Deja View

2010-04-10T23:08:00.026-04:00

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

DIRECTOR: Dorothy Arzner
WRITERS: Vicki Baum (story), Frank Davis, Tess Slesinger
PHOTOGRAPHY: Russell Metty
CAST: Maureen O'Hara, Lucille Ball, Louis Hayward, Ralph Bellamy
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 90m; bw

Although not exactly revolutionary in its portrayal of women, Dorothy Arzner's "Dance, Girl, Dance" has some righteous moments for 1940, notably when ballerina Maureen O'Hara dresses down the audience of a burlesque act. Arzner turns the tables on the "male gaze" in another scene, too, with an uncomfortably tight, unrelenting shot of a cigar-chomping nightclub manager who is sizing up the sex appeal of auditioning dancers. At a point in the story ripe for exploitation — half-naked women are writhing, let's watch! — the camera rebels, focusing its impolite stare on the smug and lascivious face of the man whose privilege it is to leer and deliver judgment.

The plot mirrors a feminist dilemma, pitting a dancer of dubious talent who cashes in on her ability to pander to male chauvinists against one down to her last dime because she can't play herself cheap. Neither woman is villified. They dance for the same troupe, led by a washed-up Russian ballerina who has traded her tutu for a necktie. Madame Basilova has sold out her ideals to survive, sexing up her dancers and marketing them to various nightclubs. The troupe is hard to sell, though, without their vampy leader, Bubbles, played by Lucille Ball. Even the gorgeous Judy, played by a young but ever-feisty Maureen O'Hara, can't cut it. The girl can dance, but it does her little good because she lacks what Madame Basilova terms "oomph," a trait she describes as a birthright and which Bubbles has in spades.

Watching Ball before she was Lucy, well after she became Lucy and an icon of women's liberation, makes it difficult to imagine how she struck audiences in 1940. The TV Lucy we love is a married housewife, not an exotic dancer, but she is a lot like Bubbles, full of Ball's trademark sarcasm, and delightfully unafraid of appearing unladylike. This must have been a revelation at the time, but I take it for granted in 2010.

O'Hara's Judy is an aspiring ballerina with raw talent, fated by financial necessity to play Bubbles' stooge in a burlesque act that contrasts the proverbial good girl against the bad girl. Guess who the audience favors? Still, everyone except Bubbles admits the act is nothing without Judy to absorb the audience's abuse. The act parallels the competition between the dancers for the attention of Jimmy, a millionaire with an alcohol problem who likes Judy because she reminds him of his ex-wife Elinor but doesn't offer much resistance when Bubbles tries to turn his head.

The film avoids cliches, and aside from Judy, no character is wholly good or bad, and relationships, like Jimmy and Elinor's, are not clearly defined.

2010-01-09T01:55:00.012-05:00

Ramrod (1947)

DIRECTOR: Andre de Toth
WRITERS: Luke Short, Jack Moffitt, C. Graham Baker
PHOTOGRAPHY: Russell Harlan
CAST: Veronica Lake, Joel McCrea, Don DeFore, Preston Foster
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Western
MISCELLANY: 95m; bw

Upon hearing a rival gang galloping to the doorstep, some characters in western movies head for their guns, and others head for the hills. Connie Dickason heads for the mirror.

The rivals riding up to Connie's door are associates of entrenched cattle baron Frank Ivey. He drove Connie's fiance Walt Shipley out of town, partly because he wanted to marry Connie himself, but mostly because Walt had set out to herd sheep in the territory — bad for business. Connie surprises Frank, though. Instead of giving her hand in marriage, she bitch slaps him ... one, two, three, four? times. The diminutive blonde fixes to run the ranch Walt abandoned, partly because she's got the entrepreneurial spirit, but mostly because she wants to bring Ivey to his knees. She'll destroy Frank, she warns her father (just another man in town who is in Ivey's pocket), but she'll do it without violence, because she's a woman.

At first, her disarming femininity manages to keep guns out of the conflict: When faced with Connie, Ivey's men are handcuffed by chivalry. So they target her male ranch hands, particularly "ramrod" Dave Nash, the only truly honest and decent man in town besides the sheriff. An alcoholic past is alluded to, but Dave is squeaky clean in his stiff dad dungarees cinched too high, his carefully tousled mane and his frozen half-smile. As difficult as it is to swallow sweet little Veronica Lake with her cute peek-a-boo hairdo as a scheming spitfire with a case of penis envy, it's tough to buy boy-next-door Joel McCrea as the loner tough guy with a dark past, driven back to the brink in his quest for redemption.

In contrast to Dave, his partner Bill Schell is a risk-taker and, like all the men in Ivey's gang, putty in Connie's hands. It's interesting that Connie's rival for Dave's affections, the golden-hearted, long-suffering Rose Leland, also devises a scheme to thwart Ivey that relies on his chivalry for success: the old half-dressed lady trick to halt a house search.

"Ramrod" is a perverse western in the vein of "Forty Guns" and "Johnny Guitar," but here the woman riding herd does not pack her own pistol or wear pants, and seems all the harder in her softness.
— Becky

2010-01-06T03:04:00.004-05:00

The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972)

DIRECTOR: Andy Milligan
PRODUCER: William Mishkin
WRITER: Andy Milligan
PHOTOGRAPHY: Andy Milligan
CAST: Hope Stansbury, Douglas Phair, Jackie Skarvellis, Ian Innes
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Horror
MISCELLANY: 91m

After the wacky opening segment, part of me had seen enough. Low production values and tacky period costumes cried made-for-TV fairy tale, but that vibe was at odds with the freak show unfolding. And the way the opening credit music halted mid-note in a choppy segue to the feature suggested in the filmmaker a certain sloppiness. But the first few minutes were so brutal — albeit amateurishly so, arousing horror but also amusement — I was curious enough to watch, just a little bit longer.

Plus the description of the film had sounded good: A man marries into a family of werewolves. I was wondering where the rats fit in.

After the bloody first scene, I stared into the abyss of flying chicken feathers, frustrated in my search for meaning. Harsh lighting burned a glare into the upper frame, souring the color and obscuring the scenes in grainy shadows. As I strained to make sense of the film visually, the audio proved unhelpful as well. Probably due to poor miking and the actors rushing their lines, I missed large blocks of dialogue, and if curiosity kept me watching even that had its limits — I wasn't about to rewind. Making matters worse, the actors were assuming aristocratic accents, but their point of reference seems to have been W.C. Fields. And the soundtrack varied from scene to scene, the stock compositions continuing to halt abruptly wherever scenes stopped, creating a patchwork quilt of sound.

From what I could make out, the conversations mostly comprised petty in-fighting among the Mooneys — a bitchy, inbred, lycanthropic, moneyed clan — all competing for the favor of their aging patriarch, who is fighting to stay alive to conduct certain experiments with his least crazy daughter, Diana, the only one not completely sheltered (because, it's explained, her mother was "pure"). Pa Mooney even risked sending her to medical school in Scotland, but she bitterly disappointed him by bringing home a husband, who finds sponging off his wealthy in-laws not all it was cracked up to be.

For a stupid horror film, this is way too talky. The dysfunctional dramatics coupled with the bad period costumes and set lend the air of a low-rent soap opera, which is what it would be mistaken for if one stumbled upon it while channel-surfing — although that would never happen because I cannot imagine a scenario in which a station would air this film, even in the dead of night. And yet the sheer weirdness — of everything and everyone, from the Mooneys to the "normal" townsfolk — is almost visionary.

Or maybe I'm giving the film too much credit: a case of cinematic stockholm syndrome. (Admittedly, I feel like a bully when taking cheap shots at a low-budget movie, kind of like the out-of-shape dude on the couch yelling at the TV that he could have caught the ball that the professional athlete just missed.)

The rat scenes add nothing to the plot, and are rather disturbing from an animal rights perspective, but they give Monica a chance to shine as the looniest Mooney of them all.
— Becky

2010-01-06T03:02:00.004-05:00

Pitfall (1948)

DIRECTOR: Andre de Toth
WRITER: Jay Dratler, Karl Kamb
PHOTOGRAPHY: Harry J. Wild
CAST: Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Noir
MISCELLANY: 86m; bw

Insurance investigator John Forbes is a wise guy who surrounds himself with people who find his stream of cynical commentary endearing, so his complaints about suburban drudgery are laughed off as part of the routine. In the midst of this restlessness, he meets Mona Stevens and falls for her. Meanwhile, Mack McDonald, an ex-cop who considers Forbes competition, starts stalking the couple, and Mona's boyfriend Bill Smiley is about to be let out of jail.

When I rented "Pitfall," I was afraid I had seen it already. Even the most banal noirs entertain me when the mood is right, but they tend to overlap. "Pitfall" would be one of those enjoyable but predictable and ultimately forgettable noirs were it not for a few distinguishing features, the most startling being the subtlety of its female characters.

In this tale of infidelity the wife is not painted as a shrew driving her husband to cheat, nor is she a shining saint to be contrasted with the ignoble mistress. The other woman, played by an apologetically luminous Lizabeth Scott, does not thrive on stealing husbands; she does not scheme or cling. And if anyone can be accused of seduction it's Forbes, who fails to disclose his marital status. Forbes is an unpleasant hero, only marginally less odious than the villain Mack. A few awkward scenes even set me wondering whether de Toth was going for something deeper with Mack than the stock stalker psychopath, like maybe he existed only as Forbes' doppelganger. Eventually the plot took such a turn I dismissed that notion and stopped trying to find deeper meaning in the occasional bursts of overdone acting and overwrought music.

"Pitall," in 1948, also was on the cutting edge of capturing the dissatisfaction simmering under the surface of suburban life. Forbes has the cookie-cutter home, the respectable job, a son that idolizes him and a wife who dotes on him. When he proposes throwing it all away, his wife takes it as a joke. That was the day he met Stevens and set himself on a course leading to murder.
— Becky

2009-12-21T13:46:00.003-05:00

Odd Couple | Bo Ming Chan Dao Duo Ming Qiang (1979)

DIRECTOR: Lau Kar-Wing
PRODUCER: Karl Maka
CAST: Sammo Hung, Lau Kar-Wing, Mars, Dean Shek, Leung Kar Yan
COUNTRY: Hong Kong
GENRE: Martial arts, comedy
MISCELLANY: 97m; Cantonese, with subtitles

Which is mightier, the spear or the sword? Two aging masters, of the sword and of the spear, attempt to answer that question, meeting yearly to duel — and possibly to enjoy each other's company, although they would never admit it. Their matches always end in a draw, so they adopt students, passing the rivalry to another generation.

Fans of kung fu comedy won't be disappointed by "Odd Couple," which is packed with the right ingredients.

• Creative gags spoofing the kung fu genre. In one scene, Fatty Ah Yo defeats a sword with magnets. In another, he dispatches of a couple of bad characters who were trained in the Peking Opera, the clash punctuated by crashing cymbals and gongs.

• Flamboyant villains. How about the lecherous Mr. Rocking, who flags his archetype by holding a fan and lounging on a palanquin, and when he deigns to walk, stalks women to his own theme music — a cheesy, synthesized beat?

• Characters with outrageous hairstyles and funny nicknames. Potato, the obligatory servant with exaggerated buck teeth, has one of my favorite haircuts, a mullet crossed with a mohawk gone awry.

• Gross-out humor. One gag has Potato, who is tailing Stubborn Wing, pretending to piss every time his target turns around. Another makes for the sickest egg scene since "Cool Hand Luke."

• Asshole masters. The King of the Sword is the kind of guy who saves your life then burns down your house, laughing his ass off as you try to put the fire out.

• Misleading subtitles. As Stubborn Wing's house burns, the King of the Sword says something to the effect of "What a sweat house you have now!", making me wonder, was there a bad pun in the original Cantonese?

"Odd Couple" was directed by Lau Kar-Wing, who also stars as the King of the Spear and as Stubborn Wing, the King of the Sword's pupil. Co-starring is Sammo Hung, who played two roles as well, the King of the Sword and Fatty Ah Yo, the King of the Spear's disciple.

The movie is preceded by a short lesson in the 18 weapons of kung fu, which focuses on the advantages of the sabre vs. the spear.

The film's ever-inventive fight scenes and breathless, entertaining pace betray the influence of Hung, the legendary martial arts auteur whose films display contradictory impulses, celebrating and subverting Confucianism. Rooted in Chinese traditions but grounded in the Hong Kong streets, his cinema refuses to take itself seriously but demands to be taken seriously, on the merits of its martial arts mastery. The slightly rotund Hung cuts an unlikely figure for an action film star but uses it to his advantage, milking his physique for laughs while wowing us with his agility.
— Becky

2009-12-18T01:43:00.000-05:00

Jennifer Jones dies at age 90
• Los Angeles Times obituary. • New York Times obituary. • Washington Post obituary.

My 5 favorite Jennifer Jones films:

• Portrait of Jennie. One of Bunuel's favorite movies.

• Beat the Devil. Huston's "Maltese Falcon" spoof.

• Terminal Station. De Sica's cut of "Indiscretions of an American Wife."

• Cluny Brown. Last film Lubitsch completed.

• Gone to Earth. Powell and Pressburger's cut of "The Wild Heart."

— Becky

2009-12-11T23:22:00.000-05:00

The Iron-Fisted Monk |
San De Huo Shang Yu Chong Mi Liu (1977)

DIRECTOR: Sammo Hung
WRITER: Sammo Hung, Chen Sing, James Tien
CAST: Sammo Hung, Huang Feng, Yu Ting
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lee Yao-Ting
COUNTRY: Hong Kong
GENRE: Martial arts
MISCELLANY: 92m; Cantonese, with subtitles

Husker favors dog meat, liquor and prostitutes, plays pranks on his Shaolin classmates, picks fights with his master, and flavors his technique with slapstick. When he tires of the monks declaring him unready to take revenge on the Manchu gangsters who killed his uncle, he walks out of the temple.

Husker's irreverence is sacrilegious in kung fu cinema, where the master is always right and patience and humility are revered.

As expected, Husker's rebellion draws reprisals from his teachers, but in a twist, their punishment hardly matters. The student's impatience proves warranted: The Manchus are terrorizing the village, and the imperative to stop them makes the stonewalling protocol of the monks seem petty. After all, there comes a time in every martial arts movie when reflection gives way to action, when the restraint carefully cultivated in the kung fu disciple is put to the test. Otherwise, what would be the point of the film? "Iron-Fisted Monk" challenges the presumption that restraint before violence is virtuous. Several times in the film, it's fatal.

Yet the tenet of kung fu cinema that the wise disciple exhausts all other options before resorting to violence cannot be totally discarded, even here. It is a principle that ensures the villains in these films will be most vile. That's certainly true of the corrupt Manchus of "The Iron-Fisted Monk." The film strikes an uneasy balance between brutality and comedy. A graphic gang rape scene, for example, manages to pity the victim while taking juvenile swipes at the predators. The pure evil expressed by the Manchus darkens the comedy yet preserves the comic character of the film by drawing a bold line between viewer and villain, allowing us to savor the payback.

"Iron-Fisted Monk" is the directing debut of renowned choreographer Sammo Hung, who also played Husker and had a hand in writing the script and creating the menagerie of moves. Mixed in with the tiger, eagle, snake, crane and mantis forms is plenty of horseplay, all sped up in the furious showdown, which includes a sequence that must have inspired the "Kill Bill" ball-and-chain match.

The rich color film survives in fairly clean shape; stubborn specks only lend period authenticity. The subtitles seem to correspond with the action, mostly. The occasional mangled joke and slang are to be expected, perhaps even desired as a reminder of all the work that went into bringing this piece of Hong Kong cinema history to your home.
— Becky

2009-11-25T23:59:00.000-05:00

The Devil Strikes at Night |
Nachts, Wenn Der Teufel Kam (1957)

DIRECTOR: Robert Siodmak
WRITER: Werner Jorg Luuddecke
CAST: Claus Holm, Annemarie Duringer, Mario Adorf
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Georg Krause
COUNTRY: Germany
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 105m; bw; German, with subtitles

The homicide bureau of the Berlin Police Department under normal circumstances would not be considered a "cozy corner," but it's the waning days of World War II with thousands dying on the front lines every day, and inspector Axel Kersten hopes a post investigating civilian killings will allow him to fly under the Nazis' radar until the war "blows over."

Not even 10 minutes on the job, however, any hopes of retreat are shot down when a Gestapo officer bursts in, demanding leniency for an SS member charged with murder. Upon noticing Kersten, the Nazi instructs him to remain seated. "I didn't intend to get up," Kersten responds. We see it is unlikely Kersten will avoid Nazis, or keep a low profile.

When Kersten is insolent to Nazis, we admire him, but let's be candid: He is Hitler's begrudging accomplice — as a decorated veteran who was wounded fighting Russians on the eastern front, and as a cynical, war-weary civilian who stifles dissent for practical reasons. Even though he barely conceals his distaste for Nazi policies, he is complicit.

If murder investigations do not provide the relative peace and quiet Kersten seeks after fighting a war he opposes ideologically, he at least swears to mind his own business, settling into a routine, scaring up the rare pleasures to be had amid the air raids, and courting a file clerk.

The illusion of peace is shattered when he suspects a man is about to be executed for a murder committed by a serial killer. Violating his "philosophy" of minding his own business, he digs deeper, learning the killer is a physically imposing but mentally retarded man named Bruno, whose senseless destruction mirrors his government's.

Based on an actual serial killer, Bruno's portrait is chilling — especially in a bloodless but brutal scene with an unsuspecting Jewish woman who appeals to him for help. Yet the real horror story is the Nazis' handling of the case.

When director Robert Siodmak fled the Nazis, he brought to Hollywood the Expressionistic filmmaking style of his homeland in noirs such as "Phantom Lady," "Criss-Cross," "The Spiral Staircase" and "The Killers." After World War II, he returned to Europe, undoubtedly transformed by his experiences in America. Perhaps this can account for the peculiar mood of "The Devil Strikes at Night," a story that manages to express both optimism and disillusionment.
— Becky

2009-11-16T15:02:00.001-05:00

Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painleve
I often say Jacques Cousteau when I mean to say Jean Cocteau. Making matters more confusing is the missing link between them — French marine biologist Jean Painleve — whose underwater cinema predates Cousteau's by decades and, whose body of work, like Cocteau's, is dedicated to exploring life on "the other side." Except that Cocteau entered mysterious realms in his films through mirrors, telephones and radios; Painleve, through the sea and micro-photography.

Painleve pioneered, not only wildlife films, but popular wildlife films. A good example is his entertaining movie about crustaceans, photographed in studio-bright black-and-white, one of 23 included in the recently released, three-disc Criterion set "Science is Fiction." We watch the intrigues of sea creatures who disguise themselves in algae and sponges, as the narrator enthusiastically mixes fact with poetic observation — comparing the crustaceans to ballerinas, "Japanese warriors" and "praying buddhas."

Anthropomorphism dominates, but Painleve also focuses on traits that set his subjects apart. Among sea horses, for example, it is the female who produces the eggs and the male who gives birth. Painleve spent sleepless nights behind the camera, even installing an electrical shock mechanism on his hat should he nod off while waiting for one pregnant papa to pop. The footage of baby sea horses bursting out of the convulsing male's pouch was worth the wait: "The Sea Horse" (1933) was Painleve's most popular movie; he even spun off a jewelry line.

“The sea horse was for me a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to re-establish the balance between male and female.”— Jean Painleve

The care Painleve took in choosing music for his films also was ahead of its time. He had Darius Milhaud score "The Sea Horse"; Painleve wrote his own music for "Sea Urchins" (1954), a symphony of banging pots and pans in tribute, he said, to Edgar Varese but with a mambo bar thrown in "so as not to be taken too seriously"; and "The Vampire" (1945) is set to a couple of Duke Ellington songs.

"The Vampire" is classic Painleve in the way it fixes on an odd attribute of an exotic animal — the vampire bat's affinity for the blood of other animals — and draws out a comparison to humans. “When I was finishing the film," Painleve said, "I noticed how the vampire bat extends its wing before going to sleep. I thought it looked like the Nazi heil-Hitler salute.” Painleve also taps fictional cinema here, coupling footage of the vampire bat with scenes from "Nosferatu."

It was that penchant for playful presentation, and fetishism of the bizarre, that sent some of Painleve's fellow scientists storming out of his screenings, denying the validity of his work. But Painleve, like his subjects, was a strange breed. He was a scientist crossed with an artist.
— Becky

2009-11-08T23:20:00.000-05:00

Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

DIRECTOR: Robert Montgomery
WRITERS: Dorothy B. Hughes (novel), Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer
CAST: Robert Montgomery, Wanda Hendrix, Art Smith, Thomas Gomez
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Russell Metty
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Noir, drama
MISCELLANY: 101m

Even among noir men, hardly the most loquacious bunch, Robert Montgomery's disillusioned veteran Gagin of "Ride the Pink Horse" is notably tight-lipped. But his terseness arouses interest, not indifference; in the absence of revealing dialogue, I turned to his body language, his relationships. Instead of being told what he was thinking, I wondered what he was thinking.

With nowhere to sleep, Gagin is referred to as "the man with no place." His alienation is enforced by the setting, a village in New Mexico, where he goes to find the man who killed his friend Shorty. There he is a foreigner among the locals — who greet his questions with blank looks, amusement and sometimes furious outbursts in Spanish that he struggles to comprehend. And he's an outsider among the tourists there for the fiesta, whose gaiety mocks his desolation. In a flawless scene that makes his loneliness plain, he opens the door to a cantina and the singing and strumming and talking stop cold; the patrons stare, their faces laced with shadows and smoke and, perhaps, Gagin's paranoia.

Gagin's hardly a big shot gringo throwing around cash, yet seems most at ease in relationships whose boundaries are set by money. He's demonstrably friendly with the bellboy, whom he tips for service and advice. He buys a round of drinks at the bar and finds shelter and camaraderie at Pancho's carousel. He gives the Indian girl Pila, who stalks him like an angel despite his brushoffs, a 10-cent spin on the merry-go-round, and $10 so she can have her hair waved. Maybe he is not buying loyalty from Pancho and Pila but earning it; simply because he does not care enough about money to hoard it.

This quality certainly endears him to Pancho, who declares himself "born to be broke" and claims to be happy only when he has nothing. He incurs a debt to Gagin rather than accept a second round of drinks, because of his "pride." So is his refusal to give free rides on the carousel, even for friends, a business policy or a moral code? The time he breaks it riders pay dearly as they spin around, helpless witnesses to a brutal beating.

Greed sickens Gagin, especially the brand exhibited by the very man he's battling, war-profiteer Frank Hugo. When Gagin attempts to shake him down, Hugo taunts him for his modest ambitions. "Thirty thousand?" complains Hugo's moll, who tries to partner with Gagin. Hugo, she says, "would've asked for a million — and gotten it." But Gagin's heart isn't in blackmail, at least that's what the FBI agent tailing Hugo thinks. He sizes up Gagin as a veteran who is outraged to discover that he went to war for three years and "got nothing out of it but a bunch of dangling ribbons."

"Ride the Pink Horse" is one of many forties films about a maladjusted veteran. Its long, hallucinatory night sequences evoke those of other veteran noirs of the period, notably "The Chase," "Blue Dahlia" and "Somewhere in the Night." Dorothy B. Hughes, author of "Ride the Pink Horse," also wrote "In a Lonely Place," another hardboiled tale about a troubled veteran, adapted to film by Nicholas Ray, starring Humphrey Bogart in one of his grittiest performances.
— Becky

2009-10-31T14:44:00.001-04:00

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

DIRECTOR: Samuel Fuller
PRODUCER: Samuel Fuller
WRITER: Samuel Fuller
CAST: James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett, Victoria Shaw, Anna Lee
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sam Leavitt
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Noir, drama
MISCELLANY: 82m

"The Crimson Kimono" opens with a caricature of womanhood, a burlesque dancer screwing her face into a mask of ecstasy. In its closing scene, a parade through LA's Little Tokyo, the camera pans marchers wearing geisha makeup and Japanese folk masks. The symmetry between the two episodes is unmistakable, both culminating in a woman being gunned down in the street.

These images of cultural disguises help to illustrate the struggle of Detective Sgt. Joe Kojaku, a Japanese-American who falls in love with a white woman while investigating a stripper's slaying. His All-American partner, roommate and best friend Charlie Bancroft, whom he fought alongside in Korea, loves her, too, so Joe tries to suppress his feelings, which only uncorks a lifetime of pent-up racial tension. The love triangle starts to bleed into the murder investigation, the two stories casting warped reflections on each other.

When is the racism real and when is it imagined? Samuel Fuller never shied away from such issues, giving voice to Japanese-American and black GIs in his Korean War film "Steel Helmet" — and to the Italian-American soldier in "The Big Red One," who, when told he should have stayed home singing "O Sole Mio," coolly sticks the barrel of his gun in the bigot's mouth and serenades him with the tune.

In addition to being a crime movie and a love story, "Crimson Kimono" is a cultural tour of Little Tokyo in the fifties. We see a kendo match, a Nisei veteran memorial, a Buddhist temple and traditional Japanese artwork. Of course, this being a Fuller story, the murder case revolves around the adulteration of a samurai-and-geisha love story for a striptease. And it's not the white man in the kendo match who abandons discipline and breaks the rules but his Japanese opponent.

"Crimson Kimono" is a Fuller movie through and through. Fuller was a veteran of the "fighting first" in World War II, and his movies often featured veterans from that division. Also, some of the shots in "Crimson Kimono," particularly in the opening scene, look as if they were torn from the pages of old tabloids, reflecting another aspect of Fuller's background, his years as a crime reporter.

The "tabloid" style that makes Fuller's films instantly recognizable is not limited to the photography; it's also in the efficient arrangement of revelatory details designed to "grab you by the balls," as Fuller famously put it. When Fuller was no longer bound to the fact-based storytelling of journalism, he used his creative license to more fluently communicate emotion, but remained faithful to nouns and verbs, the building blocks of a good news story, letting them speak for themselves.
— Becky

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2009-10-02T16:05:00.000-04:00

Strange Woman (1946)

DIRECTOR: Edgar G. Ulmer
WRITERS: Herb Meadow, Hunt Stromberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, Ben Ames Williams (novel)
CAST: Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lucien Andriot
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Noir, drama
MISCELLANY: 100m

We meet Jenny Hager when she's a young girl, holding a playmate's head under water with her foot, mocking him as he flails and gasps and cries for help.

When one of the richest men in town runs over to investigate, Jenny jumps in the water and pulls the boy, Ephraim, to safety. Years later, he recalls her cruelty, and Jenny indignantly reminds him that she's the one who saved him from drowning.

It's possible that Jenny is trying to deceive Ephraim, but it's also possible that she's trying to delude herself, that her memory of the incident is selective and that on some level she would like to think of herself as a good person.

Because of the film's moral ambiguity, I am taking pains to avoid terming Jenny a femme fatale, in an attempt to imagine her as a complex person, capable of helping and hurting others both. Jenny uses her sex appeal to get ahead, but the men who desire her are not blameless for their actions.

Set in the first half of the 19th century in Bangor, Maine, "Strange Woman" focuses on the ambitions of Jenny, who was raised by her alcoholic father in the hardscrabble section of town called the "devil's half acre," but through her Ulmer exposes the darkness of the other "more respectable" citizens.

When Jenny marries Ephraim's wealthy father, Isaiah, she does not pretend it's for anything but security — and if she did not scheme to make the marriage happen, she at least seized on opportunities when they arose. In a fight with her father, she boasts that she "made" Isaiah want her. Then, after her father whips her, although he has fallen to the ground, she runs to the Poster house acting as if she were in imminent danger, and benefits from the miscommunication.

The whipping scene has sexual overtones — Jenny's father warns her that this will be one beating that she won't like, and at first sight of the whip, Jenny's eyes light up. At the Poster house, she provocatively displays her whip marks to Isaiah, and when the virtuous old servantwoman tending to Jenny's wounds sees the gleam in old Isaiah's eye, she slams the bedroom door in his face. This sparks lust-filled Isaiah to rescue Jenny from her father by marrying her at once.

Even before Jenny ran to his house that night, Isaiah seems to have had designs on her. When Jenny wanders off with a sailor, interrupting a mildly flirtatious exchange with Isaiah, he goes straight for her father, buys him a drink and rats out the affair, setting in motion the beating that drives the girl to his arms.

So while Jenny is using Isaiah for his money and Isaiah is using Jenny for her body, to make the arrangement socially acceptable, she has pretended to be a victim and he has pretended to be a benefactor — and neither seems aware of the other's wiles.

Because Jenny is in the marriage for the money, it is difficult to pity her dissatisfaction, but it is not surprising that the passionate and attractive young woman's eyes wander. Things get especially twisted when she writes to Isaiah's son Ephraim, her old playmate and boyfriend, beckoning him home to kiss his "new mother" goodnight. This incestuous love triangle threatens to become fatal, the intentions of the characters always murky.

As sensational as Jenny's sexual indiscretions are, Ulmer shows another side. She never forgets her roots, faithfully delivering food and medicine to the residents of her old neighborhood, becoming a beloved patron of the poor. Is she feigning empathy for appearances sake, like she did by the river that day? Or is her empathy for the poor sincere because she was once a have-not herself? Do her motives matter if she is helping people? Likewise if she's hurting people?

You get the sense that Jenny would have married for love had she not been born poor. When her rich friend Meg confides her love for a man of little means, Jenny encourages her to marry him anyway. It could be argued that love is what Jenny always wanted but being born lower class, she sought money first.

Some fictional characters might be classified as "good" simply by default, not because they do beneficial things but simply by virtue of not doing the harmful things that a character like Jenny does.

Before we have a chance to reduce them ourselves, film characters usually are boiled down to fit in one of those categories, the filmmaker, like a lawyer, building a case by highlighting the behavior most likely to draw a positive or a negative reaction, taking care not to confuse us with subtlety.

Yet once we accept somebody as a hero or a villain, we lose our ability to impartially observe their behavior and to accept them as human beings as complicated as ourselves. I don't consider myself either a villain or a hero, yet routinely cast one or the other label on fictional characters and even real people I read about in the news.

Ulmer restrains judgment here, while painting a picture of Jenny that is as clear as a mirror.
— Becky

2009-09-18T00:12:00.000-04:00

A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

DIRECTOR: Takashi Nomura
WRITERS: Shuichi Nagahara, Nobuo Yamada, Shinji Fujiwara
CAST: Jo Shishido, Jerry Fujio, Chitose Kobayashi
MUSIC: Harumi Ibe
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shigeyoshi Mine
COUNTRY: Japan
GENRE: Noir, Action, Crime
MISCELLANY: 84m; with subtitles; on DVD

When Quentin Tarantino fused the samurai movie and the spaghetti western in "Kill Bill" in 2003, he was carrying on a great cinematic tradition that reached its apex with Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" in 1961, a samurai movie patterned after the western, film noir and a Dashiell Hammett detective novel and, in turn, the blueprint for the breakout spaghetti western "Fistful of Dollars." Similar cross-pollination shaped "A Colt Is My Passport," a Japanese gangster film indebted to noir, with a spaghetti-western-style soundtrack as vital to the story as Ennio Morricone's scores were to Sergio Leone's films, infusing scenes with the emotion absent from hardboiled faces.

One of those hardboiled faces belongs to Jo Shishido, whose chipmunk-cheeked mug might be as emblematic of gangster cinema as the jowls of Edward G. Robinson. Here, the actor famous for his outsider Yakuza roles plays a double-crossed killer named Kamimura, hired by a gang to assassinate a rival. It is thrilling to watch the ever-cool Shishido take on the Yakuza system, and easy to forget that Kamimura is a cold-blooded killer himself as we become invested in his struggle to reach air or sea, beyond the gang's reach. This free agent is at least preferable to the detestable, entrenched Yakuza leaders, who are relentless in their pursuit of power.

The film's east-west dichotomy runs frequently into a philosophical clash between Fate and Free Will, and the schizophrenia is particularly sharp in the scene in which two characters taken hostage at an airport watch their plane lift off in one direction as their captors drive them off in another, but soon recoup the car using the second brake they had the foresight to install.

Perhaps the most traditionally noirish setting is a seaside hotel, where Mina, a sad-eyed maid, wards off the groping hands of the trucker and sailor lodgers. She feels stuck in Yokohama because her gangster ex-boyfriend will not permit her to leave. Mina introduces Kamimura to the barge crews, whose docks are the only place where the Yakuza cannot gain solid footing. As Kamimura and a gangster stand on a barge and make a deal in which it is unclear who has the advantage, the men rock with the waves.

This all leads to a stunning showdown in a dusty landfill evocative of westerns, where Kamimura seeks to foil Fate by manipulating time itself. He uses a few guns, too.

Kamimura tells Mina that as a child he would have starved had he not learned to fight. He's still fighting to survive, but the cynicism that keeps him alive coexists with a childlike wonder, in the way the flight of a bird or an insect holds his attention and coaxes the shadow of a smile just before he is about to kill, or be killed.
— Becky

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2009-09-15T15:10:00.000-04:00

Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939)

DIRECTORS: Joseph Losey
ANIMATION: Charles R. Bowers
NARRATOR: Charles R. Bowers
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Short
MISCELLANY:25m; commissioned by oil industry for 1939 World's Fair; on DVD "Charley Bowers: Rediscovering an American Comic Genius"

The oil industry greased director Joseph Losey's palms to make this piece of petroleum propaganda years before he was blacklisted for suspected Communist activities. But today, on the heels of eight years of rule by George W. Bush, this 1939 animated short enumerating the many ways we rely on oil begs to be re-imagined as a wake-up call not heeded.

Stop-motion master Charley Bowers works his magic, in a rich Technicolor palette, on Pete-Roleum and his cousins, personified oil drops who keep the gears of civilization running smoothly. Bowers' films usually feature overly complex machines that surrealistically mash up the mechanical and the natural — one of his cinematic contraptions produces a plant that sprouts a can of peas; another makes eggs that hatch automobiles. Similarly in this film, petroleum is composed of a lovable cast of dedicated droplets, faithful servants who paint our nails, lubricate the wheels of our cars, swab the decks of our ships and kill the worms in our apples. But bubbling under the surface is the notion that we are the slaves.

Take the scene lacking narration that pans an apocalyptic landscape, presumably representing what life would be like without oil. Looming in the industrial wasteland is a huge apple with a worm in it, an image in character with the piece's bold visual style that borders on the expressionistic.

"Pete-Roleum" is included in the collection "Charley Bowers: Rediscovering an American Comic Genius," which includes most of the animators' amazing films. Notably missing is "There It Is!" a hilarious piece featuring the mischievous Fuzz-Faced Phantom, a kilted Scotland Yard detective and a bug named MacGregor — but fortunately "There It Is!" is available on DVD, as well, on the box set "More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931."

— Becky

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2009-09-08T00:10:00.000-04:00

The Small Back Room (1949)

DIRECTORS: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
PRODUCERS: Powell & Pressburger
WRITERS: Powell & Pressburger; Nigel Balchin
CAST: David Farrar, Kathleen Byron
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christopher Challis
COUNTRY: UK
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 106m

Sammy Rice, a British scientist who creates the weapons his employer hawks to the military, is consumed with personal battles in the midst of World War II. The hero of this introspective war drama struggles with the pain caused by his tin leg, the bottle of whisky beckoning from his desk, a crippling dependency on his girlfriend and a crisis of conscience over the profiteering and bureaucratic aspects of his job.

This dark, unromantic film tightly focuses on Sammy's demons, and, save the whimsy of a hallucinatory sequence with the whisky bottle, hardly resembles Powell and Presserger's widely scoped World War II fantasy "Stairway to Heaven."

Three episodes of note in "The Small Back Room" mark Sammy's emotional stages. The first shows him visiting a military drill at Stonehenge, a rare sunlit scene, in which the stones loom as timepieces and burial markers. The second, in front of the hearth in Sammy's apartment, shows him waiting for his girlfriend Sue to call, expressionistically shrinking before the bottle and a wall of multiplying, mocking clocks that cruelly tick each moment of her absence. The third is the climax at Chesil Bank, where Sammy attempts to defuse a bomb on a treacherous beach of pebbles. It's significant that this weapons developer emerges from his depression as he resolves to disarm an instrument of death.

A typical postwar hero, Sammy is scarred and complex. We don't know how he lost his leg and to what depths alcohol has taken him already. When we meet him, he's wincing, brooding, adrift, sometimes unable to tear his eyes from the bottle he sets in plain view, on a desk near his telephone and a portrait of Sue.

The redemptive power of love, which was so dear to "Stairway to Heaven" in 1946, is blasted away here just a few years later. Although surrounded by others in crucial moments, such as his assistants who remotely listen in as he works to dismantle the bomb, Sammy ultimately fights his battles alone.

There is a ritual he shares with Sue when he is about to succumb to temptation: She offers him a drink, and he refuses. The strength to resist comes from within.
— Becky

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2009-09-04T00:39:00.000-04:00

Intentions of Murder (1964)

DIRECTOR: Shohei Imamura
WRITERS: Shohei Imamura, Shinji Fujiwara, Keiji Hasbebe
CAST: Masumi Hurukawa, Ko Nishimura, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sinsaku Himeda
COUNTRY: Japan
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 150m; with subtitles; on DVD

Sadako is told to beware the family curse, and it's true she finds herself paying for the transgressions of one of her ancestors.

Yet if Sadako is cursed, it's by the living, not the dead. By her husband, who betrays her, beats her, belittles her, and bosses her around. By her mother-in-law and her son Masaru, who also lord over her, calling her fat and lazy. By her husband's myopic mistress, who hypocritically stalks her with a camera in the hopes of capturing an indiscretion. By the thief who breaks into her home and rapes her, then decides he loves her and shows it by forcing himself on her again and again.

After the first assault, Sadako considers her options. Reporting the crime is ruled out; the shame would be unbearable. Suicide appears the honorable thing to do, but first she cleans the house. Soon, she's devouring a plate of cold food, deferring her death until she sees her child again. Sadako's feeble suicide attempts are portrayed with a gentle, life-affirming humor. Eventually, self-destruction turns to self-preservation.

After the assault, Sadako recalls a scene from her youth, when a suitor called up to her bedroom window. That she opened the window strikes her as important in retrospect. Though never spoken, there is a sense Sadako blames herself for the rape, and her passivity dares the viewer to blame her, too. Many characters mistake Sadako's humility for lack of intelligence, but the director discerns this meek woman's wisdom, and her will to live. It is hard to believe that a man made "Intentions of Murder," so sensitive and nuanced is the portrait of the heroine.

There is ever a thin line between fantasy and reality; does Sadako cease at a certain point to be a victim by making the rapist her lover? Imamura is not explicit, but takes pains to reveal Sadako's thoughts, through reflective voiceovers and striking images. When she meditates on the dead, a shirt hanging on a clothesline dances in the breeze. One of the most memorable images, evocative of Maya Deren's "Meshes" — Sadako's frightened face reflected in the surface of an iron wielded by the thief — is repeated when her husband forces himself on her. Another haunting image, the corpse of Masaru's pet mouse, eaten hollow by its cage companion, re-emerges in the child's murals. We get a glimpse of how this domestic drama is being processed by the boy through the lurid scenes he draws all over the home's sliding screens. Throughout the film, violent subterranean episodes show up in this way, as ripples on the surface of the family's life.

I left "Intentions of Murder" caring deeply for Sadako. Imamura's long-suffering heroine, like Fellini's Cabiria, is one of cinema's great survivors.
— Becky

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2009-08-29T16:14:00.001-04:00

The Brainiac (1962)

DIRECTOR: Chano Urueta
PRODUCER: Abel Salazar (USA: K. Gordon Murray)
WRITER: Adolpho Portillo
CAST: Abel Salazar, German Robles, Rene Cardona
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jose Ortiz Ramos
COUNTRY: Mexico
GENRE: Sci-fi, horror, cult.
MISCELLANY: 77m; bw; Spanish with subtitles or overdubbed; on DVD

It's Mexico, 1661. The Baron Vitelius Destera is shackled in a torch-lit cave, ringed by black-hooded Inquisitors. As a prosecutor reads the charges against him — witchcraft, womanizing, indifference to torture — the baron behaves like a schoolboy in the principal's office, barely keeping a straight face. Once he's sentenced to burn at the stake, he boasts his black magic one last time, making his shackles disappear. Having shown he could escape if he really wanted to, he dutifully goes to the pyre. As flames envelop him, a crudely drawn comet appears. The baron swears vengeance on the descendants of his enemies, and presumably hitches a celestial ride.

Flash forward to Mexico 1961. The comet reappears. A meteor is lowered from a string in a harshly lit studio filled with branches and projected, clearly fake backgrounds. The rock dissolves, and we are presented with what a stake-burning and centuries aboard a comet will do to a body. Tattered clothes, straggly hair, melted skin, tubular, pincer hands and a long, forked tongue, all the better for sucking out brains. Luckily, a well-dressed man of not much consequence to the plot happens by, and as a leopard sound effect loops, the creature licks his nape with the fatal tongue and mutates back into the baron, looking smoother than ever in his victim's modern suit.

An essay included with the DVD posits that Chano Urueta's other, superior works prove "The Brainiac" is not camp but camp satire. Regardless of its intentions, the artificiality is as audacious as that of a kiddie production, and its frank fakeness makes for a magical viewing experience. Do we regress, watching something so primitive? Is that the appeal? The claustrophobic stillness of the back-projected outdoor scenes was probably not consciously achieved, but manages to express terror. Creepiness is forged fortuitously through random episodes, awkward editing and acting, set monotony and the blank eyes staring out of the puffing, rubber flesh of the Brainiac mask. The film charges bullishly through the motions of revenge without a lick of suspense, but sustains mystery in spite of its artlessness.

The baron in his current incarnation remains quite the lothario. When he takes a shine to a woman, a flashlight blinks on his face, the same effect used when he recognizes one of his adversaries' heirs. In a scene that was cut from the original theatrical release, the baron meets a woman on a street corner and they start making out. The excitement turns him into the Brainiac. (He really does want you for your mind, honey.) The contrast of that misshapen, long-tongued mask against the smooth, human flesh of his victims is stark. In a Murnau moment, another female victim faints on her bed as the Brainiac's shadow approaches, lobster-claw arms first.

I recommend watching the film in the original Spanish with subtitles. But for those non-Spanish-speakers whose appreciation for trash exceeds mine, the version K. Gordon Murray had overdubbed for U.S. theaters is available.
— Becky

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2009-08-22T00:22:00.000-04:00

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino
WRITER: Quentin Tarantino
CAST: Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Richardson
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Drama, comedy, war, thriller
MISCELLANY: 149m; in theaters

Making sport of Nazis is nothing new, but killing Nazis for sport?

As far back as 1942, German-born Jewish director Ernst Lubitsch skewered the Third Reich in "To Be Or Not To Be." Quentin Tarantino takes off from Lubitsch's satire in his outrageous revenge fantasy "Inglourious Basterds," but goes far beyond depicting the Nazis as sinister incompetents. Lubitsch had the "touch," but Tarantino opts for a sledgehammer, bleeding this symbol of evil of all its comedic worth.

Hitler's boys are scalped, bashed in the head with baseball bats, disfigured, or sometimes merely shot, stabbed or blown up, by the Inglourious Basterds, a ragtag band of Jewish American "Natsy"-hunters led by Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine. The violence is so over-the-top and the Germans so dehumanized that satirical delight can, and should, be taken in the Basterds' brand of rogue justice.

For a while, anyway. Eventually, Tarantino aims the mirror at us.

As Nazis watch a propaganda movie glorifying sniper Frederick Zoller, Tarantino cuts away to the Basterds killing German soldiers. As we start to laugh on cue — each Nazi death at the Basterds' hands another punchline — Tarantino cuts back to the German film audience laughing as Zoller shoots down another American. One moment we're laughing at the Nazis, the next we're laughing with them.

The story of Raine and the Basterds dovetails with that of Shosanna Dreyfus, who witnessed her family's slaughter at the hands of Col. Landa, a self-worshipping intelligence officer who relishes his nickname "Jew Hunter." Landa is played to the hilt by Christoph Waltz, who reminds us of the Nazis' true menace. As the film's aesthetic swings from arthouse to grindhouse, Waltz remains steady as the villain who is particularly odious because he seems, at times, to be omniscient and omnipresent. But is he a practical man or an ideologue? He exhibits both traits.

The script compensates for gaps in plot and background with scenes that flaunt Tarantino's ear for dialogue. In a tavern, officers play a drinking game with a German starlet, the object to guess which famous person's name is printed on the card stuck to their foreheads. In this segment, and others, socially clueless Nazis force their companionship on others, either oblivious to the discomfort they cause, or indifferent. When a British spy tells a Nazi officer who sets his outlandishly large beer glass on their table that he's intruding, the witty chitchat dries up and polite facades fall away.

There are other magnificent moments of suspense, but the overriding mood is comic. One of the most priceless scenes is when Raine and his crew attempt to pass themselves off as Italians.

Even at 149 minutes, "Basterds" seems to strangle Tarantino's vision. The pacing is a beat off in some spots, suggesting massive editing and lost scenes. I look forward to a DVD version that restores some of the scenes that didn't make the cut.
— Becky

FURTHER READING:
• MASHUP | Lolita (1962) & Death Proof (2007). Imagining Kubrick's "Lolita" and Tarantino's "Death Proof" colliding.
• The Big Red One (1980). QT clearly was influenced by Samuel Fuller, and "The Big Red One" in particular.
• Hi Diddle Diddle (1943). Camera-conscious screwball comedy that spoofs opera, features an animated Leon Schlesinger sequence and has been cited by Quentin Tarantino as influential.
• REPLAY | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Our "Replay" features obsess over the great moments. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is full of them, but one scene in particular, although not the most iconic, never fails to give me chills.[Becky]

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2009-08-17T13:05:00.000-04:00

The Big Red One (The Reconstruction) | (1980)

DIRECTOR: Samuel Fuller
WRITER: Samuel Fuller
CAST: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby DiCCicco, Kelly Ward
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Adam Greenberg
PRODUCER: Gene Corman
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Drama, action, war
MISCELLANY: 162m; on DVD

The only signs of life on the battlefield are a lone officer patrolling the carnage, a shell-shocked horse, and bugs devouring the eyes of a wooden figure of Jesus — until an enemy appears through the fog with his hands up and we are presented with the question that is to recur throughout "The Big Red One": What is the difference between murder and killing?

The second time we see this battlefield with the crucifix, it's World War II. The same soldier now is leading the first infantry division. Lee Marvin delivers a moving but subtle performance as a hard-edged father figure shepherding a core group of survivors through the war's major battles (North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach on D-Day, Belgium, Germany and, finally, the liberation of a death camp in Czechoslovakia). When we return to the World War I battlefield that opened the film, emotion flickers through the cracks of Marvin's stony face, but director Samuel Fuller does not permit sentimentality. The lesson learned from World War I is, above all, survival. Marvin will not emulate the messiah towering over the battlefield and risk becoming just another body rotting.

The scene ends with the soldiers delivering a baby in a tank, (and if you thought the childbirth scene in Ford's "3 Godfathers" was weird ...). As the men loom over the screaming and panting mother-to-be, whose legs are held apart with belts of bullets, urging her to push in an amusing misuse of French, there is an element of bawdy humor. Yet the scene is unsettlingly evocative of a gang rape. And there's no missing that this child is born into the line of fire. Again, survival is the theme. Next to killing, surviving is the soldier's principal concern.

Other filmmakers have depicted the Omaha Beach landing with a better arsenal of special effects, but a simple detail in "The Big Red One" makes the scene unforgettable: blood-tinged waves washing over the watch on a dead soldier's wrist.

Fuller had an eye for lurid details. Often referred to as a "tabloid filmmaker," his days as a copyboy and a crime reporter inform his work. Reporters who must grind out copy daily hunt for the detail in each story that sets it apart — and as a filmmaker, Fuller uses his creative license to gorge his stories with high-octane versions of the details he coveted as a reporter. An officer losing one of his testicles ("that's why they gave you two"); the soldiers serenaded at night by the sexy, taunting voice of a German propaganda radio personality; Marvin sparing one of Hitler's boy scouts, but not before giving him a spanking. There are many jaw-dropping moments, yet the film does not lack good pacing or contrast, and reaches beyond sensationalism.

Movies about war usually can be divided into two camps, pro-war or anti-war. "The Big Red One," based loosely on Samuel Fuller's experiences in the fighting first, is neither, and although not especially political, it's unequivocally pro-Allies. "The real glory of war is surviving," is the film's tagline and one of its most memorable quotes. If "The Big Red One" were a newspaper article, that would be the quote in big type.
— Becky

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2009-08-12T03:43:00.000-04:00

Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

DIRECTOR: Bert I. Gordon
WRITER: Bert I. Gordon, George W. Yates
CAST: John Hoyt, John Agar, June Kenney
SPECIAL EFFECTS: Bert I. Gordon
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ernest Laszlo
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Sci-fi, horror, cult.
MISCELLANY: 79m; bw; on DVD

A lonely dollmaker shrinks people he senses are about to abandon him, using the science of a film projector. Somehow, he is able to store his charges in glass tubes and revive them when he gets the urge to throw parties, serving bubbly wine in itsy-bitsy cups.

Freakish images make this film — a woman bathing in a coffee can, a cat wiggling out of a matchbox, a man thrashing a puppet on a marionette stage. The special effects are OK, at least for the scenes that are supposed to be indoors. The attempts at "realism" are uneven, as you would expect from a low-budget rush job. Proportions are not always logical, but the simple shots work surprisingly well.

The plot resorts to some of camp's most notorious cliches: the defiance of science; the first-date marriage proposal; the open-minded policeman who works around the clock.

Going into B-movies, you expect to have your intelligence insulted, but I couldn't dismiss curiosity about the fate of the doll people who were left on the shelf for the entire film.

"Attack of the Puppet People" is a sensational title. There's no attack. Maybe one was intended, because the movie halts abruptly, as if the filmmakers unexpectedly ran out of time and money and called it a wrap. The brisk 79 minutes at least saves the audience from growing weary.

John Hoyt pulls out a genuinely creepy performance as the dollmaker who complains of loneliness, but when an old pal visits, blows him off in favor of the obedient cast of "friends" he has assembled. Friendship, we see, is not what he craves. If only Facebook or MySpace were around in those days, maybe the doll people would have been spared.
— Becky

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2009-08-11T13:15:00.001-04:00

Sleep, My Love (1948)

DIRECTOR: Douglas Sirk
PRODUCERS: Mary Pickford, Buddy Rogers
WRITERS: St. Clair McKelway, Leo Rosten
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Joseph A. Valentine
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: Claudette Colbert, Robert Cummings, Don Ameche
GENRE: Noir, drama
MISCELLANY: 97m; on DVD

"Sleep, My Love" opens with New York socialite Alison Courtland waking up on a train to Boston with no recollection of how she got there. Meanwhile, her husband, Richard, is reporting her missing to police, and his veneer of concern already is nauseating.

Although the film presents Alison's psychological state as questionable at first, the audience in 1948 had probably seen enough of these "women in jeopardy" films to spot right away that Dick is trying to drive his wife mad. The real mystery is why, how and whether he will succeed.

Alison is escorted home by a friend of a friend, Bruce Elcott, who slightly tones down the flirting when he discovers she is married. It's funny he didn't think to look for a wedding ring, because Bruce is otherwise uncannily observant, displaying an eagle eye as he uncovers the scheme against Alison.

Such discrepancies of character and plot exist throughout "Sleep, My Love," which can be disconcerting for a modern viewer who expects a higher level of sophistication and "believability" than many forties' films delivered. Yet for the viewer willing to suspend cynicism and accept chivalry and innocence for a spell, (and disregard that Sirk himself deemed this work a failure), "Sleep, My Love" proves to be one of the more entertaining films in the noir canon, particularly through the mood it expresses with its deep-focus, high-contrast photography constantly revealing different perspectives and angles.

Almost every shot hints at what lies beyond. Through mirrors, doorways, windows, winding staircases, we get a sense of worlds colliding.

In a single shot in a doorway, we see both the comfort of a luxury home and the rainy street outside; where each character stands in relation to the door informs the story.

Another shot situates us on the street, looking up at a model in the window of a photographer's studio; it's followed by a shot that places us in the studio, behind the model, looking down at the street.

It's jarring, as we become accustomed to a space, to follow the camera out a window or through a door and glimpse another world. The balcony to Alison's plush bedroom, for example, commands views of the Queensboro Bridge. Her conservatory, which she refers to as "the jungle," overlooks an outdoor garden, casting ambiguity about where each space ends.

"Sleep, My Love" carries us to unexpected places. For no apparent reason, we're treated to a Chinese-American wedding. As a traditional orchestra plays, (not the "Oriental Riff," thankfully), Alison and Bruce dance under a tree aglow with lanterns. Alison gets smashed, and struggles to define and articulate her feelings for Bruce. "You're my very good friend," she stammers with a bright smile after awkwardly comparing Bruce to Dick. Of course in a movie such as this, we trust that fate, rather than any conscious move on Alison's part, will thrust her into the arms of the "good guy," although at several points, while unaware of her husband's machinations, she expresses dissatisfaction with her relationship. The wedding segment runs parallel to a scene showing another couple dancing in a seedy, out-of-the-way joint. The wedding vignette is slightly exotic and sweet, fateful; its sister scene, dirty and furtive, calculating.

The more I watch these "damsel in distress" noirs, the more I'm convinced that they enjoyed popularity with women in the forties and fifties because their depiction of villainous husbands hit a chord: not just fear of marriage but marital unhappiness. At a time when being single or divorced was not considered respectable and pressure to wed (and wed early) was tremendous, a masochistic wish fulfillment fantasy plays out. A woman at this time who left her husband risked condemnation from family, friends, society, even herself. But, these films seem to suggest an alternative to the stigma of divorce. If her husband were subjecting her to emotional abuse, then maybe a dashing stranger, or a male friend, would rush to her rescue. Then of course she couldn't be blamed for falling into the interloper's arms; they would get married — and start the cycle all over again? Not that anyone would really wish for such a scenario, but these "damsel in distress" fantasies, or gothic melodramas, do have a familiar ring for women, who are fed fairy tales from childhood. The depiction of "ball-and-chain" wives likewise justifies the fantasies of restless husbands who feel marriage is a sentence.

Although some characters in "Sleep, My Love" seem miscast, I thought it added to the charm. Claudette Colbert as Alison is clownishly painted, over-coiffed and old-fashioned next to Hazel Brooks, the film's chain-smoking femme fatale, who projects an icy, minimal glamor with her mane of loose finger waves, cat eyes and lingerie chic. I think Alison is supposed to be alluringly adorable when she's drunk but instead is interminably silly and high-maintenance. Robert Cummings as Bruce is more convincing when behaving as a rakish flirt than as a smitten Prince Charming. Don Ameche as Dick nails the insincere husband but his heart doesn't seem to be in slumming it, either. George Coulouris plays a mean creep. Raymond Burr as the law is spot-on.

— Becky

RELATED ARTICLES:
• The Chase (1946), Robert Cummings to the rescue again, but this "women in jeopardy" noir is from the male point of view. One of the more eccentric in a series of noirs featuring returning veterans, "The Chase" blurs the line between dream and waking life.
• Femme fatale, gothic heroine: Extreme female archetypes in cinema. A concept put forth in a book by Helen Hanson, "Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film," liberates discussion about those dusty damsels-in-distress of forties and fifties cinema who have been overshadowed by the dames of noir.
• Dark Waters (1944), noir set on the Louisiana bayou fits more aptly in the gothic melodrama category with its female lead, a damsel in distress.

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2009-08-10T00:04:00.000-04:00

Ganja & Hess (1973)

DIRECTOR: Bill Gunn
WRITER: Bill Gunn
PHOTOGRAPHY: James Hinton
MUSIC: Sam Waymon
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn, Sam Waymon
GENRE: Horror, blaxploitation
MISCELLANY: 110m; on DVD

When the studio commissioned "Ganja & Hess," the expectation was a blaxploitation horror flick that would cash in on the commercial success of 1972's "Blacula." Playwright Bill Gunn, uninterested in such an assignment but hungry for the opportunity to direct, resolved to make a vampire movie the vehicle of his artistic vision.

The result is a challenging film that failed commercially and critically.

Here is a vampire movie that uses the word victim instead of vampire. A "blaxploitation" hero who is intellectual, wealthy and suburban.

Intensely visual and aural with dialogue and turns of plot that often feel spontaneous and non-linear, "Ganja & Hess" is not so action-packed as its horror brethren but is far creepier. It is arthouse psychotronica in the vein of "Suspiria" with the rhythm of free jazz and an underlying bluesy moan. The tapestry of disturbing images and sounds seeps into the psyche: Plastic-wrapped corpses dotting fields of golden grass; porcelain, linoleum and glass cups stained sanguine; a buzzing noise to signal blood cravings; childish tribal chanting that is sped up and slowed down; twisted religious imagery.

Sadness tinges the horror. Gunn paints the vampire as an addict, and takes pains to show his struggle. We watch Hess Green, doctor of anthropology and geology, whose emotions at first seem pressed behind museum glass, sink into desperation and self-hate, then reach for redemption.

When a troubled assistant, played by Gunn, stabs him with an artifact from the ancient blood-drinking civilization of Myrthia, Hess awakens from death, immortal and thirsty. He finds nonviolent ways to sate his need until bloodlust explodes in a moment of self-defense. Then the assistant's beautiful and opportunistic wife, Ganja, comes looking for her husband, and falls quickly into bed with Hess.

Pioneering black photographer James Hinton shot "Ganja & Hess" in soft, saturated 16mm. The soundtrack, which ranges from gospel fervor and bluesy soul to chants and trance-inducing noise, was scored and performed by Nina Simone's brother Sam Waymon, who also plays a reverend.

The Complete Edition DVD restores Gunn's vision, which was hacked up by the studio and packaged under various lurid pseudonyms over the years, including "Blood Couple," "Double Possession" and the puzzling "Vampires of Harlem."
— Becky

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2009-08-02T23:57:00.000-04:00

Darktown Strutters (1975)

DIRECTOR: William Witney
PRODUCER: Gene Corman
WRITER: George Armitage
PHOTOGRAPHY: Joao Fernandes
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: Trina Parks, Roger E. Mosley
GENRE: Comedy, musical, blaxploitation, action, suspense, comic book ...
MISCELLANY: 90m

In the quest to rescue their leader's mother, members of the Darktown Strutters motorcycle gang cross paths with:

• A bumbling police force inspired by Keystone Kops.
• An ice cream man who snorts coke out of a pistol, and stashes his woman in an igloo inside his "pot-sicle" freezer.
• The Dramatics, dancing, and mouthing "What You See is What You Get" in a disco jail cell.
• The Newcomers, crooning "Don't Have To Shop Around" at the park.
• VD, a mangy wildman who infects on contact.
• A pimp in a casbah trailer.
• A Klan biker gang.
• A barbecue restaurant mogul known as "the colonel" who has invented a "negro making machine" in the hopes of expanding his customer base and locking up the black vote. He lives in a mansion with cotton shrubs on the lawn and a prison full of black leaders in the cellar.

Offensive stuff, but "Darktown Strutters" trades in stereotypes, ripping them from the routine and recasting them in a grotesque light that exposes their essential absurdity.

Syreena, who leads the Strutter pack in her lemon-yellow, winged helmet and matching polyester pantsuit, romps through the streets of Watts and interior sets that scream carnival castoff. Over the course of the film, she:

• Disguises herself as a nun.
• Disguises herself as a cop.
• Crashes her three-wheeled bike through doors and fences.
• Whips pies at Marines, giving them meringue white-face.
• Dispels the colonel's pig-masked henchmen with pancakes.

Through these zany vignettes, the movie manages to hold up a funhouse mirror to social problems, such as police brutality, phony corporate philanthropy and drug dealers targeting children.

Many scenes are satirical or twists on cliches, but others are just wonderfully weird: the Newcomers' sublime doo-wop stroll; the Dramatics' disco interlude; a conversation on a staircase interrupted by a man in a bunny suit, toting a giant carrot and muttering "snobs" under his breath.

"Darktown Strutters" could be a live, ghetto version of a comic strip or a Looney Tunes episode — or a cartoonish take on one of Chester Himes' Harlem detective stories (from the Watts side). If that sounds appealing, see this movie. It will have you dropping your jaw, shaking your head and doing the bump.

— Becky

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2009-07-27T14:13:00.000-04:00

Made in U.S.A. (1966)

DIRECTOR: Jean-Luc Godard
WRITERS: Jean-Luc Godard, Donald E. Westlake (novel)
PHOTOGRAPHY: Raoul Coutard
COUNTRY: France
CAST: Anna Karina, Laszlo Szabo, Yves Afonso
GENRE: Avant-garde, crime
MISCELLANY: 85m; French with subtitles; on DVD

The typical American movie set in Paris is filled with characters speaking English — with a few common French phrases thrown in for authenticite — and behaving like Americans, save a few gallic mannerisms ala Maurice Chevalier. In "Made in U.S.A.," Jean-Luc Godard flips the formula.

This existential mystery is set in an Atlantic Cite where everyone speaks French, where Hollywood characters such as Daisy Kenyon and Ruby Gentry are paged in a club, and where British singer Marianne Faithfull sitting in a bar sings "As Tears Go By" in English.

A deconstruction of crime movies, "Made in U.S.A." stars Godard's soon to be ex-wife Anna Karina as a detective probing her lover's death in high style, pulling a chic little gat out of the trenchcoat she wears over a revolving array of mod dresses, all in screaming colors. The film's pop-art cartoonish aesthetic belies the treachery and murder being depicted.

Unlike the American crime genre it's homaging, "Made in U.S.A." paints an unsolvable mystery that grows murkier as the unconventional investigation progresses, every answer begetting more questions. The convoluted political plot gets tangled up in the soul-searching journey of the heroine fighting to uphold her ideals.

The bar scene is a good example of the way the movie flirts with the absurd but refuses to commit to it. The bartender urges a patron who declares sentences "useless" to "stop throwing words around. ... Do something with them." The scene evokes a vignette in Godard's "My Life to Live," in which Karina debates the limits of language with a philosopher.

Here, the patron starts shooting off sophisms:

"The floor is stubbed out on the cigarette."

"The tables are on the glasses."

"The window looks into the young lady's eyes. I open them, and the door sits on the stool."

"I am what you are."

"He is not what we are."

"They are what you are."

And so on.

Faithfull's a capella rendition of "As Tears Go By," a fragile lament of lost innocence, follows this barrage of the "meaningless," and although not explicitly a rebuttal, offers a striking contrast. It sounds vulnerable, meaningful.

As Faithfull quietly sings, Karina smiles knowingly and in voiceover, accepts "ethics" and resolves to face her "responsibility toward others."

"Either this life is nothing, or it must be everything," Karina concludes, narrating one of the film's many magnificent widescreen closeups of her expressive face.

The soundtrack of "Made in U.S.A." plays an active role in the plot (what there is of a plot). There are echoes of Tati, as throughout the film a cacophony of modern noise — particularly airplanes lifting off — foils communication.

"Made in U.S.A." manages to be goofy and serious, poignant and casual, personal and political, revealing and obscure. Perhaps it's fitting that it defies description.
— Becky

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2009-07-24T01:12:00.000-04:00

Bigger Than Life (1956)

DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray
PRODUCER: James Mason
WRITERS: Cyril Hume, Richard Maibaum
PHOTOGRAPHY: Joe MacDonald
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: James Mason, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau, Christopher Olsen
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 95m; CinemaScope

Behind Ed's reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror lies the purple vial filled with cortisone, the "miracle drug" keeping him alive. Under its sway, he feels euphoric, "10 feet tall."

He admires his reflection, smoking, fussing with his hair, as his wife, Lou, pours hot water in the tub for him. When he tosses an order at her, her temper flares and she slams the medicine cabinet shut, shattering the glass.

When his wife fails to be docile, Ed, and his reflection, fall to pieces, revealing the fragility of his inflated ego and the superficiality of his identity as the patriarch of a nuclear family in the fifties.

In "Bigger Than Life," Nicholas Ray paints mid-century suburban pathos on a widescreen canvas in lurid colors and deep shadows. The film is as much an indictment of sick social constructs as it is a miracle drug expose or a harrowing tale of addiction.

Ed Avery, a schoolteacher with a rare disease, is given a year to live unless he consents to take an experimental drug. The cortisone kills the pain all right, but unleashes an alpha male monster. Even on the recommended dosage, Ed is flying on what his friend Wally calls a "big shot" trip. He takes his wife on a spending spree that his son calls "foolish." In the store, he bosses around the sales girls and dictates what dresses his wife will try on.

At work, a teacher he once treated as an equal becomes a sexual object. On parent-teacher night, he launches into a tirade about the need for tauter discipline and a tougher curriculum, declaring childhood a disease and education its cure. "We're breeding a race of moral midgets," he says. Most of the parents seem unsure how to respond.

It's interesting that Ed uses a medical analogy. If he feels emasculated by the doctors and at their mercy, he soon cures that, too, as his doctor impersonation takes literal form at a pharmacy, where he brazenly scams more pills.

Ed's son Richie bears the brunt of his father's instability. As Ed spirals deeper into addiction and psychosis, he demands perfection from his son. "Do you want to be a man?" he asks Richie, who is lying at his feet after missing a football. Understandably, the boy pauses before assenting.

The terror of life with an addict is palpable as we watch Lou and Richie walk on eggshells. As the monster inside of Ed grows, the house gets suffocatingly small.

I've often complained in this blog about movies not getting the attention they deserve, but this one especially blows the mind. From the photography to the stunning performances, this is a masterpiece, certainly one of the best American movies of the fifties. I hope a U.S. release is forthcoming. For now, the British Film Institute has published it on DVD.
— Becky

RELATED ARTICLE:
• Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. OK, "Bigger Than Life" is a masterpiece and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" is trash, but they deal with addiction in similar ways and each offer snapshots of the fifties.

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2009-07-21T01:20:00.000-04:00

Dragon Gate Inn | Longmen Kezhan (1967)

DIRECTOR: King Hu
WRITER: King Hu
MUSIC: Lan-Ping Chow
COUNTRY: Taiwan
CAST: Chun Shi, Shangguan Lingfeng, Bai Ying, Chien Tsao
GENRE: Action, martial arts, wuxia
MISCELLANY: 110m; Eastmancolor; Mandarin, with subtitles

The first eunuch to the emperor packs an enormous inferiority complex. He has rival Wu Ming beheaded and his son and daughter deported, but fearing revenge plots to kill the children, too. As Wu's family is marched into exile, the eunuch's gang lies in wait at a border inn, where they've killed most of the staff and instructed the two remaining servants to turn everyone away.

Enter Xiao, who refuses to be intimidated. To the displeasure of the quivering waiter and the grimacing thugs, he sits down and orders noodles. When his food arrives, one of the eunuch's agents says he wants noodles, too, but not a fresh bowl, Xiao's bowl.

The resolution of this conflict is pure King Hu.

So many trademarks of Hu's early films, "Dragon Gate Inn," "Come Drink with Me" and "Touch of Zen," have become kung fu movie cliches.

• The female warrior disguised as a man (though it's obvious to the viewer that she's a woman).
• The choreography inspired by Peking Opera.
• A group of potential friends or foes, cloaking their identity and intentions, gathered at a restaurant/inn where eating or sleeping — although seemingly the natural thing to do in such a setting — might prove fatal.

Some elements of Hu's trend-setting films have been emulated less than others, such as his refusal to exploit his female warriors sexually. Like their male counterparts, they are on the path to enlightenment.

Romance is transitory in Hu's films. When attraction develops between the hero and heroine, if it is allowed to consummate, duty pulls the couple apart.

There is a poignant scene in which Miss Chu and Xiao, in the midst of an attack, have a moment alone at the inn. Although he could use her help fighting, they reason she must lead Wu's children to safety. Before departing, Miss Chu tries to say something to Xiao, who is looking out the window for enemies. She bows her head, torn. Standing on the inn's balcony, she looks back, but Xiao waves her away. After she's gone, his expression changes. He reaches out his hand. Seconds later he is interrupted, and the moment of longing is over.

The photography in Hu's films is breathtaking. He embraces nature, particularly sunlight. In "Touch of Zen," light filtering through the bamboo trees becomes a design element, not something to overcome; lens flare, too, which he uses thematically.

Hu's choreography also is something to behold. More interested in the tension and consequences of violence than geysers of blood and severed limbs, Hu uses extreme closeups as well as soaring acrobatics in his fight scenes. Inspired by Chinese opera, the sparring is rhythmic, punctuated by traditional music.

Hu's movies are as entertaining as any blockbuster, where a good ass-kicking is not complete without one-liners. In the manner of a true Hollywood action hero, Xiao laces his showdown with the eunuch with trash talk — and aims below the belt.

"Dragon Gate Inn" was a box office smash in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Yet it's difficult to track down a copy of the original — maybe because it was remade in 1992, or because it shares so much in common with "Come Drink With Me" and "Touch of Zen." Although the three movies share many features, they can be enjoyed on their own merits. Had Hu made 10 movies in the same period, I'd watch them all.
— Becky

RELATED ARTICLE:
• VIEWING | Touch of Zen. Capsule review of King Hu's masterpiece "Touch of Zen," paired with a video clip.

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2009-07-19T23:29:00.000-04:00

Ich Will! | I Want (2008)

DIRECTOR: Kenneth Anger
WRITER: Kenneth Anger
EDITOR: Kenneth Anger
COUNTRY: USA
SOUNDTRACK: Ninth Symphony, Anton Bruckner
GENRE: Short, fantasy, avant garde, archival Nazi footage edited
MISCELLANY: 35m; color and tinted bw

"Ich Will!" is a 35-minute, sepia-toned montage of Hitler Youth footage shot by the Nazis in the thirties.

Kenneth Anger arranges the historical footage into a fantasy in three parts. The story opens in a Nazi youth camp and dissolves in a rally presided over by Hitler, but consists mostly of marching in between.

In Part 1, a boy scout shunned by his comrades climbs above the campgrounds and hides from an adult. When he looks down, the tents look like toy pyramids. In another vignette, children march straight off a roof, to safety nets Anger reveals after the fall.

As the ponderous parade segment steps off, youths morph into adults. Anger finds disturbing visual patterns, emphasizing drills and rituals. As the mass of humanity swells, faces become less distinct. The triangular lines of campfires and tents from earlier clips are echoed in rows of pointy flags and diagonally thrusted salutes. Anger interrupts the tramping tedium with psychedelic bursts of color.

There is a growing sense of horror as the parade picks up more and more members.

In the rally sequence, Hitler waves to throngs teeming in a stadium. The marchers form swastikas and the Fuhrer's initials. Watching the human formations, I wondered whether the Nazis were fans of Busby Berkeley movies.

"Ich Will!" appears to be the most ambitious film from the series "New Films: Kenneth Anger," which I caught recently at the Anthology Film Archives in New York.

From the forties through the seventies, Anger blazed a path of cinematic poetry, melding pop culture and mythology. Instead of trying to recapture the visual glory of his masterworks, over the past decade Anger has embraced a cheap video aesthetic.

The less interesting films in the series consist of two slide shows of occultist Aleister Crowley's paintings and drawings; an erotically charged take on a soccer workout; an ode to Elliott Smith and a surfer friend, both with the flavor of home movies; and a graphic "sex tape" that is fitting for the YouTube/Facebook/MySpace/Twitter age.

"Mouse Heaven" (2005), a montage of Mickey Mouse merchandise, contains some humorous and thought-provoking juxtapositions, and one train of thought leads to an iconic Hitchcock scene. "Uniform Attraction" (2009) rambles from cheesy eighties military commercials, to recruits working out in tight shorts and yelling in each other's faces, to still photographs of children toting toy guns. It explodes in pixelated Iraq war footage set to heavy metal. I can't remember the title of the final movie shown, but it's a piece of shock cinema that takes pornography to its logical next step.

— Becky

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2009-07-17T01:53:00.000-04:00

Borderline (1930)

DIRECTOR: Kenneth MacPherson
PRODUCER: The Pool Group
COUNTRY: UK
CAST: Paul Robeson, Eslanda Robeson, Hilda Doolittle, Gavin Arthur
WRITERS: Kenneth MacPherson, Hilda Doolittle
GENRE: Avant garde, silent, drama
MISCELLANY: 63m; silent; on DVD

How many films in 1930 featured black actors in dignified roles? Dared touch interracial relationships and homosexuality?

At a time when white filmmakers wanted black actors to chuckle and shuffle, Kenneth MacPherson shot the iconic Paul Robeson mostly from below, giving him a godlike stature. He towers over the rest of the cast, and in one scene sneers while his superiority over a white romantic rival is made unmistakable.

When Robeson's Pete learns his girlfriend Adah has been having an affair with Thorne, a white man, he seems amused. Not so Thorne's wife Astrid, played by Hilda Doolittle, the feminist poet better known as H.D.

Astrid seesaws between dependency and hatred. She slips into despair then explodes with rage. Down to the high cheekbones, she reminds me of Katharine Hepburn in "Suddenly, Last Summer," while the mercurial Thorne, with his tousled hair, tortured eyes and turtlenecks, has a James Dean quality. Adah, meanwhile, remains enigmatic, her emotions muted.

After the credits roll, Doolittle's volatility and Robeson's cool majesty remain vivid, even if the story overall is elusive.

"Borderline," according to the filmmakers, attempts to show the "extreme psychological states of the characters," largely through Eisenstein-esque bursts of montage. MacPherson also had an adventurous sense of composition in which cutting faces off at the nose was not unusual. He also set actors against expressive backgrounds, such as stone walls, cloudy skies and patterned wallpaper, and lingered on their faces.

Although "Borderline" seems more focused on expressing inner turmoil than making political statements, it does not shy away from showing racism. Even the seemingly liberal lesbian guesthouse manager evicts Pete when push comes to shove. However, I wondered whether the film sought to condemn interracial relationships, mainly because of the way it kept juxtaposing shots of Pete and Adah with nature. Shot in Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the glorious landscape ultimately conveys the harmony between the lovers. But is there a deeper statement being made about what is natural?

The jazzy Courtney Pine score complements the action and keeps things feeling lively when the movie drags, but it's distracting at times.

MacPherson and Doolittle were members of the Pool Group, a group of artists that published a film journal called Close Up. "Borderline" is their only surviving film.
— Becky

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2009-07-13T00:31:00.000-04:00

Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)

DIRECTOR: Hans Richter
PRODUCER: Hans Richter
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: Jack Bittner, Dorothy Griffith
PHOTOGRAPHY: Arnold Eagle
MUSIC DIRECTOR: Louis Applebaum
GENRE: Avant garde, fantasy
MISCELLANY: 99m; on DVD, region 2

Avant-garde films leading up to 1947, with notable exceptions, were brief, black-and-white and silent. "Dreams That Money Can Buy" not only is color and feature-length, but it weds some of the most prominent artists of the surrealist and dada movements.

The seven dreams featured in the film are derived from "drawings, objects and suggestions" by Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Alexander Calder and Hans Richter. Music plays an important role and is supplied by composers such as John Cage and Darius Milhaud. The film was shot over three years on a budget of $25,000, mainly in a Manhattan loft.

Richter's story is the framing narrative: A struggling veteran named Joe sets up a practice creating dreams for his patients. Each session features a dream conceived by a different artist, varying from proto-pop art to abstract.

The soundtrack was recorded separately. Characters' words, without much distinction between thought and speech, are expressed through voiceovers that often sound tongue-in-cheek. Joe, for example, "speaks" in a heavy-handed beat poetry style.

Richter's sequences echo film noir, but playfully. Hollywood borrowed ideas from surrealism in earnest, and those ideas took on new life in the context of mainstream movies; likewise here, Richter cannibalizes noir, but when he's through adapting it, it's a different beast.

After the war, many noirs featured the returning disillusioned veteran, and more than one blurred the line between nightmare sequences and reality. Here, although "reality" is surprisingly coherent considering the filmmakers are surrealists, the conscious world is only marginally more trustworthy than the subconscious, casting the disturbed hero in a radically different light than even the more eccentric veteran noirs like "Somewhere in the Night" and "The Chase." When the walls move in on Joe, it's literal.

For a film chasing something as subjective as dreams, the emphasis on objects is more pronounced than in mainstream films that profess to deal in objective reality. Mise en scene is free of the clutter of authenticity; every object in the frame has artistic significance. Its sets stripped to their essence, "Dreams That Money Can Buy" feels stark, impersonal. Even more unsettling, characters often behave irrationally. Not being able to relate with the characters, however, can be liberating. If we do not identify with them, our analysis of their behavior should not be so narcissistic — that is, until we learn the artists' language and recognize ourselves in a surprising new way.

One of my favorite sequences, "The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart," which you can watch in the clip above, satirizes materialistic love. Mannequin parts are manipulated to the strains of a saccharine-sounding tune sung by "torch" singer Libby Holman, with lyrics like: "Oh, Venus was born out of sea foam / Oh, Venus was born out of brine / But a girl of today / if she is Grade A / is assembled upon the assembly line."

My favorite part, though, is Max Ernst's "Desire," which is as darkly whimsical and voyeuristic as his collages. Other segments are more abstract, fetishizing puppets and shapes. In Man Ray's, a film audience mimics the on-screen action.

Avant-garde film often gets dismissed as pretentious, but "Dreams That Money Can Buy" playfully dodges such labels.
— Becky

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2009-07-05T14:19:00.000-04:00

Dark Waters (1944)

DIRECTOR: Andre de Toth
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: Merle Oberon, Franchot Tone, Thomas Mithell, Elisha Cook Jr., Rex Ingram
CINEMATOGRAPHY: John Mescall, Archie Stout
MUSIC: Miklos Rozsa
GENRE: Noir, gothic, romance
MISCELLANY: 90m; bw; VHS

Noir may conjure images of city streets bathed in neon, but some of the best noirs take place outside of the asphalt jungle.

In Andre de Toth's "Dark Waters," moonlight filters through the kudzu and lacy plantation railings of a Louisiana bayou, and the murky waters and creeping vines reflect the deception and suspicion lurking behind smiling faces.

In a recent post, we explored the shades between noir and gothic melodrama. "Dark Waters" can be classified as a noir but better fits the gothic category. Not only does it have a female lead, but she is a damsel in distress trapped in a mansion that architecturally expresses her fears.

After heiress Leslie Calvin, played by Merle Oberon, survives her parents in a boat sinking, she finds herself traumatized and alone, save an aunt and uncle who invite her to convalesce at their plantation. But when she arrives, her doddering relatives are hardly comforting, and the household is being controlled by two shady characters, Mr. Sydney and Cleeve, the latter played by perennial kicked-around sidekick Elisha Cook Jr. Fortunately, a country doctor who fancies Leslie provides an outsider's perspective, even if he's a bit overbearing himself.

"Dark Waters" brims with unfulfilled promise with its stark photography, dark score and swampy setting. The actors do little things that make them convincing as menacing eccentrics. Yet the script's rhythm seems off; tension never develops. There are too many episodes that halt abruptly, too many harsh cuts from night to morning.

Oberon does what she can, but the script's treatment of Leslie's psychological journey lacks depth. Leslie randomly teeters from helpless to determined. One minute she wishes she was underwater with her parents, the next she is the belle of the cajun dance party, only to be thrown back randomly into the throes of despair.

Although the pacing proves fatal to the movie as a whole, there are plenty of atmosphere-rich segments that make submerging yourself in the "bayou noir" world of "Dark Waters" worthwhile.
— Becky

RELATED ARTICLE:
• Femme fatale, gothic heroine: Extreme female archetypes in cinema. A concept put forth in a book by Helen Hanson, "Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film," liberates discussion about those dusty damsels-in-distress of forties and fifties cinema who have been overshadowed by the dames of noir.

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2009-06-29T14:29:00.000-04:00

Million Dollar Legs (1932)

DIRECTOR: Edward Cline
COUNTRY: USA
WRITERS: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Nicholas T. Barrows, Henry Myers
CAST: W.C. Fields, Jack Oakie, Susan Fleming, Andy Clyde, Lyda Roberti, Hugh Herbert
GENRE: Comedy
MISCELLANY: 64m; bw; VHS

A year before Groucho Marx's reign over Fredonia in "Duck Soup" made a mockery of government, W.C. Fields spoofed politics as president of Klopstokia in "Million Dollar Legs." The Marxes' war comedy, a sublime barrage of the absurd, was poorly received upon release but has evolved into a classic in critics' eyes. Time has not been as kind to Fields' lampoon of the Olympics, which has yet to be released on DVD (at least in the U.S. Region).

"Million Dollar Legs" is not nearly as frenetic as "Duck Soup," but it may be more bizarre, Harpo's transcendental trench coat notwithstanding.

Several W.C. Fields films have been cited as examples of Hollywood surrealism, particularly "International House" and "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break." "Million Dollar Legs" deserves a spot on that list. Dream logic prevails in the film to wonderful effect.

Consider the scene in which American brush salesman Migg Tweeny collides with the president's daughter while running to catch the boat out of Klopstokia. As if it were a mating ritual, they start using Tweeny's wares to brush each other off. Tweeny says: "Gee, I'd like to meet you. I'd like to know your name. Well, to sum it all up, I love you." Actor Jack Oakie's delivery is anti-intuitive, placing emphasis on what feels like the wrong words. Hardly any time lapses before Angela (all of Klopstokia's women are named Angela) delivers this line: "What are you selling? Yes. I love you, too." This is the kind of dialog one expects, 60 years later, from Guy Maddin films. (The movie even has the ethnographic flavor of "Saddest Music in the World" with its footage from the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, which Klopstokia — chief exports: goats and nuts — enters in the hopes of filling its empty coffers.)

Pols scheme to topple Fields, who established his right to rule through superior arm wrestling skills. Spies hang on coat hooks and emerge from sliding wall panels. One-upping the eyes-cut-out-of-the-painting routine, which already was overdone in 1932, one agent recedes into the wall shadow-box style. In another proto-Scooby Doo moment, a patch of land descends to the Cabinet's underground lair. There the lawmakers plot to enlist vamp Mata Machree to drive Klopstokia's Olympic team to distraction. With her serpentine dance and cliche accent, Mata gets hearts a-thumping. As she leans against a Rodin statue, even the Thinking Man comes to life and asks, "How can I concentrate?"

If all that is not weird enough, there's the president's majordomo racing around in a goat skin — "What I always use when traveling incognito," Fields explains — and the Klopstokian love song, "Wolf Bloogle Jig."

Unfortunately for fans of Fields, he shares the spotlight with romantic leads Oakie and Susan Fleming (who was soon to be Harpo Marx's wife). Also, the VHS version I watched suffers from choppy editing and a slightly muted soundtrack.

Although it predates "Duck Soup," "Million Dollar Legs" has been overshadowed by the Marx Brothers classic. It may not be in the same league, but because it's in the same realm — a fictional kingdom ruled by a comic — it has paid the price of obscurity.
— Becky

RELATED ARTICLE:
• Laurel and Hardy, an appreciation.

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2009-06-23T03:46:00.000-04:00

VIEW | Femme fatale, gothic heroine:
Extreme female archetypes in cinema
The top actresses of American cinema in the forties and fifties inevitably played an extreme female archetype, the femme fatale or the damsel in distress, and in many cases, both, for these roles were staples of two popular types of cinema at the time, the film noir and the gothic melodrama.

In the typical noir, a beautiful woman wields her sex appeal fatally. In the typical gothic, the heroine's murderous spouse batters her psychologically. Take the image above: On the left, Joan Bennett plays the femme fatale in Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street," and on the right, she plays the wife who suspects her husband wants to kill her in the same director's "Secret Beyond the Door." In crossing the threshold between noir and gothic, Bennett was in good company.

Katharine Hepburn, who transcended stereotypes in some of her most famous roles is reduced to a victim in the little-known gothic "Undercurrent." It's unsettling to watch Joan Crawford play the fool in "Sudden Fear," a film often billed as noir that bears hallmarks of the gothic melodrama. Perhaps most startling is Barbara Stanwyck, who perfected the femme fatale in "Double Indemnity," pulling the wool from her eyes as she is poisoned slowly by husband Humphrey Bogart in "The Two Mrs. Carrolls."

Doubtless, the noir villain has aged more gracefully than the gothic heroine.

The woman who relies on her sex appeal to get ahead is not a quaint character today, but the passive heroine of movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion" and George Cukor's "Gaslight" is regarded as old-fashioned. The modern viewer of a gothic cringes watching women in such roles because they are not "politically correct." That same viewer might champion the femme fatale because it seems less threatening, women abusing men — maybe because, as the patronizing joke goes, men enjoy being mistreated by beautiful women.

Still, the femme fatale was liberated ahead of her time. She rejected domesticity and refused to defer to men long before such behavior was acceptable. The femme fatale cannot escape ill repute, but is the gothic female — who finds the respectable institution of marriage a prison — much better off? Perhaps fear of marriage can account for the popularity enjoyed by women-in-distress films in the forties. Societal pressure to tie the knot has subsided since, and consequently the gothic no longer feels relevant and the femme fatale has lost her edge, though none of her appeal.

In contrast to the noir's pursuit of realism, gothics wallow in fantasy and romanticism. We wonder: Is the woman imagining her husband's murderous intent? Shrouded in a haze of symbolism and psychological uncertainty, the gothics unfold like fairy tales.

Yet even femme fatales are fantasy figures, glamorized (probably more in retrospect) because they project power. Meanwhile, we shrink from the gothic females who expose our deepest fears and desires, revealing weakness we are reluctant to face.

A noir can exist without a femme fatale, but a gothic needs its female lead, and as a "women's picture" it is free to explore a spectrum of emotions: love, hate, fear, even hysteria. Femme fatales, on the other hand, must suppress emotion to survive in the masculine world of noir. In her rare display of emotion, she pretends to be a damsel in distress.

Gothics dwell in a privileged realm, where characters have the luxury of fear. Noir characters on the margins of society exhibit a boldness rooted in a resignation to danger, even death. Just as the gothic taps into fear, the noir buries it, painting lonely characters, devoid of faith, physically powerful and unencumbered by morality.

I recently discovered a book online called "Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film" by Helen Hanson. Although I haven't read it yet, the concept of the "female gothic" intrigued me because I had noticed many of the so-called "women's pictures" of the forties and early fifties featured murderous husbands, enough to merit a genre distinction. I am in the process of trying to track down a copy of the book.

Hanson's concept also inspired me to order several gothic melodramas I have been meaning to see: "Dark Waters" directed by Andre de Toth, "Experiment Perilous" directed by Jacques Tourneur and "Sleep, My Love" directed by Douglas Sirk.

I hope to view and write about those films soon. In the meantime, here's a list of gothic female films I can recommend, followed by a list of some noirs with my favorite femme fatales. Some directors and actors appear on both lists.

GOTHICS:
• The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947). Director: Peter Godfrey. Leads: Barbara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart.
• The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). Director: Fritz Lang. Leads: Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave.
• Suspicion (1941). Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Leads: Joan Fontaine and Carey Grant.
• Sudden Fear (1952). Director: David Miller. Leads: Joan Crawford, Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame.
• Undercurrent (1946). Director: Vincente Minnelli. Leads: Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum.
• Gaslight (1944). Director: George Cukor. Leads: Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotton.
• Caught (1949). Director: Max Ophuls. Leads: Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, James Mason.
• Dragonwyck (1946). Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Leads: Gene Tierney, Vincent Price.

NOIRS:
• The Maltese Falcon (1941). Director: John Huston. Leads: Mary Astor, Humphrey Bogart.
• Out of the Past (1947). Director: Jacques Tourneur. Leads: Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas.
• Scarlet Street (1945). Director: Fritz Lang. Leads: Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson and Dan Duryea.
• Too Late for Tears (1949). Director: Byron Haskin. Leads: Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea and Arthur Kennedy.
• Double Indemnity (1944). Director: Billy Wilder. Leads: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray.
• The Killers (1946). Director: Richard Siodmak. Leads: Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster.
• Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Director: John M. Stahl. Leads: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain.
• Gun Crazy (1950). Director: Joseph H. Lewis. Leads: Peggy Cummins, John Dall.

— Becky

RELATED REVIEWS:
• Dark Waters (1944), noir set on the Louisiana bayou fits more aptly in the gothic melodrama category with its female lead, a damsel in distress.
• The Furies (1950), western melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck.
• Gun Crazy (1950), an appreciation.

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2009-06-12T10:54:00.001-04:00

VIEW | Marilyn Monroe: Comedienne
It can be difficult to separate the icon from the actress where Marilyn Monroe is concerned. She strove her entire life to be taken seriously, by both critics and audiences, and only partially succeeded. In considering her artistic canon, author James Haspiel observed, "She had played a showgirl in just about every movie that she ever made." In her final interview, she pleaded with the reporter "not to make a joke of me," a plea that fell on deaf ears. Many still view or dismiss her as nothing more than a vapid pinup girl, easy on the eyes but sorely lacking in the chops department. While her attempts to stretch her abilities in serious dramas such as "Don't Bother to Knock" (1952), "Niagara" (1953) and "The Misfits" (1961) were noble but ultimately unsuccessful, Monroe used her sexy starlet persona to wonderful comedic effect in such classics as "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1953), "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953), "The Seven Year Itch" (1955), and "Some Like it Hot" (1959). Playing off of her reputation as a brainless breathy blonde, Monroe manages to create a perfect balance between voluptuousness and vulnerability: part wide-eyed innocent, part sultry vamp. She frequently plays the straight (wo)man, professing blissful ignorance as the fawning and bumbling men surrounding her go to increasingly absurd lengths to garner her fancy, or, in the case of "The Seven Year Itch," to remain immune to her considerable charms, which are on display in glorious Cinemascope. In "How to Marry a Millionaire," Monroe is the naïve member of an impressive troika of conniving gold diggers, along with steely pro Lauren Bacall and tart-tongued Betty Grable. Monroe plays Pola Debovoise, a woman who refuses to wear her glasses out of fear that the old adage about men seldom making passes is true. She thus spends quite a bit of the film walking into things and confusing several of the male characters, all to great comic effect. Her timing and natural gift for physical comedy are on full display, and she almost steals the film from veterans Bacall and Grable.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," released the same year, is a lavish musical co-starring Jane Russell in which Monroe plays the usual ditzy bombshell, though this time underneath the vapid exterior lies a shrewd young woman — Russell comments that "sometimes your brain amazes me" — who lusts after all things multi-caret. The audience never gets the feeling that Monroe's character Lorelei is manipulative or conniving, however, which would have lessened her appeal considerably. When she observes that "it's just as easy to marry a rich man as it is a poor man," the statement does not ring cold or materialistic, only reasonably logical. She is upfront about the financial support she expects in return for any relationship, and Lorelei's obsession with diamonds is a running gag that is referenced repeatedly, though never unkindly. As Russell, playing Lorelei's cynical, streetwise friend Dorothy puts it, "You're the only girl in the world that can stand on a stage with a spotlight in her eye and still see a diamond stuck in a man's pocket."

There is one priceless scene in the film where Lorelei gets stuck attempting to exit a room through the porthole. She is first spotted by young Henry Spofford III (George Winslow), an adult trapped in a child's body. She pleads for his assistance in extricating her, which he agrees to in part because, as he informs her, "You’ve got a lot of animal magnetism." Just then, Lorelei notices the impending arrival of Sir Francis Beekman (Charles Coburn), a rich, elderly gentleman on whom she has had designs. Spofford quickly covers the two of them with a blanket, so it appears that Lorelei is wrapped in the blanket, standing on a deck chair, instead of the more compromising position of being wedged in a porthole. Beekman then flirts with Lorelei and kisses what he believes to be her hand, which prompts a stern "Stop that" from the deep voiced Spofford.

"The Seven Year Itch" is probably most famous for providing the indelible image of Monroe standing on a subway grate, the wind billowing her skirt up around her thighs. The film itself is one of the great comedies of its time, or any other. Heavily censored from its original stage incarnation, the film still manages to insert a few knowing double entendres. Monroe, who never even gets a character name in the film (she is billed simply as "The Girl") is at her comic best here, delivering lines like "I was up there watering the plants … They don’t even have a hose so I was using the cocktail shaker" with wide-eyed wonderment. When, upon hearing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto she exclaims with breathy earnestness, "This is what they call classical music, isn't it? I can tell because there is no vocal," everyone is laughing except her — she's the only one not in on the joke. Were another actress to deliver that line, the laughter it received would be derisive, but with Monroe it never is— her naivete is endearing, not contemptible.

There is an amusing fantasy sequence featuring the above-mentioned concerto where Tom Ewell, the hapless, henpecked husband who lives downstairs from Monroe, mugs his way through the piece, in the guise of an urbane playboy. Monroe, sitting on the bench next to him, vamps and gesticulates her way through his performance, urging him on with an impassioned cry of "Don't stop! Don't ever stop!" The scene, and the film itself, works because Monroe is able to convey a playful sexuality that is never leering or base in its manifestations, but simply innocent and pure. Unlike the other pinup vixens of that era, like Jayne Mansfield or Mamie Van Doren, Monroe was the kind of sex symbol you could take home to meet your mother, which was part of her almost universal popularity. As Monroe puts it in "The Seven Year Itch," "People keep falling desperately in love with me."

In the films discussed above, and a few others, Marilyn Monroe displayed a genuine knack for comedy, as well as impeccable timing. When given the opportunity to work with talented directors like Wilder and Howard Hawks, she took full advantage, and, even though her high maintenance reputation and on-set difficulties were the stuff of legend, the finished product is hard to argue with. Monroe's unique mixture of purity and All-American sexuality defined the fifties, and this intoxicating blend of the sacred and the profane is on full, comedic display in "How to Marry a Millionaire," "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "The Seven Year Itch," and the sublime "Some Like it Hot," which is about as close to perfect as movies get.

In "Let's Make Love" (1960), French playboy Jean Marc Clement (Yves Montand) remarks to Monroe's character, Amanda Dell, that "You seem to be at home wherever you are." He was only half right. Marilyn Monroe was never fully comfortable in more challenging dramatic fare, but she certainly was right at home in the world of comedy, where she starred in some of the undisputed classics of the genre.
— Theo Wulff
Contact: beshef2000@yahoo.com

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2009-06-10T01:37:00.000-04:00

The Good Fairy (1935)

DIRECTOR: William Wyler
WRITER: Preston Sturges
COUNTRY: USA
CAST: Margaret Sullavan, Herbert Marshall, Reginald Owen, Frank Morgan
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Norbert Brodine
GENRE: Screwball comedy, romance
MISCELLANY: 98m; bw; on DVD

We never learn how Luisa Ginglebusher became an orphan, but we do know that rather than pity herself, she feels obliged to be a "good fairy," ever ready to do others a good turn. So when she hits the streets, it's not surprising that her ability to detect dubious motives in members of the opposite sex is compromised by her inexperience and desire to do good.

However, shortly after leaving the asylum, Luisa is confronted by a joker so pushy that even she recognizes his intentions — he's played by Cesar Romero, after all. She wards him off by pretending to be married to Detlaff, a suitably paternal but cantankerous waiter. A friendship develops, and Detlaff wangles Luisa a ticket to a soiree at the fancy hotel where he works, ordering her not to speak to the other waiters — or divulge her last name, which he finds objectionable.

Detlaff, who is on duty at the party, boils when he finds a lecherous meat tycoon named Konrad whisking Luisa to his room. His disgust is plain as he barges in on Konrad chasing Luisa about, pretending he's a mountain lion and she's a lamb. As Detlaff furiously motions to Luisa to escape, she smiles blithely. The movie scores the most laughs when it pits Luisa's wide eyes against Detlaff's hot head.

This sad love triangle becomes square when the stuffy Max Sporum enters the equation. When Konrad finally musters a move, Luisa gets creeped out, resorting to the tact that worked so well before. She tells him she's married. Not to be deterred, Konrad offers to make her husband rich in exchange for ... well, Luisa tunes that part out, caught up in the prospect of becoming a good fairy to some unsuspecting "husband." She picks Sporum's name out of the phone book, a name almost as unfortunate as her own, setting off a chain of misunderstandings, and romance.

"The Good Fairy" mixes screwball comedy with fairy tale and Freudian fantasy. If every girl wants to marry her father, Luisa starts the film at a loss, soon attracting two older men, one who wants to protect her and another who wants to bed her, ultimately finding a prospect who embodies both in Sporum, a handsome young man behind his stodgy beard.

Five years after making this film, Sullavan would star in another romantic comedy set in Budapest, "The Shop Around the Corner." Perhaps that's why, despite the Wyler-Sturges pedigree, "The Good Fairy" fails to get the attention it deserves.
— Becky

RELATED REVIEWS:
• Easy Living (1937), another Preston Sturges-penned screwball comedy, this one a satire of Wall Street during the Great Depression.
• Hi Diddle Diddle (1943), camera-conscious screwball comedy that spoofs opera, features an animated Leon Schlesinger sequence and has been cited by Quentin Tarantino as influential.

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2009-06-10T00:40:00.000-04:00

Breathless | A Bout De Souffle (1960)

DIRECTOR: Jean Luc-Godard
COUNTRY: France
WRITERS: Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut
EDITING: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
CAST: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg
GENRE: Crime, romance, new wave
MISCELLANY: 90m; in French with subtitles

Upon its release in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" must have seemed, especially to American viewers, to be a truly revolutionary piece of filmmaking. Here was a work that was somewhat experimental in style, yet simultaneously traditional in narrative. Godard had taken the American gangster movie and reinvented it, turning the conventions of the genre on their head, while still managing to pay loving homage to it. The film, influenced by the gritty works of Sam Fuller and John Huston, itself became widely influential, and is regarded as the most seminal, accessible film in the New Wave canon.

The hard-boiled anti-hero, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is a chain-smoking car thief who worships Humphrey Bogart and swaggers through the film with sunglasses on and a Trilby hat pulled insolently down over his brow. The obsession with the cynical, sardonic Bogart is an appropriate one, as Bogart and his noir dwelling tough guys are the natural precursors to Michel's laid-back killer. Michel nonchalantly plugs a policeman early in the film with the same indifference he seems to show throughout the film. As he admits to us at the start of the picture, setting the irreverent tone: "So, I'm a son of a bitch. After all, it's gotta be done. It has to." Although neither Michel or his flighty American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg) are particularly likable characters, we find ourselves, if not exactly rooting for them, strangely fascinated by their lives, which are alternately gripping and mundane. As Patricia puts it, "I'd like to know what’s behind that face of yours." Whether there is, in actuality, anything more to Michel than what he has cultivated from movies and popular culture is open to debate. Whether the two are fleeing the cops or engaging in existential banter in Patricia's apartment, there is something perversely hypnotizing about this unlikely duo. While watching them, I was reminded somewhat of the blank-faced honeymoon killers in "Badlands" (1973) — neither are exceptionally sympathetic leads, yet we are never less than enthralled with their performances.

Though they are both somewhat shallow, callous individuals, there is a playful, winning quality to their interactions with each other, and the script, also by Godard from a treatment by Francois Truffaut, is full of knowing asides and witty bits of repartee that help paint a more sympathetic, well-rounded portrait of the doomed young lovers.

The real innovations of "Breathless," however, lie not in the performances but in the look of the film itself. Godard utilizes natural sound and hand-held camera to give the film a gritty, cinema verite feel, and this off-the-cuff, freewheeling style provides a unique contrast to the hip dialogue and groundbreaking jump cuts, the latter of which enraged cinema purists and critics upon the film's release, but would become commonplace in the years to come. These seemingly arbitrary quick edits were appropriated, far less effectively, by Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider" (1969). Coincidentally, or not, the director of photography on "Easy Rider" is Laszlo Kovacs, Michel's alias in "Breathless." This is only one of several film culture references in "Breathless." In addition to the above mentioned homage to Bogart, the camera lingers over a Jack Palance movie poster, Michel and Patricia watch "Westbound" (1959), Patricia hangs a poster of an August Renoir painting in her apartment (Renoir's filmmaker son Jean was an acknowledged influence on Godard), and a girl on the street attempts (unsuccessfully) to sell Michel a copy of Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine for which Godard, and many of the other New Wave auteurs, wrote for before becoming filmmakers. Also, Godard himself has a cameo in the film as an informant, and the director Jean-Pierre Melville plays a famous writer being interviewed by Seberg.

Godard's use of natural sound reaches its almost absurd peak during the scenes in Patricia's apartment, in which the wailing sirens wafting in through the open window actually drown out the characters' dialogue. Rather than being a distraction that takes the viewer out of the moment, the use of natural sound here, and throughout the film, only heighten the realism. After all, in real life, in a bustling metropolis like Paris, one certainly would have to cope with the intrusive sounds of the city. At the same time, Godard utilizes several iris shots, whose glaring artificiality reminds us that this is a film. In one scene, Patricia peeks at Michel through a rolled up poster, and the camera switches to a peephole-style lens. Both Michel and Patricia talk to the camera, breaking down the so-called "fourth wall" that separates the audience from the actors. This device would become cliched and overused in time, but in 1960, it must have seemed positively revolutionary. Godard utilizes these techniques in several of his other films, including "Bande a Parte" (1964), in which Anna Karina often flashes a look or an exclamation at the audience. That film also takes the genre-reflexivity of "Breathless" to the ultimate degree when the three main characters wonder what a minute of silence would sound like, and then proceed to sit for a minute in complete silence — Godard even mutes the ambient audio.

To complete the almost documentary-style feel of "Breathless," passing extras often stare directly into the camera or at the actors. Also, characters sometimes interrupt and talk over each other — this overlapping dialogue would be quite influential on Robert Altman, whose films almost always employ it to some degree, most famously in "M*A*S*H" (1970). Godard also inserts several stylistic flourishes that might seem gimmicky and forced on paper, but that work perfectly within the context and tone of the film. As the police bear down on Michel, a neon sign in a window informs us that "the net tightens around Michel."

These scenes only serve to heighten the self-referential, knowing tone of "Breathless." The film is, in many ways, a tribute to film itself — Godard's valentine to cinema. The fact that the film influenced and inspired a generation of directors is cinema's valentine to Godard, and to "Breathless."
— Theo Wulff
Contact: beshef2000@yahoo.com

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2009-06-05T13:21:00.001-04:00

Wise Blood (1979)

DIRECTOR: John Huston
COUNTRY: USA
WRITERS: Flannery O'Connor (novel); Benedict Fitzgerald and Michael Fitzgerald (screenplay)
CAST: Brad Dourif, John Huston, Dan Shor, Amy Wright, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 108m

In America, velvet Jesus paintings are as much a fact of life as "Elvis Has Risen" headlines.

"Wise Blood" was published on the eve of The King's stardom, in 1952, and the book paints an increasingly mechanized and isolated postwar landscape where folks are thirsting for a "new Jesus," a more up-to-date figure to fit the modern world.

John Huston's film "Wise Blood" for the most part abides by the peculiar dialogue and trajectory of the so-called "grotesques" who populate Flannery O'Connor's Southern Gothic masterpiece. The same philosophical questions raised by the book play out on the screen.

Before the dashboard Jesus, there was Hazel Motes, preacher of the Church Without Christ, perched on the hood of his almighty automobile trying to drown out his conscience with nihilistic sermons.

Before much of America became drooling tools led around by corporate slogans in the aisles of the Super Wal-Mart, there was Enoch Emery, a seeker of redemption in shrunken corpses who finds bliss in a gorilla suit.

Before the Home Shopping Network and televangelists of Jimmy Swaggert's ilk vied for our attention and dollars, blind preachers competed with the likes of potato-peeler hucksters for street crowds and spare change.

As strange as the characters seem on the surface, we recognize them. O'Connor seamlessly weaves into her prose details that allow us to sympathize with extreme behavior.

Huston incorporates such insightful elements into the film: the fire-and-brimstone sermons of Motes' youth, an obsession with a preacher that Motes disguises as attraction to his daughter, the shards lining the soles of his "old Army shoes that he had painted black to get the government off."

Although O'Connor does not specify a period, the setting in the novel is undeniably the fifties. Huston manages to keep the look timeless enough, although every once in a while a late-seventies element, such as a ringer T-shirt, pops up and spoils the mood. Also, the soundtrack — variations of "The Tennessee Waltz" played on a keyboard — make the film seem tacky, in a made-for-TV-movie way. The heavy-handed audio cues that Emery is a comedic figure were not appreciated, either. Viewers can decide for themselves whether a man who would go to such great lengths to meet Gonga the Gorilla is a buffoon.

Watching a film adaptation is like listening to a cover song. To hear a note interpreted differently than the original either strikes us as wrong or deepens the meaning. The difference being that film adaptations carry the story to another realm. Although cinema may be a more versatile medium than the written word, all too often it fails to stack up against the power of imagination. Viewers inevitably struggle to submit to the vision of the filmmaker, preferring the pictures that they formed mentally as readers. Yet there's no denying the allure of watching literary characters "come alive."

I enjoyed watching this attempt to bring one of my favorites books to cinematic life. It seems to have been done in a loving spirit, brimming with O'Connor's ideas.
— Becky

MORE LITERARY ADAPTATIONS:
• Lolita (1962). This article imagines the cinematic worlds of "Lolita" and "Death Proof" colliding.
• Macario (1960). Book by "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" author B. Traven inspires this Mexican film, which is full of amazing Day of the Dead imagery.

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2009-06-04T23:51:00.000-04:00

The River | Woman with Raven (1929)

DIRECTOR: Frank Borzage
COUNTRY: USA
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ernest Palmer
ART DIRECTION: Harry Oliver
CAST: Charles Farrell, Mary Duncan
GENRE: Silent, drama, romance
RECONSTRUCTION: Herve Dumont
MISCELLANY: 55m; on DVD

The reconstruction of Frank Borzage's silent masterpiece assembles still images and intertitles to fill in the blanks left by the film's lost beginning and end. In this way, "The River" flows much like our lives do moment-to-moment — elusive, frustrated by a hazy past and an uncertain future.

The river runs through a valley, which is nestled amid mountains trellised by impossibly vertical rows of huts that seem to form an expressionistic stairway to heaven. Into this poetic setting sails Allen John, who is thwarted by the construction of a dam and the train he keeps missing.

During his layover, he nearly gets pulled into a whirlpool in the ravine. Instead, he gets sucked into the vortex of the smoky, cynical eyes of a woman who lives on the river banks named Rosalee. Before falling for the earnest Allen John, she sulks on the water's edge in the shadow of her incarcerated lover's raven, punctuating every sentence with a roll of her eyes. Upon meeting Allen John, we can see she finds him just too precious. When she determines he's not putting on an innocent act, she promptly dismisses him as a boy, probably as a way to preserve her soured view of men. But her gentle teasing exposes an essential goodness under the hard exterior.

This is Borzage country, after all, an exotic land where humans possess pure intentions and behave with dignity. Especially in this age of irony, positivity is equated with corniness. True, optimism often deals in platitudes, giving it a hollow ring, while reactionary pessimism resounds with a biting truth. But rather than roll out predictable schmaltz, Borzage restrains judgment, which allows his characters to shine in ways that are startlingly true.

Fortunately, the extant reels of "The River" contain the heart of the film — the buildup of sexual tension between Rosalee and Allen John.

Although their attraction is palpable, and despite fateful river currents and chugging locomotives conspiring to bring them together, the couple struggle against the grain of their feelings. The delayed gratification of two lonely people unable to let each other in, painful as it is to watch at times, deepens the relationship but places it in a rare class of on-screen romances. Perhaps to indulge our fantasies, many films gloss over the growing pains of a relationship, much more likely to focus on the conflict that has settled in once the "honeymoon is over." Here the misunderstandings of strangers form a wall to intimacy, as does her past experiences and his inexperience. Clarity borne from that confusion, as delicate as the house of cards the couple builds together, give this relationship the meaning it would certainly lack had they immediately hopped in the sack. Indeed, unbridled passion here has ugly, violent overtones: Rosalee's stonewalled lust takes expression in a knife; jealous rage sends her former lover to prison.

Maybe the missing reels will be found. Yet the surviving episode functions even without the back story and conclusion, and the Filmmuseum reconstruction's gentle use of stills and notes at least gives us a sense of Borzage's intentions.
— Becky

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2009-06-02T14:25:00.000-04:00

The King of Comedy (1983)

DIRECTOR: Martin Scorsese
COUNTRY: USA
WRITER: Paul D. Zimmerman
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Fred Schuler
CAST: Robert DeNiro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard
GENRE: Comedy, drama
MISCELLANY: 109m; won BAFTA Film Award for best original screenplay

It is hard to argue with the fact that we, as Americans, live in a celebrity-obsessed culture. Glossy magazines like People and In Style breathlessly note each and every movement of the stars who orbit our world, no matter how mind-bogglingly mundane or insignificant these details appear to be. While guiltily perusing these trashy periodicals is a harmless enough activity, there seem to be a high number of people roaming the streets who have difficulty separating actors from their roles, reality from fantasy. I'm forever hearing actors tell anecdotes involving a fan coming up to them on the street and addressing them by their character's name, questioning a decision they made on their television show last week or hissing what an evil bitch they were in their last movie. The celebrities always seem amused by such behavior, ignoring the deeply disturbing undercurrent here: If people are incapable of, or refuse to, differentiate between fact and fiction, then what's to stop them from acting out whatever feelings, positive or negative, that they have towards a particular fictional character on its real world representative? Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy" (1983) is a film that focuses on one such unhinged individual, born loser Rupert Pupkin, played with a simmering malevolence by Robert DeNiro.

"The King of Comedy" is one of the more intriguing titles in the Scorsese canon, if only because of the fact that audiences and critics are so strongly divided on the film. It is an unsettling and somewhat unsatisfying viewing experience, to be sure. Scorsese's direction in the film is strangely anonymous — there are virtually none of his trademark flourishes, and the overall presentation is rather flat. Scorsese approaches the film like a hired hand, creating a cold, emotionally distant film. The performances, while excellent across the board, do not bother to delve below the surface, and we are given virtually no insight into the characters. That being said, I find this to be among my favorite films by Scorsese, though it is not really a Scorsese film, per se. The film was a box office disaster, and it is not difficult to see why. Audiences don't like the camera being pointed at them, and they don't like being mocked. "The King of Comedy" shows us at our most obsessed and sycophantic, and provides no easy solutions or pat reassurances. It is an often ugly film, both in what we are shown and the manner in which it is presented to us. Ultimately though, for a film entitled "The King of Comedy," it's a damn funny movie, though the laughs are mostly at our expense — for we are not as different from Rupert as we might think we are.

The film opens with the intro to The Jerry Langford Show, which seems to be a carbon copy of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. In fact, the role of Langford was originally slated for Carson, before Scorsese eventually settled on Jerry Lewis. Langford does a bit of banter with announcer Ed Herlihy, the guffawing Ed McMahon-esque second banana — "I'm sorry I woke you, Ed" — and, with only a few visual signifiers, Scorsese has placed us within a recognizable milieu, complete with perky, jazzy theme music (provided by one-time actual Carson bandleader Lou Brown) and a typically random guest list, including Tony Randall and Dr. Joyce Brothers. We then cut to the chaotic scene outside the back door of the studio where the show is filmed, as a shouting, teeming mass of humanity clamor for their idol, Jerry Langford. The grizzled showbiz vet doorman, gruff and blasé, collects autograph books from the eager, outstretched hands of the animated throng. One man yells, "Have him write something personal!", which is a patently absurd request — how can Langford possibly scrawl something personal to someone he has never met? Rupert Pupkin, clearly an old hand at this, presses his way to the front of the crowd, acknowledging the greetings from the various other autograph hounds. Grown men trade signatures like they were little kids trading baseball cards: one autograph seeker tells Pupkin, "I got Rodney Dangerfield and Richard Harris, I'll trade 'em for Barbara (Streisand)," but Pupkin retorts, "It's not my whole life," dismissing the trade request. This statement is an interesting one by Pupkin, and he makes several other similar declarations during the course of the film. Clearly, he views himself as being different, superior. No crazed, one-note fan is he. As Langford exits the studio, the excited mob turns unruly, pushing and shoving each other in a vain attempt to get close to the late-night host. A woman who we later learn is Masha (Sandra Bernhard), a flailing, screaming ball of almost feral energy, forces her way into Langford's limo, her hands pressed up against the window as flashbulbs pop outside on the startled Lewis. The movie freezes on this image, and the opening credits begin to roll. The music we hear over these credits is Ray Charles' "Come Rain or Come Shine," whose lyrics of earnest, steadfast love stand in ironic juxtaposition to the twisted, possessive feelings of Pupkin towards Langford. Later in the film, Masha will serenade a captive Langford with an impromptu a cappella version of the song.

Pupkin, we soon find out, is a bumbling, mumbling walking exercise in passive aggressive behavior. He seems filled with thinly veiled, bitter anger and possesses a possible propensity for violence that lies deep within him, which we get the sense is always on the verge of coming to the surface in an ugly manner. "Comedy," in its first half, alternates between sequences of fantasy and reality, and, at first, we are given no indication by Scorsese when one segment ends and the other begins, which makes for a somewhat discombobulating and on-edge viewing experience. The first of these fantasy moments details a conversation between the now famous Pupkin and Langford, the latter of which is begging Pupkin to take six weeks off from his busy schedule to host the show. This scene is intercut with footage of Pupkin is his basement, acting out this lonely, two-sided monologue. It is both hilarious and creepy, and the disembodied voice of Rupert's mother (Scorsese's own mother, Catherine) telling him to keep the noise down only makes the moment all the more heartbreaking. After much pleading, Pupkin agrees to the favor, and Langford tells him, admiringly, "You're a tough one, Rupe." Pupkin responds, "Well, you gotta be in this business." The duo burst into laughter at Rupert's clever retort. Here we are given our first glimpse of Pupkin's fantasy world, and it is an unsettling one indeed, though our reaction is still one of amusement at this point tempered by a slight twinge of unease.

Pupkin is enamored with Rita (Diahnne Abbott), a high school crush he admired from afar. The two go out on a date, which seems to go relatively well. She's not totally cold to him, and views him as a harmless amusement. Pupkin lugs his autograph book with him to the restaurant (one gets the feeling he takes it everywhere with him), and, beaming with a kind of smug pride, asks her to guess the identity of one of the scribbled autographs. Rita, not recognizing that it is, in fact, Pupkin's own signature, responds, "It looks like a retard wrote this." Rupert is unfazed by this unwitting putdown, and brags to the skeptical Rita about his brief encounter with Langford outside the studio, which he has somehow, in his twisted mind, turned into an invitation from his old friend Jerry to visit for the weekend. The two will make the sojourn to Langford's house, with the expected disastrous results.

Pupkin repeatedly attempts to speak with Langford at his office in person, clad in a garish pastel baby blue suit, his audition tape clutched in one hand. The polite yet firm receptionists and secretaries eventually tire of his stalking act and call on security to forcibly remove Mr. "Pumpkin" (it is a running joke that no one can get his name right, as each person mangles it in a new way) from the premises.

There is one telling exchange between DeNiro and Lewis, in one of Pupkin's fantasy sequences, where a reverent Langford asks Rupert what his secret to comedic success is, and Pupkin responds, "I look at my whole life, and I see all the awful, terrible things in my life, and I turn it into something funny." From this one sentence alone, we get all the back-story on Pupkin we need: We envision his lonely childhood, his invisibility at school, uncaring or absent parents, and so forth. Pupkin's statement seems to be an echo of one once made by Woody Allen: "Comedy is tragedy, plus time."
Eventually, Rupert and Masha, who is only slightly less unhinged than Pupkin, conspire to kidnap Langford and force his producers to allow Rupert to open that evening's show with a monologue. The duo are like a bickering old couple, arguing over whether Langford should be forced to wear a sleeveless sweater that Masha has knitted for him, or what to do with Jerry's chewing gum. DeNiro is clad in the unsightly combo of Panama hat and Hawaiian shirt, and looks every inch the brain-dead goofball. Actors can often feel uncomfortable appearing in a manner that is not particularly flattering, and it is a testament to Robert DeNiro's abilities that he is able to suppress whatever oppositions he had on the subject and throw himself full force into the performance. As Bernhard notes on the documentary that accompanies the DVD, "He allowed himself to be a geek, and that's not easy for a guy like DeNiro."

Rupert gets his wish to be on national television, as guest host Tony Randall, introducing him, is the first person to pronounce Pupkin's name correctly. All of this is done to impress Rita, who watches, bemused, at the bar in which she works, as a proud Pupkin looks on, beaming. The crowd laughs heartily at his painful monologue, as Pupkin details the various humiliations of his childhood. It is hard to tell if they are genuinely amused or merely following the commands of the blinking applause signs like so many sheep. The final irony, of course, is that Rupert Pupkin and his bizarre story become a media sensation, and, after his prison stint, Rupert makes a triumphant return, best-selling autobiography in tow. But is this real either? Since Scorsese has never differentiated between dream and real sequences earlier in the film, why would he know? The ending, as a result, is all the more haunting and disturbing, since we are never really certain what is real, and what is not.

"The King of Comedy" seems to be viewed as a rather minor film in Scorsese's catalog, and while it is admittedly not without its flaws, the film is still a bravura piece of work, for it forces us to look in the mirror at ourselves and confront what we see, a not always pleasant task. A dark and unsettling look at fame and its underbelly, the film is one that still resonates today. After all, how many dedicated followers of celebrity news today would disagree with the closing line of Rupert Pupkin's monologue: "Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime"?
— Theo Wulff
Contact: beshef2000@yahoo.com

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2009-06-01T01:48:00.001-04:00

In the Mood for Love | Fa Yeung Nin Wa (2000)

DIRECTOR: Wong Kar-Wai
COUNTRY: Hong Kong
WRITER: Wong Kar-Wai
PRODUCER: Wong Kar-Wai
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christopher Doyle, Pin Bing Lee
CAST: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Siu Ping-Lam, Rebecca Pan
GENRE: Drama, romance
MISCELLANY: 98m; Cantonese with subtitles

Wong Kar-Wai’s "In the Mood for Love" is a bit of a departure for the director, a slow-moving, stately period piece set primarily in 1962 Hong Kong. The high-energy pace and rapid cuts that are usually Wai's calling cards are wholly absent here — it is as if he is channeling Bresson or Dreyer, with their somewhat distant, contemplative approaches to cinema. The silent opening credits inform us of the setting, as well as providing a series of Godard-esque intertitles, though Wai's are poetic, not didactic.

"It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered ... to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away."

With these evocative, yet somehow coldly clinical words, we are under way. The two leads, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) "meet cute," to use a Hollywood cliche (though the terrain this film explores is far removed from that of the average Kate Hudson vehicle), when both find themselves moving into an apartment building on the same day. The scene is bustling chaos: Shoes and books are delivered to the wrong owners, movers drag bulky couches through narrow hallways while Chan and Chow attempt to squeeze by. At first, the duo are distant and formal with each other, exchanging tight smiles and making light, polite chitchat. Gradually, they discover their spouses are having an affair with one another. For most directors, this would be a cheap, lazy gimmick used to pile on the sobbing, overwrought melodrama, but the immensely sensitive, nuanced hand of Wai ensures this never becomes the case. Many of the film's ostensibly dramatic moments are presented in fragments or omitted completely, and even the scene in which Chan and Chow confirm to each other their knowledge of the affair is peppered with long, measured silences. "What are you getting at, exactly?" says Chan finally, to which Chow's only response is an inhalation of his cigarette. "I thought I was the only one who knew," she muses, and the scene ends.

There are echoes of "Brief Encounter" (1945) here, as both films present a couple, thrown together by happenstance, in love with one another but unable to act on their feelings, bound as they are by marriage and the disapproving eye of a more old-fashioned era. The difference, however, is that Lean's film gives us gushing romanticism set to a quivering Rachmaninoff soundtrack, while "In the Mood for Love" is cool and detached, accompanied by a handful of jazzy Nat King Cole numbers, repeated for hypnotic effect. Wai treats the secondary characters in the film with calculated dismissal, though their landlady, Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan) contributes the film's most telling observation, as she informs Chow and Chan on separate occasions that they are both "too polite." Polite they are, rigidly repressed in both style and garb. Chan's gorgeous dresses are form-fitting yet topped by stiff, high collars, her clothes glided over by an almost fetishistic fixated camera. Harkening again to Bresson, Chow's hands, and in them his ever-flickering gold lighter, are emphasized repeatedly. These leisurely, reflective shots help give the film its languid rhythm.

Their spouses are given pointedly abstract depictions, filmed through windows or from behind, obscuring their appearances. Wai never shows us either one of their faces — we are given a brief flash of hair, a pair of shoulders. They speak in flat, disembodied voices, uttering half-hearted excuses and blatant lies to Chan and Chow, casually carrying on their affair right under their noses. The performances of Leung and Chang are almost as understated as those of their significant others, though their delicate refinement perfectly suits the material. What makes "In the Mood for Love" so successful is its perfect fusion of visual panache and narrative minimalism. Some of the sweeping, elaborate camera movements would make Ophuls jealous, yet the film never finds itself bogged down by grandiose melodrama, as was Ophuls' occasional tendency.

Meticulous frame structure is also important, as, like Fassbinder and Sirk before him, Wai helps convey the psychological state of characters through visual composition. Chow's wife, in the rare scenes in which she appears, is filmed through peepholes, doors and other objects. We feel her emotional distance from her husband, her complete disassociation from the film's events. Wai also uses space to detach Chan's husband from the narrative, as our only tenuous connection to him is his voice, chilly and aloof. These subtle displays of their spouses' personal disconnection help garner audience sympathy for the two leads without reducing their unfaithful partners to one-dimensional cardboard monsters.

As if acknowledging the potentially precious, affected nature of the film's proceedings, Wai wisely includes the earthy, grinning Ah-Ping (Siu Ping-Lam), whorehouse aficionado and gleeful gambler, to occasionally lighten the self-consciously somber mood. "I'm not like you," says Chow to Ah-Ping, and it is a good thing he is not. We sense that Chow, under his cool, starched-collar surface, has an untapped reservoir of emotion, but there are only infrequent hints of the romantic yearnings that no doubt swirl wildly in his thoughts whenever Chan glides by. This emotional restraint on the part of Chow and Chan helps give their relationship heat, and infuses every interaction with an undercurrent of erotic desire, giving a charge to even the most banal of exchanges. Ah-Ping, on the other hand, holds back nothing, making his lustful urges towards Chan all too clear. He would make a far less fascinating lead, for he has no real interior life — everything is on the surface, in the open, laid out for all to see.

There is a wonderfully self-reflexive sequence in the film, in which it first appears that Chan is confronting her husband over his infidelity. The camera reveals to us, however, that it is actually Chow whom she is addressing — the two are rehearsing, engaging in a sort of dry run, so that Chan will be well prepared for the actual confrontation. The two argue over possible approaches and reactions, like Method actors going over an upcoming scene. It is a delightful moment, made more so by our voyeuristic complicity in their play-acting. What we had initially viewed as a major dramatic moment is merely a staged play, a dress rehearsal. The joke is on us, but it is a joke we can enjoy as well. "In the Mood for Love" is an appropriate title for the film, for it is mood itself that Wai gives us, impeccably composed and expressed.
— Theo Wulff
Contact: beshef2000@yahoo.com

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2009-05-26T13:53:00.000-04:00

Homicidal (1961)

DIRECTOR: William Castle
COUNTRY: USA
PRODUCER: William Castle
CAST: Jean Arless (Joan Marshall), Glenn Corbett, Patricia Breslin
WRITER: Robb White
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Burnett Guffey
GENRE: Horror, thriller, comedy?
MISCELLANY: 87m; bw; on DVD

Forget the "fright break," a 45-second interlude that allowed viewers to exit the theater with a refund if they were too scared to endure the film's climax. It's just one of many gimmicks — seats equipped with buzzers, inflatable glow-in-the-dark skeletons, audience polls — that William Castle used to promote his B-movies.

Forget also that "Homicidal" is a Hitchcock knockoff. There's only one master, but the apprentices of suspense have something to offer, too.

Even without the fright break and the Hitchcock homages, this is a solid thriller. It starts strong, with a mysterious woman's semi-seduction of a bellhop. She's intriguing. We have a lot of questions. And the movie takes its sweet time answering them.

A less entertaining movie would hang itself leaving so many plot threads untied, but "Homicidal" uses loose ends to rope us in. Early on, something shocking happens, building up stores of faith in the viewer, which the movie proceeds to squander with its labyrinthine back story, but before we stop caring, we get another jolt.

Poor Helga widens her eyes and raps objects against her wheelchair when she's about to be left alone with her caretaker Emily. Failing to heed the bulging eyes, family members suppress their doubts about the unabashedly unhinged nurse until a murder in a nearby town brings their fears to the surface.

They are not alone in their naivete. The residents of this idyllic town are slow to recognize Emily's madness. She fails to stir the suspicion of the pharmacist when she presents a prescription for poison, even after the doctor strolls to the counter and says he hasn't seen Helga in ages. Then there's the scene with the knife-sharpener, who coaxes anything but reassuring answers out of Emily regarding her plans for the blade. A freakout in a flower shop is more funny than unnerving. The campy plot makes this feel more like a black comedy than a psychological thriller.

Most of the actors speak their lines in a natural, believable manner, so the wooden, stilted delivery of a major character is hard to ignore. The poor performance is yet another mystery that the film resolves after the fright break.

Remember the fright break? Apparently, there was a small percentage of viewers who having made it that far in the film, called Castle on his gimmick, leaving the theater and seeking a refund. Castle's response, according to an article by John Waters, was to shame those who were brave enough to say they were too scared to watch the finale by making them walk along yellow footsteps under a yellow spotlight, while being heckled by a recording, to "coward's corner," where they were administered a blood-pressure test and given a coward's certificate.

— Becky

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• Blood Freak (1972). "The world's only turkey-monster, anti-drug, pro-Jesus gore film."

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2009-05-20T00:26:00.000-04:00

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

DIRECTOR: Peter Yates
COUNTRY: USA
WRITER: George V. Higgins, Paul Monash
CAST: Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco, Steven Keats
GENRE: Action, drama, crime, neo-noir
MISCELLANY: 102m; Technicolor; on DVD; shot on location in and around Boston

No matter what picture he's in, Robert Mitchum is Robert Mitchum. He's an icon. A brand.

In this incarnation, he's sloshed in the old Boston Garden, slurring odes to "Number 4! Bobby Orr!" He's imbibing in Back Bay dives, dropping New England expressions "like a bastard."

I'd long heard about the "best Boston movie ever," starring Robert Mitchum no less, and finally, Criterion has freed "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" from obscurity, releasing it on DVD in all its neo-noir anti-glory.

"I got that thing coming up in New Hampshire," Mitchum's Eddie Coyle reminds whoever will listen. "That thing" is the Irish mob middle-man's sentencing for driving a truck full of stolen liquor.

Sadder than Coyle's looming jail time is the possibility that a character played by Robert Mitchum is whining. His friends don't bother to fake sympathy when he drops hints about his upcoming court date and make no secret that he's boring them with his troubles. The movie catches up with Coyle as he pulls a few jobs leading up to his sentencing, raising money for his family and desperately trying to cash in on connections — cop and criminal alike — to put in a good word with the judge.

Long before Jack Nicholson's acting chops sprouted whiskers in "The Departed," "Eddie Coyle" wove its web of double-dealing cops and hoods. A series of shots in The Callahan Tunnel, through disorienting lights and perspectives, even seems to simulate burrowing rats.

"Eddie Coyle" distinguishes itself from the gangster movie pack with its quiet, authentic dialog, melancholy mood and relentless realism. Least gripping are the heist and bust scenes. No cliche display of heroics is proffered to distract us from the depressing facts. The movie is kind of like those cerebral "Sopranos" episodes that maddened its mainstream fans when "nothing happened."

"Eddie Coyle" strips Mitchum and gangster life of glamor, and paints Boston in dirty, low-lit color. Sixties optimism is dead. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have not yet arrived on the scene. The city seems to shrug in resignation as a vicious selfishness roils below the surface.

Hippies shop for automatic weapons. Even the parish priest wants to buy a piece. Gun dealer Jackie Brown buys machine guns from teenagers and without irony swaps weapons for "bread" in grocery bags.

In the hockey sequence, old ladies scream for blood as a fight breaks out on the ice and the crowd exults in the violence.

The Boston Garden scene works on multiple levels. The beer-spattered haze. The competition and tribalism. The lust for a fight. Why'd you bring your target here where there are so many souls under one roof, the hitman is asked. Nobody cares, the hitman replies.

As Coyle's dilemma deepens, he sits in a pub rubbing the extra set of knuckles his friends gave him the last time things went wrong. The camera hardly can keep him in focus. He doesn't command sympathy, and if anything, the film provides ample evidence that he has it coming. But we want somebody to give a damn, even if we don't ourselves.
— Becky

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2009-05-14T14:21:00.000-04:00

Wanda (1971)

DIRECTOR: Barbara Loden
COUNTRY: USA
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nicholas T. Proferes
EDITING: Nicholas T. Proferes
WRITER: Barbara Loden
CAST: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins
GENRE: Independent, drama
MISCELLANY: 102m; 16mm blown up to 35mm; on DVD

When Mr. Dennis slaps Wanda, it's the sound of reality trying to shatter fantasy, failing.

Wanda dwells in a thick fog of delusion. In an emergency, the fog parts, but quickly closes back up once the immediate crisis is overcome.

Wanda might seem like a compromiser on the surface, but she's so idealistic that she floats above the grimy world she inhabits, like the scene where she walks through the coal fields wearing white, her head sailing above piles of rocks. Wanda struggles to live her ideals through a wise innocence that could be mistaken for ignorance or a lack of intelligence or spirit.

Director Barbara Loden, who was married to Elia Kazan, directs and portrays Wanda, a drifting divorcee who detaches herself from her past, including her children. She hooks up with a petty thief and becomes his partner in crime. This was Loden's only film as a director. It was shot with hand-held cameras on location with often long, slowly panning shots observing the characters, a spare soundtrack and dialogue filled with the uncomfortable silences you can't write into a script.

At first Wanda seems to be a victim or a dog begging for a bone, but we catch glimpses of complexity. When a factory manager lies to her about money she is owed, she stands there awkwardly. When her request for more work is struck down because she's "too slow," she doesn't argue but doesn't accept his insult, either. It's as if the words were not spoken. She knows she's owed that money, but to confront him would be to admit he's cheating her. When Mr. Dennis asks her to fetch him a burger with no onions, she gets him a burger with onions, not because she's slow or forgetful but because she likes onions and can't imagine someone else not liking them. When a man who bought her beers tries to sneak out of the motel room while she's sleeping, she wakes and chases him out the door, not because she's too stupid to realize it was a one-night stand but because she refuses to operate on his level of deceit.

Wanda's attempts to preserve her delusions are challenged, in the form of judges, newspaper articles, mirrors, policemen, sexual violence. In the process of being raped, it's like she suddenly awakens, summons all her strength and escapes ... where? Into the woods.

Buffeted by reality and isolated in her escapism, Wanda runs from a bleak past into a hopeless future, never quite experiencing the present.
— Becky

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2009-05-06T00:18:00.000-04:00

Movies, by actor (selected)

ANNA KARINA
September 22, 1940

• Made In U.S.A.

BARBARA STANWYCK
July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990

• The Furies

ELISHA COOK JR.
December 26, 1903 – May 18, 1995

• Dark Waters

JAMES MASON
May 15, 1909 – July 27, 1984

• Bigger Than Life
• Lolita (Mashup)
• Odd Man Out (Lineup)

JEAN ARTHUR
October 17, 1900 – June 19, 1991

• Easy Living

MEIKO KAJI
March 24, 1947

• Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion

MERLE OBERON
February 18, 1911 – November 23, 1979

• Dark Waters

ROBERT CUMMINGS
June 9, 1910 – December 2, 1990

• The Chase (1946)
• Sleep, My Love (1948)

PETER LORRE
June 26, 1904 – March 23, 1964

• The Chase

ROBERT DE NIRO
August 17, 1943

• King of Comedy

ROBERT MITCHUM
August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle

ROBERT RYAN
November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973

• Day of the Outlaw

W.C. FIELDS
January 29, 1880 – December 25, 1946

• Million Dollar Legs

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2009-05-04T23:53:00.000-04:00

The Stone Flower | Kamennyy Tsvetok (1946)

DIRECTOR: Aleksandr Ptushko
COUNTRY: USSR
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Fedor Provorov
CAST: Vladimir Druzhnikov, Yekaterina Derevshchikova, Tamara Makarova, Mikhail Troyanovsky
GENRE: Fantasy, romance, children's
MISCELLANY: 70m; Russian with subtitles; on DVD

Aleksandr Ptushko designs a Technicolor tapestry of folklore with colors so rich, it looks more like a collage of paintings than photography. One of the first color Soviet movies, if not the first, its film stock was stolen from Germany, so Technicolor is not technically correct. The brand used was Agfacolor, and it's the star of the show. Characters, drenched in painterly light, are captured in fine detail through the film's saturated veil, even while in motion. Before the film stock left its impression, were the sets and costumes as dazzling? The forest and cavern scenes seem particularly suited for the cinematography.

A boy given to reverie in the forest becomes a master stone-cutter. He gains skill mysteriously, possibly through the help of a witch. Passionate about his craft, he is lured by the witch on his wedding night into caverns sparkling with gems, and his fiancee faithfully awaits his return.

A fairy tale about art and love, it refrains from sentimentality but dabbles in the supernatural. Bursts of folk music and dance and snatches of peasant life liven up the tale.

Russian fairy tale films, a creative outlet for Soviet filmmakers, possess a rare beauty with their majestic settings and exquisite costumes. Even if you're not drawn to this kind of movie, there's a reason to take in this entry by the man referred to as the "Soviet Walt Disney": simply to peer through the old film stock's prism.
— Becky

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2009-05-02T01:35:00.001-04:00

Heaven and Hell | Di San Lei Da Dou (1980)

DIRECTOR: Cheh Chang
COMPANY: Shaw Brothers
COUNTRY: Hong Kong
WRITERS: Cheh Chang, Lang Chou, Kuang Ni
CAST: Yi Min Lee, Chen Chi Lin, David Chiang, Alexander Fu Sheng
GENRE: Martial arts, fantasy
MISCELLANY: 88m; Mandarin with subtitles; on DVD

If there's anything worse than going to Hell, it's going to Plow Hell. Gossip Hell is no picnic, either.

If you're just watching Hell from your couch, though, it's the ultimate reward for sticking with the first two parts of this schizophrenic movie. You'll contemplate shutting it off in Heaven and might just do it during the random duet on Earth. But things get more interesting in the underworld.

The constant thread in a raveling plot is an angel who sticks up for star-crossed lovers exiled from Heaven, falls to Earth, and is killed fighting for them there. In Hell, Buddha instructs him to round up a posse to fight their way out of perdition.

But there's so much more.

What starts as fantasy with an '80s music-video aesthetic drifts into a pop-art parody of Seijun Suzuki. A schmaltzy musical number breaks out. Then we're sent to a kaleidoscopic Hell, a cartoonish version of the one in "Jigoku" that is gory and funny at the same time. The nonsensical plot bends to accommodate well-choreographed kung fu throughout. The glittery man-eyeshadow, half-shirts, neon and cheap sound effects fix the action firmly in the late '70s/early '80s, even as characters zip across time and space.

The film tries to do so much it fails to develop its myriad characters and ideas. Unusual color schemes and hyper-stylized sets lend the film visual punch, but the images, as fickle as the plot, often are not on the same page as the words.

Yet the busy plot and chameleon-like visuals keep "Heaven and Hell" unpredictable, and the steam of its enthusiasm carried me to the end.

— Becky

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2009-04-27T02:40:00.000-04:00

REPLAY | Easy Living (1937)

Director: Mitchell Leisen; 88m.

A peep show of pies, chicken dinners and grapefruit, backlit to silhouette behind little glass doors, carefully labeled, compartmentalized and convenient. Drop nickels in the slot and the door pops.

You can afford only a cup of coffee and a sandwich? Get on the busboy's good side and the next thing you know, he slips you a hot plate — a breach in the marble wall, and the social contract. Soon, all the doors burst open, and diners rush the wall.

The hilarious and anarchic automat scene could stand on its own as a short, but sparkles within this Preston Sturges script satirizing Wall Street during the Great Depression. The scene connects two key characters in a coincidence among many improbable coincidences that drive much of the film's humor. It also mirrors the absurdity of the market.

An editor on the brink of eviction is fired after a fur coat falls from the sky on the way to work and she stops to debate with a banker the number of weeks in a year. Then through a misunderstanding that she fails to grasp because her mind isn't as dirty as the milliner's, she is practically given a hotel penthouse. The apartment's swell, but fails to stop the hunger pains, so off to the automat she goes in her $58,000 mink coat with her last couple of nickels.

After she is given something for nothing, again, she tries to cling to naivete and enjoy the meal, but around her the automat slides into sharp elbows, greasy backflips and smashed china.

Watching something so calculated as the automat explode delights. It is a business that hinges on the working stiff's dearth of coin and time.

The diners' greedy rush mimics the frenzy of the stock market scene but at least it springs from a basic need, hunger. We laugh at one diner's savvy pepper scheme, because the only harm is shattered dishes.

— Becky

2009-04-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

MASHUP | The Blood of Jesus (1941) &
Don't Play Us Cheap (1973)

Director: Spencer Williams; 68m.

Director: Melvin Van Peebles; 95m.

It's the rural South in the 1940s. Led astray on the gray road to eternity, Martha escapes Satan's honky tonk and runs for the crossroads. A gospel choir plays a Greek chorus, spurring her on with "Run, Child, Run." Down a fork, through a swirl of dust, she sees a man in a devil costume darting toward her, gaining candy-dye color. Chasing the fiend is Miss Maybell, rattling a rolled-up newspaper with headlines out of 1970s Harlem. The refrain she runs to is: "If You See A Devil, Smash Him."

The two movies intersecting here are the product of independent filmmakers, one from the forties, the other the seventies; each a starkly different vision presented by the rare American black auteur of his period.

In the forties, the devil dangles a party to corrupt the soul. In the seventies, the devil is a party-pooper to be crushed under the sole.

The sacred and the secular provoke each other in both films, but "Blood of Jesus" is a religious tale in deadly earnest and "Don't Play Us Cheap" is lively irreverence.

"Blood of Jesus" takes place on a Sunday; "Don't Play Us Cheap," a Saturday night. Jesus appears as an image of a white man on the wall struck by a bullet in "Blood of Jesus." The cover of the Isaac Hayes' album "Black Moses" reaches out from the wall in "Don't Play Us Cheap." The devil in both films is black and appears in the flesh.

"Blood of Jesus" focuses on the afterlife; "Don't Play Us Cheap," the now.

Both films are steeped in morality, one depicting the crossroads leading to Heaven and Hell literally, reverentially; the other interpreting mortality through common sense: "Well, if the lord can't take a little joke, heaven's not such a wonderful place, anyhow." I even imagine Martha's sin in "Blood of Jesus" — accepting a nice dress and shoes — to be absolved through a song belted out by a former Ikette in "Don't Play Us Cheap": "You Cut Up the Clothes in the Closet of My Dreams."

Both movies meld realism and fantasy. "Blood of Jesus" paints death, or at least a vision of death, as if the road to eternity could peel off a dusty byway and any old roadhouse could be a pitstop on the highway to hell. "Don't Play Us Cheap" takes a birthday party on a Saturday night, and through cinematic acrobatics bleeds the medium of all its potential, elevating the social gathering to a transforming experience through dazzling color and texture, and examining it objectively and subjectively, individually and collectively, consciously and subconsciously.

The scarcity of black independent film ordains these pictures vital artifacts in addition to being art. Both were created by black filmmakers with all-black casts for black audiences, so it's safe to assume neither panders to whites. "Blood of Jesus" especially feels like folk art, maybe because of its age, its sincerity and because it was lost and found (with reels still missing). Its value is incalculable when you factor in the odds against a black director in the forties. "Don't Play Us Cheap" was chosen here for contrast because it too features a devil and a party. But is also lends a window into its time period. Due to the superior skill of the cast and the visionary Van Peebles, is it more true to life or more fantastic?
— Becky

RETURN TO HOME PAGE.

2009-04-21T12:28:00.000-04:00

Edwards Drive-In
Spotlight on the big-screen temples, some spared the wrecking ball, others consigned to memory.

ADDRESS: 4469 E. Live Oak Ave., Arcadia, CA
ARCHITECT: S. Charles Lee
OPENED: 1948
CAPACITY: 750 cars
CLOSED/DEMOLISHED: 1980s-1990s

2009-04-19T14:33:00.000-04:00

5th Avenue Theatre
Spotlight on the big-screen temples, some spared the wrecking ball, others consigned to memory.

ADDRESS: 1308 5th Ave., Seattle
ARCHITECT: R.C. Reamer
OPENED: 1926
STYLE: Modeled after three of ancient China's most significant architectural achievements: The Forbidden City, The Temple of Heaven and The Summer Palace
WEB SITE: http://www.5thavenue.org/

2009-04-16T13:29:00.000-04:00

Blood Freak (1972)

DIRECTORS: Steve Hawkes, Brad F. Grinter
PRODUCERS: Steve Hawkes, Brad F. Grinter
WRITERS: Steve Hawkes, Brad F. Grinter
CAST: Steve Hawkes, Brad Grinter, Tera Anderson, Dana Cullivan, Bob Currier, Dolores Currier, Randy Grinter
GENRE: Cult, horror, sci-fi
MISCELLANY: 80m; on DVD

Which came first, the turkey rating or "Blood Freak?"

Fans of so-bad-it's-good cinema probably have seen or at least heard of the "world's only turkey-monster, anti-drug, pro-Jesus gore film." Now that I've seen it, I wanna testify to its mysterious charms and give thanks, even though I probably shouldn't admit to sitting through the whole thing. I should be ashamed.

The plot is difficult to divine. The gist:

A Vietnam War veteran named Herschell meets a Jesus freak on the highway who, I think, fakes a breakdown in order to pick him up. Back at her place, her pea-brained sister horns in on her action and gets Herschell hooked on some potent herb. The pot doesn't agree with the drug-filled turkey meat Herschell eats in his capacity as a guinea pig on a farm, and before you can say gobble twice, he has grown a wattle, a snood and a beak and is slaying dope fiends and drinking their drug-laced blood.

You might think the idea sounds pretty good, but things fall apart in the execution. The camera is often out of focus; actors who usually forget their lines mumble without a trace of conviction, look down at the script and toward the camera for cues, and often appear on the verge of laughter, including co-director Brad Grinter, who plays a chain-smoking, philosophizing narrator; Bible-thumpers garble Bible passages; someone off-screen breathes into a microphone; gobbles and screams are looped seemingly for the fun of it; the lighting lapses; the editing is harsh and confusing; the turkey mask, comedy and tragedy.

If you sink your teeth into this film, you will laugh at its failings. But let he who has never lowered standards cast the first stone. (... Or is it sticks and stones will break your neighbor's wife's bones? See if you can make sense of it.)

It's hard to indulge a serious big-budget movie when it fails to hide the strings it uses to manipulate emotions, but when a low-budget movie such as this fails to seduce the viewer, there's something endearing about its strivings. Even when we "suspend disbelief," no matter how artful the film, we only surrender part of ourselves to its world. While watching a movie that forces us constantly to acknowledge the filmmakers' wiles, or lack of, we see how in our desire to escape reality, we're co-conspirators. When confronted with sloppy storytelling, we feel the filmmaker isn't holding up his or her side of the bargain. We try to quiet the cynical voice, but it won't pipe down, and a dysfunctional relationship between filmmaker and viewer is born, which is maybe more intimate because the viewer is participating critically.

Who would like this movie? Young kids who want to feel grown-up and adults who want to feel like they're kids again. "Blood Freak" appealed to the ghost of me at 9 years old, sleepless, sneaking forbidden TV; I expected my parents to burst in, especially during the turkey-monster-sex and table-saw scenes, yell at me and shut it off.

But if the spectacle of campiness alone isn't worth 80 minutes, remember, there's a story being told — paltry, incoherent — but maybe so arresting in its lack of clarity that you'll be intrigued enough to follow it to the blood-dripping-font "end" and even find some of those grainy images ground into your brain.

— Becky

2009-04-15T14:42:00.001-04:00

MASHUP | The Steel Helmet (1951)
& Gran Torino (2008)

Director: Samuel Fuller; 84m.

Director: Clint Eastwood; 116m.

Short Round painted his last prayer in that temple on the Korean War battlefield asking Buddha for Sgt. Zach to like him. When first faced with the South Korean orphan's prayers, Zach tore them up. This was back when he called the boy a gook. The hard-boiled GI's heart eventually softened, but in wartime, is love wise? When hit in the vulnerable spot, he pulled the trigger, not for Uncle Sam but for himself.

Fast-forward to Walt Kowalski in contemporary Highland Park, Mich., a Korean War veteran who squints warily at the world and rarely speaks except to grunt or to spit invective. Secure in his solitude, his emotional armor is pierced by his Hmong neighbors, whom he refers to, of course, as gooks. Grudgingly at first, he mentors young Thao, who is struggling not to get swept up in gang warfare.

Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" could be a sequel to Samuel Fuller's "The Steel Helmet."

Both films present a dilemma when you reflect on the stereotypes: the steely Western paternalistic figure finding spiritual redemption through his association with a humble Asian. Fuller's film bravely addresses inequity, but maintains a simplistic patriotism, which generated ill feeling on the right and the left. Eastwood's film similarly presents a side of America that many would like to ignore, but it's ultimately a status quo fantasy, Walt representing the good, the bad and the ugly of American values. Ultimately, the personal growth of the human in these stories supersedes political caricature, but it's worth noting the overused frameworks, no matter how universal the journey of the main character.

Viewing these two movies as one, though, enhances the hero's sense of redemption for me. If Fuller's Zach experienced guilt over what went down on the battlefield, then Eastwood's Walt allays it with an extraordinary gesture that looks more like the suicide protest of Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War than the conduct we've come to expect from an all-American, decorated veteran "type." But perhaps this is the ultimate sacrifice from a soul weary of war.
— Becky

2009-04-13T22:05:00.000-04:00

VIEWING | When The Organ Played 'Oh Promise Me'
Crosby's voice married magically with the recording technology of the time; here also new technology is '30s Technicolor. What is this? Is this a missing scene from "King of Jazz"? I misspelled "scene" and wrote "seance" here first but that's probably true too, this was probably projected while stage seances were conducted, when cinema had not yet completely taken over. Well, probably not but maybe somewhere, and everyone forgets or maybe everyone is sworn to secrecy and this transitional stage of American entertainment is forever forbidden, hidden from us. Is this an actual scene in "King of Jazz"? "King of Jazz" always hypnotizes me whenever I try to rewatch it. Usually it takes weeks for me to regain full consciousness. Perhaps this imagery is what happens when one watches all of the Mack Sennett/Leslie Pearce shorts that Crosby did around this time; maybe it's those films' film; if film could bounce off the screen and go back into the projector and then somehow become film again. Whatever this may actually be, it is a definite sign that the movie-going experience of today is only an infinitesimal fraction of the experience of days gone by; where there once were spectacles such as this and sing-alongs and give-aways and interaction, there are now only poorly projected stale trivia bits and mountain dew commercials.

One can be sure that Crosby would have appreciated the psychedelic visuals seen here; bleary-eyed and crooning into the swirling afterglow. I wish the recording were done like you see John Williams or Ornette Coleman doing; with Crosby there in person, synchronizing in a sound studio, engulfed by this phantasmagorical message, nailing it on the second take.
— Carl

2009-04-13T11:11:00.000-04:00

VIEWING | Menilmontant (1926)
This scene from the Dimitri Kirsanoff film conveys a delicate and beautiful exchange between strangers. Without a word it expresses despair, sympathy, dignity, gratitude.

2009-04-11T15:46:00.000-04:00

Fox Florence Theatre
Spotlight on the big-screen temples, some spared the wrecking ball, others consigned to memory.

ADDRESS: 1536 E. Florence Ave., Los Angeles
ARCHITECT: S. Charles Lee
OPENED: 1932
STYLE: Spanish Colonial Revival
FEATURES: "Auto Park" entrance accessible to automobiles; courtyard with fountain and fish pond
CLOSED: Some time around 1965
DEMOLISHED: Around 1968

2009-04-06T23:32:00.000-04:00

Macario (1960)

DIRECTOR: Roberto Gavaldon
STORY: B. Traven
COUNTRY: Mexico
CAST: Ignacio Lopez Tarso, Pina Pellicer
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Gabriel Figueroa
LANGUAGE: Spanish
GENRE: Fantasy, drama
MISCELLANY: bw; 91m; on DVD; nominated for Best Film in a Foreign Language

Macario has death on his mind.

It's survival of the fittest at the famished woodcutter's supper table as his five children scrape their plates in a savage scramble for seconds. Macario swears off food, sickened by the thought of competing with his children for sustenance.

But amid Day of the Dead festivities, he has no choice but to breathe in the bread, roasted meat and sugary, skull-shaped treats, and their scent lashes the growling beast in his belly.

To defy pangs of hunger is to defy survival, to beckon death. The hunger strike is a tool of those with little power, a way to exercise control, at least over their own bodies. It's a last resort for those shoved to the margins of existence.

Macario's self-denial smacks of political protest. A parade of roasted turkeys being delivered to a wealthy man sends him over the edge. Until he can eat a turkey all by himself, he says, he won't eat at all. The film is based on a story by B. Traven, author of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," whose tales condemn capitalistic exploitation.

In a key scene, Macario has a dream that incorporates an image from his day in the village: his family gawking through the gate of an affluent home at the mountains of food offered to the dead.

In the dream, skeleton puppets press against bars of bones, watching a danse macabre of the well-fed in fine clothing sliding down the dinner table. Macario manipulates crosses, pulling the puppets' strings, raising the wretched over the gate. They jump on the table, beat the rich with bones, and gorge themselves. Macario wakes up screaming for them to save him some food.

His dream draws from the days before — the Day of the Dead imagery, the gate dividing the rich and the poor, his children licking their plates — but it also has a prophetic quality — foreshadowing the power the woodcutter will gain from his friendship with the grim reaper, the ability to pull the strings between life and death as a means to feed his family.

Before the dream sequence, the film is a realistic portrait of poverty. After the dream, it drifts into mythological and fantastic realms.

The dream is distinguished stylistically by layering images of a tunnel and Macario asleep. Although the scenes that follow lack the dream style, they unfold a wish-fulfillment scenario suited to what we know of Macario's psyche, enough to make the viewer wonder whether to interpret them as more fantasy.

Significantly, after meeting Death, Macario succeeds outside the marketplace that felt alien to him before the encounter. He only takes what customers can pay, and the instruments of his trade (faith, water and fate) lack monetary value.

After the dream, Macario literally rejects temptations offered by the Devil, declines to make the "gesture" God seeks, but cooperates with Death. Are these interactions with mythological figures real or imagined? The dream sequence riffs off of images from the village scene, and the rest of the film similarly references itself, giving it a subconscious quality.

In the village, Macario was hit viscerally by the words of a candlemaker: "When we're born, we're carrying death, in the liver, the stomach, the heart." Candle imagery resurfaces when Death, who is now Macario's friend, reveals life's fateful flames — and the limits of his patronage. It's then Macario discovers that even Death has his master.

— Becky

2009-04-04T18:15:00.000-04:00

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

DIRECTOR: Nathan H. Juran
WRITER: Mark Hanna
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Allison Hayes, William Hudson, Yvette Vickers, George Douglas, Ken Terrell, Frank Chase
PRODUCER: Bernard Woolner
BUDGET: $88,000
GENRE: Sci-fi, cult
MISCELLANY: bw; 65m; on DVD

Nancy's husband, Harry, and his girlfriend, Honey, are so smug and slimy that you ache to see the statuesque star raise the roof and rip them to pieces.

Unfortunately, this 50-foot woman is hamstrung by the filmmakers' shortcomings, and the movie is toppled by its gimmicky raison d'etre. Instead of feminine fury unleashed, the revenge plays out like a bad dream. We get fuzzy double exposures and fake humongous hands fumbling around a flimsy set. With more technical prowess, maybe this monster could be fearsome, but here she is an oversized sad sack.

Yet all the great movie monsters evoke pity. They are grotesque outsiders, usually byproducts of society's ills that grow so large that at last we are forced to confront them. The problem is, this movie does such a fine job trashing Harry and Honey that when Nancy stomps into town, I found myself fearing she wouldn't be up to the task when I probably should have been begrudging her awesome power. It is difficult to grasp her threat because we mostly see her in tight shots with a miniature building, or roaming in ghostly double exposure with panicking townsfolk not quite looking at her. She seems divorced from that giant, tacky hand.

Nancy's physical instability parallels her psychic instability under the influence. The heiress takes refuge from her husband's cruelty in booze, which only swells her sense of doom and self-importance.

Her brush with the extraterrestrial also makes her feel bigger than everybody else, but this time literally. From her lonesome 50-foot perch, her problems seem remote, but it is only her perception of the threats that is dulling, not the threats themselves. The community's reaction descends from horror to pity to indifference.

At 50 feet tall, Nancy finally musters the courage to track her husband to the hotel tavern, where he nightly makes a fool of her whooping it up with Honey, much to the admiration and envy of other men, especially the deputy. Even though Harry and Honey are aware of Nancy's transformation, the source of the booming footsteps eludes them, so wrapped up they are in each other and so little they think of her.

Despite the poor special effects and the utter lack of a sense of proportions (for a movie that has dimensions in the title), the photography is compelling. In the UFO, for example, faces are magnified in the containers displaying the alien's bling. Another effective visual is when Harry, who is always lurking around the corner when some potentially fatal tidbit about Nancy is discussed, carries his wife upstairs and puts her to bed, foreshadowing what we know is in store for him.

If you're looking for a movie with the "girl power" sensibilities the title evokes, you'll probably be disappointed, although the destructive influence of Nancy and Harry on each other condemns marriage. In addition to fifies' social mores, the movie captures the age's space mania, and endures, if not as art, then as artifact.

Plus, it's fun. Next time I'm around a dollhouse, I'll be tempted to smash it.
— Becky

2009-04-01T15:42:00.000-04:00

Tampa Theatre
Spotlight on the big-screen temples, some spared the wrecking ball, others consigned to memory.

ADDRESS: 711 N. Franklin St., Tampa, Fla.
ARCHITECT: John Eberson
OPENED: 1926
FEATURES: Mediterranean courtyard, 1400-pipe "Mighty Wurlitzer"
FIRST MOVIE: "The Ace of Cads"
WEB SITE: http://www.tampatheatre.org/

2009-03-31T12:04:00.001-04:00

VIEW | Gun Crazy (1950)

Director: Joseph H. Lewis; 87m.

Why did Bart do it? He's not violent by nature. But what is he by "nurture"? Where did the gun-loving pacifist belong before he met Annie Laurie Starr?

His martyred sister, put-upon friends and the stern judge scratch their heads: What to do with this enigma Bart? To the row of frowning faces, he's a problem, parentless, relegated to reform school and the service. And he's supposed to be grateful.

Laurie's not grateful for anything. With her, Bart becomes the judge, the martyr. They go together "like guns and ammunition."

Bart knows his place. Laurie does not. When her starchy supervisor admonishes her for wearing slacks, for example, we know what's coming.

Together, Bart and Laurie are like "wild animals," one character says. Cornered in a swamp, Bart's bird-chirping conscience that harks back to his first kill cannot be heard over society's voice. He fires his parting shot for The Man.

What would the story be like if we saw the forces that shaped Laurie, who seems impervious to domestication?

Before they get married, the two confess to being bad. Lifetimes of condemnation pour out. I've got a funny feeling that I want to be good," Laurie says. "I don't know. Maybe I can't, but I'm gonna try."

We are denied access to Laurie's origins, but we are privy to Bart's background, so we cannot shake our heads at his choices, or blame the "lethal blonde."

Lacking meaningful relationships, shoved through the institutional assembly line of reform school and the military, made to feel like a burden, it's no wonder Bart is drawn to machines. The couple express lust through their guns and love through their cars.

Society put the gun in Bart's hands but deprived him of bullets. Then he found Laurie Starr.
— Becky

2009-03-26T14:48:00.000-04:00

The Chase (1946)

DIRECTOR: Arthur Ripley
WRITERS: Cornell Woolrich, Philip Yordan
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Robert Cummings, Michele Morgan, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre
MUSIC: Michel Michelet
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Franz Planer
GENRE: Noir
MISCELLANY: bw; 86m; on DVD

"The Chase" improves with age. Decay deepens the dreamy mood of a film already crackling with atmosphere. Some examples of the mark that time has left:

• A weeping woman seems decapitated, the glare of a light on her back washing out the shadows around her head.
• The indecipherable words of the gangster Gino, played by Peter Lorre, issue forth like messages from the subconscious.
• The piano soundtrack sounds submerged.

Where does the dream begin and end? The film, one of the more eccentric "returning veteran" noirs of the late forties, starts with a sleepy, unreal sensibility and never seems to wake up.

Pill-popping, down-on-his-luck World War II veteran Chuck Scott stands outside a Miami greasy spoon, salivating over the breakfast frying in the window.

A wallet is dropped out of nowhere. The card inside sends him to Eddie Roman, who lives in a creepy mansion filled with ... what else but Roman statuary? Despite getting the same answer every time, an attendant repeatedly asks Chuck what he wants, through a cherubic peephole.

From there, the sense that Chuck is sleepwalking only magnifies.

Chuck gains a job as a chauffeur, but Roman controls the speed of the car from the back seat. A suicidal woman stands at the beach contemplating Cuba, for some reason unable to buy a ticket there herself. Over a Cuba-bound steamer's porthole, shadows rise and fall like eyelids. The camera seems to bob during the ship scene, giving the viewer the sensation of being underwater. In a Havana nightclub, a camera flash seems fatal. A power outage triggers escape through piercing headlights and foghorns. A destination is dreamed, presumably, then visited awake, but is it yet another dream?

Robert Cummings' portrayal of the troubled veteran, bordering on deadpan at inappropriate times, perfectly suits the hallucinatory air.

The movie is based on a book by Cornell Woolrich, a pulp fiction writer who also wrote as William Irish. Woolrich had many works adapted into films, including "Rear Window," "Phantom Lady," "Nightmare," "The Window" and "The Bride Wore Black."
— Becky

2009-03-26T03:44:00.000-04:00

The Day of the Outlaw (1959)

DIRECTOR: Andre De Toth
WRITERS: Lee E. Wells, Philip Yordan
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise, David Nelson, Alan Marshal, Nehemiah Persoff, Elisha Cook Jr.
GENRE: "White" or "winter" western
MISCELLANY: bw; 92m; on DVD

Bitters, a small Wyoming town, is in the white-knuckled grip of paralysis.

Under a thick blanket of snow, characters' movements take on a dreamlike quality. They muster a few steps only to plunge face-first into drifts. They stumble aimlessly, agape at their frozen hands. They furiously whip their horses, only to lurch slowly into a blinding white abyss that quickly smooths over a trail of corpses.

Even before the storm, there is terror, isolation, suppression.

A band of renegade soldiers, on the run after robbing a bank, holds the town hostage. The movie's central tension: Most of the bandits are eager to get drunk and "borrow" the town's four women. The group's wounded captain locks up the liquor and women, yet as he slips closer to death, his grip on his men loosens.

He arranges a dance as a compromise when it looks like they might be snowbound. To a merry tune, the women ward off the hungry hands of their captors while being whirled violently in circles, until the film's hero, world-weary rancher Blaise Starrett steps in.

Before the gang's arrival, the town was far from united. The crisis only delayed Blaise's showdown with farmer Hal Crane. Robert Ryan, as Blaise, spits out a searing monologue early in the film that sums up the tension between newcomers like Hal, and tough old-timers like himself who made the town a safe place to put down roots.

"It took more than a big mouth to get rid of the lice who infested every bend of the road you ride so safely on," Blaise snarls. "... We hunted them down in the freezing cold while you sat back in the East hugging your pot-bellied stove.

"Nobody thanked us. Nobody paid us. We did it because we felt we belonged. We earned the right to belong. And all you've done is ride in here and put down your stinking boots.

"And now you tell us that you belong and we don't."

Burl Ives plays the captain, Jack Bruhn, an intriguing mix of honor and corruption. He tries to instill a code of conduct into the degenerate posse he leads and does so mostly by fear. If anyone doubted his ability to intimidate, stone sober he lets a horse doctor pry a bullet out of his chest.

Bruhn's fallen ideals find kinship in the town, where residents are struck by a malaise that mirrors the bandits' desperate dance of desire. Blaise seems the most likely to break out of it; just about any breakthrough in the plot is precipitated by him. Yet he is trapped, too.

Even the feud between Hal and Blaise is as halting as the slow-rolling bottle suspended by the siege.

Hal's wife, Helen, urges Blaise to cover the tracks of their affair, yet says she thinks her husband "understands." She keeps returning to Blaise's side to repeat unconvincing denials, then offers herself to him on the pretense of saving Hal's life, but her gesture seems self-serving.

The sense of being mired in moral uncertainty is heightened by the snowy landscape. Snow is used to such effect in several other so-called "white westerns" or "winter westerns," notably Sergio Corbucci's "The Great Silence" and William A. Wellman's "Track of the Cat."

One weakness is the film's overbearing score, which treads all over some scenes, leaving the viewer thankful when it lets up at other key moments.
— Becky

2009-03-26T01:31:00.000-04:00

MASHUP | Lolita (1962) & Death Proof (2007)

Director: Stanley Kubrick; 152m.

Director: Quentin Tarantino; 114m.

Humbert Humbert eyes the rearview mirror.

Open road.

Has he lost rival Clare Quilty at last? He looks again, and before the smile hits his lips he sees fast approaching in the distance an anachronism. A white 1970 Dodge Challenger filled with three angry women who have lost their bead on Stuntman Mike.

Stuntman crashed an earlier scene of "Lolita" to make roadkill of Charlotte Haze and to slide a finger along her daughter's bare feet. The "Death Proof" girls roar after him into 1950s roadside America with blood in their eyes. Only instead of their hotrod stalker, they find the enchanted hunter, the professor of pedophilia, and their sister of the broken-hearted glasses, who has been much maligned for manipulating the manipulator.

If Quilty is Humbert's alter ego, then the "Death Proof" chicks are Dolores Haze doppelgangers, hunted enchanters, chanting: "Please don't dead-end; please don't dead-end; please don't dead-end."

They cruise into a cinematic time warp, dogged as karma, and shift gears. True they abandoned their friend in the cheerleader outfit, as collateral to the chuckling redneck, but to make amends they've got to muscle the king of jailbait off of the highway.

"I'm the horniest (expletive) on the road!" Kim shrieks, stealing old Humbert's thunder. "Boo-yah, bitch!"
— Becky

2009-03-25T22:54:00.000-04:00

Overview

LINEUPS
Suggested series.

• Mike's Top Ten
• St. Patrick's Day
• Femme fatale, gothic heroine

VIEW
Appreciation.

• Georges Franju
• Femme fatale, gothic heroine: Extreme female archetypes in cinema
• Gun Crazy (1950)
• Laurel and Hardy
• Marilyn Monroe: Comedienne

YOUR VIEW
Join the discussion.

• Poll archive
• Alfred Hitchcock's Greatest Hits?
• Soundtracks

REPLAY
Great moments.

• Easy Living (1937)

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
• Killer of Sheep (1977)
• The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

MASHUP
Double feature in one.

• Blood of Jesus (1941) | Don't Play Us Cheap (1973)
• Lolita (1962) | Death Proof (2007)
• Steel Helmet (1951) | Gran Torino (2008)

REVIEW

• The Doll | Die Puppe (1919)
• The Love Parade (1929)
• The River (1929)
• Borderline (1930)
• Million Dollar Legs (1932)
• The Good Fairy (1935)
• Street Angel | Malu Tianshi (1937)
• Hi Diddle Diddle (1943)
• Dark Waters (1944)
• The Chase (1946)
• The Stone Flower | Kamennyy Tsvetok (1946)
• Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
• Ride the Pink Horse(1947)
• Sleep, My Love (1948)
• The Furies (1950)
• Bigger Than Life (1956)
• The Day of the Outlaw (1956)
• Seven Men From Now (1956)

• The Devil Strikes at Night | Nachts, Wenn Der Teufel Kam (1957)
• Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
• Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
• The Crimson Kimono (1959)
• Santa Claus (1959)
• Breathless | A Bout De Souffle (1960)
• Macario (1960)
• Homicidal (1961)
• Made In U.S.A. (1966)
• The Craven Sluck (1967)
• Dragon Gate Inn (1967)
• Nightmare in Wax (1969)
• Wanda (1971)
• Blood Freak (1972)
• Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion | Joshuu 701-go: Sasori (1972)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
• Ganja & Hess (1973)
• Darktown Strutters (1975)
• Wise Blood (1979)
• The Big Red One (1980)
• Encounters of the Spooky Kind | Gui da Gui (1980)
• Heaven and Hell | Di San Lei Da Dou (1980)
• King of Comedy (1983)
• In the Mood for Love (2000)
• Ich Will! (2008)
• Inglourious Basterds (2009)

VIEWING
Multimedia.

• Menilmontant (1926)
• Bing Crosby | When The Organ Played "Oh Promise Me"
• Randy Rides Alone (1934)
• Science Friction (1959)
• A Touch of Zen | Xia Nu (1969)
• Ellam Inba Mayam (1981)

GAME

• Draw a line

NEWS
• Composer Maurice Jarre dies
• New Yorker Films shuts its doors

COMING ATTRACTIONS

• Soundtracks

THEATERS

• 5th Avenue Theatre
• Edwards Drive-in
• Fox Florence Theatre
• Tampa Theatre

2009-03-25T21:52:00.000-04:00

Contributors' top 10's

BECKY:
• Killer of Sheep
• Night of the Hunter
• Seppuku
• Duck Soup
• Le Notti Di Cabiria
• Don't Play Us Cheap
• The Naked Kiss
• Apocalypse Now
• El Topo
• Ikiru

BEN:
• Ikiru
• La Strada
• High Noon
• Out of the Past
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
• The Fire Within
• Band of Outsiders
• Memories of Underdevelopment
• Gojira
• Chinatown

CARL:
• Antiquated methods
• Accidental camera eye contact
• Disorienting time/space editing
• Obvious cinematic deception
• Inanimate object cutaways
• Zealous inept directors
• Robert Montgomery
• Print deterioration
• Unexpectations
• Artificiality

LORI:
• Reed's extra ginger, ginger brew
• The IT crowd on Tuesday nights (IFC)
• House in syndication
• Trader Joe's dark chocolate sea salt almonds
• My fuzzy slippers
• Animation class
• My new travel mug
• Sharp scissors
• Glue sticks
• Sleeping late

MIKE:
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• Strange Brew
• Faust
• Holiday | Bringing Up Baby
• The Avengers
• The Return of the Vampire
• Down By Law
• The Worst Witch
• Die Hard
• King of Hearts

THEO:
• Detour
• The Third Man
• Better Off Dead
• Nights of Cabiria
• Taxi Driver
• In a Lonely Place
• Tabu
• Unfaithfully Yours
• Repo Man
• Werckmeister Harmonies

2009-03-25T19:10:00.000-04:00

Movies, by country:

CHINA:
• Street Angel | Malu Tianshi (1937)

FRANCE:
• Menilmontant (1926)
• Breathless | A Bout De Souffle (1960)
• Eyes Without a Face | Les Yeux sans Visage (1960)
• Judex (1963)
• Made In U.S.A. (1966)

GERMANY:
• The Doll | Die Puppe (1919)
• The Devil Strikes at Night | Nachts, Wenn Der Teufel Kam (1957)

HONG KONG:
• A Touch of Zen | Xia Nu (1969)
• Encounters of the Spooky Kind | Gui da Gui (1980)
• Heaven and Hell | Di San Lei Da Dou (1980)
• In the Mood for Love (2000)

INDIA:
• Ellam Inba Mayam (1981)

ITALY:
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966)

JAPAN:
• Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion | Joshuu 701-go: Sasori (1972)

MEXICO:
• Santa Claus (1959)
• Macario (1960)

RUSSIA
• The Stone Flower | Kamennyy Tsvetok (1946)

SPAIN:
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966)

U.K.:
• Borderline (1930)
• Lolita (1962)

U.S.:
• The Love Parade (1929)
• The River (1929)
• Million Dollar Legs (1932)
• Randy Rides Alone (1934)
• The Good Fairy (1935)
• Easy Living (1937)
• Blood of Jesus (1941)
• Hi Diddle Diddle (1943)
• Dark Waters (1944)
• The Chase (1946)
• Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
• Ride the Pink Horse(1947)
• Sleep, My Love (1948)
• The Furies (1950)
• Gun Crazy (1950)
• Steel Helmet (1951)
• Bigger Than Life (1956)
• The Day of the Outlaw (1956)
• Seven Men From Now (1956)
• Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
• Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
• The Crimson Kimono (1959)
• Santa Claus (1959)
• Science Friction (1959)
• Homicidal (1961)
• The Craven Sluck (1967)
• Nightmare in Wax (1969)
• Wanda (1971)
• Blood Freak (1972)
• Don't Play Us Cheap (1973)
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
• Ganja & Hess (1973)
• Darktown Strutters (1975)
• Killer of Sheep (1977)
• Wise Blood (1979)
• The Big Red One (1980)
• King of Comedy (1983)
• The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
• Death Proof (2007)
• Gran Torino (2008)
• Ich Will! (2008)
• Inglourious Basterds (2009)

TAIWAN:
• Dragon Gate Inn (1967)