Now Showing: JUNE 6, 1962

If I've seen one thing so far in my survey of 1962 that I didn't expect to see, it's the phenomenon I call Cleosploitation -- the exhibitor strategy of exploiting the gossip surrounding the affair of Elizabeth Taylor, then married to Eddie Fisher, and Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra, a film still a year from opening, by showing a double feature of one Taylor and one Burton film. As I've remarked before, the gimmick must be working because theaters keep using it. Here's the latest example I've found, from Eugene OR.

That "Roman Threesome" tag makes the gimmick more salacious than ever. But my hunch about this whole trend is that it takes advantage of fresh curiosity about Burton, who'd been knocking around Hollywood for nearly a decade, most notably in The Robe, without really becoming a big name until Taylor made him one. Something like Ice Palace just might make more money in this market then it did when Warner Bros. pushed it as "The Motion Picture Giant of 1960."

But on to more conventional exploitation. This title, advertised in Hendersonville NC, probably promises more than it can deliver to the imaginative reader.

Veteran B-western actor Russell Hayden directed (for the only time in his career) this comedy about a Caribbean revolution defeated by sex. Even that description promises more than this picture is likely to deliver. But why not judge for yourselves? The film's in public domain and you can watch it on YouTube here.

Now for some adults-only fine-art cinema from Milwaukee.

Jean Seberg was a known quantity for Americans both for Otto Preminger's attempts to make her a star and Jean-Luc Godard's arguable success on another front with Breathless. Here she headlines a Philippe de Broca romantic comedy. De Broca's name would come closest to meaning something to Americans following the release of King of Hearts later in the decade. I have no clue about the meaning of the rabbit.

Things get just a little sleazier in Toledo.

It was rumored at one time that Ed Wood had a hand in this screenplay, but this authority finds little evidence for the claim in a purportedly dull J.D. picture. We have a trailer for this one, courtesy of captbijou.



Finally, in Pittsburgh, ...well, the fruit is ripe!

From France and writer-director Louis Solanes comes this drama of competing passions among seasonal fruit pickers. The more literal translation of the actual title, if you can trust Google with such matters, is "The girls sow the wind," which would seem to promise a sequel, "The girls reap the whirlwind," or in American, The Fruit is Rotten. But seriously, this was Solanes's first film as a director. Though still living, he hasn't directed another, says IMDB, since 1970's Africa Erotica. Star Scilla Gabel may have been familiar to Americans for a number of films ranging from Tarzan's Greatest Adventure to Mill of the Stone Women. But she wasn't enough of a name to be included in the ad. The content rather than the cast mattered most, I suspect, for the target audience.

Happy D-Day, everyone!

DVR Diary: LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT (1933)

Ladies: proper prison etiquette dictates that you not slap Barbara Stanwyck in the course of your petty disputes, because she will punch you in the face. That's one of the lessons learned in this Warner Bros. collaboration between directors Herbert Bretherton and William Keighley. If Ever in My Heart offered the Pre-Code public a new, goody-good Stanwyck, Ladies They Talk About is the good old bad Stanwyck, the same one that made the now-legendary Baby Face later in 1933. Here she's Nan Taylor, an unrepentant gun moll who puts on an act to give her gang an in at a bank. The gang (led by Lyle Talbot) gets the loot and gets away, but Nan has to stay behind to finish her innocent act. Unfortunately, one of the investigating officers recognizes her as a hardened crook and takes her in. Her looks make her a newspaper cover girl and attract the attention of moral crusader David Slade (Preston S. Foster), who calls for a crackdown on crime from his revival pulpit and on the radio. Turns out he and she are old school chums, she a renegade parson's daughter. He thinks she can reform and appeals for her to be released into his custody, but she makes the mistake of admitting to him what she wouldn't admit to the cops. He promptly rats her out and dooms her to a term in prison. 

Nan's place of confinement sometimes seems more like a girl's dormitory than a women's prison. The convicts are allowed to decorate their rooms as they please -- as long as they don't make an opening to the outside. Nan's fellow cons are an eclectic bunch, from a cigar-smoking butch lesbian who impresses her cellmate with her constant exercise to an aristocratic murderess who thinks of the others, especially a black prisoner named Mustard, as her servants. Playing Mustard, Madame Sul-Te-Wan has a great scene in which she chews out this biddy with a ferocity unusual for a black actress even in this period -- only for the effect to be ruined when a guard frightens Mustard with her pet cockatoo. Nan's main antagonist among the prisoners is Susie (Dorothy Burgess), who has an obsessive crush on David Slade and listens to him on the radio every night. Nan makes trouble for herself by shutting the radio off without permission, since she can't stand the sound of Slade's voice. It's Susie who learns the lesson cited above first hand; Nan floors her with one punch, and afterwards can intimidate her simply by making a fist. Stanwyck is never so close to being a female Cagney and the hard-boiled equal of Warners' gangster stars as she is here.

Slade still pines for Nan and writes her letters that she tears up contemptuously until she finds a way to use him. Learning that Talbot is in jail himself, she works up a plan for a joint breakout, part of which involves using Slade as an unwitting courier of a paper outline for an all-important prison key. Unwittingly enough, Slade mails the letter, but Nan doesn't know that her outside collaborator has himself been arrested. The letter is forwarded to prison and opened by the authorities, exposing the plot. Talbot and a partner are killed making a break, while Nan is doomed to finish her full sentence seething with fresh hatred for Slade, whom she assumes opened the letter and ratted her out himself. Finally free, she plans a mortal revenge, setting up a suspenseful climax that the directors botch. Nan goes to Slade's revival hall with a gun and heads to the anxious bench with the other penitents. It seems as if she intends to shoot him as he blesses her, and the film builds tension nicely as Slade works his way toward her while Susie, freed earlier and now working for Slade, watches with alarm and the chorus sings "Almost Persuaded." The climax should come here, one way or the other -- but the tension starts to dissipate as Slade recognizes Nan and invites her into a private room. It seems like this is what she wanted, because she has a more theatrical revenge in mind, though one not designed for play before a live audience. Her plan is more theatrical because it's more corny. She shows Slade a photograph of herself with Talbot and the other dead con, neither of whom the reformer knows. But she wants him to know that they're the reason why he's going to die. Suspicious Susie eavesdrops through a keyhole but does and says nothing until Nan has levelled her weapon and fired. Then she runs for help while Nan, her violent passion spent, immediately repents of wounding Slade in the arm. He immediately forgives her, and by the time Susie returns with some cops Slade is proposing to our antiheroine. Since bloodless wounds are the rule even in Pre-Code, no one notices that Slade has been shot, and Susie the eyewitness is disposed of with some trickery that convinces the cops that she couldn't have seen anything. The situation begs for a sequel in which psycho Susie seeks revenge on Nan, but Warners wasn't into sequels unless you count Gold Diggers of 1935, of 1937, etc. But even though Keighley and Bretherton waste opportunities on an anticlimax their closing stumble doesn't debase the entertainment value of their picture very much. If Baby Face is Stanwyck in apex-sexual-predator form, Ladies They Talk About is Barbara at her hard-boiled swaggering best. Don't expect much realism here; this picture is closer to classical, authentic pulp fiction come to cinematic life. If that idea appeals to you, so will the movie.

Warners knew that a brawling Stanwyck was a highlight, so they threw her punch into the trailer, provided as usual by TCM.com.

CHRONICLE (2012)

To the extent that Josh Trank's tale of teenagers with superpowers is part of the currently fashionable "found footage" genre, it's an abject failure -- and that's almost cause for relief. At no time are you convinced that you're actually seeing the story through the lens of a kid's video camera; the cinematography, the lighting, the framing are simply too good -- too professional. To maintain the premise that everything we see is something somebody filmed, Trank and writer Max Landis have to introduce an otherwise pointless character -- she eventually gets to be an archetypal damsel in distress -- who, like one of our three protagonists, obsessively records everything. For the big climax they give up any pretense that the story comes to us from one or two points of view, giving us a montage of news footage, security cameras, anonymous video footage, etc.  Trank could just as well have simply shown us some characters toting cameras -- maybe as an ironic commentary on the found-footage craze, and filmed his story as a conventional narrative, since he has little to say on the recording compulsion apart from suggesting that the camera is a metaphorical wall between the recorder and his subjects. This seems true for Andrew, the misfit of our teen trio and the film's eventual supervillain, but is it true of Casey, the video girl who befriends Matt, Andrew's cousin and eventual superhero?

In any event, that question fades as the film becomes less about the recording compulsion and more about an inevitable reenactment of superhero tropes, and as a whole the film is better off whenever it comes closest to shrugging off the found-footage gimmickry. Chronicle is the rare film of which I can say that it should have been in 3-D, but wasn't. Its most spectacular moment comes when Matt and Casey are driving through scenes of telekinetic chaos in the streets of Seattle, only to have their car lifted high into the air and left floating near the tip of the Space Needle as Andrew appears to menace them. The scene is shot from inside the car and the effect achieves the immediacy and spontaneity that found-footage movies aspire to -- but it would have worked just as well without the pretense that Casey is carrying a video camera throughout the experience.

Trank's pretentiously generic title tells us that he plans to play with archetypes even as he plays at realism. He and Landis give us an origin story for his teen trio involving an alien artifact and a vague transmission of energy and power. As with M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, the culmination of the story is the emergence of a supervillain. In Chronicle's case, despite a mythic warning against hubris, the villain is driven not by greed or ambition but by a pile-up of petty hurts and hatreds. Andrew lives a wretched life with an alky dad on disability and a dying mother whose expenses are bankrupting the family. He's a defensive loner and despite his pals' urging that he take advantage of his new powers to make himself cool -- the effort seems to pay off at a talent show were he passes himself off as a magician -- his awkwardness is incorrigible. His road to moral ruin starts when he pukes on the brink of his first sexual experience. To compensate, he envisions himself as an "apex predator," a Homo superior if you will, though he comes across more like a Columbine shooter. Unfortunately for the picture, Dane DeHaan, the actor who plays Andrew, can't transcend the character's predetermined nature or the script's confusion over whether we should pity Andrew for his miserable background or despise him as a loser at heart.

Like Spider-Man becoming a professional wrestler, Andrew uses his powers for petty personal gain.

When Strikes the Fireman!

Chronicle's climax leaves the actors hanging, not the audience.

Chronicle rises or falls on its illusion of a superpower breakout in the real world. But the effect of its effects are inconsistent. The big fight scene over Seattle often looks just as a superhero fight should; the folks at Marvel Studios should take notes against the time when they can't just have the Avengers fight another horde of anonymous alien war machines. Long shots of bodies hurtling through the air are also queasily evocative of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, but if this film didn't evoke 9/11 it would be missing both an opportunity and part of its own point. Yet while bits like the car's predicament in the sky are highly effective, some effects are downright poor. Many of the flying scenes self-evidently involve actors dangling from cranes; there's a difference between floating and dangling, but this film's crew didn't figure that out. Meanwhile, one moment may feature brilliant camerawork, and another will have the actors dangling on an obvious soundstage in front of an obvious two-dimensional backdrop. Times like those make it hard to endorse this movie, but Chronicle has a primal energy in its best moments and enough visual imagination at its most inspired to make it worth a look, though more for superhero fans than for found-footage fetishists.

DVR Diary: EVER IN MY HEART (1933)

In 1933 Barbara Stanwyck made two movies featuring tragic romances with foreigners. The better known of the two, and the more transgressive, is Frank Capra's Bitter Tea of General Yen, which links her with a Chinese warlord, albeit one played by a Swedish actor. The other film, directed by Archie Mayo for Warner Bros., is more explicitly opposed to prejudice than General Yen and more totally tragic than the Capra film. Ever in My Heart is a product of a peak-period of anti-war sentiment in the United States. Many people had come to question the benefit or the point of American involvement in the Great War, as well as the role of "black propaganda" in driving the country toward war with Germany. Mayo's film also reflects a Roaring Twenties backlash against superpatriotic and bigoted "100% Americanism" and a related prejudice against so-called "hyphenated Americans." Yet the same film is also a patriotic melodrama that ends with Stanwyck playing a tragic American heroine. To explain, she plays Mary Archer, daughter of a New England family with generations of war heroes; their names predominate the local war memorials. Mary's waiting for her childhood friend Jeff (Ralph Bellamy) to come home from his studies in Germany, fully expecting to love and marry him. But by 1933 Ralph Bellamy is already "Ralph Bellamy," the archetype of the dull male passed over in favor of someone more clever, more exotic, more something. So Mary passes Jeff over in favor of his German school chum Hugo Wilbrandt (Otto Kruger), who serenades her with language lessons in the form of romantic lieder. Mary falls hard and fast, and while Jeff's a good sport about it, her own brother Sam (Frank Albertson) doesn't like foreigners and resents the way Hugo has replaced Jeff in her heart. So why doesn't he marry Jeff, then? Anyway, Hugo lands a teaching post at a local school and earns the admiration of Mary's social circle. His acceptance is capped by a party celebrating his oath of citizenship on the same day that the newspapers report Germany's invasion of Belgium.

America's entry into the war is still years away, but constant press reports of German atrocities in Europe stir up hostility toward Germans in the U.S. Things get worse when the Lusitania is sunk. Mary's friends disinvite themselves from a tea she's holding in order to ostracize Hugo, who soon loses his teaching post. As the Wilbrandts slip into poverty their child sickens and dies and Mary herself grows ill from malnutrition. It gets so bad that local punks stone Hugo's dachshund; the poor man has to put the animal out of its misery with a bullet. Finally, when Mary's family takes her home to recuperate, Hugo promises to follow, but instead leaves for Europe, writing Mary that American prejudice has driven him to go home and fight for his country. When the U.S. finally declares war on Germany, Mary honors family tradition and joins the military as a canteen worker. Isn't she surprised to stumble upon Hugo in an American uniform near the front lines? For a moment I thought the picture was going to throw an O. Henry at us and reveal that Hugo had meant the U.S. as his country. But no: we are to understand, as Mary understands it, that Hugo is a spy for the Germans. Jeff, who's also at war, offers Mary his suspicion that a spy's at work, but Mary doesn't yet reveal Hugo. But Hugo has snuck into her quarters to beg her to spare him. The fact that they still love each other earns him a night's reprieve, if you know what I mean, but he insists on leaving in the morning with his info on U.S. troop movements. That's not going to happen, but how could Mary live with herself after sending Hugo to his death, or killing him herself? Since this is a tragic love story, the answer is that she can't and she won't. Instead, the picture ends on a strange note of patriotic liebestod.

In more expressionistic directorial hands -- and it's not as if the director of Svengali is helpless in this regard -- Ever in My Heart could have been a work of delirious camp, but however appalling the tale gets, it's told in a plodding manner, handicapped by Otto Kruger's questionable credibility as a leading man who could steal a girl even from the hapless Bellamy. The story's also compromised somewhat by its mixed message. Everything leading up to the war tells us that the forces driving Mary and Hugo apart are wrong, yet once the war came they play their wartime roles to the hilt instead of rebelling, deserting or otherwise following the example of the lovers in the contemporary hit A Farewell to Arms. I suppose you could count Mary's final solution as a kind of act of rebellion, but it's also a self-conscious act of patriotic heroism that could have left audiences convinced that it was the right thing to do. It also leaves the film feeling old-fashioned for its own time, too indulgent of the pathos of renunciation typical of silent cinema instead of applying the hard-boiled survival ethics of Pre-Code cinema. Warner Bros. tried to sell the film by avoiding the subject matter, as the newspaper ad above shows, while emphasizing the emergence of a "new" Barbara Stanwyck. By this the studio meant that she would play a "good girl" immediately after two definitive "bad girl" turns in Ladies They Talk About (coming soon to DVR Diary) and Baby Face. It doesn't quite come off, Stanwyck coming closest to full life only in the war scenes. Ever in My Heart is another film that ends up more interesting than fully entertaining for what it tells us about Hollywood's conflicted attitude toward war in the year when Hitler took power in Germany and the long march to the next European war began.

To be fair, let's let George Brent make the case for the picture in the original trailer from TCM.com

Now Playing: JUNE 3, 1962

Someone in Florence AL didn't get the memo from the studio.

The picture being advertised, as you may have guessed, is Lonely Are the Brave, but "Only the Brave" was the picture's working title. It was being promoted under that name as late as March 1962, as evidenced by a Leonard Lyons gossip column which includes an unlikely story about Tony Curtis pretending to be a cab driver to play a practical joke on Kirk. Depending on how close to release the title changed, some markets may have received press materials with the old title -- though this exhibitor isn't using the official movie logo. There may have been an executive decision that "Only the Brave" would make a stronger impression than the actual title. We'll never know if the exhibitor was right.

LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010)

In 2000 the actor-director Jiang Wen premiered his World War II black comedy Devils on the Doorstep at the Cannes film festival. Despite winning a Grand Prix he found himself shut out of directing for nearly a decade, while Devils was banned by both China and Japan for its irreverent yet provocative portrayal of the two nations' conflict. Let the Bullets Fly is only Jiang's second film as a director since then, though he remained a popular actor throughout the decade. Bullets has the same darkly irreverent attitude as Devils, but in a safer and familiar context of Chinese pulp fiction. Because of the setting and the generic trappings, Bullets seems less singular a work than Devils, but distinguishes itself from other Chinese period crime films with a hard-boiled cartoonishness that makes it more like a Chinese Coen Brothers movie than Zhang Yimou's actual Blood Simple remake, A Girl, a Gun and a Noodle Shop. Having some high powered actors, including the director himself, helps further that impression.

Jiang plays Zhang Mazi ("Pockmarked" or "Pocky" Zhang), so named despite his unmarked face for reasons eventually explained. Zhang is the leader of a bandit gang in the early days of the Republic of China, circa 1920. The gang wears masks with dots denoting who's "Number One," "Number Two" and so on. This gang ambushes a train bearing a new governor, Ma Bangde (Ge You) to Goose Town. The train is derailed, to put it mildly, when it hits an axe embedded on the rail. To put it less mildly, the car flips like the truck in The Dark Knight and goes sailing over the bandits' heads. The governor and his wife survive the mayhem, but his counselor dies. Fearing for his life, Ma decides to pretend to be the counselor, telling Zhang that the dead counselor was the governor. He convinces Zhang to accompany him to Goose Town, where he'll tell the people that Zhang is, in fact, the new governor that none of them have seen before, so he can plunder the place at his leisure.

The protagonists' deceptively miraculous entry into Goose Town, where Chow Yun-Fat (below) is your friendly guide.

But someone else is already plundering Goose Town: the local crime boss Huang Fox (Chow Yun-Fat). War is inevitable as Zhang tries to assert his ersatz authority and refuses deference to the gangster. It becomes personal when Huang manipulates "Number Six" into killing himself, and it only grows more personal as more allies fall. Throughout, Huang doesn't realize that the governor is really a bandit and stages attacks on him with men wearing the gang's familiar masks in order to take the heat off himself. In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, Zhang and Ma (who had inadvertently revealed the truth about himself under tragic circumstances) perpetuate the imposture, though Zhang can never be absolutely certain of Ma's loyalties. Episodes of violent absurdity mount until the inescapable final showdown.

Zhou Yun plays a woman who wants to be a bandit. This is her audition.

Despite all the mayhem Let the Bullets Fly is a character-driven comedy above all. It has a hard-boiled feel because Jiang films many of the key dialogue scenes involving himself, Chow and Ge in a fast-talking manner with rapid fire editing. All three are outstanding. Ge seems set up as a disreputable weasel yet proves an avid and ultimately sympathetic player in the three-way power game. Chow probably surprises his American fans with a broadly emotive performance as a criminal mastermind who probably isn't as smart as he thinks he is. He's not above lowbrow slapstick, most notably in an early scene with an idiotic body double determined to repeat everything Huang says in childish fashion. As our antihero, Jiang comes across like a Chinese Robert Mitchum, world-weary, wary and bemused all at once, cynical to his core yet sincerely feeling each loss in his circle. He lends the sometimes goofy proceedings a deadpan gravitas that somehow keeps us caring no matter how ridiculous the situation. He makes a great lord of misrule, especially when he has to remind his republican subjects at gunpoint that they musn't kneel to anyone anymore.

As a director, Jiang works on a high wire, making much of the action deliberately cartoonish while trusting himself and his co-stars to keep audiences emotionally invested in the story. Some scenes are pure slapstick, like the bit where the town's "justice drum" is cut loose from ancient vines and rolls crazily through the streets, chasing random citizens like a cartoon boulder until it crashes into a building -- and in the very next moment a body goes flying and bouncing off the drum, booted there by the local kung fu master. Later, Jiang balances pathos and black humor, making a sight gag out of the fact that a character has been blown in half by a bomb yet making the victim's death scene honestly poignant. He's never afraid to be cartoonish even in non-violent scenes like the one scored to the "Colonel Bogey" March (of Bridge on the River Kwai fame) when the three main characters make megaphone speeches to the people, Jiang terse, Chow unctuous, Ge transparently self-pitying. Cinematographer Zhao Fei makes it all as colorful as possible, in the starkest contrast with the monochrome Devils on the Doorstep, and fills the film with memorable images. Let the Bullets Fly can't help but seem less ambitious for being less controversial than Devils, but it reaffirms that Jiang Wen is a highly entertaining and imaginiative director with major potential.

Now Playing: JUNE 1, 1962

That Hitler movie with Richard Basehart must be doing well, because here's some Nazisploitation on its tail. This is Albany NY's idea of a drive-in attraction.

 

Ralph Porter's After Mein Kampf is not to be confused with a more questionable 1940 film called After Mein Kampf? Porter's 1961 release is apparently a straight documentary (or "shockumentary," as IMDB suggests) while the earlier film included reenactments with such young actors as Peter Ustinov and Herbert Lom.  You can find the earlier film (with the question mark) readily available online, but Porter's film may well have vanished without a trace, except for three reviews on IMDB which may well be for the other movie.

Continuing a wartime theme, here's a belligerent triple-bill of guns, gals and antics in Dubuque IA.

Two of these pictures sound credible, but Battle Flame is a 1959 B picture from Allied Artists. The sole IMDB reviewer writes that "Scott Brady speaks his lines as if he were reading them from cue cards. That's as much of a blurb as this Korean War melodrama gets.

In 1962 it looked as if Robert Bloch might become a household name, but first he had to get past the stage of being identified only as "Author of Psycho." Here's one of his would-be breakthrough films opening in Reading PA.

Pretty audacious of the studio to invoke the "first horror film" with that title for a picture that is not a remake, but it happens not to be bad. Lupinmaru seems to have filmed the trailer as it played on his TV set, but take a look anyway.



Remaining in Reading, here's some subversive Soviet cinema slipped into unsuspecting American theaters.

In its American form, this picture was a mainstay of cheap TV for generations. I remember seeing it often on a campus channel back in my schooldays and being stunned by the discrepancy between the self-evident scale of the production and the soundtrack that sounded like a Saturday morning cartoon. Most of the video clips I could embed here have some robots talking over the picture, so screw it.

And now for some real exploitation, starting in St. Petersburg FL.

From the era of high concepts, this is something about a man who gets the power to turn into animals so he can peep at naked women. I think that's all I need to say about that one, though here's more if you want to know more. Let's move on to Youngstown OH, where men have been waiting impatiently for a Doris Wishman movie.

Bank robbers hide out in a nudist camp; one of them falls in love with a captive camp worker. I think this could be made today, don't you. And with that glowing blurb from the Times, can you blame those tired businessmen of 1962 for wanting to see this one?

Our last stop is Palm Beach, for something breezy.

Something Weird sells this Cuba-lensed non-nudie under the alternate title Girls on the Rocks. The musicians encounter a jungle man and cannibals, and there's a twist (not the dance) toward the end. If it doesn't actually have any naked women in it, then this picture deserves the exploitation crown for the weekend.