Documentary of high school life in the late 1960s. Actually incredible, and so was the post-film Q&A, where a bunch of 20 year-olds debated how hilariously wrong everything was in the Ancient America before their parents were even born, then the one attendee who personally experienced the late 1960’s said the movie documents a unique moment when the old authorities were starting to lose their grip.
Tag: 1960’s
The TAMI Show (1964, Steve Binder)
Rock performance show/film from the first wave of the British invasion. Killer opening title sequence, with a montage of artists heading to the show with a Beach Boys song about these same artists heading to the show. Chuck Berry opens with an invisible backing band, then Gerry and the Pacemakers takes over from Chuck mid-song to the delight of the crowd even though they are 10% as cool. Audience gets screamy so the sound mix isn’t great, but the crowd calms down whenever someone non-white is onstage. Some of the best music acts at the peak of their powers (and also Jimmy D Whoever, who’s a drag) play a handful of songs each, hosted by cheeseballs Jan & Dean. The prizes for dancing, vocal performance and stage presence all go to James Brown – a shame that pretty-decent dancer Mick Jagger has to follow him. Dave Kehr raves: “Shot on videotape and transferred to film, this was the first full-scale rockumentary, and it’s still a model of the genre, well paced and mostly in focus.”
Mick vs. the Santa Monica crowd:
The Party (1968, Blake Edwards)
The same day I wished I was watching Mon Oncle during the WC Fields three-story house routines, I end up watching Blake and Peter Sellers make an American Tati movie. And like the Fields movie this has barely a plot (inept foreigner is fired from a movie and accidentally invited to the studio boss’s fancy party), is more about putting a comedian in a setting where he can get into hijinks. The normally racially-sensitive Edwards decided Sellers should be in brownface, because white British men weren’t permitted to be as socially weird as the script requires until the 1990 invention of Mr. Bean.
The hot French girl (mainly known for having shot her boyfriend) likes our guy, but is menaced by her McHale’s Navy costar Gavin MacLeod. Party host Alice was in anti-marijuana picture Assassin of Youth, and the film director was downgraded to a TV director in The Fortune Cookie. Drunk Waiter Steve Franken is the breakout star, went on to appear in some late Jerry Lewis films.
Sellers and the Drunk Waiter:
Early films by Ken Jacobs
Orchard Street (1955)
Doc with good color, up and down a short NYC commercial street, staring at the shops and the workers and patrons. Pretty wonderful. Watching some Varda films this week, so this brings Daguerrotypes to mind. These are silent so I’m testing my new music mix, had to cut some Orbital.
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The Whirled (1961/63)
Different unreleased segments stitched together. In the first couple, Jack Smith prances through the streets of NYC. This has sound, but it’s generic silent movie music, so I thought it would be funnier to watch Jack prance to the new Nine Inch Nails Tron soundtrack. Then we get filmed-off-the-TV footage from when Ken appeared on game show Play Your Hunch along with Carolee Schneeman. Then Jack prances through a graveyard.
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Window (1964)
Both the Les Rhinoceros and the LCD Soundsystem songs that shuffle chose were inappropriately high-energy for this camera test looking at and through a building’s window and other materials (mirrors and rainy tarp).
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Blonde Cobra (1960/63)
We’ve reached Peak Jack Smith, as Ken films Jack doing face/body antics and also records Jack on an audio commentary doing voice/speech antics. “Mother, mother, mooootheeerrrrr.” Too much improv nonsense over black leader, I’ll be glad to be finished with Jack for a while. “What went wrong?!”
Salesman (1968, Maysles Bros. & Charlotte Zwerin)
I knew this was a famed doc about door-to-door bible salesman, have previously seen multiple parodies of it, did not foresee a scene where a salesman gets lost in a Florida town designed like an Arabian Nights theme park. John Semley: “Sad men with no money bilking lonely housewives with slightly less money for salvation on the installment plan.”
The Haunted Palace (1963, Roger Corman)
“One becomes accustomed to the darkness here.” Another year, another lovely Corman/Price/Poe movie, this one with some Lovecraft mixed in. The Raven came out in January, The Terror in June, X in July, and this in August – Corman was a powerhouse in ’63.
Vince prepares the waffle iron:
110 years after Vince got burned as a witch, his descendant (also Vince) comes looking for his haunted palace inheritance, along with his useless woman Debra Paget (of Tales of Terror, Lang’s Indian Tomb star). They find Lon “The Wolf Man” Chaney claiming to be the caretaker, but he’s standing in the dark and has cleared out none of the cobwebs.
Elisha debuts his famous wide-eyed stare:
Possessed Vince with Lon and their bald friend:
Ancient Vince had possessed the Necronomicon (this is a good movie to watch right after The Ninth Gate) and his vengeful spirit still lives in the basement. With Chaney’s assistance he possesses Current Vince and summons hellfire against his enemies’ families who all still live in town – first Leo Gordon (villain of Riot in Cell Block 11) then the great Elisha Cook Jr. (in his first of many demonic and scary-house movies). The only normal guy who advocates against revenge and mob violence is Dr. Frank Maxwell (also the only normal person in The Intruder), but you can’t stop mob violence – at least the townspeople pause outside the castle to call Vince’s name a couple times before they charge in and set the place on fire.
How people in New England say “let’s do this”
Quatermass and the Pit (1967, Roy Ward Baker)
The Quatermass movies are like Knives Out, not really sequels, just the continuing otherworldly adventures of Dr. Q – same studio a decade after the last one, but everyone here is new except the writer. The doctor (Andrew Keir, a Hammer guy who tended to play priests and professors) is recruited by a military bomb squad and taken to subway station Hobbs End (“hob was once a sort of nickname for the devil”) where ancient apeman skeletons and a mysterious vessel have been excavated. The film title evokes Poe, but the pit is just a subway tunnel.
Dr. Q and the Colonel
Doing Science:
After they uncover locust aliens who decompose into green goo when the air hits them, the military reluctantly admits this maybe isn’t a nazi bomb, and the doctor thinks Martian insects kidnapped abnormal prehumans and enlightened them. A worker goes down alone and a wind storm ensues, he comes prancing outside with his arms held out like a preemptive parody of Weapons, not clear if he is alien-possessed or just British-terrified – remember, a British person can be driven mad by the smallest inconsistency. The assembled scientists and priests agree that whatever mystery they’ve uncovered, it is Evil.
Roney poses with an artist’s rendering of a big-brained apeman:
Crystal mantis pods:
Reporter Barbara Shelley (Village of the Damned, The Gorgon) is sensitive enough to see the invisible martians so they put a brainwave helmet on her and videotape the psychic visions from her “susceptible brain,” then Dr. Q screens the tape (actually some kids’ home movie of plastic mantises fighting on a rockpile) and tries to convince the government that humans have got alien-inherited genocidal tendencies (partly true). “People don’t believe nothing nowadays unless they’ve seen it on the telly.”
Finally with the station full of TV crews and passersby the ship comes violently alive. The Colonel (Julian Glover, lately of Tar) gets hypnotised by the commotion and melts, everyone else starts doing mob violence, until Q’s science-friend James Donald rides a construction crane to electrocute Mantis Satan and save the world (these movies usually end with Dr. Q identifying some great evil then setting it on fire).
My fifth Roy Ward Baker movie, and if I ever watch a sixth then I’ve officially got problems. Though in its best moments this had shades of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.
Come Drink With Me (1966, King Hu)
The second time I’ve watched Tsai/King movies back to back, this time by accident. Pale guy in white robe (Chen Hung-Lieh) kidnaps the governor’s son Master Chang until Golden Swallow (Jade Fox herself) shows up to set things right. But she gets poisoned, then rescued by Drunken Cat (House of 72 Tenants star Elliot Ngok Wah), whose archrival Abbot Liao Kung (One-Armed Swordsman villain Yang Chi-Ching) teams up with the pale guy for a showdown. The action in this is slower and less fluid than usual, but the people on the internet say it’s actually great, so what do I know.
Swallow vs. Pale Guy:
Abbot vs. Drunken Cat:
Kanto Wanderer (1963, Seijun Suzuki)
Unique structure, starting with the girls in a crime town gazing at the local criminals, then spiraling into the lives of the criminals themselves. Who here is a Kanto wanderer, though?
Gutsy chick Hanako (Fukasaku regular Sanae Nakahara) gets sold into prostitution, sidelining the young women, while scarfaced Kat (Akira Kobayashi, between Rusty Knife and the Yakuza Papers) tries in vain to protect his boss while the rival gang’s warrior Diamond is on a bloody rampage. Kat is also hot for Diamond’s gambler-hustler sister (Hiroko Ito of Tattooed Life), flashing back to when he got his scar over her years earlier.
It’s a pretty okay story, but sometimes leads to great moments like this:
