While William Asher wasn't directing dubious yet fascinating science fiction films like The 27th Day, it seems he was making things like this for American International. They were the one of the more important low budget studios to make movies quickly and cheaply, that capitalised on whatever trend happened to have leapt out at the time. Apparently the mid sixties were the right time for beach movies and there were naturally a huge amount of them, possibly all of which were varying degrees of awful.
I've seen one of them, Beach Blanket Bingo, which was frankly terrible. Stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello may have been the in thing at the time but they're certainly nothing beyond laughable now to anyone who isn't wallowing in the nostalgia of it. The only decent thing in it was Buster Keaton showing up every now and again to show the kids how it was really done. This is better by virtue of being such an awful train wreck that it's impossible not to watch it. There's also some hidden influence here that makes it far more important than it really has any right to be.
This one was made a year earlier, still with both Frankie and Annette (and most of the supporting cast), but Frankie gets a second role as Potato Bug, a horrendously stereotyped English singer and drag racer that surely must have been a major influence on Mike Myers when he came up with Austin Powers. It all has to be seen to be believed, especially as Austin Powers was an intentional joke. Then there's Harvey Lembeck, as Erich von Zipper, a Brando-esque biker who runs a gang called the Rats and Mice, where the guys are rats and the girls are mice. He's a complete moron and is almost as much of a train wreck as the Potato Bug. There's Don Rickles, a modern artist called Big Drag who has a talking falcon, which is as ludicrous as it sounds, and who also runs both the local teen hangout bar and the local drag strip too. Busy man, huh?
Then there are the guests, who steal plenty of the movie. This time there's Keenan Wynn as millionaire Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III, who wants to prove that his pet chimp is just as bright as the kids on the beach, and especially Janos Prohaska as Clyde the Ape himself. Yep, Clyde, who dances and surfs and drives and breaks the world speed record in drag racing. About the only thing he doesn't do is make right turns. There's Candy Johnson, playing Candy and thus presumably herself, as a go go dancer who can knock people down from a distance with the swish of her hips.
There's Timothy Carey as pool player South Dakota Slim, who hangs out in a joint with Adolf Hitler on the wall and Val Warren in the corner, playing a quote Teenage Werewolf Monster unquote. There's art dealer Boris Karloff, who doesn't speaks or turn his face to the camera until the very end of the film and then only to throw a couple of jokes our way that explain his entire presence. There's even Little Stevie Wonder, before he stopped being little.
It's atrocious, pure and simple, but somehow I couldn't stop watching, and this is certainly far more watchable than Beach Blanket Bingo. It isn't boring though, in the slightest. It has about everything you could imagine from mid sixties pop culture, even a music score by Les Baxter and Candy Johnson teaching go go dancing to some old woman while the end credits roll. It's a riot, for all the good and bad that implies.
Sunday, 14 January 2007
Friday, 12 January 2007
The 27th Day (1957)
We open with what must be the politest abductions ever shown on film. Some unseen man, who appears out of nowhere and is apparently bulletproof, asks his victims to come with him. Where we initially don't know, but we do know that they're from diverse locations and backgrounds: an English girl from the seaside, an American journalist, a Chinese peasant girl, a European scientist and a Russian soldier. Soon we discover that we're on a flying saucer and the host has a sense of humour, asking them to call him 'the alien'.
However we soon discover that we're also in a fifties sci-fi B-movie and thus nobody bothered to think about consistency. We watch the Earth slowly disappear but apparently we're travelling at light speed. The alien tells them that his race want to move in because their own planet is dying, but they're all nice guys so they won't invade or kill us or anything like that. Instead he gives each of his five guests an ultimate weapon and expects rather than hopes that they'll use them within the 27 days that they'll be active. If they don't, the aliens will quietly die so as to not cause any inconvenience to anyone; but if they do, the weapons will destroy all human life on the planet without damaging anything else and the aliens' conscience will apparently stay clean.
No, I don't quite buy this logic either, but there it is: it's still an intriguing concept, courtesy of screenwriter John Mantley who adapted it from his own novel. Rather than the standard plot from numerous fifties movies about all powerful aliens invading the Earth and destroying humanity, we have aliens granting us the opportunity to do it for them. Instead of merely regarding us as savages, they give us the chance to prove it. The key factor is a real bitch: the alien ensures that the five can't hide their stories by broadcasting to the entire world their names and home cities, suddenly it's no secret any more.
The stars are Gene Barry from The War of the Worlds (the American), and Valerie French (the Englishwoman), along with George Voskovec, (the European), who made this the same year he played Uncle Vanya and appeared in 12 Angry Men. That's a varied and interesting year in film for one man. All of them are solid decent people in a very fifties vein, obviously chosen for the image they project. Like many fifties scifi movies, it's American propaganda as much as anything, as controlled by the moral arbiters of the country through the confines of the Production Code. For instance, the Americans merely seek their man but the Russians torture theirs.
However it could also be seen as a victory for individualism: mankind is dumb but man is not. That fits a lot of my optimistic/pessimistic beliefs too: that if there's a way for mankind to screw everything up, it'll find it; but if there's a way for an individual to find a fix, he or she will do that too. The film isn't as good as it could be but it's far better than it should be. This concept, as much as I don't buy it, really makes me think and that's a damn fine thing for a movie to do.
However we soon discover that we're also in a fifties sci-fi B-movie and thus nobody bothered to think about consistency. We watch the Earth slowly disappear but apparently we're travelling at light speed. The alien tells them that his race want to move in because their own planet is dying, but they're all nice guys so they won't invade or kill us or anything like that. Instead he gives each of his five guests an ultimate weapon and expects rather than hopes that they'll use them within the 27 days that they'll be active. If they don't, the aliens will quietly die so as to not cause any inconvenience to anyone; but if they do, the weapons will destroy all human life on the planet without damaging anything else and the aliens' conscience will apparently stay clean.
No, I don't quite buy this logic either, but there it is: it's still an intriguing concept, courtesy of screenwriter John Mantley who adapted it from his own novel. Rather than the standard plot from numerous fifties movies about all powerful aliens invading the Earth and destroying humanity, we have aliens granting us the opportunity to do it for them. Instead of merely regarding us as savages, they give us the chance to prove it. The key factor is a real bitch: the alien ensures that the five can't hide their stories by broadcasting to the entire world their names and home cities, suddenly it's no secret any more.
The stars are Gene Barry from The War of the Worlds (the American), and Valerie French (the Englishwoman), along with George Voskovec, (the European), who made this the same year he played Uncle Vanya and appeared in 12 Angry Men. That's a varied and interesting year in film for one man. All of them are solid decent people in a very fifties vein, obviously chosen for the image they project. Like many fifties scifi movies, it's American propaganda as much as anything, as controlled by the moral arbiters of the country through the confines of the Production Code. For instance, the Americans merely seek their man but the Russians torture theirs.
However it could also be seen as a victory for individualism: mankind is dumb but man is not. That fits a lot of my optimistic/pessimistic beliefs too: that if there's a way for mankind to screw everything up, it'll find it; but if there's a way for an individual to find a fix, he or she will do that too. The film isn't as good as it could be but it's far better than it should be. This concept, as much as I don't buy it, really makes me think and that's a damn fine thing for a movie to do.
Detective Kitty O'Day (1944)
One of the great guilty pleasures in life is to discover a new forties detective series. This is hardly a series, being only two movies as far as I can see, but it's a recurring character nonetheless. The most fun ones in my book were detectives who weren't really detectives, merely playing the part. This time it's Kitty O'Day who is a precisely spoken and shapely secretary played by Jean Parker, whose mother created undergrowth for Forbidden Planet. She appeared in two films: Detective Kitty O'Day and The Adventures of Kitty O'Day, this being the first.
Kitty is a nosy secretary, always listening in on her boss's calls. He's about to head out on a trip and when she follows him home to finalise some paperwork before he leaves, she finds him dead instead in a house with no power. His securities are missing along with the butler and a note that only Kitty has seen, he was apparently going to South America not Boston and the house soon fills up with suspects, starting with Kitty's boyfriend who is also her boss's accountant.
Most of the cast members are either reliable workhorses like Tim Ryan as the inept cop in charge of the investigation, who is very reminiscent of Edward Brophy; or third rate actors like Peter Cookson as the boyfriend, who has so little acting talent that he tries to be Cary Grant but ends up more like Matt LeBlanc. He's almost outacted by the walls, which are of the very cheap wooden variety marked with neat but very cheap signs that all look like they took about ten seconds to create. To say the budget was low is something of an understatement.
Luckily there's Jean Parker to keep up something of a standard. She is by far the best thing about this movie. She has a field day with her character, getting into everyone's business, answering everyone else's questions and running her own investigation into the whole thing. She's so much fun I'm amazed I haven't seen her in much else. I'll have to keep my eyes open for more of her films.
Kitty is a nosy secretary, always listening in on her boss's calls. He's about to head out on a trip and when she follows him home to finalise some paperwork before he leaves, she finds him dead instead in a house with no power. His securities are missing along with the butler and a note that only Kitty has seen, he was apparently going to South America not Boston and the house soon fills up with suspects, starting with Kitty's boyfriend who is also her boss's accountant.
Most of the cast members are either reliable workhorses like Tim Ryan as the inept cop in charge of the investigation, who is very reminiscent of Edward Brophy; or third rate actors like Peter Cookson as the boyfriend, who has so little acting talent that he tries to be Cary Grant but ends up more like Matt LeBlanc. He's almost outacted by the walls, which are of the very cheap wooden variety marked with neat but very cheap signs that all look like they took about ten seconds to create. To say the budget was low is something of an understatement.
Luckily there's Jean Parker to keep up something of a standard. She is by far the best thing about this movie. She has a field day with her character, getting into everyone's business, answering everyone else's questions and running her own investigation into the whole thing. She's so much fun I'm amazed I haven't seen her in much else. I'll have to keep my eyes open for more of her films.
Work (1915)
There are wonderfully poetic images early on here that could easily have been made by a Lang or a Murnau: Charlie Chaplin, as the little tramp, pulling a large cart up a steep hillside, more mule than rickshaw driver. It's laden down with barrels, ladders and scaffolding, along with two passengers, and so naturally they fall prey to the power of gravity: they all go up and then back down again. More than once. And naturally there's a railroad track at the bottom complete with what must be the most frequently running train in Hollywood. These aren't slapstick in the slightest but they're comedic genius, possibly the first point in Chaplin's career where he gave us a glimpse of the timeless masterworks he would go on to create, and here unwittingly aided by the stark print with terrible contrast.
Up until now he'd been doing great stuff: pioneering the comedic arts, making the first feature length comedy, defining just what comedy was in the movies. Yet much of it really isn't that fun to watch today. Many of those numerous Keystone films from 1914 may have been riotous in their day but that day has long gone. Now they're tired. A year later Chaplin was at Essanay making films like this, and they're not tired any more, they're hilarious. While working through all this early work, this moment has seemed a long time coming, but after all this is still only 1915. Putting it into perspective, people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd hadn't started to do anything either. Keaton didn't even make a film until 1917 and Lloyd had only just become Lonesome Luke, hardly his heyday.
Here Chaplin is working with decorators, or at least they're decorators and he's working, for the most part. You can almost describe half the script from that alone, but there's a lot more going on here. There's still the slapstick, here about as frenetically insane as I've seen, to be the obvious focus of attention, but there are other gags too that we have to pay attention to see: ones that run over longer periods of time or just take time to mature. This is definitely the peak of Chaplin's work up until this point and the start of the great work to come. It's also probably the first of his movies that is worth watching again and again.
Up until now he'd been doing great stuff: pioneering the comedic arts, making the first feature length comedy, defining just what comedy was in the movies. Yet much of it really isn't that fun to watch today. Many of those numerous Keystone films from 1914 may have been riotous in their day but that day has long gone. Now they're tired. A year later Chaplin was at Essanay making films like this, and they're not tired any more, they're hilarious. While working through all this early work, this moment has seemed a long time coming, but after all this is still only 1915. Putting it into perspective, people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd hadn't started to do anything either. Keaton didn't even make a film until 1917 and Lloyd had only just become Lonesome Luke, hardly his heyday.
Here Chaplin is working with decorators, or at least they're decorators and he's working, for the most part. You can almost describe half the script from that alone, but there's a lot more going on here. There's still the slapstick, here about as frenetically insane as I've seen, to be the obvious focus of attention, but there are other gags too that we have to pay attention to see: ones that run over longer periods of time or just take time to mature. This is definitely the peak of Chaplin's work up until this point and the start of the great work to come. It's also probably the first of his movies that is worth watching again and again.
By the Sea (1915)
There's a lot of wind at the sea side in 1915, it seems, so we're treated to a lot of flying hats that blow around like crazy to the accompaniment of a large amount of crazy high speed slapstick fun. This time it's all even faster paced than usual because half the frames seem to be missing. Maybe that's why my DVD copy runs less than ten minutes even though the running time is listed as either sixteen or twenty depending on where you look.
The cast are all interchangeable with all the other casts Chaplin worked with, though the only one I recognise is the omnipresent Edna Purviance. It's a wild ride but very little else, with almost no title cards and not much explanation of anything. The film is nothing more than a framework on which to hang fights and chases with whatever props come to hand. They may be fun fights and fun chases but that's all they are.
The cast are all interchangeable with all the other casts Chaplin worked with, though the only one I recognise is the omnipresent Edna Purviance. It's a wild ride but very little else, with almost no title cards and not much explanation of anything. The film is nothing more than a framework on which to hang fights and chases with whatever props come to hand. They may be fun fights and fun chases but that's all they are.
Thursday, 11 January 2007
The Man with Nine Lives (1940)
Frozen therapy is here apparently in the modern era of 1940. It roughly equates to the common modern cartoon version of cryogenics, where subjects aren't cured but put into suspended animation through being frozen until such time as a cure may have been discovered. However in this instance the suspended animation itself is the cure: merely freezing someone for five days is enough to stimulate the good tissue and kill off the diseased tissue. Or at least that's what the journalists think, though the doctor involved, Dr Tim Mason, freely points out that it's just a temporary thing.
He also points out that everything he's done has been inspired by a book, the work of a mysterious hermit of a scientist who disappeared ten years earlier and Mason can't trace. However all the misleading publicity leads Mason to get thrown into an involuntary sabbatical, so he and his nurse head on out to Silver Lake on the Canadian border to track down this recluse, Dr Kravaal, played naturally by Boris Karloff. Just as naturally Kravaal's island isn't quite as deserted as they might expect. Deep down under his mansion Kravaal is frozen solid in his refrigeration room, so they thaw him out and hear his story.
The Man with Nine Lives has an intriguing story that is unfortunately notably leading, especially in the early stages. The cast make the most of it through sheer earnestness and deserve something a little less clumsy because the performances are pretty good. The leads keep everything going nicely until the arrival of Karloff twenty minutes in. Dr Mason is Roger Pryor, known as the poor man's Clark Gable. Jo Ann Sayers, playing his fiancee, Judy the nurse, has everything it takes to have become a decent B movie staple but this was the last of only twelve films she made, before she retired young to marry.
And then there's Karloff. He's a mad scientist, have no doubts about that, but he's far from the usual sort of mad scientist. He wasn't mad until he was driven so by the unwelcome attention of idiots in authority. He has a noble cause in mind, the cure for cancer no less, and he only experiments with subjects willing to take part, until circumstances and the actions of others decree otherwise. In many ways he's the real hero here and the bad guys are the sheriff, the DA, the coroner and a rich man's nephew greedy for inheritance. Kravaal wants to give his cure to the world, free of charge, but that greedy nephew destroys his formula because it's pointed out that he's legally dead and thus can no longer inherit. How's that for mitigating circumstances? One man destroys your cure for cancer and you have a gun in your pocket. No, this definitely isn't your run of the mill mad scientist movie!
He also points out that everything he's done has been inspired by a book, the work of a mysterious hermit of a scientist who disappeared ten years earlier and Mason can't trace. However all the misleading publicity leads Mason to get thrown into an involuntary sabbatical, so he and his nurse head on out to Silver Lake on the Canadian border to track down this recluse, Dr Kravaal, played naturally by Boris Karloff. Just as naturally Kravaal's island isn't quite as deserted as they might expect. Deep down under his mansion Kravaal is frozen solid in his refrigeration room, so they thaw him out and hear his story.
The Man with Nine Lives has an intriguing story that is unfortunately notably leading, especially in the early stages. The cast make the most of it through sheer earnestness and deserve something a little less clumsy because the performances are pretty good. The leads keep everything going nicely until the arrival of Karloff twenty minutes in. Dr Mason is Roger Pryor, known as the poor man's Clark Gable. Jo Ann Sayers, playing his fiancee, Judy the nurse, has everything it takes to have become a decent B movie staple but this was the last of only twelve films she made, before she retired young to marry.
And then there's Karloff. He's a mad scientist, have no doubts about that, but he's far from the usual sort of mad scientist. He wasn't mad until he was driven so by the unwelcome attention of idiots in authority. He has a noble cause in mind, the cure for cancer no less, and he only experiments with subjects willing to take part, until circumstances and the actions of others decree otherwise. In many ways he's the real hero here and the bad guys are the sheriff, the DA, the coroner and a rich man's nephew greedy for inheritance. Kravaal wants to give his cure to the world, free of charge, but that greedy nephew destroys his formula because it's pointed out that he's legally dead and thus can no longer inherit. How's that for mitigating circumstances? One man destroys your cure for cancer and you have a gun in your pocket. No, this definitely isn't your run of the mill mad scientist movie!
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1965)
We're in Egypt in 1900 and Arabs in black outfits are busy cutting a hand off a bound prisoner belonging to the Dalrymple expedition that has located the tomb of the ancient Egyptian prince Ra-Antef. The victim is Professor Dubois, who leaves a lovely daughter as well as a couple of colleagues, Sir Giles Dalrymple and John Bray. Inevitably there's the usual curse but at the instigation of American showman Alexander King they're soon out of Egypt and sailing back to England to put the prince on tour.
This is a Hammer horror and it's far too long since I've seen a good Hammer horror. However this isn't a great one, not a patch on the first ancient Egyptian mummy curse movie they put out, 1959's The Mummy. That film had the good fortune of starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and being directed by Terence Fisher. It's pretty hard to screw up a combination like that and it's one of the best of the early Hammers. As far as I can tell the only continuing cast member though is Michael Ripper, and he's a long way down the credits on both films.
Here we have Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard (not Ron Howard), Fred Clark, Jack Gwillim and Dickie Owen as the mummy which is inevitably brought back to stumbing life to attack everyone else. The film also introduces Jeanne Roland and her pleasing cleavage as the young Annette Dubois in her debut film, before going on to such lofty heights as being James Bond's masseuse in You Only Live Twice. Everyone is perfectly decent but nobody really shines, with the possible exception of Clark who blusters joyously as the American showman, inventing Turkish Delight and rambling on about his friend Phineas Barnum. The rest of it is pretty predictable but there's nothing too bad about any of it, merely nothing that compares with the great material that Hammer tended to put out.
This is a Hammer horror and it's far too long since I've seen a good Hammer horror. However this isn't a great one, not a patch on the first ancient Egyptian mummy curse movie they put out, 1959's The Mummy. That film had the good fortune of starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and being directed by Terence Fisher. It's pretty hard to screw up a combination like that and it's one of the best of the early Hammers. As far as I can tell the only continuing cast member though is Michael Ripper, and he's a long way down the credits on both films.
Here we have Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard (not Ron Howard), Fred Clark, Jack Gwillim and Dickie Owen as the mummy which is inevitably brought back to stumbing life to attack everyone else. The film also introduces Jeanne Roland and her pleasing cleavage as the young Annette Dubois in her debut film, before going on to such lofty heights as being James Bond's masseuse in You Only Live Twice. Everyone is perfectly decent but nobody really shines, with the possible exception of Clark who blusters joyously as the American showman, inventing Turkish Delight and rambling on about his friend Phineas Barnum. The rest of it is pretty predictable but there's nothing too bad about any of it, merely nothing that compares with the great material that Hammer tended to put out.
The Tramp (1915)
Some lowlife from a trio of lowlifes steals Charlie Chaplin's lunch and Edna Purviance's money. When his friend comes back for more, the little tramp is there to help her out by kicking some lowlife ass. In return he gets invited home to her farm for free food and work and all the rest of it. Quite why anyone would be stupid enough to give Chaplin a hayfork is completely beyond me, but these folks then proceed to allow him to use it on them in all the ways you'd expect.
This is an interesting film for a number of reasons. I recognise a lot of the gags from the last couple of Essanay shorts he made, and they haven't really progressed any further, but there's a lot more here. This is the first of Chaplin's short comedies to really be a complete feature film condensed into a mere twenty minutes. We start with Chaplin walking down the road towards us and we end with him walking down the road away from us. It's neatly bookended and it progresses with intent throughout. It's completely obvious that Chaplin was really beginning to master the talents that he would demonstrate so amply as the years progressed.
Edna Purviance was the main woman in Chaplin's life at this point so naturally she has a prominent part. Future director Lloyd Bacon gets a double role in this one as one of the thieves and Edna's fiancee. At least he manages to avoid the sharp end of the little tramp's hayfork.
This is an interesting film for a number of reasons. I recognise a lot of the gags from the last couple of Essanay shorts he made, and they haven't really progressed any further, but there's a lot more here. This is the first of Chaplin's short comedies to really be a complete feature film condensed into a mere twenty minutes. We start with Chaplin walking down the road towards us and we end with him walking down the road away from us. It's neatly bookended and it progresses with intent throughout. It's completely obvious that Chaplin was really beginning to master the talents that he would demonstrate so amply as the years progressed.
Edna Purviance was the main woman in Chaplin's life at this point so naturally she has a prominent part. Future director Lloyd Bacon gets a double role in this one as one of the thieves and Edna's fiancee. At least he manages to avoid the sharp end of the little tramp's hayfork.
Caught in the Rain (1914)
According to my 57 film Charlie Chaplin box set from Brentwood Home Video, this one's called In the Park and it fits in with his Essanay period in 1915. Indeed Chaplin made a film called In the Park in that very timeframe, but this ons isn't it. In this case In the Park is the reissue title of a film made a year earlier called Caught in the Rain. Now In the Park is not a great title, given that only the first couple of the twelve minute running time are actually spent in a park, but it's no worse than Caught in the Rain as that only happens in one scene for even less time. Go figure.
Anyway, it's not bad for one of Chaplin's 1914 movies, but it's hardly a great one. He's apparently a little drunk and so decides to try it on with Alice Davenport who has been temporarily left alone on a park bench by her husband Mack Swain. Swain of course is the inevitable large guy with facial hair and he gets more than a little upset when he realises what's going on. Then it's quickly out of the park and into the same hotel I just watched Chaplin wander around drunk in in A Night Out. In fact most of the gags are the same too, with lots of falling down stairs and getting caught in the wrong bedrooms.
Not bad, but it's all been done before, and obviously this wasn't the last time it was done either, even by Chaplin himself. There's even a short Keystone Kops type routine at the end.
Anyway, it's not bad for one of Chaplin's 1914 movies, but it's hardly a great one. He's apparently a little drunk and so decides to try it on with Alice Davenport who has been temporarily left alone on a park bench by her husband Mack Swain. Swain of course is the inevitable large guy with facial hair and he gets more than a little upset when he realises what's going on. Then it's quickly out of the park and into the same hotel I just watched Chaplin wander around drunk in in A Night Out. In fact most of the gags are the same too, with lots of falling down stairs and getting caught in the wrong bedrooms.
Not bad, but it's all been done before, and obviously this wasn't the last time it was done either, even by Chaplin himself. There's even a short Keystone Kops type routine at the end.
Wednesday, 10 January 2007
The Ninth Gate (1999)
You really can't go wrong when starting off a film with a suicide by hanging, especially when the dead man is surrounded by a gorgeous library filled with antique books. It's a Roman Polanski movie, based on the novel El Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, the best selling Spanish journalist turned writer. He's quoted as saying that Polanski's film isn't bad but it isn't his novel. It stars Johnny Depp, meaning that it's one a Depp that I haven't managed to see yet, and there aren't too many of those left.
Depp is Dean Corso, an unscrupulous book dealer with a reputation, who is not unwilling to buy a rare Don Quixote for a steal from a couple who don't have a clue, when the man who does is right there in the room but unable to comment after having a stroke. Boris Balkan, a wealthy collector of books on the devil, invites him to work for him. There are three copies of an antique volume called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows still in existence, a book containing riddles that when decoded lead to a ritual to raise the devil. Balkan believes that only one is genuine he doesn't know if it's his own copy or one of the other two. So he hires Corso to find a way to compare the three and find out which one is the real one.
The investigation leads him down strange paths. He starts seeing things that aren't there, his home is ransacked and beautiful women start throwing themselves at him. Naturally it all revolves around the book, and when those beautiful women can't find it they start trying to kill him instead, and manage that with the dealer he trusts to stash the book for him. Even piles of scaffolding seem to be trying to kill him, when nobody else is around. And throughout he keeps bumping into a nameless young lady who can vanish without explanation.
This is not an action film and it's far from an effects film either, though there are some very subtle effects shots that are as notable for their brevity as their effectiveness. José López Rodero does a magnificent job in a couple of double roles, for instance, even though he's not even an actor, but a production manager. I also love the colour of the film, which is usually beautifully faded to brown, and makes me want to see Chinatown again in widescreen this time round. The performances are subtle but very powerful indeed. Depp is far more restrained than usual and deliberately lets himself be outshone by a number of female characters with smaller parts in the film: a dynamic and sexual Lena Olin; an enigmatic Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's real wife who has featured in a few of his movies; and Barbara Jefford as an elderly baroness with a colourful past. Frank Langella is also a remarkably and refreshingly unvillainous villain. Above all, I have a feeling that this is a film that grows with each viewing. I'm looking forward to next time through.
Depp is Dean Corso, an unscrupulous book dealer with a reputation, who is not unwilling to buy a rare Don Quixote for a steal from a couple who don't have a clue, when the man who does is right there in the room but unable to comment after having a stroke. Boris Balkan, a wealthy collector of books on the devil, invites him to work for him. There are three copies of an antique volume called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows still in existence, a book containing riddles that when decoded lead to a ritual to raise the devil. Balkan believes that only one is genuine he doesn't know if it's his own copy or one of the other two. So he hires Corso to find a way to compare the three and find out which one is the real one.
The investigation leads him down strange paths. He starts seeing things that aren't there, his home is ransacked and beautiful women start throwing themselves at him. Naturally it all revolves around the book, and when those beautiful women can't find it they start trying to kill him instead, and manage that with the dealer he trusts to stash the book for him. Even piles of scaffolding seem to be trying to kill him, when nobody else is around. And throughout he keeps bumping into a nameless young lady who can vanish without explanation.
This is not an action film and it's far from an effects film either, though there are some very subtle effects shots that are as notable for their brevity as their effectiveness. José López Rodero does a magnificent job in a couple of double roles, for instance, even though he's not even an actor, but a production manager. I also love the colour of the film, which is usually beautifully faded to brown, and makes me want to see Chinatown again in widescreen this time round. The performances are subtle but very powerful indeed. Depp is far more restrained than usual and deliberately lets himself be outshone by a number of female characters with smaller parts in the film: a dynamic and sexual Lena Olin; an enigmatic Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's real wife who has featured in a few of his movies; and Barbara Jefford as an elderly baroness with a colourful past. Frank Langella is also a remarkably and refreshingly unvillainous villain. Above all, I have a feeling that this is a film that grows with each viewing. I'm looking forward to next time through.
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