Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
April 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
The money's in, we're made of tin, we're here to give you more.
It's arguable that the Monkees as a popular phenomenon were already over by the time Head was put before a bewildered public in the fall of 1968, but that doesn't make it any less fascinating a cultural artifact. Directed by Bob Rafelson, who was one of the producers of the TV series, and written by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson (with uncredited input from all four Monkees), Head depicts the group's repeated attempts to "break out of the box" (i.e. television), all of which end up in failure. Individually or as a group, they can't help but fall prey to their personae as codified by two seasons on their eponymous television show.
One scene which exemplifies this is when Davy Jones is getting the stuffing beaten out of him by Sonny Liston in a boxing ring. Micky Dolenz is at ringside, exhorting him to "Stay down, dummy!" but soon enough Peter Tork comes along to correct him. "I'm the dummy, Micky," Tork says. "I'm always the dummy." Extrapolating from that, it's not hard to identify Micky as the lovable goofball, Davy as the cute one and Mike Nesmith as the cynical stoic. Throughout the film, each gets a chance to showcase other sides of their personalities. Micky finds himself in a stand-off with a Coca-Cola machine in the desert. Davy breaks into an elaborate song-and-dance routine (with choreographer Toni Basil). Mike loses his temper at a birthday party. And Peter learns the truth about conceptual reality at the foot of a mystic, but is unable to communicate it to the others.
The film is chock full of bizarre cameos from the likes of Timothy Carey (who they keep bumping into on the backlot), Victor Mature (who first pops up in a dandruff commercial and then keeps popping up) and Frank Zappa (who is leading a cow when he tells Davy to keep working on his music because the the song he just performed was "pretty white"). The imagery is frequently psychedelic, the concepts are pretty heady and the transitions are whiplash-inducing, especially as the film progresses and gets more and more self-reflexive. There's even a scene where Peter punches a cafeteria worker and the Rafelson calls cut, but the camera keeps rolling to document the aftermath as Peter expresses his concern about how the scene will affect his non-violent image and Rafelson shrugs him off, consulting with Nicholson before they move on to the next set-up.
And, of course, there are the songs. The most memorable one is the psychedelic "Porpoise Song," which opens the film after Micky disrupts a bridge dedication ceremony, finally leaping to the icy waters below, where he is visited by mermaids. (Some guys have all the luck.) The live performance of "Circle Sky" which follows, though, is just as effective, especially when their fans rush the stage and literally tear the performers to pieces to have something to take home with them. (And before you snicker, yes, the Monkees did learn how to play their own instruments and they did take the show on the road.) It all comes back to "Porpoise Song," though, as the film comes full circle, having spent 80 minutes showing exactly what Micky was running from. For the Monkees, there is no escape.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
My mind tends to jump around a little and I have some trouble between fantasy and reality.
Thirty years ago today, Woody Allen's major breakthrough as a filmmaker came when Annie Hall won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1977. In fact, it nearly swept all of the major awards that night, with Allen winning Best Director and sharing Best Original Screenplay with Marshall Brickman and Diane Keaton winning Best Actress. The only one it missed was Best Actor, which the Academy decided to bestow upon Richard Dreyfuss for The Goodbye Girl. I guess it was felt that Allen wasn't really "acting" because he was playing "himself." The thing is, this was the first time he was playing a part like this and, for good or ill, it provided the template for many of his performances to come. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care how much of the film is autobiographical and how much the central relationship between Annie Hall and Alvy Singer mirrored the one between Keaton and Allen. All that matters is that it's still funny after three decades and it stands as one of the few comedies the Hollywood establishment ever embraced at Oscar time.
Also up for an award that night was Luis Buñuel's final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, which was nominated for Best Foreign Film, but didn't win. Once again reuniting him with Fernando Rey, who had starred in Viridiana, Tristana and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the film featured Rey as an elderly aristocrat who becomes enamored of his new chambermaid and ends up pursuing her in a masochistic love/hate relationship. Or perhaps I should say he ends up pursuing them because Buñuel plays the trick of having the character played by two different actresses, alternating between them from scene to scene and sometimes shot to shot.
That's not the only surrealist element that he slips in: there's also an unexplained detail about men carrying around burlap sacks and a woman who is discovered carrying a piglet in the park. Then there are the terrorist bombings and other acts of violence that weren't present in the novel, but were incorporated into the script by Buñuel and his collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière to reflect the atmosphere in which it was made. Buñuel may have been deaf in his later years, but he still had his ear to the ground and knew how to keep his films relevant to contemporary audiences. And, of course, this is still the case 30 years later, which is both a testament to his filmmaking skills and a sad reminder that some things haven't changed.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
This isn't exactly the cream of America's workforce.
When I first head about Leatherheads a few years back, it was a comedy about the early days of professional football to be written and directed by Steven Soderbergh for George Clooney to star in. Now the film has become a reality, but Clooney was the one in the director's chair and the screenplay penned by Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly. Regardless of how it came about or who brought it about, it is out and about and I just got back from seeing it.
A neo-screwball comedy in the mold of The Hudsucker Proxy, Leatherheads takes place in 1925, when college football drew crowds in the tens of thousands and professional football was struggling to stay afloat, with teams constantly folding due to lack of sponsorship. Clooney heads up one such team, the Duluth Bulldogs, which gets its second wind when he recruits Princeton football sensation John Krasinski, who's not only a talented player (he hasn't earned the nickname "The Bullet" for nothing), but a decorated war hero to boot. There's some question about the validity of his war record, though, which ace Chicago Tribune reporter Renée Zellweger is tasked with sniffing out (practically a direct lift from Hudsucker). That she winds up in a love triangle with both of them is both inevitable and the least inspired thing about the whole enterprise.
The film features some great supporting turns from the likes of Jonathan Pryce as Krasinski's unscrupulous promoter, Stephen Root as a perpetually drunk local sports writer whose articles are dictated to him by Clooney, Keith Loneker (the ill-fated Wild Boy Bob in Out of Sight) as the well-named Big Gus (a high school student who is also recruited for the team), and Max Casella (Vinnie on Doogie Howser, M.D.) as the soldier who blows the whistle on Krasinski, but later changes his tune. Speaking of tunes, one shouldn't underestimate the effectiveness of Randy Newman's original score, which sets the tone and period of the film perfectly. (Newman also shows up late in the game as a piano player at a speakeasy.) In fact, the film as a whole works like gangbusters until about an hour in, when Clooney and his screenwriters start overemphasizing some of the screwball elements at the expense of the characters. It recovers nicely as the clock runs out, though, with a climactic grudge match on a muddy football field. If that sort of thing appeals to you, you know where you can see it.
It is in imperfect creatures that God finds all His greatness.
Pedro Almodóvar's third feature was 1983's Dark Habits, in which a nightclub singer whose boyfriend overdosed on tainted heroin hides out in a convent to avoid being picked up by the police. I know, I know. You've seen it all before, but only Almodóvar at his most irreverent would conceive of a mother superior who is a lesbian drug addict and sisters with names like Rat (who secretly writes softcore porn), Manure (a reformed murderess who drops acid), Damned (who keeps a tiger at the convent) and Snake (a fashion designer to the saints who is secretly in love with their priest). Cristina Sánchez Pascual stars as the singer who arrives at the convent just as it's facing forced closure, with Julieta Serrano as the mother superior who attempts to woo her with drugs and expensive gifts, Marisa Paredes as the mildly unhinged murderess who takes mortification to the extreme and Carmen Maura as the nun who delights in playing the bongos while she plays Sigfried (or would that be Roy?). If the film as a whole seems somewhat rushed and disjointed at times, that's probably down to Almodóvar feeling the pressures of commercial filmmaking for the first time. (Up until then, his films were all self-financed. It must have been disconcerting for him to have someone else to answer to.)
Monday, April 7, 2008
I can imagine no way in which this thing could be considered anywhere remotely close to safe.
The kind of intelligent science fiction film they don't make anymore -- if, indeed, they ever made them like this -- Shane Carruth's Primer is quite the singular motion picture. And it literally took a singular effort to make it a reality since Carruth wrote, directed, produced, scored, edited, cast and did the production and sound design on the film. (In fact, about the only things he didn't do were operate the camera and do the catering.) Carruth also stars as Aaron, an engineer who spends his spare time tinkering in his garage with colleague Abe (David Sullivan). It's not entirely clear what they're working on at the start of the film, but what they manage to invent is a device that allows them to send themselves back in time a few hours. Unlike a lot of time-travel stories, though, this one is populated by characters who think scientifically, building in fail-safes, anticipating contingencies and making sure they don't trigger any paradoxes. I freely confess I don't understand everything that happens in the last third or so (and it didn't help that my library copy has some deep scratches that affected playback at a couple crucial junctures), but I'm sure this is the kind of film that rewards anyone who goes back and watches it over again from the beginning. And it's short.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
He'll do anything but steal and murder so he can indulge in wine and women.
It may have something of a generic title, but Kihachi Okamoto's 1965 film Samurai Assassin (which was called the even more generic Samurai in Japan) is an exciting genre workout with a captivating lead performance by Toshiro Mifune. Mifune plays a ronin seeking the status that he believe being a full-fledged samurai will give him. To this end, he joins up with the House of Mito, which aims to assassinate an important Shogunate leader. When one of their plans goes awry there is concern that they have a traitor in their midst, and the two most likely suspects are Mifune (who comes under scrutiny because he's something of a ruffian) and a scholar played by Keiju Kobayashi. Upon investigation Mifune is cleared, but as a test of his loyalty he is given the task of eliminating Kobayashi, who he has come to regard as a friend.
Meanwhile, Mifune clumsily pursues accommodating hostess Michiyo Aratama, who is the spitting image of an old lover he was forced to give up while he was training to be a samurai five years earlier. It seems her father (Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura) disapproved of her being courted by such a low-born suitor, but the irony is he was actually of noble lineage, a fact which his mother (Ozu stalwart Haruko Sugimura) kept from him. Everything culminates in an exciting ambush in a blinding snowstorm, when Mifune proves his mettle once and for all, not realizing the larger part in history his actions will take. That's up to the narrator to reveal.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Training to fight isn't just about hitting. It's about being hit, too.
Watched Seijun Suzuki's 1966 film Fighting Elegy this afternoon. The Criterion Collection includes six of his films from the mid-'60s (he was an incredibly prolific filmmaker during this period), but this was the only one at my library. (The others will have to be Netflixed.) Set in Japan in the mid-'30s, the film stars Hideki Takahashi as a middle school senior who lusts after Catholic schoolgirl Junko Asano, whose mother runs the boardinghouse where he lives. Unable to fulfill his desires, Takahashi channels them into knock-down, drag-out fights with his schoolmates, turning to father figure Yusuke Kawazu to teach him the "secrets of fighting." His actual father is largely absent from his life, but has a way of turning up when Takahashi has gotten himself into a spot, either with his school (which suspends him for fighting), the army (which throws him out for insubordination) or one of the many gangs of youths he crosses paths with during the course of the story. If one wanted to get a feel for the Japanese character in the years leading up to World War II, this would be a good place to start.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Is it true that a long time ago firemen used to put out fires and not burn books?
It's quite safe to say that Fahrenheit 451 was the first Francois Truffaut film I ever saw. Viewing it again tonight, it's also readily apparent that is was the first (and only) one he ever shot in English. Based on the novel by Ray Bradbury, it's set in a futuristic totalitarian state where reading books is illegal and firemen are employed to burn them when they are found. (It appears they're not needed to put out fires since all houses are fireproof, although the end of the film belies this statement.) In addition to rounding up subversives and forcing men to cut their hair, the state keeps the populace in line by numbing them senseless with pills and television. It's a beautiful film to look at thanks to Nicolas Roeg's sharp photography (which accentuates the reds that dominate the color scheme) and Bernard Herrmann provides a stirring score, but one gets the feeling that Truffaut is constantly straining -- and failing -- to overcome the language barrier.
Of course, if Truffaut was uncomfortable writing and directing in a foreign tongue, that's nothing compared to poor Oskar Werner, who plays Montag the hero in a halting German accent -- the only one in a cast of native-born English speakers like Julie Christie (who plays a double role as Werner's vacuous wife and a teacher who lives nearby) and Cyril Cusack (who plays Werner's captain, who artlessly dangles a promotion in front of him). The film also features a plum role for Bee Duffell (probably best known as the old crone who is menaced by King Arthur and Sir Bedevere while they're searching for a shrubbery in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) as an old woman whose secret library is discovered and who decides to be burned along with them. Even if it was done in the service of a story about the dangers of censorship, it's still painful to watch the scenes of books (many of them masterpieces) being doused with kerosene and set ablaze.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
What do you get the girl who has everything and who likes to play with fire?
I had been debating what to watch next out of the cache of tapes Jeff Goodhartz sent me when the man himself contacted me the other day and told me in no uncertain terms that I should go with Don't Play with Fire. (His exact words were "I guarantee that you'll be blown away by it.") Well, true to his word, Don't Play with Fire is one of the blowingest awayingest movies I have ever seen. Directed by Hong Kong action specialist Tsui Hark (who, sadly, is best known in the States for the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles Double Team and Knock Off -- that is, if he's known at all), Don't Play with Fire was only his third film and it has all the earmarks of someone trying to impress the hell out of the Hong Kong film industry.
The film gets off to a disturbing start with a genuine scene of animal cruelty (no SPCA in 1980 Hong Kong), which gives a taste of how amoral some if not most of its characters are. Then, after some plot that's hard to follow, a trio of bespectacled youths out for a drive runs over a pedestrian after swerving to avoid a motorcyclist. Panicking, they leave the scene of the accident, but they're seen by an antisocial girl who blackmails them into being her friends -- and by "friends" I mean "weak-willed boys she can intimidate into terrorizing a bus load of Japanese tourists with her." And there's other stuff going on, too, including a bombing at a movie theater, a pesky cat getting impaled on a fence, a foiled garage hold-up, and a queasy scene where the girl buys firecrackers from an old lecher (which actually comes before the bus hijacking, but you'll forgive me if I get a few things out of order).
Things take a turn from the prankish to the dangerous when the girl absconds with a box containing 800 million yen in Japanese money orders being carried by an American Vietnam veteran. After a failed attempt to cash one at the bank, they take some to an underworld figure who exchanges them (taking a sizable cut for himself), after which their contact sics his Triad thugs on them to recover the rest. Meanwhile, the police are trying to get to the bottom of things and the American's well-armed war buddies are also tracking the money down, leading to a violent climax in a cemetery. Unsurprisingly, few of our "heroes" (and even fewer of the villains) make it out alive.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
This is a time of war. You can't rise by your sword alone.
The Criterion Collection's selection of samurai cinema is usually quite reliable, and that is definitely the case with Hideo Gosha's 1965 film Sword of the Beast, which was released as part of Criterion's "Rebel Samurai" set (along with Kill! and two other films I'll be getting to in the near future). The central character is a most rebellious samurai indeed, having slain his clan's counselor because he was opposed to reform. (This film is set in 1857, just a few years before Samurai Assassin, so trouble was definitely brewing for the samurai class.) Mikijiro Hira plays the ronin on the run from his clan who hears about gold in the mountains from a prospector (Kunie Tanaka) seeking protection. There he comes into conflict with another swordsman (Go Kato), who is panning for gold with his wife (Shima Iwashita) on orders from his clan. The film is full of exciting fight scenes, touching dramatics, and enough dollops of humor (courtesy of Tanaka's cowardly prospector) to keep things from getting too grim.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
You guys should act more responsible. You still act like yakuza off the street.
The beastly Japanese films continue with Seijun Suzuki's hyperkinetic 1963 yakuza tale Youth of the Beast (which I would follow up with Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast if I could get my hands on it). Jo Shishido stars as an ex-cop (who spent three years in jail on trumped-up assault and embezzlement charges) looking to avenge his former partner's murder by infiltrating a yakuza gang so he can find out who was responsible. Misako Watanabe plays his slain partner's widow, who is not as pure as she seems, with Akiji Kobayashi as the yakuza boss who takes him on, Tamio Kawaji as Kobayashi's knife-wielding gay brother (who doesn't like it when people remind him that his mother was a whore), and Suzuki himself as the police detective who tries to talk Shishido out of his vendetta.
Youth of the Beast marked a turning point for Suzuki, who was accustomed to shooting three or four films a year for his studio. Starting with this film, he started imposing an extreme shooting style on the scripts he was given, a practice that would reach its zenith with 1967's Branded to Kill, after which he was summarily fired. Even if the studio bosses didn't appreciate it at the time, it's what makes Suzuki's films distinctive and why they're still remembered today. (It's doubtful Criterion would have taken an interest if they were cookie-cutter program pictures.)
Look at them. Their own chief and they left him in the lurch.
Took a break from the beastliness (I called around and Plan 9 has Blind Beast, so that's on tap for Saturday) to take in a tale of the troubles in Northern Ireland as told by Carol Reed. 1947's Odd Man Out stars James Mason as an I.R.A. chief who plans a daylight payroll robbery and is shot while carrying it out. That would be bad enough, but he also kills a cashier during the getaway and gets separated from his accomplices (who include panicky driver Cyril Cusack and a young Dan O'Herlihy) and has to hole up in an air-raid shelter to avoid being found by the police. Kathleen Ryan plays his sweetheart, in whose house he's been hiding since he broke out of prison six months earlier, who tries to spirit him away to safety, and Robert Newton is a mad painter who wants to capture his dying moments on canvas. It's a hard-edged film that pulls no punches and presents a cross-section of society, with most people choosing not to get involved.
Friday, April 18, 2008
I was just making pictures.
Harold Pinter's first screenplay for a major Hollywood studio was 1976's The Last Tycoon, which was based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's last, unfinished novel and was the last film by director Elia Kazan. Not as tightly-scripted as Pinter's work for Joseph Losey in '60s, The Last Tycoon charts a week in the life of wunderkind studio head Robert De Niro, who lives, breathes and eats movies, as he singlemindedly pursues the unattainable Ingrid Boulting, who resembles his dead wife, a starlet from the silent days. De Niro is the kind of hands-on producer who dictates editing changes during screenings, puts multiple writers on the same film so he can pick and choose which scenes he wants to use -- and influences which direction he wants them to go in, and is frequently called upon to handle on-set disputes quickly and decisively. He also has an unfinished beach house which he takes Boulting to at one point and which shouldn't have too much metaphorical weight heaped upon it. After all, it's just the frame; it can't support that heavy a metaphor.
The film features a mix of contemporary stars and actors from Hollywood's golden age, including Tony Curtis as a supremely insecure actor, Jeanne Moreau as an aging beauty prone to diva fits, Robert Mitchum as a studio executive, Ray Milland as his lawyer, Theresa Russell as Mitchum's college-age daughter (who pines for De Niro), Donald Pleasence as a disgruntled writer who doesn't understand the pictures, Dana Andrews as the veteran director quietly fired off Moreau's movie, John Carradine as a studio tour guide who has been around since the silents, Jeff Corey as De Niro's doctor, Seymour Cassel as a seal trainer, and Anjelica Huston as a woman De Niro tracks down mistakenly thinking she's Boulting. And late in the game Jack Nicholson shows up as a communist looking to unionize the writers, something De Niro was informed about at the beginning of the film. By the time they finally meet, though, he has been told in no uncertain terms that Boulting will never be his, so he's hardly in the best frame of mind for negotiating. As a meeting of acting giants, it's somewhat underwhelming, but that pretty much describes the film as a whole. There are certainly worse ways to pass two hours.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
There'll be food and drink and ghosts, and perhaps even a few murders. You're all invited.
It's one thing for a haunted house movie to be illogical, but William Castle's House on Haunted Hill takes the cake, eats it and has it with a scoop of boysenberry ice cream. The film features the typical haunted house tropes of self-closing doors, falling chandeliers, acid vats in the basement, severed heads that appear and disappear when you're not looking, dusty organs that play themselves, and characters prone to wandering off by themselves even after they've been warned several times not to. The illogicality comes from the way it tries to rationally explain away all of the supernatural hugger-mugger when some of the things that happen are clearly physically impossible (unless you have the ability to reverse film, that is).
Castle's second horror film and his second to be sold on a gimmick (for 1958's Macabre, patrons were issued an insurance policy against "death by fright" by Lloyds of London), House was also the first of two films he made with Vincent Price, who was perfectly cast as the smug, eccentric millionaire who lures five total strangers to a haunted house with the promise of $10,000 for anyone who survives the night. They're a varied lot, including a test pilot, a society columnist, a psychiatrist, a typist at one of Price's companies, and the superstitious owner of the house (effectively played by a frazzled Elisha Cook Jr.). And there's also Price's gold-digging wife, who would like nothing better than for Price to join the seven people who have already been murdered there. For Price, the feeling is mutual.
The blind have eyes in our fingertips. I know your body better than someone with eyes.
Thanks to Plan 9, I have completed my beastly '60s Japanese triptych with Yasuzo Masumura's 1969 film Blind Beast. As befits a film made at the end of that decade, it is much more extreme than the earlier ones could be without being too explicit (even the Japanese had their limits). Eiji Funakoshi plays a blind amateur sculptor who becomes fixated on model Mako Midori, who came to his attention after posing for a series of bondage shots for a famous photographer. With the aid of his far too indulgent mother (Noriko Sengoku), Funakoshi kidnaps Midori and installs her at his remote warehouse studio so he can have her all to himself. Naturally this doesn't sit well with Midori, who is freaked out by the walls of body parts and the two large nude sculptures in the middle of the floor (which bring to mind Benjamin Pierce's artwork in David Cronenberg's Scanners).
Midori tries to escape several times, but eventually agrees to model for the determined sculptor, who has certain theories about exploring the "art of touching." Finally she uses sex to drive a wedge between mother and son, after which they descend into a sadomasochistic psycho-sexual relationship with an endpoint that prefigures Boxing Helena by more than two decades. It's the kind of film that can be extremely unsettling to watch, even if it isn't very graphic. Who needs a lot of blood and gore up on the screen when the worst is right there in your own head?
Sunday, April 20, 2008
It is only through enlightenment that this scourge can be eliminated.
I have never in my life partaken of what some call "the kind bud," but today is 4/20, so I chose to mark the observance by indulging in my own addiction: watching movies. And tonight I watched none other than Reefer Madness, the infamous 1936 exploitation film (which originally went out under the title Tell Your Children) that became a staple of the midnight movie circuit in the '70s. For those not in the know, Reefer Madness is an overly hysterical screed against the dangers of marijuana addiction, following a trio of clean-cut high school kids as they fall prey to its clutches. If the film is to be believed (and I see no reason why it shouldn't be), some of the symptoms of marijuana use include ecstatic jitterbugging, excessive kissing, hysterical laughter, unsafe driving at speeds in excess of 45 m.p.h., sexual aggression, torpor and listlessness, violent outbursts, disassociation of ideas, substandard tennis playing, tearful confessions and self-defenestration. Reefer Madness also shows the mundane side of the marijuana trade, depicting the petty domestic squabbles of dope peddlers, and features some of the worst fake piano playing ever put on film.
For my money, though, the highlight of the film comes near the end, when Bill, who used to be a top student and star athlete until marijuana made him lose interest in his studies, is on trial for the murder of Mary, the nice girl he once recited Shakespeare with while sipping hot chocolate. When his jury goes into deliberations there's one juror who believes there's a reasonable doubt, but this is a far cry from 12 Angry Men and he's quickly chastened into acquiescence. What tips the scene for me is when the foreman sees a shadow on the wall turn into a swinging noose, looks startled, and then goes right back to badgering the holdout. It's the kind of touch that makes you think the director was actually trying to show off or something. (I'm also highly amused by the newspaper that screams "HARPER VERDICT EXPECTED TONIGHT," with subsidiary stories like "NATION WARNED AGAINST TREND TO MACHINERY," "DICK TRACY, G-MAN, IN SENSATIONAL RAID," "3000 ADDITIONAL JAPANESE TROOPS ARRIVE IN CHINA" and "NEW LIVING BUDDHA REPORTED DISCOVERED." Hey, who cares about the high school kid accused of murder? There's a new living Buddha!)
Nobody will ever mistake Reefer Madness for high art, but it's the sort of film that can cause even the straightest arrow to start giggling uncontrollably. And the Legend Films DVD includes both a colorized version that enhances the entertainment value and a commentary by Mystery Science Theater 3000's Mike Nelson. Well worth the $10 investment.
Monday, April 21, 2008
By August the 22nd, two of these people would be dead, and one of them a murderer.
Right before the outbreak of World War II, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder collaborated on the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Immediately after the war they produced the medical thriller Green for Danger, which Gilliat directed and co-wrote. Set during the summer of 1944, when Britain is being bombarded by "buzz bombs," the plot is set in motion when a patient dies while being given anesthesia. Naturally suspicion immediately falls on anesthesiologist Trevor Howard, but it's not as clear cut as that, especially after a second victim is added to the roster, which brings Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard (played by the inimitable Alastair Sim) to the scene.
Sim's self-satisfied manner rankles Howard, but he's not the only one perturbed by it. During the course of his investigation Sim finds reasons to suspect everybody who was present at the operation, including surgeon Leo Genn, who didn't even get the chance to operate (although he's quite the smooth operator with the ladies), and nurses Sally Gray (who broke off her engagement to Howard just the night before) and Rosamund John (whose mother recently died in an air raid). Like Sim, Gilliat keeps us guessing right up until the very end who the actual murderer is -- as well as their reasons for doing it. Clearly he learned something from working with Hitchcock.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Perhaps it's the female beauty that makes him kill.
I realize it's entirely possible for someone to watch horror films all year round, but for some reason I tend to confine my viewing of them to the month of October, with some spillover into early November. Actually, the reason for this is not too mysterious; I'm simply in more of the horror mood around Halloween. Apart from the occasional anomalies like the Bob Clark films I watched over the winter, the notion simply doesn't occur to me. And with rare exceptions like Romero's Diary of the Dead or Zombie's Halloween, I just don't see them in the theaters. What's a horror fan like me to do? The answer is Halloween in April.
You've heard of Christmas in July. Well, Halloween in April works on the same principle, only without the dressing up (I don't care how much the car dealership is paying you, it's submoronic to wear a Santa suit in the height in the summer) or the candy (sure, it might be possible to get remaindered Easter candy for a steal right now, but pastels and blood red don't quite go together). To kick it off, I have gone with Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, the film that touched off the Italian "giallo" subgenre and established many of its trademarks. It's also one that I've been meaning to catch up with for years and that's no exaggeration.
Made in 1964, Blood and Black Lace is about a series of murders revolving around the fashion house run by countess Eva Bartok and her lover Cameron Mitchell. Seems a mysterious assailant dressed in a black trench coat, hat and gloves, and wearing a featureless mask, has started killing off their models, and police inspector Thomas Reiner is so clueless that the bodies continue to pile up even after he's detained all of his suspects. This is the sort of film that is more concerned with creating atmosphere and building up to shocks than having a logical plot or characters. For example, when one of the women finds a corpse stuffed into the trunk of her car, does she immediately phone the police? No, she drags the dead body into her house and stupidly hides it, even though she had nothing to do with the murder. Of course, this sort of thing doesn't seem to bother most giallo fans. Give us a few startling images and a well-staged murder set-piece or two and we're happy as clams (or, as the Italians call them, molluschi).
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
What's happening to me? This damned thing is turning into an obsession.
Back in the day, South Jersey's Exhumed Films occasionally had an "Argento vs. Bava Night," which is how I got to see Dario Argento's Deep Red b/w Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill and Argento's Inferno b/w Bava's Black Sabbath. Accordingly, it only seems right for me to follow Bava's Blood and Black Lace with Argento's first giallo -- and his directorial debut -- 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. As in the earlier film, the killer in Crystal Plumage is decked out in a black hat and gloves, only this one wears a shiny black raincoat. And Argento goes to greater lengths to fetishize the killer's gloves and glinting knife collection, frequently to the strains of Ennio Morricone's creepy score.
The plot is set in motion when American writer Tony Musante, who is in Italy to get over a bout of writer's block, witnesses an attempted murder in an art gallery and, much to his girlfriend Suzy Kendall's consternation, becomes obsessed with trying to solve it. This suits police inspector Enrico Maria Salerno just fine because, like most inspectors in giallo films, he's bad at his job and quite content to let a civilian chase down all the crazy leads (like the visit Mustante makes to an eccentric painter, which would be echoed later on in Deep Red). He also lets Musante take enormous risks, putting himself (and eventually his girlfriend) in danger. Never let it be said that the police in a giallo film have your best interests at heart.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
You haven't changed, I see. You always loved violence.
Had my own personal Argento vs. Bava Night Afternoon, watching Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body and Dario Argento's The Cat O' Nine Tails back to back. The former was a bootleg videotape of poor quality bearing the film's American title What, the latter a pristine Blue Underground DVD which restored 22 minutes of footage cut out of American prints. Both are relatively minor works in their respective director's careers, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that they were shot in English, but I figured I'd mention it.
Made in 1963, The Whip and the Body stars Christopher Lee as the disinherited son of a nobleman who returns to the family estate, where he finds he is less than welcome. He wants to have his entitlements restored to him, but his father has bestowed them on new favorite son Tony Kendall, even going so far as letting him marry Lee's former lover, Daliah Lavi, with whom he had a sadomasochistic relationship (his whip, her body). Lee's return stirs up her old feelings, proving that she may have married Kendall, but she's always belonged to Lee, body and soul.
As befits a Bava film of the period, The Whip and the Body is absolutely gorgeous to look at and includes some striking imagery (like the funeral that is attended by four red robed and hooded pallbearers -- not sure where they came from or what purpose they served, but they sure were cool to look at). The atmosphere of dread that Bava evokes is powerful and there are some surreal touches, too, like the muddy footprints that are tracked all over the castle. At first only Lavi sees them, but eventually the others do, too. Of course, why somebody entombed in a crypt would track mud everywhere is a puzzle the film never bothers to address.
Speaking of puzzles, Karl Malden is crazy about them in The Cat O' Nine Tails, which was released in 1971. Malden plays a former journalist who retired after he was blinded in an accident. One night he hears a crime being committed near where he lives and teams up with reporter James Franciscus to get to the bottom of it. This film is more indebted to Hitchcock than Bava, although I doubt even Hitchcock would have conceived of somebody killing off people who know they're genetically disposed to violence (thanks to an extra Y chromosome, according to Argento's script). This is also the second film in a row where Argento includes a distasteful gay stereotype. (In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it was a solicitous gallery owner. In this film, one of the suspects is a homosexual who patronizes "St. Peter's Club.") I wonder what I have to look forward to tomorrow night in Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
Friday, April 25, 2008
We made a deal, sure. Nobody said anything about murder.
Dario Argento concluded his unofficial "animal trilogy" with 1971's Four Flies on Grey Velvet, a bizarre and not entirely successful mix of suspense and horror about a rock drummer (Michael Brandon) who is tricked into stabbing a stranger while a ventriloquist's dummy takes photographs -- and that's just in the first ten minutes. Soon Brandon is being blackmailed by a mysterious individual, which leads him to assault his mailman, blow off his band mates and alienate his wife (Mimsy Farmer). Afraid to go to police for fear of implicating himself, he seeks the advice of guru Bud Spencer, who puts him in touch with downmarket private dick Jean-Pierre Marielle (playing one of the two distasteful gay stereotypes in the film, the other being one of the contacts he makes during his investigation). Eventually his wife splits and Brandon wastes no time hopping into bed with her cousin, which is precisely what I would do in the same situation.
There are a lot of things about this film that don't make a whole lot of sense and it meanders around when it should be ratcheting up the tension. (The private detective's investigation, for example, doesn't seem to go anywhere and quite literally comes to a dead end.) What starts out as a promising variation on giallo conventions gets sandbagged by interminable scenes of "suspense" with insufficient payoffs. By the time Argento starts getting creative with the deaths, all the viewer wants him to do is reveal who the killer is already and be done with it. One gets the feeling Argento was anxious to move on to other things at this point, too, but after a failed stab at comedy (the virtually unseen Five Days in Milan), he returned to the genre with 1975's stylish Deep Red -- his first film scored by prog group Goblin. Together they would become an almost unbeatable combination.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Stop pretending to be humanitarian. Have the courage to really come to terms with this crisis.
This afternoon, Halloween in April leaves Italy and boards an SST flight to Japan to take in Toho's Prophecies of Nostradamus, a heavy-handed environmentalist parable based on, well, the prophecies of Nostradamus. Made in 1974 and fairly swiftly banned in Japan and other countries -- despite breaking box office records -- it hasn't been seen in its 114-minute form since its original release. What Jeff was able to provide me with was the 85-minute international version, which is dubbed into English and subtitled in Danish. That means a huge chunk of the film is missing and what's left over plays like a '70s disaster film version of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (which brings to mind the 1981 Nostradamus documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, which was narrated by Orson Welles). Of course, neither of those films features an electronic score by composer/synthesizer player Isao Tomita, so advantage Prophecies.
Also seen on American television under the title The Last Days of Planet Earth, the film was directed by Toshio Masuda and features Tetsuro Tamba as a scientist whose belief in Nostradamus makes him something of an alarmist, Toshio Kurosawa as a photographer who can't stop taking pictures while society breaks down around him, and Kaoru Yumi as his pregnant lover (and Tamba's daughter). Tamba's views are looked down upon by the government, but it becomes harder to dismiss him when many of his dire predictions come to pass. The film starts out with word of an impending food crisis and a scene of children in surgical masks thanks to air pollution (decades before SARS), and continues with birds and animals dying by the thousands and the discovery of monster slugs, deformed babies (with a cameo by Takashi Shimura as a cold-hearted pediatrician), fast-growing weeds in the subway, and mutant children with exceptional abilities (and short lifespans). Soon enough the planet is faced with overpopulation, droughts, deluges, exploding jet airplanes, instant ozone depletion, fires, violent storms, flooding and outbreaks of hippies.
In the middle of all this, Tamba heads up a team of U.N. researchers in New Guinea studying the effects of a radioactive cloud over the island. They're actually the second expedition sent there -- one of their objectives is to find out what happened to the first (shades of Sir George Head's expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro, as well as Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters). Along the way they encounter carnivorous plants, giant bats, killer leeches and hostile cannibals (is there any other kind?). Meanwhile, back in Japan rationing is imposed, leading to food riots (this is fiction, remember, not World News Tonight) and a mass exodus from Tokyo, which spectacularly goes up in flames after one car overturns while trying to get through the bumper-to-bumper traffic. (I've heard of chain reactions, but this is ridiculous.)
Out of desperation, the youth of the nation begin committing ritual suicide by taking boats out to sea while dressed as a cross between kabuki actors and the cast of Godspell or by riding motorcycles over cliffs and plunging to their doom. In the end, Tamba's predictions expand to include volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, racial divisions and war which goes nuclear in 1999, leaving the surface of the planet uninhabitable, save for the "monsters" (i.e. atomic mutations) who are left to "stalk the earth." Not a pretty picture and it's what got the film in the most hot water. Maybe someday it will be seen in its uncut version again, but I'm not holding my breath.
28 days... six hours... 42 minutes... 12 seconds... That is when the world will end.
When a film has built up a sizable cult following over a short period of time, how is one supposed to approach it? Is it possible to write about it objectively or does one have to tread carefully lest they say the wrong thing? And what the hell was up with the guy in the bunny suit? These are some of the questions that ran through my mind as I watched Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko for the first time tonight. It's not a horror movie, per se, but it does take place in October, so it fits in perfectly with my Halloween in April. And it's a good follow-up to Prophecies of Nostradamus since it also deals with the end of the world, albeit in a more roundabout way.
Released in the fall of 2001, but set in 1988, Donnie Darko stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the title character, an emotionally detached high school honor student who's in therapy and on medication, but that doesn't prevent him from hearing strange voices in the night and doing their bidding. He's also in the habit of sleeping outdoors, which comes in handy one night when a jet engine falls out of sky and lands in his bedroom. It's when he starts listening to Frank, his new imaginary friend in the bunny suit, that things really get strange.
The film boasts an incredible supporting cast, with Maggie Gyllenhaal as Donnie's Harvard-bound sister, Mary McDonnell as his mother (who's first seen reading Stephen King's It), Patrick Swayze as a slick motivational speaker (is there any other kind?) with a series of tapes about Controlling Fear and a book called Attitudinal Beliefs, Jena Malone as the new girl at school who agrees to go with Donnie, Seth Rogen as one the class dicks, Noah Wyle as the science teacher who awakens in Donnie an interest in time travel, Drew Barrymore as the English teacher trying to reach her students any way she can, and Katharine Ross as the therapist who finds out more than she ever expected when she tries out hypnotherapy on Donnie.
Kelly establishes the time period with his soundtrack choices ("The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen, "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears, "Notorious" by Duran Duran, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, "Under the Milky Way" by the Church) and cultural references (voting Dukakis, Married... With Children, The Smurfs, Back to the Future, Rubik's Cube, The Evil Dead on an improbable double bill with The Last Temptation of Christ, Star Search and, of course, someone going as Hulk Hogan to a costume party). I caught all that. What escapes me is why the film developed such a fervent cult. It's got an intriguing premise, I'll give it that, but maybe I need to let it worm its way into my subconscious before I buy into it completely.
Monday, April 28, 2008
We should never try to deny the beast, the animal within us.
I'm a sucker for a good werewolf flick and the early '80s produced a number of great ones in a short period of time. The first one out of the gate was Joe Dante's The Howling, which benefited from Rob Bottin's innovative makeup/transformation effects, an intelligent script co-written by John Sayles (who has nifty cameo as a morgue attendant), and a pitch-perfect score by Pino Donaggio. Dante loves his in-jokes, so the cast of characters is littered with the names of directors of classic werewolf movies, and he gives screen time to great character actors like Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens and Dick Miller (once again playing Walter Paisley, his character from A Bucket of Blood) and cameos by Roger Corman (as a man lurking outside a phone booth so he can check for change) and Forrest J. Ackerman (who gets to flash copies of his Famous Monsters of Filmland fanzine).
The star of the film, however, is Dee Wallace, who plays a television reporter who is used as bait by the Los Angeles police to catch a notorious killer who goes by the name of Eddie (played by Robert Picardo, in his first of many roles for Dante). When she's traumatized by the experience, she and her husband (Christopher Stone, Wallace's husband in real life) accept the invitation of new age-y psychiatrist Patrick Macnee to stay at The Colony, which turns out to be a haven for werewolves attempting to live in peaceful coexistence with mankind. Of course, the more feral members of the community, led by the enigmatic Elisabeth Brooks, couldn't care less about coexisting with humans, they just want to feed on them -- and maybe turn a few of them while they're at it. The film even makes the prospect seem reasonably attractive. (If I had a choice between being turned into werewolf or a vampire, I know which one I'd pick.)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The police report said they were attacked by an escaped lunatic. Must have been a very powerful man.
I've long maintained that The Howling and An American Werewolf in London -- which was released just four months after it in August 1981 -- were tied for best werewolf film of all time, but having just watched them back to back I now have to say the latter definitely has the edge over the former. It's not just that Rick Baker's makeup/transformation effects are better -- that comes from having a larger budget -- but the human story is that much more involving thanks to the central performances by David Naughton (as the American student on a backpacking trip through Europe who gets bitten by a werewolf on the moors of Northern England and then runs amok in London four weeks later) and Jenny Agutter (as the nurse who loves him fangs, fur and all). Shoot, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I actually had tears well up as the film was drawing to a close because I knew there was no happy ending forthcoming for them.
The film was written and directed by John Landis, who had harbored it as a dream project from his early days in the film business. In fact, he wrote the initial draft of the script in 1969 when he was on location in Yugoslavia working as a production assistant on Kelly's Heroes. The twin successes of Animal House and The Blues Brothers a decade later gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, so this is what he chose to make -- the first modern comedy/horror hybrid. There had been previous films that alternated between scenes of mirth and fright (the Abbott and Costello Meet _______ series chief among them), but American Werewolf was the first with some real teeth. Sure, there are laugh lines aplenty, but this is a film where the laughs really stick in your throat. And it also has some incredibly well-crafted scenes of suspense (the chase through the London Underground is a particular standout).
The able supporting cast includes Griffin Dunne as Naughton's best friend, who doesn't survive the initial attack and returns as a progressively rotting corpse to warn him about his curse, John Woodvine as the skeptical London doctor who looks into his wild stories, Lila Kaye as the barmaid at the Slaughtered Lamb, the pub where Naughton and Dunne seek shelter on the night of the full moon, Brian Glover as the Northerner intent on keeping their werewolf problem a secret (with Rik Mayall as the chess player he handily beats in the opening scene) and Frank Oz as the tactless embassy official who's present when Naughton first comes around. And there's an amusing parallel with The Howling since that film starts with an encounter with a werewolf in a porno store and this film ends with a werewolf passing his last few hours in a porno theater before transforming one final time. The only real misstep is the pandemonium in Piccadilly Circus that follows. (You'd think The Blues Brothers's plentiful pileups would have satiated Landis's car crash fever, but alas, no.) It's only a minor distraction, though. The best werewolf film of all time retains its crown.
Back to March 2008 -- Onward to May 2008
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