The County Hotel seems like a pretty quiet place to be, with regulars coming there to be ensured of peaceful relaxation. I'm not sure how that could be, given that Kitty O'Day is working there as a receptionist. You can be sure that with Kitty O'Day on the premises, things won't stay quiet for long, and needless to say that five minutes in Mr Williams gets shot and she's on the call when it happens. Worse still, Mr Williams is the man who runs the County Hotel and of course Kitty is going to investigate.
There's nothing here that wasn't in the first Kitty O'Day movie, the previous year's Kitty O'Day, Detective. Jean Parker is still having a ball playing the title character and it's just as fun watching her interrupt everyone and finish everyone else's sentences. Peter Cookson is just as immobile as her boyfriend Johnny Jones and he's still better at being a Cary Grant waxwork than Cary Grant. He's not much of a sidekick in the slightest and his only real talent is to be easily ignored.
Tim O'Ryan was much better in the first film, as the continually flustered Inspector Clancy. He made a lot of movies, probably mostly with budgets like this one, so I'm sure he could do this sort of thing in his sleep, and here I think he does. He spends a good deal of time dealing with his idiot sidekick, who is nothing more than comic relief but at least is better than his equivalent in the first film. Most of the film works on about the same mental level but manages to get worse, degenerating into one of the most dumb chases I think I've ever seen on film. If anyone ever wonders why there were only two Kitty O'Day movies, just ask them to watch this one.
Thursday, 18 January 2007
Suzy (1936)
Jean Harlow plays Suzy, in her last film but one of 1936, with only two more after that before her untimely death at the age of 26. By this time she had really worked out how to do what she did, and she casually admits early in this one that she can't sing or dance much but can be a little cute when she wants to be. That's understating it considerably, but any brief glimpse of a comparison between her early films and her late ones shows that she started out without much of a clue but turned into a very noticeable young lady who had a lot to offer. She brought a natural air to her performances that was like a breath of fresh air.
She starts off here in London at the final performance of Melodies of 1914, some sort of revue of scantily clad young ladies, giving her last wage to another chorus girl because she's a blonde and blondes always have money gravitating towards her. It takes a little longer than she expects but she meets and falls for regular film partner Franchot Tone. He appears to be some sort of rich lord because he nearly runs her over in a Rolls Royce twenty years older than it could possibly be, but he's really just some sort of inventor working on a stabiliser, and a bad Irish accent, in his spare time. Just as he manages to persuade her to marry him, they get caught up in some nefarious German plot involving his boss, Frau Schmidt, and he gets shot. Then again the timing is right, as the next day Franz Ferdinand gets shot too and World War I kicks off, leading to plenty of stock footage from another Jean Harlow movie, Hell's Angels.
The film can't really make up its mind whether it wants to be a wartime drama, a social commentary, a fluffy gold digger comedy or a bizarre love triangle, so it ends up being a good deal of all three. Harlow is a pleasure to watch and now I only have one more of her last fifteen films to find. Tone is solid but then he tended to be, even with such an atrocious accent that he keeps forgetting to put on. And then there's Cary Grant, who doesn't even turn up for over half an hour by which time we've forgotten that he was in the movie in the first place, let alone third on the credits list. To atone for that he does give us a thoroughly memorable entrance and suddenly it's a Cary Grant film, even though he isn't even trying to sound French as a character called Andre Charville. This is early for him, before even Topper, let alone Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and Only Angels Have Wings, so he's still trying to make a name for himself and doing a fine job of it too.
Hiding even further into the film and down the credits is Lewis Stone as Cary Grant's father. He's a curmudgeonly yet thoroughly decent old soul, but then he looked old by the time he reached fourteen, I think. There's Una O'Connor as one of Suzy's early landladies, and she's excellent in a far too brief part. Mostly though, there's Jean Harlow because this is definitely her film, however much Cary Grant tries to steal it.
She starts off here in London at the final performance of Melodies of 1914, some sort of revue of scantily clad young ladies, giving her last wage to another chorus girl because she's a blonde and blondes always have money gravitating towards her. It takes a little longer than she expects but she meets and falls for regular film partner Franchot Tone. He appears to be some sort of rich lord because he nearly runs her over in a Rolls Royce twenty years older than it could possibly be, but he's really just some sort of inventor working on a stabiliser, and a bad Irish accent, in his spare time. Just as he manages to persuade her to marry him, they get caught up in some nefarious German plot involving his boss, Frau Schmidt, and he gets shot. Then again the timing is right, as the next day Franz Ferdinand gets shot too and World War I kicks off, leading to plenty of stock footage from another Jean Harlow movie, Hell's Angels.
The film can't really make up its mind whether it wants to be a wartime drama, a social commentary, a fluffy gold digger comedy or a bizarre love triangle, so it ends up being a good deal of all three. Harlow is a pleasure to watch and now I only have one more of her last fifteen films to find. Tone is solid but then he tended to be, even with such an atrocious accent that he keeps forgetting to put on. And then there's Cary Grant, who doesn't even turn up for over half an hour by which time we've forgotten that he was in the movie in the first place, let alone third on the credits list. To atone for that he does give us a thoroughly memorable entrance and suddenly it's a Cary Grant film, even though he isn't even trying to sound French as a character called Andre Charville. This is early for him, before even Topper, let alone Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and Only Angels Have Wings, so he's still trying to make a name for himself and doing a fine job of it too.
Hiding even further into the film and down the credits is Lewis Stone as Cary Grant's father. He's a curmudgeonly yet thoroughly decent old soul, but then he looked old by the time he reached fourteen, I think. There's Una O'Connor as one of Suzy's early landladies, and she's excellent in a far too brief part. Mostly though, there's Jean Harlow because this is definitely her film, however much Cary Grant tries to steal it.
Wednesday, 17 January 2007
Forbidden (1932)
It's ten past ten and Lulu Smith is late for work, for the first time in eight years. She's a respectable small town librarian, but she's feeling the influence of springtime and decides to withdraw all her considerable savings to splurge it all on a romantic cruise to Havana where nobody knows her. She takes off her glasses and puts on an expensive dress and finds inebriated lawyer Bob Grover in her room because he'd mistaken 66 for 99. They hit it off like crazy and suddenly the trip is over and Lulu has mysteriously become a newspaper clippings librarian getting proposed to by a coworker. She just wants Bob, of course, but when she finds out that he's a married man who won't leave his wife and so drops him like a hot potato.
It becomes quickly obvious that this is a precode, but when we discover that Lulu is pregnant it's beyond any shadow of doubt. Yet it's directed by an unlikely candidate for such dangerous things: Frank Capra, so early that he still has an R in the middle of his name. Yes, this ardent proponent of American family values, who fashioned the dark alternate Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life into a town that stoops so low as to have girls doing the jitterbug with paying clients, gives us, as both writer and director, a love story between an unmarried mother and a District Attorney who cheats on his crippled wife, fathers a daughter out of wedlock, only to get her back through a fake adoption with the real mother as a fake nanny. It's hardly something the moral majority would overlook and there's no way on earth it would even be considered after the code kicked in. I wonder if he just saw it as a challenge.
Lulu Smith is played by Barbara Stanwyck, and of course she's perfect for any sort of dubious moral situation. She was a strong woman who could get away with ordering any guy around, yet somehow remains believable as a submissive woman who just can't say no to her man. She's great here but that's not surprising in the slightest. The direction Capra takes means that she also gets to show off her talent of playing any age she felt like: she's a very young woman when the film starts but we watch her daughter grow up and get engaged so you can imagine how old she has to start looking. She does it all as well as you'd expect. Adolphe Menjou deliberately plays Bob Grover as a background character for much of the film and tones his talents down admirably so as not to compete with Stanwyck.
What isn't surprising is that Ralph Bellamy doesn't get the girl, because he probably never did in a long and distinguished career. This may be the most dynamic I've ever seen him though. He's the gung ho newspaperman who's had the hots for Lily for years, even though all of those many years seem to be 1932, but he's also fighting to bring down Grover, and he's a real gem. I just wish he had a larger part. The more I watch him the more I root for him and that's exactly why he's there. No wonder he kept getting decent billing in so many decent films.
And Capra? I still don't see how this fits in with the rest of his films, in the slightest, but it's not a bad one at all, melodramatic or not.
It becomes quickly obvious that this is a precode, but when we discover that Lulu is pregnant it's beyond any shadow of doubt. Yet it's directed by an unlikely candidate for such dangerous things: Frank Capra, so early that he still has an R in the middle of his name. Yes, this ardent proponent of American family values, who fashioned the dark alternate Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life into a town that stoops so low as to have girls doing the jitterbug with paying clients, gives us, as both writer and director, a love story between an unmarried mother and a District Attorney who cheats on his crippled wife, fathers a daughter out of wedlock, only to get her back through a fake adoption with the real mother as a fake nanny. It's hardly something the moral majority would overlook and there's no way on earth it would even be considered after the code kicked in. I wonder if he just saw it as a challenge.
Lulu Smith is played by Barbara Stanwyck, and of course she's perfect for any sort of dubious moral situation. She was a strong woman who could get away with ordering any guy around, yet somehow remains believable as a submissive woman who just can't say no to her man. She's great here but that's not surprising in the slightest. The direction Capra takes means that she also gets to show off her talent of playing any age she felt like: she's a very young woman when the film starts but we watch her daughter grow up and get engaged so you can imagine how old she has to start looking. She does it all as well as you'd expect. Adolphe Menjou deliberately plays Bob Grover as a background character for much of the film and tones his talents down admirably so as not to compete with Stanwyck.
What isn't surprising is that Ralph Bellamy doesn't get the girl, because he probably never did in a long and distinguished career. This may be the most dynamic I've ever seen him though. He's the gung ho newspaperman who's had the hots for Lily for years, even though all of those many years seem to be 1932, but he's also fighting to bring down Grover, and he's a real gem. I just wish he had a larger part. The more I watch him the more I root for him and that's exactly why he's there. No wonder he kept getting decent billing in so many decent films.
And Capra? I still don't see how this fits in with the rest of his films, in the slightest, but it's not a bad one at all, melodramatic or not.
Monday, 15 January 2007
The Black Sleep (1956)
At Newgate prison in 1872, Sir Joel Cadman visits his former student Dr Gordon Ramsey, who has been imprisoned for murder and will hang, even though he claims complete innocence. Cadman slips him some of the black sleep of the title, an Indian drug, which puts him into a trancelike state approximating death. Thus he escapes the hangman's noose by virtue of being proclaimed legally dead and proceeds on to assist Sir Joel in his experiments to further the science of brain surgery.
Sir Joel is played by Basil Rathbone, who looks as old here as he did a decade later in Queen of Blood, and he's far from the only classic horror star here. The initial list of credits reads like a who's who of dark cinema: Basil Rathbone, Akim Tamiroff, Lon Chaney Jr, Bela Lugosi, John Carradine, even Tor Johnson when we get to the second page. Tamiroff plays Odo the Gypsy, an artist of various talents, with an indecent amount of charm and he comes close to stealing whole portions of the film.
To demonstrate his rank in the great ladder of stardom, Lugosi is Rathbone's mute servant, and he looks even older than Rathbone. In fact this was the last real film he ever made, after Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster and before his posthumous appearance in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Chaney, credited only as Lon Chaney, plays a former doctor reduced to a monstrous shadow of his former self. Carradine is a wild eyed prisoner who only appears briefly but notably, raving about the saracens and the infidels, as he believes he's in the Holy Land in the year 1090. Tor Johnson is blind and of course ominous just in appearance.
Of course Sir Joel is a little less sane than we initially believe, and what he describes as somewhat unorthodox practices are the domain of the mad scientist, all to save his beloved wife who is suffering from a deep seated brain tumour. Ramsey only finds out when he and Cadman experiment on a subject he believes is dead, only to discover that it's that black sleep again and they're really carving into the brain of a live human being. Sir Joel is certainly mad but he's also aiming at a lofty and laudible goal. The intent is fine, it's the methods that transcend sanity.
There are other names here beyond the stellar cast. Exotica composer Les Baxter provides the music, which is suitably eerie, and the director is Reginald Le Borg, who surprisingly wasn't really a horror director, given his decent work here and in other films like The Mummy's Ghost and Diary of a Madman. His credits run the gamut of genres and based on his horror work, they ought to be decent at least. This one would have been routine if not for some superb performances to raise the quality.
Sir Joel is played by Basil Rathbone, who looks as old here as he did a decade later in Queen of Blood, and he's far from the only classic horror star here. The initial list of credits reads like a who's who of dark cinema: Basil Rathbone, Akim Tamiroff, Lon Chaney Jr, Bela Lugosi, John Carradine, even Tor Johnson when we get to the second page. Tamiroff plays Odo the Gypsy, an artist of various talents, with an indecent amount of charm and he comes close to stealing whole portions of the film.
To demonstrate his rank in the great ladder of stardom, Lugosi is Rathbone's mute servant, and he looks even older than Rathbone. In fact this was the last real film he ever made, after Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster and before his posthumous appearance in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Chaney, credited only as Lon Chaney, plays a former doctor reduced to a monstrous shadow of his former self. Carradine is a wild eyed prisoner who only appears briefly but notably, raving about the saracens and the infidels, as he believes he's in the Holy Land in the year 1090. Tor Johnson is blind and of course ominous just in appearance.
Of course Sir Joel is a little less sane than we initially believe, and what he describes as somewhat unorthodox practices are the domain of the mad scientist, all to save his beloved wife who is suffering from a deep seated brain tumour. Ramsey only finds out when he and Cadman experiment on a subject he believes is dead, only to discover that it's that black sleep again and they're really carving into the brain of a live human being. Sir Joel is certainly mad but he's also aiming at a lofty and laudible goal. The intent is fine, it's the methods that transcend sanity.
There are other names here beyond the stellar cast. Exotica composer Les Baxter provides the music, which is suitably eerie, and the director is Reginald Le Borg, who surprisingly wasn't really a horror director, given his decent work here and in other films like The Mummy's Ghost and Diary of a Madman. His credits run the gamut of genres and based on his horror work, they ought to be decent at least. This one would have been routine if not for some superb performances to raise the quality.
Roberta (1935) William A Seiter
With certificate number 601, this is obviously a really early movie to be sanctioned by the Production Code. As I've become a huge fan of the freedom of the precodes, this is therefore a Bad Thing. Another bad thing is the fact that one of the three stars to appear above the title is Irene Dunne. I've tried to find her appeal but so far to no avail, even though I've seen such well regarded pictures as Show Boat, The Awful Truth and Cimarron, which even won the Best Picture Oscar in what must have been a really poor year. I haven't enjoyed a single one of her performances and don't understand why she was such a huge star. On the good side there's not just Fred Astaire but Ginger Rogers too and I've been enjoying both of them in musicals and non-musicals alike.
Fred turns up in Le Havre with his band, Huck Haines and His Indianians from Wabash, USA, but because they're not real Indians they don't get the gig they expect. So off they go to Paris, where Randolph Scott's aunt Helen Westley (the Roberta of the title) runs a famous costumery. Scott is the sort of character he seemed to play rather often, a large quarterback who says things like 'Gee, that's swell' a lot. No wonder he switched to westerns exclusively. He makes a big impression on Roberta's secretary, Irene Dunne, but an even larger one on the temperamental, seductive and fake Comtesse Scharwenka, played by Ginger Rogers. She's a nightclub singer who has invented her title to get her into the Cafe Russe, so she gets them a gig on the proviso that Huck doesn't give her away.
This is a pretty decent thirties musical, of the lesser sort that weren't choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Then again these dances are arranged by Fred Astaire, so they're always worth watching, both from a technical standpoint where we can be happily stunned by the talent of the man (and the lady doing everything he does, in heels and backwards) and from an aesthetic standpoint where we get to actually enjoy the dancing. Yeah, I don't tend to say that too often, but Fred and Ginger musicals are usually winners in my book. The music is by Jerome Kern so there's no problem there but Irene Dunne keeps singing.
I'd have much preferred it if she'd have kept her mouth shut, as usual. More and more she reminds me of Leslie Howard, in looks and voice and presence. Fortunately I haven't heard Howard try and sing yet and I hope I don't have to: somehow I know he's going to sound like Irene Dunne. What intrigues me is that it can't just be changing fashions that have left wishy washy people like Irene Dunne in a different age, because I'm enjoying so many others from the same era. Maybe one day I'll find a performance of hers I can enjoy, just as I finally found one of Leslie Howard's in The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the meantime I'll enjoy Fred and Ginger and thank the stars that Irene Dunne wasn't in the rest of their movies together.
Fred turns up in Le Havre with his band, Huck Haines and His Indianians from Wabash, USA, but because they're not real Indians they don't get the gig they expect. So off they go to Paris, where Randolph Scott's aunt Helen Westley (the Roberta of the title) runs a famous costumery. Scott is the sort of character he seemed to play rather often, a large quarterback who says things like 'Gee, that's swell' a lot. No wonder he switched to westerns exclusively. He makes a big impression on Roberta's secretary, Irene Dunne, but an even larger one on the temperamental, seductive and fake Comtesse Scharwenka, played by Ginger Rogers. She's a nightclub singer who has invented her title to get her into the Cafe Russe, so she gets them a gig on the proviso that Huck doesn't give her away.
This is a pretty decent thirties musical, of the lesser sort that weren't choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Then again these dances are arranged by Fred Astaire, so they're always worth watching, both from a technical standpoint where we can be happily stunned by the talent of the man (and the lady doing everything he does, in heels and backwards) and from an aesthetic standpoint where we get to actually enjoy the dancing. Yeah, I don't tend to say that too often, but Fred and Ginger musicals are usually winners in my book. The music is by Jerome Kern so there's no problem there but Irene Dunne keeps singing.
I'd have much preferred it if she'd have kept her mouth shut, as usual. More and more she reminds me of Leslie Howard, in looks and voice and presence. Fortunately I haven't heard Howard try and sing yet and I hope I don't have to: somehow I know he's going to sound like Irene Dunne. What intrigues me is that it can't just be changing fashions that have left wishy washy people like Irene Dunne in a different age, because I'm enjoying so many others from the same era. Maybe one day I'll find a performance of hers I can enjoy, just as I finally found one of Leslie Howard's in The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the meantime I'll enjoy Fred and Ginger and thank the stars that Irene Dunne wasn't in the rest of their movies together.
Sunday, 14 January 2007
Fists in the Pocket (1965)
I've watched a lot of Italian movies in my time, but how many of them didn't belong to an obvious genre I really don't know. Not many, that's for sure. I've seen spaghetti westerns, giallo horror movies, sword and sandal epics, but not a lot that could really be called international art. Then again I'm not sure what writer/director Marco Bellocchio intended this to be: a horror film, a psychological drama, a social commentary, a piece of symbolism... it's probably all the above.
It's a portrait of a family in many senses, but this is no regular family. Only Augusto seems remotely capable as a human being. Mama is blind, but the rest of the family have mental issues. Most obviously, young Alessandro is obsessed with death, including his own, and as my lass pointed out he looks like a cross between Doogie Howser and Quentin Tarantino. Those two should never have kids together! He also has the hots for Giulia, which might be understandable under other circumstances, as she looks like a cross between Rosanna Arquette and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now those two should have kids anytime someone comes up with a means to make it possible! However she's also his sister, and she's hardly all there herself. She seems to be pretty obsessive and may well have the hots for Augusto. She certainly doesn't want him to be with anyone else, that's for sure. The last child, Leone, is a simple epileptic who hardly ever speaks.
What plot there is has to do with Alessandro trying to do his brother a favour and relieve him of the burdens that he so obviously has to bear. He fails to drive them all off a cliff but he's a persevering soul. He's played by Lou Castel (not Lou Costello), a Colombian born actor in his first leading role. It was his second film but he wasn't even credited in the first. He definitely made an impression here though because it set him on the road to a long career and he now has a hundred movies to his name, along with a bunch of television work. I've only seen a couple of them and never really noticed him before. Then again I don't think I noticed anyone else in Irma Vep except Maggie Cheung. She does tend to capture the eye in anything she does, but when she's in a latex catsuit it's hard to notice anything else. After this incredible performance though I'll certainly be watching out for Lou Castel in other films.
It's a portrait of a family in many senses, but this is no regular family. Only Augusto seems remotely capable as a human being. Mama is blind, but the rest of the family have mental issues. Most obviously, young Alessandro is obsessed with death, including his own, and as my lass pointed out he looks like a cross between Doogie Howser and Quentin Tarantino. Those two should never have kids together! He also has the hots for Giulia, which might be understandable under other circumstances, as she looks like a cross between Rosanna Arquette and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now those two should have kids anytime someone comes up with a means to make it possible! However she's also his sister, and she's hardly all there herself. She seems to be pretty obsessive and may well have the hots for Augusto. She certainly doesn't want him to be with anyone else, that's for sure. The last child, Leone, is a simple epileptic who hardly ever speaks.
What plot there is has to do with Alessandro trying to do his brother a favour and relieve him of the burdens that he so obviously has to bear. He fails to drive them all off a cliff but he's a persevering soul. He's played by Lou Castel (not Lou Costello), a Colombian born actor in his first leading role. It was his second film but he wasn't even credited in the first. He definitely made an impression here though because it set him on the road to a long career and he now has a hundred movies to his name, along with a bunch of television work. I've only seen a couple of them and never really noticed him before. Then again I don't think I noticed anyone else in Irma Vep except Maggie Cheung. She does tend to capture the eye in anything she does, but when she's in a latex catsuit it's hard to notice anything else. After this incredible performance though I'll certainly be watching out for Lou Castel in other films.
La Terre (1921)
Such an obscene percentage of silent movies are lost films and so it's always a joy when one that has been lost turns up found. La Terre has long been thought lost, but it was recently rediscovered in Russia and remastered by the Royal Belgian Film Archive and it has a good picture. It's a groundbreaking film started in 1919 but not released until 1921, by French director André Antoine. He came to the movies late in life from a similar yet vastly different world in the theatre. Perhaps this is why he helped to introduce a naturalistic style into film that wasn't particularly common in the silent era, along with his assistant directors who include Julien Duvivier, who went on to make the wonderful Pépé le Moko.
We're on the plain of Beauce, near Chartres in the Cloyes region of the French countryside where classic French writer Emile Zola had set his source novel. La Terre means the Earth and that's what these people work, long and hard, or at least those who work, that is. Our main character is Jean, who meets Françoise by rescuing her runaway cow. They're both on their way to La Borderie, the home of the Hourdequins: Jean is looking for work and Françoise is taking her cow to their bull. Both are successful and deal with La Cognette, who is really just the maid but who apparently effectively runs the entire show. Naturally both of the ladies fall for Jean, and while Jean responds to La Cognette he wants to marry Françoise, whose father has died and who is thus living with her sister Lise. At least that's what seems to be important at the beginning of the film.
And here are the biggest problems with La Terre in a nutshell. Because this is an Emile Zola novel, there's plenty going on and there are plenty of characters to make it all happen, so we really need to pay attention. A few times I got confused as to who was who, and I don't think that's necessarily the fault of director André Antoine. He just had a huge job on his hand translating what I'm sure is a long and complex novel into not much more than an hour and half of film. Also the focus seems to shift. Halfway through I began to wonder about Jean and Françoise and La Cognette, because everything suddenly seemed to revolve about Pere Fouan.
Fouan is really the catalyst for everything. He is feeling much too old to work his land, and so he splits it up between his three children: Buteau, Jésus-Christ and Fanny. He misses out his elder sister who is a little bitter about it and with good cause too, as we'll discover. She doesn't believe that these three kids will pay him the pension due and provide him with what has been agreed on, and of course she's right because they don't, with the occasional exception of Fanny's husband Delhomme. Jésus-Christ is a poacher and a drunk who looks as old as his dad, Buteau marries one sister for her money but chases the other and Fanny is a clean freak with no kindness in her soul.
This is not a particularly happy story, as Françoise is about the only really sympathetic character in the film, though even she finds some hatred in her heart. Jean isn't bad but seems to have a temper to him and Papa Fouan is kind but dangerously foolish, and the rest aren't worth much at all. There is a little humour in and amongst, but mostly this is a dark tale. Once I caught up with the real players of the piece I saw a lot of the underside of human nature, well depicted with the sort of depth that was starting to creep into the movies in the twenties but which was still far from commonplace.
We're on the plain of Beauce, near Chartres in the Cloyes region of the French countryside where classic French writer Emile Zola had set his source novel. La Terre means the Earth and that's what these people work, long and hard, or at least those who work, that is. Our main character is Jean, who meets Françoise by rescuing her runaway cow. They're both on their way to La Borderie, the home of the Hourdequins: Jean is looking for work and Françoise is taking her cow to their bull. Both are successful and deal with La Cognette, who is really just the maid but who apparently effectively runs the entire show. Naturally both of the ladies fall for Jean, and while Jean responds to La Cognette he wants to marry Françoise, whose father has died and who is thus living with her sister Lise. At least that's what seems to be important at the beginning of the film.
And here are the biggest problems with La Terre in a nutshell. Because this is an Emile Zola novel, there's plenty going on and there are plenty of characters to make it all happen, so we really need to pay attention. A few times I got confused as to who was who, and I don't think that's necessarily the fault of director André Antoine. He just had a huge job on his hand translating what I'm sure is a long and complex novel into not much more than an hour and half of film. Also the focus seems to shift. Halfway through I began to wonder about Jean and Françoise and La Cognette, because everything suddenly seemed to revolve about Pere Fouan.
Fouan is really the catalyst for everything. He is feeling much too old to work his land, and so he splits it up between his three children: Buteau, Jésus-Christ and Fanny. He misses out his elder sister who is a little bitter about it and with good cause too, as we'll discover. She doesn't believe that these three kids will pay him the pension due and provide him with what has been agreed on, and of course she's right because they don't, with the occasional exception of Fanny's husband Delhomme. Jésus-Christ is a poacher and a drunk who looks as old as his dad, Buteau marries one sister for her money but chases the other and Fanny is a clean freak with no kindness in her soul.
This is not a particularly happy story, as Françoise is about the only really sympathetic character in the film, though even she finds some hatred in her heart. Jean isn't bad but seems to have a temper to him and Papa Fouan is kind but dangerously foolish, and the rest aren't worth much at all. There is a little humour in and amongst, but mostly this is a dark tale. Once I caught up with the real players of the piece I saw a lot of the underside of human nature, well depicted with the sort of depth that was starting to creep into the movies in the twenties but which was still far from commonplace.
Bikini Beach (1964)
While William Asher wasn't directing dubious yet fascinating science fiction films like The 27th Day, it seems he was making things like this for American International. They were the one of the more important low budget studios to make movies quickly and cheaply, that capitalised on whatever trend happened to have leapt out at the time. Apparently the mid sixties were the right time for beach movies and there were naturally a huge amount of them, possibly all of which were varying degrees of awful.
I've seen one of them, Beach Blanket Bingo, which was frankly terrible. Stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello may have been the in thing at the time but they're certainly nothing beyond laughable now to anyone who isn't wallowing in the nostalgia of it. The only decent thing in it was Buster Keaton showing up every now and again to show the kids how it was really done. This is better by virtue of being such an awful train wreck that it's impossible not to watch it. There's also some hidden influence here that makes it far more important than it really has any right to be.
This one was made a year earlier, still with both Frankie and Annette (and most of the supporting cast), but Frankie gets a second role as Potato Bug, a horrendously stereotyped English singer and drag racer that surely must have been a major influence on Mike Myers when he came up with Austin Powers. It all has to be seen to be believed, especially as Austin Powers was an intentional joke. Then there's Harvey Lembeck, as Erich von Zipper, a Brando-esque biker who runs a gang called the Rats and Mice, where the guys are rats and the girls are mice. He's a complete moron and is almost as much of a train wreck as the Potato Bug. There's Don Rickles, a modern artist called Big Drag who has a talking falcon, which is as ludicrous as it sounds, and who also runs both the local teen hangout bar and the local drag strip too. Busy man, huh?
Then there are the guests, who steal plenty of the movie. This time there's Keenan Wynn as millionaire Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III, who wants to prove that his pet chimp is just as bright as the kids on the beach, and especially Janos Prohaska as Clyde the Ape himself. Yep, Clyde, who dances and surfs and drives and breaks the world speed record in drag racing. About the only thing he doesn't do is make right turns. There's Candy Johnson, playing Candy and thus presumably herself, as a go go dancer who can knock people down from a distance with the swish of her hips.
There's Timothy Carey as pool player South Dakota Slim, who hangs out in a joint with Adolf Hitler on the wall and Val Warren in the corner, playing a quote Teenage Werewolf Monster unquote. There's art dealer Boris Karloff, who doesn't speaks or turn his face to the camera until the very end of the film and then only to throw a couple of jokes our way that explain his entire presence. There's even Little Stevie Wonder, before he stopped being little.
It's atrocious, pure and simple, but somehow I couldn't stop watching, and this is certainly far more watchable than Beach Blanket Bingo. It isn't boring though, in the slightest. It has about everything you could imagine from mid sixties pop culture, even a music score by Les Baxter and Candy Johnson teaching go go dancing to some old woman while the end credits roll. It's a riot, for all the good and bad that implies.
I've seen one of them, Beach Blanket Bingo, which was frankly terrible. Stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello may have been the in thing at the time but they're certainly nothing beyond laughable now to anyone who isn't wallowing in the nostalgia of it. The only decent thing in it was Buster Keaton showing up every now and again to show the kids how it was really done. This is better by virtue of being such an awful train wreck that it's impossible not to watch it. There's also some hidden influence here that makes it far more important than it really has any right to be.
This one was made a year earlier, still with both Frankie and Annette (and most of the supporting cast), but Frankie gets a second role as Potato Bug, a horrendously stereotyped English singer and drag racer that surely must have been a major influence on Mike Myers when he came up with Austin Powers. It all has to be seen to be believed, especially as Austin Powers was an intentional joke. Then there's Harvey Lembeck, as Erich von Zipper, a Brando-esque biker who runs a gang called the Rats and Mice, where the guys are rats and the girls are mice. He's a complete moron and is almost as much of a train wreck as the Potato Bug. There's Don Rickles, a modern artist called Big Drag who has a talking falcon, which is as ludicrous as it sounds, and who also runs both the local teen hangout bar and the local drag strip too. Busy man, huh?
Then there are the guests, who steal plenty of the movie. This time there's Keenan Wynn as millionaire Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III, who wants to prove that his pet chimp is just as bright as the kids on the beach, and especially Janos Prohaska as Clyde the Ape himself. Yep, Clyde, who dances and surfs and drives and breaks the world speed record in drag racing. About the only thing he doesn't do is make right turns. There's Candy Johnson, playing Candy and thus presumably herself, as a go go dancer who can knock people down from a distance with the swish of her hips.
There's Timothy Carey as pool player South Dakota Slim, who hangs out in a joint with Adolf Hitler on the wall and Val Warren in the corner, playing a quote Teenage Werewolf Monster unquote. There's art dealer Boris Karloff, who doesn't speaks or turn his face to the camera until the very end of the film and then only to throw a couple of jokes our way that explain his entire presence. There's even Little Stevie Wonder, before he stopped being little.
It's atrocious, pure and simple, but somehow I couldn't stop watching, and this is certainly far more watchable than Beach Blanket Bingo. It isn't boring though, in the slightest. It has about everything you could imagine from mid sixties pop culture, even a music score by Les Baxter and Candy Johnson teaching go go dancing to some old woman while the end credits roll. It's a riot, for all the good and bad that implies.
Friday, 12 January 2007
The 27th Day (1957)
We open with what must be the politest abductions ever shown on film. Some unseen man, who appears out of nowhere and is apparently bulletproof, asks his victims to come with him. Where we initially don't know, but we do know that they're from diverse locations and backgrounds: an English girl from the seaside, an American journalist, a Chinese peasant girl, a European scientist and a Russian soldier. Soon we discover that we're on a flying saucer and the host has a sense of humour, asking them to call him 'the alien'.
However we soon discover that we're also in a fifties sci-fi B-movie and thus nobody bothered to think about consistency. We watch the Earth slowly disappear but apparently we're travelling at light speed. The alien tells them that his race want to move in because their own planet is dying, but they're all nice guys so they won't invade or kill us or anything like that. Instead he gives each of his five guests an ultimate weapon and expects rather than hopes that they'll use them within the 27 days that they'll be active. If they don't, the aliens will quietly die so as to not cause any inconvenience to anyone; but if they do, the weapons will destroy all human life on the planet without damaging anything else and the aliens' conscience will apparently stay clean.
No, I don't quite buy this logic either, but there it is: it's still an intriguing concept, courtesy of screenwriter John Mantley who adapted it from his own novel. Rather than the standard plot from numerous fifties movies about all powerful aliens invading the Earth and destroying humanity, we have aliens granting us the opportunity to do it for them. Instead of merely regarding us as savages, they give us the chance to prove it. The key factor is a real bitch: the alien ensures that the five can't hide their stories by broadcasting to the entire world their names and home cities, suddenly it's no secret any more.
The stars are Gene Barry from The War of the Worlds (the American), and Valerie French (the Englishwoman), along with George Voskovec, (the European), who made this the same year he played Uncle Vanya and appeared in 12 Angry Men. That's a varied and interesting year in film for one man. All of them are solid decent people in a very fifties vein, obviously chosen for the image they project. Like many fifties scifi movies, it's American propaganda as much as anything, as controlled by the moral arbiters of the country through the confines of the Production Code. For instance, the Americans merely seek their man but the Russians torture theirs.
However it could also be seen as a victory for individualism: mankind is dumb but man is not. That fits a lot of my optimistic/pessimistic beliefs too: that if there's a way for mankind to screw everything up, it'll find it; but if there's a way for an individual to find a fix, he or she will do that too. The film isn't as good as it could be but it's far better than it should be. This concept, as much as I don't buy it, really makes me think and that's a damn fine thing for a movie to do.
However we soon discover that we're also in a fifties sci-fi B-movie and thus nobody bothered to think about consistency. We watch the Earth slowly disappear but apparently we're travelling at light speed. The alien tells them that his race want to move in because their own planet is dying, but they're all nice guys so they won't invade or kill us or anything like that. Instead he gives each of his five guests an ultimate weapon and expects rather than hopes that they'll use them within the 27 days that they'll be active. If they don't, the aliens will quietly die so as to not cause any inconvenience to anyone; but if they do, the weapons will destroy all human life on the planet without damaging anything else and the aliens' conscience will apparently stay clean.
No, I don't quite buy this logic either, but there it is: it's still an intriguing concept, courtesy of screenwriter John Mantley who adapted it from his own novel. Rather than the standard plot from numerous fifties movies about all powerful aliens invading the Earth and destroying humanity, we have aliens granting us the opportunity to do it for them. Instead of merely regarding us as savages, they give us the chance to prove it. The key factor is a real bitch: the alien ensures that the five can't hide their stories by broadcasting to the entire world their names and home cities, suddenly it's no secret any more.
The stars are Gene Barry from The War of the Worlds (the American), and Valerie French (the Englishwoman), along with George Voskovec, (the European), who made this the same year he played Uncle Vanya and appeared in 12 Angry Men. That's a varied and interesting year in film for one man. All of them are solid decent people in a very fifties vein, obviously chosen for the image they project. Like many fifties scifi movies, it's American propaganda as much as anything, as controlled by the moral arbiters of the country through the confines of the Production Code. For instance, the Americans merely seek their man but the Russians torture theirs.
However it could also be seen as a victory for individualism: mankind is dumb but man is not. That fits a lot of my optimistic/pessimistic beliefs too: that if there's a way for mankind to screw everything up, it'll find it; but if there's a way for an individual to find a fix, he or she will do that too. The film isn't as good as it could be but it's far better than it should be. This concept, as much as I don't buy it, really makes me think and that's a damn fine thing for a movie to do.
Detective Kitty O'Day (1944)
One of the great guilty pleasures in life is to discover a new forties detective series. This is hardly a series, being only two movies as far as I can see, but it's a recurring character nonetheless. The most fun ones in my book were detectives who weren't really detectives, merely playing the part. This time it's Kitty O'Day who is a precisely spoken and shapely secretary played by Jean Parker, whose mother created undergrowth for Forbidden Planet. She appeared in two films: Detective Kitty O'Day and The Adventures of Kitty O'Day, this being the first.
Kitty is a nosy secretary, always listening in on her boss's calls. He's about to head out on a trip and when she follows him home to finalise some paperwork before he leaves, she finds him dead instead in a house with no power. His securities are missing along with the butler and a note that only Kitty has seen, he was apparently going to South America not Boston and the house soon fills up with suspects, starting with Kitty's boyfriend who is also her boss's accountant.
Most of the cast members are either reliable workhorses like Tim Ryan as the inept cop in charge of the investigation, who is very reminiscent of Edward Brophy; or third rate actors like Peter Cookson as the boyfriend, who has so little acting talent that he tries to be Cary Grant but ends up more like Matt LeBlanc. He's almost outacted by the walls, which are of the very cheap wooden variety marked with neat but very cheap signs that all look like they took about ten seconds to create. To say the budget was low is something of an understatement.
Luckily there's Jean Parker to keep up something of a standard. She is by far the best thing about this movie. She has a field day with her character, getting into everyone's business, answering everyone else's questions and running her own investigation into the whole thing. She's so much fun I'm amazed I haven't seen her in much else. I'll have to keep my eyes open for more of her films.
Kitty is a nosy secretary, always listening in on her boss's calls. He's about to head out on a trip and when she follows him home to finalise some paperwork before he leaves, she finds him dead instead in a house with no power. His securities are missing along with the butler and a note that only Kitty has seen, he was apparently going to South America not Boston and the house soon fills up with suspects, starting with Kitty's boyfriend who is also her boss's accountant.
Most of the cast members are either reliable workhorses like Tim Ryan as the inept cop in charge of the investigation, who is very reminiscent of Edward Brophy; or third rate actors like Peter Cookson as the boyfriend, who has so little acting talent that he tries to be Cary Grant but ends up more like Matt LeBlanc. He's almost outacted by the walls, which are of the very cheap wooden variety marked with neat but very cheap signs that all look like they took about ten seconds to create. To say the budget was low is something of an understatement.
Luckily there's Jean Parker to keep up something of a standard. She is by far the best thing about this movie. She has a field day with her character, getting into everyone's business, answering everyone else's questions and running her own investigation into the whole thing. She's so much fun I'm amazed I haven't seen her in much else. I'll have to keep my eyes open for more of her films.
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