It's the 4th of July, 1900: America is 124 years old and young Johnny Sims is born. As a child of the century, Mr Sims wants his son to be somebody big and sets him on the path for success. Of course, the path is just the start and Johnny has to follow it himself, which he has every intentions of doing, being an earnest young thing. The defining line of the film comes when he's a 21 year old looking down from the top of a double decker bus at the people of New York City: he tells his date, 'Look at that crowd! The poor boobs... all in the same rut!' What he doesn't see is that he's already one of them.
One of the most acclaimed silent films of all time, I was underwhelmed when I saw this in 2005 and wanted to give it another shot. I think it was the story that did it, which seemed like a pretty basic runthrough of a couple's rise and fall compared to the obvious artistry that had gone into the film. 1928, right at the end of the silent era, was a great time for artistry in film and this one has some of the most quoted imagery of the era, including two masterpiece shots that were highly influential and often seen.
The first comes when Johnny is a kid and his father comes home on a stretcher, dead. The camera is static and positioned at the top of the stairs looking down at the bustle of official folks carrying the stretcher in. As they pass we see the emptiness of the stairway and the crowd at the bottom, then up comes young Johnny, slowly climbing the stairs, knowing the worst but hoping for something much better. It's an astounding shot that really leaves the heart in the mouth and the acting on the face of the young actor playing Johnny.
The second comes in New York City when he's 21 and working for a living. After wandering round New York for a little while to show us how big it is and how many people are teeming around it, the camera heads up the Atlas Insurance Company building from the bottom, angling in to one window, entering to show us a huge floor full of desks laid out at regular intervals and zooming in to the desk where Johnny Sims works. There is a cut between the outside and the inside, but this is 1928 and it's a superb shot nonetheless, created through imagination and artistry rather than reliance on CGI.
What's most surprising is that there is CGI here or the analogue technology that equated to it in 1928, which is pretty impressive. The best is some superimposition work that I presume involved reusing the same film with masks in different places. However it was done it looked very good indeed for 1928. Some people can't reach that quality today with all the digital tools that can be brought to bear. The camera also really moves around in this film in many different ways. Some of the more ambitious shots involved heading round New York on the top of a double decker bus or heading down a slide ahead of a foursome out on the town.
James Murray is solid as Johnny, but Eleanor Boardman is even better as his wife. She's present throughout here, as we progress through the years in scenes that represent defining moments. She's luminous on their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, forgiving during Christmas with Johnny disappointing the in laws, believable during a big fight in April and a making up in October, frustrated during a disastrous picnic at the beach five years on, griefstrick through the death of their daughter and on. Throughout all this she's the lynchpin as Johnny waits: for his big promotion, his pay raise, his ship to come in, all of which stubbornly refuse to actually turn up. It's a rollercoaster ride for them, but it's a pretty believable one.
The real name behind the success of the film is King Vidor though: it's definitely his film, it says something that he obviously very much wanted to say and it says it very definably. I'm a lot more impressed this time out than last. I can't call it a favourite and I'm not blown away but it's certainly a powerful piece of filmmaking that was certainly ahead of his time.
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Battle Circus (1953)
From a Bogart I'd seen before to a Bogart I haven't, this 1952 film begins just like an episode of M*A*S*H, with a helicopter bringing in wounded to a Mobile Army Service Hospital not far from the action in the Korean war. It's only the fact that this is in black and white and there's Suicide is Painless to back it all up that tells me I'm not going to see Alan Alda and Harry Morgan any moment. Sure enough, it's Humphrey Bogart and Keenan Wynn instead, but the action is roughly the same, with just a little less comedy. In fact it was even going to be called MASH, but the director and studio both thought the title would be misleading to viewers. So it goes.
There's so much here that is reminiscent of what would come a couple of decades later that it's impossible that this wasn't treated as primary influence source material for the writers of MASH and M*A*S*H. The original book that MASH was based on was written by a Korean War veteran under a pseudonym. This film was written for the screen by professional scriptwriters, but it was made during the war itself so the material was fresh. From what I've read about the response to the film from people who were there in the field, they got it pretty accurate. The film certainly closes with a note that it was made with the cooperation of the Department of Defense and the US Army.
Bogart is Maj Jed Webbe, second in command of the MASH unit 8666 to Lt Col Walters. Webbe is a surgeon and a good one at that. He's capable enough to deal with the pressures of a hospital unit that has to work under far less than optimal conditions, with too many patients, too little equipment and a propensity to move at the drop of a hat. He's tough enough to keep working in surgery when prisoner enters the operating room with a hand grenade. He's also something of a wolf but not a one dimensional one.
In short, he's a believable character in a believable drama, even though much of the light relief is hung on something as potentially flimsy as a relationship between a major/surgeon and a lieutenant/nurse. The mix of serious and tough drama with comedy and light heartedness is why Bogart took the part in the first place, at a point in time where he could choose what he wanted, two films in from an Oscar win for The African Queen. It's also one of the key reasons why the film works, and for that matter why MASH and M*A*S*H worked too, decades later.
Those later versions are far better known, of course, but this came first, and it set the tone. I'm sure a lot of that tone comes from director and co-writer Richard Brooks, who was once a reporter in New York with Sam Fuller. He was never a prolific director (it took him 35 years to make 24 films) but those films included peaches like Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and In Cold Blood. Like Fuller, he's one of those directors who I respect more and more with every one of their films I see. Unlike Fuller, he worked a lot more within the system, which got his work more widely seen but with less of an individual touch.
The nurse is Lt Ruth McGara, a good nurse but a rookie in the field who arrives in Korea without any conception of how to keep her head down. She's played by June Allyson and she does a very good job indeed. She's believable not just as a nurse, which many actresses could play well, but as a romantic interest for Bogie. It's well known that he didn't get along with a number of his leading ladies and that often shows on screen. He seems to have got on very well with Allyson because their scenes together just flow.
There are other people here too, though I don't recognise most of them. The colonel is Robert Keith, who finds the right balance of tough and fair. Needless to say he gets injured and Bogie has to take over. My favourite character is the ever ingenious Sgt Orvil Statt, a former Barnum & Bailey worker who runs the slick process of pulling the unit down and bringing it back up somewhere else, is Keenan Wynn. He gets a lot of scenes, though is rarely a focus of them, and he shines throughout. He's solid as both the tough sergeant and the tender heart who takes special care of a young Korean boy who dies for a few seconds on the operating table. I've always been a fan of Keenan Wynn and this is an early but very memorable performance.
There's so much here that is reminiscent of what would come a couple of decades later that it's impossible that this wasn't treated as primary influence source material for the writers of MASH and M*A*S*H. The original book that MASH was based on was written by a Korean War veteran under a pseudonym. This film was written for the screen by professional scriptwriters, but it was made during the war itself so the material was fresh. From what I've read about the response to the film from people who were there in the field, they got it pretty accurate. The film certainly closes with a note that it was made with the cooperation of the Department of Defense and the US Army.
Bogart is Maj Jed Webbe, second in command of the MASH unit 8666 to Lt Col Walters. Webbe is a surgeon and a good one at that. He's capable enough to deal with the pressures of a hospital unit that has to work under far less than optimal conditions, with too many patients, too little equipment and a propensity to move at the drop of a hat. He's tough enough to keep working in surgery when prisoner enters the operating room with a hand grenade. He's also something of a wolf but not a one dimensional one.
In short, he's a believable character in a believable drama, even though much of the light relief is hung on something as potentially flimsy as a relationship between a major/surgeon and a lieutenant/nurse. The mix of serious and tough drama with comedy and light heartedness is why Bogart took the part in the first place, at a point in time where he could choose what he wanted, two films in from an Oscar win for The African Queen. It's also one of the key reasons why the film works, and for that matter why MASH and M*A*S*H worked too, decades later.
Those later versions are far better known, of course, but this came first, and it set the tone. I'm sure a lot of that tone comes from director and co-writer Richard Brooks, who was once a reporter in New York with Sam Fuller. He was never a prolific director (it took him 35 years to make 24 films) but those films included peaches like Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and In Cold Blood. Like Fuller, he's one of those directors who I respect more and more with every one of their films I see. Unlike Fuller, he worked a lot more within the system, which got his work more widely seen but with less of an individual touch.
The nurse is Lt Ruth McGara, a good nurse but a rookie in the field who arrives in Korea without any conception of how to keep her head down. She's played by June Allyson and she does a very good job indeed. She's believable not just as a nurse, which many actresses could play well, but as a romantic interest for Bogie. It's well known that he didn't get along with a number of his leading ladies and that often shows on screen. He seems to have got on very well with Allyson because their scenes together just flow.
There are other people here too, though I don't recognise most of them. The colonel is Robert Keith, who finds the right balance of tough and fair. Needless to say he gets injured and Bogie has to take over. My favourite character is the ever ingenious Sgt Orvil Statt, a former Barnum & Bailey worker who runs the slick process of pulling the unit down and bringing it back up somewhere else, is Keenan Wynn. He gets a lot of scenes, though is rarely a focus of them, and he shines throughout. He's solid as both the tough sergeant and the tender heart who takes special care of a young Korean boy who dies for a few seconds on the operating table. I've always been a fan of Keenan Wynn and this is an early but very memorable performance.
Monday, 5 January 2009
Swing Your Lady (1938)
Humphrey Bogart looks chipper when he bounces out of the car and into the hotel in Mussel City, MO. Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins and Nat Pendleton don't look too happy though, following on behind, and Bogie was hiding plenty. He saw this as the worst film he ever made, which it isn't (watch The Return of Doctor X for something notably worse), but it's the least Bogart of all the Bogart films I've seen, and I'm most of the way through them. It may not be a casting disaster on the scale of John Wayne as Genghis Khan or Kate Hepburn as Mary, Queen of Scots but it's certainly not one of the department's proudest moments. While the role of Ed Hatch really should have been played by someone like Lee Tracy, there's a far better candidate than Bogart in the same film: Frank McHugh would have done a much better job.
I'm pretty sure Bogie knew that too and was cursing every line he had to say. It wouldn't surprise me if they put an extra camera behind him so that if he hated it too much they could show the other view instead and forget about take 27. Lines like 'Joe Skopopolous, the ponderous pachyderm of grunt and groan, the Wrestling Hercules, is the next heavyweight champion of the world,' are bad enough, but the ultimate embarrassing Bogart moment of all time is when he gets pinned to the ground by Louise Fazenda who won't let him up until he says, 'Hootie Owl'. He probably spent the rest of his life clocking anyone who muttered those words in his presence.
Anyway, Ed Hatch is a promoter and Joe 'Hercules' Skopapoulos is the wrestler he's promoting throughout the little towns of Missouri. He ends up looking for an opponent in Plunkett City, population 749, most of whom seem to be sat on the porch outside the hardware store playing hillbilly music. And this is hillbilly music like you haven't seen on film before. It's so down home they don't even have duelling banjos, they have duelling saw players, along with every other strange instrument you can think of that could remotely join in a hillbilly song without it sounding like it should be on the Dr Demento show. Then again, with the unique instruments, fiddlers fiddling their beards and songs like Hillbilly from 10th Avenue, maybe they should.
Of course the opponent he finds isn't quite the opponent he expects. This one's a blacksmith, but she's also a girl called Sadie Horn. He discovers her by accident when his car gets stuck in a mudhole and she lifts it out without any help and realises he's been gifted with a spectacle. While he hides the choice of opponent from Joe, because he's a dumb cluck who can't understand words when they're spelled out aloud and he's liable to do something stupid, Joe has already met Sadie and he's already fallen for her too, one night when he takes refuge from the rain inside her blacksmith's forge.
She's a big girl, admittedly, one played by veteran actress Louise Fazenda, and she steals the whole show here. She had a habit of doing that, as far back as 1913 when she was playing in slapstick comedies, one reel westerns and even things like Poor Jake's Demise with Lon Chaney, which I'm going to have to search out now that it's no longer lost. Watching her be the prize in a wrestling match between Nat Pendleton in full on dumb mode and a wild hillbilly played by Daniel Boone Savage may seem like a bizarre situation to us, but probably not to her given her long and varied career. She has a ball with the hillbilly dialect, throwing out epithets like 'well, shuck my corn', 'chisel my tombstone' and 'I'll snatch you bald headed' seemingly at least twice per line of dialogue.
Make no mistake, this is not a good film. It's a cheap piece of exploitation garbage aimed firmly at the hillbilly market, based on a play (featuring Frank McHugh's brother, among others) but with breaks for old time country good time songs and associated shenanigans, and a guest spot as Ed Hatch's dumb girlfriend for Penny Singleton, who is fine really in her singing and dancing though she's as out of place in this film as Bogie is. It's a jigsaw box with a collection of jigsaw pieces from different jigsaws with different pictures on them, and no matter how you work it the pieces aren't going to fit with each other. This even continued to the screening: who could have honestly thought this would work as the other half of a double bill with Boris Karloff's The Invisible Menace?
What saves it from being completely worthless is the fact that it has an enviable cast who know it's nonsense, and with the exception of Bogart, have fun with it. Fazenda is wonderful, but Frank McHugh is fun too. Allen Jenkins doesn't have enough to do. Nat Pendleton played every level of dumb in his long career, but this one went a little too over the top. He does get to show his wrestling chops, which are admirable but hardly surprising since he was an Olympic silver medal winner. Penny Singleton is still annoying but a little less so than she was last time I saw this film in 2005. It made enough of an impact on me then as a unique bit of film that I wrote about it here: http://www.dawtrina.com/personal/film/reviews/swing.html. This time out it still has impact, admittedly for all the wrong reasons, so I wrote about it again.
I'm pretty sure Bogie knew that too and was cursing every line he had to say. It wouldn't surprise me if they put an extra camera behind him so that if he hated it too much they could show the other view instead and forget about take 27. Lines like 'Joe Skopopolous, the ponderous pachyderm of grunt and groan, the Wrestling Hercules, is the next heavyweight champion of the world,' are bad enough, but the ultimate embarrassing Bogart moment of all time is when he gets pinned to the ground by Louise Fazenda who won't let him up until he says, 'Hootie Owl'. He probably spent the rest of his life clocking anyone who muttered those words in his presence.
Anyway, Ed Hatch is a promoter and Joe 'Hercules' Skopapoulos is the wrestler he's promoting throughout the little towns of Missouri. He ends up looking for an opponent in Plunkett City, population 749, most of whom seem to be sat on the porch outside the hardware store playing hillbilly music. And this is hillbilly music like you haven't seen on film before. It's so down home they don't even have duelling banjos, they have duelling saw players, along with every other strange instrument you can think of that could remotely join in a hillbilly song without it sounding like it should be on the Dr Demento show. Then again, with the unique instruments, fiddlers fiddling their beards and songs like Hillbilly from 10th Avenue, maybe they should.
Of course the opponent he finds isn't quite the opponent he expects. This one's a blacksmith, but she's also a girl called Sadie Horn. He discovers her by accident when his car gets stuck in a mudhole and she lifts it out without any help and realises he's been gifted with a spectacle. While he hides the choice of opponent from Joe, because he's a dumb cluck who can't understand words when they're spelled out aloud and he's liable to do something stupid, Joe has already met Sadie and he's already fallen for her too, one night when he takes refuge from the rain inside her blacksmith's forge.
She's a big girl, admittedly, one played by veteran actress Louise Fazenda, and she steals the whole show here. She had a habit of doing that, as far back as 1913 when she was playing in slapstick comedies, one reel westerns and even things like Poor Jake's Demise with Lon Chaney, which I'm going to have to search out now that it's no longer lost. Watching her be the prize in a wrestling match between Nat Pendleton in full on dumb mode and a wild hillbilly played by Daniel Boone Savage may seem like a bizarre situation to us, but probably not to her given her long and varied career. She has a ball with the hillbilly dialect, throwing out epithets like 'well, shuck my corn', 'chisel my tombstone' and 'I'll snatch you bald headed' seemingly at least twice per line of dialogue.
Make no mistake, this is not a good film. It's a cheap piece of exploitation garbage aimed firmly at the hillbilly market, based on a play (featuring Frank McHugh's brother, among others) but with breaks for old time country good time songs and associated shenanigans, and a guest spot as Ed Hatch's dumb girlfriend for Penny Singleton, who is fine really in her singing and dancing though she's as out of place in this film as Bogie is. It's a jigsaw box with a collection of jigsaw pieces from different jigsaws with different pictures on them, and no matter how you work it the pieces aren't going to fit with each other. This even continued to the screening: who could have honestly thought this would work as the other half of a double bill with Boris Karloff's The Invisible Menace?
What saves it from being completely worthless is the fact that it has an enviable cast who know it's nonsense, and with the exception of Bogart, have fun with it. Fazenda is wonderful, but Frank McHugh is fun too. Allen Jenkins doesn't have enough to do. Nat Pendleton played every level of dumb in his long career, but this one went a little too over the top. He does get to show his wrestling chops, which are admirable but hardly surprising since he was an Olympic silver medal winner. Penny Singleton is still annoying but a little less so than she was last time I saw this film in 2005. It made enough of an impact on me then as a unique bit of film that I wrote about it here: http://www.dawtrina.com/personal/film/reviews/swing.html. This time out it still has impact, admittedly for all the wrong reasons, so I wrote about it again.
The Blot (1921)
Written and directed by Lois Weber, this film proudly proclaims early on. Yes, Lois Weber was female, making this a film of significant historical value even if it doesn't turn out to be any good. Hollywood was a boys club for decades, if it isn't still, and it's a rare woman who broke through the door to make movies herself. In fact she was very possibly the first to direct a full length feature, The Merchant of Venice, in 1914. Weber, who also wrote, produced and acted in a long list of films dating back to 1911, is mostly unknown today because few of her films have survived, yet in 1920 signed a contract with Paramount that made the most highly paid director in Hollywood. Note: that's 'director', not 'woman director'.
And it's not an uninteresting film, even were it made by someone less interesting than Lois Weber. It's a social study, a little preachy in nature, that looks at a perceived imbalance between income and class, as highlighted by a couple of families who live next to each other. On one side are the Griggs, led by Andrew Theodore Griggs, a college professor of long and distinguished service who makes so little money that his family are barely getting by. On the other are the Olsens, led by Hans Olsen is a cobbler. OK, he makes high priced shoes for a high priced clientele and they make the Olsens a lot of money, but they're still shoes.
This leads to a combination of 1920s attitudes that would seem surprising today: Mrs Griggs looks down on the Olsens because of their profession and woudn't stoop low enough to socialise with them, but she apparently has no problem stooping so low as to scavenge from their garbage in order to feed her cats. In return, Mrs Olsen looks down on the stuck up Mrs Griggs because she's poor and has outdated notions of importance. The drama that writer/director Lois Weber weaves is full of such 1920s attitudes, making this film a fascinating historical artifact and in its way as alien as anything seen on Star Trek.
There's also a romance involved, in fact a complex web of romance. Prof Griggs has a lovely daughter by the name of Amelia, who works at the public library and is much admired by a number of young men: Peter Olsen, the neighbour's son; the local priest, the Revd Gates, who is also poor; and Phil West, a rich student of her father's who also happens to be the son of the wealthiest of the college trustees. And while West chases after Amelia, Juanita Claredon chases after him. Of course, class never leaves the picture: even West isn't immune, because however rich he is, Grandma Griggs still looks down on his habits of smoking while conversing and not removing his hat.
Even had I not known that The Blot was written, produced and directed by a woman, it would have been impossible to miss the woman's touch that runs throughout. The entire thing is driven by characterisation, with most of those characters being women, who drive much of the film. Mrs Griggs gets an especially huge amount of screen time, tortured by the fact that her neighbours have so much but need so little and the additional unspoken caveat that they don't deserve it as much as her own family because the Olsens are lower class. There's also a pivotal scene revolving around the temptation she feels to steal a chicken from out of the Olsen's window, which sets up a good deal of the plot from then on. The sheer presence of so much of Mrs Griggs, let alone the other women focused on throughout, suggests a woman's hand is at work, though to label it simply a women's picture would be highly unfair.
There's also a highly utopian outlook that would lean towards a feminine touch. Weber has a real point to get across and she makes absolutely sure that it can't be missed, though if truth be told, it could have been a lot more preachy. She then weaves a drama around how she addresses that point and carefully knits all the various subplots together neatly. My only real complaint is how perfectly it knits. The last ten minutes doesn't just see the salary of Prof Griggs addressed, which is optimistic on its own, but the leading man also gets the girl and all his challengers seem at least decent at losing out; the leading girl gets well and happy; the students who don't bother to work get an successful education; and all these people who don't like other people for reasons of class or income suddenly get on fine. In fact it all ends up so happy that it's almost surprising not to find cats sleeping with dogs and the whole Depression fixed in a jiffy.
This is a powerful film though, regardless of its faults and totally regardless of the sex of the person who made it. I'm still in two minds as to whether the message is overdone or not, but it's certainly an effective drama full of detail and nuance and it really stands out over other films I've seen from this era. While it certainly doesn't carry the sheer genius of something like The Kid, it has more depth of character than anything else I've seen that's comparable. In fact that puts it in a slightly strange position: some of the critics of the time didn't appreciate that detail and wished that all that pointless exploration of the minor characters would just vanish, something that seems strange today: it's this very attempt at an appropriately fleshed out story that doesn't just focus on a couple of leads that makes it so interesting. Yet it's a silent film with silent film acting styles, maybe more realistic than was usual but still very melodramatic, making it seem dated to the average viewer today, as dated as Mrs Griggs's horror at buying something on credit. It's sad that this means that it'll only find an audience among silent film afficionados.
Beyond the story, there's also some solid cinematic imagination in play, such as a transition between a pencil drawing of the head of Amelia Griggs and the real thing, in the same exact profile. One title card is shown with a corner cut out to show a scene containing the character it refers to. The various plot triggers are handled very nicely indeed, often with subtle impact, like the youngest Olsen playing in the mud with a pair of shoes that would have fed the neighbours for a month. Either the Olsens don't realise the full value of Hans's products or they simply don't care. There's much to set up comparisons in our minds, subtlety that's as surprising as it is welcome.
While Lois Weber may be mostly forgotten today, that can't be said for the leading actor. That isn't Prof Griggs, who really has very little to do, it's Phil West, played by a 26 year old Louis Calhern. Calhern, while never a huge star, was instantly recognisable to a couple of generations for a long and distinguished string of high profile performances, playing opposite everyone from the Marx Brothers to Marlon Brando. This film is ten years older than anything else I've seen him in, making him seem unbelievably young. He always looked so old and distinguished that it's surprising to suddenly realise that he was once a young man.
And it's not an uninteresting film, even were it made by someone less interesting than Lois Weber. It's a social study, a little preachy in nature, that looks at a perceived imbalance between income and class, as highlighted by a couple of families who live next to each other. On one side are the Griggs, led by Andrew Theodore Griggs, a college professor of long and distinguished service who makes so little money that his family are barely getting by. On the other are the Olsens, led by Hans Olsen is a cobbler. OK, he makes high priced shoes for a high priced clientele and they make the Olsens a lot of money, but they're still shoes.
This leads to a combination of 1920s attitudes that would seem surprising today: Mrs Griggs looks down on the Olsens because of their profession and woudn't stoop low enough to socialise with them, but she apparently has no problem stooping so low as to scavenge from their garbage in order to feed her cats. In return, Mrs Olsen looks down on the stuck up Mrs Griggs because she's poor and has outdated notions of importance. The drama that writer/director Lois Weber weaves is full of such 1920s attitudes, making this film a fascinating historical artifact and in its way as alien as anything seen on Star Trek.
There's also a romance involved, in fact a complex web of romance. Prof Griggs has a lovely daughter by the name of Amelia, who works at the public library and is much admired by a number of young men: Peter Olsen, the neighbour's son; the local priest, the Revd Gates, who is also poor; and Phil West, a rich student of her father's who also happens to be the son of the wealthiest of the college trustees. And while West chases after Amelia, Juanita Claredon chases after him. Of course, class never leaves the picture: even West isn't immune, because however rich he is, Grandma Griggs still looks down on his habits of smoking while conversing and not removing his hat.
Even had I not known that The Blot was written, produced and directed by a woman, it would have been impossible to miss the woman's touch that runs throughout. The entire thing is driven by characterisation, with most of those characters being women, who drive much of the film. Mrs Griggs gets an especially huge amount of screen time, tortured by the fact that her neighbours have so much but need so little and the additional unspoken caveat that they don't deserve it as much as her own family because the Olsens are lower class. There's also a pivotal scene revolving around the temptation she feels to steal a chicken from out of the Olsen's window, which sets up a good deal of the plot from then on. The sheer presence of so much of Mrs Griggs, let alone the other women focused on throughout, suggests a woman's hand is at work, though to label it simply a women's picture would be highly unfair.
There's also a highly utopian outlook that would lean towards a feminine touch. Weber has a real point to get across and she makes absolutely sure that it can't be missed, though if truth be told, it could have been a lot more preachy. She then weaves a drama around how she addresses that point and carefully knits all the various subplots together neatly. My only real complaint is how perfectly it knits. The last ten minutes doesn't just see the salary of Prof Griggs addressed, which is optimistic on its own, but the leading man also gets the girl and all his challengers seem at least decent at losing out; the leading girl gets well and happy; the students who don't bother to work get an successful education; and all these people who don't like other people for reasons of class or income suddenly get on fine. In fact it all ends up so happy that it's almost surprising not to find cats sleeping with dogs and the whole Depression fixed in a jiffy.
This is a powerful film though, regardless of its faults and totally regardless of the sex of the person who made it. I'm still in two minds as to whether the message is overdone or not, but it's certainly an effective drama full of detail and nuance and it really stands out over other films I've seen from this era. While it certainly doesn't carry the sheer genius of something like The Kid, it has more depth of character than anything else I've seen that's comparable. In fact that puts it in a slightly strange position: some of the critics of the time didn't appreciate that detail and wished that all that pointless exploration of the minor characters would just vanish, something that seems strange today: it's this very attempt at an appropriately fleshed out story that doesn't just focus on a couple of leads that makes it so interesting. Yet it's a silent film with silent film acting styles, maybe more realistic than was usual but still very melodramatic, making it seem dated to the average viewer today, as dated as Mrs Griggs's horror at buying something on credit. It's sad that this means that it'll only find an audience among silent film afficionados.
Beyond the story, there's also some solid cinematic imagination in play, such as a transition between a pencil drawing of the head of Amelia Griggs and the real thing, in the same exact profile. One title card is shown with a corner cut out to show a scene containing the character it refers to. The various plot triggers are handled very nicely indeed, often with subtle impact, like the youngest Olsen playing in the mud with a pair of shoes that would have fed the neighbours for a month. Either the Olsens don't realise the full value of Hans's products or they simply don't care. There's much to set up comparisons in our minds, subtlety that's as surprising as it is welcome.
While Lois Weber may be mostly forgotten today, that can't be said for the leading actor. That isn't Prof Griggs, who really has very little to do, it's Phil West, played by a 26 year old Louis Calhern. Calhern, while never a huge star, was instantly recognisable to a couple of generations for a long and distinguished string of high profile performances, playing opposite everyone from the Marx Brothers to Marlon Brando. This film is ten years older than anything else I've seen him in, making him seem unbelievably young. He always looked so old and distinguished that it's surprising to suddenly realise that he was once a young man.
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Sonny Boy (1989)
Director: Robert Martin Carroll
Stars: David Carradine, Paul L Smith, Brad Dourif and Michael Griffin
Here's another movie I remember from years gone by, from its screening on BBC's Moviedrome, courtesy of the always fascinating Alex Cox. However it's also another film that I haven't seen since, so have happily raved about it to people without ever having the opportunity to show it to them. Finally it crops up on TCM Underground, which is a fair place for it, being a rather strange cult film. It doesn't hurt to have three cult figures in the main roles: David Carradine, Paul L Smith and Brad Dourif, along with a newcomer in the title role, Michael Boston, going under the name of Michael Griffin. It certainly doesn't hurt to have it so quirky that Carradine plays Smith's 'wife'.
It's 1970 and we're in Harmony, a small New Mexico town on the Californian and Mexican borders, and Dourif's character is aptly named Weasel. He's a small time thug who kills a man checking into a hotel and steals his car, so as to pass it over to Slue to dispose of. Slue is the local kingpin, who effectively runs the town and the cops who work it, though he's hardly your regular sort of kingpin. He's played by Paul L Smith, so is a huge bulk of a man who has no restraint and no pity, and has no hesitation to take out anyone who opposes him, not least a newbie cop who comes around asking questions and who ends up on the wrong end of a cannon.
Slue lives in a farmhouse out in the desert with his 'wife' Pearl where he raises hogs, paints surreal art and, well, blows things up with his cannon, when not busy running all the local crime. Pearl, in the most bizarre casting of the film, is played by David Carradine, who obviously had a major input into the film given that beyond his highly unconventional role he also sings the theme tune. What's most amazing is that there's absolutely no mention given to why a male actor, let alone a famous male actor, is playing a woman, or even if Pearl is supposed to be a woman or a transvestite. It is simply not deemed worthy of mention because the questions are the answers.
And with Weasel's delivery of a stolen car, the family becomes three. Completely unbeknownst to Weasel, there's a little baby in the back of the car. Pearl demands to keep him but loses the fight for dominance soon enough and Slue gets to do what he wants with the boy. That means cutting out his tongue out on his sixth birthday and keeping him chained up inside a water tower, where he feeds him live chickens and effectively trains him to be his human attack dog. Eventually Sonny Boy escapes and turns the whole town upside down in more ways than one.
All told this is a pretty amazing piece of cinema. It certainly isn't like anything you've seen before, even if it doesn't quite stand up to my memory of it. There are certainly flaws and consistency errors that I doubt I noticed first time around, but it remains a highly powerful film, aided rather than hindered by some powerful overacting and a rather melodramatic soundtrack. This all makes it a brutally honest film, with characters so extrapolated that it's impossible to avoid what they mean.
There are many films that cover the same basic ground but not one of them is remotely this honest. Look at something like Road House as a good Hollywood equivalent. This is the same story, but it has raw violence instead of kung fu action scenes, a couple of bikers screwing in a dump of a hideout instead of Patrick Swayze's butt, beat up cars instead of monster trucks and of course David Carradine in drag instead of blonde bimbos. There are no cocaine parties and there's no Jeff Healey Band. Instead there's Paul L Smith as a huge, callous and tough as nails bad guy and Carradine as his wife. Both are excellent, as are Dourif as the sleazy Weasel and Sydney Lassick as another collaborator without any real allegiance.
In a very unique way, the film speaks to evil and what it can achieve when people look the other way. The key line here belongs to a drunken town doctor who comments on the town's complaints after Sonny Boy gets loose. He says, 'You're the monsters. You let it happen. Now you'll have to pay the price.' It also speaks to the power of humanity, suggesting that even under the worst circumstances a child could be brought up under, they're still a human being with an innate and underlying sense of humanity. Michael Griffin is superb in his debut, looking precisely right as a dangerous but pitiful abused boy.
What's most important is that it speaks: you watch Road House (and many other more traditionally classic films with the same concept) for the ride, you watch this because it's way out there but you leave with the message. Possibly the best comparison in style is Lars von Trier's Dogville, which achieves the same end by avoiding the standard approach: it exposes small town evil by deliberately removing almost everything from the set and relying on the story and the acting to get its story across. Sonny Boy does it through a refusal to pander to any traditional Hollywood concepts and by extrapolating everything until you can't ignore it.
This also falls into a happily decreasing category of film: those that have a small but dedicated audience who are vocal about not being able to watch them because they're not commercially available. You can tell these by reading the comments section at IMDb and noting the preponderance of 'how can I see this film?' posts. There are probably a bunch of these out there, but in order to find them you have to know about them and the problem is that by definition not many people know about them.
I've not posted anything at IMDb about it myself, but I'm one of these people, having raved about it to many over the years, and it seems that it's getting harder and harder to find. It would certainly seem that the only print available to TCM was a VHS tape because it was shown in a pretty poor transfer without the proper aspect ratio, missing a lot of film on either side of the screen and confusing a few scenes when the person talking has been cut out of the frame. Normally I wouldn't want to watch something in this sort of format but there's not really much of a choice, is there?
Until someone can arrange for a decent official release, which may of course never happen, the film lives on by word of mouth and illegal filesharing, whether that be via peer to peer or selling DVD-Rs on eBay. Sixty years ago this would quickly become a lost film, which is scary to think about, given that the current push on copyright would help that rather than hinder it. It's also scary to think about what films were made back then that are lost and forgotten now. Nowadays it's the sort of film that will reappear after an article sparks awareness and the copyright owners find out that they don't have a copy, so appeal to the public with a copyright infringement waiver if only they'll make their illegal copy available to restore. Here's to hoping that won't be needed here.
Stars: David Carradine, Paul L Smith, Brad Dourif and Michael Griffin
Here's another movie I remember from years gone by, from its screening on BBC's Moviedrome, courtesy of the always fascinating Alex Cox. However it's also another film that I haven't seen since, so have happily raved about it to people without ever having the opportunity to show it to them. Finally it crops up on TCM Underground, which is a fair place for it, being a rather strange cult film. It doesn't hurt to have three cult figures in the main roles: David Carradine, Paul L Smith and Brad Dourif, along with a newcomer in the title role, Michael Boston, going under the name of Michael Griffin. It certainly doesn't hurt to have it so quirky that Carradine plays Smith's 'wife'.
It's 1970 and we're in Harmony, a small New Mexico town on the Californian and Mexican borders, and Dourif's character is aptly named Weasel. He's a small time thug who kills a man checking into a hotel and steals his car, so as to pass it over to Slue to dispose of. Slue is the local kingpin, who effectively runs the town and the cops who work it, though he's hardly your regular sort of kingpin. He's played by Paul L Smith, so is a huge bulk of a man who has no restraint and no pity, and has no hesitation to take out anyone who opposes him, not least a newbie cop who comes around asking questions and who ends up on the wrong end of a cannon.
Slue lives in a farmhouse out in the desert with his 'wife' Pearl where he raises hogs, paints surreal art and, well, blows things up with his cannon, when not busy running all the local crime. Pearl, in the most bizarre casting of the film, is played by David Carradine, who obviously had a major input into the film given that beyond his highly unconventional role he also sings the theme tune. What's most amazing is that there's absolutely no mention given to why a male actor, let alone a famous male actor, is playing a woman, or even if Pearl is supposed to be a woman or a transvestite. It is simply not deemed worthy of mention because the questions are the answers.
And with Weasel's delivery of a stolen car, the family becomes three. Completely unbeknownst to Weasel, there's a little baby in the back of the car. Pearl demands to keep him but loses the fight for dominance soon enough and Slue gets to do what he wants with the boy. That means cutting out his tongue out on his sixth birthday and keeping him chained up inside a water tower, where he feeds him live chickens and effectively trains him to be his human attack dog. Eventually Sonny Boy escapes and turns the whole town upside down in more ways than one.
All told this is a pretty amazing piece of cinema. It certainly isn't like anything you've seen before, even if it doesn't quite stand up to my memory of it. There are certainly flaws and consistency errors that I doubt I noticed first time around, but it remains a highly powerful film, aided rather than hindered by some powerful overacting and a rather melodramatic soundtrack. This all makes it a brutally honest film, with characters so extrapolated that it's impossible to avoid what they mean.
There are many films that cover the same basic ground but not one of them is remotely this honest. Look at something like Road House as a good Hollywood equivalent. This is the same story, but it has raw violence instead of kung fu action scenes, a couple of bikers screwing in a dump of a hideout instead of Patrick Swayze's butt, beat up cars instead of monster trucks and of course David Carradine in drag instead of blonde bimbos. There are no cocaine parties and there's no Jeff Healey Band. Instead there's Paul L Smith as a huge, callous and tough as nails bad guy and Carradine as his wife. Both are excellent, as are Dourif as the sleazy Weasel and Sydney Lassick as another collaborator without any real allegiance.
In a very unique way, the film speaks to evil and what it can achieve when people look the other way. The key line here belongs to a drunken town doctor who comments on the town's complaints after Sonny Boy gets loose. He says, 'You're the monsters. You let it happen. Now you'll have to pay the price.' It also speaks to the power of humanity, suggesting that even under the worst circumstances a child could be brought up under, they're still a human being with an innate and underlying sense of humanity. Michael Griffin is superb in his debut, looking precisely right as a dangerous but pitiful abused boy.
What's most important is that it speaks: you watch Road House (and many other more traditionally classic films with the same concept) for the ride, you watch this because it's way out there but you leave with the message. Possibly the best comparison in style is Lars von Trier's Dogville, which achieves the same end by avoiding the standard approach: it exposes small town evil by deliberately removing almost everything from the set and relying on the story and the acting to get its story across. Sonny Boy does it through a refusal to pander to any traditional Hollywood concepts and by extrapolating everything until you can't ignore it.
This also falls into a happily decreasing category of film: those that have a small but dedicated audience who are vocal about not being able to watch them because they're not commercially available. You can tell these by reading the comments section at IMDb and noting the preponderance of 'how can I see this film?' posts. There are probably a bunch of these out there, but in order to find them you have to know about them and the problem is that by definition not many people know about them.
I've not posted anything at IMDb about it myself, but I'm one of these people, having raved about it to many over the years, and it seems that it's getting harder and harder to find. It would certainly seem that the only print available to TCM was a VHS tape because it was shown in a pretty poor transfer without the proper aspect ratio, missing a lot of film on either side of the screen and confusing a few scenes when the person talking has been cut out of the frame. Normally I wouldn't want to watch something in this sort of format but there's not really much of a choice, is there?
Until someone can arrange for a decent official release, which may of course never happen, the film lives on by word of mouth and illegal filesharing, whether that be via peer to peer or selling DVD-Rs on eBay. Sixty years ago this would quickly become a lost film, which is scary to think about, given that the current push on copyright would help that rather than hinder it. It's also scary to think about what films were made back then that are lost and forgotten now. Nowadays it's the sort of film that will reappear after an article sparks awareness and the copyright owners find out that they don't have a copy, so appeal to the public with a copyright infringement waiver if only they'll make their illegal copy available to restore. Here's to hoping that won't be needed here.
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Dead and Deader (2006)
So I noticed that there's a new channel available on my Cox digital cable called Chiller, that shows a bunch of horror TV shows and a bunch of modern movies I haven't seen. The movies mostly look as fascinating as they do awful: of the 24 movies they're showing in January, no less than three of them are in the bottom 100 at IMDb, but they also include John Schlesinger's The Believers, along with films featuring what seems like half the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Charisma Carpenter, Julie Benz and Armin Shimerman, plus other TV names (and former TV names) like John de Lancie, Bruce Boxleitner, Renee O'Connor, Yancy Butler and Dean Cain. More importantly, there are also names I pay serious attention to: John Billingsley and Jeffrey Combs.
This one combines all three categories: starring Dean Cain but also featuring John Billingsley and Armin Shimerman. Unfortunately there's nowhere enough of either, because we concentrate far more on Dean Cain, who spends half the film dressed like Don Johnson, Guy Torry as a wisecracking black cook entirely there for comic relief and TV soap girl Susan Ward as a tough film geek bartender girl. If you're expecting anything remotely serious, you're definitely looking at the wrong movie.
We begin in Cambodia where a US army special forces unit heads in to a 'humanitarian medical relief' hut that broke off communication two days earlier, only to find it full of zombies and scorpions. Soon they're all toast and Lt Robert Quinn comes home in a body bag. The catch is that he wakes up back at Fort Preston, CA right as the coroner begins his autopsy. He has no vital signs, heightened strength, enhanced senses, an ability to heal in no time flat and a thirst for red meat. Yep, he's a zombie.
However, while he certainly appears to be dead he isn't completely zombified, unlike his fellow soldiers who are full on eat people's throats out zombies, probably because unlike them, he cut the scorpion out of his arm and smashed it with a board. So Dean Cain gets to kick lots of ass, the military police get to not believe a word he says and he gets to escape with the black cook to fill up the last hour of the film with virus blocking, ass kicking, zombie killing comedy.
This is not a good movie, make no mistake about it. In fact it's a terrible movie.. However it knows full well that it's a terrible movie and runs with it. In fact it's a fine ride and is a peach of a candidate for a late night beer session. Definitely the more the merrier, and I mean beer as well as drinkers. In fact it would probably get better with each viewing, because of the amazingly high quotability factor, with a room full of drunkards laughing their asses off at all the pop culture references. There are many of them, some are funny and many require a large alcohol intake to avoid being painful.
This is definitely a film that wants to be hip, from the wise cracking black sidekick picking a Thriller era Michael Jackson jacket as a disguise to a mortuary attendant who embalms corpses to the accompaniment of Black Sabbath's You Sold My Soul to Rock 'n' Roll. And you just can't go wrong with a midget zombie castrating a redneck with his teeth. Watch it for any other reason other than late night drunken fun and you're not likely to find it much good at all. You may not throw up your hands in disgust (but you might), but you're certainly not going to rave about it to anyone.
This one combines all three categories: starring Dean Cain but also featuring John Billingsley and Armin Shimerman. Unfortunately there's nowhere enough of either, because we concentrate far more on Dean Cain, who spends half the film dressed like Don Johnson, Guy Torry as a wisecracking black cook entirely there for comic relief and TV soap girl Susan Ward as a tough film geek bartender girl. If you're expecting anything remotely serious, you're definitely looking at the wrong movie.
We begin in Cambodia where a US army special forces unit heads in to a 'humanitarian medical relief' hut that broke off communication two days earlier, only to find it full of zombies and scorpions. Soon they're all toast and Lt Robert Quinn comes home in a body bag. The catch is that he wakes up back at Fort Preston, CA right as the coroner begins his autopsy. He has no vital signs, heightened strength, enhanced senses, an ability to heal in no time flat and a thirst for red meat. Yep, he's a zombie.
However, while he certainly appears to be dead he isn't completely zombified, unlike his fellow soldiers who are full on eat people's throats out zombies, probably because unlike them, he cut the scorpion out of his arm and smashed it with a board. So Dean Cain gets to kick lots of ass, the military police get to not believe a word he says and he gets to escape with the black cook to fill up the last hour of the film with virus blocking, ass kicking, zombie killing comedy.
This is not a good movie, make no mistake about it. In fact it's a terrible movie.. However it knows full well that it's a terrible movie and runs with it. In fact it's a fine ride and is a peach of a candidate for a late night beer session. Definitely the more the merrier, and I mean beer as well as drinkers. In fact it would probably get better with each viewing, because of the amazingly high quotability factor, with a room full of drunkards laughing their asses off at all the pop culture references. There are many of them, some are funny and many require a large alcohol intake to avoid being painful.
This is definitely a film that wants to be hip, from the wise cracking black sidekick picking a Thriller era Michael Jackson jacket as a disguise to a mortuary attendant who embalms corpses to the accompaniment of Black Sabbath's You Sold My Soul to Rock 'n' Roll. And you just can't go wrong with a midget zombie castrating a redneck with his teeth. Watch it for any other reason other than late night drunken fun and you're not likely to find it much good at all. You may not throw up your hands in disgust (but you might), but you're certainly not going to rave about it to anyone.
Friday, 2 January 2009
Sanshiro Sugata II (1945)
We've moved on to 1887 in Yokohama and all the propaganda that wasn't in the first film is present in the first five minutes of the sequel. A young rickshaw driver is a little overeager in speeding his fare into town and that fare takes it personally. Because that fare is an American sailor, he's petty and cruel and so starts beating the rickshaw driver, at least until he's stopped by our hero, Sanshiro Sugata, and thrown into the sea. Sugata is now something of a celebrity, having beaten Hansuke Murai in the demonstration match we saw in the first film. There's even a song that children sing about him, and this latest exploit just brings him even more celebrity.
You see, the Americans are all over the place and a noted American boxer wants to fight a ju jitsu wrestler at the American Embassy, with Sugata being asked to fill that spot. He declines, because he doesn't want to fight for entertainment. He turns up to watch though, to see what boxing actually looks like, and in this film it's a disgusting spectacle with brutal fighters destroying each other for the enjoyment of bloodthirsty savages watching. It doesn't even bear mentioning in the same breath as the sacred martial arts of Japan. Yes, this is a powerful and not particularly subtle piece of propaganda, but then it was 1945 and the Americans were the enemy.
This film surprised me and not just because of the blatant propaganda. While the first film was full of little Kurosawa touches, this one just doesn't feel like his work, even though he wrote and directed and it's nicely done. The first Sanshiro Sugata film was set mostly outdoors with frequent use of clouds and wind, transition effects including wipes and a fluid camera that impressed with its motion. There were also a couple of very nice symbolic scenes to signify passage of time and comparative mental states. Here all of those elements I mentioned are notably absent. Almost everything is indoors with no connection to nature, there are no wipes or symbolic transitions and the camera hardly moves. When it does venture outdoors, such as for the final fight in the snow, it pales in comparison with its equivalent fight in the field in the first film.
However just because it doesn't stylistically match the original doesn't mean it isn't worth anything. The story is much clearer and better defined, while still leaving certain deliberate ambiguities, and it's a much smoother ride. Susumu Fujita is one of many actors who returned to reprise their roles (such as Deniiro Okochi as Sugata's sensei Shogoro Yano, Yukiko Todoroki as his girlfriend Sayo, and Ryunosuke Tsukigata in a double role), and it's much easier to get into his characterisations here. Sugata is a much stronger person, still troubled but much more human. The fights are better, with the exception of the final one which is terribly staged and quickly becomes pantomime.
There are also a couple of memorable villains, who feel like they should be in a colour exploitation film from the seventies, especially the androgynous and insane Genzaburo Higaki, played by the Akitake Kono. He was in the first film, playing a different character, but he looked very different. He has a presence to him here that seems very familiar, even though I don't remember his parts in Sansho the Bailiff and one of the Zatoichi movies. I'll be watching out for him in the future though, and because he seems so appropriate for horror, I think I'll have to seek out The Temptress and the Monk. His last appearance was in a Crimson Bat movie in 1969. I wonder why he didn't continue longer. IMDb doesn't carry birth or death dates but I would assume deliberate retirement or early death.
You see, the Americans are all over the place and a noted American boxer wants to fight a ju jitsu wrestler at the American Embassy, with Sugata being asked to fill that spot. He declines, because he doesn't want to fight for entertainment. He turns up to watch though, to see what boxing actually looks like, and in this film it's a disgusting spectacle with brutal fighters destroying each other for the enjoyment of bloodthirsty savages watching. It doesn't even bear mentioning in the same breath as the sacred martial arts of Japan. Yes, this is a powerful and not particularly subtle piece of propaganda, but then it was 1945 and the Americans were the enemy.
This film surprised me and not just because of the blatant propaganda. While the first film was full of little Kurosawa touches, this one just doesn't feel like his work, even though he wrote and directed and it's nicely done. The first Sanshiro Sugata film was set mostly outdoors with frequent use of clouds and wind, transition effects including wipes and a fluid camera that impressed with its motion. There were also a couple of very nice symbolic scenes to signify passage of time and comparative mental states. Here all of those elements I mentioned are notably absent. Almost everything is indoors with no connection to nature, there are no wipes or symbolic transitions and the camera hardly moves. When it does venture outdoors, such as for the final fight in the snow, it pales in comparison with its equivalent fight in the field in the first film.
However just because it doesn't stylistically match the original doesn't mean it isn't worth anything. The story is much clearer and better defined, while still leaving certain deliberate ambiguities, and it's a much smoother ride. Susumu Fujita is one of many actors who returned to reprise their roles (such as Deniiro Okochi as Sugata's sensei Shogoro Yano, Yukiko Todoroki as his girlfriend Sayo, and Ryunosuke Tsukigata in a double role), and it's much easier to get into his characterisations here. Sugata is a much stronger person, still troubled but much more human. The fights are better, with the exception of the final one which is terribly staged and quickly becomes pantomime.
There are also a couple of memorable villains, who feel like they should be in a colour exploitation film from the seventies, especially the androgynous and insane Genzaburo Higaki, played by the Akitake Kono. He was in the first film, playing a different character, but he looked very different. He has a presence to him here that seems very familiar, even though I don't remember his parts in Sansho the Bailiff and one of the Zatoichi movies. I'll be watching out for him in the future though, and because he seems so appropriate for horror, I think I'll have to seek out The Temptress and the Monk. His last appearance was in a Crimson Bat movie in 1969. I wonder why he didn't continue longer. IMDb doesn't carry birth or death dates but I would assume deliberate retirement or early death.
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Them! (1954)
The state police are looking for something out in the deserts of New Mexico when they find a little girl walking out of the desert in utter shock. They find her trailer just up the road mysteriously torn to pieces from the inside out and as the medics turn up they hear weird noises. They head over to the general store to see if the proprietor knew anything and find that torn up too, along with its owner. They can safely rule out robbery because money was left at both locations, but given that the only thing taken seems to be sugar, what do they rule in?
Well, this was 1954 and world cinema was beginning to pay attention to the fact that it was the atomic age. This one came out in June, five months before the granddaddy of all atomic age monster movies, Gojira, making it something of an original. Of course, as any classic movie monster buff knows, this one doesn't have a giant monster lizard, it has a whole bunch of giant monster ants. What's hard to really get to grips with is that in 1954 everyone knew that there were atomic tests going on in the deserts of the southwestern US, but nobody knew that things like this weren't going to be the results of those tests.
This one took advantage of that knowledge. It's set right in the location where the first atomic bomb was exploded, the Trinity test at what is now the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. That was in July 1945, a few weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus providing only nine years for the residual radiation to die down. Even now, sixty years afterwards, that's ten times more the normal. I don't know what it was in 1954 but I'm sure it was pretty high. And that's about all that your average American knew at the time. No wonder this film scared so many.
It doesn't hurt that this is an archetype: it has everything you could expect from a monster movie. There's a giant mutated menace that doesn't get too much screen time and doesn't get shown right off the bat. There are capable local cops who are out of their depth plus an FBI agent specially flown in. There are a couple of scientists: one elder man with an eccentric personality and his beautiful daughter. There's plenty of science, some politics and even a dab of religion too. We get a little film presentation by the scientist that ends with dire threats about the extinction of the human race. We even get two separate trips into giant ant nests, one with flamethrowers and the other with the army.
What we get that we don't expect from a monster movie is a bunch of decent acting, but the names here aren't your average B movie regulars. James Arness, who seems to have spent most of the film standing in trenches, did make something of an impact as the title role in The Thing from Another World, but was far better known for his westerns, including a very long run as Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. Dr Harold Medford is played by Edmund Gwenn, who had won an Oscar six years earlier for playing Father Christmas in The Miracle on 34th Street.
His daughter is played by Joan Weldon, who was a little disappointed that her beautiful scientist role wouldn't get a romance but that's another of the plus points here. She brings the glamour but she's no dumb blonde. She's there to be a scientist because the ants are the stars. There are also name like Fess Parker and even Leonard Nimoy, who both like Arness would soon become famous on TV. All these talents lend a credence to the story, which started out high up on the ranks of monster movies because there weren't many but remains there sixty years later when there are far too many. It doesn't hold up quite as well as I remembered it from years ago but it's still effective today.
Well, this was 1954 and world cinema was beginning to pay attention to the fact that it was the atomic age. This one came out in June, five months before the granddaddy of all atomic age monster movies, Gojira, making it something of an original. Of course, as any classic movie monster buff knows, this one doesn't have a giant monster lizard, it has a whole bunch of giant monster ants. What's hard to really get to grips with is that in 1954 everyone knew that there were atomic tests going on in the deserts of the southwestern US, but nobody knew that things like this weren't going to be the results of those tests.
This one took advantage of that knowledge. It's set right in the location where the first atomic bomb was exploded, the Trinity test at what is now the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. That was in July 1945, a few weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus providing only nine years for the residual radiation to die down. Even now, sixty years afterwards, that's ten times more the normal. I don't know what it was in 1954 but I'm sure it was pretty high. And that's about all that your average American knew at the time. No wonder this film scared so many.
It doesn't hurt that this is an archetype: it has everything you could expect from a monster movie. There's a giant mutated menace that doesn't get too much screen time and doesn't get shown right off the bat. There are capable local cops who are out of their depth plus an FBI agent specially flown in. There are a couple of scientists: one elder man with an eccentric personality and his beautiful daughter. There's plenty of science, some politics and even a dab of religion too. We get a little film presentation by the scientist that ends with dire threats about the extinction of the human race. We even get two separate trips into giant ant nests, one with flamethrowers and the other with the army.
What we get that we don't expect from a monster movie is a bunch of decent acting, but the names here aren't your average B movie regulars. James Arness, who seems to have spent most of the film standing in trenches, did make something of an impact as the title role in The Thing from Another World, but was far better known for his westerns, including a very long run as Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. Dr Harold Medford is played by Edmund Gwenn, who had won an Oscar six years earlier for playing Father Christmas in The Miracle on 34th Street.
His daughter is played by Joan Weldon, who was a little disappointed that her beautiful scientist role wouldn't get a romance but that's another of the plus points here. She brings the glamour but she's no dumb blonde. She's there to be a scientist because the ants are the stars. There are also name like Fess Parker and even Leonard Nimoy, who both like Arness would soon become famous on TV. All these talents lend a credence to the story, which started out high up on the ranks of monster movies because there weren't many but remains there sixty years later when there are far too many. It doesn't hold up quite as well as I remembered it from years ago but it's still effective today.
Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
The biggest problem I have with traditional martial arts films is that the whole basic concept of whether this style is better than that style is completely pointless. If it was truly that simple then everyone would have forgotten about every style other than the best one and there would be no more martial arts films. In this 1943 Japanese film, we're watching judo rather than kung fu but we're mostly watching the same old story: one style against another, one school constantly challenging another school, that constant struggle to prove superiority over someone else, when there are so many other factors in play.
In keeping with that theme of purity, the usual revenge story fades in the background here behind a theme of personal discovery, though this is kept reasonably vague as such things go and happens pretty quickly, possibly because this was a wartime film and while it was deemed a safe subject, that doesn't mean that other elements would have made it in from the source novel by Tsuneo Tomita had it been made at any other time. There are a five subsequent versions of the story, and the last three are based directly on the book rather than this screenplay. I wonder how much they differed from this version.
The title character, Sanshiro Sugata, is apparently some sort of hoodlum at the beginning of the film, but really that just translates to him being unfocused. He comes to the city to learn ju jitsu but falls in with the thugs of Shimmei School, and on night one he witnesses one master, Shogoro Yano, of the Shudokan School, dispose of them all into the river, one at a time. So he decides to study under Yano and learn the form of ju jitsu that he practises, called judo. In doing so, he finds that he learns just as much about himself, finding calm and focus in the gentle way or way of softness. There's also a mild romance thrown in there too.
It's a period piece, set in 1882, and the martial art of choice is judo, so it all looks a little strange, something aided by the fact that it's directed by no less a filmmaker than Akira Kurosawa. This was his first film as a solo director after a few years of second unit work for others, so nobody associated him with samurai at this point. However the fight scenes, especially early on, are often highly reminiscent of much later samurai battles. The problem is that judo doesn't look violent enough, and I say that as a former student of judo myself, because the moves are all based around holds and throws rather than strikes. There are no weapons to flail around or slash with and no hitting or punching at all, removing all possibility of a punch of death or some such device. Yet we have matches to the death to deal with.
Kurosawa's name resonates through this film. While there's much in common with later samurai films it doesn't feel like a standard martial arts film of the kung fu or karate varieties. One of the key reasons may be because while this is no masterpiece, Kurosawa had already developed an eye for visuals, hardly surprising given that he was a trained painter who storyboards his films as large paintings. There are many shots here that would have appeared ambitious for a first time director, such as the opening point of view tracking shot, or which presage later work. He would return for a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata II, two years later.
The man playing the lead role would also return for the sequel. He's Susumu Fujita and he'd become a Kurosawa regular, making nine films for him across the two decades to High and Low in 1963. I've seen him a few times without recognising him, which is surprising as he so often looked just like a Japanese Glenn Ford in this film. I did recognise another Kurosawa regular though: Takashi Shimura, who made more films for Kurosawa than even Toshiro Mifune. None of the actors really get to do much though, which is a little disappointing.
In keeping with that theme of purity, the usual revenge story fades in the background here behind a theme of personal discovery, though this is kept reasonably vague as such things go and happens pretty quickly, possibly because this was a wartime film and while it was deemed a safe subject, that doesn't mean that other elements would have made it in from the source novel by Tsuneo Tomita had it been made at any other time. There are a five subsequent versions of the story, and the last three are based directly on the book rather than this screenplay. I wonder how much they differed from this version.
The title character, Sanshiro Sugata, is apparently some sort of hoodlum at the beginning of the film, but really that just translates to him being unfocused. He comes to the city to learn ju jitsu but falls in with the thugs of Shimmei School, and on night one he witnesses one master, Shogoro Yano, of the Shudokan School, dispose of them all into the river, one at a time. So he decides to study under Yano and learn the form of ju jitsu that he practises, called judo. In doing so, he finds that he learns just as much about himself, finding calm and focus in the gentle way or way of softness. There's also a mild romance thrown in there too.
It's a period piece, set in 1882, and the martial art of choice is judo, so it all looks a little strange, something aided by the fact that it's directed by no less a filmmaker than Akira Kurosawa. This was his first film as a solo director after a few years of second unit work for others, so nobody associated him with samurai at this point. However the fight scenes, especially early on, are often highly reminiscent of much later samurai battles. The problem is that judo doesn't look violent enough, and I say that as a former student of judo myself, because the moves are all based around holds and throws rather than strikes. There are no weapons to flail around or slash with and no hitting or punching at all, removing all possibility of a punch of death or some such device. Yet we have matches to the death to deal with.
Kurosawa's name resonates through this film. While there's much in common with later samurai films it doesn't feel like a standard martial arts film of the kung fu or karate varieties. One of the key reasons may be because while this is no masterpiece, Kurosawa had already developed an eye for visuals, hardly surprising given that he was a trained painter who storyboards his films as large paintings. There are many shots here that would have appeared ambitious for a first time director, such as the opening point of view tracking shot, or which presage later work. He would return for a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata II, two years later.
The man playing the lead role would also return for the sequel. He's Susumu Fujita and he'd become a Kurosawa regular, making nine films for him across the two decades to High and Low in 1963. I've seen him a few times without recognising him, which is surprising as he so often looked just like a Japanese Glenn Ford in this film. I did recognise another Kurosawa regular though: Takashi Shimura, who made more films for Kurosawa than even Toshiro Mifune. None of the actors really get to do much though, which is a little disappointing.
The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976)
A Man Called Horse was something of a triumph for Richard Harris in 1970, so the only surprise here is how long it took him to make a sequel. Six years later he returns as the man named Horse: Lord John Morgan back in England but Shunkawakan to the Yellow Hand tribe, a branch of the Sioux. He had originally travelled to the wild west on a hunting expedition to find himself. He did find himself, though not in any way he would ever have dreamed of: his party killed, himself enslaved by the Sioux as a beast of burden, then becoming Sioux himself.
This film opens with a brief synopsis of the last, adding that after five years of 'fulfillment in their tribal and spiritual life' he then took that fulfillment back to England only to find that the spirit he'd found was lost. He spends three years in England, obviously now out of place and yearning for his previous life across the pond, and finally gives in to what must have been painfully obvious all along: to go back to the Yellow Hands. Unfortunately by the time he gets there, they've been attacked and driven from their sacred land by a man called Zenas who runs a trading post. Most were killed, some enslaved by the Rickaree trappers, the rest hide out waiting for the great evil spirit to free them.
So it falls to the man called Horse to get them back onto what he sees as the right path and fight to get their sacred land back, which means a new spirit vision and a new Vow to the Sun ceremony, though, like the film, it's a pale imitation of its predecessor. In fact that may be a little unfair. It really isn't an imitation at all: it's a different film with a different tone and telling a different sort of story, only a sequel in name and recurring use of characters. And in fact this becomes really telling, because of how and why the director did what he did and what the consequences of those decisions were.
The director is Irvin Kershner, a capable director, who had made films as far back as the impressive Stakeout on Dope Street in 1958. What he did here, to my eyes, was to make a compromised film. It certainly doesn't tell a story as bleak, impactful and uncompromising as A Man Called Horse. Most of that film was entirely Sioux, with mostly authentic actors, dialogue, language and culture. Harris was naked for a good part of it and went through obvious hardship in making the film, naturally not so much as his character but some nonetheless.
By comparison this one felt comfortable, with many concessions to Hollywood. The tough scenes are not as tough, the use of the Sioux language is subtitled and much of the dialogue is in English, even though it shouldn't be. Far fewer of the actors look authentic, though Gale Sondergaard is surprisingly effective. Not least, the story isn't simply a voyage of personal discovery but something far closer to a Hollywood western. Yet George Lucas, whom Kershner had taught in film school, was knocked out by it. He saw it as superior to the original and on that basis hired Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back. When Kershner later asked him about his choice, he said this: 'Well, because you know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you're not Hollywood.'
Now I like Kershner and I like the way he had a talent for instilling the basic essence of humanity into so many of his scenes, but these are telling comparisons. A Man Called Horse carried an impact, through its blistering honesty and lack of moral judgement and felt like a piece of art. The Return of a Man Called Horse feels like compromised Hollywood product, albeit effective compromised Hollywood product made by a talented director. It's full of Hollywood morality and cutaways from the more salacious aspects of truth. It's superior as a saleable product but it certainly isn't superior as a work of art. If anything could sum up Lucas better as a superlative businessman but someone who doesn't understand cinematic art, I don't know what that could be.
This film opens with a brief synopsis of the last, adding that after five years of 'fulfillment in their tribal and spiritual life' he then took that fulfillment back to England only to find that the spirit he'd found was lost. He spends three years in England, obviously now out of place and yearning for his previous life across the pond, and finally gives in to what must have been painfully obvious all along: to go back to the Yellow Hands. Unfortunately by the time he gets there, they've been attacked and driven from their sacred land by a man called Zenas who runs a trading post. Most were killed, some enslaved by the Rickaree trappers, the rest hide out waiting for the great evil spirit to free them.
So it falls to the man called Horse to get them back onto what he sees as the right path and fight to get their sacred land back, which means a new spirit vision and a new Vow to the Sun ceremony, though, like the film, it's a pale imitation of its predecessor. In fact that may be a little unfair. It really isn't an imitation at all: it's a different film with a different tone and telling a different sort of story, only a sequel in name and recurring use of characters. And in fact this becomes really telling, because of how and why the director did what he did and what the consequences of those decisions were.
The director is Irvin Kershner, a capable director, who had made films as far back as the impressive Stakeout on Dope Street in 1958. What he did here, to my eyes, was to make a compromised film. It certainly doesn't tell a story as bleak, impactful and uncompromising as A Man Called Horse. Most of that film was entirely Sioux, with mostly authentic actors, dialogue, language and culture. Harris was naked for a good part of it and went through obvious hardship in making the film, naturally not so much as his character but some nonetheless.
By comparison this one felt comfortable, with many concessions to Hollywood. The tough scenes are not as tough, the use of the Sioux language is subtitled and much of the dialogue is in English, even though it shouldn't be. Far fewer of the actors look authentic, though Gale Sondergaard is surprisingly effective. Not least, the story isn't simply a voyage of personal discovery but something far closer to a Hollywood western. Yet George Lucas, whom Kershner had taught in film school, was knocked out by it. He saw it as superior to the original and on that basis hired Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back. When Kershner later asked him about his choice, he said this: 'Well, because you know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you're not Hollywood.'
Now I like Kershner and I like the way he had a talent for instilling the basic essence of humanity into so many of his scenes, but these are telling comparisons. A Man Called Horse carried an impact, through its blistering honesty and lack of moral judgement and felt like a piece of art. The Return of a Man Called Horse feels like compromised Hollywood product, albeit effective compromised Hollywood product made by a talented director. It's full of Hollywood morality and cutaways from the more salacious aspects of truth. It's superior as a saleable product but it certainly isn't superior as a work of art. If anything could sum up Lucas better as a superlative businessman but someone who doesn't understand cinematic art, I don't know what that could be.
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