The Cobalt Screening Room Balcony

One more clip. I love this movie.

Space, you're killing me, Smalls. I had that one cued up for a future commentary. *What's Up Doc* is one of my all time favorites.  But since you're in the mood to make another recommendation, allow me to reciprocate by following up on your request. . . .

Post #183: Let's set a scene. Imagine you're one of six friends on a walking tour of Germany.  One of your friends is Herbert Marshall and another is an uncredited Sterling Holloway, who has been memorialized as the voice of Disney's Winnie The Pooh. Your sextet comes upon a sun-dappled vine-curtained swimming spot where six young thespian women are frolicking in their altogether--not body suits, mind you but in full nymphet nude mode because it's Pre-Code Hollywood. You can almost hear a silly little bear somewhere saying, "Oh bother."  Herbert Marshall engages one of the women, Helen who bears a striking resemblance to a young Marlene Dietrich, in conversation.  She asks him to go away but he doesn't relent.  Cut to a nude boy in a bathtub and realize it's their son, for that chance meeting has led to a happy married life years later.  Got whiplash?

If you haven't yet, hold on.  The fan is going to be spinning with poop before you know it.

Because this is today's feature, *Blonde Venus* (1932) based on a story by its star Marlene Dietrich.  Directed and produced by Josef von Sternberg, this is the fifth collaboration between the director and star, and was delayed a full year as the Hays Code censors slashed, chopped and made julienne fries of the story, seriously weakening the artists' original intent to the point that when filming started, neither wanted to do the film anymore. But they persevered and we're all the more lucky for it.  For its day it's still a pretty shocking piece, parading some tough moral choices before an appreciative audience.

Herbert Marshall is Ned Faraday, an American chemist suffering from radiation poisoning due to his experiments with radium. "Dr. Pierce," he says. "I have a rather peculiar request to make. I want to sell you my body."  Perhaps strapped for cash or maybe he just doesn't swing that way, Dr. Pierce gives Nick perhaps eight months to live unless he can hustle over to Germany for radical treatment running a mere $1500. Basically consigning himself to death, Ned tells his wife Helen who, out of undying love for her family, immediately decides she'll resume her night club singing to fund the treatment.  Within seconds (she can't get out of their cramped apartment fast enough) she's off to a cabaret befriending a hardened showgirl named "Taxi" (let's not speculate on the encyclopedia of jokes we can formulate over THAT name or we'll never finish the commentary) who cues Helen in on her "friend" millionaire Nick Townsend (Cary Grant!) who's a big tipper and always pays the fare on the trip downtown.

Helen's first big number, "Hot Voodoo," by today's standards is weirdly uncomfortable at best.  A conga line of scantily clad Nubian show girls with outrageous afros lead a chained gorilla into the mist of the smoky night club, weaving through the crowd brandishing shields and spears in rhythmic accompaniment by the band.  Now imagine their surprise when the gorilla ("Is it real?" hushed patrons ask as it passes) performs a stealthy strip tease to reveal. . . The Blonde Venus Helen herself, quick to doff her own white afro'd wig and finish the seductive song in trademark breathy tones.  Hoowah! And this woman is a devoted mother too?  Dang!

By the end of the evening (Don't wait up, Darling, I don't know how long the show goes), she has met Nick, told him her life story, and returns in the dark with a three-hundred-dollar check, enough to gain passage for Ned to get farmed out to Germany.  Now the cynical among you might think one of two ways: Nick is actually a soft-headed, softer-hearted philanthropist who wants to help a desperate mother and wife out of dire straits (Money for nothing, get your chicks for free). OR what really happened. . .

Get out your neck brace, because this story moves fast.  With Ned away being de-radiated with more money coming in from, let's say, the success of her stage show, Helen ends up spending--or is it making?--more time with Nick, finally moving herself and her son Johnny (Dickie Moore, he of the *Little Rascals/Our Gang* fame with his big cheeks and pursed, round baby mouth guaranteed to tug motherly instincts out of even a petrified rock) into a palatial apartment of "one of Nick's friends who's away for a few months" (nudge nudge wink wink).  More classy, memorable stage routines follow as her fame hits the stratosphere at which point Nick has her quit her job to spend more time with him.  Why, the cad!

Admitting she loves Nick but must return to Ned because "he's weak," not strong like Nick, Helen seals her farewell from Nick with a two-week "vacation" with him, during which time, unbeknownst to her, Ned returns to America completely cured.  Do you recall that poop I mentioned earlier? Well, here it comes again, raining down so hard you're going to need a hat.  It's a classic Face Palm, Oh Excrement! moment, when Helen confronts Ned, who has been running all over town in search of his wife and Johnny.  Helen admits her infidelity and is greeted with a salvo of rage:  "Go on as before, eh? You saved my life and I'm very happy. Let us go and thank this gentleman for his kindness to us, or would you rather I shoot him dead? Oh, it doesn't matter. He's not to blame. The minute I was out of sight, you took up with the first man who could give you the things I couldn't. What puzzles me now is why you should want to come back to me." You can almost superimpose the Batman "Pow! Oooof! Bam!" over the scene.

Faced with losing Johnny because "You've been a rotten mother to him. You're through with him. The law will give him to me if you don't," Helen packs up and spends the duration of the film circling the drain on the lam. Everywhere she goes her face is in newsprint and she's hounded by Detective Wilson (Sidney Toler--and when you've got Charlie Chan on the case, your options are limited, boy).  In her descent, she picks up cheap night club gigs while uncredited Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel respectively look after Johnny, who like a young Willie Nelson seems to adapt to being on the road again.  But it's dispiriting trying to get two nickels to mate so they can have a good meal, and soon with the womanhunt looming and Johnny being exposed to a less than savory lifestyle, Helen relents and allows Johnny to join his father again.

Of course, Ned takes this opportunity to castigate Helen again, paying her back for "saving his life":  "In this envelope are fifteen hundred dollars. I've been wanting to pay this for a long time. It's what I owe you for my life. It would have been better, Helen, if you'd let me die. You might as well know what that money means to me. It represents my life work. Had I been able to exploit it properly, I could have made a fortune, but I sold my rights and now we're quits. Stay away from Johnny, for good. Give him a chance to forget you. That's the only way you can be a good mother to him now." Sheesh, put away the ball peen hammer, Ned, she's got the point.

I will end my action summary there so you can witness the next whipcrack dramatic shift on your own and I'll not spoil the last third of the movie for you.  Instead, I just want to comment a bit on the morality and risque risks they took in making this film.  Today as in 1932 we could debate the merits and demerits of Helen's choices morally and the resultant emotional wreckage those choices brought with them.  But today the "immorality" of the film is more tempered than it was in 1932.  I believe today we may focus more on the romantic aspects (by that I don't mean hearts and flowers, but the reliance on sacrifice and the definitions of maternal love as motivating forces).  As a caveat, I'll concentrate on a more sympathetic assessment, since narcissism is such a downer. . . .

Just what are the internal workings of Helen's mind? Clearly she loves her husband, and Johnny is a key determinant of her post-Nick actions.  Finding SOME way to fund Ned's life is crucial to her, but did she consciously choose to prostitute herself in service to her love of family?  Well, that depends on how you want to view Helen: She didn't jump into Nick immediately--remember she takes her time before she'll even allow him to kiss her.  On the other hand, she's no innocent either.  I think the lyrics to "Hot Voodoo" shed a klieg light on her in more than the physical sense:

"Did you ever happen to hear a voodoo?
Hear it and you won't give a darn, what you do,
Tom-toms put me under a sort of hoodoo,
And the whole night long,
I don't know the right from wrong, . . .
Hot voodoo, dance of sin,
Hot voodoo, worse than gin, I'd follow a caveman, Right into his cave,
That beat gives me a wicked sensation,
My conscience wants to take a vacation,
Got voodoo, head to toes, Hot voodoo, burn my clothes,
I want to start dancing, Just wearing a smile...

Hot voodoo, I'm aflame, I'm really not to blame,
That African tempo is meaner than mean,
Hot voodoo makes me brave,
I want to misbehave,
I'm beginning to feel like an African queen,
Those drums bring out, The devil inside me,
I need some great big angel to guide me,
Hot voodoo gets me wild,
Oh, fireman, save this child,
I'm going to blazes, I want to be bad!"

Jeepers! Doesn't that prophecy come true--let's break it down.

As noted on the Wanted posters when she's evading capture with Johnny, she's between twenty and twenty-three years old. Through the compression of time von Sternberg uses to hasten the action, we can estimate she was fifteen to eighteen when Ned first stumbled upon her and her friends skinny-dipping, and still in her teen, she married the solid and stolid button-down chemist and had a child.  Coming from the glitz and glamour of the German theater, where she was successful and admired, Helen now performs the duties of a dedicated mother and wife in a dark and close apartment in America.  Tamp down those wild and crazy days of floating naked in nature among the vines and sunlight. Girl, you'll be a woman soon.

Now assuming she was at very least twenty when she sang her Voodoo song, can we realistically consider a girl in her early twenties, seduced by the lure of theater and realizing "That's me in the hot white spotlight losing my religion," to have sown ALL her wild oats?  Surrounded by the sin of excess--even though she admits she does not drink--she might find it challenging not to be led into temptation but to be delivered from evil. Drums keep beating rhythm to the brain. La de da de dee, la de da dee dah. "My conscience wants to take a vacation"--maybe a two week spree with Cary Grant? He is certainly a little more enticing than Herbert Marshall.  And rich.  And charming. And faithful. . . wait, let's not go there, because fidelity may not be Helen's long white suit with a top hat and cigarette holder.

Later, we hear "Oh, fireman, save this child" echoing--Torn between her intense motherly protection and her somewhat wayward, unstable life on the road, Helen chooses the best interests of her son, fully aware that Ned will do everything within his power to erase her from Johnny's memory.  "I'm going to blazes," and she doesn't want Johnny to suffer the slings and arrows of her outrageous fortune.  So she sacrifices her own happiness for the painful greater good, and as she freely admits in Paris she is consigned to a life of not feeling anything ever again; a self-imposed emotional and spiritual exile brought on by her own selfish desires, a just punishment for the hurt she has imposed on her family.

Holy Martyr, Batman.  This is tough stuff.  But you've got to give it Nick, as evidently Helen did, for not trying to supplant Ned's affections for Johnny or ship him away to a boarding school in Omsk; his first act, once Ned is on his way to Germany, is to buy Johnny a puppy.  Never once does he demand the kid call him Uncle Nick or something equally smarmy.  He doesn't paw Helen at any time in the film and basically treats her with kindness and respect.  Even his last act in the film is one of compassion.  So it's difficult to feel feral animosity toward him and those dimples; Ned is much less sympathetic in his vitriol, even though it's coming from an open wound.

Even though I know I'm invoking the wrath of any of my former students who read this, I'm going to use Erich Fromm as a touchstone here.  His thoughts on love are perfectly applicable to this film.  He said: “Infantile love follows the principle: 'I love because I am loved.' Mature love follows the principle: 'I am loved because I love.'  Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'”  To my mind infantile love comes from Johnny, which is only natural. our first mature love is coming from Nick.  Immature love is emblematic of Ned, and our second mature love comes from Helen, first for Johnny, then for Ned.

As frisky as *Blonde Venus* might have been at the time of its release, today it has become a cult favorite with no simple, easily dismissed answers.  If it weren't for Hollywood's creed, the ending may have been different, darker, less conventional, and I would have loved knowing what Dietrich and von Sternberg had cooked up before the censors put the film through a bout with the belt sander.  It might have further alienated audiences in 1932, but it also might have elevated the film as well.  No spoilers--just see and judge for yourself.

All that aside, how's the film?  As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've not been a huge fan of Marlene Dietrich (her singing still seems to me a little flat; I know, pelt me with tomatoes, I'm in the minority), but I cannot deny that she is luminous in some of these scenes, particularly when she's hiding her light under one of those great brimmed hats that fall across one eye.  Cary Grant, age twenty-eight and given the unenviable task of playing a largely unsympathetic role, still manages to infuse Nick with some common decency, and this was well before he trademarked the suave, likable protagonist who defined the power of the suit or tuxedo.  It's a relatively well known fact that von Sternberg gave Grant very little direction during the filming, only one piece of advice, in fact: Part your hair on the other side, which he did and continued wearing it thusly for the rest of his career.  While I love the certainty and gravity of Herbert Marshall's voice, I didn't particularly like his cuckolded chemist as he played hurt with too much vindictiveness for my tastes.  He went from simpering possessiveness to aggressive possessiveness in just about zero screen time.

As always von Sternberg's masterful lighting and framing showcase every performance; even Dickie Moore's Johnny seems to go with the flow and eke out emotion without being sappy or sentimental.  So while *Blonde Venus* may not be everyone's favorite collaboration between Dietrich and von Sternberg, it still holds up as first a classic performance from Marlene Dietrich, second a melodrama and finally a neat snapshot of the mores of Hollywood in the pre-code days.  Come for the nude bathing beauties and stay for the chance to see Marlene Dietrich glow on the screen . . . without the benefit of radium.  (And thanks go to Space Cadet for asking for my thoughts on this film. I owe you another one, Space.)
Enjoy.
Jeff

Jeff, Oh Brudder From a Nudder Mudder, Ya owe me nuthin'. And I'm not gonna recommend any more movies from this era. Instead, I'll suggest that Ya explore it on your own. Say, 1928 up through 1939. Pre-code through the Depression Era. The time when a great movie had to depend on a great story and/or great performances.

Did I muck up yer What's Up Doc treatise? Sorry! I didn't know. But yesterday's grand treatment popped it into my pointy little head and I couldn't restrain myself. It's one of my all time favorites, from what I now think of as the transition era. But I think that Sneaky Pete Bog just re-wrote and remade Bringing Up Baby. After he filed off the serial numbers of course.

Ah my dear friend Space, don't give it a thought. I was just joshing ye.  I'll still do *What's Up, Doc?* but in the meantime, here's today's Blast from the '80s.:

Post #184: Sing along with me now in celebration of America's Beauty: "Suburbia, Suburbia, the answer to God's call, we trimmed thy lawn from dusk till dawn, with barbecues for all."  Yes, dear friends, we are stewards of the blessings given unto us: plush, verdant yards, banks of meticulously shaped shrubbery and splashes of color fresh from the nurseries, the warm scent of diesel-fueled weed-whackers whose insistent growl underscores the distant pining wail of a passing train taking its passengers Anywhere But Here, the poignant thwack of silence against the front porch as yet another evening newspaper ceases to be delivered because it's all done electronically now. . . Beaver Cleaver has grown up, left the house and the cul-de-sac, making commercials for his show on Me TV with an aged curing of a canned ham.  But somewhere in America, God still sheds his grace on thee. . . and crowned thy good with Brotherhood beneath the shedding tree. . . of today's feature, *The 'Burbs* (1989).

And who, other than Jimmy Stewart, more perfectly symbolizes Everyman than Tom Hanks? (That's a rhetorical question; the answer is nobody, obviously.) He's one of the few stars today you might feel at home with on a fall day, knocking back some cider with an apple doughnut after raking and jumping in leaf piles with childlike exuberance.  Tom would do it with you; he's playing Fred Rogers on screen in a couple weeks, for God's sake.

But in *The 'Burbs* he's Ray Peterson, a stressed out nice guy who decides to take a week's vacation from work AT HOME with his family (Carrie Fisher and son Cory Danziger who's around just long enough to fulfill the nuclear family requirement).  Like the good old days when we knew our neighbors and either liked or tolerated them, Ray peacefully coexists with the good folks of Mayfield Place--Art Weingartner (Rick Ducommun) the goofball whose wife is out of town, Lt. Mark Rumsfeld (Bruce Dern) the retired arms dealer with the sexy wife (Wendy Shaal), Walter Seznick (Gale Gordon) a bad toupee'd loner who adores his poodle and has pictures of Lucille Ball in his house--and then there are The Klopeks next door (Brother Theodore, Henry Gibson and Courtney Gains) who may be weird ritual killers, Satanists or  hermits with really bad grooming practices.

Late at night in the crumbling Victorian manse, basement windows covered with lattice release bolts of mysterious light and electrical crackling and unearthly humming rising to a piercing crescendo of suspicion.  Lightning arcs toward the rod jutting from the house's parapet, and the air is charged with menacing conspiracy.  And in a torrential rain storm, from the safe confines of his kitchen, Ray sees the Klopeks digging trenchlike holes in their backyard with ferocious intensity.  But it could be worse--it could be raining. . . no, wait, it IS raining. Strike that. Reverse it.  It could not be worse. To quote Tom Waits, "What's he building in there . . .?"

Director Joe Dante (the man behind *Matinee* (1992) which I commented on some weeks back) is at full throttle here in another dark comedy of escalating conflict and growing paranoia.  His fluid camera movement and perfect framing nicely build dread alongside slapstick comedy. A very actor-centric director, Dante promoted improvisation from his cast, which lends a comfortable looseness to the film. Veteran Dante regulars are back again--Dick Miller and Robert Picardo offer great cameos as Vic and Joe, two garbage men, and the aforementioned Wendy Shaal and Henry Gibson along with Corey Feldman have all appeared in other Dante films like *Innerspace* (1987) and *Gremlins* (1984).  Clearly he knows and excels at black comedy or humor arising from tension.

I won't ruin the fun of *The 'Burbs* by outlining the plot, but merely suggest it's another reductio ad absurdum structure, starting with an ominous premise relating to the next-door neighbors--perfect for Halloween--and spinning vignettes around it in an ever increasing gyre of inference, uncalculated risks, and deterioration of good relations.  Bruce Dern, for me, is the stand out here, his every introduction on screen accompanied by the echoing trumpets of the *Patton* (1970) theme.  His portrayal as Rumsfeld slyly references the former Secretary of Defense in his overly militaristic demeanor as an aggressive watchdog over the neighborhood.  In his camouflage shorts, wild white hair, glowering eyes and jutting jaw, he's the perfect complement and fuel to Ray's active imagination.

The late Rick Ducommun is a constant in the story, egging Ray on to rash and questionable behavior at every turn. He is the instigator, the mental cattle prod whose best intentions deteriorate into self-imposed slapstick, falling over fences, pratfalling with an electrical shock after rendering the entire block powerless by cutting wires from a utility pole, and all manner of buffoonery.  Though Hanks did not get along well with him during filming, Hanks remained professional, though I could see where Ducommun's antics would wear on anyone after a time--he wore on mine and seemed to push Hanks' performance into bouts of loud overacting at select moments.

The DVD and Blu-Ray extras give us an alternate ending, which rearranges some of the material from the original and adds roughly four and one-half minutes of improvisation from Henry Gibson that is interesting but ultimately unnecessary.  Dante reworked the ending, roughly twenty minutes of the film, with reshoots in the dead of night, roughly 3:00 in the morning, finally trimming five minutes off the original time to produce the 101 minute final theatrical version.

*The 'Burbs* opened Number One at the box office, gaining $11,101,197 in that weekend, and topped at $49,101,993 worldwide.  Though it now holds cult status and is loved by many (most IMDB reviewers give it 8-10 on a 10-point scale), critics were less than enthused by it, one critic Vincent Canby of the *New York Times* suggesting, "So little goes on that it might be argued that 'The Burbs' means to be a comment on the vacuity of popular entertainment in the television age, though it's much more an example of it."  Some have suggested it's a dark sit-com, a criticism that may hold some truth since it was filmed totally on the backlot of Universal; in fact, both the original *Leave It To Beaver* and *The Munsters* houses were used in the filming, though the Munsters' house was cropped in shots as Dante felt people would recognize it too readily.

So for all of us who live in the green pastures of suburban sanctuary, *The 'Burbs* can offer creature comforts and questions tied to those new people who just moved in.  You may even come to know the exquisite joy of living in a neighborhood long enough to be graduated from "The New People" status to "One of the Veterans" after a succession of move-ins and move-outs.  And chances are good that you'll never see your neighbors exhuming ancestors' heads in mason jars or performing strange ritualistic dances around your recycling bins, so relax and let's make the most of this beautiful day, sine we're together we might as well say, would you be my, could you be my, won't you be. . . my neighbor. Hi, Neighbor!
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #185: With Halloween hunched over our shoulders like a hungry buzzard, now is the time to trot out all the traditional horror movies and crack out the Karo syrup as Sam Raimi did nearly forty years ago in Royal Oak and then Tennessee in making *The Evil Dead* (1981).  A tsunami of scares is expected right about now. But if you want some really unsettling moments, a truly creeping dread that literally gets under your skin and gashes at your psyche, boy, have I got a recommendation for you: Look in the mirror!

No, don't raise your hackles at me, that was not a lame joke or a cheap condescending slap at your self image--it's the underlying dictate of today's feature, *Seconds* (1966), one of the most acidic, unsettling and lingering assessments of the American Dream I've ever seen.  As a study in popular culture paranoia and spiritual disintegration, I'd put this one above Catherine Deneuve's scary *Repulsion* (1965) from Roman Polanski.  This one creeped the crap out of me, urging me to go back to the university and unleash it on unsuspecting students; I had left my poisonous mark on legions of the innocent by creating three different classes in which *Seconds* would have been a high watermark --Acts of Contrition, Visions Of Dystopia, and The American Dream.  These were literature classes for people who didn't like to read but were forced into enrolling to fulfill General Education requirements, the collegiate equivalent of eating raw broccoli and brussel sprouts swimming in a castor oil flambe.  O, the unbridled glee of those days . . . (You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch)

But alas, those days are over, so I have to loose such finds on you poor folks whose internet car has stalled on a remote road of the information highway. (Secretly I am rubbing my hands together in gleeful conspiracy like Bela Lugosi or Tor Johnson in *Plan 9 From Outer Space* (1959).)

*Seconds* amps up the Sinister Meter immediately, with a credit sequence displaying hideously morphing close-ups of a face, swimming and curling in on itself like a mobius strip. And Jerry Goldsmith's striking score insinuates itself with minor chords that lurk and stab, promising an uneasy alliance with James Wong Howe's disturbing (but excellent and moving) cinematography. Director John Frankenheimer masterfully sets the mood with close cropping, extreme close-ups and a stealthily stalking low angle camera for most of the picture, but never more effectively than in the film's opening minutes--a calculated movement from objective to subjective camera point of view as we track our protagonist Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) through a crowded rush hour Grand Central Station. (The actual filming was done via a camera mounted in a suitcase.)

Arthur is a bank executive with a picture postcard life: good job with a shot at the Presidency of the bank, a devoted wife Emily (Frances Reid, who had just begun her lengthy career as Alice Horton on the NBC soap *Days Of Our Lives*), a comfortable lifestyle--all of which is as boring a diamond-as-big-as-the-Ritz hole in him.  He's trapped in his middle-age, middle America, middle class illusion of the American Dream, and it's a vice squeezing the life force out of him.  Sheryl Crow wouldn't sing it for another forty years, but he's the embodiment of the lyric "All I want to do is have some fun before I die," but he's resigned himself to the truth that life will never afford him that opportunity.  Sensing his membership in TS Eliot's Hollow Men Society located in the valley of dying stars, one night Emily attempts to reignite his spark, but her kiss is like pressing lips against mound of Play Doh left out of its can too long.

In a house of low hanging ceilings increasing the cloying claustrophobia of a dead soul unaware of its own passing, Arthur receives a succession of phone calls from his friend, who unfortunately has been declared dead (how apropos), offering him a "rebirth." Arthur Hamilton, a man held together in a coat of tarnished armor held in place by one bolt, feels that bolt slowly being pulled away, so he follows the mysterious address passed to him in a chance encounter on the way home one night.  Through a circuitous route he ends up in a meat packing plant (Ooo, symbolism), then in the posh offices of a shadowy organization offering him his own specially tailored choice of death--car accident, hotel fire, asphyxiation by being stuck in a closet while someone with a straw sucks all the air out through a keyhole. . . the list is long.

"Arthur Hamilton" will cease to exist, all traces obliterated and his family well compensated, as the contract with the Company stipulates.  He can re-enter the world afresh, new, with a new face, identity, set of mannerisms, and no guilt whatsoever; he's offered an immaculately fashioned womb with a view in the New Frontier.  Numbly, dumbly, "Arthur" assents, trading in Sheryl Crow for Aimee Mann who sings, "Prepare a list for what you need/Before you sign away the deed/'Cause it's not going to stop/It's not going to stop/It's not going to stop Till you wise up, , , No, it's not going to stop/So just give up. . ."

When he wakes up, he is now Antiochus "Tony" Wilson (Rock Hudson), "Arthur Hamilton" having been killed in a hotel fire.  Thus begins the slow and achingly painful rehabilitation and conditioning of the New Man, now a talented painter whose work will be supplied for him until he can develop his own style. Outwardly "Tony" has changed dramatically--in fact he's five inches taller than "Arthur" (John Randolph), but we cannot tell since oblique camera angles are used to intense, anxious effect. Demonstrating such verisimilitude "Arthur's" metamorphosis into "Tony" included footage of an actual rhinoplasty operation, filmed by Frankenheimer himself after his cameraman fainted. In another sign of dedication to detail, John Randolph meticulously taught himself to favor his left hand since Rock Hudson was left-handed.

But inwardly, "Tony" is the same man as "Arthur," freighted with angst, a stifling fear of connecting with another person, and the nagging insistence that life is not what he signed up for.  What follows is, in my mind, the most chilling and powerful performance of Rock Hudson's career.  At first he is a brittle husk of a man, one of Eliot's "stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar,"  And yet with tremulous, suspicious steps he engages a young woman, Nora Marcus (Salome Jens) on the empty beach in halting conversation, and she helps him move into her world.

Frankenheimer originally wanted Sir Laurence Olivier for the role of Tony, but studio executives vetoed that casting choice because Olivier was "not a big name" and not "bankable" enough for the role. But Rock Hudson, in my mind, and in Frankenheimer's on reflection, nailed the role, bringing genuine pathos and gut-twisting agony in his depiction. The final seven minutes of the film stand in my memory as one of the most quietly shocking denouements I've seen in film, and it's going to stick with me in its casual violence.  I can take a bloody payoff by Tarantino without blinking because it's so over-the-top--in every sense of the word a Tarantino conclusion is just a movie, and as he's quick to point out, there's a palpable difference between movie violence and real world carnage, and we're in on the joke for the most part. But Frankenheimer's money shot cuts too close to the bone for comfort, and the result is decalcifying.

No spoilers here, just commentary:  One of the elements that makes *Seconds* so propulsive--in addition to plot, dizzying camera work, taut structure, dead-on acting all the way around, and some of the blackest humor exhibited in a complex psychological drama--is its scathing indictment of corporate life, commerce and acquisition of goods as a "happiness" fiction perpetrated by advertisers.  Frankenheimer said, "All of today's literature and films about escapism are just rubbish, [since] you cannot and should not ever try to escape from who you are."  He saw *Seconds* as "a matter-of-fact yet horrifying portrait of big business that will do anything for anybody, provided you are willing to pay for it. He was contemptuous of "all this nonsense in society that we must be forever young, this accent on youth in advertising and thinking."  Erich Fromm is surely dancing a crazed mazurka in his grave, thinking "Someone GOT it!"

Granted, *Seconds* is not for everyone, even though it earned him one of his ten Academy Award nominations. He anticipated "an audience of six" attending the movie's screening because most people would not wish to see Rock Hudson in such a demanding, dark and subversive critique of American morality, even in the guise of a science fiction film. In fact, The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, recovering from a severe bout of depression, has been noted to remark he thought the opening credits would say, "Come in, Mr. Wilson," as it was such a relentlessly traumatic movie. Wilson also believed one of the investors in *Seconds*, producer and his musical rival Phil Spector, was purposefully taunting him, bringing to the screen Wilson's recent struggles; scenes set on the beach didn't help. Wilson was so distraught over his experience with the film that he stopped production of his masterpiece *Smile* and did not go to a movie theater again until *E.T.* (1982).

Yet even if you're not amenable to the questioning of capitalistic motives, *Seconds* can still stand as a fascinating psychological horror movie with an unsettling ring around the rosy truth: Alec Baldwin, an admirer of the film, affectionately called Frankenheimer "Machiavellian" in his directing style.  At the director's prodding and plying Rock Hudson with alcohol until the actor was notably stewed, Hudson played a cocktail party sequence completely plowed, falling-down drunk, as befit Tony's mental and emotional state at that time.  Frankenheimer later admitted he didn't want to invest the time it might take Hudson to get into the right frame of mind to place the scene as effectively.  We can certainly feel the control Frankenheimer held in every shot of the film.  *Seconds* also marks the return to cinema from John Randolph, Jeff Corey and Nedrick Young, all of whom had been blacklisted in the 1950s (Randolph was reputedly on the list longer than any other actor). Equally shocking is a bacchanalia set in the California wilds where freewheelers fill wooden barrels with grapes and stomp out their abandon in full frontal natural nudity, a scene censored in previous incarnations of the film but now reinstated on DVD.  Here is the scene wherein Tony finally begrudgingly lets loose of his straitjacketed morality and begins his Faustian descent followed by frantic reawakening.

Today, *Seconds* is considered a cult classic, still holding its sting.  When I bought the Criterion Collection edition a few years ago and promptly forgot about it, I should have sat down right then and watched it--I could easily have messed up more students than I did by showing it to them and engaging them in a lively debate. So I apologize, my dear friends who suffered through one or more of my classroom diatribes--I should have shown you this film. What fun we could have had tearing this apart.  But if you do sit down with this, taking time out from a job I hope you find much more fulfilling than Arthur Hamilton did, drop me a line and tell me what you think.  And when you look in the mirror, I'll selfishly pray you find a genuine good friend in there--I don't want to read you've met your end in a freak Nerf Frisbee beheading on a beach somewhere.

I love the movie Burbs. So frantic. And Goonies Cory just being Cory. Bruce Dern's is a stand out. Carrie puts in low key performance. I love when Hanks loses his cool the amount of destruction is funny.

I loved Rick Ducommun he was hilarious and showed up in tons of shows around this time. I have seen this movie a lot but still watch it from beginning to end.

Post #186: And now for something completely different. . . a man with a tape recorder up his nose.  No, actually, because it's Halloween, today's a Triple Feature Day. First up: Not really a movie in the traditional sense, but a compilation of 21 skits orbiting late night television and horrible 1950s movies--*Amazon Women Of The Moon* (1987) with a cast of "A Lot Of Actors," as they're billed in the opening credits.

Hosting four directors, including Joe Dante (*Gremlins*(1984) and *The 'Burbs*(1989)) and John Landis (*Animal House* (1978), *The Blues Brothers* (1980) and *Trading Places*(1983)), *Amazon Women Of The Moon* is a hit and miss affair, with many solid laughs.  My personal favorites include BB King's public service plea for help for "Blacks With No Soul," featuring a hilarious running gag with David Allen Grier as Don "No Soul" Simmons, who does super-caucasian renditions of "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" and the like. "Son Of The Invisible Man" with Ed Begley Jr. is another wonderful spoof of the old Universal horror film, except the Son is fully visible even though he thinks he's not. A quick plug for "First Lady Of The Evening" with Angel Tompkins as a prostitute who's married to the president is fast and funny. But for me the best piece is "Reckless Youth," a dead-on parody of 1930s cautionary shorts, this one starring Paul Bartel and Carrie Fisher covering the dangers of "social disease."

As you can see from the line-up, the film earns its *R* rating with adult humor and just a smattering of profanity.  The scenes of nudity, gratuitous as they are, are actually in service to the stories--an informational TV profile of a *Pethouse* model who follows her daily routine naked while no one seems to notice; adult film director and legend Russ Meyers as a video store owner  recommends to Mark McClure (who played Jimmy Olsen in the *Superman* (1978) to (1987) and *Supergirl* (1984) films and who has a stray copy of a Jimmy Olsen comic lying around his apartment) a personalized video featuring a busty vixen who leads him into trouble.

But for the most part the compilation offers good-natured comic bits starring such notables as Arsenio Hall, Lou Jacobi, Phil Hartman, Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter Horton (who were married at the time, and Horton directed their spot and others), Griffin Dunne, Joe Pantoliano, Joey Travolta and Kelly Preston (who was married to Joey's brother John at the time), Sybil Danning, Steve Forrest, Roxie Roker (from *The Jeffersons*), Rosanna Arquette (who inspired the Toto song "Rosanna"), Steve Guttenberg, Henry Silva, Phil Proctor (from The Firesign Theater), Ralph Bellamy, Howard Hesseman (Dr. Johnny Fever from *WKRP In Cininnati*), Steve Allen, Henny Youngman, Slappy White, Charlie Callas, and others.

There's not a lot to say about this, except you'll find it funny. . . or not. Some sketches are overwrought, but the sheer volume of jokes rapidly fired at you might make the journey worth while.  I laughed out loud several times, but then, that's just me.

Our second feature is far more traditional in its narrative approach, an Irish film starring Amy Huberman, *Rewind* (2010).  Chances are you've never heard of this film, let alone seen it, as it's a low budget (800,000 Euros) thriller released in Ireland and shown at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.  It is notable for its stars, Allen Leech (*Downton Abbey*'s Tom Branson) and Amy Huberman (writer and star of *Finding Joy*, a lovely Irish television series).  Karen, a recovering alcoholic with a past she'd rather forget, has her idyllic married life upended when old boyfriend Karl, freshly released from prison, returns to blackmail her into taking a road trip with him.  Determined to save her daughter and devoted husband (Owen McDonnell) from her terrible secret, she leaves with Karl for a day trip to confront the person she was and be rid of the past once and for all.

The trailer gives away much of the plot and the denouement, but the film is a tension-filled 80 minutes written and directed by PJ Dillon.  While the story itself is finely sliced pure baby Swiss, the three-character scenario moves at a good clip, allowing little character development, though the actors accomplish the stretching of suspense quite capably.  The film picks up as we discover Karen's husband is fully aware of her past and becomes increasingly alarmed at her abrupt disappearance, having met Karl and being led to seek them out on his own, with a powerful final encounter.

You know, that's about it. *Rewind* is a passable adventure, but certainly it doesn't hold enough to move you into an extensive search for it.  

If *It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown* doesn't thrill you, if the kids adhere to the 6:00 to 8:00 Trick-Or-Treat recommendation in many states and you've got the evening to kill, I'd drop in Sam Raimi's *Drag Me To Hell* (2009), Raimi's only PG-13 horror film, though his (1990) R-rated spectacle *Darkman* is for me a great deal of fun too.  *Drag Me To Hell* stars Alison Lohman as bank loan officer Christine Brown who is put in a tough position: To demonstrate she has the wherewithal to make hard decisions, thus sweetening her chances to gain a promotion, she turns down the request for a third mortgage by a tattered old gypsy, Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver),  Despite the old woman's crying and pathetic pleadings in broken English, Christine stands her ground, but when Security escorts Ganush away, she curses Christine for shaming her before the public.  This turns out to be worse than getting a rock in your Halloween bag. [Watch the trailer in the link below:  ]

Ganush attacks Christine as she's preparing to leave for the day, grabbing a button from her coat, just the personal item the old gypsy needs to complete her curse.  Plagued by nightmares, Christine and her boyfriend visit a fortune teller who informs them she is being haunted by a dark spirit, and only Sylvia Ganush can remove the incantation.  Oh, holy hell if Christine discovers the old bat has died, leaving her to be stalked by an insidious demon, the Lamia, who will give Christine a scenic tour of Hades in three days' time unless she can somehow break the spell, which is harder than getting out of a lease in a New York apartment.

Once again, the creepy fun comes from not knowing what happens next, so fugeddabouddit! I'm not telling you any more. But be aware: This is Sam Raimi (*The Evil Dead* Trilogy) so you can bet there are hundreds of wicked special effects now that he has been granted a budget, $30 million, and it paid off with over three times that amount in box office receipts.  Raimi said his intent was to create “a horror film with lots of wild moments and lots of suspense and big shocks that’ll hopefully make audiences jump. But I also wanted to have a lot of dark humor sprinkled throughout. I spent the last decade doing *Spider-Man* and you come to rely on a lot of people doing things for you and a lot of help, but it’s refreshing and wonderful to be reminded that, as with most filmmakers, the best way to do it is yourself, with a tight team doing the main jobs."

Alison Lohman, to her credit, performed all her own stunts, and Lorna Raver actually took her cues from a Hungarian dialect coach to lend an air of authenticity to her role.  As Ganush, she remains in my mind one of the most effective and frightening characters in modern horror; she's right up there with the decaying woman in the bathtub in Kubrick's *The Shining* (1980).  But despite the positively harrowing events and scenes in the film, it's also filled with wonderful dark humor, which can heighten the chills while providing an outlet for the tension.  This attention to comic undertones is what has made *Drag Me To Hell* such a fun film, and one of my favorite Raimi movies, though *Army Of Darkness* still reigns as the top winner.  ("All right you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?"  Groovy.

I once used *Drag Me To Hell* in an Ethics class as a study of character, individual responsibility, moral relativism, and deontological vs. teleological ethical theory in practice.  Christine' actions provide a great forum for discussion of the formation of an ethical code--though she is the centerpiece of the drama, is she driven to make "good" moral decisions? We should not merely dismiss her choices because she is the arguably sympathetic heroine and star of the film; surely some of her decisions have been fired in desperation, but do the circumstances nullify her moral responsibility, or is she acting as an agent of Ayn Rand's ethical egoism and objectivism?  If so, is that a viable compass to follow when we face dilemmas?  Now, naturally, most of us will never have to concern ourselves with a demonic stalker with a three-day deadline, but metaphorically we may be treated to our own versions of hell.  Will they be products of our own construction?

Okay, you get the deal: You've got a comedy, a thriller, and a horror film to choose from today.  As the sage Grail Knight in *Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade* (1989) warned, "You must choose. But choose wisely, for as the true Grail will bring you life, a false Grail will take it from you."  Happy Halloween.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Hey, Space--come for the movie, stay till the end for an Orwell quote. Happy November, ya'll.

Post #187: Savage Drama! Pulse-Pounding Action! Crippling Betrayal! Violent Cramping! We had none of that last night. With our first snowfall and pelting rain, only eleven sopping little Captain Americas and quaking baby ballerinas stopped by for Halloween, so we're up to our armpits with extra Hershey bars--I know what our kids are getting for Christmas this year! (Finally, a cost effective holiday)  With plummeting temperatures and the blessed promise of an extra hour of sleep this weekend (Daylight Savings Time, anyone?), what better way to celebrate than with a classic noir, in this case *Criss Cross* (1949) with Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea.

Two years have passed since Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) experienced his decimating divorce after a seven-month marriage to the seductive Anna Dundee (Yvonne De Carlo). Still haunted by her dark charms, Steve returns to his seedy surroundings in Los Angeles with the desire of seeing her once again and resuming his job as an armored car driver. He wanders around the town, warmly received by his old friends at the armored car company, but remains only a stranger in the Roundup Bar and night club he used to frequent. . . until one night he catches a flash of Anna dancing to "Jungle Fantasy" (with Tony Curtis in his film debut) to Esy Morales and his Rhumba Band.

Their passion is reignited and they go in close for the clinches of a torrid affair, even though Anna is now married to mobster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea in his best laconic frowner role), who has been known to rough up the skirt when the mood strikes him.  Diluting Dundee's suspicions of their affair, Steve tosses an armored car heist at the hood, who coolly accepts the proposition.  Planning to use the heist as a cover to run away with Anna, Steve crosses and double crosses Dundee's gang, leading to a deadly trip down Betrayal Boulevard with a dogleg over to Crossfire Court.

Here director Robert Siodmak is in his element, having previously directed Burt Lancaster's film debut in *The Killers* (1946) along with a one of my old favorites *The Spiral Staircase* (1945) with Dorothy Mcguire.  Siodmak, at times compared to Alfred Hitchcock for his flair at thrillers and mysteries, works the scenery masterfully, creating stable, solid black and white imagery in every frame.  Particularly his use of architectural inclines sets up a rhythm of tension--sidewalks slant, the driveway to the armored car company slopes up to the street, tiers in the Roundup Bar angle upward, stairways tip and dip--all contributing to stimulated camera angles setting us subliminally off balance, a true noir trademark.

Honing his fatalism in this film, Siodmak confidently moves the characters through their emotional landscapes as Steve and Dundee measure a mutual contempt with stark enmity.  They eye one another with suspicious distrust even as they enter into a tenuous partnership, bound by their possessive obsession for Anna. Lancaster reportedly disliked a plot refiguring shortly before shooting, turning the original focus from a racetrack heist to a vitriolic love triangle, but evidences a terrific mix of tough guy bravado and romantic blindness.  Even supporting characters like Percy Helton's Frank the bartender and Alan Napier's cagey and sinister Finchley add to the grit and aura of complicity through their guarded shifting gazes.  I've always enjoyed Helton with his voice squeezed through a fine mesh strainer, his head stealing into the hunch of his shoulders and his high-pitched raspy giggle making my teeth curl; and Napier--whom I fondly remember as Alfred the butler in TV's *Batman*--subtly channeling his British aristocrat fallen out of favor with the ruling class, elevates those around him with sly insouciance.

You might look for his recurring usage of mirrors to ramp up the tension, especially in a wonderful sequence of Steve's convalescence in a hospital bed.  This cross-section of the movie demonstrates the precariousness of Steve's position, actually and metaphorically, and he slowly realizes the claustrophobia of his choices at this moment.  Siodmak's meticulous use of shadow and drifting consciousness as Steve fights to stay alert are showcases here.  Siodmak perfectly employs the standard noir conventions of flashback and subjective camera shots, carefully cranking up our expectations with an encroaching sense of doom.  Duryea is menacing even in his early scenes, when he's masking his rage and overweening grip over control.  His final scenes are as harrowing as a python in a punchbowl.  Conversely, Lancaster's unfounded optimism amid this moral melee, his innocent clinging to the belief he's absolved from blame since the getaway money will buy himself and Anna the life they deserve--these are the elements that make Lancaster such an interesting choice.  I've always maintained it's harder to watch a big man crumble under the weight of a woman than a little guy's being twisted into an emotional pretzel.  So Lancaster's vulnerability is the saddest heart of this coldly rational exercise in cynicism.

Yvonne De Carlo is a classic femme fatale--voluptuous, sensuous, striking in Siodmak's spotlit close-ups, and coolly bored and distanced in scenes with Duryea, throwing herself fully into her interactions with Lancaster.  It is she who initiates contact when Steve hangs back in the Roundup, trying his best to simultaneously melt away and stand at attention as his inner conflict rages.  The last shot of the film, then, is particularly poignant, evoking images of a Michelangelo statue--I'm trying to be cagey here since the ending is a powerhouse to me, a great underlining of Siodmak's philosophy.  Just see it.

*Criss Cross* is extremely effective in its economical 88 minutes, packed with a seedy energy that reminds us that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Orwell once said, "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."  He must have been thinking about this film. But even if he wasn't, I like to picture him sitting back in a comfortable Barcalounger, chipping away at a Hershey bar, and nodding his approval.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Steve returns to his seedy surroundings in Los Angeles.

I was there a few months ago and this is bein' generous. Seedy would be a major step up from what I saw there. And it's an absolute injustice, that the role most people remember Yvonne De Carlo for is Lily Munster.

Post #188: Not that anyone has asked, but I adopted one of my life philosophies from Robert Hastings in his poem "The Station": "It isn’t the burdens of today that drive men mad. Rather, it is regret over yesterday or fear of tomorrow. Regret and fear are twin thieves who would rob us of today."  Every once in awhile I dance and stumble over a fabulous embodiment of Hastings' sentiment, and every time I do I am met with the same response--lingering with my face planted in the pavement with a combined sense of reverence and wonder with a wisp of stock taking.

Admittedly, I am a sucker for unabashedly "human" stories, narratives that strip away pretense and train their eye on the quiet consequences of the past. Tolstoy said God listens but waits.  *Nobody's Fool* (1994), today's feature starring Paul Newman in an Academy Award nominated role, explores the time of God's waiting in the life of Donald "Sully" Sullivan. And I would argue this is one of Newman's finest roles, full of nuance, buried hurt, and truncated dreams that may beg no return.

At sixty years old with a leg writhing with arthritis due to a construction accident (and aided if not initiated by his incessant drinking), Sully (Paul Newman) lives in one room in a house owned by his eighth grade teacher (Jessica Tandy).  He is divorced, long absent from his grown son's (Dylan Walsh) and grandsons' lives, cantankerous in a manner acceptable to his friends, flirtatious with the barmaid (Margot Martindale) and the put-upon wife (Melanie Griffith) of his former employer (Bruce Willis), and loses the Trifecta every day.  He's what my dad would have called an old rascal, who drives a decrepit old vet of a truck and drinks too much beer soaked with regret and fear that his life has added up to less than the rings he's left on the wood of the bar.

His ventures into suing his former boss, Carl Roebuck (Willis), for damages have been patiently and persistently dismissed, though his one-legged friend and lawyer Wirf Wirfley (Gene Saks) persists with optimism.  Sully's also cultivated a combative relationship with Officer Raymer (a young Philip Seymour Hoffman), a hyperkinetic cop who scours the streets for opportunities to bust Sully's chops, though he is fully ill equipped to do so.  Only when his son Peter, his wife and sons return to the snow-covered North Bath, New York, for Thanksgiving does Sully confront the mistakes he's made in the past twenty years.

Director Robert Benton (*The Late Show* (1977) commented on earlier this year, *Kramer Vs. Kramer* (1979), *Places In The Heart* (1984)) is at his best when he explores the intricacies and small moments binding people in their personal failures.  And basing his talents squarely in the work of Richard Russo who excels in quietly unearthing the pressures beneath small town America, Benton conspires to create a lasting portrait of redemption and relationships.  This is all done simply, without fanfare and buckets of special effects.  Benton and Russo train their laser sharp focus on the faces and foibles of their characters, and Paul Newman can convey more pathos and contradiction in one look than others can in their entire careers.

Always sporting his Iron Horse Bar cap and the whole-body pain of a hard lived life, Sully takes no sympathy from those around him; they are simultaneously part of the weight he carries and some of the impetus he knows to be pushing him on. And every day is a slow juggling act as each new interaction is just another element added to the show--he has miles to go and obligations, if not promises, to keep: Miss Beryl Peoples (Tandy) wants her front porch banister repaired, her self-centered banker son wants Sully out of her house as he's spearheading a major real estate development, Sully's son has lost his job at the University and shoulders a fractious marriage with two energetic boys, and he has a running feud with Carl Roebuck by repeatedly stealing and hiding Roebuck's snow blower.

Symbolic of his crumbling life is his ownership of his father's decaying Victorian, a boarded-up edifice that all too strongly reminds him of his father's alcoholic rantings and beatings in Sully's youth.  Now it's gone to rot, just as Sully intended as his tortured tribute to his father's influence.  In Russo's words, "Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully -- people still remarked -- was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application -- that at 60, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable -- all of which he stubbornly confused with independence."

I found so much to love in this film, which never stoops to sappy, soppy sentimentality or mawkish moralizing.  It's a film warmed by incorrigibility and human resolve, a porcelain coffee cup at Hattie's Diner thawing the aging fingers of a hard worker in below-zero temperatures.  It warms from within.  I've seen dozens of Paul Newman's films, and enjoyed every one of them in different degrees, but this one made me want to meet him and tell him how his effortless acting moved me to greater appreciation of his talents.  Well, there's another regret to throw on the pile since Newman died in 2008, another hero gone.  And I have seen perhaps everything Melanie Griffith has done, but for me none of her performances stands in such luminescence as her Toby Roebuck.  Her grace, soft humor and tenacity give Sully reason to hope for another day.  Her final scenes testify to the curative powers she evinces as Sully slowly trudges toward a hard-fought redemption.  God bless Jessica Tandy, who fulfilled Ms. Peoples' fateful premonition to her late husband's picture, "He's getting closer Clive. Last year it was the street light at the end of the block, now it's Mrs. Gruber's bird bath. I think God's zeroing in on me. I have the feeling this is the year he lowers the boom."  Jessica Tandy died before *Nobody's Fool* was released to theaters.

Okay, I confess, this is moving fast up the Favorite Movie List, and to think I saw it for the first time last night.  *Nobody's Fool* has gentle comedy, moving drama, lessons on regret and fear, and a more than impressive cast who work with and off one another so cleanly you'll wonder why we settle for some of the manipulative, derivative, soulless drivel at the theaters today.  Movies like this one make no pretensions about themselves--they merely present life in such a way that we can see possibilities even when we're kissing the pavement in a town populated by sad people camouflaged in coats of optimism.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Post #189: Daylight Savings Time mocked me last night, pointing out with gleeful enmity that I was born at the wrong time.  Turn back the clock, the temporal shift intoned--in another time you coulda been a contender, you coulda been someBODY.  You coulda had a great career writing and directing horrific 1950s B-grade movies like the one you watched in last night's time warp, *The Monolith Monsters* (1957).

It go me thinking.  Gargantuan tarantulas who got LEGS, they know how to use them?  Been there. Undersea gilled beings singing like Billy Bass to beauties in heaving decolletage? Check.  Waah-hoooo, werewolves of London? Seen 'em down at Lee Ho Fook's gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein.  So with all the great monsters roaming the earth, was there anything left to strike stark terror into the hearts of small town America?  Yes! If *The Monolith Monsters* could rile up Californians by fracking up the desert with pieces of meteor that replicated like Gremlins at the first touch of water, then I had it made. . . .

Borrowing Paul Frees from the *Monolith*'s prologue, and just twisting around a few of the images he provoked while trying to sound eerily prescient and foreboding, I sketched out my voice over for the opening shot of a Universal International Earth swimming in a densely star studded background of falling heavenly bodies, and it goes. . . something like this: "From the time God heaved His first celestial sigh of boredom into the void, the Earth has been host to shrieking shards of cosmic garbage. Bits, pieces, chunks of Universal matter have been blown to penetrate our atmosphere in a never ceasing barrage, transforming our heavenly haven into a literal landfill of littering.  Luckily, much of the detritus burns in a fiery inferno upon entry, leaving little trace of its path across the nebula through which they've passed. But occasionally, with the determination borne from some ancient unknowable insistence, a few break through, only to burrow into the soft crust of our planet, heaving the land upward in symmetrical elegance.  What malevolent force issued them forth? What invasive intelligence propelled them to strike us at the very heart of our vulnerability, and why did they seek out our pleasant peninsula?  Was it because Michigan appears a welcome catcher's mitt for the macrocosm, welcoming an extragalactic line drive to called safe at home?  From infinity and beyond, the meteors came, bearing what, only time would tell. . . . for the nameless terror lurks beneath Johnson Street in the sinister sidereal shadows of. . . THE POTHOLES OF PARTICULATE-42!"

Don't you see the possibilities here, people?  If Hollywood could create out of the desert massive black silicates that seem to have no sentient life beyond the ability to grow, topple over, replicate themselves and turn pesky people to stone by sucking the minerals out of them, what could be more successful at the box office than demonizing something we face everyday here in the Wolverine State--the pothole.

True, we can no longer book Grant Williams (who was also in Universal's classic *The Incredible Shrinking Man* (1957)) as the intrepid geologist in the San Angelo Department of Interior office, and we can't get Lola Albright (Peter Gunn's gorgeous right hand bombshell) to stand around in wonder, fear, and tight dresses while the alien dark crystals jut up out of the ground without the charm of Jim Henson to help them.  And Les Tremayne, whose voice on radio held us enrapt in the exploits of *The Thin Man* and *The First Nighter*, is no longer around to whine about his obsolescence as a newspaper editor even though the Shiny Not-Of-This-Known-World rocks might give him a story worth chronicling. But we could easily find a crowd of homey stereotypes to populate our fictional city and cast covert glimpses directly into the camera, to ensure that they are in fact in a movie and not artificially scripted responses to improbable situations.  We could certainly drum a handful of kids who utter phrases like "Jeepers! I'll get my whole gang together with their Schwinns and we'll save the darn town since the power and telephone lines have been knocked down by those jerky stones!  It'll be keen!"

And I could stop by Russ's Hobby Shop to get some of those cool little barn and factory models along with tiny fake trees so we can demolish them just like the Monolith Monsters did in the film. The people in San Angelo had access to iron lungs, though, to keep young Ginny Simpson and a couple oldsters who touched the rocks from becoming a paper weights, so we might need some funding for medical equipment to give the air of authenticity and hike up the beat-the-clock suspense factor.  And microscopes, we'll need microscopes to look professional so when we peer into a sample from The Potholes we'll be able to say things like, "No telling what went on inside of it. It's been gathering the secrets of time and space for billions of years. . . Billions of years. And how long have we got to unlock its most important secrets - three hours or three minutes?"  At this point we can have whatever hot curvaceous woman acting as the high school geologist's fiancee put her hands, palms out, up to her cheek and say, "But, Buck, it's just chert, feldspar, pyroxene, almost all the olivine group, flint - almost solid silica, little bits of it slapped together in such a way that it shouldn't even exist--isn't there SOMETHING we can do to stop it?"  I smell a winner.  Maybe we can get Seamus and Space Cadet to flesh out some of the dialogue.

I haven't yet quite figured out if the Potholes should suck innocent bystanders into their depths, only to have them resurface as emotionless automatons doing the Potholes' bidding, or if they should adopt an Upper Peninsula Uper dialect so we can tell them apart from "regular" townfolk. But wouldn't it be spooky to have Little Bobby DeBebo's Dow chemist father wandering around the house, gathering compounds while intoning, "Well yuh sure, that there salt and aspirin sure would come in mighty handy there, don't you know. And maybe somma that there Traverse City Cherry ice cream with the Mackinaw fudge swirl would make it all go down so good, you betcha, yah sure."

And the Mayor would be hesitant to recognize the threat of The Potholes since he has a huge money-making campaign hinged on the Annual Procession of the Orange Barrels down the center of town, and he doesn't want to acknowledge it might have to be canceled in the interests of public safety. (He incidentally will be shown in lip-smacking detail, falling into one of the insidious Potholes, hanging on with his only good hand, his right hand having been crushed in a nasty paper-shredding scandal years ago--calling for assistance in stark panic, though the only people surrounding the Pothole are Robbie DeBebo, Bobby's dad, and a couple other blank starers who sing to the Mayor, "Let it go, let it go. . .")

In the final analysis, our high school geology teaching protagonist, aided by his already clearly identified sexy fiancee who is several pay grades above him, would be the ones to determine the Potholes are actually afraid of Jell-O, bananas, and Bondo, its chemical make-up countermanding the alien life support systems, thus stopping the Potholes from expanding and swallowing the small town wholly. Raiding every Sam's Club within a one hundred mile radius, technicians directed by Mr. Kościuszko, the town baker, fill fuel tankers with the mixture, coating the main thoroughfares and backstreet alleys and roads with a glaze that buoyantly allows traffic to pass over the dormant divots, never to open again--just as the Monolith Monsters succumbed to the natural salts in the desert that surrounded San Angelo.

No longer would Michiganians have to suffer the jarring jolt of broken car suspensions, the tooth-rattling whiplash from four-foot drops into the evil unraveling gravel lurking beneath residential byways; no more would children scream in terror as they watched their parents' minivans upending and sinking into the schools' pick-up lanes. But what would the winter and its chilling, freezing winds off the Great Lakes bring? Would the Jell-O Formulate splinter, coaxing a return of the portentous Potholes?  We can end the movie with the slow dolly in at one of the smaller Potholes, a thin vein of a hairline fracture snapping, crackling and popping in the Jell-O. . . under the words *The End* then adding in smokey script a QUESTION MARK!  Hey, Kids, what time is it? It's Sequel Time!

Wow.  Think of the boon to Michigan's economy if I had been been born early enough to make this 1950s dream project a reality.  The mind reels, doesn't it?  Now maybe it doesn't hold up to the science of *The Monolith Monster*, but it could be a companion piece.  If only we could get the funding. . . Hey, does anyone know how to initiate a Kickstarter page?
Enjoy.
Jeff

Ah, Jeff. Ya had me in your sites for this one didn't Ya. Ya know I love me a cheesy sci-fi flick. And this one flips all the switches. It's not The Killer Shrews cheesy, and doesn't hold a candle to such cheese fests as Plan 9 From Outer Space or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. But it does peg a solid 7 on the Cheese-O-Meter.

As for dialog for cheesy 50's movies. That thought got me all reminiscent of our Ol' Pal Mars. That my dear friend was one of his greatest abilities. He could sling the lingo of any bygone era like none other. Just the thought of him takin' on that project brought a little smile to my face and yes, a tear or two as well. And that led to thoughts of Niles, Omaha and others. I miss em'. Those who have gone to that great sound stage beyond. And those who have just drifted away.

Space, I'll be back with another horrible '50s film in a day or so. Stay tuned; I still think we have a future in film. . . even if it's just watching them.

Post #190: In 1977 I passed up today's feature *The Other Side Of Midnight* to enter a galaxy far, far away. I could have gone to see a nearly three-hour epic romance filled with passion and power, not to mention more nudity that a complete run of *Playboy* and an invisible man's visit to the local YWCA locker rooms.  Instead of all that software, I opted for hardware--androids and "pieces of junk" attempting leaps to hyperspace.  Now, forty-two (42!) years later, I'm almost *Star Wars*'d out, even though I am eager to see the last installment, and *The Other Side Of Midnight* still looks like an expensive Lifetime movie, without the terminal illnesses or wife beatings.

And to think that Fox distributors had such little faith in George Lucas that they tacked on *Star Wars* as baggage if the theaters wanted a shot at booking *The Other Side Of Midnight*, which executives believed would be an international runaway success. Well, they were right about one thing--audiences ran away from *TOSOM* and into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.  Borrowing from *Star Trek* to mix sci-fi metaphors (and immediately provoke both *Star* camps in a race to disembowel me), set that light sabre on stun.

Based on Sidney Sheldon's blockbusting best seller (which I read and hate to admit I liked), *The Other Side Of Midnight* offers two roads diverging in a yellowed world, a sun-spackled spectacle in every frame.  Two women, one man, all simultaneously bound and separated by war. Passion and power. Hearts brimming with adoration and pain.  Pulse quickening feathery caresses and soul crushing acts of heinous betrayal. (I can go on like this for the duration of my commentary, never invoking an independent clause but teasing out abstractions like the scriptwriter of the trailer, but I may actually feel my mind rot in doing it.)

Everybody sing:  Here's the story, of a lovely lady (Marie-France Pisier) who was traded by her father for some wine. She would shed her clothes for a vendor, so her poor family'd dine. [Her father sends her on her way with a life philosophy you probably wouldn't hear from Dr. Phil: “Noelle, war is coming.  You have beauty. It is your only weapon of survival. Use it. Let the hand under your dress wear gold, and you’ll be that much ahead of the game.”  Say WHAT?] 'Til the one day this poor woman met the vendor, who's as ugly as a toad upon a log; she ends up in his bed and then she leaves him, that's because he's *Dukes Of Hazzard* jerk Boss Hogg (Sorrell Booke).  Hold on, it gets better. . . .

Noelle travels to Paris, clutching at the frayed shawl of innocence with her big blue eyes reflecting trust and extreme gullibility. She meets the dashing Larry Douglas (John Beck), an American flying in the Royal Canadian Air Force with his square jaw and Errol Flynn-wannabe mustache wafting seductively in the City of Lights evening air.  Faster than you can say "Boink" they're dancing in the sheets, three times in ten minutes' montage time, taking time out to hold hands, buy new hats, giggle coyly, run toward the Eiffel Tower and pose beneath a replica of the Statue of Liberty in giddy affection--all underscored by the sweeping strings of Michel Legrand with the subtlety of nail gun.  But a pretty nail gun.

Alas, Larry's leave comes to an end and he must return to the raging war against Hitler, but--can you guess, can you?--he pledges his eternal love to Noelle, promising to marry her when he returns in November; they will meet at 7:00 in their favorite restaurant (and probably end up under the table within five minutes). Uh, actually. . . they won't, because Larry is a cad (SURPRISE!) who has left a trail of pregnant girls like blown roses all across Europe.  And now Noelle is one of them, she learns and in desperation and despondency fills a bath with hot water and in an agonizingly lengthy scene performs an operation with a wire coat hanger. . . .

Meanwhile, in Washington, Catherine Alexander (Susan Sarandon) snags a top-level job as a publicist and wends her way to Hollywood where she's producing a short recruitment film.  (See, I told you this was nearly three hours long.) On set she meets (wait for it) Larry Douglas, a cocky American Air Force pilot whose idea of charming repartee is pressing his hips into Catherine's while dancing in a club while explaining she's the only woman who ever gave him an erection.  Oh you smooth talker Betty Crocker.  And in case you're in suspense, yes, they end up boinking in short order. Except this time he actually DOES marry Catherine.

Back in Europe, Noelle has now become an international film star, wealthy beyond measure, having climbed up the social registry by climbing on every rich benefactor she could lay, uh, her hands on.  Now she can hire a private detective to track down Larry, in whom she still maintains a vested interest.  Naturally she is crestfallen when she discovers he's now a civilian, picking up odd piloting gigs while struggling to adjust to life outside the Air Force. And of course by this time Catherine has developed an intense affection for anything in a bottle because stories like these are required by law to employ at least one alcoholic.  At this point in the film I was checking the running time, calculating how much longer this soap opera was going to drag on; it turns out we're at the 106 minute mark, God help us.

Okay, look: Push the fast forward button to the scene when Noelle sabotages every job Larry works, gets him fired, takes up with the second richest man in the world as his mistress, and hires Larry as her private pilot. She is now a cold, exacting icon whom Larry does not immediately recognize, so she belittles him with the same energy as a kid thinking his tiny pet turtle can be revved up like the spring of a Hot Wheels car.  Larry suffers, Catherine drinks, Larry and Catherine fight, Noelle schemes, culminating in Larry finally finding who Noelle is, kicking in her bedroom door in manly frustration and. . . boink boink boink. . . and once again I have been proven wrong: It IS possible to make sex boring.

Long story short: Noelle is on trial for Catherine's murder, so is Larry. The last fifteen minutes are almost--almost--interesting if you can't see what's coming.  No spoilers.  But once again I appear to be in the minority regarding this film. A rousing 90% approval (4 and 5 star) rating at Amazon suggests there is a major audience ready for this epic.  It stands as Andy Warhol's favorite film, indeed because it was “so plastic.”  I don't think that is a rousing recommendation, though: Plasticity is never one of my key criteria for assessing a film's worth.

But the late Marie-France Pisier (appearing in five Truffaut films, plus *Cousin Cousine* (1975), the charming *French Postcards* (1979)) does dominate the screen with her expressive eyes and immaculate complexion. I honestly thought her full frontal nudity detracted from her performance, though, and as a result most of the emotional impact was blunted for the sake of sensationalism. John Beck as Larry is a resounding stereotype, a mobile block of balsa who often comes across as a serious case of arrested development with a lazy commitment (to his role) befitting an actor who figures he's in a colossal smash hit and thus requires only a stand-in for the character.  I blame the script for some of this, and "Larry" obviously is a vacuous skirt chaser, but a more capable actor could have done SOMETHING with the idiot to make him less hunkering.

Susan Sarandon takes a rocket sled to Lush Land, moving from an interesting if a bit out-of-her-element naif to marital wreck in a snap.  She is a far more accomplished actress, capable of powerful nuances and emotional intensity, than this film would allow her explore. Again the key interest is in scenery and opulence rather than human interaction. World War II is just a convenient backdrop,a handful of Nazi flags fluttering in newsreel footage, and not the underpinning of interpersonal conflict heightened in times of homegrown shifting allegiances.  The war is a plot point, a shorthand to provide a leading man the opportunity to wear a uniform and decimate an obsessive-compulsive innocent turned maneater.  BGut hey, it's a romance.

If you've suffered through some of my commentaries before, you know I freely admit to being a romantic at heart. I am not avowedly against romances--unless they are formulaic pablum blenderized with treacle and rose petals.  And I like a good revenge yarn, even if it's completely over the top like *Kill Bill*.  But I have to empathize with critic Jessica Ritchey who wrote *The Other Side Of Midnight*  “looks cheap in that way only expensive studio flops can, suggesting with every frame that nobody had any idea how to spend the money.” I like Sidney Sheldon's work; in fact I think his screenplay for *The Bachelor And The Bobby Soxer* (1947) holds some of the funniest scenes and lines around, but then you have Cary Grant and Myrna Loy and a teenaged Shirley Temple in there for shiggles too.  And Joyce still gets a kick out of his *I Dream Of Jeannie* in MeTV reruns.

But given the choice between a sumptuous mansion in Greece or a greasy cantina on Mos Eisley, I'll get more *emotional* bang for my buck with a Bothan spy than a French flatfoot floozie with the floy floy.  But don't pay any attention to me--a million Amazon customers can't be wrong. . . .
Enjoy.
Jeff

Both trailers were over the top. I fear the movies cannot live up to the trailers. Meteor Borne, Meteor Strange. Hells yes please. To be a fly on the wall at that writing session. Yeah big stone monoliths that fall on stuff. Yes sounds great. I would (and have) watch a 100 movies like this.

And that bastard Larry got two women on the go with his C acting dashing good looks and piloting skills. I was very happy with that trailer.

"I could have gone to see a nearly three-hour epic romance filled with passion and power, not to mention more nudity that a complete run of *Playboy* and an invisible man's visit to the local YWCA locker rooms."

Every comment I thought up for this line, would require me to ban myself from the site. So, I'll abstain.

You guys crack me up. And, Space, don't hold back in private messages. . . .

Wait till you see tomorrow's abomination.
Jeff

Post #191: Congratulations!  It's Throwback Tuesday and welcome to Anthropoid Afternoon Theatre. Are we not men? We are Devo in today's feature *Monster On The Campus* (1958), another sparkling Jack Arnold offering. [Once again enlisting the voice of Paul Frees, as we did in today's trailer:] From the director of *It Came From Outer Space* (1953), *The Creature From The Black Lagoon* (1954), *Tarantula* (1955), *The Incredible Shrinking Man* (1957) and the break from tradition with *The Mouse That Roared* (1959) comes a tale of unmitigated horror! A story ripped from the headlines of *The Natural Perspirer* beating The Bat Boy for sheer gorgonzola audacity! More daring than a beating with a nylon stocking! More shocking than a good Nicholas Cage film! More shock-inducing than the demented creation of Covfefe in the twisted mind of Potus Industries! Do you dare to face the spine chilling terror of. . . *The Monster On The Campus*?

Can anything prepare you for the prehistoric Big Mouth Billy Bass whose bite is worse than his smell?  Flown in a Coleman Cooler packed with gamma treated ice cubes from Madagascar, this monstrous abomination from the ancient past plunges the quiet Dunsford University into a vortex of revulsion and savage primordial dread. Science professor Dr. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) did not comprehend the ramifications when he unpacked the coelacanth, a toothy living fossil whose species is millions of years old and impervious to natural evolution.  Blake's inquisitive student Jimmy (Troy Donahue), who wears baggy varsity sweaters and exhibits more care for his German shepherd than his girlfriend (who admittedly does little more than look blandly horrified most of the time), gives Blake license to provide the necessary exposition, pontificating with foreboding menace, "Unless we learn to control the instincts we've inherited from our ape-like ancestors, the race is doomed."  Cue the theremin.

One night, as the coelacanth thaws in its leaky case of antediluvian stew, the professor and his colleague's horny assistant Molly Riordan (Helen Westcott) decide Charlie the Primeval Tuna should go into cold storage in the professor's private university meat locker. Sticking his fingers into the gaping maw of the fish to pick it up, Blake seems surprised when he gashes open his hand on its razor sharp teeth, drawing blood.  Like any reputable scientist with advanced degrees in biology, he plunges his hand into the murky soup of the coelacanth's container (Mmm mmm good) to soothe the pain, then shaking off the excess murk, sucks at the wound to make it all better.  Hey, it's an honest reaction any Rhodes scholar would choose, especially since his mommy wasn't there to kiss the booboo and make it well again.

Within seconds Blake grows groggy and passes out in Molly's car, raising hopes in Molly that maybe he'll forget that he's engaged to the University President's daughter Madeline Howard (Joanne Moore) and give her a tumble at her house. As it turns out, there's something strange in the neighborhood, something weird and it don't look good, because soon after getting Blake into her living room, Molly is cloaked in a monstrous growling shadow of a figure which allows her to shriek wildly as it passes over her, even though it's not Passover.  

Later, Madeline arrives to find the house in definite need of the Property Brothers, or a John Deere compact track loader, as no stick of furniture is salvageable. Blake is curled up in a fetal position in the backyard, sporting the spring line from The Incredible Hulk--affordable without putting a massive dent in the ol' pocketbook--moaning with a massive hangover.  And evidently Molly thought it was Christmas because she is hanging by her hair from a tree, an unsettling wide-eyed ornament in a grim rictus of death.  Acknowledging it's not a good look for her, Madeline calls the police, thinking Blake could use a make-over as well.  For all his credentials, the professor can't quite figure out why his clothes are shredded and he cannot recall anything, but summoning up his vast intellectual prowess and thinking back over the evening starting in the lab, he deduces the causal relationship of events leading to this debacle: Molly slipped him a roofie. . . or a drug named after her.

But science must move onward.  And being cleared of all charges, since the police have found a deformed hand print that does not match Blake's, the professor goes back for a second helping of coelacanth, just as a dragonfly beats him to it.  He shoos away the insect, only to find Jimmy and his fatuous girlfriend screaming moments later at the sight of a two-foot dragonfly buzzing like a squadron of drones over them. They net and stab it and in keeping with the pristine, sanitary conditions of the lab, leak some of the blood conveniently into the professor's pipe without knowing it.  Swearing the "kids" (for God's sake, they're probably in their thirties) to secrecy, Blake honors the age-old scientific tradition of sitting back and lighting up his pipe in thoughtful contemplation.  As his mind pinwheels and he witnesses his lab growing blurry with Vaseline around the edges, and his hands sprout wiry dark hair, with his last remnants of cogency the professor deduces another causal relationship between his present condition and what has led to it--the old wives' tale was right: sexual frustration leads to hairy palms!

The story, shot in twelve days, goes on like this for a grand 77 minutes, leaving Jack Arnold himself with the feeling, "I didn't really hate it, but I didn't think it was up to the standards of the other films that I have done." But a couple elements need to be recognized for the treats they bestow.  An uncredited Hank Patterson is on hand as Mr. Townsend, the night watchman, and what a joy it is to see Fred Ziffel moonlighting without Arnold back in Hooterville.  All the rest of the folks on hand have a grand time playing it absolutely straight without a scintilla of irony or camp. Arthur Franz is as resolute as they come in his starring role, reciting some of the silliest dialogue as if he were Olivier in pain as the melancholy Dane. It's also a kick to see Troy Donahue still two years away from *Surfside 6* as the condescendingly named Jimmy Flanders.  And it would be another four years before Joanna Moore would become Sheriff Andy Taylor's girlfriend for a year on TV, then marrying in real life Ryan O'Neal and becoming mother to Tatum.  

Another really nice feature of *Monster On The Campus* is the Universal man-to-hairy-beast metamorphosis. It's seamless, transitioning without the usual small jerk of the camera so often demonstrated in such films.  The final mask of the Monster is what Rocket J. Squirrel would call "Hokey Smoke, Bullwinkle," but actor Eddie Parker who stands in for Arthur Franz uses his body language to lope and leap and low with the best werewolves.  *Monster On Campus* will never win awards for its logic, and the police are about as dense as twelve-year-old French Raclette cheese. But all this aside, I have to agree with Arbogast On Film in their assessment of the Molly Riordan discovery scene:

"I've always found the reveal of the dead Molly Riordan to be one of the most disturbing images in American horror movie history. Hanging by her hair, her dead eyes staring straight out in an expression less of terror (as might be expected) than of a complete and utter failure of comprehension, Molly looks like the subject of Weegee photograph.  I might expect this kind of gruesome detail in a 30s movie, before the Hays Code pissed on everyone's parade, but this macabre tableau was permitted in antiseptic Eisenhower America. Genre movies of this time, of course, were pitched to exploit our fears and our lack of national confidence, to subvert the received wisdom of the day that order could be won from chaos by the combined powers of Brylcreme, Playtex and Dow Chemical. Ergo the giant grasshoppers and crabs and predatory alien intelligences. But this was beyond the pale.  I don't know that the demise of a First Victim has ever affected me quite like this "

It's a wonderfully glossy print with music that sustains the suspense, yet the glaring irrationality of Professor Blake is so wonderfully overwrought and between the giant Cootie-inspired dragonfly on fishing wire and the bubbly rubber of the Monster himself, *Monster On The Campus* is silly enough to host your own MST3K convention in your living room. A note of warning, however: If you ever catch a big mother carp in the Tittabawassee River, don't microwave it unless you're absolutely certain your appliance is approved by Underwriter Laboratory's Anti-Gamma Ray inspection code. Otherwise, it might be smart to stock up on extra Gillettes and Barbasol for your hands.
Enjoy.
Jeff

Jeff, you've flung enough cheese (and cheesecake) lately, to keep me firmly rooted in my best couch potato form for quite a spell. Keep up the good work.

And on a totally unrelated and hypothetical subject. If an unreformed practical joker decided to use a drone, a few mylar balloons and some light weight but high intensity LED lights to fake a UFO, would that be a felony or a misdemeanor? Askin' for a friend...

Space, tell your friend s/he's probably not in jeopardy unless the UFO is equipped with a Bubble Boy who's filmed by his father and sold to the tabloids.  I'll await the news.

Post #192: Just when you thought we couldn't sink any lower, today's commentary proves you wrong. We scudded the depths of prehistoric waterways yesterday, and today we get right down to the core of it, the crux, with. . . *The Mole People* (1956), a journey to the center of the earth Jules Verne would have balked at.  But as our main character observes, "In archaeology all things are possible."  Oh, say it ain't so, Joe!

Since *Mystery Science Theater 3000* has already excoriated this mastermash, I'll keep my commentary a little shorter than usual.  But the opening credits rising out of a smoldering pit, which seems an apt metaphor for this film, promise a warm reception for all.  Settling in for subterranean silliness, we are first greeted by Dr. Frank Baxter, a great blast from my past as he hosted a slew of *Bell Telephone Hour* science programs as "Dr. Research" when I was five or six. At the time I didn't realize what goofy pre-disco mannerisms he sported--weird hand gestures that had nothing to do with what he was discussing, though his frequent pantomime of a circular globe jerkily expanding like an invisible beach ball grew to be my favorite.  With all respect to Dr. Baxter, who was a USC English professor, I never for a moment figured my professorship in Language Arts and English would qualify me to host a TV series or enlist me as an authority on albino civilizations at the earth's core.  Oh, the road not taken. . . .

Be that as it may, our epic took only 17 days to film as we're off to Tibet with archaeologists Dr. Roger Bentley (John Agar, aka Shirley Temple's husband) and Dr. Jud Bellamin (Hugh Beaumont, evidently in search of Barbara Billingsly, Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers as The Beaver), climbing the treacherous terrain of a Himalayan mountain on the trail of Sumerian artifacts.  They are joined by Professor Etienne Lafarge (Nestor Paiva) as dead weight because if it were just the two of them, they'd have no reason to slow down and risk capture and annihilation if they were charged by angry mutants or condescending Ishtar worshipers in dire need of a sunlamp. Sure enough, by the time they've found a mountaintop ancient Mesopotamian Best Eastern motel-slash-temple, Lafarge has initiated panting, sweating and moaning like the stars of *The Other Side of Midnight*, though he seems to be having less fun.

Falling to his death through the decrepit linoleum floor of the temple, one of the supernumeraries discovers Frontierland several hundred feet below. Roger, Jud and LaFarge, listening to War on their Walkmen, go slipping into darkness like a beetle in a bog where they are accosted by a race of mutant recluses from Proactiv commercials, who do not seem to be impressed by Roger's insistence that "Cisco Kid was a friend of mine. . . ." But eveready with a handy supply of Energizer batteries, our trio shine their flashlight at them, causing the cave critters to retreat, avoiding the spotlight like any humble actor with a hunchback stuffed with newspaper. After many long minutes in the dark, saving producers money on sets, our heroes are captured by upright bags of tripe who worship Ishtar (How could they know that Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty could make such a rotten film?) with complexions the consistency of Elmer's Glue Paste.

Theirs is a Flash Gordon Magic Kingdom shimmering with an inner light from phosphorous rocks and virgin sacrifices through extensive sunburn.  Head Priest Elinu (Alan Napier in a white Fun Manchu and a bowlcut cap with tinsel) is suspicious of the archaeologists, though they gain the favor of the King whose crown looks like a cross between a gigantic Afro comb and a stripped barbecued ribs platter.  To the King they are Gods with the Fire Of Ishtar at their disposal, a maglight. As a present Roger receives a Sumarian Blue Plate Special, Adad (Cynthia Patrick, the only real reason to watch this film), a slave girl touched by "the darkness," that is, she is capable of a great tan, and therefore unworthy to all the Ishtar-And-Feathering brethren.  Singing "Hello From The Other Side," Adad naturally falls in love with Roger who plans to take her above, to become an Uptown Girl, once they escape.  (Looking at Adad we can reasonably assume the rest of the Ishtar-babies are eunuchs or genuinely blind if they haven't hit on her. In fact, she looks nothing like adad I've ever seen; if I were to name her it'd be Woo Lordy Momma, those Friday nights. . . But then that's just me.)

Even though poor LaFarge collapses after running in panic into the caves, only to be hunkered over by one of the Mole People, thinking he was an oversized Big Mac, the Mole People are really just a misunderstood race, ancient misshapen youth who yearn just to be listened to.  Roger and Jud try, saving a few from being chained to the walls and beaten by When-You-Wish-Upon-Ishtar brutes, but their inaudible mumbling in their latex faces makes them give up and wander back to the pits.   You might expect these slavish Mole Men working away in the Mesopotamian La Brea Ishtar Pits to revolt, because they are truly revolting, after years of subjugation and flailing with sluggish whips of rawhide and beef jerky.  Well, you would be correct: They slink out of the silt and wage pimply war, allowing Roger, Jud and Adad to escape certain doom by following the Eye of Ishtar, aka the Sun.

Unfortunately, when they return to their Himalayan point of entry, the freaking idiots back at the studio change the original happy ending of Roger and Adad married in harmonious rapture because, they decided, they didn't want to promote interracial marriages.  So they hastily bowl Adad over with a sixty ton Doric column, crushing the only saving grace of the whole movie under its weight while the screen fades to black with stark white THE END leaving the audience to scream in unison WTF?  Cynthia Patrick is a white girl, for God's sake, though admittedly not as white as the High Priest or the Babyback Rib King.  And even if she was Tondelayo's kid sister from *White Cargo* (1942), so frickin' WHAT? At this point I just wanted Universal International's staff to be besieged by Mole Men, giant Tarantulas, Monsters from the Campus, and any other stray abominations in their commissary, or maybe just be beaten by the goofy hand gestures of Dr. Frank Baxter in the Faculty Coffee Room.

But those were simple times, I have to remind myself, when executive pinheads grew rich on the fevered dreams induced by writers and special effects agents who were scared by Silly Putty in their youth.  At least we have grown up a bit and now live in a land that respects differences while realizing it's precisely our differences that make us useful to one another, accepts all folks for the individual strengths they bring to life, joyfully embraces others with divergent opinions and appearances as they bring diversity to help us all mature, and steadfastly puts in place measures that will never allow wanton exercises of power and the abuse of responsibility to reduce us to myopic, exclusionary despots whose only rule is Me First. And the skies are not cloudy all day. . . .

I seem to have drifted a bit. Anyway, if anything is possible with archaeology, we can always hope that our descendants will judge us kindly when they unearth a Coca-Cola bottle emblazoned with the words "Share a Coke With Adad."
Enjoy.
Jeff

I love me some cheesy sci-fi. I'm pretty sure that's been proven. This one IMHO ain't cheese. It feels more to me, like a low budget niche market cash grab. It would have been far more appropriate if the openin' titles had been descendin' into a smolderin' pit. I can't imagine that there would be anyone left at any drive-in beyond the first 45 minutes of this turkey, except for the cars on the back row with the fogged up windows. It stinks. But never to the point of reachin' humorous.

I don't know if "In archeology all things are possible." But I know where this is. It was incorporated into the back wall of Grauman's Chinese Theater.

With luck, I'll make up for all that today, Space.

Post #193: You know how bad *Mole People* is?  That's how good *Night And The City* (1950) is. After a string of Monsters Of Mediocrity in my offerings, I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge of offering a really top notch character study that knocks a lot of the competition flat on their keisters and continues to hold them in a nasty headlock. Blacklisted director Jules Dassin has crafted one of the most thoroughly bleak, existential and fatalistic narratives I've seen, with a roster of characters so devoutly predestined for disappointment and doom that penitence isn't even on their menus. But rather than being depressed by its insistent downward spiral, I was fascinated by it, thanks to the stand-out performances of the cast.

When the first shot of a movie is the murky landscape of London fog and a high aerial shot of a frantic man being chased in deep shadow, accompanied by a desperate soundtrack from Franz Waxman, you know this isn't going to pan out to be a sequel to *Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm* (1938).  The running man, who will continue running through the entire film, is grifter/shill/unprincipled dreamer Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) whose indefatigable restlessness for success never seems to pay off. The only person in his corner, which is shrinking by the moment, is Mary Bristol (the luminous Gene Tierney), a scrupulously honest singer in the seedy Silver Fox Club owned by Phil Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), a corpulent cross between Sydney Greenstreet and Robert Morley, with his estranged wife Helen (Googie Withers in a withering role).  

Perpetually working himself up from nothing to a state of abject poverty, Fabian lures patrons of more expensive clubs away to frequent the Silver Fox Club while on Nosseross' payroll.  With his slick smile and effusive salesmanship, he's known to every two-bit con on the street and has borrowed money from all of them. But one night working on a con at a wrestling match, he happens upon Gregorius the Great (Stanislans Szybysko), now a retired progenitor of the art of Greco-Roman wrestling whose son Kristo (Herbert Lom), a man of considerable influence, controls all wrestling venues in London. Denouncing his son's exhibitions as a cheap commercial disgrace to the art, Gregorius is immediately leeched onto by Fabian, who suddenly figures himself to be London's finest wrestling promoter.

Over the span of the film's brisk 96 minutes, Fabian proves there's not a single law of averages or integrity he cannot exploit in his pained effort to make it big and "be somebody."  His is a world of hustlers and double-crossers, smooth operators and down-at-heels opportunists in a world of self-serving scammers.  And in Dassin's lens everyone is trapped, tapped, imprisoned and impassioned by ego and egregious manipulation:  Fabian steals from Mary, undercuts Nosseross, steals away the main wrestling attraction The Strangler (Mike Mazurki) from Kristo (never acknowledging Rule One in the confidence game--Never piss off the mob), conspires with Helen Nosseross to back her sly attempt to start up her own night club to undermine her husband, and dupes the mortar of morality Gregorius with deadly consequences.

Nearly every frame of the film' set up (mise en scene) is rendered close with paranoia and entrapment. Ceilings are low, tamping down the characters shown from low angles. Alleyways and brick edifices hug each other, pressing in with vise-like claustrophobia. Close-ups from beneath fill the screen with sweaty intensity.  Nosseross's stifling glass office barely manages enough space to hold his girth while looking out into the patrons packed shoulder to shoulder in delirious drunken proximity to small tables and the breath of the night.  Each set becomes its own wrestling ring as the fight for survival or escape burrows down.  

Perhaps it's all symbolic of Dassin's state of mind at the time of filming that he's directed such a potent paean to confinement: Twentieth Century Fox chief Daryl Zanuck told Dassin to leave for Europe to avoid persecution and prosecution from the HUAC, and *Night And The City* would be the "last film he'd do."  Zanuck recommended shooting the most expensive scenes first, which would guarantee studio commitment to the project.  While Douglas Fairbanks Jr. cast most of the film with his contacts in Great Britain, Zanuck pressed Dassin to cast Gene Tierney, who he said had become despondent to the verge of being suicidal over a failed affair, and she could benefit from the work.  

Working at a fever pitch, Dassin admitted he didn't take the time to read the Gerald Kersh novel on which the film was based, the result filling the author with lividity.  But in the rush to finish the film quickly, Dassin innovated some wonderful sequences, including the final sequence--perhaps ten minutes long--in which Fabian literally runs for his life through stony streets and inevitably faces his fate.  In addition to the raw energy and emotional impact of the sequence, it's made that much more powerful knowing it was filmed in one day at dawn with six cameras--in one take.  

Equally intense is a wrestling sequence between Stanislans Szybysko and Mike Mazurki, both of whom were professional wrestlers in their own right. At the time of filming Szybysko was retired, a two-time World heavyweight Champion and a Greco-Roman World Heavyweight Champion living on a farm in Iowa. Dessin pictured him as Gregorius and despite Zanuck's belief that Szybysko was dead, Dessin found and hired him.  Much more than just an accomplished wrestler, Szybsyko took some acting lessons and fulfilled the role so convincingly that Richard Widmark, watching him film his final scene, actually believed the wrestler was dying before his eyes.  The match between him and Mazurki stands as one of the hallmarks of the film, at times difficult to watch due to the wrestlers' primal commitment to the scene; this is no Flying Fred Curry, Bobo Brazil or Brylcreme-coiffed Ric Flair.  These guys are fighting for all they hold dear--and that ain't Slim Jims, Macho Man. You can almost feel the sheets of sweat through your DVD.

When Dessin returned from London, he was not allowed back on the studio grounds and was not met in person by the co-editor of the movie, due to his being blacklisted by HUAC.  The final editing of the cut was done with only scant instructions fed to the editor over the phone.  And though *Night And The City* is frequently hailed as a superior film noir, Dessin admits he had never heard the term or been influenced by its tenets during the production.  The themes of alienation, greed, complicity, fatal determinism, and the visual sense of hard shadows, oblique angles and psychological devastation (an acute usage of micro physiognomy), these were all his invention for the characters.

In that light, then, I'd urge you to see this film. Richard Widmark, who shared a mutual admiration with his director, is by turns tragic, smarmy, confident and wracked by insecurities, yet engaging enough to make you think he might be on the level at times, only to disappoint you again and again as Fabian.  Gene Tierney, decked in Oleg Cassini's elegant but understated wardrobe, can break your heart in her trust and unfathomable belief in her man. Francis L. Sullivan commands the screen in bulk and bluster, tripping a condescending "Dear boy" from his tongue with panache that is belied by his character's soft heart and sadly self-aware vulnerability directed at his coldly calculating wife. And Googie Withers as the spiteful Helen holds everyone in cool disdain, totally determined not to return to her sub-modest beginnings.  Herbert Lom as the shrewd business mogul and dedicated son Kristo combines fierce malice with warm devotion with an intimate scene that is as heartbreaking as it is deadly.

If my last few commentaries have caused you to wonder if I'd embarked on the bad-movie equivalent to "The Lost Weekend," let this film assure you I can still direct your attention toward something edifying and strong. To me *Night And The City* is a powerhouse, a film that in the clinches will throw you off balance, slam you into the ethical turnbuckles, and make you slap the mat as a concession to its superior moves. Wooooo!  Oh yeah!
Enjoy.
Jeff

Don't mind me Jeff. Some of the worst reviewed movies in cinematic history are on my "comfort" movie list. I can appreciate and even sit in awe of some of the greatest movies ever made. I consider Citizen Kane to be a "good" movie. And while I can appreciate the technical aspects of it. On the whole, I consider it to be pretty pedestrian. I really enjoyed Waterworld. It was just a bit long winded. And I consider The Martian to be the best movie of the last 10 years.

And for some reason, writin' this post has made me decide to watch Harvey again. The Jimmy Stewart original, not the silly 80's remake. And I may make it a double feature with...

I immediately ordered *Second Hand Lions* after that clip, Space. Thanks.  It will be a great birthday present for my wife next week.

Post #194:  I first became aware that comedy was a very subjective entity in the seventh grade. Rob Ferguson was manically flailing his hands like limp pancakes trying to expel any trace of syrup from their surface for no discernible reason. It struck me as the most random action anyone had ever taken, and I burst into a paroxysm of uncontrollable laughter. I was the only one. I recall my buddy Jerry Howell, who has one of the keenest senses of humor on the planet, looking at me like I had three heads--one with a beard--his gaze questioning my sanity.  Which made me laugh all the harder.  Rob smiled at me but kept shaking his Silly Putty hands until his fingers blurred like whiz marks on a Warner Brothers cartoon.  Humor, like gravity, is relative.

So when I mention that today's feature *Masterminds* (2016) made me laugh out loud several times and smile good naturedly all the way through, take it with the memory of Rob Ferguson.

Now I've noted in past commentaries that I have grown weary of purely crude and sophomoric comedies that relish seeing how far they can push the envelope of good taste with forays into mean spiritedness.  I disavow classics like *Blazing Saddles* (1974) and Monty Python's *Holy Grail* (1975) and *Life Of Brian* (1979), and though I blanch at some of the jokes of Richard Pryor, I still hold his comedy in pretty high regard for the same reason I like George Carlin's riffs--because they did it first.  Too many comedies or comedians today are derivative rehashes of "FUNNY" done around forty years ago, and because I lived through the original incarnations, trying to be edgy today for the sake of shock I find tedious, sad echoes of the truly inventive.  Instead of yelling fire in a crowded theater, they're yelling F*** in an orgy and thinking themselves witty.

Enough with the caveats and apologies. I liked *Masterminds*, I like Zach Galifianakis and Kristen Wiig and Owen Wilson and Jason Sideikis, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones; when they are on point and playing it straight, their ability to wring humor out of idiocy or just uninformed, amorphous logic is for me a joy to watch.  As you may well know, *Masterminds* is based on a true story and Jeff Diamant's book chronicling the second largest heist ($17 million) in American history.  Keeping in mind that the bones of the film are true, even the perpetrator of the crime, David Ghantt (also technical advisor to the film), admits some liberties were taken to make a slapstick comedy, interviews with Ghantt and the FBI agents who brought him in confirm some of the implausible events underlying the movie.

At its heart *Masterminds* follows the misguided travails of David Ghantt (Zach Galifianakis), an uncomplicated security armored car driver and courier for Loomis Fargo Bank in 1997 North Carolina.  By all accounts, David was (and is) a man of simple tastes who was led astray by his affection for coworker Kelly Campbell (Kristen Wiig) more than a gnawing desire for millions.  At the behest of Kelly's friend Steve Eugene Chambers (Owen Wilson) Kelly sets out to enliven David's desire with a kiss and a promise--simply empty Loomis Fargo's vault into a company van and drive it out the gate; the haul will help fund Kelly and David's escape to Cancun to live the good life.  Complicating the scheme is the sheer stupidity, if not the moral ramifications, of such a robbery, but then the entire gang fulfilled the old joke that if their combined intelligence were gunpowder, they wouldn't have enough to blow their noses.

The actual David Ghantt confirms stashing away several thousand dollars in panty hose, shoes, pants and duck tape to pass through customs to Mexico paving the way for Kelly, who would stay behind and help Steve divvy up the loot.  But he didn't count on Kelly lying to him about her infatuation, even while in the film Kristen Wiig strains to sound seductive over the phone, explaining she had to cut her call short "'cause I have to go wash out my panty hose. . . with my mouth." Meanwhile, Steve enlists a hit man (Jason Sudeikis) to travel south of the border to execute David and tie up loose ends.

Of course, being a broad comedy, *Masterminds* never places our hapless robber in any real jeopardy, as hitman Mike McKinney is as inept as everyone else, even reprieving David when he assumes he's a long-lost brother separated at birth (David's fake identification was lifted from McKinney's, and as such bears McKinney's name, birth date and hospital).  Okay, you either buy the premise, relax and enjoy it or just give up altogether and skip the film.

Zach Galifianakis is in fine form, sporting a shoulder-length pageboy with spectacular bangs and Brillo beard.  His David is a true innocent, driven a little by adventure and not a little chaste lust for Kelly.  He's one of the few physical comedians today who can make you believe he is that clumsy, but at the same time sympathetic in his incurable romanticism.  Kristen Wiig is pitch perfect as a spitfire who struggles to be a femme fatale and actually succeeds to some degree while still managing to show how far outside of her element she really is. And in the good nature of the film,  she is nearly a victim herself, though the real Kelly admits she doesn't remember many of the details of the robbery and subsequent investigation because she was high on pot most of the time; this detail is nicely excised in the movie.

The rhythm of the film is frantic and manic but smooth as we move between David's mounting anxiety that Kelly isn't around him in Mexico as the law bears down, and Steve and his wife's massive flouting of new wealth, moving from a double wide to a huge mansion using $700,000 in cash instead of cashier's checks.  Though the explosive confrontation between David and Steve is largely fictional (David says he never nuked Steve's 4x4 with a molotov cocktail), the momentum never lags, carrying the audience away on a madcap escapade that had me hooked in the opening ten minutes.

Jim Carrey was originally slated to play David, but backed out, and though I'm a fan of Carrey, I fear his characterization would have put the film too far into the parody and smirk territory if he had stayed with the project.  Galifianakis plays David straight, woefully and perhaps gleefully unaware of his deficiencies, but not in Carrey's *Dumb And Dumber* (1994) mugging manner.  While I find some of Carrey's exploits to be one-note kinetic mania (*Liar Liar* (1997) and *The Truman Show* (1998) are Phillips Family Favorites however), I think director Jared Hess has controlled the insanity as he did with *Napoleon Dynamite* (2004); when slapstick arrives, it's well positioned, and Galifianakis brings some small shard of humanity to the role.

*Masterminds*'s opening day take at the box office was $2,325,546 with its first week profits grossing $6,541,205, or sixth place, finally grossing $30.9 million against its $25 million budget.  *The New Yorker* critic Richard Brody offered praise amidst staggered reviews, saying, "Yes, the comedy is funny—even when it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, it’s sparklingly inventive and charmingly loopy—but, above all, it has the religious intensity and spiritual resonance that marks all of Hess’s [the director's] other films, and it extends his world of ideas into wild new realms, extends his vision into darker corners of existence than he had formerly contemplated."  Amazon's audiences cue it at 69% four- or five-star ratings with a conglomerate score of B- by Cinemascope audiences.

True, it certainly will not please everyone, as it lacks the dry wit of *Downton Abbey* (2019) and the aristocratic hilarity of *Kind Hearts And Coronets* (1949), but then *Masterminds* doesn't attempt to replicate them either.  On the other end of the spectrum, it's not the insipid insufferability *Dumb And Dumber To* (2014) or the drug-infested witlessness of many Seth Rogan movies.  It's silly and goofy and holds some of the zany action of Hope-Crosby *Road* pictures, all the more interesting because it's, as Stephen Colbert might say, "truthier than fiction."

I think Rob Ferguson would have enjoyed it. . . if his hands ever pumped blood again.
Enjoy.
Jeff

I immediately ordered *Second Hand Lions* after that clip, Space. Thanks. It will be a great birthday present for my wife next week. wrote:

It's not an art film by any stretch of the imagination. But it's a heartwarming comedy adventure. And one of my "comfort" movies.

another vote for Second Hand Lions might be the last good kid thing HJO did. Cain and Duvall were brilliant. What kid would not love to barnstorming uncles like that. But the Mom sigh....