The Irene Dobson Papers

Candace Hilligoss, Carnival of Souls

Shortly after my Bringing Up Baby piece appeared on Flickhead, I received a letter from my correspondent Eddie Biesel. In it he recalled how, following the closure of the Bijou in 1988, the people of Penwicken were invited to a sale of paraphernalia relating to the cinema’s glory days. In amongst the posters, lobby cards and old ushers’ uniforms there was a dusty faded box file with Irene Dobson’s name neatly typed on a label on the lid.

    In amongst the correspondence with distributors and print couriers, papers relating to the taxes and upkeep of the building, faded copies of program annotations, there were some random notes on individual films scribbled or typed up on lined foolscap paper. Irene Dobson was not a professional writer so her style was not particularly polished. Sometimes her enthusiasm got the better of her judgment. But her insights could be provocative and astute. She was a dedicated cinephile and, like the best cinephiliac writing, her prose fairly springs from the page when enthused by some overlooked and fugitive pleasure. I think the following observations, written at various times between 1975 and 1987, capture something of her unique sensibility and presence as a moviegoer.

—Richard Armstrong

My Darling Clementine
    When she strolls into the saloon, just by her presence Clementine Carter brings an end to all the rough talk, silently bidding good men live up to their destinies. In this role Cathy Downs, only 22 at the time, elicits a reverence usually reserved for much older, more experienced actresses. Silence falls as she enters the smoky back room to find Doc Holliday. Later there is a super profile shot of her with the desert dusk behind her little brunette head. A true American princess! Later she bides her time in the empty saloon and Wyatt Earp strolls in, unaware that she is there. For a brief moment, we see this grave upstanding man standing in the light from the doorway through the eyes of a young woman who is falling in love for perhaps the only time in her entire life, and all of a sudden she is home: “I love your town in the morning, Marshal, the air’s so clean and clear.”
    “Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river,” the townsfolk sing, luring this genteel pair to make their way to the church social. Hesitant, coltish, Wyatt shyly looks at Clementine standing beside him, debating with himself over whether to ask her to dance with him. He plucks up the courage, she removes her jacket as if she has been waiting for these words all her life. The final shot of Clem finds her, like he was in the saloon doorway, a clean upstanding figure amid a sea of shifting sand and sagebrush.

Cat People
    Why does Irena visit Alice at the pool? Does she like to look at her? To eat? Like a canary? “There are some things a woman doesn’t want other women to understand,” Irena tells Oliver. But I think there are some things Irena wants only Alice to understand. “Irena’s perfume…strong…sweet,” Alice says as she returns to the flat where the beastly psychiatrist has come to call.
    Perhaps Alice likes the smell of Irena just as Irena likes the shape of Alice. And Alice is a good girl. Conscientious, always wanting to go to work, take down figures from Mr. Reed like a secretary, like Carol Richman, Hildy Johnson. I admire Alice!

I Walked with a Zombie
    Betsy Connell is drawn to Mr. Holland because there is “something clean, honest” about him. When she calculates how much Rand drinks because she is a nurse and used to measuring fluids from little bottles with her eyes, Betsy seems such a capable girl. But when she meets Mrs. Holland near the staircase at dead of night they are like wraiths meeting in Bauhaus.
    Mrs. Holland is like Irena in Cat People living in limbo. Meanwhile, Betsy and Mr. Holland communicate on an unspoken spiritual level. The strange thing is that the film wants the black magic all around them to fight the rational voices of medicine. How much research went into the skull and circle of stones, the fetishes, Mr. Carrefour guarding the crossroads, when Betsy escorts Mrs. Holland to the voudoun ceremony at the ‘Home Fort’? How much of the ceremony is authentic from proper books? I keep thinking of Maya Deren. Did Jacques Tourneur know Deren’s films? During the ceremony Mrs. Holland looks like a Renaissance icon of the Madonna.
    The shadows of the grillwork, then branches and leaves as Betsy is awoken by the strange man in her room and stumbles into the garden writes the strangeness on her body like a tattoo. Can any of us be the same after that night?

Bringing Up Baby
    Miss Swallow is commendably dedicated to David’s career. “My future wife has always regarded me as a man of some dignity.” Then why is Miss Swallow wearing a pince nez when we last see her? She must have good eyesight. She is not very old. Miss Swallow is right — David is a butterfly! And that is why I don’t like Bringing Up Baby.


That the following notes were given a title suggests that Dobson had a fuller piece in mind:

Marie de 7 à 7
    In Carnival of Souls Mary drives her Chevrolet Impala through the night like Marion Crane, a cold fish in a graceful steel antelope who lets no man in. She manages to wrest her car from a ditch without help. Then there is a close-up of Mary in bed that reminded me of the somnambulist Mrs. Holland in I Walked with a Zombie. Then there is beastly Mr. Linden and the close-up of his piggy eye. (I wish I was Buñuel!)
    Later on in the department store Mary changes in a cubicle. What a pretty little black dress! I love her mouth — like Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti — and did Candace Hilligoss have rhinoplasty? But then Dr. Samuels seizes her by the arm in the street, gripping her so hard it must have hurt! (I hate the way men assumed that they could just handle a woman in the old films.) “I’ve no desire for the close company of other people.” That’s telling Dr. Samuels! And Mr. Linden is so awful. And Harvey doesn’t let the actor court me or you. Mr. Linden’s prurience, his sexual aggressiveness and stupidity alienate us and that’s an end to it. The film seems to will M to go back to the old carnival in search of her ghostly dance partner in his nice black suit.
    What is so lovely about the film is its odd mixture of the natural and the macabre. When the little bird starts singing as Mary returns to the living, and the sun glints through the leaves in the park, it is nothing short of springtime. And the light shimmering on the water before the zombie heads appear is so relaxing on the eyes. And the play of shadows beneath the slats of an arcade make such pleasant patterns against Mary’s face, bust and tummy. What M knows is precisely what we cannot know about ourselves; that she is going to die.

—Irene Dobson


I am grateful to Eddie Biesel for bringing the writings of Irene Dobson to my attention.

—Richard Armstrong

Claude Chabrol Gallery

Click images to enlarge:


Bernadette Lafont in
À double tour
(1959)



Stéphane Audran and Bernadette Lafont in
Les Bonnes femmes
(1960)



Jean Seberg in
La Route de Corinthe
(1967)



Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran in
La Femme infidèle
(1969)



Claude Chabrol



Chabrol portrait by Roberto Frankenberg



Chabrol portrait by Serge Cohen

Ryan Larkin

Above: Chris Landreth imagines a CGI Ryan Larkin in Ryan

A friend recently sent me an e-mail with information on a Canadian artist named Ryan Larkin, who made animated short films in the 1960’s. I’d never heard of Mr. Larkin before, but found some interesting material about him on the internet. Perhaps the best place to start is Last Exit on St. Laurent Street: The Wonderfully Fucked Up World of Ryan Larkin by Chris Robinson: “In the 1960s, Ryan Larkin was a 19-year-old protégé of Norman McLaren. With McLaren’s support, Larkin was given a rare carte blanche at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and made one of the most influential animation films of all time, Walking (1968). By 1999, Larkin was living on welfare in a mission house and panhandling for spending money. How the hell did this happen?”

    In 2004, filmmaker Chris Landreth made a short film about Mr. Larkin, titled Ryan: “A gentleman panhandler. One of the pioneers of Canadian animation. Oscar nominee. Poor beggar. An artist unable to create. God observing the world. Fallen angel. Arrogant. Shy. Broken. Not destroyed.” For more on this film, click here.

    Since Mr. Landreth’s film came out, a renewed interest in Mr. Larkin has surfaced: “Now, thanks to two new fascinating bio pics that will screen at the Festival du nouveau cinéma as part of a fundraising tribute to help get Larkin off the streets, the eccentric artist is about to be thrust back into the spotlight.” So writes Raf Katigbak in his 2004 article, Luck of the draw. The result? Spare Change.

Walking (1968) by Ryan Larkin:

Syrinx (1965) by Ryan Larkin:

Golden lady

After watching and writing about Robert Altman movies, Dennis Cozzalio took a breather to post a couple of random photos of Angie Dickinson on his blog. Turning to gaze innocently if not longingly at this lovely lady after the mental aerobics of Altman seemed perfectly natural, for ultimately what purpose does she serve other than to let us know all is right with the world?

    She was never a huge star, and handled the movies, television and fame with equal and casual aplomb. ‘Everyone,’ however, seemed to know her in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This could make her appear less an actress than a celebrity, but even on that level she came up short. Angie flowered in an era that went gaga over smoldering, busty exotics and amazons: Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Senta Berger, Anita Ekberg. But wisely and logically, she never tried to compete. Hers is a soft sexuality, warm and genuine, merry narrow-eyes and a slight lisp, the promise of a pleasant time in the sack and blueberry pancakes in the morning.

    My first conscious awareness came in 1968 when, at the age of ten, I was visiting relatives in York, PA. Angie was co-starring with Burt Reynolds in a western comedy called Sam Whiskey. I didn’t go to see the movie, but found myself mesmerized by the ad in the local newspaper, which looked like the one below, only a lot smaller and in black and white:

    For the sake of this Blog-a-Thon — AngieThon, as it were, though one toyed with the idea of Angie DickinThon — I top-stacked Sam Whiskey on my Netflix queue along with eight or nine titles from her hodgepodge oeuvre. Fortunately, my thirty-eight-year wait fostered no high hopes. Sam Whiskey is innocuous fluff, part of the paving that led to Reynolds’s success, and little more than a standard made-for-TV movie that finagled a limited theatrical release. By the same token, it’s typical of the modest work she’d grown used to and would continue with in a subdued career that’s still going after five decades. On screen for a total of perhaps fifteen minutes parceled out over an hour and a half, she serves as a delicate grounding for Reynolds’s ne’er-do-well. In the hands of Natalie Wood, the same part could have been cute, bawdy and sizzling; with Raquel Welch, a steamy parody of eroticism. But Angie possessed a rare balance of all of those things under deft and gentle, almost maternal, control.

    She spent a lot of time in ensemble casts: part of the terrorist cell in Andrew L. Stone’s frantic Cry Terror! (1958); a charter member of the Rat Pack in Ocean’s Eleven (1960) — she’d later do several of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts on TV; somewhat helpless as Brando’s wife (and flagrantly upstaged by the Confederate sleaze) in The Chase (1966); faring better with comedy in The Art of Love (1965), relaxed with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke.

Above: 24-year-old Angie (second from left) in an unbilled appearance in Tennessee’s Partner (1955) with Rhonda Fleming (center).

    Angie was trim and attractive but somewhat bland as the femme fatale in Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964). Initially made for TV but released theatrically because of its violence, it’s an engaging rehash of concepts from Robert Siodmak’s superior 1946 version which, in turn, was derived from a Hemingway story. Angie plays the Ava Gardner part — a startling contrast in itself, the hot mother and the whore — but women were never Siegel’s forte, and she soon blends in with a band of crooks including John Cassavetes, Norman Fell and Ronald ‘Dutch’ Reagan (in his last film) as the bourgeois kingpin who “has no problem with larceny.” Closing in are a couple of hitmen: Clu Gulager and Lee Marvin, doing his bizarre spider-walk at the end.

    (The Killers wasn’t the only film Angie made with Reagan. In 1955, the twenty-four-year-old actress was unbilled as one of the girls working in Rhonda Fleming’s ‘Marriage Market’ in Allan Dwan’s feisty Tennessee’s Partner, with the future President as ‘Cowpoke.’)

    She was fortunate to hook up with Marvin again three years later in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). A key film of the decade (and still quite riveting), it works as a critique of America’s post-WWII nouveau riche as well as an existential parable chiseled out of the gangster genre. Given that, Angie, second billed under Marvin, plays less a person than a controlled figure in an engineered landscape constantly shifting from amorality, consumerism, vanity and isolation. One scene, in which Angie beats Marvin for real, is a frightening display of her ferocity and his unflappable resistance, a condition Boorman believes has been foisted upon his character by the forked-tongue of corporate bureaucracy.

Above: Angie beats the hell out of Lee in Point Blank (click to enlarge).

    Angie also worked for Sam Fuller, dubbing Sarita Montiel in Run of the Arrow (1957) and playing the half-caste ‘Lucky Legs’ in China Gate (1957). “[Daryl F.] Zanuck approved of my choice of Angie Dickinson for the lead, even though she was an unknown,” Fuller wrote in his autobiography, A Third Face. “She had a strong presence in the tests we did with her. With her high cheekbones and slanted eyes, Angie passed for a Eurasian. And those legs of hers stretched all the way across a CinemaScope screen.”

    Those legs were instrumental when the gravy train arrived in the form of Police Woman, her popular and trendy cop show that ran from 1974 to 1978. Angie’s weekly stint as Pepper Anderson brought the fame that eluded her in the movies. Taken into consideration, her ninety-one one-hour episodes equals the combined running times of forty-five feature films, all made in the space of four years.

    After all is said and done, Angie’s career is framed by two particularly revealing films, Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) and Steve Carver’s Big Bad Mama (1974). There isn’t much one can say about the latter, the epitome of a Roger Corman-produced drive-in movie, other than its gutsy display of forty-three-year-old Angie stone naked in a couple of eye-popping scenes. Especially the tryst she has with co-star William Shatner, who looks rather uncomfortable running his hands over her body. Of the face and figure, though, all one can do is marvel at the perfection. Angie in her forties easily topped Angie in her twenties.

    She has limited but essential screen time in Rio Bravo, Hawks’s comical observation of political and social folly. Sheriff John Wayne watches over a small Western town’s miscreants, its wealthy villains and flawed working class, with Angie stepping off the stagecoach to become his voice of reason. She plays Feathers to Duke’s Chance (and Dean Martin’s Dude, Walter Brennan’s Stumpy and Ricky Nelson’s Colorado), her breathless, apprehensive delivery feeding the questions Chance should be asking himself. Feathers is another of the director’s fascinating females, prone to smirking over an unspoken, private joke, sexually available to whom she chooses, mature enough to realize the power she wields over men. Angie’s visibly uneasy in the role, which may have been by design — in relation to Wayne, a more domineering or assured presence could have made Feathers less persuasive. Inherently beautiful, when she repeatedly questions even her own motives the character becomes oddly endearing. It may be Angie’s finest performance.

Above: Feathers in Rio Bravo, with Duke (click to enlarge).

Surf the AngieThon:
(Additional links will be added throughout the day)

Better Living Through Television

Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee

Cult Clash 2.0

Film Ick

Greenbriar Picture Shows (Excellent stills!)

Inisfree

The Ongoing Cinematic Education of Steven Carlson

Richard Gibson

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

That Little Round-Headed Boy

Buy Angie at Amazon:

Trailer for Big Bad Mama, voiceover by Dick Miller:

L’Inferno

“You often feel as if you’re watching something left behind a century ago by an ancient, extinct and half mad religious order.” A review of the 1911 film of Dante’s Inferno, now on Flickhead.

Valley of the Bees

“Steeped in the Classical cinema taught so thoroughly and effectively in the film schools of Eastern Europe, the technical skill of the filmmaking is evident in every frame, every composition, every carefully weighed image.” A review of Frantisek Vlácil’s Valley of the Bees by Nelhydrea Paupér, now on Flickhead.

Winter Soldier

“It…reports moments from an event, voices speaking of things once buried in the closet.” The rarely-seen 1972 documentary Winter Soldier is now out on DVD. Read the review on Flickhead.

Poster giveaway: I Am a Sex Addict

In conjunction with the current release of I Am a Sex Addict, we’re giving away three posters for the film, each signed by director Caveh Zahedi. For a chance to win one, simply send us an email with your name and address (continental U.S. only, please) and “I Am a Sex Addict” in the subject box. Winners will be chosen at random at midnight (ET), April 24, 2006.

Official movie site

Putting out the fire with gasoline

“In the Cornish town of Penwicken in 1986 there was a spate of cases in which babies went missing and were subsequently discovered dead and dreadfully mauled. At the time there was an independent cinema in the town called the Bijou.” A new article by Richard Armstrong at Flickhead.

Happy Birthday, Roger!

When he announced two days ago a spur-of-the-moment Blog-a-Thon to commemorate Roger Corman on his eightieth birthday, Tim Lucas offered something of a challenge: “That gives you about as much time as Roger had to make Little Shop of Horrors (1960).” Time has always dogged Roger, the struggle to maintain production schedules and deliver pictures to theatres as promised. With that, of course, comes the meticulous attention to budget and the art of squeezing as much as you can from a dollar. No interview with him can skirt such basics.

    I was reminded of all this just recently while watching Big Bad Mama (1974), part of my research for the upcoming Angie Dickinson Blog-a-Thon. Though direction is credited to Steve Carver, the picture is Roger’s from start to finish. And, sure enough, there was Roger on the DVD, chatting about getting things done on time and budget.

    It was released by New World Pictures, Roger’s lucrative base of operations during the ‘70s. He’d stopped directing pictures by the late ‘60s to focus on producing and distributing exploitation movies for the drive-in trade, most of them directed by green, young talent. This was where Martin Scorsese was given the opportunity to do Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Ron Howard honed (or busted) his chops on Grand Theft Auto (1977). You may think you’re seeing Scorsese or Howard or Carver in those films, but they’re all Roger’s, a throwback to the producer as auteur.

    One look at Corman’s filmography at IMDb is enough to boggle the mind. While I’d kept tabs on what he was doing thirty years ago (in those days, in the midst of so much critical adulation, who didn’t?), his subsequent work seemed to elude me. (I still haven’t caught up with Frankenstein Unbound [1990], his one return to the director’s chair.) But the list of product he’s worked on as producer or executive producer from the ‘80s on is simply astonishing in both volume and longevity.

    It was “The French” who first noticed Roger in the ‘60s, not long after they’d discovered Jerry Lewis. He was feted for the Godardian influences supposedly percolating between the lines of The Wild Angels (1966), and was one of the first to milk visual references to other films and filmmakers in The Trip (1967). He seized the interview and festival circuit in those heady years, explaining the art of rapid camera set-ups when not pontificating on the Freudian implications in the handful of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he directed in the early ‘60s. Pass the popcorn, please…

    Corman approached his scripts objectively, rarely elaborating on scenes or characters beyond what was required of a day’s shoot. He was fortunate in his friendships and associations, because people like Sam Arkoff, Jim Nicholson, Susan Cabot, Peter Bogdanovich, Dick Miller, Boris Karloff, Barboura Morris, Luana Anders, Floyd Crosby, Jack Nicholson, Charles Beaumont, Vincent Price, and countless others were willing to go the distance at scale. I doubt that they had faith or interest in the films they were making, but the warmth and charm of Corman’s manner was (and is) unquestionably seductive.

Bruce Dern and Peter Fonda in The Trip

    It takes a particular mindset to watch most of the work, because so much is dross and juvenile. But there are a few highlights worth pointing out: the feel of eerie desolation in Day the World Ended (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957); the weird spin on the Bridey Murphy case in The Undead (1957); noir teen rebellion in Teenage Doll (1957) — a personal favorite of mine.

    He later flourished in satire with Little Shop of Horrors and the excellent A Bucket of Blood (1959), and explored the comedic brilliance of Peter Lorre in the otherwise tepid The Raven (1963). However, the once-lauded Poe pictures now seem stiff and hollow, with Masque of the Red Death (1964) a particular disappointment — the script’s black humor and decadence sailed beyond its director’s grasp, material better suited to a Buñuel or a Pasolini.

    Starring the young, pre-Star Trek Bill Shatner, The Intruder (1962) was an earnest attempt to portray racism and hucksterism, but it flopped at the box office and sent Corman back to science fiction, gangsters and hot rod movies. (He wasn’t accustomed to being in the red.) The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) was an all-star hoot, with Jason Robards as a boisterous caricature of Al Capone. Made the same year, The Trip survives as an arresting relic of psychedelia.

    One could go on and on…about the movies, Corman’s infectious enthusiasm, his unyielding influence over generations of filmmakers. But the purpose of this Blog-a-Thon is to wish Roger a Happy Birthday. I do so without hesitation. He was an integral part of my cinema education, one of the first producers and directors I recognized by name. His pictures thrilled me when it counted most, and for that I’m forever grateful.



Note: If anyone has a VHS or DVD copy of CBS-TV’s two-part Camera Three special on Roger Corman that aired in the ‘70s, please drop me a line. (I’m not referring to Christian Blackwell’s Hollywood’s Wildest Angel.)

The Roger Corman Blog-a-Thon:

Video WatchBlog

That Little Round Headed Boy

More Than Meets The Mogwai

Greenbriar Picture Shows

Between Productions

Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee

FilmZoneX

Johnny Larue's Crane Shot

Lance Tooks' Journal

Nadaland

The House of Irony

The Bleeding Tree

And now: MAXIMUM ENERGY!

“There’s a history between Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster and myself, so objectivity (if not caution) is hereby thrown to the wind. If you’re wondering about the quality of the film — well, you do realize it’s called Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, right?” Now for the first time on DVD. Read the Flickhead review!