END OF THE WORLD (1977)

I can't hope to match the terse assessment of John Hayes's doomsday scenario that comes from the critic T. S. Eliot

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

So I'll focus on particular details of interest. For instance, the movie has a pretty action-packed opening, at least by comparison with what comes afterward. We find ourselves in a kind of diner where the cook is playing a Disco-Tek pinball game. All of a sudden, in walks Christopher Lee in priestly regalia, as if he were reporting at the wrong door for an Exorcist sequel. Perhaps understandably confused, he asks to use a pay phone, which practically blows up in his face before he can dial a number.

That's not all. The cook's coffee-maker explodes as well, showering the man with scalding water. There follows some heroic stuntwork as cookie runs out from behind the counter and down the length of the diner, screaming and covering his face, before taking a sharp turn away from Lee to hurl himself through an exploding neon window. It's a rare triple-play: scalding, defenestration and electrocution all in one -- a quadruple play if you count damage from the broken glass.

Not forgetting his priestly duties despite his anxiety, Lee coolly steps over to bless the corpse, but not until a final flinch-inducing burst of sparks from the window. Then, with the air of a beaten man, he trudges to a church, presumably his own. It must be, because Christopher Lee is waiting to welcome him in. This is the last really interesting thing to happen for about 45 minutes.

During that interval, we're introduced to Andrew and Sylvia Boran, a computer-savvy scientist and his wife. Andy is enjoying an unexplained sexual second wind at the same time that he's trying to decipher apparent alien signals on the computers, despite his boss's determination to send him off on a speaking tour. He cracks the code, which seems to have predicted both a major Chinese earthquake and a volcanic eruption in Zaire. Rather than lecture kids about the thrills of space exploration, Andy wants to find the source of the alien signals. The most likely spot, improbably, is this little mission where Father Pergardo (guess who?) presides over a little flock of six old nuns. Nope, no alien signals coming out of here, he says, unless you count Sister Whatsername's transistor radio. But blind alleys elsewhere bring Andy and Sylvia back to the mission. This time they're grabbed by a nun with a gnarly clawed hand and taken into the basement, which reveals itself as an alien operations base with all the amenities, including a big spinning globe representing the imperiled Earth. There remain a good Chris Lee and a bad Chris Lee to sort out, but that doesn't last much longer.

Nunsploitation meets hard sci-fi in End of the World. Below, Christopher Lee meets a red overlay.

There's an odd hint here that the evil nuns need human energy to fuel their so-far mysterious whatsit, and that the real Father Pergardo was a kind of human sacrifice, but the truth is even stranger, as only fiction can be. What follows, in words crafted by Frank Ray Perilli, the future author of Laserblast and Dracula's Dog, features some of the most innovative science since Eros explained the principles of solarite, er, solanite, ...oh, you know what I mean, in Plan Nine From Outer Space.

Andy: Obviously, everything in this room has some connection with velocity-time relationships.
Lee (his alien self is called Zindar): Exactly. Interstellar travel.
Andy: What happened to the nuns who were here before?
Lee: You humans are just beginning to understand cloning. We mastered it many years ago. We took on the appearance of Father Pergardo and the six nuns of this mission, because we were forced to for our experiment.
Sylvia: You're telling us that you murdered six nuns and a priest?
Lee: We had no choice. There was a malfunction in negative velocity.
Andy (intuitively): A spaceship!
Lee: No, we use inertial navigation. We have paid many visits to your planet, but now your planet has become restructured through seismic disturbance, and we cannot return to our planet as we did before.
Andy: How did you manage then?
Lee: We used what you humans would call a time warp, such as that one.

No lie: this is exactly what they cut to after Lee says that line. This is the time warp device.

Andy: What do you want from us?
Lee: Your planet has been working on a speed coordination system. We know that, Mr. Boran. What we don't know is what you have achieved.
Andy: We've developed an emergency speed.
Lee: How many kilometers per hour?
Andy: Close to 200,000,000.
Lee: What precisely do you use to achieve this emergency speed?
Andy: A small capsule containing zero time reference. A variance crystal.
Lee: That is exactly what we need.

Got that? Well, Zindar, if we must call him that, simply insists that Andy go back to his job and steal the zero-time-reference variance crystal so the aliens can overcome the crippling effects of the Earth's restructuring and achieve the emergency speed necessary to activate the time warp. And they'll do stuff to Sylvia if he doesn't. But first, the pseudo-Catholics give our couple a chance to sleep on it, i.e., try to escape. They head out in the dead of night and take a nice, slow walk that leads them back to the mission. Of course! Andy deduces; the aliens have been controlling our every move -- that's why we're walking in circles. Way to save face, Andy. But this crippling realization doesn't stop them from venturing out again, this time in the hope of intercepting someone passing through who might rescue them. They find a promising motorist, but just as Father Pergardo found phones and coffee machines malfunctioning when he wanted to escape in those long-gone optimistic times, so this poor slob's engine goes boom. It may be a matter of seconds before the whole car goes up with this would-be Samaritan in it. In those crucial seconds, Andy and Sylvia run as far away from that car as their little legs will carry them. But maybe it's for the best, because the nuns would have grabbed that driver anyway and sent him out on an errand, probably. Isn't death preferable?

So there's nothing else for Andy to do but steal that variance crystal. By now it's becoming commonplace for things to blow up around him, so it's little more than cause for a sigh to see the place go up as security guards fire wildly at fuel tanks trying to plug him. Then it's back to the mission and a little clarification from Zindar on the details of his mission.

Sue Lyon and Kirk Scott in a moment of repose as the endangered globe spins on

Lee: The planet Earth has emitted an overabundance of diseases. They are contaminating the universe. All the planets light-years away from here will suffer, unless it is destroyed....We have received our orders. An earthquake in a remote part of China. The eruption of a long-dead volcano. We stopped when we discovered that the restructioning of the Earth was preventing us from returning to our own planet. That problem has been rectified. Your world will end. Nothing can prevent it. This convent will be the last to go. I have set the emergency speed to 200,000,000 kilometers per hour, three times the speed required. We have a direct path.

To elaborate on Eliot a little, the world ends with lots of stock footage of disaster movies: dams bursting, avalanches, more volcanoes, und so weiter. As our oppressed humans watch it all on the monitors, the nuns step on the inertial navigation dingus and zap happily homeward. The last to leave, Zindar says regretfully that a scientist like Andy would be welcome on his world because over there they're dedicated to building things, not destruction. He has a lot of gall saying that while destroying -- I mean, restructioning the planet, but I suppose scientists are like that everywhere. Perhaps as a gesture of respect, Zindar show the Borans his true face, leaving us the hope that it was, in fact, not Christopher Lee embarrassing himself by uttering this dialogue, but some severely mutated being who needed the money for medical expenses and was willing to wear a pretty advanced makeup.

In any event, Zindar's parting words plant a thought in Andy's already thoughtful brain. The planet Earth is about to be destroyed. All of Andy and Sylvia's friends and extended family, as well as everything that makes their lives meaningful, is about to be annihilated, just like that poor motorist was when he tried to help them...and you see where this is leading.

"God knows what's on the other side of that wall," he tells his wife, "It's our only chance. Let's take it." For crying out loud, by the standards of this picture you'd think that Andy could work up some pseudoscience to reverse the inertia or induce negative time references or, well, something heroic. Instead, our randy couple decide to ditch their homeworld and try their luck elsewhere. Bastards.

When you find yourself making a bad science fiction film, you really may as well try to make it one of the worst ever. That might be the one thing that would make it watchable. John Hayes, whose only other work I'm familiar with is Grave of the Vampire, nearly fails at this. For very long stretches End of the World is merely boring, betraying the promise of that somewhat spectacular diner scene. It's really Perilli who saves the day by taking his writing to a special level of bad. It is bad both as concept and as dialogue. It is such science as Ed Wood would have laughed out of the room. Sir Christopher Lee is shamelessly straightfaced while uttering it all in the guise of an emotionless alien. I'm guessing he was attracted to this film (or I'm guessing this is what he'd say now) by the idea of the dual role, though his good self ends up with pitiably little to do and he never gets a good self-to-self dialogue scene. Still, I think deadpan was the right approach to this dialogue. Try to read it Dudley Manlove-style and the attention will all be on you. Lee's line readings are a way to let Perilli's lines twist in the wind of bad-movie history, so that credit ends up where it belongs. Apart from Lee, the cast includes a lot of the usual suspects from genre movies of this period: Dean Jagger as Andy's boss, MacDonald Carey as a security guard and Lew Ayres as the commander of a secret compound whom Andy stumbles across in another ultimately pointless scene. The role of Andrew Boran was a rare escape from television for Kirk Scott, though he also turns up in Heathers later on. Sue Lyon is Sylvia, fifteen years after Kubrick's Lolita, but that means she was still relatively young compared with the other guest stars in this picture. Her looks, at least, are a saving grace of the film.

I can only honestly recommend this film to connoisseurs of cinematic badness or Seventies negativity, and you know who you are. You'll find it in Mill Creek Entertainment's Nightmare Worlds box set, and probably in some others from that admirable salvage operation. You can also find it right here on your computer via the equally admirable Internet Archive. Watch in amazement, if you choose, and reflect that this came out in the same year as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Actually, Eliot's review wasn't quite accurate.

BANG!

On the Big Screen: HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (2008-9)

The story needs no introduction to most people, so I'll content myself with saying that David Yates's second round with the series is the best film of the set since Alfonso Cuaron's Prisoner of Azbakan. It's a wonder of art direction that approaches an ideal of fantasy cinema in its near-abandonment of exposition. Yates and adapter Steve Kloves are confident enough in the audience's familiarity with the material that they can send you right into Hogwarts and environs without you feeling that they're holding your hand and explaining every little detail like this is your first time there. That's really been so for the last couple of episodes, but the previous two felt choppy and somewhat incomplete compared to this one. Yates has clearly got his grip on the material now, and may be able to name his price when he finishes the two-part finale. But I wonder whether he isn't like quarterbacks on certain college football teams whose programs are designed to score touchdowns by the bushel and earn their stars Heisman trophies, who then flop in the NFL. That is, it's open to debate how much Yates benefits from his production team and his pantheon cast of English actors, or how much Yates himself has imposed organization on it all.

Fidelity to the novel I cannot judge. I've tried to read the first book after multiple recommendations, but I can't shake the feeling that J. K. Rowling really is writing down to an audience of young children. I imagine that changes as the series goes on, but I wouldn't want to start in the middle. I know other people dislike Rowling's writings. There was a children's book seller in my neighborhood in Albany who refused to carry the Potters because he thought them so badly written, but I ought to add that he went out of business this summer. In any event, I can judge the films on their own merits as screen stories rather than by fidelity to the books. The latter films must have cut out lots of material from the increasingly enormous novels, but while you could tell that from the last film, for instance, the new one feels more like a whole story. If anything it has to juggle nearly more than it can handle in maintaining a balance between the menace of the Dark Lord and the personal struggles of the hormonal Hogwarts kids as they go through the motions of another year. The comedy of their romantic tangles is welcome, but I can't help wondering whether there should have been more of a sense of crisis among the student body as a whole following the revolt in the previous film.

The series as a whole will be a monument to ensemble acting, but I want to single out two standout performers for praise this time. Of Michael Gambon, the replacement Dumbledore, I think I can now say that, had Ian McKellan not been at Peter Jackson's disposal a decade ago, Gambon could have filled in nicely as Gandalf. I tip my metaphorical hat to him. But the person who nearly steals this film from everyone else is an actor I might have thought least capable of doing so. Throughout the series until now, Tom Felton in the role of Draco Malfoy has seemed like a waste of space. Built up in the ballyhoo since the first film as Harry Potter's schoolyard arch-enemy, Malfoy has really had little to do in the movies, as I remember them, and has been dreadfully unimpressive in what he did do. In the new film Draco has an important plot function, and it's as if someone finally turned the "On" switch on Felton. Draco Malfoy emerges as a nearly-tragic figure who trembles under the heavy responsibility of perpetrating a great evil whether he really wants to or not, torn between a sense of duty and a desire to prove himself, on one hand, and something between cowardice and guilty self-loathing on the other hand. This is much more of a character challenge than the mere bully that Malfoy has usually been on screen, and Felton, in my opinion, nails it. He has finally earned his spot alongside his phenomenal fellow youngsters in a new generation of English actors, and I'd now be interested in seeing him in other roles.

Half-Blood Prince is the Empire Strikes Back of the film series, providing arguably the darkest moment of the long story and setting up the grand finale. From the reviews and the box office receipts it seems that it will fulfill its function and leave people eager for the seventh round next year. Whether Yates and Kloves will be able to break the final novel in half and leave each half a coherent whole of a film is a question for another time.

THE FURIES (1950)

Over at Goodfella's Movie Blog there's an inexorable march in progress through the talkie era as Dave names his favorites for each year and takes all comers with other picks and lists. It's great sport for people with lots of movie experience, and Dave makes an eloquent case for his choice every time. 1950 came up on Thursday (Dave named All About Eve), so that was an excuse to crack open a Criterion DVD that I'd picked up at a Borders going-out-of-business sale last year. Why it took so long to look at Anthony Mann's other western from 1950 I can't say, except to point to the constant distractions that show up on the Albany Public Library's DVD shelves.

For those wondering what I mean by "other western," 1950 was the year of Mann's big breakthrough film, Winchester 73. That was the film that signaled the darker turn that would make James Stewart one of the top actors of the 1950s, often directed by Mann in grim westerns like The Naked Spur and The Man From Laramie. Winchester is also one of the early "adult" or "psychological" westerns, as the genre is called that looks beyond the white and black hats to discover conflicted heroes and complex villains. Another frequently-used label that's actually more specialized is "Freudian western," and The Furies is one of these.

The Freudian Western adds a level of sexual obsession to the adult-western template, dating back to David O. Selznick's Duel in the Sun from 1947. Duel was based on a novel by Niven Busch, and The Furies was another of his novels, picked up by Paramount-affiliated producer Hal Wallis for direction by Mann. Criterion has reprinted the novel for inclusion in a neat little box with the movie. I haven't read it yet, but I did open it to answer a question that occurred to me almost immediately as I watched the film.

"The Furies" is a giant cattle ranch owned by T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston), a mighty man of the old school who spends much of his time spending his money in the fleshpots of San Francisco. When I say his money, that sometimes means "his" money. He somehow has the right to print promissory notes called T.C.s that are accepted as legal tender, albeit with increasing reluctance, when he runs up debts.

T.C. has two children that we know of. The son, Clay, is an ineffectual, nearly effeminate fellow who is nevertheless getting married as our story opens. The true heir apparent to The Furies, however, is the daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck). She runs things in T. C.'s absence, gripes about his expenses, and busts his balls when he's home, but theirs is a very affectionate relationship. He trusts her to massage his sixth lumbar vertebrae, and there's something disquietingly intimate about their interaction that's only accentuated by Franz Waxman's suggestive music. Vance is headstrong, competent, yet virginal and naive in sexual matters. This seems inconsistent with the plain fact of Barbara Stanwyck on the screen. Few of her peers in Classic Hollywood exude the raw power that she does, and that's sexual power along with everything else. But there's something about Vance that makes Stanwyck seem inappropriate for the role, though I suppose that only emerges because she has the character nailed as far as acting is concerned. What I had to check in the novel was Vance's age. Stanwyck was 43 when she played the role. In the book, Vance is nineteen. To be fair, I don't know if the movie means her to be nineteen, and Stanwyck's age is arguably appropriate relative to Huston's. Also, I don't know if a more age-appropriate actress could have brought the necessary power that Stanwyck does.

Father and daughter bust one another's chops and always seem to be maneuvering for advantage over each other, but they clearly love one another until others enter their orbit. She already has a perhaps more-than-friendly relationship with Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), scion of a local squatter clan, but she seems suddenly to be more serious about Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), a questionable character whose family lost a valuable strip of land to T.C. and bequeathed a grudge to their boy. Vance wants to get T.C.'s goat by going with an enemy, while T.C. is determined to show her that Rip is a scumbag. It takes $50,000 to prove it, which is what he offers Rip to walk away from Vance. Rip accepts, taking it as compensation for the loss of his family's land and using it to start his own bank. Vance, who has been repeatedly stood up, not to mention slapped around (in some convincingly rough scenes) by this creep, is heartbroken, confiding her sorrows and lingering feelings for Rip to Juan.

If this film were to be remade today, I suspect that Vance would end up with Juan, who seems like too good a guy to pass up. But there's increasing pressure on the Jeffords clan to drive out all squatters, who are a "cloud" over the land in the eyes of the bankers from whom T.C. wants a new mortgage. For the moment, Vance's affection for Juan earns the Herreras a breather while T.C. and his right hand goon El Tigre (Thomas Gomez) burn out the other squatters.

Anthony Mann's deep-focus style is also suited for illustrating height, as in this scene in which Vance (on horseback at the right bottom of the screen) hails Juan, standing atop the Herrera fortress.

Things fall apart when T.C. brings a new, older woman home from his latest jaunt in Frisco. This is Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), a self-confessed fortune hunter who encourages her beau to pack Vance off for a long European tour while she settles in at The Furies. Vance's anxiety at the alienation of her father's affections seems more than childish, though it does seem very much like a childish outburst when she hurls a good-sized pair of scissors at Flo's face when she learns that T.C. is going to marry her. Enraged, T.C. adopts the tit-for-tat principle and decides to level the Herrera's hilltop fortress, defying a rain of boulders and bullets to hurl dynamite at its foundations. Juan's mother has quite the bloodlust for T.C., but for Vance's sake Juan urges her to stand down and his family to quit the ranch. Unfortunately for Juan, T.C. discovers that he's riding a horse with a Furies brand and has him hanged for rustling on the spot. There's a moral intended for Vance in this: it's not nice to see someone you love hurt. But the analogy fails once Juan is swinging in the wind, and it's Vance who's determined to teach T.C. a lesson by destroying him.

The stage is set for an epic war between father and daughter, but it's at this point that the movie begins to fall apart. Vance's revenge requires her to travel the country buying up all the T.C. notes her father has spread around, and this removes Stanwyck from the explosive proximity to Huston that fueled the first half of the film. The film's early power came from them playing off each other, so isolating them dilutes the drama, especially when Vance's revenge scheme proves more elaborate than it needs to be. Worse, it involves her teaming up with the once-despised Rip Darrow, who now softens as he perceives a newly maturing Vance. Wendell Corey had been so convincing as a dirtbag early in the picture that his emergence as the true romantic lead was completely unconvincing. Even less convincing is the spirit of reconciliation that descends (despite a violent interruption by the Herreras) after a digressive cattle drive that seems included only to demonstrate T.C.'s mightiness in steer rassling and showcase a song about his prowess with whips. Not having read the novel, I can't say whether this decline is faithful to the story or a case of Hollywood coming down in favor of matrimony and domesticity. Either way, it's not what I'd been led to expect from the appropriately furious emotions displayed by Stanwyck and Huston.

None of the above takes away from the pure visual quality of Mann's direction. He had mastered deep-focus composition so that there's always a dramatic balance between foreground and background in his shots. He's as great in his outdoor scenes as anyone familiar with his other westerns would expect, especially during the sequences at the Herrera fortress. But he also makes outstanding use of some impressive sets for the Jeffords house. One such scene stands out: Vance and Flo are arguing in what was once Vance's mother's room. Vance stands by a mirror, in which we see Flo sitting in a chair. We see her rise and walk, and while we hear her talking we first see her in another mirror just behind Vance, then finally in person, entering from the left to face Vance. Mann uses the mirrors to impose a dramatic pace on Anderson's movements that steadily builds up tension. He puts the mirrors to further good use while setting up Stanwyck's scissors attack.

In short, this is a film that's definitely worth looking at despite its story shortcomings. I recommend it to fans of Stanwyck, as this is (I think) the first manifestation of her western-matriarch persona that received its apotheosis on The Big Valley. Anyone who appreciates Walter Huston should also check out his career-closing performance here, in which he shows a vigor that belies the nearness of his demise. The Furies has the makings of a classic, and probably still qualifies as a flawed one.

Here's the trailer, uploaded by ClassicMovieTrailers:

THE REBEL (2007)

A Google search for "Vietnamese martial arts" reveals a long history that I should have taken for granted, given the nation's proximity to China. The general term Vo Thuat refers to a full range of skill sets, from open-hand combat to a variety of weapons. Martial arts gained the glamor of the forbidden during the period of French rule, when they were banned. How the Communists regarded it all is unclear from the Wikipedia entry. A clue on past attitudes might be gleaned from the fact that a Google search for "Vietnamese martial arts movies" generates only two results, both asking if anyone knows of Vietnamese martial arts movies.

Charlie Nguyen's film, known at home as Dong Mau Anh Hung, thus seems to fill a vast cultural gap in Vietnamese popular culture. According to different reports, it's both the most expensive and the most popular Vietnamese movie ever made. It's the handiwork of two Viet-American brothers, director Charlie and co-producer, co-writer and star Johnny Tri Nguyen. Another Viet-American, Dustin Nguyen of 21 Jump Street fame, plays the leonine villain.

Johnny Tri Nguyen has blood on his hands (well, his face) in The Rebel, while Dustin Nguyen (below) continues to aspire to be the Vietnamese Johnny Depp.

Johnny and Dustin play agents of the French colonial government during the 1920s. Their job is to help put down nationalist independence movements. Both men are Westernized, but Cuong (Johnny) is ambivalent about his work, while Sy (Dustin) is ambitious to rise in the colonial hierarchy despite the disgrace of his mother being a prostitute. We see them in action foiling an assassination attempt and capturing Thuy, a female rebel. Coung doesn't like to see Sy torturing the girl, and he thinks something's fishy about the way the lead assassin was gunned down before he could even pull his gun out. It looks like Sy has inside information, but may be abusing it to make himself look good at the risk of other people's lives. Refusing to let Sy torture Thuy to death, he breaks her out of jail and goes out on the run with her, leaving behind his opium-addicted dad as well as, most likely, his career. He's told her that there's a mole in her father's rebel organization, and he heads back to her home with her to find out about it for himself.

An episode in the iron mines reminds Coung of the cruelty of the French occupation, and he seems more of a committed rebel when he and Thuy bust out in explosive fashion. But Sy is on their trial, and their arrival at the rebel stronghold is only the cue for Sy to make his move.

A "Frog's" about to flog poor Thuy at the iron mine, but this Viet-minx knows how to handle those cheese-eating imperialists. Below, she makes her farewells as Cuong chauffeurs her home.

He captures Thuy's dad, intending to take him back to Hanoi and earn his long-coveted promotion. If Cuong wants to play rebel, he concludes, the poor schmuck can die like one. Disappointment is in store for our villain, however, when his French superiors meet him on the train to tell him he's been passed over in favor of another Frenchman. Sy snaps and has his personal goon squad slaughter the French officials. Has he turned rebel too? Hell, no! He's going to pin all the killings on Thuy's dad, take all the credit for bringing him in, and claim that damn promotion. That is, if Cuong, Thuy and some angry villagers can't stop the train from leaving the village....

This is a fast-paced unpretentious and pretty much apolitical action film. It has nothing to say about Communism, and if Ho Chi Minh was up to anything at this time no one in the film has heard about it. The rebellion of this film is purely nationalistic, and while the French are shown as bad guys throughout, the script goes the extra mile to say that they weren't all bad and actually brought some benefits to the country by modernizing it. The Nguyens, I think, had an eye on the international martial arts audience and not just on Vietnam, so ideology is off the table. Anyone but a racist would root for the Vietnamese while watching this film, and at the same time a Vietnamese, rather than a Frenchman, is the main bad guy.

On the humid city streets Cuong prefers to kick around in a natty white ensemble. On the road, he opts for rustic, earthy colors and a more casual look overall.

The martial arts are closer to the Thai style popularized by Tony Jaa than to traditional Chinese film style. Johnny Tri Nguyen practices a family style of martial arts called lien feng kwon as well as a Vietnamese style called vovinam which emphasizes elbows and knees. It's a cumulative style that followers of mixed martial arts as well as pure cinematic fighting will appreciate, though there are a few too many showy spins for my own taste. As an actor, he gets the period look right in the early part of the film, including the hair, but opts for a more rugged look as he goes native. His co-star, Ngo Thanh Van, is a beauty queen and Vietnamese pop singer who proves her versatility by brawling quite nicely here. Dustin Nguyen makes no effort to fit into the period apart from wearing the clothes, but that greying mop of hair definitely makes him stand out. He's been working in Vietnam more often lately, American opportunities having apparently dried up for him. He projects a certain menacing cool but is out of his depth in the one scene when Sy must vent his bitterness over the way everyone talks about his mother. Overall, though, his Magua-style villain is nasty enough to keep you interested in his comeuppance, though you do wonder how that's going to happen when he seems to have superhuman invulnerability early in the film.

Ngo Thanh Van kills in style -- a style that seems partly derived from professional wrestling -- in The Rebel.

As a martial arts film, I don't think The Rebel is on the level of the Thai films I've seen lately, but as a period action film it looks good and stays lively. The relationship of martial arts to large-scale 20th century violence is a little shaky, though. I can understand the scene where the disarmed villagers use mass drop kicks to disarm the colonial troops and then arm themselves, but in the climactic attack on the train it seems like the armed and explosive part of the assault is only a prologue to the decisive vo thuat phase. If I were Cuong and I had access to guns, I'd want to bring one with me to a final showdown with Sy. Then again, nobody paid admission (and I didn't put the Albany Public Library disc into my machine) to watch two dudes fire pistols at each other. That'd be like putting Fred Astaire in a big romantic scene and watching him take his clothes off. In this film, I wanted hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot, elbow-to-wherever combat, and if that's what you're after, The Rebel will probably satisfy you.

Here are two trailers. First, a Vietnamese preview uploaded by lecoquino

Now, the English-language Dragon Dynasty trailer, uploaded by 9charlie25.

CRAZY JOE (1974)

A few months ago I listed Carlo Lizzani's biopic about wiseguy revolutionary Joe Gallo among the films I remembered dimly from my childhood that I couldn't find on DVD. In the late 1970s the film was in fairly heavy rotation on WOR in New York City, and I recall seeing it several times when it played on weekday afternoons. I didn't actually remember much about it besides the distinctive music (a kind of disco version of the song "Mona Lisa" is the main theme), a prominent political assassination, and the presence of Fred Williamson. When I found that I could watch the film on Crackle, it was the first time in perhaps 30 years that I had given it a look. It more than lived up to my expectations.

Peter Boyle plays the title character in what may have seemed a natural follow-up to Joe. We meet Joey Gallo in 1960 as a movie-mad made man and a disgruntled underling alongside his brother Richie (Rip Torn) in the Falco family. Gallo's crew doesn't feel that they're getting their due or the proper respect from their bosses, and so they go to war, with second-in-command Vinnie Colleti opting to sit things out.

After a few rounds of mayhem the other crime families, led by Don Vittorio (Eli Wallach) attempt to negotiate a settlement, but Vittorio himself gives Joey a private assurance that, after the formality of releasing some hostages, the Gallos can settle accounts with the Falco leadership without interference. The Falcos end up with the upper hand when they set up Joey to get arrested trying to make an illegal firearms purchase, leaving him in jail for the next eight years, but they overplay their hand when they try to convince Colleti to whack Don Vittorio. Instead, Vinnie rats them out and is rewarded with leadership of the family. Richie can't handle the stress on his own and drives his car off a cliff to end the first act of the picture, which to this point has been a fairly conventional Mafia movie with moments of effective brutality and a nearly overqualified cast as well as such distinctive Seventies personalities as Henry Winkler and Herve Villechaize in supporting roles.

Herve Villechaize as Samson, Joey Gallo's "bodyguard"

In the second act Crazy Joe becomes a definitive Seventies movie as the Mafia formula morphs into something more challenging. While in prison Joey educates himself with a bunch of books that Richie had given him, ranging from War and Peace (which he'd formerly mocked as "a commie book") to the writings of the Existentialists, who really impress him and give him a glorified sense of his own struggles. He also befriends Willie (Williamson), a black convict and a born leader who takes Gallo's half-baked philosophizing with increasing good humor; he sort of gets it himself. Joey himself can take some mockery, embracing the label of "the Italian Hippie."

When Willie leads a prison riot to demand better conditions, the warden trusts Gallo to negotiate a peaceful resolution, which ends up with Willie getting his way and still getting released on schedule. The seeds of a potentially revolutionary collaboration are planted when Willie offers his help to Joey if he wants to challenge Coletti upon his release. At the same time that Joey and Willie envision an interracial mob, Coletti hits upon a notion of taking the heat off the Mafia by forming an Italian-American anti-defamation movement to protest negative portrayals of his people in the media. Consciously imitating both the Black Panthers and the NAACP, he rapidly builds a popular movement that draws 50,000 people to a Columbus Day rally. He does this initially with Don Vittorio's blessing, agreed on over a bottle of J&B because the Don is impressed by the amount of money Vinnie can raise in membership fees.

Eli Wallach as Don Vittorio, the arch-conservative who excels at playing insurgents off each other.

But Vittorio is taken aback by the size of the movement and the attention it's drawing to Costelli and other organizers. He warns Coletti to give up the movement before the second annual rally, but Vinnie refuses, besotted with a bit of megalomania and feeling that the movement is the only thing he can claim to have created himself. The Don initially welcomes Joey out of prison as a counter to Coletti's excess ambition, but soon finds himself even more troubled by Gallo's consorting with black gangsters.

Joe and Willie meet again on Joe's release as a runty-by-comparison Henry Winkler looks on.

The genius of Crazy Joe, for which credit is due to writers Nicholas Gage and Lewis John Carlino, is to make an old gangster the spokesman for "law and order" and against change. "All I hear about is change," he complains, "Men are becoming women. Women are becoming men." Despite this, he insists ominously, nothing really changes. In time, Vittorio finds a way to kill two birds with one stone, apparently hiring a black man to assassinate Costelli at the second Columbus Day rally so that Joey and Willie can be blamed for it. At first Willie thinks Joey has set him up to take the fall, but their bond proves stronger than his suspicion, and he buys into Joey's Spartacus-inspired scheme to go all-or-nothing -- to topple Don Vittorio himself or die trying....

How could a film with a cast like this go wrong? Well, it doesn't. Peter Boyle is terrifically charismatic as a guy who starts out a little crazy and a little dumb, who still seems a little laughable as he overeducates himself to the point of becoming briefly the lion of high society, yet finally proves a poignant figure as a final scene with his long-suffering girlfriend (Paula Prentiss) reveals the sincerity of his need to be an important person -- what he often refers to (imitating Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, as in a pre-credits theater scene) as a "big man." Although history dictates that he loses in the end, we get a sense that he did win to some extent, as he realizes that you're really a big man when others call you that, and experiences that when he negotiates the prison truce. Boyle's chemistry with Fred Williamson, who is quite good here in evolving from jailbird to a more "Hammer" like figure in freedom, gives the last half of the film a vitality that it lacked earlier. They share some outrageous moments, as when Gallo forces one of Vittorio's men to kiss Willie's (clothed, thank goodness) ass during a numbers robbery. Wallach and Torn are also very good, as is the less well known Charles Cioffi as Coletti, built up as a nemesis to Gallo who ends up the protagonist of his own parallel tragedy.

Carlo Lizzani's location work in New York City with cinematographer Aldo Tonti, assisted by stock footage of the real Columbus Day rallies staged by Joe Columbo, gives the film an additional epic feel in scenes atop skyscrapers overlooking the Manhattan skyline or at massive construction sites. He doesn't go short on the violence either, with a sequence of a Gallo gangster getting buried in cement after being beaten down with pickaxes and other implements and getting a hand chopped off serving as a highlight. Giancarlo Chiaramello's score has a lounge quality bordering on Muzak at times, but that seems appropriate for the period, and he comes through with some more serious music for the final scene between Boyle and Prentiss.

The movie can now apparently be purchased through Crackle, but the picture quality there is actually pretty good (the "Buy Now" thing doesn't mar the image if you watch it full screen) if you want to sit through it on your computer for free. Be prepared, however, to sit through some advertisements in the middle of the picture. If you can stand that, then Crazy Joe is definitely worth your time if you like Seventies crime or any of the lead actors. It's a unique blend of the gangster and failed-revolutionary genres that ought to be better remembered as a classic of its time.

And if you don't believe me, watch the trailer uploaded to YouTube by johnnyredeyes

ECOUTE LE TEMPS (Fissures, 2007)

The French title basically means "listen to time," and while that makes sense the international title is just as valid while doing more justice to the multiplicity of fissures that emerge in Alante Kavaite's writing-directing debut. Watching it, I felt that an American remake is inevitable, though it would probably more overwrought and even busier in plot terms than the original. It has a high concept that falls somewhere between science fiction and horror wrapped inside a murder mystery with twists for the unwary, not to mention a starring role that I imagine lots of American actresses would kill for.

The main character is Charlotte, a movie sound technician. She goes out on locations and records live sound for use in nature documentary. After an opening bit that shows her on a drive with her mother in which they hit a deer, we see Charlotte at work recording sounds bubbling from a fissure in the earth. Then she gets the news that her mother has been murdered. Her mission of mourning returns her to her old home town, where she isn't especially welcome and her mother isn't particularly missed by some people. "I'd thought we'd seen the back of that witch," someone grumbles, and that's not that broad a metaphor. Among other things, Charlotte's mom did a variation on tarot readings using a pack of rune cards. When they hit the deer, we learn, she felt it was a bad omen, and her instincts seem to have been correct.

But whodunit? A number of candidates emerge, the most likely being Jerome, a local simpleton who masturbates to a photo of Charlotte and Mom, and M. Bourmel, the town's mayor, who's feuding with organic farmers (led by handsome Julien, who seems to have had a fling with the mom before the end) who oppose the area's fertilizer industry. The mayor links the dead mother to the green hippies by scoffing, "It's organic tomatoes one day, a black mass the next." He wants to buy mom's house, and discouraging Charlotte from keeping it because "there are a lot of holes" on the land. We can eventually infer that he wants the land to dump toxic waste in. To add to suspicions, there's a second mystery, the fate of a missing boy that may be linked to the murder.

Genre fans may recognize Emilie Dequenne from Brotherhood of the Wolf. Here she is alongside an (alternatively) titular fissure in Ecoute le Temps.

To be honest, Mom's house isn't in good shape. The walls are cracking everywhere. To lighten her mood, Charlotte decides to record the fissures in the walls and the settling of the floors. To her surprise, she picks up what some might call EVPs, only much clearer and more distinct than anything you ever hear on Ghost Hunters. It's her own mother's voice, and in some places her own. Her microphone and equipment are picking up sounds of the past. Over time, she can map out places where she can hear certain times, turning the main room into a kind of giant cat's cradle. Some of these phenomena date back to her childhood. Others are ominously more recent. Once this all sinks in, Charlotte realizes that she might be able to listen in on her mother's death and hear who did it. The challenge will be to crack the mystery before the house comes crashing down around her, or before anyone decides that she suddenly knows too much....

How is this happening? Had Charlotte's Mom tapped into real magic that is somehow leaking out of the house? Could the toxic waste leeching into the soil have something to do with this mutant phenomena? Could there simply be fissures in time the way there are fissures in the earth? Kavaite wisely leaves the why question unanswered, opting for a vague yet progressively more creepy sense of uncanny dread. The movie ultimately comes down on the horror side of the equation, I think, as the house deteriorates more rapidly the closer Charlotte comes to discovering the moment of death. The payoff is a reasonably effective scare scene, but some viewers might think that Kavaite didn't exploit every opportunity available in this story. In an American version, I'd suppose, there'd be someone trying to kill Charlotte, possibly in the house at the climactic moment, but Kavaite saw no need for that extra suspense. Once Charlotte learns the truth, the story resolves itself with little added drama. Hollywood, by comparison, often assumes that someone who has killed is capable of killing again at any moment. To be fair, that's a common assumption of the exploitation mentality around the world, which only proves that Ecoute le Temps, for all its genre trappings, is no exploitation film. But that's all right, because it works as a low-key independent film with a major gimme lurking inside. I was lucky enough to borrow it from the Albany Public Library, but it might be worth it even if you have to go to a little more trouble.

Here's the trailer with English captions and subtitles, uploaded by dogwoof

VENGEANCE IS MINE (1979)

Who's the worse person: Giulio Sacchi, the kidnapper and murder in Umberto Lenzi's Almost Human, or Iwao Enokizu, a habitual con man and murderer of five people in Shohei Imamura's portrait of a real-life killing spree in 1960s Japan? In objective terms, Sacchi killed more people. In cinematic terms as well, he is portrayed as a loathsome monster (the English-language title is more apropos than the Italian original) and, perhaps wishfully, as an aberration that might be eliminated if the police had proper powers to do so. Enokizu, however, seems like a less aberrational figure in Imamura's Japan. That's not to say that the director thinks Japan is a nation of murderers. But Vengeance Is Mine, contemplating a killer who happened to be Catholic, insists on the pervasiveness of sin and refuses to comfort the audience with an easy dichotomy of evil and innocence.

At the same time, Imamura doesn't lose focus on the pure horror of Enokizu's crimes. The initial double murder scene has blood enough for anyone, plus a de-aestheticizing clumsiness to Enokizu's attacks with hammer and stiletto. It also has a singularly outrageous moment when our protagonist has to clean up between murders. There's no place around to wash the blood off his hands. So he pisses it off. Then he grabs some fruit from a tree and squeezes the juice out to cut the urine smell. You don't want to kill with smelly hands, after all.

Imamura is interested in the why of Iwao Enokizu. His investigation reveals a tragic, twisted family. A flashback points to a formative scarring experience from World War II when the Japanese military requisitions boats belonging to Iwao's innkeeper dad. Dad seems to be singled out for abusive treatment because he's a Catholic, and because he takes his religion seriously, he refuses to cooperate with the militarist government. When little Iwao sees an officer slap Dad around, he grabs a wooden board and whacks the white-clad thug in the leg. Suddenly, Dad relents and gives the boats to the government. We can tell that he's doing it to save his son from whatever reprisal the officer might have in mind. But all Iwao sees is his father becoming a double coward, for not fighting back and for backing down from his principles. Worse, the officer forces Dad to recite some formulaic lines of happy servitude to the Emperor. The government certainly doesn't look good in the kid's eyes, but Dad comes out worst.

A lot of Iwao's future crimes seem motivated by a desire to make his father miserable. That streak of gratuitous rebellion extends to his rejection of an arranged marriage in favor of a girl basically off the streets whom he's just knocked up. Imagine the complications, then, when father and daughter-in-law begin to fall in love while Iwao's in jail on a fraud conviction.

Yet Iwao never takes his rage out on them physically. As his father says later, he can only hurt people who've done him no harm. That includes a law professor whose identity he steals. Under that alias he begins an affair with Haru Asano, a female innkeeper with a shady operation of her own.

Usually people want to cover up the smell of alcohol, but I suppose that if you keep a corpse in your closet there could be worse odors than those from a spilt bottle.

She and her mother are procuresses. Men check into their inn and they call the local madam to send over some entertainment. Like his dad and his wife, here's another genuine love story. You know something warm and generous is stirring in Iwao when he tries to strangle himself. Haru has feelings that transcend conventional scruples. When she figures out that Iwao is the man wanted for three murders, she still wants to stay with him, and he does for a while. But Iwao seems to need to be evil or see himself as such, and he lashes out at the thought of happiness with lethal force, even if he breaks his own heart doing so. At least that's how I read the scene when he finally strangles Haru (before killing her mother as well) and then says, "Thank you."

The movie is told in flashback, opening with Iwao's capture, and closes five years later, after his execution, with his father and widow performing a ritual (I assume) by tossing his bones off a cliff into the sea with mounting vehemence that seems to mingle grief and relief. Dad is still trying to urge Kazuko away, but she still wants to stay with him. She tells him that Iwao used to say he was a great deceiver, and he pretty much agrees with this, only for her to add that "that's what I like about you." That leaves us with the mystery of human relationships, some of which can end in passionate murder while others retain a promise of happiness, and the further mystery of their intertwining complications. Is the elder Enokizu really to blame for Iwao's crimes. Imamura most likely doesn't believe in absolute answers. For him, there seems to be blame enough to go around for everyone.

This is my second Imamura film. The first I'd seen was his follow-up, the ribald and harrowing Ballad of Narayama, which has everything from bestiality to ritual abandonment of the elderly on an icy mountain. Vengeance is Mine is a more mundane affair in its setting, but shares a specific creative sensibility, as well as Ken Ogata (Paul Schrader's Mishima)as a leading man. Both films have moments of extreme outrageousness (though in Narayama these are more often funny than horrifying) worthy of exploitation cinema, within a framework of moral seriousness that marks the films as arthouse fare. It's a mix you don't see often elsewhere, and it makes me eager to try more Imamura films.