X was never like this...

In memory of Sylvia Kristel (1952-2012) 

LIPS OF BLOOD (Levres de sang, 1975)

While the rest of Europe made what I call "swinging Gothic" horror films in the 1960s and 1970s, Jean Rollin comes closer to just plain Gothic. His is a Gothic manner befitting his own time, however. Some of his films are period pieces, but Lips of Blood in particular portrays nostalgia, and arguably criticizes it, rather than being a mere exercise in nostalgia. It creates a fitting setting for nostalgia: a modern France of bland parties, workmanlike sexuality and abandoned storefronts. The present day, for Rollin, already seems to be in a state of decay, dark and empty but for monuments where killers living and undead stalk the few hapless seekers. Why not yearn for a fantastic past as Frederic (Jean-Loup Philippe) does, like a sleeper awakened, when he happens to see a photo of an old castle at a party? The picture stirs long-buried memories of a night spent huddled under a borrowed shawl in the castle, and a friendly girl who comforts him and sends him home in the morning. Yet Frederic's mother says he never spent a night at such a place. And what's up with her? We saw her during the opening credits supervising the disposal of several bodies, still-breathing figures dumped into coffins that are nailed shut. It looks like sinister work, but is it?

For some strange reason Frederic isn't satisfied with life in Seventies France (above), but longs for a gothic past.

The rest of the film is Frederic's struggle to fully recover his memory of the chateau. He begins to see the mute girl from the chateau, at among other places a movie theater showing Jean Rollin's Nude Vampire. The visions draw Frederic to open the coffins we saw at the start of the picture, which have bats inside them now. Before long, vampires are stalking the city and helping Frederic in his quest when not feasting on victims. Frederic needs help because people are out to get him. A woman confronts him and claims to be the girl from the chateau, now middle-aged; she leads him to a house and locks him in a room until the vampires rescue him. He's shadowed by a gunman who corners him at a large fountain until the vampires distract him by turning on the sprays. He's thrown into a mental hospital until the vampires disguise as nurses and spring him. But dumb luck puts a postcard in his hand that identifies the old castle, still the mystery girl's home. He find her in a coffin as his mother finds him, and the truth comes out. The girl is a vampire who infected the other vampire girls who've been helping Frederic. Mom and her vampire-hunter pals will take care of them, but Frederic has to resist the temptation to free his memory, or else the plague of vampirism will break out anew.

Spoiler: Frederic doesn't resist. That's what makes it a horror film.

And what's horrific about it -- chilling sounds like the right word -- is the way Rollin roots horror in nostalgia. If Frederic feels victimized by the repression of a memory, Jennifer (Annie Briand), the object of his longing, has been condemned to a regime of enforced nostalgia. Her coffin is surrounded by treasures of her childhood, including storybooks and Donald Duck comics. She can project her consciousness outside the coffin even before he's freed -- that's how Frederic could see her -- but she was stuck reading the same stories over and over. In later films, especially Two Orphan Vampires, Rollin will again summon nostalgia for a storybook world, but there his is the elegiac nostalgia of an old man. In Lips of Blood nostalgia comes with a threat of corruption, with a warning that some things should not be remembered or longed for so intensely. Frederic doesn't start seeing Jennifer until the random encounter with a photo jogs his memory. Once he sees her, his fairytale quest to rescue a sleeping princess threatens to cost him his sanity or his soul. If Jennifer's liberation can look like an escape from the past, Frederic's quest and his final choice seem like a retreat to an imagined past that can only render the seeker undead. The ambivalent mood of the movie may be as much Philippe's idea as Rollin's; the actor co-wrote the screenplay. That ambivalence still allows the possibility that Frederic's choice is the right one in his dead-end world, though that makes the conclusion no less horrible.

Lips of Blood is Rollin's most accomplished work as a director of his films that I've seen. His atmospheric instincts are assured, whether he films amid the ruins of the chateau or the modern ruins and monuments of the city. A strong sense of dread pervades everything once Frederic's quest begins. The film's one galling weakness is in the casting of the vampire girls. Briand is fine as an actual character, but the four subordinate vampires seem to be utter amateurs with no instinct for the camera whatsoever, stumbling about vacuously as if they've just staggered out of a nightclub or fallen out of bed, barely capable of grimacing or baring their fangs on cue. They are so many does in the headlights, and I feel sorry for the two who had nothing to wear but big diaphanous veils that blow wildly in some surely cold winds. They're all expendable, of course, but they undercut whatever mood Rollin is aiming for whenever they appear. Fortunately, they don't undercut the mood fatally; the director's vision here is too profound and expansive to be so easily ruined, and few great horror films are without awkward elements. I'm not ready to call Lips a great horror film after one viewing, and it'll never rank as any great scarefest. But if you're looking for a certain gothic creepiness rather than raw fright, Lips of Blood has something special to offer.

Now Playing: OCT. 15, 1962

Our one and only stop for today is New York City for a major American premiere.

Itself allegedly derived from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Yojimbo would become a template in its own right, most famously for Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars (Kurosawa sued) and subsequently for any picture in which a tough guy intervenes in a feud with the intention of destroying both parties.  If not Kurosawa's definitive film -- there are too many choices -- it's probably Toshiro Mifune's definitive performance, at least for audiences outside Japan. He would play the role again for Kurosawa in a sequel and a very similar "yojimbo" in a comics team-up with Shintaro Katsu's Zatoichi a decade later. Fifty years ago today he reached American shores, and he has never really left.

So here's an English-subtitled version of the Japanese trailer from the Criterion Collection.

BLOOD BATH (1963-66)

With hyperbole rare for a non-controversial subject, Wikipedia says of Blood Bath that it "had possibly the most convoluted production history of any horror movie ever made." Over three years, under the worried stewardship of Roger Corman, a Yugoslavian-American spy picture called Operation Titian transformed first into a Jack Hill slasher picture, then into a Stephanie Rothman vampire movie. The finished product is reported by Wikipedia to be 69 minutes long, but more footage was added so the picture could fit into a conventional TV time slot, while the version available for streaming on Netflix is a minimalist 61 minutes. It must have seemed far out of date by the time it was released in 1966, being in black and white and burdened with comedy-relief beatniks. But despite everything it has its moments.

Confusion sets in early after a stylish opening that appears to establish the location as somewhere in Europe. Yet the story seems to be set in Venice, California, rather than Venice, Italy. Saying otherwise, you could still explain the beatniks by calling it an artists' colony for expatriate Americans, but you'd have a harder time explaining the beaches facing the Pacific Ocean. Some scenes of stalking and chasing were shot in Europe for Operation Titian, and one of the stars of the first draft, William (Squire of Gothos) Campbell, returned for the California shoot. Whatever he was in Titian, he's now the painter Antonio Sordi, the envy of his pretentious beatnik rivals and lately acclaimed for a series of paintings portraying women in their death throes. Little do the connoisseurs realize that these scenes were modeled from life ... or death. But Sordi is no mere madman, as he had been in the Jack Hill version. He is a vampire, an accursed Renaissance artist haunted by the taunting spirit of his original muse. Sordi's vampirism was Rothman's idea, but Campbell didn't come back for the third round of filming, so Rothman films transformations that allow another actor to play the grey-haired, puffy-faced bloodsucker. The vampire idea sits well, however, with a storyline filmed by Hill in which Sordi falls in love with a woman he doesn't want to kill. One of Campbell's scenes with the girl (Linda Saunders) can even be taken, in the new context, as a riff on Nosferatu. During a picnic, the girl struggles to slice a loaf of bread. Watching a vampire movie, you expect her to cut herself and tempt Sordi with her blood, but Sordi himself seems to anticipate that possibility and snatches the bread and knife from her before any mishap can occur.

 

Portrait of the Vampire as an Artist

 

According to Wikipedia, while Rothman shaped the final story, most of what we see is Hill's work. Before reading the reference, I assumed the beatnik scenes were Hill's because Hill protege Sid Haig is one of the beatniks. The joke is that the beatniks are vacuously pretentious, led by Max (Carl Schanzer), the inventor of gun-toting "quantum painting" and Sordi's rival in the local art market. The beatniks squabble over "formalism" and go into raptures over random splashes of color. In his one scene with the beatniks, Campbell contemptuously squirts ketchup from a bottle onto Haig's newest work, and Haig feels the picture's been improved. Oddly, the beatniks emerge as quasi-heroes in the final version, temporarily rescuing the Saunders character from a vampire attack while Max chases the monster and seems to defeat him. The beatnik material seems to brand Blood Bath as an AIP product, evoking memories of A Bucket of Blood in particular because of the art-horror angle, but at this late date it looks like a case of AIP nostalgia for itself.

Highlights include most of the stalk and chase scenes, including a Felliniesque encounter with masked revelers that has Sordi briefly confronting a fake vampire and a man in a skeleton costume innocently dragging Sordi's target from her hiding place; the beach chase scenes with Campbell's daywalking stand-in; the impressionistic flashback to Sordi's origin, climaxing in the desert as the camera hurtles back from the painter's easel to reveal corpses all around him. Dare I suggest, by the way, that Blood Bath's final concept of a vampire cursed by a witch and obsessing over a presumed reincarnation of his lover anticipates some elements of Barnabas Collins, who first appeared on Dark Shadows the year after Blood Bath finally appeared?

 

 

The lowlight, regrettably, is the out-of-nowhere EC Comics finish in which those victims of Sordi whom he'd preserved as pseudo-sculptures come to vengeful un-life. However you distribute the hits and misses, the film is a mess, and no one is more to blame for that than the hard-to-please Corman, who may have been too conscious of rapidly changing tastes and too desperate to adjust. The film we have is a shambles of potential, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to remake it as a more coherent whole. It wouldn't be hard.

DANTE'S INFERNO (1935)

If any one movie can serve as an epilogue to the Pre-Code era, Harry Lachman's film fills the bill as well as any. Released a year into the era of Code Enforcement, it's not only a last brazen yawp of the old audacity but something of a summation or at least a closing of an epoch. It's one of the last films released by the Fox Film Corporation, which merged this year with Daryl F. Zanuck's Twentieth-Century company, and it's the last Fox release with contract player Spencer Tracy. It's like a ghost at the party; there's something deeply antique about it despite its largely being able to pass as a Pre-Code. In many ways the DeMille picture Cecil B. himself never made, it's reminiscent of a storytelling style and sensibility the great showman himself had outgrown. And yet I couldn't help being reminded of The Master as the film introduces Tracy as a malcontent, malingering ship's stoker feeding fuel to a furnace from the fire's point of view. Like Joaquin Phoenix's Freddy, Tracy's Jim Carter seems an aimless, irreconcilable drifter, losing the stoker's job and only briefly holding another as a blackface ball-dodger at an amusement pier. In retrospect, of course, the spectacle of Tracy parading around in burnt cork for a reel or so is one of Inferno's most transgressive elements, but even at the time there must have been a sense of vagrant menace as the miserable minstrel is treated to a hot dog and a tour of an all-too-sedate Inferno concession by the fatherly Pop McWade (Birth of a Nation's Henry B. Walthall). How this earnest moralist ended up a carny barker, albeit a bad one, is an unsolved backstory mystery, but Jim Carter is just the man he needs. Turns out Jim did some barking back in the day and after his own walk-through he has a rough idea of how to sell the attraction -- by now the black is off -- and impress Pop's pretty daughter (Claire Trevor). From this point Dante's Inferno is as much a satire of DeMille as a pastiche, implicitly criticizing the Paramount director's trick of using sin to sell morality -- or is it vice versa? And from this point we leave The Master behind, since like most classic Hollywood antiheroes Jim has much more ambition than Freddy Quell. Carter is more like a Quell who turns into a Lancaster Dodd, though he does so for the money more than for emotional fulfillment.

Inspired by Pop's portrait of Alexander the Great severing the Gordian Knot, Carter makes the Inferno the foundation of an entertainment empire, transforming McWade's modest display into a sprawling theme-park complex that dominates the pier. Like many a Pre-Code striver, he doesn't know when to quit and takes too many risks with other people's money while trampling those who stand in his way. He outwits the owner of a Shoot-the-Chute whose property he needs, ruining the man and driving him to suicide during one of Pop's first tours of the new-and-improved Inferno, a mountainous outrage entered through a devil's maw, with horned and muscular trident-wielders as your guides. Jim doesn't let that bother him. He's more concerned with getting accepted in society and making sure his son gets admitted into the best school. He gets his foot in the door by making the Inferno available for a charity benefit despite warnings from a building inspector that the structure is unsound. A bribe takes care of that guy, but wouldn't you know? The very night of that benefit the whole thing comes crashing down. Miraculously, Pop survives -- he's the sort of character who gets killed to make a point in this sort of film -- but that bribed bureaucrat does himself in a way that implicates Carter. Two suicides in one picture is pretty strong stuff.

I almost shot past the main point of the picture. The big selling point was that it would show you Dante's vision of Hell in lurid detail. That it does, but how it goes about it will seem strange to anyone unfamiliar with silent cinema. From the synopsis so far, where would you think this Hell stuff would fit in? You might figure it'd be the big attraction at the bigger-better Inferno show, and if this had been Busby Berkeley's or David O. Selznick's Dante's Inferno that would probably have been the right guess. Not here. Instead, after Pop is hospitalized after the Inferno disaster, Jim visits him as the old man reads an illustrated edition of Dante. Pop then explains the poem to his son-in-law, and the film illustrates this by dissolving to an eight-minute vision of Hell. Some of it is taken, supposedly, from an earlier, unrelated (apart from the poetic inspiration) Dante's Inferno movie Fox made in the 1920s, and much of it is clearly inspired by Gustave Dore's classic 19th century illustrations, but it all looks Pre-Code to me. This is the way DeMille used to do things, including his 1923 Ten Commandments, in which the Moses stuff is only prologue to a modern story about the ways flaming youth breaks the commandments. Michael Curtiz did the same thing in the 1928 part-talkie Noah's Ark, in which the pseudo-biblical spectacle is framed by a story set during World War I. Lachman's Inferno reminds me of DeMille not just because of the roundabout way he goes about getting to it, but also because there's something oddly orgiastic about the director's writhing oily assemblages of nearly or just-plain naked bodies, Hell as a bacchanal, the border between pleasure and pain broken down. And it has no effect! Carter is unrepentant, going on to perjure himself in the trial that follows the last suicide and its surrounding revelations. It's like Gene Kelly pitching his mammoth Broadway Melody number to Millard Mitchell in Singin' in the Rain, only to have Mitchell say that he can't quite envision it. No wonder Pop wasn't getting anywhere before Jim came along. He has neither the fire nor the brimstone, and maybe you can't have what it takes to put all that over, in the age of fictional Elmer Gantries and Miracle Women and real Aimee Semple Macphersons, without inhaling the fumes and getting high on your own supply. Except that Jim never falls for his own buncombe.

The trial destroys his marriage, though, after his wife voluntarily perjures herself in order to spare her son the shame of having a jailbird for a dad. Jim gives up on her, once she walks out, the way he gives up on the Inferno after the disaster. His new big idea is the Paradise, a floating casino for gambling outside U.S. territorial waters. But if he's given up on the Inferno, the Inferno hasn't given up on him. It comes back with a vengeance when a drunk sprays a flambé with champagne during a Rita (Hayworth-to-be) Cansino dance number and starts a conflagration that turns the film into a disaster movie, just as Jim discovers that his son has stowed away on the ship with the help of Jim's overzealous stooge. The effects here are just about as impressive as the Inferno scenes, and Tracy really goes all out after a scab crew abandons ship, leaving him to remember his old stoker skills so the captain has the power to run the ship aground. Despite this superhuman heroism, he's chastened at last, admitting once reunited with his wife that he's been in a Hell of his own making. I get what the film's trying to say, but Tracy doesn't really put the rage into the role that he hints at in the beginning. According to some stories, he saved his rage for when the cameras weren't rolling. He brings nothing special to the rise-and-fall, hubris-nemesis pattern that others had followed before him. Warren William could have pulled this off if you could have believed him as a stoker or ball-dodger. But the acting is just one of the puzzle pieces that lie jumbled about instead of forming a truly visionary or visceral whole. For all that, it's an instant epic ruin, its indisputably spectacular set pieces easily justifying the 90 minutes spent on this death song for Pre-Code cinema.

Now Playing: OCT. 11, 1962

Here are the two big wide releases of the week, both opening today in Miami.

Heston in a comedy was a definite change of pace at this point in his career, though I can't testify to how funny this actually is. Or how funny this is:

Baltimore has these theaters beat, however. They have a real live spook show in town.

The Last of the High Priests of Karnak

Turhan Bey, who died on September 30, had been one of the very last surviving actors from the classic Universal horror cycle, appearing most prominently as the villain who inherits the priesthood of Karnak and custody of Kharis from George Zucco in The Mummy's Tomb. The Austria-born Bey also figured in the studio's cycle of Technicolor adventure films, later acclaimed as the height of camp, appearing in Arabian Nights and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. He cut an exotically boyish figure in wartime Hollywood and endured to work sporadically into the 1990s, when he appeared as an alien emperor on the Babylon 5 show. With his passing, his time and his cinematic world are more past than ever.

 

1922-2012