by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 1958 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Whole
Truth, a 1958 wanna-be thriller
made in England (though set on the French Riviera, in and around Rex Ingram’s
old Vittorine Studios in Nice, which remained in use as a filmmaking complex
long after Ingram retired in 1933 and died in 1949) starring Stewart Granger —
whom we see in the opening as a man on the run, wanted by the police and being
chased by them through a series of artfully constructed urban “exteriors” that
are clearly sets inside a soundstage. He manages to get away and a shot of an
outdoor clock first registers 2:30 a.m. and then starts running backwards — indicating that we’re in for an extended
flashback showing how Granger’s character got into this pickle. He’s movie
producer Max Poulton (though when the other characters pronounce his name it
usually comes out sounding like “Bolton”), and we get to see the inside of a
Vittorine soundstage as the star of his movie, Gina Bertini (Gianna Maria
Canale), is doing a scene in which she’s supposed to be making out with a
bathing-suited man on top of a boat. (The boat is actually suspended on top of
a metal frame and isn’t anywhere near anything resembling water — presumably
that was going to be added later via process screen.) Needless to say, she has
a diva hissy-fit and blows the take, then makes a bee-line for producer Max as
soon as the director calls “cut.” It turns out that Max had an affair with Gina
while he was separated from his wife Carol (Donna Reed — and yes, as a fan of It’s
a Wonderful Life I savored the irony of
Reed co-starring with the other James Stewart — it was Granger’s real name but he couldn’t use it in
films because another actor had already laid claim to it and become a
superstar), only when he and Carol reconciled Max broke off the affair with
Gina. Gina first says that she’ll continue to act up on the film and render it
unfinishable unless Max starts having sex with her again; then, when he begs
off, she says in that case she’ll tell Carol about their prior affair unless
Max agrees to resume it.
Max succumbs long enough to drive Gina back to her
hotel (which appears to be in neighboring Monte Carlo — at least there are
quite a few references to gambling that make it seem like people involved in
the film are commuting back and forth between southern France and Monaco, where
they can recreate by gambling), and as a result he’s very late to a party Carol
is giving at their rented villa that night. Max is confronted by a mysterious
Englishman named Carliss (George Sanders, older and seedier than in his glory
days, and already showing off the boredom with both life and acting that led
him to commit suicide 12 years later, but still by far the best and most authoritative actor in
this film), who says he’s a Scotland Yard detective and is investigating Gina’s
murder. Max was already wondering about the red stain on his shirt that looked
like blood — so he and Carol both said, though at first we just assumed that
some of Gina’s lipstick got on it while he was either fending off or yielding
to her advances — and he has no trouble believing that Gina is indeed dead …
until she turns up at his party, very much alive. Then she gets killed after
all when she asks Max for a ride back to her hotel (again?) — and just as she’s
got into his car she tumbles out of it again with a knife in her back. The
local police are convinced Max is the killer, while he’s convinced it’s Carliss
— the film was advertised as a whodunit but with only two possible suspects,
one of whom is the star, it’s pretty obvious who the killer is — and the rest
of the film consists of Max’s attempt to stay out of police custody and nail
Carliss, who it turns out isn’t a Scotland Yard inspector at all but a
religious-book publisher who married Gina just before she auditioned for movies
and became a star — and responded to the adulation by seeking out every even
remotely willing male in the vicinity and having sex with him. Having decided
he can’t divorce Gina because the scandal would ruin his career, Carliss determined to murder her but do so
in a way that someone else would take the fall — and he decided to make Max the
someone else just because he was the latest and, apparently, the most serious
of Gina’s alternate amours.
Needless to say, Carol is angry that her husband had an affair with
his temperamental star, but she eventually forgives him and decides to trap
Carliss into a confession herself — only he gets her alone in his home and
seems to have the upper hand (he’s going to push her off his balcony and then
set it up so it looks like she was so devastated by the news of her husband’s
affair and his being a murderer that she killed herself) when the cops arrive,
arrest Carliss (for a moment it looked like he was going to commit suicide to avoid capture, but
he didn’t) and all seems well — until Max reacts with a start at the sight of a
woman who looks just like Gina. She turns out to be the British actress who’s
been made up to look like Gina in order to finish Gina’s scenes in the picture
(ya remember the picture?).
Charles and I joked that The Whole Truth could be paired with the recent film Nothing But the Truth to form one of our quirky double bills — “The
Whole Truth and Nothing But the
Truth” — but on its own The
Whole Truth is a sporadically
interesting but not especially thrilling attempt at a thriller. Once again one
can’t help but imagine what St. Alfred (Hitchcock) would have done with this
script — it was actually directed by John Guillermin (whose best-known credit
was The Towering Inferno, a movie
that between the well-trained macho antics of its stars and the work of the special-effects crew hardly needed a director) and produced by Jack Clayton (director
of the monumentally dull 1974 version of The Great Gatsby and a man who got an unearned reputation from his
one truly great film, Room at the Top) from a script by Jonathan Latimer (not exactly one of the great names
in pulp fiction but a writer with better credits than this) based on a play by
Philip Mackie.
Despite the long shots of Max driving about in his Jaguar sports
car — which becomes one of the movie’s most appealing characters in itself —
and the flight scene we see both at the beginning and the end (in which Stewart
Granger finally looks like the actor of
the same name who did the Technicolor remakes of silent swashbucklers like Scaramouche and The Prisoner of Zenda that made his reputation in the early 1950’s) —
most of The Whole Truth is
pretty dull, and it’s hard to guess what we’re less interested in: the
machinations of Carliss or the marital politics of Max and Carol Poulton (was
their name deliberately picked to evoke poulet, the French word for “chicken”?). About the only
innovative aspect of The Whole Truth is the music score, composed in modern-jazz style by Mischa Spoliansky
(not exactly the name that first comes to mind when thinking about jazz) and
played by John Dankworth and his orchestra (Dankworth was a British
saxophonist, bandleader and arranger, and also the musical director for his
wife, the haunting-voiced singer Cleo Laine); curiously, there’s a piano-and-strings
cue used when Max is driving around in his Jaguar that sounds awfully like Mary
Lou Williams’ song “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?” and which is the most
compelling music in the film. There’s also a nice music cut in which we hear
some dire piano chords signaling a melodramatic twist in the plot — and then,
without any audible break in the music, the film cuts to a party scene in which
the pianist is playing the same song, only in a lounge-jazz version. The
Whole Truth also makes one common
thriller mistake: the most interesting and multidimensional character — the
star Gina Bertini — is the one who gets killed early on and starts the plot
proper, and the film simply isn’t as interesting once she departs.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Monday, July 15, 2013
Seven Years’ Bad Luck (Max Linder Productions/Robertson-Cole, 1921)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended up watching the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday” feature — one of them, anyway — the marvelous 1921 silent comedy Seven Years’ Bad Luck, starring French comedian Max Linder, who also wrote, directed and produced the film. Linder was born Gabriel-Maximilian Leuvielle in Saint-Loubès, Gironde, France on December 1, 1883 and started making films as early as 1905 —thereby putting him ahead of Charlie Chaplin (who made his first film nine years later), Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Buster Keaton, Snub Pollard, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon as the first true superstar comic of the movies. Unfortunately, Linder has become hard to assess because so few of his films survive, and the ones that do … well, the only Linder item Charles and I had seen before this was a 1914 split-reeler (five to six minutes) in which Linder spent most of the movie disguised as a donkey (as did his rival for the heroine’s affections — don’t ask), and the film was funny enough in a crude way but didn’t really establish Linder as one of the greats of silent comedy. Linder had an unhappy career trajectory; when Chaplin left Essanay Studios in 1916 Essanay hired Linder to replace him — perhaps figuring that the logical replacement to a comic from England would be a comic from France, perhaps thinking that with some people already saying that Chaplin had borrowed extensively from Linder they could score big by bringing over the original.
Unfortunately, Linder didn’t take too well to American filming conditions — and according to his imdb.com biographer, Michael Brooke, he’d also started having health problems when he was drafted to fight in World War I and was the victim of a poison-gas attack. “Although offered a contract in America, recurring ill-health meant that his US films had little of the sparkle of his early French work, and a brief attempt to revive his career by making films for the recently formed United Artists (one of whose founders, of course, was Chaplin) in the early 1920’s came to little, although these later films are now regarded as classics.” Brooke wrote “He returned to France and killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925.” Made by Max Linder Productions for a short-lived distribution company called Robertson-Cole, Seven Years’ Bad Luck turned out to be a comedy masterpiece, with all the “sparkle” one could want, screamingly funny and good enough that this one film is enough to establish Linder as one of the greats of silent comedy. Note that this film was made in 1921, which rather begs the question of who influenced whom; Linder can’t have been unaware that whatever early success he’d had in France had long been eclipsed by Chaplin’s worldwide popularity, and it seems clear to me that much of Seven Years’ Bad Luck was influenced by Chaplin’s work. One of the most famous sequences in Seven Years’ Bad Luck is the “mirror” gag — two similar-looking people stand on either side of an open frame and think they’re looking at their own reflection in a mirror — which was most famously performed by Groucho and Harpo Marx in Duck Soup in 1933 (and reprised by Harpo with Lucille Ball on an I Love Lucy episode in the 1950’s). Linder is often credited with inventing the gag … only Chaplin had done it five years earlier (in, ironically enough, The Floorwalker, the first film he made for Mutual Studios after leaving Essanay). Chaplin’s influence also seems to be strong in a later sequence in which Linder has a dream of himself in a mock heaven full of beautiful girls that literally sprout up from under the ground — a year after Chaplin had done his own version of a mock heaven in The Kid.
Nonetheless, Seven Years’ Bad Luck is a very funny movie, showing off Linder’s usual character — the wealthy boulevardier whose money helps him get into all sorts of scrapes — and also hinting at films made years or even decades later. The opening title tells us that Linder (he uses his own name for his character) is about to forsake bachelor life and get married — and the first shot is of Linder at his bachelor party, shot from overhead in an uncanny anticipation of Busby Berkeley’s famous overhead shots in his musical numbers. Linder goes home, roaring drunk (he may have been imitating another Chaplin Mutual, One A.M., here), throwing his clothes out the window and tossing a bilious-looking tonic onto his hanging dress suit (he thinks his window is the closet door, and vice versa), and when he gets up the next morning his cat is licking Linder’s whiskers and two flies have settled on his face. (In a modern movie there’d be a credit to the “fly wrangler.”) His servants John (Ralph McCullough) and Mary (Betty Peterson) are amorously wrestling when they accidentally break his mirror, and in order to avoid getting caught having done so they get Linder’s cook (Harry Mann), who resembles him closely enough to make it work, to impersonate him on the other side of the mirror frame, setting up the mirror gag (and though Linder might not have thought it up he sets it up and stages it perfectly) — only just as Linder gets suspicious that the other person is not his reflection, he throws his shoe at the mirror — and the mirror shatters: John and Mary had called a glazier to come over with a replacement mirror. Linder is utterly horrified at having broken the mirror and is convinced he’s going to have the proverbial seven years’ bad luck — and of course, being a silent comedian, he acts in outrageously stupid ways that bring about exactly the bad luck he fears. Invited over to the home of his fiancée Betty (Alta Allen), he decides not to drive because he’s read a newspaper article about auto accidents (incidentally, the insert shot of the newspaper has the central article in English, but all the print surrounding it is in French), so he hits on the idea of mounting a horse and riding there. When that turns out predictably dreadfully, he decides to walk instead — and ends up in imminent danger of a car running over him, ultimately getting caught on the front bumper of a car whose owners, a young couple, chew him out for trying to hitch a ride on their car.
When he finally gets to Betty’s home he and Betty’s dog Frisotto take an instant dislike to each other — Linder finally hides the dog in a water pitcher — and she breaks off the engagement because Frisotto doesn’t like him. (Between the cat in the opening scene and the dog in this one, Linder takes a refreshingly unsentimental view of household animals.) Betty’s mom urges her to make up with Linder, and she’s about to do so when she catches Linder doing a Hawai’ian dance with her servants and this time mom tells her to dump Linder — and she accepts the proposal of Linder’s best friend (F. B. Crayne) instead. Linder decides to leave town on a train, only as soon as he gets to a new city he’s robbed (he obligingly hands his valise to one of the robbers and his jacket — containing his wallet, with all his money — to another while he’s fighting with the third) and, suddenly broke, he has to sneak onto a train to get home. He ends up in a stationhouse in which the stationmaster (Hugh Saxon) has stepped out and left his daughter (Thelma Percy) in charge. Linder impersonates the stationmaster and, asked by a Black woman to sell her a ticket to New Orleans, instead gives her all the tickets he has in his drawer — earlier Linder had donned a black stocking to disguise himself as a Pullman porter on a train — only she also asks him to ship a package, he gets glue on his hands, and in this genuinely “pre-Code” movie he ends up with his glue-soaked hand stuck on Thelma’s dress, which he pulls completely off while she’s struggling to get away from him. Linder is arrested and asked by another prisoner to scratch his back — and while he’s doing this he nods off and dreams that the prisoner is his fiancée Betty, leading to a surprisingly audacious Gay gag for 1921 in which he wakes up as he’s about to kiss the other prisoner — who later shows up in court with him and seems quite taken with him. The movie ends with Linder restored to his social position but his ex-girlfriend still married to the other guy.
Charles noted that Seven Years’ Bad Luck was made with an awareness of class and its privileges (or lack of them) that pretty much disappeared from the movies after the silent era — I’d already noted that the three most famous silent comedians all had clearly defined class strata: Chaplin as the poor man, Buster Keaton as the rich man and Harold Lloyd as the middle-class man — and watching Linder’s greased-skids descent down the social ladder in this movie it occurred to me not only that this film could be read as the prequel to Chaplin’s work (Chaplin did acknowledge that he thought of his Tramp character as “a run-down gentleman”) but that Preston Sturges might have been influenced by it when he made Sullivan’s Travels, another comedy about a man of status and position who by a combination of his own arrogance and circumstances beyond his control loses it all. It also occurred to me that Linder might have been an influence on the recent film The Artist — when Charles and I saw it I’d assumed that the appearance of the male lead was based on Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., but it seems in retrospect that both his looks and some of the gags may well derive from Linder. (Gee, a bunch of Frenchmen make an homage to silent-era Hollywood — why wouldn’t they have drawn on the films of a great French silent star for material?) Basically Seven Years’ Bad Luck is perched on the cusp between Chaplin and Keaton; Linder resembles Chaplin in the mobility of his facial expressions and many of his gestures and movements seem “Chaplinesque” (though without seeing more of Linder’s pre-Chaplin films it would be hard to be definitive about who influenced whom), but Seven Years’ Bad Luck also seems like a Keaton film in embryo, partly because he’s cast as rich instead of poor and partly because so much of it takes place on a train. Whatever else Seven Years’ Bad Luck is, it’s also very, very funny, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone who likes silent comedy at all not being taken with it!
Charles and I ended up watching the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday” feature — one of them, anyway — the marvelous 1921 silent comedy Seven Years’ Bad Luck, starring French comedian Max Linder, who also wrote, directed and produced the film. Linder was born Gabriel-Maximilian Leuvielle in Saint-Loubès, Gironde, France on December 1, 1883 and started making films as early as 1905 —thereby putting him ahead of Charlie Chaplin (who made his first film nine years later), Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Buster Keaton, Snub Pollard, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon as the first true superstar comic of the movies. Unfortunately, Linder has become hard to assess because so few of his films survive, and the ones that do … well, the only Linder item Charles and I had seen before this was a 1914 split-reeler (five to six minutes) in which Linder spent most of the movie disguised as a donkey (as did his rival for the heroine’s affections — don’t ask), and the film was funny enough in a crude way but didn’t really establish Linder as one of the greats of silent comedy. Linder had an unhappy career trajectory; when Chaplin left Essanay Studios in 1916 Essanay hired Linder to replace him — perhaps figuring that the logical replacement to a comic from England would be a comic from France, perhaps thinking that with some people already saying that Chaplin had borrowed extensively from Linder they could score big by bringing over the original.
Unfortunately, Linder didn’t take too well to American filming conditions — and according to his imdb.com biographer, Michael Brooke, he’d also started having health problems when he was drafted to fight in World War I and was the victim of a poison-gas attack. “Although offered a contract in America, recurring ill-health meant that his US films had little of the sparkle of his early French work, and a brief attempt to revive his career by making films for the recently formed United Artists (one of whose founders, of course, was Chaplin) in the early 1920’s came to little, although these later films are now regarded as classics.” Brooke wrote “He returned to France and killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925.” Made by Max Linder Productions for a short-lived distribution company called Robertson-Cole, Seven Years’ Bad Luck turned out to be a comedy masterpiece, with all the “sparkle” one could want, screamingly funny and good enough that this one film is enough to establish Linder as one of the greats of silent comedy. Note that this film was made in 1921, which rather begs the question of who influenced whom; Linder can’t have been unaware that whatever early success he’d had in France had long been eclipsed by Chaplin’s worldwide popularity, and it seems clear to me that much of Seven Years’ Bad Luck was influenced by Chaplin’s work. One of the most famous sequences in Seven Years’ Bad Luck is the “mirror” gag — two similar-looking people stand on either side of an open frame and think they’re looking at their own reflection in a mirror — which was most famously performed by Groucho and Harpo Marx in Duck Soup in 1933 (and reprised by Harpo with Lucille Ball on an I Love Lucy episode in the 1950’s). Linder is often credited with inventing the gag … only Chaplin had done it five years earlier (in, ironically enough, The Floorwalker, the first film he made for Mutual Studios after leaving Essanay). Chaplin’s influence also seems to be strong in a later sequence in which Linder has a dream of himself in a mock heaven full of beautiful girls that literally sprout up from under the ground — a year after Chaplin had done his own version of a mock heaven in The Kid.
Nonetheless, Seven Years’ Bad Luck is a very funny movie, showing off Linder’s usual character — the wealthy boulevardier whose money helps him get into all sorts of scrapes — and also hinting at films made years or even decades later. The opening title tells us that Linder (he uses his own name for his character) is about to forsake bachelor life and get married — and the first shot is of Linder at his bachelor party, shot from overhead in an uncanny anticipation of Busby Berkeley’s famous overhead shots in his musical numbers. Linder goes home, roaring drunk (he may have been imitating another Chaplin Mutual, One A.M., here), throwing his clothes out the window and tossing a bilious-looking tonic onto his hanging dress suit (he thinks his window is the closet door, and vice versa), and when he gets up the next morning his cat is licking Linder’s whiskers and two flies have settled on his face. (In a modern movie there’d be a credit to the “fly wrangler.”) His servants John (Ralph McCullough) and Mary (Betty Peterson) are amorously wrestling when they accidentally break his mirror, and in order to avoid getting caught having done so they get Linder’s cook (Harry Mann), who resembles him closely enough to make it work, to impersonate him on the other side of the mirror frame, setting up the mirror gag (and though Linder might not have thought it up he sets it up and stages it perfectly) — only just as Linder gets suspicious that the other person is not his reflection, he throws his shoe at the mirror — and the mirror shatters: John and Mary had called a glazier to come over with a replacement mirror. Linder is utterly horrified at having broken the mirror and is convinced he’s going to have the proverbial seven years’ bad luck — and of course, being a silent comedian, he acts in outrageously stupid ways that bring about exactly the bad luck he fears. Invited over to the home of his fiancée Betty (Alta Allen), he decides not to drive because he’s read a newspaper article about auto accidents (incidentally, the insert shot of the newspaper has the central article in English, but all the print surrounding it is in French), so he hits on the idea of mounting a horse and riding there. When that turns out predictably dreadfully, he decides to walk instead — and ends up in imminent danger of a car running over him, ultimately getting caught on the front bumper of a car whose owners, a young couple, chew him out for trying to hitch a ride on their car.
When he finally gets to Betty’s home he and Betty’s dog Frisotto take an instant dislike to each other — Linder finally hides the dog in a water pitcher — and she breaks off the engagement because Frisotto doesn’t like him. (Between the cat in the opening scene and the dog in this one, Linder takes a refreshingly unsentimental view of household animals.) Betty’s mom urges her to make up with Linder, and she’s about to do so when she catches Linder doing a Hawai’ian dance with her servants and this time mom tells her to dump Linder — and she accepts the proposal of Linder’s best friend (F. B. Crayne) instead. Linder decides to leave town on a train, only as soon as he gets to a new city he’s robbed (he obligingly hands his valise to one of the robbers and his jacket — containing his wallet, with all his money — to another while he’s fighting with the third) and, suddenly broke, he has to sneak onto a train to get home. He ends up in a stationhouse in which the stationmaster (Hugh Saxon) has stepped out and left his daughter (Thelma Percy) in charge. Linder impersonates the stationmaster and, asked by a Black woman to sell her a ticket to New Orleans, instead gives her all the tickets he has in his drawer — earlier Linder had donned a black stocking to disguise himself as a Pullman porter on a train — only she also asks him to ship a package, he gets glue on his hands, and in this genuinely “pre-Code” movie he ends up with his glue-soaked hand stuck on Thelma’s dress, which he pulls completely off while she’s struggling to get away from him. Linder is arrested and asked by another prisoner to scratch his back — and while he’s doing this he nods off and dreams that the prisoner is his fiancée Betty, leading to a surprisingly audacious Gay gag for 1921 in which he wakes up as he’s about to kiss the other prisoner — who later shows up in court with him and seems quite taken with him. The movie ends with Linder restored to his social position but his ex-girlfriend still married to the other guy.
Charles noted that Seven Years’ Bad Luck was made with an awareness of class and its privileges (or lack of them) that pretty much disappeared from the movies after the silent era — I’d already noted that the three most famous silent comedians all had clearly defined class strata: Chaplin as the poor man, Buster Keaton as the rich man and Harold Lloyd as the middle-class man — and watching Linder’s greased-skids descent down the social ladder in this movie it occurred to me not only that this film could be read as the prequel to Chaplin’s work (Chaplin did acknowledge that he thought of his Tramp character as “a run-down gentleman”) but that Preston Sturges might have been influenced by it when he made Sullivan’s Travels, another comedy about a man of status and position who by a combination of his own arrogance and circumstances beyond his control loses it all. It also occurred to me that Linder might have been an influence on the recent film The Artist — when Charles and I saw it I’d assumed that the appearance of the male lead was based on Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., but it seems in retrospect that both his looks and some of the gags may well derive from Linder. (Gee, a bunch of Frenchmen make an homage to silent-era Hollywood — why wouldn’t they have drawn on the films of a great French silent star for material?) Basically Seven Years’ Bad Luck is perched on the cusp between Chaplin and Keaton; Linder resembles Chaplin in the mobility of his facial expressions and many of his gestures and movements seem “Chaplinesque” (though without seeing more of Linder’s pre-Chaplin films it would be hard to be definitive about who influenced whom), but Seven Years’ Bad Luck also seems like a Keaton film in embryo, partly because he’s cast as rich instead of poor and partly because so much of it takes place on a train. Whatever else Seven Years’ Bad Luck is, it’s also very, very funny, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone who likes silent comedy at all not being taken with it!
Sunday, July 14, 2013
The She-Beast (Italy, 1966)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the most recent “Internet Slasher Drive-In” double bill, containing two Italian productions from 1966 that both turned out to be considerably better than we would have expected from the genre, the titles — The She-Beast and Kill, Baby, Kill — and the time. The She-Beast was one of only four features directed by British horror director Michael Reeves — the others were Castle of the Living Dead (uncredited), The Sorcerers (with Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey as a couple of old mad scientists who invent a consciousness-transference machine and take over the body of a young man so through him they can experience vicariously decadent thrills they’re both too old to partake in directly) and Witchfinder General (released in the U.S. as The Conqueror Worm to tie it into the cycle of horror films its star, Vincent Price, made at least nominally based on works by Edgar Allan Poe), a biopic of the real-life witchhunter Matthew Hopkins. Like The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General, the innocent young male lead was played by Reeves’ schoolhood friend Ian Ogilvy. The She-Beast was billed as a vehicle for Barbara Steele, who’d achieved international stardom (of sorts) in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday — which I remember watching with Charles years ago and finding quite impressive, the most accurate reproduction of the visual style of 1930’s Universal horror since Universal itself gave up the Gothic tradition — though she only signed for one day’s work and therefore had just a minor part as Veronica, who with her new husband Philip (Ian Ogilvy) is driving through Romania in a black VW bug (whose license number, instead of being on a plate, is actually stenciled across the car’s front) when they get stranded in a small village.
The village is inhabited by a nasty hotelier named Groper (Mel Welles) who spies on his guests as they’re having sex, and also a bunch of superstitious locals, a truck driver who worries he’s going to hit someone and get arrested, and Alexis van Helsing (John Karlsen, second-billed), last descendant of a noble family dispossessed by the Communist government of Romania, whose family has been in the vampire-hunting business for generations (the name “Dracula” is actually mentioned on the soundtrack). Two hundred years before to the day, the villagers captured a murderous supernatural hag and drowned her in the local lake, but as van Helsing explains, her spirit survives because the villagers jumped the gun and didn’t wait for van Helsing’s ancestor to arrive and perform a full-tilt exorcism on the woman before they killed her. Anxious to get away from the hotel because Philip is convinced he murdered Groper after he caught the man watching him and Veronica having sex (he didn’t — there’s more than one instance in this film of someone abandoning someone they think they’ve killed, but who is still alive), Philip steals back the distributor cap from his car that Groper stole, refits it and he and Veronica drive off — only mysteriously both the steering wheel and the brakes cease to function, the car takes a header into the haunted lake, and Philip swims to safety but Veronica drowns. Only as anybody who’s seen more than two horror movies in their life will guess, Veronica isn’t dead; she’s been taken over by the spirit of the hag (Joe “Flash” Riley in an intriguing bit of Transgender casting) and the old woman comes to life and starts knocking off people.
The script is by Reeves (under the pseudonym “Michael Byron” — “no relation,” I joked) and E. Amos Powell, and they deserve credit for properly locating Transylvania in Romania (almost all other horror-film makers have mistakenly put it in Hungary!) and also for slipping in a lot of slyly satirical jokes about Communism — the best of which comes when the she-beast has just knocked off a victim with a sickle, she throws it away, and it lands on top of a hammer to form the Communist emblem. The rest of the movie deals with the killing of the she-beast and van Helsing’s determination to steal the body before it can be autopsied, because as he informs the rather incredulous Philip he needs the body intact so he can perform the ritual that will change her back to Veronica and return Philip’s wife to him alive and reasonably well. The final chase scene — in which Philip and van Helsing steal the police van containing the hag’s body, the police steal van Helsing’s own car (a charming yellow number so old it actually has to be hand-cranked to start) and then van Helsing realizes he has to recover his own car because that contains the notes he needs to do the ritual — is pretty risible; the Romanian police do an excellent imitation of the Keystone Kops. According to an imdb.com trivia poster, this scene was shot not by Reeves but a second-unit director, and when Reeves saw it he was horrified (and not in the way this film intended) at how cheap and silly it looked — but he didn’t have the budget available to reshoot it, so in it went. The She-Beast is actually a pretty good movie within the genre conventions — the goriest thing in it is a real-life cockfight (during which one of the murders takes place) and Reeves proves himself a director with a creative eye and an instinct for the Gothic (the scenes in the flashback showing the hag’s original drowning look like he copied some of the setups from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), but the same misanthropy that made his films interesting led him to commit suicide at age 25, after Witchfinder General was finished but before it was released.
Charles and I watched the most recent “Internet Slasher Drive-In” double bill, containing two Italian productions from 1966 that both turned out to be considerably better than we would have expected from the genre, the titles — The She-Beast and Kill, Baby, Kill — and the time. The She-Beast was one of only four features directed by British horror director Michael Reeves — the others were Castle of the Living Dead (uncredited), The Sorcerers (with Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey as a couple of old mad scientists who invent a consciousness-transference machine and take over the body of a young man so through him they can experience vicariously decadent thrills they’re both too old to partake in directly) and Witchfinder General (released in the U.S. as The Conqueror Worm to tie it into the cycle of horror films its star, Vincent Price, made at least nominally based on works by Edgar Allan Poe), a biopic of the real-life witchhunter Matthew Hopkins. Like The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General, the innocent young male lead was played by Reeves’ schoolhood friend Ian Ogilvy. The She-Beast was billed as a vehicle for Barbara Steele, who’d achieved international stardom (of sorts) in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday — which I remember watching with Charles years ago and finding quite impressive, the most accurate reproduction of the visual style of 1930’s Universal horror since Universal itself gave up the Gothic tradition — though she only signed for one day’s work and therefore had just a minor part as Veronica, who with her new husband Philip (Ian Ogilvy) is driving through Romania in a black VW bug (whose license number, instead of being on a plate, is actually stenciled across the car’s front) when they get stranded in a small village.
The village is inhabited by a nasty hotelier named Groper (Mel Welles) who spies on his guests as they’re having sex, and also a bunch of superstitious locals, a truck driver who worries he’s going to hit someone and get arrested, and Alexis van Helsing (John Karlsen, second-billed), last descendant of a noble family dispossessed by the Communist government of Romania, whose family has been in the vampire-hunting business for generations (the name “Dracula” is actually mentioned on the soundtrack). Two hundred years before to the day, the villagers captured a murderous supernatural hag and drowned her in the local lake, but as van Helsing explains, her spirit survives because the villagers jumped the gun and didn’t wait for van Helsing’s ancestor to arrive and perform a full-tilt exorcism on the woman before they killed her. Anxious to get away from the hotel because Philip is convinced he murdered Groper after he caught the man watching him and Veronica having sex (he didn’t — there’s more than one instance in this film of someone abandoning someone they think they’ve killed, but who is still alive), Philip steals back the distributor cap from his car that Groper stole, refits it and he and Veronica drive off — only mysteriously both the steering wheel and the brakes cease to function, the car takes a header into the haunted lake, and Philip swims to safety but Veronica drowns. Only as anybody who’s seen more than two horror movies in their life will guess, Veronica isn’t dead; she’s been taken over by the spirit of the hag (Joe “Flash” Riley in an intriguing bit of Transgender casting) and the old woman comes to life and starts knocking off people.
The script is by Reeves (under the pseudonym “Michael Byron” — “no relation,” I joked) and E. Amos Powell, and they deserve credit for properly locating Transylvania in Romania (almost all other horror-film makers have mistakenly put it in Hungary!) and also for slipping in a lot of slyly satirical jokes about Communism — the best of which comes when the she-beast has just knocked off a victim with a sickle, she throws it away, and it lands on top of a hammer to form the Communist emblem. The rest of the movie deals with the killing of the she-beast and van Helsing’s determination to steal the body before it can be autopsied, because as he informs the rather incredulous Philip he needs the body intact so he can perform the ritual that will change her back to Veronica and return Philip’s wife to him alive and reasonably well. The final chase scene — in which Philip and van Helsing steal the police van containing the hag’s body, the police steal van Helsing’s own car (a charming yellow number so old it actually has to be hand-cranked to start) and then van Helsing realizes he has to recover his own car because that contains the notes he needs to do the ritual — is pretty risible; the Romanian police do an excellent imitation of the Keystone Kops. According to an imdb.com trivia poster, this scene was shot not by Reeves but a second-unit director, and when Reeves saw it he was horrified (and not in the way this film intended) at how cheap and silly it looked — but he didn’t have the budget available to reshoot it, so in it went. The She-Beast is actually a pretty good movie within the genre conventions — the goriest thing in it is a real-life cockfight (during which one of the murders takes place) and Reeves proves himself a director with a creative eye and an instinct for the Gothic (the scenes in the flashback showing the hag’s original drowning look like he copied some of the setups from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), but the same misanthropy that made his films interesting led him to commit suicide at age 25, after Witchfinder General was finished but before it was released.
Kill, Baby, Kill (FUL Films, 1966)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the pleasant surprise of The She-Beast I hadn’t expected much from a movie called Kill, Baby, Kill — the title led me to expect a modern-day urban thriller with one or more female psychos — and by an intriguing coincidence, until I realized who “Mike Reeves” really was and that I’d seen other films of his, I thought the credited director of The She-Beast might have been a pseudonym for Italian director Mario Bava. Surprise! Kill, Baby, Kill actually was a Mario Bava film, and it was quite worthwhile seeing for Bava’s marvelous sense of atmospherics and visual style even though its plot makes virtually no sense. One imdb.com reviewer said Bava “may be the most influential horror director of all time” (not F. W. Murnau? Paul Leni? Tod Browning? James Whale?), and while that’s overstating the case Bava is one of those people (like Michael Powell) who’s probably shaped the film world more through the subsequent directors influenced by him than from his own works. Guillermo del Toro has named Bava as his all-time favorite director, and the Bava influence works its way through almost all of del Toro’s films — as well as those of Dario Argento and quite a few other more recent horror filmmakers. Kill, Baby, Kill takes place at the turn of the (last) century in a small village in Italy (or at least somewhere in mittel-Europa) and it starts with an atmospheric sequence in which a young woman runs through the streets of town, takes a header and impales herself on a series of sharp-pointed fence rails. Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, a considerably better — and better-looking — actor than one expects to find as the “normal” lead of a horror film) comes to town to autopsy the victim, and because he needs a witness with some knowledge of medical science, student Monika Schuftan (Erika Blanc — was her character name a deliberate tribute to the pioneer cinematographer, effects genius and process-screen inventor Eugen Schuftan?), agrees to team up with him.
They find the town in the middle of a murder wave in which people are arranging to kill themselves by impaling themselves on sharp objects, and in every case they see the vision of a child just before they go and this tells them they are doomed and nothing can save them. The child, it turns out, is Melissa Graps (the imdb.com page on this film doesn’t list who played her but a trivia poster claimed that “she” was really a boy, which would account for her weirdly androgynous appearance), who died at age 7 in 1887 and whose memory is being kept alive by her mother, Baroness Graps (Giana Vivaldi, true name Giovanna Galletti), an embittered blonde who lives alone in her castle. There’s also a mysterious dark-haired woman named Ruth (Fabienne Dali) who’s listed in the cast as “sorcerer” but is on the side of good (at least we think she’s on the side of good); police inspector Kruger (Piero Lulli); and Karl, the town burgomaster (Marc Lawrence, t/n Luciano Catenacci). The ghost of Melissa manages to dispatch Kruger and Karl, and is on the point of knocking off Monika — who’s really her younger sister (don’t ask); Baroness Graps told Monika she was the daughter of a servant couple whom she adopted, but it turns out she’s a blood Graps after all —when Dr. Eswai finally figures it all out: the real killer is Baroness Graps, who’s a long-distance hypnotist who can hypnotize her victims (everyone she blames for the death of her daughter, which turns out to be just about everyone in town) into believing they see Melissa’s image and killing themselves by skewering themselves on the nearest handy object. No, it’s not the sort of film you watch for the plot; it doesn’t make any sense but you don’t really expect it to — you just groove on Bava’s amazing images and enjoy the physical beauty and slow-moving (sometimes a bit too slow-moving for the film’s own good) atmospherics, and appreciate the visual imagination that has gone into making even something this silly. I hadn’t expected films in the “Shocker Internet Drive-In” series to be genuinely interesting works of art — albeit in a disreputable and unpretentious genre — but there they were, stuck in the middle of a nostalgia-inducing presentation that also included ads for the drive-in theatre’s refreshment stand (complete with food-porn close-ups of hamburgers, hot dogs and pizza) and a sleazy music video, though even that (a white singer doing “C’est Si Bon” — she’s hardly Eartha Kitt but she does have a voice, and the band behind her swings) proved unexpectedly good and worth watching.
After the pleasant surprise of The She-Beast I hadn’t expected much from a movie called Kill, Baby, Kill — the title led me to expect a modern-day urban thriller with one or more female psychos — and by an intriguing coincidence, until I realized who “Mike Reeves” really was and that I’d seen other films of his, I thought the credited director of The She-Beast might have been a pseudonym for Italian director Mario Bava. Surprise! Kill, Baby, Kill actually was a Mario Bava film, and it was quite worthwhile seeing for Bava’s marvelous sense of atmospherics and visual style even though its plot makes virtually no sense. One imdb.com reviewer said Bava “may be the most influential horror director of all time” (not F. W. Murnau? Paul Leni? Tod Browning? James Whale?), and while that’s overstating the case Bava is one of those people (like Michael Powell) who’s probably shaped the film world more through the subsequent directors influenced by him than from his own works. Guillermo del Toro has named Bava as his all-time favorite director, and the Bava influence works its way through almost all of del Toro’s films — as well as those of Dario Argento and quite a few other more recent horror filmmakers. Kill, Baby, Kill takes place at the turn of the (last) century in a small village in Italy (or at least somewhere in mittel-Europa) and it starts with an atmospheric sequence in which a young woman runs through the streets of town, takes a header and impales herself on a series of sharp-pointed fence rails. Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, a considerably better — and better-looking — actor than one expects to find as the “normal” lead of a horror film) comes to town to autopsy the victim, and because he needs a witness with some knowledge of medical science, student Monika Schuftan (Erika Blanc — was her character name a deliberate tribute to the pioneer cinematographer, effects genius and process-screen inventor Eugen Schuftan?), agrees to team up with him.
They find the town in the middle of a murder wave in which people are arranging to kill themselves by impaling themselves on sharp objects, and in every case they see the vision of a child just before they go and this tells them they are doomed and nothing can save them. The child, it turns out, is Melissa Graps (the imdb.com page on this film doesn’t list who played her but a trivia poster claimed that “she” was really a boy, which would account for her weirdly androgynous appearance), who died at age 7 in 1887 and whose memory is being kept alive by her mother, Baroness Graps (Giana Vivaldi, true name Giovanna Galletti), an embittered blonde who lives alone in her castle. There’s also a mysterious dark-haired woman named Ruth (Fabienne Dali) who’s listed in the cast as “sorcerer” but is on the side of good (at least we think she’s on the side of good); police inspector Kruger (Piero Lulli); and Karl, the town burgomaster (Marc Lawrence, t/n Luciano Catenacci). The ghost of Melissa manages to dispatch Kruger and Karl, and is on the point of knocking off Monika — who’s really her younger sister (don’t ask); Baroness Graps told Monika she was the daughter of a servant couple whom she adopted, but it turns out she’s a blood Graps after all —when Dr. Eswai finally figures it all out: the real killer is Baroness Graps, who’s a long-distance hypnotist who can hypnotize her victims (everyone she blames for the death of her daughter, which turns out to be just about everyone in town) into believing they see Melissa’s image and killing themselves by skewering themselves on the nearest handy object. No, it’s not the sort of film you watch for the plot; it doesn’t make any sense but you don’t really expect it to — you just groove on Bava’s amazing images and enjoy the physical beauty and slow-moving (sometimes a bit too slow-moving for the film’s own good) atmospherics, and appreciate the visual imagination that has gone into making even something this silly. I hadn’t expected films in the “Shocker Internet Drive-In” series to be genuinely interesting works of art — albeit in a disreputable and unpretentious genre — but there they were, stuck in the middle of a nostalgia-inducing presentation that also included ads for the drive-in theatre’s refreshment stand (complete with food-porn close-ups of hamburgers, hot dogs and pizza) and a sleazy music video, though even that (a white singer doing “C’est Si Bon” — she’s hardly Eartha Kitt but she does have a voice, and the band behind her swings) proved unexpectedly good and worth watching.
Friday, July 12, 2013
The Truth About Murder (RKO, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Truth About Murder, a 1946 RKO “B” directed by Lew Landers that’s long been one of my quirky favorites, mainly because there’s a nice shot early on of a hot young beefcake model wearing nothing but a swimsuit (you usually don’t get that much flesh from either gender in a film that old!) and it’s also a comedy-thriller featuring Morgan Conway as a D.A. in an unnamed city (it’s pretty obviously New York, but our only indication of that is a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge under the opening credits and another appearance of a copy of that same photo on Conway’s office wall) and Bonita Granville as the recent law-school graduate he hired as an assistant prosecutor but refused to give her any actual cases to prosecute. The two are dating and D.A. Lester Ashton (Conway) makes it clear to Christine Allen (Granville) that he has utterly no interest in helping her get started on a career; he wants her married to him, in the kitchen, and pregnant. It’s thanks to this plot element that imdb.com reviewer “blanche-2” said the film is badly dated, but it’s also dated in that already by 1946 the emerging film noir genre (which RKO had done a lot to help into existence with at least two key films, 1940’s Stranger on the Third Floor and 1944’s Murder, My Sweet) had pretty much wiped out the market for this sort of Thin Man-esque comedy-thriller. The title stems from the fact that rather than give “Chris” (the androgynous name by which Granville’s character is referred to and addressed throughout) any cases to prosecute, Ashton has put her in charge of working the office’s polygraph equipment, a rather crude device which involves wrapping two rubber tubes around the subject — one of which is loose-fitting enough (it’s supposed to measure the subject’s breathing patterns) one gets the impression its maker has invented a combination lie detector and reducing-belt machine. (“If you’re telling lies you’re going to come out of this machine 10 pounds lighter!”) Frustrated at her lack of professional progress in Ashton’s office, Chris quits her job and seeks out the other person who wanted to employ her as soon as she got her law degree, civil attorney Bill Crane (Edward Norris) — only Crane has taken a resounding belly-flop off the wagon and is regularly drinking himself into stupors over the way his wife Marsha (June Clayworth) is throwing herself at just about every other man in the dramatis personae, including Hank (Michael St. Angel) — the hunky swimsuit model whom she encountered professionally because she’s an advertising photographer and he’s one of her models (when we saw him in swim trunks he was shooting an ad for sunscreen with his wife Peggy, played by Rita Corday); her boss/client Paul Marvin (Don Douglas); and gangster Johnny Lacka (Gerald Mohr), whose bookie joint she patronizes just to have an excuse to get close to him.
There’s a nice line in which Paul watches Marsha Crane photographing Hank and Peggy and says, “They look like they’re falling out of love” — and indeed in any modern movie in which a male model showed such total disinterest in his attractive young female colleague, we’d assume it was because he was Gay — but the film is actually 63 minutes’ worth of pleasant if rather predictable entertainment, in which Charles guessed the murderer early on and I didn’t only because I couldn’t believe the writing committee (Lawrence Kimble, Hilda Gordon and Eric Taylor) were going to make it that obvious. The gimmick is that Marsha Crane is knocked off about 15 minutes in — just after the writers have spent most of the previous running time giving her so many acquaintances with motives for wanting her dead (including most of the men in her life and their significant others) it’s obvious they’re setting her up to be victim number one — just as Ashton and Chris were showing up at the Cranes’ apartment to take them out to dinner in hopes that Ashton could get the Cranes to reconcile, therefore Crane wouldn’t need a partner in his firm and Chris would go back to him. When they arrive there Crane is stinking drunk thanks to a letter Marsha wrote Paul, which Paul showed him, saying that she’d like to leave Bill for him but she didn’t want to abandon him in his current condition — which made Paul angry enough to knock her off (aw, c’mon, was it really that much of a spoiler?) and then, later, kill Peggy by firing his gun at her through a window because he thought Peggy was about to expose him. There’s also a scene in which Chris recovers the gun with which Marsha was shot in the developing tank in the darkroom in the Cranes’ apartment (an adjunct to the studio where Marsha shot her photos), only her assistant Jonesy (Tom Noonan) discovers her and there’s some cute by-play between them over the gun.
It all ends pretty much the way you expect it to — I was hoping for a Black Angel-ish ending in which Bill Crane would have been the murderer of his wife but would have been so drunk when he committed the crime that, sober, he would have no memory of it; and when Crane was exonerated it would have been nice if the writers had paired him and Chris together, so that horribly male-chauvinist Ashton would be left in the cold and she’d be with a man with whom she could have a professional and personal partnership (sort of like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell at the end of His Girl Friday). Instead there’s a parallel to the opening scene (Chris testing the lie detector on Ashton and asking him questions about their relationship) in which Chris puts Paul under the polygraph and suddenly realizes from the answers she’s getting that he is the murderer, and she’s all alone with him — until Ashton and the cops arrive just as Paul is about to kill her, they save her life and she agrees to give up her career and marry him. (Barf.) This sort of sexist ending was de rigueur in movies in 1946, a year after the war was over, when Hollywood was taking up the cause of telling American women that the age of Rosie the Riveter was over and now that the menfolk were back home from combat, the women needed to step aside from the workforce and be good little housewives and mothers (ironically echoing what the Nazis had said their idea of women’s roles should be: Kinder, Küche, Kirche — “children, kitchen, church”). Just how George Seaton was able to buck the trend in his marvelous film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim and pair Betty Grable and Dick Haymes as professional and personal partners in a 1946 movie remains a mystery to me! The Truth About Murder is a standard-issue 1946 RKO “B” about an attorney who’s accused of murdering his philandering wife, but it’s efficiently done and there’s even one marvelous noir composition in what is otherwise a pretty flatly photographed film: when Chris enters the apartment of the murder victim and she’s seen in dark shadows and dim light behind partitions, gratings and whatnot.
The film was The Truth About Murder, a 1946 RKO “B” directed by Lew Landers that’s long been one of my quirky favorites, mainly because there’s a nice shot early on of a hot young beefcake model wearing nothing but a swimsuit (you usually don’t get that much flesh from either gender in a film that old!) and it’s also a comedy-thriller featuring Morgan Conway as a D.A. in an unnamed city (it’s pretty obviously New York, but our only indication of that is a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge under the opening credits and another appearance of a copy of that same photo on Conway’s office wall) and Bonita Granville as the recent law-school graduate he hired as an assistant prosecutor but refused to give her any actual cases to prosecute. The two are dating and D.A. Lester Ashton (Conway) makes it clear to Christine Allen (Granville) that he has utterly no interest in helping her get started on a career; he wants her married to him, in the kitchen, and pregnant. It’s thanks to this plot element that imdb.com reviewer “blanche-2” said the film is badly dated, but it’s also dated in that already by 1946 the emerging film noir genre (which RKO had done a lot to help into existence with at least two key films, 1940’s Stranger on the Third Floor and 1944’s Murder, My Sweet) had pretty much wiped out the market for this sort of Thin Man-esque comedy-thriller. The title stems from the fact that rather than give “Chris” (the androgynous name by which Granville’s character is referred to and addressed throughout) any cases to prosecute, Ashton has put her in charge of working the office’s polygraph equipment, a rather crude device which involves wrapping two rubber tubes around the subject — one of which is loose-fitting enough (it’s supposed to measure the subject’s breathing patterns) one gets the impression its maker has invented a combination lie detector and reducing-belt machine. (“If you’re telling lies you’re going to come out of this machine 10 pounds lighter!”) Frustrated at her lack of professional progress in Ashton’s office, Chris quits her job and seeks out the other person who wanted to employ her as soon as she got her law degree, civil attorney Bill Crane (Edward Norris) — only Crane has taken a resounding belly-flop off the wagon and is regularly drinking himself into stupors over the way his wife Marsha (June Clayworth) is throwing herself at just about every other man in the dramatis personae, including Hank (Michael St. Angel) — the hunky swimsuit model whom she encountered professionally because she’s an advertising photographer and he’s one of her models (when we saw him in swim trunks he was shooting an ad for sunscreen with his wife Peggy, played by Rita Corday); her boss/client Paul Marvin (Don Douglas); and gangster Johnny Lacka (Gerald Mohr), whose bookie joint she patronizes just to have an excuse to get close to him.
There’s a nice line in which Paul watches Marsha Crane photographing Hank and Peggy and says, “They look like they’re falling out of love” — and indeed in any modern movie in which a male model showed such total disinterest in his attractive young female colleague, we’d assume it was because he was Gay — but the film is actually 63 minutes’ worth of pleasant if rather predictable entertainment, in which Charles guessed the murderer early on and I didn’t only because I couldn’t believe the writing committee (Lawrence Kimble, Hilda Gordon and Eric Taylor) were going to make it that obvious. The gimmick is that Marsha Crane is knocked off about 15 minutes in — just after the writers have spent most of the previous running time giving her so many acquaintances with motives for wanting her dead (including most of the men in her life and their significant others) it’s obvious they’re setting her up to be victim number one — just as Ashton and Chris were showing up at the Cranes’ apartment to take them out to dinner in hopes that Ashton could get the Cranes to reconcile, therefore Crane wouldn’t need a partner in his firm and Chris would go back to him. When they arrive there Crane is stinking drunk thanks to a letter Marsha wrote Paul, which Paul showed him, saying that she’d like to leave Bill for him but she didn’t want to abandon him in his current condition — which made Paul angry enough to knock her off (aw, c’mon, was it really that much of a spoiler?) and then, later, kill Peggy by firing his gun at her through a window because he thought Peggy was about to expose him. There’s also a scene in which Chris recovers the gun with which Marsha was shot in the developing tank in the darkroom in the Cranes’ apartment (an adjunct to the studio where Marsha shot her photos), only her assistant Jonesy (Tom Noonan) discovers her and there’s some cute by-play between them over the gun.
It all ends pretty much the way you expect it to — I was hoping for a Black Angel-ish ending in which Bill Crane would have been the murderer of his wife but would have been so drunk when he committed the crime that, sober, he would have no memory of it; and when Crane was exonerated it would have been nice if the writers had paired him and Chris together, so that horribly male-chauvinist Ashton would be left in the cold and she’d be with a man with whom she could have a professional and personal partnership (sort of like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell at the end of His Girl Friday). Instead there’s a parallel to the opening scene (Chris testing the lie detector on Ashton and asking him questions about their relationship) in which Chris puts Paul under the polygraph and suddenly realizes from the answers she’s getting that he is the murderer, and she’s all alone with him — until Ashton and the cops arrive just as Paul is about to kill her, they save her life and she agrees to give up her career and marry him. (Barf.) This sort of sexist ending was de rigueur in movies in 1946, a year after the war was over, when Hollywood was taking up the cause of telling American women that the age of Rosie the Riveter was over and now that the menfolk were back home from combat, the women needed to step aside from the workforce and be good little housewives and mothers (ironically echoing what the Nazis had said their idea of women’s roles should be: Kinder, Küche, Kirche — “children, kitchen, church”). Just how George Seaton was able to buck the trend in his marvelous film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim and pair Betty Grable and Dick Haymes as professional and personal partners in a 1946 movie remains a mystery to me! The Truth About Murder is a standard-issue 1946 RKO “B” about an attorney who’s accused of murdering his philandering wife, but it’s efficiently done and there’s even one marvelous noir composition in what is otherwise a pretty flatly photographed film: when Chris enters the apartment of the murder victim and she’s seen in dark shadows and dim light behind partitions, gratings and whatnot.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
American Experience: Mount Rushmore (PBS, 2001)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was a recent rerun of a PBS American Experience documentary on Mount Rushmore — and in particular on Gutzon Borglum, the main person behind the famous monumental sculpture of four American Presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — the last got in because he was a personal acquaintance of Borglum’s and a sort of political model; the first President Roosevelt had bought Borglum’s earlier bust of Lincoln and exhibited it in the White House) and one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction characters that often appear in PBS documentaries. His full name was John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum and it’s indicative of his grandiloquence and the consciousness with which he shaped his own legend that he abandoned “John” as a first name — too prosaic — and went with the more unusual (at least outside of his family’s ancestral homeland, Denmark) Gutzon. (Interestingly, though the narration for the program described him as an anti-Semite and a racist, he had enough admiration for Lincoln that he not only sculpted him at least twice, he also named his own son Lincoln Borglum.) The PBS.com Web site contains a biography of Borglum that makes his life seem even weirder than it is in the film; he was born in Utah as the son of a polygamous Mormon convert who married two sisters. When they relocated, first to Nebraska and then (briefly) to Los Angeles, Borglum’s dad dumped his mom but stayed married to her sister because they were now living in states where polygamy was illegal. Borglum père didn’t stay long in L.A., but Borglum himself did, where he made the acquaintance of General John C. Frémont, who in 1856 had been the first Republican Party nominee for President and as Civil War governor of occupied Missouri (Missouri never formally left the Union but President Lincoln sent an expeditionary force to occupy it anyway to make sure it didn’t) signed the first emancipation proclamation, two years before Lincoln’s version. Borglum met Frémont in 1889, painted his portrait and learned from his experience that it was a good career move to cultivate wealthy and prestigious friends like Theodore Roosevelt and Leland Stanford. In the 1890’s Borglum and his wife traveled to Paris, and he switched from painting to sculpture under the influence of Auguste Rodin. His marriage broke up and he met another woman, Mary Montgomery, on the ship taking him back to the U.S. He began a career as a sculptor, specializing in heroic depictions of real-life people and selling his works to churches and galleries.
Then the United Daughters of the Confederacy invited him to create a giant sculpture of Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain in Georgia, and in order to gain support for the project he did some politically convenient cozying up to the local Ku Klux Klan. But Borglum and the United Daughters of the Confederacy had a falling-out and Borglum quit the project and destroyed his models (provoking a lawsuit from the UDC, who claimed that they’d paid him for the models and therefore they had legal title to them and he had no right to destroy them), only a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson had read about Stone Mountain and invited Borglum to his state to carve a giant mountain sculpture that would serve as a tourist attraction to lure visitors to the Black Hills region. Borglum planned his project to include Washington and Lincoln — Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt were added to the plan later — and the film went into quite a lot of detail on just how you carve a mountain sculpture and make sure the finished project is faithful to the original design. Borglum went back to a technique first devised by the ancient Greeks: taking geometrical instruments and using them to measure your model, then applying them to the actual mountain so that if the nose, say, has to begin at an angle of 135 degrees, you can plot where that is on the mountain so the mountain sculpture matches the model. The show also detailed the several stages of carving, including the first rough work with jackhammers to mold the mountains into egg shapes that can then be reduced to detailed faces, then the design of the faces himself and the “honeycombing” technique used as the next-to-last step before the faces themselves are burnished to a simulacrum of human appearance. According to both the program and the PBS biographical page on Borglum (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/rushmore-borglum/), he also had a ferocious temper; often he’d fire his best workmen (and then be forced to hire them back because he’d trained them in his techniques and it would have been prohibitively expensive to go back to square one with new hires) and his son Lincoln would have to smooth over the ruffled feathers his dad left.
The show also mentioned that Borglum’s original plan for Rushmore was to have the figures sculpted down to their waists, but he never got anywhere near that far; from 1935 to 1941 he had a cooperative federal government that mostly gave him the money he wanted to fund the project (that it was the Depression and the Franklin Roosevelt administration was looking for federally funded projects that would put people to work really helped), but in 1935 the South Dakota Senator Peter Norbeck, Borglum’s principal backer for the project in Washington, D.C., got sick with cancer and the project finally expired in 1941 when the U.S. entered World War II (Borglum died in April 1941 but work continued for a few more months under his son Lincoln’s direction), so what you see when you go to Mount Rushmore today is four giant faces and a huge pile of rubble beneath them. Charles had actually been to Mount Rushmore at age 13 — his family was traveling cross-country and they decided to stop there — and he noted that the observation deck is so far away you can’t see the imperfections (the fissures in the rock faces and the other evidences of erosion) which PBS’s cameras caught. I’m always partial to stories about obsessive people and their creations of supposedly “impossible” works (how else to explain my admiration for Wagner in general and the Ring in particular?), and Mount Rushmore is one of the biggest, strangest and most bizarre of them; it’s been enough of a flash point that in 1959 Alfred Hitchcock (not your average boy-next-door either!) told his writer Ernest Lehman to write him a script that would incorporate a chase scene across the faces of Mount Rushmore. The result, of course, was the movie classic North by Northwest. More recently, the Right-wing maniacs who currently run the Republican Parth have called for the sandblasting of Theodore Roosevelt (as I’ve pointed out before, his booting from the Republican Party in 1912 was the beginning of the decades-long process of purging it of any progressive or liberal elements and its reorganization as the hard-Right party of today) off the mountain and his replacement with Ronald Reagan!
The show was a recent rerun of a PBS American Experience documentary on Mount Rushmore — and in particular on Gutzon Borglum, the main person behind the famous monumental sculpture of four American Presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — the last got in because he was a personal acquaintance of Borglum’s and a sort of political model; the first President Roosevelt had bought Borglum’s earlier bust of Lincoln and exhibited it in the White House) and one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction characters that often appear in PBS documentaries. His full name was John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum and it’s indicative of his grandiloquence and the consciousness with which he shaped his own legend that he abandoned “John” as a first name — too prosaic — and went with the more unusual (at least outside of his family’s ancestral homeland, Denmark) Gutzon. (Interestingly, though the narration for the program described him as an anti-Semite and a racist, he had enough admiration for Lincoln that he not only sculpted him at least twice, he also named his own son Lincoln Borglum.) The PBS.com Web site contains a biography of Borglum that makes his life seem even weirder than it is in the film; he was born in Utah as the son of a polygamous Mormon convert who married two sisters. When they relocated, first to Nebraska and then (briefly) to Los Angeles, Borglum’s dad dumped his mom but stayed married to her sister because they were now living in states where polygamy was illegal. Borglum père didn’t stay long in L.A., but Borglum himself did, where he made the acquaintance of General John C. Frémont, who in 1856 had been the first Republican Party nominee for President and as Civil War governor of occupied Missouri (Missouri never formally left the Union but President Lincoln sent an expeditionary force to occupy it anyway to make sure it didn’t) signed the first emancipation proclamation, two years before Lincoln’s version. Borglum met Frémont in 1889, painted his portrait and learned from his experience that it was a good career move to cultivate wealthy and prestigious friends like Theodore Roosevelt and Leland Stanford. In the 1890’s Borglum and his wife traveled to Paris, and he switched from painting to sculpture under the influence of Auguste Rodin. His marriage broke up and he met another woman, Mary Montgomery, on the ship taking him back to the U.S. He began a career as a sculptor, specializing in heroic depictions of real-life people and selling his works to churches and galleries.
Then the United Daughters of the Confederacy invited him to create a giant sculpture of Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain in Georgia, and in order to gain support for the project he did some politically convenient cozying up to the local Ku Klux Klan. But Borglum and the United Daughters of the Confederacy had a falling-out and Borglum quit the project and destroyed his models (provoking a lawsuit from the UDC, who claimed that they’d paid him for the models and therefore they had legal title to them and he had no right to destroy them), only a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson had read about Stone Mountain and invited Borglum to his state to carve a giant mountain sculpture that would serve as a tourist attraction to lure visitors to the Black Hills region. Borglum planned his project to include Washington and Lincoln — Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt were added to the plan later — and the film went into quite a lot of detail on just how you carve a mountain sculpture and make sure the finished project is faithful to the original design. Borglum went back to a technique first devised by the ancient Greeks: taking geometrical instruments and using them to measure your model, then applying them to the actual mountain so that if the nose, say, has to begin at an angle of 135 degrees, you can plot where that is on the mountain so the mountain sculpture matches the model. The show also detailed the several stages of carving, including the first rough work with jackhammers to mold the mountains into egg shapes that can then be reduced to detailed faces, then the design of the faces himself and the “honeycombing” technique used as the next-to-last step before the faces themselves are burnished to a simulacrum of human appearance. According to both the program and the PBS biographical page on Borglum (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/rushmore-borglum/), he also had a ferocious temper; often he’d fire his best workmen (and then be forced to hire them back because he’d trained them in his techniques and it would have been prohibitively expensive to go back to square one with new hires) and his son Lincoln would have to smooth over the ruffled feathers his dad left.
The show also mentioned that Borglum’s original plan for Rushmore was to have the figures sculpted down to their waists, but he never got anywhere near that far; from 1935 to 1941 he had a cooperative federal government that mostly gave him the money he wanted to fund the project (that it was the Depression and the Franklin Roosevelt administration was looking for federally funded projects that would put people to work really helped), but in 1935 the South Dakota Senator Peter Norbeck, Borglum’s principal backer for the project in Washington, D.C., got sick with cancer and the project finally expired in 1941 when the U.S. entered World War II (Borglum died in April 1941 but work continued for a few more months under his son Lincoln’s direction), so what you see when you go to Mount Rushmore today is four giant faces and a huge pile of rubble beneath them. Charles had actually been to Mount Rushmore at age 13 — his family was traveling cross-country and they decided to stop there — and he noted that the observation deck is so far away you can’t see the imperfections (the fissures in the rock faces and the other evidences of erosion) which PBS’s cameras caught. I’m always partial to stories about obsessive people and their creations of supposedly “impossible” works (how else to explain my admiration for Wagner in general and the Ring in particular?), and Mount Rushmore is one of the biggest, strangest and most bizarre of them; it’s been enough of a flash point that in 1959 Alfred Hitchcock (not your average boy-next-door either!) told his writer Ernest Lehman to write him a script that would incorporate a chase scene across the faces of Mount Rushmore. The result, of course, was the movie classic North by Northwest. More recently, the Right-wing maniacs who currently run the Republican Parth have called for the sandblasting of Theodore Roosevelt (as I’ve pointed out before, his booting from the Republican Party in 1912 was the beginning of the decades-long process of purging it of any progressive or liberal elements and its reorganization as the hard-Right party of today) off the mountain and his replacement with Ronald Reagan!
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Monster from a Prehistoric Planet (Nikkatsu, Manson, American International, 1967)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, a 1967 Japanese monster movie from a short-lived studio called Nikkatsu, which was the double-bill companion on the “Internet Drive-In Shocker” package that also featured Yongary, Monster from the Deep, but was a considerably better movie. The fact that it was a Japanese production was the initial surprise — the archive.org page on the download had hinted that both features were Korean, but the names of the cast members gave its true origins away (and incidentally at least two people in it, including the leading lady, were played by actresses named Yoko; it’s not than unusual a female given name in Japan!) — and though it had the usual messy plot and tacky effects, it was also clearly the work of a director, Haruyasu Noguchi, with a good camera eye. The plot is basically a fusion of King Kong and the 1957 Boris Karloff vehicle Voodoo Island — in which he played a professional debunker of phony spiritualists hired by a developer who wants to build a mega-resort on a deserted island and seeks to put an end to all this nonsense being spread by the natives that the place is cursed (which, of course, it is). In this version, Playmate publisher George Inoue (Tatsuya Fuji) wants to build “Playland,” a super-resort on a South Pacific island, and in order to stock his island with suitably exotic flora and fauna to draw in paying customers, he sends out a scientific expedition headed by young scientist Hiroshi Kurosaki (Tamio Kawaji) and his photojournalist girlfriend Itoko Koyanagi (Yoko Yamamoto — see, I told you the leading lady was an actress named Yoko!). Also along is the obligatory “comic-relief” idiot, Daize Tonooka (Yuji Okada), who for some reason came off (at least for me) as a Japanese version of Paul Lynde. The first half of the movie is a farrago of shipboard scenes and native dances once the expedition lands on Playmate Island (or whatever it was called before Inoue bought it), and director Noguchi shows his readiness for biggers and betters with overhead shots, daring editing and some quite artful angling and color in the native dance sequences. The natives, it turns out, worship a godlike creature called “Gappa,” a prehistoric remnant (there’s no indication, pace the American title, that the creature is from another planet, prehistoric or otherwise), and while exploring a cave the expedition discovers an egg from which Gappa hatches.
It turns out there are actually three survivors of the species — a Papa Gappa, a Mama Gappa and a little Baby Gappa — and when Inoue insists that the Baby Gappa be taken to Tokyo, where he intends to suppress any revelation of its existence until the next issue of Playmate is ready for the presses and he can scoop the world, Papa and Mama Gappa understandably get upset and come to Tokyo. They start doing their Godzilla impressions and stomping out the city (I was amused when they crushed all the big apartment buildings but left one whose neon sign identified it as “Bar” — shades of The Leech Woman! — in place) until finally Kurosaki (whose name, almost inevitably, I kept hearing as “Kawasaki” and wondering why he was named after a Japanese motorcycle or SUV) figures out that the only way to make them go away, since of course no human weapons affect them at all, is to give them back their kid and have them high-tail it back to the island. (Apparently Kurosaki, or the film’s writers — Ryuzo Nakanishi and Gan Yamazaki — had seen the original Mothra, another film in which a presumably invincible monster is persuaded to leave urban Japan alone by being allowed to return to his place of origin with his pets, the nine-inch-tall women in a cage around whom much of that film revolved.) Alas, once the Gappas (flying creatures with bird-like wings and beaks grafted onto the basic Godzilla-style Japanese mega-monster template) come on the scene and start stomping out Tokyo, Noguchi seems to lose all interest in coming up with interesting visuals and shoots it as flatly as most of the competing films from bigger Japanese companies, hamstrung by the fact that the Gappas are people in ill-fitting monster suits stamping out balsa-wood model buildings and easily fending off attacks from toy tanks. (As with Yongary, one suspects the local Woolworth’s or whatever the Japanese equivalent is was the production’s prop department.) Still, it’s a good deal more interesting and more fun than many of the competitors in the genre, and though it was hardly a great film it was the sort of mindless fun that helps you unwind after a long and tiring day.
The film was Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, a 1967 Japanese monster movie from a short-lived studio called Nikkatsu, which was the double-bill companion on the “Internet Drive-In Shocker” package that also featured Yongary, Monster from the Deep, but was a considerably better movie. The fact that it was a Japanese production was the initial surprise — the archive.org page on the download had hinted that both features were Korean, but the names of the cast members gave its true origins away (and incidentally at least two people in it, including the leading lady, were played by actresses named Yoko; it’s not than unusual a female given name in Japan!) — and though it had the usual messy plot and tacky effects, it was also clearly the work of a director, Haruyasu Noguchi, with a good camera eye. The plot is basically a fusion of King Kong and the 1957 Boris Karloff vehicle Voodoo Island — in which he played a professional debunker of phony spiritualists hired by a developer who wants to build a mega-resort on a deserted island and seeks to put an end to all this nonsense being spread by the natives that the place is cursed (which, of course, it is). In this version, Playmate publisher George Inoue (Tatsuya Fuji) wants to build “Playland,” a super-resort on a South Pacific island, and in order to stock his island with suitably exotic flora and fauna to draw in paying customers, he sends out a scientific expedition headed by young scientist Hiroshi Kurosaki (Tamio Kawaji) and his photojournalist girlfriend Itoko Koyanagi (Yoko Yamamoto — see, I told you the leading lady was an actress named Yoko!). Also along is the obligatory “comic-relief” idiot, Daize Tonooka (Yuji Okada), who for some reason came off (at least for me) as a Japanese version of Paul Lynde. The first half of the movie is a farrago of shipboard scenes and native dances once the expedition lands on Playmate Island (or whatever it was called before Inoue bought it), and director Noguchi shows his readiness for biggers and betters with overhead shots, daring editing and some quite artful angling and color in the native dance sequences. The natives, it turns out, worship a godlike creature called “Gappa,” a prehistoric remnant (there’s no indication, pace the American title, that the creature is from another planet, prehistoric or otherwise), and while exploring a cave the expedition discovers an egg from which Gappa hatches.
It turns out there are actually three survivors of the species — a Papa Gappa, a Mama Gappa and a little Baby Gappa — and when Inoue insists that the Baby Gappa be taken to Tokyo, where he intends to suppress any revelation of its existence until the next issue of Playmate is ready for the presses and he can scoop the world, Papa and Mama Gappa understandably get upset and come to Tokyo. They start doing their Godzilla impressions and stomping out the city (I was amused when they crushed all the big apartment buildings but left one whose neon sign identified it as “Bar” — shades of The Leech Woman! — in place) until finally Kurosaki (whose name, almost inevitably, I kept hearing as “Kawasaki” and wondering why he was named after a Japanese motorcycle or SUV) figures out that the only way to make them go away, since of course no human weapons affect them at all, is to give them back their kid and have them high-tail it back to the island. (Apparently Kurosaki, or the film’s writers — Ryuzo Nakanishi and Gan Yamazaki — had seen the original Mothra, another film in which a presumably invincible monster is persuaded to leave urban Japan alone by being allowed to return to his place of origin with his pets, the nine-inch-tall women in a cage around whom much of that film revolved.) Alas, once the Gappas (flying creatures with bird-like wings and beaks grafted onto the basic Godzilla-style Japanese mega-monster template) come on the scene and start stomping out Tokyo, Noguchi seems to lose all interest in coming up with interesting visuals and shoots it as flatly as most of the competing films from bigger Japanese companies, hamstrung by the fact that the Gappas are people in ill-fitting monster suits stamping out balsa-wood model buildings and easily fending off attacks from toy tanks. (As with Yongary, one suspects the local Woolworth’s or whatever the Japanese equivalent is was the production’s prop department.) Still, it’s a good deal more interesting and more fun than many of the competitors in the genre, and though it was hardly a great film it was the sort of mindless fun that helps you unwind after a long and tiring day.
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