F L I C K H E A D

Industries die in the wake of global masturbation

2012-01-17T11:26:00.001-05:00

PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

The H-Man revisited

2012-01-13T06:12:00.002-05:00

Nearly avant-garde in spite of itself, Ishirô Honda’s The H-Man (1958) is an anomaly from Japan’s Godzilla era, a faceless, shapeless blobby monster contaminating the water supply and making people dissolve on contact. Honda segues freely from policier to gangster picture to noir (complete with a Gilda-esque chanteuse belting out the blues in a local nightclub), with moments of Sirkian melodrama, Stray Dog-ish location vérité to far-from conventional monster shenanigans and a flexible roster of faces who challenge the need for having a lead character at all. Fascinating.

Things I understand about Things I Don’t Understand

2012-01-01T21:03:00.003-05:00

After surviving an ‘experiment’ in suicide, twenty-something Violet Kubelick (Molly Ryman, inset) wanders around an emotional cul-de-sac. Her minimum wage gig at a bookstore unleashes an antisocial streak, turning her into a salesperson with no desire to make any sales. She shares an apartment in Brooklyn with an artistic pair who are only slightly less unhinged than she: the performance artist Gabby (Meissa Hampton) and struggling musician Remy (Hugo Dillon). Fiercely intelligent — unlike most movie suicides, she knows to cut her wrists along the length of the vein rather than across — Violet’s grad school thesis, a study of people who’ve had near-death experiences (she refers to them as “near-deathers”) prompts a meeting and eventual friendship with terminal cancer patient Sara (Grace Folsom). All the while, poking at her conscience, a brooding bartender/would-be boyfriend named Parker (Aaron Mathias) and a psychiatrist whose laidback drollery flows through deadpan delivery, Dr. Blankenship (Lisa Eichhorn), gently rattle Violet’s cage, forcing her to examine some ugly personal baggage she’d much rather sweep under the rug.

This is the framework of Things I Don’t Understand (2011), writer-director David Spaltro’s new comedy about self destruction, loss and cancer. As in his first feature, . . . Around (2008), Spaltro orchestrates a bluesy atmosphere surrounding characters caught momentarily out of sync with everyone and everything else. He treads perilously close to the narcissistic whining of some Woody Allen and Henry Jaglom films, out on that dicey plateau where underlined confusion collides with the protracted adolescence of the privileged and their sundry insecurities. Spaltro’s dialog, however, is mostly genuine and believable, his characters true-to-life creations trudging the rocky urban streets to some kind of epiphany. For what it’s worth, Jaglom has never made a film as coherent, enlightened or as funny as this.

Above: David Spaltro and Molly Ryman go over a scene; click to enlarge. “Sometimes an actor and director become working soul mates,” says the director, “and they choose to collaborate on multiple films. This is somewhat of a mysterious phenomenon. It is hard to say what exactly makes the actor/director relationship ‘pop.’ They inspire each other. They trust each other. They just ‘get’ each other. Whatever it is, it’s fascinating.”

    I’m sure it’s no coincidence that ‘Violet Kubelick’ will remind some of us of the equally promiscuous and self-destructive Miss Kubelik played by Shirley MacLaine in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). With her pricey coiffure, meticulous makeup, tasteful wardrobe, trendy wit and elevated IQ, Ryman’s Violet appears to have her act together. At first it’s difficult to grant her any sympathy — isn’t she too smart, too pretty, too cool? She contradicts the common gloomy image of a suicide, as Spaltro’s screenplay wisely recognizes the superficial trappings used by troubled people to camouflage their broken hearts and fatigued, racing minds. And Molly Ryman, whose ‘indie’ career has so far consisted of just a handful of shorts and three barely-seen features, has crafted such a rich, full-bodied character that, if we’ve any compassion at all, our defenses should crumble once Violet’s quiet desperation emerges, usually on mornings after nights of blackout drinking, or being shunned for casual sex by the philosophical mixologist. (Her line, “You just don’t want to fuck me,” slaps the ear with the anguished melancholy of someone who knows rejection all too well.)

    Seasoned with enough characters to fill a good novel, the script challenges its cast and director to overcome the dozens of limitations facing the (very) independent production. Not without its technical gaffes (the audio dips in a couple of spots) and minor flaws, Things I Don’t Understand occasionally lapses during its final act by trying to tie up a few too many loose subplots. (The story of the bartender and his wife, for example, holds enough of a plot for its own movie.) Regardless, everyone works diligently on cramped sets and isolated exteriors — where Spaltro and cinematographer Gus Sacks guide the camera softly and thoughtfully, never obtrusively — to mine the human condition, and are rewarded by an ensemble of mostly unknown actors evidently willing to go the distance.

    This speaks volumes for the talent, charisma and passion of the director, who, at the very least, holds an innate gift for casting. Grace Folsom transforms the cancer patient Sara into a fount of inner beauty and peace prevailing over her disease, evolving into a perfect counterpoint and friend to Violet. Supplying a touch of broad comedy relief, Meissa Hampton and Hugo Dillon appear like a trendy downtown couple ready for their own sitcom, the latter gambling with the film’s low key tone by approaching scenes as if shot out of a cannon. Give him props, however, for delivering the line “This vagina’s got balls!” with unyielding conviction. Last but certainly not least, Spaltro pulls a casting coup with Lisa Eichhorn as the psychiatrist. She had prominent roles in John Schlesinger’s Yanks and James Ivory’s The Europeans (both 1979), while readers of this blog may remember her best as the woozy Maureen ‘Mo’ Cutter in Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981). Her Dr. Blankenship in Things I Don’t Understand comes off as guarded and steely-eyed but far from humorless, a sense of empathetic irony quietly resonating in her restrained expressions. Combined, they make the would-be suicide’s recovery story palpable and strangely appealing, tucked away into a private corner of Brooklyn that’s bursting with life.

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You AXED for It!

2011-12-22T14:47:00.002-05:00

"Battle Axe: The Making of Strait-Jacket"... and a lot of fun!

The Flickhead year-end list: ten additions I made to my DVD and Blu-ray library in 2011

2011-12-15T14:01:00.005-05:00

Amer (2009) Or, Last Giallo At Marienbad. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani pay homage to the Italian giallo genre of the 60s and 70s in this otherwise contemporary visual puzzle which interlocks key moments in a woman’s life. Heady, sensual and violent, this is an acquired taste; throughout it all I wondered what Donald Cammell could’ve done with this technology at his disposal.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009) On the surface, a fairly straightforward account of Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 production, L’enfer. But as the story unfolds through the reminiscences of those who were present (including William Lubtchansky, Thi Lan Nguyen, Catherine Allégret and Costa-Gavras) and surviving footage of location exteriors and fascinating studio experiments (the latter recalling Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), a sketchy portrait emerges of a filmmaker faced with self doubt, inner demons and a sense of impending doom. Directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea discover that Clouzot was inspired by Fellini’s personal approach to cinema in 8½, but what’s here is not one director emulating another, but rather Clouzot’s own descent into the life-altering conundrum snaring Marcello Mastroianni’s character in that picture. Curiously, no mention is made of the 1994 version of L’enfer Claude Chabrol constructed from Clouzot’s script.

Machete (2010) I’ve an on-again/off-again appreciation for Robert Rodriguez (here co-directing with Ethan Maniquis), and this is definitely ‘on,’ a movie determined to make the retro-Deuce dream of Grindhouse a reality. Suggesting Sam Peckinpah by way of Tex Avery, Machete blisters in the desert heat where everyone is bent on fucking over everyone else. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world, brilliantly cast (can you top Steven Seagal?), down to the blinding eye candy of Jessica Alba (“Hold the spit, please”) and Michelle Rodriguez — the latter one tough cookie flaunting abs to die for. Needless to say, when Danny Trejo gets it on with the two dollbabes in the pool (mother and daughter, no less, the latter Lindsay Lohan!), I was hooked.

The Night Heaven Fell (1958) 2011 turned out to be the Year of Bardot in my living room, as we covered a great deal of Brigitte’s oeuvre. A lot of it is dross, but there were the occasional stand-outs, such as this overripe melodrama. Playing a young innocent fresh from the convent, BB is thrust into a provincial soap opera of lust and decadence, a scenario that could’ve soared in the hands of Luis Buñuel. (Remember Susana?) Instead, it’s Roger Vadim titillation, and there’s very little nuance or satire evident, just a lot of extremes. But he instinctively knew how to photograph the former Mrs. Vadim, especially naked, truly a sight to behold.

Road to Nowhere (2010) Any charges of arty pretentiousness affixed to this are warranted, but only among those who’ve never enjoyed the singular beauty of Monte Hellman’s vision. In his first substantial, feature-length picture since 1988’s Iguana, he returns to the quiet visual poetry of his best work: The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and China 9, Liberty 37. Plus it stars Shannyn Sossamon, a recent favorite of mine. Meanwhile, Monte completists should take note that his atypical and gamy Silent Night Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! has surfaced on DVD as part of a discount horror set — click here.

Sci-Fi Invasion This is the first time I’ve ever bought an inexpensive collection of public domain movies, and for a sale price of ten dollars and ninety-nine cents I now own fifty SF (and pseudo-SF) features packed onto twelve DVDs! Before you can say, “How great is that?!?” let it be known that the only reason for my purchase was Mission Stardust, a 1967 Italian production originally titled ...4 ...3 ...2 ...1 ...morte. Back when I was a wee Flickhead, I’d see photos of its blonde bombshell star, Essy Persson, in the pages of Famous Monsters magazine, and now, more than forty years later, figured it was time to check things out. And what we found was a sketchy James Bondian scenario involving the ever-resourceful Perry Rhodan landing on the moon, getting hijacked by condescending extraterrestrials and battling it out with an Earth-bound megalomaniac, served in an image quality equal to a Goodtimes VHS tape. On a few occasions I had to reverse the disc a few minutes because I kept nodding off.

Serial (1980) With growing concerns over the probable demise of music CDs (read about it here), I assume DVDs and Blu-rays are also headed for extinction once online streaming takes over. I’m grabbing up any small, relatively unknown films that may not make the transition, hence this sharp, deceptively low key satire of Marin County trends of the late 1970s: encounter groups, fad vegetarianism, suburban orgies, sham spirituality, cult brainwashing, quack psychology and gay outlaw bikers, set to an Easy Listening score by Lalo Schifrin echoing the beige era of Love, American Style. Directed by prolific TV vet Bill Persky, this time capsule stars Martin Mull, Tuesday Weld, Bill Macy, Peter Bonerz, Sally Kellerman, Tom Smothers, Barbara Rhodes and Christopher Lee in one of his more interesting roles as ‘Skull.’

Sucker Punch (2011) At first put off by the antiseptic tone and dead-eye posturing I’ve come to associate with the Ritalin Generation, the film gradually seduced me as it bounced from scenario to scenario, trading off its lead characters with druggy dexterity. (Admittedly, watching this under the influence helps immeasurably.) Having seen both the theatrical version and an alternate cut extended by seventeen minutes, I prefer the leaner one: characters and situations are tighter, while the longer version occasionally wades in dreary repetition. I’m not familiar with director Zack Snyder’s other pictures, but kudos to his casting here, with a special shout-out to Jena Malone and Scott Glenn (and his endless barrage of cliché homilies).

Welcome to the Grindhouse: The Teacher and Pick-Up Recently I wrote about The Teacher (1974), a notorious teen-boy-meets-cougar romp (read it here), but its cofeature on this double set (meant to emulate the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse, only with films and trailers actually from the 1970s) is an outré endeavor bordering on the avant-garde: Pick-Up (1975), the sole directorial credit of Bernard Hirschenson, who rearranges the basic ingredients of sexploitation for something wholly unique, at least as far as Crown International Pictures are concerned. An odyssey through a Florida swampland, it combines lusty young folk, a sweaty authority figure modeled after Rod Steiger, youthful rebellion and visual effects evoking the spirit of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.

The Women in Cages Collection There are some nights when a Flickhead needs to don his fez, fire up a White Owl and cut loose, and what better accompaniment than a Pam Grier triple feature? In interviews she’s referred to these as the “hooties in the jungle” pictures she shot in the Philippines for Roger Corman, the cinematic equivalent of those sultry and ribald men’s ‘sweat mags’ of the 50s and 60s: Big Doll House and Women in Cages (both 1971); and The Big Bird Cage (1972) co-starring Anitra (Invasion of the Bee Girls) Ford. If you’re wondering which one’s the best, then you’re probably not ready.

For you blue

2011-12-13T07:06:00.001-05:00

Mentally distanced from contemporary means of music broadcasting (I have no idea who’s hot on the Billboard charts — if such a thing still exists — and couldn’t navigate my way around a radio dial if you paid me), most of my exposure to new sounds often arrives via the internet or through music channels such as Palladia. This dirge, “Video Games” by the heretofore unknown (to me, at least) Lana Del Rey was recently discussed by Erich Kuersten on his blog, Acidemic. The first time I listened and watched, I imagined a young Angelina Jolie playing the ghost of Amy Winehouse singing from the grave. The second time, it evoked a memory from 1965 or ‘66, when the girl next door (Beverly) and I crashed a neighboring girl’s birthday party the two of us were most definitely not invited to while all the other kids were. I remember the celebrant, one Elaine Jacobs, telling me in no uncertain terms that she hated me and wanted me out of “her” house immediately. (Mind you, we were all seven- or eight-years-old.) Beverly and I both ran, she in tears, and took refuge in my basement while Elaine’s mother yelled arbitrarily in the wind for us to come back because we “were wanted.” We stayed away, milking sympathy but getting none. And then I tried to think of just one childhood memory that wasn’t in some way tainted by feelings of inadequacy, but came up empty.

Son of Harpo Speaks!

2011-12-05T21:07:00.000-05:00

Son of Harpo Speaks! By Bill Marx. 328 pages, soft cover, illustrated. Published by and available from Applause Books. ISBN: 9781557837905.

Book review by Nelhydrea Paupér

Bill Marx’s autobiography, Son of Harpo Speaks!, is notable among the memoirs of celebrities’ children for the complete and unabashed love Marx has for his father and mother, actress Susan Fleming. It’s rather a relief to read about Hollywood parents who adored their children and who stayed together for life. The fact that Marx doesn’t find this unusual enough to point it out speaks volumes about his upbringing.

    The portrait of his father Harpo is uncomplicated. A loving, devoted, gentle man, Harpo is full of humor and practical jokes, an almost avant-garde openness to new types of art and music (including modern jazz and an enthusiastic announcement in 1964, much to his Julliard-educated son’s consternation, that he loves the Beatles) and a deep, wise intelligence that gives no hint of an education limited to the second grade.

    Like his three younger siblings, Bill Marx was adopted by Harpo and Susan at a time when would-be parents still visited orphanages and pick out the child they wanted. Bill’s adoption required assistance from Susan’s friend Marion Davies, who helped smooth the way for a second wedding, this time Catholic, between the Jewish Harpo and nominally Episcopalian Susan, allowing them to meet the birth mother’s stipulation that the boy be raised in a Catholic home. Following the adoption the family experienced several months of weekly home visits by a woman from the agency, causing the Marxes to drag out crosses and holy water from the closet for each visit. Harpo finally had enough and one day answered the door stark naked. They were never visited again.

    Later in the book he details the absolutely astonishing story of how he accidentally discovered his birth family, a tale so farfetched it could only have been either conceived by Dickens or actually be true.

Harpo on I Love Lucy

    Harpo hired his son at age twelve to be his personal prop man while he toured England with brother Chico in 1948. Thus young Billy was responsible for maintaining the innumerable items that filled the various pockets and sleeves of his father’s famous coat. He goes on to describe accompanying Harpo on his various TV appearances, including the legendary episode of I Love Lucy.

    Marx the Younger went on to become the music arranger for his father’s two 1950s instrumental albums, which hover between muzak and exotica, the first of which features the Chico Hamilton Quintet as Harpo’s band. Marx went on to make a name for himself as a composer and arranger, notable for his early 1970s AIP film scores (Count Yorga, Vampire; Scream, Blacula, Scream, etc.)

    Marx’s career is a curio to anyone interested in 1950s and ‘60s American popular music. He was signed as the first white artist on the black-owned label Chicago Vee-Jay Records (before the Beatles) for which he released a few easy listening LPs, mainly as The Castaway Strings (“The Bobby Vinton Songbook”). He spent most of the Sixties as the piano man at Dino’s Lodge, Dean Martin’s famed cocktail lounge on the Sunset Strip. Aside from his stint at AIP, he has sporadically scored and arranged music for films and TV (Murphy’s Romance, Who’s That Girl, Fantasy Island), as well as composed concert commissions.

    Marx makes no bones about the fact that he is not a writer, and the book could have used more guidance. More detail about his day to day home life growing up with his family would have been especially welcome. But enthusiasm and warmth fill the book, and personal photos are everywhere, making this a must for Marx Brothers fanatics.

Available from Applause Books

Hot for ‘Teacher’

2011-11-29T22:06:00.002-05:00

Why is it I never saw The Teacher until now? Despite its low budget and a release limited primarily to drive-ins and dollar theaters, this 1974 softcore wonder written and directed by the adventurous Hikmet Avedis received a fair amount of press back in the day, most of it having to do with second-billed Jay North, all grown up from TV’s Dennis the Menace, shagging the actress who critic Paul Mavis accurately described as “freakishly gorgeous” (his italics), Angel Tompkins, as the lad’s lusty, accommodating schoolteacher. Plus, it came from Crown International Pictures, a key player in America’s lowbrow nouvelle vague, threadbare pictures seemingly made on the fly, often in prematurely faded color with actors on their way up or down but rarely ‘in.’ Crown’s small, dodgy archetypes of ingenuity — The Virgin Queen of St. Francis High, Weekend With the Babysitter, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, the miraculous They Saved Hitler’s Brain — bridged the rocky road that once separated urban grindhouses from lucrative rural and suburban markets hungry for adolescent sexual hi-jinx and cheap thrills. As film historian Richard Nowell notes (perhaps a tad too gushingly) in the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: American Independent (Vol.2):

“Crown International Pictures is a significant casualty of the selective traditions of film historiography and the emphasis that is placed on the distinctions, rather than the connections, between American independent cinema, in its many guises, and the shifting contours of ‘mainstream’ Hollywood and its output. Although [American International Pictures] and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures usually are provided as exemplars of 1970s exploitation, Crown International was an equally visible presence in independent production and distribution by virtue of being, for a while at least, America’s youth-market leader; and, whereas much has been said of the influence of the period’s independently released bikerpics and car-crash movies, it was in fact Crown’s long-forgotten date-movies, particularly The Pom Pom Girls (1976), that left an indelible mark on movie-making, industrially and aesthetically. The box-office achievements of Crown’s upbeat teenpics led Hollywood belatedly to embrace films made exclusively for young people and adopt the marketing-friendly approach to filmmaking known simply as ‘high-concept’. For better or worse, without Crown, there would likely have been no Grease (1978) or Porky’s (1981), and films like Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986) would probably have looked very different indeed.”

We could debate that last sentence — Grease came from Broadway, Porkys evolved out of Universal’s American Graffiti, and Flashdance owes more to New World’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School than anything else — but there’s no denying the presence of Crown from the late 60s until the early 80s, when home video snuffed out most of the second-run theatres playing their wares. The Teacher arrived a year after New World’s The Student Teachers (“They can teach you a lot…enter their course!”), but we shouldn’t overlook Summer of ‘42, a hugely successful Warners hit (made for $1 million, it grossed $25 million in the States alone) which sent low budget entrepreneurs looking into quasi-Oedipal scenarios with slow-witted pubescent guys popping their cherries to hot older women. (I’d add The Graduate to the fray, but Benjamin Braddock was in his twenties and should’ve known better.)

    In The Teacher, twenty-three-year-old Mr. North — gangly, awkward, topped by a unruly mane of oversize cowlicks — plays seventeen-year-old Sean Roberts, whose hot mom (former Miss Universe — and wife of the director — Marlene Schmidt) struts her bikinied bod around the house and harbors a barely concealed interest in boinking her own son. Taking the high ground, she presses him to date their neighbor, thirty-something high school teacher Diane Marshall (Ms. Tompkins), who’s all into topless sunbathing and getting it on with Sean. Unfortunately for her, and tortuous for us, the boy’s got the IQ of a grape, leaving Mrs. Marshall (her husband’s off ‘somewhere’) begging him for some action. To widen the breadth of these shenanigans, Avedis’s script incorporates a feverish subplot concerning the accidental death of Sean’s friend, Joe (Med Florey), and the retaliation of Joe’s village idiot brother, Ralph. For the latter, they cast Anthony James, all wide-eyed and over-the-top, whose chipped beef cranium is centered by a facial hybrid of Henry Silva and Vladek Sheybal, with enough pockmarks to make Robert Davi wince. (So impressed by his look and deportment, Avedis used him again in two other pictures.) When not cruising the bucolic suburban streets in his hearse (a dose of sledgehammer symbolism), Ralph hurls a stream of empty threats at Sean (he has the opportunity to kill him several times but doesn’t), leading to an unexpectedly gloomy conclusion wherein The Teacher falls back on two of the decade’s prominent clichés, a downbeat denouement and freeze-frame fade-out.

    It takes a seasoned craftsman to string all of this heated nonsense together, and, despite the absurd situations and thespic limitations of some of the actors, Hikmet Avedis appears genuinely invested in every scene. Made a few short years before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas exiled popular American film to a state of calculated irony, The Teacher is played ‘straight’ — which, ironically, makes it seem all the more ironic. He piles on the nudity wherever applicable (and Angel looks splendid in the buff) while simultaneously correlating sex with death, opening the picture for psychological analysis to anyone willing to read into these Ken & Barbie personas and their myopic universe. Which, incidentally, is a location shoot in a pre-1990 blue collar suburbia yet to be overhauled by McMansions, big-box stores and fast food chains, looking virtually pastoral in its post-WWII simplicity.

    The Teacher is quintessential 70s teen sexploitation, but also serves as a model of Avedis’s adherence to the old school approach to form and content. While the majority of genre product then being distributed by Crown, New World, AIP and Cannon Films was hackneyed and insubstantial, Avedis made an effort to shape his screenplays with small, colorful plot digressions and secondary characters, suggesting a talent that could have flourished a decade or so earlier in the kind of tight, meaty pictures once made by Don Siegel and Hugo Fregonese. Instead, he anglicized his first name to Howard, toiled in the campy schlock of Edy Williams as Dr. Minx and Connie Stevens as Scorchy, and reworked the basic theme of The Teacher into the noirish They’re Playing with Fire, which is notable for showcasing Sybil Danning’s spectacular physique in its prime. After making just eleven films together, Avedis and Ms. Schmidt ended their fifteen-year career in 1987 with Kidnapped, about young girls shanghaied into the porn industry… making us wonder if that’s where the filmmaker ended up as well.

The movie that everyone’s talking about… this week

2011-11-24T08:23:00.008-05:00

Editor’s note: the following was an email I dashed off to a friend. In an effort to grant this blog a little fresh written content, it’s reproduced here for your pleasure. This Thanksgiving, the film in question seems to be on the lips of my relatives who managed to nab their apparently highly-sought-after rental copies for the long holiday weekend:

I had no idea what Super 8 was about until I put it in the machine. I rented it because of J.J. Abrams — Cloverfield is ridiculous but amusing; Mission Impossible III is an inventive action picture, the best in the series; and Star Trek is an excellent rethinking of the original TV program, superbly cast and superior to most of the other films in the franchise. At first Super 8 surprised me because I realized, some five minutes in, that it was not only a paean to 1980s, Spielberg-influenced science fiction, but of The Goonies in particular — tapping into that audience of misguided unfortunates who look back at that dim decade with unwarranted nostalgic reverence. Then, when the monster was introduced (I wasn’t expecting a monster), it felt like the picture could go to great lengths to simply entertain; I was, for a time, somewhat enthralled. It was approximately an hour in when the script decided to take a critical wrong turn — characters begin discussing their past and private lives. Back in the 1970s, Siskel and Ebert became directly responsible for teaching middlebrow America to look for “character development” (a term rarely heard before then), the meat of a persona, something wholly unnecessary in a monster movie. At the hour mark, when these people start blubbering about their problems and dissatisfactions, Super 8 dies, leaving it the unenviable task of restarting its engine, thus making the last act seem slower and less interesting than the first. (Imagine this at a crisp, tight 87 minutes instead of its current 112.) By the end, I didn’t care one way or the other about the monster going home (“ET go home”?) and found myself yawning over the Close Encounters-style spaceship. Today, as it was in the 80s, the only person who could do a good Spielberg-style science fiction movie is... well, Steven Spielberg. Who, surprise surprise, produced Super 8.

As for the monster: I'm counting the days when we go back to actually seeing a creature instead of having to squint to make out its appearance.

Hello Kitty!

2011-11-19T09:36:00.000-05:00

Marisa Mell in Perversion Story; photo via Scrawl Club, click to enlarge.

You look like an angel... but I got wise

2011-11-19T08:26:00.001-05:00

The hottest woman ever in films? Shots of Brigitte Bardot set to Elvis!

Yo, goombah...

2011-11-19T08:19:00.003-05:00

Sophia Loren and the “Mambo Italiano”

The Movie Game (1969-1971)

2011-11-13T09:43:00.010-05:00

Shown in the New York tristate area on WOR-TV (usually late Saturday afternoons, right before Gerry Anderson’s UFO), The Movie Game was a movie trivia game show hosted by actor Larry Blyden (replacing first season emcee Sonny ‘Christmas That Almost Wasn’t’ Fox) with assist from Hollywood columnist Army Archerd. I kept up with it fairly regularly in the late 1960s and early 70s — long after the show’s initial run, WOR would use episodes as filler for rained-out ballgames. Panelists in this clip are Shelly Winters, Roscoe Lee Browne, Richard Crenna, Fernando Lamas, Della Reese and Kurt Kasznar. Pinky swear! Meanwhile, you might remember Larry for playing Babs’ boyfriend in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Jack & Angelica

2011-10-31T20:38:00.000-05:00

…but mostly Angelica, here. (Click above images to enlarge.)

Halloweenies

2011-10-26T09:33:00.005-05:00

Click image to enlarge

Two years before they produced Jaws (1975), Richard Zanuck and David Brown dabbled with the mad scientist genre in Sssssss (“Don’t say it: hiss it!”), a 1973 reboot of 50s schlock. They hired Bernard L. Kowalski to direct, an odd choice considering his l’age d’or transpired some fifteen years earlier with such Tin Age Psychotronica as the man-impregnated-by-hideous-space-aliens in Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and the self-explanatory Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)… and whose regard for simple, old school linear narrative may cause today’s squirrelly Ritalin Generation to fidget. An unusually restrained Strother Martin handles black mambas, pythons and king cobras (for real!), mutating their venom to create an über race of snake men out of a rapidly dwindling supply of unsuspecting lab assistants. The distressed damsel is played by Heather Menzies, whose plum role as ‘Louisa’ in The Sound of Music surely must’ve had her dreaming of better days than this, only now bespectacled and somewhat naked in a blurry skinny dip scene. I hadn’t seen Sssssss since it came out; I thought it was entertaining back then, and find now that it makes for a fairly amusing evening. It’s on a two-disc set, “4 Movie Marathon: Cult Horror Collection”, which yours truly fished out of a five-dollar bin at the local convenience store.
Also in the set is The Funhouse (1981), the kind of movie custom cut for that decade’s spurt-‘n’-gurgle crowd and gooey Fangoria promo pieces. It was directed by Tobe Hooper who, just seven years earlier, reshaped modern horror with the remarkable Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Did any other filmmaker who came to attention during that period fall so swiftly or so permanently? There’s no denying The Funhouse has two or three creative moments, but the sense of urgency and craftsmanship permeating Texas Chainsaw is all but gone. Its wafer-thin scenario is hungry for horrific crescendos, but momentum is in short supply and suspense is miles out of reach. (Kudos to Sylvia Miles, however, for her brief bit as a back alley fortune teller.) The film’s ‘monster’ is a multi-clefted head pinched together from inbred flesh, bulging eyes and nightmare dentistry — the ugly, low income, mentally retarded neighbor as the monster of the id. As in Texas Chainsaw, the sole survivor of Funhouse’s mass slaughter is driven mad and tossed back to normalcy, but the effect is no longer poignant nor harrowing. It’s merely there to tell us that the movie’s over… and that no one really cares.

A name once synonymous with lowbrow horror and exploitation, Jerry Gross had his moment as the poor man’s Roger Corman, producing and distributing barebones product for the drive-in and grindhouse trade throughout the 1970s and early 80s. I first became aware of him sometime in the mid-70s at an abstract-dementia double bill of I Drink Your Blood (1970) with I Eat Your Skin (1964/71). The combination was toxic, a balls-to-the-walls gore fest in blood-splattered color paired with a black and white relic that had been sitting on the shelf for seven years, a crazy, ill-conceived zombie reconfiguration of Dr. No initially filmed under the way-cooler title, Voodoo Blood Bath.
But I Drink Your Blood is an entirely different kettle of fish. You could read sociopolitical subtext in its portrayal of the 60s counterculture as corrupted by the violence it abhorred, the influence of the Manson Family killings or as a prediction of Altamont; or regard it as a steppingstone figuring somewhere in the bumpy trail blazed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and George Romero.
Written and directed by the comparatively unknown David Durston, I Drink Your Blood is, for the first twenty minutes, utterly grotesque in both content and execution. There’s little sense of reality in its setting (a dying rural town held together by a folksy little bakery specializing in “meat pies”) or the awkward cue card readings emoted by a cast of bewildered thespians and amateurs. Before tumbling thoroughly into Ed Wood territory, however, Durston bulldozes through the remaining hour with fierce conviction and a sense of humor that’s cynical and surreal. He follows a band of devil-worshipping acidheads infected with rabies, watching them run amok with swords and knives, foaming at the mouth while passing the disease onto townsfolk and a construction crew (hardhats vs. longhairs in the age of Joe), the scenario swirling into an apocalyptic frenzy that’s totally outrageous and ridiculously funny. When the dust settles and the dismembered body parts are no longer used as billy clubs, you may think you’ve imagined the whole thing.

Been so long . . .

2011-10-17T20:00:00.006-05:00

During his momentary stint as a movie star, Johnny Rotten played a psycho haunting a white socks and black shoes detective played by Harvey Keitel in… well, I know it as Corrupt, the title used for the New York premiere in 1983. Since then it’s had more alternate titles than I can count. (It’s presently known as Corrupt Lieutenant on a wretched, pan/scan DVD.) I recall the ads trumpeting it in both the Village Voice and Soho Weekly News, and, for a week or two, it was ‘the’ thing to see, at least for the downtown crowd. I can’t say that I ever thought much of the picture, but Corrupt did have two or three entrancing scenes of Keitel sitting in his living room, listening to a jaunty tune (co-written by Ennio Morricone) over and over: “Tchaikovsky´s Destruction”. The vocal was credited to ‘Steve’ — just ‘Steve’ — who turned out to be Steve Linford, later the director of Spamhaus. Even though I never heard it again, for decades I could never get the song out of my head. Just recently this decent copy turned up on YouTube, presumably to haunt me into the new millennium… so play it at your own risk!

Downtime

2011-10-06T14:11:00.000-05:00

Sophia Loren between takes on Marriage Italian Style; click to enlarge.

‘Ball’ of confusion

2011-10-05T06:17:00.003-05:00

Click to enlarge

A film about the insecurities percolating within the minds of its married characters, Last Night (2010) offers occasional moments of wisdom and insight concerning an innate human need to bond with more than just one partner, and the invented morality that tricks millions of people into lives of repression and desperation. Its upscale couples enjoy the freedom that money can buy in their spacious Manhattan digs, a chilly deviation on the bourgeois staple of kids and the white picket fence, with genuine happiness in short supply. We sense it as Keira Knightley’s Joanna loses herself momentarily in the heady company of Alex (Guillaume Canet), Truman (a refreshing Griffin Dunne) and Sandra (Stephanie Romanov) — artistic souls all — while her confused, corporate-minded spouse Michael (Sam Worthington) is off on a business trip with his coworker, the sexually available Laura (Eva Mendes). If we commit ourselves physically to just one person, are we depriving some instinctive motivator that led us to them in the first place — part of what made them fall in love with us? If we pursue sex outside of the marriage, should we be condemned for fulfilling a need to feel attractive and desirable in the eyes of another? Presently I’m uncertain if writer-director Massy Tadjedin subscribes to conventional mores. Above, Alex and Joanna test the shaky walls she’s erected out of the fear and ignorance instilled by a puritanical society. You can see the film on Netflix instant streaming.

Kelsey

2011-10-02T13:01:00.002-05:00

Click to enlarge

My 2nd favorite music video

2011-10-02T12:56:00.002-05:00

Best viewed full screen with the volume cranked through headphones.

Stiletto pumps in the Black Lagoon

2011-10-01T19:57:00.002-05:00

Maria Montez saunters through Universal’s all-purpose jungle backlot, filming Robert Siodmak’s semi-deranged Cobra Woman (1944), via Pour 15 minutes d’amour; click to enlarge.

Positively 8th Street

2011-10-01T19:45:00.003-05:00

1978 Village Voice ad via It’s All the Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago; click to enlarge.

Takin’ tips and gettin’ stoned

2011-09-25T19:13:00.003-05:00

Oh, I've got something inside me,
To drive a princess blind.
There's a wild man wizard,
He's hiding in me, illuminating my mind.
Oh, I've got something inside me,
Not what my life's about,
Cause I've been letting my outside tide me,
Over 'till my time runs out.

Open invitations

2011-09-23T20:53:00.000-05:00

Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran and Jean Yanne either before, during or after production of Le Boucher (1969); click to enlarge.

Claude Chabrol

2011-09-22T22:06:00.001-05:00

Click to enlarge

Minx

2011-09-22T14:01:00.002-05:00

Minky Stéphane Audran with her minky legs and minky tan and minky little feet in Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidèle (1969). Oh yeah, the dude with the book is Michel Bouquet. Definitely click to enlarge.

Claude Chabrol finally arrives on Blu-ray

2011-09-18T15:40:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, Criterion denied my request for screeners. Therefore, the review I’d hoped to post here… isn’t. In the meantime, if you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas…

Pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street

2011-09-14T19:53:00.002-05:00

Images via Jhalal Drut; click to enlarge.

Simply Scarlett

2011-09-14T15:47:00.013-05:00

Ms. Johansson's notorious self portraits! (Click to enlarge.)

How Come (King Of The Waves)

2011-09-13T23:28:00.001-05:00

By Little Barrie
With Mareva Galanter
Via Pour 15 minutes d’amour

The peanut butter revelation

2011-09-13T08:59:00.008-05:00

Reading Rich Cohen’s interview with Angelina Jolie in the latest Vanity Fair, I was struck by a revelation, mostly concerning my desire (ability?) to write and the frustration that comes from never having achieved a professional career in the field. It was this exchange between interviewer and movie star that had me See The Light:

    Angie: “I hung out with the kids. Usually we have swim class in the morning for the twins, then art class. The boys got this crazy fish pedicure. It’s one of those things you shouldn’t talk about in an interview, and yet… There are fish here that eat the dead skin off your feet. I thought it would be fun to send the boys.”

    Rob: “Did it hurt?”

    Angie: “They were in hysterics.”

    Rob: “Is it like when you put peanut butter on your toes and let your dog lick it off?”

    You know something? I could never, would never, write a line like that, let alone submit it to a publisher. (Imagine defending it to a scissor-happy editor looking to trim some fat!) Which I guess partially explains my non-position in a field whose appeal weakens by the day.

Ian Dury for the day

2011-09-12T21:18:00.002-05:00

There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards
By Ian Dury & the Blockheads

Noel Coward was a charmer.
As a writer he was brahma.
Velvet, jackets and pyjamas,
had a gay divorce and other dramas.

There ain't half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain't half been some clever bas-tards.

Van Gough did some eyeball pleasers.
He must have been a pencil squeezer.
He didn't do the Mona Lisa,
That was an Italian geezer.

There ain't half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain't half been some clever bas-tards.

Einstein can't be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
Frighten everybody shitless

There ain't half been some clever bastards.
Probably got help from their mum
(who had help from her mum).
There ain't half been some clever bastards.
Now that we've had some,
let's hope that there's lots more to come.

There ain't half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain't half been some clever bas-tards.

Okey-dokey!
Oh!
Segovia.
Da-laa la-laa da-daa da-lee
De dump di dump de dump-dump-diddle li-lee.

AJ for the day

2011-09-12T19:20:00.002-05:00

Teenage Angelina Jolie Culture Clubbing, via This Is Not Porn; click to enlarge.

Elephant heads — “Oh, chiefee!” edition

2011-09-11T13:30:00.005-05:00

Dude, the frikkin’ Bowery Boys rule!

¡Eye, caramba!

2011-09-09T21:47:00.003-05:00

Real peepers, no FX . . . Socket to me!

Pop-Eye Perry

Willie Ingram

The deuce, 1972

2011-09-09T19:34:00.002-05:00

Via My 1970s Tumblr; click to enlarge.

Labor Day 1965 at Rock Hudson’s House

2011-09-08T20:31:00.002-05:00

Silent home movies!

Laughing in the dark

2011-09-08T06:29:00.002-05:00

Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, circa 1954
Click to enlarge.

Elephant heads, Jerry Lewis edition

2011-09-08T06:00:00.001-05:00

Click images to enlarge

Elephant heads at MGM

2011-09-08T05:50:00.001-05:00

Click images to enlarge

Malibu, 1965

2011-09-07T05:08:00.002-05:00

Silent home movies shot by Roddy McDowall via Sunset GunShots.

‘Roller Boogie’ is the new ‘Xanadu’

2011-09-06T16:57:00.003-05:00

A cultural relic even when it first came out, Roller Boogie (1979) has Linda Blair foundering like Barbara Stanwyck in a Frankie Avalon picture, babyfat t&a, dudes with Chachi ‘dos and way-too-short shorts. “No rinks in Beverly Hills, just minks.” Occasionally amazing, pretty cool post-disco disco soundtrack. On demand at Netflix. Click poster to enlarge.

Life during wartime

2011-09-06T14:43:00.002-05:00

Via right here; click to enlarge.

Life's a Mitch

2011-09-06T14:00:00.002-05:00

“. . . Everybody got a road game . . .”

Elephant heads at sea and in the air

2011-09-04T13:39:00.004-05:00

A very popular program among men my father’s age who’d drink beer and wax nostalgic over their ‘glory days’ of bombing those pesky ‘Nips’ in The Big One (WWII), McHale’s Navy ran on ABC from 1962 through 1966 and spawned these two theatrical features. While the first, released in 1964, was essentially a feature-length version of the half-hour show, its sequel, McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (1965) almost had a touch of surrealism about it. For starters, the lead character, Quentin McHale, played by Ernest Borgnine, isn’t even in it! (Click images to enlarge.)

Elephant heads

2011-09-03T21:45:00.001-05:00

Click to enlarge

Take a road off, Fanny

2011-09-01T19:04:00.004-05:00

“We’ve got to change course or else we’ll blow up the world!” Watch it now @ Netflix. (Click to enlarge.)

Vampire hotties

2011-08-31T19:52:00.001-05:00

Marie-Pierre Castel and Jean Rollin while filming Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), via Lunettes Noires; click to enlarge. You can see the film right now @ Netflix.

Vegetable man, where are you?

2011-08-31T19:24:00.001-05:00

Syd Barrett, David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason (circa 1968) via Barrett: the definitive visual companion to the life of Syd Barrett; click to enlarge.

Third eye blind

2011-08-31T16:40:00.001-05:00

Awake from *her* surgery (an ‘Addadicktome’?), via Comically Vintage; click to enlarge.

Sophia with her corset on

2011-08-30T14:45:00.000-05:00

Sophia Loren in The Millionairess (1960) via VintageGal; click to enlarge.

No argument from me

2011-08-30T14:29:00.004-05:00

Perused this in my dentist’s waiting room — short on substance, a little flighty, but the title’s cool. Click for more info.

Flower Powers

2011-08-29T09:41:00.001-05:00

Stephanie Powers, via Simply Sassy; click to enlarge. For anyone who’s wondering what to get me for Christmas, Warner Archive has just released the complete Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Stephanie’s spy series from the 60s!

Suddenly, Last Summer

2011-08-29T06:02:00.003-05:00

Labor Day arrives like an unloved in-law next weekend, closing down my favorite season to usher us none too gracefully into falling leaves, ice and snow — and, to the chagrin of my neck, back and arm, painfully unpleasant arthritis. Why I’ve allowed myself to live in the northeast region of the United States is a mystery, especially to me. (I’d be much happier in a shack out in the desert.) These things considered, the one title (not the play, not the film, but the title) that can stir up all sorts of melancholy in my head is Suddenly, Last Summer, as it denotes the passing of those sultry three months into history. Because the summer of today will be, suddenly, last summer a week from now — despite the fact that autumn proper doesn’t begin until the 23rd. Thanks to Pirates and Revolutionaries for the screen grabs above (all of which click to enlarge) of Liz Taylor in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film of the Tennessee Williams drama.

Back to school

2011-08-27T13:00:00.000-05:00

Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks
via Polyhymnia; click to enlarge.

It’s, like, a total catharsis, baby

2011-08-27T12:57:00.002-05:00

Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Jerry Lewis on the set of One More Time, the very strange sequel to Salt & Pepper via Drew Friedman; click to enlarge. As I wrote in a previous post:

“The only film directed by Jerry Lewis in which he does not appear, One More Time (1970) sits, just waiting for a cult to germinate. The 1960s were chockablock with cinematic weirdness, but few pushed the envelope as far or in as many unexpected directions. It was a sequel to a static faux Rat Pack movie, Salt & Pepper (1968), where a young Richard Donner laid the groundwork for his oeuvre of mediocrity. It starred Peter Lawford as ‘Pepper’ and Sammy Davis, Jr. as ‘Salt’ (yuk! yuk!…get it?), two swingin’ cats operating a swingin’ nightclub in a swingin’ London decidedly void of mods and rockers. The hipster-geezer fever dream continued in One More Time, with Jerry shaping their relationship into a clone of his long-since-deceased partnership with Dean Martin — Peter as Deano, Sammy as Jer. The screenplay by Michael Pertwee (The Mouse on the Moon, Strange Bedfellows) was wrung dry for both maudlin pathos and bizarre slapstick, putting Sammy in the unenviable position of transferring the bipolar situations in a performance that glides uneasily from weepy insincerity to something hideously abstract (re: “Here come da judge, here come da judge, here come da judge…”). Upon seeing this the first time, I believed a lengthy (albeit insane) thesis could be composed on its daring and… brilliance? But who in their right mind would believe me?”

Back to school

2011-08-27T12:23:00.000-05:00

Via Pretty Pictures.

Sophia ‘with her face on’

2011-08-26T17:28:00.002-05:00

Sophia Loren via VintageGal; click to enlarge.

Viaggio in Italia

2011-08-25T12:15:00.000-05:00

Michelangelo Antonioni, Marisa Mell and Federico Fellini via Uncle Sid; click to enlarge.

Hello Dali!

2011-08-24T19:35:00.002-05:00

Salvador Dali appears on What's My Line? (1952).

Art appreciation

2011-08-24T10:30:00.001-05:00

Kelsey and the statue; click to enlarge.

Great abdomens of the 21st century

2011-08-22T15:54:00.001-05:00

Sheridyn Fisher via Girl in Photo; click to enlarge.

Poolside with Carol

2011-08-22T15:37:00.000-05:00

Lynley, that is, via Yello!; click to enlarge.

Happy Birthday, Honor Blackman!

2011-08-22T15:33:00.001-05:00

Via Pretty Pictures; click to enlarge.

Romy Schneider l’enfer

2011-08-21T19:16:00.001-05:00

Via Old Hollywood; click to enlarge.

Her eyes were filled with feathers

2011-08-20T08:11:00.003-05:00

“Lord of the Reedy River” composed and recorded by Donovan, from the album HMS Donovan (1971). He also performed a shortened version in the film, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).

Digging the Stones

2011-08-16T17:31:00.004-05:00

Of the scores of ignored artisans toiling below the radar of the front office, those independent spirits who manipulated Hollywood’s vast resources to realize exotic personal visions on ‘b’ budgets, writer/producer/director Andrew L. Stone is certainly worthy of attention. I first became aware of him and his wife, Virginia (his editor and collaborator), via The Last Voyage (1960), a disaster film set aboard a sinking ocean liner. Shot in real time, Stone filmed on a genuine ship that was actually sinking. Irwin Allen, meet Werner Herzog.

    It contains most all of the script and visual elements to be found in the other pictures Stone made during his peak years. After a string of mediocre musical comedies hacked out in the ‘30s and ‘40s — one notable exception being Stormy Weather (1943) — Stone evinced a predilection for sweaty melodrama in Highway 301 (1950), a tough bank robbery picture with trigger-happy crooks. It inaugurated a decades’ worth of claustrophobic suspense yarns (nearly all of them shot on location, inside real houses and buildings, a rickety bridge connecting late 40s Fox noir with the nouvelle vague) in which personal relationships are whittled down to fundamentals, converting any given scenario into a showcase of pluck, quick wits and frayed nerves.

    There are obvious parallels to Louis Feuillade, Fritz Lang, Sam Fuller and Hitchcock — Shadow of a Doubt’s Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright were reunited for Stone’s The Steel Trap (1952). Most reminiscent of Lang, several of Stone’s scripts (which were often based on true events) recognize love, marriage, children and home life as ornaments teetering on the brink of collapse. The husband (Robert Stack), wife (Dorothy Malone) and daughter (Tammy Marihugh) taking The Last Voyage are hollow and bland, while the ship’s captain (George Sanders) and his grizzled engineer (Edmond O’Brien) dance a crude, formulaic power play.

    Stone’s interest isn’t so much in the heart as it is in the hardware. With his wife helplessly pinned under a steel beam, Stack spends most of The Last Voyage hunting down its pivotal, mechanical main character: the acetylene torch needed to cut her to a dubious ‘freedom’ — the arduous, potentially deadly search for a lifeboat. Myopic in its obsessions, the screenplay’s too preoccupied to notice the irony of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Dorothy Dandridge in Stone’s The Decks Ran Red

    For the square-jawed hero, they hired Stack; for pride and vanity, they were rewarded with Sanders. The Stones took advantage of Hollywood’s then-vast supply of familiar character actors, seasoned vets who could project panic in lieu of personality: Doris Day, Louis Jordan, Barry Sullivan and Frank Lovejoy in Julie (1956); James Mason, Inger Stevens, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand and Angie Dickinson in Cry Terror! (1958); Mason again, with Broderick Crawford, Dorothy Dandridge and Stuart Whitman in The Decks Ran Red (1958) — Stone alluding to interracial sex when it was taboo; David Janssen, Joyce Taylor and Frank Gorshin in Ring of Fire (1961).

    Capable players all, they’re occasionally stranded by the director, especially the women. Day, Dandridge and Stevens manage through extended scenes of wide-eyed fear that appear barely rehearsed; in lesser hands, these moments could easily exile the work to self parody. This benign neglect of Stone’s coincides with a visible (though unspoken) belief in compassionate authority figures watching over a nervous collective whose ethics are built upon the imagined trust and decency within a white, middle-class utopia. Bravura performances here would simply undermine all purpose. When Cry Terror!’s Inger Stevens races against the clock to fulfill a commitment to kidnappers, the cinema’s been (very) artfully rigged to a state of unyielding emergency.

    In the case of Julie, Stone cast Day as a stewardess tiptoeing around her husband’s mental deterioration. Shreds of xenophobia hang over the latter, Louis Jordan’s oily Frenchman, a cliché stereotype reminiscent of Sanders’s stuffy Brit in Last Voyage and perhaps an indication of distrust of Europeans on Stone’s part. Stalked to the point of madness, Doris nonetheless clocks in at her job and ends up piloting a passenger plane after the cockpit crew’s been shot. Absurd without apology, Julie — like so much of Stone’s oeuvre — is a compelling ride from start to finish.

Both Julie and Cry Terror! are now available on DVD-R from Warner Archive.

“Smart people don’t live here”

2011-08-10T11:02:00.002-05:00

Click to enlarge

Flagrantly anti-capitalist, regarding the police as power-driven fascists and the clergy as money-grubbing hypocrites, Edge of Doom (1950) underlines the bleakness of its noir backdrop by casting Dana Andrews and Farley Granger — two faces wrought with quiet desperation, anxiety and decadence — as, respectively, a “two-fisted” parish priest and a young delivery boy whose rather unhealthy fixation on mom gets him into very hot water. He lives in a low-rent shithole where Paul Stewart’s in a jam with his bookie and Adele Jergens is the local talent looking to get laid. There’s a murder plot that becomes something of a red herring once we’re hit with all the sour allusions to back-stabbing employers, bullies with badges, and a cranky old monsignor who, in all truth, deserves a good beating. I won’t reveal what the murder weapon is, but I’d be surprised if the Catholic Legion of Decency didn’t slap this with a “C” rating (for “condemned”). Based on a novel I’ve never read by Leo Brady, the hard-as-nails screenplay was written by Philip Yordan, with a tacked-on (and tacky) framing device — Andrews having tea with a young priest questioning his value in this urban hell — whipped up by Ben Hecht. A Sam Goldwyn production, it’s directed by Mark Robson, and it may be the best film I’ve seen by him yet. You can watch it now via Netflix Instant. Suggested co-feature: Give Us This Day (1949).

Dead stylish

2011-08-06T19:35:00.005-05:00

Above, an interesting montage from The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), a scene of the public invited to look over the charred remains of an unknown murder victim in the hopes of establishing an identification — a weird situation inspired by the real-life crime the film is (very) loosely based on. The catchy club music was composed by Riz Ortolani (whose song “More” from the film Mondo Cane was, in my youth, piped over every supermarket and elevator PA system in the country). Seasoned with ‘moments of hallucinatory clarity’ (I may trademark that), it was originally released in Italy as La Ragazza dal Pigiama Giallo (“the girl in the yellow pyjamas”) and co-stars former King of Paramount Ray Milland (who pumps the ‘high-sign’ at a chronic masturbator), former Mr. Audrey Hepburn Mel Ferrar, and Dalila Di Lazzaro as the damsel in perpetual distress. You can watch it now @ Netflix.

Luis Buñuel’s Death in the Garden

2011-07-27T07:14:00.003-05:00

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.

Sketchy ramblings on a sticky afternoon

2011-07-19T22:01:00.010-05:00

Some images click to enlarge . . .

Above: On the debit side it should read ‘Woefully, Tragically Unavailable.’ I wonder how many ‘social drinkers’ can go weeks (if not months) without their hootch before they start climbing the walls?

Above: Shirley Jones — peaches ‘n’ cream or hot buttery spread? Via Uncle Sid.

Above: Brother of dancer Isadora, Raymond Duncan (right) was interviewed in the 1950s TV show Around the World With Orson Welles:

“People are not what they think they are. They are what they do, and one of the finest parts of the technique of working is to enjoy what you’re doing and do it as a game….Not to make money, not to produce, but to make yourself in working…that’s the end in view, whereas in today, people destroy themselves in working.”

Above: Daughter of James Joyce, Lucia Joyce studied dance with Isadora Duncan, had an affair with Samuel Beckett, was analyzed by Carl Jung, and died in a mental hospital. Via No You Shut Up.

Above: A (perhaps justifiably) forgotten 60s ‘comedy’ featuring several cast members from TV’s Hogan’s Heroes. But did fans of Kill Bill make the connection? Without Googling it, that is...

Above: The original coming attraction for Giant Spider Invasion (1975), a film your humble narrator eyewitnessed at a drive-in in Buffalo, New York in 1976, on a bill with Night of the Cobra Woman. If my memory’s correct, what you see here is infinitely superior to the feature itself. Alan Hale, Jr., ‘Skipper’ on Gilligan’s Island, plays the sheriff.

If it’s twelve inches, it’s a foot

2011-07-12T18:38:00.001-05:00

As America whirls in economic and political turmoil, one recent not-so-groundbreaking story caught my eye: The Quentin Tarantino Toe-Sucking Sex Email That Will Haunt Your Dreams, wherein we discover the filmmaker sports “the most unattractive penis” its author has ever seen and asks her, “Can I suck on your toes while I jerk off?”
Although I have never voiced that request of anyone — my wife, past girlfriends and one-night-stands will surely attest to this under oath — I can empathize to a degree, for I find some women’s feet quite arousing. After all, I rented The Flintstones (1994) solely (if you’ll forgive the pun) to ogle Halle Berry’s… only to have my libidinous quirk quelled by Rosie O’Donnell’s and John Goodman’s ungainly tootsies.
In any event, I felt it, well, not entire necessary but momentarily amusing to peruse the unsubtle hints of Mr. Tarantino’s obsession as revealed in his films:

It may be traced back to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (1994), a portent of things to come. (More on Uma below…)

For my money, Bridget Fonda never looked better than she did in Jackie Brown (1997). Kudos to QT and his cinematographer for this scene in particular.

On his blog, Lonnie Bruner admits an attraction to women’s feet similar to mine, and I’m afraid I must concur with his findings regarding Uma Thurman’s in Kill Bill: “I had to avert my eyes during the numerous close-ups of [her] gnarled, finger-like feet…her toes on each foot don’t match…one of her big — BIG — toes is curving off to the west, while the other leans clearly to starboard…Good lord…Only 2% of all the female feet in the world meet my standards, and Uma Thurman’s fail miserably.”

Above, Grindhouse; click to enlarge

QT let his fetish fly in the Death Proof portion of Grindhouse (2007), kicking off with credits superimposed over Sydney Poitier’s feet. No, not Sidney Poitier (eww!), but Sydney Poitier, the Lilies of the Field actor’s daughter. Part of it is set in a mythical roadhouse where a bunch of hot babes sit around and get wasted and talk a lot of shit, the camera hypnotized by Sydney’s feet and Vanessa Ferlito’s. Hey, I ain’t complainin.’ To wit (all click to enlarge):

Which brings us to . . .

Of all his films, I’m most partial to Inglourious Basterds (2009), which featured the casting, so to speak, of the rather lovely feet of Diane Kruger (above). In an interview with SheKnows.com, the star is asked about The Foot Thing:

SheKnows: There are some shots of your feet in this film. People like to talk about Quentin’s interest in shooting women’s feet. Were you aware of that as it was happening?

Diane Kruger: The true story is that I did not know about his apparent foot thing (laughs). When I first got the job, I was interviewed by some journalist and he said ‘So, have you read the foot scene yet?’ and he filled me in on this whole thing. I was like ‘Wow, I didn't know that.’ So the day comes and I go ‘Quentin, are you excited? Today’s the foot day. Good day at work, huh?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s all made up. Don’t even think that that’s true. It’s all made up by media.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ Six close-ups later on my foot and not on my face, and I say, ‘Sure, sure thing, Quentin.’ So, I don’t know. You ask him.

SheKnows: So did you make sure to have your feet pedicured?

Diane Kruger: I made sure? He made sure. Are you kidding me? And my foot has never looked better, ever.

Earth mother

2011-07-11T15:12:00.000-05:00

Click to enlarge

I came to Ava Gardner late — growing up when I did, rejecting anything and everything from my parents’ generation, she was dumped in with the other Establishment figures we were once so intent on burying. And besides, by that time she was making dreck like Earthquake (1974), a true korporate kalamity.
About ten years later, while I was studying the work of Robert Siodmak, she blew me through the back of the theatre in The Killers (1946). Pairing her with Burt Lancaster was a stroke of erotic genius. During their tense ‘n’ torrid scenes all I could think was: how are these two gorgeous, sexed-up creatures able to be in the same room together without ripping off their clothes?
The cleft, the lips, the eyes… at a time when so many American women wore white gloves and lace veils, Ava was robust and sultry. She drank, she smoked, she bragged about the size and weight of hubby Frank Sinatra’s cock, she partied with Ernest Hemingway and John Huston. In what I consider her last worthy screen appearance, Night of the Iguana (1964), she’s listening to Deborah Kerr prattle, “I’m a spinster pushing forty!” To which Ava replies, “Aw, honey — who isn’t!” No truer words were ever spoken. (Photo source: Fuck Yeah Ava Gardner.)

Fathom this . . .

2011-07-09T14:33:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge

Above, Raquel Welch filming Maurice Binder’s ‘Freudian’ credits for Fathom (1967). “Note how low the background set is,” observes filmmaker Nathan Schiff. “It was clear the camera would not be going anywhere above her pubic area.” (Photo source: Sunset GunShots.)

Seeing this in the theatre when it came out, my ten-year-old libido was awakened by my first screen crush:

A double bill at Chez Flickhead

2011-06-22T05:55:00.005-05:00

“Stirring, even triumphant moments!”

~ P L U S ! ~

“Jaw-dropping!”

Click to enlarge

Instead of the standard “Directed by Edward Dmytryk,” the credit on Bluebeard (1972) reads “An Edward Dmytryk Film.” That’s a fairly lofty claim back when Hollywood made distinctions between films (considered to be representations of ‘art’) and movies (middlebrow entertainment) — remember the words of the fatcat producer played by Ernest Borgnine in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968): “I don’t make films,” he snarled, “I make movies, dammit!”
    I’m sure the moneymen bankrolling Bluebeard could relate. Produced — finagled? — by the pre-Superman team of Ilya and Alexander Salkind, Bluebeard defies the ‘films’ of its time (figure anything from Truffaut to Bob Rafelson) by sticking to the antiquated forms of a 1940s gothic mystery/thriller tainted by the 1960’s unfortunate move toward ‘camp.’
    Richard Burton is simply ridiculous as the ladykiller — ten minutes into this and I could only hope he was paid handsomely for his efforts — inches away from twirling a fake moustache and muttering “Bwa-ha-ha!” to his unsuspecting brides. Who all look wonderful, by the way — the movie… er, ah, film is a Playboy pictorial come to life, its nude scenes causing quite a stir back in the day. As you can see from the poster above, some are shot, some are suffocated, two are “chandeliered,” one is “falconated,” and Raquel Welch plays a nun. All under the guidance of sanctimonious hack Edward Dmytryk. If only Buñuel could’ve gotten his hands on this thing.
    In an inspired feat of programming, our co-feature for the evening is Ted Post’s The Baby (1973), a deranged reaction to Women’s Lib. Its predominantly female cast keeps the titular male in a state of infantilism, in diapers and a crib even though he’s pushing twenty. Anjanette Comer plays the social worker out to upgrade the lad, much to the chagrin of his sisters (Suzan Zenor and a radiant Mariana Hill) and mother (Ruth Roman, looking all Joan Crawford with her eyebrows and cigarettes). To divulge any more of this mishegas would be criminal.

The mercenary position

2011-06-20T14:44:00.002-05:00

Best known as a master cinematographer — you can see some of his finest imagery in Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) — but Jack Cardiff’s career as a director is a very different kettle of fish. He made a respectable version of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1960), a serviceable Shirley MacLaine comedy in My Geisha (1962), and worked with John Ford on Young Cassidy (1965), a biopic about playwright Sean O’Casey. Then there’s the other side of Jack Cardiff, where a proclivity for cheap dime store novels and Saturday matinees may preclude serious academic consideration: Scent of Mystery (1960), the first and only picture ever shown in Smell-O-Vision; the kitschy Viking warrior epic The Long Ships (1964), complete with Sidney Poitier in pointy, upturned genie shoes; The Liquidator (1965), a humdrum faux-Bond affair; Alain Delon wooing Marianne Faithfull with deep purple prose in Naked Under Leather (1968); and the ripe mad scientist shenanigans of The Mutations (1974).

    Falling somewhere in the middle of all this, and now available on DVD-R from Warner Archive, is Dark of the Sun (1968), wherein Cardiff takes off like Sam Fuller on steroids. Following a band of mercenaries led by Rod Taylor and Jim Brown, hired by Calvin Lockhart to retrieve a gaggle of whites under attack and millions in diamonds deep in the Congo, the picture plays like a two-fisted, barrel-chested homage to the tawdry men’s adventure magazines of the day: Stag, True Men, Argosy, etc. — a popular genre which died sometime in the 1970s with the softening of earlier definitions of masculinity.

    Based on a novel I haven’t read by Wilbur Smith, Cardiff and screenwriters Ranald MacDougall and Adrien Spies sidestep standard movie conventions. They plow through the scenario’s three-day mission with verve, pausing the action only long enough for intelligent banter about duty and honor versus whoring one’s soul in the midst of a country’s political freefall. (Taylor’s bead on the trickle-down effect of globalization corrupting the Congo’s warring factions is a progressive observation for the time.) When the action resumes, it’s often brutal and pulverizing: the rape and slaughter of innocents, fistfights fortified with machetes, chainsaws and bayonets, sweaty, rootless men driven beyond the breaking point. During two scenes in which Rod flips out on a neo-Nazi opportunist played by Peter Carsten, the actor seems moments away from having a nervous breakdown.

    There’s reason to believe the new video is missing a few scenes, notably between Taylor and Yvette Mimieux, whom he rescues along the way; promotional stills suggest a brief romantic subplot that’s not onscreen. (If you’ll recall, Yvette played Rod’s Weena in The Time Machine in 1960.) Remastered from a print and not the negative, the new DVD looks acceptable but has a slight audio fade that’s sporadically detectable. Despite these misgivings, however, any opportunity to see Dark of the Sun is well advised.

Update: On their Twitter page, Warners claims the DVD-R is uncut and not mastered from a print.

Above and below, original ads and art details by Frank McCarthy; click images to enlarge

Will I ever see this hanging in the lobby of my local multiplex?

2011-06-18T05:27:00.000-05:00

Click to enlarge

The Powers That Be have opted to remake The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, even though the original version is just two years old and, to me at least, a perfectly satisfactory work with a standout performance by Noomi Rapace in the title role. Of course, that picture was Swedish, so those gosh darned subtitles are an imposing chore for America’s “slow readers” and illiterates. Filling time while Barbara Broccoli sorts out the tangled finances of the next James Bond movie, Daniel Craig stars as Blomkvist and Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth. It’s under the direction of David Fincher, which could be a blessing or a curse.

Silicone boobs and brass bras

2011-06-15T20:11:00.000-05:00

Film director Terence Young (1915-1994) had an undistinguished career in the 1950s British cinema, but fell in with the original perpetrators of the James Bond franchise and soared to international prominence in the 60s. There’s no question that his three most famous pictures will always be Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965). Perhaps a falling out with Cubby Broccoli and/or Harry Saltzman, the double-ohs of 007, secured his rather curious fall from Bond: the all-star drug smuggling mediocrity The Poppy is Also a Flower (1966); hitting pay dirt with Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin in Wait Until Dark (1967); blundering into David Lean territory with the interminable Mayerling (1968); the nearly surreal Red Sun (1971), samurai Toshirô Mifune saddling up in the Old West with Alain Delon, Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress and Capucine — I shit you not; again with Bronson for The Valachi Papers (1972), when the star was on his commercial roll; from the age of Mandingo, Young braved the southern fried KKK exposé The Klansman (1974), with Lee Marvin, Richard Burton, Cameron Mitchell… and O.J. Simpson “as Garth”; reunited with Audrey Hepburn for Bloodline (1979), streamlined kitsch via Sidney Sheldon; directing the first and only picture produced by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Inchon (1981), a famous disaster, impeccably cast; and the dry espionage of The Jigsaw Man (1984), Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine and the anti-Sleuth.

    Therefore, in the center of this mishegas, it should come as no surprise to find War Goddess (1973), one of the more fascinating deviations of its time. A throwback to those sweaty, wretchedly dubbed Italian sword-and-sandal/peplum epics from a decade earlier, it takes place in an all-female city of Amazon warriors — the insignia on their flag looks like the Bat Signal — who live under enforced lesbianism save for the one day of the year when the male Greek army piles in to knock ‘em up and propagate the race.

    Its color has faded, the image muted from age, the dubbing sucks, and the version that’s on DVD and Netflix streaming is a full-frame affair, the scope and breadth of some shots now the property of one’s imagination. Still, War Goddess is amazing on so many foul levels, its dialog teetering on What’s Up, Tiger Lily?-style witticisms (“Have you tried Oriental concentration?” “Only on Orientals!”), and an adventure that snakes into enough truly bizarre territories that I wouldn’t be surprised if Herman Mankiewicz wrote it over one feverish night it in the throes of a drunken tear. It’s that good… and bad.

    But the presence of Young’s name in the credits (indeed, it’s on the screen as Terence Young’s War Goddess) serves to underline the tumble from past glories. This is, after all, the guy who made From Russia With Love: what happened? Despite a cast of literally, well, a thousand, mounted and robed and on horseback, and battle scenes that may have impressed on the big screen, War Goddess carries the stink of Poverty Row by way of Cinecittà.

    Young borrows from his famous catfight scene in From Russia With Love, two healthy specimens engaged in nude knock-down, drag-out hot oil rasslin’ that reverberates with the 1950s S/M cheesecake of Irving Klaw. And there’s enough nudity to suggest this is a truncated version minus whatever soft core porn transpired between the statuesque Amazon Queen and the wisecracking King of Greece, a sword-wielding stand-up comic with no shortage of comebacks. No matter how dire the production, there’s never a dull moment.

Netflix streaming

Tie-dyed utopian dreams: La Vallée

2011-06-13T14:21:00.004-05:00

Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon strike a pose in a publicity photo for La Vallée, click to enlarge

La Vallée (The Valley [Obscured by Clouds]) Produced and directed by Barbet Schroeder. Cinematography by Néstor Almendros. Edited by Denise De Casabianca. Music by Pink Floyd. Filmed in Techniscope and Eastmancolor. 100 minutes, released in 1972 by Les Films du Losange. Cast: Bulle Ogier (Viviane), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Gaetan), Michael Gothard (Olivier), Valerie Lagrange (Hermine), Jerome Beauvarlet (Yann), Monique Giraudy (Monique), and The Mapuga Tribe and its Chiefs.

When Barbet Schroeder’s La Vallée was released in the United States in 1978, it was already six years old. Originally distributed in Europe in 1972, the film had all the ingredients for a cult hit in those heady times when marijuana smoke filled more than a few American movie theatres: a cast of young idealists and societal dropouts searching for nirvana, esoteric drug use, open sexuality, and a music score by Pink Floyd, recorded shortly before their signature hit, Dark Side of the Moon.

The belated release unfortunately missed the peak years of the ‘midnight show,’ the short-lived market that buzzed with druggy concoctions along the lines of El Topo (1970) and Eraserhead (1977). I first saw La Vallée in 1978 at the Valley Art theatre in Tempe, Arizona; and again a year later at San Francisco’s Strand, paired on both occasions with Schroeder’s More (1969), an erratic portrait of heroin addicts featuring what is, without question, the finest performance in Mimsy Farmer’s checkered career. At the time, given my patchouli-and-tea shades state of mind, La Vallée struck me as the work of a kindred spirit. From its opening shot panning over the mountains of New Guinea, set to the Floyd’s pulsing instrumental theme, the picture held me spellbound.

The producer and distributor of work by Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, Barbet Schroeder made his directorial debut with More, co-writing it and La Vallée with Paul Gégauff, an author whose screenplays often delved into pet themes of dual natures and conflicting personas within the individual — the efforts of a man perhaps ill at ease in his own skin, or carrying a deep seated distrust of others: René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, wherein a jet set wannabe consumes his well heeled role model; and a long string of pictures for Claude Chabrol, among them Les Biches (1968), in which a neglected sex partner loses her identity when morphing into a superficial copy of her alpha lover. Both of these pictures have similar scenes of characters believing they’re ‘transforming’ in front of mirrors, while effectively highlighting the lines separating one being from another, masters from servants.

The American release poster; click to enlarge

In More, Gégauff traces the transmutation of a hot tempered wanderer into a strung-out junkie attempting to take root in a secluded Spanish village with a woman unstuck in reality. In La Vallée, it’s the gradual evolution of a capitalist bourgeois into a free spirit shedding all ties to conventional living. The pressbook for the film offers this synopsis:

    Viviane is an uncomplicated young woman married to the French Consul in Melbourne. Her interests lead her to New Guinea in search of the near-extinct Bird of Paradise feathers, which she plans to send back for sale to Paris boutiques.
    At Lae, a coastal town, she meets Olivier, a young adventurer who is about to leave with some friends on an expedition into bush country. Gaetan, the head of the expedition, reveals his secret goal is to discover an unknown valley in the phantom regions of the island which is still nothing but blank spots on the map — “obscured by clouds.”
    Only the natives suspect its existence but do not dare explore it — for it is there that the Gods live.
    Despite her misgivings, Viviane joins the expedition — to find her feathers. She wavers between doubt and fascination, hesitates about continuing and gradually discovers other visions of life outside her own. Her exposure to the lush environment, Papuan rites and instinctual love, pushes her further than her companions. As the search continues into the unexplored regions, the horses are abandoned and the expedition is stripped to the essentials.
    At the point of exhaustion, they see a valley.

On the one hand, I doubt that Gégauff bought the concept of heaven on earth, if he ever believed in heaven at all. In the quasi-autobiographical Une partie de plaisir (1975), a film written by and starring the author under the direction of Chabrol, we’re given a glimpse of him as a Hemingwayesque control freak making life miserable for his wife and daughter — who, incidentally, are played by his actual (second) wife and daughter. (Not long after its release, Gégauff was stabbed to death by his first wife.) But the Chabrol film also indicates that he was probably an alcoholic; and addicts, being what they are, habitually dream of some imaginary plateau where they can flee from responsibility and accountability.

Valerie Lagrange, Ogier, Kalfon and a Mapugan tribesman; click to enlarge

Also included in the pressbook is the following interview with Barbet Schroeder, conducted in 1971 by filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier:

Why this film after More? This film seems also to be a trip.
In one shot of More, I had La Vallée in mind: we see a chart of the human brain. The areas still unknown to modern science are left blank. The hero comments: “The brain is like a map of Africa: still largely uncharted. It is in these blank spots that the highest functions of reason and creativity take place.” At the beginning, La Vallée was the story of a woman’s discovery of life and pleasure. But pleasure is a serious thing, full of anguish, which has no ultimate direction but a relationship with death. One must pay for it, one must “leave some feathers.” The two films realize a transformation and a journey of characters who try to push themselves to the limit, with all the risks which that involves.

What is your position in relation to the characters?
I am no longer interested in classic heroes; documentaries, reportages, whether ethnologic or not, have taught us to look at individuals in a different way; their intensity of existence and their truth have taken precedence over psychology and “characterization.” I make no value judgments of my characters any more than of the natives, and I tried to keep the same distance in filming both, leaving them to develop freely. A caricature would have been too easy. Certain roles did not develop at all. Rather than typing them with a few specific traits, I preferred that they should be like people one encounters in life, whose presence one feels without knowing anything about them, but whom one would like to know.

Ogier and mudmen; click to enlarge

Why New Guinea? Why this expedition?
Because New Guinea is the last unknown. It is one of the only places on the globe where there still remain some unexplored regions, some blank spots on the map. It is also one of the last places where tribes can be found whose way of life is still close to Upper Neolithic. Only enlightened adventurers, spurred on by the need to seek out their origins, could have undertaken this search for a legendary valley. In another era they would have been mystic peasants, like those in the films of Glauber Rocha.
The hippies are the only contemporary movement which has produced a lunatic fringe filled with a spirit of adventure. I have tried as much as possible to eliminate all gratuitous hippy folklore in order to better describe a certain way of feeling. It would have been senseless to draw from the magnificent characters of the great American adventure stories, from Hawks to Hemingway, from The African Queen to Green Mansions, from H. Rider Haggard to Mogambo. . .

How much is improvisation, and how much is scripted?
Everything concerning the mountain tribe is obviously improvised, and a number of other sequences are partly improvised. In general we always tried to improvise, even within written scenes, but following the established structure scene by scene.

Are you trying to establish a relationship between people who are searching for a kind of primitivism, and the primitives themselves?
No, because there isn’t really much, except on the initial, warm, intense level of human beings who meet and, curious about each other, exchange gifts and hospitality. Beyond that, misunderstanding inevitably encroaches between a group which is the product of our industrial society and a tribe in the process of slowly emerging from the Stone Age.

How do you define this film?
All along, I’ve tried to keep as many meanings as possible, in order to avoid the possibility of leaving the film open to a single definition. What interests me, as John Huston says, “The pleasure of the journey itself rather than the goal.” It’s up to each individual to decide whether or not he wants to conclude that his dream of returning to the bosom of nature is a sad utopian vision, and a flight from the self and its implications in society.

Folies Chabrol: two new to DVD

2011-05-25T06:22:00.001-05:00

Michel Bouquet and Anna Douking in Juste avant la nuit

From his first picture in 1958 to his death in 2010, Claude Chabrol directed dozens of features, with something of a signature period kicking off in 1967 with Le scandale and running through Une partie de plaisir in 1975, films that casually twist genre conventions and defy viewer expectations. Part of that epoch, Juste avant la nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971), has been notoriously absent on VHS and DVD in North America, but now arrives via Pathfinder Home Entertainment. This may not elicit a vote of confidence in some quarters: I knew a man in Peoria who wept over their ramshackle edition of Chabrol’s La décade prodigieuse (1971).

    As the creator and woefully lethargic proprietor of The Claude Chabrol Project, a dedication site long overdue for an update, I must confess that I’d never seen this pivotal work before. And regardless of Pathfinder’s alarmingly ghetto presentation, a faded print that’s not been remastered, in full frame no less, I can do nothing but hail it for providing one of Chabrol’s greatest works, in which he appears genuinely, passionately invested in every frame.

    I generally try to remain objective and refrain from hyperbole when writing about the cinema, but Juste avant la nuit nearly had me doing cartwheels. All the ingredients for a ‘typical’ Chabrol crime meditation are here: the threatened relationship, the impulsive murder, the simmering tension, the specter of a breakdown that may or may not occur… to say nothing of the welcome involvement of Stéphane Audran, Michel Bouquet, Henri Attal, Dominique Zardi (in psychedelic threads and wig!), cinematographer Jean Rabier and composer Pierre Jansen.

    What they’ve concocted, however, transcends most other Chabrols as it follows the aftermath of a homicide, a mental blackout experienced by the perp and his gradual descent into guilt, regardless that the people around him, who’ve heard his confession, are willing to let the crime slide, not involve the police, all to maintain the equilibrium of their tidy bourgeois universe. On the one hand, it would make a worthy companion piece to Chabrol’s La femme infidèle (1969), which also cast Bouquet and Audran as husband and wife, perhaps to illustrate where their union could go under different dysfunctional circumstances; or it’d make a fascinating co-feature with Luis Buñuel’s Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), as portraits of men consumed by their demons, both real and imaginary.

Bruce Dern in Folies bourgeoises

    Jumping from the sublime to the ridiculous, or perhaps a Chabrolian theatre of the absurd, Folies bourgeoises (The Twist, 1976) was made four years shy of the director’s divorce from Audran, his second wife. It also arrives from Pathfinder in a less than ideal condition, yet the fuzzy image (a challenge to the retina and a test of one’s patience on HDTV) somehow compliments this hallucinatory vision of a failed marriage and the frazzled state of its jumpy couple. Shot in English, one gets the strange feeling that this half mad film shouldn’t look too sharp or professional.

    It’s set up as a comedy, but you don’t have to dig deep to find the arsenic seasoning every punch line. With a cast that may have been contracted over cocktails at Cannes, Bruce Dern plays an American writer living in France, suffocating in a sexless, childless marriage to Ms. Audran’s haughty, horny socialite. He’s having an affair with domesticated single mom Ann-Margret, while Stéphane’s banging Dern’s book editor, Jean-Pierre Cassel, their scenes recalling the frantic rolls in the hay they shared in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Along for the ride is Sydne Rome as Audran’s sexed-up niece, dispensing tidbits of loopy advice when not scratching her itch with a parade of sleazy paramours.

    Segueing freely in and out of daydreams and subconscious visions, including the dismemberment of a phallic prosthetic worthy of Ken Russell, Folies bourgeoises is simply amazing in its awfulness. (Dig that smoking chimp in the fez!) I recall an interview with Chabrol in which he claimed no memory of having made it, the project coming after his earlier, fruitful association with producer André Génovès, as the director slid into one of his off periods. These were times he’d fill his days with food and drink, which would explain why Folies bourgeoises has the look and feel of a druggy confection, the work of a brilliant mind sailing three sheets to the wind.

Buy Juste avant la nuit from Pathfinder Home Entertainment

Buy Folies bourgeoises from Pathfinder Home Entertainment

Vittorio De Sica & Sophia Loren on Blu-ray

2011-05-20T16:06:00.004-05:00

Sophia Loren in Marriage Italian Style

Sophia Loren and Vittorio De Sica were part of a vital moment in popular Italian cinema, when the hugely profitable American market was temporarily open and eager for European imports, when a lot of people were confused by Federico Fellini or wary of Roberto Rossellini. In the neorealist masterpieces Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951) and Umberto D. (1952), De Sica (and writer Cesare Zavattini) worked from the gut, emotionally driven and confidently middlebrow (he knew how to tug at the heartstrings), and Sophia was… well, Sophia, her braless 38C breasts joyfully bouncing through De Sica’s The Gold of Naples (1954), the drop-dead-gorgeous twenty-year-old igniting a spark in the filmmaker, who’d do wonders for her career six years later with Two Women (1960), earning her an Oscar and a lifetime of international fame.

    Kino Lorber has released both a Blu-ray bundle and a DVD set of three of their pictures together under the title ‘The Sophia Loren Award Collection,’ and any one of them would go well with a bottle of Chianti and a hearty serving of spaghetti and meatballs: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), Marriage Italian Style (1964), and Sunflower (1970). All co-star Marcello Mastroianni, whose good looks, sly humor and impeccable manner made him a perfect partner for Sophia. Their combined beauty now looks razor-sharp on Blu-ray, especially considering that these films fell to decay over the years and were available in cut, weathered, dubbed, pan-and-scan versions. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow had surfaced as a restored DVD in 2005 from NoShame Films, but went out of print almost immediately when the company folded shortly after.

    As fashions and styles come and go, post-GenXers who only know her from Grumpier Old Men (1995) or Rob Marshall’s Nine (2009) may scratch their heads over Sophia’s record as a reigning sex symbol, but to these eyes she’s still a voluptuous goddess, and a good actor under all that eyeliner and mascara. In De Sica’s contribution to the amorphous subgenre of omnibus sketch movies which came trickling out of Italy and France during the 1960s, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow casts her in three vignettes, playing three separate characters who are anchored and guided by family, fortune and impulsive behavior. An Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, it was a box office smash in America thanks primarily to Sophia’s relentlessly hyped striptease number, a bit of erotic iconography that became nearly as famous as Marilyn and her dress billowing over the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch (1955).

Click poster to enlarge.

    Like most everyone of previous generations, De Sica was prone to what would now be regarded as ethnic profiling, and the first part of the film is set in the loud and lusty village of Forcella in Naples, its impassioned working class a blur of comical raucousness, derogatory gestures (everyone speaks with their hands), nonexistent birth control, and vast amounts of starchy, fatty foods. Sophia plays an earthy housewife who can avoid a stint in debtor’s prison by staying pregnant, constantly pregnant, a setup that could’ve netted nothing more than a predictable sitcom were it not for her rowdy performance and De Sica’s genteel handling of her domestic scenes with a droll, taciturn Marcello.

    De Sica juxtaposes a primitive south with upscale northern decadence in the chilly Today portion, Sophia now a rich, bored housewife decked out in Christian Dior, driving aimlessly in her Rolls, contemplating an extramarital fling with a visibly unimpressed Marcello. While far from subtle, De Sica does avoid the steamroller approach later used by Lina Wertmüller in Swept Away (1974) to illustrate the chasm between Italy’s economic classes, interpreting their politics in uncomplicated terms with his sympathies running to the have-nots.

    At which point you may ask, “Hey, where’s the striptease?” Ever the showman, De Sica saves the money shot for last, though why this segment represents Tomorrow is anyone’s guess. He opens on a sunny afternoon, a beautifully tan Sophia cavorting around a rooftop in nothing but a bath towel, her flowing locks sun blanched, her wide smile and almond-shaped eyes seemingly justifying the very invention of Panavision. She juggles a hootin,’ hollerin’ and horny Marcello with the solemn young neighbor preparing for the priesthood, her mind torn between getting it on with one of the world’s best looking men or hunkering down in the confessional with God.

Marriage Italian Style

    Critics — the serious ones, at least — were then extolling the Italian New Wave of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and L’Eclisse (1962); Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963); and Lucino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963). But in terms of popularity, those films barely made it out of the art houses and museums. With Two Women and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, De Sica enjoyed prosperous runs in mainstream theatres, thanks in large part to Joseph E. Levine’s savvy marketing campaigns in the States. They hit paydirt again with Marriage Italian Style, earning two Oscar nominations (Best Foreign Film and Best Actress for Sophia), for a romantic epic spanning the tumultuous twenty-two year relationship between a retired hooker and her callous, vain sugar daddy.

    Based on the play Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo, De Sica presumably changed the title to cash in on Pietro Germi’s earlier hit, Divorce Italian Style (1961), which it bears absolutely no relation to. He bypasses a potentially messy analytical approach to the characters, never scrutinizing their damaging self esteem issues, thereby whittling them into alternately amusing and pathetic caricatures martyring their way through unstable lives. Elements of Fellini’s La Strada (1954) — the yin and yang of the strong over the meek and vice versa — are artfully blended with varying degrees of comedy, pathos and saccharine asides to children and family, but De Sica manipulates us mostly through the gorgeousness and magnetism of his stars. You could say that Sophia never looked better than she does here, but that sentiment honestly applies to a dozen of her pictures. As an actor, she flourished under his sensitive guidance.

Original poster art for Sunflower

    At which point, De Sica fell out of sync with ‘the Sixties’ and its sundry innovations. His next picture, The New World (1966) barely saw release out of Europe; filmed in English, After the Fox (1966) was a bland Peter Sellers comedy; Woman Times Seven (1967) had Shirley MacLaine in seven middling stories about adultery; and A Place for Lovers (1968), a picture made strictly for the money (in some stations, De Sica was more famous for his gambling debts than his films), offered an unconvincing romantic pair of Marcello and Faye Dunaway. Likewise, as a new dawn of filmmaking came into view, he fell out of favor with the critics. Bicycle Thieves, once counted among the great all time classics, fell off of Sight & Sound’s Top 10 Critics’ Poll, where it held the #1 position in 1952 and #7 in 1962.

    During this gray period — and before he’d reclaim prominence with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) — De Sica reunited Sophia and Marcello for Sunflower, an old fashioned romance using World War II as a backdrop. Sadly, it feels forced and routine, even though the performances and Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography are generally excellent; and Henry Mancini’s score (nominated for an Oscar) is pleasant, albeit repetitious. But the script is banal, its situations and characters not far removed from daytime soaps, an anemic work inexplicably credited to three writers, among them the brilliant Tonino Guerra, better known for Antonioni’s L’Avventura, La Notte (1961) and Blow-Up (1966), and Fellini’s Amarcord (1973).

    A bonus included with the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray and as part of the DVD set is the 90-minute documentary, Vittorio D. (2009). Directed by Mario Canale and Annarosa Morri, veterans of earlier documentaries on Marcello Mastroianni and Marco Ferreri, it gathers De Sica’s children, friends, coworkers in the Italian cinema and British and American admirers, including Paul Mazursky, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Woody Allen and Shirley MacLaine, who reminisce about his films as both director and actor, his home life, gambling and political beliefs. (A communist, De Sica believed in the ‘socialism of Jesus Christ.’) It also addresses De Sica’s legacy, of which John Landis, of all people, provides an accurate summation that’s particularly refreshing.

Order the Sophia Loren Blu-ray Bundle from Kino International

Order the Sophia Loren DVD Box Set from Kino International

Paul isn’t dead

2011-04-26T10:30:00.003-05:00

Expanding on the deadpan humor of his earlier The Daytrippers (1995), and the Apatow-esque Superbad (2007) and Adventureland (2008), director Greg Mattola combines the road movie with science fiction fandom in the new Paul (2011) DVD. As in his earlier films, it’s an uneven mix of highs and lows, occasionally funny, almost touching in its naiveté, Mattola balancing a meandering spirit with an expected dose of irony. He follows two British SF Pupkins (and Shaun of the Dead alumni), Simon Pegg (‘Scotty’ in 2009’s Star Trek) and Nick Frost, who are on a pilgrimage to the Nevada desert, Ground Zero of yesteryear’s alien sightings. Once there, they hook up with a jittery CGI extraterrestrial named Paul (voice by Seth Rogen), on the lam from his government captors, who takes them on a wild ride that evolves into the de rigueur journey of self awareness. And naturally Paul, influenced by decadent American culture, swears, smokes, and cracks a plethora of scatological jokes than can be quite funny if you’ve had a few drinks. Otherwise, this is strictly a zero-gravity affair, similar in tone to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (2007), also with Frost and Pegg, yellowing from the antiquity of its goofy Star Wars and Close Encounters references, but still inoffensive enough to painlessly pad one-hundred minutes. It also comes equipped with an interesting assortment of characters played by Jason Bateman, Sigourney Weaver, Jeffrey Tambor and others, who resuscitate the proceedings in those uneasy moments when you think Paul is about to flatline.

Disappearing act

2011-04-24T07:46:00.007-05:00

Click to enlarge

My relatively extensive knowledge of horror and science fiction films from the 1950s and 60s never included Flight That Disappeared (1961) until I stumbled upon it on Netflix Instant. It’s a threadbare disaster movie-cum-atomic warning, set aboard an airliner ascending to supernatural heights suggesting J’accuse! by way of a Jack T. Chick comic book. Produced by the ‘Harvard Film Corporation’ wing of Robert E. Kent Productions, Reginald Le Borg directs, long past his l’age d’or at Universal Pictures (Calling Doctor Death, Weird Woman, The Mummy’s Ghost, etc., etc.), from a screenplay by Ralph and Judith Hart and Orville H. Hampton, the latter a ‘name’ among genre aficionados for such Camelot-era matinee fodder as The Alligator People, Atomic Submarine, Jack the Giant Killer and The Underwater City. It’s essentially a series of mundane dialog exchanges with a hint of mystery — three passengers have been summoned to the Pentagon for a secret briefing — which seems to go on forever regardless of a running time of seventy-one minutes. We can fault a script that overextends itself, requiring a budget significantly higher than what its coffers can bear, and a cast of characters in need of thespic talent beyond the range displayed onscreen. Heading the ensemble are Craig Hill, Dayton Lummis, Harvey Stephens and John Bryant, a gaggle of no-names despite their long careers in supporting parts. Paula Raymond is onboard as well, better known for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, playing the fidgety 50s woman, all darting eyes and nervous tics.

The child is the father of the man in the gray flannel suit

2011-04-05T13:33:00.002-05:00

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Rifling through record store cut-out bins throughout most of the 1970s, I often came across the soundtrack to the film, Revolution (1968). I never bought the lp, even though it probably cost fifty cents or a dollar, with tracks by the Steve Miller Band, Country Joe & The Fish, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Nor did I ever see the film (don’t recall it playing on TV or at the movies), but found the album’s cover art intriguing with its meditative, John Lennon-esque hippie pondering life’s Deeper Meaning through tea shades (click inset to enlarge). I wondered, could this be the missing link between The Trip and Psych Out?
    Flash forward thirty-five years later and I find that Revolution isn’t a drug exploitation flick at all, but rather a documentary that’s currently on view at Netflix Instant (albeit unavailable on DVD). As hippie anthropological studies go, it’s invaluable. Producer-director Jack O’Connell took his camera to Flower Power Ground Zero, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district at the dawn of 1967’s Summer of Love, to capture the vibes of change and idealism already beginning to deteriorate from drugs, filth, disease, poverty and very poor hygiene.
    In the free spirit of the times, O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete… as their priestly rock star heroes drove around in chauffeured limos.
    O’Connell makes a halfhearted attempt at using a narrator, a wan young woman who calls herself Today Malone (click inset to enlarge). She’s dropped out of the life her parents offered, the stability and security of the workaday world as outlined by Sloan Wilson in his gruesome novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, opting instead to panhandle, eat cost-effective oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and pig-out on Twinkies when the munchies hit. She and the filmmaker got together twenty-eight years later for The Hippie Revolution (1996), a film I haven’t seen which purportedly combines footage from Revolution with new material. It would be interesting to see what happened to Today, along with their thoughts on how most everything went to shit after the ‘60s.

Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

2011-03-29T18:38:00.001-05:00

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The first time I saw Roger Corman’s Teenage Doll (1957) was in 1979, on a J.D. triple bill with Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One at San Francisco’s late, lamented Strand Theatre. You know what a J.D. is, right? Do you have a J.D. card? (I ask only because, back in sixth or seventh grade, the little brother of one of the neighborhood greasers told me that this ominous certificate of identification — supposedly distributed by sourpuss truant officers — proved your moxie as a tough guy.) I don’t ever recall it playing on TV in the 1960s or 70s, so I savored Teenage Doll that day, especially as it unspooled from a crisp, clean 35mm print.
    This was near the height of the Corman mania that swept through so much of film culture in the 70s. Some critics likened him to Jean-Luc Godard, and his interview figured prominently in Kings of the Bs, one of the first mainstream books to recognize the B-movie as legit cinema. By the late 70s I’d seen most of Corman’s pictures; the then-fresh anecdotes of threadbare budgets and insane shooting schedules (three days for The Terror! two days for Little Shop of Horrors!) constantly whetted the appetite for more. But I felt that Teenage Doll stood apart from the rest, and, emerging from the Strand late that afternoon, I considered it to be Roger Corman’s best picture.
    I’m not so quick to make such blanket statements anymore, and, revisiting Teenage Doll thirty-two years later, I find not a diamond, but rather gaudy costume jewelry, the kind that entrances the eye with light and reflection, the ear with jingles and jangles. It’s no one’s ‘best’ film, but rather a relic that speaks from a time both foreign and obsolete. It opens with a promise to tackle pertinent social issues — disgruntled adolescents, clueless parenting, drunken neighbors — but seems to exist merely for a climactic showdown in which the actors playing the girl gang members display no aptitude for pugilism while their male counterparts mug uncontrollably, some engaged in that pinched, lemon-sucking facial expression only James Dean could pull off with any success.

The original trailer

    It stars June Kenney, making her big screen debut after a brief run of TV guest spots (Boston Blackie, The Loretta Young Show, The Public Defender). With her fidgety, goody-two-shoes demeanor, petite frame, blonde hair and pronounced eyebrows, she’s Dorothy McGuire-lite. Here she accidentally kills a member of the Black Widow gang (the corpse is supplied by full-lipped beauty Abby Dalton), and flees from punchy head Widow Fay Spain and her loyal minions (among them a young Ziva Rodann), knowing she’s due to be taught the proverbial ‘lesson’ via a knuckle sandwich from what the ads call “hellcats in tight pants.” Mama Mia!
    He made plenty of teen exploitation, westerns and gangster pictures, but Corman’s métier was horror and science fiction, so it’s interesting to see how he navigates through the squalid, low rent housing and bop-noir back alleys of Teenage Doll without the beneficial eye candy of paper-mâché monsters and space vampires. The screenplay was written by Charles Griffith, author of more than a dozen Corman pictures (including the funny, irreverent Bucket of Blood), who had a knack for creating full bodied characters with distinctive quirks, and well-rounded situations that generally remain compelling. In Teenage Doll he opens on the corpse and gradually reveals the cause of death in relation to the neighborhood teens, eventually zeroing in on the guilt, stifling family life and makeshift sentencing imposed upon Kenney’s jittery schoolgirl.
    It’s difficult to imagine today, but teenagers were virtually nonexistent in the cinema prior to the 1950s. There were, of course, sundry Mickey Rooney sitcoms in the ‘40s, where the plucky kid fumbles his way into manhood; and twenty years’ worth of Dead End (1937) derivatives starring Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and the other members of the Dead End Kids as teen slum dwellers who evolved into overripe caricatures called The Bowery Boys. But teen angst as a theme didn’t jell until The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause (both in 1955), their sullen adolescent characters pained by mystery (self-pitying? crybaby?) agendas (“No one understands me!”), one set in the inner city, the other in suburbia.
    Distancing itself from America’s post-WWII economic recovery and the exodus of whites to those suburban bedroom communities, Griffith’s screenplay floats in seedy urban confinement, its characters weathering lifestyles more in tune with the Great Depression. We visit each of the Black Widows’ homes to be hit by squalor, ignorance, anger, frustration and poverty. Adults are portrayed as philanderers, alcoholics (we run into several old school winos), or tight-lipped cops (guided by the thousand-yard stare of actor Richard Devon doing his best Joe Friday). Slightly more upscale, Kenney’s character lives in a nicer house, albeit under the martial rule of an overzealous dad; and whose mother has been psychologically pounded into submission — her odd introduction in Teenage Doll is something out of a David Lynch movie.
    Despite the low budget, Corman brought together an interesting assortment of actors who excel during Griffith’s extended scenes of heated, wordy confrontation. Fay Spain is Cagney-intense: in a scene where her character chews out her father, it’s like watching Cody Jarrett Tommygun his way through the Actor’s Studio. Another vignette focusing on two sisters (one a Black Widow, the other a sell-out about to “date” her old, fat and bald employer for a plate of caviar), he juxtaposes the soft beauty of twenty-five-year-old Barboura Morris (a Corman regular) with Colette Jackson, whose hard, angular sultriness suggests a hybrid of Patricia Arquette with Fairuza Balk. I don’t know what happened to Jackson, other than she died in 1969 at the age of thirty-five. But she’s got a raw presence here that makes me want to see more.

Adventures in peplum

2011-03-23T07:22:00.001-05:00

Hercules and the Captive Women (1961) is quite something. Bodybuilder Reg Park takes a slacker approach to Hercules; Fay Spain chews the scenery as the Queen of Atlantis. No matter how dire (check out the strings on the monster vulture!), so many of these Italian muscleman flicks of the 60s had opulent sets, long tracking shots showing hundreds of extras, fascinating script deviations into science fiction and fantasy. They’re also wildly homoerotic, forcing this straight guy to question his motives for watching them (ahem). This one examines the fall of Uranus as a ‘real’ god. And it’s pronounced “your anus,” as it should be. Hercules, trucking his barely clad butt into the village square, is informed by the local princess, “Today is the celebration of Uranus!” At which point all the oiled, beefy young half-naked men smile and applaud. There’s also a comedy relief dwarf — this appears to be a recurring character in these movies — who Hercules sits on his knee, ready to be spanked. I tell ya, I could watch a hundred of these things.

Watch on Nexflix Instant!

Is this your brain on drugs?

2011-03-18T07:22:00.007-05:00

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If ever you question Russ Meyer’s position as King of the 1960s and 70s softcore mammarydrama, simply check out his competition. Russ employed the best looking women, wrote the wittiest scripts and took the sharpest photography, to say nothing of his innate flair for caricature and satire. These are things you’ll not find in The Acid Eaters, a spacey (and, at 63 minutes, mercifully short) odyssey from 1968 produced and directed by B. Ron Elliot, a pseudonym for the Psychotronically recognized Byron Mabe.
    Shot mostly outdoors in and around the same SoCal canyons the Manson family called home shortly before the fateful nights of August ‘69, The Acid Eaters disposes of Meyer’s brand of structured narrative for a stream-of-consciousness rambling Mr. Mabe and screenwriter Carl Monson (aka Carlos Monsoya) imagine one would encounter while under the influence of LSD (codename: ‘acid’). What they’ve concocted, however, occasionally suggests a fractured homage to Kenneth Anger by way of Ed Wood. Indeed, some of the personnel involved had a hand in the Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead (1966).
    Starring a group of seamy neanderthals who look as though they were fished out of a West Hollywood saloon at lunchtime, they cavort as aimless, topless crazies en route to a pyramid where hallucinogens are served by Lucifer, here played by a simian bodybuilder with short legs who resembles ‘Toody’ ("Ooh! Ooh!") on the old Car 54, Where Are You? TV show. Chewing on the drug (a prop brick of Styrofoam), they sink down a rabbit hole of incongruous fantasy subplots including a woefully un-arousing orgy held in Satan’s crib.
    Made near the height of LSD’s popularity, The Acid Eaters shows no awareness of the cultural precedents set forth by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters or Timothy Leary, while its music soundtrack, credited to Billy Allen, is ersatz jazz far removed from Sgt. Pepper or The Grateful Dead. One does wonder, though, where Mr. Mabe’s head was when he inserted those brief flashes of a bewildered granny (is that Louise Latham, who played Tippi’s mom in Marnie?) or the unrelated, Godardian vignette of literary characters conducting an obscure discourse in the middle of an isolated field.

Above: A bucolic moment from Alex de Renzy’s Weed

The Acid Eaters is on a double feature DVD with Weed (1972), a surprisingly good documentary released when marijuana legalization was a hot-button topic in the U.S. I say ‘surprising’ because it was produced and directed by Alex de Renzy, a leading practitioner of porn in the 1970s who made scads of hardcore with Desiree Cousteau, the underage Traci Lords and others of the field’s l’age d’or. He continued working long after the market slid from celluloid to videotape, his career climaxing, if you will, with Anal Booty Burner 2 in 1997. Renzy passed away four years later from a stroke and diabetic attack at the age of sixty-five.
Although clearly liberal in its views, Weed makes an honest effort to be objective, Renzy on camera (he’s a middling interviewer), traveling from the thousands of acres of marijuana growing freely throughout Missouri, to points far, far east, at a time when you could buy a pound of Cambodian Red directly at the source for less than two dollars. (In Nepal we pass a store with “Freedom for Angela Davis” posters in the window.) He talks with a handful of law enforcement figures, drug dealers and users, soldiers idling in Vietnam, who explain some of the smuggling and black market techniques, economics and philosophies surrounding pot. It’s not the definitive word on the subject, but it’s a lively attempt.

3 vues du 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup

2011-03-11T07:17:00.005-05:00

Click images to see them uncropped:

Jacques Rivette and Jane Birkin; oh, to be a fly on the wall…

“At times, nothing is everything,” says one of the performers meandering through 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (“Thirty-six views of Pic Saint Loup,” 2009). New on DVD under the anglicized Around a Small Mountain, it’s Jacques Rivette’s most recent picture, and, clocking in at 84 minutes, uncharacteristically trim. For me it plays like jazz, the director creating something from what appears to be nothing by combining abstract with conventional forms, the same way as he did in La bande des quatre (1989), Haut bas fragile (1995) and Va Savoir (2001). As one character ruminates, “Even if it’s a bad idea, it’s still an idea, which brings to another idea, which might be less bad or even better,” which could be the credo behind Rivette and company’s on-the-spot formation of the ‘script.’ It also reunites him with Jane Birkin (L'amour par terre, 1984; La belle noiseuse, 1991) and Sergio Castellitto (Va Savoir). I’ll savor it.

Jane with half-clown Sergio Castellitto

Jacques and Sergio

Weed respite: dude’s got a point

2011-03-09T07:29:00.005-05:00

Bill Hicks on target.

Stone soul birthday

2011-03-07T00:01:00.001-05:00

On this day in the year of our lawd nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, your humble narrator was born. For the occasion, I dug up the following blog entry which was first posted back when I hit the seemingly callow age of forty-eight. Enjoy. Oh, and, Sharon: you can still call me any time. — Flickhead

Sharon Stone and I slept together. Or at least I think we did. It was a very long time ago. Forty-eight years ago, to be precise, in the maternity ward of a hospital in Pennsylvania where the two of us had been born just hours apart…or a day or two. Some of Sharon’s bios offer contrary dates. Most say March 10, some place her at the 8th, others go as early as the 6th. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say she and I will be celebrating our birthdays sometime this week. But not in the same room. I’m sure Sharon would want that little fact quite clear.

I would never have given Sharon a second thought had it not been for Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990). It was then when I recognized the familiar face, the manner, that seductive, calculated smile. Had she enchanted me when we were newborn bed buddies? Did those icy-yet-inviting blue eyes put the whammy on me while I lay there innocently sucking my thumb in the next crib?

Imagine Sharon in a crib as Daddy’s Little Girl. Bad girl! You need to be spanked…!

Basic

    The eyes are flirtatious and hostile. The promise of a wild time in the sack shielded by an impenetrable wall built on that dysfunctional beast indigenous to the ‘90s, ‘attitude.’ And then there’s the mystery of the scar on her neck, which one day may yield too much information than I’d care to know.

    She had her fifteen minutes in the early ‘90s. Before Total Recall there were forgettable movies, TV shows, a lot of junk. After the Verhoeven picture, there was still the looming threat of a career in mediocrity: fifth billed in He Said, She Said (placing her a degree away from Kevin Bacon), John Frankenheimer’s Year of the Gun, the bizarre cable staple Scissors, the intriguing Diary of a Hitman — all in 1991! — and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie (1992).

    Then came Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992). Kismet. I was certain that I’d been hexed. How else to explain my fascination with this clanging monstrosity of a murder mystery action flick? Sharon smoking. Sharon crossing and uncrossing her long, tan legs. Sharon messing with Michael’s head. Sharon giving head. Sharon snorting coke. Sharon grinding with Roxy. Sharon’s aerobic intercourse workout. Michael going down on Sharon. Sharon for breakfast…for lunch…for dinner!

    There followed a run of magazine covers, fashion shoots, cocktail parties, social events, red carpets, the whole bag, all leading up to…Sliver (1993). This is a prime example of the comet burning itself out in a moment’s notice. The picture made one-third of its total U.S. gross on opening weekend alone. People went sweating from Basic Instinct but were sobered by a mess of a thriller, and word-of-mouth pulverized it from there. Part Robert Evans, part Ira Levin, part Joe Eszterhas, all of it crying out for the guidance of Roman Polanski but entrusted to Phillip Noyce, who failed to fathom the dark satire of media addiction and voyeurism. There’s still a great movie waiting to be made here, starring…Jessica Alba?

Still fairly real

    The fall was swift and assured: career suicide with Intersection (1994) — second-billed to Richard Gere in a Canadian production?!? Ouch!; guns and fast cars in The Specialist (1994), playing second-fiddle to Stallone (not even a steamy shower scene could bring in business); Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), an interesting satire on Westerns, Sharon quite fetching in buckskin, but likewise without an audience.

    A telling vindication of time taking its toll, when Verhoeven was casting Showgirls (1995), Sharon tested for the older dancer. She lost out to Gina Gershon and the sex kitten days drew to an end. I’m fascinated by an Elizabeth Berkley / Sharon Stone Showgirls: they could almost be sisters…or trailer park mother and daughter.

    The critics and Academy noticed her in Scorsese’s Casino (1995; no Oscar, but a Golden Globe), though she was better in Peter Chelsom’s The Mighty (1998), a quiet, overlooked gem. She was miscast in the Simone Signoret role in an unnecessary rehash of Diabolique (1996) — a picture that managed to make Isabelle Adjani appear dowdy; and she was semi vacant in Barry Levinson’s Sphere (1998). Two earnest attempts at social drama — Bruce Beresford’s Last Dance (1996) and Sidney Lumet’s remake of Cassavetes’s Gloria (1999) — played to empty seats.

    Which meant that Sharon had become a star who couldn’t sell tickets. And now that her ‘day’ is over and she’s inching up on fifty, the roles and opportunities seem strange, outmoded, even a little reaching. There’s a Basic Instinct 2 in the pipeline — Catherine Tramell in London directed by Michael Caton-Jones, a guaranteed train wreck — and we’ve been informed that she’s naked in several scenes. At this point in time, is that something we really want or need to see? Other than the rock-solid softball-size breast implants, she’s in fairly good shape from the neck down. But her face has seemingly frozen, the mouth and eyes apparently flattened (along with all that early, earthy rambunctious character) by Botox. The wrinkle-free, ironed skin was lampooned in Catwoman (2004), when her evil cosmetics magnate cultivated an epidermis as hard as a diamond. I’m among the few who appreciated the erotic stupidity of that goofy venture, to say nothing of Halle Berry looking fabulous in leather. (For the record, Halle played ‘Sharon Stone’ in the live action Flintstones movie.)

Reborn

So happy birthday, my dear. You’re getting older. I’m getting older. You still look glamorous even though you no longer resemble yourself. Time, gravity, and a diminutive bank account has shaped me into a pale, doughy schlub with thinning, graying hair. You continue to attract handsome millionaires; I make Paul Giamatti look like Brad Pitt. Will your eyes ever search mine again, the way they did in that maternity ward, your deep, innocent gaze so longing and free? Whether we really were side by side never truly mattered. It’s the thought that counts.

All my love forever,

Flickhead

A Propos de deux

2011-03-02T09:31:00.002-05:00

By Richard Armstrong

In a piece on French film education resources recently I included some comments on Jean Vigo’s delightful seaside documentary A Propos de Nice. So I watched the film again. It so happened that the evening before I had watched the Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Seeing both of these films in such proximity made me wonder if they had ever been paired in a double bill…

In the August 2008 issue of Sight and Sound, David Thomson writes: “my favourite double bills are secret, thematic pairings, films where deep below the surface one picture is speaking to another.” Thomson’s suggestion of unexpected relations, an unforeseen conversation, seems a vital aspect of the double bill as practice and as institution. The bringing together of two disparate films can lead to a rethinking of each in ways that encourage fresh associations to be envisaged between hitherto disparate titles and traditions. This ‘collision,’ so to speak, could even be said to produce a third film, or idea of a film, perhaps even prompting us to think anew about genres. Coming into its own during the high days of repertory arthouse exhibition in the 1960s and 1970s, the double bill can be seen as a stage in the historical progression from the classical genre cycle, the Warner gangster programmers, the MGM Freed musicals, Gainsborough melodrama, for examples, through repertory cinema’s excavation of classicism, to the contemporary cinephile’s domestic DVD juxtaposition. In his piece in the 2005 essay collection Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, Gerwin van der Pol sees the artful pairing as fundamental to the cinephile’s project: “So the ‘Holy Grail’ of knowledge for the cinephile is finding a novel connection.” Jane Giles was a former programmer at London’s Scala cinema. In the August, 2008 Sight and Sound, her testimony reinforces the perception that the inspired double was the special province of post-war cinephilia: “Despite the obvious emphases on director, genre or star, there were no hard and fast programming rules to what made a good double bill…(it was) in the hands of enthusiasts, fired up by audiences who crammed the suggestion box with their dream double bills.”

Such cinephilia is not limited to the rep aficionado. Artfully pairing films also enjoys currency among industry professionals brought up in the repertory decades. Creative pairing permeates the Hollywood story conference. In The Player (1992), a Hollywood satire balanced stealthily between fiction and verisimilitude, new projects are routinely pitched on the order of Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate, Sunset Boulevard meets Remember My Name. Quality journalism, many of its contemporary practitioners themselves habitués of the post-war arthouse, also colludes with this mentality, proffering a kind of shorthand which simultaneously appeals to the cinephile and to that amorphous consensual film knowledge which exists in the wider culture. The release of Savage Grace (2008) saw Vogue gushing: “Like Death in Venice meets The Great Gatsby on the Psycho lot” (Sight and Sound, August 2008). Formulated within the white heat of film commerce to entice the cinemagoer into the cinema, these examples graphically acknowledge the unexpected and allusive qualities of individual films. But what happens when we root through the back catalogues?

Paramount’s creative pairing of The Odd Couple with Rosemary’s Baby: does its ‘third identity’ speak of obsessive -compulsive lifestyles?

The double bill has resulted from a plethora of logics and instincts, and the ‘collision,’ so to speak, of two films seen at random, could be said to produce something akin to a third identity. To the degree that a double bill highlights similarities which are not apparent when watching individual films, it may usefully inform a new typological conceptualization both as a method and as a tradition. After decades in which film industries have initiated and reproduced generic rubrics and expectations for consumption in the commercial and critical marketplace, it may be possible to conceive of a ‘bottom up’ model of typological identification and debate whereby a rubric is discerned at the level of spectatorship and then disseminated in critical writings. The DVD era seems ripe for this formulation. More than ever before, domestic delivery systems enable a potpourri of international cinema to be sampled according to personal whim, however well-informed, affording new kinds of association and classification arising from the contingencies of home spectatorship, and prompting a wealth of fresh and fruitful juxtapositions. Meanwhile, the Internet provides a rich set of venues for criticism and analysis far from the constraints and limitations of commercial film comment. My PhD research, for example, arose accidentally out of random viewings of Millions Like Us (1942), Under the Skin (1997) and Secrets and Lies (1995); British films drawn from different contexts and of very differing aesthetic provenance, yet coming together over the issue of grief and mourning, a perception which I initially rehearsed at Bright Light Film Journal (click here).

Watching Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930) shortly after having seen Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), I was drawn by these films’ portrayal of the Côte d’Azur and their preoccupation with the leisure of the moneyed classes at a particular historical moment. Each in its way, both films deploy the iconography of the interwar Riviera and its social set. In A Propos de Nice Vigo juxtaposes a sequence of scenes on the Promenade des Anglais in which we see be-whiskered financiers in their bath chairs, ageing society matrons and haughty ‘elegants’ taking tea outside the hotels. I fancy these people, caught on film while ‘wintering’ in Nice, hail from all over Europe, a few perhaps from New York, Boston and Philadelphia: Wilhelmine ‘grafs’ eeking out the revenue from their Prussian estates, veteran French generals drinking their pensions away, ‘arriviste’ entrepreneurs watching the markets, a man asleep with his trouser legs rolled up (English?), another napping with his mouth open, an old man in a pedal wagon sells the Daily Telegraph, ancient politicians with white beards… And the women: the lady promenading with the little dogs, the voluble Russian Countess, she in the cloche hat straightening her stocking seam, the lady in the fur coat progressively stripped bare by the camera, a lady objects to being photographed and hides her face beneath the brim of her hat — heiress to a ball-bearing empire perhaps, maybe in the process of eloping from a jealous husband — the lady in silver fox, another in animated conversation with her friend — about the poor room service, the unfortunate weather….the spoilt, the bored, the jaded, the careful, the conscious, the avaricious, the fantastically rich and the desperately lonely….

Vigo deconstructs vanity in A Propos de Nice; image taken from colettesaintyves.

    If in A Propos de Nice we are introduced to the habitués of the Côte d’Azur, in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, released eight years later, it is as though we become privy to the pecuniary and sexual intrigues which lay behind Vigo’s Riviera façade. As in Vigo’s film, we begin with an aerial establishing shot of Nice…busy beach …canoes…peddle boats…bathers…rows of ritzy hotels along the palm-lined Promenade, perhaps a glimpse of the famous Hotel Negresco…, before we segue into Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s tight little confection in which an American millionaire, Michael Brandon (Gary Cooper), spars on a bathing table in the marina with a lady from a fading old French dynasty (Claudette Colbert). In this most risqué of ‘30s romantic comedies, the woman will contemplate marrying the man on condition that he will furnish her with FF100,000 if the marriage ends in divorce. At their initial marriage ceremony, we meet Tante Hedwige (Elizabeth Patterson), the matriarch of the de Loiselle family, a scornful haughty matron in a wheelchair from a long lineage going vaguely back to the Bourbons, whom we fancy we may already have met, in slightly better days, taking the sun in A Propos de Nice.

    If the fashionable lady is disrobed by Vigo from her fur coat to her bare skin, during the course of Lubitsch’s film Nicole de Loiselle (Colbert) will go from bathing costume to mink stole in her odyssey up the ladder of worldly riches. In a sophisticated sex game hewn in suggestive and succinct prose, there is little of the bawdy and ludic play of Vigo’s vision of Nice. Yet perhaps the ‘meet-cute’ of Michael and Nicole’s first encounter in the department store, he buying pyjama tops, she pyjama bottoms, retains something of the ‘seaside humor’ which permeates Vigo’s film, Michael provocatively waving the pyjama top at Nicole, she ostensibly without ‘her’ top, or so he thinks.

    Whilst it may be too ambitious to suggest that the similarities I am proposing between A Propos de Nice and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife constitute another genre in the making, place them side-by-side and the thematic, aesthetic and humoristic resonances become increasingly obvious as you watch. For Thomson, the “secret, thematic pairing” seems key to one film’s propensity to ‘speak’ to another. Perhaps the question then becomes: can movies which ‘speak’ the same language be said to be of the same genre? This involves a rethinking of genre. Changing conditions of reception, like differing exhibition practices, encourage another attitude to film classification. In 1998 I worked a stint at the London Film Archive, fielding enquiries from clients seeking footage of 1950s cars, European royalty, Londoners at the seaside or whatever. After a few months, it became evident to me that, aside from the traditional markers of generic kinship existing, say, between Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and All that Heaven Allows (1955), films can relate to each other purely on the level of footage, literally, of what they show, feature, reveal or contain. For film theorist Tom Ryall, commonality of subject matter, theme and iconography already satisfy three stipulations of generic kinship out of his five (Oxford Guide to Film Studies, 1998). As a part-time reviewer in the late-90s, I was watching new films by day and rep cinema by night. Combined with the archive work, this routine made me increasingly sensitive to ‘new’ films, whether actually new or old, singular films which the collision of others ‘bring’ like generic apparitions to the cinephiliac mind.

    Restricted as the movie consumer is by the rubrics — Thriller, Romantic Comedy, Western — of the television schedule or neighborhood rental store, themselves descendants of the lapidary remits of the old studio system and the double feature exhibition protocol, we may overlook just how heterogeneous relationships between movies can be. For example, in a recent article at Flickhead, Irene Dobson has suggested a provocative link between the French arthouse title Cléo de 5 à 7 and the left-field American independent horror film Carnival of Souls (click here). But to venture further than her claims for timely and coincident thematic and aesthetic kinship, we may indulge in an even more adventurous cinematic flâneurisme which one evening brings together A Propos de Nice with Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland (1953), for their common interest in seaside leisure, or even their mutual dismay over the class tensions of modern Europe, or perhaps juxtapose Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife with Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) for their shared images of a morally bankrupt French bourgeoisie, for the tension they share over the specter of class miscegenation, or even, given the role Czechoslovakia plays in Lubitsch’s 1938 film, speculate that both films ‘know’ more than we realize of the looming war, and that deep down both are speaking to one another of histories and reputations yet to be envisaged. At the end of the day confronted with the Criterion box sets and Artificial Eyes of her movie collection, how many secret unholy alliances does the modern cinephile contemplate…

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Weed respite: Bongwater where art thou?

2011-02-27T00:43:00.004-05:00

Ben Kingsley puffs tuff in The Wackness; click to enlarge.

New on the Flickhead website

2011-02-24T07:05:00.004-05:00

Flickhead at age 5

The following recent Flickhead blog entries have now been added to the Flickhead website (www.Flickhead.com), some with new or additional photographs:

Screen Jens: When Salome Shook Her Groove Thang for The Lord
“How many actresses are named Salome? The one who beguiles me is Salome Jens.” Looking back on her career and the 1961 film, Angel Baby. The original text has been improved with minor alterations and reconsiderations (hattip, Peter). Read it here.

At the Gallery
“What is most powerful to me about…Au Café…is what might be described as its aural dimension. Once you have seen it and studied it, surrounded in this room by the pastoral and bucolic relics of Impressionism, Degas’s canvas, modestly situated in a far corner, could almost be about to speak.” After hours with Richard Armstrong. Read it here.

Sisters of Mourning
“I watched Cléo de 5 à 7 recently on DVD and it made me jump! I was astonished by its similarity to Carnival of Souls, the little horror film which I have written about in the past.” Cinema considerations by Irene Dobson. Read it here.

I’d Walk a Mile for a Cammell
“Less the Holy Grail of Donald Cammell’s sketchy oeuvre than one of its many missing links, Duffy (1968) is a psychedelic heist film making a long overdue debut on home video.” DVD review. Read it here.

Kubrick by brick

2011-02-20T09:36:00.002-05:00

Above, an original newspaper ad for the New York premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. (Click to enlarge.) Because the blog which originally posted it has chosen not to publish comments I’ve left there, I can only assume its owner would rather remain anonymous than to risk connection with yours truly — therefore, no credit where credit is due. Regardless, this advertisement’s main draw — “IN PERSON…producer/director Stanley Kubrick, co-author Arthur C. Clarke, stars Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood…and many more!” — tends to blow my mind far more than the film itself. (Of the “many more,” did William Sylvester — aka Heywood ‘Pink’ Floyd — show up?) Below is an all-too brief interview with Kubrick from the event, a pivotal moment when the science fiction genre would be infiltrated by intellectualism and High Art; when the mainstream would be baffled, if not a little perturbed, by the unorthodox positioning of science over fiction. The interview is from a Dutch TV program, Stardust; there’s a longer clip from it here.

At the Gallery

2011-02-19T21:34:00.000-05:00

Au Café (click to enlarge)

By Richard Armstrong

There is a little painting by Edgar Degas at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge which, from time to time, I like to look at. It is an oil of two young women sitting at a café table. While the woman on the left sits pensively with her head slightly to one side looking down at the table, the woman on the right, and half out of frame, is leaning over as though about to say something. What is most powerful to me about the painting, simply entitled Au Café (At the Café, c. 1875-1877), is what might be described as its aural dimension. Once you have seen it and studied it, surrounded in this room by the pastoral and bucolic relics of Impressionism, Degas’s canvas, modestly situated in a far corner, could almost be about to speak. It is as though there is a presence in the room…the lost communicant of some forgotten séance conducted long ago, a girl whose voice you cannot yet hear, whilst knowing that she is longing to be heard, like a desire which rejoices in its imminent satisfaction.

Of all the French art of that period, there is something uniquely cinematic about Degas. His unusual cropping and perspectives, the negative space, characters caught in odd or unbecoming attitudes, suggest the influence of photography, the hastily taken snapshot long before its time. Photography emerged in the mid-19th century and Degas, like many educated men of his generation, was keenly interested in the new medium. Yet Degas’s captured moment figures a very different photographic era than that anticipated at the time. Far from the stiff and starched portraits of the medium’s infancy, with their laborious setting-up and a fastidious commemorative mise-en-scène, Au Café was ‘taken’ on the hoof, an Instamatic moment ninety or more years before the Instamatic came onto the market.

Degas self portrait (click to enlarge)

    For art historian Charles Stuckey, what is ‘impressionist’ about Degas’s work is precisely this embodiment of the distracted glance of the passer-by, at a café, at the ballet, in the Place de la Concorde (1875). I am reminded of the ‘smearing’ effect of that shot in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) as someone scans the opera crowd before them, a trace perhaps of Degas’s legacy in modern cinema. Or in an admittedly very different time and place, the arresting cut, cut, cut of Oliver Stone’s montages, in JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), resonating in the mind as impressionistic flourishes teetering on the brink of art and history. For Phoebe Pool, “Degas’s […] rapid line and uncluttered pictures are the counterpart of his own swift, epigrammatic wit. To a considerable extent their economy and directness were adopted by the Impressionists who ceased to include small details in their pictures just as they ceased to labor for a high finish.”

    Even the titles of Degas’s quotidian moments — At the Milliner’s (1885), Manet Listening to his Wife (1868-1869), Café-Concert (1875-1877) — seem reminiscent of the hastily-coined, simple and matter-of-fact titles of the Lumière ‘actualités’ a few years later — Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), Baby’s Feeding Time (1895), The Waterer Watered (1895), or of some Renoirs — Boudu Saved from Drowning (1935), A Day in the Country (1936/1946). In Manet Listening to His Wife, M Manet lounges on a canapé while Mme Manet, half in the frame, half out of the frame, plays the piano. As with the ‘missing’ voice in Au Café, it is as though we are left to ‘hear’ the sound of her playing. The sense in both paintings that the image hails, or ‘expects’ the sound recalls a silent era cinema in which sound was always ‘present’ to the spectator, yet technically absent from the artwork. Whilst perhaps themselves impressionistic, such cinematic parallels as I am suggesting seem conjured up by Au Café with a strong sense of aesthetic and historical purpose, voices off perhaps, as yet unbidden and unheard.

    At the time, critic Edmond Duranty echoed his contemporaries’ perception of Degas, describing him as “the inventor of social chiaroscuro.” The sense of chiaroscuro, of a strange exchange between light and dark, black and white, hope and despair, permeates Au Café. While the woman on the right has a lively complexion and is dressed in bright colors, her friend is dressed in black and her complexion is pallid, grey, even death-like. The dynamic between the two women in Au Café recalls that between the anxious Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) in I’ve Loved You So Long (2007) urging her pale grief-stricken sister Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) to “Talk to me…” Interested only in the rapport between these figures, Degas characterizes the table top as, well, nothing, indistinct blurs on a white tablecloth, a misty fog on a wintry field. Meanwhile, the ‘friend,’ a sister perhaps, is only half in the picture, as though within her presence, as within us all, there will always be the capacity for absence, for non-existence, for death. Is her pensive friend in mourning, we may ask? Who has she lost? How long ago…? But this is only one aspect of the mystery, for in Au Café we are in the presence of a double enigma; while the woman entreats her friend to speak, we will always await the voice in the corner of the room.

The World Bank Is Not Enough

2011-02-19T09:48:00.001-05:00

“Moby Dick? Isn’t that a social disease?”

2011-02-17T21:23:00.007-05:00

The following is my contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon and fundraiser for the Film Noir Foundation to help preserve our film heritage. The Blogathon is hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand and Self-Styled Siren. Please visit their sites for further information.

Based on Newton Thornburg’s novel of sleepy SoCal decadence — minus the toddler character (“old brown pants”) and a haunting breakdown set in an amusement park — Cutter and Bone was released by United Artists in 1981 to unanimous indifference, save for the few sharp critics who recognized its sun-blanched brilliance. Believing the film’s two stars, Jeff Bridges and John Heard, were hovering in Oscar territory, UA re-issued the picture through their boutique “Classics” division, changed the title to Cutter’s Way to yet more consumer apathy and another handful of rave reviews. Two years later, you could see it on cable TV every other night of the week. And, no, it won no Oscars.

    The YouTube clip posted above is the film’s opening seven minutes. The slo-mo parade (“Old Spanish Days”) is infused with a creeping sense of history and tradition, about to be juxtaposed with Heard and Bridges’ woozy, boozy friendship, and a bitter murder mystery that lands at the feet of a corporate authority figure, a great white whale in a tailored suit. That such a knowing reflection of alternate Americana came from director Ivan Passer, a Czech émigré, still boggles the mind.

    Film noir? No doubt. The musical score by Jack Nitzsche, combining glass harp, glass harmonica, zither and electric strings is far removed from the noir staple of bluesy sax and tinkling ivories, but nonetheless captures the sad, tenuous nature of noir and its rootless, luckless people. The sinuous theme playing over the credits in this clip is used sparingly throughout the movie.

    The scene then shifts to a motel room where Bridges’ Bone has just had sex with Nina van Pallandt — the Baroness van Pallandt, that is, formerly of the singing duo Nina & Frederik before the Baron was gunned down in a drug deal and Nina went on to act in some Robert Altman movies. (Bond aficionados, take note: she sang “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.)

    Mature and intelligent (unlike most of the characters in the book and on the screen), Cutter’s Way delivers noir to a voyeuristic conclusion, observing seedy outcasts behind closed doors. Bridges is excellent, as is Lisa Eichorn as the third point in a triangle (her line, “Get fucked, sweetie” still packs a wallop), but Heard steals the show as Alex Cutter, half a man (one eye, one arm, one leg) devising a plan to bring the world’s powerbrokers to their knees. Crashing through windows on his grand charger, the Nitzsche music swelling to its glorious crescendo, he confronts his Moby Dick, but needs the hand of a friend to take the bastard down. Which is where noir meets some kind of poetry.

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Screen Jens: When Salome shook her groove thang for The Lord

2011-02-16T08:42:00.004-05:00

Click images to enlarge…

How many actresses are named Salome? The one who beguiles me is Salome Jens. As I wrote in my memoirs, remembering Saturday matinee screenings of that science fiction/horror anti-masterpiece Terror from the Year 5000 (1958):

“[The film] was not without merit, for playing the ‘terror’ was Salome Jens. Awakening — nay! setting afire! — one’s slumbering libido, she possessed a face tailor-made for the wide-angle lens: stately cheekbones nearly as epic as Faye Dunaway’s, almond-shaped eyes slanted toward depression. Her voice quivering with Nordic ancestry and a suggestion of neurosis, Salome arrived from Y5K in a black leotard aglitter with sequins, twirling hypnotic talons at the poor fool scientists responsible for unleashing this thing on humanity.”

Twenty years after those hot buttered encounters, I revisited the picture only to find boredom (Salome or no Salome) persuading me to parcel its grueling sixty-six minutes over three nights. Back in my article, I plugged her brief onscreen stint with Rock Hudson in 1966:

“Salome put the whammy on me a few years later, in Seconds, playing a Pod variant of Holly Golightly. Stomping grapes in its orgasmic centerpiece, my nude Venus gave James Wong Howe some of his finest images. After that, it was the gradual descent of guest spots in forgotten episodes of obsolete TV shows.”

Regardless of its nightmare scenario, Seconds suggested something of the bohemian in Jens’s character Nora. Grooving in Malibu, hooking up with Rock’s Tony Wilson (a landscape painter by desire, sadly lacking the skill), Nora joyfully yells to the wind “Who are you Tony Wilson?!” to a man clueless about his true self — a malady indigenous to ‘The Sixties.’ Nora is all about big, puffy sweaters, corduroy slacks and sandals; an accommodating hausfrau from the pages of an Eddie Bauer catalog, providing comfort with a smile to a ‘straight’-laced guy so completely out of his element (and mind). Arriving within spitting distance from the Beat Generation, one would like to believe Jens was just like that in real life.

Above, Salome as the Terror from the Year 5000, and with Rock Hudson in Seconds

    Cue the bongos, professor: I envision a blonde gamine all in black, reading from Nietzsche with a dog-eared volume of Kerouac curled up in her back pocket, snapping those sinewy fingers to Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Born in 1935 in Milwaukee — a dreary locale prompting her infamous quip, “the only time I can imagine contemplating suicide would be if I was told that I had to go back and live in Milwaukee forever” — she split for Greenwich Village and gave marriage a spin, first to the actor Ralph Meeker. That gig lasted for two years (1964-66). Later, Salome was wed briefly to TV personality Lee Leonard. As far as I know, she’s been a free spirit ever since.

    She’s had a long, respected career in the theatre, and presides over a flock of Trekkers for her Changeling character on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Give me Angel Baby (1961) over any of that. Made in Florida and Hollywood, Salome (or, as she’s listed in the credits, Salomé) heads a cast of George Hamilton, Mercedes McCambridge and Joan Blondell, as well as newcomer Burt Reynolds as a horny ruffian quivering from ‘the torments’ in Salome’s presence. It all takes place in the deep south, the Bible Belt, a hotbed of feverish little daisy duke melodramas like Baby Doll (1956), God’s Little Acre (1958), and the Steinbeckian Russ Meyer flicks Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1965) — ‘hicksploitation.’

    Not that anyone cared or noticed. The press wrote it off as “a cut-rate Elmer Gantry” (that’s Eugene Archer in the New York Times), or complained that it “reeks too much of Elmer Gantry” (Time magazine), and not without reason. Released a few short months earlier, Elmer Gantry (1960) covered similar ground: working its way across the south, an evangelical tent show supervised by a too-attractive young minister takes on a first-time preacher who may be a genuine faith healer or a manipulative fake, sparking a power play between the two at the expense of the minister’s repressed sexual urges. Back when winning an Academy Award could prolong coffee klatch controversies and first-run engagements, the Oscars for Elmer Gantry’s Burt Lancaster (actor), Shirley Jones (supporting actress) and director Richard Brooks (for his adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel) quickly dashed the hopes of any and all competition.

    Not that it’s fair to compare the two. I give Elmer Gantry high marks for the punchy, pulp-twinged approach to lofty theological ideals, and for Jean Simmons… to say nothing of the brilliant casting of Ms. Jones as a hooker named Lulu. “Oh, he gave me special instructions back of the pulpit Christmas Eve,” Lulu says of her private one-on-one with Gantry. “He got to howlin’ ‘Repent! Repent!’ and I got to moanin’ ‘Save me! Save me!’ and the first thing I know he rammed the fear of God into me so fast I never heard my old man’s footsteps!” You really can’t beat that.

    Whether or not Angel Baby was intended to cash in on Elmer Gantry seems moot, since both were filmed around the same time, and Angel Baby producer Thomas Woods would’ve needed a crystal ball to predict Gantry’s enormous success. He bought the movie rights to Jenny Angel, a forgotten novel written by the equally obscure Elsie Oakes Barber, who patterned her title character after evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in a plot hinged on the then-current controversies over sham faith healing snaking its way through radio and television. Unlike the character of Gantry, however, Jenny may be the real deal.

    And unlike the film of Gantry — so hale, so hearty, so commercial — Angel Baby benefits from its modest means. Mercedes McCambridge, Joan Blondell and Henry Jones (remember the judge who disses Scotty in Vertigo?) were recognizable character actors. Add to the mix the unknown Jens and future tanning guru Hamilton (who scratched the public’s consciousness a year earlier in Where the Boys Are and All the Fine Young Cannibals), and the viewer was denied any preconceptions over acting styles, no soft comfort in stargazing, all in glorious black and white.

    The screenplay adaptation was written by Paul Mason, Samuel Roeca and Orin Borsten. The latter, incidentally, wrote the “Corpus Earthling” episode of an Outer Limits episode from 1963, in which we’re told “there’s nothing wrong with our television set” as Jens falls under the spell of an extraterrestrial rock. Teetering on exploitation, sidestepping any verbose Bible thumping, Angel Baby zeroes in on sex. It opens with Burt (as ‘Hoke’) in the throes of his ‘torments,’ pawing at Jens’s Jenny in the parking lot of a revival meeting. Her mom has brought her here, hoping that God can save her from getting knocked up — and to regain her speech, as she’s been dumbstruck after years of abuse at the hands of her alky father. Checking in for salvation with ‘Sister’ Sarah (McCambridge) at the reception area, Jenny’s distracted, wandering eye (the script makes an educated correlation between sexual promiscuity and attention deficit) lands on a photo of ‘Brother’ Paul (Hamilton), the congregation’s young and impeccably coiffed minister.

    As it turns out, Brother Paul and (the decidedly older) Sister Sarah are husband and wife, their wobbly Oedipal union about to be rocked by firm young Jenny’s yearnings and Paul’s sorely neglected libido. For a scenario immersed in hootin’ and hollerin’ Christianity, Angel Baby sure has its doubts about holy matrimony. The sexless union of Paul and Sarah (whom, after several years together, finally offers her sagging virgin body out of desperation), Jenny’s sadistic upbringing, and the old married musicians (played by Blondell and Jones) bound together by alcoholism (and broadly slurred ‘drinkie-poo’ stage enunciations) offer very little in defense of wedlock.

Above, Paul Wendkos

    While I recognize Barber’s novel and the sharp screenplay for the picture’s thematic qualities, there’s an equally smart and fluid sense of direction, especially during Brother Paul’s sermons, his heated discussions with Sister Sarah (kudos to George Hamilton and Mercedes McCambridge for going the distance), his dejection when the jazz combo stops playing because he’s a preacher, and Jenny’s budding eroticism during Paul’s “illustrated sermons,” a series of outrageous hootchie-mama dance interpretations of Biblical events used to lure in the Saturday night crowd. (Despite her namesake, Salome does not perform the Dance of the Seven Veils.)

    There’s been some hubbub (exclusively, I’m sure, among the handful of us who spend way too much time pouring over old b-movies) concerning who deserves credit for directing Angel Baby. Paul Wendkos is the name on the screen, but the project began with Hubert Cornfield, an artiste who made some interesting pictures, most of them barely stitched together, all with sporadic glimmers of excellence. In his book, The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris observed, “Cornfield seemed to be striving for a Europeanized elegance of form even when his scripts seemed too sordid for serious consideration.” Perhaps it was that elegance, combined with a lofty temperament, that worked against him in the business; his career as a director barely got out of the gate. (Four of his films are presently available for instant viewing at Netflix: Lure of the Swamp (1957); Plunder Road (1957); the odd, Stanley Kramer-produced Pressure Point (1962); and the quasi-surreal Night of the Following Day (1968), which completists should check out on DVD for the director’s brief and very raspy commentary.)

    Prolific in television, Wendkos directed fifteen theatrical features, beginning with The Burglar (1957) before wandering into the cash cow trilogy of Gidget (1959), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). Despite all that he’s done, however, it’s difficult if not impossible to distinguish any identifying trademarks to unify the work. As Sarris points out, Wendkos’s career is “consistent only in its inconsistency,” where “the Gidget movies are not all that bad, and The Burglar and Angel Baby are not all that good.” Adding insult to injury, Wendkos doesn’t even rate an entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film.

    There’s also been a question over who-did-what in the cinematography, as Hollywood veteran Jack Marta and the young, barely known Haskell Wexler share the credit. Thankfully, Stephen Bowie put in a call to Angel Baby herself to clear up the mystery: “According to Jens,” he wrote on his blog, “Cornfield was fired after one or two days (‘he had a lot of ideas, but none of them worked’) and all of his footage was reshot by Wendkos. Of the two credited cinematographers, Jens remembered Haskell Wexler as Wendkos’s primary collaborator; Jack Marta…was there mainly to protect the picture’s union status. (Wexler was not yet a member of the A.S.C.)”

Above, a rare color publicity photo of George Hamilton and Salomé Jens taken by Ralph Crane for Life magazine

With its distribution handled by Allied Artists (the poor man’s American International), Angel Baby was destined for limited rotation on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit. No matter that George Hamilton was being primed as a teen idol, the picture simply slid into oblivion. And stardom dodged Salome, who commenced a long, fragmented career of guest spots and supporting characters on any number of television programs and made-for-TV movies, ongoing and extensive work in the theatre, cartoon and documentary voiceovers, and secondary roles in a jumble of films: with Anthony Perkins in The Fool Killer (1965); as an over-the-hill go-go dancer in Fred Coe’s Me, Natalie (1969); James Ivory’s faux Buñuelian Savages (1972); with Hector Elizondo in Diary of the Dead (1976); narrating Michael Chapman’s unfairly maligned The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986); and part of an ensemble cast in I’m Losing You (1998).

The loss is ours. Her one starring role, Angel Baby is a unique character without ties to the day-to-day. Abused by her father and the local boys, rejected by her own mother, looking to God for salvation from the sins of others, sexually drawn to a man trapped by a domineering mother figure; motivated by drunks and crackpots, Jenny is stuck somewhere between the lines of truth and desire. This is a rich, subtly nuanced performance in a film packed with golden moments. Perhaps one day it’ll find its audience.

Buy it from Amazon

Sisters of Mourning

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Corinne Marchand in Cléo de 5 à 7

By Irene Dobson

I watched Cléo de 5 à 7 recently on DVD and it made me jump! I was astonished by its similarity to Carnival of Souls, the little horror film which I have written about in the past. Why is this? Well, in Cléo de 5 à 7, Cléo, a singer on the rise who must await the result of a biopsy to see if she has a cancerous lump, wanders about Paris on a spring afternoon, talking to someone here, having a coffee there, and the camera follows this sad pilgrim through its lovely Montparnasse streets and parks. Agnés Varda’s film was released in 1962 and, like the French New Wave releases with which it is frequently mentioned in the history books, it was shot away from fusty studios in real places to catch a slice of contemporary life. In her little book on Cléo, Valerie Orpen quotes Betsy Ann Bogart on the use of synchronized sound: “Nearly every image has its corresponding sound, including the kittens meowing in Cléo’s apartment, chisels of art students working on sculptures in the studio, snatches of conversations from passersby, and birdsong and the waterfall in the Parc Montsouris.” Valerie goes on to say: “That said, some sounds are manipulated to express the character’s aural point-of-view, such as the heightened sound of footsteps or ticking clocks….”

In my little piece on Carnival of Souls, I have already noticed the birdsong and the realistic toing-and-froing in the department store. I may have noticed too the manipulation of sound when the soundtrack stops, then starts again as we see the sun glinting in the trees and the birds resume their chorus. Valerie writes: “Cléo de 5 à 7 is memorable for its urban walking, particularly solitary female walking, which is unusual in itself.” In Carnival of Souls and in Cléo de 5 à 7 we have a young blonde woman wandering around in a daze, not quite knowing what she’s about, and meeting different people who talk to her but are unable to know what she is knowing and feel what she is feeling, so are unable to relate to her. In the department store in Carnival of Souls, Mary changes into a little black dress, while Cléo does exactly this after her rehearsal.

Cléo wandering the streets; click to enlarge

    Both films involve women who wander close to Death without knowing it. Both star actresses who are blonde and they look like ‘blondes,’ not, as Varda realized, the quintessential bobbed New Wave girl (Karina), nor quite the pneumatic American blonde (Monroe) of the moment. But self-aware and statuesque girls who seem to rise above and perhaps comment on the blonde ambitions of 1962. (It is ironic that Marilyn died that year…) Both use sound in a particular way to express something of these girls’ emotional muddle. And both films were released in 1962.

    In his book Movie Mutations, Jonathan Rosenbaum has written of a phenomenon which he calls ‘global synchronicity’: “the simultaneous appearance of the same apparent taste, styles and/or themes in separate parts of the world, without any signs of these common and synchronous traits having influenced one another – all of which suggest a common global experience that has not been adequately identified.”

    My original article was called Marie de 7 à 7 and, when I wrote it in 2005, I had no real inkling of a relationship between Carnival of Souls and Cléo de 5 à 7. But I now realize that two very similar films appeared within months of each other. Did one influence the other? I doubt if this was historically possible. Did director Herk Harvey even know of Agnés Varda? I doubt it; she had only made a few small films and was not well-known in her native France, and Carnival of Souls was Herk’s only film.

    These seem to me to be good examples of ‘wandering’ films, films through which the heroine wanders for sure, but also films which ‘wander’ near to one another, sharing the same apparent tastes, style and themes without showing any signs of mutual influence or knowledge.

— Irene Dobson

Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls

The following is Irene’s piece on Carnival of Souls, originally posted here on May 15, 2006:

Dance with a Spectre

“Something separates me from other people,” says Mary in Carnival of Souls. It is the editing with its unconventional splitting of an action. When Mary dashes around the streets and the bus station, an action seems incomplete, say her walking towards a car seeking help or walking around the station. Only when Mary goes back to the disused fairground do the takes become more fluid, even if there is causal disjunction between her and the space she is in as gongs sound for no reason, a mattress glides down a slide.

Carnival of Souls has a New Wavey look to it. It must be the improvised tone of the acting, the sudden shifts of perspective from high angle long shot to close-up in Mary’s first job, or those shots of places to which she feels she must go, zooms suggesting that the fairground pavilion and the mountains are landscapes of Mary’s unconscious perceived by her in innocuous places like the car wash. This would all seem to make sense as Carnival of Souls was released in 1962 when the French influence on low budget filmmaking must have been pronounced.

Even more unusual is the debt Herk Harvey’s little film owed the experimental films of Maya Deren. Carnival of Souls is, like Deren’s At Land, exploring a woman’s odd odyssey like Mary’s from water to land. In At Land, Deren’s beautiful amphibian makes her progress from sea to land and back again, exploring her soul in a topographical way as Captain Ahab does in Moby Dick. Like in Carnival of Souls, the woman is the only unifying principle in At Land. We never see the landscape in its entirety and never when Deren is not there. The film is in thrall to Deren’s looks, where she looks and how she looks, and her curiosity, her own compulsion to reveal the strange universe of the film. As in all of At Land, Mary’s odyssey is without sound, and she too determines how we negotiate the funfair, and how we feel desire and curiosity before the image. She makes me feel like her, for her. As in At Land, I always want to be somewhere where I am not. Both films invite me to travel into, as well as over, the landscape, rather like the free association I find in my sleep. Deren herself said that At Land deals with the “inability to achieve a stable, adjusted relationship to (the world’s) elements.” Carnival of Souls too is about a woman who isn’t really there. Yet while the slippage can be felt in Mary negotiating the dilapidated and decaying pavilion, there are also moments, shots smuggled in, when something looks at her. Finally, we see her dancing with her suitor at the carousel. Maya Deren’s girl chases a chess pawn from place to place. Mary is the pawn, found at last.

— Irene Dobson

Anita on top

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Anita Pallenberg riding cowgirl on John Phillip Law in a Playboy promo shot for Barbarella (1968), via Playmates;
click to enlarge.