Deathmaster (1972)

Director: Ray Danton
Writer: R. L. Grove
Stars: Robert Quarry, John Fiedler, Bob Pickett, William Jordan, Betty Anne Rees, Bill Ewing and Brenda Dickson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Roger Ebert gave this movie just one of four stars but clearly had a lot of fun talking about how bad it was and all that seems fair. It’s not simply a bad movie, though it is that. It’s a bad movie that surprises us, that confuses us, that we find we really have to ask questions about. Even now, I’m struggling to answer the pivotal one that lords over all the others: “Why?”

What makes sense is that it’s a vampire flick starring Robert Quarry. He’d had a big hit two years earlier with Count Yorga, Vampire, and he followed that up with a 1971 sequel, inevitably The Return of Count Yorga, then began 1972 with the wonderful Dr. Phibes sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. He was suddenly a horror name and so why not make him Khorda, another vampire?

What doesn’t make sense is everything else. Yes, I realise that sounds like hyperbole but let me explain, because I’m at a loss to grasp any other decision made by the filmmakers. Maybe you’ll be able to figure it out. I hope so.

Lights of Old Broadway (1925)

Director: Monta Bell
Writer: Carey Wilson, from the play Merry Wives of Gotham by Laurence Eyre, with titles by Joseph W. Farnham
Stars: Marion Davies and Conrad Nagel

Index: That's a Wrap!

“Some of us are born to be lucky...”, says the opening intertitle, “and others are lucky to be born.” That’s Joseph Farnham earning his pay for titles already. Marion Davies plays both, as a pair of sisters orphaned on board a ship on its way to New York and fostered by different parents at opposite ends of the social scale.

We quickly leap past childhood so Anne De Rhonde can be “petite and perfectly bred” at a choice address in Washington Square but Fely O’Tandy, the sister she doesn’t know she has, only “rough, roguish and Irish” down in the ethnic slums.

There’s more opportunity for Davies in Fely so naturally we concentrate on her, beginning with her climbing to the top of a ridiculously large stack of tables in the street, then tipping them over, miraculously sustaining only a few bruises in the process.

Go West (1925)

Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Buster Keaton and Lex Neal, from a scenario by Raymond Cannon
Star: Buster Keaton

Index: That's a Wrap!

The second of Buster Keaton’s two features for 1925, Go West is a far more subtle film than Seven Chances, or indeed any of his earlier full length films. I’m used to suggesting words like “frantic”, “acrobatic” and “impressive”. None of those spring to mind here. I’d offer “slow”, “calm” and “gentle”, at least until the finalé.

That finalé involves Buster dressed in red as a devil to lead a herd of cows through the city of Los Angeles to the stockyards. It reminds a great deal of the finalé to Seven Chances, where his pursuers were would-be brides—a different meat market, I guess—but it’s initially slower, gaining pace only when he finds the costume.

Until then, it’s gentle comedy performed at a gentle pace, the best scene the first one, still in the east. Buster plays Friendless, the credits tell us, and it’s a fair name. The shopkeeper he meets as we start certainly isn’t his friend and neither is anyone else at any point in the film. Well, except Brown Eyes, who plays herself.