Six years on, Bruce Campbell has turned from being just some guy that Sam Raimi knows who's willing to play the lead to being the Great Chin, a real actor who has more fun being deliberately and delightfully B-movie wooden than any ther actor in the history of film. He can act here, but he can also act the fool and he does it so well. In only a few years he reached what William Shatner took years to master and Shatner could never beat himself up with a possessed hand. Not gonna happen.
He plays Ash again, but some sort of different parallel universe Ash who comes back to the cabin in the woods without having a clue about the Book of the Dead and the Professor's translation on tape and the rest of what we learned about in film one. His girlfriend gets killed off in about five minutes flat and he's on his own. In fact the first ten minutes are basically a stripped to basics remake of the entire first film. Then, just as Ash becomes possessed and dumped in a mud puddle, the sun comes out to rescue him, complete with buzzing insects and pastoral music. The evil retreats and we can settle down to the sequel part of this remake.
We find out a lot more detail here. The Book of the Dead is a few millennia old and holds the key to another world. We see a little background about Professor Knowby's discovery and then translation of the book and we get to see his daughter and her boyfriend continue the work with the few remaining lost pages. We get scares as well timed as the first movie, we get lots of cool low budget animation and we get laughs a plenty. Only in Crimewave did Sam Raimi's Three Stooges obsession get more attention and it's still awesomely fun here.
It's twenty years since I saw this in the cinema and it feels as fresh and funny now as it was then. Only Peter Jackson's Bad Taste matched this film on those fronts. I think if I watched this another fifty times I could make a Grindhouse-esque double bill mashup version that switched the dialogue around so that Ash was Derek and Derek was Ash. I'd love to have the imagination either of these guys had to come up with, from eyeball swallowing to toffee hammers, from A Farewell to Arms to exploding sheep, from ballet dancing animated headless corpses to drinking chuck. I'm in awe of both Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and am not surprised at all that these low budget horror pioneers are now making some of the best movies to come out of the major studios today.
Monday, 6 August 2007
Sunday, 5 August 2007
Rumble Fish (1983) Francis Ford Coppola
The motorcycle boy reigns, or so the graffiti says all over town. His brother Rusty James is playing pool in Benny's Billards when in comes and tells him that Biff Wilcox wants to kill him. To his friends Rusty James is obviously seen as a tough guy, swaggering around in a headband and a sleeveless white vest, chewing gum and being called by both his names. To me he looks more like the sort of kid that dominates everything until he meets someone who's really tough, at which point he's never heard of again. What a surprise when that's exactly what happens! He looks like he should be in Staying Alive but he's in black and white and the language is certainly nothing that you'd see under the Code. The only thing in colour are the rumble fish of the title, Siamese fighting fish.
There are names everywhere in Rumble Fish. Rusty James is Matt Dillon, and his buddies are played by Chris Penn and Nicolas Cage, who is so young here he hasn't even learned how to act badly yet. His delectable girlfriend Patty is Diane Lane, who is a decent actress who sounded artificial here. Her sister is Sofia Coppola, the director's daughter who went on to become an award winning director herself, though her Oscar was for writing Lost in Translation rather than directing it. The Benny of Benny's Billiards is Tom Waits with his unforgettable voice. The cop is William Smith, legendary B movie villain. There's even Bela Lugosi on the TV.
The semi-mysterious motorcycle boy is no less than Mickey Rourke, in only his sixth film, a year after Diner, and he provides by far the best acting from any of the young actors in this film. He's apparently half deaf, colour blind and amazingly old at 21 to just about everyone else in the story. He really was notably older than the rest of the main cast: he was 27 when he made Rumble Fish, compared to 19 for Dillon and Cage or 18 for Lane and Penn. The biggest name at the time was their alcoholic father, played by Dennis Hopper, who reminds very much here of a shorter Harry Dean Stanton, strangely because he's really an inch taller.
This film is something entirely new for me. Everyone and their dog in the States, it seems, has read every novel that S E Hinton wrote, especially Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, but growing up in England around books, the name never came up. They obviously had quite an effect on Francis Ford Coppola, who directed both novels in the same year and cast her in bit parts in both. She's a hooker in this one. Now I might just see why these stories are important to the American psyche.
Rusty James is almost the exact sort of juvenile delinquent your parents don't want you hanging round with. He doesn't do drugs but he does everything else. He breaks into buildings to party, he cheats on his girlfriend any chance he can get and doesn't understand why she gets upset, he insults everyone and goes ballistic the moment anything doesn't go his way. In other words he's a dumb little kid who doesn't understand what freedom means. Leonard Cohen described the United States as the cradle of the best and the worst.
Everything I see backs that up. Whether you end up as the best or the worst depends on the choices you make and the system doesn't really seem to care which. It just gives you the right to choose and people get to write books and direct movies about the people who make the wrong choice. I see a lot of kids in the States, both old and young, who are walking the same road as Rusty James, thinking they're cool when they're just idiots, either unaware that they've made the wrong choices or unwilling to live with the life that goes along with them.
We have idiots in England too, but not particularly like this particularly American breed. The system there isn't perfect by any means but it doesn't follow this route. Whether a school is good or bad, it works to ensure that everyone reaches a particular level rather than just giving them the option of whether they learn or not. I grew up, and parts of that took a lot longer than others, but I never had to take one of these American rites of passage to get there. I therefore see stories like this one, and Stand By Me and The Breakfast Club as completely redundant.
I enjoyed the art house cinematography of Stephen H Burum and, I'm sure, Francis Ford Coppola. I got to see this on a fullscreen VHS release, so I'm sure I missed a lot of the composition but enough survived for me to see it as notable. The perspectives were great, the passage of time was fun and the black and white contrasts were excellent. I enjoyed the acting, even that of Nicolas Cage which has to be a first for me. Dillon is exactly what he should be for the part, as it's only the character that's worthless, and Rourke and Waits and Hopper are fine.
I can't say I enjoyed the film though. It just seemed stupid to me. To my mind, Rusty James deserves everything he gets here. He's a complete moron, something that should be blatantly obvious to everyone who knows him and anyone who misses that is a complete moron themselves. It's an art house movie for 12 year olds.
There are names everywhere in Rumble Fish. Rusty James is Matt Dillon, and his buddies are played by Chris Penn and Nicolas Cage, who is so young here he hasn't even learned how to act badly yet. His delectable girlfriend Patty is Diane Lane, who is a decent actress who sounded artificial here. Her sister is Sofia Coppola, the director's daughter who went on to become an award winning director herself, though her Oscar was for writing Lost in Translation rather than directing it. The Benny of Benny's Billiards is Tom Waits with his unforgettable voice. The cop is William Smith, legendary B movie villain. There's even Bela Lugosi on the TV.
The semi-mysterious motorcycle boy is no less than Mickey Rourke, in only his sixth film, a year after Diner, and he provides by far the best acting from any of the young actors in this film. He's apparently half deaf, colour blind and amazingly old at 21 to just about everyone else in the story. He really was notably older than the rest of the main cast: he was 27 when he made Rumble Fish, compared to 19 for Dillon and Cage or 18 for Lane and Penn. The biggest name at the time was their alcoholic father, played by Dennis Hopper, who reminds very much here of a shorter Harry Dean Stanton, strangely because he's really an inch taller.
This film is something entirely new for me. Everyone and their dog in the States, it seems, has read every novel that S E Hinton wrote, especially Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, but growing up in England around books, the name never came up. They obviously had quite an effect on Francis Ford Coppola, who directed both novels in the same year and cast her in bit parts in both. She's a hooker in this one. Now I might just see why these stories are important to the American psyche.
Rusty James is almost the exact sort of juvenile delinquent your parents don't want you hanging round with. He doesn't do drugs but he does everything else. He breaks into buildings to party, he cheats on his girlfriend any chance he can get and doesn't understand why she gets upset, he insults everyone and goes ballistic the moment anything doesn't go his way. In other words he's a dumb little kid who doesn't understand what freedom means. Leonard Cohen described the United States as the cradle of the best and the worst.
Everything I see backs that up. Whether you end up as the best or the worst depends on the choices you make and the system doesn't really seem to care which. It just gives you the right to choose and people get to write books and direct movies about the people who make the wrong choice. I see a lot of kids in the States, both old and young, who are walking the same road as Rusty James, thinking they're cool when they're just idiots, either unaware that they've made the wrong choices or unwilling to live with the life that goes along with them.
We have idiots in England too, but not particularly like this particularly American breed. The system there isn't perfect by any means but it doesn't follow this route. Whether a school is good or bad, it works to ensure that everyone reaches a particular level rather than just giving them the option of whether they learn or not. I grew up, and parts of that took a lot longer than others, but I never had to take one of these American rites of passage to get there. I therefore see stories like this one, and Stand By Me and The Breakfast Club as completely redundant.
I enjoyed the art house cinematography of Stephen H Burum and, I'm sure, Francis Ford Coppola. I got to see this on a fullscreen VHS release, so I'm sure I missed a lot of the composition but enough survived for me to see it as notable. The perspectives were great, the passage of time was fun and the black and white contrasts were excellent. I enjoyed the acting, even that of Nicolas Cage which has to be a first for me. Dillon is exactly what he should be for the part, as it's only the character that's worthless, and Rourke and Waits and Hopper are fine.
I can't say I enjoyed the film though. It just seemed stupid to me. To my mind, Rusty James deserves everything he gets here. He's a complete moron, something that should be blatantly obvious to everyone who knows him and anyone who misses that is a complete moron themselves. It's an art house movie for 12 year olds.
The Evil Dead (1981) Sam Raimi
Sure, the Dolby Digital animation at the beginning of this DVD edition probably cost more to make than the entire film, but it takes about two seconds of innovative camerawork to demonstrate that this was something very new indeed. A painfully young Bruce Campbell wih a painfully bad haircut is on his way to some deserted cabin in the wilderness with his sister and his buddies and it's also painfully obvious that e hasn't learned how to act yet. As much as I enjoyed the Spiderman movies, it was Campbell's cameos that I loved the best and I can't wait for My Name is Bruce, Bubba Nosferatu and the Curse of the She-Vampires and a DVD release of Crimewave. In short, I'm a fan and yet I've never actually seen this film.
I've seen Raimi's slightly larger budget remake, Evil Dead II, in which he told his story on something more expensive than Super 8. In fact I saw it in movie theatres when it came out. But the BBFC, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to ban the first one outright so that it wasn't legally available in the UK at all for some time. Somehow I never got round to it after it found a sanctioned release and by then was tracking down obscure WIP movies and other banned Eurotrash anyway. So this one's a treat for me and it's long overdue.
The story is basically the same as the remake. The two guys and three girls find the cabin full of mysterious artifacts, including a weird knife, a weirder book and a reel to reel tape detailing the exploits of some guy investigating forces beyond life and death. The book is bound in human flesh, inked in human blood and contains all sorts of dangerous incantations. Naturally the tape contains some moron reading the incantations aloud, thus freeing whatever evil wasn't already free. As the film starts something is in the woods but after the incantations hae been read, the woods themselves are alive, as they demonstrate amply by raping one of the girls. Raimi later wished he hadn't filmed that scene, but it fits.
In fact everything fits, and as long as this is viewed on its own terms, that of a $350,000 debut feature made by people who were very much learning what they were doing as they went along, it's about as great as it could possibly be. Judge it on any other level and you'll find flaws. The effects and animation aren't great but they're innovative. Who else in 1981 thought of animating plasticine corpses to show them deteriorate, have huge hands exploding out of them and then add roaches and oatmeal? The story really doesn't make a lot of sense at all but is very cool indeed, very obviously showing Raimi's Three Stooges influences as much as the more expected horror background. The whole scene with the projector is a peach. None of the acting is particularly good either, though Campbell obviously improves as the film goes on.
However there's just so much innovation and enjoyment involve that it's hardly surprising that it became a cult hit. I don't think that on its own level it's been outdone, unless you count something like Peter Jackson's debut Bad Taste, which was more overtly a comedy. It's no Hallowe'en but it's a few levels more fun than A Nightmare on Elm Street or especially Friday the 13th. Kudos to the many Raimis and Taperts, and anyone else involved.
I've seen Raimi's slightly larger budget remake, Evil Dead II, in which he told his story on something more expensive than Super 8. In fact I saw it in movie theatres when it came out. But the BBFC, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to ban the first one outright so that it wasn't legally available in the UK at all for some time. Somehow I never got round to it after it found a sanctioned release and by then was tracking down obscure WIP movies and other banned Eurotrash anyway. So this one's a treat for me and it's long overdue.
The story is basically the same as the remake. The two guys and three girls find the cabin full of mysterious artifacts, including a weird knife, a weirder book and a reel to reel tape detailing the exploits of some guy investigating forces beyond life and death. The book is bound in human flesh, inked in human blood and contains all sorts of dangerous incantations. Naturally the tape contains some moron reading the incantations aloud, thus freeing whatever evil wasn't already free. As the film starts something is in the woods but after the incantations hae been read, the woods themselves are alive, as they demonstrate amply by raping one of the girls. Raimi later wished he hadn't filmed that scene, but it fits.
In fact everything fits, and as long as this is viewed on its own terms, that of a $350,000 debut feature made by people who were very much learning what they were doing as they went along, it's about as great as it could possibly be. Judge it on any other level and you'll find flaws. The effects and animation aren't great but they're innovative. Who else in 1981 thought of animating plasticine corpses to show them deteriorate, have huge hands exploding out of them and then add roaches and oatmeal? The story really doesn't make a lot of sense at all but is very cool indeed, very obviously showing Raimi's Three Stooges influences as much as the more expected horror background. The whole scene with the projector is a peach. None of the acting is particularly good either, though Campbell obviously improves as the film goes on.
However there's just so much innovation and enjoyment involve that it's hardly surprising that it became a cult hit. I don't think that on its own level it's been outdone, unless you count something like Peter Jackson's debut Bad Taste, which was more overtly a comedy. It's no Hallowe'en but it's a few levels more fun than A Nightmare on Elm Street or especially Friday the 13th. Kudos to the many Raimis and Taperts, and anyone else involved.
Saturday, 4 August 2007
The Last of the Mohicans (1936) George B Seitz
It's 1757 and the Brits are fighting the French again, the war raging across three continents. It spreads as far as North America where Fort William Henry is under siege by the French and Huron Indians. The lovely daughters of the British Commander, Colonel Munro, are escorted by Major Heyward to join him at the fort but naturally plans are afoot to lead them astray, by their guide Magua. Just as naturally there are also good guys to the rescue, though they really haven't got anything to do with the war being colonials and Indians. They are frontiersman Natty Bumppo, known as Hawkeye, an Indian called Chingachgook and his son Uncas, who is the last of the Mohicans of the title.
I haven't read James Fenimore Cooper's series of Leatherstocking Tales, of which this is the most famous, so I can't speak to how authentic it is to the book. However from what I have read, it's truer to the source than the more recent adaptation with Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye. It plays well and believable, though there are plenty of opportunities to leap into the bound of incredulity. However every time Hawkeye makes an obvious fake trail to distract the trailing Hurons, the Hurons see it for what it really is. Every time he knows where they can shelter two minutes away from where they happen to be at a particular moment, it turns out to be burned out.
Randolph Scott, veteran of many a western, is highly believable as Hawkeye, though of course this is 1936 and so he's playing the cleanest, best dressed, best groomed and goshdarnit politest frontiersman you'll probably ever see on film. Apparently the dialogue closely adheres to the book but Scott changed some of it to feel more natural and it works. Binnie Barnes is excellent as the Colonel's eldest daughter and the most human of the old worlders, most of whom are as unfair and out of touch as Major Heyward, played ably by Henry Wilcoxon, who could do this sort of thing in his sleep. Younger daughter Cora, played by Heather Angel, is pretty but pretty pointless too and Robert Barrat is a little embarrassing as Chingachgook. He looks far more Indian than Bruce Cabot as Magua, but sounds more like Charlie Chan.
The story gets going pretty quickly and it's full of action, in the great matinee tradition, very visual and very emphatic as a true American ripping yarn. It has a more depth and attention to detail than most, which is admirable, but I couldn't help but feel that it had a lot more to tell without the time to tell it. As it stands though, there are plenty worse things you could be watching on a Saturday morning.
A Walk in the Sun (1945) Lewis Milestone
Lewis Milestone directed a lot of movies in a lot of genres, and I've been finding them to be surprisingly consistent, but it's for his war movies that he's best remembered. This one in particular seems to have been well regarded by real World War II veterans who appreciated the lack of what Hollywood was always best at: jazzing things up to keep folks with short attention spans interested. This certainly isn't a Rambo-esque shoot 'em up extravaganza, it's slow and talky how it would have been in real life. War has often been described as long periods of nothing punctuated by short episodes of shocking violence. That's what novelist Harry Brown, scriptwriter Robert Rossen and director Lewis Milestone gave us in A Walk in the Sun.
It follows the action (and the lack of it) experienced over a day in Italy by the lead platoon of the Texas Regiment in 1943. As the opening song points out, 'It was just a little walk in the Italian sun but it wasn't an easy thing.' They land on the beach at Salerno and work their way six miles inland to take a farmhouse from the enemy and blow up a bridge.
Now this may be realistic, but there are problems with it and to be fair they're not really the fault of the people making the film. Most people complaining about this film seem to complain about the lack of action but I'm not going to jump on that bandwagon. To be honest, it's refreshing to hear the mindless philosophising and pointless jokes that the soldiers indulge in to fill the many empty moments. The action is there: we hear it and we see the smoke, we're just not in the heart of it. At least most of the time. I've also seen enough bad Nazi portrayals to relish a war movie in which we never really see the enemy. They're there, in planes or destroyed tanks or shooting out of farmhouse windows but that's it. We don't get to know them at all.
What was most annoying for me was the choice to include army swearing knowing full well that it would have to be sanitised to satisfy the censors running the show. It's not overdone but using the word 'loving' in place of its more salacious alternative is just dumb. It would have made more sense to avoid swearing altogether than to bowdlerise it. I could have done without the ballads too, and it's a little disconcerting to hear big tough American soldiers keep asking for butts.
The acting is solid, not just from Dana Andrews in the lead but from the entire platoon that include such luminaries as John Ireland, Lloyd Bridges and Sterling Holloway. Even Huntz Hall is decent, making a rare foray away from the East Side Kids movies. I'm used to seeing Leo Gorcey but I can't remember seeing Huntz Hall anywhere else. Richard Conte is probably most fun as the talkative Private Rivera. It's the story that matters though, or more accurately what the story stands for, real people fighting a real war from a human perspective that has no axe to grind.
It follows the action (and the lack of it) experienced over a day in Italy by the lead platoon of the Texas Regiment in 1943. As the opening song points out, 'It was just a little walk in the Italian sun but it wasn't an easy thing.' They land on the beach at Salerno and work their way six miles inland to take a farmhouse from the enemy and blow up a bridge.
Now this may be realistic, but there are problems with it and to be fair they're not really the fault of the people making the film. Most people complaining about this film seem to complain about the lack of action but I'm not going to jump on that bandwagon. To be honest, it's refreshing to hear the mindless philosophising and pointless jokes that the soldiers indulge in to fill the many empty moments. The action is there: we hear it and we see the smoke, we're just not in the heart of it. At least most of the time. I've also seen enough bad Nazi portrayals to relish a war movie in which we never really see the enemy. They're there, in planes or destroyed tanks or shooting out of farmhouse windows but that's it. We don't get to know them at all.
What was most annoying for me was the choice to include army swearing knowing full well that it would have to be sanitised to satisfy the censors running the show. It's not overdone but using the word 'loving' in place of its more salacious alternative is just dumb. It would have made more sense to avoid swearing altogether than to bowdlerise it. I could have done without the ballads too, and it's a little disconcerting to hear big tough American soldiers keep asking for butts.
The acting is solid, not just from Dana Andrews in the lead but from the entire platoon that include such luminaries as John Ireland, Lloyd Bridges and Sterling Holloway. Even Huntz Hall is decent, making a rare foray away from the East Side Kids movies. I'm used to seeing Leo Gorcey but I can't remember seeing Huntz Hall anywhere else. Richard Conte is probably most fun as the talkative Private Rivera. It's the story that matters though, or more accurately what the story stands for, real people fighting a real war from a human perspective that has no axe to grind.
Black Magic (1944) Phil Rosen
Also known as Meeting at Midnight, this isn't a 40s Hollywood horror outing, it's a Charlie Chan from the Monogram era with Sidney Toler in the lead role, made soon after the last one I saw, Charlie Chan in the Secret Service. The murder victim is William Bonner, a fake psychic, who is shot during a seance at which Charlie's number something daughter, Frances Chan, is an attendee and to whose house Birmingham Brown had just arrived. Naturally Charlie is stuck with the investigation, which is complicated by the fact that Bonner was shot with what seems to be an invisible bullet.
Sidney Toler, who is about as Chinese as I am and who sounds far less authentic, is actually mildly entertaining here, mostly by grinning a lot, but it's still impossible to appreciate him more than the comic relief. Mantan Moreland gets to suffer from what seems like every negative racial stereotype possible as Birmingham Brown, but he's so damn good at it that it's impossible not to watch him, regardless of how many spook jokes he has to last through.
Frances is dumber than Iris, the last Chan daughter I saw, who was played by Marianne Quon, but she's still more fun to watch than Toler, and as usual she can speak so much better than her screen father. She also has the advantage of being played by someone with exactly the same name as her character: Frances Chan plays Frances Chan. I wonder how often that happened in the history of film! Apparently this is also the only instance in the whole series where a Chan daughter is the only assistant from the family, with no son, whatever number, present.
I don't recognise anyone else in the cast and nobody really shines. They're just another bunch of actors in another Monogram cheapie picture and they do their job perfectly well on that level. The picture itself does the same, and that's no bad thing for anything coming out of the Monogram studio. The fact that nobody lets the side down can be counted as a pronounced success.
Sidney Toler, who is about as Chinese as I am and who sounds far less authentic, is actually mildly entertaining here, mostly by grinning a lot, but it's still impossible to appreciate him more than the comic relief. Mantan Moreland gets to suffer from what seems like every negative racial stereotype possible as Birmingham Brown, but he's so damn good at it that it's impossible not to watch him, regardless of how many spook jokes he has to last through.
Frances is dumber than Iris, the last Chan daughter I saw, who was played by Marianne Quon, but she's still more fun to watch than Toler, and as usual she can speak so much better than her screen father. She also has the advantage of being played by someone with exactly the same name as her character: Frances Chan plays Frances Chan. I wonder how often that happened in the history of film! Apparently this is also the only instance in the whole series where a Chan daughter is the only assistant from the family, with no son, whatever number, present.
I don't recognise anyone else in the cast and nobody really shines. They're just another bunch of actors in another Monogram cheapie picture and they do their job perfectly well on that level. The picture itself does the same, and that's no bad thing for anything coming out of the Monogram studio. The fact that nobody lets the side down can be counted as a pronounced success.
Friday, 3 August 2007
Hell Up in Harlem (1973) Larry Cohen
This is the sequel to Black Caesar, made the same year by the same people, and it starts precisely how it means to go on, with a white DA molesting a black woman trying to atone for her part in the upcoming murder of her man by corrupt white cops. This is the end of the main flow of the plot in Black Caesar, not the actual end of the film which is ignored here completely. This one has Tommy Gibbs, the Black Caesar, played once more by Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson, managing to escape with the ledgers containing all that incriminating evidence identifying the corrupt cops and city officials who were trying to steal them back.
Not only does he escape with the ledgers but he still has a host of brothers to get him to Harlem Hospital at gunpoint to get medical treatment without anaesthetic because that's just how tough he is. In other words he's down but he's not out and he has help, not least from his father who gets thrust into the action against his will and ends up killing a couple of corrupt cops to save his own life. It ignores any real sense of continuity but you can hear that 1973 Harlem audience popping caps at the screen and that's precisely the point that returning director Larry Cohen was looking for. It helps that Julius Harris sucked as a good guy but kicks ass as a bad guy.
Cohen has fun here, ignoring any semblance of sense or logic but giving us plenty of bad white guys and badass black guys, along with gunfights, fistfights, everything fights. There aren't just shootings but there are plenty of those, there's death by asphyxiation, death by harpoon gun, death by flagpole even. We get black maids killing their Italian masters and throwing their racial stereotypes back at them. We get white women and Japanese drug smugglers doing bad kung fu but losing to the blacks. We only get one nude scene and I think there's only three instances of the word 'nigger', both of which are surprising but the violence makes up for it.
There's even a new hot chick, Sister Jennifer, who gets to show us a lot more than we'd expect from a holy woman, and she's played by a real actress too, Margaret Avery, who would go on to be Oscar nominated for The Color Purple twelve years later. However this is entirely Fred Williamson's show and he makes the most of it. Forget the sense, forget the bad acting and the bad wardrobes and the bad effects, just watch Fred the badass Hammer in action. That's what this is all about and while the film isn't up to the standards of its predecessor, I think Williamson is better here by far.
Not only does he escape with the ledgers but he still has a host of brothers to get him to Harlem Hospital at gunpoint to get medical treatment without anaesthetic because that's just how tough he is. In other words he's down but he's not out and he has help, not least from his father who gets thrust into the action against his will and ends up killing a couple of corrupt cops to save his own life. It ignores any real sense of continuity but you can hear that 1973 Harlem audience popping caps at the screen and that's precisely the point that returning director Larry Cohen was looking for. It helps that Julius Harris sucked as a good guy but kicks ass as a bad guy.
Cohen has fun here, ignoring any semblance of sense or logic but giving us plenty of bad white guys and badass black guys, along with gunfights, fistfights, everything fights. There aren't just shootings but there are plenty of those, there's death by asphyxiation, death by harpoon gun, death by flagpole even. We get black maids killing their Italian masters and throwing their racial stereotypes back at them. We get white women and Japanese drug smugglers doing bad kung fu but losing to the blacks. We only get one nude scene and I think there's only three instances of the word 'nigger', both of which are surprising but the violence makes up for it.
There's even a new hot chick, Sister Jennifer, who gets to show us a lot more than we'd expect from a holy woman, and she's played by a real actress too, Margaret Avery, who would go on to be Oscar nominated for The Color Purple twelve years later. However this is entirely Fred Williamson's show and he makes the most of it. Forget the sense, forget the bad acting and the bad wardrobes and the bad effects, just watch Fred the badass Hammer in action. That's what this is all about and while the film isn't up to the standards of its predecessor, I think Williamson is better here by far.
The Face of Another (1966) Hiroshi Teshigahara
There are two names I know here, both actors: Tatsuya Nakadai and Machiko Kyo. Nakadai was the gunfighter in Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and returned in a different role for Sanjuro. He also had major parts in Kwaidan, Samurai Rebellion, Kill! and The Sword of Doom. After Kurosawa fell out with Toshiro Mifune, he got even more prominent roles in the master's work, in films like Kagemusha and Ran that I haven't yet seen. Kyo is probably most famous for her memorable role in Rashomon, but I saw her first in later films like Gate of Hell and Ugetsu, where she became a personal favourite.
However there are other key names I don't know. Hiroshi Teshigahara only directed eleven films over a 33 year period but four of those teamed him up with writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Their greatest collaboration is apparently Women of the Dunes, made two years earlier and which was nominated for two Oscars, not just Best Foreign Language Film but also Best Director for Teshigahara. Up until now the only one of his films I've seen was a documentary of sorts on Barcelona architect Antonio Gaudi, which was fascinating but far more for Gaudi than the director.
Teshigahara was an ikebana specialist, an artist working in the Japanese art of flower arranging, which is a strange talent to bring to the job of a film director but a telling one and one that apparently leads him to work with a lot of closeups. We open with Mr Okuyama's face, as seen through X-rays, while he explains how his face was destroyed. Then we meet his wife, Mrs Okuyama, as they argue about his self consciousness in refusing to take off his bandages. The shots are so close up that we don't even see her whole face at once for a little while. Teshigahara is focusing on visual details just as he wants us to focus on Okuyama's psychological details, and these visuals remain striking and innovative as the film runs on. We see things through other things or from through store security camera footage, stills or changes in sound and lighting.
Nakadai is superb as Okuyama, projecting his feelings visually even though he doesn't have the benefit of a face to act with, thus matching the achievement of Claude Rains as the Invisible Man. We do see his eyes though, which are the mirrors to the soul they ought to be. At points his despair shines through them. Soon he persuades his doctor to fashion one for him, not as a means of returning to society as himself but as someone else.
Angered by his wife's rejection, he begins to lead a double life. He keeps the bandages on when around those he knows, perpetuating the thinking that his face is gone forever. However with the replacement face, he takes on the persona of someone else entirely, progressing up to the ultimate goal of seducing his own wife. 'I am who I am. That can't change,' he says, but of course that's not the case. Naturally the age old question addressed in every film about masks comes into play: as he changes, are the changes caused by himself using the mask or the mask using him?
The mask metaphor is everywhere in this film. There's talk of women using makeup to hide their faces, Arab women wearing coverings, songs about change. Even Mrs Okuyama's hobby is polishing gems, prompting her husband to wonder whether a gem's real face is when it's rough or polished. Even those without masks or the need for them get into the act and we're forced into wondering about how we can be different people whether our masks are real or imaginary.
Most obviously there's an additional subplot about a young girl who is beautiful but for the right side of her face which is horribly disfigured, but there are so many telling incidents that it's going to need a few viewings to get clear everything that Abe and Teshigahara were telling us. It's notable that while his wife apparently doesn't recognise him, a mentally handicapped girl does and after only seeing him twice. There are a lot of films about masks in the west, but usually they're about the same change and there's rarely any real psychological exploration. This one is deep and layered and worthy of many viewings, I'm sure.
However there are other key names I don't know. Hiroshi Teshigahara only directed eleven films over a 33 year period but four of those teamed him up with writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Their greatest collaboration is apparently Women of the Dunes, made two years earlier and which was nominated for two Oscars, not just Best Foreign Language Film but also Best Director for Teshigahara. Up until now the only one of his films I've seen was a documentary of sorts on Barcelona architect Antonio Gaudi, which was fascinating but far more for Gaudi than the director.
Teshigahara was an ikebana specialist, an artist working in the Japanese art of flower arranging, which is a strange talent to bring to the job of a film director but a telling one and one that apparently leads him to work with a lot of closeups. We open with Mr Okuyama's face, as seen through X-rays, while he explains how his face was destroyed. Then we meet his wife, Mrs Okuyama, as they argue about his self consciousness in refusing to take off his bandages. The shots are so close up that we don't even see her whole face at once for a little while. Teshigahara is focusing on visual details just as he wants us to focus on Okuyama's psychological details, and these visuals remain striking and innovative as the film runs on. We see things through other things or from through store security camera footage, stills or changes in sound and lighting.
Nakadai is superb as Okuyama, projecting his feelings visually even though he doesn't have the benefit of a face to act with, thus matching the achievement of Claude Rains as the Invisible Man. We do see his eyes though, which are the mirrors to the soul they ought to be. At points his despair shines through them. Soon he persuades his doctor to fashion one for him, not as a means of returning to society as himself but as someone else.
Angered by his wife's rejection, he begins to lead a double life. He keeps the bandages on when around those he knows, perpetuating the thinking that his face is gone forever. However with the replacement face, he takes on the persona of someone else entirely, progressing up to the ultimate goal of seducing his own wife. 'I am who I am. That can't change,' he says, but of course that's not the case. Naturally the age old question addressed in every film about masks comes into play: as he changes, are the changes caused by himself using the mask or the mask using him?
The mask metaphor is everywhere in this film. There's talk of women using makeup to hide their faces, Arab women wearing coverings, songs about change. Even Mrs Okuyama's hobby is polishing gems, prompting her husband to wonder whether a gem's real face is when it's rough or polished. Even those without masks or the need for them get into the act and we're forced into wondering about how we can be different people whether our masks are real or imaginary.
Most obviously there's an additional subplot about a young girl who is beautiful but for the right side of her face which is horribly disfigured, but there are so many telling incidents that it's going to need a few viewings to get clear everything that Abe and Teshigahara were telling us. It's notable that while his wife apparently doesn't recognise him, a mentally handicapped girl does and after only seeing him twice. There are a lot of films about masks in the west, but usually they're about the same change and there's rarely any real psychological exploration. This one is deep and layered and worthy of many viewings, I'm sure.
Freedom for Us (1931) René Clair
Just to prove that there's nothing new under the sun, court cases were brought against filmmakers for plaguarism back in 1938. Most interestingly to me, some of the counter thinking, director René Clair refused to have anything to do with any suggestion that no less a talent than Charlie Chaplin stole his film, titled in the French À nous la liberté, seven years later to make Modern Times, pointing out instead that if Chaplin had been influenced by his film he would be very flattered.
There are many obvious similarities but one huge difference at least: this is a musical, of all things for 1931, while Chaplin was attempting to extend the lifespan of the silent film with Modern Times, allowing only some synchronised sound. My guess is that Clair borrowed a lot from Chaplin to make this film and Chaplin borrowed a lot back to make Modern Times. It just highlights how important the public domain is and how important the free interplay of culture as building blocks.
We open with a bunch of prisoners making wooden horses in what must be the French equivalent of a chain gang. One of them (Louis, number 119) promptly escapes, but his partner in crime doesn't make it. Louis starts a phonograph company and quickly becomes a huge success, running what must have been a very profitable industry. His factory of course works precisely the same way that the prison did, with fascistic supervisors replacing the guards and phonographs replacing the wooden horses.
The equivalent of Chaplin's little tramp is the other prisoner, Émile, who escapes much later on and of course ends up working in his former cellmate's factory. Naturally he gets to be the proverbial spanner in the works, in a very Chaplinesque manner, partly through the his simple level of intellect and partly through the situations he finds himself in. He also gets to romance a girl who works at the factory, much to the displeasure of his martinet supervisor who has designs upon her himself.
As a film in itself, it's a joy. It's innovative, quirky and funny. There are various endings to plot themes, both happy and sad, fitting and ironic, calm and riotous. The direction by René Clair is spot on and the soundtrack by Georges Auric is awesome. Apparently the action on screen was choreographed around the music instead of vice versa, which makes for a powerful comedic ballet. The acting is excellent, not just by the leads Raymond Cordy (Louis) and Henri Marchand (Émile), but by the supporting cast too, especially the ladies: Rolla France is the epitome of innocence as the object of Émile's devotion, and Germaine Aussey is elegant as Louis's wife.
It's a fascinating film, not only for the Chaplin connections which could form a thesis all on their own, and not only for the political motivations that were entirely intended. This was designed as a satire on the industrial revolution and how it affects the class structure, always a favourite French theme. The comparison between being a prisoner and working on the production line is made entirely obvious, right down to the numbers they all have to wear, but there's far more going on, from the strata of power at the factory to Louis's cheating wife to the slapstick dinner party.
What surprised me most was how this fits into the history of cinema. I've got used to the progression of American film from the silent era to the clumsy advent of sound and into the precodes, but I haven't seen enough old world cinema to find a similar definable progression there. This one has a lot of scenes firmly rooted in silent film, from nods to Metropolis right down to that old silent slapstick favourite, the literal kicking of ass, and they're duly acted out silently. As much as it looks back though, it looks forward. Other parts are right out of the precodes, not that the French ever had to leave them.
Most of all though, there's the intriguing use of both sound effects and soundtrack that reminds on occasion of M and points to a particular innovative period in European film that didn't happen in the States at all, as far as I can tell. Early sound in Hollywood is generally an exercise in clumsiness but it happened a few years earlier. In Europe silent film held out a little longer but was replaced by innovation right off the bat, as the European filmmakers presumably didn't have to go through the same learning period. Fascinating stuff.
There are many obvious similarities but one huge difference at least: this is a musical, of all things for 1931, while Chaplin was attempting to extend the lifespan of the silent film with Modern Times, allowing only some synchronised sound. My guess is that Clair borrowed a lot from Chaplin to make this film and Chaplin borrowed a lot back to make Modern Times. It just highlights how important the public domain is and how important the free interplay of culture as building blocks.
We open with a bunch of prisoners making wooden horses in what must be the French equivalent of a chain gang. One of them (Louis, number 119) promptly escapes, but his partner in crime doesn't make it. Louis starts a phonograph company and quickly becomes a huge success, running what must have been a very profitable industry. His factory of course works precisely the same way that the prison did, with fascistic supervisors replacing the guards and phonographs replacing the wooden horses.
The equivalent of Chaplin's little tramp is the other prisoner, Émile, who escapes much later on and of course ends up working in his former cellmate's factory. Naturally he gets to be the proverbial spanner in the works, in a very Chaplinesque manner, partly through the his simple level of intellect and partly through the situations he finds himself in. He also gets to romance a girl who works at the factory, much to the displeasure of his martinet supervisor who has designs upon her himself.
As a film in itself, it's a joy. It's innovative, quirky and funny. There are various endings to plot themes, both happy and sad, fitting and ironic, calm and riotous. The direction by René Clair is spot on and the soundtrack by Georges Auric is awesome. Apparently the action on screen was choreographed around the music instead of vice versa, which makes for a powerful comedic ballet. The acting is excellent, not just by the leads Raymond Cordy (Louis) and Henri Marchand (Émile), but by the supporting cast too, especially the ladies: Rolla France is the epitome of innocence as the object of Émile's devotion, and Germaine Aussey is elegant as Louis's wife.
It's a fascinating film, not only for the Chaplin connections which could form a thesis all on their own, and not only for the political motivations that were entirely intended. This was designed as a satire on the industrial revolution and how it affects the class structure, always a favourite French theme. The comparison between being a prisoner and working on the production line is made entirely obvious, right down to the numbers they all have to wear, but there's far more going on, from the strata of power at the factory to Louis's cheating wife to the slapstick dinner party.
What surprised me most was how this fits into the history of cinema. I've got used to the progression of American film from the silent era to the clumsy advent of sound and into the precodes, but I haven't seen enough old world cinema to find a similar definable progression there. This one has a lot of scenes firmly rooted in silent film, from nods to Metropolis right down to that old silent slapstick favourite, the literal kicking of ass, and they're duly acted out silently. As much as it looks back though, it looks forward. Other parts are right out of the precodes, not that the French ever had to leave them.
Most of all though, there's the intriguing use of both sound effects and soundtrack that reminds on occasion of M and points to a particular innovative period in European film that didn't happen in the States at all, as far as I can tell. Early sound in Hollywood is generally an exercise in clumsiness but it happened a few years earlier. In Europe silent film held out a little longer but was replaced by innovation right off the bat, as the European filmmakers presumably didn't have to go through the same learning period. Fascinating stuff.
The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957) Leslie Kardos
Ten names on the main cast page and Friedrich von Ledebur is the only one I recognise. That can't be good. Then again, we open in the La Salle Detention Home for Girls full of women who really can't count as girls, even by Hollywood standards. That must be good, as of course this is really a women's prison under a more friendly name. What's even better is that someone's screaming outside and every time someone screams someone turns up dead in the morning. One of the admin assistants notices this and gets into immediate trouble by raising the idea to the people in charge.
Naturally anyone with a background in low budget horror scifi movies knows that this means that there are mad doctors behind the scenes using their literally captive audience to provide the life force to keep scary old Friedrich alive. After being so memorable as Queequeg in Moby Dick, he immediately sank into Voodoo Island and continued the decline here, as Eric, who looks like a hollowed out zombie until he can steal that life force, when he appears merely as a less hollowed out zombie. He's Dr Murdock's personal assistant, Murdock being the leader of this group of immortality seekers.
The biggest question I had is the most surprising one I could think of asking. Given that three score years and ten shouldn't be enough for anyone, it seems strange to wonder why these characters should seek immortality but they don't do anything. Von Ledebur may have a highly extended lifespan but he can't even speak let alone actually do anything substantial. He just stands there like a statue for most of the film, which is of course precisely what happens to any of them if they don't get their life force, hence the title. The only other activity he gets is to carry new victims around.
The story is full of awesomely bad science and completely inane plot developments, but it has a little charm to it. Murdock and Cooper and others keep letting things slip about what they did over a century ago and nobody notices until the good guy gets brought in to notice everything. He's Dr Jess Rogers, played by William Hudson, who's by far the best thing about this film, regardless of how bad his dialogue is and how many plotholes he has to studiously ignore.
Naturally anyone with a background in low budget horror scifi movies knows that this means that there are mad doctors behind the scenes using their literally captive audience to provide the life force to keep scary old Friedrich alive. After being so memorable as Queequeg in Moby Dick, he immediately sank into Voodoo Island and continued the decline here, as Eric, who looks like a hollowed out zombie until he can steal that life force, when he appears merely as a less hollowed out zombie. He's Dr Murdock's personal assistant, Murdock being the leader of this group of immortality seekers.
The biggest question I had is the most surprising one I could think of asking. Given that three score years and ten shouldn't be enough for anyone, it seems strange to wonder why these characters should seek immortality but they don't do anything. Von Ledebur may have a highly extended lifespan but he can't even speak let alone actually do anything substantial. He just stands there like a statue for most of the film, which is of course precisely what happens to any of them if they don't get their life force, hence the title. The only other activity he gets is to carry new victims around.
The story is full of awesomely bad science and completely inane plot developments, but it has a little charm to it. Murdock and Cooper and others keep letting things slip about what they did over a century ago and nobody notices until the good guy gets brought in to notice everything. He's Dr Jess Rogers, played by William Hudson, who's by far the best thing about this film, regardless of how bad his dialogue is and how many plotholes he has to studiously ignore.
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