I’m on a 1960s rock & roll kick. Rewatched this a few months after Anthology, getting some nice HD screenshots of Eleanor Bron, including when I seen her in the arms of Paul saying “I can say no more.”
Tag: 1960’s
Le Boucher (1969, Claude Chabrol)
Local butcher Jean Yanne (We Won’t Grow Old Together) likes teacher Stéphane Audran, also has been murdering people, and stabs himself when she finds out.
Marnie (1964, Alfred Hitchcock)
Normie-me often lets down cinephile-me. I’d love to feel the same ecstasy as the people with the five-star reviews blathering about “bodies in motion through space” or analyzing the use of color, but all I can see is Hollywood discovering psychology, Tippi Hedren’s childhood trauma prefiguring a million more tedious psych-dramas.
Tippi gets office jobs then robs the office and moves to another town. It’s a sweet gig until she’s recognized by Sean Connery, who has business with two of her employers. After two hours of Sean trying to figure out her deal with theft and horses and the color red, we’re rewarded with a flashback of her killing her mom’s abusive boyfriend Bruce Dern with a fireplace poker.
Connery’s sister Diane Baker starred in Strait-Jacket the same year, and in the mid-90s would play mother(s) to Matthew Broderick and Sandra Bullock. Tippi’s judgemental mom Louise Latham was in Sugarland Express. The mom’s neighbor girl Kimberly Beck would grow up to appear in a few Friday the 13th sequels, while Young Killer Marnie played in late-70s thrillers The Car, Piranha, and The Fury.
High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)
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.
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”
