Columnists
Entries from October 2016
BY ADRIAN SMITH
William
Blood (Kenneth More) is a man with an incredible immune system and without worries.
He spends most of his time working as a human guinea pig for government departments
such as the Common Cold and Flu Research Agency. There he frustrates the men in
white coats by stubbornly refusing to catch a cold. He never gets ill, and his
secret is that he has no emotional attachments. “The minute you get into a
relationship with a woman, your guard is down and the coughing will start!â€
News of this remarkable constitution gets to the scientists at N.A.A.R.S.T.I.,
the National Atomic Research Station and Technological Institute, who are
preparing to send the first maned rocket to the moon. They have previously sent
up dogs and monkeys, but owing to public complaints about cruelty to animals,
they have decided it would be far better to send a human. However, it is far
too risky to send one of their trained astronauts. After all, training is
expensive. Far better to send William Blood instead in the first rocket, and
provided he gets there in one piece, they will then send up the real
astronauts. This sounds like a fool-proof plan, but what is not accounted for
is a distraction, in the shapely form of stripper Polly (Shirley Anne Field),
who has fallen in love with him.
Once
Blood begins his astronaut training he has to face the other jealous astronauts
lead by a young Charles Gray, who are furious that they won’t be the first on
the moon after all their preparations. However, he does have the project leader
Dr. Davidson (Michael Horden) on his side, and he goes through a rigorous
raining regime featuring extreme temperatures and G-force simulators to prepare
him for the adventure ahead.
Man in the Moon is a
delightful film with a sparkling and witty script written by Bryan Forbes and
Michael Relph. Basil Dearden’s direction is inventive and makes use of some
excellent location work at RAF Denham alongside impressive sets built at
Pinewood Studios. It is a perfect encapsulation of an England on the cusp of
great change. Blood, whizzing around in an open-topped Messerschmitt
bubble-car, is the epitome of modern man, whilst those in charge at
N.A.A.R.S.T.I. he meets are still wearing tweed and smoking pipes. His thinking
is progressive, as he has no qualms about seducing a beautiful woman whilst still
actively berating the institution of marriage. The Britain of Man in the Moon has one foot in the war
years, the other in the Atomic Age, with an endearing performance by Kenneth
More at the centre of it all.
In
his forty-year career, Basil Dearden made dozens of film, many of which are now
considered classics. With notable hits including Violent Playground (1958), The
Blue Lamp (1950) and The League of
Gentlemen (1960), he clearly had an affinity for film noir-style crime
dramas, and it is perhaps easy to forget that one of his early hits was
actually the early Ealing comedy The
Goose Steps Out (1942) starring Will Hay. Dearden made many films for
Ealing Studios, even contributing to the classic supernatural portmanteau Dead of Night (1945). His last film was the
supernatural mystery The Man Who Haunted
Himself (1970), frequently cited by Roger Moore as the best film he ever
made. Sadly, Dearden died in a car crash shortly after completing the film, the
accident occurring in the very spot where months earlier they had shot Roger
Moore’s character’s car crash for that film.
Man in the Moon is another release in Network Distributing’s ‘The British Film’
collection, and as such comes with little bonus material, limited to an
original trailer, image gallery and press book. Despite this reservation it is
still a superb release. The main reason for watching is to see an excellent
transfer from original elements, and like all the films in their collection, Man in the Moon is a forgotten
but entertaining gem.
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“MORE OF WHAT THE
HEART WANTSâ€
By Raymond Benson
It’s
a recurring theme in Woody Allen’s work over the past twenty years—“the heart
wants what the heart wants.†The writer/director (and, now, only occasionally
an actor) has lately tackled this topic with varying results. You have to hand
it to him, though—the guy has consistently made more or less a movie a year
since 1969. There have to be a few clinkers in there—even Hitchcock had some.
Luckily for us, though, Café Society is a pretty good entry in Allen’s canon—not
one of the masterpieces of yesteryear, but it’s probably the best thing he’s
done since the excellent award-winning Midnight
in Paris.
Café Society is a period piece that takes place mostly in
Hollywood in the 1930s, and therein lies much of its charm—the production
design and costumes, along with Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, immediately
provides eye candy that looks fabulous in high definition. Fans of American
cinema history will find a lot to admire in the picture’s references to old
Hollywood.
The
story is familiar territory. Jesse Eisenberg is the Woody-surrogate this time
around, playing New Yorker Bobby, who goes to L.A. to get a job at the studio
run by his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell). There, he meets a secretary, Veronica
(Kristen Stewart), and falls in love. Little does he know that she is involved
with Uncle Phil. Another woman named Veronica (Blake Lively) enters the tale a
little later, when Bobby is back in New York. In short, Café Society is a love story that
spans several years with a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-meets-another
girl, boy-runs-into-first-girl-again plot structure.
There
are laughs, to be sure, but overall the film projects a bittersweet,
melancholic mood that is disarming for a Woody Allen film. Is the ending a
happy one? That’s not a guarantee; in this case what the heart wants may not be
what’s best for the heart.
The
performances are of high caliber, especially those of Stewart and Lively. The
former creates a deeply conflicted character in Veronica 1, while the latter
lights up the screen as Veronica 2. Parker Posey is always a welcome addition,
and Corey Stoll, as Bobby’s mobster brother, is hilarious.
It’s
a solid 3-out-of-4 stars Woody Allen flick. The one thing that definitely could
have been deleted was the voice-over narration (delivered by Woody himself),
which is unnecessary and, at times, annoying.
As
with most home video releases of the director’s pictures, the Lionsgate Blu-ray
(packaged with a DVD and digital copy) comes with little in the way of
supplements. In this case, there’s only two-minutes of “red carpet footage†and
a trailer—but the feature film is a little gem.
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“BERNIE SAVES THE
DAYâ€
By Raymond Benson
Film noir was still a valid Hollywood
commodity in 1951, and director Nicholas Ray was one the style’s star
practitioners. He had begun his career with the classic They Live by Night, and just the previous year he had brought us In a Lonely Place (see Cinema Retro’s
review here). On Dangerous Ground, which stars Ida Lupino (who reportedly
directed some scenes when Ray was ill) and Robert Ryan, is a fair
representation of the movement—it’s not bad, but it’s not particularly great,
either.
Oddly,
it comes across as two different movies. The first forty minutes or so are deep
in film noir territory—it has an urban
setting, a cynical and violent protagonist (Ryan, as a police detective in the
city), night scenes, hard-boiled dialogue, harshly contrasting black and white
photography (by George E. Diskant), and sultry dames. Then, the story shifts
“up north†to snow-covered landscapes and mountains, a bright sky, and a completely
different plot than the one we started off with. Ryan, after chasing after
mobsters in the city, is sent upstate to help out with a murder investigation
in a rural area (which also doesn’t make sense, jurisdiction-wise). There he
meets a lovely blind woman (Lupino) and abruptly softens his tough guy act. His
affection for her affects the way he treats her younger, mentally challenged brother,
who of course is the killer. At this point the movie doesn’t know if it wants
to be a crime thriller or a love story.
The
performances are fine, although Ward Bond as the father of the slain victim is
ridiculously over-the-top. The direction is competent, and the cinematography
is striking. The problem is the script by A. I. Bezzerides—it’s weak enough to
sink the entire picture. Fortunately, the film is saved by another member of
the production team—the inimitable Bernard Herrmann. He provides the exciting score, and fans will immediately recognize motifs that
sound as if they could be practice riffs for his music in Vertigo and, especially, North by Northwest. Bernie’s work makes On Dangerous Ground completely worthwhile
and a lot of fun to watch.
The
restoration and transfer of the Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray disk looks
darned good. The images are sharp and clear, and the blacks and whites are
vivid—the snow sequences are notably gorgeous. The movie comes with a commentary
by film historian Glenn Erickson. The theatrical trailer is the only
supplement.
Fans
of film noir should consider picking
up this release—and Bernard Herrmann enthusiasts should grab it without
thinking about it.
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BY TODD GARBARINI
It’s
a scary thought, indeed, to think that it has been twenty-nine years since I
first saw Dario Argento’s fifth giallo
feature film which I had read about two years earlier in the pages of a back
issue of Fangoria Magazine. The word giallo is the Italian word for the color
yellow, and has found new life in describing a subgenre of the Italian horror
film that refers to a who-done-it involving a killer who conceals their identity
by wearing a large coat, a wide-brimmed hat, unisex footwear and gloves, their
face always obscured or hidden completely. Very often we see the killer only in synecdoche. These stories all originated in the form of
pulp novellas which sported yellow covers, hence the use of the term giallo.
Whereas
the word giallo is always spelled one
way, the correct spelling of the film’s title, Tenebrae, has always been up for debate. One is never sure if it is Tenebre or Tenebrae. In reality, Tenebrae is the Latin word for shadows and darkness and also
refers to a Christian religious service which I personally have never been
privy to. Nevertheless, in regards to
the spelling of the title of Mr. Argento’s film, either one is much better than
the horrendous and Americanized Unsane,
which even trimmed the film’s running time down to 91 minutes. Considering that Unsane played on 42nd Street in New York City, a place
where horror films, sci-fi outings, and future cult movies were dumped and
rarely ever given advertising space in newspapers, the audiences were probably
comprised of folks either too wasted or asleep to care what they were watching,
so cutting out extraneous blood and gore seems silly in retrospect.
Peter
Neal (Anthony Franciosa) is a popular novelist whose new book, Tenebrae, has just been released. He flies from New York to Rome for a press
junket arranged by his agent Bullmer (John Saxon in a strangely comedic turn)
and his publicist Anne (Daria Nicolodi whose voice is dubbed by, of all people,
Theresa Russell!). He plays nice with journalist/feminist
friend Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), who labels Neal’s work as misogynistic, and finds
himself interrogated by an overly adoring talk show host/fan (John Steiner),
and ends up being stalked by a crazed killer who adores his work. In the thick of it, he has an affair with
Anne, nearly has a tryst with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and does
his best to help the police detectives who are working his case. Throughout all of this mayhem, Mr. Argento’s
camera is heavily engaged in the action, whether it represents the killer
trying to find a hiding place through a subjective POV shot, or just decides to
do an incredible sweep from one side of Tilde’s apartment, over the roof, and
on to the other side. This virtuoso
camerawork was accomplished by using the Louma Crane and was operated by the
late cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who also shot Suspiria for Mr. Argento.
Tenebrae’s plot is interesting
enough to keep the audience guessing until the final frame. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with
horror films and Mr. Argento’s work in particular will be able to figure out
the killer’s identity. This truth should
not prevent one from their enjoyment of viewing the film, however. Watching Tenebrae
again nearly made me want to cry because it reminded me of why Mr. Argento is
my favorite horror film director. Between 1974 and 1987 he directed six consecutive films that were not
only wildly entertaining but also incredibly imaginative and visually arresting. They are vast improvements over the narrative
dullness (albeit cinematically striking) of Four
Flies on Grey Velvet and The Cat
O’Nine Tails, although his debut film, The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage, was terrific. Deep
Red, Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena and Opera are six of the most stylish and
compulsively watchable movies that I have ever seen. Mr. Argento’s output following Opera has been uneven at best, with Sleepless and Do You Like Hitchcock? being the few standouts.
Tenebrae is one of Mr.
Argento’s best written, acted, and most tightly constructed films. It’s also one of his most violent and bloody
works. Like the tongue lashing that Peter
Neal receives at the hands of ill-fated Tilde, Mr. Argento received harsh
criticism upon the film’s release regarding not only the subject matter, but
the manner in which the female characters are horrifically dispatched. When you compare Tenebrae to some of the contemporary horror films, the sort of
torture porn that has become prevalent in the genre of late, Tenebrae seems fairly time in
comparison. For some people, it’s a
toss-up between this and Deep Red, as
to which is his best film. Tenebrae had its genesis when Mr.
Argento and his partner Daria Nicolodi were promoting Suspiria in Los Angeles in 1977 wherein a fan was stalking the
director, and left him a note telling him that he wanted to kill him. Check, please!
Tenebrae has some great extras and they are
comprised of:
An
all-new Synapse Films supervised color correction and restoration of a 1080p
scan from original uncut negative elements, presented in the original aspect
ratio of 1.85:1. The film looks
terrific. I was lucky enough to see a
screening of the film in a beautiful 35mm print imported from Norway through
Exhumed Films in February 2008, and this Blu-ray looks better than that.
Dual
English and Italian language options with newly-translated English subtitle
tracks for both.
Audio
commentary track featuring film critic and Argento scholar, Maitland McDonagh. This is a terrific commentary as Mrs.
McDonagh proves herself to be highly authoritative on the subject of this
film. Considering that she wrote the
first book I ever recall seeing on Dario Argento in 1991, this should come as
no surprise. Unfortunately, the
commentary that originally appeared on the Anchor Bay DVD with Dario Argento,
Claudio Simonetti and Lori Cursi has not been ported over, so hang on to that
DVD because that is a worthy commentary as well.
Original
international trailer
Rare
high-definition 1080p English sequence insert shots, playable within the film
via seamless branching [SPECIAL FEATURE EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY DISC]
Ninety-minute,
in-depth documentary Yellow Fever: The
Rise and Fall of the Giallo by High Rising Productions, chronicling the
giallo film genre from its beginnings as early 20th century crime fiction, to
its later influences on the modern slasher film genre. [SPECIAL FEATURE EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY
DISC]. This is a terrific documentary
which features interviews with Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh, Mikel Koven,
Ruggero Deodato, Kim Newman, Umberto Lenzi, Dardano Sachetti, Richard Stanley,
Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Alan Jones, and Luigi Cozzi to name a few. The giallo
genre is attributed to the writings of Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, P.D.
James, and Arthur Conan Doyle and is a great addition to this edition.
Original
UNSANE (U.S. version of TENEBRAE) end credits sequence [SPECIAL FEATURE
EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY DISC]
Alternate
opening credits sequence [SPECIAL FEATURE EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY DISC]
Japanese
SHADOW theatrical trailer [SPECIAL FEATURE EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY DISC]
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By
Todd Garbarini
Directors
Joe Dante (1984’s Gremlins) and Allan Arkush (1979’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) cut their teeth in Hollywood putting
together trailers for Roger Corman films in the early 1970s and got the idea to
make their own film by piecing together stock footage from other Corman pics
and shooting a story around the clips. Armed with $55,000 from Mr. Corman, Hollywood
Boulevard is the result. Released in
1976 on a smattering of screens, Hollywood
Boulevard is a charming and entertaining send-up of Hollywood filmmaking
which stars the incomparable (and sadly, the late) Candice Rialson as Candy Wednesday, a fresh-off-the-bus
naïve blonde who, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, wants to be an actress
and walks straight into the office of agent Walter Paisley (Dick Miller). His advice to just go out and walk the
streets and be seen is taken quite literally, and she finds herself suckered
into the middle of a bank robbery while assuming that it’s a movie being shot
(that old gag!). It takes Candy some
time to see through the bank robber’s real intent, but amazingly it does not
seem to faze or dissuade her from getting into showbiz. Eventually she manages to hook up with a
ragtag group of performers who work for Miracle Pictures – their motto is “If
it’s a good movie, it’s a miracle!†They
are making a film called Machete Maidens
of Mora Tau II, which is directed by a campy and pretentious director named
Erich Von Leppe (Paul Bartel) who orders around his leading lady (Mary Woronov).
Unfortunately for her, she is replacing
an actress who died on the set while Machete
Maidens was being shot! Could the
same fate befall her? Candy, now doing
stunts for Miracle Pictures, catches the attention of Patrick (Jeffrey Kramer
of Jaws), a writer, and they begin a
passionate affair while making films. A
series of misadventures follows when the crew goes to the Philippines to shoot.
There is a hilarious bit where Candy, Walter, and Patrick view their finished
product at the old Gilmore Drive-In in Los Angeles. Candy eventually becomes a
glamourous film star and Patrick a successful screenwriter.
Hollywood Boulevard was shot in August 1975 in Los Angeles
over a period of ten days(!) and is a film clearly love sonnet to the industry. There are street shots of Grauman’s Chinese
Theater (Ovidio G. Assonitis and Robert Barrett’s Beyond the Door is on the marquee!), while another theatre boasts Jaws and Dog Day Afternoon. Can you
imagine that there was a time in this country when you could go a theatre and these two films would be playing at the
same time? Try finding any theatre
nowadays boasting films half the
caliber of these two titles. The Pussycat
Theater offers Fred Donaldson’s Sometime
Sweet Susan to those adventurous enough to head through the doors (Martin
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was being
filmed during the same time in New York City and Susan is on a marquee in that film, too). The film is loaded with silly action that the
low budget would allow and ADR-looped lines abound.
Scorpion
Releasing has done a wonderful job of transferring Hollywood Boulevard. With
the exception of two brief streaks down the left side of the frame early on the
transfer, the 2K scan of the film’s inter-positive is a revelation, easily the
best the film has ever looked. There are
some nice extras on this edition, which is limited to 1,500 copies: the
feature-length commentary with directors Joe Dante and Allan Arkush and producer
Jon Davison has been ported over from the 2001 DVD release. Even if you are not a fan of the film (how
can you not be?!), the commentary is worth the price of the Blu-ray alone as it
has a terrific insight into the manner in which low budget filmmaking at New
World Pictures was done in the 1970s. Director Dante is very engaging and hilarious to listen to, recalling
with amazing swiftness which films the scenes were culled from, and funny
anecdotes about the scenes and how and when they were shot.
There
are also a handful of brand new on-screen interviews with:
Joe Dante (15:26) He quite correctly
points out that despite the fact that more movies are available for viewing now
than ever before, younger audiences don’t know about these films (foreign and
the like) because they haven’t been exposed to them.
Allan Arkush and Jon Davison (15:23) are
very funny to listen to, discussing how they came to direct and produce
respectively Hollywood Boulevard and
how they met Jeffrey Kramer and came to cast him.
Mary Woronov (11:18) speaks zealously
about her time working for New World Pictures.
Roger Corman (7:00) reiterates how
little money it took to make the film and how much he genuinely loves it.
Jeffrey
Kramer (13:16) gets a decent amount of screen time here, reminiscing about his
early days in the film industry, and tells a very funning anecdote about the
premiere of his TV series Struck by
Lightning in which he co-starred with Jack Elam. I liked this show which debuted on Wednesday,
September 19, 1979, but I was also ten years-old, and after a total of three
episodes it was cancelled due to low ratings.
Miller
Drake (3:30) was the assistant cameraman and talks about the perils of shooting
up near the Hollywood sign.
The
Blu-ray also contains the original theatrical trailer and an edition of Dante’s popular Trailers From Hell.
I
would have loved to have seen a tribute to the late actress Candice Rialson,
who passed away in 2006 at the age of 54 from liver disease. She appeared in
Raphael Nussbaum’s controversial exploitation/social commentary film Pets in 1973, the 1974 movie-of-the-week
The Girl on the Late, Late Show and a
series of three exploitation films, Candy
Stripe Nurses, Mama’s Dirty Girls,
and Summer School Teachers, all in
1974. She was a real trouper and is
spoken of highly by Jeffrey Kramer as a kind and funny person. She is deserving of her own documentary.
Machete Maidens of Mora Tau II is a film that I really want to see,
and it would have been wonderful if it was actually made (a la Machete (2010) being born from Grindhouse (2007).
Watching
Hollywood Boulevard again suddenly
made me think of David Lynch’s Mulholland
Drive (2001), with Naomi Watts’s wide-eyed Betty leaving the parking lot of
LAX to “make it in the moviesâ€. Candice
Rialson was a wonderful film personality and truly deserved to go on and enjoy
success in the Dream Factory.
(Note: this title appears to have sold out quickly though some dealers on eBay are offering it.)
BY ERNIE MAGNOTTA
Remember the days when you would wear a baggy
raincoat, visit your local independent theater and abuse your genital region
while watching “naughty†films? Maybe the younger “internet porn†readers don’t
(I actually don’t either. I just remember hearing about it while OD’ing on VHS
porn in the 80s), but I know some of you older perverts know what I’m talking
about. You see, during the 1960s and early 70s, you could hit your local
grindhouse theater and see films that are now classified as sexploitation.
These low-budget independent features contained plenty of nudity, but showed
very little in the way of actual onscreen sex, giving them the nickname
“soft-core.†Until hardcore classics like 1972’s Deep Throat and Behind the
Green Door as well as 1973’s The
Devil in Miss Jones arrived on the scene rendering the tamer stuff almost
obsolete, these soft-core flicks (which were also frequently viewed by couples)
were all the rage. And now, the nice folks at Vinegar Syndrome have unearthed
three of them for you to relive or to discover for the very first time.
In the first feature, Marsha, The Erotic Housewife, a young woman (soft-core queen Marsha
Jordan also from Count Yorga, Vampire)
whose businessman husband (Mark Edwards) is cheating on her, decides to teach
him a lesson by fulfilling her sexual fantasies with other men. The second
feature, titled For Single Swingers Only,
tells the tale of Gracie (Ann Myers) who moves into an apartment complex for
swingers, but gets much more than she bargained for. Last, but not least, Her Odd Tastes once again stars Marsha
Jordan, this time as a woman who goes from having an incestuous relationship
with her sister to becoming a door-to-door vibrator saleswoman. She eventually
kills a man in self-defense before being hired by a book publisher to research
sexual pleasure and pain. The insatiable woman travels the world, visiting Hong
Kong, Africa and the Middle East in order to satisfy her strange sexual
cravings.
All three films (which were directed by Don
Davis) may contain washed-out colors and plenty of pops, scratches, jump cuts
and lines; not to mention drab-looking locations, but hey, no one buying a
ticket to see these movies was interested in things like cinematography or
production value. They paid to see some skin and there’s plenty of nudity on
display here. There’s also a lot of kissing and groping (in lieu of everything
else) as well as a bunch of unintentional laughs thanks to silly dialogue, stiff
acting and quite a few so-bad-it’s-good moments. Highlights include a hilarious
“Marsha†theme song, a woman with a very thick Swedish accent, a satanic orgy
where one guy wears a silly-looking goat head mask and, finally, death while
boinking on an electrified chair.
On the downside, the three movies, although
each one only running a little over an hour, all move along at a somewhat slow
pace. Still, I enjoyed them all for
what they are. (I found Her Odd Tastes to
be the better paced and most entertaining of the three).
The three films have all been released on one dual layer DVD by Vinegar Syndrome.
The disc is region free and the movies are presented in their original 1.33:1
aspect ratio. The aforementioned pops, scratches, jump cuts and lines (which us
grindhouse cinema junkies adore) never detract from the story, and the images,
although far from Blu-ray quality, are more than watchable and pretty much what
you would expect something from this genre to look like. There are no special
features, but the DVD sleeve and disc both contain the original poster art for
all three films; my favorite tag line being “In Throbbing Color.†If you’re a
fan of soft-core sex flicks or are just curious to see what they were all about,
I recommend giving this retro drive-in collection a look.
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