Ganja for Halloween

Among the bonus features included in the Ganja & Hess (1973) DVD is disc producer David Kalat introducing the restored picture to a theater audience. His forewarning — that this low budget vampire movie defies simple classification and preconception — is an understatement. Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess is an oddity, often maddening, frustrating, fascinating, riddled with both flaws and beauty, and bursting with revelations.

    For a while, it seemed as if the picture were slated for oblivion. In the early 1970s, Gunn was an up-and-coming actor-writer-director who’d had brief appearances on episodic TV and wrote two perceptive screenplays about race relations: Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) and Ján Kadár’s The Angel Levine (1970). Young and Black, Gunn infused an airy knowingness into characters and situations which, in other hands, would’ve been bored away at piously and likely without his glib sense of humor.

    After writing and directing the shelved (and presumably lost) Stop (1970), Gunn was given the opportunity to make a Black vampire movie by a small distributor impressed by the box office for Blacula (1972), a horror exploitation hit at the time. What Gunn delivered, however, was no Blacula. As the so-called Blaxploitation genre was running rampant (mostly comprised of mindless action fodder), he used Ganja & Hess to address any number of pertinent issues facing Blacks in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, from drug addiction to servitude, education to capitalist propriety, bourgeois gluttony to spiritual ideology, to the selling out of principles and kowtowing to the system, of ‘letting go and letting God.’

    All of which wafts between the lines of a story about a wealthy doctor infected with the ‘disease’ of vampirism and his pilfering blood from health clinics, later killing and draining people, to his marriage to a soul mate who carries the curse after his redemption. Relatively inexperienced and surely under-financed (the budget was $300,000), Gunn detours from genre standards in favor of an elliptical, quasi-vérité approach. Made before the public’s awareness of AIDS, he probably would have taken a far different tack on his subject just five or ten years later. As it is, Ganja & Hess owes less to the myths surrounding Dracula (or Blacula) than the preoccupation with moral decay found in Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad.

    Gunn cast himself in a supporting role as an edgy, doomed catalyst, with Marlene Clark and Duane Jones playing Ganja and Hess. The three come from disparate acting styles: Clark classical, Jones brooding in the Method, and Gunn infused with the naturalism of Cassavetes. The mixture lends an uneasiness which may not have been intended. In one of its fluid, extended takes, a drunk scene between Gunn and Jones is alarmingly claustrophobic in its obvious improvisation (it reminded me of the shaky moments between DeNiro and Keitel in Taxi Driver), while the introduction of Clark, nearly midway through the picture, serves as a reminder of the formalism, humor and glamour of old Hollywood.

    Indeed, Marlene Clark was a tragically underemployed actress best known among horror buffs for starring in the low budget obscurity, Night of the Cobra Woman (1972). Seeing her in Ganja & Hess underlines our loss. She contributes to the DVD’s lively audio commentary, as does cinematographer James E. Hinton, who blames her lack of mainstream success on a culture threatened by beautiful and domineering Black women.

    At the time it was released, Duane Jones was a cult figure for starring in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Although it came out in 1968, the zombie hit continued to play at midnight in urban markets and college towns for years. A university professor who acted in movies as a second career, Jones passed away from a heart attack at the age of fifty-two in 1988.

    Ganja & Hess opened in April, 1973, at Manhattan’s upscale (and now defunct) Playboy Theatre, located on 57th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. The reviews were generally negative and it closed within a week. There were few supporters (among them James Murray in The Amsterdam News), and James Monaco wrote at length about the film and its subsequent truncated versions (under the campy titles Blood Couple and Double Possession) in his book, American Film Now (1979). By the late-1970s, only one or two complete versions of the film were believed to exist.

    “The artistry for which it strives,” wrote A.H. Weiler in The New York Times during its original run, “is largely vitiated by a confusingly vague mélange of symbolism, violence and sex.” His position is not entirely unfair, at least as far as the customer expecting a Dracula movie is concerned. Less melodrama than meditation, Ganja & Hess is one of those rare experiments that flex the fundamentals of narrative to include a wide range of emotions and ideas.

    The details that flow randomly throughout, from Jones’s stoic approach to his character’s hedonism, to Hinton’s carefully lit photography (it was filmed in super 16mm and blown up to 35), Sam Waymon’s music, and Gunn’s eye for set and location, grow more rewarding with repeat viewings. The subtleties and nuance of African heritage, with their conflicting ties to European culture, carry a sense of alienation that makes Hess’s move to God seem all the more natural. As the preacher, Waymon (brother of jazz great Nina Simone) shares a pivotal moment for Jones, in the throes of an apparently genuine spiritual awakening.

    Despite all these qualities, Ganja & Hess marked the end of Bill Gunn’s directing career. He appeared in Losing Ground (1982), a comedy also with Duane Jones, and had a recurring role as Homer on The Cosby Show in the late ‘80s. He died in 1989 at the age of fifty-five, surely conscious of Ganja & Hess’s cult (it played annually at the Museum of Modern Art). His contribution to Black American cinema is vital, however, and should not be overlooked.

Ganja & Hess Written and directed by Bill Gunn. Cinematography by James E. Hinton. Edited by Victor Kanefsky. Music by Sam Waymon. With Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn, Sam Waymon. 113 minutes. Originally released in 1973. DVD bonus features include an audio commentary, restored footage, a featurette on the history of the production, a photo gallery, the original screenplay and an article by Tim Lucas and David Walker.

Angelina Jolie is god!

With Changeling (2008) poised for her Oscar consideration, I’ve found myself on an Angelina Jolie jag lately. She was once compared to Brando for her remarkable capacity as eye magnet and changeling, and you could take her visceral performance in Gia (1998) as proof. Before that she was in Foxfire (1996), where her tough drifter could be seen as a young incarnation of the fallen manipulator she’d later play in Girl, Interrupted (1999).
    From a screenplay by Elizabeth White based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire is a heartfelt exploration of young women finding their voice in a cruel and dismissive world. Jolie wanders into suburban Portland, a black leather phantom using her pent-up angst to encourage a group of high school girls to stand up to their oppressors — a rounded assortment of bullying, controlling, abusive boys and men, schoolmates, parents and teachers. While working her magic, a guarded love affair grows between Jolie and top-billed Hedy Burress. Fledgling director Annette Haywood-Carter handles their romantic scenes tenderly, while imbuing most of the picture with the sweaty, late night yearning of adolescence.
    But observing Jolie so early in her career — before the hollow payday of the Lara Croft pictures and the virtually unwatchable Mr. And Mrs. Smith (2005) — is to witness an unexpected elevation of aesthetic. Like Brando, she drifts casually beyond craft. It runs throughout Gia and most of her scenes in Girl, Interrupted, but the overall modesty of Foxfire — from its Oregon locations and small budget, to the relative obscurity of the cast — underlines the value of its pertinent themes while causing the actress to seem nothing less than inspirational. Pauline Kael envisioned a remake of Last Tango in Paris with Jolie playing both the Brando and Maria Schneider parts, and I can see her point.

Against all odds

Rachel Ward’s Laura-ish portrait from Sharky’s Machine

I know she's a tracker, any scarlet would back her
They say she's a chooser, but I just can’t refuse her
She was just there, but then she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

She’s been down in the dunes and she’s dealt with the goons
Now she drinks from the bitter cup, I’m trying to get her to give it up
She was just here, I fear she can’t be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

It’s long, long when she’s gone, I get weary holding on
Now I’m coldly fading fast, I don’t think I’m gonna last
Very much longer

“She’s stoned” said the Swede, and the moon calf agreed
I’m like a viper in shock with my eyes in the clock
She was just there somewhere and here I am again
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

— Robbie Robertson, “Chest Fever”

Janet was born in 1950 but died just three or four years ago, her death likely precipitated by alcoholism and drug addiction. I can’t say for certain, as she and I parted ways sometime in 1980, the year the Johnnie Walker wisdom officially took over, stunting my ability to behave in public. Shortly after, I’d be dribbling in a rehab while Janet moved on to dangerous ground. Her actions included drug dealing, and excessive DWIs got her a cell at Riker’s Island. Her legacy includes an estranged son who must be pushing forty by now, and a daughter she conceived much later in life (mercifully raised by others), with Janet’s first cousin the father. That last one shocked me not so much for the ill-advised lineage as for the pregnancy itself, for she once assured me her tubes had been tied long before we met.

    Such a fabrication was fairly common for this denizen of Cloud 9, who possessed a politician’s knack for making the imaginary seem true. She suited my need for a fanciful world as I grappled with a reality that felt tenuous and harsh. It should come as no surprise that she was indeed my first love, her beauty, cynical wit and drunkard’s magnetism intoxicating me to the core. Of the physical end, she compared herself to the 1940s actress Ann Sheridan, and also to Bette Davis. She resembled neither.

    Nor did she look like Rachel Ward, which brings us to why I’m navigating my way down this rickety, Caligari-esque memory lane. A recent post at Starlet Showcase offered images of Rachel in the Burt Reynolds movie Sharky’s Machine (1981) which stirred up some ghosts, because the actress — essentially forgotten today — was also in After Dark, My Sweet (1990). This sleepy adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel I’ve never read found no audience upon its release except for those miscreants hip to its boozy SoCal élan. Rachel played Fay, and Jason Patric portrayed an ex-boxer/mental patient named Collie. The two of them, their manner, overall appearance, wardrobe, speech and lifestyle look as if it were all patterned after my interpretation of Janet and what passed for our ‘relationship.’

After Dark, My Sweet trailer

    Fay is introduced sitting in a bar at mid-afternoon, wearing denim cut-offs, flip flops and a loose shirt. She’s also wearing a hat, which we’ll pretend doesn’t exist, because Janet never wore hats except for an old navy blue wool cap in the dead of winter. But the rest of it was Janet’s trademark attire, and you could usually find her in some dive during daylight hours conversing with beefy, blank-eyed bartenders who fed her vodka gimlets, mostly on the house. She’d do her laundry on Thursdays, when I’d meet her at a small pub adjacent to the village laundromat. We’d nosh on salty snacks, swill tap beer and watch The Gong Show. Under these murky conditions, even the Unknown Comic can seem a fount of expert timing and wit.

    Janet and Rachel shared long, slender legs with flush, smooth knees, “legs that go all the way up to her ass” to use the barfly’s parlance. In the movie trailer above, there’s a fleeting shot of Rachel’s tush which has more bounce and shape than Janet’s, whose was small and flat thanks to an overindulgence of amphetamines. But Rachel’s walk is almost identical to Janet’s, and the line, “You really believe there could be a you-and-me?” strikes a chilling chord. Janet never allowed for the future — she laughed at me when I proposed marriage — while her past was sharply divided between silly inebriated stunts and dark emotional turmoil. She attempted to live squarely in the moment by drinking, reading or going to a lot of movies (we saw The Last Waltz at least half a dozen times at the Ziegfeld), and when those defenses would crumble she’d keep reality at bay by switching from beer to vodka, a guaranteed blackout, a waking unconsciousness that I was no stranger to myself.

    Our (mis)adventures took us far and wide, psychologically if not geographically. We grew into hybrids of the Susan Tyrrell and Stacy Keach characters of Fat City (1972), alternating barstool wit with exaggerated reactions, barbed tongues wagging away until pass out time. We never knew how frightened we were or how unloved we felt, our defects so intrinsic and deeply guarded as to ward off any new pain. You can sense these things in Rachel again, as the desperate housewife yearning for an orgasm in The Good Wife (1986), director Ken Cameron’s uneasy blend of David Lean-ish epic with Zalman King-style eroticism. Unfortunately, Janet and I never approached sex like normal people. It became as entangled as our skewed logic. There was nakedness, touching, penetration…yet I still don’t know if we ever made love or really had sex.

    As the 1970s faded, the ‘80s tossed us into opposite corners of the universe. I became unstable and transformed into a hurtful beast, damaging everything and everyone around me, a veritable blueprint for Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980). Janet wisely backed away. Our last exchanges were two sketchy phone conversations and an arrangement to meet in front of a movie theater in the town I’d relocated to. I stood outside waiting for her, but the hours passed and she never showed. A day or two later I thought, was she looking over at me from a parked car across the road? Who knows? I never saw or spoke to her again.

The end credits of Against All Odds

    When she hit her peak in Hollywood, Rachel Ward was top-billed over Jeff Bridges and James Woods in Against All Odds (1984), Taylor Hackford’s uneven reworking of Out of the Past (1947). The end credits clip offered above is awash in the kind of gooey sentimentality frowned upon by cynics and intellectuals (pseudo and real) who surrounded me in my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps uneasy (embarrassed?) by the camera recording her in one pregnant take, Rachel searches for a focal point. It ends on a freeze frame, that cliché holdover from the ‘70s. At one time I dismissed the Phil Collins song as slick, superficial tripe, but now it addresses things I can relate to, the mourning for people and time lost for good, of love without heat, a distant memory:

So take a look at me now, there’s just an empty space
And there’s nothing left here to remind me,
Just the memory of your face
Take a look at me now, there’s just an empty space
And you coming back to me is against all odds
and that’s what I’ve got to face

Desperate characters

Click to enlarge

“Was it good? Was it bad?” When it comes to violence and gore, Mrs. Flickhead is a lightweight. To this day she winces when thinking back on the horse’s head in The Godfather, and that was forty years ago. Now she’s asking about Abracadaver! (2008), the new film by Nathan Schiff. She adores Nathan as a friend — we’ve known him since the mid-80s — but his films and his obsession with horror sail well beyond her threshold. “I don’t know how I’d go about critiquing it,” I said, “but I sat there with my mouth open and my eyes fixed from beginning to end.”

    Absolutely no need for her to endure its rough spots: even though he hasn’t directed a picture in seventeen years, Nathan has lost none of his mojo in the gore department. That’s how he attracted a cult following with The Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) and They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore (1985), giddy, grisly films whose budgets rest squarely on the cost of the super-8 stock they were shot on. Gruesome as it is, They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore is an outrageous send-up of suburban mores, while his last feature-length work to date, Vermilion Eyes (1991) was so intensely personal that his DVD distributor chose not to release it.

    Clocking in at twenty minutes, Abracadaver! is part of “Worst Fears,” a series of shorts from England’s Pathetique Films. (For a list of their other titles, click here.) In the past Nathan wrote, produced, photographed, edited and directed his pictures, but here he’s working under producer David McGillivray with a full cast and crew, and a screenplay by Jak E. Arthur. Despite a reportedly tumultuous production history (you can read McGillivray’s take on it here), it resonates with Schiff’s distinct voice and pet themes.

    Which, on the surface, concern murder and mayhem, bloodletting at the hands of determined, chainsaw-wielding psychos. But there’s also something darker between the lines, an emotional detachment within characters stuck in a cyclical rut of longing, their passions warped by ongoing desperation. It permeates Vermilion Eyes (a unique portrait of depression and Nathan’s best film) and haunts Abracadaver!, in which a shiftless hetero man (the suitably bewildered Marc Edward Newman) gets an assistant’s job for an older gay magician (a magnetic and scary Peter de Rome).

Marc Edward Newman on his ‘job interview’ with Peter de Rome.
(Click to enlarge.)

    McGillivray was approached by the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival when they were looking for movies to show at their 2008 gala. He felt Arthur’s script would be suitable and, given its horror angle (the magician dismembers victims onstage), contacted Schiff — who has no gay leanings whatsoever. An instance of fortunate alchemy, these disparate elements work to the advantage of the scenario. By the end, like Newman’s character John, we’re not quite sure what’s going on, but the intensity snowballs and snares the attention.

    Outside of its “crowd pleasing” disembowelments and a disturbingly prolonged death scene, the sense of alienation penetrates like a creeping malaise. John’s uneasy job interview with the magician is inexplicably held in a deserted snowy forest; his sexual tryst with Michelle (Erica Leigh Boseski) feels mechanical and obligatory. As he did in Vermilion Eyes, Schiff observes everyday situations through a jaundiced eye. When John literally spills his guts out on stage, Michelle laughs maniacally from the audience. Call it Sartre Chainsaw Massacre: Schiff transcends genre for existentialism. It makes you wonder what he could do with a lot of money and a cast and crew willing to go the distance.