Sandra de Bruin is an established actress who has appeared in more than 100 television series (ER, Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files, Three’s Company, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, to name but a few), TV films (Law and Order, Return to Earth) and feature films (The Andromeda Strain, Gray Lady Down). She has done numerous commercials, worked in voice-over and looping, danced at the Los Angeles Music Center and is the creator of the bestselling Actor's Audition Log. Sandra will periodically be sharing her stories of working with Hollywood legends, which will appear in a forthcoming memoir about her on-and off-screen adventures.

BY SANDRA DE BRUIN WITH DEAN BRIERLY

Throughout my wonderfully unpredictable career I’ve enjoyed a number of repeat chance meetings with various Hollywood luminaries, perhaps none so memorable as my close encounters of the Cliff Robertson kind.

Each film generation boasts a handful of actor’s actors, leading men and women whose work is exceptional yet unaffected in ways that only fellow performers might recognize. To me, Cliff Robertson was such a paradigm during a sparkling career that spanned five-plus decades.

Although he had done acclaimed work in film and television earlier in his career and had a strong stage background, I first became aware of him after seeing the 1963 WWII film P.T. 109, wherein he played John F. Kennedy, then a Naval Lieutenant on the titular torpedo boat. However, Cliff’s Oscar-winning performance in Charly (1969) solidified my admiration for him. Not as the popular macho hero of the time, but as a mildly intellectually disabled adult who agrees to an experiment that temporarily imbues him with a super-intellect. It also leads to a romance with his night school teacher that inevitably turns tragic when Charly regresses to his previous mental state. A truly forward-looking film, both sad and inspiring thanks largely to Cliff’s talent.

In the late 1970s he became every actor’s hero when he exposed the fact that Columbia Pictures studio chief David Begelman had been embezzling money through forged checks. Begelman was subsequently fired, but a year later was named head of MGM, such was Tinseltown’s morality at that time. But the industry didn’t thank Cliff. The studios stood behind their executives, no matter how corrupt, and Cliff suddenly found himself blacklisted for several years. (David McClintick’s 1982 book Indecent Exposure details the entire sordid story.)

However, prior to the blacklisting, he was still landing great roles in significant films through the first half of the ’70s, notably Too Late the Hero (1970), J.W. Coop (1971) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Also in 1975 came Return to Earth, a TV movie about Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to walk on the moon, and his subsequent mental breakdown as his career and marriage disintegrated. I was cast as Aldrin’s Air Force secretary. However, the shoot date was an “on or about,” meaning sometime in a week or so, giving me an opportunity to work on other shows.

The timing was right, as Lady Luck smiled on me and I was cast on the mystery/comedy TV show Ellery Queen. Dina Merrill, the beautiful New York socialite-turned-actor, married to Cliff Robertson, was the guest star. The breakdown for my character was “an inept secretary in a lawyer’s outer office.” The scene opened with me filing my nails and Dina with her male assistant entering and announcing herself at my desk. I was to buzz my boss on the intercom that she had arrived, then jump up and escort her to his office. Well, when I jumped up I accidently knocked over my pencil holder, sending pens and pencils all over the floor in front of her. As I babbled an incoherent apology her assistant immediately began picking up the pencils. The crew and some bystanders, which to my surprise included Cliff, broke into laughter.

However, the director was not amused and yelled in an irritated voice, “Cut! Let’s go again. Sandra, try not to knock over the pencils this time.”

Encouraged by the laughter and not wanting to acknowledge it was an accident, I countered, “The character description says she’s inept. I thought it would be funny.” There was a pause as the director gave it some thought. “Okay, go with it. But for the record the description says inept, not clumsy.” The director always has to have the last word, as well he or she should.

We did one or two more takes, close-ups, etc., and moved into the interior of the lawyer’s office. After making the introductions, I turned to go and suddenly remembered the hilarious scene in the 1973 film Day for Night in which the Italian actress Valentina Cortese kept opening or colliding with the wrong door. With that embedded in my mind, I deliberately walked smack into the open office door. Everyone stifled a laugh as I muttered something and exited very tentatively while closing the door behind me. (Interestingly, Ingrid Bergman said in her 1975 Oscar acceptance speech, “This Oscar belongs to Valentina Cortese for her performance in Day for Night.”)

The director yelled, “Cut! Good! Like it! Let’s do it again, and Dina, give me an ‘I don’t believe her’ reaction.” She did a marvelous blank look, rolling her eyes upward.

We did the scene a few more times, then moved back to my outer desk as Dina and her assistant took their leave. That was it for the day. After saying farewell and thank you to everyone, I gathered my things from my trailer, including the wardrobe I had worn on the show, and began the long walk to my car parked in the back lot at Universal. Just a short distance from the sound stage a bland, nondescript car slowed down and a male voice called, “Can I give you a lift to your car?”

Without even looking at who was driving, I happily replied, “That would be great!” (Studio personnel driving cars and golf carts on the lot often did this helpful thing, so I didn’t hesitate accepting.) After getting myself, my wardrobe and other stuff situated in the passenger seat, I turned to look at the driver. It was Cliff Robertson! I think I said something like, “Oh, it’s you,” not knowing at the moment what else to say.

He laughed and complimented me on my performance, which of course I graciously accepted. We talked briefly about his film Charly, which he was very proud of, and then I asked him how Dina was going to get home. He grinned and said, “They have a limo for her.”

“HEY, MANNY!”

By Raymond Benson

One of the generally underrated and mostly forgotten great action thrillers of the 1980s was Runaway Train, a sleeper that took audiences by surprise in late 1985/early 1986. Produced by the low-rent team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for the now-defunct Cannon Films, Train was not the partners’ ordinary B-movie action fare. The picture’s pedigree assured that there was going to be something interesting within, and there was.

Runaway Train was originally an Akira Kurosawa project. The Japanese director had conceived the movie, co-written a screenplay with two of his regular colleagues, and planned to make it in conjunction with a Hollywood studio in the late 1960s. According to the supplements on Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray release of the film, Kurosawa wanted to cast Henry Fonda and Peter Falk in the lead roles of escaped convicts aboard an out-of-control train speeding to its oblivion. Unfortunately, weather and financial hurdles caused the production to fail, so Kurosawa went on to work on Tora, Tora, Tora!, only to be replaced by Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda on that production when Kurosawa fell behind schedule and went over-budget.

Enter Golan-Globus. They secured the rights to the screenplay in the early 1980s and had it revised by Paul Zindel and Edward Bunker. With Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky hired to helm the picture, Djordje Millicevic came in to do more work on the script. The casting of Jon Voight and Eric Roberts, though, elevated the project to near-A-list caliber. The result is a breathtaking, armrest-gripping experience. Both leads were nominated for Academy Awards (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively), and the film received a deserved Editing nomination. At the time, the performances by Voight and Roberts were perceived by some as “over the top.” Nonsense. Runaway Train can be listed on the two actors’ resumes as among the best work either of them ever did. (Voight did win a Golden Globe for his performance.)

Manny (Voight) is the most notorious inmate of Alaska’s Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison. He’s been in solitary for three years, and he’s a thorn in the side of Warden Ranken (John P. Ryan). When he’s finally released from solitary, Voight makes his escape with the help of Buck (Roberts), who tags along with Manny as they run through the freezing cold wasteland with the warden and guards in pursuit. Eventually, they secretly board a train—but the lone engineer suffers a heart attack and dies before he can shut down the engine. The only other person aboard besides the two convicts is a feisty train hostler named Sara (Rebecca DeMornay). Meanwhile, the railroad employees at the control center (Kyle T. Heffner, Kenneth McMillan, and T. K. Carter) have to figure out how to stop the train before it causes a disaster. The movie then becomes a chase, a doomsday scenario, and a conflict of wills between man, nature, and machinery.

One can see how the movie grew from a simple premise into this obstacle course of a feature. The train can’t be diverted to that line because it’s near a nuclear power plant! No, not that way, there’s a bridge that will collapse if a train barrels over it at that speed! Uh oh, that track leads head on with a freight train moving in its direction! The possibilities for set pieces were endless, and the writers knew it.

As for the performances… Jon Voight is made up to be a Frankenstein monster of sorts with scars, gold teeth, and a half-shut eye. The actor gives the character—a truly despicable and vicious villain—everything he has, and it’s fabulous. Eric Roberts’ Buck is the brawn, but he’s short on brains. He, too, chews the scenery with aplomb, annoyingly calling out, “Hey, Manny! Hey, Manny!” throughout the picture. It’s appropriate, though, and this is easily the actor’s best work since The Pope of Greenwich Village. The thing is—these “over the top” characterizations are in tune with the outlandishness of the movie itself. The entire production is dynamite.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray restoration looks superb. It comes with an audio commentary with Roberts and film historians David Del Valle and C. Courtney Joyner. The only supplement is a “Trailers from Hell” episode on the picture featuring Rod Lurie, plus theatrical trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases.

Runaway Train is an unsung masterpiece of gritty 1980s independent filmmaking, and it’s worth a revisit for those of you who may have elapsed memories of it, and it’s an enthusiastic recommendation for those of you who have never been on the ride.

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“THE WEAPON OF SEX”

By Raymond Benson

The great Taiwanese director Ang Lee has worked in Asia and in Hollywood, delivering an impressive array of motion pictures that have won awards, made money, and wowed audiences. A handful of his titles that includes Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Life of Pi (2012) place him on a top tier of filmmakers working today. He’s also won two Oscars for Best Director for the latter two titles.

Lee’s 2007 feature that came after the success of Brokeback Mountain was Lust, Caution, a Hong Kong/American co-production that won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, made some waves in Asia and other markets internationally, but was, sadly, little seen in the West. That said, Focus Features, which distributed the picture, has said that Lust, Caution is the highest grossing movie rated NC-17 ever released in the U.S. More on that in a bit.

The film is inspired by the true story of Chinese spy Zheng Pingru, a woman who allowed herself to be the bait in a “honey trap” for a Japanese collaborator target during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937 and folded into World War II. The movie is based on a novella by Eileen Chang, and it was adapted for the screen by Hui-Ling Wang and James Schamus, the latter a longtime colleague of Lee.

In the late 1930s, the Japanese have occupied most of China and the country is being ruled by a puppet government. Many Chinese officials, including Mr. Yee (Tony Leung, credited as Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), a handsome, but rather cold elitist who acts as a recruiter and special agent. In short, he is a traitor to his country. A naïve but passionate group of university theatre students in Hong Kong devise a half-baked plan to assassinate Yee by luring him to a remote location. Young Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) volunteers to be the seductress, even though she’s a virgin and is clearly out of her depth. The attempt fails, there is a violent disaster (an astonishing sequence that can’t be revealed here!), and the students flee and scatter. The story resumes in 1942 in Shanghai as the students, now resistance fighters, regroup and start their plan anew. This time Wong Chia Chi is much more confident, has been trained, and can do a much better job at seducing Yee. Unfortunately, Yee, despite his villainy, is charismatic, powerful, and teaches the woman a thing or two about sex and passion. Now conflicted, Wong is caught in her own honey trap in which newly discovered lust and her duty to country battle for domination of her spirit. Sex has indeed become a weapon on both sides.

Lust, Caution is a fascinating, beautifully shot movie that is extremely well acted. The period detail is compelling, and the sense of foreboding and oppression that motivates the characters is palpable. The performance by Tang Wei, especially, is courageous and revealing in shocking vulnerability, considering the sex scenes depicted. Tony Leung, a stalwart actor in Hong Kong pictures, exhibits a different persona than one previously seen in his action flicks.

The movie was controversial in many markets because of the explicit nature of the sex scenes and the one sequence of violence. In America, the film was rated NC-17, which is considered box office poison. Ang Lee refused to make cuts, so it was released intact. Other markets censored the picture on their own—for example, China released it in a heavily-cut version, and it was a hit. It must be said that the sex scenes are gorgeously photographed and powerfully presented so that the emotions between the two characters are unambiguous. This is important to the story and serves to justify Wong’s actions toward the end of the movie.

This reviewer’s only quibble with the film is that the ultimate message is a little too cynical. The thrust of the story examines a young woman’s sacrifices of her mind, heart, and body to patriotism, and it brings up difficult moral questions that are not easily answered. This is not a happy movie. In fact, it is quite troubling, and that is likely the point.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray presents the uncensored NC-17 cut of Lust, Caution in a gorgeous digital restoration. It comes with an audio commentary by film historian Eddy Von Mueller. The only supplement aside from the theatrical trailer is a short featurette on the making of the film.

Lust, Caution is a challenging erotic thriller that will appeal to fans of World War II history, Chinese and Hong Kong pictures, and the films of director Ang Lee. For adults with discerning tastes.

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“MELODRAMA, MUSIC, AND MAYHEM”

By Raymond Benson

The 1936 Hollywood extravaganza, San Francisco, is a near-epic that attempts to place a melodramatic love triangle (or is it four-sided?—it seems to want to be that) in the context of the catastrophic 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco; thus, making the film a melodrama-disaster movie. Oh, but it has singing and dancing, too!—the flick spawned the title number (composed by Bronislaw Kaper and Walter Jurmann, lyrics by Gus Kahn) that became one of the city’s official songs.

Helmed by the even-handed W. S. Van Dyke, one of the Golden Age’s most dependable directors, San Francisco reaches to be too many things. Granted, it is a motion picture that has its fans, especially a devoted following in its titular town. It was indeed nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award of its year; Van Dyke was also up for Best Director, and Spencer Tracy was given the nod for Best Actor (although his role is decidedly a supporting one). However, the movie won only a single award—Best Sound Recording.

Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald are the stars in this tale of nightlife folks in the days leading up to that fateful morning of April 18, 1906. “Blackie” Norton (Gable) runs a nightclub and gambling hall called the Paradise. Mary Blake (MacDonald), freshly arrived from Colorado, applies for a singing job at the club. Mary is a trained classical singer, so the fare served at the Paradise is not really her style—but she needs the job. She is also naïve and a bit too vulnerable for the rather sleazy nightlife of the Barbary Coast area. Nevertheless, Norton hires her. Norton’s friend, Father Tim Mullen (Tracy) immediately sees that Mary doesn’t belong there. Wealthy Jack Burley (Jack Holt) runs the Tivoli Opera House. He falls in love with Mary and woos her away to sing opera—where she belongs. That’s when Norton realizes he’s in love with Mary and tries to get her back. Conflict ensues. Father Mullen interferes. And then there’s an earthquake in the final twenty minutes of the picture.

Audiences in 1936 no doubt flocked to the movie to see the then-spectacular disaster footage, which is impressive considering when the picture was made. Unfortunately, it feels as if this set piece is a long time coming. The melodrama on display in the first 95 minutes can induce eyerolling. A major problem of the film is that Gable’s character is a heel and a jerk, and he treats Mary as if she’s his property. Are we supposed to believe that she loves him? Well, okay, he is Clark Gable, the most popular male star at the time. MacDonald is competent—she certainly sings like a bird and looks good—but her character is sadly undeveloped. She also allows herself to be too easily bounced between the men in her life—first Norton, then Burley, then even Father Mullen, and back again, and then to one of the others, and so forth.

There is much to admire, though. Some of the supporting actors are fun to see—Ted Healey as Norton’s sidekick at the club, Harold Huber as the club’s manager, Jessie Ralph as Burley’s mother, Edgar Kennedy as the sheriff… and other faces that will be familiar to fans of 1930s Hollywood. The musical numbers are well staged, and the “bigness” of the picture is notable—San Francisco feels as if it’s one of those “cast of thousands” pictures, even though it isn’t.

Warner Archive’s new Blu-ray is a worthy upgrade to a previous DVD release. Supplements are also ported over from the earlier edition: a nice documentary featurette on Clark Gable (narrated by Liam Neeson); two vintage “FitzPatrick Traveltalks” Shorts on San Francisco; a vintage Harman/Ising cartoon, “Bottles”; and an alternate 1948 ending that was edited into the film upon re-release. The 1936 version ends with a montage displaying “modern” (1936) San Francisco, rebuilt after the destruction of the earthquake. The 1948 alternate simply shows a skyline of ten years later. The original ’36 ending is better edited, fits better, and is appropriately in the main feature on the disk. The re-issue theatrical trailer rounds out the package.

San Francisco is an example of the kind of big movies Hollywood could make when a studio wished to do so. While it’s not a particularly great film, it’s good enough to represent a style and presentation that reflects the time in which it was made.

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“I’VE GIVEN UP KISSING STRANGE WOMEN”

By Raymond Benson

Bob Hope had a stellar career that stretched from the late 1930s through the 1960s, with subsequent star power appearances in his senior years on television in variety and awards shows. His efforts to entertain troops overseas for decades are highly commendable. What many punters today don’t realize, unless one is a Hope aficionado, is that his early solo comedies (or the duos with Bing Crosby) are absolute comic gems. Woody Allen has gone on the record to say that he based much of his early 1970s screen persona on Bob Hope, and one can easily see that nebbish, albeit here decidedly non-Jewish, “character” in My Favorite Blonde.

The story of this 1942 outing is credited to longtime Hope collaborators Melvin Frank and Norman Panama (the screenplay is by Don Hartman and Frank Butler), and it is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. The one-liners are worthy of the Marx Brothers, and Hope’s onscreen antics solidify his reputation as a superb comedian. The movie is a joy to watch.

The war is on, and British agent Karen Bentley (Madeleine Carroll, a popular U.K. actress who made the move to Hollywood in the early 40s) must get revised flight plans for U.S. bombers to a colleague in Chicago, who will in turn deliver them to the army in California. The Nazi spies are on to her, though, so she must quickly find cover for travel from New York to the west. Enter Larry Haines (Hope), who performs a comedy act with a penguin named Percy, who makes more money than he (Percy nearly steals the movie, by the way). Karen seduces Larry just enough to get him to bring her along to California, as he’s on his way there to put Percy in the movies. The German spies, led by icy Madame Runick (Gale Sondergaard) and Dr. Streger (George Zucco), follow them every step of the way. Both Karen and Larry undergo captivity and near death, and then luckily escape, several times throughout the picture, until they… well, fall in love.

There are some classic set pieces and dialogue exchanges. For example—

“Kiss me, Larry,” Karen implores.

Larry: (hesitating, shaking his head) “I hardly know you! Besides, I’ve given up kissing strange women.”

Karen: “Oh, what made you stop?”

Larry: “Strange women!”

Director Sidney Lanfield keeps the picture moving at a brisk pace, and its brevity (only 78 minutes) is a plus. The lead performers take command of the material and run with it, and the audience cannot help but be pulled along, laughing all the way. This is great stuff.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray release looks good and is appropriately grainy in its glorious black and white. An informative audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan is included. The only supplement is a collage of scenes from other Kino Lorber Bob Hope titles and a slew of theatrical trailers from the same.

My Favorite Blonde was an extremely popular entry in those early war years when the Allies needed some laughs. There were subsequent follow-ups (My Favorite Brunette and My Favorite Spy in 1947 and 1951, respectively, but the stories are not related). So, grab a copy of this excellent comedy and be ready to have a good time in the old home theater.

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“ANOTHER ‘FORBIDDEN FRUIT’ EXPLOITATION RELIC”

By Raymond Benson

Here’s another one, folks! Another entry in the “Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture” series, this time it’s Volume 8. Presented by Kino Lorber in association with Something Weird Video, we have for your pleasure the controversial “hoax” documentary, Ingagi (1930), a shocking example of racism and circus sideshow-style cinematic exhibition.

There have always existed what have been termed in the motion picture industry “exploitation films,” even back in the silent days. The 1930s and much of the 1940s, however, saw a deluge of cheap, not-even-“B” pictures made, usually independently of Hollywood and marketed in guerilla fashion as “educational” adult fare. You know the type. Reefer Madness. Child Bride. Mom and Dad (all previous titles released in the Forbidden Fruit series).

Kino Lorber and Something Weird have been doing a bang-up job on releasing some of the best (i.e., infamous) of these jaw-dropping pieces of celluloid. Most are so bad that they’re hilariously entertaining, and they especially elicit eye-rolling because they often portend to be “instructive” in nature.

Ingagi was marketed as a documentary, which, by definition, claims to be a truthful depiction of real events. Well, a gullible American audience of the year 1930 actually swallowed this carnival act, because the independently made and distributed picture grossed $4 million—and in 1930 dollars, that was a monstrous amount of cash. The movie, however, was attacked by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, a Hollywood organization that attempted to ban the film. There were indeed court cases, but it was the Federal Trade Commission that finally forced the production company, Congo Pictures, to either come clean and stop duping the public with assertations that what the movie contains is real—or withdraw it from exhibition. As a result, Ingagi disappeared for years until it was bought and resold a couple of times and finally ended up in the hands of Dwain Esper. Esper, one of the foremost practitioners of the exploitation film, redistributed Ingagi in the late 1940s as the scandalous and sensational movie it is… and the thing continued to make money. Ingagi eventually vanished again for decades… until now.

It’s allegedly the footage of an African exhibition led by “Sir Hubert Winstead.” The explorer and his team go on safari and hunt and kill exotic animals for 3/4 of the picture. If that wasn’t disgusting enough, the final quarter is about the “discovery” of a primitive race that worships ingagi (the Rwandan word for “gorilla”). The tribe sacrifices a woman every year to the ingagi, who mate with the human females to produce, uhm, half-human/half-gorilla creatures.

Right. Now you know why the film was banned.

When one excavates the production history of the film, we learn that the whole thing was a hoax to cheat the American moviegoer out of an admission fee. According to both Kelly Robinson and Bret Wood, narrators on two separate audio commentary tracks, 3/4 of the movie is actually stolen material from a 1915 silent movie, Heart of Africa, which documented a real safari—but for some reason that picture was never even completed and is lost. That existing footage, however, was hijacked by “Congo Pictures.” The remaining 1/4 of the movie was shot in Hollywood with actors. African-Americans were cast as stereotypical Tarzan-style natives, and men in gorilla suits portrayed the apes. The lead ingagi is played by Charles Gemora, arguably the most prolifically employed actor in a gorilla suit.

One major clue to the lack of authenticity is that the narrator of the picture, the supposed Sir Hubert Winstead, mispronounces ingagi throughout the movie. He pronounces the middle syllable vowel of the word as “gag,” whereas it’s supposed to be pronounced like “gog.”

As commentator Robinson tells us, the real appeal of going to see Ingagi was to view “gorilla sex,” i.e., naked “native women” who are about to have sex with gorillas. We don’t ever see that happen, but it’s implied. We do see naked “native women,” and that’s where the picture gets its exploitation and racist reputation.

Kino Lorber’s high-definition presentation of this relic is amazingly good. A featurette in the supplements details the restoration process that was undertaken. The only other supplements are the interesting and informed audio commentaries by Robinson and Wood, and trailers for other titles in the series.

Ingagi will appeal to fans of the Something Weird series, exploitation films, and cinema curiosities. Hey, it’s “movie history”—in fact, a print of Ingagi resides in the Library of Congress as a testament to its infamous standing. Ungawa!

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