The Face on the Barroom Floor (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Cecile Arnold and Jess Dandy

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

It has to be said that The Face on the Barroom Floor is one of Chaplin's weaker films, but it does carry some interest because of what he tried to achieve. It pays homage to the Keystone formula, but without really following it. Sure, Chaplin plays a drunk for the umpteenth time, but this time he's one with a real story to tell for a change. Things escalate towards the end of the film with some slapstick fighting, but it could hardly be called a standard Keystone ending, with no chase, no cops and no bricks thrown. It's all familiar material but it's presented in a completely different way with a completely different framework. It's a short comedy based on a poem, which is both seriously interpreted and parodied on screen, with the very last line transformed into a gag. It seems tailor made for Chaplin's Little Tramp, but it predates him by decades. Perhaps the fact that Chaplin adapted it to the screen soon into the period at Keystone when he had relative creative freedom suggests that it may have been an inspiration for his character.

The poem is by Hugh Antoine d'Arcy, French by birth, who came to the United States via England, where he studied at Ipswich University and became an actor at Bristol's Theatre Royal and later in London. He gave up acting in the States, becoming instead a business manager, taking care of other stage actors of renown. It was in 1887 that he wrote The Face Upon the Floor, a poem in ballad form which saw its first publication that year in the New York Dispatch. While it's far from great literature, it immediately caught on, becoming the title piece in The Face Upon the Floor and Other Ballads, a 1890 collection of d'Arcy's work, a year after being anthologised in Standard Recitations. Maurice Barrymore, the patriarch of the Barrymore acting dynasty that was stage royalty at the time and is still notable today, regarded it as a favourite recitation of his. It was also promptly adapted into song under its current title, possibly in a cunning attempt to evade d'Arcy's copyright.

The origin of the story is utterly unproved, but d'Arcy claimed that it originated in truth. As he told it, he was at a bar in Manhattan called Joe Smith's when a bum entered and was promptly evicted. Feeling for the man, d'Arcy followed him to give him a drink and some money and, when he asked what the man did for a living, was told that he was an artist. Thus arrived the inspiration for the poem about an artist who turned to drink because he lost Madeline, the love of his life, to a friend who had also modelled for him. Quite why it touched a nerve I have no idea, but it prompted a few films, with or without a hyphen in the title. Certainly at least three were based directly on the poem: the first was by Edwin S Porter at Edison's company in 1908, Chaplin's parody followed in 1914 with a lost hour long feature from John Ford arriving in 1923 at Fox. Later pictures also carried the name, but are less likely to be direct adaptations from the poem than melodramas inspired by it and its ironic adoption by prohibitionists.

Chaplin's take on the poem looks relatively standard to us today, but it was a real departure for him back in 1914. He plays the lead, of course, the drunk staggering into a bar and asking for someone to foot him a drink because he used to do that for others. In return he tells them a story, the story of how he came to be in such a state, the story that's recounted in the poem. What's new is that we see this in flashback, an approach that Chaplin had never used before and, according to Jeffrey Vance, would only use twice more in the future, in 1918's Shoulder Arms and in Limelight, released an entire era later in 1952. Even within the flashback, things look notably different from anything seen in his Keystone films thus far. We're on a static set, of course, but it's designed with far more elegance than was the norm. It's shot from an angle, for a start, and its shape doesn't follow the usual right angles. There's a staircase at the back of the room, at least some of whose stairs are real, and the set decoration is done with a careful eye.

He's a neat painter, retaining the toothbrush moustache but in a much nicer suit with a bow tie, and he's painting his lady love, Madeline, though her pose isn't what's showing up on his canvas. Then again, the addition we watch him make isn't her at all, but an imaginary urn on a stand in front of her that evolves from her curvacious rump. There are a few minor gags here but it's mostly played straight. When we return to the flashback to watch him paint 'a fair haired boy, a friend of mine', the humour comes less from gags and more from the fact that he's played by the rotund and far older Jess Dandy, with precious little hair at all, so that the idea that Madeline might fall for his 'dreamy eyes' is at once ludicrous and far more painful for the artist who can't help but compare himself to his former friend and wonder at how he came off second best. Cecile Arnold, who had debuted as one of the dancers in The Property Man earlier in the month, makes Madeline look like a Hollywood starlet; Jess Dandy looks like a fatter Hercule Poirot.

I have to admit I got a mild kick out of Chaplin's first attempt at parody. The humour is more subtle and sophisticated than anything else Keystone was turning out, pointing the way firmly towards the future. Even though the tramp isn't a tramp for even half the picture, his character is built to ensure at least as much sympathy as laughs from the audience, if not more. While there's always another laugh about to arrive, there's a lot more drama here than we're used to in these Keystone pictures; Chaplin was clearly experimenting to see what other emotions he could draw out of his audience. And while this never aims to be another laugh a minute slapstick riot of the sort that Mack Sennett expected, it is funny in its way. Both the last points are ably highlighted by the scene we see after Madeline leaves with the 'fair haired boy' and the neatly dressed artist turns into the tramp we know in the park we know. Sitting on a bench, he's passed by his friend with Madeline and five children in tow. He clearly thinks Charlie has it better.

And so we reach the title, at which point the parody reaches its peak. Already Chaplin has manipulated the poem for comedic effect and added extra scenes to enforce that take, but here he has a blast. In the poem, the artist takes a piece of chalk 'to sketch a face that well might buy the soul of any man' there on the bar-room floor, but adding 'another lock upon that shapely head, with a fearful shriek, he leaped and fell across the picture - dead!' Needless to say that's not how it goes down in Chaplin's version. Finding it difficult to even reach the floor, the staggering drunk draws a face so stunningly generic that his fellow drinkers kick him out of the bar, generating at least an approximation of the riotous finalés that Sennett tended to expect at his studio. Of course, he gets back in to finish up his picture and collapse dead upon it, but Chaplin adds a further word to the last line. He's not dead, he's just dead drunk. He was always a particularly acrobatic drunk and he collapses impressively here over his childlike work.

That's about it for Chaplin's film, certainly a more interesting entry in his Keystone filmography than an entertaining one, if one that deserves a better reputation than it's garnered. There is a further episode in the poem's history though that has outlasted Chaplin's parody, even if the story behind it is told in many different ways. An illustrator for the Denver Post by the name of Herndon Davis really did paint a face on the bar-room floor of the Teller House in Central City, CO, in 1936, which became a tourist attraction that in turn inspired a chamber opera by Henry Mollicone. Some versions suggest that he did so to provide a punchline to an itinerant actor's frequent recitation of the poem there, an added joke being that it was the face of his own wife, Juanita, who was a prohibitionist. Others suggest that it was an attempt to leave something of him behind after a heated argument there with a local lady with much influence, before he left Colorado. Whatever the truth, it's sad that more see Davis's painting each year than Chaplin's film.

Important Sources:
Bart Anderson - Whose Face is It?
Martin Gardner (ed) - Famous Poems from Bygone Days (1995)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The Face on the Barroom Floor can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in August.

The Death Factory Bloodletting (2008)

Director: Sean Tretta
Stars: Claudia Vargas, Noah Todd, Shane Dean, Kareem McRoy, David C Hayes, Jeanna Coker, Josh Bingenheimer, Timothy Pontecelli, Joth Andrews, Nadine, Shareese Hegna, and Michelle Mousel

The Prometheus Project may well be Sean Tretta's most ambitious feature and Death of a Ghost Hunter may be his most consistent work thus far, but both titles are likely to be lost to future pictures. As M is for Matchmaker, his top 12 entry to the ABCs of Death 2 competition last year highlights, his work is notably getting better. Somehow though, I don't believe The Death Factory Bloodletting will ever lose its throne as his guilty pleasure picture. It's not a great film by any measure, though it is in a whole different league to Death Factory, its vaguely related predecessor, but it throws enough edgy material at the wall for a whole dubious bunch of it to stick. Certainly when I think of a number of the film's actors, the twisted characters they play here are the ones that spring quickest to mind, however much I see those actors in other, often better films. Shane Dean has made movies as impressive as Deadfall Trail and David C Hayes has been in every other Arizona feature of the last decade, but these are their archetypal screen characters.

For half its running time, The Death Factory Bloodletting is a massive amount of fun, precisely the sort of film that generates a cult following, its fatal flaw being that it runs out of steam, feeding that first half so well that there's relatively little left for the second half, which drags quite a bit and so loses our attention. It takes very little to figure out what went wrong: just basic quantifying of how much awesome populates the first half and then trying to figure out what's left in the second. The problem isn't that the second half is filler, it's just inherently less interesting because most of the cool aspects have been dealt with already and what's left is unable to drive the film forward. Trying to reedit this down to an hour by chopping away half an hour of less interesting material wouldn't do the trick; Tretta would need to replace it with footage that bulks up all the characters who don't make it that far, footage that was probably never shot. His error was simply to make his disposable characters so interesting that we missed them when they were gone.

We quickly meet the ostensible good guy and bad guy. Ana Romero is the good guy who's documenting a journey for posterity, one that she knows she may not survive. She'll be attending an event known as the Bloodletting, the ritualistic murder of a young woman known only as the Object. Denny is the bad guy, as he's running it, even though he seems to be a highly unstable religious freak who wants to help homeless people but kills them instead when he thinks they're doing drugs. The Bloodletting is as secret as it could be. You can't even get invited unless you're a major trader in illegal material who lives on the darknet. If you're invited, you'll have to pay a couple of grand to get in and you'll have no guarantee of getting out again. Bloodletting minions will duct tape your mouth, tie your hands and throw you in the back of a van, so you can wait in an undisclosed location until everyone is present to hear the rules read. If you leave, you die. Make the guy in the balaclava nervous, you die. Clearly this event isn't for the fainthearted.

Of course, none of the characters who have signed up for this treat are remotely fainthearted, not least Ana Romero, who's on a revenge kick. Someone murdered her daughter and, years of wallowing through online filth at a site called the Gorehouse later, she believes she's figured out who it is, so she's coming to the Bloodletting to take him down with extreme vengeance. She's played well by Claudia Vargas, who has racked up surprisingly few credits, given that she gets a lot more screen time and opportunity than the other actors with few films behind them. Given that the framework calls more for individualism and character from Bloodletting attendees than any particular acting talent, I'm surprised that most of them weren't tasked with doing more than a token scene or two. We're given ideas about who these folk really are through simple interaction after the opening credits, but they're introduced properly twenty minutes in, online text giving us names, Gorehouse handles and tastes, while they back it all up verbally.

They're a varied set of freaks, as you might expect. Henry Becker aka White Manson is a Neo-Nazi white supremacist who's also into 'rape, underground fights, snuff, no big deal.' Not happy to be in the same room with him is Jerome Larson, or Black Johnson, an African American white slave trader with a female export business down in Atlanta. Patricia Snyder is Slutty Baby, a high priced call girl who sees this as a little balance after what her clients do to her for money. Bobby Shupe is the notably nerdy Cock-Master, an anarchist who's planning to commit a major killing spree someday. Hansel and Gretel are a dom/sub pair, though it's the latter who's clearly in charge, very much into F on M sodomy; they get off on places where people have died. Charles Donnely is Rubber Love, a very meticulous paedophile who's aiming to broaden his horizons. And Ana Romero is Massive 9, the biggest trader on Gorehouse, who did all of it to track down Rubber Love for a little motherly vengeance.

While there are a lot of introductions here, they run smoothly because everyone's so easy to delineate and because Tretta and his crew refuse to let anything slow down long enough to be boring. The editing is fast, without approaching the rapid fire craziness of today, the camera is usually moving and there's a staticky industrial soundtrack peppering emphasis behind the dialogue. The soundtrack is hallucinatory, especially as the film moves on, combining TV evangelism, pulsing ambient weirdness and Denny's odd, rambling commentary into something that's equally sacred and profane and wouldn't have been out of place on a crazy public access show. While the actors were cast as much for their unique looks as their acting talent and the visuals are particularly strong in these early stages, I wonder how this movie might play as an entirely audio experience. I especially wonder how people who haven't seen the film might imagine the character of Alexa, the flesh eating creature who returns from the original Death Factory.

In fact, Alexa may well be the only element to return from the original film. There, Alexa was a chemical plant worker, who, after exposure to a radioactive leak, turned into a demonic Goth chick with sharp teeth and unwieldy metal contraptions on her arms that make her fingernails deadly weapons. Most of this was changed for the sequel: the eighties goth look was replaced by longer hair and a fetishistic leather outfit of straps; instead of being a wild urban legend on the loose, she's a monster manipulated animalistically by noise from Denny's control room; and she's much quicker and less awkward. She's even portrayed by a new face, Michelle Mousel, especially surprising as the original actress, Tiffany Shepis, had, since the first film, become Mrs Sean Tretta, the wife of the director of its sequel. The only aspect to work less well here is Alexa's contact lenses, which look cheaper this time out. Otherwise, even the blood shed is more effective with plenty of arterial spray, though gore is oddly minimised by the camera looking away.

While the set up is notably innovative, light years ahead of the by the numbers approach of the original film, it's not too surprising to see how it all unfolds. It's not even surprising to see how the various guests wait for the action to begin, though we're hardly looking for surprises at this point. Rubber Love quietly contemplates the image of the Object, David C Hayes as fundamentally creepy here as he's ever been, which is saying something. Gretel takes Slutty Baby for a coked up lesbian sex session in the bathroom, while Hansel, easily the most disposable of the characters, is shredded by Alexa while he investigates a strange noise. After that, Black Johnson and the Cock-Master look for a way out, only to find an electrified fence. Massive 9 naturally focuses on her real quest, which doesn't quite go the way she expects. Tretta, who wrote the screenplay with Mike Marsh, inserts a few twists which work for the most part, especially early on and especially around her. Of course, people die, frequently and not always at Alexa's hand.

And here lies much of the problem. Every time a character dies, their potential story arcs evaporate and they're missed, even if they were only providing decoration. Claudia Vargas does well in an odd lead role with a surprising amount of substance, but she's far from the most memorable of the characters and Ana outstays her welcome, her story extending only to embrace further twists for us to care progressively less about. By comparison, Jeanna Coker and Nadine are massively less substantial as Slutty Baby and Gretel, presumably cast from outside the film world, but they look freakily awesome and they could have spiced up more scenes than they were allowed. Timmy Ponticelli is no actor either, but he's perfectly cast as Sid, Denny's mindless paeon of a cousin who's clearly in thrall to him. No offence to Ponticelli intended, but if he's given a story arc then why couldn't one be given to Coker or Nadine? I'd much rather watch the hot blonde chick and the freaky dominatrix, however much they need acting classes.

With most of the characters gone by the halfway point, much of our interest in the film wanes. Many of them never got story arcs, just the opportunity to decorate the screen for a little while, and only one was ever in our sympathies, so we do wonder who we're supposed to care about. While we had sympathy for Ana, her story arc appears to end and we find ourselves unsure as to why she's still in the movie. Alexa is the monster of the piece, but she only has presence, never character, and she's a monster who's more of a victim than anyone else in the film. Sid is a question mark but he can barely function. Denny is the loon in charge of the show, so we know he has activity coming but we don't really care. The most watchable of the characters turns out to be White Manson, who gives Shane Dean's famous arrogant grin a chance to manifest itself as a character all of its own. Once Hayes is gone from the film, it's Dean's to dominate and he has no problem doing precisely that, however freakily cool Mousel looks as Alexa.

At the end of the day, half of this film is an underground cult gem but the other half is a slow wait to see if there's anything still worth watching. Even with that massive flaw, it's a league above the film it claims to be a sequel to. With a new location and a complete set of new characters, this is hardly a sequel, more of a completely new story that could be said to be set in the same universe as Death Factory, given that one character reappears. However, with Alexa so wildly different, utterly silent and never a driving force, that becomes a real stretch. This is therefore a sequel in name only, existing entirely to capitalise on the success of Death Factory, which was popular for reasons I still can't quite fathom. I've been wracking my brain to see if I can think of another such blatant cash-in that even reached its predecessor in quality and I'm coming up dry. This, however, exceeds it so effortlessly that it's hardly worth the comparison. It's just a shame that it fired all its rounds so quickly and couldn't find a way to effectively rearm itself.

The Return (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Star: Michael Hanelin, Stacie Stocker, Bailey Stocker and Tony Sarnicki

The fifth of Running Wild's contemporary adaptations of public domain short stories is one of the oddest of them all, because of what it attempts, what it ignores, what it does and what it has no interest at all in doing. The source is an 1897 story by Joseph Conrad, which at over 20,000 words is notably longer than the first four stories Travis Mills adapted put together, but very little happens in it, at least that could be easily translated to the screen. Physically it unfolds within a single room in a single house, mostly in the form of a conversation between a couple who had been married for five years; she left a note explaining that she's leaving him, but then promptly returned while he was still absorbing the news, apparently not willing or able to go through with her plans for reasons that are never explained. However, the real story unfolds in Alvan Hervey's head, as he tries to wrap his head around it. 'He stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil,' wrote Conrad, and the story is his response to that.

Given that what drives the story isn't the fact that Hervey's wife left him but that she returned, it's a trip to realise that Mills removed the return entirely from this adaptation of The Return. Sure, Alvan Hervey is updated to become Martin Klinger, whose wife e-mails him at work to tell him that she's leaving, but the script departs from the source story at that point, except for its concentration on Klinger's wild struggles to come to terms with what's just happened. While we soon see a lot of Chelsea Klinger, not to mention their daughter, a character who doesn't exist in the story, we never once see either of them for real, as each scene is conjured up inside Martin's mind as he searches for some sort of understanding of what their relationship really was. In ignoring almost the entire story and removing the event of its title, Mills ambitiously concentrates on what Conrad was aiming for, namely an exploration of emotion within the descriptive language for which he was known and which is incredibly difficult to adapt to film.

Running less than seven rushed minutes, it makes a pretty decent attempt to adapt the claustrophobic and hallucinatory tone of much of Conrad's fiction into visuals. One of my favourite lines from Conrad is one from The Secret Agent where he described a street as 'a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.' It's a magnificently concise setting that reeks of oppression, but it would take a budget far more substantial than anything Running Wild can bring to bear to show that as well on screen. This sort of thing is very apparent in The Return, which means that, for instance, Mills is tasked with visualising a sentence like, 'He walked at her, raging, as if blind; during these three quick strides he lost touch of the material world and was whirled interminably through a kind of empty universe made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till he came suddenly upon her face—very close to his.' Such a task would stretch the likes of a master, but Mills does give it an interesting go.

He does it through a combination of close-up shots, fast paced editing and hand held camerawork, which combine into a strong sense of urgency. The first thing we see is Michael Hanelin's face, as he wills a mail to show up in his inbox, albeit not the one he gets. If that's a close-up, the next shots are closer, because they only depict halves of faces, more like chads than the zooms we see in Carl Theodor Dreyer. When we see the Dear John mail from Chelsea, we only see fractions of it, enough to catch phrases like 'I'm going', 'I'm leaving' or 'I'm sorry' without the need to highlight them. Then Martin rushes home, in rapid fire cuts that do far more than crop his journey, they suggest that his mindset precludes him from experiencing it himself. The handheld camera takes over, staying as close as it can as he rages around, emphasising his bewilderment. To highlight how quickly these emotions are running wild (pun clearly intended) inside his head, a whole host of shots begin out of focus and rush quickly into it, only to cut to another.

It's ironic that I most want to praise Rolo Tomassi here, the Running Wild editor, given that it's a clearly a pseudonym borrowed from LA Confidential, where it was used to subvert a screen adaptation by cropping out hundreds of pages of source material and allowing it all to move in a completely unfaithful direction. I have no idea who handles the role of Tomassi at Running Wild, or whether it's even the same person from one film to another, but whoever it was here did a great job. If it's Mills himself, he deserves extra praise for his work with the camera. The various experiments of this sort that pepper the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project which, after all, was an experiment to begin with, aren't always successful but they were a strong point in this entry. That's a good thing, because there's little here except the experimentation. Certainly, anyone wanting to see the source story on screen is going to be disappointed, even if they factor in the contemporary setting. You can't really have The Return without the return, after all, and it needs an end.

The key actors tasked with bringing this one to life are used to Mills's experimentations. Michael Hanelin, the Running Wild casting director, is the actor given the opportunity to bring life to Martin Klinger. In this adaptation, he's less an updated version of Alvan Harvey, given that he has neither his name nor any of his dialogue, and more of a similarly fraught bundle of emotions with a new name. Hanelin is powerful in what must have felt somewhat like a test scene performed for an acting class. Playing Chelsea is Stacie Stocker, who never disappoints, even with only a week to prepare, as she substituted here for an actress who baulked at the last minute from performing a (completely safe for work) scene with a vibrator; even bringing her real daughter, Bailey, to play her screen daughter. Surely less of a disaster than the rain that saw the last film become silent, Mills masochistically enjoyed the challenge. 'It's almost becoming fun,' he said in the accompanying webisode, 'to solve these problems.' And that's why 52 Films in 52 Weeks.

The Property Man (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

Working through all Chaplin's 1914 films on the days they were originally released has ably highlighted just how many of them there were. Each time I reviewed one, my eye was already on the next as it was never far away. It was easy to think back to 1914, as the original audiences saw these films for the first time, watching this funny new face show up time and time again to establish a hold. His first three films arrived on cinema screens in the span of only eight days and, by 20th June, no less than twenty Chaplin films had been released. Even with an uncharacteristic 25 day gap between A Busy Day and The Fatal Mallet, that averages out to one every 6.9 days, an output faster than a weekly television show today. Yet his nascent career as a director started out much more slowly; Laughing Gas was released 19 days after Mabel's Married Life and The Property Man didn't show up for another 23. For the first time in this project, his previous film wasn't fresh in my mind as I watched the new one. At this speed, life got in the way.

Part of the reason for this delay is that, while most of Chaplin's earlier films were one reelers that took a week to put together, this was a two reeler that ran 24 minutes and took 16 days to shoot. It's not tough to figure out why, though, as this must have felt like an important movie to him. Certainly, to our century of hindsight, it points firmly towards the future far better than any of the pictures he'd made thus far, but it's also fundamentally rooted in his music hall past, most obviously the famous Mumming Birds sketch that he had performed on stage with Fred Karno's London Comedians, the very one that impressed Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand enough to hire him to replace Ford Sterling at Keystone. The part he played in Mumming Birds strongly influenced the characters he would play at Keystone, which is why he shows up drunk so often in 1914. However, The Property Man is sourced less from his character in Mumming Birds and more from the sketch itself.

Mumming Birds apparently grew out of a comedy written to entertain the Shah of Persia when he visited London in 1903, imaginatively titled Entertaining the Shah. It reached the music hall stage almost a year later, its name progressing within a couple of months from Twice Nightly through A Stage Upon a Stage to The Mumming Birds. It was still being performed on stage in the forties, billed as 'Fred Karno's Greatest Comedy' and with the tagline, 'The show that made Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy', as both Chaplin and Stan Laurel had played parts in it to great acclaim. The concept is one that we'd describe as 'meta' today, as the curtain would rise to show another stage, with some of the cast taking the role of players and others audience members. In the box to the left would be a public schoolboy and his guardian, with 'a drunken swell' on the right, Chaplin's preferred role. A string of incompetent performers attempt to do their thing but are constantly interrupted by the audience on stage in increasingly chaotic ways.

No wonder Sennett was hooked when he saw it under its touring title of A Night in an English Music Hall, as it sounds like a Keystone picture on stage. Of course, before hiring Chaplin away from Karno, Keystone would never have produced a film version quite like this. The Property Man has Chaplin's name all over it, even more as a writer than as an actor or director, because it's never just about a set of gags leading up to chaos, though they do reach that standard goal; it's about how those gags build and feed into others, it's about how better defined characters can render those gags funnier and it's about how a stronger setting can ground the whole thing and keep it funnier. While it's far from Chaplin's best picture, it's arguably his best thus far because it's consistent and interwoven. A Film Johnnie, The Star Boarder and Caught in the Rain hinted at this but were more Keystone than Chaplin. This is the other way around.

While The Property Man is clearly sourced from Mumming Birds, it's no direct adaptation. We do watch an audience watching an inept set of vaudeville acts, but the fun is less in their interactions with it and more in how the property man leads the troupe into chaos. He's played by Chaplin, of course, who is the lowest rung on this ladder except one, and that pecking order is established very quickly. In fact, that's the very basis of this film, differences in status always serving as a clear parallel to class differences in British entertainment. Surely this is how Chaplin expected to find sympathy for his character, though a century has rendered him rather more unsympathetic. Status is everything here. When a couple of new artistes arrive, he mostly ignores them because they're new and his status compared to theirs hasn't yet been established. He highlights the 'No Smoking' sign, though he's smoking a pipe himself. Yet he doesn't dare do the same thing to the strongman, an established opponent, so he flips the sign over instead.

In turn, this lazy, uncaring and sadistic property man takes out his frustrations on the only character who is lower than him. That's his assistant, who Josef Swickard, for comedic emphasis, depicts as an old man with a long beard who has to walk with the assistance of a cane, even when carrying heavy trunks on his back. Many have called this picture out as an especially cruel one in Chaplin's filmography, starting with Motion Picture World, when reviewing the film in 1914. 'There is some brutality in this picture,' said their critic, 'and we can’t help feeling this is reprehensible. What human being can see an old man kicked in the face and count it fun?' I don't buy this take, as the film's tone is notably less cruel than Mabel's Busy Day and everything serves a purpose. Details are either part of a bigger gag or they help to establish the pecking order. Even those kicks, while admittedly cruel, enforce rather than damage. This old man seems as indestructible as a cartoon which, as a character in a slapstick short, he's a forerunner to.

The scene most frequently called out for criticism finds the old assistant stuck under a particularly heavy trunk that he's carried downstairs. With the exception of a couple of those feet to the face, I found this a great example of an effective gag built out of equally effective smaller ones. When it happens, Charlie's first act is to strike a match on the trunk to relight his pipe, then he clambers on top of it in an attempt to lever it free, though naturally he only makes the situation worse. Getting nowhere, he breaks off at the call of the strongman's wife, with whom he happily flirts for a while. Soon most of the cast are involved in trying to free the old man, all of them getting precisely nowhere until the strongman is called. He takes it as yet another opportunity to show off, easily doing alone what half a dozen couldn't do together, thus reaffirming his position at the top of the pecking order. Swickard, on the other hand, merely portrays the character at the bottom of it, so any cruelty is really rooted in the inequality of the class struggle.

Even when we get past pre-show shenanigans and the 'Elite Vaudeville' performance begins, everything can be easily interpreted as depicting the lower class, in the form of Charlie the property man, getting one over on the upper class, in the form of the performers who have more status than him. The audience loved it, perhaps because they were predominantly made up of the lower class, as is ably depicted in the scenes involving the audience watching the performance. It may never have been a deliberate act on Chaplin's part, but it's telling today that the audience we see in the film is comprised of the old guard at Keystone. That's Mack Sennett himself in the front row, with his goofy grin, and a drunken Harry McCoy frequently asleep on his shoulder, while Slim Summerville and Chester Conklin are there as well. As with Mumming Birds, there's a lot of fun in seeing the audience's reaction to bad vaudeville performances or to Charlie inadvertently becoming part of the show, causing chaos or ogling the dancing girls.

While class was clearly the dominant theme of The Property Man, there's also a sense of time that comes from hindsight. It's a timely film for reasons beyond it being his first two reeler as a director and the proof that his work was benefitting from the creative freedom he began to find with his previous film, Laughing Gas. Music hall, or vaudeville in the States, had been the dominant form of entertainment for the masses since the 1830s and, while it would fall into the shadow of cinema and eventually television, it was about to reach its peak of popularity. The First World War broke out on 28th July, 1914, only four days before the release of The Property Man, and the music halls would serve as a rallying point for public support and a massively effective tool for the war effort, recruiting many through patriotic songs like 1914's Keep the Home Fires Burning. Chaplin wasn't as vocal about the conflict as he would be as the Second World War loomed. 'Everyone thought it would be over in six months,' he wrote in his biography.

Ironically, given that Chaplin came from music hall and was hired out of vaudeville by Sennett to become his new movie star at Keystone, his rise in cinema was mirrored by the decline of the music halls and the two ended relatively close together. It has been said that music hall ended with the death of Max Miller in 1963; at that time, Chaplin only had one more film in him, The Countess of Hong Kong, released in 1967. As this film brings to mind an end, it also brings to mind a beginning. While the film's finalé, in which the property man turns a firehose on both the stage and its audience, was set up for comedic effect, it has a lot of meaning. The hose is the great leveller, wiping out every difference in status and leaving Charlie in charge; audiences would remember A Film Johnnie ending earlier in 1914 with Charlie being drenched by a firehose, so this highlights his elevation. It can also be read as an homage to the first cinematic gag, in which a gardener is drenched by a hose in the Lumière brothers' film, L'Arroseur Arrosé, in 1895.

The Property Man was one of the few of Chaplin's 1914 films that I hadn't seen before, so the Flicker Alley box set introduced me to the film rather than just a better quality copy of it. Ironically, it's one of the least consistently restored titles in that box, as the majority looks great but a few scenes are of horrible quality. Presumably this is because it was pieced together from seven different prints in three different countries, but it's annoying to see the inconsistency. That we can complain about this highlights how absolutely this box set has spoiled us. Most of it looks great though, so we can see the bad spelling on a number of signs ('Garlico in Feets of Strength') and a host of little details that a cheap print would probably obscure, such as Harry McCoy's drunk seeing the firehose as an opportunity to sober up and shower. While many seem to dismiss this as an exercise in cruelty, I'd suggest that they read it with the appropriate subtext; if they do that, they may see The Property Man, as I do, as the best of Chaplin's pictures thus far.

Important Sources:
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The Property Man can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in July.

Love a la Carte (2014)

Director: Tim McSpadden
Stars: Aaron Ginn-Forsberg, Chauna Mae, James Ray and Kimber Leigh

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Whenever I review a film, I try to figure out what it's trying to tell me because there's usually something burning to get out, whether the movie is successful or not. From the various synopses I'd read of Love a la Carte, I expected it to tell me something about relationships, but it seemed far more driven to tell me about the man who made it, Tim McSpadden. He wrote, directed, produced, edited and shot the film, took care of the sound and even found a small role for himself on screen too, so clearly it's his baby, for good or bad, and it's no stretch to imagine that he put a lot of himself into it. I've only met him a time or two in passing, so don't know him, but this film screams at me that he has a strong sense of humour, but tries too hard to make sure we're aware of that, and that he has a more severe case of ADHD than I do. Both of these aspects are noticeable immediately and constantly reaffirm themselves as the film runs on. I'm not sure how many breaths I took during the hour and a half but I doubt it was enough. It's a busy picture!

Initially, it feels like an interesting approach. We're given a rapid fire history of sex, from sexual freedom to crabs, from Nancy Reagan as president to Al Gore inventing the internet, before we meet Phil Anders and his wife Evelyn, all in what feels like seconds. The editing is breakneck, the narration quirky and the really cheesy credits in Comic Sans, for God's sake, with animated gifs to boot. Much of it appears to be shot like a commercial. Or a cartoon. Or both. It gleefully breaks the fourth wall. It would surely break the fifth if only it could find it. And I find myself talking. With periods. I need to take a breath and calm down. What's important to note is that this initial sequence sets the stage for the film proper, because it's rapid fire stuff, leaping around like a shoal of blue fish and with a host of innovative ways to present material. There are discussions here that take place on the road with apparently deliberately awful rear projection, set up that way for stylistic effect. McSpadden likes stylistic effect and showcases a variety of it here.

While the French girl can't act, the leads are all decent. I've seen Aaron Ginn-Forsberg in a whole slew of films but I don't remember seeing him tasked with carrying a feature before. I learned two things about him here: that he's insanely good at playing a self-absorbed ass and that he looks Scandinavian with a beard. He's well cast as Phil Anders. I've never seen his screen wife before, but Chauna Mae does a fair job as Evelyn, hindered by her character being both tough and tired. They've been married for a dozen years, she's coming up on forty and she's very aware of both of those facts. Their relationship hasn't gone quite the way she expected, even if they live in a dream of a mansion. Their staircase is sprawling, their windows huge. They have a pool. And a bar. And a lobby that's bigger than my house. I'd buy that place for a dollar! I remember this house coming up on the market and drooling at the online images. I can't buy these two remotely affording it, even if they smuggled illegals through the west wing.

As if McSpadden worried that we might start looking at this relationship somewhat seriously, he enforces a lower tone. I think we're supposed to laugh at the inappropriateness of many scenes, like the one where Phil goes to the doctor for a prostate exam and the doctor lights up a cigarette after retrieving his fist. It's all about sex, apparently. Phil needs to have more of it or he'll get blue balls, but his better half is always tired. So, he wonders what he can do about the situation and the answers he conjures up are the ones a man going through a midlife crisis would conjure up. This is where James Ray comes in, looking odd with hair. He's Phil's best friend, though we continually wonder how they get on. Phil wants to screw everyone with legs and Gene tries to talk him out of it. He's less a friend and more of a conscience, but Ray carries the sincerity angle easily so isn't stretched at all here. Unfortunately for him, this is a cynical movie that's looking for truth. That's as easy as finding a marriage counsellor who isn't divorced, right?

The answer, as the title of the film suggests, is Love a la Carte, a website for 'people stuck in relationship quagmires.' By the way, the most surprising moment of the entire film for me was McSpadden not using the word 'giggety' immediately after introducing this website. Instead, he distracted himself by showing us every landmark in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Every talking point in the city is here, from the light rail to the LOVE statue at the Art Museum to the funnel art thing downtown to the bridge over the Tempe mud pond. With Saturn in the sky? Huh? Oh hey, the Bookmans book maze. Even the corner in Winslow, AZ. Monument Valley. The horse ride at Glendale Glitters. I lost track. And yes, that was Saturn. I have no idea what the point of that was, but I enjoyed the stylistic shenanigans that arrived with the website. His pitch to Love a la Carte takes the form of a political speech ('Yes, you can have it all!') and his first dates through it are phrased as a nature documentary. McSpadden certainly has imagination in bucketloads.

Eventually Phil meets Angela Heavens, played by Kimber Leigh, through Love a la Carte, and we wonder who we're supposed to care about in this movie, while McSpadden attempts to distract us with a karaoke version of the theme song. Phil has charm, but we've been firmly introduced to who he really is. 'Who am I to deny these women me?' he asks us. No, we're not with you, dude, even before you turned into Overly Confident Midlife Crisis Idiot. Kimber Leigh is one of the nicest people on the planet, so we automatically want to care about her character, but Angela is also married with kids and screwing around on the side with no regrets whatsoever. Sure, Phil seems to connect far better with Angela than he does with his wife, but we're neither rooting for adultery nor wanting anyone to get back with anyone. In another picture, this might have been the start of a beautiful friendship, but that's clearly not where we're going. All we can assume is that things are going to go horribly wrong somehow, which somehow we want to see.

I'd heard a lot of bad things about Love a la Carte and I can see why, because it's never quite sure what it wants to be. Much of it goes too far, the tone of the comedy never staying consistent. While I laughed out loud at some scenes, there are a whole bunch of supposedly funny ADHD moments that just aren't funny at all. Many of the little gimmicky ideas thrown into the movie like confetti might have been hilarious half a dozen pints into a night, but don't stand up the morning after. Many are ill-advised, adding nothing but a 'Huh?' reaction; Saturn above the Mill Ave bridge is a great example of something that looks really cool but makes no sense at all; the internet meme conversation and the mountie led evacuation fit the same bill. The more insightful parts of the film aren't particularly insightful, while the juvenile scenes are, well, juvenile. The character names we read in the credits are thankfully not brought out within the movie, for the most part. The political bits fall flat. Yes, there's a lot of negative here.

The positive side is grounded in the actors, but I have to admire the relentlessness of the piece, the way that McSpadden kept layering on the humour. The leads do find their way through mostly successfully, though they do struggle with a few of their more dubious lines. It's a very dialogue heavy picture, which these actors have no trouble with. Aaron Ginn-Forsberg does very well, able to find most of Phil's angles, even if they made no sense. This is a great demo reel for him and it highlights how he should play leads more often. Chauna Mae was decent but her role had her play bored, tired and blasé for most of the film, which doesn't allow her to be magnetic. James Ray was fine but he had very little to do. While he played what might be the only sympathetic character in the film, Gene is notably one dimensional. Kimber Leigh impressed too, showing a little more of herself than I expected. Like the others though, Angela is mostly just a prop for Phil to bounce off. And is that four roles for Gary Herkimer? He's only credited with three.

I can see an audience for Love a la Carte, even if that audience isn't me. While many films aim at being cinematic paintings, McSpadden aimed this film at being a cinematic collage. It's far from your average romcom, but while it phrases itself as a meditation on relationships, it's less about the relationships and more about the meditation. It's the sort of feature a decent cast on Whose Line is It Anyway? might have improvised if given the right set of props in the right order. I didn't connect with any of the characters or the choices they made and really don't buy how they all wrap up in the end, but I enjoyed a lot of how it all went down. There's a section devoted to Evelyn Anders that shows up just as we're really wondering where the film is going and it plays so closely to a visualisation of a therapy session that we realise that the picture as a whole does something very similar. I wonder if this is a film to come alive only after the director's commentary track explains where all the elements of the collage came from.

Catastrophe (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: David Chan, Ron Bowen, Jim Robertson and John Miller

The fourth picture in the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project continued Running Wild's initial backward journey into time. They started in 1904 with The Sisters and proceeded slowly back through 1896 to 1890, then took a particularly ambitious leap all the way back to 1834 for a Nathaniel Hawthorne story which was originally titled Mr Higginbotham's Catastrophe. It's a particularly interesting entry into the project for a few reasons, the most obvious being that the title proved prophetic. The first of two days allocated for shooting were hammered by rain, not as unusual as you might expect for Arizona, given that late July is monsoon season, but enough to prompt writer/director Travis Mills to improvise some way to salvage his film. Under usual circumstances, he could have merely delayed the shoot but that simply isn't possible when locked into such an ambitious shooting schedule as he'd set up for Running Wild Films in 2013, so he was forced to make the most of it. He ended up turning Catastrophe into a silent movie.

Another interesting angle is that Mr Higginbotham's Catastrophe is a deceptively complex short story, an easy one to adapt to the modern day but a tricky one to get right in all three of its themes. Mills captures a couple of them capably but decides to avoid the third entirely in this adaptation; I'd have liked to have seen it addressed, but do agree that it wasn't viable in a short film that runs just shy of ten minutes. Like Useless Beauty, there's a lot more story than he was able to cram into his running time but, unlike it, he focuses more on that story than the acting, even if we imagine that the rain never forced them to remain silent, so we can actually hear what they have to say. Only David Chan gets much screen time, the rest of the cast taking the roles of talking props far more than characters. Perhaps it's the rain that causes me to see these last two pictures differently. I'd have liked to have seen more to Useless Beauty, but I feel that Mills made the film he wanted to make; I'd like to see him remake this one at greater length.

Rewatching the 52 Films in 52 Weeks pictures immediately after reading the short stories from which they were adapted has been an eye-opener from a writing perspective. Mills's approach mostly seems to be to distil each story down to its theme and then build it back up again in modern day Arizona with characters and situations that feel like contemporary equivalents. So here, Mr Higginbotham, who owns one of those surnames that would prompt jokes in 21st century Arizona, becomes simply Mr Higgins, but what we hear about him stays rather similar. You see, this really isn't about him as he only shows up for the finalé; it's about a rumour that's spreading about him, heard and retold by the lead character. In Hawthorne's story, an ill-looking traveller informs a tobacco-pedler that Mr Higginbotham was murdered the night before. In Mills's adaptation, an agreeably wide-eyed and grizzled stranger tells a fellow itinerant that Mr Higgins was murdered the night before. In each take, the story promptly gains a life of its own.

The most obvious theme of that story is the way that such rumours spread, something that remains very familiar to us today. Sure, in 1834 they would have propagated through people like Dominicus Pike, that tobacco-pedler who trusts what he's told and carries it with him on his journeys. In 2014, they would find new ears far quicker, travelling not by foot but by text and tweet or at least by Facebook post. Hawthorne would probably be horrified to know that, a century and a half after he wrote this, we've finally invented a word to describe this sort of escalation; today we'd call it viral. Mills eschews the technological angle, but I'd be fascinated to see this story retold again but centered around teenage girls and the communication media du jour. Merely updating travelling salesmen and wanderers to homeless people is a simpler, more direct translation and it works well, but what's most interesting to me is that Mills directed more attention to the second of Hawthorne's themes, that of prejudice.

The racial aspect of the source story might not be immediately obvious to anyone reading it today or, at least, not grasped fully. The traveller tells Pike that, 'Old Mr Higginbotham of Kimballton was murdered in his orchard at eight o'clock last night by an Irishman and a nigger.' We might concentrate on the political incorrectness of the latter but in the rural America of 1834, a century and a half before 'African American' was adopted, it was a common term, usually inferring inferiority more than signifying hate. What's more, Irishmen were seen in just as negative a light; Monika Elbert, editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, wrote about how the story 'played to anti-Irish sentiment.' The traveller had his reasons for what he said, which this film avoids, but it has to be said that casting his villains as 'an Irishman and a nigger' made it more readily believed. Mills updates the villains to be two Mexican punks, but Michael Hanelin's casting allows the theme to build: the lead is clearly Asian and the only legitimate authority is African American. The mob of extras is notably multi-ethnic, strikingly different from the usual lynching we see in westerns.

Had Mills not found himself painted into a corner by surprising Arizona weather, I feel that he would have done more still with each of these angles. They warranted more running time to be fully explored and I'm sure that at least some of that restriction was due to the rain. I wonder if he ignored the third and last of Hawthorne's themes deliberately or whether that was forced upon him too. It's a combination of karma, irony and a mild sense of the supernatural; it brings the source story to a memorable close but doesn't get the opportunity here because this adaptation is played straight. While I particularly appreciated the performance of David Chan as Barney, the 'wanderer' whose heart is in the right place but whose mouth does a lot more than he expects, I didn't like his final shot at all. Acting isn't a problem here; Ron Bowen is perfect as the source of the rumour, while Jim Robertson looks agreeably affected when Barney passes the news on to him. Chan excepted, the actors merely get very little to do.

The technical side is more inconsistent; that the circumstances of production were surely behind some of the less successful aspects doesn't excuse them. Bizarrely channelling Yoda, Mills explained in the weekly webcast that accompanied this project that, 'It's a gamble, filmmaking is.' The rain's first victim was the sound, prompting this movie to become silent. It plays surprisingly well, though I wonder why Mills didn't go all the way and make it black and white too; he did for Useless Beauty. As a silent movie, there should have been less intertitles; they interrupt the flow of the visuals and, while some of the dialogue would be appropriate for a sound film, it should have been ditched for the silent version. The camerawork survived the rain, the handheld camera providing a little sense of urgency without ever descending into shakycam nonsense. It should have been longer, but survives without all the meat it should have had on its bones. Mills feared that Catastrophe would be a catastrophe; it isn't, it just isn't everything it could have been.

Malediction (2007)

Director: Kevin R Phipps
Stars: Eric Parks, Mike DeCamp, Catherine Urbanek, Catherine Pilafis and Alexi Melvin

According to IMDb, Kevin R Phipps is most widely regarded for being the director of Grief, even though it hasn't been released yet. Certainly it's one of the most keenly anticipated local features for many years, given the great cast and trailer, not to mention the parties Rangelo Productions have put on; someone is doing something very right in the publicity department. What's ironic is that while Phipps is highlighted as being known for directing a feature that nobody's even seen yet, it won't be his first. In and amongst the various pictures that he's worked on under various different hats, there was another feature, 2007's Malediction. Why he isn't more widely regarded for directing a feature that's been released, played two festivals, the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival and the Phoenix Fear Fest, and won the Audience Favourite award at the latter, is a good question, but IMDb doesn't even list it. Then again, it's only been reviewed once, by Jim McLennan at Trash City, which uncoincidentally runs Fear Fest.

Features that show up early in careers tend to be problematic and this one is no different, but it's still an agreeable picture. The seams are obvious from moment one, at least once we find ourselves in daylight. The opening credits sequence is actually pretty strong, with an enticing use of sound to sucker us in. It's when that wraps up and we're shown two young adults, for want of a better phrase, paintballing a house for revenge, that those seams enforce their presence. The resolution isn't particularly great and there's a whole lot of interlacing going on. There's too much light and the sound needs work. However Sam Tolson points the camera in all the right directions, often from angles you wouldn't expect to see on a movie like this, and moves it in ways that prompt us to wonder if Malediction isn't going to be a much better picture than it technically warrants. What's more, the editing from Phipps himself backs it up, so it's much more likely to be the equipment that's lacking than the people wielding it.

The actors are clearly not experienced either so, while Eric Parks and Mike DeCamp are believably cast as decent kids with a rebellious streak, they can't draw us into the characters, instead coming off as decent kids with a rebellious streak playing decent kids with a rebellious streak. They try to be tough, especially in front of girls, but we can't resist wanting to give them a hug. Parks is Jason Cooke, a stubborn young man who's externalising strength after suffering at the hands of his father, now replaced by a nicer guy who's easier to say no to in increasingly lame ways. It's Jason's movie, however much he initially seems to be the quiet guy walking firmly in his more outgoing friend's shadow. That's Van Gerlach, DeCamp's character, who's taller, easier going and better at talking people into doing things that they probably shouldn't be doing. The thing that they shouldn't be doing that we're here to see is something that Jason drives though, albeit for no apparent reason. Maybe it's just something he has to do to take control back.

What we're here to see is #1229, a neighbourhood house newly vacated by a family who had only just moved in. Little Rodney says the place is haunted, so Jason takes Van and their maybe girlfriends, Sarah and Emily, in through a window that night for a closer look. The script, written by Bill Barnes and Kevin Hankins, unfolds slowly and, as delivered by inexperienced actors, often in awkward fashion, but it's here that the film gifts us with a pair of neat horror moments, both of them ambitious for a film whose budget is notable more for what it doesn't have than what it does and both of them successful. First is a camera movement, which shows up as the score finds a memorable Italian horror chord; simply watching a door, it pulls back through Jason's legs to rise ominously behind him, tentatively peek over his shoulder and be ready for him to turn his head and show his profile. The other is a transition, which kicks in after he walks through that door and somehow finds himself elsewhere, with a girl rising to cough blood in his face.

Of course, whenever a movie does something really right, it often turns right round and counters it with something rather wrong. This one throws out a plot convenience, as Jason's reaction to the girl involves him elbowing a hole in the wall, in the precise spot that covers a videotape covered in dried blood, and then follows it up with what Jim McLennan appropriately described as clumsiness. It's a long time since I was sixteen, or however old these kids are supposed to be, but I know for a fact that sleep would not be priority one on my agenda if I'd just discovered a bloody videotape walled up in a haunted house. Screw sleep, I'd be throwing that tape on the very moment I got home! The catch is that if Jason had done that, almost exactly half an hour in, he'd have disposed of the need to work through the next two thirds of the movie because all his questions would have been answered, even the ones he hasn't got round to asking yet. Such a promising film deserved better than these two down points.

With the answers tantalisingly close but ignored for the sake of making this a feature rather than a long short film, we get to explore the supernatural angle that has been hinted at a few times. Sarah woke up early in the film imagining that she was covered in blood, perhaps in a similar way to Jason imagining a girl coughing blood on him; we've already visited a supposedly haunted house, so we know we're going to see freaky things; and rumour suggests Mrs Delarosa at school is a witch and not only because weird questions are her favourite kind. She's into psychometry, which means she can touch an object to pull history from it, a talent that's been useful when she's lent it to police investigations. Laura Durant is the only actor I recognised in this cast and she's a cut above the rest as Mrs Delarosa, with a neat sense of humour that Jason fails to grasp. Asking her about the house, she gives him a book, Communicating with the Beyond. 'It's been looking for a new owner,' she tells him. 'I believe it's you.'

Once grounded, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the rest of the plot, which carries very little in the way of surprises. The only thing that really surprised me was how sidelined Van became as things ran on; while Mike DeCamp grins far too much to be the lead, he's the one kid with charisma. While Van rarely does anything to move things along and the story continually angles towards Jason, it's DeCamp who grabs our attention whenever he's on screen. Parks struggles to keep our attention as Jason, though he does get better as his character is given more to actually do and DeCamp's scenestealing antics are sidelined, but he has to work at it. He's better in his more respectful scenes, but he gets increasingly annoying whenever Jason decides to get pissy, as he often does. Catherine Urbanek isn't bad as Sarah, whose role is also built up as the film runs on, but she's very much in the same category as Parks rather than DeCamp: decent when she's the focus of attention but unfortunately unable to be that too often.

The progression is capable enough and the effects work by Gabriel Espinoza is solid but we can't forget the videotape; it's clearly the key to it all but it's annoyingly ignored. Instead we get to wander through the usual scenes, wondering less about what they'll achieve and more about when they'll give up clawing at clues and let us sit down and watch the frickin' tape. A more experienced cast in a more aware script might be able to distract us, but this isn't that movie. The leads are the kids, who have trouble holding our attention, especially when DeCamp gets sidelined; the adults are firmly relegated to supporting roles, serving to move things along at key points rather than bring in any sense of character. Mrs Delarosa is by far the most substantial and Durant is one of the saving graces of the second and third acts. Perhaps less known for her actual acting than for the resources she's provided to the local acting community over the last decade, she's still given life to a number of interesting characters, this being a worthy addition.

As if to highlight that there's a decent film ready to erupt from the stifled script and stifled performances of Malediction, it comes good at the end. The finalé is by far the best part of the picture, even if it's less about what happens and more about how it goes down; when we finally reach the point where we figure out what happened in #1229, Phipps hits us with it from a number of perspectives all at once, a powerful way to wrap up a promising but generally unfulfilling film. It underlines that there was a lot of vision here, sadly far more than could ever have been brought to life by the resources they had to work with, whether human or mechanical. Clearly this is a beginning film, one to set people on the road to bigger and better things. I'm not too surprised to find that the actors did little, if anything, else, while Phipps went on to far more substantial budgets, but I'm surprised to not find Sam Tolson's name on anything else; maybe it's a pseudonym. Now, when will IMDb let this festival award winner be added to allow due credit?

Useless Beauty (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Jonathan Medina, Keylor Leigh and Michael Hanelin

It feels to me that Travis Mills chose a story like Useless Beauty very deliberately for his third entry in the 52 Films in 52 Weeks series. It's a bulkier creature, for a start. The original story by French author Guy de Maupassant has a word count half as long again as The Sisters and The Kiss combined and this modern adaptation does likewise; its running time of over fourteen minutes outstrips the ten that The Sisters and The Kiss ran between them. Yet it's also a far more focused story, with a smaller cast of characters than either of its predecessors; only two characters, a well to do couple, dominate the story, with another pair showing up in the third act to wax philosophical about the lady's beauty from a distance; Mills combines the latter into a single neighbour and wisely drops all that pontification. This approach means that the majority of the film belongs to Jonathan Medina and Keylor Leigh, who are given the opportunity to act, something that the casts of The Sisters and The Kiss mostly didn't get.

Useless Beauty was originally published in French in 1890 and, while it's forward looking, it reflects very much on attitudes of the time. The lead couple are the Count and Countess de Mascaret, aristocrats who begin the story by ordering their driver to take them in their horse-drawn carriage from their mansion to ride down the Bois de Boulogne. Their drive, however, takes a sinister turn. The Countess politely rails at her husband for caging her in motherhood, the seven children she bore him in eleven years functioning as his means of control, blocking her from achieving her social ambition. Even as she lets out her anger, he's still in charge, being the man in the relationship, so she finds a way to wrest that control from him, taking him to a church and swearing before God that one of those seven was not his. She won't tell him which and the lack of knowing torments him for years until we reach the final scenes and find the truth. Or maybe not. De Maupassant leaves his ending open for interpretation, as Mills so often does.

In adapting this nineteenth century French morality tale to 21st century Arizona, Mills changes up quite a bit. The Count and Countess become a multi-racial couple, Randy and Judy; Medina is of Hispanic blood and he'd look pretty crazy with 'a big red beard', while Leigh is a young African American lady with frizzy hair and a stud in her nose. Judy has just discovered that she's pregnant with her fourth child, short of the seven the Countess had carried. While I had sympathy for the Count, whose faults may only appear so to our position of hindsight after a century of moral progression, Medina plays Randy as an outspoken male chauvinist pig. Interestingly, Mills shot this one in black and white, with enough contrast that it's difficult to tell where Judy's hair ends and their couch begins, perhaps highlighting how to Randy she's literally become part of the furniture. While the Count uses lines like 'you belong to me' and physical strength to emphasise his position as master, he's not as offensive as Randy, who has all the lines you'd expect.

You know the ones: if she didn't want another kid, she should have used protection; if he gets mad, it'll be her fault; he won't be responsible for his actions. Even talking to his neighbour, Bobby, played by Michael Hanelin with a restrained look of astonishment, he highlights how he will have to suffer through the next nine months, never wondering what she'll be going through. He'd rather not do that. He doesn't want her thinking about being a supermodel, going back to school or getting up on stage and singing. He'd rather she stay at home and look after the kids, not that she's great with them but because, 'She's not good for much else.' He even repeats that slur for emphasis. And thus far, although we do wonder why, she's put up with it. She's let him berate her and turn her chin with his fingers; she's given him the kiss he wanted as the cost of getting out of the car. All this time, she's been only half there; she's been looking inward, perhaps searching her soul, perhaps drumming up the courage to speak, perhaps both.

And indoors she finally does, responding to a stream of misogynistic invective with a strong monologue of her own that seizes the reins of the relationship. Leigh's diction is strong, but she doesn't match it with physicality, which is an interesting approach. This could easily have become a battle of gestures; Medina certainly uses a few. Instead she stays relatively still and relatively calm, still looking inside but starting to let out what she wants to say. Certainly she's past fearing a response and, in fact, may even push for one. In de Maupassant's story, we never know if the Countess is telling the truth or not. Did she cheat on her husband to father another man's son, or was she lying to him? The point, of course, is that it doesn't matter, that her action gives her control over her life for the first time. Mills never mentions the concept of lying in his adaptation, but we do wonder if Judy is telling the truth or not. Given that we're a century on from de Maupassant's Paris, there are easy methods of finding that out.

I feel that in simplifying this part of the story, Mills lost some of the depth of the original. Judy's victory is an important one and it's a good way to end this short film, but it's a weaker and surely a shorter victory than the one that the Countess obtains. 'At least I'd thrown one punch in my life,' Judy explains to Randy, as if she knows that she hasn't taken control, she's just shaken his. The unanswered question is whether she'll pursue more control in the future or just return to the yoke of motherhood. Maybe she'll eventually reach the seven that the Countess had. She does firmly strip away any romance that might still exist in their relationship, backed by a quiet romantic piano that plays in a particularly ironic key. The Countess achieved far more than Judy and, in doing so, raises a question that I'll ask over and over in my reviews of these films. In adapting these stories to a modern setting, does Mills achieve what they did, in part or in full? I feel that he added a level to The Kiss but lost one in Useless Beauty by stopping too short.

Blood Ink: The Tavalou Tales (2013)

Director: Irin 'Iroc' Daniels
Stars: Tony Kure, Greg Tap, Izzy Escobedo, WIlliam Conner, Jenelle Lee Vela, Rudy Torres, Robert Clinkscales Jr and Emory Parker

The first time I saw Blood Ink: The Tavalou Tales, I knew I had to see it again because it apparently said a lot but did so in such a confusing way that my first viewing was spoiled. Initially I couldn't figure out who I was supposed to be watching, who the focus of the film was supposed to be, but that's because there are four leads here, each with their own subplot. There are many features that take this approach, setting up a host of different, seemingly unrelated story strands, that, over time, make their connections apparent and merge into one overriding story. What sets this aside from all such films that I've seen is that each of its various subplots appears to belong to a different genre. I have no doubt that Blood Ink is the greatest urban, gangster, hip hop, drugs, inspirational, thriller, paedophile, serial killer, horror, ghost story that I've ever seen, but then it's still in a category of one. The driving force behind the film, Irin 'Iroc' Daniels, highly regarded Phoenix rapper, calls it a 'paranormal Crash', but that's really just the beginning.

The complexity of the connections between characters is one of the high points. Daniels, who wrote the script with assistance from Miguel Gonzalez and Christopher Sheffield, told the Phoenix New Times that it 'really plays into the idea of six degrees of separation' and the frequency in which characters bump into each other, sometimes quite literally, is cleverly structured, especially as they do so even at points when their subplots haven't yet connected. The sheer number of these characters is a less successful aspect, as it's often tough to keep track of who everyone is. Certainly a second viewing helps immensely, but I'm still unsure as to who a bunch of these people are because either they weren't introduced by name or I blinked at that moment and missed it. Perhaps the complexity was too much for the running time; Crash ran 112 minutes, while this is two minutes shy of an hour and a half. Mostly, though, I think that problem is rooted in the editing, which is so fast paced that it's easy to get distracted and lose track.

That's evident from the very outset, when we meet two of the four central characters in the story. They're at a gas station and one realises that he's left his wallet somewhere so bums some change off the other. This scene runs a mere 45 seconds but it includes 16 cuts and this sort of thing continues for most of the film, especially the first half. It's vastly overdone and is frequently annoying. Every now and again, a shot is held for more than a couple of seconds at a time and we have to wonder if Daniels dropped off at the editing table. Fortunately the characters themselves are much less annoying and they're a notably varied bunch. Izzy Escobedo impresses as he earns his first credit as the initial lead character, Augustine; while his acting does show his inexperience, he's very believable as an ex-con who's trying to go straight and regain custody of his young daughter, who's stuck in the foster system. He's especially believable as a tattoo artist because he is one, working at the very studio he works at here, Dark Chapel in Mesa.

He's doing well until he's shot dead relatively early on in the film by a gangster because he has the gall to respond to insults by kicking him out of his shop. Greg Tap also debuts here and does better still in a role that calls for him to be perpetually pissed off at the world, possibly because his character's mother called him Louise instead of Luis. We're annoyed at him mostly, esé, because of how stereotypical, bro, his dialogue gets, homes. These conversations feel improvised and, to be honest, may well be realistic for all I know, but still seem as scarily overdone as the editing. Occasionally the profanity takes over too, in particularly stressful situations like when one of his crew is shot during a convenience store robbery, and he starts sounding like he's in a bad blaxploitation flick. It's after that that he hauls his lieutenants over to Dark Chapel to get matching tattoos of their fallen brother and two of the four strands of story connect. These two dominate the first half of the film and underpin the rest.

The least substantial strand is perhaps the most memorable, because Bill Connor looks freaky with his long beard as the silent protagonist of the third subplot. The film's website calls him James, but I don't believe I caught his name mentioned once in the actual picture, just as I don't believe he utters a single word throughout, even though he's by far the most experienced of the lead actors. He's a notably scary dude here, often shot in such a way that he looks notably bigger than his 5'11". We can only guess as to exactly what James's thing is, but he certainly kidnaps little girls; whether he's a paedophile or just a serial killer is up for grabs, but he's clearly bad in an utterly different way to the many other bad people we've seen thus far. He's also white, unlike a majority of the cast. Surprisingly, racial issues aren't really touched on here, even with such a wide and diverse multicultural cast of characters. Most of the violence is contained within each ethnic group and rarely spreads beyond it.

The fourth plot strand centres on John Corbin, who works at a record label. He's a big bubbly ladies' man and actor Tony Kure has an air of the young Forrest Whitaker about him. He's the least important of the leads for a long time, only to start to take over after the halfway mark. Technically he's the first character we see, as he's the one who lends money to Augustine at the gas station, but that good deed comes back to haunt him, literally, after a bad one. Driving while distracted by ladies on the phone, he runs over a little girl in the street and just as Karma stalks Louise and his henchmen, Guilt starts to eat away at John. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how Augustine's story connects to James's, but John finds his strand stuck in between them in some of the most overtly paranormal scenes of the film. The morality outlined does seem a little contradictory; we're given a few polemics against revenge, all while most of the characters we see are happily seeking it. Corbin is the only character who feels torn.

Backing up these four leads are a whole host of supporting actors, a few of whom are recognisable faces in the local film scene but most of whom were probably sourced from the communities interested in the idea of a hip hop movie made in Phoenix. Iroc Daniels has been a major figure in the local hip hop scene for a long time and I'm sure he knows everyone who's worth knowing. Far from the small casts and crews of most local pictures, he's suggested that over five hundred people worked on this one and that's very believable. While the action on screen is predominantly devoted to conflict, this whole project feels like the epitome of collaboration: a sprawling story with a multi-ethnic cast, most of whom are not regulars in the local film scene, and a huge crew. This is precisely the sort of picture that falls apart in the hands of someone who's never made one before, but Daniels held it together until completion and he deserves a great deal of credit for doing that.

The biggest problem with the supporting cast begins with how many of them there are and, by extension, how little screen time they get. Most of them fade into the background, often blurring together in clumps, but some manage to make their presence known. Barbie MacBride is by far the the best of them, playing a sort of crazy old gypsy woman who is really the physical manifestation of Karma. Christopher Sheffield, who contributed to the story, gets the brief role of a cop and makes the most of it. The little girl John hits with his car also manages to make herself memorable before that happens. Unfortunately there just isn't enough running time to give everyone their moment in the spotlight, so characters who might have had a presence in a longer picture are shoehorned in to play their part and then whisked away again, such as the pair of New Age lesbians who knock on James's door to introduce themselves because they've moved into his neighbourhood. They deserved more screen time.

At the end of the day, this is a good film but it fails to be a great one for a few reasons. It's too complex for its length, causing confusion, especially on a first viewing where we don't notice a lot. The editing is massively overdone, causing more confusion, even on a second viewing. The lead actors are impressive for people who mostly aren't really actors, but they're not impressive enough for us to overlook that fact. Connor knows exactly what he's doing, but I'd like to see Escobedo, Tap and especially Kure act again in something a little less stereotypical for their looks. Hilariously, some of the more wooden performances were given by some the actors I recognise. Technically it's a solid production, with the exception of that editing, which was done by Daniels himself. As if trying to counter the number of people who worked on the film, he wrote it, directed it, produced it, edited it, shot it and scored it himself. In five of those hats, he was decent, but in the sixth far less so. Maybe he'll be less enthusiastic on that front next time.

The Kiss (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Renee Bryant, Troy Reeves, Sarah Lovell and Michael Coleman

After a safe opening entry into his 52 Films in 52 Weeks project, writer/director Travis Mills opened up his ambition a little for the second. It's The Kiss, ostensibly based on a short story by Kate Chopin, which was first published in Vogue in 1895, and it feels like a safe story too, as it's really short, only just breaking a thousand words, and it's relatively straightforward in its outlook. Mills's adaptation is also short, running a mere four minutes, but he changes much more than just the timeframe and he adds a heavy dose of that ambiguity that he's so fond of. He retains almost nothing from that original story, merely the setting of a scene around a wedding and, of course, the kiss of the title that is at the centre of both stories; otherwise it's completely unrecognisable. Inevitably the updating of century old material to contemporary settings prompts changes but that doesn't apply here because Chopin's story is notably timeless. In fact it almost describes a concept which didn't obtain a name for another twenty years, the 'gold-digger'.

I much prefer Mills's script to Chopin's short story, though perhaps it's simply because I'm a man. Chopin was an influential feminist and The Kiss revolves around a young lady who gets precisely what she wants, even though the kiss of the title temporarily scuppers her chances at the prize. She wants to get married, to the rich young man who is awkwardly courting her, for a particularly mercenary reason. As she puts it, 'The rather insignificant and unattractive Brantain was enormously rich; and she liked and required the entourage which wealth could give her.' She's about to land this big fish when another man waltzes into her house and plants an 'ardent, lingering kiss upon her lips' which would have done for her chances if she wasn't such a 'outspoken' young lady. In other words, Nathalie is modern enough to marry for money, modern enough to make it happen, even after a cog has been thrown into her machinations, and modern enough after it's done to try to keep the millionaire and the hurler of the cog both.

If any of this is there in Mills's adaptation, it's because we've brought it with us from our homework. None of it would appear to be there otherwise, because he doesn't give us any background detail to tell us why the young bride at the heart of his story got married. Maybe she's a gold-digger like Nathalie, but nothing tells us that. We can certainly see that her husband isn't a passionate man and there's nothing to suggest that she loves him, but there are a hundred reasons to get married and she could easily just be distracted by the chaos of a big wedding. We can believe from Renee Bryant's face that her character isn't sure of her decision, but she doesn't drive the story as Mills presents it. In fact, nobody drives anything except the complete stranger played by Michael Coleman who isn't given a name, a reason or any dialogue. He walks past their table on a restaurant patio, stops to kiss her completely out of the blue and then waltzes off down the road. He exists in this film only to deliver the kiss of the title and set up our story.

And because Mills avoids giving us any background, we have to find a point of reference somewhere else and the only place viable is Renee Bryant's face. She underplays her role from the outset, because she's playing someone reciting an anecdote to a friend while distracted by all the shiny at a wedding fair, so I can buy her lack of engagement (no pun intended). But when she's kissed, she has a new focus and we have to figure out why. There are two ways I can read this film and neither of them follow the original story. The literal one is that she's kissed by a stranger, whose unexpected moment of passion focuses her thoughts and makes her wonder about the commitment she's about to make. That's hardly a feminist approach as it puts her firmly out of control. The alternative I keep coming back to is the one that gives her control, in which she imagines the whole encounter as a mild fantasy to replace the passion her husband is missing in spades. Certainly when he reappears, it's because she conjured him up again.

Michael Hanelin will surely be happy that he's not the only actor tasked with playing ambiguous roles at Running Wild, but I wonder which way Renee Bryant read her character. Everything revolves around that kiss, which she doesn't fight. The last shot of the film shows her face wide open, resonating a whole host of emotions all at once, and it's the one moment in the film that she's alive. It would be easy to denigrate her lack of engagement, if only it wasn't the right choice for the picture. Staying distracted throughout, but ending up with wide eyes, is far more appropriate. The acting generally is certainly more consistent than it was in The Sisters, but these are far from the sort of outstanding performances we know Mills can conjure out of his actors. Mostly I think they did what they needed to; it's just that their characters play second fiddle to the story. There are feminist takes to this, but then the deliberate lack of background makes many readings possible. I firmly feel that the woman isn't in charge here though; the writer is.