The Edmond of the title has no other name but he's played by William H Macy and this film revolves around him just as the world revolves around Edmond. However this world has no real connection to him at all: everything just happens around him and all of it is entirely dissatisfying to him. On the way home from yet another dissatisfying day at work he stops at a fortune teller who does a tarot reading and tells him outright: 'You are not where you belong.' She's not wrong.
So he decides to do something about it. He tells his wife that he doesn't love her and isn't attracted to her and he can't live his life any more. He tells her that he's leaving and he's not coming back, and that's what he does. However he has absolutely no idea where he's going or what he's going to do. He starts by going to a bar and soon finds himself in conversation with Joe Mantegna. Mantegna's character doesn't have a name, as most characters in this film don't have names, but he talks and his outspoken racism and vague suggestion sends Edmond on a rollercoaster ride of an evening.
The film unfolds episodically through many little episodes that gradually strip away the polite veneer of Edmond's life and let the soul inside tearing out angrily against the world. There are obvious reference points: the descending spiral of After Hours or Falling Down, with the sort of wide ensemble cast of characters that you might expect Jim Jarmusch to put together. Falling Down is the closest parallel, with Macy's Edmond raging through a day where each step gets worse just like Michael Douglas's D-FENS.
The people Edmond meets are played by a dream cast of character actors that just doesn't quit. After Mantegna comes Denise Richards as a club hooker, Bai Ling as a peepshow girl in a pink wig and Mena Suvari as a whore. By this time, he's got nowhere except coughing up most of his money in cover charges, because whenever he gets inside it's always too much, and then mugged for the rest. He can't even call the cops at Jeffrey Combs's hotel because he doesn't have the quarters needed, so he pawns his wedding ring to George Wendt and buys a knife. When he gets mugged again by pimp Lionel Mark Smith he's ready to snap back and life explodes into an adrenaline high.
This is the mirror point of the movie marked by Edmond meeting the only other character with a name: Glenna, a waitress played by Julia Stiles. Glenna marks the only time something happens the way Edmond wants it too, though naturally it doesn't continue that way for long. She also marks the point of no return: there's no going back once he leaves Glenna. Luckily still to come are Patricia Belcher, Dylan Walsh and Bokeem Woodbine. These names keep coming and they continue past the actors too.
The director is Stuart Gordon, known primarily for his horror movies, not least Re-Animator, which I was lucky enough to see uncut on the big screen a couple of weeks ago with Jeffrey Combs in attendance. I love Re-Animator and From Beyond and even things like Fortress. They're not necessarily great movies but they have something very distinct about them that makes them pleasures to watch and pleasures to return to. I wouldn't have expected Stuart Gordon to make a film like this, adapted by David Mamet from his play, but maybe he was an inspired choice.
Mamet tends towards the impactful: just watch Glengarry Glen Ross for a great example of that, with an A list cast. This has as much impact but in a much more subtle way, infused with humour that Gordon may well have brought with him. It's a dream of a part for William H Macy, who I'm a huge fan of anyway, and given that Macy went to college with Mamet, I'm guessing he wrote it especially for him. I may be wrong there, given that it's also an old play, but it feels right. Macy is simply perfect as the white collar worker nobody would notice under most circumstances but who is unforgettable with the veneer of his life stripped away. Stunning stuff by all involved.
Friday, 7 November 2008
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Play Time (1967)
It's always difficult to know where to start with a Jacques Tati review, because the sort of things we tend to look for in films are usually completely absent, this one even more so than previously. There's really nothing even approaching a plot, merely a theme and the theme itself is less clear than usual; Hulot is the lead actor, if there is such a thing here, but he never speaks and the film merely happens around him. He floats through it, not really understanding anything that happens and sometimes disappearing entirely for long periods at a time. The theme seems to be a progression from Mon Oncle, Tati's previous film a whole nine years earlier. Mon Oncle was about humanity's inability to deal with technology. Here that inability comes down to conformity which technology forces us into and we really aren't good at.
Play Time is the sort of film that has much to offer but anyone unprepared for Tati's very distinctive style must surely end up wondering just what the heck they're watching. Like previous films featuring Mr Hulot, this is effectively a silent movie with sound, which would seem like an insane concept to anyone who hasn't watched Tati before. There's dialogue in Tati films, but rarely to progress the plot, because there isn't one. It's generally used for the purpose of sound rather than meaning, to the degree that the words tend to be downplayed in the mix while more mundane sounds are emphasised, like footsteps, doors opening or paper crumpling.
Also while there's no plot, there's a huge amount happening and the 70mm frame is rarely less than very busy. However because of the way things unfold we need to watch the whole frame, not just narrow in on what would usually be perceived as the focus. We can't even assume that we should be watching the lead character because there really isn't one, not even Mr Hulot himself, and nothing, not one single thing, is shot in closeup. That's bizarre and it takes a while to realise why. We need to focus on the things in the background, which are often more important than those in the foreground. So many stories are told by minor characters who never get the frame to themselves, never speak and never really do anything. We don't know anything about them except what their actions tell us and it's amazing how much that becomes.
Those are the small stories and there are many of them, but there aren't really any big stories, beyond Hulot and a bunch of tourists arriving somewhere, interacting with that somewhere for a while and then leaving, thus echoing Mr Hulot's Holiday to no small degree. We wouldn't even know where 'somewhere' is if we hadn't seen the Eiffel Tower to let us know that it's Paris and this is important: these tourists never see the Paris we imagine, they see the modern Orly airport, some sort of international technological exposition and a brand new restaurant. One key character, Barbara, spends a long time trying to take a photo of an old lady running a streetside stall that seems completely out of place. 'It's the real Paris,' she says. The rest is mostly Tativille, a huge set with huge buildings created just for this film at huge cost out of metal and glass and light. We the viewers see the real Paris occasionally but the characters don't: it's always in reflection in doors or by accident out of windows.
The details are everywhere. Some are quirky and obvious like a plastic model of a plane melting in the heat but firming back up when the air conditioning kicks in, or in the flowers on the hats of women leaving for a night on a town be spry and lively but those on the women returning at the same time be drooping and dead. Some are much harder to describe and much more subtle to notice. Tati does a lot of trickery here, taking something definable and making it seem like something else.
There's a long scene where Hulot ends up in some sort of apartment, which is the bottom left quadrant of a set of four. We can watch him and what's happening in his quarter of the frame but there's plenty happening in the other quarters too. Sometimes they all become synchronised, sometimes there's an illusion that two are interacting with each other when there's really a wall between them. Tati doesn't even make it easy for us by positioning the camera to pretend that it's a split screen: he keeps moving it around and showing us different angles, while never venturing inside.
It's all very artistic, very cinematic in the way that almost nothing else is. What we have is a piece of choreography that becomes abstract art, similar perhaps only to something equally untraditional like Koyaanisqatsi, merely with Tati's take on sound instead of a Philip Glass composition. We're watching balance and contrast, not just as a ballet of light but also by using people and buildings as objects in some sort of fluid dynamics model. It's performance art immortalised on celluloid. In fact at one point people in a street stop what they're doing to watch a group of workmen inside a building move a large sheet of glass in what appears to be street theatre. The catch is that they're inside and the viewers are on the street.
Play Time is an amazing piece of cinema but to suggest that it's something that everyone should see would be the heart of naivete. To say that this is not for everyone is an understatement. It's almost like 155 minutes of watching other people play Jenga. We can appreciate every move, knowing that it may be the last for the particular game but generally won't be. The only absolute is that eventually everything tumbles and the game starts afresh. Is it fascinating? Yep. Is it tiring? Yep. Is there an irresistible urge to stop watching and join in, followed by the frustration of realising that this is a film and so that isn't an option? Absolutely.
It's a dream of a film to analyse. It invites analysis and I'm sure more than one film student has written a thesis on this movie. On the most obvious level, Tati's view of the modern deserves much comment: he was right on more than one extrapolation, not least office cubicles, though he didn't attach them together. On other levels though, that fluid dynamics model keeps coming back to me. There's so much caught up in the flow here that I'm sure more will become apparent with each viewing.
For instance, I caught much of the gradual breakdown of convention at the restaurant, early customers dressed up for a formal dinner slowly descending in formality, class and demeanour. In the end drunks and musicians dressed in loud clothes find their way in, but they're the ones having the easiest fun, the more formal the customer the harder they find that fun point. Yet I hadn't caught anything of the colour in those scenes: I had to read up to discover just what Tati was doing with red and green and patterns.
I also hadn't quite realised what he was doing with shapes, evolving from straight lines and rectangles to curves and circles. His approach to convention and conformity was summed up by film historian Philip Kemp who wrote, 'If Play Time has a plot, it's how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line.' I expected the next sentence to read, 'Discuss in 2,000 words or less.'
It's amazing cinema, but not for everyone and that realisation cost Tati plenty. I've read that the production made it at that time the most expensive French film ever made, and he had to sign over the rights to his previous films in order to finance the escalating cost. Partly because of what it is and partly because he refused to have it shown anywhere other than theatres that could show it in full 70mm and with proper stereophonic sound, people didn't go to see it and people who did often didn't like it. Critics, on the other hand, acclaimed it then and continue to acclaim it today. I can see why for both sides of that coin.
Play Time is the sort of film that has much to offer but anyone unprepared for Tati's very distinctive style must surely end up wondering just what the heck they're watching. Like previous films featuring Mr Hulot, this is effectively a silent movie with sound, which would seem like an insane concept to anyone who hasn't watched Tati before. There's dialogue in Tati films, but rarely to progress the plot, because there isn't one. It's generally used for the purpose of sound rather than meaning, to the degree that the words tend to be downplayed in the mix while more mundane sounds are emphasised, like footsteps, doors opening or paper crumpling.
Also while there's no plot, there's a huge amount happening and the 70mm frame is rarely less than very busy. However because of the way things unfold we need to watch the whole frame, not just narrow in on what would usually be perceived as the focus. We can't even assume that we should be watching the lead character because there really isn't one, not even Mr Hulot himself, and nothing, not one single thing, is shot in closeup. That's bizarre and it takes a while to realise why. We need to focus on the things in the background, which are often more important than those in the foreground. So many stories are told by minor characters who never get the frame to themselves, never speak and never really do anything. We don't know anything about them except what their actions tell us and it's amazing how much that becomes.
Those are the small stories and there are many of them, but there aren't really any big stories, beyond Hulot and a bunch of tourists arriving somewhere, interacting with that somewhere for a while and then leaving, thus echoing Mr Hulot's Holiday to no small degree. We wouldn't even know where 'somewhere' is if we hadn't seen the Eiffel Tower to let us know that it's Paris and this is important: these tourists never see the Paris we imagine, they see the modern Orly airport, some sort of international technological exposition and a brand new restaurant. One key character, Barbara, spends a long time trying to take a photo of an old lady running a streetside stall that seems completely out of place. 'It's the real Paris,' she says. The rest is mostly Tativille, a huge set with huge buildings created just for this film at huge cost out of metal and glass and light. We the viewers see the real Paris occasionally but the characters don't: it's always in reflection in doors or by accident out of windows.
The details are everywhere. Some are quirky and obvious like a plastic model of a plane melting in the heat but firming back up when the air conditioning kicks in, or in the flowers on the hats of women leaving for a night on a town be spry and lively but those on the women returning at the same time be drooping and dead. Some are much harder to describe and much more subtle to notice. Tati does a lot of trickery here, taking something definable and making it seem like something else.
There's a long scene where Hulot ends up in some sort of apartment, which is the bottom left quadrant of a set of four. We can watch him and what's happening in his quarter of the frame but there's plenty happening in the other quarters too. Sometimes they all become synchronised, sometimes there's an illusion that two are interacting with each other when there's really a wall between them. Tati doesn't even make it easy for us by positioning the camera to pretend that it's a split screen: he keeps moving it around and showing us different angles, while never venturing inside.
It's all very artistic, very cinematic in the way that almost nothing else is. What we have is a piece of choreography that becomes abstract art, similar perhaps only to something equally untraditional like Koyaanisqatsi, merely with Tati's take on sound instead of a Philip Glass composition. We're watching balance and contrast, not just as a ballet of light but also by using people and buildings as objects in some sort of fluid dynamics model. It's performance art immortalised on celluloid. In fact at one point people in a street stop what they're doing to watch a group of workmen inside a building move a large sheet of glass in what appears to be street theatre. The catch is that they're inside and the viewers are on the street.
Play Time is an amazing piece of cinema but to suggest that it's something that everyone should see would be the heart of naivete. To say that this is not for everyone is an understatement. It's almost like 155 minutes of watching other people play Jenga. We can appreciate every move, knowing that it may be the last for the particular game but generally won't be. The only absolute is that eventually everything tumbles and the game starts afresh. Is it fascinating? Yep. Is it tiring? Yep. Is there an irresistible urge to stop watching and join in, followed by the frustration of realising that this is a film and so that isn't an option? Absolutely.
It's a dream of a film to analyse. It invites analysis and I'm sure more than one film student has written a thesis on this movie. On the most obvious level, Tati's view of the modern deserves much comment: he was right on more than one extrapolation, not least office cubicles, though he didn't attach them together. On other levels though, that fluid dynamics model keeps coming back to me. There's so much caught up in the flow here that I'm sure more will become apparent with each viewing.
For instance, I caught much of the gradual breakdown of convention at the restaurant, early customers dressed up for a formal dinner slowly descending in formality, class and demeanour. In the end drunks and musicians dressed in loud clothes find their way in, but they're the ones having the easiest fun, the more formal the customer the harder they find that fun point. Yet I hadn't caught anything of the colour in those scenes: I had to read up to discover just what Tati was doing with red and green and patterns.
I also hadn't quite realised what he was doing with shapes, evolving from straight lines and rectangles to curves and circles. His approach to convention and conformity was summed up by film historian Philip Kemp who wrote, 'If Play Time has a plot, it's how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line.' I expected the next sentence to read, 'Discuss in 2,000 words or less.'
It's amazing cinema, but not for everyone and that realisation cost Tati plenty. I've read that the production made it at that time the most expensive French film ever made, and he had to sign over the rights to his previous films in order to finance the escalating cost. Partly because of what it is and partly because he refused to have it shown anywhere other than theatres that could show it in full 70mm and with proper stereophonic sound, people didn't go to see it and people who did often didn't like it. Critics, on the other hand, acclaimed it then and continue to acclaim it today. I can see why for both sides of that coin.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)
A year after The Private Life of Henry VIII, Charles Laughton was established in Hollywood with an Oscar under his belt. MGM consequently cast him in a series of films playing other real people of historic importance, most notably Rembrandt van Rijn, Captain William Bligh of the Bounty and the Emperor Claudius. Here he's Edward Moulton-Barrett, the patriarch of the Barrett family that included Victorian England's favourite poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He's completely believable as the stern and principled father of twelve who abhors the slightest dissent from his wishes by any of them, even though Laughton was a mere three years older than Norma Shearer, who plays Elizabeth.
She's very much the focus here, regardless of how the title might suggest that other Barretts might get much of a look in and how you might expect a cast of this calibre to be granted plenty of opportunity for scene stealing by all and sundry. At this point in her life, starting in 1845, she's already a published poetess and a long term invalid, effectively exiled by her father to her room, where he does all he can to aid her recovery, according to his own emphatic beliefs of course. He brings her the best doctors, but often ignores their advice; he refuses to allow more than three of her siblings into her room at any one time; he prescribes tankards of porter which she despises and expects her to drink them out of love not fear. In seeking the best for her, of course, he denies her all that is best.
Shearer is very good as Elizabeth Barrett, however much we want to strangle her character. She was one of the greatest poets of the age, bright and intelligent and educated in the classics to a degree that would scare the socks off any student today, reading as a teen the major Latin and Greek works in their original languages along with the entire Old Testament in Hebrew. Yet here she seems afraid to actually live, resisting all the many opportunities she receives while using her father's intransigence and her undefined illness as a perennial excuse.
Then into her life like a tornado comes Robert Browning, a poet himself, who has fallen emphatically in love with her through her poems and her correspondence and so invites himself to her house to meet her, whereupon he continues to romance her and to continually propose marriage, even though he knows that she's forbidden to marry anyone. Browning is played by Fredric March and his earnest emphasis is palpable. In fact all three of the leads are excellent and were each worthy of the Oscar nomination that Shearer received.
Every time I read anything about Norma Shearer, there's an inevitable mention that she was married to MGM's wunderkind Irving Thalberg and therefore had everyone's attention for reasons well beyond her own talent. Yet she was still a very good actress who gave a number of very good performances. Here it's most obvious in the scenes in which she finally finds the courage to follow her heart, finding her way out of a land of entrenched excuses to freedom at cost.
March is a fine foil for her. March was one of the greatest actors of the day, one who is unfortunately frequently overlooked today, and he shines in a role that has him hogtied from moment one. He's a man in love with someone who loves him back and he can see with a poet's insight the joyous future that they could have, but he's continually and consistently rebuffed. 'I shall always remain an invalid,' she says, declining his proposals yet again. And it isn't because of her, of course, it's because of her father and because of her illness.
And then there's Laughton. Hogtied himself in a role which called mostly for stubborn intransigence, Laughton spends almost the entire film literally standing still, resolute against the world and its temptations, the inherent immobility of the character making it difficult to actually portray the emotions that an actor needs to do. Laughton is restricted to acting with his face and voice, along with some very subtle body movements, all of which makes his success even more admirable. He's a picture of suppressed rage and frustration, feared and obeyed, and in the hands of a lesser actor it would have been a one dimensional portrait. In Laughton's hands we see his own torment and how he projects it outwards to those around him.
I mentioned a talented cast. If Shearer, March and Laughton aren't enough for you, there are a slew of excellent character actors in tow. Most obvious is Maureen O'Sullivan as Henrietta, the wildest of the Barretts, another young lady who wants to get married but can't because of her father, but they keep on coming. Ian Wolfe is truly and embarrassingly scary as cousin Bella's fiance, but only as called to be by the part. Cousin Bella is Marion Clayton, who is almost as embarrassingly scary herself. Una O'Connor is a wonderful maid for Elizabeth, so at home in the hoop skirt that she glides across the floor like a dalek, showing everyone else up as clumsy. Leo G Carroll, credited without the G, is one of Elizabeth's doctors. Then there's Katharine Alexander and Ralph Forbes and more.
She's very much the focus here, regardless of how the title might suggest that other Barretts might get much of a look in and how you might expect a cast of this calibre to be granted plenty of opportunity for scene stealing by all and sundry. At this point in her life, starting in 1845, she's already a published poetess and a long term invalid, effectively exiled by her father to her room, where he does all he can to aid her recovery, according to his own emphatic beliefs of course. He brings her the best doctors, but often ignores their advice; he refuses to allow more than three of her siblings into her room at any one time; he prescribes tankards of porter which she despises and expects her to drink them out of love not fear. In seeking the best for her, of course, he denies her all that is best.
Shearer is very good as Elizabeth Barrett, however much we want to strangle her character. She was one of the greatest poets of the age, bright and intelligent and educated in the classics to a degree that would scare the socks off any student today, reading as a teen the major Latin and Greek works in their original languages along with the entire Old Testament in Hebrew. Yet here she seems afraid to actually live, resisting all the many opportunities she receives while using her father's intransigence and her undefined illness as a perennial excuse.
Then into her life like a tornado comes Robert Browning, a poet himself, who has fallen emphatically in love with her through her poems and her correspondence and so invites himself to her house to meet her, whereupon he continues to romance her and to continually propose marriage, even though he knows that she's forbidden to marry anyone. Browning is played by Fredric March and his earnest emphasis is palpable. In fact all three of the leads are excellent and were each worthy of the Oscar nomination that Shearer received.
Every time I read anything about Norma Shearer, there's an inevitable mention that she was married to MGM's wunderkind Irving Thalberg and therefore had everyone's attention for reasons well beyond her own talent. Yet she was still a very good actress who gave a number of very good performances. Here it's most obvious in the scenes in which she finally finds the courage to follow her heart, finding her way out of a land of entrenched excuses to freedom at cost.
March is a fine foil for her. March was one of the greatest actors of the day, one who is unfortunately frequently overlooked today, and he shines in a role that has him hogtied from moment one. He's a man in love with someone who loves him back and he can see with a poet's insight the joyous future that they could have, but he's continually and consistently rebuffed. 'I shall always remain an invalid,' she says, declining his proposals yet again. And it isn't because of her, of course, it's because of her father and because of her illness.
And then there's Laughton. Hogtied himself in a role which called mostly for stubborn intransigence, Laughton spends almost the entire film literally standing still, resolute against the world and its temptations, the inherent immobility of the character making it difficult to actually portray the emotions that an actor needs to do. Laughton is restricted to acting with his face and voice, along with some very subtle body movements, all of which makes his success even more admirable. He's a picture of suppressed rage and frustration, feared and obeyed, and in the hands of a lesser actor it would have been a one dimensional portrait. In Laughton's hands we see his own torment and how he projects it outwards to those around him.
I mentioned a talented cast. If Shearer, March and Laughton aren't enough for you, there are a slew of excellent character actors in tow. Most obvious is Maureen O'Sullivan as Henrietta, the wildest of the Barretts, another young lady who wants to get married but can't because of her father, but they keep on coming. Ian Wolfe is truly and embarrassingly scary as cousin Bella's fiance, but only as called to be by the part. Cousin Bella is Marion Clayton, who is almost as embarrassingly scary herself. Una O'Connor is a wonderful maid for Elizabeth, so at home in the hoop skirt that she glides across the floor like a dalek, showing everyone else up as clumsy. Leo G Carroll, credited without the G, is one of Elizabeth's doctors. Then there's Katharine Alexander and Ralph Forbes and more.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Zebraman (2004)
Everything's gone weird in the Yachiyo ward in 2010. While the locals apparently don't notice, the government knows that there are non humans everywhere, strange electromagnetic waves keep cropping up and what appear to be bearded seals are packing the river heading for the sea, just like the jellyfish in Bright Future. On a more down to earth level crime is rampant but quintessentially Japanese: a man robs a convenience store dressed in a crab mask and wielding a couple of pairs of scissors, for instance. Two special ops agents from the Defence Agency, Oikawa and Segawa are sent to find out what's going on, posing as a gay couple to avoid suspicion.
However these aren't our central characters: that honour falls to mild mannered Shinichi Ichikawa, who is a complete failure as a husband, father and teacher. Beyond not being able to say the right thing at the right time, he has a knack of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. His wife is cheating on him, his daughter has discovered her sexuality and his son gets picked on because of him. The first connection he really has with anyone is with a young boy called Shinpei Asano who transfers into his class, a boy who lost the ability to stand a couple of years earlier after discovering his father a victim of suicide. The thing is that Shinpei is a Zebraman fan.
Because Shinichi is so useless at everything else, he has an active fantasy life, acting out fantasies spawned from watching too much Japanese TV. He even dresses up as his favourite character, Zebraman, thus the obvious connection to Shinpei. Zebraman was a short lived character in a 1978 show that was cancelled after seven episodes and never repeated, making Shinpei an unlikely fan and a rare one. Maybe though it's this connection that gradually turns Shinichi into Zebraman, not the man in a suit but the real superhero who appears in 2010 to save the world from crustacean headed invaders. Suddenly his moves actually work.
Takashi Miike is a director as fascinating as he is prolific. He's all too often either dismissed or worshipped as a director of ultraviolent horror movies, known mostly for cult titles like Audition and Ichi the Killer. However his work runs far beyond just these films or their genre. His most frequent subject is the yakuza, with many crime movies under his belt, and he often delves into the bizarre with quite a few surreal, quirky or offbeat pictures to his name too. The last I saw was his deliriously stylish Sukiyaki Western Django, but The Great Yokai War and The Happiness of the Katakuris spring to mind as well. The latter, as the only Miike that hasn't impressed me thus far, is getting higher and higher on my need to see again list. I have a feeling that next time I may get it.
This is a strange film, at heart a story about the power of belief and a man finding himself, but it's all wrapped up in a freaky tale of alien invasion that suggests that the truth isn't just out there, it was hidden in a Japanese superhero TV show in 1978. Then again, I guess that's no weirder than the Men in Black concept that everything the Weekly World News is true, because they know full well that only those in the know will believe a word of it. It's less weird than Save the Green Planet! which would work well following this as the second half of a double bill, but then there aren't many things that are quite that weird.
Sho Aikawa is a great man to lead the cast, being completely believable in the unenviable task of being a failure who succeeds. He's a Miike regular, having appeared in no less than twelve of his films, but I've only seen one before this: Dead or Alive: Final. If this is anything to go by though, he's going to be great fun to watch in the rest. Zebraman's moves are mostly right out of Japanese superhero shows but he postures around like Adam West's Batman. He also gets beaten up more than any superhero I've ever seen but then this is a Miike film, right?
Backing him up are an able cast of people I've never seen before. I can't tell who played Shinpei Asano though he does a good job, but his mother is played by Kyoka Suzuki, who is delightful in a role that mostly has her play a simple mother of a crippled child. There's more depth there than that though and she gets a great dream sequence second role as Zebranurse. The special ops agents are Atsuro Watabe and Koen Kondo, though they get far less time than you'd expect. Watabe gets a few cool moments but he's generally overshadowed in those scenes by others and by the sheer inspired lunacy of the thing. Aided by effects that, like The Great Yokai War, run the gamut from pretty poor to excellent, it's a heck of a ride and it kicks the living crap out of Spider-Man 3. What was that budget again, Sam?
However these aren't our central characters: that honour falls to mild mannered Shinichi Ichikawa, who is a complete failure as a husband, father and teacher. Beyond not being able to say the right thing at the right time, he has a knack of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. His wife is cheating on him, his daughter has discovered her sexuality and his son gets picked on because of him. The first connection he really has with anyone is with a young boy called Shinpei Asano who transfers into his class, a boy who lost the ability to stand a couple of years earlier after discovering his father a victim of suicide. The thing is that Shinpei is a Zebraman fan.
Because Shinichi is so useless at everything else, he has an active fantasy life, acting out fantasies spawned from watching too much Japanese TV. He even dresses up as his favourite character, Zebraman, thus the obvious connection to Shinpei. Zebraman was a short lived character in a 1978 show that was cancelled after seven episodes and never repeated, making Shinpei an unlikely fan and a rare one. Maybe though it's this connection that gradually turns Shinichi into Zebraman, not the man in a suit but the real superhero who appears in 2010 to save the world from crustacean headed invaders. Suddenly his moves actually work.
Takashi Miike is a director as fascinating as he is prolific. He's all too often either dismissed or worshipped as a director of ultraviolent horror movies, known mostly for cult titles like Audition and Ichi the Killer. However his work runs far beyond just these films or their genre. His most frequent subject is the yakuza, with many crime movies under his belt, and he often delves into the bizarre with quite a few surreal, quirky or offbeat pictures to his name too. The last I saw was his deliriously stylish Sukiyaki Western Django, but The Great Yokai War and The Happiness of the Katakuris spring to mind as well. The latter, as the only Miike that hasn't impressed me thus far, is getting higher and higher on my need to see again list. I have a feeling that next time I may get it.
This is a strange film, at heart a story about the power of belief and a man finding himself, but it's all wrapped up in a freaky tale of alien invasion that suggests that the truth isn't just out there, it was hidden in a Japanese superhero TV show in 1978. Then again, I guess that's no weirder than the Men in Black concept that everything the Weekly World News is true, because they know full well that only those in the know will believe a word of it. It's less weird than Save the Green Planet! which would work well following this as the second half of a double bill, but then there aren't many things that are quite that weird.
Sho Aikawa is a great man to lead the cast, being completely believable in the unenviable task of being a failure who succeeds. He's a Miike regular, having appeared in no less than twelve of his films, but I've only seen one before this: Dead or Alive: Final. If this is anything to go by though, he's going to be great fun to watch in the rest. Zebraman's moves are mostly right out of Japanese superhero shows but he postures around like Adam West's Batman. He also gets beaten up more than any superhero I've ever seen but then this is a Miike film, right?
Backing him up are an able cast of people I've never seen before. I can't tell who played Shinpei Asano though he does a good job, but his mother is played by Kyoka Suzuki, who is delightful in a role that mostly has her play a simple mother of a crippled child. There's more depth there than that though and she gets a great dream sequence second role as Zebranurse. The special ops agents are Atsuro Watabe and Koen Kondo, though they get far less time than you'd expect. Watabe gets a few cool moments but he's generally overshadowed in those scenes by others and by the sheer inspired lunacy of the thing. Aided by effects that, like The Great Yokai War, run the gamut from pretty poor to excellent, it's a heck of a ride and it kicks the living crap out of Spider-Man 3. What was that budget again, Sam?
The Shuttered Room (1967)
You can't go wrong with an evening of early H P Lovecraft films which really don't get shown that often and TCM treated us to three on Halloween. 1970's The Dunwich Horror was terrible and 1963's The Haunted Palace was a solid textbook example of the period shenanigans Vincent Price and Roger Corman could get up to together. This one comes in between those two and was made in England, based on The Shuttered Room, different source material but highly reminiscent of the others. Nobody ever accused filmmakers of being accurate with their Lovecraft adaptations and they all cross pollinate.
This one has Susannah Kelton travelling to a small island off the New England coast, near to the town of Dunwich. She was born there, as Susannah Whateley and her lawyer sent her the keys to the old mill on her 21st birthday. Now she and her husband Mike have vague plans to turn it into a summer home but they hadn't counted on how how serious the danger is. Her Aunt Agatha is glad to see her after 17 years but warns her to leave for the mainland with all haste, because she fears for a resurgence of evil if a Whateley stays just one night in that old mill.
Aunt Agatha is cool because she's played by Flora Robson, lives in a cross between a castle and a lighthouse and keeps some sort of eagle as a pet, but her dire warnings about the Whateley curse don't have the desired effect. In fact they take the edge off Susannah's fear, so she and Mike stay for the night. There is evil in the house though, not in the supernatural sense that Aunt Agatha may have hinted at, but in a more literal sense in the form of the creature that lives behind the door with the cool spiked peephole at the end of Susannah's childhood bedroom.
To be honest this evil is well handled, in the traditional don't show the monster in the first ten seconds of the movie way, and that side of the film is slow, subtle and effective. The surprising thing is that it's far from the most obvious side of the story. Much more apparent is the danger of the locals, led by Oliver Reed, understandably believable in his loutishness. Nothing like typecasting, huh?
Partly because Carol Lynley makes for such a beautiful Susannah and partly because there seems to be a dearth of women in the village, the local young men are more than willing to take their turn in trying something on with her. This is far from supernatural though and puts us firmly in Straw Dogs territory, albeit four years earlier. It's a decent thriller with a cool location and some consistently good acting. Everything about it is handled very well indeed. It's just not quite what you'd expect for a Lovecraft story.
This one has Susannah Kelton travelling to a small island off the New England coast, near to the town of Dunwich. She was born there, as Susannah Whateley and her lawyer sent her the keys to the old mill on her 21st birthday. Now she and her husband Mike have vague plans to turn it into a summer home but they hadn't counted on how how serious the danger is. Her Aunt Agatha is glad to see her after 17 years but warns her to leave for the mainland with all haste, because she fears for a resurgence of evil if a Whateley stays just one night in that old mill.
Aunt Agatha is cool because she's played by Flora Robson, lives in a cross between a castle and a lighthouse and keeps some sort of eagle as a pet, but her dire warnings about the Whateley curse don't have the desired effect. In fact they take the edge off Susannah's fear, so she and Mike stay for the night. There is evil in the house though, not in the supernatural sense that Aunt Agatha may have hinted at, but in a more literal sense in the form of the creature that lives behind the door with the cool spiked peephole at the end of Susannah's childhood bedroom.
To be honest this evil is well handled, in the traditional don't show the monster in the first ten seconds of the movie way, and that side of the film is slow, subtle and effective. The surprising thing is that it's far from the most obvious side of the story. Much more apparent is the danger of the locals, led by Oliver Reed, understandably believable in his loutishness. Nothing like typecasting, huh?
Partly because Carol Lynley makes for such a beautiful Susannah and partly because there seems to be a dearth of women in the village, the local young men are more than willing to take their turn in trying something on with her. This is far from supernatural though and puts us firmly in Straw Dogs territory, albeit four years earlier. It's a decent thriller with a cool location and some consistently good acting. Everything about it is handled very well indeed. It's just not quite what you'd expect for a Lovecraft story.
Sunday, 2 November 2008
The Haunted Palace (1963)
Titled by American International 'Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace', this was really based on an H P Lovecraft story, with the ony connection to Poe being the use of one of his poems for ten seconds as a conclusion. Corman wanted a break from his Poe films, so made a Lovecraft film instead, but Arkoff and Nicholson were more than happy with Poe and kept his name up there anyway. At least the cast are a little more understandable in this adaptation than in The Dunwich Horror. No Sandra Dee here and no Dean Stockwell. Instead we have more expected names like Vincent Price and Lon Chaney.
There's more entertainment here in the introductory ten minutes than in the entirety of The Dunwich Horror. We begin in the Arkham of 110 years ago where on a night riddled through with lightning, Vincent Price and his buxom assistant are about to sacrifice an entranced young lady on a huge and flamboyant set. The villagers rise up and rescue her, burning Price alive after only enough delay for him to curse them and their descendants: all the Weedons, Smiths, Wests, Willetts and Leaches. While this all bears little resemblance to its Lovecraftian origins, it is at least certainly the stuff of classic horror movies.
You could hardly expect Price to only have a few minutes screen time, unless this were a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello picture, such as Beach Party, in which he had a brief cameo to publicise this film, and sure enough he arrives back in Arkham quick enough. However he was burned as Joseph Curwen, warlock, and comes back 110 years later as Charles Dexter Ward, his great great grandson to claim his inheritance. Naturally, the townsfolk want nothing to do with him or his wife, even denying him directions to his property.
Only Dr Willetts is willing to point the way to the haunted palace of the title, where they meet Simon Orne, the corpselike caretaker, played by Lon Chaney Jr, credited under his father's name, of course. In case you wonder why Orne would go against his fellows and why the palace is in such good repair when Arkham townsfolk would obviously love to have burned it to the ground, Orne and his colleague Jabez Hutchinson are fellow warlocks, merely awaiting Curwen's return. Now is the time and Ward the means as Curwen gradually takes ownership of his mind and body through the influence of the portrait hanging over the fireplace.
Price could do no wrong at this point in his career, well established as a horror icon and comfortable in a series of pictures for Roger Corman. Not all his films were great ones, but he shone even in lesser pictures like the 1962 Tower of London. Here he gets the opportunity to switch frequently between the Price screen persona of deliciously menacing villainy and something much closer to the real life Price that was cultured, polite and mild mannered. Chaney was always best as a sinister henchman with just a touch of sympathy and the part he has here was perfect for him. Milton Parsons get next to nothing to do as warlock number three.
The townsfolk are solid, though the key speaking roles only get cursory screen time and the mutated offspring are used sparingly. Leo Gordon is one of those names that mean nothing while his imposing figure and voice are easily recognisable. He's solid as Edgar Weeden and his ancestor Ezra. Elisha Cook Jr gets to use his full repertoire of shocked faces as Gideon and Micah Smith, and of course he has plenty of them. As for the ladies, there isn't enough of the delectable Cathie Merchant as the object of Curwen's affections, Hester Tillinghast. Luckily we get plenty of Debra Paget instead, as Ward's wife. She does an excellent job here, getting to be far more than just a screaming victim.
The difference between this one and The Dunwich Terror, which followed it seven years later, is vast and runs far beyond the difference in talent between Roger Corman and Daniel Haller as directors. I wonder if Dean Stockwell ever saw this film: if he did he ought to be ashamed of himself for what he did as Wilbur Whateley. Only Les Baxter comes off unscathed when comparisons are drawn: his score for The Dunwich Terror wasn't bad at all. Everything else pales in comparison to this film, which is a solid first screen adaptation of Lovecraft's work, even if it took serious liberties with the source material.
There's more entertainment here in the introductory ten minutes than in the entirety of The Dunwich Horror. We begin in the Arkham of 110 years ago where on a night riddled through with lightning, Vincent Price and his buxom assistant are about to sacrifice an entranced young lady on a huge and flamboyant set. The villagers rise up and rescue her, burning Price alive after only enough delay for him to curse them and their descendants: all the Weedons, Smiths, Wests, Willetts and Leaches. While this all bears little resemblance to its Lovecraftian origins, it is at least certainly the stuff of classic horror movies.
You could hardly expect Price to only have a few minutes screen time, unless this were a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello picture, such as Beach Party, in which he had a brief cameo to publicise this film, and sure enough he arrives back in Arkham quick enough. However he was burned as Joseph Curwen, warlock, and comes back 110 years later as Charles Dexter Ward, his great great grandson to claim his inheritance. Naturally, the townsfolk want nothing to do with him or his wife, even denying him directions to his property.
Only Dr Willetts is willing to point the way to the haunted palace of the title, where they meet Simon Orne, the corpselike caretaker, played by Lon Chaney Jr, credited under his father's name, of course. In case you wonder why Orne would go against his fellows and why the palace is in such good repair when Arkham townsfolk would obviously love to have burned it to the ground, Orne and his colleague Jabez Hutchinson are fellow warlocks, merely awaiting Curwen's return. Now is the time and Ward the means as Curwen gradually takes ownership of his mind and body through the influence of the portrait hanging over the fireplace.
Price could do no wrong at this point in his career, well established as a horror icon and comfortable in a series of pictures for Roger Corman. Not all his films were great ones, but he shone even in lesser pictures like the 1962 Tower of London. Here he gets the opportunity to switch frequently between the Price screen persona of deliciously menacing villainy and something much closer to the real life Price that was cultured, polite and mild mannered. Chaney was always best as a sinister henchman with just a touch of sympathy and the part he has here was perfect for him. Milton Parsons get next to nothing to do as warlock number three.
The townsfolk are solid, though the key speaking roles only get cursory screen time and the mutated offspring are used sparingly. Leo Gordon is one of those names that mean nothing while his imposing figure and voice are easily recognisable. He's solid as Edgar Weeden and his ancestor Ezra. Elisha Cook Jr gets to use his full repertoire of shocked faces as Gideon and Micah Smith, and of course he has plenty of them. As for the ladies, there isn't enough of the delectable Cathie Merchant as the object of Curwen's affections, Hester Tillinghast. Luckily we get plenty of Debra Paget instead, as Ward's wife. She does an excellent job here, getting to be far more than just a screaming victim.
The difference between this one and The Dunwich Terror, which followed it seven years later, is vast and runs far beyond the difference in talent between Roger Corman and Daniel Haller as directors. I wonder if Dean Stockwell ever saw this film: if he did he ought to be ashamed of himself for what he did as Wilbur Whateley. Only Les Baxter comes off unscathed when comparisons are drawn: his score for The Dunwich Terror wasn't bad at all. Everything else pales in comparison to this film, which is a solid first screen adaptation of Lovecraft's work, even if it took serious liberties with the source material.
The Dunwich Horror (1970)
Being a huge fan of the Weird Tales pulp magazine and it many writers, I've worked through Lovecraft's bibliography more than once and when I think of a film adaptation of one of his stories, I don't think of people like Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell and Ed Begley. Then again, this is an American International picture, so they were presumably spanning out from their success as adapters of Poe. More understandable names include Roger Corman as executive producer and exotica legend Les Baxter as the composer of the soundtrack.
Stockwell is Wilbur Whateley, a student of the occult with a horrendous moustache and a denizen of the Dunwich of the title, a town in Massachusetts. He travels to the Miskatonic University in Arkham to read the Necronomicon, the prize of their collection. For those who haven't read Lovecraft, the Necronomicon is a priceless volume of occult lore written by the mad Arab Abd al-Hazred that holds the keys to elder gods exiled to other dimensions. Whateley wants to bring them back and the Necronomicon is the heart of that attempt.
Also in Arkham though is Dr Henry Armitage, who refuses to let him take it away for study. Armitage is a pathetic imitation of a Lovecraftian occult scholar: he doesn't believe all this stuff about elder gods, merely admitting that he 'knows enough about strange things not to laugh at them.' Quite why he's at the Miskatonic to lecture on the subject over a period of a few weeks, I really don't know. Perhaps this disdain is the excuse for why the Miskatonic really doesn't seem to value such a unique work to the degree that you might expect. It's kept on public view, in a flimsy little case and handed around without much care. There's no alarm, only a single guard on duty at night.
While Whateley doesn't get the Necronomicon, at least at first, he does get Nancy Wagner, played by Sandra Dee. While she appears to go with him willingly, even voluntarily, the suggestion is some sort of occult power was invoked to persuade her. She's precisely what he's been looking for for his nefarious occult purposes, though beyond being a virgin we aren't made privy to his reasoning. Whateley is a strange bird, wandering around in something close to a trance state and talking in a continual monotone. No wonder the locals shun him, to the degree that a gas station attendant literally quits halfway through cleaning their windshield when he realises that Whateley is in the car.
His family have a unsavoury history in Dunwich, most notably his great-grandfather who was hanged from a tree which his accusers then burned down with his corpse still hanging from it. Nowadays his mother Lavinia has been in a padded cell for the last twenty years and his grandfather is a wild eyed Sam Jaffe, who apparently delivered him, along with an allegedly stillborn twin a quarter of a century before, in his own attempt to bring back the elder gods.
It doesn't take a genius to see where this is going, but you'd be missing all the weird late sixties psychedelia. Once in Dunwich, Nancy becomes even more hypnotised than before, and she dreams of painted native sex orgies. It's all a far cry from Gidget, but then that was presumably the point. She doesn't seem remotely comfortable in the role and I wouldn't be surprised if the more sensual scenes (that include no nudity whatsoever) were courtesy of a body double.
While there are a number of pretty creepy scenes of approaching menace, mostly as evidenced by nature's reaction to it, much of Lovecraft's cosmic horror is translated to cameraman playing around with whatever filters they could find to put on their lenses, none of which are particularly effective in the slightest. Perhaps they were trying to evoke the colour out of space, but they ended up with a bad acid trip. I doubt they really had much of a clue though, because of the use of other completely non-Lovecraftian devices that apparently just seemed like a good idea at the time. Then again this is hardly an accurate screen translation of Lovecraft's work, which is notably difficult to film anyway.
In the end, Begley proved mildly effective as Dr Henry Armitage, though Armitage himself is a waste of space. Dee and Stockwell are there but surely don't want to be. Jaffe can do wild eyed very well but he doesn't get much else to do here, and neither does Lloyd Bochner who's credited along with the top three. Further down the cast are people like Corman regular Beach Dickerson, professional wrestler and stuntman Michael Haynes, and Michael Fox, who is no relation to Michael J Fox but the reason that he acquired his middle initial, given that the Screen Actors Guild require professional names to be unique.
There's also Talia Shire, credited here as Talia Coppola. Beyond being twice nominated for an Oscar and thrice for a Razzie, she's the sister of Francis Ford Coppola and so got to appear in a few Corman movies, Coppola being yet another now famous graduate from the Corman school. Coppola's first credit as a director was for a Corman film, Dementia 13 (though there are a couple of intriguing nudie cutie titles that predate it), and Shire's first few credits were Corman films too, this being her second role, the first with a name. She was merely 1st Girlfriend in The Wild Racers two years earlier.
Stockwell is Wilbur Whateley, a student of the occult with a horrendous moustache and a denizen of the Dunwich of the title, a town in Massachusetts. He travels to the Miskatonic University in Arkham to read the Necronomicon, the prize of their collection. For those who haven't read Lovecraft, the Necronomicon is a priceless volume of occult lore written by the mad Arab Abd al-Hazred that holds the keys to elder gods exiled to other dimensions. Whateley wants to bring them back and the Necronomicon is the heart of that attempt.
Also in Arkham though is Dr Henry Armitage, who refuses to let him take it away for study. Armitage is a pathetic imitation of a Lovecraftian occult scholar: he doesn't believe all this stuff about elder gods, merely admitting that he 'knows enough about strange things not to laugh at them.' Quite why he's at the Miskatonic to lecture on the subject over a period of a few weeks, I really don't know. Perhaps this disdain is the excuse for why the Miskatonic really doesn't seem to value such a unique work to the degree that you might expect. It's kept on public view, in a flimsy little case and handed around without much care. There's no alarm, only a single guard on duty at night.
While Whateley doesn't get the Necronomicon, at least at first, he does get Nancy Wagner, played by Sandra Dee. While she appears to go with him willingly, even voluntarily, the suggestion is some sort of occult power was invoked to persuade her. She's precisely what he's been looking for for his nefarious occult purposes, though beyond being a virgin we aren't made privy to his reasoning. Whateley is a strange bird, wandering around in something close to a trance state and talking in a continual monotone. No wonder the locals shun him, to the degree that a gas station attendant literally quits halfway through cleaning their windshield when he realises that Whateley is in the car.
His family have a unsavoury history in Dunwich, most notably his great-grandfather who was hanged from a tree which his accusers then burned down with his corpse still hanging from it. Nowadays his mother Lavinia has been in a padded cell for the last twenty years and his grandfather is a wild eyed Sam Jaffe, who apparently delivered him, along with an allegedly stillborn twin a quarter of a century before, in his own attempt to bring back the elder gods.
It doesn't take a genius to see where this is going, but you'd be missing all the weird late sixties psychedelia. Once in Dunwich, Nancy becomes even more hypnotised than before, and she dreams of painted native sex orgies. It's all a far cry from Gidget, but then that was presumably the point. She doesn't seem remotely comfortable in the role and I wouldn't be surprised if the more sensual scenes (that include no nudity whatsoever) were courtesy of a body double.
While there are a number of pretty creepy scenes of approaching menace, mostly as evidenced by nature's reaction to it, much of Lovecraft's cosmic horror is translated to cameraman playing around with whatever filters they could find to put on their lenses, none of which are particularly effective in the slightest. Perhaps they were trying to evoke the colour out of space, but they ended up with a bad acid trip. I doubt they really had much of a clue though, because of the use of other completely non-Lovecraftian devices that apparently just seemed like a good idea at the time. Then again this is hardly an accurate screen translation of Lovecraft's work, which is notably difficult to film anyway.
In the end, Begley proved mildly effective as Dr Henry Armitage, though Armitage himself is a waste of space. Dee and Stockwell are there but surely don't want to be. Jaffe can do wild eyed very well but he doesn't get much else to do here, and neither does Lloyd Bochner who's credited along with the top three. Further down the cast are people like Corman regular Beach Dickerson, professional wrestler and stuntman Michael Haynes, and Michael Fox, who is no relation to Michael J Fox but the reason that he acquired his middle initial, given that the Screen Actors Guild require professional names to be unique.
There's also Talia Shire, credited here as Talia Coppola. Beyond being twice nominated for an Oscar and thrice for a Razzie, she's the sister of Francis Ford Coppola and so got to appear in a few Corman movies, Coppola being yet another now famous graduate from the Corman school. Coppola's first credit as a director was for a Corman film, Dementia 13 (though there are a couple of intriguing nudie cutie titles that predate it), and Shire's first few credits were Corman films too, this being her second role, the first with a name. She was merely 1st Girlfriend in The Wild Racers two years earlier.
My Name is Julia Ross (1945)
For some reason this seems to be regarded as an early example of British film noir, which is fallacious in every respect: neither being British nor film noir. It's set in England, but is an American film shot on the Columbia lot in Hollywood with a Dutch lead actress, Nina Foch. In fact only one member of the main cast is British, that being Dame May Whitty, as George Macready is American, Ronald Varno Dutch and Anita Bolster Irish. Rather than film noir it has far more in common with the classic English gothic genre, especially The Woman in White, this one being based on Anthony Gilbert's novel The Woman in Red, the title bearing its influences openly. There's no dark urban setting here, no hardboiled detectives or femmes fatale, but there is an old dark house on the the Cornish coast, along with polite villains and a deliberate attempt to force insanity. British film noir it isn't, fascinating it certainly is.
As you can imagine from the title, it's all about Julia Ross. She's a beautiful young lady trying to bounce back in life after a few unfortunate setbacks. She's in love but the object of that love has apparently just married someone else. She has a room in London but owes back rent to the landlady and isn't having any luck finding a job to furnish the money. She finally lands one through the Allison Employment Agency as a secretary to Mrs Hughes, so settles her debts and moves on to begin her new working life. However she goes to sleep in Henrique Square, London but wakes up a couple of days later in Cornwall, where the mystery begins.
She's told that she isn't Julia Ross at all, this being merely a character in her head. She's really Mrs Hughes's daughter-in-law Marian, wife to Ralph Hughes who loves her dearly and wishes she could only recover, though none of the best doctors in London have been able to help her thus far. Of course, as we first meet her as Julia Ross, we're one up on most of the characters in the story: we know there are shenanigans going on and our questions tie to the details of the charade and the nature of its inevitably sinister purpose. Why are Ralph Hughes and his mother trying to persuade Julia that she's someone else and how do they hope to get away with it?
They've done their work carefully, so Julia's protestations naturally go unheeded: the servants have been prepped ahead of time and all of her personal belongings have been burnt. Links to her past are also tenuous, because Mrs Hughes was careful to hire someone without family or attachments and because Julia left her back rent not with Mrs Mackie but with the maid who promptly stole it and tore up her forwarding address. Luckily Dennis Bruce, the man she loves, didn't get married after all and is looking for her.
Much better than its bigger budget Hollywood remake, Arthur Penn's 1987 film Dead of Winter with Roddy McDowall and Mary Steenburgen, this film is a notable success. It's only 65 minutes long, which ensures that it zips along with an economy of motion, being lean and mean and without any unneeded baggage. While it prompts many questions and much interest from us, fundamentally it's not particularly complicated and none of it seems forced. Any film with Dame May Whitty in it is going to be worth watching and the rest of the main cast don't let the side down, though perhaps a couple of the smaller parts are handled a little clumsily.
There's also Nina Foch, who plays Julia. Foch is a highly underrated actress who never got the breaks she deserved in Hollywood, and she does a great job here in a film that very possibly got her more notice than any other part she played. I've seen quite a bit of her work, from most of the periods of her career, and found that she's always well worth watching, not just because she looks like a softer Marlene Dietrich with inviting pools for eyes, but because of her sheer talent as an actress.
Her earliest roles were in films notably beneath her such as Cry of the Werewolf, Boston Blackie's Rendezvous and the execrable The Return of the Vampire, gradually moved up to better fare with I Love a Mystery and A Song to Remember which was her route into major pictures. For some reason she was continually cast in supporting roles in films like Johnny Allegro, An American in Paris and even The Ten Commandments which saw her playing on screen mother to Charlton Heston though he was a year older than her. She continued acting though, and I last saw her in a memorable couple of performances as Ducky's mother in NCIS. She's the main reason to watch My Name is Julia Ross, but she's far from the only one.
As you can imagine from the title, it's all about Julia Ross. She's a beautiful young lady trying to bounce back in life after a few unfortunate setbacks. She's in love but the object of that love has apparently just married someone else. She has a room in London but owes back rent to the landlady and isn't having any luck finding a job to furnish the money. She finally lands one through the Allison Employment Agency as a secretary to Mrs Hughes, so settles her debts and moves on to begin her new working life. However she goes to sleep in Henrique Square, London but wakes up a couple of days later in Cornwall, where the mystery begins.
She's told that she isn't Julia Ross at all, this being merely a character in her head. She's really Mrs Hughes's daughter-in-law Marian, wife to Ralph Hughes who loves her dearly and wishes she could only recover, though none of the best doctors in London have been able to help her thus far. Of course, as we first meet her as Julia Ross, we're one up on most of the characters in the story: we know there are shenanigans going on and our questions tie to the details of the charade and the nature of its inevitably sinister purpose. Why are Ralph Hughes and his mother trying to persuade Julia that she's someone else and how do they hope to get away with it?
They've done their work carefully, so Julia's protestations naturally go unheeded: the servants have been prepped ahead of time and all of her personal belongings have been burnt. Links to her past are also tenuous, because Mrs Hughes was careful to hire someone without family or attachments and because Julia left her back rent not with Mrs Mackie but with the maid who promptly stole it and tore up her forwarding address. Luckily Dennis Bruce, the man she loves, didn't get married after all and is looking for her.
Much better than its bigger budget Hollywood remake, Arthur Penn's 1987 film Dead of Winter with Roddy McDowall and Mary Steenburgen, this film is a notable success. It's only 65 minutes long, which ensures that it zips along with an economy of motion, being lean and mean and without any unneeded baggage. While it prompts many questions and much interest from us, fundamentally it's not particularly complicated and none of it seems forced. Any film with Dame May Whitty in it is going to be worth watching and the rest of the main cast don't let the side down, though perhaps a couple of the smaller parts are handled a little clumsily.
There's also Nina Foch, who plays Julia. Foch is a highly underrated actress who never got the breaks she deserved in Hollywood, and she does a great job here in a film that very possibly got her more notice than any other part she played. I've seen quite a bit of her work, from most of the periods of her career, and found that she's always well worth watching, not just because she looks like a softer Marlene Dietrich with inviting pools for eyes, but because of her sheer talent as an actress.
Her earliest roles were in films notably beneath her such as Cry of the Werewolf, Boston Blackie's Rendezvous and the execrable The Return of the Vampire, gradually moved up to better fare with I Love a Mystery and A Song to Remember which was her route into major pictures. For some reason she was continually cast in supporting roles in films like Johnny Allegro, An American in Paris and even The Ten Commandments which saw her playing on screen mother to Charlton Heston though he was a year older than her. She continued acting though, and I last saw her in a memorable couple of performances as Ducky's mother in NCIS. She's the main reason to watch My Name is Julia Ross, but she's far from the only one.
Saturday, 1 November 2008
I, the Jury (1982)
I'm a big fan of Armand Assante and an even bigger fan of Mike Hammer, but the two just don't seem to connect themselves in my mind. Assante can play sleazy like few others and would make a great hardboiled PI, that's for certain, but would he make a great Mike Hammer? That I didn't know and was very interested to find out. What confuses the issue here even more is that it opens with the clear possibility of moving in a whole number of completely different and mutually exclusive directions.
It begins with a two scene character teaser: the first has Hammer accepting a job from a husband worried his wife is cheating on him and the second has him reporting back over the phone from this wife's bed. Then it hits the title credits, which play like a TV show two years before Stacy Keach found his way to the character. As the film runs on, we realise that this is an early eighties (but very rooted in the seventies) sex and violence Hammer, written by exploitation legend Larry Cohen, who also directed for about a week until Richard T Heffron replaced him for budgetary reasons. Apparently the studio was already worried about overruns, one week in.
There's a murder, of course and to Hammer, it's personal. He knew the victim, a one armed fellow detective called Jack Williams, shot dead in his apartment. Hammer's friend, police captain Pat Chambers tells him to stay out of it and he just looks back and mutters a half hearted 'yeah' that really only acknowledges the pointlessness of such of a request. Hammer was never really interested in the law, he was always focused on justice and his own particular brand of justice too. The two are supposed to tie closely together, but in Hammer's world they couldn't be further apart and he's well aware of it.
Beyond being a tough, violent and misogynistic PI, though a fundamentally honest one, this film makes it pretty obvious that he only seems to belong when he's surrounded by violence. The early scenes here show him floating through life, angry, depressed or disinterested, only coming alive when he's being shot at or when he's surrounded by a bevy of scantily clad girls offering him plenty of attention. The girls are at the Northridge Clinic, a sex clinic run by Dr Charlotte Bennett that's the first stop on Hammer's trail, and the place seems to be tied to some sort of government conspiracy. The CIA isn't just tied to the mob, it's been experimenting with mind control to turn people into serial killers and somewhere within this conspiracy is the reason for Jack Williams's death.
Armand Assante is a powerful and magnetic actor with a serious artistic range and he's worth watching here, as he always is. However he's totally miscast. To answer my initial question: no, he isn't Mike Hammer. Then again Mike Hammer here isn't really Mike Hammer, especially when we close in on the bad guy, when for some reason he turns into John Rambo. There are other people here with talent like Barbara Carrera, Geoffrey Lewis and Alan King but none of them get too much to do. Carrera looks great naked but the part she was given is a waste of her talent. Judson Scott is effective as a very seventies serial killer.
Surprisingly the most interesting performance here seems to be Laurene Landon's as Velda, Hammer's secretary. I've seen a lot of Veldas over the years and they include some very beautiful women: people like Shannon Whirry, Tanya Roberts, or, if you like that sort of thing, Pamela Anderson. Laurene Landon is a beautiful lady herself, when posing for the camera, but there's something about her that goes a lot deeper than the conventional. She's too tall and too angular for convention but I think that mostly it's in how she moves: she doesn't stand the way a model would, she moves awkwardly and seems firmly rooted in the real world rather than the catwalk.
In short, she's really believable: tough and capable, yet vulnerable and reactionary. It's what made her so great in films like Hundra and Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold and it makes her great here too. She gets a strange part, obviously not the focus of the film and not stealing any scenes, but she resonates the way nothing else in the film does and ends up being what's most memorable. I loved the way she got information out of the serial killer's mother by threatening her TV. In a film that really isn't very good but remains interesting at least, she's the most memorable thing.
It begins with a two scene character teaser: the first has Hammer accepting a job from a husband worried his wife is cheating on him and the second has him reporting back over the phone from this wife's bed. Then it hits the title credits, which play like a TV show two years before Stacy Keach found his way to the character. As the film runs on, we realise that this is an early eighties (but very rooted in the seventies) sex and violence Hammer, written by exploitation legend Larry Cohen, who also directed for about a week until Richard T Heffron replaced him for budgetary reasons. Apparently the studio was already worried about overruns, one week in.
There's a murder, of course and to Hammer, it's personal. He knew the victim, a one armed fellow detective called Jack Williams, shot dead in his apartment. Hammer's friend, police captain Pat Chambers tells him to stay out of it and he just looks back and mutters a half hearted 'yeah' that really only acknowledges the pointlessness of such of a request. Hammer was never really interested in the law, he was always focused on justice and his own particular brand of justice too. The two are supposed to tie closely together, but in Hammer's world they couldn't be further apart and he's well aware of it.
Beyond being a tough, violent and misogynistic PI, though a fundamentally honest one, this film makes it pretty obvious that he only seems to belong when he's surrounded by violence. The early scenes here show him floating through life, angry, depressed or disinterested, only coming alive when he's being shot at or when he's surrounded by a bevy of scantily clad girls offering him plenty of attention. The girls are at the Northridge Clinic, a sex clinic run by Dr Charlotte Bennett that's the first stop on Hammer's trail, and the place seems to be tied to some sort of government conspiracy. The CIA isn't just tied to the mob, it's been experimenting with mind control to turn people into serial killers and somewhere within this conspiracy is the reason for Jack Williams's death.
Armand Assante is a powerful and magnetic actor with a serious artistic range and he's worth watching here, as he always is. However he's totally miscast. To answer my initial question: no, he isn't Mike Hammer. Then again Mike Hammer here isn't really Mike Hammer, especially when we close in on the bad guy, when for some reason he turns into John Rambo. There are other people here with talent like Barbara Carrera, Geoffrey Lewis and Alan King but none of them get too much to do. Carrera looks great naked but the part she was given is a waste of her talent. Judson Scott is effective as a very seventies serial killer.
Surprisingly the most interesting performance here seems to be Laurene Landon's as Velda, Hammer's secretary. I've seen a lot of Veldas over the years and they include some very beautiful women: people like Shannon Whirry, Tanya Roberts, or, if you like that sort of thing, Pamela Anderson. Laurene Landon is a beautiful lady herself, when posing for the camera, but there's something about her that goes a lot deeper than the conventional. She's too tall and too angular for convention but I think that mostly it's in how she moves: she doesn't stand the way a model would, she moves awkwardly and seems firmly rooted in the real world rather than the catwalk.
In short, she's really believable: tough and capable, yet vulnerable and reactionary. It's what made her so great in films like Hundra and Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold and it makes her great here too. She gets a strange part, obviously not the focus of the film and not stealing any scenes, but she resonates the way nothing else in the film does and ends up being what's most memorable. I loved the way she got information out of the serial killer's mother by threatening her TV. In a film that really isn't very good but remains interesting at least, she's the most memorable thing.
Mr Sardonicus (1961)
William Castle was born in the Big Apple in 1914, but here he is in the fog shrouded London of 1880 introducing this Ray Russell story about ghouls. He even gives us a dictionary definition of them so we know what we're in for, in the salacious Castle manner of course. A ghoul is a creature 'who robs graves and feasts on corpses.' Charming material, naturally, but we wouldn't have it any other way. I've seen and enjoyed some of Castle's non-horror films, his entries in series featuring detectives like the Whistler or the Crime Doctor or completely separate movies like The Houston Story, but he's remembered for horror for a reason.
This film may be titled Mr Sardonicus, but we follow the adventures of Sir Robert Cargrave, a doctor with talent and vision. We first meet him treating a young girl and apparently working something pretty close to miraculous, then he explains to one of his students the medical potential for a new invention he's just received from Scotland: a hypodermic needle. Playing Cargrave is Welsh actor Ronald Lewis, who from the front looks like Anthony LaPaglia, Jack from Without a Trace, and from the side and back like a bizarre cross between David Hasselhoff and Jack Palance.
He's a rugged romantic lead and sure enough he quickly leaves all his success in London behind on a romantic quest to aid the love of his life, the former Maude Randall, portrayed by the lovely Audrey Dalton. Instead of marrying Cargrave for love, she became the Baroness Sardonicus, wife of an Eastern European nobleman, in order to save her father from being exposed as an embezzler. However life as a baroness may be privileged but she fears for her life, and Cargrave's haste is prompted by a letter she sends him from the continent, delivered by a man with henchman written all over his face.
This man is Krull, the diminutive sort of cross between sidekick, servant and slave who only ever populates horror movies, complete with the expected anatomical abnormalities: this time a missing eye. Actor Oskar Homolka, who gets top billing, obviously paid a lot of attention to Bela Lugosi films in preparation for his role: Lugosi would have been a natural for the part. Of course he died in 1956, so the only way he could have played the part is if Ed Wood had directed instead of William Castle. He'd have found a way...
So Cargrave, in true Jonathan Harker fashion, finds his way to the remote European town of Gorslava to meet the Baron Sardonicus. He lives in a remote castle, naturally, complete with padlocked doors, empty portrait frames hanging on the wall and a complete absence of mirrors. Sardonicus is played by Guy Rolfe, who looks like Dick Miller would after a few turns on the rack, but we'd hardly know that, because he constantly wears a mask akin to that of the Phantom of the Opera that hides both his features and the secret that prompts natives of Gorslava to cringe in horror at the sheer mention of his name.
Apparently, as a younger man he was married before, to a shrew of a wife called Elenka, who did nothing except pester him for money and complain that he didn't have any. Luck comes in the form of a lottery ticket that finally brings a big win for his father after many years of trying. However he dies peacefully in his sleep that night and nobody's the wiser. Only months later do they hear the news and realise that the ticket is in his best waistcoat, the one he was buried in. The young Sardonicus, before he traded in the name of Toleslawski for such a descriptive name, is forced by his greedy wife to profane the sanctuary of the dead, dig up his father's grave and retrieve the ticket. And in doing so, his face is contorted into an immobile rictus grin, mirroring that of his father's corpse.
This is a solid horror film from Castle, one that wears its many influences on its sleeve. There's plenty of opportunity for gothic grandeur and grand guignol sadism. Cargrave may be a world renowned doctor working in the field of paralysis and so a natural candidate to assist him, but Sardonicus can't resist using his own wife, Cargrave's former lover, as a grisly incentive. Krull always does what his master wishes, whether that be delivering letters to London or stringing up the maid by her thumbs to torture with leeches, and his master is quite happy for him to perform debilitative surgery on young Maude if it will only convince Cargrave to try out experimental treatments that he otherwise wouldn't dare.
No, Sardonicus is not a nice man, not that you ever expected him to be anywhere close to one, and William Castle, being William Castle, is happy to play on that fact. His horror films tended to have a memorable gimmick and this one is no exception. Apparently after screening Mr Sardonicus for the studio executives at Columbia, they demanded a happy ending, so Castle got around that by inserting himself into the end of the film, right before the finale. He distributed what he called a punishment poll ballot to theatregoers and paused the film to ask them to vote on whether Sardonicus deserved mercy or not. In true Roman fashion, thumbs up meant mercy for the baron and thumbs down meant nothing of the kind.
Naturally this was mere theatrics and nobody ever saw a happy ending for Sardonicus, whether they voted that way or not. I doubt anyone ever did unless someone went back again and again and persuaded people to vote for mercy just so he could see the happy ending, but I think any such outcome would have been gleefully ignored anyway and I'm not going to argue with that. I'll vote thumbs down for the baron but thumbs up for William Castle; for Ray Russell; for Lewis, Dalton and Rolfe; and especially for Oscar Homolka, fairly top billed even as a henchman.
This film may be titled Mr Sardonicus, but we follow the adventures of Sir Robert Cargrave, a doctor with talent and vision. We first meet him treating a young girl and apparently working something pretty close to miraculous, then he explains to one of his students the medical potential for a new invention he's just received from Scotland: a hypodermic needle. Playing Cargrave is Welsh actor Ronald Lewis, who from the front looks like Anthony LaPaglia, Jack from Without a Trace, and from the side and back like a bizarre cross between David Hasselhoff and Jack Palance.
He's a rugged romantic lead and sure enough he quickly leaves all his success in London behind on a romantic quest to aid the love of his life, the former Maude Randall, portrayed by the lovely Audrey Dalton. Instead of marrying Cargrave for love, she became the Baroness Sardonicus, wife of an Eastern European nobleman, in order to save her father from being exposed as an embezzler. However life as a baroness may be privileged but she fears for her life, and Cargrave's haste is prompted by a letter she sends him from the continent, delivered by a man with henchman written all over his face.
This man is Krull, the diminutive sort of cross between sidekick, servant and slave who only ever populates horror movies, complete with the expected anatomical abnormalities: this time a missing eye. Actor Oskar Homolka, who gets top billing, obviously paid a lot of attention to Bela Lugosi films in preparation for his role: Lugosi would have been a natural for the part. Of course he died in 1956, so the only way he could have played the part is if Ed Wood had directed instead of William Castle. He'd have found a way...
So Cargrave, in true Jonathan Harker fashion, finds his way to the remote European town of Gorslava to meet the Baron Sardonicus. He lives in a remote castle, naturally, complete with padlocked doors, empty portrait frames hanging on the wall and a complete absence of mirrors. Sardonicus is played by Guy Rolfe, who looks like Dick Miller would after a few turns on the rack, but we'd hardly know that, because he constantly wears a mask akin to that of the Phantom of the Opera that hides both his features and the secret that prompts natives of Gorslava to cringe in horror at the sheer mention of his name.
Apparently, as a younger man he was married before, to a shrew of a wife called Elenka, who did nothing except pester him for money and complain that he didn't have any. Luck comes in the form of a lottery ticket that finally brings a big win for his father after many years of trying. However he dies peacefully in his sleep that night and nobody's the wiser. Only months later do they hear the news and realise that the ticket is in his best waistcoat, the one he was buried in. The young Sardonicus, before he traded in the name of Toleslawski for such a descriptive name, is forced by his greedy wife to profane the sanctuary of the dead, dig up his father's grave and retrieve the ticket. And in doing so, his face is contorted into an immobile rictus grin, mirroring that of his father's corpse.
This is a solid horror film from Castle, one that wears its many influences on its sleeve. There's plenty of opportunity for gothic grandeur and grand guignol sadism. Cargrave may be a world renowned doctor working in the field of paralysis and so a natural candidate to assist him, but Sardonicus can't resist using his own wife, Cargrave's former lover, as a grisly incentive. Krull always does what his master wishes, whether that be delivering letters to London or stringing up the maid by her thumbs to torture with leeches, and his master is quite happy for him to perform debilitative surgery on young Maude if it will only convince Cargrave to try out experimental treatments that he otherwise wouldn't dare.
No, Sardonicus is not a nice man, not that you ever expected him to be anywhere close to one, and William Castle, being William Castle, is happy to play on that fact. His horror films tended to have a memorable gimmick and this one is no exception. Apparently after screening Mr Sardonicus for the studio executives at Columbia, they demanded a happy ending, so Castle got around that by inserting himself into the end of the film, right before the finale. He distributed what he called a punishment poll ballot to theatregoers and paused the film to ask them to vote on whether Sardonicus deserved mercy or not. In true Roman fashion, thumbs up meant mercy for the baron and thumbs down meant nothing of the kind.
Naturally this was mere theatrics and nobody ever saw a happy ending for Sardonicus, whether they voted that way or not. I doubt anyone ever did unless someone went back again and again and persuaded people to vote for mercy just so he could see the happy ending, but I think any such outcome would have been gleefully ignored anyway and I'm not going to argue with that. I'll vote thumbs down for the baron but thumbs up for William Castle; for Ray Russell; for Lewis, Dalton and Rolfe; and especially for Oscar Homolka, fairly top billed even as a henchman.
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