Apocalypse Later

Future Kick (1991)

2012-01-21T23:03:00.000-07:00

Director: Clay Robeson
Stars: Don 'The Dragon' Wilson, Meg Foster, Christopher Penn, Eb Lottimer and Al Ruscio

I love scifi movies from the eighties and nineties that attempt to depict awesomely advanced technology without either a budget or a clue. Somehow they don't annoy me the way the fake tech in shows like CSI: Miami does. Maybe it's the difference in setting between the future and the present. When Horatio Caine's team enhance a dot into the front page of the New York Times so he can flip it over and read the sports scores on the back, it's deliberate misrepresentation. When Don 'The Dragon' Wilson plays a cyborg kickfighting machine in a future where the rich live on the moon and hold down conversations with AIs, I find it cute that the filmmakers forget to or couldn't afford to do anything about the size of the computer monitors or the crappy user interfaces on them. The futurism here is wildly inconsistent. New Los Angeles has no water but they still have newspapers. Local phone calls are expensive but organ replacement isn't.

Most importantly, virtual reality is apparently the new thing in this unidentified future year (it just says the good days on Earth were 'a long time ago'), just as it was in 1991 when Future Kick was made. Howard Morgan, rich computer programmer, is the sole designer of UltraDream, such a promising product that his company thinks they can sell 50,000 copies of it, even though it's still a buggy prototype. Maybe it'll be a toy for the rich and cost a fortune, I don't know. Anyway, he lives in opulence on the moon with a wife played by Meg Foster and all the rest of the 1%, so he doesn't generally have to deal with non-virtual reality. Unfortunately his senior publisher has him go to Earth, so that's it for him. New Los Angeles is a dark, rainy slum full of criminals, terrorists and clubs playing really unsophisticated electronic music. The cops are so busy they don't have much of a chance to do anything for anyone and are so corrupt they don't care.

There is one hope for the people. The corporations running the world did create 'biomechanical men' called Cyberons to fight the criminal element of society. That turned out to be a really bad idea for them because it didn't take too long for the Cyberons to realise that their corporate creators were the real criminals and so turned on them. In retaliation, they set the Corporate Police loose to kill all ten of them and now there's only one left: Walker, played by world kickboxing champion Don 'The Dragon' Wilson. This is a Roger Corman picture, made through his New Concorde company, and as much as I love Corman pictures generally, the presence of Don 'The Dragon' tends to indicate that it's going to be a stinker. It isn't really Wilson himself, though his acting only serves to show how good a kickboxer he is. I think it's just that he has the same problem John Travolta has: the inability to tell a good script from a bad one.

To be brutally honest, he isn't even the lead in this one, as much as his name is most prominent and the title refers specifically to him. He gets surprisingly few fight scenes, which mostly take place in the dark. They might even be the worst thing about the film, as the fight choreography is unsatisfyingly wooden with every move slow and telegraphed. There are cool and surprising death scenes, but they're mostly separate and when you realise that the best fight is against Chris Penn, you know you're in trouble. Really Wilson is only there to kick people and flesh out the futuristic background, while Jeff Pomerantz, who plays Howard Morgan, is there to set up the story by getting murdered. The lead is Meg Foster, Morgan's wife, who takes the shuttle down to Earth to investigate. To say that Nancy is out of her element in New Los Angeles is a powerful understatement, but Foster is the only member of the cast who even attempts to act.

She does a pretty good job too, especially when you know the twist that will be revealed at the end of the movie and which I won't spoil here. It's a cheap and unsatisfying gimmick but it's the key to everything that goes before. It's also adds a good deal of depth to Foster's performance, which makes it even more unfortunate that we don't get to know about it until it's over. What I can say is that she varies her acting considerably throughout. On the moon she's comfortable and alive but on Earth she's a fish out of water. Obviously traumatised by her husband's murder, in meaningless conversation she's utterly devoid of emotion, less a character and more a prop that floats through the film, but when emotions are called for, she comes alive. Her progression from professional victim to capable sidekick is not particularly credible but Foster does give it a fair attempt and that's more than anyone else in this film does. She also provides the narration.

Beyond Foster, the only reason to watch is for the pseudo-futuristic exploitation: not just fights but death scenes and pole dancing and odd little touches here and there. There's a competitive video game called LaserBlade that brings a whole new meaning to the term 'deathmatch'. There are clubs like the Trocadero 2000 House of Pleasure, which is presumably a really stupid name for a club in the future, but it does employ a lot of very limber half naked pole dancers. There's an assassin called Hynes, played by Eb Lottimer, who doesn't pass up any opportunity to go over the top, whether he's ripping people's hearts out of their chests or not. If you have a background in Corman movies, you won't be too surprised that a decent amount of these moments weren't even shot for this film: the dancers are all from Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls and the shuttle shots and other space footage are taken from Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World.

Anything to save a buck, huh? That's hardly new for Corman but it's more obvious than usual here. Behind Hynes, who's the psycho of the story, the real villain of the piece is the NewBody Corporation which doesn't get much of a chance to get established. Mostly we see one office, which is dimly lit and almost unfurnished, just a piece of space to house Dr Sado, who doesn't get to live up to his name. It's as obvious a cheap set as I think I've seen outside of microbudget cinema and it doesn't help the film. The bizarre thing is that nothing much does except reaching the end and discovering the final twist, which calls for a reevaluation of the whole picture. On a first viewing, it's a complex but unsatisfying film with little more than Foster to recommend it. It stands up better on a second run with foreknowledge of the twist at the heart of everything, but unfortunately it just isn't the sort of movie you're likely to watch twice.

3 Days Later: Jesus Christ, Zombie Lord (2008)

2012-01-19T18:31:00.002-07:00

Director: Clay Robeson
Stars: Dave Dyson, Marcus Sams and Amber Price

Another film that really puts its essence into its title, 3 Days Later is a surprisingly spot on spoof of Jesus Christ Superstar, done with people who can really sing and mostly know how to keep a straight face when departing from the classic story of our Lord and Saviour by suggesting that after his three days in the tomb he rose as a zombie. The only surprise I felt was in realising that, in our modern zombie-soaked culture, nobody had done this before! It opens with the suggestion that it's a proof-of-concept for a feature length zombie rock opera, but if that's not a gimmick it seems to have got stuck there because its web site forwards to a YouTube channel which hasn't seen an update in almost three years. Whether they really ever wanted to expand it or not, they shouldn't. At seven minutes, it's a funny musical short that would serve as a welcome humour break to any festival set. At ninety, it would drag painfully. Even twenty would be a stretch.

Of course there's very little acting and next to no sets. It's made to appear that this preview is taken from a minimalist stage musical production with attention given to costumes and facial hair and a little choreography but not much more. Everything revolves around the songs and fortunately those are solid, especially in the brief snippets we're treated to. 'What's that smell? Tell me what's happening?' the chorus chants as they dance around the newly risen Lord of the Undead. 'I don't know how to kill him,' sings Mary Magdalene as Jesus munches on an leg. 'If you eat these folks I'll know you're no hoax,' suggests the gay 70s disco dancer. You get the picture. If you're thinking that it sounds really stupid then you shouldn't bother seeking it out at all, but if you're smiling at the idea of this, you're going to love it. The voices are capable and the musical direction is solid. It does what it aims to do with aplomb.

Bloodstained Terror (2007)

2012-01-19T18:30:00.001-07:00

Directors: Cody Cather and Doug Gehl
Stars: Dudley Bowlin, Jane Wines, Daren Palacio, Lianna Hubbard, Jake Cather, Brandon Bond, Ryan Mahoney, Austin Logue, Matt Anderson and Doug Gehl

Unashamedly loud and cheap from moment one, Bloodstained Terror obviously knows exactly what its limitations are but it really doesn't care. It's nothing but a bunch of amateur gorehounds emulating the double bill with trailers concept done by Grindhouse, but condensed to a running time of under six and a half minutes, credits not included, and apparently without even a hint of a budget. I have to admire the sheer balls it takes to attempt something like this and submit to a film festival, but realistically they ended up with roughly what you might expect they ended up with: a fun little home video with terrible acting, bad aging effects and next to no plot, but also copious amounts of gore, backyard wrestling and offensive fun. These are probably exactly the sort of guys you want to hang out with at weekends but, to be brutally honest, if I made a film at the weekend I doubt I'd want to watch it at a film festival either.

The 'double feature' is Blood Wine and Reelestate Terror or, to be more accurate, Cody Cather's Blood Wine and Brandon Bond in Reelestate Terror, as there's more humour here than you might initially expect and these complete unknowns play up the cheesy antics of the stars pretty well. Blink and you'll miss a character named Bigot Tree. Blood Wine has an arguing couple walk in on a pair of cannibals mid-munch who promptly eat them too. Reelestate Terror has an agent show a house full of serial killers with inevitable effect, but he saves the day with his wrestling moves. In between the two is a trailer for a picture apparently called Jesus Christ Presents: You Suck at Life. Yeah, I said there's a lot of humour here. I didn't say that it's particularly deep. What would you expect from a picture with a credit thanking Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Lucio Fulci? Well that's exactly what you get here. You can't diss these guys for false advertising.

To be brutally honest, it's not a bad way to spend seven minutes if you're into this sort of thing. The wrestling is surprisingly capable and the gore is agreeably plentiful. I can't believe anyone could be bored when that seven minutes includes two separate stories and a trailer, jam packed full of grindhouse blatancy. It's not unfair to point out that there are ninety minute features out there with plots just as flimsy as these. On the other hand it can't be ignored that the production quality is so low that it approaches non-existent. It's obvious that the realtor's costume is a suit jacket on top of whatever metal shirt Brandon Bond showed up in. The lighting and sound are abysmal and I'd suggest the money all went on gore effects if I didn't believe that Cody Cather, Doug Gehl and their colleagues at The Terror Studios just pooled whatever cool props they had sitting in their closets already. As deep underground as it gets, on its own terms it's genius.

Shrunken Heads (1994)

2012-01-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

Director: Richard Elfman
Stars: Aeryk Egan, Becky Herbst, A J Damato, Bo Sharon, Darris Love, Meg Foster and Julius Harris

For Full Moon Entertainment's first theatrical release, Charles Band pulled out all the stops and went totally weird, helped to no small degree by bringing in Richard Elfman to direct. No, it isn't as far out there as Forbidden Zone, but it really thinks about trying it. After all, the hero of the film, for all intents and purposes, used to be a colonel in the Tonton Macoutes, the brutal secret police in Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier. Now Mr Sumatra is in New York, running a newspaper and comic book stand, practicing voodoo on the side. No wonder the local kids think he's scary. Blaxploitation legend Julius Harris has fun in his last film, goggling his eyes at every opportunity. If that isn't strange enough for you, Meg Foster is the butch lesbian head honcho of the criminal underworld, Big Moe. Oh, and the main characters are the reanimated shrunken heads of three children, which fly through the streets seeking revenge on the gang that killed them.

Initially it isn't this wacky. It begins like a fifties family movie, with the bad kids bullying the good kids and a love triangle linking the two sides. The good kids are Tommy Larsen, Bill Turner and Freddie Thompson and, inspired by superheroes like Superman and the Green Lantern, take an ill advised stand for the powers of truth, justice and the American way. First, they take down the bad kids, the Vipers, by filming them stripping a car bare and handing the footage to the police. Then, after Big Moe bails out her boys and has the good kids brought to her, they escape with all her number running slips. That leads to the inevitable conclusion: she has Vinny and his Vipers shoot them dead. We're under half an hour in and the heroes are no more. What's going to happen now? Well, Mr Sumatra happens. He bubbles up his big cauldron and cooks up his Haitian black magic and Tommy and his friends are back as vengeance crazed shrunken heads.

With all these elements, this story could get particularly dark and twisted, but the music refuses to let that happen. Richard Band's score has a notably light hearted edge to it, more so than his usual scores for his brother's films. Director Richard Elfman brought in his brother Danny too, to compose the film's theme. Every time the film gets gruesomely dark, such as when the shrunken heads murder a pair of bad guys trying to rape a woman in a dark alley, it's followed up with the joyous discovery that these malefactors are turned into neighbourhood conscious zombies who weed gardens and pick up trash. If we need the point hammered home that that this is far more of a fantasy than a horror movie, we never lose sight of the romance angle, between Tommy and Sally Conway, who wasn't even fifteen when he was murdered. Hey, if the tween girls can go for sparkling vampires, why can't the teen girls go for shrunken heads? It works for me.

The dialogue is also notably over the top, meaning that there's no possible way we can take any part of it the remotest bit seriously. That doesn't work too well for the kids, because it obviously isn't really them talking but what they've become, mere tools of vengeance. On the other hand, it works wonderfully for the adult leads, because they revel in the roles. Meg Foster is a bizarre but inspired casting choice for Big Moe because it's the sort of role you'd expect to see someone like Al Pacino play. She plays it surprisingly quietly, spending more attention on chomping cigars or placating Mitzi, her dizzy blonde plaything, than running her empire. That seems to be taken utterly for granted. It's easy to see just how much fun Foster was having as her eyes sparkle with every tough as nails line that she delivers, but I wish she'd had more to do. Especially given how completely unlikely her character is, she deserved more of an opportunity to build it.

Julius Harris got the screen time he needed and he dominates here. I've always felt that with his darker skin, creased face and cold dead stare, Harris looked tougher than most of his colleagues in the blaxploitation era, even when playing alongside far better known names like Ron O'Neal or Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson. He's perfect for the part of Mr Sumatra, however often writer Matthew Bright changed the tone of the picture. I've never been able to buy into him as a good guy on screen, but Mr Sumatra is so far from the regular sort of hero that he doesn't have that trouble here. Freaky, scary and magnetic all at once, he'd have been even better if this story had been played out as a serious horror film rather than a quirky romantic comedy fantasy. He's gifted with a few memorable moments. 'You can run but you can't hide,' is close to the most clichéd line in the book but he makes it his own, even more than Vernon Wells in Mad Max 2.

As a picture, this has to be a love it or hate it movie. I can imagine a lot of people not making it to the end, purely because of how wild it becomes, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who does will love it. It's almost the definition of an underground cult film. Bright grew up with the Elfmans and it shows in their films that they make a good team, but this isn't just theirs. It's obvious that they tried to make a Charles Band movie here, albeit with a good deal of their own quirkiness brought to the table, but it doesn't quite make it. There are Elfman elements and Full Moon elements but it ends up being neither, more of a bastard hybrid that stands unashamedly alone, in equal parts a fifties Disney movie, a cheesy horror flick, a mind trip comedy and a foul mouthed JD picture. Enjoy it, or Mr Sumatra will pluck out your tongues with bull cutters and roast them, and take your brains and chill them for the purposes of garnishment. You don't want that, do you?

Leviathan (1989)

2012-01-14T01:49:00.000-07:00

Director: George P Cosmatos
Stars: Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, Michael Carmine, Meg Foster, Lisa Eilbacher and Hector Elizondo

Given that tomorrow I'll be at DarkCon where I'll get the opportunity to meet Ernie Hudson and Meg Foster, it seemed appropriate tonight to watch the only picture they made together, a 1989 horror thriller set 16,000 feet underneath the Atlantic Ocean. It's not a great movie, hardly the peak of the few films George P Cosmatos directed. This came in between Rambo (the first one), Cobra and Tombstone and it really doesn't sit well in that company. Its good side is that a great cast mostly tries to elevate the material but the bad is that it only gets more and more derivative with each minute that passes, starting with an ill advised scene of suspense. For some reason we're supposed to thrill as a character two miles below the surface almost runs out of oxygen on his way back to base. It sounds good on paper but we have no idea who he or anyone else is at this point and so have zero emotional investment. We simply don't know enough to care.

Instead we quickly realise where the chief influences for the picture came from. The bottom of the sea in this film looks uncannily like the set of Aliens, especially with its shades of blue. The parallels with outer space continue, perhaps fairly given that it only takes a simple hurricane to apparently strand these people as far away from civilisation as if they were in space, but they're not taken in any new direction. With the crew's return to the habitat area of Mining Shack #7, we realise that we're watching Alien not Aliens and start wondering how the roles match up. Given the diverse make up of the crew, some are obvious. Ernie Hudson is Yaphet Kotto and Hector Elizondo is Harry Dean Stanton. Amanda Pays takes Veronica Cartwright's part and a relentlessly monotone Peter Weller is the geologist in charge, thus Tom Skerritt. Richard Crenna is the film's big unknown, so perhaps he'll turn out to be Sigourney Weaver. That's the real question, right?

As the story progresses, the similarities only proliferate. This is a mining expedition, just like the Nostromo. The crew locate a scuttled Russian ship called the Leviathan down at the ocean floor, rather than a derelict alien spaceship on a planetoid. It's certainly not on active duty in the Baltic where it's supposed to be. Of course they raid its safe for cool stuff, discovering that the crew's files are all marked deceased, and unwittingly bring back a monster that will grow and develop along with the running time and hunt down the crew members one by one. What would become the Weyland-Yutani company in the Alien franchise is the Tri Oceanic Mining Corporation here. The large comic relief crab looks uncannily like a facehugger and the underwater explosion plays out just like the alien egg puffball effect. The display screens are primitive, though the computer AI is sophisticated. There's even similar drool. I just wondered where Jones the cat was.

There are some minor differences, not that they add up to a heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things. My favourite is that at one point the monster bursts into a crew member's chest rather than out but the most interesting is the way it develops. In some ways it's a direct take on the creature in Alien, as expected, in others reminding more of The Thing, but there's a good deal of originality in the creature design, as much the concept behind it as the way it's constructed. That said, the creative vision of someone like H R Giger is notable only for its absence. The characters don't die in the order we expect, but that merely highlights how much more effective Dan O'Bannon's decisions were than those of scriptwriter David Webb Peoples here. This is far more conventional and predictable, the only surprise being that we don't get the strong female lead we expect. Again, that's a disappointment. The last few minutes are almost an Arnie flick.

The only real reason to watch the film is for the acting, but even there you're more likely to be disappointed than entertained. Weller is the most disappointing, but I wonder how fair that is. It's two years after RoboCop and he certainly seems to have forgotten that he was playing a human being again, but it's possible that he was deliberately evoking the deep ennui his character must have felt. The problem is that it's very hard to play bored and still keep the audience's attention. Here we wonder whether Peter Weller or his character, Steven Beck, is the most bored with the proceedings. Crenna plays Dr Glen Thompson like William Holden would, their physical similarity never seeming quite so strong as here, though facially he's more like an old Steve McQueen. The most prominent female member of the cast, Amanda Pays, is unfortunately given little to do and so she fails to achieve much more than demonstrate similar underwear to Sigourney Weaver.

Lower down the cast list, the acting is more solid because the characters are deliberately set up as character parts. Daniel Stern is suitably juvenile, Hector Elizondo suitably sharp, Ernie Hudson suitably heroic, Lisa Eilbacher suitably colourful and Michael Carmine somehow bizarrely both suitably calm and suitably hysterical, depending on the scene. That leaves Meg Foster to play up the villainy as the crew's corporate liaison on the surface. She's first shown at the other end of a videolink, so we hear her husky voice long before we see those famous blue eyes. She's smooth and bureaucratic and serves as the face to the faceless corporation, remaining infuriatingly calm as the story gets progressively frantic. In the end she starts to fit the Ian Holm role from Alien, so we wonder if she's going to turn out to be an android. The picture would have been much more entertaining if it decided to get that off the wall. Unfortunately it doesn't.

Tinted Windows (2009)

2012-01-13T01:20:00.000-07:00

Directors: Adam DeKraker
Stars: Toby Levin and Adam Halpin

Charlie apparently didn't have a great time at the party tonight. He's tired, his friends are jerks and he's going home. When he gets to his car though he finds someone outside it, someone who desperately wants a lift. He'll even pay a thousand bucks for a ride, apparently because he likes Charlie's tinted windows. Given that I saw Tinted Windows at a horror festival, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the gimmick to this short is but it's a capable concept that's explained well by writer/director Adam DeKraker. Initially it felt stupid and overly simple, but every time I came up with a reason why it was dumb the characters promptly explained why it wasn't. By the time the credits rolled after eleven minutes of cat and mouse, I found myself admiring how ambiguous the stranger's character was. Is he really good at what he does or really bad at what he does? I could provide a decent case for either side and I like that.

There are only two actors in the film, played by Toby Levin and Adam Halpin, and while they aren't going to win Oscars any time soon they're natural actors who do credit to the material. In the same way that the story won me over against initial complaints, so did the actors. Charlie isn't particularly bright and his dialogue and demeanour reflect that, but Levin's acting helps to hammer that home: delivering occasionally repetitive lines without stage school aplomb makes him seem very real. Similarly Halpin plays the stranger well, his occasional imperfections initially noticed but then rationalised as just an imperfect role the character is playing. Again, is he really good or really bad? In fact the whole film is deceptively simple but could be read in many ways. The script may well be intended as a metaphor for unprotected gay sex, but it doesn't matter. Anyone whose interest is piqued will be able to find their own meaning in it.

Bloody Daisies (2009)

2012-01-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

Directors: Cameron Kerr and David E White
Stars: David E White, Catarina de Castro and Cameron Kerr

Two men wait with daisies at the same fork in the road in the middle of nowhere. The thinner of the pair is the delightfully named Mitchell Lovenest, neatly but casually dressed and with an old school poet look and long hair. The larger one is Frank Winthrop, who made far less effort to look good with his Kojak T-shirt and shorts. He's early though and it's half an hour before he decides to talk to Mitchell and find out that they're waiting for the same girl, Daisy Tinkelbaum, who then appears out of nowhere and disappears back into nowhere, all without warning. She wants them to do something, but they don't know what. All they know is that there's a spade stuck into the ground in a clearing that wobbles with incentive and they have to figure out what it's for. Of course it becomes clear in the end, with a neat if not entirely unexpected twist to cap it off, but the journey becomes more interesting than the destination.

It's a patently low budget affair (the Dogme concept is cited) with occasionally dubious sound so dialogue can be hard to catch, especially from Catarina de Castro as Daisy, because when she talks she's deliberately obscured, visually and audibly, and it's often a little overdone. She's mostly a prop for the two men to banter against, and they do elevate the story with a notably playful sense of humour that keeps proceedings interesting with flashforwards, flashbacks and imaginary possibilities. The flashbacks are very reminiscent of early Guy Ritchie and the use of sound effects to highlight mood is more like a cartoon. What I found most intriguing is that apart from being thrust into the same situation, the two characters are utterly different, yet they're not just the co-stars of the film, they're the co-writers and co-directors too. What they conjure up runs too long at fourteen minutes, but otherwise is enjoyably quirky.

Shrove Tuesday (2009)

2012-01-11T23:55:00.001-07:00

Director: Lee Andrew Matthews
Stars: Jayde Newman, Mark Newman, Gina Newman, Jeffrey Prewer, Alison Cochran, Poppy Matthews and Peter Dean

A long short film, Shrove Tuesday is fascinating viewing but it's also wildly inconsistent. Less a horror movie and more a fairy tale in the vein of the Brothers Grimm, it opens like a Punch and Judy show in rhyme. Its plot is as simple as a colourful warning for children to be careful when walking through the woods. There isn't much more than that as far as the story goes: Pancake Marion is a mythical boogeyman with a brief moment of sympathy that's promptly ignored: a child burned alive by villagers for being evil. She emerged to bite off their heads and become a myth, kept away only by an enchanted flower. If you pick that flower in Marionwood, you'll be promptly killed, like the drunken yokel who opens up the live action part of the film. To avoid horrible death, simply don't pick flowers. Naturally that's what people do in this film, but that's about it. We don't need to know anything more. Cue the fire and blood and gore and mayhem.

So the story is cute but hardly essential. What makes the film interesting is the visual style that it employs, which is highly unusual. A good part of it is rapid fire editing, common enough today as distraction, but there's a huge amount of effects too, as a real mixed media thing. A lot of CGI sits alongside modelwork and traditional animation. Much of it is live action, but with surprisingly few lines for anyone and even there it's often played out like a comic book, with a succession of freeze frames frozen in turn, often at stark anglesm and then zoomed into. This is only the most obvious, but the angles and effects are all reminiscent of print based design too. Much of the point seems to be to aim for mood rather than story and it succeeds best in some neatly framed cinematic images with great lighting, poetically shot in the Jean Rollin style. So there's much to watch and enjoy, with the mindset and feel of a Tiger Lillies song.

Unfortunately it's not consistent. Some of it is gorgeous, moody and effective, but some of it is also obviously and painfully cheap. I'm still not sure whether that's deliberate or not but it does cause us to wonder. Even the few characters are inconsistent. The one we see most of is a young girl obviously set up to be Little Purple Riding Hood, literally skipping through the forest to take something to her grandmother, setting us up for an admittedly gruesome fairy tale for kids. Yet before this we've got past the yokel at the beginning, who is rude and crude, even when talking drunkenly to Mr Worm and Mistress Bunny Rabbit. It's hard to picture the intended audience. Even the mayhem varies between highly stylised violence that wouldn't be out of place in that Punch and Judy style opening and outrageous gore that totally wouldn't. For a film that seems to revel in being everything at once, it's something to enjoy a few times but still be confused by.

Devil Dynamite (1987)

2012-01-08T17:20:00.000-07:00

Director: Godfrey Ho
Stars: Mack Stuart, Walter Bond, Richard Phillips, Ted Wald, Eddie Leo and Mark Coston

A year before Robo Vampire, one of the most awesomely bad movies ever filmed, Hong Kong mashup maestro Godfrey Ho was at it again with Devil Dynamite. It has everything you could possibly want from a Godfrey Ho movie and more, if you're into that sort of thing. Most people aren't but Ho has become a surprising cult figure in film, perhaps because of the sheer blatancy he exhibited in patching his pictures together. He made over a hundred movies, but a pretty large percentage of the footage came from other Asian movies that he'd possibly bought the rights to, many of which hadn't been finished or released. Into this footage he'd splice newly shot scenes that only rarely pretended to have anything to do with the story at hand. In many ways they're just videos for ninja fetishists, people who believe that anything would be better if only it had a couple of colour coded ninjas. I'm not one of them but I'm building similar fetishes.

Needless to say, it's completely awful, but if you've seen Godfrey Ho movies before and you're stlil reading this then you're not going to care. This one is also courteous enough to get down to awesomeness even while the opening credits roll. A Taoist priest shows how awesome he is by juggling fire and leaping through a kata, but the token westerner with a beard, Ronald by name, renders him ineffective with a mere voodoo doll. The priest can't complain because Ronald is his boss for whom he's managing four hopping vampires or jiangshi. He's a particularly cut rate sort of boss for this sort of scenario but we should never forget that this is a Godfrey Ho movie. He's white and he has a beard, which is more than enough to make him a villain. I could have had a great career as a villain in Godfrey Ho movies. My beard is bigger, for a start, and I could easily manage scenes as complex as chuckling and asking henchmen to bring in new victims.

Meanwhile, outside are ninjas, leaping around in the dark. What sort of Godfrey Ho movie could it be without ninjas? Their job is to eliminate Steven Cox who, inconveniently for them, has just been released after ten years in prison, so they don't find him there. They slice up some of his fellow prisoners just because, but get promptly wiped out by the hopping vampires. It's all a test, you see. 'Vampires are undoubtedly the ultimate in efficient fighting killers,' explains the Taoist priest. 'No-one's able to stop them,' he adds, as he stops them with the traditional talisman to the forehead. Jiangshi fans can't complain about a lack of action here, and it continues with an attack on a restaurant, apparently to interrupt a couple of diners who want to explain to us who Steven Cox is. Unfortunately for the hopping vampires, one is a kung fu master called Tony and the other is Alex, who can instantly turn into a spaceman in a silver suit. I didn't see that coming.

I'd wondered about the Chinese RoboCop in Robo Vampire and I wondered here how a Chinese guy with an English accent can suddenly transform into a refugee from an Intel clean room. No explanation is offered and nobody seems to find it remotely unusual. Why would anyone ask? Well, as I discovered last night as Oriental Cinema's Damon Foster celebrated 30 years of metal heroes with a few key episodes of Space Sheriff Gavan, that this was an entire genre. This was a Japanese TV show that featured a lead character who could don a battle suit in a thousandth of a second through the aid of bizarrely explained technology and fight evil, and it inspired countless followers. RoboCop had a western storyline but was obviously inspired by the metal heroes from Japan and Godfrey Ho simply ripped off the ripoff. Asian audiences in 1987 couldn't avoid metal heroes so needed no explanation for why Alex can transform at will into Shadow Warrior.

Eventually we find out what the point of all this is. Steven Cox is a solid hero, a gambling king with a hidden treasure who knows kung fu and can dodge daggers thrown in the dark. However a decade ago he was betrayed by his lover, Madame Mary, the local queen of the underworld, who runs all the gambling in town and surely can't have been legal ten years earlier. Now she's trying to marry a cop called Louis who doesn't ever seem to work. Somewhere within this story is the gold, but I still haven't figured out how even after two viewings. Madame Mary knows where it is but doesn't go to get it, even though she put Cox away for a decade. What's more, he seems somehow surprised when she decides to do something about it. It almost seems that putting him in prison and sending hopping vampires to kill him is OK, but going after his gold after ten years of ignoring it is beyond the pale. Maybe it's just the inscrutable oriental mind at work.

More likely, it's just Godfrey Ho not paying too much attention to what he patched together. Like that's a surprise. Certainly this feels like it's all from two completely different movies, which of course it was. Brian Thomas, author of VideoHound's Dragon: Asian Action & Cult Flicks suggests that the half with Madame Mary, Louis and Steven Cox may be taken from Stunning Gambling, a 1982 Taiwanese picture. If it is, then it may even be the second time Godfrey Ho reused footage from that film, as in the year it came out he apparently edited it into Ninja, the Violent Sorceror as well. The other half of the picture, featuring all the other characters and all the supernatural elements, may or may not be entirely new but it's hard to tell. It makes so little sense that there may be multiple sources here too. Only Steven Cox makes it to both sides, but rarely and in dark scenes where I can't be convinced he's even played by the same actor.

Needless to say, logic takes a back seat so far in the back that it's out of sight. Of course I'm not going to expect logic in a Godfrey Ho picture, but some scenes come completely out of nowhere. About half an hour in there's a truly bizarre scene where zombie ninjas attack a children's party with a ghost girl and a fake hopping vampire kid. Enter Shadow Warrior from the ether, exit any semblance of sanity. In its place is the sort of disconcerting 'What did I just see?' moment where we wonder if someone changed the laws of physics and didn't feel it was worthy of mention. It's not often I have to rewind a movie to watch a scene again to confirm to my brain that I saw what I thought I saw, but this was definitely one of those. I couldn't even figure out exactly why some of what happens happens. Sure, I now understand the metal hero thing, but there seems to be a conspicuous Michael Jackson influence too. This metal hero moonwalks. Was I dreaming?

Of course, this is what draws a certain type of audience to Godfrey Ho movies to begin with, so we'd be disappointed if he didn't deliver. Devil Dynamite is short on sense but long on awesome. It's mostly free from the fatal flaw of many of his films, namely talky scenes inducing boredom. Instead it keeps up a steady supply of hopping vampires, ninjas, kung fu and blissfully surreal Taoist sorcery. I've long been a sucker for jiangshi, but the sparkling acupuncture conjurations the priest performs here to aid their recovery from battle led me to believe that every movie should contain a scene of Taoist sorcery. I guess it took me this long to realise that it's what Gone with the Wind was really lacking! I think I could watch a Nicolas Cage movie without crying if only there was Taoist sorcery to distract me! If only Michael Bay could learn from Godfrey Ho! The Ed Wood of Asia was never coherent but he instrinsically understood insane awesomeness.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

2012-01-08T02:34:00.000-07:00

Director: Eli Craig
Stars: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden and Jesse Moss

For about five minutes, Tucker and Dale vs Evil is the clichéd and stereotyped nonsense I had a sneaking feeling it was going to be, from the little I knew about it beforehand. Tucker and Dale are creepy rednecks passed on an Appalachian country road by a bunch of college kids. You won't be surprised to find that the girls are gorgeous, the guys are assholes and they're all about beer, sex, dope and bad fireside ghost stories. Ally is the lead hot blonde chick. Chad is the lead asshole. You've seen this a hundred times before, down to every little detail. It's only the names that ever change, right? Well, what changes here is that the rednecks are the heroes. It's outside Last Chance Gas that Dale is shown to be a sympathetic lead. It's when he builds his confidence up to approach the girls and smile and laugh with a scythe in his hand that it gets funny. By the time they're pulled over by a deputy with Dale's head in Tucker's lap, it becomes priceless.

And it stays that way for most of the picture. I laughed my way through this on the big screen and I enjoyed it just as much at home second time around. Partly it's because it's your standard slasher movie turned entirely on its head. Partly it's the way proceedings, including all the gory death scenes you expect, are set up through an inventive set of misunderstandings. Partly it's just because the roles are refreshingly reversed. The rednecks, usually the characters to fear or fight in pictures like this, are the sympathetic heroes. The college kids, far from being either the sympathetic victims or the focus of the story, are mere idiots who deserve everything they get, especially when they pay attention to Chad, the ostensible leader of the pack whose dream must be to get voted onto the island in Lord of the Flies. Those of us who realise that the real serial killers are forgettable normal people see how utterly everyday he is, right down to his inhaler.

This whole concept works wonderfully, brought gloriously to life by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine, who are magnetic and engaging in the title roles. I've been a fan of Tudyk for a while now, most obviously from Whedonverse shows like Firefly and Dollhouse but also as far back as A Knight's Tale. I only know Labine from the TV show Reaper, which I gave up on quickly even though he and Ray Wise were superb in that show. Had the humour in it been more like the humour here, I'd probably have loved it. I'm somehow surprised to find that that was far from the first thing Labine has done but he'd apparently been acting on screen for sixteen years before that. He's much older than he looks. He certainly shows his experience here, making a great double act with Tudyk. Their timing is impeccable, whether they're merely lying in the dirt or running with chainsaws, and especially in the tender moments when they're even more hilarious than ever.

They dominate proceedings here, to the degree that almost everyone else in the picture fades into the background as much as the trees. Only Allison is truly noticeable, in the stylish form of Katrina Bowden, currently going strong on TV's 30 Rock. You could call her the love interest, but only if you read the film as the routine slasher it isn't. She manages to endow her role with much more than just her looks, which are certainly pleasing to the eye. She's also the film's MacGuffin, as her apparent kidnap by Tucker and Dale, who merely saved her from drowning, is what drives the story forward for all the other characters. She could have done exactly the same thing with a fraction of the screen time and as much as I enjoyed looking at her every time she appeared on screen, I wonder if the film might have gained an edgier tone if she didn't do it as often, even as far as only appearing at the beginning and the end.

That leaves Jesse Moss, another surprisingly experienced young actor, to guide us into the more traditional side of the story as Chad, the psycho college kid. Maybe three quarters of the way in, we find that a few hints dropped early on aren't merely flavour because they coalesce into a plot that's recognisable as a traditional slasher story. Unfortunately this just isn't as much fun as the main approach the film takes. Thus far we've loved the twisted logic of the story, the slasher flick turned on its head. We realise that it makes just as much sense, if not more sense, than most of the cheesy slasher movies we've seen and it pushes us into wondering if we should view them in the future with the different perspective of this film in mind. What if what we see isn't reality but really perceived reality, seen through the eyes of supposed victims? Jason Voorhees was always a little sympathetic. How much perspective shift would we need for Freddy Krueger to join him?

So after changing our perspectives so agreeably, it feels disappointing when the writers, Morgan Jurgenson and Eli Craig, seem to back it up a little and try to change them back again, at least somewhat. It does give them the opportunity to wrap up the story but it felt to me like the easy way out and everything achieved up until that point deserved a better finalé. The large stack of conveniences needed to set up and finish off this side of the story comes far too quickly, mostly in a single overblown scene that's reminiscent of a Scooby Doo ending and it feels unworthy. I'm not sure what a good finalé would have been, given that the necessary build up to a deeper, more crafted finish would surely eat into the character and humour of the main thrust of the film, which is its greatest success, but I can't help but feel that it isn't what we're given. Fortunately it isn't difficult to shrug off after perhaps 80 minutes of the funniest gore movie since Brain Dead.

Shaolin vs Frankenstein (2012)

2012-01-05T23:24:00.000-07:00

Director: Nam Ki-nam
Star: Shim Hyung-rae

Here's a first for Apocalypse Later. This isn't just an obscure movie, it's an obscure movie that I'm in. So is my wife. And my stepson. Even his ginger teddy bear of a BFF. Well, we're sort of in this film. You could hardly call us actors. Damon Foster, editor of the glorious and long running Oriental Cinema magazine, took three forgotten Korean comedy features starring Shim Hyung-rae as an apparently retarded hero called Young Gu, recut them into a single ninety minute film with a new story that pokes fun at the originals while staying surprisingly close to the spirit of them, stripped the original language soundtrack and brought in a varied set of voice actors to record new dialogue in English. As I found out here, as I debuted as a voice actor, it isn't as easy as it looks. Some of my lines came out OK and I did get a delightfully inappropriate nuance into one dubious scene, but I learned enough to know I'd do most of it a little differently next time.

There are two things to know about Shaolin vs Frankenstein. One is that it's not a good movie but it hardly pretends to be. The second is that it's full to the brim with pure and unadulterated awesomeness. I couldn't help but imagine a trailer for it done in true fifties drive-in style with a host of text banners hurled up onto the screen. 'Vampires! Werewolves! Dinosaurs! Zombies! Aliens! It's the whole Universal Union of Monsters in a Kung Fu Bonanza! Thrill as a Shaolin monk takes on Frankenstein's monster! Recoil in terror as the mighty Yongary stomps buildings, downs planes and destroys helicopters! Sigh at Count Dracula, Vampira and their hopping vampire son! Be amazed by the Flying Japanese Superhero, the Golden Bat! Lust after those Beautiful Girls, the Eurasian Granddaughters of Van Helsing!' You know that few movies ever lived up to such huckster advertising but this comes close, as long as the awesomeness is all you're looking for.

As a story, this is an inventive melding of three Young Gu movies from the early nineties which faded quickly away into obscurity because, as Foster points out on the extra 'Behind the Scenes' featurette on the DVD, even Koreans didn't find them funny. As he tells it, two thirds of them are nothing but really juvenile toilet humour that even he, a dedicated Asian movie buff, found nigh on impossible to get through. He left in a few fart and pee jokes and started everything out with outrageously inappropriate gay humour but for the most part, all that filler is thankfully history. What he kept are the awesome bits, namely the monsters, the kung fu and the action. He then found a way to merge the similar but generally unrelated storylines together to draft out a new story that makes something close to coherent sense, at least in the world of awesome movies. I don't think there's a single realistic frame in the whole thing, but it still makes insane sense.

How's this for an awesome concept? An alien monster called Andromeda King and his new wave coiffured sidekick are creating the Universal Union of Monsters. They revive Chiun Dracula, the Eurasian grandson of Count Dracula, and his family, a flying vampire bride and their delightfully cute guansi son. They arrive at a creepy house on Jackie Chan Mountain with a werewolf butler to resurrect Frankenstein's monster, but instead they spend their time kidnapping the Eurasian granddaughters of their hereditary enemy Van Helsing. Meanwhile the giant monster Yongary and his kawaii baby dinosaur son have been raised by a zombie boss to wreak terror and stomp stuff. Pledged to stop them is the Golden Bat, a skull faced flying mummy from Atlantis who can fight like the best of them but who relies instead on the good heart of bumbling retard Young Gu and his brother, a Shaolin monk with every speech impediment in the book.

I'd love to see the original Young Gu movies to find out just how much of this glorious insanity is really there. After all, every bit of footage we see is entirely untouched, only the soundtrack and order of scenes being altered. More accurately, I really want to see the first of the three, 1989's Young Gu and Deng Chili, also known as Young Gu vs Count Dracula, because that's where all the monsters come from, along with the Shaolin monk. I'm even more intrigued because Deng Chili is apparently a dog, the Korean version of Lassie, whose footage was cut completely out of this reworking. The second source picture is Young Gu and the Golden Bat from 1992, which also looks interesting, because of the flying superhero, the swordfighting and and its intriguing pair of villains. However 1993's Young Gu and the Dinosaur Juju looks extremely painful because the good bits aren't even good and they're totally repetitive.

To be fair to the original filmmakers, there are some great shots in those first two movies. Some of the movements of the vampire bride and the werewolf are superbly shot and even their poses are often great fun. The baby guangsi is a delight, but then I'm a sucker for hopping vampires. Many of the fight scenes are well staged, albeit in a pulp manner. Yet I'm hard pressed to find a single shot of the dinosaurs that isn't embarrassing. An actor in a rubber suit stomping on a city is always fun for a while but this is neither a good suit nor a good city and even cut down to the good bits, these scenes just run on and on. I can't imagine how tiring they must feel with all the bad bits put back in. They're the biggest problem to Foster's merging of three stories into one as they slow down the pace considerably. I don't care about cardboard sets, plot conveniences and Scooby Doo logic in a film like this, but boring bits are unforgiveable.

Fortunately Foster keeps them to a minimum and, like all the various movies he's resurrected in this sort of fashion, he deserves the majority of credit. He found the source material, edited it all together and wrote the new script, including all the jokes. He even provided what must be half the voices, including the main ones. That's a lot of work and it took him a couple of years to get it to the point of release. We voice actors just showed up and added some dialogue for him to edit in. I played a couple of smaller parts, including the white hatted henchmen of the zombie boss, and I did OK, I guess, for a first attempt. My wife is Dracula's bride. My stepson nailed a few of his roles, including a helicopter pilot and a newsreader, and stretched his vocal talents as a cool character called Unleashed Wickedness. Some voice actors had a little more experience to bring to bear and Paul Hemmes and Kim Wagner in particular did great jobs.

I loved the whole experience of being part of this project and thank Damon for inviting me and my family to join in. Hopefully I'll get to do something similar again on a future picture where I can continue to improve and build some character into my parts the way some of my more experienced colleagues succeeded in doing here. If only Damon could clone himself a hundred times, I could do this sort of thing every weekend. It sure beats overtime at work and I'm sure there are plenty of other obscure movies sitting on Damon's shelves that are worthy of bringing back to some sort of prominence. I certainly need to watch some of the other pictures that he's already done, including Monkey War and Shaolin vs Terminator. I've seen Young Flying Hero, aka Return of the Magic Serpent, which was often fun but much slower and less full of awesomeness than this one. Naturally I'll post reviews here when I catch up with them. Thanks again, Damon!

Shaolin vs Frankenstein will be available for purchase at Damon Foster's World later this year. Already there are highly recommended back issues of Oriental Cinema magazine and many previous Damon Foster films.

Snakes in a Boardroom (2007)

2012-01-05T01:14:00.001-07:00

Director: Paul DeNigris
Stars: Lindsey Marlin, Brian Ronalds, Steve Briscoe and Bruce Nelson

The most obvious downside to Snakes in a Boardroom is that you can write it yourself just from the title. Yes, it's exactly what you expect: Steve Briscoe is back as a clueless exec at Pairemup Studios who wants his less clueless assistants, played by Lindsey Marlin and Brian Ronalds, to conjure up something to cash in on the success of Snakes on a Plane. It gets silly, very silly, not that you expect anything different. The most obvious upside to Snakes in a Boardroom is that it somehow succeeds in being funny nonetheless. It's funnier than Saturday Night Live nowadays, but then again I'm not sure if that has any meaning any more. Briscoe co-wrote the script with Mitch Abbott and director Paul DeNigris and what I wonder most is how drunk they all were at the time. This could be an example of a picture that doesn't have a 'making of' documentary to go with it as the two films would be exactly the same except for the presence of beer in the latter.

The fourth face in Snakes in a Boardroom is Bruce Nelson, who has a blast acting out brief snippets from each theorised cash-in that the Pairemup trio come up with. No, he doesn't do anything remotely surprising, but yes, he's funny as all get out and I'd happily pay to see him in Beavers on a Bullet Train, if only we weren't five years too late for it to be remotely topical. Given that this short was made in 2007, it was already running a little late, which has to be the reason why it didn't go viral on YouTube. I checked. I was only the 21,176th viewer, which is nowhere near enough and kids wouldn't understand it today. After all, Snakes on a Plane would probably seem like the height of imagination in a world where Hollywood is adapting Battleships for the big screen, remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show and indulging in a bidding war for the rights to Asteroids. Too much material, too little time...

Envy (2007)

2012-01-05T01:13:00.000-07:00

Director: Paul DeNigris
Stars: Vince Reign, Lindsey Marlin and Steve Briscoe

I think the biggest problem with Envy is that it doesn't try to do much. It's a professional little short and it's hard to fault in any way, but there's so little to work with that it doesn't matter. After the ambitious energy of The Long Shot and the deliciously dry wit of Stabbing Stupidity, it feels disappointing, even though I now recognise everyone involved. In fact all three actors were in Stabbing Stupidity, though Vince Reign only had a single line in that film. He's half of a young couple here with Lindsey Marlin, who move into his parents' house now that they're gone, under surprising circumstances. The omnipresent Steve Briscoe is the homicide detective who explains just how surprising, but we quickly find out the details for ourselves. Given that Envy only has three minutes to set up, explain and finish off the entire piece, you can imagine how quickly but it still isn't rushed. Marlin delivers a great last pair of lines, but it isn't enough to save this one.

Stabbing Stupidity (2006)

2012-01-05T01:11:00.000-07:00

Director: Paul DeNigris
Stars: Lindsay Marlin, Steve Briscoe, Louie Palmieri, Vince Reign and Laura Durant

Stabbing Stupidity is a lot shorter than The Long Shot, running about four minutes plus credits, but it's the peach of the shorts on the Cowboy Dreams DVD. In fact it's one of the best short films I've seen in a long time and I've screened a hundred of them in the last month. The concept is simple, centred on a young lady called Janet who has been conned into dinner with her highly inappropriate boss but finds an escape in her imagination. Writer Steve Briscoe and director Paul DeNigris riff on it superbly in a variety of ways and I still had a grin on my face on my fourth time through. Briscoe dominates here, not just because he wrote the script and its delightfully playful dialogue, but because he plays the boorish boss too with his Playboy cufflinks and even gets to sing over the end credits. DeNigris plays with technique from behind the camera, almost as an unseen dance partner with the leading lady, Lindsey Marlin, who shines through the fourth wall.

There's much worthy of praise here, but what I found most impressive was the fact that Stabbing Stupidity could so easily have spun way out of control, just because of how fun it was. This could have been a four minute film stuck in a twenty minute running time, but it isn't. It's lean and not a second longer than it should be. One of the biggest indicators for out of control filmmaking is when the director gets to edit his own picture, as DeNigris does here, because it gives them free rein to shoot as much as they like and leave in as much as they like. Usually that's a bad idea, but here DeNigris proves the exception to the rule. It plays out like clockwork. Almost every line does something, whether it be to build character, hit a punchline or set up a gimmick. Marlin and Briscoe hit every mark like professional comedians and DeNigris is right there to underline them. It's an exercise in technique, simultaneously violent and hilarious, and women will love it.

The Long Shot (2006)

2012-01-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

Director: Paul DeNigris
Stars: Christopher Loftus, Christine Bierman and Michael DeNigris

After The Hard Way, which almost felt like a two minute clip from a longer movie, The Long Shot felt more like an entire feature crunched professionally down into nineteen minutes. It's a really ambitious picture however you look at it, not least that it's a long short. It has a large cast, which includes quite a few faces I recognise from the local film scene. While few of them get much time to develop characters, the script helps a surprisingly large amount of them do that. The story is a strong one with a clear progression, story arcs for more than one character and even room for a silent segment in which words aren't needed to explain what's going on. The camera moves well and there was obviously a lot of time spent in the editing room to segue the many cuts together. It's notable that the camera speed changes with the story: initially it's slow and smooth as things start to come together, but gets frantic when they go south again. It feels like it could be studied.

We follow Matt, a college football star fallen on hard times because of gambling. He owes two hundred large and he has no way out of the mess he's in. That's until Jim gives him a tip that he shouldn't ignore: just one more bet and he'll be free and clear. Of course, if it was that simple, this wouldn't run nineteen minutes and Matt gets to work his way through more ups and downs than you might expect in a feature length movie. I really liked this one. The dialogue is clever: often humorous, often serious and often switching from one to the other in a flash. The story is careful to set up certain expectations, some of which lead us in certain directions, others away from them, but all cleverly enough to ensure that the ending is both expected and surprising. The script was obviously crafted. A second viewing highlights many lines that make sense first time through but have double meanings revealed only with hindsight.

In fact, it's so consistently good that it's hard to find fault. Sure, a few performances may have benefitted from another take here and there, but it's obvious that everyone's having fun and that's contagious. Christopher Loftus is a capable lead, earning his only credit at IMDb, but he's outshone by the story he's careened through. Christine Bierman is good as his girlfriend but she isn't the focus of the picture. Michael DeNigris is a little tongue tied on occasion playing a gem of a character called Salvatore 'The Razor' Giletti, whose name alone tells you everything you want to know about him. He has perhaps more fun than anyone in the cast though, with a few asides that show great timing. In a much smaller role, Bivas Biswas shines as a bookie playing chess in the Arizona heat. The scale of the production means that they're all really part of an ensemble cast adding different textures to a solid story, which is the big winner here.

The Hard Way (2005)

2012-01-05T01:06:00.000-07:00

Director: Paul DeNigris
Stars: Steve Cooper and Steve Briscoe

In 2009, Steve Briscoe wrote and Paul DeNigris directed the sublime short film Cowboy Dreams, with a cast to die for, including Bill Engvall and Danny Trejo. It was a leisurely piece, establishing a setting that we've seen many times before but then leading us slowly but surely into surreality and a gloriously unexpected set of lines from Trejo. This film, shot in 1999 for a Briscoe comedy special but turned into a standalone short in 2005, feels like an early draft version, with a similar concept but without the budget, the stars or the dialogue to bring it to life, let alone the level of technical skill involved. The lighting, sound and camerawork are notably weaker and the opening credits are terrible. Had the later film never been made this would have been an OK amateur short, but it pales in comparison in every way. Worthy only as an extra feature on the Cowboy Dreams DVD to see how the concept evolved over time, fortunately that's where I got to see it.

I have no idea how easy it is to get hold of this DVD but it's a great little disc, worth it for Cowboy Dreams alone, of course, but with a revealing documentary about the making of that film and no less than five earlier shorts to boot. DeNigris is a professor of film at the University of Advancing Technology in Glendale, AZ, and most of the cast and crew of his films have graduated from his classes. Watching a number of their shorts back to back is enough to see how they and he have progressed over the years. This is the earliest and the weakest of perhaps eight DeNigris films I've seen but it and Cowboy Dreams are the most easily compared. It's obvious that the pair of characters here were split up into many for the later film, adding depth all around. Expertise of cast and crew does the rest. I think that if Briscoe and DeNigris could travel back in time with the knowledge they have now, they wouldn't make this better, they'd make Cowboy Dreams instead.

Rituals (1977)

2012-01-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Director: Peter Carter
Stars: Hal Holbrook, Lawrence Dane, Robin Gammell, Ken James and Gary Reineke

Sometimes it's impossible not to watch a movie without imaging what it would be like if remade nowadays. Rituals is yet another story about a group of people leaving civilisation behind to find more than they expected in the middle of nowhere: you've seen it before and you'll see it again, but how? If shot today, the five protagonists would be young and gorgeous, happy to strip buck naked whenever possible; but in Rituals they're five middle aged male doctors, fishing barefoot. Nowadays they'd be partying it on down all night; but here they merely enjoy being out of their comfort zone. In 2012 one would film the others in footage to be found once everyone's dead; but in 1977 found footage thankfully hadn't been invented yet so the style is natural and doesn't induce motion sickness. Rituals even opens with a very 1970s easy listening theme rather than the rap or metal soundtrack you'd get today. Only beer and pot are constants over 40 years.

The most obvious difference is that instead of being a slasher flick whose death scenes are the only things to really pay attention to, here there's suspense and substance. The most obvious film to raise as a comparison is Deliverance, made five years earlier, and it wouldn't surprise me if there are five doctors here because there were only four businessmen in that film. Beyond having middle aged men hunted down a river within a wilderness, both films are fundamentally about guilt, though that's handled differently in each film. Deliverance spoke most prominently to guilt that the main characters develop over the course of the film because of actions taken within it, while Rituals speaks to less defined guilt from the past, which adds a sense of mystery to the picture. What do these doctors have to feel guilty about? That isn't just a question for us, it's one that they have to ask themselves too.

Certainly Rituals isn't as accomplished a film as Deliverance but it's still worthy of mention in the same breath and it has much to offer on its own merits. The story is a tough and unrelenting one that never lets up on its characters, mentally or physically, and it did no less on the actors. The budget didn't stretch to special effects, so the cast were called upon to actually do what we see them do in the film, albeit with safety nets to avoid the sort of catastrophic outcomes that await the characters. They really do walk through a swamp, have a bee hive thrown at them and fight in dangerous rapids. The budget didn't even allow for multiple takes in many instances, so often the scenes we see were captured in a single shot, avoiding a slick edge to the action but aiding the natural feel. Also helping this was the decision to shoot the film chronologically, so leads Hal Holbrook and Lawrence Dane really do get more and more grizzled as time runs on.

Holbrook plays Harry, a talented surgeon and ethical doctor who is still coming to terms with the death of his father, a drunk he had written off. A Vietnam veteran, he knows a thing or two about survival and it helps that he's the pragmatic one of the bunch, quiet and down to earth, usually getting the last word. Dane is the unfortunately named Mitzi, the loud one of the bunch. When things start going south, he throws out bad ideas at the least provocation. When they continue that way, he's the one who wants to give up, argue about how bad everything is or blame the others. He took care of Harry's dad's when the time came but is obviously uncomfortable with his own ethics as pertains to his work. Rounding out the five are Ken James as the routine Abel and a pair of brothers, Martin and DJ, played by Robin Gammell and Gary Reineke respectively. DJ is an irascible voice of reason, while Martin calls himself 'an independent alcoholic.'

They're dropped in a heavily forested area that the Indians poetically call the Cauldron of the Moon. It's only fifteen miles to civilisation but they're hardly well prepared for anything beyond their most basic expectations. The first step into chaos is when their boots are stolen while they fish. DJ had told them all to bring spare pairs but, of course, nobody did. None of them expected to be stalked through the wilderness by a crazed killer, naturally, but Martin's backpack is full of Scotch and toilet paper. It wouldn't bode well for him even if the killer hadn't shown up, which of course he does. We don't see him until the end and don't find out who he is until close to that point, which also adds mystery, but he makes his presence very apparent through a set of setpiece actions. It's pretty obvious that whenever these doctors go to sleep, the killer is going to have something memorably nasty ready for them when they wake up.

I grew up watching Murder, Mystery, Suspense on British TV, which was a timeslot dedicated for the most part to American films featuring one or more of those attributes. Most were probably made during the seventies, possibly for TV, and to my young and inexperienced eyes they felt like tame equivalents to the outrageous horror novels I was devouring. More recently I've often wondered how good they actually were, whether I didn't appreciate suspense as much as gore at the time and if I wouldn't find them tame today. Maybe I'll never know but every time I see an American thriller that obviously dates itself to the seventies, I ask myself those questions again. This one stands up very well indeed with some memorable shock scenes, a gruelling pace and a number of gorgeous long shots. Some almost hide the leads in distance, others turn close ups into long shots with easy camera movements and one makes the cresting of a hill truly powerful.

Of the cast and crew, I was only really familiar with Hal Holbrook, who had made his name on TV with four Emmy wins out of twelve nominations, but was instantly recognisable in many films. I don't know if I remember him best from Magnum Force, Capricorn One or The Fog, perhaps even Fletch Lives. He hopped genres continually. Lawrence Dane got the part of Mitzi because he also produced the film, but he knew which character would work for him as an actor and he was right. The others get far less opportunity to demonstrate their acting chops but they do exactly what they should. Writer Ian Sutherland and director Peter Carter obviously enjoyed working together, as they teamed up for another film, Highpoint, in 1982, just before Carter died of a heart attack. A comedy featuring the highest stunt fall ever shot for a movie, it wasn't as successful as this. I wonder if, had he lived, they'd have returned to darker material like this that they did so well.

Time Again (2011)

2012-01-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

Director: Ray Karwel
Stars: Scott F Evans, John T Woods, Angela Rachelle, Tara Smoker and Gigi Perreau

Director Ray Karwel kindly sent me a screener of his indie time travel/action feature Time Again to review back in September and, given the subject matter, I wish I could conjure up some sort of time travel shenanigans of my own to post a review back then. As it stands, I'd have to settle for changing the date of this post and that would just be cheating. So, my apologies to Ray for the delay and to any readers I still have after a particularly empty last six months. Hopefully all the things that have kept me from writing for so long are taken care of now and I can be much more prolific in 2012. I'm especially happy to get back into a routine with Time Again, as indie science fiction features are something of an endangered species nowadays. Anyone who has screened submissions for genre film festivals knows that there are ten horror pictures for every science fiction movie and there are twenty sci-fi shorts for every feature.

It helps that this is a decent film too, certainly if you consider its budget which is somewhere on the south side of not a heck of a lot. Its flaws are not the usual ones that come along with a lack of money: there's nothing wrong with the lighting, the pace or the dialogue for a start. It's rare to see an indie sci-fi feature that doesn't fail on at least one of those fronts, if not more, and I can happily report that this is an exception to that rule. That isn't to say it looks like a Hollywood epic because it doesn't. The camerawork isn't as slick as we expect, Karwel making up for that in the editing room; the music is generic, obviously public domain; the stunts, while refreshingly done by the actors themselves, are too obviously set up; and a couple of the actors can't stop smiling. Yet the engaging story and the fast pace go a long way towards making up for all those flaws. Hollywood nailed pace long ago but still has a habit of forgetting about the story. This has both.

It centres around a set of four coins minted by a Roman priest for Augustus Caesar at the point the Christian calendar was being established and they have the power to revisit the past to make different choices with the power of hindsight, like a pack of magic undo buttons. It's both a cool MacGuffin and the mechanism by which a waitress by the name of Marlo tries to save the life of her sister, Sam. As Marlo, Angela Rachelle proves a capable lead, not only because she's terminally cute but because she successfully grows as a character along with the story. Initially she's very much a waste of space little sister, so we're surprised to realise that we'll be watching her rather than Sam, but Marlo becomes much more than her beginning while Sam becomes just a prop for her to work with. Rachelle seems to be getting steady work as an actress but she deserves bigger and better parts and surely this performance can only help that to happen.

The acting is surprisingly capable for a low budget action film without anyone we recognise and with a story that by definition makes everyone's job harder. Only Marlo gets to progress through the film in a chronological fashion, allowing Rachelle the opportunity to build her character. The rest are given to us in fragments, their parts broken up by a story that leaps around in a number of different timelines over a period of six months. This means that most of the actors are tasked with establishing their roles in mere snatches of time that might be duplicated, replayed a little differently or entirely undone later on in the film. It's tough to get involved with characters when we see them running through the same lines and scenes over and over again, as it's far easier to sit back and imagine them as props for Rachelle to play with. Needless to say, some of the actors are more successful than others in making their presence known.

Scott F Evans is perhaps the standout as Mr Way, a Los Angeles crime boss. Sure, some of his lines seem a little too cool but for the most part his biggest problem is how hands on he has to get as the lack of budget is most obvious when counting extras. Similarly, John T Woods, who is ostensibly tasked with playing a likeable cop called Det Lym, is most taxed when he realises that he's actually the entire LAPD (the SWAT team don't count: they're the worst thing in the entire film). Robert Pike Daniel, whose IMDb headshots suggest he's stereotyped in stern, emotionless roles, is pleasantly genial as a boss who every waitress surely wishes they worked for. Dan Lookabill is just as pleasant as Marlo and Sam's dad, perhaps highlighting that Ray Karwel might just be a big softy at heart who wanted to make his action film as filled with feelgood moments as with bullets. If so, he succeeded. It's a happy action movie.

The biggest name is perhaps the most surprising one, a French-American child actor from the forties and fifties called Gigi Perreau. I probably last saw her in 1945's Voice of the Whistler, a William Castle picture she made at the ripe old age of four, two years after Mervyn LeRoy began her career as the title character's bilingual daughter in Madame Curie. She brings an agreeable sense of quirkiness to Time Again as an unnamed old lady (unnamed for a very good reason) who only gets a few scenes but nonetheless serves as the oil that keeps the story in motion. I wonder how Karwel talked her into this picture. Sure, she has a vast amount of experience, with 35 films behind her before she turned 21 in 1961, but she promptly retired from the screen at that point to focus on stage direction instead. I'm happy she graced us with her presence once more and I may need to dust off Journey to the Center of Time or Hell on Wheels in celebration.

The best reason to see Time Again is for the script. Karwel is one of three writers, who deserve as much praise for their attention to detail when dealing with time travel paradoxes as they do shame for not counting bullets or for use of overly convenient props. This is a well thought out, story based, time travel movie and those are rare creatures indeed. No, you shouldn't blink early on or you may do as I did and conflate a dead character with a live one, thus confusing yourself royally for a little while; but once established, it gets more intriguing the longer it runs and the foreknowledge that accompanies a repeat viewing makes it feel tighter still. I found some subtle establishing shots second time through that I'd missed previously. Any picture that works on a first viewing but still improves on a second is a keeper, especially when suspense is a key factor, and I'd happily come back again for a third watch.

The most annoying part of the script is that almost everyone has a generic one syllable name, which means that we have to pay just a little more attention to be sure of who's doing what to whom, especially in those quick changing early scenes. Perhaps Ray Karwel's background as an editor, starting out on the Asylum's version of War of the Worlds, helps him to see things clearer outside the traditional linear timeline of a story without distinctive names as cues. As the job of an editor is often to fix what everyone else has done wrong, they pick up an inherent grasp of what's good and bad in a picture. As editors become writers and directors, they often approach their films with an eye for detail so lacking in others. Karwel doesn't achieve what fellow editor Mike Flanagan did with Absentia, but after this engaging first time out as a writer, producer and director I'd like to see what's next. More budget and consistency could give us a treat.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

2012-01-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

Director: Guy Ritchie
Stars: Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Rachel McAdams and Mark Strong

This time last year I was watching Arthur Wontner play Sherlock Holmes for the first time in the 1931 British film The Sleeping Cardinal. Now the family have talked me into something a little more recent and modern, namely Robert Downey Jr playing Sherlock Holmes for the first time in the self titled Guy Ritchie movie from 2009. I tend to get burned by modern blockbusters but a few friends, especially within the steampunk scene, have spoken highly of this version, at least on some fronts. Now's my chance to find out if I need to shout at them next time I see them and ignore any further suggestions they might make. After all, when I think Robert Downey Jr, I think Tony Stark, not Sherlock Holmes. When I think Guy Ritchie, I think of how awesome his pictures were before he met Madonna, not of how he could turn the innovative gimmickry of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels into a Holmes movie. Well, the game's afoot!

There is gimmickry before we even get the title screen: slow motion and fast editing as Holmes and Watson stop Lord Blackwood from committing his sixth murder. That's mild stuff for Guy Ritchie though and things improve quickly. His version of Holmes's rooms at 221B Baker St are believable: quirky, dusty and disorganised, but not so much so that the great detective doesn't know exactly where everything is. Downey is quirky, dusty and disorganised himself as Holmes, which is refreshing, but he's still quite obviously himself. Much has been said of how this Holmes is a pugilist, but that doesn't bother me. Ritchie puts his start/stop editing to use effectively, by bringing the scientific method into his fight scenes. I was more impressed by quieter moments though, such as when Holmes deduces the history of Watson's girl and gets a glass of wine in his face for his trouble. He simply ignores it and gets on with his meal. It's beneath his concern.

So Holmes is a solid characterisation, an interesting take on the most portrayed character of all time. I like the gleam in his eye, the deceptive disorganisation and his playful nature. I didn't like the fact that in front of all of it was obviously Robert Downey Jr. Jude Law succeeds a little better on that front as Watson, though perhaps that's partly because I've seen a lot less of him in the past than I have Downey. He's not as quick as Holmes, naturally, but he's no bumbling fool in the vein of Nigel Green's approach to the role or those who followed him. It helps that Law is really a Londoner, thus a lot more believable in Victorian London than Downey, whose accent isn't quite what it should be. Downey is more fun to watch but too wild to buy into. At least he's a notably original creation, unlike Lord Blackwood, who is painted too closely from Hannibal Lector's cloth for my liking, Mark Strong also channelling the young Christopher Lee in his megalomania.

There's much to like here for those without firm preconceptions in what they expect from a Sherlock Holmes picture. The sets are superb, from grand visions like a nascent Tower Bridge to the little details of street life. This Victorian London is suitably dirty, from the streets to the sky via all sorts of locations in between, not least a particularly grimy jail. To ensure that we get the point, the tones used are suitably subdued, sometimes so dark that we can believe that they're lit by gaslight. Of course not all the sets are down and dirty. There are plenty more in upper class buildings and pseudo-Masonic lodges and they're just as solid. It certainly doesn't hurt to have a budget sometimes and this one had $90m to play with. I enjoyed the music, both the classical and the folk sides. There's frequent action, though to inconsistent effect (the boat scene and the finalé being far too predictable) and for every action scene there's another full of deductions.

Where it falls down is in being the first film in a deliberate franchise, something that Warner Bros obviously planned for all along. Thus we get a lot of Holmes and Watson but only a glimpse of a slew of other recognisable names. Lestrade gets a mere handful of scenes, Moriarty is seen only in shadow, Mycroft appears in name only and we see Mrs Hudson only once, early in the picture. We are given quite a lot of Irene Adler though, the one woman who outsmarted Holmes in Conan Doyle's stories. It's a shame that she's notably disappointing, with a promising introduction quickly devolving into a damsel in distress and a woman continually outmanouevred by others. I liked Eddie Marsan a lot, as Lestrade, but other notable actors get far too little screen time, especially James Fox and Geraldine James. Fox does get a good death scene at least and James returns as Mrs Hudson in the first sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

All in all, I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, but mostly on the surface when the CGI wasn't too obvious or the action too clichéd. For the most part it looked right and it felt right, but it didn't allow us much opportunity to play along ourselves and try to figure things out before Watson. It instead used what little Guy Ritchie gimmickry it had to provide explanations to us along with whichever characters are on screen at the time. In short it's the ride you might expect rather than the sort of detective story you might want, though on that front at least it's a worthy one, with far more attention given to its setting than most. Downey and Law make it a fun and engaging ride and if Rachel McAdams is given a poor part to play with as Irene Adler, she does bring feminine charm into the testosterone filled proceedings. I'd have preferred a different film in a lot of ways, but I enjoyed this nonetheless and won't have too many qualms about watching the sequel.

The Hoodlum (1951)

2011-12-31T22:32:00.000-07:00

Director: Max Nosseck
Stars: Lawrence Tierney, Allene Roberts, Marjorie Riordan and Edward Tierney

It's dark, it's tense, it's 1951 and the film is called The Hoodlum. Yes, this is a Lawrence Tierney B-movie, which means it's going to be a tough ride. Tierney was a tough character, not just on screen but off it too, as Quentin Tarantino found out the hard way while making Reservoir Dogs. Here he's Vincent Lubeck, a career criminal who seems to only do two things: commit crimes and get caught. He begins this film in jail, up for parole after serving five years for armed robbery. The warden totally doesn't want to know, but his mother pleads for his release, with the dubious explanation that he fights the whole world. Well, that's Tierney through and through. We know that if mama doesn't persuade the board, we wouldn't have a movie, so out comes Lubeck to work at the gas station his brother has put a down payment on from his father's life insurance. Unfortunately it's right opposite the Fidelity Bank so guess how long Lubeck takes to turn...

Tierney is exactly what you'd expect if you've seen him in anything, especially from this era. He looks like handsome leading man material, but he's all darkness, like a coiled spring just waiting to explode on someone, anyone, maybe you. I love these roles of his because they exude danger the way few could manage, even in the noir era. A lot of actors could handle the grittiness but didn't feel dangerous. Tierney was dangerous just walking on screen. The fact that he sounded like George Raft trying to be Humphrey Bogart was merely the icing on the cake. What makes this particular film stand out isn't what he does as Vincent Lubeck, though he does it well, it's the fact that his screen brother, Johnny Lubeck, is played by his real one, Edward Tierney, making his first and only credited appearance under that name. He did find some success in Germany later under the name of Ed Tracy, but it's clear here that he isn't the talent his brother was.

The story is by Sam Neuman and Nat Tanchuck, and what I've seen of their work elsewhere isn't too impressive. For instance, Tanchuck's previous film was Chained for Life, a horrendous biopic of Daisy and Violet Hilton that didn't even benefit from the Siamese twins playing themselves. When a sensationalist biopic can't even live up to the levels of reality, it's an abject failure. Yet here they wrote a tight film, only a minute over an hour long and shot on an independent budget by director Max Nosseck, his second of four films with Tierney after Dillinger six years earlier. It isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it's a satisfying and often tense B movie that packs a lot into a small space, not least another powerful showing from Tierney. He leaves a notable trail of destruction in his wake here, only his immigrant mother able to tear him a new one when it's too late. Neuman and Tanchuck wrote a great death scene for Lisa Golm as Mrs Lubeck.

In fact, The Hoodlum builds well for everyone. The more obvious scenes are early on, as the film struggles to get going on whatever budget the independent Jack Schwarz Productions could bring to bear. The actors are capable but hardly Oscar-worthy. The uncredited Gene Roth is the standout early on as the prison warden who doesn't want Lubeck released, but he chews his way through a small part with gusto, somehow reminding of both Raymond Burr and William Castle as he shows Lubeck the electric chair. Edward Tierney is initially subdued and careful as Johnny; Allene Roberts is suitably innocent as his girl, Rosa, who Vincent naturally targets; and Marjorie Riordan is a sultry bank secretary who flirts with him while he pumps her gas. It's once all hell has broken loose that they get their moments to shine, though none as brightly as Golm. After her, it's Marjorie Riordan who gets the best scene. She deserved a bigger part.

The Hoodlum has gone unseen for many years, hardly surprising given its obscurity and status as an independent picture in a time when those were rare creatures indeed. After its original theatrical run, courtesy of United Artists, in 1951, it didn't see theatres again until almost half a century later when a new print was made. It certainly doesn't deserve to remain in obscurity, as it's a thoroughly entertaining piece. It stands up as an indie noir, as a Lawrence Tierney picture and as the one time he acted alongside one of his brothers. He never worked with Edward again and never shared the screen with his other brother, Scott Brady, even though both had prolific film careers. Scott's ran for 63 films from 1948 to 1984, when he played the sheriff in Gremlins. Lawrence Tierney notched up 64, but in a much longer period from 1943 to 2000, mostly because he was so difficult a man to work with. It's hard to believe he's been gone for over a decade though.

Thor (2011)

2011-10-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

Director: Kenneth Branagh
Stars: Chris Hemsworth and Anthony Hopkins

It didn't take a lot to realise that I'm hardly the intended audience for this film. I asked a question of everyone who saw it early on that nobody understood, even those who were paid to review it. I simply wanted to know how Tadanobu Asano did in his first English language film. Having now seen Thor, I can understand the blank faces I got in response. He is utterly wasted in this film, far beyond anything I could have imagined. If viewers didn't know who he was, which is pretty likely for anyone not up on modern Japanese cinema, this certainly wouldn't have helped. He's almost not in the film at all and when he is, he's doing precisely nothing. Given that his next English language film is a screen adaptation of the game of Battleships (no, I'm not kidding), I can hardly be hopeful for a new international career, let alone my dream of seeing him playing opposite Johnny Depp in a quirky and artful drama. What a heartbreaking waste of talent.

The biggest problem Thor has, and it has many, is that Tadanobu Asano is not alone. I spent the near two hour running time being mildly disappointed, even though I came in with precisely no expectations, not having any background with the Marvel character at all. Yet when the ride was over and my brain reengaged, mild disappointment gradually built to the level of bewilderment. The more I thought about Thor, the less there was to think about. It reached the point where I'm not sure that there's anything at all in this film of any substance, leaving it as a two hour trailer for The Avengers. It isn't just Tadanobu Asano, it's everything else. Everyone and everything in this film is a heartbreaking waste of talent. I'm a long-standing fan of B-movie exploitation and yet I can't think of a single film that wasted my time more. I've seen worse films, to be sure, but I enjoyed the majority far more than this. This was literally two hours of my life I won't get back.

The story begins in Puente Antigua, as a continuation from the end of Iron Man 2, a capable if predictable Marvel blockbuster, as Thor arrives on the planet Earth to encounter a strange breed of human: field astrophysicists. Then we hop back to 965 AD so Anthony Hopkins can provide a primer on Norse mythology: frost giants, Asgard, aliens, Mjolnir, the whole thing. Yeah, aliens. These Norse gods are aliens who just hop down to Earth once in a while from Asgard to play at being gods. Earth is one of the nine realms, each accessible through some sort of Stargate. It's all very dark, very CGI and very Star Trek. Kenneth Branagh, a surprising choice of director to shoot a Marvel blockbuster, doesn't have the epic flair that Peter Jackson demonstrated in Lord of the Rings or the ability to focus on detail like Zack Snyder in 300. A few shots suggest we're in a spaceship but it's just the camera movements.

Anthony Hopkins looks like Anthony Hopkins in an Odin suit. Sometimes being a star can only be an obstacle to a performance. He does what you expect Hopkins to do, but by the end of this film I found that I hadn't disliked one of his performances this much since Red Dragon. In this version of Norse mythology, Odin, the king of Asgard, is the mighty warrior you might expect, but one who has fallen back into being a soft spoken peacemaker of a Norse god. I was waiting for him to cry havoc and let loose the berserkers, only to materialise a table to sit round and compromise. In comparison, his son Thor, about to take over as king, struts to the throne as if he was a WWE wrestler approaching the ring. Chris Hemsworth plays him rather like Brad Pitt would play Iron Man, only a little less flippant. I expected the We Will Rock You chant from A Knight's Tale. His brother Loki is jealous, scheming and ultimately forgettable. He may be the least villain ever.

The setup, within this shiny but obviously entirely CGI environment, is predictable. Loki invites the frost giants to show up and interrupt the ceremony, all on the sly of course. Odin forbids any reaction but Thor takes the Stargate to Jotunheim to piss them off anyway and his father has to calm things down. This action is enough to shift Thor in his esteem from his imminent heir to an undesirable element who he promptly strips of his powers and hurls down to Earth for the field astrophysicists to hit with their van. He does throw his mighty hammer Mjolnir after him, with an accompanying oath that its power will only manifest when his son is once more worthy. Even as this CGI action unfolds, I couldn't help but wonder that if it was this easy to outmanoeuver Thor, just why Loki hadn't got rid of him years before. However thinking about plot holes in this film is a dangerous business: there are more holes than plot.

The story from here is pretty obvious. Thor goes to get his hammer but SHIELD gets there first. Loki plots and schemes. Odin is removed from the field of play. Thor's buddies go to help him. Cue the battle. Cue the redemption scene. Cue the comeback. Cue the credits. It's all acutely disappointing, all the more so because there's no attempt to build any substance around it. Just as Asgard is a shiny bundle of CGI that never contains anyone without a direct purpose for being in a scene, Earth is apparently a single street in a single town entirely surrounded by desert, in which only the main characters have any function and then only very specific ones. Jane Foster, the lead astrophysicist, is there only as a token love interest. Her mentor, Dr Erik Selvig, is there because he knows Norse mythology. Her assistant, Darcy Lewis, is there for comic relief, which, unbelievably, amounts to one poor joke repeated twice. SHIELD are there to look impressive.

To be fair, the actors were capable, however dumb their parts were. Natalie Portman is solid as the love interest, but casting Natalie Portman as merely a love interest is like taking Mjolnir to crack a nut. She is painfully wasted in a throwaway role that feels all the more so because she does everything she can to embue it with meaning. Her acting chops merely highlight how the many other talented actors in this film didn't do the same, through their own fault or not. Rene Russo, Stellan Skarsgård and Tadanobu Asano are massive talents who get varying degrees of not a heck of a lot to do. Kat Dennings brings a weak periodic laugh but she's worth more than that. In this film only Thor really gets more to do than the extras who run around Puente Antigua looking scared, and they are only a hair's breadth above the frost giants, who are suitably sinister, but like everything in Jotunheim nothing more than shiny and meaningless CGI.

That leaves Hemsworth, Hopkins and Hiddleston, a triple H if you will, someone who would have looked a little less Hollywood than Hemsworth. Fortunately he does a decent job, once he wakes up in the hospital on Earth. Before that he's acutely annoying, but as a stranger in a strange land he's less cocky and more arrogant in a good sense, simply aware of how powerful he is. Depth arrives when he can't pick up Mjolnir, as that awareness falls away and he becomes fragile and unsure, obviously alien emotions to him. As the film revolves entirely around him, his showing is an anchor for the threadbare storyline. Without it, this would have been even more lacking than it is. Certainly Odin and Loki are nothing to focus on. Hopkins is unable to do anything with a bad part except make it worse and Tom Hiddleston, as Loki, is stuck playing a weak villain who gets weak scenes to be weak in. It's hardly surprising to find that he's weak and utterly forgettable.

Bizarrely the only character I can praise is that of Heimdall, guardian of the Bifrost, the Stargate that serves as the public transit system between worlds. This is bizarre because while actors like Ray Stevenson may look like Norse gods, only Heimdall feels like one, yet he's played by a black English actor, Idris Elba. It's a strange casting choice that is wrong on every level there is, except the actual performance that Elba delivers. He provides the only epicness that the film can boast. He epitomises timeless power, something sadly lacking in a film rooted in Norse mythology and shot by Kenneth Branagh who guided many of the actors through references to Shakespeare. It's amazing how empty this film is given that its character inspirations come from archetypes like Falstaff, Cassius and Edmund from King Lear, along with Peter O'Toole and Errol Flynn. Most took their roles because of Branagh's presence, some before there was a script. That speaks volumes.

Perhaps most surprising was that for a summer blockbuster, especially one based on a Marvel comic book character, there's not a lot of actual action, and when it arrives it's embarrassing. In the early scenes, everything is CGI and hard to see. Towards the end, when the film equivalent of a boss arrives to devastate the town, like a '50s sci fi monster, the battle is quick and lacking. Of the five warriors there, only three get shots in. The victory makes no sense. Even the moment in which Thor proves himself inevitably worthy was played badly. It read to me far more that the superhero in this film really isn't Thor at all, it's his hammer Mjolnir. It's at once Superman's cape and Batman's gadgets, but I never got the impression that Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne would die without those artefacts. Without Mjolnir, Thor is less than nothing. There's a final battle with Loki which shows off more CGI and relies on a deus ex machina. It's all embarrassing.

What surprises me is how much success Thor has managed to achieve, namely a gross of almost $450m and apparent critical acclaim from numerous fronts, including many who I'd expected would have hated it. Last time a superhero movie was made by a director pulled from the world of international art cinema rather than that of Hollywood blockbusters, the fans rebelled. Many good things have been said about Ang Lee's Hulk, but I haven't heard any from comic book fans. Here, those comic book fans seem to like it, if not outright love it and ache for the inevitable sequel. Roger Ebert was one of a few detracting critics, claiming that it failed as a movie but succeeded as marketing. Other critics were far more favourable, Richard Roeper even describing it as 'the most entertaining superhero debut since the original Spider-Man'. Adding my small voice to such esteemed company, I hated it with a passion that I haven't felt in a long time.

The Last of Mrs Cheyney (1929)

2011-09-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

Director: Sidney Franklin
Stars: Norma Shearer, Basil Rathbone, Herbert Bunston and George Barraud

It's been a while since I've seen the 1937 version of this story, a golden age production featuring an all star cast including Joan Crawford, William Powell, Robert Montgomery, Frank Morgan and Nigel Bruce, among others. This predated it by eight years and an entire era, given that this is a precode, albeit one somewhat unique in its timing. The precodes got away with much that the production era simply couldn't, but they built up to their heyday: it's the pictures from 1932 to 1934 that are usually so notable, not the ones from the end of the twenties. This one, from 1929, closer to the silent era than the glory days of Warren William, opens with plenty of sparkling innuendo, much of it sexual. Verbal banter was an art long before this but it was a highlight of the early precodes because of how hard it was to move microphones, a key reason why so many were adapted from plays. Yet it's rare to see one quite so forward quite this early.

Otherwise it feels very late twenties. The early actors are very carefully enunciated, as befits a very early sound film. Only Hedda Hopper sounds remotely natural until Basil Rathbone wanders out of Mrs Cheyney's charity concert and promptly dominates the scene, not only with his clever and deliberate wit but with his effortless voice. He looks scarily young, somehow much younger than he appeared in films made only a year later, though he is buried under a good deal of makeup. He is excellent, matched only by Norma Shearer in the lead role. These two shine in a succession of glorious scenes, both as individual actors full of subtle nuance and as an engaging and charismatic pair. It's a shame that Rathbone's star hadn't yet risen to allow his name to join Shearer's above the title. Their interplay is an enticing to and fro affair, as Mrs Cheyney has Lord Arthur Dilling notably on the hop for a while, only for it to shift back and forth between them.

I can't help but see the film as a collection of these scenes, because they and the two characters they contain are so full of life, while the rest of the film is so sadly lacking. Only George Barraud comes close to the lead couple, as Charles, Cheyney's intriguing butler. Everyone else in the cast is either far too good at being intensely annoying, such as Herbert Bunston and Cyril Chadwick, or too inconsequential to have much presence. Both these actors do their jobs well, as do the various ladies in the cast, but that doesn't make them enjoyable to watch. Late in the film is a breakfast scene, with almost the entire supporting cast bouncing off each other. It's perhaps the only scene in which they any offer any entertainment and then as an ensemble rather than as individuals; yet they're still overshadowed by Basil Rathbone sitting quietly at the end of the table and the underlying attempt to keep the most outrageous events impeccably polite.

The term for such stories was 'comedy of manners' and that's notably more accurate here than usual. It's particularly fascinating to watch the reactions in this story. Certain actions naturally deserve contempt while others warrant forgiveness, though it takes impeccable manners and breeding to appropriately distinguish between the two. Larceny is far less heinous a crime than the abuse of hospitality, it seems, and early dishonesty can be outranked by later honesty, as long as the circumstances are appropriate. In other hands, this would be a crime drama with the MacGuffin the £50,000 string of pearls that Mrs Webley keeps by her bedside at night. Yet this is a comedy of manners with the MacGuffin the true moral character of the thief caught in the act. That's a quaint and fascinating concept, as much so as the bizarre facial acting that goes on between two people who don't look at each other very much. That happens a lot here.

What all this quaintness leaves is a strange anomaly. From one angle it's a notable precode, full of moral ambiguity, with a strong leading lady and plenty of very forward dialogue. Yet instead of the usual modernity of the late precode pictures, full of reaction to the social situations of the time, this looks backward to a past age. So from another angle, it's a stagebound and talkative early sound picture that feels antiquated in its focus on manners, titles and reputations. I don't think I've ever seen such a quintessential mix of both ends of the precode era in a single film before. I'm far more used to seeing the past and future in late twenties movies for a different reason, one that's very apparent here: most of these actors were on their way out, while a few were on their way in. As with many early talkies, it's impossible not to realise which actors would thrive in the sound era, not because we recognise them but because it's just that obvious.

I've been a Rathbone fan for years, but it's been tough to work backwards from his heyday in the code era to his earlier work. While movies like The Bishop Murder Case, The Lady of Scandal and Sin Takes a Holiday were decent and interesting films, for some reason I recall them less than A Notorious Affair, a much worse picture that epitomised the stodgy play-sourced early talkies. It's refreshing to see a dynamic Rathbone here: whether he's in command, attacking with his wit and romancing more emphatically than we might expect, or whether he's forced onto the defensive, battled back by the wit of Mrs Cheyney. It's a great performance, the earliest of his I've seen yet and presumably his sound debut, given that his previous film was three years earlier: a silent Ben Lyon picture called The Great Deception in 1926. The Last of Mrs Cheyney shows us a demonstrative Rathbone six years before stardom and a full decade before Sherlock Holmes.

On the other hand, it took a long while for me to appreciate Norma Shearer. It's easy to see her as important only as the wife of MGM's wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, but that's unfair. She was the female lead in MGM's first production, the Lon Chaney film He Who Gets Slapped, three years before marrying Thalberg, and her precodes demonstrate just how important she was as a strong woman who showed a young female audience how to escape the morals of the previous generation. Never mind overblown late thirties fare like The Women, watch her in precodes, as a succession of sexually active unmarried women, not pretty young things cast adrift in a man's world but sophisticated and experienced divorcées. Hollywood forgot her not for what she could do, but because, as with Warren William, for what she couldn't do any more under the code. This may be the best I've ever seen her, full of nuance and play, especially in the first half of the film.

Now I should go back to the 1937 version, not only to compare the quality of the two films and to see how they treat the same material differently, but to examine how far my understanding of such things has come in the intervening time. I saw the 1937 version early into my exploration of classic Hollywood and remember being impressed, but I can't help but wonder now whether I was really being impressed by the film or my early experiences of people like William Powell and Robert Montgomery. Like many modern viewers, I found that golden age films opened a glorious voyage of discovery, but after seven or eight intensive years of travelling through filmographies, both backwards and sideways, I realise that much of that gold was really gilt and the real magic is often harder to find. I have a feeling that this is going to be a great example, the 1929 version not as slick, not as polished, not as star studded, but a much better film for all that.

The Coward (1915)

2011-08-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

Director: Reginald Barker & Thomas H Ince
Stars: Frank Keenan and Charles Ray

Charles Ray had a long career for Thomas Ince, but it was this film that made him a star, which he remained for the rest of the teens and into the twenties. It's easy to see why because, even as Frank Winslow, the coward of the title, he still manages to elicit some of our sympathy, ably demonstrating the torment he suddenly finds himself in as the American Civil War begins. He's pressured from many sides to sign up for the Confederacy, not least that he's the son of stern old Col Jefferson Beverly Winslow. Yet, 'Mother, I am afraid... afraid!' he wails, unable to enlist at the recruiting station. He's wracked with emotion, exhibiting an enticing combination of strength and weakness, and there's plenty of opportunity for Ray to demonstrate his dramatic range. He comes over as a strange cross between Henry Fonda and William Haines. In the end he signs up only because his dad is going to shoot him if he doesn't. How's that for incentive?

Such depth of character is only one reason why The Coward proved eye opening to me. I'm used to movies from the teens faring much better visually than with characterisation. They often had grand sets shot with capable camerawork, but rarely much to populate into them beyond simple generic storylines. Thomas Ince, famed for 1916's Civilization, sits high on the rankings of early American directors, behind only D W Griffith and Cecil B De Mille, but this is the first time I've seen one of his pictures and it certainly stands up far better than I expected. The other surprise is that the film's promise to be 'a dramatic episode of the American Civil War' is achieved not only through drama but through a surprisingly sparing use of intertitles. For the longest time, they serve only to introduce characters or to allow us to read a letter that progresses the story. It takes a long while before we read any dialogue and that's kept to a bare minimum throughout.

Charles Ray shares top billing with Frank Keenan, who plays his father. It's hard to say who gets most screen time, but if it's Keenan it's mostly through the inflexibility of his character casting a shadow over the entire film, as if he were a statue or a ghost perpetually in the background. Col Winslow has all the strength that his son doesn't have, so much so that he only has to stand up to easily dominate a scene. His toughest moments are very subtle ones, such as the one where he waits in his study for his son's decision to enlist, his power demonstrated more through a slow movement of his gun than through any choice of words. Even when his son deserts and he takes his place to keep the family honour intact, the character is too inflexible for Keenan to do much more than allow his eyes to shine in the night or to seethe quietly in the emotional scenes. He plays him well but simply has less chances to emote because of how his character is written.

Meanwhile, Frank gets opportunity after opportunity to build a character, though his story arc is more of a simple fall/rise than a more traditional and complex rise/fall/rise. He gets only a brief few moments before he's exposed as a coward, albeit one with some ambiguity, and what little sympathy he wrings out of us is soon lost as he quickly and surely sinks even lower. Yet there wouldn't be much of a plot if he wasn't given a chance for redemption and that comes through the Yankee command arriving in Cotton Creek, VA and taking up residence in Winslow Hall. He hides in the attic, where he fortuitously overhears massively important enemy secrets that he finally discovers the courage to take action over. There's more to the plot than that, but it gives you a good idea of the story arc that Frank Winslow is carried through. Ray impresses here, both as a coward and something of an action hero, albeit a frantic one.

With the success of this film, Charles Ray found fame, after a few years playing innocent country boys for Ince. He stayed with Ince and did well, but rarely strayed outside the same type of role, formula being even more important in the teens than it is today. Once you found a formula, you stayed with it and milked it as long as you could. Whether it was a growing desire on Ray's part to do something different or a growing egotism, he eventually reached the point of founding his own production company and sinking his entire fortune into a version of The Courtship of Myles Standish in 1923. After it flopped badly, his career never recovered and when he died in 1943 at the age of 52, he had deteriorated through smaller roles to bit parts and eventually extra work on Poverty Row. If he had survived to 1950, he could have been a good choice for one of Norma Desmond's silent bridge partners in Sunset Boulevard.

Frank Keenan didn't find the fame that Ray did, even though he was officially this movie's star. If he's remembered today, it's probably for being Keenan Wynn's grandfather, rather than for his long stage career or for a decade and a half of film work. After a few roles in 1909, he became serious about the movies in 1914, meaning that this was still pretty early for him, even though at 57 he was already older than Charles Ray would ever get. He would make many more pictures, though he didn't survive the silent era and it's doubtful any were particularly different from this. The inflexibility of Col Winslow fit him well, given that he was known as a 'furniture actor', one who was usually so drunk that it was only the furniture that kept him upright. With that in mind, his casting here seems even more appropriate, but the few outdoor scenes more surprising, as he gets at least a few dynamic moments. Maybe those were his sober days.

Nobody else gets a remote opportunity to shine, at least through their own merits. The officers on both sides look the part, but credit is more due to the costume and makeup departments than the actors. The negro servants at Winslow Hall are white actors in blackface, albeit done rather better than usual. The chase scene is impressive for 1914, as are the battle scenes which prove that explosions were as big business almost a century ago as they are today. Yet all this is visual as there's little structure given to the grandeur. We see the South rush into battle but we don't know any more than that they're hitting the North's weakest point. It's about explosions, flags and clouds of smoke, not anything logistical. Yet putting all this together helps to highlight to me yet again that there were filmmakers working before 1920 who could make a picture that stands up to viewing today. Each one I see makes me wonder all the more about what has been lost.

The Black Scorpion (1957)

2011-07-29T22:06:00.001-07:00

Director: Edward Ludwig
Stars: Richard Denning, Mara Corday, Carlos Rivas and Mario Navarro

Celebrating the 50's Monster Mash blogathon organised by Nathanael Hood at Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear.

Mara Corday made two very different monster movies in 1957: The Giant Claw for Columbia and The Black Scorpion for Warner Brothers. The former saw her take on what has often been called the most ludicrous monster ever to disgrace a creature feature, La Carcagne, something like a zombie chicken version of Big Bird with a mohawk. Imagine how bad that description could look like at battleship size and then take my word that the actual creature looks worse. On the other hand, the latter saw her face off instead against effects supervised by Willis O'Brien, the original master of stop motion animation, though he wasn't working with apes or dinosaurs for a change. To assist him is Pete Peterson, who had cut his teeth on Mighty Joe Young, O'Brien's previous film. He would work with him again on Behemoth, the Sea Monster. When we see the the creature's ugly drooling face head on it's truly awful, but the animation is enjoyable throughout.

The film starts as it means to go on with the destruction of wide swathes of Mexico through a volcanic eruption and a subsequent earthquake. Driving to the remote village of San Lorenzo to take a look are Dr Henry 'Hank' Scott and Dr Artur Ramos. Scott is a geologist played by Richard Denning, a couple of years after Creature with the Atom Brain and three since Creature from the Black Lagoon. Ramos is Carlos Rivas, Texan born but of Mexican heritage and so believable as Dr Scott's local equivalent, a professor of geology from Mexico City. He's certainly much better here than in The Madmen of Mandoras, which later became They Saved Hitler's Brain. What the pair find, a couple of miles south of the village, is weird damage, certainly not natural. A police car that preceded them in by a couple of hours is mangled and its occupants gone. They find a baby in its crib. They find the corpse of Sgt Baker, propped up in a corner with an empty gun.

The padre in San Lorenzo talks of a demon bull that the townsfolk are afraid of. People are dying all over, steers too. He doesn't believe it, or at least so he says, but his congregation do. Heading up towards the crater, against the will of the army, Scott and Ramos find Teresa Alvarez, thrown from her horse and in need of rescue, but who otherwise seems to be capable enough. She's played by Mara Corday, who obviously relishes a role she can get her teeth into. Teresa is a real go getter, especially when compared to her equivalent part in Tarantula. She's run a ranch up on the hills ever since her father died and she has enough firm leadership and respect from her men to call them back to work during such a time of chaos. She does switch into a stereotypical naysayer mode on occasion but it means an intriguing character balance: half of her is as tough as her father; the other half is a sappy romantic lead. The two halves fight it out throughout.

Surely Corday's best genre role, Teresa Alvarez isn't everything she should be but she's much more dynamic than usual. Corday does a solid job in good company. Denning was a capable and experienced leading man, close to the end of a prolific career with 85 movies behind him in only two decades and only five more to come. He doesn't dominate here, because the scorpions lead the way but he keeps our attention on the side of humanity. Carlos Rivas is a decent sidekick but while he plays well off Denning he gets little opportunity to shine otherwise. Carlos Múzquiz gets little screen time but still impresses as the very matter of fact Dr Velazco. Unfortunately there's also a child actor in the film, the powerfully sincere Mario Navarro as Juanito, who latches onto Hank at the Alvarez ranch and proves a capable stowaway who's impossible to shake loose. He's seven and a half but he can ride and shoot and who knows what else. He's annoying.

The first scorpion we see is at the Alvarez ranch too, broken out of obsidian by Dr Ramos. It's only a little thing but amazingly it comes out alive. After this, it doesn't take long for us to see his giant kin, as the title promises. There's much to praise. The creatures aren't man made here like in Tarantula or of mysterious alien origin like The Giant Claw; instead they escape from vast underground tunnels opened to the surface by the volcano. There are many of them, not just one, though the Black Scorpion of the title is bigger and more dominant than the rest. Willis O'Brien and his assistant give them a great finishing move too, a powerful stab downward with the stinger, which can't help but elicit a positive reaction from the audience. 'Scorpion! Finish him! Fatality!' The disasters keep on adding up too, these rural Mexicans having a tough time of it: first a volcano, then an earthquake, ensuing giant scorpions, even a cattle stampede. Then to finish the scorpions off Dr Velazco in Mexico City wants to take them down with poison gas.

The story is better than many of its competitors and I don't just mean The Giant Claw. It's hardly groundbreaking stuff, let me be clear, but scriptwriters David Duncan and Robert Blees, working from Paul Yawitz's story, know what they're doing and they do it capably enough. I can certainly see myself coming back to this one a lot more often than most of these creature features, but to be fair the biggest reason would be Willis O'Brien's animation work, which really dominates the film. Not all the effects are solid: the scorpions look awful in facial close ups and the budget ran out before everything could be completed, so a few scenes have the giant scorpions appear in silhouette form because only the backing had been completed at that time. Fortunately much of the work had been done and there are two setpieces in particular to praise, plus a shorter scene in which an army of scorpions take on a toy train.

The first is a very traditional one, staged underground inside a huge cave in the volcano, into which Drs Scott and Ramos descend to investigate. They find old school stop motion animation, scenes that could easily have been shot thirty years earlier for more classic movies. There's that army of scorpions again, plus a giant tick and a thirty foot worm that I thought was a caterpillar. The critters fight each other too in odd prehistoric battles, one on one, two on one, whatever. These scenes are awesome fun, though the rear projection is far from pristine and there's Juanito to deal with as a stowaway, an annoying distraction from a gloriously retro war of the monsters. The second comes at the finalé, inside a large stadium in Mexico City. It's a gladiatorial orgy of monster violence with the black scorpion taking on all comers, including a helicopter. This stop motion work is joyous and it makes me smile just to remember it. It's what this genre was about.

Alfred (or the Story of a Wonder Fish) (2011)

2011-07-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Directors: Aaron Hobson, Jean-Charles Lehuby and Mathieu Rigot
Stars: Sarah Marie Curtis, Aaron Hobson and Michael Sullivan

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

The only live action fiction in Selection 2011, Alfred rambles along like a beat poem but leaves us thoroughly engaged in a quirky story. It begins with a burp and gets cruder, foul language being punctuation in this short, but the mumbling narrative means we don't quite catch it all anyway. This was annoying for a while but gradually I realised how appropriate it was. It feels like a story told to you by a drunkard late one night in a noisy bar. You don't catch every word, not that every word was probably even spoken, but you always catch enough to get the gist. The fast pace and editing helps this impression too, as does the surreal nature of the story which is never fully explained. Quite why Jack wanders around with his fish in a bowl we don't really know but it doesn't matter. The whole thing is just as gloriously absurd, but it's consistent enough that we grin throughout rather than wonder what the director was smoking.

Jack's fish is named Alfred, as you might imagine from the title, and the story explains how he saved Jack's life. I won't spoil how, but it's just a punchline to a joke detailed enough to become its own story. The other players are Jenna, a young runaway, and her twisted but unnamed dad who is chasing her to bring her home. She meets Jack, who whisks her away and the rest of the story writes itself, if you happen to have the mind of a Terry Gilliam. Fortunately the imagination isn't just in the situation comedy but in the way it's shot too. We don't merely see our barefoot runaway dance around Alfred's fishbowl in the forecourt of a gas station to the accompaniment of a banjo picking attendant, we see it from the fish's perspective too, a wonderful touch indeed. I'd love to see Alfred again, though only a teaser seems to be online. While it began flawed and abrasive, it grew in magnetism and it remains fondly in my memory a couple of weeks on.

Millhaven (2010)

2011-07-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

Director: Bartek Kulas

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

I'm well acquainted with The Curse of Millhaven, a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from their 1995 album Murder Ballads, which follows nine tracks about murder and mayhem in myriad forms with a cover of Bob Dylan's Death is Not the End. I once gave a copy to my stepdaughter for Christmas in a subtle attempt to transition her from the fake alternative music ClearChannel radio fed her to real alternative music that was even more subversive. I wrote a poem based on one of the other songs on the album too, fashioning my own story around its tempo and title. Obviously the material inspires creativity, as this Polish animated short takes one of the songs and brings it to vivid life, as much through an amazing cover version as the glorious animation that accompanies it. Director Bartek Kulas knew the song from Kinga Preis's version, only for it to return to him in another by Katarzyna Groniec, which contains far more nuance and playfulness.

The story concerns a girl called Lottie who has been presiding over a reign of terror in the town of Millhaven. She's the curse of the song's title, though she's only fourteen, and she's eventually hoisted by her own petard, only to remain unapologetic in an asylum. Cave's song is a galloping narrative ballad, but Groniec's version is acutely sinister, not only in the way she builds a superb performance along with the story she sings, going from deceptive sweetness to outright lunacy through pitch and depth, but through Roman Kołakowski's translation, not direct but more of an interpretation. It misses out entire verses of the original song but adds freakish descriptive colour, swapping lines like 'twenty cops burst through my door without even phoning' for 'I was just brushing the blood out of my hair when in barged a bunch of cops'. No wonder hearing Groniec's cover drew Kulas to animate the material. It invited such a treatment.

Kulas's animation is as filled with haunting textures as the music and it grows with the story as well as Groniec's voice and the deep piano that stalks her. His Lottie is an ethereal marionette whose hair is almost as long as she is and almost as much of a character, but the way she moves depends on the point in the lyrics. He combines Christ poses with hypnotic stares to accompany the religious hints Kołakowski introduced in his translation. She plays to the camera like her dark work is a performance piece of art, like she's a Flamenco dancer, a guitar strummer or a kung fu fighter. The flies and spiders that crawl over the inside of the screen ensure the piece seethes. Kulas shot everything in halftone monochromes for which he'd been seeking a use for years and he overlaid a texture that suggests only a subtle barrier between Lottie and us. By far the best piece in Selection 2011, this is a masterpiece of a song and an animation. My wife plays it often.

Millhaven can be viewed at the director's website.

The Grandma's Village (2007)

2011-07-10T19:08:00.002-07:00

Director: Dragana Zarevska

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

Unfortunately the longest piece in Selection 2011 was the least interesting to me, not because of it the story it told but because it didn't seem able to find a focus. The title refers to the village of Babino in Macedonia (Yugoslav Macedonia not Greek Macedonia), which is populated entirely by grandmas, fifteen of them, who live in relative solitude. The only descriptions that I've managed to find online suggest that filmmaker Dragana Zarevska aimed at a cinematic poem in honour of these women, but if so, it's in free verse. She did capture some character, both of the grandmas and the town itself, but a generous eighteen minutes of running time didn't leave me with either a consistent message or tone. For a while it seemed to be a sinister piece, with talk of witches and curses, footage of a stalking black cat and sped up reenactments of stories. Yet the women seem normal and characterful. Why the suggestion otherwise?

There are some good scenes. I enjoyed the ones where Zarevska sat down on a wall with a trio of grannies who simply talked, not about anything in particular but just to talk. What we get out of this is a good deal of character and humour, these old women in their isolated village able to make the young filmmaker laugh. Unfortunately this is as inconsistent within the film as a whole as anything else within it, some scenes engaging, others apparently superfluous. What I found most engrossing were the textures of an old village, from the architecture, which is worn, to the techniques these grannies use in their everyday lives. It was interesting to watch people in this modern day creating and dying fabric and dusting a mule. It was also fascinating to see the culture clash evident as they discover what a modern video camera can do. These scenes of different worlds connecting could easily have been the focus of the film. Sadly they weren't.

111° Longitude (2009)

2011-07-10T19:07:00.001-07:00

Directors: Yuri Makino and Cindy Stilwell

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

From a technical perspective, 111° Longitude is an interesting piece. Made by two female friends and filmmakers who met at film school in New York City, they each tell about themselves while the stills and footage they shot is combined through split screen to highlight the similarities and the differences in their lives at different points on the 111th meridian: Cindy Stilwell in Montana and Yuri Makino in Arizona. There's complexity that I'd like to explore through further viewings but one time through was still enough to highlight a few things, not least that the comparisons being drawn aren't between snow and tumbleweeds but between transience and permanence. What I got out of the film was a surprising conclusion: namely how much transience is easy and consistent, while permanence is so different that it becomes difficult how to decide on it. That's a grand challenge to explore in a nine minute short.

For a while, Makino and Stilwell talk about movement and the visuals we see highlight how much consistency transience really has. We see trains, overpasses and hotels, which look precisely the same regardless where they are, something neatly highlighted by a clever illusion of motion between the two halves of the split screen. Was it Stevie Wonder who always stayed in the same hotel chain, as the layout of the rooms is identical? The message seems to be that transience is comfortable because you don't have to commit. Permanence is another matter. Makino suggests that Tucson is a place where people go to hide or heal or start over. It's somewhere to settle and while there are many similarities drawn between the two locations, there's a major gap between them that highlights how serious permanence is. Beautifully shot, well composed and compared, I feel like there's more depth here to discover. I'd like a second run through to find out.

So Who am I Anyway? (2011)

2011-07-10T19:06:00.001-07:00

Director: Lisa Wegner

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

While the theme of Selection 2011 turned out to be self, it did so predominantly through factual filmmaking, five of the seven shorts selected this year being documentaries. Of those five, this one was the most obviously oriented around self because the only person we see is director Lisa Wegner, over and over again, in a very personal experiment that aims to capture on film who she really is. Apparently made in response to negative comments people had made about her, she chose to examine the truth behind them and did so by positioning a camera to capture her as she entered or left a room, presumably in her own house. It's an intriguing visual experiment, especially for a visual artist, because of the levels of meaning that it opens up. I was fascinated more by how I reacted to the finished piece than in the conclusions it drew. At the end of the day it was hardly surprising to find that Wegner is everything we see, not just one anything.

What was surprising is how much complexity came out of such a simple setup. Initially she looks into the camera, emotes into it in apparently unscripted ways. We see individual moments, good and bad. She doesn't speak but there's commentary both in the text overlay and in the choice of music that plays in the background, backing up her mood swings amazingly well. We see growth, reinvention and change, yet those were always going to be transient. What fascinated me was the relationship between Wegner, a filmmaker, and her camera. For a while it seems blisteringly honest as she lets the camera peel away the layers that protect her from the world. As it runs on, we wonder how much the camera captures her and how much it shapes her, as well as how she uses it. She's an artist, after all. Do filmmakers need a script to get a point across? It says plenty that I'm still thinking about what these ten rivetting minutes really meant two weeks later.

Louis Lee (2006)

2011-07-10T18:57:00.003-07:00

Director: Steve Weiss

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

At Selection 2011, film programmer Steve Weiss suggested that the theme of this year's films was self. He doesn't consciously pick a theme, it just emerges gradually from his choices, but having programmed these wonderful selections of shorts at the Phoenix Art Museum for many years, it's only appropriate that this year's eventual theme would allow him to include one of his own shorts, the first of his films I've ever seen. It's a short documentary, almost entirely visual, put together as a tribute to the work of Phoenix native Louis Lee in creating a rock garden which looks unlike any rock garden you've seen. The work took decades, probably because there was no end goal, just a creativity let loose to do what it would that ended only with Lee's death in 2006. While the camerawork is inconsistent, possibly shot at different times and with different equipment, it ably provides us with a vision of why this rock garden is worthy of capture on film.

I can certainly see why it has captured so much interest. It's insanely ornate but very organic, reminding in many ways of an outsider artist's take on Antoni Gaudí. Watching the camera roll through the garden reminded me of walking through the streets and parks of Barcelona, seeing art everywhere, occasionally structured but more often somehow grown. There's no common structural design here, just rocks arranged in different ways to meet different locational needs, combined with pots, trinkets and statues. Nothing is consistent except the overriding vision of taking all this stuff and creating something artistic with it. The film feels much the same way, with the roaming camerawork mixed with ethnic music and some clips from interviews Steve Gompf made with Lee in 1994. The last one worked particularly well, bringing a sense of humour to the piece that the audience reacted to. So what else haven't you shown us yet, Steve?

Louis Lee can be viewed at YouTube.

The Performers (2011)

2011-07-10T18:51:00.005-07:00

Director: Bob Miller

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

Bob Miller's website describes him as a photographer and a visual journalist and both those arts are capably showcased here in a short piece about dancers at the BalletMet Columbus, shot as a project in multimedia storytelling at Syracuse University but also available to view at Vimeo. We listen to sound clips from interviews with dancers, quick and pithy comments that occasionally overlap, combining to provide an common impression, one that the visuals aim to bolster. There is no direct connection between the two; we have no idea who is speaking and who we're looking at. Everyone is just a nameless dancer, but that's appropriate given the comments about leaving their bodies and becoming the characters that they portray. We don't need to have their names on screen and we don't need to know who is speaking. We only need to understand the moments that they speak to.

While the piece is short, less than six minutes even when you factor in the credits, it's composed thoughtfully, very much a piece of two halves. The first half speaks to capturing the moment, so the visuals are still photographs, artfully shot with as much attention to colour as to composition. As the comments speak to escape, transformation, living in the moment, everything remains still and exotic. Then halfway through, just as a dancer speaks about coming back to reality, the film does that and returns to what we expect a film to do: move. Sure enough, the comments begin to address movement and we see a range of visuals tied to that, showing us what a human body can do. No wonder these dancers feel so alive while practicing their art, whether on stage or not. It's more than performance, it's who they are. They're dancers who dance because it's how they connect to the universe. That's what the film succeeds in showing us.

The Performers can be viewed at Vimeo.

Five Guns West (1955)

2011-07-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Director: Roger Corman
Stars: John Lund and Dorothy Malone

How better to follow up a western by William Castle than with one by Roger Corman, but even earlier in his career. This was only Corman's second film as a director, after Swamp Women. Yet while Swamp Women and Five Guns West aren't movie classics, they're both intriguing pointers to the qualities that Corman would soon bring to the B movie world. For instance, this is poor as a western but fascinating as a prototype for the wartime caper movie. While I was impressed by The Secret Invasion, a 1968 wartime caper movie directed by Corman and written by R Wright Campbell, I assumed that it simply exploited the previous year's The Dirty Dozen, which set the stage for so many such films. Yet it would seem that its real source was another wartime caper movie, 1955's Five Guns West, directed by Corman and written by R Wright Campbell, who even appears in this one too to highlight how involved he was with the picture.

The only real difference is in the choice of war. The concept is just as you'd expect in all those World War II movies: a military officer gathers together a collection of surprising characters to send on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. You won't find any Nazis here though, as Five Guns West is set in the days when 'strange dark figures rode under the flag of the confederacy'. The military officer is a Confederate captain and the men he assembles are the sort of outlaws you'd expect in the old west, all of whom he pardons so as to send into battle because the South was desperate for capable men in a losing war. The mission is simple, to bring back Stephan Jethro, a traitor who has defected to the Union with $30,000; but tough, as it involves making a hard four day ride in three days, avoiding Indians, crossing Union lines and holding up a stage escorted by the Union army. In another day, it's just what you'd expect Kelly's Heroes to do.

As Corman's films tended to be, it's ambitious for a low budget picture. I'm talking here about pictures he directed, because there was often a recognisable touch of philosophy, literacy and sense of history in the films he directed personally that you won't find in pictures like Dinocroc vs Supergator that he only touched as an executive producer. So with writer Campbell, he bands together five very different men with very different goals, fleshes out their characters and provides them with story arcs. Unfortunately the characters end up more interesting than the action they're placed into. It's very much a three act play and the first act is successful far beyond the other two, setting the stage and introducing the players. Once they have something to do, our level of interest wanes as the second and third acts prove unsatisfying for different reasons: guts and budget respectively.

The five outlaws pressed into service are played by Corman regulars for the most part, only John Lund making his sole appearance for Corman here. He had been an established B movie leading man for well over a decade, making him a logical choice for Govern Sturges, the professional highwayman and murderer who quickly dominates the group. He's strong and quiet, reminiscent of a less iconic Charles Bronson. Strangely, Lund's most remembered role today is probably the supporting one he had in High Society a year after this film. With Sturges quiet, it falls to Touch Connors to be colourful and he plays gambler Hale Clinton as a cut rate Maverick, even though Maverick wouldn't appear on screens for another couple of years. He's a troublemaker, who shot and killed an unarmed man after an argument over cards. Connors was the male lead in Swamp Women, his first of four Corman movies in two years. He wouldn't play Mannix until 1967.

The Candy brothers bring the team up to four. Young Billy Candy is played by Jonathan Haze, a long term Corman collaborator who appeared in Monster from the Ocean Floor and The Fast and the Furious, pictures Corman produced before he even started directing, and most of his credits would end up being for Corman. He's restless, crazy and a little dumb, giving Haze opportunity to chew up the scenery on occasion. He'd shot two law officers in a failed attempt to spring his brother Johnny from prison, where he'd been locked up for murder. Johnny is a sharpshooter, as quiet as Sturges but not as strong, probably mostly because the Bob Campbell who plays him is also the R Wright Campbell who wrote the picture. He's a better writer than actor and he knew it. He wrote the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces as well as a number of Corman films, including The Masque of the Red Death, The Secret Invasion and well, Teenage Cave Man.

That leaves Paul Birch as J C Haggard, handed twenty years of hard labour for illegally driving cattle to New Orleans, a run that ended with the deaths of seven men. Unlike the others, he's obviously a decent man, who only wants to get on with his life without all the craziness that war brought. He's a grizzled oldtimer with a requisite deep voice, though he's not as cantankerous as many actors who specialised in such characters tended to be. Birch may be best known as the original Marlboro Man, but he was a film veteran before he joined Corman's stock company and began to get roles of more substance than he got as an uncredited musician singing with the Plainsmen. He would make plenty of Corman films over the next couple of years, from The Beast with a Million Eyes to Day the World Ended via Apache Woman, but he'd quit after a physical confrontation with Corman during Not of This Earth in 1957, his part completed by a double.

If this all sounds a little testosterone fuelled, you'd be right, as there's plenty of opportunity for an exploration of group dynamics. Who will team up with who? Who's going to fight who? Who's going to end up with the gold? This keeps us interested for a while but hardly for 78 minutes and the fights are poorly choreographed to boot. Fortunately there is a woman in the picture, though only one and it takes a full half hour for her to arrive. She's Shalee, in the lovely form of Dorothy Malone, who mans a stage post with her drunken uncle Mike, stranded when the surrounding town died. She's tough and quick with a gun, the same year she made The Fast and the Furious and five other pictures. How's that for a B movie pin up girl? Well, a year later she'd win an Oscar for playing a nymphomaniac in Written on the Wind. That was a Douglas Sirk soap, pointing to the most famous role she would have: a long run on Peyton Place beginning in 1964.

Unfortunately, while Dorothy Malone does a fine job as Shalee, it mostly isn't the one we need. Sure, she gets to snoop around a little and get into trouble, but she's really there to stir up the men. After all, just as we don't see a woman in the picture until she shows up, neither do these characters and they're not working to screen time. These men were all serving time in prison before being acquired by the army and sent on their mission. Who knows how long it had been since any of them had even seen a woman, let alone been allowed to do anything with one. Yet along comes Shalee, one woman to their five men. This second act should be blistering with sexual tension but it isn't and I'm not sure where the blame lies. Malone had all it took to do that and Campbell sets up a couple of scenes to take advantage of it, but it's half hearted and shied away from. It feels like Campbell and Corman simply didn't want to go there, which is a shame.

After the second act, a waiting game centered around Shalee's staging post, disappoints in its lack of sexual tension, the third act disappoints in its lack of action. Eventually the stage arrives, accompanied by Union soldiers led by James B Sikking in his screen debut. He gets a couple of lines before they kill him, but strangely he wouldn't return to film until 1964's The Strangler, and he wouldn't appear on TV until an episode of Assignment: Underwater in 1961. Hill Street Blues wouldn't show up until 1981, but he's recognisable here 26 years earlier. There's violence and gunplay and revelation, but it's unsatisfying, stilted and slow. Everything gets resolved, but we really don't care too much, partly because the revelations are unsurprising but partly because there's no real imagination at play with the guns. There is one scene of genuine tension, where Johnny gets under the stage post and shoots up through the floor, but that's it.

It all made me wonder just what Corman and Campbell aimed at. They set up the component parts of a fascinating western but completely failed to deliver on those fronts. It became routine, without anything to make it stand out among a substantial crowd until we put it into perspective in movie history, something that Corman's name invites. Could it have been that Campbell was really the originator of the wartime caper flick, merely too early and too independently to spark anything? Only when someone else caught on, could he then build on it in The Secret Invasion. That reminds of the complex Jurassic Park/Carnosaur situation, where Carnosaur the movie was a ripoff of Jurassic Park the movie, but both scripts were sourced from books, where Jurassic Park the book was a ripoff of Carnosaur the book. Maybe when Campbell wrote The Secret Invasion, his ripoff was merely credit returning to where credit was due.

Cave of Outlaws (1951)

2011-07-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

Director: William Castle
Stars: Macdonald Carey and Alexis Smith

I couldn't resist Cave of Outlaws for a host of different reasons, not least that it isn't available on DVD but Netflix are streaming it anyway. It's a real genre hybrid for a start, taking elements of mystery, romance, comedy and suspense and mixing them all up within the framework of a western. It's a Technicolor picture from 1951, so it looks a little otherworldly, especially given that the many underground sequences are shot on location inside the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. It's directed by William Castle and is the earliest of his films I've seen thus far within his obscure middle period, after entries in crime series such as the Whistler and the Crime Doctor but before his famous horror titles. It's also set in the Arizona territory in 1880, in the equivalent of which I currently live, and prominently features the famous frontier company of Wells Fargo, for whom I currently work. These are only the most obvious reasons why it's an interesting film today.

It wasn't that important in 1951 though and it obviously wasn't an expensive production. While the sets and Alexis Smith's costumes are worth looking at, this was made for Universal who were known for such things on a much grander scale than this. The acting is decent, but a few scenes needed a second take that never came. The stars are recognisable but not major: Macdonald Carey in the lead, Alexis Smith as the leading lady and Edgar Buchanan and Victor Jory backing them up. You may know these folks from television, but not at this point as the roles they would become best known for were still in the future. Carey began Days of Our Lives in 1965, literally as he provided the famous opening words. Buchanan had started Petticoat Junction two years earlier and would remain with it for its entire run. Smith's TV work was notable much later. She played a recurring character on Dallas and was nominated for a primetime Emmy for Cheers.

Carey is hardly a standard hero, as he begins the film freshly released from prison. He was guilty too, as we saw during the prologue when his eighteen year old self took part in a violent train robbery that left many men dead. The heist itself is successful and they make off with the Wells Fargo payroll of gold, but a posse is close on their heels. Pete Carver leads the gang into a colossal cave system, but he's the only one who gets to walk out. The posse follows them in and shoots the rest dead. The payroll followed the corpse of Pete's dad down a vast and inaccessible drop, so when he's released from Kansas State Prison fifteen years later, we can expect him to be a lot of things, from bitter to driven, but we don't expect him to be the hero of the film. 'He's grown up to be a tough one,' the governor tells a Wells Fargo detective, 'smart and tough'. Carey plays it quiet though, like a low budget Gary Cooper, so we keep our minds open anyway.

Having set itself up as a gold hunting western, Cave of Outlaws proves that it has a funny bone as Carver arrives back in what is now a booming copper town called Copper Bend. Everyone is interested in him. 'How do you know it's Pete Carver?' asks one local. 'I seen him with my own eyes,' replies another. 'Ever seen him before?' 'No...' You see, though fifteen years have passed and everyone knows the gold is in the cave, nobody has found it yet and they all expect Carver to quickly become a rich man. Some beat him up for his dough. Many aim to become his friend sharpish. Others want to exploit his fame or extend him credit because they expect him to be able to pay those bills soon enough. Even the doc who cleans him up after he's mugged drops hints that the town needs a hospital bad. The main characters all have their own interests in him and the gold too: Dobbs, Elizabeth Trent and Ben Cross.

Dobbs is the Wells Fargo detective, the only man in town who seems to have any patience. He sits back with his eyes open, waiting to see what unfolds. Edgar Buchanan is a great choice for the role, suitably old enough to be the voice of patient experience yet young and bright eyed enough to be up to the task at hand. He's been looking for this gold for twelve years. Ben Cross is the local bad guy, as you'd expect in the form of perennial screen villain Victor Jory. He owns the town, having acquired all the copper rights in the area through fair means or foul. He wants Carver to help him find the gold, without Dobbs noticing, pay his debts which all end up owed to him, and then get the hell out of town. Elizabeth Trent wants him, as her husband ran the local paper, the Copper Bend Clarion, but disappeared a year earlier and she's out of business until someone can bankroll its reopening, which Carver promptly does on credit.

You can almost write the story from there, because while the mix of genres ensures that it's an interesting ride, each of those genres unfolds exactly as you expect. You can be sure that Carver is after the gold, but not for the reasons we're led to expect. You can be sure he's interested in Liz Trent, a presumed widow in some ostentatious 1880 dresses, and you can be just as sure that Ben Cross is interested in her too. You can also be sure that Liz's husband is going to show up at some point in the story, alive or dead, just so he won't end up as a loose end. You can be sure that the gold is going to be a consistent MacGuffin that drives most of the characters, all the way until the end of the film. You can be sure that there's going to be brawling, a couple of gunfights and a showdown in the caves. You can even be sure that the plate glass windows at the Clarion are going to get people thrown through them. None of these things will surprise.

What does surprise is how sparkly the dialogue gets, as there are some blistering lines. At one point Liz ends Carver's fierce kiss and he asks, 'What's the matter? My credit's good everywhere else.' The romance is surprising too, not only because this is a Production Code era film and the lady is technically married at the time, but because Pete and Liz share far more arguments than they do kisses. The attention to detail is surprising too, as the writing is more consistent than I would have expected for a 75 minute B movie. I liked the cute scene that has Carver and Dobbs watch a couple of kids play acting as the Bandit of the Cave and the Wells Fargo agent. The cat and mouse game Carver and Dobbs play is intriguing, as they're ostensibly on opposite sides but frequently work together. I was surprised that the name of Dobbs didn't carry more reference though: this western about gold came only three years after The Treasure of the Sierre Madre.

The acting is capable without ever being stunning. Edgar Buchanan is the best of the bunch as Dobbs, the only character who doesn't jump to conclusions. Liz Trent spends most of the picture doing that, so Alexis Smith ends up mostly as the means by which her costumes move. Victor Jory played villains so often that he could do so in his sleep, which he does here. Few others get much of a look in, though Houseley Stevenson makes the most of his brief role as Cooley, Liz's printer, who rejoins the paper as it reopens for love and loyalty rather than pay. Russ Tamblyn is the young Carver but grows up too soon and I didn't even recognise Lee Marvin as the conductor who gets a couple of throwing knives to the back during the train heist. So the Carlsbad Caverns steal the film, eerily shot by Irving Glassberg. It's the caves that stand out most here, with the unusual mix of genres notable too in the best mid-period William Castle that I've seen yet.

Kongo (1932)

2011-07-05T22:58:00.000-07:00

Director: William Cowen
Stars: Walter Huston, Lupe Velez, Conrad Nagel and Virginia Bruce

Kongo is a glorious anomaly. Not only was it a remake that returned its story to its roots and did it exactly as it was intended, it was a remake of a Lon Chaney movie that surpassed the original. I'm not aware of another instance where anyone ever outdid Chaney and doubt anyone ever did but circumstances were on Walter Huston's side here, as he was working in the precode era and so had a lot more artistic freedom than Chaney did back in the silent days. The mere four years between the two versions were vast, given the changes Hollywood had gone through. It helps that Huston didn't really take Chaney's place either, Chaney took his, as Huston originated the role on Broadway in 1926 in a play by Chester DeVonde and Kilbourn Gordon. The play was Kongo, while the loosely adapted 1928 screen adaptation was West of Zanzibar. By 1932, when the story was revisited under its original name, Chaney was dead and Huston was a star.

West of Zanzibar is a great film, one of a number of great films Chaney made for regular director Tod Browning and he excelled once more in the lead role of Dead Legs Phroso, but it's not quite up to the level of his many masterpieces, perhaps because some of its scenes were excised for release. Hollywood was already converting to sound in 1928, though Chaney resisted that trend fearing that the air of mystery he generated so well wouldn't translate successfully if audiences heard him, so West of Zanzibar is silent. By 1932, the staginess of the early talkies had vanished as the studios mastered the technology, and while Kongo is mostly shot in and around the jungle hut of Deadlegs Flint, it carries as authentic a feel as any jungle picture I've seen. The sets were built for Red Dust, with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, but they work perfectly here too, darkest Africa never appearing quite so dark and reeking of sweat from moment one.

The switch to sound also marked the beginning of the precode era, a time of unbridled artistic freedom that lasted until the Production Code was enforced in 1934, which promptly muzzled Hollywood's output for three decades. Kongo is a prime example of what the studios could get away with within that brief period that could never have been revisited later. In fact, it's hard to imagine anyone remaking this one even today, because those who would stoop to the levels of brutality it exhibits wouldn't be able to capture the underlying soul and humanity of the story. It also benefits from release at a time when parts of the world map were still marked 'unexplored' and setting stories in such exotic climes could seem entirely believable whether they had any authenticity or not. It's notable that this film never feels racist, even though it centres around a brutal white ivory trader in the heart of Africa amidst a whole host of primitive natives.

Deadlegs Flint got his nickname for a reason: he's a cripple with knife slashes over his cheeks. He has a necklace and a slight waistcoat, but underneath is nothing but sweat, which permeates this film so palpably that it's almost a member of the cast. Scantily clad Lupe Velez is so slippery that it's astounding that her outfit doesn't fall off. Flint is wheelchair bound but he lives in attic space accessible only by climbing a rope. He carries a whip to back up his statement that 'I'm the law here.' He has a pet monkey that sits on his lap and sleeps with him. He has a hat with a skull on top of it to make him appear important to the natives. They all glisten with sweat too, topless black men who carry blazing torches and wear headdresses, war paint and necklaces of teeth. Their leader is a wizened cripple whom they carry about. Flint does magic tricks with fire to impress them, when sugar cubes aren't enough, and to reassert his dominance.

I mention all this detail because it provides a texture that is unmatched in cinema, engrossingly exotic. The only thing as omnipresent as the sweat is the sound of the drums. This is nowhere we've seen before, intoxicating swamp country with alligators and salamanders and a way of life we can only imagine. Perhaps most importantly, Flint has become part of this world, not just by being tough enough to survive in it, as Gable and Harlow were in Red Dust, but by becoming an intrinsic part of the scenery. He's not just Deadlegs Flint, he's Big Boss Flint and King Flint. He's infiltrated himself into the mythology of the natives. Just as Flint was surely influenced by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, so the film itself was surely influenced by the Congo river and the descriptions Conrad used in his story. One I don't remember precisely compared jungle humidity to walking through an emptied fishtank. That returns to me every time I watch Kongo.

As much as he reeks of sweat, Flint also reeks of vengeance. He burns for revenge against 'the man who stole my wife, the man who kicked my spine in, the man who sneered.' He measures the passage of time only against what Gregg Whitehall did to him and what he'll do to redress the balance. Everything is part of his plan: his presence here in the jungle, his elevation to god status over the superstitious natives, the eighty mile juju circle he's enforced around him that no other trader can enter without his permission. Thus has he existed for so long with little white company: only a pair of assistants, the cowardly Cookie Harris and a big tattooed brute called Hogan, and a sex slave maid named Tula, Lupe Velez infinitely more exotic here than she ever was as the Mexican Spitfire. Having already proven his brutality in many ways, this plan proves his diabolical patience.

You see, Whitehall has a daughter, who grew up in a convent, and it's through her that he plans to get to her father. Viewers of precodes generally tend to be shocked, not at the content of the films which is tame compared to today, but that such content could be in films so old. Used only to code-era Hollywood films, precodes are glimpses into a time when the cinematic rules they're used to simply didn't apply. Kongo is a film that makes precode fans gasp with astonishment, as Deadlegs Flint descends to depths that seem utterly out of place in black and white yet are all the more powerful for it. So Flint has Hogan kidnap Ann Whitehall from the convent to establish instead in a Zanzibar brothel. After a time, he has her brought into the juju circle, where he has her eat scraps from the floor and drink tainted water. He keeps her drunk and bedraggled. When she comes down with malignant black fever, he gives her brandy to feed her delirium.

This is all astounding to watch, all the more because Ann Whitehall is played by Virginia Bruce, an elegant classic Hollywood leading lady, one of the original Goldwyn Girls who had just wed silent legend John Gilbert. Seeing her tormented and degraded here is as shocking as realising that the Jennifer Connolly doing lesbian sex shows in Requiem for a Dream is the same Jennifer Connolly that made Labyrinth. They reach the same depths, as when Ann Whitehall talks back to Flint, he throws her in a room and has Hogan rape her, but the realisation that this is 1932 is world shaking. Early hints at Flint's brutality, such as when he shoots a native for overhearing a conversation then has him hung up as a warning to all blacks, aren't preparation enough. Yet it all plays consistently with the tone of the film. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Flint has found a kinship with the jungle and descended into a savage and aggressive brutality.

The natives are superstitious souls who Flint feeds with cheap carnival tricks, like decapitating Tula and having her severed head speak, but they're already one with the jungle setting. White men don't manage so well unless they embrace that the way Flint and Tula have. When another white man arrives, twitching and swaying like he has an army of ants all over him, we see what happens if they fight it. He's both a doctor and a dope addict. 'My name's Kingsland and I'm a mess,' is his introduction. Flint has him work on his crippled legs to relieve his pain in return for byang root, the drug that he's addicted to, but Ann brings him out of that dependence. He finds purpose in her salvation, but this story doesn't let anything be that simple. Tula hooks him again with her seductive powers and when he stops Flint twisting her tongue with wire in punishment, Flint cuts him, ties him up and dumps him in the swamp for the leeches to bleed clean.

And so the story runs until the blisteringly brutal ending, which I won't spoil but is as much a kick in the gut as any twist in any movie. The ramifications of it are soul destroying and yet there's a chance for as much redemption as anyone who's seen a Lon Chaney story arc can expect. It all fits the same themes of cruelty and sacrifice that Chaney mined so well and so often that it isn't surprising to watch him tell the same story in West of Zanzibar, but Walter Huston owns the role. Watching him ratchet up the intensity level to degrees that Chaney never considered, I'm always stunned at what he achieved here, but he was a star in the precode days for a reason, deep and versatile in his explorations of morality. He's vibrant, brutal, driven. When Kingsland operates on him without anaesthetic, he just lies there and chomps his cigar. When Ann asks him, 'How did the Almighty ever allow a man like you on this earth?' he's already been led him to face that too.

He has able support, not only from Velez and Bruce, but from Conrad Nagel as Dr Kingsland, who deliberately and appropriately overacts when he's stoned. The overdone acting fits the material in ways that is rarely the case. Bruce overacts too, but she's playing a woman deliberately driven to the depths who nonetheless manages to keep something human inside and must concentrate to keep it there. Velez is purest exotica, a gorgeous vision of a primitive beast, as are the natives whose voodoo religion expects them to burn widows alive as the moon rises. Such atmosphere is rare and in my opinion, has never been matched. The textures are such that we feel the rain, the swamp, the sweat, the addiction, the death drums, the masks, the animal magnetism, even the pidgin English. Cinema never got closer to the worlds that Robert E Howard conjured up for the pulps and even the precodes outdid this perhaps only with Freaks. Even then it's a close call.

Midnight Alibi (1934)

2011-07-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

Director: Alan Crosland
Star: Richard Barthelmess

Richard Barthelmess is one of the forgotten greats of Hollywood and while he made a few more films, including a late and great turn as Rita Hayworth's screen husband in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings, Midnight Alibi effectively marked the end of a great career, because Warner Brothers did not renew his contract. Throughout the precode era, he had enjoyed a fixed annual salary and the ability to choose his own material. With such freedom, he served as the screen's preeminent social conscience, making powerful message films railing against the corruption of government, society and business like The Finger Points, Son of the Gods and Heroes for Sale, along with cinematic visions as powerful as The Dawn Patrol and The Last Flight. None of that meant much to Warner Brothers, who felt it financially imperative that they shed expensive contracts like his or Ruth Chatterton's. When they came up for renewal, they simply didn't renew them.

That's fair enough, though sad for us in hindsight. What isn't fair is that they gave Barthelmess such a half baked sendoff after a unique career. Based on a Damon Runyan story called The Old Doll's House, Midnight Alibi is a scant 58 minutes short and it doesn't feel remotely as cared for as any previous Barthelmess picture. It feels like a vaguely ignored afterthought, what the music industry calls 'contractual obligations', one that rambles across what seems like every genre in the book in a vain hope to find one that sticks. It really shouldn't be worth watching and you can be sure that it fails on a grand scale, but there's still much for us to see because Barthelmess is an almost constant presence and there's Helen Chandler to look forward to as well, another unjustly forgotten name who gifted precode audiences with a string of magnificent performances that go well beyond her turn as Mina in the Béla Lugosi version of Dracula.

It begins as a thriller, Barthelmess playing Lance McGowan, some sort of crime boss who returns from abroad on the noon boat. His importance can be gauged through everyone in town knowing of his return, from senators to drunks who put their heads through doors for ten bucks. He's calm though, carrying himself with purpose, but politely chatting up a fellow passenger, Joan Morley, who he met on the boat. His men tell him that Angie the Ox is the head honcho now, running his illegal empire from the Hummingbird Club. It isn't surprising to find that Joan is Angie's kid sister. So McGowan starts taking on the Ox by showing up at his underground gambling halls, exuding so much presence that the folks running the games let him win, even when he rolls dice under a hat. Eventually, of course, he ends up at the Hummingbird, though he's been warned not to. The ensuing battle leaves him leaping over the wall to the Old Doll's House next door to escape.

And here all the momentum the film has built is promptly stopped in its tracks. Thus far it's sped along with a dynamic lead, a morally ambiguous antihero with a suitable mob. There's conflict everywhere you look, with hints of turf war and dangerous romance. It's dynamic and powerful. Well, it was. Now we leave that entirely behind so that Abigail Ardsley, the Old Doll who has lived alone in this house for decades, tells him a story about her youth because he looks like someone she loved long ago. We experience this story in flashback, with Helen Chandler turning eighteen as her ethereal younger self and Barthelmess as her father's clerk, Robert Anders. The pair are in love and want to marry, but her father won't have any of it. After discovering them mid-kiss, he casts Robert out and, when he comes back that night to ask her to elope, he shoots him dead. That's this film all over: every time a story begins it promptly ends again.

Barthelmess reminds a little of Brando in the first half and Patrick MacGoohan in the second. He's much better as the tough guy, because he had a serious presence to him that commanded our attention, even though he was hardly what you'd expect in a dynamic leading man. He was short, though a little taller than Cagney or Robinson, but wasn't as striking as either. Lillian Gish thought he had the most beautiful face of any Hollywood actor, but somehow he appeared both inconsequential and utterly deserving of our attention. He's too soft in the romantic scenes here, in which Helen Chandler dominates. She had a nervous sort of energy about her that makes it difficult to watch anyone else when she's on screen, even when playing opposite someone else with the same sort of magnetism. She's wonderful here, but she and Barthelmess were both better in The Last Flight.

Having changed from a thriller to a historical drama, now it becomes a romance as we return to the Lance and Joan subplot, but compared to Helen Chandler Ann Dvorak isn't much to look at and she's too melodramatic for us to care. Lance McGowan decides to be both tough and soppy. He goes back to Angie's place unarmed on a dangerous mission to forge a future and he goes back to the Old Doll to take her a dog. After all, she never talked to her father again and her door stayed unlocked for 45 years until he walked through it, so he wants her to have some company. Actually he brings her a bunch of dogs so she can pick one. She chooses a wire haired terrier, because it is 1934 after all. He calls it Skippy, which was the real name of Asta, to which name it changed after The Thin Man, which was released about six weeks earlier than this film. And then it becomes a melodrama, a courtroom story and of course a folk tale with a happy ending.

This film has everything, but most of it isn't that substantial. The story is riddled with holes, not something Damon Runyon was known for so perhaps we can blame Warren Duff's screenplay, or the restrictions of length the film was subjected to. At less than an hour, it can't even effectively explore one story, let alone half a dozen. What we can watch are the actors who give it what life it has, not just Barthelmess and Chandler but Helen Lowell, who plays the Old Doll. Already 68, this was surprisingly close to the beginning of her screen career rather than the end. She'd made five silent films between 1919 and 1924 but proceeded to hit 1934 with a vengeance, making no less than seven in that year alone. She'd make another nineteen before she died in 1937. She's well worth watching. While the explanation of the title is hardly surprising by the time it arrives, it's a touching moment that she carries well.

At the end of the day, the film is more important for what it represents than what it contains. It's the last film Richard Barthelmess made under his First National contract, which had transferred to Warner Brothers when they bought that company. Without the control that contract gave him, he made a couple of B movies then retired to live off his real estate investments. He returned for Only Angels Have Wings and three more pictures in the early forties, but that was it for a career that had flourished for a decade and a half. Fortunately he made a lot of movies in that time and we can look back at many of them, including three famous pictures. It was when D W Griffith cast him in two great leading roles opposite Lillian Gish, in 1919's Broken Blossoms and 1920's Way Down East, that he became a star. A third film, Tol'able David, made for his own production company, cemented a stellar career which didn't founder until here. This was the end of an era.

Sing and Like It (1934)

2011-07-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

Director: William A Seiter
Stars: Zasu Pitts, Pert Kelton, Edward Everett Horton, Nat Pendleton and Ned Sparks

Sing and Like It is a great example of just why Hollywood had a golden age. People mistakenly assume that the golden age meant an abundance of classic films that people can still watch and admire today. Such pictures do exist but the golden age was much more. It came at a time when everyone went to the movies and they didn't just see one film, they saw an A picture, a B movie, a cartoon, a newsreel, a whole bunch of stuff all on the same bill. The industry was dominated by the major studios who cranked out pictures in vast numbers to fill these slots, some only taking a week to make. The point is that many of these routine programmers, like Sing and Like It, that had no expectations beyond persuading a few more punters into a few more theatres, should really suck. The realisation that they rarely did begins a real understanding of the golden age.

The reason Sing and Like It doesn't suck is because the people who made it, both in front of and behind the camera, were talented people and there were many more talented people waiting in the wings to take over if they faltered. It's the consistent depth of that talent across such a huge volume of pictures that made the golden age. There weren't actually as many truly great movies as people remember, but the routine stuff was so much better than the routine stuff of today. In many instances, the routine stuff is actually better than the good stuff of today. As produced by Merian C Cooper, a year after King Kong, and shot by reliable comedy director William A Seiter, this one focuses on five actors, four of which are favourites of mine: the delightfully ditzy Zasu Pitts; the grand ditherer, Edward Everett Horton; the gloriously dry Ned Sparks; and, in a bigger part than usual, ever lovable Nat Pendleton. The fifth is sardonic vaudevillian Pert Kelton.

Pendleton, so frequently just one of the gang backing up Cagney, Robinson, Bogart or whoever, finally gets a gang of his own. He's T Fenimore 'Fenny' Sylvester, a name that surely destined him to either run the show or have it run him. Here he's very much in charge, aiming to expand his kidnapping racket to cracking safes, but he's still a big kid at heart with a strong attachment to his mother. This leads him to finance a musical show, of all things, because he hears Annie Snodgrass singing about her mother and he's instantly and memorably smitten. She's practicing with the Union Bank Little Theatre Players, while he's robbing her employer, but he has to take a break to discover who the angel was whose voice is drifting upstairs to him. He makes her sing Your Mother again, in front of his rogues gallery of hoods and there are no dry eyes in the house. The catch is that only his are tears of joy; his men are notably suffering.

In the precode era, a few genres dominated the screen and musicals and gangster flicks were two of the key ones, so it's only natural that RKO would merge the two together in a comedy that sends up the whole thing. Pendleton was a natural to head up the gangster half and Zasu Pitts is an inspired choice to lampoon the musicals. She plays Annie Snodgrass with delightful snobbery, a bank employee in Drafts and Collections who 'doesn't think of anything but her art any more.' I have no idea which keys she sings in but I know it's more than one and her lyrics couldn't be any more schmaltzy. 'Who taught you wrong from right,' she trills in a quavery voice, 'while holding you so tight? Who misses you tonight? Your mother!' It's an awful performance in the best ways and having Pendleton all doe eyed over it is comedy gold. Never mind that his moll, Ruby, aches to be back on stage and he doesn't like the idea, he has to gift Annie Snodgrass to the world.

This is fluff, pure and simple, but it's elevated by the cast. Zasu Pitts made a number of serious films in the silent era, especially for Erich von Stroheim, but she was always a comedienne and talkies gave her opportunities to use her memorable voice that silent pictures never could. Nat Pendleton was an Olympic wrestler who played as many dumb oxen in the thirties as Karl Dane did in the twenties, but he did so in a quintessentially American way, playing cops, gangsters or wrestlers who could always be relied on to be taken advantage of, from the very best films to the very worst (think The Thin Man at one end and Swing Your Lady at the other). Pendleton gets more opportunity here than Pitts, because for the most part if she's on screen she's singing Your Mother yet again, a song that's hilarious to hear once but painful to hear again. Sylvester failing to understand that is a running joke but the joke is on us.

There are no star turns here, as each member of the ensemble cast gets their moment in the spotlight, even down to the bit part players. The thing to realise is that the cast were all known as character actors for a reason. None of them dominate the story, not only because the script doesn't aim for them to but because that isn't who they are. They're the folks who we watch in other people's movies and want to see more of, only to find that when they get their own movies they can't carry them on their own. So here, none of them are tasked with more than what they do best: building characters out of scraps of situation, then bouncing dialogue off each other with panache. That works right down to John Qualen's brief spot as Annie's boyfriend, Oswald, who with few lines and little screen time paints a complex portrait of their relationship. He'll obviously be there for her whatever, though she sees him and her as secondary to her art.

Best of all is Ned Sparks as Fenny's right hand man, Toots McGuire, whose dry wit takes full advantage of the script but goes far beyond it. His talent was to wring the highest comedic value out of the shortest lines. 'Let it go,' he says to his boss and it's genius. 'Goody,' he mutters and it carries blistering depth. Often he doesn't even have to open his mouth to be funny. On the other hand, Edward Everett Horton always made the most of his lines and the more words the better. He's perfect for the role of Adam Frink, the best show producer in town. 'Did you ever hear such a voice?' Fenny asks him about Annie. 'Not emanating from a human throat,' he replies. His futile attempts to say no to the gangster are glorious. Inevitably, Frink is caught up as helplessly in the plot as Annie, with Sylvester's love of his mother driving the whole thing and with Oswald and Toots hanging in there to pick up the inevitable pieces.

It's Ruby who shakes it up. Unhappy that she isn't the star of the show, she persuades Fenny to make her Annie's understudy, with the firm intention of stealing the lead through any nefarious means necessary. When Fenny decides to stage a publicity stunt by kidnapping Annie, Ruby has her kidnapped from the kidnappers, and by that point the story is rolling along with a life of its own. Like the rest, she's gifted with clever dialogue. 'From now on we're sisters under the skin,' she informs Annie, 'and you're already under mine.' In fact every combination of the five leads works delightfully. Toots translates everyone else's dialogue to Fenny who can only understand underworld slang. Fenny effortlessly and constantly annoys Frink. Ruby plays Fenny and plays up to Annie. Frink attempts in vain to give stage directions to his leading lady who doesn't have a clue but believes she's a consummate professional.

And I can't keep away from the writing. Adapted from a story by Aben Kandel by Marion Dix and Laird Doyle, just another couple of Hollywood scriptwriters, this was never meant to be anything special, just another routine programmer aimed to fill a scheduling slot. Yet it contains sparkling dialogue that makes the running time a swift 72 minutes; and it includes subtle commentary like the characters who write their reviews based on the reaction of the esteemed critic Abercrombie Hancock rather than the show itself, a neat take on The Emperor's New Clothes. Sure, there are flaws. There are far too many renditions of Your Mother and far too little else for Zasu Pitts to do. With so many cast members to focus on, we end up focusing on none of them. But if made today this would be an Annie Snodgrass of a picture, a clunker that expected a $50m budget. In 1934 it was a Toots McGuire, without any expectations at all but with all the talent in the world.

Smarty (1934)

2011-07-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

Director: William A Seiter
Stars: Joan Blondell, Warren William, Edward Everett Horton, Frank McHugh and Claire Dodd

Based on a play by F Hugh Herbert, this is one of those films that highlights just how far we have changed as a society in such a short time. If you can believe this, the message behind Smarty is not just that domestic abuse is fine and dandy but it's actually the key to a successful marriage. Happiness can be found by husbands not being afraid to slap their wives when they deserve it and wives understanding that it's needed to keep them in line. Oh, and it's a comedy. Can you imagine the outcry if such a film was released today? Well Warner Bros snuck this one in as the shadow of the Production Code was descending, a mere month and a half before far more than wife slapping would become beyond the pale. Don't be mistaken that the code aimed to protect women though. It crippled female characters on screen by removing what code administrators saw as moral depravity and placing women back in the kitchen where they belonged.

Regardless of the message, Smarty has a female lead who is strong and dynamic, precisely the sort of character who would promptly disappear from Hollywood movies when enforcement of the code began on 1st July, 1934. She's Vicki Wallace and she's celebrating her birthday as the film begins. As you might expect in the hands of Joan Blondell, Vicki is fascinating to watch but she's also utterly unfuriating, her hobbies apparently being to wind up her husband every way she can and to ruthlessly manoeuvre everything to her own benefit. Her husband Tony is played by Warren William and it's truly shocking to see him wrapped around someone else's finger. This may be a Warren William picture, but Joan Blondell is bizarrely playing the Warren William part. I'm sure that's the point. While William is unjustly forgotten today, audiences of the time knew and loved the bad boy of the precodes and would have understood exactly what was going on.

For a start, even though Tony is a thoughtful husband and has a pleasant birthday evening all planned out, Vicki invites Vernon Thorpe over to play bridge, knowing full well that her husband can't stand him. Their fourth is Nita, Thorpe's guest, and hanging around for comic relief is their neighbour, George Lancaster. We don't get to see a lot of cards, we get to see Vicki torment her husband shamelessly, winding up him up throughout until he breaks down and slaps her. The reactions are amazing. Tony is horrified at what he's done, unable to forgive himself for such a cruel act, even though he was totally driven to it. Nita enjoys it. While she doesn't excuse Tony's action, she freely admits that his wife is annoying and she explains to her date that 'a good sock in the eye is something every woman needs, once in her life'. Thorpe is appalled, which is easy to visualise given that he's played by Edward Everett Horton, who knew that reaction well.

It all makes for a surreal scene. Joan Blondell torments Warren William, even though we would expect the exact opposite. William is ashamed of his action, something we never thought we'd see. Witnessing an act of violence against a woman, another woman wittily approves while a lawyer is appalled. The only part that seems familiar is the humour, given that Frank McHugh is George Lancaster, breezing in and out of rooms and conversations just as we expect him to. Of course humour in this situation is of itself surreal. Well, while we're off balance, the story decides to keep us there, because whatever lesson Vicki and Tony should have learned from the incident is not learned and Vicki escalates instead. She demands an end to their marriage, hires Vernon Thorpe as her divorce attorney and promptly marries him as soon as she's a free woman. He's always loved her, it seems, so there's no possible conflict of interest there.

By this point, you probably won't be too surprised to find that Vicki continues being infuriating, merely tormenting Vernon instead of Tony. After waiting a year, she mixes them back together, inviting Tony over to dinner, calling him darling and pursuing him unashamedly while he keeps asking, 'How's Vernon?' in vain. Watching these shenanigans, I started keeping track of just how precode this movie was. When you think about it, it's astoundingly outrageous, with absolutely nothing viable for release a couple of months later. A wife spurs her husband into abuse so she marry her divorce lawyer, then repeats the action with him so she can leave her new husband for her old husband, who's seeing a married woman. Sure, it sounds like a random soap opera episode today, but in 1935 the Legion of Decency would have had kittens. The only way it could possibly even be released was to make it onto screens in 1934 before the code was enforced.

It ends up too strangely against type to fully work. Joan Blondell is capable in the Warren William role, not a usual place for her, but one that provides her with plenty of opportunity to dominate. William has fun being the recipient of this treatment for a change but it's not right for him. There are a few moments when the old William shines through anyway, such as when he arrives at her party and looks at her in a new, very revealing dress. He does get better as the picture runs on, especially once Vernon shows up and proves totally at unease, but it's unusual territory for him that he can't be comfortable in. Horton is a weasel of a divorce lawyer, which means he's doing his job right. It's good to see an edge on the bewilderment that didn't always get the chance to manifest itself. Claire Dodd radiates joy as a much divorced woman, though she's underused in this film. Frank McHugh, of course, could do this sort of thing in his sleep.

As to the plot, there is precedence to the violence and it's even explained in the film, as another knowing nod to the end of the precode era. The source play opened in 1927 so had no idea what was around the corner in the thirties, but the adaptation was by the playwright himself, working with Carl Erickson, who would ironically kill himself only a year later after receiving a letter from his wife asking him for a divorce. Vernon Thorpe calls Tony's slapping of Vicki 'extreme cruelty', enough on its own to guarantee divorce, which it promptly does. Without seeking justification, Tony later explains that he'd been going to the movies a lot, and discovered that girls apparently love to be hit, even with grapefruit, a reference to Jimmy Cagney and Mae Clarke in The Public Enemy. In the precodes, where men were gangsters and women were prostitutes, it was hardly the worst crime in play, but this commentary seems out of place.

This scene almost feels like an apology to the public on behalf of the filmmaking community, a reinforcement that just because actors do things on screen doesn't mean you should copy them at home. It's half hearted and inappropriate, even before it schizophrenically proceeds to push the concept that hitting women is absolutely something you should copy because your marriage would benefit from it! This inconsistency of approach seems fraudulent rather than careless, for it's carefully scripted otherwise. Both Tony and Vernon are immediately horrified by what they do, while Vicki literally asks for it and Nita is all for it too. What it really boils down to is a couple of men writing this story as if it was advice from women. Hitting your wife is fine, these female characters tell us, as long as you love her. Only if you don't is it offensive. A woman even gets the last word, reinforcing the concept. She says, 'Hit me again.' Wow.

Village of the Giants (1965)

2011-07-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

Director: Bert I Gordon
Stars: Tommy Kirk, Johnny Crawford and Ronny Howard

Bert I Gordon introduced giants to the late fifties monster movies with The Cyclops, then made them a staple with The Amazing Colossal Man and its sequel, War of the Colossal Beast. Every other filmmaker in the country followed suit, or at least it felt like they did, but he took a break for a while, from human giants at least, until 1965's Village of the Giants, a bizarre mashup of genres that mixed monster movies with beach movies, Disney movies and juvenile delinquent movies. It was loosely based on the H G Wells novel Food of the Gods, which Gordon adapted a little more faithfully in 1976. This version is so loose that Wells would probably have turned in his grave. As it turns out, it's a terrible picture, even by Mr BIG's usual standards, but the cast is one to pay attention to. Some are still notably recognisable today but back in 1965 many were household names which was, of course, entirely the point.

The story comes from two directions: the gang of rebellious youths and the child prodigy. The gang arrive by crashing their car into a telephone pole in the rain. So dangerous that they react by climbing out and boogieing on down in the mud while getting drenched, these four girls and four boys end up in one huge mud bath. They're led by Beau Bridges as Freddie, a particularly insipid and pasty white gang leader, certainly no competition for Marlon Brando or James Dean but not really in the same league as Mugs from the East Side Kids either. A downed street sign gives him the idea to go torment folks in Hainesville, only three miles away, a peaceful town in which our leads, Mike and Nancy, smooch away the night on the couch, attempting to ignore the kid cooking up chemistry experiments in his basement lab. He's Little Ronny Howard, back in his days as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, subtly named Genius and he's the real foil for Freddie.

Names are hardly a strong point for this picture. One explosion later and Genius invents Goo, a bubbly red concoction that the cat laps up and grows to humungous size in no time at all. This is why Tommy Kirk plays Mike, because he'd dealt with eccentric scientific wizards for Disney in The AbsentMinded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber earlier in the decade, when he was a child actor. He's supposed to be the film's star but he's outshone by a giant cat, a giant dog and especially by a giant pair of ducks that shake their tail feathers at the local hop after he feeds them Goo. He's a poor leading man, reminiscent of Wil Wheaton after he lost his juvenile charm but before he gained his adult character. Thus he proudly announces to the town that they're his ducks and he has a million dollar secret. Yeah, what a great idea that was! At least his integrity is up to shrugging off attempts by one of Freddie's girls to seduce it out of him.

The hop is where everyone first meets, because there's dancing every two pages in this script and Mr BIG hired the Beau Brummels to play live for these kids. They get two songs and continue playing even when the ducks take over the floor. That's how grounded in reality this picture is. No wonder Freddie's hooligans say things like, 'This place is really groovy.' To be fair, they're talking about the local theatre, which is off season and closed, but which conveniently leaves a host of costumes and props around for them to play with. I'm sure you won't be too surprised to find that as the local youth parties on down in the square with Mike's giant ducks skewered and cooked for them, Freddie and his gang break into Genius's basement lab, obtain some Goo and dare each other into growing to giant size and becoming the monsters in this monster movie. Unfortunately they're about as monstrous as they are delinquent, which is to say not very.

Village of the Giants is purest exploitation, as if Genius had thrown everything that kids dug at the time into a couple of test tubes and brewed up a single potion to make them all deliriously happy. Unfortunately it turns out to be an unholy mess of genres, as incoherent and overdone as any three of AIP's beach movies put together, with even more booty shaking and safe for work exposed flesh. Beyond the Beau Brummels, Mike Clifford croons a number and Freddy Cannon gets to perform a song in his cardigan. Something for everyone, remember? The biggest musical name though is Toni Basil, not as a performer but as the film's choreographer and an extra who doesn't say much but may get more screen time than anyone else. She's a dancer at the hop, shimmying at scary speed in a cage and she's a dancing distraction at a key point in the story. She's unimaginatively named Red because she spends most of the film in a bikini and a red wig.

In some ways it outdoes each of the genres it steals from, but not in any satisfying way. On the beach movie front, it has a bevy of girls who are highly pleasing to the eye, though Joy Harmon's extreme coppertone makes her look like she'd eaten something orange at Willy Wonka's. As a monster movie, it has a whole teen gang of giants, but they use their newfound dominance to demand that the sheriff bring them fried chicken and impose a curfew of 9.00pm for adults. As a gang movie it's pathetic, Freddie and his followers settling for being happy that nobody will ask for their IDs or they won't get hit by their fathers any more. They have as much imagination as the folks who named the characters. Only on the Disney movie front does it really satisfy, as it maintains the Disney feel but adds the sort of edge that Disney wouldn't dare to dream of. OK, that just means double entendres, switchblades and giant cleavage, but it's something.

Anyone paying attention can see so many opportunities for that edge to be edgier. For instance, the gang grow to giant size but their clothes don't. This was 1965 so we were hardly going to get slasher style booby shots, but the opportunity to enhance the sexual tension was wasted. Having them fashion clothes out of the theatre curtains makes sense, but a giant Beau Bridges in a red toga with tassels doesn't help us buy into his supposed toughness. The most memorable scene is when giant Merrie picks up normal sized Horsey (yeah, Horsey) and dangles him from her bra. That made some of the posters, but its promise isn't met. Similarly, there's one potentially scary scene, with a giant spider in a basement, but it's the only one and it's drained of menace by bad effects and poor editing. The gang of giants are drained of menace too, not least by having them appear in slow motion in every scene. The townsfolk just look at them for the most part.

The effects could have been much better but they could have been a lot worse too. Mostly they hinder the film because Gordon was obviously aware of the limitations. For instance, the normal size folks take down Freddie at one point with the aid of a collection of hot rods and ropes, but they do so by driving around a couple of motionless poles made up to look like his legs. What this means is that Beau Bridges has to stand there like a moron, flailing around a little in slow motion, while he's taken down because it's the only way the logistics could work. The last fight scene has the same problem, a David vs Goliath battle with sling vs pipe, because the budget didn't allow for effects capable enough for Kirk and Bridges to really go at it. As we notice this though, we also realise that it wouldn't have helped. Having the money to do it right wouldn't have made the slightest difference, because the biggest flaw is the writing and it's a fatal flaw.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

2011-06-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

Director: Nathan Hertz
Stars: Allison Hayes and William Hudson

When The Amazing Colossal Man did so well at the box office in 1957 for Bert I Gordon, it was surely no surprise to find other filmmakers promptly cashing in on its success with similar films. The one I remember most fondly from my youth was Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, made a year later by Woolner Brothers (no, not Warner Brothers), with a female lead, clad in appropriately draped bedsheets to keep her modest. Made for $88,000, it grossed well over five times that, enough to prompt sequel discussions, in colour and with a much higher budget, but it never got past the script stage. Unfortunately it isn't that great a film. Perhaps my fond memory of it was enhanced by the poster, which is one of the greatest and most subtly sexual movie posters ever made. The artist was Reynold Brown, who was reponsible for many great exploitation posters such as Creature from the Black Lagoon, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and This Island Earth.

While the poster and the title advertise this as a monster movie, it takes a long while for Allison Hayes to grow to her huge and stunningly inconsistent size. For the most part it's a movie about normal sized monsters, of the cheating variety. 'Harry, what would your wife say?' asks Honey Parker of her boyfriend Harry Archer as we begin. His wife, to whom he's returned after a brief separation, entirely so he can get his hands on some of her fifty million bucks, says 'Aaah!' but not why you think. There's a science fiction component here: 'a strange red fireball' comes out of the sky while she's driving down Route 66 and lands in front of her, like Rover from The Prisoner. A giant emerges to reach for the diamond around her neck. It simply isn't Nancy Archer's day: she has to deal both with a cheating lowlife husband and a giant from outer space. Of course not a soul believes her because they know that she's spent time in a private sanitarium.

Allison Hayes was a regular in genre pictures of the fifties and sixties, not just horror movies like The Undead, Zombies of Mora Tau and The Crawling Hand, but also westerns, films noir and spy flicks. The poster for this film is an undoubted highlight of her career but the character itself was unfortunately not quite what it should have been. As Nancy Archer, she's a rich woman dealing with her love for a man who doesn't deserve it, shamelessly cavorting with mercenary blonde Honey Parker in a small town where everyone surely knew everyone else. In another film she'd have shot him dead or conjured up the forces of evil to take care of him, but here she flounders around until she's contaminated by alien radiation and she becomes the fifty foot woman of the title. Only now does she feel safe in dealing with Harry, by reversing the iconic shot from King Kong, the giant woman reaching through the window for the normal sized gorilla.

Initially the story builds neatly as a B movie melodrama and it had all the potential to become a feminist landmark, but it loses its way. While Archer flounces around with her feelings instead of doing something about them, Yvette Vickers has no such restraint as Honey Parker. She's a sleazy piece of work from moment one, cuddling up with another woman's husband in public and needling him to bump her off for the money. She does it blisteringly well: she's a dynamo and she knows how to walk the walk and talk the talk, sashaying and pressuring in equal measure. No wonder Stephen King ranked her as one of his matinée idols. Like Hayes, she made a number of genre pictures: Reform School Girl and I, Mobster preceded this one, and Attack of the Giant Leeches would arrive in 1959, a year after being a Playmate of the Month. The pair work well as opposites: one wishywashy and emotional, the other ruthless and determined.

The script should have had them face off against each other for more than just a single lopsided, albeit satisfying, scene. Hayes and Vickers both had the looks and the acting chops to make it a battle to relish over an hour and a bit of running time. Sure, the alien radiation could have given Hayes the edge but the battle should have been raging for a long while before that ever became a factor. Instead they fail to even connect, possibly not even sharing a scene until the finalé, so we're stuck with Harry instead as the connection between the two. William Hudson is capable as Harry Archer, but nothing more. We don't like him, for sure, but he doesn't have the charisma to make us truly despise him as we should. 'You're all I have,' his wife tells him, in her mansion with her devoted butler and world famous Star of India diamond. Everything should have been there for us to hate him with a passion, like a great wrestling heel, but he's too inconsequential.

In fact the easiest male character to focus on is Sheriff Dubbitt's deputy Charlie, played by Frank Chase in his last year in the movie business. Credited in less than half his movies, this was still his 25th of 26 pictures, and he's as much a bundle of dim witted energy as Hayes is a bundle of nerves. A small town cop in every way, Charlie is still much more noticeable than his boss, who is simply in the picture, and more than any of the male actors up to the lead. William Hudson is here presumably because he'd played the doctor in The Amazing Colossal Man, as it can never hurt to steal some of the cast from the movie you're ripping off. Yet even when about to murder his wife with an overdose, we're still thinking about Deputy Charlie dancing with Honey down at Tony's Bar and Grill. Other actors like Ray Gordon or Otto Waldis do exactly as they're expected but nothing more. It's sad when the small town deputy dominates the male cast.

What surprised me most was how much buildup this story had before the fit hits the shan. There is suspense, this monster movie being far more carefully plotted than most, but there are no real surprises. It's pulp stuff, right down to the spaceship the sheriff and the butler end up on, with its glass fishbowls with suspended diamonds. How the thirty foot bald, translucent, alien giant fits in this normal sized spaceship I have no idea, with or without his crusader costume, but scale is off consistently here. The story really is a deadly B movie melodrama with a dollop of sci-fi until the very end, when the giant Nancy wakes up and tears off the roof to wreak violent revenge on her husband. It's satisfying to urge on the monster for good reason, not only because the good guys are so annoying. The ending is the wish fulfilment fantasy for victimised women that the whole of the movie should have been. If only it had been as good as the poster.

Navy Blues (1929)

2011-06-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: William Haines, Anita Page, Karl Dane and J C Nugent

For his first sound film, William Haines returned yet again to a military setting, which always felt strange to me, especially given the surreal ongoing saga that is 'don't ask, don't tell'. It isn't only that Haines was gay, it was that he was obviously gay. In real life he continually incensed studio executives by refusing to deny his homosexuality, going so far as to live openly in a committed gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields, a fifty year relationship that lasted his lifetime and cost him his movie career. On screen he isn't stereotypical or flamboyant, but he exhibits so many quintessentially gay mannerisms that it never ceased to amaze me how often his studio put him into uniform. In 1926 it was Tell It to the Marines, in 1928 West Point, now in 1929 Navy Blues. He even ended his screen career on Poverty Row with another military role in 1934's The Marines are Coming. Of course, on screen he was officially a ladies' man, so realism be damned.

His previous picture was Speedway, released earlier in 1929, and it's fascinating to compare his last silent movie with the first he made with sound, not least because the three main actors in many ways reprise the same parts they played in that film. Haines is Jack Kelly, the practical joker of his particular battleship, yet another opportunity for him to chase the ladies, antagonise the men and run through the inevitable story arc once more in ways that would cause his arrest today. If a real sailor acted like this they would spend most of their time in the brig. To be fair, he's a lot more sympathetic here than he was in Speedway, his inevitable fall from grace is a lot less powerful or direct and his just as inevitable redemption is more believable and worthy, but that doesn't mean that Kelly ends up fundamentally different from any of the other characters Haines had played over the previous decade or so.

Most of his jokes are unsurprisingly perpetrated on his friend, Sven Swanson, yet another chance for Karl Dane to haul out the tough but dumb Swede persona that he had been wearing for even longer than Haines had been playing practical jokers. Dane gets more screen time here than he did in Speedway, especially early on, but that merely helps to highlight just how thick his Danish accent was, the primary reason for the collapse of his career. Many actors lost their careers with the advent of sound, because they didn't speak English, because they didn't sound as audiences expected or because they weren't intelligible to a wide audience. Dane fits in the latter category, an English speaking foreigner who couldn't have pulled off a major part without substantial voice training. However this film suggests that he could have stayed on screen as was, merely in much smaller roles, similar to this one where his 6' 3½" bulk is more important than his voice.

Dane's decline was so tragic that he became one of the most referenced examples in Hollywood history. He had found fame in The Big Parade in 1925 and major roles in La Bohème, The Scarlet Letter and Son of the Sheik brought him to a salary of $1,500 a week, but in less than a decade he would be penniless and dead by his own hand, unable to persuade MGM to give him even $5 a day as an extra or carpenter. His Danish accent may have been the catalyst for his decline, but the stories don't include the many other factors that contributed. He worked through a nervous breakdown and suffered from a bout of pneumonia, a relationship with a crazy Russian dancer and the loss of all his mining investments to fraud. A return to vaudeville failed and even menial jobs didn't work out, including the famous hot dog stand that wasn't really in front of the gates of MGM. When a pickpocket took his last $18, he locked his door and shot himself dead.

Perhaps the most tragic thing about Dane's story is that it doesn't seem unlikely for a character he might play. So often he was the big man that everyone else took advantage of, whether that be his gold rush partner in The Trail of '98 who manoeuvred him into doing both their jobs or his shipmate here fleecing him of his dance partner and his pay. Dane played big and dumb, Haines played small and bright, even though he was six feet tall, a sort of prototype for the fast talking con man that Lee Tracy would soon master in the precodes. Sure enough, it's Dane's character who's matched with Anita Page's at a Ladies Uplift Society dinner dance that the crew attend, but it's Haines who leaves with her in yet another astounding display of insolent insubordination. He manhandles her emotions unashamedly during his ship's leave. Caught up in a whirl, Allie Brown leaves her family for him, only for him to put her up in a hotel and go back on board ship.

Anita Page was so frequently a romantic interest for Haines that he proposed to her for real in 1932, during the shooting of Are You Listening? It wasn't serious, of course, but it demonstrates how close they were as friends that when Louis B Mayer piled on the pressure for him to enter into a lavender marriage, that he chose her to ask. I wonder if Mayer was a contributing factor to her declining his proposal, given that 1932 was also the year that her own MGM contract lapsed, apparently because she rejected Mayer's sexual advances. Like Haines and Dane, she's given a much more substantial part here than in Speedway, one that leads her round a rollercoaster of an ethical story arc, from a virtuous daughter to a taxi dancer, or paid dance partner, a common precode metaphor for prostitute, then finally back to reconciliation with her family in the finalé. While Haines's character finds redemption, for a change he shares it with his leading lady.

I'd call the plot a simple one, but compared to Speedway it's deep. However nobody watches a William Haines movie to be enlightened, they come to watch his schtick. Audiences must have liked what they saw because this slightly more sympathetic version of his usual routine sped him on the way to even greater success. A year later he was the biggest male box-office draw in all of Hollywood, something that must have stuck in Louis B Mayer's craw. He shares the film better than usual here too, giving Dane and especially Page opportunities to shine. Dane gets to fight on a few occasions, one brief scene in the lobby of the Garden Cabaret being a gem. He knocks out the doorman and pulls down a chandelier to use as a prop in knocking out plenty more. Page carries the dramatic side of the picture, though she's not as sympathetic as she should be. All in all, it's a great step back up after Speedway for all concerned, but still not enough.

Speedway (1929)

2011-06-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

Director: Harry Beaumont
Stars: William Haines, Anita Page, Ernest Torrence and Karl Dane

Speedway is an unfortunate movie. As a piece of entertainment, it fails on every level except the acting, the cast members trotting out their standard routines yet again without anything new to keep it fresh. Only one plays against type, the rest so in character that we often feel like we're watching stock footage. Yet it maintains a great deal of historic value, both to race fans and film fans. Race fans will appreciate that it's set at the Indianapolis racetrack, with the cooperation of the Indianapolis Speedway Association and the participation of some of the racers. Much of the end of the film is comprised of footage from the Indy 500 in 1929. Film fans will see this not only as the last silent movie William Haines made, but as something of a who's who of silent stars, almost all of whom were closing in on the end of their careers, though for very different reasons. Only one of these silent legends became known as a sound era actor.

Haines was capable enough, as can plainly be seen in his first sound film, Navy Blues, released later the same year. The public certainly thought so too, as he was the top male box-office draw of 1930. His career ended simply because he refused to leave his lover, Jimmie Shields, when Louis B Mayer, the most important man in Hollywood and Haines's boss at MGM, ordered him to do so. Haines and Shields remained together for over fifty years, Joan Crawford calling them 'the happiest married couple in Hollywood', but his final film was The Marines are Coming in 1934. Blacklisted from the screen, he became instead the most notable interior decorator to the stars. More traditionally, the career of Karl Dane, his foil in so many movies and the butt of his pranks both here and in Navy Blues, ended because of his thick Danish accent. Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb became Karl Dane in Hollywood just as I'd have become Charlie English.

It's these two we see first, Haines apparently driving through the streets in a racecar to wow the crowds but in reality being towed by Dane to the Indianapolis racetrack. Haines isn't even the driver, he's just the mechanic, but, 'according to Bill Whipple's impression of Bill Whipple,' the intertitle suggests, 'nobody had anything on Bill Whipple but Bill Whipple.' If I'd had no context at all, I'd still have known that Bill Whipple would be played by William Haines, that's how close it is to his formula of frivolous arrogance. Dane is Dugan, another employee of Jim MacDonald, played by Ernest Torrence. MacDonald is a sympathetic character, perhaps the only one in the film, both as a father figure to the orphaned Whipple and as the underdog of the picture, given that he's raced in every Indy 500 since it began but is zero for seventeen thus far. This is his last attempt to win it because his heart won't hold out too much longer.

Torrence is the one actor playing against type. A veteran silent actor, he was best known for villainous roles, not least opposite Richard Barthelmess in Tol'able David and as Captain Hook in the 1924 version of Peter Pan. His career ended in the most emphatic way possible in 1933 when he died after surgery to remove gallstones, otherwise he'd have done fine in the sound era. He played Moriarty to Clive Brook's Holmes in 1932 and his last role, a year later, was as Claudette Colbert's father in I Cover the Waterfront. Quality didn't necessarily mean a successful transition though, as leading lady Anita Page discovered. The year she made this film she was known as 'the girl with the most beautiful face in Hollywood' and she received 10,000 fan letters per week, numbers behind only Greta Garbo's. Yet, as she told it, this merely led to sexual advances from Louis B Mayer and his right hand man, Irving Thalberg, so her contract was cancelled in 1932.

Neither Torrence nor Page get much to do here, though both get more than Dane. All of them are only really in the picture as props for Haines, who runs roughshod over all of them, as he tended to do. It's hard to describe to modern audiences what Haines did. Simply suggesting he was one of the first wisecracking leads doesn't cover it because it was the sheer degree to which he went that characterised him most. Perhaps the best comparison today would be to one of Jim Carrey's caricatures, but he was more realistic, while being just as intensely annoying. His idea of a chat up line is, 'What a break for you! You met me!' His romantic style falls into the modern definition of 'stalker', both mentally and physically. He sticks to the woman he chooses like chewing gum on their boot and, if she frees herself of him briefly, he has no compunction in lying down in the road ahead of her car, pretending death, so he can reattach himself when she rescues him.

What kept these antics from being unbearable is that his story arc always involved him falling seriously from grace, then finding redemption at the end of the picture. Speedway provides him with a less emphatic redemption than normal, but the script is notably more slight than similar films he made around this time. The stunts he pulls provide mild repercussions early, like when he climbs into another woman's car to chat her up, only to leave when he discovers she's the daughter of a policeman, but those repercussions build until he's shamelessly manipulated by the villain into betraying those he cares about, only to be promptly thrust into the shame corner when his talents are no longer required. That leaves us with a sentimental and unbelievable Indy 500 to finish off the film, with an even more sentimental and unbelievable ending. Then again, we're only shown two teams so a suspenseful race was never on the cards.

MacDonald's competition on the track comes in the form of another great Hollywood villain, John Miljan, who is on very safe territory here as the villainous Lou Renny, so villainous that we want to hiss at him as we would at Dick Dastardly. Miljan was the only major cast member to survive more than a few years in the sound era and was coincidentally the most experienced with sound, having narrated the trailer to The Jazz Singer in 1927, thus predating Al Jolson's groundbreaking words in that film. He would still be in demand in the late fifties after over two hundred movies, his last role being the chief in The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold in 1958. With Haines utterly dominant, the script almost forgets Miljan, even though the young lady that Whipple sets his sights on, Pat Bonner, is supposedly Renny's fiancée. By the time he actually does anything, that plot strand has disappeared utterly, making us wonder if we heard right to begin with.

It's stunning to watch all these silent legends sidelined so ruthlessly. It isn't just Page, Torrence, Dane and Miljan, but others too. Eugenie Besserer is MacDonald's wife, surprisingly briefly given that her screen career stretched as far back as playing Auntie Em in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1910. Like her screen husband here, death soon ended her career. Polly Moran is almost as underused, though she had been one of Mack Sennett's most consistent comediennes for a decade and a half. She got a surprising lease of life in the early sound era, teaming up with Marie Dressler, but then lapsed out of fashion and into bit parts as the thirties ran on. All we get is Haines, as in your face as he ever was, but less funny and more annoying. Even when Pat gets him up in the air for some aerobatic retribution, she loses a wing and he ends up saving the day with the only parachute. Without believable redemption, Haines can be unbearable.

And with even Haines fans potentially giving up on this clunker, the only reason for them to stay with the film is the race footage. It is fascinating to watch professional motor racing this old, as it bears very little resemblance to anything seen today, not least because the cars are tall and thin with big wheels far out from the body. They look dangerous, even before we see the crashes, so it's not surprising to find that one driver, Bill Spence, died during the race and the winner, Ray Keech, died sixteen days later in a 200 mile race at Altoona. Through synchronised sound, we're treated to plenty of engine noise to accompany the race footage, but modern technology like on car cameras has spoiled us and so we're hardly immersed in the race. The camera does venture onto the track, capably but never consistently. Unfortunately, with the story so disappointing and most of the stars so underused, it's a shame that we have to wait so long for the race.

A Feather in Her Hat (1935)

2011-06-27T21:25:00.001-07:00

Director: Alfred Santell
Stars: Pauline Lord, Basil Rathbone, Louis Hayward, Billie Burke and Wendy Barrie

One of those thirties movies so eager to advertise that it was sourced from literature that its title card is the book, A Feather in Her Hat ended up as little more than a curiosity and a filmography filler. The lead is Pauline Lord, a stage actress I'd never heard of who only appeared in two films: this and Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, released a year earlier, suggesting that while she may have picked her roles well on stage, she didn't manage it with film. I was more interested in the rest of the cast though, especially her immediate support. This is the only one of the seven movies Basil Rathbone made in 1935 that I haven't yet seen, a great year for him with a Garbo picture, two Dickens adaptations and a gloriously villainous turn in Captain Blood, among others. Louis Hayward, Billie Burke and Wendy Barrie round out the major names in major roles, and much further down the credits is a young David Niven, earning only his second credit in six films.

In Hyde Park, London, in 1925, a man complains to a crowd about how nobody has any money in the Depression. Capt Randolph Courtney is talked into addressing them too, but as well spoken as he is, he only gets through a few rambling insults before the drink in him knocks him out flat. He's Rathbone, of course, and he's a little fond of the bottle. He's rescued by Clarissa Phelps of Clarissa's Corner Shop, to which she takes him after the crowd disperses, mostly because of his speech about how any child can move up in the world just through the powers of dedication and education. Sure enough, after ten years of his help, her son Richard does just that. Unlike the 11 year old Richard, this version is well spoken and well dressed. He's even a playwright. And here, as he turns 21, he and we are both shocked by a number of surprises that come completely out of nowhere in a very capable way. The writing here is massively inconsistent, but often great.

Apparently his name is really Richard Orland, or something like that. She isn't his mother; that was an actress she won't name. She gives him a bank book with a thousand pounds of balance. And she asks him to leave. In fact he must leave, because she's done her part and that was the agreement. I really wasn't expecting this turn of events and neither was Capt Courtney. While Clarissa stays mum, the captain helps young Richard to track down his real family, discovering through her old correspondence that she used to work as a maid for an actress called Julia Trent, whose husband was an explorer who was lost in the Arctic. Now she's Julia Trent Anders and it's her house in which Richard rents a room and we meet the rest of the key members of the cast. Julia is as dizzy as you would expect for any character played by Billie Burke; and Pauline Anders, her stepdaughter, is a live wire, energetically portrayed by an excellent Wendy Barrie.

For his part, Louis Hayward exhibits plenty of sophistication, three years before he would play the Saint. It's a curiosity that two of the three well spoken Englishmen in this film were South African, both Rathbone and Hayward born in Johannesburg. Only David Niven was English. To extend that notion, none of these Englishwomen were English either, whether well spoken or not. Wendy Barrie was born in Hong Kong, though of English heritage. Burke was American, but belonged to a high enough circle to hide her accent. Pauline Lord was American too, as was the admirable Cockney slip of a girl who competes with Barrie for Richard's attentions. She's Nydia Westman, and with Lord she was my discovery here, though I have seen her before in Bulldog Drummond movies. Remarkably given this international array of talent, the English setting is thoroughly believable, as is the central conflict between landed and working classes.

I found the film to be very awkward as a whole, though I was fascinated throughout. Mostly I was enthralled by the excellent acting, not only by those I watched to see but those I hadn't heard of. Pauline Lord does excellent work as Clarissa Phelps, with a H in front of every word she can find, making me wonder what could have been if she'd have decided to stay on the screen. Originally the part was aimed at Ruth Chatterton, who would not have been as good. Wendy Barrie shines. Her costumes should have swamped her role entirely but they don't. Nydia Westman refuses to leave our attention, even though she's by definition a drab and inconsequential character when compared to the rest. Billie Burke sparkles and warbles, but not in any way we don't expect. On the male side of the cast, Hayward does a solid job as Richard, capably embracing the mystery at the centre of his existence, namely who he really is.

Unfortunately the writing is truly schizophrenic, perhaps highlighted best by the fact that the mystery we wonder most about is the background of Rathbone's character. He doesn't get the time to develop Capt Courtney fully, but we're fascinated nonetheless. He plays older than his 43 years, obviously of the upper classes and just as obviously fallen, but not so far that he isn't an admirable fish out of water. He walks with a cane and a stagger and he's rarely without a glass or a bottle in his hand, but he never appears as drunk as his first scene. Yet while we discover who Richard really is, we don't get the same revelation for the captain. Strangely, for a film that revolves around a character who writes for a living, it's full of promise that the writing can't quite keep a focus on. It keeps our interest and on occasion keeps us engrossed, but it's hard to grasp quite where it's going at any point.

There's the mystery of who Richard really is and who his mother really is. There are two vaguely romantic subplots: Clarissa and Capt Courtney, then Richard and either Pauline Anders or Emily Judson, two lovely girls from completely different classes. There are plot changes that come out of the blue, beyond the revelations of Richard's 21st birthday. At one point he's involved in a cab accident in the fog, prompting the clash of his two lives. Clarissa's health is an undercurrent throughout the film that we mostly ignore until it's too big to do so. There's also the return to the stage of Julia Trent, in a play that Richard writes for her. The film only runs 72 minutes but these myriad plots make us wonder which we should focus on. The script wonders too, as the finalé apparently aims to but forgetfully fails to tidy up all loose ends. Whether that's the fault of I A R Wylie's source novel or Lawrence Hazard's adaptation, it's still a serious but fascinating failure.

The Son-Daughter (1932)

2011-06-26T16:56:00.000-07:00

Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: Helen Hayes and Ramon Novarro

A century or so ago a western fascination with the Orient arose, almost as if the creative minds at the time suddenly noticed that there was an entire other race of people mingling with them on a daily basis. So up sprang the yellow peril pulps, inscrutable detective tales and tragic Oriental dramas, which pretended at tolerance but often found themselves the most racist of all. Here's a great example: to explore a quintessentially Chinese quandary are a host of westerners whose names fail to inspire confidence. It was adapted by John Goodrich and Claudine West from a play by George M Scarborough and David Belasco, with dialogue by Leon Gordon. The cast similarly shuns able ethnic actors of the day, like Anna May Wong or Sessue Hayakawa, for westerners, whether used to yellowface, like Lewis Stone, Warner Oland and H B Warner, or not, such as Helen Hayes, First Lady of the American Theater, and Ramon Navarro, son of a Mexican dentist.

During a popular rebellion against the Manchu dynasty, we find ourselves among sympathisers in San Francisco 'while Imperial hatchet men, hirelings of the tyrant, watched and sprang from furtive corners.' One prominent sympathiser, Sin Kai, is tasked with bribing American sailors to smuggle weapons back to China. He's played by the ever respectable H B Warner, one of the few westerners who could almost get away with acting in yellowface, most famously in Lost Horizon. His nemesis is Fen Sha, the Sea Crab, who has become the richest gambler in Chinatown partly by selling out his countrymen to the Emperor's envoy. He's Warner Oland, who despite being Swedish had played eastern roles as far back as Mandarin's Gold in 1919 and he would continue to do so throughout his career. This stereotypical villain role came after three turns as a more surprisingly believable villain, Fu Manchu, and three of his sixteen outings as Charlie Chan.

I had some vague expectation that The Son-Daughter was a well regarded film of the time that had merely aged terribly. What I found with Oland's early scenes is that it's a pulp adventure in delusion about being a work of art. After watching the Sea Crab open fire on the plotters, then torture them with an inane grin on his face, I couldn't take it seriously, and that's before we get to the leads. Trust me, while I could never buy Oland as Oriental, he's leagues ahead of what we see in the early scenes with Helen Hayes, Lewis Stone and Ramon Navarro. Hayes is Lian Wha, known as Star Blossom, and she sounds about as Chinese as I do. Lewis Stone is her father, the unfortunately named Dr Dong Tong, and he is much like Lewis Stone usually is, whatever race he's playing. Ramon Novarro looks painfully like Peter Sellers as university student Tom Lee, especially as he's so adoring of Star Blossom from afar that he walks into lamp posts.

The courtship between these two is so giddy and overblown that it's acutely painful to see. Their first actual meeting, after many slipped notes, sets us in motion with neither Hayes nor Navarro able to shed their accents. Tom Lee is supposed to be native born Chinese, whose father sent him to college in the US to prepare for the new China, yet he sounds like the Mexican American that he was. Hayes does a far better job than Katharine Hepburn, Luise Rainer or Renée Adorée in yellowface, and she does improve as the film runs on, but to begin with she's embarrassing, as stereotypically fragile an Oriental flower as could be conjured up in nightmare. The best thing about their love is that it's doomed. Sin Kai comes to Dong Tong to ask for $25,000, a quarter of the $100,000 he needs to continue to bribe the smugglers. He doesn't have it, so he's asked to give his daughter up for betrothal to a rich merchant as any true patriot would.

And so to the conveniences, which riddle this script like holes in Swiss cheese. Dong Tong sells Lian Wha to the highest bidder, who is of course the dastardly Sea Crab. Useless Star Blossom magically transforms during the betrothal auction into a dangerous and courageous enemy to the Emperor. Sin Kai tells Dong Tong that the son of Prince Chun is in the city and of course that's Tom Lee. One more scene and his father is dead in a hail of Manchurian bullets. He must go home to take up his father's fight, but he doesn't. Sin Kai is captured by the bitter Fang Fou Hy, the Sea Crab's superior, the Emperor's envoy, and brings him to the Sea Crab's lair. Facing torture to give up Prince Chun he commits suicide with a poison Dong Tong has secreted under his fingernail. For some reason, H B Warner is replaced with a wax head just for a moment so Fang Fou Hy can throw tea in his face to prove his death.

And I'll give up here. I love pulp literature and I have a fondness for politically incorrect yellow peril stories, so I should be the target audience for something like this. Yet what in print can be an exotic tale of high adventure tends to become an offensive embarrassment on screen. Most of it is that that our imaginations can picture Fu Manchu however we like and we naturally go for authentic ethnicity. On film that's impossible, because Hollywood made insane casting decisions like rejecting the magnificently talented Chinese American actress Anna May Wong because she was too Chinese to play Chinese. So we get Helen Hayes and Ramon Navarro, H B Warner and Warner Oland, Lewis Stone and Ralph Morgan, even Louise Closser Hale as Toy Yah, confidante to Lian Wha and servant to Dr Dong Tong. Even imagining a better storyline with these actors becomes a painful concept, and the one we have is painful to begin with.

Not everything is bad here: the marriage procession is capable and the costumes are interesting. However this was an MGM film, the richest of the studios, and this is hardly the peak of their set design. Mostly it just goes horribly wrong. The music is as overblown as the story, which is worst of all. Writer George Scarborough filed a lawsuit against MGM over alterations to the play it was based on. It's not clear how that turned out, but the film's script doesn't fail at odd points, it fails consistently throughout. The casting is terrible, only Warner Oland winning out as the Sea Crab and then only through authenticity as a pulp villain not a Chinese gambler. The only fight scene is poorly handled. The romance is embarrassing. The tragedy is wasted. Even Clarence Brown's direction is uninspired though capable. I've found his films inconsistent: for every Flesh and the Devil or A Free Soul, there's an underwhelming star vehicle like Anna Christie or Chained.

The most interesting things I can relay about The Son-Daughter are things you wouldn't see if you watched the film. Apparently the crew used special lighting techniques to make Chinatown appear drab at night but gaudy by day, though I didn't notice this while watching. Instead it's a little exotic throughout with some elevation during the marriage procession. Just as with most Hollywood productions centered around Oriental themes, many genuine ethnic actors were cast as extras, probably with the aim of making the background look realistic even if the foreground didn't. There were many here and a full four hundred of them went on strike until they could be served the sort of food they expected. The lesson is that it's more interesting to read about The Son-Daughter than to watch it. You'd be honestly better off watching Warner Oland as Charlie Chan, Peter Lorre as Mr Moto or even Boris Karloff as Mr Wong.

Star Trek (2009)

2011-06-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

Director: J J Abrams
Stars: John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Winona Ryder, Zoë Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Eric Bana and Leonard Nimoy

The J J Abrams reboot of Star Trek is a bright and shiny affair from moment one. It isn't just the action and the explosions, it's the light and the colour of it all too. The spectacle sucks us in but a brief moment when a crew member explodes into space suggests quality because, admirably, the sound disappears when we're outside. It reminds us to search for substance in this summer blockbuster, which has also been called a great film. It's still in the IMDb Top 250 two years on, but then so is Avatar which, as far as sci-fi blockbusters go, had precisely nothing beyond the bright and shiny. We wonder for a while as substitute captain Kirk orders an evacuation of the USS Kelvin, only to remain to fight off Capt Nero and his Romulans single handed while his wife gives birth in a corridor. The key is that the Capt Kirk we know is the baby being born not the man at the helm. I'm amazed mom doesn't say, 'He's dead, Jim' when inevitability arrives.

Next are introductions. The young James Tiberius Kirk runs his guardian's vintage car off a cliff trying to outrun a robot cop on a hoverbike, while Spock declines acceptance into the Vulcan Academy of Science when they suggest that his human mother was a disadvantage. He goes to Starfleet Academy instead. Uhura is already there, as Kirk discovers when she walks into an Iowa bar and he hits on her. She's under Capt Pike, who dares young Jim to do better than his father, a man who was a starship captain for only twelve minutes but who still saved eight hundred lives, including Jim's and his mother's. These introductions bode well, given that they're required to both introduce new characters to a new audience and re-establish those that many of us already know from a generation or two of background, while still throwing in some cool geeky details for hardcore fans to notice. The inclusion of Pike as mentor was a neat touch.

Star Trek has been around for a long time and has become the bedrock of popular science fiction on the screen. To highlight that, I turned forty this year but I wasn't even born when the original series aired on NBC. I did grow up watching the show though, then the next show and the films and people like me are going to watch this one with the aim of finding out how the characters we already know are introduced to the next generation, pun not intended. Everyone except Nurse Chapel arrives eventually, as the script contorts itself every which way it can to ensure that they do. Somehow a serious attack on the Federation from the future encompasses only the original series characters plus a single new villain, Capt Nero. To hint that there are plot conveniences is the understatement of the year, but half the fun here is watching to see how they do it. It's like a magic trick. We know we're being fooled but we want to try to figure out how.

Bones shows up next, on the shuttle Jim takes after he decides to sign up for officer training. Karl Urban does the best job of connecting to the original character, believable as a young DeForest Kelley, but the rest didn't do too badly. Chris Pine naturally gets most opportunity, but while Kirk was always unconventional, Pine plays him a little more maverick than I expected. He's certainly the focal point. Zachary Quinto was the most disappointing for me as Spock, though I wonder if this was inevitable because of the way his character was written. His story arc here relates to a struggle to determine whether he wants his human side or his Vulcan side to dominate. He goes for the Vulcan but he's obviously too human for it to work. There's potential for him to be great in the inevitable second film but he wasn't here. In fact when Leonard Nimoy turns up at a rather surprising moment, it only serves to underline Quinto's inadequacies.

Eventually there's the new bright and shiny flagship USS Enterprise, ever a character of its own. Pike is in charge, with Spock as his first officer. It's there we meet Sulu and seventeen year old Chekov, both already at their customary posts but very green. John Cho and Anton Yelchin have fun with their roles and make themselves noticed, growing as characters as the story runs on. Uhura and Bones are there too, quickly promoted as superiors die or their particular skills are needed. All fit what we might visualise as embryonic versions of the characters we know, but Zoë Saldana plays Uhura a little differently. She's a strong woman and a sex symbol, neither of which are surprising, but she doesn't seem remotely like a young Nichelle Nichols. Scotty is the last to arrive, halfway through the film after it jumps the shark. Simon Pegg gets least to do, as a deus ex machina to get Jim back onto the Enterprise, but he impresses from moment one.

I wasn't kidding about the film jumping the shark but it seems to revel in it, perhaps because of what it's trying to do. There's an important thing to know here, one that I wasn't aware of before watching. This is a reboot to an established franchise, like so many other films nowadays, but it isn't the usual safe and pointless remake. It boldly goes where nobody quite expected it to go, unafraid to change fundamentals, and had I been more of a fan than I am I'd have noticed that from the opening scene. For half the film, I didn't buy into the suspense, because this is the past and I knew which characters would be alive in the future. Yet when Capt Nero destroys the entire planet of Vulcan, I was shocked into realising that this is not the Star Trek we know. This is an alternate universe Star Trek, one in which sacred cows are slain and we can't be sure of what might happen next. The suspense returns because the future is suddenly open.

There's an underlying theme of cheating in the story, beginning with the famous Kobayashi Maru test which Kirk passes by reprogramming the simulation in his version of the Gordian knot. Here, Spock is the original programmer and they meet for the first time in front of Starfleet Academy to argue about the ethics of what was done. It's all about cheating and that theme returns over and over again. I can't help but see the entire film as a cheat, a deliberate one from scriptwriters who were firmly on Kirk's side of that argument. They know where they want their story to end up and they are utterly willing to cheat in every way possible to ensure that it gets there. I don't necessarily like everything they did but I can't help but admire how bold Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were to attempt this. Given what director J J Abrams has been doing with Fringe over the last season, also with Nimoy, I can't help but see comparisons.

I don't buy into this version of Star Trek being a great film. It's certainly leagues ahead of Avatar but it has obvious flaws beyond any geek discussion about how beloved characters were treated. The overblown choral music and some floating platform set design are clichés. The stunts are over the top. Plot conveniences are omnipresent and at some points blatant. The central plot is inevitably underdeveloped with a new franchise in mind and so many characters to re-introduce. Yet I think it succeeds for the most part. It's thoughtful as well as dynamic, as any Star Trek story should be. Its two hours whiz by in a flash, with plenty of action. There are fun new gadgets like retractable parachutes, most of the expected catchphrases and some fun references: we watch Jim in bed with a girl with green skin, there's a running joke about Uhura's first name and the red shirt arrives exactly when we expect him. It definitely bodes well for the 2012 sequel.

The Cyclops (1957)

2011-06-20T01:43:00.000-07:00

Director: Bert I Gordon
Stars: James Craig, Gloria Talbott, Lon Chaney and Tom Drake

Back in the fifties, if you wanted giants you watched movies by Bert I Gordon, whose initials were tellingly BIG. He started off big with prehistoric monsters in 1955's King Dinosaur, then followed up with giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End in 1957. The Cyclops was when he first used a giant human being, the title character who is 25 feet tall, but it really underlined his career, as his second of six films in two years, which also included The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast. He'd return to giants often in his films, whether human or not, with pictures like Earth vs The Spider, Village of the Giants and The Food of the Gods. Only occasionally would he go the other way, shrinking characters in Attack of the Puppet People, but rarest of all were attempts to leave everybody the size they should be. It's almost like Mr BIG, as Forrest Ackerman called him, just didn't want to see anyone normal sized.

The Cyclops is fun even during the opening credits, as each page is hammered onto the screen with its own crescendo. When the music dies down, we find ourselves in the Mexican town of Guayjorm, where an American lady, Susan Winter, is still looking for her fiancé, Bruce Barton, after his plane crashed three years earlier. She's played by Gloria Talbott, who initially looks a little unfortunately like Roddy McDowall playing a nun. Later she's more reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, which is never a bad comparison to make for an actress. Her trip is hindered by the governor, who doesn't want adventurers exploring the local mountains, and that's who he sees in her party of four. None of the rest believe that Barton could still be alive, even his friend Russ Bradford, a toxicologist played by James Craig. He got top billing, though he's trying a little too hard to be a cheap Clark Gable in Clark Kent glasses. He likes Susan too, big time.

The others in the party are Lee Brand, the pilot, and Marty Melville, who's exploring for uranium deposits. Tom Drake is solid as Brand, who seems good at his job, though he's a little fond of the bottle and he apparently can't get a job anywhere else, having already failed in the oil business in Texas. After all this was 1957: four decades or so later and he could have become president. Melville's the real live wire, in the form of Lon Chaney Jr, appearing again without the Jr. He's a selfish and arrogant man, quick with his fists but a coward at heart. He's dumb enough to knock the pilot out during their flight, so down they go, conveniently in a location where Melville finds his uranium, but unfortunately in an area populated by giant creatures whose cells divide every 22 seconds thus stimulating constant growth. You won't be surprised to find that, having been stuck here for three years, Bruce Barton has become the 25 foot tall cyclops.

At least the first monsters we see are composited well, a giant lizard crawling behind a rock and a giant hawk catching a giant rat. That won't last. When our newcomers discover the inevitable monster battle, the combatants, a giant iguana and a giant gila monster, are half transparent, utterly ridiculous. While the cyclops may look a little ridiculous, not a real cyclops but a giant with a deformed face that has left only one eye visible, he's added into the frame well. However by this point we're at the caves in Bronson Canyon, a popular spot to shoot Hollywood films since the silent days, but one that bad movie fans can't help but recognise as Ro-Man's HQ in Robot Monster. However many movies use that very same cave entrance, which in 1957 alone also included Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Brain from Planet Arous, I never fail to see Ro-Man's bubble machine and that doesn't help the credibility of the picture I'm watching.

Duncan Parkin gets a thankless job as Barton, the Cyclops of the title. It's not the mask he has to wear, as cheap as it is, because it's actually quite memorable. It's the fact that he's stuck playing the character like a retarded kid without the power of speech, mumbling unintelligibly, no better than Tor Johnson in The Beast of Yucca Flats. He's a walking, talking monster, except the walking and talking are problematic. He does get to wrestle a giant snake at one point, but as we can see the tape wrapped round its mouth to make it less dangerous, the suspense is utterly lost. Parkin only ever worked for Gordon, starting out as a stagehand in Beginning of the End, progressing to the monster role in both The Cyclops and War of the Colossal Beast, the latter under the name Dean Parkin. I wonder if he ever wanted a part where he could talk and actually interact with the characters outside of the magic of special effects. We may never know.

Fortunately his fiancée from his normal sized life, Susan Winter, is a sassy lead, one who mounts this expedition to find him and runs it capably. Sure, she gets a few scream scenes but she's far from the usual born victim that women tended to be in films like this. Gloria Talbott wasn't used to horror and science fiction, but she proved willing and able to return to them, first for Daughter of Dr Jekyll, which ran with The Cyclops as a double bill, and then for I Married a Monster from Outer Space a year later. While James Craig gets the manly lead role and the top credit, he isn't really in charge at any point. He always defers to the lady, which is somewhat refreshing to see in what was often a sexist genre, even back in the fifties, where women showed up only to be either victims, eye candy or both. Seeing this soon after The Black Scorpion assured me that it wasn't always the case. Sometime women could be strong and capable, but still scream.

Tarantula (1955)

2011-06-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

Director: Jack Arnold
Stars: John Agar, Mara Corday and Leo G Carroll

Having Jack Arnold's name on a creature feature in the fifties meant that it was going to be a cut above the rest. He'd made It Came fom Outer Space in 1953, which was an above average alien movie for the time, followed it up with Creature from the Black Lagoon and its first sequel, and then, if any doubt still remained as to his credentials, hammered the point home with Tarantula and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Just as you think he'd be stuck in monster movies, he proved a versatility to be admired by making notable film noir with Man in the Shadow, comedy with The Mouse That Roared and even bad seed material like High School Confidential! It would seem that he could do no wrong, but he did that too with Monster on the Campus. Even the best had a bad day once in a while, but with the record he had he could have made a dozen flops and still be a legendary director of pictures that looked bigger and more expensive than they were.

We begin with a man staggering out of the desert in striped pyjamas and what looks like an ape mask to die in front of the camera. It's either the sort of reality show I might actually watch or it's a fifties sci-fi B movie. He made it near enough to the highway for folks to find him. He might be biologist Eric Jacobs but he's not quite recognisable, so Sheriff Jack Andrews wants Doc Hastings to take a look at him to see. Hastings says it isn't. Prof Gerald Deemer disagrees, explaining that it's the disease Hastings thinks it is, but also that it ran its course in days instead of years, unlike any other known case in history. The doc doesn't buy it and so we're set for our story. Well, that and the animals we see in Deemer's lab. He's been injecting them with Nutrient Type 3Y which is making them grow: he has a guinea pig the size of a large dog and a tarantula that's larger still. He also has a deformed assistant who attacks him and inadvertently sets the creature free.

Well, what more do you need to know? We have a mad scientist with a pet monkey who thinks it might be a bright idea to turn tarantulas into giant monsters. He's already lost his assistant to a mysterious disease. A second man with the same disease tries to murder him and manages to wreck half the lab in the process, injecting him with his own formula too. With its tank smashed, the giant spider moseys on out into the Arizona desert to terrorise the local community, or what little of it there is: Deemer's lab is twenty miles out into nowhere for a reason. To save the day we have a clean cut small town doc and a beautiful biologist who arrives a little late to be the lab assistant of Dr Jacobs, late himself in a different sense of the word. There's a sheriff and a small town reporter. All the usual ingredients are here, but this is a Universal picture, the studio that invented the monster movie. They knew their formula well.

They cast their movie well too. Leo G Carroll lends a capable air to his mad scientist, making Prof Deemer less clichéd and less mad than expected. He has a valid aim, to head off food shortages he sees as imminent given the growing population of the planet. There are two billion already, he tells us, and that's going to climb, all the way to three and a half by the year 2000. It's scary when a mad scientist in a fifties B movie makes predictions that hindsight shows were notably underestimated. There were two billion people in 1920, reaching six by the turn of the century. Carroll was a major character actor for decades before he made this film and he'd go on to further successes, both in film and on television, such as The Man from UNCLE, which is where I first saw him. Whether you know him best as Alexander Waverly or for his roles in six Hitchcock films, this is certainly a change of pace for him. He gets some cool facial make up too.

As Dr Matt Hastings, John Agar is the epitome of the clean cut heroic lead of the fifties, following on from his lead role in Jack Arnold's Revenge of the Creature, earlier the same year, which set him on a firm career path. When this film was made, leading men needed to be level headed in every situation, calm and polite beyond all recognition, the imaginary sort who you would allow to take your daughter to the drive in and trust not to misbehave. Agar looks the part, sounds the part and that's why he ended up playing such characters for years. Unfortunately once Arnold wasn't helming his films, their quality sank quickly: 1956 saw him in The Mole People, 1957 in The Brain from Planet Arous, 1958 in Attack of the Puppet People. Perhaps his worst was 1959's Invisible Invaders, but there are quite a few to fight out that battle. This thankfully sits at the other end of his filmography, with the John Ford westerns he started out in.

Leading lady Mara Corday doesn't get much to do here except look pretty, which was hardly a stretch for her, a Playboy Playmate of the Month. She was a busy girl in the fifties, appearing in no less than 27 pictures in a mere eight years, but she'd retire in 1958 to raise a family. While Agar was emphasising his career path here, Corday was finding hers. Having been tormented by a giant tarantula, she would go on to face other huge creatures in The Giant Claw and The Black Scorpion, though the humungous flying turkey puppet in The Giant Claw can't remotely compare with the real tarantula Arnold put to use here. She returned to the screen decades later to play small roles in Clint Eastwood movies, just as he had played a small part in one of hers, this one. Here he leads a squadron of jets from Sands Air Force Base loaded up with rockets and napalm. Does he fire six rockets or only five? Let's just say he literally gets the last word.

Tarantula is a solid B movie throughout, simple but definitive, helping to establish a template for the hundreds more that followed in its wake over the next few years as a new wave of monster movies took the industry by storm. There's little to complain about, beyond the size of the role Mara Corday is given, but then this was 1955, when a woman's place was emphatically in the home, so she did well to be a capable and professional scientist. Prof Deemer doesn't protest the way a similar boss did three years later in The Strange World of Planet X. Of course the biggest star is the tarantula itself, not just in size but in presence, realistic because it was a real spider, guided over the landscape with air jets and shot with trick photography, effects that hold their own against similar creature features of the day. To see a better use of a giant spider, you could only go to The Incredible Shrinking Man, another Jack Arnold picture. He was that definitive.

Stage Fright (1950)

2011-06-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd and Alistair Sim

When I started watching Alfred Hitchcock seriously, I hit his filmography hard and quickly racked up forty of his pictures. It quickly got to the point where there were precious few left to discover except the very earliest ones. From The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934, I missed precisely 3 of 38, and I've found myself stuck there for years. Now, courtesy of TCM, I'm about to cross two of those off my list: 1950's Stage Fright and 1953's I Confess, leaving only Under Capricorn still to find. Why I Confess is so obscure I have no idea, but the others are the two films Hitch made back in the UK, long after his move to the US to make Rebecca. Consequently Stage Fright stars many of the great English scene stealers of the time: Alistair Sim, Sybil Thorndike, André Morell, Miles Malleson, Joyce Grenfell, Irene Handl, even Kay Walsh, who had divorced David Lean the previous year. Lionel Jeffries is omitted from that list only as this was his big screen debut.

Only the two leads are international: a rather strange combination of Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich. It's the latter we see first, opening the story in true Hitchcock style as Charlotte Inwood by stumbling into her boyfriend's house covered in blood and swearing that he's dead, 'he' being her husband, David. These opening scenes, which unfold in flashback as the boyfriend, Jonathan Cooper, tells all to his friend (and wannabe girlfriend), Eve Gill, are Hitchcockian in more than content and style, but I can't explain why without providing a spoiler. If you want to find out why, you'll need to track down the film too, but suffice it to say that he played a trick on his audience, who were not particularly happy to be tricked back in 1950. That may be another reason why Stage Fright is hard to come by today but modern audiences are likely to take it in stride. This little trick set the stage, pun not intended, for many more such cinematic tricks in the future.

What it all boils down to is that Jonathan Cooper is in a very dubious position. Charlotte Inwood is obviously already in trouble, as befits the blood on her dress and the corpse in her front room, but Jonathan goes to sort it all out, just as she expects him to, by staging a break in, that sort of thing. Unfortunately the maid shows up at just the wrong moment and he runs. He's succeeded only in shifting suspicion away from Charlotte onto himself, something he promptly underlines in no uncertain terms by running away from the police when they arrive to question him. Then again, he does have her blood stained dress in his pocket. So all he can do is have Eve Gill hide him, just as he expects her to, while she investigates Charlotte's apparent guilt. That's a lot of assumption to build a plot but such is the power of love and, sure enough, Jonathan does what Charlotte expects and Eve does what Jonathan expects, and that's where our story comes from.

What's patently obvious here is that the title of the film doesn't just refer to the fact that the lead characters are performers. Sure, Jonathan locates Eve at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where both are students, and Charlotte Inwood is a professional performer, but none of the characters stop acting when they leave the stage. That's most obvious as Eve goes undercover as Charlotte's maid, but it's a constant throughout. Jonathan acts for Eve's benefit, Eve acts for Charlotte, Charlotte acts for the police. It's all as if the whole is a play but we're watching actors not characters who haven't been let in on the script yet. In fact, it could be that Commodore Gill, Eve's father, is the playwright who remains a step ahead of the rest of us all along. He's played by Alistair Sim, who steals his first scene effortlessly with the aid of an accordion, and continues to do so throughout. He deconstructs everything, a sort of writer/critic/actor hybrid.

Late in the film Dietrich and Wyman walk down a hallway together backstage and the impression is totally that Dietrich is the woman and Wyman is the girl. Wyman had plenty of experience, in life and on screen, given that she'd already divorced third husband Ronald Reagan and had won an Oscar the previous year for Johnny Belinda. Yet she was still only 33 and looked it, making it hard to see Eve Gill as anything but a naive young girl in love, rather than a naive young girl in love who can move mountains to save the man she's in love with. For her part, Dietrich was 49 and costumed exclusively in Christian Dior, as she demanded. As Dietrich often did, she looked like she'd been everywhere and done everything, but was still young enough to look great. Dior demanded a screen credit. Paramount demanded a 25% discount. Everyone got exactly what they wanted and the result is that Wyman has difficulty registering when Dietrich is on screen.

Dietrich is very noticeable, though her part is much smaller than those of her fellow leads, with Wyman racking up most screen time by far. Dietrich said that, 'She looks too much like a victim to play a heroine, and God knows she couldn't play a woman of mystery: that was my part. Miss Wyman looks like a mystery nobody has bothered to solve.' Certainly Eve Gill is a transparent character who merely thinks that she has mystique, while Charlotte Inwood is mystique without ever having to try. She's set up as the villain of the piece from the very first scene but it's never quite that simple. Dietrich capably keeps us on the hook as to whether she's guilty, innocent or somewhere in between. Wyman does everything apparently right, but just doesn't engage well. A strange choice to play an English actress, she succeeds well as the innocent but dedicated girl but is much less convincing as the actress taking on roles as circumstances require.

Similarly, Michael Wilding, as the real leading man, private detective Wilfred 'Ordinary' Smith, is just as capable but bland, even though whatever he did in Under Capricorn a year earlier must have impressed Hitch enough to cast him again. The man caught up in the intrigue of the story, Jonathan Cooper, is nothing much to write home about either, even though he's played by solid leading man Richard Todd, also riding high after The Hasty Heart the previous year, which saw him receive his sole Oscar nomination. Instead of the leads, this film belongs to the character actors, of which there are many. After all, when your father is played by Alastair Sim and your mother by Sybil Thorndike, you have to do a heck of a lot to make yourself remotely visible and Wyman doesn't seem to want to do that. Sim and Thorndike are both very watchable indeed, as are Kay Walsh as a mercenary maid and Joyce Grenfell outrageously running a shooting gallery.

Quite why Stage Fright is forgotten today, I have no idea. American audiences didn't enjoy the trick Hitchcock played on them, but the French critics of the time, who had a particular fondness for Hitch, didn't have a problem with what he did. Given that Rashomon was released to huge acclaim the same year, emphatically for the trickery of its plot, it's hard to believe too much in that as the cause. It was made in England with predominantly English actors, but America has never had much of a problem with that. It came right before the beginning of his greatest period, which began the following year with Strangers on a Train, but it doesn't disappoint. Historically, it has note, as the debut of his daughter Patricia, but she doesn't do much more than Hitch in his traditional cameo. For me, the biggest problem was the lack of prominence from the leads. It's a film about character and that's all in the supporting players. I don't mind that. Maybe others do.

The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

2011-06-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

Director: Jim O'Connolly
Stars: James Franciscus, Gila Golan and Richard Carlson

'He who takes from Gwangi, the evil one, is cursed.' So says the blind woman in black as the pirate gypsy dude takes the struggling sack from the dying man. That's our setup as we reach the opening credits and it's a pretty good one, painted in Technicolor and filmed in Dynamation. The Valley of Gwangi has a history, one three and a half decades old by the time it was finished. Originally a project of Willis H O'Brien, the original master of stop motion animation, it was finally brought to life by his most prominent protégé, Ray Harryhausen. O'Brien saw it as a follow up to his masterpiece, King Kong, following the same formula but transplanting it to a different setting, with cowboys taking on dinosaurs. Some footage was shot and ended up in the original version of Mighty Joe Young, but it took 36 years to finally reach the screen, at this point set 'somewhere south of the Rio Grande at the turn of the century.' To make it authentic they shot it in Spain.

It all looks good, as the Breckenridge Wild West Show parades through town. We get to see it in action too, in an awesome arena, complete with an Indian attack on a covered wagon, with guns and corpses galore. They even set the wagon on fire. T J Breckenridge has the finalé: she rides a gorgeous horse called Omar up a long set of winding steps and has it leap into a flaming vat of green water. These guys put on a show, but the locals don't care. They stay away in droves, so when Tuck Kirby, T J's former fiancé, shows up to buy the horse, he almost has a chance, even if he bailed on her years earlier. His horse looks even better than Omar, even though it's acquired for him by a local kid called Lope, bizarrely providing an English child actor with the opportunity to make his only big screen appearance as a Mexican. If Willis O'Brien had lived long enough to make his The Valley of Gwangi, it may not have looked better.

The acting is capable too. James Franciscus making a suitably sleazy cowboy, the earliest I've ever seen him, just before Marooned and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. T J, on the other hand, is fiery and continental in the form of Gila Golan. She was born in German-occupied Poland, was adopted by a Roman Catholic couple and sent to school in France, only to emigrate to Israel and become Miss Israel in 1960. She'd changed her name already from Zusia Sobetzcki to Miriam Goldberg but changed it again to compete. She's very pleasing to the eyes, with a sort of Diana Rigg look and a continental flair. She was dubbed here because of the strength of her accent. In the hands of Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion work is solid too, even if it takes a while to arrive and isn't his best work. One glaring problem that may not be his fault is that the colour keeps on changing: his creatures go from grey to flesh coloured to bright blue, depending on the scene.

How do we go from a Wild West show in Mexico to the sort of story that requires the talents of Ray Harryhausen? Well, by means of a hidden valley, of course, one that the locals believe is a cursed land and the creatures are corralled into by high mountains. The first such creature we see is a miniature one, a tiny prehistoric horse called an eohippus that escaped from the valley through a tiny passageway within the rocks. It's the eohippus that brings most of our characters together. T J, who has it, calls it El Diablo and has trained it to dance on horseback. She plans to use it to bring back the customers to her show. English paleontologist Prof Bromley is out in the desert with its footprints in a fossilised human bone, hoping to validate his theory of humanoids and push the dawn of man back millions of years. Tia Zorina, the local blind gypsy leader, only aims to return it to the valley to keep her land and people from being cursed.

It's when El Diablo brings the various characters together that the story really begins, in the Forbidden Valley with a host of stop motion dinosaurs. As they find their way in, they're attacked by a pterodactyl, chase an ornithomimus, which is killed by an allosaurus, which then attacks them. They run away but the Prof stays behind, to be saved by a styracosaurus. After a long wait to see one animated monster, we're suddenly presented with a barrage of them. The allosaurus, of course, is Gwangi, which means 'lizard' in Spanish, and it's Gwangi who gets most attention and screen time, from his initial appearance to a grand finalé inside a vast Catholic cathedral. In between, there are a number of scenes, including a complicated roping, which proved to be one of Harryhausen's most ambitious and time consuming; and an exhibition and escape, which saw this allosaurus fight an elephant. Of course there's glorious chaos. That's why we're here.

The premise is a solid one, rooted in the stop motion adventure stories of the past and presaging a good deal of the modern interest in the weird west, but it doesn't spark too often. The highlight is certainly Harryhausen's animation, as everyone else takes a back seat the moment they have to share the screen with monsters. Unfortunately beyond the excellent initial concept, spawned from the Prof Challenger stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and filtered through the imagination of Willis O'Brien, it becomes derivative quickly. The back story with Tuck and T J is mild and poorly explored, the subplot with the gypsies is mostly ignored and Prof Bromley loses purpose quickly as his theory is shot. Pretty much everything else is ruthlessly stolen from the best stop motion movie of them all, King Kong. What's left is the dinosaurs, Harryhausen's last work with them. On that front this is always worth a watch, because even lesser Harryhausen is still Harryhausen.

Dinosaurus! (1960)

2011-06-12T18:45:00.000-07:00

Director: Irvin S Yeaworth Jr
Stars: Ward Ramsey, Paul Lukather, Kristina Hanson and Alan Roberts

Irvin S Yeaworth Jr has an interesting filmography. Almost entirely remembered today for making The Blob with Steve McQueen in 1958, he directed six films all told, though his first wasn't really his, as he was responsible only for the new footage that expanded a 1945 church backed scare movie called Twice Convicted into a new 1956 picture with the seemingly cut short title of The Flaming Teenage. Then it was The Blob, a huge success which paved the way for more B movies: 4D Man and Dinosaurus! Finally he returned to Christian scare movies, releasing a pair of them in 1967: The Gospel Blimp and Way Out. The former deals with spreading the message of Jesus by blimp, complete with bible drops; while the latter deals with heroin addiction, told from the point of view of an addict. Both the first and last of his films are available today from Something Weird Video, which provides a pretty good idea of the sort of material they contain.

This one opens like an ambitious B movie, shot in colour and in CinemaScope, on location on the 'tropical paradise' of St Croix in the Virgin Islands, which we first see in widescreen underwater footage. Unfortunately that's all the CinemaScope that TCM screened, so I'm stuck with pan and scan. It was also apparently intended to star Steve McQueen, but he had been difficult to work with on The Blob so Yeaworth didn't even bother to hire him. What it turns out to be is a film for kids, less comparable to The Blob and more to Son of Godzilla. The star is nominally Ward Ramsey, a new actor to film who appears somewhat like a cheap B movie Cary Grant. However, given the tone the story takes, the audience who would find this film most magnetic are young enough to focus instead on Alan Roberts, certainly the most watchable actor in the film but one who would be about to turn twelve when Dinosaurus! premiered. He retired in 1962 at fourteen.

As befits a story pitched at kids, it's a pretty threadbare outline of a plot that could easily have been a Saturday morning cartoon. Bart Thompson, cast from the standard hero mould, gets to blow things up for a living. If I understood things right, he's expanding the harbour on an exotic island by setting off underwater explosions off the coast. He's good at his job, of course, but he's not too good at putting up the required warning signs, so his girlfriend Betty Piper, cut from the cloth of the cute and sassy but non-working perpetual victim, heads to shore in her speedboat in a gap between explosions. We can see why she's popular: as soon as Bart gets to her boat to tell her to get out of the blast zone, she strips down to a bathing suit and dives into the water. She's aiming to retrieve the cooler that the last blast knocked into the water, but she faints in shock at the sight of an underwater monster instead. Of course she looks good in wet hair and a towel.

Given the title of the film, technically meaningless but probably the best thing about the picture, you'll surely be shocked to discover that the underwater monster is a dinosaur, frozen solid in unnaturally cold water. Actually there are two dinosaurs, a tyrannosaurus and a brontosaurus, or at least that's what I think they were aiming at. 'Boy, this is terrific!' cries young Julio, as Bart's men bring the frozen monsters up to the surface. Julio is the endearing local boy who serves as the link between all the characters. He constantly hangs out with the working party, especially Dumpy, the big jovial bulldozer driver who is trying so hard to be Alan Hale that it hurts. His guardian is the villain of the piece, Mike Hacker, a surprising name for a foreign villain who looks rather like a sophisticated Torgo with a white suit and two stupid henchmen. What's more, and here's where the tone is totally betrayed, Julio befriends the brontosaurus and the neanderthal.

Yes, there's a neanderthal too. Hacker finds him first, washed up on the beach in the wake of the dinosaurs, because of another of Thompson's mistakes. He makes a lot of those. He tells Betty that he wouldn't trust Hacker as far as he could throw him, immediately after entrusting him with a message to the Smithsonian about the creatures he's found. Then he brings the beasts up onto shore before the Smithsonian can send anyone down to do it properly (even if the message had got through). He takes Betty out for dinner instead of watching his new prizes thaw out. He even tasks T J O'Leary, your run of the mill drunken Irishman, with guarding them. This enables Hacker to wander around unnoticed, and find then stash the frozen neanderthal. It also means that the drunkard is the only one around when the dinosaurs get hit by lightning in the inevitable storm, wake up and wander off. Amazingly T J gets carried off instead of eaten, but let's not nitpick.

There are precisely no surprises in this movie and every plot detail is telegraphed, but in a way that would be gloriously suspenseful to kids young enough to believe everything they see. How young they would need to be to buy into some of the events that unfold here I really don't know, but it's pretty young. This is the sort of movie where the heroine can trip over a tree root, get picked up by a tyrannosaurus and be rescued by a caveman who whacks its foot with an axe and sticks his hands out to catch her. It's the sort of movie where Julio can join a fight between a brontosaurus and a T Rex by throwing rocks at the latter. The brontosaurus is his friend, you see, who gives him rides. Yes, the caveman rescues him too. The ending presages the iconic battle at the end of Aliens, so there is imagination at play here, though not much. This isn't The Land That Time Forgot. This is the Saturday morning cartoon version, remember.

In fact some of the writing demonstrates an acute lack of imagination. For instance, Hacker is blackmailing the local barmaid, because that's what villains do to cute island señoritas, but this one is sensitively named Chica. Names aren't this film's strong point: she works at the island cantina, which is called, you guessed it, Island Cantina. Perhaps the most clever moment is when O'Leary, the drunken Irish guard, falls asleep on watch while reading a Rip Van Winkle comic book. The only moment of true honesty is when Hacker breaks a bottle on the bar to prepare to fight Bart, only to cut himself. It's something that should happen almost every time such a scene crops up but somehow never does. That's what I'm going to remember this film for, that and the antics of Gregg Martell as the neanderthal. He looks pretty believable in the role, somewhat like a midget Lou Ferrigno, but his antics are too wild to be mere fantasy.

Martell plays it deadpan throughout, as do the rest of the cast. It's the sincerity of actors like him and Alan Roberts that make this picture joyous instead of awful. The highlight of the entire film for me is without doubt when Julio first encounters the living brontosaurus. 'Remember, you're a friendly vegetarian like it says on the cereal box,' he tells it. The dialogue is jaw droppingly bad but young Roberts delivers it with such sincerity that it's both touching and hilarious all at once. Martell gets a few scenes that come close too, stealing routines from the Marx Brothers. It's the scenes with both of them that go the furthest down this road though. Julio finds the caveman in Betty's mother's kitchen and, taking the whole thing in stride, shows him where the food is, then teaches him how to eat with a fork. 'No, caveman! It's not right to kill!' he shouts as the bad guys show up. So he uses a pie. No, I'm not kidding. Even Alan Roberts can't avoid laughing at points.

We have to look for this sort of magic because the traditional sort just isn't here. The stop motion animation is capable, hardly Harryhausen quality but worth watching nonetheless. The dinosaurs are far cuter than they deserve to be though: a T Rex is not supposed to grin. The rear projection work is terrible though, down at the level of the writing. Fortunately the acting is capable and, as I mentioned, sincere. Ward Ramsey, the star, debuted in this film, then made thirteen more, but he was only credited in two of the last nine. Maybe by then he took the hint and retired. Leading lady Kristina Hanson was appearing in her first movie too, building on an episode of Bachelor Father the year before. She only made one more film though, no less than nineteen years later, called Over the Edge, instead going back to her day job as a sixth grade teacher. The romance is best explained by highlighting that she gets more screentime with the caveman than her lead.

Fred Engelberg, who plays the villainous Hacker, was on his last film, though he only made four. Wayne C Treadway, a chubbier Alan Hale as Dumpy, was on his last film too, though it was his first credit in fourteen movies. He's capable but without Hale's character. Luci Blaine, who plays Chica, is perhaps better than any of them, but this was the only picture she made. Only two of the cast were really experienced. Paul Lukather, who plays Bart's sidekick Chuck, was a mainstay in film and television for decades, becoming a notable voice actor in the eighties and expanding successfully into video games in the nineties. Gregg Martell was a veteran extra by this point, in over fifty movies thus far, a dozen of which I've seen. I didn't recognise him though because he mostly landed uncredited bit parts. These are perhaps the sort of people you'd expect to be in a kids' film masquerading as a B movie to sell tickets. Be warned: watch it before you turn seven.

The Catered Affair (1956)

2011-06-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

Director: Richard Brooks
Stars: Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie Reynolds and Barry Fitzgerald

Sometimes the stars align and all the names come out at the same time. The Catered Affair is a film I hadn't even heard of, but it's a gem and it has a major list of names behind it. It's directed by Richard Brooks, a year after he made Blackboard Jungle. The story is by Paddy Chayefsky, a writer's writer who won his first of an eventual three Oscars for the previous year's Marty; and it was adapted by Gore Vidal, his first script for the big screen. It's glorious writing, that came from a surprising source: originally it was a play, not on stage but for television, broadcast as an entry in the Philco Television Playhouse. As I was growing up, 'TV movie' was a euphemism for second rate, a cheap reminder of the real thing with names that used to be important. That often wasn't the case in the fifties, when the only thing not to compare favourably with the big screen was the budgets. Even a film as important as 12 Angry Men started out as a live teleplay on Studio One.

The story, which uses a snap wedding to magnificently build a host of characters, is brought to life by a stellar cast. Cabby Tom Hurley is Ernest Borgnine, who had just won his own Oscar for Marty, a character not far removed from this one socially. He's a reliable but unimaginative man and while I've always got the impression that Borgnine is highly intelligent, he's always so good at playing stolid. Bette Davis is a more surprising choice as his dowdy wife Agnes, fresh from a part as Queen Elizabeth I in The Virgin Queen. I knew little about most of her fifties films before seeing them but they trump her earlier work for sheer versatility. Going from a historic queen of England to a working class Bronx housewife is rare and admirable, but before Elizabeth she was the washed up Hollywood actress Margaret Elliott trying to rekindle her career in The Star and after Aggie she would be a librarian fighting censorship in Storm Center. She was versatility.

It's Aggie that calls for the catered affair of the title, but not for a while and it isn't her wedding. It's Tom and Aggie's daughter Jane who's getting married, but she springs the news on them at breakfast and that's the first point Bette's Bronx accent slips. Up to then it doesn't even seem to be Bette Davis, more like someone trying to be Bette Davis, because she plays it so well. Jane doesn't just spring the wedding, she springs the date too: next Tuesday, because they want to take advantage of the loan of a car to go on honeymoon, one reason why Jane and her fiancé, Ralph Halloran, only want a plain, simple ceremony, no wedding reception, no nothing. Tom's on board, especially as he needs $4,000 of the $4,400 he's saved over the years to finally buy his own cab. He and a partner have been waiting for a decade for a medallion to come up because there are so few available. Aggie's on board too, but if she really was, there wouldn't be a movie.

What's so great here is that the film really isn't about Jane and Ralph, as they're just the trigger for Aggie to realise through her daughter just what she's done with her life. It doesn't take much gentle pressure, from Ralph's parents or her brother Jack, to bring into prominence a whole host of regrets, and so she decides to give Jane what she didn't give herself: the catered affair of the title, a big wedding with all the trimmings that she can remember when the bad days come. That phrase is repeated like a mantra: 'when the bad days come', suggesting that that's where Aggie is at this point in time and she's only just acknowledged it. The picture is really about Tom and Aggie coming to some strong realisations and acting on them, taking their marriage off pause and defining their future together. You know, the sort of thing that newlyweds should but rarely do, because at that point it's all love and roses and blissful improvisation.

Debbie Reynolds was surprisingly the only actor to win an award for this film, from the National Board of Review as Best Supporting Actress. It's surprising because the story drives her rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's because her character is life in a microcosm: she knows what she wants, but she quickly gives in to the pressures around her just to make everyone else happy, only to regret the decision and put her foot down in the end. Her subplot is a subtle one about growing up. Certainly Reynolds and Rod Taylor, who plays her fiancé, are overshadowed throughout. That's hardly surprising. Not only are her parents played by Borgnine and Davis, but Uncle Jack lives with them and he's played by Barry Fitzgerald, perhaps the most effortless scene stealer of them all. Yet again he gives a performance that would have stolen the show in any other company, twisting the truth outrageously, doing nothing but taking credit for everything.

Fitzgerald knew all the tricks at this point, close to the end of his career. He made two further pictures before dying of a heart attack, back home in Dublin, at the ripe old age of 73. He only made 44 films, and he was certainly stealing scenes from the best in the earliest I've seen: from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in 1938's Bringing Up Baby. By this point in his career, he'd stolen them from pretty much everyone else in Hollywood too, perhaps most notably from John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man and from Bing Crosby in Going My Way, so neatly that he received Oscar nominations both for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for the same role, a feat that prompted the Academy to change their rules to avoid a reoccurence. He's a joy here, yet another Irish rogue with a glint in his eye who equates 'wedding' with 'party' and who plays the age old game of emotional blackmail like a champion.

It took Bette Davis to successfully counter Fitzgerald's scene stealing, though it took work. Aggie is perhaps the busiest character I've ever seen Bette play. She's busy all the time, as befits the sort of character that doesn't often get covered in classic Hollywood. The Hurleys aren't rich, but they're not mired in poverty either. We're used to seeing the perfect wife manage the house with a maid and a housekeeper and we're used to seeing the working class wife struggle and fail to get by without enough to manage. Aggie is closer to the latter than the former but she does fine through strength of character and hard work. Her husband works, her daughter works and her son is about to join the army. She works as hard as any of them, without even thinking about it, so hard that the scene where she has to sit still and listen to Ralph's parents is uncomfortable and somehow unnatural. It's like watching a kid with ADHD try not to move.

There's so much to praise here that it's difficult to focus, though the quality of the writing shines through above everything else. It's the ground on which everything else here is built, from the deep characterisations of all the main cast and many of the smaller roles, all the way down to Jane's friend Alice Scanlon, who can't afford to be her matron of honour. Davis is stunning, but Borgnine, Fitzgerald and Reynolds are excellent too, with nobody else being less than solid. The cinematography is subtle, doing nothing flash but doing a great job at contrasting spaces: from the vast ballroom Aggie wants to rent for Jane's wedding breakfast to their claustrophobic home that would be cosy just for two but sleeps five. Cinematographer John Alton is known primarily for his films noir, but made five varied movies for Richard Brooks late in his career. Here he's yet another of the stars who aligned to make this gem, which deserves to be better remembered.

The Strange World of Planet X (1958)

2011-06-10T00:48:00.000-07:00

Director: Gilbert Gunn
Stars: Forrest Tucker and Gaby André

I think my favourite hobby is listening to Robert Osborne introduce monster movies on TCM. It may be that he secretly loves the things but I don't think so. I think he feels embarrassed every time they come up, but he's a professional and he does his job well with just a hint of a smile at the realisation of what sort of material he's introducing. Then again this one begins as a pretty intelligent monster movie as such things go, made in the UK by Anglo-Scottish Pictures, sourced from a story by René Ray. Sure, the introduction is more than a little melodramatic ('Man goes forward into the unknown but how does the unknown react?'), but it settles down quickly into a thoughtful movie. It's actually hilarious to hear such rationality about science juxtaposed with a rampant sexism. 'A woman?' cries Dr Laird when he's told that his new computer operator is a member of the fairer sex. 'This is preposterous! This is highly skilled work!'

Laird is a scientist working in pure research who is eating up government money on the basis that his work may provide major benefits to the military. It has something to do with altering the molecular structure of metals through use of electro-magnetic energy. It uses a lot of power and it may well be interfering with the local TV signals. Brigadier Cartwright wants to shut the whole thing down, but after seeing a successful experiment and the more positive side effects only he knows about, he changes his mind. The force that Laird is wielding continues on when the power is cut and it proves able to make changes at a distance, offering possibilities of taking down enemy aircraft with some sort of beam. Of course there are other possible side effects too: weird weather and flying saucers, so many that the papers talk about an invasion from Planet X, hence the film's original title. I watched it under a fresh title of The Cosmic Monsters.

It's half an hour in that we find out where the film is going. Laird proves to be a mad scientist, a single minded genius who ignores the mere possibility of risks or side effects. 'I never consider anything which might interfere with my research,' he tells his assistant, Gil Graham. 'If I always stopped to calculate the risks there would be no research.' He wants to carry on regardless, even escalate his research. While Graham warns Laird, Smith warns Graham. He's a strange character who we first encounter in Briley Woods, near Laird's lab, strange not just because of his 'funny whiskers' but because he looks off into the distance when he's talking to people. He's come from a long way off, he says, where people ride giant dragonflies. He has a cool raygun too, so surely he's from the strange world of Planet X, whatever it's real name is. He can't talk to the police so he talks to Graham instead at the Crown and Mitre over a pint. Civilisation, you see.

The film is a bizarre combination of approaches. From one angle, it's a well thought out science fiction story, talky but engaging and defined. From another, it's a monster movie without a single capable effect at any point. Unfortunately the latter can't arrive without mangling the former, so scenes of civilised science and solid logic abruptly collapse into ludicrous ramblings at the blink of an eye. Similarly, the logical first half sees Michele Dupont, the Frenchwoman who is sent to be Laird's new computer operator, promptly turn rampant sexism on its head by demonstrating how intelligent and capable women can be, but the monster half turns her into a clichéd victim, a princess in need of rescue. That's how far the film devolves and it's painful to watch it happen. Imagine if halfway through The Day the Earth Stood Still, perhaps the most obvious comparison, a nuclear bomb floods Washington, DC with giant mutated insects. It wouldn't work there either.

Both on the good side and the bad side, it's the script that dominates. René Ray wrote the story as a six part TV series in 1956, and never wrote again, though she had a three decade career as an actress. For some reason she didn't adapt her own work, the screenplay being by Paul Ryder, who wrote a few other films in the surrounding years. I wonder how much of this script is Ryder's and how much Ray's. It's hard to know where to place the praise and the blame, but I presume that each deserves one but not the other. Behind the script, the effects stand out but not in any positive light. They're pretty dismal, shots of real insects combined with shots of actors in a poor attempt to suggest they're in the same scene. There are some capable framing shots but almost everything on the effects side is awful. Only one instance bears mention and that's a surprisingly gratuitous shot of a giant insect munching through the cheek of a corpse.

At least the giant insects are worthy of note, albeit an entirely negative one. It's hard to attempt to comment on the acting because it's so utterly routine. Alec Mango (yes, that's his real name) is a rare sort of mad scientist, one who avoids acting madly. Forrest Tucker is a strange choice for his assistant, the token American in the cast and the most famous name, beginning a year that would end with Auntie Mame, though he made four more movies in between. French actress Gaby André is a strange choice for a new assistant too, though I'm sure she's only there to act as a love interest as well as torment the chauvinists. She's badly dubbed at points. As the alien visitor, Martin Benson is the best of the bunch, but he can't generate any of the charisma that ought to be there. The most memorable actor is young Susan Redway, who plays Jane Hale, a precocious child with a perpetual grin and a surety that rivals Dr Laird's.

It's not that these actors are bad, because they're not, it's just that they can't seem to find a way to make themselves noticed with the material they're given. Not one of them shines and they all fade into the background so far that they almost get upstaged by the pint of bitter Smith doesn't recognise at the Crown and Mitre. In fact they're all so down to earth and routine that it's hard not to focus on the social aspect of the film and watch it as a slice of life from the fifties, not just the chauvinism but the pub culture, post-war lodging and the way young Jane spends almost all her screen time talking to strangers, just as her mother advised her not to. I'd like to remember the science fiction, but the lunacy it finds spoils it. This could have been a warning about climate change, far ahead of its time, speaking to man's destruction of our planet's protective layers, but it just uses it as an excuse for cosmic rays to mutate grasshoppers into monsters. Sigh.

Sirocco (1951)

2011-06-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Marta Toren and Lee J Cobb

I've successfully worked my way through most of Humphrey Bogart's career, not that hard a task as he's very well represented on TCM and on DVD. However I've found myself surprised to find that it isn't just his earliest films that are hard to find, from 1928 to 1931, before he was even a supporting star at Warner Brothers, but also his most recent. I've seen every film he made in the forties, for instance, and I'm only missing two from the thirties, at least from 1932 onwards. Yet I'm missing a full third of his output in the fifties, his last decade in film. At least Sirocco knocks it down to four to go. Made by Bogie's own production company, Santana Pictures, and distributed by Columbia, it's resonant because it's set during the Syrian fight for independence from the French. Emir Hassan tells English and American journalists that God and justice is on his side and we're supposed to be there too. Today, independent Syria still fights for freedom from itself.

Cinematically, Sirocco is immediately reminiscent of Casablanca, one of Bogie's biggest hits, if not the very biggest of them all. In that picture, he was a cynical American running a gambling house in Casablanca, at the western end of the Mediterranean during World War II. This time out, he's a cynical American running a gambling house in Damascus, at the eastern end of the Med, a couple of decades earlier in 1925. Instead of being caught up with a beautiful visitor played by Ingrid Bergman, he gets caught up with a beautiful visitor played by Marta Toren, promoted as the 'next Ingrid Bergman'. In many ways it sounds like the same film, but the difference between the two makes itself very aware as these two meet in a café: Sirocco has a much darker tone to it than Casablanca. We don't just see the likeable old jasmine seller plant a bomb underneath a table, we see the bloody aftermath too and it's far from pretty.

The characters are cut from the same cloth. Bogie is Harry Smith, as hard boiled and cynical as Rick Blaine. The rebels, to whom he runs guns, think he's an oddity, an American in Syria without morals or political convictions. 'I've had them,' he says. 'I had a belly full of them. I left them in the States with my first wife.' Toren is Violette, a mysterious foreign lady with a history, to whom he immediately forges a romantic connection. 'You have so much to learn,' she tells him and the banter works. She's already taken though, by Col Feroud, the Capt Renault of this film, who is at once the villain of the picture, as the head of military intelligence for the occupying French, and the anti-hero, because he's apparently a calm, fair and honourable man. The more obvious bad guy is his superior officer, Gen LaSalle, who doesn't see his enemy as human and proclaims the execution of five Arabs for each dead French soldier, until Feroud politely returns him to sanity.

Feroud is Lee J Cobb, who is a quiet but powerful presence in the film, in between his two Oscar nominations for On the Waterfront and The Brothers Karamazov. He keeps calm everywhere and under the greatest pressure, except when it comes to Violette, who has a habit of driving him nuts. It doesn't help when she leaves him, of course, and it really doesn't help when she throws out the name of Harry Smith, the man who helped her at the café. Toren is good at being both independent and dependent at the same time, but her career didn't take off in Hollywood. This may have been her biggest film, though she made higher rated ones. After a few European films, she went home to Sweden in 1957 and died of a cerebral haemmorrhage at the slight age of thirty. Already long established, Everett Sloane plays Gen LaSalle, though after dominating the early scenes, he disappears for a long while. His bitterness is welcome when it returns.

The tone is dark throughout, Harry Smith being a lot less in control of his destiny here than Rick Blaine ever was. Sirocco could even be seen as a vague prequel to Casablanca, not just because of the timeframes involved, but because the experiences Smith goes through are easily the sort of experiences that could have shaped Blaine. The only catch to that theory is that Bogart made Sirocco in 1951, a decade after Casablanca, and the years between only etched the weight of the world further into his iconic face. There's little romance to counter the pressure, the lighter sides coming from lesser characters. Zero Mostel and Nick Dennis are only a slight reminder of Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, but they offer much the same touch. Mostel is delightfully obtuse as Balukjiaan, an Arab trader. 'Look at me, I'm an honest businessman,' he protests. Dennis is part Andrew Sachs and part Mischa Auer, dancing around even when he isn't dancing.

While the Casablanca comparisons are obvious and early, Sirocco doesn't fare too well. It does keep us involved and it grows late after indications that it wouldn't. Perhaps two thirds of the way in, as we start to believe that the characters are set in stone, change begins and it unfolds OK, the last fifteen minutes giving Bogart and Cobb in particular some good scenes. There are some neat lines, Cobb getting the humanitarian ones and Bogart the cynical ones. 'What do you care whose gun it is,' he tells one man, 'as long as it isn't aimed at you?' Mostly though it runs on without impressing too much, an excellent example of how even poor material in the hands of those involved can be worth watching. No, it isn't Casablanca, but few films are. It isn't even a great entry in Bogie's distinguished filmography, but it's still worth a look to see how he tried to continually darken his characters yet retain some semblance of sympathy.