Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
I believe in truth in advertising. I also believe in keeping things short. I watch a lot of movies. This is where I'm going to write about them. Let's roll.
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
Malcolm Shanks starts his journey into the unknown.
TCM Underground has shown some pretty strange movies over the course of its existence, but even with a good many of them under my belt I wasn't fully prepared for just how bizarre Shanks, this week's presentation, was going to be. Made in 1974, it was the last film directed by William Castle, who would go on to co-write and produce only one more film, 1975's Bug, before shuffling off this mortal coil two years later. And he must have had mortality on his mind when he took on this film -- his first in six years -- for Paramount at the age of 60.
"A Grim Fairy Tale," as the opening title card calls it, Shanks tells the story of a deaf-mute puppeteer (Marcel Marceau) who delights in entertaining children with his puppet shows but is treated like a slave (and talked down to like he's an imbecile) by his unpleasant sister-in-law (Tsilla Chelton) and her perpetually drunk second husband (Philippe Clay). The only light in his life is the girl he loves (Cindy Eilbacher) and for whom he's making a special doll. Then comes the invitation from an aged scientist (Marceau again) who hires him to perform experiments with manipulating the bodies of dead animals with electricity. This is about as off-putting to watch as you would expect it to be, but then Castle ramps up the creep factor by having the puppeteer graduate to people when the old scientist kicks the bucket.
If anything drew Marceau to this film, it must have been the chance to create the choreography, which straddles the line between amusingly clumsy and just plain disturbing. One example of this is the scene where the puppeteer takes Chelton and Clay to the grocery store (this is after they've both met with fatal accidents) and they mechanically load up on food and drink while the grocer (played by Castle himself) grouses about the money they owe him. Then Eilbacher runs into Marceau and invites herself along on a picnic where she is amused by Chelton and Clay's antics until she discovers that they're animated cadavers. This understandably freaks her out, but she gets over it rather quickly and doesn't report him to the police. This leads to a bad end, though, when bikers -- representing "the outside world of evil" -- crash her birthday party and, after forcing themselves on her, face off against Marceau's automatons (who apparently don't have to worry about rigor mortis). What follows is a happy ending of sorts, but only for people who think necrophilia is simply another lifestyle choice.
Superman, you're just in a slump. You'll be great again!
In the book Getting Away With It, which alternates between excerpts from Steven Soderbergh's journal dating from his self-imposed exile from Hollywood in the mid-'90s and a series of interviews he conducted with Richard Lester around the same time, Lester said of the Superman films, "The problem with all the films is that you have to make him destructible briefly, and then make him indestructible at the end. Now, three times, you're getting a bit bored with that." Even so, having completed Superman II after original director Richard Donner had a falling out with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, Lester chose to stick around and make Superman III because, he said, "I really was enjoying the experience and I thought it was a good thing to be doing." And while the result was something of a comedown after the high of Superman II, at least it's not a colossal bore like Supergirl or embarrassingly cheap like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
In fact, if one were to describe Superman III, words like "boring" and "cheap" would not be ones that come to mind, although "embarrassing" might considering how much screen time is given over to Richard Pryor, whole role as bumbling computer genius Gus Gorman seems misguided at best. Lester's comic touch is better utilized in the opening credit sequence, which is the most inspired example of Rube Goldberg-like slapstick I've ever seen in a motion picture, as well as a running gag about a hapless Pisa street vendor played by Lester stock company member John Bluthal. The best part of the film, though, is when Superman is exposed to some synthetic Kryptonite (now with 0.57% tar!) and Christopher Reeve gets to have some fun with the role, pretty much turning him in to an apathetic dick. Then, of course, there's the brilliantly choreographed junkyard brawl between the virtuous Clark Kent and the evil Superman. It's the kind of sustained action scene that these kinds of movies were built for and Lester carries it off like a champ.
To be fair, the film has other bright spots. Pamela Stephenson makes the most of her role as a buxom blond (and "psychic nutritionist" to the film's villain, super-rich industrialist Robert Vaughn) who plays dumb but is actually seen reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at one point. And during the sequence where Pryor attempts to tap into a weather satellite for nefarious purposes there are some unexpected side effects: an ATM starts spontaneously spitting out wads of money, one woman's Bloomingdale's account balance is grossly inflated, inspiring her husband to reenact the grapefruit scene from The Public Enemy, and some traffic signals go awry, spurring the red and green men on the "Don't Walk" sign to start tussling. Less successful is the scene where Pryor impersonates a three-star general and blusters his way through a rambling speech, even echoing George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove at one point ("We cannot afford a chemical-plastics gap!") before delivering the tainted Kryptonite to Superman. A lot less of that sort of thing would have gone a long way.
Recently Seen in Theaters:
The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, 2010)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)
Cop Out (Kevin Smith, 2010)
The Wolfman (Joe Johnston, 2010)
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