The Caramel War: Yasuzo Masumura's GIANTS AND TOYS (1958)

"E verybody wants their fifteen minutes of fame," a businessman says, in English translation, when explaining how Japan's TV networks and other media outlets strive to fill time and space in order to keep in business -- they create celebrities constantly from a perpetually willing populace.  The year is 1958. Andy Warhol will not make his famous prophecy about everyone getting their fifteen minutes for another decade. I assume that the translator who composed the subtitles for the Fantoma DVD of Giants and Toys used a now-familiar American idiom to replace an unfamiliar Japanese idiom, without realizing that putting the phrase in anyone's mouth in 1958 was anachronistic. But if it's a literal translation of the actor's remarks, then screenwriters Ken Kaiko and Yoshio Sirasaka were also prophets. That would seem right somehow. It would be in keeping with the way Yasuzo Masumura's satire echoes contemporary American concerns with mass media, celebrity, and the omnipresence of advertising. It may seem strange that Japanese writers and filmmakers, only thirteen years removed from being bombed nearly to the Stone Age, are as advanced in their anxiety about mass culture as the American vanguard, but as one character says, "America is Japan." It's less a matter of America remaking Japan in its own image than of Japan making another of its characteristic adaptive leaps and becoming, on this film's evidence, even more of a media and ad-saturated society than its American model. Accordingly, Masumura's satire is more intense, emotionally and pictorially, than such American counterparts as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Sweet Smell of Success, and so on. Giants and Toys may be the ultimate global statement on the subject.

In the neon world of Giants and Toys, Nishi (approximately fifth from right, below)

starts out as just a face in the crowd.

One immediate difference between Japanese and American cases is the absence, in Masumura's film at least, of an equivalent of "Madison Avenue," the world of advertising agencies eventually called by name in a minor 1962 Hollywood picture. The competing caramel companies of Giants and Toys appear to do all their marketing in-house. World, Giant and Apollo are battling for dominance of the candy market, each seeking a new tie-in gimmick to pull it ahead of the rest. Apollo seems to take the subtle approach, while Giant relies on a spokesman in a strongman costume to sell its stuff. Our main focus is on World's struggle to distinguish itself. The company has problems. The lights have gone out on two letters of its English language neon sign, so that the company's name reads OLD. How to change their image. Key to the effort are hard-charging Goda, who suffers from the Movie Disease (occasional coughing fits, blood on the handkerchief) and his young, idealistic assistant Nishi. Among their strategies are a space-age gimmick with futuristic giveaways to tie in to an upcoming Space Expo, and the discovery of a new corporate spokesperson, a perky girl with bad teeth, supposedly from enjoying too many World Caramels. Everything converges as the girl plucked from the slums, whom Nishi thinks "looks like a monkey," dons a spacesuit and films elaborately choreographed commercials with earwig soundtracks, delivering World Caramels to the benighted people of distant worlds.

A star is born, but will success spoil Kyoko Shima?

The girl, Kyoko Shima, becomes Japan's Next Big Thing from her initial appearances in magazine layouts to a delerious live tour, quickly growing bigger than World. All the while, Nishi strives to get intelligence on the rival companies from his buddy and his girlfriend, who happen to be his counterparts at Giant and Apollo respectively. The moment I described Nishi as idealistic you should have guessed that he would prove a loser, dominated by Goda, played by his pals, increasingly intimidated by Kyoko. Idealistic loser that he is, he rebels in spirit against the shallow cutthroat competition that intensifies after a factory fire knocks Apollo out of the running. Everything seems to depend on his getting Kyoko to appear in her space costume at the Expo, but his Galataea, now aided by Nishi's pal from Giant, checkmates him and goes on to pursue her destiny, leaving our hero to a fate more closely resembling Requiem For a Heavyweight than any of the American ad-age satires mentioned earlier. It's also an extra satiric payoff for the entire space-age gimmick, as Nishi's shamefaced donning of the spacesuit symbolizes his alien-ation from the crass culture he's helped to cultivate.

Requiem for a lightweight.

Giants and Toys is a more definitive visual document of the 1950s than most of its Hollywood counterparts. It looks right, at least to someone who didn't actually live then. That is, the cinematography of Hiroshi Murai and the art direction of Tomoo Shimogawara looks torn from the pages of Life magazine, lurid and lush. The actual products of the ad culture look authentic, especially the zany spacewoman commercial we see mostly on a TV screen and briefly as it's apparently being shot live at that moment. The film's satire seems more pointed, or more focused, than the American pictures, more on-target in portraying the caramel competition as an amoral equivalent of war. The analogy is illustrated most dramatically as planes leaflet-bomb Tokyo with promos for one of the candy companies, and dramatized most starkly when a possibly-dying Goda accuses Nishi of being a traitor for refusing to go the extra miles for his corporation. Interestingly, Goda scoffs at actual invocations of bushido, as when an older, even more moribund executive suggests that it'd be dishonorable to snatch Apollo's market share while the rival company is helpless following that fire. It's Goda, not that older man, who seems to embody the warlike spirit that set Japan on a course of conquest and tyranny a generation earlier and now expresses itself in obsessive battles for sales. That sublimated bloodthirst finds its ultimate new expression in Kyoko's utterly mad musical performance, as racist a fantasy of primitive barbarism as anything the U.S. might have come up with. As dancing savages chuck their spears, Kyoko sings lyrics about stabbing people until they bleed out, chopping them up and selling them to the native women. The goofball girl-next-door achieves apotheosis a goddess of death, capping a giant performance by Hitomi Nozoe that stands somewhere between Judy Garland in the 1954 A Star is Born and Jayne Mansfield in Rock Hunter. Hiroshi Kawaguchi as Nishi and Hideo Takamatsu (who would later turn up U.S. TV on Shogun) as Goda are also outstanding, with personalities to match Masumura's wild widescreen imagery.

Not everything the director tries works; I'm not sure of the point of running three separate montages over images of Goda attempting to use his cigarette lighter, for instance. But for someone swinging for the seats in nearly every frame (including scenes set at an actual baseball stadium) Masumura has a very good batting average in this picture. He knocks the picture as a whole out of the park, creating as defining a film for the era and its self-satirizing anxiety as I can imagine. It has to go down as one of the best films of the 1950s and one of the very greatest about the 1950s.

Devil's Handburgers: Now Playing, JULY 6, 1962

It may be new to Albany NY, but we've seen this double-bill before.

A few things are different, though. I don't recall the "Devils Handburgers" and related condiments (upper right) being offered in the last place that played these pictures. Talk about your incentives -- you can bring blood home with you! But let's not ignore the real difference: this is a triple bill of "3 Smash Hits." What's the third picture? What'd be the ideal follow-up to two Crown International schlockfests?

This would be.

Yes, it's Ingmar Bergman's classic, The Virgin Spring. The disclaimer reads: "Certain essential scenes in this film should be seen only by adults. They are not suitable for younger, more impressionable minds. We strongly recommend this film for adults only." More proof, I guess, of the fuzzy boundaries separating "art," "adult" and "exploitation" pictures at this time.

If this disturbs you, try repeating: "Det är bara en film, det är bara en film ..."

Now Playing: JULY 5, 1962

Vacations are a popular theme in summer movies fifty years ago. Disney releases an Americans-in-Paris comedy with Fred MacMurray, Bon Voyage, this month, while 20th Century-Fox provides the competition, shown here opening in Pittsburgh.

It may sound bland but it does have Maureen O'Hara doing the twist and John Saxon in a bathing suit, among other features revealed in the original trailer, available on YouTube from KaninFamily.



Exhibitors give audiences a wide choice of destinations in 1962, and sometimes offer friendly words of warning. Once again, you can see the world without leaving Pittsburgh.

Perhaps more warnings are in order, given that It's Hot in Paradise is the picture better known, if maybe not better loved, as Horror of Spider Island. Here's a sample from SomethingWeird's YouTube channel.



Why travel abroad, even in your imagination, when there are attractions aplenty abounding in America? This Charleston exhibitor emphasizes one of the country's most popular homegrown products, even if it promises slightly more than it can deliver.

On the Big Screen: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012)

Comic books are flexible folklore. The stories of characters' lives are not as set in stone as they are, theoretically, in novels. A volatile combination of corporate authorship and artistic license makes it possible for details to change. Fans distinguish between retcons, in which isolated details are altered, often in the context of "everything you thought you knew is wrong," and reboots, in which monthly continuity goes back to square one or someplace close to that. In comic-book movies, the most prominent example to date of a reboot was Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, which requires no knowledge and claims no relation to the four Batman movies made between 1989 and 1997. Nolan's picture came out in 2005, eight years after Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin. Now, five years after Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3, Columbia Pictures releases Marc Webb's reboot of Spider-Man, and some observers think the reboot has come too soon. Admitting that Raimi had run out of steam, critics ask why the movie franchise should have reverted to square one. Why not simply re-cast and carry on? Does Spidey's origin need to be retold? By comic-book criteria, Webb answers the question by introducing new details and introducing a backstory involving those famously absent figures, Peter Parker's parents. Why is he being raised by an aunt and uncle? Comics writers have been tempted to answer that question, and now comes the movies' turn. Superficial details of the origin event itself have also changed. Elements that Raimi carried over from the original comics, like Parker's early attempt to make money as an entertainer, have been set aside, though the new picture includes a clever evocation of the earlier wrestling angle. Characters prominent in Raimi's films (Mary Jane Watson, J. Jonah Jameson) are absent for now, while a villain left dead in Raimi's series lives again but is held in reserve for a future picture. One reason for movie reboots is the bad habit of comic-book movies killing off their villains, the Joker's survival at the end of Nolan's The Dark Knight being a morbidly ironic exception. Comics almost always find a way for a villain to return from seemingly certain death, but if movies want to use a popular villain a second time they may well have to reboot. Tim Burton killed the Joker and the Penguin. Raimi killed Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. That's not how comics work -- though the Goblin did remain dead in Marvel Comics for a generation before a retcon revival (he hadn't actually died, you see) in the 1990s. Until studios learn that comic-book closure doesn't require a villain's indisputable death, reboots will remain frequent. Suffice it to say that in story terms, enough is different in the screenplay by James Vanderbilt, Steve Kloves and Raimi holdover Alvin Sargent to justify a retelling by comic-book standards. By movie standards, however, the element of artistic license is arguably more important.

In comics, a reboot is just another way to give a trusted creator carte blanche for reimagining an established character. In movies, a distinctive vision would seem to be the major justification for a reboot. Burton, Schumacher and Nolan have all contributed unmistakably distinctive interpretations of Batman and his milieu. For Spidey, however, Columbia has the alternate model of Marvel's in-house movies culminating in The Avengers, which eschew genius visions in favor of a continuity-based house style. Based on what we see from Webb, a distinctive directorial vision wasn't the studio's first priority. The Amazing Spider-Man doesn't look exactly like a Raimi film because Webb doesn't think in sight gags like Raimi does. But the cityscapes are essentially the same and so are the ways Spidey navigates them, except for the new film appearing in relatively unimpressive 3-D. If Webb brings any particular vision to the project it must be an affinity for young people based on his sole previous feature, a youth film unseen by me. Recall that Raimi left the Spider-Man franchise in part because of a dispute over his desire to cast an older actor as The Vulture, the studio reportedly preferring younger faces. Sony and Columbia apparently wanted a younger, female audience that Raimi wasn't drawing in. Thus rumors that the new Parker would be none other than Robert Pattinson, and the reality of Andrew (Too Tall) Garfield playing high-school student Peter Parker with a Pattinsonian shock of hair at the age of 28. While Tobey Maguire was nearly an ideal Parker by the standard of the original comics, Garfield reflects a studio feeling that the character must be appealing to girls before the fabled spider-bite empowers him. Garfield was impressive in his first high-profile movie role in The Social Network, but he strikes me as wrong for this role, visually and emotionally. The script weighs him down by making his parents' absence a cross for him to bear before the defining death of his uncle and forgetting to write jokes for Spidey apart from one scene involving muggers and cops. Everyone seems more interested in Garfield's scenes with Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy -- admittedly the best thing in the picture and a fair facsimile of the boots-favoring comics character -- than in his super exploits. His feud with Rhys Ifans's Curt Connors, the one-armed scientist whose restorative serum, self-tested under duress, turns him into the megalomaniacal Lizard, has an obligatory if not perfunctory feel. Connors combines some elements of Raimi's Green Goblin and Doc Ock and the storyline crafted for him had potential, but there's nothing revelatory about his CGI fight scenes with Spidey. One encounter falls particularly flat: a confrontation on a bridge during which the Lizard simply leaves without fighting our hero after tossing some cars into the air. The scene actually exists only to set up a labored climax later when a father whose child Spidey rescues offers the web-slinger some high-rise assistance. The 3-D simply isn't enough to make this stuff fresh, and the fight scenes themselves are the all-too-typical muddled messes of hurtling figures and hurtling cameras. The simpleminded, predictable score by James Horner makes the picture sound even less fresh.

None of these criticisms proves that they shouldn't have done a reboot, but they do suggest that they should have done the reboot better. None of the actors really improves on their predecessors, apart from Stone surpassing Bryce Dallas Howard virtually by default. None of them do badly, really, though casting Sally Field as Aunt May misses the point of the character's frailty and Garfield, as noted, is not bad but wrong in his role. The Raimi films are not so great that they can't be improved upon, so I don't think I'm judging the new film unfairly. It just didn't quite work -- it wasn't new enough to justify the expense. Bracketed as it is this year by two climactic films, The Avengers and the imminent Dark Knight Rises, the limitations of starting over from square one are exposed starkly here. But The Amazing Spider-Man's success is probably a good thing, since almost by the nature of these series the second film is almost always an improvement on the first. I suspect that that'll be the case here, and that lets me close with a question: why can't they make a second movie first?

Now Playing: JULY 4, 1962

In honor of American independence, Miami proudly presents the end of the world.

Here's a trailer for this perfect holiday attraction, uploaded to YouTube by OutpostChannel.



Elsewhere, the big attraction for the holiday was something perhaps more patriotic in spirit. This ad is for a New London CT theater.

I read Allan Drury's novel when I was a kid. I blame my fascination with the era just before I was born and a sort of campy interest in Cold War pop culture. In print, Advise and Consent began a decade-long series of books that grew increasingly apocalyptic in their anti-communist rhetoric. They certainly were page-turners, though. It's been a while since I saw Otto Preminger's adaptation, so I don't recall whether the film retains Drury's right-wing attitude. In any event, warnervod has the documentary-style trailer up for our perusal.



Of course, some exhibitors had different ideas about holiday entertainment. Consider Sarasota Fl, for instance.

Sometimes you need evidence like this to verify that something like Brain That Wouldn't Die actually played in theaters.
Art houses have their own ideas, like this theater in Reading PA.

I guess Aunt Tillie is left to choose from disembodied heads, political scandals, and the end of civilization. We certainly can't trust her with a three-year old French movie, can we?
But Reading's idea of "art" cinema isn't the same as St. Petersburg's.

Art and obscenity are similar, after all: hard to define, but you know 'em when you see 'em. For some people, they might be one and the same; art is obscenity, obscenity art. The distinction in movies did get more clear later, but there was arguably more freedom in exhibition when the lines were more blurred -- and freedom is what we're supposed to celebrate today. Happy Independence Day.

Now Playing: JULY 3, 1962

I'm back from my vacation from the past with a word in memory of the sneak preview. It wasn't that long ago when it was still a common thing, though fairly long ago Hollywood gave up the idea of keeping the previewed movie a mystery. This example from Milwaukee actually gives away more than most preview ads did in those days. In fact, it's pretty obvious what the film is. The only mystery is whether the studio was actually uncertain about titling it Birdman of Alcatraz. Probably not, since it opened nationally, or at least in the big cities, the following day.

In the last days of the sneak preview, at least in my experience, the treat of it was that you'd actually see a double-feature of the preview and the regular attraction. Two for the price of one isn't a very popular idea with anyone in the movie business outside the drive-ins these days, I suppose. In fact, it's unclear from this ad whether Wisconsin audiences got to see Road to Hong Kong for free or not. Of course, whether a picture like that (by its reputation) is really "free" or not, given the hours of life you'd lose, is debatable -- or it was once.

Watch tomorrow for big July 4 openings all over the country. For tonight, here's the trailer for Birdman, with even the narrator admitting that it's a strange title for a movie. Clipdirect uploaded this copy to YouTube

The Great Diplomat: Cantinflas in SU EXCELENCIA (1967)

Recently I was invited to participate in a poll by naming my 50 favorite comedy films. After much procrastination I turned in my list within two days of the deadline -- the results will appear on the Wonders in the Dark blog later this year -- and almost instantly regretted it. I became conscious of all the comic cinema I have not seen. To be honest, I rarely seek out comedy in the theater; it's not that I lack a sense of humor, but I rarely see a movie with the sole goal of laughing. Still, my list was a sad thing, especially coming from someone who boasts of revealing a "wild world of cinema." I've never seen a Toto movie from Italy or a Tora-san film from Japan. Until this weekend, I'd never seen Cantinflas in his native language. Most Americans of a certain age have seen Mario Moreno in the 1956 Oscar winner Around the World in Eighty Days, the film that seemed to set him up to claim the mantle -- endorsed by no less than Charlie Chaplin -- of the world's greatest movie clown. Moreno, billed at home by both his real and stage names (i.e. "Mario Moreno, 'Cantinflas'") had been Mexico's leading movie comic since the late 1930s, but his next phase of world conquest, the 1960 Hollywood extravaganza Pepe, was a famous star-studded flop. Moreno retreated home, where his were the country's A pictures, compared to the B or below horrors or masked-wrestler films Americans usually imported. Defeated at the American box office, Moreno still saw himself (that is, Cantinflas) as a world-historical clown, and that megalomania is best illustrated in his 1967 political satire, directed by his regular collaborator Miguel Meliton Delgado from a story conceived by the star. Unlike his main rivals for global clowndom, Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, Moreno never directed himself and only occasionally wrote his own scripts. Nevertheless, it's reasonable to see him as the auteur of his films and Su Excelencia ("Your Excellency") as expressing his viewpoint on global affairs. In fact, the film seems designed exactly to let Cantinflas express his opinion of the Cold War world.

Cantinflas usually plays poor folk, though he also sometimes played policemen, but here he portrays Lopitos, a mid-level bureaucrat for the somewhere-in-Europe Cocos Republic, non-aligned neighbor to apparently socialist Pepeslavia. Cocos is one of the word's "candy" nations, the non-aligned bloc seeking a middle course between the colorados (the "Red Ones") or the verdes (the "Green Ones" or capitalist nations). The unstable republic is believed to hold a decisive vote among the non-aligned, one that could decide the fate of the world at an upcoming global conference -- apparently vested with extraordinary powers -- to be held in Pepeslavia. During the course of a whirlwind diplomatic dinner at the Pepeslavian embassy, the Cocos regime is toppled thrice over. The last coup puts Lopitos's godfather into power and the new ruler duly appoints Lopitos his minister plenipotentiary to Pepeslavia and his country's representative to the global conference.

Lopitos theoretically holds the fate of the world in his hands. Knowing this, he looks on bemusedly as both the colorados and the verdes try to influence him. He keeps them at bay with the sort of double talk that apparently defined Cantinflas as a comedian and added a word to the Spanish language. To this point, Lopitos has shown himself as no more than a somewhat lazy, somewhat crass mediocrity, the sort who'll embarrass himself while making a speech by letting mothballs spill from the pockets of his dinner jacket. He seems no more a man of ideas, ideals or ideology than Chaplin's barber in The Great Dictator -- and the comparison should tell the knowledgable what's coming. Everything has built up to the moment when Lopitos addresses the global conference, on Christmas Eve, after we've heard stereotypical speeches representing the colorados, the verdes, the Germans (by another name), etc. Clearly believing himself the Chaplin of his age (while the actual Chaplin was filming his cinematic swan song, A Countess from Hong Kong), Moreno dares ape the master by putting into Cantinflas's mouth a stupendous speech that actually makes the piously ranting Chaplin of Dictator sound like Buster Keaton. In content it's actually a sounder speech. Hewing to a non-aligned course, Lopitos makes a distinction between ideas and procedures, indicting both the verdes and the colorados for forcing their will on people, the colorados with brute force, the verdes with economic intimidation. Perhaps naively, the Cocos delegate insists on a live-and-let-live policy for the world, taking the possibility and necessity of peaceful coexistence for granted. Reportedly a political conservative despite his support for organized labor in the film industry -- but doesn't that also describe Ronald Reagan? -- Moreno saves his sharpest barbs for the "Red Ones," but as a Mexican he's hardly likely to take an uncritical view of the Colossus of the North, whose "Green" surrogates are denounced for a misplaced materialism that tries to sell cars to people who lack shoes. In any event, Lopitos refuses the opportunity to decide the world's future -- no one man should have that power no matter what the circumstances, he says -- by first announcing his refusal to break a tie vote and then making the matter moot by revealing that he'd already resigned before taking the podium. Wouldn't that give the Cocos government the power to appoint a delegate who would vote? Never mind, since the film wraps up not with Peace on Earth but with Lopitos selflessly giving a beggar his coat and getting the girl, a faithful secretary, after resisting the temptation of a Pepeslavian spy earlier in the picture.

If Chaplin had formed his impression of Cantinflas after seeing Around the World in 80 Days, it may not have been an accurate one. Su Excelencia, made when Moreno was 55, has very little in the way of slapstick -- the business with the mothballs is as broad as it gets. It conforms more to the impression I got from the Wikipedia entry for Cantinflas, of a primarily verbal rather than physical comedian and one thus unlikely to meet the French standard of authentic Frenchman Tati or honorary Frenchman Lewis. Still, Chaplin may have recognized Chaplinesque touches that are more obvious in Su Excelencia, little flourishes of a tramp's vanity in the way Lopitos almost dances with himself rather than with the seductress (though he manages to stick his hand between two patches of bare skin, mistaking her dress for his own pocket) and takes an odd little bow that's more like a curtsy before making his big speech. You can see faint glimmers of a physical comedian, but you can also see them being suppressed in an overlong talkfest that clocks in at 133 minutes. Because I can't really judge the wit of the dialogue from the subtitles, I can only fail to be impressed by the stock silly characters in the supporting cast (generals and admirals who play with toy armies and navies, an African diplomat who may or may not be joking about cannibalistic preferences) and the turgid pace of the film's first hour. While Delgado doesn't really prove himself an ace comedy director here, he does manage to capture a colorfully cosmopolitan moment in history when billions longed for an alternative to Cold War or cold victory. Strangely, the film becomes riveting to me in its final act just because I could not believe, even as the evidence piled up, that Cantinflas was gong to pull a Great Dictator and mean it. Some people accuse Sacha Baron Cohen of doing the same in this year's The Dictator, but from the reviews (I haven't seen it) it seems like Cohen at least made his speech in the form of jokes, while Moreno basically gives us a full Chaplin, an out-of-character editorial from the great artist to his public. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Su Excelencia marked a turning point for Moreno, who worked with lower budgets and less obvious ambition until retiring in the 1980s. The site doesn't say whether Excelencia flopped in Mexico, but flop or not, there's only so far you can go in that direction, and Moreno went as far as anyone could. It's as personally ambitious a film as Tati's Playtime, which was made at virtually the same time, but nowhere near as aesthetically ambitious, and that's the difference from a film that ranks high on my list and one that would not have made the list had I seen it in time. But now I want to see Cantinflas in his prime, because even in his vainglory Moreno shows himself a comic actor capable of much better, as history apparently proves.