The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Georges Vaultier and Sandra Milovanoff

Index: That's a Wrap!

I’ve already reviewed a 1925 René Clair film for this project, The Crazy Ray, but he shot that a year earlier, along with his debut, a surreal short called Entr’acte. This full length feature continues his love affair with fantastic cinema with a film that plays out like The Invisible Man but with an unusual spiritual twist.

Initially, however, it’s a routine melodrama about a young lady’s hand, which makes the eventual shift all the more wild. She’s Yvonne Vincent and she’s very much in love with her fiancé, Julien Boissel, a successful businessman who’s just as in love with her. Unfortunately, a scurrilous publisher, Gauthier, wants to marry her too and his claim wins out because he has blackmail material on her father, some sort of shady deal he made when he was a diplomat.

There’s a bit more depth than that because Julien has made a major deal as the film begins that all the papers are happy about except the Streets’ Echo, run by—guess who?—Gauthier! So Julien therefore has a pair of grudges against the man about to steal his fiancée.

Cash on Demand (1961)

Director: Quentin Lawrence
Writers: David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer, based on the teleplay The Gold Inside by Jacques Gillies
Stars: Peter Cushing, André Morell, Richard Vernon and Norman Bird

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Richard Vernon may well be one of the least famous names whose centennials I’m covering this year but his is a familiar face to me from British film and television and I’m very happy I pulled this feature out to celebrate his life and career because it’s a hidden gem that I’ve never seen before.

It’s a Hammer but not a horror, as a strange sort of polite but nonetheless brutal heist film that ends up doing the same job as A Christmas Carol, a surprise I was not prepared for.

It’s a fourth opportunity for the leads, Peter Cushing and André Morell, to work together in film and in a fourth genre but with the power dynamic neatly reversed from The Hound of the Baskervilles two years earlier.

And it’s a remake that was made by many of the same hands. It was originally a teleplay for Theatre 70, a drama series produced by ATV, a year earlier, the episode called The Gold Inside. Morell and Vernon reprise their roles and the director, Quentin Lawrence, does likewise. The Cushing role was played by Richard Warner.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Adrien Joyce, based on a story by Bob Rafelson and Adrien Joyce
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black and Susan Anspach

Index: The First Thirty.

I last saw Five Easy Pieces in 2008 and, while I don’t disagree with my review, I clearly didn’t get everything it was doing. Watching again in this flow of Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty, it’s a real gamechanger, even though the names are rather familiar.

The director was Bob Rafelson, who directed Head two years earlier from a Nicholson script. The writer was Carole Eastman, under a stage name, Adrien Joyce, as which she also wrote The Shooting. László Kovács shot the film, as he did four earlier Nicholson pictures, including Easy Rider. Leading lady Karen Black and Toni Basil were both in Easy Rider and the latter was also in Head. It’s all quite the reunion.

What’s different is that this is a seventies movie through and through, from an era when new filmmakers were changing the landscape of American film. There’s some of the nihilism of acid westerns like The Shooting here, but it’s otherwise unlike Nicholson’s earlier films that were just as clearly made in the sixties (even if some did feel like they were a decade late).