Semolina Pilchard Climbing Up the Eiffel Tower

The Beatles: Rare and Unseen 90 minutes. Produced by Paul Clark. Directed by Chris Cowey. Distributed by MVD Entertainment.

Review by Newton C. Smildge

In this crazy mixed up world in which we live in, there are few certainties we can always count upon. One of them is that any newly unearthed audio or visual material involving the Beatles will, by hook or by crook, come out in some form. Whether the material is authorized or, more likely, unauthorized, the generation that grew up with the Beatles, and a smaller but equally dedicated group too young to actually remember the group, are grateful for whatever pieces of time get re-discovered and released.

    A slew of CDs and DVDs have been issued over the years that compile public domain film clips and audio interviews which were never intended to be released in any venue besides the local nightly news or popular teen magazines. 1960s Beatles press conferences, once cut down to a few sound bytes (before the term was popularized), held in, say, Minneapolis or Los Angeles, can now be found in their entirety on various DVDs or YouTube postings. Magazine interview tapes made by journalists for print transcription make their way onto CDs that announce NO ORIGINAL BEATLES MUSIC IS INCLUDED. The market demands more new material from the group that changed the world and split up nearly forty years ago. How can we miss them if they won’t go away? It’s as if the Beatles were the Undead. The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield.

    The unfortunately named Wienerworld company has released The Beatles: Rare and Unseen, a DVD that collects brief clips of home movie footage, some shot by Beatles themselves, in Liverpool, on tour in Scotland, filming Help! and Magical Mystery Tour, and more, including snippets of a 1970s John Lennon interview on French television. These silent clips — the raison d'être for this DVD — are interspersed with interviews, some of which are with people who had genuine connections to the early Beatles — tour managers and press officers, friends, fellow musicians. Some of the interviews are rather charming (Gerry Marsden of Gerry & the Pacemakers) and some insightful (press agent Tony Barrow), while others are typically marginal for these efforts (I don’t get why comedian Ken Dodd or ballroom dancer Len Goodman are here at all). The biggest name present is Phil Collins, whose main Beatles claim to fame is that he was an extra in A Hard Day’s Night. Collins gives a straightforward account of how he found himself working on the film despite ending up on the cutting room floor. He also, in the bonus interviews, gives a nice drummer’s appreciation of Ringo’s too readily dismissed drumming.

    One section of the DVD is devoted to Mickey Jones’s home movies from the Paris Olympia Theatre eighteen-day run in early 1964. Most of this footage, made while drummer Jones was backing Trini Lopez, is already available on another DVD that Jones put out some years ago, most prominently featuring footage he shot while touring with Bob Dylan. But this recounting of the Olympia shows is better, with the added plus of an interview with co-star French pop singer Sylvie Vartan (who still looks pretty damn good at 65). Between Jones and Vartan we get a good sense of the Beatles as individuals literally days before they left for America to play their first Ed Sullivan Show. After that nothing would be the same.

    This collection is chiefly for Beatle maniacs (and maybe Phil Collinsiacs). But it is entertaining and, aside from some self-consciously Beatlesque background music that comes oh-so-close to plagiarism, the DVD and eight-page booklet written by Tony Barrow are far more enjoyable than sitting on a cornflake.

Text copyright © Newton C. Smildge

20th Century Foxes: The Full Monti

I haven’t seen The Brain since it came out in 1969. It was a caper comedy (big stuff in the post-Topkapi era) starring David Niven, Eli Wallach, Bourvil, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Italian dish Silvia Monti. I’d love to see it again! Silvia was briefly busy: after her debut in Fräulein Doktor (1969) she had supporting roles in several (mostly forgotten) European pictures before Lucio Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971). She then played alongside Bud Spencer and Terence Hill in Blackie the Pirate (1971), with Franco Nero in The Fifth Cord (1971), with Ben Gazzara in The Sicilian Connection (1972), and perhaps her meatiest part in Alberto Sordi’s While There’s War There’s Hope (1974). After The Last Desperate Hours (1974), a spaghetti rehash of Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, Silvia married the wealthy Carlo De Benedetti and retired. Meanwhile, the music in the background of this scene from The Brain is “Cento Giorni” by Caterina Caselli. Ciao bella!

Click images to enlarge

With Terence Hill

With Carlo De Benedetti

Posters of my yoot’: ‘I Dig a Pygmy’ by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids

Nothing looks that cool in the movie; click to enlarge

Hats off again to the way kewl Wrong Side of the Art for these two items from my fifty-cent matinee years. Some cockeyed sage over at Amazon calls They Came from Beyond Space (1967) “a classic movie directed by Freddie Francis, and starring Robert Hutton; Jennifer Jayne; Zia Mohyeddin. It is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest classic films of all time. This great film will surely attract a whole new generation of classic movie fans. And for seasoned cinematic connoseuirs [sic], They Came from Beyond Space (1967) [sic] will rekindle an era of film making at its best. For others who simply enjoy watching timeless pieces with icons such as Robert Hutton; Jennifer Jayne; Zia Mohyeddin, They Came from Beyond Space (1967) [double sic] is highly recommended. Re-released by Reel Classic Films this movie would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone’s personal DVD library.” Dude! WTF?!?

    The first and only time I ever saw this British movie was in 1967 at the Bellmore Playhouse. All I remember is that it was really boring. (No monsters!) Even at the age of ten, I was sort-of a fan of Michael Gough because he’d been in Horror of Dracula, Konga and Horrors of the Black Museum, but he didn’t show up in They Came from Beyond Space until the last few minutes. The star was granite-faced American Robert Hutton, who I knew from stuff shown over and over (and over) on Chiller Theatre: The Man Without a Body (second-billed to a very needy George Coulouris), The Colossus of New York, Invisible Invaders, and the remarkable Slime People, which he inexplicably directed as well as starred. In They Came from Outer Space there’s a metal plate in Hutton’s head preventing his abduction by Gough’s aliens. A quick fix for insomnia, you can watch the whole sorry thing in eight creaky parts on YouTube.

    For their Saturday matinee, the Playhouse paired it with…

Click to enlarge

    The Terrornauts (1967) was also made in the UK. Both films were produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the founding fathers of Amicus Productions, known among horror Pupkins as ‘The Studio That Dripped Blood.’

    Based on a novel I’ve never read, The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinstar, The Terrornauts seemed downright groovy in 1967. When it came out on VHS twenty years ago, I still found it amusing, stupid, and undeniably spirited. It’s about a science lab lifted off the ground, building and staff, transported to an alien space station where they’re handed instructions on how to prevent an intergalactic war… or something like that. The intriguing British cast includes TV star Simon Oates as the scientist-time traveler, former Bond girl Zena Marshall as his main squeeze (Miss Taro in Dr. No, Zena passed away this July at the age of 83), Benny Hill regular Patricia Hayes as a Cockney cleaning lady (“Aww, go’on, ducks!”), stiff-upper-Brit Max Adrian as a villainous authority figure, apple-gobbling Stanley Meadows (Rosey in Performance), and — be still my beating heart — Charles Hawtrey, stone-cold sober in the role of ‘Joshua Yellowlees.’ Charles frikkin’ Hawtrey!! In outer space! How can you resist?

Two-Moon Junction: Anyone born after a certain date would find its special effects sub-cheesy, but The Terrornauts held its pre-teen viewers spellbound in 1967. I remember the first shot of the planet with two moons elicited a few “Wow! Cool!”s from the pubescent audience.

Terrornauts trailer!

A citizen no less peaceful than his neighbors

New on DVD, Trumbo (2007) isn’t your typical documentary about writer Dalton Trumbo, but rather a film of his son Christopher’s play which rifles through the man’s family life, his achievements as novelist and screenwriter, his Communist ties and his crucifixion at the hands of HUAC. All of which helped to make him something of an icon late in life, first during Vietnam (when he eventually filmed his 1939 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun in 1971) and today as conservative ideology threatens to regress to McCarthyism.

    Comprised of home movie and interview clips with Trumbo (who died in 1976 at the age of 70), his children, friends, filmmakers and journalists, Trumbo pays scant attention to the whys and hows of his tumultuous career. His support for the Communist Party — because they “opposed the rise of fascism in Europe” — goes unexplored and unchallenged; the political and social ramifications of post-WWII anti-Communism are oversimplified; and Trumbo’s heyday in Hollywood is summarized in a fleeting montage of title cards from the pictures he wrote. The backlash of the Blacklist, Trumbo’s inability to get work and his family’s suffering for his principles, could’ve filled a feature film on its own.

    Yet all of those things have, over the decades, obscured the fact that Dalton Trumbo was amusing, erudite and an exceptional writer when moved by his subject. Christopher Trumbo seizes the moment to celebrate the raconteur and artiste through his writings. With input from Helen Manfull, the editor of Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962, Dalton’s correspondence with colleagues, friends and even a utility company are read aloud by stars: Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Liam Neeson, Nathan Lane. Inundated with pathos, cynicism and acerbic wit, the letters, memos, and excerpts from novels and scripts form a portrait of a man shaped both by his ethics as well as the intolerance of his persecutors.

    His enemies weren’t limited to Washington and Hollywood, nor did they target him exclusively. David Strathairn reads Trumbo’s plea to the local PTA for leniency toward his young daughter Mitzi, a bright and popular girl shunned at school by classmates and neighbors swayed by the HUAC hearings. Paul Giamatti recites a lively communiqué to the electric company; his insolvent family faced with the nagging necessity of overpriced power from a greedy monopoly, Trumbo plants tongue in cheek in a caustic appeal he opens with “Dear Burglars.”

    Say what you will about the Blacklist; for good or ill, it assured Trumbo’s place in history. (How many other screenwriters have had documentaries made about them?) He refused to name names on the grounds that the hearings violated his First Amendment rights. Christopher’s apparent concern, to portray Dalton as a caring, albeit idealistic, father and husband rather than simply a whipped martyr lends Trumbo a benevolence and humanity generally missing in other works about him.

Trumbo with wife Cleo at House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, 1947

Trumbo is available from Magnolia Home Entertainment

Order from Amazon

For Nelhydrea...

Hat tip: Kat

RIP, Mary

Posters of my yoot’ #1: Our man in Africa

Image swiped from The Wrong Side of the Art; click to enlarge.

This hopes to be the start of a new series, prompted in no small measure by the indispensable Wrong Side of the Art. As a kid, I loved hanging out in movie theatre lobbies and checking out the posters. This was during the 1960s. I began to lose interest in poster art by the mid 70s, a subject we may get around to in forthcoming installments. I haven’t the patience to arrange this series in any kind of order, so I’m going to begin with Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966). The artist was Reynold Brown, who did a lot of work for American International. I saw the film at the Bellmore Playhouse on a late Saturday afternoon with my father. He was big on Tarzan, read all the books, and felt the best ever screen Tarzan was Elmo Lincoln. When Tarzan and the Valley of Gold opens, we see Tarzan Mike Henry in suit and tie, going over papers in his attaché case on an airplane. Understand, this was made at the height of the James Bond craze. (Double-0 Ape Man.) Once the 727 hits the tarmac, Tarzan dons his loincloth, encounters Bondian villains (it’s been forty years, but I recall an intimidating bald henchman) and an exotic hottie played by Nancy Kovack, who was a 'Slay Girl' in the Matt Helm movie The Silencers the same year. (Quite fortuitously, Nancy moved on to become Mrs. Zubin Mehta in 1969; her acting career shriveled up shortly thereafter.) My father just shook his head for 90 minutes. Me? I hated Tarzan; I just went because the old man wanted to.

Sacrilege? Eff you!

David Bowie & Candy Clark

Anyone know where I can get a DVD of the original, edited US version of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)? You know: the one that got all the great reviews when it came out. The ‘true’ version of the film may be superior for everyone else, but, quite frankly, I think the one that Cinema V released at 119 minutes is preferable to Roeg’s 139-minute snooze-fest. I fell in love with that film back in the 70s, but now I can’t find it anywhere, I’m stuck with the Director’s Cut.

Romy rising

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Claude Chabrol’s L’enfer (1994). His heart was probably in the right place: he was resuming an unfinished project begun twenty years earlier by Henri-Georges Clouzot, one with ties to Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and the noir staple of a horny schlub getting put through the wringer by a conniving femme fatale. But Chabrol gets bored easily with conventional setups, so when his protagonist (François Cluzet) goes off the deep end, there’s very little reason to feel for him. We’re just watching an actor floundering. I will give Chabrol props for casting Emmanuelle Béart, however: she looks smashing.

    In Clouzot’s 1964 version, Romy Schneider was the sultry wife. The clip here is probably dream imagery Clouzot was going to use to drive the husband bonkers. To me, it looks like a Kenneth Anger movie. I’m sure people will be talking about the Slinky for years to come (nice touch, Henri-Georges!), and if anyone knows what the superb music track is, be sure to drop me a line.

Update: Bruno Alexiu composed the music for this clip from L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot, a new documentary by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea on the making of Clouzot's unfinished film.

Buy Chabrol's L'Enfer from Amazon

Hackin' sackers

Thanks to Erich Kuersten’s cool review at Bright Lights After Dark, I was motivated to rent a Baghead double bill of The Strangers and, of course, Baghead, modern concepts in horror. Back in the olden days, makeup artists created monsters. Today, all you gotta do is throw a bag over somebody’s head and hand them a big knife.

    Starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, The Strangers (2008) is Bryan Bertino’s debut as both writer and director. There’s an interview with him on the DVD where he explains that this is not a horror film so much as a terror film. I guess there’s a difference but, quite frankly, nothing here struck me as being all that original. Headed for a romantic breakup, an unmarried couple get trapped in their remote house by a trio of masked and bagged sadists. And for the first forty minutes, Bryan successfully milks the terror angle for all that it’s worth, especially with some creepy sound effects. The only drawback, of course, is that there’s another forty-five minutes left to go and the gimmicks do get tiresome.

    Supposedly made for one thousand dollars (the actors must’ve been getting points), Baghead (2008) is the brainchild of writers-directors Jay and Mark Duplass. Shot on high def video, this is also set in a house in the middle of nowhere, where two couples collaborate on a screenplay for an indie movie. I’m not sure where Baghead was (or is), uh, headed, but an interesting idea about their relationships is cut short for a horror (or terror) situation featuring an anonymous killer wearing a shopping bag over his face. I was kind of taken by the unrequited love angles between Steve Zissis and Greta Gerwig, and Gerwig and Ross Partridge (the embarrassing dilemma of Zissis’s character’s yearning deserves a film of its own), but the Duplass bros. gloss over the messy emotional stuff. I’d like to say they go for the jugular, but that ain't the case.

Buy The Strangers from Amazon

Buy Baghead from Amazon