One of the most unusual documentaries screened at the 2013 VFF (Virginia Film Festival) was The Missing Picture by filmmaker Rithy Panh. A personal account of Panh’s childhood in Cambodia during the years of the Khmer Rouge regime, the film follows Panh’s memories of his family and what happened to them when Pol Pot’s forces invaded the cities and deported the inhabitants to internment camps where they were “re-educated” under the most harsh living conditions imaginable.

The Missing Picture (2013) directed by Rithy Panh

Panh was eleven at the time he was incarcerated in 1975 and the horrors he witnessed at the camps – executions, torture, starvation, sickness, physically exhausting labor and complete suppression of personal thoughts, conversation or mental stimulation – are unimaginable to anyone who has never lived through the kind of genocide the director experienced. (For a more thorough understanding of how Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came into power, you might want to read Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land by Henry Kamm or When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker.)

The Missing Picture (2013) directed by Rithy Panh

What keeps The Missing Picture from becoming an unbearable and hard to watch true life account is Panh’s stylized treatment of his memoirs, combining archival footage (most of it taken from propaganda films created by Pol Pot’s staff) with intricately designed sets and characters made of clay, who become stand-ins for the people Panh knew. The effect is both poetic and inspired in terms of capturing Panh’s memories of this time. It gives you an intimate account of how the camps operated and the price of survival without alienating you with atrocity footage or actual photographs of the countless cruelties committed.

The Missing Picture (2013) directed by Rithy Panh

The reality was that the Khmer Rouge forbid photographs or filming of anything unless it was sanctioned by the regime; to disobey them meant death. In one telling sequence, we see newsreel footage of a Pol Pot rally and an audience of happy, smiling workers. The cameraman pans across the sea of ecstatic faces and pauses to note the serious, unsmiling faces of some young attendees. We later learn that the cameraman was executed for this indiscretion and it’s quite likely that his unsmiling subjects were identified and eliminated as well.

THE MISSING PICTURE (2013) directed by Rithy Panh

The meticulously detailed clay dioramas and figures featured in The Missing Picture were sculpted by Sarith Mang and the voiceover narration is by Randal Douc. Rithy Panh is not well known in the U.S. yet but The Missing Picture should change that. He was born in Phnom Penh in 1964 and has been making movies since the late ’80s. In his own country, he is considered one of their most important directors and several of his documentaries have been honored at international film festivals. His 2003 documentary S-21, la machine de mort Khmere rouge and The Missing Picture both won awards at Cannes and Le terre des ames errants (2000) won awards at both the San Francisco and Vancouver International Film Festivals.

THE MISSING PICTURE (2013) directed by Rithy Panh

The Missing Picture is Cambodia’s official submission to the 2013 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film but the fact that it is a documentary puts it at a disadvantage in a category where, it if makes the final ballot, is bound to end up running against this year’s emerging favorite, Blue is the Warmest Color. Regardless of whether it receives an Academy Award nomination or not, The Missing Picture is highly recommended and essential viewing.

Other websites of interest:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/rithy-panh-interview-the-missing-picture

http://asiapacificarts.usc.edu/(X(1)A(8Co1dw4xzwEkAAAAZTc3NjQ2Y2EtYjlhZC00OTYzLWFlYTctN2RlNDNlZGE0ZWM1La_BXvYijED9tzcKoYcgxEAeYUw1))/w_apa/showarticle.aspx?articleID=18922&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-missing-picture-review20131004,0,4718418.story#axzz2kZ8eK0sD

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cannes-2013-fragile-history-rithy-panhs-the-missing-picture

THE MISSING PICTURE (2013) directed by Rithy Panh

Another highlight among the documentary entries at the 2013 VFF (Virginia Film Festival) was Our Nixon by Penny Lane, which takes an unexpected approach to a topic which has been the covered exhaustively in books, articles and films – the presidency of Richard Nixon. The hook here is that Nixon’s core staff members – H.R. Haldeman (Chief of Staff), John Ehrlichman (Domestic Affairs Advisor) and Dwight Chapin (Special Assistant to Nixon) were all home movie enthusiasts and took lots of candid super-8 footage (over 500 reels) during their White House tenure. Lane was able to get access to their films and uses them as a way to re-examine this turbulent time in American politics.   

H.R. Haldeman shooting super-8 home movie footage of Nixon In China (from the documentary OUR NIXON)

The footage itself is not particularly ground-breaking or unusual in terms of what is being filmed – Nixon dancing with his daughter Trisha at her wedding party, Ehrlichman enjoying a meal on the President’s private jet, Nixon and his wife Pat at the Great Wall of China during his 1972 visit. It’s how Lane combines and edits this home movie footage with select audio excerpts from Nixon’s secretly taped White House phone calls, pop music, archival footage and previously filmed interviews with Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chapin that makes Our Nixon such a compelling and rarely seen window into the 37th President’s private world.

The documentary OUR NIXON (2013) directed by Penny Lane

By concentrating mostly on Nixon’s White House years in chronological order, the film generates a growing dramatic tension as the Watergate scandal breaks and begins to unravel like a runaway train. For those of us who lived through that era, it is particularly interesting to see this version of events told from an insider point of view. In an interview with Lane for US History Scene (http://www.ushistoryscene.com), the director admitted that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chapin were essential to the film because, “We wanted to experience their life as it was lived. We wanted to focus on the interpersonal relationships that happened in that White House, we tried to avoid anything that was too policy oriented. We wanted to do something more modest: what can looking at these three men and what they filmed tell us something new about Nixon?….A lesson for me that I take away is that these were just ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances – they did do questionable, unethical, and illegal things — but at the end of the day, they were just men. I feel society tries to make the Nixon Administration an exception, that they were somehow different, but I think in a gentle way the film asks you to question that. What are other White House staffs like? We don’t know anything about the way our Presidents talk in private to their staffs or friends.”

Carol Feraci, the surprise protestor, is in the center

Our Nixon does have its share of surprises and unexpected moments that I haven’t encountered before in other documentaries on the subject. For example, there is footage of a White House social event in which the Ray Conniff Singers were scheduled to perform. Just before the concert begins, Carol Feraci, one of the singers pulls out a banner that reads “Stop the Killing” and holds it up. Someone tries to pull the banner out of her hands but she yanks it away and says into the microphone: “Mr. President, stop the bombing of human beings, animals and vegetation. You go to church on Sunday and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were in this room tonight you would not dare to drop another bomb. Bless the Berrigans and Daniel S. Ellsberg.” With that, she steps back in line and the Ray Conniff Singers launch into “Ma, She’s Making Eyes at Me.”

This button was actually created by Republican campaigners

The room is momentarily silenced by this protestor’s surprise ambush. The surprising thing is that she is allowed to speak, is not escorted away immediately and even stays to perform the number with her co-singers. Perhaps everyone was too embarrassed or shocked to respond immediately or maybe removing her by force might have generated larger media coverage. White House staffers may have reasoned that if they ignored Feraci, the incident would blow over and be quickly forgotten. But to see it here on film years later is quite a show stopping moment.

John Ehrlichman with super-8 camera in the documentary OUR NIXON (2013)

Other moments that stand out are Nixon’s phone harangue over the TV sitcom All in the Family in which he decries the episode’s inclusion of a gay character and goes off on a morality rant (he doesn’t seem to know the sitcom by name and refers to it as “Archie,” the main character played by Carroll O’Connor). Nixon’s animosity toward Henry Kissinger for claiming credit for ideas which the President insists were his own erupts during one phone call with Haldeman.

President Nixon visits China in 1972 (from the documentary OUR NIXON)

The candid home movie footage of Nixon in China is further demonstration of what a complicated person he could be. A vehement anti-communist and member of the House Un-American Activities Committee that exposed Alger Hiss as a traitor, Nixon’s China visit and his meeting with Mao Zedong (aka Mao Tse-tung) must have seemed like an opportunistic publicity stunt to people who knew his politics but in hindsight his trip seems progressive and even surprising in view of his past.

Dwight Chapin with super-8 camera in the documentary OUR NIXON (2013)

One last item to note if you happen to see Our Nixon: Make sure you stay through the final end credits. At the very end, you’ll see a post-Watergate commercial for Dreyer Farms Ice Cream in which Ehrlichman is the pitchman. The fact that Ehrlichman references Watergate indirectly as part of the ad campaign’s humorous approach seems surreal now. What ad agency genius thought this was a good idea? When the ad was tested in a local market, it received unanimously negative feedback and was quickly pulled. Now it’s just one of the many bizarre historical footnotes that make Our Nixon such a fun roller coaster ride.

Our Nixon (2013), a documentary by Penny Lane

Other websites of interest:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19720129&id=6_pOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=LkwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3911,1837586

http://www.thefader.com/2013/08/30/no-concessions-director-penny-lane-talks-our-nixon-the-lost-innocence-of-home-movies/

http://filmmakermagazine.com/75905-all-the-kings-men-penny-lane-on-our-nixon/

http://www.burningsettlerscabin.com/?tag=richard-nixon

http://theinterrobang.com/2013/09/penny-lane-shows-us-another-nixon/

http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/through-us-its-about-them-our-nixon-director-penny-lane-on-viewer-bias

Movie titles can sometimes be deceptive but you know exactly what you’re in for with the aptly named Creature with the Atom Brain (1955). A superior B-horror film with sci-fi elements and a crime syndicate subplot, this 1955 Sam Katzman production gets right down to business before the opening credits even begin with the sound of a beating heart growing louder and an ominous looking figure lurching toward us from out of the dark.   

The zombie cometh (a scene from 1955′s Creature With the Atom Brain)

Director Edward L. Cahn (The She-Creature [1956], Invasion of the Saucer Men [1957]) wastes no time in laying out the premise in the opening murder sequence: A zombie-like thug with superhuman strength breaks into a mobster’s study and kills him despite being riddled with bullets. The assailant is actually a reanimated corpse being operated by a remote control device and the manipulator is deported gangster Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger), who has secretly entered the country from Europe. He’s come back to avenge himself against the business rivals who helped get him convicted and his secret weapon is former Nazi scientist Professor Steigg (Gregory Gaye). It seems that Professor Steigg has discovered a way to bring the dead back to life by atomic energy but he needs a steady supply of morgue bodies to build the zombie army Buchanan ultimately desires. At first, police scientist Chet Walker (Richard Denning) and his partner Dave Harris (S. John Launer) are baffled by the mysterious series of killings committed by dead men but once they discover a link between recently murdered District Attorney MacGraw (Tristram Coffin – great name!) and Buchanan, the criminal he prosecuted, the pieces in the puzzle come together quickly.  

The sixty-nine minute running time flies by in Cahn’s tightly paced narrative which dispenses with static talking head shots in favor of scenes where the characters are filmed in real time, either standing, pacing or sitting – with no edits. The futuristic concept of using nuclear energy to create synthetic brains (a scientist’s sketch of a creature’s brain looks like a subway map of New York City) is also an unexpected concept for a 1950s B-movie. The man-made zombies not only leave glowing fingerprints behind but their contamination level could kill a normal person due to the high radiation count. The atomic energy also endows them with great strength, allowing them to bend steel bars or snap a man’s back like a pretzel (we see this particular feat – complete with gruesome sound effects – rendered as a grotesque shadow on the wall).

A typical newspaper headline from CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (1955).

What really makes the movie great fun though is the often absurd dialogue which is conspicuous in almost every scene of Chet’s domestic home life. Chet is depicted as a bit of a workaholic whose sexy, platinum blonde wife Joyce (Angela Stevens) would love to know more about his job and current investigations but is usually dismissed with remarks like “I don’t believe in talking shop when I’m home.” Chet’s daughter Penny, a particularly awkward and annoying child actress named Linda Bennett, doesn’t get much attention either and often turns to her doll Henrietta for solace. After one particularly trying day at the office, Chet comes home to find his wife upset about the daily newspaper headline – “DO DEAD MEN WALK CITY STREETS?” – and fearful that Penny will see it. Chet’s irritated response is “I’m tired and hungry….and I don’t know anymore than it says right there. Look, how are we fixed for an ice cold martini?” Joyce, in response, angrily stuffs the newspaper under a couch cushion and says with noticeable sarcasm, “Coming right up, Chet!”

international poster for Creature with the Atom Brain

Even when a zombie comes calling on the Walker household – in this case, Chet’s unfortunate partner Dave – the situation unfolds in the innocuous manner of a Father Knows Best episode or some similar domestic sitcom. Dave, now bearing a huge surgical scar across his forehead and speaking in a dull, drone-like tone, is obviously VERY DIFFERENT from the last time he visited but Penny and Joyce don’t exactly have a high level of awareness. “Why so formal?” Joyce says in response to Dave’s mechanized voice while little Penny tugs at his wrist and exclaims, “Gosh, your hand is cold.” They eventually figure out “Uncle Dave” is not quite right after he tears Penny’s doll into little pieces.

An Italian lobby card of CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (1955)

It’s hard to pick a favorite scene in Creature with the Atom Brain but you have to love a movie where the local television newscaster addresses his viewers in this manner: “…with the murder of Jason Franchot last night I must apologize for my recent skepticism regarding these radioactive creatures. It seems they do exist and are prowling the street.” His matter of fact delivery and lack of panic indicates that something as extraordinary as dead people walking about is an easy thing to quickly grasp so just get used to it, people, ok?

The zombie waiting room in CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (1955).

A final bit of trivia about Creature with the Atom Brain. It was reportedly one of the first films to use squibs to simulate gunshot wounds. It was also banned in Sweden and Finland when it was first released.   

Creature with the Atom Brain is available for purchase as part of the DVD set, Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman, which also includes The Giant Claw, Zombies of Mora Tau and The Werewolf. TCM has also programmed Creature with the Atom Brain in the past and will probably air it again in the future.

Creature with the Atom Brain is featured in this DVD collection

* This article originally appeared in a slightly altered form on the Turner Classic Movies website

Back in the days before the VHS home video market exploded and Blockbuster became the obiquitous rental store, the 16mm film library was still a viable business in the non-theatrical college and educational markets. The decline would begin in the early eighties and by the end of the decade most 16mm distributors would be out of business. But during the peak years, this film format was affordable and easily accessible to all types of organizations (churches, schools, businesses and prisons) and also individuals who ran private film societies.   One of the largest distributors was Audio-Brandon Films, which had formerly been two separate companies with Brandon owning distribution rights to hundreds of international films, both acclaimed and obscure. MacMillian Publishers eventually purchased Audio-Brandon and then Films Inc. came along and acquired Audio Brandon (At the time, Films Inc. and Swank were probably the biggest 16mm distributors). In addition to distributing the film libraries of MGM, 20th Century Fox, RKO, Paramount and the Janus Collection, Films Inc. became the owner of Audio-Brandon’s huge library of international films (plus shorts, experimental work and indie cinema) that were not available to the 35mm theatrical market.

When I went to work for Films Inc. in Atlanta as a college sales rep in 1983, I was amazed at some of the holdings in our warehouse. The employees were loaned a 16mm projector for home use and I spent many a night watching movies I had read about for years and always wanted to see. One thing I quickly realized was that the Audio-Brandon film library had not been well maintained over the years. Many prints were in fair to ragged condition. Often there would be only one print of a popular title and there was no option of making a new print because the 16mm master was no longer available. In addition, numerous titles in the Audio-Brandon collection had been leased for a set period of time so when the rights expired, the print would either be returned to the owner or destroyed (which was more likely the case). If you ever wondered why in film collector circles there were 16mm film copies floating around of non-public domain titles like Rene Clement’s Purple Noon, Leopold Torre Nilsson’s Hand in the Trap or Andrzej Wajda’s Siberian Lady Macbeth, it was because of film inspectors or employees at companies like Films Inc. who couldn’t bear to shred these treasures for the dumpster and liberated them (they also profited from selling them which was, of course, Illegal).

Purple Noon (Plein Soleil, 1960)

The following is a short list of Audio-Brandon titles which I either saw while working at Films Inc. and have been searching for every since or were titles in the collection that I never had the opportunity to see and are still not currently available on DVD or Blu-Ray in the U.S. Some of these may be available as grey market releases (of variable quality) or for sale as imports for those who have all-region DVD/Blu-Ray players. A few may even be streamed on YouTube but I am holding out for legitimate releases of the following through a quality distributor like The Criterion Collection. It might not ever happen, in which case these are truly lost films, and that would be a sad thing for movie buffs and future generations. (For more information on the once thriving 16mm non-theatrical film market, go here – kitparkerfilms.wordpress.com/tag/audio-brandon-films)

The Bus (1965), directed by Haskell Wexler

THE BUS (1965)
Cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s first solo effort as a director (he had previously co-directed the 1953 documentary short, The Living City, with John Barnes), The Bus is an intimate record of a San Francisco delegation traveling across the country to participate in the landmark Civil Rights March on Washington in August of 1963. Wexler accompanied the delegation (composed of black, white, Jewish, Christian and non-Christian travelers) and documented this historic event with the aid of a lightweight mobile camera and hidden microphones. The result is a moving, occasionally humorous and dramatically potent time capsule.  Other links of interest:

http://www.rogerebert.com/far-flung-correspondents/haskell-wexler-and-the-bus

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_bus_haskell_wexlers_ground_breaking_documentary_of_the_march

http://haskellwexler.com/WP/?page_id=28

A Cat, Two Women and a Man (1956), directed by Shiro Toyoda

A CAT, TWO WOMEN AND ONE MAN (aka neko to shozo to futari no onna, 1956)

Shiro Toyoda became one of Japan’s top directors during the post-war years but remains a relatively unknown name to Western audiences as few, if any, of his films are available here on DVD or Blu-Ray with the exception of A Cat, Two Women and One Man (which is available for streaming on Hulu). Some of his most famous films are Wild Geese (aka Gan, 1953), Snow Country (aka Yukiguni, 1957), and a 1965 remake of a popular Japanese ghost story, Yotsuya Kaidan but I’ve always wanted to see this madcap sex farce based on descriptions I’ve read over the years. It sounds like a satiric critique of traditional male-female relationships in Japanese society with a plot line that involves a weakling being caught in the middle of a power struggle between his mother, his first wife and his new wife. Unable to deal with any of them, he transfers his affections to his cat. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The tart flavor of the film derives from the familial nastiness: one can’t like any of the them, one can’t even really like the cat…The manner in which these four scheme for affection and power, using the cat as a decoy, is a perverse object lesson in Japanese manners and mores.”   Other links of interest:

https://mubi.com/topics/imagining-pussy-and-kyoko-kagawa

http://www.wildgrounds.com/2012/08/11/criterions-rare-japanese-films-on-hulu/

El (This Strange Passion, 1953)

EL (aka This Strange Passion, 1953)

When I was a journalism major at the University of Georgia, I took an introductory film history course taught by drama professor William D. Perreault. Starting with the silent era and working through the arrival of talkies and the development of the studio system, Perreault showed us key examples from the usual suspects: Griffith, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Chaplin, Renoir, Capra, Hitchcock, Ford and Hawks. But he also introduced me to less heralded auteurs like Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet), George Sidney (Scaramouche) and earlier works by famous directors such as Luchino Visconti (La Terra Trema). El aka This Strange Passion was my first exposure to Luis Bunuel though I vaguely knew about him from my parents. They had gone to see a screening of Mexican Bus Ride at the Fine Arts Museum of Virginia and hated it (it was one of their few attempts at sampling international cinema; Fellini’s 8 1/2 was the final nail in the coffin).

Delia Garces & Arturo de Cordova in El (This Strange Passion, 1953)

I was able to revisit El during my Films Inc. days and it remains one of my favorite Bunuel films. Deceptively conventional at first, the movie introduces us to Francisco (Arturo de Cordova), a strict, middle-aged bachelor and devout Catholic, who becomes entranced by a woman he mets at church named Gloria (Delia Garces). A courtship ensues followed by marriage and a honeymoon where Gloria begins to realize her husband has some neurotic tendencies. Francisco’s behavior quickly blossoms into full blown paranoia as he becomes increasingly possessive and controlling toward Gloria.

It’s the little touches in El that stay with you; Francisco thrusting a knitting needle through a door keyhole, convinced he is being spied on by Gloria’s lover (a figment of his imagination) or his wife waking up to see her husband preparing to sew her lips shut with needle and thread. The film works as both a psychological thriller and a black comedy, often at the same time. Unfortunately, it was considered a failure at the time of its release. Bunuel recalls in his autobiography, My Last Sigh, that El “was shown at Cannes, for some inexplicable reason, during a screening in honor of the veterans of foreign wars, who, as you can imagine, were outraged. In general, it wasn’t very well received; even Jean Cocteau, who’d once written several generous pages about my work in Opium, declared that with El I’d “committed suicide.”(He later changed his mind.)”

Arturo de Cordova in Luis Bunuel’s El (1953) aka This Strange Passion

Other links of interest:

http://periscopejd.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/movies-the-luis-bunuel-project-mexican-bus-ride-el-this-strange-passion-illusion-travels-by-streetcar-the-criminal-life-of-archibaldo-de-la-cruz/

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/discoverpsychiatry/mindsonfilmblog/elorthisstrangepassion.aspx

THE GREEN WALL (1970, la muralla verde)

At one time in the early seventies, The Green Wall was probably the best known contemporary film from Peru. A film festival award winner and a popular classroom rental for college film studies, the movie rarely resurfaces today and could easily be in danger of fading into oblivion. I remember being struck by the film’s simple but emotionally powerful narrative and the ravishingly beautiful color cinematography which captured the wild splendors of the Peruvian jungle. Directed by Armando Robles Godoy, The Green Wall is the story of a frustrated salesman in Lima who takes advantage of a government program to give up life in the city and transition to farming in the jungle accompanied by his wife and son. What begins as an idyllic back to nature existence becomes much more problematic than expected and climaxes with a frantic race against time to find an anti-snake bite serum that can save a life. One of the early supporters of this film was Roger Ebert, who wrote, “The Green Wall is beautiful in so many different ways – in its story, its photography, in the construction of its images – that it becomes not simply a movie but an affirmation of life. There is not a false note in it, nothing that lies or is trickery, and we’re reminded of “The Bicycle Thief” and “The Wild Child.” And then we wonder…how could this movie come from Peru, with its “underdeveloped” movie industry? The answer, of course, is that great films have nothing to do with the industry. They come from great filmmakers, who might be found in Peru as well as anywhere.”

The Green Wall (1970), directed by Armando Robles Godoy

Other links of interest:

http://firstperuvianfilm.wordpress.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A07E6D8123DE53BBC4F53DFB0668389669EDE

IL SUCCESSO (1963)
Initially Il Sorpasso (aka The Easy Life, 1962) was at the top of my list but that long unavailable Italian gem will be coming out on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion in April 2014. Directed by Dino Risi, Il Sorpasso is a tragicomic road trip adventure in which a middle-age extrovert (Vittorio Gassman) befriends a young, introverted student (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and gives him a taste of “la dolce vita” as they take a carefree tour of the Tyrrheanian coast.

Vittorio Gassman in Il Successo (1963)

Il Successo was released a year later, pairing Gassman and Trintignant again, and although Risi was involved in the production, he was not credited and Mauro Morassi (Il cocci di mamma) was listed as the official director. A modern morality tale, the film follows businessman Giulio Ceriani (Gassman) and his frantic attempts to achieve the sort of financial success and respect that he sees others reaping during Italy’s economic boom of the early sixties. Although Il Successo was not as well received critically as Il Sorpasso, it is nonetheless a compelling character study of a man who abandons his principles and integrity while chasing the almighty buck. The talent in front of and behind the camera is reason enough to revive Mauro Morassi’s final film (he died in 1966); Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Ceriani’s best friend, Anouk Aimee stars as Ceriani’s wife, the music score is by Ennio Morricone and the screenplay was co-written by Ruggero Maccari (Profumo di donna, a 1974 Italian hit for Gassman that was remade as Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino) and Ettore Scola (director of 1974′s We All Loved Each Other So Much and 1977′s A Special Day).

Vittorio Gassman in Il Successo (1963)

Other links of interest:

http://www.clevelandmemory.org/mastroianni/tm329.html

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9401E4DE1F30E033A2575AC2A9629C946491D6CF

Invasion (1965), directed by Alan Bridges

INVASION (1965)
Director Alan Bridges is best known for his British class dramas such as The Hireling (1973), his underrated masterpiece, The Return of the Soldier (1982), based on Rebecca West’s novel, and The Shooting Party (1985) but earlier in his career, he made a low-budget, atypical entry in the sci-fi genre that was atmospheric, mysterious and downright peculiar at times. Two doctors at a rural hospital – Dr. Vernon (Edward Judd) and Dr. Harland (Valerie Gearon) – inadvertently uncover an alien invasion plot when they tend to a man who was hit by a motorist on a fog-ladden country road. Their patient proves to be not of this earth and is being pursued by female aliens who claim he is an escaped prisoner. The fact that the rubber-suited extraterrestrials are played by Asian actresses is just one of the odd touches. As the hero, Edward Judd is no stranger to fantasy films, having appeared in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, First Men in the Moon and Island of Terror, and petite Japanese star Yoko Tani was particularly memorable in the East German sci-fi adventure, Der Schweigende Stern (1960), which was edited and retitled First Spaceship on Venus for U.S. distribution. Invasion is based on a story by Robert Holmes, one of the most popular writers for the British TV series, Dr. Who.

Invasion (1965), directed by Alan Bridges

Other links of interest:

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1333419/

http://blackholereviews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/invasion-1965-prototype-for-spearhead.html

LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC (aka at’ zine republic, 1965)

At Zije Republika (aka Long Live the Republic, 1965), directed by Karel Kachyna

One of the lesser known but most important directors of the Czech New Wave was Karel Kachyna, who is probably best known in the U.S. for Carriage to Vienna (1966) and The Ear (aka Ucho, 1970). I was fortunate enough to see his magnificent widescreen epic, Long Live the Republic, while working at Films Inc. but it has gone missing ever since. Told through the viewpoint of a child, the movie chronicles the final days of WWII as the twelve year old protagonist Olda witnesses a number of historic events from the slow expulsion of Germans living in his area to the arrival of Soviet troops. To escape the harshness of his daily existence (he is beaten by his father and bullied by local villagers), Olda often has fantasies which free him from his earthborn existence and provide a visually lyrical counterpoint to the cruelties he suffers and observes.

At Zije Republika (aka Long Live the Republic, 1965), directed by Karel Kachyna

Strikingly photographed in black and white by Jaromir Sofr (Closely Watched Trains, A Report on the Party and Guests, My Sweet Little Village), Long Live the Republic falls somewhere between Rene Clement’s Forbidden Games and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) in its treatment of childhood interrupted by war and the juxtaposition of the tender and the brutal, the poetic and the horrific.

At Zije Republika (aka Long Live the Republic, 1965), directed by Karel Kachyna

Other links of interest:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/apr/17/guardianobituaries.film

http://www.kinoeye.org/03/09/hames09.php

THE NUN aka La Religieuse (1965)

I’ve always felt that The Nun might be Jacques Rivette’s most accessible film and a good entry point for movie lovers who haven’t encountered his work before. But it might also seem, on the surface, to be his most atypical due to its tight, rigorous narrative and the claustrophobic nature of the subject matter, qualities that are the opposite of the free-wheeling, improvisational spirit of 1974′s Celine and Julie Go Boating, often considered his masterpiece. Based on the novel by Denis Diderot, The Nun follows the travails of Suzanne (Anna Karina), a young woman whose parents force her to enter a convent against her will. What she finds there – abuses of power, sadism, repression of individual thought – becomes an unbearable ordeal but she attempts to free herself by legal means and only ends up being transferred to another convent. Her new “prison” is radically different from the former one in that the mother superior is an aggressive libertine with sexual designs on Suzanne. The only relief offered in this hot house of titillation and desire are occasional visits from a priest (Francisco Rabal) who is sympathetic to Suzanne’s plight and vows to help her escape. But true freedom continues to remain elusive for our protagonist. The Nun is essential viewing for any “nunsploitation” fan and easily the classiest entry in that decidely niche genre.

Anna Karina in The Nun (1965), directed by Jacques Rivette

The Nun has appeared occasionally in recent years on Turner Classic Movies but it remains unavailable as a domestic release on DVD or Blu-Ray and certainly deserves one.

Anna Karina in The Nun (1965), directed by Jacques Rivette

“Rivette is a believer in keeping cinema time as close to real time as possible…and La Religieuse seems slower, more stylized and repetitive, than it needs to be…But the movie is made with high artifice, and there are enough kind, thoughtful characters portrayed within the church and enough cynical idiots outside it so that the message is not so much anti-clerical as anti-repressive-social-contract.” – Renata Adler, The New York Times

Anna Karina in The Nun (La religieuse, 1965)

“A calculated artificiality marks the film’s progression from austere cruelty to luxuriant decadence. In its relentless portrayal of the doom of the innocent, it becomes a plea for freedom and tolerance far transcending the church issue.” – Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

Anna Karina in The Nun (La religieuse, 1965)

“Taken from a novel by Diderot written in 1760, this film was initially banned in France on grounds of anti-clericalism….It is directed with austere detachment and an authentic sense of claustrophobia and pain, with the suggestion that the corruption and cruelty lurking behind the facades of religion is a metaphor for the world at large.” – Ronald Bergen & Robyn Karney, The Faber Companion to Foreign Films

Other links of interest:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/carnal-scandal.html

PIROSMANI (1971)

I first saw this remarkable film biography of the primitive Georgian artist Niko Pirosmanashvili at Films Inc. (the movie is now distributed in the U.S. by Kino International).  Unlike most film biographies of artists, director Georgi Shengelaya’s approach to his subject is poetic rather than informative, depicting scenes of Pirosmani’s nomadic existence in a pictorial style that often imitates the style of his somewhat surrealistic paintings of farm animals, peasants and exotic singers. The painter’s alcoholism, his inability to hold a steady job, forge close relationships with anyone or place any value on his work is never explained but the evidence is there for us to contemplate. At times, the movie exudes a raw, primitive power that is closer in style to an ethnographic documentary from another time period and images from this film are guaranteed to resonate in your memory for years to come.

Pirosmani (1969), directed by Giorgi Shengelaya

I was lucky enough to see this again when it was showcased at the Telluride Film Festival in 2008. This retrospective screening was introduced by festival co-director Tom Luddy. His account of how the festival managed to receive a beautiful archival print of the film from the Georgian Film Archives was as fascinating as the actual movie. Originally a rather battered 35mm print of Pirosmani was slated to play as a backup in the event that the Georgian Film Archives couldn’t deliver their vaulted copy. Then when Russia invaded Georgia just prior to the festival and all communication with the archives staff was cut off, Luddy assumed the inferior U.S. print of Pirosmani was the only option and played its appearance down in the program schedule. In a strange twist of fate, the Georgian Film Archive print of Pirosmani turned up at the festival office after the program had gone to press – apparently, it was on the last flight out of the airport in Georgia before the Russians bombed the facility. So, along with a fortunate few (possibly 20 viewers in all), I was able to revisit Shengelaya’s hypnotic and melancholy portrait of the once neglected Soviet artist. I hope Kino makes this available on DVD or Blu-Ray in the near future.

Pirosmani (1969), directed by Giorgi Shengelaya

“The main virtue of the film, namely its atmosphere and visual splendour, are largely due to Konstantin Apryatin’s marvellous photography….There are moments of Surrealist explosions such as the one with the artist daydreaming about encountering a black shepherd with a black sheep and a white one, a weird scene enhanced by some strangely beautiful folk music. The dialogue in the film, as one would expect from the Soviets, is very restrained, but its poeticism, unmatched aesthetics and insight into Pirosmani’s mysterious life make it less of a film but rather a fascinating wander inside an art gallery.” – Spiros Gangas, Edinburgh University Film Society

Pirosmani (1969), directed by Giorgi Shengelaya

“A restrained film, possibly too-non-involving for some, beautifully shot in muted colors, and composed of studies with the subjects often looking posed and self-conscious, as the artist must have seen them. It’s not often than an artist gets the film he deserves.” – Chris Petit, TimeOut

Other links of interest:

http://eefb.org/archive/january/pirosmani/

THE SLEEPING CAR MURDERS (1965, compartment tueurs)

When the six occupants of a sleeping compartment on a train traveling overnight from Marseilles to Paris arrive at their destination, one of them is dead – murdered. None of the survivors admit to being witnesses to the crime or are able to provide much assistance to the police investigation. Then events take a more bizarre turn as someone begins stalking and bumping off the remaining five suspects. I saw this at the Westhampton Theater in Richmond, Va. when I was in high school and I remember it as a suspenseful, often creepy thriller. The Sleeping Car Murders actually prefigures the Giallo thrillers of Dario Argento and others with its vicious killer who wears a raincoat, black hat and black leather gloves. I also remember being disappointed by the film’s resolution but the cast is first rate and reads like a Who’s Who in French cinema.

Simone Signoret (bottom) in The Sleeping Car Murders (1965)

The film was something of a family affair for Simone Signoret who co-stars with her real life husband Yves Montand and Catherine Allegret (from her marriage to director Yves Allegret). Also on hand are Michel Piccoli, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Charles Denner, Jacques Perrin, Bernadette Lafont and cameos from such Gallic stalwarts as Claude Berri, Daniel Gelin, Marcel Bozzuffi, Jean Lefebvre and Claude Dauphin.  Director Costa-Gavras followed this with Shock Troops (1967), a fast-paced WWII adventure about a group of French Resistance fighters with a spy in their midst, and then achieved international fame for his brilliant political thriller, Z (1969).

“It races and pants like “Breathless,” it vibrates like “Alphaville.” And it ends in a chase that screams and screeches like something from the American “underground.” When it finally puts the finger on that mysterious character with the gun, it doesn’t make sense. But that’s not awful. It’s fast, it’s funny. And it’s quite a family film.” – Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

Jacques Perrin in The Sleeping Car Murders (1965)

“The plot is pure Agatha Christie…but at least the characters inhabit the 20th century and are beautifully played (especially Signoret as the obligatory aging actress, and Piccoli as a furtive lecher). The ending is one of those ingenious absurdities that haunt the genre, but the lively pace and attention to detail make up for the implausibility.” – Tom Milne, TimeOut

Other links of interest:

http://euro-fever.blogspot.com/2008/02/sleeping-car-murdercompartiment-tueurs.html?zx=f427b0bac9735293http://www.clevelandmemory.org/mastroianni/tm379.html

THERMIDOR (1964, ça ira, il fiume della rivolta)

Tinto Brass is not the sort of director who commands much critical respect and is best known as the director of the infamous epic financed by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Caligula (1979). But before he turned a corner in the mid-seventies with 1976′s Salon Kitty (which mixed Nazi chic with perverse sex acts in an upscale bordello) and started focusing exclusively on erotic dramas and soft core sex comedies, he was a highly imaginative and offbeat director with an avant-grade edge; Brass’s early work was bursting with social and political provocations like his more celebrated contemporary Marco Ferreri. Unlike the latter director, however, who has several critically acclaimed films to his credit and film festival awards for such films as Dillinger is Dead (1969) and La Grande Bouffe (1973), Brass hasn’t garnered many accolades or box-office success with his early work but I find some of it fascinating.

A scene from Thermidor (Ca ira, il fiume della rivolta , 1964), directed by Tinto Brass

The Howl (aka L’urlo, 1968) is an anti-establishment barrage of sex, revolution and anarchy that is a crazy quilt reflection of its time and Attraction (1969) toys with black and white stereotypes in a psychedelic fantasy framework. Brass tried his hand at genre films too, directing the sci-fi comedy The Flying Saucer (1964) with Alberto Sordi and Monica Vitti, the stylish and highly entertaining spaghetti western Yankee (1966), which the director has allegedly disowned, and Deadly Sweet (aka Col cure in goal, 1967), a pop art thriller inspired by comic books and set in swinging London with Ewa Aulin and Jean-Pierre Trintignant. But the one I’ve always wanted to see is Thermidor (aka Ca Ira, Il Fiume Della Rivolta, 1964), his critique of 20th century society and mankind through a non-traditional documentary approach. Closer to a historical montage smash-up inspired by Eisenstein’s editing techniques, the film borrows liberally from newsreel footage, mixing up Hitler, Pancho Villa, Lenin, Castro, and others with atrocity footage from the Boxer Rebellion, the Spanish Civil War, the Bolshevik uprising and other global demonstrations of man’s capacity for violence and aggression. Thermidor is most likely a lost film at this point but I continue to be surprised at the titles that have been turning up on DVD and Blu-Ray in the last year such as Vinegar Syndrome’s release of The Telephone Book (1971) and Raro Video/Kino Lorber’s I Cannibali (1970).

Other links of interest:

http://rjbuffalo.com/tinto3.html

Times of Roses (Ruusujen aika,1969), directed by Risto Jarva

TIME OF ROSES (aka Ruusujen aika, 1969)

A science fiction film from Finland? This sounds like a fascinating oddity and is set in the year 2012. Directed by Risto Jarva, it deals with a utopian society that is unable to maintain its idealistic structure because it is actually based on subversion and the suppression of knowledge. This excerpt for the Audio-Brandon catalog describes the abstract nature of the film: “The main plot is the making of a TV documentary to show how bad life was in the 60′s and 70′s. To represent this period, the producer chooses a story clerk, Saara, who was born in 1946 and committed suicide in 1976. Reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the producer finds a look-alike, Kisse, recreates the dead Saara, and because of his manipulation with real life; Saara and Kisse merge into one person.” The stills I’ve seen from Time of Roses bare comparison with the sci-fi visions of both George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).

Times of Roses (Ruusujen aika,1969), directed by Risto Jarva

Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times is a slight putdown but possibly more revealing about the writer than the film’s: “Politics, not gadgets, however, is Mr. Jarva’s principal concern, and his future Finland is one of those brave new worlds that can only be accepted as a projection of the cowardly old one. Class distinctions have disappeared. Everyone contributes according to his capacity and pure, unbiased science has become a repressive political dogma….I suspect that “Time of Roses” might seem a lot more relevant in Finland, a country that has lived on political edge for some time, than in New York, where Mr. Jarva’s view of the future seems not very dark, just dim and rather polite. Although I know it’s wrong, I can’t help but feel wistful about a state in which love is free and strikes are so rare that the very planning of one becomes an act of heroic affirmation.”

Times of Roses (Ruusujen aika,1969), directed by Risto Jarva

Other links of interest:

http://worldscinema.org/2012/06/risto-jarva-ruusujen-aika-aka-a-time-of-roses-1969/

http://toysandtechniques.blogspot.com/2011/11/ruusujen-aika.html

Times of Roses (Ruusujen aika,1969), directed by Risto Jarva

Ever since I first saw a description for The End of August at the Hotel Ozone in the 16mm rental catalog from New Line Films I’ve wanted to see it. But this 1967 post-apocalyptic drama from Czechoslovakia, directed by Jan Schmidt, has remained an elusive feature for many years. New Line, which was started by Robert Shaye as a film distribution company in 1967, catered to art houses and colleges and universities with its eclectic mix of independent work (Eagle Pennell, Mark Rappaport, Jack Hazan), international fare (Werner Herzog, Lina Wertmuller, Claude Chabrol) and midnight movies (The Hills Have Eyes, Pink Flamingos). Eventually the company moved into producing films as well (such as the popular Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) but in 1994 New Line was acquired by the Turner Broadcasting System, which was then acquired by Time Warner in 1996 and later merged into Warner Bros. in 2008.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

So what happened to The End of August at the Hotel Ozone and other international films once carried by New Line like Jan Nêmec’s Martyrs of Love or Fons Rademakers’ Max Havelaar? They went missing for years and some are still in limbo. In the case of The End of August, Facets Multimedia in Chicago secured the rights to it and released it on DVD in 2006. I recently caught up with it, thanks to Atlanta’s Videodrome, the last standing DVD/Blu-Ray rental store in Atlanta.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967), directed by Jan Schmidt

Post-apocalyptic cinema is one of my favorite genres because it is open to all manner of creative speculation and approaches. Generally categorized as science fiction, the results can vary wildly between a big budget, all-star Hollywood production like Stanley Kramer’s overstated but moving On the Beach (1959) and a no-budget effort like Roger Corman’s The Last Woman on Earth (1960), which depicts the end of the world in soap opera terms as a volatile love triangle (1959′s The World, the Flesh and the Devil went the same route but added racial tension to the mix).  

The End of August, on the other hand, is a much more abstract and loosely structured work intended for art house audiences and closer in tone and visual style to something like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1983). There are also parallels to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and such later end-of-the-world visions as Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003). Shot in black and white with minimal dialogue and a sparse music score, The End of August plunges us into the not-so-distant future where a band of eight women are meandering through the wilderness in search of food and other survivors after a worldwide nuclear event has decimated most of mankind.

The catastrophe that ended the world is noted on the tree’s timeline in The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967).

In an intriguing opening montage, we see a deserted warehouse, empty fields, abandoned eyeglasses on an open book, an empty church, a fading human footprint on rock and then a tall tree being cut down. After it crashes to the ground, we see the circular ring patterns of the tree’s core as someone describes events that occurred during the tree’s history: “This is where it happened. Lots of people survived. Only later everything died off, but there were still cinemas and trains. I was still young. There were fewer people all the time. They left towns. You were born somewhere around here. In those days even the last survivors had died. We were in the mountains then. We began our trek around here. You were only ten or twelve. Then the dogs tore apart the last boy. Helen drowned around here. And this is where Maria died.”

Beta Poinicanova plays the matriarch of feral female tribe in The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

The speaker is an elderly woman (played by Beta Poinicanova), the last link to civilization as it existed before the world fell apart. She is now the matriarch and leader of a small tribe of younger women who are uneducated, have no sense of history or moral code. Their mission, beyond mere survival, is to find a man so they can procreate and continue the human race though they all may, in fact, be sterile. The younger women are more like feral children and their attitude when encountering anything unexpected in the course of their journey often turns rapidly from curiosity to indifference or hostility with destructive consequences.

The final barbaric survivors of Earth in The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

I can imagine what an American filmmaker in the sixties would have done with a premise like The End of August but director Jan Schmidt refuses to exploit certain elements of the film such as the depiction of the female protagonists. Instead of a bunch of shapely starlets dressed in sexy rags, these women dress like men (several of the actresses are reputedly Czech soldiers; the credits acknowledge the participation of the Czech Army) and are dirty, disheveled, and sullen in appearance. There are no lesbian flirtations, erotic bathing scenes or cat fights through a male gaze. But there are scenes of shocking cruelty involving animals that stand out and are bound to outrage and repel some viewers.

The ill-fated stray dog in The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

Hand grenades are tossed into mountain streams, stunning and killing fish so they can be scooped up for cooking. A snake is literally torn apart and discarded by one of the girls after it loses its curiosity value. A starving, mangy dog that follows the tribe in hopes of getting some food scraps is shot with a rifle. Its high-pitched yelps of pain are horribly real but end when its head is crushed with a rifle butt. A cow is also shot down point blank and butchered on the spot with almost manic glee by the female hunters. Only horses are sparred a crueler fate and, in a pinch, they could easily become food.

Snakes were harmed in the making of The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

The fact that the animal deaths were not faked and were committed on camera in The End of August is unmistakable (There were no organizations like PETA or Eurogroup for Animals at the time, monitoring the treatment of animals in films being shot in Eastern Europe). It’s possible that the cow was a candidate for the slaughterhouse and the dog was a stray slated for euthanasia but it still doesn’t excuse their on-screen treatment. Of course, on a dramatic level, it’s undeniably potent in the same way animal death scenes in Mondo Cane and other Mondo films are shocking and drive home the film’s merciless vision. But Schmidt could have accomplished the same effect without actually killing the animals. Perhaps he felt it was more important to capture the grim reality of the situation but the message is clear: ignorance breeds contempt. The behavior of these last survivors condemns them to extinction and is perhaps appropriate and the logical end for an unenlightened species.

The last man on earth meets the oldest woman survivor of a nuclear event in The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

Despite the reprehensible nature of the above sequences, The End of August is still an original and thought-provoking experience with moments of austere beauty and even tenderness, particularly in the final segment when the women meet the only man they have ever seen (at the deserted hotel of the title). The twist is that he is close in age to the tribe’s matriarch and hardly the male specimen needed to impregnate the last women on earth. Interaction between the old man and the younger followers is awkward at best but, for a brief time, he manages to captivate them with a record player and his only surviving record, the popular polka song, “Roll Out the Barrel” (They have never heard music before). The result is both oddly touching and ironically amusing as the camera captures the rapt faces of the women. In the end, the record player and record prove to be more valuable and precious than the life of a human being.

The End of August was based on a screenplay by Pavel Juracek, who is best known for the influential Czech sci-fi adventure Ikarie XB 1 (aka Voyage to the End of the Universe, 1963) and the anarchic, madcap farce, Daisies (1966). As for director Jan Schmidt, he might have been considered part of the emerging Czech New Wave in his own country during the sixties but his name is relatively unknown in the US. With the exception of The End of August at the Hotel Ozone and Joseph Kilian (1965), a surreal Kafkaesque short he co-directed with Pavel Juracek, Schmidt’s work remains unavailable for viewing in the U.S. despite the fact that he has at least 15 other films to his credit. This makes it difficult to assess his importance as a filmmaker but The End of August did garner some critical acclaim when it first premiered in the U.S.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967), directed by Jan Schmidt

The late Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic wrote, “The film, with all of the pitfalls awaiting such a venture, is never tawdry, never pat or obvious or foolish. I think that Ozone with its grace and beauty and natural ease of expression, is finer than the more rigid, more theatrical The Silence [Ingmar Bergman's 1963 drama].”

A sign from a human survivor? (from The End of August at the Hotel Ozone)

Other articles of note:

http://cinematrices.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/late-august-at-the-hotel-ozone-jan-schmidt-1967/

http://itssuperawesome.blogspot.com/ (This includes an interview with lead actress Beta Ponicanova on the making of the film)

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1864ozon.html

http://www.hollywoodgothique.com/2010/02/the-end-of-august-at-the-hotel-ozone-glen-and-randa/

http://home.comcast.net/~flickhead/HotelOzone.html

http://www.idyllopuspress.com/meanwhile/1289/the-end-of-august-at-the-hotel-ozone/

Sometimes a movie goes so horribly wrong in so many ways that it ends up working on an entirely different level in spite of itself. Such is the case with Poor Pretty Eddie (1975), which is also known as Black Vengeance, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, clear indications that this is a movie with a confusing production and distribution history. A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.

Michael Christian in the title role

It was filmed outside Athens, Georgia at Charlie Williams’ Pinecrest Lodge, a home style Bar-B-Que restaurant, and was executive produced by Michael Thevis, a notorious mobster who was once on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and known as “The Scarface of Porn” (he is currently serving time in prison in Sandstone, Minnesota for the shotgun murders of two men, Isaac Galanti and Roger Dean Underhill). Thevis had provided financing for other movies (often uncredited) such as Oliver Stone’s Seizure [1974] but the mystery is how well-known and established actors such as Shelley Winters, Leslie Uggams, Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor were lured into this dubious project which capitalizes on the worst stereotypes of the rural South. Drawing inspiration from the Yankee-hating Two Thousand Maniacs! [1964] and the hillbilly nightmare Deliverance (1972), Poor Pretty Eddie also exploits women’s fears about traveling alone and the consequences but ups the ante by putting a woman of color in the driver’s seat. It certainly was the precursor to the Roger Corman/New World Pictures drive-in hit, Jackson County Jail (1976) with its quasi-feminist slant, but it was eclipsed by the male variation, Macon County Line (1974), released by American International Pictures.  My own interest in the film comes from the fact that it was filmed in Athens not long after I arrived in January 1973 to attend the University of Georgia. I remember hearing reports of Shelley Winters sightings in downtown Athens and rumors about the nightlife shenanigans of some of the cast and crew. At the time, my friend Christy Gray was a waitress at the Prime Time Restaurant (now a liquor store), one of the few semi-high end local restaurants for carnivores. I remember her telling me about a night when a large party of people involved in the production of Poor Pretty Eddie (including Shelley Winters and Michael Thevis) came into the restaurant and shut the place down. Toward the end of their partying, a drunken Thevis blurted out something like “If anyone wants to drink, gamble, fight or fuck, come to room 46 later tonight.”

Michael Thevis, “The Scarface of Porn”

The production on Poor Pretty Eddie was completed in November of 1973 but the movie did not have an official premiere until the Atlanta International Film Festival in 1974. To say it was poorly received there would be an understatement and an edited version of Poor Pretty Eddie finally received its hometown premiere in May 1975. I didn’t catch up with the film until 2009 but had always wanted to see it because several prominent residents of Athens and acquaintances of mine had played a part in the production.  The film stills you see near the beginning of the film were shot by Jim May, brother of my friend Marianne May Causey. The American Legion Hall in nearby Lexington, Ga. was used for scenes and local sheriffs Gene Smith (of Oglethorpe county) and Tommy Huff (of Clarke County) make cameo appearances. So does University of Georgia basketball coach Harbin “Red” Larson, who appears in one of the film’s most sordid scenes. Larson (he died in 1981) plays a sleazy traveling salesman who offers Uggams a ride (and potential escape) from her situation but ends up making her pay in oral sex and more in his parked car. You can only wonder why Larson agreed to do this movie or what he thought when he finally saw it (or what the president of UGA and the faculty thought).

Leslie Uggams in Poor Pretty Eddie

There were even a few prestigious crew members from outside Georgia who somehow got roped into working on Poor Pretty Eddie such as former actor (Rebel Without a Cause) turned editor Frank Mazzola and musician Grant Boatwright and his wife, singer Ginger Boatwright, who contributed to the soundtrack, and appear in the film.

Leslie Uggams in Poor Pretty Eddie

Poor Pretty Eddie starts innocuously enough at a football stadium where famous singer Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams) is belting out the national anthem before the game (It was supposed to be Sanford Stadium at UGA but ended up being shot at the home of the Falcons – Atlanta Stadium). The movie then quickly transitions to a shot of her car speeding through the countryside and her voiceover: “Look, I have two weeks before my next concert. Now I’m going to get in my car and drive until I find a nice, quiet hole to crawl into.” Truer words were never spoken. Liz finds the perfect hideaway when her car breaks down on some backwoods country road.

Ted Cassidy & Michael Christian in Poor Pretty Eddie

Stumbling upon a rundown hunting lodge with cabins for rent, Liz decides to rent a room while the property’s handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, Lurch of TV’s The Addams Family) fixes her car. What should have taken only a few hours turns into days as Liz becomes a virtual prisoner in this bucolic hellhole due to the manipulations of the innkeeper Bertha (Shelley Winters) and her younger lover Eddie (Michael Christian). He not only becomes sexually obsessed with Liz but also thinks she can help his fledgling career as a country singer (his wardrobe suggests Elvis in his Vegas years with a touch of Evel Knievel).

Liz’s attempts to repel Eddie end in rape and the degradation just continues after that – the aforementioned sexual assault from a traveling salesman, a humiliating investigation by the local sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens) who asks her questions like “Did he bite ya on the tittie?,” a meal of Keno’s beloved dog, a public trial in which Floyd (Dub Taylor), the self appointed judge, strips Liz in front of the local yokels, and a final nightmarish wedding ceremony that turns into a bloodbath.

Shelley Winters and Michael Christian’s arm in Poor Pretty Eddie

Director Chris Robinson was already an old pro at the exploitation game when he made Poor Pretty Eddie. His directorial debut was a 1970 “documentary” entitled The ABC’s of Marriage and some of his subsequent efforts were Bloody Trail (1972), a post-Civil War exploitation drama with Rance Howard (father of Clint and Ron Howard) and John Mitchum (younger brother of Robert Mitchum), the low budget Western To Hell You Preach (1972) and Is There Sex After Marriage (1973). Whether Robinson was trying to craft a commercial thriller geared for the drive-in market or trying to make a gripping melodrama that addressed racial relations, rape and self-preservation is hard to say but part of the answer may lie in the screenplay by B.W. Sandefur, which, according to some sources, was inspired by the Jean Genet play The Balcony. Strangely enough, in the 1963 film version of the Genet play, Shelley Winters played the madam of a bordello who encouraged her customers to play out their sexual fantasies while a revolution was unfolding in the streets outside. Winters is also a madam of sorts in Poor Pretty Eddie, a former showgirl who now rules over her remote domain in an alcoholic haze, dreaming of the past. Bertha’s rustic lodge, however, is no upscale bordello and is closer to a free-range insane asylum, comparable to John Waters’ conception of Mortville in his 1977 feature Desperate Living, but played as pure melodrama here.

Shelley Winters…..drunk again in Poor Pretty Eddie

Artistic pretentions aside, Poor Pretty Eddie works best as a defiant, in-your-face grindhouse flick that moves from one atrocity to the next and part of its hypnotic attraction is the sight of an actress like Shelley Winters (who was never one to refuse grotesque roles for vanity reasons) spout dialogue like “What is that there juicy pickaninny doing up there in my cabin?” She gets her share of howlers here (delivered in a pseudo-Southern accent) and plays her passive/aggressive role as an exaggerated hybrid of her earlier work in Bloody Mama [1970] with some pouty, dejected mannerisms from A Place in the Sun [1952]. Matching her scene for scene in terms of excess is Michael Christian as Eddie, who delivers most of his dialogue with a wink and a sick puppy smile, bringing new meaning to the word repulsive as he performs riffs on his psychotic half-wit character.  Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor also appear to relish their over-the-top caricatures of Southern degenerates and in one party sequence reveal their regional sense of humor:
Floyd (Taylor): “I ain’t got nuthin’ against n*ggers. It’s them goddamn Yankees. They’re like hemorrhoids.
Orville (Pickens): “How’s that?”
Floyd: “Well, if they come down and go back, that’s alright. But if they stay down, they’re a pain in the ass.”
Orville: “Ya know, the way things is going one of these days the only kinda people we’ll have around here is high yellow.”
Orville: “You asshole.” (They both laugh uproariously).

Slim Pickens in Poor Pretty Eddie

While the shrill performances, stunningly crass dialogue and the offensive central narrative of a black woman being victimized by moronic white rednecks are enough to guarantee Poor Pretty Eddie a special place in The Cinema Hall of Shame, it earns extra points for its mind-warping montage sequences which enter avant-garde territory. The most infamous scene in the movie, of course, is the slow-motion rape of Liz by Eddie in the cabin and it is intercut with footage of two dogs mating while a jaunty little country ditty plays on the soundtrack. In another sequence, Eddie, dressed like an Elvis impersonator, takes Liz to a waterfall for a photo session and as she snaps images of him striking rock star poses, she imagines her camera as a shotgun, blowing huge holes through his white body suit. The final wedding scene massacre, also shot in slow motion and an obvious nod to the cinema of Sam Peckinpah, is a gratuitous gore freakout staged for maximum incoherence.

Leslie Uggams in Poor Pretty Eddie

In some ways, you could say Poor Pretty Eddie is a less cathartic precursor to Fight for Your Life [1977), a sadistic actioner in which a trio of escaped convicts terrorize a black family until their victims finally turn the tables with extreme viciousness. There is no final catharsis for Liz. At the beginning of the movie she is a strong, independent, self-reliant woman and famous celebrity. By the end she is stripped of everything - her freedom, self-respect and maybe her sanity.

Leslie Uggams being raped by Michael Christian in Poor Pretty Eddie

Uggams, a musical star of Broadway, television and the movies, has the most difficult role in Poor Pretty Eddie and her actions and reactions to her situation often demand a major suspension of disbelief. Yet, she brings a much-needed sense of quiet defiance and seething inner rage to her character that finally explodes in the final moments but is strangely self-directed as she destroys a mirror image of herself with a shotgun.   Poor Pretty Eddie had a limited theatrical release but surfaced in various versions with different titles over the years in film prints and VHS copies. The print quality usually showed considerable wear and tear and faded color but it resurfaced on Blu-Ray in 2011 from Cultra (Who would have thought this would ever happen?) looking as good as it ever possibly could, if not better, than when it first made the rounds under the title Poor Pretty Eddie. The film still stands out as one of the purest examples of what exploitation cinema is all about and worth seeing for its unapologetic assault on good taste.

The beloved dog copulation scene from Poor Pretty Eddie

* This is an expanded and revised version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other articles of note:

http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/665/616/408580/

http://larryrevene.com/2013/01/01/count-it/

http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2011/09/truth-about-eddie-remembering-poor.html (a highly recommended article on the making of Poor Pretty Eddie)

http://www.atlantatimemachine.com/misc/eddie11.htm (another essential site for information on the film’s production history)   

“When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.” – Orson Welles

When you’re a film actor, it’s easy to understand how one can obsess over some less than perfect facial or physical feature that is going to be magnified by the camera on the big screen. But in most cases these fears are usually unfounded and not even something the average moviegoer would notice or care about. Claudette Colbert and Jean Arthur both insisted on being shot from the left side for profiles; Colbert called the right side of her face “the dark side of the moon.” Fred Astaire used movement and positioning to distract people from what he felt were his unusually large hands and Bing Crosby dealt with his increasing baldness by wearing hats at all times (he refused to wear toupees). Orson Welles’ insecurity over the size of his nose, however, is probably the most baffling of the actor hangups I’ve read about.

*This is a slightly revised version of my post that originally appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog    

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Orson Welles’ nose but the legendary actor/director/producer thought it was too small. He was once quoted as saying “My own nose is nothing” and lamented that it “had not grown one millimetre since infancy.” In a sketchbook entry from 1955, Welles wrote, “You may have wondered why I look so peculiar on the television. And it’s partly, I must confess to you, the fact that you see my nose as it is. In most of the films that I appear in, I put on a false nose.  Usually as large as I can find.” Yet when you look at photos of the young Orson Welles is there something about his nose that seems inadequate? No, it’s only in the mind of Welles that there’s a problem, one that he tried to remedy since his early days in theatre with a variety of fake noses created and employed for every role and character.

Orson Welles in The Lady From Shanghai

It’s quite possible that Welles has never allowed his real nose to be filmed without some additional padding or special makeup except for his youthful scenes in Citizen Kane (1942), his Irish sailor in The Lady from Shanghai and any live appearances as himself. Perhaps he felt it allowed him greater versatility in creating a character. Or maybe he just loved the art of disguise.

Orson Welles in Touch of Evil

One thing is true though as Welles grew older. If you didn’t notice his nose before, you certainly couldn’t avoid staring at it in movies like Touch of Evil or The Long, Hot Summer or Ten Days’ Wonder as the noses grew larger and more bulbous.

Orson Welles in Ferry to Hong Kong

But did building a bigger, more imposing nose result in a greater performance or improve the quality of his acting in movies like The Tartars (1961) or Ferry to Hong Kong (1959) or Marco the Magnificent (1965)? I think not, though Welles would obviously disagree.

Orson Welles in Marco the Magnificent

Welles’ peculiar focus on this part of his physiognomy has been documented and noted in countless biographies like this detail that appears in Barbara Leaming’s biography on Orson. After completing his 1948 film version of MacBeth, Welles agreed to appear in Black Magic as the title character Cagliostro. “In Rome where he installed himself in grand style at the Excelsior,” Leaming wrote, “Orson seemed far more worried about the supply of false noses he had inadvertently left in Hollywood than about his unfinished picture [MacBeth]. Until he received a package of noses from home he would somehow have to conserve the ones he had.”

Orson Welles in Black Magic

Around this same time Leaming mentions that Welles was planning a movie production in Paris of Cyrano de Bergerac for producer Alexander Korda. “Says Orson: We were going to do all the sets where I was shot with big doors and high door knobs, and so on – so I’d look very, very short, because I always thought that Cyrano should look up at everybody.” As for the magnitude of the false nose he would wear in the part, it seemed he would need several different sizes: “I discovered a wonderful thing about Coquelin, who created the part, that nobody knows,” recalls Orson, “which is that in every act his nose got shorter. Isn’t that brilliant? Absolute genius! And so of course I was going to do that.” Unfortunately, the play was never produced; Korda sold the property to Hollywood instead for more money and Jose Ferrer was cast in the film version.

Orson Welles as MacBeth (1948) in his film version

On the web site Shadowplay, there is a fascinating anecdote by David Cairns about Welles’ nose collection: “Each new snout would be hand-crafted by studio artists to the actor’s exacting specifications, and at the end of filming would go into Welles’ private collection. Each nose therein had its own display case and its own name, although the names did not correspond to the names of the characters the noses were designed for. Sheriff Hank Quinlan’s bloated drunkard’s schnozz, for instance, was named Sandra, for instance. The aquiline hooter worn in his television King Lear, made by cutting the corner from a shoebox, went by the nickname Sloane Jnr. On social evenings, Welles would perform magic tricks with the noses, making them vanish, or performing a variation on the old shell game, using three noses and a garden pea.”

Orson Welles as King Lear (for television)

If you could hold a séance and conjure up and interview all of the deceased actors, directors, crew people and makeup artists who worked with Welles and had stories about his fake noses, you’d probably end up with a book as detailed and as massive as Tim Lucas’s exhaustive biography on director Mario Bava (All the Colors of the Dark). I’ve culled just a tiny fraction of them below from various sources.

Orson Welles as Don Quixote (an uncompleted film)

On the Bright Lights Film Journal site, Peter Tonguette conducted an interview with Juan Luis Bunuel (son of director Luis Bunuel) about the making of the never completed Don Quixote in 1955; Juan worked as an assistant director on the film and discovered quite a few things about Welles’ working methods such as incorporating a limp into his character’s walk (the result of an injury on the set). “Another thing that I found out was that Welles hated his nose. Whenever he can in films, he puts on these huge noses. He was a very big man with this tiny pug nose. And he hated it. In the film you don’t see it much, but he would change the shape of his nose. The make-up lady would come and say, “Welles’s nose is a little too green today.” So I said, “Orson, your nose is green!” “Oh, well.” And then he’d put some more make-up on it. Or it could be twisted the wrong way and I’d say, “Orson, your nose,” and he’d push it over into shape. Every day we had to watch out for his nose!”

Orson Welles and Paul Newman on the set of The Long, Hot Summer

Just a few years later, Welles was hired to play the Southern patriarch Will Varner in The Long, Hot Summer (1957), an adaptation of William Faulkner’s “The Hamlet” and some of his short stories. It was not a happy experience for the overweight actor according to a behind the scenes story on the AMCTV site. Co-star Angela Lansbury recalled,  “He was very, very heavy…We were working under dreadful conditions of heat and he was perspiring and he seemed to have a lot of thick make-up on.” It was filmed on location in Louisiana and the rising temperatures played havoc with Welles’ prosthetic nose. Paul Newman, who was witness to the incident, said, “There’s nothing worse than having someone start a scene and then the make up guy comes over and starts picking and gluing your nose back on.”

Orson Welles (left) in The Roots of Heaven

Regardless of the role, there were always plenty of possibilities for the character’s nose as evidenced by this telegram (click on the link – http://www.flickr.com/photos/buhbuhcuh/288698979/) from Welles to Maurice Seiderman, the virtuoso makeup artist who transformed Welles into Citizen Kane, Raymond Massey into Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Alan Carney into a pop-eyed walking dead in Zombies on Broadway.  From the date and reference to Darryl Zanuck (incorrectly spelled Zanyck), I suspect that the picture in question is The Roots of Heaven.

Orson Welles (far right) in Ferry to Hong Kong

One of my favorite stories about Welles’s nose obsession comes from Lewis Gilbert (Alfie), who directed him in Ferry to Hong Kong.  (The following excerpt appeared in an article entitled “The Night Orson Welles Lost His Nose in China” on the official web site of the Daily and Sunday Express).

Sylvia Syms, Curd Jurgens and Orson Welles (right) in Ferry to Hong Kong

Gilbert said, “When I met him, I said that we would begin with a test, which we would shoot the next day. “A test? What for?” said Orson, “I don’t do tests.” “A make-up test,” I said, “That’s all, just so the make-up man can settle on what he’s going to do.” “No, that’s not for me,” said Orson. “I have one problem with my face – my nose. It’s too small and I always fix that myself.” “How?” I asked. “It’s all arranged,” said Orson,  “I had a parcel sent ahead specially. Everything for making a false nose is in it.” “So it’s here, then?” I said.

That night, 20 people scoured every post office in Hong Kong. On this big picture with all its huge logistical problems, top of the agenda was the search for Orson’s nose. Only after a very long time did someone find the missing parcel in one of the post offices. It was brought to us early the next morning. “Now all we have to do,” I said, “is hand this to the make-up man and we can get on with the test.” “But I shall be putting the nose on myself,” said Orson, “there’s no need for a test.”

“And that is what happened. He put the nose on himself every day. Only when scenes were cut together did we find out what we had let ourselves in for. Some shots had the nose tilting upwards; others had it tilting downwards. Occasionally it went sideways and in one shot it was suddenly big and hooked. In the meantime, on set, Orson was still finding ways to play up. He decided that having applied the false nose he would now stuff his cheeks with cotton wool. As a result he was unable to talk properly and produced the most extraordinary sound.”

Orson Welles in Ten Days’ Wonder

The truth is that most directors yielded to Welles’ makeup specifications and preparations for his roles despite their better judgment. A perfect case in point is Ten Days’ Wonder. French director Claude Chabrol, whose 1971 adaptation of a novel by Ellery Queen (a pseudonym and fictional hero for two writers, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) is often referenced as the worst case scenario of Welles’ fake nose addiction.

Claude Chabrol (left) and Orson Welles on the set of Ten Days’ Wonder

According to Joseph McBride in his biography, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, “Chabrol led Welles wear the most outrageously phony nose of his entire career, a ghastly gray-green creation that changes color from shot to shot. One of the film’s detractors said the only suspense was in waiting to see if Welles’s nose would fall off on camera. Admitting that the nose was rather weird, Chabrol told me that there wasn’t much he could do about it: “I asked Orson to change the nose one day, because it was too green, and he said, ‘My dear Claude, I am a changing character – at the end of the film my whole face will be green.” What can you say?”

Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution (Orson Welles was her makeup coach)

If directors were driven to the breaking point by Welles’ insistence on applying his own makeup, most actors were in awe of him and considered him an expert in these matters.  In preparing for her “double role” in Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution in 1957, Marlene Dietrich recalled the challenges facing her in the role and sought Welles’ advice (as recounted in her autobiography Marlene Dietrich: My Life): “I was enthusiastic at the prospect of playing this role. Naturally, the presentation of ‘the other woman’ made me uneasy, and I took all conceivable pains to transform myself into a person who would be as different as possible from the person I really was. Since the film would stand or fall on this transformation, I made the most extraordinary efforts to become an ugly, ordinary woman who succeeds in leading one of the greatest lawyers by the nose. Despite my many attempts I was not satisfied. I applied make-up to my nose, made it broader with massages, and called on Orson Welles -the great nose specialist – for help. In the long shot in which I’m seen going along a railroad track, I have cushions around my hips and legs. l wrapped pieces of paper around my fingers to make them look as though they were deformed by arthritis. And to complete the picture I painted my nails with a dark lacquer. Billy Wilder made no comment; like all great directors he gave his performers a free hand in the matter of costumes.” If you’ve seen Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution, you know that her disguise was a brilliant tour de force and no doubt Welles was an invaluable makeup consultant. The two of them would team up for more adventures in makeup the following year in Touch of Evil.

Orson Welles in The Tartars

Other Web Sites about Orson Welles You Might Enjoy:

http://www.best-quotes-poems.com/quotations/742/orson-welles-quotes-say

http://www.orsonwelles.co.uk/actor.htm

http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=9399

http://king-lear.org/king_lear_film_-_orson_welles

http://www.wellesnet.com/Sketchbook%20episode2.htm

http://www.marlenedietrich.org/noteWitness.htm

Orson Welles in Crack in the Mirror

Vittorio De Sica (left), Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni in TOO BAD SHE’S BAD (1955)

Often overlooked or dismissed as a minor comic trifle, Peccato che sia una canaglia (English title: Too Bad She’s Bad) has, in recent years, acquired a much more favorable reassessment from film scholars and film buffs due to occasional revivals on Turner Classic Movies and a 2004 DVD release from Ivy Video. It not only has a delightful, rakish charm and evocative on-location filming in Rome but showcases three of the most iconic names in Italian cinema directed by the legendary Alessandro Blasetti, whose career began in the silent era and spanned six decades. Also noteworthy is the fact that the film is based on the short story Il fanatico by Alberto Moravia, the celebrated Italian novelist who saw many of his novels turned into major films – la ciociara became Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women, Il disprezzo became Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Il conformista became Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.Released at the end of 1954 in Italy, Too Bad She’s Bad marked the end of Sophia Loren’s days as a starlet and the beginning of her career as an international leading lady. The film, a fast-paced, chaotic comedy about a family of thieves and the innocent taxi cab driver who is continually implicated in their schemes, may not have been the most challenging of roles for Loren, but it accented her earthy beauty and flair for comedy. It is also historically significant as the film that first paired her with rising young actor Marcello Mastroianni. They would go on to become one of the most famous screen teams in cinema, co-starring in twelve more films together, a record that surpassed that of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (10 films) and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (9 films).

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in TOO BAD SHE’S BAD (1955)

In Sophia: Living and Loving – Her Own Story by A. E. Hotchner, the actress said that Too Bad She’s Bad “was directed by the very talented Alessandro Blasetti, and…brought me together for the first time with the two men who would figure so importantly in my life – [Vittorio] De Sica, this time as an actor, and Mastroianni, who at that time was not a very well known screen actor. He had a good reputation as a stage actor but his films until then were not very distinguished and he had not had any significant success. And he had never performed in a film comedy before Too Bad She’s Bad. The rapport among De Sica, Marcello, and me was immediate. We all three came from the Naples area – Mastroianni was born in a little town a few miles from De Sica’s birthplace – and we shared a conspiratorial bond reserved for Neapolitans. We shared a sense of humor, a rhythm, a philosophy of living, a cynicism that lurked behind our lines of dialogue and interplay. Our heritage was our repertorial experience. We played scenes with a kind of flair and fire that I had never experienced before. Freer. Nearer to life – in fact, magnifying life to the point of making a comment about it.”

The director, Alessandro Blasetti, had previously directed Loren in a segment of Tempi nostri (1954), a collection of sexy vignettes released in the U.S. as The Anatomy of Love, and was convinced she was ready to play the female lead in Too Bad She’s Bad. For her role, Loren tinted her hair blonde and liked her new look so much that she was tempted briefly to keep her hair that way.

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in TOO BAD SHE’S BAD, filmed on location in Rome

Loren recalled that for Too Bad She’s Bad, “De Sica and I played father-daughter petty thieves, with Marcello as the decent taxi-driver outsider who catches us filching from him and others. De Sica created a style which Marcello and I picked up, and we three performed together with a subtlety and verve that set the tone for the many films we were to make together. As soon as a second script could be prepared, the three of us were reunited in The Miller’s Wife [1955], followed immediately by Scandal in Sorrento [1955] with De Sica, and then Lucky to be a Woman [1956] with Marcello. Unfortunately, Lucky to Be a Woman substituted Charles Boyer for De Sica and our Neapolitan soufflé fell.”

When Too Bad She’s Bad was released in Italy, it was a big box office success though it fared less successfully in the U.S. where its Neapolitan humor was lost on most American moviegoers. Sophia’s beauty and sex appeal, however, were hard to ignore and most critics focused on that aspect of the film. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times noted that “One striking point in its favor is the luxurious Sophia Loren, who is something to look at from any angle or any side…With her, ambulating is an art. Leaning over is an esthetic maneuver. The signorina racks up quite a score…Our advice to all non-Italian speakers who go to see this picture is: forget the subtitles. Forget the story. They’re unimportant. Just watch the dame.”

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni (far right) in TOO BAD, SHE’S BAD (1955)

It would take Loren several years to overcome her sex symbol image and be taken seriously as an actress. None of her Hollywood pictures, despite top talent on both sides of the camera as in Desire Under the Elms [1958], That Kind of Woman [1959] and Heller in Pink Tights [1960] were completely successful with the exception of Houseboat [1958], a light romantic comedy with Cary Grant. It was not until Loren returned to Italy in 1960 to star in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women that her talent as a dramatic actress was realized. From past experiences, De Sica knew exactly how to draw the best performance from her and the result was a Best Actress Oscar® for Loren in that role.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in TOO BAD, SHE’S BAD (1955)

It would also take Marcello Mastroianni several more years to achieve international success after the making of Too Bad She’s Bad. He began to attract favorable critical acclaim for his work in Luchino Visconti’s White Nights [1957] and Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street [1958] but his first major breakthrough role occurred in 1960 when he starred in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. At the time of Too Bad She’s Bad, however, Mastroianni was still uncertain about his future as an actor. Based on the following anecdote in Matilde Hochkofler’s biography of Mastroianni, his mother obviously didn’t attach any importance to his movie career at all. “I won ‘Nastro d’argento’ and ‘Grolla d’oro’ awards for this film [Too Bad She's Bad], which my mother immediately pawned at Monte di Pieta, the government pawnshop,” Mastroianni recalled. “I went there too, and the broker said quite kindly: ‘Look, Mr. Mastroianni (having made a number of films, I was already quite well known), there’s no need to feel embarrassed – I won’t name names, but you wouldn’t believe who’s been here.’ They gave me 120,000 lire.”

* This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on tcm.com

Other links of interest:

http://www.lorenarchives.com/film_1954_peccato_canaglia.html

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/11/02/the-films-of-alessandro-blasetti

Sources:

Sophia: Living and Loving – Her Own Story by A.E. Hotchner (William Morrow & Co.)

Sophia Loren: A Biography by Warren G. Harris (Simon & Schuster)

Sophia Style by Deirdre Donahue (Barnes & Noble)

Marcello Mastroianni: The Fun of Cinema by Matilde Hochkofler (Gremese)

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in TOO BAD, SHE’S BAD (1955)

Nigel Davenport (left ) & Michael Caine in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

Underrated by critics and ignored by audiences upon its initial release in 1969, Play Dirty, directed by Andre de Toth, has slowly but surely acquired an appreciative fan base over the years thanks to high profile advocates of the film like Martin Scorsese who included it on a long list of guilty pleasures for the May-June 1998 issue of Film Comment. Unfortunately, this World War II drama starring Michael Caine had the misfortune to follow in the wake of Robert Aldrich’s box-office hit, The Dirty Dozen (1967), to which it was often unfairly compared. But, outside of a similar assemble-the-team concept which sends a group of criminals on a suicide mission, the film has very little in common with Aldrich’s blockbuster and there is absolutely no reason to feel any guilt over liking it either. 

For the record, here is Scorsese’s entry on Play Dirty: “In the opening sequence, Michael Caine is driving a dead body on a jeep, and there’s Italian march music on the soundtrack. Right away you know you’re in for something unique. Play Dirty isn’t a sadistic film, but it’s mean. The characters have no redeeming social value, which I love. In one sequence, they pretend to be Italian soldiers to fool some Arabs; one of the Arabs spots something on them, so they take their guns and shoot all the Arabs. They don’t think, they just act. They have a job to do, and they’re going to do it. The nihilism, the pragmatism — it’s frightening.”

Michael Caine (foreground), Nigel Davenport (right) in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

This was enough to hook me even though Scorsese’s memory of the film turns out to be faulty. In the opening sequence, it is Nigel Davenport, not Michael Caine, who is at the wheel of the jeep and the music we hear is the German ballad “Lili Marlene,” which is being broadcast over a radio. Davenport switches over to another station playing “You Are My Sunshine” before the credit sequence ends. But Scorsese’s appraisal of the film as frightening in its nihilism is dead-on even if the rest of his guilty pleasures list includes Jules Dassin’s noir Night and the City (1950), George Steven’s Texas epic Giant (1956), Lewis Allen’s supernatural thriller The Uninvited (1944) and many others which seem baffling examples of movies you’d be embarrassed to admit you enjoyed.

Nigel Davenport (left), NIgel Green & Michael Caine (right) in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

Play Dirty gets down to business immediately with Col. Masters (Nigel Green) being given one last chance by Brig. Blore (Harry Andrews) to succeed in a secret mission to blow up a German fuel dump at a North African port. Masters has handpicked his seven man commando team, headed by Cyril Leech (Nigel Davenport), from an array of prisoners and convicts with distinct skills that are paramount for this covert operation but is forced by Blore to put a British officer in charge. “British officers don’t understand my methods, sir,” he protests but Masters eventually recruits a young, relatively inexperienced officer, Capt. Douglas (Michael Caine), to lead the team.

Michael Caine in PLAY DIRTY (1969), directed by Andre de Toth

Douglas’s presence generates contempt and resentment among the men and his inexperience almost jeopardizes the mission more than once on their journey but is averted by Leech’s quicksilver cunning each time. A grudging respect, if not complete trust, eventually forms between Douglas and his unit and by the time, they reach their objective, Douglas has become as hardened and ruthless as the rest. There are no real heroes to cheer and any societal notions of morality are absent in the godforsaken, sun-baked desert setting. Yet despite the film’s bleak trajectory, there is something bracing and invigorating about Play Dirty’s relentlessly cynical view of military leadership and the nasty business of war and the final fadeout carries a bitterly ironic sting in its tail.

The Dirty Dozen is similarly cynical and unsentimental in its story arc of a suicide mission but the tone is entirely different. In Aldrich’s all-star Hollywood blockbuster, the character development was done in broad strokes with operatic flourishes, resulting in scene-chewing performances by Telly Savalas, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and others as psychotic misfits; the violence was extreme for its day and veered into gratuitous sadism and misogyny in its treatment of the German women trapped in the chateau in the explosive climax. In comparison, Play Dirty is almost minimalistic with terse, hard-boiled dialogue that is used sparingly but effectively, occasionally offering uncoded insights into a character’s psyche. Often de Toth captures the essence of the story in purely visual terms with natural sound for punctuation.

Nigel Davenport (with binoculars), Michael Caine in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

A long, suspenseful scene in which Douglas steps on a hidden mine and has to remain perfectly still while the bomb defuser works frantically to deactivate it before it explodes generates the kind of nail-biting tension that distinguished such doom-ladden dramas as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953). So does a masterful sequence where Douglas charges his team with transporting three jeeps over a steep, jagged ridge using a jerry-rigged pulley system that is certain to break at some point. Other visually striking set pieces include a raid on a Nazi compound (that turns out to be a decoy) during a blinding sand storm and the final assault at night on the German munitions dump. But more obvious than the formulaic necessity of delivering plenty of action for a war themed film is de Toth’s focus on the sheer physicality of the mission with the men subjected to the punishing heat and grime, the hostile terrain, possible death at any moment and the gradual dehumanization that comes with the territory.

Nigel Green in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

The performances in Play Dirty are uniformly excellent with memorable minor roles by Harry Andrews as the pompous, glory-grabbing brigadier and Nigel Green as the mission strategist obsessed with ancient military history. But the most engrossing aspects of the film are the portrayals by Michael Caine as Douglas, an out-of-his-league, novice officer, and Davenport as Leech, a ruthless mercenary who has been promised a bonus of $2,000 pounds if he can bring Douglas back alive. The possibility that Leech might opt to forfeit the reward just for the satisfaction of seeing Douglas killed invests the film with genuine tension that rarely lets up and often results in unexpected twists and turns. Caine plays Douglas with a cool, deadpan detachment but he is often upstaged by Davenport’s charismatic sociopath, a former Irish merchant marine who was previously imprisoned for sinking his own ship for the insurance money (the entire crew drowned).

Nigel Davenport in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

The presentation of the rest of criminal commandos is curiously low key in comparison to Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and may be a reason why Play Dirty was less engaging for some viewers. The rag tag international assemblage (most of them unfamiliar faces to American audiences) includes a Tunisian demolition man, Sadok (Aly Ben Ayed), an arms smuggler named Kostos (Takis Emmanuel), communications specialist Boudesh (Scott Miller), transport and supply expert Kalarides (Enrique Ávila) and Hassah (Mohsen Ben Abdallah) and Assine (Mohamed Kouka), two Arab mercenaries who make no attempt to hide their gay relationship. Their openly affectionate behavior with each other (they are often shown holding hands) doesn’t even provoke the rancor of the other men who’ve seen it all but the couple is certainly not benign; their predatory behavior and greed is witnessed repeatedly as they loot corpses and the sites of massacres for bounty. And the other men are clearly no better as revealed in brief background profiles provided by Col. Masters to Douglas over drinks. Even Douglas stoops to their level when he takes part in the killing of two unarmed German medics.

Takis Emmanuel (background), Vivian Pickles, Enrique Avila (right) in PLAY DIRTY (1969).

In one of the more surprising plot developments, the eight man squad spare the life of a German nurse (Vivian Pickles) taken hostage in an ambush and force her to care for Hassah after he is severely wounded by an exploding mine. The presence of a woman in their midst proves to be too much for Kalarides, Boudesh and Kostos and they attempt a gang rape. But this horrific situation ends in the manner of a comedic blackout skit thanks to the intervention of an unexpected savior. Pickles, who will always be remembered for her role as the self-satisfied socialite mother of Bud Cort in the cult comedy Harold and Maude, is a formidable physical presence in her brief scenes here as the only female the group encounters.

Vivian Pickles as a captured German nurse in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

Despite my high regard for Play Dirty, the film was not a pleasurable experience for either Andre de Toth or Michael Caine, both of whom share their mostly negative impressions respectively in De Toth on De Toth (edited by Anthony Slide) and Michael Caine’s autobiography, What’s it All About?. Reputedly, the story by George Marton (which was adapted for the screenplay by Melvyn Bragg with additions by Lotte Colin) was inspired by the exploits of Popski’s Private Army, a unit of the British Special Forces, and other similar combat forces such as the Long Range Desert Group and the SAS (Special Air Service) in the Western desert of Africa during WWII. In fact, Col. Masters’ character (played by Nigel Green) was supposedly based on the real Vladimir ‘Popski’ Peniakoff.

Nigel Davenport holds a knife to Michael Caine’s throat in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

Initially, the film, produced by Harry Saltzman (Dr. No, Goldfinger, The Ipcress File), was to be directed by Rene Clément (Forbidden Games, Purple Noon) but he clashed with his producer and eventually walked off the picture after two years of haggling over production details. “Neither of them was sure what the picture was about,” de Toth recalls. “Clément wanted to shoot whatever ‘his’ picture was about in Morocco or Algeria…Harry, a headline-man and Zionist, wanted to shoot ‘his’ picture in Israel. Harry refused to scout North Africa, Clément refused to go to Israel.”

Nigel Davenport in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

After Clément’s departure, de Toth, who had been brought aboard the project by Saltzman as executive producer, was asked to take over the directorial reins and help shape the screenplay (uncredited). Almeria, Spain became the new filming location for Play Dirty but after four days of shooting, the temperamental Richard Harris (in the role of Cyril Leech) walked off the set and was replaced by Nigel Davenport.

By his own account, Caine found the filming in Almeria to be an ordeal due to the oppressive heat, isolation and less than adequate accommodations. But he began the picture with high hopes, noting, “The script was reasonable and it had a good plot: a group of Israeli commandos are sent out in the desert war to blow up the German fuel dumps, but the British Army have got there first and they want the fuel for themselves….On the surface it is a good action story, based on fact, with a moral to it and some controversy. So what could possibly go wrong? The short answer is – everything. Play Dirty is a prime example of how you can start out with a good story and the very best of intentions and yet get gradually worn down into mediocrity…There was a much-vaulted re-write of the script, which in my opinion was not as good as the original, but we used it anyway. The powers that be always use the last script in film-making no matter how bad it is because they have to justify the additional expense to their financiers and dare not admit they have made a mistake. Rene Clément was replaced by Andre de Toth with whom I had worked briefly when young in A Foxhole in Cairo. Andre came on to the picture so late that even he had no time to do his best work.”

Considering the chaotic circumstances, de Toth managed to remain faithful to his vision for the film which is one of its most distinguishing characteristics. “I wanted to rub our noses in the mess we have created and how we shy away from our responsibility to clean it up,” he stated. “I showed what I wanted, the naked truth, the truth of life and war.” He had no allusions he was making a box-office hit and addressed that, saying “The Dirty Dozen was a good and entertaining motion picture. A movie on the wide and well paved avenue to the box office. How could it compare to Play Dirty, a bitter slice of real life and certainly not entertainment. Had I wanted to entertain with Play Dirty, the demi-gods would’ve been right to tear me limb from limb.”

Director Andre de Toth

Unfortunately, de Toth did not have the right to the final cut of the film and some of his directorial touches were comprised or changed in the final editing process. For example, he recalls that “Michel Legrand wrote a wonderful score for the scene where the ambushed soldiers are being buried and above them the vultures are circling. The happy voice of a children’s choir. The harsh contrast to the macabre scene disturbed them so much that after I delivered what I thought was the finished picture, the children’s voices were taken out the day before the release-prints were ordered. Nothing I could do.”

Michael Caine in PLAY DIRTY (1969), directed by Andre de Toth

Regardless of de Toth’s and Caine’s criticism of Play Dirty, I consider it a diamond in the rough, a genuine sleeper that deserves a cult and is slowly gaining one. The film has aired occasionally on Turner Classic Movies but it has also been released on DVD over the years in varying degrees of quality. MGM released a no-frills edition in 2007, Lowndes Productions Limited released a poor quality DVD in 2010, and it turned up as part of a triple feature DVD package from Image Entertainment in 2011 with The Dogs of War and The Purple Plain. The good news is that a Blu-Ray PAL release from UK 101 Films is expected on July 14th, 2014 (you will need an all-region DVD/Blu-Ray player to view it). This might encourage some enterprising US distributor to license a domestic Blu-Ray release of it in the near future.

Enrique Ávila and Vivian Pickles in PLAY DIRTY (1969)

Although less well known today than Stanley Kramer’s Oscar-nominated 1967 drama, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and still unavailable on DVD/Blu-Ray, One Potato, Two Potato (1964) was the first serious, non-exploitive attempt to deal with an interracial marriage as its main subject and was independently produced outside Hollywood. Set in the fictional small town of Howard (a stand-in for Painesville, Ohio, where it was actually filmed), the movie is bookended by a courtroom ruling on a child custody case and in between is the sad but all too true story of an interracial couple who become social outcasts in both the white and black communities.   

Bernie Hamilton and Barbara Barrie in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

Julie (Barbara Barrie), a white divorcee with a daughter, and Frank (Bernie Hamilton), the son of a Black farmer, meet at work and a romantic relationship blossoms. For its time, released just a few weeks after the passing of the Civil Rights Act by the Supreme Court, it was a brave and unconventional film…and it still holds up remarkably well today as a portrait of two lonely, working class people living in ordinary circumstances in small town America. Yet, at the time, the filmmakers  – director Larry Peerce, producers Stephen Shalom and Anthony Spinelli (who has a small part in the movie) – had difficulties finding an American distributor and the movie ended up being picked up by Cinema V, a small New York City outfit that specialized in art house fare. Despite the fact that One Potato, Two Potato has an emotionally engaging storyline, the topic of interracial romance was enough to keep it out of mainstream cinemas in 1964, especially in the South. So, it’s not surprising that it was handled as an art film with modest distribution in urban areas across the country. At least some critics recognized its considerable merits and at the Cannes Film Festival Larry Peerce was nominated for the Golden Palm and Barbara Barrie walked off with the Best Actress award.

In the U.S. One Potato, Two Potato did garner one Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay (by Orville H. Hampton and Raphael Hayes) but neither Barrie nor Bernie Hamilton, who are both superb in the film, were recognized by the Academy for their performances. In fact, the entire film is an actor’s showcase right down to the minor players. Even screen newcomer Marti Mericka (this would be her only film) is natural and unaffected as Ellen, the child who becomes the pawn in an ugly custody battle.

Richard Mulligan and Barbara Barrie in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

If there is a weak link in the movie, it’s Richard Mulligan as Joe, Barrie’s former husband who abandoned her and their child to travel to South America for a life of adventure with no adult responsibilities. Mulligan (brother of director Robert Mulligan) got his start as a stage actor and established a considerable reputation on Broadway before moving into television and film. Perhaps because of that, his performance seems too broadly theatrical for this film’s naturalistic approach. It also doesn’t help that his character as written is completely unsympathetic; his self-loathing and sense of failure as a man and a father is what drives him to destroy the happiness of his former wife.

Bernie Hamilton and Barbara Barrie in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

The other common criticism – and this is totally a matter of perception for some viewers – is a sequence in the film that occurs just after Frank and Julie are shown embracing for the first time after a friend’s wedding celebration; they become giddy with happiness and hopscotch down a sidewalk in a deserted park as if reverting to childhood. While the sequence may be cringe-inducing to some, it also captures that moment in the first blush of romance when the masks are removed and two lovers feel completely free to express themselves openly, without any concerns of how others might perceive them.

Robert Earl Jones (left), Bernie Hamilton in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

Watching One Potato, Two Potato today one is struck by the film’s simplicity and directness. Hardly a line of dialogue rings false and there are many moments that strike a deep emotional chord without resorting to sentimentality or melodrama. Take, for example, this exchange between Frank and his parents (played by Robert Earl Jones and Vinnette Carroll) over his relationship with Julie that reflects attitudes about segregation of the races that are ingrained at an early age and still prevalent today.

Father: You’re running around with a white woman.

Frank. [no reply]

Father: I asked you something. Are you gonna answer me?

Frank: It’s true but I don’t see the difference it makes. Pop, we’re in love. Just like you and mom. We’re in love and we want to get married. What difference does it make whether she’s black, white, purple or green?

Father: You ain’t marrying no damn white woman. You’re sticking to your own kind.

Frank: Pop, you’re talking like an Uncle Tom.

Father: [slaps him] I tell ya what I’m gonna talk like. A Farmer. A Black farmer. I got land and I’ve worked hard so my family could grow up like they’re alive. Don’t you go calling me names for sweating my life away, taking care of you. For the love of God, you went to school with white people. You go to work with them. Look what it’s done to you. Did it put your brains to sleep? Make you forget the facts of life? They’re nice to you. They’re polite to you. But you still have only one place to go and that’s with your own kind.

Mother: Both of you are going to be outcasts.

Father: And children. What are you going to do about children? What are they going to be – black or white?

Mother: Frank, if you love that girl, you’ll be doing her a kindness if you leave her alone. Frank, life’s got more misery than joy in it. Colored boy, he’s got the most misery of all.

Barbara Barrie, Bernie Hamilton in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

Even in the more lyrical moments of One Potato, Two Potato as Julie and Frank begin falling in love, the harsh realities of the current social order intrude. While walking home together at night after a date, the couple are subjected to a blinding search light by a bigoted cop who gives them the third degree, addressing only Julie.

Cop: What are you doing here? This isn’t a hotel, sister

Frank: [in disbelief] What?

Cop: Beat it. Take your customer out of here.

Frank: [belligerent] You can’t talk to her like that.

Cop: You heard me. MOVE.

Immediately following this harsh treatment Frank struggles with his rage but, unexpectedly, Julie turns the situation around, making light of a humiliating situation.

Frank: The only reason he said what he did is because you’re with me.

Barrie: What a thing to say.

Frank: You have to be a prostitute to be with me.

Barrie: [She laughs]

Frank: What’s the joke?

Barrie: Me? A Prostitute? I am afraid of my own shadow. Don’t you think it’s funny? Now look at me. Don’t you think it’s funny?

Frank: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

The delicate switch between potentially explosive emotions and self-irony is prevalent throughout the film; even the loathsome Joe is allowed his moment of truth in an unguarded explanation to Julie about his behavior during a boarding house visit.

Barbara Barrie, Bernie Hamilton in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

Probably the biggest surprise of One Potato, Two Potato is the realization that the two screenwriters Orville H. Hampton and Raphael Hayes were not normally associated with this sort of grass roots, independent filmmaking. Hayes was primarily a television writer who worked on everything from Ben Casey to Rawhide to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and had only a few film credits to his name such as The Three Stooges’ romp Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959) and Hey Boy! Hey Girl! (1959), a Louis Prima-Keely Smith B-musical.

Hampton, on the other hand, had toiled for years in the B-movie industry on such films as Hong Kong Confidential (1958), The Alligator People (1959), and Jack the Giant Killer (1962). Despite being nominated for Oscars for their work on One Potato, Two Potato, however, both writers never again achieved anything as impressive as this, unless you count Hampton’s scripts for Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) or the Pam Greer actioner Friday Foster (1975) – which are impressive on an entirely different level.

Overall, there is an unadorned, honest, almost improvisational quality about One Potato, Two Potato that is often lacking in the more commercial Hollywood releases of its era. It would take three more years before Hollywood would tackle interracial marriage in the big budget, all-star Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? in which John, Sidney Poitier’s character, is practically superhuman. Unlike Frank’s humble, working class background, John comes from an esteemed, upper middle class family and, to top it off, is highly successful, wealthy and a much admired expert in the medical field. In order to make Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? viable as an acceptable entertainment for Middle America, director/producer Stanley Kramer had to make Poitier’s character so flawless and attractive that a match between him and a Caucasian (Katharine Houghton, the niece of Katharine Hepburn) wouldn’t seem so inconceivable or objectionable.

Katharine Houghton, Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

While Kramer certainly deserves credit for making films about controversial subjects that reached large audiences - racial prejudice in Home of the Brave (1949) and The Defiant Ones (1958), nuclear war in On the Beach (1959), Creationism vs. Darwinism in Inherit the Wind (1960), war crimes in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – his approach often had the effect of an earnest polemic served up in a slick, entertainment package with top Hollywood stars. In contrast, One Potato, Two Potato may seem drab and low key in terms of production values but it’s also much more likely to move you with its intimate depiction of a couple on trial by society.

The Cool World (1963), directed by Shirley Clarke

It’s also interesting to note that 1963-64 was the same time period for these independent film releases: Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man and Black Like Me, based on the non-fiction account of John Howard Griffin, a white man who medically altered his skin color and passed as Black. The Cool World, based on Warren Miller’s novel about a Harlem youth who rises to power as a gang leader, was the most experimental and edgy of the three films and also the one that saw few theatrical playdates outside of a few major U.S. cities.

Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln in Nothing But a Man (1964)

Nothing But a Man, a slice of life drama set in the South with Ivan Dixon as a man facing economic hardships and commitment issues, is another eloquent but often overlooked film from the period, that received as many accolades as One Potato, Two Potato and some critics rate it even higher. Only Black Like Me, which starred James Whitmore as John Howard Griffin, failed to resonate with its intended audience for fairly obvious reasons.

James Whitmore in Black Like Me (1964)

After One Potato, Two Potato, his debut film, Larry Peerce went on to two other impressive projects – one being The Big T.N.T. Show (1966), an amazing time capsule concert record of such performers as Ray Charles, The Byrds, Donovan, Bo Diddley, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Joan Baez and Petulia Clark. The other was The Incident (1967), a harrowing, still powerful drama about a group of subway passengers terrorized by two hoodlums with effectively creepy performances by Tony Musante and Martin Sheen as the tormentors.

Peerce’s big commercial breakthrough was Goodbye Columbia (1969), a romantic comedy starring Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw (in her first major role), based on the Philip Roth novel. After that, however, Peerce never again worked on anything as intimate or as affecting as One Potato, Two Potato, even though many of his later films had great potential but yielded uneven results such as The Bell Jar (1979), a dramatization of Sylvia Plath’s novel starring Peerce’s wife, Marilyn Hassett, or Love Child (1982), a well-intentioned drama about a female prisoner (Amy Madigan) made pregnant by her jailer and her subsequent fight to keep her child.

Bernie Hamilton in Luis Bunuel’s The Young One (1960)

As for the actors, One Potato, Two Potato might be Bernie Hamilton’s finest hour though he is probably best known for his role as Capt. Harold Dobey on the TV series Starsky and Hutch. The brother of jazz musician Chico Hamilton, Bernie’s first film was The Jackie Robinson Story and he provided memorable support in such films as Luis Bunuel’s The Young One (1960), Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960), Synanon (1965) and The Swimmer (1968). He was rarely given leading roles or even prominent supporting ones but at least he managed to avoid stereotyping most of his career and One Potato, Two Potato proved that he was a superb actor (he died in December of 2008). Donald Bogle in his definitive history of blacks in the cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, wrote, “Here in One Potato, Two Potato, he [Hamilton] presented a portrait of a decent and intelligent black man without glamorizing or idealizing the character.”

Barbara Barrie in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

Barbara Barrie, in the female lead, deserved the Best Actress award she won at Cannes and went on to enjoy further critical acclaim for numerous roles in TV dramas, series and feature films such as Breaking Away (1979), in which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and later played the same role in the TV show. Barrie is still a working actress today as well as the author of two critically acclaimed books for young adults – “Lone Star” (1989) and “Adam Zigzag” (1995).

Marti Mericka in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

One last comment and a spoiler alert: Some contemporary critics have criticized the film for the ending which they felt was unrealistic and manipulative. It’s true the climax is still powerful, even shocking, as Julie’s child turns on her in a blind rage, striking her repeatedly when she realizes she’s being sent away forever to live with her real father, a man she hardly knows. But the facts bare this out as an on-screen acknowledgement after “The End” states that the movie was based on a composite of similar custody cases. The real issue for the judge was this: who would make a better provider for the child – a white man or a black man? And in 1964, career opportunities for black men (especially one with a white wife) were limited to say the least. It wasn’t really about who could provide a more loving, supportive environment at home. No wonder this film really got under the skin of some reviewers at the time who couldn’t accept the downbeat ending.

Barbara Barrie in One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

Judith Crist, in her review of One Potato, Two Potato in the New York Herald Tribune, is a prime example of this, writing that after creating “an interracial romance and marriage that is believable and touching – the movie’s makers begin a slow but savage assault upon our emotions, leaving us finally with heartstrings wrenched and tears flowing for the wrong reason – not because of social injustice to the Negro but because of the heartbreak of a little girl being taken away from her mommy.”

Czech poster for One Potato, Two Potato

Variety was more generous in its acclaim and proclaimed the movie, “a tender, tactful look at miscegenation that speaks in human rather than polemic terms,” while adding that “Director Larry Peerce, for his first pic, has wisely told his story without many heavy symbolical and overdramatic embellishments.” On the other hand, A.H. Weiler of The New York Times, pointed out the film’s virtues and faults, “…in filming their sad tale in the small, well-kept confines of Painesville, Ohio, the producers have enhanced the documentary quality of their drama….One Potato, Two Potato” is woefully loose in conviction and reasoning. It does not soar on wings of artistry in keeping with its strong subject. But it speaks out resolutely on a generally shunned social theme that is a credit to the courage of its producers and the team that made it.”

While One Potato, Two Potato might not qualify as a masterpiece, it still remains relevant and well worth seeing almost fifty years later. Until it gets an official release on DVD/Blu-Ray, you might check to see if it is scheduled for broadcast on Turner Classic Movies where it has previously aired.

Other Links of interest:

http://www.news-herald.com/general-news/20091115/pulled-in-by-painesville-pasts-potato

http://www.clevelandmovieblog.com/2012/07/veteran-hollywood-director-larry-peerce.html

http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/2012/08/cinematheque_event_director_la.html

http://www.news-herald.com/general-news/20120802/director-of-one-potato-two-potato-filmed-in-painesville-to-attend-cleveland

http://major-smolinski.com/NAMES/BARRIE.html

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely prospect for a film adaptation than John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, which was first published in The New Yorker. Yet, it was actually adapted into a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Burt Lancaster. Was it a success? Hardly. Even though a handful of critics endorsed it, the public stayed away but for some who were lucky enough to see it, the film resonated for years. Now it is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Grindhouse Releasing and a reassessment is in order.

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer (1968)

The story of Ned Merrill, a middle-aged man in suburban Connecticut who appears to be suffering a major nervous breakdown, definitely appealed to director Frank Perry, an independent filmmaker who had previously received a Best Director Oscar nomination for the sensitive character study, David and Lisa (1962). But it was not the type of story usually optioned by a Hollywood studio. With his wife Eleanor serving as the screenwriter and Burt Lancaster agreeing to play the title role, Perry was able to convince Columbia Pictures to finance The Swimmer (1968) despite their reservations about the unusual storyline: the Lancaster character finds himself several miles from home and decides to swim his way back, using the backyard pools of numerous acquaintances along the way. With each new encounter, we get another piece of the puzzle, another detail about the identity of the confused protagonist and what might have brought him to his current mental state.

Place your bets. Burt Lancaster vs. a horse (from THE SWIMMER, 1968)

What could have become a boring, pretentious art film succeeds brilliantly as a semi-absurdist but deeply felt portrait of middle-age disillusionment and failure. It’s one of those lucky accidents that occurred in the sixties when Hollywood was still open to experimentation because most studio executives were completely insecure in predicting commercial hits. After all, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate (both 1967) had blindsided the industry with their unexpected box-office grosses. So maybe audiences were ready for more challenging films like The Swimmer? Unfortunately, the film was a box-office flop. Still, despite the star power of Burt Lancaster, I’m not even sure the most brilliant marketing team in the world could have lured audiences into theaters to see it.

Burt Lancaster and Janet Landgard in The Swimmer (1968)

The Swimmer was something of an ordeal as well for most of the cast and crew, starting with Eleanor Perry, who had to adapt a short story into a feature-length movie. Lancaster, who had a secret fear of the water, took swimming lessons to prepare for the role along with a strict exercise routine since he would be wearing only a bathing suit in most of his scenes. Almost from the beginning, the star and the director clashed and undermined each other to such a degree that after Perry completed the film, Columbia brought in three other directors, including Sydney Pollack, to do additional work on it. One sequence that was shot by Pollack was the scene where Merrill visits his ex-mistress played by Janice Rule. Barbara Loden was supposed to play this role but she never completed her scenes under Perry’s supervision. In the end, less than half of what Perry filmed ended up in the studio cut of The Swimmer.

Joan Rivers and Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer (1968)

Still, the final result is a strangely hypnotic viewing experience and is particularly notable for its offbeat casting: Diana Muldaur, Kim Hunter, Marge Champion, Bernie Hamilton, Dolph Sweet, Diana Van der Vlis (X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes), John Garfield, Jr. (he has a brief cameo as a guy selling tickets at the public pool) and comedienne Joan Rivers in her film debut as a flirtatious woman at a party. In her autobiography, Still Talking, Rivers admitted that working with Lancaster was no picnic: “He redirected every line so that there would be no sympathy for me. Frank (Perry) wanted a happy girl who then got hurt. Lancaster was going to be Mr. Wonderful who came up against a mean bitch, and was right not to go off with her. Trying to please both men, I was going back and forth between line readings, and nothing made sense.” Her brief scene ended up taking seven days to shoot.

Janice Rule and Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer (1968)

First-time film composer Marvin Hamlisch (he was only 24 years old at the time) had a much happier experience on The Swimmer. Producer Sam Spiegel hired him to write the score after hearing him play the piano at a party and Hamlisch’s haunting theme song for the film opened many doors for him in Hollywood. He would go on to win three Oscars at the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony – one for the score of The Sting (Best Song Score Adaptation) and two for The Way We Were (Best Song and Best Original Dramatic Score).

Burt Lancaster as The Swimmer (1968)

Lancaster later said in an interview in Take 22 that while The Swimmer was one of his favorite roles, “the whole film was a disaster, Columbia was down on it. I personally paid $10,000 out of my own pocket for the last day of shooting. I was furious with Sam Spiegel because he was over at Cannes playing gin with Anatole Litvak while he was doing The Night of the Generals. Sam had promised me, personally promised me to be there every single weekend to go over the film, because we had certain basic problems – the casting and so forth. He never showed up one time. I could have killed him, I was so angry with him. And finally Columbia pulled the plug on us. But we needed another day of shooting – so I paid for it.”

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer (1968)

Most critics were oblivious to the behind-the-scenes squabbles and praised the film for its unique qualities. Variety reported that “a lot of people are not going to understand this film; many will loathe it; others will be moved deeply. Its detractors will be most vocal; its supporters will not have high-powered counter-arguments.” Vincent Canby in the New York Times probably articulated the most common assessment of The Swimmer when he wrote: “Although literal in style, the film has the shape of an open-ended hallucination. It is a grim, disturbing and sometimes funny view of a very small, very special segment of upper-middle-class American life. As a box-office proposition it obviously is an uncertain quantity and one that few of the major producers might have undertaken without the insurance of Lancaster’s name…As do few movies, The Swimmer stays in the memory like an echo that never disappears.”

* This is a revised and extended version of an article that originally appeared on tcm.com

Burt Lancaster (in the distance) in The Swimmer

Other links of interest:

http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/05/swimmer.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/18/john-cheever-blake-bailey

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-swimmer-1968

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/the-swimmer

Blu-Ray/DVD edition of THE SWIMMER (1968)

Is it possible to make a movie that works as both art house fare and exploitation cinema? Arne Mattsson’s Ann och Eve – de erotiska (1970), which was released in the U.S. in an English dubbed version as Ann and Eve, certainly comes close but still manages to frustrate both intended audiences with a bait-and-switch narrative that moves freely from sexual titillation to Swedish angst a la Bergman to surreal flights of fancy and back again, never revealing whether it should be taken seriously or as a put-on until the final frames.

I first encountered Ann and Eve when I worked for the non-theatrical distributor Films Inc. in 1983. Although the college market was the predominant market for the company, churches, high schools, film societies and museums were also steady renters of 16mm films. And so were state penitentiaries. As you can imagine, Ann and Eve was a much requested title from the prison programmers who most likely had viewed the racy trailer, which is unashamedly exploitive with plenty of female nudity, straight and lesbian couplings and a hint of freakiness involving a dwarf. But when I finally saw the movie, it was a much different animal than I expected.

One of the clues that Ann and Eve was not going to be a typical grindhouse sleazefest was the director Arne Mattsson, who had earned critical accolades much earlier in his career for Hon dansade en sommar (One Summer of Happiness, 1951), For min heta ungdoms skull (Because of My Hot Youth, 1952), Karlekens brod (Bread of Love, 1953) and Korkarlen (Phantom Carriage, 1958).  

The only film of his I had seen was Vaxdockan (The Doll, 1962), a dark, moody psychological drama about a department store nightwatchman (Per Oscarsson) whose loneliness and isolation leads to increasingly erratic behavior involving his obsession with a mannequin. Once he kidnaps the doll and takes it home for companionship, reality and fantasy become indistinguishable as the mannequin (played by Gio Petré) comes to life, exerting a strong-willed personality of her own. Although The Doll is primarily a character study of a man’s descent into madness, it achieves an erotic intensity at times and the mixture of gloomy melodrama and hallucinatory fantasy points the way to an idiosyncratic style that would become more pronounced in Ann and Eve.

On the prowl for men: Marie Liljedahl and Gio Petré (on right) in ANN AND EVE (1970)

On the surface, Ann and Eve takes a formulaic premise – two women on holiday together – and embellishes it with sexual encounters and exotic locales (the film was shot at a coastal resort in Yugoslavia but, in the English dubbed version, is incorrectly identified as Italy). Think of the film as a road movie with the older, more experienced Ann (Gio Petré), introducing her younger, soon-to-be married companion Eve (Marie Liljedahl) to the pleasures of the flesh. There is no backstory on how these two became friends or decided to travel together. But you have to suspend disbelief of this unlikely friendship since it is merely a device to set up what will become a power struggle between the two women – the jaded, manipulative Ann vs. the virtuous, virginal Eve. These stereotypes are soon shattered and roles are reversed as the duo experience a greater share of humiliation, frustration and jealousy than hedonistic pleasure.

Heinz Hopf as Walter in ANN AND EVE (1970)

This alone would make a compelling melodrama, with or without the sexploitation elements, but Mattsson also weaves in a parallel subplot involving one of Eve’s seducers, Walter (Heinz Hopf), a local lothario and all-round slacker whose womanizing leads to murderous consequences. Whether the message here is that the female is the deadliest of the species is questionable but Mattsson’s true motivation for making Ann and Eve appears to be something entirely different and emerges in episodic fashion with Ann’s wanderings in the second half of the film.

Gio Petré (on bed) and Marie Liljehahl in ANN AND EVE (1970)

For sexploitation fans, there is plenty to hold one’s attention throughout with both Petré and Liljedahl disrobing often, showering or lounging around their motel room when they aren’t involved in initiating seductions or being seduced. Both are in peak physical form though it was near the end of their careers; Petré would star in two more films and Liljedahl only one before retiring. Of the two libertines, Eve’s sexual escapades seem designed to honor the come-hither aspects of the ad campaign and to please fans of Liljehahl who had flocked to such steamy fare as Inga (1968) and Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (1970).

Eve’s immersion into lust and wanton desire begins when Ann first lures her into an overnight boat excursion with Walter and his friend. Later Eve is bewitched by a voluptuous lesbian nightclub singer (Olivera Vuco) that culminates in one of the more bizarre sequences, a four-woman orgy set to live piano accompaniment and capped by the dwarf pianist mounting Eve.

Marie Liljedahl (background), Heinz Hopf and Gio Petré (foreground) in ANN AND EVE (1970)

It should be noted that this particular setting is not a nightclub by any normal stretch of the imagination; it’s like an interior courtyard in some baroque palace. And the nightclub chanteuse is a crazed hybrid of gypsy dancer and opera singer who is followed around by musicians who look like they escaped from the album cover of “Folk Music of Yugoslavia.”

Julián Mateos and Marie Liljedahl in ANN AND EVE (1970)

Eve’s same sex experimentation gets a big check mark (“It’s wonderful. Better than a  man. The way she touched my breast!”) but doesn’t convert her and she soon hooks up with the porter (Julián Mateos) in the resort hotel who seems more like a stalker. I doubt if anyone, however, could have predicted her final fling before she returns home to her fiancé. She hitches a ride with a truckload of sweaty laborers who get her drunk on wine and have their way with her on sacks of grain. The fact that it is not presented as a gang rape but as a consensual act is like a visceral taunt to potential detractors of the film, suggesting that it was Eve’s plan to choreography her own self-debasement. In the end, Eve, who always seemed more like a blank slate than Ann’s more defined nihilist, is revealed as an amoral opportunist. During a final kiss-off confrontation with Ann, Eve says, “I can go back to Sweden as fresh and untouched as when I came here. I came here to get myself a tan. I figured my white bridal gown would look better on me that way.”

Marie Liljedahl in ANN AND EVE (1970)

If Eve’s experiences in the film play to the expectations of softcore voyeurs, Ann’s story arc travels deep into Ingmar Bergman territory with occasional detours into the surreal combined with an ongoing intellectual debate about mass entertainment vs. artistic achievement. The fantasy element is apparent from the beginning when we see Ann murder a man in an abandoned circus tent with a machine gun.

Gio Petré in ANN AND EVE (1970)

As the film progresses we realize that the “murder” is metaphorical, an act of revenge in Ann’s head against her former lover, a film director, who has rejected her. The blow to her self-esteem and ego is what motivates Ann to flee the situation and go on holiday with a younger woman whose lack of sexual experience she can manipulate to her own satisfaction. But if Ann seems like a corrupting and cynical predator, it is mostly a mask to hide the pain of a major crash-and-burn relationship.

Gio Petré has a lot on her mind and an agenda in ANN AND EVE (1970)

Adding to her sense of isolation and despair are chance encounters with a former Nazi colonel (Erik Hell) now living in obscurity in a quaint seaside resort and a famous film director named Francesco (Francisco Rabal) whom she engages in an ongoing debate about art versus commerce in the film industry. The former is a shadowy presence who haunts the town’s parks and graveyard and still seeks absolution for past war crimes. The film director, on the other hand, is a charmingly smug raconteur who makes a point of refuting any praise Ann bestows on his work. “The film exists for the public, not for you,” he states with a superior smile. “You insist on seeing mystery and significance where I only see a joke and you miss the target entirely…people don’t look at films like critics do. There is no similarity between what you’ve written and I’ve intended. It goes right over the heads of most of your readers…The masses have more sense than you.”

Actor Francisco Rabal, star of Bunuel’s Viridiana & Belle du Jour, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, Mattsson’s Ann and Eve and Mario Camus’s The Holy Innocents

The final putdown could very well be Mattsson addressing the film critics of his native Sweden through Francesco when the film director says to Ann: “You write brilliantly in spite of the fact that you’ve been unable to understand the film at all and I will profit from your praise and in public conceal my contempt for your kind.”

Director Arne Mattsson

Most of this debate takes place in a suite of a luxury hotel where Francesco is surrounded by an entourage of women who are feasting at a banquet table with a semi-nude man as the centerpiece (one female guest casually puts a cigarette out on his chest). This is just one of many sequences where director Mattsson casually drifts into theater of the absurd territory.

Ann and Eve (1970)

The amount of attention Matteson devotes to the psychological duel between Ann and Francesco strongly suggests that Ann and Eve was conceived as a softcore exploitation film in the most superficial sense and that the real intent was to mock the hypocrisy of critics and the movie industry through a movie that pretended to be sexy and profound at the same time. This is borne out at the end when we see an audience previewing Francesco’s latest film and catch glimpses of Eve (the secret star of the film?) accompanied by on-screen commercial blurbs such as “You can positively feel the freshness” or “Such a lovely bride.” If there is any doubt of Mattsson’s conception of the film as an elaborate private joke, consider the final departing shot of a naked man walking past a poster for Francesco’s latest film, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as we hear the voice of a little girl exclaim, “But he’s got nothing on!”

I can only imagine how prisoners at penitentiary screenings of Ann and Eve responded to this, not to mention how the film fared with critics in Sweden. But it seems to be popular opinion that Mattsson reached the peak of his popularity in the late fifties when he embarked on a series of thrillers beginning with Damen I svart (1958); the second one, Mannekang I rott (also 1958) is reputed to be a major influence on Mario Bava’s seminal 1964 giallo, Blood and Black Lace. Mattsson fell out of public and critical favor in the sixties and seventies despite his reputation as a superb craftsman of genre films. There were occasional highpoints such as The Doll and Yngsjomordet (The Yngsjo Murder, 1966) but his later work was often regarded as uneven at best. Ann and Eve might well have been intended as the ultimate rebuke to those that dismissed his later work but I find it fascinating for the way it straddles the line between exploitation and art before settling for a self-satiric fadeout.  Too bad you can no longer see Ann and Eve in the original, uncut Swedish language version with English subtitles. It could be a lost film at this point. Something Weird Video released it on VHS but I never saw that version (It is long out of print).

The VHS release from Something Weird Video

An English dubbed, U.S. release is currently available on DVD from Video Dimensions but, according to customer comments, a blurring effect is used on all scenes involving sexual activity. Someone remarked that Mattsson had done this intentionally as a stylistic device but having seen a relatively intact version of the U.S. release at Films Inc., no blurring was evident and it was certainly more explicit than most softcore exploitation films at the time (it was released with an X rating).

I recently viewed a DVD of Ann and Eve from European Trash Cinema and was surprised to see that most of the erotic sequences are indeed blurred, cut short or missing completely (Could this be the same source as the Video Dimensions release?). It’s also quite possible that some reels are out of order as the continuity is more scattershot than I remember. But I don’t suppose Ann and Eve is going to turn up anytime soon in a restored, uncut Blu-Ray so an inferior, bowdlerized version may be your only option. Yet even in this compromised state, you can still appreciate the film’s eccentric, offbeat qualities and provocative nature and be motivated to check out other work by Arne Mattsson.

Olof Palme, former Swedish Prime Minister who was shot down and killed in 1986 (Photo: Reuters)

One final note of interest: Gio Petré, who retired from film acting in the mid-seventies, was back in the news recently in connection with an investigation into the unsolved 1986 shooting death of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. At the time, Petré was involved romantically with Alf Enerstrom, a doctor and rightwing activist who was known to vehemently oppose Palme. Although a suspect in the case, Enerstrom had an alibi the night of the murder – he said he was with Petré all night. Now Petré confesses that that is not true and Enerstrom went out for several hours that night during which time he could have killed Palme (he owned a gun). It is unclear why Petré is revealing this now but perhaps it will reignite interest in solving the case.

Alf Enestrom (photo: Yvonne Asell)

Other sites of interest:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/olaf-palme-murder-inquiry-revoked-alibi-svenska-dagbladet-stieg-larsson

http://www.sfi.se/en-gb/Swedish-film-database/Item/?type=PERSON&itemid=61072&iv=BIOGRAPHY

http://www.filmbizarro.com/view_review.php?review=vaxdockan.php

In the early thirties, most studios steered clear of social protest films but not Warner Bros. They embraced the genre with the same muckraking glee that characterized some of their subjects. Prison reform was addressed in one of their most famous films, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), with equally controversial topics like the rise in urban crime and drug addiction among war veterans being presented in The Public Enemy (1931) and Heroes for Sale (1933), respectively. Five Star Final (1931), on the other hand, addressed a different type of social problem – tabloid journalism.   

This type of reportage pandered to a mostly uneducated readership with its exploitative mix of personal tragedies, prurient interest and rumors as facts, often destroying lives and careers in the process or stirring up volatile public reactions. And the “scandal sheet” identified as the Gazette in Five Star Final was typical of the sleazy newspapers that captured the public’s attention in the late twenties/early thirties. In fact, it was modeled on the notorious New York Evening Graphic, which was owned by Bernarr MacFadden (“The Father of Physical Culture”) with Louis Weitzenkorn serving as the managing editor. Who better than Weitzenkorn to write a “fictionalized” expose of his former racket as a stage play entitled Late Night Final? It became the source for Five Star Final and one of Warner Bros.’s most important releases of 1931; it even garnered an Oscar® nomination for Best Picture. (It is currently available on DVD from the Warner Archive Collection).

Edward G. Robinson (bottom center) in FIVE STAR FINAL (1931)

The film wastes no time in establishing the opportunistic nature of the tabloid press from the outset. Managing editor Joseph Randall (Edward G. Robinson) is ordered by Gazette owner Bernard Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel) to run a series of articles on the Voorhees case. Twenty years earlier Nancy Voorhees was demonized in newspapers for murdering her unfaithful fiancé after she became pregnant. Now she is happily married to Michael Townsend (H.B. Warner) and planning her daughter’s wedding to Phillip Weeks (Anthony Bushell). But the resulting Gazette news stories have a cataclysmic effect, prompting Nancy and her husband to take extreme measures after facing the headlines and driving their daughter Jenny (Marian Marsh) into a state of hysteria.

From FIVE STAR FINAL (1931), directed by Mervyn LeRoy

In his autobiography, All My Yesterdays, Edward G. Robinson recalled Five Star Final saying, “Consider this story in the light of those who today believe in the unabridged right of the press to print anything (and God knows I am among them). But Weitzenkorn posed a dilemma that has to be considered along with the First Amendment. Does freedom of the press not carry with it some freedom of compassion, some freedom concerning the rights of the innocently involved? Okay. The ethics are one problem: the character I played is another. I loved Randall because he wasn’t a gangster. I suspect he was conceived as an Anglo-Saxon. To look at me nobody would believe it, but I enjoyed doing him. He made sense, and thus I’m able to say that Five Star Final is one of my favorite films.”

Behind the scenes on the set of FIVE STAR FINAL (1931) starring Edward G. Robinson (far left)

It’s no surprise that Robinson would favor Five Star Final among his early films since the picture completely revolves around his character. And his first scene in the movie provides an important clue to his character; Randall is seen vigorously scrubbing his hands in the sink and it turns out it’s a common joke around the office. Whenever Randall is missing in action, his staff checks to see if he’s “washing up” in the bathroom. Does this sound like a man with a guilty conscience? In due time, Randall’s conflicted feelings over his editorial responsibilities are firmly resolved in the face of a tragedy he set in motion.   Although the film rarely escapes its stage bound origins, it conveys an almost manic sense of urgency that seems completely right for its milieu. This was important to director Mervyn LeRoy who wrote in his autobiography Starmaker, “One concern I had in Five Star Final was to make sure that the newspaper office was authentic. Members of our staff in New York had sketches made of the interiors of two newspaper offices so that our dimensions were exactly correct. We even duplicated the neon lighting in the ceilings by having exceptionally bright arc lights blazing down from the top of the studio sound stage. Eddie Robinson loved the part of the dishonest editor, Randall…I went down on the set day after day to watch him work. Eddie’s attack, his vigor, his electric energy, made you forget he was a small and ugly man. He was a towering figure in pictures – a great star.”

Anthony Bushell and Marian Marsh in FIVE STAR FINAL (1931)

While Edward G. Robinson is clearly the star of Five Star Final, there are several supporting players who shine in roles that are little more than caricatures in the script. Aline MacMahon as Randall’s world-weary secretary is also a no-nonsense feminist whose comments on the Voorhees case are all too true: “I think you can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.” She also has a directness with Randall that comes out in their wisecrack patter and lines like “If you want my opinion, take me to a speakeasy. I’m not working for you then.”

Edward G. Robinson (left) and Boris Karloff in FIVE STAR FINAL (1931)

Other standouts are Frances Starr, a former New York stage actress, as the doomed Nancy Voorhees and Ona Munson (her claim to fame is playing Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind, 1939) as the shameless and opportunistic street reporter Kitty Carmody. Best of all is Boris Karloff as the obsequious T. Vernon Isopod (who came up with this name?), an expelled divinity student now posing as a clergyman in order to get inside information on the Voorhees case. Karloff credits co-star and friend George E. Stone with getting him hired for Five Star Final plus the fact that he had already impressed LeRoy with his performance that same year in The Mad Genius. In fact, Karloff made a total of 16 films in 1931 with the most famous one being Frankenstein (1931), the movie that truly launched his film career.

Edward G. Robinson in FIVE STAR FINAL (1931)

Seen today Five Star Final has the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the tone is often as shrill and overbearing as a carny hawking his star attraction. Yet it all seems perfectly in keeping with its sordid story and is often fascinating for its Pre-Code take on morality and ethics. Upon its release, The Motion Picture Herald proclaimed it “crackerjack entertainment” and Variety wrote that “this talker totes a sock and its finish wallop can’t be ducked.” No finer compliments could be bought and just in case you didn’t get the film’s message, it’s summed up for you graphically under “The End” credit – a discarded copy of the Gazette is swept along by a street cleaner into the muck of the gutter.

Edward G. Robinson (second from left) in FIVE STAR FINAL (1931)

* This is a revised and expanded version of the original article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website – tcm.com

 Other links of interest:

http://www.bernarrmacfadden.com/graphic/index.html

http://pressinamerica.pbworks.com/w/page/18360234/Tabloid%20Journalism

http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/robinson.asp

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/13/nyregion/aline-l-macmahon-92-actress-over-50-years-and-in-43-movies.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/redtop-redemption-why-tabloid-journalism-matters-2318346.html

Annie Girardot in THE APE WOMAN (1964)

I can remember being fascinated with Marco Ferreri’s The Ape Woman (La donna scimmia) from the first time I saw a still from it in the May 1964 issue 28 of Famous Monsters of Filmland. A woman wearing eye makeup and sporting a beard and hairy legs poses provocatively for the camera while her mate, either a man in a tacky ape costume or a prop gorilla, rests his head in her lap. The photo description, “Beauty (?) and the Beast make a hairy horror pair in THE APE WOMAN,” was the only information offered about this upcoming release and, since it was being featured in FFofF, I assumed it qualified as fantasy cinema.

Annie Girardot in THE APE WOMAN (1964), a publicity still that appeared in Famous Monsters of Filmland

Produced by Carlo Ponti, The Ape Woman received favorable critical attention when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, garnering a nomination for the Palme d’Or. But I didn’t catch up with it until the early nineties when Something Weird Video released it on VHS as part of their “Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers from the Vaults” series. What had been promoted as a fantasy film by FFofF was actually a caustic social satire and that bizarre image of the simian couple did not appear in the actual film; it was a publicity shot that was taken on the set of a film sequence that involves a nightclub act in Paris.

Something Weird Video VHS release of THE APE WOMAN (1964)

Yet, despite the fact that the Something Weird release was less than pristine with a soft image, uneven audio levels and crudely dubbed in English, there is something compelling about the film (which I recently revisited) that addresses issues of human exploitation, male/female relationships, and Italian society in the sixties. It also bares traces of Italian neorealism with its vivid, on-location scenes set in lower working class neighborhoods and sequences which mix film stars and non-professional actors such as a key turning point in the film, an astonishing public wedding ceremony. The final fadeout is also refreshingly unpredictable though it is now well known that the U.S. release had a completely different ending from the European cut, but more on that later.

Few, if any, champions of the film surfaced when The Ape Woman opened in the U.S. Typical of most reviewers, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, couldn’t resist making jokes about the film’s subject matter: “The only redeeming feature of this oddly distasteful film is the fact that a certain haunting pathos does emerge from it.….It is evident that the censors have used their shears on this film. The producer should have beat them to it. He should have used shaving cream.”

Julia Pastrana, the real life inspiration for Marco Ferreri’s THE APE WOMAN (1964)

Partially inspired by the real life Julia Pastrana (1834-1860), who was born with hypertrichosis, a genetic condition that made her look like a cross between a woman and a gorilla, The Ape Woman stars Annie Girardot as Maria, the title character, and Ugo Tognazzi plays Antonio, the promoter who discovers her in a poorhouse run by nuns and ends up exploiting her in a sideshow. There are expected complications along the way; Maria ends up falling in love with the crass Antonio but runs away when he tries to pimp her out to a suspect “anthropology professor” with an obsessive interest in her body and sexual history. Afraid of losing his box-office attraction, Antonio agrees to marry her but continues to exploit Maria in humiliating ways including a striptease act for Parisian audiences which becomes a wildly successful attraction (she is promoted as “the angel with hair”).

The film shares some similarities to Fellini’s La Strada in which a peasant sells his naive daughter Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) into a life of servitude to a brutal sideshow strongman named Zampano (Anthony Quinn). But Tognazzi’s crass hustler is not nearly as abusive as Quinn’s Zampano and there are occasional flashes of compassion and concern under his opportunistic facade. In some ways, The Ape Woman plays out like a metaphorical gender twist on Beauty and the Beast with Antonio’s conniving impresario presented as someone who is not a fully evolved human being. Yet, in the course of the couple’s life on the road, Antonio is slowly tamed and domesticated by Maria, whose true beauty emerges in the end.

Ugo Tognazzi (center) and Annie Girardot in THE APE WOMAN (1964)

Although you could argue that Antonio’s interest in Maria is purely financial, his persistence in getting her to join him in a business venture has a liberating effect on her. He isn’t openly repulsed by her appearance (“I used to work in a sideshow and I’ve seen worse”) and is even complimentary (“A hairy woman is a virtuous woman”). And their partnership helps Maria gain a self-confidence she never had before. Even if she is initially reluctant to pose as a wild ape woman from Africa for paying audiences, the act allows her to escape the confines and daily drudgery of the nuns’ poorhouse and see a bit of the world. Maria even develops romantic allusions about Antonio which seem wildly improbable but become a reality for her. It is at this juncture that The Ape Woman goes in two different directions.

Annie Girardot as THE APE WOMAN (1964)

[Spoiler Alert] In the U.S. release version, an unplanned pregnancy forces Maria to quit her Parisian burlesque show. Although Antonio encourages her to have an abortion, Maria decides to keep the baby. Following a successful delivery (the baby is normal), Maria begins to slowly lose her excess body hair until there is no longer any trace of The Ape Woman. At first Antonio is frantic, then angry, wanting to sue the hospital doctor for ruining their livelihood. In time, he becomes resigned to his fate and takes a job as a manual laborer to support his family. The final shot in the movie shows Maria and her daughter arriving at Antonio’s work site to share a boxed lunch with him. Whereas they were once outsiders, living on the fringes of society, they are now average working class Italians. There is sometime slyly subversive about this final image when you consider all that has gone before.

Annie Girardot and Ugo Tognazzi in THE APE WOMAN (1964)

But Ferreri’s European release of The Ape Woman had a more cynical and downbeat conclusion. Maria and her child die during the delivery and Antonio ends up presenting the mummified bodies of both in his traveling show just as the husband of Julia Pastrana, the real life Ape Woman, did following the deaths of Julia and her newborn son. (As a bizarre footnote, in 2013, Pastrana’s remains were transferred from Oslo, Norway for reburial in Sinaloa de Leyva, Mexico, a town near her birthplace; there are links to articles on this below). I have not been able to learn whether Ferreri was forced to add an upbeat ending for the U.S. release or if he actually preferred the grim fadeout of the Italian cut.

Gerard Depardieu in Marco Ferreri’s THE LAST WOMAN (1976)

Certainly Ferreri was not one to shy away from shocking denouements. In such films as 1973′s La Grande Bouffe (four men make a pact to eat, drink and f*ck themselves to death) and 1976′s The Last Woman (Gerald Depardieu cuts off his penis with an electric carving knife as a personal response to feminism), he would take an extreme situation to its logical conclusion. I actually prefer Ferreri’s more experimental, hard-to-classify cinema such as the visually dazzling Dillinger is Dead (1969), probably his masterpiece, and the futuristic allegory, The Seed of Man (1969).

I also like the less outrageous, more tongue-in-cheek social satires of the early sixties such as El Cochecito (1960), The Conjugal Bed (1963) and the U.S. version of The Ape Woman. There are still some signs of Ferreri the provocateur in the latter, especially in the opening scenes at the nunnery where Antonio witnesses a slide show of a trip to Africa by missionaries. One slide shows a priest (a cameo appearance by the director a la Hitchcock) trying to convert a topless native and the next slide shows the missionary’s head on a stick. But, on the whole, I admire Ferreri’s unsensationalized approach to a story that was geared toward exploitation but instead emerged as an offbeat and fascinating drama about human nature. Even in Something Weird’s inferior, English dubbed transfer of The Ape Woman, the film’s finer qualities shine through.

Annie Girardot in THE APE WOMAN (1964)

In addition to the expert performances by Tognazzi and Girardot in the leads, The Ape Woman is enhanced by the atmospheric black and white cinematography of Aldo Tonti (Europa ’51, Nights of Cabiria, Barabbas) and marks one of several collaborations between Ferreri and Spanish screenwriter Rafael Azona, who is also well known for his work with Carlos Saura (Peppermint Frappe, Honeycomb, The Garden of Delights). With a little luck, maybe we’ll be able to see a restored version of The Ape Woman one day.

Other links of interest:

http://www.filmwaves.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2:marco-ferreri&catid=1:filmwaves&Itemid=2

http://www.imovies.ge/dir_member/3347

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B03E1DF1E3FEE32A25750C2A96F9C946591D6CF

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/apr/10/news.mainsection

http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=12193

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19740301&id=tP4LAAAAIBAJ&sjid=J1gDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5011,183825

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

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/13/16945751-ugliest-woman-in-the-world-buried-150-years-after-end-of-tragic-life?lite&lite=obinsite

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1645262/

http://www.thehumanmarvels.com/julia-pastrana-the-nondescript/

Underrated at the time of its release, The Hanging Tree (1959) is now considered a superior western from the waning years of that popular genre which coincided with the end of the studio era. It is also considered one of Gary Cooper’s best performances from his final decade in film, comparable to his fine work in High Noon (1952) and Man of the West (1958), and a late period achievement for director Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, 3:10 to Yuma). I was encountered the film at a Saturday matinee in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when I was seven years old and remember being disturbed by it. This is an adult western. It is not a film for children. 

Synopsis: Dr. Joseph Frail, a drifter who arrives in the mining town of Skull Creek, Montana and quickly sets up a practice in the rough and tumble community, is a man of mystery. While rumors abound that he murdered his wife and brother after discovering they were lovers, Frail remains an enigma to his neighbors. He proves to be a kind, compassionate physician, but he is also a shrewd businessman, a formidable gambler and card-player, and a man capable of swift, irrevocable violence. Frail offers refuge to Rune, a young, injured thief hunted by an angry mob, and later agrees to take in Elizabeth Mahler, the temporarily blinded survivor of a stagecoach attack, whom he nurses back to health. Once she has recovered, however, Frail dismisses her and Rune and they form a partnership with Frenchy, a fellow miner, calling their gold stake, the “Lucky Lady” mine. When the trio unexpectedly strike it rich, Frenchy throws a victory celebration for the entire town. Yet, in the midst of it, the drunken, lustful Frenchy tries to rape Elizabeth, setting in motion a chain of events that lead to a fateful encounter between Frail and a lynch mob.

Ben Piazza (left), Gary Cooper and Maria Schell on right in The Hanging Tree (1959)

Adapted by screenwriters Wendell Mayes and Halsted Welles from a novella of the same name by Dorothy M. Johnson that won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award, The Hanging Tree was a Baroda Production, a company owned by Gary Cooper for the express purpose of selecting and producing hand-picked projects. Delmer Daves, who had helmed several other well-regarded Westerns such as Jubal (1956) and The Badlanders (1958), was selected to direct and the movie marked the film debut of George C. Scott in the small but scene-stealing role of Dr. George Grubb, a wild-eyed religious fanatic and alcoholic. (It might have been more than ‘Method Acting’ on display since Scott was going through a difficult period of deep depression and drunken rages in his personal life).

George C. Scott in The Hanging Tree (1959)

The film also marked the American film debut of playwright/stage actor Ben Piazza in the role of Rune.

Gary Cooper (center), Ben Piazza (right of Cooper) in The Hanging Tree (1959)

The Hanging Tree was filmed on location near Yakima, Washington from mid-June to mid-August of 1958 on a budget of $1.35 million dollars. Part of this expense went toward the creation of the mining town of Skull Creek and the final result has an authenticity and rustic allure that evokes the unruly, makeshift mining towns that sprung up in the middle of nowhere during the gold rush era. Once production began, however, Delmer Daves became ill and had to be hospitalized for ulcers. Co-star Karl Malden, who had recently directed his first film Time Limit (1957) and had been a film actor since 1936, was approached to complete the film for Daves despite his reservations. Cooper encouraged him to do it and offered his support and Malden guided the film to completion. (Director Vincent Sherman has been credited in some sources as contributing his services to one day of production).

Karl Malden (left) and Gary Cooper in The Hanging Tree (1959)

It turned out to be a good experience for Malden who became a personal friend of Gary Cooper as well as a great admirer of the actor’s working method. “I found that Cooper couldn’t communicate with me in words when I told him how I thought a scene should be done,” he recalled in Coop: The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper by Stuart M. Kaminsky. “He said, ‘Show me,’ and I did, acting out the scene with Maria [Schell], improvising. Then he took over and did exactly what I wanted him to do, not at all rigid as people have said. If there was a problem, it was with the directors who used him….Cooper knew himself and he knew the lens of the camera…Cooper knew what to avoid and what to do. He always relaxed in front of the camera and concentrated on the role. He knew what would appear on the screen and he played for it. People have often mistaken his ability to relax on the set for indifference, but he was very interested in the making of the film, the acting process.”

Director Delmer Daves (left), Maria Schell and Gary Cooper on the set of The Hanging Tree (1959)

During the filming of The Hanging Tree, Cooper was not in the best of health either and suffered from hip pain from an earlier injury in his career. This made it difficult for him to ride a horse and explains his unusual riding style of leaning to the left on the saddle. According to biographer Kaminsky, Cooper incorporated his physical problem into a character trait of Frail’s: “Two hands on the horn of his saddle, Cooper would list to the left as if resting and move to a position in which he could pay rapt attention to the other characters in the scene.”

When The Hanging Tree was released, it received respectable reviews but was not a big box office hit. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “Delmer Daves has directed the gold camp action for a great deal of clatter and bang, and it all looks rambunctious and authentic on the vividly colored screen. Indeed, what with one thing and another, the story is absorbing to the end. It keeps you wondering and wishing — finally wishing it were a little better, that’s all.” The Variety review was more affirmative, stating, “There are fine performances from a good cast, but the main contribution comes from the director. The natural splendor of the Washington location is thoroughly exploited in Technicolor, but Delmer Daves doesn’t allow his characters to get lost in the forest or mountains.” The film would also earn an Oscar® nomination for the title theme song, written by Jerry Livingston and Mack David, and sung over the opening and closing credits by Marty Robbins.

Maria Schell and Karl Malden in The Hanging Tree (1959)

After a span of more than fifty years, The Hanging Tree enjoys a reputation that separates it from the glut of routine Western programmers released during the fifties and looks ahead to Robert Altman’s lyrical frontier fable, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). The entry for the film in The BFI Companion to the Western best sums up the movie’s unique qualities: “This is Daves’ most complex and ambitious film and certainly his finest western. It was also his last…it is a brooding, romantic, opaque work of great dramatic intensity and breathtaking visual beauty. The film is an almost explicit critique of the Bildungsroman schema that underlies so many Hollywood Westerns and has certain interesting parallels with Andre Gide’s novel La Symphonie Pastorale and the 1946 film made from it. Where The Hanging Tree really scores, though, is in its style: few Westerns have been as successful in their dramatic use of space.” 

If you haven’t seen it, the film is available on DVD from Warner Bros. Archive Collection and occasionally airs on TCM.

* This is a revised version of the article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Maria Schell and Gary Cooper in The Hanging Tree (1959)

Sources:

Coop: The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper by Stuart M. Kaminsky (St. Martin’s Press).

Gary Cooper: American Hero by Jeffrey Meyers (William Morrow and Co.)

George C. Scott: The Man, the Actor and the Legend by Allen Harbinson (Pinnacle Books)

The BFI Companion to the Western, edited by Edward Buscombe (Da Capo Press) http://www.afi.com   

Other Sites of interest:

http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Posters/H/Poster%20-%20Hanging%20Tree,%20The_02.jpg

http://garycooperscrapbook.proboards.com/thread/343/hanging-tree-1959

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews28/hanging_tree.htm

How many times do you need to say Kill! In a movie title if you want to stress that it is about murder on an international scale? Apparently the distributors of this 1971 oddity were uncertain about that so they created various poster versions for the global market that ranged from four emphatic Kills! to a succinct single Kill! for promotional purposes. They covered all their bases but forgot to identify a target audience for this chaotic, frenzied and wildly improbable mash-up that freebases elements from conspiracy thrillers, secret agent exploits and sexual melodramas with a political agenda. Of course, you wouldn’t expect anything less from author-turned-filmmaker Romain Gray whose only other directorial effort was the pretentious art house mega-bomb Birds in Peru (1968), which starred his wife Jean Seberg as a suicidal nymphomaniac in the Caribbean.  

Jean Seberg in Kill! (1971)

There is certainly no shortage of bad films in the world but occasionally you come across one that is so spectacularly overwrought that it achieves a kind of hypnotic splendor. Kill! certainly fills the bill in this regard but besides the stunned disbelief and unintentional laughter it provokes, the film also exerts a perverse fascination due to Seberg’s participation.

Even though Seberg and Gray were already divorced when they filmed Kill!, biographer David Richards (in Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story) stated that the actress needed to work again, almost as a form of therapy, to combat her deep depression over losing a daughter from a miscarriage. This unfortunate occurrence was blamed on the FBI for the extreme duress and harassment Seberg was subjected to over her involvement with the Black Panther party.

Jean Seberg and Romain Gary in happier times, Los Angeles, 1965

Just a year earlier the actress was at the peak of her Hollywood career with major roles in Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Airport (1970) but Kill! represents a badly timed commercial failure which hastened her downward slide on a professional and personal level. And her co-stars James Mason, Stephen Boyd, Curd (aka Curt) Jurgens don’t fare any better either.

Jean Seberg, James Mason (foreground) and Stephen Boyd in Kill! (1971)

Boyd and Mason, in fact, were both in career slumps at the time. Boyd, once a major Hollywood player (Ben-Hur, Billy Rose’s Jumbo), was mainly working in Europe at this point in B-movies that received little or no U.S. distribution like Osvaldo Civirani’s Il diavolo a sette facce (1971, aka The Devil Has Seven Faces) and Giuseppe Rosati’s spaghetti western, Campa carogna…la taglia cresce (1973). Mason was in a similar situation, having to accept almost any role that could meet his fee due to an expensive divorce and alimony from his first wife Pamela Mason. Unlike Boyd who died much too young at 45 without ever regaining his A-picture status, Mason transitioned easily into character parts with late career triumphs in Murder by Decree (1979), Stephen King’s made-for-TV horror epic Salem’s Lot (1979), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Verdict (1982), and The Shooting Party (1985).

James Mason in Salem’s Lot

Kill! is worth seeing alone just for the eccentric casting of Mason, Seberg, Boyd and Jurgens in the same movie together. As for a brief summation of the plot, Interpol agent Alan Hamilton (Mason) is assigned by his boss Grueningen (Jurgens) to locate and bring down the organization’s number one drug czar and nemesis, Cremona (Mauro Parenti). Hamilton’s mission takes him to Pakistan but his wife Emily insists on joining him and quickly ends up over her head in a convoluted series of events that involve a manic, homicidal ex-New York City cop (Boyd) and various double agents and assassins.   In different hands, Kill! might have been a first class genre film for mainstream audiences but would it have been as entertainingly bad as what Gary delivers? The central premise is a compelling one and addresses the complications, corruption and failures of the international war on drugs, which is just as topical today. But instead of a realistic approach, Gary opts for a lurid comic book surrealism with nihilistic overtones and far too many turncoat characters which end up generating a sense of total confusion instead of a paranoid edginess. And various plot threads such as a disintegrating marriage (based on Gary and Seberg?) and a torrid affair (well, maybe not torrid but definitely sweaty) are equally overwrought in their depictions.

Stephen Boyd and Jean Seberg in Kill! (1971)

At the time of the film’s production, Gary discussed why he was drawn to the project: “For me, drugs are the most terrifying means of abasement today. Drug traffickers are the worst sort of assassins. Since I can’t kill them myself, I’ll kill them in the movies.” He also boasted, “It’s an artistic thriller in the sense that I aim to raise the level of the genre. It’s also an action film set in a strange, almost poetic environment” (from The Films of Jean Seberg by Michael Coates-Smith and Garry McGee).   While Gary failed to raise the level of the genre as he wished, he did succeed in creating a one-of-a-kind pop culture curio which is distinguished by:

1)   The bizarre appearance of blues legend Memphis Slim who pops up occasionally as the entertainer/M.C. of a nightclub straight out of a Jess Franco film

The bizarre nightclub featured in Kill! (1971), directed and written by Romain Gary

2)    A handful of cult European supporting actors such as the gaunt, malevolent looking Daniel Emilfork (The Devil’s Nightmare, Subversion) and “The Italian Peter Lorre” Luciano Pigozzi aka Alan Collins (Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory, Blood and Black Lace, Sabata)

Daniel Emilfork plays Satan in La plus longue nuit du diable (1971, aka The Devil’s Nightmare)

3)    An addictive, hyperactive theme song “Kill Them All!” composed by Berto Pisano and Jacques Chaumont with lyrics by Romain Gary and performed by soul singer Doris Troy

4)    A consistently disorienting mise-en-scene (Arabian sheiks on trampolines is a recurring visual motif)

Mauro Parenti (on left) as drug czar Cremona in Kill! (1971)

5)   Dialogue that is both hard-boiled as in detective pulp fiction and flippant in the mocking manner of a James Bond film. For example:

Emily: “Death is a big joke with you, isn’t it?”

Brad: “Sure, there’s nothing more satisfying than a job well done.”

Or:

Alan (to his wife upon meeting her at the airport): “This is a matter of life or death and I don’t want you to use it as an excuse for sightseeing.” (This is the day AFTER her disastrous self-guided tour of the country’s sinister backroads).

Or:

Emily: “You can’t kill them all Brad.”

Brad (spitting): “I’m not looking for perfection.”

6)   Exotic locales such as Tunisia, Madrid and Alicante on Spain’s Costa Brava as stand-ins for Pakistan.  When Gary completed Kill!, he chose Marseilles for the world premiere since the French port was a well known center for the international drug trade. The film was poorly received by most film critics and was not a success in France or anywhere else (It was barely distributed in the U.S.). The below review samples are indicative of the movie’s polarizing effect.

“Gary’s direction is often lurid, focusing on cripples, beggars, blood and ugliness. His stage of action is confusing while his arty cutaways to associate images don’t succeed in supplying psychological complexity.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“Romain Gary, writer of repute and budding film maker, has surpassed himself. Les Oiseaux font mourir au Pérou was already a work amusing in its pretentious pointlessness. With Kill all the records have been broken; the film is so absurd it’s hilarious.” – La Revue du cinéma

“If it were a question of some little film from one of these ‘sub’ directors, purveyors of scandal, exploiters of eroticism and sadistic violence, one would pass it by in silence. But Kill has been written and directed by one of our best writers, Romain Gary…And yet the result is a film full of mad ideas, incredible scenes, crazy images, extravagant characters.” – France-soir

“Gary’s direction is sometimes flagging, but good in action scenes and film has a sense of humor that keeps it from falling into coyness and viciousness for its own sake.” – Variety    

A scene from Kill! (1971), written and directed by Romain Gary

James Mason voiced his regrets for making Kill! but admitted that he took the role because of a long-standing friendship with Gary (He had previously turned down a part in Birds of Peru that was given to Pierre Brasseur). Mason said, “It was not a film the making of which I cherish. The scenes were not terribly real, and Alicante is hardly the most agreeable spot on earth. After a while one found oneself wondering, ‘How long is this going on?”

James Mason (left), Jean Seberg and Mauro Parenti (far right) in Kill! (1971)

Seberg was disappointed about her involvement as well, stating, “What Romain didn’t realize when he wrote it was that the girl is almost perpetually in a state of fear and terror, so she tends to stay rather on the same pitch all the way through.” For her nude sex scenes with Boyd, a body double was used. It has to be said that there is zero chemistry between Boyd and Seberg and when she was first informed that he would be her leading man in Kill!, she reportedly said, “Ick!”

Jean Seberg and Stephen Boyd in Kill! (1971)

Gary blamed part of the film’s failure on his producers, Ilya and Alexander Salkind, who kept pressuring him to beef up the exploitation elements after viewing rushes. He’d receive notes from them that would request “more blood and tits.” Gary also accused film critics of missing the intentional black humor that lurked beneath the surface of Kill! The movie also had the bad luck to open at the same time as The French Connection to which it was unfavorably compared. Ilya Salkind later admitted, “Whatever hopes we had for it were dashed. The picture turned out to be bad, extremely bad.”

Mauro Parenti (left) and Stephen Boyd in Kill! (1971)

But what is one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and Kill! should appeal to those who worship at the alter of Robot Monster, Glen or Glenda?, The Oscar and other cinematic pariahs. Paced and edited like a drug addict’s mood swings between uppers and downers, Kill! has a hallucinatory quality which yields a number of moments that will make you hit the rewind button.

Jean Seberg and Stephen Boyd in Kill! (1971)

Here are some of the most memorable scenes:

The blatant anti-drug messaging of the opening montage jumps from one newsreel clip to another with grim footage of a pre-teen O.D. victim and a stoned-out-of-her-mind addict with abscesses on her arms and legs, all of which is being screened for a room of Interpol agents from a 16mm projector.

Jean Seberg dons an Afro wig in a scene from Kill! (1971)

For her first appearance in the film, Jean Seberg is seen wearing a black Afro wig, dressed in African fashions and listening to jungle sounds on the record player as her husband (James Mason) returns home from hunting with a dead duck. Is this Gary’s response to his former wife’s involvement with black activists? The mood quickly changes and soon Jean is brandishing a shotgun and shooting up knickknacks on the shelves of their Geneva, Switzerland home. “We have a nice peaceful life,” she complains bitterly, “and it’s driving me up the wall.” “Yes, I can see that,” Mason says dryly as he pours himself a stiff drink.

Jean Seberg in Kill! (1971)

After arriving in Pakistan a day before her husband’s arrival, Jean decides to go sightseeing on her own in a flashy convertible. Bad mistake. She gets lost at night on a jungle road and stumbles into the dense forest to find help. When she encounters a group of tribesmen around a campfire, she is unable to communicate with them and returns to her car which now has a dead man in the back seat with a knife sticking out of him. She flees in terror, encounters another knifing victim emerging from the woods, returns to her car, takes off and then is startled by the surprise appearance of Stephen Boyd in her back seat. She stops the car and flees again. This entire sequence is just as bewildering and frantic as Jean’s behavior and a good example of the film’s failure to sustain disbelief or establish Jean as a woman of intelligence.

Stephen Boyd in Kill! (1973)

Stephen Boyd as a crazed anti-drug assassin goes for broke in an over-the-top performance that is convincingly deranged, thanks to his feral appearance; unshaven, constantly sweating, dressed in brown leather pants and the same filthy shirt for most of the film. His interrogation scene of Jean is filmed like a LSD freakout with the camera spinning around wildly as she asks of no one in particular, “What is this nightmare?” (It’s called a Romain Gary film and you’re the star!) Then the tables turn and Jean starts interrogating Boyd with a series of repetitive questions that become a mantra and recalls the worst excesses of a David Mamet play – “Who are those men you killed?”…”Why did you kill them?”…”What’s your name?”…”Why did you kill those men?” The scene ends when Boyd ties them both together with rope and flings their bodies onto a bed. Crazy, man, crazy.

Memphis Slim

Memphis Slim performs a bluesy number called “Kill” in what looks like a combination disco/sauna, surrounded by nude women and mannequins. He later appears at a club screening of a porno film in which a woman and a dog are the main attraction (we only see the audience reactions).

There is a long, elaborate car chase sequence that unfolds like a demonstration of a Rube Goldberg invention as the cars encounter increasingly absurd obstacles before culminating in a fiery crash that sets off a series of gas explosions…and then a second car chase begins.

[Spoiler Alert] The final sequence of Kill! might be the most insane of all with James Mason, Boyd and Seberg armed with machine guns mowing down scads of drug dealers in a slow-motion Peckinpah homage. In the midst of this, a mortally wounded Mason has visions of the bullet-ridden mobsters bouncing up and down on trampolines (yes, that again). There are other moments of inspired lunacy but I will leave that for your own research. Unfortunately, you will have some trouble tracking down Kill! on DVD. It is only available domestically in gray market versions but I was able to procure a good quality copy from European Trash Cinema (http://www.eurotrashcinema.com/); you’d better move fast on that option because the owner is closing up shop by the end of the year. Otherwise, you might be able to find an all-region DVD of the film with English subtitle and language options from European sources.

Other links of interest:

http://www.americancinemapapers.com/files/SUPER_SALKINDS.htm

http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/SEB/seb.html

http://forward.com/articles/134609/a-chameleon-on-show/

http://www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/romain-gary-short-biography

http://elarcadearciniegas.blogspot.com/2012/11/romain-gary.html

http://docublogger.typepad.com/seberg/jeans-story.html

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/03/the-jean-seberg.html

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/1968_q_a_with_jean_seberg_star_of_breathless

Image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com and Dieter

Even though the 1936 Laurel and Hardy feature The Bohemian Girl is not ranked among their best by the duo’s fervent fans or film historians, I have a fondness for it because I saw it at an early age before I was even aware of their silent films or the movies which would later become all-time favorites – Way Out West (1937), A Chump at Oxford (1940) and Sons of the Desert (1933). What stood out were the hilarious sight/audio gags such as Ollie’s bafflement at his partner’s slight-of-hand tricks, the horse scrubbing sequence, and Stan’s switch from high soprano to basso while singing; those have a resonate power to make you laugh in the worst of times. Unfortunately, most operetta aficionados dislike it because the music is secondary to the narrative and is not given a showcase deserving of the libretto. And L&H devotees find the music as insufferable and annoying as those musical passages in the MGM Marx Brothers comedies where you just want the boys to get on with their business. For those who fall between both camps and have never seen The Bohemian Girl, this is your homework.  

Laurel and Hardy in The Bohemian Girl (1936); image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com

After the financial success of Fra Diavolo (1933, aka The Devil’s Brother) and Babes in Toyland (1934, aka March of the Wooden Soldiers), producer Hal Roach was temporarily convinced that Laurel and Hardy fared best in screen adaptations of popular operettas. As a result, the film rights to Michael Balfe’s 1843 musical, The Bohemian Girl, were secured and the boys found themselves playing gypsies in 17th century Bohemia. Despite some tailoring to fit the comic duo’s unique talents, the movie version of The Bohemian Girl (1936) was partially faithful to the original operetta with Stan Laurel cast in the atypical role of a gifted thief and Oliver Hardy as his friend and cuckolded husband of a shrew (Mae Busch) who flirts openly with her lover, Devilshoof (Antonio Moreno). When Devilshoof is punished by Count Arnheim’s soldiers for an offense, he takes revenge by abducting Arline (Darla Hood of Our Gang fame), the only child of the Count. Soon Devilshoof and Ollie’s wife run off with Stan’s stolen jewels, leaving the boys to raise the little girl on their own. Twelve years later, Arline (now played by Julie Bishop) has blossomed into a beautiful gypsy girl but is put in harm’s way when her community is persecuted as undesirables by the Count and his menacing henchman, Captain Finn (James Finlayson).

James Finlayson (left), Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in The Bohemian Girl (1936)

Despite a light and whimsical tone, The Bohemian Girl is dark around the edges unlike most of Laurel and Hardy’s features from this period. Those who saw this film as children will be forever haunted by the grotesque final shot of the boys, emerging from a torture chamber – Ollie stretched by the rack to the size of a giant while Stan has been crushed down to dwarf size. Could there be a more graphic representation of Laurel and Hardy as outsiders and social outcasts? The sexual humiliation suffered by Ollie is also front and center with Mae Busch puncturing his ego at every opportunity. First, she deceives him over the identity of the abducted child, Arline, in this exchange:

Hardy: Whose kid is that?

Busch: It’s none of your business.

Hardy: What do you mean it’s none of my business? I demand to know.

Busch: Well, if you must know, she’s yours.

Hardy: Mine? Well, why didn’t you tell me before?

Busch: Because I didn’t want her to know who her father was till she was old enough to stand the shock.

But Hardy’s pride in being a father is quickly crushed by Busch’s farewell note: “Thanks for the jewels. I am leaving you forever. P.S. You are not the father of that child. Your wife.” The hurt is further compounded by Stan’s thoughtless comments on the situation which only add salt to the wounds.

Laurel and Hardy in The Bohemian Girl (1936); image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com

But if The Bohemian Girl occasionally flirts with more disturbing plot elements, it is a much more carefree affair than the actual filming of the movie. It was supposed to be co-directed by Hal Roach and James Horne but Roach was so preoccupied with running his own studio that the project was turned over to Horne and Charley Rogers. In the midst of filming, Stan remarried his second wife, Virginia Ruth Rogers (the first ceremony wasn’t legal), and then came down with the flu, halting production. Then, tragedy struck. A few days after the film’s sneak preview, co-star Thelma Todd was found dead in her garage, the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rumors would soon surface stating that her death was arranged to look like a suicide and that she was actually murdered over her business dealings with high profile mobsters involving her profitable roadside cafe on the beach. It was no secret that Todd was once married to a henchman of infamous gangster Lucky Luciano.

Publicity shot of Thelma Todd from The Bohemian Girl (1936); image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com

The mysterious circumstances surrounding Todd’s death were never solved but Stan, who was a close personal friend of the actress, requested that most of her scenes be deleted from the film prior to release since they would only generate the wrong kind of attention from the press and reviewers. Although she can still be glimpsed in the film, most of her scenes were reshot with Zeffie Tilbury in the role of the Gypsy Queen’s daughter; even her one remaining song in the film was dubbed by someone else.

Oliver Hardy (left) and Stan Laurel in The Bohemian Girl (1936); image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com

While The Bohemian Girl was in production in Hollywood, Europe was entering a dark period in history. In September of 1935, Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws which stated that citizens ‘not of German blood’ would be disenfranchised – an edict that would have a devastating effect on non-Aryan residents. In this light, the subtext of The Bohemian Girl with the Gypsies being harassed and persecuted by the Count is even more telling, though this aspect was less obvious to American audiences than it was to Europeans.

A scene from The Bohemian Girl (1936)

While not as popular as some of Laurel and Hardy’s previous efforts such as Sons of the Desert (1933), The Bohemian Girl delighted most of the comedy team’s fans. Mussolini was said to be a rabid fan of the comedians and actually approached Hal Roach in 1937 with a business proposition involving the creation of Cinecitta studios and possible film collaborations. Not surprisingly, the deal with Il Duce was quickly nixed when Roach’s more politically astute colleagues pointed out his ignorance of the current world situation.

Image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com and Dieter

Interestingly enough, when The Bohemian Girl played Italy, it was seen as a subversive film by Fascists and it encountered censorship around the globe. According to Simon Louvish in Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy, the movie “caused Japan, Sweden and Norway to ‘delete scenes of Gypsy kissing.’ Hungary deleted scenes in which ‘Hardy, awkwardly and for comedy effect, holds up and attempts to rob a gentleman’, and Latvia decreed: ‘Delete scene of Laurel’s wife hitting him and Hardy’s wife striking him on head with a spoon.'” The Bohemian Girl was banned outright in Nazi Germany for dealing sympathetically with Gypsies, who were ranked with Jews as a pariah people.

Oliver Hardy (left) and Stan Laurel in The Bohemian Girl (1936)

Of course, few of these complaints can be taken seriously when viewing The Bohemian Girl today. What remains is a handsomely produced period comedy with some unexpected twists – Stan playing a more resourceful and occasionally aggressive version of himself as a change of pace – and a few classic routines, the most famous being the scene where Stan agrees to help Ollie bottle homemade wine and gets slaphappy drunk in the process. An inebriated Stan wasn’t an uncommon sight in a Laurel and Hardy feature; he’d already done a drunk scene in the previous Fra Diavolo and would do so again in Swiss Miss (1938) but here alcohol makes him bold and fearless before his more formidable enemies, a situation that only heightens the hilarity.

Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy (background) in The Bohemian Girl (1936)

* This is a longer and revised version of my article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website

Other websites of interest:

http://laurelandhardycentral.com/bohemian.html

http://www.kitten-kaboodle.com/index.php/site/comments/movie-review-of-the-bohemian-girl/

http://moviesstarting.blogspot.com/2011/02/bohemian-girl-1936.html

http://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/stars-of-slapstick-137-thelma-todd/

http://thesilentmovieblog.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/the-death-of-thelma-todd/

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-05-05/entertainment/9102090725_1_mysterious-murder-patsy-kelly-roland-west

http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/t/Thelma%20Todd/thelma_todd.htm

http://www.james-joyce-music.com/song03_lyrics.html

http://laist.com/2008/05/10/laistory_thelma.php

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A00EFDF1730E13BBC4F52DFB466838D629EDE

Image courtesy of http://www.doctormacro.com and Dieter

Labor Day weekend for most people means a farewell to summer and a final official holiday before the Fall season but for me Labor Day usually means “The Show” – the annual Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. I have been lucky enough to attend several of the festivals over the year but since I won’t be able to attend the 41st annual event (Aug.29-Sept.1), I wanted to pay tribute to it with a blog about my first visit there – The 8th Telluride Film Festival in 1981. 

Telluride, Colorado

The first time I heard or read about the Telluride Film Festival was in Film Comment. I wasn’t even sure where it was in Colorado for several years but the reports of the guests, honorees and films that were celebrated there made me long to attend. I finally managed to scrap together enough money for a festival pass in 1981 when I was living in Athens, Georgia. The pass structure was somewhat different then and, if memory serves me well, an all-inclusive pass cost $350 and admitted you to all venues without guaranteeing a seat. At the time, the exhibition spaces were the Sheridan Opera House, The Nugget (the site of the town’s regular cinema which first became operational in 1995), Elks Park for outdoor screenings and the Telluride Community Center which was a bare bones, all-purpose hall with folding metal chairs. It has long since been replaced by the Galaxy. The policy was first come, first served and you’d have to queue up early to get a good seat.

A view from where the former Telluride Community Center stood. It has since been replaced by the Galaxy Theater (photo by Jeff Stafford)

I was coming solo to TIFF and didn’t know anyone who was attending. My wife and I had recently divorced, I was living in a rented room in a friend’s house and working at a low-paid job in the University of Georgia Special Collections unit in the main library. This was going to be an escape from reality.

My tent before (the rains came) at the campgrounds at Telluride’s Town Park (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Knowing I couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel or even a bed and breakfast in Telluride – and this was before the lodging situation became even more outrageously expensive for the average visitor – I took my camping equipment (tent, sleeping bag and backpack) with the assumption that I could set up a home base at the Telluride camping grounds.

The shuttle plane that serves the area between Denver and Montrose, Colorado (photo by Jeff Stafford, 1981)

Getting to the festival was an adventure, especially since I had never even seen the Rocky Mountains. I had to switch planes in Denver and board a small 20-30 seater commuter plane dubbed “the vomit comet” by festival regulars but I was in good company. I noticed that Roger Ebert was behind me (his film review show with Gene Siskel, Sneak Previews, was nationally syndicated at the time) accompanied by a tall, striking brunette in a cowboy hat. In front of me sat actress Susan Anspach (Five Easy Pieces, Blume in Love) and her young daughter and other passengers included several film distributors and past festival attendees.

We landed in Montrose, a small town near Telluride, and some of us took a shuttle bus to the festival, stopping for lunch along the way at The Root Cellar in Ridgway. Among my fellow passengers were Doug Lemza and Don Rosen, both of whom were working for the theatrical division of Films Inc., which distributed the Janus Film collection (which is part of the Criterion Collection), 20th-Century-Fox, Paramount, and other classic studio libraries to the college/non-theatrical market. It was my first realization that a career as a film distributor might be a viable and fun way to make a living, especially if you were knowledgeable about film history and movies as a business (Variety magazine was a good teacher).

Roger Ebert and an unidentified companion outside the Excelsior Cafe at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Once we arrived in Telluride on a bright, sunny Friday around lunchtime, everyone went their separate ways. I picked up a copy of the official schedule and began to plan my weekend around key screenings and then headed off for the campground where I staked my tent and got set up (The campground has changed drastically since then, offering only a limited number of camping spaces for festival goers). Then I took a long hike up to Bridal Veil Falls which you can see high above the town from E. Colorado Street, the town’s main drag. By the time I got back, it was almost time for “The Feed” – a simple buffet dinner that was offered to the festival passholders before the onslaught of film screenings.

The opening night feed at the New Sheraton Hotel, 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Not completely understanding the terms of my pass until too late, I only observed this “private party” from outside the patio of the Sheraton Hotel where it was hosted, not realizing I could attend (the patio no longer exists and the Sheridan was later expanded to fill out the block; the historic hotel has now been converted into private condominiums). Then the festival began and I was plunged into an intensive, sensory experience for most of the next four days. EIGHT MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT was my first festival selection. A 1981 documentary by Mary Benjamin about Dr. Helen Caldicott and one of the most outspoken antinuclear activists at the time, the sixty minute feature was assembled from news and interview footage between 1978 and 1980. It was not the most dynamic introduction to the festival but the straightforward, unadorned film held my interest due to Caldicott’s passionate and intelligent defense of her opposition to nuclear energy and weaponry. The film would go on to run for Best Documentary Feature in the yearly Oscar competition.

Tale of Tales, an animated Russian short by Yuriy Norshteyn

Next was TALE OF TALES aka Shazka Shazok, a haunting 29-minute feature by Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn that was a collection of vignettes inspired by folk tales and parables in the manner of Aesop’s Fables. I’m quite amazed that you can see this celebrated work – considered the greatest animated film ever made by Hayao Miyazaki (and that’s some compliment) – in its entirety now on YouTube.

I was already a Klaus Kinski fan (who had been a guest of the festival two years earlier) and was expecting great things of FRUITS OF PASSION aka Les Fruits de la passion, an adaptation of the novel Retour a Roissy (Return to the Chateau) by Dominique Aury, the same author as The Story of O, who used the pseudonym Pauline Reage. Directed by Shuji Terayama, the French-Japanese production was an uneasy blend of exploitation film and high class art film. It centered around a prostitute named O (Isabelle Illiers) who calls the shots in her own debasement and liberation with Kinski as her most possessive client and what a piece of work he is. The film had the potential to be a midnight cult film but was spoiled by its frequent excursions into literary and philosophical pretentiousness.  A HOLE IN THE ROCK, a short film by Suzanne Pastor, is a delightfully offbeat tribute to the curious roadside attraction created by Albert Christensen – a 14-room cave house, museum and gift shop that still exists outside Moab, Utah. I have since visited this nutty tourist destination and it’s worth a side trip it you love “Roadside American” kitsch. I’d love to see this short again but it appears to have vanished without a trace. There is no listing on IMDB or anywhere.

Bernadette Lafont in A Very Curious Girl (1969), directed by Nelly Kaplan

I had heard of French director Nelly Kaplan before but was not familiar with her films. She started her career as a film archivist but later became a film journalist in Argentina. Eventually she entered filmmaking through her association with legendary silent pioneer Abel Gance; they collaborated on some films together and allegedly were lovers.

Director Nelly Kaplan at the Labor Day picnic for the 8th Telluride Film Festival. (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Kaplan was in Telluride with a print of her 1969 black comedy A VERY CURIOUS GIRL, aka La fiancée du pirate, which starred Bernadette Lafont as the town prostitute in a provincial village who turns the tables on her hypocritical customers and neighbors. Some of the film’s bitter but lightly played satire was striking and some of it was merely misanthropic; It certainly made me curious about Kaplan’s other work which includes Nea aka A Young Emmanuelle (1976), probably her best known title, and Charles et Lucie (1979).

Woody Strode (in hat) and his wife on the right (facing him) at the Labor Day picnic at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

One of the festival highlights for me was the “Character Actors Tribute” that included a panel discussion with John Carradine, Woody Strode, Margaret Hamilton and Elisha Cook, Jr., all of whom had delightful anecdotes about their career and specific films. Afterwards I was quite moved by the sight of these actors mingling with the festival goers in the streets or just wandering around town like any other visitor. Strode, of course, towered over everyone else. You couldn’t miss him walking down the street with his lovely wife as if he owned the place. And he did. They later showed John Ford’s SERGEANT RUTLEDGE (1960) in Elks Park as a tribute to Strode. Carradine was also represented by a Ford film, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (1936), Cook Jr. by Andre de Toth’s DARK WATERS (1944), and Hamilton (seen below) by THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939).

Margaret Hamilton wandering along the main street at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

I later managed to sit beside Hamilton on our way by bus to the town’s picnic near Mountain Village (the gondala had not been build yet) where attendees were able to mingle with the guests/honorees and enjoy a lively panel discussion that included the animated Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street), Brazilian director Carlos Diegues (Bye Bye Brazil), Yugoslavian auteur Dusan Makavejev (WR: Mysteries of the Organism), Nelly Kaplan and others.

Directors Sam Fuller (center), Francesco Rosi (back to camera) and Nelly Kaplan (right) at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Another memorable moment was when some of us queued up for a mystery film to be screened early in the morning at the Nugget. It turned out to be a beautiful print of Alfred Hitchcock’s THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY which had to remain unannounced because of estate issues and had been out of distribution for years along with Rope, Rear Window, Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Universal would later re-release all four of these in dazzling remastered prints in the 1980s but the Telluride screening of HARRY was the first time I had seen it since high school and it was a thrill. It was also a continuation of the character actors salute as the movie provides wonderful showcases for Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunock and Royal Dano.  Year after year festival attendees would become quite familiar with the sight of the TIFF organizers – Bill and Stella Pence, James Card and Tom Luddy – rushing about in their hosting duties and some of the guests such as Leonard Maltin, Roger Ebert, film historian William K. Everson, Ken Burns, animator Chuck Jones, Stan Brakhage and others would become part of a returning family. There are also favorite directors and actors who are invited back often with their new work such as Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, and Michael Haneke.

Experimental filmmaker John Whitney Sr. at the 8th Telluride Film Festival. Film historian William K. Iverson in background on right (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

One major difference between the 1981 festival and more recent shows is the reduced amount of experimental film offerings. Even die hard cinephiles don’t seem to support or attend the sort of adventurous making that made The Filmmakers Coop in New York City such a one stop shop for the avant-garde in the sixties (Ken Jacob, Andy Warhol,Willard Mass, Ron Rice, Maya Deren, etc. The 8th TIFF had numerous programming events that exposed passholders to some very challenging and uncommercial work. “Digital Harmony” was a program hosted by computer animator John Whitney featuring several of his works – ARABESQUE, MATRIX III, PERMUTATIONS (You can see this on YouTube) and UNTITLED.

Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage observes children playing at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Stan Brakhage, a regular fixture at the festival until his death in 2003 and a local celebrity of sorts – he taught film at University of Colorado at Boulder – curated a program that exposed people to such films as EYE MYTH and THE GARDEN OF EARTHY DELIGHTS. Jonas Mekas’s PARADISE NOT YET LOST, OR OONA’S THIRD YEAR (1980) was also unveiled and many innovative short films such as Whitney Green’s BALANCES and Stan Phillips’ CURRENT EVENTS were premiered.

The majority of the films presented at TIFF usually receive theatrical distribution within a year of their festival premiere but there are always a few that are doomed to obscurity and the one I saw that has since vanished into obscurity was a no-budget indie feature entitled ATRAPADOS aka Trapped, directed by Matthew Patrick. I’m always a sucker for post-apocalyptic melodramas like Arch Oboler’s Five or The World, the Flesh and the Devil but this one took place in almost total darkness, illuminated by flashlights and candles. It started with the residents of an apartment house being buried alive by some external calamity and the only characters to survive were a middle aged, working class man and a slightly older upper class woman. In what is essentially a two character study, the two survivors must depend on each other for survival despite their differences over social, religious, sexual or behavioral issues. The film never breaks out of its claustrophobic setting which gives it an unresolved tension but the doomsday mood permeates everything by the end, resulting in a film festival bummer. (You can now view the entire movie on YouTube above).

Dusan Makavejev’s Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967)

TIFF has always offered a nice mix of new work with rare screenings of classic films and major restorations. I missed a lot of great stuff my first visit – Jean Renoir’s CATHERINE (1924), Janet Gaynor in DADDY LONG LEGS (1931), SILVER DOLLAR with Edward G. Robinson (1932) – but I did catch a Yugoslavian film I’d always wanted to see – LOVE AFFAIR, OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR (1967) by director Dusan Makavejev, who was at the festival presenting the delicious black comedy MONTENEGRO starring Susan Anspach (pictured below).

Susan Anspach (center, looking off to the left) and her daughter at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

There is also the rare film I remember absolutely nothing about and the winner in this category is FEAR NOT, JACOB! aka Furchte dich nicht, Jakob! by West German filmmaker Radu Gabrea who was at the festival. This surprises me because I very clearly remember his bizarre 1984 feature A MAN CALLED EVA aka Ein Mann wie EVA which was a delirious fiction modeled on director R.W. Fassinder with actress Eva Mattes playing him in drag.  I clearly remember that one of the audience favorites in 1981, based on the enthusiastic responses in the theatre, was the Joan Churchill-Nick Bloomfield documentary SOLDIER GIRLS. An intimate portrait of the Charlie Company, a unit of female soldiers in basic training at Fort Gordon in Georgia, the film was an often hilarious precursor to the reality TV shows of today though nothing was staged here, even if at times it seems to enter theatre-of-the-absurd territory.

Andre Gregory at the 8th Telluride Film Festival for My Dinner with Andre (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

The biggest audience pleaser by far and the most unexpected was Louis Malle’s two-man performance piece, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. The idea of two characters engaging in a conversation over dinner with one character doing most of the talking and the other asking questions isn’t the sort of film experience that is going to be visually captivating – and it wasn’t on that score. Yet the conversation was so engaging and Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn were such extreme opposites as personalities that the concept – which sounded deadly dull in the program guide – worked beautifully. Perhaps the audience was just ready for an eccentric stunt like this and who knows if it could ever work now but in 1981 in Telluride, it was the unquestionable hit. Gregory later said, “For the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film there was a strange and peculiar silence in the Opera House. As the Andre character went on and on about his strange doings in the Polish forests.…you could almost hear the audience thinking, “What the hell is this and who the hell is he?” The silence was so thick that Wally in terror grabbed my hand. I was so nervous myself that I only noticed toward the end of the film that Wally had drawn blood. After about 20 or 25 minutes, the audience began to titter, then laugh, then roar, then cheer. At the end, we got a five-minute standing ovation. As we stood in front of the audience, tears of joy and terror poured down my cheeks. When Wally and I walked out of the Opera House and into the sunlight, the audience was still out there cheering us. It was unforgettable. It was one of the most frightening and exhilarating events of my life.”

Wallace Shawn at the 8th Telluride Film Festival for My Dinner with Andre (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

For myself, I’ll never forget the final night of the festival when the community center was turned into a polka dance hall. First Les Blank screened footage from two documentaries that he was still working on – SPROUT WINGS AND FLY, which focused on 82-year-old Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrel, and IN HEAVEN THERE IS NO BEER? which explores the Polka culture in America. Then the metal folding chairs were cleared, a polka band came in, set up and begin playing and the party really began with beers aplenty and some serious polka dancing. I mainly watched from the sidelines and then noticed Keith Carradine standing beside me; he had roared into town on his motorcycle earlier to see his father being honored.

Les Blank and companion on his way to screen a new film at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

In between the constant screenings of film throughout I would take quick breaks for coffee, the bathroom, and a bite to eat, never pausing long enough to have a sit-down meal except for breakfast . Except for clear, sunny weather on Friday and during the Mountain Village picnic, most of the festival unfolded under the pouring rain, light drizzle and hazy, overcast skies. I would prolong going to my damp tent each night where the sound of water was omnipresent, either landing on the tent or coming from the gurgling stream by my campsite. By the last night, I had had enough – I was starting to mildrew – so I charged a hotel room to my overextended credit card.

Kent and Mary at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Still the unpleasant weather didn’t prevent me from having an extraordinary experience. I was put at ease from the very first day by the general friendliness of everyone there from the passholders to the celebrity guests. There was a very genial, clan-like mood in the village. Some of the people I met I kept up a correspondence with for a while such as Kent and Mary, a young couple from Eugene, Oregon. The couple later moved to New York City and split up. Mary moved to San Francisco, got married, had children and Kent moved into television production, eventually serving as producer of Michael Moore’s TV Nation and working for Comedy Central on Strangers With Candy and Upright Citizens Brigade. That’s about the time I lost touch with him. He has since gone Hollywood in a big way – producing major films like Elf, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and Todd Field’s Little Children. He even directed a film himself, Semi-Pro with Will Ferrell. I wonder if Kent even fantasied at the time that he would one day be a producer premiering some of his films at Telluride?

Volker Schlondorff at the Labor Day picnic at the 8th Telluride Film Festival where he screened his film Circle of Deceit (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

That’s the amazing thing about TIFF. You never know who you’re going to meet and how it might change your life. It certainly changed mine. When I returned from the festival, I focused completely on getting a job in the film distribution world even though my only experience was working for the cinematic arts committee in college. Still, boutique outfits like UA Classics (created by Michael Barker, Tom Bernard and Marcie Bloom) were thriving at the time and repertory cinema was still a healthy market and, if nothing else, I had a fairly strong background in film history, most of it self-taught.

Italian director Francesco Rosi (in center, bald with white jacket) outside the Sheridan Opera House for his premiere of Tre fratelli aka Three Brothers (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Long story short, within a year I landed a job as a film programmer/salesman at Films Inc. (the Atlanta office) and sold/marketed movie packages to universities such as Auburn, University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt, etc. Ironically enough, one of the people that interviewed me for the job was Doug Lemza, who I had met briefly at the 8th Telluride Film Festival. I have no idea what happened to Doug or Don Rosen, who I last heard was at Miramax Films, but my brief encounters with these people at Telluride marked a real turning point for me. It was really the beginning of a career switch that eventually led to my twelve year stint as the managing editor of the Turner Classic Movies website (2000-2012) and it was all due to that first transformative experience at TIFF 1981. I hope that the 41st annual “Show” has the same exhilarating effect on first-timers. And even if I’m going to miss it this time, I’ll be there in spirit.

Self portrait outside the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colorado (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Below is the link to the official Telluride Film Festival site so you can stay posted on this year’s events and under that are some links to articles and blogs about past Telluride Film Festivals:

http://www.telluridefilmfestival.org/

* This article is an extended and revised version of a blog post that originally appeared on the Movie Morlocks website.

Other posts of interest:

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/09/11/38th-telluride-film-festival/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2010/09/02/a-sneak-peak-at-telluride-film-festival-2010/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2008/08/30/the-35th-telluride-film-festival/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2010/09/11/after-the-show-telluride-film-festival-potluck/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/09/13/highlights-from-the-telluride-film-festival/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/09/06/36th-telluride-film-festival/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2007/09/08/34th-telluride-film-festival-wrapup/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2007/09/01/ready-set-go-the-34th-telluride-film-festival/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/09/02/the-floodgates-open-telluride-ff-2012/

http://moviemorlocks.com/2010/09/06/notes-on-telluride-day-of-the-directors/

Elisha Cook, Jr. at the 8th Telluride Film Festival (1981, photo by Jeff Stafford)

Chip Corman is a pseudonym for actor Andrea Giordana

The plays of William Shakespeare have provided a bottomless well of material for filmmakers as either faithful adaptations or unacknowledged inspirations since the birth of cinema. Yet, the western genre seems under-represented in this regard with only a few examples coming to mind such as a thinly disguised version of Othello (Delmar Daves’ Jubal,1956) or a re-imagining of The Tempest (William A. Wellman’s Yellow Sky, 1948) or a gender twist on King Lear (Edward Dmytryk’s Broken Lance, 1954).    

Alan Mowbray reciting Hamlet in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine

Hamlet would seem an ideal choice for a western remake but, apart from a sequence in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine where a drunken actor (Alan Mowbray) recites a soliloquy from the Bard’s play, the brooding Prince of Denmark has not been repurposed by Hollywood as the hero of a frontier revenge drama. Leave that to the Italians, who during the heyday of the spaghetti western, created Quella sporca storia nel west (1968), which was released in an English-dubbed, U.S. version as Johnny Hamlet.  Outside of a handful of genre enthusiasts, most American movie buffs probably don’t know about Johnny Hamlet, which is directed by Enzo G. Castellari (The Inglorious Bastards, 1978), but this extremely loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is full of imaginative touches which often capture the dark, gothic spirit of the original. Purists may find it ridiculous but there is something refreshing and entertaining about seeing the play’s classic storyline cannibalized and retold as a spaghetti western.

Andrea Giordana in Johnny Hamlet (1968)

The hero, Johnny Hamilton (Andrea Giordana), returns home from the Civil War to discover that his father has been murdered and his mother Gertie (Francoise Prévost) is now married to his uncle Claude (Horst Frank). Haunted by dreams of his dead father, Johnny suspects his uncle of treachery, despite evidence that his father’s murderer was a bandit named Santana who was allegedly killed. There is also more than $300,000 in gold missing from his father’s estate. When Johnny launches his own investigation into the case, he becomes a potential target for Claude’s two henchmen, Ross (Ennio Girolami) and Guild (Ignazio Spalla), as well as Polonio, the town sheriff (Giorgio Sammartino), and Santana (Manuel Serrano), who is very much alive and in cahoots with Claude. Johnny’s only ally is the mysterious Horace (Gilbert Roland), who always seems to turn up when the protagonist is in danger.

Gilbert Roland in Johnny Hamlet (1968)

Those familiar with Hamlet will notice the obvious similarities between the names of the main characters in both versions but director/screenwriter Enzo G. Castellari and his co-scripters Tito Carpi, Francesco Scardamaglia and Bruno Corbucci have expanded or reduced the roles some of these figures played in Shakespeare’s original and, in some cases, changed their motives completely. Plot details are also fair game for creative makeovers. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Ross and Guild are not former student friends of Johnny (as they were in Hamlet) but Claude’s hired gunmen who stalk him every step of the way toward a final shootout. Johnny’s mother, Gertie, transitions from a deceived, weak-willed woman into a gun-toting defender of her son. There is no equivalent for the character of Laertes but there are new characters introduced – a traveling band of performers and an outlaw gang led by Santana. The brief appearance of Emily (Gabriella Boccardo), the Ophelia character, is probably the most faithful to the original source. The gravedigger is played for comic relief and is one of the few survivors at the film’s fadeout. Probably the most radical change is the finale [Spoiler Alert]: Johnny survives and rides off into the sunset with his pal Horace. And anyone expecting a reasonable facsimile of Shakespeare’s rich language should look elsewhere because the dialogue is crude and unsubtle in the manner of most subtitled or dubbed spaghetti westerns.

A dream sequence from Johnny Hamlet (1968), directed by Enzo G. Castellari

So you can’t exactly call Johnny Hamlet a tragedy and there are moments of playful absurdity and pure fun that would never surface in a Shakespearean drama. A case in point is the frequent physical confrontations between Johnny and the obnoxious Ross and Guild duo, which start out like typical fistfights and then escalate into theatrical brawls on the order of a WCW event with wild gymnastic stunts that often look goofy as if choreographed by The Three Stooges. The pre-credit sequence of the film has an almost hallucinogenic quality that switches between Johnny’s dream of his father (set in a red, Hades-like underworld), a lyrical flashback of happier times with Emily and his current situation which is accompanying some wandering players who are cavorting on the beach while they recite lines from Hamlet. If only the whole movie had maintained this freewheeling, almost experimental approach!   The casting could have been better as well. The supporting actors, in particular, either play their roles as broad caricatures such as Ignazio Spalla, who specialized in Mexican stereotypes like Guild, or make little impression at all. The principal leads are better in most cases. Anthony Perkins was rumored to have been the first choice to play Johnny but that didn’t pan out. Tomas Milian would have made a more compelling protagonist but Andrea Giordana is adequate as a Hamlet on the range with his brooding looks and perpetually embittered persona (The actor looks like a composite of Jeffrey Hunter and Giancarlo Giannini after a sun-bronzed skin color treatment).

Andrea Giordana as Johnny Hamlet has a nice orange glow

Gilbert Roland appears to have been cast for box-office appeal alone since his character Horace is completely implausible within the story framework (What keeps Claude and his minions from eliminating this constant troublemaker?). Still, Gilbert Roland, who was well over sixty when he made this, looks remarkably fit and his iconic presence provides a link back to the golden days of American westerns when Roland appeared as the Cisco Kid in a string of sagebrush programmers and genre highlights like Fritz Lang’s The Furies (1950).

Gilbert Roland in Johnny Hamlet (1968)

As the hero’s worried mother, French actress Francoise Prévost (from Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us) brings a touch of elegance to the part which is then stripped away in her climatic moments as she drags her wounded body up a rocky ravine in an attempt to help her crucified son. But it is Horst Frank who makes the strongest impression as the sociopathic Claude. The German-born actor had a long, successful career playing numerous villains, assassins and murderers and he is a genuine scene-stealer here, whether he is grinding a lit cigar into the palm of his own hand without flinching or laughing psychotically as gold dust spills all over his face and body in the final scenes.

Horst Frank as Claude in the loose Shakespeare adaptation, Johnny Hamlet (1968)

Also known as Django Porte sa Croix, Dirty Story of the West and other titles, Johnny Hamlet has its detractors and defenders. Thomas Weisser, author of Spaghetti Westerns – the Good, the Bad and the Violent, wrote, “Turning the Shakespeare play into a Western is a “cute” idea that might have worked as a Senior High School skit, but it doesn’t do well as a full length feature film. Not one of director Castellari’s better films, and a dark day for Sergio Corbucci [who wrote the original story].”   Director Alex Cox in his influential survey of the genre, 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western, certainly had specific criticisms about Johnny Hamlet too but he also acknowledged the film’s numerous virtues: “How well made and postmodern Johnny Hamlet seems! Its style is exuberant, with the camera in restless motion around the protagonist. There are dream sequences, special effects, and enough crash zooms and telephoto shots-through-things to confirm Castellari as Corbucci’s heir apparent. But he was more, besides. Castellari’s editing – in particular his juxtaposition of cuts with musical beats – is very precise…His framing is bold, with the camera frequently dollying into striking close-ups, often pushing the edges of the Techniscope frame…There was always something acid-ish about the Spaghetti Western…In Johnny Hamlet, these hints, and tropes, become the visual structure of a film….Johnny Hamlet is Castellari’s best, most original Western.”

Andrea Giordana in Johnny Hamlet (1968)

Cox is dead on about the visual look of the film. The cinematography by Angelo Filippini is often dazzling and adds tension and attitude to scenes which would otherwise be strictly formulaic. When Johnny is first united with Emily, we see only their shadows on an ancient stone wall as they embrace and kiss. Johnny’s emotional state is sometimes represented by the camera swirling around him or capturing him in a horizontal position and then slowly inverting it. And Emily’s death becomes a surreal apparition with her inert body glimpsed as a special visual effect reflected upon the rippling surface of a stream.

The underground cemetery in Johnny Hamlet (1968)

The art direction by Enzo Bulgarelli is just as striking, particularly the scenes set in the underground cemetery which add a horror film ambiance to the proceedings. The exterior locations are often unusual as well with huge, mushroom-shaped rocks and moon-like surfaces dominating the landscape; Johnny Hamlet was filmed in Almeria and Cuenca Minera (Huelva), Spain.

The often bizarre, surreal landscape of Johnny Hamlet (1968)

Last but not least, the evocative film score by Francesco De Masi, Alessandro Alessandroni and Audrey Nohra is good enough to stand on its own. You might find yourself humming the theme song, “Find the Man,” long after the film has ended.    Johnny Hamlet might not stand alongside Sergio Leone’s Clint Eastwood trilogy, Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence or Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown as a spaghetti western landmark but it is certainly intriguing and offbeat enough to warrant a viewing by anyone interested in this genre.

Koch Media DVD of Johnny Hamlet retitled as Django

Currently Johnny Hamlet is not available on DVD or Blu-Ray in the U.S. but you can still purchase a DVD copy from the German label Koch Media under the title Django (an obvious attempt to cash in on the popular title character first seen in Corbucci’s 1966 Western). You will need an all-region DVD player to view it but the anamorphic widescreen print is quite good with vibrant colors and detail, a minimum of grain and various language/subtitle options. The disc also includes extras such as a featurette on spaghetti westerns featuring interviews with director Castellari, composer De Masi, and actor Franco Nero.

Other websites of interest:

http://sonofdjango.blogspot.com/2008/01/johnny-hamlet.html

http://www.cowboysindians.com/Cowboys-Indians/April-2010/Sagebrush-Shakespeare/

http://www.dvdactive.com/reviews/dvd/johnny-hamlet.html

http://scream-it-loud.com/interviews/enzo-g-castellari/

Hamlet as a Christ figure in the spaghetti western Johnny Hamlet (1968)

When Reveille with Beverly was first released in 1943, it was viewed as little more than a snappy little B musical programmer that showcased a star on the rise (Ann Miller) along with some of the top musical acts of the day. It was also a reflection of the type of assembly line escapist fare being released by Hollywood for war weary audiences and servicemen who needed a distraction from the harsh realities of a global conflict.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXAXCezjj9M

With a storyline loosely based on the career of Jean Ruth Hay, a Denver disc jockey whose musical broadcasts developed a cult following among service men during WWII, the film follows Beverly Ross (Miller) as she uses true grit and determination to advance from record shop clerk to switchboard operator to the host of her own radio show. Along the way she clashes with and triumphs over the station’s elitist classical music host (Franklin Pangborn) while being romanced by a serviceman in a lame mistaken identity subplot. 

Certainly the template for Reveille with Beverly was nothing new. The concept of a musical revue tied together by a minimal plot had become a film genre unto itself since 1929 with The Broadway Melody and, in the case of Reveille with Beverly, it is the phenomenal musical talent on display that makes this a unique pop culture time capsule. For one thing, it features Frank Sinatra, minus the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, in his first movie appearance as a solo vocalist. He sings “Night and Day” accompanied by an orchestra of chorus girls posing as violinists and pianists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08jyOwx96Ig

The other highlights include Count Basie and his band performing “One O’Clock Jump,” Bob Crosby and his musicians deliver a “Big Noise from Winnetka”, the Duke Ellington band pay tribute to the Billy Strayhorn composition, “Take the ‘A’ Train” (which is visualized as a railway club car and not the famous New York City subway line), Ella Mae Morse, backed by the Freddie Slack Orchestra, performs a suggestive rendition of “Cow-Cow Boogie” and the Mills Brothers get to shine in two numbers – the Spanish standard “Cielito Lindo” presented in a stylized Deep South setting and “Sweet Lucy Brown” which is just a foreshadowing of the rhythm and blues craze that erupted full-force in the fifties. The icing on the cake is provided by Ms. Miller in a big production tap dance number at the finale – “Thumbs Up and V for Victory.”

Ann Miller in Reveille with Beverly (1943)

The only low point is the specialty act, The Radio Rogues (comprised of Jimmy Hollywood, Eddie Bartell & Henry Taylor), whose brand of airwaves comedy combines vocal impersonations of famous celebrities (Amos ‘n Andy, James Cagney, W.C. Fields) with vaudeville skit humor. The group was clearly a favorite with radio listeners of the thirties but their on-screen antics in Reveille with Beverly will most likely elicit groans from viewers today.  Almost everything else in the film zips along at a fast clip under the direction of Charles Barton, who rarely got off the B-movie treadmill except for an occasional Walt Disney feature (The Shaggy Dog [1959], Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus [1960]). Barton would go on to direct Ann Miller in two more flag-waving musicals for WWII audiences – Hey, Rookie [1944] and Jam Session [1944] – but his biggest success came with a series of Abbott and Costello comedies including the trend-setting Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

A behind the scenes production still of Ann Miller from Reveille with Beverly (1943).

Like Barton, Ann Miller paid her dues in the B-movie unit at Columbia Studios. In her autobiography co-written with Norma Lee Browning – Miller’s High Life – the actress wrote “Harry Cohn was known as one of the most hated men in Hollywood. He kept a riding crop on his desk which he was apt to pick up and crack at anyone who got out of line. But I always felt that his bark was much worse than his bite. He put me in a little nothing-picture called Go West, Young Lady [1941]…And thus began my reign at Columbia as Queen of the Bees, as I became known, for turning out quickie B pictures during those early years of World War II.”

Andrew Tombes and Ann Miller in Reveille with Beverly (1943).

Miller has little to say about most of the B movies she made at Columbia but she did note “among my most notable ones was a happy-hearted little film called Reveille with Beverly, which really cleaned up at the box office, racking in millions more than the $400,000 which Columbia spent to make it…The movie was a smash hit among the armed forces. And not only because of Ann Miller. It featured some of the biggest bands in a big-band era…it also featured a new young singer in his very first motion picture, Frank Sinatra. I’ll never forget it. A record would start to spin, then the cameras would pan into the record while the voice came on, and then to Frank’s face with a big band backing him up. Even way back then he was great, his voice sent tingles up your spine. And to think the name Ann Miller (as well as a few others) topped him in the billing. How times do change!”   As for behind the scenes anecdotes, Miller does provide one in her autobiography which could easily have turned into a personal tragedy. “When I was doing Reveille with Beverly, real flames of fire were supposed to spring up behind me as I twirled my way up and down a V for Victory platform. But sometimes the man who controlled the fire turned a flame on in front of me and I would have to leap out of the way. And once I didn’t leap quite fast enough and ended up with a singed costume, eyelashes, and hair after my big finale.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb2w2m1JmCY

Even though moviegoers flocked to see Reveille with Beverly, some critics were not impressed, especially Theodore Strauss (T.S.) of The New York Times, who wrote, “Reveille With Beverly” opened with a thud yesterday at the Abbey. Dedicated to the hepcat element, which seemed to have stayed away in large numbers, it is a cheerless series of musical numbers strung together with a tired little story guaranteed to produce a severe case of ennui in record-breaking time.” Mr. Strauss must have been having a bad day or was a grumpy musical snob because what’s not to like about a movie featuring appearances by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Mae Morse, and Frank Sinatra with a tap dance finale by Ms. Miller?

A publicity still of Ann Miller from Reveille with Beverly (1943)

To my knowledge Reveille with Beverly has not had an official DVD release but you can find bootleg DVD-R copies of it for sale on the internet and it turns up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.

* This is a revised and expanded version of the original article that appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.     

Other links of interest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/arts/ann-miller-tap-dancer-starring-in-musicals-dies.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/national/03hayobit.html?fta=y&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C02E3DF1638E33BBC4C51DFB2668388659EDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BB-aGybNwo