Leonard Kastle (1929-2011)

More than forty years ago, two careers seemed to be going in opposite directions. Erstwhile film editor Martin Scorsese had been fired from his job directing The Honeymoon Killers for filming too slowly. His replacement was novice director Leonard G. Kastle, a classical composer by vocation with operas to his credit who had researched and co-written the film's true-crime inspired screenplay. Derided in its day despite defiant praise from Francois Truffaut, The Honeymoon Killers is now considered a canonical cult film and is included in the Criterion Collection of prestigious DVDs. Kastle returned to music and never directed another film. He died in Westerlo, New York, on May 18. A locally-reported obituary notes that Kastle made one last attempt to make a movie in 2001, after rediscoveries of Honeymoon Killers raised his cinematic profile, but he could not raise the funds to direct his screenplay Wedding at Cana, which on the description provided by the newspaper does sound intriguing. Nevertheless, Kastle's was not the loser's life we often associate with cult films, though the juxtaposition of his sole film work with his classical calling is arguably still the stuff of cultdom. He remained a respected musician and academic for decades beyond his brush with cinema. He may well have regarded Honeymoon Killers as as much a footnote to his own career as his career now appears as a footnote to movie history.

Wendigo Meets BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

If ever a film should have been called "Van Helsing," It's Terrence Fisher's 1960 follow up to Hammer's breakthrough vampire film (Horror of) Dracula. As an opening narration tells us, Count Dracula himself is dead, but J. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) carries on his holy work from the previous picture. Cushing is clearly the star and Van Helsing the main character, but the world wasn't ready for a film bearing the doctor's name. The "Dracula" name was more of a sure thing, as testified by contemporary films where the famous vampire's presence was a tease (Return of Dracula) or a lie (Blood of Dracula).

My friend Wendigo mentioned Brides in passing when I asked him to list his least favorite cinematic vampires, but he's here today to praise the film. His critique, in short, is "bad vampires, good movie." He hasn't warmed over time toward David Peel's tepid portrayal of Baron Meinster, the master vampire of the piece. Peel still strikes him as little more than a pretty boy who brings no power to the role. It is true that he bests the mighty Van Helsing in combat, but Wendigo reminds us that there were two other vampires plus a minion in the fight. The vampire women also disappoint him. The big problem with the otherwise typically attractive Hammer women is that they look like they're wearing clown makeup. Their faces are paler than the rest of their flesh and to Wendigo that just looks silly. Don't even gets him started on the bat effects; he finds them nightmarishly bad. The oversized bats float without flapping their wings or bounce awkwardly on wires like a silent-movie ornithopter. Hammer was usually more careful about trying effects they couldn't achieve, but this time was an embarrassing botch.

Really: would Count Dracula take these whitefaced women as his brides? They're more than good enough for Baron Meinster (David Peel, below), as are Brides's bumbling bats.

Brides is the first Hammer vampire film and possibly the first vampire movie Wendigo remembers seeing. He was more impressed by the vampire hunter than the vampire, understandably, with Cushing setting the standard for fighting the undead for ever afterward. Wendigo digs Cushing's energy, the character's courage, creativity and determination. The images of Cushing cauterizing a vampire bite on his own neck with a hot iron and holy water, throwing holy water in a vampire's face, and killing the vampire by catching him in the cruciform shadow of a windmill's blades are indelible for my friend. Stephen Sommers would probably never have made his Van Helsing movie had this one never existed -- but don't hold that against Brides. Wendigo's opinion, of course, is that Cushing could kick Hugh Jackman's ass no matter how many steampunk weapons Sommers's hero brought to the fight.

Dr. Van Helsing doesn't just clean up your vampire problems; he's also a client.

Besides Cushing, Brides boasts some luscious art direction and vivid cinematography, along with the gorgeous Yvonne Monlaur as the heroine. Fisher shows off Monlaur's red hair to full advantage, and she gives just the right performance of naive vulnerability and longing as her aspiring schoolteacher falls into Meinster's gothic trap. The first half hour of Brides is a little gothic tale that could virtually stand on its own in an anthology film or an EC comic; the poor victimized (and handsome) young scion who proves to have been held prisoner for excellent reasons. Unfortunately, Peel isn't especially convincing even in that role, but the film marches on in spite of him.

Like other early Hammers, Brides develops the mythos of the "cult of the vampires" that was briefly mentioned in Horror of Dracula. The spectre of the "cult" reflects British fear and hatred for an occult revival already underway in the U.K., but also seems to anticipate the accelerated decadence to come later in the Sixties. In this picture, Van Helsing offers an origin story for the cult, claiming that it began with pagan resistance to Christianity during the late Roman Empire. Later in the cycle, when the idea of the cult is picked up again, the vampires will be portrayed as Satanists, but for now the decadent eastern aristocrat Meinster and his harem of brides stand in for Wicca and other evils in the heritage of Aleister Crowley. Wendigo is something of a student of Wiccan history, and his observations allow us to see the early Hammer vampire films in a fresh light.

"Chill-lerrr..."

Our latest viewing of Brides made more clear for us how British vampire films emphasize class and aristocracy in a way that'd make no sense for American movies. Class and the dominance of aristocracy or gentry was an inescapable fact in the 19th century Europe portrayed in Hammer's films, and its legacy had a long-term influence on English and European images of the dominant, lordly vampire who holds whole communities in thrall. If American stories have made the vampire a different sort of creature, it's at least partly because Americans, no matter how much they may embrace certain gothic motifs and concepts, don't really feel that feudal heritage. The vampire as predatory aristocrat was bound to become too campy to be taken seriously, and at that point the vampire had to become something meaningful to an American or a post-aristocratic global audience. People watching Brides today may not get how the Meinsters could hold such sway over their community; as a result, they may miss some of the horror of films like this one.

Bite a Van Helsing in the neck and then just walk away? You deserve everything you get, Meinster.

In Hammer history, Brides can be seen as the middle film of a trilogy dealing with the "cult of the vampires" that closes with Kiss of the Vampire, which does without both Dracula and Van Helsing but boasts a much bigger cult. While certain concepts of Brides (particularly the girls' school setting) are taken up again in the sexier Karnstein films of the Seventies, the film itself is a kind of dead end in that Hammer didn't use Van Helsing again until they cast Cushing as a modern-day version of the character in Dracula A.D. 1972. The studio must have decided that it couldn't build a horror series around a hero, though they would try to create their own such hero late in the day in Captain Kronos. Like Kiss, Brides is perceived as a poor relation to the "real" Dracula films lorded over by Christopher Lee. In Wendigo's opinion, Brides is much better, despite its inferior vampire, to many of the later Lee films. It may be the most visually impressive of all the Hammer vampire films, and it deserves respect as one of Peter Cushing's greatest showcases.

David Peel is relegated to fifth billing behind Cushing, two old ladies and "France's newest sex kitten" in this U.S. trailer, uploaded to YouTube by TheFearChamber.

THE TOLL GATE (1920)

In 1919 William S. Hart received an offer that should have been hard to refuse. Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith wanted Hart to join their new "United Artists" venture, through which creative talent would control the distribution of their work. They considered Hart a peer. Like them, he was one of Hollywood's biggest box-office attractions. Like them, he was a living archetype. Hart was "the Good-Bad Man." He specialized in playing outlaws who reformed or otherwise redeemed themselves. He was Hollywood's first Western superstar of feature films, but he turned the United Artists down. He liked his arrangement with Paramount Pictures, which was about to be upgraded, and he was reluctant to risk his own money on the UA project, as the others expected him to do.

The Toll Gate announces itself as "by William S. Hart and Lambert Hillyer." Hart presumably wrote the story and the title cards, while Hillyer did the directing. Lambert Hillyer is best known now for directing two Universal horror films in 1936, Dracula's Daughter and The Invisible Ray, and the original Batman movie serial for Columbia pictures in 1943. None of these talking films suggest a great talent, and neither does The Toll Gate. The edition presented on an Image DVD is noteworthy mainly for a garish yellow tint in the final reel that was presumably meant to evoke the blinding light of the desert sun. It's nearly unwatchable, but it may not have been the director's fault. Hillyer's job, which he did frequently for Hart, was most likely to call action and let the star do his thing.

What was his thing? I've only seen one other Hart film, his 1925 swan song Tumbleweeds, so any judgment based on two films is still tentative. Hart released four features in 1920 alone, though he would soon slow down. His reputation, as reported in books, was for realism in locations, costuming, etc. Considering that he worked at the same time in which later "end of the West" movies were set, plausibility probably came easily to him. But what about Hart himself, apart from the "good-bad man" gimmick? I was ready to compare him with Randolph Scott, because Hart is about the same age here that Scott was in the mid-1950s, when he was about to begin his remarkable final run of westerns. It proves not to be a favorable comparison for Hart. Paradoxically, sound gives Scott the advantage of terseness. Hart writes his dialogue on title cards and in writing it often comes across as stagy or jokey. He writes in Western dialect, droppin' his gs and so forth, and the overall effect is sometimes literally cartoonish, as if the cards were the word balloons of a comic strip. As for the man himself, he lacks Scott's stoicism. Hart was a Shakespearean actor and created the role of Messala in the stage version of Ben-Hur. As a movie actor he knows better than to gesticulate, but he often mugs. He makes faces, rolls his eyes, and sometimes seems poised to burst into tears. That's not the impression a hard man of the West should want to make, but I think it was the impression Hart wanted to make, at least in this picture.

In The Toll Gate Hart plays a "bad-bad man" for most of the picture. Black Deering is the leader of a small army of bandits, and his sole redeeming quality, initially, is that he wants to retire, if only because the government is putting too much heat on the gang. He gets outvoted when Jordan, his lieutenant, proposes a cinch of a train-robbery as one more job. The job proves to be a set-up; Jordan has sent the gang after a military train with soldiers lying in wait for them. While most of the men are slaughtered, Deering is taken alive and has to be pulled off Jordan by the soldiers. But in the film's first bit of implausibility, some of the troops recognize Deering as a man who many years ago rode eighty miles to warn their fort of an imminent Apache attack. Never mind that he's since plundered the West as a criminal mastermind; that long-ago good deed earns Deering a break. It's not that much of a break, since it requires him to throw himself off the train while his hands and feet are tied, but at least the train had slowed down to go up a hill, and it still beats hanging.

After some undefined time passes, Deering has untied himself, "borrowed" a horse and set out to kill Jordan. He finds his enemy in a town where Jordan owns a cantina and is apparently the local vice baron. Putting on his outlaw mask, Deering wreaks havoc, burning down Jordan's cantina (the sheriff doesn't care) and a rival saloon (now he cares) and killing several of Jordan's Mexican goons. At the same time, his visit is profoundly humiliating for Deering. Initially applying for ranch work, he lies about knowing a local rancher and is laughed at when the rancher identifies himself. Realizing that his only hope for money is theft, Deering learns that "the road of the outlaw closes off all others."

William S. Hart in a characteristic two-gun pose, with an uncharacteristic mask.

After his night on the town, Deering is on the run from both Jordan's men and a posse. He's on foot after having to kill another "borrowed" horse when he stumbles upon a lone house by a lake, just in time to see a little boy fall into the water. Deering impulsively dives in to save the lad, who seems quite capable of swimming, and deliver him to an anxious mother (Anna Q. Nilsson). Her husband has abandoned her and the child, and with the posse approaching, Deering gets the idea, since they shouldn't know him unmasked, to pose as the husband and father of the house. The grateful woman agrees to cooperate, and the kid half-believes that Deering's his daddy anyway. He has to continue the imposture when the posse decides to sack out overnight at the house, but he hopes to make his escape in the middle of the night. He passes an open family Bible on the way out, and in a bit of bibliomancy reads the verse, "By their fruits ye shall know them." But at the same moment he sees that the woman's bookmark is a photograph of her and her husband -- Jordan. For one alarming moment Deering is consumed by cold fury. He enters the wife's room, and all he needs to do is remove his vest to tell us that he intends to rape the innocent woman. But she awakens just in time to tell him, "I'm still trusting you," and after that he can't do it. A title has told us that Deering has never met a good woman before, and the experience has changed him, though it was admittedly a close call.

A chastened Deering goes to the main room and admits his true identity to the posse. At the same time, word comes that for some reason Jordan's men are attacking another unit of the posse. Deering begs the men to let him ride with them and help out. Since his life is forfeit, anyway, why not let him die fighting or, as he puts it provocatively, "like a white man." The Toll Gate manages to be a racist film without actually disparaging other races because of its repeated rhetorical equation of "whiteness" with virtue. Deering is "white" to the posse because he stepped up and told the truth. He proves himself "white" again by aiding the posse, earning revenge on Jordan in the process. "I'm going to kill you for two reasons," he tells his enemy, "One you know and one you'll never know." That is, Jordan has to die not just for betraying Black Deering but for being a deadbeat dad. That means he gets strangled and thrown off a cliff.

The final pursuit of Jordan has taken our cast across the Mexican border. Once again, authority figures prove very forgiving of a notorious outlaw for one good deed. The posse leader tells Deering that he has no authority to take the outlaw back north to the U.S. Deering is a free man as long as he stays in Mexico. That's fine by him, but suddenly the ex-Mrs. Jordan wants to stay south of the border as well, to become Mrs. Deering. This cannot be; Mexico is no country for such a decent woman. In the climactic act of renunciation, Deering tells her to go back to "her people," earning him another round of "white" accolades from the posse. He rides off in the opposite direction from everyone else, through the metaphoric toll gate that exacts its price for his otherwise irredeemable past.

On this evidence, it's no surprise that Chaplin saw Hart as a peer and wanted him for a partner. They were playing the same game, or at least, on this occasion, Hart was playing Chaplin's game. That game is pathos, the defining emotional style of the silent era. Audiences of the 1910s and 1920s were capable of being moved by the drama of renunciation, and seemed to crave the emotional experience as performed by Chaplin and any number of others in his time. Maybe it was the realism of a pre-abundant age, but the critics, at least, considered pathos the actor's highest challenge. The Toll Gate is one of the era's boldest plays for pathos, given that Hart plays something closer to a monster than a tramp. His vendetta against Jordan does a lot of damage, albeit non-lethal, to innocent people, and if anything, Hart's point seems to be that Deering is irredeemable, that he has done too much wrong in his life to live among civilized people, if not quite enough to merit hanging. The pathos comes from Deering's all too brief taste of domesticity; he gets just enough to realize that he doesn't deserve it. In a way, Hart's pathos is more profound than Chaplin's, closer perhaps to Lon Chaney's, in that you could always imagine that the Tramp's wanderings might end or at least that someone might share his wanderings with him -- as finally happens in Modern Times. There's no such hope for Black Deering, but there's also the awful sense that his hopelessness is just. It's less like Randolph Scott and more like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers or Alan Ladd riding into the graveyard at the end of Shane. I don't mean to compare The Toll Gate as a whole to either film; it's not a great western or even that good a film. Its emotional power is much weaker now than it must have been for its original audiences, but watching it now could still be a powerful historical experience if you approach it with the right frame of mind -- or wear an eyeshade for the final reel.

DUEL OF CHAMPIONS (Orazi e Curiazi, 1961)

Less than a decade after making Shane, Alan Ladd's career was on a stark downhill slide by the time he went to Italy to shoot this international co-production based on the ancient wars between Rome and Alba. While the credits list Ferdinando Baldi as the director, they also identify Orazi e Curiazi as "a Terence Young film." IMDB lists the men as co-directors, the Englishman presumably filming Ladd's dialogue scenes. Young had directed Ladd previously in The Red Beret (aka The Paratroopers), so the American presumably would not feel entirely lost among the Italians. Still, it was apparently an unhappy shoot. In February 1961 UPI reported that Ladd had walked off the set because the Italian producers had not forked over the $20,000 advance he'd been promised. A fresh infusion of money from another production company apparently saved the day. But gossip columnists reported that Ladd's pet dachshund had died on the last day of production. According to legend, Ladd was desperate to remain a top-billed star, and at this point going abroad seemed the only way to retain that level of stardom. But his Italian project was doomed never to receive a general U.S. theatrical release, and a year after completing it Ladd shot himself. In 1964, after finally accepting subordinate billing for The Carpetbaggers, he suffered a fatal overdose, though history still questions whether or not he did it on purpose.

The best-known pictorial representation of the story of the Horatii is the 18th century Frenchman Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii. The Horatii were three brothers who volunteered to settle the long feud between Rome and Alba by triple combat with a band of Alban brothers. The Roman historian Livy tells us that the Horatii won, three kills to two.

A team of Italian writers, including directors Carlo Lizzani and Giuliano Montaldo, embellished the ancient legend, crafting a more character-driven screenplay than many contemporary "sword and sandal" products. They make the lead brother, Horatio (Ladd), a military commander who suffers disgrace due to miscommunication. Ordering a subordinate to take command of the main body of troops while he attempts a flanking action, he is wounded and taken prisoner while unconscious. Meanwhile, his messenger is killed before he can fully convey the order, and Horatio's fellow soldiers become convinced that their commander fled the battle as a coward. His own name is disgraced in pre-republican Rome, but the disgrace doesn't extend to the entire family. Instead, King Hostilius (American character actor Robert Keith) offers the hand of his daughter Marcia (Franca Bettoia), originally promised to Horatio, to the next brother in line.

Meanwhile, Horatio is condemned by the Albans to death in an outdoor carnival. In a nice tracking shot, the Roman is shoved through a circus of activity, including fire jugglers and wrestling women, before he's dumped into a wolf pit. A sympathetic captive girl (Ladd's daughter Alana) tosses Horatio a rock to bludgeon the beasts with, and later helps him escape captivity altogether.

Returning to Rome, Horatio finds himself an unperson. His father remains ashamed of him, still believing him a coward, while his brother and once-intended bride are profoundly embarrassed by his presence. King Hostilius is happy to see him, however, because he can help his brothers fulfill the prophecy of a sibyl who had predicted that the war with Alba would be settled by three brothers fighting three brothers. Feeling disrespected, Horatio refuses to fight and leaves for neutral country.

Adding another complication is a history-based subplot involving the sister of the family, Horatia (Jacqueline Derval). While out bathing with some girlfriends she gets kidnapped by the very Alban brothers who've been assigned to fight the expected Roman trio. One brother is clearly smitten but determined to have her immediately. He vows to make her love him eventually, but all it takes is a single kiss and she's his. I suppose this was necessary to make it not look like she was falling in love with a rapist, but it still does seem that way.

Marcia implores Horatio to return to Rome and do his duty, but he tells her to consider him a dead man. Before long, however, yet just in time, he arrives in front of the city's walls to take his place beside his brothers, who are promptly killed by the Albans. While this gives him a chance to win Marcia back, it also leaves him outnumbered one to three. The better part of valor in such a case is to ride into the woods. The Albans think that means Game Over, but since this was supposed to be combat to the death, Hostilius isn't going to surrender until the Alban brothers go into the woods and bring back Horatio's corpse. The Albans comply confidently. Numbers still favor them, but the woods offer plenty of opportunities for ambush, and before long it's down to one on one, Horatio versus the very man his sister now loves. No matter who wins, there won't be triumph without tragedy. In the end, the movie softens the legend. According to Livy, Horatio kills his sister when he sees her mourning the Alban. In the film, Horatia kills herself out of grief and the chastened survivors hasten to make peace.

Despite its relatively ambitious script, Orazi e Curiazi is a mostly uninspired film. While an atrocious fullscreen Mill Creek Entertainment DVD leaves me unable to judge the cinematography, I feel I can still fault the film for unimaginative staging of action. For some reason Italian sword-and-sandal or peplum films rarely live up to the standard of action staging set by the Americans and Japanese. The swordfights lack energy and distinction and the early mass battle is unmemorable apart from the flaming balls sent hurtling down on the Romans in emulation of Spartacus. The sets are unimpressive and the music sounds like nearly every other peplum of this period. The music of this genre is even more disappointing when you consider what Italian composers were doing or would do with nearly every other genre in this period.

Alan Ladd's performance would never have won him new friends in Hollywood. He's convincing only when his character is sulking, but the actor seems to be sulking through the entire picture. He looks fatigued throughout and invests his dialogue with little emotion. Worse, he undermines his credibility as an ancient Roman with throwaway Americanisms like "Hey, you!" His lack of confidence in the project is obvious, and it seems like a great effort for him even to smile occasionally. This is a star near the bitter end of a career, and while it may exert the morbid fascination of a trainwreck there really isn't anything amusing about it. The other actors do what they can, but the dubbing is lifeless and the script (or at least this English-language cut of the film) lacks the character and relationship-establishing scenes that would have made the conflicts among the Horatii more compelling. The writers went far enough to prove that there is strong dramatic potential in the Horatii legend, but they didn't follow through fully enough to realize that potential. It might be worth trying again someday, when no one's career is on the line.

COUP DE GRACE (Der Fangschuss, 1976)

Here's a period piece in German, set in the 1910s, and shot in black and white. I couldn't help but be reminded of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, but for people more familiar with German cinema of the 1970s, Haneke's film was probably reminiscent of Der Fangschuss. Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar's novel has the same stark atmosphere of superficial austerity belied by lurid goings-on, and unlike Haneke's movie, it has explosions. It's set in the war after the war, the international intervention against the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In the Baltic region it fell to defeated Germany to aid the "Whites" against the Reds, and this new fight brings a Germano-Russian soldier back to his family estate, where White troops are being billeted and Bolshevik shells are falling. Konrad (Rudiger Kirchstein) brings with him his war buddy Erich (Matthias Lobich), who catches the eye of Konrad's sister Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta, Schlondorff's wife and co-writer and a director herself). Sophie has stayed on in the danger zone for many reasons, and Erich's presence adds more. The odd thing about her attraction to the reactionary soldier is that Sophie is reputed to be a Bolshevik sympathizer. Odder still is her obsession with a man who proves steadfastly uninterested in her. If anything, he takes more interest in Konrad, which only infuriates Sophie into transgressive retaliation. She becomes an open Bolshevik, leaving the estate to take up arms with the Reds.

Sophie's politics are to be taken on faith, since she gets little opportunity and shows little inclination to state her views. It may well be that Yourcenar, Trotta and Schlondorff see her radicalization as more of a personal than a political thing. That's the conclusion I draw, at least, from her heightened militancy following Erich's repeated rebuffs. It seems more like a demand for Erich's attention, as is her flirting with subordinate soldiers. Her personal war with Erich reaches its ultimate resolution when she's captured. Refusing Erich's implicit offer of preferential treatment, she makes a demand in return. She wants him to execute her himself -- the Fangschuss of the title. I'm tempted to think the climactic act is intended symbolically as a coup de grace to the old regime of German gentry in the Baltics, if not to a generation already mortally ravaged by World War I.

Schlondorff employs just enough production values to make his low-level warfare convincing without turning his story needlessly into an epic. The film has impressive monochrome cinematography by Igor Luther and a typically elegiac score by Stanley Myers of Deer Hunter fame. Overall, however, the film left me cold. While I admit that it was meant coldly, I also felt that Sophie's story was historically irrelevant. I didn't get a real sense of how much she was a product of her time or social environment, or how representative of anything she was supposed to be. Perhaps she wasn't supposed to be representative, and we were simply meant to be fascinated or appalled by her obsession and its consequences. Trotta gives a decent performance in the role, but it's the sort of character who can easily end up without any audience sympathy and whose fate might well inspire a collective "so what?" regardless of Trotta and Schlondorff's intentions. Some scenes of her actually fighting or at least living with the Reds might have made a difference here. The closest we come to this is a sentimental scene near the end when she's managed to steal Erich's cigarette case during her interrogation and shares her swag with her fellow prisoners. I expected more engagement with this side of Sophie from filmmakers who make so much of their political engagement in the interviews included on the Criterion DVD. But Coup de Grace isn't quite engaged enough, nor, for a film dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville, thrilling enough to stand the test of time.

EYE OF THE DEVIL (13, 1966)

Anyone else look at this one on TCM last night? If not SolarCoasterX has uploaded a hint of what you missed.



J. Lee Thompson's thriller has a lot going for it, but doesn't quite live up to that trailer. It's pretty ambitious visually, opting for black and white pretty late in the game but to often menacing effect on location at castle and environs. Thompson and editor Ernest Walter also opt often for a rapid-fire montage style, though at times it's so reminiscent of a Mission:Impossible opening that you expect to see the fuse burning across the screen. The technique works best at the climax, as Deborah Kerr runs to the rescue of husband David Niven while David Hemmings readies his bow to perform Niven's ritual execution and Sharon Tate as Hemmings's witchy sister lurks nearby. The deal is that Niven, who owns extensive lands in rural France (and is presumably, like Hemmings, Donald Pleasance, Flora Robson, etc., French) but lives the sophisticated life (harp concerts, etc.) in the big city, must return to the countryside and his overlording castle when the vineyards fail for the third straight year. Niven's is a lineage of sacrificial kings; the menfolk lay their lives down as blood offerings to the land so the crops will flourish. But somehow he never told his wife about this before the crisis, so most of the picture is Kerr's agonizingly protracted discovery of the truth, impeded by Tate's malice and Pleasance's obfuscation in his capacity as the local priest. Maybe Niven thought he could live out his life without getting the call home, despite his angry memory of his own father's faking death by drowning to dodge the ancient obligation. Maybe I just don't understand the ways of these French folk, but this whole human sacrifice business is something you might tell the woman you're sharing your potentially-truncated life with about. But I suppose that stiff-upper-lip tradition for which the French are well known forbids one from revealing those little details that might trouble women's delicate sensibilities. Better to trouble them all at once when the time comes to take your mandatory arrow in the chest.

It's up to Kerr to carry the picture, both as a woman in peril and the only person likely to defy tradition and superstition and save the day. The problem with the story is that there's no consistent sense of the peril she's in or her potential for heroism. Sharon Tate seems to want to kill her, but her witch character seems singular in her intentions, though Hemmings does point an arrow in Kerr's direction once. Ultimately, the film disappoints because the thriller set-up requires Kerr to accomplish something, but she doesn't. She could break up the sacrifice, or convince the old man to intervene, or she could even sacrifice herself (for love if not the wine crop) by taking the arrow herself. But this is a movie that concludes with a race against time that the heroine loses. The effect was meant to be horrific, I'm sure, but it only seemed futile.

Still, Eye of the Devil (released as 13 in England) has its moments, and most of those belong to Sharon Tate. Whenever she's not being flogged by Niven, she's given free reign by Thompson to command the screen. In this introductory, heavily-hyped performance, she projects modish, mild-mannered menace in stylish black pants suits. Despite her placid, elegant demeanor, she's so overtly sinister compared to the covertly conspiratorial villagers that she seems to be in the wrong picture sometimes. She belonged in a better one. She steals this movie from a somnolent Niven, a frantic Kerr, a mostly mute Hemmings and an under-utilized Pleasance. Because of real-life horrors to come, Tate was probably bound to steal the show in retrospect, but I think she deserved some props for her performance regardless. For one reason or another, she's the main reason to watch this film.

THE WOLVES (1971)

Hideo Gosha's 1971 film is the second yakuza film in a row that I've seen set during the early Showa period, i.e. the late 1920s, early in the reign of Emperor Hirohito. I don't know if that's an especially popular period to set these films in, or whether it reflected a nostalgia for the Twenties equivalent to what Americans have often felt. Like many Japanese period pieces, the sense of period isn't really that strong. The music score is noirish rather than simply jazzy, more appropriate for a movie set in the Forties or later. It may simply be that Japanese writers and audiences find these years important, since the nation was on the brink of the adventurism that led to Nanking and Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. In both The Wolves and Seijun Suzuki's Tattooed Life Manchuria is described as a land of opportunity where businessmen or ordinary people out for a fresh start -- not to mention the army -- can make a killing. The period atmosphere, such as it is, may be that of dread, such as Americans might feel when a movie evokes any of the many moments when their nation supposedly lost its assumed innocence. For the Japanese, The Wolves adds the irony of yakuza thugs being manipulated by malignant forces beyond their control, with destiny against them.

The Japanese government celebrated the ascension of Hirohito (i.e. the Showa emperor) by declaring an amnesty for many convicts, including members of two rival families who'd feuded over railroad labor contracts. A representative battle of this war is fought in a movie theater, the mayhem interrupting the narrator's presentation of a silent movie. While Iwahashi (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Ozeki (Noboru Ando), representing the rival gangs, cool off in stir, a powerful politician brokers a truce between the clans, ushering in changing times and visions of a national yakuza network in league with Japan's expansionist militarists. Released by the amnesty, Iwahashi and Ozeki both feel that they were let out too early, before their clans' rivalry could resolve itself naturally without their complicating presence. But events are evolving rapidly and not according to nature or tradition. Iwahashi's brother was in love with the daughter of their boss, but she's now being pushed into an arranged marriage with the new boss of Ozeki's gang -- yet the brother can't keep away from her. Meanwhile, a mysterious sister-act of parasol-toting assassins are attacking people in a manner that looks like a cleanup of loose ends.

Something more has gone on while Iwahashi was away than he initially noticed, including an unthinkable betrayal of the yakuza code of honor and loyalty. Once enemies, he and Ozeki become allies, upholding a fragment of the honor code that both clans seem to have abandoned....

A visual highlight of The Wolves is Gosha's staging of the climactic action during a wildly colorful night-time festival

The Wolves has the kind of intrigue that fascinates many fans of gangster films. Gosha's effort is more like a Godfather movie than the grittier, more cynical yakuza films of Kinji Fukasaku, and Gosha aspires to more picturesque compositions than Fukasaku's handheld hurlyburly. Wolves ends up often seeming overproduced whenever Gosha tries too hard for the beautiful moments on the beach. His complex narrative lacks the suspenseful energy of his earlier samurai film, Goyokin, and the final fight between Iwahashi and his treacherous boss is protracted beyond all reason. He gets good menace from the parasol girls, but they're eliminated from the story too early after it seemed that they were being built up for the hero's final battle. But if Wolves lacks Goyokin's near-perfect pacing, it gets by on the reliably strong performances of Nakadai (who must have been to Gosha what Mifune was to Kurosawa) and Ando (a real-life ex yakuza who became a star by playing himself), along with a solid supporting cast. As a yakuza filmmaker Gosha may not measure up to Fukasaku or Suzuki -- on the evidence I've seen he was better at samurai stuff -- but he still put together a solid story that'll resonate with global crime film fans despite its flaws.