excuses if the film failed to impress us.

From the beginning, apparently, audiences have had a hard time following Gunn's story. He had to write an angry letter to the New York Times correcting the reviewer on a fairly important plot point, and to this day the synopsis on Wikipedia doesn't quite jibe with what we saw. This is odd, since the movie spells things out pretty bluntly, and twice over at that. A set of title cards relate that Dr. Hess Green (Duane "Night of the Living Dead" Jones) has become an immortal blood drinker after being stabbed with a ritual knife from the legendary African kingdom of Myrthia. The fact of Hess's blood addiction is restated in the narration of a gospel preacher who doubles as Dr. Green's chauffeur. But some people clearly believe that what follows, the first act of the film, flashes back to how Green became a blood addict, though nothing that we can recall actually identifies the sequence as a flashback. What we saw showed Green's awkward interaction with his new assistant, George Meda (Gunn). Meda is suicidal; Green has to talk him out of a tree in one scene as a noose hangs prominently from a branch. Suicidal thoughts become homicidal as Meda does stab Green with the famous knife, but the doctor pops back up promptly. Finally, Meda shoots himself. As a puddle of blood forms beneath him, Hess hits the floor to lap up the stuff in a matter-of-fact manner. If this is his first vampiric act, he give no indication that he finds it unusual or disturbing.

Enter Mrs. Ganja Meda (Marlene Clark), who makes a dismal first impression on viewers by insulting Green's long-suffering butler and not seeming overly impatient about her husband's return from wherever he went. Where he went, she finally learns, was to Green's wine cellar freezer. By this point, Hess has already started putting the moves on the unwitting widow -- though he restricts his blood drinking to strangers whenever he hears the ancient Myrthian chanting on the soundtrack. Her shocking discovery only accelerates things. Soon enough Ganja becomes Mrs. Hess Green, and a blood drinker, thanks to Hess's work with the Myrthian knife. It's your standard romantic-vampire eternal-love fantasy, except it doesn't last. Hess gives Ganja a boy toy to play with, but seems to lose interest in the lifestyle -- if you can call it that. He ponders over Myrthian and Christian lore in search of the secret of self-destruction and seeks the reverend chauffeur's blessing, more or less, in church. Having offered Ganja eternal life, Hess now invites her to join him in death -- whether as an ultimate proof of love or as a moral imperative, but Ganja isn't so sure....

Putting it mildly, Wendigo calls Ganja and Hess "a strange movie." He appreciates what Gunn wanted to do and admires his ambition, but he suspects that the director got caught up in an art-for-art's sake approach that didn't do justice to his story. His various cinematic tricks only made the story difficult to warm to, and his lack of real visual style makes many scenes just plain dull. Gunn is a better writer than he is a director, and his actors are clearly talented -- anyone who's ever seen Night of the Living Dead would regret how few opportunities Duane Jones got, and Wendigo remembers Marlene Clark fondly from The Beast Must Die -- but Gunn the director leaves his cast and his own script at sea. He's really not very good at composing images, however fond he is of symbolism and decorating his sets with masterworks of art. A few scenes are nicely staged, like the suicide tree dialogue, and the closing shot of a naked running man has some real power, but too often the frame seems lifeless despite the actors' best efforts. Some aspects of the film are almost inscrutable. For instance, Wendigo has no idea where the film was supposed to be taking place. Everything seems American -- especially the church scenes -- but then you hear an obviously European siren all of a sudden. Was that just some avant-garde trick or joke? That would fit Gunn's sense of his own place in world cinema. Sadly, he had a higher opinion of his craft than the film justifies; he complained to the Times that he would have been hailed as a master had he been white and European -- but had that been the case he might only have been Jess Franco. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it probably wouldn't guarantee you a good review in the New York Times.

As a script, Ganja and Hess offered Wendigo more to praise. As always, he likes alternative visions of the vampire, and he likes that Gunn got through the film without ever calling Hess or Ganja a vampire. Since folklore gives us countless ways in which people can become vampires, Wendigo has no problem at all with the Myrthian knife backstory -- if anything, he would have liked more of that background. Speaking for myself, I'll throw in my admiration for Gunn's deromanticized approach to the vampire-seduction archetype and his denial of solace through love for his accursed protagonist. Overall, however, this vaunted artifact of Seventies cinema reminded us both to a distressing extent of Vampire's Call, the Nigerian vampire tale we reviewed a few weeks back. That was another case, albeit more extreme, of talent falling short of ambitious vision. Bill Gunn was clearly more ambitious, or at least more pretentious, than his Nigerian counterpart, but ambition, however impressive, doesn't translate automatically to realization. Ganja and Hess has to be judged by execution, not intention, and Wendigo has to judge it a failure as a film. At its worst, it struck him less as a feast for the eye than an icepick aimed at it. That may be too harsh, but on the other hand, the film has probably been given too much credit for intentions over time. If the idea of a good movie is enough for you, Wendigo might recommend Ganja and Hess to you.

Pre-Code Parade: HIGH PRESSURE (1932)

2011-12-12T19:29:00.000-05:00

William Powell and Warren William arrived at Warner Bros. around the same time, late in 1931, and shared the lot for about two years until Powell signed with M-G-M in 1934. Watching their Warners work this month -- Powell is TCM's Star of the Month, while the movie channel did a birthday tribute to William on Dec. 2 -- you get the impression that they must have competed for a lot of roles, since they often seem to be playing the same basic type. Each did take a turn at playing the then-popular detective Philo Vance -- Powell had been playing the role at Paramount earlier -- but the snob sleuth wasn't typical of either man's work at Warners. More to the point, Warren W. biographer John Strangeland relates that W.W. at least once inherited a role from W. Powell. The Dark Horse, one of W.W.'s signature films, was originally meant for W.P., but Powell was pulled, Strangeland relates, because his presence made it all too obvious that Dark Horse was a thinly-veiled and apparently unauthorized remake, with a change of milieu, of Mervyn LeRoy's High Pressure, Powell's second film for the studio. Does that make Warren W. and W. Powell interchangeable parts? Not necessarily. Knowing the inside story, and having seen High Pressure, I can see how the Dark Horse role was more a W.P. than a W.W. part.

Powell had a sort of bipolar screen persona, embodying contradictions and swinging between extremes, especially during the pre-Code era. Even afterward, he could be typed as a detective and a master thief at the same time. He could also be the embodiment of suave sophistication and a bum. W.P could play the extremes more broadly than W.W., from the evidence I've seen. Look at The Dark Horse again. W.W.'s flunkies tout him as the master political promoter of the age, but have to bail the star out of jail before he can go to work. W.W.'s offense is non-payment of alimony, and even behind bars he's fully functional and alive with schemes, working the cons into a frenzy to make an impression on his likely new clients. Compare that introduction with High Pressure. In the earlier film Frank McHugh plays basically the same role he does in Dark Horse as the great promoter's stooge. High Pressure opens with McHugh hunting the speakeasies for his master with an uneasy Jewish businessman, Mr. Ginzburg (George Sidney) in tow. The search has already gone on a while; "Worse than a needle in a haystack is a goy in a gin-shop," Ginzburg laments. They finally find Gar Evans (Powell) in a back room, dead drunk -- I mean Weekend at Bernie's drunk. Rumpled and unshaven, Powell is an effigy of himself, something McHugh can drop on the floor when the bartender informs him that Gar has run up a tab of over $100 -- and that's in 1932 money. "We don't want to buy him," Ginzburg protests, "We just want to rent him." Powell can touch bottom in a way I haven't yet seen Warren William do. His abjection, which proves to have something to do with romantic troubles, is a kind of metaphor for the country's depressed entrepreneurial spirit. But do we want this spirit awakened?

Gar Evans is a master promoter. He whips up interest in a business venture by giving it the appearance of already-achieved success and surefire growth. Properly groomed and sharply dressed after a lengthy steambath, he becomes an embodiment of prestige. A similar function is served by his stooge Clifford Gray (Guy Kibbee, who was retained and built up for The Dark Horse), little better than a bum himself out of season but an inexplicably impressive presence in suit and toupee -- he looks presidential. With Gray as front man, with rented space in a skyscraper, a pretentious board of directors (only short a few bank presidents; they've "been committing suicide so often there's only a few of them left.") and aggressive promotion -- Evans makes ethnically-coded pitches to Italians, Jews, Greeks, etc. -- the team drives up the stock price of "Colonel" Ginzburg's Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Company -- Evans dubs Ginzburg a colonel "because you don't look like a Southern gentleman." Gar's pitches are like revival meetings as he reminds his marks of the great men skeptics laughed at like Columbus and, indeed, the Warner Brothers. The whole purpose of it all, the reason Ginzburg pours a small fortune into Evans's coffers, is to drive up the stock before the company produces any rubber from sewage through Ginzburg's miracle process, for which he depends upon an eccentric professor with a degree in chemistry from the University of Northern Jefferson at Detroit. It's a name Gar knows well -- it is, in fact, a diploma mill he ran as a racket back in the Twenties. Suddenly under pressure from the Better Business Bureau to produce rubber, and with the established rubber interests (represented by Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton) eager to eliminate a challenger, Gar and Ginzburg's future, and perhaps their freedom, depends on a madman....or does it?

High Pressure certainly takes a conflicted view of entrepreneurship. Gar is our undoubted hero, but he's also an arch huckster, a promoter whose efforts are disproportionate to the worth of the products he promotes. He's a con man, but Mervyn LeRoy and his writers seem to be saying that the nation may well need some of the confidence hustlers like Evans can instill. Pushing Golden Gate Artificial Rubber may be "the rummiest thing you've done yet," as Gar's long-suffering girlfriend (Evelyn Brent) says, but the movie still gives him a bluffer's chance to save Ginzburg and cash out a winner. The bluffer (so the separately-filmed French version was called) may be the archetypal pre-Code hero, be he a high-pressure promoter like W. Powell or W. William or the Groucho Marx sort who can double-talk foes into submission. There's a clear-eyed cynicism behind the bluffer's canonization, a hard admiration not for the lie, but for the risk he takes. There's also a recognition that the con man has to con himself or else become a living corpse like Powell is at the start of this picture. Today's idolaters of entrepreneurship might not see High Pressure as a flattering picture, but in its peculiar winking way its as much a vindication of the entrepreneurial ethos, almost, as Atlas Shrugged. It probably helps to have William Powell as your hero, as much one here as when he plays the unstoppable bandit in Jewel Robbery. He keeps the picture hopping, and LeRoy puts him through his paces with punchy efficiency. It's another exemplary amoral romp from the days when all conventional moral bets seemed off -- and as for whether W. Powell or Warren W. could romp amorally with more gusto, the jury's still out, and I demand more evidence.

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (Nanjing! Nanjing!, 2009)

2011-12-11T20:55:00.001-05:00

The "Rape of Nanking" has been a hot topic in Chinese cinema lately. China's official nominee for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar this year is Zhang Yimou's Flowers of War, a high-profile international project thanks to the participation of Christian Bale. The presence of helpful Europeans (even Nazis) in the ravaged city has made the Massacre a popular subject worldwide. The German businessman John Rabe, the equivalent for China of a righteous gentile and a minor but important character in Lu Chuan's epic, was the subject of an entire Sino-German film in his own right a few years before Nanjing! Nanjing! appeared. The Massacre has the same appeal for Chinese, apparently, that the Holocaust has for Europeans and Americans, and its recent popularity as a cinematic subject may well reflect a little "Holocaust envy," that supposed feeling of jealousy toward Jews over their having suffered the worst thing that could possibly happen to a people. It's more likely, though, that the Chinese suffer from Holocaust Movie Envy, given how City of Life and Death is visually imitative of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List -- with a little Pvt. Ryan ultraviolence thrown in. On the other hand, filming the Nanking story in black and white makes sense, since it reproduces the immediacy of newsreels. Anyway, it's not the first Chinese film in recent times to take the monochrome approach; the more controversial Devils on the Doorstep did the same thing. Moreover, Lu Chuan's first object may not have been so much to imitate Spielberg but to answer a more recent, nearly monochrome film: Clint Eastwood's paean to the valiant Japanese, Letters From Iwo Jima. Nothing gets a Chinese riled up, I suspect, as a sympathetic account of Japan's war, and the recent spate of Nanking movies may be meant as a reminder to the moviegoing world of why Japan deserved everything it got by war's end. Chinese cinema has been unforgiving toward Japan for generations, from the stock Jap villains of kung fu films to the atrocity porn of films like Men Behind the Sun. Nanjing! Nanjing! takes the trouble to give us a "good Japanese," but he appears so exceptional that he does little to humanize the enemy in general; if anything, his example damns the majority further -- and that may be the point.

Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) is one of a number of characters, mostly Chinese of course, followed by Lu as the Japanese tighten their grip on the erstwhile capital city in 1937. We also encounter a plucky (not to mention lucky) Chinese child soldier and some members of John Rabe's Nanking staff, among others. I found Kadokawa the most compelling character simply because he wasn't just an archetype of resistance or suffering. He's not the first cinematic soldier to seem too sensitive for his job, but you can hardly blame him for his reactions -- you can blame his buddies for their complacency, their casual viciousness, their treating it all as a lark once the last patches of resistance are wiped out. By comparison, Kadokawa seemingly can't help forming personal bonds with people, especially the unfortunates, Japanese and Chinese alike, recruited or impressed into being "comfort women." A curious effect of this film is that, for all the wartime violence, which is, after all, the sort of stuff we've all seen before, what horrifies the most, more than the explosions, the hangings and the severed heads, is the treatment of the female victims. What the Nazis did for mass murder, it seems, the Japanese did for mass rape -- not so much industrializing it as systematizing it. Rape trails war everywhere, but the Japanese in World War II seem unique in apparently asserting their soldiers' entitlement to sex. Rape may have happened on a comparable scale as the Soviets drove through Germany, but we don't get the same impression of perverse order portrayed here, where the Japanese occupiers can flatly demand that the Chinese deliver up a quota of women for "comfort." The most profound moment of pathos in the picture is when, one by one, women raise their hands to volunteer so that the rest of the captive community will at least be promised food and supplies for the winter. Kadokawa encounters one of these women and, as usual, makes an attempt to be a gentleman. As usual, it's in vain. These women's experience is summed up when their naked bodies are dumped into a big wheelbarrow and hauled away by swastika-wearing flunkies. Never did the Japanese seem fitter allies for the Nazis.

Since resistance by the Chinese seemed futile at an early point, I spent the film waiting for Kadokawa to snap or rebel. The moment finally comes when it can help the child soldier and another of the main characters, and it's thankfully not overstated. It's more of a simple refusal followed by a more profound refusal. The effect remains contradictory; if Kadokawa is meant to give the Japanese a human face, the failure of the rest to emulate him, one way or the other, arguably dehumanizes them even further. But you can probably excuse a Chinese filmmaker for drawing that conclusion, history being what it is. People like Kadokawa will probably be exceptional in an army, however Chinese (or Americans, for that matter) might want to flatter themselves otherwise. That point easily gets lost in an atrocity film, the point of which is to highlight one nation's crime against another. City of Life and Death really hasn't much story to tell apart from the atrocity. Some characters survive, some don't; hence the American title. Kadokawa goes a long way toward breaking up the monotony, but viewers may find the film hard to get through just the same.

This is a stark triumph of production design and black and white cinematography, and Lu Chuan shows some mastery of widescreen composition in just his third feature. Nanjing! Nanjing! is definitely an eye-opening film for people unfamiliar with the Chinese theater of World War II and one of its vilest episodes, but it may make you avert your eyes as well. In any event, it sets a formidable standard for Flowers of War to match, and proves another compelling chapter in the global revival of World War II cinema.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE Revisited

2011-12-09T21:57:00.001-05:00

When I was a kid the local PBS station regularly ran the then-canonical works of early global cinema: the German Expressionist silent films and the Soviet montage movies. The station occasionally ran sound films, including the talking pictures of Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet montage pioneer of Battleship Potemkin fame. While my memories of his Aleksandr Nevskii are, unsurprisingly, much stronger, I feel certain that I first encountered his Ivan Groznii at this time. I have stronger memories of Part I from frequent showings on A&E, way back when the cable channel took the "Arts" part of its name most seriously. Oddly, I can't remember the channel running Part II, but the sequel always lagged behind the original more than normally. As film historians know, Stalin was a big fan of Part I, but had Part II put on the shelf and halted production on Part III, mainly because the sequel seemed to make Ivan IV ("Groznii" signifies something more like "awe-inspiring" than the modern sense of "terrible") simultaneously weak and vicious while discrediting by analogy the dictator's own project of consolidating absolute power. He famously complained that Eisenstein had made the Orpichniki, Ivan's corps of enforcers, into something like the Ku Klux Klan, the complaint being phrased in a way that proved Stalin no fan of The Birth of a Nation. Curiously, the despot suppressed the film but did not destroy it, and within a few years after Stalin's demise Part II was finally authorized for release. Its world premiere came in 1958, fourteen years after Part I appeared and ten years after Eisenstein's death. Turner Classic Movies recently ran the two parts back to back, and I took advantage of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the original and finally see the sequel in its entirety.

Part I reconfirmed my years-old impression that it was a stylistic step backward for Eisenstein after the epic power of Aleksandr Nevskii. It's an unsettlingly mixed bag, combining some of the most brilliant and powerful images in cinema with some of the worst. Deepening his collaboration with composer Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein envisaged the Ivan films in operatic rather than epic terms. The performances, especially that of star Nikolai Cherkassov, are far more theatrically stylized than even the bombast of Nevskii, and Part II is very nearly a musical in its reliance on song, dance and performance. At the same time, Eisenstein, filming Part I in 1943, is still thinking like a silent film director. He too often forces gestures and facial expressions to do the work of dialogue when speech could and should have done the work better. My case in point is a painfully extended two-shot of Lyudmila Tselikovskaya as the Tsarina and Mikhail Nazvanov as Prince Kurbsky, Ivan's vacillating vassal and would-be lover of the Tsarina. Ivan himself is on the brink of death from fever, and Kurbsky is making his case for himself as her next husband and Tsar. Into the frame looms Serafima Birman as Euphrosina, Ivan's wicked aunt, who wants her idiot son Vladimir to succeed to the throne. Interminably, the three actors roll their eyes at each other, the two women on either side of Nazvanov leaning closer together to intensify their staredown, while none of them says a word. Instead of Prokofiev, the sort of sound effects you might hear on the Cartoon Network seem more appropriate at this moment. It's unnaturalistic without any real artistic compensation; Eisenstein put too much faith in the ability of facial expressions to tell the story. He might have gotten away with it in an actual silent film -- it would at least have looked less freakishly awkward. Here, however, it marks him as a director who hasn't yet caught up with the times.

Were these actors ever tempted to kill a take by turning a baleful eye on the director?

He certainly deserved it.

Fortunately, the good moments outweigh the awful in Part I, which covers more time in more episodic fashion than the sequel. The main story thread is Ivan's effort to centralize power in his hands and break the traditional power of the boyar nobility, which is shown to have crippled Russia in the face of ambitious enemies to the west and east. The main story in movie terms is Cherkassov's intensely physical performance, an extreme departure from his relatively standard heroics as Aleksandr Nevskii. The influence of two John Barrymore films on Cherkassov's look and manner -- the silent Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and the talkie Svengali, have been widely noted. The Russian actor isn't impersonating Barrymore, however; Eisenstein's inspiration seems to have been purely visual, though you could argue that Cherkassov's gradual transformation from golden youth (he was 40 when he filmed Part I) into goat-bearded, lank-limbed gargoyle echoes Barrymore's degeneration from Jekyll to Hyde. Ivan's theatricality is more justified than that of the other characters, since the Tsar is always "on," so to speak, and always playing to the farthest reaches of any crowd he finds. An absolute medieval monarch is a strangely perfect match for a director more or less committed to Communism throughout his career, but then again, look at what, or more excatly, who Bolshevism resulted in in Russia. Historical context and Hollywood influence aside, Cherkassov's performance still goes down as one of the greatest ever by a movie actor.

Part II, as I hinted, is a more concentrated narrative and more successful as drama. Eisenstein proves himself an effective if slow learner as he proves himself capable of building and sustaining tension through sound and image. Early fears of anticlimax after Kurbsky abruptly disappears from the story (he was meant to return in Part III) are dispelled as Euphrosina makes her move to destroy Ivan and the Oprichniki in order to make a very unwilling Vladimir a pliant "boyar Tsar." Watching the story play out, I began to suspect that Stalin had been irked by the extent to which Eisenstein turns Vladimir, the Tsar's "worst enemy," into a tragically sympathetic character.

As the fool, Pavel Kadochnikov nearly steals the second half of the film from Cherkassov. As a guilelessly infantile antagonist, he pitches the part somewhere between Harry Langdon and John Cazale, readily revealing once plied with drink that some folks are out to get rid of his pal the Tsar. "And do you know who they're going to replace you with," he asks in the one truly funny moment in the picture, "You'll never guess!" Meanwhile, the oily Ivan is cooly preparing to send Vlad to his death, dressed in Ivan's own robes to confuse the assassin known to be lying in wait. The slow buildup to Vladimir's inevitable destruction anticipates Coppola's technique in the Godfather films, much as Vlad himself somewhat anticipates Fredo. Eisenstein's use of color heightens the tension as Vladimir trembles at the exit of Ivan's exceptionally colorful Oprichnik party pit while the assassin waits back in the black and white world of the rest of the movie -- the lurid color becomes Vlad's last security at the brink of the abyss.

Better still, Eisenstein knows how to top himself. The climax comes not when Vladimir is whacked, but when his mother, having seen someone in royal robes go down, charges in to declare the country liberated, practically kicking the corpse. The director knows how to milk this for all it's worth, not letting Euphrosina discover her mistake until after the living Ivan shows himself, letting her have a moment to ponder who that might be on the floor before she goes mad from the truth. That last act leaves me leaning toward Part II over Part I as the better film, but it's still a close call. Both films have their false notes but they're probably to be expected from an unorthodox director's unconventional approach to historical drama. While all Stalinist art has been said to really have an audience of one, I think the rest of us can still find something of value in the Ivan films. Even under the thumb of the dictator, Eisenstein made movies that are unmistakably his -- and the dictator even liked one of them. Whether that's a triumph or not, history must judge.

Wendigo Meets THE WISDOM OF CROCODILES (1998)

2011-12-07T21:15:00.001-05:00

Does it shock you that an American DVD distributor didn't think that The Wisdom of Crocodiles was a marketable title for a vampire movie? That's why it came out here as Immortality, which is actually, as Wendigo notes, a fairly questionable title. On cable TV Po-Chih Leong's movie has its original title back, and it was under that name that Wendigo and I saw the film for the first time last weekend.

It opens starkly with a car hanging from a tree and a narration by Jude Law recounting the time when he fell from a tree as a boy and hung desperately from a branch. On screen, Law plays Steven Grlscz ("grillsh"), who is next seen saving a distraught woman from suicide. This begins a romance consummated when Grlscz bites her neck, sending a spray of blood across a bedroom wall, and drinks her blood. He doesn't seem to benefit from it much. In some agony, he passes a strange crystal, which he saves alongside others, each matched with a woman's name. In a notebook he writes "despair."

The remainder of the film sees Grlscz close in on his next target, the asthmatic intellectual Anne (Elina "Nadja" Loewensohn), while police inspector Healey (Timothy Spall) pursues links between Grlscz and the previous victim, whose submerged body had turned up in a low tide. Grlscz does little to shake his pursuer, actually saving Healey from a street gang so he can have chats about good and evil. Meanwhile, he tells Anne that he needs not just blood to survive, but blood infused with healthy emotions like love. Without loving blood, his body will fall apart -- he already needs to wear a monitor to warn him when he forgets to breathe. The problem is how to get that right kind of blood. It seems as if he'd like Anne to offer herself freely, out of love -- but I bet we'd all like lots of things. The problem for Anne is that Steven's life does seem to be in her hands. He can't quite bring himself to just take her, and if she doesn't give herself to him, he'll die. Will love prevail? -- and should it?

Wendigo realized quickly that this wasn't the typical vampire film. Steven Grlscz isn't a folkloric or fantasy vampire; he comes without mythos, seeing himself as a genetic "mistake." He has none of the traditional vulnerabilities, freely handling crosses and wandering about by day. This makes him more of a generic predator, but also a kind of outsider by virtue of his unique condition. Wendigo recognized his profound alienation, expressed in his typical observer's stance and his habit of taking notes on things. There is no "why" Grlscz is the way he is; there's no medical mystery for us to put together and no hint of a cure. To the extent that it let you draw your own conclusions about Grlscz's condition, or his nature, Wendigo felt that the film respected our intelligence. He found it well written (author Paul Hoffman adapted his own novel), naturalistically plotted and well acted across the board. He was especially impressed by Loewensohn, who was much better here, he thought, then in her own turn as a vampire in Nadja. As this film's vampire, Jude Law gave an interesting, understated yet physically well-imagined performance. He seems to have a very clear idea of what makes Grlscz tick and how to express it to emphasize his alienation and alien-ness without submerging his natural charisma. Whether he's crouching in preparation for an attack or showing off his ability to write with one hand and draw with another, Law's every move seems carefully thought out, whether on the reptilian, mammalian or human level, as is appropriate for someone who apparently needs to will himself to live sometimes. Timothy Spall is also very good in a rare un-weaselly role with homoerotic implications -- at least Wendigo inferred some from the closeness that develops between detective and suspect.

There's no question as far as Wendigo is concerned that Steven Grlscz is a vampire. He meets the minimum criterion: he needs to feed on blood to the point of another person's death in order to survive. It doesn't matter whether he's dead or not, nor is any magical, religious or xenobiological explanation of his state necessary. Grlscz joins a long, distinguished list of fictional "living" vampires, and his lonely singularity makes The Wisdom of Crocodiles another intriguing variation on that theme.

But as the DVD distributor must have asked: what is the wisdom of crocodiles, anyway? Wendigo isn't certain of a single answer -- it could refere to Grlscz's cunning, or to the superior wisdom of predators who don't get their emotions confused, or to the supposed prevalence of the "reptilian brain" in every person. But since we all have a crocodile in us, if you believe Steven Grlscz, Wendigo leaves it to you to see the film and figure it out for yourselves.

Check out a quickie trailer uploaded to YouTube by Vanillaicecream87.

Harry Morgan (1915-2011)

2011-12-07T13:03:00.001-05:00

The last surviving performer, in all likelihood, from many a classic Hollywood film of the 1940s, Harry Morgan could have drunk many a tontine toast like Col. Potter did in one episode of M*A*S*H. Morgan, who died today, long outlived even the memory of the radio humorist Henry Morgan, whose claim on the name obliged the younger actor fresh from Broadway to adopt the more familiar Harry to avoid confusion. He'll be remembered for his television work, particularly for the Dragnet role he re-created for Dan Aykroyd's travesty and his second role on M*A*S*H following an early guest turn as an insane racist last seen singing "Mississippi Mud." But his runty intensity made him an attraction throughout the Forties, whether as Henry Fonda's sidekick in The Ox-Bow Incident, Charles Laughton's unlikely yet mutely menacing bodyguard in The Big Clock, the easily-turned simpleton bandit in Yellow Sky, or the lame idiot conscience of Dark City. Others could name many more memorable performances in film and TV alike. They'd be enough to merit mourning for the actor even had Morgan never been promoted to Maclean Stevenson's replacement on the beloved service sitcom. He was a great character actor who might have been lost to posterity in an era thick with greatness had not his later TV success led people to recognize him in movies and discover his full range. With his passing, the golden age of Hollywood seems just a little further away.

Pre-Code Parade: the world of Warren William

2011-12-05T17:58:00.001-05:00

Judging by his career arc, you could argue that pre-Code cinema made Warren William a star, while the coming of Code enforcement by the Breen Office late in 1934 doomed him to decline. Joining Warner Bros. late in 1931, after having briefly worked the movies nearly a decade earlier, the 37 year old William rose like a rocket through 1932 from character roles to stardom, arguably peaking in that year and remaining a top star for at least another two years before slowly descending into B-moviedom as the star of Columbia's Lone Wolf series and one of the overqualified supporting cast of Universal's The Wolf Man. Turner Classic Movies noted William's 117th birthday on December 2 (he died in 1948) with a daytime festival of his films, several of which allowed me to trace the step-by-step rise of the man many deem one of the definitive pre-Code stars.

Appropriately enough for an actor typed as a charismatic rogue, William started 1932 by virtually stealing a film from its intended star. Archie Mayo's UNDER EIGHTEEN was designed, the publicity tells us, to launch Marian Marsh as a top-billed star. Perhaps best remembered today as Trilby, the victim of John Barrymore's Svengali (also directed by Mayo) Marsh got a high-profile push from Warners throughout 1931 as a prelude to her debut as a leading lady. In Under Eighteen Marsh is a teenager (the actress herself was just 18) scarred or scared by her sister's unhappy marriage into a precocious cynicism and a contempt for marriage, despite her boyfriend's insistence that you can't predict or assume what'll come around the corner in your own life. Her brother-in-law is a bum more interested in billiards than working, until he and his wife have to move back in with her family. Traumatized by a fight that ends with the hubby hitting her sister offscreen, Marsh takes it upon herself to facilitate a divorce by raising the necessary $200 in legal fees. Neither her boss at the clothing store (she's a seamstress) nor her boyfriend are willing to give or loan the money, so she takes a desperate chance to get the dough from Raymond Harding (William), a high-living Broadway producer who mistook her for a fashion model when he visited the store. Marsh takes the elevator to a pre-Code wild party by a penthouse pool, -- someone throws a string of pearls into the pool and practically everyone dives in after them -- is made a little tipsy, and is propositioned by William before the boyfriend (Regis Toomey) storms in and punches William in the chest. "You hit rather low," William remarks before collapsing. Disaster impends before a series of lucky cop-outs close the picture: William recovers and sends Marsh the $200 -- he had actually suffered food poisoning; the boyfriend had already decided to give her the money; and another $200 from her boss arrives moments later. But none of it is necessary: her sister and brother-and-law are reconciled after he wins more than a grand in a billiards tournament, finally proving the boyfriend's point about not presuming the worst. It's a silly finish and the film clearly deflates after William, fourth-billed here, leaves it. There's a charge, of menace or something else, between him and Marsh that is absent from her scenes with the callow, self-pitying Toomey -- the attitude seemed to come with the actor, since it cost him Loretta Young in She Had To Say Yes, a prime piece of pre-Code work in its own right in which the usually underwhelming Lyle Talbot got the girl. As for William and Marsh, Warners promptly set to work refining the chemistry that sparked briefly here.

For Roy Del Ruth's BEAUTY AND THE BOSS, released four months later, William has moved up to second billing behind Marsh, but his is really the dominant character of the film. He's Baron Josef von Ulrich, a Vienna-based captain of finance who doesn't know the meaning of Depression. We see him give dictation to his secretary, (Mary Doran) despite the distractions of her blatant beauty and her slow shorthand. Flustered, he first issues orders dictating more modest dress for his female employees, then fires Doran -- and then promptly invites her out on a date. The Baron apparently has a small dispersed harem of secretaries turned lovers -- in a running gag, one of them never seems to leave her bathtub. He wants both beauty and efficiency, but doesn't think them possible in the same package. Enter Susie Sachs (Marsh), a meek, modestly dressed little "churchmouse" who proves unexpectedly to be a superwoman of office organization who soon has the Baron's already high-powered operations running at hyperspeed. She's the woman of his office dreams and a fit mate as well, if he'd only realize that there's a beautiful woman under the drab trappings who's obviously crushing on him. His brother and uncle see it and encourage her not only to glamorize herself but to compete with her predecessors, not just by manipulating Doran out of the picture but by flirting with them. This is another giddy power romance about a nervy girl falling for an omnipotent man, and the script unleashes William, allowing him full display of what was probably his most attractive attribute during the pre-Code era: his drive. Pre-Code audiences responded to confident mastery, the ideal alternative to Depression despair, and William at his height radiated mastery, whether as an aristocratic financier or as the shadier sort of character for which he became best known. Marsh responds to his challenge with a hyperactive performance that nearly matches William's charisma. Classic horror fans will be amused by the convergence here not only of William and Marsh but also David (Jonathan Harker) Manners and Frederick (Baron Frankenstein) Kerr as William's mischievous relatives. Overall it's a highly enjoyable comedy that climaxes, I dare say, with the most symbolically orgasmic dictation of a letter the screen would see for decades to come.

Sometime in 1932, Marian Marsh dropped out, quitting Warners and heading for Europe. She worked at a slower pace thereafter and retired in the 1940s, living until 2006. But if Marsh didn't pan out for the studio, William did.

Warren William has a marvelous personality. Dashing, handsome and with a reckless gleam in his sparkling dark eyes, he wins and holds the attention of his audience, making his triumphs their triumphs, his setbacks, their setbacks.

- Dubuque Telegraph-Herald & Times-Journal, June 27, 1932.

Even when he's the unambiguous hero of the picture, there's something of the predator about William, perhaps reflecting something not necessarily predatory but survival-minded that seemed right for crisis times. There was something similar in the "hard-boiled" attitude of so many Thirties heroes and heroines. Warren was a little too flamboyant to do hard-boiled (though he did sort of play Sam Spade in a names-changed version of The Maltese Falcon) but he could do the comic mountebank, the charismatic schemer with a gift of gab, like a champion. A case in point is Alfred E. Green's THE DARK HORSE, a political comedy that proves hilariously prescient without even intending to predict the future. The film takes place in a mirror-universe U.S. in which the Democratic and Republican parties exist, but real power in an unnamed state is contested between the Progressive and Conservative parties. When the Progressive state convention is deadlocked between two candidates for governor, one faction tries to divide-and-conquer by proposing a randomly-selected supporter of their opponent as a compromise "dark horse" candidate. The other side figures out what's up, but to spite their rivals throw all their support to the dark horse, securing him the nomination. The nominee is Zachary Hicks (Guy Kibbee in his star-making role), a small-town boob who proposes abolishing capital punishment six months after the bill was signed. The Progressives despair of their predicament, but a surprisingly aggressive secretary (Bette Davis, the next "sensational discovery") has the answer. She was planted in the party office by master campaign organizer Hal S. Blake, whom she now touts as the Progressives' only hope to sell Hicks to the masses. The only thing they need to do to secure his services is bail him out of jail -- he's there for non-support of his estranged wife. The Progressives find Blake already rallying his fellow prisoners on Hicks's behalf, and he's non-stop from there. 21st century viewers will shudder with recognition when Blake tells the party that rather than hide Hicks's utter idiocy, he'll exploit it to the maximum, portraying him as an "Honest, Simple and True" ordinary joe -- a literal "Hicks From the Sticks." Fortunately, the competition is no more intelligent or scrupulous. One of the funniest moments in the picture comes after Blake has coached Hicks for his first debate by making him memorize a short campaign speech by Abraham Lincoln. If anyone recognizes the rhetoric, of course, the campaign will be screwed, but the Conservative candidate gets to speak first -- and plagiarizes from the exact same speech. While this threatens to leave Hicks with nothing to say, Blake saves the day by jumping to the podium and accusing the Conservative of blatant plagiarism. From there, the plot threads converge as Blake struggles to rid himself of the ex so he can marry the Davis character, Hicks stupidly escorts the ex into Blake's office after an assistant (Frank McHugh) had said he was out of town, and the ex ultimately plots a set-up, luring Hicks into a strip-poker game that will ruin him when tipped-off reporters arrive, if Blake can't ride to the rescue himself. Dark Horse is the best and funniest (and most pre-Code) of the films reviewed here, with Kibbee's personable moronism nearly stealing the picture from a fire-breathing William, with a dues-paying Davis providing able support. The Pre-Code Play of the film comes when McHugh is guiding Kibbee to safety after escaping the strip-poker trap. Caught in a barbed-wire fence, Kibbee's union suit is torn to bloody shreds. Fortunately, McHugh has an old-fashioned sleeping gown in a suitcase. As Kibbee slips it over his head, McHugh remarks, "Now you're sure to get the Ku Klux Klan vote!" Guy Kibbee deserves his own Pre-Code Parade float; he so convincingly establishes himself as a bourgeois bumpkin here that he got to play Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt two years later. For this one I can show you a trailer; skipjackturner uploaded it to YouTube.

Before 1932 was over Warners was loaning William out to other studios, such was the demand for his type.

M-G-M borrowed the "new idol" (as another ad called William) and top-billed him in Edgar Selwyn's SKYSCRAPER SOULS, an institutional soap-opera on the Grand Hotel model. Selwyn's film is a Deco epic in which the mighty Seacoast National Bank tower dwarfs the Empire State Building and is virtually a character in the film. William is David Dwight, the man who built the building, and while the power and position may have made William an obvious choice for the role, M-G-M seemed to miss the point of his stardom. Rather than a comedy, Skyscraper Souls is a tragedy, with some inane slapstick from Norman Foster (he keeps crashing into stuff and people) as occasional comic relief. It opens with the William character on the ropes, with added gray in his hair, and it almost immediately feels wrong. David Dwight behaves erratically, first desperately soliciting funds to save the building from creditors, then turning thoughtlessly against his own partners in a scheme to inflate Seacoast stock and sell short before its value crashes. Nearly all the characters in the picture get caught in the mania for the stock, as if they'd all forgotten what happened in real life just three years earlier, and many are ruined. Meanwhile, William must play the predator, attempting to intoxicate and seduce an office girl (Maureen O'Sullivan) while his own infatuated secretary, the girl's superior and mentor, seethes with potentially lethal jealousy. There's a pointless recklessness to William's behavior here that doesn't seem right -- the drive that animates his Warners roles is largely missing -- and the seriousness with which the picture usually goes about its business really lets the air out of the William persona. The movie's always terrific to look at, but if it proves anything it's that Warren William was one of the great comic actors of the pre-Code era. He gives a strong performance on the picture's own terms, but he's only a shadow of the Warners Warren William, while the grim climax of Skyscraper Souls may have marked the beginning of the end of his dominance of the screen. A look at William's filmography, however, suggests that some triumphs were still to come, -- his casting as Julius Caesar in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra isn't really a bad idea in context -- and I still haven't seen some of his best work from his wonder-year of 1932 like The Mouthpiece and The Match King. With luck, this won't be my last word on Warren William, and I hope I've given readers enough of a taste that they'll give him a try while I wait for my next chance.

On the Big Screen: HUGO (2011)

2011-12-04T21:00:00.001-05:00

With an irony that will probably prove the project's undoing at the box office, Martin Scorsese has employed state-of-the-art cinema technology to celebrate the most primitive forms of special effects in his heartwarming infomercial for film preservation. Hugo is a film that will more likely find its audience on home video, as a TV perrennial or an oft-watched DVD. It's too intimate a children's film, if you even want to call it that, and too humanely paced to provide the constant spectacular agitation multiplex audiences seem to demand. Is it a children's film at all? I guess it is, since The Invention of Hugo Cabret is considered a children's or young-adult story. But where are all the one-liners, the insults, the slapstick, the potty humor, the pop-culture references? There are chase scenes and cliffhangers, but I wonder whether one guard chasing one boy on foot through a train station will stimulate young audiences as much as is usually thought necessary. In any event, Hugo is above categorization. Working in the classical style, Scorsese would not think of making a film only for children -- the little brats wouldn't get many of his homages anyway. I'm sure he'd like the kids to be dazzled by the magical cityscape of 1930s Paris, enthralled by the tunnels and clockwork of Hugo Cabret's world, fascinated by the pageantry of Georges Melies' pioneer moviemaking. But I have my doubts, which reflect more on American youth than on Martin Scorsese. He's made a charming, even heartwarming picture that pulses with his love for movie history, but in this latest autumn of Twilight that love will go mostly unrequited. But that only makes Hugo more poignant, since the tale of a movie artist losing his audience is the mystery and the heart of the show. The likely massive loss of money won't kill Scorsese's career, but the hunch that this film will flop only confirms its own message that such tragedies happen.

Hugo is a very old-fashioned tale of an orphan who maintains the clocks at a Paris train station in his uncle's absence while struggling to repair the title invention, a mechanical man his late father had been tinkering with before his death in a fire. Hugo's thefts of parts and tools from a bric-a-brac dealer with a shop at the station leads to his discovery of a closer connection between the dealer, "Papa Georges," and the mechanical man. He eventually learns that the old man is the long-forgotten, believed-dead Melies, the director of A Trip To the Moon and hundreds more fantasies of innovative trickery. The invention proves a McGuffin, as the real story becomes the effort to get the embittered old man to re-embrace his past and accept the collective embrace of early film buffs and historians -- to realize, one might say, that he had a wonderful life despite all his defeats.

So benign is Scorsese's vision this time that he gives us Christopher Lee as a perfectly benevolent bookseller -- and somehow I can imagine the great man hectoring the director about what Paris was really like back when he was a boy tourist -- Lee would have been close to Hugo's age at the time of the picture. Lee's presence at this late point in his career is always a plus, and here particularly his casting is yet another token of Scorsese's adoring cinemania. It's also typical of the peculiar casting and dialogue direction that renders Paris circa 1931 a colony of the British Empire. Even Sasha Baron Cohen, practically invited to turn his awkward security guard into a Clouseau homage, steers clear of anything resembling a French accent. His character takes us back to the good old tradition of comic bumbling cops, but Scorsese can't help humanizing him while milking his leg brace for politically-incorrect humor and ultimately redeeming him. Cohen's subplot is part of a not very convincing argument that World War I was to blame for Melies's decline as well as the guard's poor attitude and his obsession with catching orphans. This approach elevates Melies's rediscovery into a moment of national healing, represented by all our various eccentric characters partying together -- but the history of cinema argues against any claim that the Great War killed audiences' appetites for fantasy. The overstatement doesn't really hurt the film, however, since its real point is rediscovering a legacy that was lost, whatever the reason for the loss.

Along with Lee and Cohen, Ben Kingsley is predictably excellent as Papa Georges, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz are very likable as the lead kids. Some of the character actors get relatively short shrift, as if Scorsese thought they'd keep our interest just by looking funny. The attention he pays to these characters without really giving them much to do slows and pads the film a bit, but the lesser characters are never on so long that they try our patience. Visually the production and cinematography are beautiful, but sometimes the 3-D only gets in the way. Scorsese puts the process through its paces and often achieves remarkable effects. But the stereoscape, as usual, eventually hits a CGI wall that flattens the illusion of reality. If Scorsese were still building massive sets like he did for Gangs of New York, or had been able to film on authentic locations, the 3-D would have been far more impressive. Instead, despite the tremendous efforts of Scorsese, Robert Richardson and Dante Ferretti, Paris still ends up looking like a video game sometimes, however attractive. That being said, Hugo is still easily one of the best 3-D movies of the current generation, and perhaps the best of them in pure movie terms. The more you like movies -- the more movies you like -- the more you'll like this one.

Pre-Code Parade: JEWEL ROBBERY (1932)

2011-12-02T22:30:00.001-05:00

It's become a cliche by now to say that movies from the "pre-Code" era (roughly 1930-34) were ahead of their time in their irreverent attitudes, but William Dieterle's comic fantasy for Warner Bros. takes the cliche to the extreme. For all I know, this romance between swanky Kay Francis's bored rich girl and William Powell's omnipotent gentleman thief (he prefers "robber") is Hollywood's earliest pothead comedy. No, the whole film isn't about people getting high, but Dieterle milks the weed for all the laughs he can get. The reason why is that Powell gives his victims reefers to smoke, on the then-current assumption that only a few puffs will so stupefy you that you'll be incapable of or uninterested in calling the police after he and his massive gang leave the crime scene. After they invade one of Vienna's ritziest jewelry stores and clean it out, Powell offers one of his special cigarettes to one of his captives. In a minute he's giggling like he was auditioning for Reefer Madness. The deal is that you accept the reefer of get locked in a safe, but Francis insists on neither. She's infatuated with the robber, but wants to keep her wits about her, and promises not to call the gendarmes, claiming afterward to have fainted. Meanwhile, Powell foists the rest of his pot on the idiot security guard whom he'd convinced to watch his swag while he finished his business in the store. This fool then spreads them around until a stuffy official is found babbling that he's Napoleon and practically forcing a joint down an assistant's throat. Needless to say, the man enjoys it. As Cab Calloway asks, did you ever see that funny reefer man? If not, you will here in perhaps the unlikeliest of settings: a semi-Lubitschian landscape down to sharing Kay Francis, who was targeted by those elegant rogues Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins in Trouble in Paradise that same year. Did Hollywood take Francis for an easy mark?

More likely it was just natural to imagine a glamorous star victimized, nay, ravished by some masterful brigand. Powell's robber is perhaps the most dominant thief in pre-Code cinema. He is at once a masterful cat burglar, having emptied another shop's safe in advance of the installation of an ultramodern electric-eye alarm system, and a veritable crimelord with a small army of strongarm men, lookouts and distracting dames at his disposal. Later in the film, he attempts a chivalrous gesture and sneaks into Francis's home to return her stolen jewelry, only to be caught in the act by detectives who insist on taking Francis along as a witness. Turns out they're just more of Powell's minions who staged the scene as an excuse to bring Francis to Powell's predictably elegant lair. He's really just another romantic ravisher in a female-fantasy tradition going back at least as far as Rudolph Valentino's Shiek and extending to Jewel Robbery's contemporary, Tarzan the Ape Man, in which overwhelming mastery comes with intensely romantic solicitude toward a beautiful lady. Some might even extend the fantasy to King Kong, albeit in retrospect, but unlike the beloved ape Powell is no less victorious when he takes to the rooftops, while Francis regards the prospect of a reunion in Nice with rapture -- and a finger across her lips to shush the audience, lest we -- as if we would -- give the game away to the plodding coppers. My friend Wendigo might agree with me that this is the same sort of dark-lover fantasy, though not so dark this time, that Dracula was without the Tod Browning film really trying that hard. Well, in the depths of Depression, who wouldn't dream of a spree of invincible plunder and escape to glamorous hideouts around the world? Would that make you a commie or something? Someone calls Powell a communist after he insinuates that he's only robbing the robbers, i.e. the rich. He quickly sets them straight. What would I rob under communism, he asks -- grain silos and tractors? So no, the fantasy of ill-gotten wealth didn't threaten the social order, no matter what the phalangist fussbudget Joe Breen might have thought. It wasn't until people started saying "share and share alike" was the American way that anyone had to worry. If anything, Dieterle's dream of an all-conquering criminal who succeeds beyond the dreams of mere public enemies or scarfaced caesars was probably proof that recovery was just around the corner.

TO HAVE (Howard Hawks) AND HAVE (Hemingway) NOT (1944)

2011-12-02T12:00:00.001-05:00

Last weekend wasn't the first time I'd watched Howard Hawks's version of To Have and Have Not, but it was the first time since I'd read the actual novel by Ernest Hemingway. As I noted when I reviewed The Gun Runners, Don Siegel's partial adaptation of the same source material, Hemingway's novel describes the downward spiral of an otherwise typical two-fisted lone-wolf hero who trusts the wrong people and takes too many risks out of Depression desperation for money. It may have been the last time Hemingway wrote a hero who wasn't just a version of himself, and it's an expansive attempt to draw a broader picture of society from a variety of perspectives, particularly in the final section, and in a variety of literary styles. The novel is more ambitious than its reputation suggests and seems to have set the tone for Hemingway's later incomplete experiments in fiction. Hawks's movie had a different kind of ambition, which was to exploit the blockbuster success of the movie adaptation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. That meant selling To Have and Have Not as "Ernest Hemingway's most daring man-woman story," when the novel was nothing of the sort. Hemingway's Harry Morgan is married with children, concern for whose future drives him to increasingly desperate and ultimately fatal schemes. Hawks's Harry, as conceived by Jules Furthman and Hemingway rival William Faulkner, is unattached, unless you count his loyalty to his rummy sidekick Eddie. In the novel, Harry contemplates murdering Harry to take the heat off himself in the first episode, but spares him thanks to a lucky bookkeeping break. Nothing close to that happens in the movie, but the overall compassion the movie Harry has for Eddie is typical of the book. In the book, however, Eddie disappears after the first episode, and in a later chapter Harry has a different rummy sidekick who gets killed in cold blood by the bank robbers Harry has agreed to transport in a getaway boat. That's the sort of detail that got the novel its bad name and the movie its repute for having "cleaned up" Hemingway's story.

Drastic literary adaptations like this one raise questions of aesthetic ethics. Hawks's movie is regarded as a classic and beloved for introducing Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart and the world. On the other hand, it's a travesty of Hemingway and has threatened since its release to take the novel's place in the pop-culture consciousness. Can it be "wrong" and "right" at the same time? That's hard to say when you watch a movie adaptation of a novel after reading the novel. My feeling tends to be that the filmmakers owe some fidelity to the novel, and owe the public a reasonably accurate representation of the novel. But I'm not going to say that an unfaithful adaptation can't be a good movie. I recently read T. T. Flynn's novel The Man From Laramie, which was made into an Anthony Mann - Jimmy Stewart western not long after publication. Mann took liberties with the story, but I can say unhesitantly that the film was better than the book, which was little more than a page-turner burdened with purplish prose. The story was improved by the adaptation, but should that be our only standard of judgement? Approaching the matter from the other side, To Have and Have Not may be one of the most flagrant travesties of a novel, but it's far from being the worst literary adaptation. Compared to such things as Roland Joffe's The Scarlet Letter or Brian de Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities, Hawks's film isn't even a bad movie. But is it good enough that its merits outweigh its injustice to Hemingway?

Like The Gun Runners, Furthman and Faulkner's script works mostly with the first section of the novel, which is based on the short story "One Trip Across." In the story, Harry Morgan turns down a group of Cuban revolutionaries who want him to do some smuggling for them because it's too great a risk to his livelihood. Harry's main trade is taking tourists out fishing. He takes a Mr. Johnson out and patiently endures the man's failure to learn anything about the sport after days at sea until Johnson's incompetence costs Harry a rod and reel. Johnson decides to leave Cuba the next day and promises to meet Harry at the bank the next morning to square up with him. After Harry learns that Johnson left early, leaving Harry about $800 in the hole, our hero is more willing to take on risky work. Instead of helping the revolutionaries, who've been shot up anyway, he gets involved with a Chinese people-smuggling ring in the full expectation that he might get killed in the process. Harry pre-emptively bumps off the Chinese boss, dumps the illegals within wading distance of shore, and faces the dilemma of what to do about Eddie that I mentioned earlier.

In Hawks's movie, the setting has shifted to French-ruled Martinique, with Free French patriots taking the place of Cuban rebels. The business with Johnson on the boat is much as in the novel, but the movie takes pains to minimize the extent to which the Bogart character is shown as a sucker. Before Johnson can abscond, the pretty drifter Slim (Bacall) picks his pocket. Harry discovers the theft, takes the wallet from Slim, and finds that Johnson had plenty of traveler's checks that he could have made out to Harry on the spot. Harry and Slim confront Johnson, and Harry compels Johnson to make the checks payable to him. Before Johnson can sign, however, he's killed in a crossfire between Free French and Vichy forces, and Harry is SOL. That makes him more amenable to doing things for the Free French, and from that point Hawks's more-or-less original romance begins.

What does that leave us with? Apart from some cosmetic details -- a Gestapo officer is nicknamed "Bee-Lips" like a fixer from the novel -- there's nothing more of Hemingway in the movie. The personality of Eddie, tailored to Walter Brennan's screen persona and enhanced with allegedly comic business like his constant inquiry, "Was you ever bitten by a dead bee?" is almost entirely made up for the film, as is the whole character of Slim. The notion that Slim is "all right" because she answers the dead-bee query correctly -- "Why, have you?" -- would probably have made Hemingway puke. On that note, I was intrigued by the scene where the Gestapo man is plying Eddie with booze in order to loosen his tongue about the whereabouts of Harry's passengers. Impressed by the fat spy's slimy politeness, Eddie declares him "all right" and starts to ask the bee question when Harry abruptly changes the subject. Was Harry afraid that the Nazi would give the correct answer? Was this moment Hawks's own unconscious confession that the whole dead-bee idea was garbage? Perhaps.

Subtract Hemingway and Hawks's To Have and Have Not is self-evidently a Casablanca ripoff, with Bogart reprising his reluctant-hero act, Hoagy Carmichael sitting in at the piano for Dooley Wilson, and Dan Seymour (in the Gestapo role) as a substitute fat man for Sidney Greenstreet. The big difference is that the Bogart character doesn't romance the noble Free French woman whose husband lies wounded, but the charismatically insolent Slim. From Warner Bros.'s standpoint, an important purpose of the picture is to put over Lauren Bacall, particularly as a singer -- though that thread of her career wasn't really picked up again for another quarter-century, until Bacall starred in a Broadway musical. If you dig the stars you'll dig the film. The chemistry is there. Bacall earned her spot. But otherwise, with the arguable exception of Brennan, Bogart's surrounded by a B-team cast by Casablanca standards -- and I'd be willing to argue against Brennan in this picture. Bogart himself is coasting. Harry Morgan should be a more desperate character, almost like Bogart's Roy Earle from High Sierra in his fatedness and compromised ruthlessness, but once you give the character partners (the Free French) who are certain not to betray him, the noirish edge is largely gone from his one trip across, leaving behind little more than a likable lark that becomes a little less likable, fairly or not, when you learn what To Have and Have Not was and could have been. No one who likes the Hawks movie without having read the book should like it less, and those who've done both and like the film better should stick to their guns, since we'd presumably disagree on the book more than on the movie. All I know is that I can't look at this picture the same way I used to. I suppose that's too bad, but on the other hand I'm glad I read the real thing.

Wendigo meets a Nollywood Vampire: VAMPIRE'S CALL (2005)

2011-11-30T21:02:00.001-05:00

At long last, our tour of the Wild World of Cinema arrives in Nollywood -- Nigeria, land of what's reputed to be the world's second-most prolific national film industry. Second only to India, it reportedly produces at least 30 new feature films a week, or somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 features annually. Nollywood is the bane of African art cinema; mostly anglophone while the most honored African auteurs hail from francophone lands; largely if not entirely shot on video on short schedules and sold direct to DVD or other formats instead of playing in theaters; aimed squarely at the LCD of superstition and reactionary family values. While "Bollywood" has earned grudging respect for sticking to a distinct cultural aesthetic, Nollywood is widely reviled as the bottom of the cinematic barrel, except by the avid consumers who spend hundreds of millions of US dollars on the stuff and have made cinema the second largest employment sector in Nigeria, after government.

Accompanied by my intrepid friend Wendigo, I made my first foray into Nollywood by stumbling across Vampire's Call during a YouTube search for vampire movies available for free online. Wendigo proved willing to examine another culture's take on vampires, especially since the film would be in English. What we found was a sometimes compelling, sometimes repelling experience in many ways reminiscent of the lower rungs of U.S. exploitation in the Seventies and Eighties, at least in terms of story structure if not in gore or sleaze. It's hard for us to say whether Kasat Esosa Egbon's film is typical of Nollywood or whether it's above or below the norm, but we have learned that female lead Stephanie Okereke is one of Nigeria's more popular actresses, an award-winning performer who has since gone on to study film in the U.S. and write and direct a film on her own. Vampire's Call, however, does not appear on her IMDB filmography.

Okereke plays Lisa, a medical student returning from Britain to visit her grandparents in her home village. We learn that she's been having strange dreams that she suspects have something to do with the old country, and we note early that her avuncular elders don't want her to wander around the village after dark. A few years earlier, her cousin Vera had gone against that advice and had become one of many human and animal victims of a mysterious killer. The people have all been bitten in the neck and drained of blood, and no one in the village can imagine why.

Lisa's dreams are crudely spooky. She first encounters a CGI skeleton with a glowing heart. Later, she meets a man who grows telescopic fangs and causes the sky to grow dark -- and it seems that she's seen this person before. She dreams of dancing with the mystery man in a haphazardly red-draped, throne-furnished room fit for a low-rent Count Yorga. Awake, she finds her way to the actual room, and finds the man himself sleeping in an adjoining room. Who is he? Having lived in Britain and imbibed its pop culture and superstitions, she suspects that he must be a vampire; the idea seems to have occurred to no one else in the village, despite the teeth marks.

Lisa investigates a home-decorating atrocity in her native village.

Her grandfather (Justus Esiri) finally tells her a local legend that might explain her dreams, her discoveries, and all the recent deaths. Once upon a time, in the 18th or 19th century (the villagers have firearms), the community was plagued by a strange "wild animal". How strange? Well, it's one of the crappiest CGI critters we've seen in quite a while, with a sickly repetitive bleat to match; it wouldn't even pass muster for a video game.

Despite appearances, it's a frightening enough beast for the elders to call out all the able-bodied young men to fight it and promise the powerful village priestess, Atunma (Miltex Ogiri), to the man who slays it. A good sized band of fighters dances its way toward the creature's stomping ground, but only one wounded warrior, Chioke (Muna Obiekwe) survives the battle. He's nursed back to health by an outcast female, Chioma (Okereke) who slowly loses her resolve never to consort with men. Chioke persuades her to return to the village with him, where he intends to marry her. But that plan slights the fierce Atunma and offends the elders who arranged for her marriage to the monster-slayer. The modern-minded Chioke, determined to marry and live for love, decides to share Chioma's exile instead. Their idyll lasts until Atunma goads a gang into beating a pregnant Chioma to death, but the victim doesn't die until she's given Chioke a son. Atunma promptly curses the child, then kills Chioke when he seeks revenge for his wife's death....and somehow the boy survives and founds a line that carries the curse to the present day. The sons of Chioke will be vampires until a woman in Chioma's image will make a sacrifice of blood to wash away Atunma's curse.

The man of Lisa's dreams is Max (Obiekwe), the cursed, murderous descendant of Chioke and Chioma. The second half of Vampire's Call (it was released in two parts, adding up to approximately three hours total) is Max's Bram Stoker's Dracula/Beauty & The Beast/Phantom of the Opera/You Get the Idea courtship of the strangely enthralled Lisa. That courtship is complicated by the arrival from Britain of Richard, Lisa's fellow medical student, erstwhile boyfriend and aspiring Ralph Bellamy of Nollywood. Lisa is torn between two lovers, or is just plain fickle. Ultimately, however, Max means to force the romantic issue, though he's more reluctant to claim the blood necessary to lift his curse. He follows the couple to Lagos and spooks the hapless Richard away, but can't bring himself to take Lisa's blood. But when he resorts desperately to attacking a stranger at the wrong place and time, whether Lisa will live or not won't be his decision to make....

He's actually quite nice if you get to know him.

Objectively speaking, Wendigo has to say at the start that Vampire's Call is not a good film by any standard. He gives the creative team credit for ambition, but they simply lacked the talent to make their concept work. The most obvious problem with the movie is its obvious padding. To stretch the story enough to justify the two parts (Hollywood seems to be copying Nollywood lately) the director fills the film with extended scenes of people walking and watching local scenery that simply isn't scenic enough to hold our interest. The camera wanders occasionally, abandoning characters to follow a car that seems to have passed through randomly. The romantic scenes between Lisa and her two suitors go on far too long without actually evolving cinematically or building to anything like a climax. The big dance scene between Lisa and Max is interminable. A lot of these tricks reminded Wendigo of the way grindhouse exploitation films, or Seventies porn films, were padded -- but those films were padded to reach a minimal feature length. Doing the same thing to make a film three hours long is inexcusable. In some cases, he concedes, letting dialogue scenes linger long past their relevance, or showing extended folk dances, adds a feel of authenticity to the proceedings. But practically every scene rambles on longer than it should. Even worse, while Egbon wastes time on irrelevant stuff, he flagrantly omits some of the most potentially dramatic bits from the Chioke legend. We see the warriors dancing down the road, but we don't see them fight the monster. Instead of showing us the showdown between Chioke and Atunma, Egbon has grandpa flatly tell us that Chioke was killed. Did his budget determine what he could and couldn't show, did censorship determine it, or did he simply make profoundly wrong narrative choices? It's hard for us to say. We will say that he lacks much sense of pace. That's proven when he breaks off Part 1 smack in the middle of one of Atumna's rants. Rather than give us a cliffhanger -- and it may not have been necessary, depending on how the two parts were marketed -- he doesn't even climb the mountain.

Wendigo found the first half better than the second because the slow buildup toward the revelation of the Chioke legend gave him an interesting puzzle to put together. The film succeeds somewhat in establishing the mystery of how the Chioke legend explains Lisa's dreams and the village murders, but it quickly loses momentum after the flashback ends. At its heart, Vampire's Call is a standard modern melodrama of reincarnated lost love and a reluctant monster, but Egbon found some interesting ways to transplant those motifs into an African setting. He does also manage a few effectively creepy moments in Part 2, especially when Max appears to be in two hotel rooms at once, holding separate chats with Lisa and Richard. By the time that scene happens, however, Wendigo worries that you may be ready to gnaw your arm off from boredom. The end may annoy some viewers since evil seems to go unpunished, even if it isn't evil anymore. It's almost as if Egbon forgot about all the murders he'd shown earlier -- it is a long movie, after all. Maybe he also thinks that Max isn't responsible for the killings because he'd been cursed -- but I'd like to see that defense tried in a court of law.

The acting is probably the best element in Vampire's Call. Both Okereke and Obiekwe succeed, sometimes in spite of the script, in creating two distinct characters in their respective dual roles, and Wendigo found Obiekwe as Max quietly menacing in a sometimes-unnerving way. As Chioke, the actor has a likable swagger as a man with attitudes ahead of his time. Even he's upstaged, however, by Miltex Ogiri as Atunma. She's built up as a formidable villainess, and you wish the writers had found a way to give the actress a character in the modern story, because she commands the screen in a way that really stands out. Overall, the actors (especially Esiri's likably grouchy grandpa) have a casual, natural style that makes some of the lengthy dialogue scenes somewhat more palatable. Some of the dialogue itself achieves a sort of poetry, e.g. Atunma's curse: "Chioke will seek tears, but they will not drop." Nollywood may simply have a more easygoing or patient approach to dialogue and character development. It's too bad that Egbon's technical skills are nowhere near the artistic level of his actors. Not only are the few attempts at effects uniformly awful, but the sound mixing may well be the worst we've ever heard in a motion picture. Library cues of howling wolves, tolling bells, crying babies are used to the point of abuse, and often drown out dialogue.

These technical shortcomings make Vampire's Call not bad in the cult sense of inspired stupidity, but simply amateurish. But while Wendigo can't call it a good film, and can't really recommend it to vampire fans, he did find it compelling enough to stick with the film to the end, despite the endurance test of Part 2. He doesn't regret the experiment with Nigerian pop cinema, and neither do I. Tourists in the Wild World of Cinema will probably find enough here that's odd, over the top, or simply strange to justify future forays into the Nollywood netherworld.

From you, I get opinions ...

2011-11-28T22:45:00.001-05:00

In memory of Ken Russell (1927-2011).

uploaded to YouTube by Edentropy

uploaded by The Fantastic 48

THE WARPED ONES (1960)

2011-11-27T20:22:00.001-05:00

Koreyoshi Kurahara's signature film -- or so the curators of the Criterion Eclipse Kurahara collection see it -- has gone by numerous names over the years. In Japan, it's known as "Season of Heat." In the U.S., Radley Metzger released it as The Weird Love Makers before it acquired its DVD tag in a subsequent re-release. Since liner-notes writer Chuck Stephens wants to equate this film with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, we could give the Kurahara a more suggestive and exploitative title -- "Brainless." That's not a knock on Kurahra and his film, but an acknowledgment that its main character, the ex-con shoplifter Akira (Tamio Kawachi) is an utter malevolent moron. Stephens characterizes Warped Ones as a triumph of style, and to an extent it is that, but it's also little more than the sort of juvenile-delinquent movie made in America at the same time. What sets it apart from the U.S. genre is the triumph it grants the punk at the end and the bleak message about Japan's future his triumph conveys.

Akira is alienated to the point of sociopathy. American jazz is his drug and his anthem of alienation. When someone abruptly switches off the jazz record playing at one of his hangouts, Akira goes berserk and is ready to slice the girl's face with a broken bottle before his black GI buddy stops him. Akira had earlier defended the soldier against a Japanese girl who said she didn't like "darkies." Blacks are the best, he says, because they invented jazz. After that, he goes on, the whiteys stole it, and now the Japanese imitate it. That proves to Akira that "We're the worst of all." Kurahara and screenwriter Nobuo Yamada seem to imply that Akira's enthusiasm for the American art form is an outgrowth of a national self-loathing. It is not part of any greater cultural sensibility. Akira is no beatnik, and his overall attitude toward avant-garde culture is contemptuously uncomprehending. The feeling is mutual between him and the actual would-be avant garde -- who seem more interested in classical music than jazz. The pretentious circles he travels through while seeking to get back at the reporter who got him arrested at the start of the picture regard him as a specimen rather than a person -- "What extraordinary Fauvism!" one exclaims. The others seem more civilized, but Kurahara and Yamada may consider them just as hopelessly alienated, or even just as addicted to the sensory overload that The Warped Ones tries to translate into cinema.

I don't know art but I know what I hate:

Tamio Kawachi is always a critic in The Warped Ones.

Warped Ones is highly regarded for its widescreen compositions and its frantic editing. It seems timed to the erratic rhythms of Akira's restless consciousness, but the overall effect is less a celebration of youth, or of style as an end unto itself, than a kind of horror of modernity. Akira may win in the end, for what it's worth, but Kurahara's strikes me as nearly as reactionary a film as those American B-movies that required delinquents to pay or atone for their crimes, precisely because Akira's victory means misery for others rather than any sort of liberation. But someone can probably watch it quite pleasurably without judgement, digging the unrepentant exuberance of Akira and his pals, taking it like the sort of pop drug they're hooked on. It's a fun film to watch and it is some kind of cinematic achievement, and even a sort of historic document -- but I expect Kurahara's thematic sequel (or remake), Black Sun, to top it. And as for equating it, even thematically, with Godard? Give me a break. Kurahara has a better chance of getting a fair hearing from movie buffs if we don't insist on pretentious comparisons. His boosters ought to have enough confidence in him to let new viewers watch him on his own terms.

A VERY PRIVATE AFFAIR (Vie Privee, 1962)

2011-11-25T21:51:00.001-05:00

A week or so ago, as I was watching the Pre-Code Parade pass by, I caught a glimpse of Victor Fleming's Bombshell (1933), the ultimate Jean Harlow vehicle for many people because the story of a movie star hounded by hangers-on is thought to be partly a send-up of Harlow's own career. The film invites you to equate actress with fictional character by having Harlow's character star in Harlow's own earlier film Red Dust. Harlow gives every impression of being a good sport about it all, and why not? It's just a comedy, and often a fairly amusing one. I bring this up because Louis Malle's Vie Privee is conceptually very similar to Bombshell yet just about diametrically opposed in mood, unless I'm not getting the joke. Thirty years later the star imitating herself is the proverbial "sex kitten," Brigitte Bardot, and the identification extends to badly editing some poster art from Bardot movies to turn them into vehicles for "Jill," the character she plays here. In at least one scene, the disguise slips and Malle shows us a theater marquee blatantly advertising "Brigitte Bardot." Yet just as Harlow in Bombshell was reportedly playing an amalgam of herself, Clara Bow and other sex-symbols of her time, so Bardot in Vie Privee is playing a fairly specific amalgam of herself and Marilyn Monroe, the latter emerging when Jill falls for Marcello Mastroianni's Fabio, the "avant-garde lover," a magazine editor/translator/theater director standing in for Arthur Miller. The implicit commentary on Monroe veers eerily into prophecy as Jill spirals toward self-destruction in a film released in the U.S. in the summer of the real Monroe's demise but obviously filmed months before. The American title promises a frothy, salacious comedy (the original, "Private Life," is more austerely satiric) but delivers something else -- and takes a damned long time doing that.
Malle's film only gets going about halfway through, when Jill hooks up with Fabio, who'd been introduced much earlier in the picture. The first half, in the dubbed American version at least, is burdened with a dull, dry narration whose irrelevance is proven when it fades away past the midpoint. For the first hour, approximately, Vie Privee follows Jill's path from indifferent dancing to magazine modeling to sudden movie stardom with an utter lack of enthusiasm or wonder on the part of director and star. Everyone involved seems to take for granted that all they need to do is show Bardot to be halfway home. As a result, the film is front-loaded with padding to set up the actual story Malle and his writers wanted to tell: a kind of reversal of the making of The Misfits in which Jill's presence in Spoleto disrupts Fabio's spectacular outdoor staging of his new translation of a classic Kleist play. Fabio is jealous of every man's attention to Jill but also resentful of her upstaging of his planned triumph. Jill is torn by conflicting impulses, craving Fabio's attention, resenting the paparazzi but also resenting the boredom of isolation while hiding from them. All of this plays out in an almost operatically overwrought manner, established with a long tracking shot through the city's narrow streets as choral music plays and a chorus is revealed singing it -- the effect is regrettably reminiscent (or premonitory) of Count Basie's band serenading Cleavon Little in the desert. It culminates with Jill stalking the rooftops to watch Fabio's play from a godlike vantage. The predictable happens with Verdi's Requiem for a soundtrack, and in slow motion with an abstract backdrop and a sense that the supreme self-dramatizing moment has come for a character who hadn't really been shown with such tendencies before.

There are hints of satire in Vie Privee, but compared to Bombshell it seems entirely humorless. Even if Malle intended it as a satire, the finished product takes itself oppressively seriously. It's an invitation to pity the poor movie star that the Harlow film wouldn't dare. Harlow may have been playing a version of herself, but she was also playing her fans' fantasy of sudden stardom and liberation from Depression poverty. Who would want to be Jill? -- or on this evidence, who'd want to be Brigitte Bardot? If anything, besides being a grim prophecy of Marilyn Monroe's doom, the film is also a prophecy of the miserable, hateful person Bardot has apparently become in real life. It's such a personal film, even though she does no more than perform in it, that the mighty Mastroianni is little more than a flustered bystander. But the Spoleto section of the film is riveting enough, and not necessarily in train-wreck fashion to nearly redeem the picture. Ideally it would have stood on its own, albeit as part of an anthology film like the Malle-Bardot segment of Spirits of the Dead. That short and the 1965 comedy-adventure Viva Maria! at least prove that Malle and Bardot could actually entertain people together, as long as they made movies instead of movie-movies. Bardot herself could make a decent movie-movie, but while she's the star of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, she doesn't play a star. That might make all the difference.

THE ROPE AND THE COLT (Cimiterio senza croci, 1969)

2011-11-23T22:55:00.001-05:00

Actor-director Robert Hossein dedicated his western to Sergio Leone, but his film is no homage to the master. Instead, he honors Leone by making an original and uniquely bleak and deliberate variation on spaghetti-western motifs. It's a revenge story like many other spaghettis, but Hossein's tragic spin on the situation, the result of his disputed collaboration with Dario Argento and another writer, sets his film apart from the rest of the genre.

Hossein plays Manuel, a gunfighter living in apparent retirement and seclusion in an almost expressionist ghost town. We meet him after we've seen a man hounded and hanged in front of his own wife by the local bullyboys, the Rogers clan. The widow, Maria (Michele Mercier) makes a pilgrimage to the ghost town to implore Manuel, with whom she clearly had a past, to kill the Rogers men. He tries to beg off, claiming to have renounced violence and warning that revenge will do Maria no good, but she tosses a bag of gold at his feet as payment in advance. Inside his abandoned gambling den, he mulls over her request as he plays with the roulette wheel. Finally, he pulls on the leather glove that means he means business, stashes the money away in a cabinet where we see a photo of himself, Maria and the late Mr. Caine, and sets out on his mission.

Summoned from his ghost-town refuge (above), Manuel dons his shooting glove when trouble impends(below).

In town, Manuel waits for a chance to ingratiate himself with the Rogers clan, and gets it when another clan, the Valleys, threaten one of the Rogers men over cards. Manuel parlays his disinterested intervention into a job as a Rogers ranch foreman, which gives him an opportunity to bust open a corral and scare the clan's horses into the night. When the rest of the hands give chase, Manuel steals into the patriarch's house to kidnap the old man's daughter Diana (Anne-Marie Balin). He takes the girl to the ghost town, where he meets with Maria, who intends to collect a huge ransom. She intends more than that for Diana, it seems, when she lets two of her own goons into the old gambling den. As she and Manuel wait outside, Hossein stages something like the moral equivalent of a gunfight. He cuts back and forth between himself and Mercier, moving the camera closer each time as the gunfighter realizes that Maria's men are raping Diana. The scene plays out without dialogue, but Hossein's expression conveys his horror and disappointment, while Mercier seems to crumble from within while maintaining an implacable facade.

The avenger: Michele Mercier as Maria Caine.

The incident exhausts Maria's hunger for revenge, and she declares herself ready to leave the region with Manuel once they collect the ransom. But they learn too soon that they no longer control their destinies. The cycle of revenge takes on a life of its own as the Rogers clan strikes back at Maria and Manuel heads for a showdown with the Rogers men in the ghost town, only to face a surprise final antagonist....

Rope and Colt is an unusually pensive spaghetti western, a departure from the cartoonish tendency of the genre in its emphasis on guilty consciences and regret for roads not taken. It's as much a doomed romance as a revenge drama, a rare spaghetti in which a male-female relationship overshadows the feuds among men. Hossein and Mercier had been a romantic team in a series of films earlier in the Sixties, a fact that must have lent their tragedy here extra resonance for European audiences. Without knowing their on-screen history, I could appreciate their chemistry despite the dubbing because Hossein tells their story with as few words and as many meaningful looks and gestures as possible. In a bit of Coppolesque nepotism, Hossein's father wrote the score, and while it has the expected Morriconian theme and awkward English lyrics at the beginning it mostly succeeds at expressing the film's bleak sentiment, sometimes with near-operatic intensity. As a director, Hossein doesn't ape Leone's dynamic action or epic framing, but he invests his film with a strong sense of space and a good eye for landscape. In many ways it comes closer to an American "psychological" western of the 1950s than to a spaghetti, but Hossein's homage to Leone was not to make a spaghetti western, but to make a good one.

The next avenger? Anne-Marie Balin as Diana (or Johanna in the original language).

The film may be better known under the English translation of its Italian title, "Cemetery Without Crosses," but Rope and the Colt is how its presented in Timeless Media Group's The Best of the Spaghetti Westerns collection. This 20-film set is a twofold case of false advertising, being obviously not the best of the genre in the absence of Leone's films (though all are said to be "in the tradition of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), but in one respect the false advertising is a good thing. The box proclaims a "Full Screen Presentation," but never was box copy more happily wrong, as all the films I've sampled so far are letterboxed. I was fortunate enough to stumble across this set at Barnes & Noble, coincidentally at a 50% discount at the same time as the chain's last half-off sale on Criterion discs. If Hossein's film is typical of the set, this may prove the best bargain in the store.

Here's an Italian trailer, uploaded to YouTube by SWDBTrailer.