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The Cobalt Screening Room Balcony

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Post by ghemrats 10/28/2020, 5:35 pm

Post #549: If you're an eagle eyed patron of the cinema and you look closely at the still introducing today's feature, *Skyscraper* (2018), you might guess that our film today is not documentary. Nor is it a spiritual epic about making the leap of faith or the story of a wildly fanatical window washer. Well, pat yourself on the back if none of those options entered your mind, because whatever mind you may harbor should be put on waivers or deep freeze with a quickly slurped frigid Big Gulp if you sit down with this thriller. With a budget of $129 million, it's a safe bet it's not charming slice of life romantic comedy either.

Honestly, within ten minutes I immediately called up three elements cuisinarted on puree: *Die Hard* (1988), *The Towering Inferno* (1974) and every single episode of *American Ninja Warrior*. Producer/director and writer Rawson Marshall Thurber even mentioned one I that hadn't occurred to me, but makes perfect sense on reflection--*Clifhanger* (1993) which immediately brought to mind *The Eiger Sanction* (1975) if Clint Eastwood substituted a hyper-futuristic 225 floor building in Hong Kong for the mountain. As people used to say, same difference.

One day it may come to pass that the label "Action Movie" will not mean "Big Budget Special Effects Extravaganza With Lots Of Bone Crunching And Explosions Connoting Ridiculous Carnage To Everyone But The Hero Who Can Withstand Everything From a TNT Suppository or A Fall From Seven Miles Above The Construction Platform, Landing On His Back, Rolling Over And Saying, 'Whoa, That's A Pain That's Gonna Linger' Before Dispatching The Internationally-But-Hard-To-Pin-Down Accented Villain With Another Smart Remark."

But that day ain't here yet, so we've got Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a paraplegic former Marine, who ten years ago was an FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader, who is married to Neve Campbell with two adorably well scrubbed kids, one of whom is asthmatic--perfect for an insidious conflagration of a ridiculously towering 3,500-foot business hub of Hong Kong. That's 774 feet taller than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which stands at 2,723 feet.

Look, a target this big is screaming for sarcasm. And honestly, the only reason I have this in my collection is because it's a default movie--it was cheap, I bought it at a Kroger bin, and I didn't have to reach into my personal money for it since it could be declared on our grocery shopping fund (It was at KROGER, okay?), and I could sneak it into the house under the Shake & Bake. So for however much it set us back (maybe $5.00?) it provided me with enough traveling mat shots and greenscreens as well as requisite moments of genuine suspense to justify its purchase. I could sit through it again without pausing it every seventeen seconds to exclaim, "Like THAT'S going to happen!" because as Super Chicken said, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred."

So now it's time to play Spot The Plot: William "Will" Sawyer (Dwayne) accepts the push of a job from his former colleague Ben Gillespie (Pablo Schreiber) as security analyst for "The Pearl", Hong Kong's tallest tower, for owner Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), a Chinese tech entrepreneur. Wouldn't you just know it, Zhao has enemies, at least one at the global scale, Kores Botha (Roland Møller), a Scandinavian terrorist. With cut-glass efficiency Botha and his merry band of gun-toters seize the monolithic structure's incredibly sophisticated computer guidance system and set the ninety-sixth floor on fire. And gosh-all fishhooks, what a coincidence that Will's wife Sarah (Neve) and their twin kids Georgia and Henry (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell respectively) are living in those new digs as a perk to Will's job. Since all the elevators are locked down and the whole superstructure is going cattywompus (that's the technical term), Will has to save the day, even though he's been fingered as the instigator of the catastrophe so he has to evade police capture in addition to gain access to the insides of a fancy Coleman Powerhouse Dual Fuel Lantern costing mega-millions.

Do you really need to know more?

*Skyscraper* grossed $68.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $236.4 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $304.9 million. Technically, even though that qualifies as a hit, critical and audience appreciation flagged, even though Dwayne Johnson is his usual charismatic self--I enjoyed his work here for a reason no one save for a tiny handful of people might understand: he looks amazingly like my old college buddy and roommate, who is now a minister down South. Except he has both legs and no CGI to erase either of them. Pleasantly there is very little cursing to be heard, and nothing more shocking than an occasional excremental oath, which after fifteen episodes of TV's *Doom Patrol* was surprisingly refreshing, like a Junior Mint. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It's nice to see Neve Campbell not aging, and the kids are good little soldiers. As Kores Botha, Roland Møller will allow Alan Rickman to continue his rest undisturbed, for Hans Gruber will continue to hold sway over cold-blooded villainy for many more years if this jamoke is any indication of bad guys waiting in the wings: He sneers, looks down at the camera and basically fills in the paint-by-number integer role of bad asp. Yeah, yeah, you bad, you bad, you bad, we know it. You also boring, Dude. Derivative comes to mind.

But credit goes to Rawson Marshall Thurber in his first big-screen actioner after the mainly capable comedies of *We're the Millers* (2013) with Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston, *Dodgeball* (2004) with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn, and Central Intelligence* (2016) with Dwayne and Kevin Hart. It's a change of genre for him, but he's assembled a perfectly sturdy escapist fantasy that references a lot of tropes and already-done-it plot devices, but in the final analysis I didn't care. He seemed to enjoy the stunts and the building of tension even though we knew from the poster that it was just another improbable scenario executed with less panache and humor than Indiana Jones. Sure, it's silly and loud--that's what makes popcorn taste better in the summer; in the winter, less so, but still gasp-worthy if your movie intake is pretty lean.

And to my old roomie, Michael, in your retirement, if Dwayne Johnson is unavailable and somebody is needed to play a Sky Pilot, put your name in for consideration. You never know when that football injury might come in handy plot-wise.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by Seamus 10/28/2020, 6:38 pm

Didn't these idiots know the Rock was inside that building. What idiots.
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Post by ghemrats 10/29/2020, 5:41 pm

Post #550: Here's a special treat for you today! I have been inundated with emails and messages asking me if I could track down the film debut of one of America's most cherished national treasures, and the good news is I found it. Yes, today's feature, *The Fury* (1978) marks the historic first appearance of Jim Belushi (not John) in the movies. He remains uncredited, and unless you're looking for him in the background of a Chicago beach scene, you won't find him, but he's there, doggone it. Oh, and of a lesser interest is knowing this is the film debut of Darryl Hannah (Pam) and Laura Innes (Jody) too, though they are actually on screen and noticeable. But what a thrill it must have been for them to be sharing the screen with Jim Belushi. Wow.

*The Fury* (1978), at the time of its release, was for me a taut and bloody thriller with supernatural overtones, thanks to the governmental intervention of Alpha wave researchers and paranormal activity. Today, especially after director Brian DePalma's superior scarefest *Carrie* (1976) which also featured Amy Irving (who was dating her future husband [1984-'89] and future ex- Steven Spielberg at the time of filming) and *Scanners* (1981, which borrows directly from *The Fury*) as well as any X-Men movie, *The Fury* seems by turns overwrought and kind of silly. It is also one of De Palma's least liked personal choices from his canon. It's not bad, mind you; it's just not so very memorable, at least to me.

Vacationing in Israel, ex-CIA operative Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas, age 61) and his psychic son Robin (Andrew Stevens) are relaxing on the beach when Peter's former colleague Ben Childress (John Cassavetes) stages a terrorist assault as a diversion to kidnap Robin for his own nasty plans to harness the kid's psychokinesis powers. You know, just another day in paradise. Meanwhile, in Chicago, high schooler Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving) struggles to contain and adapt to her own telekinesis and extra-sensory perception, which is difficult because people who touch her tend to start spurting blood from contact with her energy pack while she makes the most over-the-top faces at them. Evidently it's not fun for either of them.

Gillian enrolls in Paragon Institute, a posh live-in facility that studies psychic phenomenon in a relaxed atmosphere governed, it appears, by kindly Dr. Jim McKeever (Charles Durning) and friendly, caring nurse Hester (Carrie Snodgrass). But beneath McKeever's affable facade he's secretly involved with MORG (Multiphasic Operations Research Group) headed by Childress and manipulated by Dr. Susan Childs (Fiona Lewis) who is sleeping with the sequestered Robin who believes his father is dead. Meanwhile-squared, Peter rushes around Chicago madly evading capture and searching for his son. Meanwhile-cubed, Gillian's powers are growing exponentially and she senses a psychic link with Robin. Boing boing boing boing, look at me, I'm a pinball.

As long as you don't try to delve into all this too deeply, *The Fury* can be fun in a hollow horror kind of way. As is par for the DePalma course, it's glossy and polished to a bright sheen, and a couple set pieces are wonderful to behold. One takes place in Old Chicago of Bolingbrook, Illinois, the world's first indoor amusement park, closed in 1980 and razed in 1986. Robin, jealous and peeved when his lover Dr. Childs is sharing a drink with colleagues, wanders in the park and sees robed sheiks boarding an aerial tilt-a-whirl Paratroopers ride, which reminds him of his father's killers, the veins in his head throb as he sullenly looks at the happy campers, and whoops, suddenly there's hamburger all over the highway. Another scene allows Gillian to "see" Robin being chased and injured by her doctors, and two apocalyptic showdowns let the blood seek its own level in centrifugal force.

And my reaction was . . . yup. Okay. So that's it, huh? Well, bummer for the baddies, sucks to be you, guys. Was I expecting more from DePalma, with my memories of his work more exciting than his actual contributions? In this case, yes. The denouement of his *Carrie* scared the ever lovin' blue-eyed crap out of me when I saw it, still remaining one of the best jump scares in cinema. But here it's just so very. . . goofy. Amy Irving's registration of fear and awe and horror made the larger part of me want to laugh out loud rather than be entranced--it's like a parody of horror rather than genuine empathetic fear. And in a suspense-horror movie, that's not good.

Budgeted at $5.5 million and raking in an impressive $24 million, *The Fury* boasts its finale captured by nine high speed cameras and two takes. According to Vincent Canby of *The New York Times*, " *The Fury* is bigger than *Carrie,* more elaborate, much more expensive and far sillier. Let's face it—it's the De Palma *1900*—a movie that somehow got out of hand. It's also, in fits and starts, the kind of mindless fun that only a horror movie that so seriously pretends to be about the mind can be. Mr. De Palma seems to have been less interested in the overall movie than in pulling off a couple of spectacular set-pieces, which he does. He leaves the rest of *The Fury* to take care of itself." Rap on, brother, rap on.

At the time of Kirk Douglas's death, Amy Irving recalled his fondly. "*The Fury* was my first starring role. This was a real big deal for me. And I had a certain way of working, getting myself there emotionally to play the character. I wasn’t very experienced in front of the camera at all. So, while Brian De Palma was setting up shots, I was sitting in my little director’s chair, in my own world, concentrating on where I’m at in the scene — I was taking it really seriously and getting myself into an emotional state. And as tears were rolling down my face, Kirk came over to me.

"'Are you all right?' he asked. I told him I was just preparing. He said, 'Amy, first of all, you’re what, 23 or 24 years old? You’re never going to make it to 30 if you put that much into everything while they’re lighting the set. My advice to you is, A, save it and use it when the camera is rolling. And, B, did you not hear what lens he was using on this shot? With that lens, you’re going to be the size of a pea on the screen. It really doesn’t matter how emotional you are.' It was a really good lesson. And he was right. I probably would not have made it to 30 if I had not had that sage advice from Kirk Douglas."

*The Fury* is something of a cult classic now, so maybe my less than ecstatic pleasure in watching it has been tainted by so many stories that followed it and offered more. If you have not seen it, it's definitely worth the 120 minutes you can invest in it, though it does at times seem padded to me. And it's certainly much more effective than the endless line of sequels to Freddy and Jason and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But if you miss Jim Belushi, you can redeem yourself by taking special note of Alice Nunn (Large Marge in *Pee-Wee's Big Adventure* 1985) without makeup. She's not scary, she's actually pretty sweet, but seeing her will make you wonder what happened to her in the seven years that followed this film before she started driving the big rigs.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 10/30/2020, 5:11 pm

Post #551: Today's feature, *Innerspace* (1987), a Joe Dante directed, Steven Spielberg produced riff on the old science fiction movie *Fantastic Voyage* (1966). But this time it's a raucous comedy with Martin Short, Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan and a host of Dante's regulars including Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Kevin McCarthy, Fiona Lewis, Vernon Wells, Henry Gibson, William Schallert, Wendy Schaal and Orson Bean as well as Kevin Hooks. Some of these names may not register high on your Star Meter, but believe me you'll know them the second you see them. They conspire to make a fast-paced, goofy film that in the words of Dennis Quaid, "[is] a dumb, stupid comedy, which is exactly what people need in the summertime. It's very idiotic and I love it. We encounter every dumb, stupid cliché in the book. Leave your brain at home and you'll have a good time."

Hot dog cocky Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid) resigns his commission and volunteers for a secret miniaturization experiment, to be shrunk and injected into a rabbit via syringe. When rival scientist Dr. Margaret Canker (Fiona Lewis) breaks into the laboratory to hijack the experiment, project supervisor Ozzie Wexler (John Hora, Dante's cinematographer) escapes with the syringe bearing Tuck and his miniaturized pod, chased by Canker's sore thug Mr. Igoe (Vernon Welles) to a local shopping mall. There Ozzie literally runs into a hypochondriacal Safeway bagging clerk Jack Putter (Martin Short) and injects Tuck and the pod into Putter's body just as Ozzie is shot.

Tuck is knocked unconscious but upon regaining consciousness determines he's inside a human and, planting a camera in Jack's optic nerve, finds he can see what Jack can. He also communicates with Jack via his inner ear, leading Jack to assume he's possessed until he can be persuaded of the urgency of Tuck's situation. Tuck and Jack form a symbiotic relationship as Tuck directs Jack to recover two computer chips stolen by Victor Scrimshaw (Kevin McCarthy), the mastermind of the attempted heist with Canker, Igoe and a mysterious dude known as "The Cowboy" (Robert Picardo). If Jack can retrieve the chips, Tuck will be extracted before his oxygen supply runs out or he spontaneously grows, which would be disastrous for both of them. Enlisting the help of Tuck's former girlfriend, Lydia Maxwell (Meg Ryan), Jack learns to accommodate a tiny man in his bloodstream.

It's non stop adventure and comedy, never for a moment taking itself seriously, which allows the audience to gleefully enjoy the proceedings with slapstick special effects that still tend to dazzle. *Innerspace* also marks the only Academy Award for Joe Dante, when it won Best Visual Effects award in 1988. It is also notable that Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan met and dated one another on the set and married four years later, ending their marriage in 2001. Amy Irving, who was married to Steven Spielberg at the time he was producing the film, lobbied extensively to play the part of Lydia, but she had incredibly stiff competition: Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer, Karen Allen, Beverly d'Angelo, Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Linda Hamilton, Rene Russo, Julia Roberts, Elisabeth Shue, Claudia Wells, Anjelica Huston, Amy Madigan, Sean Young, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore and Madeleine Stowe were all considered at one time or another, the part finally going to Meg Ryan.

Screenwriter Jeffey Boam (*The Dead Zone* 1983, *Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade* 1989 and *Lethal Weapon 2 & 3* 1989 & 1992) said he approached the film "... from the concept of what would happen if we shrank Dean Martin down and injected him inside Jerry Lewis. It was such a goofy idea that there were no limits to it. I felt I could do anything, and so the script I wrote was very loony and far out there but everybody loved it. Dick Donner, Joe Dante, John Carpenter and even Steven Spielberg wanted to do it. So when Steven wanted to do it, Warners thought I was a God and any amount of money it would take to do the movie they would spend. Steve ultimately decided he only wanted to produce so Joe came along and really latched on to the idea."

It's a manic 120 minute roller coaster of a movie with all the actors in on the joke and giving it their all. Equally fun, aside from the craziness of the plot and effects which are used to further the narrative, not gratuitously splashed in, is playing the Spot The Cameo with the film. For Warner Brothers fanatics like me, it's great fun to hear the sound effects of Looney Tunes being employed throughout, but a special treat to see the great Chuck Jones (creator of Marvin the Martian, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote and my own favorite animator responsible for *Rabbit Seasoning*) eat carrots at the check-out aisle at the supermarket in homage to Bugs Bunny; director Joe Dante as the first employee in the Vectorscope Lab attacked by the techno-terrorists; and New York Dolls bass player Arthur "Killer" Kane on the plane with The Cowboy. And how great is it that William Schallert appears as Jack's doctor Greenbush when he played a similar role in the classic *The Incredible Shrinking Man* (1957)--now THAT'S an in-joke to beat the band. Look also for Rance Howard (Ron Howard's father) in the supermarket, and SCTV co-stars with Short Andrea Martin and Joe Flaherty. Riches abound.

With the venerable Jerry Goldsmith providing an energetic score, *Innerspace* continues to be one of our family's favorites when we get in the mood for silliness. *Empire* said, "Dante’s film doesn’t outstay its welcome, never overreaches its high concept nor forces us to dally in sentiment or any kind of genuine emotion. It’s flat-packed Hollywood, but once upright surely stays that way. It doesn't have the dark edge of Joe Dante's other works, but brilliant performances by Martin Short and Meg Ryan make it a joy from start to finish."

Friends, if you have not seen this one or you saw it a long time ago, it's time to (re)visit it in these days when a good laugh is so very preferable to a dense drama. Enjoy it for Halloween as an alternative to dressing up in a sheet and saying Boo--it's not scary, but if you want that, just watch the news. Me, I'll take *Innerspace*.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 10/31/2020, 5:08 pm

Post #552: Even though it's probably a polarization, there are dog people and there are cat people. Since I have a dogged personality, I prefer to own a canine, which I do--the most handsome Shelty named Nicki anyone could love. No brag, just fact. Even our groomers (the dog's, not ours personally) admit he's the sweetest 27-pound baby around. So after watching today's feature, *Cat People* (1942), I love our dog even more--because Cat People, if the visualization by producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur is any indication, are seriously freaky, frightening felines with a limited sense of humor where their partners are concerned. Seriously. This is one of the most unnerving movie classics in my collection, and I loved every feline moment of it.

And that reaction is fresh, because I can't recall sitting down to watch this all the way through before last night. Holy schnikes, it's eerie, methodical and great fun for a solid, purring, hissing 73 minutes. Made on a shoe-string budget for RKO of $134,000 with hopes of recouping some of the money lost on this little picture you might have seen or heard of--*Citizen Kane* (1941), *Cat People* should be grabbing more audiences and gnawing away at their resolve. Val Lewton even gave us a trademark (known as the Lewton Bus or Cat Scare) for slowly building scenes of suspense that provide at their apex a jump scare from a totally harmless and benign object. It sure worked here 78 years after it first made audiences scream in terror and delight.

And that approach is the strongest technique for Lewton and Tourneur, who polished off this classic in 18 days of shooting. But at the heart of the film is a remarkably tight control on what we DON'T see--shadows become menacing simply by existing. Hitchcock and Spielberg were masters of letting the imagination grow suspiciously more fertile than offering visceral close-ups and gushing fountains of blood because superior suspense comes from our anticipation of what we might see. In *Cat People* what lies in our ears and evades our eyes allow us to enjoy that troubling ambiguity of Not Knowing, of avoiding certainty or validating our worst fears. Something is coiled to strike, but when and how and where and at whom?

The "Suits" at RKO were unimpressed with the early rushes of the film because if it were a horror movie, why did it stalk us in enigmatic shadows and strange personality quirks rather than big, rubber beasts with mouths dripping saliva? Three days into the filming Jacques Tourneur was almost fired as director because his chiaroscuro and unsettling camera set ups were moody but too subtle. Lou L. Ostrow, the head of RKO's B unit, wanted Tourneur and Lewton replaced after four days, but RKO chief Charles Koerner interceded and went on to create more horror classics with them. Critics, too, initially berated the film since it didn't fall into the expectations of the standard horror tropes, but *Cat People* persisted at the box office and moved critics to see it again and totally retract their earlier criticisms.

So what's all the hubbub, Bub? First of all, consider that this is the first feature film of note directed by Jacques Tourneur, and Val Lewton used to be a story editor for David O. Selznick. But in today's feature, Serbian fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is sketching a panther at Central Park's zoo when he meets marine engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). Both entranced they share tea at Irena's apartment where Oliver is taken by an odd carving of King John of Serbia impaling a cat, not the sort of objet d'art people usually prominently display. According to legend townfolk in Irena's home centuries ago turned to sorcery and devil worship after the Marmeluks subjugated them, but King John drove them away, killing the most evil of the converts from Christianity. But some escaped into the mountains, siring descendants who would transform into cats if their passions were aroused. Irena's one of them. So start up the tingling machine when she says to Oliver, "I've never had anyone here. You're the first friend I met in America. Oh, I know lots of people in business. Editors, secretaries, other sketch artists, you know. But you might be my first real friend."

Nevertheless, the two marry (chastely) and during the wedding dinner Irena is approached by a mysterious streamlined feline type in black (the memorable Elizabeth Russell, whose voice is dubbed by Simone Simon to up the weird vibe) who says to her "Moya sestra" or "my sister") before slinking away. Irena crosses herself, visibly shaken, and the couple return to their wedding home sleeping in separate rooms and never consummating their marriage bed, as Oliver gives her room to breathe. After a while, though, the couple agree Irena should see Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, George Sanders' brother off screen), a psychologist who can help Irena shed these ancient superstitions and help Oliver get laid. Meanwhile, Oliver has confided in his assistant, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) about Irena's irrational fears, a move that infuriates the jealous gene in his wife. What follows is a tour de force in suspense as Irena grows more protective of Oliver and jealous of Alice, who heretofore was a good friend, now a rival.

Screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen called the film a collaboration: "Tourneur was entirely responsible for the style of *Cat People*, but if you read the screenplay you would find everything in the film was in the original script – and that's simply because it was a group project. Val, Tourneur, myself, [editor Mark] Robson – we all talked about it and I put it down on paper." Though Simone Simon clashed with her co-stars, most notably Jane Randolph as her rivalry adds to the dynamic tension on the screen, there is a strong erotic underpinning, in Roger Ebert's words "an undertone of sexual danger that was more ominous because it was never acted upon." With her dark looks and lithe mannerisms, two of *Cat People*'s greatest scenes involve Irena stalking Alice, ratcheting up the drama and tensile strength of the audience's nerves.

Lewton said, "To find ever new 'busses' or horror spots, is a horror expert's most difficult problem. Horror spots must be well planned and there should be no more than four or five in a picture. Most of them are caused by the fundamental fears: sudden sound, wild animals, darkness. The horror addicts will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of. . . . I'll tell you a secret: if you make the screen dark enough, the mind's eye will read anything into it you want!" he said. "We're great ones for dark patches. Remember the long walk alone at night in *Cat People*? Most people will swear they saw a leopard move in the hedge above her - but they didn't! Optical illusion; dark patch."

Bodeen harbored worries at the first screening in public. "The preview was preceded by a Disney cartoon about a little pussy-cat and Val's spirits sank lower and lower as the audience began to catcall and make loud mewing sounds. 'Oh God!' he kept murmuring, as he wiped the perspiration from his forehead. The picture's title was greeted with whoops of derision and louder meows, but when the credits were over and the film began to unreel, the audience quieted, and, as the story progressed, reacted as we had hoped an audience might. There were gasps and some screaming as the shock sequences grew. The audience accepted and believed our story, and was enchanted."

In addition to appearing on Roger Ebert's "Great Films" list, the American Film Institute nominated *Cat People* for inclusion in its "100 Most Heart-Pounding American Movies" and its "Top 100 Greatest American Movies" list, and Steven Schneider added it to "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die." The Library of Congress also selected *Cat People* for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." According to Michael Pitts, an RKO historian, a reviewer at *BoxOffice* found the film "grim and unrelenting . . . a dose of horror best suited to addicts past the curable stage" and noted that the film was "definitely not for children, young or old . . . Potent stuff, straight from the psychopathic clinic."

According to TCM, despite mixed reviews, it broke box-office records, even playing 13 weeks at a first-run theatre in Los Angeles. *Cat People* didn't just turn a small profit. It grossed $4 million worldwide and saved RKO from bankruptcy. In gratitude, the studio gave Bodeen a new contract with a hefty raise. The director they'd tried to fire was given a $5,000 bonus and the promise of top-budget films as soon as he finished his obligation to Lewton.

In short, dear friends, this is one for a special Halloween viewing. Turn out all the lights and bask in the deep blacks and contrastive whites for 73 minutes and let the shivers commence. This one has convinced me to seek out more Lewton-Tourneur offerings, burnt or otherwise. Be safe and sane with your trick or treating. Wear a mask.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/1/2020, 7:28 pm

Post #553: Okay, so: I may lose a substantial number of friends if I keep writing really upbeat appraisals of movies, leading you to believe I like everything and hold no discernible taste: Put a movie out, I'll like it! I'm like Mikey in the cereal commercials--he likes everything. But my history will show you I decry multi-million dollar CGI-heavy movies because they are all effects and little to no character development, soulless ghosts in glossy shells at which we are supposed to roll onto our backs, kick our feet in the air and howl in approval.

So maybe, just maybe, sitting down with a $200 Million epic dependent on computer graphics will yield a wondrously snarky, sarcastic and curmudgeonly grouse-worthy commentary to shake you out of your flagging faith in my taste. Well, buckle your seat belts, friends, because my wife and I sat down with today's feature James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez's *Alita, Battle Angel* (2019) last night. Then unbuckle your seat belt because we fell in love with it, citing it as fresh and interesting as anything we've watched in a long time, remarking to each other afterward, "That was really good! Dang!" (We talk like that at home; I was raised watching Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers.)

As I used to say to my dear friend Barbara E. Sumi, so Sumi. We were so moved by the film that we actually watched all the extras that came with the Blu-Ray, and my wife NEVER has done that before. Laden with a spectacular 1,500 visual effects shots, *Alita* has us clamoring for the next installment, which Cameron and Rodriguez have teased might be a possibility, even though *Alita* performed less successfully (WHAT?) than its competition released at the same time, Steven Spielberg's *Ready Player One* (2019). I will admit Spielberg's film overshadowed Cameron's in my mind because 1.) I had taught Ernest Cline's novel a few years before it hit the screen, 2.) I hadn't read any of the manga on which *Alita* is faithfully based, and 3.) I didn't realize Robert Rodriguez was directing Cameron's production; so I saw *Ready Player One*, which received a ton of hype.

For me and my wife, *Alita* is far more fun, and even though Cline has a hotly anticipated new novel *Ready Player Two* coming out on November 24, 2020, I'll be spending more time and money on the original Yukito Kishiro manga graphic novels. Cameron and Rodriguez were so concerned that their film capture the masterful composition and quality of the source material, Rodriguez duplicated many shots directly from the "comic" series. So throw away any disdain you may hold toward "comic book movies" because this holds as many philosophical identity issues as a top level examination of power, selfhood, humanity and inclusion. It is so layered visually that even the most throw-away image (the cybernetic three handed guitarist executing intricate harmonies) is dynamic in its presentation.

That meticulous attention to detail, culled from over 600 pages of notes Cameron made in preparation for his composition of a script, drives *Alita* into a feast for the eyes. Have you seen *The Polar Express* (2004) with Tom Hanks or *A Christmas Carol* (2009) with Jim Carrey? If you did, did either strike you as interesting. . . but really oddly creepy, artificial and unsettling with their stop-motion visual graphics, rendering the actors flat and vaguely sinister? I can't watch them precisely because I can see their synthetic souls beneath the joy of the story; they de-dimensionalized the actors into cold Muppet rejects. Ick. But in *Alita* Rosa Salazar is totally human but. . . not. She is the sort of hero we need now, in the epoch of busty bra-busting superheroines--a seventeen year old girl whose cybernetic head is *just* a little too big for her slender body, and her eyes commanding probably sixty-one percent of that noggin. But I just could not take my eyes off her. And almost immediately in the film she became a lovable force of nature.

With a budget of between $175-200 million, the most expensive film Rodriguez has undertaken, his task was formidable. "This just doesn't happen," he said. "Guys like Quentin Tarantino and Jim only write scripts for themselves to direct. When Avatar becomes the biggest movie of all time, he told me that he's going to spend the rest of his career making Avatars, so I said, 'What happens to *Battle Angel* then?', because as a fan I was just interested! And he said, 'I don't think I'll ever get to do that. Hey, if you can figure out the script, you can shoot it!' So I took it home, spent all summer working on it, cut it down to 130, 125 pages, without cutting anything that he missed. It was a great gift. We had a blast; anytime I had a question I could just call him or email him and he would send back these hugely detailed answers that were so helpful. He just loves being the producer that he always wants. The guy's just so freakin' smart. Getting to learn from someone like that was the greatest internship ever."

It's 2563, and Earth has survived an apocalyptic war "to end all wars" known as "The Fall," three hundred years ago. Headquartered in Iron City and scavenging for parts in its scrapyard, leading cyborg scientist and part-time bounty hunter Dyson Ito (Christoph Waltz) finds the disembodied hulk of a female cyborg with a still-functioning brain. Equipping her with a new cybernetic body and his deceased daughter's name, Ito becomes a father figure to the young Alita, meaning "Little Wing" (Rosa Salazar), who has only scraps of memory as to her former existence. Her love interest Hugo (Keean Johnson) enters the narrative quickly as a morally conflicted scrap dealer who scrounges and compromises cyborgs for parts so he can gain enough credits to ascend to the wealthy sky city of Zalem.

While Zalem is a city floating several thousand meters above the dump whose inhabitants are humans living in an idyllic environment, Iron City is largely an industrial wasteland composed of parts shredded by Zalem and populated by cyborgs, beggars, criminals, and bounty hunters. In this filthy environment Hugo teaches Alita Motorball, an almost direct descendant of *Rollerball* (1975) employing robots in a roller derby to the death. Owned by entrepreneurial Vector (Mahershala Ali), ruler of The Factory, Iron City's governing authority and supplier of parts to Motorball particpants, the sport commands an impressive following, while Ito considers it barbaric and puerile. Dr. Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) is Vector's assistant, Ito's estranged wife, and the original Alita's mother, now a cold, calculating scientist herself who works for the omniscient and feared Nova (Edward Norton in a cameo) who rules Vector.

When it's discovered that Ito is secretly a Hunter-Warrior for The Factory, Alita intervenes in a fierce battle between Ito and cyborg serial killers led by Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley), a monstrous cyborg serving Nova. Spectacular choreography in this sequence trigger Alita's memories as she instinctively employs "Panzer-Kunst," or "art of tanks," a lost combat art for machine bodies. Prodded to discover who she truly is, Alita registers as a Hunter-Warrior and tries to enlist the other hardened bounty hunters in a revolt against Grewishka who escaped severely wounded in his first encounter with Alita. Zapan (Ed Skrein), a cyborg Hunter-Warrior bully with an egotistical grudge against Alita, bows out until Grewishka returns. From that point on, Alita learns much more of her past self.

Several times during the 120 minute running time I looked over at Joyce and said, "What a director to be able to take such a twisting, turning narrative and make sense of it. And to make it so easy to follow; the fight sequences alone were engineered with such a grand style that never were we lost. And with all those computerized tentacles." Altogether the film clipped along so winningly that two hours felt like one half hour. And we were ready for more.

*Alita* languished in Cameron's wheelhouse for twenty years, but his interest in it never lagged. For one thing he was consumed with a couple other projects--*Titanic* (2010) and *Avatar* (2009)--but also felt he would never tackle Yukito Kishiro's masterpiece until the technology progresses to the point he'd make it honorably. Well, here it is, a seamless blending of human action and computerized enhancement that makes for one exciting journey to another world we've never seen. While Zendaya, Rosa Salazar, Maika Monroe, and Bella Thorne screen tested for the titular character, Rosa's understanding of the character and the essential humanity of Alita shines through. And her bravura performance is augmented by a sweeping symphonic score by Junkie XL that underscores every scene.

According to Box Office Mojo, *Alita: Battle Angel* grossed $85.7 million in the United States and Canada, and $319.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $404.9 million, against a production budget of $170 million. It is Robert Rodriguez's highest-grossing film. Are there plans for *Alita 2*? So many details to be deviled with: Disney has acquired Twentieth Century Fox (*Alita*'s studio), so the Motorball is in their arena as to whether it will be greenlit or not. Cameron has said *Alita* would be a trilogy, and he has over 1000 pages of planning already done. Co-producer Jon Landau has said, "What I think the Alita Army [an online group committed to getting the sequel made] should do is keep peppering our family now at Disney and [let them know] how important it is to have another Alita movie and hopefully we'll venture there one day. Once a sequel has been greenlit, it can still take a while for production to start though, Landau revealed: "You've got to assume that's going to take you 12 to 18 months to write a script. Assuming that script is great, you then have a six to 10 month pre-production. You then have a six-month shoot. You then have a year of post-production and that's just any movie of this ilk."

In the meantime, just three days ago in fact, Rodriguez released the new poster for *Alita*'s re-release into theaters yesterday (October 31, 2020). Perhaps with this new wave we could see a resurgence in the *Alita* battle for the screen again. Look, Disney: It's about time you stop cannibalizing your classics like *Aladdin*, *Beauty And The Beast*, *Mulan* and *The Lion King* into colossal missteps and computerized abominations of the cartoons and enlist your talents on something that does not already herald all the attention. It is fresh intellectual property--and God help me for voicing this--and it's marketing potential is limitless for Disney's physical adventures in Florida and California. We know you've already lined up *Alien* and *Planet Of The Apes* along with *Avatar* sequels--WTF are you waiting for with this international cult favorite?

According to the UK-based Express, "A petition on Change.org has called on the makers of the film, Disney, to make a second film, and so far the response has been astounding. The petition has reached more than 150,000 signatures, and the star of the film has even spoken up about her desire to reprise her role. In an interview with Slashfilm, Salazar said: 'I would play Alita ‘til my last breath. I would, and thanks to the performance capture technology, I probably could. Oh yeah! I would love to come back and do that one. It was so fun.'” Robert Rodriguez expressed a similar tone: "Working with Jim’s [producer James Cameron] great, I thought Rosa was incredible, and the effects were just amazing. To think they would even be better by then for the sequel because they just keep evolving."

So rally the cause, folks. Sign a petition to get *Alita 2* on track. (I sound like a kid about this movie because I haven't been so completely entertained by a blockbuster in years. Maybe you'll like it too.)
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/2/2020, 6:07 pm

Post #554: I know it's after Halloween, but with Election Day being tomorrow and madness taking over the world, I figured today's feature, *I Walked With A Zombie* (1943) would still find relevance as we've been flooded with political ads appealing to crowds of mindless, quasi-sentient beings who believe anything tossed in their path. But this isn't your garden variety brain-munching brood we're following in this film--it's another Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur effort, their second collaboration after *Cat People* (1942) for RKO. So you'll find a wheelbarrow full of mood and shadow here, with Charlotte Bronte's *Jane Eyre* propping up the spine of the story. But instead of North England we're safely ensconced in a sugar plantation in the Caribbean on the island of Saint Sebastian where the natives soothe the tattered nerve with Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich solos through the night.

Into this lovely haven for descendants of slavery and a small coterie of white settlers comes Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), who has been summoned by the lugubrious owner of the plantation, Paul Holland (Tom Conway, still the brother of George Sanders). Welcomed by the warm and supportive figurehead from the Hollands' slave ship, "Ti-Misery" (Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows) watches over the family courtyard, and if the statue of an eviscerated saint spouting water into a fountain doesn't spell hospitality, I don't know what does. Soon Betsy "meets" her charge, Holland's wife Jessica (Christine Gordon) adorned in diaphanous white gowns as she wanders the grounds with not even the barest whiff of consciousness. The doctors have tried everything to bring her out of her catatonic staring contest with the furniture, but after a serious fever leaving her spinal column irreparably damaged and her soul trapped in limbo with no willpower, she will probably never be able to dance the limbo or sing "Lady WIllpower" ever again. But she looooooks mahvelous!

Along for the ride into land of voodoo that you do so well is Paul's brother, Wesley Rand (James Ellison), who main purpose in life is to drink himself into a stupor, disparage his brother, and pine away for Jessica whom he loves. Naturally the townspeople have sport with the family, a calypso singer (Sir Lancelot, I'm not kidding) crooning tunes ("Shame and Scandal in the Family") that chronicle the travails of the Hollands and plunge Wesley into darker resentment and deeper levels of bottles of rum. Meanwhile, Betsy also meets Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), Paul and Wesley's doctor mother, who takes an instant liking to the nurse. Together they try an insulin shock treatment on Jessica, to no avail, and Betsy decides she will secretly whisk Jessica away to the voodoo practitioners further inland to break the confounding spell.

So there, in a nutshell, is how the film progresses. Personally I feel you've got to love a film that touts a disclaimer that says, "The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictional. Any similarity to actual persons, living, dead, or possessed, is purely coincidental." And once again, you've got give props to Lewton and Tourneur for treating African-American actors with respect and dignity, never stooping to reduce them to fearful, stammering comic relief as so many did in the 1940s. Even though it's a bit part, Housemaid Alma (Theresa Harris) provides insight and humanity into the family's troubles while being slightly above it all, and the tribal voodoo scenes are not compromised by an arrogant atavism that so many "horror" directors opted for during the time.

In that way, *I Walked With A Zombie* is much more a suspense film than a splash-and-bother spectacle. No one staggers around with excessive drool coating the camera lenses in close-ups, no one has his or her head lopped off as fiendish undead scramble for their share of the medulla oblongata, and there's no frantic rushing around in search of Home Depot's lumber aisle to board up the house. No, it's just some languid elegiac strolls in the drenching moonlight which is perhaps more unsettling than a crowdsourced group tipping their heads to one side and loping around with heavy limbs (sometimes their own).

It's all very understated and eerie, while still retaining the core mystery of voodoo practitioners. Here the whole drum solos in the night trope accompanying Twyla Tharp interpreters around a roaring fire is akin to art rather than ancient sorceries. And the closeness to reality make it work as the naive Betsy stares in wonder alongside her charge, waiting for her turn to receive some sacramental blessing from whoever is behind Door Number One next to Carol Merrill.

And helping a great deal to the dis-ease is Tom Conway, who sets the tone for the film early on as Betsy admires the moonlight glancing off the sea as they are en route to the plantation. "Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here, only death and decay. . . . Everything good dies here. Even the stars." Oh you sweet talker, Betty Crocker, I'll bet you say that to all the girls.

Co-scripter Alden Wray recalled, "We were all plunged into research on Haitian voodoo, every book on the subject Val could find. He was an addictive researcher, drawing out of it the overall feel, mood, and quality he wanted, as well as details for actual production. He got hold of a real calypso singer, Sir Lancelot he was called....He, in turn, found some genuine voodoo musicians. I remember they had a 'papa drum' and a 'mama drum,' that the crew on the set were fascinated by them, and by one particular scene in which a doll 'walks' in a voodoo ritual...I particularly remember that doll because Val sent me out to find and buy one 'cheap.' Everything had to be cheap because we really were on a shoestring. That was another thing about Val - a low budget was a challenge to him, a spur to inventiveness, and everyone around him caught the fever. Anyway, I got a rather bland-faced doll at a department store, cheap, and by the time she had been dressed in a soft gray robe, and her hair had been combed out to the appropriate 'lost girl' look, she too, was somehow transformed."

Val Lewton himself held *I Walked With A Zombie* as his personal favorite, though he despised the title, which was foisted on him by RKO chief Charles Koerner who liked exploitive titles for purely commercial reasons; his motto was “Showmanship in Place of Genius.” So by today's perspective with Zombie merchandise chomping away at markets, Lewton's deft touch will be lost on many of the boyfiends and their ghoulfriends who relish slicing, dicing and mounds of julienne fries made from victims. But for genuine stealthy horror without all the seemingly requisite viscera, this is the one to see.

Vikram Muthi of IndieWire noted the significance of the "horror" which gains even more relevance today than when Lewton and Tourneur presented it. "It’s a cursed island because its existence is built upon racial entrapment and ownership, and it's that “curse” that infects everyone from Jessica through the Holland’s matriarch, Mrs. Brand. But what’s especially effective in *I Walked With a Zombie* is the prevailing ambiguity of the supernatural at all. When the natives stab Jessica with a sabre, she doesn’t bleed, but is that because she’s a zombie possessed by a Voodoo God, or is it because she has no lifeblood at all after being complicit in such a devastating racial history? Tourneur presents the Evil in the film as a direct descendant from human action and behavior, with the 'supernatural' being the natural consequence of rational horrors we chalk up to being 'business as usual.'"

Somehow that metaphor of zombieism seems to be a ruling principle in the political arena today: Dehumanize the opposition, reduce them to symbols, because symbols have no rights, and therefore anything can be done to them--we can misrepresent who they are, take their passion out of context, ridicule their right to exist alongside everyone else, demonize them with prophecies of Doomsday and, c'mon, people, just let us get back to the business of clean living while we methodically strip our detractors of their right to have a voice. Let's wrap an apple pie in a flag and pretend a plague killing millions is just a passing phase like the hula hoop. "Vote for me an' I'll set you free," sang The Temptations in *Ball of Confusion* FIFTY years ago! "Round and round and around we go, where the world's headed, say nobody knows. . . . Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation Ball Of Confusion that's what the world is today (yeah, yeah)." Thank God we've come so far in that time. . . .

No, that's not a digression. Nor is it a rant. As Will Sonnett said, "No brag, just fact." So if this film and its resultant morality might be considered voter intimidation, stop reading and don't see this movie, even though it's only 69 minutes. It may echo the great tragedy of our lives, as Norman Cousins warned, "The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.” Courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self control, indomitable spirit. And as Ti-Joseph intones in the film, "Oh Lord God most holy, deliver them from the bitter pains of eternal death. The woman was a wicked woman, and she was dead in her own life. Yea lord, dead in the selfishness of her spirit. And the man followed her. Her steps led him down to evil, her feet took hold on death. Forgive him oh Lord, who knowest the secret of all hearts. Yea Lord, pity them who are dead, and give peace and happiness to the living."
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/3/2020, 4:14 pm

Post #555: I love a good classic screwball comedy. I don't love today's feature *Behave Yourself* (1951) even though it falls in that category. Yes, it's a zany, complicated venture with goofy crooks (Sheldon Leonard, Elisha Cook Jr., Lon Chaney, Hans Conreid and Marvin Kaplan, all terrific perplexed hoods) and one of the greatest scene stealers of the time, Archie the Welsh terrier who literally steals the spotlight. And even though the famous Alberto Vargas provided the saucy title card, the whole enchilada is overcooked with way too much cheese (usually a drawing point for me if the enchilada is from Taco Boy and not RKO Pictures).

Originally the film was slated for Cary Grant, who in my mind was the lead from the first scene and would have elevated this farce into classic realms. In the final product, however, it's Farley Granger who takes over as William Calhoun 'Bill' Denny, a married put-upon accountant who lives in his mother-in-law's house (Margalo Gillmore plays the stuffy, sarcastic naysayer). Bill is married to Kate (Shelley Winters, whom I have never enjoyed and found a little grating in this film), who reminds him today is their two-year anniversary. Naturally hapless Bill has forgotten but makes a big production of surprising her with a special gift--on his way home from work.

Meanwhile, some sort of shady mob deal is underway as a pick-up man Albert Jonas (Elisha Cook) is instructed to take Archie the dog for a walk down Wilshire, and he will lead Jonas to the spot where the exchange will take place. But Jonas stops to call his boss Pete The Pusher (Glenn Anders) to confirm the transaction, and Archie pulls his leash loose enough to follow Bill down the street, thus sending the film into a whirlwind of Get The Dog Back antics, murder and marital tension.

Based on his own short story, George Beck directs this trail of bodies at a frenetic pace with lunkheaded police investigators Officer O'Ryan (William Demarest) and Plainclothesman Allen Jenkins stumbling all over one another as Bill becomes a murder suspect, then cleared, then re-investigated, then not, and the beat goes on. *Behave Yourself* could have been a bright and breezy affair with the right leads, but Granger and Winters, as attractive and compelling as they might be in dramas, fall back onto the "Scream Real Loud" School of comedy, thinking situations and lines are funnier the more they increase the volume of their portrayals. And Farley Granger, though likable, just looks clumsy when he initiates a pratfall. Shelly Winters looks great with her tiny waist and sexy gowns, but she is completely one dimensional as a character, taking a role that just about anyone in the studio could portray.

It's rather telling when the audience finds the bad guys much more compelling and funny than the heroes of a film, though each actor has barely enough time on screen to make much of his character since the mobsters are crammed in like 1950s teenagers wedging themselves into a phone booth as a prank or fad. I also think we're supposed to find Bill, fed up with the dog's antics, picking up Archie and biting him on the back (Man bites dog, get it, ha ha) excruciatingly humorous. It's not. Archie is too cute to suffer such a cheap indignity.

By the end of its speedy and confusing 81 minutes, we're less amused and more fatigued at what the film was attempting but had gone off the rails. Too bad. This could have been a fleet footed offering for the right screwball pair. I'm afraid at the first sound of the theme song *Behave Yourself* co-written by Buddy Ebsen (Jed Clampett, Barnaby Jones and almost the Scarecrow in *The Wizard Of Oz* 1939), and its perky choir of singers, I feared the worst. I didn't get it, thankfully, but I did want to scream the title of the film at the particulars several times during its run. Loved the dog, not so much his human co-stars.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/4/2020, 6:26 pm

Post #556: Sometimes in movies you can see right through the main character, making a predictable cinematic experience. Sometimes the main character surprises you with an unexpected motivation or layer upon layer of serious subterfuge. And then sometimes you are rewarded with a main character who is so transparent but conceals madness in layer upon layer of gauze, and the end result is awe, laughter and an unnerving sense of dread. That’s today’s feature, *The Invisible Man* (1933) with the great Claude Rains, who physically appears on screen only for a minute in the film’s final shot (no spoiler).

This is the original first film (and best) outing for H. G. Wells’s infamous chemist, Dr. Jack Griffin, with terrific Pre-Code Hollywood special effects by John P. Fulton, employing black velvet to cloak Claude Rains in invisibility The invisibility process concluded with technicians altering 64,000 frames by hand to complete the effects. While H. G. Wells was relatively pleased with the Universal Studio film, according to TCM, "he had one grave fault to find with it. It had taken his brilliant scientist and changed him into a lunatic, a liberty he could not condone." Whale replied that the film was addressed to the "rationally minded motion picture audience," because "in the minds of rational people only a lunatic would want to make himself invisible anyway."

And make no mistake about it: Dr. Jack is one startlingly crazy mofo. Having mixed up his potion with a rare and exotic drug monocane, an injection of said drug having turned a dog in Germany mad, Griffin has disappeared (!) for weeks on end, holing himself up in a remote tavern, The Lion’s Head Inn, in Iping in Sussex, England to continue his trials for a remedy. Increasingly volatile and frustrated with his lack of progress, Griffin finally forces the innkeeper Herbert Hall (Forrester Harvey) and his comically overwrought wife Jenny (Una O’Connor) to attempt evicting him. Let’s just say it doesn’t go well.

Meanwhile, Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart), Griffin's fiancée and the daughter of Griffin's employer, Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers, Clarence the angel in *It’s A Wonderful Life, 1946), frets and whines at Griffin’s absence while Cranley and his other assistant, Dr. Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan), fear he may have done some serious damage to himself by injecting the drug. They would be right—Griffin has taken up streaking and engaging in mischief—stealing bicycles, knocking off hats, choking policemen and bashing their heads in with small tables, you know, standard boyish fun. This movie has more full frontal nudity than any other picture of the legitimate stage; you just can’t see it.

As Griffin’s madness takes its toll (please have exact change ready), the body count escalates, a final tally reaching 122 deaths. Not bad for 71 minutes. But many of the murders we see are treated with such giddy black humor that even though we recoil in disgust at the actions, we laugh at the glee with which Griffin goes about his business. Between the haplessness of the victims who are taunted or cajoled (but not killed) and the merry giggling of the nutty chemist, we can’t help but strangely enjoy the melee. As Griffin runs amok early on in just a shirt, E.E. Clive as the mustachioed village constable huffs, "I can't arrest a bloomin' shirt." And later it’s a hoot to see just a pair of pants gamboling down a country lane, chasing a terrified woman while Griffin sings, “Here we go gathering nuts in may.” It’s not May, but he is nuts.

Director James Whale, who was responsible for Universal’s certified classics *Frankenstein* (1931), *The Old Dark House* (1932), and *The Bride of Frankenstein* (1935), petitioned hard for Claude Rains to fill the shirt of Dr. Griffin, though Universal wanted Boris Karloff, and Chester Morris, Paul Lukas and Colin Clive were also considered. Additionally, Universal wanted Robert Florey, Cyril Gardner, and Ewald André Dupontas to direct before they settled on (and rightly so) Whale, who brought life, zing and humor to the film with a dry wit explored in such morbid missions from Griffin as "We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there. Murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction. We might even wreck a train or two. Just these fingers around a signalman’s throat, that’s all." Actors and crew noted that while filming Una O'Connor, the hysterical pub landlady, James Whale struggled to control his own laughter, as he adored O' Connor's humor.

At the time of its release, *The New York Times* declared it one of the Ten Best Films of 1933, and in 2001 the American Film Institute named it as one of the top 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Movies. In 2008 The Invisible Man was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

ThemOvieblog cites *The Invisible Man* as one of the most terrifying creatures. “Part of what’s fascinating about The Invisible Man is that the lead character is probably the most monstrous in the Universal Horror canon. Dracula feeds to live. Frankenstein’s monster occasionally kills, but has a whole lot of excuses. [The Mummy] Imhotep is willing to do terrible things for love, but an eternity as the living dead will do that. The Wolfman is driven by his compulsions. Gill-man [Creature From The Black Lagoon] just wants to be left alone… unless you’re a hot science babe. However, Jack Griffin is a complete and utter sociopath, despite the fact that he’s clearly the most human and grounded of the characters in the Universal canon.”

While ranting with visions like “I shall offer my secret to the world, with all its terrible power!” he boasts. “The nations of the world will bid for it – thousands, millions. The nation that wins my secret can sweep the world with invisible armies!” Griffin is a megalomaniac of his own design, of his own choosing. And that Nietzschean will to power to be imposed on countless others at all costs is an amplification of his pre-experimentation desires: “You must be made to understand what I can do. . . . It came to me suddenly. The drugs I took seemed to light up my brain.” O, where was Nancy Reagan when we needed her?

Eerie, sinister and weirdly funny, *The Invisible Man* ironically announced the screen debut of Claude Rains, whose articulation skills were deemed perfect for a role covered in so many bandages. It is he who makes Griffin so deadly and frightening, compelling CommonSense.org to suggest there is a demonstrative lack of positive messages for the average viewer. That may well be true, but in my mind we have a terrific character study of power gone to extremes. No, hardly a role model in any way, but it does raise the question posed by Plato’s Ring of Gyges: If you had the power of invisibility, would a person of intelligence use it justly, or would the lack of recriminations drain that individual’s morality? Plato didn’t get into the drug angle. . . yet is that adequate justification for unjust actions? Discuss amongst y’selves. . . .
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/5/2020, 6:08 pm

Post #557: Welcome to Screaming Irony Theater for today’s feature, a change of pace, Series 1 of the BBC comedy-horror-supernatural series, *Truth Seekers* (2020). In a desperate attempt to find something available to watch other than election results, speculations, amazing simulations, outright downright lies and footage of angry unwashed fist wavers, I heard John Lennon’s voice ringing in my ears, “Just gimme some truth.” And lo, it came to pass in those days, when we had newly installed an expansive flat screen “smart” TV, I found Simon Pegg and Nick Frost engaging their dry wry wit in a new series following Gus Roberts (Nick Frost), a corpulent but engaging broadband installer for the SMYLE internet network, who finds other wordly goings on with his every assignment. Joining him initially as a tag-along assigned by boss Dave (Simon Pegg looking like a David Bowie corporate clone) is Elton John (Samson Kayo), a reluctant paranormal investigator with a dark past. Over eight roughly thirty-minute, infinitely bingeable episodes they uncover a vast, insidious conspiracy led by the “visionary” Dr. Peter Toynbee (Julian Barratt).

You may be conversant with Pegg and Frost’s films—the Cornetto trilogy *Shaun Of The Dead* (1994), *Hot Fuzz* (1997), and *End Of The World* (2013), one of my all-time favorites, and *Paul* (2011). Pegg is also well known for his role as Benji Dunn in the *Mission: Impossible* franchise with Tom Cruise. But working as a team, Pegg and Frost have developed sharp eyes for detail and subtlety as well as a creative ebullience that crosses genres. *Truth Seekers* continues that fine tradition as it is alternately funny, eerie, mysterious, suspenseful and pregnant with a few excellent jump scares, depending on the episode or point in the larger story.

Gus is brilliant, an expert wireless SMYLE technician and amateur supernaturalist, hosting his own ghostbusting internet show which faithfully mocks and comments on the handheld camera “undercover” shows the Discovery Channel loves to foist on us. He lives with his father-in-law Richard (Malcolm McDowell), a moderately cranky curmudgeon who gets sucked into the larger conspiracy plot totally by accident. (And as Richard, McDowell is afforded the opportunity to pay homage to his most famous role Alex DeLarge in Kubrick’s *A Clockwork Orange* (1971) literally halfway through the series in Episode 4: "The Incident at CovColCosCon.")

Our journey into the world between life and death and the transmigration of the soul begins innocuously enough in the home of kindly old Mrs. Connelly (Episode 1: “The Haunting Of Connelly’s Nook”) when she calls upon SMYLE to help with her disconnected smart TV. Gus and Elton discover her HDMI cable has been sheared in twain and when fixed her TV now carries signals from the room of her deceased husband, who tinkered with experiments in separating the soul from the body, starting with their pet dog Pepper in 1965.

From that point onward we meet Astrid (Emma D'Arcy), a pixie-like helper with some horrifying secrets of her own, and Helen (Susan Wokoma), Elton’s cosplaying agoraphobic sister who, like everyone in the series, also has a tortured past which ties all the principals together. Some episodes are pure joyful British comedy resting comfortably next to horror. Pegg says, “You just have to not make fun of the horror. It’s tempting with genre fare to parody something that asks you to suspend your disbelief. The key with horror comedy is to take the horror completely seriously and allow the comedy to exist adjacent to it.”

And he is completely on target with that assessment: The horror is not mocked, it is palpable and ominous, liberally sprinkled through the entire series, though for the most part it is not horribly graphic—director Jim Field Smith is never far from dropping in a ghost, apparition or electronic embodiment of fear. Only three quick references to bloodletting are capitalized upon over eight episodes, and they are jarring within their contexts. And when Gus faces the spectral vision of his wife Emily (Rosalie Craig) dead now some ten years on, the show surprises us with the depth of feeling we’ve invested in these characters in so short a time.

While many of the episodes are self-contained, I’d urge anyone interested in the arc of the story to view them together. The number of surprises and suspenseful unveilings of backstories is formidable, potentially changing our perspectives on the characters while endearing them to us more deeply as the show rolls out. Never would I have considered an abandoned Shredded Wheat factory in Welwyn Garden City hold such intrigue and unnerving energy.

For now, as I’ve said, only the first season is being aired, but will there be a second season? According to Samson Kayo (Elton), "I feel another season could be bigger if it happened. It would be a joy to work with everyone again, and the show has scope to go to a lot of places. You'll see from season one's end that it can build, so I'd be up for it." The final episode surely has offered a lot of breathing room, if not cliffhanging threads that demand investigation. I’d surely be up for it, if Amazon can corral the talent again.

Frost has said, “When you look at the best shows from the past 15 years, like *The Sopranos*, they have incredible characters who audiences can relate to. Tony Soprano might be a madman, but he has problems with his daughter and his wife. Normal things that are relatable, even when viewers can’t relate to someone bashing in a person’s head with a baseball bat. . . . The joy of making this show is that you’ve got the character and plot arcs, but you can also have fun with the ‘monster of the week.’ I also wanted it to be a world with drones flying around, so it’s a slightly futuristic version of Earth. You feel a little unanchored watching it as you’re unsure where it is.”

For those interested in delving deeper into the *Truth Seekers* dimension, there is also a 45-minute game online (https://truthseekersexperience.com/ ) in which partners via Zoom can explore their own ghostbusting capabilities. I haven’t tried this yet but may once I figure out to install Zoom. I’m not a Luddite, but some of these newfangled Internecine computer thingees confound me. . . . I’m still trying to figure out how to get to the end of the internet.

So it’s without reserve that I recommend your trying *Truth Seekers* if you enjoy the amusements and atmosphere found in shows like *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*. It’s filled with pop cultural references and an endearing sense of humanity in an age of nanobots, spyware and humans-as-babies toying with the Great Beyond, especially since Toynbee’s book *Beyond The Beyond* is more than just a terrific parody of influential psychobabble joined with technology with a human face but no human soul.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go recount my single ballot, as I hear a paraphrasing of John in my ears, “No fluff-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky Is going to Mother Hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of hope. . . I've had enough of watching scenes with schizophrenic, egocentric, paranoiac, prima-donnas; All I want is the truth, Just give me some truth.”
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by Seamus 11/6/2020, 5:34 pm

I really enjoyed this show. Was the right kind of spooky.
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Post by ghemrats 11/6/2020, 6:09 pm

Post #558: Today's feature, an exclusive Netflix production by Charlie Kaufman (*Being John Malkovich* 1999, *Adaptation* 2002, and a favorite mind bender *Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind* 2004), is the perfect movie for an icy, prohibitive winter's night when you can hear every minute creak and groan from your house settling as the wind comes sweeping down the plain and a hawk makes lazy circles in the sky. (How does he do that in such gusts?) It would help if you enjoy slowly unfolding psychological mysteries with an unsettling sense of dread and the patience to see it through to its enigmatic climax. If you prefer loud, pulse-grinding extravaganzas short on character but long on explosions, slide past this one, do not pass Go and impatiently await the next *Fast And Furious 24: Oxnard Firedrill* movie.

On balance, Charlie Kaufman movies are not for everyone. They are dense, filled with existential dread and philosophical meanderings, wherein reality and illusion dance together in poetical ballets that confound audiences geared toward monster truck rallies. For me, his work is a mixed bag of ennui and technical brilliance. His last two movies--*Synecdoche, New York* (2008) his directorial debut which Roger Ebert proclaimed was the "best movie of the decade" and the stop-motion *Anamolisa* (2015)--excited me to boredom and pretension, long slogs that made me feel I'd spent a long weekend with a cold flounder. But having taught the Iain Reid novel *I'm Thinking Of Ending Things* some years ago and finding it absolutely mesmerizing, I was eager to see how ANYONE could translate it to the screen since so much of it was steeped in internality.

Happily, this film falls back into the old Charlie Kaufman I enjoyed so much in *Eternal Sunshine*. Like that film, there lies a very tenuous balance between what we see and what is there. Temporal shifts abound without warning, though our anchor, a young woman known variously as Lucy, Louisa, Lucia and Ames, perhaps short for Amy (Jessie Buckley), is our one stable constant as events transpire around her. The premise is simple: Lucy (maybe) has been dating Jake (Jesse Plemons) for six weeks now, and the two are making a day trip to his parents' home (the amazing Toni Collette and David Thewlis) in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, their journey is met with a blinding snow storm, and the folks live in a remote expanse of land surrounded only by fields and a vast void of white. To clarify her role as the girl, Jessie Buckley received a script from Kaufman that described "Lucy" as "molecular." Well, that clears THAT up.

Pensive and self possessed, Lucy ponders ending the relationship, hence the title which takes on far more significance than first believed. An artistic type, extremely well read and full of Sylvia Plath-type poetry and painting, she is both a great match for Jake, who is simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by his family home, and a wary participant in his life. In her *Time* magazine review, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, "For every moment of raw, affecting insight there are zillions of milliseconds of Kaufman's proving what a tortured smartie he is." And though her assessment was roundly negative, I would assert that line is supremely accurate: In *I'm Thinking Of Ending Things* you'll find allusions to Pauline Kael's deconstruction of John Cassavetes' *A Woman Under The Influence* (1974), John Nash's speech in *A Beautiful Mind* (2001), *Oklahoma* the stage musical, David Foster Wallace, a host of Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King movies, poet Eva H.D. Later and Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel *Ice* which adds a deeper circle within Kaufman's spiral, a wheel within a wheel.

But don't get the idea that all this implies a lack of humor amidst the puzzlement. Case in point is the snippet of a movie within the movie, a romantic comedy truncated cheesily by a bold black and white title card announcing, "Directed by Robert Zemeckis." Startling as it is with its total tonal shift, it catches us off guard, providing a tension breaking laugh. Kaufman said, “Sometimes things are funny because they’re funny, and I feel like it’s possible that Zemeckis could have made this movie, even if it’s unlikely. At the same time, there’s a touch of irony to the choice. I don’t think Zemeckis ever has or ever would make a movie like this. It’s more like a Nancy Meyers movie. He wasn’t a model for it. His stuff is generally more high-concept, but it’s possible, so the joke resonates somehow.”

The film, while not a literal adaptation of Reid's novel, certainly captures its spirit. When I taught the novel in my literature class, I found it a professionally demanding experience: In a couple classes peppered with students who vehemently exercised their right NOT to read the book under discussion, I found a blessed sympathetic reader or two who would keep up with the assignments and tease out for the others certain "riddles" that provoked curiosity in those who sat idly by as their grades circled the drain. Since there are so many intricacies and symbols and immediately unanswered plot turns, open discussion with the readers was done through implication and inference, a'la "The girl's calls on her phone--have you gotten that far yet? Yes? Oh, well, what do you think is the 'Answer' to the Question she must address? Remember, a voice on her phone says, 'There’s only one question to resolve.'" Soon those who didn't want to read were either sucked into taking the plunge or skipping the class. We won more readers than absentees. The resultant reward for finishing the book was Reid's being named their favorite book for the semester. Almost unilaterally.

Kaufman alters Reid's ending somewhat, but even so affords us his own brand of powerful tragedy, elegiac and memorable. If it appears I'm being potently circumspect about this movie, you are right. It's designed to set off balance, though Kaufman has said, “The way I was presenting it was that you would probably figure it out. This is what the character is going through. You either get it or you don’t.” Evidently film critic Karen Han got it: "The lack of clear answers and structure can be frustrating, but the strange way the story is told enhances just how real the exchanges between characters feel. The frustration that Lucy feels with Jake, that Jake feels with his mother, that his parents feel for each other, are all uncomfortably tangible, especially as tensions rise. The film's 134-minute runtime is a long time to sit with that feeling, but Kaufman’s big divergence from the novel he's adapting is in lending its ending a more buoyant note." Succinctly and appropriately put, her assessment confirms my interest in the film, while offering an additional caveat to viewers who don't care for single-minded single-set sequences: Of the 134 minutes, 39 minutes and 52 seconds are invested in the car as our couple face the white-out.

It's a movie for details, so be prepared to be eagle-eyed, noting changes in apparel, hairstyles and the like as the story pulls us deeper into the mysteries. For me, that is great fun, holding the film up for more than one viewing. But for many others the pace may well be infuriating, slow and irksome if they are in the market for something light. The film looks beautiful, with its densely floral saturated color wallpaper, shifts in lenses, and fluid camera movement, proving that when Kaufman writes the screenplay and directs his vision of how a story unfurls, it can be quiet, eerie magic that dwells inside the soul rather than in exteriors. And the animated sections, one involving the voice talent of Oliver Pratt as the pig, dredge up fragments dropped in earlier passages with bold new meanings.

Production designer Molly Hughes commented on the lyrical ballet sequences which were Kaufman's own contribution to the film's climax. “When I first read it, I thought that it was beautiful, and I hope that people find it beautiful,” she says. “I hope that people sit with it and just go with it and [are not] afraid of the feelings that it provokes, because they’re not pleasant a lot of the time. But they’re very much a part of who we are as human beings. I think we spend a lot of time avoiding those feelings and avoiding memories and the ideas that he presents, but he always does such a good a job of bringing them to the surface. You have to face them.”

If you have Netflix and an analytical disposition, you may fully enjoy this labyrinthine journey. Just be prepared to dig in, and I'm not talking about snow drifts.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/7/2020, 5:38 pm

Post #559: I chose today's feature, *The Comedy Of Terrors* (1963), before the President Elect was announced, as a snide commentary on the state of mind I've held all week long as I girded my loins for fear of what might transpire. I was right there next to Bruce Springsteen planning a move to Australia if the terror persisted. Luckily, in my mind, the prophecy did not come true, and I should have posted a commentary on *Joy* (2015) instead. But we'll move ahead with this Jacques Tourneur movie from American International anyway, keeping things light with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Joyce Jamison, Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone, a prime cast if there ever was one. (Perhaps we can view them as candidates for the President Elect's cabinet.)

With several nods to Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the film, Jacques Tourneur kept the set relaxed and full of good humor with the stars, including a cameo from Joe E. Brown in his last film role. It's penned by Richard Matheson (famed for some 14 classic *Twilight Zone* episodes and countless fantasy TV series and films including *Somewhere In Time* (1980) with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, *What Dreams May Come* (1998) with Robin Williams, and the inimitable *The Incredible Shrinking Man* (1957). So this film's credentials are indeed impressive. And depending on your expectations, it will meet some of your black humor needs as long as you don't shoot too high. Seeing these fear-mongering greats doing pratfalls and engaging in supreme silliness, at times in fast motion to amp up the camp, may delight, entertain or embarrass as they cut loose and go full-out parody. (As Waldo Trumbell, a mortician with a sagging business, Vincent Price signals right out the gate that he plans to have fun, as he holds his stovepipe hat at the gravesite in such a way as to flip the mourners the bird.)

Such broad comedy with horror overtones, in this entry, may not be an easy alliance, even though the stars themselves seem to enjoy mocking the stentorian, theatrical roles that raised them to prominence. Price's besotted Trumbell predicts the sort of roles he would assume for American International in the coming years--the Beach Movies and Dr. Goldfoot entries--which made light of his successes in good humor if not funny humor. But seeing the 60-year-old Peter Lorre climbing up and sliding down pitched roofs, and Boris Karloff's aging legs confining him a largely seated performance devoid of sinister menace but turned into a doddering old codger might leave us with a sense of pity rather than laughter.

Aided by his faithful assistant in crime Felix Gillie (Lorre), Waldo Trumbell spends most of his time swilling wine, yelling at his buxom wife Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson), attempting to poison his father-in-law Amos Hinchley (Karloff at an arthritic 76) and avoiding foreclosure from his landlord John F. Black, Esq. (Rathbone). As a drunkard Price swaggers and struts, often with a bottle in his hand, as he tries to drum up business for his mortuary service by killing patrons while struggling to remain upright. Sneaking into the Phipps mansion after midnight one night, Waldo pauses in his prowling of the upper level to gawk and salivate over Old Phipps' (Buddy Mason) voluptuous, pneumatic wife (Beverly Powers, credited as Beverly Hills) before dispatching the old boy then wait for discovery of the body. But this plan goes awry as the comely wife packs up her entire household and leaves without paying for the funeral while her husband lies in state.

From that point on the murder plots shift to Black, who is known for fits of catatonia after enacting thunderous scenes from *Macbeth*, and Trumbell's various ploys to off him, while Felix flirts with Amaryllis who persists in screeching operatic arias for "comic" effect. The production values are very fine, with lush sets echoing the 1890s New England upper crust, and the hearse coach we see transporting bodies is now established at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. But personally I found it all a bit grating rather than ingratiating, even though I really wanted to like it. For me it's just too much buffoonery and volume amplification--another example of the "Louder Makes It Funnier" school, at which I have never matriculated.

According to Matheson, he was ""proud of that picture and of the fact that I got AIP [American International Pictures] to hire Tourner [sic]. Earlier on, I had asked for Tourner [sic] on one of my *Twilight Zones*... They said, 'Well, he's a movie director. I don't think he can handle this time schedule' . . . As I recall, he did the shortest shooting schedule of anyone—twenty-eight hours. He had this book with every shot in it and detailed notes. He knew exactly what he was doing every inch of the way. He was so organized.

"It didn't lose any money," Matheson said. "They [AIP] told me that the title itself cost them a lot. It's such a contradiction in terms, though. Terror sells and comedy makes them go away, so it's like they're walking in two directions at once. But I thought it was very clever to do a take off of Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*.... I think they were probably sorry they didn't use a Poe title, because Poe had a certain marketability. I guess they couldn't figure out how to market it. But it was the last one because I was getting tired of writing about people being buried alive, so I decided to make a joke about it."

Howard Thompson of the *New York Times* called it "A MUSTY, rusty bag of tricks rigged as a horror farce," and Philip K. Scheuer of the *Los Angeles Times* called it "a series of predictable gags repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum...I felt ashamed to watch once reputable actors hamming it up all over the place, making a mockery of whatever is left of their poor images." But some folks still find it nostalgic and funny--78% of Amazon viewers rate it at four or five stars. At the time of its release on December 23, 1963, the *Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin* wrote, "The sheer ludicrousness of it all will give this tongue-in-cheek American International release strong exploitation values in the mass markets. Although there is absolutely no suspense and the gags are antique, the players are so wonderfully miscast that only the dourest of viewers will fail to be amused. Richard Matheson's screenplay and Jacques Tourneur's direction are adequate to allow the players their hammy fun, Les Baxter's rollicking background score, consisting mostly of player-piano ditties and other such cornball devices, is pure delight."

In reference to the Les Baxter score, it's interesting to note he conducted the entire soundtrack in one day, November 15, 1963. Sadly, Peter Lorre died two months after the film's release. And *Variety* noted that the hydraulically-operated coffin specially built for this film cost $9,300, or $78,000 today. But when all is chronicled, "Gort" at CinemaOutsider said it best: "As loud at times as an exploding ironmongery, *The Comedy of Terrors* is a bit like that over-boisterous friend that you wish would calm down just a little, but whose company you enjoy and whose jokes you sometimes find yourself laughing at in spite of yourself. I can't say I chortled quite as much as I did when I first saw it, but the sense that everyone involved is having a ball really does prove infectious."

But then I'm in good humor today, as it marks the first time in the last four years that I think I can cancel my Prozac prescription and settle down into quasi-normalcy. (I still think 2020 has been a comedy of terrors, but at least we're, to coin a phrase, "turning a corner.")
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/8/2020, 5:23 pm

Post #560: When I think of late 1950s-early 1960s New York, I can't help but visualize dark suited executives swilling martinis in posh apartments which will be populated by a steady stream of blondes who wear out "modern Space Aged" furniture while coyly teasing about sexual attraction. It helps if the men are in advertising.

So fulfilling or perhaps initiating that picture is today's feature, *Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957). It checks every box which would become prototypical: voluptuous blonde (Jayne Mansfield) as Rita Marlowe, harried and confused young man clinging to the last rung of the advertising ladder suddenly thrust into prominence (Tony Randall) as Rock Hunter, a muscle headed ex-boyfriend of the woman (Mickey Hargitay) as Bobo Branigansky, Rita's brassy secretary who's the only voice of reason (Joan Blondell) and the hapless girlfriend of the adman who is now hailed as "Lover Boy" (Betsy Drake, Cary Grant's third wife). Add directing, producing and screenplay revising by Frank Tashlin (director of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros., six Jerry Lewis films, and writer for Bob Hope, The Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball and Red Skelton) and you've got a definition of "madcap."

Tashlin takes his anarchic sensibilities and skewers Madison Avenue in this raucous satire of advertising and marketing, loosely based on George Axelrod's successful Broadway play which also starred Randall and Mansfield. He signals out the gate that he's going to be searing and playful as the film opens not with a title song with credits but a set of television commercials for faux products, leading to Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall), who struggling at the La Salle advertising agency headed by Irving La Salle Jr. (John Williams). As a last-ditch effort to salvage the agency's biggest account, Stay-Put Lipstick, Rockwell beseeches mega-bombshell star Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield overtly parodying Marilyn Monroe with a character named after Rita Hayworth and Jean Harlow) to star as the girl with the "Oh so kissable lips" in a line of commercials.

Dealing with a slow-to-commit boyfriend, Bob Branigansky (Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield's husband and father of *Law And Order SVU*'s Mariska Hargitay), Rita agrees provided Rockwell pose as her boyfriend to inspire jealous in the famed TV jungle man. Soon Rock Hunter is splashed all over the tabloids as "Lover Boy" who has gained the heart of America's sweetheartbreaker. Rocketed to success in his firm, being bestowed the hallowed key to the executive washroom which reduces him to tears, Rock tries to balance newfound attention with his "regular" life wooing his girlfriend Jenny Wells (Betsy Drake). Though Rita's real love is the man who discovered her, George Schmidlap (a cameo I won't reveal here, but he's a keeper), he's unavailable, so despite her secretary Violet's (Joan Blondell) better advice, she puruses Rock.

If any of this sounds familiar, there is good reason for it. Tashlin and Mansfield, as well as Hargitay, worked together the year before on *The Girl Can't Help It* (1956), which I commented on back in June. While this one doesn't hold the reliance on rock and roll stars, *Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?* is just as fizzy and goofy. The pacing is fast and furious with some delightful satirical jabs landing at the prevailing wisdom of the 1950s man in the grey flannel suit. Tony Randall is perfect, offering yet another variation on his put-upon straight-laced businessman, at sea amidst the escalating fawning and fandom as the ideal foil for the affected Ooohing of Mansfield's ditz (though she is in fact a pretty savvy woman).

Michael Atkinson of TCM said of the film, "There may not be another American film made in the '50s that has such lacerating things to say about the entire infrastructure of modern culture, as it had recently coalesced as a nexus of Hollywood, publicity, advertising, gossip, television and materialistic youth culture. The whole shebang takes a shellacking, if with a smirk and a wink, and the film is nothing if not stone cold proof that Hollywood and its audiences were far, far more cynical about celebrity than we are today."

And Lang Thompson, also of TCM, singled out Tashlin's contribution: "A former animator (boasting Disney and Warners' infamous "Termite Terrace" under his belt), Tashlin was addicted to speed, bright colors and uncontrollable comic twitches. Whether he learned this from his time in the cartoon trenches or was driven to animation by innate tendencies doesn't much matter; Tashlin was American cinema's gut-bucket satirist and a direct, openly acknowledged influence on the French New Wave. He directed many of Jerry Lewis' wildest films (such as *Artists and Models*) and possibly for that reason has often been dismissed. If you want to know why Tashlin deserves full respect. then just watch two of his best films [*The Girl Can't Help It* 1956 and *Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?* 1957]."

Tashlin has noted before that the funniest thing in the world to him is large breasts. Toward that end he perfectly captures the dual-edged sword posited by Terry-Thomas in *It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World* (1963): “In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don’t you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture? In literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I’ll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight!”

This attraction toward bust size as a symbol of "success" is mirrored by the proto-feminist stance of Rockwell's girlfriend Jenny. She too seems bollocks'd by this infatuation: She sees Rita as competition and so bemoans lingerie stores' pandering to enhancements for the modern woman. She adopts Rita's [annoying] diction punctuated by high pitched goosing of punctuation and her hip swinging walk, all in a debasing attempt to capture Rock's attention while clearly disdaining the ploy. And this is enacted while Rock's new secretary (Barbara Eden in her debut Fox role) announces that she’s available for service … anytime. We empathize with Jenny and hate to see her stoop to such competitive levels if Rockwell is in fact falling for the charade; but Tashlin is clear that he does not subscribe to such sexual politicking--Rock is not truly enjoying the time of his life, but is miserable in his search for peace of mind. Jenny's charade fills him with guilt and embarrassment.

So in some ways the film is simultaneously dated and relevant, a nice conflict that Tashlin would enjoy. But it's been described by some critics as a perfect comedy, since it's consistently funny and at times arch. Amazon viewers rate it at 90% in four- or five-star ratings as a 93-minute romp that breaks the fourth wall. In many ways it's a bonkers precursor to the Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies that would skirt naughtiness with a sniggering sideways smile in the years to come, with faithful friend Tony Randall in tow. It's a film I've returned to many times when times called for a lightening of mood. There's a lot to like here in its pseudo-sophistication, but the satire is spot on even today.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/9/2020, 7:33 pm

Post #561: Nihilists offer fertile ground for comedy, since they believe in nothing. They are among the most counterproductive goofballs around in one of my favorite films, *The Big Lebowski* (1998), leading Walter Sobchak to say in awe, "Nihilists! **** me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, but at least it's an ethos." Nihilists are good people to know if you want a toe, but they can be a drag on a camping trip. And so it is with today's feature, *The 7th Victim* (1943), which may stand as one of the bleakest suspense films I've ever seen. Any film that starts with a quote from John Donne's Holy Sonnet I--"I run to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday"--might telegraph to the audience that this is not a ride on a merry-go-round unless it's run by a demented fatalist.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But before you sit down with *The 7th Victim* expecting a lively romp like a Torchy Blaze feature, you should know a couple things: This is a vintage, classic Val Lewton film, so it's bursting with deep shadows (on the screen and in its soul) and complex relationships well beyond your everyday Saturday matinee fare. It rather clearly intimates (and sympathetically condones) lesbianism, though no overt visuals are offered. It deals with devil worshipers not as pitchfork-brandishing deviants but disenchanted, morally confounded social butterflies who struggle with their moral choices or blandly and blindly follow their "rules." With the deepest shadow of suicide hovering overhead, counterbalanced by a relatively naive, innocent babe in the woods (Kim Hunter in her debut role) and a growing affection for her missing sister's husband (Hugh Beaumont--does June Cleaver know about this?).

Seeing such a strong existential message as this one imparts--and knowing it was filmed in 1943--certainly gives us pause. As you can see from the title shot still, the quarry in our hunt for meaning is Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks) whose propensity toward lugubrious melancholy is apparent immediately. And it all starts out so nicely, if you exempt the Donne quote: Opening with the Latin recitation and declension of "I love" at Highcliffe Academy, a Catholic boarding school, young Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is summoned to the main office where she learns her sister Jacqueline has perhaps disappeared, since they cannot contact her and tuition has come due. Worried, Mary leaves for New York, where her sister owns a cosmetic firm, La Sagesse. From Jacqueline's close friend, Frances Fallon (Isabel Jewell) Mary learns that her sister sold the firm eight months ago, to Esther Redi (Mary Newton, who's as stark and dark as any alley in Greenwich Village), one of the members of the Palladists, a fun loving bunch of mopes who form a Satanic cult in full view.

Directed to Dante's restaurant where Mary was seen a week ago, Mary discovers she rented a room on the upper floor. When she begs owners Giacomo Romari (Chef Milani) and his wife Bella (Marguerita Sylva) to let her see the room, they sympathetically open to door to show her a sparse apartment with a chair and a noose, obviously not being employed to hang out her wash. Emboldening her resolve to find her sister, she engages the help of attorney Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont) and a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, reprising the role he held in *Cat People* 1942). She also is approached by Irving August (Lou Lubin) who is soon dispatched, his body being transported in the subway car Mary rides to visit Dr. Judd.

I can't possibly disclose any more of the story lest I ruin the fun you'll experience yourself over its moody but tightly efficient 71 minutes. While some critics of the time were bamboozled by its relentlessly downbeat arc, resulting in a climactic final scene that still has me wondering how Lewton and director Mark Robson got it past the censors, there is no denying that it packs a wallop by its end. Some have complained that the final cut of the film seems a bit disjointed. though I would assert it's precisely that quality that helps to create such a potent smack on the audience. Yes, the interminable night walks down shadow-banked streets, interesting camera angles and a general sense of dis-ease are assistants in the creeping dread, but a measured excising of four scenes from the final print also ramps up the tension.

“We make the audience do the work," Lewton told the *Chicago Tribune.* "… If you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will read anything into it you want.” And RKO didn't really care about Lewton's stories; RKO refused to hand a first-time director [Mark Robson, who has worked with Orson Welles on *Citizen Kane*] a lofty budget, so they gave Lewton an ultimatum: Robson or the money. Lewton chose the director, which resulted in four scenes from the script left on the cutting room floor. While these scenes invariably fleshed out the story, they merely filled in some relatively insignificant holes: a visit to Mary's kindergarten class, Dr. Judd feigns interest in joining the cult, he carries on a philosophical argument with Natalie Cortez (Evelyn Brent) on the nature of good and evil, and a coda ends with Gregory thinking in voice-over, ""I am alive, yet every hope I had is dead. Death can be good. Death can be happy. If I could speak like Cyrano . . . then perhaps, you might understand." Okay.

Of the scene involving lesbian overtones, film theorist Harry M. Benshoff said, "*The Seventh Victim* invokes the analogy in ways more sympathetic to homosexuality. While it could have easily fallen into the trap of using gay and lesbian signifiers to characterize its villains (i.e. homosexual = Satanist, as did Universal's *The Black Cat* in 1934), the film is much more complex than that."

Robson and Lewton keep the creeps moving all the way through the film, hardly pausing at all to allow us to breathe. The scene on the subway is so strange as to be part of a fever dream: How often do we see two men juggling a corpse for the amusement of a single passenger? Redi's visit to Mary while Mary is completely vulnerable, nude and standing in the midst of a shower is masterful--we see only her shadow, a precursor to *Psycho* (1959) if there ever was one. Mary sings a lilting lullabye to her pre-schoolers ending with the words, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed/Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” Dang, woman, do you hear yourself?

The Satanists actually look like members of the Algonquin Club Round Table, a spirited little group of aristocrats who look spooky only when they hover above the light source or make an issue of having only one arm. They believe in non-violence, unless one of them crosses the group, for which they must die, but otherwise they just hang their heads in shame when poet Jason Hoag (Erford Gage) metaphorically rakes his forefinger over the other, chastising them with a recitation of The Lord's Prayer. And why in God's name, if you people want to be a secret society, do you leave hand drawn logos for your practices in library books and on your perfume bottles?

But all this aside, you've got to see this film to believe it. And even then you won't. Some consider this Lewton's masterpiece, ranking alongside *Cat People* though it lost money at the box office and cost $130,000 to make, including the $120 RKO spent on Jean Brooks's wig. Domestic rentals totaled $200,000, and US$68,000 overseas; the film made a profit of only $50,000 on its first run, which means relegation to the nether regions, even though according to Doug McClelland author of *The Golden Age of the B Movies*: “It makes *Rosemary’s Baby* look like *Blondie’s Blessed Event*.” Even so, Joel Siegel, Lewton's biographer, asserts, “*The Seventh Victim* is so rich and compact that only after a second viewing can most audiences begin to apprehend its beauties. (…) The resignation and despair, the perpetual awareness of death at the very center of life, is what *The Seventh Victim* is about. Few works of art have treated this subject with such courage, intelligence and eloquence.” Something tells me our lame duck President probably has it on a loop in Lincoln's bedroom which in my mind is reason enough to applaud it.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/10/2020, 4:28 pm

Post #562: When you enter the private world of an auteur director, expectations will be confounded, though you can still find signature touches that will anchor you to his sustained vision. A Hitchcock movie will surprise, but you usually know what you're getting into--superior control of visuals, strong motifs, recurring themes. The same might be said of Coen Brothers films--incredibly singular dialogue, terrific camerawork, tragedy and comedy comingling to keep you reeling. Frank Capra will focus on the heart of humanity, Martin Scorsese will follow gritty stylized reality, and Terry Gilliam will give you a picaresque narrative and a visual feast with philosophical pokes that knock you off balance. Tim Burton will explore social outcasts and black humor. And Michael Bay will blow up sh*t.

But then there's producer Val Lewton, a less emphatically remembered name, but for a span of nine movies made some spectacular head scratchers as they thrilled his fan base which has grown with the years. I've already commented on a number of his hits (*Cat People* 1941 and yesterday's *The 7th Victim* (1943) to name a couple). So when he helmed a sequel, today's feature, *The Curse Of The Cat People* (1944), people who followed his films knew only one thing: It would not be a run of the mill rehashing of the original picture. And that would be an understatement. Resemblances between this and the original are facile at best, as are scenes with cats. There's the obligatory cat up a tree shot, a glancing blow at Goya's painting (*Don Manuel Osorio*) that so entranced Irena in the first, and you'll find a stuffed cat gorging itself on a bird, but that's about it, feline friends.

Oh, Simone Simon, Kent Smith, and Jane Randolph are all back reprising their roles, but they are clearly not the same people we saw at the end of Irena's reign of terror. Nautical engineer Oliver Reed (Smith) has remarried following the fate of his former wife Irena Dubrovna to his former co-worker, Alice, and they are living the good life in Tarrytown, New York, with their daughter Amy (the estimable Ann Carter who is the real star of the film). An introspective child with a rich internal landscape, Amy has few friends, and most of her peers chide and avoid her. Until one day they lead her to a Victorian manse reported to house a witch, Julia Farren (Julia Dean), an elderly stage performer with a spooky flair for the dramatic. She is watched over by her daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell), haunted. reclusive and depressed to the point of angry, bitter ambulatory catatonia. Julia refuses to acknowledge her as her offspring, preferring to cling to the notion that Barbara died when she was a child. The old lady invites Amy in, gives her a ring and enacts a harrowing retelling of The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

Amy awakes in the night, scared of the Headless Rhinestone Cowboy, and wishes into existence as "friend," who is initially a shadow, but soon after seeing an old discarded photo of Irena, Amy realizes it is she who is her friend. And she is still hot, even as a fantasy angel. Naturally, Oliver and Alice are concerned, since Amy's friend is never seen, and fearing she might fade into Irena's madness Oliver blows a gasket and becomes fiercely overprotective to the point of obsessive and quick to snap. The story then evolves into a really sweet but doubly bizarre Christmas tale involving Amy, Irena, and the Farren House regulars. Yup, it's a little dark for repeated traditional Christmas viewing, but cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca offers up some of the prettiest sinister shadow play this side of classic noir. His thick falling snow and grey tones capture the essence of a snow squall with exacting, gorgeous detail. But then we could expect as much from Lewton, the master of shadow and light.

So audiences rabid for more taut thrills tied to panther legend were probably flummoxed by this addition as it is much more a psychological fantasy plumbing the depths of children's inner worlds and the potency of imagination. So much of the film is semi-autobiographical that even Lewton's wife suggested Val lived in a fantasy world as a child and "never truly came back to the real world as an adult." The Magic Mailbox Tree Amy uses to "mail" her birthday party invitations is the manifestation of Lewton's childhood when he stashed invitations to his sister's party in a "magic mailbox tree." Frances Wickes' *The Inner World Of Childhood* mentioned by Amy's teacher Miss Callahan (Eve March) is a real study with an introduction by Carl Jung, another of Lewton's highly literate allusions; others include nods to Robert Louis Stevenson and Washington Irving.

Not without its issues, *The Curse Of The Cat People* was a title foisted upon Lewton by RKO, who deemed his work in the B-picture realm and were hungry for marketing prospects more than artistic ruminations on the active fantasy life of a little girl whom her parents, particularly her father, believe might be a contagion to the madness of Reed's first wife. In that regard, this is less a sequel than a continuation of character lives, living in the figurative and literal shadows of earlier life. Being so budget conscious, RKO grew increasingly concerned when Lewton's director Gunther Fritsch filmed slowly, taking much too much time for the executives--filming only half the film in the allotted 18 days--and was consequently replaced after most filming was done by film editor Robert Wise (in his debut as director after being nominated for an Academy Award in editing for *Citizen Kane* (1941), to be followed by an illustrious career including *West Side Story* (1961) and *The Sound Of Music* 1965).

Wise remembered, "A shooting schedule was set up for eighteen days but he [Fritsch] fell so far behind that after the eighteen days were used up, he was still only halfway through the screenplay. Val tried and tried to get Gunther to pick up the tempo, but it was his first job and he was just too nervous to move any faster. One Saturday morning, I got a call from Sid Rogell, who was then head of the B-unit...Rogell told me that I was to replace Gunther on Monday morning. Gunther and I had planned to do some extra night footage that very evening and I knew he had not yet been told of his dismissal. I couldn't bring myself to go to work with him under those conditions and I called Val to ask his advice. 'Look,' he said, 'if it's not you, it will be somebody else. You're not pushing Gunther out.' So I took over the picture on Monday morning and brought it in by early October."

Though Lewton pleaded with the suits of RKO to change the title to *Amy and Her Friend*, there was no bargaining to be done. In fact, the studio was so tied to the *Cat People* approach (actual charming but dark narrative be damned), they marketed the film with splashy, sensationalistic banners boasting "The Beast-Woman Haunts the Night Anew!" and "The Black Menace Creeps Again!" Neither image of which would appear on the screen in such lurid tones. Marketing also instructed exhibitors to "Stencil paw prints leading to your theatre. Send out a small group of men and women wearing cat masks to walk through the streets with cards on their backs reading, 'Are cats people?'" One of the posters suggested Irena would slink “into the heart of a little girl who could not see the evil behind her smiling lips that could snarl, and feline fingers that could rip young flesh to shreds!” All this smacks of a kid's book report based not on the assigned reading but the cheapjack adaptation by Classics Illustrated or a third-rate film. A complete and utter misinterpretation of Lewton's creation.

Thank heavens critics like James Agee, who called the film one of the best of 1943, saw through the money grabbers at RKO: “When the picture ended and it was clear beyond further suspense that anyone who had come to see a story about curses and were-cats should have stayed away, they clearly did not feel sold out; for an hour they have been captivated by the poetry and danger of childhood, and they showed it in their thorough applause.”

Despite the stupid intentions of the studio, Lewton and crew made a complex, satisfying yarn that is far less horror than it is a study of loneliness. According to TCM, "*The Curse of the Cat People* was often shown to psychology students at universities. At one point, Dr. Fearing, head of the Child Psychology Clinic at U.C.L.A., asked Lewton to attend a class screening of it. According to Joel E. Siegel's Lewton biography, '...Dr. Fearing praised Lewton's use of Amy's tight-lipped half-smile, observing that in his treatment of children with similar emotional problems, the same reticent smile appeared again and again. But Lewton...refused to take credit for this particular touch. Little Ann Carter, he explained, had lost one of her front teeth during shooting, and since there was not enough time or money to have the tooth replaced, she was instructed to act with her mouth shut for the rest of the filming.'"

Film theorist Brian Eggert also suggests, ". . . few films have ever captured the mind of a child so beautifully, existing in a state that never quite determines what reality is. The viewer remains uncertain as to whether Amy’s visions derive from Irena’s ghost watching over the daughter of her former husband, or if Amy has created Irena in her mind, possibly from half-understood stories about her father’s first wife (similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Unseen Playmate, quoted in the film). The film also draws significant connections between adults and children in the film, suggesting not only a biographical nod to its author, Lewton, but also the innate reality that somewhere buried within every adult lingers their childlike self."

There are so many reasons to extol the virtues of this film, but I'll just touch on a couple relationships that cement the mysterious quality of fantasy and childlike wonder: Kudos to Lewton for once again enlisting the talents of Sir Lancelot, the Jamaican singer telling the tragic story of the Holland family in calypso, this time as Edward, the chief cook and bottle washer for the Reeds and a kind of guardian angel for Amy. Once again Lewton treats his entire cast with respect and equal screen time. Amy's steadfast need to make her father proud and always tell the truth--even when adults are too stupid or fearful to trust their progeny--draws us to her even more fondly, even as it casts Oliver in a dictatorial autocratic role which could separate him from her affections. Irena is warm and inviting, careful to not damage Amy's love of her family, though Irena is constantly saddled with evil suspicion.

If anything, *The Curse Of The Cat People* makes me mad--frustrated that I have waited so long to discover this moving tribute to the wildness, the untainted joy and pain of childhood. If you had told me I'd be drawn to *Cat People* and *The Curse Of The Cat People* as one of the best double features I'd ever seen, I would have deemed you either crazy or a little short of good taste, since its titles in no way prepare audiences for the exquisite complexity of their missions. My friends, these are so NOT B-pictures--don't wait to see them for fear of a promise of tabloid trash. They are artistic, accessible demonstrations of a master producer who will keep you guessing. O, that we were all so cursed.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/11/2020, 6:18 pm

Post #563: And I think it's gonna be a long, long time till touchdown brings me 'round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home, O no no no, I'm a. . . . Leopard Man! Yes, I fear Val Lewton has been handed another stupid title around which he can build his own magic tale of suspense, redefining horror in his own mold. And while the title is indeed moldy as seventy-year-old limburger, today's feature *The Leopard Man* (1943) is not. It's vintage nose thumbing at the suits at RKO, with some scenes that put Lewton and his fabulous directorial conspirator Jacques Tourneur at the top of their stealthy best. And it boasts two really good Lewton Bus scenes, one which literally gave me a start. So now that I have my start, let's go. . . .

In his accompanying commentary, acclaimed director William Friedkin (*The French Connection* 1971, *The Exorcist* 1973) notes that Lewton may well have influenced Alfred Hitchcock's drawing out of suspense and certainly Quentin Tarantino's *Pulp Fiction* (1994) narrative core by focusing on divergent characters to tell the story. He bemoans, "That's something that we as filmmakers have lost. We now feel we have to show everything. Every plunge of the knife, every moment of pain and agony that the victims have to go through, that's what you see in horror films today. People cut up by hacksaws, people ripped apart at the hands of alien creatures" rather than Lewton's refusal to disclose every detail of the horror.

As expected with the unpredictable Lewton and Tourneur, RKO suits, notably production chief Charles Koerner, hated the film, not being able to grasp the intent or structure, both of which are admittedly far beyond the standard cranked out horror films of the time: Friedkin notes that it's actually several films in one--a strong commentary on society's lack of compassion, which would lead to its demise, a general lack of control over the paths our lives take (a standard Lewton existential question), tha absence of strong father figures in the lives of his characters, leaving them at sea, and the overpowering influence of fate. Elements of a good introductory philosophy course maybe, but cheap B-movies? Never. Unless you're Val Lewton who believed in defining quality over profit and audience expectations.

One such head scratcher for the traditional matinee attendant was the introduction of a plastic ball suspended in the plume of a water fountain's spout, noticed by nightclub owner Jerry Manning and his colleague Dr. Galbraith (James Bell) to pause and reflect on its significance: “We are like that ball dancing on the fountain. We know as little about the forces that move us and move the world around us as that empty ball, which lives only because the water pushes it into the air, lets it fall and catches it again.…” Tourneur believed Lewton's films were largely successful due to "“war psychosis… In wartime people want to be frightened… We all carry in us a feeling of guilt. Cruelty flows in our blood, even if we have learned to master it.” Wartime audiences might also have resonated with the philosophy embedded within *The Leopard Man*‘s confrontation with the dark side of Self in that grace note concerning the plastic ball.

And we start up the Suspense-O-Meter in the opening frames, as we move in on adjacent dressing rooms in a New Mexico nightclub. In one is Gabriella aka "Clo-Clo" (Margo) who is practicing her liquid movements while clacking away on castanets in a fury; next door is Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks), also a performer and girlfriend of the club's owner Jerry (shouldn't he be called Jer-Jer?) Manning (Dennis O'Keefe), banging on the walls to quell her rival's noise level. Clo-Clo is used to commanding all the attention and so is infuriated when Jerry suggests Kiki enter the club in a slinky gown with a jet-black leopard on a leash, upstaging Clo-Clo's routine. It certainly does the trick, moving Clo-Clo to spook the cat with a flurry of castanets and send it lurching out into the night, much to the dismay of its owner Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman).

Lewton and Tourneur are cagey as they introduce their plot, taking a dog leg (or leopard haunch) by introducing a set of new characters as Clo-CLo walks home down another of Lewton's famed dark streets enveloped in harsh shadows. The camera lingers on Terésa Delgado (Margaret Landry), a young woman sent out into the night to buy corn meal for her father's tortillas the next morning, her mother a strident disciplinarian who will not let Teresa back into the house until she has the grain. With all the local grocers closing up for the night, Teresa traverses the darkness, crossing under a bridge in an arroyo, finally finding a sympathetic store owner and returning amidst growing fears of glowing eyes in the shadows.

Friedkin perceptively calls this sequence "a strange journey that will lead to what I believe is one of the greatest horror sequences ever filmed." While Teresa's younger brother makes menacing shadow puppets on the wall inside their home, the poor young girl with the most expressive large eyes screams outside the latched door, pleading to be let in as the leopard (Dynamite, the same cat used in the duo's classic *Cat People* 1941) closes in on her. After a moment of incredulity chalked up to Teresa's youthful imagination, Senora Delgado (Kate Drain Lawson) registers the terror in her daughter's cries and struggles to slide the bolt open--to no avail.

The scene shifts from Teresa's funeral to an evocative close up of Maria, The Fortune Teller (Isabelle Jewell), for a split second in the perfect pose of the Madonna--until a second later she plugs a cigarette in her mouth destroying the allusion in an insouciant motion. Repeatedly Maria's cards for Clo-Clo warn of her impending death, now in the shadows of Teresa's mauling an even greater threat. But again Clo-Clo becomes the conduit to another heretofore unrelated group of characters, the camera taking us to the birthday of Consuela Contreras (Tuulikki Paananen, aka Tula Parma) as the young woman breathlessly reads a secret note from her lover Raoul Belmonte (Richard Martin) entreating her to meet him in the graveyard at 4:00 that afternoon. Under the guise of laying flowers on her father's grave, Consuela arrives too late to meet her love and spends the greater part of the day waiting for him to return, until the old groundskeeper (Brandon Hurst) signals with his whistle he's locking up for the night. Too absorbed in her thoughts Consuela finds herself locked within the walls as dusk gathers. Cue growing shadows and another off-camera death.

Meanwhile, golddigging Clo-Clo spends her evening with a wealthy old man who gives her a gift of $100, which she loses on her way home, following another visit to Maria who warns that "something black" is coming to claim her. After more ratcheting tension down those dark Lewton streets, Clo-Clo safely returns home, only to find her money missing, sending her back out into the streets to give the black menace another shot at her. It's a very tidy tale as Kiki and Jerry investigate the murders as the body count mounts.

Once again a box office was less than kind to *The Leopard Man*, especially since both Tourneur and Lewton considered it an artistic failure and their third and last collaboration. Some speculate today that the reason it was considered a failure was due to the audience expectations that it would be another *Cat People* or *I Walked With A Zombie*, two of the duo's previous films. "We had the perfect collaboration -- Val was the dreamer, the idealist, and I was the materialist, the realist. We should have gone right on doing bigger, more ambitious pictures and not just horror movie," Tourneur said. Still today, Indiewire placed it at #90 in their "The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All-Time" and *Slant* Magazine listed it at #31 in their "The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time." So it is certainly worth tracking down and enjoying for its brisk 66 minutes.

A common question among novice students of film is "What makes a Lewton/Tourneur collaboration so worthy of praise? In essence, why should I appreciate their films or be looking for as validation of their staying power? The answer is not totally objective, as if there were a good definition of what an orange tastes like, and why the fruit is so popular. For me the aesthetics--the mood, the texture, the expressiveness of a cautiously lit character in a bank of absolute darkness (visually and metaphorically) and the issues concerning what it is to be moral and mortal--these figure prominently in my appreciation. Friedkin says it's their application and manipulation of expectations that make their films stand out in a positive way. They tend to thwart a standardized response, causing us to question what scares us deep down. The cats, leopards, debilitating diseases and human indifference, and thus culpability, are just ornamentations to the really frightening aspects--fate and fatalism will out. The final procession of darkly hooded monks, trudging through the barren landscape with candles, is enough to send a shiver through anyone, but their penitence is equally disturbing as they move on, leaving the denouement in the hands of Jerry Manning.

My Val Lewton collection has turned me on to a whole new appreciation of thoughtful filmmaking, even though the ultimate mission is darker than I would subscribe to personally. I stayed away from his films precisely because of the lurid titles imposed on him by RKO, and that, joyfully, was wrong. So I'll urge you to give Lewton's canon a try; your own expectations may be challenged and you'll find a ripping good time, just a little over an hour at a time. (And I didn't mean that as a pun connoting a panther claw.)
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by Space Cadet 11/11/2020, 6:47 pm

So, you're saying that these last two are better than that horror classic... The Giant Claw? I find that hard to believe. I set the time of death for modern suspense/horror at the first Halloween movie. All of the sequels should have ended up in an unmarked grave.
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Post by ghemrats 11/12/2020, 5:04 pm

Post #564: I had a choice today: I could post either an introduction to today's feature, *The Ghost Ship* (1943), or a super clip from the film. As you can see, Ben Mankiewicz won out, because I didn't want to spoil your potential enjoyment of the film with a crucial scene. Yes, I'm still on the Val Lewton kick, this one starring Richard Dix and directed by Mark Robson. As per our expectations of the unexpected, Lewton is once again creeping up on horror or tension rather than smacking you in the face with it like a velvet sledgehammer. It's claustrophobic, all action taking place on a merchant marine ship as a fresh young third mate officer, Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) fights back suspicions that the captain of the ship Will Stone (Richard Dix) is either too strict a disciplinarian or a psychotic killer who holds grudges. Neither option is attractive, especially as crew members start dying or disappearing.

Oh, the captain is affable enough at first glance, but the men onboard are a crusty bunch of barnacles who don't seem to trust the newbie. When Peter The Greek (Paul Marion) suffers from appendicitis and the Captain freezes during his operation, Tom takes over and covers for his commanding officer. It doesn't escape the attention of radioman Jacob "Sparks" Winslow (Edmund Glover) though, and Tom asks him not to spread the news around the ship, to save the Captain's reputation. Thus Sparks becomes Tom's confidant as the Captain's behavior vacillates between irrationality and absolute authority, with a brief stopover when the two collide. Increasingly, the Captain spirals, at one point outlining his management theory:

"I’ll explain now. I told you you had no right to kill the moth. That its safety did not depend on you. But I have the right to do what I want with the men because their safety does depend on me. I stand ready any hour of the day or night to give my life for their safety and the safety of this vessel — because I do, I have certain rights of risk over them. Do you understand?"

And later, in a clarification of his absolute power as God of the ship, he berates Merriam with a more forceful mandate:

"I want you to learn the great lesson that I thought I'd taught you: authority *cannot* be questioned! . . . I've never felt more sane in my life than I do at this moment... Who's crazy? You, who defied me and are helpless? Or I, who control your destiny and the destiny of the [ship] *Altair* and all the lives on board? . . . I'm captain. As long as I wear these stripes there isn't a man in the crew that'll believe you or help you. You'll find them too lazy, too cowardly, too disinterested . . . That's what I want you to learn, Merriam! Men are worthless cattle! And a few men are given authority to drive them."

He and Bogart's Captain Queeg would be a dilly of a couple of bridge partners.

When Seaman Louie Parker (Lawrence Tierney) confronts the Captain over one of his decisions, the old man rebuffs him with an ominous yet seemingly off-handed remark, "You know, there are captains who might hold this against you, Louie." And so it's only a matter of minutes before, by design or accident, Louie ends up experiencing a horrible death played out with dispassionate objectivity from Lewton and Robson. This scene once again reminds us how Lewton was a master of sound and image, the two perfectly balanced for complete panic. Intensifying the aesthetic distances is Finn the Mute (Skelton Knaggs), who watches everything, sees everything, but remains incapable of doing much to stop it. In an eerie voice-over we share his thoughts, a Greek Chorus freighted with a disturbing blend of nihilism and hope. It is he who is largely dismissed by the Captain and crew, but it is he who is most human among them.

When the *Altair* docks at San Sebastian (the same fictional island Lewton used in *I Walked With A Zombie* (1943)), Tom brings charges against the Captain, loses his case with First Officer Bowns (Ben Bard) and Charles Roberts the Dunhan Line Agent (Boyd Davis) when the crew bond against his naivete, quits the ship, and intervenes in a fight to help crewmember Billy Radd (Sir Lancelot, who again sings sea shanties onboard to boost morale), gets knocked out, and is deposited back on the ship, only to regain consciousness at sea, now stripped of his rank and existing merely as a passenger. The Captain, indignant that he was ridiculed in a competency trial, reminds Tom, "You know, Mr. Merriam, there are some captains who would hold this against you." Uh oh. Tom's clock just got overwound. . . . and the Captain may take action to clean it.

Frequent collaborator Robert Wise said RKO wanted another quickie horror film for $150,000 budget, using a set they had created for **Pacific Liner* (1939): "He would find what we call a 'standing set,' and then tailor his script to the set, whatever it was. That's how he made *The Ghost Ship*. He walked onto a set and saw a tanker, then cooked up the idea for this ship with a murderous captain." Opening on Christmas Eve 1943, the film did well at the box office, but the following February 1944, Lewton was sued by playwrights Samuel R. Golding and Norbert Faulkner for plagiarism, claiming he stole their ideas from a script they had sent him. Though Lewton forcibly denied the charges, it went to trial, awarding the men $25,000 in damages and attorney fees of $5,000. And in one fell swoop, *The Ghost Ship* was yanked from distribution for fifty years, losing all future booking residuals and the right to sell the film for airing on television.

Still, there are some wonderful set pieces in the film, as film historian Edmund Bansak describes an early encounter which "showcases Robson's underrated directorial skill. Robson creates a dynamic sense of menace from a physical object: a massive giant hook hanging from upon an enormous chain, pendulumlike, inches above the deck. ... [The] hook remains unattended and unsecured. ... In a tightly directed, genuinely exciting scene, the monstrous hook sways back and forth in a direct path toward the camera, making one wonder how cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, kept his camera (and head) intact during the shooting. ... The lighting is also used to great advantage, the shadows and fog accenting the terror. Half the time the swinging hook is so hidden in the darkness that aside from the creak of its sway, there is no telling which direction it will take."

Particularly telling is an engraved motto hanging in the Captain's quarters: a brass plate warning: "Who Does Not Heed the Rudder Must Face the Rock." According to Donald Phelps in *Fear Itself* the plaque bears two "hidden clauses": "The rudder (i.e., sheer control) has become law in itself. Two: the skipper, aptly named Stone, has become both rudder and rock." And so drawing upon his extensive reading background, Lewton has fashioned a sea tale in the mold of Melville, Nietzsche, Wouk, and London, culminating in a knife fight that is surprisingly dark, skillful and menacing as Merriam physically and metaphorically remains incapable of assisting in the outcome as the combatants slash and tear at one another inches away in the cloying confines of a stateroom, bright blades shooting glints of light across the tight spaces. Ding dong, Avon Fate calling.

*The Ghost Ship* is less ambiguous than other Lewton classics, but that does not diminish its watchable 69 minutes of slow, seething fear. It doesn't dwell on supernatural aspects of horror but remains firmly entrenched in the psychological demons that can haunt obsession. And after a handful of *Whistler* films, Richard Dix here appears less wooden, but positively maniacal in a few late scenes filmed in close-up like a panel from an old DC *Crypt Of Terror* comic drawn by Jack Davis. Yes, the denouement comes pretty quickly once events start unfolding, but it's a bravura performance all the way. Perhaps the only thing more upsetting than this boat ride would be taking a Covid Princess Cruise to Alaska. Travel rates might be negotiable for the holidays, so check in early.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by Space Cadet 11/12/2020, 7:05 pm

I need to schedule a Richard Dix film festival at some point. I think I'll skip his "Whistler" flicks though. But it will definitely include Cimarron.
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Post by ghemrats 11/12/2020, 7:57 pm

You are a wise man, Space. This one is good too.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/13/2020, 6:31 pm

Post #565 (A Palindrome Production with Boris Karloff): Today's Val Lewton feature, the second of three of his "horror" films with Boris Karloff, sounds like the most avoided space in the supermarket, *Isle Of The Dead* (1945), and if our grocery stores looked like this place, no one would go within shouting distance of it. Another movie created out of thin air based on an inane title foisted upon him and director Mark Robson by RKO, *Isle Of The Dead* turns out to be a pretty good thriller for all its lurid promise name-wise. In fact, Martin Scorsese lists it as the second scariest movies of all time, after Robert Wise's *The Haunting* (1963). So no, it's not a comedy. [See Scorsese's list at https://web.archive.org/web/20091101124401/http:/www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-28/martin-scorseses-top-11-horror-films-of-all-time/ ] As such I am reminded of Scorsese's *Shutter Island* (2010).

It's 1912 Greece during the First Balkan War, as General Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) and American reporter Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) walk through the dead littering the battlefield on their way to the titular isle to pay respects to the General's dead wife entombed there. Setting off amidst the wine dark sea they find the crypt of Pherides' wife despoiled, her body burned perhaps fifteen years ago, as they hear the plaintive siren's call of a woman singing in the distance. Investigating, they find the home of a retired Swiss archeologist Dr. Aubrecht (Jason Robards, Sr.), his Greek housekeeper Madame Kyra (Helen Thimig), British diplomat Mr. St. Aubyn (Alan Napier) and his pale and sickly wife (Katherine Emery), her youthful Greek companion Thea (Ellen Drew), and English tinsmith Andrew Robbins (Skelton Knaggs). They play the mash, they play the monster mash . . . until Robbins complains about not feeling too chipper and dies the next morning. “The horseman on the pale horse is Pestilence--he follows the wars,” the General intones.

The superstitious Madame Kyra, who appears to spend most of her time thinking up lugubrious film titles for RKO, pulls Pherides aside, warning him that the bright and sexy Thea is a *Vorvolaka, a demonic, vampiric spirit capable of assuming pleasing forms. She will bring down the house of Aubrecht with her machinations while retaining her youthful insouciance. Made Kyra is also a fantastic practitioner of wet blanket throwing in the Olympics. In order to compensate for the hole Robbins has left in the festivities, Dr. Drossos (Ernst Deutsch) is summoned, who pronounces the entire island is now quarantined due to the spread of septicemic plague, not that far removed from Covid as a godly retribution against the Vorvolaka, which up to this time people thought was a strong liquor made from potatoes. So ring in the Claustrophobia Bell, kids, because we're in the for the long haul. And just for shiggles, let's allow Mrs. Mary St. Aubyn to crank up the unease with her vocalizing her gripping fear of being buried alive while she succumbs to a cataleptic seizure. So if you're celebrating Thanksgiving this year and need some extra house guests, these would be doozies.

*Isle of the Dead* was inspired by Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, whose work can be see during the credits and in the staging of scenes. (Adolph Hitler was so impressed by the painting that he bought one of the versions of it for himself and later hung it in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin.) The score by Leigh Harline's also draws use of another work inspired by Böecklin's painting, Sergei Rachmaninoff's tone poem, "Isle of the Dead" (1908), making it a double dinger of a film. The picture was shut down after two weeks of filming July 1944 to allow Karloff to undergo and recover from spinal surgery, and in the time between the pause and the reassembly of the cast to finish the production in Devember 1944, Lewton and Karloff made *The Body Snatcher* (1944) which was released before *Isle of the Dead*.

Sporting curly blonde hair as the General, Karloff gives a graded performance suggesting his sternness is the product of his years mourning his wife and making hard decisions as a militarist. But beneath his haunted exterior is what Criterion's Don Callahan calls "a flower in the mud," a smile at the opening which reminds us that in this harsh world Pherides is neither purely bad nor good, but a man caught in the battleground of light and shadow. He has been surrounded by death much of his life, and those years wear themselves on his gaunt face and body like the medals he has accumulated, even though there may lie within him a well of humanity and dignity.

The horror here hangs in the very air of the environment: Visitors to the island are greeted by an immense statue of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades on the River Styx. Treated as a cemetery the isle is a curious location for retirement, though Aubrecht's cozy home for the holidays is weighed down with the black cloaked Madame Kyra and her looming gloom and the fatalistic intonations of Dr. Drossos ("I meet my old familiar enemy, Death. I've fought him before. I've won, often. Now he wins. Let him come for me") and decrying anger of young Thea ("Laws can be wrong, and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel"). The hard sirroco winds which can sweep away the plague are standing their distance from the island, and shadowy figures in the night haunt the open crypts--but they are humans, wracked with fear and perhaps madness.

What struck me most about this compelling, genuinely scary thriller, was how close to the bone it remains today. With our own homes closing in around us and social distancing compelling us to avoid meaningful contact with others, this film shines in fresh relevance. Lewton successfully explores an atavistic compulsion toward fear that continues to prod and push us, even as we consider ourselves to rational human beings. Especially as Covid claims 259,183 confirmed victims today in Michigan, expecting an additional spike in our "dark Winter," uncertainty breaks down the walls of rationality, as we watch strong numbers of people refusing to face reality, believing the plague is just a flu that will run its course without a mask imperative. Rationality is in short supply as people persist in avoiding hard proven reality. But then in Lewton's wheelhouse that was a standard reaction to the uncertain, a belief Karloff shared. Karloff argued for the superiority of stories that used the subtlety of suggestion and explored the “fear of the unknown and the unknowable.”

“Go away with your nonsense, old woman,” Pherides chides. “These are new times for Greece. We do not believe the old foolish tales anymore.” Except for all our "wisdom," we still do believe when it's dark. For all his scientific knowledge and faith in medical science, as the plague rages on, Pherides finds his rational trust being chipped away; imagine someone with less common sense and discerning ability to separate fact from fiction living in the same ecosystem: Instead of blaming a Vorvolaka we can demonize the Chinese, anything to deal with the unknowable. Fear and engulfing paranoia can lead to delusion and ever expanding circles of irrationality. Lewton's employment of the diaphanous, ghostly wraithlike presence of Mary St. Aubyn floating along the landscape and cottage is genuinely frightening, especially when detached from the twaddle of Madame Kyra's ravings. No: She is human and therefore heir to all our frailties.

It's brief, only 71 minutes, and low budget, but if you've been faithful to any of the other Lewton films I've commented on, you'll never guess he was wedged into a shoestring budget. Because you're too busy shivering wide eyed at what he accomplishes by turning his eye inward. I have yet to see a Val Lewton film that did not elevate the B-film and "horror" genre into the level of high cinema. *Isle of The Dead* basically broke even, earning RKO a slim profit of $13,000, and thus may not be prominently listed among Lewton classics like *Cat People* and *I Walked With A Zombie*, even though it's clearly at least in those film's league. And if you're really into a complex melding of sound and picture, this one is hard to beat: Rachmaninov's *Isle of the Dead* has been listed at 18 in the 20 Scariest Pieces of Classical Music by ClassicFM. What more could you want? It's just magnificent.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/14/2020, 5:52 pm

Post #566: What a line up! Humphrey Bogart (in trench coats, no less), Barbara Stanwyck (in flowing diaphanous gowns), Alexis Smith (so cold and calculating) and Nigel Bruce (so ready for a decanter of whiskey--to fight off the cold of Alexis Smith, no doubt). It's gonna be a thriller and chiller when they meet a gorilla in Manila. (Actually, no, they won't; they're in Scotland and England, and no monkeys were harmed in the filming of this production. If there is any hint of a gorilla in the room, it's the overwrought, bloated soundtrack by Franz Waxman, which announces the simplest suspense nod with a bombastic sting chord, a'la "Where's your mother?" "Upstairs." BRAAANNNGGGG!)

It all begins so innocuously on an idyllic fishing trip in the lush landscape of Scotland as Sally Morton (Barbara Stanwyck) gazes moonily at her lover of two weeks, artist Geoffrey Carroll, as he sketches her while she poses. Oh, they're so cute together, obviously entranced by the promise of marriage. . . until (DA DA DUMMMM) Sally finds an unmailed letter in Geoffrey's coal addressed to Mrs. Geoffrey Carroll (OOOOWEEEOOOOO, signals Franz Waxman, complete with an eerie theremin in the background). But she's an invalid, Geoffrey protests to the distraught Sally who was shielded from the news, as if immobility were a rational cause for infidelity. She runs over the Scottish hummocks in betrayed despair (Insert whiny violins here, giving way to a dark DUM DUM DAMMMN as we find Geoffrey returning home to his daughter Beatrice "Bea" (Ann Carter playing the role of a precocious adult-child with perfect diction and British demeanor which is immediately annoying). And oh, yes, the unseen first Mrs. Carroll lies in her bed awaiting her next administration of poisoned milk).

Note to self: Never drink glowing white shimmery glasses of milk before bedtime--it's almost a guarantee I won't wake up in the morning. We should have learned that from Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock's *Suspicion* six years earlier.

Leapfrog ahead as Geoffrey has hung his portrait of his first wife, now dead, in the lovely new digs of his second wife's home. It's a rather haunting picture of his first adorned in black and lovingly titled "The Angel Of Death." Why, golly, what bouncy, buoyant and beautiful new wife wouldn't want such a cheerful piece greeting everyone who visits? But the second Mrs. Carroll, Sally, is exploding with happiness, trusting her husband's odd mood swings and shortness of temper with gay abandon and constant rationalizations that he is merely disappointed in not having sold a painting lately, but God's in His heaven and all's right with the world. She's in love (TWEET DE TWEET DE TWIT sings the merry instrumentation to let us know she's full of whimsy over being married).

Geoffrey, on the other hand, is guided by minor keys and bass notes as he scowls and prowls in between bouts of kissy face with Sally. Of course he has reason to be distracted and woeful--the local chemist, Horace Blagdon (Barry Bernard) has been pressuring him to pay up to keep hidden his recent purchases under an assumed name (DA DAAAMN!), and Sally's former fiance Charles "Penny" Pennington (the foppish Patrick O'Moore) has been hanging around lately, infuriating Geoffrey's jealous streak. (One saving grace is Bogart's line to O'Moore, "I have the feeling that this is the beginning of a beautiful hatred," cribbed from *Casablanca* 1943) Penny has also invited to visit Sally two American friends, the Lathams, a dowager mother (Isobel Elsom) and her ice queen daughter Cecily Latham (Alexis Smith who telegraphs Manipulative Bitch in every minute) who unabashedly flirts with Geoffrey in front of everyone, wishing he'd paint her portrait, even remarking "Do you marry all the women you paint?" (BWAA BWAA, BWAAA BOM BOM BOMMMM BOM BODDA BOMP). Of course, wistfully innocent Sally just laughs.

Before you can say Lactose Intolerant, Sally starts feeling weak after drinking her nightly milk cocktail, and Geoffrey starts taking to being illuminated up from beneath. Then (WEEEEN) Sally holds a nice conversation with Bea, who reveals her mother was never an invalid, as Geoffrey maintained, but was in fact a vibrant woman until she took ill with headaches and fatigue. . . . right after she started drinking milk at bedtime! (RUNN RUNN RUNNN) Sally grows suspicious, considering switching to eggnog or Vernor's. Meanwhile, Geoffrey starts taking more trips, and Cecily starts hanging around a bit longer than normal. . . .

Okay, you get the idea. Bogart was at his prime here, earning $400,000 in 1947, making him one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, and enjoying the bliss of marriage to Lauren Bacall. But, Lord Amighty, his performance here as a mad artist is awful, clutching at his head and generally standing around in morose shadows almost parodying madness. A scene intended to induce a gasp of horror--Geoffrey bursting into Sally's locked room from behind billowing curtains as rain shoots down diagonally and thunder booms--is a prime MST3K moment. We almost expect Bogart to blubber, "Blah blah, I haff come to sock your bloooood." It's a horrific eye roller of a shot, way below both stars' splendid pedigree. I blame director Peter Godfrey (who appears as a horse race tipster), a good friend of Stanwyck who directed her in *Christmas In Connecticut* (1945) in a much better film. He seems as ill at ease as our stars, both of whom were horribly miscast, as he trots out every Gothic trope in the manual--whipping rains, whooping winds, dangerous overblown shadows, clanging church bells which allow Bogart to writhe in pain while holding his temples, and cavernous rooms found only in bad English movies. We even have the brogue-heavy Mr. MacGregor at the opening of the film warning Sally, as she runs through the rain, "You'll catch your death of cold! Do ya hear me?! You'll catch your death!" Wooo, foreshadowing.

Warners filmed this in 1945 but kept it under wraps for two years, fearing comparisons to the contemporaneous release of *Gaslight* (1944) with Ingrid Bergman. Good thinking. It's also hot on the heels of *Conflict* (1945) in which Bogart DOES kill Alexis Smith. So there's a lot to mourn here: In their only teaming, Bogart and Stanwyck develop less than zero chemistry; Ann Carter's Bea is so emotionless and intellectual she is simply not believable, remotely credible, and she is distant to the point of being a Midwich Cuckoo; Sally boils down to bubbleheaded dumbness because she doesn't just pack up and get the hell out of that house even though she finally realizes her husband is a blazing nutball with a Bluebeard complex, and a few seconds after discovering her phone lines have been cut--SHE TRIES THE PHONE AGAIN! which is akin to punching an elevator button repeatedly thinking it will make the car arrive more quickly.

Man, I wanted to like this movie. Bogart is one of my mainstay heroes in 90% of the films he's in, regardless of his dark or balanced character sides. I have become a Barbara Stanwyck maven, loving her since her early Pre-Hollywood days. Even Ann Carter, whom I last saw in *Cat People* (1942), can be explained away as the daughter of a psychotic, so maybe she wouldn't be all that "normal." Maybe I just watched it under the wrong reliance on its strong draws--its stars, its being labeled a thriller, and the chance to see Bogart in a trench coat again and to see Barbara Stanwyck looking gorgeous and never doing a bad job, and a fairly good budget of $1.5 million. So this is great entertainment if you go in with the proper perspective: See as a potential candidate for *Mystery Science Theater 3000* and be prepared to wisecrack your way through it. THAT would be a blast for 99 minutes. But if you're up for an exercise in sinister suspense, you won't find it here, because it doesn't exist. We know too early that Geoffrey is bats**t crazy, putting his art ahead of a woman's dignity, so he's perpetually a snot.

But 92% of Amazon viewers give it four or five stars, so what do I know? Make up your own mind, but if you're a connoisseur of tension expecting a Hitchcockian escapade, be warned. It doesn't have that flair. Boy, I wish it did. (DUM DUM DUMMMMB)
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by ghemrats 11/15/2020, 6:11 pm

Post #567 (Followed at some point in the future by 8910 undoubtedly, but not by me): Boris Karloff can be at his most unnerving best when he aspires to be the perfect gentleman, deferent, calm, and abundantly polite, much like his true self off-screen. He communicates volumes with his eyes and posture, and seldom has he been as notoriously covertly evil as he is in today's feature, *Bedlam* (1946), his third and last collaboration with Val Lewton. *Bedlam* also signals Lewton's last "horror" film, so for those reasons alone it's worth a look. Now, honestly, for much of the picture I can't say I was "entertained" in the traditional sense, but as it ends I couldn't in any way deny it stands as a terrific 79 minute tour of history and hell that I could easily sit through again--this time for study purposes.

We are in 1761 London, constantly reminded of the etching of Hogarth on whose work the screenplay by Lewton and director Mark Robson is based, specifically *A Rake's Progress*. If you're acquainted with Hogarth's work, you know he dealt in grotesqueries overflowing with satiric mirth and realism, often at the expense of his subjects. So intricate and inspirational are his engravings on the work of Lewton, that he is even given writing credit for the film. And we're plunged into that world, moving into St. Mary's of Bethlehem Asylum, a fictionalized version of Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as "Bedlam," as we see a friend of the artistocratic Lord Mortimer (Billy House) falling to his death in an attempted escape from the Asylum (with the help of a guard).

Apothecary general Master George Sims (Boris Karloff) escapes his own disciplinary measure by promising Mortimer and his protégé Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) an evening's pleasure as he presents an original play performed by his "loonies," inmates of the asylum. Aghast at the treatment of the institutionalized Nell pleads with Mortimer to enact prison reform, taking Sims to task with his deplorable treatment of the ill. (She says, "If you ask me, M’Lord, he’s a stench in the nostrils, a sewer of ugliness, and a gutter brimming with slop." Jeez, have an opinion, Nell.) But Mortimer says no soap, driving Nell to enlist the help of Whig politician John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson) whose position might bring about the security of human rights. Unfortunately, Sims is a crafty Machiavellian and goads Mortimer into relieving the mounting tension Nell is imposing by committing her to Bedlam after a top-heavy competency hearing. This is a far cry from the opening scenes when she is the very picture of beauty, actually wearing the same dress Vivian Leigh wore, fashioned from the curtains of Tara, in *Gone With The Wind* (1939).

In the clip accompanying today's commentary, you can see the decrepit conditions of the asylum as Sims proudly leads Nell on a tour early on in their acquaintance. The stoic, perhaps semi-catatonic Dorothea the Dove (Joan Newton) lends an otherworldly aura amidst the groveling, cowering inmates that populate most of the citizenry here, though attorney Sidney Long (the memorable Ian Wolfe) and studious Oliver Todd (Jason Robards Sr.) hold their own reality apart from the masses. When Nell is planted among the mob, being taught a lesson in power by the megalomaniacal Sims, she has but one advocate in Hannay (Richard Fraser), a Quaker who speaks the only reason in this Age of Reason, working on her behalf to free her.

Once against setting a new standard for horror, Lewton and Robson turn their eyes within to probe the depths of human depravity and indifference. In some ways this approach is even more disturbing since it's based in fact--the arrogance of the aristocracy, laughing at the dispossessed, the "Gilded Boy" (Glen Vernon) dying from golden skin poisoning for their amusement, is harrowing and despicable, as is Sims' disdain for his charges. Additionally, some critics have suggested this is a feminist nightmare: What could be more demonstrative than an independent, impassioned woman being set aside and entombed by a misogynistic male-dominated society for the sin of speaking her mind? Anna Lee is a strong advocate for her character, a fire in her eyes even in the face of a disastrous "cure" which will be effected against her mere hours before her scheduled release.

This is a stark psychological examination allowing Karloff to prove once and for all he was a masterful student of human nature driven to "acceptable" lunacy in his quest for influence and control. Sims is a sadistic power monger who can still wield charm and persuasive oratorical slipperiness to cover his base atrocities. But in Karloff's hands he transcends the B-formula that saddled Lewton's budget to produce a lasting insinuation of evil and articulation that is, quite frankly, maddening as he seems incapable of being stopped. His amusement at the dehumanization of the inmates--Dan the Dog, Tom the Tiger, Dorothea The Dove--refuses the acknowledgement that very mortal hearts are still beating beneath their rugged and torn exteriors. And the elevation of their conditions by Nell's attention is heartbreaking in its decency. Sims outlines his philosophy simply: "Ours is a human world, there’s is a bestial world, without reason, without soul. They’re animals. Some are dogs: these I beat. Some are pigs: those I let wallow in their own filth. Some are tigers: these I cage. Some, like this one, are doves."

Actor Ian Champion suggests a scene of resounding interest: "The scene is set for a revolt as the lunatics literally take over the asylum and force Simms to undergo a mock trial, no worse than those which banged up many of them, accompanied by the grisly declaration of Solomon to ‘Split him in two!’ However, director Robson is careful never to reduce the inmates to a crude monsterdom. While the kangaroo court is in session, Bowen’s freed cell-mate takes a moment during their escape to enjoy the innocent wonderment of the night sky’s stars. It’s a poignant reminder of the terrible loss the prisoners have endured in their hell-hole."

*Bedlam* might not be at the top of Lewton's fan list, but it is undeniable in its power. It may not have set well with audiences at the time of release due to its unflinching portrayal of indifference, and the Hays Office was instrumental in softening the overall impact--Nell's role was shifted from being "more" to the corpulent Mortimer than a mere protegee, and the mads' filth was soft-pedaled to reduce revulsion--but it's still top notch. It would be only another four years or so before Lewton succumbed to a heart attack, taking him in 1951.

Now this is not really holiday fare, but it is a good film. Rest assured I'll be commenting on lighter fare as we move into Thanksgiving and Christmas (et al.) time, but until then, stash this one away for a time when you can relish a social commentary or a wish for human integrity. It will not disappoint.
Enjoy.
Jeff

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Post by Space Cadet 11/15/2020, 11:51 pm

Hey Jeff, have Ya ever tried to get your lady love to review any of those Lifetime movies?
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