Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
September 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Your strike may be for your demands, but what wife want, that come later. Always later.
As it's Labor Day, a pro-union film seemed appropriate, but I didn't feel like watching Norma Rae (sorry, Sally Field, it's not that I don't like you, but...). Instead I went with the 1954 independent film Salt of the Earth, which was banned on its release for its political content and had to be developed and edited in secret once the authorities got wind of it. Directed by Herbert J. Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the late '40s, and co-written by blacklisted screenwriter Michael Wilson, the film told the true story of a strike at a New Mexico zinc mine that dragged on for 15 months. While the mostly Mexican-American workers were striking for equal pay, their wives wanted sanitary drinking water and eventually joined and -- after the company got an injunction against the miners -- replaced them on the picket lines. It's an inspiring film made all the more extraordinary by the fact that the majority of the actors in it were non-professionals.
Just as the Italian Neorealists stacked their films with real people essentially playing themselves, Biberban only used a handful of professionals -- including Will Geer, who plays the town sheriff -- in Salt of the Earth. One of the others was the extraordinary Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who narrates the film and fights not only for racial, but also sexual equality. Naturally her husband, played by Juan Chacón, disapproves of her involvement in the strike, but he like all of the men has to learn not to take his wife's strength for granted. In fact, without them it would have been all over long before the company caved to their demands. (Hey, you didn't think leftist filmmakers would make a film about a union that lost its battle with its evil capitalist overlords, did you?)
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
If you don't pull me out of this swamp of boredom, I'm going to do something drastic.
It's been several months since my last Hitchcock fix, so to get back into the swing of things I could think of no better film than 1954's Rear Window, which I got to see in theaters when a newly restored print made the rounds in 2000. Based on a story by Cornell Woolrich and a screenplay by John Michael Hayes (his first of an unprecedented four in a row for Hitchcock), the film stars James Stewart as a daredevil magazine photographer laid up with his leg in a cast who has taken an unhealthy interest in his neighbors across the courtyard, Grace Kelly as his fashion plate girlfriend trying to convince him to settle down, Thelma Ritter as the straight-talking nurse who berates him for being a peeping tom, and Raymond Burr as the traveling salesman they all come to believe killed his nagging, invalid wife. If you need to know whether he did it or not, there's a reason why Hitchcock had Burr made up to look like David O. Selznick.
Hitchcock and Hayes take their time setting up the situation, introducing us to all of the characters in the courtyard and establishing Stewart's prickly relationship with Kelly and Ritter. Things start to pick up, though, once Hitchcock makes his cameo, winding the clock in one of the neighbors' apartments -- just like he winds up the tension in the story. By the time Kelly is impulsively breaking into Burr's place to get an important piece of evidence, we're just as afraid for her as Stewart is when Burr comes back earlier than they expected. The most chilling shot in the whole film, though, has to be the moment when Burr realizes he's being watched and looks straight into the camera, not only endangering Stewart, but also implicating the audience in his voyeurism. After all, haven't we been watching, too?
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Money isn't dirty. Just people.
1954's Pushover may be a minor entry in the film noir canon, but it's a highly enjoyable one. The film stars Fred MacMurray as a cop assigned to watch Kim Novak after her boyfriend robs a bank and kills a guard in the process. At first he doesn't like the assignment, but then he starts to develop a thing for her and, once he's put in charge of the stakeout at her apartment, starts spending a lot of time watching her through binoculars (shades of Rear Window) and getting funny ideas about how he can get his hands on the missing money. The film also features Philip Carey as MacMurray's partner, who spends a lot of his binocular time watching the pretty nurse (Dorothy Malone) who lives next door to Novak, and E.G. Marshall as their boss, who's eager to see results. MacMurray is able to stay a step ahead of everybody else for a while, but just as in Double Indemnity (of which this is a pale imitation), there are always some contingencies that you simply can't plan for.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
I feel like I'm being shoved into a corner and if I don't get out soon, it will be too late.
August was a pretty good month for obscure noir films on Turner Classic Movies. In addition to Pushover, I also managed to tape 1950's Quicksand, which stars Mickey Rooney as an auto mechanic who needs money fast to take a pretty cashier out and makes the mistake of lifting $20 from the till at the garage where he works. The $20 becomes $100 when he hocks a watch he doesn't own to pay it back, and the $100 becomes $3,000 when he has to steal a car to keep a blackmailer quiet about a robbery he pulled to get the $100, and, well, you see how it doesn't take long for Mickey to get in over his head. He would have been a lot better off if he'd never laid eyes on vamp Jeanne Cagney, who covets a $2,000 mink coat and would do anything to get it, or gotten mixed up with her old boss, joyless penny arcade proprietor Peter Lorre. His salvation comes when nice girl Barbara Bates, who's been playing doormat throughout the whole picture, starts talking sense to him and he starts listening. That's the thing about quicksand: you usually need somebody else to pull you out.
Do you mind if I take the reins? I like to know where I'm going.
Criterion doesn't often venture into western territory, so when it does the film in question must be something special. Such is the case with Anthony Mann's The Furies, which he made in 1950, the same year as his classic western Winchester '73. The film stars Barbara Stanwyck as the strong-willed daughter of powerful rancher T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston, making his last screen appearance), who controls a huge swath of land in the New Mexico territory and is in the habit of printing up his own money. He also has it in for saloon owner Wendell Corey, which naturally sends Stanwyck straight into his arms, but Corey proves to be a tough nut to crack. Meanwhile, there's trouble at the Furies when Huston comes home from a trip to San Francisco with wealthy widow Judith Anderson on his arm. All of a sudden Stanwyck's inheritance looks a lot less secure, and she has to fight for what she believes she's entitled to. If that means she to ruin her own father in the process, well, so be it.
Friday, September 5, 2008
One way or another, we all work for a vice.
Caper films don't come much more moody and fatalistic than 1950's The Asphalt Jungle. Directed by John Huston, it stars Sterling Hayden as a small-time hoodlum recruited for a big-time jewel heist concocted by criminal mastermind Sam Jaffe, who is eager to put his plan into effect right after he gets out of prison. Louis Calhern co-stars as the high-society lawyer on his uppers who bankrolls the job as a way of keeping both his invalid wife and his mistress (delicately played by Marilyn Monroe) in the lifestyles to which they're accustomed, with Jean Hagen as the sweet girl who's stuck on Hayden and John McIntyre as the irascible police commissioner cracking down on organized crime. The crime in this film is organized all right, but once some people start getting too greedy it doesn't take long for the whole to go down the tubes.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
I've got a headache this big and it's got Roger Corman written all over it.
I don't know why I thought I'd seen Roger Corman's 1959 monster quickie The Wasp Woman before, although it's probably because its premise is very similar to that of 1960's The Leech Woman, which MST3K tackled during the Sci Fi Years. And now that Cinematic Titanic has given the treatment to The Wasp Woman, the circle is complete.
Written by Leo Gordon, who also penned Attack of the Giant Leeches the same year for Roger's brother Gene, the movie stars Susan Cabot as the aging head of a multimillion dollar cosmetics company that's gone in the dumper ever since she had to remove herself as the product's spokesperson. Desperate to turn back to the clock, she funds the research of crackpot scientist Michael Mark, who champions the rejuvenational properties of queen wasp extract. Soon Cabot is mainlining the stuff and, when she can't get a fix, transforming into an actress wearing a silly wasp mask and pincers. The movie also features Corman mainstay Bruno VeSota as a chubby nightwatchman who becomes one of Cabot's victims and Corman himself as a doctor. I wouldn't exactly say Corman acquits himself like a pro, but he doesn't embarrass himself, either.
As for Cinematic Titanic's evisceration of the movie, it is well-deserved and up to the crew's usual standards. Unlike Rifftrax or the Film Crew, which are straight commentaries on the films they're riffing, CT goes the extra step and brings back the silhouettes, which was a key component of the audience's identification with Joel (and later Mike) and the Bots. Instead of being stuck in one corner, though, they're ranged about the screen, and instead of leaving the theater for the host segments (which, to be perfectly honest, were the weakest link on the Film Crew DVDs), they just stop the film and do their bit right then and there, often incorporating a clever sight gag. No matter how it's done, though, as MST3K approaches its 20th anniversary (the first KTMA-TV episode aired on November 24, 1988), it's good to see the tradition being carried on.
People knew a cinemateque was needed, but Langlois alone succeeded.
This afternoon I watched a documentary on the Rear Window DVD that touched in part on the film's painstaking restoration. I then followed it up with the 2004 feature-length documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque, which is about the first man who believed that films were worth preserving to begin with. Starting in the mid-'30s, Langlois worked tirelessly to collect films and film memorabilia and held screenings that grouped films by director and theme, essentially providing the template for future film programmers and auteur theorists alike. The French Cinémathèque's screening room became a second home for the likes of Godard and Truffaut during the '50s and they -- along with famous filmmakers from around the world -- came to Langlois's aid in 1968 when he was ousted as head of the Cinémathèque, assuring his eventual reinstatement. Langlois's crowning achievement, though, was his Museum of Cinema, which sought to immerse museum patrons in the history of cinema in a unique and memorable fashion. Too bad he didn't have long to enjoy it.
Only the French would house a cinema inside a palace.
The perfect complement to Phantom of the Cinematheque is Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers, which is set against the backdrop of the Cinémathèque's forced closure in the spring of 1968. Written by Gilbert Adair and based on his own novel, the film stars Michael Pitt as a 20-year-old American film buff who came to Paris to study the language, but wound up soaking up the cinema instead. When the Cinémathèque is closed he's at loose ends until he's invited to stay with sister and brother Eva Green and Louis Garrel while their parents are away. Pitt is attracted to Green and loves debating film, music and politics with Garrel, but it takes some doing for him to shed his inhibitions around the two of them. That he will is something of a given considering the film's rating (NC-17, "for explicit sexual content"), but how he gets there is somewhat unique.
As all three of them are film buffs, Green and Garrel initiate Pitt into their game of acting out a movie scene and making the other guess what it is. Fail to do so and you have to take a forfeit -- kind of like Truth or Dare, but with classics of world cinema. He also joins them for an exhilarating dash through the Louvre just like the leads in Band of Outsiders, after which they accept him (a la Tod Browning's Freaks). Bertolucci includes frequent cutaways to those and other films as the characters reference them, but those fall away as the situation inside the apartment intensifies and Pitt gets more involved with Green and Garrel. For a time they even manage to forget that the outside world exists -- that is, until it comes crashing through their window one night. Even the heaviest sleepers must awake from their dreams sometime.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
In our world the only thing that counts is who dies first.
Japaese writer Yukio Mishima had a brief screen acting career, starting with 1960's Afraid to Die, in which he starred as a yakuza underboss who narrowly escapes death on the day he's to be released from prison and then continues to dodge it once he's out. Directed by Yasuzo Masumura, who went on to make Blind Beast at the end of the decade, the film presents a cynical world where the police employ yakuza as strikebreakers and the yakuza employ asthmatic hitmen to take out their rivals. While hiding out in the family cinema, Mishima takes advice from his uncle (Takashi Shimura), who tells him to take out his rival before his rival takes him out, and his brother (Eiji Funakoshi), who talks to him about going straight. At first he can't imagine anything beyond the yakuza life, but slowly changes his mind after he takes up with a pretty young cashier (Ayako Wakao), who loves him even after he rapes her, slaps her around and tries to force her to have an abortion when she gets pregnant. What a swell guy.
Monday, September 8, 2008
This man was Abel Davos, sentenced to death in absentia.
Continuing the theme of gangsters returning home under a cloud of danger and suspicion is 1960's Classe Tous Risques (known as The Big Risk when it was shown in America). Directed by Claude Sautet, the film stars Lino Ventura as a Parisian gangster forced to return with his family from exile in Italy when the police there start closing in. He pulls a daring daylight robbery to get enough money to travel on, but eventually finds himself in desperate straits, on the run with two young sons in tow. He makes a desperate call to an old crony, who sends petty thief Jean-Paul Belmondo (fresh off his star-making role in Godard's Breathless) to smuggle them to Paris, but Ventura soon finds out that he can't depend on old friends -- and it's too late for him to make new ones.
By the time he got to make Classe Tous Risques, Sautet had spent a decade working as an assistant director (his last such job was on Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, which was made the same year). From what I've read, this film is fairly uncharacteristic of his work, but I like it because of reminds me of the classic French crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville with a New Wave twist courtesy of Belmondo, who gives an extremely likable performance as the only guy in Paris that Ventura can trust. This film was little-seen on its initial release, but hopefully now that Criterion has given it a place of honor in its Collection, it will reach a wider audience.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
It's not worth playing the game unless you play it to the hilt.
In 1972, Michael Caine starred opposite Laurence Olivier in the film version of Anthony Shaffer's hit play Sleuth. In it he played Olivier's wife's lover, who comes to his house to ask him to give her a divorce, which prompts Olivier -- who is a writer of crime novels -- to initiate a deadly game of cat and also-cat with him. In 2007, Caine starred opposite Jude Law in the remake, only this time he was the older chap and Law the young turk who's schtupping his wife. Another crucial difference is while the first film was very faithful to the play (hardly surprising since Shaffer wrote the adaptation), the screenplay for the remake was written by Harold Pinter, who used the basic premise and precious little else. And instead of a stuffy old country house, now the writer lives in a sleek, high-tech residence with everything at the press of a button and security cameras everywhere.
Those cameras give director Kenneth Branagh the opportunity to open the film with a number of arty compositions, often keeping the characters at a distance and even deliberately obscuring their features. This pays off to a degree later on, but at the start it's extremely off-putting and comes across as too show-offy. And Pinter's dialogue goes from being purposefully mannered to patently ludicrous as the film progresses and the story quite frankly goes off the rails. At a certain point the characters just stop being believable and, since we're not expected to identify with either one of them, it doesn't particularly matter who comes out on top in the end. I realize that the point of the film is how they play the game, but it helps to know enough about it to care about the outcome. In short, a disappointment.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The police are chasing the wrong man. Someone's got to start chasing the right one.
Found myself with an afternoon at liberty, so I used it to catch up with To Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock's second collaboration with screenwriter John Michael Hayes and his third and final film with Grace Kelly before she became Princess Grace. Released in 1955, the film stars Cary Grant as a retired cat burglar who comes under suspicion when a spate of jewel robberies breaks out on the French Riviera. As is often the case with Hitchcock, it is the innocent party who must track down the real culprit while the police continue to dutifully hunt down the wrong man.
In order to clear his name, Grant gets help from Lloyds of London representative John Williams (not the composer), who is anxious to recover the stolen jewels so his company does has to pay out the insurance claims, and sparks an unlikely alliance with Kelly, who plays the daughter of one of the burglar's potential victims. Just as important as the actors, though, are the fabulous costumes designed by Edith Head, particularly at the climactic fancy dress party where Grant hopes to unmask the copycat. Coming so close on the heels of Rear Window, the film may seem like something of a trifle, but it would be petty to complain overmuch about such a pretty bauble.
This is the single most perfect acoustic machine I have ever seen.
Ten years ago today, Francois Girard's The Red Violin premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It subsequently won eight Genie Awards (Canada's answer to the Academy Awards), had similar good fortune at the Jutra Awards (which honors achievements from the Canadian region of Quebec), and won the Oscar for John Corigliano's original score. Not bad for a film about a violin that gets passed down through three centuries, but having seen what Girard could do with the life of Glenn Gould, I knew it wouldn't be your typical omnibus film.
Written by Don McKellar and Girard, The Red Violin interweaves five stories, starting with the violin's creation, which coincides with its maker's wife's troubled pregnancy, and ending at an auction house in Montreal where the violin is the subject of a protracted bidding war. In between we spend time with the some of the people who have been in its thrall, including a sickly Austrian orphan, an English libertine (Jason Flemyng) who is likened to the Devil, and a Chinese idealist (Sylvia Chang) who tries to keep it out of the crossfire of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The one who falls under its spell most completely, though, is Samuel L. Jackson's modern-day appraiser, who is the first to recognize the Red Violin for what it is and tries to keep that knowledge to himself.
The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, with Greta Scacchi as Flemyng's lover, who is given ample reason to be jealous of the violin, Colm Feore as the smooth auctioneer, Monique Mercure as the auction's sponsor, Don McKellar as the restoration expert who gets roped into being Jackson's partner in concealment, and Sandra Oh as the wife of Chang's grown-up son, who is one of several parties with a personal interest in acquiring the violin. And then, of course, there is Joshua Bell, whose solo violin playing binds everything together. It's impossible to imagine what the film would be like without his contribution.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I should have worked on my own, but I let feelings get in the way.
After watching Classe Tous Risques on Monday, I resolved to see more Lino Ventura films. Since Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxième Souffle isn't due out for another month, I decided to fill the gap with Jacques Becker's 1954 film Touchez Pas au Grisbi (a.k.a. Hands Off the Loot!). Jean Gabin stars as an aging gangster who has pulled a 50 million franc job with his partner of 20 years, played by René Dary. When Dary blabs about it to showgirl Jeanne Moreau, though, they have to contend with upstart dope supplier Lino Ventura (making his screen debut), who wants to cut in on the action. Luckily Gabin knows he can count on club owner Paul Frankeur, who may have retired from the life -- something Gabin desperately wants to do -- but he's still eager to take up arms to help a friend. Competent as he is, when it comes to the final confrontation -- complete with a car chase and machine guns -- Gabin needs all the help he can get.
The world is ending tonight at midnight, and that's kept me pretty occupied.
Ten years ago today, Don McKellar's Last Night was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. According to McKellar's biography at the IMDb, it was one of six films he was involved with that screened at the festival that year, but I expect it was the one he was most proud of since it was his first feature as a director. (Heretofore he had written and acted in several, but his only directing credits had been on two shorts, one of which -- 1992's Blue -- came to my attention because it starred David Cronenberg.) I first saw Last Night in the spring of 1999 at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema and had planned on seeing it again when it came to the Ritz that fall, but alas, it didn't hang on long enough to make it to New Year's Eve, which would have been perfect. This is because the film depicts the last six hours before an unexplained cataclysm that will end all life as we know it on the planet is due to occur. That's a bit more extreme than what the doomsayers said about the so-called "Y2K" bug, but people were pretty freaked about that, as I recall.
In contrast, most of the Torontonians facing oblivion in Last Night are fairly resigned to what's going to happen. McKellar plays a widower who fulfills a family obligation before returning to his apartment to greet the end of the world on his own terms. Sandra Oh gets stranded on the wrong side of town when hooligans wreck her car and she has to ask McKellar for help getting home to her husband. Sarah Polley plays McKellar's sister, who plans to join in a mass gathering of revelers with her boyfriend. David Cronenberg is a super-dedicated gas company executive who personally calls every customer to let them know that the gas will stay on right until the end. (He gets a lot of answering machines.) Tracy Wright is the lone employee who is tasked with staying behind to make sure the gas stays on line. Callum Keith Rennie goes about fulfilling all of his sexual fantasies, one of which includes bedding his high school French teacher (Geneviève Bujold). And Jackie Burroughs plays a runner who acts as a kind of town crier, counting down the hours until the end. About the only character we see who doesn't have it together is the mother on the stalled streetcar played by Arsinée Khanjian. Then again, it makes sense that not everyone would be able to keep their wits about them.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
I've got the feeling we'll be an invincible team.
You've gotta love Italian-German-French-Yugoslavian co-productions. Case in point: 1967's The Three Fantastic Supermen, a film co-written and directed by "Frank Kramer" (actually Gianfranco Parolini). It stars Tony Kendall, Brad Harris and Aldo Canti (credited as Nick Jordan) as a trio of acrobatic thieves who use their bulletproof supersuits and other gadgets to evade the authorities (although it isn't long before it comes out that Brad is actually an undercover FBI man). If they have one superpower, it is the ability to jump around on conveniently placed trampolines (at least that's what constantly giggling mute Nick does). If they have another, I clearly missed what it was, although it could possibly be supersmarminess.
Their first job as a team is ransacking the vault at the embassy of a fictional Middle Eastern country, but soon they're after a bigger score, namely the "Universal Reproducer," which can duplicate anything: gold, dollar bills, even people. Naturally it's fallen the hands of devious philanthropist Wilford Golem, who runs a school for precocious children called the Island of Smiles as a front for his world domination scheme. The film is full of ridiculous dubbed dialogue (my favorite line is when one of the sub-villains sneers, "We're going to hold those fools in their car as long as possible. They'll burn like a big pile of hay.") and a mildly disturbing scene where the three heroes run around in nothing but their capes and skimpy underwear (this is a kid's film, right?). Apparently that failed to scare audiences away and it was followed by seven sequels, including 1968's Three Supermen in Tokyo, 1970's Three Supermen in the Jungle and 1979's Three Supermen Against the Godfather (which somehow involves a time machine, which is all I really need to know).
This is a crucifixion. This is political. And don't tell me it's not.
Second time's the charm, I guess. Saw the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading this afternoon -- all the way through this time. Their first original screenplay since 2001's The Man Who Wasn't There, it is a convoluted comedy about intelligence -- those who work for it, those who have it and those who are without it. John Malkovich's C.I.A. analyst falls into the first category until he's taken off the Balkans desk by his superior (the always-welcome David Rasche), whereupon he quits rather than suffering the ignominy of being transferred to the State Dept. In the second category go Malkovich's wife (a chilly Tilda Swinton) and her lover, Treasury agent George Clooney, whose quirks include various food allergies, an obsession with exercise, and clandestine do-it-yourself projects. And in the third category go Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, two dim-witted gym employees who come into possession of a computer disc with Malkovich's unfinished memoirs on them and unwisely try to shake him down for its return. See, McDormand would like to get some plastic surgery, which her Mickey Mouse HMO won't cover, and Pitt, well, I doubt he has any personal motivation beyond pure greed.
Things gets complicated pretty quickly, what with all the people cheating on their spouses and engaging divorce attorneys and so forth, so periodically Rasche goes to his superior at the C.I.A. (the priceless J.K. Simmons) to explain what's going on. Now, normally I hate movies where one character has to explain the plot to another character, but with this film it's not only necessary, but the Coens also manage to make it hysterically funny. And for my money, the film's MVP is Coen stalwart Richard Jenkins as the sad-sack gym manager with a hopeless crush on McDormand, who's too busy hooking up with strangers on an internet dating site to notice him. It's a bit of a lightweight after No Country for Old Men, but at least it proves that the Coens still have the comic touch -- and I'm ready to forget that The Ladykillers ever happened.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Can this happen to a normal woman?
As it's the full moon -- and October is right around the corner -- I have decided there's no time like the present to get my werewolf back on. Picking up where I left off in May (with 1996's execrable Bad Moon), and skipping right over An American Werewolf in Paris, the next high-profile werewolf flick to come out was 2000's Ginger Snaps, which is about two teenage sisters who have enough problems even before one of them survives a werewolf attack during a full moon. Deliberately alienating themselves from their peers and their clueless parents, they amuse themselves by compiling a photographic record of creative suicides and dissing their more popular classmates. Then older sister Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), who's not quite 16, gets her first period (three years late) and a werewolf bite on the same day, leading 15-year-old Brigitte (Emily Perkins) to spend the next month boning up on both lycanthrope lore and menstrual cycles.
Ginger, meanwhile, starts showing an interest in boys, which alarms Brigitte, but not as much as the other changes she starts to go through (growing hair in strange places, developing sharp nails and canines, and growing a prehensile tail, among other things). For help, Brigitte turns to the local drug dealer (Kris Lemche), who not only takes her seriously, but also agrees to help her find a cure. Of less help is the girls' mother (Mimi Rogers), who is so thrilled that they're finally becoming women that she doesn't notice that one of them is turning into something else entirely. This may not be the first film to equate the emergence of a young woman's untapped sexuality with turning into a monster (that would be Brian De Palma's Carrie), but it's probably the one that does it best.
This film, incidentally, was directed by John Fawcett from a screenplay by Karen Walton (based on a story by Walton & Fawcett) and they manage to deliver the genre goods while putting a decidedly feminist twist on the werewolf mythos. They also have a unique take on the werewolf itself -- it's much less hairy than its cinematic forebears (or should I say forewolves?). I've heard mixed things about the two follow-ups (2004's Ginger Snaps: Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning), though, so I'll probably just leave it at this one.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
If you kill for killing's sake, you become a monster.
Watched Mario Bava's 1971 proto-slasher film A Bay of Blood, which was released on DVD by Image as part of "The Mario Bava Collection" under the title Twitch of the Death Nerve, which is a bit less direct. After all, the film is set at a very picturesque bay where people go to be murdered violently (which may not have been their intentions, but it is the result). In a film like this, the reasons why are infinitely less important than the methods how and the makers of the DVD very thoughtfully include a "Murder Menu" that allows you to skip straight to any of its 13 gruesome deaths. Whether that amounts to pandering to the audience or simply recognizing what they would watch a movie like this for is not for me to say.
Co-written, directed and photographed by Bava, A Bay of Blood opens with a scene of a wheelchair-bound dowager rolling around a dark room for a few minutes until the music gets loud and she is creatively dispatched by a man wearing black gloves. He doesn't stick around long, though, for he is almost immediately knifed to death and dumped in the bay. Then we cut to two more people, one of whom has to leave immediately to close a deal at the bay. Then we cut to a fisherman wrangling a squid who gets into a philosophical argument with a man who's obsessed with insects -- and all the while the two of them are being watched by a mysterious man and woman. Then we cut to a quartet of joyriding youths who find an abandoned nightclub on the bay and make a nuisance of themselves next door to a woman who is reading tarot cards very quietly to herself. Then one of the four youth decides to go swimming in the bay (completely nude, of course), finds the dead body and is chased and savagely killed by an unseen assailant. After her friends quickly follow suit, we cut to a couple (the mysterious man and woman from earlier) who leave their kids alone in a camper so they can drive to the bay and investigate her father's disappearance.
It was around this point that I stopped taking notes. Quite frankly, I found it a relief when Bava and his co-writers stopped adding characters and started having them pick each other off. I did find it annoying, though, that he kept having the picture go in and out of focus during the transitions -- and I haven't seen so many zooms outside of an Altman film. One has to wonder whether Bava the director ever thought to tell Bava the cinematographer to stop drawing so much attention to the camerawork. Somehow I doubt that very much.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Bury him, I say, and have done with him. He's no good to anyone now.
Back in 2000, I had the chance to see a few films in a Hitchcock retrospective at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia. The first one I picked was 1955's The Trouble with Harry, which also has the distinction of being the first Hitchcock film I even saw on the big screen. An unconventional choice, to say the least, but I've always been an idiosyncratic filmgoer, so I bypassed titles like Rope and Psycho and gravitated to the ones that seemed less likely to make return appearances. One of Hitchcock's most low-key films, The Trouble with Harry is that he's dead and a number of New Englanders all have reason to believe that they're the ones who did him in, which leads to Harry being buried and dug up several times over the course of a single autumn day.
The cast of possible murderers is headed up by retired captain Edmund Gwenn (appearing in his fourth and final film for Hitchcock), who was out shooting rabbits and may have shot Harry instead. Then there's young mother Shirley MacLaine (appearing in her first film for anyone), who was unhappily married to Harry and is the mother of a very young Jerry Mathers, who was the first person to discover the body. And then there's town spinster Mildred Natwick, who was attacked by Harry and hit him in self defense. All of them in turn call on starving artist John Forsythe to help bury and exhume the body as each new revelation comes out. Even after they have everything sorted out amongst themselves, they still need to worry about keeping deputy sheriff Royal Dano in the dark, which is no easy task.
The film as a whole is quite droll and the screenplay (by John Michael Hayes, his third in a row for Hitchcock) is full of sly jokes that often have a double meaning. They may have been a little too subtle, though, for audiences in 1955 didn't exactly flock to see it. (The film was better-received overseas, where its mordant humor was more readily appreciated.) Even today it's more of a curiosity than anything, but it's probably best known as being the film that brought composer Bernard Herrmann into Hitchcock's stable of collaborators. Herrmann's score for Harry is sprightly and upbeat, but it occasionally detours into the darker themes that would color most of their work together. Comedy or no, it's still about a dead body.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
These days there are so many dirty hoodlums. You don't see many real yakuza.
Getting back to Seijun Suzuki after a three-month break, I got his 1965 film Tattooed Life through Netflix. It's the story of a low-level yakuza (Hideki Takahashi) who carries out a hit for his clan, but then has to escape when he is targeted for elimination himself. Fleeing with his artist brother (Kotobuki Hananomoto), they get fleeced by a con artist and then go to work in a mine to pay for passage to Manchuria. Their goal is to keep a low profile, but romantic entanglements ensue when the artist brother falls hopelessly in love with the boss's wife (Hiroko Ito), and her younger sister (Masako Izumi) falls hopelessly in love with the yakuza.
The longer they stick around, the more danger they're in of the yakuza clan catching up with them, and when it does Suzuki lets loose with blood-red skies and cool-blue backgrounds. He even shoots through the floor at one point -- anything to keep the visuals from getting generic. The best sequence, though, has to be when Takahashi takes up the sword and, after infiltrating the enemy clan's headquarters, takes on dozens of fighters single-handedly. It's a testament to his skill (which we've never had reason to doubt) and Suzuki's control of the medium. It also points the way toward Tokyo Drifter, which burst onto the screen the following year. That's one I've been looking forward to seeing for some time.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
I exist on the best terms I can.
One film I wanted to see last year that never made it to Bloomington was Control, the biography of doomed Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. Directed by Anton Corbijn (heretofore a photographer and video director best known for his work with Depeche Mode, U2, Nirvana and others) and based on the book Touching from a Distance by Curtis's widow Deborah Curtis, the film starts in 1973 when Curtis (Sam Riley) is a disaffected teen listening to David Bowie records in his room. He marries young, goes to work at an employment agency, and, after attending the seminal Sex Pistols performance that was also one of the focal points of 24 Hour Party People, joins fledgling band Warsaw, which subsequently changes its name to Joy Division.
Things move quickly from there, with the band meeting impresario Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) and manager Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell), who push them into bigger things despite the onset of Curtis's previously undiagnosed epilepsy (he has his first fit on the way back from their first London gig). Meanwhile, Curtis has to deal with the pressures of being a new father, and his wife Debbie (Samantha Morton) becomes more and more marginalized as time goes on, especially once he takes up with a Belgian groupie (Alexandra Maria Lara). If he was distant and uncommunicative before, that's nothing compared to how he is after his wife confronts him about the affair.
If Control has a major flaw, it is that the first half is much more propulsive and entertaining than the second half, which is somewhat unavoidable considering how Curtis ended up. By choosing to tell the story strictly chronologically, Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh had no choice to end on a down note, which makes me think it may have been wiser to deal with Curtis's suicide up front. After all, anybody who knows even a little about Ian Curtis knows that he took his own life, so when he finally goes through with it, it's not much of a shock. Incidentally, last year also saw the release of a feature-length documentary on the band (called, creatively enough, Joy Division). It should be worth checking out.
Monday, September 22, 2008
I would not advise more than a temporary visit.
Before he joined forces with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, with whom he made some of Britain's greatest films of the '40s, Michael Powell was a seasoned writer/director in his own right. Case in point: 1937's The Edge of the World, which is about a remote island off the coast of Scotland and the inhabitants who face the choice of staying true to tradition or leaving to seek an easier life on the mainland. The story is told by sailor Niall MacGinnis (with Powell as the yachtsman he tells the story to after having him put ashore), who recalls the events leading up to the island's evacuation, which are tied up with the Manson family (no, not that Manson family).
Patriarch John Laurie sees no reason to change things that have worked for a thousand years or more, but his son Eric Berry wishes to leave the island and marry a girl on the mainland. Meanwhile, daughter Belle Chrystall is due to marry MacGinnis, but that gets postponed after tragedy strikes. Along the way Powell shows us how people in such an isolated community live and the hardships they have to endure (such as 75-minute sermons -- that's longer than the film itself!). These would be themes he would return to again and again over the course of his career, both with and without Pressburger. And 40 years later he would Return to the Edge of the World to make a short film about its making. The next time TCM shows it, I'll be sure to check it out.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
There's nothing like taking a nice quiet bomb apart to steady the nerves.
The writing/producing/directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (who called themselves "The Archers" to announce that they were always on target) made some of the most enduring contributions to British film both during and immediately after World War II. 1949's The Small Back Room was for them the best of both worlds since it saw them coming off the twin Technicolor triumphs of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes and returning to the wartime setting that had previously served them so well. They also reverted to the moody black and white photography of their wartime films, which perfectly complements the dark turns the story takes.
The film stars David Farrar as an embittered cripple (he lost a foot under circumstances never explained in the film) who works as a research scientist trying to figure out ways of defusing bigger and better bombs when he isn't fighting a battle of wills with a bottle of whiskey. About the only steadying influence in his life is office secretary (and his Black Narcissus co-star) Kathleen Byron, but even she can't help it if she has to work late some nights. After all, there is a war on. This fact hits home when Farrar is brought in by army captain Michael Gough on a hush-hush situation involving a newfangled German bomb that has already claimed the lives of a number of civilians, most of them young boys. They don't make much progress on that front, though, until one is set off by a gunner (played by future director Bryan Forbes) who clings to life just long enough to give them some vital information.
The Small Back Room is a recent addition to Criterion's ever-growing Collection and it's doubtful it would have found a home on any other distributor's release slate. As well-regarded as they are by cinephiles, Powell and Pressburger's films are virtually unknown as far as the average movie-watcher is concerned, which is a real shame. Of course, I'm far from the average movie-watcher, but you probably already knew that.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Don't you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?
I expect more people have seen Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much than his 1934 original, but that's hardly surprising considering the position he was in when the later film was released. It was Hitchcock's fourth and final collaboration with screenwriter John Michael Hayes (they had a falling out over the writing credit) and his third with star James Stewart, playing an Indianapolis doctor on vacation with wife Doris Day in Marrakesh when they get caught up in a deadly assassination plot. They have to keep quiet about it when their son is kidnapped, but that doesn't stop them from trying to find him themselves -- and possibly preventing the assassination while they're at it.
As in the earlier film, the assassination attempt takes place at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with composer Bernard Herrmann standing in as the conductor. Instead of composing a new piece for the sequence, though, Herrmann chose to reuse the one that had made the original so memorable. The way it leads up to a climactic crash of cymbals, you really couldn't ask for a more perfect soundtrack to suspense -- and Hitchcock milks it for all it's worth. Of course, he also manages to do the same for "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," which goes to show just how good he was at that sort of thing.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
It's hard to describe the scene here as tension mounts by the minute.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger closed out their longtime partnership with a pair of war films, the first of which was 1956's The Battle of the River Plate (retitled Pursuit of the Graf Spee when it was first shown in America). It tells the true story of a German surface raider that caused havoc with merchant ships in the opening months of World War II and the trio of British vessels that set out to stop it. Made with the cooperation of the navies of several countries, it has a cast of hundreds (maybe even thousands if you count all the extras), with a number of familiar faces thrown in like Peter Finch (as the noble captain of the Graf Spee), Bernard Lee (as the captain of the merchant vessel that's sunk at the beginning of the film -- and the recipient of the grand tour that shows us what the British forces are up against), Patrick Macnee (as a commander who scuttled his own ship rather than let it be taken), Donald Moffat (as the lookout on the commodore's ship), John Le Mesurier (as the padre on board the Exeter, the first ship to be knocked out of the battle), and Christopher Lee (as a Uruguayan club owner who gets greedy when the Graf Spee docks in neutral Montevideo to lick its wounds).
Like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was made the same year, this film was shot in the widescreen format VistaVision, but unfortunately TCM chose not to present it letterboxed, so I missed out on some of the effect. According to the IMDb, it was the Archers' most financially successful film. After one more collaboration, though (1957's somewhat uninvolving Ill Met by Moonlight a.k.a. Night Ambush), the two of them went their separate ways. Would Powell not have made the career-killing Peeping Tom if he had still been working with Pressburger? It's entirely possible, but I'm still glad that Peeping Tom got made. It's probably the Michael Powell film I've seen the most over the years and I'm looking forward to watching it again very soon.
She's my model and I don't want anybody messing around.
One of the few films Michael Powell was able to complete after Peeping Tom -- and his last full-length feature -- was 1969's Age of Consent, based on the novel by Norman Lindsay. James Mason stars as a tortured Australian painter who is a success commercially but feels bankrupt creatively. Fed up with the New York art scene, he returns home and takes a shack on a mostly deserted island on the Great Barrier Reef. There he meets a girl (played by a very young Helen Mirren) who lives with her tyrannical grandmother and is trying to save enough money to move to the mainland. (At one point she buys herself a fancy handbag, just in time to beat an amorous boy over the head with it.) She eventually agrees to model for Mason (for a fee, of course), but their work is interrupted by Mason's deadbeat friend Jack MacGowran, who arrives uninvited and looking for a handout. He provides a great deal of comic relief (as does the dog that Mason brings along, thinking it will be his only companion), but the overall tone that the film strikes is of a creative artist regaining his inspiration. It's easy to see why that would have drawn Powell to the story.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Doesn't anybody work in this bloody country anymore?
The bomb-defusing scene at the end of The Small Back Room put me in mind of Richard Lester's 1974 film Juggernaut, which climaxes with a very similar sequence, this time set aboard an ocean liner that has been targeted by a terrorist bomber. Lester took on the film while he was in the midst of postproduction on The Four Musketeers (which was originally going to be part of The Three Musketeers until it was decided to split that into two films) and even managed to get it out first, which goes to show what a quick worker he could be when the occasion called for it. He also took what could have been a simple work-for-hire job and in a brief space of time transformed it into an unmistakable Richard Lester film.
Juggernaut is frequently lumped in with the disaster film boom of the '70s, but it has a lot more on its mind than simply introducing a horde of minor stars and character actors and picking them off (or sparing them) at regular intervals. That said, it does have a most impressive cast, headed by Richard Harris as a champion bomb expert (who, like David Farrar in The Small Back Room, also smokes a pipe) and Omar Sharif as the captain of the Britannic, which is launched with much fanfare while it's still being refitted, which makes for unsteady going when it reaches heavy seas. (Lester has said that the film is a commentary on the state of British society at the time it was made, which is something else that sets it apart from the likes of The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and so on.)
As for the supporting cast, it includes David Hemmings as Harris's second in command, Anthony Hopkins as a police superintendent whose wife and children are on board, Shirley Knight as an American socialite having an affair with Sharif, Ian Holm as the managing director of the cruise line, Clifton James as a politician who knows when he's being lied to, Roy Kinnear as the social director who has his work cut out for him even before it's announced that the ship is in danger of being blown up, Julian Glover as a Navy commander, Kenneth Colley as a police detective, and Freddie Jones, Cyril Cusack and Michael Hordern as some of the suspects interviewed while Scotland Yard tries to ferret out the culprit. And on the production end of things, Lester was able to employ his regular composer Ken Thorne, with whom he had last worked on The Bed Sitting Room, and editor Antony Gibbs, whose efforts combined to build the tension to almost unbearable levels. One of the quintessential thrillers of the '70s.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
I think Turkish cinema just committed suicide. Without knowing it.
Before he would agree to send me any more movies, Jeff told me I needed to take my medicine, and that meant I could no longer put off Death Warrior, the 1984 Turkish martial arts extravaganza co-written, co-directed, produced by and starring Cuneyt Arkin. Arkin has acted in over 250 movies and TV series (and directed 26 of them) and Death Warrior came at about the midpoint of his long career, when the Turkish pop cinema boom was on its last legs. The version Jeff sent me isn't subtitled, which is probably just as well because I doubt you would be able to follow it even if you could understand what people were saying. The main thrust of it is that Arkin is a policeman who, through the use of repeating shots, reversed film, strategically placed trampolines and slow motion (not to mention music and sound effects lifted straight out of kung fu flicks -- that is, when they're not being borrowed from Flash Gordon and Pyscho), is able to defeat ninja master Osman Betin and his hordes of warriors.
I took copious notes, but instead of trying to put them into some kind of coherent order (because it's not like the filmmakers tried to), here they are (virtually) unedited:
martial arts demo ... ninja home invasion ... mummy paw thing ... tender dialogue scene ... scimitar duel -- draws blood, but none left on blades ... police action ... back to demo, rock levitation + explosion ... blindfolded ... back to NHI* ... press conference ... back to couple at beach for more tender dialogue ... NHI ... demo ... chase through streets/woods ... dishwashing disturbed by headless pigeon thrown through window ... inexplicable walking shot into meeting with gov't official ... beach -- different suits, at least** ... tender goodbye scene ... demo ... drive to building site ... gets on plane ... demo ... worst foley ever recorded -- like someone walking on tin roof ... psychedelic training flashback ... demo ... girl in red dress runs through woods, lost, waits for The Force from The Evil Dead to catch up with her ... hero confronts ninja ... girl shows appreciation/NHI ... gov't meeting ... ninja ambush -- bulletproof*** ... talk with pipe-smoking fat man ... cigar-smoking fat man**** ... motorcycles to meeting with shirtless slobs ... press conference with pipe-smoking fat man and inexplicable roving cameraman ... pleasant drink + cigarette ... makeshift morgue ... clawed marshmallow face ... creeping vines that kill bodyguards ... wet ninja kidnap fat guy ... dark and stormy night ... motorcycle melee ... training... well, I hesitate to call it a montage ... waking nightmare ... girl turns into frog? ... NHI ... motorcycle chase ... interrogate fat guy ... through catacombs with girl ... bow + arrow ... final confrontation with bad guy ... exploding rock/dummy on fire ... stay down, flaming dummy!
There you have it. What could be more straightforward than that? Incidentally, the subject line comes from a short Mondo Macabro documentary Jeff appended to the tape (the movie itself barely runs 73 minutes). Jeff says he has more Turkish delights in his collection, but so does Plan 9 here in town. It may be a while before I'm ready to sample another one, though.
* Actually a different ninja home invasion. I couldn't tell that at first, though, because it was shot exactly the same as the first and the victim looked the same, too.
** I think this was an attempt to show that they were supposed to take place on different days. Of course, how many men really own more than one swimsuit?
*** They must get their outfits from the same guy who supplies the Three Fantastic Supermen.
**** These may, in fact, be the same fat man. Then again, maybe they're not.
You know... for kids!
When I read this morning that Paul Newman had died, I knew exactly which film of his I was going to watch tonight -- 1994's The Hudsucker Proxy. The Coen Brothers' first shot at a big-budget studio picture, written with their longtime buddy Sam Raimi, it was something of a flop on its initial release, but those who took a chance on it (and I was one of them) had a rapturous experience that simply can't be recreated on the small screen (especially not with the bare-bones DVD that's out now). It's a story of failure and redemption, a neo-screwball comedy about a schmoe from the sticks (Tim Robbins) who comes to New York full of big ideas (well, one big idea) and through a cosmic fluke winds up running a major company. Newman is the senior executive who promotes him thinking he'll cause the stocks to plummet, but he underestimates Robbins's pluck and vision -- as does Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper reporter Jennifer Jason Leigh, who takes him for an imbecile and sets out to prove he's a phony. He's the real deal, though, and so is his extruded plastic dingus. If you ask me, though, this movie is worth watching just for the way Paul Newman says "dingus." Sure, sure.
Monday, September 29, 2008
In Cuba, anything goes if you've got enough dough.
At first glance, I Am Cuba seemed like an odd addition to the Onion AV Club's New Cult Canon (for starters, the film was made in 1964), but since it wasn't seen in this country until 1995, it would have been rather difficult for it to gain a cult audience before then. It's about as blatant as propaganda gets -- a Soviet-financed epic about the injustices and degradations endured by the Cuban people in the '50s under Batista's regime and a rallying cry to the side of Fidel's revolution -- but it transcends its ideological origins through the sheer power of its images and the awe-inspiring long takes frequently employed by director Mikhail Kalatozov (best known for 1957's The Cranes Are Flying, which won the Golden Palm at Cannes) and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky. In fact, there are several shots that make you wonder how in the hell they managed to get them at all, let alone in one. It's an incredible piece of movie history that, propaganda or no, stands alongside the greatest films ever made.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
What kind of country is this, anyway?
Set in the waning days of Batista's regime (after the simmering tension seen in I Am Cuba has reached a boiling point), Richard Lester's 1979 film Cuba has long been one of my favorites. Written by Charles Wood (who scripted many of his '60s films) and photographed by David Watkin (ditto), the film stars Sean Connery as an ex-British officer who has been brought in as a counterinsurgency expert, but by the time he gets there (with outdated information, no less) it's a case of too little, too late. Besides, he has other things on his mind once he's reunited with an old lover (Brooke Adams) who has since married into one of Cuba's oldest and richest families. How eager she is to leave her life of privilege is another matter entirely.
Connery isn't the only foreigner with business in Cuba. American businessman Jack Weston is also in the country to buy up the cigar factory Adams runs for her indolent husband (Chris Sarandon), and British exile Denholm Elliott is chummy with a corrupt general (Martin Balsam) while making money on the side running guns to the rebels. Balsam is the one who hired Connery in the first place, but his greed overrides his military prowess since his soldiers (with the exception of Hector Elizondo, who is busy shepherding Connery around) are mostly put to use emptying parking meters. The film has quite an eclectic cast, and it even includes David Rappaport (before his days of banditry through time and space) as the cigar factory foreman who keeps things running smoothly for Adams until the rebels call for a general strike. Then it's every man and woman for themselves as they scramble to leave Cuba with all haste -- and as much money and valuables as they can carry.
Back to August 2008 -- Onward to October 2008
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