Some of my friends find these to be cynical and unhopeful times. Imagine that.
People are voting against their interests.
Poor counties in my home state that receive hugely larger amounts of help from the federal government than the taxes they pay are solidly and repeatedly voting for candidates dedicated to drastically reducing that assistance.
My state has over 400,000 people who now have medical insurance because of the Affordable Care Act and yet they elected a governor and voted for a presidential candidate who campaigned clearly and openly on a promise to put an end to their newly acquired insurance.
These things don’t affect me personally except for the accelerating diminishing of my hair as I scratch my head in wonderment.
Intelligence increasingly is being scorned as undesirable. Legislators are using the phrase “I’m not a scientist” to refuse to listen to scientists…with pride for their cleverness.
Extreme defensive shifts are damaging major league baseball. That one’s only a concern of mine. My friends are not really bothered by this.
These are disturbing signs. I join my friends in worrying about where this all might be heading.
But I don’t think it’s the end of times.
They’re just different times.
Tonight’s flick is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. In it, an aged professor leans out his nocturnal window to receive professions of affection from three young people as they leave him to live their lives in the future. He then lies down to dream of his parents waving their affection for him as they live their lives in the past. He is blissfully nestled in these generational boundaries.
I think that’s relevant…and soothing.
They’re just different times. I’m OK wit’ dat.
BUT I think it would be wise to swallow our egos and listen to scientists and other smart people…and our dogs – we should always listen to our dogs. Our dogs are not all-knowing and all-wise, but all their priorities are spot on.
AND…the batters have got to swallow their egos and hit the ball the opposite way!
Political junkie that I usually am, I could lock-in on this week’s political convention (red shirts, plastic cowboy hats, interminable plagiarism discussion loops, and conventioneers I suspect have spent a bit more time at the hotel bar than is advisable before strutting before cameras announcing numbers to millions of viewers – whoop!), or I could skip along the cultural high road with director Riccardo Freda’s giallo classic, The Iguana With the Tongue of Fire.
Pass up a title like that? I think not.
I can think of two movies with “iguana” in their titles. What are those odds? The other film is Night of the Iguana based on a story by Tennessee Williams. You may be asking (as I did); “What’s so special about iguanas?” That led me to recall a story by British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard. Mr. Ballard is best known for his novel; EMPIRE OF THE SUN, upon which the award-winning film was based. But in his novel; THE DROWNED WORLD, the Earth’s protective ionosphere has been decimated by solar flares and the planet has devolved into a ubiquitous, dank, fetid, swamp. The planet’s cities have decayed. Many buildings now harbor amphibian creatures living in the darkness of the buildings’ long missing windows and doors. For Ballard, these creatures are clearly representative of atavistic impulses and desires that lurk within us all waiting to be triggered and released by drastic changes in the conditions that restrain them. I think that may also true for both of our “iguana” flicks.
There is, of course, a chasm of difference in performance quality between Night of the Iguana (Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr) and The Iguana With the Tongue of Fire (Luigi Pistilli, Dagmar Lassander, and Anton Diffring), but not in one performance.
I have not seen many performances by Valentina Cortese, but I’m impressed by what I’ve seen. Her Oscar-nominated performance in Francois Truffault’s Day for Night is a thing of wonder. In The Iguana With the Tongue of Fire (made two years before), Ms. Cortese has a heart-wrenching scene that transcends the tawdriness of the film.
She says of her husband;
“His Excellency has returned to Switzerland and I am alone…as always. How do you expect me to say it? It’s the truth. Behind this façade you are looking at there is the most terrible…unbelievable…emptiness…between me and my children, between me and my………husband.”
The camera never leaves her face. It would be criminal to do so. Score one for director Freda.
Oh yes, this was a much better choice than those ersatz cowboy hats. Whoop indeed!
Victory Pictures Studio could always be counted on to deliver a quality product (well no, they couldn’t) and AMATEUR CROOK (1938) proves it (well…No! It doesn’t).
AMATEUR CROOK was worthy enough in someone’s eyes to be released under two other titles; JEWEL THIEF, and CROOKED BUT DUMB. If I read CROOKED BUT DUMB on a theater’s marquee, I’d give it a try.
I can’t truthfully say I recommend viewing many of the films I cite. A goodly number of them are awful in spite of the affection I may feel for them. But if you stumble across AMATEUR CROOK, an hour of your time will be rewarded with a few tawdry wonders.
A diamond as big as a chicken egg is pawned by a wealthy man who has clearly never required the services of a pawnbroker previously. He does this for no discernible reason except to provide a “McGuffin” for us to follow for sixty minutes.
Former Olympian Herman Brix (before he morphed into Bruce Bennett) plays a starving artist. He gives one of his classic deer-in-the-headlights performances. This was during his deer-in-the-headlights period which lasted for much of his career.
Mr. Brix participates in the worst screen fistfight I’ve ever witnessed. Worst. Fistfight. Ever.
Mr. Brix’s character in one scene improvises instantly a most brilliant plan for escaping the police. He exclaims; “I’ve got it! Let’s go out the back way!!”
Then, later in the film, he repeats the same plan. Hey, if it ain’t broke…
And yes, it works both times. I can only assume police work has improved greatly since 1938.
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.
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’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).
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.
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.
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.
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…?”
June's Boy 