The Mafu Cage (1978)

Director: Karen Arthur
Writer: Don Chastain, based on the play Toi et Tes nuages by Éric Wesphal, translated into English by Richard Cottrell
Stars: Lee Grant and Carol Kane

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The Mafu Cage is an American film that was widely seen in Europe but little seen at home. I can see why, because it’s a very European film, indeed one based on a French play. I can also see why Jerry Gross, a distributor who kept on trying the U.S. market under an array of titles, went bankrupt. I’m European. I adored it.

I’m watching a version called Deviation that includes a brief voiceover at the beginning, as my copy of The Mafu Cage is an extremely dark open matte version. However, that omits the voiceover. Hopefully the rest was unchanged.

We’re in Los Angeles but it doesn’t seem like it because we hardly see it. We spend most of the film at the home of Dr. Ellen Carpenter, an astronomer who specialises in solar activity. If we leave the house, it’s to visit her at work so that we can see the life that she tries to have, a life with a purpose and the potential for more, as a co-worker, David Eastman, tells her he’s in love with her. However, she’s unable to fully embrace life so keeps him at arm’s length.

Demons of the Mind (1972)

Director: Peter Sykes
Writer: Christopher Wicking, from a story by Christopher Wicking and Frank Godwin
Stars: Paul Jones, Patrick Magee, Gillian Hills, Robert Hardy, Michael Hordern and Yvonne Mitchell

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I wanted to see 1973’s Yellow Dog for Robert Hardy’s centennial but it’s stubbornly elusive and I couldn’t find a copy. Instead, I went with this kinda sorta Hammer horror from the year before. I hadn’t seen it before and he’s the lead character, however the order of credits reads, so it seemed like a good choice. However, now I understand why it’s not better known.

It worked best for me as a mood piece, a sort of impressionistic painting, because the film is as unhinged as its subject matter. We’re never quite sure of much that happens or why and, if I ever imagined that the ending would clear it all up, then I was horribly wrong. Half of me is eager to watch it again to discover what I had missed that would make sense of it all, but the other half is convinced that it wouldn’t help.

Initially, it’s all about Elizabeth. She’s in the back of a horse drawn carriage heading home to her family’s castle down a woodland path. It could easily be a Disney princess story but she clearly doesn’t want to be there and her older companion drugs her. Then she calms and we drift into either a memory or a dream. I’m not sure which, given that she spends it blissfully with a woodcutter but neither of them speaks.

The Light of Asia (1925)

Directors: Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai
Writer: Niranjan Pal, “with specially selected titles from Sir Edwin Arnold’s masterpiece”
Stars: The Indian Players Company

Index: That's a Wrap!

It’s well known that 80% of American silent films are lost. That’s a painful statistic to think about but, in India, the equivalent percentage is a staggering 98%. Of the 1,338 known silent films made in India, only twenty-nine survive today and not all of them completely.

That makes The Light of Asia or Prem Sanyas a historic film, though it wasn’t entirely Indian. It was shot on location in the British Raj, most of it around Lahore, the city ironically now in Pakistan. Its cast was drawn from the Indian Players Company, so it looks authentic.

Another reason it looks authentic is because the Maharajah of Jaipur lent huge assistance. The story really isn’t deep so it takes time with extras: rituals, costumes and pageantry. That help allowed a vast amount of architecture to be on display and legions of local extras.

Himanshu Rai, the film’s lead actor, is even credited as its co-director. Nine years later, he would create the Bombay Talkies studio, a key element in the rise of Hindi cinema in a nation where each tongue has its own film industry.

Little Annie Rooney (1925)

Director: William Beaudine
Writers: Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, based on a story by Catherine Hennessey
Star: Mary Pickford

Index: That's a Wrap!

Based on my rating alone, I clearly enjoyed Little Annie Rooney back in 2005, but that was a little before I started reviewing movies, so I’m unable to tap into my thoughts at the time. In 2025, I can’t ignore the obvious fact that Mary Pickford was far too old to play this role.

The thing is that she knew it too. She was a big star in the teens, very possibly the biggest, and she built her career on playing children, a natural gravitation for someone four foot ten who looked great in curls. That was believable in 1917 when she played The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at twenty-five, but she’d become the most powerful woman in Hollywood, a co-founder of United Artists with complete control over her films. So she moved on to adult roles, as you might expect.

Unfortunately, the public didn’t follow her. They still wanted “the girl with the curls” and they told her so after she asked them during an interview for Photoplay. So she made this, a feature that opens with a protracted battle in the back streets of a bowery between Annie’s gang and the Kid Kellys. Every participant is a kid and looks it, except for Pickford. It seems anomalous to start with and gets progressively more awkward as she and fifteen year old Joe Butterworth start leaping onto each other.

Please Murder Me! (1956)

Director: Peter Godfrey
Writers: Al C. Ward and Donald Hyde, based on an original story by E. A. Dupont and David Chantler
Stars: Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, Dick Foran, John Dehmer and Lamont Johnson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

This didn’t turn out to be the greatest movie that Angela Lansbury ever made, but I’ll leave it to others to look at Gaslight, The Manchurian Candidate and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, to cite just three. It didn’t turn out to contain a great role for her either, though I always like her as a villain, even if she didn’t. What it did turn out to be was an interesting failure and a pristine opportunity for Raymond Burr, billed second.

He’s Craig Carlson, attorney at law, and this starts out with him walking through dark film noir streets, checking pawnshop windows and buying a gun. He comes back to his office and dictates a fantastic message to Ray Willis: “In exactly 55 minutes, I will be dead. Murdered.”

If you want to hook an audience, this is how. Nowadays, it’s tailor made for a trailer, but it works as the prologue too. Of course, it’s a film noir so we leap into flashback and learn how the story progressed to that point.