by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
You Said a Mouthful is a Joe E. Brown comedy from Warner Bros. (in “First National” drag — apparently the use of both trade names was a condition of the U.S. government’s antitrust division for approving the 1928 merger of Warners and First National — that they had at least to maintain the fiction of being two separate entities: an especially fascinating factoid in an era in which antitrust seems to have gone the way of the dodo about 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan, former Warners contract player who hated antitrust because he believed it had been what did in the studio system, became president!) recently shown on TCM as part of a day-long tribute to Ginger Rogers that focused on some of her most obscure early credits.
Directed (unusually energetically) by all-purpose Warners hack Lloyd Bacon from a script by Robert Lord and Bolton Mallory from a story by William B. Dover, You Said a Mouthful was a typical Brown vehicle in which, as Joe Holt, a shipping clerk for the Armstrong Rubber Goods and Swimming Wear company, he devises a material from which he can make a bathing suit that will render its wearer unsinkable and thereby cut the rate of people drowning in oceans, lakes and pools. Needless to say, his boss isn’t interested in it and his co-workers keep playing practical jokes on him, so he’s only too glad to escape when he receives word (which at first he thinks is just another rib) that he’s inherited a fortune from a recently deceased aunt in California. Alas, when he gets there he finds (apparently, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, none of the writers ever outlined this story to a friend and said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before”) that the “inheritance” is a bunch of worthless shares of stocks in companies that have long since gone bankrupt and $105 in cash, of which the attorneys handling the estate (Bernstein, Bernstein, Bernstein and Jones — one wonders if their offices adjoin those of Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and McCormack from the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers) take $100 as their fee. Joe also finds that his aunt’s will has obliged him to care for Sam Wellington (Farina from the “Our Gang” series at Hal Roach, later known on TV as “The Little Rascals”), the young Black son of her former servant.
The two apply for jobs on the steamer from Los Angeles to Catalina Island (which played itself in this film; a quarter-century later it would play the Salton Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World!), where Holt is paged by Alice Brandon (Ginger Rogers), daughter of Tom Brandon (Walter Walker), a wealthy man who sponsors an annual swimming race from Catalina to the mainland. Alice has mistaken Holt for another person of the same name, an Australian long-distance swimmer whom the Brandons are sponsoring in the big race. The favorite is Ed Dover (Preston Foster, billed as “Preston S. Foster” here), the typical movie egomaniac hunk — and of course we know where this is going: though Our Hero’s previous experience as a swimmer has been confined to bathtubs, nonetheless he’s going to swim in the race and win both the race and Alice’s hand against Ed, his rival. It’s also clear that the writers have deposited that unsinkable bathing suit Holt has invented into the Screenwriters’ Cliché Bank to be withdrawn as needed — though the twist is that, thinking she’s doing him a favor, Alice sneaks into Joe’s room and substitutes a normal swimsuit for Holt’s invention, so he goes out thinking he’s unsinkable but really isn’t.
The movie ends the way you’d expect it to, but what makes it special is the writers’ firmly tongue-in-cheek attitude towards their material, their obvious awareness that not only is the expected outcome utterly impossible but that their audience knows that, too, so they can play around with the situation and riff on the sheer unlikeliness of it all as part of their plot — and by far the best gag in the movie is the sequence in which Joe gets an unfair advantage (not that we mind!) by hitching a tow from a swordfish (mistakenly identified in the American Film Institute Catalog as a shark) and speeding through about half the course far faster than any unaided human, no matter how well trained, could do. It’s not much of a Ginger Rogers credit — she’s there and she’s recognizable, and that’s about all that can be said for her acting here — but it’s a fun movie anyway.
Friday, April 17, 2009
The Monster That Challenged the World (United Artists, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was The Monster That Challenged the World, which was a 1957 entry from producers Jules V. Levey (the man behind the 1947 film New Orleans, which was actually pretty good but would have been far better if its African-American leads, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, had been permitted to star without interference from a decidedly “C”-list white cast enacting a clichéd plot whose resemblance to the 1936 MGM San Francisco had eluded me until Charles pointed it out) and Arthur Gardner, director Arnold Laven and writers David Duncan (story) and Pat Fiedler (script). This film doesn’t appear on the complete list of extant Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes but it might as well have; made with the infrastructure of a major studio behind it, The Monster That Challenged the World was at least somewhat more credible than the cheapies American International and even smaller producers were cranking out for the drive-in audience at the time, but it was still a sci-fi monster movie from the 1950’s with all the vicissitudes of the genre.
This one takes place at a Navy base in the Salton Sea area, with Navy paratroopers doing practice runs jumping into it — only one of them lands in the water and then doesn’t re-emerge even after the boat that’s supposed to pick him up arrives. The two sailors on the boat dive into the sea at that point and they both get killed, one being eaten by the titular monster that’s about to challenge the world and the other dying of fright as the monster, who is apparently amphibious, gets out of the water and appears before them. Then a “fast” girl in the surrounding community runs away from her overprotective mom (who runs a diner that services the servicemen) to go for a dip in the sea with her boyfriend — and they get eaten (as with a lot of movies of this type, the monster is surprisingly decorous and moral, enforcing the standard rules by picking on people having supposedly illicit sex to kill). The key dramatis personae are Navy investigator Lt. Commander John “Twill” Terwilliger (Tim Holt, whose career trajectory remains one of Hollywood’s most bizarre mysteries; he appeared in two of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but most of his movies were “B” Westerns and other cheapies), who takes charge of the investigation and uncovers the giant monster (actually “monsters,” plural, more on that later); Gail MacKenzie (Audrey Dalton), secretary in the base’s research facility (and a single mother who’s raising a less-obnoxious-than-usual movie child whose daddy died in the backstory); and the head of the lab, Dr. Jess Rogers (Hans Conried — TCM was showing this as part of a day-long tribute to him that also included The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. “T” and The Twonky, the latter a guilty pleasure of mine even though its maker, writer-director Arch Oboler, took a marvelously sinister science-fiction story by the great Henry Kuttner and turned it into an appallingly unfunny so-called “comedy” — and here he overacted a good deal less than usual even though, as usual, he obstinately refused to appear on-screen with his hair combed), who figures out what the monster looks like from the residue it leaves on anything it walks on, which looks like a combination of marshmallow cream and semen but turns out to be radioactive.
Director Laven has quite a few things going for him, including a budget several ticks above what Roger Corman and the other American International directors had to work with in making a story like this, actors who can actually deliver a line with a simulacrum of reality instead of the almost porn-star incompetence of some of the people who made movies like this for the cheap companies, and a flair for shock cutting that actually makes the movie’s monster genuinely frightening in a couple of places. Mostly, though, this is a film that falls apart thanks to the risible appearance of the monster, who’s more credible than most of them in films of this era and type but still looks pretty silly — as if the writers couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to be an oversized snail, an oversized slug or an oversized crab, so they gave him aspects of all three and also made him amphibious, so he can move about either under water (and picturesquely strangle a sea diver who’s down there looking for him) or on land (where he stands upright — how? — and munches on people far away from the Salton Sea or any other body of water).
There are some interesting plot twists in the later reels as the monster starts sneaking into the canals that lead out of the Salton Sea and the scientists start worrying that it will start laying eggs (so I guess I should have used the female pronoun above!) and they will hatch and create such a large quantity of its species that they will literally threaten all life on earth. They drop a lot of depth charges into the sea at the points where they determine the monsters have their lairs, but in the meantime one monster egg they’ve had inside the lab hatches and briefly threatens Gail MacKenzie’s daughter Sandy (Mimi Gibson) before “Twill” and the other good guys regain control of the lab and dispatch it to monster heaven (or monster hell, take your pick). The Monster That Challenged the World is better than most of the examples of its genre but not so much better that we wouldn’t have wanted to see it get the full MST3K “treatment” — and when I started to nod off midway through Charles joked, “Of course it’s putting you to sleep — you don’t have the guy and two robots to keep it interesting!”It’s also worth noting that this morning’s Los Angeles Times ran an obituary for Joel McCrea’s son Jody, who is actually in The Monster That Challenged the World — he followed in his dad’s (and his mom’s, Frances Dee) footsteps as a movie actor but didn’t have anywhere near the career they did, with his most famous credits coming as the comic-relief sidekick to Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the Beach Party movies.
The film I picked out was The Monster That Challenged the World, which was a 1957 entry from producers Jules V. Levey (the man behind the 1947 film New Orleans, which was actually pretty good but would have been far better if its African-American leads, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, had been permitted to star without interference from a decidedly “C”-list white cast enacting a clichéd plot whose resemblance to the 1936 MGM San Francisco had eluded me until Charles pointed it out) and Arthur Gardner, director Arnold Laven and writers David Duncan (story) and Pat Fiedler (script). This film doesn’t appear on the complete list of extant Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes but it might as well have; made with the infrastructure of a major studio behind it, The Monster That Challenged the World was at least somewhat more credible than the cheapies American International and even smaller producers were cranking out for the drive-in audience at the time, but it was still a sci-fi monster movie from the 1950’s with all the vicissitudes of the genre.
This one takes place at a Navy base in the Salton Sea area, with Navy paratroopers doing practice runs jumping into it — only one of them lands in the water and then doesn’t re-emerge even after the boat that’s supposed to pick him up arrives. The two sailors on the boat dive into the sea at that point and they both get killed, one being eaten by the titular monster that’s about to challenge the world and the other dying of fright as the monster, who is apparently amphibious, gets out of the water and appears before them. Then a “fast” girl in the surrounding community runs away from her overprotective mom (who runs a diner that services the servicemen) to go for a dip in the sea with her boyfriend — and they get eaten (as with a lot of movies of this type, the monster is surprisingly decorous and moral, enforcing the standard rules by picking on people having supposedly illicit sex to kill). The key dramatis personae are Navy investigator Lt. Commander John “Twill” Terwilliger (Tim Holt, whose career trajectory remains one of Hollywood’s most bizarre mysteries; he appeared in two of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but most of his movies were “B” Westerns and other cheapies), who takes charge of the investigation and uncovers the giant monster (actually “monsters,” plural, more on that later); Gail MacKenzie (Audrey Dalton), secretary in the base’s research facility (and a single mother who’s raising a less-obnoxious-than-usual movie child whose daddy died in the backstory); and the head of the lab, Dr. Jess Rogers (Hans Conried — TCM was showing this as part of a day-long tribute to him that also included The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. “T” and The Twonky, the latter a guilty pleasure of mine even though its maker, writer-director Arch Oboler, took a marvelously sinister science-fiction story by the great Henry Kuttner and turned it into an appallingly unfunny so-called “comedy” — and here he overacted a good deal less than usual even though, as usual, he obstinately refused to appear on-screen with his hair combed), who figures out what the monster looks like from the residue it leaves on anything it walks on, which looks like a combination of marshmallow cream and semen but turns out to be radioactive.
Director Laven has quite a few things going for him, including a budget several ticks above what Roger Corman and the other American International directors had to work with in making a story like this, actors who can actually deliver a line with a simulacrum of reality instead of the almost porn-star incompetence of some of the people who made movies like this for the cheap companies, and a flair for shock cutting that actually makes the movie’s monster genuinely frightening in a couple of places. Mostly, though, this is a film that falls apart thanks to the risible appearance of the monster, who’s more credible than most of them in films of this era and type but still looks pretty silly — as if the writers couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to be an oversized snail, an oversized slug or an oversized crab, so they gave him aspects of all three and also made him amphibious, so he can move about either under water (and picturesquely strangle a sea diver who’s down there looking for him) or on land (where he stands upright — how? — and munches on people far away from the Salton Sea or any other body of water).
There are some interesting plot twists in the later reels as the monster starts sneaking into the canals that lead out of the Salton Sea and the scientists start worrying that it will start laying eggs (so I guess I should have used the female pronoun above!) and they will hatch and create such a large quantity of its species that they will literally threaten all life on earth. They drop a lot of depth charges into the sea at the points where they determine the monsters have their lairs, but in the meantime one monster egg they’ve had inside the lab hatches and briefly threatens Gail MacKenzie’s daughter Sandy (Mimi Gibson) before “Twill” and the other good guys regain control of the lab and dispatch it to monster heaven (or monster hell, take your pick). The Monster That Challenged the World is better than most of the examples of its genre but not so much better that we wouldn’t have wanted to see it get the full MST3K “treatment” — and when I started to nod off midway through Charles joked, “Of course it’s putting you to sleep — you don’t have the guy and two robots to keep it interesting!”It’s also worth noting that this morning’s Los Angeles Times ran an obituary for Joel McCrea’s son Jody, who is actually in The Monster That Challenged the World — he followed in his dad’s (and his mom’s, Frances Dee) footsteps as a movie actor but didn’t have anywhere near the career they did, with his most famous credits coming as the comic-relief sidekick to Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the Beach Party movies.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Tip-Off (RKO-Pathé, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Tip-Off is a 1931 RKO-Pathé production from the same team (Charles Rogers, producer; Harry Joe Brown, associate producer; Albert S. Rogell, director) that brought us Carnival Boat the following year, and also featuring Ginger Rogers in the female lead, though in this case the men were by far the most important characters: the billing had Eddie Quillan’s and Robert Armstrong’s names in big letters above the title, and then below the title in really tiny type it said, “And Ginger Rogers.” It’s a quite charming movie even though a good deal more could have been made of its almost surreal genre shifts, and it could have used both a better star than Quillan (like Buster Keaton) and a better director (like Preston Sturges).
It begins as a proletarian drama with Eddie Quillan as Tommy Jordan, a radio repairman with dreams of stardom — when he’s introduced he’s standing in the window of the store where he works, miming to a rendition of “I Surrender, Dear” and drawing an admiring crowd which quickly disperses when he’s called away on a job while the record continues to play (though the voice he’s lip-synching to appears to be Quillan’s own). The call he’s sent out on is to the home of “Babyface” (Ginger Rogers) — the character has no other name — and he comes upon her while she’s bathing her feet and gets a good look at her legs (oddly fatter than we remember them from her later movies with Fred Astaire — apparently all those dance rehearsals really slimmed them down!). They embark on a tentative flirtation that goes as far as her mixing drinks for them when suddenly her very jealous boyfriend, middleweight boxing contender “Kayo” McClure (couldn’t writers George Kibbe Turner and Earl Baldwin be bothered with thinking up normal names for the protagonists?) — played by Robert Armstrong a year after he’d made the movie Be Yourself with Fanny Brice, in which he also played a boxer — comes home, and Babyface bids Tommy hide under the bed.
When he finally emerges because he thinks Kayo has left, he ends up in the middle of a confrontation between Kayo and a gang led by gangster Nick Vatelli (Ralf Harolde). Kayo has been managed by Vatelli but he’s trying to break the contract, and Vatelli wants him to renew it … or else. Tommy uses the same voice amplifier he used back at the radio store to trick Vatelli into believing that the cops are staking out the place, Vatelli’s gangsters leave and Kayo rewards Tommy by giving him tickets to an upcoming dance — where Babyface wants to dance with him, but scared of Kayo’s possible reaction, Tommy refuses. (“Jerk!” I wanted to yell at him. “You just turned down a chance to dance with Ginger Rogers!” Then Charles pointed out to me that when this movie was made nobody cared whether Ginger Rogers could dance.) Instead Tommy leaps from the frying pan into the fire by picking as his dancing partner Vatelli’s girlfriend, Edna Moreno (Joan Peers), and what’s more he actually falls in love with her — and she with him, though she’s too concerned about his safety to dare bringing down Vatelli’s wrath on him by continuing to date him. It all comes to a head when both Tommy and Kayo learn that Edna is about to marry Vatelli at a restaurant variously called Sarno’s (in the dialogue) and Scarno’s (on screen), and the movie suddenly becomes a grim gangster film with Tommy shot down at the end and doing a death scene that appears to be a parody of Edward G. Robinson’s death in Little Caesar — only [spoiler alert!] he’s really not dead, and the final scene is his wedding to Edna now that Vatelli has been conveniently disposed of.
The Tip-Off isn’t exactly a world-beater, and it’s not altogether clear why it’s called that, but it’s still a fun movie, directed straightforwardly but with a good sense of pace by Rogell and with a script that, like a lot of 1930’s movies, taps into many of the old familiar clichés but deploys them in a sufficiently inventive way that through much of the movie we’re really not sure in what direction the plot is going. Ginger Rogers is good, though it would have been hard to tell from this what she became later — dark-haired and not too attractively costumed, she’s decent-looking but hardly as goddess-like as she appeared in her films with Fred Astaire — and Robert Armstrong overdoes the dumb gags but otherwise is acceptable even though he’s remembered only for his role-of-a-lifetime in King Kong. Eddie Quillan is the star and the movie was obviously a vehicle for him, but he’s pretty obnoxious; he gets laughs, but a subtler comedian with a dryer sense of wit would have got more of them — but while there are times when we just want to strangle him, at least most of his performance can be read as good (if rather overdone) fun and the film itself emerges as clever and entertaining.
The Tip-Off is a 1931 RKO-Pathé production from the same team (Charles Rogers, producer; Harry Joe Brown, associate producer; Albert S. Rogell, director) that brought us Carnival Boat the following year, and also featuring Ginger Rogers in the female lead, though in this case the men were by far the most important characters: the billing had Eddie Quillan’s and Robert Armstrong’s names in big letters above the title, and then below the title in really tiny type it said, “And Ginger Rogers.” It’s a quite charming movie even though a good deal more could have been made of its almost surreal genre shifts, and it could have used both a better star than Quillan (like Buster Keaton) and a better director (like Preston Sturges).
It begins as a proletarian drama with Eddie Quillan as Tommy Jordan, a radio repairman with dreams of stardom — when he’s introduced he’s standing in the window of the store where he works, miming to a rendition of “I Surrender, Dear” and drawing an admiring crowd which quickly disperses when he’s called away on a job while the record continues to play (though the voice he’s lip-synching to appears to be Quillan’s own). The call he’s sent out on is to the home of “Babyface” (Ginger Rogers) — the character has no other name — and he comes upon her while she’s bathing her feet and gets a good look at her legs (oddly fatter than we remember them from her later movies with Fred Astaire — apparently all those dance rehearsals really slimmed them down!). They embark on a tentative flirtation that goes as far as her mixing drinks for them when suddenly her very jealous boyfriend, middleweight boxing contender “Kayo” McClure (couldn’t writers George Kibbe Turner and Earl Baldwin be bothered with thinking up normal names for the protagonists?) — played by Robert Armstrong a year after he’d made the movie Be Yourself with Fanny Brice, in which he also played a boxer — comes home, and Babyface bids Tommy hide under the bed.
When he finally emerges because he thinks Kayo has left, he ends up in the middle of a confrontation between Kayo and a gang led by gangster Nick Vatelli (Ralf Harolde). Kayo has been managed by Vatelli but he’s trying to break the contract, and Vatelli wants him to renew it … or else. Tommy uses the same voice amplifier he used back at the radio store to trick Vatelli into believing that the cops are staking out the place, Vatelli’s gangsters leave and Kayo rewards Tommy by giving him tickets to an upcoming dance — where Babyface wants to dance with him, but scared of Kayo’s possible reaction, Tommy refuses. (“Jerk!” I wanted to yell at him. “You just turned down a chance to dance with Ginger Rogers!” Then Charles pointed out to me that when this movie was made nobody cared whether Ginger Rogers could dance.) Instead Tommy leaps from the frying pan into the fire by picking as his dancing partner Vatelli’s girlfriend, Edna Moreno (Joan Peers), and what’s more he actually falls in love with her — and she with him, though she’s too concerned about his safety to dare bringing down Vatelli’s wrath on him by continuing to date him. It all comes to a head when both Tommy and Kayo learn that Edna is about to marry Vatelli at a restaurant variously called Sarno’s (in the dialogue) and Scarno’s (on screen), and the movie suddenly becomes a grim gangster film with Tommy shot down at the end and doing a death scene that appears to be a parody of Edward G. Robinson’s death in Little Caesar — only [spoiler alert!] he’s really not dead, and the final scene is his wedding to Edna now that Vatelli has been conveniently disposed of.
The Tip-Off isn’t exactly a world-beater, and it’s not altogether clear why it’s called that, but it’s still a fun movie, directed straightforwardly but with a good sense of pace by Rogell and with a script that, like a lot of 1930’s movies, taps into many of the old familiar clichés but deploys them in a sufficiently inventive way that through much of the movie we’re really not sure in what direction the plot is going. Ginger Rogers is good, though it would have been hard to tell from this what she became later — dark-haired and not too attractively costumed, she’s decent-looking but hardly as goddess-like as she appeared in her films with Fred Astaire — and Robert Armstrong overdoes the dumb gags but otherwise is acceptable even though he’s remembered only for his role-of-a-lifetime in King Kong. Eddie Quillan is the star and the movie was obviously a vehicle for him, but he’s pretty obnoxious; he gets laughs, but a subtler comedian with a dryer sense of wit would have got more of them — but while there are times when we just want to strangle him, at least most of his performance can be read as good (if rather overdone) fun and the film itself emerges as clever and entertaining.
First Spaceship on Venus (DEFA/Globe International, 1960-62)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on a movie I actually remembered from my childhood: First Spaceship on Venus, an Eastern bloc (East German, actually) science-fiction movie from 1960 which was released here in 1962 by a company called “Globe International” but was apparently an actual prestige production in its day. It was made by the Deutsche Film (DEFA) studio and filmed at the old UFA complex in Babelsberg, and in its original version it ran a whopping 130 minutes and was the most expensive movie DEFA had produced to that time.
It also carried Prestige with a capital P; it was intended as a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the “German Democratic Republic,” the official name of East Germany — and the fact that the 1990 “reunification” of Germany was really a friendly takeover of the East by the West is exemplified by the fact that the reunited Germany has the same legal name as the old West Germany: the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or “Federal Republic of Germany”); it was based on a novel called Astronauci by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, whose Solaris was filmed brilliantly by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and less brilliantly by Steven Soderbergh in 2003; and DEFA actually sought out an international cast, including Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret — but the East German bureaucrats who held DEFA’s purse strings objected to their collaborating with a big, bad capitalist country like France and so the best the producers could do to bring an international flavor to their movie was to borrow Japan’s Scream Queen, Yoko Tani (probably the most famous person in the world named “Yoko” until John Lennon got involved with Yoko Ono), from Toho Studios and her similar roles in bad Japanese horror/sci-fi movies.
First Spaceship on Venus takes place in the year 1985, when an expedition to the site of the 1908 meteor crash in Siberia (a real event) digs up an object that looks like an inept amateur potter’s attempt to make a vase but which we are solemnly told is a “spool,” a magnetic recording from the spaceship that actually crashed into that bit of Siberian countryside and was mistakenly thought to have been a meteor. When the world’s scientists get hold of it and run it through a computer to decipher and translate it, they learn it’s a message from Venus Central to their operatives in the spaceship on how to attack and conquer Earth. Thinking the plot is still operative, the nations of the world and their representative scientists — Dr. Sumiko Ogimura (Yoko Tani), astrophysicist Prof. Harringway Hawling (Oldrich Lukes), Orloff (Ignacy Machowski), Talua (African actor Julius Ongewe — and yes, it’s nice to see a Black face on screen at a time when U.S. and Western sci-fi films were invariably all-white!), mathematician Prof. Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann), pilot Raimund Brinkmann (Günther Simon) — in the U.S. version his nationality is changed from (East) German to American and his first name to “Robert” — linguist Dr. Tchen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta, surprisingly the most attractive male in the film), and Durand (Michail N. Postnikow), the first man to land on the moon (and another character who was made an American in the U.S. dubbed version — he was Russian in the original — as well as being the former lover of Dr. Ogimura, and while she couldn’t care less about him he wants to end the “former” part of their relationship and get back together) — decide to redirect their super-rocket, the “Kosmokrator” (a sort of trimaran missile whose three spires make it resemble a Mormon temple), from Mars to Venus to investigate.
First Spaceship on Venus might have been a genuinely interesting movie except for the fact that virtually nothing actually happens. The script was written by no fewer than five credited people — Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker and Alexander Stenbock-Fermor — plus at least seven other uncredited ones, and according to imdb.com it took three writing teams and 12 screenplays before one was finally found that was acceptable not only to the DEFA producers and director Kurt Maetzig but to the two governments involved (East Germany and Poland were co-producing). The result seems only to provide good evidence for my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; the script (at least in the 78-minute American dubbed version) is laden down with reams of pseudo-scientific dialogue that doesn’t make any sense to anyone without scientific training and is probably utterly hilarious to people with scientific training in the disciplines supposedly represented by the cast.
I remember seeing this movie when it was first released in the U.S. (by a company called “Globe International” — it seems a good idea to beware of any movie studio that has “International” as the second word in its name), falling asleep relatively quickly and remembering only the stock shots of giant radar antennae sweeping the countryside (the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew joked about them coming so close to the humans that they’d take off hats, toupees and pieces of skin) attempting to find clues to what’s going on on Venus and how we puny humans can stop it. Eventually the spaceship not only flies to Venus but actually lands on it, two of the crew members (Brinkmann and Tchen Yu — in one of their few tasteless bits that verges on racism the MST3K crew decided to interpret Tchen Yu’s name as a sneeze and say “Gesundheit!” every time it was spoken) get killed, they discover a group of quasi-mechanical, quasi-biological metal insects that are the only even remotely lifelike objects they find on Venus, and eventually the planet itself rejects the spaceship and launches it involuntarily back to Earth. (Apparently the planet Venus was getting as bored with these people as we were!) I must say that this mind-numbing movie from my childhood has lost none of its remarkable power to make me sleepy!
I showed the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on a movie I actually remembered from my childhood: First Spaceship on Venus, an Eastern bloc (East German, actually) science-fiction movie from 1960 which was released here in 1962 by a company called “Globe International” but was apparently an actual prestige production in its day. It was made by the Deutsche Film (DEFA) studio and filmed at the old UFA complex in Babelsberg, and in its original version it ran a whopping 130 minutes and was the most expensive movie DEFA had produced to that time.
It also carried Prestige with a capital P; it was intended as a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the “German Democratic Republic,” the official name of East Germany — and the fact that the 1990 “reunification” of Germany was really a friendly takeover of the East by the West is exemplified by the fact that the reunited Germany has the same legal name as the old West Germany: the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or “Federal Republic of Germany”); it was based on a novel called Astronauci by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, whose Solaris was filmed brilliantly by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and less brilliantly by Steven Soderbergh in 2003; and DEFA actually sought out an international cast, including Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret — but the East German bureaucrats who held DEFA’s purse strings objected to their collaborating with a big, bad capitalist country like France and so the best the producers could do to bring an international flavor to their movie was to borrow Japan’s Scream Queen, Yoko Tani (probably the most famous person in the world named “Yoko” until John Lennon got involved with Yoko Ono), from Toho Studios and her similar roles in bad Japanese horror/sci-fi movies.
First Spaceship on Venus takes place in the year 1985, when an expedition to the site of the 1908 meteor crash in Siberia (a real event) digs up an object that looks like an inept amateur potter’s attempt to make a vase but which we are solemnly told is a “spool,” a magnetic recording from the spaceship that actually crashed into that bit of Siberian countryside and was mistakenly thought to have been a meteor. When the world’s scientists get hold of it and run it through a computer to decipher and translate it, they learn it’s a message from Venus Central to their operatives in the spaceship on how to attack and conquer Earth. Thinking the plot is still operative, the nations of the world and their representative scientists — Dr. Sumiko Ogimura (Yoko Tani), astrophysicist Prof. Harringway Hawling (Oldrich Lukes), Orloff (Ignacy Machowski), Talua (African actor Julius Ongewe — and yes, it’s nice to see a Black face on screen at a time when U.S. and Western sci-fi films were invariably all-white!), mathematician Prof. Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann), pilot Raimund Brinkmann (Günther Simon) — in the U.S. version his nationality is changed from (East) German to American and his first name to “Robert” — linguist Dr. Tchen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta, surprisingly the most attractive male in the film), and Durand (Michail N. Postnikow), the first man to land on the moon (and another character who was made an American in the U.S. dubbed version — he was Russian in the original — as well as being the former lover of Dr. Ogimura, and while she couldn’t care less about him he wants to end the “former” part of their relationship and get back together) — decide to redirect their super-rocket, the “Kosmokrator” (a sort of trimaran missile whose three spires make it resemble a Mormon temple), from Mars to Venus to investigate.
First Spaceship on Venus might have been a genuinely interesting movie except for the fact that virtually nothing actually happens. The script was written by no fewer than five credited people — Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker and Alexander Stenbock-Fermor — plus at least seven other uncredited ones, and according to imdb.com it took three writing teams and 12 screenplays before one was finally found that was acceptable not only to the DEFA producers and director Kurt Maetzig but to the two governments involved (East Germany and Poland were co-producing). The result seems only to provide good evidence for my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; the script (at least in the 78-minute American dubbed version) is laden down with reams of pseudo-scientific dialogue that doesn’t make any sense to anyone without scientific training and is probably utterly hilarious to people with scientific training in the disciplines supposedly represented by the cast.
I remember seeing this movie when it was first released in the U.S. (by a company called “Globe International” — it seems a good idea to beware of any movie studio that has “International” as the second word in its name), falling asleep relatively quickly and remembering only the stock shots of giant radar antennae sweeping the countryside (the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew joked about them coming so close to the humans that they’d take off hats, toupees and pieces of skin) attempting to find clues to what’s going on on Venus and how we puny humans can stop it. Eventually the spaceship not only flies to Venus but actually lands on it, two of the crew members (Brinkmann and Tchen Yu — in one of their few tasteless bits that verges on racism the MST3K crew decided to interpret Tchen Yu’s name as a sneeze and say “Gesundheit!” every time it was spoken) get killed, they discover a group of quasi-mechanical, quasi-biological metal insects that are the only even remotely lifelike objects they find on Venus, and eventually the planet itself rejects the spaceship and launches it involuntarily back to Earth. (Apparently the planet Venus was getting as bored with these people as we were!) I must say that this mind-numbing movie from my childhood has lost none of its remarkable power to make me sleepy!
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Pearl Harbor (Touchstone, 2001)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked Pearl Harbor — all 183 minutes of it — the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay production for Disney’s Touchstone label, which basically compares to the 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora! (a film that was ripped apart by the critics when it first came out but has since acquired a reputation for historical accuracy and dramatic truth) the way the 1997 James Cameron Titanic does to A Night to Remember: a movie that writes fictional characters into the actual story as opposed to one that finds all the drama it needs in the real deal: the actual people and events. People who liked Pearl Harbor basically praised it for the action scenes — which are indeed quite spectacular; according to imdb.com this film set a record for the sheer amount of explosives used on any single movie — and that despite the fact that a lot of the action shots are quite obviously wholly or partly computer-generated. People who didn’t like it focused on the lame romantic triangle that formed the backbone of the fictional plot.
The movie opens in 1923 in Tennessee, where Rafe McCauley and his best friend Danny Walker have built a fake airplane in a barn — McCauley’s father (or is it Walker’s? I can’t remember!) is actually an aviator who makes his living doing crop dusting (a job that didn’t actually exist until the end of World War II) and he’s also a World War I veteran who says, in a rare moment of candor after the boys have actually started his real plane and flown it for a few seconds before landing it (fortunately unscathed, though except for that detail the scene seemed so much like the opening of that obscure 1935 MGM “B” Pursuit I wondered if Michael Bay and/or his writer, Randall Wallace, had seen it), that they shouldn’t be playing at war because real war is so terrible they won’t want to be joking about it. Then the film cuts forward to January 1941, when McCauley and Walker have grown up to be Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, respectively, and they’re both training for the U.S. Army Air Corps (it was only after World War II that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. military) and romancing several nurses at the Army hospitals, including one in particular, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale).
McCauley gets a volunteer assignment flying in London in the Eagle Squadron (which really existed; it was a chance for American flyers anxious to fight on the side of the Allies to do so, though no one could actually join the Eagle Squadron on loan from the U.S. military as McCauley does in the film; you had to resign your U.S. commission and re-enlist in someone else’s air corps, usually Canada’s), flies as one of Winston Churchill’s famous “Few” and ultimately gets shot down over the English Channel and is presumed dead. Meanwhile, Walker, Evelyn and the movie’s other principals (including Red Winkle, played by Ewen Bremmer in the spirit of Frank McHugh or Allen Jenkins, except that one decidedly unfunny element of his “comic relief” is that he has to fart a lot) get assigned to Hawai’i, where they’re stationed at Pearl Harbor (the title character finally appears 35 minutes into this three-hour movie) and are supposed to be protecting the U.S. fleet from attack — only the base commander is convinced nobody could attack Pearl Harbor so he thinks the only real danger is sabotage, which is why he parks all the planes wingtip-to-wingtip, which famously made them sitting ducks when the Japanese actually did attack. (Like Tora! Tora! Tora!, this film explains both the reason the U.S. military thought Pearl Harbor was immune from air attack and how the Japanese pulled it off; the Americans were convinced that air-launched torpedoes would sink harmlessly in the shallow waters of the harbor, and the Japanese figured out that if they made the torpedoes’ stabilizing fins out of wood instead of metal, they’d remain afloat in the water long enough to hit their targets.)
Anyway, while they’re cavorting around the island and waiting (unknowingly) for the war to begin, Walker and Evelyn, believing McCauley to be dead — can you say Casablanca? — drift into an affair, and when McCauley shows up very much alive and learns that his best friend has been fucking his girlfriend, he wants to and in fact does beat the guy up. (Somehow the makers of Casablanca were able to figure out a way for Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo to resolve their similar situation without fisticuffs.) There are intercuts between the scenes on the island and the councils in both the American and Japanese governments (the actors playing Japanese bigwigs get to speak Japanese, with English subtitles for our benefit, but the Japanese pilot readying himself for the mission — and, incidentally, putting on the white scarf worn by the kamikazes even though that was a much later development in the war — is forced to say his farewell prayers in horribly accented English; also an imdb.com commentator noted that the depiction of the Japanese officials holding their planning meetings outdoors is wrong, since Japanese would regard even the suggestion of an outdoor meeting as an insult), with Jon Voight playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt — apparently Voight is a long-time devotee of F.D.R. and actively lobbied for the role, though he plays him in a smarmy voice that doesn’t sound at all like the real one and there’s a really tacky scene when, in overruling his Cabinet and authorizing the Doolittle raid on Tokyo (more on that later), he clambers out of his wheelchair, uses his crutches, stands upright (or at least leans against the conference table) and dares anyone to tell him that something is impossible.
Indeed, the biggest problem with Pearl Harbor is not only that it’s over three hours long (one could readily imagine a Warners hack like Lloyd Bacon or Ray Enright getting it on and off the screen in 100 minutes, tops) but that so much of that time is filled with scenes that were clichéd before the filmmakers were born — hell, that were clichéd before the attack on Pearl Harbor even happened! All too much of this film feels like a mid-1930’s Warners aviation drama, with Ben Affleck in the James Cagney role and Josh Hartnett in the Pat O’Brien role. Some of that was deliberate — director Michael Bay said he was trying for a 1940’s feel to the romance (which explains why the movie’s depiction of love and sex is surprisingly decorous for a 20th-century film; McCauley and Evelyn never make it to bed together before McCauley’s “death” — maybe we’re supposed to think that the real reason he’s so pissed at Walker is because Walker popped her cherry — and Walker and Evelyn’s first love scene is a charmingly staged one in which the two of them are standing up and enveloped in the folds of parachutes being packed for flight crews) — but there’s also a ponderousness with which the old clichés are trundled out that makes a good deal of the first hour and a half of this film rather dull but also gives it a quirkily dorky appeal.
At least this film makes sense, which hasn’t always been the case with Michael Bay’s work (you’ll recall that he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times responding to people who had said his film Armageddon was incoherent, and the gist of his letter was that young people not only don’t care about but actively dislike plot continuity and they were the audience for which he had made the film), and the action scenes really are spectacular. What’s more, the film does a very good job of depicting the sheer disorientation felt even by people who were supposedly preparing for war when they are in fact attacked — and if Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman hadn’t shot them through distortion that makes them look like they smeared Vaseline on the lenses, the scenes in the service hospital with the nurses scrambling to save as many of the attack victims as they can and having to improvise a triage system on the fly would have had a similar power.
The production of Pearl Harbor we were watching was a two-DVD edition whose first DVD abruptly ended with the calling-off of the planned third wave of the Japanese attack and the line about how Admiral Yamamoto, who had proposed and commanded the attack, supposedly said when it was over, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant” — a line invented by the screenwriters of Tora! Tora! Tora! that has become part of the legend of the actual battle. The remaining 53 minutes of the film (not counting the seemingly endless credit roll — even for a modern film this one listed a lot of effects people, stunt people, editors, sound editors, technicians, computer people and others whose job titles sometimes barely hint to us non-movie professionals exactly what they did on this film) details the story behind the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in April 1942, which was an attempt to strike a psychological blow against Japan to make up for the one they’d struck against us by attacking Pearl Harbor.
When Pearl Harbor came out, the New Yorker reviewer had a lot of fun imagining just how this sequence got in the movie — at a story conference someone said, “Hey, wait a minute. A movie about Pearl Harbor is going to be a downer. It’s a battle we lost” — and at least in the New Yorker critic’s fantasy, they decided to extend the story to the Doolittle raid so the movie could end on a note of triumph. There’s some more exciting action footage in this part and also some more pachydermous exposition (though Alec Baldwin’s acting as Doolittle is, quite frankly, the finest performance in the film), and the romantic triangle is resolved when Walker is killed in the raid and McCauley agrees to marry Evelyn and raise the child she conceived with Walker (did I mention that Walker got her pregnant? Another old-movie cliché Randall Wallace couldn’t resist!), and there’s a final scene that shows them back on the old homestead in Tennessee, with McCauley still flying his dad’s old red biplane on crop-dusting runs.
Pearl Harbor is a movie that is overwhelming in both the good and bad senses of the term — it’s a well-made piece of entertainment and it offers the spectacular action scenes so many modern moviegoers buy tickets to see, but it also leaves one stuffed and sensorily overloaded — and it’s also not especially well acted; Beckinsale’s whole manner is that of a fine actress who’s all too aware that this role doesn’t even come close to tapping her potential but she’s doing it anyway for the money; Affleck too often stares straight at the camera and tries to let his good looks give his performance for him; and Hartnett is probably the best of the principals but he, too, has been challenged more in other roles (notably the Iago character in O, the intriguing retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello set in a previously all-white prep school in the South that has just admitted its first African-American on a basketball scholarship, which according to his imdb.com filmography he actually made after Pearl Harbor — I’d thought it was earlier); though the subject is the 1940’s and the script draws on clichés from even earlier in cinematic history, the overall sensibility is still that of 2001 and this film proved unexpectedly prescient when the 9/11 attacks occurred four months after its release.
I picked Pearl Harbor — all 183 minutes of it — the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay production for Disney’s Touchstone label, which basically compares to the 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora! (a film that was ripped apart by the critics when it first came out but has since acquired a reputation for historical accuracy and dramatic truth) the way the 1997 James Cameron Titanic does to A Night to Remember: a movie that writes fictional characters into the actual story as opposed to one that finds all the drama it needs in the real deal: the actual people and events. People who liked Pearl Harbor basically praised it for the action scenes — which are indeed quite spectacular; according to imdb.com this film set a record for the sheer amount of explosives used on any single movie — and that despite the fact that a lot of the action shots are quite obviously wholly or partly computer-generated. People who didn’t like it focused on the lame romantic triangle that formed the backbone of the fictional plot.
The movie opens in 1923 in Tennessee, where Rafe McCauley and his best friend Danny Walker have built a fake airplane in a barn — McCauley’s father (or is it Walker’s? I can’t remember!) is actually an aviator who makes his living doing crop dusting (a job that didn’t actually exist until the end of World War II) and he’s also a World War I veteran who says, in a rare moment of candor after the boys have actually started his real plane and flown it for a few seconds before landing it (fortunately unscathed, though except for that detail the scene seemed so much like the opening of that obscure 1935 MGM “B” Pursuit I wondered if Michael Bay and/or his writer, Randall Wallace, had seen it), that they shouldn’t be playing at war because real war is so terrible they won’t want to be joking about it. Then the film cuts forward to January 1941, when McCauley and Walker have grown up to be Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, respectively, and they’re both training for the U.S. Army Air Corps (it was only after World War II that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. military) and romancing several nurses at the Army hospitals, including one in particular, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale).
McCauley gets a volunteer assignment flying in London in the Eagle Squadron (which really existed; it was a chance for American flyers anxious to fight on the side of the Allies to do so, though no one could actually join the Eagle Squadron on loan from the U.S. military as McCauley does in the film; you had to resign your U.S. commission and re-enlist in someone else’s air corps, usually Canada’s), flies as one of Winston Churchill’s famous “Few” and ultimately gets shot down over the English Channel and is presumed dead. Meanwhile, Walker, Evelyn and the movie’s other principals (including Red Winkle, played by Ewen Bremmer in the spirit of Frank McHugh or Allen Jenkins, except that one decidedly unfunny element of his “comic relief” is that he has to fart a lot) get assigned to Hawai’i, where they’re stationed at Pearl Harbor (the title character finally appears 35 minutes into this three-hour movie) and are supposed to be protecting the U.S. fleet from attack — only the base commander is convinced nobody could attack Pearl Harbor so he thinks the only real danger is sabotage, which is why he parks all the planes wingtip-to-wingtip, which famously made them sitting ducks when the Japanese actually did attack. (Like Tora! Tora! Tora!, this film explains both the reason the U.S. military thought Pearl Harbor was immune from air attack and how the Japanese pulled it off; the Americans were convinced that air-launched torpedoes would sink harmlessly in the shallow waters of the harbor, and the Japanese figured out that if they made the torpedoes’ stabilizing fins out of wood instead of metal, they’d remain afloat in the water long enough to hit their targets.)
Anyway, while they’re cavorting around the island and waiting (unknowingly) for the war to begin, Walker and Evelyn, believing McCauley to be dead — can you say Casablanca? — drift into an affair, and when McCauley shows up very much alive and learns that his best friend has been fucking his girlfriend, he wants to and in fact does beat the guy up. (Somehow the makers of Casablanca were able to figure out a way for Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo to resolve their similar situation without fisticuffs.) There are intercuts between the scenes on the island and the councils in both the American and Japanese governments (the actors playing Japanese bigwigs get to speak Japanese, with English subtitles for our benefit, but the Japanese pilot readying himself for the mission — and, incidentally, putting on the white scarf worn by the kamikazes even though that was a much later development in the war — is forced to say his farewell prayers in horribly accented English; also an imdb.com commentator noted that the depiction of the Japanese officials holding their planning meetings outdoors is wrong, since Japanese would regard even the suggestion of an outdoor meeting as an insult), with Jon Voight playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt — apparently Voight is a long-time devotee of F.D.R. and actively lobbied for the role, though he plays him in a smarmy voice that doesn’t sound at all like the real one and there’s a really tacky scene when, in overruling his Cabinet and authorizing the Doolittle raid on Tokyo (more on that later), he clambers out of his wheelchair, uses his crutches, stands upright (or at least leans against the conference table) and dares anyone to tell him that something is impossible.
Indeed, the biggest problem with Pearl Harbor is not only that it’s over three hours long (one could readily imagine a Warners hack like Lloyd Bacon or Ray Enright getting it on and off the screen in 100 minutes, tops) but that so much of that time is filled with scenes that were clichéd before the filmmakers were born — hell, that were clichéd before the attack on Pearl Harbor even happened! All too much of this film feels like a mid-1930’s Warners aviation drama, with Ben Affleck in the James Cagney role and Josh Hartnett in the Pat O’Brien role. Some of that was deliberate — director Michael Bay said he was trying for a 1940’s feel to the romance (which explains why the movie’s depiction of love and sex is surprisingly decorous for a 20th-century film; McCauley and Evelyn never make it to bed together before McCauley’s “death” — maybe we’re supposed to think that the real reason he’s so pissed at Walker is because Walker popped her cherry — and Walker and Evelyn’s first love scene is a charmingly staged one in which the two of them are standing up and enveloped in the folds of parachutes being packed for flight crews) — but there’s also a ponderousness with which the old clichés are trundled out that makes a good deal of the first hour and a half of this film rather dull but also gives it a quirkily dorky appeal.
At least this film makes sense, which hasn’t always been the case with Michael Bay’s work (you’ll recall that he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times responding to people who had said his film Armageddon was incoherent, and the gist of his letter was that young people not only don’t care about but actively dislike plot continuity and they were the audience for which he had made the film), and the action scenes really are spectacular. What’s more, the film does a very good job of depicting the sheer disorientation felt even by people who were supposedly preparing for war when they are in fact attacked — and if Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman hadn’t shot them through distortion that makes them look like they smeared Vaseline on the lenses, the scenes in the service hospital with the nurses scrambling to save as many of the attack victims as they can and having to improvise a triage system on the fly would have had a similar power.
The production of Pearl Harbor we were watching was a two-DVD edition whose first DVD abruptly ended with the calling-off of the planned third wave of the Japanese attack and the line about how Admiral Yamamoto, who had proposed and commanded the attack, supposedly said when it was over, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant” — a line invented by the screenwriters of Tora! Tora! Tora! that has become part of the legend of the actual battle. The remaining 53 minutes of the film (not counting the seemingly endless credit roll — even for a modern film this one listed a lot of effects people, stunt people, editors, sound editors, technicians, computer people and others whose job titles sometimes barely hint to us non-movie professionals exactly what they did on this film) details the story behind the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in April 1942, which was an attempt to strike a psychological blow against Japan to make up for the one they’d struck against us by attacking Pearl Harbor.
When Pearl Harbor came out, the New Yorker reviewer had a lot of fun imagining just how this sequence got in the movie — at a story conference someone said, “Hey, wait a minute. A movie about Pearl Harbor is going to be a downer. It’s a battle we lost” — and at least in the New Yorker critic’s fantasy, they decided to extend the story to the Doolittle raid so the movie could end on a note of triumph. There’s some more exciting action footage in this part and also some more pachydermous exposition (though Alec Baldwin’s acting as Doolittle is, quite frankly, the finest performance in the film), and the romantic triangle is resolved when Walker is killed in the raid and McCauley agrees to marry Evelyn and raise the child she conceived with Walker (did I mention that Walker got her pregnant? Another old-movie cliché Randall Wallace couldn’t resist!), and there’s a final scene that shows them back on the old homestead in Tennessee, with McCauley still flying his dad’s old red biplane on crop-dusting runs.
Pearl Harbor is a movie that is overwhelming in both the good and bad senses of the term — it’s a well-made piece of entertainment and it offers the spectacular action scenes so many modern moviegoers buy tickets to see, but it also leaves one stuffed and sensorily overloaded — and it’s also not especially well acted; Beckinsale’s whole manner is that of a fine actress who’s all too aware that this role doesn’t even come close to tapping her potential but she’s doing it anyway for the money; Affleck too often stares straight at the camera and tries to let his good looks give his performance for him; and Hartnett is probably the best of the principals but he, too, has been challenged more in other roles (notably the Iago character in O, the intriguing retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello set in a previously all-white prep school in the South that has just admitted its first African-American on a basketball scholarship, which according to his imdb.com filmography he actually made after Pearl Harbor — I’d thought it was earlier); though the subject is the 1940’s and the script draws on clichés from even earlier in cinematic history, the overall sensibility is still that of 2001 and this film proved unexpectedly prescient when the 9/11 attacks occurred four months after its release.
Friday, April 10, 2009
King Dinosaur (Lippert, 1955)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1955 Lippert release called King Dinosaur, produced by Al Zimbalist, directed by Bert I. Gordon, written by Tom Gries from an “original” (in quotes) story by Zimbalist and Gordon, and featuring Gordon’s career-long obsession with the artificially enlarged. The gimmick here is that four astronauts — two men, Dr. Ralph Martin (William Bryant) and Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson), and two women, Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis) and (presumably non-Dr.) Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher) — are sent up on a newly developed spaceship to explore a recently discovered planet called Nova, which turns out to have a topography similar to that of Earth (or at least that of Bronson Canyon and Griffith Park, where most of it was filmed) and also an Earth-like atmosphere (so we don’t have to see the actors — especially the pretty female ones — walk around in spacesuits), and where some of the fauna (alligators, owls, vultures) are the same size as Earth’s but others (notably bees and lizards) are far larger than what we’re used to.
Oddly, King Dinosaur is actually a not-bad sci-fi cheapie for the period; though liberally filled out with stock footage (a fact the MST3K crew inevitably made fun of), narrated with the usual obviousness by Marvin Miller and suffering from the fact that we’re supposed to accept ordinary, living lizards filmed on miniature sets as “dinosaurs” (in the film’s worst line, one of the characters compares the lizard that’s menacing them at the opening of the cave they’re hiding in to Tyrannosaurus rex, and one’s tempted to yell at the screen, “It doesn’t look like T. rex at all!” — it’s walking on all fours whereas anyone whose science education stopped in grade school knows that T. rex walked upright), its plot at least makes a certain degree of sense; the two-male, two-female casting of the astronauts (and the only humans shown in the film, at least in footage actually shot specifically for it) is innovative and proto-feminist even though it’s only motivated by the desire to form two romantic couples (though I couldn’t help but remix the film in my head and have the two men pair off with each other, and the two women ditto — and there are enough choice shots of William Bryant with his chest exposed, revealing lots of nice body hair and a good pair of nipples that probably showed even better when this was shown in theatres, that it’s not only straight men who will get a sexual charge from this film!); and the special effects are actually pretty good — the process work is surprisingly convincing for the time and the budget and only that rather washed-out looking bee (so washed out that I have to take the MST3K crew’s word for it that it was supposed to be a bee and not some other species of insect) is too bad an effect to allow the viewer to suspend disbelief.
The big problem with this film is the lizards — and particularly the fact that the filmmakers didn’t at least think of shooting them in slow motion to make them look sufficiently ponderous to be believable as giant-sized beasts; when one of them scampers quickly across the screen the way real lizards dash into the bushes when humans approach, all believability is lost instantly. Still, this was a good MST3K presentation because it achieved the right balance for their formula: a movie good enough that it retained some entertainment value but not so good that one would resent hearing it mocked (as was the case with some of MST3K’s later presentations, notably I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Space Children, both flawed films but of sufficient quality they didn’t deserve the MST3K “treatment”) — and since King Dinosaur, like most Lippert presentations, was only about an hour long (Lippert’s name did end up on a few genuinely good films, but those were all foreign films which Lippert simply distributed in the U.S.), the MST3K crew filled it out with X Marks the Spot, an embarrassingly bad traffic-safety film produced by the state of New Jersey in the 1940’s featuring the heavenly-court gimmick of a very bored-looking God passing judgment on a recently deceased driver and some of the worst acting of all time (notably by a New Jersey state commissioner named Magee, who was so awful he couldn’t even play himself) — and some of MST3K’s all-time best jokes, including two Fibber McGee and Molly references that probably sailed over the heads of most of their viewers!
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1955 Lippert release called King Dinosaur, produced by Al Zimbalist, directed by Bert I. Gordon, written by Tom Gries from an “original” (in quotes) story by Zimbalist and Gordon, and featuring Gordon’s career-long obsession with the artificially enlarged. The gimmick here is that four astronauts — two men, Dr. Ralph Martin (William Bryant) and Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson), and two women, Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis) and (presumably non-Dr.) Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher) — are sent up on a newly developed spaceship to explore a recently discovered planet called Nova, which turns out to have a topography similar to that of Earth (or at least that of Bronson Canyon and Griffith Park, where most of it was filmed) and also an Earth-like atmosphere (so we don’t have to see the actors — especially the pretty female ones — walk around in spacesuits), and where some of the fauna (alligators, owls, vultures) are the same size as Earth’s but others (notably bees and lizards) are far larger than what we’re used to.
Oddly, King Dinosaur is actually a not-bad sci-fi cheapie for the period; though liberally filled out with stock footage (a fact the MST3K crew inevitably made fun of), narrated with the usual obviousness by Marvin Miller and suffering from the fact that we’re supposed to accept ordinary, living lizards filmed on miniature sets as “dinosaurs” (in the film’s worst line, one of the characters compares the lizard that’s menacing them at the opening of the cave they’re hiding in to Tyrannosaurus rex, and one’s tempted to yell at the screen, “It doesn’t look like T. rex at all!” — it’s walking on all fours whereas anyone whose science education stopped in grade school knows that T. rex walked upright), its plot at least makes a certain degree of sense; the two-male, two-female casting of the astronauts (and the only humans shown in the film, at least in footage actually shot specifically for it) is innovative and proto-feminist even though it’s only motivated by the desire to form two romantic couples (though I couldn’t help but remix the film in my head and have the two men pair off with each other, and the two women ditto — and there are enough choice shots of William Bryant with his chest exposed, revealing lots of nice body hair and a good pair of nipples that probably showed even better when this was shown in theatres, that it’s not only straight men who will get a sexual charge from this film!); and the special effects are actually pretty good — the process work is surprisingly convincing for the time and the budget and only that rather washed-out looking bee (so washed out that I have to take the MST3K crew’s word for it that it was supposed to be a bee and not some other species of insect) is too bad an effect to allow the viewer to suspend disbelief.
The big problem with this film is the lizards — and particularly the fact that the filmmakers didn’t at least think of shooting them in slow motion to make them look sufficiently ponderous to be believable as giant-sized beasts; when one of them scampers quickly across the screen the way real lizards dash into the bushes when humans approach, all believability is lost instantly. Still, this was a good MST3K presentation because it achieved the right balance for their formula: a movie good enough that it retained some entertainment value but not so good that one would resent hearing it mocked (as was the case with some of MST3K’s later presentations, notably I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Space Children, both flawed films but of sufficient quality they didn’t deserve the MST3K “treatment”) — and since King Dinosaur, like most Lippert presentations, was only about an hour long (Lippert’s name did end up on a few genuinely good films, but those were all foreign films which Lippert simply distributed in the U.S.), the MST3K crew filled it out with X Marks the Spot, an embarrassingly bad traffic-safety film produced by the state of New Jersey in the 1940’s featuring the heavenly-court gimmick of a very bored-looking God passing judgment on a recently deceased driver and some of the worst acting of all time (notably by a New Jersey state commissioner named Magee, who was so awful he couldn’t even play himself) — and some of MST3K’s all-time best jokes, including two Fibber McGee and Molly references that probably sailed over the heads of most of their viewers!
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Carnival Boat (RKO-Pathé, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Carnival Boat, a 62-minute RKO-Pathé production from 1932 that TCM had recently shown as part of a tribute to the more obscure films of Ginger Rogers — though both Rogers’ presence and the film’s title are really deceptive as to its true contents. It’s actually a film about lumberjacking, starring William Boyd — the one who later became known almost exclusively as Hopalong Cassidy — and Fred Kohler as rival lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest. Boyd’s character, Buck Gannon, is actually the son of the lumber camp’s boss, Jim Gannon (former silent-screen star Hobart Bosworth), and the elder Gannon is being threatened with dismissal by DeLacey (Walter Percival), the representative of the corporation that owns the logging operation and wants the rate of production sped up. DeLacey is convinced that the reason the forest isn’t being harvested fast enough for his employers’ satisfaction (this part of the plot seems modern now!) is that the lumberjacks are spending too much time roughhousing and clowning, and too little actually working — and it’s hard to argue with him based on what we actually see, especially a lot of annoying footage with Baldy (Edgar Kennedy) and Stubby (Harry Sweet), who are supposed to be a two-man saw team, only one of them isn’t handling his end of the saw and letting the other do all the work.
The carnival boat doesn’t enter until the film is about half over, and Jim Gannon is strongly opposed to its arrival — it’s really a floating casino and he senses (rightly, as it turns out) that its sole purpose there is to separate his men from their money. Rogers’ character is identified only as “Honey” and she does one number on the boat, “How I Could Go for You,” dancing in front of a chorus line and singing in the Betty Boop voice — depending on which source you believe, she was either the successor to Helen Kane in Paul Ash’s band in 1929 or actually originated the “boop-boop-a-doop” singing style even though Kane was certainly the first one to record it. (Supposedly Ginger was touring in vaudeville with her first husband, Jack Pepper, and singing that way when Kane heard them and decided to steal the style.) She’s also dark-haired, and one really has to look carefully at the face and the voice to recognize either as belonging to the Ginger Rogers we know — the Queen of Carioca with Fred Astaire and the tough but vulnerable screwball comedienne she became when she wasn’t dancing.
Her only plot function is to provide a focal point for the rivalry between Bill Gannon and Hack Logan (Fred Kohler — in a Warners film with this script they’d have been James Cagney and Pat O’Brien!), who in a spectacular final sequence end up rescuing each other from a logjam and the dynamite used to break it up, only to start beating the shit out of each other once they’re both out of the water and safe, and the film ends rather awkwardly when there’s a shot of the carnival boat (ya remember the carnival boat?) steaming away and Ginger Rogers appears on the scene, saying that she’s missed the boat and is ready and willing to marry Bill and settle down in the logging camp — while in the meantime Jim has successfully persuaded DeLacey to let him retire and appoint Bill as his replacement. Just about the only interest Carnival Boat really has comes from the spectacular footage of people actually doing logging — indeed, there’s so much logging footage and so little of it involves the principals that I wondered whether RKO-Pathé bought the rights to a documentary on logging and decided to build a fiction film around the existing footage.
The effects work needed to put the stars in with the logging scenes is sometimes quite good (as befitted the studio that was simultaneously working on King Kong) and sometimes embarrassingly bad — as in one scene in which Boyd and Kohler are on top of the screen while the logs go rushing past them in the river on top of the scene, and it’s one of the most obnoxiously obvious process shots of all time. I note from imdb.com that the film had two working titles, Bad Timber and Timber Beast, either of which would have been better than Carnival Boat — at least the alternate titles would have told you this was a film about logging! — and the film, directed by Albert S. Rogell in his usual coolly efficient fashion and written by James Seymour from an “original” (quotes definitely appropriate!) story by Marion Jackson and Don Ryan, is a pleasant enough time-filler that doesn’t really work as drama but does have a lot of cool logging footage to watch.
The film was Carnival Boat, a 62-minute RKO-Pathé production from 1932 that TCM had recently shown as part of a tribute to the more obscure films of Ginger Rogers — though both Rogers’ presence and the film’s title are really deceptive as to its true contents. It’s actually a film about lumberjacking, starring William Boyd — the one who later became known almost exclusively as Hopalong Cassidy — and Fred Kohler as rival lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest. Boyd’s character, Buck Gannon, is actually the son of the lumber camp’s boss, Jim Gannon (former silent-screen star Hobart Bosworth), and the elder Gannon is being threatened with dismissal by DeLacey (Walter Percival), the representative of the corporation that owns the logging operation and wants the rate of production sped up. DeLacey is convinced that the reason the forest isn’t being harvested fast enough for his employers’ satisfaction (this part of the plot seems modern now!) is that the lumberjacks are spending too much time roughhousing and clowning, and too little actually working — and it’s hard to argue with him based on what we actually see, especially a lot of annoying footage with Baldy (Edgar Kennedy) and Stubby (Harry Sweet), who are supposed to be a two-man saw team, only one of them isn’t handling his end of the saw and letting the other do all the work.
The carnival boat doesn’t enter until the film is about half over, and Jim Gannon is strongly opposed to its arrival — it’s really a floating casino and he senses (rightly, as it turns out) that its sole purpose there is to separate his men from their money. Rogers’ character is identified only as “Honey” and she does one number on the boat, “How I Could Go for You,” dancing in front of a chorus line and singing in the Betty Boop voice — depending on which source you believe, she was either the successor to Helen Kane in Paul Ash’s band in 1929 or actually originated the “boop-boop-a-doop” singing style even though Kane was certainly the first one to record it. (Supposedly Ginger was touring in vaudeville with her first husband, Jack Pepper, and singing that way when Kane heard them and decided to steal the style.) She’s also dark-haired, and one really has to look carefully at the face and the voice to recognize either as belonging to the Ginger Rogers we know — the Queen of Carioca with Fred Astaire and the tough but vulnerable screwball comedienne she became when she wasn’t dancing.
Her only plot function is to provide a focal point for the rivalry between Bill Gannon and Hack Logan (Fred Kohler — in a Warners film with this script they’d have been James Cagney and Pat O’Brien!), who in a spectacular final sequence end up rescuing each other from a logjam and the dynamite used to break it up, only to start beating the shit out of each other once they’re both out of the water and safe, and the film ends rather awkwardly when there’s a shot of the carnival boat (ya remember the carnival boat?) steaming away and Ginger Rogers appears on the scene, saying that she’s missed the boat and is ready and willing to marry Bill and settle down in the logging camp — while in the meantime Jim has successfully persuaded DeLacey to let him retire and appoint Bill as his replacement. Just about the only interest Carnival Boat really has comes from the spectacular footage of people actually doing logging — indeed, there’s so much logging footage and so little of it involves the principals that I wondered whether RKO-Pathé bought the rights to a documentary on logging and decided to build a fiction film around the existing footage.
The effects work needed to put the stars in with the logging scenes is sometimes quite good (as befitted the studio that was simultaneously working on King Kong) and sometimes embarrassingly bad — as in one scene in which Boyd and Kohler are on top of the screen while the logs go rushing past them in the river on top of the scene, and it’s one of the most obnoxiously obvious process shots of all time. I note from imdb.com that the film had two working titles, Bad Timber and Timber Beast, either of which would have been better than Carnival Boat — at least the alternate titles would have told you this was a film about logging! — and the film, directed by Albert S. Rogell in his usual coolly efficient fashion and written by James Seymour from an “original” (quotes definitely appropriate!) story by Marion Jackson and Don Ryan, is a pleasant enough time-filler that doesn’t really work as drama but does have a lot of cool logging footage to watch.
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