The ABC’s of Flickhead

Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada

There’s a ‘meme’ floating around in which bloggers name a favorite film for each letter of the alphabet. The instigating blog posted a bunch of rules to follow, but I zoned out while reading them. Here’s my train wreck. Some of these I’ve seen more times than I can count:

All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)

Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)

The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006)

The End of August at the Ozone Hotel (Jan Schmidt, 1965)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Grass (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1925)

A Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema (Agnès Varda, 1995)

I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004)

Johnny Handsome (Walter Hill, 1989)

The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)

Above and below: Chockablock with symbolism, The Legend Of Lylah Clare finds the title character (Kim Novak, in her last major starring vehicle) confusing reality with her image…or, images. She’s Lylah, Elsa Brinkmann and Elsa Cameron. Watch this back to back with Mulholland Dr. and lose your mind! (Click photos to enlarge.)

The Legend of Lylah Clare (Robert Aldrich, 1968)

Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952)

New Year’s Day (Henry Jaglom, 1989)

Open Water (Chris Kentis, 2003)

The President’s Analyst (Theodore J. Flicker, 1967)

Quicksand (Irving Pichel, 1950)

Rider on the Rain (René Clément, 1970)

Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957)

Trees Lounge (Steve Buscemi, 1996)

Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)

Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994)

Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, 1933)

Xanadu (Robert Greenwald, 1980)

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983)

Some drool on my Bibb

I first noticed Leslie Bibb when she played the reporter in Iron Man (2008). The part was underwritten, but she seemed above the typical Barbie Doll blonde. Since I don’t watch episodic TV, I haven’t seen her on Popular, Line of Fire or Crossing Jordan, but I have seen The Midnight Meat Train (2008). Based on a story by Clive Barker, it’s about Bibb’s boyfriend and his obsession with a serial killer. Horror aficionados generally have stringent standards concerning what’s good or bad in the genre; all I know is I wasn’t bored and found it entertaining. And it made me a Leslie Bibb fan. I guess she can act — Iron Man and Midnight Meat Train aren’t exactly La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc — but she’s sexy in the style of Maria Bello…also like Maria, she’s sexy at an age too often dismissed by the dunderheads in Hollywood. (Leslie’s thirty-four, Maria’s forty-one.) Click these photos to enlarge.

Iron Man


Midnight Meat Train


Love that overbite!


…plus she’s presentable for social occasions and family gatherings!

New DVDs

Above: Hunter Thompson under duress

Best watched at two in the morning, Edward Dmytryk’s potential cult item Mirage (1965) finally arrives on DVD via The Gregory Peck Film Collection. Faux Hitchcock, even fauxer Stanley Donen (in the Charade mode), Mad Ave Exec Peck has amnesia — Spellbound meets The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The attending psychiatrist in this Woolrichian morass (did Greg kill someone?) is played by Robert H. Harris (the deranged makeup artist in How to Make a Monster), George Kennedy (as ‘Willard’) wants to beat him up, private eye Walter Matthau unlocks the secret of Unidyne, and everyone’s under the thumb of The Major, even ‘Boobie baby’ Kevin McCarthy swilling drinkie-poos in the land of Joe Turtle. Made back when Manhattan had to contend with frequent blackouts (those damned UFOs), it’s mindlessly enthralling. Co-starring Diane Baker, Jack Weston and former Mr. Frances Farmer Leif Erickson. (To order from Amazon, click here.)

It’s been less than twelve hours since I saw WALL-E (2008), an animated film directed by Andrew Stanton, though fans of this sort of thing generally point to Pixar as the auteur. Fifty years ago a lot of people did the same thing with MGM, but even that renowned studio had its share of clunkers. Twelve hours and I’m hard pressed to remember anything other than the calculatedly cute title robot (a trash compactor) and a future society of sedentary fatsos resembling Walmart on Black Friday. According to IMDb the budget was a whopping $180 million but it grossed $223 million, an apparent failure in the eyes of industry bigwigs. I assume one needs to bring up budgets and corporate auteurship, because there’s really nothing to talk about beyond that. (To order from Amazon, click here.)

As a follower of Raoul Duke since the 1970s, I was looking forward to Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008). Safe, well constructed and ultimately mainstream (need I say I was occasionally bored?), it works as a one-sided introduction to the author (widow Anita Thompson nearly gets the bum’s rush) while missing the essence of Gonzo. There are respectable interviews and good film clips, and two moments I found highly entertaining: all-too-brief footage of Thompson on To Tell the Truth in 1967 (you haven’t lived until you hear Kitty Carlisle ask about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters), and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner holding back crocodile tears over Hunter’s suicide. If you took all the bullshit out of Wenner, you could bury him in a cigar box. (To order from Amazon, click here.)

Guilty(?) Pleasures: The Gamma People

This may be the start of an ongoing series…


Pauline Drewett and Goon

For all six people who were wondering what screen bulldozer Paul Douglas was doing between The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) and This Could Be the Night (1957), it was The Gamma People (John Gilling, 1956). I like it because it’s a mixed bag: a quasi-science fiction, quasi-political quasi-comedy from Warwick Films, a company headed by future Matt Helm producer Irving Allen and James Bond’s Cubby Broccoli. (The Gamma People’s DP was future Bond vet Ted Moore.) Paul’s sidekick is the eternally flustered Leslie Phillips, one of my favorite comedy actors. They’re trapped in the mythical Iron Curtain country Gudavia, lorded over by mad scientist Walter Rilla and an army of slackjawed goons whose brains have been melted by Rilla’s insidious gamma rays. As an added bonus, the coldly stylish Eva Bartok wavers effortlessly from femme fatale to Paul’s unlikely love interest. Director Gilling did a few pictures for Warwick, and later for Hammer, but I’ve yet to see one as spontaneous and animated as Gamma People: Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), Odongo (1956), The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), Night Caller from Outer Space (1965), Where the Bullets Fly (the second and last of Tom Adams’s Charles Vine spy series, 1966), and The Mummy’s Shroud (1967). You can check out Gilling’s other credits at IMDb. While it was released ages ago on VHS, The Gamma People isn’t available on DVD.

The images below were pilfered from Wrong Side of the Art (click to enlarge):

Future dudes with ‘tude

I’m no big Star Trek fan, but the trailer for the upcoming installment looks identical to every bad action movie that’s been released in the last ten years. I’m expecting Vin Diesel to jump out as Khan. The guys playing Kirk and Spock look like a couple of tweens fresh off the Disney Channel. Way illogical, dude.

Miniskirts in Outer Space

I first saw Queen of Outer Space (1958) as an 11-year-old sci-fi crazed tyke, but even then found it tedious. Alas, I was too young to savor the hoochie mama decadence. Recently released on DVD, I can now see that the third quarter of an already padded and poky eighty minutes finds a cast with little to say or do other than run around waving ray guns on cheesy sets. The temptation to nod off runs high, no matter that one of the extraterrestrials is Zsa Zsa Gabor (complete with Hungarian accent), then the reigning Queen of Alimony: seven divorces, one annulment from nine marriages, dethroning Liz Taylor by one ex.

    The belated opening credits (they arrive some fifteen minutes into the action, an anomaly for the time) offers this zinger: a screenplay by a then-unknown Charles Beaumont, based on a story by Ben Hecht (!). It was a treatment Hecht knocked out nearly a decade earlier, of a spaceship landing on Venus where a four-man crew discovers a civilization of Amazonian babes in miniskirts plotting to destroy Earth. The expedition is led by Eric Fleming (the poor man’s Leslie Nielsen — chiseled furniture) and aging butterball Paul Birch (the poorer man’s Jay C. Flippen).

    Don’t expect any of the wit or poetry of Hecht’s The Front Page or Notorious on this excursion. With the exception of a campy exchange between hunky astronaut Patrick Waltz and an unbilled (and very funny) Joi Lansing, and Waltz drooling over the Venusians (“How’d you like to drag that one to the Senior Prom?”), Beaumont generally distances the script from the obvious socio-sexual-political satire.

    Producer Ben Schwalb and director Edward Bernds both came from comedy, the Bowery Boys and Three Stooges in particular, and could’ve transformed Queen of Outer Space into a send-up of post-WWII conformity and the budding Playboy ethos. But the picture was shot in color and CinemaScope, a rare and costly endeavor for poverty row studio Allied Artists, who probably toned down any subversive concepts in favor of safe and conventional sci-fi. The result is somewhat similar to, but nowhere near as comical as, Cat Women of the Moon (1953) and Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956).




    Unless I missed something while trying to stay awake, Queen of Outer Space never asks how an all-female Venus procreates. Bernd’s earlier and vastly superior World Without End (1956) dwells on a futuristic planet where similar sexual tensions abound. The women — more cellulite-free pinups in miniskirts — can’t get laid since atomic fallout has sterilized their men. (World without erections?) A spaceship from Earth arrives, this time led by Hugh Marlowe and twenty-six-year-old babe magnet Rod Taylor, both of them up for the task of replenishing a dying race.

    Recently released on DVD (on a double bill disc with the static Satellite in the Sky [1956]), World Without End comes from an original story by Bernds, cribbing H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in an earnest plea against atomic war, predicting elements of Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) along the way. Despite color and CinemaScope, it was another frugal Allied Artists production occasionally marred by the visible wires suspending the rocket and a laughable rubber monster spider — chintzy effects recycled in Queen of Outer Space.

    However, Bernds’s contemporary sexual and political points overshadow the cosmetic flaws. He exhibits a clear understanding of loss, bewilderment and faith as the astronauts help guide a culture from selfishness and fear to a thriving socialist state — all this while consumerism (and HUAC) flourished in post-war America. Disregard the budgetary restrictions, wooden dialog and 1950s theatrics (did Hugh Marlowe’s expression ever change?): this is a highpoint of Cold War-era sci-fi.

I Vote Valerie Solanas

“Seeing I Shot Andy Warhol again after umpteen years, I am struck by its pitiful story of outsider-hood. I don’t think the film makes a very successful case for reading the writings of Valerie Solanas, but it does reflect very wisely on the nature of being outside, whether that means that you are also one of the ‘in-crowd,’ or not.” Read Irene Dobson’s ruminations now on Flickhead.

The con film festival

Angie redux: My recent plunge into all things Angelina Jolie (previously discussed here) took me back to Original Sin (2001). Notable for containing one of the screen’s great orgasms (my girl knows her stuff), the surrounding 115-minutes is high-minded pulp, and none too convincing. The second misguided adaptation of a tawdry but compelling Cornell Woolrich novel, Waltz into Darkness (the first was Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid [1969]), it reunites Angie with Michael Cristofer, her director on Gia (1998), a by-the-numbers TV biopic elevated to excellence by the star alone. She may have felt an affinity for that character, whereas Original Sin offers her little more than a shallow vamp — and her wiry physique, billowing black hair and taught olive skin had me thinking of Martine Beswicke (circa Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde). Out to fleece Antonio Banderas of his vast fortune, Angie’s a twofaced, homicidal mail-order bride. Antonio’s a humble millionaire who can’t get a date…and Cristofer is short on the cynical humor needed to milk this puppy for all that it’s worth. He’s also void of the kitschy eroticism of a Zalman King and gives us something akin to a very long, silly and boring perfume commercial.

F for flake: Destined for a dreary career as a second-rate novelist, Clifford Irving basked in his fifteen minutes of fame during the early 1970s, after hurling himself in the spotlight as Howard Hughes’s ‘authorized biographer.’ Heady times, indeed, and the subject of Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax (2007), with Richard Gere a rather soft incarnation of the writer. It’s based on Irving’s own (factual?) account of the scandal that put he and his wife and collaborator Dick Suskind in jail, and sent Hughes, McGraw-Hill publishers and Life magazine to court. Idealized to the point of caricature, Hallström’s picture is interesting and amusing but insubstantial. Marcia Gay Harden is good as Irving’s bewildered fourth wife, artist Edith Sommer, and Julie Delpy appears briefly as his on-again-off-again girlfriend, the Baroness Nina van Pallandt. (The real Pallandt is a part-time actress — she’s in the motel room with Jeff Bridges at the beginning of Cutter’s Way — and a vocalist — once part of the duo Nina & Frederik — who sang “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” in the James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.) You’re better off checking out Irving playing himself for documentary filmmaker François Reichenbach in interview footage Orson Welles later worked into F for Fake (1974), a faux documentary about art forgery and fakers, specifically Irving’s neighbor in Ibiza, Elmyr de Hory. Welles and Reichenbach were doubtlessly intrigued by Irving’s book, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time, published in 1969, which tells Elmyr’s story and his uncanny ability to copy Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse.