Pre-Code Parade: MADAM SATAN (1930)

Describe Madam Satan as Cecil B. DeMille's semi-musical comedy-disaster movie and the uninitiated will assume that nothing good could come from such a concept. They're not far from the mark, but it's not what DeMille's contemporaries would have thought before the film first appeared. In 1930 his Jesus biopic The King of Kings was still an exceptional work in his filmography, the Bible scenes in his first go at The Ten Commandments only a prologue to a modern story. Memories of all his supposedly sophisticated society comedies were still fresh, and Madam Satan is like those, if more heavily farcical and dubiously musical. As it turns out, the part that's most DeMille-like to modern audiences is the best part, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

DeMille started the talkie era at a new home, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after a stint as an independent producer. Madam Satan was his second M-G-M picture, conceived at a time when movies were ideally All-Singing as well as All-Talking. The story I heard at a festival screening last month was that the studio pressured DeMille to make Madam Satan a musical. It's sort of a musical, with most of the songs and dances concentrated in one section except for an out-of-nowhere bursting-into-song moment near the end of an interminable-seeming first act. "Sort of musical" would describe the quality of the music, too. Music isn't the real problem with the picture, however. While DeMille wasn't saddled with a "dialogue director," he probably could have used one. Look at the rest of his career and you might argue that he never really figured out how to deal with dialogue in a way that made it look normal. Look at some of his silent films and you can see how much more efficient he was at storytelling before sound. Had Madam Satan been silent the story still would have been dumb but he probably would have nailed the farce aspect of the first act with little trouble and some panache. With sound the farce is leaden; everyone's timing seems off and the story seems to go nowhere slowly.

Bob Brooks (Reginald Denny) is coming home from a night of hard partying with his millionaire buddy Jimmy Wade (Roland Young). They strive with drunken industriousness not to wake up Mrs Brooks, Angela (Kay Johnson), a stay-at-home wife on whom Bob is cheating with one Trixie, a showgirl (legit singer Lillian Roth). Bob never stays at home long; he's grown bored with Angela, and Angela is boring. Bob is equally boring, by the way, but he's more aggressive about it. Denny played Bulldog Drummond's sidekick Algy in a series of films later in the Thirties; Algy is described by Drummond himself as a "driveling idiot," and you see that quality in Denny's performance here. Roland Young's character is supposed to be a wild and crazy guy, but movie buffs familiar with Young's work -- he was the original Topper, if that means anything to anyone -- will see the problem here. Anyway, things get more farcical when Angela calls on Jimmy Wade to meet his new fiancee. The engagement's a cover story, since Bob uses Jimmy's place for trysts with Trixie, who now has to feign intimacy with Jimmy in Angela's presence. A knock on the door from Bob forces Jimmy to hide Angela in the closet, but she manages to learn the truth about Bob and Trixie. Now she remembers the song her maid sang to her all of a sudden about fighting for her happiness, and by God, she will!

Jimmy Wade is rich enough to hire out a dirigible and a dance troupe for his next big costume party. We're starting to enter the territory of DeMillean spectacle here; the miniature effects for the moored dirigible, with skyscrapers in the distance, look quite good on the big screen, while the antics inside show the influence of DeMille's aesthetic henchman Mitchell Leisen. Early musicals have little to offer in terms of virtuoso dancing or choreography, but sometimes made up for that lack with pure conceptual nuttiness. So it is with Madam Satan's Ballet Mecanique, a dance interpretive of mechanization, the dancers so many cogs presided over by the lightning-bolt wielding Spirit of Electricity. But it really defies description, so look at it instead. This clip was uploaded to YouTube by one absurdomundo, some spiritual kin of mine.



After the entertainment the revelers are to remove their masks, but one latecomer refuses to do so. This is the stunning, the incredible, the irresistible MADAM SATAN! whose true identity is a mystery to none in the audience but all on the blimp. The idea, you see, is that Angela  (did I spoil it???) is so atypically, unprecedentedly brazen that none of her acquaintances would suspect that this gorgeous monster is the once-mousy housewife. It might work on paper, but on film the premise hits a high hurdle early; Kay Johnson in a mask and a slinky costume still isn't as sexy as Lillian Roth; nor can she sing like that legit talent and future biopic subject. Let's compare. Here's Roth rehearsing a number, as uploaded by WMMDN:


Now here's Johnson in her Satanic majesty, at the climax of her re-seduction of Bob. This one was uploaded by ray85milan:


Maybe Bob gets off on novelty. All such speculation is moot, however, as there's a storm coming. Lightning blasts the mooring tower and sends the dirigible adrift into the turbulent sky. Again, on the special-effects level this is all stylishly if not quite realistically done, especially if you see it on a big screen as it was meant to be seen. Fortunately, Jimmy Wade has well-stocked his balloon with parachutes, setting the stage for comedy rather than suspense. Madam Satan climaxes on a mock-epic scale like It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as passengers are tossed from the dirigible to make slapstick landings, the most spectacular Pre-Code Moment of the Film being Trixie's entrance through a skylight into a men's club locker-room. That stuff you'll have to see for yourselves someday.

Length works in Madam Satan's favor. At nearly two hours, you have time to forget the terrible first half-hour and appreciate the often-inspired art direction and overall madness of the picture. Kay Johnson's failings as a demonic seductress don't really detract from the quality. If anything, the way all the men fall for her -- it's like the way the men of Metropolis drool over Brigitte Helm's lead-footed hoochie-koochie dance -- enhances the film's satire of the mentally-idle rich. It just so happens that, with the Depression descending, people didn't find it quite so funny as DeMille or Metro hoped. The director never really worked in this mode again, unless you count his rarely-remembered 1934 castaway comedy Four Frightened People. He may have realized that sound had taken his comedic touch; most of the subsequent laughs he got would be unintended. He may also have realized that this sort of story, the kind that helped make his name, had become obsolete, and adapted in order not to go obsolete himself. The destruction of the dirigible is a symbolic farewell, if not a Viking funeral, to one stage of DeMille's career. It's the triumph of spectacle over wit in his work, and in this case it's a deserved victory that makes Madam Satan worth seeing today.

Pre-Code Parade: BORN RECKLESS (1930)

It's called a "John Ford Production" but who directed it? We're told that it was "staged" by Andrew Bennison. What this seems to mean is that Bennison played that short-lived role of the early talkie era, the dialogue director. Folks at Fox Film apparently weren't sure of Ford's ability to direct dialogue, or else Ford, more interested in free-range camera movement in the manner of his erstwhile studio stablemate F. W. Murnau, couldn't be bothered with the dialogue scenes. There's definitely some impressive camera movement here for a 1930 film, along with the sort of dense set design typical of Fox's late silents. The camera lurks through the narrow, crowded streets of the main city set early on to establish the protagonist's milieu. The art direction is impressive without quite being convincing, and that goes for the story, too.

Ford and Dudley Nichols adapted what apparently was a popular novel by Donald Henderson Clarke. Louis Beretti was well enough known that star Edmund Lowe could be identified as the novel's title character in some movie advertising, though Fox didn't see fit to name the film after the novel. Beretti is a neighborhood hood who goes to war and survives to make a fresh start back home. He keeps his criminal career secret from his old-world parents, switching from dapper gangster duds into a worker's overalls before coming home for spaghetti dinner. The cops aren't fooled so easily and Beretti is brought in for questioning. At the suggestion of a drunken reporter (Lee Tracy, shortly before his brief breakout to stardom) the authorities give Louis and his buddies the option of enlisting -- it's 1917 and bands are playing "Over There" everywhere -- with the promise of pardons if they make good as soldiers. The real idea is to burnish the police chief's reputation as a patriot, but whatever the ulterior motives involved Beretti is willing to give war a shot.

The next section is a botch that nearly cripples the film and can probably be blamed all on Ford. War is supposed to change Louis Beretti in some way, but Born Reckless never follows him into combat. Instead, we get a lot of Fordian shenanigans in boot camp and behind the lines featuring some of the usual suspects like Ward Bond. John Wayne is supposed to be in the picture somewhere, historians claim, but I didn't notice him. A subplot is set up in which Beretti befriends a wealthy young man determined to prove himself in combat despite coddling from his parents, but after the establishing scene we don't get the payoff until Beretti narrates it to his friend's widow after the war. The military sequence plays like the road to a dead end, and having reached it Ford and Bennison simply give up and go back to the U.S.A.

Beretti has a longing for the widow, whom his dead buddy apparently talked up quite well, but before our hero can make a move we learn that Joan Sheldon (Catherine Dale Owen) has already hooked up with a new beau. While I missed John Wayne's passing presence in this picture, there was no mistaking an unbilled Randolph Scott as the new beau. At 32, Scott is as young as I've ever seen him. He's still paying his dues here, playing little more than a handsome profile who has no more than a few words of dialogue in his few scenes. But enough of him. Beretti goes more or less straight, opening up a niteclub whose presumed violations of Prohibition appear to bother no one. But his old friendship with the local underworld big shot, cleverly named Big Shot (Warren Hymer) deteriorates as Beretti is torn between respectability and his old crowd.The plot threads tie together when Big Shot, returned from a stretch in stir, makes a new racket of kidnapping, snatching Joan Sheldon's child. Beretti rescues the kid before a final showdown with Big Shot. Both scenes are nicely shot, the rescue introduced with a tracking shot of Beretti walking across a field to the kidnappers' hideout. The showdown is a slow burn leading to an explosion, Lowe and Beretti chatting at a bar with an odd, evasive formality that distantly anticipates the technique of Leone and Tarantino before they abruptly open fire on each other as the camera retreats through the bar's swinging doors. There are definitely pieces of a superior gangster film here, but it looks like Ford didn't know how to put them together. Part of the problem is Edmund Lowe's much too laid-back performance as Beretti, but you can't blame him for the film's faulty construction; he may have had as little proper direction as the movie as a whole did. Despite any ambiguity in the credits, Born Reckless is often unmistakably, and in this case unfortunately, a John Ford film.

DVR Diary: A TIME FOR KILLING (1967)

Here is the end of an era: A Time for Killing is the last film produced by Harry Joe Brown, Randolph Scott's longtime production partner. Scott had retired five years earlier on the high note of Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, leaving Brown to deal with upheaval in the western genre. The influence of spaghetti westerns is arguably apparent in some dramatic use of widescreen close-ups and in a darker, more brutal tone. I was willing to credit that tone to Phil Karlson, the credited director, since Karlson made some of the darker, more brutal films of the 1950s. Yet there's also a self-destructive inconsistency of tone I at first blamed on studio interference with Karlson, only to learn that Karlson was the interference. At first, Brown had a dream team working on the picture: Roger Corman directing and Robert Towne screenplay, edited by Monte Hellman. Brown, or Columbia Pictures higher-ups, fired Corman because, for once, that industrious director had fallen behind schedule. For Corman this was an A assignment and he apparently treated it as such, ambitious to achieve epic visuals on location. Karlson was brought in to speed the job to completion, while Hellman quit and the script was rewritten. The result is a mess, a sloppy mix of Hollywood past, present and future -- the last in the form of Harrison J. Ford in his first credited movie role -- and conflicting notions of what a western should look like.

Some of the inconsistency may have remained had Corman done so; his frequent stooge Dick Miller stuck around in an annoying comic-relief role as a cowardly Union soldier that may have been part of the original conception. If anything, Brown must have wanted more of Miller; there are blatant studio pick-up shots of him and his comedy partner that muck up the pacing that Karlson was supposed to improve. Their pathetic comedy seems increasingly out-of-place as the story turns darker and darker. Meanwhile, the best-known comic performer in the cast, Max Baer Jr. of The Beverly Hillbillies, turns in a once-in-a-lifetime turn as an unhinged Reb, one of a band breaking out of a western prison camp days before the end of the Civil War. This psycho loves fighting and killing for their own sakes, and is almost as likely to pick fights with or kill his own comrades as he is to fight the pursuing Union troops led by star Glenn Ford. Baer is skyrocketing over the top, and yet he's topped by his character's commander, a Confederate officer played by George Hamilton in a once-in-a-lifetime channeling of pure evil.

If Baer's evil is a barbaric yawp, Hamilton's is arrogant, almost satanic spite directed at Glenn Ford. He resents Ford, it seems, merely for showing him courtesy, if not also for showing mercy to one of Hamilton's men who was sentenced by Ford's own spiteful commander to be executed by untrained black orderlies; the wretch survives two volleys before Ford puts one in the brain. It all seems futile to Ford because word from the East indicates that General Lee's surrender and the war's end are no more than days away. If the finished film has a theme left, it's that war endures in hearts and minds after armies stand down. Hamilton embodies all the unreconstructed Rebs who endured to the time the film was made, and beyond. "This war will continue for a hundred years," he vows, despite learning from a dispatch stolen from a murdered messenger that the war, indeed, has ended. He flaunts the telegram to his hostage, played by Inger Stevens, a missionary who is Ford's fiancee, to show that he doesn't give a damn about it. And after he rapes her -- Corman/Karlson only take us to the brink of the act, but do show us Hamilton dragging his spur across her naked side -- she in turn withholds knowledge of the surrender to Ford, as if fearful that he wouldn't avenge her if he knew the war was over. Instead, he continues the pursuit across the Mexican border to an abandoned town where most of the remaining cast are slaughtered, but the two comedy-relief idiots get to escape. Ford only learns the truth when Baer, who murdered the original messenger with a shot to the face, confesses it hysterically after getting gut-shot by one of his own team.

Glenn Ford himself seems to have been intrigued by the idea of a hero weary of violence betrayed by a beloved's bloodlust. In Richard Thorpe's The Last Challenge, made around the same time, he breaks up with Angie Dickinson after learning that she'd paid Jack Elam (in vain) to dry-gulch a hot-shot young gunfighter looking to pick a fight with Ford's marshal. If Ford seems tired, showing all his fifty years, in both films, that seems in part to be an artistic choice by the actor. In Time for Killing it looks like he reconciles with Stevens, but an air of hopelessness hangs over both films, underscored in Killing by the strategic and philosophical pointlessness of the whole running battle. The makings of a possibly great western are strewn about the landscape of Karlson's film. The location footage, much of it presumably Corman's and shot by Kenneth Peach (who worked mostly in TV), is often as impressive as Corman hoped, making the studio inserts all the more glaring. Also in the eclectic cast are (Harry) Dean Stanton as one of the more reasonable Rebs and Timothy Carey as an arrogant Union sharpshooter. Among the negatives is the utterly generic, inappropriately upbeat score by Mundell Lowe. In the end the location work and the extreme villainy of Hamilton and Baer -- they get the best close-ups, by the way -- make Time for Killing worth seeing, but no one who sees it will doubt that it could have been a better if not great western.

I still watch too much TV

And that's not even counting the news, which can take up a lot of my time sometimes. You'll have to look at my other blog for my reviews of the news, but over here at Mondo 70 it's time for a new season of "Too Much TV," which proved the first time around (improbably to me) one of the most popular features, judged by pageviews, in the seven years of this blog. As before, there's a bias toward genre programming here, as there seems to be more programming in that broad category than ever. How broad is it? For me, it ranges from superhero shows to historical dramas. It might be better to say it's a category that excludes sitcoms, reality shows and the more mundane dramatic shows. I don't dismiss the last type out of hand, but I watch too much TV already, and a line has to be drawn somewhere. Anyway, in the next few weeks we'll look at some shows that have come (and, in some cases, gone) since my last TV review. The new season will start this weekend with BBC America's The Last Kingdom, probably with a passing glance at FX's Bastard Executioner. From there, and in no particular order, I'll cover Ash vs. Evil Dead, Into the Badlands and Supergirl and take a belated (and probably too late) look at Da Vinci's Demons. Time permitting, I may take retrospective looks at some much older shows I'm watching, or update some of the ongoing shows I reviewed earlier this year. I'll probably review some movies, too. Stay tuned.

On the Big Screen: SPOTLIGHT (2015)

The director Tom McCarthy is in the peculiar position of having released films in 2015 that are considered among the year's worst and the year's best. The first and apparently worse of the two is The Cobbler, an idiosyncratic Adam Sandler film. The latest, Spotlight, is seen as an Oscar contender and one of the best films of recent times, or ever, in the journalistic procedural genre. It's the story of how a special investigative reporting team on the Boston Globe, goaded by a new editor, broke the story of a systematic cover-up by the Archdiocese of Boston of child molestation by priests and opened a floodgate of revelations around the Catholic world. This is meat-and-potatoes cinema in which content outranks form; expect nothing visionary from it because the story doesn't need it. The journalistic procedural has a pretty strict structure of inquiry, resistance and revelation. Its success depends as much on the quality of the revelations as on any effort by director, writers (McCarthy collaborate with Josh Singer) or actors. Spotlight has a formidable cast of Oscar winners and nominees and superhero actors (the categories overlap) but most of them commit to a realistic professionalism in their performances, with only Mark Ruffalo standing out by conventional standards as the most energetic and argumentative member of the Globe staff. There's admirable realism in the writing as McCarthy and Singer steer clear of certain movie cliches. Hints are dropped of a traitor within the ranks, a reporter or editor who had much of the goods on the Church years earlier but buried the story for unfathomable reasons. The truth proves less dramatic but more plausible: at the time, the guilty party simply missed the implications of the material. The moral vindicates the judgment of the new editor (Liev Schreiber wins the underplaying competition without sacrificing moral seriousness) that "the story needed Spotlight." It's really a vindication of the major metropolitan newspaper, of journalism as a collective endeavor that requires an institutional power base to carry out its essential work in civil society of speaking truth to power. When a lawyer for abuse victims (Stanley Tucci) reminds Ruffalo's character that he'd already talked to the Phoenix, a weekly paper, Ruffalo observes that the Phoenix's dismal financial situation renders it powerless as a tool against the abusers. But if Spotlight is an appeal for power to the press, its entertainment value depends on the moral indignation it generates from interviews with survivors and carefully calibrated info dumps. The film describes a reign of "spiritual abuse" in which molesters exploit their virtually holy standing with vulnerable families and children. In two different cases the early, probing attentions of abusers is equated with God taking a personal interest in people's lives. It will be another film's task to tell the Why of it all, though Spotlight allows characters to make suggestions about celibacy and arrested emotional development. This film is all about the subtle horror of discovery, and despite what I wrote above there are appropriately subtle ways for directors like McCarthy to milk those moments. The best such moment is a long-take that has the entire team teleconferencing with an expert on abusive priests who informs them that their estimate of the number of abusers in the archdiocese is far too conservative. The camera simply pulls back gradually, as if to encompass the enormity of this particular revelation, as the reporters are momentarily too stunned to respond and the caller asks if they're still there. It isn't visionary, but it's effective storytelling, and that can't be taken for granted at the movies. Since I've mentioned some of the actors, I ought to give Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery and Brian D'Arcy James their just shares of the credit. We probably won't have better ensemble acting this year, though none of them may win a personal award. I can't imagine Spotlight being the best film of the year -- I've already seen better and many of the big pictures are still yet to come -- but I can appreciate why some people think it might be.

THE DAUGHTER OF DAWN (1920)

Like the buffalo and the Native Americans, The Daughter of Dawn was nearly lost. An independent production of the Texas Film Company, this all-Indian cast film had few known showings before disappearing for decades. Now you can stream it on Netflix, and now that the film is much closer in time to the epoch it portrays than it is to our own it probably looks more like an authentic historical document, simply by virtue of age and wear, than it may have to whoever saw it 95 years ago. Back then, the film's cornier aspects may have stood out more. While they still stand out now, they matter less than the idea that here is a movie of Indians hunting buffalo in which the actors probably had living knowledge of how it was done. Daughter of Dawn puts us one degree of separation from the legendary Old West; two of its main actors were children of the famous Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Its historical value is indisputably, almost immeasurably greater than its aesthetic value.

Norbert Myles and Richard Banks's scenario is self-consciously archetypal in a generic way. He's less interested in a narrative grounded in the authentic details and rhythm of Native life than in "the eternal triangle" that could appear anywhere, at any time. This time it's a triangle of a woman and two men. The woman is our title character (Esther Labarre), named for the time of her birth but in fact the daughter of a Kiowa chief. She has two suitors. One, Black Wolf (Jack Sankadota), is rich in goods. The other, White Eagle (White Parker) is a hunk compared to the pot-bellied Black Wolf. White Eagle is also a good citizen; he locates a buffalo herd and leads the Kiowas on a successful hunt that highlights the picture. The chief knows that Black Wolf can offer more for his daughter but he also respects her opinion and her emotions. Knowing her preference for White Eagle, the chief decides to let a trial of courage decide her future.

Black Wolf and White Eagle are to jump off a cliff. It's more steep than high but it promises a rough landing. Whoever survives will win the Daughter of Dawn. I'd hate to think any actual tribe settled such disputes that way, but no one claimed that this is an anthropological text. Anyway, both men survive, but Black Wolf survives by cowering on a ledge while White Eagle nobly takes his lumps all the way down. He'll be fine, while Black Wolf is shamed out of the tribe. On the rebound, he finally accepts the loyalty of Red Wing (Wanada Parker), who's been pining inexplicably for this lout through the whole picture and now volunteers to share his exile.

Rather than take his punishment like a man, Black Wolf turns traitor, betraying the Kiowas to this film's bad guys, the Comanches. He shows them the way to the Kiowa village, promising them horses and women, so long as he gets Daughter of Dawn. To cut to the chase, a recovered White Eagle leads the rescue mission, setting up a final showdown with Black Wolf. This climactic fight is reasonably well staged for 1920, Myles gradually moving closer, cut by cut, from long shot to close-up. But he follows it with a corny, clunky anticlimax as Red Wing knifes herself out of implausible grief for this dead Bluto of the Kiowas and an intertitle comments: "Constancy, thy name is Red Wing."

 

As a Native critic might have said, "Ugh." But while the story is the stuff of pulp fiction, with apologies to pulp fiction, Daughter of Dawn is fascinating even more as a piece of cinematic history than as a relic of Native folkways. For silent film buffs there's inherent drama to every rediscovery, and Daughter deserves its place on the National Film Registry (Class of 2013) regardless of its dramatic limitations. With so many major-studio Hollywood pictures from the silent era still missing or unlikely to be found, it's a wonder that an outlier project like this one can be seen so easily today, and that shouldn't be taken for granted.

WHEN AN ALIEN ROBOT CRASH LANDS IN TROY, NY (2015)

The poster above is an accurate representation of the protagonist of Bobby Kendall's silent film. On film, the alien robot is a charmingly preposterous creation. He's really no more than a cardboard frame built on top of a remote-control toy truck, with a control panel painted or drawn on his torso and a permanent expression of open-mouthed anxiety drawn onto his red-eyed face. His arms look useless, and when he uses them to touch or manipulate things, Kendall resorts to POV shots in which the arms are clearly being held in the director's hands. It's not to be taken seriously, after all, and the robot's abject simplicity makes him almost a 21st century version of the tramps and pasty-faced clowns of a century ago. He's a sign of Kendall's intentions, which are not, as far as I can tell, to make science fiction, but to get back to the essence of moviemaking. Silent films are about images and movement, and boy, does this film move.

In slightly less than an hour, Kendall follows his little robot from his crash site through the Collar City known as the Home of Uncle Sam, the place of my birth and my daily work. In the first section, "Terror," the robot struggles to find an exit from a post-industrial wasteland. In the second, "Wonder," he makes it into the city proper, exploring downtown Troy during one Saturday's outdoor farmer's market. In "Exploration" he tries to make contact with the planet's indigenous life, primarily an indifferent cat, and takes a treacherous trip through some parkland. In the final section, "Love/Freedom," he discovers the possibility of companionship and appears to find fulfillment as a child's toy.

The robot is Kendall's only special effect, but his dogged mobility brings this micro-budgeted film to life. Much of the film consists of long tracking shots following the robot as he scoots down roads of varying smoothness. These are impressive compositions, and they only get more so when the robot reaches populated areas. The Farmers' Market sequence is a modest tour de force as Kendall follows the robot through a crowded Monument Square and environs, leaving you wondering how the little guy doesn't get stepped on, or how no one ever sued Kendall for tripping over the thing. It takes you back a little to the early days of silent comedy when Mack Sennett's troupe would set up shop at public events and make comedy wherever they might find it. There aren't really any gags in Alien Robot, but it's still a sincere throwback to that century-old spirit. That comes through in the final sequence, when the robot, after watching two people enjoy a railyard picnic, befriends a little girl playing alone in her yard. There's something sentimental if not corny to this courtship, as the girl guides the robot with her little stick and finally does a happy dance as he circles elegantly around her. The closing high-five is a more modern touch, of course.

If the robot is in some ways a 21st century silent clown, in another way he's a humble embodiment of cinema itself. Seeing Troy from ankle-level and on the move from the robot's perspective must be like seeing things through a movie camera for the first time; the artifice automatically changing what we see as well as how we see it. Kendall has a few more tricks up his sleeve than tracking shots; like a good silent director he's also adept at montage, which he uses to establish the first terrifying, then wondrous strangeness of the cityscape. But when he's following the robot through the city he arrives at something like pure cinema. And on top of that, like many a silent film Alien Robot has an original score, which I was lucky to hear performed live by the band Lastdayshining, including Kendall. The score elevates the film, underscoring its often ecstatic sense of discovery and wonder. The combined effect is more artistry than amateurism -- which is more than I can say for that poster -- reminding us of what can still be done with limited resources and an understanding that cinema itself is a special effect. I don't want to exaggerate the film's virtues, but it definitely deserves a lot of appreciation, just as Bobby Kendall deserves encouragement in his future ventures.