BEFORE THE RAIN (Pred Dozhdot, 1994)

The filmmakers of Macedonia must be the most sophisticated on Earth. Consider that it took the United States a century to come up with a film as complexly and non-linearly structured as Pulp Fiction, but that in the very same year, the Former Yugoslav Republic came up with something just as sophisticated, perhaps more so -- and it was their very first movie! Well, movies were apparently made in Macedonia before, but this was the first one made after the country became independent, and Criterion calls it a first, so who are we to question?

We open with some children playing "ninja turtles." Their toys are real turtles, which the kids have "armed" with tiny swords. Now begins the first segment of the movie, "Words." It's about an Orthodox monk, Kiril, who has taken a vow of silence. What is he to do, then, when he finds that someone's been sleeping in his bed? It looks like a teenage boy, and thanks to subtitles we learn that the ragamuffin speaks Albanian, which the Macedonian Kiril doesn't understand. Kiril doesn't seem sure what to do, but lets the kid stay.

The next day brings a funeral, watched from a distance by what appears to be an English woman. Afterward, gunman come to the monastery. Their leader, Mitre, just buried his brother, and he thinks the girl who did the murder may be hiding on the premises. Despite vowing that "We'll find her even if she hides in America," they can't find her, though one gunman manages to machine gun a cat on a roof. That night, Kiril thinks he sees the girl, Zamira, then realizes he was dreaming. Then he starts again, and she's really there. Unfortunately, so are some of the other monks. "Time for you to leave," as they might say at the Shaolin monastery. Kiril abandons the religious life and his vow, resolving to take the girl out of the country, possibly all the way to Britain, where Kiril has an uncle who's a famous photographer. Who should turn up, however, but the girl's own grandfather, who welcomes her with a slap in the face. Her crime has started a war between the Christians and the Muslim Albanians, he fears; "Blood calls for blood now." He sneers at the notion that Kiril might care for her, and tries to prove his point by driving Kiril away. This works, except that Zamira breaks loose to join him -- only to be machine-gunned from behind. She dies with a smile, however.

We then see a naked woman weeping in a through the glass of a bathroom shower. This is our introduction to the second episode, "Faces." This is Ann, the Englishwoman we saw at the funeral of Mitre's brother. She reviews photos of refugees, soldiers, victims of war. A doctor calls to tell her she's pregnant. She vomits. On the street, walking with her mother, she encounters Alex, a Pulitzer-prize winning photographer just back from Bosnia -- Kiril's uncle, we presume, played by Rade Serbedzija, one of Hollywood's all-purpose foreigners. He's quit his photojournalism gig because he didn't want to take sides in the Yugoslav wars. Later, in a cab, Ann asks if something happened to provoke his decision. "I killed," Alex explains. He intends to go back to his home town in Macedonia, and wants Ann to come along. She doesn't. Instead, we see her at a tense dinner with Nick, her ex-husband, made more tense by the boorish behavior of some Balkan(?) thug at the restaurant bar, who picks a fight with a waiter and starts a larger brawl.

"At least they weren't from Ulster," Nick laughs after the dust has cleared a little. "I'm from Ulster, sir," the headwaiter protests. So it's a still more awkward dinner as Nick offers a toast: "Here's to civil wars becoming more civil when they come over here." Nick and Ann argue, and she's convinced him not to leave, telling him she still loves him, when the thug reappears, less civil, if that's possible, than before....

Abruptly, we're back in Macedonia, and Alex is off a plane and onto a bus heading into some familiar countryside. This is the third and final segment, "Pictures." This is his first visit in 16 years. In the village, we recognize a red-haired kid as one of Mitre's goons. Alex neatly disarms him as heads off, gun in tow, to see his cousin Bojan. His memories must still be vivid, for he pulls an old water pistol out of a niche in a wall on his way. His old home is nearly an empty shell, but has a bed he can sleep in overnight. He finally meets Bojan and Mitre the next day, but he has another reunion in mind, with Hana Halili, an old Muslim flame, the daughter of Zekir, who tells Alex that "Blood is in the air." We see the baptism, and we see a local vet helping a sheep give birth to two lambs. Alex writes a letter to Ann explaining what he meant by "I killed." He blames himself for a gunman shooting a victim in order to give him a good photo subject. Then the news spreads that Bojan has been fatally stabbed. But by whom? And when is this happening -- when did it happen, exactly?...

The trailer will not help you piece things together.

Not only has director Milcho Manchevski presented his episodes out of proper chronological order, but he's also shifted time in the middle of one of the episodes. We don't realize this until sometime later in the film, at which point we realize that much of what we saw in that episode was a flashback. We find ourselves expecting certain scenes, like a meeting between Alex and Kiril, that actually can't happen. At the same time, there are several parallel scenes in different episodes. In "Pictures," Alex has a dream of Hana, followed by a true vision, just as Kiril does with Zamira in "Words." Similarly, a moment in "Pictures" when Alex shows his back to his trigger-happy relatives mirrors Zamira's final moments in the first episode. There are other elements common to all three episodes. The same Beastie Boys rap plays in different snippets in each one, for instance, and some wisdom from a monk is repeated in the form of London graffiti: "Time doesn't wait, and the circle is not round." This is apparently the moral of the movie, and one way to read it is to understand that we can't see the same events the same way every time. Another way is to note that the film itself does not form a perfect circle, since it sort of knots in the middle. Either way, Before the Rain is the sort of movie that is impossible to watch in the same way the second time around. The real test of its staying power would really be the third viewing, since many people would spend the second viewing noticing patterns they might have missed before or trying to pinpoint the time shifts in the middle episode. Once the structural novelty wears off, I think the film will stand as a fairly predictable lamentation of Balkan horrors, augmented by a strong multilingual performance from Serbedzija, who earned some international stardom for his work.

As much as I'd like to compliment the Macedonians for a good first effort, I wonder whether Before the Rain is really more of an international than a Macedonian movie. It looks like something meant for film festivals and art house theaters rather than the Skopje multiplex. Maybe we've yet to see what an authentic popular Macedonian cinema might look like, though this film gives some reason to fear that it would have much to do with killing Albanians. I don't doubt that Manchevski's opus was popular in his homeland, but I do wonder whether his people were really the movie's primary audience. This isn't a criticism of the film, but just the return of a thought I've had when seeing other reputed landmark films from small countries. It's a suspicion that these countries have more stories to tell than the world sees, for one reason or another. But we probably ought to be grateful for the stories that do get told.

THE YELLOW ROLLS ROYCE (1964)

This is another film of which I had only dim childhood memories before the DVD release, mostly of the posh theme music, which turns out to be the work of mondo maestro Riz Ortolani. He knows how to stick a theme in your head, because the opening music was just as I remembered it. Of the story (or stories) I remembered virtually nothing, except for the obvious, that the film was about the adventures of a particular car. But unlike the coat that links the stories of Tales of Manhattan, for instance, the car has no special quality that charms the lives of its owners -- though the manufacturer might disagree.



Anthony Asquith's film of Terence Rattigan's screenplay is an odd collection of star couplings, starting off with Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau. He's a diplomat and horseman who's perhaps not as attentive to the wife as he should be, but wants to make up for it by buying her a certain car. She ends up using it for a tryst with her paramour. You might understand Jeanne Moreau straying from "Sexy Rexy," -- but with Edmund Purdom? I've seen The Egyptian and the man is a block of wood. I suppose he may be a pretty block of wood, but I'm not qualified to judge such things. In any event, Rex discovers her and is heartbroken despite his horse winning the big race, and Jeanne is stricken with guilt, for she does love her husband, after all. Harrison ends up sending the car back to the RR showroom because "it displeases me."

After 20,000 miles, including mentioned but unrecorded ownership by a gambling-addicted maharaja, the car ends up in an Italian showroom, where it's purchased by Paolo Maltese, an Italian-american gangster who's come with his moll and his flunky to marry the former in the old country. George C. Scott is the gangster, Shirley MacLaine the moll, Art Carney the worldly-wise flunky, and Alain Delon is a young hustler with a street-photographer racket. The interplay among the Americans is the highlight of the film, and Asquith seems most inspired by filming on location all over Italy. This seems to be the only episode of the film in which characters actually ride in the car on location. Much of the first episode is done on soundstages, but this middle segment, the longest, takes full advantage of the widescreen scenery. Ortolani also seems more energized on his home ground, and with MacLaine as a muse (see also his score for Woman Times Seven). MacLaine is initially bored by the tourist bit despite Scott's belligerent enthusiasm, but when Scott has to speed back home to take care of business, Delon's charms awaken her sensual appreciation of all Italy has to offer -- including a rather fake looking grotto set where Delon woos her most ardently. She and we also learn the difference between immoral and amoral (pronounced "ah-moral") personalities from Carney, whose good work here makes me wonder why we didn't see more of him in movies in this decade.

I nearly forgot about the car. Once again it's used for a romantic tryst, but that big moment might as well have taken place anywhere. The unifying concept of the film is undercut by the lack of any sense of magic, even metaphorically speaking, in the title vehicle. Unless we really are meant to be simply awed by the presence of an actual Rolls Royce automobile on our movie screens, the car has little to contribute and can hardly be called a "character" in any episode. You might at least perceive a common thread in the car being a site of tragicomic trysts, for that's how the second episode turns out, too, but there's little tragic or comic about the final segment.

By 1941, the yellow Rolls has fallen on hard times in Trieste, but can still be banged into shape for use by a famously wealthy American widow, played by Ingrid Bergman. Learning of a coup in neighboring Yugoslavia that has overthrown the pro-Nazi regime, she decides against advice from the American consulate, in the not exactly authoritative form of Wally Cox, to cross the border and pay her respects to the new regime. Bergman's political sympathies are hard to grasp. She seems happy at the change of government in Yugoslavia, but otherwise seems to be a reactionary and a hater of FDR. Reluctantly she allows a Yugoslav national with a shadowy agenda to accompany her. This is the ethnically versatile Omar Sharif, adding a Slovenian, I believe, to his repertoire. He and Bergman are to be a couple, for a time, but there is no chemistry between them. She is radicalized when the Germans dare to bomb her hotel during dinner, forcing them to serve herself from the salad bar. She's also a take-charge person with a humanitarian bent. Her natural impulse is to help the wounded and injured, and that instinct inspires her to use the YRR to ferry Sharif's partisan pals back and forth along dangerous roads. Here I was expecting a heroic demise for the car, if not for the characters, but there is no such consummation, and the film ends with the venerable vehicle arriving in New York for further domestic service.

By its nature The Yellow Rolls Royce is a mixed bag. The middle episode could almost stand alone with a little elaboration, while the first one isn't really bad but seems constrained by its brevity, and the closer is just silly. I would recommend it most enthusiastically to people who like a certain kind of 60s glossiness, including the music. Ortolani got a kind of hit out of the song "Forget Domani," which sounded more familiar to me as an instrumental than with lyrics. Overall, though he lets it rip a little in the middle episode, this is a relatively tepid score, though the theme still has its grandeur. The film as a whole aspires to grandeur but works best when it aspires least.

EL TOPO (1970)

Give me a movie theater and here's a double-bill I would program: Alejandro Jodorowsky's western and Mel Brooks's. I mean no insult to either film, but I think that showing El Topo and Blazing Saddles together would illustrate two different ways to send-up the western genre. Brooks works in a satirical mode typical of his creative roots in the 1950s. He highlights the absurdities of the genre relative to some base notion of reality, with race relations as a reference point. Jodorowsky opts for the reductio ad absurdam, an exaggeration of genre tendencies past the snapping point. Neither director means to belittle the western. Brooks's film is not quite the labor of love that Young Frankenstein is, but neither is it a by-the-numbers genre putdown like Spaceballs. Likewise, Jodorowsky has no axe to grind against westerns, but uses the motifs of the spaghetti subgenre in particular to address more personal issues.

So how can I call myself a cult movie fan and only be watching El Topo for the first time today? To be honest, I didn't trust the film. It has always carried an air of pretentiousness about it, and I feared that its vaunted symbolism would prove rather banal. It seems too much like something made as a cult film on purpose, though Jodorowsky can hardly be accused of that even when he boasts of inventing cult (or at least midnight) movies. He didn't schedule it for a midnight showing at the Elgin theater; John Lennon did. I may also have held the period against the film, assuming it to be some kind of a "drug" movie that's meant to be appreciated only by the stoned. When it came down to it, I thought it would be boring, despite all the descriptions I'd read of it, simply because Jodorowsky seems to take himself so seriously. But Ed Wood was pretentious, too, so what harm was there in giving El Topo a chance finally, especially since the Albany Public Library had just acquired the Anchor Bay DVD? If I claimed to chronicle the wild world of cinema, I owed it to myself, my followers (I'm not pretentious, am I?) and casual readers to take the measure of this famous film.

Jodorowsky himself is El Topo, the mole -- a westerner with a small son who goes about naked. On the boy's seventh birthday, Topo orders him to bury his favorite toy and his mother's portrait in the desert. They then ride into a massacred town, and Topo takes it upon himself to avenge the peasants on the killer gang. He confronts a crew of eccentrics, each with his odd hobby, and from there goes after the real ringleader, the Colonel. He conquers that villain's enclave of decadence and claims his enemy's kept woman, kicking his naked boy into the dirt. Man and woman (he calls her Mara) try to make a living in the desert. After he rapes her, the woman can do as he does, digging fruit out of the sand and drawing water from a stump or rock by shooting it. She then gets the ambitious notion that Topo should be a "winner." He can do this by defeating the four masters known to dwell elsewhere in the desert. Each practices a form of spiritual or esoteric wisdom, but Topo takes down three of the four. The fourth defeats him by shooting himself, proving that there is really nothing to take from him and thus nothing to win. Traumatized by this revelation, Topo is left for dead by the mysterious whip-wielding woman (who talks with a man's voice) who had joined the journey, and who now administers the wounds of Christ on him with bullets while stealing away his fickle girlfriend. He is rescued by a tribe of deformed people who live in a deep cave. He endeavors to dig them a tunnel so they can leave their cave permanently. To do so he raises funds by playing a clown with his new friend, a dwarf woman, in the nearest town. The New World Order has apparently taken over there, since the eye in the pyramid is everywhere. And now I understand why conspiracy theorists worry: slaughtering or merely branding and enslaving peasants is the local sport. Ugly women impose themselves on a black man and accuse him of rape, earning him a lynching. All the building signs are in English by the way -- hint, hint. While Topo labors away, a new stranger disrupts the NWO by intervening in a faith-based Russian Roulette game. But that's just a distraction from his real business, which, he being Topo's long lost son, is to kill him. Topo requests a reprieve so he can complete the tunnel project, only to renege on the deal by immolating himself Vietnamese-monk style after the townsfolk massacre the escaping freaks and he massacres the townsfolk. Let me illustrate:

I have spared you detailed descriptions of many of the activities of the characters in the film. It's up to all of you to see those and figure them out for yourselves. I will say that much of it struck me as an illogical extension of the increasingly surreal actuality of the spaghetti western genre. An early scene in which a killer slices a banana into bite size pieces so he can skewer each one for individual snacks somehow reminded me of the absurdly tedious business of the gunfighters during the opening credits of Once Upon a Time in the West. It's all outrageous, yet trivial at the same time. And the odd abilities of gunfighters or masters are not far removed from the increasingly specialized killing or shooting techniques of the actual spaghettis, which were by this time often spiraling off into mythic extremes. Jodorowsky's Panic movement seems to have elaborated intellectually what the spaghettis had generated more or less spontaneously. The difference is not really that great, unless we insist on analyzing all the imagery. But I'm not sure that will do much more for us than tell us what's going on in Jodorowsky's head, and I don't know if the genuine effectiveness of his powerful imagery can be explained fully by that sort of analysis. The man himself will gladly elaborate on that aspect of his art, as I learned from watching the brief English-language interview on the DVD, but I'd rather give him credit for getting beyond himself in this legitimately visionary film.

As far as art direction goes, El Topo fully lives up to its reputation. It's a riot of excessive imagery, from the simple immensity of the desert to the literal animal vitality of certain scenes, as when the Colonel emerges from his pyramid-like lair and is followed out by an outburst of dozens of pigs, or the swarm of rabbits in the compound on one of the masters. At first I was anachronistically reminded of Circle of Iron, but it soon became clear how pale an imitation of El Topo that silly film was. The film it ended up more like to me was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a similarly iconographic but rather less bloody film by Sergei Parajanov. Both films are about putting archetypal strangeness right in front of the camera to express some sort of primal message. The messages we can take or leave, but El Topo, at least, is a terrific film to at least look at -- unless you're disturbed by deformities (the makers of The Crippled Masters must have taken inspiration here) or human ugliness in general, or lots of bloodshed. But if you can stand all that, you can stand at least one viewing of this historic film.

Memories of Missing Movies

There was a time when I was naive enough to think that every movie would make it onto DVD eventually, so frequently were so many once obscure titles appearing, but a growing group of movie bloggers, inspired by Jeremy Richey's outstanding Moon In The Gutter, have exposed the bitter reality. They've posted lists of the movies they still want to see on Region 1 DVD, but can't. Foremost among these efforts, apart from Jeremy's own exposes, is the festival of 100 tantalizing posters for non-disc films over at the Temple of Schlock. My contribution can only be modest in comparison, and I'll try to justify it by taking a slightly different approach. I'm going to write about a few movies that I saw long ago, as far back as my childhood, that imprinted profound memories in my mind. I can't vouch for the quality of any of these films, but they were all memorable in some way, and my mentioning them may stir memories in other readers. I'm going to go about this in chronological order.



SIGN OF THE PAGAN (1954). Jack Palance as Attila the Hun, directed by Douglas Sirk. I think I first saw this on WOR from New York City, around the time that my family first got cable TV. That was a golden age for incipient movie fans, since we got WOR, WPIX and WNEW when they were all independent stations with copious movie schedules. Here's a role Palance was born to play. The hero is actually Jeff Chandler, an actor I've never cared for who seemed singularly inauthentic in period work. His presence didn't even register with me when I first saw this movie. I was preoccupied with Palance's seeming spiritual struggle with a prophecy that a cross or a shadow of a cross would mean his doom. This guaranteed a troubled relationship with Christianity and a reticence when it came to sacking Italy that disgusted Attila's peers. "He fears his holy Leo!" is a line I well remember, Leo being the Pope who had persuaded Attila to spare Rome. I also remember the payoff that fulfilled the prophecy, and Attila's final request to "Bury me deep." Whatever budget this Universal costumer had, Palance was a spectacle unto himself.

Here's a clip from a Greek fan. I can't vouch for the subtitles.






TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE (1959) Back when American Movie Classics was a worthy and sometimes superior rival to Turner Classic Movies, the station had the rights to all the Tarzan movies. That gave me my first opportunity to see Gordon Scott as Tarzan, including this penultimate effort, which revolutionized the series. Director John Guillerman and screenwriter Les Crutchfield finally abandoned the "primitive" archetype that MGM had imposed on the character with Johnny Weismuller, permitting Scott to become a fully articulate Tarzan while at the same time giving him a more rugged story to perform in and pitting him against an incredible roster of villains including Anthony Quayle and Sean Connery. Scott rose to the occasion as "the man who lives in the jungle." He struck me as more of a Natty Bumppo type than a noble savage, though this film is arguably quite savage compared to previous kid-oriented efforts. I was knowledgeable enough about movies by the time I saw this to realize, once I saw the climactic fight between Scott and Quayle, that this was probably the nearest we'd ever get to an Anthony Mann Tarzan movie. Scott reprised this interpretation in Tarzan the Magnificent before trying his luck as a peplum star -- a career dead end, as it turned out. If the topic were top movies of my imagination, one would be the third Scott Tarzan for Sy Weintraub, a full-scale transposition of The Last of the Mohicans into post-colonial Africa. Think about it, then take a look at the trailer.




HOUSE OF CARDS (1968). I remember seeing this one fairly frequently on one of the local channels in Albany. John Guillerman returns to direct a thriller set in Paris and starring George Peppard and Orson Welles. About the story I actually remember very little. What I do recall is a very memorable score, which I learn was the work of Francis Lai, and a climactic scene on a bridge in which Welles tries to goad a brainwashed child into shooting Peppard, only to end up going over the side himself. Perhaps because it involved a killer kid, or a kid intended to be a killer, that scene made a strong impression separate from its actual cinematic merits, which we cannot verify today. While the reviews on IMDB, based on longer memories than mine, are mixed, the cast and crew list and the bare description of the story make me think that this particular landmark of the wild world of cinema might be reopened profitably. No trailer for this one, I'm afraid.

CRAZY JOE (1974). This is another item I remember seeing on WOR, usually during their 4:00 p.m. weekday movie slot. Carlo Lizzani's film about mafia renegade Joe Gallo has a natural exploitation angle. Peter Boyle made his name in a film called Joe, so why not Crazy Joe? I don't remember very much about it apart from liking it and watching it every time it was on. It was good and violent and had a unique angle of a mafia guy teaming up with black gangsters led by none other than Fred Williamson. I think I remember a kind of disco version of the song "Mona Lisa" playing over the end credits. It had a current-events quality about it, being based on a recent gang war, that gave it a quality distinct from the Godfather films, which I didn't see until the "novel for television" later in the decade. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Gangster Film partly corroborates my favorable memories. Dating the film to 1973, the reviewer credits Crazy Joe with "an almost operatic intensity" and calls it "an enterprisingly off-beat film." As my appreciation of Italian crime cinema has grown over time, I'd really like to give this film another look. This trailer brings a lot of the memories back. I remember the assassination scene quite vividly now.

I hope I've managed to stake my own territory of absence with this post. I may return to the general subject with a different emphasis on films that I've never seen, but would like a chance to see. Until then, Jeremy has a running list of contributors to the topic at Moon In The Gutter, where he's adding to his own list on a regular basis. I highly recommend a visit.

FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (5 bambole per la luna d'agusto, 1970)

Mario Bava's black comedy is set on an island somewhere. I'm tempted to say its in the Mediterranean, but I don't know if you can assume that, since all the characters have Anglo or American sounding names. That may be why Bava and screenwriter Mario di Nardo have such a snide attitude toward the characters. For a couple of Italians, they are the other on which they can project all the nastiness and depravity that makes what happens look like just desserts.

Let's nail down the genre up front. Some call it a giallo, I suppose, but it hardly qualifies. As I understand it, gialli are all about creative ways of killing people. Five Dolls, however giallesque [?] the title sounds, is all about finding bodies that have already been killed, except for a few very conventional shootings at the end. Bava is said to have liked this least of all his work, and the lack of creative killing may be the reason. Still, he found ways to occupy himself, and the film is a triumph of style over substance. I suppose we could also call it a body-count film, since apart from ogling the scenery -- outdoor, architectural and female -- there's not much to do but count bodies. But body-count films are always sort of a subset of black comedy, given how audiences usually respond to them, and we're clearly meant to laugh at this film.

How couldn't you? We have ten people in the cast, four couples and two singles. The island belongs to George Stark, married to Jill, and his guests are Nick and Marie Chaney, Jack and Peggy Davidson, and Fritz and Trudy Farrell. They're gathered so George, Nick and Jack can schmooze Fritz, a professor, into selling them his important secret formula for three million dollars. The prof. isn't interested in selling; a pall hangs over the formula for him because a colleague died while they were working on it. The men's united front doesn't last long, as Nick angles to get exclusive rights to the formula and urges Marie to seduce the Professor, while people start dying, starting with Jacques the houseboy. George's yacht has vanished and his wireless telephone isn't working, so there's no way off the island and no way to communicate with the mainland. There's nothing to do but put Jacques in the meat locker, wait for other people to die, and drink. Nick does most of the drinking, since "Death makes me thirsty." He has opportunities to get quite sloshed.

Professor Farrell (William Berger) struggles to resist all temptation in FIVE
DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (picture from images.movieplayer.it)

So who's the killer? Is it Isabel, the lone single female, who we see shooting the Professor with a rifle during a break from romping on the beach and stalking people? Well, this is the sort of movie where seeing someone shoot somebody else pretty much guarantees that she didn't kill everyone else -- or does it??? Any further elaboration of the synopsis would only spoil a plot that's pretty gamy already. This isn't the sort of film you watch for the story, and if efficient storytelling is your sole criterion of cinematic quality, you may as well stop reading.

The reasons to look at Five Dolls are the lush outdoor scenery, photographed by Bava and Antonio Rinaldi, the colorfully decadent indoor sets, and the uniformly luscious female cast, from Justine Galli as Isabel to the great Edwige Fenech as the particularly depraved Marie Chaney. The date is 1970, but this is still very much the swinging 60s, put to music by Piero Umiliani's swanky lounge score. It's still the era when it was hard to find an Italian film in which the music, at least, did not sound good. And Bava can't help but make the whole production look much more lavish than it actually was. However he felt about the story, he gets in a few excellent set pieces, including the mock human sacrifice bit at the beginning and a later sequence where we follow some spilt glass balls from the scene of a drunken fight down a flight of stairs into a bathtub where we find the latest victim. There's also one big scare moment near the end when Isabel has to nab a piece of microfilm (I think that's what it is) in the aftermath of a shootout in the meat locker -- which by that point is very well populated.

This is a body count film where you're almost certainly meant to root for nearly all the characters to die. They're such scumbags, such cartoonish incarnations of the idle yet greedy rich, that you most likely will cheer on whoever's doing the killing. But at the same time you can revel in their depravity, from cavorting on a rotating circular bed to puffing a cigarette from between a woman's bare toes. This film is eye candy: pure cinematic junk food that won't make you fat -- and it's okay to laugh. If you didn't, I'd wonder....

Try this clip on for size. It's Edwige Fenech dancing, stripping, and playing the sacrifice for Kraal. While I saw the Anchor Bay DVD in Italian from the Bava Vol. 2 box set, this clip is dubbed into English for your enjoyment.

"Our Gang's" Shirley Jean Rickert (1926-2009)

Local newspapers report today that onetime child actress and latter-day burlesque performer Shirley Jean Rickert (second from left in the photo from http://www.cyranos.ch/) passed away in Saratoga Springs, New York, one week ago, aged 82. Rickert performed in Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies during 1931 while supporting Mickey Rooney in Mickey McGuire shorts. She carried on in movies as a background dancer in MGM musicals ranging from Best Foot Forward (1943) to Singin' In The Rain (1952) before hitting the road as Gilda in the Gilda and Her Crowning Glory burlesque act for most of the 1950s. The "Crowning Glory" was a long mane of blond hair. In more mundane work as a hardware salesperson, she found that showing photos from her Our Gang days was a great way to get in the door.There probably aren't more than ten Our Gang performers left alive now, Jackie Cooper probably most famously and Mickey "Robert Blake" Gubitosi perhaps most infamously. But to counter the stereotype of urban legend, Rickert was another one who lived a long life, and apparently one no more troubled than ordinary folks'.

Rickert in maturity, as "Gilda the Golden Girl"
(photo from www.streetswing.com)

Steve McQueen in NEVER LOVE A STRANGER (1958)

Harold Robbins co-wrote this screenplay adapting his own early best-seller from 1948. Unsurprisingly, there's a strong narrative voice through much of the picture, but it begins with a desperate drive by what looks like a dying man, ending in a crash and a body tumbling out of the car. From there we travel back in time to the year 1912, which seems a long way to go at first. A sick young woman is taking lodging in a rough building. The landlady tosses the poor girl's suitcase into a closet, where it promptly disappears behind the wall. Try to remember that, but our first concern is the young woman's health. She's in the family way, you see. But alas, she'll not long survive the blessed event. She expires upon naming her newborn "Francis Kane."


Francis is raised in a Catholic orphan asylum and becomes an industrious bootblack and boy of all work for one of the local pool halls. He's running with the wrong crowd, but that doesn't stop him from stepping in when the gang menaces a harmless Jewish boys. Their anti-Semitic sensors seem to be off, though, because Steve McQueen hardly seems like a Jew. Frankie saves him by putting him down with one punch, which Steve, who we'll call Marty Cabell for our purposes, appreciates as a reasonable alternative to a protracted beatdown. Marty invites Frankie to his place to teach him how to box. Frankie also gets to meet Marty's sister Julie (Lita Milan). Those clever Jews: Julie doesn't even look or sound like she's from the same country as Marty. Frankie, however, is unprejudiced, for who could be prejudiced against such a dish.

Two representative men of the 1920s: Steve McQueen thanks John Drew Barrymore for knocking him out in NEVER LOVE A STRANGER (photo from www.mcqueenonline.com)

Things are looking up for Frankie on both the romantic and criminal fronts until a shocking discovery is made. The old landlady finally hauls Frankie's mom's suitcase out from behind the closet, and inside finds a book written, as Frankie puts it, "in Jewish." A terrible mistake has been made! The well-meaning authorities seem to think it was unfair of them to raise as a Catholic someone who should have been a Jew, but Frankie sees it all differently. "I don't want to be a Jew!" he cries, and rather than face transfer to a Jewish school, he hops a freight, leaving behind a bankroll he's been keeping for his mentor Silk Fennelli (erstwhile Mike Hammer Robert Bray), with instructions for Julie to return it to Silk. Fennelli shows his gratitude by making her a nightclub singer and kept woman, while Frankie has timed his hobo adventure for the advent of the Great Depression, and lean years follow for him.

I have to remind you occasionally about the time frame of our story because the film itself can confuse you. Unless you look at the cars, you could hardly tell from how the people look that the story's taking place sometime earlier than 1958. Neither Steve McQueen nor our actual star, John Drew Barrymore, looks right for the period. They are neither Fop nor Dapper Dan men. I owe you an account of young Barrymore. He is the missing link, if you please, between alcoholic master thespian John Barrymore and alcoholic actress-producer Drew Barrymore. John Drew was pretty much just alcoholic. Not long after this starring role in a low-budget Allied Artists release, he was supporting Steve Reeves in The Trojan Horse across the big water, and it was further downhill from there.But whereas his father could still earn money by shamelessly parodying himself, and his daughter can claim to be a successful show-business survivor, JDB finished his career literally as a bum. But don't blame Never Love A Stranger for that. He lacks intensity, but has some of the family charisma.

As Frankie, he returns to New York to take a WPA job, during which he is hit by a truck during a moment of inattention. He's hospitalized just as Marty, a rising young prosecutor, is visiting the building. Marty gives his old pal $20 to get him started again, and once on his feet Frankie restores himself to Silk Fennelli's service as a most trusty gunsel. After three years as Silk's right hand, Frankie's impatient to take over and establish some order in the underworld. He makes his move at a gang conference, clobbering Silk into submission and declaring himself the guarantor of peaceful crime. For reasons known only to Harold Robbins, Frankie does not exterminate Silk, but retains him as an underling while reclaiming his relationship with Julie. It will be increasingly apparent that Frankie is sort of soft.

He runs the New York bookmaking operations from the safety of New Jersey, where newly-minted special prosecutor Marty can't touch him. Marty is not exactly Thomas Dewey. His campaign to defeat Frankie consists largely of meeting him at restaurants or calling him on the phone and asking him nicely to turn himself in. Otherwise, he waits for Frankie to slip up and step across the river. Meanwhile, Silk looks for some way to avenge his humiliation. He doesn't like Frankie's indulgence toward Mosh, a Jewish numbers man who wants to retire. Silk thinks Mosh should die because there's too much chance of him turning rat, but Frankie trusts the old man. Finally, Silk weaves a plot to eliminate Mosh, Frankie, Marty and his sister in one Corleonian swoop, with help from Flix the hitman (Peckinpah stalwart R.G. Armstrong). I'll skip to climactic details except to bring us back to that careening car from the opening, then forward once more to another birth and the continuation of the Kane lineage.

I think this is meant as some sort of gangster tearjerker. Everything from the omniscient narration and the lachrymose theme song to the sentimental score by Raymond Scott (otherwise a powerhouse composer) and the circle-of-life finale point that way. It certainly tries harder at that than it does to recreate the 1930s on screen. Maybe the filmmakers thought the period was close enough to the present that people wouldn't notice anachronisms, but more likely they just lacked money. The director, Robert Stevens, worked mostly in television. IMDB credits him with 44 episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock show. Going to 90 minutes may have been beyond his powers. His direction here is efficient but uninspired, lacking forcefulness or momentum.

The acting throughout is pretty green. If you didn't know McQueen on sight you might not accuse him of stealing scenes. His job is to be dully earnest and he earns his pay. He is at least competent. It's hard to judge Barrymore apart from the implausibilities of the character he plays, but I think he could have handled better material. Neither actor embarrasses himself, but they look pretty silly anyway, trapped in such a silly story. The title should have told me not to expect anything really raw or violent, but the DVD did hint at something like that. This film probably exists in digital form only because McQueen is in it, playing what's apparently his first billed role, so it's historical interest is obvious, but I'm afraid that there's little of interest apart from that unless I've made it sound campy enough for an unintended laugh.

Of the book, its original publisher reportedly said: "it was the first time he had ever read a book where on one page you'd have tears and on the next page you'd have a hard-on." If so, Robbins did not do justice to his own work this time.