by ·Comments Off on The Furies (1950, Anthony Mann)

Walter Huston (John’s father, in his final role) is a slightly less grotesquely comic version of Egbert in Ruggles of Red Gap, a rich, eccentric cowboy. His extremely strong-willed but beloved daughter Barbara Stanwyck (soon before Clash By Night) argues with him over practically everything, finally scheming to swindle him out of his land as revenge for an argument taken too far. She has a brother (John Bromfield) who is introduced at the beginning but practically disappears from the movie, since he’s a decent, unassuming fellow and Stanwyck and Huston are commanding our attention at all times.

Complicated, exquisitely shot and acted movie, obviously based on a novel (I can’t explain – it just smells novelistic). Stanwyck and Huston have a near-incestual rivalry. She loves Juan (Gilbert Roland, who played bandit The Cisco Kid in six movies) who lives illegally on Huston’s land, and Huston marries gold digger Flo (Judith Anderson, sinister housekeeper in Rebecca). But after Stanwyck stabs her new stepmother in the face with scissors (!), Huston has Juan killed. Katy and I lost track of exactly how Stanwyck then claimed possession of her father’s land. She cozied up to rich gambler Rip (Wendell Corey, Janet Leigh’s dull boyfriend in Holiday Affair) then bought up her father’s outstanding I.O.U.s around the country and used those as payment when he sold off his animals, but then how did that prevent the bank from repossessing the land?

This is the first movie I’ve seen by Mann, who made three other movies in 1950, at least two of them considered great classics. That’s just how it used to work.

R. Wood for Criterion:

All of Mann’s westerns—unlike, for example, John Ford’s—suggest deep psychological disturbance, but those currents never again manifest themselves as blatantly and explicitly as they do in The Furies. Mann’s westerns … show little interest in history or in mythology; they are grounded in a fallen world of existential struggle in which the villains often become the heroes’ dark shadows. Typically, when he shoots down his enemy, the Mann hero experiences not triumph but exhaustion, almost prostration, as if he had forfeited a part of himself, his manhood.

by ·Comments Off on Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray)

Westerns Month continues. This is one of those contrary-auteurist favorites. It’s not even popular enough to be out on DVD in the states, and it’ll never make an AFI list, but, just for example, it’s on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s top 100 list (that’s hundred, not thousand). Not of westerns – of movies. So I had high expectations. And hell, I loved it, but I wouldn’t say I loved it more than Stagecoach or My Darling Clementine (or Red Garters), so maybe I wasn’t paying the right kind of attention, as usual.

L-R: Ben Cooper, Crawford, Carradine, Hayden:

Made the year before Rebel Without a Cause, and the acting style seems like a warm-up for that picture. Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge play town rivals. These actresses were so mad that one had a movie made about how she abused her children, and the other voiced the devil in The Exorcist. They play everything so huge that when they finally meet for a shootout at the end, you can see sparks flying off the film. The women are the men in this picture. Town leader (Ward Bond: Rio Bravo and Wyatt’s older brother in My Darling Clementine) takes his cues from Mercedes, and the other two men are named Johnny Guitar and The Dancin’ Kid – not so tough.

The Kid offends McCambridge; Ward Bond looks on:

Johnny, a former gunfighter trying his luck as a musician, is Sterling Hayden (still a couple years before The Killing) and the Kid is Scott Brady (who starred in a not-so-well-loved Billy the Kid movie for William Castle this same year) with reasonable henchman Royal Dano and mean, irritable henchman Ernest Borgnine. Those fellows are kind of assholes but they’re not criminals – that is, not until a Mercedes-led mob tosses them out of town. Then they figure they might as well knock over the bank on the way out. Crawford is an entrepreneur like McCabe, opening a bar and gambling hall right where the train is gonna come through town. All she ever did wrong was to steal the Kid away from Mercedes. The mob shuts her down and almost hangs her after the bank heist. Her loyal employee (Stagecoach vet John Carradine) is killed and her place burned to the ground, so she hides out with the Kid’s gang until the mob tracks them town. Awesome final scene – the men all stand aside as the two women face off. Mercedes shoots the Kid in the head then gets blasted by Joan, who walks off with Johnny.

McCambridge stares down Crawford…

…while Hayden hides behind some wood:

Empire calls it “a truly demented Western, with vividly colourful settings and and an almost operatic intensity of emotional and physical violence … Best of all, the film acts as a vigorous indictment of the McCarthy witch-hunts; as a lynch mob rides after Crawford while McCambridge bullies witnesses into false confessions.” I suppose so – unlike the mobs in The Sun Shines Bright the previous year or Lang’s Fury, this one has a ringleader who eggs them on. In fact, as soon as Mercedes is shot, they’ve lost their voice – nobody moves or says a word as Johnny escorts Crawford past them all. There’s little doubt that writer Ben Maddow (blacklisted for being a lefty shortly after winning an oscar for The Asphalt Jungle) would’ve held a grudge with McCarthy.

My favorite shot: the (sharply dressed) mob looks past the body of The Kid:

The Guardian: “It is difficult to describe what makes Johnny Guitar so fascinating, except to say that Ray’s orchestration of Philip Yordan’s almost literary screenplay gives a small budget film, made for Republic Studios, a kind of heady but clipped dignity.”

by ·Comments Off on There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954, Walter Lang)

A flimsy, superficial story about a family with a history in showbusiness provides an excuse to put on a series of old-fashioned showtunes, including the title number, You’d Be Surprised, the best-forgotten A Sailor’s Not a Sailor (‘Til a Sailor’s Been Tattooed) and a seemingly hundred-minute version of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Yet somehow it got a best-story oscar nomination, beaten out by a Spencer Tracy western.

The women were good in this, at least. Ethel Merman (more of a stage actress, only her second movie since the 30’s) plays the mom. I see she did an early version of Anything Goes and a movie called Alexander’s Ragtime Band – remind me not to rent that one. She and Dan Dailey (It’s Always Fair Weather, My Blue Heaven) play vaudeville performers who weather out the decline portrayed in Cradle Will Rock, start performing at movie theaters, and gradually expand their act as they have children who grow into Donald O’Connor (couple years after Singin’ in the Rain), Mitzi Gaynor (Donald’s gal in Anything Goes), and a horribly wooden Johnnie Ray, in just about his only movie role.

Drama (barely): Donald falls for young upstart Marilyn Monroe then he and Mitzi follow her on tour instead of sticking with the parents, Johnnie leaves showbiz entirely to become a priest, and they all happily reunite for a revival show at the end. Katy and I were not impressed. The same group – director Lang, writers the Ephrons, cinematographer Leon Shamroy – made Desk Set a couple years later.

by ·Comments Off on Roger Corman double-feature

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

“You’re just a simple little farmboy and the rest of us are all sophisticated beatniks.”

I’m always afraid of Roger Corman movies because I figure they’ll be awful, Ed Wood-style catastrophes. But after I reminded myself that he made the great X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes, I rented these two. Both were great, quick and cheap, but very fun and full of weird humor, not the dull, cardboardy type of cheap movies MST3K always mocked (though the show did feature four Corman movies, all from ’57 and earlier). It was only Corman’s sixth year in the movie business, and the twenty-third movie he directed. Shot in five days, and entirely not bad.

Alice and Walter:

Joe Dante fave Dick Miller, in his only starring role, is slightly creepy and socially inept but eager waiter Walter at a super-hip cafe populated by some hammy characters. I was glad to learn that the songs and clothes and beat poetry were intended as exaggerated parodies of the fashions of the time, since I found it all hilarious. Especially good were cafe boss Leonard, who does a nice horrified stagger when he first discovers Walter’s secret, and Maxwell (Bruno VeSota, vet of sixteen Corman pictures) the beardy ultra-pretentious king poet.

Walter accidentally kills his cat (while trying to save it), then an undercover cop trying to bust oblivious Walter for heroin possession (in crazed self-defense), then covers them in clay and is celebrated by the locals for his lifelike “sculptures.”

Walter vs. the undercover cop:

Walter wins:

Determined to stay famous, he starts killing people on purpose – starting with Alice (Judy Bamber of The Atomic Brain), a Marilyn-looking hottie who’s a total bitch to Walter, yet eagerly agrees to pose nude for his next sculpture. Then he murders a random dude with a table saw (“What’s that you got in the box?,” says Leonard to Walter, who is carrying a man’s head in a box – an early influence on Se7en?). Finally he’s given an art show by Leonard – I’m not clear how his plan to keep Walter from killing more people was supposed to work out – and discovered, he chases his crush Carla (Barboura Morris of Wasp Woman and The Trip) into the night until the voices in his head drive him to suicide.

Leonard finds out what’s in the box:

“I suppose he would have called it ‘hanging man’… his greatest work.”

–
Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

“Please don’t damage the horticulturalist.”

Opens with a pan across a comic strip drawing and a skid-row detective voiceover. The main flaw with this version versus the musical is that Seymour (Jonathan Haze of Gunslinger and Swamp Women) and Audrey (Mrs. Futterman in the Gremlins movies) are less cute and more annoying. Audrey II’s voice is good but the plant prop and puppeteering are pathetic. But the script is good, and as with Bucket of Blood it’s nice that it’s a comedy instead of a sadly self-serious horror about a man-eating plant.

I did like Mr. Mushnick, New Yorker Mel Welles playing a bearded eastern-europe type. Also good to see Dick Miller again – he’s a regular customer who eats flowers (nicely contrasted with the flower who eats people). The dentist (who is not dating Audrey) is a disappointingly regular looking guy. As the VHS box used to proudly proclaim (“Starring Jack Nicholson”), Jack plays the Bill Murray role, a masochistic patient with two minutes’ worth of groan-worthy dialogue.

As in Bucket of Blood, the first person killed is undercover police (dressed as a railway bum for reasons unknown), so a pair of Dragnet-parody cops keep hanging out at the flower shop, along with two giddy girls who want flowers for a parade float and a woman who wants to award Seymour with a prize for Audrey II. Similar ending to the other movie, really – wimpy guy who’s gained celebrity by killing people in secret gets found out, nighttime chase outdoors leads back to a familiar location where he dies (in this case, eaten by plant).

I didn’t get any Little Shop screenshots, so here’s the cast of Bucket of Blood one more time:

Both movies were written by Charles B. Griffith, later director of the Ron Howard-starring clutch-popping classic Eat My Dust. Netflix disc included Rifftrax commentary, which didn’t work too well since the movie was already a comedy, resorting to rude swipes at the low-budget production.

by ·Comments Off on Royal Wedding (1951, Stanley Donen)

Katy found some rare free time to watch a movie (she was sick), so we watched another Fred Astaire musical (our sixth). SHOCKtober will resume shortly.

For once, Fred Astaire’s costar isn’t his romantic partner but his sister. Fred was in his 50’s, looking slightly rough in close-up but having lost no charm, and sister Jane Powell was only 32, of course. The two are dancing partners in a hit show in New York – he’s the consummate professional and she’s always out with a different guy. Their agent books them a gig in London (supposedly it’s the same show, but prefiguring The Band Wagon, none of the music numbers we see from it seem vaguely related to each other) and they each find true love. Jane Powell recognizes a kindred spirit in royal womanizer Peter Lawford (who costarred in Easter Parade with Astaire and Judy Garland in 1948, the same year Jane Powell starred in A Date With Judy), and Astaire meets pretty redhead Sarah Churchill (who wasn’t in a ton of movies, but guess whose daughter she was). And they live happily et cetera.

Of course the group/duo dances are very nice, but Astaire kills it in the solo segments. He does two of his most famous and elegant dances – one on the walls and ceiling (even after I explained, Katy still can’t figure how he did this), and one ingeniously with a coat rack as his partner, a clear influence on David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. For her own solo numbers, Powell sings. And I did not have to turn to IMDB to know that she’s a big fan of Jeanette MacDonald, the piercing Snow White soprano of Monte Carlo and Love Me Tonight. Powell isn’t as horribly shrill, and recording equipment was of higher quality in 1951, but it’s still not my favorite vocal style.

Young director Stanley Donen’s next musical would be Singin’ in the Rain, and this was the first movie by writer Alan Jay Lerner, who’d write Gigi and My Fair Lady. Sarah’s bartender dad is Irishman Albert Sharpe, who returned in Lerner’s Brigadoon. Keenan Wynn seemed awfully proud of himself, but was frankly stupid as both the couple’s New York agent Irving, and his twin brother in England, Edgar. He would improve into the 60’s, appearing in Dr. Strangelove and Point Blank, before falling to the depths of Laserblast and Parts: The Clonus Horror.

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“Some day you’ll wiggle that bottom of yours just once too often”

Aw, this wasn’t much of a horror movie. I guess the idea of surgery without anesthesia is pretty horrific, and the local innkeeper is killing homeless people for fun and profit, and it costars two Frankensteins (Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee), so you could definitely call it a horror movie, but it didn’t much feel like one – more of a dark medical drama. Preston Sturges’ The Great Moment comes to mind. I’ve never seen it, but I thought it was also an invention-of-anesthesia drama. IMDB’s summary makes it sound like more of a patent-infringement thriller, so maybe it’s Corridors of Blood meets Flash of Genius (that intermittent-windshield-wiper-invention drama). Of all the horror movies in the world, why did Criterion pick this one?

A tale of two Frankensteins:

Anyway, it wasn’t bad, for what it was. Lee, in only his third horror movie after Hammer’s earliest Frankenstein and Dracula movies, was deliciously sinister, and Karloff is a surprisingly great actor (guess I’d only seen him as Frankenstein before). Greatly enjoyed the scene where he invents laughing gas and goes on a rampage of hilarity, smashing up his lab. So he overdid it there, but usually he’s quite good.

Karloff is powerless before Black Ben:

While Karloff spends the whole movie experimenting on himself, being mocked by his peers and ultimately becoming a useless opium addict tricked into signing false death certificates for the evil innkeeper, the movie blows some time on our romantic young couple (every movie needs one!): his son Jonathan (Francis Matthews of Terence Fisher’s Revenge of Frankenstein and Dracula: Prince of Darkness) and the housekeeper Susan (Betta St. John of The Robe and Horror Hotel). A haughty white-haired fellow at the hospital (Finlay Currie, who played a man with unpronounceable name in I Know Where I’m Going!) mocks Karloff at every opportunity, with a pinched-mouth arched-eyebrow movie-villain expression on his face.

Finlay Currie to young Jonathan: “your tie is ridiculous.”

Karloff dies in the end (Lee might die also – someone threw “vitriol” in his face) but his son picks up his papers and proves him right, demonstrating the importance of anesthesia in a scene which was probably funnier in the Preston Sturges version. Additional players: the evil innkeeper Black Ben is Francis De Wolff (Hound of the Baskervilles, Under Capricorn) and his even-more-evil wife is Adrienne Corri, who went from playing the neighbor girl in Renoir’s The River to a gang-rape victim (not the one killed with a giant phallus) in A Clockwork Orange. As far as anyone knows the director is still alive. His last theatrical feature was 1980’s The Man With Bogart’s Face, which has a hilarious VHS cover.

by ·Comments Off on Head Against The Wall (1959, Georges Franju)

“You’re botching my gramophone!”

Jean-Pierre Mocky (also the film’s writer, who would later write/direct/produce/star in something called Mocky Story) is our rebel star, a fuckup biker who borrows money all over town and carries on affairs with pretty ladies. The sister of the husband of one of those ladies (Anouk “Lola” Aimée) comes by to warn Mocky away, but she instantly falls for him because he is bad. Then he goes home, burns some of his dad’s work papers, and gets arrested and committed to a mental institution.

Movie slows right down, becomes an exposé of institution life, and more importantly, the impossibility of ever leaving. Mocky meets Charles Aznavour (who was in this and Testament of Orpheus before starring in Shoot The Piano Player), who seems alright but falls into seizures at moments of great stress, and the two talk about being (or seeming) cured, or of simply escaping from the facility.

Not my favorite kind of story, but Franju keeps it visually amazing, as he always does. He and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Eyes Without a Face, Port of Shadows) do such a job with the black-and-white, I can’t imagine it being filmed in color (one of these days I’ll get around to watching color Franju film Shadowman). Some memorable moments: a patient gets violent with a saw, Aznavour has a fit during an escape attempt, he and Mocky ride a little train around the facility, the two doctors coldly discuss their patients outside a cage full of doves (symbolism, anyone?) and Edith Scob (below), in her first film, starts singing.

The “good” doctor (if Aznavour can be believed) whose ward is always full is noble-looking Paul Meurisse (Army of Shadows, Le deuxième souffle, Diabolique), and our man’s doctor (distinctive-looking with his beard and spectacles) is Pierre Brasseur (Port of Shadows and Children of Paradise, later star of Eyes Without a Face and Goto: Island of Love). Mocky’s evil dad is Jean Galland (the masked dancer in Le Plaisir, also star of Renoir’s Whirlpool and Pál Fejös’s Fantomas).

Another failed escape: Mocky tries to walk out with Anouk Aimée on visiting day:

by ·Comments Off on Elena and Her Men (1956, Jean Renoir)

I remember an early scene in which Elena (Ingrid Bergman) is trying to see the parade honoring Jean Marais, then a mutual friend takes her to meet him, and he seems to like her. Doesn’t she give him a special flower that she says will bring luck? Other things must happen after that.

by ·Comments Off on Desk Set (1957, Walter Lang)

Walter “no relation to Fritz” Lang had just come off a couple big musicals and been nominated for an oscar (George Stevens beat him with Giant). Written by Phoebe and Henry “parents of Nora” Ephron (Carousel) and shot by Leon Shamroy (Caprice, Leave Her to Heaven, You Only Live Once) in glorious Cinemascope. Seems odd for an office comedy which all takes place indoors, but it looked really nice so I’m not complaining. Katy liked it, too.

This massive wide shot of the research department, where the bulk of the film takes place, looks so sad shrunken down to web-size:

Katharine Hepburn heads the research department at a TV network, with her loyal coworkers Peg The Older One (Joan Blondell of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Footlight Parade, Nightmare Alley), Ruthie The Cute One (Sue Randall, whom I thought I recognized, but this was her only film before a busy ten-year TV career) and Sylvia The Nondescript Blonde (Dina Merrill of The Magnificent Ambersons [not the Welles], Beyond a Reasonable Doubt [not the Lang] and Catch Me If You Can [not the Spielberg]).

The girls, L-R: Hepburn, Blondell, Randall, Merrill. Notice anything about the actresses’ names when they’re strung together like that?

All is running smoothly until Spencer Tracy shows up muttering about computers and waving a measuring tape all over the place. Rumors fly that he’s planning to replace the girls with machines. Finally the mammoth computer is installed (thanks to the movie’s marketing partner IBM) along with its brittle operator (TV’s Neva Patterson), and worst fears come true when the researchers all get pink slips in their next paycheck. But it turns out everyone got pink slips – the computer in accounting is malfunctioning. IBM didn’t have the whole product-placement thing figured out yet – humorous or not, you’re not supposed to show your major new technological innovation causing massive problems at the company that installed it. To make up for that, Tracy explains that none of the girls will lose their jobs, and in fact their work will be easier than ever thanks to the new computer – a giant lie.

Wikipedia: “At that time IBM had not quite finished establishing its dominance over the computer market, but computers were already starting to replace whole offices of clerical workers, and most Americans did not know much more than that about computers. This movie would prepare them for what computers were about to do to their society.”

I know how Tracy feels. This weekend it took the Flying Biscuit twenty minutes to make my sausage biscuit because “the computer was down”. What computer??

Secondary conflict: Hepburn’s boss (Gig Young of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and the George Sidney Three Musketeers) is also her occasional boyfriend. He’s a loser manager who can’t even do his own budget reports, getting Hepburn to secretly do them for him, and she’s a total brainiac, so it figures at the end she’ll dump the loser in favor of socially-awkward computer egghead Tracy.

Spencer Tracy knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Hepburn’s boss/boyfriend listens intently while she flashes a ghastly expression: