A three hour tour

Leave it to the Professor to hand out midterms the day before Thanksgiving weekend. Thankfully, your humble narrator studied and, in all probability, aced this puppy. For a copy of the original — Professor Russell Johnson’s ‘My Ancestors Came Over on the Minnow’ Thanksgiving/Christmas Movie Quiz — go to Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and take it. That is, if you’re cinephile enough.

1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie.
As a man of constant sorrow, I’ll go with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, even if it withers under repeat viewings. Ah, those zaftig babes in the stream!

2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible? (Question submitted by Peter Nellhaus)
Vaguely off topic: I saw Vertigo on what must’ve been its ‘last’ telecast in the 1960s. When it was re-released in the 80s, I saw it at the Jerry Lewis Twin. When it was ‘restored’ a few years later, I saw it at the Ziegfeld, presumably in its proper VistaVision aspect ratio. I then bought it on VHS (VistaVision be damned), followed by DVD. Now that I’m wise to their tricks — “There’s a sucker born every minute” — I won’t shell out for the Blu-ray.

3) Japan or France? (Question submitted by Bob Westal)
“French is the language of cinema,” said (Italian) Bernardo Bertolucci. Louis Feuillade. Jean Vigo. Jean Renoir. (Jean Renoir!) Marcel Pagnol. Marcel Carné. Henri-Georges Clouzot. Robert Bresson. Jean Cocteau. Jean-Pierre Melville. Georges Franju. Jacques Becker. Henri Verneuil. René Clément. And then there’s the nouvelle vague. I rest my case.

4) Favorite moment/line from a western.
Dog-eared for sure, but: “If they move, kill ‘em.”

5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?
Literature. This includes the scripted direction of photographic image. I believe that, in most cases, everything, including the visual, begins with the written word.

6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?).
Which would put me in the awkward position of trying to convince someone of something they don’t (or don’t want to) believe in. Once they have their minds made up, too many cinephiles are impossible to sway, no matter how wrong they may be. In short, it’s not worth my time. Besides, you couldn’t afford me.

7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.
Did overkill or common sense quell my fascination with Brando?

8) Herbert Lom or Patrick Magee?
One’s understated, the other underlined, both fall somewhere down the middle. Lom’s haunted, so I’m with him.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (click to enlarge)

9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film (Submitted by Tony Dayoub)
I groaned through most of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; did it need to be 135 minutes? I drew a blank on Inland Empire.

10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
Both superb craftsmen. I’ll give Hall props for Incubus, Cool Hand Luke, Fat City (a masterwork), and sundry episodes of The Outer Limits.

11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie.
I have a soft spot for Coogan’s Bluff, which probably paved the way for Dennis Weaver’s McCloud… and reminds me that I’ve never seen Siegel’s Private Hell 36.

12) Last movie you saw on DVD/Blu-ray? In theaters?
On DVD, it was 18-year-old Angelina Jolie in Cyborg 2. On HD VOD — the nieces giggle when Uncle Flickhead speaks in acronyms — it was Orphan, a deranged family-in-crisis movie. (Is it my imagination, or does Peter Sarsgaard looked stoned all the time?) On Blu-ray, G.I. Joe: the Rise of the Cobra proved instantly forgettable. In the theater it was The Fourth Kind, bogus ‘reality’ SF marginally redeemed by the presence of Milla Jovovich.

13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
Still smarting from replacing VHS with DVD, giving these bastards even more money for the same on Blu-ray would be idiocy. I do own about ten Blu-rays, and I’m always searching for bargains, rarely willing to pony up more than ten bucks a pop.

14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?
The latter was amusing in Superbad. Deezen’s a train wreck. An annoying train wreck.

15) Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.
I’ll see anything with Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman. I even slogged through Margot at the Wedding. Which prompts me to ask: if your vision were as shaky as hand-held cinematography, wouldn’t you check into a hospital, like, toot sweet?

16) Fight Club -- yes or no?
There are sycophants who honestly don’t know any better. But they think they do.

The Search for Bridey Murphy (click to enlarge)

17) Teresa Wright or Olivia De Havilland?
Olivia can be repetitious. And she never gave us anything like Teresa’s Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. Plus, Teresa was in one of my guilty pleasures, The Search for Bridey Murphy.

18) Favorite moment/line from a film noir.
I ID with Tom Neal when he says “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all” in Detour. I empathize with Sam Jaffe drooling over young stuff in Asphalt Jungle.

19) Best (or worst) death scene involving an obvious dummy substituting for a human or any other unsuccessful special effect(s)—see the wonderful blog Destructible Man for inspiration.
Anything having to do with the big bird in The Giant Claw.

20) What's the least you've spent on a film and still regretted it? (Submitted by Lucas McNelly)
Ah, as if it were yesterday: Sky Riders plus Breakout for $1.50 at the Bellmore Theatre, aka ‘The Itch’ in 1976. One of those days when I thought, “that’s it: cinema’s dead.”

21) Van Johnson or Van Heflin?
I’ve always had trouble with that wad of spittle twirling around in Mr. Johnson’s mouth as he recites lines. Mr. Heflin, meanwhile, carries the look of eternal constipation. And then there’s Bobby Van, who hopped his way through town in an MGM musical I don’t know the name of. It’s getting late.

22) Favorite Alan Rudolph film.
When I can make it through one without nodding off, I’ll let you know.

23) Name a documentary that you believe more people should see.
Schoedsack and Cooper’s Grass (1925).

24) In deference to this quiz’s professor, name a favorite film which revolves around someone becoming stranded.
It hasn’t aged well, but Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away still captivates. Or is it Mariangela Melato?

25) Is there a moment when your knowledge of film, or lack thereof, caused you an unusual degree of embarrassment and/or humiliation? If so, please share.
Taking this test.

They Drive By Night (click to enlarge)

26) Ann Sheridan or Geraldine Fitzgerald? (Submitted by Larry Aydlette)
While I know she’s a fine actor, I can’t think of one Fitzgerald performance off the top of my head. Sheridan, however, had all that juicy repartee with George Raft in the diner in They Drive By Night.

27) Do you or any of your family members physically resemble movie actors or other notable figures in the film world? If so, who?
My mother claimed she and my father resembled Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck. Photographs have yet to confirm this but, truthfully, the woman was nuts. People used to say I look like Aidan Quinn. Today I just look scary.

28) Is there a movie you have purposely avoided seeing? If so, why?
Anything with George Lucas’s name on it. Is an explanation necessary?

29) Movie with the most palpable or otherwise effective wintry atmosphere or ambience.
A reminder that I need to see The Sweet Hereafter again, it’s been ages.

30) Gerrit Graham or Jeffrey Jones?
I just looked at Graham’s filmography; I have no idea who he is. Isn’t Jeffrey into little boys?

31) The best cinematic antidote to a cultural stereotype (sexual, political, regional, whatever).
God forgive me: I was going to be cruel and stupid and poke fun by saying Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but, no, that would be way wrong.

Elsa comes between Duke & Pockets in Hatari! (click to enlarge). Note the position of Pockets’s left index finger in between his right index and thumb, parallel with Duke’s lap (not Elsa’s).

32) Second favorite John Wayne movie.
Props to Hatari! and its (imagined?) gay subtext: Red Buttons (as ‘Pockets,’ read into it what you will) bewildered to find a woman in Duke’s bed; Pockets running around in yellow latex gloves; Pockets too concerned with who’s sleeping with Duke; Hardy Krüger in hotpants; Hardy palling around with Gérard Blain; Elsa Martinelli, of all people, finding it difficult to get laid; the phallic rhino horns; the phallic elephant trunks; it goes on and on. Bring vodka.

33) Favorite movie car chase.
Only one is instantly identifiable: Bullitt.

34) In the spirit of His Girl Friday, propose a gender-switched remake of a classic or not-so-classic film. (Submitted by Patrick Robbins)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t everything already gone through a gender switch?

35) Barbara Rhoades or Barbara Feldon?
Ms. Rhoades put the whammy on my ten-year-old libido in The Shakiest Gun in the West, an early lust issue never to be forgotten.

36) Favorite Andre De Toth movie.
I was watching De Toth’s Crime Wave with the James Ellroy/Eddie Muller commentary, dismayed by their failure to recognize the Buñuelian aspect of the ‘repeat’ shot of Dub Taylor in the beginning. Am I the only one who draws these parallels?

37) If you could take one filmmaker's entire body of work and erase it from all time and memory, as if it had never happened, whose oeuvre would it be? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)
I’d have gone with Richard Donner, whose oeuvre is crap from the word ‘go,’ but he did Inside Moves (1980), which should count for something. Therefore, I think we can terminate Chris Columbus. No love lost there.

38) Name a film you actively hated when you first encountered it, only to see it again later in life and fall in love with it.
Perhaps I was in a foul mood at the time, but Dazed and Confused initially left me cold. Now it’s a favorite.

39) Max Ophuls or Marcel Ophuls? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)
Apples and oranges.

40) In which club would you most want an active membership, the Delta Tau Chi fraternity, the Cutters or the Warriors? And which member would you most resemble, either physically or in personality?
As I had to Google Delta Tau Chi, I’ll pass.

41) Your favorite movie cliché.
When the guy finally gets the girl.

42) Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen? (Submitted by Bob Westal)
I like a lot of Stanley’s work, but few can compare with Vincente: Bad and the Beautiful, Two Weeks in Another Town, American in Paris; The Courtship of Eddie’s Father has personal meaning; The Band Wagon is the quintessential MGM musical.

43) Favorite Christmas-themed horror movie or sequence.
Can we go with Crispin Glover’s Jingle Dell in Wild at Heart?

44) Favorite moment of self- or selfless sacrifice in a movie.
Do I look like I sit around thinking about stuff like this?!? Let’s see… how about Thelma and Louise driving over the edge to avoid permanent imprisonment under male domination? On the other side of the coin, I think George Bailey was a frikkin’ idiot for using the honeymoon cash to bail out the Building & Loan when he could’ve been doing Donna Reed in a tropical paradise.

45) If you were the cinematic Spanish Inquisition, which movie cult (or cult movie) would you decimate? (Submitted by Bob Westal)
I’m not stepping into that trap, buddy boy.

Caroline Munro in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (click to enlarge)

46) Caroline Munro or Veronica Carlson?
It was a weekday afternoon showing at the Wantagh Theatre in 1974 when, virtually alone in the place save for a bored usher and gum-snapping popcorn girl, I rubbed one out over Caroline in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Right there in the theater. Just. Like. That. Yeah, yeah: I was 17 and should’ve controlled myself, but all that ripe Technicolor flesh was just too much!

47) Favorite eye-patch wearing director. (Submitted by Patty Cozzalio)
Raoul Walsh, if just for the time he stole John Barrymore’s corpse to freak out Errol Flynn. (Gene Fowler said it’s all lies.)

48) Favorite ambiguous movie ending. (Original somewhat ambiguous submission---“Something about ambiguous movie endings!”-- by Jim Emerson, who may have some inspiration of his own to offer you.)
Sandrine Bonnaire walking into the dark at the close of La cérémonie.

49) In giving thanks for the movies this year, what are you most thankful for?
That I can still see and hear them.

50) George Kennedy or Alan North? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
I looked up North’s credits and I’m not sure who he is. Still, George was always in new movies back when I was going three or four times a week. Most of them were terrible, but the guy kept busy.

Reflections on Boris

Boris as Im-Ho-Tep in The Mummy (1932)

This is my contribution to The Boris Karloff Blogathon now going on at Frankensteinia:

It was sometime in the early 1960s when I first became aware of Boris Karloff. What a name! There were Johns and Jimmys and Roberts, but no other Borises, and as far as I knew no other Karloffs in the movies, either. To this day, the only other Karloff I know of is his daughter Sarah, who used to make the rounds at movie conventions, keeping her father’s legacy intact. But forty years ago you could find him on one syndicated channel or another, raising a bushy eyebrow to some poor, unsuspecting shlub about to get whammied in black and white.

    He was part of a school of actors who specialized in horror, though some of them could do Shakespeare in a pinch: Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Vincent Price, George Zucco. They worked for major studios and poverty row fly-by-nights, appeared on Broadway, radio and television shows, constantly working. Yet in his entire life I doubt Boris earned as much as Tom Cruise pulls down for one movie. (By the 1960s, Boris was getting less than $30k per picture.)

    ‘They had faces then,’ the saying goes, and Boris did have an unmistakable one. But they also had voices then — an art as extinct as radio drama. Boris’s was without peer: smooth, slightly hollow, ethereal, melancholy. It could be soothing one minute, menacing the next. Having him narrate How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) was a stroke of genius; hearing him whimper “friend?” in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) can break your heart.

    As a kid, I was an avid reader of Famous Monsters and Castle of Frankenstein magazines, their editors eager to point up his thespic abilities. (Famous Monsters editor Forest J Ackeman often wrote about the mythical kingdom of Horrorwood, Karloffornia.) But there was little to substantiate the claim in what I was then seeing at the movies or on episodic TV. He’d done scads of drive-in flicks, running the rickety gamut from Voodoo Island (1957) to The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), and a couple of Roger Corman pictures: The Raven (1963), a comedic take on Poe co-starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre; and The Terror (1963), Boris shooting his scenes in three days on sets from The Raven with young Jack Nicholson. Another pastiche, Jacques Tourneur’s Comedy of Terrors (1963) found Karloff with Price, Lorre and Basil Rathbone. A few years shy of the Age of Irony, before gore and nihilism reshaped the culture, these slight efforts may be the last vestiges of the studio-era horror film.

Above: I remember tuning in in 1966 to watch secret agents April Dancer (Stephanie Powers) and Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) bring down evil mastermind Mother Muffin — Karloff in drag! — in the infamous “Mother Muffin Affair” on The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (Click to enlarge.)

    It took some maturity on my part to enable an appreciation for Karloff as an actor and artist. His golden age coinciding with Hollywood’s, he did most of his best work in the 1930s and for Val Lewton in three pictures in the 40s: The Body Snatcher (1945); quite excellent in Isle of the Dead (1945); and Bedlam (1946).

    Bride of Frankenstein is radically different in tone from Whale’s original Frankenstein (1931), but Karloff’s interpretation of the monster in both pictures was unique and, to this day, unequaled. It was commonly mistaken that he was a ‘new sensation’ when, in fact, he was forty-four at the time of Frankenstein, and had been in movies since 1919. He hung around for a third, Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein (1939), a middling endeavor hurt by Whale’s absence.

    If I had to choose any one film as my favorite Karloff, I’d go with Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). He was paired with Lugosi for the first of eight pictures, their different realms of eccentricity played straight. You could look at it as a New Wave picture twenty-five years before the term was coined, Ulmer casually abandoning genre conventions for decadence and depravity in delicious Art Deco topsy-turvyism. Once banned in several countries, it’s an ancestor to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a tilted portrait of questing, moneyed souls lost in fear and desire, and one of the few films hip to the obsessive sexuality percolating in Poe.

    There is, of course, so much more. When he died at eighty-two in 1969, Karloff had appeared in over two hundred films and TV shows. Near the end, Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt crafted an odd testimonial, Targets (1968). They had Karloff and could use his scenes from The Terror, if needed. What they delivered was both an obituary for old school horror and a reflection on contemporary violence and terrorism. And there in the middle of it is an aberration, an extended scene of Boris listening to Bogdanovich (unconvincingly playing drunk) prattle on about Howard Hawks (Karloff’s director on The Criminal Code [1931] and Scarface [1932]), the auteur theory, mise-en-scène and other lofty allusions ripped from the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, at a time when few in the audience (or on the set) knew what the hell he was talking about. It’s a ridiculous and touching scene, and I’m sure after Bogdanovich yelled “cut,” Boris went off to his dressing room, scratching his head along the way.

My 50 favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century

Elisha Cuthbert in The Girl Next Door

To quote That Little Round-Headed Boy:

“This list means nothing, except to me. It's a list of 50 movies that gave me pleasure over the past decade. I can say without reservation that I would watch any of these again. Would I say that all of them are great films, however great films are supposed to be defined? Probably not. But that's nothing you need to worry about. Because it's my list.”

Why not? I’ve listed mine alphabetically:

1) Australia (2008)
2) Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
3) Birth (2004)
4) Black Book (2006)
5) Black Snake Moan (2007)
6) Bowling for Columbine (2002)
7) Casino Royale (2006)
8) Catwoman (2004)
9) Code Inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000)
10) A Decade Under the Influence (2003)
11) The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
12) Eastern Promises (2007)
13) Factotum (2005)
14) The Fast and the Furious (2001)
15) Um Filme Falado (A Talking Picture, 2003)
16) La Fleur du Mal (The Flower of Evil, 2003)
17) Ghost World (2001)
18) The Girl Next Door (2004)
19) Honey (2003)
20) Hors de prix (Priceless, 2006)
21) The Hours (2002)
22) I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
23) I Heart Huckabees (2004)
24) The Illusionist (2006)
25) Inglourious Basterds (2009)
26) In Her Shoes (2005)
27) The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)
28) Juno (2007)
29) Lie with Me (2005)
30) Laurel Canyon (2002)
31) Lucía y el Sexo (Sex and Lucía, 2002)
32) Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2004)
33) Midnight Movies (2007)
34) Mulholland Dr. (2001)
35) Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)
36) No Country for Old Men (2007)
37) Open Range (2003)
38) Open Water (2004)
39) Pollock (2000)
40) Roger Dodger (2002)
41) Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007)
42) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
43) Spun (2002)
44) Sukkar banat (Caramel, 2007)
45) The Sweetest Thing (2002)
46) An Unfinished Life (2005)
47) Va Savoir (2000)
48) Wanted (2008)
49) Where the Heart Is (2000)
50) X-Men (2000)

AJ's next

Those lips, those eyes...



Yeah, I'm hooked. So sue me...

Luis Buñuel’s Death in the Garden

New on DVD from Microcinema International, Luis Buñuel’s Death in the Garden (1956) stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel and Michel Piccoli in an adventure of political uprising, lust, deception and jungle hell. And in the grand tradition of its director, any and all conventional themes and genre trappings have been systematically corrupted by his sardonic take on fate, chance and human nature.

    Filmed in Mexico, it was one of a handful of what would become relatively obscure Mexican-French co-productions Buñuel was involved with in the late 1950s. (The film didn’t open in the United States until 1977; Vincent Canby was there.) Its budget allowed for Eastmancolor, the director’s second in color after Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952), and his first with international movie stars. Marchal and Piccoli were just establishing themselves, but Vanel had prominent roles in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953) and Les diaboliques (1955), and Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955); and Signoret was famous for Les diaboliques, Max Ophüls’s La ronde (1950), Jacques Becker’s Casque d'or (1952) and Marcel Carné’s Thérèse Raquin (1953).

    Buñuel wasn’t happy making the picture nor with the finished product. “I almost don’t want to talk about [it],” he told José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent in their book of interviews, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel:

    “The production was torture; there were difficulties from the very beginning. The producer was bothered by censorship and asked me to modify some things. The star of the film, Simone Signoret, felt uncomfortable because [her husband] Yves Montand was far away from her in Italy and she wanted to join him; she looked for any excuse to return to Europe. When she entered the United States, she deliberately showed a passport with visas showing trips to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, but the immigration agents — rara avis — let her pass. So many things were changed during the production that scenes often had to be rewritten minutes before the camera began rolling, and furthermore Gabriel Arout had to translate the text into French. I suffered a lot with Michele Girardon, the actress who played the deaf girl; she was only working on the film because her parents wanted her to, and, of course, she was completely ignorant of the craft. I had a lot of problems. By the end of the production I had had enough and I didn’t even have a hand in the music. I let them put in whatever they wanted.”

    Had he envisioned doing a ‘straight’ adventure à la King Solomon’s Mines? Buñuel was fairly faithful to Defoe on Robinson Crusoe, but Belgian author José-André Lacour’s novel Death in That Garden was rank with the kind of superficial moralizing the surrealist abhorred. However, his frustrations with Death in the Garden probably stemmed more from burnout than anything else. It came after an astonishing run of activity, Buñuel directing thirteen pictures from Los olvidados (1950) to That Is the Dawn (1955). Indeed, after Death in the Garden wrapped he took a three-year hiatus from the camera.

Above: Simone Signoret in a publicity photo for Death in the Garden — click to enlarge. Despite her pedigree (or perhaps because of it), Buñuel found her tediously high maintenance: “Her behavior was at best unruly,” he wrote in My Last Sigh, “at worst very destructive to the rest of the cast.”

    In a book review published in 1959, Time magazine felt that Lacour “brought off with literary flair and an almost savage imagination” the two-part story that opens in a South American village where local government is evicting a community of diamond miners, some of whom flee to the jungle to escape jail and execution. Buñuel wisely sidesteps the novel’s purple prose “symbolism, its irony, its implicit plea for man’s humanity to man” (Time) to examine breakdown and survival, the stifling tropical backdrop a prediction of the inescapable dining room in The Exterminating Angel (1962).

    The screenplays to that later film and Death in the Garden were co-written with Luis Alcoriza, Buñuel’s frequent collaborator throughout his Mexican period. Alcoriza offered a counterbalance of satire and optimism to Buñuel’s caustic wit and fatalist view — a creative partnership similar to the one he’d share with Jean-Claude Carrière in the 1960s and 70s. They worked together on ten pictures, often using groups of characters (as opposed to single protagonists) to observe personality traits within the herd: Los olvidados, Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953) and Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959).

    With Lacour’s novel, they reduced the hero’s role and enhanced secondary characters, affording equal time to all: Chark the drifter-adventurer (Marchal), Djin the prostitute (Signoret), Castin the delusional, displaced restaurateur (Vanel), Castin’s deaf mute virgin daughter Maria (Girardon), and the naïve, haunted Catholic priest, Father Lizardi (Piccoli).

    Gruff and sweaty, Chark is introduced giving the finger to a platoon of armed, trigger-happy soldiers. It’s humorous, shocking and uncharacteristic, for both 1956 and Buñuel (who deplored vulgarity), a moment I’m inclined to credit to Raymond Queneau. Novelist, poet and one-time member of the Surrealists, Queneau dabbled in films, and worked just this once with Buñuel on the script. Was their combined effort so brilliant it flew over the heads of the producers, prompting all those last minute changes Buñuel mentions? Or had the gifted triumvirate concocted a mess of concepts necessitating alterations for the sake of coherence?

    In his DVD commentary, Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz demerits the picture as “minor Buñuel,” but is there such a thing? Author of Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema, he nearly retracts his own statement when discussing Death in the Garden’s characters, their outward façades and the “devolution from civility to savagery” as the action moves from village to jungle — a trip he equates with Marlow’s odyssey in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Death in the Garden is one of the classically structured Buñuel movies,” he says, “but even within the classical structure it violates conventions of narrative.”

    Or, typical Buñuel, a surrealist true to his principles. “The narrative in Death in the Garden does not advance,” Acevedo-Munoz notes, “it simply repeats itself.” It shares The Exterminating Angel’s use of repetition, a leitmotif haunting the director’s work from Las Hurdes (1933) through That Obscure Object of Desire (1977); and concludes that fate is determined not by government, class, self will or divine intervention, but by crazy, blind chance, rendering everything — from politics to religion, economics to social values — impotent. Whether they’re caught in the town’s revolution or trapped in the jungle, the deteriorating group is constantly redirected, tested and mocked by chance, a portent of things to come in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

    Other references abound. The characters of Castin and Maria are a forecast of the incestuous father and daughter in The Young One (1960), with Maria bearing a resemblance to Key Meersman’s Evalyn in the later film. (Plus, both Girardon and Meersman were nonprofessional actors.) Lizardi can be likened to The Young One’s Rev. Fleetwood (Claudio Brook), or any of the hypocritical clerics dotting Buñuel’s oeuvre, the director a devout atheist steeped in Catholicism. And Castin’s pursuit of Djin recalls the older men lured to their doom by duplicitous younger women, what Acevedo-Munoz terms the “monstrous feminine,” in Susana (1951), El (1953) and That Obscure Object of Desire.

About the color in Death in the Garden

Above: Marchal and Signoret — click to enlarge. The lighting and cinematography of Jorge Stahl Jr. captures the soft decadence of the whorehouse. (Image swiped from DVD Beaver.)

    In his review at DVD Beaver, Gary Tooze has mostly good things to say about the video transfer but adds, “It may be a shade yellow/green and tend to look a bit frail.” Included with the DVD is a booklet featuring two articles, one a humorous anecdote by Buñuel’s son, Juan-Luis, the other a scholarly essay by author Susan Hayward on the Eastmancolor in Death in the Garden:

    “In terms of color and to give meaning to his mise-en-scène, Buñuel plays with the flexibility of Eastmancolor by either adding or subtracting color (through using different filters). In the first half of the film, the exterior colors are bleached out to the point of pale yellow hues, reflecting the heat of the beating sunlight. Interestingly, at this stage, we only see [Simone] Signoret in interiors — and here, as opposed to the exteriors, the color has tonality and depth. The overall impression is one of great realism. In the second half of the film, however, when Signoret and the four other fugitives flee into the rain forest (the ‘garden’ of the film’s title), the color — predominately an oppressive green — takes on a deep, at times, thick and unguent quality, which, coupled with the choice of shots (in particular, the close-ups of the flora and fauna), brings it far closer to a visceral, surrealist painterliness.”

For more information, go to Microcinema International.

Buy Death in the Garden from Amazon.

Posters of my yoot’: Double-Oh Flickhead

Click this and the other posters to enlarge

This week, from November 9 through the 13th, Mr. Squish at Filmsquish will be hosting the Double-Oh-Thon, a celebration of all things Bond, James Bond. Providing me with an excuse to revisit what I consider the l’age d’or of movie marketing, the punchy Bondian graphics of the mid to late 60s.

    When I was but a wee Flickhead, my parents were sharply divided over the series. Papa Flickhead dug all the babes and martoonies and guns and explosions; Mama Flickhead hated them for those very reasons. Strictly old world, she loathed From Russia with Love for the Lotte Lenya character. (In Mama’s view, women were incapable of homosexuality: “Only men do silly things like that,” she informed me.) ‘Pussy Galore’ in Goldfinger had her expressing outrage in a letter to The Long Island Catholic and a plea to the Catholic Legion of Decency to have the movie condemned. Even though she only went to church on Easter Sunday, Mama used their stilted rating system as a barometer of what we could and could not see, one of many reasons why Papa Flickhead drank so much.

    None of which deterred us from Thunderball in 1965. By that time, Bondmania was in bloom, and we headed out with my older sister and her husband on a cold Saturday night in December to the luxurious, balconied Freeport Theater, where all the Bond movies played. (If you wanted Matt Helm, you had to go down the road to the Grove.) It was opening weekend, the line went around the block, the place was selling out, and Mama persuaded everyone to ditch Bond and drive over to the Wantagh Theater for The Great Race instead. Dad was miffed until he got a load of Natalie Wood, then all was forgiven. Me and him checked out Thunderball a week later.

    It was the first movie ad to grab my eye. I’d stare at it, entranced by the content, style and vibrant color. Back then I had no idea who the artists were, but years later found out that both Robert McGinnis and Frank McCarthy were responsible. I cut out the newspaper ads and bought the soundtrack lp — a rather pricey acquisition for an eight-year-old on a thirty-five cent allowance. (Yeah, yeah: I stole the money from my parents.) My friends and schoolmates were buying Beatles records for three bucks and 45rpm singles for thirty-five cents; but the Thunderball album, like most movie soundtracks, fetched a whopping $4.99, a princely sum.

    Two years later, the poster for You Only Live Twice (1967) blew me through the roof. The image here is the one that was mostly used where I lived (the two other styles were this and this), ad art Mr. Squish describes as “batshit insane.” He may be onto something.

    My teachers in elementary school and junior high determined the influence was negative. In the margins of book reports, tests and other written projects I’d include pencil drawings of evil SPECTRE frogmen and secret agents flying in mini helicopters over erupting volcanoes. Mama Flickhead got calls from the principal alerting her that her son was either ‘different’ or ‘difficult,’ and sent me off to Rorschach tests and counseling sessions. I was around ten-years-old. Just a few years later, I would be taking classes in commercial art, a passion fueled by McGinnis and McCarthy and other movie poster artists like Mort Drucker, Frank Frazetta and Jack Davis. All I learned in school was, a) the other students were as good as or better than me, b) it’s a ridiculously competitive field, and c) without contacts or connections, if you want to eat you should plan on waiting tables or selling tube socks out of the trunk of your car.

    There’s a common misconception that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) bombed at the box office. Yet, budgeted at $7 million, it grossed $87 million worldwide within a year. That would be like a $70 million movie today grossing $870 million, figures that would make the suits get all hot and bothered. Still, Sean Connery had ‘become’ James Bond, so a lot of people had a hard time with George Lazenby in the part. But the public back then would’ve had problems with anyone playing Bond. I didn’t mind Lazenby at all; I thought the movie was excellent then, and still believe it’s one of the best in the series.

    The one-sheet for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the first Bond poster I owned. I never took care of my posters as a collector would. One-sheets, window cards and lobby cards were tacked onto my bedroom walls with total abandon, a barrage of eye-popping images that I’d shift around every so often for a change of scenery. I loved staring at the skiers shooting at Bond, the snow, the explosions, the helicopters. Unfortunately, it would be the last of its kind: you can see the difference in the rendering in the ad for the next film, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), below. It’s a softer, less direct style. The film, too, was a turning point. In previous Bonds, humor accented the action, but in Diamonds you get the feeling that the action’s accenting the humor. In the next movie, the cheap and hollow Live and Let Die (1973), Roger Moore would effectively kill Bond with prep school arrogance, effete jokiness, conservative condescension and the posturing of an unmitigated candy ass. Naturally, the mainstream thought he was just marvy. Me? I had to slog through seven of his movies until Bond regained his balls in The Living Daylights (1987). (To these eyes, Timothy Dalton is the closest to Ian Fleming’s Bond.)

    Mention should be made of the great Bond reissues. Before home video, before they were shown on TV, the real Bond movies were re-released in double (and one triple) features. United Artists would sneak these in every so often, necessitating a diligent scouring of the newspaper’s entertainment section each and every week. These posters also adorned my walls. I’ve included trailers, because they were pretty cool, too.

    Someone made a documentary about Robert McGinnis. I’ve never seen it, but if anyone can lend me a copy, I’d love to check it out. Here’s the trailer: