D. Anthony de La Sewell
Colour
This one is going to be like a dog whistle to bad movie lovers.
Here we have Patsi Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony as a female pop group/super spies saving the world whilst also filming a music video and trying to get to Top of the Pops on time. Yes, I’ll say those names again Patsy Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony, three beautiful but limited actresses who scream the 1980s to Britons of a certain age. As with all deference to George Orwell, this is the most 1984 movie ever made. There’s the cast, the music, the hair, the shoulder pads, the cultural references which were supposed to make it hip and with it, but must have actually made it look aged and past it by January the First, 1985. You see the group here are clearly supposed to be Bananarama. In fact I’d be totally stunned if this wasn’t written with Bananarama in mind. Not only is there the sassy all good trio, adored stars of the British music scene, but the fact that when they perform the singing is actually Bananarama’s – taking on songs from the bottom of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman slush pile (and when you hear them you’ll realise that these songs must have been pressed right to the floorboards they were so far down). Why Bananarama themselves weren’t cast is open to debate. One can only guess that it’s because they weren’t really actors. Although when you see the performances Hurley, Anthony and Kensit give, you’ll realise that can’t possibly be the reason.
The plot starts in Thailand (for the music video shoot) before returning to London (for the Top of the Pops appearance), but in-between the wearing swimsuits and leggings and miming, the girls find that the spy agency they work for has been compromised and a list of agents is now in the wrong hands. It’s up to our mighty trio (the group is actually called ‘Trio’, such is the lack of inspiration) to juggle their priorities and get them back. Gradually the prime suspect emerges as former agent and 1970s pop superstar, Magdalena de Faith – and Trio have to stop her before she carries out the final part of her dastardly plan.
(Interestingly this would all seem to be much the same plot as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, so I guess that is an unofficial remake of this. That’s a film I’ve never managed to watch all the way through, as it’s awful. This is awful too, but in a more fun and haphazard way; Charlie’s Angels is awful in the most corporate, soulless way possible.)
Joanna Lumley plays Magdalena de Faith and is fantastic as the haughty European has-been, and thus totally wasted in this movie. Kensit is bad, Anthony equally so, but both look Rada trained next to Hurley, who can barely walk convincingly, let alone deliver lines. The songs are awful, the plot is obvious (with zero sense of pacing) and even though the crew was clearly flown out to Thailand for exteriors, the interiors couldn’t be any more shot on a cheap sitcom set in Elstree if Mrs Slocambe marched into shot. In short this is a bit of a disaster, but I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Showing posts with label bizarre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bizarre. Show all posts
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Sunday, 7 December 2014
Angels in Los Angeles (1975)
D. Ted Grimley
Colour
The trio of films made in the 1970s where Tom Jones at the height of his pomp played a swinging sex-bomb private detective do have a surreally 1970s gritty aesthetic to them. Okay, no actually hard edged, down and dirty movie ever employs the real, honest to goodness, Elvis Presley as a super villain; but if you squint hard enough you can just imagine – with its washed out palate and naturalistic lighting – that you were really watching one of those proper serious 1970s films that were a wow with the critics and the Top 100 lists. Indeed it wouldn’t be totally out of place for Gene Hackman to appear here as a surveillance man – although any scene between a downbeat Gene Hackman and a naturally exuberant (barely acting) Tom Jones would make the eyes of even the most blasé viewer actually boggle.
But what makes the third film so jarring, is that the makers have married this grittiness to the kind of ludicrous plot that a Roger Moore Bond film of the same vintage would have dismissed as just a bit silly. We’re in Los Angeles, where the murder of a poet hippy on Venice Beach leads Tom towards a man-hating, beautiful Russian spy who is planning to release an air-born bug into downtown LA that will remove the potency of all men and turn them into limp-wristed wimps. It’s up Tom Jones (as Wayne Wales) the most virile man in The City of Angels (and America, and Europe and almost certainly the world) to turn her head and stop her plan.
As the beautiful Russian spy we have Tippi Hedren, finally out of her Hitchcock contract and choosing this rather strange way to celebrate her freedom. Of course the audience already knows that she can do cool and aloof, but there’s no answer as to whether she can actually do anything else. That’s, to say the least, weird. Tom Jones is of course sex on legs, and here is a film where the beautiful Russian spy is supposed to fall in love with him, in lust with him and basically be over-whelmed by passion for her Welsh lover boy. But passion, or even mild interest, are emotions Tippi triumphantly fails to register. At least as Marnie she was supposed to be frigid when confronted by a smouldering Sean Connery, here she’s supposed to be swept of our feet by our Tom – yet it’s like watching a wet blanket take on a flame thrower and being told that the flame thrower won even though the evidence of our own eyes says that the wet blanket barely flickered.
And that – even beyond the fact that it’s a ludicrously 1960s plot (doesn’t Woody Allen in the original ‘Casino Royale’ want to do something similar? And that’s supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?) is the film’s main problem; the fact that we have a movie here that ultimately hinges on these two being in love and never manages to make the audience believe such a thing is even slightly possible or conceivable.
The credits roll with the two of them settling down, Wayne Wales becoming a one woman man (yeah, that will last) and even for as ramshackle and jarring a series of films as this, it feels a bizarrely half-baked ending. And yet ‘bizarre’ and ‘half-baked’ would be good ways to describe the whole series so maybe it fits.
Colour
The trio of films made in the 1970s where Tom Jones at the height of his pomp played a swinging sex-bomb private detective do have a surreally 1970s gritty aesthetic to them. Okay, no actually hard edged, down and dirty movie ever employs the real, honest to goodness, Elvis Presley as a super villain; but if you squint hard enough you can just imagine – with its washed out palate and naturalistic lighting – that you were really watching one of those proper serious 1970s films that were a wow with the critics and the Top 100 lists. Indeed it wouldn’t be totally out of place for Gene Hackman to appear here as a surveillance man – although any scene between a downbeat Gene Hackman and a naturally exuberant (barely acting) Tom Jones would make the eyes of even the most blasé viewer actually boggle.
But what makes the third film so jarring, is that the makers have married this grittiness to the kind of ludicrous plot that a Roger Moore Bond film of the same vintage would have dismissed as just a bit silly. We’re in Los Angeles, where the murder of a poet hippy on Venice Beach leads Tom towards a man-hating, beautiful Russian spy who is planning to release an air-born bug into downtown LA that will remove the potency of all men and turn them into limp-wristed wimps. It’s up Tom Jones (as Wayne Wales) the most virile man in The City of Angels (and America, and Europe and almost certainly the world) to turn her head and stop her plan.
As the beautiful Russian spy we have Tippi Hedren, finally out of her Hitchcock contract and choosing this rather strange way to celebrate her freedom. Of course the audience already knows that she can do cool and aloof, but there’s no answer as to whether she can actually do anything else. That’s, to say the least, weird. Tom Jones is of course sex on legs, and here is a film where the beautiful Russian spy is supposed to fall in love with him, in lust with him and basically be over-whelmed by passion for her Welsh lover boy. But passion, or even mild interest, are emotions Tippi triumphantly fails to register. At least as Marnie she was supposed to be frigid when confronted by a smouldering Sean Connery, here she’s supposed to be swept of our feet by our Tom – yet it’s like watching a wet blanket take on a flame thrower and being told that the flame thrower won even though the evidence of our own eyes says that the wet blanket barely flickered.
And that – even beyond the fact that it’s a ludicrously 1960s plot (doesn’t Woody Allen in the original ‘Casino Royale’ want to do something similar? And that’s supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?) is the film’s main problem; the fact that we have a movie here that ultimately hinges on these two being in love and never manages to make the audience believe such a thing is even slightly possible or conceivable.
The credits roll with the two of them settling down, Wayne Wales becoming a one woman man (yeah, that will last) and even for as ramshackle and jarring a series of films as this, it feels a bizarrely half-baked ending. And yet ‘bizarre’ and ‘half-baked’ would be good ways to describe the whole series so maybe it fits.
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
Mummy in Manhattan (1936)
D. Raoul Walsh
B&W
It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.
Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.
Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!
This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.
When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.
It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?
At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.
B&W
It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.
Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.
Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!
This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.
When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.
It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?
At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.
Sunday, 16 November 2014
Jack Malibu (1988)
D. Corey Dickshield
Colour
Jack the Ripper haunts the public imagination like no other killer. He is all mist, frightened women and a mystery which never ends (DNA discoveries will prove easy to ignore, mark my words). He’s a supernatural figure, one who lives inside the London fog and attacks like a knife wielding ghost. Yeah, his name might turn out to be Aaron Kosminski or he might be the dissolute son of a high-born family – it doesn’t matter. The mystique and odd romance of this (let’s not forget) particularly brutal killer will continue for centuries to come.
That’s how you can take the idea out of London and put it in a whole other geographic locale, as we understand how the Ripper works. Similarly you can set the tale nearly a hundred years after the events, as again we all understand how the Ripper works. You can even throw rock ballads in and make it a musical. Ah no, that might just be pushing things a little too far.
Here’s a genuine oddity. A musical set amongst affluent beach front property on the California coast, starring two Celtic singers, and centred around the return of England’s most famous serial killer.
Yes, this is Jack Malibu.
Bonnie Tyler (for it is she) is a Welsh-American singing star who now lives in a big house on the Coast and is at the height of her career. But she’s also the descendent of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and the ghost of that killer is coming back to wrap up unfinished business. A fog (borrowed from the occasion from John Carpenter) rolls in from the Pacific and suddenly there’s a dead prostitute lying on the patio of Bonnie’s house. Called in to investigate is Scottish-America detective, Sheena Eastern (for it is she), who also has a connection to the original Ripper case. And as the fog rolls in again, the two women try to work out what the hell is going on – all the while singing their lungs out.
The songs are over-blow 80s numbers, full of synths and echoing drums, but bizarrely all have titles stolen from great standards: so that ‘Strangers in the Night’ is nowhere near what you’d imagine it to be; neither is ‘Foggy Day’; nor ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. All have terrible tunes with lyrics seemingly scribbled out by a collective of sub-literate, goth obsessed, teenage boys. ‘Excruciating’ is the best word, and the only soundtrack albums bought were surely used to torture terrorists.
The hair is big, the shoulder pads could balance scaffolding, the acting is ludicrously bad (with the accents making some lines unintelligible even to a fellow Brit – and a fellow Welshie at that), the plot is ridiculous and the ending is just too Scooby Doo for words. It’s worth watching though as a ludicrous camp spectacular and the saving grace that at least they realised that if Jack was going to be scary he couldn’t be made to bloody sing.
Colour
Jack the Ripper haunts the public imagination like no other killer. He is all mist, frightened women and a mystery which never ends (DNA discoveries will prove easy to ignore, mark my words). He’s a supernatural figure, one who lives inside the London fog and attacks like a knife wielding ghost. Yeah, his name might turn out to be Aaron Kosminski or he might be the dissolute son of a high-born family – it doesn’t matter. The mystique and odd romance of this (let’s not forget) particularly brutal killer will continue for centuries to come.
That’s how you can take the idea out of London and put it in a whole other geographic locale, as we understand how the Ripper works. Similarly you can set the tale nearly a hundred years after the events, as again we all understand how the Ripper works. You can even throw rock ballads in and make it a musical. Ah no, that might just be pushing things a little too far.
Here’s a genuine oddity. A musical set amongst affluent beach front property on the California coast, starring two Celtic singers, and centred around the return of England’s most famous serial killer.
Yes, this is Jack Malibu.
Bonnie Tyler (for it is she) is a Welsh-American singing star who now lives in a big house on the Coast and is at the height of her career. But she’s also the descendent of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and the ghost of that killer is coming back to wrap up unfinished business. A fog (borrowed from the occasion from John Carpenter) rolls in from the Pacific and suddenly there’s a dead prostitute lying on the patio of Bonnie’s house. Called in to investigate is Scottish-America detective, Sheena Eastern (for it is she), who also has a connection to the original Ripper case. And as the fog rolls in again, the two women try to work out what the hell is going on – all the while singing their lungs out.
The songs are over-blow 80s numbers, full of synths and echoing drums, but bizarrely all have titles stolen from great standards: so that ‘Strangers in the Night’ is nowhere near what you’d imagine it to be; neither is ‘Foggy Day’; nor ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. All have terrible tunes with lyrics seemingly scribbled out by a collective of sub-literate, goth obsessed, teenage boys. ‘Excruciating’ is the best word, and the only soundtrack albums bought were surely used to torture terrorists.
The hair is big, the shoulder pads could balance scaffolding, the acting is ludicrously bad (with the accents making some lines unintelligible even to a fellow Brit – and a fellow Welshie at that), the plot is ridiculous and the ending is just too Scooby Doo for words. It’s worth watching though as a ludicrous camp spectacular and the saving grace that at least they realised that if Jack was going to be scary he couldn’t be made to bloody sing.
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
The Spaceman of Alcatraz (1968)
D. Franc Violon
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
There Be Monsters!!! (1945)
D. Raoul Walsh
B&W
James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart: two actors so much of their age. Two actors who specialised in ripped from the headlines dramas of the thirties, before the latter became the definitive leading man of the 1940s. If you think of either, it’s likely to be with sharp suits, spats, guns and snarling faces. That’s why ‘The Oklahoma Kid’, where the two play cowboys and try to send the whole thing up, is held as something of a cult classic. An example of how badly wrong casting can go. It’s odd then that their last onscreen appearance together, a film that makes ‘The Oklahoma Kid’ look like it has the gravitas of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in comparison, is so obscure. As ‘There Be Monsters!!!’ isn’t just Cagney and Bogart as cowboys, it’s Cagney and Bogart as a proto Butch and Sundance taking on Nazis and dinosaurs in the Arizona desert.
Our heroes are cowboys at the turn of the Twentieth Century, rogues perhaps, but essentially that heart of gold type outlaw so prominent in the movies but markedly less visible in real life. Framed for a crime they didn’t commit by a ruthless sheriff (Lon Chaney Jr – playing it straight and probably delighted not to be playing the monster role in a film with ‘monster’ in the title), they break out of their latest prison cell, ride into the desert and straight into a mist which takes them to – who the hell knows? The film isn’t clear on that point and it will only hurt your head to think about it. But before long our heroes are battling pterodactyls, tyrannosauruses and an oddly ferocious brontosaurus. What’s more, they find themselves up against Nazis, who are trying to capture the biggest carnivore of all – the mighty Galactisaurous – and have it lead their army to victory.
So we have dinosaurs and Nazis, at which point we rub our aching heads and presume that our heroes have somehow gone simultaneously back and forward in time. What’s really peculiar though is that Cagney and Bogart – despite being turn of the century roughneck men – instantly recognise the Nazis. They know who they are, what they’re up to and set out to stop them with the help and hindrance of the various dinosaurs.
It really is ridiculously potty – but if you just go with it, a ridiculously potty and exciting ride. In the distance Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs are even more impressive than they were in ‘King Kong’. It’s when they’re up close that they cause problems, as it can only raise smiles to watch such tough guy actors (and various blokes faking German accents) pretending to be menaced by pieces of rubber. But they do give it their all even in those scenes. Bogart makes these monsters seem real by sneering them in much the same way he does Peter Lorre; while Cagney acts the hell out of a confrontation with the most ridiculous and rubbery snake seen this side of an Ed Wood movie, as if defying the audience to find anything at all silly in what he’s doing. And that commitment is what makes this film so wonderful; throughout it our two leads really do give their all. Even when they’re winking at the camera and saying: “Hey! We know this is nonsense, but it’s fun!”
Raoul Walsh directs with panache and a ceaseless sense of adventure, and if you remove your brain and your sneer at the start, it’s most entertaining. But clearly we needed special effects to advance and Steven Spielberg to arrive to make this kind of nonsense as beautiful and as gripping as it could be.
B&W
James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart: two actors so much of their age. Two actors who specialised in ripped from the headlines dramas of the thirties, before the latter became the definitive leading man of the 1940s. If you think of either, it’s likely to be with sharp suits, spats, guns and snarling faces. That’s why ‘The Oklahoma Kid’, where the two play cowboys and try to send the whole thing up, is held as something of a cult classic. An example of how badly wrong casting can go. It’s odd then that their last onscreen appearance together, a film that makes ‘The Oklahoma Kid’ look like it has the gravitas of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in comparison, is so obscure. As ‘There Be Monsters!!!’ isn’t just Cagney and Bogart as cowboys, it’s Cagney and Bogart as a proto Butch and Sundance taking on Nazis and dinosaurs in the Arizona desert.
Our heroes are cowboys at the turn of the Twentieth Century, rogues perhaps, but essentially that heart of gold type outlaw so prominent in the movies but markedly less visible in real life. Framed for a crime they didn’t commit by a ruthless sheriff (Lon Chaney Jr – playing it straight and probably delighted not to be playing the monster role in a film with ‘monster’ in the title), they break out of their latest prison cell, ride into the desert and straight into a mist which takes them to – who the hell knows? The film isn’t clear on that point and it will only hurt your head to think about it. But before long our heroes are battling pterodactyls, tyrannosauruses and an oddly ferocious brontosaurus. What’s more, they find themselves up against Nazis, who are trying to capture the biggest carnivore of all – the mighty Galactisaurous – and have it lead their army to victory.
So we have dinosaurs and Nazis, at which point we rub our aching heads and presume that our heroes have somehow gone simultaneously back and forward in time. What’s really peculiar though is that Cagney and Bogart – despite being turn of the century roughneck men – instantly recognise the Nazis. They know who they are, what they’re up to and set out to stop them with the help and hindrance of the various dinosaurs.
It really is ridiculously potty – but if you just go with it, a ridiculously potty and exciting ride. In the distance Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs are even more impressive than they were in ‘King Kong’. It’s when they’re up close that they cause problems, as it can only raise smiles to watch such tough guy actors (and various blokes faking German accents) pretending to be menaced by pieces of rubber. But they do give it their all even in those scenes. Bogart makes these monsters seem real by sneering them in much the same way he does Peter Lorre; while Cagney acts the hell out of a confrontation with the most ridiculous and rubbery snake seen this side of an Ed Wood movie, as if defying the audience to find anything at all silly in what he’s doing. And that commitment is what makes this film so wonderful; throughout it our two leads really do give their all. Even when they’re winking at the camera and saying: “Hey! We know this is nonsense, but it’s fun!”
Raoul Walsh directs with panache and a ceaseless sense of adventure, and if you remove your brain and your sneer at the start, it’s most entertaining. But clearly we needed special effects to advance and Steven Spielberg to arrive to make this kind of nonsense as beautiful and as gripping as it could be.
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon (1972)
D. Horatio Jason
Colour
Having looked at ‘Malcolm on Wheels’ at the start of the week and made the point that British bikers are just far less scary than their American Hells Angel counterparts, I’m now going to make the point again by looking at perhaps THE scariest biker gang ever to grace American cinema. In ‘The Wild One’ Marlon Brando is asked what he’s rebelling against and famously responds with “Whadda you got?”. The Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon would see that as a weak and lily-livered answer. They aren’t just rebelling against what you’ve got, they’re rebelling against what you haven’t even thought of yet, what you haven’t even imagined. As this is not just the scariest biker gang in America (we’re told that more than once; so solid a fact is it within the film that I wonder if there was a little award ceremony where they received a plaque), but they’re actual werewolves.
Yes, werewolves.
Riding motorbikes.
Pretty cool, ay?
Interestingly this doesn’t follow the path of the normal werewolf film. In the normal werewolf film Lon Chaney is bitten and then strives against the rising animal urges within him. He is a human being, a civilised man and he doesn’t want the beast inside to take over. In the normal werewolf film the bite and the consequences thereof are terrible things to be fought against. Not here though, the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon are werewolves and fucking proud!
So we get incredible scenes of them pulling into trailer parts just at dusk, waiting for the sun to go down and then sating their appetites with huge amounts of blood and violence. This is a tremendously gory and gruesome film. It’s also an incredibly sexist film, the women are either chicks who want to be with the gang, or else they’re meat to feed the gang – no other roles but lovers or snacks, both requiring very little clothing. It fits well within the film’s viewpoint though as we see everything through the eyes of the gang; we never see anybody pursuing them, we never see any of their victims until briefly before the attacks. This is all about the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon and nothing but the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon.
What defeats them is their own appetites, their own indulgences. The more they change, the harder it is to turn back and those more advanced in their lycanthropy end up on all fours scampering away into the woods, the part of them that was man totally lost. This does lead to a few scenes in daylight of men in werewolf make-up and leathers riding big motorbikes, and the filmmakers clearly don’t realise how funny a sight that is. But the message is that giving into your wildness means that your wildness subsumes you and you can never go back again. And the fact that they’re defeated by what’s within them, as opposed to some gunfight or narrative voodoo, makes this is a lot more subtle and clever a film than it pretends to be.
Colour
Having looked at ‘Malcolm on Wheels’ at the start of the week and made the point that British bikers are just far less scary than their American Hells Angel counterparts, I’m now going to make the point again by looking at perhaps THE scariest biker gang ever to grace American cinema. In ‘The Wild One’ Marlon Brando is asked what he’s rebelling against and famously responds with “Whadda you got?”. The Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon would see that as a weak and lily-livered answer. They aren’t just rebelling against what you’ve got, they’re rebelling against what you haven’t even thought of yet, what you haven’t even imagined. As this is not just the scariest biker gang in America (we’re told that more than once; so solid a fact is it within the film that I wonder if there was a little award ceremony where they received a plaque), but they’re actual werewolves.
Yes, werewolves.
Riding motorbikes.
Pretty cool, ay?
Interestingly this doesn’t follow the path of the normal werewolf film. In the normal werewolf film Lon Chaney is bitten and then strives against the rising animal urges within him. He is a human being, a civilised man and he doesn’t want the beast inside to take over. In the normal werewolf film the bite and the consequences thereof are terrible things to be fought against. Not here though, the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon are werewolves and fucking proud!
So we get incredible scenes of them pulling into trailer parts just at dusk, waiting for the sun to go down and then sating their appetites with huge amounts of blood and violence. This is a tremendously gory and gruesome film. It’s also an incredibly sexist film, the women are either chicks who want to be with the gang, or else they’re meat to feed the gang – no other roles but lovers or snacks, both requiring very little clothing. It fits well within the film’s viewpoint though as we see everything through the eyes of the gang; we never see anybody pursuing them, we never see any of their victims until briefly before the attacks. This is all about the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon and nothing but the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon.
What defeats them is their own appetites, their own indulgences. The more they change, the harder it is to turn back and those more advanced in their lycanthropy end up on all fours scampering away into the woods, the part of them that was man totally lost. This does lead to a few scenes in daylight of men in werewolf make-up and leathers riding big motorbikes, and the filmmakers clearly don’t realise how funny a sight that is. But the message is that giving into your wildness means that your wildness subsumes you and you can never go back again. And the fact that they’re defeated by what’s within them, as opposed to some gunfight or narrative voodoo, makes this is a lot more subtle and clever a film than it pretends to be.
Sunday, 6 July 2014
The Story of Fire (1937)
D. Wilhelm Dieterle
B&W
In-between playing Louis Pasteur and Emile Zola, Paul Muni had time to appear in another 'historical' movie playing another 'historical' character. The veracity of this particular history is a lot more up in the air though, as here Muni is - for want of a better phrase – ‘that bloke who invented fire’. Yes, the 1930's favourite go-to actor for big and worthy roles, straps on some animal skins and a fake beard and pretends to be the man who first clocked the notion that if you rub two sticks together you might just get results. This is bizarre notion and one that should be a Eureka moment in a comedy sketch, rather than the basis of a whole movie; so to drag the story out the filmmakers make these particular cavemen the most verbose and articulate troglodytes this side of the Parthenon. As rather than grunting around in the dark, these cave dwellers make speeches with the passion and grace of Aristotle as they determine whether they should harness the destructive power of this new-fangled fire stuff.
We are with the Garl tribe (they may be more advanced than you’d expect your standard man, who’s just this moment evolved from chimps, but they still haven’t got around to pretty names) who are having troubles from a rival tribe called the Theraks. One night in a great storm a lightening-strike is witnessed and a tree bursts into flames. The power of this new phenomenon, which they swiftly call ‘fire’ - thus revealing themselves as the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons – is one desired to help them in their battle against the Theraks. But how to capture it? The young warrior leader takes the problem to their wise man (Muni), the one person likely to be able to work out how to create fire, but also the one most likely to see the ethical and moral dilemmas of doing so.
Basically ‘The Story of Fire’ is an unholy mess. Primitive caveman who are as eloquent and verbose as any faeces and Neanderthal-blood smeared Shakespearian king, trying to decide whether it’s right to harness one of the fundamentals of human existence. It plays like a Mel Brooks or Monty Python sketch that has been stretched to an abnormal length and unaccountably had all the jokes removed. (That’s until the final scene, when Muni stares at something round and brings his hand to his chin to ponder. The same man inventing fire and the wheel, truly he was the Edison of his day). The drama is so ridiculous and artificial and the speeches so over the top and pompous that it keeps you watching with a kind of hypnotic fascination as to how bad it can get. Muni and the other actors try their best, but it’s written on their furry faces that they know they’re beating a dead mammoth.
What I like about this film though is that it actually bloody exists. These were the days when biblical movies were still big business at the box office, so it’s truly fantastic to have this film out there, pushing the envelope and showing that even in the 1930s American cinema was thinking of other origin stories for man – even if the story they came up with was utterly preposterous.
B&W
In-between playing Louis Pasteur and Emile Zola, Paul Muni had time to appear in another 'historical' movie playing another 'historical' character. The veracity of this particular history is a lot more up in the air though, as here Muni is - for want of a better phrase – ‘that bloke who invented fire’. Yes, the 1930's favourite go-to actor for big and worthy roles, straps on some animal skins and a fake beard and pretends to be the man who first clocked the notion that if you rub two sticks together you might just get results. This is bizarre notion and one that should be a Eureka moment in a comedy sketch, rather than the basis of a whole movie; so to drag the story out the filmmakers make these particular cavemen the most verbose and articulate troglodytes this side of the Parthenon. As rather than grunting around in the dark, these cave dwellers make speeches with the passion and grace of Aristotle as they determine whether they should harness the destructive power of this new-fangled fire stuff.
We are with the Garl tribe (they may be more advanced than you’d expect your standard man, who’s just this moment evolved from chimps, but they still haven’t got around to pretty names) who are having troubles from a rival tribe called the Theraks. One night in a great storm a lightening-strike is witnessed and a tree bursts into flames. The power of this new phenomenon, which they swiftly call ‘fire’ - thus revealing themselves as the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons – is one desired to help them in their battle against the Theraks. But how to capture it? The young warrior leader takes the problem to their wise man (Muni), the one person likely to be able to work out how to create fire, but also the one most likely to see the ethical and moral dilemmas of doing so.
Basically ‘The Story of Fire’ is an unholy mess. Primitive caveman who are as eloquent and verbose as any faeces and Neanderthal-blood smeared Shakespearian king, trying to decide whether it’s right to harness one of the fundamentals of human existence. It plays like a Mel Brooks or Monty Python sketch that has been stretched to an abnormal length and unaccountably had all the jokes removed. (That’s until the final scene, when Muni stares at something round and brings his hand to his chin to ponder. The same man inventing fire and the wheel, truly he was the Edison of his day). The drama is so ridiculous and artificial and the speeches so over the top and pompous that it keeps you watching with a kind of hypnotic fascination as to how bad it can get. Muni and the other actors try their best, but it’s written on their furry faces that they know they’re beating a dead mammoth.
What I like about this film though is that it actually bloody exists. These were the days when biblical movies were still big business at the box office, so it’s truly fantastic to have this film out there, pushing the envelope and showing that even in the 1930s American cinema was thinking of other origin stories for man – even if the story they came up with was utterly preposterous.
Sunday, 18 May 2014
The Beatles: The Future (1976)
D. Winston O’Boogie/Apollo C. Vermouth
B&W, with flashes of bright and scary psychedelic colour
Here’s an absolutely bizarre and barely seen movie which is exactly the kind of film this blog is duty-bound to bring to wider attention. ‘The Beatles: The Future’ is a surreal faux documentary which looks at what would have happened if The Beatles hadn’t broken up. Constructed using fake talking head clips, fake footage of The Beatles and even really amateurish cartoons, this is a head-spinning montage which revels in love for the 1960s and disappointment in the 1970s. Clearly the filmmakers believed the 1960s was the ushering of a utopia which cruelly never actually happened, and that the 1970s (which when this began filming were only three years old) were struggling to cope with all that failed promise. The Beatles were of course the great symbol of the 1960s and perhaps another group of filmmakers would have used their continuing presence as the salve that the decade needed; another film would have suggested that if The Beatles were still around the 1970s would have been much brighter and better. But that’s not what this movie does. Yes, The Beatles were part of the more hopeful age of the 1960s, but if they’d stayed around for the following decade they’d have been tarnished along with everything else.
The Beatles – none of whom are really played by the same actors from one scene to the next, let alone right away from the movie (so working out who is who is can be a trifle hard) – are instead portrayed as doing all the ridiculous 1970s rock star stuff. This is a movie which comes to slaughter, rather than praise, its idols. The not so fab four preach a Marxian tune of shared belongings, but move to Monaco to stop paying taxes; they talk peace, whilst employing thuggish bodyguards; they festoon themselves in ridiculous kaftans and shawls, demanding attention even as they claim to be “just four ordinary lads from Liverpool” (the accents are atrocious btw); and when they do play a concert, it’s a pompous three hour event in front of the pyramids at sunset which proves disastrous, leading to a stampeded “where eight people and fourteen beautiful camels died tragically”. They also have other more Beatles-centric concerns, with Yoko and Linda very much to the fore so that the band end up releasing albums as ‘The Beatles Collective’; including a four disk number, the side Ringo is in charge of apparently benefiting from actually being some fun.
Actually for a musical film there’s little in the way of music. Obviously they couldn’t afford the rights to actual Beatles songs and your jobbing songsmith can’t just knock out a genuine Lennon/McCartney. So what we have here is ramshackle affair with little music and from scene to scene difficulty in telling which Beatle is which, but if you’re a Beatles fan and want to watch something which is occasionally witty and clever and pointed about the failures of heroes, then this is a bit of a slog but well worth tracking down.
My favourite scene? In 1973 when The Beatles are getting truly bad coverage, a press conference is called. John Lennon tears up poster-size covers of the NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone and others – all of whom have had the temerity to criticise the band – but for each one torn up The Beatles take off an item of clothing. It ends with four chubby and hairy Beatles impersonators in a line, wearing only Y-fronts and socks, doing the kind of stamping dance which one imagines inspired Madness. I don’t know what it all means, but in it’s clearly fucking mad way, it captures the whole shabby vagabond spirit of the film.
B&W, with flashes of bright and scary psychedelic colour
Here’s an absolutely bizarre and barely seen movie which is exactly the kind of film this blog is duty-bound to bring to wider attention. ‘The Beatles: The Future’ is a surreal faux documentary which looks at what would have happened if The Beatles hadn’t broken up. Constructed using fake talking head clips, fake footage of The Beatles and even really amateurish cartoons, this is a head-spinning montage which revels in love for the 1960s and disappointment in the 1970s. Clearly the filmmakers believed the 1960s was the ushering of a utopia which cruelly never actually happened, and that the 1970s (which when this began filming were only three years old) were struggling to cope with all that failed promise. The Beatles were of course the great symbol of the 1960s and perhaps another group of filmmakers would have used their continuing presence as the salve that the decade needed; another film would have suggested that if The Beatles were still around the 1970s would have been much brighter and better. But that’s not what this movie does. Yes, The Beatles were part of the more hopeful age of the 1960s, but if they’d stayed around for the following decade they’d have been tarnished along with everything else.
The Beatles – none of whom are really played by the same actors from one scene to the next, let alone right away from the movie (so working out who is who is can be a trifle hard) – are instead portrayed as doing all the ridiculous 1970s rock star stuff. This is a movie which comes to slaughter, rather than praise, its idols. The not so fab four preach a Marxian tune of shared belongings, but move to Monaco to stop paying taxes; they talk peace, whilst employing thuggish bodyguards; they festoon themselves in ridiculous kaftans and shawls, demanding attention even as they claim to be “just four ordinary lads from Liverpool” (the accents are atrocious btw); and when they do play a concert, it’s a pompous three hour event in front of the pyramids at sunset which proves disastrous, leading to a stampeded “where eight people and fourteen beautiful camels died tragically”. They also have other more Beatles-centric concerns, with Yoko and Linda very much to the fore so that the band end up releasing albums as ‘The Beatles Collective’; including a four disk number, the side Ringo is in charge of apparently benefiting from actually being some fun.
Actually for a musical film there’s little in the way of music. Obviously they couldn’t afford the rights to actual Beatles songs and your jobbing songsmith can’t just knock out a genuine Lennon/McCartney. So what we have here is ramshackle affair with little music and from scene to scene difficulty in telling which Beatle is which, but if you’re a Beatles fan and want to watch something which is occasionally witty and clever and pointed about the failures of heroes, then this is a bit of a slog but well worth tracking down.
My favourite scene? In 1973 when The Beatles are getting truly bad coverage, a press conference is called. John Lennon tears up poster-size covers of the NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone and others – all of whom have had the temerity to criticise the band – but for each one torn up The Beatles take off an item of clothing. It ends with four chubby and hairy Beatles impersonators in a line, wearing only Y-fronts and socks, doing the kind of stamping dance which one imagines inspired Madness. I don’t know what it all means, but in it’s clearly fucking mad way, it captures the whole shabby vagabond spirit of the film.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
The Man from Budapest (1946)
D. Raoul Walsh
B&W
Ah, it must have been great to have an actor like Peter Lorre hanging around the studio. He could make any bog-standard scene 500% better, while if you gave him something really good he’d turn it into black & white gold. I guess Steve Buscemi would be the modern equivalent. Both are weedy tough guys, both are always better than their material and both occasionally had the chance to be a leading man. In Buscemi’s case television has moved on far enough that he can find himself the star of a lavish drama, while Lorre got ‘The Man from Budapest’. This is a remarkable movie: here’s Peter Lorre in the Bogart role: the ethically dubious detective, with love scenes, smacking down the villains, and being brilliant in the most unsettling way.
Lorre is Lazlo Tec, a famous Hungarian detective (this is a world where policeman in Eastern Europe can build up reputations which stretch across continents – just go with it). On a trip to Manhattan, Lazlo literally has murder drop into his lap in the form of the young Angela Lansbury. Even on holiday Lazlo is too much of a professional to let criminals get away, so he helps nice but dim NY police detective, George Reeves, solve the crime. Along the way he spars with bad girl gone good but maybe going bad again, Lana Turner; roughs up gangster Edward G. Robinson (himself born in Romania, but here playing very American) before revealing the killer at a big fireworks event in a truly bizarre scene where all the dialogue is interspersed by pops and bangs and the other characters look to be peering around Lorre to watch the thrills.
But by that point in the film we’ve got used to the bizarre, as all the way through we’ve had Lorre’s truly shifty and untrustworthy performance. The kind of performance no one usually gives as a hero, but which makes this film truly interesting. No doubt this was written for a Robert Montgomery or a Dana Andrews. That would have been a straightforward film, a run of the mill film, a boring film – this one though is fascinating.
There’s something so wrong about having Lorre as a hero. Every line he utters sounds like a lie, every assertion a misdirection, every accusation a fabrication to hide his own sins. There’s that snivelling voice, that weedy demeanour, those big wet eyes not designed for your straightforward detective. When he smiles at a suspect, one imagines he does so because he knows he’ll be murdering the suspect’s parents later. But what makes it truly great is that the script all the way through treats him as if he is of the highest repute, admired and loved by all, even though that doesn’t really work on the screen. Lana Turner’s character – for instance – falls for him hard, but Lana Turner the actress can’t quite pull off the burning desire for Peter Lorre she needs and so the love scenes feel like he’s paying her to be there.
All of this adds up to a really weird film which almost brings a big old unreliable narrator to the cinema. We’re told Lorre is a hero and he seems to behave decently and to solve the crime at the end. But what if he isn’t and he doesn’t? After all, Lansbury drops into his lap just after he’s been away from his seat to find a waiter. What if, rather than finding the waiter he was killing her for some unknown reason? Then when the police arrive he lays out his credentials (and he may be the real Lazlo Tec, or he might not – who would really know?) and leads the dim NY City police detective on a merry dance. He charges over NY blaming others for his crime, committing more in the cover up (or just for the hell of it), before finally landing on some dumb sap to take the heat for it all. Then at the end he heads back to Hungary with his new paid for floozy escort.
Pick your own version of what the hell is going on, but acknowledge that this is wonderfully subversive film which makes you doff your cap once again to the genius of Peter Lorre.
B&W
Ah, it must have been great to have an actor like Peter Lorre hanging around the studio. He could make any bog-standard scene 500% better, while if you gave him something really good he’d turn it into black & white gold. I guess Steve Buscemi would be the modern equivalent. Both are weedy tough guys, both are always better than their material and both occasionally had the chance to be a leading man. In Buscemi’s case television has moved on far enough that he can find himself the star of a lavish drama, while Lorre got ‘The Man from Budapest’. This is a remarkable movie: here’s Peter Lorre in the Bogart role: the ethically dubious detective, with love scenes, smacking down the villains, and being brilliant in the most unsettling way.
Lorre is Lazlo Tec, a famous Hungarian detective (this is a world where policeman in Eastern Europe can build up reputations which stretch across continents – just go with it). On a trip to Manhattan, Lazlo literally has murder drop into his lap in the form of the young Angela Lansbury. Even on holiday Lazlo is too much of a professional to let criminals get away, so he helps nice but dim NY police detective, George Reeves, solve the crime. Along the way he spars with bad girl gone good but maybe going bad again, Lana Turner; roughs up gangster Edward G. Robinson (himself born in Romania, but here playing very American) before revealing the killer at a big fireworks event in a truly bizarre scene where all the dialogue is interspersed by pops and bangs and the other characters look to be peering around Lorre to watch the thrills.
But by that point in the film we’ve got used to the bizarre, as all the way through we’ve had Lorre’s truly shifty and untrustworthy performance. The kind of performance no one usually gives as a hero, but which makes this film truly interesting. No doubt this was written for a Robert Montgomery or a Dana Andrews. That would have been a straightforward film, a run of the mill film, a boring film – this one though is fascinating.
There’s something so wrong about having Lorre as a hero. Every line he utters sounds like a lie, every assertion a misdirection, every accusation a fabrication to hide his own sins. There’s that snivelling voice, that weedy demeanour, those big wet eyes not designed for your straightforward detective. When he smiles at a suspect, one imagines he does so because he knows he’ll be murdering the suspect’s parents later. But what makes it truly great is that the script all the way through treats him as if he is of the highest repute, admired and loved by all, even though that doesn’t really work on the screen. Lana Turner’s character – for instance – falls for him hard, but Lana Turner the actress can’t quite pull off the burning desire for Peter Lorre she needs and so the love scenes feel like he’s paying her to be there.
All of this adds up to a really weird film which almost brings a big old unreliable narrator to the cinema. We’re told Lorre is a hero and he seems to behave decently and to solve the crime at the end. But what if he isn’t and he doesn’t? After all, Lansbury drops into his lap just after he’s been away from his seat to find a waiter. What if, rather than finding the waiter he was killing her for some unknown reason? Then when the police arrive he lays out his credentials (and he may be the real Lazlo Tec, or he might not – who would really know?) and leads the dim NY City police detective on a merry dance. He charges over NY blaming others for his crime, committing more in the cover up (or just for the hell of it), before finally landing on some dumb sap to take the heat for it all. Then at the end he heads back to Hungary with his new paid for floozy escort.
Pick your own version of what the hell is going on, but acknowledge that this is wonderfully subversive film which makes you doff your cap once again to the genius of Peter Lorre.
Sunday, 20 April 2014
The Chocolate Man (1974)
D. Antonio Falucci
Colour
A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.
Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.
Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.
None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.
Colour
A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.
Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.
Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.
None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Hot Cross Bunny (1985)
D. Tim Delingpole
Colour
A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.
Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.
Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.
I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.
Colour
A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.
Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.
Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.
I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.
Sunday, 9 March 2014
A Bucket of Bolognese (1974)
D. Franco di Palma
Colour
We’re through the looking glass here, people. And it’s a looking glass which is cracked and dripping bright red with thick viscous blood, or – actually – is that pasta sauce? As today we’re looking at the bizarrely titled and utterly bizarre ‘A Bucket of Bolognese’, and I’m torn as to whether this is an attempt to make the weirdest Spaghetti Western of all time, or an attempt to spoof the whole genre, or simply a filmmaker taking his dream journal and making a very long and very silly movie from it.
The setting is a lost desert town which wears the name ‘Nowheresville’ on an old battered sign. It’s a small, ramshackle place, the kind you’ve seen in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Unmistakably it’s the type of town where the locals have earned deep lines on their faces, where the wind and wisdom of years has given them an interesting turn of phrase, yet where they speak English in a way which doesn’t quite match the movement of their mouths. Living in Nowhereville is stock character after stock character: there’s a corrupt sheriff; a sage and philosophical saloon owner; an earnest and good hearted whippersnapper; and a particularly lusty and buxom madam. Into town one day rides a stranger – Robert Vaughan, of all people – handsome, debonair and deadly. He clearly has the killer instinct to match his sharp get up. And he’s just in time, as the town is about to be besieged by an insane undertaker who has decided to build up his business by massacring the town folk.
(That last point is particularly interesting. Yes, for an undertaker, massacring a whole town would make him much busier in the short term – but who on Earth is going to pay him? There’s no financial gain in this. And what would the word of mouth about this undertaker be? Yes, it would undoubtedly give you more holes to dig, but this is not a sensible business building scheme.)
I’ve always admired the dream-like quality of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, the way, for example, a whole army can vanish from a destroyed bridge while Eastwood and Wallach sleep. Here that dream quality is turned up to some loud and proud, bright and brash, feverish hallucination. The undertaker is portrayed as a cackling lunatic of the kind The Grimm Brothers would have dismissed as a tad too broad. Around the town he sets up these coffin traps, where out of nowhere a full sized coffin springs up and starts spraying machine-gun fire. In town things are no better, with the lusty madam always in a state of undress and putting herself in the most ridiculous situations. You don’t expect to see a busty, sexy woman in a slip run right across the middle of a gunfight in slow motion for no real reason (well, apart from the obvious ones). Elsewhere the earnest youth is shot, but still acts as a gopher for Vaughan for the unfeasibly long amount of time it takes him to die – a good half of the movie’s length, I reckon. So what we have here is a really weird mixture and that’s before we get to the backroom of the saloon, where an incongruous party of dwarfs does nothing but play poker and eat a giant suckling pig – worrying little about the possible oncoming slaughter.
At the centre of it all, doing amazingly stoic and sterling work as the gunslinger, is Robert Vaughan. I like Robert Vaughan, I like how he uses his traditional Hollywood looks and charisma and gives them a sinister edge. It works amazingly well here, in a film where no one is sure what the gunfighter’s next move will be, that dubious morality is beautifully judged. But even more than that, by keeping a straight face and remaining calm no matter what piece of madness unfurls in front of him, he provides a centre which makes whatever the hell is happening in this movie appear almost normal.
How funny this is, I couldn’t tell you, nor whether it’s supposed to be funny. I can’t even tell you how good it is, but I know that once seen, it’s not forgotten.
Colour
We’re through the looking glass here, people. And it’s a looking glass which is cracked and dripping bright red with thick viscous blood, or – actually – is that pasta sauce? As today we’re looking at the bizarrely titled and utterly bizarre ‘A Bucket of Bolognese’, and I’m torn as to whether this is an attempt to make the weirdest Spaghetti Western of all time, or an attempt to spoof the whole genre, or simply a filmmaker taking his dream journal and making a very long and very silly movie from it.
The setting is a lost desert town which wears the name ‘Nowheresville’ on an old battered sign. It’s a small, ramshackle place, the kind you’ve seen in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Unmistakably it’s the type of town where the locals have earned deep lines on their faces, where the wind and wisdom of years has given them an interesting turn of phrase, yet where they speak English in a way which doesn’t quite match the movement of their mouths. Living in Nowhereville is stock character after stock character: there’s a corrupt sheriff; a sage and philosophical saloon owner; an earnest and good hearted whippersnapper; and a particularly lusty and buxom madam. Into town one day rides a stranger – Robert Vaughan, of all people – handsome, debonair and deadly. He clearly has the killer instinct to match his sharp get up. And he’s just in time, as the town is about to be besieged by an insane undertaker who has decided to build up his business by massacring the town folk.
(That last point is particularly interesting. Yes, for an undertaker, massacring a whole town would make him much busier in the short term – but who on Earth is going to pay him? There’s no financial gain in this. And what would the word of mouth about this undertaker be? Yes, it would undoubtedly give you more holes to dig, but this is not a sensible business building scheme.)
I’ve always admired the dream-like quality of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, the way, for example, a whole army can vanish from a destroyed bridge while Eastwood and Wallach sleep. Here that dream quality is turned up to some loud and proud, bright and brash, feverish hallucination. The undertaker is portrayed as a cackling lunatic of the kind The Grimm Brothers would have dismissed as a tad too broad. Around the town he sets up these coffin traps, where out of nowhere a full sized coffin springs up and starts spraying machine-gun fire. In town things are no better, with the lusty madam always in a state of undress and putting herself in the most ridiculous situations. You don’t expect to see a busty, sexy woman in a slip run right across the middle of a gunfight in slow motion for no real reason (well, apart from the obvious ones). Elsewhere the earnest youth is shot, but still acts as a gopher for Vaughan for the unfeasibly long amount of time it takes him to die – a good half of the movie’s length, I reckon. So what we have here is a really weird mixture and that’s before we get to the backroom of the saloon, where an incongruous party of dwarfs does nothing but play poker and eat a giant suckling pig – worrying little about the possible oncoming slaughter.
At the centre of it all, doing amazingly stoic and sterling work as the gunslinger, is Robert Vaughan. I like Robert Vaughan, I like how he uses his traditional Hollywood looks and charisma and gives them a sinister edge. It works amazingly well here, in a film where no one is sure what the gunfighter’s next move will be, that dubious morality is beautifully judged. But even more than that, by keeping a straight face and remaining calm no matter what piece of madness unfurls in front of him, he provides a centre which makes whatever the hell is happening in this movie appear almost normal.
How funny this is, I couldn’t tell you, nor whether it’s supposed to be funny. I can’t even tell you how good it is, but I know that once seen, it’s not forgotten.
Sunday, 2 March 2014
The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities (1994)
D. Marco Webber
Colour
Colour
So it’s five minutes past St David’s Day and so we really should
take the opportunity to peek at a couple of Welsh movies, visit the land of my
birth, the land of my fathers. It’s time to pin on a daffodil and type
furiously whilst singing ‘Sospan Fach’ at an irritatingly high volume. Actually
compared to the other corners of the British Isles, Welsh cinema exists in the
kind of shallow pool that your average algae would move out of seeking somewhere
more spacious. Whereas Scotland has some undoubted classics (‘Local Hero’,
‘Trainspotting’), Northern Ireland a whole series of films inspired by the troubles
(most recently the hugely impressive ‘Good Vibrations’) and Ireland was given a
grand cinema tradition by John Ford which it either embraces or pushes
violently against – the Welsh shuffle nervously at the edges, occasionally
lobbing something forward before scuttling back to hide behind the settee
again.
Which makes the ambition of ‘The Carmarthen Circus of
Curiosities’ all the more impressive. If you can imagine a magic-realist Mike
Leigh movie, with a fantastically bright palate, dream sequences full of
brilliantly crummy special effects, the occasional Welsh folk song, Catherine
Zeta-Jones pouting in a tiny outfit, while Ruth Madoc sports a beard – then you
have something approximating ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’. This is a
magical and ambitious movie, but also a provincially small Welsh film that
thinks nothing of having whole scenes where characters just pass the time of
day in almost incomprehensible Wenglish. It’s a day in a life of this extra special
circus, which never travels anywhere, but has the world come to it. It’s the
trials and tribulations of its performers, where nothing really happens beyond
everyday moments of drama. It’s an odd film, which like laverbread is far from
everybody’s tastes, but some people genuinely love.
We have Jonathan Pryce as the ringmaster, pattering away in
a gorgeous singsong accent, and using force of personality to dominate the ring
and the world around it. If you ever needed someone to lead a group of
stilt-walkers into war, Pryce would be your man. There’s Owen Teale as the
circus strongman who can lift any weight placed in front of him (including, as
we see in montage, a double decker bus, a rather startled looking rhinoceros
and a picnic table full of pensioners who don’t let such an occurrence
interrupt their tea). The object of both their desires is Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Words are not adequate to describe how ravishing la Zeta-Jones looks in this
movie, dressed as she is mostly in a tiny black bikini, underneath a glittering
almost sheer wisp of material – both of which seem to fluctuate in size and
shape from scene to scene. To be honest it’s a ridiculously poorly written role
which doesn’t require much more than pouting and smiling, and could no doubt
have been played by a slightly more expressive than normal shop mannequin. It’s
an odd use then for this future Oscar winner’s talents, although in the post
‘Darling Buds of May’ lull she was probably just happy to get the work.
(Allegedly though, this is the first film in which Michael Douglas ever
glimpsed her). Elsewhere we have Michael Sheen as the skinny stable boy, a very
young Ruth Jones as his comically curvy squeeze and Antony Hopkins deigning to cameo
for about for about twenty seven seconds as local gentry who is entranced by it
all. While narrating the whole thing we have Ruth Madoc, in the only role I’ve
ever seen her in outside of ‘Hi-De-Hi’, wearing the kind of luxurious and
voluminous beard you could easily hide geese in.
If anything represented The Tafia in action, it’s this film. I
think it’s marvellous, a real psychedelic treat. This is a motion picture I
love dearly, but undeniably it’s an example of the Welsh film industry taking
careful aim and shooting itself in the foot. As let’s be fair, it’s difficult
to see where a large audience for such a film would come from. Yes it looks
great, yes it is in parts brilliant – but soap opera mixed with Angela Carter,
performed by a cast determined to exaggerate their Welsh accents to ludicrous
effect, is not the kind of movie that will get them queuing around the block at
the multiplex. I’m sure even at Cineworlds in Rhyl, Aberystwyth and – yes –
Carmarthen, seats would have been very easy to come by.
Sunday, 15 December 2013
The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois (1968)
D.
Victor Hill
Colour
There was always something so worthy about The Children’s Film Foundation. For the uninitiated (who never saw their body of work repeated ad nauseam on kid’s TV through the early 1980s) it was a body set up by the British government to make films for children. However with government money and civil service oversight, it was a body that never ever felt the need to take risks. Its product was as safe as it was twee as it was bland. In a way it was what the BBC would have become if it hadn’t been hijacked by enterprising talents who wanted to do something unique with television. In the Children’s Film Foundation there was very little striving for originality (unless you count casting Keith Chegwin as a teen Robin Hood, which is pretty original), there was just safe play by the numbers and tick all the right boxes.
That’s not to say their work is completely lacking the odd curiosity though.
What, for example, are we to make of ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petit Pois’? One of the few animations the foundation ever produced. On first blush you’d think that any animated film made in 1968 that concerned two big, round, green peas wandering through a wild jungle would be a LSD, surrealist treat. You’d think it was the kind of film made for stoners to stare at and find newer and stranger meanings each and every time. And yet with the best will in the world, making films for the counter-culture wasn’t really in the Children’s Film Foundation’s remit. And besides, for all the madness of its set-up, the film is just so bloody tame. All the characters speak in very pucker, received pronunciation – with the exception, of course, of Petit Pois who talks in comedy French. And when I say it’s a wild jungle, it’s the most harmless and child appropriate wild jungle ever committed to celluloid. The kind of wild jungle specifically created not to scare the three year olds. On their travels, Little Pea and Petits Pois meet El Rico, a grain of rice who speaks and sings in a Spanish accent and is desperate for Petits Pois and Little Pea to join his gang (some peas coming together with a Spanish grain of rice, it does feel like a subliminal paella recipe). They meet a lettuce called Hans who travels with them while talking and singing of his childhood in Dusseldorf; then they hang out with a bouncing orange bean named Victor who duets long and loud with them in the most over the top Dutch accent seen on screen until ‘Goldmember’; before they picnic with some brussel sprouts from – well – Brussels. It’s all so utterly bizarre, all so unspeakably surreal – and yet still so totally bland. And that’s the really incredible thing about this film: it takes all these amazing concepts and makes them so utterly safe and anodyne. It’s 1960s counter culture reimagined as an advert for your greens. It’s the avant grade as seen through the eyes of a civil servant.
So, what the hell is all this about?
Maybe its meaning is something to do with better cooperation with our European cousins. Here we have a British pea and a French pea who walk hand in hand and get along oh so well. Along the way they meet Spanish, German, Dutch and Belgium vegetables and have fun with them (there is no conflict in this movie, no antagonist. It is 72 minutes of getting along, which may partly explain why it’s so strange and stultifying). It’s brotherly love in produce form. But even more than that, with the exception of Spain, these food substances are all members of the new EEC. Is this then a plea that Britain should join up with the Commonmarket? Obviously Spain wasn’t yet a member, but then the Spanish accent on display is quite funny (and camp, unbelievably camp – the campest Spanish grain of rice I have ever witnessed) and maybe that’s why he’s included.
But then did The Children’s Film Foundation ever do politics, even in the form of cartoons? I think possibly not. So that brings us back to what the bloody hell is this film for? A surreal food substance romp which manages to null most of its surrealness and is just too sedate to be all that rompy; a wild and psychedelic ride which manages to be neither that wild or that psychedelic (and making a film about anthropomorphic vegetables in a wood and not making it psychedelic is quite a feat); a truly bizarre and weird film which is made even more bizarre and weird by the fact that clearly there were civil servants in the background doing their utmost best not to make it look bizarre and weird.
Ladies and Gentleman, I give you ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois’ – one of the strangest, most middle of the road, head-spinningly, safe pieces entertainment you will ever see.
Colour
There was always something so worthy about The Children’s Film Foundation. For the uninitiated (who never saw their body of work repeated ad nauseam on kid’s TV through the early 1980s) it was a body set up by the British government to make films for children. However with government money and civil service oversight, it was a body that never ever felt the need to take risks. Its product was as safe as it was twee as it was bland. In a way it was what the BBC would have become if it hadn’t been hijacked by enterprising talents who wanted to do something unique with television. In the Children’s Film Foundation there was very little striving for originality (unless you count casting Keith Chegwin as a teen Robin Hood, which is pretty original), there was just safe play by the numbers and tick all the right boxes.
That’s not to say their work is completely lacking the odd curiosity though.
What, for example, are we to make of ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petit Pois’? One of the few animations the foundation ever produced. On first blush you’d think that any animated film made in 1968 that concerned two big, round, green peas wandering through a wild jungle would be a LSD, surrealist treat. You’d think it was the kind of film made for stoners to stare at and find newer and stranger meanings each and every time. And yet with the best will in the world, making films for the counter-culture wasn’t really in the Children’s Film Foundation’s remit. And besides, for all the madness of its set-up, the film is just so bloody tame. All the characters speak in very pucker, received pronunciation – with the exception, of course, of Petit Pois who talks in comedy French. And when I say it’s a wild jungle, it’s the most harmless and child appropriate wild jungle ever committed to celluloid. The kind of wild jungle specifically created not to scare the three year olds. On their travels, Little Pea and Petits Pois meet El Rico, a grain of rice who speaks and sings in a Spanish accent and is desperate for Petits Pois and Little Pea to join his gang (some peas coming together with a Spanish grain of rice, it does feel like a subliminal paella recipe). They meet a lettuce called Hans who travels with them while talking and singing of his childhood in Dusseldorf; then they hang out with a bouncing orange bean named Victor who duets long and loud with them in the most over the top Dutch accent seen on screen until ‘Goldmember’; before they picnic with some brussel sprouts from – well – Brussels. It’s all so utterly bizarre, all so unspeakably surreal – and yet still so totally bland. And that’s the really incredible thing about this film: it takes all these amazing concepts and makes them so utterly safe and anodyne. It’s 1960s counter culture reimagined as an advert for your greens. It’s the avant grade as seen through the eyes of a civil servant.
So, what the hell is all this about?
Maybe its meaning is something to do with better cooperation with our European cousins. Here we have a British pea and a French pea who walk hand in hand and get along oh so well. Along the way they meet Spanish, German, Dutch and Belgium vegetables and have fun with them (there is no conflict in this movie, no antagonist. It is 72 minutes of getting along, which may partly explain why it’s so strange and stultifying). It’s brotherly love in produce form. But even more than that, with the exception of Spain, these food substances are all members of the new EEC. Is this then a plea that Britain should join up with the Commonmarket? Obviously Spain wasn’t yet a member, but then the Spanish accent on display is quite funny (and camp, unbelievably camp – the campest Spanish grain of rice I have ever witnessed) and maybe that’s why he’s included.
But then did The Children’s Film Foundation ever do politics, even in the form of cartoons? I think possibly not. So that brings us back to what the bloody hell is this film for? A surreal food substance romp which manages to null most of its surrealness and is just too sedate to be all that rompy; a wild and psychedelic ride which manages to be neither that wild or that psychedelic (and making a film about anthropomorphic vegetables in a wood and not making it psychedelic is quite a feat); a truly bizarre and weird film which is made even more bizarre and weird by the fact that clearly there were civil servants in the background doing their utmost best not to make it look bizarre and weird.
Ladies and Gentleman, I give you ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois’ – one of the strangest, most middle of the road, head-spinningly, safe pieces entertainment you will ever see.
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
The Voodoo Lady of Texas (1945)
D. Otto Preminger
B&W
The moon is high and yet it’s still an eerily dark night. The prairie plain seems desolate, what we would now liken to a moonscape. Only the odd cactus leads you to acknowledge there is any life whatsoever, and even then it doesn’t look comforting. There’s no sound (apart from the distant whirr of the projector) and that’s incredibly spooky as well; so much so that you’d welcome even the howl of a distant jackal, but none comes. Even though it’s just an image projected on a screen you can see that it’s a cold place, so freezing and airless in the darkness that even your bones start to shiver. This is a place of death, a vision of what hell must look like, and you are all alone within it – no comfort in sight. But wait, there’s movement. From somewhere deep in the prairie plain a figure is appearing, shambling and stumbling forward as if not fully in control of its limbs. You look closer and see that it’s a man, a cowboy dressed in full garb, but looking so bruised and beaten. He almost seems like a dead cowboy. He stumbles towards the camera, his head down, as if weeping or needing every ounce of strength to make one foot move in front of the other. His arm is wounded and there is blood on his shirt, but still he keeps coming – staggering his way towards you. And then as he is almost upon the camera he finally raises his head to let you see his dazed eyes, and – oh my god! – is that John Wayne?
And so begins one of the strangest movies The Duke ever participated in. His only horror and one of the few horror westerns I’ve found. Clearly influenced by the likes of Jacques Tournier’s ‘The Cat People’, this is a master class of dark shadows, suspense and things not being quite what they should be. Wayne plays Ellis Bob, a widower with a sick child. We join him out in the desert, mid-way through his quest to find the strange voodoo princess who lives just beyond the mountains. This voodoo lady, when he finds her, sets him several quests. She is arch, she seems foreign; she is the unmistakably exotic and dazzling form of Marlene Dietrich.
A virtual two hander, Dietrich purrs her lines and sets Wayne his challenge of fire, ice, air and earth and when he succeeds in each task gives him a bit more of the information he’ll need to save his son’s life. It is spooky, it is atmospheric. It’s dark and claustrophobic and also terrifying. Okay, with her accent it’s difficult to really believe that Dietrich grew up from a small child practicing New Orleans voodoo (although to be fair, she doesn’t even try to make a haphazard stab at the Louisiana accent), but her presence is so alien and exotic that you end up believing virtually everything of her. While Wayne is great at playing not too intelligent, superb as a slow and dutiful father who can only believe the evidence of his own eyes. It’s a great pairing, and the scenes between them are a hungry and smiling cat playing with a dim-witted toy mouse. This is a taut and claustrophobic western horror, which is definitely worth traipsing across a bleak landscape for.
B&W
The moon is high and yet it’s still an eerily dark night. The prairie plain seems desolate, what we would now liken to a moonscape. Only the odd cactus leads you to acknowledge there is any life whatsoever, and even then it doesn’t look comforting. There’s no sound (apart from the distant whirr of the projector) and that’s incredibly spooky as well; so much so that you’d welcome even the howl of a distant jackal, but none comes. Even though it’s just an image projected on a screen you can see that it’s a cold place, so freezing and airless in the darkness that even your bones start to shiver. This is a place of death, a vision of what hell must look like, and you are all alone within it – no comfort in sight. But wait, there’s movement. From somewhere deep in the prairie plain a figure is appearing, shambling and stumbling forward as if not fully in control of its limbs. You look closer and see that it’s a man, a cowboy dressed in full garb, but looking so bruised and beaten. He almost seems like a dead cowboy. He stumbles towards the camera, his head down, as if weeping or needing every ounce of strength to make one foot move in front of the other. His arm is wounded and there is blood on his shirt, but still he keeps coming – staggering his way towards you. And then as he is almost upon the camera he finally raises his head to let you see his dazed eyes, and – oh my god! – is that John Wayne?
And so begins one of the strangest movies The Duke ever participated in. His only horror and one of the few horror westerns I’ve found. Clearly influenced by the likes of Jacques Tournier’s ‘The Cat People’, this is a master class of dark shadows, suspense and things not being quite what they should be. Wayne plays Ellis Bob, a widower with a sick child. We join him out in the desert, mid-way through his quest to find the strange voodoo princess who lives just beyond the mountains. This voodoo lady, when he finds her, sets him several quests. She is arch, she seems foreign; she is the unmistakably exotic and dazzling form of Marlene Dietrich.
A virtual two hander, Dietrich purrs her lines and sets Wayne his challenge of fire, ice, air and earth and when he succeeds in each task gives him a bit more of the information he’ll need to save his son’s life. It is spooky, it is atmospheric. It’s dark and claustrophobic and also terrifying. Okay, with her accent it’s difficult to really believe that Dietrich grew up from a small child practicing New Orleans voodoo (although to be fair, she doesn’t even try to make a haphazard stab at the Louisiana accent), but her presence is so alien and exotic that you end up believing virtually everything of her. While Wayne is great at playing not too intelligent, superb as a slow and dutiful father who can only believe the evidence of his own eyes. It’s a great pairing, and the scenes between them are a hungry and smiling cat playing with a dim-witted toy mouse. This is a taut and claustrophobic western horror, which is definitely worth traipsing across a bleak landscape for.
Sunday, 24 November 2013
Jarndyce vs Jarndyce (2002)
D.
Emil Bron
Colour/B&W
Sheets of white paper with indistinguishable, but official looking, writing tumble out of a large industrial printer. Swiftly ink-stained hands move in to attach stickers to them, some have red stickers, some have blue, some have yellow. Some of these papers are left unadorned and there’s a sense that these are the most important documents. They are the ones we follow anyway. They’re placed on a rackety old conveyer belt and make their way through a warren of dingy, poky offices. These documents do not remain unadorned for long, they are stamped and counter stamped. Some of them clearly have problems (although since what’s on them remains a total mystery, so do their problems) and stern, hard faced men send them back with an expression that doesn’t offer even a glimmer of hope that the problem will be fixed. The unmistakable deadness in these men’s eyes says that they know the document will come back exactly the same way again and again for the rest of their lives. Still these documents wind on and on, making their way through the system, presumably to some end point but the longer the film continues, the less sure the viewer is that this is some kind of circle. Perhaps this process doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, an end; maybe it’s just one endless odyssey and these papers will always stay in the system and their import will never be known or recognised.
It seems appropriate that it’s the country of Kafka which produced this love letter to administration, this ode to bureaucracy. As the papers move through the system, followed by the film beyond the point where surely sanity ends, then this stops being a mindless (government?) machine and becomes something oddly alive and wonderful. Watching papers flutter by, watching these sheets be sent back and forth, becoming more crumpled and stained by their passage through the system, becomes an almost compulsive sight. I mean that, this is a film about paperwork which is not infuriatingly tedious but is in fact pretty engrossing. And that’s an incredible feat, particularly as the human characters we meet are fleeting and only important in as far as they are dealing with the papers.
How is that done? How with no Joseph K figure, how with no heirs of Jarndyce, is it possible to create a functional and interesting film just out of paperwork alone? The answer is to throw the kitchen sink, the taps and all the fittings at it. This is a film with segments in colour and black and white; there are scenes which are animated – not only in a harsh Eastern European all angles and black lines way, but also in a cutesy Disney style and one segment in Manga. There is even more than one puppet sequence, with the film suggesting that at least one room in every large bureaucracy is staffed entirely by excited socks with swivel eyes. It takes a dull subject matter, purposefully makes it harder for itself by banning any real human characters, and then attacks it with huge amounts of vim and brio. It’s an extraordinary film and well worth seeking out. Although I can’t guarantee it will make you any less angry the next time your borough loses your council tax form.
Colour/B&W
Sheets of white paper with indistinguishable, but official looking, writing tumble out of a large industrial printer. Swiftly ink-stained hands move in to attach stickers to them, some have red stickers, some have blue, some have yellow. Some of these papers are left unadorned and there’s a sense that these are the most important documents. They are the ones we follow anyway. They’re placed on a rackety old conveyer belt and make their way through a warren of dingy, poky offices. These documents do not remain unadorned for long, they are stamped and counter stamped. Some of them clearly have problems (although since what’s on them remains a total mystery, so do their problems) and stern, hard faced men send them back with an expression that doesn’t offer even a glimmer of hope that the problem will be fixed. The unmistakable deadness in these men’s eyes says that they know the document will come back exactly the same way again and again for the rest of their lives. Still these documents wind on and on, making their way through the system, presumably to some end point but the longer the film continues, the less sure the viewer is that this is some kind of circle. Perhaps this process doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, an end; maybe it’s just one endless odyssey and these papers will always stay in the system and their import will never be known or recognised.
It seems appropriate that it’s the country of Kafka which produced this love letter to administration, this ode to bureaucracy. As the papers move through the system, followed by the film beyond the point where surely sanity ends, then this stops being a mindless (government?) machine and becomes something oddly alive and wonderful. Watching papers flutter by, watching these sheets be sent back and forth, becoming more crumpled and stained by their passage through the system, becomes an almost compulsive sight. I mean that, this is a film about paperwork which is not infuriatingly tedious but is in fact pretty engrossing. And that’s an incredible feat, particularly as the human characters we meet are fleeting and only important in as far as they are dealing with the papers.
How is that done? How with no Joseph K figure, how with no heirs of Jarndyce, is it possible to create a functional and interesting film just out of paperwork alone? The answer is to throw the kitchen sink, the taps and all the fittings at it. This is a film with segments in colour and black and white; there are scenes which are animated – not only in a harsh Eastern European all angles and black lines way, but also in a cutesy Disney style and one segment in Manga. There is even more than one puppet sequence, with the film suggesting that at least one room in every large bureaucracy is staffed entirely by excited socks with swivel eyes. It takes a dull subject matter, purposefully makes it harder for itself by banning any real human characters, and then attacks it with huge amounts of vim and brio. It’s an extraordinary film and well worth seeking out. Although I can’t guarantee it will make you any less angry the next time your borough loses your council tax form.
Sunday, 17 November 2013
Advertisement (1981)
D.
Malcolm McClaren
Colour and B&W
I suppose it’s easy to see the attraction Orson Welles and Malcolm McClaren must have felt for each other. Have there ever been two more arch pranksters? Have two men ever greeted failure with a more knowing smile and a glint in the eye which suggested it was all actually planned? A collaboration, when you stop to think about it, seems obvious. But if they were to make a film together, who’d have put money on Malcolm McClaren handling the directing?
This is a genuine curio, an oddity even stranger than Welles’ own ‘F for Fake’. Clearly inspired by Welles’ tribulations when hawking frozen peas a few years prior, ‘Advertisement’ finds him pushing a vast array of different products. Here he is stood in a bowling alley, marching up from the pins and extolling Pepsi Cola in that honeyed voice of his; while there he is explaining his lovely waistline with reference to Big Macs, while a mime artist dressed as Ronald McDonald is beaten up behind him.
Yes, these are real products and the idea seems to have been that the film would be part funded by having the companies themselves take their little segments and screen them as part of an advertising campaign.
That, of course, never happened – hence why this film remains so lost and neglected (but this blog exists for neglected films). Surely the two of them could have guessed that a portly washed up Hollywood trouble maker, no matter how fascinating and charismatic he remained, was not the best pitch person for a bunch of random products. Particularly as a great many of these items are provincially British based, thus limiting the market of potential buyers even further. While McClaren’s offbeat visual style, and the need both of them seem to have to subvert these products even whilst selling them, means that it’s unlikely that any gaudy braces sporting Don Draper would have snapped these promos up.
Oddest moment? I think that’s a choice between Welles posing in a giant nappy and waving a rattle, telling us how much he adores Farley’s Rusks; or Welles standing side by side with Sid Vicious – in a segment filmed in 1978 – waxing lyrically about the virtues of Mars bars while young Sid stuffs his sneering face full.
It’s a small monument to how much Welles adored Europe and how that adoration led him down lots of odd little (sometimes completely blind) alleyways. He’s never a boring watch and it’s another example of how his talents are never truly wasted, even when the film around him is clearly and utterly not worthy of him. And it’s once again Orson Welles (and Malcolm McClaren too) going off on a mad adventure of his own and not caring about the consequences.
‘Advertisement’ is definitely not without interest, but a 78 minute string of commercials is tough to watch in one go, no matter who the pitchman is.
Colour and B&W
I suppose it’s easy to see the attraction Orson Welles and Malcolm McClaren must have felt for each other. Have there ever been two more arch pranksters? Have two men ever greeted failure with a more knowing smile and a glint in the eye which suggested it was all actually planned? A collaboration, when you stop to think about it, seems obvious. But if they were to make a film together, who’d have put money on Malcolm McClaren handling the directing?
This is a genuine curio, an oddity even stranger than Welles’ own ‘F for Fake’. Clearly inspired by Welles’ tribulations when hawking frozen peas a few years prior, ‘Advertisement’ finds him pushing a vast array of different products. Here he is stood in a bowling alley, marching up from the pins and extolling Pepsi Cola in that honeyed voice of his; while there he is explaining his lovely waistline with reference to Big Macs, while a mime artist dressed as Ronald McDonald is beaten up behind him.
Yes, these are real products and the idea seems to have been that the film would be part funded by having the companies themselves take their little segments and screen them as part of an advertising campaign.
That, of course, never happened – hence why this film remains so lost and neglected (but this blog exists for neglected films). Surely the two of them could have guessed that a portly washed up Hollywood trouble maker, no matter how fascinating and charismatic he remained, was not the best pitch person for a bunch of random products. Particularly as a great many of these items are provincially British based, thus limiting the market of potential buyers even further. While McClaren’s offbeat visual style, and the need both of them seem to have to subvert these products even whilst selling them, means that it’s unlikely that any gaudy braces sporting Don Draper would have snapped these promos up.
Oddest moment? I think that’s a choice between Welles posing in a giant nappy and waving a rattle, telling us how much he adores Farley’s Rusks; or Welles standing side by side with Sid Vicious – in a segment filmed in 1978 – waxing lyrically about the virtues of Mars bars while young Sid stuffs his sneering face full.
It’s a small monument to how much Welles adored Europe and how that adoration led him down lots of odd little (sometimes completely blind) alleyways. He’s never a boring watch and it’s another example of how his talents are never truly wasted, even when the film around him is clearly and utterly not worthy of him. And it’s once again Orson Welles (and Malcolm McClaren too) going off on a mad adventure of his own and not caring about the consequences.
‘Advertisement’ is definitely not without interest, but a 78 minute string of commercials is tough to watch in one go, no matter who the pitchman is.
Sunday, 15 September 2013
Poison Penmanship (1972)
D. Jack Gold
Colour
Five minutes before he was James Bond, Roger Moore starred in this odd, bizarre, decidedly peculiar, yet without a doubt entertaining thriller. The set-up is thus: a man with terrible hand writing can't decipher the mysterious notes he leaves for himself in his sleep. Clearly there is a danger coming and he and his wife (Susan George) attempt to solve the mystery of the notes before stopping an awful crime.
A discerning viewer will no doubt spot a number of flaws to this plot; not least why would someone assume that indecipherable nocturnal scribbles are in anyway related to some awful event to come? I have, in my writing career, woken up more than once with words scrawled in notepads that I can’t possibly fathom. Very rarely have I contacted the police about them. (The film does make clear the ridiculousness of that particular course of action though. At the police station Detective Inspector Anton Rogers’ dialogue may be sympathetic, but his face is definitely set to sceptical.) The whole thing is ultimately explained – and I guess this is as good a spot for a SPOILER ALERT as any – because of Moore’s exposure to group therapy and hypnosis. Okay, so any group therapy session which includes Donald Pleasance, Joanna Lumley, Wilfrid Brambell, David Essex and Lulu – and is run by a pouting Lee Remick – may be a little on the unusual side, but the explanation itself is done in such a half-hearted and slack way, that even the most alert and mystery-attuned audience member will just keep scratching the top of their head in confusion.
It’s a film with all the signs of a contemporary British horror film of 1972. A remote house surrounded by creepy trees through which a wind blows, the kind of deserted road up to that house which even a Ford Anglia looks creepy driving down, the villain spinning a circle of paper to create a wagon wheel effect, that wagon wheel effect being filmed in a red light to look doubly spooky and unsettling, the female lead running frantically into the trees even though the bricks and mortar of the house are clearly safer, a lot of rain. You’ve seen it all before and you’ll see it all again here. British horror films of the age were often cut from the same cookie mould.
So far I haven’t really sold this film, but what makes it so entertaining – and some will be amazed by this – is Moore’s performance. Or, to be more specific, it’s his hair’s performance. His barnet is not as sleek or firmly coiffeured as we remember from The Saint or know later from Bond. And wild hair definitely makes Roger Moore look decidedly unhinged. In my last viewing I counted three whole emotions that Roger and his hair managed to pull off – extreme bafflement (side parting askew), rage (pushed back and spiky), and despair (drenched flat to the head by rain water). Yes, by the end his hair is back to normal and he’s smiling Roger Moore again – but before that it’s Moore’s, and his hair’s, emotional state that the audience clings to.
London looks as wet and dreary as it always does in British films in 1972, (did we export every atom of the swinging sixties along with The Rolling Stones?), but Moore adds that touch of class and Susan George – as so often – is decoratively lovely in a poorly written role. The five minute exposition scene she performs in just a see through negligee is now described in detail in the dictionary entry for ‘gratuitous’.
Colour
Five minutes before he was James Bond, Roger Moore starred in this odd, bizarre, decidedly peculiar, yet without a doubt entertaining thriller. The set-up is thus: a man with terrible hand writing can't decipher the mysterious notes he leaves for himself in his sleep. Clearly there is a danger coming and he and his wife (Susan George) attempt to solve the mystery of the notes before stopping an awful crime.
A discerning viewer will no doubt spot a number of flaws to this plot; not least why would someone assume that indecipherable nocturnal scribbles are in anyway related to some awful event to come? I have, in my writing career, woken up more than once with words scrawled in notepads that I can’t possibly fathom. Very rarely have I contacted the police about them. (The film does make clear the ridiculousness of that particular course of action though. At the police station Detective Inspector Anton Rogers’ dialogue may be sympathetic, but his face is definitely set to sceptical.) The whole thing is ultimately explained – and I guess this is as good a spot for a SPOILER ALERT as any – because of Moore’s exposure to group therapy and hypnosis. Okay, so any group therapy session which includes Donald Pleasance, Joanna Lumley, Wilfrid Brambell, David Essex and Lulu – and is run by a pouting Lee Remick – may be a little on the unusual side, but the explanation itself is done in such a half-hearted and slack way, that even the most alert and mystery-attuned audience member will just keep scratching the top of their head in confusion.
It’s a film with all the signs of a contemporary British horror film of 1972. A remote house surrounded by creepy trees through which a wind blows, the kind of deserted road up to that house which even a Ford Anglia looks creepy driving down, the villain spinning a circle of paper to create a wagon wheel effect, that wagon wheel effect being filmed in a red light to look doubly spooky and unsettling, the female lead running frantically into the trees even though the bricks and mortar of the house are clearly safer, a lot of rain. You’ve seen it all before and you’ll see it all again here. British horror films of the age were often cut from the same cookie mould.
So far I haven’t really sold this film, but what makes it so entertaining – and some will be amazed by this – is Moore’s performance. Or, to be more specific, it’s his hair’s performance. His barnet is not as sleek or firmly coiffeured as we remember from The Saint or know later from Bond. And wild hair definitely makes Roger Moore look decidedly unhinged. In my last viewing I counted three whole emotions that Roger and his hair managed to pull off – extreme bafflement (side parting askew), rage (pushed back and spiky), and despair (drenched flat to the head by rain water). Yes, by the end his hair is back to normal and he’s smiling Roger Moore again – but before that it’s Moore’s, and his hair’s, emotional state that the audience clings to.
London looks as wet and dreary as it always does in British films in 1972, (did we export every atom of the swinging sixties along with The Rolling Stones?), but Moore adds that touch of class and Susan George – as so often – is decoratively lovely in a poorly written role. The five minute exposition scene she performs in just a see through negligee is now described in detail in the dictionary entry for ‘gratuitous’.
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