On a recent November trip to Amsterdam with my wife, we had no set agenda other than pure pleasure – to soak in the culture, see the city sights and various art museums, tour the canals and neighborhoods, sample the great beers, and occasionally retreat from the constant onslaught of bicycles into some cosy cafe or coffeeshop. (A word of warning to first time visitors to Amsterdam: bicyclists have the right of way over pedestrians and their own designated lanes everywhere. If you don’t look carefully both ways before stepping across a bike lane, you could get creamed by someone going 30 miles an hour or more. The trams (streetcars) can be just as deadly if you aren’t paying close attention to the street traffic.)     

Being a lifelong cinephile, I also wanted to check out the cinema culture in Amsterdam because I had always heard the city had a vibrant movie scene like Paris and London with grand movie palaces, numerous art house cinemas, independent single screen hole in the walls, and offbeat film clubs in shared performing arts venues with live music and theatre. All of which turned out to be true though I was surprised at how many screens were playing the same films. For instance, you could catch Francois Ozon’s dark, witty comedy IN THE HOUSE (Dans la mason) or Andrew Dominik’s morose, lowlife gangster drama KILLING THEM SOFTLY with Brad Pitt at one of the many Pathe cineplexes or at a much smaller indie space like the Kriterion (which is run by university students). There wasn’t much in the way of retrospective or classic film programming other than a new print of John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in a limited run.

Even the spectacular Tuschinski Cinema (built in 1921 and a fusion of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and other architectural influences) is part of the Pathe chain and host to the most contemporary film releases. We tried to see SKYFALL, the new James Bond adventure, in that magnificent setting but it was sold out. The theatre used to hold 1200 seats and had a wide stage for live orchestras and performers (Edith Piaf, Fats Domino and Judy Garland are among some of the legends who have performed there) but after its renovation in 2002, it hosts 740 seats including a few private boxes and love seats. For more info on the Tuschinski, visit http://www.amsterdam.info/cinema/tuschinski/

Then I discovered the Eye Film Institute located on the Amsterdam harbor at ILpromenade 1, across the water from Amsterdam’s Central Station (the train-tram connection). This dazzling structure is relatively new. It opened in the spring of 2012 and is the present home of Amsterdam’s Film Museum and archive which was previously located in an imposing Pavillion (circa 1880) in Vondelpark (the structure is now sadly vacant).

The new space houses a trendy bar/cafe, exhibition spaces, four movie screens, a gift shop and classrooms for educational programs. Plus an interactive digital experience on the basement level where you can sample film clips arranged by theme. The new space houses a trendy bar/cafe, exhibition spaces, four movie screens, a gift shop and classrooms for educational programs. Plus an interactive digital experience on the basement level where you can sample film clips arranged by theme. You enter a large, darkened space illuminated only by the surrounding strobe-like digital wall of looped scenes from movies (if you suffer from vertigo or have an internal trigger for epilepsy, this room might not be for you).

There are several waist level selection stations situated in the space with touch pad screen menus, each one representing a specific topic or genre. Among the categories are Magic, Color, Conflict, Explorations, Movie Stars, Slapstick and The Netherlands (Dutch filmmakers) with a selection of eight or more film clips available on each monitor. Say, for example, you want to sample the offerings under Conflict and choose a title like HIGH NOON. Suddenly before you, a section of the digital wall is instantly reconfigured to display your clip at a much larger screen size while an embedded speaker in the ceiling projects the audio so clearly and precisely that it’s as if you are encased in a sound bubble. If you step out of your cone-like space, the sound quickly diminishes the further you move away. It’s quite a feat of audio engineering but was absolutely essential for this sort of sci-fi installation. Otherwise, you’d have total cacophony with visitors playing different film clips all at the same time.

Outside the interactive room are six or seven yellow cinema pods which can hold up to three people each inside. Each pod has a widescreen monitor and controls which allow you to access hundreds of films from Eye’s vast collection – everything from avant-garde shorts, newsreels, travelogues, animated films and silent masterpieces with a heavy emphasis, of course, on Dutch filmmakers to feature films like Roger Vadim’s …And God Created Woman, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (I think Kubrick would have heartily approved of the Eye space and its sheer accessibility, despite the fact that his widescreen futuristic epic is served up here in a much more intimate, reduced screen ratio by the archival browser.)

Best of all, there is no admission to visit Eye or use a pod (only the theaters require tickets) and you don’t need to book a pod in advance though this will surely change in the future; they are becoming far too popular. Currently the pods are on a first come, first serve basis. Nor could I discern any time limits for usage so I happily surfed and explored the archive for about 2 hours. I returned with Beth the second day (we arrived when Eye opened at 10 am) for a three hour plus pod adventure.

On day one, I watched the 1936 animation short Ether Symphony which was a promotional film for Philips Radio that George Pal produced while working in the Netherlands. I followed that with Body and Soul (1966), a quirky little black comedy by Dutch filmmaker Rene Daalder about a young weightlifter whose is experiencing a major disconnect between his mind and his body. There is a decadent party sequence in the last half that captures some of the world weary cynicism/boredom of jet set culture glimpsed in both La Dolce Vita and John Schlesinger’s Darling. Daalder relocated to Hollywood in the seventies and made the landmark cult film Massacre at Central High (1976) and the lesser known sci-fi musical Population:1 (1986) starring Tomata du Plenty (from the L.A. punk band The Screamers). You can actually view Body and Soul and several other Daalder’s films at his official web site – http://projects.renedaalder.com

On day two, Beth and I started with Alice’s Spooky Adventure (1924), directed and produced by Walt Disney. It was one of his early silent shorts featuring child actress Virginia Davis and was predominantly live-action with some animated sequences. The central premise has tomboy Alice going to retrieve a baseball which has landed inside a deserted mansion that the other boys are afraid to enter. Inside a chunk of the rotting ceiling falls on her head, knocks her out and Alice enters a dream world inhabited by a sympatico cat (a Felix the Cat variation) and ghosts and supernatural beings who pursue her. After this we sampled Een Film voor Lucebert on the pod menu by renowned Amsterdam filmmaker Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001). This is a playful, colorful free-form portrait of the artist/poet Lucebert who was part of the COBRA movement (1948-1951) that came out of the avant-garde art scene in Europe (embracing artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam). I’m not sure if this was an excerpt from van der Keuken’s later 51 minute documentary Lucebert: Time and Farewell (1994) but it works fine as an introduction to his work.

We followed this with two silent travelogue shorts – one from the 1920s (La Perle de la Mediterranee: Barcelona) and the other, a portrait of an Italian harbor town from 1914 entitled Rapallo (in the province of Genoa). Both were wonderful time travel machines back to two picturesque, underpopulated European locales before automobiles and progress changed the landscape. We ended our day at Eye with a film by Bert Haanstra – Dokter Pulder zaait palavers (1975, aka Doctor Pulder Sows Poppies). Haanstra is recognized as one of the Netherlands’ most revered filmmakers and an internationally acclaimed documentarian, famous for Glass (a 1958 short which won an Oscar), Alleman (1963 aka The Human Dutch) and Bij de bees ten af (1972 aka Ape and Super-Ape). He didn’t make that many theatrical features but Fanfare, a 1959 comedy, is one of his most popular.

Doctor Pulder Sows Poppies, on the other hand, is a psychological drama with a black comedy streak and some oddball slapstick (including a sequence where an overflowing bathtub transforms a posh hotel dining room into a disaster area). The movie primarily focuses on the title doctor (Kees Brusse) who is visited by Hans (Ton Lensink), a former medical colleague who is now secretly addicted to morphine. When Hans steals Dr. Pulder’s drug supply and flees, the narrative tracks the ensuing consequences while charting the good doctor’s puzzled but dogged determination to uncover Hans’ hidden past. A slowly paced character study, Dokter Pulder zaait palavers manages to hold the interest with Brusse’s sympathetic performance, an evocative wintry setting in a small coastal village and the odd detail (the doctor cuts his finger while preparing a hors d’oeuvre plate and the blood drips all over the sliced cheese – bon appetit!).

For more information on the Eye Film Institute, visit http://www.eyefilm.nl/en

Rififi in Tokyo poster

RIFIFI, Jules Dassin’s quintessential 1955 noir/heist thriller, had quite an impact on the European crime movie genre in its day though most of its imitators or similarly inspired creations rarely found distribution in the U.S. except as English-dubbed second features in limited runs in a few major cities like New York. And I have yet to read of any major film critics or movie buffs like Quentin Tarantino championing any of the Rififi knockoffs. But for anyone with a soft spot for heist films, you might enjoy sampling some of these lesser efforts, particularly RIFIFI IN TOKYO (1963).     

Based on a crime novel by Auguste Le Breton, who penned The Sicilian Clan (made into a 1969 movie with Jean Gabin and Alain Delon) and contributed dialogue to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956), the screenplay for RIFIFI IN TOKYO was the work of Jose Giovanni (Le Trou, Le Deuxieme Souffle), Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud (Inspector Maigret) and Jacques Deray. Like most heist thrillers, the movie culminates in an intricately planned robbery – the theft of a priceless diamond from the Bank of Tokyo vault. And like any noir worth its salt, things go badly with double-crosses, murders, entrapment and suicide. It all begins with the arrival of Van Hekken (Charles Vanel), an international jewel thief who plots the heist with the assistance of his right hand man, Danny Riquet (Eric Okada). When a rival gang of Japanese yakuza assassinate Riquet, Van Hekken enlists the aid of a former army buddy Carl Mersen (Karl Boehm) and Merigne (Michel Vitold), an electronics expert who is accompanied by his bored, sexy wife Francoise (Barbara Lass). There is an immediate attraction between Carl and Francoise which creates tension within the group and is complicated by Carl’s former relationship with Asami (Keiko Kishi), who may or may not be an informer for Japanese gangster kingpin Kan Ishii (Oda Masao).

The Bank of Tokyo heist sequence in Rififi in Tokyo (1963)

Originally released and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the U.S. in 1963, RIFIFI IN TOKYO has been out of circulation for years and is practically unknown today. At the time, the studio treated the film as a B-movie/second feature on double bills which were targeted toward undiscriminating action audiences. Yet the film is surprisingly stylish and subtle and has a formal beauty that you don’t ordinarily expect from an obscure European programmer. For one thing, Deray’s melodrama is more focused on the uneasy relationships between the members of Van Hekken’s gang than the planning and execution of the climatic jewel robbery. The tension is generated by who will betray who, who will crack under pressure, who will fall victim to a rival gang or cause their own downfall. This doesn’t mean there is an absence of action. There are chases, beatings, shootings, knifings and, in one case, a key figure is crushed to death by a car – twice (It might lack the shock factor of the Jack Weston-car crushing in 1967′s Wait Until Dark but the staging of it is masterful and hard to forget).

Karl Boehm, Barbara Lass in Rififi in Tokyo (1963)

Since the film is set in Tokyo in the early sixties, you expect a leap forward in terms of technology from the painstaking heist maneuvers on display in the original Rififi…and you get it with the Bank of Tokyo’s multiple surveillance monitors, 24-hour security guards, time release vault doors, and various electronics and hardware carried by the thieves to hack the system. All of it is downplayed however with little fanfare and the thrill of the heist is less important to Deray than an all-pervasive sense of doom and futility that reaches a crescendo in the robbery’s wake and qualifies this as a true noir.

Charles Vanel (left), Michel Vitold, Karl Boehm in Rififi in Tokyo

There are flaws of course. Some intriguing characters and situations are introduced and never developed. For example, we get a brief glimpse of Asami at home with her parents and her brother (who is also her partner in crime). With her job as a nightclub hostess/escort, Asami appears to be the family’s sole provider but the parents’ disdain for her and her profession (with its mob connections) are obvious in the way they ignore her gift of a television set, refusing to even turn it on. No further attempt is made though to explore the generational, cultural and widening moral gulf between Asami and her parents. It’s not that kind of movie but makes me wonder what would have been the result if Yasujiro Ozu had directed a crime drama. Much more distracting is the erratic and unconventional editing which is fascinating at times with its jump-cuts and butcher shop sound edits but also occasionally disorienting and destructive to building suspense in the final third of RIFIFI IN TOKYO when a gang war erupts as Van Hekken and his team infiltrate the bank.

Still, the biggest challenge of the film is the poorly translated subtitles (on the DVD version available from ETC, more info below). Instead of the usual hard-to-read white subtitles for black and white movies, these are highlighted nicely in yellow but – oy vey! – they often are barely coherent. Luckily, you can comprehend most of the plot and its unraveling without too much effort but the subtitles add an unintentional comic element and some translations are delightfully daffy. Often sentences have the wrong pronoun or are missing one or more words or are awkwardly structured such as:
“Damn you. Get yourself to another.”
“I should have thought also known.”
“How long have you ready?”
“Think there is a war and is a general?”
“Does your laboratory air-conditioning?”
“Do THEY not say good afternoon?” (a woman addressing her husband as he enters the room without speaking)

French director Jacques Deray

Despite these minor quibbles, the movie will appeal to film buffs who have read this far and the on-location setting alone with its eclectic mix of European and Japanese actors provides an exotic allure and fascination. Consider, for instance, the talent behind the camera and in front of it. RIFIFI IN TOKYO is directed by Jacques Deray, the underrated French filmmaker of numerous Alain Delon crime vehicles such as The Swimming Pool (1969), Borsalino (1970) and Flic Story (1975). He also directed a personal favorite of mine, The Outside Man (1972), a quirky, engaging thriller with a rather astonishing cast (Ann-Margret, Roy Scheider, Angie Dickinson, Jackie Earle Haley, Umberto Orsini, Michel Constantin, Talia Shire, Ben Piazza, Alex Rocco) about a hired assassin (Jean-Louis Trintignant) on the run from mobsters and cops in Los Angeles after completing a successful hit; it is currently available on DVD from the Warner Archives Collection. RIFIFI IN TOKYO was only Deray’s second feature and the crisp black and white cinematography is courtesy of the little known Tadashi Aramaki, who only has one other credit listed on IMDB. The music score is by the prolific Georges Delerue who composed music for Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’immortelle, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Magnet of Doom and 13 more features, shorts, TV movies and documentaries the same year! As for the unpredictable and often abrupt tonal changes in the editing, Albert Jurgenson claims that credit and has been honored numerous times in his career, receiving Cesar awards for Best Editing on Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977) and Claude Miller’s Garde a cue (1981).

Karl Boehm in Rififi in Tokyo

Known in his native Germany as Karlheinz Bohm but in English language films as Karl Boehm, the star of RIFIFI IN TOKYO will be familiar to cinephiles as the deeply disturbed, homicidal protagonist of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Like Anthony Perkins in Psycho the same year, Boehm will be forever linked in many filmgoers’ minds as that sick, twisted photographer who impaled women with a sharpened tripod. But he’s playing the hero here even though he hardly projects the image of a man of action. His cerebral and brooding presence doesn’t quite fit his character which is that of a man driven to avenge a friend’s death. Still, it’s an offbeat casting choice when you consider his career as a whole. Boehm was quite the matinee idol in his younger days, scoring a huge popular success opposite Romy Schneider in Sissi (1955) and its sequels, but that phase was over by the time he made Peeping Tom. Unlike Powell, Boehm’s career wasn’t hurt by appearing in such a scandalous, shocking film for its time and in its wake, he alternated between big Hollywood epics like The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (both 1962), minor genre efforts like RIFIFI IN TOKYO and TV work. It wasn’t until his later career that he found his groove as a member of R.W. Fassbinder’s repertory, making strong impressions in such films as Martha (1974), Effi Briest (1974) and Fox and His Friends (1975). Martha, in particular, finds Boehm back in full-force creepy mode as a cruel, sadistic engineer who seems intent on dominating and humiliating his anxiety-ridden wife.

Karl Boehm, Barbara Lass in RIFIFI IN TOKYO

If Boehm comes across as a cipher in RIFIFI IN TOKYO, Polish actress Barbara Lass (she changed her last name from Kwiatkowska for obvious reasons) is infinitely more animated and appealing as the main love interest (love that umbrella cha-cha dance). Lass was formerly married to director Roman Polanski and soon divorced him after she traveled to Tokyo to make this Deray heist melodrama. She fell in love with Boehm during the filming (she had just ended an affair with director Costa-Gavras) and they would subsequently marry in 1963. Unfortunately, their obvious real-life chemistry is sadly lacking in their scenes together which includes a would-be torrid seduction scene (the couple would later divorce in 1980). Overall, Lass had an impressive if brief career, going from Polish cinema (most of her early work is unavailable for viewing) to Italian horror (Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory, 1961) to art house fare (Fassbinder’s Effi Briest, Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Lillenthal’s Das Schweigen des Dichters). Lass is certainly at the height of her beauty here and makes the most of her limited screen time as a lovely but callow jet-setter.

Charles Vanel in Rififi in Tokyo

It is actually Charles Vanel as the diamond heist mastermind who is the real heart and soul of RIFIFI IN TOKYO, bringing a touch of world-weariness and tragic grandeur to his aging criminal. He wants to retire after one last score which is wishful thinking in a genre famous for such cliches. Still, Vanel, like his younger peer Jean Gabin in similar crime films, represents the last of his breed, a gentleman thief trying to retain a sense of honor (an ironic stance no doubt) in an increasingly amoral society. His rock solid presence in the film is also a homage to the golden age of French cinema where Vanel began in silent films at the age of sixteen. His early sound era triumphs include Raymond Bernard’s anti-war epic Wooden Crosses (1932) as well as that same director’s superb screen adaptation of Les Miserables (1934) in which Vanel made an ideal Inspector Javert. Most cinephiles, however, know Vanel from his collaborations with Georges-Henri Clouzot on The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955). In his later years as a character actor, he brought a touch of class and professionalism to a number of genre films, especially crime thrillers like Symphony for a Massacre (1963), Magnet of Doom (1963) and Gang War in Naples (1972).

Barbara Lass (left), Karl Boehm, Keiko Kishi in Rififi in Tokyo

Rounding out the key supporting cast of RIFIFI IN TOKYO are Keiko Kishi, Michel Vitold, and Eiji Okada (or is it?), actors who might not be familiar to you at first glance but each has a body of work behind them that includes box-office successes and internationally acclaimed art house fare. Kishi is a celebrated Japanese actress who garnered praise for such early career efforts as Yoshitaro Nomura’s Bomeiki (1955), Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring (1956) and Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964). Her later work includes Hideo Gosha’s Hunter in the Dark (1979), Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters (1983) and Yoji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai (2002), winner of 13 Awards of the Japanese Academy (the equivalent of the Oscar) and a Best Foreign Language Film nominee in the 2004 Oscar race.

Michel Vitold in Rififi in Tokyo

Vitold has mostly specialized in supporting roles, easily moving back and forth between feature films and TV work throughout his career. Some of his more recognizable work includes Georges Franju’s Judex (1963) and Thomas the Impostor (1965), Costa-Gavras’ The Confession (1970) and Fabio Carpi’s Basileus Quartet (1983), which shares some similarities to the more recent indie drama, A Late Quartet (2012) with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Christopher Walken.

This is Eric Okada, not Eiji Okada, in Rififi in Tokyo

Despite IMBD’s credits for RIFIFI IN TOKYO and other online film sources, I do not think the actor playing the ill-fated Riquet is Eiji Okada who is billed in the on-screen credits as Eric Okada. Unless the actor is a total chameleon who can completely change his body shape and physical features, I suspect that the man cast as Riquet is actually Taibi “Erick” Okada (older brother of actor Masumi Okada) who also goes by the name E.H. Eric. But if you see RIFIFI IN TOKYO, I think you’ll agree that the tall, gaunt Eurasian actor with the protruding ears looks nothing like the actor who appeared opposite Marlon Brando the same year in The Ugly American. The real Eiji Okada first attracted world wide attention as the married architect involved with a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and followed it with the haunting allegory, Woman in the Dunes (1964), in which he plays an entomologist lured into an inescapable sand pit with a stranger. Samurai action fans, on the other hand, know him for such superior genre entries as Samurai Spy (1965), Zatoichi’s Conspiracy (1973), Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons (1973) and Lady Snowblood (1973).

The real Eiji Okada in Hiroshima, mon amour

RIFIFI IN TOKYO was one of the first caper films to capitalize on Rififi‘s success and its title but there were other imitations including Giovanni Korporaal’s Rififi in Amsterdam (1962), Jess Franco’s Rififi en la Ciudad (1963), and Rififi in Panama aka The Upper Hand (1965) with Jean Gabin, George Raft, Gert Frobe and Nadja Tiller. As a die hard heist fan, I would like to seek out the rest of these now-obscure genre efforts but for anyone interested in seeing RIFIFI IN TOKYO, European Trash Cinema offers a surprisingly sharp DVD transfer with yellow English subtitles (as I cautiously noted above).

According to one reviewer on the internet, “Du Rififi a Tokyo was recently released on DVD in France and can be ordered from http://www.amazon.co.fr.”; Be aware, however, that this version is in French with no subtitle options.

Charles Vanel, Karl Boehm in Rififi in Tokyo

RIFIFI IN TOKYO links:

http://hollywoodjapanfile.blogspot.com/2011/02/rififi-in-tokyo-1963.html

http://retrografix.blogspot.com/2012/02/rififi-tokyo-1963.html

http://kebekmac.blogspot.com/2012/02/deray-1963-rififi-tokyo.html

Barbara Lass, Karl Boehm in Rififi in Tokyo

Photography by Wouter Spitters

Prior to traveling to Brussels, Belgium this past November, I put some serious research time into identifying the key sights and activities I wanted to see and do while visiting. Apart from the essentials like a walk through “The Grand Place” and a visit to the Magritte Museum, there are plenty of offbeat detours like the incredibly cluttered but charming Musee de Jouet (a vast collection of toys from the past) and the Musee des Instruments de Musique, housed in a former 1899 department store in the art nouveau style. If you are a fan of Belgium beers, you will be in heaven here (visit A La Morte Subite and Delirium Tremens Cafe for starters) and your choices of various cuisines will be endless though you may be tempted to try the local specialty – mussels & frites – at least once unless you have an aversion to shellfish and french fries. And if you a film lover, particularly one interested in repertory programming, you will be amazed at what you find for Brussels has a thriving movie culture with even more “classic cinema” viewing options than nearby Amsterdam (less than 3 hours by train), another mecca for cinephiles which we visited a few days before.    

Foremost among the screening venues – and the one we visited three times during our brief stay – is the CINEMATEK (aka Musee de Cinema) which is located at rue Baron Horta 9 and is accessible by a side street entrance or through the main lobby of the Bozar, Brussels’ Center for Fine Arts (pictured above), during normal operating hours. Recently renovated and redesigned by architects Robbrecht and Daem, this archive, which holds one of the largest and richest film collections in the world, features a permanent exhibition space, two screening rooms (the Plateau and the Ledoux) equipped to project most common formats, a reading area stocked with film periodicals, terminals to watch films on demand and more. I was overwhelmed by the width and breath of the programming and the ambitious daily calendar of screening events. It is not uncommon to have five to seven film showings a day at the Cinematek with up to 25 or more thematic or special exhibitions scheduled monthly.

To give you an idea of the daily offerings, consider this past line-up for November 7 (2012): a program of newsreels and animation entitled “Astronauts, Robots and Aliens,” George Lacombe’s 1941 mystery thriller Le Dernier Des Six (with a screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot), Jane Campion’s 1990 film biography of New Zealand novelist Janet Frame – An Angel at My Table, Cecil B. DeMille’s silent melodrama The Cheat (1915) with a piano score performed live, Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle (1955), Les Mille et Une Mains (A Thousand and One Hands, 1972) by Morocco-based filmmaker Souheil Ben-Barka, and Olivier Assayas’ Une Nouvelle Vie (A New Life, 1993). Quite a feast for one day of programming but with two screening rooms and overlapping run times you can’t see everything and most of the selections are not repeated.

Thematic programming is interwoven throughout the schedule, sometimes as a one time spotlight (director Michel Ciment and film critic Hubert Niogret introduced a personal favorite, Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-Bi) but more often as a series slotted for specific days and times throughout the month and beyond. A perfect example of some recent retrospectives that often ran parallel to each other are Le Cinema Francais Sous L’Occupation (French films made under Germany rule in WWII including Le Corbeau, Remorques and Children of Paradise), Estonian Cinema (a much needed survey course of this small republic’s film culture that included such intriguing titles as Bear Hunting in Parnumaal and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel); a series of movies set in train stations with Vittorio De Sica’s Stazione Termini (1953), released in the U.S. in a truncated version entitled Indiscretion of an American Wife, and Samy Szlingerbaum’s Brussels Transit (1980) among the fare; a program dedicated to the French film magazine Positif which presented key works championed by the periodical including Elia Kazan’s much maligned The Arrangement (1969); Jerzy Skolimowski’s Moonlighting (1982), Nagisa Oshima’s The Ceremony (1971) and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), and African-American Hollywood, a sprawling historic retrospective from the silent era (Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1903) to Sidney Meyer’s The Quiet One (1948) to Jamie Foxx in Ray (2004) with a sidebar tribute to Sidney Poitier, showcasing such seldom seen films as the Western, Duel at Diablo (1966), and A Warm December (1973), a romance directed by and starring Poitier.

Juliette Duret, Cinematek’s coordinator and film curator, and her staff deserve the highest praise for assembling such a stimulating and wildly diverse cinematic smorgasbord, week after week, month after month. If I lived in Brussels, I would probably be camped out here in my spare time. And they have a sister arm – the Flagey Cinematek – in another neighborhood of Brussels, Place Flagey (which I didn’t have time to visit) but their programming is also pure crack for cinephiles. Current offerings have included a tribute to directors Roman Polanski, John Huston, and Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps) and such classic favorites as King Kong, Splendor in the Grass, The Barefoot Contessa and Brief Encounter. Check it out here – http://www.flagey.be/en/program/genre/cinema.

During our whirlwind three-day visit to Brussels, we originally planned to visit the Cinematek on the afternoon of the second day for a screening of EROTIKON (1920), starring Tora Teje and Lars Hanson, directed by Greta Garbo’s muse and favorite director Mauritz Stiller and featuring a live score. But we got sidetracked by the interactive displays, photographs, maps, drawings and artifacts at the BELvue museum, which presents a comprehensive and fascinating history of Brussels beginning with 1830, the year Belgium became an independent state in Europe. We were too late to make the EROTIKON screening but made plans to see the Cinematek’s final film of the evening after dinner – CLEOPATRA JONES (1973).

One of several films being offered in a two-month overview of Blaxploitation cinema, this rowdy, low-down action drama features statuesque 6′ 2″ former model Tamara Dobson as the title heroine, an undercover CIA narcotics agent intent on busting a Los Angeles drug smuggling gang lead by a vicious bull-dyke named “Mommy.” As played by Shelley Winters, the character is a wild cartoon caricature of evil excess and it makes her performance as Ma Barker in Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama look demure in comparison. The somewhat splicey and worn 35mm print (all of the films we saw were projected on film) was still serviceable and the film’s vibrant color palette had not faded. The audience seemed to enjoy the broadly played, camp nature of the film (which inspired the 1975 sequel, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold) and it was fun to see some of the supporting cast try to steal scenes from Ms. Winters, especially Antonio Fargas as Doodlebug Simkins, a manic, jive-talkin’, flamboyantly dressed business rival who delivers some of the funniest dialogue in the film.

Other standouts are Bill McKinney (the rapist from Deliverance) as a corrupt, racist cop and Bernie Casey as a formidable anti-drug activist from the hood and sometimes lover of CJ. Tamara Dobson looks gorgeous in a non-stop parade of implausible but hilariously outré outfits and is better at posing than acting plus her martial arts action scenes are about as convincing as the clumsy kick boxing footwork of Dolemite, Rudy Ray Moore’s alter ego. Still, Dobson has undeniable screen charisma and it’s a shame she is no longer with us (she died at the early age of 59 in 2006 of complications of pneumonia and multiple sclerosis). By the way, CLEOPATRA JONES was co-written by actor/producer Max Julien, the cult star of The Mack (1973), and the film was directed with crude, vigorous style by character actor Jack Starrett, who is a familiar face in biker flicks (Hell’s Angels on Wheels, The Born Losers, Nam’s Angels) and an exploitation legend himself (he helmed Race With the Devil, the Jim Brown crime drama Slaughter, and other drive-in classics.)

On the following day, we returned to the Cinematek for an afternoon program organized for family viewing – “Astronauts, Robots and Aliens,” which opened with the 1963 newsreel John Glenn Orbits the Earth and was followed by five animated shorts, two of them Russian, the other three U.S. releases. Programming films for children and their parents is one of the regular on-going events here and it was fun to experience this Sunday afternoon community gathering. I was particularly surprised at how quiet and attentive most of the small children were while watching the John Glenn newsreel since it was in black and white with voiceover narration and typical of the officious reporting style of most films produced by the United States Information Service. Perhaps part of their interest was due to Glenn’s space suit and helmet (which looks strangely archaic now and closer to something from a fifties sci-fi film) and the odd spectacle of the tiny space capsule he was literally strapped into, allowing him little freedom of movement.

As for the space age cartoons, the two shorts from Russia were new discoveries for me and quite innovative for their era beginning with JAAK JA ROBOT (1965) by Estonian animator Heino Pars and concluding with KHELMARJVE OSTATIS TAVGADASAVALI (Adventures of Samodelkin, 1957) by Republic of Georgia animator Vakhtang Bakhtadze. The three U.S. cartoons featured were MARTIAN RECIPE (1965), a late period Terrytoon short from Paul Terry (of Heckle and Jeckle and Deputy Dawg fame), THE HASTY HARE (1952), the Chuck Jones/Warner Bros. classic in which Bugs Bunny outwits an invader from Mars and his dog-soldier K-9, and THE CAT THAT HATED PEOPLE (1948), a Tex Avery cartoon in which the title character wants to escape the human race and relocates to the Moon where his reception is less than idyllic.

Later than evening, Beth and I returned to the Cinematek for our final film there – THE TAKE (1974), another entry in the Blaxploitation series. This relatively obscure crime drama doesn’t really bear any of the expected cliches, attitudes and distinctive fashion sense of this once popular genre in seventies cinema. Instead, it is an unheralded and underrated film noir that turns a cynical eye toward law enforcement where almost everyone is tainted by corruption to some degree, making them no better than the criminals they pursue. Directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, a British filmmaker better known for such horror titles as The Black Torment and Corruption, THE TAKE could have benefitted from tighter pacing and more dynamic action sequences but the film works well as a gritty character study thanks to a more than capable cast. Billy Dee Williams is perfectly cast as Sneed, a police lieutenant who is playing both sides of the law by taking brides from criminals in exchange for busting their business rivals, using the money to finance his own scams and advancing his career in the police force. Despite his mercenary and deceptive nature, you root for Sneed anyway because he works that lone wolf coolness factor (Jim Brown has it too) yet still has some decency left in him.

In addition to Williams, THE TAKE is also distinguished by its non-urban setting – a small town in sunbaked New Mexico (it was filmed on locations around Santa Fe and Albuquerque) – and a first rate supporting cast that includes Eddie Albert as Sneed’s ineffective, dissatisfied superior, Albert Salmi as Sneed’s crooked partner, a very young A. Martinez as a rising and corruptible cop on the force, the always creepy John Davis Chandler as an ill-fated gangster in an opening shootout, and Frankie Avalon in a surprising dramatic turn (and completely convincing) as a two-hit hood and mob stool pigeon. The real acting honors though go to Vic Morrow as Manso, an ailing but still intimidating crime lord who gets his cronies to do his dirty deeds while taking a sadistic pleasure in the orchestration and viewing of them. Morrow, who has been typecast as villains too many times in his career for obvious reasons, avoids the histrionics of previous performances and goes for something quieter, devious and more psychologically complex than the sort of thugs he played in Blackboard Jungle and King Creole. As the object of Williams’ shakedown, he conveys more danger and menace in his gravelly voice and malevolent smile than a pack of gun-toting hit men. Granted, THE TAKE is no masterpiece but for a movie often lumped into the Blaxploitation category, the focus is on morality, not race, and provides both Morrow and Williams with intriguing characters who have embraced the dark side of life in varying degrees. The 35mm print of THE TAKE shown at Cinematek, despite a few nicks and scratches, was in fine shape which may be due to the fact that the film is rarely screened.

I still can’t figure out why Williams didn’t have a bigger, more high profile career than he did; he certainly had the looks and the talent. The TV movies Brian’s Song and The Glass House (both 1972) brought him visibility and acclaim (he earned an Emmy nomination for the former) and Lady Sings the Blues (also 1972) made him into a bona fide matinee idol. But after that, major films or important roles were few and far between. Was it a matter of Williams – or his agent – not picking the right projects or simply the lack of opportunity in white Hollywood? He did land a few promising assignments – The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings in 1977, the title role in the TV biopic Scott Joplin in 1978 – and secured his legacy in film history by appearing as Lando Calrissian in 1980′s The Empire Strikes Back (Stars Wars: Episode V). But overall, Williams has been misused and overlooked. Still, he has worked steadily in television and film ever since he earned his first screen credits in 1959 and he is still in the game.

It would have been fun to linger longer in Brussels and check out the other great repertory and art house cinemas in the city such as the Vendome Cinema, The Actors Studio, The Styx, and the other Cinematek branch at Flagey. But it would be hard to top the Cinematek at the Bozar location for selection and diversity in terms of classic film. It’s a world class operation and deserves to be ranked right up there with MoMA, UCLA, the George Eastman House, the BFI and other renowned film archives. Don’t miss a chance to experience it if you happen to visit Brussels – http://www.cinematek.be/?node=17&description=Programme

Publicity still from TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY (1951) with Ruth Roman & Steve Cochran

Released in 1951 by Warner Bros. and often considered a film noir by some film buffs and critics, the little known TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY is a hard-to-peg but exceptional B-movie that proves to be something of a shape shifter in the genre department. The title is bland but also deceptive in the sense that it calls to mind a completely different and inappropriate reference – Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The movie is also not true noir because, by general consensus and tradition, a noir can’t have a happy ending yet the two main characters – a bitter ex-con and a gold digging taxi dancer – are archetypes from a noir universe who try to flee their circumstances and still find redemption in the end. Along the way, the film (which airs on TCM on Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 11 pm ET) effortlessly morphs from one cinematic convention to another, starting with a social reform drama (shades of Heroes for Sale or I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang) in the gritty Warner Bros. tradition before detouring into noir. Then the tone quickly changes as the movie moves from the city to the rural backroads, becoming first a road trip/pursuit thriller of the paranoid kind, then a romance of thwarted lovers and finally an ethnographic slice of Americana that introduces a migrant worker subculture and the socio-economic hardships that come with it a la The Grapes of Wrath.       

Mixed messages are sent from the beginning as the credits for TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY appear over a graphic of a man, alone on a cliff ledge, gazing at a cloudy sky with some rays of sunshine breaking through in the distance to the tune of an emotionally overblown theme song. The man is Bill Clark (Steve Cochran), who has spent most of his life in prison but is finally paroled at the age of 32. He entered the slammer at 13 after killing his sadistic brute of a father (the term child abuse was not common then) and is now emotionally stunted and unprepared for life outside prison walls. The warden cautions him about his prospects, saying “A lot of things have changed out there…Your generation grew up, married, raised families, went to war but nothing happened to you Bill. You just got older….the average person outside won’t accept you. Won’t hire you, won’t trust you. You won’t even have a vote.” (The 14th Amendment permits states to deny the vote “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.”).

The future for Bill looks bleak indeed as he wanders around his home town on his first day of freedom….and finds trouble almost immediately in the form of an incognito reporter (John Kellogg) looking for a news story. Bill’s chances for a normal life there are ruined when his background is revealed in a front page expose – “Bill Clark, State’s Youngest Murderer, Returns” – so he hops a train to New York City where worse things await him. An encounter with Cay (Ruth Roman as a blonde), a streetwise club dancer – there would be no ambiguity about her profession in the Pre-Code era – develops into an intense infatuation but there are complications.

Cay’s “benefactor,” George Conover (Hugh Sanders) shows up and the trio end up in a brawl with Bill knocked unconscious and Cay mortally wounding Conover with his gun (she lets Bill think he was the trigger man). Fearing arrest, the couple flee the city and began a haphazard road trip while posing as a married couple.

By the time Cay and Bill check into a roadside motor court under aliases, TOMORROW IS ANOTHER NIGHT veers off a conventional noir path and becomes a love story of two hard luck losers who might make it as a couple if they can learn to trust each other….but will society give them a break?

For awhile, the future looks promising as the couple find work and a place to live with some friendly migrant workers, Mr. and Mrs. Dawson (Ray Teal & Lurene Tuttle) and their son (Robert Hyatt). But when the Dawsons discover Bill’s true identity in a crime magazine that offers a $1,000 reward for his capture, their sense of loyalty is conflicted and throws them into a moral quandary.
Mrs. Dawson: You’re not gonna get mixed up in it.
Mr. Dawson: Even if it’s true?
Mrs. Dawson: Let somebody else turn him in.
Mr. Dawson: And collect the reward? That’s a $1,000 bucks. Maybe we don’t need it.
Mrs. Dawson: Not that kind of money.
Mr. Dawson: There’s only one kind of money and we haven’t seen much of it. No home, nothing that belongs to us and we’re not getting any younger. C’mon Stella, say yes.
Mrs. Dawson: We haven’t got much. But everything we have is ours. Nobody else had to pay for it.

The situation becomes dire when Mr. Dawson is seriously burned in an auto accident and only an expensive new medical treatment offers any hope for his recovery. Will Mrs. Dawson betray her new friends for the reward money? The way TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY resolves this dilemma plays out in unexpected ways and, if the ending seems compromised and studio-imposed, the film still lingers in the memory as one of the more emotionally satisfying B-movies of its era.

Part of this is due to the terse, economic direction of Felix E. Feist, who trims away any narrative fat, achieving a streamlined journey into darkness and back into light. Most film buffs know that Feist is a first rate B-movie stylist who turned out such cult items as The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), one of the most horrific of any noir thriller, This Woman is Dangerous (1952) with Joan Crawford and Donovan’s Brain (1953) featuring soon-to-be-First-Lady Nancy Davis Reagan. The screenplay and dialogue by Art Cohn (who died in the same plane crash that killed movie mogul Mike Todd) and Guy Endore (who was blacklisted during the fifties) is equally tough and smart. And the casting and ensemble performances lift TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY out of the average B-programmer rut.

Steve Cochran and Ruth Roman make a curiously appealing couple and Cochran has more than enough onscreen chutzpah to counterbalance Roman’s too-much-woman-for-you presence which can overwhelm a less forceful actor…like Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train. Although Cochran was already being stereotyped as a smooth villain at this point in his career, he generates a believable vulnerability here, combined with misdirected aggression, as someone who is finally coming to terms with the adult inside him. And Roman is never less than believable as a tough, manipulative working gal who has had to harden her heart to survive. The real turning point for her character (signified by dying her blonde hair to brunette) is when she drops the mask and reacts to Bill’s marriage proposal, an emotional moment for both that reveals what their characters secretly want but are afraid they can’t have or don’t deserve.

There are other things to admire in TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY such as the glistening cinematography of Robert Burks (Oscar nominee for Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief & A Patch of Blue), an unobtrusive but effective dramatic score (except for the opening theme) by Daniele Amfitheatrof (The Naked Jungle, Human Desire) and beautifully executed sequences, edited by Alan Crosland Jr. (The Breaking Point, Vera Cruz), such as Cochran and Roman’s nocturnal attempt to sneak aboard a trucker’s automobile transport without being discovered.

Without wanting to oversell it – and this is a movie that works best if you just take a chance on a film with the unpromising title of TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY – I have to say that the movie becomes richer on subsequent viewings (It was initially released on DVD from Warner Archives in 2006). It’s the incidental details that stand out – the hunger in Bill’s face when he spots an attractive young woman on the street his first day out of jail and starts following her, staring at her legs; Cay’s verbal cat fight with a dancer at the Dream Land Dance club ending with “This is a refined place for refined people.” (She pronounces refined as re-fiended); the scene where Bill gives Cay a gold-plated watch that becomes an item of barter between them, being accepted and rejected repeatedly as an ongoing motif for their evolving relationship; the slow pan up from Bill and Cay’s feet as they hitchhike down the highway, dressed in denim with rolled up cuffs (fashion alert!); the pain in Stella Dawson’s face as she smacks her son for wanting to watch what happens when the police arrive to arrest Bill. I could go on but here is what I love most of all – the idea of a Hollywood B-movie examining the lower rung of society with empathy and no sermonizing and still delivering a compelling entertainment.

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY is ultimately the story of two lost souls who find themselves and each other after years of personal pain and despair. And the path to redemption for these misfits, living on the fringes of society, is unexpectedly moving in ways that utilize every film genre with noir as the driving force that launches the journey.

Other Websites of Interest:

http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.com/2009/10/tomorrow-is-another-day-1951.html

http://goatdog.com/blog/archives/for_the_love_of_film_noir_tomorrow_is_another_day_1951.html

http://laurasmiscmusings.blogspot.com/2012/01/tonights-movie-tomorrow-is-another-day.html

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/93552/Tomorrow-Is-Another-Day/articles.html

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/dvd_reviews53/tomorrow_is_another_day.htm

http://mikegrost.com/feist.htm

http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2009/10/tomorrow-is-another-day-1951.html

The Last Circus (2010) by Alex de la Iglesia

When clowns are the main characters in movies, you can almost bet they aren’t going to be very funny (He Who Gets Slapped, La Strada, The Comic)…especially in a film by Alex de la Inglesia; this is the fantasist who gave us such outlandish spectacles as Accion Mutante (1993), Perdita Durango (1997) and 800 Bullets (2002). Similar in tone to his pitch black farce Muertos de Risa (1999), in which a two-man comedy act self-destructs in a bitter, homicidal rivalry, de la Inglesia takes this basic conflict and pushes it further into bloody madcap surrealism in The Last Circus (Spanish title: Balada Triste de Trompeta, 2010). It opens in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, circa 1937, as a circus clown, wearing a dress, is interrupted in the middle of his comedy routine and forced into service by the militia. Armed with a machete, he single-handedly massacres scores of Nationals before being captured by the opposition. Before he is executed, he is allowed to give some parting advice to his son Javier, who is so traumatized by the experience that it marks him for life. Though Javier vows to continue in his father’s line of work, he is incapable of playing the happy clown and finds his niche as a sad clown instead.   

Flash forward to 1973 and The Last Circus becomes the story of a twisted menage a trois and its eventual implosion. At the center is Natalia (Carolina Bang, de la Iglesia’s companion in real life), a sexy trapeze artist who is married to Sergio (Antonio de la Torre), a sadistic, alcoholic brute whose public persona is that of a zany, fun-loving clown, beloved by children. The triangle is completed by Javier (Carlos Areces), the new circus recruit and fated whipping boy for Sergio’s slapstick routines. When Javier falls passionately in love with the manipulative Natalia and finds his inner beast, Sergio’s behavior becomes equally combative and builds to a battle to the death with Javier atop a tower in the sky. But the final showdown does not play out as expected in this emotionally volatile grand guignol.

Carolina Bang & Antonio de la Torre in The Last Circus (2010)

A tale of hatred, jealousy, revenge, lust and longing carried to extremes, The Last Circus may be too over-the-top for some viewers but it’s one of de la Iglesia’s most imaginative if grisly offerings yet. And underneath the twisted humor and grotesque imagery, there is a sweeping tragic grandeur…something closer to opera than manic melodrama. In one of the most affecting moments in the film, Javier has a machine-gun freakout in a diner and stops abruptly when he hears a song playing on the jukebox, “Balada de la Trompeta,” a lush, romantic ballad (with traces of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western scores) sung with slowly building intensity by Raphael. The song has a transformative effect on Javier and becomes his theme song, expressing a lifetime of anguish, loneliness and dashed dreams.

Later, on a movie theatre screen, Javier sees Raphael performing the song as a clown in the 1970 feature film Sin un adios and it’s a mesmerizing “music video,” one that adds a much needed soulful resonance to de la Inglesia’s theatre of cruelty. It also provides a pop cultural touchstone for Spain’s past when Franco was still in power and Raphael was at the top of the charts as the country’s most popular singer. Despite de la Iglesia’s audacious cinematic style and flamboyant set pieces that includes Natalia’s tantalizing, gravity-defying nightclub act in front of a huge image of Telly Savalas (the name of the club is Kojak), it is the “Balada de la Trompeta” sequence that sticks in my memory with that song stuck on an endless loop in my brain. Haunting…but in a good way.

Carolina Bang in The Last Circus (2010)

Raphael aka Miguel Rafael Martos Sanchez is internationally famous and probably the most popular Spanish singer of his generation during his peak years (1962-1984); in fact, he continues to perform today. But I had never heard of Raphael before I saw The Last Circus – he simply wasn’t on my radar. On the basis of this one song alone, I have sought out other Raphael recordings (“El Gondolero,” “Hablemos Del Amor,” and “Mi Gran Noche” are also recommended) and learned that the singer appeared in eight films between 1963 and 1973, formulaic musical romances or dramas which were designed to showcase his singing, not unlike the typical Elvis Presley formula. But Sin un adios, in which he appears in clown face to sing “Balada de la Trompeta”, is the one I want to see and it would make an ideal double feature with The Last Circus.

Raphael sings Balada de la trompeta in Sin un Adios (1970)

Meanwhile, fans of Alex de la Iglesia (including me) keep waiting for this director’s breakthrough film – the one that will finally earn him the sort of cult status and critical accolades that Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro and David Cronenberg enjoy. But maybe it’s better if he isn’t discovered. A big box office success could actually be a liability for such an idiosyncratic filmmaker and his one attempt at an English language feature – The Oxford Murders (2008) – was barely released here (after sitting on the shelf for two years) and not at all representative of his filmography. If you’ve never seen one of his movies, I suggest you start with his superbly crafted supernatural thriller The Day of the Beast (1995). If you like that, move on to the paranoid black comedy La Comunidad (2000) starring Carmen Maura (famous for her work with Almodovar) and then you might be ready for the roller coaster horrors of Perdita Durango or The Last Circus.    

Carlos Areces in The Last Circus (2010)

Other links of interest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBAMkFg7DBo (a longer version of the Raphael song)

http://aidyreviews.net/balada-de-la-trompeta-review/

Each year hundreds of international films never get picked up for distribution in the U.S. and the select few that do are either high profile film festival prize winners like Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) or popular commercial hits like March of the Penguins (2005) from France and Life is Beautiful (1997) from Italy. So when you come across an austere and haunting cinematic work like Valerio Zurlini’s The Desert of the Tartars (Il Deserto Dei Tartari), you have to wonder how many great films from other lands are out there that you are not going to see…and probably never will.      

Although originally released in Europe in 1976, The Desert of the Tartars never had an official U.S. theatrical release but thanks to the Italian based DVD distributor NoShame, a 2-disc special edition of the film (which included the original soundtrack by Ennio Morricone) was released in 2006. Unfortunately NoShame went out of business the same year but during their brief operation they released an impressive number of Italian art films (as well as a slew of primo exploitation items) primarily from the sixties and seventies. And their restorations of three Valerio Zurlini films – Violent Summer (1959), Girl With a Suitcase (1960) and The Desert of the Tartars – led to a reassessment and appreciation of this often overlooked and forgotten Italian filmmaker. While Girl With a Suitcase did make the art house circuit in America upon its original release and is probably Zurlini’s best known movie, The Desert of the Tartars, his final work, might be his masterpiece.

Jacques Perrin in The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

Based on the critically acclaimed 1940 novel The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati, the story is set in 1907 and follows Drogo (Jacques Perrin), a young nobleman, who journeys to Bastiani, a remote fort in the desert on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where he will serve as a lieutenant in the army. What he anticipates as being a brief stay before being transferred to a more important post becomes an eternity of waiting as his youthful high spirits and career ambitions give way to ennui and despair. But, in the beginning, the peculiar behavior of most of his fellow officers combined with the fort’s hermetically sealed society are so puzzling to Drogo that he launches his own investigation into the matter. Drogo’s commanding officer, Major Mattis (Guiliano Gemma), is a rigid disciplinarian with a sadistic streak who enjoys tormenting Amerling (Laurent Terzieff), a sickly aristocratic officer. At the same time, Mattis is unable to command the respect or earn the promotion he desires from the fort’s commander, Count Filimore (Vittoria Gassman), whose agenda remains a mystery. Petty rivalries and power plays among the officers simmer under the surface and occasionally spill over into volatile confrontations. And a rare visit to their outpost by the army general (Philippe Noiret) convinces Drogo that his fellow officers are merely going through the motions of military protocol while they wait in vain for something to alter their destinies.

The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

Among the other enlisted men are Nathanson (Fernando Rey), whose infirm condition has rendered him practically mute, Rovin (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the humane but detached garrison doctor, Tronk (Francisco Rabal), a gloom and doom agitator, and Lieutenant Simeon (Helmut Griem), one of the few soldiers to offer some amiable companionship in the beginning. And then there is officer Hortiz (Max von Sydow) whose sanity appears to be cracking after spending most of his career yearning for action in this godforsaken place. Drogo longs for adventure and purpose as well and eventually Hortiz’s stories of a phantom enemy, the Tartars, that dwell just beyond the sand dunes and the fort’s sight lines becomes an obsession for him. As he begins to see evidence of what he thought was Hortiz’s paranoia – a mysterious, stray white horse, flickering campfire lights in the distance – Drogo becomes convinced that an attack is imminent. Belief or denial in the existence of the Tartars becomes a constantly changing state of mind that is passed back and forth between the soldiers like a disease. By the time Drogo shows Hortiz a distant Tartar encampment through binoculars, the latter denies seeing anything and treats the younger officer as if he’s delusional. With the film’s final closing scene, it is unclear whether we are experiencing a mass hallucination of the soldiers or whether we have become infected by the madness that is Bastiani.

The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

The Desert of the Tartars has a distinctly surrealist quality and the ineffective, repressed military figures on display are caught up in the same sort of meaningless rituals that consume the bureaucratic characters inhabiting the nightmare worlds of Franz Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle. Reputedly, Buzzati’s novel was inspired by his monotonous desk job on the night shift of a newspaper and by his former military experience. The DVD liner notes by Chris D. astutely notes that “the cosmic, Catch-22 senselessness of military conduct is pushed to new heights.” And one brief summary of the film as “Beau Geste meets Waiting for Godot” is completely apt. As you can see below, this concept was too difficult to convey in a promotional poster so one distributor chose to represent the movie as a conventional action genre entry.  

Maybe one way to describe The Desert of the Tartars is to think of it as a historical epic in the tradition of a David Lean film but without the sweeping action sequences. This doesn’t mean Zurlini’s film is a dull, cerebral slog. Instead it maintains an underlying tension for its duration and occasionally erupts in violence – a returning soldier mistaken for a Tartar is shot for not knowing the password – or theater-of-the-absurd antics (a pointless march into a blizzard). The entire production is handsomely mounted, displaying a lavish budget that was well spent on a top tier, international cast, period costumes, Morricone’s elegant, melancholy score (which sounds like it was composed in an earlier era), and the stunning cinematography of Luciano Tovoli (inspired by the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico).

Jacques Perrin in The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

Jacques Perrin, who co-produced the film, makes an ideal Drogo, going from a proud young lieutenant brimming with idealism to an exhausted, gray-haired military careerist whose soul has been sucked out of him. Jean-Louis Trintignant is quietly effective as the army doctor who became resigned to his fate long ago, stating, “Here or elsewhere…we’re all somewhere by mistake.”

Max Von Sydow in The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

Equally impressive is Max von Sydow who brings an unexpected poignancy to his character, one that fluctuates between immeasurable loss and pompous superiority. He has a moment of self-realization in the final moments of the movie that speaks volumes for anyone who has not lived the life they wanted or intended: “Obeying is the thing I did best in my life. What nonsense and what disregard. I might have been useful in wartime. I’m so regretful. I waited for such a long time without knowing why.”

Giuliano Gemma as Major Mattis in The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

The real surprise among the international cast, however, is Giuliano Gemma as the cold, competitive Major Mattis. Gemma was a popular leading man in Italian cinema but was more often cast in undemanding action roles in sword and scandal epics (Messalina, Goliath and the Sins of Babylon), spaghetti westerns (Arizona Colt, The Return of Ringo) and adventures (Safari Express, Operation Leopard) than parts which required versatility and range. There have been memorable exceptions along the way such as Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Luigi Comencini’s tragic, working class romance, Delitto d’amore but Gemma is unexpectedly mesmerizing here as a cunning, power-hungry opportunist with fascist leanings (the boar-hunting scene with Drogo is particularly revealing). Critics took notice and Gemma won a special citation from the prestigious David di Donatello Awards for his performance as well as a Silver Ribbon nomination from the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.

Bam Citadel, Iran – the set for The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

In the end, though, the entire cast is overshadowed by the true star of The Desert of the Tartars – the bleak but beautiful sun-baked desert setting and the imposing austerity of the Bastiani outpost. Shot on location in Iran, the film’s ancient fort (built before 500 B.C.) and its surrounding ruins is actually the Safavid Fort of Bam which was last used as an active military barracks in 1932.  Sometime in 1953, major restoration was begun on the fort in hopes of preserving its history and attracting the tourist trade but a major earthquake in 2003, destroyed much of the completed work and killed more than 26,000 people. Any further news on the fate of Safavid Fort of Bam is mere speculation but if you want to see the historic site and what once remained of its former glory, check out The Desert of the Tartars, which is available for viewing on Netflix and still available for purchase on DVD from Amazon and other outlets.

Bam Citadel, Iran after the 2003 earthquake

Other sites of interest:

http://sacredsites.com/middle_east/iran/bam.html

http://www.earth-auroville.com/bam_and_arg_e_bam_en.php

http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-08-22/film/valerio-zurlini-s-autumn-tales/full/

http://www.payvand.com/news/03/jun/1165.html

http://iranian.com/DariusKadivar/2004/January/Bam/index.html

http://www.giulianogemma.it/

http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Giuliano_Gemma    

Jean Seberg in Birds in Peru (1968)

There is a popular misconception these days that almost any movie you want to see is available for streaming or viewing somewhere in cyberspace but that simply isn’t true. Thousands of films go missing, become inaccessible or go into distribution purgatory as the years pass and they become forgotten in time. Birds in Peru (aka Birds Come to Die in Peru) would probably be forgotten too if it hadn’t received such scathing reviews upon its original release in 1968.    A vanity project for novelist-turned-filmmaker Romain Gary based on his original screenplay, this would-be art film featured his wife Jean Seberg as a suicidal nymphomaniac languishing on a desolate beach in the Caribbean (it was filmed on the coast of Spain). It was considered a major debacle by most critics and has since vanished from sight (even though it was produced by a French subsidiary of Universal Pictures). But striking images and scene stills from it remain along with its infamous reputation (it received an X rating) which is reason enough for cinephiles obsessed with beautiful, doomed Jean Seberg to seek it out. Plus the movie features an impressive French supporting cast of Maurice Ronet, Pierre Brasseur and Danielle Darrieux as a brothel madam with cinematography by Christian Matras (Paris Blues, Cartouche, Bunuel’s The Milky Way).

Jean Seberg & Danielle Darrieux in Birds in Peru (1968)

While I have no illusions about Birds in Peru being a lost masterpiece, Gary’s only other directorial effort entitled Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (1971), which also starred Seberg, is so seriously deranged and chaotic in terms of narrative coherence that I figure this earlier effort is worth a revival for the sake of curiosity. And Seberg still looks stunningly beautiful at this point in her career. While she might have been a limited actress in terms of her dramatic range, the actress managed to work with some of the biggest names and talents in the industry in her 22 year career. After her literal trial by fire debut in Otto Preminger’s universally maligned Saint Joan, Seberg fared much better in the vastly underrated Bonjour Tristesse (also directed by Preminger) and then reinvented herself as a Nouvelle Vague superstar in several French films such as the landmark Jean-Luc Godard debut Breathless (1960), Philippe de Broca’s Five Day Lover (1961) and Claude Chabrol’s Line of Demarcation (1966).

Possibly her finest performance was in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) as a passionate, alluring mental case who entices staff therapist Warren Beatty into a complicated, destructive relationship. Seberg reached her peak as a Hollywood star in 1969 when she appeared in the George Schaefer crime drama Pendulum and the big budget musical Paint Your Wagon, opposite Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, followed by a major box office hit, Airport (1970). After that, it was a slow, sad descent despite such interesting later efforts as Juan Antonio Bardem’s offbeat serial killer thriller The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973), Hans W. Geissendorfer’s 1976 screen adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Philippe Garrel’s Le bleu des origins (1979), her final screen appearance (she died the same year, a suicide).

Seberg’s collaboration with her husband Gary, however, on Birds in Peru and Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! marks one of the more extreme and unusual examples of a husband directing his wife on screen and maybe a reflection of their volatile offscreen marriage (1962-1970), a relationship that is documented in depth in David Richards’ biography Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story and dissected in Mark Rappaport’s fascinating reflection on the actress, From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) with Mary Beth Hurt acting as a self-aware stand-in for Seberg. While there are other Seberg films that I would love to see that are in danger of sliding into complete obscurity such as Jacques Becker’s crime caper Backfire (1964) with Jean-Paul Belmondo or Nicolas Gessner’s heist drama Un milliard dans un billiard (1965), Birds in Peru is like some exotic endangered species. Consider the below AFI synopsis of the film and excerpts from some of the movie reviews and maybe you too will be intrigued enough to join in the hunt for this elusive Eurotrash artifact.

Jean Seberg in Birds in Peru (1968)

In the early morning hours after a Peruvian carnival, a young woman named Adriana lies naked and exhausted on a lonely stretch of beach–the final resting place for dying gulls from the nearby Guano Islands. The night before, Adriana left her sadomasochistic millionaire husband and came to the beach with four costumed revelers with whom she hoped to find sexual fulfillment. Tormented by nymphomania, and knowing that her husband and his chauffeur-bodyguard will soon come for her, Adriana dresses herself and wanders into a beachside brothel owned by Madame Fernande. At first Adriana gives herself to the madame and offers to work for her as a prostitute but then changes her mind and returns to the beach. Remembering her agreement that the chauffeur could kill her if she ever succumbed again to her sickness, she attempts to drown herself, but she is rescued by Rainier, a poet and self-confessed failure, who runs a beach cafe that no one frequents. While they make love, Rainier implies that they could be each other’s salvation. His suggestions are interrupted, however, by the arrival of the chauffeur and the whisky-sodden husband, who have come to carry out the agreed-upon ritualized execution. Rainier intervenes and is knocked unconscious; a young Indian boy called Alejo, who has been following Adriana, leaps out from a hiding place and plunges a knife into the chauffeur. Ignoring the others, Adriana wanders off alone as her husband picks up the dead chauffeur’s cap and hands it to Rainier, who accepts it. As the two men set off after Adriana, the young boy races headlong into the sea. (Published in the American Film Institute Catalog 1961-1970).

Maurice Ronet & Jean Seberg in Birds in Peru (1968)

Roger Ebert review:

“The story goes that Gary wanted to direct this movie because he was so displeased by the two previous movies made from his books: “Lady L” and “Roots of Heaven.” Those were stinkers, yes. So Gary took his short story “Birds in Peru” and directed it himself this time. Now there are three stinkers made from his work….Gary holds his close-ups much too long, especially in the case of Miss Seberg; instead of providing dramatic impact and pacing, they drag the movie to a halt. Gary doesn’t like to move his camera much, either; his ideas of composing a scene are painfully elementary. Shots on the beach are invariably photographed by arranging his actors in a geometric pattern and having them march dreamily ahead.”

Jean Seberg & husband director Romain Gary on the set of Birds in Peru (1968)

“The beach photography, by the way, was apparently meant to be surrealistic. We get long vistas of barren sand, with figures here and there in the landscape, old Peruvian masks and feathers and dying birds stuck in the sand, and strange rocks on the horizon, as if, this were a Salvador Dali retrospective. But none of it works. The movie doesn’t grow. The characters drift through their vacuum. Rarely has so much pretension created so much waste.”

Jean Seberg in Birds in Peru (1968)

Vincent Canby review:

“In an interview a year ago, Romain Gary, the French novelist, said he had decided to make his debut as a director with the movie version of his short story, “Birds in Peru,” because professional filmmakers had “slaughtered” his “Roots of Heaven” and “Lady L.” Even though I haven’t read the original story, I doubt whether Gary has actually slaughtered “Birds in Peru.” He just lets it drown—slowly and rather pleasantly—in a sea of literary symbols, prettily photographed on the coasts of Spain and Mauritania. The French movie, with English subtitles, opened yesterday at the Little Carnegie Theater. The story is the kind of cryptic, cleanly simple one that can be interpreted in as many ways as a horoscope….Jean Seberg (Mrs. Gary) is a lovely but not very interesting Adriana. Her perfectly molded face and body, which have the look of youth preserved in a deep freeze, are tenderly explored by a camera that never finds anything more than an actress in the throes of simulated emotion. When, in a tight close-up, she sticks out her chin and looks to heaven, she doesn’t resemble a woman lost to an empty passion as much as a little girl about to lose a spelling bee. That fine old performer, Pierre Brasseur (“Quai des Brumes”), is nicely menacing as Adriana’s husband who revels in her illness. But Maurice Ronet hasn’t much to do as the man who saves her, only to let himself become part of her ménage of masochists. Danielle Darrieux is seen briefly as the madame. As a movie director, Gary is a very good writer; funny and sardonic. However, the mind exhausts his visual images—lots of Hialeah-like pictures of birds—much more quickly than his literary ones and, in the process picks up a lot of nonessential information, such as the fact that no matter how many times Miss Seberg is seduced, her hair seldom gets mussed….It is, of course, somewhat revealing of Gary. In his loving exploitation of Miss Seberg, he seems just a bit like the husband in the movie.”

Boxoffice Magazine:

“Christian Matra’s photography emphasizes the strangeness of this uninhibited French film with its unearthly bird strewn beaches, its symbolism and its preoccupation with sex and death. Seberg’s acting is unrealistic and the film as a whole is unbelievable. The color film work is technically acceptable. The film does not possess art house qualities nor does it have a strong enough sex story for grind exploitation houses.”

Maurice Ronet & Jean Seberg in Birds in Peru (1968)

Other links of interest:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/19690812/REVIEWS/908120301/1023

http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2010/01/lost-and-still-not-found-case-file-56.html

http://www.filmbrain.com/filmbrain/2008/09/lost-in-the-six.html

http://www.signis.net/malone/tiki-index.php?page=Birds+Come+to+Die+in+Peru&PHPSESSID=eab23934106c0ca67b02cb6e8dc95839

Though relatively unknown today, Golden Salamander (1950), Ronald Neame’s second directorial effort, is one of those unexpected but welcome cinema excursions that actually delivers on its exotic title. On the surface, it appears to be no more than pure pulp, a B-movie thriller, but the casting, direction, music score and atmospheric setting elevate it to A-picture status. It might not be great art but it’s total escapism, executed with flair.     

Trevor Howard in Golden Salamander (1950)

The story hooks you from the beginning like most tales that begin on a dark and stormy night. David Redfern (Trevor Howard), a British archaeologist, is driving on a treacherous winding road en route to Tunisia where he has been summoned to catalog some Etruscan artifacts that were salvaged from a sinking ship. A landslide prevents him from completing his journey and he is forced to abandon his car and seek refuge from the rain. In the rock slide rubble, he discovers a lorry loaded with guns and then spies an approaching car with two men, Rankl (Herbert Lom) and Max (Jacques Sernas), who turn out to be gun-runners working for a local crime syndicate. Redfern manages to slip away from the scene undetected and makes his way to a nearby inn, run by Anna (Anouk Aimee, billed here simply as “Anouk”), which becomes a temporary base for him.

As the narrative unwinds, Redfern realizes that his knowledge of the gun-running operation puts him at risk and is further complicated by his relationship with Serafis (Walter Rilla), the sinister kingpin of the smuggling ring who is masquerading as an antiquities dealer and Redfern’s contact for the Etruscan rarities. At the same time, Redfern feels an undeniable attraction to Anna, who is desperate to help her childhood friend Max break away from his criminal cohorts and go straight.

Trevor Howard & Anouk Aimee in Golden Salamander (1950)

The film moves along at a brisk clip, is blessed with some witty dialogue (it was based on a novel by Victor Canning; his novel The Rainbird Pattern became Hitchcock’s Family Plot) and benefits greatly from the exotic Tunisian locations.

There is one unusually striking visual sequence when Redfern discovers a corpse floating underwater in the bay and the climax, staged during a village boar hunt as our hero and Anna are chased by Rankl, generates real tension in the manner of The Most Dangerous Game.

Herbert Lom in Golden Salamander (1950)

Filmed on location in Tunisia, Golden Salamander seems like an unusual film project for Trevor Howard following his critically acclaimed performance in Carol Reed’s The Third Man but part of the lure may have been the exotic location. Howard was an actor with wanderlust and loved visiting other countries, especially when he was being paid for it.

Trevor Howard in Golden Salamander (1950)

Golden Salamander was the first major film production directed by cinematographer/screenwriter Ronald Neame; he had previously directed a low-budget crime thriller in 1947 entitled Take My Life. When Neame first offered the film to Howard, he turned it down but then changed his mind and was soon delighted to be playing opposite French actress Anouk Aimee, who was the love interest. Aimee was at the very beginning of her film career (she is barely seventeen years old here) and had just attracted international attention for her role in Andre Cayatte’s Les Amants de Verone (1949). During the filming Howard and Aimee became very close, resulting in rumors of an affair but no evidence exists that it did, much to the relief of Howard’s wife, who was genuinely concerned for awhile that the picture might ultimately cause the breakup of her marriage.

Herbert Lom is appropriately sinister as the brooding Rankl and had already established himself as a swarthy heavy by this point in his career; he would follow this with an equally menacing gangster role in Jules Dassin’s superb noir Night and the City (1950). The real scene stealer in Golden Salamander, however, is Wilfred Hyde-White as Agno, a dissolute bartender/pianist at the inn whose jaded persona hides his true allegiances. He was 47 years old at the time he made this and younger than I’d ever seen him. He brings an appealing impishness to the role and always has a devilish twinkle in his eyes whether he’s tickling the ivory keyboards in a smoky haze or acting as an informer for both sides. By the film’s fadeout, he has become as indispensable as Dooley Wilson’s Sam in Casablanca.

Among the impressive behind-the-camera crew on Golden Salamander are William Alwyn, the film’s music composer who provides snatches of “Clopid Clopant” and “Pigalle” during Agno’s piano ramblings, cinematographer Oswald Morris and art director John Bryant. Alwyn had already scored such key British films as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948) and would go on to make memorable contributions to the soundtracks of The Crimson Pirate (1952), A Night to Remember (1958) and Burn, Witch, Burn aka Night of the Eagle (1962). Morris, of course, is a three time Oscar nominee for best cinematography on Oliver! (1968), Fiddler on the Roof (1971 – he won the Academy Award for this) and The Wiz (1978). And Bryant is an equally honored film industry professional, garnering Oscar nominations for his art direction/set decoration on Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Great Expectations (1946 – he won for this), and Becket (1964).

Trevor Howard (left), Anouk Aimee & director Ronald Neame on the set of Golden Salamander (1950)

Ronald Neame had already been working in the British cinema as a cinematographer since 1933 so he was no newcomer on the scene when he made Golden Salamander. But for a second directing effort, this is a streamlined, superbly crafted genre film, something Neame would master on a larger scale in his later years in such categories as the heist film (Gambit, 1966), the disaster epic (The Poseidon Adventure, 1972) and the espionage thriller (The Odessa File, 1974). Neame was also the esteemed director of such British cinema classics as The Horse’s Mouth (1958), Tunes of Glory (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

The filming of Golden Salamander did provide its share of comic anecdotes during the on-location shooting in Tunisia. “One of the best scenes on location was, Neame recalls (in Trevor Howard: A Gentleman and a Player by Vivienne Knight), unfortunately not for the picture. Shooting was taking place in an open market of a native village which was filthy, squalid and filled with Arabs buying and selling fly-covered local produce: a nice natural scene with thousands of free extras. The script called for Trevor Howard to work his way through the crowd in the market place. The camera was set up, creating a stir in itself since none of the locals had ever seen one before. Then came a loud hailer emitting interpreted pleas to the crowd to behave quite normally and naturally, just as though the camera wasn’t there and, this above all, “Please don’t look at the camera.” It was a crane shot and there could be no rehearsal. It was all set. Ronnie Neame lifted his megaphone, shouted “Action!” and all hell was let loose: the Arabs started to fight, stalls were knocked over and a number of participants were knocked out. In the middle of it all Trevor Howard strugged with shock, amazement and other people. When, with some difficulty, a degree of order was restored and Arab had stopped tearing into Arab, it transpired that the word ‘action’ had triggered off something they had either seen in films, or thought should happen in films: action equalled fighting. But Ronnie Neame found out that, once they got the hang of it, many of the voluntary extras were quite good. So, up to a point, was the film.”

Typical of the critical reviews that Golden Salamander received upon its theatrical release is this one by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times: “The Britishers’ taste for the exotic in their romantic adventure yarns is quite evident in “Golden Salamander,” which came to the Little Carnegie yesterday. And this liberal indulgence of preference is most fortunate in this case, for the authentic Tunisian backgrounds and atmosphere of this film are its best points-these and a pretty young lady who now goes by the name of Anouk…As the scientist, Trevor Howard delivers his usual sincere and forceful job, demonstrating as much evolution into a bold adventurer as the script will allow. Under Ronald Neame’s easy-going direction, he emerges from his academic calm rather abruptly but with absolute assurance once the melodramatic heat is turned on. Herbert Lom is extravagantly evil as the gunman of the gun-running gang and Walter Rilla is exquisitely silky as the lord of a Moorish villa and boss of the mob. A vast lot of outdoor action within the crowded streets of a Tunisian town and in the midst of a noisy native boar-hunt (for the climax) brings color to the film.”

Golden Salamander has aired before on TCM during a mini-Ronald Neame retrospective and will probably turn up again in the future. But for now, you can stream it on Netflix, view it on YouTube in its entirety (the print is surprisingly decent) or purchase it on DVD if you have an all-region DVD player; it is available from the Amazon UK web site as part of the series, “The Best of British Collection. “

* A shorter alternate version of this article is available on tcm.com

Other web sites of interest:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/canning/salamander.html

https://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Golden_Salamander/70147295?locale=en-US

http://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000fJbzx_lz6Sc

First person narration in films can be a tricky proposition. Not only can it become monotonous but it can also work against the visual storytelling, imposing a structure on the film that frustrates the viewer’s attempt to interpret and come to their own conclusions about events, characters and dialogue. One of the rare exceptions to this often overused device is Rolf de Heer’s THE QUIET ROOM (1996), the story of a marriage coming apart as told by the couple’s seven year old daughter. Seen from her viewpoint, the increasingly hostile relationship is something she can’t fully comprehend but she decides to take steps to alter her unhappy situation by refusing to speak until her parents reconcile. Despite a highly stylized visual approach (the cinematography is by Tony Clark), THE QUIET ROOM is a simply told but emotionally complex character study with moments of magical realism and a refreshingly unsentimental but compassionate look at how one child reacts to a marriage on the rocks.   

When the film opens, the young girl (no character is identified by name) has already started her vow of silence though her parents are not sure why this is happening. Nor does the child explain herself through written messages or pantomime. Instead, she hopes her behavior can affect a positive change in her mother and father’s relationship. But her parents can’t read her thoughts and, as their marriage deteriorates, their child sometimes retreats into escapist fantasies or finds herself witnessing happier times in the presence of a younger version of herself.

Chloe Ferguson (left) & Celine O’Leary in The Quiet Room (1996)

Most of THE QUIET ROOM takes place within the home of the protagonist who, as played by Chloe Ferguson (her sister Phoebe plays her at age 3), is on-screen for almost the entire 92 minute running time. Despite the claustrophobic nature of the narrative, the film exerts a hypnotic allure due to director Rolf de Heer’s original approach to what could have been a conventional domestic drama. For one thing, the striking art direction (by Beverly Freeman) and production design (by Fiona Paterson) transforms Chloe’s bedroom with its goldfish tank, toys and drawings into an almost enchanted realm, highlighted by the deep blue-toned walls. The intimate and occasionally wry voiceover narration (written by de Heer) also rarely hits a false note with its unique insights on the adult world as seen through the eyes of a child. Early in the film, Chloe says, “Dad asks me what I think of death when I still used to talk. Nothing, I said. I think nothing of death. He’s always asking me questions I don’t have words for. Sad…sad because…I can’t say why sad.” At another point, she states, “I don’t have problems anymore since I’ve stopped talking. Maybe talking’s the problem.”

Chloe Ferguson in The Quiet Room (1996)

Some viewers may find the young girl’s narration too articulate and wise beyond her years for a 7 year old but I think de Heer brilliantly captures her psychological and emotional state in a way that seems true to life and completely believable. Part of the credit belongs, of course, to young Miss Ferguson who has a natural, unaffected screen presence and carries the burden of the movie on her shoulders, despite excellent support by Celine O’Leary and Paul Blackwell as the disillusioned parents.

Chloe Ferguson in The Quiet Room (1996)

Even though Chloe gains the sympathy of the viewer by virtue of being the narrator/protagonist in THE QUIET ROOM, we begin to realize by the halfway point that the child is not entirely correct in her assumptions or understanding of her parents’ problems. Her vow of silence might even be aggravating the situation further and, as in any situation involving marital discord, it is too complicated to easily blame either party for the failing marriage. One can only imagine what a major Hollywood studio would do with this material but since THE QUIET ROOM is an independent Australian production and not a mainstream melodrama designed for broad appeal, there is no manufactured, happy ending to the film. But it doesn’t end in despair either. Instead, there is hope that the parents can reconcile without divorcing and that is the closest thing to closure that the movie offers.

Chloe Ferguson in The Quiet Room (1996)

In an interview with Andrew L. Urban (for the website Urban Cinephile), de Heer described what motivated him to make THE QUIET ROOM and his approach to the subject: “What I was interested in was a seven-year-old’s perception of adulthood. As I had to give it some sort of structural format, it seemed to me that the marriage breakdown was the thing to use. There is a dynamic, there is conflict, there are all sorts of possibilities. But where I began was with a seven-year-old’s perception of adulthood…..I’ve been interested in kids and the way they think a long time … since I was four. It has always seemed to me that adults tend to underestimate the way kids think. Kids will jump from one way of being to another as if it were a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want them to be this way, they will be. They move easily between being quite sophisticated and adult in the way they view things, and then quite childlike. I also like working with kids and this particular film, because of the way it was done, in that there was a window of opportunity in which to make it, I needed something that I could write well but quickly. Because I have kids of my own, I have readily accessible to me a whole amount of information.”

Director Rolf De Heer

Although THE QUIET ROOM was barely distributed in the U.S. and seen by very few people at the time of its release, it was highly praised by most critics who saw it. New York Times critic Stephen Holden proclaimed, “Rarely has a movie entered the consciousness of a child as deeply and convincingly as ‘‘The Quiet Room,” which was filmed in Adelaide, Australia. What holds together this beautifully woven series of impressionistic family scenes and occasional flashbacks is the girl’s artless voice-over narration. You never question for a second whether her observations or vocabulary might be precocious for someone her age…”The Quiet Room” is much more than a portrait of an adorable child coping with a potentially traumatic family crisis. It is an exploration of the power that children wield over their parents and an almost intimidating reminder that not much escapes our children’s vision, as much as we wish it might. Every joyous hug, every casual dismissal, every harsh word registers and is recorded.” Variety critic David Stratton wrote, “On the surface it might seem like a simple concept, but de Heer’s acute insights into a child’s mentality and speech patterns, his bold visual design and the quite amazing performance of Chloe Ferguson as his young protagonist, will rivet audiences willing to take a chance on this rigorous, uncompromising film….Chloe Ferguson gives an exceptional performance. Quite often she’s called upon only to gaze at the camera while her voice reflects her inner feelings, and her expressive face speaks volumes. The child captures every nuance with uncanny precision and effortlessly dominates the film, appearing in virtually every frame…De Heer’s skill in entering this child’s world so single-mindedly is astonishing. Few films about children have been as honest and dedicated as this one.” And Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum called it an “unusual and beautifully made film…The mood study loses some intensity as it winds down, but De Heer (Bad Boy Bubby) and cinematographer Tony Clark sustain an enchanting, child’s-eye visual style throughout, lingering on textures and a deep crayon-hued palette with a pleasure that’ll make you want to sniff some Crayolas.”

Chloe Ferguson in The Quiet Room (1996)

Despite such glowing reviews from the critics and numerous accolades (it was nominated for the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival), THE QUIET ROOM failed to attract audiences and was a box-office flatliner. Yet, due to the sale of distribution rights in Japan and the U.S., the film became de Heer’s most profitable release. Unfortunately, the director has yet to score a box-office hit in the U.S. or attract any major media attention for his work. Even in his own country Australia, de Heer’s films do not draw audiences despite critical acclaim and awards. But when you look at the body of de Heer’s work, one thing is certain; he is one of the most original and adventurous filmmakers working in current cinema. Although born in the Netherlands, the director has lived in Australia since the age of eight and many of his films display an engaging curiosity and occasionally acerbic view of that nation’s culture and landscape. His second feature, Encounter at Raven’s Gate (1988), is a quasi-supernatural thriller with sci-fi overtones that bares some similarities with the apocalyptic menace of both Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave by fellow Australian filmmaker Peter Weir. Dingo (1991), an offbeat homage to jazz, follows a struggling musician from the Outback who eventually gets to meet his idol, the legendary trumpeter Billy Cross (played by Miles Davis in his only role in a feature film), in Paris. Bad Boy Bubby (1993) looked like it was going to be the turning point film for de Heer as it won numerous film festival awards and generated controversial word-of-mouth for its audacious character study of an emotionally stunted and abused adult male who escapes his captivity to make his way in the world. The first third of the film is disturbing, squalid and unwatchable for some due to scenes of incest and animal cruelty (involving a cat) but the darkness gives way to light in the second section as the title character grows as a human being through the wonders of sex, rock ‘n roll and pizza, ending up as a functioning and happy member of society by the fadeout. Unfortunately, Bad Boy Bubby‘s mix of the outrageous, tragic and whimsical were too unclassifiable and art house niche to attract a U.S. distributor but his subsequent film, THE QUIET ROOM, was no easy sell either with its unorthodox approach to a troubled marriage as witnessed by a child.

Still de Heer continued to march to the beat of his own drummer, regardless of poor box-office prospects, and helmed Epsilon (1995), a visionary fable that pondered the existence of alien beings while questioning the future and value of the human race. The film was shorn of ten minutes and released by Miramax Films in America under the generic title of Alien Visitor – it bombed.

Dance Me to My Song (1998) was another challenging and unexpected character study focusing on a woman with debilitating cerebral palsy and her awakening sexual desire. de Herr also embarked on an unofficial trilogy about Aboriginal culture beginning with The Tracker (2002), starring David Gulpilil (Walkabout) in a period allegory about a native hunter who leads three policemen on a search for a wanted killer; Ten Canoes (2006), an ethnographic adventure made with the participation of the Ramingining community on the Arafura Swamp in Arnhem Land (the remote northern territory of Australia) and Twelve Canoes (2009), a documentary portrait of the Yoingu people who inhabit the aforementioned Arafura Swamp region. In 2007, de Heer made Dr. Plonk, a black and white silent comedy about an eccentric inventor that pays homage to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charles Charplin. Other one-offs include Alexandra’s Project (2003), de Heer’s harsh dissection of a dysfunctional marriage which has some of the disturbing power of a Michael Haneke film; the awkwardly titled The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2001) starring Richard Dreyfuss in an exotic jungle adventure (filmed in French Guiana) and the oddball black comedy/suburban drama, The King is Dead (2012), which follows an escalating feud between a young married couple and their obnoxious, unruly neighbor.

If you have never seen a de Heer film, then I recommend you start with either THE QUIET ROOM or The Tracker before moving on to edgier, more provocative fare like Alexandra’s Project or Bad Boy Bubby. Eight of his movies are available on Netflix including the rarely seen Dingo or you can spring for the 6-film Rolf De Heer DVD box set which includes the lesser known Dr. Plonk and The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. For more information on THE QUIET ROOM and de Heer, check out the links below.

http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=199&s=Interviews (interview with Andrew L. Urban)

http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/the_quiet_room_overview.php

http://regrettablesincerity.com/?p=6236

Nicholas Hope as Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

The headline is referencing the past, not the present, for A DAY AT THE BEACH, a film that Roman Polanski scripted and co-produced with his partner Gene Gutowski for their short-lived production company, Cadre Films, in 1969 finally surfaced on DVD in 2007 via Odeon Entertainment’s “The Best of British Collection” series in the U.K. and then in the U.S. in 2008, courtesy of Code Red, which specializes in re-releasing cult and lesser known genre films like Rituals (1977) and Group Marriage (1973).  For more than thirty five years, the film was considered lost after being shelved by Paramount following an unsuccessful limited release in Europe. But a serviceable print was discovered and preserved and any self-professed fan of Polanski’s films will want to check it out if they haven’t already.  It may not be “the lost Roman Polanski masterpiece” that the Code Red DVD cover promises but it is much more than a curiosity piece and quite compelling if you are in the mood for a bitter, bleak and harrowing character study.   

Mark Burns in A Day at the Beach

The narrative is fashioned as a Long-Day’s-Journey-Into-Night for the main protagonist, Bernie (Mark Burns), an alcoholic wastrel who is on the verge of a full-blown flameout. Early in the film when Bernie shows up at the apartment of his ex-wife Melissa (Fiona Lewis) to take their daughter Winnie (Beatrice Edney) on an outing to the beach, he has already started drinking and it’s just the beginning of what could be a final self-destructive binge. It quickly becomes apparent that Winnie thinks her father is really her uncle, a misconception reinforced by her mother. But Bernie doesn’t seem to mind the charade as long as he’s paid for his servitude (to spend on booze). So off they go to the beach on a cold, miserable rainy day with no resistance from Winnie’s mom. The dysfunctional tone is set and Bernie and Winnie’s non-idyllic getaway becomes a series of episodic encounters with various strangers and friends at the beach as Bernie gets progressively blotto, often leaving his daughter in harm’s way.

Beatrice Edney, Mark Burns & Fiona Lewis in A DAY AT THE BEACH

Along the way he encounters an intrigued café owner and her daughter (Eva Dahlbeck & Sisse Reingaard), an irate beach chair attendant (Jack MacGowran), a gay couple who run a seaside tourist shop (Peter Sellers & Graham Stark), a successful writer friend (Maurice Roeves) accompanied by his wife (Joanna Dunham) and child, all of whom are subjected to his mooching, verbal abuse and faux-literary pontificating. In real life, few, if any people, would put up with such an infuriating, obnoxious bore but, as a film subject, Bernie is a spectacular car wreck in motion and you can’t tear your eyes away.   Unlike Geoffrey Firmin, Albert Finney’s equally self-destructive alcoholic in John Huston’s film adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1984), Bernie doesn’t engage the viewer’s compassion or sympathy; we may see moments of vulnerability and suffering but he remains unlikable, particularly in his irresponsible and selfish behavior toward his daughter. At least Finney’s Geoffrey in Under the Volcano was once a highly respected and successful British consul and we can still see remnants of his essential goodness. But we can only imagine what sort of man Bernie used to be – possibly a promising writer at one point. Who knows? The challenge is to find the humanity is this wretched creature – an impossible task for some and one reason several film reviewers (and even Polanski himself) have dismissed the film as a failure. The negative criticism tended to focus on what many consider an alienating lead performance by Mark Burns, the uneven direction (it was Simon Hesera’s sole dramatic feature) and the original source material, a novel by Dutch author Heere Heeresman which is considered virtually unfilmable by some. That didn’t deter Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (who was assassinated by a Muslim extremist in 2004) from making his own screen adaptation of Heeresman’s novel in 1984 under the title Een dagje naar het strand.

Beatrice Edney & Mark Burns in A Day at the Beach

Despite the naysayers, admirers of Polanski’s work will find much to admire in A DAY AT THE BEACH for the film is full of the psychological overtones, disturbing visual detail, macabre humor and sense of paranoia present in all of Polanski’s work. One detects a slightly perverse streak in the depiction of the adolescent Winnie, a polio victim who wears a leg brace that emits a mechanical squeaking sound as she scampers around. Several encounters, particularly the argument between Bernie and the beach attendant over the rental of a deck chair, have a Theater-of-the-Absurd quality that bear comparison to some of Polanski’s early experimental shorts such as Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) and Mammals (1962). The eccentric gay couple in the gift shop are representative of the types of outsiders and social renegades who have inhabited most of Polanski’s films from the sexually ambiguous married couple in Cul-de-Sac (1966) to Count von Krolock’s homosexual son in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) to the Castevets, the satanic neighbors in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). A DAY AT THE BEACH also shares similarities to Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) with its mounting sense of anxiety and helplessness that results in the complete mental collapse of the protagonist.  Curiously enough, many of the major biographies and critical studies of Polanski’s work omit any mention of A DAY AT THE BEACH. Even if he did not direct it, the film deserves some attention for his involvement as screenwriter and producer but I have noticed that, in general, Polanski’s solo work as a scenarist is rarely noted in biographies of the director. This explains why you rarely read or hear about his work on Jean Leon’s Aimez-vous les femmes (A Taste for Women, 1964), a black comedy about a cannibal cult operating out of a vegetarian restaurant, Jean-Daniel Simon’s La fille d’en face (The Girl Across the Way, 1968) or Gerard Brach’s Le bateau sur l’herbe (The Boat on the Grass, 1971). But even if A DAY AT THE BEACH has been out of circulation or unavailable for viewing for decades, it has never been a secret. Made in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby while Polanski was also considering a film about Paganini and one about the infamous Donner Party, he devotes almost two paragraphs to the project in his autobiography, stating, “For want of anything better to do, I began writing A Day at the Beach, a screenplay based on a short story by the Dutch writer Heere Heresma and conceived as a low-budget picture within the scope of Cadre Films…This was to be Simon Hesera’s first directorial attempt and Paramount were dragging their feet over financing it. Charlie Bluhdorn and Bob Evans were in London on business, so Gene Gutowski decided to make a final pitch. I flew over for a working lunch with them at Gene’s apartment. Peter Sellers, who had agreed to play an unpaid cameo part, was also invited as, of course, was Simon. Between them, Peter and Simon so mesmerized Bluhdorn with their clowning that he’d have signed anything. Paramount had some funds in Denmark it wanted to invest, so Simon flew to Copenhagen to line things up for shooting there.”

Mark Burns on right in A Day at the Beach

Polanski’s involvement with A DAY AT THE BEACH is also substantiated by Ed Sikov in Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers and the author makes this curious comment about the production: “In an apparent attempt to make the film even more raw than its subject matter destined it to be, Hessera cast an unknown and inexperienced actor, Mark Burns, in the lead.” Burns was certainly not an inexperienced actor or unknown in the entertainment industry at the time, even if he wasn’t a household name. He started with bit parts in Sink the Bismarck! and Tunes of Glory in 1960, appeared in numerous TV series throughout the sixties and landed major supporting roles in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Adventures of Gerald (1970), Christopher Miles’ The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Perhaps Sikov’s comment was colored by Polanski’s poor opinion of the film: “It’s not good…The problem is, I’m afraid, the director, and also insufficient funds. But the main problem is the actor. You can’t watch a man playing a drunk for one and a half hours unless he’s a really great actor and has some charisma. That guy had none. Other than that, I mean, the film…If there had been a great performance….The film is done well enough to work. What didn’t work was the casting. Simon was not a director, and, let’s face it, we were a little bit cavalier.”

Graham Stark (left) & Peter Sellers in A DAY AT THE BEACH

Of the numerous biographies on the controversial director, Barbara Leaming’s Polanski (first published in 1982) is one of the few to acknowledge the existence of A DAY AT THE BEACH. Ivan Butler’s The Cinema of Roman Polanski also makes a brief reference to it. And then there is John Parker’s biography on Polanski which gives a completely contradictory and erroneous account of the project, stating that the movie was a collaboration between producer Gene Gutowski and “Polanski’s former collaborator Jerzy Skolimowski…Gutowski was interested in producing a new screenplay by Skolimowski called A Day at the Beach. He signed Peter Sellers to star and they all went off to Rome to make the picture. Sadly for Skolimowski, the partnership with Gutowski did not bring him the same fortune and recognition as had his collaboration with Polanski. They failed to sell their movie to a distributor and it was never released.” I suspect that Parker was actually referring to Skolimowski’s The Adventures of Gerald (aka Brigadier Gerard) which was co-produced by Gutowski and filmed in Italy, outside Rome. But Peter Sellers was not the star or even it it; the lead was played by Peter McEnery.

Beatrice Edney in A DAY AT THE BEACH

There are other popular misconceptions floating around about A DAY AT THE BEACH. Some writers have stated that Polanski was the original director of the film and replaced by Simon Hesera while others insist Polanski was in the process of editing the picture when he received the news that his wife Sharon Tate and three friends had been murdered in Los Angeles and flew home immediately to deal with the tragedy. Neither claim is valid if you accept Polanski’s recounting of the events in his autobiography. What we do know is that Polanski was already working on a film treatment for The Day of the Dolphin, which he also planned to direct for Paramount, at the time of his departure from London to Los Angeles (The Day of the Dolphin would eventually be taken over by director Mike Nichols and released by Avco Embassy). A DAY AT THE BEACH stands as a strange, mostly forgotten segue from Rosemary’s Baby to Polanski’s next fully realized venture, MacBeth (1971).

Sisse Reingaard (left), Eva Dahlbeck, Mark Burns in A DAY AT THE BEACH

Yes, the story is a true downer and probably not for anyone who expects only instant gratification from movies. But I have to disagree with Polanski’s harsh critique of the lead actor’s performance (Mark Burns died in 2007 and reputedly was a recovering alcoholic in real life). If anything, Burns’ portrayal of Bernie is probably too real and naked in its emotional evisceration for some. There is no redemption for this sad sack loser and A DAY AT THE BEACH doesn’t deviate from its relentless descend into darkness. Sometimes you need a tough-love movie like this to cleanse the cinema palate.

Mark Burns & Fiona Lewis in A DAY AT THE BEACH

But even without Burn’s commanding, wraithlike presence, A DAY AT THE BEACH is worth seeing for other reasons such as the wintry, atmospheric cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (A Hard Day’s Night, Frenzy, Star Wars) that chills you to the bone; child actress Beatrice Edney’s spontaneous, remarkable and completely unaffected performance as the resilient Winnie; and a host of memorable cameos by such distinguished players as Peter Sellers (clearly having fun with a character credited as A. Queen), Eva Dahlbeck (leading lady of such Ingmar Bergman classics as A Lesson in Love, Dreams and Smiles of a Summer Night), Jack MacGowran (famous for his stage roles in the plays of Samuel Beckett and other Polanski films) and Fiona Lewis, whose elegant, sexy presence and wicked sense of humor has added a touch of class to genre films like Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), Stunts (1977), Strange Behavior (1981) and Strange Invaders (1983). I have never quite forgiven Brian De Palma for designing such a grisly, special effects death for her in The Fury though I have read in interviews that Fiona had great fun making that telekinetic gorefest. She is completely deglamorized in A DAY AT THE BEACH and offers further proof that her talents have been underused and wasted in minor parts.

Beatrice Edney & Mark Burns in A DAY AT THE BEACH

Other Links of Interest:

http://witneyman.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/a-day-at-the-beach-1970/

http://www.dvddrive-in.com/reviews/a-d/dayatbeach72.htm

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/36968/day-at-the-beach-1970-a/

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/dayatbeach.php

http://www.mondo-digital.com/tess.html

Bob Dylan in Backtrack aka Catchfire (1990)

Sometimes the casting in a film is so peculiar and unique that you feel compelled to take a chance on it no matter how many negative things you’ve heard about it. Wouldn’t you want to see a movie that featured Jodie Foster, Vincent Price, Joe Pesci, Charlie Sheen, Dean Stockwell, Bob Dylan and numerous other well-known stars? Such is the case with 1990′s Catchfire, one of Dennis Hopper’s least known movies but there’s a reason for that.  

Hopper virtually disowned the film after the production company Vestron Pictures reedited it against his wishes. We’ll never know what his original three hour cut was like but the 98 minute version Vestron released theatrically was savaged by the critics. The 116 minute version released later on DVD and retitled Backtrack didn’t fare much better. The story of a hit man (Dennis Hopper) who falls in love with his intended victim (Jodie Foster), a Los Angeles conceptual artist who witnessed some murders by the mob, is part road movie, part chase thriller, and part oddball romance with a kinky edge. It might even be a satire about the parallels and posturings that occur between the art world and the criminal underground but none of it works on any level. What is fascinating and often entertaining about Backtrack (the version I saw) is the casting. Even if many of the familiar faces on display end up as little more than cameo appearances, there’s a certain pleasure in spotting them in such a bizarre mishmash, especially those at such an early stage in their career like Catherine Keener as a truck driver’s companion.

Catherine Keener, Jodie Foster in Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

Where to start? John Turturro plays a none-too-bright hit man named Pinella who functions mostly as comic relief. His homicidal cohort is none other than Tony Sirico, who is best known as Paulie Gualtieri on the HBO hit series The Sopranos. Both of these thugs are in league with the hot-tempered, aggressive Joe Pesci (he made Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas the same year) and all three report to Dean Stockwell, a Mafia kingpin with a public identity as a lawyer who enjoys inside LAPD connections. Stockwell, in turn, reports to the crime syndicate chieftain Vincent Price.

Dean Stockwell in Backtrack aka Catchfire (1990)

On the side of the law we have Fred Ward as a blundering, barely competent police detective with Sy Richardson (a regular in the films of Alex Cox – Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, Walker) as his equally ineffectual, donut-munching partner. Helene Kallianiotes, the ranting lesbian hitchhiker from Five Easy Pieces, shows up briefly as Pesci’s put-upon mistress and then, of course, there’s Dennis Hopper in the starring role of Milo, the kind of hit man who plays the saxophone (he wants to be Charlie Parker) and has his apartment walls covered with the art of Hieronymus Bosch.

Jodie Foster, Dennis Hopper in BACKTRACK (1990) aka Catchfire

Among the other notable cast members are Charlie Sheen as Jodie Foster’s unlucky boyfriend and Julie Adams (the terrified object of The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Hopper’s co-star in his 1971 experimental epic, The Last Movie) pops up briefly for no rhyme or reason in the Taos, New Mexico portion of Backtrack. I was almost convinced I saw Jamie Foxx as a desk clerk in the police department sequence but IMDB lists his screen debut as Toys, which was released the following year, 1992.

Bob Dylan in Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

Besides the aforementioned Ms. Keener, there are also brief glimpses of choreographer Toni Basil (Hopper’s co-star in Easy Rider and the mastermind behind the 1982 MTV music video hit, “Mickey”), director Alex Cox (who allegedly contributed to the screenplay of Backtrack) and Bob Dylan as a chainsaw-wielding artist reputedly modeled on Venice based California legend, Laddie John Dill. Dylan has zero screen presence as an actor but as himself, he exudes an effortless charisma and mystique. Check him out in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Don’t Look Back or Murray Lerner’s Festival (both 1967) and then compare that to his awkward, uncomfortable performances in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Hearts of Fire (1987) or Masked and Anonymous (2003).

Catchfire (1990) aka Backtrack

Last but not least we have Ms. Foster, who is the true star of Backtrack and has more screen time than anyone else as a Jenny Holzer-like media darling whose LED message board art is the rage of the L.A. gallery scene. It is also one of the few roles of her adult career in which she becomes a highly erotized sex object, viewed through the male gaze of the film’s director. Sporting an ever changing wardrobe that accents her nubile form with special attention paid to her lovely legs, Foster displays a surprising amount of skin including a sensual but subtle nude shower scene. The real topper though is a naughty tete-a-tete between Foster and Hopper as the former slowly strips down to her black lingerie while taunting her kidnapper with comments like “Why don’t I tie you up? That would be exciting.” None of this is the sort of thing you’d expect from an A-list actress like Foster who made Backtrack between The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), both of which won her Best Actress Oscars. While it is true that Foster has taken a lot of risks in her career (mostly the pre-1988 years) with such offbeat indie offering as Carny (1980), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) and Fiesta (1987), Backtrack definitely stands out from the crowd as a true oddity.

Charlie Sheen, Jodie Foster in Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

Unfortunately, there is little sexual chemistry between Hopper and Foster but it would take a brilliant script and an actor other than Hopper to generate the sort of attraction/repulsion needed for this master-slave relationship. The idea of a kidnapped woman falling in love and lust with her abductor/would-be murderer is some sort of romanticized male rape fantasy and it’s been done before more effectively in Robert Aldrich’s lurid The Grissom Gang, which was a remake of the equally lurid 1948 noir, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Probably the biggest problem with Backtrack is the inexplicable and baffling transition between Foster being enraged and miserable to frolicking with abandon in Hopper’s bed. Once they set up housekeeping in a rustic cabin in the mountains of New Mexico with a herd of goats, you start to wonder if you’re watching the same movie. I’m sure Vestron is responsible for the shoddy continuity but it’s impossible to tell if Hopper’s original three hour version could have made this central relationship work.

Dennis Hopper, Jodie Foster in Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

But if Foster and Hopper make unconvincing lovers, they have a loose, spontaneous rapport together on screen which was NOT reflective of their off screen relationship. During the filming of the infamous shower scene, Foster yelled “Cut” when she became dissatisfied with Hopper’s direction. Although she was reprimanded by her director and didn’t do it again, Foster obviously was unhappy with the whole experience. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Hopper later revealed, “I have a problem with Jodie, and it was not a problem when I was working with her and directing her in the movie. She did something that wasn’t very pleasant to me. I had a picture I wanted to use Meryl Streep in, and I wanted to direct her in a movie, and Jodie went out of her way to call her and tell her she shouldn’t work with me, and I can’t really come to grips with that one. I called her a number of times. She’s refused to call me back. It blew what I thought at the time was a go project a few years ago. ‘Cause Meryl suddenly said no. She [Foster] thought I had this AA mentality where I was really just doing this sober drunk or something, and I just couldn’t possibly understand women. But she didn’t say that, confront me with that on the set, so I didn’t know where that was coming from, ’cause I thought I treated her rather well.” (Source: Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel by Peter L. Winkler).

Jodie Foster’s nude shower scene from Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

Next to The Last Movie, Backtrack is probably Hopper’s most compromised and rarely screened feature. And though it is a total mess, there are memorably moments along the way such as a nighttime festival in Taos, New Mexico where a giant effigy is burned (homage to The Wicker Man?), a scene where Foster’s craving for pink Hostess coconut snowballs is appeased by Hopper and the nutty climax where our runaway couple don silver metallic suits and stage an explosive showdown with the mob in an L.A. refinery, shades of White Heat. While the idea of a hit man becoming personally involved with his victim is an intriguing if overly familiar plot device (see Murder by Contract, both versions of The Killers or Hard Contract for reference), Hopper at least gives Backtrack a pop culture shine that separates it from most contemporary film noirs. The color cinematography by Edward Lachman (The Limey, The Virgin Suicides, Far from Heaven) is often stunning and the roadside Americana depicted in New Mexico (the El Cortez Theater, Andy’s La Fiesta Restaurant, the Rio Grande river) and California (the art gallery scene, a goony golf course, a reference to In-N-Out Burger) is fun for armchair tourists. As stated earlier, the quirky casting is a big drawing card here, even if the wildly divergent acting styles result in something closer to a parody than a crime drama/chase thriller. Certainly any Dennis Hopper completist needs to see Backtrack and anyone else curious about this much maligned movie may actually enjoy the ride.

Dennis Hopper in Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

Other Links of Interest:

http://www.showbiz411.com/2011/05/05/jodie-foster-didnt-like-being-directed-by-dennis-hopper

http://www.moviescreenshots.blogspot.com

http://www.thegreatgodpanisdead.com/2013/04/obscure-art-movies-catchfire-aka.html

http://laddiejohndill.com

http://www.jennyholzer.com/

Jodie Foster in disguise in Backtrack (1990) aka Catchfire

The prolific independent filmmaker Les Blank died on April 7, 2013 but somehow that sad news slipped past me. I’m just now reading a host of glowing eulogies and tributes to the man, mostly from fellow filmmakers and critics. He wasn’t ever a household name because his movies rarely received theatrical distribution outside of a few major cities. Unless you happened to catch one on your local PBS station or attended a film festival, which is where most of his work first premiered, there’s a good chance you never even heard of Les Blank. Even though he made more than 40 non-fiction features and shorts, the only Les Blank film you can view on Netflix is Burden of Dreams (1982), his justly famous chronicle of the trouble plagued production of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, filmed on location in the Amazon.     

Lydia Mendoza in Chulas Fronteras (1976) by Les Blank

But any cinephile knows who he is and I remember my first exposure to him was a review of Chulas Fronteras (1976) in the long-out-of-print Canadian film magazine Take One. Like most of his movies, Chulas Fronteras was an exploration and celebration of a niche culture. In this case, the subject was “The Valley,” that stretch of the Rio Grande that runs along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, and the main focus was the music of that region which was a true reflection of the Spanish-speaking inhabitants (many of them migrant workers) who lived there. Whether you call it conjunto or Tex-Mex or musica nortena, the songs and musicians on display in Chulas Fronteras were a revelation to many of us – Flaco Jimenez, Lydia Mendoza, Los Alegres de Teran, Narcisco Martinez, Rumei Fuentes. In fact, music was usually an integral part of Blank’s films and this one, produced by his friend and founder of Arhoolie Records, Chris Strachwitz, was no exception. I caught up with it many years later at a screening at Image Film and Video, a center for independent filmmakers in Atlanta that no longer exists. Blank would be a regular visitor to Image over the years and some of the most popular events were his “smellorama” screenings. Once he cooked up beans and rice in the back of the room while showing Always for Pleasure (1978), his joyous insider look at New Orleans’ rich musical heritage with appearances by such legends as Allen Toussaint and The Wild Tchoupitoulas. Another time he sautéed garlic and olive oil to enhance screenings of his Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980). In addition to his own projects, he also worked as a cinematographer on such captivating and quirky indies as Jean-Pierre Goran’s Poto and Cabengo (1980), Stoney Knows How (1981), Pacho Lane’s look at a master tattoo artist, Leonard ‘Stoney’ St. Clair, and Wild Wheels (1992), a survey of car art directed by Blank’s son, Harrod Blank.

Les Blank at the 1981 Telluride Film Festival (photo by J. Stafford)

My favorite Blank experience was his appearance at the 1981 Telluride Film Festival where he presented rough cuts of two films he was in the process of completing – Sprout Wings and Fly (1983), his portrait of 82 year old Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell, and In Heaven There is No Beer? (1984), an exploration of America’s polka culture. The latter screening occurred on the last night of the festival in the community center (razed long ago) and was followed by a wrap party complete with live polka band and lots of beer. http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/09/05/tiff-1981-flashback/ Another memorable Les Blank encounter was at the 3rd Orphan Film Symposium in 2002, where the filmmaker presented a 16mm print of A Poem is a Naked Person (1974), his suppressed profile of musician Leon Russell which remains unseen to this day due to legal entanglements.

Clifton Chenier in Hot Pepper (1973) by Les Blank

Although he didn’t think of his films as documentaries, that is often how Blank got pigeonholed by reviewers. Some people, though, prefer to think of Blank as an ethnographer and his eye to detail and what to document gives all of his movies a you-are-there intimacy. His longtime editor Maureen Gosling summed it up best in an obit (by Tony Russell) for The Guardian when she called Blank’s movies,”celebrations – looking at the way people survive in their lives above and beyond the struggles. [Many] of his films are about people that are poor, marginal or struggling, but there’s something else going on there … the other human qualities that make life worth living, the music and the food that help these groups and cultures survive”.

Les Blank displaying his 2007 Edward MacDowell medal (photo by his son Harrod Blank)

Certainly Blank was a national treasure even though that honor doesn’t officially exist in the U.S. (It does in Japan). He also never received an Oscar nomination during his lifetime which is another example of the Academy’s on-going tunnel vision. He did, however, receive the prestigious Edward MacDowell medal in 2007 for his achievements in the arts. It was one of the few times the award went to a filmmaker and he joined a not too shabby list of previous winners like Leonard Bernstein, Willa Cather, Aaron Copland, James Baldwin, Studs Terkel and Meredith Monk.

Gap-Toothed Women (1987) by Les Blank

If I had to pick a favorite Les Blank movie, I don’t think I could decide. But for those who have never seen one, I can recommend some places to start. Dry Wood (1973) and Hot Pepper (1973) are wonderful tributes to Zydeco music, with the former a look at black Creole culture in the Louisiana delta and the latter a showcase for Clifton Chenier, the Grammy award winning accordionist. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightning Hopkins (1970) is essential viewing but you could say the same thing about Gap-Toothed Women (1987) or A Well Spent Life (1972), his tribute to Texas guitarist/songwriter/blues musician Mance Lipscomb. The aforementioned Burden of Dreams would make a good double feature with Blank’s short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), in which the eccentric German director loses a bet with filmmaker Errol Morris and performs the title act. And then there are all of the Les Blank films I haven’t seen and look forward to catching some day. You can see bits and pieces of a lot of Blank’s work on YouTube now; Dizzy Gillespie (1965) in its entirety and bits and pieces of J’ai eye au val (1989), The Sun’s Gonna Shine (1969) and others. A much more satisfying option is to visit the official web site – http://www.lesblank.com/ -  where all of his films are available for purchase (except that elusive Leon Russell portrait). But Blank’s films were always best experienced with a live audience of fellow aficionados. That was pure lightning in a bottle. Everyone in the room would be groovin’ to Blank’s alchemy. So what we really need is a Les Blank film festival, one where his entire filmography is programmed. Now that would be a fitting tribute to the man.

Always for Pleasure (1978) by Les Blank

A newlywed couple’s road trip into the countryside grows stranger and stranger and then a deranged Michael J. Pollard shows up, wandering out of the wilderness and clutching a stolen wedding dress. Welcome to Morbo, a 1972 film by Gonzalo Suárez which is in the tradition of other dark, disturbing works by Spanish masters like Luis Bunuel (The Exterminating Angel), Juan Antonio Bardem (Death of a Cyclist) and Carlos Saura (The Hunt).     

Ana Belen & Michael J. Pollard are NOT dancing in this scene from Morbo (1972).

An eerie, not-quite-right tone is established from the start as the camera prowls a sprawling country farmhouse in a state of decay. Vines and weeds are growing over the walls and windows and the rooms look dusty and deserted. But is the place really abandoned? We hear a man and woman having a conversation but the voices could be from an earlier time when they lived in the house. Or perhaps they are ghosts. The woman asks, “Do you like my hands? Do you like my face? Am I well groomed?” The man tries to compliment her but she erupts in anger. “I will never be again as I was before the fire…when my legs weren’t burnt and I attracted men.” We don’t see the couple conversing but their dialogue is punctuated by stark compositions of a shotgun leaning against a wall, an empty wheelchair, rats scurrying cross the floor and outside on the grounds, the charred remains of a forest fire. As the sound of a crackling fire fills the soundtrack, the credits begin over a wedding ceremony in a church.    

We follow the newlywed couple, Alice (Ana Belen) and Diego (Victor Manuel), as they exit the church and drive off in their bright red Sport Coupe with camper attached. Bride and groom drive deep into the countryside for their honeymoon and seem primed for sex and adventure. At a gas station, Alice strips off her wedding dress, revealing her sexy white fishnet bikini underneath while catching the eye of the station attendant. You might think that Alice’s uninhibited behavior is going to have repercussions a la Straw Dogs but Morbo is not that kind of movie. Instead, it toys with formulaic conventions without utilizing them and ends up defying easy categorization. [Spoilers ahead]

Ana Belen & Victor Manuel begin their journey into darkness in Morbo (1972)

The couple drive off the main highway and onto a dirt road, ignoring the private property sign. They set up camp briefly at an arid cul-de-sac and sprawl on the hard earth, drinking champagne and eating food out of tins. Then Diego decides to have a brief look around and after discovering a rotting animal carcass (which he doesn’t mention to Alice), he drives Alice further down the dirt road, arriving at a clearing on the edge of a forest. This unscenic, remote location becomes their honeymoon spot for the next few days. At first the couple is passionate and carefree. They make love, carve their names into a tree, play an erotic game of tag with a large green ball and tear into their wedding gifts with a disrespectful glee. “What rubbish!” Diego mutters as the couple trashes colorful wrapped presents to reveal a Mona Lisa reproduction, a whiskey decanter, a fancy vase, an iron, all of which are discarded on the ground.

Scenes from Morbo (1972)

What begins in a spirit of liberation and spontaneity soon dissolves into something oppressive and ominous over the course of their stay. The couple begin to have petty quarrels that escalate into major confrontations, all of it fanned by a rising fear in Alice of being watched by someone or something (voyeurism becomes a thematic thread running through the movie). Though we occasionally see the couple from a point of view that suggests they are being stalked, director Suárez never confirms that fact which merely heightens the tension. The cliches we expect of the-terrified-couple genre thriller aren’t exploited here. Instead, the creepiness comes from subtle foreboding touches. A strange sound that turns out to be their car’s windshield wipers. Who turned them on? Or finding the bride and groom figurine from their wedding cake floating in a stream. In one scene, Alice pricks her leg on something on the ground and Diego picks up the object, saying, “It’s weird to find a hairpin out here.” It’s just another premonition of strange things to come.

Ana Belen being filmed for a scene in Morbo (1972)

Unlike crazed-rural-family thrillers like The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Morbo is much closer in spirit to one of Ingmar Bergman’s brooding psychological dramas like Hour of the Wolf or The Passion of Anna. There are certainly touches of horror like the scene where Alice witnesses a pet hamster eat its companion, a moment that looks ahead to the nature gone amok paranoia of the Aussie thriller Long Weekend (1978). And the two co-dependent inhabitants of the farmhouse appear to be aroused and excited by the presence of the young lovers, suggesting they might be psychic vampires in the manner of Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey in The Sorcerers (1967). There are also visually striking surreal touches such as the inflatable red and yellow plastic chairs that Diego and Alice use for lounging in a barren field or a wedding cake left in the sun that becomes insect food. Best of all is an odd shot of Alice’s eye peering through a hole in the wall of the farmhouse as she sees and hears the bizarre phantom couple talking about her: “Always naked. Her clean skin exposed to the sun.”   

But the central focus of Morbo is the disintegrating relationship of the newlyweds who begin to drop their masks, revealing their true natures as the situation becomes more abnormal. Alice, the more perceptive and reactionary of the two, begins to realize early on that she and Diego don’t communicate well when they are cut off from all human contact. Even though they are free of social conventions in this remote natural setting and can make their own rules, the couple doesn’t become more intimate, they become estranged, even though Alice verbalizes this concern to Diego. “There are so many things to say about us but who dares to say them?”.

Victor Manuel plays an economist on his honeymoon doing homework in Morbo (1972).

Suárez’s exploration of the dynamics between Alice and Diego is what drives the narrative and keeps it compelling, even when it occasionally crosses the line into arty pretentiousness. And even though the climax feels rushed and not completely satisfying, Morbo stands out as an intriguing mixture of the commercial and the experimental. Like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the film casts a strange, otherworldly spell and remains an enigma despite a resolution that sends Alice and Diego back to their bourgeois world, obviously changed forever by their experience.   

Ana Belen, who has a successful singing career under the name Maria del Pilar Cuesta Acosta, is perfectly cast as the impulsive and highly emotional Alice while Victor Manuel is completely convincing as the priggish, self-absorbed Diego. In real life, the two actors fell in love during the filming of Morbo and married (they are still together and have two children). Manuel was a well established singer-songwriter when he met Belen and had only appeared in one TV movie. He would co-star with his wife in one more film after Morbo – Al diablo, con amor (1972), which was also directed by Gonzalo Suárez. After that, he abandoned acting in favor of music scoring and composing for films and television shows.

Michael J. Pollard in Morbo (1972)

The real wild card in Morbo is Michael J. Pollard, who was enjoying a career high after the success of Bonnie and Clyde (1966). Morbo was made between Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), in which he co-starred with Robert Redford, and Dirty Little Billy (1972), an offbeat western in which he played the title role (Billy the Kid). He doesn’t make a proper appearance in Morbo until the final scenes of the movie and has maybe two lines of dialogue but his distinctly unique screen presence is well suited for a role that is basically a cipher. At the end, when he returns the wedding dress he stole from the couple’s car, you can’t tell if his self-amused smile is malevolent or good-natured. Nor can you tell if his intentions toward Alice in the camper are truly threatening or a matter of childlike curiosity.

This is NOT a remake of The Long, Long Trailer. This is Morbo (1972).

In a role that is just as much a blank slate, Maria Vico plays Pollard’s blind, wheelchair-bound companion. She remains a tragic but shadowy figure until her shotgun-wielding finale. Vico should look familiar to fans of Eurotrash genre films, having appeared in numerous supporting roles in movies like Jess Franco’s 99 Women (1969), the spaghetti Western Light the Fuse…Sartana is Coming (1970) and Jorge Grau’s horror drama Ceremonia sangrienta (1973, aka The Legend of Blood Castle).   

Morbo is the only film by Suárez I have seen but I am more than curious to see others. Unfortunately, there are very few options in the U.S. Netflix only carries two of his films – El Portico (2000), the story of a soccer player in the post-Spanish Civil War era circa 1948, and Rowing With the Wind (1988), starring Hugh Grant in a film about Percy Shelley, his mistress Mary, her stepsister Claire and Lord Byron at Lake Geneva (Ken Russell’s covered the same subject matter earlier in 1986′s Gothic). For those who want to see Morbo, you can purchase a very good subtitled, letterboxed print from ETC (European Trash Cinema) at CLJcl@aol.com.

Ana Belen eavesdrops on a disturbing conversation about her and her husband in Morbo (1972).

Outside of a small circle of film historians and movie buffs, Suárez remains relatively unknown in the U.S. and even Morbo (English title: Morbidness) isn’t that well known in his own country. After a successful career as a sports writer and journalist, he established himself as an author of avant-garde literature, publishing his first novel in 1963. Not long afterwards, he began dabbling in filmmaking and soon became part of a group known as the “Barcelona School,” which included directors Ricardo Bofill, Vicente Aranda and Joaquin Jordá, among others. Although Suárez was not from Barcelona, he claimed the city as his home and shared his fellow filmmakers’ interest in dark fantasies and metaphysical narratives. His first feature film, Ditirambo (1969), in which he also stars as the title character, a brooding, cerebral detective hero, set the tone for the unorthodox features that followed. El extrano case del doctor Fausto (The Strange Case of Doctor Faust), in which he played Mephistopheles, was his own personal take on Christopher Marlowe’s famous story and Aoom (1970), which was never released theatrically, are considered high points of Spanish avant-garde cinema. Suárez’s later work, though more accessible and less challenging, was often adapted from famous literary works such as Moliere’s Don Juan in Hell (1991), probably his most highly regarded film, and Mi hombre es sombra (My Name is Shadow, 1996), which is based on Robert Luis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ironically, Suárez is probably best known to American audiences as an actor; he played the alcoholic writer with a Hitler fixation in Pedro Almodovar’s What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). Suárez is still active and working today; his last effort to date is the screenplay for The Sale of Paradise (2012).

Director Gonzalo Suarez plays the title role in his film debut, Ditirambo (1969).

Other websites of interest:

http://mubi.com/films/ditirambo

http://www.spainisculture.com/en/artistas_creadores/gonzalo_suarez.html

http://kinomusorka.ru/en/directors-director-gonzalo-suarez-films-film-remando-al-viento.html

http://spanish_cinema.enacademic.com/213/Suárez,_Gonzalo

http://www.giantbomb.com/gonzalo-suarez/3040-27197/

http://worldscinema.org/2012/07/gonzalo-suarez-morbo-aka-morbidness-1972/

http://mubi.com/lists/50-spanish-films

Aoom (1970) – Gonzalo Suarez’s most experimental film

Forry Ackerman in his guest room at the Ackermansion (1998) photo by J.Stafford

I never would have imagined when I was a geeky eleven year old kid hooked on Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine that I would one day meet the brainiac behind it – Forrest J. Ackerman – and be invited inside the world famous Ackermansion. It happened while I was visiting friends in Los Angeles in February 1998.   

Beverly, an old high school friend living in Los Angeles, knew I was addicted to horror films after being dragged to a few that she regretted (Blackenstein, Armando Crispino’s The Dead Are Alive, and Roman Polanski’s ultra-violent MacBeth, which qualifies as a horror film). When I first talked to her about visiting, she casually mentioned that Ackerman had an open house at his home on Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz every Saturday for his fans (It was located in the Lincoln Park area of L.A., not far from the Griffith Park Observatory). So that was one activity that became a must on my list and I made sure to pack a favorite Famous Monsters of Filmland issue (no. 30) for a photo op.

The day finally arrived and our group, consisting of me, my wife Beth, Beverly and her housemate Shohanna, made our way up a winding road to the top of a hill overlooking the Los Feliz neighborhood and there it stood – the famous Ackermansion. To my surprise there was not a big mob at the door waiting for Forry to show his face. Instead, there were only a few fan boys milling about, one of whom was a college student from Japan who barely spoke a few words of English.

The Ackermansion on Glendower Avenue in Los Angeles (1998) photo by J. Stafford

Eventually someone appeared at the door – a personal assistant perhaps – and beckoned us inside. We were led to a large study with a wide window view of the city below and there was Forry, ready to hold court. He couldn’t have been more welcoming or friendly and told us to look around and ask him any questions. Receiving female visitors at the Ackermansion was probably a refreshing change from the usual fan boy which might explain why Forry came over to Bev, Sho and Beth right away and offered to give us a personal tour of his house/museum.

Sho & Forry but who’s that in the middle? (1998, photo by J. Stafford)

He seemed particularly taken with Sho and before we left that day he was flirting with her in Esperanto.

The view from Forry Ackerman’s study at his Los Angeles home on Glendower Avenue (1998) photo by B. Boston

Forry mentioned his late wife Wendy (Wendayne) several times and said how much he missed her. They were on a vacation in Europe in 1990 and while visiting Italy she was mugged and suffered a head injury that resulted in her death not long afterwards. I had never heard this sad story before and it was obvious that Forry was still grieving for her as if it happened yesterday. His mood brightened though when Sho asked (with a wink) where he slept in this maze of memorabilia and he resumed the tour.

One of many shelves filled with collectibles at The Ackermansion (1998) photo by J. Stafford

I recall going into a guest room at the top of some stairs. It was hard to forget because the room was dominated by two standees – one of Marlene Dietrich, posing as Lola Lola from The Blue Angel, the other Marilyn Monroe in a clingy lavender outfit from either Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or How to Marry a Millionaire.  At the time, a fan boy from Europe was staying in the guest room. According to most people who knew Forry well, it was not at all unusual for him to invite Famous Monsters fans into his home to browse around or even stay there while visiting Los Angeles. He was a kind, trusting soul and his generosity was sometimes taken advantage of. Over the years, some of his archival treasures went missing and, in one instance, a so-called fan tried to sell Forry’s sound disc of Frankenstein that he had stolen back to him. “Every once in awhile my heart would be broken when something would disappear,” Ackerman admitted in an article in The Daily Mirror by Hilary E. MacGregor. “My wife used to say, ‘What have they stolen now? Why do you let all these strangers come?’ But what’s the use of having 300,000 interesting things if I just sit up here, a crotchety old codger in his house on the hill.”

Forry Ackerman at his home in Los Angeles on Glendower Avenue (1998) photo by J. Stafford

There had been a major rainstorm recently and Forry complained about some leaks in the roof that had resulted in some water damage to his collection. So much of the memorabilia in the Ackermansion included paper material – books, magazines, paperbacks, posters – and there was no denying a pervasive smell of dampness and mildew, obviously the result of the leaks. But for the most part, the wealth of material on display was still in good shape and overwhelming to an almost claustrophobic degree with rooms filled with floor to ceiling displays that made for tight quarters. It was said that he had over 50,000 books and 100,000 film stills and memorabilia.

From the Collection of Forrest J. Ackerman at the famous Ackermansion (1998) photo by J. Stafford

During his lifetime Ackerman had received offers from investors to sell his collection but nothing ever panned out. When his health began to fail and he moved into a small bungalow in 2002 that he dubbed “The Acker Mini-Mansion,” he tried again to sell the collection in its entirety but no one made an offer so he began selling it piecemeal. I always thought some of the successful Hollywood directors he had influenced and inspired as kids such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would come forward with the money to create a museum in his horror but this never happened.

The fiberglass replica of Maria the Robotrix from Metropolis in Forry Ackerman’s collection (1998) photo b J. Stafford

Forry died on December 4, 2008 at age 92 and, on May 2, 2009, the remainder of his collectibles went on sale at an auction where it garnered a quarter of a million dollars. Among the prized possessions sold were a fiberglass replica of Maria the Robotrix from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which had been built by special effects artist Bill Malone ($40,000), the top hat worn by Lon Chaney in London After Midnight ($27,500) and a nude statue of Marlene Dietrich which Forry had commissioned ($9,000).

From the private collection of Forrest J. Ackerman (1998) photo by J. Stafford

I’ll always feel grateful for the opportunity to have met Forry and to have been a guest in his Ackermanion. Like many other kids my age, he was the one who fed our fantasy life and taught us so much about the horror and sci-fi (a term he coined) film genres through Famous Monsters of Filmland and other publications like Monster World. I can still remember my initial discovery of Forry’s trailblazing horror fanzine in July of 1962. I was visiting Dalton, Georgia during my family’s annual summer trip there to see my grandparents and relatives. There was a newspaper/magazine store downtown called Ace News where my older brother liked to go and check out the baseball cards. We went there one July day and I saw this magazine on the rack with a cover that immediately grabbed me. The leering, hideous face was an artistic rendering of Dwight Frye from his role as Renfield in 1931′s Dracula but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that I had to have that magazine. It was particularly odd to have discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland at a newstand in small town Dalton, Georgia and not in my home, Richmond, Virginia, where it should have been available in any comic or magazine shop but….gaining access to the world of Forry was the important thing.

In some ways, buying that first issue (number 18, published July 1962) was a transformative experience for me. I poured over the thing, studying the photos, reading the articles and fantasizing about all the merchandise that was sold in the magazine’s back pages which my parents would deny me no matter how much I tried to negotiate – “Genuine Official U.S. Government Surplus Astronaut Space Suit,” “Own a Pair of Mated Live Sea Horses,” “Tremendous 30 Ft. Balloons,” “A Complete Set of 5 Different Monster Rings” and countless horror masks, 8mm movies, models and horror soundtrack albums.

A typical ad page from Famous Monsters of Filmland

I still have that first Famous Monsters of Filmland purchase, although in a much more ragged form; the cover is now unattached, the pages are yellow but I can still remember the impact the content had on me. That #18 issue also made me want to write about movies, thanks to an article called “Dante’s Inferno” by future director Joe Dante, who would have been around fifteen years old at the time. He presented his candidates for the top 50 worst fantasy films of all time and I was inspired to write tiny caption reviews next to some of his on the pages. For example, on Rodan, which he dismissed as “another routine (Japanese) prehistoric-monster-on-the-loose melodrama, inferior to many U.S. productions,” I penciled in “good; special effects, screenplay, etc. at its best.” Ya can’t get much nerdier than that. I wonder how Dante feels about that list now since some of the films he deemed as the worst have endured as favorite cult items like The Blob, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Famous Monsters of Filmland article by teenage fan Joe Dante (issue #18, 1962)

When I visited Forry that February in 1998, I got him to sign my worn copy of issue number 30 showcasing Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Instead of putting his signature on the cover, however, Forry suggested a better place to put it and turned to an article called “Werewolf in Monsterland” about monster fanatic Val Warren and his trip to Horrorwood (as Forry called it) for winning the Famous Monsters of Filmland’s makeup contest. At the left top corner of a photo featuring AIP president James Nicholson, Val Warren in werewolf makeup, and guess who?, Forry signed his name and then drew a little arrow pointing to his head, just in case I forgot who he was. Fat chance.

My Forrest J. Ackerman signed copy of FMoF issue #30

Other Links of Interest:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/07/forrest-ackerman-science-fiction-obituary

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/forrest-j-ackermans-scary-treasures-go-to-the-auction-block/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_J_Ackerman

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/12/voices—-forre.html?cid=142342488#comments

Tour of his house

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/17/life-after-death-project-forest-j-ackerman_n_3280368.html

http://www.unknowncountry.com/insight/ackerman-enigma-strange-case-forrest-j-ackerman-paul-davids

http://famousmonsterforrestjackerman.blogspot.com/

Forry and me at the Ackermansion with FMoF issue #30 (photo by B. Boston, 1998)

Owen Wilson in The Minus Man (1999)

“Once when I was young I was lying in the grass and a spider crawled in my ear…and it crawled out again. Nobody home.” – Vann Siegert

The depiction of serial killers in movies tends to be unconditionally violent, horrific and sensationalized when you’re dealing with real and fictitious murderers like Son of Sam, The Boston Strangler, John Wayne Gacy and Hannibal Lecter. But Vann Siegert, the protagonist of The Minus Man (Hampton Fancher’s 1999 movie adaptation based on the 1991 Lew McCreary novel), doesn’t fit the standard serial killer profile. With his boyish charm, personable manner and disarming sense of humor, you’d never suspect on first impressions that he is a dangerous sociopath. But not dangerous in the predictable way. Instead of indulging in various forms of cruelty like mutilation, torture or rape, Vann is non-violent in his methods. He likes to dispatch his victims, both women and men, with amaretto, spiked with a lethal poison derived from a rare plant fungus. And why does he do this? Vann doesn’t always know the reasons himself but it has something to do with his search for meaning in the universe. It’s as if he’s an alien from another galaxy trying to comprehend human behavior.   

Unlike any other serial killer portrait produced by a Hollywood studio, The Minus Man is alternately lyrical, melancholy, and slyly subversive in its intimate depiction of small town life seen through the eyes of a newly arrived visitor. Think Shadow of a Doubt told from Joseph Cotten’s viewpoint….except much stranger. Slowly paced but mesmerizing in its pursuit of the odd detail, the film vanished without a trace from movie theaters almost immediately upon its release.

Part of the problem might have been the below pre-release teaser which showed a couple leaving a screening of the film and arguing about it for hours via a series of dissolves set to incongruous banjo music:
Guy: It’s like the Heart of Darkness meets Gilligan’s Island.
Girl: C’mon, inside he loved these people. There’s a part of him that cared.

…and so on until the girl looks at her date’s watch and dashes off without an explanation. She’s late for her lifeguard duties at an indoor pool and when she arrives, she sees two lifeless bodies floating in the water. The trailer ends with the text: Careful, you can talk about it for hours.

The odd thing about this lo-fi approach is that it makes perfect sense AFTER you’re seen The Minus Man but it conveys little of the film’s compelling tonal shifts, evocative atmosphere or unsettling storyline (no clips from the movie are shown) to audiences who knew nothing about the title. You have to give the marketing folks credit for originality but they have to share the blame for the boxoffice disconnect as well. Obviously they were charged with an almost impossible task because the film is simply too offbeat, intelligent and idiosyncratic to appeal to a mass audience.

The official film trailer, on the other hand, plays it up as a thriller and is peppered with enough spoilers to kill any mystique it might have had. There is that amazing, one-of-a-kind cast. That should have generated some buzz. Owen Wilson was a rising star at the time and the supporting players were an inspired mix of seasoned character actors (Brian Cox, Mercedes Ruehl, Dennis Haysbert) and performers with cult followings (Janeane Garofalo, Dwight Yoakam, Meg Foster). There was also the curiosity value of seeing singer Sheryl Crow in her dramatic film debut. Yet, despite some excellent reviews from such major critics as Andrew Sarris and Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, The Minus Man failed to attract audiences.

Owen Wilson in The Minus Man (1999)

Maybe the turnoff was Owen Wilson in the title role. Is it possible that Wilson’s fans simply refused to accept him as a serial killer or had no interest in seeing him in such a part? I think this might be one of the finest performances he’s given. Everything that makes Wilson so spontaneously funny and appealing in films like Bottle Rocket, Meet the Parents and Zoolander is off kilter here; all of his endearing traits suddenly become suspect and affected in this portrayal. That open, unselfconscious smile becomes a frozen clinched-teeth grin. The eyes squint in puzzlement or apprehension, not amusement. And Wilson’s attempts to socialize often seem rehearsed like his anecdote about the spider or result in supremely weird responses to questions like why he doesn’t like lakes: “Lakes are like stepping into someone else’s underwear.” What? The fact that so few of the people he encounters pick up on these things suggests that everyone is guilty of self-absorption…and a major reason why the more cunning serial killers evade detection for so long. [Spoilers ahead]

Sheryl Crow & Owen Wilson in The Minus Man (1999)

Told from Vann’s point of view and occasionally narrated by him in voiceover, the story offers no backstory from the get-go. We know next to nothing about Vann when he first stops at a bar and hooks up with a down-and-out drug addict named Casper (Crow) who becomes his first victim. There are indications that Vann might think his actions are benevolent, especially in the case of people like Casper who seem bent on self-destruction anyway. “I’ve never done anything violent to anybody,” Vann muses. “Just the minimum that was necessary. No fear, no pain. They just go to sleep. But after it’s done, there’s no going back. No second choice. If I made a mistake, I’ll pay for it.” 

It’s quite possible that Vann sometimes sees himself as some angel of mercy who is putting tormented people out of their misery like the purpose-driven, homicidal aunts of Arsenic and Old Lace. Like that popular farce, The Minus Man has its moments of black comedy but the overall impression is one of existential angst. “You don’t always chose what you do. Sometimes what you do choses you.”

Mercedes Ruehl & Brian Cox in The Minus Man (1999)

A sleepy little town on the Pacific Northwest coast becomes the setting for Vann’s new adventure (the novel was set in the fictitious town of Bledsoe, Massachusetts). He finds a room for rent in the home of Jane and Doug, a miserable married couple, and soon finds part-time work at the post office which helps ground him in routine. People seem drawn to Vann because he’s friendly, non-judgmental and, most of all, a good listener. “I feel like a light in the dark. They come to me like moths because I shine.” His presence in town brings out a confessional nature in the most needy people in the community, most of whom seem to be projecting onto Vann what they want him to be. For Jane and Doug, the new boarder provides a welcome distraction from their dysfunctional marriage and feelings of grief over their absent daughter (Is she dead? A runaway from home? Or did she move away and cut off all communication from them?).

Brian Cox (left) in The Minus Man (1999)

Doug, in particular, seems to derive his only happiness from taking a paternal interest in Vann’s life and living through the athletic victories of Gene, the high school football star. In a drunken moment, Doug drops the mask and says, “I’m not so well off as I act. My life’s not that hot. If it wasn’t for Gene there, they’d be no hope, none at all.” But Vann has already sized up Doug, revealing in voiceover, “I take the natural momentum of a person and draw it toward me. The most important part about understanding someone is knowing whether they can hurt you or not. Doug can’t hurt anybody. Not as he is.” But Vann is no psychologist and Doug turns out to have a dark side no one could have suspected.

Janeane Garofalo & Owen Wilson in The Minus Man (1999)

Ferrin, the desperately lonely postal worker who befriends Vann, is another needy soul who sees the new stranger in town as a potential boyfriend. Things don’t pan out that way but their awkward, on-and-off relationship might be the closest Vann comes to making a genuine human connection. Ironically, the only people who really seem to “get” Vann exist in his subconscious and only appear during his occasional blackouts. Are these two detectives (Yoakam and Haysbert) paranoid hallucinations, pursuers from his past or prophetic representatives of Vann’s impending capture? It’s never spelled out – nothing is, it’s part of the film’s appeal – but it does provide some absurdist humor at Vann’s expense. In one of the weirder, David Lynch-like moments, Vann tells the detectives, “I’ve got seven expressions but I’ll show you two of them if you want to see ‘em.” With that, he does a facial contortion of silent rage, then turns sideways and repeats it in profile, causing Yoakum to say with dry sarcasm, “That’s not bad except number two looks an awful lot like number one.” According to McCreary, the book’s author, the two detectives were manifestations of Vann’s conscience to “let him know he’s flying a little close to the flame.”

Dwight Yoakum & Dennis Haysbert in The Minus Man (1999)

Director Hampton Fancher, who also adapted the screenplay from McCreary’s novel, draws the viewer slowly into Vann’s private world and rarely takes a false step. The one minor exception is a music video-like sequence of Vann and Ferrin enjoying a day at the beach which is out of synch with the rest of the film but mercifully brief.

Director Hampton Fancher, The Minus Man (1999)

In an interview, Fancher made a telling comment about Vann’s character describing him as “a cross between Psycho‘s Norman Bates, Melville’s Billy Budd and Being There‘s Chauncey Gardner.” He also emphasized that Vann “is true innocence, true goodness, he’s an angel. But he embodies also a dark thing that he can’t control; it controls him at times. I think that’s the story of mankind.” Fancher’s cinematic approach to The Minus Man also reflects the influence of The Ladykillers, Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and other non-traditional approaches to the crime genre.

While Wilson clearly deserved kudos and critical acclaim for his performance, the supporting cast of The Minus Man is uniformly excellent throughout with Garofalo, Cox and Ruehl adding great shading and depth to characters that might have become stereotypes in the hands of lesser actors. There are also plenty of familiar faces on display such as John Carroll Lynch as the bartender in the opening scene (he was one of the prime suspects in David Fincher’s Zodiac) and Meg Foster, who has a wonderfully bizarre cameo as a painter who lures Vann to her home so she can sketch him. Vann’s psychic vibe tells him she is even stranger than he is – you can tell that by her grotesque paintings – and he flees her house. As for Sheryl Crow, her brief appearance as a broken down junkie is too low key to determine if she has any genuine acting talent or not. And you have to wonder what attracted her to such a small, unglamorous part for her dramatic debut. Maybe it was just the opportunity to work with Wilson and be involved in such an offbeat independent venture. The fact that she hasn’t pursued serious dramatic roles since The Minus Man suggests that this was just an experiment or a lark.

Meg Foster in The Minus Man (1999)

According to Fancher, he had to cut forty-five minutes out of The Minus Man though I think the current 111 minute version is almost perfect and grows richer with each viewing. To date, The Minus Man remains Fancher’s only directorial effort. He is best known among sci-fi fans for co-authoring the screenplay for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) but people born before 1960 know him as an actor. Fancher appeared in countless TV shows between 1959 and 1978 and had a handful of memorable supporting movie roles in Parrish (1961), Rome Adventure (1962) and The Other Side of the Mountain (1975). His other claim to fame is his brief marriage to Sue Lyon (1963-1965) shortly after the release of Lolita (1962). Fancher was the first of her five husbands.

Sue Lyon & Hampton Fancher

Not all critics were favorably disposed toward The Minus Man when it was released in 1999. Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle called it “a half-baked disappointment” that “never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.” Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club wrote, “The Minus Man leaves so many questions hanging in the air that its strangeness ends up more intriguing then substantive.” And Stephen Holden of The New York Times said the film “takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat…the movie is too stripped of feeling (beyond a lurking sense of imminent doom) to be terribly engaging.”

Owen Wilson & Janeane Garofalo in The Minus Man (1999)

Ok, so they obviously saw a different movie than I did. But I’m not alone in my high regard for the movie. Glenn Lovell of Variety called it a “muted, anything-but-obvious psychological thriller Hitchcock would have loved…compelling and creepy enough to become a sleeper on the art-house circuit…Dynamite fadeout is the stuff of classic Hitchcock-Roald Dahl twist endings.” Roger Ebert revised his opinion from his original review to call it “a psychological thriller of uncommon power maybe because it’s so quiet and devious.” Andrew Sarris wrote, “A surging undercurrent of black comedy drives us out to sea without ever breaking to the surface with glib psychological or sociological explanations.” And Kevin Thomas’s review for the Los Angeles Times might have been the inspiration for The Minus Man‘s unusual pre-release trailer: “It is above all such an unsettling experience you find yourself still taking it all in well after the lights have gone up.”Other websites of interest:

http://www.salon.com/1999/10/02/fancher/

http://www.uncleanarts.com/writing/interviews/hampton-fancher.htm

http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/m/minusman.htm

http://variety.com/1999/film/reviews/minus-man-1200456386/

http://www.newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/99august/mcceary.htm

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/forum/1000031/the-minus-man

http://www.popmatters.com/feature/fancher-hampton/

The premiere of the documentary OSWALD’S GHOST at the Texas Theatre in 2007

50 years ago today Lee Harvey Oswald ran into the Texas Theatre in Dallas to hide after shooting police officer J.D. Tippit.  The Texas Theatre was showing a double feature that day (November 22, 1963) – WAR IS HELL (1963), a low-budget, Korean War drama directed by Burt Topper and narrated by Audie Murphy, and CRY OF BATTLE (1963), Irving Lerner’s small scale WWII/Pacific Campaign actioner with James MacArthur, Van Heflin and Rita Moreno.    Allegedly, WAR IS HELL was on the screen when Oswald entered the theatre around 1:40 p.m. though reports on his arrival time vary. He had been followed to the theatre – where he entered without paying – by a shoe store clerk next door who had noticed his suspicious behavior after hearing an all-points bulletin from the police. The shoe store clerk, alerted the ticket seller who made an emergency phone call and within minutes at least 30 police squad cars arrived on the scene.

The Texas Theatre, Nov. 1963

The theater house lights were turned on and Officer Maurice N. McDonald was the first to confront Oswald, who was sitting at the back of the theater in one of the last three rows. McDonald said he heard Oswald mutter, “Well, it’s all over now,” before striking him with his fist. A shuffle ensued and Oswald was soon handcuffed and taken into police custody in what must have been one of the strangest interruptions to ever occur during a show at the Texas Theatre.

Since President Kennedy had been shot at approximately 12:30 p.m. that day, the patrons in the theater (reportedly less than 15) were probably completely unaware of what was happening outside since they were already at the matinee. I also have to wonder what was flashing through Oswald’s mind as he stared at WAR IS HELL, the feature in progress. Conspiracy theorists surmise that The Texas Theatre was a pre-determined meeting place after the shooting for Oswald and another conspirator. One thing is fairly certain though; Oswald had no inkling that WAR IS HELL would be the last movie he would ever attend.

Lee Harvey Oswald

When I was working on Joe Bob Brigg’s Monstervision franchise for TNT in the ’90s, circa 1996-97, we would often fly out to Dallas for the production shoots. Although we rarely had extra time to explore Dallas, we did make it to the Sixth Floor Museum in the former Texas Book Depository and the Conspiracy Museum (now closed) in the Katy Building (just across the street from the Kennedy Memorial). We even drove past the Texas Theatre which was closed due to a fire that had gutted it in 1995.

The boxoffice at the Texas Theatre in Dallas

The art deco theater first opened in 1931, amid a public ceremony presided over by billionaire Howard Hughes, and was touted as “the first air-conditioned theatre in Dallas.” The Texas eventually shut its doors in 1989 due to decreasing attendance and city residents’ flight to the suburbs where moviegoers preferred the multiplex experience to the single screen one.

The Texas Theatre in the 1930s

The Texas Theatre Historical Society (TTHS) raised money to keep it from the wrecking ball and Oliver Stone was allowed to remodel the exterior for use in his 1990 film, JFK. Then, in 1992, a former usher at the theatre, Don Dubois, took over the lease from TTHS, only to see the Texas completely gutted by a fire in 1995.

The Texas Theatre as it appears today (photo by Mona Reeder, Dallas News)

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 and was occasionally used for special events but reopened to the public after a major refurbishing in 2010 under the ownership of Aviation Cinema. It now functions as an art house cinema. The seat where Oswald sat (the fifth row from the aisle in the third to last row) has been immortalized as you can see here.

Lee Harvey Oswald sat here at the Texas Theatre on Nov. 22, 1963

To get a more detailed history of the Texas Theatre, check out this link http://www.unvisiteddallas.com/archives/2217   In an appropriate twist of fate, the theatre was chosen in 2007 to host a screening of Robert Stone’s fascinating documentary about the lone gunman, OSWALD’S GHOST, which was originally broadcast on PBS.  If you visit the Texas Theatre website today, you’ll see that they are paying tribute to their past with, appropriately enough, a double feature of WAR IS HELL and CRY OF BATTLE. For better or worse, the Texas Theatre will be forever linked with Oswald and the JFK assassination. And so will the last movie Oswald saw.

I sometimes wonder what my last picture show will be.

* This post originally appeared on TCM’s official blog, Movie Morlocks, in a slightly altered version.    SOURCES:

http://www.unvisiteddallas.com/archives/2217

http://thetexastheatre.com/

http://www.oakclifffoundation.org/

http://www.oswaldsghost.com/Site/Oswalds_Ghost_.html

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/11/28/texas-theatre-where-oswald-was-caught-re-opens/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2007/08/11/the-underexposed-cinema-of-irving-lerner-part-two/

The Texas Theatre interior circa the ’60s

Now in its 26th year, the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville might not enjoy the high profile of Sundance or Telluride but that’s actually to its credit. While the latter festivals continue to introduce important new filmmakers and work to audiences, the media attention and crowds they attract can often be exhausting and even competitive for attendees trying to get into a select screening. That is not yet the case with VFF which continues to take a relaxed, laid back approach to film festivals despite an ambitious schedule of almost 100 screenings. Very rarely do you have to contend with long lines or sold-out shows. Nor do you often encounter the entertainment press getting priority treatment or trying to impress you with celebrity name-dropping in cellphone conversations that you can’t avoid at other major film industry events.   

The Regal Theater, Charlottesville downtown mall, site of Virginia Film Festival 2013

The majority of the venues are located in the downtown mall area of Charlottesville – the Paramount and the Regal Theater (which has four screens devoted to the festival) – with two large screening spaces located on the University of Virginia campus in the Culbreth and Newcomb auditoriums. The only disadvantage for out-of-town attendees is that you will need a car if you plan to attend any screenings on the UVA campus as the Culbreth and Newcomb locations are too far from the mall area by foot.

Alfred Hitchcock on the set of THE BIRDS

This year the festival took place Thursday, Nov. 7-Sunday Nov. 10 and I was able to catch six films during a visit with family members who live in the area. Among the screenings I attended were Le Joli Mai, Gloria, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, A Single Shot, The Missing Picture, and Our Nixon. The festival usually offers an eclectic mix of new documentaries, international and independent fare and selected retrospective programming such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (with actress Tippi Hedren present to discuss her experience making the film), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Court Jester, Walt Disney’s animated version of Peter Pan, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and the rarely seen 2010 comedy MacGruber (based on the sketch comedy character created by Will Forte on SLN; Forte was one of the guests at VFF).   Several of the new films were hot off the festival circuit, arriving with critical kudos and notoriety from Cannes and other festivals, such as Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color, The Invisible Woman (directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes), Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, The Past (Asghar Farhadi’s follow up to his Oscar-winning A Separation), August: Asage Country (the Meryl Streep-Julia Roberts comedy-drama adapted by Tracey Letts (Killer Joe, Bug) from his own play and the much-anticipated documentary, The Armstrong Lie. My strategy is usually to avoid these high profile titles because I know they’ll receive theatrical distribution in the weeks ahead. Instead I try to seek out the films that won’t be readily accessible for some time or might not even find distribution at all.  One of the major revelations for me was the revival of Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s landmark documentary, Le Joli Mai (1963). Restored and re-edited by Marker in 2009 (he died in 2012), the film, assembled from over 55 hours of footage, now has a running time of 146 minutes (though it once existed in versions that varied between seven and twenty hours in length); To add to the confusion, IMDB lists the original running time as 165 minutes. This is a deceptively unconventional portrait of Paris and French culture at a pivotal turning point in the country’s history. What seems like unadorned man-on-the-street interviews and brief snapshots of that particular place and time begin to take shape as a critique of France by the filmmakers who don’t assert their own opinions into the mix. Yet you can almost feel their amusement, empathy, cynicism or displeasure with their subjects from the questions that are asked and the way in which Le Joli Mai is edited. Clearly influenced by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Le Joli Mai follows a similar open air, public inquiry approach to its subject, which in turn inspired such American documentaries as Inquiring Nuns (1968) by Gordon Quinn, the founder of Kartemquin films and co-producer of Hoop Dreams (1994).

Le Joli Mai (1963)

This marked the first time France hadn’t been involved in a war since 1939; their eight year attempt to control and suppress Algeria in its struggle for independence had come to an end in 1962. Yet, many of the Parisians interviewed on the streets, in their homes or shops seem apathetic or uninterested in politics as if it has no bearing on their lives or is simply beyond their control so why care?

Le Joli Mai (1963)

Marker and Lhomme’s interviewing technique may seem formulaic at first with interview subjects being asked similar questions. But often their responses trigger more probing questions that reveal racial tensions, frustrations over a rigid class system and dysfunctional bureaucracy or a general social myopia about the changing world around them. A men’s clothes salesman complains that he has become a workaholic because of his nagging wife’s demands for more money. A newlywed couple look forward to a happy future without apparent fears or anxieties even though the young husband (an enlisted soldier) is about to be sent to Algeria. A married couple with nine children living in a one room hovel are overjoyed at receiving news from the city housing authority that they have been approved for relocation to a slightly larger apartment. An African immigrant describes how the priests at his school tried to convert him to Catholicism by denigrating the religious beliefs of his native land which he had practiced since childhood. A teenage boy reveals his desired career path of working in an auto shop. Is that the height of your ambition the filmmakers ask to which the boy adds he might work his work up to assistant manager before finally becoming the auto shop owner. And then what?, the interviewer inquires further. The boy looks puzzled as if there is no further advancement possible. Perhaps a blue collar job as a gas station attendant really is his goal but this is just one of many interviews that suggests that some French working class people were conditioned to think of their career options in terms of class hierarchy.

Le Joli Mai (1963)

It’s an endlessly fascinating but not always positive portrait of a nation on the cusp of major change. The turbulent nature of the mid-to-late sixties with riots, demonstrations, political upheaval and more is bubbling just under the surface here, soon to explode. If an American filmmaker had set out to capture the opinions of say, random people on the streets of New York in 1963, would the outcome have mirrored this same sense of fragmentation and lack of national unity? It’s hard to say but it would be hard to match Marker and Lhomme’s sheer artistry.

Le Joli Mai (1963)

Despite the seriousness of the topics discussed, there is a casual, almost upbeat tone to Le Joli Mai which often finds ironic humor in juxtapositions like nightclubbers doing the Madison followed by Parisians at another dance club doing the twist. The off-the-cuff cinematography by Lhomme, Denys Cleval, Etienne Becker and Pierre Willemin is still fresh, bracing and alive to the moment. A public demonstration by hundreds of people conducted in complete silence in a central square in homage to eight people killed by the police in a Paris Metro attack is one of several powerful and affecting sequences. Even though the film was made fifty years ago, many of the same problems are still with us and that infuses Le Joli Mai with a kind of timeless universality.

Featuring a music score by Michel Legrand, Le Joli Mai is divided into two sections; Part 1, “A Prayer from the Eiffel Tower” explores the personal attitudes and emotional state of people on the street, while Part 2, “The Return of Fantomas,” focuses more on political and social issues. Icarus Films has recently released Le Joli Mai on DVD in the 146 minute, re-edited version from Marker that features a choice of either English narration by Simone Signoret (this was the version screened at VFF) or French narration by Signoret’s husband, Yves Montand. The disc also comes with various Direct Cinema shorts by either Marker or Lhomme and 17 minutes of deleted material from the original release of Le Joli Mai.

Le Joli Mai (1963)

Other sites of interest:

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/chris-marker-the-truth-about-paris

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/le-joli-mai

http://itpworld.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/le-joli-mai-the-merry-month-of-may/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/11/13/nuns-stepin-fetchit-and-philip-glass/

http://blogs.artinfo.com/moviejournal/2013/09/12/le-joli-septembre-marker’s-classic-doc-returns/

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/09/chris-marker-and-pierre-lhommes-le-joli-mai.html

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s4359joli.html

Paulina Garcia dancing to her theme song in Gloria (2013)

This woman is being transported to someplace we can’t see by “Gloria,” the original Italian version of the pop tune by Umberto Tozzi and Giancarlo Bigazzi. That song became a Top Forty hit in the US by Laura Brannigan in 1982 and is an appropriate theme song for the heroine of a new film by Sebastian Lelio (El ano del tigre, 2011) with the same name. And this film is proof that the Chilean film industry is still enjoying a renaissance; Gloria played to a full house at the recent Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.

A scene from Nostalgia for the Light (2011) directed by Patricio Guzman

In recent years, we have seen a number of provocative and thought-provoking films emerge from this country such as Nostalgia for the Light (2010) by Patrizio Guzman (director of the epic radical documentary The Battle of Chile, 1975-1979), Andres Wood’s Violeta Went to Heaven (2012), Marialy Rivas’ Young and Wild (2012) and No (2013) by Pablo Larrain, which is the third film in a trilogy about Chile during the Pinochet regime and also includes the ultra-disturbing Tony Manero (2008) and the equally unsettling Post Mortem (2010). Larrain has been an instrumental force in the resurgence of Chilean film, co-producing the work of fellow filmmakers like Sebastian Silva’s Crystal Fairy (2013) and Oscar Godoy’s Ulises (2011), so it’s no surprise to see his name on the producer credits for Gloria as well.

Paulina Garcia as Gloria (2013)

An intimate and unsentimental portrait of a beyond middle-aged divorcee, Gloria sounds like a made-for-TV movie on the Lifetime channel based on the festival program description: “Gloria is 58 years old and still feels young. Making a party out of her loneliness, she fills her nights seeking love in ballrooms for single adults. This fragile happiness changes the day she meets Rodolfo….” On first impressions, nothing is particularly unique about the heroine. She has a stable office job in Santiago, lives alone in a modest apartment and enjoys spending time with her grown children though she is usually the one to initiate the visits. Yet her zest for life and openness to new experiences become defining aspects of her character as Lelio’s briskly paced direction quickly sweeps you up in her life, avoiding the usual soap opera cliches.

Paulina Garcia (top center, in glasses) is the star of Sebastian Lelio’s Gloria (2013)

Still searching for romance and companionship after being divorced for more than a decade, Gloria frequents a nightclub/dance hall for older singles. The first time you see her at the club, armed with a Pisco Sour and surveying the dance floor for a potential partner, you can tell this woman is completely comfortable in her own skin. When she begins an affair with Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez), a former naval officer, she proceeds cautiously at first but her passionate nature soon emerges. She goes bungee jumping, learns to play paintball and discovers the sensory pleasures of marijuana. Gloria may have few illusions about her options for happiness at her age but she seizes the moment, more often than not, and eventually reveals herself to be a complicated and resilient human being.

Sergio Hernandez and Paulina Garcia in Gloria (2013)

This is an adult film in the best sense of the term and Lelio handles Gloria and Rodolfo’s sexual encounters with a non-exploitive, matter-of-fact realism but is also unafraid to inject humor into the mix: In one erotic encounter, Gloria becomes the aggressor and rips off Rodolfo’s Velcro-attached girdle with aplomb, tossing it aside as she expertly maneuvers her partner (who recently had a massive weight reduction operation) into bed. But the heroine’s impulsive nature sometimes puts her at risk such as the sequence when she gets blotto after being abandoned at a fancy resort. She is then befriended by some strangers at a casino, pairs off with an overbearing drunken man and wakes up alone the next morning on the beach minus her purse.

Not to worry, Gloria rebounds with renewed determination. Rodolfo doesn’t turn out to be Mr. Right and the on-again, off-again courtship culminates in a hilarious romantic revenge that restores Gloria’s self-respect and confidence. The life-affirming final shot of Gloria, lost in the music and dancing solo (to the strains of the original Italian version of “Gloria”- no relation to the Van Morrison anthem from his group Them), leaves no doubt that she has become her own heroine.

Paulina Garcia in Gloria (2013)

Paulina Garcia, who won the Best Actress award at the Berlin International Film Festival, has a commanding screen presence and the sort of expressive face and eyes, accented by her large, round glasses, that draw you to her. Although relatively unknown outside of her own country, Garcia is bound to receive more critical acclaim and awards when Gloria receives a theatrical release in the U.S. (It has been picked up for distribution by Roadside Attractions.).

Director Sebastian Lelio

In addition to Garcia’s personable performance, Gloria also offers a fascinating insider’s view of contemporary Santiago that is dramatically different from the repressive days of the Pinochet dictatorship when the title character would have been in her twenties. If some scenes seem like a throwback to the disco era with the dance clubs and vacation retreats for the over 50 set, it looks a lot more fun than present day America for this age group. Yet there are a few subtle references to Chile’s past which Lelio addressed in an interview with Brian Brooks for Filmlinc.com: “…this generation is so fascinating because they incarnate the social, historical processes of the past 40 years. In a way, they’re Pinochet survivors. When you look at them, it’s fascinating because you are seeing the whole country’s evolution. Gloria is not the heroine type. She’s not the intellectual left wing rebel archetype. And that’s exactly the point. We took someone who wouldn’t normally be “deserving” of a film in heroic terms and we gave her a film. In a way she’s a character that has been forgotten on [the big screen]. She is relatable to anyone. Even the left wing intellectuals can relate to Gloria. It is something that was moving for me. The fact that she is a future-oriented character has a lot to do with the process of awakening and awareness that the collective consciousness in Chile is going through now.”

Stay tuned for more film coverage of the 2013 Virginia Film Festival with reviews of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, A Single Shot and more.

Other sites of interest:

http://www.filmlinc.com/daily/entry/nyff51-gloria-is-an-unlikely-heroine-for-a-modern-chile

http://twitchfilm.com/2013/10/morelia-2013-interview-sebastian-lelio-talks-gloria-and-the-jodorowsky-family.html

http://blogs.indiewire.com/sydneylevine/chile-in-toronto-interview-with-sebastian-lelio-director-of-gloria-and-star-paulina-garcia

Following the same format and stylized approach they used in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, director Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes) and theorist/cultural critic Slovoj Zizek are back with another unorthodox but thoroughly entertaining film critique entitled The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. This time, using a wealth of superbly chosen film clips (The Fall of Berlin,The Searchers, Cabaret, etc.), Zizek demonstrates how the film medium influences the way we think and feel through imagery that reinforces social behavior and conditioning. 

Slavoj Zizek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)

Sometimes the messaging is blatant and intentional as in such landmark propaganda films as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Veit Harlan’s Jud Suss (1940) but often a film’s subtext can be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on one’s personal beliefs. “Ideology is an empty container open to all possible meaning,” Zizek states as he imposes his own theories on the viewer.

John Carpenter’s They Live (1988)

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology comes out of the starting gate at full gallop with Zizek recognizing John Carpenter’s They Live as “Hollywood’s forgotten left-wing masterpiece.” I remember seeing this film in the theater on the evening that George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election and was amazed with the prescience of Carpenter’s vision. The villains in this paranoid sci-fi fantasy are power-hungry alien elitists who infiltrated Earth and created a brave new world of haves and have-nots with the latter taking control of the government, media, military and corporations.

Republicans from outer space invade Earth in They Live (1988)

Zizek draws our attention to the most famous scene from They Live, which also might be the longest fight scene in movies. In a trash-strewn alley, Roddy Piper and his homeless friend Keith David come to blows over David’s refusal to put on a pair of unusual sunglasses Piper has found. We know that the alien-created sunglasses allow you to see the hidden meanings and subliminal messages behind billboards, newspapers, signs, magazines but David rejects them because he thinks Piper is an aggressive crackpot. The resulting brawl might be the most literal-minded but hilarious example of how hard it really is to make someone see your point of view.

Slavoj Zizek discusses John Carpenter’s They Live in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012).

1997′s Titanic is interpreted by Zizek as an attempt by James Cameron to make a Marxism epic with Kate Winslet’s Rose symbolizing the decadent, exploitive upper class. Her romance with Jack, Leonardo DiCaprio’s working class hero, is seen in vampiric terms as Kate is attracted to his youth and vitality, sucks it out of him and then discards him while pretending to care. All of this is amusingly illustrated in scenes from the movie that culminate with Kate uttering the famous line, “I’ll never let go, Jack. I promise,” while she releases his hand and Jack descends to his watery grave.

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic (1997)

In Zizek’s critique of the Hollywood blockbuster Jaws (1975), he reveals that Fidel Castro was a big fan of the movie and saw the great white shark as a bloated symbol of American capitalism. In fact, Zizek states, “The depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionizing force.”

Slavoj Zizek critiques Taxi Driver in a recreation of Travis Bickel’s room from The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)

Avoiding a standard talking heads approach, Fiennes employs a number of witty and often surprising settings for Zizek’s theories, often placing him in faithful recreations of iconic movie scenes. We see him discoursing on Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as he relaxes in bed in a set that duplicates Travis Bickel’s dingy, unkept apartment. He analyzes Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) from a toilet seat in a restroom that mirrors the military barracks bathroom where Pvt. Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) turns homicidal. Even if you don’t agree with Zizek’s insights – sometimes his interpretations might require more than a passing familiarity with the teachings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other noted intellectuals – the movie is engaging brain candy and a treat for the eyes. For film buffs, just seeing favorite scenes from movies like John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965), Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1972), Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and The Dark Knight (2008) with Zizek’s unique take on the scene’s ideology is consistently intriguing, even at a running time of 136 minutes.

Rock Hudson (center in bandages) begins life with a new identity in Seconds (1966).

Commercials and popular music are also targeted along the way with Zizek playfully dissecting “It’s the Real Thing” and other campaigns for Coca-Cola, Starbuck’s corporate strategy for charging more money for a cup of coffee than competitors (It’s to save the rain forests, stupid!), and the fact that Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” became an all-purpose anthem embraced by political movements as diverse as Nazi Germany, Communist China and the Shining Path in Peru.

Slavoj Zizek’s discusses Stanley Kubrick’s subtext in Full Metal Jacket for The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012).

Still, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is not for everyone. Zizek has a quirky, physical presence with constantly gesticulating hand gestures, a strong Eastern European accent (he was born in Yugoslavia which is now Slovenia) that is as distinctive and amusing in a deadpan way as Werner Herzog’s, and he has a non-stop sniffle which is made more noticeable by his habit of rubbing his nose with his finger.

Slavoj Zizek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)

I dragged my brother and his wife to see The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology and neither liked it very much. My brother said it reminded him of an interminable college lecture and his wife said the movie made her head feel like it was going to explode. But either had seen many of the movies referenced which greatly adds to the enjoyment, especially if you are a film buff. If you saw The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and loved it, you know what to expect.

Stay tuned for more film coverage of the 2013 Virginia Film Festival with reviews of A Single Shot, The Missing Picture and Our Nixon.

Other links of interest:

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2013/10/slavoj-zizek-most-idiots-i-know-are-academics

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/encounter/slavoj-zizek-2013-11/

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/slavoj_zizek_i_am_not_the_worlds_hippest_philosopher/

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring

A contemporary film noir set in an economically depressed backwoods town, A Single Shot comes with impressive credentials – cinematography by Eduard Grau (A Single Man, Buried), production design by David Brisbin (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) and a superior ensemble cast of Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Jeffrey Wright, Ted Levine, Kelly Reilly and Jason Isaacs. Nothing in the brief filmography of director David M. Rosenthal, however, suggested that he would follow such audience-friendly entertainments as See This Movie, Falling Up and Janie Jones with something so relentlessly dark. Based on the novel by Matthew F. Jones (who also adapted the screenplay), the film plunges you into a horrific situation from the start and then follows the terrible repercussions that fan out from there.    

Sam Rockwell in A Single Shot (2013)

Rockwell plays John Moon, an unemployed hunter whose wife has recently left him and wants a divorce and custody of their young son. Previously arrested for poaching, Moon continues to press his luck by stalking a deer out of season and shooting it. One of his random shots happens to hit and kill a young woman in the woods who was hidden behind some foliage. At first overcome with remorse, Moon re-evaluates his situation and decides to hide her body. In the process, he comes across a shack where she was squatting and discovers a box filled with mucho dinero inside. What does he do? He steals it and returns home to stash the loot in a hiding place. Not a good plan. Everything that happens from this point on is on par with the nightmarish, amoral universe of a Cormac McCarthy novel like No Country for Old Men.

Despite strong performances by everyone and the atmospheric cinematography which captures the bleak, wintry setting where the action unfolds, A Single Shot is so determinedly grim, violent and despairing that there is little pleasure to be had in the telling…or any real point to its nihilistic worldview. Unlike some of my favorite noirs like Detour (1945), Out of the Past (1947) or Raw Deal (1948) where the flawed, self-destructive protagonists are still sympathetic, the protagonist of A Single Shot is more problematic.

Sam Rockwell attempts to bury a mistake in A Single Shot (2013)

Rockwell is thoroughly convincing as a basically decent man driven to desperation but Moon makes so many ill-judged decisions from the start that he seals his own fate and alienates everyone around him…along with this viewer. It’s obvious Moon would be facing manslaughter charges or worse for accidentally killing a woman while hunting, a situation that would be further compounded by previous charges for poaching. But deciding to hide the body and not report it is the first big strike against him. Strike two is his decision to take the money and hide it. And strike three is when he dips into the loot and dispenses some big bills to his wife and later a lawyer (William C. Macy) in a bid to stop divorce proceedings against him. His generosity and the fact that he was previously penniless does not go unnoticed in his small town. The simple fact is that Moon is not that bright and Rockwell does his best to humanize this proud but hapless ex-farmer.

William H. Macy in A Single Shot

A Single Shot does generate a consistent, unnerving tension and provides some scene stealing opportunities for William H. Macy (in a laughable, ill-fitting toupee) as a corrupt lawyer and Jeffrey Wright as Rockwell’s always inebriated friend (his slurred country accent and mumblings could use subtitles). But the film is so pitch black in its conception that not a moment of lightness or levity is allowed to break the mood unless you count the brief appearances of Abbie (Ophelia Lovibond), a sassy young innocent who has a crush on Moon and seems to have wandered in from another movie. Her character seems to exist only to serve the grisly climax which reflects the film’s unironic title.

Sam Rockwell & Amy Sloan in A Single Shot (2013)

Matthew F. Jones, who adapted A Single Shot from his novel, is a highly acclaimed author whose work is in the tradition of such noir masters as Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish). But reading and imagining a backwoods gothic thriller like A Single Shot is a lot different than seeing it dramatized on the big screen where everything becomes much more explicit and exaggerated, particularly the violence. We know Moon is dealing with some remorseless, hardened psychopaths (Jason Isaacs from the Harry Potter film franchise and Joe Anderson of Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe) who place no value on human life except their own but director David M. Rosenthal’s tendency to dwell on the morbid detail (a deer being gutted, a throat being slit open, fingers being severed in close-up) becomes overly exploitative and eventually a wallow in human cruelty. Pets don’t fare any better so don’t hold out any hope for Moon’s devoted dog.

Still, A Single Shot has its admirers but you have to wonder what the film might have been with a different director and some of the actors originally considered for the key roles such as Michael Fassbender, Emily Mortimer, Thomas Haden Church, Terrence Howard, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Forest Whitaker. Currently A Single Shot is available in pay-for-view situations but has yet to receive a major theatrical release.

Stay tuned for more film coverage of the 2013 Virginia Film Festival with reviews of The Missing Picture and Our Nixon.

Other websites of interest:

http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/2011/09/22/a-conversation-with-matthew-f-jones/

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/interview-a-single-shots-sam-rockwell-discusses-his-favorite-genre-films-whether-or-not-hes-still-under-contract-with-marvel-and-what-happened-with-cowboys-aliens-20130918

http://www.iamrogue.com/news/interviews/item/9731-iar-exclusive-interview-director-david-m-rosenthal-talks-a-single-shot.html

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/64225