The
film noir movement/trend in Hollywood was fading away by the end of the
1950s decade. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is often cited by film
historians and film noir aficionados as the “last true film noir.”
However, one picture released in 1959 could very well take that honor,
for it indeed exhibits many of the traits of pure film noir (black and
white photography, gritty realism, cynical and edgy characters, a heist,
and an ending that is, well, not a happy one).
Odds
Against Tomorrow was set up by actor and musician Harry Belafonte and
was made by his production company. Is it the first film noir with a
Black protagonist? This reviewer can’t think of another that preceded
it. Basing it on a novel by William P. McGivern, Belafonte hired
blacklisted Abraham Polonsky to write the screenplay. Polonsky (who had
written the great Body and Soul, 1947) had been caught up in the HUAC
investigations in Hollywood, refused to testify in the hearings, and was
subsequently blacklisted along with many other writers, producers,
directors, and actors. Polonsky, working with co-writer Nelson Gidding,
wrote the script under a front-pseudonym, John O. Killens, a living
Black novelist. It wasn’t until 1996 that the Writers Guild restored
Polonsky’s real name to the credits.
Belafonte
apparently had wanted to make a movie that was not only a gripping heist
drama but also a statement about prejudice. Of the trio of robbers who
attempt a bank robbery in the film, one is Black (Belafonte), the other
two are White, and one of the latter is terribly racist… a factor that
plays into how the caper ultimately plays out.
New York
City. Dave Burke (Ed Begley) is a disgraced former cop who needs money.
Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) is an embittered, racist war veteran and
ex-con who needs money. Johnny Ingram (Belafonte) is a musician in debt
to a gangster because of a gambling addiction, so he needs money, too.
Slater lives with needy Lorry (Shelley Winters, in one of her whiny
roles) but he has the hots for apartment building neighbor Helen (Gloria
Grahame). Johnny is separated from his wife, Ruth (Kim Hamilton) and
daughter Edie, but he desperately wants to make good and reunite the
family. When Dave learns about an upstate smalltown bank with a
vulnerability, he enlists Earl and Johnny in a scheme to steal $150,000,
split three ways. Johnny doesn’t want to do it, but the pressure from
the mobster and threats to his family force him into it. Earl is not
happy that a Black man is part of the plan, and this tension is a major
conflict in the heist proceedings. To reveal more would spoil the
excitement.
Robert Wise, a filmmaker who seemed to be
able to make a great film out of any genre, is at the helm, and he does a
terrific job. He had worked with Ryan before in the film noir, The
Set-Up (1949). Wise, of course, won Oscars for directing The Sound of
Music (1965) and co-directing West Side Story (1961), but also made such
diverse classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Haunting
(1963), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)!
This
is an intense, engaging picture that generates suspense and has
something to say. The script is top-notch, and the performances are
heightened just enough to fit firmly into the film noir style. The
music, composed by John Lewis and performed by the Modern Jazz Quartet,
is phenomenally good, adding another level to the tone and feel of the
movie.
Kino Lorber Studio Classics’ new Blu-ray
presentation is sharp and clean in glorious black and white. There is an
accompanying audio commentary by author/film historian Alan K. Rode.
Supplements include Post Screening Q&A interviews with Harry
Belafonte (in 2009) and Kim Hamilton (in 2007), plus the theatrical
trailer for this and other Kino Lorber film noir titles.
Odds
Against Tomorrow is for fans of film noir, heist movies, Robert Wise,
Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, and other members of the sparkling cast.
Highly recommended.
RETRO-ACTIVE: MEMORABLE ARTICLES FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES
By
Hank Reineke
In September of 2021 I attended Manhattan’s Quad Cinema screening
of Thomas Hamilton’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster.As a life-long fan of the actor - and the
owner of dozens of books examining the actor’s career in film, stage and radio
- this was the sort of career-spanning appraisal I was hoping to someday
see.Then, only a few weeks following
that theatrical screening, Cinema Retro
was provided a stream of the doc for critical review.This enabled me to watch the film a second
time, revisiting bits of commentary I had missed or recalled only hazily.At the time the stream was provided to Cinema Retro, it was still uncertain if Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster
would be offered on physical media.That
question was answered in October 2022 when the film became available as a two-disc
combo Blu ray/DVD set from Voltage Films/Abramorama.
In the sixteen-page booklet that’s included in the set, director
Hamilton advises both he and scripter Ronald MacCloskey originally envisioned
their Karloff doc as a bold “4-hour, 2-part film or a 6 part miniseries.”They certainly had enough material to do so,
with a reported 60+ hours of interviews involving no fewer than fifty-five
subjects.And, that sixty hours of
recorded interviews, of course, didn’t include the footage gleaned from
Karloff’s fabled filmography.
While you’re not going to find some sixty-odd hours of
extras on this release,the set does suggest that it offers an expanded
director’s cut (titled on packaging - but not on the film itself - as Boris Karloff: The Rest of the Story).This is a bit curious.The version screened theatrically at the Quad
ran 103 minutes – at least as per its billing at the cinema.The
Rest of the Story disc runs one hour and forty-three minutes.Which, if my math skills haven’t failed,
equals the same 103 minutes of running time.
Of course the new set does feature two additional bonus
selections.The first, Meeting Boris Karloff, is, truthfully,
not a terribly essential addition, but not uninteresting.It’s an offering of fourteen minutes of interview/commentary
by three figures a bit tangential to Karloff’s legend.Of the trio, author and film historian Kevin
Brownlow shares his reminisce of his November 1964 interview with Karloff.He recalls Karloff as an interesting
interviewee – one who wasn’t remiss to take issue or correct erroneous information
found in the press clippings Brownlow had collected.But he noted Karloff always challenged misinformation
in a gentlemanly manner.
Andrew Pratt, described as a “great nephew” of the actor,
then shyly recounts his one and only meeting with his great uncle.He credits that meeting as inspiration to
pursue a career in film art direction – a career that would earn him a number
of nominations and awards from the Academy, BAFTA, and the Art Directors
Guild.The last subject interviewed was
Anthony Bilbow, a television host of BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up. His only real connection to Karloff was when
the actor was a guest on the program, September of 1968.He recalls Karloff as a gentleman kind and
warm, modest and self-effacing – but not in a “counterfeit” sort of way.
The final bonus feature of the set is a three-minute
interview with the co-scriptwriter of Boris
Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster, Ron MacCloskey.This New Jersey-based writer and comedian
fell under Karloff’s spell at age seven, having caught Frankenstein on a late night TV telecast.A collector of Frankenstein memorabilia,
MacCloskey’s interest in Karloff’s work proved lifelong and ultimately led to
his teaming with director Thomas Hamilton to start shooting this documentary in
2018.
If the doc itself is truly an expanded version of the original,
it doesn’t really change or radically alter anything presented in the
theatrical cut.I’m more than willing to
stand corrected if indeed, the doc is offered here in an expanded form.My frame-by-frame memories of those 2021
screenings are all a bit hazy now, so I can’t say with any certainty if extra
footage/commentary was included.But, if
you missed it the first time, I’ll tack on my original “streaming” review of
October of 2021.I very much enjoyed the
doc on its original run and my opinion of its merit has not changed at all.Read on, should you wish:
There’s a telling moment at the dénouement of Thomas
Hamilton’s and Ron MacCloskey’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: The Man behind the Monster.Sara Karloff, the now eighty-two year old daughter
of the beloved actor, opines that her father’s lasting cinematic legacy is due,
in part, to the tenaciousness of his devoted fan base.It’s a demographic that we soon discover
consists of a number of amazingly creative people: folks whose loyalty to and
enthusiasm for Karloff’s work has not wavered over the decades.Sara’s contention is inarguably true.As this ninety-nine minute Voltage
Films/Abramorama documentary unspools – crisply narrated by Paul Ryan and
featuring commentary by preeminent Karloff scholar and “Biographical
Consultant” Stephen Jacobs - we discover the actor’s admirer’s bridge several
generations of fans and filmmakers.
The first generation to discover Karloff in the decades
following his big splash as the Frankenstein monster in 1931, include directors
Roger Corman and Peter Bogdanovich.Both
men would have the opportunity and honor to work with the actor in his twilight
years.The second generation of admirers
were those introduced to Karloff via neighborhood cinema screenings or through
television broadcasts of Shock Theater
in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
These filmmakers, profoundly influenced by Karloff’s art,
would go on to create a few cinematic gems of their own:John Landis, Joe Dante, and Guillermo Del
Toro, to name a few.The latter
gentleman is particularly effusive in his praise, describing Karloff’s
performance as the vampiric Wurdalak
in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath as a
“tremendous” example of the great actor’s “physical presence, his majesty, his
demonic power.”
If the documentary is chock-full of talented filmmakers offering
tributes, the film is also supported by the erudite commentaries of film
scholars David J. Skal (The Monster Show:
a Cultural History of Horror), Gregory W. Mank (Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: the Expanded Story of a Haunting
Collaboration), Donald F. Glut (The
Frankenstein Legend: a tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff), Sir
Christopher Frayling (Frankenstein: the
first Two Hundred Years), and critic Leonard Maltin.
There are also short tributes and reminisces by several
actors – three now gone - who had worked with Karloff at some point in their
career: Dick Miller (The Terror),
Christopher Plummer (The Lark, Even the Weariest River), Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers), and Orson Bean (Arsenic and Old Lace).Karloff’s tells part of his own story through
audio recordings made available to the filmmakers courtesy of the British cinema
historian/author Kevin Brownlow (The
Parades Gone By…) and the Pacifica Radio Archive.
It has long annoyed me that when one searches out the
term “Boris Karloff” in the ever-expanding IMDB, the resulting prompt
identifies the actor’s signature film as The
Grinch that Stole Christmas (1966).My daughters would remind me that my personal agitation of this result is,
by definition, a “first world” problem, one hardly worthy of condemnation.But as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman for four
decades, seeing Karloff’s storied career reduced to a role featuring only his
disembodied voice as the Grinch… Well, let’s just say that I still find it somewhat
misleading and inappropriate.
Be that as it may, Hamilton’s film reminds Karloff
himself might disagree with my wariness of the Grinch being bandied as the
cinematic crown jewel of the actor’s legacy.Sara Karloff recalls receiving a phone call from her father immediately
following his recording of the narration for that beloved Dr. Seuss vehicle.The actor we learn was profoundly happy with
his work on the now-famous animated holiday classic, telling his daughter
proudly, “I’ve done something which I think is pretty good.”
Karloff would pass away a couple of years following the
first broadcast of The Grinch that Stole
Christmas, but he worked to the very end of his days, appearing in a number
of memorable – and a few less-than-memorable – films, several of which would see
release in years following his passing.His last films were little more than cameo-length appearances shot on a
Hollywood sound stage.It was director
Jack Hill’s idea to take the Karloff footage from these shoots and blend the
results into a series of Mexican horror films.
Karloff, rightly and proudly, would choose to refer to
his spell-binding turn as the semi-autobiographical aging horror film actor Byron
Orlok in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968)
as his feature film swan song.Technically,
it wasn’t.But the brief appearances in that
post- Target series of Hollywood-Mexico
co-production mash-ups were mostly an excuse for an old pro to continue to ply
his trade and keep busy.But working
oxygen-tank dependent and wheelchair bound on the Jack Hill-directed sequences,
Karloff was prevented from doing much of anything with the already somewhat
cut-and-paste material given to him.
Karloff, of course, was not the only “horror film” star
of the genre’s celebrated Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s. Karloff, we learn, was actually not happy with
the designation “horror movie”, much preferring his films to be termed as
“thrillers” or “shock” pictures. His contemporary competitor as grand ghoul of
the horror film - one whose own legacy would burn bright into the next century -
was Bela Lugosi.Although Lugosi had too
often played second-fiddle to Karloff in matters of employment and billing, the
Hungarian’s post-mortem fame may have eclipsed his friend’s star over the last few
decades.
For starters, Lugosi’s sad and lurid dependency on morphine
and alcohol in his final years made him the subject of tabloid fodder, and
gossip then – and now – still rules.Lugosi’s
slow demise coupled with his appearances in several of Edward J. Wood’s revered
cult films brought him a big degree of post-mortem fame.A brand new generation would discover the
actor through Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning turn as Lugosi in Tim Burton’s
semi-biographical drama Ed Wood.
To be fair, Lugosi’s string of mad performances in Wood’s
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Glen or Glenda (1953) are, in many ways,
were no less better or worse or more undistinguished than Karloff’s walk-ons in
the creaky Jack Hill/Mexi-horror films of spring 1968. Though both sets of films are passably
entertaining in their own uneven, cult-ish ways, both actor’s cinematic exits
were ignoble ends to these two great men who famously made audiences shiver in
1931.
James Whale’s Frankenstein
would ultimately transform Karloff into a full-fledged movie star, but it had
been a long road to achieving such fame.The actor had been working on various Hollywood backlots since the
silent era.In the course of his
earliest silent film efforts – beginning with such titles as The Lightning Raider (1919) and His Majesty, the American (1919) – he
worked as little more than an extra.His
subsequent fame would cause a score of budding film historians to carefully
survey battered old prints of Karloff’s earliest filmography in the often
futile hope of catching a glimpse as he passed by the camera.
In truth, his decade-long career as a silent film actor
was mostly non consequential.He would
appear in approximately sixty or so silent films between 1919 and 1929.He would, on occasion, be gifted a role of
some heft, most notably as that of “The Mesmerist” in The Bells (1926) opposite Lionel Barrymore, but he was most often
cast in adventure-orientated serials as a heavy, or as a Hindu, Mexican or an Arab,
a mystic or a general ne’er-do-well.
It was his casting as the sadistic “Galloway” in Howard
Hawk’s sound prison drama The Criminal
Code (1930) that brought him to the attention of Universal executives
looking to cast a suitably cadaverous-appearing actor as the Frankenstein
monster.Following Lugosi’s rejection of
the part due to the absence of dialogue afforded, Bela’s pass on the role was
fortuitous for Karloff.He was still hungry
and looking for that big break.Although
the role of the monster would forever typecast him, the actor remained forever
grateful for having taking the role in Frankenstein,
once describing the career door-opening creature as “the best friend I ever
had.”
It’s not hard to see why Karloff’s portrayal of the
monster remains the preeminent of the Universal series.He was, after all, the only actor to have
been given the opportunity to actually act and emote, to bring a sense of pathos
to the role.He was abetted, of course,
by Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up which, rather than masking, cannily sculpted
and made highlight of Karloff’s facial features and sunken cheeks.This gave the monster, according to one of
the participants in the documentary, a “full expression range.”The trio of actors who would subsequently
portray the monster in the Universal series simply weren’t given the
opportunity to apply any emotive effect of their own.Even by Son
of Frankenstein (1939), the third film in the series, the screenwriters had
already reduced the monster into little more than a hulking, lumbering menace
and henchman.
It is discouraging to learn that when Frankenstein had its gala premiere in
the autumn of 1931, Karloff was not even invited to attend.He was already forty-four years of age when
he assumed the role, a no-name celebrity and hardly a handsome matinee idol of
any recognition.The unexpected
phenomenal success of Frankenstein
would change all that, and Universal was quick to capitalize on the actor’s
sudden notoriety as Hollywood’s most beloved boogeyman.Karloff’s natural proclivity for taking on
roles of menacing villainous characters with icy stares would allow his casting
into a string of Golden Age horror classics – not only for Universal but for
other studios as well, including memorable turn in MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu.The
latter remains a great, entertaining film… if undeniably one of the most
politically-incorrect lavish big studio productions of the 1930s.
When the market for horror films softened in the
mid-1940s – thanks, in part, due to the horror genre’s continuing perceived transgressions
of the Hays Code - Karloff easily transitioned to character roles, where,
according to his daughter, her father’s natural “dark coloring,” permitted him
to slip easily into “ethnic roles.”As
one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, he was able to exercise his
freelance status by working for, amongst others, RKO, Columbia, Monogram, and
Warner Bros.
Another avenue of opportunity had presented itself around
this same time.In 1941 Karloff was
lured, against his better judgement according to this film, to take on the Broadway
role of the villainous Jonathan Brewster in Joseph L. Kesselring’s stage play Arsenic and Old Lace.It was to his life-long disappointment that a
clause in his theatrical stage contract prevented his returning to Hollywood –
as did several fellow members of the original Broadway cast – to reprise the
role for the much beloved Frank Capra film adaptation of 1944.
Though initially frightened to work in theatre before a
live audience, the success of Arsenic
emboldened Karloff to accept several other roles in such Broadway productions as
The Lark (with Julie Harris), The Linden Tree, The Shop at Sly Corner, and even in a memorable turn as Captain
Hook in a 1950 production of Peter Pan.Fortunately, we of a certain age who missed
out still can get a small taste of what we missed since kinescopes survive from
early Hallmark Hall of Fame
broadcasts of the original production of The
Lark and a 1961 re-staging of Arsenic
and Old Lace.
Though Karloff’s work in radio is mostly ignored in this
documentary, the film does take pains to point out that he was among the first
movie stars of his generation to fully embrace television.Though he would often appear in serious
televisions drams for such programs as Texaco
Star Theater or Playhouse 90, he
was not above spoofing his own curious fame as Hollywood’s grandest ghoul on
any number of variety programs hosted by the likes of Red Skelton or Dinah
Shore.
(Stefanie Powers and Robert Vaughn with Karloff in "The Mother Muffin Affair" on "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." (Photo: Cinema Retro Archives)
In the 1960s, he would famously host (and occasionally
act) in episodes of the television program Thriller,
or appear in drag as “Mother Muffin” in an episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E – or with former U.N.C.L.E. agent Robert
Vaughn in the spy-film The Venetian
Affair (1966).Joe Dante also
references the series of wonderful long-playing albums Karloff would record
over the years, his unmistakable, lisping voice introducing children to a wonderful
selection of folk tales, ghost stories, Washington Irving classics, and
time-worn fables.
Boris
Karloff: the Man behind the Monster reminds us that the actor (1887-1969)
accomplished a lot in his eighty-one-years, a large percentage of which would
encompass appearances on screen, on stage, on air, on record, and on
television.To their credit, the
filmmakers share what they can in the constraint of the film’ ninety-nine
minute running time, and the film certainly succeeds as an excellent
primer.Karloff wonks like myself might
hold out hope that a multi-part, Ken Burns-style series might someday be put
into the works, but I imagine that’s unlikely.One hundred and thirty four years have passed since Karloff’s birth.The fact that contemporary audiences remain completely
entranced by his filmography in 2021 is testament enough to the worthiness of
this loving tribute painting him as one of Hollywood’s greatest.
William Holden, Grace Kelly and Mickey Rooney star in James
A. Michener’s Korean War drama, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” released on Blu-ray by
Kino Lorber. Holden is Lieutenant Harry Brubaker, a lawyer and Naval Reservist
called to active duty during the Korean War. The film opens in November 1952
where we meet Brubaker returning to the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Savo
Island off the coast of Korea. He ends up ditching his plane in the ocean after
running out of fuel and is rescued from the icy waters. Mickey Rooney gives a
memorable performance as Chief Petty Officer Mike Forney, the helicopter pilot who
rescues Brubaker from the ocean. Forney wears an unauthorized addition to his
uniform, a green top hat and matching scarf, when flying. He also likes to
brawl while on shore leave due to girlfriend problems. Earl
Holliman plays Nestor Gamidge, the rescue man who assists in getting the
pilots into the helicopter and brawling with Mike.
Brubaker is a good pilot and WWII veteran who’s resentful
because his civilian life was disrupted by the recall for the Korean War. He
starts to question his abilities as a pilot after ditching his plane and is
nervous about an upcoming bombing mission. Grace Kelly plays his wife, Nancy
Brubaker, who surprises her husband by visiting Japan with their children which
casts additional doubts on Brubaker’s ability to carry out dangerous missions.
Headquartered on the USS Savo Island, the naval task
force commander is Rear Admiral George Tarrant and is played by Fredric March.
Tarrant lost his sons during WWII and is filled with many regrets in life but
tries to change Brubaker’s mind about his career as a naval aviator.Rounding out the cast is Charles McGraw as
Commander Wayne Lee, the fighter wing commander, who leads the climactic
assault on the bridges. Robert Strauss is
Lieutenant “Beer Barrel,” and Willis Bouchey as Captain Evans.There’s also an uncredited bit role by Dennis Weaver as the mission briefing
officer.
The movie is divided into three parts. We meet the
members of the carrier crew in part one. The middle section features shore
leave in Japan where we meet Mrs. Brubaker and the Brubaker’s two young
daughters. There’s also some shore leave drama involving Forney and Nestor
which shows Brubaker’s dedication to these men. The final part of the movie
involves the bombing mission at Toko-Ri which pays off beautifully.
The movie features great use of United States Navy
resources as the bulk of the film takes place on the deck of the carrier USS
Essex with extensive use of the F9F Panther and shots of the carrier task
force. The use of actual United States Navy ships and aircraft rather than
models is an essential part of the authenticity of this movie. Michener himself
spent time on board the USS Essex gathering research for what would become the
short novel, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” which was released in 1953. That
experience by Michener was made into the MGM release, “Men of the Fighting Lady,”
with Michener played by Louis Calhern. That movie was released in May 1954, a
few months prior to the premier of “Toko-Ri.”
Holden gives one of his typical cynical performances
which he was great at doing, especially in such films as “Sunset Blvd,” “Stalag
17” and later in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “The Horse Soldiers.” He’s
not quite so cynical in this film and gives a great performance as
Brubaker. Grace Kelly isn’t given much to do other than looking beautiful as
the dutiful wife with kids in tow, but she’s important in sealing her husband’s’
doubts. All her scenes were filmed on studio sets in Hollywood with someone
doubling for her in long shots in the location scenes. I think Rooney gives the
standout performance as Mike Forney with the green top hat and scarf. Earl
Holliman is also good as Mike’s best friend and sidekick with Fredric March and
Charles McGraw good as the stoic and capable father figures. I wish Robert
Strauss’ comedic skills were put to greater use in the film, especially
considering he is fondly remembered in “Stalag 17” with Holden. There’s a side
story set up at the start and end of shore leave involving a set of golf clubs carried
by Beer Barrel that’s never explained.
The movie is directed by Mark Robson with a screenplay by
Valentine Davies. While Robson is not a name that rings bells, you certainly
know his movies which include “Peyton Place,” “The Prize,” “Von Ryan’s
Express,” “Valley of the Dolls” and “Earthquake” to name a few of his most well-known
movies. Robson started his career working uncredited as an assistant editor for
Orson Welles and eventually worked his way up to editor and director
culminating in several high-profile big budget movies. He died of a heart
attack in 1978 shortly after the completion of “Avalanche Express” which was
released the following year.
The score by Lyn Murray is serviceable and the on-location
shipboard filming adds great production value to the movie. The model work
depicting the crash landing scenes are very done as well. The film was released theatrically in December
1954 by Paramount. This Kino Lorber release looks and sounds better than ever. The
movie clocks in at 102 minutes and is presented in a widescreen aspect ratio
which resembles VistaVision, even though it isn’t, as the movie went into
production during the transition period when the process was still being perfected.
The Blu-ray release includes an outstanding audio commentary by film historians
Steve Mitchell and Steven J. Rubin as well as trailers for this and other Kino
Lorber releases. The movie is highly recommended for fans of Holden, Kelly,
Rooney and military drama.
"Author's Corner":
Cinema Retro invites authors to contribute a first-hand account of how they
were inspired to write their book. Our guest contributor today is Julian
Schlossberg, author of "Try Not to Hold It Against Me: A Producer's
Life" (Beaufort Books). (Click
here for Cinema Retro's review of the book.)
A producer had better be working on several things at the
same time. As they say, throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and
hope that some of it sticks. But in 2021, with the pandemic raging, nothing was
sticking. I felt the need to put all my projects on hold. So what is a producer
to do with all of that free time and energy? He looks back. He
shares stories. Prior to that, whenever I would share some anecdote
related to my sixty years in show business, I was often asked “are you
writing a book?” I had always answered truthfully that I was too
busy. Well, now, with the pandemic, busy, I wasn’t. So I sat down and
wrote just one chapter. It was a story I had told for years and that had
made my wife Merryn laugh, even though she had heard me tell it countless
times. I then wrote another. And another. I would read each new
chapter to Merryn and two women who are my frequent collaborators and, have
become, like sisters to me, Marlo Thomas and Elaine May. These three
women were very important to my process. Eventually Elaine would
contribute the foreword to my book.
The past started flooding back and I found myself
downloading incidents I had forgotten. The more I wrote, the more I
began to realize that I had many reasons for bring my story to the page. In
looking back, I wanted to transport readers of my generation back to a time
that will never come again. I wanted to share my experiences with a younger
generation that might enjoy reading about a totally different world that once
existed. This was a time when there was only three television
networks. A time when people still dressed up to go to the movies
(especially if it was a musical!). A time when I thought I could do anything,
because I was still young and inexperienced enough to have not considered the
alternative.
(Photo: Julian Schlossberg).
Beyond the nostalgia, I knew that I wanted my story to entertain, and perhaps,
even inspire. Having produced movies, television and theater, I wanted to
write about my personal experiences working in all three mediums. I would
recount in some detail how a play, a movie and a television show is produced
from the ground up. I would share my experiences learning the trade from
the ground up, and recall my collaborations, encounters and, in some cases,
friendships with the likes of Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Shirley
MacLaine, Bruce Springsteen, Elia Kazan, Sid Caesar, Orson Welles, Al
Pacino, Burt Reynolds, Lillian Hellman, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack
Nicholson, Bob Hope, Ethan Coen, George Burns, Sid Caesar, Steve Allen,
Larry Gelbart and many others.
Just writing such a list humbles me, and looking back, I am still amazed by my
unexpected trajectory. When I was just starting out, I drove a taxi for a
living. To keep alert while picking up late night fares, I would listen
to comedy legends on the radio; talents like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Woody
Allen and Alan Arkin. I dreamed that I might one day meet them and tell them
how much I admired their talent. The fact that I ended up producing for
them, to this day, boggles my mind.
But before I became a producer, my first showbiz job was working at the ABC-TV
network. There, I decided to learn all I could about the entertainment
business. I didn’t have a medical, accounting or law degree. But I
knew knowledge was power, and if I could attain knowledge perhaps I could
attain some power. So I became my own kind of hyphenate. I was a TV
network executive—motion picture syndicator—V.P. of a theater chain— V.P. of a
major film studio—owner of a production and film distribution company.
And after that, my list of hyphenated job titles grew to include
producer—director—radio host—TV host—co-owner of a record company—talent
manager—producer representative—lecturer-teacher.
And, now, finally, I can say that I’m an author too. Who would have thought
that the cabbie from the Bronx would one day author a memoir titled Try
Not To Hold It Against Me – A Producer’s Life? Who’d have thought that
anyone would want to read it? Certainly not me. But with the book having
sold out on Amazon within days of its initial release, and a second printing on
order, I guess people are reading. I’m awe-struck and I couldn’t be more
pleased or grateful.
(Photo: Julian Schlossberg).
Since this is a cinema site, I’ll close with a memory that I include in the new
book. I describe my experience of working, distantly, with Martin
Scorsese and Federico Fellini. I close that particular chapter with this
recollection: “It meant a lot to me to present a Fellini film with
Scorsese. I was proud to be associated with both of them. But I
also knew how to answer the question often posed in elementary school tests,
‘which one doesn’t belong’.”
I suppose, despite my 60 years in
the business, I will always see myself as the kid from the Bronx who
wanted to get into show business …but try not to hold it against me.
(PR contact for Julian Schlossberg: Brett Oberman at
Keith Sherman & Associates: brett@ksa-pr.com)
This Kino Lorber 4K Restoration Blu ray of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is likely as
good as we’re going to get.Universal
Studio’s official 1923 program heralded Hunchback
as Hugo’s “Mighty Epic of a Mighty Epoch” and, truth be told, director Wallace Worsley’s
film never delivers less than promised. It is, above all, a spectacle. In August of
1922 when announced Universal-Jewel was to begin lensing the film, newspapers
reported it had been Lon Chaney’s “life’s ambition” to bring Hugo’s tale – and
the story of the novel’s titular tortured soul Quasimodo - to the big screen.
Chaney’s Hunchback
would not be the first cinematic adaptation of the famed 1831 novel.Esmeralda,
a ten-minute long French adaptation was brought to the screen as early as in
1905. Albert Capellani’s 1911 French
silent (Notre-Dame de Paris) would also
precede the Universal version, but that film too was a modest production running
a mere twenty-six minutes in length.The
first feature length-effort was Fox’s romantic The Darling of Paris (1917) featuring silent-screen-siren Theda
Bara.A British version of 1922 preceded
Chaney’s by only a year – though, again, only as a short of some thirteen
minutes.All but the 1911 version are
now presumed lost.
If Universal was not the first to bring the epic to the screen,
producer and studio co-founder Carl Laemmle promised a production unmatched in size
and scope.Universal would front a
budget of some $1,250,000, bringing in some 2800 artisans to work on the film’s
massive sets.The centerpiece was to be
the cathedral of Notre Dame, built practically to scale.Universal promised, “The cathedral at Notre Dame is an exact replica in every infinite
detail of the cathedral as it looked in 1482, an extraordinary feat and an
archeologic, historical and technical triumph.”
Such an ambitious project was going to require an
ambitious production team.In October of
1922, gossips whispered the studio was “anxious to have D.W. Griffith direct” Hunchback.On the surface, Griffith would seem a natural
choice.He had, after all, helmed such
pictures as Birth of a Nation (1915)
and Intolerance (1916), both showcase
spectacles of large scale and huge casts.In the end, Universal would announce, January 1923, that Worsley would
direct – with assists by “ten assistant directors and twenty-eight field
captains.”Worsley and Chaney already
had a good working relationship: the two having already combined their talents
on The Penalty, The Ace of Heartsand The
Blind Bargain. This new collaboration would spend six months in pre-production
and one year in filming.
Everything was crafted bigger-than-life. The make-up
appliances for Quasimodo, the film’s monstrous bell-ringer, were painstakingly crafted
by Chaney in a series of three-and-a-half hour sessions.The September 1923 issue of Pictures and Picturegoer magazine
enthused Chaney had promised “something even more startling than usual in the
way of make-up.” Alongside that of Erik, The
Phantom of the Opera (1925), the twisted and feral Quasimodo remains the
most iconic example of Chaney’s make-up artistry.
Biographer Michael F. Blake’s Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces (Vestal Press, 1990)
and A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique
Artistry in Motion Pictures (Vestal Press, 1995) remain the two most
essential reference books on the man and his films, but they weren’t the first.There were earlier “serious” circulating books
on the actor:Robert G. Anderson’s Faces, Forms Films: The Artistry of Lon
Chaney (1971) came first, N.L.
Ross’s Lon Chaney: Master Craftsman of
Make Believe following more than a decade later. That said, Blake’s sister
volumes remain the most reliable and error free sources of Chaney marginalia.Blake occasionally proffers stern judgements,
some fair and some maybe not so, on preceding Chaney biographers, but all books
mentioned above are worthwhile reads and contain excellent bibliographies.
Blake opens his 1995 study with the declaration “Lon
Chaney was not a “horror actor.”Though this is essentially true, Blake – who contributes
seven pages of booklet notes to this new Kino Blu – sighs the actor’s association
with the horror genre is terribly overblown.He argues this mistaken union was due to the actor’s famous ghastly
make-up creations.It’s doubtful the
audience of eleven and twelve year-olds who sought out these cheap newsprint monster
movie magazines of the 1950s and ‘60s had actually ever saw a Lon Chaney silent film.But the reproduced published stills would fire imaginations, giving
Chaney Sr. instant cult status as a “horror film” icon. At the very least, I think
it’s fair to say that the genre mags were instrumental in keeping Chaney’s
legend alive at a time when few other outlets were interested.
It was that way for me at least.I’m not sure when I first learned the name “Lon
Chaney.”But it was likely through
photographs or an article in the pages of Famous
Monsters of Filmland magazine.I had
become obsessed with Famous Monsters when
chancing upon a used copy of their May 1967 issue at a school “white elephant”
sale.The magazine sent me scouring the
listings in TV Guide in search of the
films I was first introduced to in the pages of “FM.”It was through Famous Monsters I was first introduced to silent films – many of which
I find even today to be as fascinating as any talkie.
In trying to learn about silent films, I discovered
Daniel Blum’s A Pictorial History of the
Silent Screen (1974) at my local library.It was an oversize hardcover held in the reference section.Since I couldn’t bring it home to read at leisure,
I spent hours in the library looking through the hundreds – maybe thousands of
stills – reproduced therein.My
knowledge of and interest in film history really began there.While combing through the pages for Chaney info
(there wasn’t a lot, if I recall), I discovered Chaplin, Keaton, Pearl White,
Fatty Arbuckle, the Keystone Cops and hundreds of others.
It was around this time I also managed to catch Robert
Youngson’s affectionate silent-era doc Days
of Thrills and Laughter on television.As with Blum’s book, I don’t believe Chaney, again to my great disappointment,
was even mentioned in the doc.Youngson’s
emphasis was mostly on the slapstick comedy of Charlie Chaplin, “Fatty”
Arbuckle,” Snub Pollard and Ben Turpin.Though
a rare, brief clip of Boris Karloff in King
of the Congo (1929) further fueled my interest in early cinema, Chaney –
frustratingly – would remain a man of mystery.
Knowing what I know now, the notoriously private and
reclusive actor – non-ceremoniously interred following his passing, age forty-seven,
in a Glendale sepulcher – would have likely preferred it that way.At age nine I finally had the opportunity to catch
Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
on WNET-13, Manhattan’s PBS-TV affiliate.Hunchback was the last title to
be featured on the network’s “The Silent Years” series (each segment introduced
by Orson Welles) in September of 1971.
OK, I apologize. I have digressed. I will also confess
it’s taken me quite some time to finally getting around to view this Kino issue
of Hunchback. I was gifted a copy
back in the autumn of 2021 but chose to put the Blu-ray aside – for the time
being, anyway.I had already planned to
attend a genuine film element screening of Hunchback
at a local cinema that October, one complete with live organ
accompaniment.That night, sadly, proved
to be a projection booth disaster.The
theater ran the last two reels in reverse so inter-titles appeared Cyrillic and
completely unreadable.God bless Ben
Model, the silent film historian/organist accompanying the program.He calmly and expertly navigated through this
maelstrom with amazing poise and finesse, salvaging what would have been
otherwise a completely disastrous evening.
There’s no point in discussing here the plot of Worsley’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It’s a
more-or-less faithful rendering of the Hugo novel.This is a century old film, one I find as
entertaining today as it was a hundred years ago.Yes, the acting often is – as was the order
of the day – visually exaggerated and overly emotive, but the story remains a
compelling one.The scenario really
revolves around Esmeralda, the soft-hearted street dancer, and not the tragic
Quasimodo.To his credit, Chaney – though
top-billed – recognizes this and admirably serves as an essential member of the
ensemble, not as the film’s principal player.
This Kino release has been cobbled together from the best
existing prints available, so there are temperature and tinting changes from
section to section.But it’s a beautiful
4K restoration and while surviving element damage is not totally absent, the
film looks remarkable all things considered.This edition also features a lively and original musical score.This new soundtrack is composed and performed
by Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum and Laura Karpman, both Julliard-trained artists and
the previous recipients of Grammy and Emmy Award nominations/victories.
Over this millennium, The
Hunchback of Notre Dame has been re-made on any number of occasions.The best recalled of these are RKO’s 1939
version featuring Charles Laughton or the French-Italian 1956 version featuring
Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida.Folks of my generation might better recall these two post-Chaney re-tellings,
especially if they have little interest in silent cinema.Younger folks were likely first introduced to
the tale via Disney’s 1996 animated musical adaptation – a film whose cartoon
Quasimodo most resembled Laughton’s pitiful, less grotesque caricature.Having said that, Chaney’s Quasimodo, despite
age, will forever remain the most iconic.
A few notes on this generous bonus materials supplied on
this set.Included is a vintage, silent Life in Hollywood newsreel that features
a birds-eye view of the massive Universal City lot, described on an inter-title
card as “the strangest city in the world.”Once on soil, we watch as a procession of Universal’s silent-era stars
and starlets’ parade out of a studio canteen.Most of these names are now sadly lost to the memory of all but a small cabal
of film historians.The newsreel,
running approximately eight and a half minutes in length features a small clip
of Chaney – sans costume and make-up - demonstrating a bit of acrobatics on the
exterior of the Notre Dame structure.
The set also features a thirteen-minute silent reel of
“Mabel and Bill Dumphy’s Visit with Hazel and Lon.”This is sourced from 16mm footage shot during
the couple’s visits with Chaney, his wife Hazel, and their wire-haired terrier
Sandy, at rest during the family’s residencies in Soboba Hot Springs and
Saratoga.The Soboba footage is
primarily interesting in its moody capture of the former’s Riverside County
hamlet’s Spanish mission-styled architecture and terraced landscapes.There’s not much Chaney in the Soboba
footage, aside from Lon looking out pensively over the hillside, or playfully
tugging at Sandy the dog’s tail in another.
The Saratoga footage documents additional glimpses of the
Chaneys at home.We watch as Chaney and
guests mill about a backyard garden, the reclusive actor letting down his guarded
reserve.We watch as Lon playfully
wrestles a giggling Hazel on the lawn or smoking and drinking with friends.The latter clip is of interest due to the recognizable
presence of Lon’s son, Creighton (strategically “re-christened” Lon Chaney Jr. following
his father’s passing), smiling as he too puffs away on a cigarette in the
background.The set also features an
audio-commentary track by Farran Smith Nehme, a film historian and critic whose
work has appeared in such publications as Film
Comment, The Wall Street Journal, Village Voice and New York Post.The set
rounds off with a generous gallery/slideshow of publicity materials and
production stills.
One hundred years following the date of its production,
Worsley’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
admittedly puts the “retro” in Cinema
Retro.But despite the film’s age,
its heart still beats soundly.Anyone
interested in film history should visit this film at least once in their
lifetime, and this Kino Blu-ray might just be the best conduit for one to do
just that.
In the star-studded, wildly erratic experience that is the 1967 big screen version of "Casino Royale", there is one oasis amidst the non-stop slapstick and zaniness. In this scene, noted expert gambler Evelyn Tremble (under the assumed name "James Bond"), played by Peter Sellers, engages SMERSH bigwig LeChiffre (Orson Welles) in a high stakes game of backgammon. Not shown in this clip is a preceding bit in which LeChiffre mesmerizes the bystanders by engaging in some marvelous feats of magic. (Welles was a noted magician in real life.) This is followed by an all-too brief interplay between Tremble and LeChiffre that actually approaches a level of seriousness not found elsewhere in the movie, which Bond fans either loathe or love. By the way, an observance of the scene shown here disproves the myth that Peter Sellers refused to ever be on camera with Welles, who he found intimidating. They are indeed seen in the same frame. However, it is true that Sellers' paranoia was in full bloom and he was resentful toward Welles because of his revered reputation and the idolization shown to him by the cast and crew. Sellers made it clear that he would not appear on set with Welles again. This left the production team with the awkward alternative of having to film closeups of Sellers that were shot when Welles wasn't on the set and vice-versa. Making matters worse, Sellers publicly insulted Welles, who responded in kind. Ultimately, producer Charles K. Feldman fired Sellers from "Casino Royale", which was probably what the mercurial actor had hoped for. This explains why his character is killed off and doesn't appear in the wacky, expensive battle royale inside Casino Royale. For all that, the film has plenty of merits: an amusing Woody Allen, a delightful David Niven as the real James Bond, the presence of the first "Bond girl", Ursula Andress, fantastic production design and a marvelous Burt Bacharach score and title theme song, played winningly by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. For more, click here.
Poor
Orson Welles. After the critical success but box office failure that was Citizen
Kane (1941), it seemed as though the “boy genius” could never again get his
ultimate vision on the screen when he was working in Hollywood. The studio
butchered his second picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), although
the version released is still pretty much a masterpiece and earned an Oscar
Best Picture nomination. Still, it didn’t make money. After that, Welles was persona
non grata in Hollywood, at least as a director. The studios were happy to
have him as an actor.
Nevertheless,
he continued to squeeze his way in and make more Hollywood pictures. He
produced, co-wrote, and acted in Journey Into Fear (1943), and the story
goes that he directed some of it uncredited (Norman Foster was the credited
director). Welles then made The Stranger (1946) as an attempt to prove
he could deliver a movie under budget and on time—and he did. The Stranger is
perhaps Welles’ most “conventional” motion picture and it made money.
Unfortunately, RKO (the studio that had made his previous three films) still
turned its back on Welles.
The
filmmaker’s next title, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), was made for
Columbia Pictures. Legend has it that Welles, who in 1946 was producing with
Mike Todd a Broadway stage musical based on Around the World in Eighty Days,
needed $50,000 to complete the budget so that the musical could open. He called
Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, and offered to write and star in a movie for
that amount of money,and direct the picture for free and with no credit. Cohn
asked, “What do you have in mind?” It may be an apocryphal story, but Welles,
who was calling Cohn from a phone booth, either saw a woman reading a pulp
paperback or he spied it on a rack of books. It was called If I Die Before I
Wake, a 1938 potboiler by Raymond Sherwood King. Welles, off the cuff,
grabbed the book and read the blurb on the back to tell Cohn what the movie was
about, but he improvised the title, calling it The Lady from Shanghai. (And,
indeed, Welles does not receive a credit for directing—there is no directing
credit at all.)
Cohn
made the deal, but on one condition—it had to star Rita Hayworth, who was at
the time Columbia’s biggest star. The problem with that was that Hayworth and
Welles were married, but their union was on the rocks. They were estranged from
each other.
But,
hey, both Welles and Hayworth were professionals. They could work together. And
they did. Welles assembled the cast, wrote the script, and proceeded to film on
location (New York, San Francisco, out at sea) so that no one would interfere
with the work. Of course, he went over budget and delivered a movie that was
three hours long. Cohn went berserk, took the film away from Welles, and cut it
down to approximately 90 minutes. Once again, Welles’ “vision” was hijacked.
And
yet… AND
YET… The Lady from Shanghai is a MARVELOUS motion picture! No, it wasn’t
well received by the critics or the public in 1948 when it was finally released
(it had premiered in France in 1947)… but time is often kind to movies made by
Orson Welles, and today The Lady from Shanghai is considered a film
noir classic.
Film
noir (not
a term used at the time) was big in the late 1940s. Movies like Double
Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The
Killers, and Out of the Past were coming out fast and furiously. The
Lady from Shanghai and The Stranger are Welles’ contributions to
that stylistic movement of dark shadows, high contrast lighting,
Expressionistic design, cynical and hard-boiled characters, and crime that
doesn’t pay.
Michael
O’Hara (Welles) is an out of work seaman who meets gorgeous Elsa Bannister
(Hayworth) in Central Park one evening. He immediately falls for her, even
though she is married to one of the country’s most accomplished defense
attorneys, Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). O’Hara is hired to be a crewman
on Bannister’s yacht as the couple sails around North America, through the
Panama Canal, from New York to San Francisco. Along the way, Bannister’s sleazy
business partner, George Grisby (stage actor Glenn Anders, in an extraordinary,
eccentric performance), asks O’Hara to “kill” him in a plot to fake his own
death. O’Hara would be paid enough money for he and Elsa to run away together.
Ah, but nothing is what it seems. Grisby is, of course, setting up O’Hara for a
big fall, and Elsa is, you guessed it, a femme fatale.
The
plot is rather complex and there was much critical lashing at the time of the
movie’s release that it was “incomprehensible,” but this is simply not the
case. Even though Columbia deleted 1-1/2 hours from Welles’ rough cut, the
story still makes sense… and as film noir expert Eddie Muller explains
on one of the Blu-ray disk’s supplements, what isn’t explained in the movie can
easily be interpreted by audiences who are somewhat intelligent. (He calls it a
“film noir poem.”)
The
most memorable sequence is the famed climax that takes place at an abandoned
amusement park outside San Francisco. The chase and ultimate shootout in an old
fun house made up of a mirror maze has been copied many times in subsequent
motion pictures (Enter the Dragon and The Man with the Golden Gun,
for example). But the surreal quality of Welles’ direction of this sequence
reminds one of the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dalí, and it is masterfully presented. Supposedly the scene was
to have lasted nearly twenty minutes. If only we could see what ended up on the
cutting room floor!
The new Blu-ray edition from Kino
Lorber looks exquisite. The glorious black and white cinematography (by the
credited Charles Lawton Jr., with uncredited work by Rudolph Maté and Joseph
Walker) is sharp and clear. There are three different audio commentaries
one can choose to accompany the film: one by film historian Imogen Sara Smith,
another by novelist and critic Tim Lucas, and another by filmmaker Peter
Bogdanovich, who spent a lot of his later career commenting on Welles’ life and
work. An additional video supplement is an interview with Bogdanovich about the
making of the movie. A video interview with Eddie Muller shines a light on the
apocryphal tales of the movie’s production. Finally, the theatrical trailer
rounds out the package.
The Lady from Shanghai is a top-notch gem, and the new Kino Lorber release is a
good way to experience it. For fans of film noir, Orson Welles, and Rita
Hayworth. Highly recommended.
My
introduction to science fiction came in the form of George Lucas’s Star Wars
(1977), though many would argue that this initial film in the first trilogy is
a glorified western set in outer space. This was a point of view I would not
have remotely considered the following summer when my father bought me a copy
of the June 1978 issue of Space Encounters magazine featuring an article
on and, best of all, photos of this glorious space opera. Among the other films
showcased in this magazine that were new to me were Destination Moon
(1950) and The War of the Worlds (1953), the latter of which was depicted
in beautiful color, filling me with intrigue. When I think of science fiction
now, the images of Douglas Trumbull’s slow-moving spaceships gliding through
space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the
mothership landing near Devil’s Tower in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters
of the Third Kind (1977), or the dystopian landscape of Los Angeles in
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), come to mind. Back then, however, the
effects were a lot more primitive but no less effective to a child’s eyes: something
about the way these creepy-looking, Manta-shaped Martian ships with cobra-like
heads that fire a deadly heat ray capable of incinerating just about anything
in its path unnerved me. It is this film that is now available from Paramount
Home Video in a gorgeous new 4K UHD Blu-ray, in a double feature set of two
discs that also includes a standard Blu-ray of 1951’s When Worlds Collide,
clearly the lesser of the two films.
Dr.
Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is an atomic scientist who gets more than he
bargains for when he stumbles upon a heated object that has crash-landed
nearby. At the impact site, he meets Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and her
pastor uncle, all confused by the scene before them. Later, Martian ships
emerge from the site, and it is reported that similar scenarios are playing out
in other parts of the country. The United States military finds their weapons (even
atomic bombs!) to be of no use against the Martian invaders who employ the use
of the heat rays. Clayton and Sylvia make their way to a farmhouse and
encounter a strange looking electronic eye that the Martians use to investigate
the premises, but Clayton hacks off the electronic eye and manages to collect a
blood sample from the arm of a wounded Martian that we only see briefly. Their
blood proves to be the key to understanding them, as well as their undoing: Earth’s
bacteria is too much for the Martians and their supposed invincibility no
longer is an issue when then germs bring about their demise.
The
War of the Worlds has
been around for over one hundred years in various forms, beginning life in the
late 1890’s as a multi-part story published in Cosmopolitan if you can
believe it, then as a novel and, most famously, as a notorious radio broadcast emceed
by Orson Welles on the night before Halloween in 1938 that led to mass panic by
those listeners unfortunate enough to miss not only the program’s beginning
disclaimer, but the three mid-broadcast announcements emphasizing the play’s
fictional nature. Listeners actually believed it to be a real news broadcast!
The film opened in New York on Thursday, August 13, 1953 at the Mayfair on 7th
and Broadway on a panoramic screen with stereophonic sound. It was nominated
for three Academy Awards: Film Editing, Sound Recording, and won by default for
Special Effects on Thursday, March 25, 1954 because no other film was in the
category. Steven Spielberg directed a
very effective interpretation of this material following the 9/11 attacks; that
version was released in the summer of 2005 and featured Gene Barry and Ann
Robinson as Tom Cruise’s in-laws at the film’s end (love it!).
The
new 4K Ultra High-Definition release contains the following extras that have
been ported over from the 2005 Paramount DVD of the film:
There
is a wonderful, feature-length audio commentary with Gene Barry and Ann Robinson.
There
is a secondary audio commentary with Joe Dante, Bob Burns, and Bill Warren
which is very funny, anecdotal and engaging.
The
Sky is Falling: Making The War of the Worlds (SD – 29:59)
H.G.
Wells: The Father of Science Fiction
(SD – 10:29)
The
Mercury Theater on the Air Presets: The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from
1938 (HD – 59:30)
Original
Theatrical Trailer (HD – 2:20)
When
Worlds Collide (1951),
released in New York on Wednesday, February 6, 1952 at the Globe on 46th
and Broadway, depicts the effects of a mob mentality when word gets out that
scientists have accurately predicted the end of the world but are shrugged off
as crackpot theorists. Dr. Cole Hendron (Larry Keating) is given photographs
from a pilot, David Randall (Richard Derr), who has taken them on the sly.
Along with his daughter Joyce Hendron (Barbara Rush), Dr. Hendron’s fears
become a reality. A star by the name of Bellus is on a collision course with
Earth and disaster is only eight months away, proving that aside from one’s own
personal health the most important asset a human can possess is time. Young,
healthy, and attractive people are singled out to make a future trip to a
planet, Zyra, that is travelling in Bellus’s orbit for purposes of continuing
the Human Race. First, however, a spaceship needs to be constructed to do this.
Along the way, Joyce has to choose between her boyfriend Dr. Tony Drake (Peter
Hansen) and her attraction to Randall while a wheelchair-bound wealthy
businessman, Sidney Stanton (John Hoyt), demands to be saved in exchange for
money and also wants the right to choose who goes on the ship. A mad dash is
made to build the ship (other countries around the world follow suit) and
miraculously the feat is pulled off in record time. Just as August 12th
arrives, the doubting Stanton berates the doomsday predictors until the world
begins crumbling around them. He tries fruitlessly to make it to the ship until
the door closes and it leaves Earth’s atmosphere, rocketing itself to Zyra,
where the passengers make a smooth landing and are greeted with the prospect of
a new life.
Both
of these films are the brainchild of György Pál Marczincsak, better known as
George Pal, who is also known to American audiences for his earlier colorful Puppetoons
films, and the charming 1950 Jimmy Durante-Terry Moore outing The Great
Rupert (1950). He would go on to direct Russ Tamblyn in both Tom Thumb
(1958) and The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm (1962), the latter
in Cinemarama.
The
War of the Worlds was
released on standard Blu-ray in 2020 on the Criterion Collection which had features different from the one provided here.
Likewise, When Worlds Collide was released in a now out-of-print special
edition from Imprint that included a handful of extras, although the sole extra
on this Blu-ray is the film’s trailer.
Recommended
for died-hard Pal fans!
Click here to order the limited edition release from Amazon
Preston
Sturges’ filmmaking career in Hollywood between 1940-1944 is unparalleled. He
is often called the first “writer-director” who would helm his own screenplays
(actually this is untrue, since Charles Chaplin had been doing it since 1914,
and Orson Welles was also doing it in the early 40s), but there is no question
that Sturges became an auteur of sorts in those glorious five years. His flame
burned brightly for that short period, and then it sadly weakened and
eventually blew out.
One
of the reasons for the filmmaker’s demise was the unfortunate production of The
Great Moment, a biopic of a 19th Century dentist named Dr. William Thomas
Green Morton, who is (mostly) credited as discovering the use of ether as an
anesthetic for surgery.
Sturges,
who was known for his acerbic comedies like The Great McGinty (1940), The
Lady Eve (1941), and Sullivan’s Travels (1942), was apparently
obsessed with Morton’s story and had been working on a script as early as 1939
to be directed by Henry Hathaway. That project was shelved, and then Sturges
began his run of directing his own scripts in 1940. He resurrected the Morton biopic
on his own in 1942. It was based on the book Triumph Over Pain (1940) by
René Fülüp-Miller,
and that also became the title of Sturges’ script. The film was shot before the
making of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero!
(both released in 1944). But Paramount, Sturges’ studio, didn’t like the Morton
biopic Sturges had made, and they took control away from the writer-director,
retitled it The Great Moment, and re-edited it. The film was finally
released two years after its production in 1944, after Miracle and Conquering
Hero. By then, Sturges had already left Paramount in disgust. The Great
Moment bombed at the box office and critics hated it. Sturges made a few
more films for other studios, but his career never regained the peak of his
earlier Paramount successes.
The
Great Moment exhibits
how Dr. Morton (Joel McCrea) discovers that ether allows him to successfully
pull a tooth from patient Eben Frost (Sturges’ stalwart character actor William
Demarest), so he develops a specially shaped bottle from which patients can
inhale the ether vapors. History has shown that Morton pulled pieces of his
“idea” from other doctors and his mentor, surgeon Professor Warren (Harry
Carey), and the story illustrates this. After Morton’s discovery, he endured
attacks to his claim, especially when he attempts to patent the process. The
medical profession is quick to condemn Morton for what they perceive as
“monetizing” the method by patenting it, even though Morton has no intention of
making a profit. He simply doesn’t want to reveal the ingredients of what’s in
the bottle. Morton and his wife, Elizabeth (Betty Field), withstand hardships
as Morton stubbornly pursues his claims in courts and even in a petition to the
president of the United States.
Doesn’t
sound like a comedy, does it? Well, it isn’t. There are humorous bits and
pieces in The Great Moment (mostly from Demarest), but the studio was
correct in determining that the film was not in keeping with the previous
“Preston Sturges Comedies.” Never mind that Sturges had likely made a good
biopic with a message about sacrifice. Paramount deleted scenes, rearranged the
narrative flow, and emphasized the few comic bits—and then they marketed the
film as if it were a Preston Sturges Comedy. It’s no wonder that
audiences were disappointed.
In
viewing The Great Moment today, one can see that it’s not a good film. It
really is “anesthesia on celluloid.” It is, as the late filmmaker Peter
Bogdanovich calls it in a supplement included on the new Kino Lorber disk, a
“mess.” The thing is, Sturges can’t be blamed for it. But for Preston Sturges
fans, it is an interesting document. We can see that there are indeed Sturges’
fingerprints all through the picture, and many of the Sturges “stock company”
are present (such as Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, and others). The irony and
bite that is pure Sturges is often there in the dialogue.
In
short, The Great Moment is a great failure, but one that illustrates how
Hollywood tended to squash talented auteurs who bucked the system in the 1940s
(like Sturges and Welles).
Kino
Lorber’s new Blu-ray edition looks pristine and sharp in its glorious black and
white. The disk includes the previously mentioned supplement, “Triumph Over
Pain: A Celebration of Preston Sturges,” which is a three-way Zoom call between
Tom Sturges (Preston’s son), Bogdanovich, and film historian Constantine Nasr. This
is a lot of fun and very informative (perhaps more entertaining than the
feature film!). Also of interest is a lengthy Introduction by Nasr, which goes
into the history of the problematic production. The theatrical trailers for
this and other Sturges’ releases round out the package.
The
Great Moment is
for fans of Preston Sturges, to be sure, but also for historians interested in documentation
of Hollywood’s miscalculations and bone-headed decisions when it came to
filmmakers who likely knew much more about what they were doing than the
studios behind them.
Godard with Belmondo and Seberg filming "Breathless".
By Joe Elliott
French director Jean-Luc Godard, who was a significant part of
the 1960s French New Wave movement, died on Tuesday at age 91. Godard was among
a handful of brilliant and innovative French filmmakers of the period that
included Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut. While
these young turks of the cinema viewed their work as intellectually
serious statements of their times, they did so with an air of stylish
nonchalance, off-handed humor and striking visual flair. Heavily influenced by
American movies, especially film noir of the 1940s, they, in turn, influenced
the next generation of American movie makers, among them Arthur Penn, Woody
Allen, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
Godard’s
“Breathless” ("À Bout de Souffle") is
probably the film for which most of us remember him best. His first feature,
it’s a witty, romantic cops and robbers picture starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and
American-born Jean Seberg as his girlfriend. “Breathless” is filled with
many memorable grace notes and startling visual signifiers, not the least of
which is the radiant young presence of Seberg herself. (Who can ever
forget the "New York Herald Tribune" sweater she wore?) According
to film critic Pauline Kael, whose early support of Godard helped create a
market for his pictures in the States, the director “saw something in the cheap
American gangster movies of his youth what French movies lacked; he poeticized
it and made it so modern (via jump cutting) that he, in turn, became the key
influence of American movies in the 60s.” In his later years, Goddard grew
more embittered and combative in his attitude and
was frequently critical of younger filmmakers. However, he never lost
his childhood love of the cinema. In a 1989 “New York Times” interview he is
quoted as saying, “I never thought I would do better
than John Ford or Orson Welles, but I thought I could perhaps do what Godard
was meant to do.”
Film historians like to
connect Jack Arnold’s Man in the Shadow (1957) to Orson Welles’s Touch
of Evil from the same year, produced both at Universal-International by
Albert Zugsmith. Each revolves around a murder somewhere in the South or Southwest
that ensues when a rich and prejudiced gringo capitalist tries to prevent a
romance between his daughter and a Mexican man. Each involves an intrepid squared-jawed
he-man law enforcement figure investigating that murder and fightin the
obstructions of a racist megalomaniac played in both cases by Welles.
But the differences are instructive.
For instance, in Touch of Evil, the Welles figure is, like the hero, a
lawman, but in this case corrupt yet often getting the job done even as he
bends the law to do so. In Man in the Shadow, in contrast, Welles’s character
Renchler is an imperious cattleman (Virgil Renchler) whose ranch was the site
of a killing he oversaw. He’s unremittingly corrupt from beginning to end. Touch
of Evil then is about moral ambiguity – Welles’s Hank Quinlan is good cop
and bad cop rolled up into one. Man in the Shadow is more certain of its
morality: if, at the film’s beginning, Sherriff Ben Sadler (Jeff Chandler) has
a somewhat jaded attitude to his job (he clearly couldn’t care a whit about the
presumed killing of a Mexican bracero), he nonetheless pushes on in his inquiry
and stands finally for ethical uprightness against the unambiguous immorality
of Renchler. If Jeff Chandler once played Native Americans (Cochise in three
films), thus crossing or confusing racial and ethnic lines, here he is the
all-American, initially disdainful of the lowly Mexican workers but coming
ultimately to defend their rights against fascistic Anglo over-reachers.
Conversely, in Touch of Evil, the good cop, played by sculpted macho man
Charlton Heston, is himself Mexican, a casting decision that has never made
sense even as it adds to the weird fun of Welles’s film. And indeed Touch of
Evil is weird in so many ways – curious acting, baroque editing,
overwrought compositions, convoluted plot, and on and on.
Man in the Shadow in
contrast is a straightforward 80 minute programmer shot in a generally sober
style: after an initial act of excessive violence (the murder of the bracero in
the shadows), the film settles down to offer a taut and tight morality tale played
often in daylight (until a final battle that is dark in look but clear in moral
stance) and in long takes that, instead of meandering like the ones in Touch
of Evil often do, frequently remain implacably fixed on the action in order
to take in the verbal sparring of Sadler and everyone who wants to prevent him
from getting at the truth.
In this pared-down narrative
of one intrepid man against the world, Man in the Shadow is in a lineage
of other such films that came out the complex context of the 1950s. For
instance, Sadler’s casting off of his badge when virtually no one in the town
comes to his defense seems inspired by High Noon while the paranoid
atmosphere of a modern Western town where deadly realities of racial violence
are being hidden away by the villagers reminds one of John Sturges’s man-against-conspiratorial-community-nightmare,
Bad Day at Black Rock. Yet, when an Italian barber announces his
allegiance to Sherriff Sadler and explains that over in Italy, they tried to
install a dictator in the 1920s and that’s why he prefers America, we can
readily see that Man in the Shadow is going in a different direction
than the paranoid narratives of the hunted hero alone against corrupt society. The
barber is the first crack in the mindless devotion to fascistic conformity. Like,
say, the Frank Sinatra Western Johnny Concho from the year before, Man
in the Shadow ultimately shows itself devoted to the cause of liberalism as
the townsfolk convert in their convictions and come to Sadler’s defense. This
liberalism against a conspiratorial conformity takes on new relevance and
resonance in today’s fraught political context as we see the townsfolk
initially disdaining the Mexican workers as undocumented and othering them
through xenophobic stereotypes while imagining whiteness as a fundamental
decency. That the white commonfolk can evolve ideologically and overcome
prejudice might well link the progressivism of Man in the Shadow to a
key earlier film by director Jack Arnold, It Came from Outer Space,
another liberal intervention into Cold War Culture that, similarly, is all
about turning fear of the other into inter-cultural tolerance.
Filmed in CinemaScope
black-and-white (like some other programmers just around this time), Man in
the Shadow looks great on Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray edition. The only special features
are the original trailer (which, interestingly, pinpoints Sherriff Sadler and
not Orson Welles’s seemingly respectable but fundamentally corrupt capitalist
as the “man in the shadow”) and a breathless commentary track from movie critic
Troy Howarth. To my mind, Howarth is a bit too enamored of character actors’
filmographies, enumerating at length the career and date of death for virtually
anyone from within the film’s secondary cast, but he does offer helpful
insights about the film’s genre affiliations: for example, Horwath’s perception
that violence around a seemingly alien otherness insinuating itself into arid
small towns is common to a number of Jack Arnold films enables us to see the
xenophobia at issue in both Arnold’s Westerns and science-fiction.
Long unavailable (or
available only in pan-and-scan), Man in the Shadow in Kino Lorber’s fine
Blu-Ray edition offers anew a strikingly suspenseful social-problem film that
offers a trenchant glimpse of the politics of its time.
The
late Peter Bogdanovich called it “the first great detective movie.” That
statement is possibly arguable, but there is no question that the 1941 version
of The Maltese Falcon was the beginning of something new. Film
historians will forever debate what the first film noir might have been,
but Falcon is one of the contenders. The film presented a cynical, hard
boiled detective in Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), utilized German expressionism
in its cinematography and design (low camera angles, high contrasting black and
white photography, shadows, and angular architecture), and a pessimistic tone. Falcon
also truly launched Bogart into the A-list. Prior to this (and, some say, High
Sierra, released the same year), Bogart usually played villains in crime
pictures, third billed or ever further down the line.
The
Maltese Falcon is
of course based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, originally serialized in 1929.
Warner Brothers immediately bought the film rights, and an initial adaptation
was made and released in 1931 (also called The Maltese Falcon). This
version starred Ricardo Cortez as Spade and Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly. The
picture definitely can be termed “pre-Code,” as it is rather risqué and isn’t a
very faithful adaptation of the novel. Warners remade the material five years
later as Satan Met a Lady, starring Warren William as “Ted Shane” and
none other than Bette Davis as “Valerie Purvis.” This version is played mostly
for laughs and is even less faithful than the first.
Enter
John Huston, who had been working in Hollywood in the late 1930s as a respected
screenwriter. He wrote the script for High Sierra (1941, directed by
Raoul Walsh), which starred Bogart. The two men became friends. Huston made it
known that he wanted to write and direct. Legend has it that Orson Welles
suggested that Huston try a faithful adaptation of The Maltese Falcon,
since the material was crying out to be done properly. Huston apparently wrote
the script and left it on Jack Warner’s desk. Then, on condition that no
“stars” were cast and the budget remain ridiculously low, Huston got the job to
make the film. At the time, Bogart was not a star. Co-star Mary Astor had been
a big star in the silent era and early 30s, but some personal scandals had
stymied her career by the 40s—so casting her was not expensive. The two other
(now) big names in the movie, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, were also
considered low risks. Lorre had been making cheap horror films and mysteries,
Greenstreet, a stage actor, had never made a movie. The picture also brought us
Elisha Cook, Jr., Gladys George, and Lee Patrick.
The
story is typically complex with many twists and turns, and it is always
surprising. It is about one of cinema’s greatest “MacGuffins,” a statue of a
falcon that is allegedly made out of gold and covered in rare jewels—but to disguise
it, someone covered it in black enamel. It seems everyone in the tale wants the
thing, except for private investigator Sam Spade (Bogart). He gets involved in
the hunt for the trophy when his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) is
murdered at a rendezvous set up by a new client, “Ruth Wonderly” (Astor). It
turns out Wonderly’s real name is Brigid O’Shaughnessy (maybe), and she’s in
league with some sinister characters to buy—or steal—the statue. The “fat man,”
Kasper Gutman (Greenstreet) is the top villain here, and his sidekick, Joel
Cairo (Lorre), provides icky support. All Spade really wants to do is find out
who killed his partner and deliver that person to the police, but in doing so
must become embroiled in the intrigue and puzzles surrounding the coveted
Maltese Falcon.
Besides
the acting and direction, Huston’s script contains memorable lines of dialogue.
“When I slap you, you’ll take it and like it.” “Don’t be too sure I’m as
crooked as I’m supposed to be.” And of course, “The stuff that dreams are made
of.” The film received three Academy Award nominations—Best Picture, Best
Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Greenstreet), but failed to win
any of them.
The
Warner Home Video Blu-ray edition of The Maltese Falcon was released over
ten years ago, but its timeless appeal makes it appropriate to review. It is a
marked improvement over the 2000 DVD release, which was bare bones. A further
2006 3-disk DVD release contained all of the extras ported over to this Blu-ray
edition. The high definition transfer looks great and is without blemishes. The
movie comes with an audio commentary (by Bogart biographer Eric Lax).
Supplements
abound: There’s an interesting, nearly half-hour featurette on the history of
the film; a collection of Bogart trailers narrated by the late Robert Osborne
of TCM; a blooper reel of Warners pictures; makeup tests; a 1941 newsreel; an
Oscar-nominated short (“The Gay Parisian”); two of the greatest Looney Tunes
cartoons (Bugs Bunny in “Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt” and Porky Pig in “Meet John
Doughboy”); trailers for Falcon and other Warners films of the era; and three
audio-only radio adaptations, two of which feature the movie’s original stars
and one with Edward G. Robinson). The only thing missing from the Blu-ray
edition is the inclusion of the previous two Falcon feature adaptations,
which were included in the 3-disk DVD set.
The
Maltese Falcon is
fabulous entertainment, a spectacular example of film noir, a showcase
for Humphrey Bogart’s star power, and one of the great Hollywood films of the
1940s. Highly recommended.
“WATERLOO, MAKING AN EPIC: The
Spectacular Behind-the-Scenes Story of a Movie Colossus”
By Simon Lewis (BearManor Media), 534 pages,
illustrated (B&W), Hardback, Paperback & Ebook, ISBN978-1-62933-832-3
REVIEW BY BRIAN HANNAN
One would think that a film that
flopped as dramatically as Waterloo would scarcely deserve a book as superb as this. In quite extraordinary detail,
author Simon Lewis discusses every aspect of the making of the film, from
initial set-up to release, by way of analysis of dozens of separate scenes
through to rarely discussed elements like the editing and mixing, and even the
myth of the missing longer version and the importance of wooden boxes. It might have helped the movie’s commercial
chances, and not put too much of a dent in the ultimately massive budget of
$26.1 million if producer Dino De Laurentiis has snagged original dream team of
Richard Burton (Napoleon) and Peter O’Toole (Wellington), both of whom carried
much greater box office marquee than Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer.
Burton was never really a possibility but by 1968 O’Toole was “practically set”
although turning it down because he thought it would flop. John Huston, who had
just completed The Bible (1966) for De Laurentiis, was original choice
for director and got so far as being involved in the screenplay being written
by H.A.L Craig (Anzio, 1968). When he dropped out, Gilles Pontecorvo (The
Battle of Algiers, 1966) was briefly in the frame. However, a six-hour
version of War and Peace (1965) ultimately put Sergei Bondarchuk in the
director’s chair.
Requiring thousands of
properly trained and preferably “celluloid-seasoned” troops to carry out
disciplined manoeuvres rather than extras, De Laurentiis was in negotiation
with Turkey, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria before plumping for Russia, whose
production arm, Mosfilm, pumped in $8 million (later rising in line with budget
increases). Paramount and Columbia contributed a combined $7 million with
worldwide rights selling for a total of $25 million. Once filming began, Paramount
chiefs Charles Bludhorn and Robert Evans, watching elements of shooting, were
so taken with what they saw they wished they had invested more. Evans was
reportedly “enthralled by hours of film material.” Craig’s screenplay was
augmented by the director and Vittorio Bonicelli as well as uncredited contributions
by Jean Anouilh (Becket, 1964), Samuel Marx and Edward O. Marsh, not to
mention additions by the two main actors. Steiger pocketed $385,000, Plummer
$300,000, Craig $121,000 but Anouilh only $21,000. Gordon Highlanders pipers
and drummers picked up £7 a day.
Lewis is at his best when
forensically examining particular scenes, for example, the Duchess of Richmond
Ball which used 4,000 candles inserted into candelabras, the slightest draught
causing these to melt and drip wax on performers. A carpet was used to get
camera shots from a very low level.
Steiger played Napoleon almost
as a dead man walking, having got hold of a copy of the French Emperor’s autopsy
which revealed advanced cirrhosis and gonorrhoea. Steiger and Bondarchuk met
the night before to iron out ideas for the following day but Steiger was not
above forcing the director’s hand. In in one instance the actor removed his
trousers to ensure he could only be shot in close-up. Orson Welles matched
Steiger in trickery. Only hired for two days, Welles extended his employment by
insisting on doing his own make-up which of course was never up to scratch and
required amendment. And in terms of movie trickery, Steiger was required to sit
on a wooden box on his horse to ensure he could be kept in focus. Jack Hawkins
dispensed with the horse altogether – he was either atop a box or on top of
stilts, as he was unsteady on an animal. In the absence of CGI of the kind
Ridley Scott could eventually employ for his battle scenes, the real soldiers
were occasionally augmented by mannequins. Five thousand were made, two real
soldiers at either end of a row held eight mannequins in place by the use of a
single wooden plank – “this allowed all regiments to march forward.” Among the
many wonderful candid pictures in this lavishly illustrated tome – 200
photographs, many never seen before - is one of three girls staring at the
mannequins as well as photos of Steiger and Hawkins on their boxes.
The Waterloo battlefield had
one of the biggest sets ever built. A total of 17,000 soldiers, mostly from
Siberia andincluding 2,000 cavalry,
lived in a tented city a mile away. Steiger noted, “It would have taken assistant
directors three days to put untrained men, mere extras, into position. When
they broke for lunch it would be another three days to arrange them again.
These guys are superb.” Real soldiers working with their actual commanders was
the difference between waste and superb. Having a general in charge of the
troops often created issues. Bondarchuk would select the horses he wanted based
on the effect he wished to achieve with the light, demands often obstructed by the
commander if it meant the chosen horses had not been properly fed. “I will
order soldiers – but how do I order animals?” was the dry comment from the army
chief..
Although the battlefield was primarily
authentic – mud for one scene created by
pumping two days’ worth of water into the soil before cavalry churned up the area
– there were occasions when filming conformed to the Hollywood norm. “The use
of fiery explosions had been cinematic shorthand for battle scenes long before Waterloo”
when in reality these would be minimal. “Most ammunition that was fired
comprised large iron balls and so low was its speed it was possible to watch
their progress.”
The famous charge of the Scots Greys was
described thusly in the script: “they came straight into camera – like centaurs
in their magnificence.” The sight of 350 Arabian mounts travelling at breakneck
speed was captured by use of a specially constructed railway powered by a
diesel locomotive. Five cameras were sited in different positions on the train.
The famous slow-motion effect – possibly the most exhilarating moment in the
picture – was achieved by over-cranking the camera at 100 frames per second
which slowed what you saw by a factor of four.
Perhaps the best reveal
regarding movie trickery was the moon above Wellington as he rode past the
carnage. It comprised “special silver paper for front projection – 3M – like
shark skin. You put one light on it and it reflects ten times brighter.” The
moon was shown as one quarter less than full since the effect of a full moon
would be harder to carry off. “Blue ink made some spots as moon craters.” The
fake moon was suspended with one wire on top and two left and right to prevent
it from moving, then one light was projected onto it.
Lewis rebuts the myth of the
missing longer version. He reckons this probably came about because over
300,000 feet of film – 55 hours – was shot and the first rough cut was five
hours long. The final cut was 123 minutes and 42 seconds - not much longer than
if you had worked out the length by counting the pages of the screenplay - and
release cuts varied because, for example, the British censors cut out 28
seconds of horse falls and the ending includes 50 seconds of music over the
credits. It was never shown with the intermission which was de rigeur at
the time for longer roadshows and would have, artificially, inflated the
running time.There was some confusion
over the final print because a novelisation by Frederick E. Smith included some
scenes that didn’t make it into the final print, and Smith’s book, written of
necessity before the film appeared, would have used as its main reference tool
the screenplay. But Lewis spends a whole chapter explaining why a longer cut
never existed.
The world premiere was held on
26 October 1970 in London where the movie released as a roadshow (i.e. separate
performances) was a huge success. It ran for a few weeks short of an entire
year in the London West End, breaking box office records at the Odeon Leicester
Square and the Metropole where it opened on December 3rd, 1970, before
shifting to the Columbia on June 17, 1971, and then a final week at the Odeon
Kensington from September 30 1971. But audience appeal in the United States was
at the other end of the spectrum. It went from a strong opening week of $25,436
at the Criterion in New York to just $1,775 in its fourth week, and nationwide
racked up only $1.4 million in rentals (the studio share of the box office). It
was derided in France in part because the film was about the defeat of a legend
and the French could not come to terms with the idea that it was directed by a
Russian.
Where most “making of” books
concentrate on the stars and the director, Lewis goes into fantastic detail
about all aspects of the production, the chapter on editing and mixing an
education in itself. There’s a chapter on how historically accurate the film
actually was. The author was helped by the discovery of a diary kept during
production by actor Richard Heffer who played the small part Mercer. But Lewis
also managed to make contact with Dino De Laurentiis’s daughters, Raffaella and
Veronica, and around two dozen people connected with the film in some way, and
clearly examined every scrap of information available on the picture. The notes
are another mine of information.
Even if the film is not at the
top of your must-watch list, this book should go to the top of your must-read
list.
Bogdanovich directing Ben Gazzara in "Saint Jack" (1979).
BY LEE PFEIFFER
Noted director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has passed away from natural causes at age 82. Bogdanovich grew up idolizing the legendary actors and directors of his youth and would later enter the film industry working for Roger Corman on the 1966 hit "The Wild Angels". Corman saw potential in him and allowed him to direct a "B" movie titled "Targets" in 1968, which Bogdanovich and his wife Polly wrote very quickly. The atmospheric film was widely praised and it provided a fictional interpretation of a notorious mass shooting in 1966 that had horrified the nation. Bogdanovich also managed to logically intermingle a parallel story relating to a once-legendary horror actor played by Boris Karloff in his last great role. Bogdanovich next gained acclaimed with his 1971 B&W drama "The Last Picture Show" which received international honors. He seemed to be on a non-stop juggernaut towards success, as more hits followed: "What's Up, Doc?" and "Paper Moon". However, after Bogdanovich began an affair with Cybill Shepherd, who had appeared in "The Last Picture Show", his personal life became increasingly chaotic. His marriage ended and his next film, "Daisy Miller" starring Shepherd was a notorious bomb. This was followed by another starring vehicle for Shepherd that paired her with Burt Reynolds, "At Long Last Love", a tribute to musicals of the 1930s. When that film proved to be an expensive failure, Bogdanovich's reputation as a "Golden Boy" was diminished.
Over the years, he was in the news, not because of his film achievements, but because of his love life. After he and Cybill Shepherd broke up (but stayed on amicable terms), Bogdanovich became obsessed with Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten, who was married. On the evening she was going to tell her husband she was leaving him for Bogdanovich, he brutally murdered her in a jealous rage and then committed suicide. (Bob Fosse would later make a film about Stratton, "Star 80", that recounted her love affair with Bogdanovich.) Bogdanovich remained haunted by the tragedy for the rest of his life and would he would later marry Stratten's 20 year-old sister Louise. He was 49 at the time. The marriage didn't last but Bogdanovich continued to live with Louise and her mother.
Professionally, Bogdanovich would continue to make films occasionally. He received critical acclaim for the 1979 arthouse film "Saint Jack" starring Ben Gazzara but his much-anticipated 1981 comedy "They All Laughed" in which Dorothy Stratton had a major role, proved to be a boxoffice bomb when it was released shortly after her death. Bogdanovich didn't like the studio's marketing campaign for the movie and bought back the rights at a cost of most of his assets. He believed he could distribute the film himself but reviews were tepid and he could find few theaters that would play the movie. He rebounded and a modest boxoffice success in 1985 with "Mask" starring Cher.
In later years, Bogdanovich was often sought-out for his first-hand knowledge of old Hollywood. As a young man, he had the foresight to interview prominent actors and directors and used the original tapes to launch his own podcast. Bogdanovich had befriended his idol Orson Welles in the 1960s and Welles served as his adviser and mentor. However, Welles was often the victim of his own ego and excesses and fell out of favor in Hollywood. At one point, he was living in Bogdanovich's house as he tried to raise funds for his final film "The Other Side of the Wind". Welles worked on the project for many years but died before finishing it. Bogdanovich, with support from Netflix, finished the movie using Welles's own scripts and notes. Bogdanovich would also occasionally accept roles as an actor and proved be quite effective. He had a recurring role on "The Sopranos" and appeared in supporting roles in many feature films.
In 2021, he consented to participate in Turner Classic Movie's podcast "The Plot Thickens" and afforded a series of remarkably insightful and brutally honest interviews that didn't reflect well on the decisions he made as a much younger man. In the podcast, hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, Bogdanovich comes across as a man who is proud of his successes but regretful about many aspects of his personal life and how it adversely affected his career.
Having been a film fanatic my entire life I was thrilled when, in June
1982, a new magazine burst onto the scene and quickly caught my attention.
Devoted exclusively to new and upcoming motion picture releases, Coming
Attractions cost $2.50 per issue and was published on a bi-monthly basis. It
didn’t last long, unfortunately, but I recall that a bit of an uproar occurred
over the cover of the March/April 1983 issue which featured a half-naked Valerie
Kaprisky in a promo for the Breathless remake. Seriously, back in the
day who complained about a beautiful naked woman on a magazine cover??
In one of the earlier issues, there was an article published
about an upcoming horror film entitled Trick or Treats starring David
Carradine. I don’t recall the film ever opening in my area and wondered whatever
happened to it until I saw it on the shelf as a VHS rental a few years later in
a local video store. Trick or Treats is not to be confused with the 1986
Dino De Laurentiis film Trick or Treat, directed by Charles Martin
Smith, or the 2007 Michael Dougherty-directed vignette film Trick r Treat.
It’s a strange concoction that cannot seem to make up its mind as to what it
wants to be. My guess is that it’s attempting to be serious but fails miserably
at it. It’s a mixture of horror and absurdist elements that almost play like a
Saturday Night Live sketch.
Filmed mostly in Neil Young’s house that his then-girlfriend, actress
Carrie Snodgress, lived in at the time on South Irving Boulevard in Los
Angeles, CA, the film opens in 1978 and Malcolm O'Keefe (Peter Jason) just
wants to read the morning paper, but his wife Joan (Carrie Snodgress) has other
plans. Out of nowhere, she has two burly men fight to get Malcolm into a strait
jacket while affording no explanation. Their antics are humorous and silly, and
we have no idea why it’s even happening. Apparently, he’s being carted off to a
mental institution where he stays until 1982 and plans his escape. None of this
is even remotely believable as it raises too many questions – is he really
insane? How did his wife arrange this? Why would anyone go along with it? Do
the doctors know? As he’s planning his escape, Joan is now with Richard (David
Carradine, the star of the film, who has less than ten minutes of screen time) and
has an eight-year-old son, Christopher (is he Malcolm’s son or Richard’s son
from a previous marriage? None of this is explained). Christopher (Christopher
O’Keefe) is a practical jokester, an aspiring magician and aficionado of Harry
Houdini. Joan and Richard decide to head to Vegas for a Halloween party and
call their babysitter, Linda (Jacqueline Giroux), requesting her services to
watch him and dole out candy to trick or treaters. Linda is an actress and is
torn between seeing her boyfriend Bret (Steve Railsback) in his acting debut in
Othello (I swear, I’m not making this up) or making the extra money. She
chooses the latter despite Bret’s insistence on her presence at the play. The boyfriend
doth protest too much. Richard tries to put the moves on Linda but is stopped
by Joan. Despite this, they leave for the Playground of the World, and this
gives Christopher all the time he needs to torture Linda by playing jokes on
her that she continually falls for: sticking his head into a fake guillotine
(remember this for the ending!), using a buzzer while shaking hands, pretending
to cut off his finger and even feigning drowning in the family swimming pool. After
so many instances of this, one must wonder how dim-witted Linda really is.
Things get really ridiculous when Malcolm escapes by
donning a nurse’s outfit – and everyone he meets treats him as though he’s female.
He’s a guy with a guy’s face and a guy’s voice! He makes
his way back to the house and hides in the attic. Another subplot featuring two
additional young women working on a film that Linda appears in comes out of
nowhere. One of the women, Andrea (the late Jillian Kesner), goes to the house
and spends a lot of time looking around very slowly just to pad out the running
time until the final showdown with Malcolm…
If you’re looking for a serious horror film, this one’s going to
be a disappointment. The credits even list Orson Welles as a “magical
consultantâ€. I can definitely see the influence of Citizen Kane (1941)
and Touch of Evil (1958) on this flick. Yikes! Mr. Welles put his
“magical consulting†to better use two years later in the pilot episode of
NBC-TV’s short-lived Scene of the Crime series which aired on Sunday,
September 30, 1984. In the second story of the pilot, called “The Babysitterâ€
and penned by Jeffrey Boam, the title character is left in charge of a
prepubescent girl whom she antagonizes while the girl’s parents go out for the
night. The girl gets her revenge in a very cool ending by making a wish to a
magician topper that appeared on her birthday cake. That episode was
better than this film. Mr. Welles should have put his full “magical†powers to
work and made Trick or Treats disappear. The film would have worked
better as an episode of Tales from the Darkside, which ran from
September 1984 to July 1988 in syndication, and without the camp. Christopher
constantly annoying Linda gets tiresome, though I give the film props for the
scene wherein Christopher sorts through his LP record collection which consist
of the soundtracks to Maniac (1980), The Howling (1981), and the BBC
Sound Effects No. 13 - Death & Horror album from 1977 that my friend
and I used to play in the early 1980s.
Trick or Treats debuted on DVD in November 2013 and has now been released in high
definition on Blu-ray by Code Red (probably the same transfer, though this time
it’s more colorful and clearer due to the high definition afforded in the Blu-ray
format) with the same audio commentary which runs the entire length of the film
and contains five people: Jackie Giroux, Peter Jason, Chris Graver and
Cameraman R. Michael Stringer, moderated by Sean Graver. The big problem with
the commentary is the audio quality – it’s poorly miked and begins with no
introductions at all. It’s also too low. I loved listening to it, but at times
I didn’t even know who was speaking. Commentaries as an extra are something
that I love on any disc, but if it sounds as though the people who are speaking
are on the other side of the room…hey, great title for an Orson Welles
movie!
There is an audio interview with actor Steve Railsback that adds
little value to the package.
There is something called “Katarina’s Bucketlist†mode wherein the
hostess talks about the cast and does an Elvira, Mistress of the Dark-inspired
schtick.
There are no trailers, interestingly.
The bottom line: I love a campy horror film, but if you’re going
to be silly, make sure that you market it that way. Don’t sell it as
something in the same vein (no pun intended, naturally) as John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978). Otherwise, you might feel like Charlie Brown did on Halloween…you go
out for candy, but all you end up with is a rock.
The first generation to discover Karloff in the decades
following his big splash as the Frankenstein monster in 1931, include directors
Roger Corman and Peter Bogdanovich.Both
men would have the opportunity and honor to work with the actor in his twilight
years.The second generation of admirers
were those introduced to Karloff via neighborhood cinema screenings or through
television broadcasts of Shock Theater
in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
These filmmakers, profoundly influenced by Karloff’s art,
would go on to create a few cinematic gems of their own:John Landis, Joe Dante, and Guillermo Del
Toro, to name a few.The latter
gentleman is particularly effusive in his praise, describing Karloff’s
performance as the vampiric Wurdalak
in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath as a
“tremendous†example of the great actor’s “physical presence, his majesty, his
demonic power.â€
If the documentary is chock-full of talented filmmakers offering
tributes, the film is also supported by the erudite commentaries of film
scholars David J. Skal (The Monster Show:
a Cultural History of Horror), Gregory W. Mank (Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: the Expanded Story of a Haunting
Collaboration), Donald F. Glut (The
Frankenstein Legend: a tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff), Sir
Christopher Frayling (Frankenstein: the
first Two Hundred Years), and critic Leonard Maltin.
There are also short tributes and reminisces by several
actors – three now gone - who had worked with Karloff at some point in their
career: Dick Miller (The Terror),
Christopher Plummer (The Lark, Even the Weariest River), Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers), and Orson Bean (Arsenic and Old Lace).Karloff’s tells part of his own story through
audio recordings made available to the filmmakers courtesy of the British cinema
historian/author Kevin Brownlow (The
Parades Gone By…) and the Pacifica Radio Archive.
It has long annoyed me that when one searches out the
term “Boris Karloff†in the ever-expanding IMDB, the resulting prompt
identifies the actor’s signature film as The
Grinch that Stole Christmas (1966).My daughters would remind me that my personal agitation of this result is,
by definition, a “first world†problem, one hardly worthy of condemnation.But as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman for four
decades, seeing Karloff’s storied career reduced to a role featuring only his
disembodied voice as the Grinch… Well, let’s just say that I still find it somewhat
misleading and inappropriate.
Be that as it may, Hamilton’s film reminds Karloff
himself might disagree with my wariness of the Grinch being bandied as the
cinematic crown jewel of the actor’s legacy.Sara Karloff recalls receiving a phone call from her father immediately
following his recording of the narration for that beloved Dr. Seuss vehicle.The actor we learn was profoundly happy with
his work on the now-famous animated holiday classic, telling his daughter
proudly, “I’ve done something which I think is pretty good.â€
Karloff would pass away a couple of years following the
first broadcast of The Grinch that Stole
Christmas, but he worked to the very end of his days, appearing in a number
of memorable – and a few less-than-memorable – films, several of which would see
release in years following his passing.His last films were little more than cameo-length appearances shot on a
Hollywood sound stage.It was director
Jack Hill’s idea to take the Karloff footage from these shoots and blend the
results into a series of Mexican horror films. Karloff, rightly and proudly, would choose to refer
to his spell-binding turn as the semi-autobiographical aging horror film actor Byron
Orlok in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968)
as his feature film swan song.Technically,
it wasn’t.But the brief appearances in that
post- Target series of Hollywood-Mexico
co-production mash-ups were mostly an excuse for an old pro to continue to ply
his trade and keep busy.But working
oxygen-tank dependent and wheelchair bound on the Jack Hill-directed sequences,
Karloff was prevented from doing much of anything with the already somewhat
cut-and-paste material given to him.
Karloff, of course, was not the only “horror film†star
of the genre’s celebrated Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s. Karloff, we learn, was actually not happy with
the designation “horror movieâ€, much preferring his films to be termed as
“thrillers.†His contemporary competitor as grand ghoul of the horror film - one
whose own legacy would burn bright into the next century - was Bela Lugosi.Although Lugosi had too often played
second-fiddle to Karloff in matters of employment and billing, the Hungarian’s
post-mortem fame may have eclipsed his friend’s over the last several decades.
For starters, Lugosi’s sad and lurid dependency on morphine
and alcohol in his final years made him the subject of tabloid fodder, and
gossip then – and now – still rules.Lugosi’s
slow demise coupled with his appearances in several of Edward J. Wood’s revered
cult films brought him a big degree of post-mortem fame.A brand new generation would discover the
actor through Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning turn as Lugosi in Tim Burton’s
semi-biographical drama Ed Wood.
To be fair, Lugosi’s string of mad performances in Wood’s
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Glen or Glenda (1953) are, in many ways,
were no less better or worse or more undistinguished than Karloff’s walk-ons in
the creaky Jack Hill/Mexi-horror films of spring 1968. Though both sets of films are passably
entertaining in their own uneven, cult-ish ways, both actor’s cinematic exits
were ignoble ends to these two great men who famously made audiences shiver in
1931.
James Whale’s Frankenstein
would ultimately transform Karloff into a full-fledged movie star, but it had
been a long road to achieving such fame.The actor had been working on various Hollywood backlots since the
silent era.In the course of his
earliest silent film efforts – beginning with such titles as The Lightning Raider (1919) and His Majesty, the American (1919) – he
worked as little more than an extra.His
subsequent fame would cause a score of budding film historians to carefully
survey battered old prints of Karloff’s earliest filmography in the often
futile hope of catching a glimpse as he passed by the camera.
In truth, his decade-long career as a silent film actor
was mostly non consequential.He would
appear in approximately sixty or so silent films between 1919 and 1929.He would, on occasion, be gifted a role of
some heft, most notably as that of “The Mesmerist†in The Bells (1926) opposite Lionel Barrymore, but he was most often
cast in adventure-orientated serials as a heavy, or as a Hindu, Mexican or an Arab,
a mystic or a general ne’er-do-well.
It was his casting as the sadistic “Galloway†in Howard
Hawk’s sound prison drama The Criminal
Code (1930) that brought him to the attention of Universal executives
looking to cast a suitably cadaverous-appearing actor as the Frankenstein
monster.Following Lugosi’s rejection of
the part due to the absence of dialogue afforded, Bela’s pass on the role was
fortuitous for Karloff.He was still hungry
and looking for that big break.Although
the role of the monster would forever typecast him, the actor remained forever
grateful for having taking the role in Frankenstein,
once describing the career door-opening creature as “the best friend I ever
had.â€
It’s not hard to see why Karloff’s portrayal of the
monster remains the preeminent of the Universal series.He was, after all, the only actor to have been
given the opportunity to actually act and emote, to bring a sense of pathos to
the role.He was abetted, of course, by
Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up which, rather than masking, cannily sculpted and
made highlight of Karloff’s facial features and sunken cheeks.This gave the monster, according to one of
the participants in the documentary, a “full expression range.â€The trio of actors who would subsequently
portray the monster in the Universal series simply weren’t given the opportunity
to apply any emotive effect of their own.Even by Son of Frankenstein (1939),
the third film in the series, the screenwriters had already reduced the monster
into little more than a hulking, lumbering menace and henchman.
It is discouraging to learn that when Frankenstein had its gala premiere in
the autumn of 1931, Karloff was not even invited to attend.He was already forty-four years of age when
he assumed the role, a no-name celebrity and hardly a handsome matinee idol of
any recognition. The unexpected
phenomenal success of Frankenstein
would change all that, and Universal was quick to capitalize on the actor’s
sudden notoriety as Hollywood’s most beloved boogeyman.Karloff’s natural proclivity for taking on
roles of menacing villainous characters with icy stares would allow his casting
into a string of Golden Age horror classics – not only for Universal but for
other studios as well, including memorable turn in MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu.The
latter remains a great, entertaining film… if undeniably one of the most
politically-incorrect lavish big studio productions of the 1930s.
When the market for horror films softened in the
mid-1940s – thanks, in part, due to the horror genre’s continuing perceived transgressions
of the Hays Code - Karloff easily transitioned to character roles, where,
according to his daughter, her father’s natural “dark coloring,†permitted him
to slip easily into “ethnic roles.â€As
one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, he was able to exercise his
freelance status by working for, amongst others, RKO, Columbia, Monogram, and
Warner Bros.
Another avenue of opportunity had presented itself around
this same time.In 1941 Karloff was
lured, against his better judgement according to this film, to take on the Broadway
role of the villainous Jonathan Brewster in Joseph L. Kesselring’s stage play Arsenic and Old Lace.It was to his life-long disappointment that a
clause in his theatrical stage contract prevented his returning to Hollywood –
as did several fellow members of the original Broadway cast – to reprise the
role for the much beloved Frank Capra film adaptation of 1944.
Though initially frightened to work in theatre before a
live audience, the success of Arsenic
emboldened Karloff to accept several other roles in such Broadway productions as
The Lark (with Julie Harris), The Linden Tree, The Shop at Sly Corner, and even in a memorable turn as Captain
Hook in a 1950 production of Peter Pan.Fortunately, we of a certain age who missed
out still can get a small taste of what we missed since kinescopes survive from
early Hallmark Hall of Fame
broadcasts of the original production of The
Lark and a 1961 re-staging of Arsenic
and Old Lace.
Though Karloff’s work in radio is mostly ignored in this
documentary, the film does take pains to point out that he was among the first
movie stars of his generation to fully embrace television.Though he would often appear in serious
television dramas for such programs as Texaco
Star Theater or Playhouse 90, he
was not above spoofing his own curious fame as Hollywood’s grandest ghoul on
any number of variety programs hosted by the likes of Red Skelton or Dinah
Shore.
In the 1960s, he would famously host (and occasionally
act) in episodes of the television program Thriller,
or appear in drag as “Mother Muffin†in an episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E – or with former U.N.C.L.E. agent Robert
Vaughn in the spy-film The Venetian
Affair (1966).Joe Dante also
references the series of wonderful long-playing albums Karloff would record
over the years, his unmistakable, lisping voice introducing children to a wonderful
selection of folk tales, ghost stories, Washington Irving classics, and
time-worn fables.
Karloff's late career guest star appearance in "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." as Mother Muffin, opposite Stefanie Powers and Robert Vaughn.
Boris
Karloff: the Man behind the Monster reminds us that the actor (1887-1969)
accomplished a lot in his eighty-one-years, a large percentage of which would
encompass appearances on screen, on stage, on air, on record, and on
television.To their credit, the
filmmakers share what they can in the constraint of the film’ ninety-nine
minute running time, and the film certainly succeeds as an excellent
primer.Karloff wonks like myself might
hold out hope that a multi-part, Ken Burns-style series might someday be put
into the works, but I imagine that’s unlikely.One hundred and thirty four years have passed since Karloff’s birth.The fact that contemporary audiences remain completely
entranced by his filmography in 2021 is testament enough to the worthiness of
this loving tribute painting him as one of Hollywood’s greatest.
For details about how to view the film, click here.
The
decade of the 1950s is the Golden Age of science fiction movies. Prior to that,
the genre was mostly ignored on film in favor of horror. Of course, the two
genres often overlapped, especially in the 50s, when audiences were worried
about nuclear war, UFOs, alien invasions, and the dangers of radioactivity. We
got pictures with giant bugs, flying saucers, amphibious creatures, Martian
invaders, and mole people. With few exceptions, most of the science fiction
fare from the period is godawful but usually fun for a drive-in movie
experience or late-night “creature feature†material on television.
The
exceptions have proven to stand the test of time and are considered classics
today—The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing from Another
World (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956), Forbidden Planet (1956), among others.
The
Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is one of these gems. Conceived and written by the
great Richard Matheson, the movie was brought to the screen by Jack Arnold, one
of the more under-appreciated filmmakers of his day. While Arnold specialized
in “creature features†in the fifties (he brought us The Creature from the
Black Lagoon in 1954 and Tarantula in ’55, for example), he went on
to be a successful hard-working craftsman for dozens of popular television
shows in the 60s and 70s.
Matheson
wrote the initial story and simultaneously penned a novel (The Shrinking Man)
published in 1956. He sold the rights to Universal on the condition that he be
hired to write the screenplay. Matheson’s script followed the structure of his
novel, which used flashbacks to tell Scott Carey’s story. Arnold and the studio
preferred that the story be told linearly, so Richard Alan Simmons got the job
to re-write the screenplay as such. Both Matheson and Simmons share screenplay
credit, while Matheson receives story credit.
The
tale is well-known. Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is in a loving marriage with
Louise (Randy Stuart). One day they are out on a boat. While Louise is below
deck, a strange mist envelops Scott. As time passes, Scott notices that his
clothes no longer fit him—he’s becoming smaller. Doctors are befuddled. Scott
shrinks some more. Eventually this affects the marriage and Scott questions his
manhood. He becomes a media curiosity, and he continues to diminish in size.
Ultimately, he is alone in his house and must first battle the family cat, and
later, in a climactic sequence, a tarantula. And still, he continues to grow
smaller…
The
Incredible Shrinking Man is one of the most thoughtful, mind-bending, and
existential science fiction films ever made—and it was certainly a milestone of
the period. Its cosmic ending, which studio executives wanted to change to a
happier one, was kept intact by director Arnold—and this is what elevates Shrinking
Man to a BIG picture.
The
visual effects, while crude by today’s standards, were cleverly done in
1956-57. Arnold utilized split screens, rear screen projections, oversized sets
and furniture, and trick photography to achieve the illusion of Scott’s
condition against an enlarging hostile world around him. As Arnold states in a
wonderful vintage 1983 interview that is a supplement accompanying the film,
the secret to this and all the director’s work was “preparation.†He was a
believer in storyboards, and he created these to fully imagine the picture
prior to shooting a frame of film. Much like the outline some authors pen prior
to drafting a novel, Arnold’s storyboards allowed him to try out different
ideas and erase them if they didn’t work.
The
Criterion Collection presents an outstanding package for Shrinking Man.
The film is a 4K digital restoration that looks amazingly fresh. It comes with
an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. There is an optional and informative audio
commentary by genre-film historian Tom Weaver and horror-music expert David
Schecter.
Supplements
abound. A new featurette on the film’s visual effects hosted by FX experts
Craig Barron and Ben Burtt is a lot of fun. A very entertaining conversation
about the film between filmmaker Joe Dante and comedian/writer Dana Gould is
fabulous. A remembrance on the film with Richard Christian Matheson (Richard
Matheson’s son) is also superb. Of particular interest to film buffs might be
the previously mentioned footage from 1983 of Jack Arnold interviewed about the
film. Also of great significance is a “director’s cut†of a 2021 documentary
about Arnold, Auteur on the Campus: Jack Arnold at Universal. And if all
that weren’t enough, we get two 8mm home video short presentations of the film that
circulated in the 1960s, a feature on missing musical cues, a vintage teaser
narrated by none other than Orson Welles, and the theatrical trailer. The
booklet contains an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien.
The
Incredible Shrinking Man is a must-have, buy-today, excellent release from
Criterion. For fans of 1950s science fiction, Richard Matheson, Jack Arnold,
and giant spiders. Sublime!
The first "biker" movie to click with the public was "The Wild One" starring Marlon Brando in one of his most iconic roles. Released in 1953, the film set the template for the biker films that would follow: the motorcycle gang was rebellious and sometimes violent. They ignored laws and looked on young women as prey. But the script would usually provide a sympathetic side to them, as well, just so the audience didn't find itself cheering for protagonists who were irredeemable cretins. Despite the success of "The Wild One", it took until 1966 for the next major biker movie to emerge with the release of Roger Corman's "The Wild Angels". The success of that film shocked the movie industry and before long studios were churning out low-budget copycat productions. Most were crudely made and instantly dispensable but one of them, "The Born Losers", would introduce the character of Billy Jack, played by Tom Laughlin, who took on a gang of cutthroat bikers. Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider" became a landmark film in 1969 but it was unique in that it centered on two individual bikers and didn't involve the traditional Hell's Angels clones. The biker movie fad was popular and profitable but by the early 1970s it had already pretty much burned out. One of the last films in the genre, "J.C.", was unknown to me until a screener copy turned up. The film was the brainchild of one William McGaha, who I was equally unfamiliar with. McGaha, who obviously thought of himself as the Orson Welles of the dying biker film cycle, directed, produced, wrote and starred in the film. What emerged was one of the most bizarre biker films imaginable.
McGaha plays the title character J.C., a troubled young man who is trying to live down the shame of his father having been a fanatical preacher. There are instant analogies to Jesus Christ aside from his initials. He is an avid biker who has a group of dedicated followers who he regards as his disciples. Get it? When we first see him, he's working as a carpenter until he quits the job after being bullied by a hippie-hating foreman. In some reviews of the film, it has been speculated that he's supposed to be Jesus Christ himself reincarnated as a hippie. I don't recall that being spelled out specifically and besides, those who believe in Jesus Christ being the son of God would find it difficult to fathom that a man who would willfully endure the horrors of crucifixion would, in his modern guise, throw in the towel on his profession because his boss tossed a few insults his way. Early in the film, J.C. announces that he suddenly has a desire to visit his small hometown in Georgia with the intention of seeing his estranged sister, Miriam (Joanna Moore). As J.C. was despised by the redneck townspeople many years ago, he's advised that the visit will be ill-fated. However, during a drug-fueled hallucinogenic "trip", he announces that God has spoken to him and he is an all-knowing prophet. That's all it takes for the disciples to follow him on his dramatic bike journey home. At first, things go well and J.C. enjoys catching up with his sister. But pretty soon, the town's bigoted sheriff (Slim Pickens) and his deputy (Burr DeBenning) decide to show those hippies they aren't welcome in a traditional "family values" community of racists. They arrest a black member of the gang, David (Hannibal Penney) on a trumped-up drug charge and beat him to a pulp while he is in jail. When word gets to J.C. that a committee of good citizens intends to lynch David, he rallies his disciples like John Wayne did his ranch hands in "Chisum'" and they engage the locals in a battle royale.
By any measure, "J.C." is an unsatisfying film. The cinematography and editing are erratic and the script is choppy and episodic. But for all its flaws, you have to admire the fact that McGaha got the movie made despite having only two even more obscure films to his credit. He shot largely on location, eschewing studio sets for obvious budget reasons. It would be easy to mock his efforts, but I have great admiration for aspiring filmmakers from the pre-digital era in which shooting even a low-budget movie required financing clunky equipment and expensive film stock that left precious few opportunities for retakes. As an actor, McGaha is adequate at best but he does get a terrific performance from Slim Pickens in a refreshingly non-comedic role. Equally good are Hannibal Penney and Burr DeBenning, especially in a tense jailhouse discussion in which the tortured man and his torturer almost reach a level of humanity between them. McGaha's budgetary problems are all-too-apparent in the climax of the film when action scenes are cut abruptly and the lack of coverage makes it appear as though he barely had enough film stock to complete the scene.
The Kino Lorber transfer is as good as one could expect, given the surviving elements it was mastered from. The bonus extras consist of the trailer and an assortment of trailers for other KL releases.
"J.C" is not a film that merits a recommendation, but it is one I have to admire for simply never being as bad as I had expected. For that, Bill McGaha (who seems to have vanished from society) deserves praise. If he is still alive and well, I hope he enjoys seeing his film get the Blu-ray treatment. (An amusing aspect of the movie's packaging is the use of the original poster art that proclaimed "J.C. and his disciples were a gang of broads, bikes and blacks", which was obviously meant as an inclusive message in 1972.)
I
originally saw the Brian De Palma/Al Pacino version of Scarface (1983) on
laserdisc in 1994 and again in a 20th anniversary theatrical
screening in New York, but not since. Recently, I decided to have revisit it on
Netflix and was amazed that I recalled very little of it. The constant use of
profanity and the intensity of some of the violent set pieces, in particular
the notorious chainsaw scene, are tamer than the language and the most violent moments
of HBO’s The Sopranos (1999 – 2007) and Showtime’s Brotherhood
(2006 – 2008). However, in 1983 Universal Pictures was prompted to release the
film with the following caveat in the newspaper ads when the film was released
in December: “CAUTION – Scarface is an intense film both in its use of
language and depiction of violence. We suggest mature audiences.†While one
might think this was a publicity stunt with the objective to get as many people
to see the film as possible, it could very well have instead been a compromise
to having the film released without the dreaded X rating. Director De Palma was
no stranger to sparring with the then Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) and its president, Richard Heffner. Previously, Mr. De Palma’s 1980 film
Dressed to Kill needed to be altered to avoid an X and he went back and
forth with the MPAA on the violence and overt sexual nature of the film until
it was releasable. It is interesting to note that the X rating, generally
associated with explicit sexual content as opposed to violence, was also given
to John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy when it was released in May 1969
(later changed to an R rating), Stanley Kubrick’s masterful A Clockwork
Orange in December 1971 (also later changed to an R rating following the
removal of several seconds of footage), and most famously, to Bernardo
Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in February 1973 (recently changed to
NC-17). Tango garnered critical acclaim from New Yorker reviewer Pauline
Kael and, arguably because of the promise of sex scenes with the then
45-year-old Marlon Brando, did boffo box office. These are the cinema’s most
notable examples, with Cowboy winning the Best Picture Oscar and Clockwork
being nominated but losing to William Friedkin’s The French Connection
(1971) for that top prize. In the end, Scarface received an R rating and
grossed several million dollars shy of its $23.5M budget but, like so many
films of that period, cleaned up later on from ancillary sources such as home
video and cable television airings. It has become one of the most famous and
beloved motion pictures in recent memory, adding Al Pacino’s famous line about
saying hello to his little friend to the American lexicon, right up there with
Roy Scheider’s quip about needing a bigger boat in Jaws (1975).
It
is interesting to note that the very existence of Scarface began with the
original film of the same name made roughly fifty years prior to it and served
as the blueprint for Mr. Pacino’s interpretation of Cuban arrival Antonio
Montana and his rise to fame in the cocaine-laden backdrop of Miami, FL. Directed
by Howard Hawks between September 1930 and March 1931 and written by playwright
Ben Hecht, Scarface (1932), then billed as Scarface, the Shame of a
Nation, opened at the Rialto Theatre in New York City on Thursday, May 19,
1932 and, like the remake, also suffered its own share of controversy for
violence and sexuality, though not due to the same intensity as the remake. Coming
on the heels of Mervyn Leroy’s Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson and
William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy, both from 1931, Scarface
is widely considered to be the start of cinema’s depiction of and fascination
with gangsters and crime dramas. We are in 1920s Chicago in the time of Al
Capone (upon whose life the film is loosely based) and gangland wars between
the city’s North Side and South Side. The film begins with a single take that
runs just over three minutes in a setup that sets the tone. This must have been
deemed very suspenseful at the time and, while not nearly as intricate as the
three-minute mobile crane shot that opens Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil
(1957) or the three-minute Panaglide shot that starts John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978), it manages to build tension for an audience not used to seeing such
cinematic techniques at the time.
The
story gets underway with “Big†Louis Costillo (Harry J. Vegar), the most
successful crime boss on the city’s South Side, talking and laughing with
members of his crew at a restaurant when heads to a phone booth. In the
shadows, still in the same opening take, Antonio “Tony†Camonte (Paul Muni),
Costillo’s own hired muscle, appears in silhouette and kills him in a murder contracted
with him by John “Johnny†Lovo (Osgood Perkins), his new boss. This being the
era of Prohibition, the main source of income is not cocaine but beer to be
delivered to speakeasies. A police officer heads to a barbershop the next day
and brings Tony in for questioning, determined to finger him for Costillo’s murder.
A lawyer pulls some strings and gets Tony out of it, but the police want to
catch him in the act of a crime, and they are more determined than ever. As it
stands Johnny, Tony’s new boss, now controls the South Side, with Tony and the
reticent Rinaldo (George Raft in a menacing performance) at his side. Rinaldo
reminds me of Al Neri, Michael Corleone’s reticent henchman in The Godfather
films, played icily by the late Richard Bright.
The
North Side is run by a man named O’Hara and Tony’s thirst for power begins to
swell. Johnny warns him not to mess with business associates on the North Side
because, in the words of Tony Soprano, “it attracts negative attention†and
potential violence. Tony also has his eye on Poppy (Karen Morley), Johnny’s
girlfriend, who initially shrugs Tony off, but warms up to him later when his
flirtations increase as he becomes more intrigued by her. In his apartment, he
shows her the sight of an electric billboard across the way advertising Cook’s
Tours beneath the slogan “The World is Yours,†taken to excessive extremes in
the De Palma remake.
Cinema Retro has received the following press release from Turner Classic Movies:
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will celebrate
the life and career of iconic actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd with a programming
tribute on Monday, June 14. Lloyd,
who passed away on May 11 at the age of 106, was known for playing the saboteur
himself in Hitchcock’s Saboteur
(1942) and was part of original company of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater. His
eight-decade career saw him work in all media including Broadway, television,
film, and radio, with stints as director and producer. He attended the TCM
Classic Cruise in 2011 and 2013 and attended all but one TCM Classic Film
Festival in Hollywood.
The following is the complete schedule for TCM's on-air tribute to Norman
Lloyd:
TCM Remembers Norman Lloyd –
Monday, June 14
8:00 p.m. Saboteur (1942) – A young man accused of
sabotage goes on the lam to prove his innocence. 10:00 p.m. Live From the TCM Classic Film Festival: Norman
Lloyd (2016) –
Norman Lloyd discusses his career in front of a live audience. 11:00 p.m. Limelight (1952) – A broken-down comic
sacrifices everything to give a young dancer a shot at the big time. 1:30 a.m. He Ran All the Way (1951) – A crook on the run
hides out in an innocent girl's apartment. 3:00 a.m. The Southerner (1945) – A sharecropper fights
the elements to start his own farm. 5:00 a.m. Live From the TCM Classic Film Festival: Norman
Lloyd (2016) –
Norman Lloyd discusses his career in front of a live audience.
In this undated clip from "The Dick Cavett Show", Orson Welles is in top form: he's humble (or pretending to be), witty, jocular and a master ranconteur., and he relates marvelous tales all the while puffing on one of his signature Churchill cigars. Here, he reflects on the making of "Citizen Kane" and a chance encounter with publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, on whom the Kane character was partly based. Welles also explains about how his naivety and "dumbness" in terms of his knowledge of filmmaking helped ensure the artistic success of the movie. He also reflects on the great contributions of cinematographer Greg Toland. Welles claims he hadn't seen "Kane" since its premiere. That may be true, but keep in mind that Welles was, among many things, a master fabulist.
When 23 year-old genius and enfant terrible Orson Welles broadcast his Halloween eve radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" in 1938, as we all know, it resulted in scandal and panic. There have been plenty of urban legends and misconceptions relating the broadcast including beliefs that many people committed suicide but this is just one exaggeration relating to one of the most infamous radio broadcasts in history. Welles, who was the director of the acclaimed Mercury Theatre weekly radio program that he founded with John Houseman, had eschewed the highbrow fare in favor of playfully presenting a modern spin on H.G. Wells's novel that had been written and set in the Victorian era. His reluctant script writer Howard Koch randomly chose an innocuous small town, Grover's Mill, New Jersey, to replace the London setting of the book. Welles listened to the finished recording of the program and made a last minute decision to liven it up by presenting it in the format of what today would be called a "breaking news" story. Cleverly presenting the show as a standard musical program, Welles had intermittent bulletins about large explosions on Mars taking place. Ultimately, the bulletins announced that Martians had landed in New Jersey and were decimating local military forces, using high powered ray guns as weapons. This 2013 PBS broadcast of "American Experience" looks at the unintended consequences of the broadcast, separating fact from fiction. For example, Welles did have an introduction stating that the program was a fictional radio play. However, many listeners were tuned into another program to hear the popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his legendary "partner", Charlie McCarthy. When Bergen's act ended, listeners started to engage in channel-surfing and came upon the sensational broadcast, having missed the introduction. Before long, many people did indeed panic. Police stations were flooded with calls from locals all across the nation. Some people packed their belongings and fled to isolated areas, while others sought ways to enlist in the battle against the Martians. (The program uses actors to verbalize actual interviews of everyday people who spoke to the press about their own personal experiences.)
What the "American Experience" episode clarifies is that not everyone was snookered. People who were aware of the joke wrote and called the network to praise Welles, but others were outraged about being made to look foolish. While the show was on the air, Welles was forced to interrupt the program with a reminder that it was all a work of fiction, but by then many people had tuned out and run for the hills. Some filed lawsuits against Welles and CBS, the network that broadcast the show. As the program points out, Welles pretended to be contrite and made a public apology, even though he privately delighted in having gained international recognition that he correctly assumed would boost his career. (Indeed, Hollywood soon beckoned.) One commentator says that Welles's apology was, in fact, the greatest performance of his career. In the end, none of the lawsuits against Welles or CBS succeeded and the government only issued a rule that prohibited any future broadcast from simulating an actual news bulletin.Welles was catapulted to international fame and even got his first sponsor for future broadcasts.The rest, as they say, is history- and Welles would continue to antagonize benefactors who employed him throughout his life.
The excellent 53-miinute "American Experience" episode provides excerpts from the broadcasts, comments from media historians and a wealth of fascinating photos consisting of Welles at work in the studio and front pages from the national newspapers that covered the scandal with predictable prominence.
It's easy in the modern era to smirk at what influential columnist Dorothy Thompson called the "incredible stupidity" of the American people in her column that defended Welles and his artistic vision. However, the show puts in context the fact that in those dark days of the late 1930s, the radio was a virtual god in most households, dispensing reliable and accurate information. The news was often grim but it was honest. An American public had been through almost decade of financial devastation from the Great Depression. Many millions were still out of work, life savings were lost and life for many seemed hopeless. In the midst of all this, Americans looked with great concern on alarming world events: Hitler's ever-expanding territorial ambitions and the correct suspicion that the accommodation of the Allies wouldn't satiate him for long; the rise of fascist Italy and the war-mongering gains of a militaristic Japan, all of which pointed to the seeming inevitability of second world war. Before modern day America judges the gullibility of a previous generation, consider that as you are reading this, the nation is reeling from thousands of deaths a week from the worst pandemic in a hundred years. Yet, there are substantial numbers of people who continue to insist that it's all a hoax. Now that is "incredible stupidity".
The program is available for streaming on Amazon and can be viewed for free by Amazon Prime members.
Criterion has
released a Blu-ray edition of one of the best science fiction films from the
1950s or any other decade for that matter. George Pal’s version of War of
the Worlds, directed by Byron Haskin, landed in theaters in 1953 and has become
an iconic symbol of alien invasion stories.
H.G. Wells’
novel had already been made famous by Orson Welles’ landmark CBS radio drama in
1938. The Martian invasion played out as news bulletins concerning an
attack on the East Coast by enemy tripod machines armed with a terrifying heat
ray and poisonous gas. With Americans nervous about a possible war in
Europe at the time, audiences listening that night were especially vulnerable
hearing the fabricated reports of destruction and carnage. One has to wonder
why many of the people glued to their radios didn’t turn to another station for
confirmation.
With Alfred
Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille linked to film adaptations of Wells’ novel at
different times, it was producer George Pal who finally brought the story to
the screen in 1953. Pal, an Academy Award winning animator, had already
thrilled moviegoers with Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide, both of
which were box office successes. His Puppetoon short from 1942,
Tulips Shall Grow, depicted the Nazi invasion of Holland and provided a
template for the attack sequences in War of the Worlds.
Featuring a relatively
hefty budget of $2 million, Pal funneled most of his resources into the famed
special effects depicting the deadly Martian war machines destroying Los Angeles.
An in-house team at Paramount, led by Gordon Jennings and art director Albert
Nozaki, designed and built the futuristic swan-like vehicles armed with
ferocious heat rays and skeleton beams that lay waste to all military weapons
that stood in their way. Striking miniature work and beautiful paintings
by astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell completed the look of this Technicolor
masterpiece.
The cast
included future Bat Masterson star Gene Barry, beautiful newcomer Ann Robinson
and radio actor Les Tremayne. The script was fashioned by Barre Lyndon who
transferred the story from Victorian England to modern day California. The
three-strip Technicolor photography was supervised by George Barnes and the
pulsating music score was composed by Leith Stevens. The unsung heroes of War
of the Worlds were the sound effects teams led by Paramount regulars Gene
Garvin and Harry Lindgren. All manner of new sound cues were created for
this film and many of these effects are still in use today.
Criterion’s
Blu-ray features the 2018 4K restoration produced by Paramount Pictures, and
the results are truly spectacular with amazing color saturation and crisp,
clear sound. Errors in registration of the Technicolor strips have been
cleaned up and an alternate 5.1 soundtrack has been realized by Star Wars
sound designer Ben Burtt. Purists will be happy to know that the original
mono track has been included as an option.
War of the
Worlds was filmed in the 1.37 aspect ratio although some theaters were
exhibiting it in a matted 1.66 version. After adjusting my monitor to
view this cropped presentation, I found the picture to look cramped and noticed
that important information was occasionally lost. The original stereo
tracks are now lost but, according to Ben Burtt, they only provided exaggerated
sound effects to the additional speakers.
As a 9 year-old
watching War of the Worlds on its’ NBC television premier in 1967, I was
terrified and hooked at the same time. Much like experiencing an E-ticket ride
at Disneyland, I enjoyed being
scared. I
found the narration by Sir Cedric Hardwicke to be gripping as he described the
“rout of civilization" during a montage of destruction. Through the
years I continued to enjoy this film on network and local television broadcasts
and at college screenings. Eventually I owned home video copies in the
VHS, CED disc, DVD and now Blu-ray formats. To say War of the Worlds
is my favorite film is an extreme understatement.
Some movie directors achieve greatness by steadily
working at their craft over a lifetime, building their reputation movie by
movie, until they develop a following, creating a catalogue of films that they
become known for. It’s a steady process of craftsmanship. And then there are
some few directors who seem to come out of the egg fully hatched, so to speak.
Their particular vision, their attraction to certain themes, their own peculiar
style is evident even from their earliest work. Orson Welles was one such film
maker. So were Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah. If you watch the episodes of the
half-hour “Gunsmoke†TV series that Peckinpah wrote in the 1950’s, or The
Westerner TV series in 1960, you will be surprised to see how many of the
themes and obsessions that Peckinpah put into films like “The Wild Bunch†and “Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid†were on display even back then.
John Ford is another one of those “fully-hatchedâ€
directors. His movies are immediately identifiable, infused with a vision that
Ford and only Ford possessed, and he had it from the beginning. If you want a
demonstration of what I’m talking about get a copy of Kino Lorber Studio
Classics new Blu-ray release of “Straight Shooting†(1917), Ford’s very first
silent feature film, which he directed under the name Jack Ford. Starring the
legendary Harry Carey, it’s a story set against the backdrop of the changing
frontier. Like “Shane†(1953) it’s about the conflict between the cattlemen who
conquered the frontier and the sod busters who wanted to tame it. But it’s more
complex than “Shane.†Even though Ford is on the side of the farmers and sees
the necessity of civilization, he also mourns for the passing of the frontier.
Carey plays a hired gunslinger named “Cheyenne†Harry, a
man who sells his gun to the highest bidder. He’s an outsider in every sense of
the word—a man not unlike Ethan Edwards, the central character John Wayne
played 40 years later in Ford’s “The Searchers†(1956). In “Straight Shootingâ€
Cheyenne comes face to face for the first time with everything that’s lacking
in his own life. He’s changed when he sees how desperately the family of a
young boy grieves after being shot by Placer Fremont (Vester Pegg), another
killer hired by the ranchers. He feels compassion, especially for Joan Sims
(Molly Malone), the dead boy’s sister, and quits the ranchers, saying there are
some jobs too low even for him. He’s then faced with the dilemma of either
riding away, as he always has, or siding with the farmers.
Ford repeated that same inner conflict in “The Searchersâ€
by making Edwards face the choice of either remaining an outcast by killing his
own niece because she had been raised by Indians, or rejoining society by letting
go of his passionate hatred of them. What is really fascinating when you
compare the two films, is that the resemblance between Cheyenne and Edwards is
not merely thematic, it’s physical. Film historian Joseph McBride, author of
“Searching for John Ford: A Life,†explains in the audio commentary accompanying
the movie, that later in his career when he worked with Wayne, Ford told him to
study Carey. “Duke, take a look over at Harry Carey and watch him work,†Ford
said. “Stand like he does, if you can, and play your roles so that people can
look upon you as a friend.†Wayne even imitated the way Carey held his right
arm with his left hand, a gesture Ford taught him to indicate his aloneness.
Both films end with the same shot of the hero standing in
the open door way of the sod buster’s house, which Ford used as a symbolic boundary
line between a settled life and the wilderness. In “The Searchers,†Edwards is
left standing outside as the door closes on him. In Cheyenne’s case, Ford
couldn’t seem to decide which way to conclude the story, with the gunman
struggling internally until almost the last frame which way he wants to go.
There are some great action scenes in “Straight
Shooting,†especially an assault on the farmer’s house by the ranchers’ army of
gunmen, which Ford modeled on a similar scene in D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a
Nation.†Also in the cast, as one of Cheyenne’s pals, is Hoot Gibson, a rodeo
rider who went on to become a cowboy star in his own right.
In addition to McBride’s audio commentary, Kino Lorber
provides a 12-page booklet with an informative essay by film critic Tag
Gallagher. According to Gallagher the sole surviving print of “Straight
Shootingâ€is in the Czech Film Archive,
under the title “Facing Cowboy’s Guns,†35 mm, and tinted. In 2016 Universal
made a color digital restoration from a Czech print, 4th generation,
given to the Library of Congress. Gallagher notes the Kino Lorber 4K Blu-ray restoration
is in black and white and correctly mastered at 18 fps. The picture is
remarkably sharp and clear, displaying Ford’s California location photography around
Beale’s Cut in Newhall in all its glory. Other bonus features include a video
essay by Gallagher, and a 10-minute fragment of “Hitchin’ Post†(1920)
preserved by the Library of Congress.
For anyone interested in the history of movies or John
Ford’s career this Blu-ray is a must have.Recommended.
Paramount Home Video has released a new Blu-ray special
edition of Cecil B. DeMille’s epic “The Ten Commandmentsâ€. The set includes
both the director’s original silent film version as well as his 1956
blockbuster remake starring Charlton Heston as Moses. To commemorate the
release of the video, Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief Lee Pfeiffer caught up with filmmaker Fraser C. Heston to
discuss the impact of the movie on his father’s career. (An interesting
footnote: Fraser Heston is seen in the film as baby Moses, thus, both father
and son played the same character.)
Cinema
Retro:Your
father first worked for Cecil B. DeMille on The
Greatest Show on Earth. Would you say he is the singular most important
person responsible for your father’s rise to fame?
Fraser C.
Heston: Absolutely.My
father was on the Paramount lot and he waved at Mr. DeMille. He had been on the
lot for some other audition and he saw Mr. DeMille by the gate and said,
“Hello, Mr. DeMille†before driving off the lot.Mr. DeMille asked his secretary, “Who was that guy?â€She said, “Oh, that’s Charlton Heston. I
think you met him before and you didn’t think much of him.†But DeMille said,
“Well, I think he’s an interesting guy. Why don’t you have him over and I’ll
meet with him?†He ends up offering him the part of the circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth and it ends
up winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Then he tells him to come back
for another meeting- he doesn’t even tell him what the part is- and says, “I’m
going to make The Ten Commandments.â€
He shows him models and paintings all afternoon and gets him all excited but he
doesn’t offer him a part. He just says, “I’ll bring you back in a week or two.â€
He ended up asking him, “How would you like to play Moses?â€The rest is history, as they say.
CR: Was
your father intimidated by playing such an historic character?
FH: No,
I think he embraced the challenge. He obviously didn’t have to play him from a
baby, as that was my job! But he did have to play him as a young man right up
through when he had that white beard at the end of the movie, however old Moses
was at that point.He also had the
challenge of going from an Egyptian prince to a slave to the leader of his
people- and to do it in a way that perhaps wasn’t as stylized as some of the
DeMille epics. That film, I think, stands the test of time. The reason for
that, I think, is the fantastic cast. Look at Yul Brynner’s performance, for
example. I can’t imagine anyone else playing Ramses.
CR: I’m
trying to remember if your father and Brynner ever worked together again…
FH: They
did on The Buccaneer, which was
produced by DeMille and directed by his son-in-law, Anthony Quinn. Not as good
a film, obviously, but still a classic. Some interesting trivia- if I live long
enough, since I was the youngest actor on the set of The Ten Commandments, I will be the last actor in Hollywood who
worked with Cecil B. DeMille.
(Photo copyright Fraser C. Heston, 2019.)
CR: I
was recently revisiting your father’s wonderful book “The Actor’s Lifeâ€, which
consists of the daily diary entries he kept when shooting films and discovered
that, unfortunately, he began this habit only after The Ten Commandments has wrapped, though he does discuss
post-production work on the movie. But he does write, “If you can’t make a
career out of two DeMille pictures, you’d better turn in your suit.†He also
writes, “Our son Fraser was born while we were shooting The Ten Commandments. He played the infant Moses at the age of
three months and immediately retired, displaying an acute judgment of the
acting profession.â€
FH: (Laughing) Well, I think I felt a little
pressure from my dad not to follow in his footsteps.
CR: Well,
many offspring of iconic actors have followed in their footsteps with varying
degrees of success. Were you ever tempted to do so?
FH: I
think I was but I was discouraged by my mom and dad. I mean Michael Douglas
pulled it off and a couple of other father-and-son acting teams pulled it off
but I think my parents knew how tough it would be to follow in my dad’s
footsteps. I started out in a different aspects of films. I started out as a
writer and discovered I liked writing screenplays. I got a couple of things
made and from there I started producing and then directing. So I came at filmmaking
more from the storyteller’s point-of-view. I consider myself, even if I’m
directing, to be a storyteller. That’s a director’s job.
CR: When
was the first time you remember seeing The
Ten Commandments?
FH: I
was probably about five and it was pretty terrifying, you know between the
Burning Bush and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army when the Red Sea
collapses…and oh, my God…
CR: …and
let’s not forget the presence of the great Vincent Price…
FH: Yes,
the evil Vincent Price and Yvonne De Carlo and Yul Brynner and everybody. It
was just fantastic.How could you have
seen that as a young person and not been blown away by it all and be terribly
impressed? I think everyone had that experience the first time they saw it.
People in our generation were young when it came out and that was their first
experience with an epic film. I think you have to place the film in a larger
pool of epics associated with my father along with Ben-Hur, El Cid and to a certain degree, Planet of the Apes that culminated in films like Gladiator. You can even go so far as The Avengers series, which are giant
modern epics. I think DeMille started it all. When you think of spectacle, you
think of C.B. DeMille. When you think of C.B. DeMille, you think of The Ten Commandments, right?
CR: I’ve
always said that if you didn’t like the way he directed actors, you had to
admire the way he directed traffic in films that large…
FH: (Laughs) So true!
CR: I
recall you once telling me that in the Heston household, DeMille was a revered
name.
FH: He
was. My dad always called him Mr. DeMille, never C.B. We still have the
telegram he sent my mom and when I was born saying, “Congratulations, he’s got
the part.†I’m looking at a picture on my wall right now. It’s a photo of me at
age four or five being held in my dad’s arms and reaching out and tweaking Mr.
DeMille’s nose.
A Cinema Retro Exclusive: director John Stevenson ("Kung Fu Panda", "Sherlock Gnomes") provides an exclusive interview with Midge Costin, director of the acclaimed new film "Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound".
Working on the sound was the most fun part of the two
animated feature films I have directed. One of the nicest gifts you get as a director,
after working on your film for years, is being able to see your film fresh
again once the sound designers and composer have added a whole new dimension to
the story. So I was very excited to see Midge Costin's new documentary "Making
Waves: The Art Of Cinematic Sound" and have a chance to talk to her about this
vital, but often overlooked aspect of movie making. (John Stevenson)
JS: I loved your
film and was surprised at how visual it was for a subject that is primarily
auditory. It must have been a labor of love.
MC: It took 9 years to
make! My editor, David J. Turner was a student of mine and he was so good. He
had already come into film school having made films and he was also a composer.
He was so good at both sound and picture and he was so sensitive. We shot most
of the interviews from 2013 to 2016. In the first year I just sat with him,
which I know people don’t do anymore as directors, and we sat and went through
the dailies and talked and he took it all in. He’s a young guy (now in his mid
30’s) and he was with me the whole time. He was brilliant.
JS: IMDB Lists
“Quiet Cool†from 1986 as your only picture editing credit, but did you edit
picture on any other films?
MC: I did apprentice editing on
something called GYMKATA (1985) and then QUIET COOL and a couple of other
things, then I went to Alaska right after film school. I actually did some
editing on some documentaries up there.What happened was, the last thing I thought I would do coming
out of film school was sound. I would get in a panic doing sound because
I thought it was technical, and I wasn’t relating it to story and character and
all of that. So I edited the picture with a friend of mine who ended up going into
sound and we edited his student film together.So I came out and did apprentice, assistant editing and all that. And I
had my thesis film left which was a short documentary and Dan calls me up and
says “Midge, none of the Union guys will touch this 16mm film, but if you come
I will teach you sound effects and I will cut the dialogueâ€. So, as I tell my
students, I lowered myself and took a sound job because I needed the money to
finish my thesis film. And on that very first film I realized ‘Oh crap, I am
responsible for setting mood and tone and establishing plot points and
character, and how do I do that?â€And so
I started and then it's like one show led to the next because I knew so many
people from film school. Once you do anything in sound everybody is like ’Oh,
can you help me?’ So I just started getting sound jobs, and then here it is,
the 80s and going into the 90s and sound is now in 5.1 and because I cut sound
effects (I was one of the few women that was cutting effects, which made it kind
of fun) and then I found myself on these big action adventure movies. My first Union Show
was DAYS OF THUNDER and I had to do the sound effect for the engine of the car
for the bad guy who was racing against Tom Cruise, and I did all the aerial
shots showing the Nascar racetrack. When I was a little I wanted to be a race car
driver (laughs). One thing just led to another and it was so exciting.
JS: You have 23
sound editing credits (according to IMDB) and those include doing Foley,
dialogue, sound effects, so out of all of those films which ones did you like
the most? MC: My favorite, because it comes down
to story and character was CRIMSON TIDE. I just love Gene Hackman and Denzel
Washington and their relationship and also the story. It is a good story about
the military, and are they pro war or anti-war? And I found that fascinating.
But the other thing is, you are in a submarine, so you are in a tin can and you
are telling a story on a set, and you have to take out the footsteps in the
dialogue track because they are stepping on plywood! But the whole tension of when
they get hit and they are going down, down, down, and they are going to be
crushed, it is your responsibility to bring the emotion and the reality,
because they are all just listening! It is all being told through their ears,
the story is being told aurally.
And also in that movie each different department (radio, sonar, weapons systems,
etc.) have a different coloured lighting, so we do the same thing, every single
space has a different background ambience to it, but I just loved working on that.
Another fun one was ARMAGEDDON. I know Stanley Kubrick is
probably rolling over in his grave because there is no sound in space and I'm
putting in all these incredible sounds. Even a fire happens and I am like "Oh,
really?" But when Bruce Willis and Steve
Buscemi come out of that shuttle for the first time, the meteor was the
antagonist and so what I wanted to do is make it sound like its going to devour
them. So I get earthquake rumbles and low tones that always go to our gut and
bring up fear and cue us that something is going to happen. And then have the rock as if it was almost like munching on somebody like
really chewing, going to eat them, devour them. But we are always thinking too "What’s the low frequency sound, what’s the mid, what’s the high?" And for the high
on that, I used this wind through a wire that really kind of makes the hair on
the back of your neck stand up, so that was fun.
My least favorite thing
is when you don’t have time and they get to sound at the last minute and they
don’t really care about sound. But when you have someone like Tony Scott who
cared about sound you would get it early enough, maybe even at the script stage
so you can be feeding the edit room, then those things are great. Michael Bay,
in some of his earlier films, did not seem as interested in sound. I was working
with George Waters, who was the supervisor, and he was getting him to pay
attention to sound, enlightening him and now Michael Bay really cares about
sound and realizes how important it is.
JS: So out of all of
those 23 films you worked on as a sound editor which director did you enjoy working
with the most and who used sound the most creatively?
MC: Tony Scott really
cared and was a really great collaborator and he looked on sound as one of his
key positions. But I know some big
directors even now who are not paying attention to sound. They do it late, and
they are changing picture to the last second and you just don’t have time to do
a good job. So it is all about respect. I was really sorry not to be able to
get the Cohen brothers for my film, they don’t really do too many interviews,
but they have sound specified in their scripts. So think about that, you can
read a script and possibly make suggestions.
I ended up on these big action adventure movies but the truth is
I realized one day late in the 90’s that I don’t even like those films, to tell
you the truth.I realized, a couple of
years ago, that I go to a movie to hear someone tell me what they think the
meaning of life is, and you don’t get that from those films! The whole
rollercoaster thing, I don’t really understand. I love rollercoasters, so I
would rather go on a real rollercoaster than watch some of these action
adventure movies. They are so overly violent, I found them sexist and racist,
so I started teaching and I thought I can pass on these skills that I have so
that they can make really good movies. One of my students was Ryan Coogler, who
did sound, because he didn’t know it very well. So that is kind of a fun thing.
JS: So a personal
question as a sound editor: which film sound design is the one that has
impressed you the most in the history of movies?
MC: I was just
thinking about that. One of the ones that stood out for me when I saw it and
thought about sound was David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD. Now when I listen to it I
think it is over the top, of course the whole film is, but still that had a big
impact on me. But I would say APOCALYPSE NOW and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, for
those big films. But I also really like smaller films. One of the reasons
ORDINARY PEOPLE is in my film is because silence can be really powerful. And I
also think about that with Hitchcock films. And Orson Welles, his films are so
subtle. And those films are as good as anything being made now. A lot of times
I will get questions from these 18 year-old boys about "What kind of microphone
did you use, or what kind of editing system?" And it is not about the
technology, that’s what I am trying to make sure people know, it is about the
directors. The directors who are pushing. Now it is so much easier digitally
than when we were doing it analog, but we are doing the same thing, and it was
kind of fun to learn when you could not even see anything. We would be staring
off into space. Now you can see the waveforms.
JS: So you have all these wonderful
directors-Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, George Lucas, Ang Lee Christopher
Nolan, and more and more. How easy was it to get all those directors for the
film, and how easy was it to get this plethora of clips from films going back
to the beginning of cinema? It must have been a huge job.
MC: Well, the
directors I got through the sound people mostly and then Spielberg and Lucas
are active at USC, and I have an endowed chair that was given by both of them.
So they're aware and they said yes, but we almost didn’t get Spielberg because
he was doing back to back films, and he had no time. We were literally about
to go to Tribeca and he was able to do the interview at the last minute.So it was always because they have so much respect for their sound people that
we got them. So that wasn't too bad. With Peter Weir, David Lynch and Ang Lee, it’s
like their spirituality is their film making. Ang Lee talked about being in the
Foley room on THE ICESTORM and making the sound of the ice with broken glass. He
was so engaged. He was in the edit room for BILLY LYNNâ€S LONG HALF TIME
WALKand he came and hung out with us
while we were setting up. Whereas some other people just came to do their piece.
I remember Robert Redford came in and said “I only have 20 minutes†(everybody
would say “I only have 20 minutesâ€) and then he gave us at least an hour,
because I think they really respect sound. And going into the second part of
your question, I had listened to their body of work and had very specific
questions because all those clips, we had to set them up. I had to know what
clips we could use so that I could ask them to talk about them. And if they
didn’t say the name of the film, we would ask and get them to say it (almost
like ADR) because I was asking them about specific films, and very specific
scenes because we had to know what we could use. So we learned (myself, my
editors, my producing partners and anyone involved in the film )
‘fair use’ and understand how it was used so we didn’t end up having the lawyers
cut our film for us (laughs).
JS: It must have
taken a long time to clear all those rights?
MC: It did, but we
were constantly giving them cuts in the last two years so that they could say
this is working and this is not. One of the things that we did it is that we
built scenes that we knew we wanted, like for SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and A RIVER
RUNS THROUGH IT, a quieter film, so we would build these scenes and that was
hard, because I didn’t want to go over 90 minutes, I knew it should be a 90
minute film, so I never made like a 5-hour version.
JS: Thank you! Films
are too long!
MC: I totally agree.
So we never even had a two-hour version.
JS: I have seen your film twice now, and if you can, I think it is very
important to see it in a cinema with a good Surround Sound system, because you
demonstrate various surround sound formats both visually and aurally. So what
is going to happen for home video where most people will hear it out of a
single sound bar in the front?
MC: You know, I just
got off the phone with someone who said (and this is the second person who has
said this to me in 24 hours) that it works somehow on a computer. And I’m like,
really? Because if you do something that is mono it splits 50/50 but if you do
left and right, it has a whole different feel, so it must translate somehow. I
have got to listen to it now! I understand most people will see it at home and
not in theaters, but it was important to me to find a distributor who would
give it a theatrical release. Some people bemoan the fact that people aren’t
going to theaters and all that stuff, but sound is even more important as
screens get smaller because that is the emotion, the emotion is coming through
sound. And also headphone technology is getting better with VR.
JS: I used to love CinemaScope films where they would pan the sound as
characters moved across the screen. With 5.1 mixes the dialogue got anchored to
the center of the screen, but now with Dolby Atmos mixes panning sound seems to
be back (I am thinking of the immersive soundtrack for Alfonso Curon’s ROMA if
you saw it in 70mm). Do you like panning sound to increase the spatiality, or
do you find it distracting?
MC: I just did a panel
at the Mill Valley Film Festival with Iaon Allen from Dolby and Ben Burtt. I
worked on a show where they did pan the sound, it was HOCUS POCUS with Bette
Midler and was kind of fun, but here is what the problem is. If the left,
center, right speakers are different when you pan from one to the other then
they will sound different as you move from speaker to speaker, and this is what
Iaon was saying. So they stopped. The other thing is, it takes so long to do
that and then you go to so many theaters and the sound is screwed up. I remember going to see THE LAST EMPEROR and this is what
happened, it is the perspective thing. I am looking at the emperor, and now I
am looking at the audience, and things swap. And it calls attention to itself.
So if you do a P.O.V., it changes, and then it’s like “Why is the sound over
there?†It calls attention to why the sound is coming from that side of the
screen and the audience gets pulled out of the movie. So it is so awkward doing
that, that it got anchored. But I loved ROMA! I thought it was brilliant. I insisted on
including it in the film because even Ben Burtt was saying "There is nothing
that’s happened in the last 30 years or so that’s new", but I was like "No, I
think ROMA is changing it" because I would be telling students, "Don’t put
stuff in the surrounds, you’re going to make the audience look behind them". But
when I am in that car and they are driving to the beach and the kid's voices are
behind me, I am totally in that scene. I loved that. I loved that he got more
aggressive with his sound design. That’s what we need.
JS: We went from
mono, to stereo, to quadraphonic, to 5.1, 7.1 and now Dolby Atmos. Where can we
go next?
MC: Well, possibly
there may be in-seat audio, kind of like a ride. You can almost see them doing
the LFE low frequency, the boom channel, under seats or speakers by your ears.
I don’t think they have figured out how to use VR well yet, but when that comes
in I think that we will have more channels. I don’t know where it’s going
besides that, but maybe it’s almost like a ride to bring people in.
JS: When you got into movies your
original interest was story. After a while working as a sound editor you
realized you could use sound to shape narrative, reveal character, and express
emotion. What advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers about how to use sound
creatively to tell their stories?
MC: What I would say is to break down a script. Think about what can
your character hear. What is the environment? And how are they being affected
by sound? So start there, at the script stage. I always break down each scene but think thematically. What can sound bring? Just like you are thinking about
camera, lighting, costume, production design, or any other area of film making. Ask how sound could help tell this story. And I always think of the background
and the ambience, how does the environment affect your character? What is the
mood in the film you want to create? What are the sound themes thematically? A
lot of times plot points might not have sound, so what can you take from the
environment?
So I have people ask me
how is sound telling the story. One scene I always like to show my beginning
students is from NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. It is a very simple scene where Josh
Brolin first finds the money. So he is in this kind of prairie desert and he’s
looking, looking, and there is a wind and then he looks at his watch. And he is
looking to see if the guy under the tree with the money is really dead. And so
he puts up his watch as if we are going to have to cut time, as if we are going
to have to see the watch again to show that 45 minutes or an hour has passed.
Then we cut to the same perspective almost, but the sound of the wind has
changed and we know time has changed, it is not continuous, and we never had to
look at the watch again. Now he walks up onto the rocks and we see his heavy-duty
boots, which says something about his character. This is our man. We hear flies;
the guy with the money is dead. Then here comes the big plot point, the money,
follow the money. So he opens the case. Was there any music? No.There is no
music cue. There would normally be a big music cue, a brassy Dun-Dun-Duuuun! to
say ‘There is the money!". So I always say "Did anything tell you that was the
money?" No one can remember, so we play it again. There has always been a
slight wind sound effect throughout the scene, but now there is a big wind gust
as the money is revealed. It doesn’t register as a big wind gust but you feel
it in your gut.
And then I will show scenes from CRIMSON TIDE when Gene Hackman
is giving his speech to his crew about the submarine being the most powerful
destructive force in the ocean, and it is raining. And I put big thunderclaps
on top of his speech. If I had told them before I wanted to do that, they would
have said "No, you don’t put thunder over his speech. Put it between his
dialogueâ€, and they would also have said "She is the biggest hack". They watched
it afterwards and laughed, because it seemed so ridiculous. But audiences did
not notice I put all the thunder claps over the biggest statements he is
making.
We don’t get credit for what we do because it is happening
emotionally but not intellectually. But we are all filmmakers and that is why
it was fun to make this film, and yes to make it visual because we are making
movies, which are visual and aural.
JS: Well, I loved
your movie and thank you so much for talking with me.
When Olive Films released its highly impressive new special Blu-ray edition of the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", the initial run sold out before we even got around to promoting it. Due to overwhelming demand, however, Olive has made the title available again. Here are the details from Olive Films:
“They’re already here! You’re next!†With these chilling words, Invasion of
the BodySnatchers sounded a clarion call to the dangers of
conformity, paranoia, and mass hysteria at the heart of 1950s American life.
Considered one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, Invasion of
the Body Snatchers stars Kevin McCarthy (Academy Award® nominee, Best
Supporting Actor, Death of A Salesman – 1952) as Miles Bennell, a doctor
in a small California town whose patients are becoming increasingly
overwrought, accusing their loved ones of being emotionless imposters. They’re
right! Plant-like aliens have invaded Earth, taking possession of humans as
they sleep and replicating them in giant seed pods. Convinced that a
catastrophic epidemic is imminent, Bennell, in a terrifying race for his life,
must warn the world of this deadly invasion of the pod people before it’s too
late.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by the accomplished Don Siegel
(Dirty Harry, The Shootist) and co-starring Dana Wynter (Airport),
Carolyn Jones (A Holein the Head), Larry Gates (The Sand
Pebbles) and King Donovan (The Enforcer), was photographed by
Academy Award nominee Ellsworth Fredericks (Best Cinematography, Sayonara
– 1958) with production design by Academy Award winner Ted Haworth (Best Art
Direction, Sayonara – 1958).
New
High-Definition digital restoration
Audio
Commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith
Audio
Commentary by actors Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, and filmmaker Joe
Dante
"The
Stranger in Your Lover's Eyes" – A two-part visual essay with actor
and son of director Don Siegel, Kristoffer Tabori, reading from his
father's book A Siegel Film
"The
Fear is Real" – Filmmakers Larry Cohen and Joe Dante on the film's
cultural significance
"I
No Longer Belong: The Rise and Fall of Walter Wanger" – Film scholar
and author Matthew Bernstein discusses the life and career of the film's
producer
"Sleep
No More: Invasion of the Body Snatchers Revisited" –
Never-before-seen appreciation of the film featuring actors Kevin
McCarthy and Dana Wynter, along with comments from film directors and
fans, John Landis, Mick Garris, and Stuart Gordon
"The
Fear and the Fiction: The Body Snatchers Phenomenon" –
Never-before-seen interviews with Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, along
with film directors John Landis, Mick Garris and Stuart Gordon, discussing
the making of the film, its place in history, and its meaning
1985
archival interview with Kevin McCarthy hosted by Tom Hatten
“Return
to Santa Mira" – An exploration of the film's locations
"What's
In a Name?" – On the film's title
Gallery
of rare documents detailing aspects of the film's production including the
never-produced opening narration to have been read by Orson Welles
Essay
by author and film programmer Kier-La Janisse
The
1970’s were a time of much spookiness and speculation in this country. Unidentified
Flying Objects (UFO’s), a publicity-shy Plesiosaur called Nessie steaking out
the Scottish Highlands, Sasquatch “sightingsâ€, ghosts, satanic cults, witchcraft,
and the threat of nuclear catastrophe highlighted the newspapers when Vietnam, Richard
Nixon and Watergate weren’t. Between 1977 and 1982, Leonard Nimoy’s narration
provided the basis for nearly 150 speculative and generally outright creepy
episodes of In Search Of…Similarly-themed
television specials were even categorized by TV Guide as “speculation†in their
genre listings. I even recall a scenario in 1979 that was reported in a local
newspaper concerning the discovery of ribcages and bowls of blood at a nearby
campground. Yikes!
May
1970 saw the release of Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, a
grimly-titled caveat in eschatological terms detailing the end of the world and
destruction to humankind as we know it (it was followed up in 1972 with Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and in 1982 with The
1980s: Countdown to Armageddon). The genesis of this line of
thinking has its roots in the Holy Bible, specifically the Book of Revelation
which is the final book of the New Testament. What better way to get the word
out than in a major motion picture? The book was optioned for a film in 1976 by
Pacific International Enterprises, known as PIE for short, which was both a
film production and distribution company founded two years earlier by Arthur R.
Debs (it folded in 2001) for
the purpose of releasing “family filmsâ€. How they came to the subject of
Armageddon is anyone’s guess. Between 1976 and 1978, interviews were conducted
with renowned thinkers, scientists and religious folks to get their views and
interpretations of the Bible and the promise of pestilence.
The
film sports the same title as the book and was released in a good number of
neighborhood theatres on Wednesday, January 17, 1979. It opens with a sequence
involving a group of men chasing a Gandalf wannabe up a mountain (in reality,
Vaszquez Rocks in California where Captain James T. Kirk fought the Gorn in the
Star Trek episode “Arena†in 1966) and pushing him to his death. These are
actors, of course, and they look like they might have tried out to be the
apostles in Martin Scorsese’s first attempt to bring The Last Temptation of Christ to the screen via Paramount Pictures on
a minimal budget. Orson Welles appears with a skull meant to represent the fallen
man from thousands of years earlier and sets the film’s tone by explaining how
the ancient Hebrews believed that a prophet was God’s Man and spoke the Words
of God, foretelling, many centuries before, of events to come. The prophet was
killed because he wasn’t accurate one hundred percent of the time and therefore
was deemed a fraud.
The
film talks of the Anti-Christ entering the world of politics – shades of Omen III: The Final Conflict (1983)? There
are many predictions made using stock footage to enunciate impending doom. However
interesting or frightening the claims, the orator’s guessing of the timeline is
vague at best. Something that was
correctly predicted at the time of the film’s shooting was the estimate of the
world population 40 years hence to be roughly 8 billion people. It is closer to
7.5 billion, but not a bad estimate.
Earthquakes,
world famine, floods, killer bees (I recall this threat in 1979 and wondered
how they came about. The film provides the not-so-surprising explanation) were
the stuff of disaster movies in the 1970s. I’m not sure if Planet Earth is a statement of veracity or pure bollocks, but it’s
an interesting examination of prophesies, nonetheless.
The
film has been recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber/Scorpion and the transfer is
exceptional. There are two bonus features. The first is a making-of featurette
that runs fourteen minutes and is comprised of interviews with nearly ten
people behind-the-scenes. Roger Riddell is the film’s producer who discusses
how the movie came into being. Alan Belkin, President of American Cinema, a
division of American Communications Industries, shares his memories of the
film. The rough cut was two hours; the film’s running time is 86 minutes. Composer
Dana Kaproff provides an exceptional score that is one of the film’s
strongpoints (it deserves a soundtrack album release) and he explains his role
as a composer. Tom Doddington, head of Sound and Production, explains how Orson
Welles was a consummate professional, going so far as to record his voiceover
at his house. Thomas Nicely, one of the actors running in the opening sequence,
also weighs in. Lynn McCallon and Anne Goursaud were editors on the film. Jean
Higgins, Head of Production for American Cinema, and David Miller, Head of
Distribution, discuss the film’s marketing.
Bonus
features consist of a selection of trailers: theatrical trailer and TV spot for
The Late Great Planet Earth (1979); Go Tell the Spartans (1978) theatrical
trailer, Charlie Chan and the Curse of
the Dragon Queen TV spot; The Apple
(1980) theatrical trailer; and The
Salamander (1981) theatrical trailer.
It's arguable that Orson Welles's "The Other Side of the Wind" was the most famous unseen film of all time. However, with it's recent release there seems to be little doubt that "The Day the Clown Cried" can take the title. Jerry Lewis went into production in 1972 on the Holocaust drama only to immediately run into a tidal wave of problems ranging from unreliable funding sources to complex copyright disputes. Lewis finished the film but the elements were scattered to, well, the other side of the wind as various investors and stake-holders in the production all claimed their pound of flesh. The end result: there apparently isn't a complete version of the movie anywhere, though substantial portions ended up in Lewis's possession and he cobbled together something akin to a final cut. Very few people were shown the movie and response ranged from underwhelming to appalling. Lewis at various times indicated he wanted the movie to be seen if the legal problems could be resolved but at one point seemed to change his mind, saying he didn't want it shown because he was ashamed of the poor workmanship on the production. New York Times writer Peter Tonguette looks at the current status of the legendary, unseen work. Click here to read.
In
a fascinating interview supplement contained on this amazing new release by The
Criterion Collection, film historian Joseph McBride calls The Magnificent Ambersons one of the great Hollywood tragedies in
that the film we got from writer/director Orson Welles was not the one he
intended. It is widely known that RKO Radio, the studio behind the production,
deleted forty-three minutes from Welles’ final cut, reshot the ending, and
released the film their way—all
against Welles’ wishes—and then promptly destroyed the cut footage so that the
movie could never be reconstructed.
The Magnificent
Ambersons
is a stolen masterpiece.
That
said, the film is still a great
movie. In fact, it earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting
Actress (Agnes Moorehead), Best Cinematography (Black & White, by Stanley
Cortez), and Best Art/Interior Set Decoration (Black & White).
Ambersons, based on Booth
Tarkington’s 1918 novel (Welles claims that Tarkington was a “friend†of his
father’s), the picture was the director’s follow-up to Citizen Kane. Once again featuring some of the Mercury Players
(Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, and Moorehead) and new casting choices (Dolores
Costello, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter), the production of Ambersons went well, with the picture going only a little over
budget. Welles delivered a 148-minute cut—and then Pearl Harbor happened.
Welles was appointed by Nelson Rockefeller to be a goodwill ambassador to Latin
America so that he could attempt to persuade South American countries from
entering the war on the Axis side.
Welles
dutifully went to Brazil and started shooting a film (It’s All True, another picture sabotaged by RKO) and was
essentially unavailable to receive notes and requests from RKO regarding Ambersons. RKO, unhappy with the film,
then took it upon themselves to change it to suit their needs, and there was
nothing Welles could do about it. The picture released in July 1942 was
88-minutes in length.
Would
a Magnificent Ambersons that is an
hour longer be a better film than it already is? We can only assume. For one
thing, the ending was drastically different. Welles’ version was cynical, dark,
and ironic. Given the wartime climate, RKO wanted a more upbeat ending—never
mind that it really doesn’t make sense that the characters suddenly change
entire attitudes they have held throughout the film. Never mind that the final
half-hour of the movie feels choppy, rushed, and out-of-rhythm from the first
hour. The 88-minute version is what we have and must live with.
It
should be stated again—The Magnificent
Ambersons is still a great picture.
The
story concerns the wealthy Amberson family in the early 1900s Indianapolis. Beautiful
Isabel Amberson (Costello) marries Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway) instead of
Eugene Morgan (Cotten), but she regrets it… and she and Morgan carry torches
for each other for the remainder of their days. Enter Isabel and Wilbur’s
bratty son, George (Holt), who terrorizes the town with his bad manners,
arrogance, and boorishness. Things get complicated when he begins to woo
Morgan’s daughter Lucy (Baxter) and at the same time insult and humiliate her
father. All the while, Wilbur’s sister Fanny (Moorehead) also carries
unrequited love for Morgan and inserts herself into the already-touchy
situation.
Ultimately,
Ambersons is about the downfall of a
respected and wealthy family to that thing called Progress—namely, the
invention and proliferation of the automobile and other industrial evolutions.
Welles makes an ecological statement with the picture (back in 1942!) which is
something else RKO was unhappy with, seeing that American industries had to
ramp up to support the war effort.
Criterion’s
new 4K digital restoration looks marvelous, and it contains two separate audio
commentaries with scholars Robert L. Carringer and James Naremore, and critic
Jonathan Rosenbaum.
The
packaging is first-rate. The numerous and excellent supplements alone make the
product a 5-star purchase. Especially interesting and informative are the new
interviews with (previously mentioned) McBride and one with film historian
Simon Callow. Both men relate different insights into the history of the
production and the editing debacle. Director Welles appears on a 1970 segment
of The Dick Cavett Show (along with second
guest Jack Lemmon) for an often-hilarious and always-entertaining half-hour
discussion. New video essays on the cinematography and Bernard Herrmann’s uncredited score (that was also chopped
up with RKO’s editing), by Francois Thomas and Christopher Husted,
respectively, are a welcome addition.
Also
included is the silent version of Ambersons,
originally called Pampered Youth (1925),
and re-edited for the U.K. as Two to One (1927).
If that wasn’t enough, we get two Mercury Theatre radio plays: the 1939
adaptation by Welles of Ambersons (with
Welles playing the role of George), and a 1938 adaptation of Seventeen, another Booth Tarkington
creation. There’s more, such as audio interviews with Welles by Peter
Bogdanovich and at an AFI symposium, and the theatrical trailer. The booklet
comes in a stapled “manuscript†that resembles a typed screenplay. It contains
essays by authors and critics (Molly Haskell, Luc Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien,
Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem), and excerpts from a Welles memoir.
The Magnificent
Ambersons,
even in its sadly truncated form,further
illustrates the genius that was Orson Welles. This Criterion release is a
must-have.
Eccentric,
quirky, and often brilliant director Robert Altman had a hit-and-miss career
spanning six decades. After a mostly spectacular run of cutting-edge comedies
and dramas in the 1970s, Altman’s pictures in the 1980s faltered. He lost some
of the value in his stock that he had gained after such hits as M*A*S*H and Nashville. However, he had a strong come-back in the 1990s with The Player and Short Cuts, and he made a few more interesting movies in the last
ten years of his life.
One
of these was The Gingerbread Man,
based on an original story by legal-thriller author John Grisham. Apparently,
Grisham had also tried his hand at the screenplay, too, and successfully sold
it. Altman, however, rewrote it himself, and then Al Hayes (credited for the
film’s screenplay) finished it. Curiously, the picture is more of an action
crime-thriller than it is a legal-thriller.
British
actor Kenneth Branagh plays an American lawyer from the south (and convincingly
delivers the accent) who takes on as a client (and also sleeps with) a
high-maintenance young woman (Embeth Davidtz) who wants to put away her crazy
and violent father (Robert Duvall). Branagh must additionally and simultaneously
navigate his dysfunctional personal life with his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) and
kids, his sleazy private investigator (Robert Downey, Jr., in an entertainingly
bizarre performance), and his client’s ex-husband (Tom Berenger).
There’s
some good stuff here. While it cannot be placed in the upper tier of Altman’s oeuvre, it’s a solid middle-ground piece
that owes much to the director’s penchant for never doing what one might expect.
Hollywood lore tells us that the studio tried to pull an Orson Welles/Touch of Evil on him by re-editing the
picture without Altman’s knowledge—but the director’s version tested better, so
luckily that’s what we got.
Kino
Lorber’s new Blu-ray restoration looks fine and comes with 5.1 Surround and 2.0
Lossless Audio. Robert Altman does his own commentary, a delightful voice from
the past who ponders his film with detached amusement. Other supplements
include the theatrical trailer and other Kino Lorber release trailers.
John
Grisham fans may be disappointed by the lack of courtroom shenanigans, but
Altman aficionados will appreciate The
Gingerbread Man as another entry in the filmmaker’s hearty and diverse
canon.
The final film of Orson Welles is the stuff of movie legend because the temperamental genius had spent about 15 years working on the project which remained unfinished upon his death in 1985. Since then, the troubled film, "The Other Side of the Wind", which Welles had hoped would restore him to the kind of glory he had not enjoyed since the 1940s, sat in a disjointed state, its rights the subject of seemingly endless lawsuits and other obstacles. Director Peter Bogdanovich, who viewed Welles as a mentor and friend, took up the task of trying to salvage "Wind" by raising enough funds to construct a coherent film based on Welles' notes and the many discussions they had on the set of the film, in which Bogdanovich appeared in a sizable role. Every time Bogdanovich thought he had found the funding for completion, his hopes were dashed- until recently when Netflix rode to the rescue and provided enough resources for the movie to finally emerge in a coherent state. The film will enjoy a limited theatrical release followed by telecast on Netflix on November 2. It stars John Huston as a grumpy, headstrong, once-great director trying to reclaim his reputation by producing one last classic film. (Welles claimed the movie wasn't autobiographical, but few believed him). Advance reviews indicate that the movie is not a masterpiece but does emerge as a serious and important work from a great talent. Pretty soon retro movie lovers will be able to judge for themselves. Click here for more.
The works of William Shakespeare were ideally
suited to the sensibilities of Orson Welles. More than once, on stage and in
the cinema, The Bard’s scenarios supplied a prime source for Welles the auteur,
and the dramatist’s distinct personalities manifest themselves in grandiose roles
skillfully personified by Welles the actor, in his straightforward Shakespearian
adaptations and in characters created to embody correspondingly epic types (Charles
Foster Kane, as the most notable example). This artistic appreciation and cross-form
application was most outstandingly realized in Chimes at Midnight, from 1965, but the same impassioned devotion—aesthetic
and thematic—is likewise evident in the dynamic, striking Othello (1951), otherwise known as The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, an unsung Welles film now
available on an exceptional Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
Welles’ venerated
love affair with Shakespeare began at a young age, when he published an
annotated series of Shakespearean texts at the age of 12 and, later, at just 16,
when he performed in assortedproductions
at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, an outing that would prove significant to Othello’s genesis. Fleeing the infamous
blacklist business in America, Welles arrived in Rome to star in Gregory
Ratoff’s Black Magic (1949), and it
was around that time that he embarked on the disorderly path toward what would
be his second consecutive cinematic rendering of a Shakespeare primer,
following 1948’s Macbeth. What ensued
was a convoluted lesson in haphazard, yet thoroughly determined independent
filmmaking, with years of on-again, off-again shooting, different
cinematographers and editors, several locations (Rome, Venice, Morocco, etc.),
miscellaneous financial interruptions, and multiple casting changes—there were two
Desdemonas before Welles settled on Suzanne Cloutier, whose voice he
nevertheless had dubbed by Gudrun Ure. Othello
was initially (finally) released in 1952, when it shared the Grand Prize with Two Cents Worth of Hope (1952) at the
Cannes Film Festival. But that was not the end of its difficulties. The details
of the whole process are recounted (and frequently repeated) on the Criterion
disc, dispersed amongst a range of interviews and documentaries and in Geoffrey
O’Brien’s accompanying essay. But what matters most, is that while a decent
film managing to survive the turmoil would be remarkable enough, that a very good film was the ultimate result
is even more impressive.
Beginning just after the death of
Othello (Welles assumes audiences know how and why this happened and so spends
little time worrying about exposition), Othello
flashes back and delves into the intricate web of deception that led to the Venetian
general’s demise. Prominent in this charade is Othello’s traitorous ensign,Iago
(Micheál MacLiammóir), whose dubious, ambiguous motives are born not from some pure,
abstract malevolence, but from an ordinary professional, personal resentfulness
(or, so Welles would also interpret it, potential impotency). Driving a wedge
between Othello and his radiant wife, Desdemona (Cloutier),
the weaselly Iago takes advantage of Roderigo’s (Robert Coote) jealousy—he,
too, has amorous eyes for Desdemona—and the two of them devise a ruse to drive
Othello mad with suspicion and to concurrently sew discord between he and his favored
lieutenant, Cassio (Michael Laurence). Cloutier is at her best in moments of
unknowing bewilderment, her chaste beauty convincingly stunned by Othello’s
rage and his distrust, while MacLiammóir, who co-founded the Gate and was
fundamental to Welles’ early theatrical career, is the embodiment of deceit; hovering
always on the periphery, scheming and biding his time, he is all vacillating slants
and slithering movements. Welles, of course, is center stage, his performance
descending from one of class, command, and charm (“I think this tale would win
my daughter, too,†says one onlooker as Othello captivates the crowd—and the
viewer), to one of deadening confusion and despair. And yet, even as the seeds
of doubt produce an ensnaring crop of gradual torment, Welles loses none of his
booming, prevailing presence, nor the magnitude of his theatrical inflection.
In
hindsight, the most enjoyable thing about Manhattan
Murder Mystery was Diane Keaton’s return to co-star with Woody Allen in what
will most likely be their last screen appearance together. Released in 1993, Murder Mystery was Allen’s obvious
attempt to regain public favor after an acrimonious split with Mia Farrow and
the surrounding uproar of allegations and custody battles. Keaton’s presence
served to remind us that the old chemistry between the two actors could still
generate sparks, and it did.
Many
critics at the time commented that the pair could have been playing the characters
of Annie and Alvy (from Annie Hall) sixteen
years later, now settled in an imperfect, but comfortable, marriage. In fact,
much of the plot of Manhattan Murder
Mystery was originally a part of Annie
Hall! That 1977 classic, co-written by Allen and Marshall Brickman,
contained not only the Annie/Alvy love story but also a murder mystery the
couple attempts to solve. Eventually that was all thrown out of Annie Hall (thank goodness!). Years
later, Allen and Brickman decided to resurrect the discarded plot elements and
fashion a brand-new script in which a couple like Annie and Alvy—now middle-aged—get themselves embroiled in
comic sleuthing.
Larry
(Allen) and Carol (Keaton) live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (where
else?) and meet their apartment building neighbors, Paul (Jerry Adler) and
Lillian (Lynn Cohen). The next day, Lillian has died of a heart attack. Larry
and Carol notice that Paul doesn’t seem too broken up about it. Furthermore,
Carol discovers an urn full of ashes in Paul’s kitchen, even after Paul has
said that Lillian was buried in their “twin cemetery plots.†Enter Larry and
Carol’s friend Ted (Alan Alda), who encourages Carol’s imaginative speculation
that Paul murdered his wife. Larry’s client, Marcia (Anjelica Huston), gets into
the act as well, and the foursome embark on exposing Paul’s nefarious scheme
that involves a series of lies, a mistress, and his wife’s twin sister.
The
plot is far-fetched, but Allen treats the material as a farce anyway. It works well
enough. Much of the fun of the picture is watching Allen and Keaton as their
characters do astonishingly stupid things, such as when Carol, thinking Paul is
out of the building for a while, sneaks into his apartment to snoop. Of course,
Paul returns, forcing her to hide under the bed and lose her glasses at the
same time.
Allen
has included references to cinema history that are a lot of fun—clips from
Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)
and Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947)—inform
the story with thematic and visual motifs. There are laughs, to be sure, but Manhattan Murder Mystery does not rank
among Allen’s best comedies. It’s enjoyable fluff, and perhaps that was all it
was meant to be.
Twilight
Time’s limited-edition Blu-ray (only 3000 units) looks very nice in its 1080p
High Definition transfer, showing off Carlo Di Palma’s colorful cinematography
and New York City landmarks that are always a treat in a Woody Allen film. The
audio is 1.0 DTS-HD MA, with an isolated score and effects track. The
theatrical trailer is the only supplement.
Good
for a lightweight romp around the Big Apple, Manhattan Murder Mystery will please fans of Allen and, especially,
Diane Keaton.
‘I was there; I was in that picture, fighting
the Cyclops on the beach, running from the dragon! I was enthralled. It's one
of my strongest childhood memories.’ It’s very hard to argue with director John
Landis’s vivid account of his earliest memories and the fantasy films of Ray
Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer. They seemed to touch us all in an
indelible manner and took us into a fantasy realm far beyond our imagination.
Indicator has (for the first time in the UK) combined the three Sinbad
adventures in one very handsomely produced package. It’s a magical box that has
very little trouble in sending us on a journey, and back to a place called
innocence…
The Seventh voyage of Sinbad (1958) was
something of a revelation back in its day. Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering stop-motion
animation had worked so well in films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
(1953), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) and 20 Million Miles to Earth
(1957). However, he was about to enter a new period and face a new set of
challenges. Along with his producer Charles H. Schneer, Harryhausen was about
to embark on their next collaboration, The Seventh voyage of Sinbad, and it was
to be made in full colour.
The story of The Seventh voyage of Sinbad was
quite simple and uncomplicated. Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and Princess Parisa’s
(Kathryn Grant) plans of marriage are interrupted by the evil magician Sokurah
(Torin Thatcher). Sokurah insists that Sinbad return a lamp that he lost on the
island of Colossa. Sinbad at first refuses, which leads to Sokurah shrinking
Parisa and blackmailing Sinbad and his crew on a dangerous adventure in order
to save her.
Exciting as the story was, the real magical
elements were of course in the monsters and creatures the Sinbad would
encounter along the way and was very much were Harryhausen stepped in.
Considering its age and taking into account the combination of early colour
film and special effects techniques, Harryhausen’s work was nothing less than
miraculous. From that startling entrance of ‘the Cyclops on the beach’ that
Landis so excitingly refers to, we as an audience are hooked. The blending of
an enormous, mythical creature and real life people, seemingly in a real
location, was enough to take any child’s breath away and leave them both complexed
and in wonder. There was naturally more to come, the giant Roc, the mysterious
snake woman, the fire breathing dragon and perhaps most enthralling of all
sequences, Sinbad’s sword duel with the living skeleton. The results were not
only seamless, but utterly mindboggling.
The new 4K restoration of The Seventh voyage
of Sinbad (from the original camera negative) really brings it to life. Colours
are both rich and vivid. Certain backgrounds may occasionally look a little
grainy, but nevertheless perfectly acceptable and no doubt down to separate
film elements used in the film’s original production. The high resolution scan
perhaps highlights these limitations to some degree. It’s necessary to also
remember, this production was working to a tight schedule and an even tighter
budget. However, simply look at the level of detail in close-ups and location
shots, and the real revelation of the restoration becomes extremely clear. The
audio also sounds marvellous and is presented in both mono and DTS
multi-channel.
Speaking of revelations, Indicator’s
collection of bonus material is exhaustive – ‘exhaustive’ in the most
complementary way I might add. Firstly, we have a commentary track (from 2008) which
not only features Harryhausen at the helm, but a whole host of industry
wizards. Producer Arnold Kunert, visual effects experts Phil Tippett, Randall
William Cook and Bernard Herrmann biographer Steven Smith all provide fascinating
insights and their respect towards Harryhausen’s work is undeniable.
Also included are the original Super 8mm cut
down versions. As any serious movie fan of a certain age will recall, these
were essential, especially if you were growing up in the 70s. Before the
introduction of videocassettes, these 200ft spools contained around 8-9 minutes
of film and featured condensed sequences or key scenes from the movie. You
could buy these in different versions such as b/w silent or colour sound (which
were a lot more expensive). Four parts were released for The Seventh Voyage of
Sinbad – The Cyclops, The Strange Voyage, The Evil Magician and Dragon’s Lair –
which was the reel I owned and watched over and over again. Each of these
segments is presented in their raw state, complete with speckles and tram line
scratches, but to be honest, I wouldn’t really want them any other way. They
are a wonderful, retrospective reminder of those glorious days. I should also
point out that parts 1 and 4 are in their colour / sound versions while parts 2
and 3 are in b/w / silent. There is also an option to play individual reels or
play all.
The Secrets of Sinbad (11.23) is a featurette
with Phil Tippet (in his workshop) recollecting on how he grew up on
Harryhausen’s films. He talks about the whole period and Forrest J. Ackerman’s
Famous Monsters magazine and how this became a key influence in his own career
path.
Remembering The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
(23.31) has Harryhausen talking about the struggle in getting the film made. He
talks about various elements including the shooting in Granada, Spain, and
Majorca. Kerwin Matthews, the building of giant props, his creature designs and
his disapproval over the English censoring of the skeleton fight are among the
many other subjects discussed.
A Look Behind the Voyage (11.52) is a TV
featurette from 1995. It looks to be from a video source, which was being used
regularly during this period. This short piece features interviews with both
Schneer and Harryhausen and looks back at the early work such as Mighty Joe
Young and his fairy tale films. It also looks at the importance of his parents
and the role they played, the difficulties in moving from b/w to colour and
working to tight budgets. It’s a nice informative, condensed piece.
Music promo (2.34) – Well this is a nice rare
little piece and the sort of thing that really grabs my interest. In 1958,
Colpix (the record division of Columbia pictures), produced this 7†45rpm
single to be played in cinema lobbies, radio shows and for giving away as kids
competition prizes. The song ‘Sinbad May Have Been Bad, But He’s Been Good to Me’
is as cheesy as hell, but oh so wonderful. It’s presented here in beautiful,
clear sound and played over a piece of Seventh Voyage poster artwork.
The Music of Bernard Herrmann (26.52) is a
fascinating essay on composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann biographer Steven
Smith presents an insightful and eloquent account of the composer’s love of
fantasy films. Smith takes us through his early work including CBS radio, Orson
Welles’s Mercury theatre, his innovative instrumentation style and his use of
Theremin, Brass and electronics. All of which is fascinating.
Keeping on the subject of Bernard Herrmann,
Indicator have pulled off a real treat with the inclusion of Herrmann’s full
isolated score. Presented in Stereo, the score is rousing, clean and dynamic,
it is also plentiful as Herrmann leaves very few scenes unscored. I believe
this marks its debut as an isolated score, but 2009 complete score CD (released
by Prometheus) came with a total time of 71 minutes, so expect a lot of great
music here.
Birthday Tribute (1.00) features a short
birthday tribute to Harryhausen from Phil Tippet’s studio – complete with
dancing skeletons.
The Trailer Gallery starts with the original ‘This
is Dynamation!’ trailer (3.26). This is a fascinating preview that presents the
process of Dynamation and includes some rare behind the scenes footage, effects
shots and Kerwin Mathews practising with his fencing coach for the skeleton
fight. We then have the same trailer introduced and with a commentary from
Trailers from Hell presenter Brian Trenchard-Smith (4.47). Finally, there is
the re-release trailer which I believe is from 1975 (1.46).
The image gallery is quite comprehensive and
contains approx. 75 steps. This is a little misleading as a great deal of
portrait shots are placed side-by-side, so in reality there’s a great deal
more. Here you will find original promotional material, Harryhausen drawings,
b/w stills, mini lobby cards, comic books and poster art from around the
world.
Mark Robson’s 1957 film Peyton Place celebrates its 60th
anniversary with a special screening at the Royal Theatre in Los Angeles. The
film, which runs 157 minutes, stars Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Lloyd Nolan,
Arthur Kennedy, Russ Tamblyn, Terry More, and Hope Lange.
PLEASE
NOTE: Actress Terry Moore is currently scheduled to appear at the screening as
part of a Q & A regarding the film and her career.
From the press release:
Part
of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.
PEYTON PLACE (1957)
60th Anniversary Screening
Wednesday, July 12, at 7:00 PM at the Royal Theatre
Q & A with Co-Star Terry Moore
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 60th anniversary
screening of 'Peyton Place,' the smash hit movie version of Grace Metalious’s
best-selling novel. The film earned nine top Academy Award nominations,
including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also
tied the all-time record of five acting nominations from a single film: Lana
Turner as Best Actress and four supporting nods, for newcomers Diane Varsi and
Hope Lange, along with Arthur Kennedy and Russ Tamblyn.
Metalious’s novel exposed the steamy shenanigans in a small New England town,
and even in a slightly toned-down version, the film tackled such once-forbidden
topics as rape, incest, sexual hypocrisy and repression. It opened in December
of 1957 and became the second highest grossing film of 1958 after going into
wide release and then spawned a sequel and a popular TV series in the 1960s.
Leonard Maltin summed up the critical consensus when he wrote, “Grace Metalious’s
once-notorious novel receives Grade A filming.†Producer Jerry Wald (whose
credits included 'Mildred Pierce,' 'Key Largo,' 'Johnny Belinda,' 'An Affair to
Remember,' 'The Long Hot Summer,' and 'Sons and Lovers') bought the rights to
the novel for $250,000 and hired a first-rate team to bring it to the screen.
Screenwriter John Michael Hayes wrote many of the best Alfred Hitchcock movies
of the 1950s, including 'Rear Window,' 'The Trouble with Harry,' and 'The Man
Who Knew Too Much.' Director Mark Robson started as an assistant editor on
Orson Welles’ 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' then directed
such successful films as 'Champion,' 'The Bridges at Toko-Ri,' and 'Inn of the
Sixth Happiness.' Oscar winning composer Franz Waxman provided the memorable
score.
The Hollywood Reporter praised
all the performances but singled out co-star Terry Moore, who “shows what a
forceful and moving actress she can be.†Moore made a vivid impression in
1949’s 'Mighty Joe Young,' then earned an Oscar nomination for 'Come Back,
Little Sheba' in 1952. Her other films include 'Man on a Tightrope' with
Fredric March, 'King of the Khyber Rifles' with Tyrone Power, 'Beneath the
12-Mile Reef' with Robert Wagner, and 'Daddy Long Legs' with Fred Astaire and
Leslie Caron. She made 77 feature films over the course of her career and also
appeared in many TV series and movies.
The
Royal Theatre is located at 11523 Santa Monica Blvd. 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., Los
Angeles, CA 90025. The phone number is (310) 478 – 0401.
As the film begins, Falstaff (Welles) is
navigating his fatherly-friend relationship with Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), who
is conflicted in his loyalty to his real father, King Henry IV (John Gielgud).
In the meantime, rival Henry “Hotspur†Percy (Norman Rodway) joins others in a
plot to overthrow the king, in retaliation for his brutal usurping of power
from Richard II. The ensuing drama is a complex web of political intrigue and
wartime struggle, balanced against the more intimate themes of betrayal,
friendship, family, and responsibility.
As the main character, a riotous, bulbous,
crass and somehow still charming nobleman, Welles gives one of his most
grandiose and memorable performances. In an interview on the Criterion disc,
historian Joseph McBride says it is “by far his greatest,†while in an
accompanying essay, Michael Anderegg writes, “Welles’s star performance as
Falstaff is one of his finest, tempering an unfettered exuberance with touching
vulnerability, his facial expressions and the modulations of his voice
projecting a cunning watchfulness at one moment and an openness to all of
life’s possibilities the next.†The slovenly outcast—rather “patheticâ€
according to scholar James Naremore in his commentary track—is nevertheless
ambitious, scheming, and wisely opportunistic. Obviously reveling in such meaty
material, Welles plays Falstaff with a touching sympathy and a witty pomposity,
best juxtaposed when he is pranked and ridiculed by Hal and Poins (Tony
Beckley) in one scene, while in the next, his steadfast penchant for bluster
and exaggeration fails to waver in the face of shame. Unlike many of the other
individuals featured in the film, in Welles’ stage play, and in the various
Shakespearean texts, Falstaff has no historical grounding, which really doesn’t
matter. He was a popular character in Shakespearean times, always good for a
laugh, and in Chimes at Midnight, he is
similarly appealing as an endearing, comic individual.
While Welles is the clear figure of
prominence, Chimes at Midnight is
abounding in contrasting character types and a corresponding diversity of
performance. From a delightfully raucous Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet and a
rigidly formal Gielgud as Henry IV, to Marina Vlady as Kate Percy and Fernando
Rey as Worcester, Chimes at Midnight
boasts an exceptional cast with varying presentational styles. In scenes of
bawdy drunken revelry, where the words “grotesque†and “bodily humor†come to
mind (or at least they do in Naremore’s commentary), or in those sequences
distinguished by stoic primness, the actors all breathe exuberant air into what
could have easily strayed into the stolid territory of textbook Shakespearean
drama.
Leading the charge is, of course, Welles.
Under his tenacious direction, Chimes at
Midnight is a stunning assembly of formal brilliance and a masterfully
arranged adaptation, Welles’ inspired restructuring of the Shakespearean text a
testament to his familiarity with the subject. But even if he personally
oversaw details that could have been merely assigned (sketching the costumes
himself, for instance), Welles, especially in this film, benefitted greatly
from key collaborators. Edmond Richard, his cinematographer on The Trail (1962) (who would later do
excellent work with Luis Buñuel), production designer Mariano Erdoiza (his only
credit in such a role), and set decorator Jose Antonio de la Guerra all work to
contribute invaluable visual detail to the film. The Boar’s Head tavern is a
dingy and squalid retreat, a wooden structure that organically pulsates to the
rhythms of its rowdy clientele, while the King’s castle is a looming stone
chamber that, even in its sealed-off reserve, still yields vivid shafts of light.
To see just how these differing sets impact character interaction, one need
only to again go back to Welles’ portrayal of Falstaff. In the tavern, a
congenial, boozing Falstaff (the “king of winos,†according to McBride), holds
court as a larger than life figure, yet he awkwardly seems pinned within the
building’s narrow walls. “In a partly self-referential gesture—he was always
struggling with his weight—Welles goes out of his way throughout the film to
emphasize Falstaff’s sheer mass,†writes Anderegg, “his huge figure often
dominating the frame.†By contrast, at the castle, Falstaff is dwarfed by the
enormity of the structure and is reduced to being a disregarded shape amongst
the masses. In any location, though, Richard and Welles manage to strike just
the right visual balance of high-contrast black and white photography and
precise camera placement, which is nearly always conducive to a general
impression of tone, character stature, and narrative weight (nobody uses a low
angle quite like Welles).
Aside from the setting distinction between
the castle and the tavern, Chimes at
Midnight further builds on contrasting imagery. Close quarters crammed with
the bobbing heads of onlooking bystanders (many of whom were non-professional
chosen by Welles simply for the way they look) are countered by wide sweeping
natural arenas, like the setting of the Gadshill robbery, which is itself an
open patchwork of horizontal movement (Welles freely tracking through the
forest) and vertical expanse (it is a forest defined by pillaring sun-kissed
trees). The Battle of Shrewsbury, the most famous sequence from Chimes at Midnight, is similarly assembled
from juxtaposition, of speed, shot size, duration, and position. It’s an
extraordinarily well-orchestrated battle scene, an Eisensteinian montage of
quick cutting and movement textured by what Naremore points out as a Fordian
incorporation of atmospheric detail: wind, cloud cover, muddy terrain, etc.
With so much visual stimulus, the emotional
resonance of Chimes at Midnight can
potentially get lost in the crowd. By the time Hal comes to power and appears
to brush aside the pitiably loyal Falstaff, the creeping sadness that went
along with the dejected giant’s tragic optimism has become a potent, painful
betrayal—“The king has killed his heart,†says one observer. This is a film
heavily preoccupied with looming death and, worse yet, the fear of irrelevance.
Everyone’s lives are at stake in this tumultuous period, but what concerns many
more than that, particularly Falstaff, is the realization of not being wanted
or needed. Surely some of this was reflective of Welles at the time. Pushing
forward in the face of little money, limited technology, and an often
unreceptive audience, he continued to make films on his own terms, as best he
could (which was still as good if not better than anyone else). If Chimes at Midnight subsequently took
longer than hoped to be given a proper restoration and distribution, so be it.
Better late than never.
Welles, Bogdanovich and Huston on the set of The Other Side of the Wind.
BY LEE PFEIFFER
Netflix has ridden to the rescue to team with a crowdfunding effort that raised $400,000 to help complete Orson Welles' final film, "The Other Side of the Wind", which is perhaps the most legendary unseen movie of all time. Welles promised that the movie would mark his return to greatness but his independent financing sources were diverse and unreliable. The production of the movie dragged on for many years and Welles was trying to complete it when he died in 1985. The film's original production manager, producer Frank Marshall, will oversee completion of the project, working in conjunction with filmmaker Filip Jan Rymsza, who headed the fundraising effort. Director Peter Bogdanovich, a protege and friend of Welles who appeared in the film, has worked diligently for many years to complete the movie but always ran into obstacles. Bogdanovich will serve as a consultant on the Netflix project. The few people who have seen footage from the movie, which Welles had mostly completed at the time of his death, provided mixed emotions, with some saying it's a strange and off-putting movie while others proclaim it a work of genius. It is a scathing take down of hypocrisy in Hollywood. The film stars John Huston playing a once-great director who has fallen on hard times, thus leading some to speculate Welles viewed the character as his alter ego. While no one doubted Welles' genius, his prickly nature, offbeat projects and unreliable habits caused major studios to shun working with him. Welles had turned to finding independent funding from often shady sources that would sometimes dry up unexpectedly. Additionally when Welles did get a substantial sum infused into the film, he would often blow through it by spending it on expensive hotel suites, fine wines and upscale cigars. The highly unusual deal by Netflix is sure to win praise from classic movie lovers who have hungered to see "The Other Side of the Wind". For more click here.
Cinema Retro has received the following press release:
BURBANK, Calif., November 3, 2016 – To mark the 75thanniversary of
Orson Welles’ cinematic masterpiece“Citizen
Kane,â€Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
(WBHE) will release a new Blu-rayâ„¢ and DVD on November 15, and the American
Film Institute (AFI) will mount a special screening of the restored master at
AFI FEST presented by Audi, the Institute'sannual film festival in Hollywood,
on November 13.The
screening will take place at the Egyptian Theatre at 1:30 p.m., followed by an
AFI Master Class, featuring close personal Welles friend Peter Bogdanovich and
a celebrity and academic panel to be announced.
The film’s central character is powerful
publisher Charles Foster Kane, who aspires to be president of the United
States. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearstclaimed“Citizen
Kaneâ€was a
thinly veiled and slanderous account of his own life and sought to use his
formidable muscle to halt the film’s production and distribution and ultimately
to destroy Welles himself.
By
the early 1960s“Citizen Kaneâ€had been out of
circulation for many years when a panel of top industry tastemakers, selected
by the AFI,voted it as the Greatest Film of All Time. Since then,“Citizen
Kaneâ€has remained # 1 or # 2 on countless critics’ lists and
other surveys including those from Roger Ebert, The BBC,Rolling Stone
Magazine, Pauline Kael, among many others.
One-time dean of American movie reviewers,
Pauline Kael, noted, “Citizen Kaneis perhaps the one
American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may
seem even fresher.†Ebert echoed, “This towering achievement is as fresh, as
provoking, as entertaining, as sad, as brilliant as it ever was. Many agree it
is the greatest film of all time.â€
According to Martin Scorsese, Welles and the
film are “responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than
anyone else in the history of cinema.†Woody Allen:“Welles takes a
quantum leap above every American director with that intangible thing called
genius. Just an exhilarating movie.†Mel Brooks: “Maybe the best American
picture ever. A masterpiece with artistic genius on a ‘Beethoven’ level.â€
Richard Dreyfuss: “I usually avoid questions about my favorite movie but then
people keep pressing me. ‘OK, ‘Citizen Kane’ is my favorite movie. It’s the
greatest movie ever made, OK?’ Without a doubt the only film you can watch 138
times, and each time you’ll still see something new.†And finally, Steven
Spielberg: “Just one of the great movies ever made. A great American experience
in cinema.â€
Citizen Kaneâ€also heads a long list of film dramas about the media
including such classics as “All The President’s Men,†“Sweet Smell of Success,â€
“The Killing Fields,†“Absence of Malice,†“The Paper,†and lastyear’s Academy
Award®-winning Best Picture, “Spotlight.â€
Not only did he star in the film, but the
then only 25-year-old Orson Welles also produced, directed and co-wrote the
film which won the Academy Award® for Best Writing, Original Screenplay (Welles
and Herman J. Mankiewicz) and captured nine nominations, including Best
Picture, Best Actor and Best Director (Welles). Joseph Cotten made an
impressive screen debut as Jedidiah Leland, newspaper reporter and Kane’s
longtime friend, from whom he had become estranged over the issue of
journalistic integrity. Other actors included Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead,
Ruth Warrick, Paul Stewart and William Alland as the investigative reporter who
delves into Kane’s life and his mysterious “Rosebud.â€
Alan Ladd and Arthur O’Connell appear uncredited as reporters. Gregg Toland was
the film’s cinematographer and Robert Wise, later a two-time Academy
Award-winning director, edited the picture.
Remastered and restored from original nitrate
elements in 4K resolution, the film (certified 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes)
will be available on DVD ($14.97) and Blu-ray ($19.98). A wide variety of DVD
and Blu-ray extras will be included in all editions.
Sometimes
brilliance in Hollywood comes in very modest packages. Who would have thought
that a string of horror films made on shoestring budgets, with no star power,
and little attention from the studio, would become classics in style and
cinematic poetry?
That’s
what happened when, in 1942, producer Val Lewton was put in charge of a
division at RKO Radio Pictures with the directive to make a series of ridiculously inexpensive movies intended to be competition for Universal’s successful
franchise of monster flicks. Lewton—a former novelist and poet—had previously worked
for MGM and, in particular, David O. Selznick, before being hired by RKO. He
brought this experience along with his literary background to the table when he
was told he could do anything he wanted as long as the budget for each film did
not exceed $150,000.
Thus,
there wasn’t enough budget for special visual effects, elaborate monster
makeup, or any of the other trappings for which Universal was known. Lewton had
to tap into the imaginations of his audience members and find ways to suggest that what was on the screen was
truly frightening. To do so, he put
together an inventive creative team—director Jacques Tourneur, writer DeWitt
Bodean, cinematographer Nicholas Musucara, and editor Mark Robson—to make the
first iconic entry under the producer’s watch.
The
result? Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur,was so successful
that it put RKO, which had been struggling after the financial failures of
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, back on the
map. Box-office aside, the motion picture manages to be atmospheric, eerie, and
psychologically disturbing without a single monster appearance. Everything
frightening about it is all in the mind. Cat
People unnerves viewers through the use of light and shadow, sound, and the
mere suggestion of menace.
The
story concerns Irena, an Eastern European woman in New York (exotically played
by Simone Simon), who has a mysterious past and family tree. It seems she
descended from a cult of Serbians who practiced witchcraft—and they had the
ability (or curse?) of turning into panthers when sexually aroused. During the
course of the story, Irena—as well as the men around her— must come to grips
with who she really is. Okay, it’s a love story... sort of.
The
sexuality at the heart of Cat People had
to be played with a good deal of subtlety due to the Production Code, but it’s
there. Much of the film’s power comes from the primal, sensual heat within the
subtext of the visual poetry on display. Not only does the movie burn with
suggestive tension, its German expressionistic beauty is seductive. The style is what gives Cat People its claws.
Criterion’s
new 2K digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, certainly
shows off the look of the film, and it appears better than ever. The black and
white imagery is appropriately grainy and the contrasts are sharp. There’s an
audio commentary from 2005 featuring film historian Gregory Mank, including
excerpts from an audio interview with Simone Simon.
Among
the supplements is a new interview with cinematographer John Bailey, who was DP
of Paul Schrader’s more explicit 1982 remake of Cat People—this is a highlight, as Bailey compares the two pictures
and talks about the work of his predecessor Musucara. Additionally, Jacques
Tourneur is interviewed in a 1977 French television program. Most impressive is
the inclusion of a feature-length documentary from TCM, narrated by Martin
Scorsese, about the life and work of Val Lewton. The movie trailer and an essay
in the booklet by critic Geoffrey O’Brien round out the extras.
Creepy,
stylish, and mesmerizing, Cat People was
the beginning of a remarkable four-year run of interesting, intelligent horror
movies made by dedicated craftsmen who not only wanted to entertain an audience
but also to create art. Let’s hope that The Criterion Collection presents more
of the works of Val Lewton, but for now, Cat
People is just in time for Halloween!
Cinema Retro has received the following press release
regarding the book “Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey†by Harlan Lebo (Thomas
Dunne Books)
“This book is a gold mine for fans.â€â€•Kirkus
Reviews
It is the story of a film masterpiece―how it was created and how it was almost
destroyed.
It is the celebration of brilliant
achievement and a sinister tale of conspiracy, extortion, and Communist witch
hunts.
It is the chronicle of a plot
orchestrated in boardrooms and a mountaintop palace, as a media company that
claimed to stand for “genuine democracy†defied the First Amendment and schemed
to burn Hollywood’s greatest creation.
Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journeyis
the extraordinary story of the production of Orson Welles’ classic film, using
previously unpublished material from studio files and the Hearst organization,
exclusive interviews with the last surviving members of the cast and crew, and
what may be the only surviving copies of the “lost†final script.
Harlan Lebo charts the meteoric rise to stardom of the
twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles, his defiance of the Hollywood system, and
the unprecedented contract that gave him near-total creative control of his
first film. Lebo recounts the clashes between Welles and studio executives
eager to see him fail, the high-pressure production schedule, and the
groundbreaking results. Lebo reveals the plot by the organization of publisher
William Randolph Hearst to attack Hollywood, discredit Welles, and incinerate
the film. And, at last, he follows the rise ofCitizen Kaneto its status as the greatest film
ever made.
When
Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), an up-and-coming young Hollywood studio exec
suggests in a meeting that writers could be eliminated and “any old news storyâ€
could be adapted to provide a movie idea—“it would write itselfâ€â€”Griffin Mill
(Tim Robbins), the guy at the studio who usually takes story pitches from
screenwriters, replies, “...what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the
writer from the artistic process. If we
could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something
here.â€
Such
is the satirical tone of The Player,
which is easily my favorite film of 1992. It’s a mystery why it wasn’t
nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but the Academy did honor the film with a
Best Director nod for Robert Altman, Best Adapted Screenplay for Michael Tolkin
(also co-producer), and Best Film Editing (Geraldine Peroni). Like 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, The Player takes potshots at the movie industry and skewers—fairly
lightly—Hollywood.
Director
Altman obviously had a good time with this one. He had spent the 1980s on the
outs with Hollywood after the 1970s, the years in which Altman enjoyed some of
his greatest acclaim (M*A*S*H, Nashville, among others). He had reason
to exhibit a somewhat cynical attitude toward Tinsel Town, and probably could
have gone further with the acerbic jabs The
Player gives to its subject matter. Instead, Altman plays it cool and
delivers a mildly critical treatise on the way movies are made, and provides a
darned good noir-ish murder mystery as
well.
The
story involves Mill, superbly played by Robbins, who is receiving death threats
from an unknown screenwriter. Mill thinks he knows who it is, and he goes to
confront the guy (Vincent D’Onofrio). There’s a fight—and Mill accidentally
kills the writer. Mill spends the rest of the movie covering up the crime,
avoiding the police investigating the case (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett),
and romancing the dead writer’s girlfriend, June (Greta Scacchi). In the
meantime, Mill’s job is threatened by the previously-mentioned Levy, who has
begun to attend meetings to which Mill isn’t invited. The Player is part satire-comedy, part 40’s-style noir (but in color), and all bravura
filmmaking.
Altman
directed a handful of masterpieces, and this is one of them. Although it’s not
one of his signature “ensemble†films—there are really only six main
characters—the picture arguably could be called his ultimate ensemble film because around sixty celebrities appear as
themselves in cameos (Malcolm McDowell, Cher, Burt Reynolds, Buck Henry, Bruce
Willis, Julia Roberts, Lily Tomlin, Scott Glen, Jack Lemmon, Nick Nolte,
Elliott Gould, Harry Belafonte, and many more). As a testament to the respect
with which they held Altman, these people donated their time as a favor.
The
movie is also known for its spectacular opening eight minutes, a crane shot
that moves around the studio lot with no cuts, similar to what Orson Welles did
at the beginning of Touch of Evil (1958).
All through The Player, there are
nods and winks to movie insider trivia. The posters on the walls of the studio
offices where Mill works are only classics from the 1930s and 40s, mostly film noir titles, slyly suggesting to
the audience what we’re watching. Altman is really saying, “You’re watching a movie, folks, and we’re going to play it
up.†This is never more evident in the fact that the first thing we see is a
clapboard, and we hear the voice of the director calling, “Action!â€
The Player is one for the
history books. As the original Blu-ray is out of print, the new Criterion
edition is a must-have. The film represents Robert Altman’s masterful
“comeback†to Hollywood, and it set him on an even course for the rest of his
colorful career.
Carlos Tobalina was among the most prolific of adult film directors. From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, Tobalina ground out dozens of grind house porn flicks and, no fool he, appeared in any number of them as well, though often not in the sex scenes. What set Tobalina's films apart was the fact that he at least tried to instill some quality and occasional social messages into what was otherwise undistinguished fare. Tobalina, who died at age 64 in 1989, would probably have appreciated the fact that Vinegar Syndrome has been releasing quite a few of his titles in remastered DVD editions that probably look better than they did back in the day. Among these releases is a Tobalina double feature that he directed under one of his alter ego names, Troy Benny. Both of the movies have a common theme in that they star one William Margold, who apparently was quite influential in the adult film industry of the 1980s and is still appearing in sleazy movies today even though he is in his seventies. He is also a social activist, having founded the Free Speech Coalition and established a charity to look after down-and-out veterans of the porn industry. First up in the double feature is "Lust Inferno", a 1982 production in which Margold appears as a corrupt TV evangelist (is there any other kind?). Margold, who is curiously billed as "Mr. William Margold" (not even Orson Welles had that much clout), stars as Rev. Jerry, a charismatic preacher who rips off the suckers in his audience by indulging in the usual fire-and-brimstone sermons. He also "cures" invalids who he pays off in cash backstage after the event. At home, Rev. Jerry is very much a family man, but it's probably not the kind of family most of us could relate to. His wife (Rita Ricardo) is frustrated that the Rev won't indulge in intercourse with her because he believes the act is only for procreation. He does indulge in some other sexual activities with her that are entirely for his satisfaction. Consequently, she goes off to "group therapy" sessions that are actually bi-sexual orgies. Rev. Jerry's oldest daughter, Dora (Tamara Longley) does the same with her teenage friends because dad won't allow her to date anyone. (The effectiveness of that strategy seems to be dubious, at best.) Meanwhile, the youngest daughter, Lucy (Marguerite Nuit) is also finding it hard to deal with her raging hormones. She asks for- and receives- her mother's permission to adopt a disguise and seek work in the local bordello that is run by Madame Blanche (Lina Spencer). What Lucy and no one else in the family knows is that her father is Madame Blanche's best customer. He pays thousands of dollars for S&M sex sessions with Blanche's young hookers. This plot development leads to the film's ironic conclusion in which Reverend Jerry finally pays a terrible price for his immorality- but it also results in a major "Yuck" factor for the viewer. The hardcore scenes are pretty standard for the era with nothing particularly inventive going on but at least director Tobalina attempts to make a statement about the craze for supporting corrupt TV preachers. In fact, he was a bit ahead of his time. Within a few years some of the best-known televangelists would be brought down in their own sex scandals.
The most enjoyable aspect of the presentation is the recent interview with William Margold on a commentary track. Margold describes himself as a blowhard and its difficult to take issue with him. We're all for admiring anyone who takes pride in their work but Margold discusses "Lust Inferno" as though it's a major achievement. He indicates that he based his interpretation of the Reverend on Richard Brooks' 1960 film version of "Elmer Gantry" and says that back in the day he even met Burt Lancaster and correctly predicted he would win an Oscar for the role. The most amusing aspect of the commentary track has Margold, who was obviously watching a sub-standard VHS version prior to the film's restoration for DVD, complain constantly about the poor quality of the tape. He also rails against the fact that the version they are watching is missing key sequences, only to have him proven wrong when they turn up later. Margold, like most of the leading men in this peculiar branch of the film industry, was probably chosen more for his physical attributes than his acting abilities, but he seems to think that his work here is top-notch both. In fact, his performance is par for the course for porn films and there is no indication he possessed any admirable skills outside of the boudoir. Speaking of which, Margold waxes nostalgic about some of his sex partners in the movie, including one woman who became his wife and another who he continues to pine away for because he never appeared in a sex scene with her, sort of like the fisherman who gripes about "the one who got away". Regarding stock footage in the film of real life audiences at televangelist events, Margold chuckles and wonders if they ever knew they would end up in a porn film. It's also quite eye-opening to listen to Margold give the play-by-play for his on-screen antics and to provide opinions about his personal techniques for self-pleasure. Margold may indeed be a blowhard but he makes for an entertaining commentator. You have to admire Vinegar Syndrome for creating some value-added content that is both funny and insightful because it gives you an idea of what the adult film industry was like from the viewpoint of one of its veterans.
The second feature on the DVD is "Marathon", a lazy production even by the low standards one would have expected for the genre. Shot in 1982, it's a quickie that features a lot of major stars from the industry including Ron Jeremy, Jamie Gillis. Sharon Mitchell and John Holmes. The "plot" simply features a large group of swingers who attend a costume party at Gillis's apartment. Everyone is getting it on while attired in crazy costumes when a phone call alerts them that a friend (William Margold) and his wife have been injured in a skiing accident and they are both in the hospital. Deciding to provide the kind of bedside companionship that no doctor would, they all barge into the hospital suite where Margold and his wife are being treated. Here, while still in costume, they resume the orgy. The therapy works as both patients join in the action. The film is played entirely for laughs and is therefore about as erotic as a dip in a pool of ice water.
The transfers of both features look very good with vibrant colors and enough original film stock grain to make you nostalgic for the era.
Cinema Retro has asked author Michael Richardson to write an exclusive article for us regarding what influenced him to write his new book "The Making of Casino Royale".
BY MICHAEL RICHARDSON
The sixties James Bond spoof Casino
Royale was a psychedelic multi-storylined extravaganza of improvisation and the
constant rewriting of various screenplays, brought about after negotiations
between producer Charles K Feldman, Eon Productions, United Artists and
Columbia Pictures failed to bring about a co-production. Realising that he
would have to proceed without Bond actor Sean Connery, Feldman crammed his
picture with as many famous names as possible: Peter Sellers, Woody Allen,
David Niven, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, Deborah Kerr, Daliah Lavi, Joanna
Pettet, Barbara Bouchet, William Holden and Jean Paul Belmondo to name but a
few. The cast also included several unbilled cameos such as: Peter O’Toole,
Caroline Munro, Dave Prowse, John Le Mesurier, Fiona Lewis and ex- Formula 1
racing driver Stirling Moss.
I had watched Charles K Feldman’s Casino Royale on
television many times before a friend of mine furthered my interest in the
production by pointing out the different plotlines and disjointed nature of the
screenplay. Over the years, I both researched and came across much more
information about the hap-hazard manner in which CasinoRoyale was produced,
which only wetted my appetite to learn as much as I possibly could about this
feature film that had somehow managed to get out of control. My fascination
with this craziest Bond film of all eventually brought about an exchange of
faxes with director Val Guest, who was living in California at the time. When
Guest made a flying visit to London for Christmas 2005, I telephoned him at his
London home in Belgravia just before the New Year and we discussed the
production in great detail.
Sometime later I was reading an interview with
Guest, where he was quoted as saying, ‘There’s a whole film to be made about
the making of Casino Royale!’ This made me think, though obviously making a
movie was beyond my abilities and resources, but writing a book that outlined
both the development and production of the film was certainly something I could
do. Doubling my efforts to obtain even more information regarding the film, I
read through every Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Orson Welles and David Niven
biography I could locate. However, this was just the beginning as I then began
consuming every book associated with anyone who had worked on the film
including actors: Dave Prowse, Ronnie Corbett, Peter O’Toole, Chic Murray and
Duncan Macrae, directors: Val Guest, John Huston and Robert Parrish, plus
writers: Wolf Mankowitz and Terry Southern. My quest for additional knowledge
involved the scouring of both British and American film industry publications
of the time, plus searches through many website features and on-line archives
and even obtaining the French published Ursula Andress biography, despite not
being able to read or speak the language.
The Making of Casino Royale (1967)
explores all aspects of production, including the origins of Ian Fleming’s
novel and subsequent screenplays, the casting choices, pre-production, filming
at three British film studios, location filming in England, Ireland, Scotland
and France, plus publicity and merchandising. This gives an overall picture of
how this strange psychedelic pop art movie was assembled from several different
storylines that involved no fewer than seven directors (including two second
unit directors), working from a screenplay credited to three writers, although
known to have input from at least nine other people including Peter Sellers and
Woody Allen. Eventually, I amassed enough information to
assemble a production schedule with dates for the picture, which indicates in
which order the various segments were filmed, who was directing and which major
cast members were present.
The story behind the making of this
film outlines how what was happening behind the scenes was just as bizarre as
anything happening in front of the cameras. The book also pieces together what
material was filmed and then discarded from the movie, by using reference
sources such as production stills, portions of scripts and anecdotes about the
making the film. Overall this outlines the story of a major blockbuster movie,
which got out of control to become one of the most complicated productions
filmed and the most bizarre James Bond film ever. Almost 50 years after being produced the elements that originally worked
against the sixties Casino Royale, such as the lack of a coherent storyline and
the sending up of James Bond, are now considered to work in its favour and have
assisted in making it a cult slice of sixties psychedelia.
Just
to whet your appetite I can confirm that you will discover the answers to the
following…
1 During development, which James Bond
actor was approached about playing the character for what would have been the
first time in June 1964?
2 During December 1965, which actress
well known for appearing in The Avengers television series was named in the
American press as being lined-up to appear in Casino Royale?
3 For his cameo role in the Scottish
Marching Band sequence, what did Peter O’Toole accept as payment?
4 Why did Sarah Miles turn down the
role of Meg, one of the McTarry daughters?
5 What did Shirley MacLaine do the
week before principal photography was due to commence that stopped production?
6 Why was Blake Edwards turned down as
a director for Casino Royale?
7 After suffering the bad experience
of having his screenplay constantly rewritten while making the film What’s New
Pussycat? why did Woody Allen agree to work with Charles K Feldman again on
Casino Royale?
8 What role was Dave Prowse originally
going to play in Peter Sellers’ nightmare?
David
Cronenberg’s horror films always seem to tackle subjects that involve an
unpredictable human body and the terror of your consciousness residing inside
of it. He explored parasites in his first mainstream picture, Shivers (aka They Came From Within, 1975), and viral “stingers†than grow in a
woman’s armpit in his second, Rabid,
1977. The rest of his movies, leading up to the ultimate statement of being
trapped in a horrible body, The Fly
(1986), all dealt with some aspect of physical or mental transformation. The Brood, released in 1979, fits right
in with Cronenberg’s thematic fascination with flesh and blood. And it’s a
corker.
Oliver
Reed plays Dr. Raglan, an unorthodox psychotherapist who uses controversial
techniques that cause his patients to manifest their inner turmoil and anger
into visible, bizarre growths on their bodies. One guy sprouts spots. Another
man grows a weird gland on the outside of his neck. The most extreme result of
Dr. Raglan’s methods occurs with a disturbed woman named Nola (Samantha Eggar),
who was abused as a child and is in the throes of a divorce and custody battle
with her husband Frank (Art Hindle). Nola is growing “wombs†on her body that eventually
give birth to horrific dwarf “copies†of her and Frank’s five-year-old daughter
Candice (Cindy Hinds)—except these siblings are murderous creatures unwittingly
and psychically controlled by their mother. They have the faces of trolls, no
navels, and are anatomically asexual, but otherwise they are somewhat identical
to Candice. (Where they get the clothes that Candice wears is unexplained.)
As
a horror film, The Brood brilliantly
succeeds. The shocks are genuine, the gross-out factor is palpable, and the
story—which is absurd on the surface—is intelligently well-written (by
Cronenberg himself). Apparently the impetus for the film was the director’s
harrowing experience in going through a divorce and rescuing his child from a
cult.
Reed
delivers one of his best campy performances, and Eggar is suitably deranged in
her part. Of particular note is young Hinds, who manages to be simultaneously
innocent and creepy—this was her first acting role. Perhaps the weakest link in
the picture is Hindle, who somehow never reaches the emotional heights that his
co-stars do.
It’s
a fairly low-budget affair, made for a little less than two million dollars,
but the visual effects and production values are top-notch. As noted in the new
supplemental documentary on the film’s making, all the strange bodily terrors
were accomplished with clever makeup applications—in particular, the use of
various-sized condoms filled with movie blood and... other stuff. Eggar relates
how hilarious this actually was on the set; she could hardly keep from laughing
as the crew glued the ends of prophylactics onto her torso.
Criterion
has released a new, restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by Cronenberg,
with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. As is usually the case with Criterion
Blu-rays, the video is gorgeous and vividly colorful—and this is one of those
movies in which the color is practically a character in the film! Supplements
include: the new documentary featuring interviews with Eggar, executive
producer Pierre David, cinematographer Mark Irwin, assistant director John
Board, and special makeup effects artists Rick Baker and Joe Blasco (neither of
whom worked on The Brood, but served
on other Cronenberg pictures); a 2011 interview with Cronenberg covers his
early career in the 70s; a 2013 interview with Hindle and a grown-up Hinds is
conducted by the editor of Fangoria magazine;
and—most fun of all—a segment from The
Merv Griffin Show from 1980, featuring Reed verbally sparring with Orson
Welles. There’s also a radio spot and an essay by critic Carrie Rickey in the
booklet.
Another
notable supplement is Cronenberg’s rare second feature film, Crimes of the Future (1970), made in
color on a shoestring budget. This is a truly bizarre picture about a world in
which all the women capable of reproducing are gone (killed by toxic cosmetics)
and men are attempting to compensate without a feminine influence in their
lives. A little too stilted for its own good, Crimes serves as a curiosity in the Cronenberg pantheon that is
worth seeing... once.
But
the main attraction is an excellent fright fest. The Brood has arrived in glorious high definition just in time for
Halloween. Grab the popcorn, turn out the lights, and prepare yourself for some
truly nightmarish material. The Brood is
a keeper.
Warner Home Entertainment has recently released their
special edition DVD of director Joe Dante’s “Innerspace†on Blu-ray. The 1987
film is a sci-fi comedy that afforded Martin Short and Meg Ryan early career leading roles in a tale of inspired lunacy. The premise of the script centers on a narcissistic former military test pilot Tuck Pendelton (Dennis Quaid) who volunteers for an unprecedented scientific experiment. Doctors have the technology to shrink him and inject him into the body of a rabbit. They also obviously have the ability to bring him back into the outside world where he can resume his normal activities at his normal size. The purpose of the experiment is to allow medical technicians to eventually inject operatives into human beings so that they can perform miracle surgeries. However, there are some bad guys who are looking to benefit from the amazing technology by selling it to the highest bidder. After Tuck has been reduced inside a hypodermic needle, there is an altercation between the villains and scientists. A chase ensues that extends outside of the laboratory. By happenstance, Jack Putter (Martin Short), a nondescript grocery store clerk, is injected by the needle. The result is that Tuck is now floating around the bloodstream of an unwitting, innocent man. The laughs result from Tuck's ability to communicate with Jack and convince him of what is happening. Drawn into the mix is Tuck's girlfriend Lydia (Meg Ryan), who Jack befriends at Tuck's urging. In the zany antics that follow, Lydia is finally convinced of the fantastic scenario after she has become targeted by the head villain, a zillionaire named Scrimshaw (Kevin McCarthy). By then, there is a desperate race against time to get Tuck back into the real world before he becomes a permanent part of Jack's DNA.
"Innerspace" is a throwback to an era when major studios would routinely turn out family friendly comedies that were devoid of today's mandatory gross-out jokes and mean-spirited pranks. The entire cast seems to be having a blast under Dante's direction, perhaps because his films are glorious evidence that he has never grown out of the wonder of the types of films that appealed to him as a kid. The movie is a particular triumph of sorts for Martin Short, who proved he could carry a major budget production as a leading man. The special effects hold up extremely well even today (no surprise the film won an Oscar in this category).
We caught up with Dante all these years later to ask him to reflect on his thoughts about "Innerspace".
CINEMA RETRO: How do you feel the film holds up into today's modern age?
JOE DANTE: I've always liked it and I had a lot of fun making it. I think you can tell when you watch it.
CR: It's especially evident listening to the commentary track on the Blu-ray. It's no secret that you have been heavily influenced in your work by the classic and cult horror and sci-fi movies of your youth. Is it fair to say that "Innerspace" was a satire of "Fantastic Voyage"?
JD: I can't vouch for that because I wasn't in on the creation of it. When I was first offered it, the script had no comedy at all. I didn't think it worked that way so I went off and did something else. When I came back, they had a new writer and he approached it as comedy from the concept of what would happen if we shrank Dean Martin down and injected him inside Jerry Lewis. That was a concept I could relate to.
CR: Steven Spielberg executive produced the film. Was he involved before you were?
JD: Actually no, because I was offered the picture by Peter Guber when it was in its serious incarnation. During the time I went off to do something else, Spielberg had become involved. He was probably an impetus for turning it into a comedy.
CR: Did he have any constraints on you regarding your vision of the film?
JD: The atmosphere at Amblin was pretty free. The thing Steven would do is protect you from the studio and sometimes from the other producers. It was a very filmmaker-friendly atmosphere over there. You got all the best equipment and all the best people and all the toys you wanted to play with. Plus you had somebody on your side who was also a filmmaker and they knew exactly what you were talking about when you had a problem or you had a question.
CR: In terms of casting, you seemed to have your own stock company of actors you liked to work with: Dick Miller, William Schallert, Rance Howard, Orson Bean, Kathleen Freeman and even Kenneth Tobey.
JD: I think when you look at a director's filmography, you see the same faces popping up all the time because these people are copacetic and sometimes they become your friend. You originally hire them because you like their work and you like to watch them do their stuff so, whether it's Ingmar Bergman, Preston Sturges or John Ford, they have "go to" people that they put into almost every one of their pictures. The only down side comes when you have made a lot of movies and now you have a lot of people you want to include but, of course, you don't have parts for them.
CR: That tradition doesn't seem to be as prevalent today.
JD: That's because the business has changed so much. The movies aren't made in one locale anymore. There are less opportunities for an actor to shine over and over in a supporting role because when a movie goes to Canada or Australia, you have to use their local people. All those people who built up followings from television and movies and sometimes even radio were constantly being seen by people. Today there's just no opportunity to do that. Not only are there less movies, there are fewer roles and most of the films aren't made in Hollywood any longer.
CR: With "Innerspace", were the leading roles already cast before you got involved? Did you rely much on the casting director?
JD: No, once you are involved with a movie, you're in on all those decisions. The good thing about casting directors is that you can tell them who you want to see and they have the ability to make that happen. They make deals, they make contracts. I was using Mike Fenton, who was one of the best casting directors in the business at the time. Many of my best pictures were cast by Mike. Today, it's a little more piecemeal because so many of the movies aren't made here. So you have dual casting directors. You have the Hollywood casting director and the Canadian casting director. When it gets down to the smaller roles, they almost always cast in the locality you are shooting in. I made enough movies in Vancouver that I actually started to build up a Vancouver stock company because the talent pool there isn't that vast. I sort of bemoan the fact that actors don't have the opportunity for that kind of career longevity. When they decided to start giving all that money to the stars it came out of the casting budget. All of a sudden there wasn't much money for the supporting actors.
When
Orson Welles died in 1985, he was known to the younger generation for his
adverts, his chat show appearances and for voicing a giant robot in Transformers:
The Movie. His early successes more than forty years earlier were often
over-looked, the larger-than-life raconteur having allowed his legend and
personality to become bigger than his numerous cinematic achievements.
Thankfully
Magician serves as a much-needed reminder of just how talented Orson
Welles was. A true polymath, it did not seem to matter what Welles turned his
hand to, he would be better at it than you. He was an established artist,
actor, theatre actor and director all before reaching twenty years old. Before
creating what is still generally accepted as the greatest film ever made, Citizen
Kane (1941), he was a popular radio presence, both as the voice of The
Shadow and through his own Mercury Theatre productions. It was with the
latter that he produced what is still considered one of the most controversial
radio dramas of all time: his contemporary adaptation of The War of the
Worlds in 1938, which terrified audiences by forcing them to realise that
they could not always trust what they were listening to on the wireless. Anyone
who had achieved such amazing success at an age where most of us still don't
know what we want to do with our lives could be forgiven for relaxing somewhat
after that. But not Welles. He spent his entire working life going from one
creative project to another, whether it was film, theatre or television.
Frustrated by the lack of control afforded to him by the studio system, and in
particular by the disappointing way The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was
treated, he became in effect an independent film director, raising money
wherever he could to fund projects which were often left unfinished. Yet it was
during this time that some of his greatest films were made, in particular The
Trial (1962) and Falstaff: Chimes At Midnight (1965). He funded
these films by putting in memorable appearances in other director’s work, such
as his Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949), a role which he later
recreated for a successful radio series.
Sadly
the complicated nature of the funding means that some of Welles films are still
in legal dispute, and a high quality copy of Falstaff: Chimes At Midnight is
still not commercially available. Clips from this and many examples of his
other work are included here which reminds us just how visually impressive his
films were. The documentary includes interviews with friends, family and
colleagues, both newly shot and archival. Most importantly Welles is given the
opportunity to speak for himself, with clips taken from various points
throughout his career. Time and time again he was frustrated yet he always
seems philosophical as he considers his failures as well as his achievements.
This
documentary was given a brief theatrical run before being released on DVD by
the BFI. Extra features include an extended interview with the actor Simon
Callow, who has written three volumes of biography on Orson Welles, whose
research has helped to sift through many of the legends to get to the truth of
the man. Magician is as thorough and engaging a documentary as one would
hope for, and ought to lead to a resurgence of interest in Welles' work. It may
perhaps help to finally resolve the legal limbo in which many of his films
still sit.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of the Cinema Retro experience is that we continue to get inundated with review copies of niche market DVD and Blu-ray titles pertaining to films we've never heard of. Many of these come from Vinegar Syndrome (so-called for the nefarious affliction that attaches itself to old reels of film if they are not stored correctly.) The company has earned kudos for not only rescuing obscure titles from oblivion but releasing them in remastered versions that often include bonus extras. Much of the company's product line consists of vintage hardcore porn from the 1960s-1980s but Vinegar Syndrome also releases bizarre exploitation films from this era as well. Case in point: "The Cut-Throats", a 1969 WWII opus that is aptly described on the DVD sleeve as a cross between Nazisloitation and sexploitation genres. What is Nazisploitation? Well, it's a sordid sub-genre of low-budget film-making that took off in the 1970s and had a limited, but profitable run over the next decade. The subject matter was particularly distasteful: it involved the sexual torture and exploitation of female prisoners and concentration camp inmates as a device for stimulation. (Think "The Night Porter" without the redeeming factors.) Perhaps the most notorious of the Nazisploitation films was the infamous "Ilsa: She Wolf of the S.S." , a twisted and sickening exercise in cinematic offensiveness that should result in your crossing anyone you know who enjoyed it off your list of house guests (click here for review). "The Cut-Throats" is not a Nazisploitation film in that regard. Yes, there are women who are constantly groped but in this case the females are willing and mostly prone to doing some groping themselves. The movie was directed by one John Hayes, who apparently has a cult following for his Ed Wood-like ability to see his dream projects through despite a lack of funding or resources. This admirable quality is on display in "The Cut-Throats" from the very first frames.
The film opens on a bizarre note: a painted backdrop of a cowboy over which we hear someone warbling an old-fashioned western song. (The score is by Jamie Mendoza-Nava, who went on to compose music for other more notable "B" movies.) At first I thought I had accidentally put on some old John Ford film with the Sons of the Pioneers singing over the opening credits. Hayes's decision to open the movie with this song never makes sense in the course of what follows beyond a brief opening scene of a G.I. using a lasso. We are then introduced to the no-name cast as we see an American colonel recruit a handful of men to accompany him on a dangerous mission to infiltrate a remote German outpost and capture important documents and battle plans. What the G.I.s don't realize is that they are being duped into helping him secure possession of a chest of priceless jewels that is being hidden inside the German HQ. When the men infiltrate the compound, they quickly dispatch the German soldiers, only to find that the place is actually a bordello. The sexy females on site quickly switch allegiance and put on a bizarre stage performance consisting of singing and dancing in costume(!) Things heat up pretty quickly from that point with the G.I.s understandably lowering their resistance and bedding the young women. In one of the film's few attempts to provide some outright humor, one G.I. of German ancestry finds he is sexually stimulated by making love on a bed draped in Swastika sheets while listening to records of Hitler's speeches. Once the corrupt colonel intimidates a prostitute into showing him the hidden treasure, he considers his own men to be expendable. He uses a skirmish with a passing German motorcade as a cover to murder his own men. The film's climax finds him going mano-a-mano with a surviving German colonel as they duel over who gets possession of the jewels. (Ironically, the plot device of corrupt Americans and corrupt German soldiers vying for a fortune in stolen treasure bares a similarity to the finale of "Kelly's Heroes", which was produced the same year.)
"The Cut-Throats" is such a mess that it boggles the mind to imagine that even drive-ins or grindhouse cinemas would have shown it back in the day. However, the sexual revolution in film was a new phenomenon so any outlet horny male viewers had to ogle naked women on screen was probably assured of some financial success. The movie was clearly not made for the Noel Coward crowd. The film has an abundance of guilty pleasures, not the least of which is the fact that the film is set in "Germany". I use quotation marks because it appears this is a Germany from an alternate dimension, unless in my travels I somehow missed the nation's desert areas, where the action takes place. Then we have the main location, the German military compound which is clearly a modern housing unit that is either being constructed or deconstructed. With the house boasting a modern American facade and an empty in-ground swimming pool, one is tempted to suspect that director Hayes simply appropriated an abandoned property for the few days it probably took to film this epic. The premise is like staging a WWII action film on the same sets where "Leave It To Beaver" was shot. The editing process looks like it was achieved with a chainsaw, with abrupt cuts in abundance. There is virtually no character development beyond the most simplistic characteristics afforded the principals. Hayes did manage to find the budget for some period G.I. uniforms and weapons, as well as few German WWII-era vehicles (though one of them seems to be adorned with the Afrika Corps symbol even though the fighting is supposed to be taking place in Germany.) For cult movie purists, about the only recognizable face....well, not exactly face....I became aware of is that of Uschi Digard, whose legendary assets figure into a ludicrous sequence in which she plays the secretary to the German colonel. Upon hearing that the war is officially over, she doffs her uniform and seduces the German's young adjutant by going starkers and serving him a bottle of wine in a unique manner- by first pouring it over her trademark natural assets. The scene is representative of the entire goofy atmosphere of the production. The sex scenes feature full female nudity but never go into hardcore territory. A somewhat kinky aspect involves a scene in which two G.I's are engaging in a threesome with one of the prostitutes. One of the G.I.'s gets so carried away that he begins to caress his friend. Seeing gay sex on screen, even if played for laughs, was rather groundbreaking for 1969. Another amusing aspect of the film is the fact that some of the G.I.s and German soldiers sport hair styles that make them look like they were auditioning for The Grateful Dead.
"The Cut-Throats" will appeal only to those dedicated retro movie lovers who revel in "D" level (or in this case "double D" level) obscurities such as this. I personally enjoyed watching this train wreck of an indie film and have some grudging respect for the people involved. Back in the pre-video camera era, it was an expensive and cumbersome task to bring even a slight venture like this to reality. The Vinegar Syndrome transfer is excellent on all levels. The packaging features what I presume is the original one-sheet movie poster art which is appropriately awful. There is also an original trailer that features a narrator who seems to be doing a poor Orson Welles imitation in relating the action as though he were the voice of God. A selection of still photos are also included but they are censored with bikini tops drawn on the women so that they could be displayed in neighborhood theaters.
"The Cut-Throats" DVD is limited to only 1,500 copies.
Most
film noir pictures take place in
urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles—where the big city is as much a
character as the unhappy humans in these often bleak and brutal, sometimes
brilliant, Hollywood crime films that spanned the early forties to the late
fifties. Film noir peaked in the latter half of the forties, with an
abundance of the classic titles released between 1946-1948.
One
of the more unique things about Ride the
Pink Horse is that the urban setting is gone. Instead, the action is set in
a border town in New Mexico, where there is indeed danger, to be sure, but
there’s also a little less pessimism among the inhabitants—unlike in the urban noirs in which everyone’s a cynic.
Interestingly, one might say that the “border town noir†could be a sub-set of
the broader category, for Ride the Pink
Horse isn’t the only crime movie of the period set away from the big city.
Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is
another good example.
Ride the Pink Horse, based on a novel
by Dorothy B. Hughes, became actor Robert Montgomery’s second noir in which he both starred and
directed. His first directorial effort was Lady in the Lake (also 1947),
in which the actor played detective Phillip Marlowe. Here, Montgomery plays
Gagin, an ex-GI, with a take-no-guff attitude but also with a subtle sense of
cluelessness—he is definitely a fish out of water in “San Pablo.†His mission
there is to locate a crook named Hugo (Fred Clark) to avenge the murder of
Gagin’s best friend. What he thought might be a simple task turns out to be a
lot more complicated, for the FBI is in town in the form of amiable Retz (Art
Smith), and the Feds want Hugo, too. On his first night in town, Gagin falls
in with Pancho (Thomas Gomez), a Mexican who runs a cheap merry-go-round for
the kids, and Pila (Wanda Hendrix), a young woman who speaks little, but seems
to know a heck of a lot about the goings-on in town. As it turns out, Gagin
isn’t really the tough guy he pretended to be at the beginning. He really is in over his head, and he needs the
help of his newfound Mexican friends to simply survive.
The
merry-go-round could be some kind of metaphor for the film’s message—possibly
that we can go round and round and still wind up where we started. On the other
hand, the ride might suggest that it is a source of innocence, something to
which our hero can’t return. Even if you ride the pink horse; you get the same
truth on a horse of any other color.
The
setting’s flavor is pleasingly captured in the stark black and white
cinematography by Russell Metty, especially during the “Fiesta†sequences. One
striking sequence takes place with the camera on the merry-go-round—as it goes
around we see two thugs giving Pancho a beating at the side of the ride; with
every revolution our glimpse of the violence is increasingly upsetting. The
production design by Bernard Herzbrun and Robert Boyle, is very impressive,
seeing that, ironically, the picture was filmed on the Universal lot in
Hollywood and not in New Mexico.
The
story, adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, is engaging enough, although Ride the Pink Horse doesn’t seem to
reach the climax that is promised by the opening half-hour. Nevertheless, the
performances are very good, especially that of Gomez, who, with this picture,
became the first Hispanic actor to be nominated for an Oscar—Best Supporting
Actor (1947).
Criterion’s
new 2K digital restoration looks sharp and clean. An audio commentary by film noir historians Alain Silver and
James Ursini accompanies the film. The only two extras are a new interview about
the film with Imogen Sara Smith, author of In
Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City; and a radio adaptation starring
Montgomery, Hendrix, and Gomez. The booklet contains an essay by filmmaker and
writer Michael Almereyda.
Ride the Pink Horse
is
for film noir enthusiasts looking to
get out of the city and travel somewhere a little different.
Ian Ogilvy in his latest film, "We Still Kill the Old Way", now available on Blu-ray and DVD.
Ian Ogilvy: Saints, Sorcerers and Secret Agents
Cinema Retro's Mark Mawston recently caught up with the legendary Ian Ogilvy to discuss projects past and present.
Mark Mawston: Ian, your film career began in the mid
60’s with The She Beast, directed by Michael Reeves. You had a great
relationship with him. How did that come about?
Ian Ogilvy: Well, when we were 15 years old we made
a couple of amateur movies together after we were introduced by a mutual friend
and we became great friends. I used to stay at his mother’s house with him in
Norfolk and over two years we made these two little amateur movies. I then lost
contact with him as I went off and did different things like attending drama
school and he went off and did lots of assistant director jobs and general “go-foringâ€
jobs in the movie industry. Then one day my English agent said “Have you heard
of a guy called Michael Reeves? He wants you to play the lead in his first
film!†So, as it turned out, he hadn’t forgotten me and I hadn’t forgotten him
and that’s how it came about.
MM: You seemed to be Reeves’ muse,
appearing in all three of his finished films (The She Beast, The Sorcerers and the
classic Witchfinder General). Through those films you worked with two of horror’s
greatest stars, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price. What can you tell us about
that?
IO: Well I wasn’t really his muse. The
thing about Michael was that he couldn’t really direct actors. He didn’t
understand what acting was all about so he left them pretty much alone. He only
liked to work with actors he knew and trusted. I simply became the actor he
trusted and that’s how we worked together. As for working with Boris, well he
was a complete delight, the most charming, courteous old man id ever met in my
life and quite funny, too. He always tried to do his best. Vincent on the other
hand, well its quite well known that he was an unhappy actor when doing this
film (Witchfinder General a.k.a The
Conqueror Worm) and really didn’t want to be there. He didn’t like Michael and
didn’t like the way he was being treated by Michael but still gave, I think,
one of his best ever performances in that movie. So Michael was right and he
was wrong. I didn’t have much to do with either of them bar meeting regarding
each film but other than that, didn’t really come across them. My knowledge of
Vincent specifically isn’t that great as I didn’t spend a lot of time working
with him. Our paths and parts ran parallel yet different, if you know what I
mean.
MM: Yes I believe the famous put down by
Reeves to Price;
Price: “Young
Man, I have made over a hundred films, how many have you made�
Reeves: “ Three good ones†cleared the air and led to, I agree, one of
Prices best performances.
Witchfinder General
After this you worked on Waterloo with
Christopher Plummer, Jack Hawkins and Orson Welles. Did you spend time with the
great orator?
IO: Orson Welles spent one day on set and it
was miles away from where I was! His entire role was shot in one or two days,
filmed in Italy or somewhere. I didn’t get to meet Rod Steiger, either, as
there was no need to because they got all the French actors to come in and do
their stuff, then get the British actors in. There was no particular reason for
us to meet. Although I do wish I’d met Orson Welles. I don’t think anyone did!
MM: What was the overall experience working
on Waterloo, as it was so different in set-up and sheer scale?
IO: Well, the sheer scale was enormous. It was a vast project. It
couldn’t be done today, or if it was, it would all be CGI. We had over 25,000
extra’s which was The Red army, The Russian army. We were given whole
regiments. The Director Sergei Bondarchuk had made War and Peace a few years earlier, an 8 or 9 hour epic using
the same soldiers so they all knew about dressing up in uniforms (laughs). It
was a huge film, the biggest I’ve ever been involved with.
Waterloo
MM: You’ve starred in some of the most
beloved cult TV shows, such as The Avengers and Ripping Yarns. Did you prefer
TV and did it give you more scope as an actor?
IO: When people ask actors that they tend
to say it would be films for the money, TV for the regular bread and butter,
which is what you did the most in order to give yourself a decent living and the
theatre for the material, as the material is always better than TV or
film. I loved doing films but they
didn’t come around as often as TV shows. TV was a general staple in those days,
if not now, though things have changed . Back then , if you’d looked at TV from
6:00 PM in the evening until late at night when it stopped, TV would be
employing actors. Now it just seems to be quiz shows, cooking shows and so-called
reality shows. We, as young actors, had more opportunity than they do now. I
liked TV, as it gave me my daily bread.
MM: Were you approached by The Pythons for
Ripping Yarns?
IO: (laughs) I don’t know to be honest with
you! I think I may have gone and read for them or they knew me from before. I
hardly remember how I got that, but it was a joyous job.
MM: It was on again recently and holds up
wonderfully and your turn in it was especially good. Bar long running series
Upstairs Downstairs, you’re most recognized for your role as Simon Templer in
Return of The Saint. How did that come about? Did producer Bob Baker spot you?
IO: No, it was Bob’s wife who spotted me in
Upstairs Downstairs and said “Bob, if you ever do another Saint, that guy would
be good†which was odd really, as my character in that program was so weak, so effeminate,
that I was surprised she made the connection. Still, Bob trusted her judgment
and his agent called me and Bob took me to dinner and asked that- if he did get
a new series off the ground- would I be willing to do it? I said “Sureâ€, but I
forgot all about it for several years, as I didn’t hear anything back. Then in
the late 70’s, all of a sudden, it came back again and he managed to raise the
money, as he’d managed to get Lord Lew
Grade to back it. So it happened after talking about it all those years before.
Return of the Saint
MM: It shows your range as an actor, that
you can play a total fop and yet still be seen as an all action hero
