by ·Comments Off on Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur)

I always like a good satanic cult movie, and the cult’s power in this one seems much stronger than in The Seventh Victim. The movie as a whole isn’t as great as Seventh Victim – much more straightforward, less mysterious and with appalling special effects – but it’s also more audacious and intense.

Doomed professor Harrington (Maurice Denham, appropriately of Shout at the Devil) comes running over to see devil-bearded Dr. Karswell (Niall MacGinnis, appropriately of The Devil’s Agent), asking him to take back some curse, but Karswell declines, and Harrington is chased by a giant demon into power lines. So dreamy Doctor Holden (Dana Andrews, appropriately of Hot Rods to Hell and The Devil’s Brigade) arrives in town to take over Harrington’s work, gets cozy with Harrington’s niece (Peggy Cummings, appropriately of Hell Drivers and Meet Mr. Lucifer) and ignores all this devil/curse nonsense – until it’s too late!

It seems Karswell is part of some demon cult and Harrington planned to publish a conference paper exposing the group, so K. passed H. a slip of paper with runes written on it, and after three days of spooky signs, the giant demon came for Harrington. K. asks Holden if he plans to continue his predecessor’s work, Holden says yes, gets the runes, is doomed – unless Karswell forgives him and breaks the spell, or Holden figures it out and passes them to someone else before they “escape” (are pulled by a clearly visible string) from his grasp.

Karswell’s pet cat morphs into a leopard, shown here mid-transformation.
Not shown: the leopard’s transformation into a stuffed toy, which “wrestles” comically with Holden.

Clearly the best scene is when our heroes show at Karswell’s house to speak with him and his mother (Athene Seyler, appropriately of Satan Never Sleeps) and K. is dressed as a clown, using his dark magic to entertain children. Challenged to prove his powers, he summons a hurricane and destroys his own party. His mom isn’t pleased, and starts helping the do-gooders behind her son’s back.

Clownswell with the grinning do-gooders:

There’s also some business about an ex-cult member, a farmer now in an insitution, who is hypnotized into revealing some plot points about the runes, before jumping to his death under Holden’s supervision – you’d think he’d be blamed for the poor guy’s death but nobody seems to care.

Holden and Ms. Harrington gradually become convinced of the dark powers, go to the police complaining of smoke following them through the woods and pages ripped out of books, and are rightly dismissed. So Holden fights witchcraft with witchcraft, manages to pass the runes back to Harrington who is immediately killed by the demon and/or a train.

A cool, noirish shot:

From what I’ve seen, it looks like Tourneur went from genre cheapies (Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie) to great studio pictures (Out of the Past and Stars In My Crown) back to genre cheapies, maintaining unusually high quality throughout.

IMDB on Drag Me To Hell: “Raimi intended this to be a remake but could not secure the rights to the film. Instead, they kept many elements and rewrote the story. Elements kept: 3 day hex, the passing of an item to be rid the curse, the train station used for the ending.”

by ·Comments Off on Sweet Home (1989, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

A middling haunted-house movie, with none of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s post-Cure style of evil lurking in the offscreen space. Some inspired moments, and some cinematic plot points (living shadows, a slide melting under a projector bulb, an actor melting in much the same way). Apparently the movie is most famous for having spawned a “survival horror” Nintendo game which inspired the Resident Evil series. Also the last time Juzo Itami (Japanese New Wave actor, more recently in Grass Labyrinth) appeared as an actor, having already turned to directing with Tampopo and a few others. I assumed that he played Old Man Exposition, the local crank who helps out at the end, but no that was Tsutomu Yamazaki, an actor in Tampopo, so I don’t know where Itami showed up.

not Juzo Itami:

A TV production talks their way into the long-abandoned mansion of a dead artist to document the murals he’d painted on his walls. Widower Kazuo (Shingo Yamashiro of some Kinji Fukasaku movies) is the show’s producer. He brings along his daughter Emi (pop singer Nokko – in her mid-20’s, but I bought her performance as a middle-schooler) and show director Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto, also of Tampopo) – our family-unit heroes, which leaves the other two (driver/cameraman/comic relief Taguchi and melodramatic on-air personality Asuka) to be murdered by ghosts.

L-R: Asuka, Taguchi, surrogate mom, actual dad, “child”:

And murdered they are, with surprisingly good, goopy gore effects. First Asuka turns into a ghost, yelling “give me back my baby” then digging up an actual baby coffin. Then the shadows come to life, so they all have to hide in patches of light. Taguchi doesn’t make it, gets burned clean in half and Asuka finishes him with a wrench shortly before an axe falls on her head.

Akiko vs. furnace:

Old Man Exposition comes to the house and walks into the furnace to rescue Emi, kidnapped by ghosts. But either he fails or she’s kidnapped again, and her dad gives up, leaving Akiko to rescue the girl, proving herself a worthy wife/mother figure. I did like the evil-mother monster who fights her with lightning there at the end.

by ·Comments Off on I Was a Male War Bride (1949, Howard Hawks)

Like two short films – a classic courtship comedy and a gender-politics comedy, with a wedding in the middle. In the first half, Cary Grant is reluctantly stuck with Ann Sheridan (of They Drive By Night & Good Sam) on a softball military mission in France, his last before retirement from the armed services. In the second, he’s Ann’s “war bride,” a civilian married to a “serviceman,” a loophole in the system, dealing with paperwork and regulations in attempts to stay (or better, sleep) with his new wife.

Smart, funny movie – Katy and I liked it. Based on a true story by Henri Rochard (the name of Grant’s character). Senses of Cinema has a write-up, but the very first sentence declares the difficulty to adequately situate the film within “accepted interpretative frameworks,” so I didn’t make it much further.

by ·Comments Off on He Who Gets Slapped (1924, Victor Sjöström)

Opening-day SHOCKtober screening this season is one I’ve been meaning to watch for years for being Shadowplay’s favorite film. Not my favorite, but I appreciated the enjoyably absurd premise, Chaney’s performance (which involves getting slapped), the brilliant optical transitions (a spinning ball -> globe -> circus ring), and of course, murder by lion.

Lon with his wife and benefactor, just before tragedy struck:

Lon Chaney (same year he did Phantom of the Opera and The Unholy Three) is a brilliant scientist married to sweet Ruth King (in possibly her only surviving film) and sponsored by a wealthy baron (Marc McDermott). Life is good, until McDermott steals Chaney’s ideas and his wife. Chaney is humiliated in front of his peers at a big presentation, slapped by the baron, slapped by his wife, and told to fuck off. Treated like a clown, he joins the circus, becomes an actual clown and creates a hugely successful routine wherein he reenacts his humiliation, getting slapped again and again as he tries to be taken seriously, the other clowns and the crowd roaring laughter at him.

A few years later, attractive young Norma Shearer (The Divorcee) joins the circus, drawing the attention of attractive young John Gilbert (The Merry Widow, The Big Parade) as well as Lon (now, hilariously, only known as “HE”). But slimy old Baron McDermott visits the circus and sees his chance to dump Lon’s wife for a younger girl. He makes a deal with her father to marry Norma, causing HE to take his belated revenge via lion.

Attractive young couple, somewhat overdoing it:

Cairns:

The biggest contortion of credibility is when Chaney confesses his love to Norma Shearer and she thinks he’s joking which, given his performance and the lines we get via intertitle, is impossible to accept as believable in any literal way. Nobody could be that dumb. A modern actor might say the scene is unplayable. But it works, because we get what it’s about (this film is deep but it ain’t exactly subtle, so Chaney even TELLS us what it’s about: “I say serious things and people laugh!”).

The first film MGM released, and the first American picture by Sjöström, lured to Hollywood after the international success of The Phantom Carriage. IMDB suggests a pile of related films – a 1917 Russian version, later Chinese and Argentinian versions, and three 1925 shorts with parody titles.

Transformation:

by ·Comments Off on Gone to Earth (1950, Powell & Pressburger)

The sixth-and-a-half Powell movie I’ve shown to Katy. I always think of Powell/Pressburger films as the kind of thing she’ll love, despite the fact that she hasn’t loved any, and has roundly disliked at least three. This one was going well, with a strong-willed female lead until, cornered by her confusion and desire, she falls down a well to her death. Sorry, Katy.

Hazel (Jennifer Jones) is lovely with a disconcerting gypsy accent, lives with her father Esmond Knight (just saw him in Contraband), who doesn’t seem blind at all in this movie. Rich asshole David Farrar (also kinda an asshole in Black Narcissus) hotly desires her, but she hides away from him and finally marries meek minister Cyril Cusack (Odd Man Out, Fahrenheit 451). They sleep in separate bedrooms and he can’t bring himself to touch her – shades of Smiles of a Summer Night – and so she ends up back with David Farrar, shaming her husband and outraging his mother (Sybil Thorndike) and congregation. Hazel is attracted/repelled by Farrar all along, and he seems like the love ’em-and-leave ’em type but obsesses over Hazel for years, so it’s unclear just how this is going to work out. Of course it doesn’t – she tries to run from everybody at once, wild like her pet fox (thanks, Katy) towards certain doom.

Jennifer Jones and David Farrar:

Cyril Cusack:

We knew that the fiery pagan girl wouldn’t be easily domesticated by her mild Christian husband, and would’ve known very well that she wouldn’t live through the movie if we’d paid attention to the signs: the film’s title, the bottomless pit shown in the first act, and the fact that the first time we see her at home, she’s framed inside a coffin.

Strong, deep colors and expert production design, as expected from a Powell/Pressburger/Heckroth picture. My favorite character was Andrew Vessons (Hugh Griffith) as Farrar’s contemptuous coachman. Movie was cut down considerably by David O. Selznick for the U.S. release with added close-ups and explanation, doing nothing for the film’s reputation.

A couple of characters: Hugh Griffith above and Esmond Knight below

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Forgot what a sad movie this is. Bowie falls to earth, finds a patent lawyer (Get Smart creator Buck Henry), makes more money than Steve Jobs, but the government interferes in his plan to return home with water for his desert planet and he ends up a secluded musician, discovered in hiding by his stalker/employee Rip Torn.

The 1970’s were the kind of ridiculous time when Rip Torn could be a sex symbol, starring as Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer – that I’ve come to accept. And I can accept Bowie as a sex symbol, too. But seeing them both naked in the same movie is just confounding. I suppose that’s Roeg’s point, making Bowie that much more alien by casting him with Torn. Also somewhat confounding is Candy Clark (of Q: The Winged Serpent) as Bowie’s earth girl. She’s a housekeeper at a bad hotel who becomes Bowie’s main source of human comfort – not the brightest bulb but maybe he decides that makes her less of a threat.

Good variety of music – only one Bowie song. The old-age makeup is markedly better than Julie Christie’s in The Go-Between. Hard to imagine how this got released without copious explanatory voiceover added. For instance, shots of Bowie’s home planet/family seem to be subjective, their present situation as Bowie imagines/hopes/fears, but of course this is never discussed. Not that I’m complaining – I like it the way it is, full of Roegian trickery. Bowie gives a blankly contemplative look almost all time, detached, Bowie-like, in other words. Why is Buck Henry thrown through a window at the end, and Bowie imprisoned in a mansionous hotel suite by badmen who don’t seem to know what they want from him? Something to do with Bernie Casey, I think.

One program Bowie watches on his array of TVs is lions fucking, which I found funny since the night before I’d watched The Lion King. Remade for 1980’s television with Wil Wheaton and Beverly D’Angelo. Bowie failed to grab an oscar nomination for playing his thin white alien self, but picked up a golden scroll from the sci-fi academy.

G. Fuller:

As critic Tom Milne has suggested, [Bowie’s] defenselessness is central to the exchanging of identities and the shifting of power dynamics between the characters in The Man Who Fell to Earth. This also occurs in Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, Bad Timing, and Track 29, the other films on which Roeg’s reputation as an auteur is based. As Newton becomes progressively more human, he becomes susceptible to the same vices that taint his intimates: the aggrandizement of power and wealth (Farnsworth), alcoholism and emotional dependency (Mary-Lou), abusive sexual behavior (Bryce). They, in turn, in Milne’s words, “rediscover something of that vulnerability,” shedding their protective carapaces even as they variously let Newton down, because, as humans, that is what they are fated to do.

by ·Comments Off on People On Sunday (1930, Siodmak & Ulmer & Zinnemann & Wilder)

“Filmstudio 1929 presents its first experiment: People On Sunday, a film without actors.”

Like Natalie Portman in Garden State, I like to do things nobody else has ever done before, hence I watched the German silent film People On Sunday on my laptop whilst listening to John Zorn’s manic, screechy, pounding “Spy vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman.” Once my Portmanic originality had been established, I switched to Zorn’s more pleasing “Filmworks Anthology” disc.

Things the movie proved to me:
– All germans eat are sausages, and all they drink is beer.
– In the 1920’s/30’s, young men held spanking parties.

The movie suffered from the fact that I’d just watched Lonesome, a much more exciting movie from the same era with the same working-people-on-vacation vibe. This one has less urgency and romanticism, just taking it easy on a lazy Sunday, some friends out for a picnic and paddleboat ride, trying to score with women in the park. My favorite plot point was the girl from the original group who never makes it to the park, stays in bed and sleeps through the whole movie.

Nicely-shot and well-paced, a fine way to spend 80 minutes. It’d probably be a forgotten footnote if not for the amazing combination of soon-to-be-famous filmmakers who worked on it – co-directed by Curt and Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, cowritten with Billy Wilder, shot by Eugen Schüfftan (Eyes Without a Face, Port of Shadows), all just starting out in the movies. An IMDB commenter: “Within a few years most of these people were in Hollywood, and Hitler had destroyed both the wonderful film industry they had helped build and the joyous Berlin that this film depicts . . . the film allows us a glimpse of Berlin between the wars and it is sad to watch it with the knowledge of what was soon to be.”

N. Isenberg:

Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing . . . a remarkably straightforward depiction, by turns affectionate and comical, of courting rituals, leisure activity, and mass entertainment circa 1930

In the first act the sleepy model and her man tear up each other’s movie star pictures – recognized Greta Garbo and Harold Lloyd:

Stylishly scrawled end titles: “4 million people waiting for next sunday,” one word at a time.

Some fun editing, including one weird bit with rapid cutting between a man in the park and various statues. Lots of close-ups and few intertitles. A different kind of movie, free-spirited and outdoorsy, can see why they labeled it an experiment.

Sweet record advertisement (from the same songwriter as “Jollity Farm”):

by ·Comments Off on The Go-Between (1970, Joseph Losey)

“The past is a foreign county. They do things differently there.” No longer just a Silkworm lyric (from the same song that references “Willie” Somerset Maugham and possibly Casablanca), now back home in its proper element, or at least the film adaptation of its proper element.

A quality picture with excellent production design and fluid camera movement – like Carol Reed with a touch of Alain Resnais. It’s a perfect storm of my least-favorite types of movies: British upper-class period costume dramas and coming-of-age stories. But, highly recommended and Cannes-award-winning and all, I stuck with it and really loved the last half hour.

Kid named Leo is spending the summer with a family in the country, but his playmate Marcus (I like him – privileged asshole with a good vocabulary) gets the measles, leaving Leo to pal around with the grownups, getting involved in their secret affairs as a messenger boy. Julie Christie (between Petulia and McCabe & Mrs. Miller) is the young hottie of the household, promised to dull scarfaced Hugh Trimingham (Edward Fox of Day of the Jackal) but having a Leo-assisted affair with rough farmer Ted Burgess (Alan Bates of Secret Friends, also Chabrol’s Dr. M). Once the lovers are caught together and Julie seems lost to him, Ted shoots himself.

Fancy Hugh:

“We can’t expect to be happy all the time, can we?”

Fun sidetracks with Leo’s belief in occult curses. A dog with a name like “dry toast” (tri-toes?). A cricket ball is batted straight into the camera. A 1970’s love-triangle movie set among wheat fields, bringing to mind Days of Heaven. Little bursts of voiceover dialogue, like scenes omitted for time, or sometimes repeating what we’ve heard. An unexplained, unheard shot of a conversation between two characters we haven’t seen – only when going back through the screenshots did I notice the television set in the corner, definite sign of a flash-forward. The present day keeps breaking through into the early-century period story, and suddenly Leo is sixty (now Michael Redgrave of Mr. Arkadin, Secret Beyond the Door), summoned to visit Julie Christie (backlit to avoid displaying her old-age makeup).

“So you met my grandson”
“Yes I did”
“Does he remind you of anyone?”
“Ted Burgess”
“That’s it. That’s it. He does.”

Leo Redgrave:

Based on a famous novel, screenplay by Harold Pinter, who also wrote The Servant and Accident. Senses calls it Losey’s last great film and compliments Michel Legrand’s fine score. “Aside from its intelligence and insight, however, it hardly seems to be a Losey film—it is evocative, judicious, perfectly cast, but rather cautious.”

Shooting Down Pictures:

Occurring mostly in the past with occasional flashes to the present, Pinter’s manipulation of time feels perfunctory compared to what Alain Resnais was doing a decade prior, or even what Pinter managed in his script for Losey’s Accident. More interesting is Losey’s entymological dramatization of British manor life, exhibiting both gentility and prejudice with near-emotionless decorum. Pinter’s dialogue pinpoints the neurotic weirdness underlying British politeness with unnerving precision, and is served ably by the ensemble, especially Dominic Guard as the boy, whose naivete and unwitting indiscretions stand sharply against the hypocrisy and innuendo surrounding him.

by ·Comments Off on With Nails (1996, Richard E. Grant)

Picked this up at Strand, opened to a random page in The Player chapter and decided I need it – then thought I’d better watch Withnail & I before reading. Hilarious, fun book about Richard’s travails acting in Withnail & I, Warlock, Henry and June, LA Stories, Hudson Hawk, The Player, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Age of Innocence and Ready to Wear, with paperback-edition epilogue bits on Portrait of a Lady, Twelfth Night, The Serpent’s Kiss and Spice World. A couple mentions of How to Get Ahead in Advertising (having already sketched out the process of working with Bruce Robinson in the Withnail chapter, he probably wanted to get on to the Hollywood stuff), a few sentences on Mountains of the Moon (its producer is insanely wealthy) and no mention at all of Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Since I never read gossipy behind-the-scenes Hollywood tales it was full of surprises for me – but Grant’s writing and humor is always the main attraction.

Lately Grant has written/directed a movie called Wah-Wah and written a diary about that – something to look forward to. Oooh and looks like there’s a novel called “By Design,” which a reviewer says is “an attempt to fictionalize all those great Hollywood experiences & stories that for legal reasons he couldn’t include” in the diaries.