Though the Bert I. Gordon’s and William Castle’s of 1950s-1960s
Hollywood were successful in grinding out a string of their own low-budget suspense
films, it’s clear they both aspired for recognition as auteurs of
psychological-thrillers in the Hitchcock tradition.Producer/Director Bert I. Gordon would throw
his hat into that particular ring with the redoubtable Picture Mommy Dead.The
screenplay for Gordon’s picture was written by Robert Sherman, a television
writer with no feature film credits. This was to be Gordon’s second film for Joseph
Levine’s Embassy Pictures, his first being the outrageous exploitation/sci-fi
flick Village of the Giants (1965) (“Teen-agers
Zoom to Supersize and Terrorize a Town!”).
Casting for Picture
Mommy Dead began as early as November of 1965, the trades reporting Levine had
hopes of reuniting Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews (of Otto Preminger’s classic
noir Laura (1944) for Color Mommy Dead (the provisional title
of the film).Though Tierney appeared to
be interested – she had been working before the camera only intermittently in
the mid-60s – on January 12, Gordon announced her part was instead given to actress
Martha Hyer, since “the role developed more into a Martha Hyer type of beauty
than a Gene Tierney type beauty.”
If Dana Andrews was on Levine’s wish list to take on the
role of Edward Shelley in the film, the actor was either already working on
another project or simply not interested.The part would go to Don Ameche whose recent roles were also occasional
and on television.In a classic example
of Hollywood nepotism, actress Susan Gordon – Bert’s daughter – would beat out eighty
actresses auditioning for the role of the troubled Susan Shelley.“I solved the second femme lead,” the
producer explained, “by giving it to my 16-year-old daughter, Susan, but I’ve
got to find still another lady before we start shooting at Paramount on January
24.”
That “lady” still to be cast as the filthy-rich Jessica
Flagmore Shelley was the sultry screen-legend Hedy Lamarr.On January 18, a mere six days before that
character’s first scheduled shoot was to take place at Beverly Hills Doheny
Estate, it was announced the notoriously reclusive and eccentric Lamarr had
accepted the role.It was reported her acceptance
was mostly due to the coaxing of Marvin Paige, a talent agent and occasional
on-the-town paramour of the aging glamour queen.
But if the film’s casting appeared settled, events would soon
take a dramatic turn.In the interim of winning
this “comeback” gig Lamarr, the Garbo-like fifty-one year-old actress, found
herself behind bars at the Sybil Brand Institution for Women.The actress had been caught shoplifting
eighty-six dollars’ worth of merchandise from a Wilshire Boulevard department
store.Following the posting of a $550 release
bond, Lamarr told a throng of reporters the shoplifting accusation was the
result of a “misunderstanding.”
It was an odd turn of events but on January 28, 1966, the
very same day Lamarr was to be arraigned, Gordon promised the actresses’
casting was safe.“This unfortunate happening
will make no difference in our plans,” the director/producer told the
press.“I’m behind her 100%.”But in the days between her brief
incarceration and her first scheduled on-set date, it was obvious things might
not work out. Picture Mommy Dead was already ten-days into its shooting schedule,
with another three weeks of work to go.Lamarr, who had yet been called before the cameras, was considered integral
to those next three-weeks.
Hollywood gossip maven Dorothy Manners reported Gordon’s optimistic
suggestion that “the concentration her role demands” would offer Lamarr a welcome
distraction from her recent petty theft indiscretions.But Manners chose to stir the pot further, making
a passing reference to Lamarr’s prima
donna declaration that she’d work only “between the hours of twelve noon
and five in the afternoon.”It was
Lamarr’s contention that “Any actress who steps before a camera before noon is
indecent.”
The resulting press was making everyone invested in the
film a little uneasy.Embassy was quick
to remind Gordon the budget of Picture
Mommy Dead was a cool one million.The film’s backers were, not surprisingly, concerned over Lamarr’s
eccentric behavior and public statements.Though some conceded in Hollywood even bad or sordid publicity might
prove beneficial in the long run, Gordon was told if he “couldn’t guarantee” Lamarr’s
physical and mental commitment to the project, the actress would need to be
replaced.
Gordon chose to ignore the warning signs, determined to push
forward with his original plan.On Wednesday
morning, February 2, a limousine was sent to pick up the embattled actress at
her home.The driver was given
instructions to deliver Lamarr to the grounds of the Doheny Estate where her first
scenes were to be filmed.But there was
a new twist. When the driver arrived as scheduled Lamarr was nowhere to be
found: a maid explained the actress wasn’t in residence.She told the driver the actress had been
admitted to Westwood hospital only hours earlier.
The maid’s explanation was countenanced by both Lamarr’s
doctor and attorney.They offered their
client was suffering from “nervous exhaustion,” but would be prepared to go
before the cameras two day’s hence on Friday the 4th. This of course was problematic as a crew was already
awaiting her arrival on location.The
filmmakers decided to check on the Lamarr’s physical and mental well-being
themselves.But when they arrived at the
hospital they learned there was no record of the actress having ever been
admitted.This news was enough for
Embassy to pull the plug on Lamarr’s return to the big screen.A spokesman explained to the press, “We have
too much involved in production costs to chance any delay.”Embassy then announced that actress Zsa Zsa
Gabor had already been offered and accepted the role of Jessica Flagmore
Shelley.
Though Lamarr threatened a legal challenge, her lawyers
would not ultimately pursue the case.“Gordon made it clear,” an Embassy spokesman offered, “that his decision
was in no way predicated upon Miss Lamarr’s recent arrest on shoplifting
charges.”Calling a press conference in
the backyard of her home on the very day of her losing her role in the film,
Lamarr contested all she really needed “was a good night’s sleep,”defiantly vowing to “never act again.” She held
true to her promise.The 1958 noir The Female Animal would remain her final
appearance in a feature film.
The firing put Gordon in an awkward position.He tried his best to smooth things over
before getting back to his work on the film.“I cannot afford to gamble on anyone’s health, but I do have tremendous
respect and admiration for Miss Lamarr as an actress as a woman.And whenever she feels she’s able to work I
have a story in which I would star her.”
In truth, the role Lamarr was ousted from likely wouldn’t
have brought her anything but the briefest return to glory.As the dearly departed Jessica Flagmore
Shelley, Zsa Zsa Gabor really doesn’t have all that much to do.She’s seen in a few brief silent sequences in
the first half of the film, later enjoying a slightly more expanded role near
the film’s climactic end.The crux of Picture Mommy Dead is the mysterious
circumstances surrounding mommy’s death.Was it an unfortunate accident?Or was it murder?
The film offers red herrings aplenty.Shelley’s daughter Susan (Susan Gordon) is convinced
she’s solely responsible for her mother’s fiery demise.Such thoughts clouding her “fragile mind” would
cause her to spend three years convalescing at a convent.Susan’s father Edward (Don Ameche) arrives at
the convent to bring his daughter back home to the estate, bringing along his
new wife Francine (Martha Hyer), Susan’s scheming former governess.The kindly nun (Signe Hasso) who has been
caring for Susan since Jessica’s death warns the couple the young girl is still
not in a good place, traumatized by “phantoms of the past” and “vivid, horrid
nightmares.”
Bringing Susan home to the Shelley estate was, to put it
mildly, probably not the best of father’s decisions. For starters, there’s plenty of Peyton Place-style intrigue at play in
and around the palatial grounds: infidelities, back stabbings and duplicitous
folks scheming to get their paws on the sizable inheritance due Susan.The screenplay’s riddling mystery is who – or
whom – are behind the cruel plan to drive Susan out of her mind so they can
steal away the Shelley fortune.
The film as written is an uneasy pairing of those old-fashioned
mansion-dagger-inheritance mysteries of the 1930s made fresh with a dollop of
psychological mumbo-jumbo.I’m guessing
Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) served as a
partial template for Sherman’s scripting. In fact, I kept thinking of Tippi Hedren’s
character of Marnie throughout the entirety of Picture Mommy Dead since Martha Hyer’s hairstyle is
near-identical.To be fair, the
difference ends there.Hedren’s Marnie
was simply a troubled gal, Hyer’s Francine is simply trouble.
Though there are a couple of interesting plot twists here
and there – and a falconry scene involving Susan running in terror for safety
is mildly suspenseful – Picture Mommy
Dead is, at best, a workmanlike feature.Neither a great film nor a poor one, it’s a semi-suspenseful time-waster
which attempts to hitch a formulaic murder mystery with Jungian psychoanalysis.Not so successfully, in my opinion.
This is no slight on director-producer Bert I.
Gordon.We “monster kids” of a certain
generation revere the filmmaker for his work on such cult classics as Beginning of the End (giant
grasshoppers), The Amazing Colossal Man
(giant nuclear blast survivor), The
Cyclops (giant mutation), The Spider
(giant spider) Food of the Gods
(giant rodents) and Empire of the Ants
(giant ants) etc. etc. But with Picture Mommy Dead, Gordon found himself
deep in the shadow of a cinematic giant of another sort, one more difficult to
triumph over: Alfred Hitchcock.
This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray edition of Picture Mommy Dead is presented in 1920
x 1080p, with a ratio of 1.85:1, dts sound and removable English
sub-titles.The film looks brilliant,
Kino engineering this new issue from a new 4K restoration. The set rounds off
with five theatrical trailers that support other Kino product as well as an
audio commentary courtesy of writer-producer-directors Howard S. Berger and
Nathaniel Thompson.
Robert
Shaw, Harrison Ford and Edward Fox lead “Force 10 from Navarone,” available on
Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Based on the 1968 Alistair MacLean novel of the same
name, it was initially announced a movie was to follow. After the huge success
of “The Guns of Navarone,” a sequel was a no-brainer. The classic “The Guns of
Navarone” is among the greatest adventure movies ever made and serves as the
template for every “Men on an Impossible Mission” movie that followed. There
were other similar movies that preceded it, but MacLean nailed the formula with
a mix of action, adventure, suspense with a dash of spy thriller tossed in for
good measure. However, the sequel would wait nearly two decades until its release
in 1978.
The
plot of the sequel, like the previous movie, involves sabotage behind enemy
lines with Mallory, Robert Shaw replacing Gregory Peck, Edward Fox covering for
David Niven as Miller and joined by fresh-faced Harrison Ford as Barnsby, who
is presumably the stand in for Anthony Quinn’s Andrea Stavrou. Ford leads Force
10 on a mission to Yugoslavia to meet up with local partisans in order to
locate a traitor from Navarone. This being a movie based on an Alistair MacLean
novel, the story also involves double crosses, blowing up a dam and uncovering a
traitor.
As
I alluded to earlier, the sequel was going to be made in 1967 with Carl
Foreman, MacLean and the three leads from the previous film (Peck, Niven and
Quinn) reprising their roles. MacLean completed a screenplay which he adapted
into the novel, “Force 10 From Navarone” which was released in 1968. MacLean
would do the same thing with “Where Eagles Dare” writing the screenplay and
then adapting it as a novel before the movie. Readers of the novel “Force 10
From Navarone” will note this movie has little resemblance to the 1968 novel or
the original screenplay written in 1967. This change and the long wait for the
sequel probably contributed to a less-than-thrilling box office take.
“Force
10 from Navarone” isn’t a bad film, but it was misguided in the approach taken
to bring it to the big screen. While the movie has aged rather well, in
hindsight it would have been better had the filmmakers stuck with the original treatment
including all the original characters. I remember seeing “Force 10 from
Navarone” in the theater on its original release with great anticipation, and
while it’s not quite up to the classic status of “The Guns of Navarone,” it was
a pretty good effort. The movie opens with some of the climactic footage from
“The Guns of Navarone” as a pre-credits scene, but it just reminds viewers of
the missed opportunity if the movie would have been made back in 1967.
The
film adds great production value with location shooting in Yugoslavia and the
bevy of great supporting players. The movie was directed by James Bond veteran veteran
Guy Hamilton and boasts a bit of a 007 past and future cast and crew reunion.
Shaw, as I’m sure readers recall, was Red Grant in “From Russia with Love.” The
film also includes “The Spy Who Loved Me” alumni Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel
as partisans, and Edward Fox, who would play “M” in “Never Say Never Again.” The
movie also features Carl Weathers as Weaver, an American soldier who joins the
Force 10 team, Franco Nero as the leader of the partisans, Philip Latham as
Jenson (replacing James Robertson Justice), and Alan Badel as Petrovich. Sharp-eyed
viewers will catch Wolf Kahler and Michael Byrne as Nazis a few years prior to
appearing again as Nazis in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade,” respectively. “Star Wars” fans should also watch for several
actors who appeared in one or more of the original trilogy films, and of course
Harrison Ford was Han Solo and Indiana Jones. There’s a great party game here ala,
“Spot the connections to Bond, Star Wars and Indiana Jones.”
The
movie clocks in at 126 minutes and looks and sounds terrific on this Blu-ray
release by Kino Lorber. The music by Ron Goodwin is good, if a bit too jolly at
times. The extras include an outstanding audio commentary by Steve Mitchell and
Steven Jay Rubin as well as the trailers for this and other Alistair MacLean
releases. There is also reversible sleeve artwork. I highly recommend this Blu-ray release.
It’s
quite possible that there are more podcasts about cinema these days than there
are cinemas. Given such saturation, podcast creators have to work hard to make
their movie shows stand out from the competition. It is to film critic John Bleasdale’s
credit then that he’s managed to find a singular cinematic theme to concentrate
on, yet one with a vastly broad range of potential subjects and guests.
Writers
On Film is the only podcast dedicated to books on cinema and it is only a few
film-chats away from its 100th episode. Readers of Cinema Retro will no doubt
have at least one Movie section within their bookshelves. Search the authors’ names
on the spines of some of your most recent purchases and there’s a very good
chance you’ll find one of the many guests on Writers on Film.
Bleasdale,
a respected critic who has written for The Times, The Guardian, The
Independent, Sight and Sound and many others was, like so many creatives
looking for something to get him through the lockdown. ‘Because of Covid there
were no releases,’ he says, ‘so I was scrabbling around for things to write
that didn’t require being topical; I didn’t want to do a review podcast or
anything like that. I knew a few people who had written books that I’d met in
film festivals: former editor of Premiere Glenn Kenny was one. My brother had
sent me over a couple of beautiful books for Christmas, the Scorsese book by
Tom Shone and Ian Nathan’s book on Ridley Scott, so I originally thought I’d
just interview a few of these authors.
‘I
noticed that a lot of film writers were promoting their work on Twitter so I
reached out to them and eventually, I had enough of a response to realise this
was a podcast. Initially, the idea was to do about 10 episodes, because I
thought my guest list would have dried up by then, but here we are now crossing
the hundred mark.’
The
guest list has now blossomed into a who’s who of the cinema literature genre.
Scroll back through the episodes and you’ll find Sam Wasson talking about his
Chinatown book The Big Goodbye, Gabriel Byrne discussing his memoir, and Julie
Salamon revisiting her landmark book The Devil’s Candy. In between, there’s
everything from Spike Lee to Buster Keaton via Michael Cimino, Biblical epics,
women vs Hollywood, and George Stevens Jr reminiscing about about Hollywood’s
Golden Age.
Bleasdale
has a convivial, conversational style and the loose format allows space for the
guests to open up about their work, rather than just give quick soundbites.
Occasionally you can hear a guest, perhaps a little tentative at first, relax
and unwind once they realise they’re talking with someone who knows of which he
speaks and isn’t there to trap them.
(Photo:John Bleasdale)
His
love of film books goes back to his youth in Barrow in Furness. ‘The very first
ones were novelisations by writers like Alan Dean Foster, who I was lucky to
have on the podcast. It’s such a legendary name that I was actually surprised
that he was a person!Books and film
really cross over for me. When I couldn’t sneak in to see Blade Runner at the
cinema, because I was ten when it came out and it was an ‘A,’ I bought the
Philip K Dick book with Harrison Ford on the cover and lived in that book as
though it was the movie.’
‘My
auntie was a librarian so I would get all these cinema books out and run up
terrible fines because I was useless at returning them. There was The Cinema of
Loneliness by Robert P. Kolker, with Travis Bickle on the cover, and other one
was the Kubrick book by Michel Ciment (another Writers on Film guest), which
was stunning and so deep and fascinating, and of course this was when we couldn’t
actually see A Clockwork Orange. I became fascinated not just by his films but
by understanding that there was a mind behind these films which was separately
fascinating: if he’d never made a single film, an interview with Kubrick would
have been extraordinary in itself.’
What
the disparate list of guests and themes investigated on Writers on Film
demonstrates is the enormous breadth of subjects that can be categorised under
the Cinema Literature umbrella. ‘It’s pretty much limitless,’ says Bleasdale. ‘If
you want to write a book on cinema, good luck because the hardest thing to find
is a subject that hasn’t been covered, which is good for me because I can find
lots of things to talk about and it’s always different.’
It’s
refreshing to hear that Movie Books are still thriving, despite the potentially
smothering factor of the internet. Bleasdale thinks they have survived by
evolving in the face of competition online. ‘There are cinema books on
bestseller lists these days. The ‘90s were a heyday for a very specific kind of
cinema book. The Faber books were great and some of those authors have been on
the podcast, but they did tend to be interview books. Nowadays, if I want to
find out what Martin Scorsese once said about so-and-so, with YouTube and
Google and even DVD commentaries, that information is now so much more
accessible than it was back then.
‘Today,
there’s more engagement with putting films into a historical context: Peter
Biskind was one of the first writers who launched this idea with Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures. Nowadays people like Sam Wasson and
Glenn Frankel are really running with that. Glenn Frankel’s books are just so
deep and interesting and go so far beyond cinema into history, politics and
society and culture generally. Mark Harris is another: calling Scenes from A
Revolution a ‘film book’ is quite limiting. You learn so much not just about
Hollywood but about everything that went on in 1967.Coffee table books have never been more
varied in terms of subject matter or looked better. The recent one on Sofia
Coppola by Hannah Strong looks stunning.’
Writers
on Film is an ear-feast for cinema fans but don’t get too carried away with the
recommendations or, to paraphrase Chief Martin Brody, you’re gonna need a
bigger bookshelf.
(Search
for Writers on Film wherever you find your podcasts. Click here to visit official web site.)
70-year old Philip Marlowe is snooping around in the dark
alleys of an ersatz 1939 Los Angeles beating up punks and turning down sexual
advances from black-eyed blondes. That’s pretty much what we get in the new
Neil Jordan-directed “Marlowe,” the latest in a long line of film noirs
featuring Raymond Chandler’s mythic private dick. He’s been played by Humphrey
Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, James Garner and Robert Montgomery, and
others. Seventy-year-old Liam Neeson, in his 100th movie, takes a
crack at the character this time around, and comes off a bit shopworn and
somewhat out of focus.
One reason for the slightly out of focus presentation of
Chandler’s urban knight—the man who lives by a code and walks the mean streets
of LA “neither tarnished nor afraid,” – is that the script by William Monahan
is based not on one of Chandler’s novels, but on a “Chandler-estate-approved
novel” called, “The Black Eyed Blonde” by Irish novelist John Banville. The
novel and the film have a seemingly simple plot. Claire Cavendish (Diane
Kruger), a married blonde heiress with black eyes, hires Marlowe to find Nico
Peterson, her missing lover, a movie stunt man. Of course, nothing is ever
really that simple in a Marlowe story, because no sooner does the investigation
get underway than Nico turns up dead in a parking lot of the Cabana Club with
his skull crushed by a car, which makes a positive identification somewhat tricky.
Except his body was identified by his sister. That seems to settle the matter
of identification, until later on the sister is beaten, tortured and killed,
and Marlowe wonders what’s up with that?
Marlowe’s employer refuses to believe that her lover is
dead. She wants him to keep digging and find out if he’s alive and where he’s
hiding. Marlowe’s quest for the truth brings him into contact with the usual weird
assortment of film noir characters, including Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange,
who is first presented as Claire’s mother and then in a plot shift that seemed
borrowed from “Chinatown” turns out to be Claire’s aunt. “She’s my daughter.
She’s my niece. She’s my . . .”) In fact, the shadow of “Chinatown” looms even
more ominously over “Marlowe” with the introduction of night club owner Floyd
Hanson played by John Huston’s son Danny Huston, who basically gives Marlowe
the old spiel John Huston’s Noah Cross gave Jake Gittes about life being so
fouled up it’s impossible for anyone to do any good in this world. But that
doesn’t stop Marlowe. He keeps sniffing and snooping, running into creeps like crooked
antiques dealer Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming), a cross between Clifton Webb and
Tennessee Williams, and his driver Cedric (Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who’s pretty big
and pretty handy with a machine gun.
Jordan, Monahan and Neeson try their best to do justice
to Chandler’s Marlowe, but it’s hit and miss at best. Neeson pulls off the
“world-weary hero” look, but it’s obviously not much of a stretch. There’s basically
some inconsistency in Monahan’s script. At times the characters utter lines
that cop quotes from Christopher Marlowe, with references to the Bard, that somehow
seem as artificial as a BBC teleplay. Marlowe keeps telling everybody he’s just
an average guy, a working stiff, but still everyone treats him with some kind
of awe, with one character telling him he lives like a monk. It’s like the
filmmakers on one hand want to show Marlowe is just a tough guy doing
everybody’s dirty work, nothing special, while at the same time trying to
canonize him as a saint.
The use of locations in Barcelona and Dublin shot with a
reddish filter give “Marlowe” a dated look, but there are few if any wider
shots showing L.A. as it was in1939 so you get a claustrophobic feeling. You
wish Neeson would wander off the set once in a while and get a drink somewhere
in a bar down on Long Beach, with the oil wells pumping in the background. L.A.
was always a character in Chandler’s books. Its absence here is a real
handicap. Another troublesome aspect is David Holmes’ soundtrack score. The repeated
use of “These Foolish Things” in the background, kept reminding me more of Monica
Lewinsky (it was her and Bill’s favorite song, according to her) than the plot
involving Claire Cavendish. And there is one scene where Marlowe drives his
Plymouth coupe onto the grounds of a palatial chateau where the band playing
“Brazil” at full volume sounds more like Ernie Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio. Why were
there so many Tangos played over the course of a film set in ’39 in L.A.?
A weird side note: “Marlowe” is no classic, but it does
have something in common with one of the great ones ---Howard Hawks’ classic, “The
Big Sleep (1946).” When Hawks was filming “The Big Sleep,” (1946) there’s a
scene where a limo drives off a pier and the driver drowns. The screenwriters
(Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman) asked Hawks who killed
him. Hawks didn’t know and they contacted Chandler and he said he didn’t know
either. In “Marlowe” someone is killed and has his skull crushed so it would
look like it was Nico Peterson. But it turned out it wasn’t Nico. So who was
it? Never explained. Who cares? Just
another bit player, another nameless face lost in the blurry background of
Tinseltown.
“Marlowe” may not go down as a great addition to the
Marlowe canon but it’s better than nothing and despite its flaws, it is good to
see serious movie makers trying their hand at it, even if not that
successfully. There’s a need for someone to do Philip Marlowe justice,
especially now.
Upon arriving for the matinee performance of the new production of "Disney's Hercules: The Mythical Musical Adventure" presented in conjunction with Disney Theatrical Productions at the esteemed Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, it occurred to me that I had not been immersed in the adventures of the mythological hero since I was in grade school in the early 1960s when theaters were showing those Italian "sword and sandal" films that were imported into the U.S. I came to the obvious conclusion that I didn't represent the intended demographic for the show, which does not include people who are old enough to remember when Steve Reeves was a boxoffice sensation. The intended demographic-young people-were on hand despite this being a school day. There was an abundance of local high school students there on field trips. It may seem that Disney's musical productions might be skewed to pre-teens but the producers are generally shrewd enough to include plenty of pop culture references and jokes that would appeal to everyone. It's a delicate balance. Overload the sophisticated jokes and kids will be bewildered. Overdo the tween elements and mom and dad are looking at their watches by the time the intermission arrives. The new musical is based upon Disney's animated big screen release from 1997, importing some of the more prominent songs by Alan Menken while providing some new ones for this production. Lyrics are by David Zippel. The book for this presentation is by Robert Horn & Kwame Kewei-Armah. A version of the show had been presented in 2019 at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, which this reviewer did not see. However, it appears that the current version at the Paper Mill is substantially different.
The reed-thin plot finds Hercules the offspring of the god Zeus (Dennis Stowe) and goddess Hera (Kristen-Faith Oei), who send the infant to earth where is adopted and raised by Despina (Kathryn Allison), who comes to realize that the boy possesses superhuman strength. (Shades of Kal-El!). As a young man (Bradley Gibson), Hercules is the model of the all-around good citizen. He's kind and helpful to all, keeping evidence of his great strength subdued. By the time he goes into the world on his own, he's innocent and naive. Meanwhile, evil forces are at work through the plotting of Hades (Shuler Hensley), who intends to find a way to harness Hercules' powers to further his schemes. This comes about by manipulating the beautiful Meg (Isabelle McCalla), who foolishly had entered an agreement with Hades that resulted in her being under his complete control for eternity. He ensures that Hercules meets Meg, knowing he will not be able to resist falling in love with her. Hades then persuades her to have Hercules cede his powers for 24 hours in return for Meg being released from her binding agreement that has kept her enslaved. Of course, all sorts of unintended consequences befall the major characters, with Hades intending to use Hercules as a vehicle for widespread chaos and destruction. Guess who ends up winning?
The show features plenty of impressive talent, including singing muses who appear periodically and perform in the manner of a Motown act. They are played by Anastacia McCleskey, Destinee Rea, Charity Angel Dawson, Tiffany Mann and Rashidra Scott and their appearances were met by great enthusiasm by the audience. The performances of the leading actors are engaging and energetic, with Isabelle McCalla spot-on as the leading lady. The most interesting roles, however, are the supporting characters. James Monroe Iglehart, a Tony Award winner for his role as Genie in the Disney Broadway production of "Aladdin", steals the show as Phil, a trainer for would-be heroes who takes the innocent Hercules under his wing and teaches him to harness his powers. Iglehart opens the second act with a solo number topped by an unexpected acrobatic feat that brought down the house. As in any "Star Wars" or James Bond movie, the juiciest role usually belongs to the villain, and that's true here, too, with Shuler Hensley's thundering voice commanding attention in his every appearance. Since this is a Disney production, cute, eccentric sidekicks are a must. In this case they are named Pain and Panic (played by Reggie De Leon and Jeff Blumenkrantz) and they have some of the best gags in the show. Alas, Bradley Gibson's Hercules is undone by some factors not within his control. Gibson makes for an appealing hero, but the role is underwritten. We hear a lot about his great strength, but it's rarely demonstrated in an impressive manner. Gibson has a physique that any male would envy but there is nothing larger-than-life about his appearance. He looks like a well-toned guy you might run into at your local L.A. Fitness center. Perhaps it's almost impossible to find someone who is both a Herculean muscleman and a talented and trained singer and dancer. Gibson's performance is admirable but he's held hostage to the limitations of how a stage production can present Hercules versus a filmed version.
Director Lear deBessonet keeps the action and laughs flowing smoothly and the pace never slackens. The choreography by Chase Brock and Tanisha Scott is especially impressive, as is the work of musical director and conductor Ted Arthur. As one might expect, the production values are first-rate and display
evidence of the substantial budget that generally accompanies a
production done in coordination with Disney. Kudos to Dane Laffrey, who oversaw the scenic design. As you might imagine, this Disney production features some dazzling set pieces. There are also giant puppets that feature prominently and amusingly, courtesy of James Ortiz and some terrific lighting effects by Jeff Croiter and special effects by Jeremy Chernick. Kudos also to Emilio Sosa for providing some suitably ornate costumes.
The show undoubtedly follows the formula of previous Disney stage productions.This includes not-so-subtle references to female empowerment, racial harmony (Hercules' parents are caucasian and Asian and he is Black) and the belief in the ability to overcome almost any obstacle and achieve success. Disney, like most aspects of American society, has become a lightning rod for political debate in recent years and there are plenty of people who find such material as preachy and "woke". If you're among them, this show will only reaffirm your criticisms. Conversely, if you view these aspects as positive and life-affirming, you'll find plenty to embrace here.
Rumor has it that Disney is road-testing "Hercules" at the Paper Mill in anticipation of a Broadway run, as was the case with the wonderful production of "Newsies" some years ago. Based upon the rousing audience response to the show, it appears the strongman might exert a mighty pull at the boxoffice across the river on the Great White Way. If that wasn't enough, director Guy Ritchie is working with Disney to prepare a live-action return to the big screen for Hercules. If only Steve Reeves were still around to see the revival of interest in the character he popularized way back when.
The
plot of Dario Argento’s much-maligned 1985 thriller Phenomena has long been the subject of ridicule and derision by
critics and fans alike since its initial release. The inevitable complaints
about the film range from the bad dubbing and stiff performances to the
ludicrous notion that insects can be employed as detectives in a homicide
investigation (this is true and has actually been done, providing the
inspiration for the film. A November 1996 episode of television’s Forensic Files even featured
an episode about this very method).
If the film does not sound familiar, that could be attributed to the fact that Phenomena was severely cut by some 33
minutes and retitled Creepers when it
opened in New York on Friday, August 30, 1985.
Jennifer
Corvino (Jennifer Connelly) is a fourteen year-old student attending an
all-girls school in Switzerland while her movie star father is away for the
better part of a year shooting a film. Her mother, who left the family when
Jennifer was a child, is merely mentioned but never seen. Unfortunately, her
roommate Sophie (Federica
Mastroianni) has just informed her that the school is
beset by a killer who stalks girls their age and kills them. Well, that is unfortunate! You would think that someone would order
the school closed and the girls sent away. As you can imagine, this does not
sit too well with Jennifer who suffers from a bad case of sleepwalking and
manages to find herself embroiled in the very murders she was hoping to avoid. She
meets entomologist John McGregor, a wheelchair-bound Scot who lacks a Scottish
accent but possesses an avuncular disposition that endears Jennifer to him and
his chimpanzee Inga who doubles as his nurse. Fortunately for Jennifer, he is
aiding the police in their investigation into the murder of a Danish tourist,
Vera Brandt (Fiore Argento, the director’s eldest daughter) and the
disappearance of McGregor’s former aid. Together with the help of McGregor,
Inga (yes, the chimp!) and a very large fly, Jennifer sets off to locate the
murderer. When she does, she has a very good reason to nearly regret it.
Phenomena is an unusual entry in
the Dario Argento universe as it is a mashup of fantasy and giallo-esque
murder mystery, effectively making some to refer to the film as a fairytale. Jennifer
Connelly was chosen by Mr. Argento to play the lead as he had seen her in
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in
America (1984) and he thought she would be perfect for the film. His
decision to set the film in the Swiss Alps is unorthodox but provides the
perfect backdrop to the story as the scenery is utterly breathtaking. He also
makes terrific use of the Steadi-cam and it never feels over-used. From a
thematic standpoint, the film also deals with a subject I never would have
thought of: female abandonment. Critic and devoted Argentophile Maitland
McDonagh brought up this point when Mr. Argento discussed the film at the
Walter Reade Theatre in June 2022 at a retrospective
of his work. She is right: Vera is
abandoned by the bus (accidentally), Sophie is abandoned by her boyfriend,
Jennifer is abandoned by her mother (in an explanation left out of Creepers),
and even Inga is abandoned by her keeper.
Phenomena has been released on home video more times than I can
count, and I have personally owned it in the past as Creepers from the
original Media Home Entertainment VHS release from 1986; as Phenomena in
the form of the gatefold Japanese laserdisc pressing in 1997; the 1999 American
laserdisc release from The Roan Group; the 2008 DVD pressing as part of a
package of four other titles; the 2011 single Blu-ray from Arrow Films; the
2017 Blu-ray steelbook from Synapse Films; the 2017 Limited Edition Blu-ray from
Arrow Films with newly commissioned artwork by Candice Tripp, and the 2023 4K
UHD Blu-ray set from Arrow Films. Whew…Now, Synapse Films follows suit with
their own release of the film in yet another 4K UHD Blu-ray edition, this time
in a limited edition pressing with less-than-spectacular cover artwork design.
However, there is a more cost-effective edition that has made me giddy with
excitement. I must say that as a Dario Argento fan, and Phenomena being
my favorite film of his, the new pressing of this standard edition from Synapse
Films is a must-buy if only for the absolutely beautiful, gorgeous, and atmospheric
cover artwork that has been newly commissioned by artist Nick Charge. As a
purist, I generally shy away from artwork that is anything other than the key
art used in the original exhibition of the film. I do not wish to sound stuffy
or, heaven forbid, pretentious regarding this point, but it has been my
experience that the key art used in promoting a film is generally the best and
most effective artwork that has been used, regardless of the title in question,
though there have been exceptions. The original style “B” poster for Dan
Curtis’s 1976 thriller Burnt Offerings I have found to be infinitely
more interesting and creepy than the lesser-used style “A” artwork; Conversely,
Saul Bass’s beautiful mockup of the contorted face in the black lettering set
against a yellow background in the style “A” for Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980) was, is, and always will be far more effective to me than
the requisite and now tongue-in-cheek “Here’s Johnny!” image of Jack
Nicholson’s crazed visage peering at his wife through the remnants of the
bathroom door.
In the
case of Phenomena, which was trimmed and altered significantly for its
American debut and retitled Creepers, the original Italian key artwork by
the late great artist Enzo Sciotti was discarded altogether in favor of a poster
that focused on Jennifer Connelly holding flies in her hand, and the America
video poster went even further to have the insects remove the flesh from half
of her face! Nick Charge’s artwork is one of the most spectacular alternative promotional
images of the film that I have ever seen.
Watching
Phenomena again makes me realize just
how much I miss Daria Nicolodi, Mr. Argento’s long-time girlfriend who appeared
in six films for him. She brought so much to his work, and her absence is
deeply felt more than ever now. In Deep
Red (1975), she played the
wonderfully sweet journalist, redubbed by Carolyn de Fonseca; in Inferno she’s the strange Elise Stallone
Van Adler who keeps finding paint on her foot; in Tenebre (1982) she’s Peter Neal’s secretary Anne, redubbed by
Theresa Russel of all people; here in Phenomena
she’s the sinister Frau Bruckner, again redubbed by Carolyn de Fonseca; in Opera (1987) she is Mira, and this was
the first time that her actual voice was used; and La Terza Madre (2007) she is Elisa Mandy (again with her own voice).
Donald
Pleasence is also quite good as the entomologist. Some have complained about
his performance, but I have never seen him give anything less than 100% in his
roles, however off-beat. His presence in a horror film is always welcome. Check
him out in Gary Sherman’s Death Line
(1972). He is unorthodox and brilliant.
The new
4K UHD Blu-ray standard edition from Synapse Films is gorgeous and only
contains 4K UHD Blu-rays. There are no standard Blu-rays or DVDs in this
package. Phenomena has more
detractors than admirers if you believe what you read, and even staunch
proponents of Mr. Argento’s vision (Maitland McDonagh and Alan Jones) have
written off the film as silly. However, the amount of love and dedication that
has been lavished upon this film restoring it to its former glory on Blu-ray
says volumes about those who cherish it. This set is absolutely beautiful and
definitely worth the price of an upgrade as it sports the following:
Two
4K UHD Blu-rays which consist of three (3) different cuts of the film, all
available in high-definition for the first time ever in one collector’s edition
package:
the
83-minute United States Creepers cut
in HD
the
110-minute International Phenomena
cut in HD
the 116-minute English/Italian hybrid
audio Phenomena cut in HD
Extras:
Disc One includes the Italian language cut of Phenomena.
There is a disclaimer: “No English audio exists for scenes unique to the
Italian version of Phenomena. This full-length version can be viewed
either entirely in Italian, or in a hybrid version which uses Italian audio in
instances where English audio is unavailable.” You can choose from English /
Italian Hybrid in 5.1 Surround, or Italian 5.1 Surround, or Italian 2.0
Surround.
There
is an audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of Murder by Design: The
Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento (on Italian Version). Mr. Howarth proves
himself to be a fountain of knowledge about Italian horror and this film in
particular.
There
is a 2017 documentary produced by Arrow Films called Of Flies and Maggots,
which runs two hours(!), including interviews with co-writer/producer/director
Dario Argento, actors Fiore Argento, Davide Marotta, Daria Nicolodi and others.
Much of the information presented here is already familiar to die-hard fans,
but it is a welcome look at the film.
“Jennifer”
is a music video of the Phenomena theme by former Goblin member Claudio
Simonetti, directed by Dario Argento, and featuring Jennifer Connelly.
The
promotional materials consist of: the Italian theatrical trailer, the
International theatrical trailer, and a page-by-page replica of the Japanese
pressbook.
Disc Two consists of both the international cut of Phenomena
and the U.S. Creepers cut.
There
is an audio commentary track on Phenomena
(the 110-minute cut) moderated by film
historian, journalist and radio/television commentator David Del Valle, who
speaks exclusively with Argento scholar and Derek Botelho, author of the
excellent book The Argento Syndrome. The discussion is both spirited and
informative as Mr. Botelho clearly knows his stuff. I love listening to
commentaries that tell me anecdotes that I either forgot about or never knew
before, and there is plenty of interesting info here.
The
Three Sarcophagi is a
visual essay by Arrow Films producer Michael Mackenzie comparing the different
cuts of Phenomena, and it is enough to make your head spin trying to
keep track of the different versions. This piece runs 31 minutes.
Rounding out the extras are the U.S. theatrical trailer and
two U.S. radio spots for Creepers.
Phenomena is not Mr. Argento’s best. IMHO, Deep Red (1975) holds that title, and it also could be argued that Tenebrae
(1982) is a contender for that mantle as well. It is, however, a terrifically
entertaining murder mystery with some great set pieces and a driving score by
some members of Goblin among others, and the sort of gonzo film that the
Italian Maestro has not made since Opera in 1987.
Tony Curtis, like most aspiring screen stars, slogged through bit
parts in unmemorable films when he first broke into the industry in the
late 1940s. By the mid-1950s, however, he was a major star, even if the
films he top-lined were relatively undistinguished. With his boyish good
looks and New York wise guy persona, Curtis excelled at playing
charismatic rogues and, perhaps improbably for a guy born in the Bronx,
cowboys, knights and other exotic men of action. But Curtis was more
than just a pretty face and by the late 1950s he was getting challenging
roles that allowed him to show off his dramatic acting skills. He was
brilliant in "Sweet Smell of Success" and "The Defiant Ones" and gave
one of the great comedic performances of all time in Billy Wilder's
"Some Like It Hot". By the late 1960s, however, his star power was
fading. He still had enough clout to get the male leads in lightweight
comedies like "Sex and the Single Girl" and "Don't Make Waves", but the
bloom was off the rose. Ironically, he won fine reviews for his
convincing performance in the 1968 film "The Boston Strangler", but most
of the good roles would continue to elude him. Like many fading
American stars, he turned toward European productions, starring in
"Those Daring Young Men in the Jaunty Jalopies" and "You Can't Win 'Em
All", the latter with fellow U.S. import Charles Bronson who found major
stardom in Europe long before he became a big name in America. One of
the least prestigious films that Curtis appeared was titled "On the Way
to the Crusades, I Met a Girl Who...", a 1967 sex comedy filmed in Italy
and which would not be released in the USA until 1969, when it had
limited distribution. Perhaps because theater owners in the UK and USA
had pity on the poor souls who had to stand on ladders and put film
titles on theater marquees letter-by-letter, the English language
version of the film was shortened to the more provocative "The Chastity
Belt". Curtis wasn't the only English-speaking actor in the otherwise
all-Italian production, as Hugh Griffith and John Richardson were
co-starred.
The film opens with Curtis playing against type as Guerrando de
Montone, a sniveling, cowardly and bumbling opportunist who finally is
granted his wish to be made a knight. As his reward, he is entitled to
claim a vast tract of land as his own. Guerrando is quick to abuse his
power over the peasants, especially when he discovers that the local
game warden and his voluptuous daughter, Boccadoro (Monica Vitti) live
on his land. Although Boccadoro is initially attracted to him,
Guerrando's misogynistic ways quickly alienate her. Guerrando informs
her that he is her lord and master and will use her for sexual pleasure
whenever he pleases. Most of the fun in the script, which was co-written
by the esteemed Larry Gelbart, centers on the buxom beauty's strategies
to avoid going to bed with Guerrando, who becomes increasingly
frustrated. To solve the problem, he forces her to marry him but she
delays the consummation of the marriage by invoking a rare, ancient
ritual that commits them both to spending three days in constant prayer.
When that obstacle is removed, Guerrando is ready to make his move only
to find that he has been summoned to join the Crusades and leave Italy
for a period of years. To ensure that Boccadoro remains chaste, he has
her fitted with a chastity belt which causes her to swear vengeance. The
film meanders through the couple's misadventures with Boccadoro intent
on finding her husband and murdering him. She poses as a knight in armor
and infiltrates his camp but both are kidnapped by an evil, horny
sultan (Hugh Griffith) who forces Guerrando to convert to Islam while he
makes plans to open the chastity belt and have his way with
Boccadoro.The whole thing ends in a madcap chase with heroes and
villains chasing each other about a castle.
Italian cinema-goers were very enamored of sex farces during this
period. "The Chasity Belt" is one of the tamest, as there is no nudity
and the most provocative aspects are plentiful shots of Ms. Vitti's
ample bosom bouncing around during the many chase scenes. Like most
films of the genre, there are plenty of moments of slapstick and narrow
escapes. What impresses most about this modest production is director
Pasquale Festa Campanile's light touch and the ability to move the
action at such a rapid pace that you don't ponder how predictable it all
is. While it's still a bit of a shock to see someone of Curtis's
stature in this "B" level comedy, he is in good form and provides plenty
of laughs by not even attempting to disguise his New Yawk accent. He is
matched by the very likable Vitti and Hugh Griffith, who recycles his
lovable rascal shtick from "Ben-Hur". What is stands out most are
the rather spectacular locations. Most of the action is shot outdoors
in ancient ruins and castles that add a good deal of atmosphere to the
goings on.
"The Chasity Belt" is the kind of film that Curtis probably did very
reluctantly. He would later try his hand in television co-starring with
Roger Moore in the sensational action series "The Persuaders", but it
lasted only 24 episodes. A later series, "McCoy" lasted only a single
season. Curtis would still turn up in a few major films like "The Mirror
Crack'd" and "The Last Tycoon" but only in supporting roles.
Nevertheless, he remained enjoyable to watch and always gave his best
effort. Perhaps for that reason, "The Chastity Belt" is a lot more
worthwhile than you might imagine.
The Warner Archive DVD is generally very good with a few blotches and
grainy frames, but one suspects there aren't too many archival prints
of this long-forgotten film floating around out there. There are no
bonus extras.
Lee Van Cleef was a man of few words on screen and in real life also, as evidenced by the relatively few interviews he consented to. Here is a rarity: Van Cleef interviewed by Johnny Carson from February, 1984. The reason? He was promoting his TV series "The Master", which also aired on NBC.
The Cinerama Releasing Co. was in its seventh year of film
distribution in 1973.The distributor
had earned a reputation in the industry for working successfully with producers
to distribute independent films.Such business
partnerships had proven beneficial to both parties.In 1973 Cinerama scored big with two
modest-budget indie hits: Michael Campus’s Blaxploitation pic The Mack (1973) and Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall (1973).Since the horror film genre was a (mostly) dependable
box office gamble for low-budget film productions, Cinerama scored handsomely
in 1972 with the domestically produced Willard
rat-fest and the decidedly more up-scale and colorfully creepy Amicus-import Tales from the Crypt.
Hoping to continue to capitalize on this successful
trend, Cinerama was preparing to distribute a slate of new horrors in 1973: the
British Amicus production And Now the
Screaming Starts, the U.S. produced mystery-horror Terror in the Wax Museum, and indie Freedom Art’s Doctor Death.Box
Office reported in September of 1973, that Cinerama had only recently acquired
the rights to Doctor Death.It promised the film would showcase “optical
effects unseen before on screen... the illusion of souls passing from one body
to another.”That was they called ballyhoo.We’d actually seen it all before, as the effects
offered in Doctor Death had been
present as early as the silent film era.Doctor Death, whose full title
is actually Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls,
was the brainchild of producer/director Eddie Saeta and associate producer/screenwriter
Sal Ponti.It was the latter’s first
(and only) produced screenplay. Ponti worked mostly – if infrequently - as a
film actor and occasional songwriter.In
contrast, director Saeta had a long-running career in Hollywood, working on
studio lots and behind the camera from 1937 on.He was second generation Hollywood.Saeta’s dad had worked in the electrical department for Columbia Pictures
from the late 1920s on.
It was through his father’s connections that Eddie Saeta worked
as a messenger for Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn.He worked his way through the ranks,
ultimately serving as an assistant or 2nd unit director for such
studios as Columbia and Monogram.He mostly
assisted in churning out such low-budget fares as westerns, East Side Kids
films and even The Three Stooges in Orbit
(1962).(That latter film explains the
curious and brief walk through of septuagenarian Moe Howard in Doctor Death).In his later years, Saeta also worked
extensively as an AD on television. Eagle-eyed James Bond fans might also
recognize Saeta’s name from his front end credit as co-Location Manager for
1971’s Diamonds are Forever.
Ponti’s original script wasn’t uninteresting in
concept.Distraught over the loss of his
wife in a deadly automobile accident he blames on himself, Dr. Fred Saunders
(Barry Coe) goes to great lengths to see her revived by supernatural means.He visits her corpse daily where she lies in
state in a conveniently unlocked crypt.Though his friend Greg (Stewart Moss) presses, “For God sake, let Laura
rest in peace!” Fred is unable to do so.He visits any number of charlatans who profess revivification but who
are unable to deliver on their promises.
Things change when Fred meets Tana (Florence Marley) who
professes the greatness of an ex-magician known as “Doctor Death” (John
Considine). She describes the not-so-good Doctor as, “The genius of all ages,
the man who has conquered death.” The problem with Doctor Death is that while
he’s actually pretty good in his practice of “selective reincarnation,” he also
displays many characteristics you’d prefer your resurrectionist to not have: he’s a pompous, selfish,
sadistic, pervert with a necrophilic bent.
He’s also a vampire… of a sort.We learn Doctor Death is more than a thousand
year’s old.He sustains himself not on
the feeding of blood of his victims, but by the absorption of their souls.Dracula, of course, is Dracula.He too may be a thousand or so years old, but
he manages to retain his original physical appearance through the centuries.As someone who absorbs the souls of others,
Doctor Death conversely takes on the physical appearance of whomever his latest
victim might be.Through his soul
absorptions, the doctor has appeared over centuries in any number of multi-racial,
multi-ethic and transgender forms.The
problem facing the grieving Fred is that Doctor Death, the heralded “genius of
all ages,” has been unable to rustle up a suitable fresh corpse to transpose
its soul to that of the still very dead Linda.Which was sort of the point of Fred’s hiring him.
Doctor
Death was released in November of 1973, the film
unflatteringly described by one critic as, “one of a handful of year end
grotesqueries being dumped into theaters like a movie distributor’s version of
a clearance table.”The reviews of Doctor Death were, in fact, mostly poor
to middling.A Pittsburgh Press critic offered, the picture looked “like a grainy
blow-up of a 16mm film and with the sort of flat soundtrack that usually
accompanies porno films, this would-be horror item is horrible in ways not
intended.”But I’d say such criticism is
a bit unfair.Though the film’s Colorlab visuals are dark and gritty,
this is after all an early 1970s production.Some of the film’s exterior’s sequences were photographed in and around
Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard.It was
intended to appear a bit seedy.
I’d argue the cinematography of Emil Oster and Kent
Wakeford – both pros - was at least on par with such contemporary L.A. based horror-themed
productions as The Night Stalker, the
Count Yorga and Blacula films, and TV’s Night
Gallery. In any case, if one’s nostalgic for the 1970s, this film is for
you.The first-half of the decade is duly
represented by telltale flashes of ‘70s hairstyles and clothing, of gaudy apartment
furnishings and oversize gas-guzzling automobiles.
Doctor
Death is occasionally defended as a misunderstood horror-comedy.That’s a bit of a stretch though it’s clear
that Ponti’s script did try to lace his tale with a sprinkling of graveyard
humor.The problem is that the satire,
as written, is just too subtle (or perhaps so poorly played throughout) that
many critics missed this angle.Variety thought the film too
melodramatic and this, they reckoned, is what invoked “unconscious laughs” by
those attending.But perhaps some of
those chuckles were intentional.The Louisville
Courier-Journal, on the other hand, saw no humor in the film at all.They lambasted, “A new horror has been
released from the creaky medieval dungeons, and to tell the honest truth, [it]
should have stayed there.”
Well, I disagree. Doctor Death, while no classic, does
manage to offer ninety-minutes of dark entertainment and a smile or two.The Los
Angeles Times was one of the few newspapers to recognize the film’s lighter
aspects, describing Doctor Death as a
“silly but kinda cute and ultimately entertaining spoof” of the horror-pic biz -
with Considine playing the role of an “ersatz John Carradine.”The San
Francisco Examiner also noted Doctor
Death was, in essence, “a gruesome horror film that tries unsuccessfully to
equate merriment with slaughter.”“The
film sustains a certain amount of suspense,” its critic conceded.“But its unpleasant theme is quite repellant,
especially in sequences that suggest Considine’s necrophilic [sic] persuasion.”
New York’s Independent
Film Journal thought Considine’s performance, “rampantly theatrical, and
that’s not a help because he isn’t rampantly hammy as well.And it would take an actor as overblown as
Vincent Price to get some good fun into the good doctor.” This is a pretty prescient observation.Throughout Doctor Death, I also reflected on how Considine’s cool portrayal of
the loathsome magician-turned-resurrectionist was simply off.He was OK when the role tasked him to be manipulative
and sinister, but the absence of black-comedy winks are also painfully in evidence.It would
have taken someone of Vincent Price’s caliber to pull it off.Price had, managed to successfully mix horror
and humor a decade earlier in such earlier productions as Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) and Jacques Tourneur’s The Comedy of Terrors (1963).And, of course, in the more recent and devilishly
tongue-in-cheek horror classic Theatre of
Blood.
It’s of some interest to note that Price was about to play
a character named “Dr. Death” in the forthcoming Amicus/A.I.P. co- production
of Madhouse (1974).It’s likely had Saeta’s flick not beaten Madhouse to the gate, the Price film
might even have been released under it’s working title: The Revenge of Dr. Death.It’s almost certain the poor box-office reception of Cinerama’s Doctor Death was part of the decision of
the Madhouse team’s intent to re-title
and separate their new Vincent Price/Peter Cushing vehicle far from Saeta’s
bargain basement production.
It’s also worth noting that even Cinerama and
theater-owners thought Doctor Death not
strong enough to stand alone.The film
wasn’t playing on many upscale first-run screens, the picture almost completely
relegated to grindhouses and west-coast drive-ins.Depending on the market, Doctor Death was part of a double or triple feature bill.These combo-bills mixed newish pics (Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), with psychological
thrillers and mysteries (Scream, Baby,
Scream (1969), The Butcher
(1970), Bluebeard (1972), The Other (1972) and A Name for Evil (1973).The film was also paired with an assortment
of horror pictures on their second and third runs: (Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Countess
Dracula (1971), Lady Frankenstein
(1971), The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
and Asylum (1972).There were even a few golden oldies sprinkled
into the bills when prints were available: (The
Pit and the Pendulum (1964) and the incongruous A Long Ride from Hell (1968), a spaghetti western with Steve (Hercules)
Reeves.
Even with such support, the box-office of Doctor Death was mostly weak.In its first week of screenings in San
Francisco, the film pulled in a mere $4,500.When the film rolled out regionally, it pulled in only $2,500 on its
first week Pittsburgh, but did slightly better in Detroit with a take of
$4,000.But as Christmas week
approached, even the Detroit sank to $2,500.The film did some surprising first week receipts in Chicago with a gross
of $30,000.It might have been helpful
that in Chicago the film had been paired as a double with the old school mystery
Terror in the Wax Museum: a film featuring
familiar faces (Ray Milland, Elsa Lanchester, John Carradine and Broderick
Crawford). Regardless, the combo’s take in the Windy City dropped to $16,500 on
week two and (as per Variety) a “tepid”
$10,000 of earnings on week three.Though the film seemed destined to play New York City’s “Deuce” strip on
its initial run, by mid-January of 1974, Doctor
Death would only made it to screens near the upper regions of New York
State before disappearing completely from sight.
In any event, the folks at Scorpion Releasing are making
sure that Doctor Death doesn’t
disappear from your home video screen. This release, taken from a 2015
High-Definition master from the Original Camera Negative is as good as it
likely will ever look.The special
features include both an audio commentary and separate interview with actor
John Considine, as well the reminiscences of director Eddie’s son, Steve.The set arounds out with the film’s trailer
and a “new” light-hearted introduction courtesy of Doctor Death himself.I suggest fans of 1970s fringy horror make
their appointment with doctor.
Stella Stevens, the beautiful and talented American
actress, who enjoyed a long career, passed away on February 17. She was 84.
Stella was my friend.
We became friends in early 2000 when I co-hosted a
benefit screening of The Poseidon Adventure on board the Queen Mary ocean liner
in Long Beach, CA. Stella was gorgeous and wonderful during the question and
answer portion of the evening. Stella loved her fans, and she sparkled on stage
between Shelley Winters and Pamela Sue Martin. Over the years, a group of
mutual friends would have a potluck dinner and show Stella’s films on a 16mm projector.
Halfway through the film, we would have desert. Stella told fascinating stories
about the films we saw and how they were made. She had a great sense of humor,
and the evening was always filled with laughter.
Stella loved animals, especially her cats and her horses.
She had an outdoor spirit, but she could easily dress up and look every inch a
movie star. Somewhere I read that Stella was one of the most photographed women
on earth in the 1960s. Stella was extremely talented and left behind a large
body of work. She was requested to be in films by some of the major male actors
and directors in the business.
Stella was very kind to me. She invited me to her home,
she had lunch with me in Beverly Hills, and she had dinner at my home many
times. She was gracious to everyone. I shared holidays with Stella and her
partner, Bob, on several occasions. Laughter and friendship is what I think of
when I think of Stella.
Rest in peace.
(James Radford is the author of "Adventures on the
Queen Mary".)
Stella Stevens, who started in show business after overcoming the hardships of being a single mother at age 17, has passed away at age 84 after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer's Disease. Her death was announced by her son, actor and producer Andrews Stevens. She was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi and her family moved to Memphis when she was four years-old. By the time she was out of high school, she had been married and divorced and had a young son Stevens was always obsessed with movies and was eventually signed under contract with Fox. She earned a Golden Globe for her screen debut in the 1959 film "Say One for Me" as Most Promising Newcomer. With her voluptuous figure, she caught the eye of Hugh Hefner and she
appeared as Playmate of the Month during 1960. She would two more photo
shoots for the magazine in the years that followed. Fame eventually followed despite the fact that Fox, which had her under contract, released her from the agreement. She balked at co-starring with Elvis Presley in the 1964 film "Girls! Girls! Girls" because she felt the movie had a poor script. Nonetheless, she needed the money and the film was a high profile hit.
Stevens would go on to become an in-demand popular leading lady, appearing opposite the top male stars of the 1960s. She often was cast as a ditzy blonde but these roles proved she had considerable comedic skills. Among the movies she appeared in were "Too Late Blues", the Jerry Lewis comedy classic "The Nutty Professor", "Advance to the Rear", the first Dean Martin Matt Helm film "The Silencers" and again with Martin in "How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life". She gave an impressive dramatic performance opposite David McCallum in the 1968 crime thriller "Sol Madrid" (aka "The Heroin Gang") and earned praise for her comedic skills in Sam Peckinpah's "The Ballad of Cable Hogue". In 1972, she was prominent in the all-star cast in the blockbuster disaster movie "The Poseidon Adventure", which spawned a fan cult that exists to this day. As the good roles began to diminish, Stevens found work in television, starring in the series "Flamingo Road" in the early 1980s. She would appear frequently in guest star roles on series in the ensuing years. Stevens desired to be a director but found few opportunities, though she did direct two low-budget films. Perhaps the her most impressive achievement was overcoming personal challenges through sheer determination to fulfill her dream of becoming a major star on the silver screen. For more about her life and career, click here.
From the Cinema Retro archives: newspaper adverts for Walt Disney's "Follow Me, Boys!" a Boy Scout comedy hit starring Fred MacMurray, Vera Miles and up-and-comer Kurt Russell.
Cinema Retro has received the following press release from Paramount Home Video:
Called “an absolute spectacle of filmmaking from start to
finish” (Lauren Huff, Entertainment Weekly) and “extravagant,
decadent…phenomenal” (Jazz Tangcay, Variety), writer/director Damien Chazelle’s
glittering tale of Hollywood glamour and excess BABYLON arrives for fans to
watch at home on Premium Video-On-Demand and to purchase on Digital January 31,
2023 from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Nominated for three Academy Awards®, including Best Original
Score, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design, BABYLON is a must-see
spectacle featuring outstanding work from a world-class cast and filmmaking
team. Fans who buy the film on Digital will have access to over 40
minutes of behind-the-scenes interviews and deleted scenes to further
illuminate how the cinematic tour-de-force was brought to life. Bonus content
is detailed below:
•A Panoramic Canvas Called Babylon— The cast and
crew discuss the inspiration and motivation behind the original story and
development of this epic, 15 years in the making.•The Costumes of Babylon— Discover how costume
design was fundamental to character development and the challenges that went
into creating over 7,000 costumes for the film.•Scoring Babylon— Take a peek into Justin
Hurwitz's musical process to understand the artistry behind composing an iconic
score that further elevates the film.•Deleted & Extended Scenes
BABYLON follows an ambitious cast of characters -- The
Silent Film Superstar (Brad Pitt), the Young Starlet (Margot Robbie), the
Production Executive (Diego Calva), the Musical Sensation (Jovan Adepo) and the
Alluring Powerhouse Performer (Li Jun Li) -- who are striving to stay on top of
the raucous, 1920s Hollywood scene and maintain their relevance at a time when
the industry is moving on to the next best thing.
The film will arrive on 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray™, DVD, and in
a Limited-Edition 4K Ultra HD SteelBook® March 21, 2023.
(Welch in a publicity photo for the 1967 spy film "Fathom".
(Cinema Retro Archive)
By Lee Pfeiffer
Raquel Welch, the actress who took the international film industry by storm with her appearance in the 1966 remake of the fantasy film "One Million Years B.C.", has passed away after a brief illness. Welch was one of the last of the so-called "Glamour Girls" of this period; actresses who were chosen primarily for their looks and measurements as opposed to their acting abilities. But Welch defied the odds and didn't prove to be a flash-in-the-pan in terms of popularity. She was one of the last of the big studio contract players- in this case 20th-Century-Fox, which meant she could only make films for another studio if Fox approved. She had little say over the films she appeared in during this period and she would later look back on them with disdain. However, retro movie fans would be largely defensive of many of these films, as they cast her opposite popular leading men of the period as Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, Stephen Boyd, Jim Brown, Burt Reynolds, Robert Wagner, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart and Dean Martin. Among her best films of this era were "100 Rifles", "Fantastic Voyage", "Bandolero!", "The Biggest Bundle of them All" and "Lady in Cement". Some were duds, such as the misguided thriller "Flareup" and the disastrous sex comedy "Myra Breckinridge". She became an instant pop culture icon due to the famous photo of her as a cavegirl sporting a fur bikini in "One Million Years B.C." Teenage boys around the world had the resulting poster adorning their bedroom walls. In the early 1970s, she played vengeance-driven female gunslinger in the Western "Hannie Caulder", a victim of Richard Burton's lady killer in "Bluebeard", a roller derby queen in "Kansas City Bomber" and a member of the all-star cast in the murder mystery "The Last of Sheila". By the mid-190's, she played a comedic co-starring role in the big budget version of "The Three Musketeers" and its sequel "The Four Musketeers". Critics finally acknowledged that she could act and should be judged by her talent and not her image as a voluptuous sex symbol.
(Welch in her first leading role in "Fantastic Voyage" (1966).
(Photo: Cinema Retro Archive)
When the prime big screen roles began to vanish, Welch suspected it may have been due to her suing MGM over age discrimination when she was fired as the leading lady in the film "Cannery Row" and replaced by Debra Winger. The studio countered that Welch had acted unprofessionally on the set. She won the case and $10 million in damages but it seemed to make studios reluctant to hire her again. Nevertheless, she successfully reinvented herself with live shows on stage including an acclaimed leading role in the Broadway production of "Victor/Victoria". She also scored with a funny self-deprecating appearance as herself in "Seinfeld" in which she was presented as an obnoxious, hot-tempered diva.
Welch kept a low profile in recent years and was rarely seen in public. She was married four times and is survived by a son and daughter. Despite her sex symbol image, she was always proud that she never gave in to offers to appear nude on screen or in print. She was the one who got away, said a disappointed Hugh Hefner who couldn't use influence or money to lure her to the pages of Playboy.
1972 was a busy year
for the vice squad of the Metropolitan Police. Having only seized 140,000
obscene items from London’s sex shops the previous year, this time they managed
to grab over one million items, raiding sex shops, private cinemas and the
occasional warehouse. Obscenity generally meant pornography, and this could
take the guise of magazines, photos and films. This was the year when America
saw the release of Deep Throat
(Gerard Damiano), but there was no such porno
chic revolution in the UK. Hardcore pornography was illegal and produced secretly
on low budgets by daring, enterprising filmmakers whose work could land them in
jail, much like the American stag film producers of the 1930s and 1940s.
Britain had always been years behind, not only the States but Europe as well.
The early 1970s saw a boom in the production of pornography across the Western
world, with censorship laws either being relaxed or abolished in many
countries, something which the lawmakers and moral guardians of the UK watched
with great unease.
Despite its illegal
status there was still money to be made, and in this new book from academic
Benjamin Halligan we get some fascinating insight into the history of British
pornography and its connection to politics and the campaigning against it of
groups such as the Festival of Light. One filmmaker who seemed to have little
regard for the laws was the Scottish entrepreneur John Lindsay, who was known
for producing films frequently depicting schoolgirls or nuns. The films were
made for European distribution, but also found British customers through mail
order as well as being screened secretly in the sex cinemas of Soho.
As Halligan points
out in this fascinating study, as with many aspects of British culture, the
pornography of this time was often about class, with fantasies being played out
from sophisticated erotica in country houses and gentlemen’s clubs to
frustrated housewives and chambermaids encountering guests in their hotel rooms.
Individual filmmakers developed an almost auteur status in the industry and
became celebrities themselves, publishing autobiographies and documentaries on
the sex film industry. It wasn’t all just hardcore of course, with Britain’s
most famous sex film star Mary Millington moving away from hardcore to appear
in softcore sex comedies such as Come
Play With Me (George Harrison Marks, 1977), whose director was a true
pioneer in British glamour film and photography, producing dozens of books, 8mm
loops and feature films from the late 1950s.
Halligan has
uncovered a new canon of British filmmakers who for the most part have been
ignored in previous histories, who played an important role in this secretive,
frequently controversial world. He has watched hundreds of these “joyless
erotic films” which blurred into “one underlit and dingy tale of sexual
frustration… across housing estates, rainy holiday resorts and chintzy hotels”
as part of the research (being a historian is a tough job sometimes!) and as
such is able to give us a great overview of the films, their directors and
producers (generally those in front of the camera are uncredited and anonymous
so it is very difficult to identify who they might be). He explores the
difficulty the British government had in defining precisely what obscenity and
pornography were, which helped to create the grey areas that allowed those
involved to flourish despite the risks.
The book is divided
into three sections, exploring the notion of “The Permissive Society” and the
campaigners both for and against pornography and immoral behaviour, the
hardcore films of John Lindsay, George Harrison Marks and Russell Gay, and the
softcore (and therefore more commercially acceptable) worlds of Derek Ford and
David Hamilton Grant. As a coda, he explores the post-Thatcherite notions of
hardcore pornography, focusing on films set on council estates, which again
brings us back to class. In British film, as pointed out in the introduction
here, everything is really about class.
For anyone interested
in this occasionally murky aspect of British film industry, this is an
essential addition to a library which should also include the work of Simon Sheridan
and David McGillivray. As has been pointed out before, don’t let that high
price for the hardback put you off: this is an academic publication, which
means that a more affordable paperback should be along soon. If you can’t wait
that long, simply request a copy of Hotbeds
of Licentiousness from your local library. Perhaps they can supply it in a
plain brown wrapper.
In
May 1977 my parents and I saw George Lucas’s Star Wars and my life
changed forever. We saw it July with other family members and a third time in
November prior to the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (henceforth abbreviated as CE3K). The trailer
for CE3K was mysterious and intense to my young eyes and the prospect of
seeing it again led me to turn down my parent’s offer to sit through Star
Wars a second time after that afternoon’s showing. What frightened me about
the trailer was not the chaotic scenes with Richard Dreyfus and Melinda Dillon,
but rather the sequence wherein Bob Balaban and Francois Truffaut approach
Richard Dreyfuss in a claustrophobic makeshift room to interrogate him about
what he has seen, reminding me of my first trip to what I considered to be the
Ninth Circle of Hell: THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE. In retrospect, I am amused by
this memory and my initial impression of the film.
If
you look at the history of Steven Spielberg’s work, his films are about many
things, not the least of which is people’s impressions of the world around
them. Additionally, a common theme that runs throughout much of his work is the
notion of broken families or absent parents. Beginning with his film debut, The
Sugarland Express (1974), and continuing with the father who is not around
much for his young children in Jaws (1975), or a UFO-obsessed power
plant worker who leaves his family for other worlds in the aforementioned CE3K,
or a lonely young boy who feels a connection to an alien in E.T. The
Extra-Terrestrial (1982), or the broken family that needs to come together
to survive in War of the Worlds (2005), to name a few, authority figures
are often anything but authoritative. His latest film, the wonderful and semi-autobiographical
The Fabelmans, is a story that has existed in Mr. Spielberg’s mind all
his life and finally needed to come out during the height of the coronavirus
pandemic during worldwide downtime, if it was going to come out at all. Collaborating
with writer Tony Kushner for the fourth time, Mr. Spielberg gives the audience
a sense of what his turbulent childhood was like.
Although
Mr. Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, OH, his family moved around due to his
father’s position as an electrical engineer in the burgeoning computer industry.
In The Fabelmans, Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano standing in for real-life
father Arnold Spielberg) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams standing in for
real-life mother Leah Adler) take their young son Sammy (Mateo Zoryan) to see his
first movie, Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, in Haddon
Township, NJ in 1952. The spectacular train crash seen on screen both
captivates and frightens him. Using his father’s 8mm camera with his mother’s
secretive permission, he recreates it with his train set that he received for
Hanukkah, and this gives Sammy the confidence to start shooting films involving
friends and his three younger sisters.
Years
later, Sammy is much older and now portrayed by Gabriel LaBelle. His father is
offered a better job, and this takes them to Phoenix, AZ along with Burt’s
friend and business associate Benny Loewy (played endearingly by Seth Rogen). Sammy
shoots footage of them all on a camping trip, including a headlight-illuminated
dance performed by his mother in her nightgown, which makes a deep impression
on Benny. Following Mitzi’s mother’s passing and her subsequent sadness, Burt urges
Sammy to create a little film of the camping trip to cheer her up, which he
does begrudgingly while he is shooting a film with his fellow Boy Scouts. In
the film’s most inspired moment, the family’s Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch in a
wonderful performance) briefly visits, giving Sammy a spirited monologue about the
discord between art and familial responsibility. The turning point in the film
comes when Sammy sorts through the campfire footage, only to discover that
“Uncle” Benny is showing more than a passing interest in Mitzi: they are caught
holding hands and getting too close for comfort in the background images. Sammy
is shellshocked. After more strife, the family is uprooted yet again, this time
to Southern California, where he encounters both severe antisemitism at the
hands of two school bullies and experiences first love with a devoutly Christian
girl who puts Jesus first. More turmoil ensues, and Sammy ultimately learns to
use his natural gift for filmmaking to deal with personal traumas and bending
others to his will.
Steven
Spielberg is my favorite director, and he shares the number one spot for me in
a tie with Stanley Kubrick. Both men have made extraordinarily entertaining and
mind-bending films. It was a constant joy to watch The Fablemans as it
gives the audience a window into the person who would go on to become the
creative genius who not only makes great movies but is also and deservedly
financially successful at it.
I
met Leah Adler in November 2008 when I was getting ready to come home from a
horror film convention. She owned a restaurant called Milky
Way, which opened in
1977, and when I walked in, she was there to greet me. I began gushing about
her son, how CE3K was the first film of his that I saw and how it blew
me away, what Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. meant to me, etc.
She guided me over to a table and listened intently to my rambling, and when I
thanked her for encouraging Steven to become a filmmaker, she paused and simply
said, “I don’t know where the hell he came from.” This made me burst out
laughing as I have always thought of her son as the best friend I never met
(not entirely true: I waited outside the Ziegfeld Theater in June 2005 for
eight hours the day of the War of the Worlds premiere and managed to get
his autograph and snap a few photos of him). If he and I grew up together, we
would have been inseparable – watching movies, talking about movies, making
movies, you name it. My own parents were not movie fanatics by any means, and
they could just as easily have said the same thing about me! The few times that
my family went on vacation, I was enlisted to shoot the home movies. When I was
fourteen on vacation in Florida, I began shooting our home movies from a
cinematic perspective. This is due to Steven Spielberg.
Todd Garbarini with Leah Adler, November, 2008. (Photo: Todd Garbarini).
The
new 4K UHD Blu-ray and standard Blu-ray combo is now available from Valentine’s
Day, appropriate as this film is a Valentine to Mr. Spielberg’s parents. It
comes with some extras, and I had my fingers crossed that the director would
have provided an audio commentary (something that he flatly refuses to do as he
wants his films to speak for themselves and feels that it’s a way to lifting a
curtain behind the magic), however he has stuck to his guns and I must respect
his decision. It does feature some nice extras:
The
first piece is called The Fabelmans: A Personal Journey and runs 11:00.
It focuses on comments by producer Kristie Macosko Kriger, who is on board with
the director for the ninth time; co-writer Tony Kushner, and how the film came
about, the product of a conversation while the director was shooting Munich
in Malta in 2005.
The
second piece is named Family Dynamics and runs 15:28. Much of the cast
of the film discusses their feelings and interpretations of the real-life
people they portray in the film.
The
third and final extra is called Crafting the World of The Fabelmans and
runs 22:04. This is a bit more in-depth with input from Production Designer
Rick Carter; Costume Designer Mark Bridges; Directory of Photography Januz
Kaminski; Property Master Andrew M. Siegel; Editors Michael Khan (on his 30th
film with the director) and Sarah Broshar; Actress Chloe East; Actors Sam
Rechner and Oakes Fegley; and Maestro/Composer John Williams.
The set also includes a digital version for streaming.
While
the film is a no-brainer for Spielberg completists, being one is not a
prerequisite as it can be enjoyed as a work of fiction for those who do not
idolize the subject of the film.
The
Fabelmans is an example of
life not only imitating art, but art imitating life as well.
One
of the most talked-about and popular films of 1968 was Franco Zeffirelli’s
adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Audiences in the
UK were treated to the film early in the year (March), but the release date in
the USA was held back to October. By then, the picture was a worldwide phenomenon.
Nino Rota’s theme song (known in various markets as “Love Theme from Romeo
and Juliet,” “A Time for Us,” and “What is a Youth?”) had been covered by
numerous musical artists and was already a standard on the radio and other
media.
A
British-Italian co-production, the picture’s creative team consisted of mostly
Italians, while the production/financing and actors hailed largely from Britain
(with some Italian actors being dubbed into English). Director Zeffirelli had
already enjoyed some success with his earlier Shakespearean adaptation, The
Taming of the Shrew (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). It
made box-office sense for the filmmaker to go a step further and bring more
Shakespeare to the masses.
Zeffirelli
made a canny decision to cast two young actors who were the same ages of the
characters in the play. Productions of Romeo and Juliet in the past had
always cast actors who were well into their thirties and beyond (the most
notable being the 1936 George Cukor-helmed picture featuring Leslie Howard and
Norma Shearer). Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey were 16 and 15, respectively,
when they were cast, and 17 and 16 during filming. Not only were the two stars
extremely attractive and likable, they were also competent and charismatic
performers as well.
The
film captured the zeitgeist of 1968—an era of youth rebellion, “free love,” and
pushing the envelope in the arts. There was much ado of how Zeffirelli and his
co-screenwriters (Franco Brusati and Masolino D’Amico) cut massive portions
from Shakespeare’s text in order to release a movie that ran a little over two
hours (and with an intermission, too, to mimic the experience of a stage play).
Schools in America organized field trips to see the film, because for once,
Shakespeare had been made “commercial.” Some markets, however, made cuts in the
film to eliminate the brief nudity in the bedroom scene. This reviewer recalls
that in West Texas, two different versions of the film played. The picture was
released prior to the creation of the movie ratings system in America, but by
the time it ran in West Texas, the ratings were in effect. The cinema where Romeo
and Juliet was shown in late 1968 or early 1969 arbitrarily exhibited a
censored “M” (for Mature Audiences) rated version during matinees, and an “R”
(for Restricted Audiences) version in the evenings. All this seems rather silly
in retrospect, because the film is, at worst, a “PG” in today’s rating
sensibilities.
Filmed
on location in Italy, the movie is gorgeous to look at (with Oscar winning
cinematography and costumes by Pasqualino De Santis and Danilo Donati,
respectively). As mentioned previously, the now classic score by Nino Rota had
a great deal to do with the movie’s success. One must give Zeffirelli his due,
though (he was nominated for Best Director but didn’t win). His direction of
the film is superb, not only in guiding his two young stars into intense,
utterly believable performances, but especially in the street brawls and sword fighting
scenes. The sequence in which Romeo and Tybalt (Michael York) have at it is
appropriately awkward, messy, and realistically choreographed.
The
Criterion Collection has released a lovely Blu-ray disk (the first time in the
USA and UK for a Blu-ray, although the film has been available on a Paramount DVD
for years). The 4K digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural
soundtrack, looks magnificent with its expected 1960s-era film stock
appearance. Supplements include an excerpt from a 2018 documentary on
Zeffirelli, and interviews with stars Whiting and Hussey from 1967 after
filming was complete and in 2016 at a retrospective screening.
Whiting
and Hussey have recently made the news by filing a lawsuit against the studio for
allegedly being pushed by Zeffirelli (now deceased) into doing the brief nudity.
Interestingly, in the 2016 interview on the disk, they joke about the bedroom
scene as “being fun” and there are interviews with the couple in recent years in
which they defend the nude scenes as appropriate to the material. It will be
interesting to see how this all plays out in the legal proceedings.
Regardless,
Criterion’s release of Romeo and Juliet on Blu-ray is a landmark
presentation of a classic, beloved motion picture. It is perhaps the definitive
adaptation of Shakespeare’s play on film, and the disk is highly recommended
for fans of the Bard, the play itself, Nino Rota’s music, Zeffirelli, and the
two stars who light up the screen. As Romeo says of Juliet, “O, she doth teach
the torches to burn bright.” They both do.
Burt Bacharach, one of the most prolific musical talents in the modern history of the art form, has died from natural causes at age 94. Bacharach was a rare artist who was honored with Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. His list of pop hits crossed the charts from easy listening to becoming major hits on rock radio stations. He had long and fruitful collaborations with lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick, who had some of the biggest hits of her career singing Bacharach songs. He had long feuds with both artists but would eventually reconcile with them. Movie buffs are well-acquainted with Bacharach's contributions to the music of the film industry beginning with his campy but beloved theme song "Beware of the Blob" for the 1958 early Steve McQueen sci-fi film. He wouldn't dwell in the "B" movie realm for long, however. He wrote the hit title theme for "What's New Pussycat"?, a major early career success for Tom Jones. He also wrote the classic title theme for "Alfie", which was sung in the film by Cher. However, both Dionne Warwick and Cilla Black would have hit cover versions of the song. Bacharach won two Oscars for the 1969 film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" for both the musical composition and for the classic song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head". He would also win a Best Song Oscar for "The Best That You Can Do", the theme from the 1980s comedy "Arthur". Bacharach also composed "The Look of Love", one of the most recorded romantic songs of all time. The song appeared, perhaps improbably, in the madcap 1967 big screen spoof version of the first James Bond novel "Casino Royale". It was nominated for an Oscar, as well. The song inspired Mike Myers to create the Austin Powers character and films, which were heavily influenced by "Casino Royale". Bacharach did suffer a major career disappointment when he wrote the score for the ill-fated 1973 musical remake of "Lost Horizon", the failure of which was said to send him into a prolonged funk.
Bacharach was good to his word that he would never retire and continued to work almost to the end of his life, writing new songs and even performing with Elvis Costello and Dr. Dre, an indication of the timelessness and wide popularity of his work. For more about his life, click here.
By Darren Allison, Cinema Retro Soundtracks Editor
I always tend to get excited upon the arrival
of a couple of new releases from Chris' Soundtrack Corner. They’ve been doing
it a long while now, and they have found a seemingly smooth and reliable sense
of confident continuity with every subsequent title. Their commitment to the
works of composer Stelvio Cipriani has been a journey of discovery which
continues with CSC’s two latest releases.
Peccato Senza Malizia (aka Sins Without
Intentions, 1975) (CSC 038) certainly brings out the subtly romantic elements
of Cipriani’s craft. Theo Campanelli’s film is the story of Stefania (Luciana
Tamburini), an 18 year-old girl who leaves her orphanage in Ascoli Piceno to
move in with her stepfather, a humble and simplistic fisherman. Seeing the girl
as a wife and a lover rather than a daughter, the unnamed stepfather (Luigi
Pistelli) (who had minor roles in Leone’s, For A Few Dollars More and The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly) ignites an abusive relationship until Stefania escapes
into a series of equally bad situations. Produced in Italy, the film falls into
the general realm of erotica and remains widely unseen by a great deal of
mainstream audiences.
When the movie was released, an inventive
marketing campaign was launched to promote its arrival; foreign promotional campaigns
played upon the film’s sexuality, focusing on the single (and comparatively
tame) shower sequence in a series of lobby cards and posters. Unfortunately,
Peccato Senza Malizia has all but disappeared from the public eye. The film
never gained any form of cult status and remained largely ignored by home video
labels. It was director Theo Campanelli's only film, and as such, it simply
became just another Italian film with the Cipriani score providing more
interest than the movie itself.
It’s an old and familiar tale, but one that
at least offers a form of longevity and respectability towards the composer's
work. Stelvio Cipriani’s score is light, breezy and charming, and weaves its
way delicately via the ‘variations of a theme’ approach. Cipriani was well
versed in this romantic, playful style of scoring, and it still works well some
50 years on. Cipriani’s composition makes good use of smokey saxophones, loungy
sounding piano, trumpets and foreboding harpsichord. Peccato Senza Malizia
tries to achieve parallels between Cipriani music and the paintings presented
on screen and featured within the film. His score relies upon two basic themes,
with its first half building almost all of its cues around the main theme with
a strong focus on Stefania's character. Here, Cipriani uses his array of
orchestral tricks to showcase the emotional rollercoaster of the main heroine.
When Stefania hooks up with her inspiring music teacher, Maurizio, a trumpet is
used to suggest his masculine swagger; as their relationship blossoms, Cipriani
introduces his love theme. This motif draws upon Stefania's innocence to
showcase the transformative power of their romance.
Chris' Soundtrack Corner has worked wonders
in making this a really credible listen as well as making the score available
at all. This CD marks the soundtrack’s worldwide debut. Given the fact that the
first half of the movie is on the more monothematic side, CSC has opted to
create a better listening experience by either merging shorter cues together or
by simply changing the order of the cues. Peccato Senza Malizia is arguably the
label’s most obscure movie soundtrack it has ever released, but it's well worth
picking up, especially as a virtually forgotten Cipriani gem. The album is
produced beautifully as always by Christian Riedrich and mastered by Manmade
Mastering. The packaging is again impressive for such a minor film title and
consists of an 8-page illustrated booklet designed by Tobias Kohlhaas and
featuring exclusive and detailed notes by Gergely Hubai, who explores the
making of the film and its score. An excellent release which I hope is
rightfully rewarded.
For their second Stelvio Cipriani score
Chris' Soundtrack Corner turned to the ‘Comisario Mendoza’ trilogy from Spanish
filmmaker José Antonio de la Loma. El último viaje (1974)(CSC 039) was the second film in the trilogy
and featured Eduardo Fajardo as Mendoza.
El último viaje has been described as the
sleaziest instalment with the drug plot inviting casual orgies and a fair share
of topless women. Whether it's an urban crime thriller, a drug bust movie, or a
cross-country manhunt, Comisario Mendoza is always hot on the trail of the
criminals even if his screen time varied greatly from mission to mission.
Stelvio Cipriani's musical legacy with the
Comisario Mendoza movies is as convoluted as the constant recasting of the
trilogy's central hero. Whilst the first two movies were scored by Cipriani,
the third movie used pre-existing compositions from the C.A.M. archives. The
film also used tracks from other composers, but overall the majority of
compositions were previously written by Cipriani (these soundtracks are also
available from Chris' Soundtrack Corner). El último viaje's score is largely
based around two themes, each representing a different aspect of gangster life.
The key idea for the central love theme is deception, as the film spends a good
portion of its running time highlighting the fake criminal lifestyle.
Interestingly, a recurring feature of Cipriani's score is that it provides some
self-contained, almost isolated cues for certain sequences that seemingly
separate themselves from the film’s general narrative style, and as a result,
seem unrelated to the overall theme of the score. This is more prominent
towards the middle section of the movie where the score suddenly throws a
couple of unrelated tracks into the mix, one being for a drug-fueled orgy
sequence. Here Cipriani provides music for bass guitar, flutes, and percussion
and is only interrupted by a sudden burst of violence when somebody is dragged
out towards a clifftop. Whilst such sequences proved to be challenging for the
composer, Cipriani resolves and fulfils the tasks admirably.
Rather curiously, no soundtrack album was
ever issued for this beautiful and immersive score, so Chris' Soundtrack Corner
is particularly proud to present a world premiere release of the full
soundtrack. With his usual sense of artistic flair, Cipriani provides a
memorable and rich 45 minutes of music and also contains a couple of bonus
tracks.The album is again impressively produced by Christian Riedrich and
mastered by Manmade Mastering. The CD packaging consists of a 12-page
illustrated booklet designed by Tobias Kohlhaas and featuring exclusive notes
by Gergely Hubai, who explores the making of the film and its score in detail.
Chris' Soundtrack Corner have again chosen wisely and intelligently and we can
only hope that their Cipriani quest continues to blossom.
RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES.
By Lee Pfeiffer
MGM has made available a region-free DVD of the Oakmont-produced British WWII films from the late 1960s-early 1970s. These modestly-budgeted films were not designed as Oscar-bait. In fact, they seem to be specifically created to fill out the bottom of double bills as the era of that great cinema staple was rapidly coming to a close. Hell Boats was shot in 1970 and bares all the ingredients of an Oakmont production: it's intelligently written, well-acted and directed (by Paul Wendkos) and features some exotic locations, in this case Malta. As with some other Oakmont titles (The Last Escape, Attack on the Iron Coast, The Thousand Plane Raid), this rather unconvincingly shoehorns an American leading man into what is clearly an all-British story line, presumably to give the film some broader boxoffice appeal. In this case, James Franciscus (in full, Chuck Heston clone mode) is Jeffords, the new commander of a British torpedo boat unit. There is a brief explanation as to how an American got a job as Commander in the Royal Navy- something to do with having been born in the UK. With that sore point quickly dispensed of, we get to the main plot line. Jeffords is assigned to blow up a seemingly impregnable German gun bastion carved into a mountainside in Malta. The mission appears suicidal but Jeffords concocts a daring plan that involves scuba divers, commandos and the torpedo boats. He does have other distractions: he and his superior officer, Ashurst (Ronald Allen) despise each other. Ashurst wants to prove himself in combat, but is stuck behind a desk. He envies Jefford's courage and is further emasculated by his knowledge that Jeffords is bedding his frustrated wife Alison (Elizabeth Shepherd), who fortunately has an aversion to clothing. The soap opera elements are actually intelligently woven into the story line, creating genuine tension between the two men. Franciscus is all grit-teethed masculinity, but he makes a rather bland hero. He is humorless and all business, all the time. (He even makes his sexual dalliances look about as desirable as changing a tire.) Allen's character is far more interesting and the dissolution of his marriage before his eyes adds an interesting subplot to the military sequences.
Like most Oakmont productions, Hell Boats does a lot with very little in terms of budget. The photography is excellent and so are the production values, save for the sea battle sequences that betray the very obvious use of miniatures. Nevertheless, this is a highly entertaining adventure movie throughout- and it refreshingly sidesteps what I thought was going to be a predictable plot device leading to a somewhat unexpected conclusion.
If MGM is listening, the only Oakmont title not available on DVD is The Last Escape starring Stuart Whitman. C'mon guys, keep up the good work and get this one out there.
Click here to order from Amazon (The film is currently streaming on Screenpix and Paramount +)
Imprint, the Australia-based video label, has released a limited edition (1500) Blu-ray boxed set of "The Eagle Has Landed". It includes the original theatrical release cut and an extended version as well. As is often the case with Imprint titles, they sell out almost immediately. However, there are a few copies listed on Amazon USA for hardcore fans of the film. Here are the details from Imprint's site. To order the set from Amazon,click here. We can say that the set is amazing and includes bonus extras from previous releases as well as new content for this limited edition set. Note: although the Amazon description lists this title as a Region B/2 Blu-ray, in fact it is region-free.
The daring World War II plot that changed the course of history.
During World War II, Nazi officer Max Radl (Robert Duvall)
devises a plan to kidnap or kill the British prime minister. Approved by
German Cmdr. Heinrich Himmler (Donald Pleasence), the scheme moves
forward with Col. Kurt Steiner (Michael Caine) leading the mission,
aided by Liam Devlin (Donald Sutherland), an Irishman with a deep hatred
of England. As the plan unfolds, it seems to be going well — until
certain events threaten the group’s shot at success.
Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall lead a
star-studded cast in this World War II classic based on Jack Higgins’
best-selling novel. Directed by John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape).
Starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Jenny Agutter, and Treat Williams.
Screenpix is currently streaming the hard-to-find (in America, at least) 1957 version of "Robbery Under Arms", based on the famous novel by Rolf Boldrewood. Written in the late 19th century, the book inspired some early film versions in 1907, 1911 and 1920. The Australian tale was later remade in 1985. The 1957 film is set in 1865 and was filmed in remote areas of Flinders Range and Wilpena Pound in South Australia. The tale follows the exploits of the charismatic, but notorious outlaw known as Captain Starlight (Peter Finch), whose band of henchmen include brothers Dick and Jim Marston (Ronald Lewis and David McCallum), as well as their crusty father Ben (Laurence Naismith). They've just rustled a thousand head of cattle and sell them quickly before the pursuing police can catch them. However, with their new-found riches the men become reckless and begin spending lavishly. Dick and Jim, delighted to be freed of their hardscrabble struggle to survive in the unforgiving Outback, decide to take a cruise to Melbourne. On board they meet teenage sisters Kate and Jean Swanson (Maureen Swanson and Jill Ireland) who are traveling with their elderly aunt. Sparks fly, especially when they find out the girls also reside in an area accessible to where they live. Kate is especially captivated and she and Dick promise to reunite. The men are as good as their word and promise to give up a life of crime, especially when they learn that Captain Starlight had been arrested as a consequence of his drawing attention to his sudden wealth. However, Starlight bribes his captors. He is freed and tracks down his former gang members and forces them to participate in a stagecoach robbery that nets everyone a good deal of loot. Jim and Dick are now wanted men and hide in the hills in gold-mining country. These use the stolen funds to finance their own operation and find success with it.
The script takes an improbable turn when Dick and Jim unexpectedly encounter Kate and Jean, who they had to spurn when they went into hiding. Both young women are now saloon girls in the raucous boom town. Jim and Jean ultimately marry and it isn't long after that they learn a baby is on the way. Dick, however, doesn't prove to be as reliable as Jim. He meets a local girl he falls for and betrays Jean's trust in him. When Starling and his gang turn up in town and execute a bank robbery that goes terribly wrong, the authorities are in hot pursuit, but also come across Jim, who is accused of being complicit in the murder of an innocent bystander despite the fact he wasn't present at the scene. The climax of the film finds Dick reuniting with Starlight and his remaining gang members as it becomes apparent to them that their only way to survive is to engage the police in a gunfight- even as Jim faces the prospect of being hanged. .The shootout in the final scenes is well-handled and exciting.
The film is very much identical to an American Western with the exception of seeing the odd kangaroo and the fact that the native people are from Aborigine tribes. Jack Lee provides the excellent direction, although he later called the film a disappointment because the script wasn't up to par and that he felt it was too slow and talky. I beg to differ. I found the film to be thoroughly engrossing and benefiting from the impressive cinematography of Harry Waxman. The opening titles claim it is "A British Film" and indeed it is, at least technically. The producers were British, as were most of the cast members and interiors were shot at Pinewood Studios near London. However, this isn't a cheapjack production that incorporates a few minutes of second unit photography to represent Australia. The country's own film industry had yet to really blossom so any films made there during this period are of special interest. The performances as all excellent with David McCallum especially impressive as the more mature and sensitive of the Martson brothers. (He developed a real life romance with Jill Ireland and the two would marry shortly thereafter.) The Screenpix source material is okay but is a bit soft to do justice to the fine camerawork. The film has only been released in the USA on a public domain video label, as far as I can tell. Here's hoping a Blu-ray might appear in the future.
(Screenpix is available for $2.99 extra a month for subscribers to Amazon Prime, Roku and Apple TV.)
Edgar
Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan first appeared in the October 1912 issue of the pulp
fiction magazine “All-Story.”
This inaugural novel, “Tarzan of the Apes,”
introduced the character as a British peer, Lord Greystoke, who was reared by
great apes in Africa as an orphaned infant, and then assimilated into European
society in adulthood as a sophisticated adventurer and conservationist.
Burroughs was ingenious in working out the details of the premise (for example,
how Tarzan taught himself to read and write), which bordered on science-fiction
even by the standards of 1912.
The
story was immediately popular, and a hardcover edition followed in 1914.
It’s important to term the character “Edgar Rice Burroughs’
Tarzan,” as he was typically labelled in media credits, because the author
shrewdly trademarked the name. That way, he could control all uses of his
creation, reap the profits, and legally stop any attempts by others to hijack
it. As Burroughs realized, the birth of the motion picture industry and
the growth of newspaper syndication in the early 1900s offered access to
unlimited audiences. Many middle-class people in small towns might never
buy a magazine or a book, but they were sure to be movie-goers and newspaper
readers. Securing Tarzan as his Intellectual Property allowed Burroughs
to exploit those opportunities and ensure they didn’t fall into the hands of
others. He incorporated himself as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and wrote
twenty-two more Tarzan novels over the next thirty-five years, along with many
other science-fiction and adventure series. Burroughs—and then after his
death in 1950, his heirs—licensed Tarzan to numerous other media platforms,
including movies, radio, a newspaper comic strip, comic books, toys, and
television. If podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, virtual reality, video games,
and streaming video had existed back then, we can be certain he would have
utilised them too. Today, when we think of creators who wisely kept a
tight commercial grip on their creations, Walt Disney and George Lucas are likely
to come to mind, but Burroughs led the way.
Over
the years, movies’ portrayals of Tarzan have varied from the wily, masculine,
powerful, articulate, principled character of Burroughs’ original vision to a
muscular but asexual simpleton with the verbal skills of a two-year-old.
The latter version was popularised for one generation by MGM’s Johnny
Weissmuller movies in the 1940s, and reinforced for the next by years of reruns
on television. The Weissmuller films began promisingly with the violent,
sexy “Tarzan the Ape Man”
in 1932 and “Tarzan and His Mate”
in 1934, but over time at MGM (and then at RKO, where the series moved in
1943), they became increasingly simplistic. Under the fierce censorship
of Hollywood’s Production Code, MGM tightened down on the semi-nudity and
mayhem of the first two films, aiming instead for a juvenile demographic.
The studio reasoned that kids were an easier audience who would laugh at the
antics of Tarzan’s chimpanzee and not wonder why Weissmuller’s Tarzan never had
intimate relations with Jane.
The
last seven decades have seen a variety of Tarzans. Some producers adhered
to the Weissmuller model, beginning with five features from RKO starring Lex
Barker, who inherited the role after Weissmuller retired his loincloth.
Others redesigned the concept to meet changing trends in society. In the
James Bond era of the 1960s, a character closer to the Burroughs prototype
appeared in two features starring Jock Mahoney and three with Mike Henry.
This peer of the jungle realm was a suave, jet-setting trouble shooter.
The image of an articulate ape man carried over to a 1966-68 NBC-TV series with
Ron Ely in the role. Where Mahoney’s and Henry’s character travelled to
India, Thailand, Mexico, and South America to solve jungle crises, Ely’s
remained in Africa, in one episode coming to the aid of three nuns from America
played by Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Birdsong, better known as the
Supremes. Even with those attempts to appeal to a more contemporary
audience, popular interest waned. In part, this was because the
Weissmuller image was the one that stuck in the popular memory, lampooned by
television comics. What can you do with a hero once your audience laughs
at him? Even more to the point, enormous cultural changes around racial
issues occurred with the advancements of the Civil Rights era. Many
critics now saw Tarzan as a worrisome symbol of white entitlement, despite the
prominent casting of Black actors and a more nuanced portrayal of African
tribal societies in the Ron Ely series.
Nevertheless,
with a brand name that older viewers still recognised at least, the character
continued to appear sporadically. If you gathered around the VCR with
your family as a kid in the Reagan years, the Tarzan you may remember best was
Christopher Lambert’s portrayal in 1984’s “Greystoke: The Legend
of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.” “Greystoke” had the good fortune to appear
as VCRs became standard fixtures in American television rooms; on home video,
the movie enjoyed a long life as a VHS rental. Adapted by Robert Towne
from “Tarzan of the Apes”
and directed by Hugh Hudson, the film was promoted as a return to Burroughs’ concept
of a feral but innately intelligent man who attempts to blend back into polite
society. Some Burroughs fans, primed to embrace a virile Tarzan close to
the commanding pulp-fiction character, were disappointed. In trying to
rectify the prevailing Weissmuller image from decades past, Towne and Hudson
may have overbalanced in the opposite direction. Burroughs’ Tarzan
dominated whatever environment he chose to be in; Lambert’s was a sad figure,
overwhelmed and lost,once he left the jungle. Nevertheless, lavishly
produced, the movie was popular with critics and general audiences. There
were Academy Award nominations for Towne’s screenplay and for Rick Baker’s
costuming effects for Tarzan’s adopted ape family. Another live action
movie (“Tarzan and the Lost
City,” 1998), two short-lived, syndicated TV series, and Disney’s animated “Tarzan” (1999) were released through the
1990s.
The
latest iteration as a live-action feature, “The Legend of Tarzan”
(2016), drew tepid reviews and disappointing box-office. Although the
producers cast Samuel L. Jackson in a prominent role alongside Alexander
Skarsgard’s Tarzan above the title, the strategy probably did little to attract
younger, hipper, and more diverse ticket-buyers as it was intended to. Jackson’s
American envoy remained little more than a sidekick to Tarzan in an 1885 period
setting. If you hoped to see Jackson’s character shove Tarzan aside to
get medieval on somebody’s ass, you were disappointed. In contrast,
Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther,” with a modern Black jungle hero, a largely
Black supporting cast and production team, and James Bond-style action
situations, emerged two years later with a whopping $1.3 billion in ticket
sales and a place on many critics’ Top Ten lists. The 2022 sequel, “Black
Panther: Wakanda Forever,” performed nearly as well with an $838.1 million
return.On a $50 million budget, another
2022 Hollywood production with a prestigious Black cast and exotic action in
the Burroughs style, “The Woman King,” nearly doubled its investment with $94.3
million in revenue.
In
late 2022, Sony Pictures acquired the latest screen rights to Tarzan and
promised a “total reinvention” of the character.What the studio has in mind, and whether it
will actually follow through, appears to be up in the air right now.Would anybody be surprised to see Tarzan
“reinvented” as a role for a Black actor the next time out, if there is a next
time? Popular culture is already there.Vintage movies (“A League of Their Own”) and TV series (“SWAT”) once
cast primarily with white actors are remade now, routinely, with Black stars or
all-Black casts.On the hit Netflix
series “Bridgerton,” actors
of color portray British aristocrats in Jane Austen’s Regency-era England, in
reality one of the whitest of white societies ever.
As
we wait to see what the next Tarzan, if any, will look like, The Film Detective
has released “The Tarzan Vault
Collection,” a three-disc Blu-ray set that includes the first Tarzan movie, “Tarzan of the Apes” (1918); “Adventures of Tarzan” (1921), a re-edited
feature version of a 10-chapter serial; and “The New Adventures of
Tarzan” (1935), a 12-chapter serial presented in its entirety. The first
two pictures starred Elmo Lincoln, a stocky actor who had appeared in several
of D.W. Griffith’s milestone silent films, including the ambitious “Intolerance” (1916) as a Biblical strongman, “the Mighty Man of Valor.” Although it’s
said Burroughs wasn’t particularly fond of Lincoln’s casting after another
actor was chosen but had to bow out, the films were relatively faithful to the
source novels. Outdoor filming locations in Louisiana for “Tarzan of the Apes” stand in acceptably for
equatorial Africa, at least to the satisfaction of moviegoers in 1918 who had
no idea what Africa really looked like, and certainly better than the studio
backlots used in the Weissmuller films. Actors in shaggy anthropoid
costumes portrayed Tarzan’s ape friends. Although primitive in comparison
with the modern CGI in “The Legend of
Tarzan,” the makeup effects aren’t bad for that early era of cinema.
“Adventures of
Tarzan,” based on Burroughs’ “The Return of Tarzan” (1913), finds Tarzan in
pursuit of a villain named Rokoff, who has kidnapped Jane in a plot to find the
treasure vaults of the lost city of Opar (an idea later reiterated in “The Legend of Tarzan”). In “The Return of Tarzan” and subsequent novels,
Tarzan blithely removes gold and jewels from Burroughs’ imaginary Opar to help
support his African estate, reasoning that otherwise the treasure would just
lie there. In the books, the underground vaults are vast, cavernous, and
sinister. In the movie, where the 1921 budget was too low to keep up with
Burroughs’ staggering imagination, they look more like somebody’s root
cellar. Good try anyway. As an hour-long feature truncated from a
much longer serial version, “Adventures of Tarzan”
is a succession of chases, rescues, and fights from the final chapters of the
serial. A title card at the beginning brings the viewer up to speed on
the action already in progress, much as the “Star Wars” movies do
now.
It
may be confusing to watch an old serial after most of its continuity has been
removed, but the third movie in the Film Detective set, “The New Adventures of
Tarzan,” represents the other side of the coin as a serial presented in its
original, multi-chapter format. The serials were designed to be taken one
chapter at a time each week. That remains the best way to experience
one. Otherwise, watched in a binge, repetition becomes a problem.
It’s difficult to work up much concern when Tarzan falls into a
crocodile-infested river in Chapter Seven, if, an hour earlier, he’d already
escaped the same danger in Chapter Three. Still, taken piecemeal or in
one long sitting, fans will be happy for the chance to see this original
version of “The New Adventures of
Tarzan,” which is better known in its truncated feature version, “Tarzan and the Green Goddess,” a one-time
television staple. Co-produced by Burroughs, it introduced Herman Brix, a
1928 Olympics finalist, as the title hero. Trimly muscular, Brix was
offered as an alternative to Johnny Weissmuller’s monosyllabic Tarzan; his
version, endorsed by Burroughs, spoke in whole, commanding sentences and looked
equally comfortable in a loincloth or a dinner jacket. The serial was set
and filmed on location in Guatemala, where Tarzan and his friends race against
the bad guys to find a Mayan statue with a valuable secret. Fans often
rank Brix with Jock Mahoney and Mike Henry as their favourite Tarzan. He
later changed his screen name to Bruce Bennett for a long career in Westerns
and crime dramas. Humphrey Bogart fans will remember him as Cody, the
drifter who tries to steal Fred C. Dobbs’ gold mine claim in “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.”
The
back story of the serial is more intriguing than the plot about the Mayan
statue. Burroughs fell in love with the wife of his co-producer, Ashton
Dearholt, eventually marrying her after she divorced Dearholt and Burroughs
divorced his first wife. In turn, Dearholt had carried on an extramarital
affair with Ula Holt, the lead actress in the serial, and they married after
Dearholt’s divorce. It’s the kind of Hollywood story that TMZ.com would
love today.
Here are some fun highlights from "The Addams Family", which last only two seasons on television (1964-66) but which has become a major part of pop culture through the ensuing decades. These scenes are a tribute to Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday Addams, and who passed away recently at age 64. The show was so politically incorrect that it is amazing it was ever telecast in the 1960s. Tribute must be paid to Loring's talented co-stars, Carolyn Jones, John Astin, Ken Weatherwax, Jackie Coogan, Ted Cassidy and Blossom Rock for their iconic interpretations of these immortal characters who were created by cartoonist Charles Addams. - Lee Pfeiffer
Richard Boone is best known for playing the iconic role of gentleman gunslinger Palladin in the classic TV series "Have Gun, Will Travel" which ran between 1957-1963. But there was much more to his career in TV, stage and film. The YouTube channel Remembering Hollywood Celebrity presents a fine overview of his work and reveals some surprising facts through the assistance of Peter Boone, Richard's son. For example, Boone played a pivotal role in the filming of "Hawaii Five-0" on location in Honolulu. This is a fine tribute to a fine actor.
In 1975 film director Sam Peckinpah was at loose ends.
His last film, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” while an artistic triumph
of a certain kind, was a box office failure. He had a script for a movie called
“The Insurance Company,” but couldn’t get any backing for it. When United
Artists offered him a chance to direct a movie based on Robert Rostand’s novel,
“Monkey in the Middle,” he took it. The book was a thriller about security
expert Mike Locken, hired to protect an African diplomat traveling through London.
He takes the job because one of three elite assassins hired to kill the
diplomat was a former colleague who had shot him up on his last job and left
him for dead. The new assignment was a way to get revenge.
Peckinpah saw some elements in the story that he felt he
could work with. But when UA offered the Mike Locken role to James Caan, he
said he didn’t want to work in Europe, where he’d been working the last several
years. He’d do it, if they changed the location to the U.S. Marc Norman rewrote
the script that Reginald Rose had written based on the novel, but UA and
Peckinpah hated it.Top notch
screenwriter, Oscar winner Stirling Silliphant (“In the Heat of the Night”) was
hired to do a new script. Silliphant, only married a year to Tiana, his 33-years
younger Vietnamese actress wife, said he’d do the script but only if they
agreed to put her in the picture as Locken’s love interest. Peckinpah tested
her and gave the part.
Tiana and Silliphant were both former students of Bruce
Lee and Silliphant had always had an interest in Asian culture and philosophy. So
he set the story in San Francisco, using Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge and
other locations, and brought aboard kung fu and martial arts experts like the
legendary Tai Chi master Kuo Lien Ying to play some of the background
characters. He created a fictitious security agency named ComTeg, and changed
the character of the African diplomat to a Taiwanese politician named Chung
(Mako), who was traveling with his daughter Tommy (Tiana). Robert Duvall was
brought on board to play George Hansen, Locken’s best buddy, who in the movie’s
first act, succumbed to a better offer from the opposition on a previous
assignment, and shot Locken in the knee and elbow, “retiring” him from active
service. The first 40 minutes of “The Killer Elite” consists mostly of Hansen’s
betrayal and Locken’s rehabilitation, rendered in excruciating detail. He
learns to use a metal elbow brace and wooden cane as martial arts weapons.
Locken’s bosses at ComTeg, Cap Collis (Arthur Hill), and
Lawrence Weybourne (Gig Young), tell him he has to retire with disability.
“Let’s face it,” Collis says. “That knee of yours will never be anything but a
wet noodle.” When the CIA contracts ComTeg to provide security for Chung and
his daughter while they’re in the U.S., they’re not interested until they learn
that Hansen is heading up a team to eliminate Chung. Collis and Weybourne offer
Locken his old job back—the chance for revenge that Mike has been waiting for.
Locken gets in touch with two members of his old team for
two or three days of work. “I don’t think anyone could handle more of what we
got.” He meets up with Jerome Miller (Bo Hopkins) on a hillside overlooking the
Golden Gate Bridge, where he’s practicing his skeet shooting, which is probably
not something that happens there every day. Miller tells him he doesn’t think
his company would hire him. “They’ve got me classified as a psycho.” Locken
tells him: “You’re not a psycho, Jerome. You’re the patron poet of the manic
depressives.” A typical Silliphant line.
Next up is Mac (Burt Young), his old driver, who now runs
a garage, where he just happens to have a bullet proof taxi available that
would be just perfect for the job Locken has in mind. Mac’s wife calls Locken
Mr. Davis. When Locken asks why, Mac says: “When you’re around, she calls
everybody Mr. Davis.” They don’t know it, but while everybody’s getting
reacquainted, a mechanic has attached a bomb to the exhaust manifold.
The trio drive to San Francisco’s Chinatown to pick up
Chung and his daughter. Naturally there’s a gun battle with Hansen and another
gunman perched on the roof of the building across the street from the place
where Chung is staying. They manage to shoot their way out, but Mac hears
something rattling under the taxi. It’s bomb disposal time. They pull over on
an overpass and get some assistance from a dim-witted motorcycle cop— another
scene that is as unrealistic and impossible as the scene with Jerome skeet
shooting out in the open by the Golden Gate Bridge.
At this point you begin to suspect there’s something
weird going on. This is not your typical action thriller being played out here.
As the story moves on absurdity piles on absurdity, all of which culminates in
an unlikely battle between assassins equipped with automatic weapons and a team
of ghost-like ninjas armed with swords, aboard the deck of an abandoned
battleship, part of the Navy’s Mothball Fleet anchored in Suisan Bay. Got all
that?
Critic Pauline Kael in a 1976 review for The New Yorker
described Peckinpah’s career as a constant battle with studio bosses who
consistently tried to take the movies he made away from him, demanding changes
more in line with their thinking rather than his. As a result he kept making
movies that are more about that battle than any melodramatic plot that may be
involved. “There’s no way to make sense of what has been going on in
Peckinpah’s recent films,” she wrote, “if one looks only at their surface
stories. Whether consciously or, as I think, part unconsciously, he’s been
destroying the surface content.” According to Kael, “He’s crowing in The
Killer Elite, saying, ‘No matter what you do to me, look at the way I can make
a movie.’”
She attributes most of the film’s weirdness to Peckinpah,
but it might also be instructive to look at the career of screenwriter Stirling
Silliphant for some clues about the subtext both he and Peckinpah present in
The Killer Elite.Like Peckinpah,
Silliphant started out working in television. Peckinpah wrote episodes of “Gunsmoke,”
and created “The Rifleman” and “The Westerner” series. Silliphant wrote for
just about every TV series on the air in the mid-fifties, eventually writing 70
hour-long episodes of the classic Route 66 series, before moving to the movies.
He left television because of the same problem Peckinpah faced in filmmaking—loss
of creative control. He went on to achieve great success in films but when he wrote
the script for The Killer Elite, it was a year after having penned The Towering
Inferno. It was a successful, well-written movie but he probably realized he
had sold out his artistic independence when the hopped on the IrwinAllen Disaster Movie bandwagon, which he began
with The Poseidon Adventure. It would be only a few years after “The Killer
Elite” that he would nearly destroy his career turning out the script for Allen’s
“The Swarm.”
For relief between projects, he would take Tiana aboard his
yacht, the Tiana 2, and sail to exotic ports in the South Pacific. It’s no
coincidence, I think, that “The Killer Elite” ends with Locken turning down a
job offer and a promotion from his old boss Weybourne, and sails away on a
sailboat with his pal Mac (Miller is killed in the gunfight on the Mothball
Fleet). When Silliphant saw no future for him if he remained in what he
publicly called “the eel pit” that was Hollywood he sold everything and moved
to Thailand.
Peckinpah held similar sentiments about the Hollywood
establishment. He said in a 1972 Playboy interview: “The woods are full of
killers, all sizes, all colors. … A director has to deal with a whole world
absolutely teeming with mediocrities, jackals, hangers-on, and just plain
killers. The attrition is terrific. It can kill you. The saying is that they
can kill you but not eat you. That’s nonsense. I’ve had them eating on me while
I was still walking around.” I think he identified with Silliphant’s image of a
hero sailing away from it all if he could.
Imprint’s two-disc box set is a must have for any
Peckinpah fan or anyone who digs action thrillers, Silliphant, martial arts, or
the poetry of manic depression. The first disc presents the “original”
theatrical version in a 1080p high definition transfer from MGM that runs 2 hours
and 3 minutes, and includes a ton of bonus features, most notable of which is a
fabulous audio commentary by Peckinpah expert Mike Siegel. He provides some terrific
revelations about the film and its production and shows a real appreciation of
Peckinpah’s work. Siegel indicates that Sam, at Bo Hopkins’ suggestion, filmed
an alternate “absurdist” ending in which Locken and Mac find Miller alive and
well aboard the sailboat, after having been seen getting shot to pieces. In an
interview with Siegel, Hopkins confirms that bit of info, and even shows some
footage of the scene that was finally excised by the bosses at United Artists,
who just didn’t get it. In a separate commentary ported over from a previous
Twilight Time release, Garner Simmons and Paul Seydor, two film historians whom
I lovingly refer to as the Peckinpah Peckerwoods, and the late Nick Redman,
make the assertion that the complete film, with the Jerome Miller
“resurrection” scene had one showing in Northern California and has never been
seen again.
Well, I beg to differ with that statement. Fellow Cinema
Retro reviewer Fred Blosser and I saw The Killer Elite the night it opened in
December 19, 1975 at a local theater in northern Virginia. The scene in
question was definitely included. Fred states that he has also seen it in the
occasional TV broadcast of the film. So, despite statements made to the
contrary, there probably is at least one copy of the unexpurgated “The Killer
Elite” out there somewhere. JEROME MILLER LIVES!
Other extras included in the Imprint release include an
alternate, shorter version of the film that mainly cuts scenes from Locken’s
painful looking rehab; documentaries taken from Siegel’s The Passion and the
Poetry Project on the works of Sam Peckinpah; interviews Siegel conducted with
Bo Hopkins, Ernest Borgnine, LQ Jones and others. There is so much here to
enjoy. The bad news is that Imprint has sold out of the 1500 copies it made. I
obtained one the last two copies Grindhouse Video had left, but now they are
sold out. Good luck trying to find a copy. Check your usual sources. (Note: as of this writing, there are still a few copies left at
Amazon USA. Although it is listed as a Region 2 set, it is actually
region-free. Click here to order. Good luck!)
Poor
Orson Welles. After the critical success but box office failure that was Citizen
Kane (1941), it seemed as though the “boy genius” could never again get his
ultimate vision on the screen when he was working in Hollywood. The studio
butchered his second picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), although
the version released is still pretty much a masterpiece and earned an Oscar
Best Picture nomination. Still, it didn’t make money. After that, Welles was persona
non grata in Hollywood, at least as a director. The studios were happy to
have him as an actor.
Nevertheless,
he continued to squeeze his way in and make more Hollywood pictures. He
produced, co-wrote, and acted in Journey Into Fear (1943), and the story
goes that he directed some of it uncredited (Norman Foster was the credited
director). Welles then made The Stranger (1946) as an attempt to prove
he could deliver a movie under budget and on time—and he did. The Stranger is
perhaps Welles’ most “conventional” motion picture and it made money.
Unfortunately, RKO (the studio that had made his previous three films) still
turned its back on Welles.
The
filmmaker’s next title, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), was made for
Columbia Pictures. Legend has it that Welles, who in 1946 was producing with
Mike Todd a Broadway stage musical based on Around the World in Eighty Days,
needed $50,000 to complete the budget so that the musical could open. He called
Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, and offered to write and star in a movie for
that amount of money,and direct the picture for free and with no credit. Cohn
asked, “What do you have in mind?” It may be an apocryphal story, but Welles,
who was calling Cohn from a phone booth, either saw a woman reading a pulp
paperback or he spied it on a rack of books. It was called If I Die Before I
Wake, a 1938 potboiler by Raymond Sherwood King. Welles, off the cuff,
grabbed the book and read the blurb on the back to tell Cohn what the movie was
about, but he improvised the title, calling it The Lady from Shanghai. (And,
indeed, Welles does not receive a credit for directing—there is no directing
credit at all.)
Cohn
made the deal, but on one condition—it had to star Rita Hayworth, who was at
the time Columbia’s biggest star. The problem with that was that Hayworth and
Welles were married, but their union was on the rocks. They were estranged from
each other.
But,
hey, both Welles and Hayworth were professionals. They could work together. And
they did. Welles assembled the cast, wrote the script, and proceeded to film on
location (New York, San Francisco, out at sea) so that no one would interfere
with the work. Of course, he went over budget and delivered a movie that was
three hours long. Cohn went berserk, took the film away from Welles, and cut it
down to approximately 90 minutes. Once again, Welles’ “vision” was hijacked.
And
yet… AND
YET… The Lady from Shanghai is a MARVELOUS motion picture! No, it wasn’t
well received by the critics or the public in 1948 when it was finally released
(it had premiered in France in 1947)… but time is often kind to movies made by
Orson Welles, and today The Lady from Shanghai is considered a film
noir classic.
Film
noir (not
a term used at the time) was big in the late 1940s. Movies like Double
Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The
Killers, and Out of the Past were coming out fast and furiously. The
Lady from Shanghai and The Stranger are Welles’ contributions to
that stylistic movement of dark shadows, high contrast lighting,
Expressionistic design, cynical and hard-boiled characters, and crime that
doesn’t pay.
Michael
O’Hara (Welles) is an out of work seaman who meets gorgeous Elsa Bannister
(Hayworth) in Central Park one evening. He immediately falls for her, even
though she is married to one of the country’s most accomplished defense
attorneys, Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). O’Hara is hired to be a crewman
on Bannister’s yacht as the couple sails around North America, through the
Panama Canal, from New York to San Francisco. Along the way, Bannister’s sleazy
business partner, George Grisby (stage actor Glenn Anders, in an extraordinary,
eccentric performance), asks O’Hara to “kill” him in a plot to fake his own
death. O’Hara would be paid enough money for he and Elsa to run away together.
Ah, but nothing is what it seems. Grisby is, of course, setting up O’Hara for a
big fall, and Elsa is, you guessed it, a femme fatale.
The
plot is rather complex and there was much critical lashing at the time of the
movie’s release that it was “incomprehensible,” but this is simply not the
case. Even though Columbia deleted 1-1/2 hours from Welles’ rough cut, the
story still makes sense… and as film noir expert Eddie Muller explains
on one of the Blu-ray disk’s supplements, what isn’t explained in the movie can
easily be interpreted by audiences who are somewhat intelligent. (He calls it a
“film noir poem.”)
The
most memorable sequence is the famed climax that takes place at an abandoned
amusement park outside San Francisco. The chase and ultimate shootout in an old
fun house made up of a mirror maze has been copied many times in subsequent
motion pictures (Enter the Dragon and The Man with the Golden Gun,
for example). But the surreal quality of Welles’ direction of this sequence
reminds one of the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dalí, and it is masterfully presented. Supposedly the scene was
to have lasted nearly twenty minutes. If only we could see what ended up on the
cutting room floor!
The new Blu-ray edition from Kino
Lorber looks exquisite. The glorious black and white cinematography (by the
credited Charles Lawton Jr., with uncredited work by Rudolph Maté and Joseph
Walker) is sharp and clear. There are three different audio commentaries
one can choose to accompany the film: one by film historian Imogen Sara Smith,
another by novelist and critic Tim Lucas, and another by filmmaker Peter
Bogdanovich, who spent a lot of his later career commenting on Welles’ life and
work. An additional video supplement is an interview with Bogdanovich about the
making of the movie. A video interview with Eddie Muller shines a light on the
apocryphal tales of the movie’s production. Finally, the theatrical trailer
rounds out the package.
The Lady from Shanghai is a top-notch gem, and the new Kino Lorber release is a
good way to experience it. For fans of film noir, Orson Welles, and Rita
Hayworth. Highly recommended.