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Films de France says:
“Fantômas (1964) is certainly a very different film to Fantômas (1913), although both were targeted at mass cinema audiences. Whereas Feuillade’s film is a chilling and atmospheric work which succeeds in conveying the menace of Fantômas, André Hunebelle’s version is little more than a conventional action comedy which is far more concerned with trivial comic stunts than characterisation. Because their approaches are so different, it is difficult, and perhaps unfair, to make comparisons between the two films.”

The French dutifully line up for the latest Fantomas movie:

I disagree, and shall proceed to make comparisons between the two films. The original was wonderful, groundbreaking, while this one is a bit of fluff that would seem demeaning to the great Jean Marais – except that I somehow had him confused with Jean Gabin. Marais… let’s see, he was in those Cocteau movies and Donkey Skin, and before this he made The Iron Mask, Captain Blood and The Hunchback of Paris, so on second thought, this seems right up his alley. Marais plays Fandor the journalist, a sidekick to chief inspector Juve in the Feuillade, but here his rival. With Fandor’s type of sensationalist journalism, Fuller would’ve made him a villain, but Hunebelle makes him our hero. I think we’re supposed to like him, but it’s hard to tell, because I think by the end we’re also supposed to like Juve, a nasty, hateful little man.

A rare smile from Juve after a prolonged earplug gag:

First half of the movie is barely a movie at all, people standing still and talking. Sometimes there’s a joke, usually one that tries too hard. Sometimes cute comic sound effects play on the soundtrack. Ineffectual Juve is Louis de Funes, supposedly a big enough star to make Marais jealous, but with my fancypants Criterion-groomed New Wave bias, I haven’t heard of his other movies. Fandor’s got a fiancee (Mylene Demongeot of Bonjour Tristesse and Tashlin’s Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell) and Fantomas, who wears a blue robot mask when he’s not being played by Marais, has a girl (Lady Beltham – remember her?) played by some magazine model. It heats up in the second half with some fun vehicle chases, almost becoming a worthwhile action-comedy were it not for the comedy. I was glad that Mylene takes an active role by the end, taking helicopters to rescue people, and that it’s always the men who are in distress.

Jean and Mylene:

Ah, so Fandor ticks off the great criminal Fantomas by faking an interview, so Fantomas kidnaps him and commits some robberies wearing a Fandor mask. He also wears a Juve mask, getting the chief in trouble with his own subordinates. The two victims grudgingly team up and fail to catch him, because there are sequels. Hunebelle made two more in the Fantomas series with the same stars, and also a few OSS 117 movies. People in the 60’s liked this sort of stuff.

Jean Marais will return… on television!

by ·Comments Off on Kwaidan (1965, Masaki Kobayashi)

It’s been a pretty outstanding SHOCKtober over here. I did well to avoid the usual direct-to-video garbage of the last few years and watch stuff I’d actually heard would be good. So I figured I was due for a disappointment when I popped in Kwaidan, another period Japanese piece where everybody moves too slowly – another Ugetsu, in other words. But though it’s definitely true that everyone moves too slowly (and the more rich and upper-class, the slower they move) it’s an awesome looking movie, and even the stories I liked less were a pleasure to watch. I don’t know much about Kobayashi, but easily figured out that he had a background in painting. Watched the full-length version from Masters of Cinema.

1. The Black Hair
Rentaro Mikuni (The Burmese Harp, Vengeance Is Mine, Teshigahara’s Rikyu) is a samurai who has fallen on hard times. He has a good wife, Michiyo Aratama (Sword of Doom, The Human Condition, Ozu’s The End of Summer) but he “could not understand the value of love,” tells his wife “for men, advancement is the most important” and walks out on her, moves away and marries the daughter (Misako Watanabe of Youth of the Beast) of a rich man. But he finds himself unhappy, misses his first wife, so one day he throws it all away and returns to her, finding his property decrepit and run down, but her still sewing quietly in a corner. Or is she? After he pledges he’ll stay with her forever, she’s revealed to be a ghost. He ages about fifty years in the span of a minute, in a pretty awesome scene, then falls to the ground.

2. The Woman of the Snow
This one has the most remarkable images, which is good since I already know the story, first from Tales from the Darkside: The Movie but it also has similarities to The Crane Wife tale. A woodcutter (Tatsuya Nakadai, star of The Human Condition and The Face of Another, played the old king in Ran) is caught in a storm with an older man and witnesses a sort of Jack Frost woman freezing the man to death. She lets him live if he promises to never tell what he’s seen. Soon after, he meets a girl (Keiko Kishi of Early Spring, Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza), falls in love, gets married, has kids, and one day laughingly tells her about that day in the snow, at which point his wife turns back into the snow demon and leaves him, saying if their children ever have reason to complain about his parenting she will return and kill him. The sky is a series of colorfully painted backdrops, often with an eye in the middle, always watching the woodcutter.

3. Hoichi, The Earless
I assumed for a while that the subtitles had missed a letter in “Fearless,” but no. This was the longest and best story. Set in a monastery near the site of an ancient sea battle, with head priest Takashi Shimura (the older detective in Stray Dog and star of Ikiru) and blind errand boy Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura of Demons, Sad Vacation). Ghosts of the defeated army appear at a shrine and send a warrior to fetch Hoichi to sing them the story of the sea battle. He secretly performs for them all week, until the priest finds out, and tells him he’s in great danger. The priests write scripture across Hoichi’s skin – but miss his ears. The warrior comes and can’t find the singer, “I will take these ears to my lord to prove his commands have been obeyed.” The ghosts leave, and from then on, people come from all over and pay to hear the famed Hoichi the Earless play his music.

4. In a Cup of Tea
Kan’emon Nakamura (Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin and Miyamoto Musashi) is a very serious warrior, a guard I think. He sees another man’s smiling reflection in a cup of tea, but drinks it anyway. The ghost (Noboru Nakaya, husband of the Woman in the dunes) appears “in person” with his retainers, challenging the warrior, who finds he cannot fight them since they can disappear at will. But all this is a story being written by an author (Osamu Takizawa of Fires on the Plain) who goes missing until his reflection is seen inside a pot of water – the weirdest of the four stories, and a good one to end on. Kobayashi made 20-some other movies, all of which I must see immediately.

by ·Comments Off on Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard)

It’s the 50th anniversary of Breathless! It’s also the 50th anniversary of Peeping Tom and Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors, but you don’t see anyone making a fuss over those. It’s also the 50th anniversary of writer Truffaut’s other movie about doomed small-time criminals, Shoot the Piano Player. I don’t know which of the two I prefer. StPP has more indelible images, but Breathless is all about motion, with its jazzy editing. Feels like a story that got away from them, a two hour script filmed as a four-hour feature, then mercilessly reduced to 90 minutes.

I didn’t remember the story very well – not that there’s much story to worry about. Belmondo is an incorrigible cad, stealing from everyone he comes across, and Seberg is the conflicted girl who becomes his downfall, reporting him for having killed a cop at the start of the film. He stops to meet with friends (always trying to get money) and she stops to interview a writer (I think) played by Jean-Pierre Melville, part of her ambition to climb from street newspaper-seller to reporter, while a police inspector is always close behind them both.

Good to see on the big screen, a highly enjoyable classic-film experience. Nice to hear from the DVD interviews that just a couple years after Breathless came out, Godard was already talking about the end of cinema – it’s not a recent thing with him.

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 Brainiac: The Baron of Terror (1962, Chano Urueta)

I didn’t set out to watch Brainiac: The Baron of Terror – nobody does. But these blog posts don’t write themselves. Sometimes when I’m sitting and writing about horror movies, I wish I was simply watching more horror movies, so I’ll half-watch some half-assed movie while writing. I doubt this one even makes it up to quarter-assed, so I’ll be brief.

Is this set in Spain, or did the Spanish Inquisition make it to Mexico? Very promising opening: in 1661 the Baron, who has magical powers to release himself from his chains (so, why doesn’t he simply escape the inquisitor?) is sentenced to burn, swears he’ll take his revenge in 300 years. Not a bad looking movie (except for a ludicrous optical effect of a comet) or story. But then comes the revenge, wherein the Baron puts on a silly hairy rubber mask with a long plastic tongue and puts his hands on his victims’ shoulders until they fall down. Supposedly he is sucking out their brains with the evil tongue, which he then stores in a canister and eats when needs some quick energy. At the end our hero discovers the canister, and I figure he’ll chuck it against a wall and the Baron will lose his magic, but instead two guys with flamethrowers bust in and torch the Baron – didn’t see that coming.

Heroes: Rubén Rojo of King of Kings and Rosa María Gallardo of Los secretos del sexo débil

A few translation problems: the grand inquisitor accuses the Baron of using spells “for clumsy and dishonest purposes,” and later an astronomer states “This is the most interesting thing about what I am telling you.” From the director of Blue Demon vs. The Infernal Brains (the guy had a thing for brains) and starring the movie’s own producer as the Baron.

by ·Comments Off on A Single Man (2009, Tom Ford)

I’d never heard of Steve McQueen (the Hunger director, not the actor) or Tom Ford before their latest movies came out, but I sure expected to enjoy the work of “acclaimed visual artist” McQueen more than fashion designer Ford. So as usual I like all the wrong things, because I thought Hunger was alright and this was excellent. Shame about the ending though – Firth decides not to kill himself then has a fatal heart attack moments later, the kind of twist that would’ve seemed well-worn in 1962 when the film was set. But hell, that’s probably from the novel (from the writer of Cabaret, though I didn’t see that mentioned on the posters). Katy says it sounds like a typical literature ending.

Tom Ford (whose IMDB photo looks like a digital mash-up of Keanu Reeves and Kevin Spacey) is fond of jump cuts, slow-mo and focus tricks. He keeps the colors desaturated only to pump them up when his lead character’s emotions are sharp, plays with focus, edits whenever he damn well pleases, and throws in subjective fantasy scenes (like the bomb shelter above), but it all hangs together well, never calling dramatic attention to technique. I guess I could credit cinematographer Eduard Grau (the upcoming Buried) and editor Joan Sodel (Glass House 2) for the technique, but I’m surely not going to. Shout out, however, to Shigeru Umebayashi, whose music grabbed me right from the start (but only returned rarely – he’s just the “additional” composer, damn it).

Firth goes to work on the last day of his life (because he plans to kill himself), teaches his class and inspires spooky student Nicholas Hoult (the boy About a Boy was about) to stalk him. He also wishes death upon his whitebread next door neighbor (Ginnifer Goodwin of that awful movie) and her family, gives some free cash to a hustlin’ Spanish dude (Jon Kortajarena) he meets in the liquor store parking lot beneath an awesome huge Psycho poster, talks to longtime boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode of Match Point) who died months ago in a car crash, and has a private party with old friend Julianne Moore who’s always had a crush on him. Lots of people have crushes on Colin Firth in this movie.

Shades of American Beauty… the period suburbs (actually Los Angeles but it felt like suburbs) featuring women with perfect hair while solitary men with hidden pain were threatened by gun violence and creepy young men with pointed eyebrows (Wes Bentley/Nicholas Hoult) lurked. Firth was up for an acting oscar but lost to The Dude. I thought the movie was nominated for best picture, but even after having seen both of them, I’m still confusing it with A Serious Man.

Julianne Moore gets down:

by ·Comments Off on The Virginian: It Tolls For Thee (1962, Samuel Fuller)

A silly TV western series in which the good guys smile all the time, with an episode written/directed by the great Sam Fuller in his prime (between Underworld USA and Shock Corridor) and guest starring Lee Marvin. In 1884, Marvin shoots gang leader Sharkey (Warren Kemmerling of Close Encounters) and takes over the gang (were they called gangs back then?), plotting revenge on Judge Garth (Lee J. Cobb of Party Girl, Call Northside 777, Our Man Flint) for sending him away years earlier (of course, that’s always why dudes in westerns want revenge on judges). It’s up to our gang of interchangeable white-hats to stop him – and stop him they will, but not before Lee Marvin gets in a good bit of badassery (oh, spell-check doesn’t like that word).

I assume Fuller was working with a rush schedule and stock crew, but he was always a guy who worked fast, so he gets in plenty of striking shots. He also crams the script with literary quotes and references to newspapermen (Joseph Pulitzer is a major presence in the episode). Glad I tracked this one down.

by ·Comments Off on Branded To Kill (1967, Seijun Suzuki)

IMDB says:
“A hit-man, with a fetish for sniffing boiling rice, fumbles his latest job, putting him into conflict with his treacherous wife, with a mysterious woman eager for death and with the phantom-like hit-man known only as Number One.”

I say: “She was his wife??”

Crazypants movie, seems to have been semi-remade in Suzuki’s own even-crazier Pistol Opera (they share a writer). This one has four credited writers, but Suzuki seems to have paid the script little mind, leading to his firing from the studio.

Starring my favorite chipmunk-cheeked badass Jo Shishido, who I just watched in the same year’s A Colt Is My Passport.

Joe, the third-ranked hitman, busts around with new partner Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami of a couple Miyamoto Musashi movies), gets a contract to protect a dude, but Kasuga seems unstable.

Kasuga loses it and charges the fourth-ranked hitman in a tunnel, killing both of them.

Joe kills the second-ranked hitman next – I’m not sure if he was supposed to, or if there was any plan, but he sets the guy on fire. Joe returns home to his wife and snorts rice fumes. It gives him energy (AKA makes him horny). But she tries to kill him and runs off.

Next, Joe is hired by a mysterious girl with a funny nose named Misako (Anne Mari of The Killing Bottle and Mini Skirt Lynchers).

But she is confusing, aims a gun at him, and maybe wants to kill herself.

Joe kills his own wife, the guy he was protecting ends up dead, he fails a job for Misako when a butterfly lands on his rifle scope. The movie begins to confuse Joe excessively.

Shadowy, mysterious Number One (Koji Nanbara of The Human Condition I) begins to threaten Joe, saying he’s kidnapped Misako.

Joe checks the film, says “this can’t be right”:

Joe is set up, hides under a car for cover, dragging it along as a ludicrous shield. But he can’t escape Number One, who leads him to a boxing ring, where Joe accidentally shoots Misako, and either Joe or Number One or maybe both are killed.

John Zorn loves it:

Born in 1923 during the short-lived and quirky Taisho period in Japan, Suzuki inherited a powerful appetite for Haikara (modern style) that was tempered by his experiences in World War II. As the member of a meteorological unit, he was twice shipwrecked in the Philippines and Taiwan, and bore witness to atrocities we can only imagine. His nihilistic philosophy is quite apparent in this work—“Making things is not what counts: the power that destroys them is”—as a kind of playful irreverence that echoes the French New Wave that influenced Suzuki and his contemporaries.

by ·Comments Off on Take Aim at the Police Van (1960, Seijun Suzuki)

Something like my tenth Suzuki movie. They’re always so reliably entertaining – except to Katy, who still hasn’t forgotten how much she hated Kageroza four years later. Maybe she’d like these earlier, more straightforward films over the late, poetic, bonkers ones.

This isn’t stylistically bonkers, but it’s got a super-twisty plot compared to A Colt Is My Passport, or even to a similar disgraced-cop detective story like Stray Dog. Lead character Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima of Underworld Beauty) isn’t even a cop, just a prison security guard, but he does as well connecting the dots as Mifune in Stray Dog. He was on duty when a sniper took aim at the police van, and now that he’s suspended from duty he spends his free time trying to solve the case independently.

Tamon with his Underworld Beauty costar Mari Shiraki:

Shadowy suspicion:

Dancing girls:

No U Turn: