Director: Roy William Neill
Stars: Mae Clarke, James Hall and Marie Prevost
Marcia Cameron isn't happy so she's leaving. She appreciates everything Dan has done for her, she tells him in a letter, but she just can't stand the racket. Now we know she's not talking about noise, because this is a precode: it means her boyfriend is a gangster, 'Dapper' Dan Tyler. Sure enough, he promptly turns up to render the letter apparently worthless because she can tell him that it's all over in person. What Dan doesn't know is that there's still a really good reason for us seeing the letter: it's the only way we'd ever believe that Dan is a gangster.
'Dapper' Dan is apparently so tough and dangerous a gangster that in the very next scene he bumps off a competitor on his own turf, but even doing that he's utterly unconvincing. He's played by Robert Ellis, who is absolutely wrong for the part. He's slow and sure, like these early scenes, but too slow and too sure. He has perfect diction, careful to enunciate every single syllable, and it's all wrong. This was 1931, the year of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, when gangsters hijacked over the cinematic world and there's a reason that we all know who Edward G Robinson and James Cagney are but have never heard of Robert Ellis.
To be fair, he's not bad, he's just totally wrong for the role; and Mae Clarke is too slow and sure herself as Marcia. She's trying to be Barbara Stanwyck but she just doesn't have the personality for it. Luckily for us, there's another couple that gets plenty of screen time and while they're not too crucial to the story, they're a joy to see. They're Tony Pagano and his Trixie Barnes who says that she has Tiffany ideas but a Woolworth's papa, all in fun. Trixie is Marie Prevost who was a fast mouthed bundle of fun in whatever part she got and Tony is Paul Porcasi, who also reprised his role in the Spanish language version. This is the most screen time I've ever seen him with and he's a worthy foil for Prevost.
There is a story in here. Marcia gets rid of Dan and leaves the gangster's life behind, marrying a man who knows absolutely nothing about her. She doesn't know anything about him either, though he proves to be a rich heir, Bob Henderson by name. And sure enough, being a precode, her past comes back to haunt her and the family drum her out so she has to survive on her own, bringing up the son that they don't know about. And if you're well versed in precodes, you'll be able to write much of the rest of the story too. It's not unpredictable, that's for sure, except that there's a real copout of a happy ending.
I don't think the story is really the problem, not that it would sparkle too brightly even if someone injected the pure essence of life into its veins, which patently nobody did. Beyond Marie Prevost and Paul Porcasi, who are blissfully alive, there's not a lot of life here: James Hall isn't bad as Bob Henderson and Nance O'Neil is fine as his mother, but I'd be stretching a long way to mention anyone else. I'm stretching a little to get that far, to be honest, as this is a wooden affair throughout.
I wonder what made this wooden. I don't think anyone's claiming that Roy William Neill was a genius director but he was turned out solid material for a long while, often without an appropriate budget. Jo Swerling, who adapted Winifred Van Duzer's novel, was a highly capable screenwriter, writing The Pride of the Yankees, The Westerner, even Guys and Dolls. And Mae Clarke was was not a bad actress, though she does suggest it here, failing utterly to lead the cast.
Perhaps it's the casting that's really at fault. Robert Ellis shouldn't have landed this part and realistically neither should Clarke. Mae Clarke had a powerful knack of being overshadowed, however important her roles were, and that's not good when she's supposed to be the focus of the plot. To highlight this, I'm sure you've seen her before, but do you remember her? I've seen her in a number of films, even a number of films made in 1931, and to my recollection she's been fine in all of them, but every one of them I remember for reasons other than her.
Her closest claim to immortality probably still lies in one uncredited scene in The Public Enemy where, as Jimmy Cagney's girlfriend, she gets a grapefruit in the kisser. To be brutally honest it's Cagney and the grapefruit we're remembering, not Mae Clarke. The same year she was Colin Clive's wife in Frankenstein but when we think of that film we probably remember Karloff, Frye and Clive, in that order. The best I've seen her has to be as Molly Malloy in The Front Page, also 1931, but that was a film with a dream cast, all of whom screamed out to be remembered. That means three good parts in three classic films in one year but not much to stand out.
Perhaps the most telling example came a year later when she even attempted a solid role in Penguin Pool Murder, a film starring Edna May Oliver, making the attempt as close to deliberately trying to be overshadowed as you could possibly manage. Luckily TCM showed this film amongst a slew of Mae Clarke movies, all precodes, so I'll shortly have more opportunity to try to find a role that she can make her own.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Crazed Fruit (1956)
Director: Ko Nakahira
Stars: Masahiko Tsugawa, Yujiro Ishihara and Mie Kitahara
In this early Japanese youth culture film from the fifties, we focus on two young brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji Takishima. The first time we meet them, they're in so much of a rush that they run onto the train at Kamakura Station without even buying tickets. Of course they're not just eager for catching trains. At this point it's water skiing on their brains but usually it's girls. What else would young men be thinking about all the time? Well this is what made films like this revolutionary in Japan in the mid fifties. At that point, Japanese kids did precisely what they were told, because the culture was all about respecting those older than yourself.
Natsuhisa is the cool one of the pair, a confident girl chaser who smokes, plays the ukelele and sings in a powerful voice that all the girls can't help falling for. He's played by Yujiro Ishihara, the real life brother of the man who wrote the script, Shintaro Ishihari, so presumably utterly in tune with the intent of the film. While Haruji is definitely the innocent younger brother, played by sixteen year old Masahiko Tsugawa, that doesn't mean he isn't interested or even able to find a girl of his own.
And so he does, by accident when he loses his hat at Kamakura Station. He's instantly smitten with the girl who picks it up for him, but he has no clue who she is. Luckily for Haru, he finds her again later in the day, out on the water where she's swimming a long way out. They give her a lift in the boat and sure enough, she oh so accidentally leaves her bathing cap behind and appears on the station the next day so he can give it back. So Haru has himself a girl to take out in the boat and make out with.
It's good timing too because there's a party coming up soon at Frank Hirosawa's house. Frank is the leader of their particular clique, the band of older friends that their parents disapprove of. He looks too tall, probably because of actor Masumi Okada's mixed heritage (his father is Japanese but his mother is Danish), but he has the utter confidence to make him the coolest one of the bunch, very Rat Pack in his demeanour. Of course his house and car and boat can't hurt in the slightest as focal points for this youth culture. His party is a sort of competition, where all these young men have to bring the most and the most beautiful girls with them. Innocent young Haru wins that contest with his Eri.
Unfortunately Eri isn't what she seems. While she honestly falls for young Haru, she has a husband already, a much older American husband to boot. What she's experiencing with Haru is the youthful freedom that she never got round to before she got married. And while this is obviously not a good situation, Haru falling deeper in love with her as time goes by, there's a further spanner in the works. Natsu falls for her too, in his own less innocent and more deliberate way. After all if she's going to cheat on her husband, why can't she do it with him too? And so the coil tightens.
This is a tight and tense little film, acted well by its youthful cast. Masahiko Tsugawa is amazing for a sixteen year old, while Yujiro Ishihara was 22 and Mie Kitahara, who plays Eri the older woman Eri, was still only 23. Ishihara and Kitahara apparently became married after this film, but I don't know how soon. Together they portray something new in Japanese cinema, part of what became known as taiyozoku or 'sun tribe', affluent youths who can spend their time boating and driving and doing nothing except enjoying themselves. In an early rapid fire discussion, they joke that they make boredom their credo, simply because they can.
Everything in taiyozoku seems to stem from Shintaro Ishihara, the godfather of the tribe. Initially it was his 1955 novel, Season of the Sun, but then cinema took over. Season of the Sun was adapted into a film in 1956, as was another Ishihara novel, Punishment Room, making this film with its original Ishihara screenplay the third of three important Ishihara films that year. I haven't read or seen the other two, but this film would appear to reference them in more than just theme: the Takishima's motorboat being called Sun-Season, a name that is prominently displayed on screen throughout the movie.
It's tame by today's standards, of course, but it would appear to be compare well to the similar work sprouting up elsewhere, notably France and the US. The Wild One was three years old at this time and didn't touch on anywhere near as much as this film. Rebel Without a Cause was only a year old and I really need to get round to seeing it. The real marker for 1956 in the US is probably Rock Around the Clock, which highlights how edgy this one really was. It predates the French New Wave wouldn't arrive for another couple of years, Breathless in particular in 1960.
The music is mild jazz, which is as dated as the poor rear screen projection work. Technically this really doesn't meet the imagination of the filmmakers: while static scenes look very nice indeed, with more than a few beautifully framed shots, many of the motion shots are jumpy and often obviously against a rear projection. It's what the film says that matters, along with how the actors manage to make it believable. This was something new, something as un-Japanese as Matsu's Hawaiian shirts and Eri's older husband, both American influences on Japan that the film looks down upon.
When Matsu and Haru's parents badmouth Frank and his friends, they're effectively acting as surrogates for the Japanese establishment, the respected elder generations, who would no doubt badmouth this film and other taiyozoku films in much the same way. That's the point here. Japan was changing in a major way and it was stories like this one that told it how it was. How much of that we care about today is a whole new question, but I feel that as tame as much of this has become, it's still pretty interesting stuff and it's a lot less tame than many of the American films of the same era that tried to be as edgy at the time.
Stars: Masahiko Tsugawa, Yujiro Ishihara and Mie Kitahara
In this early Japanese youth culture film from the fifties, we focus on two young brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji Takishima. The first time we meet them, they're in so much of a rush that they run onto the train at Kamakura Station without even buying tickets. Of course they're not just eager for catching trains. At this point it's water skiing on their brains but usually it's girls. What else would young men be thinking about all the time? Well this is what made films like this revolutionary in Japan in the mid fifties. At that point, Japanese kids did precisely what they were told, because the culture was all about respecting those older than yourself.
Natsuhisa is the cool one of the pair, a confident girl chaser who smokes, plays the ukelele and sings in a powerful voice that all the girls can't help falling for. He's played by Yujiro Ishihara, the real life brother of the man who wrote the script, Shintaro Ishihari, so presumably utterly in tune with the intent of the film. While Haruji is definitely the innocent younger brother, played by sixteen year old Masahiko Tsugawa, that doesn't mean he isn't interested or even able to find a girl of his own.
And so he does, by accident when he loses his hat at Kamakura Station. He's instantly smitten with the girl who picks it up for him, but he has no clue who she is. Luckily for Haru, he finds her again later in the day, out on the water where she's swimming a long way out. They give her a lift in the boat and sure enough, she oh so accidentally leaves her bathing cap behind and appears on the station the next day so he can give it back. So Haru has himself a girl to take out in the boat and make out with.
It's good timing too because there's a party coming up soon at Frank Hirosawa's house. Frank is the leader of their particular clique, the band of older friends that their parents disapprove of. He looks too tall, probably because of actor Masumi Okada's mixed heritage (his father is Japanese but his mother is Danish), but he has the utter confidence to make him the coolest one of the bunch, very Rat Pack in his demeanour. Of course his house and car and boat can't hurt in the slightest as focal points for this youth culture. His party is a sort of competition, where all these young men have to bring the most and the most beautiful girls with them. Innocent young Haru wins that contest with his Eri.
Unfortunately Eri isn't what she seems. While she honestly falls for young Haru, she has a husband already, a much older American husband to boot. What she's experiencing with Haru is the youthful freedom that she never got round to before she got married. And while this is obviously not a good situation, Haru falling deeper in love with her as time goes by, there's a further spanner in the works. Natsu falls for her too, in his own less innocent and more deliberate way. After all if she's going to cheat on her husband, why can't she do it with him too? And so the coil tightens.
This is a tight and tense little film, acted well by its youthful cast. Masahiko Tsugawa is amazing for a sixteen year old, while Yujiro Ishihara was 22 and Mie Kitahara, who plays Eri the older woman Eri, was still only 23. Ishihara and Kitahara apparently became married after this film, but I don't know how soon. Together they portray something new in Japanese cinema, part of what became known as taiyozoku or 'sun tribe', affluent youths who can spend their time boating and driving and doing nothing except enjoying themselves. In an early rapid fire discussion, they joke that they make boredom their credo, simply because they can.
Everything in taiyozoku seems to stem from Shintaro Ishihara, the godfather of the tribe. Initially it was his 1955 novel, Season of the Sun, but then cinema took over. Season of the Sun was adapted into a film in 1956, as was another Ishihara novel, Punishment Room, making this film with its original Ishihara screenplay the third of three important Ishihara films that year. I haven't read or seen the other two, but this film would appear to reference them in more than just theme: the Takishima's motorboat being called Sun-Season, a name that is prominently displayed on screen throughout the movie.
It's tame by today's standards, of course, but it would appear to be compare well to the similar work sprouting up elsewhere, notably France and the US. The Wild One was three years old at this time and didn't touch on anywhere near as much as this film. Rebel Without a Cause was only a year old and I really need to get round to seeing it. The real marker for 1956 in the US is probably Rock Around the Clock, which highlights how edgy this one really was. It predates the French New Wave wouldn't arrive for another couple of years, Breathless in particular in 1960.
The music is mild jazz, which is as dated as the poor rear screen projection work. Technically this really doesn't meet the imagination of the filmmakers: while static scenes look very nice indeed, with more than a few beautifully framed shots, many of the motion shots are jumpy and often obviously against a rear projection. It's what the film says that matters, along with how the actors manage to make it believable. This was something new, something as un-Japanese as Matsu's Hawaiian shirts and Eri's older husband, both American influences on Japan that the film looks down upon.
When Matsu and Haru's parents badmouth Frank and his friends, they're effectively acting as surrogates for the Japanese establishment, the respected elder generations, who would no doubt badmouth this film and other taiyozoku films in much the same way. That's the point here. Japan was changing in a major way and it was stories like this one that told it how it was. How much of that we care about today is a whole new question, but I feel that as tame as much of this has become, it's still pretty interesting stuff and it's a lot less tame than many of the American films of the same era that tried to be as edgy at the time.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Director: Samuel Fuller
Star: Gene Evans
Dedicated with its very first words to the US infantry, this was Sam Fuller's third film as a director and and one that he quite a lot about as he'd served in the infantry himself in the Second World War. This one's a Korean War film, made just as it was beginning, and beyond drawing on his own experiences for this film, he cast another veteran infantryman in the lead role because he looked precisely like a war weary GI. He's Gene Evans, playing Sgt Zack, and we meet him pretty quickly in a very neat way indeed.
The credits roll over a steel helmet, sitting behind them with only a bullet hole to distinguish it. In a very neat move, the moment the credits finish, the soldier wearing it hauls himself over a ridge and past a number of his dead colleagues. He's Sgt Zack, not having an easy time of it as he's been shot in the leg and his hands are tied behind his back, but at least he's alive, unlike the rest of his outfit. He's also aware enough to pretend he's dead when he hears a Korean coming.
Luckily for him it's a South Korean boy, one of the good guys, and sure enough he cuts him loose. In a refreshing change from the normal American war film, our soldier asks the kid if he's a dog face or a gook but isn't actually a racist. It's just how it is and he can say such things while holding some respect for the culture of the country he's in. He adopts the kid and names him Short Round, because he's a big fan of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Well actually Steven Spielberg is a big fan of this film and Sam Fuller too, I wouldn't doubt. This Short Round doesn't get to do quite as much as his later version but what he does is pretty much the same sort of thing.
The Steel Helmet is one of the truest war films I've ever seen. It has no stars, so we have no expectation of who's going to do and when. It has no grand message to rally behind or argue about. It's not pro-war or anti-war. It has no real focus in the conflict of choice. It's not telling us how great the Americans are or how evil they are. It's not spouting patriotic propaganda or decrying it. It's not even illustrating that war is Hell or that it's the means of salvation. It simply tells it how it is, without an underlying point of view beyond truth and reality.
War is simply there because it's there and if you have to be in it, here's how you need to do things if you want to survive. Sgt Zack is the last of his outfit, so a proven survivor, though his survival had a lot to do with luck. He meets up with Cpl Thompson, a medic in the same situation, so again a survivor. Short Round is a survivor too, his parents having gone to Buddha. And this trio run into Lt Driscoll's outfit, who are so green that they haven't yet had much of an opportunity to survive anything. Not all of them make it because they don't have the skills needed.
As they learn from grizzled veterans like Sgts Zack and Tanaka, surviving in a warzone has nothing to do with the human side of things or the standard processes that the green recruits think by. Survival is something reserved for those characters who play the game by its own rules. Your best friends are your boots, your helmet and your gun. You don't stop to get dog tags off corpses because they may be booby trapped. You shoot through doors before you go through them. You don't carry things you don't need because it's just added weight. You drop the moment you hear gunfire. You may follow orders from superiors, but you listen to the voice of experience, wherever it comes from. And even then you may get the wrong answer.
The only real commentary here comes in the details. Some of it speaks to friendship, some to expectation. Some of it speaks to preparedness, or the utter lack of it. The more obvious comments speak to racism, something that Sam Fuller would return to again and again, in films like Shock Corridor and White Dog. Here it's wide ranging. At one point our soldiers capture an enemy, a North Korean Communist major, who tries to fathom what makes the Americans tick, especially when talking to two soldiers from minorities.
Cpl Thompson is black, so can only eat with his colleagues when there's a war on. Back home he would have to sit on the back of the bus, so why would he fight with people who would otherwise treat him in such a prejudiced manner? Well, you can't rush these things, he says. Fifty years before he wouldn't even have been able to get on the bus, so maybe fifty years later he'll be able to sit in the front. I'm sure he'd have been happy to find that not much over fifty years later there's a black president in the White House.
Sgt Tanaka has Japanese heritage, so during the last war he and his family would have been rounded up and thrown into a concentration camp. But he sees himself as American rather than Japanese and had no sympathy for the enemy in that war, let alone this one. He's no angel either, having been a con man, but he points out how many Japanese-Americans won purple hearts fighting for their country.
I could talk about the cast but it wouldn't really say much. The major names are Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie and James Edwards, but only Evans could really be called a leading man. It's an ensemble performance of coarse acting that nobody lets down, not even William Chun as Short Round, a twelve year old actor who only made two films, this being the first. The point is that it isn't about these people, at least not individually. It's about the story, this grand unfocused thing that merely says that war happens and here's how it works on the ground. And in that, it's the most honest war film I think I've ever seen.
Star: Gene Evans
Dedicated with its very first words to the US infantry, this was Sam Fuller's third film as a director and and one that he quite a lot about as he'd served in the infantry himself in the Second World War. This one's a Korean War film, made just as it was beginning, and beyond drawing on his own experiences for this film, he cast another veteran infantryman in the lead role because he looked precisely like a war weary GI. He's Gene Evans, playing Sgt Zack, and we meet him pretty quickly in a very neat way indeed.
The credits roll over a steel helmet, sitting behind them with only a bullet hole to distinguish it. In a very neat move, the moment the credits finish, the soldier wearing it hauls himself over a ridge and past a number of his dead colleagues. He's Sgt Zack, not having an easy time of it as he's been shot in the leg and his hands are tied behind his back, but at least he's alive, unlike the rest of his outfit. He's also aware enough to pretend he's dead when he hears a Korean coming.
Luckily for him it's a South Korean boy, one of the good guys, and sure enough he cuts him loose. In a refreshing change from the normal American war film, our soldier asks the kid if he's a dog face or a gook but isn't actually a racist. It's just how it is and he can say such things while holding some respect for the culture of the country he's in. He adopts the kid and names him Short Round, because he's a big fan of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Well actually Steven Spielberg is a big fan of this film and Sam Fuller too, I wouldn't doubt. This Short Round doesn't get to do quite as much as his later version but what he does is pretty much the same sort of thing.
The Steel Helmet is one of the truest war films I've ever seen. It has no stars, so we have no expectation of who's going to do and when. It has no grand message to rally behind or argue about. It's not pro-war or anti-war. It has no real focus in the conflict of choice. It's not telling us how great the Americans are or how evil they are. It's not spouting patriotic propaganda or decrying it. It's not even illustrating that war is Hell or that it's the means of salvation. It simply tells it how it is, without an underlying point of view beyond truth and reality.
War is simply there because it's there and if you have to be in it, here's how you need to do things if you want to survive. Sgt Zack is the last of his outfit, so a proven survivor, though his survival had a lot to do with luck. He meets up with Cpl Thompson, a medic in the same situation, so again a survivor. Short Round is a survivor too, his parents having gone to Buddha. And this trio run into Lt Driscoll's outfit, who are so green that they haven't yet had much of an opportunity to survive anything. Not all of them make it because they don't have the skills needed.
As they learn from grizzled veterans like Sgts Zack and Tanaka, surviving in a warzone has nothing to do with the human side of things or the standard processes that the green recruits think by. Survival is something reserved for those characters who play the game by its own rules. Your best friends are your boots, your helmet and your gun. You don't stop to get dog tags off corpses because they may be booby trapped. You shoot through doors before you go through them. You don't carry things you don't need because it's just added weight. You drop the moment you hear gunfire. You may follow orders from superiors, but you listen to the voice of experience, wherever it comes from. And even then you may get the wrong answer.
The only real commentary here comes in the details. Some of it speaks to friendship, some to expectation. Some of it speaks to preparedness, or the utter lack of it. The more obvious comments speak to racism, something that Sam Fuller would return to again and again, in films like Shock Corridor and White Dog. Here it's wide ranging. At one point our soldiers capture an enemy, a North Korean Communist major, who tries to fathom what makes the Americans tick, especially when talking to two soldiers from minorities.
Cpl Thompson is black, so can only eat with his colleagues when there's a war on. Back home he would have to sit on the back of the bus, so why would he fight with people who would otherwise treat him in such a prejudiced manner? Well, you can't rush these things, he says. Fifty years before he wouldn't even have been able to get on the bus, so maybe fifty years later he'll be able to sit in the front. I'm sure he'd have been happy to find that not much over fifty years later there's a black president in the White House.
Sgt Tanaka has Japanese heritage, so during the last war he and his family would have been rounded up and thrown into a concentration camp. But he sees himself as American rather than Japanese and had no sympathy for the enemy in that war, let alone this one. He's no angel either, having been a con man, but he points out how many Japanese-Americans won purple hearts fighting for their country.
I could talk about the cast but it wouldn't really say much. The major names are Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie and James Edwards, but only Evans could really be called a leading man. It's an ensemble performance of coarse acting that nobody lets down, not even William Chun as Short Round, a twelve year old actor who only made two films, this being the first. The point is that it isn't about these people, at least not individually. It's about the story, this grand unfocused thing that merely says that war happens and here's how it works on the ground. And in that, it's the most honest war film I think I've ever seen.
Monday, 6 July 2009
Mockery (1927)
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Stars: Lon Chaney and Ricardo Cortez
Highly forgotten today, this is a silent film featuring a few major names, not least Lon Chaney himself, one of the biggest stars of the entire silent era. This one comes between two of his more famous films: a wonderful Tod Browning film called The Unknown and what is likely to be a far less wonderful Tod Browning film called London After Midnight, judging from the reconstruction I've seen of it. It's a lost film, one of the most sought after lost films of them all, not far behind F W Murnau's 4 Devils and the full version of Greed.
Here Chaney surprisingly plays only one role, that of a unibrowed Russian halfwit called Sergei, and he looks more like Paul Muni than Lon Chaney. Then again he never looked the same from one film to the next, so such a look is hardly surprising. We're in Siberia during the Russian Revolution and a beautiful young woman appears to him in the forest and asks him to guide her to Novokursk. I wonder why that never happen to me. Anyway, he takes very good care of her, protecting her in every way possible, even suffering defiantly through a whipping by the enemy without giving her up.
Of course she's not just some random beautiful young woman. She's the Countess Alexandrova, on an important mission to deliver orders to the army at Novokursk. Sergei doesn't realise this, of course, doing his job purely out of devotion and her promise to be his friend, and neither does a Russian soldier called Dimitri who is sent to escort her from the hospital to the army HQ. He takes her for a peasant and tries on the sort of arrogant charm you might expect given that he's played by Ricardo Cortez, riding high himself in 1927 after playing opposite Greta Garbo in one of her best films, 1926's Torrent.
So while Dimitri romances the Countess and gets her avid kisses in return, our dim witted Sergei only gets jealous because she appears to be going back on her promise to be his friend. She does ensure he's fed and given employment at the house of a nouveau riche war profiteer called Gaidaroff, a character played by someone as utterly un-Russian as you could get: the Mack Sennett regular Mack Swain, a regular foil to Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin. Such was the universal appeal of silent movies that he can play Gaidaroff without anyone having to complain about his accent.
Sergei is given work with the Gaidaroff's gatekeeper, Ivan. Now Ivan doesn't just have notably scary teeth, he also has notably subversive ideas that he is just itching to try out on dim witted Sergei, who eats it all up. After all, if every man is rendered equal then the Countess must surely accept his kisses instead of Dimitri's. How could anyone resist a unibrowed peasant when his only competition is Ricardo Cortez? Well, he is a halfwit, after all, and he gets his chance when the army rushes out to save Vladisk from the Cossacks and the reds seize the opportunity.
The cast are decent but don't get much opportunity. Barbara Bedford is an agreeable Countess, whose eyes widen and nostril flare accordingly, but she sinks a little too often into the damsel in distress mode that doesn't quite fit with her obvious capabilities. She's a forgotten name of the silent era, having risen as high as playing opposite Wallace Beery in The Last of the Mohicans, William S Hart in Tumbleweeds and Lon Chaney here, only to drop down the credit list as the sound era took over, from initially higher slots in films like Tol'able David and The Lash down to uncredited roles as the thirties ran on. I don't remember her voice from the sound films I've seen her in but I presume that must have had a lot to do with it.
In support, Ricardo Cortez has next to nothing to do, not even as much as Mack Swain and Emily Fitzroy, playing his screen wife. Future western leading man Johnny Mack Brown was on his second credit and so only gets a couple of lines. It would be another year before his star would rise in Garbo movies like The Divine Woman and A Woman of Affairs, as well as through being Joan Crawford's leading man in Our Dancing Daughters. But Brown was no name here.
The real name everyone paid to see was Chaney's but there's another one that warrants mention too: that of the director, Benjamin Christensen. This Danish director had rocketed to fame with his third film, Häxan, later mangled into an American version under the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. This is only the second of his films that I've seen, though he had done some work on the Lionel Barrymore version of The Mysterious Island, and it looks very good indeed. It ends up as an unremarkable historical melodrama with an inevitable Chaney ending, but that's not the fault of Christensen or the cast.
Stars: Lon Chaney and Ricardo Cortez
Highly forgotten today, this is a silent film featuring a few major names, not least Lon Chaney himself, one of the biggest stars of the entire silent era. This one comes between two of his more famous films: a wonderful Tod Browning film called The Unknown and what is likely to be a far less wonderful Tod Browning film called London After Midnight, judging from the reconstruction I've seen of it. It's a lost film, one of the most sought after lost films of them all, not far behind F W Murnau's 4 Devils and the full version of Greed.
Here Chaney surprisingly plays only one role, that of a unibrowed Russian halfwit called Sergei, and he looks more like Paul Muni than Lon Chaney. Then again he never looked the same from one film to the next, so such a look is hardly surprising. We're in Siberia during the Russian Revolution and a beautiful young woman appears to him in the forest and asks him to guide her to Novokursk. I wonder why that never happen to me. Anyway, he takes very good care of her, protecting her in every way possible, even suffering defiantly through a whipping by the enemy without giving her up.
Of course she's not just some random beautiful young woman. She's the Countess Alexandrova, on an important mission to deliver orders to the army at Novokursk. Sergei doesn't realise this, of course, doing his job purely out of devotion and her promise to be his friend, and neither does a Russian soldier called Dimitri who is sent to escort her from the hospital to the army HQ. He takes her for a peasant and tries on the sort of arrogant charm you might expect given that he's played by Ricardo Cortez, riding high himself in 1927 after playing opposite Greta Garbo in one of her best films, 1926's Torrent.
So while Dimitri romances the Countess and gets her avid kisses in return, our dim witted Sergei only gets jealous because she appears to be going back on her promise to be his friend. She does ensure he's fed and given employment at the house of a nouveau riche war profiteer called Gaidaroff, a character played by someone as utterly un-Russian as you could get: the Mack Sennett regular Mack Swain, a regular foil to Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin. Such was the universal appeal of silent movies that he can play Gaidaroff without anyone having to complain about his accent.
Sergei is given work with the Gaidaroff's gatekeeper, Ivan. Now Ivan doesn't just have notably scary teeth, he also has notably subversive ideas that he is just itching to try out on dim witted Sergei, who eats it all up. After all, if every man is rendered equal then the Countess must surely accept his kisses instead of Dimitri's. How could anyone resist a unibrowed peasant when his only competition is Ricardo Cortez? Well, he is a halfwit, after all, and he gets his chance when the army rushes out to save Vladisk from the Cossacks and the reds seize the opportunity.
The cast are decent but don't get much opportunity. Barbara Bedford is an agreeable Countess, whose eyes widen and nostril flare accordingly, but she sinks a little too often into the damsel in distress mode that doesn't quite fit with her obvious capabilities. She's a forgotten name of the silent era, having risen as high as playing opposite Wallace Beery in The Last of the Mohicans, William S Hart in Tumbleweeds and Lon Chaney here, only to drop down the credit list as the sound era took over, from initially higher slots in films like Tol'able David and The Lash down to uncredited roles as the thirties ran on. I don't remember her voice from the sound films I've seen her in but I presume that must have had a lot to do with it.
In support, Ricardo Cortez has next to nothing to do, not even as much as Mack Swain and Emily Fitzroy, playing his screen wife. Future western leading man Johnny Mack Brown was on his second credit and so only gets a couple of lines. It would be another year before his star would rise in Garbo movies like The Divine Woman and A Woman of Affairs, as well as through being Joan Crawford's leading man in Our Dancing Daughters. But Brown was no name here.
The real name everyone paid to see was Chaney's but there's another one that warrants mention too: that of the director, Benjamin Christensen. This Danish director had rocketed to fame with his third film, Häxan, later mangled into an American version under the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. This is only the second of his films that I've seen, though he had done some work on the Lionel Barrymore version of The Mysterious Island, and it looks very good indeed. It ends up as an unremarkable historical melodrama with an inevitable Chaney ending, but that's not the fault of Christensen or the cast.
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Air Force (1943)
Directory: Howard Hawks
Stars: Gig Young, Harry Carey and John Garfield
Howard Hawks served in the First Great War in the Signal Corps and the Army Air Corps, and there are a number of notable air related movies in his filmography. I haven't yet caught Ceiling Zero, which is a notable gap in my James Cagney filmography, but I've seen the others, at least those that still exist. The Dawn Patrol, written by aviation film mainstay John Monk Saunders, was a definitive picture that everything else copied for quite some time. Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most underrated aviation pictures out there, possibly because it got lost in the mix in Hollywood's greatest year.
This one was made during the war, late on when the Americans had decided to turn up, and in fact it focuses on the reason why they chose to do so. The star isn't Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, or John Garfield, or Harry Carey, Moroni Olsen or Edward Brophy. It's a plane, a B-17 called Mary Ann, so important here that we even get treated to her number: she's plane no 05664. She's part of a training flight with a pretty green crew but it's 6 Dec 1941 and this training flight is taking her to Honolulu.
That's only a day away from a date that lives on in infamy and sure enough, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor while they're en route. They pick up the enemy's attack on the radio as it's happening, so divert to an emergency field in Maui, damaging their landing gear in the process on a field that wasn't designed for a B-17. Before long though she's back in the air though because they're being sniped at and they all get a great view of the wreckage of Pearl Harbor from the air before they head off for Manila. As this was released in late March 1943, the history we're watching was less than a year and a half old at the time it hit theatres, making it even more poignant than it is today. This is so close that they had to shoot the scenes with Japanese planes in Texas and Florida because the west coast was so wary of invasion.
The story isn't really the point here. It's a morale booster aimed at reinforcing why the Americans were fighting and why they needed to keep on doing so. The cinemas were filled with them in 1943 as Hollywood did its bit for the war effort, giving us the sort of examples we see here. This one has a bomber crew doing what everyone else thinks is impossible and throws out patriotic lines like 'Uncle Sam is a pretty tough old gentleman. Wait till he gets mad.' It has gun battles and explosions, and all of them mean something. What else this film has that most its fellows didn't is the reality of life on a B-17, which is what shines out in and amongst the melodrama. The down side is that there's plenty of that too.
There's a girl in Honolulu injured in the attack who is of particular interest to three members of the crew of the Mary Ann. One's her brother, another her boyfriend; the third is an officer who was driving the car she was shot in. The other two berate him for it, but he's the only who's actually been up shooting down Zeros, and naturally he's the passenger they end up taking . The crew chief, played by Harry Carey, has a son who's working up the ranks in Manila. He knows he's going to stay a sergeant but he has hopes for his son to end up a brigadier. Most obviously there's John Garfield's character who is bitter about being drummed out of flight school. Now he's an aerial gunner, but only till he leaves the forces. It takes Pearl Harbor to get rid of his bitterness and bring him back to being one of the team.
The quality of the actors involved, especially Harry Carey, makes these scenes better than they should be, but most of them are full of throwaway stuff. The real value is in the details of the day to day running of the Mary Ann, watching rookies learn the ropes and become veterans in the hardest of situations. There's a slow but sure transition from training flight to war footing. Some of the best scenes are in the perspectives of these characters, especially the pursuit pilot that they transport to Manila. There's a lot of friendly banter between the pursuit pilot and the guys running the bomber that's a joy to hear.
And there are those explosions, lots of explosions. For a while this feels like a Michael Bay movie, merely shot in black and white with some real actors and no CGI. It comes through as an action film but it has real power too and there's one further impact that it has that should be mentioned. Sadly while many of the actors in this film had long careers, the Mary Ann was lost in the Pacific after completing this film and returning to combat duty.
Stars: Gig Young, Harry Carey and John Garfield
Howard Hawks served in the First Great War in the Signal Corps and the Army Air Corps, and there are a number of notable air related movies in his filmography. I haven't yet caught Ceiling Zero, which is a notable gap in my James Cagney filmography, but I've seen the others, at least those that still exist. The Dawn Patrol, written by aviation film mainstay John Monk Saunders, was a definitive picture that everything else copied for quite some time. Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most underrated aviation pictures out there, possibly because it got lost in the mix in Hollywood's greatest year.
This one was made during the war, late on when the Americans had decided to turn up, and in fact it focuses on the reason why they chose to do so. The star isn't Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, or John Garfield, or Harry Carey, Moroni Olsen or Edward Brophy. It's a plane, a B-17 called Mary Ann, so important here that we even get treated to her number: she's plane no 05664. She's part of a training flight with a pretty green crew but it's 6 Dec 1941 and this training flight is taking her to Honolulu.
That's only a day away from a date that lives on in infamy and sure enough, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor while they're en route. They pick up the enemy's attack on the radio as it's happening, so divert to an emergency field in Maui, damaging their landing gear in the process on a field that wasn't designed for a B-17. Before long though she's back in the air though because they're being sniped at and they all get a great view of the wreckage of Pearl Harbor from the air before they head off for Manila. As this was released in late March 1943, the history we're watching was less than a year and a half old at the time it hit theatres, making it even more poignant than it is today. This is so close that they had to shoot the scenes with Japanese planes in Texas and Florida because the west coast was so wary of invasion.
The story isn't really the point here. It's a morale booster aimed at reinforcing why the Americans were fighting and why they needed to keep on doing so. The cinemas were filled with them in 1943 as Hollywood did its bit for the war effort, giving us the sort of examples we see here. This one has a bomber crew doing what everyone else thinks is impossible and throws out patriotic lines like 'Uncle Sam is a pretty tough old gentleman. Wait till he gets mad.' It has gun battles and explosions, and all of them mean something. What else this film has that most its fellows didn't is the reality of life on a B-17, which is what shines out in and amongst the melodrama. The down side is that there's plenty of that too.
There's a girl in Honolulu injured in the attack who is of particular interest to three members of the crew of the Mary Ann. One's her brother, another her boyfriend; the third is an officer who was driving the car she was shot in. The other two berate him for it, but he's the only who's actually been up shooting down Zeros, and naturally he's the passenger they end up taking . The crew chief, played by Harry Carey, has a son who's working up the ranks in Manila. He knows he's going to stay a sergeant but he has hopes for his son to end up a brigadier. Most obviously there's John Garfield's character who is bitter about being drummed out of flight school. Now he's an aerial gunner, but only till he leaves the forces. It takes Pearl Harbor to get rid of his bitterness and bring him back to being one of the team.
The quality of the actors involved, especially Harry Carey, makes these scenes better than they should be, but most of them are full of throwaway stuff. The real value is in the details of the day to day running of the Mary Ann, watching rookies learn the ropes and become veterans in the hardest of situations. There's a slow but sure transition from training flight to war footing. Some of the best scenes are in the perspectives of these characters, especially the pursuit pilot that they transport to Manila. There's a lot of friendly banter between the pursuit pilot and the guys running the bomber that's a joy to hear.
And there are those explosions, lots of explosions. For a while this feels like a Michael Bay movie, merely shot in black and white with some real actors and no CGI. It comes through as an action film but it has real power too and there's one further impact that it has that should be mentioned. Sadly while many of the actors in this film had long careers, the Mary Ann was lost in the Pacific after completing this film and returning to combat duty.
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)
Director: H C Potter
TCM is highlighting 1939, Hollywood's greatest year, and I was surprised to find that I hadn't seen all the films they're showing. Here's one that I'd missed and it's surprising because it would appear to be a Fred and Ginger film that contains not just what they all have (amazing dancing) but what they tend to lack (a plot). The reason for this is because it's a biopic, the Castles of the title being a dancing couple who popularised dancing in the early 20th century in much the same way as the couple playing them here did a little later on.
As we begin, Vernon Castle is a comic who sits at the bottom of the bill and just about gets by on next week's wages. He's the professional butt end of another comic's routines, getting abused on stage for pay by Lew Fields, playing himself. Irene Foote isn't really anyone, until the two of them meet at the New Rochelle beach in New York where she lives. They literally swim into each other trying to save a dog from drowning. He ends up at her place to get dry where she puts on a horrendous vaudeville performance to impress him. In a clown outfit.
Needless to say, he isn't impressed in the slightest but she's thoroughly impressed with him, especially after his impromptu dance off on the New Rochelle train platform against a Brooklyn Bachelor returning from a night out. After all, Fred Astaire had roughly the same impact on a dance scene as Bruce Lee had on a fight: the worst thing the other guy could ever do is simply to turn up. So, as the pair of them fall in love and get married, she persuades him that he's wasting his time on comedy and should concentrate on his dancing. In return he teaches her how and they rehearse a routine together.
Of course it doesn't quite work out that smoothly. They try out for Lew Fields, who can't fathom why anyone would want to pay to see a man dance with his wife. Luckily they get hired by a couple of French producers instead, but unluckily the show isn't for six more weeks so they run out of money waiting only to find that they weren't hired for dancing anyway but for Vernon's barber chair comedy routine. Just as they hit rock bottom, broke and painfully behind on their rent in a foreign country, they get discovered by Maggie Sutton, an entrepreneuse as pushy and capable as you'd expect someone played by Edna May Oliver to be.
So suddenly they're a hit, dancing at the Cafe de Paris for Grand Dukes. Suddenly money isn't an issue, and the world is buying Vernon and Irene Castle gowns, shoes, hats, even cigars. They even change fashion trends, not just in clothes but in hairstyles too: 'Irene Castle Cuts Her Hair' is a front page headline and America's women switch to the Castle Bob. They become household names doing whirlwind tours and performing everywhere. Only the First World War can interrupt their work, as Vernon Castle was born an Englishman and so signs up for the Royal Flying Corps.
This is an interesting film. Perhaps the dances aren't as spectacular or memorable as those in other Fred and Ginger movies, but I'm not the best qualified man to judge. It has Edna May Oliver, so is incapable of being entirely bad, regardless of whatever else happens. It has Walter Brennan too, though he's a strange choice to play the Castle's butler/manager/whatever given that the real Walter was black. Above everything else though, this is valuable because it has far more of a plot than any of the other films Fred and Ginger made together, a real one to boot.
It's always annoyed me that their films had so little substance to them. I understand that people paid to see them dance and they got very much what they paid for; but unlike many performers primarily known for one thing, they had a lot of talent beyond what they were famous for. Fred Astaire was a solid actor, as he'd prove later in his career in films like On the Beach; and Ginger Rogers had a flair for comedy that outshone many professional comediennes. These aren't the deepest roles either would play but they're far more notable than anything else they did together. And yeah, there's some dancing too.
TCM is highlighting 1939, Hollywood's greatest year, and I was surprised to find that I hadn't seen all the films they're showing. Here's one that I'd missed and it's surprising because it would appear to be a Fred and Ginger film that contains not just what they all have (amazing dancing) but what they tend to lack (a plot). The reason for this is because it's a biopic, the Castles of the title being a dancing couple who popularised dancing in the early 20th century in much the same way as the couple playing them here did a little later on.
As we begin, Vernon Castle is a comic who sits at the bottom of the bill and just about gets by on next week's wages. He's the professional butt end of another comic's routines, getting abused on stage for pay by Lew Fields, playing himself. Irene Foote isn't really anyone, until the two of them meet at the New Rochelle beach in New York where she lives. They literally swim into each other trying to save a dog from drowning. He ends up at her place to get dry where she puts on a horrendous vaudeville performance to impress him. In a clown outfit.
Needless to say, he isn't impressed in the slightest but she's thoroughly impressed with him, especially after his impromptu dance off on the New Rochelle train platform against a Brooklyn Bachelor returning from a night out. After all, Fred Astaire had roughly the same impact on a dance scene as Bruce Lee had on a fight: the worst thing the other guy could ever do is simply to turn up. So, as the pair of them fall in love and get married, she persuades him that he's wasting his time on comedy and should concentrate on his dancing. In return he teaches her how and they rehearse a routine together.
Of course it doesn't quite work out that smoothly. They try out for Lew Fields, who can't fathom why anyone would want to pay to see a man dance with his wife. Luckily they get hired by a couple of French producers instead, but unluckily the show isn't for six more weeks so they run out of money waiting only to find that they weren't hired for dancing anyway but for Vernon's barber chair comedy routine. Just as they hit rock bottom, broke and painfully behind on their rent in a foreign country, they get discovered by Maggie Sutton, an entrepreneuse as pushy and capable as you'd expect someone played by Edna May Oliver to be.
So suddenly they're a hit, dancing at the Cafe de Paris for Grand Dukes. Suddenly money isn't an issue, and the world is buying Vernon and Irene Castle gowns, shoes, hats, even cigars. They even change fashion trends, not just in clothes but in hairstyles too: 'Irene Castle Cuts Her Hair' is a front page headline and America's women switch to the Castle Bob. They become household names doing whirlwind tours and performing everywhere. Only the First World War can interrupt their work, as Vernon Castle was born an Englishman and so signs up for the Royal Flying Corps.
This is an interesting film. Perhaps the dances aren't as spectacular or memorable as those in other Fred and Ginger movies, but I'm not the best qualified man to judge. It has Edna May Oliver, so is incapable of being entirely bad, regardless of whatever else happens. It has Walter Brennan too, though he's a strange choice to play the Castle's butler/manager/whatever given that the real Walter was black. Above everything else though, this is valuable because it has far more of a plot than any of the other films Fred and Ginger made together, a real one to boot.
It's always annoyed me that their films had so little substance to them. I understand that people paid to see them dance and they got very much what they paid for; but unlike many performers primarily known for one thing, they had a lot of talent beyond what they were famous for. Fred Astaire was a solid actor, as he'd prove later in his career in films like On the Beach; and Ginger Rogers had a flair for comedy that outshone many professional comediennes. These aren't the deepest roles either would play but they're far more notable than anything else they did together. And yeah, there's some dancing too.
Saturday, 4 July 2009
I Shot Jesse James (1949)
Director: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Preston Foster, Barbara Britton, John Ireland and Reed Hadley
Sam Fuller was an established name in cinema in 1949, but only as a writer. He'd written eleven films but hadn't directed a single one until this one. Made for Robert Lippert, it was pitched as the story of Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar, but in keeping with Lippert's penchant for westerns, ended up instead as being the story of Bob Ford, who betrayed Jesse James. It's an interesting story, just because it is what it is, but it's even more interesting as an example of how few real stories there are and how ingeniously they can be retold.
Jesse James is played by Reed Hadley and we begin with him and his gang making a daring daylight robbery on the Cattlemen Bank in Topeka, only to be foiled by what the papers proclaim is the world's first alarm bell. The front pages thrown up on the screen also play up the James legend, claiming they took no money and that Jesse saved a wounded member of his gang. Well, the money was dropped during the escape and Bob Ford got away on his own from what I could see, but papers need to be sold.
Incidentally these front pages continued to get thrown up on the screen in films throughout Fuller's career. They were the obvious way for him to speak, given that he was a newspaperman before he was ever a filmmaker. He made one film that spoke specifically to this subject, the astoundingly underrated Park Row, but he kept the newspaperman's mentality throughout his life. Whenever I watch an old film where the someone like Clark Gable plays a reporter who breaks all the rules to get his story, I think of Fuller.
Now, unlike the newspapers and indeed most of Hollywood, Fuller wasn't interested in seeing Jesse James as a legend. He saw him as a murderous psychopath who killed the weak and innocent, and that the man who finally killed him did something that should have been done far sooner. This story never leaves that legend even though Jesse James himself leaves the film pretty early on, shot in the back by Bob Ford as he tries to straighten a picture on the wall.
Ford doesn't kill him for the $10,000 reward. He kills him for the opportunity to be free, to be granted amnesty for the crimes he'd already committed and pardoned for this one, and most of all to be able to marry his sweetheart, an actress by the name of Cynthy Waters. Naturally it doesn't turn out quite how he expects. The act that took him only a few seconds to perpetrate resonates and never lets him be. Instead of getting him out of the life he was in, it shapes the life he has left and not in the ways he wants or expects.
He's ripped off by the government, who gives him a measly $500 instead of the promised $10,000. So he gets a job in Cynthy's company, doing a reenactment of the famous incident, only to walk off the stage because he's unable to pull the trigger on his friend again even when it's fake. He goes to a bar, only for a wandering minstrel who doesn't know who he is to sing him the famous ballad of Jesse James, which brands him 'Robert Ford, the dirty little coward'. He leaves the bar, only for a youth to open fire on him from across the street, because whoever kills the man who shot Jesse James will be famous.
Most importantly, while Cynthy wanted him out of the James gang, she's horrified at what he did and really doesn't want anything to do with him any more. When she says she won't marry him, he misinterprets what she says entirely. With the blind eyes of a man in love, he thinks she's saying that she won't marry him now because he hasn't got the money to provide for her. So off he goes to Creede, CO, where they've discovered silver, to see if he can strike it rich and bring her back a mountain of money so they can live happily ever after.
Naturally this doesn't turn out quite how he expects either, especially through the presence of John Kelley throughout. Kelley meets Cynthy just before Ford kills James, right there in St Joseph, MO, where Jesse James has been hiding under the name of Thomas Howard. There's nothing between them at this point but because Ford believes there is, Cynthy talks him into leaving town for his own safety. Sure enough he's right there in Creede, CO, when Ford arrives and he's there at the end of his story too and so is Cynthy.
This is a pretty good take on the story though it's mostly interesting because it's Fuller's first movie, the beginning of a fascinating career. However it's a low budget production, shot in ten days, that looks far better than the money that was spent on it and it lived on in a number of further films. These aren't sequels per se but are either related or speak to the same characters. The most obvious is The Return of Jesse James, another Lippert film made a year later, presumably to cash in the success of this film. Many of the actors here return, but bizarrely in different roles.
Reed Hadley, who plays Jesse here plays his brother Frank there. John Ireland, who plays Bob Ford here plays Jesse there, and his half-brother in real life, Tommy Noon is Bob's brother Charlie in both films. Barbara Woodell is Jesse's wife Zee here but an unrelated character there, though she'd return to the role of Zee for 1953's The Great Jesse James Raid. Tom Tyler, who plays Frank here, had already played that part in 1946 in Badman's Territory and would return to it again for 1951's Best of the Badmen. I guess if you watched westerns in the forties and fifties, you had to get used to actors and characters playing some sort of game of cinematic musical chairs. If it's Wednesday I must be Jesse James, huh?
Stars: Preston Foster, Barbara Britton, John Ireland and Reed Hadley
Sam Fuller was an established name in cinema in 1949, but only as a writer. He'd written eleven films but hadn't directed a single one until this one. Made for Robert Lippert, it was pitched as the story of Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar, but in keeping with Lippert's penchant for westerns, ended up instead as being the story of Bob Ford, who betrayed Jesse James. It's an interesting story, just because it is what it is, but it's even more interesting as an example of how few real stories there are and how ingeniously they can be retold.
Jesse James is played by Reed Hadley and we begin with him and his gang making a daring daylight robbery on the Cattlemen Bank in Topeka, only to be foiled by what the papers proclaim is the world's first alarm bell. The front pages thrown up on the screen also play up the James legend, claiming they took no money and that Jesse saved a wounded member of his gang. Well, the money was dropped during the escape and Bob Ford got away on his own from what I could see, but papers need to be sold.
Incidentally these front pages continued to get thrown up on the screen in films throughout Fuller's career. They were the obvious way for him to speak, given that he was a newspaperman before he was ever a filmmaker. He made one film that spoke specifically to this subject, the astoundingly underrated Park Row, but he kept the newspaperman's mentality throughout his life. Whenever I watch an old film where the someone like Clark Gable plays a reporter who breaks all the rules to get his story, I think of Fuller.
Now, unlike the newspapers and indeed most of Hollywood, Fuller wasn't interested in seeing Jesse James as a legend. He saw him as a murderous psychopath who killed the weak and innocent, and that the man who finally killed him did something that should have been done far sooner. This story never leaves that legend even though Jesse James himself leaves the film pretty early on, shot in the back by Bob Ford as he tries to straighten a picture on the wall.
Ford doesn't kill him for the $10,000 reward. He kills him for the opportunity to be free, to be granted amnesty for the crimes he'd already committed and pardoned for this one, and most of all to be able to marry his sweetheart, an actress by the name of Cynthy Waters. Naturally it doesn't turn out quite how he expects. The act that took him only a few seconds to perpetrate resonates and never lets him be. Instead of getting him out of the life he was in, it shapes the life he has left and not in the ways he wants or expects.
He's ripped off by the government, who gives him a measly $500 instead of the promised $10,000. So he gets a job in Cynthy's company, doing a reenactment of the famous incident, only to walk off the stage because he's unable to pull the trigger on his friend again even when it's fake. He goes to a bar, only for a wandering minstrel who doesn't know who he is to sing him the famous ballad of Jesse James, which brands him 'Robert Ford, the dirty little coward'. He leaves the bar, only for a youth to open fire on him from across the street, because whoever kills the man who shot Jesse James will be famous.
Most importantly, while Cynthy wanted him out of the James gang, she's horrified at what he did and really doesn't want anything to do with him any more. When she says she won't marry him, he misinterprets what she says entirely. With the blind eyes of a man in love, he thinks she's saying that she won't marry him now because he hasn't got the money to provide for her. So off he goes to Creede, CO, where they've discovered silver, to see if he can strike it rich and bring her back a mountain of money so they can live happily ever after.
Naturally this doesn't turn out quite how he expects either, especially through the presence of John Kelley throughout. Kelley meets Cynthy just before Ford kills James, right there in St Joseph, MO, where Jesse James has been hiding under the name of Thomas Howard. There's nothing between them at this point but because Ford believes there is, Cynthy talks him into leaving town for his own safety. Sure enough he's right there in Creede, CO, when Ford arrives and he's there at the end of his story too and so is Cynthy.
This is a pretty good take on the story though it's mostly interesting because it's Fuller's first movie, the beginning of a fascinating career. However it's a low budget production, shot in ten days, that looks far better than the money that was spent on it and it lived on in a number of further films. These aren't sequels per se but are either related or speak to the same characters. The most obvious is The Return of Jesse James, another Lippert film made a year later, presumably to cash in the success of this film. Many of the actors here return, but bizarrely in different roles.
Reed Hadley, who plays Jesse here plays his brother Frank there. John Ireland, who plays Bob Ford here plays Jesse there, and his half-brother in real life, Tommy Noon is Bob's brother Charlie in both films. Barbara Woodell is Jesse's wife Zee here but an unrelated character there, though she'd return to the role of Zee for 1953's The Great Jesse James Raid. Tom Tyler, who plays Frank here, had already played that part in 1946 in Badman's Territory and would return to it again for 1951's Best of the Badmen. I guess if you watched westerns in the forties and fifties, you had to get used to actors and characters playing some sort of game of cinematic musical chairs. If it's Wednesday I must be Jesse James, huh?
The Baron of Arizona (1950)
Director: Samuel Fuller
Star: Vincent Price
To imagine Vincent Price playing a Baron really doesn't stretch our imagination too far, but this is a very different sort of Baron from the horror roles we're used to him. However this is a perfect character for him to play, a ruthless swindler who puts on airs of grandeur and hatches a decades long plan to take ownership of a huge swathe of land in the territory of Arizona. It's also a perfect film for Samuel Fuller, who wrote and directed, because he was a newspaperman at heart and this true story is a scandal from the headlines.
Price plays James Addison Reavis, a unique figure in Arizona history, who is toasted as the film begins. It's Valentine's Day 1912 and President Taft has signed the proclamation to turn the territory of Arizona into the 48th state of the USA. The toast is made by a writer called John Griff, who works for the US Department of the Interior. In his official capacity he tussled with Reavis for a long while and proved to be his eventual downfall. The pair are charismatic opponents, as we discover during the bulk of the film, sharing much more than just a common taste in Havana cigars.
In fact it was one of Griff's books, Historical Handwriting and Crime of Forgery, that inspired him his grand scheme. It was his Bible. At this point Reavis is a clerk for the land office in Santa Fe where he learns all about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American war in 1848. Through this treaty, Mexico ceded to the United States most of what was then northern Mexico and what is now all or part of six southwestern American states. In turn the US government guaranteed to honour any land grants previously made by Mexico or by Spain.
And Reavis builds a claim, a serious claim that the Government have to seriously investigate before handing over to him and his wife most of the territory of Arizona and parts of the territory of New Mexico, including what is now the city of Phoenix along with all mining rights, railroad rights, who knows what other rights. The numbers involved here are huge. At one point Reavis, now James de Peralta-Reavis, refuses an offer from the Secretary of the Interior for $25m in exchange for his territory. Perhaps for him it wasn't the kill but the thrill of the chase.
His claim is nearly flawless and is based on his wife, the Baroness Sofia de Peralta-Reavis. It includes a 1748 land grant from King Ferdinand VI to her ancestor, Miguel de Peralta, Baron of Arizona. There's a stone in the desert that Peralta carved in 1750 to mark his claim. Sofia's parents are buried in the Guadalajara cemetery. The records office in Chihuahua include the family history. Even the original Spanish land grants, hosted in the Biblioteca al Quantra in a Spanish monastery, back up the claim.
Of course, all this is fake. We watch Reavis build it up from moment one: carving the stone, breaking into the Chihuahua archives, finding a young orphan girl to turn into the Baroness. The sheer tenacity of the man is amazing to watch because of the lengths he took to set his plan in motion. He spends over three years as a Spanish monk called Brother Anthony, just so that he can get into their library to rewrite the original 1748 book of land grants, with ink he makes himself from their 500 year old formula. Then he takes up with gypsies to be able to get at the second copy, secreted in the castle of the Marquis de Santella in Madrid, the secretary to the King. It's an awesome story to watch unfold.
Now how much of this is true or not is beside the point. Reavis was real and his plot was real. The fact that he found a young lady to marry to further his claim is real. The amount of land he claimed is real. Certainly many other parts of the story aren't, but as a newspaperman, Fuller understood what we were taught at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: that when confronted with a choice between the fact and the legend, he'll print the legend. This story is very much a take on a real one, a fiction based on fact, an inspiration rather than a reality, but there's so much that is true that it probably ends up more accurate than a lot of Hollywood biopics that, unlike this film, claimed to be true stories.
This film goes way back to the beginning of Sam Fuller's career. It's his second film, made after 1949's I Shot Jesse James, and like that film, made for poverty row producer Robert Lippert. Lippert gave Fuller the opportunity to break into direction, producing his first three films as a director. In return Fuller directed for free, technically being paid only for writing them. The three were I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona and The Steel Helmet. From what I'm reading they provided a solid start to Fuller's career. I Shot Jesse James told its story from a different angle to the norm and The Steel Helmet is a low budget war film with a high reputation. This film certainly belies its origins and outdoes much of its big budget competition.
There are few reasons for this. Fuller was an amazing director who is fast becoming one of my personal favourites. He was an independent soul when there generally weren't such things and he made precisely what he wanted to. He was also a great writer, able to spin his stories the way Hollywood really should have done and often didn't. They pull us into the screen, making us want to be part of the story and when they're over to read up on the stories afterwards. There are a couple of books about James Addison Reavis, who had his claims been recognised, would have owned the land I'm currently living in, and while Fuller didn't tell his true story, I want to go out right now and find those books so that I can see how close he got and what the real details were.
Fuller also got lucky to get two very fortunate colleagues on this film. One is the star, Vincent Price, who carries the film magnificently. He was an established name in 1950 with 25 films behind him, films that include Laura and The Song of Bernadette, but it would be three further years before he'd really begin his legend with House of Wax. The other is the cinematographer, no less a name than James Wong Howe, who won two Oscars for his work and probably should have won a few more. His first wouldn't come for another six years, but he'd been shooting films since 1923 and had worked in the industry longer than that. This film's budget was less than his usual salary on its own but he was apparently friends with Fuller and was interested in the project.
As a result, this film looks very good indeed, for something shot in fifteen days on Ray Corrigan's ranch, and Fuller wrings solid performances from his cast. It certainly isn't perfect, falling prey to many of the curses that plague low budget cinema. The cast do what they can with their roles, but sometimes they just shouldn't be in them. Karen Kester looks the part as the young Sofia, but Ellen Drew obviously has no Spanish blood in her, which is hardly her fault but doesn't bode well given that she's playing a character whose very point is that she is the last of the Peralta line that dates back to Spain itself. Gene Roth is notably American as an otherwise fine Father Guardian of a Spanish monastery. Vladimir Sokoloff is about as Mexican as his name but is surprisingly one of the more effective ethnic characters here. But it isn't who they are, it's what Sam Fuller does with them, and it's obvious here that he knew how it all worked even by his second film.
Star: Vincent Price
To imagine Vincent Price playing a Baron really doesn't stretch our imagination too far, but this is a very different sort of Baron from the horror roles we're used to him. However this is a perfect character for him to play, a ruthless swindler who puts on airs of grandeur and hatches a decades long plan to take ownership of a huge swathe of land in the territory of Arizona. It's also a perfect film for Samuel Fuller, who wrote and directed, because he was a newspaperman at heart and this true story is a scandal from the headlines.
Price plays James Addison Reavis, a unique figure in Arizona history, who is toasted as the film begins. It's Valentine's Day 1912 and President Taft has signed the proclamation to turn the territory of Arizona into the 48th state of the USA. The toast is made by a writer called John Griff, who works for the US Department of the Interior. In his official capacity he tussled with Reavis for a long while and proved to be his eventual downfall. The pair are charismatic opponents, as we discover during the bulk of the film, sharing much more than just a common taste in Havana cigars.
In fact it was one of Griff's books, Historical Handwriting and Crime of Forgery, that inspired him his grand scheme. It was his Bible. At this point Reavis is a clerk for the land office in Santa Fe where he learns all about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American war in 1848. Through this treaty, Mexico ceded to the United States most of what was then northern Mexico and what is now all or part of six southwestern American states. In turn the US government guaranteed to honour any land grants previously made by Mexico or by Spain.
And Reavis builds a claim, a serious claim that the Government have to seriously investigate before handing over to him and his wife most of the territory of Arizona and parts of the territory of New Mexico, including what is now the city of Phoenix along with all mining rights, railroad rights, who knows what other rights. The numbers involved here are huge. At one point Reavis, now James de Peralta-Reavis, refuses an offer from the Secretary of the Interior for $25m in exchange for his territory. Perhaps for him it wasn't the kill but the thrill of the chase.
His claim is nearly flawless and is based on his wife, the Baroness Sofia de Peralta-Reavis. It includes a 1748 land grant from King Ferdinand VI to her ancestor, Miguel de Peralta, Baron of Arizona. There's a stone in the desert that Peralta carved in 1750 to mark his claim. Sofia's parents are buried in the Guadalajara cemetery. The records office in Chihuahua include the family history. Even the original Spanish land grants, hosted in the Biblioteca al Quantra in a Spanish monastery, back up the claim.
Of course, all this is fake. We watch Reavis build it up from moment one: carving the stone, breaking into the Chihuahua archives, finding a young orphan girl to turn into the Baroness. The sheer tenacity of the man is amazing to watch because of the lengths he took to set his plan in motion. He spends over three years as a Spanish monk called Brother Anthony, just so that he can get into their library to rewrite the original 1748 book of land grants, with ink he makes himself from their 500 year old formula. Then he takes up with gypsies to be able to get at the second copy, secreted in the castle of the Marquis de Santella in Madrid, the secretary to the King. It's an awesome story to watch unfold.
Now how much of this is true or not is beside the point. Reavis was real and his plot was real. The fact that he found a young lady to marry to further his claim is real. The amount of land he claimed is real. Certainly many other parts of the story aren't, but as a newspaperman, Fuller understood what we were taught at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: that when confronted with a choice between the fact and the legend, he'll print the legend. This story is very much a take on a real one, a fiction based on fact, an inspiration rather than a reality, but there's so much that is true that it probably ends up more accurate than a lot of Hollywood biopics that, unlike this film, claimed to be true stories.
This film goes way back to the beginning of Sam Fuller's career. It's his second film, made after 1949's I Shot Jesse James, and like that film, made for poverty row producer Robert Lippert. Lippert gave Fuller the opportunity to break into direction, producing his first three films as a director. In return Fuller directed for free, technically being paid only for writing them. The three were I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona and The Steel Helmet. From what I'm reading they provided a solid start to Fuller's career. I Shot Jesse James told its story from a different angle to the norm and The Steel Helmet is a low budget war film with a high reputation. This film certainly belies its origins and outdoes much of its big budget competition.
There are few reasons for this. Fuller was an amazing director who is fast becoming one of my personal favourites. He was an independent soul when there generally weren't such things and he made precisely what he wanted to. He was also a great writer, able to spin his stories the way Hollywood really should have done and often didn't. They pull us into the screen, making us want to be part of the story and when they're over to read up on the stories afterwards. There are a couple of books about James Addison Reavis, who had his claims been recognised, would have owned the land I'm currently living in, and while Fuller didn't tell his true story, I want to go out right now and find those books so that I can see how close he got and what the real details were.
Fuller also got lucky to get two very fortunate colleagues on this film. One is the star, Vincent Price, who carries the film magnificently. He was an established name in 1950 with 25 films behind him, films that include Laura and The Song of Bernadette, but it would be three further years before he'd really begin his legend with House of Wax. The other is the cinematographer, no less a name than James Wong Howe, who won two Oscars for his work and probably should have won a few more. His first wouldn't come for another six years, but he'd been shooting films since 1923 and had worked in the industry longer than that. This film's budget was less than his usual salary on its own but he was apparently friends with Fuller and was interested in the project.
As a result, this film looks very good indeed, for something shot in fifteen days on Ray Corrigan's ranch, and Fuller wrings solid performances from his cast. It certainly isn't perfect, falling prey to many of the curses that plague low budget cinema. The cast do what they can with their roles, but sometimes they just shouldn't be in them. Karen Kester looks the part as the young Sofia, but Ellen Drew obviously has no Spanish blood in her, which is hardly her fault but doesn't bode well given that she's playing a character whose very point is that she is the last of the Peralta line that dates back to Spain itself. Gene Roth is notably American as an otherwise fine Father Guardian of a Spanish monastery. Vladimir Sokoloff is about as Mexican as his name but is surprisingly one of the more effective ethnic characters here. But it isn't who they are, it's what Sam Fuller does with them, and it's obvious here that he knew how it all worked even by his second film.
Friday, 3 July 2009
The Wizard of Gore (1970)
Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Star: Ray Sager
This was an experience. I've never before watched a low budget piece of seventies exploitation horror trash while dining on fine cuisine, but that's what Farrelli's Supper Club offered one happy Friday night in Scottsdale: gourmet brie, salmon and chainsaws. I think it was something new for them too but they seemed fascinated and I hope they continue to play this sort of material in and amongst their standard blockbusters. I've also never seen this film before, though I thought I had. I was expecting a nasty example of late Herschell Gordon Lewis with Henny Youngman and a bunch of go go dancers, but it turns out that's The Gore Gore Girls. So this one ended up being new to me.
The Wizard of Gore is Montag the Magnificent. It says so on the sign but he tells us anyway just in case we can't read. Quite why he's named after a day of the week is open to question, but perhaps it's because he wants to tear asunder our rules of logic and crumble our world of reality. He's a master of illusion, a defier of the laws of reason, a sly deceiver who wants us to believe that we're asleep and dreaming and we can believe it too because he tells us this from a very cheap stage. While. Overacting. Horrendously. Slowly. He's Lewis regular Ray Sager, who is obviously trying to be Vincent Price but comes across more like the aging John Carradine.
To to prove his mastery of illusion he promptly chops off his own head in full Eastmancolor, but hey, he's a sly deceiver, remember? It isn't real, needless to say. He's a stage magician, apparently not a very big one given the size of the theatre and the response of his audience, who fail to react even when he takes a volunteer from the audience apart with a chainsaw. They sit there utterly quiet even when he starts pulling her intestines out, as if they didn't know the camera was running and they were waiting for Lewis to call 'Action!'
But magically Montag the Magnificent puts our delightful volunteer back together again. Her intestines go back where they should be, her flesh heals itself and even her dress repairs. But after the show is over, she wanders off into a restaurant like a zombie and promptly falls apart, her injuries precisely as they were delivered to her during Montag's performance. Now you might expect that people might connect these two little dots but the film hinges on the fact that nobody really noticed. Maybe that audience was asleep after all.
Two members of that audience are Jack and Sherry. Jack is a sports reporter and his girlfriend Sherry is a daytime TV presenter, but this audience is so in tune with reality that they don't even notice. Imagine Oprah sitting next to you at a show and nobody noticing. Yeah, that's what we have here. Anyway, Jack and Sherry happily leave Montag's performance arguing about how real it all was. Jack is cynical and shrugs it all off as cheap trickery but Sherry is hooked, promptly turning her TV show into a commercial for Montag. The. Magnificent. and trying to persuade him to appear live.
He won't have any of it, dismissing her utterly, at least until he touches her hand and it magically appears covered in blood at the spot where she'd touched the corpse the night before. He instantly changes his tune and becomes all sweetness and light, inviting her and Jack back the next night on his dime. Jack really doesn't want to go but he's so pussywhipped he wears boxers with hearts on them, so it's hardly surprising he tags along with Sherry and even volunteers to inspect the metal spike Montag hammers throught he head of a blonde from the audience, pulling out her eyes and her brain with the sort of lingering exploitation glee you'll expect if you've ever seen the tongue scene in Blood Feast.
And so the cycle begins. Montag does his show in the same tiny theatre with the same tiny unresponsive audience. Jack and Sherry turn up every night for free. A new girl is volunteered to be murdered on stage by her boyfriend, but she always leaves alone. Montag runs through the same material, only varying the method by which the girl dies by changing the angle of his table and introducing a new weapon. Gobs of blood and gore appear and disappear depending on the view, as if the editor of the movie is blind. Montag puts the girls back together again, only for them to die after the show in the same way they were apparently killed during it.
And nobody notices. You'd think that Montag, who must have a long running gig at this tiny theatre similar in length to the one Michael Jackson had to kill himself to get out of doing at the O2 Arena in London, would be something of a known entity in the town, especially as Sherry doesn't talk about anything else on her daytime slot on the NBC affiliate she works on, WTVO 17. But no, nobody notices. The press notices that people are dying but the police don't seem to notice anything. Only Jack, sports reporter, is up to the task of connecting the dots.
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that these murder victims die, in their unusual ways, are autopsied and buried all in the same day, so that Montag can dig them up for his collection in some evil lair and start on the next victim the very next night. This would be awesomely efficient policework if only they'd done something more than bury the bodies, which it would seem they hadn't. So Montag continues with his nefarious plan, whatever it is. We do discover what it is, late in the film when Herschell Gordon Lewis decides that we've run through enough cycles. Montag appears live on Sherry's TV show and... well, I'm not going to give it away.
This is a cheap and cheesy horror movie with the sort of effects you'd expect from Lewis and even worse acting than usual. Ray Sager is such a terrible actor that we can't fail to wonder why Lewis kept casting him. His IMDb page shows that he's a versatile talent who has turned his hand to many roles in the film industry with a good deal of success. What he can't do is act, however often Lewis cast him and this was the fifth attempt. He'd played the lead in the last one too, Just for the Hell of It. And yes, that's the title not just the end of my sentence but both could work.
Yet The Wizard of Gore is a mindmelting film, because it has ideas that has depth way beyond the budget. No, it's not cleverly done, because there are more plot holes than you could comfortably imagine and it doesn't all make sense, but it relentlessly throws more twists and turns into the last twenty minutes than sanity allows. It's like an episode of The Twilight Zone where the scriptwriter was running on bad acid and couldn't find his way back to reality until he'd turned out the right twist, and every try he had made it into the story. Freaky freaky stuff.
Star: Ray Sager
This was an experience. I've never before watched a low budget piece of seventies exploitation horror trash while dining on fine cuisine, but that's what Farrelli's Supper Club offered one happy Friday night in Scottsdale: gourmet brie, salmon and chainsaws. I think it was something new for them too but they seemed fascinated and I hope they continue to play this sort of material in and amongst their standard blockbusters. I've also never seen this film before, though I thought I had. I was expecting a nasty example of late Herschell Gordon Lewis with Henny Youngman and a bunch of go go dancers, but it turns out that's The Gore Gore Girls. So this one ended up being new to me.
The Wizard of Gore is Montag the Magnificent. It says so on the sign but he tells us anyway just in case we can't read. Quite why he's named after a day of the week is open to question, but perhaps it's because he wants to tear asunder our rules of logic and crumble our world of reality. He's a master of illusion, a defier of the laws of reason, a sly deceiver who wants us to believe that we're asleep and dreaming and we can believe it too because he tells us this from a very cheap stage. While. Overacting. Horrendously. Slowly. He's Lewis regular Ray Sager, who is obviously trying to be Vincent Price but comes across more like the aging John Carradine.
To to prove his mastery of illusion he promptly chops off his own head in full Eastmancolor, but hey, he's a sly deceiver, remember? It isn't real, needless to say. He's a stage magician, apparently not a very big one given the size of the theatre and the response of his audience, who fail to react even when he takes a volunteer from the audience apart with a chainsaw. They sit there utterly quiet even when he starts pulling her intestines out, as if they didn't know the camera was running and they were waiting for Lewis to call 'Action!'
But magically Montag the Magnificent puts our delightful volunteer back together again. Her intestines go back where they should be, her flesh heals itself and even her dress repairs. But after the show is over, she wanders off into a restaurant like a zombie and promptly falls apart, her injuries precisely as they were delivered to her during Montag's performance. Now you might expect that people might connect these two little dots but the film hinges on the fact that nobody really noticed. Maybe that audience was asleep after all.
Two members of that audience are Jack and Sherry. Jack is a sports reporter and his girlfriend Sherry is a daytime TV presenter, but this audience is so in tune with reality that they don't even notice. Imagine Oprah sitting next to you at a show and nobody noticing. Yeah, that's what we have here. Anyway, Jack and Sherry happily leave Montag's performance arguing about how real it all was. Jack is cynical and shrugs it all off as cheap trickery but Sherry is hooked, promptly turning her TV show into a commercial for Montag. The. Magnificent. and trying to persuade him to appear live.
He won't have any of it, dismissing her utterly, at least until he touches her hand and it magically appears covered in blood at the spot where she'd touched the corpse the night before. He instantly changes his tune and becomes all sweetness and light, inviting her and Jack back the next night on his dime. Jack really doesn't want to go but he's so pussywhipped he wears boxers with hearts on them, so it's hardly surprising he tags along with Sherry and even volunteers to inspect the metal spike Montag hammers throught he head of a blonde from the audience, pulling out her eyes and her brain with the sort of lingering exploitation glee you'll expect if you've ever seen the tongue scene in Blood Feast.
And so the cycle begins. Montag does his show in the same tiny theatre with the same tiny unresponsive audience. Jack and Sherry turn up every night for free. A new girl is volunteered to be murdered on stage by her boyfriend, but she always leaves alone. Montag runs through the same material, only varying the method by which the girl dies by changing the angle of his table and introducing a new weapon. Gobs of blood and gore appear and disappear depending on the view, as if the editor of the movie is blind. Montag puts the girls back together again, only for them to die after the show in the same way they were apparently killed during it.
And nobody notices. You'd think that Montag, who must have a long running gig at this tiny theatre similar in length to the one Michael Jackson had to kill himself to get out of doing at the O2 Arena in London, would be something of a known entity in the town, especially as Sherry doesn't talk about anything else on her daytime slot on the NBC affiliate she works on, WTVO 17. But no, nobody notices. The press notices that people are dying but the police don't seem to notice anything. Only Jack, sports reporter, is up to the task of connecting the dots.
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that these murder victims die, in their unusual ways, are autopsied and buried all in the same day, so that Montag can dig them up for his collection in some evil lair and start on the next victim the very next night. This would be awesomely efficient policework if only they'd done something more than bury the bodies, which it would seem they hadn't. So Montag continues with his nefarious plan, whatever it is. We do discover what it is, late in the film when Herschell Gordon Lewis decides that we've run through enough cycles. Montag appears live on Sherry's TV show and... well, I'm not going to give it away.
This is a cheap and cheesy horror movie with the sort of effects you'd expect from Lewis and even worse acting than usual. Ray Sager is such a terrible actor that we can't fail to wonder why Lewis kept casting him. His IMDb page shows that he's a versatile talent who has turned his hand to many roles in the film industry with a good deal of success. What he can't do is act, however often Lewis cast him and this was the fifth attempt. He'd played the lead in the last one too, Just for the Hell of It. And yes, that's the title not just the end of my sentence but both could work.
Yet The Wizard of Gore is a mindmelting film, because it has ideas that has depth way beyond the budget. No, it's not cleverly done, because there are more plot holes than you could comfortably imagine and it doesn't all make sense, but it relentlessly throws more twists and turns into the last twenty minutes than sanity allows. It's like an episode of The Twilight Zone where the scriptwriter was running on bad acid and couldn't find his way back to reality until he'd turned out the right twist, and every try he had made it into the story. Freaky freaky stuff.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Nobody Knows (2004)
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Star: Yuyu Yagira
Played by an actor with the stunningly awesome name of You, who has a stunningly sexy baby voice, Keiko Fukishima moves into a new apartment. Her husband is apparently abroad, but that's just a story for the new landlord as she's really a single mother. She has with her a son, twelve year old Akira, but that's it, just the two of them. Well, officially there's only two of them. Inside her luggage however are another two children, Shigeru and Yuki, and there's another one, Kyoko, sneaking in by herself.
She sets the rules. No loud noises and no shouting, especially Shigeru who apparently made them move because of his tantrums. No going outside; Kyoko will have to sneak out to do the laundry, but that's the only exception. And because mum is often late home, Akira is in charge when she's not there. Now Akira is a pretty resourceful character to leave in charge: he does the shopping, the cooking, the dishes. He takes care of business. However he doesn't expect to have to take care of business forever, but that's how it works out.
And this seems a little strange. Keiko really seems to care for her kids and she has a solid rapport with them. The first thing she does when she gets home late is to help Akira with his elementary Japanese and they all seem very happy together. But she definitely has some funny ideas. The world only knows about one of her four kids, as the rest aren't just hiding from the landlord. None of them go to school, though at least a couple can read. They each have different fathers and we're led to believe that generally they don't even know that they have kids.
And then one day, she literally up and leaves. She leaves a note for Akira saying asking him to look after his siblings, and she leaves a stack of 10,000 yen notes. That isn't a lot in anyone else's money and however reliable he is, he's still twelve years old. He makes do, chasing down the kids fathers (or potential fathers) when he runs out, but he still only just makes it by the time mum arrives home. She's been gone a whole month, breezes in as if she's been gone for half an hour, drops off presents and promptly leaves again. She doesn't even make it back for Christmas and Akira has to fake New Year presents to them.
She says she's working, but we presume from moment one that it's really her new boyfriend, the serious one that one day she'll let know that she has kids. Eventually Akira figures it out too, by tracking down her work number from what looks like a wage slip, only to find out that she quit a month before. When he finally tracks her down by phone, she answers with a new name. And so the kids live their lives, with only Akira their connection with the world.
This is not a pleasant film but unlike most films that aren't pleasant it isn't a nasty sadistic piece of work. The nastiness is generally not in what we see but in what we don't see: namely parents, who aren't there for those who need them most. Akira has to be both parents to his three siblings and make do without any for himself. There's a lot of sacrifice here and, as you might expect, a lot of sadness, but there's a lot of charm too. We don't see much of Keiko and she acts so well when she's there that it's hard to hate her utterly until things get so out of hand we leave sadness behind and visit heartbreak. What we see are the kids, who find their way to live their lives on their own.
It's these kids who make this story work. Had they not been up to the task, this film would probably have sucked badly, but they're so charismatic that it's often hard not to grin. The subtle soundtrack helps this too, mostly just ambience and never overt. There's a lot of silence in this film and a lot of space too, to let the actors fill out the film by being the characters as the world happens around them. The other huge benefit is that these kids all make mistakes: as good as they are at doing their own thing, they're certainly not perfect, something that becomes more and more apparent as the film runs on.
It's easy for them to give up on chores if there's nobody there to make sure they get done. It's easy to break the rules when there's nobody to enforce them. It's easy to get behind on bills when you don't have any money. So they have to improvise solutions, come up with their own rules, find ways to do much with little or even something with nothing. But the real world has a way of making itself very apparent and these kids have to deal with adult responsibility even before they hit puberty. They even grew as actors during the film because it was shot chronologically over an entire year.
And they're so much fun to watch. Yuya Yagira is the best actor, even though he's a fourteen year old playing twelve. He gets so many emotions across effectively without apparently trying, appearing simultaneously capable but lost. He won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for this performance, making an Oriental double, given that Maggie Cheung won Best Actress for her powerful showing in Clean. This was his first film, but he's made a few more since, his latest being a horror movie from Takashi Shimizu, maker of The Grudge. He's definitely a face to watch.
While Yagira's is the tour de force performance, nine year old Hiei Kimura is the most watchable, playing Shigeru. He's infectious and dynamic and obviously had fun making this film but that fun looks like it may well have come in half hour chunks. He'd be a great kid to play with but you'd probably want to send him home pretty soon. The girls are played by Ayu Kitaura (Kyoko) and Momoko Shimizu (Yuki), and they act well beyond their years, being twelve and seven respectively. They round out an excellent but hardly traditional cast.
It's hardly a traditional film either. There is absolutely nothing flash here whatsoever, not just no CGI but nothing even remotely close to a special effect. It isn't just that there are no car chases, no explosions, no giant robots, the closest we get to any sort of cinematic device is a shot late on where the brightness is turned up so much that everything fades into the white. Far from being a slick piece of cinematic art, it's able to be professional without professionals. There aren't any real actors in the film. There's hardly a soundtrack. Whole swathes of the film appear to be shot in natural light or a lack of it. And yet it's rivetting viewing, for over two hours and twenty minutes.
Writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda deserves much praise, and I'll definitely be looking out for more of his work. I'd love to know the background to the film, what drove him to make it. Japan is a strange place, culturally, but I wasn't aware of a hidden part of society comprised entirely of abandoned children making their way as best they can. Apparently the first draft of the script was written a whole fifteen years before the film was made, suggesting that it's something close to his heart. I hope there's an English language interview out there somewhere on the web.
Star: Yuyu Yagira
Played by an actor with the stunningly awesome name of You, who has a stunningly sexy baby voice, Keiko Fukishima moves into a new apartment. Her husband is apparently abroad, but that's just a story for the new landlord as she's really a single mother. She has with her a son, twelve year old Akira, but that's it, just the two of them. Well, officially there's only two of them. Inside her luggage however are another two children, Shigeru and Yuki, and there's another one, Kyoko, sneaking in by herself.
She sets the rules. No loud noises and no shouting, especially Shigeru who apparently made them move because of his tantrums. No going outside; Kyoko will have to sneak out to do the laundry, but that's the only exception. And because mum is often late home, Akira is in charge when she's not there. Now Akira is a pretty resourceful character to leave in charge: he does the shopping, the cooking, the dishes. He takes care of business. However he doesn't expect to have to take care of business forever, but that's how it works out.
And this seems a little strange. Keiko really seems to care for her kids and she has a solid rapport with them. The first thing she does when she gets home late is to help Akira with his elementary Japanese and they all seem very happy together. But she definitely has some funny ideas. The world only knows about one of her four kids, as the rest aren't just hiding from the landlord. None of them go to school, though at least a couple can read. They each have different fathers and we're led to believe that generally they don't even know that they have kids.
And then one day, she literally up and leaves. She leaves a note for Akira saying asking him to look after his siblings, and she leaves a stack of 10,000 yen notes. That isn't a lot in anyone else's money and however reliable he is, he's still twelve years old. He makes do, chasing down the kids fathers (or potential fathers) when he runs out, but he still only just makes it by the time mum arrives home. She's been gone a whole month, breezes in as if she's been gone for half an hour, drops off presents and promptly leaves again. She doesn't even make it back for Christmas and Akira has to fake New Year presents to them.
She says she's working, but we presume from moment one that it's really her new boyfriend, the serious one that one day she'll let know that she has kids. Eventually Akira figures it out too, by tracking down her work number from what looks like a wage slip, only to find out that she quit a month before. When he finally tracks her down by phone, she answers with a new name. And so the kids live their lives, with only Akira their connection with the world.
This is not a pleasant film but unlike most films that aren't pleasant it isn't a nasty sadistic piece of work. The nastiness is generally not in what we see but in what we don't see: namely parents, who aren't there for those who need them most. Akira has to be both parents to his three siblings and make do without any for himself. There's a lot of sacrifice here and, as you might expect, a lot of sadness, but there's a lot of charm too. We don't see much of Keiko and she acts so well when she's there that it's hard to hate her utterly until things get so out of hand we leave sadness behind and visit heartbreak. What we see are the kids, who find their way to live their lives on their own.
It's these kids who make this story work. Had they not been up to the task, this film would probably have sucked badly, but they're so charismatic that it's often hard not to grin. The subtle soundtrack helps this too, mostly just ambience and never overt. There's a lot of silence in this film and a lot of space too, to let the actors fill out the film by being the characters as the world happens around them. The other huge benefit is that these kids all make mistakes: as good as they are at doing their own thing, they're certainly not perfect, something that becomes more and more apparent as the film runs on.
It's easy for them to give up on chores if there's nobody there to make sure they get done. It's easy to break the rules when there's nobody to enforce them. It's easy to get behind on bills when you don't have any money. So they have to improvise solutions, come up with their own rules, find ways to do much with little or even something with nothing. But the real world has a way of making itself very apparent and these kids have to deal with adult responsibility even before they hit puberty. They even grew as actors during the film because it was shot chronologically over an entire year.
And they're so much fun to watch. Yuya Yagira is the best actor, even though he's a fourteen year old playing twelve. He gets so many emotions across effectively without apparently trying, appearing simultaneously capable but lost. He won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for this performance, making an Oriental double, given that Maggie Cheung won Best Actress for her powerful showing in Clean. This was his first film, but he's made a few more since, his latest being a horror movie from Takashi Shimizu, maker of The Grudge. He's definitely a face to watch.
While Yagira's is the tour de force performance, nine year old Hiei Kimura is the most watchable, playing Shigeru. He's infectious and dynamic and obviously had fun making this film but that fun looks like it may well have come in half hour chunks. He'd be a great kid to play with but you'd probably want to send him home pretty soon. The girls are played by Ayu Kitaura (Kyoko) and Momoko Shimizu (Yuki), and they act well beyond their years, being twelve and seven respectively. They round out an excellent but hardly traditional cast.
It's hardly a traditional film either. There is absolutely nothing flash here whatsoever, not just no CGI but nothing even remotely close to a special effect. It isn't just that there are no car chases, no explosions, no giant robots, the closest we get to any sort of cinematic device is a shot late on where the brightness is turned up so much that everything fades into the white. Far from being a slick piece of cinematic art, it's able to be professional without professionals. There aren't any real actors in the film. There's hardly a soundtrack. Whole swathes of the film appear to be shot in natural light or a lack of it. And yet it's rivetting viewing, for over two hours and twenty minutes.
Writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda deserves much praise, and I'll definitely be looking out for more of his work. I'd love to know the background to the film, what drove him to make it. Japan is a strange place, culturally, but I wasn't aware of a hidden part of society comprised entirely of abandoned children making their way as best they can. Apparently the first draft of the script was written a whole fifteen years before the film was made, suggesting that it's something close to his heart. I hope there's an English language interview out there somewhere on the web.
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