Inroads to Inland #1: Zabriskie point

Something should be said about David Lynch’s Inland Empire, no? A film not easily understood, it defies any hasty analysis. Imagine the quandary faced by the reviewer handing out star ratings: how many to award this esoteric vision?

I’d like to take issue with the people who call Lynch’s work ‘surreal.’ Surrealists abhor sentiment and sentimentality; I suspect Mr. Lynch is a deeply sentimental man. Sentimentality is dripping from nearly everything he’s done: the longing for family (Eraserhead), unconditional love (Wild at Heart), acceptance (Mulholland Dr.). If we’ve got to toss labels around, I think he belongs somewhere in Symbolism or Expressionism.

Since I’m incapable of writing a review (there’s too much going on in the movie), an informal (and probably half-baked) series of Inland Empire posts may be the best bet. For starters, let’s go to the beginning of the film. The actress having coffee with Laura Dern is Grace Zabriskie (above). She played Laura Palmer’s haunted mom in Twin Peaks and hobbled around on club foot and cane in Wild at Heart ("Fuck me, Reggie!"). I think it’s interesting that Inland’s labyrinthine plot kicks off from Zabriskie’s point, when she motions to Dern to look across the room.

Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach

Labor Day is here, ringing its depressing death knell for an imaginary sacred season. Summer has its nostalgic moments, tucked far away in my mind; though nowadays it no longer provides those idyllic scenarios of youth. The tan young girls and the cars, the beers and the joints, the juke box with its 45-rpm singles, the beach—eroded, gone, out of reach, littered with debris and obnoxious cats itching for a fight or demanding that I pay a bill. My beloved sun that I worshipped so has left behind roadmaps of wrinkles and patches of basal cell carcinoma. I'm beginning to resemble Robert Redford...today's Robert Redford.

Labor Day is also the harbinger of the term, suddenly last summer. For, suddenly, this Tuesday, what we're in right now will be ‘last summer.’ It’s also my all-time favorite title…not the film or the play, just the title. I’ve never seen a stage production of Tennessee Williams’s play, but the movie—which I last saw about thirty years ago—was too staid and dry. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz wasn’t sleazy or lecherous enough to appreciate the decadence of the material, its homosexuality, cannibalism, insanity. It needed, at the very least, Kazan or Huston (in his Night of the Iguana mode) or Mann (in his God’s Little Acre mode).

But the title haunts, implying all is transient except the memory…and even that, given a little age, slips away.

Below is lovely Liz on location for Suddenly Last Summer (click images to enlarge).

Mystery photo 5: posh digs

The common incorrect answer to last week’s mystery photo was Maria Schneider in The Passenger, but there were several Flickheads who correctly identified Paz Vega in one of my erotic faves, Lucía y el sexo, a/k/a Sex and Lucia: congrats to Robert T. from Toronto, Paul C. from Columbus, Roeland V. from the Nederlands, Julie R. from DC, and the nefarious Gilgamesh.

This week the accent is on style and décor. Name the mystery film and win a mystery prize. (Click the image to enlarge.) Send your answers here before Wednesday, September 5. Prizes will be sent only to addresses in the continental U.S.

Mystery photo 4: underground movies

There were good guesses—Anatomy of a Murder, Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind—but no one had the correct answer to last week’s photo. Look again at the man in the lower left, his walking apparatus nearby, something he holds onto like a banister. Arthur Bannister, that is, played by the great Everett Sloan in The Lady from Shanghai.

This week’s photo is the pits. Click to enlarge for full effect and send your answers here. Free previously viewed DVD screeners to the first five people to ID the film before August 29. Prizes will be sent only to addresses in the continental U.S.

Mystery SOLVED! (click here).

Buñuel-a-Thon: The Luis Buñuel Blog-a-Thon

Click here to go to the Luis Buñuel Blogathon

Buñuel-a-Thon banners
When using these images, please link to this url:
http://flickhead.blogspot.com/

Small announcement:

100 x 46

183 x 85

Square:

200 x 187

Vertical banner:

163 x 240

189 x 279

Vertical banner:

123 x 240

183 x 358

Horizontal banner:

240 x 59

416 x 103

Horizontal banner:

500 x 72

692 x 100

Sounds from the Forbidden Zone

When they were distributing Planet of the Apes in 1968, 20th Century Fox marketed it to reach the widest audience possible. Up to that point and with a handful of notable exceptions—Things to Come (1936), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), This Island Earth (1955), Forbidden Planet (1956)—science fiction movies were routinely dismissed by the studios and public alike as fodder for juveniles and adolescents. Between its prestige cast (Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore) and topical themes of creationism vs. evolution, slavery and racism, Planet of the Apes tapped into a huge crossover demographic. Fox offered schools and religious organizations literature proclaiming the film’s relevance as a tool for discussion on scientific and theological issues. They hyped John Chambers’s inventive makeup work. And in the lofty tradition of Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago, they first released the picture with an intermission—even though it ran under two hours. (The break came after Taylor barks, “Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”)

Among its many irregularities, Planet of the Apes boasted a unique, quasi- avant-garde musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, then Fox’s in-house composer. Goldsmith’s overall contribution to film and television is enormous, but this score in particular shuffled rhythms, instruments and playing methods to enhance the picture’s sense of dislocation. The download offered here is the original soundtrack issued by Project 3 records. Copy and paste the URL:

http://rapidshare.com/files/49316621/PlanetApes.rar.html

Mystery photo 3: the wrong arm of the law

There were several correct replies to last week’s mystery photo, Michel Piccoli’s unfinished portrait of Jane Birkin in La Belle noiseuse. (The canvas was painted by Bernard Dufour.) Congrats to Paul C. from Columbus, Filmbo, J On the Road, Little Doc and Mike from NYC.

Click image to enlarge

This week we take to the hallowed halls of American justice. The first five people to correctly identify the film before August 22 will win a package of randomly selected, previously viewed DVD screeners and CDs. (I have to clean up my office somehow.) Don’t leave your answers in the comment box; send them here. Prizes will be sent only to addresses in the continental U.S.

Mystery SOLVED! (click here).

Whatever became of Beverly Michaels?

Click this and other images to enlarge

I’d hoped to find more information on the actress Beverly Michaels than I did…which is next to zero. Born in 1928, she began modeling as a teenager (one dubious source puts her age at thirteen for the above photo). She was at least 5’ 9” and had a husky voice—someone on the internet was fairly accurate describing her as a prediction of Sally Kellerman. She appeared in less than a dozen low budget movies in the 1950s and retired after marrying Russell Rouse, her director on Wicked Woman (1953). The last credit I can find is Women Without Men (a.k.a. Blonde Bait, 1956).

    Beverly was a formidable presence, especially seductive and threatening in the two pictures she did for Hugo Haas, before Hugo defected to Cleo Moore: Pickup and The Girl on the Bridge (both 1951). Haas was a true primitive: his films are threadbare in both budget and vision, the poverty of production inadvertently underlining the correlation of beauty with power in deceptive women. A lowly butterball, Hugo often cast himself as the naïve cuckold gone to seed after being bamboozled by gold digging sexpots. Pickup is a pastiche of elements from The Postman Always Rings Twice and La Bête humaine, Beverly marrying rail worker Hugo for his money while banging a young stud on the side. By the same token, The Girl on the Bridge borrows heavily from Woman in the Window. The combination of her allure with his antediluvian technique makes Pickup oddly compelling. Check her out giving the boys a show in this clip (that’s Hugo ogling in the straw hat):

    Blatantly sexual, Beverly may have been too ‘too’ for the ‘50s. Unlike other actresses of the period who equated carnal bliss in the public’s mind—Marilyn, Kim Novak, Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell, etc.—Beverly had no airs and employed no gimmicks. Hers is a raw sexuality, at once disquieting and enticing. The hardness in her face didn’t endear her to audiences, but her performances hint at dramatic and comedic talents that were never explored. She probably scorned the movies, perhaps savvy to the corporate manipulation that corrupts hearts and minds…the stuff that drove Marilyn crazy.

Trailer for Wicked Woman

The art of the double bill, part four

Odds & Ends


Challenging the kidneys. A major Christmas release in 1966, John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix was heavily promoted and poised to become the event of the season. That is until people saw it and the reviews came in. After a run of high-minded hits—Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and The Train (sorry: Seconds was no hit)—the costly racecar drama flopped. I remember seeing it on opening weekend, barely able to get through its plodding three (3) hours. The decision to reissue it with the meat and potatoes Dirty Dozen seems insane: Robert Aldrich’s lively knuckle-dragger was no slouch in length, clocking in at two-and-one-half hours. But at least it moved and offered some memorable moments with Lee Marvin, an overwrought John Cassavetes, a malnourished Donald Sutherland, and Clint Walker as ‘Posey.’

Click this and other images to enlarge

Medusa in stereo. After Brute Force, Naked City, and Thieves’ Highway Jules Dassin went to Europe (troubles with HUAC) and began well enough with Night and the City and Rififi. But he fell in with Melina Mercouri and never looked back. (Would he have turned to stone?) She bulges like a volcanic hallucination of depravity, a coarse, unsettling beast seemingly capable of any decadent act. This is not to reflect on her personal and political life; but her screen image is, to these eyes, ghastly even in those uncomfortable moments of feigned refinement. Never on Sunday is irritating, made worse by an appalling performance by the director—the scenes of Dassin staring at Melina’s reactions are among the most embarrassing things I’ve ever witnessed. Topkapi is simply inept, with her popping those spooky eyes for the camera. (Will we turn to stone?) That both pictures were tremendous hits can only be attributed to postwar stress.

Chop socky. This ad commemorates one of the last visits my high school friends and I made to a drive-in. After we got our drivers licenses, the ‘open air’ became a new venue for adolescent shenanigans and cinematic indulgence. We’d load up coolers full of beer, get nickel bags, raid the concession stand for buckets of oily popcorn and greasy chili dogs. And see movies. Lots of movies. Most of them have faded from memory, but there are some that stand out. Hot Potato is a title not easily forgotten; and Enter the Dragon is still a good action picture. Soon after this night, we disbanded and went to universities in different areas of the country. Some of us became successes, others floundered, and there were those who simply maintained or got lost.

La la la—Nice Lady! The Martin & Lewis pictures of the 1950s continued playing in theaters in the early ‘60s, but I never cared for them save for that weird shot of the blinking eye on the golf ball in The Caddy. As a kid I liked Jerry Lewis—much to the chagrin of my parents, who fancied themselves cultivated but were merely faux nouvelle riche. He cracked me up, except when he thought he was Chaplin and got all gooey and maudlin. Jerry increasingly fell out of favor as the decade progressed, but I still remember seeing Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River and The Big Mouth and Way, Way Out in packed theaters.

Read more of The Art of the Double Bill:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Filmcrush

click to enlarge

Love chick: In his current mini-meme, Wiley Wiggins asks, “Who was your first onscreen crush?” I wonder how many fat, disgusting, sweaty, balding middle-aged men like myself will participate and teach you young whippersnappers about real broads like Sophia, Ava, Bardot, Senta Berger…back when meaty thighs and thick eyeliner were de rigueur. Yes, boys, those were the days. Time to light up a White Owl and crack open a can of Schlitz…

While I probably had “a thing” (heh-heh) for Dorothy Provine or Stephanie Powers on TV, the first woman on the big screen to put the whammy on me was Raquel Welch. She was hot and happening, a rack to reckon with and legs that stretched all the way up to the finest derriere in town. Her film career was in full swing in the mid-1960s: Fantastic Voyage (bland in a wetsuit, though there is an implied gang-rape scene open for complaints), One Million Years BC (YOWZA!), Bedazzled (Ooga! Ooga!), and the pièce de résistance, Fathom (Eek-A-Wow-Wow!). As I sat there during one Saturday afternoon matinee at the local theater worshipping her body in all its CinemaScope splendor, my innocent ten-year-old physique experienced—to borrow from Nicholas Cage in Wild at Heart—“a boner with a capital ‘O’.”

click to enlarge

Mystery Photo 2

Although it elicited a wide range of guesses, from the Coleen Gray/Francis X. Bushman fiasco The Phantom Planet (1961) to Alexander Kluge’s social satire The Big Mess (1971), last week’s Mystery Photo eluded you all. The outer space shenanigans was footage shot for the theater scene in Midnight Cowboy, when Joe Buck and a young Bob Balaban fumbled around in the back row.

This week’s may not be easier, depending on your appreciation of the fine arts. A package of several randomly selected, previously viewed DVD screeners and CDs to the first five people who correctly identify the image below. Don’t leave answers in the comment box; send them here. Prizes will be sent to addresses in the continental U.S. only!

Click to enlarge

Mystery SOLVED! (click here).

The art of the double bill, part three

Although it runs contrary to common practice, I feel a successful double feature depends on variety. When I went to the movies in the 1970s, neighborhood theaters would show unlikely combos like the one above, while art and revival theaters usually paired films by director or star. In the end, however, something as disparate and bizarre as The Odd Couple with Rosemary’s Baby or That Touch of Mink with To Kill a Mockingbird avoid any form of competition, instead offering art and diversity.

Click this and other images to enlarge

Whereas an evening of Some Like It Hot (two hours) with Irma La Douce (142 minutes) may yield an awareness that a little Billy Wilder can go a long way. But the teaming of the two radically different Hitchcock films below covers a vast range of attributes and qualities, at once enlightening and exhilarating. Note that Vertigo, widely considered a failure in its time, gets second billing.

After the success of Midnight Cowboy, Canada’s Astral Films paired a dubbed, pre-Graduate Italian comedy with Dustin Hoffman (originally third-billed under Elsa Martinelli and Caesar Romero) with an experimental Phil Kaufman comedy starring Jon Voight, Monique Van Vooren, Severn Darden, Joan Darling and Nelson Algren (!). As for the oddity below, it’s anyone’s guess if these pictures made it beyond urban screens or university auditoriums. I actually owned this poster way back when—it was a present from Nelhydrea Paupér.

The Art of the Double Bill, part one, click here

The Art of the Double Bill, part two, click here

The art of the double bill, part two

Click this and other images to enlarge

Among my private passions are James Bond movies, even the Roger Moore ones. I’ve seen them all countless times, and occasionally go slumming with Derek Flint and Matt Helm. (Sorry, I draw the line at Secret Agent Super Dragon and The Spy With a Cold Nose.) For the record, I think the best Bonds are From Russia, With Love and Casino Royale (the 2006 version; the 1967 edition is for fan club members only). I became hooked on Bond in 1965 when Thunderball came out. My friends bought records by The Beatles and The Stones, but the first album I ever bought was the soundtrack to Thunderball.

United Artists began re-releasing the Bond films in double feature packages in the late ‘60s, and I’m certain I saw all of them. Dr. No and From Russia, With Love were paired, as was Dr. No with Goldfinger (“Miss Honey and Miss Galore Have James Bond Back For More!”). In my bedroom there was a standee like the ad above, about six feet across and five feet high. There were Bond posters, inserts and lobby cards stapled all over the walls. At the dinner table I’d do voices for my parents: “Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?” “No, Mr. Bond: I expect you to die!” They were not impressed.

Before You Only Live Twice came out in 1967, Thunderball was my favorite. The above program really caught my eye when I saw it in the newspaper. Luckily, I could talk my father into taking me, he was always up for Bond movies. My one stipulation was that we had to see the films in chronological order. For example, never was Goldfinger to be seen before Dr. No. Dad humored this obsessive compulsive quirk. Meanwhile, I nearly fainted in the early ‘70s when Thunderball was paired with You Only Live Twice—I must have gone to this double feature five or six times.

My father didn’t have the stamina to sit through three Bond movies, nor was I able to talk any of my friends into the glorious six-hour-plus marathon. I went alone on a Sunday afternoon. Thankfully, the Grove Theater showed them in order. When my mother came to collect me at seven that night, she shook her head, sighed, and sized me up for a straightjacket.

Above is a rare memento from a bill that played only once, for one week. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was another of my favorites. I had no problem with George Lazenby as Bond. (He was better than Roger Moore.) But the producers believed that he and the picture fared poorly at the box office: made for $7 million, it grossed $87 million worldwide. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s an astounding profit. Still, I was surprised that it was re-released at all, and took one of my first girlfriends to see it with Diamonds Are Forever. Thereafter, Bond reissues were few and far between.

James Coburn’s Flint was the best of the Bond wannabes. His two films were comedies that also worked as secret agent movies. I saw this double feature in 1967 at the Wantagh Theater, projected in glorious CinemaScope. I was too young to appreciate some of the humor, such as the scene where Flint recognizes “Hans Gruber, Hitler Youth Movement.” That exchange still cracks me up.

Dean Martin’s 4-picture Matt Helm series is, as they say, an acquired taste. A lot of it hinges on whether or not you can believe young, beautiful women throwing themselves at greasy-haired, middle-aged, doughy, drunken Dino. I saw this pair in 1967 (both films came out separately in 1966), the same year of the third Helm picture, The Ambushers. (A friend and I went to see that on opening weekend and were the only two people in the theater!) In all fairness, I have the Helm quartet on DVD and find them quite amusing at 4am on sleepless nights.

To read The Art of the Double Bill, part one, click here.

Next: Odd couples and very long evenings!

Women In Film

80 years of female portraits in cinema
Including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Julie Andrews, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jodie Foster, Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Demi Moore, Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow

Via Various & Sundry

Mystery photo

A package of potluck DVD screeners and CDs to each of the first five people to identify the movie in this shot. (Click to enlarge.) Don’t leave your answers in the comment box, but send them here. I’ll send prizes only to addresses in the continental U.S. Good luck!

Mystery SOLVED! (click here).

The art of the double bill, part one

When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s mock double feature, Grindhouse (2007) was released, “exhibitors were reporting that many audience members were leaving the cinema [halfway through], apparently not realizing, or forgetting, that a second feature was going to be shown,” according to a report posted on the Internet Movie Database. “One reason cited was that many of audience members were too young to remember when theaters showed double features. The distributor planned some changes in the campaign while some exhibitors solved the problem by posting employees by the auditorium doors to remind departing patrons that the program contains a second feature.”

Double features were a staple of my movie-going diet for years. Up until the late ‘70s, major releases played solo in first run, but after a few weeks they’d go to the two- and three-dollar theaters paired with something that came out six months or a year earlier. And then there were the dollar theaters that showed anything they thought people would pay to see. Films were reissued regularly. Home video didn’t exist.

Below are some original ads for double features. I used to look forward to Wednesday’s newspaper to gaze at these graphics. Films used to open on Wednesday to generate word of mouth for the weekend. I’d go to the movies two, three or four times a week…eight features!

(Some images click to enlarge.)

Subsequent generations may be immune to their tawdry charms, but The Blob (1958) and Dinosaurus! (1960) blew me away when Paramount reissued them together in 1964. I was seven-years-old when my mother took me and a friend to a Saturday matinee at the Bellmore Playhouse where weekend afternoon admission was fifty cents. Both pictures were directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., The Blob starring Steve McQueen in his first lead role. I wasn’t the only kid in the audience who lifted his feet off the floor as the gooey monster slid across the screen, and my friend went screaming up the aisle when the T-Rex came to life in Dinosaurus! My favorite feature in ads for monster movies were the small illustrations at the bottom of people screaming and running. I’d make special trips to the Playhouse just to browse their posters, as if in an art gallery.

There was a spate of European and Mexican fairytale and fantasy films imported to America’s kiddie matinees throughout the 1960s, the two biggest distributors being K. Gordon Murray and Barry Yellen’s Childhood Productions. The pictures were live action, shot on shoestring budgets with actors playing animals in threadbare costumes. Along with the Italian Hercules and Japanese Godzilla movies of the time, one became aware of dubbing—shoddy dubbing at that, the American voices mismatched and so often breathless. While most of these films have faded from my memory, I do remember that one, The Tinder Box (1958), was a rather bizarre German period piece; and the Mexican Santa Claus (1959) played annually in theaters well into the 1980s.

Britain’s Hammer Films were the foremost producer of horror movies throughout the ‘60s, and paired their films regularly. I haven’t been able to locate an image of my favorite Hammer double feature ad, the 1964 program of Curse of Frankenstein (1957) with Horror of Dracula (1958): “Frankenstein spills it, Dracula drinks it!” read the copy. But back at the Bellmore Playhouse, two scenes sent the matinee crowd screaming: the famous zoom into the Frankenstein monster’s face as his bandages come undone, and Dracula’s lusty entrance with red eyeballs and blood dripping from bared fangs. The above bill from 1967, the tepid Frankenstein Created Woman and the wholly uneventful Mummy’s Shroud (why is that tree growing out of his head?) came and went before I had a chance to see it: I was in hospital that week having my appendix removed! Too bad about Frankenstein Created Woman, however: it botches a fascinating premise about soul transplantation, and fails to utilize the ample charms of it’s star, Playboy Playmate Susan Denberg.

Awesome update:
After reading the above, John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows dug into his vast archive to find the graphic below. Imagine being a seven-year-old monster movie fanatic and seeing this ad… (Many thanks, John!!)


Click to enlarge!

Coming Soon: The spies have it!