Now Playing: NOV. 14, 1962

Here's one opening in Baltimore. It at least deserves a nomination for title of the year.

What's it all about? Here's the trailer, uploaded by brutallodotcom:

DVR Diary: MOBY DICK (1930)

After Rin-Tin-Tin, John Barrymore was probably Warner Bros.' biggest star of the silent era. With the arrival of sound, the studio must have felt confident that in Barrymore, famed for his stage work before he went before the camera, they had an ace up their sleeve. He actually was in their first Vitaphone feature, but 1926's Don Juan had only a musical soundtrack, and Barrymore did not speak. That same year, he starred in The Sea Beast, a free adaptation -- to put it mildly -- of Moby Dick. That was still a silent, but Warners must have been pleased enough with it to produce a talking remake four years later. This time the movie went by the novel's name, though it was no more faithful to Herman Melville than The Sea Beast was. It isn't perfectly faithful to The Sea Beast, either, and that's probably a point in the sound film's favor.

As the star, Barrymore doesn't play Melville's point-of-view, audience-identification character Ishmael, but the book's most famous character, Captain Ahab. Following Sea Beast, the 1930 Moby Dick makes Ahab Ceeley the protagonist, indeed the hero of the story. We meet him as a harpoonist on the whaler Mary Ann, returning to New Bedford after years at sea. Ahab is the Douglas Fairbanks of the 19th century, cutting capers atop the mast as women watch admiringly. There's something slightly insane about him already, but I can't tell whether that's in the script or Barrymore's unrestrained contribution to the film. The Great Profile is good with the dialogue, naturally, but he does too much with his eyes, as if still stuck in the silent style of movie acting. Or he may have been blotto throughout the production. Whatever the problem, it seems hard to believe -- the star being 48 years old also has something to do with this -- that winsome Faith (Joan Bennett) would dump Ahab's priggish, lubberish, yet far younger brother Derek (Lloyd Hughes) for the old salt. It happens, however, but in a departure from the core text -- The Sea Beast, that is -- Derek doesn't follow Ahab out to sea to sabotage his career and his romantic prospects. For most of Moby Dick, Derek is simply a sullen, sulky presence, as if realizing he doesn't belong in the story, having been invented for The Sea Beast rather than by Melville. Somehow Ahab manages to get his leg gnawed off by the white whale without Derek's help. When he returns, peg-legged, to New Bedford, Faith flees in horror from him in a moment of weakness, and here Ahab acquires his obsession to avenge his lost hopes upon the whale.

While quantitatively less deviant from the novel than The Sea Beast, the 1930 Moby Dick nevertheless misses no opportunity to completely miss any points Melville meant to make. In the novel, Ahab as captain of the Pequod is an employee of the merchants who paid for the ship and its provisions; his hunt for the whale is before all else a transgression from his obligation to his employers. In the movie, he is outright master of his own ship, which is not the Pequod, having bought it in Singapore. While in the novel Ishmael and the rest of the crew are there of their own free will, in the talkie Ahab is obliged to shanghai a crew of rabble in New Bedford, improbably including his brother, after most of his terrified men jump ship. They have no other task than to hunt the whale, so there's no reason for anyone to try to dissuade him -- so long to most of the novel's dramatic tension. Instead, Ahab finally has it out with his brother, who assumes falsely that he's been singled out for torture, and in cinema's ultimate blasphemy against literature, kills Moby Dick singlehandedly -- his harpoon strikes from on board the whale draw forth gushers of black Pre-Code gore -- and then returns home in triumph to claim his love.

Movies have always taken liberties with literature, if only because cinema necessarily has different narrative rules and possibilities. It's not impossible for a movie to stray far from its literary source and yet remain a good movie. The best example of that I can think of, for American literature, is Michael Mann's adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans. At the opposite extreme sits Roland Joffe's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. While Lloyd Bacon's Moby Dick is, as I said above, an incomparable travesty of Melville's story, as a movie it comes a little closer to Mann than to Joffe. For an early talkie it's a visual treat, thanks to Robert Kurrle's photography of an impressive New Bedford set and special effects that are mostly not bad. There are some well-executed process shots of Ahab's harpoon boat pursuing the whale, and the production only falters when it has to introduce a fake whale that looks like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon to pursue live actors in the water. Barrymore may be too over-the-top from the start to convince as a romantic lead, but once the origin-story half of the film is over he's entitled to be as crazy as he needs to be. The star may have appreciated the handicap of his age, since here and in the following year's Svengali he seems more determined to be the next Lon Chaney than to be a great lover. He's supported by a remarkable cast of grotesques as his crew -- boy, did they have faces then! -- led by Noble Johnson (of King Kong fame) as Queequeg, Ahab's sidekick here instead of Ishmael's. As Derek, Hughes is too much of a wet blanket to be a compelling antagonist, and the filmmakers may have toned down the character's villainy for that reason. Bacon's Moby Dick may be a travesty, but being motivated by showmanship rather than political correctness, as was the case with Joffe's Scarlet Letter, it's forgivably fun to watch, amusing rather than offensive in its brazen deviance from Melville. If you know what to expect going in -- or if you have no familiarity with Moby Dick whatsoever, you may find this an entertaining picture on its own terms.

THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI (1964)

Hideo Gosha's first theatrical film was an adaptation of a popular Japanese TV series. The Shochiku studio promoted it as a revolutionary film while noting that it was star Testuro Tamba's first movie as a producer. 1964 was a big year for Tamba, as the future Tiger Tanaka would make his first English-language film, The 7th Dawn (coming soon to this blog). While the studio stressed these milestones, Three Outlaw Samurai is in line with a number of contemporary films that used the chambara genre to criticize historical injustices and highlight class conflicts. There seemed to be a cinematic consensus that feudal Japan was a cruel land where aristocrats ground peasants into the earth, while samurai and ronin chose sides according to their personalities.

Shiba (Tamba) stumbles into a zone of class warfare where some exceptionally bold peasants have kidnapped the daughter of a local lord in hopes of extracting concessions from him. His exactions have left them hungry, and Shiba takes an initially dispassionate interest in the kidnappers, advising them on how to defend their ground and finally intervening when the lord's men try to rescue the girl. The lord recruits a motley lot to escalate the conflict, including two more ronin. One, the deceptively lazy looking Sakura (Isamu Nagato), quickly switches sides to support Shiba, though not before killing a peasant who attacked him for no apparent reason. The third, the self-styled "freeloader" Kikyo (Mikijiro Hira), sticks with the lord until he sees proof of the man's dishonor.

 

Following Sakura's defection, the lord's men capture a peasant girl and torture her in order to force the hostage's release. When the peasants relent, the girl kills herself by biting her own tongue off rather than see her people give up their own advantage. But when the peasants threaten to kill the lord's daughter for revenge, Shiba defuses the situation by turning her and himself over to the authorities, vowing to accept any punishment the lord wishes so long as the peasants are spared. Kikyo witnesses Shiba's torture, and learns that the lord has ordered the peasant ringleaders slaughtered anyway. He helps Shiba escape, then finally joins forces with Shiba and Sakura to fight a small army determined to prevent the peasants from presenting a petition to a nobleman denouncing the lord.

For a debut film Gosha's is pretty slick, but the director had honed his craft on the TV version. Three Outlaw Samurai is stylishly efficient, packing plenty of plot and subplot in little more than 90 minutes.  Amid all the action Gosha manages to fit in a major romantic storyline for Sakura, who falls for a peasant widow before either realizes that the attacker the ronin had killed earlier was her husband. While the film as a whole is understandably Tamba's show, Isamu Nagato just about steals it as the samurai who comes nearest to a spaghetti-western "ugly" type, but is also the most conscientious and soulful of the three.

 

(l-r) Mikijiro Hara, Testuro Tamba, Isamu Nagato;

(Below) You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

 

Sixties samurai films anticipate spaghetti westerns in their class consciousness, most resembling the spaghettis set in Mexico, where the oppression of the poor by the rich could be shown in starkest if not cartoonish detail. Gosha steps back from embracing the peasantry, however. He emphasizes how exceptional the few were who dared kidnap the lord's daughter by portraying the rest as abject cowards in the denouement, when Shiba, having risked his life for the peasants' right to submit their petition, can't convince any of them to actually give it to the nobleman. Gosha's peasants are less the salt of the earth than an opposite extreme of wretched impotence from the nobility's extreme of oppressive ruthlessness. The samurai seem to be the only ones capable of decisive, honorable action, and for every one who proves a good guy there's probably another who tramples the helpless under foot. Looking at it from the broadest perspective, Three Outlaw Samurai is no more political than any Robin Hood or William Tell movie, since just about everyone agrees that feudalism was bad and made people bad. As an action movie, it can be enjoyed quite easily without looking for any politics in it. Gosha's greatest works in the genre were yet to come, of course -- Goyokin is his masterpiece of the films I've seen -- but Three Outlaw Samurai is an impressive start to his cinematic career.

Now Playing: NOV. 9, 1962

Was Jimmy Dean singing about the Duke in his famous song? A Palm Beach exhibitor raises suspicions.

For something more recent, but perhaps along the same general lines, try Pittsburgh.

Too harsh? Too hectic? Maybe this fall's gimmick picture is more your type. It's just opening in Victoria, TX.

Too quiet? Be patient, Victorians: the countdown has begun. And now that the Cuban Missile Crisis has died down, people can actually look forward 19 days and expect to be around.

Can't wait for controversy? They're stirring some up in Youngstown, OH.

By comparison, this weekend show in Spokane, WA, doesn't seem controversial at all.

It all depends on your perspective!

Now Playing: NOVEMBER 7, 1962

Feeling paranoid today? Take a break at the movies. Here's one opening today in Daytona Beach -- it opened last week in many other places.

Does that strike the wrong note? Try this theater in Miami!

Ideal viewing either way after the Cuban Missile Crisis, don't you think?

Weird Noir: THE NAKED ROAD (1959)

According to gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, William Martin's independent feature, now included in Something Weird Video's Weird-Noir collection, was inspired by an Edward R. Murrow radio report on prostitution rings operating near the advertising industry district on Madison Ave in New York City. Writing in July 1959, Kilgallen predicted that The Naked Road would "cause quite a stir" in the metropolis later that summer. This was probably the best publicity the film ever got. If it caused a stir anywhere it played, it was probably nothing a square-up reel couldn't fix. An exhibitor would have been wise to have one on hand, as Naked Road is a textbook case of delivering much, much less than a movie might promise.

The ad-industry angle consists of an agency man taking the heroine, Gay Andrews (Jeanne Rainer), out on a date, only to learn that she won't put out. Taking her home, our Mad Man is pulled over for speeding and conducted to the home of a local justice of the peace, who levies a stiff fine. Mr. Big Businessman doesn't have the ready cash, but the judge lets him go get the money, as long as Gay stays in his custody until the driver returns.

 

The Majesty of the Law

Hours later, another sympathetic speeder sees that Gay's been abandoned, confined to the judge's couch. Taking pity on the girl, he pays the ad guy's fine as well as his own so the girl can be let go. This Wayne Jackson (Ronald Long) takes Gay to a fancy restaurant (see below), but it soon becomes apparent that his motives are even more ulterior than those of the ad guy. Wayne intends to recruit Gay into his "public relations" racket, enticing her with a promise of $1,000 a week and threatening her with "the Treatment." Gay has a pain in her arm when she wakes up in Wayne's apartment. That pain was the first prick of the needle, the first round of the Treatment. But if she agrees to become a whore voluntarily, Wayne will spare her the horror of drug addiction.

 

Wayne takes his victims to the finest places.

A waiting game now begins that rivals Beckett for existential futility. Wayne and his stooge impatiently await Gay's surrender, going so far as denying her food -- though cigarettes are still okay, since they'll help her think. The threat of the Treatment always looms, and Gay finally surrenders. At this point Wayne sets up an impromptu training session, ordering Gay to show his stooge a good time. As the jazz music builds on the soundtrack, Wayne steps into the other room, and we watch him wait until Gay screams. Back in the bedroom, she's smacked the stooge in the face, and Wayne sends him away. Angrily, Wayne reminds Gay of the Treatment, but then informs her that the initial shot had only been penicillin. The waiting game resumes, and might go on forever were Wayne's stooge not caught by an eyewitness, one of Wayne's own hookers, dumping a dead girl's body out a window to simulate suicide.  Wayne rightly chides his flunky for letting someone see him, and warns him that the consequences will be dire if the girl talks -- but the thought of silencing the girl never takes root in either mind. Finally, it's only a matter of waiting for the cops to come....

 

After an hour or so of Naked Road,

you'll probably be ready to chuck it.

 

The weird thing about this would-be noir is how absolutely ineffectual its villains are. Their recruitment process for prostitutes stops short only at saying "pretty please with sugar on top" to poor Gay, whose torture by tedium can only inspire empathy from audiences who watch it, so long as they stay awake. Martin may have convinced Dorothy Kilgallen, without showing her the film, of its relevance, but Naked Road is more nearly a film about nothing.  It appears to have been filmed in people's houses, various rooms passing for offices and restaurants, apart from the closing coup de cinema, for which Martin arranged for the denouement, settling the fate of Wayne's official co-conspirators, to scroll across a New York TV station's electronic sign. If Something Weird deems it "Weird-Noir," that's in spite of Martin's effort to purge the tale of any weird vitality. I suppose there is something weird about Wayne's desultory attempts to dominate Gay, but it's dumb-weird, not weird-weird, if you appreciate the distinction. Naked Road is a truly bad movie, a celluloid void that friends and intoxicants are unlikely to redeem -- though that probably won't stop people from trying.

MAIDSTONE (1968-70)

Norman Mailer lived long enough to see his generation's ambitions become irrelevant. As an ambitious American writer after World War II, he grew up in the shadow of Ernest Hemingway, who rose from avant-garde obscurity to become a celebrity while largely retaining his literary reputation. Hemingway was a model and a target for those who would write the Great American Novel, or be the Great American Novelist. Mailer struck early, his war novel The Naked and the Dead making him famous at age 25. For many, he never surpassed that first success, but some credit him for becoming one of the greatest non-fiction writers of the latter 20th century. Beginning with 1959's Advertisements for Myself, Mailer became his own great subject, and in a way he may have written the Great American Novel without realizing it, or maybe without wanting to admit it in the form it took. In Advertisements he promised the G.A.N., but after another decade, despite two more novels, the Great One had not come. Mailer struck out in two directions simultaneously. He published a "non-fiction novel" about his adventures at an antiwar protest, and The Armies of the Night won a Pulitzer Prize. During the same period he became a movie director, but cinema seemed to require a different approach.

Most movies are made as a corporation product. You know, they're planned, and there's a corporation behind them, and they're turned out. Now what we did is, we made a movie as a military operation. When you have a military operation what happens is you set out to take a given town, and your objective is to take that town, and as you go forward all sorts of unforeseen contingencies arrive, and as they do you go around them, or you go through them, or you go under them. But the whole idea is, in a military operation that you get a certain amount of force, moving, and then you move with it, and you discover what the reality of your attack is by attacking. So what we've been doing in the last five days is making an attack on the nature of reality, on what is reality. You can't say that this is real now, what we're doing; you can't say what we were doing last night is real. The only thing you can say is that the reality exists somewhere in the extraordinary tension between the two extremes of the relationship....

You're still thinking of movies that are made when you very carefully structure them, you follow? And you get the maximum out of each moment. But what I'm arguing about in this method is that you can't make a movie that way and get something even remotely resembling the truth. What you can get is, you can get a unilinear abstract of one man's conception of how something might happen. But what I'm saying is that's not the way anything happens. The way anything happens is that it has five different realities at any given moment which then swing around to there, you see?

 

 

Or like this, you follow? And in other words it's sort of a tumbling, odd thing....There's not anyone here, including myself, who finally knows what went on in that movie.

By the standard expressed here Mailer couldn't hope to capture reality in a novel which could only be his own "unilinear abstract." But his operation, as described in a fourth-wall breaking moment near the end of Maidstone, his third feature film, points toward a dead end for modernism at an opposite extreme from art, which to be meaningful must distill experience or "reality" into something comprehensible and ideally vindicated by relevance if not verisimilitude. Mailer's notion of cinema is a recipe for chaos, and Maidstone is a pie in his own face. Something more substantial than a pie, actually.

Mailer apparently conceived Maidstone as a kind of role-playing-game for his cronies, the challenge being whether someone would assassinate Mailer's character, a director turned presidential candidate named Norman T. Kingsley. The author assumes that this Kingsley's candidacy would be taken seriously enough by the power elite that they would contemplate murdering him. We are to understand that Kingsley is an art-house success with a following (of potential voters) in the millions, and a talent comparable to Bunuel, Dreyer, Fellini and Antonioni. The director Norman Mailer isn't the same as the director Kingsley, but from what we see of Kingsley's methods the comparisons are insulting to all of the above. Kingsley's work, which seems to deteriorate from a Bunuel homage to some rather lifeless porn, seems no less amateurish than Mailer's; the latter, it must be said by a fan of the writer, has almost no pictorial sense at all, and at most some aptitude for montage if not narrative. Where there are glimmerings of a visual imagination, Mailer (not Kingsley) seems most influenced by Antonioni in scenes of actors wandering aimlessly through an airy countryside. The wandering may seem Felliniesque, but the space is used more in Antonioni style. But the effect is the opposite of Antonioni's evocation of emptiness, since these excursions feel like idyllic respites from the claustrophobic paranoia chez Kingsley. I'll even give Mailer credit for intending them that way.

Politically, Maidstone is vacuous, its main premise, as far as I can tell, being that Norman Mailer is a legitimate threat to the establishment. Kingsley articulates no political vision, telling a skeptical interviewer only that he has the qualities of character necessary to steer the nation through crises. Mailer sees Kingsley, despite his artistic vocation, as a representative politician, but one guileless enough to allow the contradictions Mailer perceives in all politicians crack the surface -- though while the author sees politicians as potentially part angel, part devil, Kingsley seems mostly devil, a misogynist manipulator who makes an epic ass of himself during an encounter with an ex-wife. With recently-enhanced hindsight, this particular scene, in which actor Mailer scats childishly to some radio music just to fill the air around the estranged couple, reveals Kingsley, if not Mailer, as a real-life Lancaster Dodd, one who we see later admitting that he's made things up as he went along.

 

If Mailer/Kingsley is Lancaster Dodd, than Rip Torn, the professional ringer in the cast, is Maidstone's Freddy Quell. Torn doesn't get many opportunities to act extensively, but he's still obviously in another league than all the hopeless participants improvising without method or conviction. In the story or game, Torn plays Kingsley's disgruntled or disturbed brother, the person most likely to be turned into an assassin. Apparently, any assassination attempt was expected at a party Kingsley stages, and during Mailer's Q&A after the fact a cast member expresses surprise that no one tried anything then. But if the rap session was meant to show that the game was over, Torn didn't get the message. Maidstone closes with an apparently spontaneous surprise attack by Torn, in character, on Mailer, with a hammer. A bloodied Mailer instantly falls out of character and fights Torn, who protests that he has to kill Kingsley, not Mailer. After the men are separated by Mailer's legitimately frightened family, they go on arguing as Mailer denounces Torn's betrayal of his trust. Yet Mailer left the attack in the picture, in lieu of an assassination within the game, and may have inserted the Q&A to set up the new ending as a proof of his method, Torn's attack reshaping the reality of Maidstone as an event rather than a narrative. But the wrap-up is more an admission of defeat, a confession that Maidstone could never be anything more than a documentary about itself, less a commentary about anything than raw material for future commentators on Norman Mailer, who had more literary triumphs to come but only one more film to make, the comparatively conventional adaption of his own detective novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, in the 1980s. Maidstone remains relevant as long as Mailer does, but no matter how much Mailer fascinates me, his ambitions no longer impress many people, -- who expects novels to imitate life now? -- and despite the welcome arrival of three Mailer films in a Criterion Eclipse box set, those films' time is probably running out. But Maidstone seems worth mentioning on the brink of a presidential election, if only to remind you that there are always other candidates than Row A or Row B on the ballot, and some of them are at least more plausible than Kingsley.