by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Mondo Balordo (literally “A Crazy World,” though the “official” English title on imdb.com is A Fool’s World), one of the many documentaries on the kinkier sides of human life churned out with Italian titles following the surprising success of Mondo Cane — which was a surprise hit in the U.S. and generated an Academy Award-nominated theme song, “More,” which also became a hit. There was a short spate of follow-ups, some by the original filmmakers of Mondo Cane and some, like Mondo Balordo, from others — I remember reading a Reader’s Digest article from 1964 announcing the success of a campaign to pull one of them, Malamondo (described in its publicity as “a frenzied, fantastic ride on this wide, wide world”), from a small-town theatre in upstate New York by grass-roots picketers who carried signs outside the theatre reading, “Filth Is Not Art!”
I’ve never seen Malamondo and I haven’t seen Mondo Cane since it screened at the College of Marin in the early 1970’s and most of my fellow students were literally sickened by the bullfight sequence — the movie presented it in the old Hemingwayesque mythological way but all this audience saw in it was utterly disgusting cruelty to animals — but I remember Mondo Cane as having fewer sequences and doing more justice to each topic than Mondo Balordo, which cut so frantically from subculture to subculture and country to country it was hard to discern any narrative thread, even a documentary one. I got a copy of this film as part of the Passport International Entertainment boxed set Boris Karloff: 15 Frightful Films, because Karloff narrated the U.S. release by Crown International, and he managed to sound courtly throughout and refreshingly non-judgmental even when the text of the narration (by Ted Wilde) sounds awfully moralistic — yes, this is one of those movies (from the dregs of the Production Code era) that manages to show a lot of sexually kinky stuff by presenting it as an absolutely horrible way to live.
It begins with a couple in Italy getting into a parked car with a flat tire, getting into its back seat and starting to make out (the car is a Fiat 600, and the damned things were so small this constitutes a pretty amazing feat in and of itself), whereupon either as a routine privacy precaution or because they realized a camera was eavesdropping on them, they start putting newspapers over the car windows so whatever they’re going to do next is obscured from public view. The best sequence in Mondo Balordo occurs early on; it’s the performance of a rock band called (at least if I’m reading the inscription on the drummer’s bass drum correctly) “Les Amantes,” featuring a 27-inch lead singer with a flair for impressions (the song presented is “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and he does it in the style of Louis Prima) and a spectacular dancing talent good enough to evoke comparisons with James Brown and the young Michael Jackson. He’s Franz Drago, born in Tokyo of a Spanish father and a Sicilian mother, “and as Japan is the land of miniatures,” the narration explains in one of the dubious jokes in which this film abounds, “you can see what pre-natal influence did to Franz!” Though he was undoubtedly presented “live” as a freak to be exploited — which is certainly how this film uses him — he was also a spectacular talent, as is shown later in the film when the same band is seen, only this time fronted by a normal-sized but considerably less charismatic performer (in a scene that intercuts them with a Haitian voodoo ritual to suggest that rock ’n’ roll is a throwback to primitive ecstatic dancing).
Alas, it’s pretty much downhill from there, and probably the worst scene is one in which Arabs are shown collecting camel piss because they believe it can be useful in dyeing black hair blonde — though the “blonde” hair the women subjected to this treatment sport at the end of it actually comes from pretty obvious wigs far less convincing than the ones sported by drag queens in earlier sequences! Much of the kinky thrill of Mondo Balordo comes from envelope-pushing sexuality, including shots of a Hong Kong photographer staging scenes of women in bondage which we’re told are intended for porn magazines aimed at the Chinese market (though Charles pointed out that the printing on the magazine we see is actually Japanese — not that people in any country buy these sorts of magazines for the text, anyway) and quite a lot of footage of Queers, mostly from Germany (though given the Cuisinart editing style it’s hard to keep track of just which German city — Munich, Hamburg or Berlin — each Gay or Lesbian sequence is in).
I’d shied away from watching Mondo Balordo until now because Donald F. Glut’s entry on it in his Karloff biography/filmography made it seem considerably more homophobic than it is, and while the narration to the scene showing the back room of a Lesbian bar (in which the customers are in such widely varying stages of butchness — and the butches are not automatically pairing off with the femmes, or vice versa — it’s refreshingly difficult to tell who is who and what they’re likely to do once they go home together) has a bit of the they’re-destroying-all-morality line about it, for the most part these scenes, and the ones showing Gay men as well (including a Gay bar sequence in which some of the men are in full drag, some are in normal male attire but are clearly affecting an effeminate style, and some of them are in what later came to be called genderfuck or slag-drag, wearing some makeup and/or women’s clothing but also showing enough male characteristics there’s no doubt about their true gender), come off with a decent level of respect surprising for a mid-1960’s exploitation documentary. (At least part of that may be due to Karloff’s courtly, matter-of-fact delivery of Wilde’s lines; the text may tell us we’re supposed either to condemn these people or feel sorry for them — at one point Wilde tells us that the men in the Gay bar have worn their disguises so long they no longer know what parts of their personalities are authentic and which are role-playing — but Karloff is so quiet, gentle, nice and kind, as he almost always was when he came out of character, he softens the condemnatory aspects of the narration and treats the freaks on screen with the gentility and grace they deserve as human beings.)
Another particularly noteworthy scene shows a Berlin cabaret featuring a transvestite performer doing a surprisingly good impression of Marlene Dietrich, singing and dancing around a chair the way the real Dietrich had done in The Blue Angel (the film that obviously inspired his act!) and Liza Minnelli would do later in Cabaret; the scene is genuinely entertaining despite the oddity that the film carries Italian subtitles translating the German lyrics of his song, but the U.S. distributor didn’t see fit to supply any English! Otherwise Mondo Balordo isn’t much as a movie, a real period piece that cuts frantically from one aspect of human (or animal) behavior to another — and for all its documentary pretensions a lot of it seems staged: the great procession of the Maharajah of Mysore on elephant-back through his kingdom seems to be stock footage from the 1953 Sabaka (another Karloff item that ended up in the 15 Frightful Films box) and the sequence of lions hunting down a zebra for food was probably also stock from a Wild Kingdom-type nature documentary.
The direction is credited to Roberto Bianchi Montero and Albert T. Viola (though I suspect Viola had nothing to do with making the original film and only supervised the English-language version, including Karloff’s narration) and there are also a couple of stentorian theme songs — obviously Crown International was hoping for a surprise hit on the level of “More,” which this film didn’t deliver — and Mondo Balordo emerges as a real period piece (and piques my curiosity to see the original Mondo Cane again, especially since it was recently in the news in connection with a New York museum exhibit of the avant-garde artist Yves Klein, who eagerly agreed to participate in the film thinking it would rehabilitate his reputation; instead he came off as a freak and he had a heart attack while he was watching its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, then had two more heart attacks in the following three weeks, the last of which killed him at age 44 — his death is often blamed on his horror at the way he was caricatured in Mondo Cane).
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
Snake People (Azteca-Columbia-Horror International, 1969)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Snake People — one of the four-film package Boris Karloff contracted to make at the very end of his life. They were originally co-productions between the Mexican company Azteca Films and Columbia Pictures, but after they were finished (more or less) and Karloff died, Columbia bowed out of the deal and sold their rights to a U.S. distributor called “Horror International” (thereby, as Charles noted, confirming our general-field theory that studios with the word “International” in their names make particularly awful movies). Karloff was scheduled to shoot all four films in five weeks and was originally supposed to go to Azteca’s studio in Mexico City to make them, but since he was suffering from pneumonia and had already had one lung removed due to cancer, his doctors forbade him from going to Mexico City’s notoriously high altitude and thin air, so the plan changed so that he could shoot his scenes in Hollywood (though at independent studios instead of Columbia’s own facilities). The films weren’t actually edited and released until 1970 and 1971, well after Karloff’s death in February 1969 (just a month after he shot them, so he really was working until the end!), and they’ve been listed in Sinister Cinema’s catalog for years but I’d never been sufficiently interested in them to pay Sinister’s rack rate.
This one was included in the Passport International (there’s that word again!) boxed set Boris Karloff: 15 Frightful Films, an unwitting pun given that the word “frightful,” which they obviously used to mean “frightening,” could also mean “very bad” — and that was the case for all too many of the movies included. The box, which presented all but one of the films in chronological order (and that one, a CBS-TV version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, was put out of place because it was a TV show and not a theatrical release), led off with what was by far its best film, The Bells, the quite engaging 1926 silent that co-starred Lionel Barrymore and counts (at least in my view) as Karloff’s first horror film, five years before Frankenstein.
It was pretty much downhill from there with the British production Juggernaut (1936) — actually a crime thriller tricked up with a bit of horror gimmickry — Karloff’s five Mr. Wong films for Monogram, the 1940 Monogram horror (in both senses) The Ape, British Intelligence (Karloff’s 1940 Warners remake of Three Faces East, the first — but not the last — time he’d remake a role originally played by Erich von Stroheim; he did it again in Lured), Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, Sabaka (a quite silly British film set in India and noteworthy only for the marvelous villainess played by June Foray, in quite a departure from her most famous credit as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel!), The Terror (a bit of nonsense Roger Corman cooked up at American International in 1963 when he realized that Karloff and Jack Nicholson, whom he’d signed for the film The Raven, still owed him two days’ work, so he squeezed out another whole movie from them!) Mondo Balordo (one of those European documentaries about the kinkier sides of life that followed in the wake of the success of Mondo Cane) and this one, which comes off as the nadir of the bunch.
I hadn’t expected any of these Mexican Karloff movies to be especially good (both Donald F. Glut and Peter Underwood said in their books on Karloff that Peter Bogdanovich’s marvelous social-protest melodrama Targets, Karloff’s last genuinely good movie, should be considered his farewell even though he squeezed in five more films, including the British-made The Crimson Cult, in the few remaining months of his life!) but I hadn’t expected them to be as putrid and uninvolving as Snake People — whose title seems to have got progressively shorter with each incarnation. Azteca’s working title was La Muerte Viviende — literally “The Living Dead Woman” — and the original English title was Isle of the Snake People, which got shortened to The Snake People and then got still shorter with the loss of its definite article — starts with a panning shot of a globe being revolved almost at random while a narrator’s voice talks about voodoo and zombies. The camera eventually alights not on voodoo’s real home, the Caribbean in general and Haiti in particular, but on a fictitious (and crudely drawn-in) island in the neighborhood of Indonesia called Korbai.
There seem to have been not only two production locales but two sets of sets and two different casts; the one Karloff is in (shot largely on all-too-familiar standing “Western” sets — the time is the 1890’s or thereabouts) shows Anabella Vandenberg (an actress billed only as “Julissa” who appeared in at least one other of Karloff’s scrappy last films), who’s supposedly his daughter (his great-granddaughter would have been more believable) and who’s also a temperance activist come to bring prohibition to Korbai — though from what we see, alcohol is the least of its problems. The local police, headed by Captain Pierre Labesch (Rafael “Ralph” Bertrand) — that’s how the name is spelled on imdb.com’s page for the film, though I assumed from the soundtrack it was spelled “Labiche” and was supposed to be French even though his uniform was pure Mexican federales — and the male ingénue, Lt. Andrew Wilhelm (Carlos “Charles” East, actually a quite attractive man within the rather dorky hairstyles and costumes of the 1960’s), are trying to stamp out a voodoo cult headed by a god (or at least a human posing as a god) named Damballah whose high priest is a little person (i.e., what we used to call midgets until that became un-P.C.) and is played by someone billed only as Santanón. (At least two other performers in this film, a dancer played by Yolanda “Tongolele” Martinez and another player billed only as “Martinique” and unidentified with his or her role on imdb.com, are billed with only one name.)
The other half of Snake People deals with the little person, his tall but scrawny-looking assistant and the mysterious young Black woman they revive from a coffin with their voodoo spells — whereupon the lanky wasted-looking guy gets into the coffin with her and starts making out (and I suggested the midget probably said, “We went to all that trouble reviving the dead just so you could get laid?”) There are quite a few close shots of sweaty Black women’s bodies dancing supposedly “primitive” moves, suggesting that the audience the people who made this movie had in mind was a bunch of horny teenage straight boys who’d be turned on by this sort of thing — and the plots just sit there limply as the film cuts between them like a ping-pong game. The stories don’t come together until the very end, when — in a twist that we probably would have expected even if it hadn’t been telegraphed about halfway through by writers Juan Ibáñez and Jack Hill (who also co-directed) with Luis Enrique Vergara — it turns out that Karloff’s octogenarian character is the mysterious Damballah, or is at least posing as this voodoo god to run the cult like a dictatorship. Charles suggested that Karloff’s last-scene appearance as the voodoo demon was doubled — it’s certainly his voice on the soundtrack but pretty obviously not his body on screen.
Snake People is one of those dull movies that has little to offer — just some nice shots of a dancing girl (if you’re into that sort of thing) and Karloff, as he did so often (especially in his last decade), somehow maintaining his dignity even in a nothing role in a preposterous movie. This would have made excellent fodder for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 but really doesn’t offer much entertainment value au naturel, and the plot description on imdb.com — “Evil scientist runs a veritable army of LSD-crazed zombies” — doesn’t seem to correspond with anything we actually see (the baddies extract their zombie-making drug not from chemical synthesis, the way LSD was invented and manufactured, but from an extract of a plant).
Our “feature” last night was Snake People — one of the four-film package Boris Karloff contracted to make at the very end of his life. They were originally co-productions between the Mexican company Azteca Films and Columbia Pictures, but after they were finished (more or less) and Karloff died, Columbia bowed out of the deal and sold their rights to a U.S. distributor called “Horror International” (thereby, as Charles noted, confirming our general-field theory that studios with the word “International” in their names make particularly awful movies). Karloff was scheduled to shoot all four films in five weeks and was originally supposed to go to Azteca’s studio in Mexico City to make them, but since he was suffering from pneumonia and had already had one lung removed due to cancer, his doctors forbade him from going to Mexico City’s notoriously high altitude and thin air, so the plan changed so that he could shoot his scenes in Hollywood (though at independent studios instead of Columbia’s own facilities). The films weren’t actually edited and released until 1970 and 1971, well after Karloff’s death in February 1969 (just a month after he shot them, so he really was working until the end!), and they’ve been listed in Sinister Cinema’s catalog for years but I’d never been sufficiently interested in them to pay Sinister’s rack rate.
This one was included in the Passport International (there’s that word again!) boxed set Boris Karloff: 15 Frightful Films, an unwitting pun given that the word “frightful,” which they obviously used to mean “frightening,” could also mean “very bad” — and that was the case for all too many of the movies included. The box, which presented all but one of the films in chronological order (and that one, a CBS-TV version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, was put out of place because it was a TV show and not a theatrical release), led off with what was by far its best film, The Bells, the quite engaging 1926 silent that co-starred Lionel Barrymore and counts (at least in my view) as Karloff’s first horror film, five years before Frankenstein.
It was pretty much downhill from there with the British production Juggernaut (1936) — actually a crime thriller tricked up with a bit of horror gimmickry — Karloff’s five Mr. Wong films for Monogram, the 1940 Monogram horror (in both senses) The Ape, British Intelligence (Karloff’s 1940 Warners remake of Three Faces East, the first — but not the last — time he’d remake a role originally played by Erich von Stroheim; he did it again in Lured), Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, Sabaka (a quite silly British film set in India and noteworthy only for the marvelous villainess played by June Foray, in quite a departure from her most famous credit as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel!), The Terror (a bit of nonsense Roger Corman cooked up at American International in 1963 when he realized that Karloff and Jack Nicholson, whom he’d signed for the film The Raven, still owed him two days’ work, so he squeezed out another whole movie from them!) Mondo Balordo (one of those European documentaries about the kinkier sides of life that followed in the wake of the success of Mondo Cane) and this one, which comes off as the nadir of the bunch.
I hadn’t expected any of these Mexican Karloff movies to be especially good (both Donald F. Glut and Peter Underwood said in their books on Karloff that Peter Bogdanovich’s marvelous social-protest melodrama Targets, Karloff’s last genuinely good movie, should be considered his farewell even though he squeezed in five more films, including the British-made The Crimson Cult, in the few remaining months of his life!) but I hadn’t expected them to be as putrid and uninvolving as Snake People — whose title seems to have got progressively shorter with each incarnation. Azteca’s working title was La Muerte Viviende — literally “The Living Dead Woman” — and the original English title was Isle of the Snake People, which got shortened to The Snake People and then got still shorter with the loss of its definite article — starts with a panning shot of a globe being revolved almost at random while a narrator’s voice talks about voodoo and zombies. The camera eventually alights not on voodoo’s real home, the Caribbean in general and Haiti in particular, but on a fictitious (and crudely drawn-in) island in the neighborhood of Indonesia called Korbai.
There seem to have been not only two production locales but two sets of sets and two different casts; the one Karloff is in (shot largely on all-too-familiar standing “Western” sets — the time is the 1890’s or thereabouts) shows Anabella Vandenberg (an actress billed only as “Julissa” who appeared in at least one other of Karloff’s scrappy last films), who’s supposedly his daughter (his great-granddaughter would have been more believable) and who’s also a temperance activist come to bring prohibition to Korbai — though from what we see, alcohol is the least of its problems. The local police, headed by Captain Pierre Labesch (Rafael “Ralph” Bertrand) — that’s how the name is spelled on imdb.com’s page for the film, though I assumed from the soundtrack it was spelled “Labiche” and was supposed to be French even though his uniform was pure Mexican federales — and the male ingénue, Lt. Andrew Wilhelm (Carlos “Charles” East, actually a quite attractive man within the rather dorky hairstyles and costumes of the 1960’s), are trying to stamp out a voodoo cult headed by a god (or at least a human posing as a god) named Damballah whose high priest is a little person (i.e., what we used to call midgets until that became un-P.C.) and is played by someone billed only as Santanón. (At least two other performers in this film, a dancer played by Yolanda “Tongolele” Martinez and another player billed only as “Martinique” and unidentified with his or her role on imdb.com, are billed with only one name.)
The other half of Snake People deals with the little person, his tall but scrawny-looking assistant and the mysterious young Black woman they revive from a coffin with their voodoo spells — whereupon the lanky wasted-looking guy gets into the coffin with her and starts making out (and I suggested the midget probably said, “We went to all that trouble reviving the dead just so you could get laid?”) There are quite a few close shots of sweaty Black women’s bodies dancing supposedly “primitive” moves, suggesting that the audience the people who made this movie had in mind was a bunch of horny teenage straight boys who’d be turned on by this sort of thing — and the plots just sit there limply as the film cuts between them like a ping-pong game. The stories don’t come together until the very end, when — in a twist that we probably would have expected even if it hadn’t been telegraphed about halfway through by writers Juan Ibáñez and Jack Hill (who also co-directed) with Luis Enrique Vergara — it turns out that Karloff’s octogenarian character is the mysterious Damballah, or is at least posing as this voodoo god to run the cult like a dictatorship. Charles suggested that Karloff’s last-scene appearance as the voodoo demon was doubled — it’s certainly his voice on the soundtrack but pretty obviously not his body on screen.
Snake People is one of those dull movies that has little to offer — just some nice shots of a dancing girl (if you’re into that sort of thing) and Karloff, as he did so often (especially in his last decade), somehow maintaining his dignity even in a nothing role in a preposterous movie. This would have made excellent fodder for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 but really doesn’t offer much entertainment value au naturel, and the plot description on imdb.com — “Evil scientist runs a veritable army of LSD-crazed zombies” — doesn’t seem to correspond with anything we actually see (the baddies extract their zombie-making drug not from chemical synthesis, the way LSD was invented and manufactured, but from an extract of a plant).
Serious Moonlight (Night and Day Pictures, Magnolia Pictures, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Madeleine Peyroux’s album Dreamland contains a version of the song “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” backed with a piano-bass-drums rhythm section that sounded so much like Billie Holiday I was fooled into thinking it was Billie when I heard it at the start of the soundtrack of the film Serious Moonlight, a 2009 theatrical release that apparently went nowhere since I recorded it on Saturday off the Lifetime channel and just screened it this morning. (I checked the Web site http://www.billieholidaysongs.com/ and found that Billie’s only recording of “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” was the 1937 studio version with Claude Thornhill and Lester Young.)
Serious Moonlight (which carries eight listings for soundtrack songs on its credits, though David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” the source for the title, isn’t heard either in Bowie’s version or anyone else’s) is a bizarre romantic comedy — or at least a wanna-be romantic comedy — starring Meg Ryan as Louise, a successful attorney who decides to surprise her husband Ian (Timothy Hutton) by arriving at their vacation home in the country one day earlier than she was expected. We see Ian strewing the whole place with rose petals and we think, “How romantic,” though if you’ve seen this the day after watching The Room (which also used roses as an erotic gimmick) you’ll be flashed back to the sex scenes in that ridiculous but haunting movie, which are so much more interesting than the rest of it one wonders why The Room director (and producer, writer and star) Tommy Wiseau didn’t just turn it into out-and-out hard-core and create a money-maker instead of a money-loser.
Anyway, getting back to Serious Moonlight, it soon develops that the rose petals and romantic/erotic atmosphere weren’t intended for Louise: before she even enters, we see Ian writing her a note saying that he’s breaking up with her. He’s already got a replacement girlfriend, Sara (Kristen Bell), whom he’s planning to spend a wild night with in his and Louise’s bed and then fly out to Paris the next morning, following which at some point he intends to ask Louise for a divorce so he can marry Sara. When Louise finds his note — which he hadn’t finished when she arrived; he’d got as far as writing, “Please remember to feed the fish” (a goldfish they keep in a large brandy snifter), then crossing that out — she has the predictable jealous hissy-fit and gets so angry she throws a telephone at him, knocking him out. When he comes to she’s duct-taped him to a chair in the bedroom and announces that she intends to keep him there until he decides he’s no longer interested in Sara and is in love with his wife again.
When he protests that he has to use the bathroom (incidentally he demands to use the bathroom twice while neither she nor Sara seem to need it at all — odd since women usually have to pee more often than men), she undoes him from the chair — and re-tapes him to the toilet, this time with his pants down. “It’s going to take a miracle to get me to fall in love with you again!” Ian declares — and the miracle promptly arrives in the unlikely form of Todd (Justin Long, younger and considerably hotter-looking than Timothy Hutton — though, perhaps because this was a theatrical movie and not produced especially for Lifetime, Hutton is at least better looking than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime generally goes for in their leading men), who drives in on a tractor-style lawnmower, playing a punk-rock song through ear buds and therefore unable to hear Ian’s cries for help.
When he stops the mower, takes off the ear buds and does hear Ian’s cries for help, he turns out to be the leader of a gang of young burglars there to ransack the house and steal all the valuables — and instead of freeing Ian he regards it as a gift from Providence that he’s already tied up and therefore Ian and his gang don’t have to do that themselves. They invade the house and not only steal the obvious — the TV and stereo (they miss the valuable silverware Louise’s late mother willed them) — and pack it in an unmarked van, they then return to torture Ian some more (Todd seems to get off on taunting Ian over his marital distress and giving him a few back-handed slaps and punches to the face since he’s in no position to retaliate) and have a party in his living room. (The members of Todd’s gang are referred to in the credits only as “Man #1,” played by Derek Carter; “Man #2,” played by Bill Parks; and Todd’s girlfriend, “Trashy Girl,” played by Kimberlee Peterson.) Louise, who was out shopping for ingredients for “a romantic dinner” when the burglars arrived, returns and gets overpowered and duct-taped herself — as does Sara when she arrives the next morning in high dudgeon, wondering why Ian stood her up at the airport.
In the meantime, Todd used Louise’s helplessness to cop a feel of Louise’s breasts and say he’d never leave a woman with such hot tits — and Ian goes into a state of impotent defensiveness and the violation, however minor, of his wife starts him towards the process of a reconciliation. When Sara arrives and gets taped and thrown in the bathroom with her boyfriend and the wife he was going to leave for her, she goes into a jealous hissy-fit of her own and refuses to call anyone (since they were running of duct tape, her arms aren’t tied as tightly as everyone else’s) until Ian says he doesn’t love his wife anymore and is going to run off with her after all. Eventually the burglars take off, Sara gets her arms free enough to use her cell phone (which the burglars have neglected to steal), and they call the police — who are understandably confused by the presence of a man and two women as the victims. There’s a final tag scene in which Ian and Louise are selling the house where all this happened, they have a baby (an important issue early on since Ian was ragging Louise about the failure of their previous attempts at in vitro fertilization — leaving us to wonder how they got the baby: did their latest in vitro attempt take, did they actually conceive naturally, did they give up and adopt, or did Todd rape Louise and that’s his child?) and Ian is strolling down the streets of the small town near their country home when he sees Todd and his “trashy” girlfriend and maybe recognizes him as the burglar, or maybe not.
Serious Moonlight was directed by Cheryl Hines from a script by the late Adrienne Shelly — who, in an almost unbelievably ironic twist, was murdered in 2006 (three years before this film was made, which is an indication of how long it takes to get a story from page to screen these days) by a burglar who had broken into her office and whom she caught stealing money from her purse. Shelly’s death was a tragedy but it also was probably responsible for the fact that this script ever saw the light of day as a movie; had she survived, I’d like to think she’d have realized how terrible it was and mothballed it in favor of something she’d have written later and better. Serious Moonlight is a decently directed and acted movie — Meg Ryan had weathered the years well but there were enough character lines in her face it was evident she hadn’t had much, if any, “work” done (to use the au courant euphemism for plastic surgery), and she and Hutton both did the best they could with their ridiculous and impossibly written characters — but it’s clear this film (the type of movie Dwight Macdonald called “a comedy, at least in form and intention”) got made only because all the good ideas for romantic comedies were taken.
I was never that big a fan of Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan’s breakthrough movie, but compared to Serious Moonlight that looks like a Lubitsch film; Serious Moonlight just drones on and on, with the characters somehow managing to keep straight faces while enacting the ridiculous and impossible situations Shelly concocted from them — there were some people on an imdb.com message board for this film who were defending her by saying all the silly stuff was added to the script by other hands after she died, but unless the burglar subplot was added later and inspired by Shelly’s death rather than something she invented herself in a weird and uncomfortable premonition of her own end, it’s hard to see how this movie could have been made genuinely entertaining because the whole premise is so stupid.
Madeleine Peyroux’s album Dreamland contains a version of the song “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” backed with a piano-bass-drums rhythm section that sounded so much like Billie Holiday I was fooled into thinking it was Billie when I heard it at the start of the soundtrack of the film Serious Moonlight, a 2009 theatrical release that apparently went nowhere since I recorded it on Saturday off the Lifetime channel and just screened it this morning. (I checked the Web site http://www.billieholidaysongs.com/ and found that Billie’s only recording of “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” was the 1937 studio version with Claude Thornhill and Lester Young.)
Serious Moonlight (which carries eight listings for soundtrack songs on its credits, though David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” the source for the title, isn’t heard either in Bowie’s version or anyone else’s) is a bizarre romantic comedy — or at least a wanna-be romantic comedy — starring Meg Ryan as Louise, a successful attorney who decides to surprise her husband Ian (Timothy Hutton) by arriving at their vacation home in the country one day earlier than she was expected. We see Ian strewing the whole place with rose petals and we think, “How romantic,” though if you’ve seen this the day after watching The Room (which also used roses as an erotic gimmick) you’ll be flashed back to the sex scenes in that ridiculous but haunting movie, which are so much more interesting than the rest of it one wonders why The Room director (and producer, writer and star) Tommy Wiseau didn’t just turn it into out-and-out hard-core and create a money-maker instead of a money-loser.
Anyway, getting back to Serious Moonlight, it soon develops that the rose petals and romantic/erotic atmosphere weren’t intended for Louise: before she even enters, we see Ian writing her a note saying that he’s breaking up with her. He’s already got a replacement girlfriend, Sara (Kristen Bell), whom he’s planning to spend a wild night with in his and Louise’s bed and then fly out to Paris the next morning, following which at some point he intends to ask Louise for a divorce so he can marry Sara. When Louise finds his note — which he hadn’t finished when she arrived; he’d got as far as writing, “Please remember to feed the fish” (a goldfish they keep in a large brandy snifter), then crossing that out — she has the predictable jealous hissy-fit and gets so angry she throws a telephone at him, knocking him out. When he comes to she’s duct-taped him to a chair in the bedroom and announces that she intends to keep him there until he decides he’s no longer interested in Sara and is in love with his wife again.
When he protests that he has to use the bathroom (incidentally he demands to use the bathroom twice while neither she nor Sara seem to need it at all — odd since women usually have to pee more often than men), she undoes him from the chair — and re-tapes him to the toilet, this time with his pants down. “It’s going to take a miracle to get me to fall in love with you again!” Ian declares — and the miracle promptly arrives in the unlikely form of Todd (Justin Long, younger and considerably hotter-looking than Timothy Hutton — though, perhaps because this was a theatrical movie and not produced especially for Lifetime, Hutton is at least better looking than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime generally goes for in their leading men), who drives in on a tractor-style lawnmower, playing a punk-rock song through ear buds and therefore unable to hear Ian’s cries for help.
When he stops the mower, takes off the ear buds and does hear Ian’s cries for help, he turns out to be the leader of a gang of young burglars there to ransack the house and steal all the valuables — and instead of freeing Ian he regards it as a gift from Providence that he’s already tied up and therefore Ian and his gang don’t have to do that themselves. They invade the house and not only steal the obvious — the TV and stereo (they miss the valuable silverware Louise’s late mother willed them) — and pack it in an unmarked van, they then return to torture Ian some more (Todd seems to get off on taunting Ian over his marital distress and giving him a few back-handed slaps and punches to the face since he’s in no position to retaliate) and have a party in his living room. (The members of Todd’s gang are referred to in the credits only as “Man #1,” played by Derek Carter; “Man #2,” played by Bill Parks; and Todd’s girlfriend, “Trashy Girl,” played by Kimberlee Peterson.) Louise, who was out shopping for ingredients for “a romantic dinner” when the burglars arrived, returns and gets overpowered and duct-taped herself — as does Sara when she arrives the next morning in high dudgeon, wondering why Ian stood her up at the airport.
In the meantime, Todd used Louise’s helplessness to cop a feel of Louise’s breasts and say he’d never leave a woman with such hot tits — and Ian goes into a state of impotent defensiveness and the violation, however minor, of his wife starts him towards the process of a reconciliation. When Sara arrives and gets taped and thrown in the bathroom with her boyfriend and the wife he was going to leave for her, she goes into a jealous hissy-fit of her own and refuses to call anyone (since they were running of duct tape, her arms aren’t tied as tightly as everyone else’s) until Ian says he doesn’t love his wife anymore and is going to run off with her after all. Eventually the burglars take off, Sara gets her arms free enough to use her cell phone (which the burglars have neglected to steal), and they call the police — who are understandably confused by the presence of a man and two women as the victims. There’s a final tag scene in which Ian and Louise are selling the house where all this happened, they have a baby (an important issue early on since Ian was ragging Louise about the failure of their previous attempts at in vitro fertilization — leaving us to wonder how they got the baby: did their latest in vitro attempt take, did they actually conceive naturally, did they give up and adopt, or did Todd rape Louise and that’s his child?) and Ian is strolling down the streets of the small town near their country home when he sees Todd and his “trashy” girlfriend and maybe recognizes him as the burglar, or maybe not.
Serious Moonlight was directed by Cheryl Hines from a script by the late Adrienne Shelly — who, in an almost unbelievably ironic twist, was murdered in 2006 (three years before this film was made, which is an indication of how long it takes to get a story from page to screen these days) by a burglar who had broken into her office and whom she caught stealing money from her purse. Shelly’s death was a tragedy but it also was probably responsible for the fact that this script ever saw the light of day as a movie; had she survived, I’d like to think she’d have realized how terrible it was and mothballed it in favor of something she’d have written later and better. Serious Moonlight is a decently directed and acted movie — Meg Ryan had weathered the years well but there were enough character lines in her face it was evident she hadn’t had much, if any, “work” done (to use the au courant euphemism for plastic surgery), and she and Hutton both did the best they could with their ridiculous and impossibly written characters — but it’s clear this film (the type of movie Dwight Macdonald called “a comedy, at least in form and intention”) got made only because all the good ideas for romantic comedies were taken.
I was never that big a fan of Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan’s breakthrough movie, but compared to Serious Moonlight that looks like a Lubitsch film; Serious Moonlight just drones on and on, with the characters somehow managing to keep straight faces while enacting the ridiculous and impossible situations Shelly concocted from them — there were some people on an imdb.com message board for this film who were defending her by saying all the silly stuff was added to the script by other hands after she died, but unless the burglar subplot was added later and inspired by Shelly’s death rather than something she invented herself in a weird and uncomfortable premonition of her own end, it’s hard to see how this movie could have been made genuinely entertaining because the whole premise is so stupid.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
The Room (Wiseau Films,2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was an unlikely item: a 2003 independent production called The Room, a romantic-triangle story set in San Francisco produced, directed, written by and starring one Tommy Wiseau, a tall, dark, not all that handsome but not all that unattractive either type who claimed Orson Welles as his inspiration (well, they do have something in common: six-letter last names beginning with “W”) who somehow managed to put together $6 million to make a film that attracted enough of a cult following that Tom Bissell wrote an article about it in the current (August 2010) Harper’s that piqued my curiosity and made me order a copy of the DVD.
Besides Welles, his apparent role model, Wiseau told Bissell he also admires the work of Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean (and the dialogue of The Room features enough of the “cheep-cheep-cheep” challenges to the various characters’ masculinity Wiseau copied from Rebel Without a Cause that an imdb.com commentator listed this film as “referencing” Rebel), and The Room originally was intended as a wrenching, Williams-esque drama in which Lisa (Juliette Danielle), live-in girlfriend and fiancée of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), drifts into an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). When Wiseau screened the film theatrically and found audiences were laughing at it, he resourcefully changed his marketing pitch and called it a “black comedy” even though there’s nothing funny about it except by pure unintention.
Bissell’s article made it sound like Wiseau is the 21st century Ed Wood, which he is and he isn’t: the opening scene is in color and in focus, and Wiseau acually has a somewhat interesting camera eye even though most of his visual ideas were done far more beautifully and engagingly by Josef von Sternberg decades before Wiseau was born. (There’s also an addiction to candle-lit sex scenes, with bad soft-rock songs in the background, which makes it seem like Wiseau saw the Streisand version of A Star Is Born and had an orgasm then and there.) Where The Room comes off as Wood redux is the quality (or lack of same) of the acting and the weirdly elliptical character of Wiseau’s writing.
The Room begins with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge — Wiseau shot enough footage of the bridge from enough different angles during his second-unit trip to San Francisco (the interiors were shot at a studio in L.A.) that every time we see it we’re reassured that it’s still there, suggesting that maybe instead of a romantic melodrama Wiseau should have made a terrorist thriller with himself as a baddie plotting to blow up the bridge, which would probably have been equally stupid but also a lot more entertaining. The Room cuts from the bridge to the interior of the titular room — where at least three-quarters of this 99-minute movie takes place — and a scene in which Johnny brings Lisa a low-cut red dress, she puts it on and they make love — after they get rid of Denny (Philip Haldiman), an 18-year-old whose plot function we have no idea of at first, who insists on remaining with them, though since all they’re doing when he shows up is throwing pillows at each other doesn’t seem all that much out of line: he just wants to be in on the pillow fight, too!
Then Johnny leaves and Mark arrives, and Lisa seduces him; he’s reluctant at first (“Johnny’s my best friend!” Mark protests — in fact he and Johnny call each other their best friends so often during this film Charles suggested Best Friends might have been a better title for it) but ultimately he pounds away at her. There’s also a dizzying array of dramatis personae Wiseau plugs into the action while only giving us a dim awareness of who they are or how they relate to his central characters, including Lisa’s stereotypically nagging mother Claudette (Carolyn Minott, who comes closer to acting than anyone else in the film), who pleads with her daughter not to blow it with Johnny because he’s doing so well in his job (which is either working in a bank or doing IT consulting for banks, we’re not sure which) and is in line for a promotion — which he doesn’t get — and another couple, Mike (Mike Holmes) and Michelle (Robin Paris), who for reasons Wiseau doesn’t explain (there’s a lot of character background Wiseau doesn’t give us, less because he’s being post-modern and more because he’s just being sloppy) have to meet in Johnny’s apartment to have sex because they can’t do it where either of them actually live.
The bulk of the film deals with the quirky friendship between Johnny and Mark and builds up the suspense of how Johnny is going to react when he finds out that Mark is having an affair with Lisa — but we get quite a few other extraneous characters, including Peter (Kyle Vogt), a psychiatrist whom Mark nearly kills by throwing him off the roof of Johnny’s apartment building; and Chris-R (Dan Janjigian), a (white) gangsta type (though frankly he did more for me physically than either Wiseau or Sestero did) who shows up at the apartment building to terrorize Denny into paying a debt that somehow involves drugs. Johnny, Lisa and Claudette catch Chris-R in the act of threatening to shoot Denny with a distinctive-looking silver gun and Johnny absurdly easily pulls Chris-R off Denny, after which Chris-R leaves and Lisa and Claudette lecture Denny about letting himself get in debt to a drug dealer. “I owe him some money,” Denny confesses, and Lisa says, “What kind of money?” — which Bissell lampooned (“Why does Lisa appear to believe there are different kinds of money?”), somewhat unfairly: it’s an established fictional convention that “What kind of money?,” used in reference to a debt, is slang for “How much money?” — particularly, “What order of magnitude of money?,” since a debt in the thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars clearly has a quite different plot significance than a debt in the hundreds.
Johnny eventually explains that Denny (who, being 18, naturally has a schoolboy crush on Lisa — though he doesn’t try to act on it and she doesn’t try to seduce him, which would have made this film even kinkier than it is) is an orphan he was planning to adopt, and now that he’s 18 Johnny is paying for Denny’s apartment and giving him money for a college fund. At some point in the story a football appears, and in one of the most bizarre scenes of this bizarre movie the four male principals all go out and play catch with the football in the tuxedos they’ve bought for the upcoming wedding of Johnny and Lisa. The climax occurs at a surprise party Lisa gives for Johnny, in which all his friends appear — except Peter, since Kyle Vogt apparently had a fight over “creative differences” with Wiseau and thereby got himself written out of the ending — in which a new pair of unexplained characters appear, Johnny finally catches on that Lisa and Mark are having an affair, and he responds [spoiler alert!] by reaching into a box he keeps under his bed, drawing out a gun (needless to say, it’s the same prop gun we saw Chris-R hold on Denny earlier, though as with so much else in this maddening film it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to read it as the same gun or not), sticking it in his mouth and shooting himself, leaving Mark and Lisa to discover the body. Instead of doing the obviously sensible thing — calling the police — Mark and Lisa just hang around the scene and start arguing, Mark sticks his hand in Johnny’s blood (which made me briefly wonder if the final irony was going to be Mark getting arrested for murdering Johnny), and eventually Mark tells Lisa that he blames her for Johnny’s death and doesn’t want to see her, let alone screw her, anymore.
I’ll give The Room credit for a few things — including casting the surprisingly buxom Juliette Danielle as Lisa; Marilyn Monroe was about this zaftig but these days the only actresses a major studio would consider casting in a role like this look like breadsticks with tits. But any potential this story could have had — and did in various tellings ranging from Tristan und Isolde and Pelléas et Mélisande to two truly great films with similar premises, Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952) and François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1963) — gets sabotaged by Wiseau’s airy indifference to story continuity (he builds up seemingly important subplots — like Denny’s mysterious drug-related debt and Claudette’s confession to her daughter that her test for breast cancer just turned out positive — only to drop them completely) and even airier indifference to character consistency.
Had Lisa been drawn the way Fritz Lang and Clifford Odets drew Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Clash by Night — a bored, burned-out woman who married one man (Paul Douglas) out of boredom and ended up having an affair with his friend (Robert Ryan) out of still unrelieved boredom — she could have been a genuinely tragic figure and the plot of The Room might have had some broader meaning. Had Wiseau written her the way Truffaut wrote Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in Jules and Jim — as a borderline psycho who gets off playing the men in her life against each other — The Room might also have the dramatic interest and quality it totally misses as it stands. Instead we just watch the antics of these three people with almost no clue why they do what they do, as other characters and plot situations surface around them and then just disappear again.
The Room is a wretched movie but also one whose writer-director-producer-star’s cheery indifference to his utter incompetence in all those functions is what gives it a haunting appeal. One item Bissell mentioned in his article is that “Johnny and Lisa, enigmatically, have around their apartment several framed portraits of spoons” — a detail I missed while watching the movie (there is one recognizable spoon-like shape in an abstract painting on their wall), I suspect because the “spoon paintings” simply weren’t recognizable as such on a small-screen TV playing a DVD — which has led to a Rocky Horror-like ritual of audience members throwing plastic spoons at the screen whenever one of these paintings appear. Apparently Tommy Wiseau was even more of a diva off-screen during the making of The Room than his character is on-screen: according to Bissell, “Wiseau fired the whole crew four times over” during his production, while an imdb.com “Trivia” item says he replaced the original actors cast as Mark and Michelle because of “creative differences” (their scenes were reshot) as well as losing Kyle Vogt in mid-shoot and writing his character out of the rest of the film.
Certainly The Room comes off as an enormous ego-trip, made by a man so ignorant of the basic economics of filmmaking that he not only bought (instead of renting) all his own equipment but shot the film simultaneously in 35 mm and high-definition digital video (apparently mounting both sorts of camera on the same tripod) because he was confused about the difference and couldn’t make up his mind which would give better results. The Room is one of those bad movies you can’t get out of your head once you’ve seen it, a film that at once fits into the so-bad-it’s-good and the bad-film-that-could-have-been-good categories, and the same disinterest in real human emotions and motivations that led Wiseau to make it the way he did has also made him invulnerable to criticism; Bissell ends his article with Wiseau making a personal appearance at a Los Angeles screening and beaming as much at the audience’s love for his movie as (unintentionally) hilarious as he would be if they’d taken it as the tough, no-nonsense, emotionally riveting drama he intended. “That night in Los Angeles,” Bissell wrote, “he was as famous and well loved as he has ever been and nevertheless seemed like an unfortunate cultic animal we had all come together to stab at the stroke of midnight. We were laughing because we were not him, and because we were.”
Last night’s “feature” was an unlikely item: a 2003 independent production called The Room, a romantic-triangle story set in San Francisco produced, directed, written by and starring one Tommy Wiseau, a tall, dark, not all that handsome but not all that unattractive either type who claimed Orson Welles as his inspiration (well, they do have something in common: six-letter last names beginning with “W”) who somehow managed to put together $6 million to make a film that attracted enough of a cult following that Tom Bissell wrote an article about it in the current (August 2010) Harper’s that piqued my curiosity and made me order a copy of the DVD.
Besides Welles, his apparent role model, Wiseau told Bissell he also admires the work of Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean (and the dialogue of The Room features enough of the “cheep-cheep-cheep” challenges to the various characters’ masculinity Wiseau copied from Rebel Without a Cause that an imdb.com commentator listed this film as “referencing” Rebel), and The Room originally was intended as a wrenching, Williams-esque drama in which Lisa (Juliette Danielle), live-in girlfriend and fiancée of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), drifts into an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). When Wiseau screened the film theatrically and found audiences were laughing at it, he resourcefully changed his marketing pitch and called it a “black comedy” even though there’s nothing funny about it except by pure unintention.
Bissell’s article made it sound like Wiseau is the 21st century Ed Wood, which he is and he isn’t: the opening scene is in color and in focus, and Wiseau acually has a somewhat interesting camera eye even though most of his visual ideas were done far more beautifully and engagingly by Josef von Sternberg decades before Wiseau was born. (There’s also an addiction to candle-lit sex scenes, with bad soft-rock songs in the background, which makes it seem like Wiseau saw the Streisand version of A Star Is Born and had an orgasm then and there.) Where The Room comes off as Wood redux is the quality (or lack of same) of the acting and the weirdly elliptical character of Wiseau’s writing.
The Room begins with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge — Wiseau shot enough footage of the bridge from enough different angles during his second-unit trip to San Francisco (the interiors were shot at a studio in L.A.) that every time we see it we’re reassured that it’s still there, suggesting that maybe instead of a romantic melodrama Wiseau should have made a terrorist thriller with himself as a baddie plotting to blow up the bridge, which would probably have been equally stupid but also a lot more entertaining. The Room cuts from the bridge to the interior of the titular room — where at least three-quarters of this 99-minute movie takes place — and a scene in which Johnny brings Lisa a low-cut red dress, she puts it on and they make love — after they get rid of Denny (Philip Haldiman), an 18-year-old whose plot function we have no idea of at first, who insists on remaining with them, though since all they’re doing when he shows up is throwing pillows at each other doesn’t seem all that much out of line: he just wants to be in on the pillow fight, too!
Then Johnny leaves and Mark arrives, and Lisa seduces him; he’s reluctant at first (“Johnny’s my best friend!” Mark protests — in fact he and Johnny call each other their best friends so often during this film Charles suggested Best Friends might have been a better title for it) but ultimately he pounds away at her. There’s also a dizzying array of dramatis personae Wiseau plugs into the action while only giving us a dim awareness of who they are or how they relate to his central characters, including Lisa’s stereotypically nagging mother Claudette (Carolyn Minott, who comes closer to acting than anyone else in the film), who pleads with her daughter not to blow it with Johnny because he’s doing so well in his job (which is either working in a bank or doing IT consulting for banks, we’re not sure which) and is in line for a promotion — which he doesn’t get — and another couple, Mike (Mike Holmes) and Michelle (Robin Paris), who for reasons Wiseau doesn’t explain (there’s a lot of character background Wiseau doesn’t give us, less because he’s being post-modern and more because he’s just being sloppy) have to meet in Johnny’s apartment to have sex because they can’t do it where either of them actually live.
The bulk of the film deals with the quirky friendship between Johnny and Mark and builds up the suspense of how Johnny is going to react when he finds out that Mark is having an affair with Lisa — but we get quite a few other extraneous characters, including Peter (Kyle Vogt), a psychiatrist whom Mark nearly kills by throwing him off the roof of Johnny’s apartment building; and Chris-R (Dan Janjigian), a (white) gangsta type (though frankly he did more for me physically than either Wiseau or Sestero did) who shows up at the apartment building to terrorize Denny into paying a debt that somehow involves drugs. Johnny, Lisa and Claudette catch Chris-R in the act of threatening to shoot Denny with a distinctive-looking silver gun and Johnny absurdly easily pulls Chris-R off Denny, after which Chris-R leaves and Lisa and Claudette lecture Denny about letting himself get in debt to a drug dealer. “I owe him some money,” Denny confesses, and Lisa says, “What kind of money?” — which Bissell lampooned (“Why does Lisa appear to believe there are different kinds of money?”), somewhat unfairly: it’s an established fictional convention that “What kind of money?,” used in reference to a debt, is slang for “How much money?” — particularly, “What order of magnitude of money?,” since a debt in the thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars clearly has a quite different plot significance than a debt in the hundreds.
Johnny eventually explains that Denny (who, being 18, naturally has a schoolboy crush on Lisa — though he doesn’t try to act on it and she doesn’t try to seduce him, which would have made this film even kinkier than it is) is an orphan he was planning to adopt, and now that he’s 18 Johnny is paying for Denny’s apartment and giving him money for a college fund. At some point in the story a football appears, and in one of the most bizarre scenes of this bizarre movie the four male principals all go out and play catch with the football in the tuxedos they’ve bought for the upcoming wedding of Johnny and Lisa. The climax occurs at a surprise party Lisa gives for Johnny, in which all his friends appear — except Peter, since Kyle Vogt apparently had a fight over “creative differences” with Wiseau and thereby got himself written out of the ending — in which a new pair of unexplained characters appear, Johnny finally catches on that Lisa and Mark are having an affair, and he responds [spoiler alert!] by reaching into a box he keeps under his bed, drawing out a gun (needless to say, it’s the same prop gun we saw Chris-R hold on Denny earlier, though as with so much else in this maddening film it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to read it as the same gun or not), sticking it in his mouth and shooting himself, leaving Mark and Lisa to discover the body. Instead of doing the obviously sensible thing — calling the police — Mark and Lisa just hang around the scene and start arguing, Mark sticks his hand in Johnny’s blood (which made me briefly wonder if the final irony was going to be Mark getting arrested for murdering Johnny), and eventually Mark tells Lisa that he blames her for Johnny’s death and doesn’t want to see her, let alone screw her, anymore.
I’ll give The Room credit for a few things — including casting the surprisingly buxom Juliette Danielle as Lisa; Marilyn Monroe was about this zaftig but these days the only actresses a major studio would consider casting in a role like this look like breadsticks with tits. But any potential this story could have had — and did in various tellings ranging from Tristan und Isolde and Pelléas et Mélisande to two truly great films with similar premises, Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952) and François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1963) — gets sabotaged by Wiseau’s airy indifference to story continuity (he builds up seemingly important subplots — like Denny’s mysterious drug-related debt and Claudette’s confession to her daughter that her test for breast cancer just turned out positive — only to drop them completely) and even airier indifference to character consistency.
Had Lisa been drawn the way Fritz Lang and Clifford Odets drew Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Clash by Night — a bored, burned-out woman who married one man (Paul Douglas) out of boredom and ended up having an affair with his friend (Robert Ryan) out of still unrelieved boredom — she could have been a genuinely tragic figure and the plot of The Room might have had some broader meaning. Had Wiseau written her the way Truffaut wrote Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in Jules and Jim — as a borderline psycho who gets off playing the men in her life against each other — The Room might also have the dramatic interest and quality it totally misses as it stands. Instead we just watch the antics of these three people with almost no clue why they do what they do, as other characters and plot situations surface around them and then just disappear again.
The Room is a wretched movie but also one whose writer-director-producer-star’s cheery indifference to his utter incompetence in all those functions is what gives it a haunting appeal. One item Bissell mentioned in his article is that “Johnny and Lisa, enigmatically, have around their apartment several framed portraits of spoons” — a detail I missed while watching the movie (there is one recognizable spoon-like shape in an abstract painting on their wall), I suspect because the “spoon paintings” simply weren’t recognizable as such on a small-screen TV playing a DVD — which has led to a Rocky Horror-like ritual of audience members throwing plastic spoons at the screen whenever one of these paintings appear. Apparently Tommy Wiseau was even more of a diva off-screen during the making of The Room than his character is on-screen: according to Bissell, “Wiseau fired the whole crew four times over” during his production, while an imdb.com “Trivia” item says he replaced the original actors cast as Mark and Michelle because of “creative differences” (their scenes were reshot) as well as losing Kyle Vogt in mid-shoot and writing his character out of the rest of the film.
Certainly The Room comes off as an enormous ego-trip, made by a man so ignorant of the basic economics of filmmaking that he not only bought (instead of renting) all his own equipment but shot the film simultaneously in 35 mm and high-definition digital video (apparently mounting both sorts of camera on the same tripod) because he was confused about the difference and couldn’t make up his mind which would give better results. The Room is one of those bad movies you can’t get out of your head once you’ve seen it, a film that at once fits into the so-bad-it’s-good and the bad-film-that-could-have-been-good categories, and the same disinterest in real human emotions and motivations that led Wiseau to make it the way he did has also made him invulnerable to criticism; Bissell ends his article with Wiseau making a personal appearance at a Los Angeles screening and beaming as much at the audience’s love for his movie as (unintentionally) hilarious as he would be if they’d taken it as the tough, no-nonsense, emotionally riveting drama he intended. “That night in Los Angeles,” Bissell wrote, “he was as famous and well loved as he has ever been and nevertheless seemed like an unfortunate cultic animal we had all come together to stab at the stroke of midnight. We were laughing because we were not him, and because we were.”
Flash Gordon (Universal serial, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent the evening running the VCR to tape the first Flash Gordon serial (American Movie Classics is running all three of them, in sequence, having done the first one last night and continuing with the second and third ones tonight and tomorrow). I got to see bits of it, and it looked surprisingly good — this is the best print of the serial I’ve ever seen, and it has the original titles from the 1936 Universal release rather than the crudely printed reissue titles from King Features (the Hearst-owned syndication company that held the rights to the original comic strip, and received reissue rights to the films after a certain period) which replaced it for a 1950’s reissue. Indeed, this version looked good enough to show the surprisingly elaborate sets used in the production, and to indicate that the Universal art department actually did a pretty good job of duplicating (albeit in black-and-white instead of color) the “look” of Alex Raymond’s original art (and Raymond was enough of a “star” in the comics world that the main titles actually say, “Based on Alex Raymond’s Cartoon Strip”). — 10/29/96
•••••
Later we watched the first two episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, presented here on DVD by King Features Syndicate (the Hearst subsidiary which owned the comic strip and its characters, and which regained the rights to the three Flash Gordon serials from Universal in 1951), which ran pretty much as I’d remembered them. Interestingly, while the Flash Gordon TV series had been set in the 31st century and had avoided any depiction of the earth of that time, the serials took place in the 1930’s and had Flash (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) and Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) take off in that little toy rocket ship from a recognizable earth of that period, which is threatened with annihilation when the rogue planet Mongo comes crashing through the solar system headed for an apparent collision with earth. (One of the charms of this serial was the interesting assortment of newsreel footage used to represent people panicking about their impending doom — everything from riots to scenes of Hindus praying on the Ganges.)
The serial scores in the magnificent physical production — Universal spent $300,000 on it, and the investment shows in the splendiferous sets and hundreds of extras — and the marvelous villain performance of Charles Middleton as the Emperor Ming. Where it’s weak is in the acting of the good guys: Buster Crabbe is personable and suitably butch but, quite frankly, Steve Holland made a more convincing Flash in the 1950’s TV show; Frank Shannon’s performance is a souvenir of the day in which Hollywood thought one foreign accent was as good as another (which is how Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman got to play Frenchwomen), apparently deciding that a Scottish accent was perfectly credible coming from a character named “Zarkov”; and though Jean Rogers’ performance was better than I remembered it — her wrath when she realizes she’s about to be impressed into service as the latest wife in Ming’s harem is suitably convincing — there are still all too many closeups of her staring goop-eyed as Flash as though awed into silence by his magnificence.
The best performances so far are Middleton’s and Priscilla Lawson’s as his daughter, Princess Aura — who seems to be vamping Flash and giving the impression that the writing committee (Frederick Stephani — who also directed, though imdb.com claims that Ray Taylor, who did such a marvelous and unusual job with The Return of Chandu, was an uncredited co-director — George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey and Ella O’Neill) had seen The Mask of Fu Manchu and were copying the setup of dashing hero, imperial villain and villain’s daughter with the hots for the hero. — 7/17/10
•••••
We ran the third and fourth episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial from Universal, “Captured by Shark Men” and “Battling the Sea Beast,” and what’s most interesting about this serial is that for all the money Universal spent on it ($300,000, three times the production budget of Republic’s lavish — for them — Undersea Kingdom and about eight to 10 times the normal serial budget) and for all the care they took on some of the scenes (including artfully redressing some of the sets from Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy as well as constructing some pretty elaborate new ones), there are also some really embarrassing short-cuts. The Shark Men are actually ordinary people with metal helmets (according to the plot the helmets are the mechanism by which Emperor Ming keeps them in line and prevents them from rebelling) and swim trunks, and the only connection to “sharkicity” is a few pencil-like protuberances on their backsides that are supposed to make them look “sharkish.” The “Sea Beast” is an ordinary octopus (referred to in the dialogue as an “octopod”) shown in stock footage, and its supposed battle to the death with Flash Gordon is staged surprisingly ineptly.
Even more than most serials, Flash Gordon seems to fall back on similar situations over and over again — and the plethora of underwater scenes is probably explainable as Universal’s desire to exploit Crabbe’s swimming claim to fame (he was a medalist in swimming at the 1932 Olympics — Johnny Weissmuller had been the big swimming medal winner in 1924 and 1928 and that had jump-started him to movie fame, and Crabbe and his handlers at Universal and Paramount thought he could do the same — Crabbe even got to play the juvenile male lead in a W. C. Fields movie, You’re Telling Me!, though all it took to play that sort of role — the down-to-earth young guy who wants to marry Fields’ daughter even though Fields’ snobbish wife doesn’t think he’s good enough for her — was a reasonably photogenic bod and a decent screen personality, and Crabbe had both).
I’ve seen the Flash Gordon serials before — various stations in the Bay Area used to show them, episode by episode, during the late 1970’s — and they’re appealing (many of them are scored with familiar Universal music cues — the music that accompanied the death of the Invisible Man in James Whale’s 1933 classic is heard a lot — and bits of the classics as well: among the odder parts of the Flash Gordon score are the repeated quotes from the “Dresden Amen,” the traditional Lutheran hymn used by Mendelssohn in the “Reformation” symphony and Wagner in the prelude to Parsifal) but I still think — and this is probably heresy among Flash Gordon fans — that the 1950’s TV episodes were better: the stories were at least marginally more sophisticated, the effects equal or better (despite the shoestring TV budgets) and the cast stronger: Steve Holland totally outclasses Crabbe in the looks department and he’s also a better actor within the limits of the character, and the other TV principals are also better than their opposite numbers in the serial.
If anything has kept the Flash Gordon serials in the cultural spotlight, it’s Charles Middleton’s magnificent performance as the Emperor Ming: acting the part of a megalomaniac who wants to rule the universe at a time when the real-life role models for the character — Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler — were all alive, well and at or near the peaks of their powers, Middleton turns in a full-bodied villain performance that ties Ming in with his contemporary real-life role models and projects a really formidable foe for Flash and our heroes — and the writing committee doesn’t bother to explain why Zarkov is willing and even enthusiastic about working for Ming (they haven’t had him taken over by mind control the way Republic did with the equivalent character in Undersea Kingdom). — 7/19/10
•••••
When we settled in Charles suggested we watch another episode of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial and then the 2004 movie I, Robot as a kind of science-fiction then-and-now comparison. The fifth episode of Flash Gordon was called “The Destroying Ray,” and was pretty much more of the same except that it introduced Prince Barin (Richard Alexander, a tall, hunky actor who quite frankly could give Buster Crabbe competition in the hunk department), the rightful ruler of the planet Mongo — his father was deposed by Emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) and murdered, along with his mom, when Barin was still a boy, though the writing committee never bothered to tell us how Barin survived to adulthood or who raised him. Nonetheless, he’s mounted a resistance movement and he takes Flash out of the kingdom of the shark men (Ming’s allies) — and you don’t need two guesses as to what the interior of Barin’s spaceship looks like. That’s right: it’s exactly the same as the interior of Zarkov’s spaceship, built back on 1936 Earth, which took Zarkov (Frank Shannon), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) and Flash (Buster Crabbe) to Mongo in the first place, which also looked exactly the same as the inside of Ming’s spaceship on Mongo and the inside of the submarine owned by the shark men.
This bizarre mixture of expensive production values on one hand and typical serial cheapness on the other runs throughout this film — and the other oddity about the 1936 Flash Gordon is how Flash gets out of most of the cliffhangers not through his own efforts (he doesn’t even get to jump!) but via intervention from outside — often from Emperor Ming, who for all his vaunted mercilessness seems to have a vested interest in Flash Gordon’s survival, either because he’s hoping to use Flash against his home-grown enemies on Mongo, he’s hoping to use Dr. Zarkov’s scientific genius and protecting Flash and Dale is the price of Zarkov’s cooperation, or he’s genuinely concerned about the safety of his daughter, Princess Aura (the striking-looking Priscilla Lawson, who should have been playing the female lead!) and Aura has a crush on Flash and seems to keep popping up wherever he is, much to Dale’s jealous irritation. Flash Gordon is a marvelously produced serial but also one in which the action scenes have an oddly perfunctory air, and given that he’s supposed to be a strapping butch action hero, one would like to see Flash get himself out of more of the cliffhangers instead of relying on someone else — and the show’s principal villain, at that — to help him escape. — 7/21/10
•••••
What we ended up doing was running two more episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, “Flaming Torture” (episode six) and “Shattering Doom” (episode seven), in which all the serial’s good or even remotely good people — Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers), Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon), Prince Barin (Richard Alexander), Prince Thun (James Pierce) and Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson, who so totally out-sexes and out-acts Jean Rogers one wonders why Flash remains so disinterested in her and so loyal to Dale), daughter of Emperor Ming (Charles Middleton) — end up as captives of the repulsive King Vultan (Jack ‘Tiny’ Lipson — the nickname is a deliberately ironic misnomer since Vultan is actually a large bear-type with a smarmily ingratiating manner that makes it clear he thinks of himself as God’s gift to women of any planet), ruler of the Hawkmen, who captured Dale and Thun and got hold of the others by shooting down their rocket ship.
Vultan, like Ming himself, immediately got the hots for Dale the moment he first saw her, and is so insistent on her marrying him she’s probably wondering about now why she didn’t go ahead and marry Ming (who’s just as evil but considerably more charming; Middleton clearly patterned his performance on Boris Karloff’s in The Mask of Fu Manchu) in one of the previous episodes. Once again these episodes offered pretty much the same mix as those before: splendiferous sets (though the mass dance/orgy sequence at King Vultan’s court looks like a stock clip from an older film — but what older film I have no idea!), intriguing gimmicks (the cliffhanger between episodes six and seven plugs Buster Crabbe into some of the machinery Kenneth Strickfaden built for the first Frankenstein and even offers a stock clip from Frankenstein — in which the machinery is shot in a much darker, shadowier and more creative lighting style than Frederick Stephani used in the new footage — and placed between two electrodes that will kill him if he’s exposed to them long enough) and sloppy plotting that all too often makes Flash’s escapes from the cliffhangers dependent on other people saving him (for someone who’s nominally this serial’s principal villain, Emperor Ming sure gives the hero a lot of help — though that’s mainly because Princess Aura is with him often and Ming is more concerned about saving his daughter than offing Flash) rather than him using his own strength and/or resourcefulness to escape them himself.
Flash Gordon is a good serial, and the handsome production values have their own appeal — as does Priscilla Lawson, who clearly should have had more of a career than she did, even though all too many of her scenes show her trying to get rid of Dale and get Flash for herself (the writers fall back on this so often they might as well have called this Flash Gordon: The Soap Opera) — but it’s not all that imaginatively written (especially by comparison to the first Columbia Batman, which gave Middleton a sympathetic role) and the action is hardly as excitingly over-the-top as it was in the much cheaper rival serials from Republic. — 8/1/10
•••••
We managed, once Charles arrived, to squeeze in two episodes of the Flash Gordon serial from 1936, which has proven surprisingly disappointing despite its large (for a serial, and indeed at $300,000 large for a Universal project in general) budget and some good action scenes. We watched episodes eight and nine, “Tournament of Doom” and “Fighting the Fire Demon,” both of which took place in the court of King Vultan of the Hawkmen (Jack “Tiny” Lipson), who live in a “sky city” that looks like something out of Metropolis (though it could also have been an inspiration for the design of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, made three years later) that is kept floating in mid-air by a beam fed by “radium furnaces” whose design — including a huge dial with three hands that has to be maneuvered, to no apparent purpose, by a person at its control, which even more than the design of the sky city itself makes it obvious that someone connected with this production had seen Metropolis. (In fact, the parallel is so obvious Charles chuckled at every scene in which that giant gadget appeared.)
Flash (Buster Crabbe) and his friend Prince Barin (Richard Alexander, who’s older, stockier and heavier than Crabbe but also more convincingly butch), captured and forced to work as galley slaves feeding the radium furnace, escape via an electrically charged shovel Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) rigged up for them, and this causes the sky city to lose the energy that’s keeping it up until Zarkov’s replacement ray (powered by some of the cool electronic gizmos Kenneth Strickfaden built for the Frankenstein movies — instead of selling them to any one studio Strickfaden kept ownership of them and rented them out to anyone who wanted them, so they appear not only in Universal movies but in productions by Columbia and Republic as well) kicks in — Zarkov developed this ray but only on condition that Vultan release his prisoners. Then Emperor Ming (Charles Middleton) shows up and claims the prisoners for himself, and the rest of these two episodes consists of the trials by battle Ming cooks up for Flash to regain his freedom and the hand of his earthling girlfriend, Dale Arden (Jean Rogers).
First he has to fight a “masked swordsman” who turns out to be Prince Barin (tricked into this due to his own love for Princess Aura, Ming’s daughter, played by Priscilla Lawson — Aura seems to be the only woman on the planet Mongo other than Dale, who’s not a native, and the business of Barin loving Aura who loves Flash who loves Dale brings this serial awfully close to Flash Gordon: The Soap Opera). Then, when he unmasks Barin and both men refuse to continue the combat, Flash is sent into the arena to fight an “orangopoid” (Ray Corrigan, who was doing this even while over at Republic he was playing a human lead in Undersea Kingdom, a serial pretty obviously patterned on Flash Gordon and also relatively lavish in its physical production), basically an ape (or a person in an ape suit) with a unicorn-like horn stuck on the top of its head.
In episode nine, Flash gets the secret of how to kill the “orangopoid” from Princess Aura, who in turn got it from the High Priest of Mongo (Theodore Lorch) — a spot of vulnerability just below its throat, into which Flash, who was sent into combat with the thing with just a dagger, thrusts a spear Princess Aura has given him. Then, in a plot twist the writing committee evidently ripped off from Götterdämmerung (or maybe Tristan und Isolde), Aura decides to win Flash for herself by slipping him two drugs: one which will put him into a state of unconsciousness and one which will wake him up but leave him no memory of his previous life … so hopefully he’ll wake up and instantly fall in love with Aura because she’ll be the first woman he’s ever seen (or at least the first one who hasn’t been his aunt — I am making this up, you know). Only in order for this plot to work, for some reason she has to take him to a secret hideaway that can only be accessed through a tunnel guarded by the Fire Dragon. Aura is told by the High Priest that she and Flash can safely traverse the tunnel at midnight because that’s when the Fire Dragon is asleep, but — wouldn’t you know it? — the High Priest strikes the ceremonial gong that’s the Fire Dragon’s alarm clock and he gets up, ready to tear Flash limb from limb.
That’s the cliffhanger to episode nine, and if the Fire Dragon’s appearance weren’t so risible it might actually be frightening — instead he’s yet another human actor in a badly-fitting monster suit, with the creases and folds of the fabric all too visible, and with special prop gloves on the limbs that are supposed to make it look like a giant ambulatory crab. One of the frustrations of the Flash Gordon serial is that for all the money that was spent on it, and all the care taken with some aspects of the production, all too often they went for this really tacky serial cheapness; frankly, had they used the stop-motion animation technique from the 1925 Lost World and 1933 King Kong instead of making these ridiculous monster suits and casting live humans in these parts, the monsters would have been considerably more chilling and the fight scenes between them and the humans a lot more convincing. — 8/6/10
•••••
When Charles and I finally got together we screened two more episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon — episodes 10, “The Unseen Peril,” and 11, “In the Claws of the Tigron” (in case you were wondering, the “tigron” is actually a tiger, most of whose appearances I suspect were borrowed from Clyde Beatty’s 1932 Universal film The Big Cage) — and while at least in these we got to see more women than just Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) and Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson) — Aura has a lady in waiting and there are a few other females scattered around the cast — Flash Gordon remained, as before, a frustrating mixture of lavish production values and cheap serial shortcuts, brilliant visuals and stupid dialogue, vivid effects work and lousy acting (aside from Lawson and Charles Middleton as her father, the evil Emperor Ming, both of whom bring genuine power and interest to their characterizations — but then in stories like this the villains are usually more interesting than the heroes anyway). Indeed, the 1936 Flash Gordon (“based on Alex Raymond’s cartoon strip,” the opening credit proudly proclaims, billing him higher than the screenwriters or even any of the actors) seems to share both the beauties and the failings of many more recent movies based on cartoon strips or comic books, notably stunning visuals and silly plots.
The episode title “The Unseen Peril” is something of a cheat because it’s actually Flash Gordon, not any of the bad guys, who becomes invisible (courtesy of yet another one of Dr. Zarkov’s high-tech inventions) and beats up Ming’s guards until he suddenly becomes visible again in mid-fight sequence. Apparently Universal had built up such an inventory of gadgets and know-how making The Invisible Man (1933) — much of whose music score is repeatedly reused here — that they crammed the invisibility gimmick into serials like this one and The Phantom Creeps (1939) well before they made a second “Invisible Man” feature, The Invisible Man Returns (1940). The tenth episode opens with one of the nastier serial cop-outs; confronted by the Fire Dragon, awakened (via the ceremonial gong that is its alarm clock) by the High Priest of Mongo (Theodore Lorch) in league with Ming in hopes it will destroy Flash Gordon (incidentally the Fire Dragon is one of the most ridiculous-looking monsters in the whole show: he looks like Big Bird with giant crab mitts on his hands and feet), Flash is saved not by his own skills in combat but by Dr. Zarkov, who just happens to have a grenade on him that he throws at the Fire Dragon, blowing it up.
With Flash Gordon still under total memory loss from the potion Princess Aura slipped him in episode nine (bearing its origins in the potion gimmicks from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung), Ming takes the opportunity to foist him off on Princess Aura (thereby frustrating her lover, Prince Barin) so he can add Dale Arden to his harem — only Zarkov restores Flash’s memory with yet another huge electronic gizmo and so Flash once more has eyes only for Dale again. Interestingly, there are only two more episodes to go — “Trapped in the Turret” and “Rocketing to Earth” — making 13 in all, a peculiar number for a serial (usually they came, like boxing matches, in 10-, 12- or 15-round versions) — and one element that will probably become more important later is the effort of Dr. Zarkov and his fellow scientists back on Earth to establish radio communications with each other. One of the gimmicks behind this serial is that Earth is surrounded by a radioactive cloud created on Mongo and threatened with immediate destruction by it — though in the matte paintings of Earth (shown as if on a globe without the cloud cover that the real Earth, as photographed from space, always has) in these episodes the crew apparently forgot to matte in the cloud, because it’s gone and we’re left to attribute its disappearance to true serial discontinuity.
One thing I will miss when we finish watching this is a surprisingly beautiful and haunting piece of music, originally played on a saxophone and then taken up by full orchestra, that accompanies the chapter title in each opening credits sequence. The rest of the music is familiar stuff from Universal’s stock library, but this is a quite lovely and plaintive theme I don’t otherwise recognize (actually a softer, subtler rewrite of the main title theme) and which I’ve come to look forward to hearing in the credits much as I did the slow theme of the opening music to each episode of Republic’s 1937 serial Dick Tracy. — 8/7/10
•••••
Charles and I managed to finish watching the last two episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, “Trapped in a Turret” and “Rocketing to Earth.” This was a good serial all in all, though it suffered from some lapses in story construction and bits of cheapness surprising in what was mostly an expensive (about $300,000, high for a serial) production with the benefit of a major-studio infrastructure. The plot in this one ends with Emperor Ming (Charles Middleton) promising, at the behest of his daughter Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson), to befriend the earth people and let them go home, only he attempts one final trap to kill them — he arrests Prince Barin and has his minions steal Barin’s spaceship and fire its built-in ray gun at Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers), Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) and King Vultan (Jack Lipson) of the Hawkmen, a species of winged humans indigenous to Mongo, as they wait to meet Barin outside a metal gate that admits one to something called a “turret” that doesn’t either look or function like the object usually suggested by that word.
The ending of episode 12 and beginning of episode 13 features one of those infamous serial “cheats” this Flash Gordon had otherwise avoided: at the end of episode 12 a well-aimed blast from the ray gun explodes the ground in front of Our Heroes, but the start of episode 13 reveals that they made it through a trap door (though not entirely unscathed by the blast) just before the ray hit. Episode 13 features Ming apparently committing suicide by “going to meet the Great God Theo” (is there any reason why the reigning deity of the planet Mongo was named after Vincent Van Gogh’s brother?) — meaning he locks himself into a chamber that appears to be open to the sky and throws himself into it (though since Ming appeared as a character in later Universal Flash Gordon serials, obviously the writing committee were able to figure out some preposterous explanation to keep him alive — which, given how Universal kept reviving their fabled monsters for film after film, was probably no particular challenge for the Universal writing department), but there’s one final thrill in which the High Priest of Theo (Theodore Lorch) plants a time bomb on board Zarkov’s spaceship as it leaves for earth and Barin, now freed and the rightful ruler of Mongo with Aura soon to be his queen, warns them by radio.
They find it incredibly quickly (well, it was the last episode and time was running out!) and Flash opens the door to the spaceship and throws the bomb out the door so it can explode harmlessly, which looks even more preposterous than it is (since as he does this we see clouds in the sky, so we’re obviously meant to assume that during this action the spaceship is still in Mongo’s airspace and therefore has access to an outside atmosphere). Flash and company arrive back on earth to a hero’s welcome (and there’s an incongruous bit of stock footage: a clip of the crowds in Paris welcoming Charles Lindbergh in 1927!) and newspapers are able to print the news that they’re returning even though, at Zarkov’s request, all electrical power has been turned off temporarily so as not to interfere with the magnetic functioning of the spacecraft.
Overall, the 1936 Flash Gordon serial is a good one, with plenty of action sequences and a handsome physical production, but the good guys’ acting ranges from mediocre to awful (at least Charles Middleton and Priscilla Lawson get to shine, and Middleton is so convincing in his quasi-Asian makeup — obviously the name and look of Ming were designed to hook into fears of the “Asian peril” — it’s a pity he never got to play Fu Manchu) and there are jarring bits of serial cheapness and sloppy and/or inconsistent plot construction to make this one as frustrating as it is entertaining. — 8/8/10
I spent the evening running the VCR to tape the first Flash Gordon serial (American Movie Classics is running all three of them, in sequence, having done the first one last night and continuing with the second and third ones tonight and tomorrow). I got to see bits of it, and it looked surprisingly good — this is the best print of the serial I’ve ever seen, and it has the original titles from the 1936 Universal release rather than the crudely printed reissue titles from King Features (the Hearst-owned syndication company that held the rights to the original comic strip, and received reissue rights to the films after a certain period) which replaced it for a 1950’s reissue. Indeed, this version looked good enough to show the surprisingly elaborate sets used in the production, and to indicate that the Universal art department actually did a pretty good job of duplicating (albeit in black-and-white instead of color) the “look” of Alex Raymond’s original art (and Raymond was enough of a “star” in the comics world that the main titles actually say, “Based on Alex Raymond’s Cartoon Strip”). — 10/29/96
•••••
Later we watched the first two episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, presented here on DVD by King Features Syndicate (the Hearst subsidiary which owned the comic strip and its characters, and which regained the rights to the three Flash Gordon serials from Universal in 1951), which ran pretty much as I’d remembered them. Interestingly, while the Flash Gordon TV series had been set in the 31st century and had avoided any depiction of the earth of that time, the serials took place in the 1930’s and had Flash (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) and Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) take off in that little toy rocket ship from a recognizable earth of that period, which is threatened with annihilation when the rogue planet Mongo comes crashing through the solar system headed for an apparent collision with earth. (One of the charms of this serial was the interesting assortment of newsreel footage used to represent people panicking about their impending doom — everything from riots to scenes of Hindus praying on the Ganges.)
The serial scores in the magnificent physical production — Universal spent $300,000 on it, and the investment shows in the splendiferous sets and hundreds of extras — and the marvelous villain performance of Charles Middleton as the Emperor Ming. Where it’s weak is in the acting of the good guys: Buster Crabbe is personable and suitably butch but, quite frankly, Steve Holland made a more convincing Flash in the 1950’s TV show; Frank Shannon’s performance is a souvenir of the day in which Hollywood thought one foreign accent was as good as another (which is how Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman got to play Frenchwomen), apparently deciding that a Scottish accent was perfectly credible coming from a character named “Zarkov”; and though Jean Rogers’ performance was better than I remembered it — her wrath when she realizes she’s about to be impressed into service as the latest wife in Ming’s harem is suitably convincing — there are still all too many closeups of her staring goop-eyed as Flash as though awed into silence by his magnificence.
The best performances so far are Middleton’s and Priscilla Lawson’s as his daughter, Princess Aura — who seems to be vamping Flash and giving the impression that the writing committee (Frederick Stephani — who also directed, though imdb.com claims that Ray Taylor, who did such a marvelous and unusual job with The Return of Chandu, was an uncredited co-director — George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey and Ella O’Neill) had seen The Mask of Fu Manchu and were copying the setup of dashing hero, imperial villain and villain’s daughter with the hots for the hero. — 7/17/10
•••••
We ran the third and fourth episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial from Universal, “Captured by Shark Men” and “Battling the Sea Beast,” and what’s most interesting about this serial is that for all the money Universal spent on it ($300,000, three times the production budget of Republic’s lavish — for them — Undersea Kingdom and about eight to 10 times the normal serial budget) and for all the care they took on some of the scenes (including artfully redressing some of the sets from Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy as well as constructing some pretty elaborate new ones), there are also some really embarrassing short-cuts. The Shark Men are actually ordinary people with metal helmets (according to the plot the helmets are the mechanism by which Emperor Ming keeps them in line and prevents them from rebelling) and swim trunks, and the only connection to “sharkicity” is a few pencil-like protuberances on their backsides that are supposed to make them look “sharkish.” The “Sea Beast” is an ordinary octopus (referred to in the dialogue as an “octopod”) shown in stock footage, and its supposed battle to the death with Flash Gordon is staged surprisingly ineptly.
Even more than most serials, Flash Gordon seems to fall back on similar situations over and over again — and the plethora of underwater scenes is probably explainable as Universal’s desire to exploit Crabbe’s swimming claim to fame (he was a medalist in swimming at the 1932 Olympics — Johnny Weissmuller had been the big swimming medal winner in 1924 and 1928 and that had jump-started him to movie fame, and Crabbe and his handlers at Universal and Paramount thought he could do the same — Crabbe even got to play the juvenile male lead in a W. C. Fields movie, You’re Telling Me!, though all it took to play that sort of role — the down-to-earth young guy who wants to marry Fields’ daughter even though Fields’ snobbish wife doesn’t think he’s good enough for her — was a reasonably photogenic bod and a decent screen personality, and Crabbe had both).
I’ve seen the Flash Gordon serials before — various stations in the Bay Area used to show them, episode by episode, during the late 1970’s — and they’re appealing (many of them are scored with familiar Universal music cues — the music that accompanied the death of the Invisible Man in James Whale’s 1933 classic is heard a lot — and bits of the classics as well: among the odder parts of the Flash Gordon score are the repeated quotes from the “Dresden Amen,” the traditional Lutheran hymn used by Mendelssohn in the “Reformation” symphony and Wagner in the prelude to Parsifal) but I still think — and this is probably heresy among Flash Gordon fans — that the 1950’s TV episodes were better: the stories were at least marginally more sophisticated, the effects equal or better (despite the shoestring TV budgets) and the cast stronger: Steve Holland totally outclasses Crabbe in the looks department and he’s also a better actor within the limits of the character, and the other TV principals are also better than their opposite numbers in the serial.
If anything has kept the Flash Gordon serials in the cultural spotlight, it’s Charles Middleton’s magnificent performance as the Emperor Ming: acting the part of a megalomaniac who wants to rule the universe at a time when the real-life role models for the character — Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler — were all alive, well and at or near the peaks of their powers, Middleton turns in a full-bodied villain performance that ties Ming in with his contemporary real-life role models and projects a really formidable foe for Flash and our heroes — and the writing committee doesn’t bother to explain why Zarkov is willing and even enthusiastic about working for Ming (they haven’t had him taken over by mind control the way Republic did with the equivalent character in Undersea Kingdom). — 7/19/10
•••••
When we settled in Charles suggested we watch another episode of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial and then the 2004 movie I, Robot as a kind of science-fiction then-and-now comparison. The fifth episode of Flash Gordon was called “The Destroying Ray,” and was pretty much more of the same except that it introduced Prince Barin (Richard Alexander, a tall, hunky actor who quite frankly could give Buster Crabbe competition in the hunk department), the rightful ruler of the planet Mongo — his father was deposed by Emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) and murdered, along with his mom, when Barin was still a boy, though the writing committee never bothered to tell us how Barin survived to adulthood or who raised him. Nonetheless, he’s mounted a resistance movement and he takes Flash out of the kingdom of the shark men (Ming’s allies) — and you don’t need two guesses as to what the interior of Barin’s spaceship looks like. That’s right: it’s exactly the same as the interior of Zarkov’s spaceship, built back on 1936 Earth, which took Zarkov (Frank Shannon), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) and Flash (Buster Crabbe) to Mongo in the first place, which also looked exactly the same as the inside of Ming’s spaceship on Mongo and the inside of the submarine owned by the shark men.
This bizarre mixture of expensive production values on one hand and typical serial cheapness on the other runs throughout this film — and the other oddity about the 1936 Flash Gordon is how Flash gets out of most of the cliffhangers not through his own efforts (he doesn’t even get to jump!) but via intervention from outside — often from Emperor Ming, who for all his vaunted mercilessness seems to have a vested interest in Flash Gordon’s survival, either because he’s hoping to use Flash against his home-grown enemies on Mongo, he’s hoping to use Dr. Zarkov’s scientific genius and protecting Flash and Dale is the price of Zarkov’s cooperation, or he’s genuinely concerned about the safety of his daughter, Princess Aura (the striking-looking Priscilla Lawson, who should have been playing the female lead!) and Aura has a crush on Flash and seems to keep popping up wherever he is, much to Dale’s jealous irritation. Flash Gordon is a marvelously produced serial but also one in which the action scenes have an oddly perfunctory air, and given that he’s supposed to be a strapping butch action hero, one would like to see Flash get himself out of more of the cliffhangers instead of relying on someone else — and the show’s principal villain, at that — to help him escape. — 7/21/10
•••••
What we ended up doing was running two more episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, “Flaming Torture” (episode six) and “Shattering Doom” (episode seven), in which all the serial’s good or even remotely good people — Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers), Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon), Prince Barin (Richard Alexander), Prince Thun (James Pierce) and Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson, who so totally out-sexes and out-acts Jean Rogers one wonders why Flash remains so disinterested in her and so loyal to Dale), daughter of Emperor Ming (Charles Middleton) — end up as captives of the repulsive King Vultan (Jack ‘Tiny’ Lipson — the nickname is a deliberately ironic misnomer since Vultan is actually a large bear-type with a smarmily ingratiating manner that makes it clear he thinks of himself as God’s gift to women of any planet), ruler of the Hawkmen, who captured Dale and Thun and got hold of the others by shooting down their rocket ship.
Vultan, like Ming himself, immediately got the hots for Dale the moment he first saw her, and is so insistent on her marrying him she’s probably wondering about now why she didn’t go ahead and marry Ming (who’s just as evil but considerably more charming; Middleton clearly patterned his performance on Boris Karloff’s in The Mask of Fu Manchu) in one of the previous episodes. Once again these episodes offered pretty much the same mix as those before: splendiferous sets (though the mass dance/orgy sequence at King Vultan’s court looks like a stock clip from an older film — but what older film I have no idea!), intriguing gimmicks (the cliffhanger between episodes six and seven plugs Buster Crabbe into some of the machinery Kenneth Strickfaden built for the first Frankenstein and even offers a stock clip from Frankenstein — in which the machinery is shot in a much darker, shadowier and more creative lighting style than Frederick Stephani used in the new footage — and placed between two electrodes that will kill him if he’s exposed to them long enough) and sloppy plotting that all too often makes Flash’s escapes from the cliffhangers dependent on other people saving him (for someone who’s nominally this serial’s principal villain, Emperor Ming sure gives the hero a lot of help — though that’s mainly because Princess Aura is with him often and Ming is more concerned about saving his daughter than offing Flash) rather than him using his own strength and/or resourcefulness to escape them himself.
Flash Gordon is a good serial, and the handsome production values have their own appeal — as does Priscilla Lawson, who clearly should have had more of a career than she did, even though all too many of her scenes show her trying to get rid of Dale and get Flash for herself (the writers fall back on this so often they might as well have called this Flash Gordon: The Soap Opera) — but it’s not all that imaginatively written (especially by comparison to the first Columbia Batman, which gave Middleton a sympathetic role) and the action is hardly as excitingly over-the-top as it was in the much cheaper rival serials from Republic. — 8/1/10
•••••
We managed, once Charles arrived, to squeeze in two episodes of the Flash Gordon serial from 1936, which has proven surprisingly disappointing despite its large (for a serial, and indeed at $300,000 large for a Universal project in general) budget and some good action scenes. We watched episodes eight and nine, “Tournament of Doom” and “Fighting the Fire Demon,” both of which took place in the court of King Vultan of the Hawkmen (Jack “Tiny” Lipson), who live in a “sky city” that looks like something out of Metropolis (though it could also have been an inspiration for the design of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, made three years later) that is kept floating in mid-air by a beam fed by “radium furnaces” whose design — including a huge dial with three hands that has to be maneuvered, to no apparent purpose, by a person at its control, which even more than the design of the sky city itself makes it obvious that someone connected with this production had seen Metropolis. (In fact, the parallel is so obvious Charles chuckled at every scene in which that giant gadget appeared.)
Flash (Buster Crabbe) and his friend Prince Barin (Richard Alexander, who’s older, stockier and heavier than Crabbe but also more convincingly butch), captured and forced to work as galley slaves feeding the radium furnace, escape via an electrically charged shovel Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) rigged up for them, and this causes the sky city to lose the energy that’s keeping it up until Zarkov’s replacement ray (powered by some of the cool electronic gizmos Kenneth Strickfaden built for the Frankenstein movies — instead of selling them to any one studio Strickfaden kept ownership of them and rented them out to anyone who wanted them, so they appear not only in Universal movies but in productions by Columbia and Republic as well) kicks in — Zarkov developed this ray but only on condition that Vultan release his prisoners. Then Emperor Ming (Charles Middleton) shows up and claims the prisoners for himself, and the rest of these two episodes consists of the trials by battle Ming cooks up for Flash to regain his freedom and the hand of his earthling girlfriend, Dale Arden (Jean Rogers).
First he has to fight a “masked swordsman” who turns out to be Prince Barin (tricked into this due to his own love for Princess Aura, Ming’s daughter, played by Priscilla Lawson — Aura seems to be the only woman on the planet Mongo other than Dale, who’s not a native, and the business of Barin loving Aura who loves Flash who loves Dale brings this serial awfully close to Flash Gordon: The Soap Opera). Then, when he unmasks Barin and both men refuse to continue the combat, Flash is sent into the arena to fight an “orangopoid” (Ray Corrigan, who was doing this even while over at Republic he was playing a human lead in Undersea Kingdom, a serial pretty obviously patterned on Flash Gordon and also relatively lavish in its physical production), basically an ape (or a person in an ape suit) with a unicorn-like horn stuck on the top of its head.
In episode nine, Flash gets the secret of how to kill the “orangopoid” from Princess Aura, who in turn got it from the High Priest of Mongo (Theodore Lorch) — a spot of vulnerability just below its throat, into which Flash, who was sent into combat with the thing with just a dagger, thrusts a spear Princess Aura has given him. Then, in a plot twist the writing committee evidently ripped off from Götterdämmerung (or maybe Tristan und Isolde), Aura decides to win Flash for herself by slipping him two drugs: one which will put him into a state of unconsciousness and one which will wake him up but leave him no memory of his previous life … so hopefully he’ll wake up and instantly fall in love with Aura because she’ll be the first woman he’s ever seen (or at least the first one who hasn’t been his aunt — I am making this up, you know). Only in order for this plot to work, for some reason she has to take him to a secret hideaway that can only be accessed through a tunnel guarded by the Fire Dragon. Aura is told by the High Priest that she and Flash can safely traverse the tunnel at midnight because that’s when the Fire Dragon is asleep, but — wouldn’t you know it? — the High Priest strikes the ceremonial gong that’s the Fire Dragon’s alarm clock and he gets up, ready to tear Flash limb from limb.
That’s the cliffhanger to episode nine, and if the Fire Dragon’s appearance weren’t so risible it might actually be frightening — instead he’s yet another human actor in a badly-fitting monster suit, with the creases and folds of the fabric all too visible, and with special prop gloves on the limbs that are supposed to make it look like a giant ambulatory crab. One of the frustrations of the Flash Gordon serial is that for all the money that was spent on it, and all the care taken with some aspects of the production, all too often they went for this really tacky serial cheapness; frankly, had they used the stop-motion animation technique from the 1925 Lost World and 1933 King Kong instead of making these ridiculous monster suits and casting live humans in these parts, the monsters would have been considerably more chilling and the fight scenes between them and the humans a lot more convincing. — 8/6/10
•••••
When Charles and I finally got together we screened two more episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon — episodes 10, “The Unseen Peril,” and 11, “In the Claws of the Tigron” (in case you were wondering, the “tigron” is actually a tiger, most of whose appearances I suspect were borrowed from Clyde Beatty’s 1932 Universal film The Big Cage) — and while at least in these we got to see more women than just Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) and Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson) — Aura has a lady in waiting and there are a few other females scattered around the cast — Flash Gordon remained, as before, a frustrating mixture of lavish production values and cheap serial shortcuts, brilliant visuals and stupid dialogue, vivid effects work and lousy acting (aside from Lawson and Charles Middleton as her father, the evil Emperor Ming, both of whom bring genuine power and interest to their characterizations — but then in stories like this the villains are usually more interesting than the heroes anyway). Indeed, the 1936 Flash Gordon (“based on Alex Raymond’s cartoon strip,” the opening credit proudly proclaims, billing him higher than the screenwriters or even any of the actors) seems to share both the beauties and the failings of many more recent movies based on cartoon strips or comic books, notably stunning visuals and silly plots.
The episode title “The Unseen Peril” is something of a cheat because it’s actually Flash Gordon, not any of the bad guys, who becomes invisible (courtesy of yet another one of Dr. Zarkov’s high-tech inventions) and beats up Ming’s guards until he suddenly becomes visible again in mid-fight sequence. Apparently Universal had built up such an inventory of gadgets and know-how making The Invisible Man (1933) — much of whose music score is repeatedly reused here — that they crammed the invisibility gimmick into serials like this one and The Phantom Creeps (1939) well before they made a second “Invisible Man” feature, The Invisible Man Returns (1940). The tenth episode opens with one of the nastier serial cop-outs; confronted by the Fire Dragon, awakened (via the ceremonial gong that is its alarm clock) by the High Priest of Mongo (Theodore Lorch) in league with Ming in hopes it will destroy Flash Gordon (incidentally the Fire Dragon is one of the most ridiculous-looking monsters in the whole show: he looks like Big Bird with giant crab mitts on his hands and feet), Flash is saved not by his own skills in combat but by Dr. Zarkov, who just happens to have a grenade on him that he throws at the Fire Dragon, blowing it up.
With Flash Gordon still under total memory loss from the potion Princess Aura slipped him in episode nine (bearing its origins in the potion gimmicks from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung), Ming takes the opportunity to foist him off on Princess Aura (thereby frustrating her lover, Prince Barin) so he can add Dale Arden to his harem — only Zarkov restores Flash’s memory with yet another huge electronic gizmo and so Flash once more has eyes only for Dale again. Interestingly, there are only two more episodes to go — “Trapped in the Turret” and “Rocketing to Earth” — making 13 in all, a peculiar number for a serial (usually they came, like boxing matches, in 10-, 12- or 15-round versions) — and one element that will probably become more important later is the effort of Dr. Zarkov and his fellow scientists back on Earth to establish radio communications with each other. One of the gimmicks behind this serial is that Earth is surrounded by a radioactive cloud created on Mongo and threatened with immediate destruction by it — though in the matte paintings of Earth (shown as if on a globe without the cloud cover that the real Earth, as photographed from space, always has) in these episodes the crew apparently forgot to matte in the cloud, because it’s gone and we’re left to attribute its disappearance to true serial discontinuity.
One thing I will miss when we finish watching this is a surprisingly beautiful and haunting piece of music, originally played on a saxophone and then taken up by full orchestra, that accompanies the chapter title in each opening credits sequence. The rest of the music is familiar stuff from Universal’s stock library, but this is a quite lovely and plaintive theme I don’t otherwise recognize (actually a softer, subtler rewrite of the main title theme) and which I’ve come to look forward to hearing in the credits much as I did the slow theme of the opening music to each episode of Republic’s 1937 serial Dick Tracy. — 8/7/10
•••••
Charles and I managed to finish watching the last two episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, “Trapped in a Turret” and “Rocketing to Earth.” This was a good serial all in all, though it suffered from some lapses in story construction and bits of cheapness surprising in what was mostly an expensive (about $300,000, high for a serial) production with the benefit of a major-studio infrastructure. The plot in this one ends with Emperor Ming (Charles Middleton) promising, at the behest of his daughter Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson), to befriend the earth people and let them go home, only he attempts one final trap to kill them — he arrests Prince Barin and has his minions steal Barin’s spaceship and fire its built-in ray gun at Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Jean Rogers), Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) and King Vultan (Jack Lipson) of the Hawkmen, a species of winged humans indigenous to Mongo, as they wait to meet Barin outside a metal gate that admits one to something called a “turret” that doesn’t either look or function like the object usually suggested by that word.
The ending of episode 12 and beginning of episode 13 features one of those infamous serial “cheats” this Flash Gordon had otherwise avoided: at the end of episode 12 a well-aimed blast from the ray gun explodes the ground in front of Our Heroes, but the start of episode 13 reveals that they made it through a trap door (though not entirely unscathed by the blast) just before the ray hit. Episode 13 features Ming apparently committing suicide by “going to meet the Great God Theo” (is there any reason why the reigning deity of the planet Mongo was named after Vincent Van Gogh’s brother?) — meaning he locks himself into a chamber that appears to be open to the sky and throws himself into it (though since Ming appeared as a character in later Universal Flash Gordon serials, obviously the writing committee were able to figure out some preposterous explanation to keep him alive — which, given how Universal kept reviving their fabled monsters for film after film, was probably no particular challenge for the Universal writing department), but there’s one final thrill in which the High Priest of Theo (Theodore Lorch) plants a time bomb on board Zarkov’s spaceship as it leaves for earth and Barin, now freed and the rightful ruler of Mongo with Aura soon to be his queen, warns them by radio.
They find it incredibly quickly (well, it was the last episode and time was running out!) and Flash opens the door to the spaceship and throws the bomb out the door so it can explode harmlessly, which looks even more preposterous than it is (since as he does this we see clouds in the sky, so we’re obviously meant to assume that during this action the spaceship is still in Mongo’s airspace and therefore has access to an outside atmosphere). Flash and company arrive back on earth to a hero’s welcome (and there’s an incongruous bit of stock footage: a clip of the crowds in Paris welcoming Charles Lindbergh in 1927!) and newspapers are able to print the news that they’re returning even though, at Zarkov’s request, all electrical power has been turned off temporarily so as not to interfere with the magnetic functioning of the spacecraft.
Overall, the 1936 Flash Gordon serial is a good one, with plenty of action sequences and a handsome physical production, but the good guys’ acting ranges from mediocre to awful (at least Charles Middleton and Priscilla Lawson get to shine, and Middleton is so convincing in his quasi-Asian makeup — obviously the name and look of Ming were designed to hook into fears of the “Asian peril” — it’s a pity he never got to play Fu Manchu) and there are jarring bits of serial cheapness and sloppy and/or inconsistent plot construction to make this one as frustrating as it is entertaining. — 8/8/10
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The Payoff (Warner Bros.-First National, 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was The Payoff (one word, no hyphen), made by Warners in 1935 (though the ending credit read “A First National Picture”) that TCM showed as part of a recent tribute to James Dunn, who seemed to alternate as a “type” between wisecracking and whining. In this one he plays Joe McCoy, a junior sports reporter for a New York newspaper, whose wife Maxine (Claire Dodd) is whining about how little money he makes and how few opportunities she has to get out — either with or without him — and have fun. When the paper’s star sports columnist, George Gorman (Frank Sheridan), gets sick and has to miss the opening game of the World Series. McCoy fills in for him and, bored by the game itself, turns his binoculars on the audience and spots Marty Bleuler (the marvelous villain-type Alan Dinehart), a gambler who was banned from all major league baseball games for life after having participated in the (genuine) 1919 World Series fix, but who’s somehow sneaked back in.
McCoy makes that the first item in what’s essentially a gossip column about sports, and shortly thereafter Gorman decides he’s too ill to continue working and recommends to his editor, Harvey Morris (Joseph Crehan), that McCoy take his place full-time. McCoy’s pay gets doubled from $75 to $150 per week and he establishes a reputation for incorruptibility despite repeated attempts by Bleuler to get him to take bribes — as well as a beating in a subway station by three of Bleuler’s goons after McCoy rejects Bleuler’s bribe offers once too often. Meanwhile, his wife is spending his increased income faster than he can earn it, and when he gets sent by the paper to California to cover the Rose Bowl (which turns out, defying the promised California sunshine, to take place in driving rain) and the spring training camps of the major baseball teams, Maxine, who’s agreed to accompany him, bails within a day or two and heads back to New York.
The next thing we see, she’s blowing all her husband’s money and racking up I.O.U.’s in Bleuler’s casino, and cheating on Joe to boot — first with an anonymous “roo” (we know because he’s got one of those pencil-thin moustaches that for some reason was acceptable on Ronald Colman but marked any other male who wore one as a flea-bitten Lothario and bad news for any girl unlucky enough to get involved with him) and then with Bleuler himself. When Joe returns from his trip, Bleuler presents him with $5,400 in his wife’s I.O.U.’s and says now he has to accept bribes and write what Bleuler tells him to write to pay off the gambling debts. Too stuck on his wife (even now!) to do the obvious thing — report the whole affair to the police — Bleuler agrees, and to assuage his own guilt feelings he starts drinking heavily and missing deadlines, and eventually Harvey fires him and he hits the skids, ultimately ending up in Bellevue (his wife reports him to get rid of him and announces she’s filing for divorce) and then sleeping on park benches, until his old friend Connie (Patricia Ellis), still employed by the paper, finds him.
Jimmy Moore (Frankie Darro), a newsboy Joe once befriended, has become a jockey and reports to Connie that Bleuler has offered him a bribe to throw a big race — and Connie seeks out Joe, sobers him up and the three of them work out a plot to entrap Bleuler: Jimmy will take Bleuler’s money but double-cross him and win anyway — despite the efforts of two of Bleuler’s jockeys to box him in during the race so he can’t get by even though he has the fastest horse — only Bleuler and his new girlfriend (he’s dumped Maxine for a blonde) show up at the race and one of Bleuler’s gang shoots Jimmy during the final turn once it becomes apparent they’re not going to beat him either by bribery or on-track tactics, and while it’s just a shoulder wound and it’s indicated he will recover, Jimmy barely makes it across the finish line on his horse’s back before falling off from the wound. The police, tipped off by Joe and Connie, arrest Bleuler and his gang members, Joe is rehired at the paper, and later we’re told — not shown! — that when Bleuler was taken to the courthouse for arraignment, Maxine showed up with a gun, murdered him and then committed suicide. (This seemed like an overwrought way to get rid of her character and pave the way for Joe to marry Connie; I thought it would end with her divorcing him, then getting rejected by Bleuler, and thereby ending up with nobody — which one would think would be enough of a punishment for her even under the Production Code, which generally frowned on suicides but might have O.K.’d this one because it wasn’t actually shown.)
The Payoff has a certain similarity to The Finger Points, another Warners film in “First National” drag about a corrupt reporter (Richard Barthelmess) under the thumb of a gang boss (Clark Gable, on loan from MGM), made four years earlier and altogether a much tougher, more incisive drama — in that one it’s the reporter himself who decides he wants the crooked money, rather than his wife corrupting him — and while the script for The Payoff was co-written (with George Bricker) by a real reporter, Joel Sayre (he worked for the New York Herald-Tribune and wrote a New Yorker article on a potential suicide that became the basis for Fourteen Hours, Grace Kelly’s first feature film, in 1951), and the film was directed by Robert Florey, it’s pretty much just chips off the Warners’ cliché log.
It suffers from a weak cast — the parts of Joe and Maxine cry out for James Cagney and Bette Davis, and get James Dunn and Claire Dodd — and also from Florey’s clear disinterest in this sort of story: only in the scenes of Joe McCoy’s descent and dissipation do Florey and cinematographer Arthur Todd get to do the rich, chiaroscuro, proto-noir compositions, oblique angles and stylized backgrounds Florey liked so much and used so effectively in his great movies. The Payoff is an exciting movie, it holds one’s interest for its blessedly short 64-minute running time (about as much as its slender story can sustain), and yet James Dunn is annoyingly whiny through much of it and the writers never make it believable that he’d be so stuck on his wife he’d be willing to give up everything, including his integrity, for her.
The film I picked out was The Payoff (one word, no hyphen), made by Warners in 1935 (though the ending credit read “A First National Picture”) that TCM showed as part of a recent tribute to James Dunn, who seemed to alternate as a “type” between wisecracking and whining. In this one he plays Joe McCoy, a junior sports reporter for a New York newspaper, whose wife Maxine (Claire Dodd) is whining about how little money he makes and how few opportunities she has to get out — either with or without him — and have fun. When the paper’s star sports columnist, George Gorman (Frank Sheridan), gets sick and has to miss the opening game of the World Series. McCoy fills in for him and, bored by the game itself, turns his binoculars on the audience and spots Marty Bleuler (the marvelous villain-type Alan Dinehart), a gambler who was banned from all major league baseball games for life after having participated in the (genuine) 1919 World Series fix, but who’s somehow sneaked back in.
McCoy makes that the first item in what’s essentially a gossip column about sports, and shortly thereafter Gorman decides he’s too ill to continue working and recommends to his editor, Harvey Morris (Joseph Crehan), that McCoy take his place full-time. McCoy’s pay gets doubled from $75 to $150 per week and he establishes a reputation for incorruptibility despite repeated attempts by Bleuler to get him to take bribes — as well as a beating in a subway station by three of Bleuler’s goons after McCoy rejects Bleuler’s bribe offers once too often. Meanwhile, his wife is spending his increased income faster than he can earn it, and when he gets sent by the paper to California to cover the Rose Bowl (which turns out, defying the promised California sunshine, to take place in driving rain) and the spring training camps of the major baseball teams, Maxine, who’s agreed to accompany him, bails within a day or two and heads back to New York.
The next thing we see, she’s blowing all her husband’s money and racking up I.O.U.’s in Bleuler’s casino, and cheating on Joe to boot — first with an anonymous “roo” (we know because he’s got one of those pencil-thin moustaches that for some reason was acceptable on Ronald Colman but marked any other male who wore one as a flea-bitten Lothario and bad news for any girl unlucky enough to get involved with him) and then with Bleuler himself. When Joe returns from his trip, Bleuler presents him with $5,400 in his wife’s I.O.U.’s and says now he has to accept bribes and write what Bleuler tells him to write to pay off the gambling debts. Too stuck on his wife (even now!) to do the obvious thing — report the whole affair to the police — Bleuler agrees, and to assuage his own guilt feelings he starts drinking heavily and missing deadlines, and eventually Harvey fires him and he hits the skids, ultimately ending up in Bellevue (his wife reports him to get rid of him and announces she’s filing for divorce) and then sleeping on park benches, until his old friend Connie (Patricia Ellis), still employed by the paper, finds him.
Jimmy Moore (Frankie Darro), a newsboy Joe once befriended, has become a jockey and reports to Connie that Bleuler has offered him a bribe to throw a big race — and Connie seeks out Joe, sobers him up and the three of them work out a plot to entrap Bleuler: Jimmy will take Bleuler’s money but double-cross him and win anyway — despite the efforts of two of Bleuler’s jockeys to box him in during the race so he can’t get by even though he has the fastest horse — only Bleuler and his new girlfriend (he’s dumped Maxine for a blonde) show up at the race and one of Bleuler’s gang shoots Jimmy during the final turn once it becomes apparent they’re not going to beat him either by bribery or on-track tactics, and while it’s just a shoulder wound and it’s indicated he will recover, Jimmy barely makes it across the finish line on his horse’s back before falling off from the wound. The police, tipped off by Joe and Connie, arrest Bleuler and his gang members, Joe is rehired at the paper, and later we’re told — not shown! — that when Bleuler was taken to the courthouse for arraignment, Maxine showed up with a gun, murdered him and then committed suicide. (This seemed like an overwrought way to get rid of her character and pave the way for Joe to marry Connie; I thought it would end with her divorcing him, then getting rejected by Bleuler, and thereby ending up with nobody — which one would think would be enough of a punishment for her even under the Production Code, which generally frowned on suicides but might have O.K.’d this one because it wasn’t actually shown.)
The Payoff has a certain similarity to The Finger Points, another Warners film in “First National” drag about a corrupt reporter (Richard Barthelmess) under the thumb of a gang boss (Clark Gable, on loan from MGM), made four years earlier and altogether a much tougher, more incisive drama — in that one it’s the reporter himself who decides he wants the crooked money, rather than his wife corrupting him — and while the script for The Payoff was co-written (with George Bricker) by a real reporter, Joel Sayre (he worked for the New York Herald-Tribune and wrote a New Yorker article on a potential suicide that became the basis for Fourteen Hours, Grace Kelly’s first feature film, in 1951), and the film was directed by Robert Florey, it’s pretty much just chips off the Warners’ cliché log.
It suffers from a weak cast — the parts of Joe and Maxine cry out for James Cagney and Bette Davis, and get James Dunn and Claire Dodd — and also from Florey’s clear disinterest in this sort of story: only in the scenes of Joe McCoy’s descent and dissipation do Florey and cinematographer Arthur Todd get to do the rich, chiaroscuro, proto-noir compositions, oblique angles and stylized backgrounds Florey liked so much and used so effectively in his great movies. The Payoff is an exciting movie, it holds one’s interest for its blessedly short 64-minute running time (about as much as its slender story can sustain), and yet James Dunn is annoyingly whiny through much of it and the writers never make it believable that he’d be so stuck on his wife he’d be willing to give up everything, including his integrity, for her.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (20th Century-Fox, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I finally did watch was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, made at 20th Century-Fox in 1939 and a follow-up to The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Basil Rathbone playing Holmes for the second time and getting the top billing he deserved: Ida Lupino as the damsel in distress, Ann Brandon, was second, Nigel Bruce as Watson was third and Alan Marshal as Ann’s solicitor (in the British sense, meaning a business attorney) and boyfriend, was fourth. Most of the behind-the-camera talent changed for this one — the director was Alfred Werker (no great shakes but with more of a sense of atmosphere than Sidney Lanfield), the script was by Edwin Blum and Richard Drake (it was ostensibly based on the play Sherlock Holmes, written by American actor William Gillette — the first person to play Holmes in any medium — from an original draft by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but the plot of the movie has almost nothing to do with the Gillette play) and Leon Shamroy replaced J. Peverell Marley as the cinematographer (Shamroy was most famous for his elaborately decorative color film, but he proves here he could be just as much a master of atmosphere in black-and-white) — though Richard Day and Hans Peters remained the art directors and they were absolutely first-rate in creating a convincing visual evocation of Victorian London (where the setting of this film remains instead of taking any run-outs to the countryside like The Hound of the Baskervilles).
If pressed, I’d list this as my all-time favorite Holmes film (though if the tasteless first half-hour of Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes were excised, the remaining hour and a half would give it serious competition) despite a script of almost demented complexity and levels of confusion. Indeed, at the very beginning of the movie Professor Moriarty (George Zucco, one of the two best actors ever to play the role — Lionel Atwill, in a subsequent Rathbone Holmes film called Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, was the other) manages to win acquittal in a murder trial (Holmes arrives at the courtroom with new evidence definitively proving Moriarty’s guilt but he’s too late — the jury’s verdict has already been recorded and Moriarty has been released) and announces that he will get his revenge against Holmes by planning such a dramatic and far-reaching crime that Holmes will be embarrassed into retirement by his failure to prevent it. Before chewing out his butler, Dawes (Frank Dawson), for having failed to water his precious plants and thereby letting at least one of them die (“You have murdered a flower — and for merely murdering a man I was locked in a filthy cell for months and nearly hanged,” Moriarty says, neatly summing up his twisted priorities), he tells his lieutenant Bassick (Arthur Hohl) that he’s going to give Holmes “two toys” in a particular order: the first is a letter to Sir Ronald Ramsgate (Henry Stephenson) threatening to steal the Star of Delhi, on its way from India to take its place in the Tower of London with the other crown jewels; and the second is an enigmatic drawing, mailed to Ann Brandon’s brother Lloyd (Peter Willes), showing a man with an albatross around his neck (an image from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) with a date on it that’s ten years to the day after Ann’s and Lloyd’s father died mysteriously.
The idea is that Moriarty has dropped the fantastically complicated (because he’s framed it to be so) Brandon case in Holmes’ lap after threatening to steal the Star of Delhi so Holmes will lose interest in protecting the crown jewels and Moriarty will be able to sneak into the Tower in the hubbub over his attempt to steal the Star of Delhi (for which he disguises himself as a policeman) and help himself to the crown jewels at his leisure. The plot is full of ridiculous holes — like how and why, if the entire Brandon plot line is just Moriarty’s feint to distract Holmes from his real crime, Brandon père got that mysterious drawing, identical to the current one, ten years earlier (were we supposed to believe Moriarty was planning that far ahead?) — but it doesn’t matter that this movie makes very little sense because it’s all so superbly atmospheric: Blum and Drake plant all sorts of haunting gimmicks in their script (notably a lovesick South American who plays a mournful melody on a low flute and murders Ann’s brother Lloyd with a bolo; he also wears a cleverly designed orthopedic shoe to make it look like he has a club foot, even though he doesn’t; there’s also an engaging red herring when Moriarty is seeing going into Jerrold Hunter’s office — merely a blind, as it turns out, but it makes both Watson and us wonder if the two are in league) and Werker and Shamroy take full advantage of them.
Werker has the 20th Century-Fox fog machines going even faster and harder than they did in the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles, and quite a few scenes — especially towards the end of the film — start out in total darkness before some flash of light (usually Holmes lighting a cigarette — Rathbone smokes quite a few cigarettes in this film as well as the canonical Holmes pipe) starts illuminating what’s going on. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes stands out among Holmes films because of the absolute rightness of Rathbone’s casting in the role (he looks like the Holmes of Sidney Paget’s illustrations to the original publication of Conan Doyle’s stories in The Strand, and no actor before or since has looked so good in the full-figure profile shots of Holmes in deerstalker, long coat and curved pipe in his mouth; his authoritative manner and ringing voice are also utterly right for the part, he’s at home as both cerebral thinker and action hero, and as I’ve written here before — paraphrasing the opening of the Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” — to me, Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes), the plot’s potential for haunting Gothic imagery and thrills, Ida Lupino’s performance (she plays the part quite incisively and offers considerably more than the usual decorative damsel-in-distress) and an overall flavor that may depart considerably from the letter of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but remains true to his spirit.
The film Charles and I finally did watch was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, made at 20th Century-Fox in 1939 and a follow-up to The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Basil Rathbone playing Holmes for the second time and getting the top billing he deserved: Ida Lupino as the damsel in distress, Ann Brandon, was second, Nigel Bruce as Watson was third and Alan Marshal as Ann’s solicitor (in the British sense, meaning a business attorney) and boyfriend, was fourth. Most of the behind-the-camera talent changed for this one — the director was Alfred Werker (no great shakes but with more of a sense of atmosphere than Sidney Lanfield), the script was by Edwin Blum and Richard Drake (it was ostensibly based on the play Sherlock Holmes, written by American actor William Gillette — the first person to play Holmes in any medium — from an original draft by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but the plot of the movie has almost nothing to do with the Gillette play) and Leon Shamroy replaced J. Peverell Marley as the cinematographer (Shamroy was most famous for his elaborately decorative color film, but he proves here he could be just as much a master of atmosphere in black-and-white) — though Richard Day and Hans Peters remained the art directors and they were absolutely first-rate in creating a convincing visual evocation of Victorian London (where the setting of this film remains instead of taking any run-outs to the countryside like The Hound of the Baskervilles).
If pressed, I’d list this as my all-time favorite Holmes film (though if the tasteless first half-hour of Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes were excised, the remaining hour and a half would give it serious competition) despite a script of almost demented complexity and levels of confusion. Indeed, at the very beginning of the movie Professor Moriarty (George Zucco, one of the two best actors ever to play the role — Lionel Atwill, in a subsequent Rathbone Holmes film called Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, was the other) manages to win acquittal in a murder trial (Holmes arrives at the courtroom with new evidence definitively proving Moriarty’s guilt but he’s too late — the jury’s verdict has already been recorded and Moriarty has been released) and announces that he will get his revenge against Holmes by planning such a dramatic and far-reaching crime that Holmes will be embarrassed into retirement by his failure to prevent it. Before chewing out his butler, Dawes (Frank Dawson), for having failed to water his precious plants and thereby letting at least one of them die (“You have murdered a flower — and for merely murdering a man I was locked in a filthy cell for months and nearly hanged,” Moriarty says, neatly summing up his twisted priorities), he tells his lieutenant Bassick (Arthur Hohl) that he’s going to give Holmes “two toys” in a particular order: the first is a letter to Sir Ronald Ramsgate (Henry Stephenson) threatening to steal the Star of Delhi, on its way from India to take its place in the Tower of London with the other crown jewels; and the second is an enigmatic drawing, mailed to Ann Brandon’s brother Lloyd (Peter Willes), showing a man with an albatross around his neck (an image from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) with a date on it that’s ten years to the day after Ann’s and Lloyd’s father died mysteriously.
The idea is that Moriarty has dropped the fantastically complicated (because he’s framed it to be so) Brandon case in Holmes’ lap after threatening to steal the Star of Delhi so Holmes will lose interest in protecting the crown jewels and Moriarty will be able to sneak into the Tower in the hubbub over his attempt to steal the Star of Delhi (for which he disguises himself as a policeman) and help himself to the crown jewels at his leisure. The plot is full of ridiculous holes — like how and why, if the entire Brandon plot line is just Moriarty’s feint to distract Holmes from his real crime, Brandon père got that mysterious drawing, identical to the current one, ten years earlier (were we supposed to believe Moriarty was planning that far ahead?) — but it doesn’t matter that this movie makes very little sense because it’s all so superbly atmospheric: Blum and Drake plant all sorts of haunting gimmicks in their script (notably a lovesick South American who plays a mournful melody on a low flute and murders Ann’s brother Lloyd with a bolo; he also wears a cleverly designed orthopedic shoe to make it look like he has a club foot, even though he doesn’t; there’s also an engaging red herring when Moriarty is seeing going into Jerrold Hunter’s office — merely a blind, as it turns out, but it makes both Watson and us wonder if the two are in league) and Werker and Shamroy take full advantage of them.
Werker has the 20th Century-Fox fog machines going even faster and harder than they did in the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles, and quite a few scenes — especially towards the end of the film — start out in total darkness before some flash of light (usually Holmes lighting a cigarette — Rathbone smokes quite a few cigarettes in this film as well as the canonical Holmes pipe) starts illuminating what’s going on. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes stands out among Holmes films because of the absolute rightness of Rathbone’s casting in the role (he looks like the Holmes of Sidney Paget’s illustrations to the original publication of Conan Doyle’s stories in The Strand, and no actor before or since has looked so good in the full-figure profile shots of Holmes in deerstalker, long coat and curved pipe in his mouth; his authoritative manner and ringing voice are also utterly right for the part, he’s at home as both cerebral thinker and action hero, and as I’ve written here before — paraphrasing the opening of the Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” — to me, Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes), the plot’s potential for haunting Gothic imagery and thrills, Ida Lupino’s performance (she plays the part quite incisively and offers considerably more than the usual decorative damsel-in-distress) and an overall flavor that may depart considerably from the letter of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but remains true to his spirit.
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