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Orson Welles, The Immortal Story (1968), and Television

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The Immortal Story (1968) directed by Orson Welles shown: Orson Welles

To view The Immortal Story click here.

In his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles was often derisive towards television, or at least he was in the 1960s. Back then, television hadn’t reached the levels of sophistication it has today and someone like Welles couldn’t see how leaving film for TV could ever be a viable move. Of course, it should be noted that he and Bogdanovich also have a lengthy discussion about the only aspects of color film they like (how snow photographs being near the top) so it’s fair to say that no matter how inventive and ahead of the curve Welles was most of the time, there was clearly a limit to his vision. In 1968 he adapted Isaak Dineson’s The Immortal Story for French television and, clocking in at just 60 minutes, with an economy and efficiency of an expert old hand, shows that perhaps Welles and TV may have been the best match of all.

If you know the story itself, the immortal one that is, you know it’s more about legend than anything else. A man hears of a legend of a rich man who pays a sailor to impregnate his wife and Welles, in the character of Mr. Clay, a wealthy but old and tired man in 19th century Macau, wants to make the legend come true. Why? No reason outside of the fact that he finds it intriguing. He doesn’t even have a wife. For that, he has to hire someone, specifically the daughter of a former business partner. The daughter, Virginie (Jeanne Moreau) agrees as she hates Clay and feels like she can, I suppose, vicariously humiliate him through the exercise. Or purposely sabotage it.

The production itself is low on funding, as per any late Welles’ work, and thrown together piece by piece. Waiters are borrowed to be extras, scenes are completed over the course of weeks from different locations due to financial troubles and the main set was actually Welles’ house. There was no makeup artist to speak of which may explain why Welles so heavily relies upon himself for applying generous layers of stage makeup which don’t exactly bear the mark of realism when subjected to the eye of a camera. And all of this, all of it, the usual time constraints, lack of resources and financial distress was because Welles loved the cinema and couldn’t understand at the time what a great time he could have had in television.

I’m not trying to say he didn’t do a great job with practically every piece of film he made, though certainly there are exceptions. I’m just saying that I think someone like Welles, had he taken up the mantle of television exclusivity in the 1960s and 1970s, could have transformed the landscape long before cable came along and eventually did the job in the 21st century.

Having consumed every Welles biography I could get my hands on in the eighties, nineties, and beyond, from Frank Brady to Simon Callow, one thing is perfectly clear: Welles loved Shakespeare and combined narratives. He loved a lot of other things, too, but it was his dual love of Shakespeare and combined narratives that brought about his massive work Five Kings, in which he combined elements from almost ten different Shakespearean plays (Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; Richard III) to make one all inclusive production covering the War of the Roses and running nearly six hours long on the stage. Years later, this would be cut down dramatically and condensed into the film we now know as Chimes at Midnight.

Had Welles had the opportunities that television affords today, he could have made series from these works. Let’s face it, if the narrative structure of Citizen Kane doesn’t eerily predate what we now call “limited series” on HBO, Netflix, and Amazon, nothing does. Today, Citizen Kane would be a ten part series as well as The Magnificent Ambersons and Welles, instead of being the ostracized wonder boy that everyone resented, might well be the King of the Small Screen.

Also consider that Welles planned to do a whole series of films based on Dinesen’s stories. And his It’s All True docudrama hybrid from the early forties would surely be transformed today as an in-depth look into the underbelly of life in Brazil using the anthology series form.

Orson Welles, no stranger to serialized story telling from his earliest days in radio, would have been a natural match for the kind of television produced today. You can see it throughout his entire career and films like The Immortal Story and F for Fake are right at home in today’s cultural atmosphere. But the industry couldn’t see it and Welles either couldn’t or, more likely, didn’t want to bother blazing any new trails. He just wanted to keep making the movies he loved, no matter how difficult the process. It’s understandable, but what a great final chapter to his career if he started out in theater, moved to radio, conquered film, and then, finally, reinvented television. He didn’t, but one can dream.

Greg Ferrara


Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight!

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FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, A

To view A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum click here.

During the late 1950s, film adaptations of Broadway productions began to dominate the musical genre. Film historians such as Rick Altman, author of The American Film Musical, grumble about this trend, which often resulted in stilted adaptations or clumsy attempts to “open up” the original. According to Altman, adaptations lacked the freedom “to exploit the versatility of the film medium” compared to original film musicals. He compared Vincente Minnelli’s original musicals (An American in Paris [1951]) to his later Broadway adaptations (On a Clear Day [1970]) to make his point, which is valid.

I find A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) to be an exception. It’s light, breezy surface belies its modernist approach to production numbers, clever verbal humor and well-researched production design, making it a unique adaptation of the Broadway hit. Forum is currently streaming on FilmStruck along with other films by director Richard Lester.

Richard Lester was fresh from his success with the Beatles musicals A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) when he was tapped to direct Forum. Using New Wave techniques such as hand-held camera as well as a montage editing, Lester had updated the musical to capture the rebellious flavor of rock ‘n’ roll. Lester applied some of these techniques to the production numbers in Forum, infusing them with energy and vitality.

Forum opens with a montage of shots of the residents of ancient Rome in lieu of the standard establishing shots of the main setting, which is typical of Hollywood films. As star Zero Mostel sings “Comedy Tonight,” the credits are intercut with shots of everyday Romans going about their daily business. Mostel addresses the camera directly, breaking the fourth wall to explain the story. Shots of pratfalls and physical stunts from throughout the film are interwoven into the number, foreshadowing the comedy antics in store. The pace accelerates as the song and scene come to a climax. The rapid editing of the montage style combined with the flashforward shots definitely exploits the versatility of the film medium. My favorite production number in this style is “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” in which Mostel, Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers and Michael Hordern sing about the joys of domestic help. The vaudeville-style production number consists of dozens of shots of the veteran comedians hamming it up in front of various Roman structures and ruins. Low-brow humor meets high-brow history. However, the musical montages aren’t all this fun or clever. The love song “Lovely,” sung by Michael Crawford and Annette Andre over shots of them running through a field, looks a bit too much like a TV commercial.

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I was surprised to learn of the caliber of talent who worked on either the play or the film. The play had been penned by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, creator and head writer for the TV series M*A*S*H. Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for the production numbers. Gelbart did not end up adapting his work for the big screen, and he was critical of the movie because much of his original libretto had been rewritten. Respected screenwriter Melvin Frank (White Christmas [1954], The Court Jester [1956], A Touch of Class [1973]) cowrote the adaption with Michael Pertwee. Nicolas Roeg was the cinematographer, and his bright, high-key lighting made the costumes with their primary colors pop off the screen. The cast of veteran stage and screen comedians delivered their lines with that exquisite comic timing associated with vaudeville and old-school showbiz.

Gelbart and Shevelove deserve praise for basing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on the work of ancient Roman playwright Plautus, who penned farces about Roman life during the Republic. Forum combines two plays by Plautus: Pseudolus is a play about a slave who helps his master’s son retrieve the girl of his dreams, a prostitute sold to another buyer and Miles Gloriosus tells the story of a pompous soldier. Some of the names in Forum were taken directly from Plautus, including Lycus, Pseudolus, which means “faker,” and Miles Gloriosus, or “boastful soldier.” Gelbart and Shevelove then piggyback on the playwright’s use of farcical names: The young, handsome lead is called Hero, while the courtesan he falls for is Philia, which is Greek for “love.” Pseudolus’s master is Senex, which is Latin for “old man;” Senex is henpecked by his wife Domina, a name perilously close to “dominate.” The anxiety-ridden slave played by Jack Gilford is called Hysterium (that is, hysterical), while the peripatetic father played by Buster Keaton is Erronius (meaning “wandering,” plus he is always wrong). Some of the best names are given to the courtesans: Tintinabula wears tiny bells that jingle when she moves; Panacea is good for what ails you; Vibrata jiggles when she moves; and Gymnasia is an athletic girl in scanty attire.

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Noted production designer Tony Walton must have done extensive research into ancient Rome. Each set design echoes Roman architecture and art. The walls in and around Senex’s villa resemble the frescoes of Pompeii. There are four phases of Roman fresco painting. In Forum, the paintings resemble those from the second period in which the images were designed to suggest there were no walls at all. In other words, scenes of gardens and cityscapes were painted onto walls and framed in architectonic features such as columns or windows as though the viewer were looking out onto a vista. During “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” the group dances across the top of an aqueduct, which looks like the Pont du Gard famous for its precisely constructed Roman arches. Miles Gloriosus (Leon Greene) bursts into the city through a triumphal arch, befitting his overblown ego. My favorite art history reference is the marble bust of nagging wife Domina (Patricia Jessel), who is taking the sculpture to her mother to use at her funeral. It is as ugly as Domina herself, but the ugliness is actually historically accurate. The Roman interest in realism, called verism, was manifested in funerary busts commissioned by the patrician class to commemorate members of their families. The goal was to make the busts look exactly like the subject, with every wrinkle or flaw included. After the person died, the bust was carried to the funeral. In the case of Domina, her prominent nose and hardened expression are perfectly captured in the bust, which is the object of humor in several gags.

Hmmmm! I wonder if I can show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to represent Roman art the next time I teach art history.

Susan Doll

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The End of the Affair: Cynara (1932)

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To view Cynara click here.

Ronald Colman signed as a contract player with the Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1924, cranking out heart-tugging romances all the way through the transition to sound, as in the 1932 production Cynara. A particularly “adult” pre-code drama, it frankly discusses extramarital affairs and suicide in a tone of disarming directness. Adapted from a hit play, Goldwyn wanted faithfulness to the material, though director King Vidor and writer Frances Marion sought ways to make this stage scenario more cinematic. The resulting film leads one to think that Goldwyn won most of the battles, as it is ends up as a very well-acted filmed play, though Vidor does find ways to be inventive at the edges. Ronald Colman, in his penultimate performance for Goldwyn, plays against type as a boring barrister who falls into an affair with a young shopgirl. He is no great lover, as he portrayed in a series of hit silents with Vilma Banky, but a nervous, guilt-ridden, self-flagellating one. Colman wasn’t happy with the film because it clashed with his established persona, but that is what makes the film so fascinating today.

Cynara originated in Robert Gore-Brown’s 1928 novel An Imperfect Lover, which was adapted into the play Cynara, a stage success in 1930. Goldwyn was in a perpetual search for quality material to funnel Colman into, wanting to build off of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931), which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The search lasted for months, and was so consuming that one evening, according to Harpo Marx, he visited the Goldwyn home to find their son Sammy reading the funny pages. Harpo asked what he was doing, and Sammy responded, “I’m looking for a Ronald Colman story, Mr. Marx.” With its suggestive subject matter and stage pedigree, Goldwyn eventually settled on Cynara as Colman’s next film, and lined up Vidor and Marion as his directing and writing time, fresh off of their triumph The Champ (1931). Marion agreed to do the job on one condition – that Goldwyn hire Lois Weber to assist in the adaptation. Weber, one of the pioneering female directors of the silent era, had fallen on hard times, and hadn’t worked on a film in five years, taking on a job as an apartment manager to make a living. Goldwyn agreed to the arrangement, both respecting Weber’s accomplishments and wanting Marion on the job.

Told in flashback as a confession from the misleadingly named barrister Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) to his wife Clemency (Kay Francis), Cynara is an apologia for male infidelity. Jim is a homebody whose horny old bachelor pal John Tring (Henry Stephenson) is always encouraging Jim to join him on extra-curricular outings. So when Clemency goes on an impromptu trip to Venice with her sister, Tring encourages Jim to explore the London nightlife, specifically its women. One night at an Italian restaurant, they run into two shopgirls named Doris (Phyllis Barry) and Milly (Viva Tattersall). Milly uses the flirtation as an excuse to enjoy Tring’s money, but Doris falls for Jim’s awkward sincerity, and concocts a plan to meet up with him again at a swimming exhibition that Jim would be judging. Jim tears up a note with Doris’s address, and in a beautiful transition, Vidor dissolves from the bits of torn-up note to pigeons flying in Venice, connecting Jim’s two loves in a poetic bit of montage. Despite his seemingly abiding love for Clemency, Jim begins a whirlwind affair with Doris, which ends just as abruptly when Clemency arrives home early. The whole affair ends in tragedy, threatening Jim’s marriage and the entire life he had built up until that point.

CYNARA, from left: Phyllis Barry, Ronald Colman, 1932

Though the film is centrally focused on Jim and Clemency’s marriage, it finds time to give the shopgirl’s perspective – showing how Doris doesn’t have the same societal protections as Jim’s upper-class bubble. Milly repeatedly warns her about how working class girls are tossed away by men like Jim, but Doris refuses to hear it. She is in love, and pays the price. It is unclear how much influence Weber had on the script, but she dealt with the double-standard between married men and single women in the fallout of an affair in films like What Do Men Want? (1921) and Shoes (1916). That double standard definitely applies in Cynara,for while Jim’s reputation is tarnished, he is still free to make a new life wherever he’d like, whereas Doris is jobless and spiraling into depression.

The most thrilling scenes in the film occurs when Jim and Tring deign to visit the blue-collar district – there is a remarkable sequence set inside a movie theater showing Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918). Vidor has a camera boom swoop from the back of the theater down to the front, capturing the full-body laughter of an audience losing its mind to Chaplin’s antics. In a clumsy if effective visual metaphor, Chaplin shoves a dog down his pants to sneak into a dance hall, and the animal pokes through Chaplin’s pants, causing some awkward encounters. It is after this that Doris takes Jim’s hand in hers, and for the first time Jim exhibits what looks like lust. The sequence presents a Chaplin short as an erotic experience, both for the other revelers laughing their heads off in full body convulsions, and Jim and Doris, who find the film’s loosening of social codes a way to free themselves from their guilt, and towards their disastrous affair.

R. Emmet Sweeney

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A Chilly Early Christmas: L’assassinat du Père Noël (1941)

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To view L’assassinat du Père Noël click here

First of all, let it be said that this film has one of my all-time favorite opening credit sequences. It’s almost a lost art these days how much impact you can have on an audience the first time they see a film’s title blasted on a theatrical screen stretching from floor to ceiling, and the one here is just killer. Sure, it’s always cool to see the words Gone with the Wind (1939) scrolling across in huge letters or Star Wars (1977) blasting in your face with the full John Williams musical treatment, but there’s something about the opening minute or so of L’assassinat du Père Noël (1941) that really grabs you by the throat as a lurching figure carrying a sack loaded with gifts stumbles to the camera in moody lighting, his hood and beard picking up an eerie glow from behind as he gets closer to the camera. It’s both sinister and charming, a perfect opener for a film that mixes those two qualities in great abundance. I don’t care if Woody Allen’s been recycling that same black background and Windsor font for decades now in his opening credits; I’m a sucker for a riveting curtain raiser like this, and hopefully you are, too.

So, chances are you’re still wondering, what the heck is L’assassinat du Père Noël (or as it was originally released in English, Who Killed Santa Claus?, or more literally, The Murder of Father Christmas)? Well, superficially it’s a stylish, highly engrossing murder mystery set in a snow-laden French town in the Alps where the children, called potential “dunces and duncettes” by their politically leftist schoolteacher, are overjoyed to be out for the holidays. That spirit is shared by the older townspeople, but intrigue is afoot when a mysterious, black-gloved Baron has made his delayed return to town and claims to be suffering from leprosy. Crime soon rears its head as the holidays approach, ranging from a mugging and stolen ring to the murder of someone dressed in a Santa Claus outfit. The dead man first appears to be the town’s beloved globe maker, but something stranger and even more nefarious could be afoot.

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That may sound fairly straightforward, and on a superficial level, this film is quite fun in the same vein as René Clair’s exceptional And Then There Were None four years later. However, since this is currently running in the FilmStruck theme “Sold Out! Films Made during the Occupation of France,” there’s obviously more going on here. In fact, this film is most often discussed by European film critics (or a very tiny handful of American ones) for its status as the first feature to be shot and released under the Vichy government, which makes it tempting to read a resistance message into nearly every single line of dialogue and plot twist. Adding to the strangeness is the fact that the opening logos include Continental Films, a German-financed production company that kept a close eye on the content of its films. That’s a rocky set of circumstances for any film artist to spin into gold, but that certainly did happen over the course of the company’s five-year existence with little classics like this, Le main du diable (1943) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942) and Le corbeau (1943) (perhaps the most legendary example of anti-collaboration cinematic subterfuge).

So where does that leave this film? It doesn’t seem to tweak the noses of the Nazis with intellectual references as much as some of its peers; instead what we have is a film that emphasizes culture, perception and just plain old smarts as forces greater than any criminal undertakings simmering within a society. The church is one bedrock element here tied visually throughout to the youngest generation (“The children will guide us” is one key line), which could be extended to the Christmastime setting as well with its implications of annual celebration and union among the townspeople. It’s interesting to see just how dark Christmas became during and just after World War II, with films like Robert Siodmak’s misleadingly titled dark noir Christmas Holiday (1944) and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) painting more anguished takes on the holiday season than what you’d find a decade later. Even the first British horror film allowed to be made after the war, Dead of Night (1945), had to put a chilling Christmas smack in the center of one of its stories.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call this a creepy Christmas film, but it comes really close at times (like in those aforementioned opening credits). A sequence with two young boys wandering through snowdrifts at dusk calling out for Father Christmas is otherworldly in its delicate lighting and desolate setting, and the sight of villagers dancing hysterically in circles with flashing tinsel around one particularly distraught character isn’t exactly the kind of thing to put you in the holiday spirit. The effective use of young characters here is undeniably the trademark of director Christian-Jaque, a prolific director who remained active until 1985 with crowd-pleasing entertainments like The Legend of Frenchie King (1971) and the beloved Fan-Fan the Tulip (1952). However, it’s his earlier, more stylized output that really fascinates today like this film’s closest cinematic cousin, Les disparus de St. Agil (1938), known in English as Boys’ School. Both of these films were nearly impossible to see in good condition or even any kind of English-friendly versions for decades after their initial theatrical runs in the U.S., and in fact, I never had a chance to see either of them until Pathé undertook complete restorations of both and gave them English-subtitled Blu-ray and DVD releases in France. It was a real treat to discover both of them this way, but now you lucky folks can watch Christian-Jaque’s unique, potent Christmas mystery right here without having to worry about any disc importing or region code checking. December may still be a month or so away, but you can still pop this one on late at night and settle in for a night of stylish, moody entertainment with more than a bit of historical value.

Nathaniel Thompson

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Boris Karloff is The Body Snatcher (1945)

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To view The Body Snatcher click here.

Director Robert Wise is widely regarded as a journeyman filmmaker with no defining traits or distinct talents. In The American Cinema: Directors And Directions 1929-1968 critic Andrew Sarris famously labeled Wise’s output as “strained seriousness” asserting that the director’s “stylistic signature . . . is indistinct to the point of invisibility.” David Thompson parroted these claims in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film when he stated that Wise’s “better credits are only the haphazard products of artistic aimlessness given rare guidance” and complained that his filmography was merely a “restless, dispiriting search among subject areas.” While it’s true that Wise explored a variety of genres including horror, science fiction, noir, westerns, musicals and war dramas, his best films frequently share a gloomy nihilistic worldview and he possessed the extraordinary ability to elicit career-defining performances from many of the actors he worked with.

A few of the remarkable roles Wise nurtured and defined include Lawrence Tierney’s ruthless Sam Wilde in Born to Kill (1947), Robert Ryan’s down-and-out boxer in The Set-Up (1949), Michael Rennie’s peace-pursuing alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Susan Hayward’s doomed career criminal in I Want to Live! (1958), Rita Moreno’s spirited and vengeful Anita in West Side Story (1961), Julie Harris’s meek and melancholy Eleanor “Nell” Lance in The Haunting (1963) and Steve McQueen’s solitary sailor in The Sand Pebbles (1966). But my favorite acting feat in all of Wise’s directing oeuvre can be found in The Body Snatcher (1945). Currently streaming on FilmStruck, this classic Val Lewton production directed by Wise, includes Boris Karloff in what is arguably his most accomplished performance playing John Gray, a merciless grave robber with soul-piercing eyes and a bone-chilling grin.

The Body Snatcher is based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson that was inspired by the 19th-century crimes of Burke and Hare, two notorious body snatchers who committed multiple murders and then sold the victim’s corpses to The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for dissection purposes. The film adaption broadens Stevenson’s tale of an accomplished doctor (Henry Daniell) and his loyal student (Russell Wade) who become entangled with a grave robbing cabbie named John Gray. It also ratchets up the horror quotient by magnifying the role of Gray as he commits one shocking atrocity after another to supply the doctors with much-needed specimens while gleefully lining his pockets with the ill-gotten gains.

Stevenson’s original text only contains a few words that describe the character of John Gray commenting on the “hang-dog, abominable looks” typical of grave robbers and singling him out as “a very loathsome rogue.” The screenplay, which was originally written by Philip MacDonald and revised by Val Lewton, reinforces the characterization describing Gray as “a man of middle years with keen, darting eyes set in a face lined and furrowed by an evil life. The quick play of his features as he talks or smiles can form a moving and deceptive mask.” These brief descriptions of Gray only scratch the surface of Karloff’s rich, multifaceted depiction of the sinister scoundrel but they are noteworthy stepping stones that demonstrate what little background the 58-year-old actor had to work with and how much he brought to the role.

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Additional inspiration for Karloff’s interpretation of Gray most likely came from another Robert Louis Stevenson story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In The Body Snatcher, the dueling nature of man is represented by the noble, wisdom-seeking Dr. MacFarlane (also played brilliantly by Henry Daniell) while his evil alter-ego manifests as the capital-driven resurrection man. Even Karloff’s appearance in a worn top hat and long, cape-like coat is reminiscent of Hyde.

Karloff carries himself with a kind of willful arrogance, but his ragged clothes, stooped posture, deep-set eyes, heavy brows, unruly stubble and unwashed hair suggest a cadaver’s appearance. His John Gray is losing what’s left of his humanity with every swing of his shovel and Karloff wears the weight of the character’s deeds like a suit of rusty old armor. His crimes have become a grotesque badge of honor. He is the Grim Reaper or Charon of Edinburgh, driving a hansom cab through cobblestone streets instead of a ferry boat down the River Styx. He relishes the fear he ignites in the hearts of so-called ‘gentlemen’ who buy his profane wares, so they won’t have to dig around in rotting cemeteries during the dead of night and risk sullying their good names. But Gray is no mindless lackey and Karloff instills his character with a cutting wit and streetwise wisdom that suggest he is sharper than many of the well-read doctors he interacts with.

If I had to single out one standout acting moment in a film that contains many, I would point to Karloff’s final screen encounter with his longtime associate Bela Lugosi who also makes a noteworthy appearance in The Body Snatcher. Bela plays Joseph, a simple-minded and sympathetic janitor who cleans the doctor’s labs. When he becomes aware of John Gray’s nefarious money-making activities, Joseph decides to blackmail him but he isn’t prepared for the callous brutality that awaits him once he ventures inside Gray’s den of iniquity and their interaction takes a particularly macabre turn.

Val Lewton originally did not want to work with Karloff but producer Jack Gross convinced RKO to sign the “King of Horror” to a three-picture deal. Gross hoped the actor’s name would attract audiences but Lewton wanted to distance himself from Universal’s brand of Gothic horror. He was interested in creating modern thrillers with a subtler approach that didn’t rely on lots of monster makeup to terrify audiences. But according to director Robert Wise, once Lewton met Karloff, the two became fast friends and developed a respect for one another’s talent.

“Boris Karloff was an absolute joy . . . he was very well educated and well-read, a cultured man with fine manners–soft-spoken, and a gentleman in every sense. He was a delight to work with as an actor–very responsive, very professional. Boris was particularly keen about doing The Body Snatcher. He felt it was his first opportunity to show what he could do as an actor, a fine actor of great skill and great depth.” – Robert Wise, quoted in Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration by Gregory William Mank

When it was released in 1945, The Body Snatcher proved to be one of RKO’s most successful horror films and Boris Karloff went on to appear in two other Lewton productions, Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946). Karloff is exceptional in the three films he made with Val Lewton but in The Body Snatcher, he is a terrifying force of nature. Robert Wise, who was proud of his collaborative working relationships with actors, was able to encourage a truly spectacular performance from the aging horror star that rivals his iconic portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster. Karloff also had something to prove to these new purveyors of horror cinema who were not particularly interested in his antiquated skills, but they shouldn’t have worried. Karloff’s cadaverous John Gray is one of the greatest screen achievements of the 1940s.

If you stream one horror film this Halloween, I recommend The Body Snatcher but I suggest pairing it with The Haunting (1961) and Audrey Rose (1977). These chill-inducing movies were all made by Robert Wise and prove that the director was not only adept at eliciting great acting performances from his cast but he also knew how to scare the hell out of an audience.

Kimberly Lindbergs

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Beware The Blob (1958)!

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To view The Blob click here.

The credits are Saul Bass lite. Different red shapes, blobby outlines, move forward on the screen while one of the great movie theme songs plays behind them. The song, “Beware the Blob,” performed by The Five Blobs (lead singer Bernie Knee) and written by Burt Bacharach and Mack David, is instantly singable upon one hearing. Finally, the title of the movie, in black surrounded by a glowing red outline, appears. And so begins the 1958 classic, The Blob, starring Steve McQueen in his first major film role (often credited as his debut when in fact he had done both movies and plenty of TV before). The Blob is often pigeonholed into the same category as any other low-budget sci-fi film from the 1950s that most people would now call “cult classics” but it’s actually a lot more than that and deserves better. Better treatment and better direction. It’s a frustrating mixture of all the right ingredients producing a less than optimal outcome but still showing enough promise that it’s a fascinating journey.

The opening scene of The Blob is damned peculiar. Steve, played by Steve McQueen (very convenient), is kissing Jane, played by my childhood crush from The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), Helen Crump, aka Aneta Corsaut. The camera swings from the right to the left and Jane pulls back. What follows is an oddly quiet and reflective conversation as Jane feels she has been lured here and Steve assures her she hasn’t. She seems genuinely distraught and their lines feel almost unrehearsed. It’s a quiet, tender moment followed by a meteor streaking across the sky and Steve determined to find out where it landed. As they rush to find it, an old man wanders out of his cabin to find a small, round meteorite, complete with its own set of tiny impact craters, making it look like an old moon model someone did for a science project. He cracks it open and a small gelatinous center leaps to his hand and begins consuming it. He runs to the road where Steve and Jane almost hit him and they take him to a doctor.

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Eventually, the blobby mass consumes the old man, the doctor and his nurse before going on a rampage across the town. Well, a slow, gradual rampage. As the title song suggests, it creeps and glides and slides its way around the town, killing off innocent citizens who, once consumed, allow the blob to grow larger. Finally, it invades a movie theater and engulfs a diner before they figure out what stops it, air conditioning. Or just plain old cold. Which actually makes sense, believe it or not. Traveling through the cold vacuum of space, it remains dormant and solidified. Once the meteor heats up upon atmospheric entry, it comes to life. It avoids the cold to avoid slipping back into dormancy.

The Blob looks great, both the movie and the title character. The movie is shot in widescreen Deluxe color and looks absolutely lush, the opposite of what one expects from a low budget sci-fi movie from the 1950s. The creature itself, made from silicone and red dye, has a genuineness to it that many movie monsters lack. The very fact that it is so completely alien, and thus so completely unable to communicate with us, gives it all the character menace it needs. Even when it pours out of the movie theater near the end, and a large thumb print is clearly visible at its center, the magic isn’t lost. Hey, who knows, maybe the blob has fingerprints.

There are, of course, the usual elements of sci-fi at the time, a genre not taken very seriously in the 1950s, with very few getting the kind of treatment MGM gave Forbidden Planet (1956). There’s the less than stellar dialogue, the not-so-convincing emoting, the teenagers who look old enough to be playing the parents and there’s lackluster direction from Irvin Yeaworth who lets scenes just kind of sit there. When he should be coaching the actors to blaze through their lines, he seems content to sit back and let them slowly fumble through their lines until minutes of screen time have gone by to no avail. This movie, this very same movie, directed by someone like Howard Hawks, could have been amazing.

Still, it’s pretty damn good as it is. The score by Ralph Carmichael is impressive, the special effects work well and Steve McQueen does a pretty decent job playing someone ten years younger than himself. The Blob could be better, yes, and served by a better director, it could have been great. But for sheer fun, and brightly colored menace from beyond the stars, few 1950s sci-fi movies give me more satisfaction than The Blob. Let’s just say, it grows on you.

Greg Ferrara

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An Unusual Western: William Wyler’s The Westerner (’40)

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To view The Westerner click here.

In 1940, immediately following his adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1939), William Wyler directed his first major full-length Western, The Westerner, starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Although he hadn’t yet made any Westerns for producer Samuel Goldwyn, this wasn’t Wyler’s first time working in the popular genre. In the 1920s, in the early years of his career working for Carl Laemmle at Universal, Wyler was a crew member on countless Westerns, eventually working his way up to director. Finally in the director’s chair and still under contract with Universal, Wyler only directed Westerns. It wasn’t until the 1928 comedy Has Anyone Seen Kelly? starring Bessie Love, that he was able to break free and experiment with other genres outside of the Western. Returning to the genre after a long absence gave Wyler a renewed perspective, allowing him to apply his artistic vision and constantly evolving camera techniques to something he was quite familiar with.

The Westerner tells a fictionalized account of the life of the infamous “Judge” Roy Bean (Walter Brennan), a man whose penchant for violence and corruption was used to enforce his vigilante ideas of “law and order,” resulting in unusually harsh punishments for those breaking his law. Over time, the legend behind the actual Roy Bean has reached tall tale proportions, with numerous accounts regarding his reputation as the Wild West’s most ruthless “hanging judge.” For this larger-than-life character, Samuel Goldwyn wanted to cast actor Walter Brennan. Goldwyn wasn’t always right when it came to casting, but having Brennan play Bean proved to be a brilliant choice.

For this particular tale of Judge Roy Bean, we are transported to a saloon in the town of Vinegaroon, Texas, where he is sole proprietor. Bean not only enforces the law, but he is the law. Bean unfairly dishes out punishments to those he perceives as guilty (meaning anyone who stands in his way or disagrees with his methods), refusing to give them a fair trial. For the residents of Vinegaroon and the surrounding area, getting on Bean’s bad side is a death sentence. In addition to the corruption from Bean’s self-appointment, there is a land war between cattle ranchers and the homesteaders. To protect their homes and crops, the homesteaders have put up fences to keep the livestock out. The ranchers, who have the unwavering support of Judge Bean and his cronies, insist that the fences are harmful to their cattle and keep them from accessing water. With the homesteaders legally occupying the land due to federal law, they attempt to fight for their rights. Unfortunately, with Bean in charge, their fight is a lost cause.

Spencer Tracy In Movie Still

Enter wandering cowboy Cole Harden, played by Gary Cooper. Harden has been brought into Judge Bean’s “court” on the charge of stealing a horse. Harden claims to have bought the horse, unaware that the person who sold it was not the rightful owner. Bean sentences Harden to death, but delays the sentence when Harden comments on Bean’s impressive shrine to actress Lily Langtry (Lilian Bond). Picking up on Bean’s obsession with Langtry, Harden spins an incredible story about meeting the actress and receiving a lock of her hair. Intrigued, Bean asks to see the lock. Quick on his feet, Harden says the lock is in El Paso, but that he can get it if given the time. Fortunately, the real horse thief is caught, saving Harden’s life. But Bean naively believes Harden’s story and is insistent upon seeing the lock of hair. Despite the original circumstances of their meeting, Bean and Harden become unlikely friends. Bean respects Harden, treating him like a younger brother. Harden disagrees with Bean’s methods, especially his treatment of the homesteaders. But he also sees the good in the man, what little is left anyway, and he tries to encourage Bean to be a kind and fair person. Harden’s outlook on life, as well as his peace-seeking mentality, is very much needed in Vinegaroon. Harden’s outlook on life is sort of a novelty for Bean, who, despite Harden’s influence, ultimately fails to change his ways. Bean’s steadfast cruelty, selfishness and cynicism betrays Harden’s trust in him.

The Westerner is one of the most unusual Westerns ever made. Like most Westerns, we know who the bad guys and good guys are, but in this film, the characters are more complicated and nuanced than what regularly appears in this genre. Also, the feud between the ranchers and homesteaders is secondary to the plot, as is the romance between Gary Cooper’s Harden and the homesteading Jane Ellen Mathews, played by Doris Davenport. The film is ultimately about the friendship between Judge Roy Bean and Cole Harden. Their interactions are like what you would expect to see between two old friends or close brothers. Another thing that sets The Westerner apart from other examples is the humor. While the homesteader storyline is quite serious, the back and forth between Judge Bean and Harden, at least initially, is hilarious. This is no doubt due to the chemistry and rapport between Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan, who starred together in several films, including Meet John Doe (1940) and The Pride of the Yankees (1942, written about here). Another interesting observation about The Westerner is that it can be viewed as a subtle commentary on the then-unfolding events in Europe, prior to the United States involvement in World War II. Cole Harden represents the idea of neutrality and maintaining it at all costs. That is, until the horrific actions of one party against another party forces him to choose a side and fight for basic human rights. If you watch The Westerner through that lens, it proves to be a pretty strong argument for America’s involvement in World War II, as well as adding an interesting layer to an already incredible film.

Jill Blake

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Mario Bava Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly

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To view A Bay of Blood click here.

A Bay of Blood (1971) shares something in common with Friday the 13th (1980), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Brazil (1985). The first commonality is obvious as A Bay of Blood was clearly a huge influence on Friday the 13th (director Sean S. Cunningham cribs Mario Bava’s murder-setups along with a forest-by-the-water landscape normally used to inspire a sense of idyll), leaving the second connection squarely on the shoulders of Carlo Rambaldi, a special effects master who could decapitate a person as easily for Bava as he could construct a small, amiable and home-sick alien with a penguin-like waddle for Spielberg. As to the third connection, I’d like to think that one would stump most. Here’s the answer: both A Bay of Blood and Brazil begin with the death of a fly. In Brazil it’s a big to-do, with a bureaucrat killing said fly such that it lands in a typewriter, causing a typo that sets in motion all the chaos to follow. In A Bay of Blood, around the two-minute-mark, a fly buzzes noisily in the night sky and then, seconds later, drops into the water with a soft “plop” and dies with barely a ripple. It will be the first death of many.

A quote from Psycho (1960) at this point would be apropos: “They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…’”

I’d like to think the same of Bava, although in his case the insect in question is a beetle. According to the IMDB trivia page, “Mario Bava deeply regretted filming the scene where a bug is pinned alive.” Rebutting that assessment, however, is the following excerpt from the voluminous tome put out by Tim Lucas, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark,wherein he discusses that same beetle:

“The appearances of Paolo Fossatti’s little friend Ferdinando, the black beetle, also entailed some special effects trickery. For the Fossatis’ scene with Renata and Albert, in which Paolo babbles embarrassing endearments to the bug, contained in a tiny clear plastic box, a fake beetle was moved from side to side by means of a slender filament secreted under the bandage on actor Leopoldo Trieste’s hand. While on the subject of Ferdinando, Ecologia del delitto (A Bay of Blood) contained one shot that caused Mario Bava considerable distress: the pinning of the beetle – a significant shot in that it echoes the earlier shot of Duke and Denise impaled in bed. The man at the helm of this riotous procession of homicides had such a profound respect for all forms of life that he later confessed to being unable to sleep the entire night before filming the shot. By looking at the shot closely, we can see that Bava’s sleeplessness ultimately resulted in life winning out over art: the beetle is not pinned straight through, but on its side – and just enough to hold it in place – with the angle of its body in relation to the camera selling the lie.

Norman Bates wouldn’t hurt a fly, but people? That’s a different matter. Mario Bava wouldn’t hurt a beetle, but characters in a giallo film? He’ll go through 13. It’s fitting that we should be thinking about Psycho in relation to A Bay of Blood because Hitchcock’s masterpiece of horror was a big influence on Bava and one of the original writers, Dardano Sacchetti. Again, I consult Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (aka: My Bava Bible). Spoilers ahead:

Bavaand Sacchetti set out to write a giallo in which everyone was the murderer, a story of wall-to-wall homicide that would leave everyone, likewise, a victim. It was a play on the shock conceit initiated by Hitchcock for Psyco (1960), in which he surprised the audience by killing off the lead character, played by Janet Leigh, one-third of the way through the story. “Thirteen characters, thirteen murders!” Bava laughed. “I was [also] interested in depicting a variety of ways to kill, in presenting a veritable catalogue of crime.”

Bava succeeds on his intended level, and much more. My own personal attachment to this film is a simple one: an idyllic landscape gets pitted against greedy developers, and the landscape wins. How many times does that happen? However, only a few days ago was I introduced to the very unsettling idea that perhaps there are more than Bava’s 13 bodies buried in that landscape. Adam Lowenstein (Italian Horror Cinema, Edited by Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter) suggests that there might be real ones:

Bava’s choice for the film’s most important setting, the bayside landscape, turns out to be a fascinating one: Sabaudia, a small coastal town on the Tyrrhenian Sea roughly 50 miles southeast of Rome (Lucas, 2007: 862, 849, 856).

Sabaudia came into existence in 1933 through the draining of the malaria-infested Pontine Marshes, one of fascist Italy’s most ambitious and significant public works projects. Indeed, Benito Mussolini’s ideology of bonifica (reclamation) was exemplified by the Pontine Marshes plan, so Sabaudia was prominently located within discourses of ideal fascist land for ideal fascist citizens.

Much like a Stephen King novel in which a fancy hotel gets built atop an Indian burial ground, Italy clearly has its share of haunted real estate. Special thanks to Sabrina Negri for alerting me to Adam Lowenstein’s essay within Baschiera and Hunter’s “Italian Horror Cinema” book (published 2016), as well as (of course) Tim Lucas for his astounding Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.

Pablo Kjolseth

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Murnau and the Phantoms of Germany

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To view Phantom click here.

It’s that time of year when Nosferatu (1922), F.W. Murnau’s interpretation of Dracula, appears on lists of recommended horror films. The oldest, existing film version of Bram Stoker’s novel, Nosferatu is likely Murnau’s most watched title. It’s eerie Expressionist style was a major influence on the American horror genre, but Murnau’s talent for mise-en-scène is evident in all of his films. I have been fortunate enough to see most of his movies, but one film, Phantom, eluded me until recently. Currently streaming on FilmStruck, Phantom (1922) was one of those thousands of silents that had been lost to the pages of history. However, in the early 2000s, a print of the film was found in an old theater in Germany. The film was restored through the efforts of several organizations, including the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation.

Phantom was released just eight months after Nosferatu. Despite the timing of its release and the title, this is not a tale of horror and the supernatural. Phantom is that specific type of melodrama popular in Germany during the 1920s dubbed kammerspielfilm. The stories focused on the plights of ordinary, good-hearted folks who are driven by poverty and desperation to cross moral lines into theft, prostitution, fraud, embezzlement and other illegal acts. Germany during the Weimar Republic and after was a society in shambles. Failing social institutions, from the economy to law & order to the medical establishment, resulted in the destruction of the working class and the decline of the middle class. Audiences could relate to these stories of characters in economic despair and moral crisis.

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Phantom features a cast of prominent stars of the Expressionist cinema. Alfred Abel plays Lorenz, a poet who works as the town clerk. Unfortunately, he does not earn enough money to support his ailing mother and siblings. Cinephiles might recognize Abel from several Fritz Lang films: He played Count Told in the Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) and the industrial magnate Jon Fredersen in Metropolis (1927). On his way to work one morning, Lorenz is struck down by a carriage drawn by two white horses. The carriage was driven by Veronika Harlan (Lya De Putti), the beautiful daughter of the town’s wealthiest family. The normally responsible Lorenz becomes obsessed with her. He not only daydreams about courting Veronika, but he begins to have unusual visions. He falls prey to his heartless aunt, a greedy woman who owns the local pawnshop. Believing that Lorenz’s poems will surely get published, she loans him money, which he spends on pursuing Veronika. When it is clear that Veronika is out of his league, Lorenz foolishly blows the rest of his aunt’s money on the shameless Mellitta (Lya De Putti), who looks exactly like his dream girl. Lya De Putti, who would soon leave for Hollywood to play vamp roles, costars as both Veronika and Mellitta. Meanwhile, Lorenz’s mother continues to decline while his sister leaves home to seek a better life only to fall into prostitution. The story unfolds in flashback as Lorenz writes down his life story at the urging of wife Marie, played by Lil Dagover who was the melancholy Jane in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

Murnau’s mastery of mise-en-scène is evident in the formal compositions, detailed set design and controlled lighting. An Expressionist style is reserved for Lorenz’s dream of his perfect day with Veronika. The pair descend on an exaggerated spiral structure in which a bicyclist endlessly circles, suggesting the delirium in Lorenz’s mind. The couple dance at a club, and the camera joins them on the dance floor, spiraling around them as Lorenz experiences his fever dream. An extreme high angle tells us that fate is looking down on Lorenz, predicting his downfall. The Lorenz family home is a dark hovel shot in low-key and high-contrast lighting. Their economic trap is reinforced through shots of family members composed in frames within frames.

Phantom was lauded at the time for its use of double exposures and other special effects. Murnau paid homage to Victor Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage (1920), a major influence in terms of double exposure and in-camera effects, with a scene in which Lorenz hallucinates Veronika racing through the streets in her carriage. Other effects include an Inception-like (2010) scene in which the city’s buildings seem to tip forward as Lorenz skulks down the street. Lorenz’s delusions and hallucinations give the film a dream-like quality, enhanced by the tinting. The most common colors are blue and amber, but green was used for the sequence at the city’s most expensive restaurant, while a hazy lavender tints a dreamy shot of Veronika in her bedroom.

Watching German films of the 1920s is a window into the era. In addition to chronicling the financial decline of the working and middle classes, the films reflect the demoralized state of the German people after losing WWI. Expressionist films often feature male characters, like Lorenz, Francis and Cesare of Dr. Caligari and Hutter of Nosferatu, who fall into a daze or delusion. The inner workings of their fevered minds are expressed in the distorted mise-en-scène. Like the shell-shocked veterans who came home from the war, the male characters in Expressionist films are emotionally fragile or mentally unstable. They exist in a kind of altered state, halfway between sanity and reality—not unlike the trench soldiers on the front driven into a stupor by the constant barrage of shelling week after week. These weakened male characters in Expressionist films are the real phantoms—not some ghostly, supernatural presence. Social institutions, including marriage, family, the law and the medical establishment do little to help these characters, just as they failed the German people in real life.

Watching Phantom on a small screen is not an easy viewing experience. The film is slowly paced, which is typical of Expressionist films. On a big screen in a theater, the mise-en-scène and deliberate pacing create an atmosphere and mood; on a small screen, these characteristics are diminished. But, patient viewers will be rewarded with an exquisitely crafted film that showcases popular stars of Expressionist cinema while capturing the bitter history of a defeated country.

Susan Doll

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Affairs of the Heart: The Wedding Night (1935)

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To view The Wedding Night click here.

The Wedding Night was doomed from the start. It was producer Samuel Goldwyn’s final attempt at making the Ukrainian actress Anna Sten into a Garbo-level star, and his persistence had become something of a Hollywood joke. The Wedding Night became known around town as “Goldwyn’s Last Sten,” but though it failed as a star-making enterprise, it was another sensitively directed drama from King Vidor, detailing an unlikely romance between a dissolute big city writer and a Polish farm girl.

The story by Edwin Knopf and script by Edith Fitzgerald concerns down-on-his-luck writer Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper), a former wunderkind turned hack (supposedly based on F. Scott Fitzgerald), whose latest cash grab novel was declined by his publisher. Swiftly running out of money, he moves into a derelict house he inherited with his wife Dora (Helen Vinson). It is there he meets the Novak family, Polish farmers who are putting up tobacco acreage as far as the eye can see. Their only daughter Manya (Sten) is due to be wed to local yokel Fredrik (Ralph Bellamy, of course).

Tony is inspired by the Novak’s work ethic, and begins to write a new novel. Manya takes on the role of sounding board, and once all of Tony’s servants quit and Dora heads back to the city, a romantic interest develops between the farm girl and the author. When Dora returns, Tony must make a decision – to upend Manya’s carefully controlled life, or remain with his wife to repair their tattered vows.

Tony Barrett is introduced at a society party in a bathroom, pitching his publisher on a book when, he says, “I know its tripe.” He still expects it to be published based on the fumes of his former fame, but is soundly rejected. Tony and his wife Dora seem perpetually soused – their biggest concern about the move was the safety of their box of scotch. But while rural life bores Dora, it begins to rejuvenate Tony, who finds a focus and work ethic he had formerly abandoned.

THE WEDDING NIGHT, Helen Vinson, Gary Cooper, 1935

Vidor was unenthused with the assignment from Goldwyn, as he found both Cooper and Sten to have severe limitations, as Cooper kept mumbling and muffing his lines, while Sten’s thick accent was another hurdle altogether. Regarding Sten, Vidor wrote, “Her pantomime flowed quite easily and freely, but her dialogue was quite a different matter. Her words and syllables were never quite synchronized with her gestures. Rather than a director, I began to feel like a dentist trying to pull the syllables out of her mouth before the accompanying gesture had passed by.”

But once Vidor started looking at the rushes, he discovered that Cooper gave “a performance that overflowed with charm and personality…a highly complex and fascinating inner personality revealed itself on the projection room screen.” He was a performer who played well for the camera, not for the crew. Sten is unable to overcome a certain stiffness and formalism in her performance style, though it is appropriate for her character, a woman in a tightly-controlled patriarchal family unit who for the first time is granted a certain freedom of movement – inside Tony’s house. Sten’s buttoned-up coolness is an interesting contrast to Cooper’s anxious warmth and his puppy dog desire to be loved.

Tony re-ignites his will to write mostly due to his exposure to the Novak family, who have successfully avoided assimilation into the American way of life, for better or worse. They maintain something of an agrarian existence, living off the proceeds of the land, but treat their women like slaves and their children like servants. They are completely alien to him, and are a rich source of character detail for his novel. They are content for him to exploit.

Early on Tony is invited for dinner, and Vidor sketches out the power structure through his blocking of the characters, keeping the women on the periphery, rotating around the male Novaks, rarely puncturing the center of their frame. It is only on the night of her wedding that Manya stands in the center of the kitchen, isolated in dramatic overhead lighting as the other women work around her, sewing and cooking and preparing for her wedding party. Manya stands alone, more isolated than ever, miserable in the thought that she is being given this privileged moment, this space as the center of attention, only because she is to marry Fredrik, played with utmost buffoonery by Ralph Bellamy. The film was shot by the great Gregg Toland in a naturalistic, evenly lit style, though he is already experimenting with the deep focus that would get so much attention in Citizen Kane (1941)in the next decade.

Tony believes that Manya is aiding his work, but not through any muse-like inspiration from the gods, but simply for re-instilling in him a work ethic. She is out there milking cows every day, because otherwise the job would not get done. So he takes the same attitude toward his writing, putting up the following sign at his desk: “YOU MAKE YOUR LIVING AT IT – YOUR PEN IS YOUR PLOW, YOU BLANKETY BLANK!” Vidor presents writing as just another form of labor, and that practicality is refreshing for this type of romance. And the love that emerges between them seems realistic because of this practicality, it is love not of the spirit but of the flesh. And with the flesh comes fathers-in-law, and this particular one is none too pleased that Manya had been spending so much time with a married writer from the city. And neither, of course, is Dora, who returns to mend their broken marital bonds. There is no villain, no wronged party, just the messy stuff of living.

R. Emmet Sweeney

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StreamLine Has Moved to Tumblr!

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On November 1, 2017 FilmStruck’s blog, StreamLine, moved to Tumblr.

This archive will remain active for anyone looking to access older content, but going forward our daily posts dedicated to cinema will appear on FilmStruck’s Tumblr page. See the the link below to be redirected to our new location.

http://filmstruck.tumblr.com/

 

How’s It Going, Everybody?

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Every now and then I stop back in to look at some of the updated comments and I’m surprised, and gladdened, to see that there still are comments! Now, I no longer get paid to post here so this is just a “Hi, how are you?” to everyone who still comments here (so don’t freak out, Streamline, I’m still writing for you at tumblr – I won’t put this on the invoice).

I’ve missed talking with you guys quite a lot. Comments are difficult and burdensome on tumblr so most people just leave their comments on the twitter page. That would be, by the way, https://twitter.com/FilmStruck. My own twitter, if anyone wants to comment on my posts there, is https://twitter.com/fantomascinema . Please, feel free to stop by anytime.

So, this is going to be super informal since it’s not actually a paid post or anything.  Some movies I’ve seen recently:

PHANTOM THREAD. Thought it was excellent although I found it more visually beautiful to behold than dramatically captivating. All three leads (Day-Lewis, Manville, and Krieps) were exceptionally good.

BABY DRIVER. Wow! The sound mixing and editing really made this movie a showcase for what the cinema can do. I found it absolutely thrilling from start to finish. Terrific.

WONDER WOMAN. Right now, this may well be my favorite comic book movie yet. Also, I fully admit, I was pretty much gushing over Gal Gadot in every scene. Honestly think she could have gotten nominated. No emotional or dramatic theatrics, but she holds on tight to her character and never lets go.

LAST JEDI. Seen every STAR WARS in the theater, so I wasn’t going to stop here. Didn’t much care for it. Didn’t outright hate it, but I was pretty “eh” upon leaving the theater.

DUNKIRK. Liked it. Was hoping for more of a gut impact but didn’t get it. The evacuation, which is at the heart of the historic battle, takes a back seat to the drama of preparing for the evacuation instead. Works, but not as well as I’d hoped.

GET OUT. Fully pleased with this horror/satire. Fantastic work on everyone’s part and really happy that both Jordan Peele and Daniel Kaluuya got recognized.

Well, that’s it for now.  Talk to you again soon!

Greg

 

Man’s Castle 1933

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Embarrassed to say but I just watched Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle for the first time this week.

Wow, what a movie!

Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young are both excellent but the way the movie plows headlong into the plight of desperate people during the despression is remarkable. There are some obvious hard cuts in the movie because when they re-released it a few years later, they cut out 9 minutes of stuff considered too offensive in the era of the production code. But, hell, what they left in is still pretty amazing.

And that ending! If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it.

Favorite line in the whole movie: “Murder? This ain’t murder. This is housecleaning.”

Great stuff.

Jean Harlow, Mary Dees, and SARATOGA

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I watched SARATOGA again last night for the first time in years and still found it very depressing. It is so sad to watch Harlow, clearly weak and listless, playing each scene when you know how sick she is. And every time I saw her double Mary Dees’ back turned to the camera, all I could think was, “She was dead at this point.”

They wanted to recast the role and reshoot after Harlow died but fans overwhelmingly wanted her to stay in so they shot remaining scenes with doubles and rewrote other scenes to exclude her and brother does it show. What makes it stand out all the more is the fact that they clearly shot the movie mostly in chronological order because it is around the two-thirds point that she disappears and we start seeing scenes where characters tell us she’s resting in the other room or we see Mary Dees’ back.

I’ve tried several times now, but there’s simply no way for me to watch this movie and enjoy it. I always know from the opening shots that Harlow is at her last days and it just casts a pall over the whole movie.

Greg

Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight!

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FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, A

To view A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum click here.

During the late 1950s, film adaptations of Broadway productions began to dominate the musical genre. Film historians such as Rick Altman, author of The American Film Musical, grumble about this trend, which often resulted in stilted adaptations or clumsy attempts to “open up” the original. According to Altman, adaptations lacked the freedom “to exploit the versatility of the film medium” compared to original film musicals. He compared Vincente Minnelli’s original musicals (An American in Paris [1951]) to his later Broadway adaptations (On a Clear Day [1970]) to make his point, which is valid.

I find A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) to be an exception. It’s light, breezy surface belies its modernist approach to production numbers, clever verbal humor and well-researched production design, making it a unique adaptation of the Broadway hit. Forum is currently streaming on FilmStruck along with other films by director Richard Lester.

Richard Lester was fresh from his success with the Beatles musicals A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) when he was tapped to direct Forum. Using New Wave techniques such as hand-held camera as well as a montage editing, Lester had updated the musical to capture the rebellious flavor of rock ‘n’ roll. Lester applied some of these techniques to the production numbers in Forum, infusing them with energy and vitality.

Forum opens with a montage of shots of the residents of ancient Rome in lieu of the standard establishing shots of the main setting. The latter was  typical of classic Hollywood films, including musicals. As star Zero Mostel sings “Comedy Tonight,” the credits are intercut with shots of everyday Romans going about their daily business. Mostel addresses the camera directly, breaking the fourth wall to explain the story. Shots of pratfalls and physical stunts from throughout the film are interwoven into the number, foreshadowing the comedy antics in store. The pace accelerates as the song and scene come to a climax. The rapid editing of the montage style combined with the flashforward shots definitely “exploits the versatility of the film medium.” My favorite production number in this style is “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” in which Mostel, Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers and Michael Hordern sing about the joys of domestic help. The vaudeville-style production number consists of dozens of shots of the veteran comedians hamming it up in front of various Roman structures and ruins. Low-brow humor meets high-brow history. However, all of the musical montages aren’t this fun or clever. The love song “Lovely,” sung by Michael Crawford and Annette Andre over shots of them running through a field, looks a bit too much like a TV commercial.

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I was surprised to learn of the caliber of talent who worked on either the play or the film. The play had been penned by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, creator and head writer for the TV series M*A*S*H. Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for the production numbers. Gelbart did not end up adapting his work for the big screen, and he was critical of the movie because much of his original libretto had been rewritten. Respected screenwriter Melvin Frank (White Christmas [1954], The Court Jester [1956], A Touch of Class [1973]) cowrote the adaption with Michael Pertwee. Nicolas Roeg was the cinematographer, and his bright, high-key lighting made the costumes with their primary colors pop off the screen. The cast of veteran stage and screen comedians delivered their lines with that exquisite comic timing associated with vaudeville and old-school showbiz.

Gelbart and Shevelove deserve praise for basing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on the work of ancient Roman playwright Plautus, who penned farces about Roman life during the Republic. Forum combines two plays by Plautus: Pseudolus is a play about a slave who helps his master’s son retrieve the girl of his dreams, a prostitute sold to another buyer and Miles Gloriosus tells the story of a pompous soldier. Some of the names in Forum were taken directly from Plautus, including Lycus, Pseudolus, which means “faker,” and Miles Gloriosus, or “boastful soldier.” Gelbart and Shevelove then piggyback on the playwright’s use of farcical names: The young, handsome lead is called Hero, while the courtesan he falls for is Philia, which is Greek for “love.” Pseudolus’s master is Senex, which is Latin for “old man;” Senex is henpecked by his wife Domina, a name perilously close to “dominate.” The anxiety-ridden slave played by Jack Gilford is called Hysterium (that is, hysterical), while the peripatetic father played by Buster Keaton is Erronius (meaning “wandering,” plus he is always wrong). Some of the best names are given to the courtesans: Tintinabula wears tiny bells that jingle when she moves; Panacea is good for what ails you; Vibrata jiggles when she moves; and Gymnasia is an athletic girl in scanty attire.

FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, A

Noted production designer Tony Walton must have done extensive research into ancient Rome. Each set design echoes Roman architecture and art. The walls in and around Senex’s villa resemble the frescoes of Pompeii. There are four phases of Roman fresco painting. In Forum, the paintings resemble those from the second period in which the images were designed to suggest there were no walls at all. In other words, scenes of gardens and cityscapes were painted onto walls and framed in architectonic features such as columns or windows as though the viewer were looking out onto a vista. During “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” the group dances across the top of an aqueduct, which looks like the Pont du Gard famous for its precisely constructed Roman arches. Miles Gloriosus (Leon Greene) bursts into the city through a triumphal arch, befitting his overblown ego. My favorite art history reference is the marble bust of nagging wife Domina (Patricia Jessel), who is taking the sculpture to her mother to use at her funeral. It is as ugly as Domina herself, but the ugliness is actually historically accurate. The Roman interest in realism, called verism, was manifested in funerary busts commissioned by the patrician class to commemorate members of their families. The goal was to make the busts look exactly like the subject, with every wrinkle or flaw included. After the person died, the bust was carried to the funeral. In the case of Domina, her prominent nose and hardened expression are perfectly captured in the bust, which is the object of humor in several gags.

Hmmmm! I wonder if I can show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to represent Roman art the next time I teach art history.

Susan Doll

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The End of the Affair: Cynara (1932)

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To view Cynara click here.

Ronald Colman signed as a contract player with the Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1924, cranking out heart-tugging romances all the way through the transition to sound, as in the 1932 production Cynara. A particularly “adult” pre-code drama, it frankly discusses extramarital affairs and suicide in a tone of disarming directness. Adapted from a hit play, Goldwyn wanted faithfulness to the material, though director King Vidor and writer Frances Marion sought ways to make this stage scenario more cinematic. The resulting film leads one to think that Goldwyn won most of the battles, as it is ends up as a very well-acted filmed play, though Vidor does find ways to be inventive at the edges. Ronald Colman, in his penultimate performance for Goldwyn, plays against type as a boring barrister who falls into an affair with a young shopgirl. He is no great lover, as he portrayed in a series of hit silents with Vilma Banky, but a nervous, guilt-ridden, self-flagellating one. Colman wasn’t happy with the film because it clashed with his established persona, but that is what makes the film so fascinating today.

Cynara originated in Robert Gore-Brown’s 1928 novel An Imperfect Lover, which was adapted into the play Cynara, a stage success in 1930. Goldwyn was in a perpetual search for quality material to funnel Colman into, wanting to build off of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931), which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The search lasted for months, and was so consuming that one evening, according to Harpo Marx, he visited the Goldwyn home to find their son Sammy reading the funny pages. Harpo asked what he was doing, and Sammy responded, “I’m looking for a Ronald Colman story, Mr. Marx.” With its suggestive subject matter and stage pedigree, Goldwyn eventually settled on Cynara as Colman’s next film, and lined up Vidor and Marion as his directing and writing time, fresh off of their triumph The Champ (1931). Marion agreed to do the job on one condition – that Goldwyn hire Lois Weber to assist in the adaptation. Weber, one of the pioneering female directors of the silent era, had fallen on hard times, and hadn’t worked on a film in five years, taking on a job as an apartment manager to make a living. Goldwyn agreed to the arrangement, both respecting Weber’s accomplishments and wanting Marion on the job.

Told in flashback as a confession from the misleadingly named barrister Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) to his wife Clemency (Kay Francis), Cynara is an apologia for male infidelity. Jim is a homebody whose horny old bachelor pal John Tring (Henry Stephenson) is always encouraging Jim to join him on extra-curricular outings. So when Clemency goes on an impromptu trip to Venice with her sister, Tring encourages Jim to explore the London nightlife, specifically its women. One night at an Italian restaurant, they run into two shopgirls named Doris (Phyllis Barry) and Milly (Viva Tattersall). Milly uses the flirtation as an excuse to enjoy Tring’s money, but Doris falls for Jim’s awkward sincerity, and concocts a plan to meet up with him again at a swimming exhibition that Jim would be judging. Jim tears up a note with Doris’s address, and in a beautiful transition, Vidor dissolves from the bits of torn-up note to pigeons flying in Venice, connecting Jim’s two loves in a poetic bit of montage. Despite his seemingly abiding love for Clemency, Jim begins a whirlwind affair with Doris, which ends just as abruptly when Clemency arrives home early. The whole affair ends in tragedy, threatening Jim’s marriage and the entire life he had built up until that point.

CYNARA, from left: Phyllis Barry, Ronald Colman, 1932

Though the film is centrally focused on Jim and Clemency’s marriage, it finds time to give the shopgirl’s perspective – showing how Doris doesn’t have the same societal protections as Jim’s upper-class bubble. Milly repeatedly warns her about how working class girls are tossed away by men like Jim, but Doris refuses to hear it. She is in love, and pays the price. It is unclear how much influence Weber had on the script, but she dealt with the double-standard between married men and single women in the fallout of an affair in films like What Do Men Want? (1921) and Shoes (1916). That double standard definitely applies in Cynara,for while Jim’s reputation is tarnished, he is still free to make a new life wherever he’d like, whereas Doris is jobless and spiraling into depression.

The most thrilling scenes in the film occurs when Jim and Tring deign to visit the blue-collar district – there is a remarkable sequence set inside a movie theater showing Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918). Vidor has a camera boom swoop from the back of the theater down to the front, capturing the full-body laughter of an audience losing its mind to Chaplin’s antics. In a clumsy if effective visual metaphor, Chaplin shoves a dog down his pants to sneak into a dance hall, and the animal pokes through Chaplin’s pants, causing some awkward encounters. It is after this that Doris takes Jim’s hand in hers, and for the first time Jim exhibits what looks like lust. The sequence presents a Chaplin short as an erotic experience, both for the other revelers laughing their heads off in full body convulsions, and Jim and Doris, who find the film’s loosening of social codes a way to free themselves from their guilt, and towards their disastrous affair.

R. Emmet Sweeney

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A Chilly Early Christmas: L’assassinat du Père Noël (1941)

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To view L’assassinat du Père Noël click here

First of all, let it be said that this film has one of my all-time favorite opening credit sequences. It’s almost a lost art these days how much impact you can have on an audience the first time they see a film’s title blasted on a theatrical screen stretching from floor to ceiling, and the one here is just killer. Sure, it’s always cool to see the words Gone with the Wind (1939) scrolling across in huge letters or Star Wars (1977) blasting in your face with the full John Williams musical treatment, but there’s something about the opening minute or so of L’assassinat du Père Noël (1941) that really grabs you by the throat as a lurching figure carrying a sack loaded with gifts stumbles to the camera in moody lighting, his hood and beard picking up an eerie glow from behind as he gets closer to the camera. It’s both sinister and charming, a perfect opener for a film that mixes those two qualities in great abundance. I don’t care if Woody Allen’s been recycling that same black background and Windsor font for decades now in his opening credits; I’m a sucker for a riveting curtain raiser like this, and hopefully you are, too.

So, chances are you’re still wondering, what the heck is L’assassinat du Père Noël (or as it was originally released in English, Who Killed Santa Claus?, or more literally, The Murder of Father Christmas)? Well, superficially it’s a stylish, highly engrossing murder mystery set in a snow-laden French town in the Alps where the children, called potential “dunces and duncettes” by their politically leftist schoolteacher, are overjoyed to be out for the holidays. That spirit is shared by the older townspeople, but intrigue is afoot when a mysterious, black-gloved Baron has made his delayed return to town and claims to be suffering from leprosy. Crime soon rears its head as the holidays approach, ranging from a mugging and stolen ring to the murder of someone dressed in a Santa Claus outfit. The dead man first appears to be the town’s beloved globe maker, but something stranger and even more nefarious could be afoot.

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That may sound fairly straightforward, and on a superficial level, this film is quite fun in the same vein as René Clair’s exceptional And Then There Were None four years later. However, since this is currently running in the FilmStruck theme “Sold Out! Films Made during the Occupation of France,” there’s obviously more going on here. In fact, this film is most often discussed by European film critics (or a very tiny handful of American ones) for its status as the first feature to be shot and released under the Vichy government, which makes it tempting to read a resistance message into nearly every single line of dialogue and plot twist. Adding to the strangeness is the fact that the opening logos include Continental Films, a German-financed production company that kept a close eye on the content of its films. That’s a rocky set of circumstances for any film artist to spin into gold, but that certainly did happen over the course of the company’s five-year existence with little classics like this, Le main du diable (1943) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942) and Le corbeau (1943) (perhaps the most legendary example of anti-collaboration cinematic subterfuge).

So where does that leave this film? It doesn’t seem to tweak the noses of the Nazis with intellectual references as much as some of its peers; instead what we have is a film that emphasizes culture, perception and just plain old smarts as forces greater than any criminal undertakings simmering within a society. The church is one bedrock element here tied visually throughout to the youngest generation (“The children will guide us” is one key line), which could be extended to the Christmastime setting as well with its implications of annual celebration and union among the townspeople. It’s interesting to see just how dark Christmas became during and just after World War II, with films like Robert Siodmak’s misleadingly titled dark noir Christmas Holiday (1944) and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) painting more anguished takes on the holiday season than what you’d find a decade later. Even the first British horror film allowed to be made after the war, Dead of Night (1945), had to put a chilling Christmas smack in the center of one of its stories.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call this a creepy Christmas film, but it comes really close at times (like in those aforementioned opening credits). A sequence with two young boys wandering through snowdrifts at dusk calling out for Father Christmas is otherworldly in its delicate lighting and desolate setting, and the sight of villagers dancing hysterically in circles with flashing tinsel around one particularly distraught character isn’t exactly the kind of thing to put you in the holiday spirit. The effective use of young characters here is undeniably the trademark of director Christian-Jaque, a prolific director who remained active until 1985 with crowd-pleasing entertainments like The Legend of Frenchie King (1971) and the beloved Fan-Fan the Tulip (1952). However, it’s his earlier, more stylized output that really fascinates today like this film’s closest cinematic cousin, Les disparus de St. Agil (1938), known in English as Boys’ School. Both of these films were nearly impossible to see in good condition or even any kind of English-friendly versions for decades after their initial theatrical runs in the U.S., and in fact, I never had a chance to see either of them until Pathé undertook complete restorations of both and gave them English-subtitled Blu-ray and DVD releases in France. It was a real treat to discover both of them this way, but now you lucky folks can watch Christian-Jaque’s unique, potent Christmas mystery right here without having to worry about any disc importing or region code checking. December may still be a month or so away, but you can still pop this one on late at night and settle in for a night of stylish, moody entertainment with more than a bit of historical value.

Nathaniel Thompson

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StreamLine welcomes an open dialogue with our readers and we encourage you to comment below, but we ask that all comments be respectful of our writers, readers, viewers, etc., otherwise we reserve the right to delete them.

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