Category Archives: Movies

Rescue Me!

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janie 40 sprite in the bag
Sprite, Our Lady of Daily Distress aka Gloria Talbott

Movie night!

I’m completing my own little Gloria Talbott film festival by following up We’re No Angels and The Leech Woman with I Married a Monster From Outer Space.

Hey, someone’s gotta do it.

What a career stretch this was for Ms. Talbott; from Humphrey Bogart to Tom Tryon. Ms. Talbott seemed best at playing characters that were moderately perky and cute, not particularly bright nor quick, and perpetually anxious and in distress – in short, always in need of rescue. Perhaps that’s why Sprite, my kitten, enjoys her performances. Sprite believes her own raison d’etre on this planet is to be always in need of rescue…from everything…hunger, swinging gates, other cats, outdoors, indoors, Tuesdays…she’s a feline Gloria Talbott. We may change her name to Gloria.

We’re No Angels is one of my favorite Christmas movies, probably because of its un-Christmas-like ingredients. You don’t expect a Christmas flick to feature;

  • Humphrey Bogart and Basil Rathbone.
  • A poisonous snake.
  • A convicted murderer, an embezzler, and a safecracker – all just escaped from prison and all apparently unrepentant.
  • Palm trees and 100-degree heat.

Despite the outré components, the Christmas payoff at the end is genuine and moving, and the redemptive dénouement, though fatal, is pleasing if not exactly plausible.

Oh, and Ms. Talbott is rescued in the end from her wicked uncle. Thus fulfilling her contract.

The Leech Woman is better than the title implies. How could it not be? And Ms. Talbott is again rescued, this time from a gruesome crone while the native drums pound. Nuff said ‘bout dat.

Our third film comes from a time when a significant part of our population was living in fear and sometimes considering poor decisions because of that fear. My current fear is we may be living in a similar emotional state now. My hope is that we will resist making catastrophically poor decisions as our parents resisted in the 1950’s. In the United States in the 50’s, people were fearful of surreptitious infiltration by enemies of our way of life. Spies were everywhere. Communists were everywhere. Free-thinkers and agitators disguised as Protestants were everywhere. A goodly number of movies in that decade picked up on those fears to scare the be-jeezus out of us.

My favorite of these films is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It posited the classic conundrum of conspiracy fear; your neighbor/colleague/spouse looks like your neighbor/colleague/spouse, but is it really them? I harbor an intense fear of pods to this day. If I’m elected I will build a wall to deter all pods…except laundry detergent pods…we might need food.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been remade twice…and I don’t mind. My usual dim view of remaking good films is pushed aside by my suspicion that this plot has something new and old to say to us about every ten years. It is a story of today, and this year’s today is not the 1950’s today. The story of paranoia and response needs to be updated regularly to the current mythology and technology. How we respond to suspicion and difference may ultimately determine if we are condemned or redeemed.

But I still recommend keeping a watchful eye on any pods you encounter.

I Married a Monster From Outer Space is another of these paranoid delicacies. Gloria Talbott’s fiancé’s body and identity is taken over by a Cthulhu look-alike space alien the night before their wedding.

Whatta buzzkill.

The marriage proceeds anyway and a year later Ms. Talbott notices her husband has changed. It took a year – like I said before, she’s good at playing not particularly bright nor quick. From this point the film proceeds along the lines of Body Snatchers with Ms. Talbott assuming the storytelling duties Kevin McCarthy performed in Snatchers. This film is pretty interesting but is burdened by Tom Tryon’s performance (or non-performance) as the husband. There’s no discernible difference between the original husband and the alien co-opted husband: both are uniformly wooden and both are uniformly Tom Tryon. You can almost understand why it took his wife a year to sense a change…almost.

The bottom line is the repulsive aliens are repulsed, the planet is saved, and Gloria Talbott is once again rescued, but with some ‘splainin’ to do to her real husband.

Whew!

Now, I’d best go see how Sprite the cat is currently imperiled.

My raison d’etre…

Flash the Wonder Dog…Meh

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janie 86 chloe-futon

Movie night!

I confess. After ten years, I still keenly feel the loss of my movie-watching canine partner, the late and lamented Lilly the Pup. Lil boasted a voluminous film-watching resumé. She watched anything and everything with me and usually had a trenchant point or two to make about each flick. I pretty much granted her opinions great deference, whether about how she would have made a better “Asta” in the “Thin Man” movies, or whether the mailman was making far too many uninvited visits to our front porch.

Hey! That’s why you have a dog in the first place. Capiche?

Curiously, Sprite, my “dumb blonde” tortie, had physically assumed Lilly’s movie-watching spot (two blankets on the futon). I was not deceived by this into thinking the kitten might have hidden depths. I suspected she also missed Lilly.

Chloe, Lilly’s clueless and constantly ecstatic successor, tries as best she can but…well…she’s clueless and constantly ecstatic. She’d like a play date with Asta.

Lil would have been thrilled with our film selection tonight; The Flaming Signal. This super-cheap 1930’s flick features Flash, a Rin-Tin-Tin knockoff, and airplanes, and jungle islands. You can’t miss with a combo like that.

Moments of wonder abound;

  • Flash (a dog, remember) breaks out of his shack/prison, fetches his own parachute, crawls under airplane propellers, and stows away on his master’s solo endurance flight to Hawaii.
  • As the plane plunges to destruction in a storm, Flash’s master puts the parachute on his disobedient pooch and watches from the cockpit as Flash floats to safety on an uncharted island whose roadways (on an uncharted island) are perfectly visible in the camera shot. So…the island is uncharted, but there could possibly exist a road map of the area.
  • Flash’s master has obviously confused his role as airplane pilot with that of a ship’s captain and goes down with his plane. Clearly, the dog is the brains of this duo.
  • Never fear. Flash, having shucked his chute (try saying that three times real fast), leaps into the stormy ocean and drags his master to shore where they immediately encounter an alluring white woman gleefully and provocatively bathing in a sun-drenched jungle pool. Where did the storm go?

It just keeps gettin’ better from there.

But none of that is as historically important as Mischa Auer’s role in the show. Mr. Auer plays Manu, the tribal leader of the natives of the island. He makes dour pronouncements by the tribal fire, leads torch-bearing islanders in revolt against the evil trader (who does he trade with on this uncharted island?), gets killed, comes back to life, and gets killed again. I’m convinced that this resilient fellow is the inspiration of the legendary film so admired by Walter Tunis; Manos, Hand of Fate.

This is all essential stuff to know and why you keep me around.

By the way, Flash (a dog, remember) eventually saves the day (if not the film) by carrying a torch to a convenient but unexplained (and I assume uncharted) pile of combustible material. The resulting “flaming signal” attracts a passing ship…because of course no other passing ship has ever noticed tribal fires or torches on the island before and thought they perhaps should investigate.

It was great. I loved it.

Chloe now wants a play date with Flash.

Euro-Trash and “Other Organic Things”

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It’s Movie Night and I’m hooked solid when the flick’s philosophical underpinnings are spelled out in the opening dialogue and are clearly words to live by.

“Dealing with a murderer is not only repugnant, but it can lead to…complications.”

I have always found this to be true.

Doesn’t that line sound like something Charlie Chan might have said? But no, it’s one of the many pearls of wisdom included in the Euro-trash classic; The Hunchback of the Morgue. This is another inexplicably overlooked candidate for adaptation to a Broadway musical.

Check out this snappy exchange;

“Sulphuric acid!”

“Yes. We’ll be using it to dispose of the anatomical parts and other organic things.”

Let’s ponder that for a moment, shall we? …”other organic things”… what could “other organic things” possibly be? And do we really want to know? Pass the acid, please.

This film has so many of the basic elements of great bad film-making;

  • A secret cave with jagged rock walls but a perfectly flat floor (only in the movies can such a geo-miracle exist).
  • A fully functional mad doctor laboratory (with much gurgling and bubbling equipment) in said secret cave.
  • Sporadic electricity (besides most of the acting). This state-of-the-art laboratory (with much gurgling and bubbling equipment) is lit by torches – go figure.
  • Whispering. Everyone in the film whispers. Everyone, everywhere, all the time. I’m guessin’ the actors are actually moonlighting golf commentators.
  • A hunchback with a foot fetish and the ability to climb tile-roofs like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.
  • A student nurse whose apartment has dead animals and a Modigliani hanging on her walls. Clearly student nurses make damn good money in Europe and have a remarkable range in taste.
  • Grave-robbing, decapitation, artificial life (besides most of the acting).

The only thing missing is Godzilla!

I loved it.

Pigeons…What Might They Mean?

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Movie night!

For the umpteenth time I’m revisiting King of Hearts.

I’m pretty well convinced you can’t pretend to be a knowledgeable human being without seeing this film, though that might not disqualify you from a presidential nomination. The film is (as TCM puts it) one of the “essentials”. Also, this film and On the Waterfront and the disturbing Eye of the Needle constitute a fascinating triple-feature of films in which pigeons play an important role. Clearly this is another under-studied film genre. It’s probably best to leave it so. You could wander into some heavy…

But I wonder.

What strikes me on this viewing of King of Hearts is the heartbreakingly charming performance of Genevieve Bujold. I suppose Ms. Bujold will be remembered primarily for her Anne of a Thousand Days, and she will forever try to make folks forget Earthquake, but for me her fascination is in my pondering what kind of journey takes the Coquilotte in King of Hearts to the Dr. Nancy Love in the quirky Choose Me. The journey may not be as long as I first assumed. Both characters profess a worldly knowledge (sex) and a casual proficiency (sex) that neither actually possesses.

If we begin to think of Nancy as a grown-up Coquilotte, would that mean David Carradine is the King of Hearts? Hm-m-m-m-m. Heavy…

By the way, Choose Me is certainly worth a look, if only to watch Lesley Anne Warren locomote from her car to the bar.

Whoa……..temp just went up in here!

Radioactive Emanations

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Movie night!

Tonight’s viewing features two – count ‘em! – two classics; THE CREATURE WITH THE ATOMIC BRAIN and GODZILLA VS. THE SEA CREATURE.

Always snappy

THE CREATURE WITH THE ATOMIC BRAIN features snappy dialogue exchanges like;

Detective; “What’s that?”

Professor (played by the always snappy Richard Denning); “It’s a Geiger counter – I’m searching for radioactive emanations.”

I’m pretty sure from the title he’s gonna find some.

Radioactive Emanations – weren’t they the opening act for the Strawberry Alarm Clock back in 1978?

This flick features radio-controlled, radioactive zombies (the worst kind) working for a gangster. It’s a viable business plan. I wish I had thought of it, but then I don’t possess an atomic brain…and I’m not a gangster.

I suspect part of the appeal of living dead/zombie storylines to film producers is the money saved in costuming. For the most part the zombies can wear their own clothes as long as they haven’t been laundered recently. No rubber monster suits are required, unlike our second masterpiece.

GODZILLA VS. THE SEA CREATURE is a big lizard flick starring Godzilla (the Cary Grant of big lizards), Ebirah (a monster lobster), Mothra (a serene destroyer in the sky), and those miniature twin singers (Walter Tunis has all their albums). These tiny and irritating singers appeared in several Japanese monster films featuring Mothra. The original singers were a real life duo called The Peanuts. In this film however, The Peanuts are out and the fairy singers are played by another equally grating duo called The Pair Bambi (Walter used to date them).

Collect them all

I can’t believe I know things like this.

But…THIS is why movies were invented; rubber suits, tiny lousy singers, giant lobsters, and radioactive emanations.

I get all tingly.

Winter Light on the Summer Solstice

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It’s Movie Night in Central Kentucky. It’s summer with 132% humidity; just the night for a cold beer or Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light.

I have radically mixed feelings about the films of Ingmar Bergman. Some of the longest and most tedious decades of my life have been spent watching Persona and Fanny and Alexander and The Virgin Spring…and yes, The Seventh Seal. Some of the most interesting times have been spent watching Through a Glass Darkly, Smiles of a Summer Night, Summer With Monika…and yes again, The Seventh Seal (scratchin’ my head).

And then there’s Winter Light.

I love this film. I first saw it in the summer of 1969. It sank its claws in me and has never let go. I’ve watched the film about a half-dozen times since then.

It is small, intimate, exquisite, painful story-telling about the largest of issues. It would never make it in today’s United States of Donald Trump, AK-14’s (or 47’s, or whatever), anti-maskers, or ark parks.

It whispers – it doesn’t shout. It agonizes – it doesn’t sneer. It lingers and ponders – it’s not a sound byte or a tweet. It thinks for itself – it doesn’t meme (is that even a verb?). It’s not reality TV – it’s reality. No need to fake it for the judges or a hidden camera or the voters at home – just tell the story in the unforgiving glare of truth.

I’m reminded of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s captivating film; Joan of Arc, which tells its story as a ballet of faces. You cannot look away.

Winter Light takes it further. Bergman uses his faces in excruciatingly long shots – but his characters also speak – directly and with no hesitation. Neither faces nor their voices blink. There is no escape from their story; not for you as the viewer, and certainly not for Gunnar Bjornstrand, the faith-challenged priest of the story or Max Von Sydow the faith-bereft farmer he attempts to counsel.

Faith is hard. It’s available to everyone, but not granted to everyone. It has value. It will save/redeem/inspire…but not everyone.

Mr. Bjornstrand’s performance is wondrous to me. I totally believe Bjornstrand’s discomfort with his cold/flu. I believe his discomfort comforting his parishioners. I believe his weariness and desperation. I believe his slipping belief. I believe his desire to believe. I watch the film waiting for his epiphany like a boy raised in a Southern Baptist Sunday School should. I wait for Godot as a child of the sixties should.

This is great storytelling and nothing gets blown up and there are no super-powers…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I Was a Teenage Whatever

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Movie night!

Inexplicably, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was not nominated for any Academy Awards in 1957…go figure. Nor was it made into a musical, though if it had, perhaps we wouldn’t have needed Young Frankenstein…no-o-o-o, strike that…we still would have needed “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and Frau Brucker.

Interestingly enough (or not), this flick had a companion film; I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I assume they were shown as a double-feature. Werewolf was no better or worse than Frankenstein, but Werewolf did feature a young Michael Landon (James Dean, I assume, not being available). I find myself speculating on the potential effect of Mr. Landon’s work in this film on his later TV work. Imagine the change in viewer demographics had the title been; “Little House of the Hairy”.

But tonight’s film is I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. It features a classic cast with Phyllis Coates (Tiger Girl of Saturday serial fame), Gary Conway (TV – “Land of the Giants”), and the always spot-on Whit Bissell (weasely, trouble-making boyfriend in The Day the Earth Stood Still and whiny scientist nerd in The Creature of the Black Lagoon).

One of the special delights in this film is a basement scientific laboratory (complete with alligators!) that rivals anything that Ed Wood ever put on the screen.

It also features the usually mild Mr. Bissell goin’ all postal on his fiance, Ms. Coates – a sudden and disturbing reminder that domestic violence has been with us for a long time.

To sum up; the flick is just…poor.

As my great friend; teacher and philosopher Paul Thomas frames the question when confronted with such jaw-dropping drivel; “What kind of mind…?”

The Invisible Dog and “The Book”

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It’s Movie Night and we’re headin’ south.

Janie and I used to go Hilton Head on vacation with some regularity. We didn’t have any money, but Janie’s great friends had a condo there and were kind enough to share it with us occasionally.

Hilton Head was great but we don’t play golf or tennis and the charm of driving 600 miles to stroll through outlet shops plumb evades me, so we would fill our days with day trips to surrounding areas. Beaufort found us hanging over the gate of The Big Chill house. We had Hunting Beach and its lighthouse totally to ourselves. Fripp Island was a new experience for us; a gated island…so much for southern hospitality.

And then there was Savannah. Our first visit to Savannah was one of these vacations from our vacation. We slipped over there one day and wandered around the squares and shops. We even took a horse-drawn carriage tour. We’re suckers for ‘em and tolerant of tour guide mendacity. We understand the guide’s not lyin’, he’s just tellin’ us a story and hopin’ for a tip. I do recall though, a memorable afternoon in Charleston on a horse-drawn carriage ghost tour when Janie corrected the newly-hired guide at every stop. He was mortified which, if you ponder it, might improve his effectiveness as a ghost tour guide.

What can I say? I’m married to a paranormal fact-checker.

On that first visit to Savannah, everyone all day kept referring to “the book”. We didn’t know what they were talking about. Finally, as is miraculous when traveling with me, a bookstore found us and there it was in the window, recently but firmly established on the New York Times Best-Seller’s List; MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. We bought it. I read it the next day; Janie the day after. We were completely charmed and our southern accents broadened at least 20%.

Then the movie came out and I was charmed all over again.

I’m not qualified to comment in depth on Clint Eastwood’s directorial abilities but I love this film.

I love the music. I loll in the the accents and cadences. The lushness and warmth pulls you through the story. AND I love Kevin Spacey’s performance. His stroll through the park with John Cusack at the beginning of the film and his pressing through the crowd at his party, simultaneously communicating with his voice, his eyes, and his hands with three different people… It was masterful.

How can you not love a film that features;

  • No hint of winter.
  • An invisible dog.
  • A line like; “Savin’ face in the most difficult circumstances, it’s the southern way.”
  • Houseflies on strings.
  • A line like “Billy was known to be a good time, but he was not yet a good time had by all-l-l-l-l-l-l.”
  • The Lady Chablis, aka Frank.
  • The songs of Johnny Mercer, especially “Fools Rush In”. “Oh, I see the danger there. If there’s a chance for me then I don’t care.” Can I get an Amen?

I love this film and I love Savannah.

Remind me one day to relate how Janie and I were in Savannah for the end of the world.

It’s true!

Oh, the world survived its predicted demise (in case you hadn’t noticed during the last presidential administration), but if it hadn’t, we were goin’ out with sweet sherry on our bedstead and chocolate on our pillows.

“Savin’ face in the most difficult circumstances…”

Old Yellers

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Julie Adams, always stunning in white

One night while watching an exquisite double feature on TCM (Creature From the Black Lagoon and Tarantula), I was able to put aside, for a moment, the fashion questions posed by these flicks (Julie Adams’ stunning white bathing suit – white always being the sensible choice for swimming in the Amazon – and Mara Corday’s inexplicable white gloves in a crusty desert town with dirt roads), and consider the respective screaming techniques of those actors. Ms. Corday’s pitiful squeak came out a poor second to Ms. Adams’ flawed, but lusty bellow. Ms. Adams’ technique was probably better suited for the stage than the camera. She paused, registered the menace (as implausible as it was), took a deep breath, and cut loose with a face-shattering, but perfectly coifed shriek. Not bad. I’d give it an eight (the bathing suit, brooking no discussion, gets a solid ten).

The female star/victims of these cinematic expressions of the 19th-century penny dreadfuls are often referred to as “scream queens”, but how often do we really evaluate their screaming abilities? We (or at least I) revere Barbara Steele, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Adrienne Barbeau, Judy Geeson, Evelyn Ankers, and so many others for their contributions to the horror genre. However, their contributions are usually visual; big eyes, big hair, big…? (I believe the traditional euphemism for this moment is “charms.”) The exception in this group would be Ms. Geeson. Her screaming in the sublimely crude It Happened in Nightmare Inn (imagine a Spanish Motel Hell) was spot on.

As fine a shrieker as Ms. Geeson is though, there’s one old yeller that’s truly the queen.

My first play on the Guignol stage at the University of Kentucky was “Playboy of the Western World”, directed by Charles Dickens (yes, that was his real name) in September, 1969. One evening in rehearsal Professor Dickens coached me in a reactive moment to let forth a “Fay Wray” scream. I had to confess my complete ignorance as to who Fay Wray might be. Charles muttered “dull…flat…literal undergraduate students…” and moved on to presumably more literate and direct-able cast members.

Judy Geeson, shrieking sublimely

However, I took this admonition to heart and later in the year I had a chance to see Ms. Wray’s piéce de resistance performance opposite the titular character on top of a New York skyscraper in King Kong. Keep in mind this was before Netflix, TCM, Youtube, cable television, Tivo, streaming, dvr’s, and vcr’s. I didn’t even own a television set! I had to be on TV Guide* alert to learn when a local channel (two channels – count ‘em – two!) would be showing the movie and then impose on some classmate (probably Chuck Pogue) to let me come to their place watch it. Watch it I did, and to this day for me, no one screams like Fay Wray. It’s spontaneous. It’s instant. It’s totally committed to the moment.

The next fall, I was cast in the Guignol’s production of “Billy Budd”. This jolly little play takes place on a British ship in the 1800’s. Why a college theatre department comprised of about a dozen active male actors and about five dozen active female actors would choose to do a play with a cast of 26 males and no females is beyond my pay grade, but schedule it they did, and the predictable result was that there were a few guys in the cast that had seriously limited experience on stage…like…none. There’s a big moment in the first act of the play in which a sailor falls (offstage) from the heights of the ship’s rigging to his death. His screams are the audience’s only connection to the tragedy of the moment. Unfortunately, this part was being played by an English major whose previous stage experience consisted of accepting his high school diploma. The director (Ray Smith) held auditions for offstage screamers to create the moment.

Guess who got the part…and killed it.

Fay Wray, it’s spontaneous, it’s instant

Fay Wray will always be the ultimate scream queen to this grateful geezer.

  •  TV Guide was an indispensable weekly digest-sized magazine that listed the program schedules of the two local channels and included jaunty puff-piece articles about the programs and actors. You had to pay for this. Ah…the good ol’ days when America was great. How did we survive?

How I Wish I’d Spent My Summer Vacation

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It’s Movie Night with Ingmar Bergman. Let the dancing begin!

I watched Ingmar Bergman’s film; Summer With Monica. The rest of you probably watched it in 1956 or 66 or 76 or 86 or… What can I say? I’m in a different time zone and moving with my usual glacier-like speed.

This is a lovely film!

The film mashes several little boy fantasies;

  • stealing a boat and sailing away,
  • the stolen boat belonging to an iconic “older dark man in the castle” – his father in this case – even better,
  • and escaping to summer islands with a willing female companion,

against the inevitable realization of what it means to be a rent-paying, child-rearing adult. The resulting sparks in this case are difficult and discouraging, but not unhopeful.

Whoa. Not unhopeful! This is Bergman, right?

I am ambivalent about Bergman. The craftsmanship is evident. The tricks with light and dark are mesmerizing. I am always impressed…and usually bored. The films are tedious. I don’t require a car crash every thirty seconds but I do appreciate an occasional pulse.

I know Mr. Bergman was famously influenced by the films of Carl Theodore Dreyer (whom I admire) and you can see this when his camera dwells on the faces of his actors, most especially in Winter Light. But in Dreyer’s films, Joan of Arc as an excellent example, while the actors’ faces are the main tool for telling the story, those faces don’t feel static or tedious. Bergman misses this distinction.

However, Summer With Monica never becomes stationary. Most of the scenes in this film leave you wanting more. How often can you say that about a Bergman film?

I really liked the film and will be thinking about it for a while yet.

Oh yeah, Harriet Andersson was pretty cute too!