Greece is the word

Jean Seberg ponders the black box

It’s been said that you can sometimes determine how much enthusiasm Claude Chabrol had for a film he’s directed by the attention that’s been lavished on the cuisine. Provincial cooking plays an integral part in La Cérémonie, Le Boucher serves lamb metaphorically rare, and pivotal discussions are held over dinner in Ten Days’ Wonder and La Fleur de mal. In La Route de Corinthe (1967), Jean Seberg eats sardines from the can and Maurice Ronet sips beer and nibbles on cold cuts — we’ve obviously hit the low-rent district. New on region-1 DVD (under its cheeky American title, Who’s Got the Black Box?), those skimpy noshes coincide with a feeble scenario about spies hunting for radar jamming devices. Chabrol’s disinterest in James Bondian intrigue is palpable, a lethargy compounded by the miniscule budget that forced most of the action outdoors into the midday sun, the cast trudging dutifully through waterfront shanties and featureless rock quarries. Legend has it that Chabrol doesn’t recall filming his 1976 wreck, Folies bourgeoises (aka The Twist) at all, that it was the byproduct of a week-long drinking binge; La Route de Corinthe suggests that that may not have been an isolated incident. Light-years away from À bout de souffle, Lilith and Bonjour tristesse, Seberg remains a compelling screen presence, even though Jean Rabier’s camera does little to conceal the bruises on the actress’s (and not her character’s) stomach and legs. Her tragic death was just twelve years away. (Pathfinder’s DVD includes a Chabrol biography written by Flickhead.)

Buy from Amazon

Read about Jean Seberg at tedstrong.com.

The abyss

Above: Red eye, blue eye, aye-aye. Phyllis Kirk and Vincent Price in House of Wax (click to enlarge).

Being now in the midst of the so-called ‘holidays,’ I recall the adage that floats around therapy groups and 12-Step meetings this time of the year: “Depression [or addiction, or alcoholism, etc.] is a three-fold disease: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.” One could sit here and rattle the skeletons in the closet, and things could get dangerously personal. Dare I discuss in public that dark night in 1969 when my parents annihilated their wreck of a marriage?

    It was New Year’s Eve, and our segue into the new decade kicked off with the two of them in formal attire, and my eleven-year-old body packed into a tailored suit. (Dad supposedly made big bucks; mom rarely bought off the rack.) But as nine o’clock rolled around, we learned that dad had made arrangements that didn’t include us. My parents exchanged heated words right out on the front lawn, within earshot of four or five houses in the neighborhood. He slammed the door of his car and went off into the night — to screw his secretary, as I’d find out years later. He would never live with us again.

    Her best jewelry dangling, her hair ‘done,’ and her ‘face on’ (do women still ‘put their face on,’ I wonder?), mom sat at the kitchen table, frantically pouring over the newspaper to find something for us to do, muttering about “getting out of the house.” The next thing I knew she was grabbing me by the arm and telling me to get into the car.

    We drove to a movie theatre for a ten o’clock show, a revival of the 3D horror movie, House of Wax (1953), still suited up so elegantly for New Year’s Eve. My guess is that mom ‘wanted people to think’ we were going out clubbing afterward. She was always deathly afraid of ‘what people might think,’ and it would take me more than twenty fucking years until I understood what a crock of shit that is — hence my awareness of the adages that float around counseling sessions and 12-Step programs.

    There were five or six people in the audience, a sad little group doing their best to get through a tough night without reaching for the razor. Unwanted, uninvited to party, cast aside to watch Vincent Price and a young Charles Bronson terrorize Caroline Jones and Frank Lovejoy in 3D. I’m sure the usher and the popcorn girl would’ve been hanging themselves if they weren’t so young and hopeful.

    3D means wearing glasses and mom had hers on, a cardboard veil that did nothing to hide the stream of tears running down her face onto her pearl necklace. For some ninety minutes she sobbed quietly, even during the one interesting and lively scene I remember, a barker playing paddleball to the camera.

The Concert for Bangladesh

Above: Klaus Voormann, George Harrison and Jesse Ed Davis
(click to enlarge)


Above: Billy Preston and George Harrison
(click to enlarge)

Above: One of Flickhead’s most profound lust issues of the ‘70s, singer Claudia Lennear (orange blouse). The Rolling Stones song “Brown Sugar” was written about her, the David Bowie song “Lady Grinning Soul” was written about her, and she appeared in Playboy. All before my stunned and ravenous eyes.

(click to enlarge)


Above: Leon Russell, a significant influence on my own style of piano playing.
(click to enlarge)

It’s been nearly thirty years since I last saw The Concert for Bangladesh (1972) on the big screen. After its initial run, the film became a common and popular attraction on the midnight show circuit. How many times I watched it in 35mm and 70mm is anyone’s guess. But as video put the squeeze on things in the early ‘80s, those midnight shows became a memory, and the film and I parted ways.

    Seeing it now on a brand new DVD edition, the flaws that were once obscured by a clouded mind in theatres thick with marijuana smoke (Flickhead used to frequent only the most accommodating venues) are now patently visible. The image is grainy, several of the songs feel rushed, the concert seems much shorter than it should be. Which brings us to the part where objectivity goes out the window.

    Held at New York’s Madison Square Garden in August 1971, the concert was a fundraiser organized by George Harrison. His ‘back-up band’ included Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan. If younger readers of this blog are barely cognizant of those names, they’d probably draw a blank on Klaus Voormann, Carl Radle, Jesse Ed Davis, and Jim Keltner.

    At the time, however, these were the crème de la crème of studio musicians. Drifting freely from album to album, studio to studio, star performer to star performer, you could hear virtually any combination of them on just about anyone’s recording. It happened after the breakup of The Beatles, when orderliness became a joke; by the end of the decade, their kind would dissolve in the war between commercial pop and punk.

    After The Beatles, Harrison made the excellent All Things Must Pass, a three-album set. He was poised to become the ex-Beatle most likely to succeed. Concert for Bangladesh draws on several of its songs, notably “Wah-Wah” and “Beware of Darkness,” sharing vocals with Russell on the latter. I was a big Leon Russell fan at the time, believing his high-energy medley of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Youngblood” to be the movie’s centerpiece. It holds up remarkably well, a grand composite of rock, gospel and guttural sexuality.

    I had a lump in my throat and got teary-eyed when Billy Preston performed “That’s the Way God Planned It”. Regardless of the present climate of conservative Christianity that’s been a nagging concern in newspapers and magazines, I doubt if contemporary popular music shares such strong ties to spirituality as demonstrated on that stage thirty-five years ago — by artists once regarded as heathens by the mainstream, no less. Preston, Russell, Dylan and Harrison sang of faith and healing, of holiness and love. Deliberately void of glamour, they offered a comprehension and appreciation for the existence of something greater than themselves. Preceded by Ravi Shankar (whose introductory set, “Bangla Dhun”, dances on air), the spirituality becomes manifest.

    The keyword, though, is repeated in Preston’s lyric: humble. An intentional demeanor locked squarely in faith, it abandons self will, and liberates with humility, a state of grace. Although they’re quick to announce their Christianity, I haven’t seen or heard such words or actions out of the corporate-minded conservative right presently taking charge, and I doubt I ever will. But they can set an example for others to do differently, if that’s the way God planned it.

Buy the DVD from Amazon


Buy the CD from Amazon

Related links:

Jesse Ed Davis

Klaus Voormann

Carl Radle

George Harrison

Ravi Shankar

Eric Clapton

Jim Keltner

Billy Preston

Leon Russell

Back lot Haiti, or: Please don’t squeeze the shaman

Recommended browsing music: Boogie Nights by Heatwave

Click images to enlarge:

VOODOO DEVIL DRUMS (1944/Toddy) 44mins. BW. US.
Features voodoo rites, witchcraft and magic with an all-black cast.

This Budd’s for you!

Above: Budd Boetticher ‘directing’ a punch (click to enlarge)

“Budd Boetticher explored the base essentials of the Western,” wrote Martin Scorsese in A Personal Journey Through American Movies. “His style was as simple as his impassive heroes — deceptively simple. The archetypes of the genre were distilled to the point of abstraction.” Woefully underserved on DVD, Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now (1956) comes out this week from Paramount.

Mostly known for the series of seven Westerns he made with Randolph Scott in the 50’s, Boetticher also wrote and directed The Bullfigher and the Lady (1951), based on his own experience as the first American to become a professional matador in Mexico.

Despite all of his films, Boetticher’s most memorable work is an autobiography, When In Disgrace. A fragmentary attempt to penetrate the alcoholic haze clouding a delusional man’s perception, it traces a stunted career in the bullring and ‘problems’ with authority figures in Hollywood. Amazed by his own good fortune in marrying actress Debra Paget, Boetticher sets his more fascinating accounts south of the border, from getting gored in the ass by a testy toro, to days and nights in rat-infested drunk tanks. A textbook example of self-will run riot, it surely deserves a second printing. (Copies are scarce.)

Turner Classic Movies will broadcast Seven Men from Now on Wednesday, December 21, at 9:30pm (EST). They will also show the new documentary, Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, the same day at 8pm and 11pm (EST).


Buy from Amazon!

A nook for Anouk

In the ‘60s, films by Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut took America not exactly by storm — they were generally limited to upscale urban ‘art houses,’ and very often dubbed. But the one import that did make a sizeable dent in cities and suburbs across the country was Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (1966), better known as A Man and a Woman. A ‘date movie’ of the highest order, it played in first run for months, and composer Francis Lai’s haunting theme song became a bouncy anthem for starry-eyed romantics.

A Man and a Woman
Original soundtrack by Francis Lai

1. Un Homme et une femme - orchestral
2. Samba saravah
3. Aujord'hui c'est toi - vocal
4. Un Homme et une femme - vocal
5. Plus fort que nous - orchestral
6. Aujord'hui c'est toi - orchestral
7. A L'ombre de nous - vocal
8. Plus fort que nous - vocal


Get the movie
At Amazon

A note to readers who requested that we use YouSendIt for downloads: They’ve changed their format and, quite frankly, I can’t figure out how to use it. Besides, their downloads only last for seven days.

Herbert L. Strock 1918 — 2005

(Click to enlarge)

Low budget science fiction and horror movies made in the 1950’s were once a staple on television (I remember them mostly on New York’s local stations, WPIX, WOR and WNEW) and theaters were still booking such inexpensive rentals as the genre perennials How to Make a Monster (1958) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) for their Saturday matinees well into the ‘60s. Those two were directed by Herbert L. Strock, who, with absolutely no fanfare or notice, died last week at the age of eighty-seven.
    He wasn’t a major player in the business, and his name never carried the clout of Roger Corman or William Castle in the exploitation market. Nor was he much of a craftsman: on the whole, his films are virtually interchangeable with nearly anything else you can think of that came out of American International Pictures at the time. It would take a sharp eye (or a delusional mind) to make a case for recurring leitmotifs or aesthetic trademarks.

(Click to enlarge)

    But the few pictures of Strock’s that I’ve seen posses a creepy aura, a vaguely subliminal influence. Something that he may have considered vulgar or obscene is tucked away between the lines of paper-thin scripts about mad scientists and vampires. Not that that should invite claims to an auteur’s hand — the subconscious predilection for latent homosexual adult characters controlling drifting, unfocused and ripe teenagers were key elements likely prompted by his occasional writer and producer, Herman Cohen.
    Blood of Dracula (1957) finds a temperamental young woman manipulated by the butch headmistress of an all-girl’s school; I Was a Teenage Frankenstein has b-movie regular Whit Bissell constructing vacant-minded beefcake out of dead bodies; and in How to Make a Monster a Hollywood makeup artist forced into early retirement drugs young actors to kill the higher-ups putting him to pasture.

(Click to enlarge)

    Although it sailed clear over the heads of kids like myself who watched it on “Chiller Theatre” or “Creature Features” forty years ago, the hint of an erotic relationship between the women in Blood of Dracula recalls the lesbian undertones of the creaky Universal chestnut, Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which had its ties to Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu’s nineteenth-century vampire story. The homosexual undercurrent motivating Bissell’s Dr. Frankenstein has him committed to a “straight” partnership with Phyllis Coates for appearances. But he spends most of his waking hours in the basement, obsessively piecing together gym hunk Gary Conway, ostensibly a fresh replacement for the aging toady lab assistant played by Robert Burton. Is it all a zany twist on Nabokov’s Lolita?
    Meanwhile, Robert H. Harris’s character in How to Make a Monster fawns over boytoys while plotting with his aging toady sidekick, ‘Rivero.’ The suffocating environment moves its crescendo to Harris’s seedy digs, a resting place for obsolete monster costumes and masks. That Strock and Cohen stretched the budget to film the last few minutes in color — if you’re drunk enough, it can play like a weird homage to Portrait of Jennie — may have been AIP’s sign-off to a profitable decade. (In a few months they’d be preoccupied with Edgar Allan Poe and Frankie Avalon.) How to Make a Monster should be required viewing for buffs, for it’s The Bad and the Beautiful warped and on a shoestring, relocated to Poverty Row and lacking every ounce of glamour that that implies.

The god thang

Dexter Gordon

According to what it says here, Arts and Faith is “the best place on the Web for discussion of Christian faith, the arts, and much more…” They recently had the chutzpah (sorry, I couldn’t resist) to put together a list of 100 titles of “Spiritually Significant Films,” and if you go there you’ll notice that they’ve trademarked that moniker. Which may mean that I’ll go straight to hell (or court) if I refer to “Spiritually Significant Film” without authorization. (Christian forgiveness only goes so far.)

    The round-up is pretty much what you’d expect — obligatory nods to Bresson, Dreyer and Bergman mixed in with Mel Gibson’s gory Jesus movie and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, that queasy speculative fantasy of George Cukor tackling Budd Schulberg out west — On the Waterfront meets Heller in Pink Tights. These days no one, not even Arts and Faith, pays much attention to Nick Ray’s King of Kings or DeMille’s Ten Commandments, though I’d rather watch either one of those old chestnuts before Franco Zeffirelli’s puffy and dutiful Jesus of Nazareth, which came in at number thirty-seven.

    Missing from the countdown is Majid Majidi’s extraordinary The Color of Paradise, which warrants a place among the top twenty-five, certainly before Dead Men Walking or A Man for All Seasons. It may be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Arts and Faith to recognize John Huston’s Fat City or Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating as saintly ideals. And Bertrand Tavernier’s Un dimanche à la campagne and ‘Round Midnight are also absent, inexplicably so given that they convey more genuine compassion and wisdom than Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, two cases of lumpy overload. (I’ve known a few people — heathens? — who’d ring Benigni’s neck just for laughs.)

    Aside from its heartfelt recreation of nightclub life and Dexter Gordon’s touching performance, ‘Round Midnight approaches introspective and spiritual themes, first by addressing a man’s loss of his mentor (Robert Bly once used the film to illustrate his theory of the “male mother”), and then by showing the construction and creative process of music. Jazz is America’s most overlooked and underplayed musical genre, but it represents the free soul and art in perhaps its purest form. Gordon plays tenor sax in the picture, which also features Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, Pierre Michelot and other jazz greats improvising on camera. While the Pope may not agree, I think that Tavernier’s movie holds more spiritual weight than Mel Gibson’s whipped and bloodied Jesus or Jim Carrey wishing away Kate Winslet. And the music is divine.

‘Round Midnight
Original soundtrack; recorded in 1985

1. ‘Round Midnight (5:35)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Ron Carter, bass. Tony Williams, drums. Bobby McFerrin, vocals.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

2. Body and Soul (5:54)
Dexter Gordon, tenor sax. Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. John McLaughlin, guitar.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

3. Bérangère’s Nightmare (3:06)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. John McLaughlin, guitar.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

4. Fair Weather (6:05)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. Chet Baker, vocal and trumpet.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

5. Una Noche con Francis (4:22)
Dexter Gordon, tenor sax. Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. Bobby Hutcherson, vibes. Wayne Shorter, tenor sax.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

6. The Peacocks (7:16)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. Wayne Shorter, tenor sax.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

7. How Long Has This Been Going On? (3:12)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. Lonette McKee, vocal. Dexter Gordon, tenor sax.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

8. Rhythm-a-ning (4:11)
Dexter Gordon, tenor sax. Freddie Hubbard, trumpet. Cedar Walton, piano. Ron Carter, bass. Tony Williams, drums.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

9. Still Time (3:50)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Pierre Michelot, bass. Billy Higgins, drums. Dexter Gordon, tenor sax.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

10. Minuit aux Champs-Elysées (3:26)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Bobby Hutcherson, vibes.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3

11. Chan’s Song / Never Said (4:15)
Herbie Hancock, piano. Ron Carter, bass. Tony Williams, drums. Bobby McFerrin, vocals.
    YouSendIt mp3
    RapidShare mp3