Writer/Producer Mark Cerulli with the homicidal “Ruby Rose” (Matthew Lucero). (Photo copyright Mark Cerulli).
(Cinema Retro's Mark Cerulli provides an update on his initial report that took readers inside the making of an indie horror film.)
By Mark Cerulli
My
first Cinema Retro report was just after we had wrapped our first shoot for Area
5150, a sci-fi/horror comedy I co-wrote with director Sean Haitz.It was 6 days filled with
warmth, laughter and moments of terror in the high desert outside Palm Springs,
California.But we got it done, movie in
the can, premiere on the horizon, right?
Not
so fast.
Haitz,
an intense storyteller (who also fronts a rock band), wanted to do a “Cold
Opening” to the film, launching the audience right into the action.He had a vision of a terrified young woman,
babbling in a foreign language, running down a deserted highway, trying to get
away from… something.Several
weeks later, damn if Sean didn’t have Kati Rausch, a young Finnish actress,
running down an empty highway in a bloody hospital gown at 7 AM on a
Sunday.She gets recaptured – ‘natch - and
then we meet our villain, Dr. Izar (an amazing character actor named Jed Rowen)
in a prison cell that would have done Hannibal Lecter proud.
Director Sean Haitz lining up a shot in Morongo Valley, CA.
(Photo copyright Sean Haitz.)
A
few months later Sean landed Felissa Rose – the “it girl” of Sleepaway Camp,
now a well-known genre star with over 100 credits including Victor Crowley,
Terrifier 2 and the upcoming Dark Circles.We had her for only one day, so Sean and I pounded
out some scenes where she played a crazy desert rat mom with two feral kids – local
desert residents who brought a menagerie with them including a tarantula,
snakes and scorpions!(In a very un-Bondian
manner, this writer declined the opportunity to have the tarantula crawl up his
arm.) Felissa went all out and delivered an outstanding performance, getting
applause from the sleep-deprived crew.
“No thanks, kid.” writer/producer Mark Cerulli with a cast member and her pet Tarantula. (Photo copyright Mark Cerulli).
That’s
a wrap, right?Well… we realized the
film needed more.In came a
brilliant young producer named Ryan James who had us write some
character-building scenes and stayed on for the duration.The entire cast was brought back for a new
shoot in March ’22.Like the previous year, we made use of every last
minute of daylight, especially during the fabled “Golden Hour” which seemed to
go by in minutes. Once again, we shot
scenes in an abandoned crack house – now even MORE vandalized than on our
previous shoot.Somehow, we managed to
get our new scenes shot both in the desert and in a soundstage in LA that had
very realistic standing sets which we used for the interiors of Area 51.
There
is still more to do – a few more scenes (possibly with an iconic genre actor)
and Sean has an epic attack on Area 51 by our lead mutant, Ruby Rose in mind.
There’s also hiring a skilled editor and funding the maze of post-production –
mixing, scoring, color correcting, etc.But we’re getting there…
For more on Area 5150 or to get involved on the
film, click here.
Were
it not for the beloved nature of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz
(1939), itself a financial failure upon its original release but finally making
a profit decades later, there is a good bet that many fantasy films would never
have seen the light of day. I get the feeling that director Jean Yarbrough’s Jack and
the Beanstalk (1952), which opened at the Warner in New York in April 1952
and was the first color outing by the late great comedy team of Abbott and
Costello, falls into that camp. The inspiration for the film reportedly came
from Mr. Costello’s daughter, Christine, who asked him to read her the
fairytale one night before bed, and he was so taken with the story that he
decided that it would be a good vehicle for him and his partner, Bud Abbott, to
make in the hopes of reaching young children in the audience.
From
the opening sepia-toned “real-life” scenes to the colorful fantasy sequences, Jack
and the Beanstalk may be delightful for children but is an uneven comedy
for all but perhaps the comedy duo’s most fervent admirers. While it is indeed
whimsical, it lacks the re-watch factor found in Gus Meins and Charley Rogers’s
wonderful comedy/musical March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934) starring
another great comedy team, Laurel and Hardy, a film that I grew up on and can
still watch today.
Donald
Larkin (child actor David Stollery), a self-described problem child, is a
precocious nine-year-old whose older sister, Eloise (Shaye Cogan), wants to
attend the rehearsal of a play with her fiancé Arthur (James Alexander),
however a babysitter for Donald is nowhere in sight. Through a mishap, Lou
Costello and Bud Abbott end up taking on the boy through the Cosman Employment
Agency while they are looking for work. Lou and Bud make their way to Donald’s
house and Lou banters with Donald. Lou attempts to read Donald “Jack and the
Beanstalk”, but the wording proves too much for him. In a reversal of roles,
Donald becomes the reader, but Lou falls asleep, and we are taken into the
fairy tale in color. In Lou’s dream, Jack (as portrayed by Lou) finds himself
face to face with a giant (Buddy Baer) who gives him a run for his money. Jack
has a cow named Henry and ends up selling Henry for some magic beans. Just as
in the fairy tale, the magic beans are planted and, in a quick but charming
animated sequence, the magic beanstalk grows high into the sky. Jack marvels at
its height and, along with the village butcher Mr. Dinklepuss (Bud in a
supporting role), climbs into the giant’s abode and finds a wealth of treasures
that he took from the villagers, including a hen that lays golden eggs and a
large harp with a truly maniacal-looking face fashioned on the end of it. I can
imagine many a child in the audience being frightened by this image. A
kidnapped prince (James Alexander) and princess (Shaye Coggan) become the
objects that Jack attempts to extricate from the giant’s clutches.
It’s
disarming to see the Warner Brothers logo before the film given that the team
made nearly twenty films for Universal Pictures. While it’s certainly not one
of the duo’s best films – much of the acting is wooden and their antics and
jokes seem a little forced. However the slapstick would no doubt be appreciated
by youngsters and the film actually improves during the musical numbers. Mr. Costello sings the film’s best tune, “I
Fear Nothing”, which you’ll be singing for days after viewing the film, and
there is a funny dance routine that is lifted from Hold That Ghost
(1941).
While
this film has been available on home video many times before (on DVD in 1999, 2000,
2001, and 2012 and in 2020 on Blu-ray), if you’re a true Abbott and Costello
completist the new 70th anniversary 2022 Blu-ray from ClassicFlix.com is the way to go as it
contains a 4K restoration of the film in color as well as a whole host of
extras not found anywhere else.
Bonus
Features:
Newly
recorded feature introduction by Lou’s youngest daughter, Chris Costello. This is in high definition and runs 1:12 and
you have the option of watching it or not.
Commentary
by Abbott and Costello expert Ron Palumbo, with recollections from Jack and
the Beanstalk co-star David Stollery. The information that Mr. Palumbo
knows about this duo is unreal. His rapid-fire discussion of the onscreen
antics and the behind-the-scenes history of the images are well researched and
encyclopedic. He informs us that the sepia-toned opening was filmed after the
color sequences, and that the film was shot between July 9th and
August 2nd in 1951. A real pleasure to listen to.
Who's
On First? on December 2,
1940 – this is very cool: Abbott and Costello performing for military troops
and is presented in high definition and runs 4:05.
Imperfect
Spectrum: A Brief History of Cinecolor by Jack Theakston – in high definition and running 13:21.
This is a fascinating piece that explains both the history of and the workings
of Cinecolor. I wish that someone would do a full-blown documentary on this and
Technicolor.
Climbing
the Scales: The Music of Jack and the Beanstalk – in high definition and running 9:18,
this piece gives us a look at the creation of the musical score and the songs
in the film.
Cutting
Down the Beanstalk – in
high definition and running 18:30, this piece recreates the 26 minutes of
footage that was excised prior to the film’s release. Ron Palumbo provides the
running commentary.
Abbott
and Costello Meet the Creature
– in high definition and running 15:00, this piece is from February 1954 and
shows Bud and Lou looking through some props from their past movies. Glenn
Strange appears as Frankenstein's Monster, recreating his famous bits from Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Rudy
Vallee Radio Sketch – in
high definition and running 6:16, this piece is a radio bit set to images.
Restoration
Demo – in high definition and running 3:10,
this piece shows how the film looked before and after the restoration.
Image
Gallery
Behind
the Scenes photo gallery by Chip Ordway with 1952 children's recording – in high definition and running 7:02,
this includes a wealth of images taken on the set with Bud and Lou telling the
story of Jack and the Beanstalk (at 2:31, it sounds as though Lou is saying
“godammit”, which I cannot believe, but then it sounds like “there Abbott!”)
Publicity
Materials photo gallery by Chip Ordway
– in high definition and running 12:15, this is exactly what the description indicates.
Trailers:
Abbott
and Costello Trailer Rarities
– in high definition and running 41:04, this features 18 original "Coming
Attractions" previews, including Jack and the Beanstalk. The
condition of some of them vary from poor to excellent.
Fireman
Save My Child – in
high definition and running 2:10, this features two commentary tracks: one by
Mike Ballew (3-D aficionado) and the other with Ron Palumbo.
ClassicFlix
Trailers: There are several trailers here for other titles by ClassicFlix,
among them the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946) which
actually begins the disc when you start it up. It runs 2:17. The only way to skip
the trailer is to fast forward through it. Also included are Abbott and
Costello’s TV show, The Little Rascals, Merrily We Live, and Zenobia.
Writer/director/producer Russell Rouse may
not be a household name, but his credits are pretty impressive. For instance,
he co-wrote the 1949 film noir classic
D.O.A. (and the 1988 remake). Russell also co-wrote and directed the 1956
western The Fastest Gun Alive which
starred Glenn Ford. He was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing the
1951 drama The Well, and in 1959
Rouse finally won the Oscar for co-writing the Pillow Talk screenplay. Recently, the 1967 heist film The Caper of the Golden Bulls, which
was directed by Rouse, has been released on Blu-ray.
The Caper of the
Golden Bulls concerns
former bank robber Peter Churchman (Stephen Boyd) who is blackmailed by an old
flame (Giovanna Ralli) into stealing priceless jewels from a bank in Spain. Along
with his girlfriend (Yvette Mimieux) and his old crew, Churchman attempts to
pull off the dangerous heist during the annual “Running of the Bulls” festival.
Filmed on location in Spain, The Caper of the Golden Bulls is an
entertaining and well-done caper film which features fun performances from
Boyd, Mimieux and Ralli as well as from many other talented and familiar faces
(who all seem to be having a good time) such as Vito Scotti, Walter Slezak,
Clifton James, Jay Novello, Henry Beckman, Leon Askin, J.G. Devlin, Arnold Moss
and Noah Keen.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film. It’s a very
watchable caper flick with a strong cast, an involving story, solid direction
and beautiful locations. The cute film also benefits from a terrific musical
score by the great Vic Mizzy and lovely cinematography by Academy Award nominee
Harold E. Stine. I definitely recommend checking it out.
The Caper of the
Golden Bulls has
been released on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. The film is presented in its
original 1:85:1 aspect ratio, the 4K transfer looks great and the audio is
clear. Special Features include an audio commentary by film historian Phillipa
Berry and trailers for the films Topkapi,
The Brink’s Job, Loophole, The Real McCoy, The Mercenary and The Neptune Factor.
As we all know, Fred Astaire’s
amazing, God-given dancing talent made him a Golden Age movie star. As a matter
of fact, numerous times, he has been called the greatest dancer in film
history. Although Astaire was also an accomplished actor, singer and
choreographer, he will forever be remembered as a top-notch, innovative dancer.
He made 31 musical features; some of his best being Holiday Inn, Easter Parade, The Band Wagon, Funny Face and, of
course, the many films he made with the lovely and equally talented Ginger
Rogers. (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing
Time, Shall We Dance, etc.) If
you’re a fan of this legendary Hollywood icon, you will be happy to know that,
although not a musical, Midas Run, a
film Fred Astaire made near the end of his long and illustrious career, has been
released on Blu-ray.
Written by Ronald Austin, James
Buchanan and Berne Giler, and directed by Alf Kjellin, Midas Run tells the entertaining story of a retired secret service
agent named Pedley (Fred Astaire) who hires writer Mike Warden (Richard Crenna)
and Mike’s girlfriend Sylvia Giroux (Anne Heywood) to help him steal
$15,000,000 in gold. However, the clever Pedley may have something even bigger
planned.
Made for only $1.1 million, Midas Run was shot in London, Venice,
Milan, Tuscany and Rome and was released in April of 1969. The lighthearted production
not only contains fun performances from Crenna, Heywood and Astaire, but also
features several highly talented and recognizable faces from classic cinema such
as Sir Ralph Richardson, Cesar Romero, Adolfo Celi, Jacques Sernas and Roddy
McDowall. Midas Run also benefits from
a wonderful musical score by immortal composer Elmer Bernstein and a title song
written by Don Black and sung by Anne Heywood.
It may not ever appear on a “best of” Fred
Astaire film list, but Midas Run is still
an extremely well-made, engaging and fun movie that is sure to make you smile.
Midas
Run has been released on Blu-ray by the fine folks at Kino Lorber. The film,
which looks terrific, is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The
disc contains a very informative audio commentary by film historians Lee Gambin
and Emma Westwood as well as the original theatrical trailer. There are also
trailers for Robbery, The High
Commissioner, Cop-out and Street
People.
Film
Director Paul W.S. Anderson cut his teeth in the industry by directing the 1995
Christopher Lambert film Mortal Kombat, a cinematic adaptation of the
video game franchise of the same name. This gave him the clout to tackle the
sci-fi horror film Event Horizon, a colorful pastiche of genre influences
ranging from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) to Gary Nelson’s The Black
Hole (1979) to Peter Hyams’ Outland (1981) to Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce
(1985) and to James Cameron’s Aliens (1986).
The
term “event horizon”, as defined by Wikipedia, refers to “a boundary beyond
which events cannot affect an observer.” Physicist Wolfgang Rindler founded
this term in 1956 and this phenomenon is mentioned by Dr. Hans Reinhardt (played
by Maximillian Schell) in Walt Disney’s The Black Hole. In Mr.
Anderson’s film, Event Horizon is the name of a starship that mysteriously
vanished on its way to Proxima Centauri in 2040. Proxima Centauri is roughly 25
trillion miles from Earth and would take 6300-man years to get to it with
present day technology, but the film has much better transportation methods in
mind. It reappears seven years later with little explanation regarding its
current state. A distress signal is picked up by the rescue vessel, Lewis and
Clark, and the Event Horizon is now orbiting Neptune. The inhabitants of the
Lewis and Clark, who come out of hyper sleep like the crew of the Nostromo in Alien,
consist of Laurence Fishburne (of 1979’s Apocalypse Now) as Commanding
Officer Miller, Sam Neill (of 1993’s Jurassic Park) as Dr. William Weir,
Kathleen Quinlan (of 1997’s Breakdown) as Peters, Joely Richardson as
Starck, Richard T. Jones as Cooper, Jack Noseworthy (of 1997’s Breakdown)
as Justin, Jason Isaacs (of 2006’s Brotherhood, Showtime’s best series)
as D.J., and Sean Pertwee as Smith. This motley crew is on edge, dropping not-so-subtle
hints about their reluctance to engage in this mission to see if there are any
survivors aboard the starship. Dr. Weir reminds me of Ash, the aloof and
sinister science officer in Alien. He designed the Event Horizon and
tries to explain to the crew how the ship was built with the capability of
generating manmade black holes to connect space and time for the purpose of
enabling lightning-fast travel – at least that’s what I got out of his rant.
Even
in space, the ultimate enemy is man (anyone remember that tag line?), and there
are many pissing contests in space to be had in the testosterone-bathed
environment that the crew is forced to work in. Snide remarks and insults
abound, much to the consternation of Miller who realizes that the ship itself
has a life of its own and causes the crew to hallucinate when it taps into
their psyches, exposing unresolved fears and grief from their past that only
each individual can see. This is a nice change of pace for the genre. Sending
the crew to their demise at the hands of yet another onboard alien would truly
have been an unnecessary and unwarranted retread of Sir Ridley Scott’s and
James Cameron’s aforementioned masterworks, no matter how good the intentions
may have been. Event Horizon may be the ultimate “face your fears” film.
The premise results in some truly shocking imagery that, according to director
Anderson, appears in the form of one to three quick frames to give the audience
a glimpse of what the crew is facing/experiencing. If the imagery does appear
to be very fast, it’s also due to the fact that much more had actually been
filmed but ultimately cut as it was deemed to be too gruesome.
Interestingly,
Event Horizon was both a critical and commercial failure following its
release on Friday, August 15, 1997 and if the film seems confusing at times, it
should – the original desired 130-minute cut assembled by director Anderson was
truncated by 34 minutes by the studio against his wishes. It also didn’t help
in that the film was rushed through both principal photography and postproduction
and was released just a mere five months after the production wrapped. Through
no fault of the director, the 96-minute running time feels too little for a
film like this. What makes Alien and Aliens the masterpieces they
are is even after many viewings is that they spend time on character
development and exposition and never feel rushed.
A
similar fate infamously befell Michael Mann’s doomed 1983 film version of F.
Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep when he was forced to reduce the original running
time of 210 minutes down to 120 minutes, and Paramount reduced it by yet another
23 minutes to a nearly incomprehensible 97 minutes, giving audiences only a
hint at what greatness may have lay on the cutting room floor. While fans of Event
Horizon would love to see the longer cut (even Paramount reached out to the
director following the film’s excellent rental and purchasing history on DVD
following its box office failure), this footage is, unfortunately, deemed to be
lost.
Event
Horizon was previously
released on DVD in a movie-only edition in 1998, then again in a special
edition with extras in 2006. It made its way to Blu-ray with the same extras in
2008, 2013, 2017, and most notably in 2021 with a special edition from Scream
Factory boasting eleven new extras exclusive to that edition. The new 4K Ultra
High Definition Paramount Blu-ray easily contains the film’s best-looking
transfer to date, along with a Blu-ray and a Digital Code. The ported over
extras consist of:
A
feature-length audio commentary with director Anderson and the film’s producer
Jeremy Bolt, partners who met early in their careers and founded Impact
Pictures in 1992. The track was recorded for the 2006 DVD release, and it
covers the requisite history of how the film came to be, the difficulties in
the execution of the film’s effects, the design of the starship, their working
relationship with the actors and actresses, the film’s marketing, to name a
few.
The
Making of Event Horizon
– This is a five-part making-of documentary from 2006 that has the “Play All”
feature available as an option. It runs one hour and forty-three minutes. It’s
a fascinating look at the origins of the film, with a lot of intercutting among
the cast and crew speaking eloquently and complimentary about the production.
There are some funny and humorous anecdotes here, which is refreshing to see when
you’re dealing with such horrific subject matter. Director Anderson also speaks
about the difficulties of rushing to get the film answer printed and locked for
test screenings.
The
Point of No Return: The Filming of Event Horizon – Just over eight minutes, this is a four-part
encapsulation of the revolving tunnel, the 360-degree camerawork, zero gravity,
and one of the character’s descents into madness.
Secrets – At ten minutes, this piece consists
of three deleted scenes that were cut from the film. Most of it contains the
more unsavory elements that were excised from the final cut, such as a truly
creepy scene of one of the characters in an Exorcist-inspired “spider
walk” scene.
The
Unseen Event Horizon – At
three minutes, this piece illustrates conceptual art done for the film, most of
which was not filmed.
Rounding
out the extras are a theatrical trailer and a video trailer.
If
you’re a fan of the film, the new transfer is a must-have.
Film
director Paul W.S. Anderson, not to be confused with film directors Paul Thomas
Anderson or Wes Anderson, hails from Wallsend, North Tyneside, England and,
like so many of his contemporaries, began shooting movies on Super-8mm in his
youth. In his mid-twenties, he enjoyed professional success as a writer on the British
series El C.I.D. Following the end of the show, he and producer Jeremy
Bolt founded their own company, Impact Pictures and, after much toil, financed Shopping,
which was released in the United Kingdom in 1994 and in the States in 1996. This
put them on the map and brought him Mortal Kombat in 1995, a film based
upon the popular video game of the same name. This led to the sci-fi/horror
film Event Horizon, which is now available on 4K UHD Blu-ray, and it’s
this film that I discussed with Mr. Anderson recently while he was promoting
the release.
Todd Garbarini: I want to thank you for taking the
time to speak with me and thank you also for the Resident Evil films. I
enjoy those very much.
Paul W.S. Anderson: Me, too!
TG: How did you first see Ridley Scott’s Alien and what
was the effect that it had on you?
PWSA: I saw
[Sir] Ridley’s Alien when I was at school, and I saw it when I was far
too young, and it terrified the living daylights out of me. I also had a real
crush on Sigourney Weaver. So, it was a big, big impact. I had never seen a
movie like it. I mean it was amazing, and the look of the alien and the alien
spaceship, which I later realized was the work of [Swiss artist H.R.] Giger,
was just spectacular. It was really like nothing I’d ever seen in cinemas
before.
TG: I feel
the exact same way. I was ten and-a-half years-old when Alien was
released here in the States, two years to the day that Star Wars was
released here…in fact, the financial success of Star Wars bankrolled Alien…and
I was shocked to see that it was restricted to just adults! My parents would not
take me to see it. Kenner had produced toys, games and puzzles in the stores
based on the film. It took me another four years to see it on home video, but
the power of that movie came through tremendously, even on a six-year-old 13” Sylvania
television.
PWSA: I didn’t
see it with my parents either. Like you, I had loved Star Wars and I
thought, Wow, another space movie! Boy, was I wrong! (laughs)
TG: Was there one
particular film that, or filmmaker who, compelled you to become a director?
PWSA: I can
tell you that certain filmmakers have had a huge influence on me. Ridley Scott and
Tony Scott in particular because I love their movies. I love the look of their
movies and what their movies are about and how they are put together. They came
from the same part of the Northeast of England as I did. I never knew anyone in
the film industry, and no one made movies in the North of England. So, wanting
to be a film director when I was growing up seemed like an impossible dream. But
there were these two brothers who somehow managed to do it and they were very
inspiring to me because of that. They didn’t know anyone in the film industry
either. They built themselves from the ground up. I felt like I could do it as
well.
TG: You
derived inspiration from them.
PWSA: Exactly. Now, in terms of
wanting to become a filmmaker, I used to watch a lot of westerns when I was a little
kid. They used to have these things called “Saturday morning pictures” wherein
your parents would drop you off at a cinema that was full of about 350 kids without
any parental supervision. This would never happen today, and you would be there
for about four hours to basically run riot while your parents went and did some
shopping or went and had sex or did whatever they did on a Saturday afternoon without
the kids around. Most of the kids were running around throwing popcorn at one
another and beating each other up. I think I was one of the few kids who just
sat and watched the movies. They showed a couple of Laurel and Hardy shorts because
they were cheap and then some old westerns. I must have seen every John Ford western.
John Wayne was my favorite actor because I watched all these westerns with him
in them. I recall at the end of either The Searchers or Rio Bravo,
I saw his name in the credits as they rolled and I suddenly made the link that
he wasn’t a real cowboy, but rather an actor pretending to be a cowboy. Once I
realized that movies were not reality and just recorded by a cameraman, that
they were artifice, they were awesome and that’s what I wanted to do with my
life. I had no idea how I was going to achieve that. I just knew that that’s
what I wanted to do after seeing those amazing images on the big screen. That
was the inception of me wanting to make movies.
TG: Do you consider yourself to be a genre director?
PWSA: Yes, I
have worked almost exclusively in the sci-fi/horror genre. But like every
director in the world, I want to direct a western. No studio wants to make a
western, unfortunately, because they are just so uncommercial nowadays. I’m
about to make a movie called In the Lost Lands based on a story by author
George R.R. Martin [of Game of Thrones fame]. At its heart, it’s very
much a western as it has all the iconography that one would associate with a
western. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic land, so on the surface it’s not a
western, but at its heart it is most definitely a western. It deals with a lot
of western tropes and storytelling and imagery, so I am very excited to be
doing that.
TG: I
interviewed John Carpenter in 2010 and he is a big fan of westerns like yourself.
When he came out of film school in the early 1970s, he really wanted to make one,
but nobody was doing them in this country at the time. So, needless to say, he
was very disappointed.
PWSA: Yes,
but if you take a look at Assault on Precinct 13, the obvious influence
of westerns is in that film.
TG: Yes, absolutely. I love how that film was edited by “John
T. Chance” [the name of the sheriff that John Wayne plays in Rio Bravo]!
PWSG: Exactly! (laughs) And also people like Walter Hill, who was a big influence on me. I absolutely loved, loved The Driver
and 48 Hours. But specifically, what I really liked about Walter Hill
was when he was basically redoing the kind of Jean-Pierre Melville vibe of
those French gangster movies. So, they had imported the American movies, and
they did the French twist on them making them very existential, and then Walter
Hill kind of reimported them back into America and didn’t bother giving the
characters any names, which I absolutely love. So, for me Walter Hill is
somebody who pretty much, with every movie he makes, is a western. Ironically,
the films that work the least are actual westerns, but the ones that tend to
work the best are these urban movies that are really westerns in disguise. So,
I’m sort of hoping that it’s a “lightning strikes” moment for me when I do In
the Lost Lands. It’s basically my western, but nobody will realize it!
TG: Event Horizon pits
a lot of terrific actors in an ensemble piece, among them Sam Neill, Lawrence
Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, and Kathleen Quinlan. Were they your first choices for
their respective roles?
PWSA: Yes, it was a movie where I was
very lucky that the studio was kind of willing to go with my personal choices.
They never insisted that we absolutely had to have somebody who was a movie
star who carried very big movies before. They were on board for doing the ensemble
casting. I was very, very happy about it. It allowed me to get some really
terrific actors together, playing roles that they didn’t traditionally play as
well. Sam Neill at that point was very much in the minds of audiences as the heroic
guy who saved the children from the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. He was
up there with Tom Hanks as probably the actor whom the audience could trust the
most.
TG: Yes. I recall seeing Michael
Mann’s Collateral wherein Tom Cruise completely plays against type.
PWSA: Exactly. Sam Neill was still
sort of the guy who could look after your kids. So, the idea that he would be
the one who goes insane and tears his own eyes out, at that point in time it’s
probably the type of role that you would have expected Laurence Fishburne to
play. And then Fishburne playing sort of the heroic Captain as well, that was
not really a role that he had played before. So, both of them are amazing
performances but both of them were kind of stretching, but in a good way.
TG: Have
you ever seen Sam Neill in a film by Andrzej Zulawski called Possession?
PWSG: No, I
haven’t.
TG: It was shot
in the summer of 1980 in Germany and was released the following year
internationally. It made its way here to the States in a highly butchered
version in 1983, but it’s one of the most bizarre, cinematic experiences that I’ve
ever seen. You should catch up with it if you can. The uncut version is readily
available now.
PWSA: I will!
TG: What
are some of the challenges that you encountered in making Event Horizon
that you hadn’t foreseen?
PWSA: It was
just the compacted time that we had to actually make the film. That was a big
challenge. You know, I was young, and I hadn’t made many movies so I didn’t
really know what I was doing. I was up for a challenge at the time, but
nowadays I would probably say, “Hey, wait a second, I don’t know if that’s really
a good idea.” I had another movie to make right after Event Horizon and
it was with Kurt Russell [Soldier (1998)] with Warner Brothers, so I had
to finish Event Horizon on a certain date, so we had to start shooting
early. So, for such an elaborate movie with so many big builds, and really
complicated things, like the third containment being a real spinning, gyroscope
that was thirty-five feet high, I mean, this was really complicated stuff to do
in the time frame allotted. Then the production got even more compressed when Titanic
fell out of the summer and Paramount announced that Event Horizon would
be taking its place, and then suddenly I had only three to four weeks to
actually do my first cut of the movie before we started testing it. Those were
the logistical challenges. The actual making of the movie was just a delight. I
loved being with those actors on those sets. I didn’t even mind the challenges,
to be honest. Like I said, now I would think twice about doing certain things
in the movie, but back then I was just up for it.
TG: Thank
you for your time and best of luck to you with In the Lost Lands!
PWSA: Thank
you!
(Thanks to Deborah Annakin Peters for her help in arranging this interview.)
I’ve always been a fan of the heist/caper
film; a genre which details the planning, execution and aftermath of a huge
robbery. It’s an extremely fun and involving formula in which we oftentimes
sympathize with the thieves and want them to reach their goal. Some notable
heist/caper films are The Asphalt Jungle,
The Killing, Ocean’s 11, Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian
Job, The Getaway, The Sting, Dog Day Afternoon, Thief, A Fish Called Wanda, Reservoir Dogs, Heat and The Usual Suspects. Just to name a few.
Add to the list the comedy caper film A Man, a Woman, and a Bank available on
Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.
Solidly directed by Noel Black from a
humorous screenplay by Raynold Gideon, Bruce A. Evans and actor Stuart Margolin,
A Man, a Woman, and a Bank tells the
tale of friends Reese (Donald Sutherland) and Norman (Paul Mazursky), who
devise an elaborate plan to rob a bank in Vancouver. Things get a bit
complicated, however, when Reese falls in love with a pretty photographer
(Brooke Adams).
Released by Avco Embassy Pictures in
September of 1979, A Man, a Woman, and a
Bank is listed as the first and only film to be made by McNichol, a
production company said to have been created by actress Kristy McNichol and her
mother Carollyne. However, some believe this to be false and state that
McNichol is actually Donald Sutherland’s company. Whatever the case may be, A Man, a Woman, and a Bank is an extremely
enjoyable, well-directed, written and acted feature that definitely deserves to
be seen. The engaging story contains very interesting and likeable three-dimensional
characters. Reese is intelligent, confident, romantic and also a good friend.
The great Donald Sutherland effortlessly gets all this across and makes his
character totally believable. Five-time Academy Award nominee Paul Mazursky is
hilarious and extremely convincing as henpecked hypochondriac Norman, and the
lovely, talented and always welcome Brooke Adams (reuniting here with her Invasion of the Body Snatchers co-star,
Sutherland) shines as adorable photographer Stacey.
The fun feature also benefits from some
wonderful cinematography by the legendary Jack Cardiff and a terrific musical
score by Academy Award winning composer Bill Conti. All in all, it’s an
extremely solid and fun comedic crime film that audiences are sure to enjoy.
The Kino Lorber Blu-ray presents the movie in its original 1.78:1
aspect ratio. The transfer looks beautiful and the disc also contains quite a
few worthy special features. There’s the original theatrical trailer as well as
two very interesting and informative audio commentaries; one by director Noel
Black and producer Peter Samuelson from 2002, and another by film historians
Dean Brandum and Andrew Nette. The Blu-ray also has trailers for four other
films featuring Donald Sutherland: The
Great Train Robbery, Ordeal by Innocence, The Rosary Murders and The Puppet Masters.
RRP: £86 (a more
reasonably-priced paperback will be available soon)
Review by Adrian
Smith
In a world where
every possible sexual proclivity and desire can be sated at the click of a mouse
button, the idea of pornography only being available at an illicit party in a
hired hall, where the gathered men watch black and white amateur footage
projected onto a wall whilst half-expecting to be raided by local law
enforcement, seems difficult to imagine. Yet according to this fascinating
study by historian Dan Erdman, this was indeed the situation for decades, from
the early days of cinema through to the 1950s when home projector ownership
finally meant that people could receive illegal pornography through the mail
and watch it in the privacy of their own homes. As things began to change in
the 1960s, individual film-viewing booths became available, where for a dime a
customer could get access to a few minutes of hardcore pornography. Ultimately
by the 1970s hardcore went mainstream and husbands and wives could go to the cinema
together for screenings of Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door
and the stag film fell out of fashion.
But just what is a
stag film, I hear you cry innocently? Erdman, drawing on his own research as
well as the writing of others, explains that they were short films, often made
by amateurs and usually shot on 8mm or 16mm film, in which hardcore sex acts
took place, they were anonymously made and presented, and undated. One would
have no idea whether the film you were watching was made last year or thirty
years ago. They were effectively “orphaned films”, in that no records were
kept, and no information was provided about who was in the films, who directed
and produced them, and who was even making all the prints. They were screened
at private parties, or “smokers” as they were sometimes described, which would
often be accompanied by live performances, but those in attendance were
constantly in fear of a police bust. As home projection became more
commercially available thousands of copies of stag films criss-crossed America
in the postal service, with enterprising distributors using carefully compiled
mailing lists and anonymous return addresses to target customers whilst
avoiding both the police and the FBI.
Here, in this
US-focused book, Dan Erdman attempts to chart the origins of the stag film, its
growth in popularity, the people behind the production and distribution, and the
many legal attempts to shut it all down. Given that the production,
distribution and screening of these short pornographic films was illegal, and
the films were generally considered ephemeral with no historical or cultural
value, it’s no surprise to learn that the people involved in this underground
world were not really keeping records or even copies of the films. The Kinsey
Institute appears to be the main archive currently available for seeing copies
of stag films but given that even if a film did have credits the names would
inevitably be fake, the job of trying to piece together a history is a
difficult one.
It is a surprise to
discover that the other main archive is the FBI, who kept thousands of seized
films and attempted to keep records of names, dates, and places, but sadly,
again given that the films had no perceived historical value, the films were
all destroyed long ago to save archival space. Luckily the written records
remain, and through drawing on these records, alongside the Kinsey Institute,
the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (funded in the late
1960s in an attempt to provide legislation, which ultimately concluded that the
constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech trumped charges of obscenity and
paved the way for porn’s golden age), private archives and newspaper reports,
Erdman has managed to piece together what is surely the definitive history of
this elusive subject. He also provides an excellent case study in how one can
attempt to write a history of a subject when access to both primary and
secondary sources is severely limited, and as such it should be compulsory
reading for any serious historian researching in the margins of popular
culture.
This book gives
fascinating and non-judgemental insight into the secret world of the twentieth
century American male (the audience was always male) and may also provide some
nostalgia for a simpler time before pornography became a global billion-dollar
business, and modern mainstream culture became increasingly pornified.
“Way
down in the jungle deep, the lion stepped on the signifyin’ monkey’s feet.” Anyone
who is familiar with that poem’s first line, most likely heard it from
comedian/actor/singer, the late, great Rudy Ray Moore. Influenced by legendary
comedians Red Foxx and Richard Pryor, Moore, who worked nightclubs throughout
the 1960s, became popular through a series of hilarious and racy party albums
he released in the early 70s, some of which featured Rudy Ray as a character
named Dolemite; a sharply-dressed, supercool, humorous and loquacious, rhyming
pimp-poet whose incredible strength and expert martial arts ability are equaled
only by his sexual prowess. The albums and his live stand-up routine were so
popular that, in 1975, the charismatic Moore took all of his earnings and
decided to turn this larger-than-life urban hero into a kick-ass, comedic
movie.
Bad-ass pimp Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore, Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law),
who was framed, incarcerated and had his club, The Total Experience, stolen
from him by his evil rival Willie Green (D’Urville Martin, Black Caesar), is released from prison and, with help from the FBI,
the loyal Queen Bee (Lady Reed, Disco
Godfather) and Dolemite’s all-girl army of Kung Fu killers, sets out to
bring Willie Green to justice and retake his rightful place as king of the
streets.
Co-written (with actor Jerry Jones who
appears in the film as an FBI agent) and produced by Rudy Ray Moore, Dolemite was directed by D’Urville
Martin for the paltry sum of $100,000, but went on to gross $12 million. Rudy
Ray not only capitalized on the popularity of his own adult party albums and
the Dolemite character, but he smartly cashed in on the now legendary “Blaxploitation”
craze started by wonderful films such as Shaft
(1971), Super Fly (1972) and Three the Hard Way (1974) as well as
the Kung Fu phenomenon that was sweeping the country, mostly due to the
immortal Bruce Lee and his iconic 1973 film Enter
the Dragon in particular.
The entertaining Dolemite not only features plenty of comedy and very quotable
dialogue, but also, Kung Fu, adult language and liberal doses of sex and
violence; not to mention a great musical score by Arthur Wright (The Human Tornado, The Crying Game) and
the Filmore Street Soul Rebellion as well as a fun and memorable title song composed
and sung by Ben Taylor. It also contains loads of unintended laughs which,
along with Rudy Ray’s enjoyable ghetto poems, give the extremely low-budget
film much of its charm. Some wonderful examples of Dolemite’s unintentional hilarity are visible boom mics,
character’s talking over one another (“Flo!”),
wooden line deliveries (“Another
frame-up, hmm?”), a cop who attacks Dolemite and falls on his ass (no
second takes), a lip-synching nightclub singer who is way out of synch, Rudy
Ray almost falling asleep during a scene and D’Urville Martin saying to him, “Don’t get excited!”, and a character
named Creeper who is also known as the Hamburger Pimp and is played by a real-life
junkie (Vainus Rackstraw). Naturally, the film is also a fantastic early 70s
time capsule featuring funky fashions (the ginormous, furry hats are my
favorite) as well as wonderfully gaudy décor. For those who may turn their
noses up at the film, Dolemite and
the work of Rudy Ray Moore (who has rightly been dubbed “The Godfather of Rap”)
has gone on to influence many; most notably a plethora of Rap artists including
Snoop Dogg and the 2009 comedy classic Black
Dynamite.
Dolemite has been released on
Blu-ray/DVD by Vinegar Syndrome. The extremely fun film, which has been
restored in 2k from its 35mm negative, is presented in its original 1.85:1
aspect ratio and is extremely sharp and beautiful looking. We are also treated
to a lovingly included full frame version (the VHS version everyone’s used to)
which not only shows the boom mic in frame even more than the 1.85 version, but
sometimes the sound guy too. Special features include a very informative
making-of documentary by Elijah Drenner (That
Guy Dick Miller) which contains remembrances from many of Dolemite’s cast and crew including Rudy
Ray Moore, Jerry Jones and Ben Taylor; an entertaining interview with Lady
Reed; a “Locations: Then & Now” featurette and a very thorough audio
commentary by Rudy Ray’s biographer, Mark Jason Murray. Amongst many other
interesting things, he talks about Rudy’s early days in show business, how the
character of Dolemite came to be, the trials and tribulations that came with
making the film and Rudy Ray’s life after his amazing 1970s reign (interspersed
between Murray’s commentary are a few audio interviews with Rudy Ray, Jerry
Jones and martial arts champion Howard Jackson (who appears in the film).
Although cool and informative, some of these interviews are a bit muffled and
somewhat hard to fully hear). There are also trailers for Dolemite and its hilarious sequel The Human Tornado (also released on Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome)as well as a reversible sleeve with the
fun, eye-catching, original poster art. There’s also some cool new artwork,
too. Both images are also featured on the discs themselves. If you’re a fan of Dolemite, Rudy Ray Moore or the 1970s “Blaxploitation”
genre in general, this Blu-ray is a must have. Can you dig it?
What more can be said about the immortal Kirk
Douglas? He was a three-time Academy Award nominee who was finally given the Academy’s
Lifetime Achievement award in 1996; not to mention being a loving family man and
a philanthropist. With a tremendous body of work which showcases his incredible
acting talent, Douglas was truly one of the icons of Hollywood’s Golden Age. A
genuine movie star if ever there was one, Douglas headlined amazing movies such
as Champion (1949), Detective Story (1951), Ace in the Hole (1951), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Lust for Life (1956), Spartacus (1960), 1963’s The List of Adrian Messenger (one of
seven films he made with the great Burt Lancaster), and The Fury (1978). Just to name a few. Recently, our good friends at
Kino Lorber have released A Lovely Way to
Die; a crime neo noir film Douglas made for Universal Pictures in 1968.
Solidly directed by David Lowell Rich (The Horror at 37,000 Feet), A Lovely Way to Die tells the tale of
Jim Schuyler (Douglas), a former cop who is hired by lawyer Tennessee
Fredericks (played by the always impressive Eli Wallach) to protect Rena
Westabrook (Sylva Koscina, Hercules
Unchained), a woman who has been accused of murdering her wealthy husband.
Although not in the same league as some of
the Douglas films I mentioned earlier, A
Lovely Way to Die is a very enjoyable moviewhich also features the acting talents of Kenneth Haigh (TV’s The Twilight Zone), Martyn Green (The Iceman Cometh), Sharon Farrell (It’s Alive), Ruth White (Midnight Cowboy), Philip Bosco (The Savages), Ralph Waite (TV’s The Waltons), Meg Myles (The Edge of Night), William Roerick (The Wasp Woman), Dana Elcar (TV’s MacGyver), Dolph Sweet (TV’s Gimme a Break!), Lincoln Kilpatrick (The Omega Man) and famed New York radio
announcer Marty Glickman. There are also uncredited appearances by Ali MacGraw
(Love Story), Richard Castellano (The Godfather), Conrad Bain (TV’s Diff’rent Strokes), Marianne McAndrew (Hello, Dolly!), Doris Roberts (TV’s Everybody Loves Raymond) and John P.
Ryan (It Lives Again). The film also
contains a terrific musical score by composer Kenyon Hopkins (The Hustler).
A Lovely Way to Die has been released on
a Region 1 Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. The transfer looks fantastic and the movie is
presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Special features include the
original U.S. theatrical trailer, the international theatrical trailer, a very
informative audio commentary by Film Historians Howard S. Berger and Steve
Mitchell as well as trailers for Lonely
Are the Brave; The Secret War of Harry Frigg and The Night of the Following Day.
Filmmaker Lewis Teague has some very
impressive credits. In 1964, he directed an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. In the 70s, Teague worked at Roger
Corman’s New World Pictures as an editor and assistant director before helming
1979’s crime drama The Lady in Red.
He also edited an Oscar-winning short in 1976 titled Number Our Days, worked on classic TV shows like Barnaby Jones and performed second unit
on Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One
(1980). Teague is probably best known for directing cult classics such as the
underrated 1980 monster movie Alligator;
the vigilante film Fighting Back
(1982); the Stephen King adaptations Cujo
(1983) and Cat’s Eye (1985), and the
romantic comedy The Jewel of the Nile
(1985). Recently, Dirty O’Neil, the
first feature film to be directed by Teague, has been made available on
Blu-ray.
Dirty O’Neil concerns police
officer/ladies’ man Jimmy O’Neil (Morgan Paull, Blade Runner) who must do everything he can to stop three
dangerous criminals from terrorizing his small, peaceful town.
The entertaining film, which was co-directed
and written by Howard Freen and distributed by American International Pictures,
is filled with solid direction and features fun performances by wonderful
talent the likes of Art Metrano (Police
Academy series), Pat Anderson (TNT
Jackson), Katie Saylor (TV’s The
Fantastic Journey), Tara Strohmeier (The
Great Texas Dynamite Chase), Anitra Ford (TV’s The Price is Right), Kate Murtagh (The Night Strangler), John Steadman (1977’s The Hills Have Eyes) and Playboy Playmates Jeane Manson (The Young Nurses) and Liv Lindeland (Picasso Trigger). Dirty O’Neil also benefits from a simple and engaging story, a
catchy musical score by Raoul Kraushaar (1953’s Invaders From Mars), and contains enough action and laughs to fill
its brief 89 minute running time.
Dirty O’Neil has been released in
high definition Blu-ray from a brand new 2K master and is presented in its
original anamorphic (1.85:1) widescreen aspect ratio. The great looking and
sounding Region 1 disc also contains English subtitles, the original theatrical
trailer and trailers for Dagmar’s Hot
Pants, inc.; National Lampoon Goes to the Movies; Maria’s Lovers; Checkered
Flag or Crash and Sunnyside.
In the world of exploitation cinema, the name
Jerry Gross is very well known. Gross owned and ran Cinemation Industries, a
film studio/distribution company based in New York. Cinemation produced and/or
distributed many movies like the teenage pregnancy film Teenage Mother (1967), the Swedish made sexploitation films Inga and Fanny Hill (both 1968), the revolutionary “Blaxploitation” classic
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
(1971), the horror film I Drink Your
Blood (1971) and the popular animated adult feature 1972’s Fritz the Cat. Just to name a few.
After the company went bankrupt in the mid-70s, Jerry started the Jerry Gross
Organization which continued the tradition, releasing shocking fare such as
1978’s controversial I Spit on Your Grave
and the horror classic Zombie (1979).
Recently, Gross’s first feature film, Girl
on a Chain Gang, was released on Blu-ray.
Written, produced and directed by Gross, Girl on a Chain Gang, which was based on
a story by Don Olsen, concerns three young civil rights activists who drive
through a small Southern town and are wrongly arrested by the hateful and
corrupt local police. Once they are brought to the station, the three young
friends—two men and a woman—are put through the most humiliating and terrifying
night of their lives.
Originally titled Bayou, Girl on a Chain Gang,
which was made for a paltry$31,000
and shot in Long Island, New York, is a surprisingly (considering the budget)
well-made, but, in some spots, disturbing film to watch. Based on actual
events, the film deals with the hate and racism that existed in the mid to late
1960s (and unfortunately still exists today). The film also contains a talented
cast (especially William Watson as the evil sheriff) and a memorable musical
score by Steve Karmen.
Girl on a Chain Gang has been released on
a region free Blu-ray by The Film Detective and is presented in its original
1:37:1 aspect ratio. The beautiful-looking transfer boasts sharp, crystal clear
black and white images (which shows off George Zimmermann’s lovely
cinematography) and the disc not only contains an informative audio commentary
by Jennifer Churchill, author of Movies
are Magic, but also an interesting featurette about writer/producer/director
Jerry Gross, a wonderful booklet which contains an essay on the film by
Something Weird Video’s Lisa Petrucci, and a reproduction of the “Certificate
of Jury Service” which Jerry Gross gave out to audience members in 1966.
The
year 1976 was a phenomenal time for films that went into production. George
Lucas’s space opera, Star Wars, began
principal photography in March; Steven Spielberg, fresh off the success of Jaws, was given carte blanche to bring Close
Encounters of the Third Kind to the screen and began shooting in May; and
Dario Argento, who became emboldened by the financial success of his latest and
arguably best film to date, Profundo
Rosso (known in the U.S. as Deep Red),
embarked upon Suspiria, a murder
mystery involving a dance academy hiding in plain sight while doubling as a
home to a coven of witches, which began filming in July. Suspiria is
just one of a handful of films directed by Signor Argento over a fifty-plus
year career, and it’s also being showcased in full-blown 4K Digital Cinema
Projection as part of the sinisterly titled Beware of Dario Argento: A
20-Film Retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City now through
June 29th. You can see the full calendar at this link here. The one omission from the roster of
titles is his 2009 thriller Giallo, starring Adrien Brody, which was
stopped from being released due to the actor’s failure to be paid for his role
until he successfully sued the producers.
Beginning
on Friday, June 17th, the first film shown in the retrospective was
his debut outing, the phenomenal The Bird With the Crystal Plumage from
1970, lensed by straordinario cineasta Vittorio Storaro, on a double
bill with his equally fine thriller Tenebre/Tenebrae from 1982. Bird
is amazing in that it was the first film that he ever directed…ever.
There were no interminable student films made prior to it. Somehow, following
his years as a newspaper film critic and having contributed to the 1968 western
Once Upon a Time in the West, he made a visually dazzling cinematic yarn
loosely inspired by Fredric Brown’s 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi (itself
made into the 1958 film of the same title by Gerd Oswald starring Anita Ekberg),
though there are also some similarities to the creepy 1949 “Birdsong for a
Murderer” episode of the Inner Sanctum radio drama that starred the late
great Boris Karloff.
The
standout in this series is clearly Suspiria, with its amazingly bright
color palette and virtuoso camerawork. Also of note, at least for die-hard
Argento completists, is his sole non-thriller/horror outing, the 1973 Italian
comedy set during the Italian Revolution of 1848 called The Five Days (Le
Cinque Giornate) shot by cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller who would go on to lens Deep
Red (Profondo Rosso) (1975). While available on Youtube in Italian,
this is an extremely rare presentation of the film with English subtitles –
restored in 4K to boot. It’s also quite funny; not on the level of the Pink
Panther films, but enough to elicit audible chuckles. The seldom-seen Inferno
(1980), his beautiful follow-up to Suspiria, will also be shown, the sole
title to be showcased in 35mm.
The
Italian Maestro appeared in-person at several of the screenings over the
weekend, most notably on Sunday in a Q & A session emceed by Argento expert
Maitland McDonagh, the author of the excellent book Broken Mirrors/Broken
Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, originally published in 1991. Following
the sold-out screening of his 1985 film Phenomena, a phantasmagorical fairytale/murder
mystery that was presented to an audience of mostly younger fans who, judging
by their applause and reactions to the film, were new to it. The plot of 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. If the film’s title does not sound
familiar, that could be attributed to the fact that Phenomena was severely cut by 34 minutes and retitled Creepers when it opened in the States on
Friday, August 30, 1985. Fortunately, the 116-minute cut of the film was shown.
Signor Argento responded through an
interpreter to Ms. Donagh’s questions about the film.
Photo: Todd Garbarini. All rights reserved.
Maitland McDonagh:I've always thought that Phenomena was extraordinary
because it's a story that is sort of both a cross between the operatic and the
fairy tale. Dario, what were the origins of Phenomena?
Dario Argento: I was on vacation with my mother on a small
island, and we were listening to Radio Monte Carlo. There was a person telling
a story about how in Germany they had discovered that by examining insects,
they could discover when a person had died. I was very struck by
this and when I returned to Rome, I went to see an entomologist and asked
him how this was possible. He told me, for example, that if somebody fired a
gun off in a room full of insects, that the insects would die. He also
explained that for a whole series of reasons, that it would be possible to
identify a person’s exact date of death using insects, which is described in-depth
in the film.
MM: The insects are one of the most remarkable parts of this film.
Working with them must have been a great challenge. How did you work with your
crew and your on-set insect experts to get the insects to almost be their own
characters in their own right?
DA: For this movie, I needed thousands of flies. I rented a small
theater and completely sealed it off. I put some fly larvae in there and every
week I would throw some raw meat in the room. Eventually, after several
weeks, they turned into a mass of flies that just went after the actor the way
that we had intended and that’s how we shot the end of the film. The insects in
the scenes with Donald Pleasence, who plays the entomologist, were all
manipulated by insect handlers on the set and through editing.
MM: One of the things that really struck me after having viewed this
film after many years, was that it tells the story of two abandoned females.
First, there is Jennifer Corvino played by Jennifer Connelly, whose mother
leaves the family on a Christmas morning, and her father is currently away
shooting a movie in the Philippines, unable to be reached by telephone. The
other female is Inga, the chimpanzee, who loses her friend, played wonderfully
by Donald Pleasence.
DA:Tanga, the chimpanzee who plays Inga in the film, suffered greatly from the loss of
her friend (the Donald
Pleasence character) halfway through shooting. She escaped from the
set. We were working and shooting right near a large forest, and she went into
that forest for almost three days. As
you can well imagine, she became very hungry and so the forest rangers put out
some food and they were able to lure her back out. Tanga was a
remarkable creature; I would tell her what to do and she would simply do it. I
recall that in the film there is a scene where she must break up the wooden
slats on the shutters in order to get into her friend’s house. I showed her how
to do it, and she did it exactly how I showed her. Jennifer Corvino is also a very sad character.
Even though a lot of her classmates must think that she’s so lucky to have this
famous father for an actor, she’s very much alone and off by herself. Because
of this, she becomes prey to a very evil person. This is the story that I
wanted to tell, the loneliness of a young girl. This was a girl that was my
daughter’s age at the time. Jennifer Connelly was thirteen when she played this
role, and she did it with a tremendous amount of elegance.
MM: I also
love the way that you use the Swiss locations in the film, especially the trees
and the wind. They really work well in conveying the mindset of the characters
and the larger forces of nature that are at work.
DA: I have
the character of the professor talk about the foehn, the wind in the Swiss Alps,
with the link into the insects. At the very start of the film, where we see the
trees and the wind, there is this little house set against this vast landscape.
It looks like something right out of a fairy tale, sort of like a gingerbread
house. This young Danish tourist who is accidentally abandoned by her tourist
bus, is all alone in the midst of this panorama of forests, mountains and trees.
There’s this awful thing that is about to happen. The girl who plays her is my
first daughter, Fiore Argento. I really studied for this film very thoroughly.
I put a lot of time and effort into it. I did my best to create this, as you so
put it, operatic fairytale. I did it with great love, and I especially
appreciate the wonderful performance by Jennifer Connelly and what she had to
offer. She was thirteen years-old when we shot the film. This was her first big
movie, and I was just dazzled by her beauty, her intelligence, and her grace.
Photo: Todd Garbarini. All rights reserved.
Dark
Glasses
The
evening was rounded out with the premiere of his new film Dark Glasses (Occhiali
Neri), his first film in ten years, and while it fails to crack the Top Ten
Best Argento Flicks list, it’s still worth seeing in a theater. It was shot in mid-2021
in Italian and has English subtitles. Written over twenty years ago and
consigned to a drawer in 2002 after the financier went bankrupt and ended up in
prison, Dark Glasses was resurrected by his daughter, actress Asia
Argento, who stumbled across the script, read it, and urged him to make it. Described
as a “tender thriller”, this is highly misleading as there is a fair amount of
brutal violence and explicit gore, far more than anything seen in Profondo
Rosso, Suspiria, Tenebrae, Phenomena, or even Opera
– arguably the last truly great film he has made – the films often cited as his
most violent and most censored. If I had to compare Dark Glasses to
anything in his filmography of the past 35 years following Opera, it
would be Sleepless (Non Ho Sonno) (2001).
Diana
(Ilenia Pastorelli) is a matter-of-fact prostitute who finds herself blinded in
an accident caused by a maniac out to kill women in her line of work. Her
misfortune puts her in contact with a young orphaned Asian boy named Chin
(Andrea Zhang) as well as a woman named Rita from the Association for the Blind
and Visually Impaired (Asia Argento, in a refreshingly realistic and subdued
performance, with her own voice to boot!) who works with people to help them
get on with their lives. There is also a seeing-eye dog who comes to the rescue
to help our protagonists out of danger. While some of the plot points feel a
little silly and predictable, the film possesses an extremely atmospheric score
by Arnaud Rebotini. Missing from the film are the very directorial flourishes
that fans have come to love and expect from the Maestro’s golden era, his
genius method of cinematically propelling a story forward with astonishing set
pieces: there are no cameras booring into brains or over buildings, or
excessive jump-cuts, etc. The film boasts a decent performance from Ilenia
Pastorelli and young Andrea Zhang whose characterization of Chin is ultimately
sympathetic as the Mandarin youth the audience roots for. One of the director’s
shortest films at just 90 minutes give or take, the lack of visual splendor may
be a result of the director’s getting on in years – he is currently 81 – and
unwillingness to perform time-consuming set-ups. Or it may be having to make a
film on a smaller budget.
Once
wonders what fate has befallen the director’s as-yet-unfilmed project, The
Sandman, first announce in the fall of 2014. As of this writing, there is
still no word on it, however in the meantime, Dark Glasses fits the bill
as a bright spot in the director’s later filmography.
Ah, the early 1970s. If you were a monster
movie fan, this was a fun time to be around. After all, creature features,
which became popular with kids of the late 1950s and continued throughout the
60s, were still all the rage. Classic monster movies like Universal’s Son of Frankenstein (1939) starring
horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, The
Wolf Man (1941) starring the immortal Lon Chaney, Jr. and Hammer Films’ amazing
and highly enjoyable Christopher Lee Dracula
series were constantly playing on television. The late, great Forrest
Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine
was required reading for all 70s monster-kids, and Aurora plastics put out a
wonderful line of glow-in-the-dark monster model kits which happily kept fans
busy for hours. The local drive-ins and hard top theaters also rode the
creature feature wave as, every week it seemed, movie houses were filled with
outstanding, atmospheric delights starring horror kings Vincent Price, Peter
Cushing and Sir Lee. Monster enthusiasts couldn’t get enough.
Meanwhile, legendary film studio American
International Pictures, who for almost two decades had specialized in producing
fun, low-budget, youth-oriented films such as 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf as well as the Beach Party, Edgar Allan Poeand Biker film cycles of the 1960s,
decided to create a new creature feature. Most likely due to both the huge
popularity of monster films and the Hammer vampire movies of the time, AIP
created their own Dracula-like villain; a modern-day bloodsucker named Count
Yorga. Benefitting from a solid script, above average direction and an amazing
performance by star Robert Quarry (Dr.
Phibes Rises Again) as Yorga, Count
Yorga, Vampire (1970) did very well at the box office. It’s no surprise
that AIP almost immediately started work on a sequel titled, appropriately
enough, The Return of Count Yorga.
After crumbling to dust in Count Yorga, Vampire, the evil Count is resurrected
when the world famous and supposedly supernatural Santa Ana Winds blow across
an old cemetery. In no time, Yorga, his faithful servant, Brudah, and his horde
of vampire brides put the bite on oblivious locals and cast a spell over little
Billy, younger brother of the beautiful Cynthia who Yorga has developed deep
feelings for. The undead fiend then kills Cynthia’s parents, turns her sister,
Ellen, into a vampire bride and brings an unconscious Cynthia to his home where
he plans to romance the lovely, young woman. Cynthia awakens and is told by
Yorga that her parents were in an accident and that he will be caring for her
until they are well. Meanwhile, Cynthia’s maid, Jennifer, who discovered the dead
bodies, informs the police, but when they arrive, they find that the corpses
have mysteriously disappeared. Cynthia’s fiancé, David, suspects that Yorga may
be behind the grisly goings-on and, with the help of Lieutenant Madden, Sargent
O’Connor and a frightened Reverend, he sneaks into Yorga’s lair in an attempt
to rescue his beloved and stop the wicked Count for good.
Originally titled Yorga Returns, but changed to The
Return of Count Yorga at the time of its release, the very entertaining
sequel contains much of the fun, eerie atmosphere of the first movie and also
uses most of the same cast and crew. The film was solidly directed by Bob
Kelljan (Scream, Blacula, Scream) who
helmed the original, and the engaging and creepy story was written by Kelljan
and newcomer (to the Yorga series)
Yvonne Wilder (Seems Like Old Times)
who also shines in the role of mute maid, Jennifer. Kelljan keeps the film
moving while, all along, building tension and dread; most notably in a terrific
scene where Yorga sends his vampire brides to attack Cynthia’s family in their
home one windy night. The talented director also keeps the film current (for
1971) by having the brides resemble zombies from the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead as well as
giving their terrifying home invasion sequence a definite Charles Manson feel.
Michael Macready (Terror House), who produced and starred in Count Yorga, Vampire, once again takes on producing chores and
makes a cameo appearance as well. His dad, actor George Macready (Gilda), who narrated the first film, also
appears in a brief, but humorous scene. Talented composer Bill Marx (son of
Harpo) returns and contributes another atmospheric and extremely eerie score
while the likeable Roger Perry (Harrigan
and Son), who played the heroic lead in the first Yorga film, returns in a similar role as Cynthia’s concerned
fiancé, David. Edward Walsh (Another 48
Hrs.) is also back as Brudah and he’s just as intimidating as he was the
first time around. Last, but certainly not least, the late, great Robert Quarry
returns to the role for which he will be forever remembered: Count Yorga. Quarry
once again plays the bloodthirsty Count as suave, sophisticated, cultured and
magnetic. For the first time ever, the lonely Yorga falls in love and Quarry
really makes you believe that he is completely taken with Cynthia. In other
scenes, you can sense his pain at feeling this new and powerful emotion. Of
course Yorga is also an evil, undead fiend and Quarry doesn’t disappoint in
that department either as his vampire can be convincingly cold and extremely
ruthless. Also, for a movie that’s over 40 years-old, you wouldn’t expect the
scares to still work. However, the frightening image of a crazed, bloodthirsty Quarry/Yorga
running out of the darkness in slow motion, fangs bared and arms outstretched
while chasing a terrified victim, is still the stuff of nightmares.
We have plenty of newcomers to the series and
they’re all wonderful. The lovely, talented and Emmy-winning Mariette Hartley (Marnie) is perfect as the goodhearted
Cynthia. Both Rudy De Luca (High Anxiety)
and, in an early appearance, Craig T. Nelson (Poltergeist) are believable, likeable and a bit humorous as the
skeptical cops. Philip Frame (The Little
Ark) is extremely creepy as young Tommy; Tom Toner (Splash) is a bit funny as the Reverend; Karen Houston/Ericson (Night of the Demons) does well as Ellen,
Cynthia’s sister (especially in the scene where she vamps out), and David
Lampson (Silence) is solid as Ellen’s
faithful boyfriend, Jason. Helen Baron (Private
Benjamin) and the highly recognizable Walter Brooke (The Graduate) are seen early on as Cynthia’s parents, Corrine
Conley (Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer)
skulks around as an old witch, and beloved character actor Michael Pataki (Grave of the Vampire) shows up briefly
as a concerned boyfriend whose girl (Jesse Wells from Wizards) has been attacked by Yorga. B-movie aficionados of the 60s
and 70s will be interested to know that the multi-talented Gary Kent, who
appeared in many fun drive-in films such as Schoolgirls
in Chains and Dracula vs.
Frankenstein, was stunt coordinator on this film, and musician Marilynn
Lovell, who provided music for Kelljan’s Scream,
Blacula, Scream, Michael Macready’s Terror
House and Quarry’s Deathmaster,
sings the haunting tune “Think It Over.”
As already stated, the film is scary,
atmospheric, well-directed and well-acted, but as much praise as it gets, I
believe that it is still quite underrated. American International Pictures was
all set to have Count Yorga rise from the grave once more, but, for whatever
reason, a third film was, unfortunately, never made.
(Shout Factory’s Blu-ray special edition of
the film is out of print but the movie is available for streaming rental or
purchase on Amazon).
In the summer of 1975,
a much-anticipated film adapted from a bestselling novel called Jaws,
directed by a little-known newcomer named Steven Spielberg, was unleashed on
the public- and visiting the beach would never be the same again.
The stories about the
making of Jaws have been told many, many times: the shark didn’t work, they
ran over budget and schedule because just a few seconds of usable footage was
shot each day, the studio wanted to fire its young director, etc. The myths and
legends around Jaws have become almost as popular as the film itself,
with dozens of books and documentaries, as well as the three sequels, serving
to keep Jaws firmly lodged in the public consciousness.
So what else can
there possibly be to say about this legendary film? Well as this book’s
subtitle suggests, new perspectives have been found and reveal new ways of
thinking about Jaws and its place in popular culture and film history. The
contributors to the book take several different approaches, questioning myths
(was Jaws really the first summer blockbuster? Cinema Retro’s own
Sheldon Hall tackles that one), analysing themes and looking at its legacy, or
‘cultural footprint’.
Verna Fields rightly
won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, and one chapter here focuses
specifically on the editing, highlighting technical innovations and analysing
why some of those classic scenes work so well. A similar level of in-depth
analysis is applied to John Williams’ iconic score. It may well be one of the
most well-known scores in cinema history, but musicologist Emilio Audissino
brings his understanding of music theory here to explain exactly why the music
works so well.
Another chapter sees
a consideration of the influence of Steven Spielberg’s Jewishness on Jaws,
whilst Linda Ruth Williams looks at the way children are often used as bait in
his films. Matthew Leggatt focuses specifically on that Indianapolis
speech from Quint, exploring the atomic legacy as evidenced in Jaws. Is
it a coincidence that the shark is killed with a massive explosion?
The ongoing influence
and legacy of Jaws is delved into in the fascinating final section of
the book, which, as well as exploring the sequels, also looks at the many
documentaries about the making of the film, the ‘Sharksploitation’ edit of Jaws
(a strictly unofficial fan-edit which incorporates footage from Jaws and
its sequels as well as from deleted scenes and shark documentaries, and also
replaces the score with contemporary rock songs), and even a discussion of The
Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week.
This is a terrific
collection of essays that genuinely brings new insight, and with a foreword
provided by Jaws’ screenwriter and supporting actor Carl Gottlieb
himself, The Jaws Book is highly recommended for any fan of Jaws,
or for anyone with even a passing interest in this crucial moment in film
history.
Almost
30 years ago, Jurassic Park thundered into theaters, forever changing
the cinematic landscape. Steven Spielberg’s iconic film was based on Michael
Crichton’s best-selling novel that brilliantly channeled people’s endless fascination
with dinosaurs. It was beyond a box
office hit, grossing close to a billion dollars during its 1993 release. It
also revolutionized visual effects, leaving old-school stop motion dinosaurs in
its dust.
Jurassic
World: Dominion
ain’t your father’s Jurassic Park…This 6th and “final” instalment in the JP franchiseis
a huge, loud, expansive spectacle that brings together the original cast (including
dinosaurs) and the franchise’s 2nd generation stars for one last
scaly hurrah.
The
film opens with a cable news clip that tells us that dinosaurs have escaped
from the ruins of Isla Nublar and are now everywhere. Once that has been
established, director Colin Trevorrow puts the cinematic pedal down and doesn’t
let up for two hours and twenty-seven minutes. The somewhat muddied plot involves Biosyn, the
shady corporate heir to John Hammond’s InGen, run by Lewis Dodgson (Campbell
Scott), a Jeff Bezos type who is using dino DNA to “benefit mankind”. Uh huh. (If
Dodgson’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the original bagman who
handed Dennis Nedry the infamous can of shaving cream/bio-sample tubes in the
original film.)
Luckily,
Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is onto Biosyn, corralling her reluctant former
colleague Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to visit their remote headquarters where
the third member of the original Jurassic team, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)
is a visiting scholar in residence.The
Biosyn retreat is also a world sanctuary for… dinosaurs.The OTHER parallel-running plot involves the
genetically-engineered child (the wonderful Isabella Sermon) of an original
Jurassic Park scientist who is in hiding with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and
Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). Her unique genetic makeup makes her a
very valuable commodity and a target for kidnappers. The two Jurassic Park
worlds - old and new - collide when she is
kidnapped and Owen and Claire follow her trail from the Pacific Northwest
to the alleyways of Malta and, the futuristic Biosyn complex itself.There are breathtaking man v. dinosaur chases
that rival any James Bond or Jason Bourne pursuit. Jurassic World Dominion
also drifts into Indiana Jones territory with a knock-down, drag-out fight in a
seedy dinosaur smuggler’s market, complete with a dino fighting pit, of course!
Trevorrow,
who ably helmed the previous two Jurassic Park movies, really hits his
stride with this film – from a dino roundup on horseback in a vast prairie to
stunning mountain photography in the Italian Alps and dino-mayhem in the dense
forests of the Pacific Northwest.The
film brings back old favorites like the T-Rex and the raptor “Blue”, and
introduces new ones like the Quetzalcoatlus, a huge, feathered dinosaur and the
Dreadnoughtus, which resembles a Brontosaurus on steroids – 27 dinosaur species
in all. According to the production materials, each creature was grounded in
reality under the strict supervision of a leading paleontologist. The film’s visual effects are rivalled only by
its audio effects – every crash is bone-jarring and the various dino roars are
teeth-rattling.
While
Pratt and Howard are great performers and have developed a wonderful onscreen
chemistry, it’s the return of the original cast members – Neill, Dern and
Goldblum that really got the preview audience clapping.Even original JP scientist Henry Wu (BD Wong)
is on hand to try to rectify his mistakes. They all step back into their roles as
easily as you’d pull on a favorite shirt; and Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm patois is
as wry and quirky as it was in 1993.Time has been kind to them all.
For
this epic conclusion to the cinematic Jurassic era, Universal has pulled out
all the stops and is seeing their cash cowasaurus off with a bang.
Real-life crime and corruption seemed to grow
in the United States during the late 1960s and victims felt that, in certain
cases, the law couldn’t always protect them. Thus, by the early 70s, American
cinemas saw the rise of the vigilante/revenge film. Amazingly entertaining and
hard-hitting classics such as Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack (1971) Don Siegel’s Dirty
Harry (1971), Phil Karlson’s Walking
Tall (1973)and Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973) blazed across movie
screens. These films featured lone, individualistic heroes who, after seeing
the innocent people of their communities (and sometimes their loved ones)
either robbed, beaten, raped or killed, and the law either powerless to help or
itself part of the problem, decide that enough is enough and proceed to take
the imperfect law into their own hands. As entertaining as these movies were,
they were also an outcry against the real-life crime and corruption that was
polluting the streets at the time; not to mention the imperfect legal system.
Also, by viewing the tough, but well-meaning heroes of these fantasy films ridding
their communities of this dangerous and undesired element, audiences
experienced a real catharsis.
Although many more vigilante/revenge movies
would hit theater screens throughout the rest of the decade, the genre reached
its height with the release of Michael Winner’s masterful, if controversial, Death Wish (1974) which starred the
legendary Charles Bronson as a passive architect/family man who, after his wife
and daughter are raped by muggers (which also causes his wife’s death), and the
authorities are powerless to help, decides to hunt criminals by night on the
dangerous urban streets of New York. Death
Wish proved to be highly influential and, in the 1980s, the genre showed no
signs of slowing down as urban-based vigilante/revenge films such as 1980’s
underrated The Exterminator, 1982’s Fighting Back and 1983’s Vigilante exploded into theaters along
with, among many others, three entertaining, but inferior Death Wish sequels. Smack dab in the middle of these two decades, a
modest, solid little urban vigilante/revenge film called Defiance was released.
Directed by John Flynn (Rolling Thunder), Defiance,
which was written by Thomas Michael Donnelly (Quicksilver), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun) and released by American International
Pictures, concerns a merchant seaman named Tommy (Jan-Michael Vincent, The Mechanic, Big Wednesday, Airwolf)
who, while waiting for his next ship to sail, takes up residence on New York’s
Lower East Side. While there, he romances pretty, young Marsha (Raging Bull’s Theresa Saldana) and
befriends a boy (Fernando Lopez from Frankie
and Johnny) and an old grocery shop owner named Abe (Academy Award winner
(for Harry and Tonto) Art Carney). He
also discovers that a violent street gang called the Souls is terrorizing the
neighborhood and the entire police force’s hands are tied. After a series of
brutal muggings, beatings and murders, Tommy decides to put a stop to the
violence by taking on the gang himself. But does Tommy alone have what it takes
to put an end to the madness?
Although a very well-done addition to the
urban vigilante genre, Defiance differs
somewhat from films like Death Wish and The Exterminator in that the main hero
doesn’t kill any of the villains. He just fights back and, hopefully, brings
them to justice. Director Flynn delivers a well-balanced combo of drama and
suspense-thriller while giving the film a gritty, realistic feel which is
helped along by the stark cinematography of the talented Ric Waite (48 Hrs.).
Jan-Michael Vincent is extremely convincing as
Tommy. He plays the well-written character as quiet, but tough and also isn’t
afraid to show that, at times, Tommy is scared. He also shows traits such as
humor and heart which further humanizes the character. Overall, it’s an understated
and very believable performance. The
extremely likeable Theresa Saldana brings a nice touch of humor to her role and
the late, great Art Carney is wholly convincing as an aging, kind, but fed up
grocery store owner. We also have a terrific performance by Fernando Lopez as
the kid; not to mention Rudy Ramos (The
Enforcer) exuding icy evil as gang leader Angel Cruz who utters the
immortal line, “Now, we’re gonna make the new dude slow bleed.”
The entertaining and engaging film is loaded
with even more top-notch acting talent; mostly made up of familiar East Coast/Italian-American
faces such as Academy Award nominee Danny Aiello (Do the Right Thing), former AWA Tag Team champion wrestler turned
actor Lenny “Luca Brasi” Montana (The
Godfather), legendary film and television actor Joseph Campanella (The St. Valentine's Day Massacre), The Sopranos’ Tony “Paulie Walnuts”
Sirico and the highly recognizable Frank Pesce (Vigilante). What a freakin’ cast! My only question is where the
hell was Joe Spinell? The movie also features well-known faces like Ernie F.
Orsatti (The Car), Chino “Fats”
Williams (Weird Science) and Santos
Morales (Scarface) as well asvery brief appearances by Fred Lincoln
(The Last House on the Left) and Tony
DiBenedetto (The Exterminator), and
quite a few others whose faces are more familiar than their names.
Defiance has been released on
a region one Blu-ray by Kino Lorber and is presented in its original 1.85:1
aspect ratio. As is usually the case with KL, the beautiful HD transfer boasts
sharp, crystal clear and colorful images as well as perfect sound. The disc
also contains the original theatrical trailer along with the trailer for the
1976, Jan-Michael Vincent actioner Vigilante
Force which is also available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. If you’re looking
for a solid entry from the vigilante film heyday, the extremely underrated Defiance won’t disappoint.
Who
should we blame for the execrable Tentacles? Samuel Z. Arkoff? The cast?
The pazzo Italians who made it? Steven Spielberg, for heaven’s sake?
This ridiculous yarn should be retitled with another word beginning with “T”
and ending with “s” that is also comprised of nine letters because it takes a
huge pair of them to put so many well-known performers into one film and give
them nothing to do.
Tentacles, was filmed in 1976 and unleashed on New
Yorkers on Wednesday, August 3, 1977 during the Summer of Sam, when Michael
Anderson’s Orca: The Killer Whale and Rene Cardona, Jr.’s Tintorera:
Killer Shark, among other cinematic indignities were also in theaters, assuaged only by George
Lucas’s Star Wars. The movie commits one of the genre’s gravest sins – it’s
boooooring. To boot, it lacks the cheeze factor that makes movies like this fun
to watch. Running a full 102 minutes, the exact same running time as William
Friedkin’s masterful The French Connection (1971), Tentacles posits
an octopus with tentacles (octopi have limbs, not tentacles, as squids do, but
no one told the screenwriters) off the coast of Solana Beach in California who
is annoyed by the unauthorized use of radio frequencies by Mr. Whitehead (Henry
Fonda), a corrupt owner of a construction company and his assistant (Cesare
Danova, unrecognizable from his turn as Harvey Keitel’s mafioso uncle in Martin
Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets). The angry squid makes its way near
people to serve them up as dinner. A sheriff (Claude Akins running through
Stanislavski’s Seven Pillars Acting Technique before starring in The
Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo from 1979 to 1981) is confused as to how
people are dying; a reporter (John Houston in a role that makes you wonder if he was financially solvent at the time)
pursues leads to “get the story” as another feather in his cap; Bo Hopkins
reluctantly comes to the rescue with killer whales that ultimately do in the
titular creature; and the always reliable Shelley Winters comes along for the
ride but spends most of her time yelling at children. Apparently, Auntie Roo
isn’t dead after all.
The
movie is completely devoid of interest and suspense except for a clone of the
Ben Gardner-inspired head-bobbing death scene from Jaws (1975) and the
disappearance of a child from the beach in a visually interesting sequence
featuring the winner of the World’s Worst Mother of the Year award. The production’s “inspiration”, if you can call it that, is clearly Mr.
Spielberg’s aforementioned suspense masterpiece, however it bears more of a resemblance
to Robert Gordon’s 1955 sci-fi film It Came from Beneath the Sea, though
that black and white film possessed something that Tentacles lacks –
entertainment value.
Tentacles played in my area on a double bill
with Bert I. Gordon’s Empire of the Ants (1977) at a theater that went
exclusively adult prior to becoming a supermarket (an obscenity of a different
kind) and at a drive-in with Michael Campus’s The Mack (1973) with
Richard Pryor as the second feature, which put poor Mr. Pryor in the unenviable
position of making comatose people laugh.
What
Tentacles does have is a series of truly beautiful poster art used in
the film’s marketing campaign that, while colorful and exciting to behold,
advertise the film as something that it ultimately fails to deliver.
Apparently,
Kino Lorber couldn’t find anyone willing to sit down and talk about this
monstrosity (pun most definitely intended), as they have either all passed on or
are currently in prison after having murdered their agents and managers after
appearing in this film.
The
only extras to speak of are both the radio spot and theatrical trailer for the
film, and trailers for The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), The Island of
Dr. Moreau (1977), Parasite (1983), Tintorera...Tiger Shark
(1977), Zoltan...Hound of Dracula (1977), Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978), Without Warning (1980), Deepstar Six (1989), and Deep
Rising (1998).
If
you’re going to watch a film about an octopus, I would recommend the highly
enlightening My Octopus Teacher (2020) as an alternate, championed by
Mr. Friedkin himself when I asked him about new films that he would recommend.
Of
the millions of film books out there, it’s highly likely that horror covers by
far the largest percentage in terms of genre. Just what is it about the genre
that proves to be so endlessly fascinating to readers and audiences,
considering its disreputable reputation? This is something that Barry Keith
Grant addresses in his introduction to this excellent collection of essays on
100 classic (and occasionally forgotten) American horror films. As he points
out, horror has been with us throughout history, with its roots in Medieval
woodcuts, Grand Guignol theatre and the Gothic novel, with the first horror
film being produced by Georges Méliès in 1896. We are endlessly fascinated and
enthralled by the feelings of terror, fear, suspense, and revulsion that horror
inflicts on its willing audience.
The
book covers American horror from over 100 years, going back as far as D.W.
Griffith’s 1914 adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Raven’, The Avenging Conscience, or
‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, right up to more recent hits such as American
Psycho (2000) Get Out (2017). Grant provides a two-page entry for
each film with an in-depth discussion of the importance of the film and its
place within cinema history, as well as a very useful Further Reading guide for
anyone who wants to dig deeper.
Despite
the relative brevity of each entry, the book provides insightful analysis and can
cause the reader to reassess some of the films under discussion as well as
discovering some for the first time: there are classics here, of course, such
as Carrie (1976), Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), The
Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Shining (1980, both
technically American films despite being shot in the UK with mostly British
crews), but it also covers some that one might not immediately think of when
compiling your own list of important American horror films, such as Two
Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Ganja and Hess (1973), Weird Woman
(1944) and John Carpenter’s box office bomb In the Mouth of Madness
(1994).
Writing
something like this must be a thankless task as there will always be people who
disagree with the selection of films, but as it covers such a broad range across
the entire history of American cinema, there ought to be plenty of titles here
for readers to enjoy discovering more about in this immensely readable and
highly recommended collection.
Kino
Lorber has been releasing the W. C. Fields catalog in high definition, upgraded
from previous releases on DVD, and two more have come to the fore—You’re
Telling Me! and Man on the Flying Trapeze, two titles that don’t
immediately come to mind when one thinks of top tier, classic Fields pictures,
but never fear—they’re hilarious and worth a look.
You’re
Telling Me!
preceded The Old Fashioned Way and the brilliant It’s a Gift (both
previously reviewed here at Cinema Retro), all three of which appeared
in 1934, while Fields (real name—William Claude Dukenfield) still had a working
contract with Paramount Pictures. Man on the Flying Trapeze was released
in 1935, a return to a “Fields comedy” after the actor took a sidetrack sojourn,
courtesy of Paramount, into more high-brow fare (David Copperfield, an
Oscar Best Picture nominee,and Mississippi, a musical starring
Bing Crosby).
In
Telling Me, Fields is Sam Bisbee, an optometrist and amateur inventor (one
of his inventions is a “nose-holder-upper,” which pulls one’s nose up to open
the nasal passages when in bed). As usual, he’s married to a shrew of a wife (Louise
Carter), who is embarrassed by the family’s social status of living “on the
wrong side of the tracks.” Their daughter, Pauline (Joan Marsh), is sweet on Bob
Murchison (Larry “Buster” Crabbe), who comes from a wealthy, upper class
family. Bob’s snobby mother (Kathleen Howard) will not allow her son to marry
Pauline, mainly because of her contempt for “low life” Sam. However, Sam by
chance meets Princess Lescaboura (Adrienne Ames) on a train. The princess is a
visiting dignitary, and she is impressed by Sam’s woeful story of his troubles.
Sam is under the mistaken impression that the princess (“Call me Marie”) was
about to commit suicide when he meets her, and she plays along to earn his
friendship. Marie can see there’s a good man there, so she takes it upon
herself to visit his town and make things right between him and his family and
the community.Click here to order from Amazon.
Man
on the Flying Trapeze has no flying trapezes, but the title possibly suggests
the precarious tightrope act that is the life of Ambrose Wolfinger (Fields).
He, too, is married to a shrew (Kathleen Howard again, something of the
“Margaret Dumont” of W. C. Fields films). Fields has a daughter, Hope (Mary
Brian), from a previous marriage, but the second Mrs. Wolfinger’s uptight
mother (Vera Lewis) and lazy brother (Grady Sutton) live with them, too. No one
in the household can stand Ambrose—in fact, they make his life hell—except for Hope,
who adores him. Ambrose loses his job as a “memory expert” because he takes a
day off to attend a wrestling match, and it’s one of many things that goes
wrong in Ambrose’s world. Luckily, Hope is on hand to steer luck his way.
There
are some classic comedic bits in both films. Telling Me has a wonderful
golfing sequence toward the end, in which Fields shares the screen with
longtime foil Tammany Young (here as a caddy). Flying Trapeze is packed
with funny bits. The opening involves two burglars (one being Tammany Young,
again, plus a young Walter Brennan!) who get drunk in Fields’ cellar and start
singing. Later, the chase of a runaway tire after getting a flat takes Fields
onto the railroad tracks provides some laughs, along with the wrestling
sequence (featuring a young Tor Johnson as a heavily bearded “Russian”
wrestler).
Throughout
it all in both films, W. C. Fields maintains a command of the material. The
camera loves him, and he obviously loves the camera. This is a period when
Fields’ popularity was at its highest, with excellent examples of his impeccable
comic timing, slow burns, drunken confusion, and outrageous dialogue.
Both
Kino Lorber disks, sold separately, are 2K masters that are indeed an improvement
over previous DVD releases. Oddly, both Blu-ray editions feature the same bonus
supplement—an episode of the old “Wayne and Shuster” TV show (Johnny Wayne and
Frank Shuster, comics of the 40s and beyond, who had some success on television
in the 50s and early 60s). The segment focuses on the life of Fields. This same
supplement also appeared on the Never Give a Sucker an Even Break Blu-ray
disk from the same label. One might have thought that Kino could have found
some different supplements to spread around the various Fields titles on
release, but that is not the case. Theatrical trailers for both films, and
other Kino products, fill out the packages.
You’re
Telling Me! and
Man on the Flying Trapeze are both worthwhile additions to your W. C.
Fields library. They are snapshots of a comic genius in his prime. Click here to order from Amazon.
British
author Edgar Wallace, aside from the London pub bearing his name, is now
largely forgotten in his home country, and is perhaps best remembered, if at
all, for his contribution to RKO’s King Kong (1933), although he sadly
died before the film was completed. During his immensely prolific career as a
journalist, author, poet, playwright, historian, film producer and director,
screenwriter and chairman of the British Lion Film Corporation, he published
around two hundred novels, almost a thousand short stories and twenty stage
plays. It was said that at one point around a quarter of all books being read
in the UK were written by Wallace. He was best known for his crime novels,
particularly ‘The Four Just Men’ series and the amateur detective J.G. Reeder,
but he also created the colonial adventurer ‘Sanders of the River’ and wrote
science fiction and comedy stories. His non-fiction often focused on his
experiences in South Africa during the Boer War or on his passion for horse
racing (the latter of which kept him mostly in debt and helped fuel his need to
keep writing).
Many
of his stories and plays were adapted by Hollywood and British filmmakers
during the 1930s and 1940s, and in the 1960s the tiny Merton Park Studios
produced a whopping forty-seven second-feature films under the title The
Edgar Wallace Mysteries. These films were so successful that The Shadows
scored a chart hit with their cover of the theme music ‘Man of Mystery’.
And
yet Edgar Wallace’s work has now mostly fallen out of print in the UK. Perhaps
it is because, as he himself once admitted, “I do not write good books, I write
bestsellers.” In Germany, however, it was a different story; paperback publisher
Goldmanns issued dozens of Wallace novels (and those of his son Bryan Edgar
Wallace) in the 1940s and 1950s under the cheap imprint Taschen-Krimi (krimi
meaning crime), and these novels were very popular in a post-war country still
coming to terms with the relationship it now had with the UK, it’s former enemy
in two world wars. Wallace’s stories, often set in a fog-bound London, were a
fantasy world of terror and crime where the good guys always prevailed.
In
1959 Danish film company Rialto tried their hand at an adaptation and produced The
Mask of the Frog, shot in German language but set in London, and made with
a comedic tone which was often found in the original novels. It was such a huge
success that it launched a series which ran for over a decade and resulted in
thirty-two films, mostly shot in Hamburg or Berlin (with second unit
photography in London) and helped launch the careers of such film stars as
Klaus Kinski, Karin Dor and Joachim Fuchsberger, as well as attracting stars
such as Christopher Lee – he spoke perfect German – who appeared in The
Devil’s Daffodil and Secret of the Red Orchid. Each film would begin
with the message “Hallo, hier spricht Edgar Wallace.” Other popular films in
the series, many of which were dubbed into English and distributed in the UK
and the USA, included The Dead Eyes of London, The Ringer and The
Hunchback of Soho. Towards the end of the cycle, Rialto joined forces with
Italian filmmakers to make Double Face, What Have You Done to
Solange? and Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, generally thought of as
giallo films but released in Germany as part of the Krimi series.
Although
Rialto’s Krimi production ended in the early 1970s, the films lived on through
regular television screenings, and thus the popularity of Edgar Wallace has endured,
and German translations of his novels have remained in print ever since. And
whilst several German volumes have also been published dedicated to this series
of films, until now the main English-language writing on the Krimi phenomenon was
in the magazine Video Watchdog back in the 1990s. Nicholas G. Schlegel’s
new book German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon: Dark Eyes of
London is therefore a very welcome and much- needed addition for anyone
interested in exploring these films in more detail. With an insightful analysis
of each of the films and their reception, alongside a history of the post-war
German film industry and where these films sit within that context, reading
this book will have you eagerly seeking out copies of all of them. Fortunately,
a great deal of the Rialto Krimis are now available on DVD and Blu-ray with
English subtitles, and occasionally with the original English dubs (sometimes
the films were shot in both languages, with different actors), although some
are still only available in German. Perhaps the films are considered to only be
of commercial interest to German-speaking audiences. It can be hoped that the
renewed interest this book will spark amongst English-speaking film fans will
encourage the rights holders to eventually make all these films available.
Although
the idea of 1960s German film adaptations of Edgar Wallace may not be
everyone’s cup of tea (something which is drunk with great regularity in the
films themselves), I would strongly encourage you to at least seek one out.
They are great fun, balancing humour with tales of outlandish criminal
masterminds (the tone often recalls episodes of The Avengers), and the
novelty of seeing people in English police uniforms talking in German about
Scotland Yard adds an additional element of charm to the whole thing. This new
book from Schlegel is an essential read, taking in the films, the industry,
their enduring legacy, and global influence. The hardback is admittedly
something of an eye-watering price, but well worth it for the serious Krimi
fan. For the curious, perhaps wait patiently for the paperback.
The
late Peter Bogdanovich called it “the first great detective movie.” That
statement is possibly arguable, but there is no question that the 1941 version
of The Maltese Falcon was the beginning of something new. Film
historians will forever debate what the first film noir might have been,
but Falcon is one of the contenders. The film presented a cynical, hard
boiled detective in Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), utilized German expressionism
in its cinematography and design (low camera angles, high contrasting black and
white photography, shadows, and angular architecture), and a pessimistic tone. Falcon
also truly launched Bogart into the A-list. Prior to this (and, some say, High
Sierra, released the same year), Bogart usually played villains in crime
pictures, third billed or ever further down the line.
The
Maltese Falcon is
of course based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, originally serialized in 1929.
Warner Brothers immediately bought the film rights, and an initial adaptation
was made and released in 1931 (also called The Maltese Falcon). This
version starred Ricardo Cortez as Spade and Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly. The
picture definitely can be termed “pre-Code,” as it is rather risqué and isn’t a
very faithful adaptation of the novel. Warners remade the material five years
later as Satan Met a Lady, starring Warren William as “Ted Shane” and
none other than Bette Davis as “Valerie Purvis.” This version is played mostly
for laughs and is even less faithful than the first.
Enter
John Huston, who had been working in Hollywood in the late 1930s as a respected
screenwriter. He wrote the script for High Sierra (1941, directed by
Raoul Walsh), which starred Bogart. The two men became friends. Huston made it
known that he wanted to write and direct. Legend has it that Orson Welles
suggested that Huston try a faithful adaptation of The Maltese Falcon,
since the material was crying out to be done properly. Huston apparently wrote
the script and left it on Jack Warner’s desk. Then, on condition that no
“stars” were cast and the budget remain ridiculously low, Huston got the job to
make the film. At the time, Bogart was not a star. Co-star Mary Astor had been
a big star in the silent era and early 30s, but some personal scandals had
stymied her career by the 40s—so casting her was not expensive. The two other
(now) big names in the movie, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, were also
considered low risks. Lorre had been making cheap horror films and mysteries,
Greenstreet, a stage actor, had never made a movie. The picture also brought us
Elisha Cook, Jr., Gladys George, and Lee Patrick.
The
story is typically complex with many twists and turns, and it is always
surprising. It is about one of cinema’s greatest “MacGuffins,” a statue of a
falcon that is allegedly made out of gold and covered in rare jewels—but to disguise
it, someone covered it in black enamel. It seems everyone in the tale wants the
thing, except for private investigator Sam Spade (Bogart). He gets involved in
the hunt for the trophy when his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) is
murdered at a rendezvous set up by a new client, “Ruth Wonderly” (Astor). It
turns out Wonderly’s real name is Brigid O’Shaughnessy (maybe), and she’s in
league with some sinister characters to buy—or steal—the statue. The “fat man,”
Kasper Gutman (Greenstreet) is the top villain here, and his sidekick, Joel
Cairo (Lorre), provides icky support. All Spade really wants to do is find out
who killed his partner and deliver that person to the police, but in doing so
must become embroiled in the intrigue and puzzles surrounding the coveted
Maltese Falcon.
Besides
the acting and direction, Huston’s script contains memorable lines of dialogue.
“When I slap you, you’ll take it and like it.” “Don’t be too sure I’m as
crooked as I’m supposed to be.” And of course, “The stuff that dreams are made
of.” The film received three Academy Award nominations—Best Picture, Best
Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Greenstreet), but failed to win
any of them.
The
Warner Home Video Blu-ray edition of The Maltese Falcon was released over
ten years ago, but its timeless appeal makes it appropriate to review. It is a
marked improvement over the 2000 DVD release, which was bare bones. A further
2006 3-disk DVD release contained all of the extras ported over to this Blu-ray
edition. The high definition transfer looks great and is without blemishes. The
movie comes with an audio commentary (by Bogart biographer Eric Lax).
Supplements
abound: There’s an interesting, nearly half-hour featurette on the history of
the film; a collection of Bogart trailers narrated by the late Robert Osborne
of TCM; a blooper reel of Warners pictures; makeup tests; a 1941 newsreel; an
Oscar-nominated short (“The Gay Parisian”); two of the greatest Looney Tunes
cartoons (Bugs Bunny in “Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt” and Porky Pig in “Meet John
Doughboy”); trailers for Falcon and other Warners films of the era; and three
audio-only radio adaptations, two of which feature the movie’s original stars
and one with Edward G. Robinson). The only thing missing from the Blu-ray
edition is the inclusion of the previous two Falcon feature adaptations,
which were included in the 3-disk DVD set.
The
Maltese Falcon is
fabulous entertainment, a spectacular example of film noir, a showcase
for Humphrey Bogart’s star power, and one of the great Hollywood films of the
1940s. Highly recommended.
This
is a little-known gem of a film from producer Louis de Rochemont, the man best
known for introducing The March of Time documentary newsreels to cinemas
that ran from the 1930s until the early 1950s. He also produced several
mainstream pictures, and one of these from 1951, The Whistle at Eaton Falls,
is an underdog-battles-severe-odds tale of the highest caliber.
Directed
by Robert Siodmak and starring Lloyd Bridges, Whistle might be described
as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, only with unions. Yes, this is a union
drama along the lines of On the Waterfront or, much later, Norma Rae.
In
a tight 96 minutes, Siodmak brings us a riveting story—the kind that gets an
audience riled up against the injustices thrown at a protagonist. The suspense
builds to a breaking point as we wonder how it’s all going to play out.
The
writing credits are a bit complicated. J. Sterling Livingston wrote the
original story, but then a story treatment was developed by Lawrence Dugan and
Laurence Heath. This was next turned into a screenplay by Lemist Esler and
Virginia Shaler (de Rochemont’s wife), with additional dialogue by Leo Rosten!
Whatever it took, the movie is well-written and engaging.
Supporting
Lloyd Bridges in the cast is a host of young, future character actors such as Murray
Hamilton, Ernest Borgnine, Arthur O’Connell, James Westerfield, Parker
Fennelly, and Anne Francis. Second billed, though, is Dorothy Gish (actually in
a small role). Carleton Carpenter, a crooner/actor of the period, has a showy
role as a younger union member who sings a number with Francis (“Ev’ry Other
Day”). Each cast member displays a down-home small town persona that works very
well with the location filming in New Hampshire, where the story takes place.
In
the hamlet of Eaton Falls, a whistle signals the beginning and end of the work
day. But there’s trouble. A shoe factory had to close down, laying off its
workers. Now, the Doubleday Plastic Factory is losing money and must cut costs
to stay in business. Brad Adams (Bridges) is the head of the union, and he is
determined to make sure no one gets laid off; and yet, Mr. Doubleday may be
forced to cut some workers as more modern machinery is purchased to pave the
way for the future. When Doubleday dies in an accident, his wife and now-owner
of the plant (Gish), appoints Brad the new president. This doesn’t sit well
with some of the crankier union members, like Al Webster (Hamilton, in one of
his typical “hothead” roles). To make things worse, the slimy production
manager, Hawkins (Russell Hardie) and his cohort, the company’s treasurer (Helen
Shields), plot to ruin Brad and convince Mrs. Doubleday to sell the company.
This would, of course, be a disaster for the town. Brad soon finds himself at
odds with his loyalties to the union and his responsibility as “management.”
Eventually, the plant must temporarily close while Brad and his few allies
scramble to find solutions to keep the company running while the malcontents
threaten upheaval and violence.
This
is potent stuff and while it doesn’t have the depth and grit that On the
Waterfront brought to the subject three years later, Whistle is
still a serious and tension-inducing winner. The cast is marvelous and the
black and white cinematography by Joseph C. Brun is striking.
Flicker
Alley/Flicker Fusion presents an impressive product. Great care was made to
restore the little-seen film to a 2K master, undertaken by the de Rochemont
estate and spearheaded by Tom H. March and David Strohmaier, the same team that
brought us the Flicker releases of the Cinerama and Cinemiracle films. There is
an audio commentary by author and film historian Alan K. Rode.
Supplements
include a short remembrance of de Rochemont from his grandson, L. Pierre de
Rochemont; a featurette on the restoration of the picture; an isolated score
track (music by Louis Applebaum); archival single recordings of Carleton
Carpenter’s “Ev’ry Other Day” and (presumably) the B-side, “It’s a Million to
One You’re in Love,” and the theatrical trailer. A nice insert contains an essay
excerpt from Richard Koszarski’s Keep ‘em in the East—Kazan, Kubrick and the
Post-War New York Film Renaissance.
The
Whistle at Eaton Falls is a surprise treasure from Flicker. For fans of
Hollywood post-war social problem dramas, and of the spectacular cast.
Recommended.
There
are a handful of Hollywood movies out there that successfully combined comedy
with the horror genre. Surprisingly, truly good ones are few and far between. Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) is perhaps the quintessential example
of the genre mashup. It provided genuine thrills and some frights mixed in with
hilarious comedic bits. A more recent one that comes to mind is of course the
1984 megahit, Ghostbusters. There is no question that this Bill Murray
vehicle owes a great deal to the 1940 romp, The Ghost Breakers,
considered one of Bob Hope’s most beloved early pictures.
Based
on the 1909 stage play, The Ghost Breaker, by Paul Dickey and Charles W.
Goddard, the 1940 movie is actually a remake of previous adaptations. Both
Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred E. Green made silent films of the play in 1914 and
1922, respectively, and both of these versions are considered lost. In turn,
the 1940 The Ghost Breakers was remade by the same director, George
Marshall, as Scared Stiff (1953), which starred Dean Martin and Jerry
Lewis, and it is arguable that Marshall also helmed a very similar picture in
1945 entitled Murder, He Says, which starred Fred MacMurray.
After
the success of The Cat and the Canary (1939), yet another good example
of a Hollywood horror-comedy that starred Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, the pair
was brought back a year later for The Ghost Breakers. Also starring
Richard Carlson, Paul Lukas, a young Anthony Quinn, and African-American comic
actor Willie Best, The Ghost Breakers was a popular hit that solidified
Hope’s place as one of the coming decade’s great talents.
Mary
Carter (Goddard) has inherited a spooky old mansion on an island off of Cuba,
and she plans to sail from New York to the island to inspect the place. Other
sinister forces—a foreigner named Parada (Lukas), the twin Mederos brothers
(Quinn, in both roles), and others not named here for the sake of spoilers,
also want the mansion because of a secret hidden within. Apparently it is also full
of ghosts, or so the legends say. During a classic situational and comedic
mix-up of mistaken identities, radio star Larry Lawrence (Hope) finds himself
trapped in Mary’s steamer trunk that has been loaded onto the ship to Cuba. Larry’s
loyal valet and friend, Alex (Best) stowaways to keep track of his boss. Once
on the island, Larry assumes the role of a “ghost buster,” since he’s obviously
fallen for Mary and wants to protect her from the bad guys. Throw in a handsome
historian, Geoff (Carlson), and the cinematic stew has enough complications and
plot twists to keep one entertained for the film’s brief 83 minutes.
Hope
is terrific, and one can easily see the development of his coward-with-bravado character
that he adapted for himself in pretty much all screen appearances, including
the “Road” pictures with Bing Crosby. Goddard is also winning, a perfect comic
and gorgeous foil for the tale. While the rest of the cast is admirable, one
must single out the great Willie Best, an actor who unfortunately was misused
by Hollywood—very typical in those days—to display a stereotype of the comic
black man with bulging eyes and slow dialogue delivery. (“Is you in there,
zombie?” he asks, knocking on a door.) That said, it is apparent that Best is brilliant
in comic timing, handling the demeaning characterization with utmost
professionalism. If The Ghost Breakers has a flaw, it is this. In
today’s climate, Best’s Alex is wince-inducing, but one can still appreciate
the man’s talent and competence.
Director
Marshall keeps the picture moving at a brisk pace, and the creepy aspects—while
certainly not scary today—are effective enough. Noble Johnson’s zombie is an
interesting take on that relatively rare creature (for the time), three years
prior to the Val Lewton masterpiece, I Walked with a Zombie.
Kino
Lorber’s new 2K master looks quite good in high definition, despite the age of
the material. There is an audio commentary by author and film historian Lee
Gambin that fills in listeners on all the trivia behind the movie. The only
supplement is a “Trailers from Hell” piece on the title by Larry Karaszewski,
and the theatrical trailer for this and other Kino releases.
The
Ghost Breakers is
for fans of Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Hollywood horror-comedy, and those
distinctive pre-war pictures that provided solid enjoyment in less than ninety
minutes.
RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES
In honor of the esteemed actor Nehemiah Persoff, who recently passed away at age 102, we are running this interview originally conducted with Mr. Persoff in 2010 by the late writer Herb Shadrak.
Nehemiah Persoff: From Jerusalem to Hollywood and Beyond
By Herb Shadrak
Born in Jerusalem in 1919, Nehemiah Persoff went on to
become one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood. His face is familiar
to millions of boomers across North America from his numerous guest appearances
on just about every TV series that aired from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Persoff’s name may have been unfamiliar to many of these TV viewers, but his
face was instantly recognizable. Filmspot.com describes Persoff as a short, dark and stocky-framed actor who specialized in playing ethnic-type
villains, although he frequently essayed sympathetic roles as well. (Witness
his heartbreaking moments with Maria Schell in Voyage of the Damned.) Yet he excelled as gangland figures like
Johnny Torrio, mentor to Al Capone in
the 1959 biopic, or mobster Jake Greasy Thumbs Guzik, a recurring role on The Untouchables.
Persoff's childhood was poverty-stricken, but there was constant
singing, dancing and music in his home. He was a very creative and imaginative
youngster, who always visited the circus when it came to the Holy City. "There
was a large field in Jerusalem where the circus used to set up", Persoff
recalls. "It was a very small one-ring circus, but I loved it. Outside the circus
was an Arab with a box on a stand with peepholes in it, and he had a small
monkey on a chain with a hat. This was enough to make me stand there for hours
watching. One day, the Arab let me look through the peepholes. There I saw a
funny man with a derby and cane. He had a funny walk. It was Charlie Chaplin!
Little did I know that 20 years later I would meet that man face-to-face!"
Persoff found himself drawn to the cinema at an early age. "Two outdoor movie houses were opened on Zion Square: one was called Eden", he said. "It
had a circle of bulbs that would light up one after the other. I used to walk
down there barefoot and watch the cinema from a post on the street. From that
height I could see the top of the screen for free. I think the other outdoor
movie house was called Aviv. For its grand opening they showed Ben-Hur
with Ramon Novarro. There were pennants hung all over! I guess that was our
version of a Hollywood opening.I find that at age 88 my mind goes back to my early
childhood more and more. Jerusalem in the late twenties was a place like no
other. I cannot imagine a 10-year-old more attached to his birthplace than I
was. I was keenly aware of the love that people had for each other, the feeling
that we were all tied to the same cause. The pioneers came with nothing but
enthusiasm and a love for life and our native land. Their attitude was "to hell
with worldly goods, that's not what's important in our lives."
And yet Persoff's father, a silversmith and painter, felt he had no career
prospects in Palestine. So the young Persoff emigrated with his family to the
United States in 1929, just in time for the Stock Market Crash and the Great
Depression. Persoff spent several years working as an electrician on the New
York subway system, gradually taking an interest in acting in the 1940's.
"When I started acting, I was working in the subway and
there was a rule that subway workers were not allowed to have any other job"
Persoff remembers. "So on the program of the play, I used the name Nick Perry.
My reviews were great but no one knew it was me, so I got none of the glory.
After that I always used ˜Nehemiah Persoff".
After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Persoff started
seriously pursuing an acting career in the New York theatre. In 1947, Persoffs
big break came along, one that would lead to steady work in films and
television for the next 52 years.
"My friend (actor) Lou Gilbert told me that if I wanted to
audition for the Actors Studio, he would arrange it. I jumped at the chance.
Elia Kazan was one of the busiest directors around, and to study with him and
be in his pool of actors was every actor's dream. I was in summer stock playing
the lead role in George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple. I knew that
Kazan was with the Group Theatre along with writer Clifford Odets. I thought of
doing something from an Odets play but then reasoned that perhaps a more
classic approach might work better for me, so I did a monologue from Shaw. Two
weeks later, I received an invitation to come to the first meeting of the
Actors Studio. I took my seat on a bench and slowly looked around. There were
John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Montgomery Clift, Kim Hunter and
Maureen Stapleton, among others. Kazan began to speak and told us his aim was
to create a group of actors who work as he does, who speak his language, and
that the people assembled in this room were the cream of the talent available.
This was heady stuff for a nearly starving young actor. I studied with Lee
Strasberg. He was brilliant and helped me find myself as an actor… I owe him
much. Among other scenes, I did a Noel Coward piece with Kim Stanley"
After the Actors Studio, Persoff never looked back. His film credits include Kazan's On the
Waterfront, The Harder They Fall (Humphrey
Bogart's last film), Alfred Hitchcock's The
Wrong Man, Never Steal Anything Small
(with James Cagney), Rene Clement's This
Angry Age (shot in Thailand), Green
Mansions (with Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins), The Hook (with
Kirk Douglas), A Global Affair (with
Bob Hope), Ray Danton's frightfest Psychic
Killer, Barbra Streisand's Yentl and
Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of
Christ.
Persoff also guest starred on about 400 TV shows, including The Twilight
Zone (playing a Nazi U-Boat captain in the classic episode "Judgment
Night"!), Route 66, Ben Casey, Wagon
Train, Rawhide, Mr. Novak, Burke's Law, Honey West, Dan August, The High
Chapparal, The Big Valley, The Legend of Jesse James, The Wild Wild West, Gilligan's
Island, Hawaii Five-O, Tarzan, It Takes a Thief, Land of the Giants
and The Time Tunnel.
In the mid-1980s, Persoff began to pursue painting. Now retired from
acting, he devotes full time to this avocation he has always loved.
Cinema Retro spoke to
Persoff from his home in Cambria, California. (Continue to next page for interview)
The
major question that I have about Douglas Heyes’s Kitten with a Whip,
which opened in New York on Wednesday, November 4, 1964 on a double bill with Lance
Comfort’s Sing and Swing (1963) with David Hemmings at some theaters, is
this: where is the titular whip? We have the kitten, as embodied by the overly
beautiful Ann-Margret as “bad girl” Jody Dvorak, but there is no whip to be
found. Perhaps the “whip” is her personality? There certainly is an argument to
be made for that. Jody has just made a break from a juvenile detention center
but not before seriously wounding the head of the place who becomes
hospitalized. Outwitting the police, she breaks into the semi-upscale home of David
Stratton (John Forsyth), a stuffy, by-the-book political candidate hopeful twenty-three
years her senior whose wife and daughter are conveniently away in a scenario
determined to make him look very creepy. David discovers Jody asleep in his
daughter’s bedroom and many questions ensue along with his disdain for her
presence. He knows full well that people will talk should they find out he is
harboring a fugitive dripping with sex appeal. Desperate to get rid of Jody, he
appears to be uneasy about his own unchecked desire for her which she readily
picks up on. A series of embarrassing situations that could reveal Jody’s
presence in David’s house to his friends and family bring out David’s true
nature, especially when Jody’s three friends (a 1960’s “tough girl” and
cinema’s two cleanest male “goons”) force their way in to crash his homelife in
a chain of events that lead them all to Mexico and a tragic ending.
Ann-Margret
had already made a name for herself appearing in Frank Capra’s Pocket Full
of Miracles (1961), José Ferrer’s State Fair (1962), and George
Sidney’s Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and his Viva Las Vegas (1964) by
the time she filmed this black-and-white outing. She sheds her ingenue persona
with sex kitten ferocity in a tale (or tail) that was based upon the 1959 novel
of the same name. Kitten is a showcase for her considerable talents in a
performance that goes from sublime and demur to that of a fighting and snarling
hellcat. The dialog dances around the issues of promiscuity and infidelity the
way that it had to at that time, coming on the heels of Elia Kazan’s 1958 Baby
Doll and Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 Lolita (in the novel Jody and David
have sex, however that would have been a big screen no-no in 1964 something
that Alfred Hitchcock knew all too well). Kitten comes just a little
later than it probably should have, but it allows its star to alternate
emotions in a performance that fluctuates from naïve innocence to verbally
threatening David should he call the police on her. While we are not talking
about anything so overtly sexual as the onscreen coupling of Marlon Brando and
Maria Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci’s infamous Last Tango in Paris
(1972), the film no doubt raised some eyebrows at the time.
The movie is now available as a Region-Free Blu-ray from ViaVision Entertainment’s
fine Imprint video label, with a
brand new and beautiful high definition transfer.. The extras are as follows:
A very informative and entertaining audio commentary by film critics Alexandra
Heller-Nicholas,
author of the 2021 book The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema,
and Josh
Nelson. They
discuss how Baltimore filmmaker John Waters considers Kitten to be a
failed art film, and there is a discussion of how the movie was seen as the low
point of Ann-Margret’s career and how she struggled and came back gloriously in
Carnal Knowledge (1971), earning her first Academy Award nomination for
Best Supporting Actress in 1972 (losing out to Cloris Leachman in The Last
Picture Show). Her second nomination was for Best Actress in Tommy
(1975) in 1976 (losing out to Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest).
Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is
the aptly titled piece narrated by Kat Ellinger that runs about 29 minutes and
is a commentary on how teenagers were not a force to be reckoned with until
they possessed their own spending power. Juvenile delinquency was looked upon
as an epidemic that required a response. Rock ‘n Roll and comic books were
considered catalysts for juvenile delinquency, along with trashy movies at the
drive-in that were filled with violence,
sex and songs. Think the Beach Party films, Rebel Without a Cause
(1955) and The Wild One (1957) as the type of fare desired by this new dollar-toting
demographic. The Blackboard Jungle (1955) dealt with inner city school
bullies and authority, while other films presented stories of redemption and
salvation – themes that permeate much of the later cinema of Martin Scorsese.
Ms. Ellinger also discusses Roger Corman’s 1957 outing Teenage Doll, a
film devoted to girls which was released during an era of exploitation films
featuring unknown actresses. Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters (1973) is
also discussed as a film wherein the women use their sexuality as a weapon of
aggression. She also mentions the Sukeban films of Japan, loosely translated to
“girl boss”, a sub-genre of cinema wherein women weaponize their sexuality to
get what they want. While this piece is very interesting, the music overshadows
the narrator at times. I wish that this was addressed prior to pressing of the
disc. There is also a look at the paperback books of the era, and Jody was at
one time going to be played by Brigitte Bardot. The film falls into the “Bad
Girl” subgenre of Juvenile Delinquent stories.
She
Reached for Evil: Dissecting Kitten with a Whip is a video essay that runs about 18
minutes on pulp author Wade Miller by author and film historian Andrew Nette
(2021).
There
is also a photo gallery of black and white stills from the film.
MST3000
rips on the film as a parody in 1994 and is a hoot to listen to.
Click Here to order from Amazon USA and ignore
Amazon’s caveat about regional encoding. This disc will play an any Blu-ray
player. Non-U.S. readers can order the film directly from Imprint by clicking here.
Canadian
filmmaker David Cronenberg has always managed to push the envelope with nearly
every one of his striking pieces of work since he appeared on the scene in the
mid-1970s. Known at first as primarily a director of unique “body-horror” films
(The Brood, 1979, or The Fly; 1986), Cronenberg spread his wings
in the 1990s and moved away from the genre to tackle more dramatic and varied
subjects. His 2007 crime picture about the Russian mafia operating in London, Eastern
Promises, stands as a milestone title in the director’s filmography.
Kino
Lorber Classics has released a superb 2-disk (4K Ultra and Blu-ray) package of
the film, and the results are impressive. The picture quality is so sharp and
clear that it could be used as a demonstration product for high definition
televisions.
Anna
Khitrova (Naomi Watts) is a British-Russian who lives with her parents, Helen
and Stepan (Sinéad Cusack, and filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowsky in
an acting role). Stepan is an ex-KGB officer, and the family emigrated to the
U.K. some years ago. Anna works as a midwife in a London hospital, where she treats
a teenage Russian girl who dies in childbirth. The girl has a diary, written in
Russian, as well as a business card for a well-known Russian restaurant. Anna
is determined to find the girl’s family so that the baby can have a proper home.
She visits the restaurant and meets the manager, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl),
but he is really an elderly but powerful Russian mafia chief. Semyon has a
brash and reckless son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), who runs brothels in London
stocked with women trafficked from Russia. The family’s bodyguard/chauffeur is
Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). He is a formidable killer who insists he’s “just the
driver,” and yet there is something good inside Nikolai that transcends his
menace. As Anna digs deeper into the mystery, she discovers the truth about the
organized crime going on in her city, and she also develops a dangerous mutual
attraction with Nikolai. When Kirill authorizes a hit on a rival Chechen gangster
without Semyon’s approval, a war between the two groups ensues, and Anna and
her parents are caught in the middle.
Eastern
Promises,
written by Steven Knight, is one of the better organized crime pictures ever
made. Cronenberg and Knight seriously did a deep-dive into the realism of the
piece, and star Mortensen went so far as to hang out with real Russian mafia
soldiers to learn the lingo and especially study the all-important tattoos that
adorn the men’s bodies.
Viggo
Mortensen is fabulous in his portrayal and he was Oscar-nominated for his
efforts. For this reviewer’s money, he should have won (Daniel Day-Lewis scored
the trophy for There Will Be Blood). For the fight scene in the bath house
alone, in which an entirely nude Mortensen fights two clothed men armed with
knives, the actor deserved every accolade on the planet. The sequence is the
centerpiece of the film, and it’s one of the best directed and choreographed
fight scenes of the last twenty years.
Watts
is terrific, as always, and Mueller-Stahl delivers a chilling turn, too. However,
the movie belongs to Mortensen and to director Cronenberg.
For
Kino Lorber’s HDR Dolby Vision Master of the movie, Peter Suschitzky approved
and color graded his own cinematography. It looks simply marvelous. There are
several short vintage featurettes included as supplements, also in HD: interviews
with writer Knight and director Cronenberg; a piece on the tattoos and their
significance; and looks at the bath house scene and Naomi Watts’ motorcycle
riding, plus two theatrical trailers and other Kino Lorber trailers.
Eastern
Promises is
for fans of riveting crime dramas, the films of David Cronenberg, actor Viggo
Mortensen, and actress Naomi Watts. Highly recommended.
By
1939, comic superstar W. C. Fields (real name William Claude Dukenfield) had a
love-hate relationship with Hollywood. While he was still something of a box
office draw and enjoyed immense popularity, Fields’ relationship with the
bottle was causing more problems for the actor, and he had lost his contract
with Paramount, the home of his earlier talkies. After a resurgence in
admiration due to radio broadcasts with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (and his
dummy partner, Charlie McCarthy), Fields signed a new contract with Universal.
The first picture out of the gate was a team-up with Fields and Bergen/McCarthy.
You
Can’t Cheat an Honest Man can’t be counted among Fields’ best pictures, but it’s
entertaining and funny enough. It is arguable that Bergen and McCarthy steal
the show based on Bergen’s charm and good looks, and Bergen’s is the most
likable character in the story. While Fields has some great signature lines in
the picture, Bergen and McCarthy have a great deal of funny dialogue.
The
movie’s story is by Fields (using the pseudonym Charles Bogle), with a
screenplay by Everett Freeman, Richard Mack, and George Marion, Jr. George
Marshall received screen credit as director, although historians have claimed
that Marshall and Fields did not get along. Hence, Edward F. Cline was brought
in to exclusively work with Fields on his scenes; Cline was then hired to
direct Fields’ next films with Universal. Furthermore, second unit director B.
Reeves Eason did more than his share of action and chase sequences. Remarkably,
the film, with three directors, came out all right.
Fields
is Larsen E. Whipsnade (Larsen E.? Get it?), a traveling circus proprietor who
cheats his own staff by not paying them. The law is after him, too, and the
circus is one step away from bankruptcy. He has grown children not involved in
the circus—Vicky (Constance Moore) and Phineas (John Arledge). Phineas wants
Vicky to marry wealthy but boring socialite Roger Bel-Goodie (James Bush) so
that Phineas can get a job in Roger’s company, but Vicky isn’t keen. When she
visits her father at the circus, Vicky meets Edgar Bergen (playing himself, as
one of the circus acts), who is never without his dummy, Charlie. Edgar
immediately falls for Vicky, and while Whipsnade has no problem with Edgar, he
can’t stand Charlie (a “termite’s flophouse!”). Vicky eventually agrees to
marry Roger in order to become wealthy enough to save her father’s circus.
During the final half hour of the film, Vicky and Roger’s engagement party at
the posh Bel-Goodie mansion becomes a chaotic disruption as Whipsnade manages
to insult and frighten the elder Bel-Goodies, while Edgar/Charlie have been
cast adrift in a weather balloon. Will Vicky and Edgar get together? Will the
circus be saved? Who cares, it’s all just a vehicle for the brilliance of W. C.
Fields’ comedic antics and Edgar Bergen’s talent at ventriloquism.
Kino
Lorber’s new Blu-ray 2K master looks and sounds fine, certainly an upgrade from
previous DVD releases. There is an informative and humorous audio commentary by
film historian Michael Schlesinger, plus the theatrical trailers for this and
other Kino Lorber releases.
You
Can’t Cheat an Honest Man is for fans of W. C. Fields, Edgar Bergen, and late 1930s
Hollywood comedy. As Larsen E. Whipsnade’s grandfather Litvak used to say, “You
can’t cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a
chump.”
Finally,
a high definition Blu-ray disk of Robert Redford’s 1980 masterpiece, Ordinary
People, has been released. To date, the film has existed on home video only
on VHS and DVD, and the new Paramount Presents edition is most welcome.
People
was
Redford’s directorial debut, and at the time audiences and critics expected it
to be good, but they didn’t count on it being that good. It took the
Best Picture prize at the Academy Awards, along with a trophy for Redford for
Direction, one for Alvin Sargent’s Adapted Screenplay (based on Judith Guest’s
wonderful novel), and a most deserved Supporting Actor Oscar for Timothy
Hutton. Granted, Hutton’s character, Conrad Jarrett, is really the protagonist,
i.e., the lead in the movie, so it’s one of those infuriating cases in
which an actor is nominated in the wrong category. (That said, there’s no way
Hutton would have won over Robert De Niro’s blistering once-in-a-lifetime
performance in Raging Bull, so the studio was smart to offer up Hutton
in the Supporting category, where he’d have a better than fighting chance.)
Mary
Tyler Moore also received a nomination for Best Actress, and Judd Hirsch a nod
for Supporting Actor (competing with Hutton). They are both brilliant, too.
Moore plays against type, portraying a woman with a cold heart who has
forgotten—or never knew—how to love, and Hirsch is the psychiatrist with whom
we all would want to spend two sessions a week. Missing from the Oscar awards
tally was Donald Sutherland, who, for this reviewer’s money, provides the
performance of his career. In many ways, he’s the center of the picture. We
slowly see that his stable assuredness is also cracking from the pretense going
in his family. Why Sutherland wasn’t at least nominated is a head-scratcher.
The
story is about a mid-to-upper class family living in the Chicago suburb of Lake
Forest. Everything should be as Beth Jarrett (Moore) believes it is—that their
family is happy and their world is perfect. “Neat and easy,” as her husband,
Calvin (Sutherland), describes how she keeps their lives. But under the
polished veneer, all is not well. Not one bit. The Jarretts recently
experienced a tragedy. The oldest son, Buck, drowned in a boating accident
while out on the water with his younger brother, Conrad (Hutton). Not long
afterwards, Conrad attempted suicide and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for
four months. Now he’s home, and Conrad is having a very difficult time
adjusting. He can’t relate the way he once did to his high school buddies. He
can’t feel as if he’s part of the school swim team, the way he could prior to
the incident. Worst of all, his relationship with his mother has deteriorated. Calvin
can see the conflict between them and does his best to play referee and
understanding father, but this only begins to drive a wedge between him and
Beth. It’s only after Conrad starts seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Berger (Hirsch),
that the teenager embarks on an excruciating but necessary emotional journey
toward wellness.
The
script is an honest and canny depiction of how families bury truths and put up
facades. Redford’s direction is sensitively nuanced, and the acting all around
is impeccable. This is powerful stuff. Ordinary People also provides one
of the better positive depictions of psychiatry ever put on celluloid, and this
reviewer challenges anyone viewing the film not to have welling eyes during the
scene in which Dr. Berger tells Conrad, “I’m your friend.”
Beyond
the quartet of principle stars, Elizabeth McGovern is striking as a high school
romantic interest for Conrad, a young Adam Baldwin is effective as one of the
teen swim team pals, M. Emmet Walsh has a turn as the clueless swimming coach,
and Dinah Manoff has a short but significant scene as a fellow hospital
patient, now out in the real world like Conrad.
But
the movie belongs to Timothy Hutton. Ordinary People was his first
feature film (he had made only one television movie earlier in the year, and
appeared uncredited, briefly, as a child in a picture in the 1960s.) His Conrad
is a virtuoso piece of acting.
The
Paramount Presents feature is remastered from a new 4K film transfer overseen
by Redford, and it looks crisp and colorful. The only supplements are two new,
short featurettes with interviews with Hutton and author Judith Guest, plus the
theatrical trailer.
Ordinary
People merited
every honor it received. It is an emotional roller-coaster that elevates the
Hollywood family drama to an unprecedented high. Enthusiastically recommended.
Some
personal observations and opinions here. There have been critics over the years
(Siskel and Ebert, for example) who have claimed that Ordinary People “stole”
the Oscar from Raging Bull, which is often cited not only as the “best”
movie of 1980, but of the entire 1980s decade.
I
love Raging Bull and consider it a magnificent example of bravura
filmmaking from Martin Scorsese. It’s slick, gorgeously shot in black and
white, brilliantly edited (by Oscar winner Thelma Schoonmaker), and it contains
not only powerhouse performances by Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty in supporting
roles, but the crowning screen appearance of Robert De Niro’s career. There is
no question that De Niro’s Jake LaMotta is one of the most accomplished acting
displays ever.
Yes,
Raging Bull is a great film… and I also find it unpleasant as hell. The
brutality is visceral, and of course, that’s the point. It’s about a man who can’t
control his rage. I may love the film, but I can’t say I enjoy it,
if that makes any sense.
Ordinary
People
is not a happy story, either—that’s true. While it’s without physical violence,
it is an emotionally violent tale; but it is so elegantly rendered with
intelligence and, yes, beauty, that I, personally, am always movedby
it. For me, it tugs at the heartstrings and the tear ducts. And while the fate
of the tale’s family is a tragedy, there is the hint of hope at the end that
all will be well for young Conrad Jarrett. I adore Ordinary People more
every time I see it.
Ordinary People deserved the Oscar for Best Picture in 1980.
A
Star is Born has
been made many times—as four Hollywood feature films, one television movie, and
one Bollywood picture. The 1937 original, produced by David O. Selznick,
directed by William A. Wellman, is often forgotten amongst the more recent
versions, such as the celebrated 2018 remake starring Lady Gaga and Bradley
Cooper.
For
this reviewer’s money, the 1937 A Star is Born is superior to them all.
Granted, it is obviously dated and one must place oneself within the context of
the period in which the movie was released. It is also not a musical, as all
the others are. The first version also deals exclusively with the motion
picture industry. The second one, released in 1954 and starring Judy Garland
and James Mason, did as well… but following adaptations went more into the
music professions of the characters and incorporated Grammy Awards rather than
Oscars. If you want A Star is Born without musical numbers, and there is
ample support that the piece works more realistically without them, then the
1937 version is for you.
The
Oscar winning story, by William A. Wellman and Robert Carson, was the basis of
all the remakes, but here it was the origin, turned into a screenplay by Carson,
Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell. The tale is by now familiar ground—a young
woman becomes a star overnight while simultaneously her husband experiences ruin.
A rise and a fall, all in lovely Technicolor!
Esther
Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is an innocent but bright-eyed farmgirl who is intent
on making her way to Hollywood to become an actress. Against her father and
aunt’s wishes, but encouraged by her grandmother, Esther leaves the nest and
goes to Tinsel Town. She quickly learns that things are not so easy. With the
help of a neighbor, Danny (Andy Devine), who happens to be an assistant
director, she is placed in positions where she can “meet” people. Sure enough, she
encounters a big star, Norman Maine (Fredric March). Unfortunately, Norman’s
glory days seem to be behind him as the bottle has dictated a gradual descent in
popularity. Nevertheless, Norman is struck by Esther and finagles a screen test
for her with his producer, Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou). Oliver immediately
sees Esther’s potential, gives her the more marketable name of “Vicki Lester,” and
she is off and running. Promising to quit drinking, Norman asks Esther to marry
him, and she accepts. But as Esther/Vicki becomes more successful, Norman falls
off the wagon and their relationship goes off the rails.
There
is one scene that exists in all the versions of A Star is Born, and that
is when the husband embarrasses his wife during her moment of triumph at an
awards ceremony—here the event is the Oscars, as it is in the 1954 edition. The
moment is powerful and excruciating, and it is one of the reasons both Gaynor
and March were nominated for Best Actor and Actress for the film.
Producer
Selznick was known for overseeing lavish, gorgeous productions, and A Star
is Born fits the bill. Beautifully photographed in that distinctive, vivid
1930s Technicolor by W. Howard Greene (who received an Honorary Oscar for his
achievement), the picture displays the glitz and glamour of that bygone,
mythical Hollywood era. Director Wellman was nominated for his efforts, and the
movie was up for Best Picture (the category was called Best Production then).
Gaynor
is especially good, and March is always brilliant. The supporting cast—Menjou,
Devine, May Robson, Lionel Stander, and Edgar Kennedy—is stellar.
The
picture, while assuredly a drama that takes a hard look at the alcoholism
destroying Maine, is also striking for the amount of humor it contains. There
are many Hollywood in-jokes, such as when Gaynor impersonates several leading
actresses of the day when she is waitressing at a star-studded party. Stander,
Devine, and Kennedy, known for their comedic turns, also provide much of the
levity.
The
Warner Archive Blu-ray is a new, meticulous 4K restoration from the original
nitrate Technicolor camera negative, and it looks absolutely fantastic. In
keeping with Warner disks that employ “A Night at the Movies” supplements, this
one contains a treasure trove of extras. The 1938 cartoon, “A Star is Hatched,”
is one of those Looney Tunes that features Hollywood star caricatures, and it’s
hilarious. A 1937 comic short featuring Joe Palooka and Shemp Howard, “Taking
the Count,” is amusing, and two other vintage shorts—“Mal Hallett and His
Orchestra” and “Alibi Mark”—are also entertaining and indicative of the type of
fare one would see at the theater in those days. The disk also incudes two
different Lux Radio Theater broadcasts of the story—one from 1937 featuring
Janet Gaynor and Robert Montgomery, and one from 1952 starring Judy Garland and
Walter Pidgeon. The theatrical trailer rounds out the package.
This
new region-free Blu-ray edition from Warner Archive is a must for fans of any version
of A Star is Born. The 1937 original, though, is and will always be
grand entertainment. Highly recommended.
(NOTE:
Much of this review is repeated from an earlier Cinema Retro review of a
previous Blu-ray release.)
In
the world of the Jewish Conservative Orthodox community, a divorce is truly
final only when the husband presents his wife with a “get”—a document in Hebrew
that grants the woman her freedom to be with other men. Likewise, the wife must
accept the get before the man can re-marry, too.
This
is the crux of the story behind Hester
Street, an independent art-house film that appeared in 1975, written and
directed by Joan Micklin Silver. Starring Carol Kane, who was nominated for
Best Actress for her performance as Gitl, a newly arrived immigrant to New York
City in 1896, and Steven Keats as her husband Yankl, who, in an attempt to
assimilate, in public goes by the name “Jake.” Jake has been in America for a
while and isn’t looking forward to the arrival of his wife and son from Europe,
for he has begun an affair with a wealthy, assimilated actress in the Yiddish
theatre named Mamie. When the very traditional Gitl arrives with her son, the
marriage disintegrates.
Luckily,
Gitl meets Bernstein, an Orthodox man who is much more suited for her
requirements, seeing that Jake has become something of a capitalist cad.
Therefore, she needs a “get” from Jake so that both husband and wife can
divorce and go their separate ways. That’s when Mamie’s money comes into play.
Silver
beautifully rendered this period drama on a miniscule budget. Location shooting
took place in and around New York’s lower east side, where much of the flavor
of the late 19th Century Jewish Orthodox community is still pretty much the
same. Replace the cars with horses and buggies, get the correct vintage
costumes, and you’re more than halfway there. The dialogue is mostly in Yiddish
(with English subtitles), thus making it an American foreign language film—an
oddity in 1975, to be sure (although Coppola’s The Godfather Part II appeared a year earlier with a great amount
of its dialogue spoken in Sicilian).
Keats
plays Jake as a rake and a rascal, but our perception of him is not that of a
villain. In many ways, he is the generic immigrant who came to America and
sincerely tried to assimilate, become “American,” and leave the Old Country
traditions behind. His fault is that he dreams of making big money in the States and this becomes his all-consuming desire,
forgetting that he has a wife and son. Kane’s character and spot-on portrayal
not only illustrates the role of females in the Orthodox community, but in many
ways is a commentary on the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
Hester Street is a terrific little
film that went out of print on DVD years ago and became a collector’s item on
the resale market until a Blu-ray release appeared in 2015. With that also now
out of print, Cohen Media Group has issued a welcome new edition in a 4K
restoration. Filmed in black and white by Kenneth Van Sickle, the picture is
grainy and flat—much like the early silent cinema of the that era!—which
actually is quite appropriate for the movie’s setting. That said, the new
restoration considerably sharpens the images and the display is the best seen
since the movie’s 1975 theatrical release. The feature comes with an archival
audio commentary with director Silver and producer Raphael D. Silver.
Also
new to this release is supplementary material not present on the previous
Blu-ray. Approximately eight minutes of an alternate opening sequence, with
commentary by Daniel Kremer (author of an upcoming book about Silver and her
work), is an interesting find. There are two relatively recent video
conversations with director Silver and film historian Shonni Enelow about the
making of Hester Street and Silver’s career as a filmmaker (Silver died
in 2020). There are also vintage interviews with Carol Kane, Doris Roberts, and
both Joan and Raphael Silver, likely ported over from the old DVD release. The restoration
trailer rounds out the package.
Hester Street is an excellent synagogue
discussion-group item for American Jews who want to explore the immigration
scene and the topics of tradition and assimilation; but it is also a good
educational piece for non-Jews who want to learn a little bit about New York
history and the Jewish Orthodox religion. Recommended.
(Alan Ladd Jr. has passed away at the age of 84. In his honor, we're republishing Todd Garbarini's interview with him which originally ran in November, 2020.)
BY TODD GARBARINI
If you ask the average movie fan who Alan Ladd, Jr. is, you will
more than likely be greeted with a blank stare. Some might say, “Oh yeah, he
was in Shane!â€, erroneously thinking of his movie star father. If you
asked a movie fan who Laddie is, they would probably think you were referring
to that old TV show about the border collie. The truth is, “Laddie†is an
affectionate industry nickname for Alan Ladd, Jr., a man who grew up in and
made his profession in the movie business and has produced some of the greatest
and most successful films of all-time, including the Oscar-winning films The
Omen (1976), Chariots of Fire (1981) and Braveheart (1995). Arguably
his greatest professional decision was saying “yes†to George Lucas when all of
Tinseltown said “no†to his science fiction tale of a young man looking to
battle the Galactic Empire using a mysterious power known as The Force. The
Oscar-winning Star Wars (1977) paved the way for another film
green-lighted by Laddie, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
A man of few words who prefers to work quietly under the radar and
on his own terms, Laddie is the subject of a new, award-winning documentary, Laddie,
The Man Behind The Movies, directed by his daughter, Amanda Ladd-Jones,
containing interviews with George
Lucas, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Affleck, Ron Howard, Morgan Freeman,
Mel Brooks, and Richard Donner to name a few, and has won the Best Documentary
Award at the 2019 Julien Dubuque International Film Festival, as well as
received nominations for Best Documentary and Best Film at both the 2018 Milano
International Film Festival Awards (MIFF Awards) and the 2018 NewFilmmakers Los
Angeles.
I spoke with Laddie about his career and Amanda on how the project
got started and became a reality.
Alan Ladd, Jr.: Rabbi Jacob, wow, I don’t even remember
what that was about!
Amanda Ladd-Jones: I never even heard of that movie! (laughs)
Todd Garbarini: It’s a hilarious slapstick comedy starring a very funny
French film actor, Louis de Funès, who unfortunately
passed away in 1983 at age 59. The film was subtitled, though I don’t recall
being able to read at the time! I was five years old and I just responded to
the onscreen action. The film revolves around all these shenanigans that he
finds himself in. It played here and there on the film repertoire circuit in
the 1980’s in New York, and I managed to see it again in August 1995 at the
Walter Reade Theatre near Lincoln Center.
Alan Ladd, Jr.:I’m glad that you liked it!
Todd Garbarini: Given
that your father, Alan Ladd, was a prominent film actor, do you personally feel
that it was inevitable that you would follow him into the film industry in some
capacity?
Alan
Ladd, Jr.:I guess so, since I was around it, and he sort of led me in
that direction. However, I never received any encouragement from him. I
always felt that I would be involved in movies somehow, but I didn’t know
exactly what it was I was actually going to do. I tried to be an assistant
director, but I couldn’t get into the Directors Guild. I tried to get into
editing, but I couldn’t get into the Editors Guild, either. So, I basically
ended up where I ended up through sheer luck more than anything else. There
weren’t any real options available, so I started off as an agent and then
worked my way up to film producer and then ultimately to studio head (of 20th
Century Fox).
Amanda Ladd-Jones: It’s probably safe to say that the Directors
Guild and the Editors Guild are lamenting the decisions that they made. They
probably could have collected some dues off of you!
Alan Ladd, Jr.:Well, they could have collected the dues,
yes, but I don’t know how the hell else they would have gotten anything else
out of me! (laughs)
Todd Garbarini: You’re described by Wikipedia as being a “film
industry executive and producer.†How do those roles differ?
Alan Ladd, Jr.:Well, an executive and a producer are
essentially the same thing. You basically have to try and find good material
and put it together and ultimately try and make the movie.
Amanda Ladd-Jones: The big difference between the two is that as
an executive, you have a steady paycheck!
Todd Garbarini: What would you say are some of the more difficult
aspects of being a producer, from your experience?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: For me, finding good material is ultimately the
most difficult aspect of the job. Once you do find really good material, then everything
else more or less just falls into place.
Todd Garbarini: In the pre-Internet days of mining and sourcing potential
material for a film, how did you go about finding good material? Did you sort
it out by reading books or reviews of books? Did you sort through
screenplays?
Alan
Ladd, Jr: It was a combination all of that, really. I
began my career as an agent in 1963 and I did that for a long time. It was
something that I enjoyed very much. As an agent, you learn a lot. You learn a
lot about how good deals are made and how bad deals are made. You learn to work
with the talent you represent, and you find out early on that they are just as
insecure as you are. These people may be famous stars, but they had their
insecurities and problems just like anybody else does.
Todd Garbarini: The 1970’s is, for me, the greatest decade in the
history of the American Cinema and William Friedkin’s The French Connection
from 1971 is my favorite movie of all-time. The outpouring of exceptional films
that were produced during this time was unbelievable. Star Wars was the
obvious watershed and May 25, 1977, the day of its release, is also known as
The Day the Movies Died, which I don’t feel is a fair assessment of the film’s
artistic accomplishments and intake at the box office. How did you come to meet
the film’s director, George Lucas?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: Well, Universal sent me a print of a movie he just
finished called American Graffiti. Universal didn't like the movie at
all and they had absolutely no desire to release it. So, they sent me a print
because they were really interested in getting the movie off their hands. They
wanted to sell it. So, I took a look at it at seven o’clock one morning, which
is really too early to be watching anything. I was very impressed with
it right off the bat. I thought the casting was terrific and I really liked the
way that George put the music in. So, I was impressed with the whole thing and
I called his agent and told him that I wanted to buy the film. Of course, once
I said that, Universal suddenly decided that if somebody wanted to actually buy
it that must mean that it must be good! So, they held onto it and decided to
release it themselves. It went on to be a very successful movie and made a lot
of money for Universal. Regardless, I still wanted to meet with George. We went
out for a drink and had a nice conversation. I asked him if he was working on
anything at the moment, and he told me that he had this idea for a movie that
was called Adventures of the Starkiller as taken
from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. It went through many variations and had different titles. He later
wrote several different drafts which I heard about, but I never read them. He
wrote one draft that featured a lot of little people. That eventually morphed
into (Ron Howard’s 1988 film) Willow. So, eventually he produced Star
Wars, which is the script of the movie that we now have. At the time, though,
he gave me an earlier draft that ran nearly two hundred pages. I said, “George
this is ridiculous. This is going to be a five-hour movie!†He said, “No, it's
going to be two hours.†I said okay. He obviously knew more than I did! So, we
shot the film and it did come in just a few minutes over two hours. It was
obvious to me that he had written a script that was more for a director than it
was for me. I saw the film as it was being made. Several times, as I flew to
London to watch them shooting it.
Todd Garbarini: How difficult was it to get Star Wars made
at a time when science fiction films just weren’t big box office draws?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: It wasn't very difficult, really. It did go
considerably over budget which was difficult to explain. I mean, how do you
explain Wookies and droids to a board of directors? They don’t have any idea
what the hell you’re talking about. I’m sure it all sounded very crazy to them.
The film kept going over budget and the board kept demanding explanations for
that. At times, it was more difficult to keep the movie going than it was to just
get it going.
Todd Garbarini: That sounds like Jaws and what Steven
Spielberg went through on the set of that film, with Richard Zanuck and David
Brown trying to keep production afloat, no pun intended! What was your
reaction to the initial and explosive successive of Star Wars?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: It was wonderful. I remember thinking at the time,
Wow!
One
of the more popular Hollywood movies of 1954 was The Country Girl,
written and directed by George Seaton, adapted from a stage play by Clifford
Odets. The Academy liked it well enough to nominate it for Best Picture,
Director, Actor (Bing Crosby), Black and White Art Direction, and Black and
White Cinematography (John F. Warren). The movie won Oscars for Actress
(Grace Kelly) and for the Adapted Screenplay by Seaton.
The
Academy sure loves it when a beautiful actress dispenses with any hint of
glamour and presents herself in a dowdy, plain, or even “ugly†appearance. And
while Grace Kelly could never not be beautiful, her role as Georgie
Elgin is not known to emphasize her timeless attractiveness and sensuality.
Furthermore, she delivers an outstanding performance that was good enough to surpass
the likes of Judy Garland (A Star is Born), Dorothy Dandridge (Carmen
Jones), Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina), and Jane Wyman (Magnificent
Obsession). Whether or not Kelly deserved the awardr over these four equally
superb performances is one of those forever debatable Oscar quandaries.
Besides
Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, The Country Girl features a fine
performance by William Holden, who is really the protagonist of the film (oddly
placed at third billing). The movie is basically a triangle between the trio,
with Kelly’s Georgie as the object of both conflict and adoration between the
two men.
Bernie
Dodd (Holden) is a successful Broadway theater director, whose new musical, The
Land Around Us, has lost its leading man after one week of rehearsals.
Scrambling to replace him, Dodd wants Frank Elgin (Crosby), but producer Philip
Cook (Anthony Ross) objects. Elgin is allegedly a washed up alcoholic who could
no longer carry an entire production. Nevertheless, Dodd gets his way and Elgin
is hired. It soon becomes apparent that Elgin is completely dependent on his
younger wife, Georgie (Kelly), to give him moral support, prop him up, keep him
in line, and dictate what he should do or not do. Dodd interprets the couple’s
relationship as detrimental to Elgin, seeing Georgie as the reason for the
actor’s decline. Elgin presents a different position—that Georgie depends on him
and that he could never leave her. Thus, Georgie accompanies her husband to
rehearsals, interferes in production decisions, and annoys both the director
and producer in the process. Things come to a head when Elgin succumbs to the
pressure and starts to drink again. What happens next would spoil the story,
but suffice it to say there is much melodrama, a switcheroo of affections, and backstage
intrigue.
Oh—and
it wouldn’t be a Bing Crosby vehicle without some songs, so musical numbers
were added to the script by Ira Gershwin (lyrics) and Harold Arlen (music) to
accompany Victor Young’s somewhat overwrought score.
The
Country Girl is
pure melodrama, for sure, and all three actors give it their all. Crosby is
quite effective as the pathetic and insecure Elgin, Holden is dynamic and
forceful as Dodd, and, yes, Kelly is full of surprises as the dowdy woman who
in reality is stronger than either man. If anything, the picture is worth
seeing for the three actors that carry it.
While
any motion picture should be evaluated within the context of when it was made
and released, The Country Girl does suffer from being dated in its
sensibilities about marriage and the relationships between men and women. Audiences
today might cringe at the blatant misogyny, especially exuding from Holden’s
character. (In referring to wives, he says they “all start out as Juliets and
wind up as Lady Macbeths.â€) In short, the movie emphasizes the old adage that
“behind every man stands a (fill in the blank) woman.â€
Additionally,
there is a kiss—and subsequent confession of affection—that occurs at a crucial
point in the story that is so unexpected, out of the blue, and unbelievable,
that one wonders if some sort of foreshadowing or clue to this development was
missed. And therein lies the biggest flaw of the film.
Imprint’s
new 1080p high definition presentation in Blu-ray looks quite good, and
Warren’s cinematography wonderfully captures the light and dark of a Broadway
theater (Georgie: “There’s nothing quite so mysterious and silent as a dark
theater, a night without a star.â€) The feature comes with a new audio
commentary by professor and film scholar Jason A. Ney. A 1987 hour-long
documentary, Grace Kelly: An American Princess, is a welcome supplement,
along with a photo gallery and the theatrical trailer.
The
Country Girl is
for fans of Grace Kelly, for sure, as well as Bing Crosby and William Holden,
for fans of Broadway theater storylines, and of 1950s Hollywood melodramas.
The
decade of the 1950s is generally considered to be director Alfred Hitchcock’s
most glorious period, stocked with some of his acknowledged masterpieces of
cinema (Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North
by Northwest, etc.). Those ten years didn’t begin so promisingly, though.
In
the late 1940s, Hitchcock had finally broken away from the smothering contract
he had under producer David O. Selznick, and he had set out with a partner to
form his own production company, Transatlantic. The company made two box office
losers—Rope (1948, a failure despite being quite a good movie), and Under
Capricorn (1949, no question one of the filmmaker’s weakest pictures).
Transatlantic bombed, but Hitchcock continued to work with Warner Brothers, the
studio that had distributed these two titles.
Stage
Fright was
made at Elstree Studios in England and employed an all British crew and cast except for
the two female leads, Jane Wyman (under contract at Warners) and veteran star
Marlene Dietrich. The male leads were filled by reliable Michael Wilding (who
had been in Under Capricorn) and Richard Todd. Stealing the movie in a
supporting role, however, is Alastair Sim, the great comic actor who was very
popular at the time. Oddly, Sim’s first name is misspelled as “Alistair†in the
opening and closing credits of the film!
Eve
(Wyman) is a budding young actress, a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art, whose friend, Jonathan (Todd) has found himself in a pickle. Eve is sweet
on Jonathan, although the relationship is mostly platonic, for Jonathan is in a
relationship with the flamboyant star of the stage, Charlotte Inwood
(Dietrich). The problem there is that Charlotte is married… until her husband
is lying dead on the floor of their house, allegedly killed by Charlotte
herself. Jonathan has helped her cover up the crime, but he believes he was
seen by Charlotte’s housekeeper, Nellie (Kay Walsh). Jonathan, now the prime
suspect, gets Eve to hide him from the police, so Eve enlists her father, the
“Commander†(Sim) to help. Despite the Commander’s doubts as to what really
happened, he dutifully works with his daughter and Jonathan to avoid suspicion
from Detective Smith (Wilding). As the plot unfolds, Eve decides to do some
investigating herself and manages to bribe Nellie to go away for a while, and
Eve takes her place as Charlotte’s new Cockney housekeeper, “Doris.†Things get
complicated when Eve begins to fall for Detective Smith (and he for her). Eventually,
of course, the truth is discovered and the real killer is pursued through a
theatre building in grand Hitchcock style.
When
Stage Fright was first released, it received some criticism because the
film begins with a flashback narrated by Jonathan, explaining what happened at
Charlotte’s house with footage that “re-enacts†the crime. It’s not a spoiler
to say that this flashback turns out to be untrue. Hitchcock deliberately lets
us believe events occurred, when they really didn’t. Audiences and critics at
the time felt this was something of a cheat. However, this is a perfect example
of a trend that has cropped up in film and mystery novels quite often in the
last twenty years—the “unreliable narrator.†Is Stage Fright the first
instance in which the unreliable narrator device was used in cinema? Perhaps
not, but in 1950, it was perceived as new and unsettling. Now, this device is
fairly commonplace. It just goes to show how Hitchcock really was ahead of his
time!
That
said, Stage Fright is only middle-tier Hitchcock. It never reaches the
highs of the later masterpieces of the 50s mentioned earlier. The plot is
rather unbelievable, especially when Eve pretends to be the Cockney maid and
becomes a sleuth on her own. Wyman is fine in the role, but one questions her common
sense in sticking with Jonathan and his legal problems. The great Marlene Dietrich
performs exactly how one would expect… as the great Marlene Dietrich. She
exudes a deliciously sinister subtext to her actions, but we can see right
through it from the beginning. Richard Todd is never believable as an innocent
man, and this is a stickler. However, Alastair Sim is such a delight as Eve’s
crafty father that the movie is worth a watch just for him. Even weak Hitchcock
can be good fun.
Warner
Archive’s new Blu-ray release is a port-over from their previous DVD edition
from several years ago. The feature film looks marvelous in glorious black and
white high definition, and the London and English countryside locations are a
treat. The supplement “making of†documentary is also ported over from the DVD
release, along with the theatrical trailer.
Stage
Fright is
for fans of Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Wyman or Marlene Dietrich, and especially Alastair
Sim.
Click here to order the Region-Free Blu-ray from the Cinema Retro Movie Store.
The
early 1970s was a time of experimentation and risk-taking in Hollywood. Studios
were more willing to allow filmmakers to take a project and run with it, just
to see if something thrown at the wall would stick. After all, this was the
period of “New Hollywood,†maverick young directors just out of film school,
and pushing the envelope when it came to what was permissible on screen since
the Production Code was gone and the relatively new movie ratings were in
place.
Playboy
Enterprises got into the movie making business in the early 70s (see Cinema
Retro Vol. 2, issue #5 from 2006 for the magazine’s exclusive interview with
Hugh M. Hefner about Playboy’s film productions). After the critical success of
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Playboy produced The Naked Ape (1973),
loosely adapted from Desmond Morris’ 1967 best-selling non-fiction book.
Morris’
book was an entertaining anthropological study of man’s evolution from primates
and how social norms and mating rituals, especially between males and females
for procreation, have more or less never changed since prehistoric times.
Morris had relatively nothing to do with the film adaptation, for the
filmmakers decided to make a “hip†comedy out of the concepts in the book,
illustrating how “unchanging evolution†still dictated man’s behavior.
The
idea probably looked good on paper. Perhaps the box office success of Woody Allen’s
loose, comedic adaptation of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972),
which was also parodied a best-selling non-fiction book, was an inspiration. However,
The Naked Ape, directed by avant-garde filmmaker Donald Driver, does not
possess the wit and brilliance of a Woody Allen or a Mel Brooks, who also might
have done wonderful things with the material. Instead, The Naked Ape is
a head-scratching curiosity that might have played somewhat well as a “midnight
movie†for college-age audiences in altered states of consciousness.
Johnny
Crawford (who had played Mark McCain in the TV series The Rifleman, now
grown up and looking hunky and handsome) is Lee, a college student infatuated
with Cathy (Victoria Principal, in an early film appearance), a tour guide in a
natural history museum. Through a series of fantasy vignettes, both live action
and animated, the film takes us through the couple’s courtship, marriage, and
subsequent relationship, as well as Lee’s stint in the army and the pair’s
experience in school (they are in an “erotic literature†class together). The
animations, usually narrated by Cathy, interrupt the flow of the loose storyline
to comment, in a humorous fashion, on the proceedings from an anthropological
viewpoint.
Both
Crawford and Principal are attractive on screen (yes, there is nudity; after
all, this is a Playboy Production), but the script is, frankly, subpar. While the
actors do their best, the movie is just not as clever as it thinks it is. The
animations, made by Murakami-Wolf Studios, are somewhat interesting (Frank
Zappa’s album cover artist, Calvin Schenkel, is one of the animators). Vocal
rock songs by Jimmy Webb help liven up the action.
This
reviewer became friends with Johnny Crawford (who passed away in 2021) over the
years. Crawford was always a kind, soft-spoken gentleman who had numerous
stories about his Hollywood years, such as having a studio mailbox right next
to Joan Crawford’s and the two of them often accidentally receiving each
other’s mail. Whenever The Naked Ape was brought up in conversation,
Crawford would simply shake his head, roll his eyes, and smile.
(Photo courtesy of Raymond Benson.)
Kino
Lorber has distributed Code Red’s presentation of The Naked Ape in 1080p
high definition, and that distinctive 1970s film stock looks good enough. There
are English subtitles for the hearing impaired and a theatrical trailer, but
otherwise no other supplements.
The
Naked Ape is
for fans of Johnny Crawford and/or Victoria Principal, early 70s experimental
films aimed at the college crowd, and, ahem, amateur anthropologists.
I
have long considered Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation to be his
greatest film. The story of a tortured sound recordist, Harry Caul (Gene
Hackman in arguably his greatest screen performance), a man who is disturbed by
the morality and ethics of his profession. He is secretly recording private
citizens in exchange for payment from companies with a vested interest in doing
so and whose actions have resulted in several deaths. The film was a long
gestating project that came about during a 1967 discussion the director had
with fellow director Irvin Kirshner about wiretapping and privacy intrusion.
Following the instant success of the release of The Godfather in March
1972, Mr. Coppola was only given the green light to make The Conversation
for Paramount Pictures after they begged him to direct The Godfather Part II.
One month after the public announcement was made about Mr. Coppola’s mysterious
next film, the Watergate burglary took place. It then came to light that then-President
Richard Nixon had knowingly recorded conversations in the White House,
specifically the Oval Office, as well as over the telephone, of everything regarding
news coverage of the burglary! Who could the public trust? The Conversation
would go on to win the Palme d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and opened
in April 1974 in New York.
Alan
J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, released in New York on Wednesday, June
19, 1974, was one of several films, like The Conversation, to be
released during the post-Watergate era that dealt with systemic national
paranoia concerning the government. In the month of June alone, moviegoers were
treated to Blake Edwards’s The Tamarind Seed, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown,
and this thriller which concerns the mysterious workings of a faceless corporate
entity known as The Parallax Corporation which appears to be behind the assassinations
of political nominees regardless of which side of the aisle they sit on. It is
1971 and Charles Carroll (William Joyce) is campaigning while at a luncheon
atop Seattle’s Space Needle. Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) is covering the event
for a television news story and her ex-boyfriend, newspaper reporter Joe Frady
(Warren Beatty), attempts to gain access to the event but is denied entry when
Carter shrugs him off. An associate of Carroll’s, Austin Tucker (William
Daniels), speaks with Carter in a short on-camera interview. Two
sinister-looking waiters (Bill McKinney and Richard Bull) serve food when
suddenly the former shoots and kills Carroll in front of shocked and horrified
guests. A stomach-churning chase ensues atop the Space Needle and the “waiterâ€
falls to his death.
Three
years later, a shaken Carter goes to Frady and unleashes a tale of paranoia,
revealing that no less than six witnesses at the luncheon have all died under
mysterious circumstances. Frady initially brushes off her concerns until Carter
is found dead less than 24 hours later. Out of guilt, he begins to investigate
the deaths and in a major scene lifted straight from the novel, he nearly dies
himself, outsmarting a sheriff who sets Frady up to be drowned at the hands of a
deluge running out from a dam (in the novel it’s a “helpful hotel managerâ€). Frady
manages to secure documents concerning the Parallax Corporation from the
sheriff’s house and tries to convince his skeptical editor, Bill Rintels (Hume
Cronyn), of the links to the deaths. Frady then turns his attention to Austin
Tucker and accompanies Tucker and his aide/lover on a yacht ride to discuss the
assassinations – until a bomb onboard kills both men and Frady narrowly escapes
by jumping overboard. It seems that wherever Frady goes, a Parallax minion is
not too far behind. This sets in motion a series of near logic-defying events
which results in an ending of
ambivalence.
To
fully appreciate this film in 2022, one needs to be aware of the climate of
fear and panic that must have pervaded the zeitgeist in the 1960s and 1970s
when seemingly no one could be trusted (John Frankenheimer’s 1962 outing The
Manchurian Candidate, based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, was eerily
prescient as was his 1964 classic Seven
Days in May, which centered on a coup attempt to topple the U.S. government).
After the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X in
February 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy
in June 1968, who really could be trusted? The film was shot in the Spring of
1973 while the country was mired in the Watergate scandal, and it points to evil
forces at work that Frady hopes to uncover. In the novel, Frady’s name is
Malcolm Graham and he works in tandem with Austin Tucker, one of the men who
perish on the boat.
The
late author Loren Adelson Singer, who passed away in 2009, had published
several novels, among them That’s the House, There (1973), Boca
Grande (1974), and Making Good (1993). His first work was 1970s The
Parallax View, published by Doubleday. It was written as an answer to his disdain
for the printing business he worked at with his father-in-law and proved to be
enough of a success to permit him to become a paid author. The inspiration for
the book came from the covert operations he assisted in while training with the
Office of Strategic Services and was penned following the high-profile
political assassinations of the 1960s. It also provided the blueprint for the
film which is the second of Mr. Pakula’s informally named “paranoia trilogy,â€
bookended by Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976). All
three films were photographed by the late Gordon Willis. While the first two
were shot in anamorphic Panavision (2.35:1), the third film was shot flat
(1.85:1).
Conspiracy
thrillers of this era concerned with Everyman against the Establishment often
possessed creepy, minimalist musical scores and The Parallax View is no
exception. Michael Small provides an excellent theme on the heels of his work
for Klute prior to passing the baton to David Shire on All the
President’s Men (Mr. Shire coincidentally scored The Conversation
for his then brother-in-lawFrancis Coppola). It is reminiscent of the music he
would later write for John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), yet
another terrific film about paranoia.
One
of actor/comedian Bob Hope’s most cherished films is Monsieur Beaucaire,
a 1946 remake of a Rudolph Valentino silent picture from 1924, both of which are
based on a 1900 novel by Booth Tarkington. Hope’s version, directed by George
Marshall, is certainly a loose adaptation because it turned what was a
historical romantic drama into a flat-out comedy.
Woody
Allen has been known to cite early Bob Hope movies as an inspiration for his
onscreen persona in the director’s early “zany†comedies like Bananas and
Sleeper. When one views something like Monsieur Beaucaire or My
Favorite Blonde (1942), the comparison is strikingly apt. Hope creates a
persona of nervous mannerisms, lack of self confidence masked by bravado, clumsy
but endearing interaction with the opposite sex, and witty one-liners. Beaucaire
exhibits Hope in fine form, producing a good deal of laughs as well as
swashbuckling action.
The
tale is set sometime in the 1700s. Beaucaire (Hope) is the royal barber to King
Louis XV (Reginald Owen). King Philip V (Howard Freeman) of Spain has suggested
a solution to prevent war between their two countries—marrying off Princess
Maria (Marjorie Reynolds) of Spain to a suitor of Louis’ choosing. Louis
decides that Duc le Chandre (Patrick Knowles), a dashing swordsman and lady’s
man, to be the lucky groom. Actually, Louis wants le Chandre out of France
because they both have eyes on the same woman, Madame Pompadour (Hillary
Brooke). Never mind that Louis is still married to the queen (Constance
Collier). Beaucaire is in love with scullery maid Mimi (Joan Caulfield), but
Mimi has loftier goals of seducing the king himself and being one of his mistresses.
After a series of mistaken identities, the king banishing both Mimi and
Beaucaire to Spain for something they didn’t do, and le Chandre being forced to
go into hiding because of another mix-up, the duke and Beaucaire trade places
and travel together while impersonating one another. In Spain, nasty Don
Francisco (Joseph Schildkraut) is determined to stop the marriage between Maria
and le Chandre because he wants war between Spain and France so that he
can usurp his king. Once in Spain, Beaucaire—as le Chandre—must juggle several
risky situations to keep up the subterfuge, help le Chandre and Maria (who do
end up falling in love), and finally win over Mimi.
As
with most Bob Hope vehicles, there are musical numbers, slapstick routines,
and, here, some swashbuckling set pieces, all in period costumes with those
wacky powdered white wigs (in fact, one early comic piece involves Beaucaire,
the king, and the powder). Joan Caulfield is a worthy foil for Hope, and
Patrick Knowles provides adequate straight man/dashing hero duties. The always
reliable Joseph Schildkraut makes a good slimy villain, and there are plenty of
other supporting folks who add merriment to the proceedings. Director Marshall
keeps the picture moving at a brisk pace, and the script by Hope regulars
Melvin Frank and Norman Panama is clever and sharp.
Kino
Lober’s new Blu-ray release is a high definition transfer that looks good and
does the job. Unfortunately, there are no supplements on the disk apart from
theatrical trailers from this and other Bob Hope titles.
Monsieur
Beaucaire is
for fans of Bob Hope, Hollywood comedies of the 1940s, and excuses to while
away approximately 90 minutes with a smile on the face.
One
of the defining Hollywood gangster movies of the 1930s is the magnificent Angels
with Dirty Faces, directed by the versatile Michael Curtiz, and starring
the inimitable James Cagney in a signature role. For years afterwards,
impressionists would perform Cagney’s twitching mannerisms along with the
oft-repeated line in the film, “Whaddaya hear? Whaddaya say?†Cagney would
never live it down.
Interestingly,
Cagney nearly didn’t make the film. He had been afraid that he would be
typecast forever in “tough guy†roles, when at heart he was really a song and
dance man. He had already revealed his diversity to the world after his big
breakthrough in 1931 (The Public Enemy) by appearing in some musicals
like Footlight Parade (1933). However, even pictures like G-Men
(1935), in which Cagney played a law enforcement officer, was still a tough guy
outing for the actor. After some contract and studio conflicts, walking away
from Warner Brothers, further haggling, and the actor’s eventual return, Cagney
finally accepted the part of Rocky Sullivan.
In
the story’s ending, Sullivan is to be executed in the electric chair, and his Catholic
priest best friend, Father Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien) convinces him to “act
like a coward†so that his influence on younger hoodlums (played by the “Dead
End Kidsâ€) would be broken and they would no longer emulate him. At first Cagney
didn’t think that was a good idea for his tough guy image on screen, even
though he really wanted to get away from it. Then he came to his senses and
realized this was an opportunity to stretch his acting chops and show the
audiences yet another side of James Cagney—emotion and tears. As a result, the
actor received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for Angels
with Dirty Faces.
Rocky
and Jerry are juvenile delinquents in the early 1920s (uncannily cast by
younger lookalike actors Frankie Burke and William Tracy, respectively). Rocky
gets sent to reform school and then later is arrested for armed robbery. His
co-conspirator in that job was lawyer/gangster Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart, in
one of his pre-star gangster roles) who convinces Rocky to take the rap.
Frazier promises to give him $100,000 of the stolen money upon Rocky’s release.
Now, years later in the 30s, Rocky is free and he wants his money. Jerry has
become a priest who oversees the parish where the Dead End Kids (Billy Halop,
Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, and Bernard Punsly) are
teenagers on their way to become professional gangsters. Rocky becomes a mentor
to them, much to Jerry’s chagrin. Also in the mix is Laury (Ann Sheridan),
Rocky’s love interest who has known him since they were kids and is now his
landlady. When Rocky goes to Frazier to get his money, trouble ensues, for
Frazier has become more corrupt. Rather than give Rocky the money that he was
promised, Frazier would rather bump off the guy. Rocky, despite pleas from
Jerry and Laury, declares war on Frazier and his underground syndicate.
Angels
with Dirty Faces is
successful on all counts, from the casting and acting, the direction, and the
writing (by John Wexley and Warren Duff, from a story by Rowland Brown). As
mentioned, Cagney received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Curtiz received a
Best Director nomination and had to compete with himself, for he was also
nominated for Four Daughters the same year! These were Curtiz’s first
official nominations—he had been a “write-in†candidate in 1935 for Captain
Blood. Rowland Brown also received a nomination for Best Story (a category
that no longer exists). For this reviewer’s money, the movie itself should have
been a Best Picture nominee.
A
word about the Dead End Kids… These talented young actors got their start in
Sidney Kingsley’s 1935 Broadway play, Dead End, which was made into a
film in 1937 by United Artists. Because the actors were troublemakers on the
set, their contract was sold to Warner Brothers, where the boys made six
features in two years, including Angels with Dirty Faces. In 1939,
Warners kicked them out because of more destructive antics on the sets. This
didn’t end their careers, though. Other studios picked them up in various configurations
and names—the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys. In
total they made 89 feature films!
The
new Warner Archive Blu-ray is a direct port-over from the studio’s previous DVD
edition, except that the feature film is in high definition and looks marvelous
in glorious black and white. It comes with a commentary by film historian Dana
Polan. The supplements are one of Warner’s Leonard Maltin-hosted “Night at the
Movies†compilation that mimics what audiences might have seen in 1938 when
going to the theater. It begins with a newsreel, followed by a musical short
(“Out Where the Stars Beginâ€), a cartoon (“Porky and Daffyâ€), a theatrical
trailer, and finally the feature film. There is also a featurette about the
movie, and an audio-only radio production with the film’s two stars.
Angels
with Dirty Faces is
grand entertainment, a representation of the Golden Age of Hollywood at its
best, with a magnificent James Cagney performance, and exciting, riveting
gangster flick action. Don’t miss it.
In
an isolated theatre, a group of young performers is being drilled by a
tyrannical director with a passion for the dark and twisted. This new
production appears to be an all-dancing musical extravaganza filled with rape, murder,
and saxophone solos. Unknown to everyone involved however, the lead actor under
the giant owl head (don’t ask) has been offed and replaced by an actual crazed
serial killer who then proceeds to pick off the attractive cast and crew one by
one whilst they search helplessly for a way out of the theatre to alert the
police outside. Think the Friday the 13th franchise meets the
kids from Fame .
This
suspenseful, entertaining slasher from Italy (but shot entirely in English and
presented as though this is happening New York) was something of
a staple in the VHS days and now a new audience will be able to discover it
thanks to this 4K director-approved restoration from Shameless Screen Entertainment.
Also
known as Aquarius or Deliera, Stagefright was the feature
directorial debut of Dario Argento acolyte Michele Soavi, who had a run of
spectacular and operatic horror films during the last gasp of the Italian genre
film industry in the tail end of the 1980s. He was seen as something of a
natural successor to Argento. Having worked as an actor and assistant director
on a number of hit Italian genre films like City of the Living Dead
(1980, Lucio Fulci), Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento) and Demons
(1985, Lamberto Bava), as well as on the epic Terry Gilliam production The Adventures
of Baron Munchausen (1988), Soavi was well experienced in putting the
grotesque and the fantastical onto the big screen. The success of Stagefright
enabled him to move onto bigger, weirder and more ambitions films like The
Church (1989), The Sect (1991) and Cemetery Man (1994) [which
are also all available on Blu-ray from Shameless] and he continues to work
today in a very successful television career in Italy.
As
well as a spectacular visual and audio restoration, this new Blu-ray (with an
O-ring and reversible sleeve featuring two kinds of original artwork) also
features a long and insightful interview with Michele Soavi himself, as well as
interviews with Irish star David Brandon, no stranger to Italian genre cinema
during his long career, and Italian supporting actor Giovanni Lombado Radice,
who has possibly had more gory onscreen deaths than any other actor of his
generation. All three of these interviews are as entertaining as Stagefright
itself.
Produced
by Joe D’Amato and written by George Eastman, with a score featuring Guido
Anelli and Stefano Mainetti, this film is Italian through and through yet still
captures something of that 1980s New York off-Broadway spirit in its
pretentious director and young cast’s highs and lows, where the backstage
dramas threaten to overshadow the show itself even before the crazed owl-headed
killer turns up with an attitude and a chainsaw.
Stagefright is available now. Click here to order. (Please note: this is a Region 2, PAL format release.)
The
mid-1960s were full of motion pictures that capitalized on the exotic,
globe-trotting James Bond adventures. Even if they weren’t particularly spy
films, they had the same flavor, or at least they attempted to capture a
similar magic. Cinema Retro has reviewed several of these movies in
recent weeks (e.g., Masquerade, Arabesque), and Gambit,
released in 1966, is another one.
Directed
by Ronald Neame, Gambit is a top notch caper flick, and a clever one to
boot. Written by Jack Davies and Alvin Sargent, from a story by Sidney Carroll,
the film might remind viewers of the excellent Topkapi (1964), which was
also an international heist tale.
Shirley
MacLaine receives top billing over the up-and-comer Michael Caine, whose star
was rising rapidly in those days. They make a wonderful pair, and the film’s
electricity derives solely from their chemistry together. Add the shrewd
script, Neame’s able direction, a lively score by the great Maurice Jarre, and
beautifully faked foreign locations (the movie was made in Hollywood, despite a
few second unit establishing shots), and the results are a winner.
One
of the more unique things about the script is that the first twenty minutes or
so depict the caper as it is planned to work. The entire heist is acted
out without a hitch, and our protagonists get away with a priceless antiquity.
But all that was only Harry’s (Caine) plot, being told to his accomplice, Emile
(John Abbott). The rest of the movie is the enactment of that plan, which of
course, goes wrong every step of the way. This is a movie about being forced to
throw the plan out the window and improvise, with the stakes much higher and
more dangerous.
Harry
wants to steal an ancient Chinese sculpture of a woman’s head. It just so
happens that Nicole (MacLaine), an exotic dancer in Hong Kong, looks exactly
like the face of the woman. The owner of the relic is allegedly the “richest
man in the world,†Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), who lives in a fictional Middle
Eastern country not unlike Egypt. It also just so happens that Shahbandar’s
deceased wife greatly resembled the statue, and thus, Nicole, too. Harry
promises Nicole a payment of $5,000 and a British passport if she will
cooperate in his scheme. Nicole is to dress in flashy Middle Eastern garb and
pose as Harry’s wife, and Harry fenagles a visit with Shahbandar. Harry is
counting on the rich collector to be so entranced by Nicole’s looks that Harry
will be able to case the house, steal the statue, and escape in less than a
day. Unfortunately, Shahbandar is not the pushover Harry thinks he is. The man
is one step ahead of the thieves, and Harry must quickly alter his scheme on
the fly. And, naturally, neither Harry nor Nicole expected to fall in love with
each other, either!
This
is fun stuff, and it’s all presented in a playful, tongue-in-cheek manner that
is characteristic of the genre and the era in which these types of movies were
made. The heist sequence is especially smart. Who knew Shirley MacLaine was so
flexible? (You’ll have to see the movie.) Incidentally, the film was nominated for three Oscars: Art Direction, Sound and Costume Design.
Kino
Lorber’s new Blu-ray showcases Clifford Stine’s colorful cinematography, and it
looks lovely. The movie comes with two different audio commentaries—one an
archival track by director Neame, and a newer one by film historians Howard S.
Berger, Sergio Mims, and Nathaniel Thompson. The theatrical trailer is
included, along with other Kino Lorber trailers.
Gambit
is
for fans of Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, 1960s-era crime adventures, and
old-fashioned romps at the movies.
(Note: the film inspired a quasi-remake in 2012 starring Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz and Alan Rickman.-Ed.)
The inmates are running the asylum in
Jack Sholder’s directorial debut Alone in the Dark (1982) which opened in
New York on Friday, November 19, 1982 among a smorgasbord of horror outings
that included midnight showings of George A. Romero’s then-notorious Dawn of
the Dead, Trick or Treats (which, contrary to my original
recollection, did play in my area, a fact that could have been easily
confirmed with a quick consultation of an archival copy of my local newspaper –
my bad!), the Canadian horror outing Funeral Home, the comic book pairing
of George A. Romero and Stephen King in the fun-thrilled Creepshow, the
mis-marketed Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and John Carpenter’s
then-maligned but now rightly revered The Thing. While the marketing for
Alone may hint at buckets of gore, it’s actually a fairly mild affair by
today’s (arguably low) standards. It primarily focuses on the scenario at hand
which features a group of then-unknowns pitted against an all-star cast in what
can be described as a mixture of social commentary and a send-up of killer-on-the-loose
movies. The lead characters play their roles straight despite having to utter
some truly silly dialogue worthy of anything penned by Franco Ferrini and Dario
Argento.
Dr. Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) moves
his family into a large new house after he goes to work for Dr. Leo Bain
(Donald Pleasence) at the Haven Asylum, taking over the position from the previous
Dr. Merton. Dr. Bain, whose last name cannot help but draw smirks from those
who notice the absence of the letter “r†from his name, could easily be mistaken
for one of the patients that Haven houses, as he seems more off-the-wall than
they are. He smokes from a marijuana pipe and refers to the inmates as
“voyagersâ€. One of the “voyagers†makes the comical statement that “There are
no crazy people, doctor. We’re all just on vacation!†Yikes! It’s tough
not to get a kick out of a film that boasts a nightclub scene featuring a band
called the Sick F*cks who sing a song that has lyrics consisting solely of “Chop
chop, chop up your mother!†recited over and over again. Dr. Potter hilariously
remarks over the loud music, “I have enough insanity in my life. I don’t wanna
pay for it!â€
While a far cry from the “Do not touch
the glass, do not approach the glass†severity of Hannibal Lecter, several
of the inmates – sorry, voyagers – specifically Hawkes (Jack Palance),
Preacher (Martin Landau), and Fatty (the late Erland van Lidth, unrecognizable from
The Wanderers (1979) and from 1980’s Stir Crazy as the huge bald
inmate), had been close to Dr. Merton and erroneously believe that his absence
is a result of having been murdered by Dr. Potter. The poor doctor is now the
target of termination by the triumvirate of terrors. They manage to have their
day of reckoning when a power outage befalls the hospital and the loss of electricity
causes their normally locked cells to now be conveniently opened, thus beginning
their reign of terror. Fault tolerance was obviously not part of the institution’s
budget. Oops!
Martin Landau is very amusing as Preacher.
He looks like Fred Flintstone at the end of the “A Haunted House is Not a Homeâ€
1964 episode when Fred flips his lid and sports a meat cleaver, laughing
maniacally and chasing his relatives. I never would have expected Landau to
deliver the impressive performance he gave Woody Allen in Crimes and
Misdemeanors (1989) years later. When Potter realizes the reality of the
situation, he holes up his family in his house to save their lives, but not
before his precocious young daughter’s (Elizabeth Ward) sexy, Playboy-like
babysitter Bunky (Carol Levy) is attacked after her boyfriend is killed. The
scene of a huge knife menacing her on the bed is creepy and decidedly phallic. They
all do their best to outwit the escapees.
The film’s ending is a bit bloody,
however there is more to it than meets the eye, which is to say that it’s more
than just a slasher film in that it posits questions about “who is crazy?†along
the same lines as Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
Originally released on DVD in 2005, the
new Blu-ray from Scream Factory has a beautiful HD transfer and ports over the
extras from that release, minus the liner notes by horror film authority Michael
Gingold (a shame), while adding new ones. Up first is a feature-length audio
commentary with the film’s director who discusses Ronald David Lang, who ran a
famous psychiatric hospital and said that crazy people were saner than the “normalâ€
people- they had just adjusted to it. This reminds me of Claire Bloom’s line to
Julie Harris in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963): “You really expect me
to believe you’re sane and the rest of the world is mad?†He also talks
in-depth about the choices made by some of the actors; the challenges he
encountered working with Jack Palance; Lyn Shaye’s cameo at the film’s start;
how New Line Cinema was originally a distribution company and moved into the
production end of the business, and an interesting tidbit about Matthew
Broderick auditioning and the director, who rejected him because he thought he
was too good!
Out of the Dark – Interview with Jack
Shoulder
– A very interesting 40 minutes with the film’s director talking about his
humble beginnings and the difficulties he ran into making films in his early
days.
Mother Choppers – The Sick F*cks
Remember Alone in the Dark – For over nine minutes, Snooky, Tish
and Russell discuss their experience working on the film.
Sites in the Dark – The Locations of
Alone in the Dark – Alone was filmed in sections of northern New
Jersey in November 1981. As you can imagine, much of the locations have changed
in 40 years. At just under 12 minutes, this is a brand-new, HD-lensed tour
hosted by Michael Gingold, who did a great job with his tours of Alice,
Sweet Alice (1977) and The Changeling (1980), to name a few. For the benefit of New Jersey readers, this
time he takes us to the Skyland Manor, the Rockland Psychiatric Center, Route
46 and Bergan Turnpike, Hillsdale Plaza, Closter Plaza where the Bleeder wears
a hockey mask before Jason Voorhees did in 1983’s Friday the 13th
Part 3 In 3-D, the Englewood Police Department, Oradell, NJ (specifically
the intersection of Midland Road and Commander Black Drive where Preacher obtains
his mailman’s hat), and the Potter Family house, which is a private residence
that forbade them from filming on the property. I always love horror film
locations and this is a great piece.
Bunky Lives! – Interview with Carol
Levy – Now
a successful real estate agent in New York, Carol did a lot of toothpaste
commercials in her early career. She also talks about the few other films that
she appeared in. I appreciated her taking the time to do this, which is
something she clearly didn’t have to considering her current profession. This
runs over 16 minutes.
Still F*cking Sick – Catching
Up with the Sick F*cks – At 16 minutes, this is a piece that is ported over
from that 2005 DVD. Great for fans of this group.
Rounding out the extras are a theatrical
trailer, a TV Spot, two creepy radio spots (I miss those!) and an extensive stills
gallery.
One of my all-time favorite horror films is Richard Ciupka’s 1983 outing
Curtains. Following nearly three
consecutive decades of relative obscurity after a VHS release even among
die-hard horror genre fans, Curtains finally made its DVD and Blu-ray
debut in 2014, restored to its original grandeur. The film starred Samantha Eggar
who I knew from William Wyler’s The Collector (1965) and David Cronenberg’s
The Brood (1979). At the time that I first viewed the film in the summer
of 1986, however, I was unfamiliar with much of the supporting female cast
members. One of them was an actress named Anne Ditchburn, and it came to my
attention that she had primarily been hired for the film due to her talent in
ballet, which she performs in the film.
An earlier title that she co-starred in is the little seen but
interesting Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978), a leisurely romantic
drama starring Paul Sorvino. The film was directed by the late John Avildsen
and was his follow-up to his 1976 surprise smash hit Rocky which starred
Sylvester Stallone and won the 1977 Oscar for Best Picture. Slow Dancing
was shot from September to November in 1977 and follows the exploits of two
characters from completely disparate backgrounds. Lou Friedlander (Paul Sorvino)
is a New York Daily News columnist who ingratiates himself into any and every
situation that he can possibly write about because his paycheck depends upon
it. Whether he is chatting up young children on the playground (an action that
would get you jailed today), or meeting with creepy undesirables in a bar, Mr.
Sorvino portrays Lou with an unusually spirited and enthusiastic air. Nothing bothers
him: insults roll off his back and he perpetually smiles against even the most vituperative
of threats. He genuinely cares about the people he writes about, including an
elderly apartment dweller (Michael Gorrin from 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One
Two Three) displaced following a fire, reminding him that he is a human
being. He is well-known, and those who recognize his name are only too happy to
tell him that they love his work. (The character of Lou was all-too-obviously
based on legendary New York reporter Jimmy Breslin, a fact that many critics
pointed out, much to Breslin’s disdain.)
It is not long before he crosses paths with Sarah Gantz (Anne Ditchburn),
a stunningly beautiful and lithe ballet dancer ten years his junior who leaves the
safety of her impatient boyfriend David’s (Nicolas Coster) opulent home for a
tiny New York City walk-up apartment right next door to him. She is a
workaholic and dances as much as she can, almost putting The Red Shoes’s
(1948) Victoria Page to shame. For Sarah, dancing is all she knows, or even
seems to care about. Specifically, she is training for a show that is due to
open at Lincoln Center and becomes the target of the show’s director’s frustration
as she makes considerable missteps in her beats and timing and begins to flail
here and there. When pressed as to why she is fumbling, she brushes it off as
being tired and unfocused. The truth comes out eventually when, at a fellow
dancer’s urging, a visit to a doctor reveals that she suffers from fibro myositis,
a muscle disorder that will not only require an operation but will also derail
her plans for dancing in the future. The news is devastating, though she chooses
to press on, thumbing her nose in the face of adversity.
Meanwhile, Lou is trying to get a young Spanish drummer out of
poverty and into the big time by trying to convince him that his natural gift
is something that he should pursue. This is a subplot that I feel could have
been jettisoned and does not work as well as it should, though the director
probably felt that it was necessary to make the ending more emotional. The
focus should be more on Lou and Sarah’s budding romance similar to the teen
drama Jeremy (1973), and the film could
have easily lost about 20 minutes to make it tighter. There is an argument to
be made that the movie is Rocky simply supplanted to the world of
choreography and dancing. However, Mr. Sorvino is always charming when constantly
looking at the bright side of things and attempting to raise Sarah’s spirits.
Kino Lorber has restored and released the film on Blu-ray. It
begins with the era’s United Artists/Transamerica logo and the film is shot in
a way that visually downplays the seediness that plagued New York City in the
1970s. (Owen Roizman made New York look far more sinister in William Friedkin’s
The French Connection (1971). The trademark landmarks of Lincoln Center
and Broadway are recognizable to even out-of-towners. The film’s running time
is 110 minutes, although the artwork states 84 minutes. This discrepancy could
be based upon the fact that some sequences were reportedly added or extended
following the film’s lukewarm reception upon its release on Friday, November 8,
1978 in an effort to flesh out the characters more and draw in the audience.
The extras are a bare minimum this time around, with on-camera
interviews with actor Nicolas Coster at just under eight minutes and composer
Bill Conti at around seven minutes. I would have loved a commentary with Paul
Sorvino, and am not sure if an attempt was made to include his participation.There is also reversible sleeve artwork.
The trailer is included, and it is a bit of a curiosity as it
makes no mention of Mr. Avildsen’s success with Rocky.
The
1964 action-adventure picture, The 7th Dawn, is a solid piece of work that
features an exotic location (it was filmed in Malaysia), a couple of big stars
(William Holden, Capucine), a fairly “new†one (Susannah York), and, for the
year it was released and its budget limitations, moderately spectacular action
sequences.
However,
today, the movie might be memorable because of its links to James Bond films. It
was directed by Lewis Gilbert (who helmed You Only Live Twice, The
Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker), it co-stars TetsurÅ
Tamba (“Tiger Tanaka†in You Only Live Twice), is photographed by
Freddie Young (credited here are Frederick Young, DP of You Only Live Twice),
the main titles are by Maurice Binder (veteran of the 007 films for three
decades), it was released by United Artists, and the movie is produced by
Charles K. Feldman (responsible for the non-EON 1967 Casino Royale)!
The
7th Dawn is
based on the 1960 novel, The Durian Tree by Michael Keon, and was
adapted to film by Karl Tunberg. It’s the story of the path to Malayan
independence from British rule after World War II, especially during the
chaotic and violent years of the early 1950s.
Three
close friends—American Ferris (William Holden), Malayan/French Dhana (French actress
Capucine), and Malayan Ng (Japanese actor TetsurÅ Tamba) fight with
the Malayan army against the Japanese during World War II. Both men are sweet
on Dhana, but at the end of the war, Ng graciously retreats and allows Ferris
and Dhana to live together while he goes off to Russia to further his education.
Cut to 1953, when Malayan guerrillas—led by Ng—are attacking both the British
forces and Malayans in terrorist acts to force the British to leave. Ferris,
who simply wants to live in peace on his rubber plantation, is persuaded by the
British leader, Trumpey (Michael Goodliffe), to find Ng and convince the man
that the British eventually do want to grant the Malayans independence. Dhana
leaves Ferris to join Ng’s guerrillas, making room for Trumpey’s daughter,
Candace (Susannah York), to set sights on the American. When Dhana is arrested,
tried for terrorist acts, and sentenced to death, Candace is kidnapped by Ng’s
forces. Ferris then has seven days to find Ng and Candace in the back country before
Dhana is hanged.
It’s
all fairly exciting stuff, and it’s a colorful display of mid-1960s Hollywood
production values depicting warfare in a jungle setting. Holden is fine as the
stalwart and stubborn former mercenary turned businessman. Capucine, although
lacking Asian heritage, is convincing enough as being half Malayan (her skin
color appears to have been artificially darkened), and Tamba exhibits why
director Gilbert likely chose him to play Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live
Twice. York is also a screen presence who, being the only blonde in sight, attracts
audience attention. She had just come off her appearance in the award-winning Tom
Jones, so her star was quickly rising.
The
musical score by Riz Ortolani is of note with lush melodies and sweeping
strings. The theme song, sung by The Lettermen, became a hit standard in the
decade.
Kino
Lorber’s high def transfer is acceptable; it certainly shows off that
distinctive look of 1960s film stock, and Freddie Jones’ cinematography
captures panoramic vistas of Malaysia and its jungles. There are no other supplements
other than a theatrical trailer and optional English subtitles for the hearing
impaired.
The
7th Dawn is
fine fare for fans of any of the cast members, action-adventure in exotic
landscapes, and 1960s Hollywood sensibility in widescreen Technicolor.
The
Academy Awards certainly overlooked this well made and superbly acted drama
when it was released in 1948. All My Sons is tightly-adapted from the
1947 stage play by Arthur Miller, and it deserved some recognition, especially
for some of the actors and perhaps the screenplay by Chester Erskine, who also
produced the movie. It was directed by Irving Reis, who had earlier in the
decade come into his own in Hollywood with the first few “Falcon†detective
pictures starring George Sanders.
All
My Sons
was Arthur Miller’s first significant hit play, his second produced on Broadway
(the first one flopped), and it won the playwright a Tony award. Erskine and
Universal Pictures quickly secured the rights and got the movie into production,
streamlining the three-act play into a roughly 90-minute movie. It works
extremely well.
It’s
very typical Arthur Miller angst, the kind of family drama that the playwright
would explore often. And here, in All My Sons, the Miller angst is faithfully
represented.
Edward
G. Robinson delivers a powerful performance as Joe Keller. It is Oscar worthy,
and the sad thing is that Robinson was never nominated for an Academy Award
throughout his long career. He did receive an honorary Oscar in 1973, but he
died two months before it was presented. This is one of those “shame on youâ€
footnotes in the history of the Oscars, for Robinson always approached his
roles with professionalism and skill. His Joe Keller in All My Sons is a
pivotal piece of the film’s success.
Burt
Lancaster, still fairly new to the industry, is also quite effective as the Good
Son who is ready to leave his career at the factory for the girl he loves if
his parents don’t accept the union. Louisa Horton is also very good, and All
My Sons is her debut film performance. Horton didn’t make many movies, but
she did a lot of television and was then married to filmmaker George Roy Hill
for a couple of decades. Mady Christians, a longtime veteran of films since the
silent days, holds her own, too. Unfortunately, Christians became a victim of
HUAC—the House Un-American Activities Committee—shortly after the release of
the movie and her career ended after four decades. HUAC certainly had its
tentacles on several elements of the movie. Robinson had some unpleasant
dealings with them, Elia Kazan (original director of the Broadway play and
co-producer of the film) was a major figure in the investigations into
“Communist infiltration†of Hollywood, and, most of all, Arthur Miller himself
was an outspoken adversary of the committee.
Kino
Lorber’s new Blu-ray release presents a high definition transfer that shows off
Russell Metty’s black and white cinematography quite well. It comes with an
informative audio commentary by film historian Kat Ellinger and author/film
historian Lee Gambin. The only supplements are the theatrical trailer and other
Kino Lorber trailers.
All
My Sons is
highly recommended for fans of Arthur Miller, Edward G. Robinson, Burt
Lancaster, and for late 1940s Hollywood fare. Just be ready for the angst.
My introduction into the world of the late horror film director Wes
Craven’s films came in October 1977 when I began seeing ads in my local
newspaper for his film The Hills Have Eyes. The image of actor Michael
Berryman as Jupiter, with his bald head and serious grin, I will not lie,
freaked me out. Twenty-one years later I would meet him at a horror film
convention, and he could not have been nicer – but that is beside the point! I did
not know what the movie was about, but it sported an R-rating, and it did not
look like anything that I could ever sit through at the age of nine. I would
later learn that I was correct. I finally caught up with Hills in the
summer of 1984 on a television broadcast, three years into my newfound love of
horror films. I found it to be fairly terrifying, even during an afternoon viewing.
Around the same time, I obtained Mr. Craven’s lesser-known film, Deadly Blessing
(1981), which also featured Mr. Berryman, on CED, which
takes place in the Amish Country. It is more of a supernatural film, but I
enjoyed it just the same.
Everything changed when, in early November 1984, I saw the television
trailer for Mr. Craven’s new film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, which
introduced audiences to the world of Fred Krueger. I was curious and
enthralled, and my mind began working on how I could get my parents to agree to
allow me to see it. A local theater was showing it with the PG-rated A
Soldier’s Story on the other screen. I lied and said that I needed to
review A Soldier’s Story for my English class as we were reading the
stage play upon which it was based. My friend and I saw Elm Street on my
sixteenth birthday. When we left the theater after the film was done, I was
over the moon. The original Elm Street was and still is the best horror
film I have ever seen in a theater, though I was clueless that it would begin a
franchise that I would grow to like less and less as time went on. When my
parents asked me what A Soldier’s Story was about, all I could muster
what that it was a story about a soldier. I think they had their suspicions…
When I saw Mr. Craven’s latest film at the time, Scream (originally
titled Scary Movie), on opening night on Friday, December 20, 1996, it
did not feel like anything that he had directed before. The terror and
brutality that permeates much of Hills and even portions of Elm
Street are absent. There is graphic gore in Scream, but the whole
affair looks closer to an episode of The O.C. than a horror film as the
California high school setting looks a little too clean and shiny. Drew Barrymore
plays Casey, a babysitter, at the film’s start in a similar way that opens Fred
Walton’s 1979 thriller When a Stranger Calls. She fields calls from a
psycho who taunts her, asking her what her favorite scary movie is, etc. The
calls become more verbal and horrible. Casey is killed after the first thirteen
minutes in a clear nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, although Janet Leigh’s
scream time (sorry) in that film was much longer.
The real protagonist of Scream is Sidney (Neve Campbell),
the virginal high school girl whose boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) is predictably
pressuring her for sex. We discover that her mother was killed a year ago and
her father travels for business. Sidney is pretty much left to fend for herself.
As though her problems were not bad enough, she is now subjected to the same
calls that plagued Casey. A cloaked figure wearing a contorted ghost mask makes
his way into her home and a fight ensues, with her boyfriend Billy coming to
the rescue. His timing arouses suspicion in both the audience and Sidney, and
his possessing a cell phone at a time when they were not everywhere as they are
today is even more cause for alarm. The police bring him in for questioning but
they have no tangible proof of any guilt. While all of this is going on, a
television newscaster (Courtney Cox) is anxious to get the story of her career
and stops at nothing to glean information from Sidney or even seduce the local
goofball cop (David Arquette) who is never taken seriously. She uses her charms
to infiltrate a party comprised of teenagers who are all suspect; she places a
hidden camera to record their gathering. The camera is nondescript, and it made
me wonder what 1996 technology would be small enough to go unnoticed. How does
it even work? How is it powered? From the looks of it, it is wireless, though
this raises more questions than it answers. Probably best to not make too much
of it in a film that clearly does not take itself seriously.
One of the issues that I have with the film is its failure to make
up its mind as to what kind of a film it is intended to be: a parody or an
actual slasher film? It never really succeeds at either, because it is not
funny enough to be a parody, nor is it even scary enough to be considered a
true slasher film. Henry Winkler plays the high school principal. He is
summarily displaced as a request from producer Bob Shaye, who wanted an
additional kill in the story, but not before encountering a janitor named Fred
in a green and black sweater, played by Mr. Craven, in an eye-rolling cameo,
clearly saluting the “hero†of his better film.
The screenplay also gets into a little too much social commentary wherein
the high schoolers talk about how movies do not make killers, etc. By the time
the true killer’s identity is revealed, I was honestly glad that the film was
over, as I found it more irritating than anything else.
Scream was written by Kevin Williamson who is best known for the teen
drama Dawson's Creek, and it shows – the film has a polished look that,
I feel, works to its detriment – Hills (shot on 16mm and blown up to
35mm) and Elm Street (shot on 35mm) both have their own signature visual
styles that work very well. He also penned a short-lived and (unfairly) panned television
series in 2007 called Hidden Palms, which featured a twenty-year-old Amber
Heard as Gretchen, a troubled teen whose boyfriend reportedly committed suicide,
with rumors about aspects of his death arising afterward. That show only lasted
two months, but an air of mystery permeated each episode. Mr. Williamson has
employed sexual promiscuity in much of his work and the results never seem to
be worth the trouble that the characters endure.
I take no pleasure in saying anything
negative about Scream, as I possess a genuine affinity for Mr. Craven’s
work. Scream feels like a Hollywood mainscream film (I know, sorry!),
however the another issue that I have with it probably is not even
an issue at all. It is just a pet peeve of mine: when it comes to slasher
films, beginning with Halloween (the 1978 John Carpenter film and Mr.
Williamson’s favorite movie, one that figures prominently in Scream),
there has been sort of a misunderstanding, in my humble opinion, among hardcore
fans regarding the notion of the reputed “Last Girl†being a virgin and
therefore making it through to the end while the promiscuous “Bad Girls†are
killed. The unspoken notion is that being a virgin is what manages to keep
these surviving girls safe from being killed. In Halloween, Jamie Lee
Curtis's character, Laurie, makes it not because she is a virgin, but because
she actually pays attention to what is going on around her. Her friends
Linda and Annie are so busy being distracted by their boyfriends and their
sexual shenanigans that they have no idea what is really going on and are
oblivious to the presence of the killer, Michael Myers. The way that this motif
is displayed historically from everything following Sean Cunningham’s Friday
the 13th(1980) up to Scream is quizzical, and I often
wonder if we are meant to identify with the teenage characters because we are
seeing it through their eyes. They seem to be interpreting the “Final Girl†as making
it simply because she is a virgin.
Mr. Craven has made plenty of other
films throughout his career that have nothing to do with Elm Street’s
Fred Krueger, among them his debut film The Last House on the Left (1972)
of which I am not a fan; the Linda Blair TV-movie Stranger in Our
House/Summer of Fear (his first 35mm film); Swamp Thing (1981); the oddball Kristy Swanson vehicle Deadly Friend
(1986); The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988); Shocker (1989); and
the bizarre The People Under the Stairs (1991), all horror films that deal
with different subjects. Despite what most people may feel about Scream,
it was a highly successful and well-received film that also paved the way for not
only sequels, but also a remake scheduled for release in early 2022. Scream
also revived the slasher film, a genre that for years languished in the mediocre
made-for-video sections of video stores all across the country. For that, I am
grateful, as some true classics of the genre have been made in the years since.
Scream is now available on a Paramount 4K Ultra High-Definition Blu-ray and
the results are spectacular. The disc has some interesting extras, which
consist of:
A feature-length audio commentary with
Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson that was more than likely recorded for the
original DVD release. It is a fun listen, though most of it entails them
commenting on the onscream action (damn, sorry again! These puns write
themselves!) than delving into the behind-the-scenes facts to any great extent.
A Bloody Legacy: SCREAM 25 Years Later – This is just over seven minutes and is more of a
promotional piece for the 2022 release of the new Scream film directed
by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
Production Featurette – This runs just over six minutes and is exactly what it
sounds like.
Behind the Scenes has two small parts: a three-and-a-half-minute piece of BTS
footage, while another runs just under three minutes and focuses on Drew
Barrymore’s work on the film.
Q & A with Cast and Crew – Two short parts, the first being What’s Your Favorite Scary
Movie?, which most people interviewed do not reveal, they sort of just list
movies that scared them. I was grateful that one woman mentioned Burnt
Offerings, which is the first thriller that I saw and made me become
interested in horror films. This part runs just under three minutes. The second
portion, Why Are People So Fascinated by Horror Films?, runs about
two-and-a-half-minutes, and they all echo similar notions about living through
fear vicariously. Neve Campbell reveals the dark side in all of us and letting
it out in a movie. Look fast for Linda Blair early on as a
television reporter.
The release also includes a digital code for streaming the film.
Scream is, of course, not to be confused with the film of the same
name from 1981, written and directed by Byron Quisenberry, which was widely
panned by pretty much everyone who saw it.
Most
film historians agree that the great Alfred Hitchcock became the Master of
Suspense with his British production, The Man Who Knew Too Much. But
Hitchcock had been directing movies since 1925—nine silent titles and seven
sound features preceded that 1934 landmark. While a couple of these earlier titles
are quite good, such as The Lodger (1927) and Blackmail (1929),
the rest are mostly oddballs that don’t reflect the types of films for which
Hitchcock would be known.
Rich
and Strange,
released in Britain at the end of 1931 and in America (retitled East of
Shanghai) in early 1932, is one of these oddities. That is not to say it’s
an unworthy entry in Hitchcock’s filmography. While it will never be considered
one of his numerous masterworks, Rich and Strange is such a curiosity
that it’s interesting and entertaining enough for the discerning Hitchcock fan
or vintage film buff. Everyone else, though, will assuredly stop watching after
thirty minutes.
Based
on a 1930 novel by Dale Collins, the screenplay was written by Alma Reville
(Mrs. Hitchcock) and Val Valentine. Hitchcock also worked on the script
uncredited. Allegedly it is somewhat inspired by a round-the-world cruise the
Hitchcocks had taken. Is it autobiographical? Some historians claim that some
elements might be, but it’s more likely that Rich and Strange is the
couple’s shared fantasy of a marital misadventure.
Billed
and marketed as a comedy, the movie does contain humorous moments in the vein
of Hitchcock’s sardonic wit and sometimes rather prurient sensibility. The
first third is certainly more comic than the rest, the middle becomes
tragically serious, and the final act is action-adventure on the high seas.
Yes, it’s an oddball movie.
Fred
and Emily Hill are a middle-class married couple who are happily married, and
yet they don’t realize they’re happy. Fred (Henry Kendall) is bored with his
job in London and dissatisfied with their living conditions. Em (Joan Barry) is
a bit shrewish but only because of Fred’s malaise. Then, out of the blue, Fred
receives a large early inheritance from an uncle. The couple ditches it all and
goes on a round-the-world cruise. From the get-go, Fred discovers that he
easily succumbs to seasickness aboard the ship, which puts a damper on the
festivities. In Paris, they are shocked by the Folies Bergère.
By the time they get to the Mediterranean, Em has become infatuated with handsome
Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont). Fred, too, begins an affair with a sexy
German “Princess†(Betty Amann). Thus, the Hills’ marriage is threatened by
their attractions to other partners. It takes the sinking of a tramp steamer,
where they end up after losing all their money, and being captured by Chinese
pirates, to save it.
Rich
and Strange could
be called a warm-up to Hitchcock’s 1941 Hollywood comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith,
which also revolved around a bickering couple played by Carole Lombard and Robert
Montgomery. While even that picture is not held in high regard in Hitchcock’s
filmography, it’s much better than Rich and Strange. True, there is a
ten year difference in technical advancements and in Hitchcock’s development as
a director. In fact, Rich and Strange seems to still have one foot in
the silent era. Quite a bit of the movie has no dialogue and there is an
abundance of unnecessary title cards. Obviously, when Hitchcock made Rich
and Strange, he was still learning—and experimenting with—how to make sound
pictures.
Kino
Lorber’s Blu-ray is the 4K restoration recently done by the BFI and it looks
the best this reviewer has ever seen it. In the USA, the title has mostly
appeared on knock-off bootleg compilations on VHS and then DVD in poor quality.
The movie comes with optional English subtitles, and an audio commentary by
film historian Troy Howarth. The only supplements are an introduction (in
French with subtitles) by Noël Simsolo, and an
audio excerpt about the film from the famed Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews. The
theatrical trailer and more Kino Hitchcock trailers complete the package.
Rich
and Strange is
for Alfred Hitchcock completists and fans of early British cinema.
I owe a lot to my late grandmother on my mother’s side. She
introduced the arts to me at a very early age. As far back as I can remember, her
household was always a place filled with music and laughter as the sounds of
Broadway show tunes, singer Allen Sherman and George Burns and Gracie Allen filtered
through her basement. In the summer of 1978, she told me about a new film that
had just come out which was a remake of an earlier black and white comedy that
she had enjoyed. I had heard the term “remake†the previous year when my father
took me to see King Kong as directed by John Guillermin starring Jeff
Bridges and Jessica Lange. This time, the “remake†in question was Heaven
Can Wait which had been based upon Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr.
Jordan (1941). I knew nothing of either film, but it was a day to go to the
movies with my grandmother, so I jumped at the chance.
Heaven Can Wait opened on Wednesday, June 28, 1978 as another starring
vehicle for Warren Beatty, an actor who was new to me. Coming on the heels of McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and Shampoo
(1975), Mr. Beatty was riding high and struck box office gold with this
colorful and charming update of an athlete who finds himself in a predicament
for the ages. I immediately liked his interpretation of Joe Pendelton, a
quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams (not a prize fighter as in the original
which, itself, was based on a stage play) training for the Super Bowl who has a
near-fatal bicycle accident which results in his appearing at a heavenly “way
station†with others who have just become deceased. His escort (Buck Henry)
introduces him to Mr. Jordan (James Mason) when he fails to convince Joe about
his worldly death and ultimate fate. Through their discussions, it becomes
clear that The Escort, for lack of a better term, jumped the gun and removed
Joe from the accident just before it happened – a big “no-no†and a
clear rule-breaker as far as the gentlemanly Mr. Jordan is concerned. To fix
this, The Escort must find a suitable body back on Earth to put Joe back into,
as his own body has already been cremated.
Leo Farnsworth is a millionaire who is
involved with many industrial and political affairs and is about to be murdered
by his wife Julia (Dyan Cannon) and her lover Tony Abbott (Charles Grodin) who
works for him. Joe steps into his shoes and perplexes the staff at his
(Farnsworth’s) character traits and sudden love of football, while also
shocking Julia and Tony following the “murderâ€. Joe/Leo finds himself in the
midst of a meeting with Betty Logan (Julie Christie) who is determined to stop
the reach of Farnsworth’s company’s negative effects on the environment. Deep
down, however, Joe’s/Leo’s only desire is to play football and get back to
playing with the Rams.
Mr. Beatty co-wrote the script with
Elaine May and co-directed the film with Buck Henry. The supporting cast in
this film are all excellent and charming, especially Ms. Cannon and Mr. Grodin,
both of whom I would go on to enjoy immensely in Revenge of the Pink Panther
(1978) and Midnight Run (1988), respectively. Jack Warden is also
terrific as Max Corkle, Joe’s trainer who is summoned to the Farnsworth estate and
is astonished when he is made aware of Joe’s transformation into Leo. I could
not help but feel overjoyed for Max as I knew that he missed his friend
terribly. James Mason is also wonderful with his dry expressions and comments.
Heaven made a huge impact on my life that year. For Halloween 1978,
I came very dangerously close to dressing in Joe’s trademark sneakers,
sweatpants and zippered sweatshirt, though I doubt that any of my fellow
classmates, who themselves were donning their best impressions of ghosts,
vampires, characters from Happy Days, Star Wars and Grease,
would have had the slightest idea of who I was trying to impersonate.
Coincidentally, Here Comes Mr. Jordan was airing on the 1:00 Movie on
Channel 9 in New York on Halloween. My mother’s uncle was the sole owner of a
then-$1200.00 top-loading Magnavox VCR which he used to record the movie for me
to view on a later date. I liked it just as much as the remake.
Heaven was nominated for nine Academy Awards in the Spring of 1979
and I wanted very badly to view the ceremonies. A start time of ten o’clock in
the evening for the broadcast on a school night ensured no such luck. I had to make
do with the movie tie-in novelization of the film as well as the Fotonovel, an
ingenious paperback reproduction of the entire film in color photos with all
the dialogue. I enjoyed Dave Grusin’s lovely musical score, though if anyone
had told me that I would have to wait until 2017 to purchase it on a device
known as a “compact disc†I would have been thoroughly confused and crestfallen
to say the least. Heaven ultimately won its sole Oscar for Best
Production Design, indubitably due in no small part to Northern California’s
beautiful Filoli Mansion that doubles as the Farnsworth estate. The Best
Picture accolades went to Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.
Birney Lettick provided the marketing
campaign with the film’s sole key art for the promotion of the film, an
enormous tapestry of which was unfurled on the side of (Grauman’s?) movie
theater in Los Angeles which can be seen briefly in the 1978 John Travolta film
Moment by Moment.
Although released in July 1999 on DVD,
that pressing has been out-of-print for many years. Fortunately, “Paramount
Presents†has now reissued the film in a lovely transfer on Blu-ray. Inexplicably, there are
no extras, not even a trailer (although it does contain a code to access a digital version), but that should not stop you from purchasing one
of the most delightful romantic comedies from the 1970’s. A true classic.
Harold
and Maude,
which was directed by Hal Ashby (his second feature film) and released in 1971,
is one of those initially critically stomped box-office bombs… and yet years
later became a cult hit in revival houses, on television broadcasts, and home
video releases. It’s one of many examples that illustrate how critics don’t
always know everything and how some motion pictures are ahead of their time. Harold
and Maude now resides in the top 50 of the AFI’s list of 100 greatest
comedy films.
Written
by Colin Higgins, who simultaneously turned his original screenplay into a
novel (also published in 1971), the movie was unquestionably a counter-culture,
rebellious black comedy that from the get-go had the potential to offend some
folks. The main character’s fake suicide pranks aside, the theme of a
May-December romance—this time with the woman being the older one in the relationship—was
sure to be off-putting to the moral majority. One often hears the justification
for couples in which one person is much older than the other is that “age is
just a number.†In the case of Harold and Maude, Maude’s number is 79,
while Harold’s is 19. That’s a sixty year difference. Okay, then!
Most
everyone by now knows the story. Harold (Bud Cort) is a cynical young man who
lives with his wealthy, snobbish mother (Vivian Pickles). He is a misfit who is
obsessed with death. He constantly stages gory suicides for shock effect, which
of course upsets his mother as well as any blind dates that she sets up for her
son. Harold also attends funerals for people he doesn’t know, and that’s where
he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon). It turns out that Maude, a concentration camp
survivor, also likes to go to strangers’ funerals, but her outlook on life is
much different than Harold’s. She is wild, happy-go-lucky, and full of life.
She’ll commit misdemeanors like stealing cars for the fun of it. The two develop
a fast friendship, and together they have some misadventures, all set to the
lively music of Cat Stevens. Romance blooms between the two, and Harold
ultimately announces that he will marry Maude. The movie takes a poignant left
turn at this point, and to say more would spoil it for those who have never
seen the picture.
Director
Ashby has always been something of an iconoclast in Hollywood. He started out
as a successful editor who transitioned to directing. He found a niche in the
swinging early 1970s as a helmsman of fringe anti-establishment titles like The
Last Detail (1973) or Shampoo (1975). The failure—and then cult
reputation—of Harold and Maude solidified Ashby’s place as a quirky, but
talented, director. His work here is obviously eccentric, inventive, and
perfect for the material.
Bud
Cort is winning in his role as Harold, but it is of course Ruth Gordon who is
the heart of the movie. Without her screen presence, charisma, and enthusiasm in
the role of Maude, the film would not have worked.
Another
element that elevates the film is the soundtrack full of songs by Cat Stevens.
Most of the tunes were taken from previously-released albums, but two numbers
were composed and recorded specifically for the movie.
Harold
and Maude has
appeared several times in home media, including a now out of print Criterion Collection
edition. A more affordable new release from Paramount Presents is the item on
display here, and the remaster from film transfer looks quite good. It comes
with an entertaining audio commentary by Larry Karaszewski and Cameron Crowe.
The only supplements, though, is a short interview with Yusuf/Cat Stevens and a
couple of theatrical trailers.
For
fans of Hal Ashby, Ruth Gordon, Cat Stevens, and those free-wheeling early cult
films of 1970s Hollywood, Harold and Maude is for you.
(Note:
Portions of this review appeared on Cinema Retro in 2014 for an earlier
Kino Lorber edition.)
Robert
Altman was a very quirky director, sometimes missing the mark, but oftentimes
brilliant. His 1973 take on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye is a case in point. It might take a second viewing
to appreciate what’s really going on in the film. Updating what is essentially
a 1940s film noir character to the
swinging 70s was a risky and challenging prospect—and Altman and his star,
Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe (!), pull it off.
It’s
one of those pictures that critics hated when it was first released; and yet,
by the end of the year, it was being named on several Top Ten lists. I admit
that when I first saw it in 1973, I didn’t much care for it. I still wasn’t
totally in tune with the kinds of movies Altman made—even after M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud (an underrated gem), and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. But I saw it again a few years later on a
college campus and totally dug it. Altman made oddball films, and either you
went with the flow or you would be put off by the improvisational, sometimes
sloppy mise-en-scène that the director used. And the sound—well, Altman is
infamous for his overlapping dialogue (one critic called it “Altman Soupâ€). If
you didn’t “get†what the director was doing with sound, then you would
certainly have a hard time with his pictures.
Yes,
Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe. A very different interpretation than
Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell, obviously. And yet, it works. Gould displays
the right amount of bemused cynicism, as if he had been asleep for twenty years
and suddenly woken up in the 1970s. And that’s exactly how Altman, screenwriter
Leigh Brackett (who co-wrote the 1946 The
Big Sleep), and Gould approached the material. Altman, in a documentary
extra on the making of the film, called the character “Rip Van Marlowe.†He is
an anachronism in a different time. For example, Marlowe can’t help but be
bewildered by the quartet of exhibitionist hippie lesbians that live in his
apartment complex. And he still drives a car from his original era. And therein
lies the point of the picture—this is a comment on the 70s, not the 40s or 50s.
The
plot concerns the possible murder of the wife of Marlowe’s good friend, Terry
(played by baseball pro Jim Boutin), who is indeed a suspect, as well as a
suitcase of missing money belonging to a vicious gangster (extrovertly portrayed
by film director Mark Rydell), an Ernest Hemingway-like writer who has gone
missing (eccentrically performed by Sterling Hayden), and the author’s hot
blonde wife who may know more than she’s telling (honestly played by newcomer
Nina van Pallandt). The story twists, turns, hits some bumps in the road, and
finally circles back to the initial beginning mystery.
It
may not be one of Altman’s best films, but it’s one of the better ones. It’s
certainly one of the more interesting experiments he tried in his most prolific
period of the 70s.
Kino
Lorber already put out a Blu-ray release several years ago, but it didn’t
really improve much on the original DVD release prior to that. The company has
now re-issued the film in a brand new 4K master that is a vast step-up from the
previous release. It looks great. The soft focus cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond
is no longer a hazy gaze but is instead a crystal transfer of that distinctive
1970s film stock imagery. The movie now comes with an informative audio
commentary by film historian Tim Lucas.
Some
of the extras are ported over from the previous Kino Lorber release, such as
the aforementioned “making of†documentary, a short piece on Zsigmond, an
animated reproduction of a vintage American
Cinematographer article, the trailer, and a few radio spots. New to this
edition are featurettes with film historian/critic David Thompson on Altman and
the film, author Tom Williams on Raymond Chandler, and author/historian Maxim
Jakubowski on hard-boiled fiction in general. There is also a “Trailers from
Hell†segment with Josh Olson.
If
you’re an Altman fan and don’t already own the out of print DVD or previous
Blu-ray, you may want to pick up the new, improved The Long Goodbye. It
probably won’t be long before this, too, like Philip Marlowe himself, is a rare
collector’s item.
We all know the old saying that hindsight is 20/20. When it comes
to slasher films from the 1980s, movies that were released during that time
were very often dismissed by critics – and rightfully so. Audiences, on the
other hand, had a great time experiencing arguably the cinematic equivalent of
riding a roller coaster. Following the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween
in 1978 and its most closely related “holiday†second cousin, Sean Cunningham’s
Friday the 13th in 1980, movie studios were
falling over themselves to come up with the next big horror hit in much the
same way that the spate of killer fish and outer space movies followed the
success of Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977, respectively.
Unfortunately, for us, often this resulted in some terribly silly and cookie
cutter films that were nothing more than derivations of superior slasher films
from years past.
The
House on Sorority Row
(1982) is a film that didn’t exactly set the
box-office on fire during its initial release. To be fair, it didn’t receive a
huge theatrical distribution deal. It was shot on a small budget, starring a
cast of relative unknowns at the time. In keeping in slasher film tradition,
the film begins, as so many other films of the day do, with the typical opening
sequence that takes many years prior to the film’s start wherein something
quite awful happens before bringing the viewers to present day. In this case, House
begins with a soft filter which is generally used to imply a flashback. The
trick is remembering this prologue as it will answer the question as to what is
happening for the rest of the film. This is a familiar trope that can be seen
in everything from Paul Lynch’s Prom Night (1980) to his own Humongous
(1982).
Written and directed by Mark Rosen in the summer of 1980 and
released in New York in February 1983, House concerns seven sisters of a sorority – Katey (Kathryn McNeil), Vicki
(Eileen Davidson), Liz (Janis Zido), Jeanie (Robin Meloy), Diane (Harley Jane
Kozak), Morgan (Jodi Draigie), and Stevie (Ellen Dorsher) – whose graduation
celebration is interrupted by their house mother, Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso
Hunt), who throws cold water on their plans for a party. In retaliation, the
leader of the pack, Vicki, devises a prank to play on Mrs. Slater which
involves submerging her cane in the outdoor pool (which is full of muck) and
forcing her to retrieve it at gunpoint! The gun is supposed to be loaded
with blanks but accidentally fires and hits Mrs. Slater, who collapses.
Shocked, there is a mad dash by the sisters to hide her body in the pool and go
through with the party and pretend as though everything is status quo.
The bulk of the film revolves around the party and the sisters
trying to keep up a good-natured charade, though some of them have more
difficulty than the others. None of these characters are especially interesting
and the actresses portraying them do their best to remain interesting enough to
parlay their actions into suspense, however in the hands of another director,
the film could just as easily resemble a comedy, something along the lines of Weekend
at Bernie’s (1989). The ending may have been a bit of a shocker at the
time, however nearly forty years hence it’s old hat and has been echoed in many
better slashers, in particular Michele Soavi’s 1987 directorial debut film Deliria
(StageFright).
House made its home video debut on VHS, Betamax, CED and laserdisc in
1983 (wow – did I really just type that??) and then surfaced on DVD in 2000,
2004, 2010 and 2012(!) in varying special editions. Scorpion Releasing brought
the film to Blu-ray in 2014 and 2018. Now, MVD has reissued the film on Blu-ray
as part of its MVD Rewind Collection in a slipcase edition wherein the
cardboard cover is made to resemble a worn VHS rental that needs to be returned
to a video store. If you don’t own the 2018 Scorpion Releasing version, this
new MVD release contains all the extras from that Blu-ray and is the most
comprehensive release to date.
The first interview is with actress Harley
Jane Kozak (Diane) who went to New York University and was waiting tables while
trying out for the role of Diane. She says that the cast saw the film at the only
theater in New York City that was showing it. She also recalls how Eileen
Davidson (Vicki) wore her gym shorts in the film. Strangely, the house mother
was dubbed! Harley also describes the party scene as “slogging through cementâ€
as they had to dance with no music playing while speaking their lines. This
interview lasts a whopping 42 minutes.
The second interview is called “Kats
Eyes†with Eileen Davidson, who went on to a successful career in soap operas, and
runs just over seven minutes. The third interview is with Kathryn McNeil (Katey)
and runs about 14 minutes. She discusses how she got the audition through
Backstage magazine (the old-fashioned way!). She had no agent; the cast helped the
crew set up the scenes; she was paid $50.00 per day; she was scared by The
Wizard of Oz when she was a child and is amazed how young kids now tend to
see the more violent films (I was always freaked out by the boat ride sequence
in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!).
The
fourth interview is with writer and director Mark Rosman, running about 21
minutes. He had the great opportunity to work on Home Movies by Brian De
Palma as a first assistant director on the campus of Sarah Lawrence!
The
fifth interview is with composer Richard Band and is the most in-depth, running
45 minutes. The score was recorded in London; he grew up in Rome, which I never
would have assumed; he talks about many other aspects of his career and his
website.
The
sixth interview is with composer Igo Kantor and runs 10 minutes.
The
additional extras consist of:
Original
pre-credit sequence – this runs just over two minutes and is bathed in a blue hue.
Alternate
ending storyboards and runs just over seven minutes.
Alternate
monoaural audio version with re-timed pre-credit sequence
There
is a feature-length audio commentary with the director, and a secondary feature-length
audio commentary with the director and Eileen Davidson and Kathryn McNeil.
There
are trailers for this film, Mortuary, Dahmer, Mikey and Mind
Games.