by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Moulin Rouge! (note the exclamation point), Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 musical extravaganza and a quite peculiar movie, alternately dazzling and numbing, a geyser of songs (mostly recognizable rock and dance hits from the 1970’s and 1980’s — mostly all too recognizable, quite frankly) staged with barely adequate singers on a sumptuous dance floor with splendiferous sets, dazzling colors (I’ve got a bright spot — no pun intended — for any movie that offers us more than dirty browns and greens these days!), excellent choreography and one of those modern ADHD editing styles from a director and an editor (Jill Bilcock) who seem convinced that if they ever hold a shot on the screen longer than three seconds, the audience will get horrendously bored.
The plot, not that it matters, concerns writer Christian (Ewan McGregor), who escapes his Victorian prude father in 1899 Britain and makes his way to Paris, where he falls in with a bunch of Bohemians including artist Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo). They engage (I can’t really say “hire” since they can’t afford to pay him) him to write a super-show called Spectacular Spectacular, and prevail on the owner of the Moulin Rouge, Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent), to stage it as a vehicle for his on-stage star and off-stage courtesan, Satine (Nicole Kidman, top-billed). We already know Satine is doomed from the start because the story is introduced in a flashback by Christian, who’s writing it as a book a year after it occurred and his narration is supposedly what he’s writing. Satine and Christian are paired by Zidler (who appears to be her pimp) when he mistakenly gets them together because he thinks Christian is the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), whom he’s trying to get to invest in the show.
From then on the plot (by director Luhrmann and Chris Pearce) turns into an inventive but still readily discernible reworking of Camille, complete with the idyllic time for the lovers, its sudden end (the Duke has demanded that Zidler promise him sexual exclusivity with Satine in exchange for the money to put on the show), the scene (enacted not at a casino but on stage at the Moulin Rouge during the performance of Christian’s script) in which a hurt Christian throws money at Satine’s feet and explains to the shocked audience that he’s paid the whore off; and her final death from tuberculosis — prefigured by an early shot of her coughing tiny spots of blood into a handkerchief that’s the most heart-stoppingly beautiful shot in the film, one Guy Maddin would have been proud of.
Alas, most of Moulin Rouge! is simply an elaborate set of song cues, in which modern-day pieces of bathos like Elton John’s “Your Song” (which was just barely tolerable when he recorded it initially and simply doesn’t carry the emotional weight in this story the script tells us it does) and “Up Where We Belong” intermix awkwardly (and, at times, brilliantly — as when a duet between Satine and Christian segues from David Bowie’s “Heroes” to “I Will Always Love You” and the bridge actually works!) with edgier material like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (sung as a duet by Broadbent and Roxburgh in the most entertaining sequence in the film, even if it comes off like a middle-aged Gay male couple whose members are both getting in touch with their inner Madonnas) and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (the notes to this film on imdb.com state that Courtney Love was briefly considered for Satine and, while she wasn’t cast, she did allow them to use her late husband’s song even though she usually turns such requests down).
Much of the fun of Moulin Rouge! lies in the sheer outrageousness of its song cues, its sense of, “They’re not going to perform that here, are they?” Some of the songs work quite well — Paul McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs” actually comes off better as a duet than it did when he sang it solo — but most of them seem artificially torn from their original contexts and flung willy-nilly into this one, and the most moving parts of the film were when the songs being performed weren’t pieces I know (only one original song was used, and even that was one that had been written for a previous Luhrmann film but not used there).
Moulin Rouge! almost begs comparison with John Huston’s similarly titled film of 1952, which had an even more artistic (though less openly spectacular) use of color and shared the turn-of-the-century Paris setting and Toulouse-Lautrec as a character, but was made with warmth and heart — qualities lacking in this lumbering spectacle except in very brief moments, in which the acting skill of Nicole Kidman actually puts some flesh on the bones of her character and makes one wonder how she would do in a come scritto version of Camille. (The two stories are close enough that Richard Roxburgh even adopts Henry Daniell’s slimy vocal inflections in his role as the Duke.)
The modern Moulin Rouge! is an impressive movie on one level — Charles suggested it was what Busby Berkeley would be doing if he were alive and active today, and indeed Luhrmann copied some of Berkeley’s classic kaleidoscopic dance shots — but its plot is as pretextual as that of a porn movie and the film suffers from an excess of “cool,” from the damnable emotional distance between us and the characters modern-day directors like to create just to show us how “hip” they are. (To be sure, that bothers me less in a film like this, in which the story is obviously only a pretext for the songs and dances, than in a film like Brokeback Mountain which was intended to be a great love story and, for me, failed because I never really felt for the people in the film.) It’s fun in a dorky, rather lumbering way (how appropriate that Satine should live inside a plaster elephant — a prop at the real Moulin Rouge but not anybody’s residence in real life!) but one wishes for more heart.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Dracula (English version; Universal, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up breaking open the Universal Legacy collection of the Dracula movies with the intent of watching the original 1931 Dracula with Tod Browning directing and Bela Lugosi as star. Alas, the disc containing the English-language version of Dracula in our copy of the Legacy set had got badly scratched due to poor packing at the factory (it had been allowed to jiggle around the hub of the package instead of being firmly fastened to it) and therefore there was a run of scratches in a circle on the disc, spoiling the film at about 48 minutes in (fortunately I still had my copy of the 1999 DVD release, which also contains the simultaneously-filmed Spanish-language version — which is in the Legacy set, too, but on another disc — and I played us the remaining 27 minutes from that source). Also, as important as this is as Universal’s first out-and-out horror film of the sound era and the only record we have of Lugosi’s performance in his most famous role (though in the next two years he’d make two films that were even better, Murders in the Rue Morgue and White Zombie, before sinking into the rut of cheap “B”’s that marked most of the rest of his career), it simply isn’t good.
One report in the imdb.com “Trivia” section said that director-of-record Tod Browning — whose best films had been made at MGM during the silent era with Lon Chaney, Sr. as star (Chaney had originally been planned to play Dracula in this film and MGM had agreed to loan him to Universal for this project, but he died of throat cancer in 1930 before he could make this movie) — was thoroughly unprofessional during the shoot, tearing out pages of the script he thought were redundant and frequently disappearing altogether and leaving his cinematographer, Karl Freund (who would briefly become a director himself, helming the marvelous 1932 version of The Mummy with Boris Karloff and Zita Johann and the almost-as-good Mad Love in 1935 with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive), to direct. The big mistake Universal made was to abandon its plans to base the film directly on Bram Stoker’s source novel — Louis Bromfield, a major novelist in his own right (best known in the film world as the author of the novel The Rains Came, on which the 1939 film was based), was hired to adapt the novel and wrote a complete script, which the studio abandoned because they were worried it would be too expensive and not attract enough moviegoers in the middle of the Depression to turn a profit — and instead they drew the film from Hamilton Deane’s creaky London stage adaptation, further worked over by John L. Balderston for the U.S. premiere in New York in 1927. Universal considered a dizzying array of actors to play Dracula, including William Powell (which would have been ridiculous!), Conrad Veidt (who would have been good), Ian Keith (maybe), William Courtenay (a British actor who didn’t have much of a subsequent career), John Carradine (who finally did play Dracula in two later Universal movies in the mid-1940’s and would have been good but nowhere near as right as Lugosi) and Paul Muni (who might have pulled it off) before finally grabbing Lugosi, who was so anxious to repeat his star-making role on film that he took a low (even by 1930 standards!) salary of $500 per week for seven weeks.
It also doesn’t help that the film has no background underscoring — just the opening of Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake under the opening credits and snatches of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and Wagner’s Meistersinger prelude during a concert at Covent Garden the principals attend shortly after the film’s action shifts from Transylvania to London. What’s good about this movie are the performances of Lugosi and Dwight Frye (especially Dwight Frye; he delivers a beautifully balanced reading of Renfield that manages to suggest madness even in his sane moments and sanity even in his maddest ones — and he’s particularly impressive by comparison to Pablo Alvarez Rubio in the simultaneously shot Spanish version, who just screams maniacally from start to finish) and the pleasantly Gothic flavor of the early scenes in Transylvania. What’s not so good about it is everything else: Browning’s stiff and uncinematic direction (what happened to this first-rate silent filmmaker when sound came in? My guess is he was traumatized by the death of his friend and frequent star, Lon Chaney, and never recovered from the blow), the stagy conception of the script and many of the gestures (particularly the outrageously phony move Lugosi makes when Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing flashes the crucifix in his face) and the dullness of the supporting cast: Van Sloan overacts relentlessly, David Manners and Helen Chandler are just dull as the romantic leads (Barry K. Norton and the marvelous Lupita Tovar play these parts far more effectively in the Spanish version) and only Frances Dade as Lucy Weston (called “Westenra” in the novel — apparently one of those script changes made to give the actors something easier to pronounce) suggests something of the allure of the vampire mythos. Why film veteran Browning turned in so stagy a movie while James Whale, making the original Frankenstein as only his third film, came up with something fully fluid and cinematic remains a mystery to me.
The better Draculas seem to have been adapted for radio; I still think Orson Welles’ live Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of July 11, 1938 is the best version of Stoker’s novel in any other medium — Welles captured all the kinky twists and turns of the story that its film adapters missed, he had a superb cast (headed by himself as Dracula and Agnes Moorehead as Mina Harker) and produced dazzling moments like the wicked parody of the Christian communion ritual he had Dracula intone as he gets Mina (temporarily) under his spell, telling her she will be “flesh of my flesh … blood of my blood!” Once again, what a pity Welles never got to make a film version of Dracula, especially early on when he would still have been young and (relatively) slim enough to play the part himself! Recently Charles and I played what appeared to be a British radio program from the 1950’s, an 83-minute adaptation called Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, essentially a mash-up in which Holmes (John Moffatt) and Watson (Timothy West) were written into Stoker’s tale, with David March as Dracula and Aubrey Woods as Van Helsing; yes, this would have been a lot more fun with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Lugosi as Dracula (the two made at least three movies together, Son of Frankenstein in 1939, the second The Black Cat in 1941 and The Black Sleep in 1956), but in its own right it was a relatively faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel (certainly a lot closer to what Stoker wrote than the film!) and a lot of fun.
I ended up breaking open the Universal Legacy collection of the Dracula movies with the intent of watching the original 1931 Dracula with Tod Browning directing and Bela Lugosi as star. Alas, the disc containing the English-language version of Dracula in our copy of the Legacy set had got badly scratched due to poor packing at the factory (it had been allowed to jiggle around the hub of the package instead of being firmly fastened to it) and therefore there was a run of scratches in a circle on the disc, spoiling the film at about 48 minutes in (fortunately I still had my copy of the 1999 DVD release, which also contains the simultaneously-filmed Spanish-language version — which is in the Legacy set, too, but on another disc — and I played us the remaining 27 minutes from that source). Also, as important as this is as Universal’s first out-and-out horror film of the sound era and the only record we have of Lugosi’s performance in his most famous role (though in the next two years he’d make two films that were even better, Murders in the Rue Morgue and White Zombie, before sinking into the rut of cheap “B”’s that marked most of the rest of his career), it simply isn’t good.
One report in the imdb.com “Trivia” section said that director-of-record Tod Browning — whose best films had been made at MGM during the silent era with Lon Chaney, Sr. as star (Chaney had originally been planned to play Dracula in this film and MGM had agreed to loan him to Universal for this project, but he died of throat cancer in 1930 before he could make this movie) — was thoroughly unprofessional during the shoot, tearing out pages of the script he thought were redundant and frequently disappearing altogether and leaving his cinematographer, Karl Freund (who would briefly become a director himself, helming the marvelous 1932 version of The Mummy with Boris Karloff and Zita Johann and the almost-as-good Mad Love in 1935 with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive), to direct. The big mistake Universal made was to abandon its plans to base the film directly on Bram Stoker’s source novel — Louis Bromfield, a major novelist in his own right (best known in the film world as the author of the novel The Rains Came, on which the 1939 film was based), was hired to adapt the novel and wrote a complete script, which the studio abandoned because they were worried it would be too expensive and not attract enough moviegoers in the middle of the Depression to turn a profit — and instead they drew the film from Hamilton Deane’s creaky London stage adaptation, further worked over by John L. Balderston for the U.S. premiere in New York in 1927. Universal considered a dizzying array of actors to play Dracula, including William Powell (which would have been ridiculous!), Conrad Veidt (who would have been good), Ian Keith (maybe), William Courtenay (a British actor who didn’t have much of a subsequent career), John Carradine (who finally did play Dracula in two later Universal movies in the mid-1940’s and would have been good but nowhere near as right as Lugosi) and Paul Muni (who might have pulled it off) before finally grabbing Lugosi, who was so anxious to repeat his star-making role on film that he took a low (even by 1930 standards!) salary of $500 per week for seven weeks.
It also doesn’t help that the film has no background underscoring — just the opening of Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake under the opening credits and snatches of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and Wagner’s Meistersinger prelude during a concert at Covent Garden the principals attend shortly after the film’s action shifts from Transylvania to London. What’s good about this movie are the performances of Lugosi and Dwight Frye (especially Dwight Frye; he delivers a beautifully balanced reading of Renfield that manages to suggest madness even in his sane moments and sanity even in his maddest ones — and he’s particularly impressive by comparison to Pablo Alvarez Rubio in the simultaneously shot Spanish version, who just screams maniacally from start to finish) and the pleasantly Gothic flavor of the early scenes in Transylvania. What’s not so good about it is everything else: Browning’s stiff and uncinematic direction (what happened to this first-rate silent filmmaker when sound came in? My guess is he was traumatized by the death of his friend and frequent star, Lon Chaney, and never recovered from the blow), the stagy conception of the script and many of the gestures (particularly the outrageously phony move Lugosi makes when Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing flashes the crucifix in his face) and the dullness of the supporting cast: Van Sloan overacts relentlessly, David Manners and Helen Chandler are just dull as the romantic leads (Barry K. Norton and the marvelous Lupita Tovar play these parts far more effectively in the Spanish version) and only Frances Dade as Lucy Weston (called “Westenra” in the novel — apparently one of those script changes made to give the actors something easier to pronounce) suggests something of the allure of the vampire mythos. Why film veteran Browning turned in so stagy a movie while James Whale, making the original Frankenstein as only his third film, came up with something fully fluid and cinematic remains a mystery to me.
The better Draculas seem to have been adapted for radio; I still think Orson Welles’ live Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of July 11, 1938 is the best version of Stoker’s novel in any other medium — Welles captured all the kinky twists and turns of the story that its film adapters missed, he had a superb cast (headed by himself as Dracula and Agnes Moorehead as Mina Harker) and produced dazzling moments like the wicked parody of the Christian communion ritual he had Dracula intone as he gets Mina (temporarily) under his spell, telling her she will be “flesh of my flesh … blood of my blood!” Once again, what a pity Welles never got to make a film version of Dracula, especially early on when he would still have been young and (relatively) slim enough to play the part himself! Recently Charles and I played what appeared to be a British radio program from the 1950’s, an 83-minute adaptation called Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, essentially a mash-up in which Holmes (John Moffatt) and Watson (Timothy West) were written into Stoker’s tale, with David March as Dracula and Aubrey Woods as Van Helsing; yes, this would have been a lot more fun with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Lugosi as Dracula (the two made at least three movies together, Son of Frankenstein in 1939, the second The Black Cat in 1941 and The Black Sleep in 1956), but in its own right it was a relatively faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel (certainly a lot closer to what Stoker wrote than the film!) and a lot of fun.
On With the Show! (Warners, 1929)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was On With the Show! (the opening credit has the exclamation point in the title, though most of the promotional material didn’t), yet another early musical and Warner Brothers’ (the “Brothers” is spelled out fully on the end credit) answer to the success of The Broadway Melody from MGM. It’s a far less interesting movie than The Broadway Melody even though the plot is distinctive and in more subtle hands would have made a great premise for a film. Unlike most backstage stories, which take place over a period of weeks and cover the entire genesis of a show, from its auditions and opening rehearsals to its opening night, On With the Show! (based on an unproduced play by Humphrey Pearson called Shoestring) takes place all in one night, during the final make-or-break performance of The Phantom Sweetheart in its out-of-town tryouts.
The premise is that this performance will either be the show’s last ever or will get it a berth on Broadway — and throughout the film, which takes place in real time, scenes from the actual performance being given for the audience within the story (if I wanted to sound like a real film critic I’d say “in the diegesis”) are intercut with scenes taking place backstage or elsewhere in the theatre or its vicinity, representing events that are happening while the show is being performed. Arlene Croce once called the film 42nd Street a remake of On With the Show!; Richard Barrios points out that it isn’t — about the only similarity is they both are backstage stories (though 42nd Street is the more conventional type of backstage story which happens over several weeks and takes place over the entire rehearsal process) and they share two plot devices: a rich man has bankrolled the show in an unsuccessful attempt to get a star to go to bed with him, and an unknown replaces an indisposed star and becomes an overnight success.
On With the Show! as it exists now is a pretty pathetic remnant of the film that wowed audiences on its initial release (according to Richard Barrios, in some parts of the country it was an even bigger hit than The Broadway Melody); it was shot entirely in two-strip Technicolor but only exists in black-and-white, and to make matters even worse one-tenth of the image on the left side of the screen has also disappeared. (The problem was the film was originally made in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, and when it was converted to sound-on-film that one-tenth of the image on the left side had to be erased to make room for the film soundtrack.) This leads to such bizarre solecisms as the appearance of the Four Covans (a two-man, two-woman African-American dance team that are among the best acts in the film), who thanks to the missing part of the picture mostly turn into the Three (or at best the Three-and-One-Half) Covans. It also suffers from an extraordinarily weak cast — about the only people in it who were heard of afterwards were Joe E. Brown, making his film debut as the show-within-the-show’s comic; and Ethel Waters, making her film debut as a performer who turns up twice, does one song each time, and departs.
Sally O’Neil plays Kitty, the hat-check girl who takes over in mid-show after Nita (Betty Compson), the star, has a fit of temperament and withdraws. Barrios calls her performance “appalling … one of the very worst of the era,” and while I think he’s exaggerating (she’s no worse than Dorothy Lee was in the Wheeler and Woolsey films, and not that far below Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street) there’s no question that, though her character is supposed to be the focus of the film the way Billie Dove’s was in The Broadway Melody, she’s far below the level of Dove’s incandescence. (Then again, Dove had far more to work with; On With the Show!’s writer, Robert Lord, gave O’Neil’s character virtually no depth and it’s not surprising she fell back on whining and pouting through the role to disguise its lack of emotional affect.) Her boyfriend, the head usher, is William Bakewell; the male lead in the show is Arthur Lake (later Dagwood in the Blondie films); Louise Fazenda has a comic part but isn’t used to her potential either (and the loss of the two-strip has cost us the views of her bright-red hair — anticipating Lucille Ball’s famous look — that the original reviewers noted and disliked); Sam Hardy is the harried producer who worries how he’s going to pay the performers; Purnell Pratt is the man who wants to attach the scenery (there always seems to be a man who wants to attach the scenery) until Fazenda successfully vamps him; and Josephine Houston, virtually the only white person in this movie who can sing, is wasted as the character in the show whom Lake jilts for his “phantom sweetheart,” who’s encased in miles of chiffon so that O’Neil can take over the part from Compson mid-show and nobody will notice.
Despite its deficiencies — Lord’s writing was considered dated even then (one reviewer called it “snappy comebacks, 1910 variety”) and the musical numbers are clunkily staged by Larry Ceballos and shot from immobile cameras at far distances — On With the Show! still packs a punch, though like The Broadway Melody it seems more effective when the characters aren’t singing and dancing. (Lord and director Alan Crosland do deserve credit for making the film hang together without the scene-setting intertitles Harry Beaumont and Norman Houston fell back on in The Broadway Melody.) The African-American performers — Waters, the Four Covans and four unidentified Black men who sing backup for Waters during “Am I Blue?” (the big hit song from this film and the only one to become a standard) — come off better than the whites for a peculiar reason: given the way the “look” of two-strip Technicolor became murky and dull when printed down to black-and-white, their dark faces stand out a lot better from the murk than the other actors’ white ones. Waters is also the only singer in the cast who actually knows how to project, an important skill in the earliest musicals because they were still recording the songs and instrumental backing “live” while the scenes were being shot; whereas the white voices tend to get swallowed up by the backing band and the stage noises, Waters’ voice booms out powerfully and one can hear every word of her songs (at least until her backup singers come on during “Am I Blue?”). It’s a shame more musicals weren’t made with this interesting device — about the only later film I can think of that used it was an RKO “B” from the late 1930’s called Forty Naughty Girls, a mystery that takes place during the performance of a show, and in that case the budget was so strangulation-tight they weren’t able to show the actual show!
The film was On With the Show! (the opening credit has the exclamation point in the title, though most of the promotional material didn’t), yet another early musical and Warner Brothers’ (the “Brothers” is spelled out fully on the end credit) answer to the success of The Broadway Melody from MGM. It’s a far less interesting movie than The Broadway Melody even though the plot is distinctive and in more subtle hands would have made a great premise for a film. Unlike most backstage stories, which take place over a period of weeks and cover the entire genesis of a show, from its auditions and opening rehearsals to its opening night, On With the Show! (based on an unproduced play by Humphrey Pearson called Shoestring) takes place all in one night, during the final make-or-break performance of The Phantom Sweetheart in its out-of-town tryouts.
The premise is that this performance will either be the show’s last ever or will get it a berth on Broadway — and throughout the film, which takes place in real time, scenes from the actual performance being given for the audience within the story (if I wanted to sound like a real film critic I’d say “in the diegesis”) are intercut with scenes taking place backstage or elsewhere in the theatre or its vicinity, representing events that are happening while the show is being performed. Arlene Croce once called the film 42nd Street a remake of On With the Show!; Richard Barrios points out that it isn’t — about the only similarity is they both are backstage stories (though 42nd Street is the more conventional type of backstage story which happens over several weeks and takes place over the entire rehearsal process) and they share two plot devices: a rich man has bankrolled the show in an unsuccessful attempt to get a star to go to bed with him, and an unknown replaces an indisposed star and becomes an overnight success.
On With the Show! as it exists now is a pretty pathetic remnant of the film that wowed audiences on its initial release (according to Richard Barrios, in some parts of the country it was an even bigger hit than The Broadway Melody); it was shot entirely in two-strip Technicolor but only exists in black-and-white, and to make matters even worse one-tenth of the image on the left side of the screen has also disappeared. (The problem was the film was originally made in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, and when it was converted to sound-on-film that one-tenth of the image on the left side had to be erased to make room for the film soundtrack.) This leads to such bizarre solecisms as the appearance of the Four Covans (a two-man, two-woman African-American dance team that are among the best acts in the film), who thanks to the missing part of the picture mostly turn into the Three (or at best the Three-and-One-Half) Covans. It also suffers from an extraordinarily weak cast — about the only people in it who were heard of afterwards were Joe E. Brown, making his film debut as the show-within-the-show’s comic; and Ethel Waters, making her film debut as a performer who turns up twice, does one song each time, and departs.
Sally O’Neil plays Kitty, the hat-check girl who takes over in mid-show after Nita (Betty Compson), the star, has a fit of temperament and withdraws. Barrios calls her performance “appalling … one of the very worst of the era,” and while I think he’s exaggerating (she’s no worse than Dorothy Lee was in the Wheeler and Woolsey films, and not that far below Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street) there’s no question that, though her character is supposed to be the focus of the film the way Billie Dove’s was in The Broadway Melody, she’s far below the level of Dove’s incandescence. (Then again, Dove had far more to work with; On With the Show!’s writer, Robert Lord, gave O’Neil’s character virtually no depth and it’s not surprising she fell back on whining and pouting through the role to disguise its lack of emotional affect.) Her boyfriend, the head usher, is William Bakewell; the male lead in the show is Arthur Lake (later Dagwood in the Blondie films); Louise Fazenda has a comic part but isn’t used to her potential either (and the loss of the two-strip has cost us the views of her bright-red hair — anticipating Lucille Ball’s famous look — that the original reviewers noted and disliked); Sam Hardy is the harried producer who worries how he’s going to pay the performers; Purnell Pratt is the man who wants to attach the scenery (there always seems to be a man who wants to attach the scenery) until Fazenda successfully vamps him; and Josephine Houston, virtually the only white person in this movie who can sing, is wasted as the character in the show whom Lake jilts for his “phantom sweetheart,” who’s encased in miles of chiffon so that O’Neil can take over the part from Compson mid-show and nobody will notice.
Despite its deficiencies — Lord’s writing was considered dated even then (one reviewer called it “snappy comebacks, 1910 variety”) and the musical numbers are clunkily staged by Larry Ceballos and shot from immobile cameras at far distances — On With the Show! still packs a punch, though like The Broadway Melody it seems more effective when the characters aren’t singing and dancing. (Lord and director Alan Crosland do deserve credit for making the film hang together without the scene-setting intertitles Harry Beaumont and Norman Houston fell back on in The Broadway Melody.) The African-American performers — Waters, the Four Covans and four unidentified Black men who sing backup for Waters during “Am I Blue?” (the big hit song from this film and the only one to become a standard) — come off better than the whites for a peculiar reason: given the way the “look” of two-strip Technicolor became murky and dull when printed down to black-and-white, their dark faces stand out a lot better from the murk than the other actors’ white ones. Waters is also the only singer in the cast who actually knows how to project, an important skill in the earliest musicals because they were still recording the songs and instrumental backing “live” while the scenes were being shot; whereas the white voices tend to get swallowed up by the backing band and the stage noises, Waters’ voice booms out powerfully and one can hear every word of her songs (at least until her backup singers come on during “Am I Blue?”). It’s a shame more musicals weren’t made with this interesting device — about the only later film I can think of that used it was an RKO “B” from the late 1930’s called Forty Naughty Girls, a mystery that takes place during the performance of a show, and in that case the budget was so strangulation-tight they weren’t able to show the actual show!
Friday, October 17, 2008
The Circus Queen Murder (Columbia, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Wednesday night Charles and I watched an interesting Columbia “B” movie from 1933: The Circus Queen Murder, the second and last of a projected three-film series dealing with the detective character Thatcher Colt (Adolphe Menjou), created by Fulton Oursler under the pen-name “Anthony Abbott” (I’ve also seen the final name spelled with just one “t,” but on the credits here there are the usual two). Colt was the New York City Police Commissioner, but on his “off” time he would investigate cases personally — as here, when he and his long-suffering secretary and (it’s hinted) fiancée Miss Kelly (Ruthelma Stevens — a quite personable and effective actress who should have got a new name and a star buildup) go on vacation to the upstate New York town of Gilead. There they find a circus, the Greater John T. Rainey Shows, which is so dowdy I couldn’t help but wonder what the lesser John T. Rainey Shows looked like; Rainey (George Rosener) has sold most of his interest in the circus to a scheming investor, Lubbell (Clay Clement), whose interest is trying to get in the pants of aerialist Josie La Tour (Greta Nissen), who owns the other half of the circus and whose act is virtually its only commercially appealing attraction.
As usual with movie circuses (including the one from Frank Capra’s film Rain or Shine, made three years earlier — I suspected the wagons and tents came from that film, and according to imdb.com I was right), this one is on its last legs financially, but the main intrigue comes from Josie La Tour and the three men who are interested in her: Lubbell, her lover Sebastian (a quite hot-looking Donald Cook) and her (understandably) jealous husband Flandrin (Dwight Frye), The circus also features an act of 13 cannibals, ostensibly straight from Africa — there were 14 originally, a fact the ringmaster announces to the audiences and leaves them to guess at the most dire conclusion possible, though one of them actually died of the flu earlier in the tour — which gives the director, Roy William Neill (who’d later helm Boris Karloff’s melodrama The Black Room at Columbia, lose the directorship of the British film The Lady Vanishes when his work permit ran out and he had to return to the U.S., and ultimately direct all but the first of Universal’s 12 modern-dress Sherlock Holmes films from 1942 to 1946 with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson), plenty of chances for quite exciting Gothic effects that make this look much more like a Universal than a Columbia product and provide an effective setting for Dwight Frye’s typically twitchy performance.
Surprisingly, the story is not a whodunit; Frye’s character, Flandrin, fakes his own death but is found out quickly when the blood left behind when he disappears (it really looked like chocolate syrup, which I suspect the Columbia prop department actually used!) turns out to be dog’s blood. Colt quickly realizes that Flandrin is still alive and is targeting Josie and Sebastian — and in some surprisingly Phantom of the Opera-ish scenes he’s shown above the big tent cutting ropes so Josie will fall to the ground during her act and die. This is actually quite an engaging movie, and it’s a bit surprising the third Thatcher Colt film Columbia projected was never made — at least not by them; in 1942 PRC put out the film The Panther’s Claw with Sidney Blackmer as Colt — since this is a good thriller at a time in Hollywood history when (as I’ve mentioned in these pages before) few really good thrillers were being made; Hollywood made great gangster movies in the early 1930’s but seemed at sea dealing with other sorts of crimes (the best American thrillers of the early 1930’s were the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1934 The Thin Man, both based on novels by Dashiell Hammett, though the 1931 Maltese Falcon was overshadowed by the classic Huston/Bogart remake 10 years later) — though the associations with Gothic horror, the performances by a surprisingly good cast (Nissen was the German beauty cast by Howard Hughes in the silent version of Hell’s Angels and then replaced by Jean Harlow in the sound version because Nissen’s Dietrichesque accent would have been unbelievable coming from someone who was supposed to be English — though, quite frankly, Harlow’s nasal Midwestern English wasn’t that much more credible!) and above all the snappy pace of Neill’s direction make this a considerably better-than-usual suspense film for the period.
On Wednesday night Charles and I watched an interesting Columbia “B” movie from 1933: The Circus Queen Murder, the second and last of a projected three-film series dealing with the detective character Thatcher Colt (Adolphe Menjou), created by Fulton Oursler under the pen-name “Anthony Abbott” (I’ve also seen the final name spelled with just one “t,” but on the credits here there are the usual two). Colt was the New York City Police Commissioner, but on his “off” time he would investigate cases personally — as here, when he and his long-suffering secretary and (it’s hinted) fiancée Miss Kelly (Ruthelma Stevens — a quite personable and effective actress who should have got a new name and a star buildup) go on vacation to the upstate New York town of Gilead. There they find a circus, the Greater John T. Rainey Shows, which is so dowdy I couldn’t help but wonder what the lesser John T. Rainey Shows looked like; Rainey (George Rosener) has sold most of his interest in the circus to a scheming investor, Lubbell (Clay Clement), whose interest is trying to get in the pants of aerialist Josie La Tour (Greta Nissen), who owns the other half of the circus and whose act is virtually its only commercially appealing attraction.
As usual with movie circuses (including the one from Frank Capra’s film Rain or Shine, made three years earlier — I suspected the wagons and tents came from that film, and according to imdb.com I was right), this one is on its last legs financially, but the main intrigue comes from Josie La Tour and the three men who are interested in her: Lubbell, her lover Sebastian (a quite hot-looking Donald Cook) and her (understandably) jealous husband Flandrin (Dwight Frye), The circus also features an act of 13 cannibals, ostensibly straight from Africa — there were 14 originally, a fact the ringmaster announces to the audiences and leaves them to guess at the most dire conclusion possible, though one of them actually died of the flu earlier in the tour — which gives the director, Roy William Neill (who’d later helm Boris Karloff’s melodrama The Black Room at Columbia, lose the directorship of the British film The Lady Vanishes when his work permit ran out and he had to return to the U.S., and ultimately direct all but the first of Universal’s 12 modern-dress Sherlock Holmes films from 1942 to 1946 with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson), plenty of chances for quite exciting Gothic effects that make this look much more like a Universal than a Columbia product and provide an effective setting for Dwight Frye’s typically twitchy performance.
Surprisingly, the story is not a whodunit; Frye’s character, Flandrin, fakes his own death but is found out quickly when the blood left behind when he disappears (it really looked like chocolate syrup, which I suspect the Columbia prop department actually used!) turns out to be dog’s blood. Colt quickly realizes that Flandrin is still alive and is targeting Josie and Sebastian — and in some surprisingly Phantom of the Opera-ish scenes he’s shown above the big tent cutting ropes so Josie will fall to the ground during her act and die. This is actually quite an engaging movie, and it’s a bit surprising the third Thatcher Colt film Columbia projected was never made — at least not by them; in 1942 PRC put out the film The Panther’s Claw with Sidney Blackmer as Colt — since this is a good thriller at a time in Hollywood history when (as I’ve mentioned in these pages before) few really good thrillers were being made; Hollywood made great gangster movies in the early 1930’s but seemed at sea dealing with other sorts of crimes (the best American thrillers of the early 1930’s were the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1934 The Thin Man, both based on novels by Dashiell Hammett, though the 1931 Maltese Falcon was overshadowed by the classic Huston/Bogart remake 10 years later) — though the associations with Gothic horror, the performances by a surprisingly good cast (Nissen was the German beauty cast by Howard Hughes in the silent version of Hell’s Angels and then replaced by Jean Harlow in the sound version because Nissen’s Dietrichesque accent would have been unbelievable coming from someone who was supposed to be English — though, quite frankly, Harlow’s nasal Midwestern English wasn’t that much more credible!) and above all the snappy pace of Neill’s direction make this a considerably better-than-usual suspense film for the period.
Torturing Democracy (Washington Media Associates, National Security Archive, PBS, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other show I watched yesterday morning was Torturing Democracy, a PBS documentary by Sherry Jones which for some quirky reason KPBS actually ran ahead of most of the PBS network (it was scheduled to air in New York October 16 but it was shown here October 10), a grim hour and a half that’s mostly a typical PBS talking-heads fest but contains some grim dramatizations of interrogations at Guantánamo (faked with actors, based on the surviving logs of the actual interrogations, because the real videos were destroyed by the CIA) and an overall tack that savored the irony that the techniques being used by U.S. interrogators came originally from the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training given to U.S. servicemembers starting in the 1950’s to keep them from breaking under enemy torture (it was inspired by the so-called “brainwashing” of U.S. prisoners held by the North Koreans during the Korean War). Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage (you remember, the person who after all was said and done turned out to be the one who really outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent), said he even recognized the techniques as ones he’d been subjected to by U.S. interrogators during practice sessions in his own SERE training.
I was surprised Thomas Frank didn’t mention this in his new book The Wrecking Crew (probably because he wasn’t concerned with foreign policy except as just another arena for corporations with well-connected lobbyists to profit off the U.S. taxpayer in a Right-wing government) but it seems to me that the Right’s obsession with torture reflects what Frank called the bullying nature of the radical Right: their idea that it isn’t enough to defeat their political enemies, but to “utterly destroy” them; their love of out-and-out terrorists like former Angola “freedom fighter” Jonas Savimbi (one of the best parts of The Wrecking Crew is Frank’s telling comparison of the Right’s idolatry of Savimbi with the American Left’s similarly misguided adulation for Huey Newton 15 years before); even the prominence of figures like Rush Limbaugh, who looks like a schoolyard bully who (like Harry Langdon) grew to manhood becoming larger but not achieving the definition of facial or body features that usually distinguishes adults from children. I couldn’t help but think of the debate tacked on to the end of the movie, with former liberal Alan Dershowitz desperately trying to explain how his idea for requiring “torture warrants” in case a captured terrorist has information that might lead to the so-called “ticking time bomb” which, if not defused in time, will obliterate a major U.S. city would actually reinforce the rule of law instead of utterly destroying it, without thinking of Bill O’Reilly (another one of those out-and-out thugs the Right so admires) saying that once you’d conceded that torture was acceptable in the “ticking time bomb” scenario, you’d conceded that it was acceptable, period, and the only remaining question was where do you draw the line.
Jennifer Harbury — who took up the subject after her husband was kidnapped, tortured and eventually murdered by the Latin American government his movement was rebelling against — gave the most convincing refutation I’ve heard to the “ticking time bomb” scenario, pointing out that any terrorist group sending an operative out to do such an important attack would first give him or her the well-known counterintelligence training to prevent them from “cracking” under torture — which includes withstanding as long as you can and then flooding your torturers with such a convincing blizzard of information and misinformation they won’t be able to sort out the truth from the lies until after the big bomb goes off. Ever Dershowitz’s claim that you shouldn’t let someone in this scenario off the hook until they physically lead you to the bomb is meaningless; any halfway competent terrorist would plant more than one bomb and be prepared, if necessary, to lead his or her torturers to a blind bomb instead of the real one, so while they’re energetically disarming the blind “bomb,” the real one goes off on schedule.
The other show I watched yesterday morning was Torturing Democracy, a PBS documentary by Sherry Jones which for some quirky reason KPBS actually ran ahead of most of the PBS network (it was scheduled to air in New York October 16 but it was shown here October 10), a grim hour and a half that’s mostly a typical PBS talking-heads fest but contains some grim dramatizations of interrogations at Guantánamo (faked with actors, based on the surviving logs of the actual interrogations, because the real videos were destroyed by the CIA) and an overall tack that savored the irony that the techniques being used by U.S. interrogators came originally from the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training given to U.S. servicemembers starting in the 1950’s to keep them from breaking under enemy torture (it was inspired by the so-called “brainwashing” of U.S. prisoners held by the North Koreans during the Korean War). Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage (you remember, the person who after all was said and done turned out to be the one who really outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent), said he even recognized the techniques as ones he’d been subjected to by U.S. interrogators during practice sessions in his own SERE training.
I was surprised Thomas Frank didn’t mention this in his new book The Wrecking Crew (probably because he wasn’t concerned with foreign policy except as just another arena for corporations with well-connected lobbyists to profit off the U.S. taxpayer in a Right-wing government) but it seems to me that the Right’s obsession with torture reflects what Frank called the bullying nature of the radical Right: their idea that it isn’t enough to defeat their political enemies, but to “utterly destroy” them; their love of out-and-out terrorists like former Angola “freedom fighter” Jonas Savimbi (one of the best parts of The Wrecking Crew is Frank’s telling comparison of the Right’s idolatry of Savimbi with the American Left’s similarly misguided adulation for Huey Newton 15 years before); even the prominence of figures like Rush Limbaugh, who looks like a schoolyard bully who (like Harry Langdon) grew to manhood becoming larger but not achieving the definition of facial or body features that usually distinguishes adults from children. I couldn’t help but think of the debate tacked on to the end of the movie, with former liberal Alan Dershowitz desperately trying to explain how his idea for requiring “torture warrants” in case a captured terrorist has information that might lead to the so-called “ticking time bomb” which, if not defused in time, will obliterate a major U.S. city would actually reinforce the rule of law instead of utterly destroying it, without thinking of Bill O’Reilly (another one of those out-and-out thugs the Right so admires) saying that once you’d conceded that torture was acceptable in the “ticking time bomb” scenario, you’d conceded that it was acceptable, period, and the only remaining question was where do you draw the line.
Jennifer Harbury — who took up the subject after her husband was kidnapped, tortured and eventually murdered by the Latin American government his movement was rebelling against — gave the most convincing refutation I’ve heard to the “ticking time bomb” scenario, pointing out that any terrorist group sending an operative out to do such an important attack would first give him or her the well-known counterintelligence training to prevent them from “cracking” under torture — which includes withstanding as long as you can and then flooding your torturers with such a convincing blizzard of information and misinformation they won’t be able to sort out the truth from the lies until after the big bomb goes off. Ever Dershowitz’s claim that you shouldn’t let someone in this scenario off the hook until they physically lead you to the bomb is meaningless; any halfway competent terrorist would plant more than one bomb and be prepared, if necessary, to lead his or her torturers to a blind bomb instead of the real one, so while they’re energetically disarming the blind “bomb,” the real one goes off on schedule.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Shockproof (Columbia, 1948, rel. 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles Shockproof, a 1948 film noir made at Columbia and directed by Douglas Sirk, who had been signed to a Columbia contract in 1942 but didn’t do any work at all for them for five years. During that time Sirk established a reputation making quirky independent films for producers Seymour Nebenzal, Hunt Stromberg and Edward Small — Hitler’s Madman, Summer Storm, A Scandal in Paris and Lured — before hitting the big time, more or less, with Sleep No More (a Mary Pickford production), a Gaslight knockoff with Claudette Colbert as the innocent young woman and Don Ameche as the sinister husband who’s trying to drive her crazy and ultimately knock her off.
Columbia’s president Harry Cohn, whose tenure as a studio head alternated between brilliant decisions (like giving Frank Capra his big break as a director and Rita Hayworth hers as a star) and idiotic mistakes (like firing Marilyn Monroe after her first six-month option in 1948), decided he’d finally give Sirk a Columbia assignment and made him do Slightly French, a screwball comedy (in 1947, when that genre was pretty well dead) in which Don Ameche plays a fired film director who tries to get his job back by passing off Dorothy Lamour as a Frenchwoman. (“I have no feeling for this picture at all,” Sirk told Jon Halliday in their book-length interview.) For Sirk’s next (and, as it turned out, last) Columbia film, Cohn offered him The Lovers, a story by Samuel Fuller (who hadn’t yet directed himself) about convicted murderess Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), who’s paroled into the custody of tough parole officer Griffin “Griff” Marat (Cornel Wilde, top-billed — a weird role for him reflecting how hard a time Cohn had casting him after his breakthrough as Chopin in A Song to Remember).
Marsh remains in love with gambler Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), who waited for her during her five-year prison stretch after she committed murder in the first place to protect him (the details of her previous crime are left powerfully unstated), but Marat declares him an “undesirable person” and insists that her parole will be revoked if she ever sees him. After she washes out on one job Marat has set up for her, Marat hires her as a maid in his home and caregiver for his blind mother (Esther Minciotti), and ultimately proximity works its magic and Marat falls in love with her himself. Wesson, whom she’s still seeing on the sly (they meet in a public library and are photographed speaking furtively to each other across the bookshelves in a shot Sirk seems to have ripped off the famous meeting between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in a supermarket in Double Indemnity), encourages her to vamp Marat and get him to marry her, which will immediately violate her parole restriction — she’s forbidden to marry anyone as a condition of parole — and get him in trouble.
Eventually Marat proposes marriage to Jenny, and she accepts — not as part of Wesson’s plot but because she’s now genuinely in love with him — and when she visits Wesson and he calls Marat threatening to blackmail him over the marriage, she shoots him. She and Marat escape, and there are quite a few powerful scenes showing them on the run and in particular underscoring the irony of how a man who’s always lived on the right side of the law makes a singularly inept fugitive. Meanwhile, their case becomes the subject of a barrage of newspaper stories, referring to them as “The Lovers” and underscoring the irony of a parolee wanted for murder and fleeing in the company of her parole officer/lover. Samuel Fuller planned to end the movie with a shoot-out between Marat and the police, in which either or both of the lovers would be killed (his comments to Halliday are ambiguous); but the producer, Helen Deutsch, pulled rank on both her director and writer and rewrote the script herself to create a “happy” ending: Marat and Jenny give themselves up, Wesson turns out to have been merely wounded (not killed), and they visit him in the hospital and he forgives them, decides not to press charges and blesses their union.
For all the compromising in the script (Sirk complained to Halliday that Deutsch’s revisions of the script leached out of the movie everything that had interested him and made him want to do it), the unbelievability of the ending and the woodenness of Cornel Wilde (who’s believable in the beginning as the representative of law and order but isn’t a good enough actor to make his transition to love-driven fugitive from justice believable), Shockproof comes off as a finely honed noir with some fascinating aspects, notably the Hitchcockian hero-heroine-villain love triangle and the fact that the villain seems more personable and even, in a way, more honorable than the hero. There’s an anticipation of The Magnificent Obsession in the use of a blind character and also a premonition of Fuller’s own directorial efforts in the use of the media and the contrast between the version of the story given in the newspapers and the “real” one we in the audience see (indeed, one could readily imagine Shockproof being made today with the fugitives’ story being dredged up, after they thought it had been forgotten, by being staged on America’s Most Wanted).
Wilde really isn’t a noir actor — the part cries out for someone more ambiguous, like Dick Powell — but Patricia Knight (then Mrs. Cornel Wilde) is, giving a unique spin on the femme fatale who vamps her man not because she’s evil and wants to destroy him for her own benefit but because she’s traumatized and genuinely torn. While I couldn’t help imagining what Shockproof might have been with the young Marilyn Monroe in the role (had Harry Cohn realized what he had in her, it’s entirely possible he would have cast her as boldly and creatively as he did Kim Novak later and she would have developed quite a different image from the dumb-blonde type she got stuck in at Fox), Knight’s performance is chillingly effective and should have led her to a major career — and John Baragrey also comes off as an unjustly forgotten actor, playing a character who’s been careful to avoid anything out-and-out illegal and, despite Marat’s conviction that it’s only a matter of time before he will break the law and involve Jenny in a situation that will lead her back to prison, Harry has a distinct code of honor which Baragrey communicates vividly.
As one of those good movies that could have been even better, Shockproof is worth watching but also a bit frustrating; afterwards Sirk briefly worked on a third Columbia project, Lulu Belle (another stupid comedy), then got Cohn to cancel his contract and left for Europe for about a year, did the comeback film The First Legion with Charles Boyer on his return and then signed with Universal-International and eventually made the big movies on which his reputation rests.
I ran Charles Shockproof, a 1948 film noir made at Columbia and directed by Douglas Sirk, who had been signed to a Columbia contract in 1942 but didn’t do any work at all for them for five years. During that time Sirk established a reputation making quirky independent films for producers Seymour Nebenzal, Hunt Stromberg and Edward Small — Hitler’s Madman, Summer Storm, A Scandal in Paris and Lured — before hitting the big time, more or less, with Sleep No More (a Mary Pickford production), a Gaslight knockoff with Claudette Colbert as the innocent young woman and Don Ameche as the sinister husband who’s trying to drive her crazy and ultimately knock her off.
Columbia’s president Harry Cohn, whose tenure as a studio head alternated between brilliant decisions (like giving Frank Capra his big break as a director and Rita Hayworth hers as a star) and idiotic mistakes (like firing Marilyn Monroe after her first six-month option in 1948), decided he’d finally give Sirk a Columbia assignment and made him do Slightly French, a screwball comedy (in 1947, when that genre was pretty well dead) in which Don Ameche plays a fired film director who tries to get his job back by passing off Dorothy Lamour as a Frenchwoman. (“I have no feeling for this picture at all,” Sirk told Jon Halliday in their book-length interview.) For Sirk’s next (and, as it turned out, last) Columbia film, Cohn offered him The Lovers, a story by Samuel Fuller (who hadn’t yet directed himself) about convicted murderess Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), who’s paroled into the custody of tough parole officer Griffin “Griff” Marat (Cornel Wilde, top-billed — a weird role for him reflecting how hard a time Cohn had casting him after his breakthrough as Chopin in A Song to Remember).
Marsh remains in love with gambler Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), who waited for her during her five-year prison stretch after she committed murder in the first place to protect him (the details of her previous crime are left powerfully unstated), but Marat declares him an “undesirable person” and insists that her parole will be revoked if she ever sees him. After she washes out on one job Marat has set up for her, Marat hires her as a maid in his home and caregiver for his blind mother (Esther Minciotti), and ultimately proximity works its magic and Marat falls in love with her himself. Wesson, whom she’s still seeing on the sly (they meet in a public library and are photographed speaking furtively to each other across the bookshelves in a shot Sirk seems to have ripped off the famous meeting between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in a supermarket in Double Indemnity), encourages her to vamp Marat and get him to marry her, which will immediately violate her parole restriction — she’s forbidden to marry anyone as a condition of parole — and get him in trouble.
Eventually Marat proposes marriage to Jenny, and she accepts — not as part of Wesson’s plot but because she’s now genuinely in love with him — and when she visits Wesson and he calls Marat threatening to blackmail him over the marriage, she shoots him. She and Marat escape, and there are quite a few powerful scenes showing them on the run and in particular underscoring the irony of how a man who’s always lived on the right side of the law makes a singularly inept fugitive. Meanwhile, their case becomes the subject of a barrage of newspaper stories, referring to them as “The Lovers” and underscoring the irony of a parolee wanted for murder and fleeing in the company of her parole officer/lover. Samuel Fuller planned to end the movie with a shoot-out between Marat and the police, in which either or both of the lovers would be killed (his comments to Halliday are ambiguous); but the producer, Helen Deutsch, pulled rank on both her director and writer and rewrote the script herself to create a “happy” ending: Marat and Jenny give themselves up, Wesson turns out to have been merely wounded (not killed), and they visit him in the hospital and he forgives them, decides not to press charges and blesses their union.
For all the compromising in the script (Sirk complained to Halliday that Deutsch’s revisions of the script leached out of the movie everything that had interested him and made him want to do it), the unbelievability of the ending and the woodenness of Cornel Wilde (who’s believable in the beginning as the representative of law and order but isn’t a good enough actor to make his transition to love-driven fugitive from justice believable), Shockproof comes off as a finely honed noir with some fascinating aspects, notably the Hitchcockian hero-heroine-villain love triangle and the fact that the villain seems more personable and even, in a way, more honorable than the hero. There’s an anticipation of The Magnificent Obsession in the use of a blind character and also a premonition of Fuller’s own directorial efforts in the use of the media and the contrast between the version of the story given in the newspapers and the “real” one we in the audience see (indeed, one could readily imagine Shockproof being made today with the fugitives’ story being dredged up, after they thought it had been forgotten, by being staged on America’s Most Wanted).
Wilde really isn’t a noir actor — the part cries out for someone more ambiguous, like Dick Powell — but Patricia Knight (then Mrs. Cornel Wilde) is, giving a unique spin on the femme fatale who vamps her man not because she’s evil and wants to destroy him for her own benefit but because she’s traumatized and genuinely torn. While I couldn’t help imagining what Shockproof might have been with the young Marilyn Monroe in the role (had Harry Cohn realized what he had in her, it’s entirely possible he would have cast her as boldly and creatively as he did Kim Novak later and she would have developed quite a different image from the dumb-blonde type she got stuck in at Fox), Knight’s performance is chillingly effective and should have led her to a major career — and John Baragrey also comes off as an unjustly forgotten actor, playing a character who’s been careful to avoid anything out-and-out illegal and, despite Marat’s conviction that it’s only a matter of time before he will break the law and involve Jenny in a situation that will lead her back to prison, Harry has a distinct code of honor which Baragrey communicates vividly.
As one of those good movies that could have been even better, Shockproof is worth watching but also a bit frustrating; afterwards Sirk briefly worked on a third Columbia project, Lulu Belle (another stupid comedy), then got Cohn to cancel his contract and left for Europe for about a year, did the comeback film The First Legion with Charles Boyer on his return and then signed with Universal-International and eventually made the big movies on which his reputation rests.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
3 by Arch Hall, Sr. and Jr.: “Eegah,” “Wild Guitar,” “The Sadist”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I finally ran a movie from the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archives: Eegah, a 1962 non-classic from Fairway International, the movie company founded by Arch Hall, Sr. to promote the movie and rock ’n’ roll careers of his son, Arch Hall, Jr. The first film produced by this outfit was The Choppers (1961) and Eegah (some sources list the title with an exclamation point) was the second; it deals with a prehistoric throwback, the last of a race of cave people who are still living in one of the caves in Bronson Canyon near L.A. Arch Hall, Jr. plays Tom, aspiring young wimp-rocker — with a decent but rather pudgy body (when he goes shirtless we can see a broad expanse of hairless white chest, too broad for him to be seen as quite as sexy as the director, “Nicholas Merriweather” a.k.a. Arch Hall, Sr., obviously wants us to), a reasonably good but hardly exciting guitar technique (their next film was called Wild Guitar, obviously a misnomer as a description of Arch Hall, Jr.’s musicianship), and a decent but wimpy singing style that only in the era of Frankie Avalon and Fabian could have been considered a rock voice.
Tom has a girlfriend named Roxy Miller (played by Marilyn Manning, Arch Hall, Sr.’s secretary) whose dad, Robert Miller (played by someone billed as “William Watters” who is really — I hate to do this to you — Arch Hall, Sr., who looks dorky enough one has no doubt about Arch Hall, Jr.’s true parentage), gets lost while exploring the caves around Bronson Canyon looking for the “giant” his daughter Roxy swears she saw on the road. Miller père insists on hiring a helicopter to fly him into the cave country and begs off on Tom’s attempt to drive him there in his dune buggy (“Will you stop about the dune buggy already?” one of the MST3K robots pleaded as part of their commentary on the film), which turns out to be a hot rod based on what’s left of a Ford Model A body whose tires, Tom tells us repeatedly throughout the movie, are filled with water instead of air, which plays hell on him getting any speed on ordinary roads (his attempts to drive on normal surfaces resemble the ultra-slow “chase” scene in Moon Zero Two) but supposedly weights the vehicle down enough that most of the time he can get decent traction on sand.
The writers, “Nicholas Merriweather” (you-know-who again) and Bob Wehling, were obviously trying for King Kong-style pathos in their boy-girl-giant love triangle, but they weren’t literate enough to pull it off and the overall cheapness of the production and the idiocy of Eegah’s costume (he looks like the older brother of the Geico caveman and apparently the only reason Arch Hall, Sr. made this movie was that he met 7’ 2” Richard Kiel and wanted to use him for something: later he played a hit man in a James Bond movie, Moonraker, and that’s his only other claim to fame) defeat any attempt at pathos … or anything else that might actually make this film entertaining. Like a lot of the movies MST3K picked on, the biggest sin of Eegah is that it’s dull: soporifically paced, seeming quite a bit longer than its actual running time, it just sort of drones on and on, and when Eegah (copying the plot construction of King Kong) escapes from his cave world and spends the last third of the movie plodding through the streets of L.A., the ordinary people — who, according to the script, are supposed to be scared out of their wits — just seem mildly annoyed.
Eegah himself (the Millers deduce that’s his name because it’s the word he repeats most often — one imdb.com commentator made fun of that conceit and wrote, “Why would you be wandering around growling your own name endlessly, anyway? Some sort of identity crisis?”) is a wimp as far as movie monsters are concerned: he doesn’t kill anybody, he doesn’t destroy anything except one plate-glass window in a store, and he doesn’t even get to rape the heroine, though I couldn’t help but wish he had: my vision of how it should have ended was, with the cops having plugged Eegah and him floating face down in a swimming pool like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Roxy rests her head on Tom’s shoulders and as Tom says it’s a pity Eegah’s race has finally died out, she looks at him and says, “No, it hasn’t — I’m having his baby!”
•••••
I looked for a movie from my backlog I didn’t think Charles would be interested in seeing and found it in Wild Guitar, the second of the two Arch Hall, Jr. films TCM had paired in their “Underground” series. This was the third in the series of six productions Arch Hall, Sr. made for his Fairway International studio in his ill-advised attempt to establish his son as a rock star and singing actor, released in December 1962 and a genuinely dreadful movie with only a few quirks to redeem it.
As a singer, Arch Hall, Jr. isn’t half-bad; Harry and Michael Medved dismissed him as “thoroughly and obviously without talent” but in fact he has a decent if not particularly rock ’n’ roll-ish voice — one appropriate for an age in which the biggest male “rockers” were boys like Frankie Avalon and Fabian (the early 1960’s, the interregnum between the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens and the advent of the Beatles, were among the most dismal periods of pop music ever: at least of the white artists of the period, only Ricky Nelson, who had genuine rockabilly chops, and Del Shannon of the solo artists, and the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons among the male groups, made enduring music in those years) — and his guitar playing, though hardly “wild,” is at least serviceable. (There were surprisingly few virtuoso rock guitarists in the early years — and the best ones, Duane Eddy and Dick Dale, recorded almost exclusively instrumentals; the era of guitar gods like Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix would come later, in the mid- to late-1960’s.) About the only truly annoying part of Arch Hall, Jr.’s vocalism is his occasional adoption of Buddy Holly’s hiccup — which only underscores the vast gulf between Holly’s genius and Hall’s mere serviceability.
Wild Guitar’s theme is the corruption of the music business — this is probably the darkest rock ’n’ roll movie made since Jailhouse Rock — and specifically the character of Mike McCauley, super-manager who signs young singers like vacuum cleaners, lets them live high off the hog while he’s establishing their careers, and then essentially turns them into musical sharecroppers, working them to the bone and giving them almost no money, until the musical fad changes and he abruptly drops them. What makes the on-screen relationship of McCauley and “Bud Eagle,” the character played by Arch Hall, Jr., is that McCauley is played by Arch Hall, Sr. under the pseudonym “William Watters” — and it’s impossible to watch this movie without wondering about the family dynamics of attempting to push your son into stardom while casting yourself in his movie as his unscrupulous and exploitative manager. McCauley also has an assistant, Stake, a tall, zombie-like young man who looks like he was stretched out on a torture rack and is played by the film’s director, the infamous Ray Dennis Steckler, using the same acting pseudonym, “Cash Flagg,” he used in his own auteur messterpiece The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. (I’ve seen that film only on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, but it was easier to forgive its silliness and tackiness because the title gave away that it was intended as a genre spoof.)
Aside from the bizarre family connections (which give this movie a patina of family dysfunction even though the multiple roles played by Arch Hall, Sr. — who also wrote the script and produced the film under still another pseudonym, “Nicholas Merriweather” — and Ray Dennis Steckler were clearly motivated only by cost-cutting needs), Wild Guitar is a campy mess. Arch Hall, Jr.’s weird appearance — particularly his perpetual sneer and his bizarre hairdo, which makes it look as if his ass has somehow migrated to the top of his head — worked, sort of, in The Sadist but it’s totally wrong for a hero we’re supposed to root for and genuinely like. What’s more, while The Sadist had two genuinely talented women in the cast, in Wild Guitar Hall’s leading lady, Nancy Czar (as Bud Eagle’s dancer girlfriend, Vickie Wills), is just as untalented as he is and it’s odd, to say the least, to watch them play what Arch Hall, Sr. clearly intended as major emotional scenes with all the passion and intensity of ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s. (Porn performers act this badly, but at least you get to see them having sex afterwards.)
The film wanders off its main plot for all sorts of digressions, some of which actually have some dramatic power — notably when one of McCauley’s former stars, Don Proctor (Robert Crumb), now a homeless, drunken derelict, comes to Bud Eagle’s apartment (which used to be his home when he was McCauley’s fair-haired young boy, and which he can get in because McCauley hasn’t even bothered to change the locks) and confronts Bud with what he’ll be in for career-wise if he continues to let McCauley run his life (and who’s quickly dispatched by Stake, who shoves him down a flight of stairs) — but most of which don’t, notably an unfunny scene in which three men who hang out at the coffee shop owned by Marge (Marie Denn, a sort of micro-budget Thelma Ritter) hit on the idea of kidnapping Bud and he eagerly goes along with it to find out just how much he’s worth to McCauley.
Wild Guitar has its moments — the kidnapping scene eerily anticipates the real-life kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. (which was also portrayed in the media as a publicity stunt cooked up by Sinatra with his alleged kidnappers, one of whom certainly knew the Sinatras because he’d previously dated Nancy) and the sequences of Bud Eagle actually making music are quite a bit better technically than the rest of the film, with quick cuts and offbeat angles anticipating A Hard Day’s Night and quite likely the work of Vilmos Zsigmond, who was credited as director of photography for the second unit and was rewarded for his efforts on this film by being hired as the full-fledged d.p. on The Sadist. Nonetheless, Wild Guitar lumbers along to a predictable conclusion (Bud and his brother Ted — credited in the cast list to “Al Scott” but possibly a real-life brother to Arch Hall, Jr. and thereby also a son of Arch Hall, Sr. — get an embarrassing confession from McCauley on tape and therefore can blackmail him into being honest with them about their business dealing, and the film ends with a sequence on a beach that’s supposed to represent a scene from Bud Eagle’s first movie, complete with a song called “Twist Crazy” that’s actually a 12-bar blues) and expires in a kind of campy wretchedness that makes one wonder why one’s bothered spending 92 minutes watching this movie. Incidentally, this TCM showing had two introductions, one from Rob Zombie and one as part of a TV (or video) series called Teenage Classics hosted by Mamie van Doren — who at least got to make a cheap, exploitative teen movie with a genuinely great rock star, Jerry Lee Lewis. — 5/18/07
•••••
I wanted to run one of the TCM “cult” films before Charles came home at 9 — the one I picked was The Sadist, a 1963 production from Arch Hall, Sr.’s Fairway International studio that was the fourth in the sequence of six films Arch Hall, Sr. produced as vehicles for his son, rock ’n’ roll wanna-be Arch Hall, Jr. (The six films, in order, were The Choppers, Eegah! — which starred future James Bond villain Richard Kiel as a caveman brought back to life in 1960’s L.A. — Wild Guitar, The Sadist, The Nasty Rabbit and Deadwood ’76.) This is also the only one in which Arch Hall, Jr. doesn’t sing: a helpful introduction by rock semi-star Rob Zombie (whom TCM got rid of fairly quickly) noted that Arch Hall, Jr. had first picked up a guitar at age 11 and his budding talent had so impressed his dad that he got Jr. a contract with Steve Allen’s record label, for which he recorded a single which bombed.
Not to be denied — Arch Hall, Sr.’s devotion to advancing his son’s talents has been compared to the plot of Citizen Kane, probably as close as either of them got to a truly great movie — Sr. launched the Fairway International studio with the intent of promoting Jr. as an actor-singer-rock star in the manner of Elvis Presley. Not that he had the kinds of budgets available to him that Elvis’s producers, Hal Wallis and Sam Katzman, did — The Sadist was reportedly an unusually expensive Fairway International production at a budget of $37,000, and financial resources were tight enough that writer-director James Landis (any relation to John?) wrote his script so that all of it took place outdoors during daylight and therefore he didn’t need to rent lights.
The surprise is that The Sadist is actually pretty good: it opens much like your typical drive-in exploitation movie of the time, with a pair of eyes on a black field, an uncredited narrator (Arch Hall, Sr.) announcing the theme of the film — “The words of a sadist, one of the most disruptive elements in human society. To have complete mastery over another, to make him a helpless object, to humiliate him, to enslave, to inflict moral insanity upon the innocent. That is his objective, and his twisted pleasure!” — and a fade-in onto a grainy, low-contrast, washed-out black-and-white image of a black Chevrolet pulling up to a garage in the boonies in the desert between California and Arizona (a favorite location for Arch Hall, Sr.).
Its occupants, Carl Oliver (Don Russell), a fifty-something married man whose son is about to graduate from West Point in two weeks and who’s on his way to a Dodgers game because they’re playing the Reds from his former home town of Cincinnati; Ed Stiles (Richard Alden), a history teacher at a local high school; and Doris Page (Helen Hovey, Arch Hall, Jr.’s cousin), the math teacher colleague Stiles has a crush on, soon are confronted by the Sadist himself: Charlie Tibbs (Arch Hall, Jr.), along with his mentally retarded girlfriend Judy (Marilyn Manning). The characterizations were based on spree killers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate — who since have inspired more prestigious movies like Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers — though a later reissue of The Sadist under the title Sweet Baby Charlie seems to have been aimed at making audiences think it was really about Charles Manson — and at first Hall couldn’t be more repulsive, with his dirty blond hair combed up in what’s attempting to be an Elvis-style pompadour and looks more like a bouffant (there’s a reason why the naturally blond Elvis kept his hair dyed black his entire career!), his denim jacket and skin-tight blue jeans revealing an almost microscopic basket (are we supposed to think this guy went crazy because other kids teased him about the small size of his dick?) and his perpetual sneer that makes him look like he’s getting butt-fucked with an oil drill.
At first The Sadist seems like any other cheap exploitation film of the period, but as it goes on it gets surprising scope and power. Even its weakest element — the utter incompetence of Arch Hall, Jr.’s portrayal, his attempt to overplay the psycho role in the manner of James Cagney, Richard Widmark and Neville Brand (instead of adopting the cooler, twitchier approach to serial-killer acting pioneered by Anthony Perkins in Psycho) when he not only can’t overact, he can’t act at all — turns into a plus. The sheer weirdness of Hall’s appearance and aspect in the role sets him apart from the normal human beings he torments (though, aside from one chilling scene in which he forces Doris to stick her head in the ground and literally eat dirt, his actions are psychotic but not really sadistic); I found myself thinking of Herman Melville’s line in Billy Budd that to understand Claggart you had to cross “the deadly space between” his character and normal humanity.
James Landis’s script is weak when he tries to write dialogue — his attempts to get us to sympathize with the victims only makes them sound whiny and pathetic — but as the film progresses and relies less on dialogue and more on action, Landis emerges as a suspense director of real power and a plotter whose script is far enough away from the usual clichés that we’re really uncertain as to how it all comes out. At one point Doris openly boasts that the police are going to come and rescue them — and when two police duly arrive on motorcycles, Charlie takes them totally by surprise and calmly shoots them.
The plot centers around Charlie’s insistence that Ed fix the broken car so he and Judy can steal it — it’s the only consideration that keeps Charlie from killing him immediately as he does with Carl — and in an attempt to blind him long enough to escape Ed sprays Charlie in the face with gasoline, leading Charlie to swivel in a blind (in both senses) rage and ultimately inadvertently kill his girlfriend Judy, which sends him spiraling downward from street-smart, cunning killer to total madman. One expects from the usual clichés that Ed and Doris will both make it out of the film alive; instead Charlie guns down Ed and Doris flees in panic across the desert, finally hiding out in another picturesquely abandoned house — and just as you’re beginning to wonder whether Charlie is going to kill her too and get away, he falls down a disused well into a nest of rattlesnakes and nature finishes him off the way man couldn’t. (Landis was a good enough script constructionist that he set this sequence up with an early one in which Doris came upon a snakeskin left behind by a snake who shed it, and tells Ed and us how afraid she is of snakes; the irony, of course, is that snakes finally save her life.)
At least part of the unexpected quality of The Sadist comes from its cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (billed as “William” in the credits), making his U.S. debut as a director of photography after having fled Hungary following the defeat of the 1956 revolution; he’d signed on with Fairway as a second-unit cameraman on Wild Guitar and this was his first full d.p. credit: he subsequently made such other teeny-budget exploitation titles as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Rat Fink and Horror of the Blood Monsters before Robert Altman discovered him and gave him his first “A” assignment on McCabe and Mrs. Miller (though the prestige of working with Altman didn’t immediately enable him to quit the drive-in schlock; two years after McCabe and Mrs. Miller he shot something called Blood of Ghastly Horror, also known as Echo of Terror, Psycho a Go-Go and The Man with the Synthetic Brain), leading him to win an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and shoot prestige successes like The Deer Hunter as well as prestige flops like Heaven’s Gate and The Black Dahlia.
Here, despite being saddled with a micro-budget, lousy low-contrast film and no lights, Zsigmond actually manages to get in some creative camera angles and intense depth-of-field shots. But The Sadist is more than an exploitation film dressed up with some nice photography; the jumpy editing style, though probably also a function of the micro-budget (just about every transition is a jump cut because dissolves cost money), actually gives this movie a contemporary feel, and it’s also surprisingly well acted, at least by the women. Arch Hall, Jr. is a special case — as I said before, he’s untalented but he’s also sufficiently weird as a screen presence to be totally believable in his role (especially when he’s waving his guns up and down in the air, emphasizing the phallic nature of firearms — it’s been a staple of the psychological literature since Freud to comment on the fact that penises are long, cylindrical objects that shoot out things which create life and guns are long, cylindrical objects that shoot out things which destroy it) — and the other males are borderline incompetent, but the two actresses are genuinely good.
Marilyn Manning is chillingly effective, somewhat reminiscent of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (but at least she doesn’t suck her thumb!) but achieving genuine pathos in her characterization of someone with so few resources of her own that she’s an easy mark for Charlie’s domination. Helen Hovey is a bit stuck-up at the beginning, but as the story progresses and its events break her down and force her to act on an instinctive level for sheer survival, the artifice comes off and we start to accept her not as an actress playing a part but as a woman driven to the limits by sheer terror, symbolized in a nice visual effect by the way her hair, tightly wrapped in a bun at the beginning, flows down haphazardly by the end.
Landis deserves credit for doing the civilized-man-driven-to-barbarism-by-the-barbarian trope far more subtly and effectively than Sam Peckinpah, whose pornographic love of photographing violence for its own sake got in the way of his feeble attempts at moralizing; I haven’t seen Straw Dogs since it was new, but I recall it as an offensive movie which pushed the we’re-all-barbarians-at-heart idea way beyond what I was willing to accept and made me feel like I was being manipulated to accept an essentially fascistic view of human nature. The Sadist seems to hold up as an unusually compelling movie despite the limits of its budget and its star, and it’s surprising that James Landis didn’t make it into the big leagues; perhaps he was ahead of his time, since it’s easy to imagine a director who could handle edgy violence and psychosis this well fitting in neatly to today’s film industry. — 5/17/07
Charles and I finally ran a movie from the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archives: Eegah, a 1962 non-classic from Fairway International, the movie company founded by Arch Hall, Sr. to promote the movie and rock ’n’ roll careers of his son, Arch Hall, Jr. The first film produced by this outfit was The Choppers (1961) and Eegah (some sources list the title with an exclamation point) was the second; it deals with a prehistoric throwback, the last of a race of cave people who are still living in one of the caves in Bronson Canyon near L.A. Arch Hall, Jr. plays Tom, aspiring young wimp-rocker — with a decent but rather pudgy body (when he goes shirtless we can see a broad expanse of hairless white chest, too broad for him to be seen as quite as sexy as the director, “Nicholas Merriweather” a.k.a. Arch Hall, Sr., obviously wants us to), a reasonably good but hardly exciting guitar technique (their next film was called Wild Guitar, obviously a misnomer as a description of Arch Hall, Jr.’s musicianship), and a decent but wimpy singing style that only in the era of Frankie Avalon and Fabian could have been considered a rock voice.
Tom has a girlfriend named Roxy Miller (played by Marilyn Manning, Arch Hall, Sr.’s secretary) whose dad, Robert Miller (played by someone billed as “William Watters” who is really — I hate to do this to you — Arch Hall, Sr., who looks dorky enough one has no doubt about Arch Hall, Jr.’s true parentage), gets lost while exploring the caves around Bronson Canyon looking for the “giant” his daughter Roxy swears she saw on the road. Miller père insists on hiring a helicopter to fly him into the cave country and begs off on Tom’s attempt to drive him there in his dune buggy (“Will you stop about the dune buggy already?” one of the MST3K robots pleaded as part of their commentary on the film), which turns out to be a hot rod based on what’s left of a Ford Model A body whose tires, Tom tells us repeatedly throughout the movie, are filled with water instead of air, which plays hell on him getting any speed on ordinary roads (his attempts to drive on normal surfaces resemble the ultra-slow “chase” scene in Moon Zero Two) but supposedly weights the vehicle down enough that most of the time he can get decent traction on sand.
The writers, “Nicholas Merriweather” (you-know-who again) and Bob Wehling, were obviously trying for King Kong-style pathos in their boy-girl-giant love triangle, but they weren’t literate enough to pull it off and the overall cheapness of the production and the idiocy of Eegah’s costume (he looks like the older brother of the Geico caveman and apparently the only reason Arch Hall, Sr. made this movie was that he met 7’ 2” Richard Kiel and wanted to use him for something: later he played a hit man in a James Bond movie, Moonraker, and that’s his only other claim to fame) defeat any attempt at pathos … or anything else that might actually make this film entertaining. Like a lot of the movies MST3K picked on, the biggest sin of Eegah is that it’s dull: soporifically paced, seeming quite a bit longer than its actual running time, it just sort of drones on and on, and when Eegah (copying the plot construction of King Kong) escapes from his cave world and spends the last third of the movie plodding through the streets of L.A., the ordinary people — who, according to the script, are supposed to be scared out of their wits — just seem mildly annoyed.
Eegah himself (the Millers deduce that’s his name because it’s the word he repeats most often — one imdb.com commentator made fun of that conceit and wrote, “Why would you be wandering around growling your own name endlessly, anyway? Some sort of identity crisis?”) is a wimp as far as movie monsters are concerned: he doesn’t kill anybody, he doesn’t destroy anything except one plate-glass window in a store, and he doesn’t even get to rape the heroine, though I couldn’t help but wish he had: my vision of how it should have ended was, with the cops having plugged Eegah and him floating face down in a swimming pool like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Roxy rests her head on Tom’s shoulders and as Tom says it’s a pity Eegah’s race has finally died out, she looks at him and says, “No, it hasn’t — I’m having his baby!”
•••••
I looked for a movie from my backlog I didn’t think Charles would be interested in seeing and found it in Wild Guitar, the second of the two Arch Hall, Jr. films TCM had paired in their “Underground” series. This was the third in the series of six productions Arch Hall, Sr. made for his Fairway International studio in his ill-advised attempt to establish his son as a rock star and singing actor, released in December 1962 and a genuinely dreadful movie with only a few quirks to redeem it.
As a singer, Arch Hall, Jr. isn’t half-bad; Harry and Michael Medved dismissed him as “thoroughly and obviously without talent” but in fact he has a decent if not particularly rock ’n’ roll-ish voice — one appropriate for an age in which the biggest male “rockers” were boys like Frankie Avalon and Fabian (the early 1960’s, the interregnum between the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens and the advent of the Beatles, were among the most dismal periods of pop music ever: at least of the white artists of the period, only Ricky Nelson, who had genuine rockabilly chops, and Del Shannon of the solo artists, and the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons among the male groups, made enduring music in those years) — and his guitar playing, though hardly “wild,” is at least serviceable. (There were surprisingly few virtuoso rock guitarists in the early years — and the best ones, Duane Eddy and Dick Dale, recorded almost exclusively instrumentals; the era of guitar gods like Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix would come later, in the mid- to late-1960’s.) About the only truly annoying part of Arch Hall, Jr.’s vocalism is his occasional adoption of Buddy Holly’s hiccup — which only underscores the vast gulf between Holly’s genius and Hall’s mere serviceability.
Wild Guitar’s theme is the corruption of the music business — this is probably the darkest rock ’n’ roll movie made since Jailhouse Rock — and specifically the character of Mike McCauley, super-manager who signs young singers like vacuum cleaners, lets them live high off the hog while he’s establishing their careers, and then essentially turns them into musical sharecroppers, working them to the bone and giving them almost no money, until the musical fad changes and he abruptly drops them. What makes the on-screen relationship of McCauley and “Bud Eagle,” the character played by Arch Hall, Jr., is that McCauley is played by Arch Hall, Sr. under the pseudonym “William Watters” — and it’s impossible to watch this movie without wondering about the family dynamics of attempting to push your son into stardom while casting yourself in his movie as his unscrupulous and exploitative manager. McCauley also has an assistant, Stake, a tall, zombie-like young man who looks like he was stretched out on a torture rack and is played by the film’s director, the infamous Ray Dennis Steckler, using the same acting pseudonym, “Cash Flagg,” he used in his own auteur messterpiece The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. (I’ve seen that film only on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, but it was easier to forgive its silliness and tackiness because the title gave away that it was intended as a genre spoof.)
Aside from the bizarre family connections (which give this movie a patina of family dysfunction even though the multiple roles played by Arch Hall, Sr. — who also wrote the script and produced the film under still another pseudonym, “Nicholas Merriweather” — and Ray Dennis Steckler were clearly motivated only by cost-cutting needs), Wild Guitar is a campy mess. Arch Hall, Jr.’s weird appearance — particularly his perpetual sneer and his bizarre hairdo, which makes it look as if his ass has somehow migrated to the top of his head — worked, sort of, in The Sadist but it’s totally wrong for a hero we’re supposed to root for and genuinely like. What’s more, while The Sadist had two genuinely talented women in the cast, in Wild Guitar Hall’s leading lady, Nancy Czar (as Bud Eagle’s dancer girlfriend, Vickie Wills), is just as untalented as he is and it’s odd, to say the least, to watch them play what Arch Hall, Sr. clearly intended as major emotional scenes with all the passion and intensity of ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s. (Porn performers act this badly, but at least you get to see them having sex afterwards.)
The film wanders off its main plot for all sorts of digressions, some of which actually have some dramatic power — notably when one of McCauley’s former stars, Don Proctor (Robert Crumb), now a homeless, drunken derelict, comes to Bud Eagle’s apartment (which used to be his home when he was McCauley’s fair-haired young boy, and which he can get in because McCauley hasn’t even bothered to change the locks) and confronts Bud with what he’ll be in for career-wise if he continues to let McCauley run his life (and who’s quickly dispatched by Stake, who shoves him down a flight of stairs) — but most of which don’t, notably an unfunny scene in which three men who hang out at the coffee shop owned by Marge (Marie Denn, a sort of micro-budget Thelma Ritter) hit on the idea of kidnapping Bud and he eagerly goes along with it to find out just how much he’s worth to McCauley.
Wild Guitar has its moments — the kidnapping scene eerily anticipates the real-life kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. (which was also portrayed in the media as a publicity stunt cooked up by Sinatra with his alleged kidnappers, one of whom certainly knew the Sinatras because he’d previously dated Nancy) and the sequences of Bud Eagle actually making music are quite a bit better technically than the rest of the film, with quick cuts and offbeat angles anticipating A Hard Day’s Night and quite likely the work of Vilmos Zsigmond, who was credited as director of photography for the second unit and was rewarded for his efforts on this film by being hired as the full-fledged d.p. on The Sadist. Nonetheless, Wild Guitar lumbers along to a predictable conclusion (Bud and his brother Ted — credited in the cast list to “Al Scott” but possibly a real-life brother to Arch Hall, Jr. and thereby also a son of Arch Hall, Sr. — get an embarrassing confession from McCauley on tape and therefore can blackmail him into being honest with them about their business dealing, and the film ends with a sequence on a beach that’s supposed to represent a scene from Bud Eagle’s first movie, complete with a song called “Twist Crazy” that’s actually a 12-bar blues) and expires in a kind of campy wretchedness that makes one wonder why one’s bothered spending 92 minutes watching this movie. Incidentally, this TCM showing had two introductions, one from Rob Zombie and one as part of a TV (or video) series called Teenage Classics hosted by Mamie van Doren — who at least got to make a cheap, exploitative teen movie with a genuinely great rock star, Jerry Lee Lewis. — 5/18/07
•••••
I wanted to run one of the TCM “cult” films before Charles came home at 9 — the one I picked was The Sadist, a 1963 production from Arch Hall, Sr.’s Fairway International studio that was the fourth in the sequence of six films Arch Hall, Sr. produced as vehicles for his son, rock ’n’ roll wanna-be Arch Hall, Jr. (The six films, in order, were The Choppers, Eegah! — which starred future James Bond villain Richard Kiel as a caveman brought back to life in 1960’s L.A. — Wild Guitar, The Sadist, The Nasty Rabbit and Deadwood ’76.) This is also the only one in which Arch Hall, Jr. doesn’t sing: a helpful introduction by rock semi-star Rob Zombie (whom TCM got rid of fairly quickly) noted that Arch Hall, Jr. had first picked up a guitar at age 11 and his budding talent had so impressed his dad that he got Jr. a contract with Steve Allen’s record label, for which he recorded a single which bombed.
Not to be denied — Arch Hall, Sr.’s devotion to advancing his son’s talents has been compared to the plot of Citizen Kane, probably as close as either of them got to a truly great movie — Sr. launched the Fairway International studio with the intent of promoting Jr. as an actor-singer-rock star in the manner of Elvis Presley. Not that he had the kinds of budgets available to him that Elvis’s producers, Hal Wallis and Sam Katzman, did — The Sadist was reportedly an unusually expensive Fairway International production at a budget of $37,000, and financial resources were tight enough that writer-director James Landis (any relation to John?) wrote his script so that all of it took place outdoors during daylight and therefore he didn’t need to rent lights.
The surprise is that The Sadist is actually pretty good: it opens much like your typical drive-in exploitation movie of the time, with a pair of eyes on a black field, an uncredited narrator (Arch Hall, Sr.) announcing the theme of the film — “The words of a sadist, one of the most disruptive elements in human society. To have complete mastery over another, to make him a helpless object, to humiliate him, to enslave, to inflict moral insanity upon the innocent. That is his objective, and his twisted pleasure!” — and a fade-in onto a grainy, low-contrast, washed-out black-and-white image of a black Chevrolet pulling up to a garage in the boonies in the desert between California and Arizona (a favorite location for Arch Hall, Sr.).
Its occupants, Carl Oliver (Don Russell), a fifty-something married man whose son is about to graduate from West Point in two weeks and who’s on his way to a Dodgers game because they’re playing the Reds from his former home town of Cincinnati; Ed Stiles (Richard Alden), a history teacher at a local high school; and Doris Page (Helen Hovey, Arch Hall, Jr.’s cousin), the math teacher colleague Stiles has a crush on, soon are confronted by the Sadist himself: Charlie Tibbs (Arch Hall, Jr.), along with his mentally retarded girlfriend Judy (Marilyn Manning). The characterizations were based on spree killers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate — who since have inspired more prestigious movies like Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers — though a later reissue of The Sadist under the title Sweet Baby Charlie seems to have been aimed at making audiences think it was really about Charles Manson — and at first Hall couldn’t be more repulsive, with his dirty blond hair combed up in what’s attempting to be an Elvis-style pompadour and looks more like a bouffant (there’s a reason why the naturally blond Elvis kept his hair dyed black his entire career!), his denim jacket and skin-tight blue jeans revealing an almost microscopic basket (are we supposed to think this guy went crazy because other kids teased him about the small size of his dick?) and his perpetual sneer that makes him look like he’s getting butt-fucked with an oil drill.
At first The Sadist seems like any other cheap exploitation film of the period, but as it goes on it gets surprising scope and power. Even its weakest element — the utter incompetence of Arch Hall, Jr.’s portrayal, his attempt to overplay the psycho role in the manner of James Cagney, Richard Widmark and Neville Brand (instead of adopting the cooler, twitchier approach to serial-killer acting pioneered by Anthony Perkins in Psycho) when he not only can’t overact, he can’t act at all — turns into a plus. The sheer weirdness of Hall’s appearance and aspect in the role sets him apart from the normal human beings he torments (though, aside from one chilling scene in which he forces Doris to stick her head in the ground and literally eat dirt, his actions are psychotic but not really sadistic); I found myself thinking of Herman Melville’s line in Billy Budd that to understand Claggart you had to cross “the deadly space between” his character and normal humanity.
James Landis’s script is weak when he tries to write dialogue — his attempts to get us to sympathize with the victims only makes them sound whiny and pathetic — but as the film progresses and relies less on dialogue and more on action, Landis emerges as a suspense director of real power and a plotter whose script is far enough away from the usual clichés that we’re really uncertain as to how it all comes out. At one point Doris openly boasts that the police are going to come and rescue them — and when two police duly arrive on motorcycles, Charlie takes them totally by surprise and calmly shoots them.
The plot centers around Charlie’s insistence that Ed fix the broken car so he and Judy can steal it — it’s the only consideration that keeps Charlie from killing him immediately as he does with Carl — and in an attempt to blind him long enough to escape Ed sprays Charlie in the face with gasoline, leading Charlie to swivel in a blind (in both senses) rage and ultimately inadvertently kill his girlfriend Judy, which sends him spiraling downward from street-smart, cunning killer to total madman. One expects from the usual clichés that Ed and Doris will both make it out of the film alive; instead Charlie guns down Ed and Doris flees in panic across the desert, finally hiding out in another picturesquely abandoned house — and just as you’re beginning to wonder whether Charlie is going to kill her too and get away, he falls down a disused well into a nest of rattlesnakes and nature finishes him off the way man couldn’t. (Landis was a good enough script constructionist that he set this sequence up with an early one in which Doris came upon a snakeskin left behind by a snake who shed it, and tells Ed and us how afraid she is of snakes; the irony, of course, is that snakes finally save her life.)
At least part of the unexpected quality of The Sadist comes from its cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (billed as “William” in the credits), making his U.S. debut as a director of photography after having fled Hungary following the defeat of the 1956 revolution; he’d signed on with Fairway as a second-unit cameraman on Wild Guitar and this was his first full d.p. credit: he subsequently made such other teeny-budget exploitation titles as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Rat Fink and Horror of the Blood Monsters before Robert Altman discovered him and gave him his first “A” assignment on McCabe and Mrs. Miller (though the prestige of working with Altman didn’t immediately enable him to quit the drive-in schlock; two years after McCabe and Mrs. Miller he shot something called Blood of Ghastly Horror, also known as Echo of Terror, Psycho a Go-Go and The Man with the Synthetic Brain), leading him to win an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and shoot prestige successes like The Deer Hunter as well as prestige flops like Heaven’s Gate and The Black Dahlia.
Here, despite being saddled with a micro-budget, lousy low-contrast film and no lights, Zsigmond actually manages to get in some creative camera angles and intense depth-of-field shots. But The Sadist is more than an exploitation film dressed up with some nice photography; the jumpy editing style, though probably also a function of the micro-budget (just about every transition is a jump cut because dissolves cost money), actually gives this movie a contemporary feel, and it’s also surprisingly well acted, at least by the women. Arch Hall, Jr. is a special case — as I said before, he’s untalented but he’s also sufficiently weird as a screen presence to be totally believable in his role (especially when he’s waving his guns up and down in the air, emphasizing the phallic nature of firearms — it’s been a staple of the psychological literature since Freud to comment on the fact that penises are long, cylindrical objects that shoot out things which create life and guns are long, cylindrical objects that shoot out things which destroy it) — and the other males are borderline incompetent, but the two actresses are genuinely good.
Marilyn Manning is chillingly effective, somewhat reminiscent of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (but at least she doesn’t suck her thumb!) but achieving genuine pathos in her characterization of someone with so few resources of her own that she’s an easy mark for Charlie’s domination. Helen Hovey is a bit stuck-up at the beginning, but as the story progresses and its events break her down and force her to act on an instinctive level for sheer survival, the artifice comes off and we start to accept her not as an actress playing a part but as a woman driven to the limits by sheer terror, symbolized in a nice visual effect by the way her hair, tightly wrapped in a bun at the beginning, flows down haphazardly by the end.
Landis deserves credit for doing the civilized-man-driven-to-barbarism-by-the-barbarian trope far more subtly and effectively than Sam Peckinpah, whose pornographic love of photographing violence for its own sake got in the way of his feeble attempts at moralizing; I haven’t seen Straw Dogs since it was new, but I recall it as an offensive movie which pushed the we’re-all-barbarians-at-heart idea way beyond what I was willing to accept and made me feel like I was being manipulated to accept an essentially fascistic view of human nature. The Sadist seems to hold up as an unusually compelling movie despite the limits of its budget and its star, and it’s surprising that James Landis didn’t make it into the big leagues; perhaps he was ahead of his time, since it’s easy to imagine a director who could handle edgy violence and psychosis this well fitting in neatly to today’s film industry. — 5/17/07
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