DVD Giveaway: Jimmy and Judy

Thanks to our generous friends at Starz Home Entertainment, we have three DVD copies of Jimmy and Judy to give away. Starring Edward Furlong (of Terminator 2) and Rachel Bella, “this is the film that Natural Born Killers wanted to be,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Skratch magazine calls it “a distinctly disturbing piece of true cinematic genius.”

To enter to win a DVD, e-mail us with your name and address (continental U.S. only) before January 7, 2008. We’d really appreciate it if you send just one e-mail. Winners will be selected at random on January 8. Good luck!

In for the ‘kill’

“Lost in the woods, a group of people, mostly soft, young and sarcastic, cross paths with a faceless, unstoppable nut job with a grudge and an axe to grind—preferably in their skulls, as far as he’s concerned.” Adam Green’s Hatchet arrives on DVD. Read the review on Flickhead.

The Powell & Pressburger Blog-a-Thon

The Edge of the World

The following is a contribution to The Powell & Pressburger Blog-a-Thon hosted by Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles.

After directing over twenty features, and two years shy of his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell was inspired to make The Edge of the World (1937) by events that had occurred in the archipelago of St. Kilda. Located in the remotest part of the British Isles, St. Kilda’s people — fishermen, mostly — evacuated the area in 1930. Commercial fishing from the mainland forced them to abandon centuries of back-breaking toil for the comparative ease of the Industrial Age. In time, this same scenario would play out in any number of islands the world over, taking with it a way of life never to be seen again.

    Although Powell shot his film on the (populated) Shetland Island of Foula — its farmers and fishermen helping out in front of and behind the camera — he nonetheless found a primitive ethos and community similar to that of St. Kilda. With its spectacular images of mountains and cottages and the sea, and regardless of being a narrative picture, The Edge of the World veers close to the cultural anthropology of Robert Flaherty, especially Man of Aran (1934), and, given Powell’s romanticism, Flaherty and F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931).

    Changing the location’s name to Hitra — Celtic for ‘death’ — the story recounts the circumstances prompting the exodus and demise of the island’s civilization. Competition from commercial fishing, declining finances, lack of health care, a thinning population, and deteriorating farming conditions make the already-rigorous existence insufferable. Through several astutely composed characters, each one a distinct personality, Powell analyzes the value of tradition and the inevitability of modernization. While this theme has been worked endlessly in the cinema — from Josef von Sternberg to Sam Peckinpah — Powell’s grounding as poet and quixotic fantasist, combined with his apparent admiration for the proletariat, lend purposeful nostalgia to an atmosphere of hardship.

    If The Edge of the World is the director’s first ‘personal film’ as is often declared, it shares those themes of trepidation, isolation, longing and eroticism that run through much of his subsequent work. From the Himalayan mission in Black Narcissus (1947) and Wendy Hiller’s inescapable stopover port in I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), to the cavernous apartment in Peeping Tom (1960), Powell’s characters appear forever perched on various edges of the world, struggling with their inner demons of fear and desire.

    On Hitra, two families serve to represent the issues, values and attitudes of its people. As Peter Manson’s (John Laurie) beliefs are embedded in tradition, his opportunist son, Robbie (Eric Berry), intends to move to the mainland. James Gray (Finlay Currie) is accepting of change, while his son, Andrew (Niall McGinnis), is far less liberal-minded. Connecting them all is Ruth Manson (Belle Chrystall), Robbie’s sister, who loves and intends to marry Andrew. From the start, the actors (Laurie and Currie especially) convey the influence of ancient bloodlines and superstitions and legacy. Their interaction invites events shared among the community — birth, death, church, farm life, and a primeval duel — all staged by Powell, respectful of the mundane and enchanted by the spiritual.

    British cinema of the 1930’s is not renowned for its technical proficiency, but the clarity of sound and image in The Edge of the World is impressive. Startling vistas, cliffs ascending to the clouds, intricate tracking shots somehow managed on rocky plains all captivate the mind and eye. Now digitally mastered from the original 35mm nitrate negatives, presented on DVD by Milestone Films, the film commemorates the historic value of its subject, the acumen of its director and the skill of his crew.

    Among the DVD bonus features is a gallery of stills, Powell’s six-minute An Airman’s Letter to His Mother (1943), his twenty-three minute Return to the Edge of the World (1978), and a supplemental audio track. The latter, shared by Ian Christie, Daniel Day-Lewis and Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell, balances brief production and technical anecdotes with Day-Lewis reading from the director’s written account of the picture’s creation. Ms. Schoonmaker-Powell, Michael’s second wife, speaks eloquently of her late husband’s art, especially when describing his experiments in double exposure (McGinnis facing island ghosts), a haunting montage sequence (Chrystall’s prospective suicide), and an elaborate dolly shot (following Currie during the celebration of a newborn). An informal documentary, Return to the Edge of the World gathers the surviving cast and crew members with Foula islanders after forty years with John Laurie weirdly trapped in character. This short feature may be a minor and eccentric inclusion to the director’s oeuvre, but watching it surely magnifies his achievements of 1937.

The Edge of the World
Written and directed by Michael Powell. Produced by Joe Rock. Cinematography by Ernest Palmer, Skeets Kelly, and Monty Berman. Edited by Derek Twist. With John Laurie, Belle Chrystall, Eric Berry, Finlay Currie, Niall MacGinnis, and Mr. Powell. 75 minutes, released in 1937.

Available from Amazon

Text copyright © by Ray Young

The fascinating and industrious wood spider

Gracias Nelhydrea Paupér

Keep it down, voices carry

Deanna in the 1940s

I haven’t the drive or ambition to clarify who did what—after all, in the end, what could it possibly accomplish?—but the screenplay of Three Smart Girls (1936) is credited to Adele Comandini and Austin Parker. Neither had long enough careers in the movies to mount an oeuvre, nor is there much in the filmography of director Henry Koster to warrant some ham handed declaration of auteurist principles. With the exceptions of It Started with Eve and The Bishop’s Wife, he was a journeyman hack who specialized in mediocrity. (Flubbing the erotic possibilities of Ava Gardner in The Naked Maja should’ve gotten him banished from Tinsel Town forever.) The last name in the credits belongs to Joe Pasternak, which is quite suitable given that this movie is clearly a producer’s work—calculated, neutered, bland and simpleminded.

    A Depression-era musical-sitcom, it’s the kind of froth that kept Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley in the chips before the war, only without elaborate dance numbers…or music, for that matter, other than when the action pauses for star ingénue Deanna Durbin to belt out an aria. She was Universal Pictures’ great white hope, fifteen-years-old and a more developed vocal talent than Judy Garland, albeit without Judy’s stirring emotional command. A few short years after Three Smart Girls, Deanna dethroned Shirley Temple as America’s reigning sweetheart and was pulling down close to a quarter of a million dollars annually at a time when a loaf of bread cost less than a nickel.

    What struck me about Three Smart Girls wasn’t Deanna or Henry or top-billed Binnie Barnes (a woefully undervalued beauty who ended her career in one of my guilty pleasures, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows). As common as muck, its screenplay and handling of dialog is brimming with the unsettling ugliness of what’s now commonly (and perhaps modishly) referred to as dysfunction. In this case, the ills that pox a family in a perpetual state of denial and fear, real or unfounded, presumably under the rule of a bullying oppressor. But it doesn’t reveal who the bugger is, because the picture as a whole is trapped in its own thick, suffocating fog of repression.

    For an hour and a half, not one character is honest with another character. Information is constantly suppressed, people walk on eggshells, subterfuge abounds. Children of divorce (and a hefty alimony settlement affording them a lakeside chateau in the Swiss Alps), the three ‘smart’ teenage girls attempt to lure their absentee father (a Manhattan-based tycoon) back into the arms of their long-suffering spinster-mother before he marries a younger, gold-digging socialite. A trio of eligible bachelors fib their way into the scheme, along with a bogus European Count, a flustered butler and a meddling governess, standard ingredients for 1930s Hollywood romance.

    If one or two of the characters were tight-lipped and loath to express their feelings or thoughts, the scenario could be believable. But in creating a universe motivated entirely by deceit, Koster and/or his writers have transformed reality into an extension of a singularly troubled mind. In its most telling part, Deanna, about to spill the beans to a police lieutenant (John Hamilton, TV’s Perry White), the scene cuts away abruptly, as if the script itself were running from the truth. When the girls speak, voices are elevated and shrill—low self esteem jockeying for recognition, straining to be heard, yet only to spread more lies and half-truths. This is a horror show.

    All of which reminds me that Christmas and New Years are upon us and I’m committed to visiting households swathed in such secrecy. Does the bigoted old man know that his young granddaughter is sleeping with an unemployed man of another race, and that he has three kids with another woman? Or that a nephew drinks himself into blackouts three or four days a week? Or that we’re not suitable for someone who’s found a home in a more affluent wing of the clan to get away from the rest of us? Or that one of our lofty ‘middle class’ couples has had to refinance their mortgage again, only this time adding car payments and thousands of dollars in credit card debt to the nut…while they drop thousands more on their children for the holidays? What about the abortions and DUI’s and drug rehabs and other dirty little secrets? The list goes on and on, but parties have agreed to stay mum in front of other parties. One assumes this is what ‘family’ is all about, therefore my displeasure over Three Smart Girls may be a reflection of my own disgust over the lack of communication in everyday reality…and my hope that January 2 will get here as soon as possible.

In heaven, everything is fine

Divine in Pink Flamingos

“Midnight Movies [is] armed with film clips and interviews with filmmakers, exhibitors and critics who attempt to convey the guerilla spirit of a bygone era.” Read the review now on Flickhead.