DVR Diary: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

You get the feeling watching William Beaudine's horror-western that the real creative work had been done when someone thought up the titles for the notorious double-feature of this film and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. Put those titles on a poster, someone must have thought, and you'll get people into the theaters. At that point, it doesn't matter what they see. It has to have been like that -- doesn't it? -- to explain what we still see. Beaudine was near the end of a very long career that stretched from Mary Pickford A pictures in the 1920s to Bowery Boys Bs and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla in the 1950s. Apart from the color, BvD is no real advance on the horror films Beaudine had made with Lugosi twenty years earlier for Monogram. For John Carradine, returning to the role of Dracula (though no one calls him that in the film) after twenty years, it was the opposite of an advance. He is a sadly shabby vampire despite the desperate attempt to tart him up with poofy cuffs and a huge red tie. His hypnotic gaze looks more like the drunken leer it probably was. His special-effects surrogates are some of the worst bat effects you'll ever see, and the transitions are truly primitive. A fake bat glides behind some object -- a rock or a stagecoach, for instance -- and Carradine scuttles out from behind.  He's probably the least graceful Dracula, though that's more the producers' fault for casting so physically limited an actor in the role. And with all these handicaps, Carradine is almost still the best actor in the cast. His only real rival is Olive Carey as a folksy old female doctor who becomes the nearest thing this film has to a Van Helsing.

But who needs Van Helsing when you have Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney)? The legendary gunman has gone straight and hopes to live in obscurity as just plain old William Bonney the ranch foreman, even though everyone in town seems to know about his past. He's sweet on Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman), the gal who's inherited the ranch he works on, and he has a rival so we can have a fistfight every few reels. Betty is expecting an uncle to arrive and act as her guardian, but she's never seen the man before -- no photo, no painting, no lithograph. Unfortunately, the uncle and his wife divulge this fact to their fellow stagecoach passenger in black and red, who boards not long after draining but not killing the blonde daughter of an immigrant couple. At the next stop, the vampire bites an Indian girl, inciting the nearby tribe to massacre the stagecoach while he flaps to town to introduce himself as the uncle arriving early. The immigrants reach the same town and recognize "Mr. Underhill" as the vampire. If you're a vampire trying to maintain an imposture, what do you do at this point?

A. Kill the entire immigrant family.
B. Kill the daughter while leaving the mother, sleeping beside her, alone, and allowing the immigrant elders to live even after Betty has hired them as your household servants who constantly interfere with your plans, from spouting vampire lore to lining Betty's window with wolfsbane.


Underhill apparently prefers to rant at the hapless foreigners and occasionally shove them, because that way he gets more lines. That's the only motivation that makes sense. But the vampire's lack of self-preservation instincts is partly understandable: the poor man's in love. From the first time he saw Betty's face in a black and white miniature, he had decided that she would be his immortal mate. Underhill has set up a challenge for himself: seduce a woman while passing himself off as her uncle. But never underestimate an old man's stare and the seductive power of Raoul Kraushaar's generic spooky music. All that's left is to consummate the unholy marriage in an abandoned silver mine -- who knows how he got the big bed in there? But it's Billy to the rescue, having overcome everyone's skepticism about "bats and vampires" (both being equally mythical, I guess) and armed himself with Doc's book-learning -- admittedly incomplete since her German isn't so hot -- and the metal spike necessary to kill a vampire. Of course, Billy being Billy, he leads with his revolver, but bullets can't hurt the undead! Bullets can't, but the gun itself can as Underhill takes a vicious blow to the face that sets him up for the deathblow. Apparently a vampire can not only transform into a bat, but can also project a bat from his body, as one takes flight as Underhill squirms in Billy's grip. The bat flops to earth as the vampire dissolves into nothingness. But we don't see the bat dissolve, so is this truly the end??? Gott in Himmel, let's hope so.

DVR Diary: LAW AND ORDER (1953)

Seminal crime author W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle) also wrote westerns. His 1930 novel Saint Johnson is based on the Tombstone legend, starring a fictional analogue for Wyatt Earp, who had only recently died. Universal Pictures turned the novel in to Edward L. Cahn's Law and Order, an early collaboration between star Walter Huston and co-writer John Huston. I've never read Saint Johnson and only dimly remember seeing some of the Cahn film when I was a kid, but my understanding is that Nathan Juran's 1953 film is a remake almost in name only. If the film is remembered it's mainly because Ronald Reagan starred as Frame Johnson, the Earp counterpart. He's actually pretty good as a stone-cold laconic lawman who wants to get away from that life and doesn't care what people think of him for doing so. Having cleaned up Tombstone, Frame decides to move on to Cottonwood, accompanied by brothers Luke (Alex Nicol) and hotheaded Jimmy (Russell Johnson), as well as their own personal undertaker, who sees no future in Tombstone after the Johnsons have annihilated the outlaw element. In Cottonwood Frame just wants to start a ranch and settle down with his girl -- Dorothy Malone's term of endearment for him is "You're big, you're ugly and you're stupid and I happen be in love with you" -- but the Johnson blood is inflamed by the unjust domination of Cottonwood by the Durling brothers, Kurt (Preston Foster) and Frank (Dennis Weaver), and their pet sheriff. Frame tries to keep out of it as long as he can, but when Luke is killed, and while Jimmy flirts dangerously with Frank Durling's sister, Frame enters the fray.

Interestingly, the ultimate showdown isn't between Johnsons and Durlings, but between Frame and Jimmy, who kills Frank Durling when caught with Frank's sister. Frame believes in the rule of law -- and it may alarm Reagan's idolators today to see the great man enforcing an aggressive gun-control policy in Cottonwood -- and so is determined to make sure that Jimmy stands trial -- his girl will testify in his favor so he'd likely get off if he isn't lynched -- but the Durling faction paradoxically breaks him out of jail in order to discredit Frame. Jimmy is a borderline misfit who'd joined a lynch mob himself earlier in the picture. He's turbulent, impulsive and impatient with a yearning for peace on Frame's part that sometimes looks like cowardice to the younger man. It's worth noting here, in light of Russell Johnson's now-total identification with the Professor on Gilligan's Island, that before that show he had become virtually typecast as a heavy on TV westerns. He seemed to project a certain mean weakness of character that here, early in his career but possibly his biggest and best role in movies, is redeemed by a romantic spirit. There's a certain anticlimactic integrity to Law and Order as it retreats from its fratricidal setup. Fugitive Jimmy wounds Frame, who refuses to draw on him, and immediately repents and surrenders to the happy ending awaiting all the surviving Johnsons. The film isn't much more than a B movie, but Juran directs with satisfying efficiency, apart from an overblown brawl between Reagan and Foster's stuntmen, and the film looks good overall. Reagan reportedly didn't think much of the film, probably seeing it as a comedown from his Warner Bros. pictures, but it's a perfectly respectable oater with a decent cast -- young Dennis Weaver is especially nasty --  that suggests that the future President wasn't the best judge of his own work.

DVR Diary: RISEN (2016)

Tensions are high in Judea as occupying Roman armies fight pitched battles against insurgent Zealots while a cult leader is crucified in Jerusalem. Procurator Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth) oddly wants a quick end to the spectacle of Yeshua's (Cliff Curtis) expected slow death and sends Centurion Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) to hurry things up. By the time he arrives at Golgotha, having not long before led the troops to victory over the Zealots, Yeshua has been up only a few hours, but appears to have already died. Clavius orders the other condemned men's legs broken so they'll die quicker and he can shut the site down. Without thinking much about it, he acquiesces when Joseph of Arimathea (Antonio Gil) claims Yeshua's body for burial in his own sepulcher. That should end the matter, but the local Jewish authorities warn that since Yeshua predicted his own resurrection, his fugitive disciples may try to steal the body and claim that he rose after all. Clavius assigns two guards to the sealed tomb who promptly get drunk, and somehow the body disappears from the tomb. It becomes Clavius' mission to find the body, or the disciples who might lead him to it, before rumors of Yeshua's return from the dead further inflame a volatile province.

That's the setup for Kevin Reynolds' Christian procedural, written by Reynolds with Paul Aiello. Taking the police-procedural approach to the mystery of mysteries is an ingenious idea, though it's inevitably compromised by a Christian production company's imperative to affirm Yeshua's divinity. There's a specific moment when Risen stops being a procedural, when Clavius possibly prematurely abandons his investigatory skepticism. This is when his detective trail leads to a house where Yeshua, apparently alive, presides at a giddy gathering of his disciples. Clavius is understandably gobsmacked by the site, since he'd last seen Yeshua as a corpse, but there should still be room for skeptical suspense. After all, to this day people still speculate that there may have been a switcheroo somewhere, a lookalike dying in Jesus's place or an imposter passing for the risen Christ. The sight of Yeshua displaying his wounds for a not exactly doubting Thomas might preempt such doubt, especially in a more credulous age, but viewers may have developed enough respect for Clavius's intelligence by this point that they'd want to see him hold out a little longer. Instead, he follows the disciples to the Sea of Galilee after Yeshua pulls a vanishing act, in hope of meeting the living-dead man again in the disciples' old fishing ground.

Until that turning point, Risen is admirable for its unconventional presentation of a sacred story. I especially appreciated how the writers and actors transcend the performance cliches of Bible movies. You don't get the glassy-eyed heavenward gaze that often makes early cinematic Christians look brainwashed rather than converted. Instead, Clavius's first encounter with a disciple is with a rather goofy Bartholemew (Stephen Hagan) who seems to have been driven just a tiny bit crazy by the ecstatic news of Yeshua's return. There's a welcome consistent note of uncertainty among the disciples, since for all that the resurrection was prophesied, it's still hard for them to fathom in all its apocalyptic implications. It's fun to see an exasperated Simon Peter (Stewart Scudamore), probably still chagrined by his misadventure at Gethsemane, nearly go apeshit on Clavius when the Roman, startled awake by the disciple's offer of water, nearly hamstrings the big fisherman with his sword. You get the sense that these guys (and Mary Magdalene [Maria Botto], in her popular guise of former prostitute) are disciples, but not yet saints. As for their faith, Risen (like this year's Ben-Hur) soft-pedals Christianity as some vague philosophy of love, with no doctrinal strings attached that Clavius or the audience can see. That's probably necessary to attract as wide a Christian audience as possible, not to mention agnostics and secularists. I count myself in the latter category but I've always enjoyed Bible movies for their spectacle and have never felt threatened by their explicit or implicit messages. Risen is a perfectly unthreatening film, unless the mere reiteration of the Jesus story offends you. As a Bible movie fan, I appreciate this film's attempt to view familiar events from a fresh vantage point, if not from an actually different perspective.

UMRIKA (2015)

Indiana Jones is trapped on a rope bridge, with Mola Ram's minions closing from either end. His drastic solution is to cut the bridge in half and hang on for dear life. "Prepare to meet Kali ... in Hell," the hero tells Mola Ram -- at which point the audience in an Indian city starts throwing food and garbage at the screen. "Don't hurt Brother Amrish!" they yell, referring to the actor known elsewhere as Om Puri, who plays the villain in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's just one of India's many conflicted encounters with American culture in Prashant Nair's film, which follows one village family from the 1970s -- it starts with Indira Gandhi's state of emergency -- through the 1980s. It's an era of promise that sees the village get electricity at long last, but that leads to the protagonist's father getting accidentally electrocuted. Still, a spirit of optimism prevailed, stoked by village scion Udai's journey to Umrika to make his fortune for his family. After a period of silence, letters begin arriving regularly, liberally illustrated with photos of the glamour and weirdness of American life. But after Udai's dad dies, as mentioned above, Udai's brother Ramakant (Suraj Sharma) discovers a guilty secret. Udai has actually written nothing since leaving; his father and uncle have been forging the letters and illustrating them with magazine clippings. Ramakant now embarks on a quest of his own to find out what became of his brother, targeting the fixer who was supposed to arrange for Udai's passage to Umrika.

If you're looking for an Indian's adventures in the U.S., find another film. Umrika is more about the idea of America in Indian minds and their identification of it with modernity, progress and a certain arrogant eccentricity. Nair is smart enough not to make his characters total marks for American culture. The heckling of Indy and some characters' skeptical discussion of the concept of Groundhog Day remind us that the Indians aren't total simpletons, though a certain naivete is necessary to fuel the drama. Ramakant's coming of age is fraught with disillusionments, but they aren't as melodramatic as a synopsis might suggest.  Nothing horrible has happened to Udai, it turns out, but that only underscores Ramakant's sense of disappointment while fueling his resolve to push forward where Udai fell short. Ramakant's determination finally creates a sense of real danger as he enters the Indian underworld and finally embarks on an uncertain journey to Umrika. If the film has been largely satiric, and sometimes sentimental, it closes on what seems to me a darker note as Ramakant and a shipping container full of would-be immigrants are loaded onto a freighter for the long voyage. Meanwhile, his mother and his village will continue to believe a myth, watching with adoration a videotape the brothers filmed together against a patently-fake Times Square backdrop, supposedly made in New York. Perhaps a sequel with an adequate budget will follow Ramakant to the U.S., but it's more likely that Prashant Nair has made his point already.

DVR Diary: SPEEDWAY (1929)

William Haines is a recognizable ancestor of the boy-men who continue to infest Hollywood, and as such he was one of the biggest stars of the late silent era. Sound and scandal snuffed out his career soon afterward, and the former alone might have done it -- Haines was gay and refused to go through with a studio-arranged marriage to cover it -- because, on the evidence of the talkies of his I've seen, his shtick came on too strong in sound. He is possibly at his most obnoxious in Harry Beaumont's racing melodrama, but his obnoxious qualities -- he seems to have been arrested in development at adolescence -- were packaged to be tolerable to movie audiences. The archetypal Haines story portrays him as arrogant and selfish, albeit with an innate harmless charisma that makes women warm to him, but while today's boy-men stop right there, Haines usually suffers some comeuppance that leads him to redeem if not necessarily mature himself. In Speedway he's part of the pit crew for Ernest Torrence's long-suffering Indy-car driver, a sort of savant with engines and ambitious to race himself yet neither very ambitious nor disciplined. In Indianapolis he spends most of his time hitting on Anita Page, who turns out to be an aviatrix and inflicts a comic comeuppance on our hero by taking him on a wild, ultimately destructive plane ride. Haines makes a spectacle of himself attempting to seduce her at a diner, and later stages a fake auto accident to get her attention. I guess the girls in these pictures are supposed to be bowled over by his good looks once they realize that he means no harm, but I don't know if I buy it.

Meanwhile, Haines grows estranged from father-figure Torrence, who hopes to finally win the 500 in his final race. Our hero is seduced himself by John Miljan's dirty driver, Torrence's longtime rival, who promises that Haines can drive his car in the big race but only wants the naive young man to soup up his engine. The melodrama really kicks in when Torrence's doctor tells him his heart won't last 500 miles. With Haines now allied with his enemy, Torrence has to hand the wheel to his other pit man, Karl Dane. Miljan reclaims his car just before the race, and when Dane can't hack it as a driver, Torrence pulls a switcheroo and lets Haines drive for him. Most of the film was shot on location and while this is no Ben-Hur with motors there are a few money shots of Haines and Miljan driving on the actual race track. Haines overcomes a four-lap deficit, and just as he's poised to pull away he fakes an eye injury in an act of filial piety, the idea being to let Torrence finish the race and take the long-coveted checkered flag. This he does, only to pass out in the winner's circle, but the film isn't so melodramatic that it will kill the man off. Speedway was Haines' last silent film -- he had already spoken on screen -- and it's enlivened by racing sound effects in place of music during the climax. It is not the picture to explain Haines' appeal to modern viewers, but I don't know if any of his films can explain it now. As a very late silent, premiering in the fall of 1929, it was destined to the memory hole, but unlike some other Haines vehicles from this period, at least Speedway survives to play sometimes on Turner Classic Movies. It's arguably even more obsolete than many late silents when you consider that within five years of its release William Haines was finished as an actor and Ernest Torrence and Karl Dane were dead.

On the Big Screen: SHIN GODZILLA (Shin Gojira, 2016)

In an alternate universe, Hollywood's second film in its latest attempt at a Godzilla franchise is due in 2018. In the real world, Toho studios returned to the game it invented this past summer with a picture modestly entitled "New Godzilla." It's as new as a New Godzilla can get, since if I'm not mistaken this is the first film since the 1954 not in continuity with that film. That is, Shin Godzilla shows the ever-popular kaiju attacking Tokyo for the first time in the year 2016. That's a big part of its novelty as envisioned by screenwriter and co-director Hideaki Anno. He and co-director Shinji Highuchi are fascinated by the idea of 21st century Japanese society, and especially its government bureaucracy, confronting a "giant unidentified creature" without any precedent. It allows them to reconstruct many of the old monster-movie tropes from scratch, with what strikes me as a new touch of satire. The first half of the film in particular may make American audiences impatient with all the bureaucratic conferences and talking heads, no matter how the directors try to keep things lively with whipcrack editing. Shin is a kind of apocalyptic procedural, and a quick Google search just now shows that I wasn't the only person who felt a resemblance to another movie that would fit that description: Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964). I don't know whether either of the filmmakers have acknowledged any debt to Lumet, but little details like intercom conversations between heads of governments, with translators standing by, and a brief mention of a theoretical nuclear strike on New York City make me wonder. Ultimately it's a trivial question, since Anno and Higuchi do an admirable job giving their Godzilla film its own identity.

Theirs is a new Godzilla in this sense, too: when you first see it, you won't be sure what the hell you're looking at. It seems that this sea creature has been chowing down on nuclear waste in the vicinity of good old Ohdo Island for the last 60 years before deciding to explore Japan, and it takes him a while to get his land legs. He crawls ashore, creating waves of boats, cars and trucks in his wake as he putters along, looking very little like his traditional self in this almost larval state. He finally hauls himself to his feet on the side of a tall building, only to immediately flop again. The poor creature seems to have a puppet face grafted onto a CGI body, but he soon outgrows this. He proves capable of auto-mutation and quickly becomes more or less bipedal, plus tail. He's still pretty wobbly, though, and you can believe that the Self-Defense Force could have taken him out if not for two stragglers, one on the other's back, getting in the way when they should have been evacuated. The Prime Minister, terrified of collateral damage, scratches what proves the last best chance to nip the creature in the bud.

In effect, Godzilla -- so the Americans have called him, having learned of a creature living near Ohdo Island years earlier, though the Japanese quickly correct this -- can program himself to grow. After slinking back into the ocean, he returns in much larger, more familiar form. He's still rather ropey looking, with perhaps his tiniest hands ever and quite the snaggletoothed and largely immobile face, but you'd definitely call him Godzilla, or Gojira if you insist. Now the full might of the SDF is unleashed on him, but from bullets to bombs they have no effect. It takes an American bunker-buster to get to the monster, and that only makes him mad. In the film's most outlandishly original moment -- one that drew applause from the monster-loving crowd at my local theater -- Godzilla unloads with not only laser breath but tail lasers and dorsal fin lasers, shredding large parts of the capital and nearly wiping out the government. Fortunately, even though the creature is a living nuclear reactor, he can't quite go all night and now needs to rest.

The last phase of the picture is a race against time as a team of malcontents and renegades led by fast-rising bureaucrat Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) rushes to perfect their wild plan to freeze the monster from the inside out before the UN, pressed by the US, Russia and China, greenlights a preemptive thermonuclear strike on Tokyo. This isn't as dire as threat as it could have been since Godzilla's dormancy gives the Japanese a fortnight-window to evacuate the city and a conscientious world pledges massive contributions to reconstruction, but the Japanese understandably resent the idea of taking yet another atomic hit. For that matter, so does our hero's American liaison, a Japanese-American U.S. Senator's daughter (Satomi Ishihara) whose grandmother survived the Hiroshima bomb. She has ambitions of becoming the first Asian-American President, but Americans viewers can't avoid noticing that the actress doesn't sound like a native English speaker. No matter. While there's plenty of (again) understandable bristling at American domination throughout Shin Godzilla, the filmmakers don't try to demonize all Americans and shows the military willing to help out crucially in the alternate plan. The big finish is epic stuff in which the city of Tokyo is virtually weaponized, the very buildings claiming payback against their tormentor. Maybe I'm a mark for "destruction porn," but I found it one of the best action sequences I've seen in a while. It was fun to root against Godzilla for once, other audience members notwithstanding, and it was exhilarating to see Yaguchi's plan come together against the odds after Godzilla had come to seem, well, godlike in his invincibility. Despite many dry moments -- I imagine an actual American edition, as opposed to the subtitled original playing limited engagements this week, would cut out a lot of the bureaucratic satire -- and despite some initial difficulty trying to follow two layers of subtitles, one for the dialogue, another for all the Japanese on-screen subtitles identifying characters, weaponry, etc., Shin Godzilla is a fun film for monster-movie fans, happily unencumbered by the mundane character arcs that burdened the most recent American Godzilla, despite its virtues. It's a textbook reboot, proving that something like the original narrative could be made fresh again after all these years.

THE SILENCED (2015)

Lee Hae-young's picture belongs to a subgenre popularized if not invented by Guillermo del Toro: the fascist gothic. The year is 1938 and the setting is Japanese-occupied Korea. Cha Ju-Ran (Park Bo-yong) is the tubercular daughter of a privileged family that has dumped her in a boarding school while they go to Japan, which is apparently where all ambitious Koreans want to go. Like all the students -- like all Koreans, I assume -- Ju-Ran is given a Japanese name, Shizuko, which makes things awkward with her new classmates, on top of all the travails of the new girl,  because there had just been a Shizuko there who went away abruptly. There's a heavy emphasis on athletics at the school, because the two top athletes will go to Japan. Those who know history might think this has something to do with the 1940 Olympics that were supposed to take place in Tokyo, as Koreans would compete under the Japanese flag as they had in previous Games. But there's something more to it than that, and that something moves the film away from its gothic trappings and toward the realm of Marvel Comics movies.

 

In a twist strongly reminiscent of origin stories told about the Black Widow, it turns out that the school is trying to create super-soldiers, the gimme being that teenage girls are the ideal test subjects for the wonder drugs that will do the job. The effects on Ju-Ran are miraculous. On her first day of track and field she can't even make it to the end of the long jump track without succumbing to a coughing fit. After some treatments she proves a prize pupil, leaping far past the pit. But she doesn't like what's happening to her and her schoolmates, or what the treatments are making her do to others. When she and her one real friend try to escape, and the friend comes to a bad end, she likes it even less. That sets up the inevitable reckoning with the headmistress and the Japanese soldiers behind her.

 

Overall, The Silenced -- the generic English title hardly approximates the original "Gyeongseong School: The Lost Girls" -- manages the balancing act of mixing gothic horror and comic-book sci-fi by maintaining an overall mood of mystery and dread that should carry the viewer through the presumably preposterous moments. Inevitably the story must resonate more with Korean audiences still conscious of the history of Japanese rule, while the contempt some characters express for Korea must have made those audiences almost as queasy as the more violent moments. It's an allegory for both the nation's exploitation by the colonial occupier and the latent power that would make South Korea a global economic competitor later in the 20th century. For the rest of us its a modest hybrid picture that manages somehow to transcend its derivative nature through an earnest lead performance and an indispensable willingness to take itself seriously as if all its ideas were new.

Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016)

Wajda, arguably Poland's greatest filmmaker, died on October 9 at age 90, just one month after his latest film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. He made his name in the 1950s with a series of grim, gritty war movies. He became a chronicler of Polish history, including (at his own risk) the history-in-the-making of the early 1980s. Lech Walesa played himself in Wajda's Man of Iron, and was the subject of a Wajda biopic thirty years later. When things got too hot Wajda became an international (albeit European) filmmaker, his most notable product of exile being the French Revolutionary drama Danton. With the end of the Cold War the west seemed to lose interest in him but international acclaim returned with his 2007 picture Katyn, a further settling of scores with the Russians who oppressed his country. His last film, Afterimage, appears to be a vindication of art against the claims of Marxist-Leninism through a painter's struggle against Socialist Realist orthodoxy. Despite living under Communism for much of his career, Wajda still created a formidable body of work within Poland, which was perhaps more liberal toward art than other Warsaw Pact countries. His best work, one hopes, will transcend ideology over time. I've reviewed a few Wajda movies over the years, so follow the links to learn more about Kanal, Promised Land, Man of Marble, Man of Iron, Danton and Katyn. I hope you'll then go on to look at some of the actual films by this great director.

ARABIAN NIGHTS (As Mil e uma Noites, 2015)

Miguel Gomes' project isn't as voluminous as it could be -- I say this with Out 1 still fresh in my memory --  but at 6 hours, 22 minutes, his phantasmagorical satire can at least claim to do justice to the title it appropriates. Gomes made his name in arthouse circles with his 2012 picture Tabu. His new subject was Portugal's austerity regime, though only a relatively small fraction of the three-part picture confronts economic policy directly. Arabian Nights combines actuality footage of current events in Portugal, from the opening vignette of the closing of a shipyard to massive protests by the nation's police, with a magical realism that proves a curious way to illustrate both the impact of globalization and the Portuguese people's apparent subjection to the whims of higher powers.

 

 

The perils of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate), who must beguile her caliph with stories to stay alive from night to night, are an allegory for both the threat austerity poses to filmmakers like Gomes, who depend in part on state subsidies, and the challenge the director sets for himself with his long project. Her stories range from the ribald tales we may associate with the original "Arabian Nights," especially the first film's "The Men With the Hard-Ons," to the virtual documentary narrative, "The Inebriating Song of the Chaffinches" (surely the right word is "Intoxicating") that takes up most of the third film. Gomes' hope is that his framing device will encourage audiences to approach the wide variety of subject matter he offers with equal curiosity and sympathy, that we might discover something as wondrous in the competition of birdsong collectors as we may in the more fantastical stories.

 

 

It's probably a good idea for Gomes to get his most spiteful tale, "Men With the Hard-Ons," out of the way early. In it, the bureaucrats and hacks negotiating some austerity-era deal meet a wizard who offers the men in the group perpetual erections for a hefty price, only to give them a further taste of their own medicine by demanding another payoff when tumescence proves bothersome or inconvenient. This episode's ad hominem attitude toward its subjects contrasts with the more humane tone that prevails through most of the project. More typical, if not the entire project's signature episode, is "The Tears of the Judge" in the second film. The judge holds court in a little amphitheatre that eventually fills with an exotic collection of characters, each invoked to explain the circumstances of the person before, from animal-costumed bandits to Chinese immigrants to a genie and the ghost of a cow. The endless interconnectedness of it all makes for riveting and sometimes hilarious viewing, and Arabian Nights is at its best when it juxtaposes the mundane and the magical in one frame to inform our view of the world we live in.

 

 

 

The third and final film may seem at first glance like Gomes was slapping stuff together just to have a trilogy without achieving any closure -- Scheherazade is little more than halfway done when the film ends and there's no wrap-up to her story -- but it has some of the project's most memorable moments. She has more screen time here than in the other films, confessing to her father her fatigue and fear when they meet in an amusement park after encountering such odd creatures as an annoying air genie and the sexually prolific Paddleman. Gomes makes an interesting point of emphasizing how many possibly fascinating folk and phenomena he shows us that Scheherazade will never discover or describe, which may be his way of preparing us for an open-ended conclusion without a conclusion. As the character disappears, not even to be heard but rather quoted in title cards as she spends day after day after day telling of the chaffinches and their masters, or taking off on the occasional tangent, viewers might wonder why her head hadn't rolled already. But Gomes manages to make the birdsong saga worthy of at least some of our attention, while the major digression of "The Tale of Hot Forest" is a tour de force of layered meaning. We see the police protest footage I mentioned earlier, a public action on an epic scale, while we hear the Chinese narrative of an exchange student -- the title character of the tale -- who has an affair with a policeman (also involved with the chaffinches) before getting deported, and over that we hear the Glenn Miller Orchestra's version of "Perfidia," the virtual theme song of the third film. The juxtaposition may make no obvious sense, except to emphasize the constant juxtapositions of our globalized existence, but the cumulative effect is dazzling. In its own way, so is the climactic tracking shot of the chaffinch trainer Chico Chapas taking a very long walk through the hills, after one more moment of fantasy with the rescue of a genie caught in a chaffinch trap. If there's no real ending of the story, Gomes seems to tell us with this sequence that that's because things are still moving and probably will never stop, even though his film must.

Too Much TV: GOMORRAH (2014 -?)

Inspired by Roberto Saviano's dangerous expose of organized crime in Naples, and presumably also by Matteo Garrone's film adaptation of Saviano's book, Stefano Sollima's TV series debuted in Italy in 2014 and reached the U.S., subtitled rather than dubbed, on the Sundance Channel this summer. By the time the first season premiered in America, a second season had wrapped in Italy, with more reported on the way. Sollima is the son of the late Sergio Sollima, who directed some decent crime films back in the 1970s along with his better known spaghetti westerns. Perhaps fitting for a second-generation director, Gomorrah is a blend of old and new. It's still relatively new in its deromanticized portrait of Italian organized crime, leaving behind the stylish men of respect for tattooed goons in hoodies like you'd see just about anywhere on earth. But at its heart the TV Gomorrah is a familiar sort of family saga of tragic dimensions, anchored by powerful performances by Maria Pia Calzone and Salvatore Esposito as a mother and son struggling to hold their crime family together after Don Pietro Savastano (Fortunato Cerlino) is sent to prison, and even better work by Marco D'Amore as the man who comes between mother and son and eventually becomes a mortal enemy to both.

Gennaro Savastano (Esposito) starts out as a spoiled, overgrown kid who idolizes one of his dad's best soldiers, Ciro Di Marzio (D'Amore). Don Pietro wants Ciro to make more of a man of his boy by taking him out on his first killing. Genny is eager but uncertain, impatient to prove himself yet prone to freezing at crucial moments. Tasked with killing a man, Genny manages to wound him but can't bring himself to finish the victim off. Shamed by his failure despite Ciro's attempt to cover for him, Genny wipes out on his motorcycle and the accident leads to Don Pietro's arrest. Caught speeding on the way to the hospital, Pietro is caught carrying drugs by cops who refuse to be bribed or intimidated. At first it looks like Pietro will keep running things from behind bars but the state isn't as pliant as it used to be. As he's forced into solitary confinement, it becomes Genny's responsibility to lead the family. Ciro sees this as his big chance to be the power behind the throne as Genny's top adviser, but Genny's mother Imma (Calzone) doesn't trust Ciro. Lady Imma, as she's usually called, is not your grandmother's mob wife. She knows full well what her husband does and has some strong ideas on how to run a mob herself. She effectively becomes Don Pietro's regent and makes a point of marginalizing Ciro. Imma has a global vision as well as solid plans for expanding operations on the ground, and she doesn't scruple at having people whacked to further her plans. People who dig the powerful women on American TV should see Imma as a sister-in-arms.

In her most drastic move to separate Genny and Ciro, Imma sends her son on a dangerous mission to Honduras to arrange for a new supply of drugs while sending Ciro to Spain to negotiate with an old enemy of his, Salvatore Conte (Marco Palvetti), whose mother's apartment was torched by Ciro in the first scene of the series. For a while, you wonder how ruthless Imma is, whether she's interested in either Ciro or Genny coming home. But each mission proves a success, despite some rough treatment for both men. Genny returns transformed by his ordeal: leaner, meaner and initially embittered toward his mother. But if Ciro thinks that things will improve for him, he soon learns otherwise. Genny is now determined to be his own master, and finally begins to reconcile with Imma when she explains that that was why she sent him to Honduras. Whether she expected him to return as vicious as he becomes -- he now can shoot a waiter in cold blood for reminding him of having been a fat boy -- is doubtful, but they soon join forces in Genny's scheme to put a new political regime, beholden to him personally, in power at the next election.

When Genny's man wins it looks like all's well with the Savastanos, but Giro is tired of being trod upon. Seeing no room for advancement with Genny and Imma in the way, he decides to bring the whole thing down by secretly provoking a war between the Savastanos and the Contes. Until this point you could sympathize with Ciro because for all his amoral ruthlessness he has seemed a good soldier and faithful to Don Pietro, and you could argue that first Imma, then Genny, have treated him unfairly. But in the last hours of the first season Ciro proves himself a monster, goading a dumb kid into killing a Conte man, on the assumption that Genny will be blamed, then trying to blot out his trail by killing the kid. When the kid proves elusive, Ciro kidnaps the kid's girlfriend and tortures her to death to find out what she might know. The kid ends up in Conte's hands and confesses that Ciro put him up to the killing, while Imma receives a cellphone that luckily recorded Ciro's kidnapping of the girl as she was trying to send a message. This sets up a showdown between the show's two real masterminds, Imma and the "Immortal" Ciro, as Gomorrah builds to a suspenseful climax -- in fact, a double cliffhanger -- that tests Imma's ability to think steps ahead of Ciro and Ciro's survival instincts and pure luck. To go into more detail would spoil a show that doesn't deserve such treatment; the final hour is one of the most exciting hours of TV I've seen in a while, and I regret to report that it had me actually rooting for one group of brutal murderers and drug dealers to defeat another. That's really a tribute both to Marco D'Amore's success at playing a slow-burn villain and a natural empathy for family that Sollima and his writers exploit masterfully. It's good to know that Season Two is already in the can, though I wonder what can be done with so many in the large cast eliminated. Now it's just a matter of how soon Sundance wants to release it. For me, it cannot be too soon.