One of the few films to emerge from Britain’s punk rock movement of the mid-seventies that succinctly expressed the anger and anarchic spirit of the times, Jubilee (1978) is possibly director Derek Jarman’s most accessible film though its irreverent mixture of history, fantasy and agitprop shot, guerilla-style, on the back streets of London is not for everyone. The loosely structured film has a framing device that is set in the year 1578 as Queen Elizabeth I ponders the future of her country. Along with her court magician, Dr. John Dee, and lady-in-waiting, she is transported to contemporary England by the angel Ariel. There she finds a mirror image of herself as Bod, the leader of an outlaw band of deviants, who struggles for dominance in a post-Margaret Thatcher wasteland controlled by the fascist media mogul Borgia Ginz.  

A scene from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

In Jarman’s apocalyptic vision, murder, muggings and widespread lawlessness are the norm, Westminster Cathedral has become a decadent discotheque and Buckingham Palace has been converted into Borgia Ginz’s recording studio. All of it reflects the disillusionment and outrage of an artist reacting against a government in decline, rendered impotent by economic recession, ultra-conservative policies and an ongoing war with the IRA.

Sex Pistols manager Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood

It has been said that the punk movement began as an art-school aesthetic expressed through the fashions and clothes created by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in their clothing store in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Jarman became fascinated with the emerging scene and originally wanted to make a super-8 film that captured the milieu around his friend Jordan who worked at the King’s Road store. “Punk…from the start raised questions about sexual codes,” Jarman stated. “It is often argued that punk opened a space which allowed women in – with its debunking of ‘male’ technique and expertise, its critique of rock naturalism, its anti-glamour.”

Jordan aka Pamela Rooke in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Howard Malin and James Whaley, who had produced Jarman’s first feature length feature Sebastiane (1976), a gay love story with Latin dialogue based on the final days of the Catholic martyr, St. Sebastian, encouraged Jarman to instead make a movie that capitalized on the burgeoning punk movement. Jarman had, in fact, already filmed the Sex Pistols performing at a 1976 Valentine’s Day party (the footage, one of the earliest surviving records of the band, later appeared in Julien Temple’s The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, 1980) and became excited about fashioning a narrative that was fueled by his political and artistic interests and partially inspired by his current interest in Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto, William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys and Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom.  Jarman would later say “With Jubilee the progressive merging of film and my reality was complete. The source of the film was often autobiographical, the locations were the streets and warehouses in which I had lived during the previous ten years. The film was cast from among and made by friends.” This eclectic group included two key participants from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) – the show’s creator, Richard O’Brien, and Little Nell (aka Nell Campbell) who played Columbia; Toyah Willcox, a classically trained actress from the National Theatre; Ian Charleson, who would receive international acclaim for his role as real-life runner Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire (1981); Jenny Runacre, the versatile art-house star of such films as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975); cinematographer Peter Middleton who filmed Sebastiane; costume designer Christopher Hobbs who would go on to work on other Jarman films as well as Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998); composer Brian Eno, a former member of the band Roxy Music who is internationally renowned for his ambient music albums. Jarman also convinced musician Wayne County to play the part of Lounge Lizard and offered small parts to The Slits (as a street gang) and a young unknown, Adam Ant, who had just entered the music scene.

Jubilee (1978), shot on location in London around Southwark, Rotherhithe and Victoria Docks

In the biography Derek Jarman, author Tony Peake wrote that “The production was based at Butler’s Wharf. There was some distant location work…but otherwise the film was shot entirely in London, principally around Southwark, Rotherhithe and Victoria Docks. All along the river, the property developers were as active as ever, and throughout 1977 the empty warehouses continued to go up in flames. The apocalyptic desolation of the area, fringed as it was with ‘rotting estates, closed shops and boarded windows,’ mirrored to perfection the desolation Jarman was dissecting, while at the same time allowing him to rescue on celluloid that which the developers were intent on destroying. In this way – and most fittingly, given that punk shared a similar attitude – Jubilee stands as yet another example of the way Jarman liked to rehabilitate what would otherwise be discarded.”   Originally Jarman had hoped that he would finish Jubilee in time to release it during the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee but it didn’t actually have its theatrical premiere until February 1978 at London’s Gate 2 cinema. The reaction to the film was decidedly mixed by critics and audiences alike. There were numerous walkouts at the premiere with some people shouting, “This isn’t punk!” at the screen. Others were offended by the film’s numerous depictions of sex and violence while some were simply baffled by Jarman’s off-kilter style with its low-budget aesthetics and artistic pretensions. Vivienne Westwood, the punk fashion designer, proclaimed it “the most boring and therefore most disgusting film I had ever seen.” But there were numerous admirers as well. Variety called Jubilee “one of the most original, bold, and exciting features to have come out of Britain this decade.”    Derek Jarman had the last word on the matter when he wrote in his autobiography, Dancing Ledge: “Afterwards the film turned prophetic. Dr. Dee’s vision came true – the streets burned in Brixton and Toxteth, Adam [Ant] was on Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball. They all sign up in one way or another.”

BEHIND THE SCENES ON JUBLIEE

Derek Jarman wrote the script for Jubilee quickly and even shot some footage for it before the film budget was even raised.

Director Derek Jarman

Producer James Whaley was able to solicit some production money for Jubilee from a former school acquaintance living in Teheran.

At an early stage in production, Jarman wrote that Jubilee was dedicated to “All those who secretly work against the tyranny of Marxists fascists trade unionists maoists capitalists socialists etc…who have conspired together to destroy the diversity and holiness of each life in the name of materialism….For William Blake.”

Before he decided on Jubilee as the film title, Jarman also considered A New Wave Movie, Honi Swar Key Maly Ponce and High Fashion with the letter g in High replaced by a hammer and sickle and the letter h in Fashion replaced by a swastika.

Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Clash were originally going to appear in Jubilee but dropped out after production began because they feared the film was going to exploit the punk movement for commercial gain.

Jordan (on left) and Toyah Willcox in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Toyah Willcox was initially given her choice of any role in Jubilee except Amyl Nitrite and selected Mad because she had the most dialogue of any character.

Willcox came from a more conservative background than Jarman and most of the cast and crew and was easily shocked by some of the scenes she was required to do at first.

After first reading the script, Willcox later admitted she was bewildered by it and “I didn’t understand what Derek’s problem was with the Royal Family.” She said to him, “Why do you want to kill them all off?” Eventually she came to understand his point of view but in the early stages of filming she felt that Jubilee was amateurish and that she had gotten mixed up in a bizarre porno-type movie.   Jarman hired Lee Drysdale, who had never worked on a film before, as his production assistant because he was known and well liked among the younger crowd in the East End, many of whom volunteered as extras, providing “local color” in the film. Jarman called Drysdale the “Artful Dodger of Cine-History” because he was such a fervent film buff, often dragging the director to films he would never have seen on his own.

Lee Drysdale made Jarman angry enough to slap him after the filming of one scene by telling actress Jenny Runacre that she sounded as if she were reading her lines.

Many of the derelict buildings you see in Jubilee were damaged by bombing during World War II and were left standing untouched for years.

Jubilee (1978), directed by Derek Jarman

For the scenes set in the bowels of Westminster Cathedral, Jarman was able to use the Catacombs club as a substitute set. According to biographer Tony Peake, the scenes were “peopled almost exclusively by friends” and “it lasted all day and involved such quantities of drink and drugs that by the time a wrap was called, some of the participants were so comprehensively unwrapped it would take them a day or two to recover.”   Jubilee was an eight week film shoot and was edited at the home of cinematographer Peter Middleton.

Jarman was able to use a fragment of the super-8 film he made with Jordan and Steve Treatment in Jubilee. The scene featured Jordan dancing around a fire while Treatment tossed books into the fire. The original plan was to burn a note and film it, which is a criminal act in England, but that was never captured on film.

Jubilee ran into some censorship trouble prior to the premiere so Jarman had to agree to cut a few seconds from the scene where Crabs and Mad suffocate Happy Days.

JUBILEE FACTS AND TRIVIA

Derek Jarman was an art student who graduated from the Slade School of Art at the University College, London, and became part of a social scene led by sculptor Andrew Logan in the 1970s.

Director Derek Jarman

Jarman’s talent as a stage designer led to his first job in the film industry as production designer for Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). He would also work on Russell’s Savage Messiah (1972) and began shooting his own experimental super-8mm shorts in 1972.

Jarman was also one of the first British film directors to shoot music videos before MTV launched in 1981 and popularized the format. In fact, Jarman filmed three Marianne Faithful videos in 1979 in support of her album – “Broken English,” “Witches’ Song,” “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan.” Among Jarman’s most famous music videos are three featuring The Smiths, prior to Morrissey leaving the group – “The Queen Is Dead,” “Panic,” and “Ask.” He also directed music videos for Throbbing Gristle, Marc Almond and the Pet Shop Boys.

Jordan in Jubilee (1978)

Jordan, the King’s Road shopgirl whose fashion sense expressed the aesthetics of the emerging punk movement, had briefly appeared in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976) as Mammea Morgana, the famous prostitute who ‘has slept her way from Bath to Rome.’

Helen Wellington-Lloyd, who appears in the first scene of Jubilee accompanied by some huge hunting dogs, was a close friend of Malcolm McLaren and a constant presence in the London punk scene. She plays a major part in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980).

John Maybury, an assistant costume designer/set decorator on the film, was a film student who was hired after Jarman met him at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert. He was assisted in some of his chores by Kenny Morris, the drummer for Siouxsie’s band.

Siouxsie and the Banshees

Production assistant Lee Drysdale went on to play a bit part in Empire State [1987] before becoming a screenwriter (Body Contact [1987], Sweet Nothing [1996]) and director (Leather Jackets, [1992]). He lived with Bridget Fonda from 1986-1989 and she also played the female lead in Leather Jackets.

Ian Charleson, who is best known for his role as athlete Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire (1981), also appeared in Gandhi (1982) and Dario Argento’s Opera (1987). He died of AIDS-related causes in January of 1990.

Jarman would occasionally appear as an actor in the works of others such as Ron Peck’s Nighthawks (1978), one of the first commercial films to emerge from London’s gay underground scene, and David Lewis’s Dead Cat (1989).   Jarman’s film War Requiem (1989) marked the final screen appearance of Laurence Olivier.

By the time Jarman made Blue (1993) he was blind and dying from AIDS-related complications. He would live long enough to complete his final film Glitterbug (1994), a one-hour compilation of super 8 footage of friends and companions set to the music of Brian Eno. He died on February 19, 1994.

The primary instigators of violence in Jubilee are women, an obvious influence of Valerie Solanas who shot and almost killed Andy Warhol. Her notorious SCUM (Society to Cut Up Men) manifesto was read by Jarman prior to filming.

Valerie Solanas

Jarman defended the scenes of violence that occur in Jubilee when he was interviewed by Clive Hodgson for program notes for a National Film Theatre screening of the film: “Those people were posturing violence, they were singing about it, they were writing violent things, but one knows that when it actually happens – and it happens to you – you can have sung about it forever, but it is going to be a completely different thing. This was what I wanted very much to underline in the film, because there was a climate of intellectual violence – ‘Dada’ violence – and that sort of thing can very easily become the forerunner of the real thing.”

In Jubilee, the Amyl Nitrite character (played by Jordan) reveals that her heroine is Myra Hindley. The latter was a famous serial killer who was arrested with her partner Ian Brady for the infamous “Moors Murders” between 1963 and 1965 in which three children and two teenagers were abducted, sexually abused and killed. Her prison mug shot appeared in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and she was portrayed by Samantha Morton in the 2006 TV movie Longford starring Jim Broadbent in the title role.

Myra Hindley

Amy Nitrite also admits in an opening scene that her favorite song is “Don’t Dream It, Be It” which, of course, was written for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) by Jordan’s co-star Richard O’Brien.4

Vivienne Westwood, whose Chelsea store was the mecca of punk fashion, hated Jubilee and created a t-shirt which sported a negative full length critique of the film.

Jubilee was the first of Jarman’s films to reference the Elizabethan period and specifically John Dee, the noted English mathematician, astrologer and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. The director would return to this period again in his films In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985) and Edward II (1991).

Jenny Runacre as Queen Elizabeth I in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Jubilee features Jarman’s jarring use, in a visual medium, of the written word, a device he would employ more extensively in his later paintings where comments in the form of graffiti such as “Dead Sexy” would be scrawled over abstract colours.

Jubilee, along with Julien Temple’s two films about the Sex Pistols, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) and The Filth and the Fury (2000), Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy (1980), Lech Kowalski’s D.O.A. (1980) and Out of the Blue (1980), directed by and starring Dennis Hopper, are considered the core films that best express the punk movement’s sensibilities and restless spirit.

CRITICAL REACTIONS TO JUBILEE

“…several sequences stoop to juvenile theatrics, and the determined sexual inversion (whereby most women become freakish ‘characters’, and men loose-limbed sex objects) comes to look disconcertingly like a misogynist binge. But in conception the film remains highly original, and it does deliver enough of the goods to sail effortlessly away with the title of Britain’s first official punk movie…”
 TimeOut

“One of the most original, bold and exciting features to have come out of Britain this decade…could duplicate the cultural impact that Easy Rider [1969] had upon the young generation of approximately 10 years ago.”
- Variety   “Although Jarman handles the film’s militant women, fetishized violence, and punk rhetoric with an iconic brashness somewhat reminiscent of Frank Tashlin, Jubilee is ultimately too whimsically wordy and fastidiously stylish to be truly effective. Evocative sequences like Jordan’s grotesque striptease production number of “Rule Britannia” are diminished by Jarman’s including such episodes as that in which Jesus Christ is groped at a disco orgy, which compares unfavorably to even the most inept blasphemies of John Waters’s Multiple Maniacs [1970] or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain [1973].” 
- J. Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies

“Perhaps the suggestion that they could never escape the system is what pissed off punks about the film back in 1978: Jubilee suggests that punk is complicit, even a willing participant, in its own commodification…For all the controversy–and perhaps because of it–Jubilee has remained something of a cult favorite for the last 25 years. Other punk films (like Temple’s The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle [1980]) have long disappeared. And now we can see that Jarman’s vision of punk’s commodification and England’s future was nothing short of prescient.” 
- Todd R. Ramlow, PopMatters    “Jubilee is the most important British film of the late ’70s….And although it strikes parallels with the earlier A Clockwork Orange [1971], Jubilee is impulsive where that film is measured, raw where it is stylized, and unrestrained where Kubrick is exacting. What’s more, in a lethargic and conservative industry that had been defeated by tax and underfunding, Jubilee was the only British film of its time advancing an unabashed social critique…Jubilee, however, seems less like Jarman’s vision than one of a punk cinema collective: it could have feasibly been made by Paul Morrissey on an Andy Warhol sabbatical…Similarly, the film has echoes of John Waters, Russ Meyer, and, fittingly for Jarman (who designed The Devils [1971]), Ken Russell. As such, it is quite a unique experience.” 
- Julian Upton, Bright Lights Film Journal

“Its blunt attitude to violence has confused many critics who seem to have missed the point: irony and cynical humor as a means of diagnosing the malaise of contemporary Britain, its paradoxes and puritanism. That there are flaws in the film it’s hard to deny – mainly in terms of its theatrical stage of the story and its attempt to invert gender roles – but it is also difficult to deny the film’s aesthetic innovation which still remains very impressive…Witty, raw and imaginative Jubilee might not provide answers to the burning questions of British society, but it will certainly provide an accurate and often darkly funny description of them.”
- Spiros Gangas, Edinburgh University Film Society   

Adam Ant in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

“A clever satire on the so-called ‘glorious past’ combined with a bleak look at the future which pulls no punches in its depiction of a once-great country gone horribly wrong…It’s not the most pleasant of viewing, but it’s observant and knowing.”
- Channel 4 Film (www.channel4.com)

“Jarman’s sophomore film “Jubilee“, is a Molotov Cocktail of celluloid – a film that practically dares you to watch it…Basically, a giant filmed “F*ck You” to Margaret Thatcher, the royal family and the times in general. Jarman’s visual flair becomes even more apparent. His technique as a filmmaker, garish colors and costumes, unreal settings, another Eno score on a shoestring budget defies logic. It looks and is to this day amazing. The theme of the decline of British society one which he would often revisit, explodes in every frame. In short, the film is punk.”
- Thomas Bennett, Film Threat   

Jordan as Amyl Nitrate in Jubilee (1978)

“The now legendary soundtrack remains one of the film’s biggest selling points, but its chaotic spirit also endeared the film itself to several generations of university students and underground movie fanatics. All others might want to start somewhere else, as this is not the most easily accessible film in the art house canon; the shifts in time and rambling monologues can be daunting to the inexperienced, and those who find Kenneth Anger too heady will no doubt run screaming during the first ten minutes.” 
- Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital

“Under the direction of Derek Jarman, who also penned the script, this is no self-aggrandizing cash-in in the style of Malcolm McLaren’s Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, but takes the punk movement seriously, so seriously in fact that it tends to lose the way at times, with a disjointed presentation verging on the incoherent while it mercilessly exposes punk’s flaws. Where it does score is in its gritty imagery, and if the music takes second place to that, then it’s spirited in other ways. The shock value is there, of course, because without the desire to be subversive and controversial, it’s doubtful that anyone would have taken much notice…but now Jubilee, once so sly, modern and of the moment, looks like a antique, an item of nostalgia, and perhaps worst of all, an art movie.”
- Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

“The film is decidedly anarchic, in keeping with late-70s British punk, and depicts a scenario of societal rot, in which the guiding throne is uninvolved. Jubilee precedes the Margaret Thatcher renaissance, and functions as a call-to-question, a statement of disinterest in the threatening use of violence…The film stands as an exemplar of its origin era, both undeniably bold and alienating.”
- Rumsey Taylor, Not Coming to a Theatre Near You (www.notcoming.com/)

Jenny Runacre and Jack Birkett in Jubilee (1978)

DIALOGUE AND QUOTES FROM JUBILEE

Angel (Ian Charleson): “I was 15 before I realized I was dead.”

Amyl Nitrite (Jordan): “History still fascinates me…It’s so intangible. You can weave facts anywhere you like. Good guys can swap places with bad guys. You might think Richard III of England was bad but you’d be wrong. What separates Hitler from Napoleon or even Alexander? The size of the destruction or is he nearer to us in time? Was Churchill a hero? Did he alter history for the better?”

Crabs (Nell Campbell): “Leave the guy alone, he’s better than a vibrator and he’s bigger.”

Mad (Toyah Willcox): “You’re a sucker for sex, Crabs. Why don’t you keep up with the times. You’re an antique like this place.”

Jordan (center) in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Crabs: “I just love a man without its uniform.”

Amyl Nitrite: “When I’m not making history, I write it.”

Angel: “You clammy slag! You sat on the KY with your fat arse!”

Borgia Ginz (Jack Birkett): “Without progress life would be unbearable. Progress has taken the place of Heaven….It’s like pornography; better than the real thing.”

Mad: “America’s dead. It’s never been alive!”

Amyl Nitrite: “Our school motto is Faites vos desirs realitie. Make your desires reality. I, myself, prefer the song “Don’t Dream It, Be It”.

A scene from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Mad: “No one’s gonna help you so help yourselves.”

Amyl Nitrite: “In those days, desires weren’t allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them – films, books, pictures. They called it ‘art’. But when your desires become reality, you don’t need fantasy any longer, or art.”

Mad: “If your house is ugly, burn it. If the street you live in depresses you, then bulldoze it down. And if the cook can’t cook then you kill her, all right?”

Viv (Linda Spurrier): “Our only hope is to recreate ourselves as artists or anarchists if you like and release the energy for all.”

Jenny Runacre in a publicity still from Jubilee (1978)

Bod (Jenny Runacre): “I never liked pearls…or oysters.”

Borgia Ginz: “This is the generation who grew up and forgot to lead their lives.”

Mad: “Sex is for geriatrics. The mindless!

Bod: “The only thing open all eleven in this f*cking county are the police cells.”

Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978)

Borgia Ginz: “As long as the music’s loud enough, we won’t hear the world falling apart.”

Bod: “Christ! Blue movies for breakfast is more than I can stomach.”

Max (Neil Kennedy): “My idea of a perfect garden is a memorative poppy field.”

Director Derek Jarman

* This is a revised version of various articles on JUBLIEE that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website

SOURCES:

Derek Jarman by Tony Peake

Derek Jarman by Rowland Wyner

Derek Jarman: Dreams of England by Michael O’Pray

Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Criterion Collection DVD liner notes

Other Links of Interest:

http://brightlightsfilm.com/30/jubilee.php

http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/jordanjubilee.htm

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/one_of_derek_jarmans_very_last_interviews

http://www.400blows.co.uk/inter_swinton.shtml

http://www.jennyrunacre.co.uk/

http://11polaroids.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/derek-jarman-21-photographs/

http://oneplusonejournal.co.uk/2013/03/13/out-of-the-archive-on-derek-jarmans-jubilee-part-1/

http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2012/01/11/63-jubilee-derek-jarman/

http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/jarman/

Buster Keaton in the two-reeler The Blacksmith (1922)

Often ranked by silent film historians as one of Buster Keaton’s lesser efforts when compared to his other two-reel shorts such as One Week (1920) or Cops (1922), The Blacksmith (1922) is now enjoying a major critical reassessment because of a remarkable turn of events. Film collector Fernando Peña who, in 2008, uncovered the original, uncut version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Argentina, discovered a remarkably different version of The Blacksmith that same year through fellow collector Fabio Manes who purchased a 9.5mm print of it online. Released by the Pathé company in France in 1922 with French intertitles, this previously undiscovered version includes missing material totaling more than four minutes of sight gags, settings, and characters not featured in what was considered the original American version of The Blacksmith.    

Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films (image courtesy of http://www.gettyimages.com)

Peña reported his find to French film archivist Serge Bromberg, who decided to restore the Pathé print of The Blacksmith through his company Lobster Films. During his restoration research, Bromberg discovered that a 35mm print of the short he had previously deposited in France’s CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée) included another additional minute of footage not seen in years. As a result, the new restoration of The Blacksmith constitutes a major rediscovery (It was a highlight of the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival). What was once considered a string of amusing but stand alone vignettes now has a fluid storyline with richer character development and a more plausible resolution to a romantic subplot that, in the American version, seemed like a hasty last-minute addition.

For more information about John Bengston’s documentation of Buster Keaton’s film locations in Hollywood, visit silentlocations.wordpress.com

Why two different versions of The Blacksmith exist is a mystery that still hasn’t been completely solved. Various sources have speculated that Keaton decided to shoot new scenes and revise it for general release after unfavorable reactions to early screenings. Film historian and author John Bengston has conducted several scene by-scene comparisons of the two versions and tried to pinpoint the exact dates of production, which range between September 1921 (when the film was first reported as being completed) to July 1922, when it went into general release. His unraveling of the film’s erratic production history is fascinating and confirms that actor James Mason discovered the pre-release version in 1952. Mason had purchased Keaton’s former home and found several films in a private vault, many of them 35mm nitrate prints in a decomposing state. He donated them to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1956, and Raymond Rohauer secured the distribution rights to these films. Bengston suspects that Keaton’s revised 1922 version was the one that was intended for general release but was lost over time and didn’t resurface until Peña’s recent discovery.

Buster Keaton in The Blacksmith, 1922 two-reeler comedy

The 14th of the 19 two-reelers Keaton made in the early 1920s that were produced by Joseph M. Schenck, The Blacksmith depicts a day in the life of a small town blacksmith’s assistant (Keaton) at a time when that occupation also entailed equipment and automobile repairs. What begins as a satire of the first stanza of the poem “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow quickly escalates into a series of gags in which Keaton’s bumbling hero makes a mess out of almost everything he touches. Yet, in classic underdog fashion, his ingenuity and perseverance save the day in the end.

A kid with a balloon antagonizes Buster Keaton in The Blacksmith (1922)

Keaton’s comic timing and pacing in The Blacksmith has the precision of a beautifully crafted Swiss watch. But beyond the synchronized mechanics of the acrobatic stunts and sight gags is an affectionate portrait of small town life with a wry awareness of class differences. There are also unexpected touches of surrealism such as Keaton’s porkpie-like hat doing a double take and flipping in the air in reaction to his boss’s unexpected return from jail or a child’s balloon being used to hold up the frame of a model-T under repair.

A new customer tries on a shoe for size in The Blacksmith (1922), a comedy short starring Buster Keaton

One sequence that displays Keaton’s well known affinity for animals is a delightful pantomime of a shoe-store clerk’s ritual of offering the latest fashions to a customer who, in this case, happens to be a white mare (the same horse, incidentally, that Keaton used in Cops, Three Ages, and Our Hospitality). More elaborate and detailed in execution is the almost gleefully anarchic destruction of a pristine Rolls-Royce brought into the shop for a very minor fix. The humor lies in watching Keaton’s completely illogical approach to prioritizing work flow and its consequences; instead of making a quick, easy repair to the Rolls whose owner expects a quick turnaround, he throws himself into rebuilding a broken down Model-T next to it with such myopic compulsiveness that he doesn’t even notice his systematic trashing of the more expensive, luxury car. Audiences at the time, many of whom couldn’t even afford a Model-T, reputedly sat aghast that someone would wreck a Rolls-Royce for a gag. (There has been speculation that the destroyed car was a wedding present from Keaton’s in-laws).

Buster Keaton attempts to rebuild a model-T wreck and destroys a Rolls-Royce in the process in The Blacksmith (1922).

The newly restored and expanded version of The Blacksmith includes all the previously mentioned sequences from the American version, although some shots have been replaced with alternates made the following year. It is even funnier with the addition of the newly added sequences. Joe Roberts, who appeared as Keaton’s nemesis in many shorts, becomes more central to the plot of The Blacksmith and his comic ferociousness reaches operatic proportions here with Keaton inciting him to further violence by accidentally running him down in a car.

Buster Keaton and Joe Roberts in the 1922 two-reeler comedy, The Blacksmith

The romantic attraction between Keaton and Virginia Fox (as the posh, upper-class owner of the white mare) is also developed more fully and introduces Fox’s father as a potential obstacle to their match. Keaton’s intentions toward Fox are also more explicit as he attempts to propose to her several times while being chased around a hut by his irate boss. Other delightful but previously unseen gags include Keaton attempting to commandeer a roadster which turns out to be an advertising prop and a sequence in which Roberts’s pursuit of Keaton comes to a brief halt as both men are distracted by the silhouette of a woman undressing behind a window shade.

Buster Keaton, his irate boss Joe Roberts and his future fiancee Virginia Fox in The Blacksmith (1922)

The Blacksmith was not well received by American critics nor was it a popular success during its initial release. A review in Photoplay Magazine from January 1922 stated, “It’s a sad day when one of our comedians fails us. Buster Keaton is guilty this month. There is hardly a smile in his latest comedy, if such it can be called. The situations are forced and his work laborious.” Even Keaton dismissed The Blacksmith as “that dud.” But often an artist is not the best judge of his own work and Lobster Films’ restoration of The Blacksmith should help place this once underrated film among the ranks of Keaton’s better silent shorts.

* This article originally appeared in 2014 film program of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Virginia Fox (who became the wife of Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck) and Buster Keaton in The Blacksmith (1922)

Other Links of Interest:

http://silentlocations.wordpress.com/page/5/?blogsub=confirming

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/buster-keaton-the-blacksmith-video-1200563581#u=http://variety.com/2013/film/news/buster-keaton-the-blacksmith-video-1200563581;k=pmc-adi-31bb2464aad8b905af7a81e1d57b77ae

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/jul/17/film-discovery-buster-keaton-blacksmith

http://nitratediva.wordpress.com/tag/buster-keaton/

http://genevaanderson.wordpress.com/tag/buster-keaton-the-blacksmith/

Hitman Sho (Yuichi Minato) fantasizes about killing his rival Ko (Shohei Yamamoto) in Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967, aka Dutch Wife in the Desert)

Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands sounds like a make-believe movie title but it actually exists. Made in 1967, this genuine head scratcher that is also known as Dutch Wife in the Desert (Koya no Dacchi waifu) has elements of two popular genres in Japanese cinema – softcore erotic films (Pinku eiga) and gangster dramas (Yakuza eiga) – but is unlikely to please fans of either due to its fragmented narrative structure and emphasis on style at the expense of delivering the expected goods (sex and violence) in a logical linear progression. In other words, it’s chaotic, rude, goofy, pretentious, misogynistic (big surprise), and unafraid to be boring or narcissistic.   

Despite all of its offenses, Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands is still intriguing for its almost gleeful subversion of formulaic elements and blatant disregard for audience expectations. ISDOTW is also intentionally anti-mainstream, an aspect of the Japanese New Wave that often resulted in films which were made by the filmmakers more for themselves then anyone else. Never mind that it received a commercial release in Japan. It quickly vanished into obscurity until recently when it has popped up in retrospective screenings at The Japan Society in NYC and the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago.

I first read about it in the early 1990s when it was programmed at Anthology Film Archives in New York. At that time, before the internet was a household utility, it was almost impossible to find out any information about the movie. As a result, the title Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands became a mythic curiosity in my mind which I knew would dissipate when I actually caught up with the film.

A scene from Nagisha Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968).

Much closer in spirit to other Japanese semi-experimental films of its era such as Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) which reflected the turbulent social climate of the sixties, ISDOTW has a bare outline of a plot but writer/director Atushi Yamatoya plays riffs off of it as bebop jazz musicians might interpret the melody from a classic film noir score like Miklos Rosza’s Double Indemnity. It is no surprise then that ISDOTW’s evocative, free-form score is by renowned jazz pianist/composer Yosuke Yamashita which reinforces the movie’s improvisational nature.

Yuichi Minato as Sho in Atushi Yamatoya’s Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967)

ISDOTW opens and closes in the same bleak, arid setting, a backwater town that is famous for its highly profitable inflatable sex doll industry. Shô (Yûichi Minato), a hitman, has arrived to do the bidding of Naka (Masayoshi Nogami), a real estate agent who is paying him to rescue his employee Sae (Noriko Tatsumi) from a gang of thugs he wants killed. Shô’s visit becomes further complicated by an encounter with a former rival, Kô (Shôhei Yamamoto), who murdered his girlfriend. Or did he?

Noriko Tatsumi, who is considered the “Queen of Pinku eiga,” in 1967’s Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands.

Before Shô can rescue Sae, she is tortured, raped and killed (we see evidence of this in a crudely shot 16mm film that the kidnappers have sent to Naka as evidence). Yet there is a suspicion that the whole incident may have been staged. Shô’s investigation into the matter only raises more questions about everyone’s motives, including the shifty Naka, and leads him into traps set by Kô, which includes a seductive prostitute named Mina (Miki Watari) and a pair of clumsy assassins (Taka Ôkubo & Akaji Maro).

Japanese print ad for Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (aka Dutch Wife in the Desert, 1967).

Nothing is as it appears to be in this twisted, dreamlike world that doesn’t differentiate between the past, present, future or whether everything is taking place in Shô’s mind. Whether by design or accident, Yamatoya’s directorial style is so self-conscious that you are always aware of the filmmaking process. The jagged editing style and the try-anything cinematography (by Yosuke Yamashita) disorient and throw the viewer off-balance. Jump cuts, out of focus shots, frantic hand-held camera movements, long static compositions, brief bursts of senseless violence and peculiar visual details such as a point of view from a dangling telephone are par for the course. Astute film buffs will also notice tiny homages and visual references to such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and other movies.

A scene from Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali. The ant imagery is a recurring visual motif in Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967).

Yamatoya also revels in pure oddness for effect such as a scene where gun-toting hoods burst into a room and freeze in the doorway. Instead of employing an actual freeze-frame of the shot, Yamatoya has his actors pose in awkward action figure mode but you can clearly see their bodies trembling from the physical strain.

Yuichi Minato as a hitman on assignment in Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967).

The dialogue is another experiment in stylization. Occasionally it seems to parody the hard-boiled pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler as when Naka confides to Shô about his violated secretary, “They gagged her with her own panties. I must have watched the reel a million times.” At other times, verbal exchanges are infantile and boastful in the manner of teenage boys dissing each other in the locker room.

Poster for Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands

All of the female characters are treated as sex objects and routinely stripped, roughed up and discarded when the men have had their way. Yet it all seems blatantly exaggerated for theatrical effect. For a pink film, it is almost tame compared to later efforts such as Wife to Be Sacrified (1974) or A Woman Called Sada Abe (1975) and features no explicit sex scenes; most of it consists of bare breasts being frantically groped and simulated gang rape by men in black hoods (a precursor to contemporary terrorist garb) punctuated with slaps, groans, moans and cries. It’s not a date movie.  But if ISDOTW earns the righteous indignation of women for its dehumanizing depictions, male audiences may feel a similar hostility toward it for denying them the pleasure of a slick, fast-paced yakuza thriller or erotic pink film that delivers ample amounts of action, sex and violence. Most of the major players are gangster stereotypes, pathetic in the extreme, who exist to be killed or humiliated in some fashion. And the total disregard for any sort of character development results in a general apathy toward everyone. Still, the mean-spirited tone seems to reflect Yamatoya’s desire to provoke or play with the viewer’s responses. There are even playful moments when he turns a bloody encounter into slapstick comedy such as a scene where a knife-throwing killer embeds a few foreheads with his weapon of choice, none of it realistic or an impressive example of special effects make-up.

Yuichi Minato doesn’t know if he’s coming or going in the perplexing pink/yakuza film, Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967).

Yamatoya is better known as a screenwriter than a director in the U.S. Among his more popular titles are Blue Film: Estimation (1968), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970), Naked Seven (1972), Sweet Scent of Eros (1973) and the anime features Mystery of Mamo (1978) and Locke the Superman (1984). He is also one of the uncredited writers on Seijun Suzuki’s outré yakuza masterpiece, Branded to Kill (1967), which was hated by the studio executives at Nikkatsu who produced and released it; the film was quickly withdrawn after its initial release but eventually garnered a massive international cult following. Other than ISDOTW, Yamatoya’s other three directorial efforts include Season of Betrayal (1966), the intriguingly titled The Pistol That Sprouted Hair (1968) and Trap of Lust (1974).

Japanese director Atushi Yamatoya

As for the featured cast of ISDOTW, Yuichi Minato as Shô is probably the most familiar face, having appeared in Madame O (1967), Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) and The Bird People in China (1998), films which are well known among connoisseurs of Japanese cinema.

Yuichi Minato as the hitman Sho encounters the INFLATABLE SEX DOLL OF THE WASTELANDS (1967).

If you have read this far, you can probably tell whether ISDOTW is your cup of poison sake or not. I can only recommend it to movie addicts interested in exploring the outer fringes of late sixties Japanese cinema with no expectations of being entertained in any conventional sense. I admit a grudging admiration for it as an amateur cinema anthropologist and some scenes continue to resurface in my memory like fragments of some half-remembered dream…or nightmare. The scene of Shô cutting a tree in two with his rapid-fire revolver, a revenge fantasy where Shô has buried arch nemesis Kô up to his neck in sand, a shot of ants teeming over Shô’s face and, most haunting of all, a curious close-up of Shô kissing an inflatable sex doll which cuts away to a fast pan over cubicle after cubicle of sex dolls in various arranged positions awaiting customers, all of them played by actresses pretending to be mannequins.

Shohei Yamamoto in Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967)

Don’t expect Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (aka Dutch Wife in the Desert) to show up as a Criterion release anytime soon. It might even be too obscure or off-the-radar for DVD/Blu-Ray pickup by Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro or Cult Epics. But you might be able to still purchase a copy of it from European Trash Cinema or some other low profile source.

Other links of interest:

http://filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu/events/2013/oscillating-visions-underworld-underground-japanese-cinema

http://insanehorizon.tumblr.com/post/47192990739

http://www.fareastfilm.com/EasyNe2/LYT.aspx?Code=FEFJ&IDLYT=15535&ST=SQL&SQL=ID_Documento=3079

http://www.japansociety.org/event/inflatable-sex-doll-of-the-wastelands

http://twi-ny.com/blog/2014/10/15/the-dark-side-of-the-sun-john-zorn-on-japanese-cinema-inflatable-sex-doll-of-the-wastelands/

https://theleastpictureshow.wordpress.com/tag/atsushi-yamatoya/

Jean Gabin plays a world weary trunk driver in Henri Verneuil’s Des gens sans importance (1956, aka People of No Importance).

One of the great stars of French cinema, Jean Gabin was also an unofficial film culture ambassador for his country whose career can be divided into five distinct phases; the first would be a brief stint in silent films and playing secondary roles in the first French “talkies” and the second would be as a ruggedly handsome, melancholy anti-hero and acclaimed actor who reached a career peak in the late thirties with Port of Shadows (1938), La Bete Humaine (1938), and Le Jour se Leve (1939). The third phase, the years between 1939 and 1953, are generally considered a fallow period in which he attempted an unsuccessful bid for Hollywood stardom and experienced equal disappointments in the French film industry.  

With the success of Touchez pas au grisbi in 1954, Gabin enjoyed a career comeback (the fourth phase) as an older leading man which lasted until the early sixties when he settled into a steady supporting role career, usually paired with a younger rising star such as Jean-Paul Belmondo (Un singe en hiver aka A Monkey in Winter, 1962) or Alain Delon (Any Number Can Win, 1963). Des Gens Sans Importance (1956, aka People of No Importance) comes from the post-Grisbi period when Gabin was portraying more introspective and world weary variations on his younger drifter characters.

Jean Gabin in Des gens sans importance (People of No Importance, 1956)

Although the film opens and closes at a desolate truck stop called La Caravanne on a lonely stretch of road in Northern France, most of Des Gens Sans Importance takes place in flashback as Jean Viard (Gabin) recalls the lost love of his life, a truck stop waitress named Clotilde (Francoise Arnoul). The film, directed by the underrated Henri Verneuil (Greed in the Sun,1964), works as both a road movie and a tragic melodrama with Jean and Clotilde meeting at La Caravanne and becoming lovers, despite the fact that Jean is married with three children. Time passes and Clotilde becomes fed up with playing the other woman in Jean’s life and trying to survive on a waitress’s salary. She moves to Paris and takes a job as a maid in a whorehouse while Jean loses his job after assaulting his manager.

Francoise Arnoul and Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil’s moody road movie, Des gens sans importance (1956).

Life takes a darker turn for them both as Jean’s wife learns about Clotilde and Jean abandons his family, taking a job driving a cattle truck. Clotilde, meanwhile, learns she is pregnant and visits an abortionist, setting the stage for the movie’s bleak conclusion. Moments of passion and joy are brief for both Jean and Clotilde during their time together and Des Gens Sans Importance has a pervasive sense of melancholy and despair that harkens back to the poetic realism of Marcel Carne’s Port of Shadows.

Francoise Arnoul and Jean Gabin in the French road movie, People of No Importance (Des gens sans importance, 1956).

There are many things to admire in Des Gens Sans Importance from the evocative cinematography of Louis Page (The Walls of Malapaga, 1949) which captures the lonely existence of a life lived on the road to the vivid supporting roles such as Paul Frankeur as the pegleg owner of La Caravanne and Dany Carrel as Jean’s vindictive teenage daughter.

Dany Carrel as the daughter of truck driver Jean Gabin in the French melodrama, People of No Importance (Des gens sans importance), directed by Henri Verneuil.

The film also compares favorably to The Wages of Fear (1953) and They Live by Night (1949) in depicting the isolation and monotony of a trucker’s existence as well as the hazards of sleep deprivation and driving long hours without a break.

A scene from Dens Ges Sans Importance (English title: People of No Importance, 1956) starring Jean Gabin as a down-on-his-luck truck driver

Best of all, Gabin gives one of his finest middle-period performances as a man totally exhausted by his work and situation in life; he is well aware that the best part of his life is behind him. Still, he sees Clotilde as his last chance for happiness and follows his instincts, regardless of the risks.

Francoise Arnoul and Jean Gabin steppin’ out at a roadhouse cafe in the French melodrama, Des gens sans importance (aka People of No Importance, 1956).

In Gabin’s previous film Gas-oil (aka Hi-Jack Highway, 1955) with Jeanne Moreau, the actor had also played a truck driver and Des Gens Sans Importance is often considered a sequel of sorts to Gas-oil because of its similar setting and thematic elements. Yet the two movies are quite different from each other even if Gabin plays a trucker wanting to be free of responsibilities in both. Gas-oil is more of a genre film in which Gabin is pursued by a gang of criminals who believe he has stolen money from them but Des Gens Sans Importance is a mood piece and the opening and closing strains of the haunting theme song (by Joseph Kosma) sets the bittersweet tone.

Jean Gabin reflects on the life he could have had in Des gens sans importance (1956), directed by Henri Verneuil

Des Gens Sans Importance is not often singled out by critics as one of Gabin’s more iconic roles but that may be because the film has not been readily available for viewing for years. It might have been seen by French critics at the time as a routine Jean Gabin vehicle and dismissed as clichéd since he had played similar characters in the past.

American reviewers were not any more receptive with the Variety critic calling it “A grim, plodding film. Never gets to the true spark of the drama…Director Henri Verneuil gives it careful mounting, but has been unable to overcome the pedestrian story.” Possibly the downbeat nature of the film was simply too unsatisfying for American audiences who were used to more conventional Hollywood fare where the endings are neatly tied up and unambiguous. More than fifty years later, however, Des Gens Sans Importance looks like a late period entry from the poetic realism movement and is clearly overdue for a reevaluation.

Des Gens Sans Importance (aka People of No Importance, 1956) starring Francoise Arnoul (in doorway) and Jean Gabin.

Des Gens Sans Importance is not currently available on DVD or Blu-Ray in the U.S. I was lucky enough to see it as part of a Jean Gabin retrospective on Turner Classic Movies where it might turn up again in the future. You might be able to find a DVD copy of it from Europe if you have an all-region player.  For more information about Jean Gabin, you should check out Charles Zigman’s mammoth two part biography, World’s Coolest Movie Star: The Complete 95 Films (and Legend) of Jean Gabin (Allenwoon Press).

International film poster for Des gens sans importance (1956)

* This is a revised and expanded version of an article that first appeared on the TCM website.

Other links of interest:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-press-release-jean-gabin-working-class-hero-to-godfather-at-bfi-southbank-in-may-2012-03-30.pdf

http://kebekmac.blogspot.com/2014/02/verneuil-1955-des-gens-sans-importance.html

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/jan/25/guardianobituaries.filmnews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoqNhxLdVf0 (trailer with theme song, no dialogue)

Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez and Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappe (1967), directed by Carlos Saura

One of Spain’s best known and critically acclaimed filmmakers in his own country, Carlos Saura is less well known in the U.S. where his mentor Luis Bunuel and his predecessor Pedro Almodovar are more famous. Yet, Saura was one of the guiding lights of the Spanish New Wave movement in the early sixties, beginning with his neorealistic social drama The Delinquents (1960). Saura would hit his stride with his two subsequent features, La Caza (1966, aka The Hunt) and Peppermint Frappe (1967), both of which explored the political, social and sexual repression of the Franco regime through the guise of allegory and psychological melodrama, respectively.    

Despite a title that seems to suggest a light, frothy romantic comedy, Peppermint Frappe is a dark, brooding character study that is heavily influenced by Luis Bunuel’s El (1953, aka This Strange Passion) and bears some striking similarities to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The 1967 feature also marks Saura’s first collaboration with actress Geraldine Chaplin, who would become his off screen companion for many years and go on to star in eight more films for the director.

The opening credits for Peppermint Frappe (1967), directed by Carlos Saura

The opening credits for Peppermint Frappe sets the voyeuristic tone of the film as images from fashion magazines are cropped and assembled in a scrapbook by the protagonist, Julian (Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez), a physician who operates a radiology clinic in the traditional Castilian town of Cuenca.

Alfredo Mayo, Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappe (1967)

Julian finds his lonely bachelor existence disrupted by the arrival of his childhood friend Pablo (Alfredo Mayo) and his beautiful young wife Elena (Geraldine Chaplin) who have returned to live in the area. Julian is immediately smitten with the enigmatic Elena and soon becomes completely obsessed with her, convinced he saw her years earlier, beating a drum at a Holy Week ceremony in Calanda. The latter image, both erotic and innocent, haunts him and reveals his idealized view of women. Elena, however, proves to be a provocative tease, enjoying but also repelling Julian’s advances, making it quite clear she is unobtainable. In frustration, Julian turns his attention to his shy office assistant Ana (also played by Chaplin) and begins to slowly mold her in the image of Elena until she completely resembles Pablo’s wife down to the blonde hair and fake eyelashes. But Julian’s obsession with Elena does not run its course naturally and the movie builds to a chilling climax that would not be out of place in a Hitchcock or Chabrol thriller.

Julian (Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez) chronicles his obsession with Elena/Ana (Geraldine Chaplin) in Peppermint Frappe (1967)

After Saura had completed La Caza, he cast about for a film project that would serve as a homage to his spiritual master Luis Bunuel. Saura later recalled, “It was in Calanda with Bunuel that I got the idea for the film. You know the story of the drums of Calanda. The year I saw it a beautiful young woman, she was one of Bunuel’s relatives, was beating the drum with all her might. I kept that extraordinary image as a persistent memory. This young woman belonged to another world; while all around her thousands of people were playing, she also beat the drum. It was all the more impressive since it is usually the men who do so.”

Geraldine Chaplin in Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappe (1967)

While the contrasting female characters of Elena and Ana propel the film’s increasingly perverse storyline, it is Julian who is the primary focus of Peppermint Frappe and Saura’s embodiment of the traditional Spanish male raised under the repressive regime of Franco. In an interview, Saura stated that, “I realized that the Spanish bourgeoisie – and by extension that of the world, including the middle class – has a series of fixed images: a medieval notion, concerning feelings, primarily held by men towards women. It is that notion of woman as object, which fashion magazines show in a very clear way…In Peppermint Frappe it’s somewhat clearer because it contains the myth of the woman-object held by the traditional man with his religious notions and his particular education. He [Julian] can be a terrific doctor, but it doesn’t let him get away from his concept of the woman-object…We all know Julian. He is a subjectified character who is traumatized by a horrible religious and sexual upbringing. We are all familiar with this problem in Spain.”

Julian (Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez) watches Elena (Geraldine Chaplin) while she sleeps in Peppermint Frappe (1967)

Initially Saura was asked by his producer Elias Querejeta to make Peppermint Frappe in English so that its commercial prospects would be better. The director recalled that Querejeta said, ‘Look, this film has to be made in English because it is very expensive and that is the only way we can sell it.’ We all turned white. He told me he would have an advisor on hand to translate, and they translated the script into English. I remember that we shot the first scene in the studio. It was a scene between Lopez Vasquez and Alfredo Mayo. We were all very serious in spite of the joking that had gone on behind the scenes. As soon as I gave the order to start, Alfredo Mayo said, “Pretty roses,” and we all let out a big laugh. There was so much joking around that Elias said to stop shooting in English. We continued shooting in Spanish.”

Elena (Geraldine Chaplin) is spied on by an obsessive admirer in Peppermint Frappe (1967)

Saura had previously experienced run-ins with government sanctioned film censors on his earlier films, all of which resulted in edited versions of his final cuts, but Peppermint Frappe was passed without any scene deletions or censored footage. The movie was not only a popular success in Spain but also won Saura the Best Director award at the 1968 Berlin International Film Festival; it also won three honors (Best Picture, Best Actor [Vazquez] and Best Screenplay at Spain’s Cinema Writers Circle Awards ceremony the same year.

Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez and Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappe (1967)

Even though Saura was trying to emulate Bunuel in Peppermint Frappe, many critics found the film to be much more directly influenced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, despite the fact that Saura had always preferred Psycho (1960) to the former film. The comparisons are undeniable however in certain scenes such as the swirling camera movement around Ana as Julian circles her, coaching her through her exercises on a rowing machine, or the delirious final shot, in which Ana appears to be complicit in Julian’s crimes. The Bunuel influence is equally obvious though and never more so than the scene where Julian asks Elena to kneel on the floor of his childhood bedroom and then spies on her through a keyhole in the door. Peppermint Frappe will prove to be revelation for those who are only familiar with Saura’s more widely-distributed work from the 80s, in particular his famous flamenco trilogy, Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983), and El Amor Brujo (1986), which enjoyed critical acclaim and popularity on the U.S. art house circuit during their release.   * This is a revised version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website. The film also aired on TCM and may be shown again in the future but currently it is unavailable in the U.S. on DVD or Blu-Ray.

SOURCES:

The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing by Marvin D’Lugo (Princeton University Press)

Carlos Saura: Interviews edited by Linda M. William (University Press of Kentucky)

http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/saura.html (Strictly Film School web site)

Links of interest:

http://depthsofcinema.blogspot.com/2011/06/superb-drink-up-to-last-sip.html

http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/saura.html

http://cinemapantheon.org/blog/2013/4/25/pantheon-intl-25-spain-peppermint-frapp

http://dcpfilm.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/peppermint-frappe-saura-1967/

Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappe (1967)

If you go back and look at the very first film that Stanley Kubrick made – a twelve-minute short subject entitled Day of the Fight (1951) – it is obvious that the former photographer for Look magazine already had a striking visual aesthetic and strong sense of narrative technique. Together with his friend and collaborator Alexander Singer, an employee at Time Inc., where The March of Time newsreels were produced, Kubrick decided to create a short film in the style of the popular newsreel based on his photo essay for Look, “Prizefighter,” which profiled middleweight boxer Walter Cartier in the January 18th issue of 1949. Kubrick had learned that a typical eight to nine minute segment for The March of Time cost approximately $40,000 to produce and vowed he could do it more effectively for only $1,500 and make an enormous profit on the film sale.  

A young Stanley Kubrick, cameraman in training

Singer, who would serve as the assistant director of Day of the Fight, recalled, “We had a notion that you could get tens of thousands of dollars. We were off by an order of magnitude. The truth was, they gave them away. They were not paid for them at all. The shorts anybody paid for were the comic routines professional vaudeville characters did, not the sort of sports shorts we were contemplating – all of those were throwaways. But what we did know was that what passed for a sports short at the time was pretty low stuff; it was junk. There was no question in our minds that we could vastly exceed the impact and power…Stanley’s concept of using the photojournalist story on Day of the Fight was inspired. Not only were the drama elements of it marvelously compressed, but the subject himself, Walter Cartier, was a textbook hero. Walter Cartier was good-looking and able…and his brother, Vincent, looked good – and the two of them together were really quite marvelous figures.”

Walter Cartier, Prizefighter of Greenwich Village in a restaurant, 1948. (photo by Stanley Kubrick for LOOK Magazine.)

Walter and his brother Vincent had taken a liking to Kubrick when he had previously worked with them on the Look photo essay and agreed to partner with him on his movie with Walter serving as the technical advisor. The story concept was simple but dramatic; it followed a day in the life of boxer Walter Cartier from the moment he woke up in the morning through his breakfast routine and out into the streets of New York City. Using only a narrator (Douglas Edwards from CBS) and a music score by Gerald Fried, Kubrick created an intimate portrait of the boxer, showing him playing with his dog, attending mass at Saint Xavier Church on Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, training with his brother, and eating lunch at his favorite restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, The Steak Joint. It all built to a dramatic finish with Cartier’s bout with middleweight fighter Bobby James at Laurel Gardens in Newark, New Jersey on April 17, 1950.

Walter Cartier slams Bobby James at Laurel Gardens in Newark, NJ on April 17, 1950

Even though Day of the Fight offered a time-compressed look at Cartier’s life, it was shot over the course of several weeks and Kubrick’s biggest challenge was capturing the main event with his “Eyemo, a daylight loading camera that takes one-hundred-foot spools of 35mm black-and-white film.” The two filmmakers would only get one opportunity to capture this crucial bout so “Kubrick shot the hand-held material, and Singer operated the second Eyemo positioned on a tripod. They were both shooting hundred-foot loads, which required constant reloading. With two cameras, one could be shooting while the other was reloading.” The final result is a stunningly edited and photographed tour de force with Kubrick often filming the action from the point of view of the canvas floor. An extra bonus was the fact that Cartier won the fight with a knockout punch, captured on film.

Prizefighter Walter Cartier in training in Stanley Kubrick’s 1951 short, Day of the Fight

Despite Kubrick’s claim that he could make Day of the Fight for a mere $1,500, it actually ended up costing him $3,900 but he was able to sell it to RKO-Pathe for their This Is America series for $4,000 and make a $100 profit. The short subject made its world premiere on April 26, 1951 at New York’s Paramount Theatre where the main feature was My Forbidden Past starring Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner. Day of the Fight marked Kubrick’s official entry into the film industry and is still regarded by movie critics and boxing fans as the ideal model for a sports film, one that captures the essence of boxing and its drama through sheer artistry.

Prizefighter Walter Cartier gazes out his window in the 1951 short, Day of the Fight (directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Cartier would go on to make boxing history on October 16, 1951, with a knockout punch to Joe Rindone in the first forty-seven seconds of a match. He would also profit from his involvement in Day of the Fight, thanks to his photogenic features and physical grace. Hollywood came calling and Cartier would soon add actor to his resume with appearances in such films as Somebody Up There Likes Me (a 1956 biopic about boxer Rocky Graziano) and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) as well as TV shows (You’ll Never Get Rich, Crunch and Dez) and guest appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Unfortunately, Day of the Fight has never been officially released on DVD or Blu-Ray and it may not ever appear in those formats. At the same time, you can easily view the short on a number of internet streaming sites (including YouTube) in varying degrees of quality. In fact, all three of Kubrick’s early shorts including Flying Padre (1951), and The Seafarers (1953), his first color short, can be viewed on the internet. Only The Seafarers is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber as part of a bonus feature with the main attraction, Fear and Desire (1953), Kubrick’s directorial feature debut.

* This is a revised and extended version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website at tcm.com.  SOURCES:

Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by Vincent LoBrutto)

Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter

Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by Vincent LoBrutto

Other Sites of Interest:

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html

http://garywarnett.wordpress.com/page/46/

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/67/67kubrick.php

http://www.filmthreat.com/features/2365/

http://www.denisbosnic.com/journal/2014/1/29/stanley-kubricks-lost-photography

http://www.filmsnotdead.com/2014/06/20/eyes-wide-open-stanley-kubrick-as-photographer/

http://fan.tcm.com/blogpost/wait-training-day-of-the-fight-1951

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=519M7nzBRZA

Sometimes a great promotional gimmick is reason enough to make a movie and this certainly proved to be a successful strategy for director William Castle who made box office hits out of low-budget horror thrillers such as Macabre (1958, admission included an insurance policy from Lloyds of London against death by fright), House on Haunted Hill (1959, a glow-in-the-dark skeleton swooped over the audience at a key point in the movie) and The Tingler (1959, selected seats were wired and vibrated when the title creature got loose in a movie theatre). Not all promoters have been as lucky as Castle though and Wicked, Wicked (1973), produced by William T. Orr and writer/director Richard L. Bare, features one of the best movie gimmicks of its era but was poorly distributed and has languished in obscurity for years…until the Warner Archive Collection released it on DVD in November 2014. 

Filmed in “Duo-vision,” Wicked, Wicked opened with the announcement, “You are about to see a new concept in motion picture technique…in this process you will witness simultaneous action through the use of a double screen…an experience that will challenge your imagination!” The dual screen technique was actually nothing new; Andy Warhol had already explored that possibility in 1966 with Chelsea Girls which required the projection of two separate movies onto the same wide screen. Brian De Palma refined the concept further in Dionysus in ’69 (1970), a filmed version of the Greek play The Bacchantes, shot entirely in the split screen technique, and he also toyed with the “Duo-Vision” idea in key scenes in his 1973 thriller, Sisters.

A sample of Brian De Palma’s split screen process in Sisters (1973)

Even Hollywood experimented with dual and multiple screen techniques in such films as Grand Prix (1966) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). But Wicked, Wicked exploits the split screen gimmick more effectively as a narrative device than most films that have utilized this visual approach. Often the movie is more fascinating for what it attempts and the visual possibilities it raises than the actual narrative which is a psychological thriller about a demented killer with a blonde fetish running amok in a sprawling resort hotel with secret passageways.

The masked killer makes a surprise appearance in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Released by MGM in 1973 during the waning days of the studio, Wicked, Wicked bore some similarities with its psycho-killer-in-a-creepy-hotel plot to Paul Bartel’s Private Parts. The latter film, released in 1972, was such an embarrassment to the studio due to the kinky content that they released it under the alias Premier Productions. It failed at the box office and so did Wicked, Wicked, even though it bore the MGM logo and had great selling points. It also has a LOT of problems. For one thing, it dispenses with building any suspense about the masked psycho who savagely stabs and kills a female hotel guest in the first fifteen minutes of the film. Despite the introduction of several oddball characters, there is no attempt to hide the obvious fact that Jason (Randolph Roberts), the hotel handyman, is the murderer. The movie is also hampered by screenwriter Bare’s inane dialogue that barely rises to the level of a daytime TV soap opera and the ensemble acting is so uniformly bad, even with such veteran performers as Arthur O’Connell and Scott Brady in the cast, it becomes immensely entertaining. In fact, Tiffany Bolling as Lisa James, the imperiled nightclub singer, is the film’s prime guilty pleasure, whether she is screaming in terror, performing excruciatingly awful cabaret tunes by Philip Springer & Irwin Levine (they will get in your head and never leave), or arguing with her ex-husband Rick (David Bailey), a disgraced cop who is now working as the hotel’s private eye.

Tiffany Bolling as the lounge singer from hell in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

All of the flaws only add to the oddball charm of Wicked, Wicked and the “Duo-Vision” process is consistently engaging, only reverting to the single frame widescreen format during scenes of sex and death. Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), the movie cleverly implicates the viewer as a voyeur in the proceedings and underlines the visual obsession with striking dual compositions: a sweaty bodybuilder working out as the hotel manager stares intently at him from behind venetian blinds; Jason retrieving a severed arm from a hallway as a group of hotel merrymakers wind their way toward him through the corridors; a flashback scene in which the ill-fated Lenore (Madeleine Sherwood) describes her husband’s accidental death which is actually revealed to be an assault with a deadly weapon.

The suspicious hotel manager spies on his guests in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

At times, director Bare is so literal-minded in his deployment of “Duo-Vision” that he renders any intended irony as null and void, such as the scene where Rick and Lisa discuss their failed marriage. “After you left,” Rick confesses, “I did a little drinking…maybe more than a little,” and, in juxtaposition to the cozy couple, we see a flashback of the drunken Rick, crawling face down on the floor.

Tiffany Bolling and David Bailey in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Wicked, Wicked was the last feature film directed by Richard L. Bare and one of the few in his filmography which also included the 1968 cult adventure I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew starring Gardner McKay; Bare was much more prolific in the world of television, having helmed countless episodes of Green Acres, Cheyenne, Maverick, Broken Arrow and other series. His other claim to fame is the comedy shorts series he created with actor George O’Hanlon for MGM featuring the character Joe McDoakes, which ran from 1942 to 1956 and featured such titles as “So You Want to Give Up Smoking,” “So You Want to Learn to Dance” and “So You Want to Be a Gladiator.”

A psycho killer with a thing for blondes in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

While TCM’s airing of Wicked, Wicked in recent years did not result in a revival of interest in “Duo-Vision” or any retrospectives of Bare’s or Bolling’s films, it stands as a unique pop culture artifact of its era. Viewers may be struck by the film’s final revelation of Jason’s corpse-strewn attic which mirrors the grotesque climax of Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s La Residencia (1969, aka The House That Screamed) and, if you listen carefully to the press reporters clamoring for an interview with Lisa at the film’s end, you’ll hear one of them shout out, “Who do you think is the Zodiac Killer?”, a reference to the mysterious serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco area between 1968 and 1970. By the way, the Grand View Hotel in Wicked, Wicked is actually the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego; it is now a very expensive luxury resort and was previously used by director Billy Wilder as a prime location in Some Like It Hot (1959) and by Richard Rush as the central film set in The Stunt Man (1980).

Marilyn Monroe at the Hotel Del Coronado

Behind the Scenes on Wicked, Wicked:
While Tiffany Bolling was working on Wicked, Wicked, she was simultaneously making The Candy Snatchers (1973) at the same time.

Bolling did her own singing in Wicked, Wicked which may also explain why her aspirations for a singing career didn’t pan out. She actually had a minor hit single with the Vietnam protest song, “Thank God the War Is Over,” and even released an album called “Tiffany” which is now a collector’s item.  “We picked Wicked, Wicked for the introduction of Duo-Vision for two reasons,” Bare explains in the studio pressbook. “It is a suspense drama of the psycho-killer genre and the entire action is laid in an old seaside resort hotel. The plot and the setting combined beautifully to make our dual screens work. Although split screen sequences have been seen in the past and are still popular for such presentations as sports telecasts, Wicked, Wicked marks the first time that an entire movie has been filmed with parallel images,” Bare says. “Although primarily it serves to depict simultaneous action,” the director continues, “Duo-Vision also lends itself to showing truth and untruth, flashbacks in time, visions of the future or cause and effect without abrupt interruption of the story’s main continuity. As applied to Wicked, Wicked the Duo-Vision technique involves an active screen and a passive screen, meaning that dialogue comes from only one screen at a time while silent footage unreels on the other so there is no dialogue confusion.”

The murderer chooses his weapon of choice in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Wicked, Wicked Trivia:
The organ music heard in Wicked, Wicked is from the original sheet music score that was played live during showings of the silent horror classic The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Taglines for the film’s promotion were:
“See the hunter, see the hunted – both at the same time!”
“No glasses – All You Need Are Your Eyes!”
&
“Twice the tension! Twice the terror!”

The Hotel del Coronado, which is identified as The Grand View Hotel in Wicked, Wicked, is a historic seaside resort which first opened its doors in 1888 and has played host to such famous celebrities and dignitaries as Charles Lindbergh, the Prince of Wales, Babe Ruth, Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe. According to legend, the Victorian structure is haunted by the ghost of a beautiful young woman, Kate Morgan, who checked in on November 25, 1892 and died under mysterious circumstances. The Coronado has been refurbished since the making of Wicked, Wicked and is available for book. Here is the web site link – http://www.hoteldel.com/about/history.cfm

Richard Kiel (left) and Lloyd Bochner in The Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man” (1962)

Director Richard L. Bare is probably best known for helming the famous Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” and for more than 170 episodes of Green Acres, which he hopes to revive. He is also the author of a memoir, Confessions of a Hollywood Director.

Set decorator Charles Pierce is not to be confused with Charles B. Pierce who launched his directorial debut in 1972 with the surprise hit, The Legend of Boggy Creek. The latter died in 2010 but Pierce, the set decorator, was employed by MGM for most of his early career, working on everything from The Strawberry Statement (1970) to Hearts of the West (1976) before going freelance and transitioning into television work in the ’80s and ’90s.

Tiffany Bolling, who plays Lisa James in Wicked, Wicked, made her film debut in an uncredited minor role in Tony Rome (1967) starring Frank Sinatra.

Tiffany Bolling in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Ms. Bolling was an extremely busy actress during the seventies, appearing in numerous TV shows (Marcus Welby, M.D., Ironside, Medical Center) and B-movies, many of which have since become cult favorites such as Bonnie’s Kids (1973), The Candy Snatchers (1973), a sick, twisted tale of three kidnappers and their hostage who is buried alive in a coffin, The Centerfold Girls (1974), and Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), in which she played an entomologist to William Shatner’s veterinarian.

The last film Bolling appeared in was a low-budget sci-fi thriller in 1996 entitled Visions.

David Bailey, who plays Rick Stewart in Wicked, Wicked, was primarily a stage and television actor who was best known for his recurring role in the soap opera Another World. His film appearances were rare and included the spaghetti Western, 7 Women for the MacGregors (1967), Change of Mind (1969), in which a black man receives a brain transplant from a white man, and The Believer (2001) starring Ryan Gosling as a Jew who becomes an anti-Semitic skinhead.

David Bailey (right) questions a suspect in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

David Bailey died in November 2004 in an accidental drowning in his apartment pool in Los Angeles.

Wicked, Wicked was the feature film debut of Randolph Roberts who played the psychotic killer. Most of his subsequent work has been in minor supporting roles in television series such as Happy Days, Police Woman and The A-Team.

The supporting cast of Wicked, Wicked includes Diane McBain, Arthur O’Connell, Scott Brady, Madeleine Sherwood and former teenage heartthrob Edd Byrnes who created a sensation as a hipster known as “Kookie” on the TV detective series, 77 Sunset Strip. He even recorded a song with Connie Stevens – “Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb” – that became a top 40 hit. Despite a promising film career that included Marjorie Morningstar (1958), Up Periscope (1959) and Roger Corman’s The Secret Invasion (1964), Byrnes was working almost exclusively in television by the time he made Wicked, Wicked.

Edd Byrnes in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Diane McBain was a popular ingénue at Warner Brothers during the early sixties, appearing in such films as Parrish (1961) and Claudelle Inglish (1961) as well as hit TV shows such as Surfside 6 and Hawaiian Eye. She is barely recognizable in her brief cameo as a murder victim in Wicked, Wicked.

Two-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor Arthur O’Connell (for Picnic [1955] and Anatomy of a Murder [1959]) had just completed The Poseidon Adventure (1972) when he took the relatively minor role of Mr. Fenley in Wicked, Wicked.

The younger brother of actor Lawrence Tierney, Scott Brady enjoyed leading man status in B-movies until the mid-sixties when he began appearing in supporting roles in exploitation films such as The Road Hustlers (1968), The Mighty Gorga (1969), Nightmare in Wax (1969) and Satan’s Sadists (1969). His total screen time in Wicked, Wicked is probably less than five minutes but he does figure prominently in a surprising death scene which he prompts with the sarcastic retort to a suspect, “Go ahead and jump.”

Madeleine Sherwood, who broadly overplays her role as the pathetic hotel tenant in Wicked, Wicked, is probably best known for her performance as the obnoxious Mae Flynn Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and as the Mother Superior in the TV series, The Flying Nun.

Madeleine Sherwood and Jack Carson in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Reviews of Wicked, Wicked:

“What distinguishes Wicked, Wicked from all other recent psychopathic-killers-loose-in-rambling-old-hotels movies is its gimmick…Duo-Vision is in fact nothing more than split-screen unremittingly applied, as in Chelsea Girls and Dionysus in ’69, but never before with such winning simplicity of intention…When you can see both the distant, stalking killer and his intended victim at the same time you have more activity but less anticipation-and consequently less suspense. And the lifting of suspense, which in most such movies functions as an annoying burden upon the audience, is a very real advantage. Wicked, Wicked thus emerges as an oddly pleasant movie about which there is not too much good to say. Everybody is likable-even the killer, who, like most amateur embalmers in movies for the last 10 years, owes a bit to Hitchcock’s Norman Bates. And everybody is at least professionally competent.”
- Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

“A silly, wretchedly derivative psycho movie in which a hotel handyman (Roberts), sexually humiliated as a child by his foster mother, goes around in a fright mask dismembering blondes.”
- TimeOut

David Bailey (left) and Randolph Roberts in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

“Wicked, Wicked is a great time capsule film. Only in 1973 would a major studio shoot an all-split-screen film, with an unoriginal murder mystery storyline, Tiffany Bolling in two wigs and singing two songs, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes as a beach bum gigolo, and Diane McBain as an early victim, an all organ music score.”
- Casey Scott, http://www.dvddrive-in.com/

“This not very exciting thriller is set in a California seaside resort…This strange feature employed “Duo-Vision,” the split-screen technique that so nicely built up suspense in Brian De Palma’s terror film, Sisters. Unfortunately, none of the skill shown in that film is evident here, so the technique is reduced to a gimmick…written, produced, and directed by the director of the 1960s TV comedy series “Green Acres.” 
- TV Guide

“…Richard L. Bare’s film pokes fun at every horror, mystery, and suspense film clich and contrivance in sight. Told entirely in split screen…writer-director Bare uses the gimmick with mostly amazing agility and slickness. But a gimmick is not substitute for style and, though admittedly it is effective for suspense, shock value, and macabre humor, it remains a gimmick when used so consistently…Some modernists believe this is real cinema, but history will prove them wrong. But it is fun.”
- Dale Winogura, Cinefantastique

“Disastrous mystery-thriller”
- Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide 

Tiffany Bolling DIDN’T order room service in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Quotes from Wicked, Wicked
Rick: “I’m a security man, not a bill collector.” 
Simmons: “As long as you work at this hotel, you’ll be whatever I say you are.”

Lenore: “I don’t want to move…you know, I’ve got a lot of wonderful friends here in the hotel. You know, I have never, ever been lonely here. Not once.”

Genny: “I think I feel another toothache coming on doctor.”
Rick: “I’m sorry. I’m not drilling today.

“

Bill: “Is that the security man? How do you know him?”
Lisa: “I was married to him.”

The Belgian poster for Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Rick (interviewing missing woman’s relative): “What about her hair?”
 Grandpa: “Oh, she had lots of it.”
 Rick: “No, the color.”
 Grandpa: “Oh, real light, real light, like Jean Harlow.”
 Rick: “Any other distinguishing features?”
 Grandpa: “Knockers!”

Rick: “Simmons, did it ever occur to you that there might be more to these things than coincidence?”

Simmons: “If you intimating what I think you are, I don’t want to hear it.”
 Rick: “Three single women, blonde, each of them with luggage, check in in the middle of the night, order dinner sent up, and that’s the last of them.”

Lisa (to Jason): “I want a full figure spot when I get to center stage, not before and not after!”

David Bailey confronts the killer in Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Lisa: “Well, what do you do besides work a spotlight?”
 Jason: “I change light bulbs, rewire old circuits, climb flagpoles, anything they can think of.”

Lenore: “I performed before kings and queens. I had legs in those days.”

Rick: “If you can’t be a good cop, be a dropout.”

Rick (to Lisa): “After you left I did a little drinking…maybe more than a little.”

Wicked, Wicked (1973) on DVD from The Warner Archive Collection

Lisa: “It’s a bit difficult to sing when you’re scared to death.”

Jason: “Don’t come any closer. There’ll be an awful mess to clean up down there.”

Simmons: “It all could have been handled without any notoriety. It’s all a matter of image.”

Reporter: “What does it feel like to have your throat cut?”
Lisa: “It hurts.”

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5e3ttvlymI (the original trailer for Wicked, Wicked)
Other Links of interest:

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/big-screen/2011/may/12/movies-shot-in-san-diego-reviews-part-1/#

http://shebloggedbynight.com/2014/wicked-wicked-1973/

https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/movies/we

Along with his film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark (1969), Tony Richardson’s The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967) is probably the most obscure and rarely seen film from the director’s middle period, a time when he was floundering and unable to match the earlier critical and commercial success of his 1963 Tom Jones adaptation. There are many reasons for that, of course, and Richardson would probably admit it was one of his biggest disasters, if not the biggest. It also wasn’t intended for the average moviegoer and was much more attuned to art house cinema patrons with its enigmatic story based on the novel Le marin de Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras, whose screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour received an Oscar® nomination in 1961 (even though the film was released in 1959). To date, The Sailor from Gibraltar is still missing in action with no legal DVD or Blu-Ray release available.

Ian Bannen and Jeanne Moreau in The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967), directed by Tony Richardson

Christopher Isherwood, Don Magner and even Richardson all contributed to the screenplay, an impressive international cast was assembled including Jeanne Moreau, Vanessa Redgrave, and Orson Welles, Antoine Duhamel delivered an evocative, atmospheric score, pop art visionary Alan Aldridge created the magical title sequence and cinematographer Raoul Coutard captured the exotic, fable-like nature of the story with often lyrical camerawork, shooting in such diverse locations as Italy, Greece, Egypt and Ethiopia. The critics were unkind and the box office results were dismal. So what went wrong? Some (like me) feel the film has been unfairly maligned over the years though film scholar David Thomson, no fan of Richardson’s, dismissed it as “one of the wettest films of all time.” Yet, despite accusations of being pretentious and overly arty, it makes for fascinating viewing for anyone interested in sixties cinema when unfilmable literary properties, unconventional subject matter and non-linear narrative techniques often resulted in mainstream films which were much more experimental in nature than the commercial films of today such as Candy (1968), The Magus (1968), Skidoo (1968), Duffy (1968) and others which were box office failures. No, the problem with The Sailor from Gibraltar is not so much what is on the screen but what went on behind the scenes that affected its production. It’s a minor miracle that the movie even exists.

Orson Welles and Jeanne Moreau in The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967)

The storyline is relatively simple. Alan, a bored bureaucrat on holiday with his girlfriend Sheila, becomes enamored with the mysterious Anna, the owner of a beautiful yacht with a full crew. She is traveling from port to port, searching for the lover who abandoned her years before after committing a murder and fleeing from the police. Anna’s obsession with finding her missing sailor is clearly a mythic quest and Alan leaves Sheila to join his new lover in her endless voyage, realizing he is merely a temporary replacement for the real thing. As their relationship intensifies and the journey becomes more overtly symbolic – is it a quest for eternal love or self-actualization? – the movie abandons any pretense of being a realistic drama and plays more like an adult fairy tale on the order of Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961).

Film director Tony Richardson

Richardson had just completed Mademoiselle (1966) when he launched into pre-production on The Sailor from Gibraltar. On the previous film, he had become romantically involved with Jeanne Moreau, his lead actress, even though he was living with his companion, Vanessa Redgrave, and their two children (Natasha and Joely) at the time. The relationship with Moreau continued throughout the filming of The Sailor from Gibraltar which created an awkward situation for Redgrave, who played a key role in the movie. In his autobiography, Richardson admitted, “I complicated everything hopelessly. Vanessa, still trying to keep our relationship going, had wanted to be part of the production and was playing the role of the girlfriend. Artistically, it was perfect; personally – and this was what had been motivating me – it was disastrous. But I was delighted to have her: Vanessa is always wonderful in her generosities, her impulsiveness, and her mistakes.”

Ian Bannen and Vanessa Redgrave in The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967)

Making a film starring both your present companion (and mother of your children) and your new mistress would be a challenge for any director but Richardson created worse obstacles for himself. “The script needed a lot of work as the book is full of highfalutin French metaphysics, but I was so enamored of the idea that I was sure I could make it work. I asked David Mercer (who later wrote for Alain Resnais) to work with me on it…The big mistake we made was to lock ourselves into dates: All the subsequent farces, dramas, and messes sprang from that.” Richardson thought it would be more economical and practical to make Mademoiselle and The Sailor from Gibraltar back to back, reasoning that “…once Mademoiselle was in the can the crew was to be shifted into high gear on Sailor, with editing on both films waiting until the following year. There were also some real production problems of a boat’s availability, the state of the Mediterranean, etc., which if we didn’t act immediately would have meant a postponement of a year. So Jeanne and everyone else was contracted and committed. In the rush to finalize production facilities, the one thing forgotten was the script.”

Actor Ian Bannen

After pursuing Paul Newman, Albert Finney and other famous names for the role of Alan (none of whom were interested or available), Richardson made his next big mistake and hired Ian Bannen, the Scottish actor who had recently been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). “I’d worked with him on television,” Richardson wrote in his memoirs, “but I never knew that he had deep psychological problems – especially when dealing with sexual and emotional scenes, where he would often relapse into a psychotic infantilism so profound that it was impossible to reach him in any way.” Bannen’s behavior on the film, if Richardson’s account is truthful, would make a great madcap comedy but for those who had to work with him, it was no laughing matter. Some of his more infamous antics during the production included almost causing a car accident in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia when he grabbed the driver’s genitals, hitting Jeanne Moreau in the face when she asked him to share with the film crew the Camembert cheese she had flown in from France, trying to destroy the airport gift shop in Khartoum and using the naked body of his co-star Hugh Griffith, who had passed out drunk, as a freeform canvass on which he created intricate Maori warrior-like designs with caviar.

Jeanne Moreau on the set of The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967)

More calamity followed when Richardson hired a young Greek actor, Thodoros Roubanis, to play Theo, one of the yacht’s crew members. During the filming in Athens, Greece, it became apparent that Moreau and Roubanis were having an affair which drove Richardson insane with jealousy. At one point the lovebirds even tried to get married but were prevented when they couldn’t produce a document of divorce from Moreau’s earlier marriage. Then there was friction between the director and his cinematographer: “Godard’s favorite collaborator Raoul Coutard,” according to Richardson. “I had admired him before and had looked forward to working with him, but it hadn’t worked out. He had a tough crew of vets from the Indo-Chinese war whom I thought were almost fascists. Coutard sensed my own uncertainty about the film and despised me for it – and for the Jeanne situation too.”

Jeanne Moreau and Hugh Griffith (far right) in Tony Richardson’s The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967)

If all of this wasn’t enough, Richardson got more trouble from Orson Welles. “I admired Orson as a director enormously,” Richardson wrote, “but as an actor he was nervous, drunk, and irresponsible. We were working against deadlines to get the boat over to Alexandria before the winter storms. Everything was going wrong and was wrong.”  For Vanessa Redgrave, however, The Sailor from Gibraltar experience was a good one, in spite of the complex and troubled relationship she had with Richardson. In her memoirs, in which she freely acknowledges the Moreau-Richardson love affair, she even speaks kindly of Ian Bannen, recalling their scenes in Agropoli (on the coast of Naples, near the Greek temples of Paestum). “Ian and I had played Orlando and Rosalind in As You Like It in 1961 and 1962. We also knew and trusted each other. Tony and his cinematographer placed the camera on a track in the sand so we could play the whole scene in a master shot. We did a couple of really good takes, one or two short cover close-ups. I knew I’d done good work. I knew Tony was pleased, and the crew. I had told myself before we began this film that I would put the work we had agreed to do before anything else. I completely trusted Tony would be truly friendly and professional, and it was up to me to be the same. This decision had been made, and everything fell into place. Besides, I really liked my role and the story.”

Indeed, Redgrave’s performance as Alan’s clinging, chattering girlfriend, who is clearly in denial of their dead-end relationship, is one of the best things in the movie. The sand dune scene, in particular, in which she is forced to face the painful truth of the situation, is all naked emotion with her cheerful façade stripped away. It’s a tour-de-force moment but not all of the other cast members fare as well. Ian Bannen’s one note performance as Alan is barely serviceable but not as inept as Richardson’s critique of it. Moreau has also done better work but her Anna exudes the necessary mystery and sexual allure and she even gets to sing a song. Eleonora Brown, on the other hand, who appears briefly as a dark beauty that Alan picks up at a seaside dance, is particularly memorable and projects a radiant sensuality. Unfortunately, John Hurt, who had a minor role in the film, never makes an appearance; his scenes were cut from the finished film.  True to Richardson’s expectations, the critics rejected The Sailor from Gibraltar, nor were they particularly gracious to his previous films, The Loved One (1965) and Mademoiselle. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it “an arty and banal piece of work,” adding, “One can only assume that some peculiar romantic fantasy, foreign to his better judgment, attracted Mr. Richardson to do this utterly way-ward twaddle in which Miss Moreau appears as a sort of female Flying Dutchman…” He also called attention to the two least effective sequences in the movie: “Certainly Mr. Welles, as a fat Mohammedan merchant in one silly sitting-down scene, and Mr. Griffith as a wild-eyed white hunter who leads a quick, grotesque foray into the African veldt, are monstrously bizarre. When they come on you have the feeling that the whole thing is a put-on joke.”

Director Tony Richardson and Jeanne Moreau on the set of The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967)

Even if The Sailor from Gibraltar was a personal disappointment for Richardson, it doesn’t deserve its reputation of being a complete disaster either. There are certainly things to savor here and the movie clearly deserves a second chance at reassessment, though its current unavailability on any format makes that difficult. One of its recent champions is British journalist and music critic David Cairns, who wrote an article on it on The Auteurs web site (http://www.theauteurs.com/), He called it “a slow, compelling and beautiful movie, which must have seemed unfashionably romantic when released in the age of free love – a tale of obsessions, in which a love affair takes on the qualities of myth.” And I fully agree with his final verdict: “I suspect contemporary observers saw Richardson straining to become a fully European filmmaker (Raoul Coutard photography, Antoine Duhamel music), and found the venture pretentious. With a bit more historical distance, the film seems closer to the cinema it aspires to – leaving behind the Northern grit of Richardson’s early work, reaching towards the fusion of romance and reality seen in something like Demy’s The Bay of Angels [1963], or Welles’ The Immortal Story [1968] (both with Moreau). Dreams are incapable of being pretentious.”

* This is a revised version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website when the film first aired on TCM

Marguerite Duras, the author of Le marin de Gibraltar. It served as the basis for Tony Richardson’s 1967 film, The Sailor from Gibraltar.

SOURCES:

The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography by Tony Richardson

Vanessa Redgrave by Vanessa Redgrave

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-lost-at-sea

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/492

The success of the James Bond series, beginning in 1962 with Dr. No, had an amazing impact on the international film world. For almost a decade or more, hundreds of imitations from Asia, Europe, the U.S. and other parts of the world flooded the market. The majority of these were formulaic, action-oriented B movies like Kiss Kiss – Bang Bang and Secret Agent Super Dragon (both 1966) but occasionally a few would depart from the heroic fantasy scenarios to present much more realistic depictions of the espionage underworld such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), based on John le Carré’s novel, and The Quiller Memorandum (1966) with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Catherine Jacobsen & Frederic de Pasquale in La peau de torpedo (1970) aka Only the Cool

Jean Delannoy’s La Peau de Torpedo (1970) doesn’t fit comfortably into either camp even though it does traffic in the grim, Cold War paranoia associated with le Carré’s novels while spinning a wildly improbable tale that makes the Roger Moore 007 adventures seem almost plausible in comparison. What makes the film worth seeing besides the eclectic international cast that includes Stéphane Audran, Lilli Palmer, Michel Constantin, and Klaus Kinski is the unconventional story arc which begins like a routine espionage thriller and then unravels spectacularly about thirty minutes into the film with an act of violence that injects a welcome note of unpredictability into the rest of the proceedings.

Stephane Audran creates the perfect storm in La peau de torpedo (1970) aka Only the Cool

What makes the film worth seeing besides the eclectic international cast that includes Stéphane Audran, Lilli Palmer, Michel Constantin, and Klaus Kinski is the unconventional story arc which begins like a routine espionage thriller and then unravels intriguingly about thirty minutes into the film with an act of violence that injects a welcome note of unpredictability into the rest of the proceedings.

Lobby card of Klaus Kinski and Lilli Palmer in La peau de torpedo (1970) aka Children of Mata Hari

Here’s a thumbnail sketch (includes spoilers) that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface: Dominique (Stéphane Audran) suspects her husband Nicholas (Frédéric de Pasquale) is cheating on her when he is, in fact, leading a double life. His antiques business is really just a front for his globetrotting undercover assignments which involve deception, theft, murder and more. Nicholas’s recent mission, which involved safecracking and photographing top secret government documents, attracts the attention of a French undercover group led by Coster (Michel Constantin) and he is forced by his “agency” to go into hiding with fellow agent Francoise (Catherine Jacobsen) in her apartment. By coincidence, a friend of Dominique spots the couple together. Immediately suspicious, she follows them to their hideaway, which she later reveals to Dominique.

Alternate poster version for La peau de torpedo (1970), retitled The Deathmakers aka Only the Cool aka Pill of Death aka Children of Mata Hari

Events take an unexpected turn when Dominique makes a surprise appearance at the apartment and shoots both Nicholas and Francoise during a heated confrontation. In a panic, Dominique flees Paris for a distant seaside port where she goes into hiding on a docked trawler, thanks to the kindness of Gianni (Angelo Infanti), the free-spirited caretaker. Meanwhile, Nicholas’s murder sets in motion a manhunt for the killer by his own subversive group and Coster’s French C.I.A.-like cell who suspect the murderer has possession of the missing microfilm.

Stephane Audran & Angelo Infanti in La peau de torpedo (1970) aka Only the Cool

Crucial information is withheld from not just from Dominique but everyone in La Peau de Torpedo, including the viewer. Delannoy utilizes the Hitchcockian device of the Macguffin – in this case, the mysterious assassination of a rogue agent and his missing suitcase – to set the plot in motion but he is less interested in what is at stake or the global implications of espionage than in creating an amoral netherworld in which almost everyone is a spy, informant or opportunist. Even Gianni, who seems to be the most benign person Dominique encounters, turns out to be an informant for the local police. There is also little or no backstory about any of the main characters others than what you see so the cloak and dagger activities take on an abstract quality in which people become ciphers in some kind of freeform chess game.

Stéphane Audran, in particular, makes an enigmatic and often aloof heroine. At first self-absorbed and petulant as the wealthy but neglected wife of Nicholas, she spends the second half of the movie in a semi-numb state, trying to make sense of the events that put her on the run. As secret operatives in a spy ring that is completely ruthless in its methods, Lilli Palmer as Helen and Jean Claudio as La Filature, her replacement for Nicholas, are button-down, cooly efficient professionals who are so fiercely dedicated to their impenetrable cause that they carry cyanide capsules in the event of being captured.

Lilli Palmer & Jean Claudio in La peau de torpedo (1970) aka Only the Cool

Even the wild card in the mix, Klaus Kinski as the deadly assassin Pavel (also known by his code name, Torpedo I), pledges alliance to his employer by carrying a suicide pill at all times.

Klaus Kinski & Stephane Audran in Le peau de torpedo (1970)

Certainly one of the highlights of the film is watching Kinski don a frogman suit complete with mask and flippers and stalk Audren with a speargun as she tries to hide from him amid a dark and cluttered harbor dock. And he is no less mesmerizing when he tries to seduce Palmer, who remains impervious to his reptilian charms. Even though Kinski doesn’t enter the film until 75 minutes into it, he easily steals the movie from his co-stars but everyone gets their moment to shine – Audran in her homicidal freakout, Palmer and Claudio in stoic death scenes and Infanti in an unintentionally funny sequence where he serenades Audran with a folk song.

Klaus Kinski attempts to live up to his code name Torpedo in Le peau de torpedo (1970) aka Children of Mata Hari. Lilli Palmer is unimpressed.

La Peau de Torpedo, which has been released under such various titles as Only the Cool, Children of Mata Hari, The Deathmakers and Pill of Death, was made toward the end of director Delannoy’s career and is probably not the best argument for a reassessment of his filmography. While it is well above average for a genre movie, Delannoy’s earlier work placed him among the top French filmmakers of his generation.

Frederic de Pasquale as Nicholas in La peau de torpedo (1970) aka The Deathmakers in top image

Among his triumphs are La symphony pastorale (1946), a grand prize winner at Cannes and based on the novel by André Gide; Les jeux song faits (1947), a romantic fantasy with script and dialogue from Jean-Paul Sartre; Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950) with Pierre Fresnay, a Venice Film Festival award winner; Shadow of the Guillotine (1956) aka Marie-Antoinette reine de France with Michèle Morgan which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes; Inspector Maigret (1958) aka Maigret tend un piège with Jean Gabin and based on Georges Simenon novel; This Special Friendship (1964) aka Les amitiés particulières. 

Unfortunately, Delannoy’s reputation went into decline with the rise of the Nouvelle Vague in the late fifties. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other film-critics-turned-directors from Cahiers de Cinéma often pointed to Delannoy and his colleagues as the worst examples of their country’s national cinema, which they considered commercial, uncreative and out of step with the changing times. Truffaut, in fact, personally attacked Delannoy in his famous essay, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” written in 1954 when Truffaut was still a young film critic (he was 21 at the time). Understandably, Delannoy was deeply offended by the critique calling it, “so low that I have never encountered anything like it in my 20 years in the profession.” 

Regardless of whether Truffaut’s opinion of Delannoy was shared by the public or film critics outside France, the sad fact remains that Delannoy is practically unknown today and that is a major oversight when you consider his successes (noted above) and his even lesser known works such as Gambling Hell (1942) aka Macao, L’enfer Du Jeu starring Sessue Hayakawa, Mireille Balin and Erich von Stroheim and The Little Rebels (1955) aka Chiens perdus sans collier, an expose of juvenile delinquency. Some of Delannoy’s work ran into censorship problems due to subject matter or adult content such as L’Éternel Retour (1948) aka The Eternal Return, which was condemned by the Legion of Decency, and Le Garçon Sauvage (1952) aka The Wild Boy. There were also notable failures as well such as the 1956 remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida but even secondary efforts like La Peau de Torpedo are worth seeking out for any self-respecting film buff. 

If you do try to track down a copy of La Peau de Torpedo, you will find it a difficult hunt. It is currently unavailable in any format except gray market DVD and VHS bootlegs. You can also view a few poor quality clips from it on YouTube.

Catherine Jacobsen & Frederic de Pasquale are NOT amorous fellow agents in the spy thriller, La peau de torpedo (1970) aka Only the Cool

I saw a less than satisfactory but viewable DVD-R copy of the film bearing the title Children of Mata Hari with a running time of 1:38:40. It had superimposed Greek subtitles and was crudely dubbed into English.

Klaus Kinski in frogman gear stalking his target (Stephane Audran) in Le peau de torpedo (1970) aka Only the Cool

IMDB lists a running time of 110 minutes for La Peau de Torpedo so it is possible that the English language version is cut by ten minutes. Yet it is doubtful that the convoluted plot would be any more decipherable with those additional ten minutes because La Peau de Torpedo is intentionally abstract and mysterious by design.

Other articles of interest:

http://www.nytimes.com/movies/movie/124439/La-Peau-de-Torpedo/overview

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/movies/20delannoy.html

http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/a-certain-tendency-of-french-cinema-truffaut.shtml

http://dudummesau.com/2011/01/09/klaus-kinski-wears-a-rubber-suit/ 

Aldo Ray as the groom & Judy Holliday as the bride in The Marrying Kind (1952), directed by George Cukor

Often overlooked among the films George Cukor directed in the fifties, The Marrying Kind (1952) starring Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray might have suffered from the fact that it was not a pure comedy like Pat and Mike (1952) and It Should Happen to You (1954). It is quite unique from anything else that Cukor attempted and it deserves more than the no-frills DVD release that was issued from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment back in 2003. This is one that cries out for a Criterion Collection Blu-Ray upgrade with all of the extra features that celebrate the featured film in context to its time, place and creation. The Marrying Kind is also an intriguing reminder of the career Aldo Ray might have had if other directors had not cast the actor in roles that accented his imposing physical presence over his acting ability.   

After the phenomenal success of Born Yesterday (1950) as both a play and a movie, the director (George Cukor), writer (Garson Kanin) and star (Judy Holliday) regrouped for a second film entitled The Marrying Kind (1952), only this time they were joined by actress/screenwriter Ruth Gordon who co-wrote the script with her husband Kanin. Because Judy Holliday had already established herself as a hilarious and gifted comic, audiences and critics were expecting another laugh-filled comedy but the resulting film defied easy classification. Mixing humor, drama and tragedy in unexpected ways, the film opens with a divorce court hearing. The judge is reviewing the case of Chet and Florence Keefer and we see in flashback the high and low points of their relationship beginning with their first meeting in Central Park and including their courtship, child-rearing, career disappointments, domestic squabbles and an unexpected death in the family.

An Italian lobby card in color of the black and white George Cukor film, The Marrying Kind (1952)

From the beginning Kanin and Gordon never intended for The Marrying Kind to be treated as a straight comedy but as a marriage-on-the-rocks tragicomedy. “Its aim is realism,” Kanin told Cukor, “Its tone is documentary rather than arty, its medium is photography rather than caricature. I think it is the closest we have ever come to “holding the mirror up to nature.”

A publicity still of director George Cukor on the set of The Marrying Kind with Judy Holliday

Kanin was very emphatic that the movie not have the “shiny,” slick look of a big budget commercial film. He also wanted the actors to be “extremely real. The trouble with most actors is that they look and sound and behave like actors, even the good ones.” In this regard, he advised Holliday to play her part differently from the role she created in Born Yesterday and to give a “performance of a real person who does real things.”

Aldo Ray and Judy Holliday in The Marrying Kind (1952)

For the role of Chet Keefer, Cukor wanted an actor who was not a well-known or typical leading man. He found who he was looking for in Aldo Ray who had only appeared in bit parts and supporting roles as Aldo DaRe up to then. According to Patrick McGilligan in George Cukor: A Double Life, the director “believed in Ray’s future, however, and worked long hours, in screen tests and throughout the filming, to put the gravelly voiced former town constable at ease, and to convey his offbeat personality”. In addition, Cukor had Ray take ballet lessons in order to alter his way of walking which reminded him of a football player. When The Marrying Kind was released, Cukor even went so far as to promote his new discovery with a special on-screen credit at the end: “You have just seen our New Personality Aldo Ray. Please watch for his next picture.”

Aldo Ray in The Marrying Kind (1952)

Ray unfortunately never really got the opportunity to deliver on his promise as an actor despite his impressive performances in The Marrying Kind and Cukor’s next feature, Pat and Mike (1952). Most casting directors only saw him as a gruff, hulking “salt of the earth” type who seemed best suited to play army men, police officers or crude rednecks. As a result, most movie fans probably associate Ray with his macho sergeant in The Naked and the Dead, the 1958 film adaptation of Norman Mailer’s WWII novel, or the lustful dirt-poor southerner in the once steamy God’s Little Acre (1958), probably the best known of his later work.

Aldo Ray and Judy Holliday in George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind (1952)

The rest of the cast of The Marrying Kind was selected with the same care and concern as Ray though Cukor and Kanin sometimes disagreed over specific actors. Cukor wanted Ina Claire to play the part of Judge Kroll but Kanin disliked her “artificial acting” and said it would throw the picture into “a strange and make-believe key.” They ended up casting Madge Kennedy in the role, who like Ina Claire, was a longtime friend of Cukor; The Marrying Kind marked her first screen appearance in twenty-eight years. Other actors featured in smaller parts were Sheila Bond, a Tony-award winning Broadway actress making her film debut here; Peggy Cass, also making her screen debut (she would later achieve fame as a guest panelist on TV shows such as What’s My Line? and Match Game); and an uncredited Charles Bronson who plays Chet’s pal at his post office job (Bronson was still going by the name Charles Buchinsky at this stage of his career).  To ground the movie in reality, The Marrying Kind was shot on location in New York City in real settings such as Central Park, Times Square and the Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in East Manhattan [SPOILERS AHEAD]. For the memorable Decoration Day picnic in which the Keefer’s son Joey drowns in the lake, Cukor drew inspiration from a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Aldo Ray & Judy Holliday in The Marrying Kind (1952)

At the time of The Marrying Kind, Kanin and Gordon were one of the busiest screenwriting teams in Hollywood. Not only were they working out the final script for this new film but also putting the finishing touches on Pat and Mike and Years Ago, the film adaptation of Gordon’s autobiographical play which was retitled The Actress, for MGM. Unfortunately, The Marrying Kind did not come close to the success of Born Yesterday despite the fact that Kanin and Gordon’s script was nominated for Best Written American Comedy by the Writers Guild and Holliday was nominated for Best Foreign Actress by the BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television Arts).

Aldo Ray & Judy Holliday in The Marrying Kind (1952)

The uneven tone of the film jarred most audiences and reviewers who had set expectations about it. Admittedly, Cukor’s excessive use of voice-over narration during several of the flashback scenes tends to hinder character development instead of enriching it. And Florrie and Chet are not immediately likable or sympathetic. In fact, they both could test anyone’s patience with their annoying idiosyncrasies. Cukor’s documentary-like approach also tends to flatten his attempts at humor which often seem contrived or artificial in this context. On the other hand, the arguments between the couple that increase in intensity and bitterness as the film develops may hit too close to home for many a married couple – petty arguments about in-laws, bad financial decisions, jealousy. Added to this is the fact that the film never really recovers its equilibrium after Florrie and Chet lose their child in a drowning accident even though the movie ends on a hopeful note with the couple reconciled. This may account for the film’s poor box office prospects, for The Marrying Kind is much closer to tragedy than comedy and not anyone’s idea of escapist fare. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, however, was one of the few reviewers at the time that recognized and admired what Cukor and Kanin were attempting to do in The Marrying Kind: “Think it not curious if we don’t seem to be as side-splittingly impressed with the hilarities in this picture as its promotion might lead you to expect. Hilarity is in it – hilarity of the best – as would be almost mandatory in any picture with Miss Holliday. But the charming and lastingly affecting thing about The Marrying Kind is its bittersweet comprehension of the thorniness of the way that stretches out for two young people after they have taken the marriage vows…This reviewer has fond recollections of King Vidor’s old film, The Crowd [1928], which was also about the frustrations of a young married couple in New York. The Marrying Kind compares to it, and that’s the nicest compliment we can pay.”

Aldo Ray & Judy Holliday in George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind (1952)

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

Other links of interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5jsS6rslzU

http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/the-george-cukor-file-part-1

http://www.popmatters.com/review/marrying-kind/

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-celebrity-masks-of-george-cukor

The Marrying Kind (1952) with Judy Holliday & Aldo Ray

“It’s a human drama thing.” That’s how Benny Perkins, one of the contestants in the “Hands on a Hard Body” contest, describes this unusual endurance contest in Longview, Texas which was once an annual event that officially began in 1992. I first became aware of S.R. Bindler’s enthralling, hilarious and often moving 1997 documentary of the event during a visit to New York City in 1998. Scanning the film section of The Village Voice for showings of movies unlikely to come to Atlanta, the title Hands on a Hard Body caught my eye and sounded like a softcore exploitation film, possibly set during Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale.   

Hands on a Hard Body (1997)

A rave review in the Voice set me straight on what it was really about and I managed to catch an afternoon screening of it at the Quad Cinema on West 13th St. in an almost deserted theatre. Shot on Hi-8 video (blown up to 16mm) and alternating between talking heads and footage culled from more than 100 hours of the contest, Hands on a Hard Body (produced by Kevin Morris, Chapin Wilson & Bindler) may not look very pretty or artful on a visual level (it has the aura of a glorified home movie). Yet it’s the subject matter – what some people are willing to do to win a free Nissan ‘hard body” truck – that is so unexpectedly engaging and American. What is it about our culture that spawns a contest where the contestants are more than willing to exert all of their time, energy and will power toward such a seemingly absurd display of materialism? The documentary is also about a specific regional subculture showing us a cross-section of Texans we rarely see in movies.  The reason I’m talking about Hands on a Hard Body now is because the film, which has been out of print for years, fetching prices as high as $300 on eBay at one time, is finally available again on DVD from HOHB Releasing.  This 2013 remastered release also includes an additional hour of never-before-seen footage. This is really the only way you are going to see this one-of-a-kind documentary these days because it is no longer available from Netflix and you can only see bits and pieces of it on YouTube. It may very well have inspired Survivor (which first aired on TV in 2000) and other reality television shows about human endurance and determination but nobody could have scripted anything this quirky or written characters as original and colorful as these.

Jack Long Nissan sponsorship of Hands on a Hard Body (1997)

The documentary focuses on the 1995 Hard Body contest at the Jack Long Nissan dealership in Longview, Tx (125 miles east of Dallas and about 60 miles west of Shreveport, La.). 23 contestants are chosen randomly from a lottery and the rules for competition are simple but grueling. You must wear gloves at all times and have one hand always placed on the truck. You can place two hands on the truck if you wish but you can not lean on it or squat down or rest your legs or prop yourself up except during a five minute break that occurs every hour. Every six hours you get a fifteen-minute bathroom break. If you lift your hand off the truck at any time during the contest or forget to follow any of the above directions, you are immediately disqualified. The last person left standing is declared the winner though one previous contest was known to last 92 hours and 40 minutes!

A scene from Hands on a Hard Body (1997)

The sight of a bunch of people standing around a new Nissan truck (valued at around $15,000 in 1995) with their hands on it and not moving for hours at a time doesn’t sound like the most cinematic of competitions. Trust me, once you begin to know the contestants you slowly find yourself sucked into the emotional experience of it, rooting for favorites and trying to predict the actual winner. At some point you may even find yourself wondering how you would fare in the contest. The seductive hook of Hands on a Hard Body is Bindler’s intimate approach to this human circus which never resorts to mean-spirited manipulation for easy laughs. Why people would go to such extremes to get a free truck begins to lose its freak show aspect as the finalists began to explain their reasons for entering and what the vehicle means to them. Kelli wants it so she can quit her waitressing job which requires her to bicycle six miles to work every day. And just about everyone else has a reason that represents some kind of escape from their current economic situation or dead-end job. Benny, the winner of the 1992 contest and a formidable current contender, also states that a truck is a Texan’s birthright and something that is bred in the bone.

Benny Perkins, former winner of the Hands on a Hard Body contest

Benny, who adopts a Zen warrior approach to the competition, citing the film Highlander as a philosophical touchstone, is one of the more unforgettable personalities on display. Equally memorable though are Norma, a devout Christian who believes it is God’s will that she win and has her whole church congregation as cheerleaders; Janis, a determined country woman missing her front teeth, and her husband (equally in need of dental work) cheering on the sidelines when he isn’t discussing his 20-ton air conditioning unit which brings the temperature of their house down to 12 degrees below zero; J.D., the oldest contestant who smokes unfiltered cigarettes constantly while receiving foot and back massages from his attentive wife or Greg, a young, buff ex-Marine who seems the most fit of the lot.

One of the contestants in Hands on a Hard Body (1997), the documentary

Some fall by the wayside quickly once the contest passes the 24-hour mark. Some succumb to leg and back pain and physical exhaustion; some are disqualified for infractions of the iron clad rules or because they make simple mistakes brought on by delirium; there are several sequences of uncontrollable laughing that seems to come in waves as the hours drag on.

What you eat, drink and wear on your feet can be the secret to success in Hands on a Hard Body, a 1997 documentary about an endurance contest.

A choice of comfortable footwear, clothing and food and drink options also appear to separate the early casualties from the finalists. We see one fall out after eating too many Snickers bars, another because he constantly ate hamburgers that made him sluggish and sleepy. Some of the disqualified people come back to cheer on the finalists while others feel resentment toward the judges and some of the contestants for trying to distract them or make them lose. It IS a human drama thing as Benny says and as the film gets down to its final four contestants the suspense builds dramatically.

A scene from S. R. Bindler’s Hands on a Hard Body (1997), later remade as a Broadway musical

On a first viewing, I never guessed the actual winner and was completed surprised by the last minute turn of events. You may even be moved to tears by the winner’s final gesture. On a second viewing, it’s even richer as you see how Bindler keeps some of the least likely contenders in the background, bringing them forward slowly in the editing process as more hardy and seemingly infallible finalists fall out.

Getting down to the real nitty-gritty in Hands on a Hard Body (1997)

Unfortunately, the Hard Body contest ended in 2005 after a tragic incident occurred during the competition which was originally reported in the Longview News-Journal: “Richard Thomas Vega II had been a contestant in the internationally popular Hands on a Hardbody contest at Patterson Nissan in Longview when he killed himself Thursday morning after leaving the contest at the beginning of its third day. The 24-year-old East Texan walked away around 6 a.m., when he politely excused himself just before a scheduled 15-minute break for competitors, a witness said. According to some sources, Vega walked across the street to the K-Mart which was closed at the time, broke in, got a 12-gauge shotgun from the sporting goods department and shot himself in the head. His wife successfully sued the Nissan dealership for the death of her husband and for failing to provide a safe environment for the contestants who were subjected to sleep deprivation and “temporarily lost their sanity.” As a result, the contest was not continued.

Janis, the wife of one of the contestants in the 1997 documentary, Hands on a Hard Body

When Hands on a Hard Body went into theatrical release in 1998 after appearing at numerous film festivals in 1997, it won almost unanimous praise wherever it played. Todd McCarthy, writing for Variety, called it “a classic piece of Americana, a down-home documentary that not only produces gales of laughter but also manages, by the end, to come together as a highly unlikely metaphor for the rigors of human existence.” Anita Gates of The New York Times wrote, “These may not be people whom moviegoers think they want to spend time with, but this is accomplished documentary making, finding universal lessons in determination, struggle, planning, persistence and the relationship of mind and body. The experience turns out to be simultaneously primal and complex.”

Bennie Perkins, center, in Hands on a Hard Body (1997)

A great interview with the director conducted by Dakota Smith appeared on Salon.com in 1999 in which Bindler was asked how he was able to avoid turning the documentary into a parody of the event. (It certainly would have been a different film if Christopher Guest or Werner Herzog had directed it). Binder replied, “I think it’s a very simple understanding that life, as Tennessee Williams said, is fantastic. And because it’s fantastic, you don’t need to amp it up any more than it already does for you. It was already a fantastic, exploitative event and I just didn’t think that it needed, on my end, to make it more so. And I genuinely found the people….very honest, very open, very vulnerable and I’m not the kind of person to take advantage of that. By the end of the contest, I felt a fondness for all these people, and as an editor, after you watch the footage three or four times, you catch all their nuances, you get to know all these people. I felt a responsibility to represent them as they are and how I perceived them…it was real people going through a real situation, even if it was hyper-realistic. The people had real concerns, real needs, real wants. I didn’t want to make fun of them.”

A scene from the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body

Of course, Bindler was also lucky to have ended up with such lively and uniquely interesting participants. Regarding the filming he added, “I over-planned, so that when things happened, we were ready to capture it. In all honesty, we were just there to capture the experience, and it’s a different film than what I had expected. But that’s the double-edged sword of a documentary. We were very prepared, but still Benny might not have been there, three or four other characters might not have been there. You either get something beautiful or you don’t. You’re either given a lot of gifts or you’re not.” After such a knock ‘em dead home run, however, R.S. Bindler didn’t make another film for eleven years and then resurfaced with Surfer Dude (2008), a stoner comedy starring Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Scott Glenn and Willie Nelson that was either ignored or trashed by most critics who bothered to see it. One critic dismissed it with “I can see it being a NetFlix rental for middle management corporate drones of a certain age who want a fantasy look at what their lives could have been if they had just said yes to pot and sunshine.” Regardless of what one thinks of Surfer Dude, though, McConaughey was actually key to the success of Bindler’s earlier documentary because he paid for the film’s Hi-8 bump up to 16mm so that Hands on a Hard Body could receive theatrical distribution. That’s why you see McConaughey receive a special thanks in the final credits of the documentary along with Benicio Del Toro, a friend of Bindler’s.

Director Robert Altman

During the years between the release of Hands on a Hard Body in 1997 and 2006 there was talk of Robert Altman directing a dramatization of it. That possibility ended with his death in November of 2006 but how fascinating to think of the potential casting with such names as Billy Bob Thornton and Hilary Swank being bandied about!  Can’t you see Thornton as Benny or Swank as Kelli? And I can see Altman working in the unfortunate 2005 suicide at the event as a dramatic device similar to the assassination that closes Nashville. A dramatic feature film of the documentary never materialized. Instead Hands on a Hard Body was reborn in 2013 as a Broadway play – a musical, no less (It actually had its world premiere in 2012 at the La Jolla Playhouse in California). The Broadway production had genuine stage creed: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright of I Am My Own Wife (he also wrote the musical version of Grey Gardens), lyricist Amanda Green (the daughter of Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green), director Neil Pepe (Speed-the-Plow) and dancer/choreographer Sergio Trujillo (the 2009 revival of Guys and Dolls). It also had guitarist/vocalist Trey Anastasio of Phish as the music composer and Keith Carradine was among the cast members. The musical was well received by most critics and it even garnered three Tony Award nominations but it had a short shelf life; It opened on March 21, 2013 and closed on April 13, 2013.

J.D. Drew (left) & Benny Perkins are formidable contest rivals in Hands on a Hard Body (1997)

Somehow I don’t think this is the end of Hands on a Hard Body. I suspect it will be revived again in some form. Maybe the contest will even come back. At any rate, it is hard to imagine anyone topping Bindler’s original achievement.

* This is a revised and updated version of my post which first appeared on moviemorlocks.com

Other links of interest:

http://www.handsonahardbodythemovie.com/

http://www.handsonahardbody.com/

http://www.salon.com/1999/04/22/hard_body/

http://filmmakermagazine.com/67700-hands-on-a-hard-body-director-s-r-bindler-on-his-documentarys-unlikely-broadway-adaptation/

http://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2013-04-19/you-gotta-have-the-mettle/

http://www.kltv.com/story/3856620/longview-police-say-hardbody-contestant-killed-himself

http://jonathanturley.org/2008/08/19/hands-on-a-hardbody-texas-car-dealership-settles-case-over-suicide-in-car-contest/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/22/hands-on-a-hardbody_n_2933136.html

Shammi Kapoor lets it rip in Junglee (1961)

The impact of rock ‘n roll music and the emerging youth culture of the late fifties on Indian cinema didn’t happen overnight but Junglee (1961) – one of the biggest Bollywood hits of its era – was largely responsible for ushering in the swinging sixties while smashing the formulaic conventions of the traditional romantic drama, a staple of the Bombay film industry. Not only was it filmed in dazzling color, a process usually reserved for costume epics only, but it starred the screen phenomenon known as Shammi Kapoor – India’s answer to Elvis Presley. His wild rendition of “Aai Aai Ya Suku Suku” became the rallying cry for his generation and introduced a new word into the Hindi language (Yahoo!), one that expressed an uninhibited lust for life.   

Shammi Kapoor and Saira Banu in Junglee (1961)

Even the standard plot device of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back” was treated in a fresh and unusual manner in Junglee, with Kapoor cast as Shekar, a humorless, driven-business executive who rides his employees mercilessly. He’s no less approachable at home where he continues to uphold “the family tradition of not laughing,” a legacy passed down from his dictatorial grandparents. His sister Mala (Shashikala) is the complete opposite – passionate and loving – but she’s hiding a terrible secret from her family; she’s pregnant. How the filmmakers get around this seemingly taboo subplot (which is resolved in the most innocuous manner in the final reel) gives Junglee an unexpected tension that contrasts nicely against the movie’s exuberant musical numbers. But it’s Shekhar’s transformation from a stern, officious businessman to a fun-loving exhibitionist – the result of his love for Rajkumari (Saira Banu), a beautiful doctor’s assistant – that makes Junglee required viewing for fans of Bollywood cinema.

Shammi Kapoor in the Bollywood musical Junglee (1961)

Shammi Kapoor had been working in films as an actor since the early fifties but had little success until he decided to change his screen image. Dropping his signature look of slicked back hair and pencil-thin moustache, Kapoor reinvented himself as a contemporary of James Dean and Elvis Presley (although Kapoor often stated in interviews that he never referenced Elvis as an inspiration).  With the help of publicist Bunny Reuben, the actor proclaimed himself “The Rebel Star” and thanks to an image makeover (clean-shaved face, long sideburns and flyaway hair style), challenged the popularity of India’s reigning male stars – the triumvirate of Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand.Beginning with Tumsa Nahin Dekha in 1957, Kapoor steadily amassed a huge following that reached its zenith in Junglee (directed by Subodh Mukherji) where his larger-than-life persona threatened to burst from the screen. Look at his frenetic rendition of “Chahe Koi Mujhe Kahe,” which has Kapoor bodysurfing snow-covered hills, tumbling down icy embankments and performing herky-jerky dance moves against a canvas of natural beauty. It is this musical number alone that solidified Kapoor’s reputation as an untamed screen presence (in the style of Dean and Presley) and set the tone for his future movies. (The actor who died in August 2011 at age 79 once admitted in an interview that his knees still hurt from performing the aforementioned song in Junglee).

Kapoor, like a lot of Indian movie stars, doesn’t do his own singing. For example, the voice you hear on “Chahe Koi Mujhe Kahe,” was none other than Mohammad Rafi’s, probably the most popular “playback” singer in Indian cinema next to Lata Mangeshkar.

Mohammad Rafi at a playback session

For the uninitiated, Junglee is a great place to start if you haven’t sampled any Indian cinema. If you like this, you might want to consider some of his other career highlights such as China Town (1962), Teesri Manzil (1966), Brahmachari (1968) and Andaz (1971).

Shammi Kapoor in Teesri Manzil (1966)

In addition to Kapoor’s energetic performance, Junglee is equally memorable for the appearance of another Indian superstar – Helen – who appears in the other musical highpoint, a visually stunning production number with sets inspired by the paintings of Monet and Van Gogh. Frolicking among giant paintbrushes and huge globs of acrylic paint, Helen goes head to head with Kapoor in a dancing duel, set to a Spanish-style flamenco accompaniment with rock ‘n roll flourishes.

The amazing Helen in Junglee (1961)

A great introduction to Helen is the 1973 documentary short by director Anthony Korner, Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, which provides a delightful profile of the sublime dancer/sex symbol and is featured as an extra on the DVD of the Merchant-Ivory film Bombay Talkie (1970) and also available for viewing on YouTube.

Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls

Junglee is still available on DVD and yes, you can view on YouTube, but a Blu-Ray of this would be the preferred way to go.

Shammi Kapoor and Helen in Junglee (1961)

*This is an updated and revised version of the original article that appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website

Other websites of interest:

http://www.glamsham.com/movies/scoops/13/aug/05-news-the-first-song-that-made-mohd-rafi-a-global-star-081304.asp

http://www.mohdrafi.com/

http://raekshroshankoul.blogspot.com/

http://cinemachaat.com/2014/11/10/chinatown-1962/

http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/TeesriManzil.html

Two college students, Miguel (John Moulder-Brown) and Julia (Inma de Santis), take advantage of a school holiday to run off together for parts unknown. Their plan is to shack up somewhere where their parents can’t find them but their impromptu road trip takes an unexpected detour. The young lovers soon find themselves prisoners at a sequestered mansion and estate under the control of Don Luis (Javier Escrivá), an aristocrat with a passionate love of fine arts and the music of Richard Wagner. He also happens to be one of their professors at college and the one who picked up the hitchhikers while he was blasting “Ride of the Valkyries” from his car stereo. This is the set-up for Eloy de la Iglesia’s Forbidden Love Game (Spanish title: Juego de amor prohibido, 1975) but if you think you know what’s coming, you’re probably mistaken.  

John Moulder-Brown (left) has the gun but he doesn’t have control in Forbidden Love Game (1975)

While the film flirts with the sinister master-servant relationship of Joseph Losey’s The Servant and the sadomasochistic sexual dynamics of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, Forbidden Love Game lacks the psychological depths of the former while avoiding the controversial and in-your-face offensiveness (for some) of the latter. But I don’t mean to dismiss it because the film is an odd but intriguing psychodrama that blurs the lines between exploitation and art film. And the fact that it was released two months before the death of Francisco Franco is surprising in view of the strict censorship the Spanish dictator imposed on his country’s film industry.  It’s not that the film is sexually explicit but a perverse and decadent atmosphere is pervasive throughout as well as scenes of aberrant human behavior that wouldn’t be out of place in the movies of Luis Buñuel, the surrealistic filmmaker who was forced to flee Spain to make his movies in Mexico and France.

The lovely Inma de Santis tries to decipher her current predicament in Forbidden Love Game aka Juego de Amor Prohibido (1975)

The opening of the movie is a study in contrasts. We see Miguel and Julia separately packing for a trip, both typical, carefree college kids. We are then introduced to Don Luis and his servant/companion Jaime (Simón Andreu) who is giving himself a haircut in the kitchen. Don Luis asks why Jaime doesn’t go to a barber but the servant’s silent, enigmatic stare suggests that a response is either unnecessary or unwarranted. Don Luis then announces that is almost Jaime’s second anniversary with him and he promises to reward him with a comb for his hair. The uncomfortable tension between them is palpable and sets the stage for a collision between this odd duo and the two runaway students.

Javier Escriva (left) and Simon Andreu in Forbidden Love Game (1975), directed by Eloy de la Iglesia

Once Miguel and Julia become guests at Don Luis’s cloistered mansion and estate, the plot unfolds in a manner not unlike a slightly more cerebral version of The Most Dangerous Game with the host a worthy stand-in for Count Zaroff. At their first dinner together in the formal dining room, the young couple are clearly uncomfortable as Don Luis casually inquires about their relationship and vacation plans and then provides them with a brief overview of his privileged background and inheritance. All the while Jaime dines with them silently, staring intently at the couple…especially Julia. An after-dinner tour of the mansion reveals Don Luis’s love of paintings, books, antiques and theater (Hamlet is cited) as well as an interest in guns (he has an impressive collection of firearms). The game has begun.

Javier Escriva in Hamlet mode with his man servant Simon Andreu in attendance in Forbidden Love Game (1975, aka Juego de amor prohibido)

After Miguel and Julia retire to bed, we get our first glimpse of the twisted dynamic that exists between Don Luis and Jaime. In his dressing gown, Don Luis conducts an imaginary orchestra to a record player recording of Wagner music while Jaime watches attentively. After Don Luis finishes his “performance,” he focuses his attention on Jaime, accusing him of wanting to watch Miguel and Julia have sex. When he gets no response, he slaps his companion. “Sorry, I’m a bit excited,” he says before demanding, “Slap me back, slap me back, man!” Jaime turns to walk away, stating, “Not tonight. I don’t feel like playing games,” and then wheels around suddenly and punches Don Luis in the stomach with full force. Don Luis doubles over in pain and then laughs delightedly at which point he presents Jaime with his gift of an expensive comb. This is immediately followed by a quick cut to the shirtless servant being groomed by Don Luis while the latter makes references to Jaime’s past. We learn that he was a former student who ran away under mysterious circumstances and has been in hiding at Don Luis’s estate ever since with no contact with the outside world.

John Moulder-Brown and Inma de Santis are caught in a web of evil in Juego de amor prohibido (1975) aka Forbidden Love Game

Providing minimal backstories on any of the four protagonists is one of the strengths of Iglesia’s film and allows the viewer to imagine their prior lives based on their behavior, interaction and occasionally revealing comments. As Forbidden Love Game moves into increasingly dark territory, it seems quite possible that Jaime may have been on the lam for a murder or something equally heinous. And we already know Don Luis is capable of anything based on his double life as a respected college professor and a formidable sadist in his own domain. Even Miguel and Julia are not the naïve, inexperienced young couple we first glimpsed and become more antagonistic as the claustrophobic environment encourages more violent and subversive behavior.

John Moulder-Brown (left), Inma de Santis and Simon Andreu in Juegos de Amor Prohibido (1975) aka Forbidden Love Game

The first half of Forbidden Love Game is a tense, well orchestrated thriller where you begin to fear the worst for the young lovers. [Spoiler alert] But the movie’s second half transitions into a moody psychodrama where the master-slave relationships are reversed. By the end Don Luis has become an impotent, pathetic figure while Julia reveals herself to be the all-controlling mistress of the manor. It must be said that the personality changes in the four principals escalate so quickly in the film’s second half that it works better as allegory than as believable human behavior, even in this hothouse environment. For example, Miguel first rebels against his fate but soon collapses in tearful resignation before becoming more opportunistic (Like a pimp, he offers Julia up for sex to Jaime in exchange for freedom).  He eventually enters into a ménage a trois with Julia and Jaime and there is no ambiguity about the sexual interplay between them. After a violent brawl between Miguel and Jaime, the two make up and get drunk together followed by an overhead bedroom shot of the two men in post-coital repose.  Still, if the resolution of the movie seems too schematic and metaphorical in its critique of a sexual power struggle, Forbidden Love Game is nonetheless an often compelling diversion that stands apart from other Spanish commercial films of its era.

Simon Andreu (left) and John Moulder-Brown ogle Inma de Santis who appears to be sleeping…or is she? (from Forbidden Love Games, 1975)

The threat of sexual violence in some scenes (Miguel is made to strip for a beating while Julia is forced to watch with a gun to her head) and blatant homoerotic overtones somehow managed to avoid the Spanish censors’ scissors and makes you wonder if any scenes were actually removed prior to release. Yet Iglesia’s film shows no obvious evidence of tampering or any noticeable lapses in continuity and unfolds in a tightly paced 85 minutes.

Director Eloy de la Iglesia

Eloy de la Iglesia – no relation to cult director Alex de la Iglesia (Acción Mutante, The Day of the Beast, Dance With the Devil, 800 Bullets) – is barely known in the U.S., except among film buffs. Even in Spain, he never received the critical attention he deserved but part of his marginalized reputation could be due to the kind of material that attracted him and was viewed as sordid, defaming and anti-mainstream in terms of commercial filmmaking in his native country. Juvenile delinquency, poverty, drug abuse, homosexuality, political corruption and class system prejudices toward minorities like the Basque are often predominant themes in his work. His most productive period was between 1969 and 1987 but then he dropped out of sight for more then fifteen years due to a serious drug addiction. He re-emerged in 2003 with Bulgarian Lovers, the tale of a closeted gay businessman in Madrid who becomes infatuated with a Bulgarian hustler.It was well received critically by most critics with New York Times critic Stephen Holden writing, “This cynical, dry-eyed sex comedy…is a European echo of American cult movies like “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills,” in which sex is inextricably bound up with greed and social ambition…Without becoming preachy or lapsing into fatuous psychological jargon, “Bulgarian Lovers” observes the interplay of sex, power and money with a cool, amused attitude and a fine sense of social detail.” Unfortunately, it was Iglesia’s final film. He died of kidney cancer at age 62 in March 2006. My first Iglesia film was La semana del asesion (1973), which was first released in the U.S. as Apartment on the 13th Floor and later achieved wider distribution on DVD as The Cannibal Man. Despite the gory cover art on the DVD, the film is an intelligent and richly detailed character study of Marcos (Vicente Parra), a slaughterhouse worker who accidentally kills a cab driver during a heated argument and then slowly spirals into madness. While the film does have some explicit scenes of violence and gore, there is no cannibalism on display (that was a marketing hook) and the main emphasis is on Marcos’ full blown paranoia, isolation and sense of worthlessness which fuels his homicidal behavior. Unfortunately, Ignesia’s film has often been unfairly dismissed as just another low-grade slasher/serial killer picture for the exploitation crowd.

Vicente Parra as the tormented title character of Eloy de la Iglesia’s Cannibal Man (1973)

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the main character’s eventual realization of his own suppressed homosexuality which emerges during his friendship with a wealthy gay neighbor (Eusebio Poncela) who spies on surrounding residents through his binoculars. This section of Cannibal Man is treated with an almost tender lyricism compared with the grim reality of Marcos’ crimes but the resolution of the film divides many critics with some accusing Iglesia of equating homosexuality with criminal behavior.  The only other film from Iglesia’s earlier period that has been readily available on VHS and DVD in the U.S. is Una gota de sangre para morir amando (1973), which has shown up under such various titles as To Love, Perhaps to Die, Murder in a Blue World and Clockwork Terror. The latter title is a direct reference to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Iglesia’s film does bare some similarities to it in regards to its non-specific futuristic setting, rampant societal violence and experimental government testing of criminals. I saw the version known as Murder in a Blue World (which some accounts claim deletes an important scene featuring the star, Robert Mitchum’s son, Christopher) and it has a distinctly quirky personality of its own, weaving in a subplot about a serial killer of young boys while depicting a complacent society that is sedated by wall-size television screens and a popular beverage identified simply as “Blue Drink.”  In some ways, Iglesia’s film could be read as a wicked satire of Franco’s fascist government. There is also something perversely amusing about seeing Sue Lyon as a nurse with a secret life who, at one point, is shown reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Simon Andreu (left), Inma de Santis (background) and John Moulder-Brown in a pivotal moment in Forbidden Love Game (1975)

Forbidden Love Crime is much more obscure and difficult to see but worth seeking out if you count yourself a fan of the above mentioned films. The cast is uniformly excellent with the possible exception of John Moulder-Brown who seems out of his depth here in the challenging role of Miguel. He is more convincing as an immature, self-absorbed young man and less credible in the film’s second half when his true colors emerge. But he still scores points in my book for his adventurous choice of roles in the early seventies with such diverse credits as Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s cult thriller, The House That Screamed (1969), Maximilian Schell’s theatrical film debut First Love (1970), which was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Deep End (1970), Jerzy Skolimowski’s brilliant mixture of quirky coming-of-age comedy with teenage sexual angst, Vampire Circus (1972), one of Hammer Horror’s most unusual concoctions, and Luchino Visconti’s historical epic Ludwig (1972) with Moulder-Brown as Prince Otto.

Lilii Palmer and her crazy, mixed-up son John Moulder-Brown in The House That Screamed (1969)

As for the other players, Javier Escrivá makes a riveting Don Luis, easily moving back and forth between menace and vulnerability, while Simón Andreu makes a brooding, revenge-driven turncoat as Jaime. And Inma de Santis generates an effortless sensuality with an element of unpredictability as the seemingly innocent Julia.

Inma de Santis in a moment of crisis in Eloy de la Iglesia’s Forbidden Love Game (1975)

Of the four actors, Andreu would collaborate with Iglesia on several other films including La otra alcoba (1976), Los placers ocultos (1977) and the title role in El sacerdote (1978, aka The Priest). Andreu also has several notable genre efforts to his credit such as the spaghetti Western I Do Not Forgive…I Kill! (1968), the Italian giallo Death Walks on High Heels (1971), Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), Amando de Ossorio’s The Night of the Sorcerers (1974) and even international and American productions like Jaguar Lives! (1979) and Triumphs of a Man Called Horse (1983).  Perhaps Iglesia’s work will be rediscovered at some point but I have yet to see a full scale retrospective of his films in America. MoMA, The Museum of the Moving Image, Facets Cinematheque in Chicago, UCLA’s Film Archive or some other repertory venue seems like the most likely place for an Iglesia revival or maybe a tribute at Telluride or some other film festival but one can always hope. In the meantime, Forbidden Love Game is available on DVD from European Trash Cinema in a decent, better-than-expected, English dubbed version.

One of the many unusual and offbeat films from Spanish film maverick, Eloy de la Iglesia

Other Websites of Interest:

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/09/08/reinventing-lolita-in-murder-in-a-blue-world-1973/

http://www.glbtq.com/arts/iglesia_e.html

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

http://www.nytimes.com/movies/person/87095/Eloy-De-La-Iglesia

Eloy de la Iglesia’s No One Heard the Scream (1973)

Christopher Plummer, out of his element and comfort zone in The Sound of Music (1965)

In interviews over the years Christopher Plummer would often jokingly refer to The Sound of Music as “The Sound of Mucus” or “S&M” but one can easily understand why he’d rather talk about almost any other film or theater production in his career because that 1965 blockbuster film was really a showcase for Julia Andrews. Plummer’s role as Captain Von Trapp was, in his own words, “very much a cardboard figure, humourless and one-dimensional.” Even though screenwriter Ernest Lehman collaborated with Plummer on improving the part, Captain Von Trapp was not destined to be one of the actor’s favorite roles. And having to sing was another drawback for him. As he confessed in his memoirs, he was “untrained as a singer. To stay on a long-sustained note was, for me, akin to a drunk trying to walk the straight white line…”   

Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, 2015 (photo courtesy of Vanity Fair)

Time has obviously mellowed Plummer’s feelings about The Sound of Music and he is much kinder about it these days. In fact, he was recently reunited with Julie Andrews for a photo shoot and article celebrating the film’s 50th anniversary in Vanity Fair. And he will also be appearing with Andrews at the opening night screening of The Sound of Music for the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood on Thursday, March 26 (The festival runs through Sunday, March 29).  In honor of the film’s 50th anniversary, I am reposting my interview with Plummer that originally appeared in December 2008 on TCM’s official blog, Movie Morlocks. The occasion was the recent publication of Plummer’s beautifully written memoirs, In Spite of Myself. This is a revised and updated version of that original blog post.

Henry Fonda and Christopher Plummer (in his feature film debut) – Stage Struck (1958)

Interviewer: What was the main reason that compelled you to write In Spite of Myself?

Christopher Plummer: Well, I wanted to write about the old guard that had gone before television had come into play…all the great stars that I had worked with in the past because that really is history. They themselves have such links with the past that you feel like you know the past by knowing them. And I knew that a lot of young people – if they ever bother to pick up the book to read – will probably not know who the hell I’m talking about. But it doesn’t matter because anybody who’s interested in the arts should know and that’s why I wanted to tell those stories.

Interviewer: It’s great to have accounts of all these theater people because there are no film records of them.

C.P.: No, there’s not. Katharine Cornell, for example, only appeared in one movie. I think it was Stage Door Canteen and she had a guest appearance like everyone else in that.

Stage legend Katharine Cornell

Interviewer: Your book fills me with regret at not being able to have seen some of these great people on the stage.

C.P.: Yes, I know, I know, and I was so lucky to have met them and some of them at the end of their careers. They were all still living that rich and extraordinary life that the theatre had in those days. Katharine Cornell, for example, was the last actress to have her own private train which we traveled in across the U.S. and Canada before hitting Broadway. It was like a fairy story.

Christopher Plummer on stage as Cyrano de Bergerac

Interviewer: I wanted to ask you about growing up in Canada. From your memoirs, it seems that music and theater were your favorite arts as a teenager but there was little mention of cinema. There was one comment you made, “I shunned celluloid and adopted toward it a repulsively snobbish disregard.” I was curious where that attitude came from?

C.P.: (laughs) Well, that attitude came from almost everyone in the theatre in those days. Don’t forget that we still had an almost snobbish disregard for the cinema. The theatre was the senior art and the cinema was this kind of brash newcomer that had come in and made a lot of people famous without a hell of a lot of training. And here we were in a profession where you had to train otherwise you wouldn’t be tolerated. It was a very old-fashioned, extraordinary [attitude]…and it still hung on with a lot of Broadway actors in guys like Jason [Robards, Jr.] and George C. Scott. When I was on Broadway and they were my friends and they were a part of the rhythm of life in New York in the fifties, even they made movies to make money in order to be able to go back to the theatre and do great plays. That sort of stayed with me through the fifties and then you grow up and say, “C’mon on, the movies are [legitimate work]..” Secretly, of course, I was lying because I went to the movies all the time as a kid. I saw thousands of films. I became a sort of boring film buff when I was fifteen or sixteen. It all changed in the sixties and seventies and we began to revere the cinema. But I still held on to that truth about the theatre and the training. That holds true to today.   Interviewer: One comment you made in the book was that you read the John Barrymore biography, Good Night, Sweet Prince and that influenced you to want to become a stage actor.

C.P.: Oh yes, hugely. It was the first book about an actor I had ever read and – my god – I thought that if this guy could look that good and be that good on the stage and still be a drunk – god love him! That was my idea of absolute heaven. To be able to drink, act, look handsome…and get girls!

John Barrymore on stage

Interviewer: But you never had a chance to see him on stage did you?

C.P.: No, but I knew his daughter Diana which I write about in the book. And she was full of stories about her dad even though she didn’t know him that well either. But…she was obsessed by him and certainly shared a huge history of stories about him. I was very fond of Diana, such a self-destructive nature. It was a Barrymore disease, I guess, and she inherited it. When I was in my sixties, I played him [John Barrymore] on the stage on Broadway and I somehow wish Diana could have seen me. I think she might have been proud of me. I hope so.

Diana Barrymore, daughter of John Barrymore

Interviewer: Did you ever see the film version of Diana Barrymore’s autobiography Too Much Too Soon? I was curious if Dorothy Malone captured what she might have been like?

C.P.: Yes, she wasn’t quite as flamboyant as Diana in life or on the screen. She was very good in it but I see Diana in other movies as herself and she’s sometimes good and sometimes a little theatrical because she hadn’t done that many films and was primarily a stage actress.  Interviewer: In terms of John Barrymore on film, is there a particular performance that you most admire?

C.P.: Well, it’s such a shame that we couldn’t see him when he was playing Hamlet on the stage, when he was in full control of his powers. I know that by the time he arrived on the screen he was kind of dissipated a bit..but I loved him in Twentieth Century. I thought all of his theatricality was given its true importance in that movie. And I liked his performance in a picture called Midnight. He was terribly good in that and I think he had a ball in Midnight. Counsellor at Law, you can see every now and then, a touch of greatness in him. There are flashes of it, you know, as you watch it. There are certain scenes, particularly almost at the end, in that tension before he tries to commit suicide. And he’s on that telephone call to the ship. There are moments in there of such pain and reality that you say, “Hey, wait a minute that must have been part of what he was like as Hamlet.” So it crosses your mind. But then he goes back to being a ham. And one enjoys that in a way but there’s something sad about it. I thought his Mercutio [in Romeo and Juliet, 1936] was a little over the top. But I knew – god who played Benvolio in that? – Basil Rathbone played Tybalt and he told me that he and Reginald Denny, he played Benvolio…they had to support Jack while he did his soliloquy. So the director said, “Look, just stay out of frame and just hold him still for christsake, will you, so he can get through this speech?” So what you see is Jack doing the great Queen Mab speech alone, of course, but what you don’t see is Benvolio and Tybalt supporting him on either side. I mean, Basil Rathbone told me that story. Awful! (laughs)

Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire

Interviewer: With you being such a classically trained actor, I was curious about your opinion of The Method and Marlon Brando’s impact on the theatre world with A Streetcar Named Desire.

C.P.: Listen, to me The Method is usually totally misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that you have to mumble and not be heard. It means that you use it when you’re in deep trouble, when you can’t bring your imagination to work then you try and have a sense memory of your own that can help and I think that’s true of any instinctive actor. You don’t have to go to a Method school to learn that. But when Marlon came to the fore and became the second – actually – very real actor, the first being Montgomery Clift…Monty and Marlon Brando were the two supremely realistic actors on the screen at that time. And it was just wonderful to watch and you realized they knew how to treat the medium. The medium needed that then.

Jean Harlow and Robert Williams in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde

Now I’m going to switch back a few decades before that to an actor not a lot of people will know but an actor called Robert Williams who was one of the most realistic comedians the screen had. He made Cary Grant look like he was overacting. Robert Williams was the lead opposite Jean Harlow in Platinum Blonde which was directed by Frank Capra. To watch Robert Williams act was like seeing a comic using the Method, long before the Method became famous with Marlon and Monty. So people were doing it already, that’s my point. Brando was great and I would have liked to use both my classical knowledge and Brando’s kind of wonderful imaginative reality and mix them up and that would have been the perfect mix for any artist.

Interviewer: I love the idea of actors playing characters in Shakespeare’s plays that you don’t ordinarily associate with Shakespeare such as Brando playing Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar or Jack Palance in the same play which you talk about in your book.

C.P.: Well, that is a true story you know and I’ll never forget him [Palance] throwing his costume offstage in a rage because the critics hadn’t recognized that he had worked very hard. And they were miserable to him. However, I do redeem Jack and I became very fond of Jack but it wasn’t easy in the beginning because he was a pretty forbidding fellow. That stare would freeze anybody in their tracks. But I became very fond of him because there was a vulnerability about him. He redeemed himself as Caliban [in Shakespeare’s The Tempest]. He was terribly good as Caliban. He used all of his sort of hissing (makes vocal sounds like Palance)…and the thing he did in westerns. He used that and it worked. Raymond Massey was Prospero, he was Caliban. So he redeemed himself and I think the critics came back and praised him for that, which they should, because they were very unkind to him in Julius Caesar.

Jack Palance

Interviewer: I’ve noticed that you’ve played some of the same characters over and over again on stage and in film – Oedipus Rex, Cyrano – and was curious if you liked replaying the role at different points in your life as you got older because you brought a different perspective to the character and got a new idea of how to approach him? Or was it something else?

C.P.: Oh, god no. You’re exactly right. Also, different people in different countries. I did Benedick [Much Ado About Nothing] twice, once in Stratford in Canada, and once in Stratford-on-Avon in England with totally different people, casts, and all that. Hamlet, you know, I’ve done twice. And Hamlet you can never do well enough until you are my age. For instance, I think I’d be terrific as Hamlet now because I’ve learned so much since then that I could put it into Hamlet. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think anybody can play that part and be the right age for it. It’s not possible that anybody could be so witty, urbane, moving, touching, wise, all the things that Hamlet is…princely, cultured, way beyond his years. How can you do all that until you’re old enough to have the technique in which to make it look all so simple? Everybody has to work so goddamn hard when they play Hamlet and I’m just as guilty as anybody else.

Christopher Plummer in William Shakespeare’s Henry V

Interviewer: Yes, it would be hard to accept a 20-year-old actor as a character like King Lear.

C.P.: Yes, in a sense, because you would look right – he was about 26 – and I played him when I was 26 or 27. And then the next time I played him I was 30 and still looked ok. The booze hadn’t gotten to me yet. (laughs) And I was better the second time. Of course. You learn more in the interum. And now I think I’m ready but sadly the movies have killed that you see because now they want you to look the part. Edwin Booth, the great American actor of the 19th century, played Lear until he was 65 or certainly into his sixties, and with long, white hair and nobody complained. He was wonderful in it.

Christopher Plummer in the 1969 film version of The Royal Hunt of the Sun

Interview: Now one play I wanted to ask about was The Royal Hunt of the Sun where you played Pizarro on the stage but in the film version of it you played the Inca King Atahualpa. Was that a difficult transition to make?

C.P.: Yes, but I kept thinking when I was Pizarro on Broadway..I kept watching young David Carradine who was playing Atahualpa, the Inca king, and making all sorts of weird sounds. It was wonderful stuff he was doing. And I kept thinking if this was ever a movie, THAT’S the film part. He doesn’t have much dialogue. All he does is come on and make these weird noises and look strange and wonderful. And poor Pizarro has all these speeches to make, which in the theatre work great, but on screen they’re too long. You’d have to cut them. So I said Atahualpa for me. And then Bob [Robert] Shaw put it together with some other people and said would you want to come and play Atahualpa? And I said yes, absolutely. I had a fascinating time playing both those characters because I think Peter Shaffer wrote a play that was way ahead of its time although it was a hit in both London and New York. But it didn’t quite hit the mark with its story about diverse cultures needing each other…societies dependent on one another. I think a few years later it would have worked better.

A young William Shatner

Interviewer: There is a photo in In Spite of Myself of William Shatner with the caption reading, “My rebellious understudy,” and wanted to know about your experiences together in theatre in Canada.

C.P.: No, in radio. We grew up in radio together in Montreal in both French and in English. So there was a lot of work going on. But rebellious understudy, by that I meant that Bill Shatner, who was my understudy, when he went on, he broke all the rules. He did everything I didn’t do. So he was totally different from me in every single way. Even from sitting down to standing up. So I knew he was a rebel. And I knew that he was going to be a star.

Interviewer: So that must have been a fun reunion when you starred together in Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country?

C.P.: Oh, god yes. It really was fun. I enjoyed that and it was a good script too, a funny script.

Christopher Plummer (left) and William Shatner in Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country

Interviewer: And now it’s time for a few inevitable The Sound of Music questions. Did you ever have an inkling while you were filming it that it was going to be the huge boxoffice hit it became?

C.P.: Well, I do mention in the book that during the last two days of shooting in California where we did most of the interiors people started coming to visit the set. Journalists would turn up, actors would turn up. Shirley MacLaine was there a lot because she was making a movie next door and…there was suddenly a strange interest in the thing which I thought very mysterious. And I remember Julie [Andrews] saying to me, “I have a feeling that we might be famous.” And of course we had no idea the bloody thing was going to take off like it did. But I began to have an inkling that something was afoot in California toward the end.

Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music (1965)

Interviewer: And after The Sound of Music was a hit, did you receive a lot of screenplays with characters similar to the Captain Von Trapp character?

C.P.: Yes, that’s sort of why I decried my role as the Captain a lot. I don’t decry the movie because it was a very well made movie.

Interviewer: But you wisely turned all of those scripts down.

C.P.: Well, not all of them. I did some of them because, you know, you have to make a living. But my type of roles are sort of uptight, urbane, sophisticated young men…sort of boring and dull. People don’t have any imagination in this business, do they? I can do comedy. I can do all sorts of things. Why are they giving me this uptight crap? So I was so happy when I arrived at a certain age and I could become a character actor and be free of all that nonsense.

From the Left: Michael Kidd, Gene Kelly and Dan Dailey in It’s Always Fair Weather

Interviewer: One person you mention in your book that I love and have only seen rarely on screen but he’s always wonderful is Michael Kidd. Of course he’s more famous as a choreographer but you worked with him on your musical Cyrano and he was so great in It’s Always Fair Weather with Gene Kelly and Dan Dailey. What are your memories of him?

C.P.: Oh, Michael Kidd was a gem. I mean I haven’t heard anybody say anything about Michael Kidd that wasn’t absolutely magical for them. Fred Astaire was over the moon about Michael Kidd when he worked with him as a choreographer. I was when he did Cyrano. He was absolutely wonderful the way he moved that whole evening. And his taste in it was extraordinary. He had a lovely human taste about everything. I’d put his name down every year on a ballot to be honored, you know, by the Kennedy Center honors. And now he’s gone and he’s never been honored. To me, he was one of the very original, great choreographers of our history. It was Agnes DeMille and Michael Kidd. He did the original Guys and Dolls, the movie version of it, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers…I mean, I can’t believe that he has not been honored in the way he deserved to be. Yeah, I loved him. He was a great guy and he was the kind of guy who would say to you (imitated his voice), “Oh, I don’t want that done, please” – he was so modest. And he shunned the limelight. Maybe that was why.

Anthony Mann, director of El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire

Interviewer: One of my favorite directors that you worked with – Anthony Mann – had moved into big budget films at the time you made The Fall of the Roman Empire with him. Your chapter on the making of that film was fascinating and would make a great film as well. But I was curious, since he was fired from Spartacus a few years before that, if you felt he had gotten in over his head with directing these epics? Having worked with him closely, do you feel it was harder for him to manage these big productions or that his style had changed from his earlier Westerns and film noirs?

C.P.: Well I loved working with him and don’t think so at all. I think The Fall of the Roman Empire was wonderfully directed. It looked wonderful, it moved well. The only problem with The Fall of the Roman Empire was that the script wasn’t very good. It was badly written because there was a huge conglomerate of writers on it that had come out of every hole in the wall. I don’t know how they managed to stay in one room – one cigarette smoke filled room – as they all penned this very mundane script with a huge and wonderful cast. A terrific director. And I thought El Cid was an absolutely wonderful epic. That had classic proportions to it in its simplicity. No, I don’t think so at all. I think Anthony Mann was a very, very unsung versatile director who could do the epic drama as equally well as he did film noir and westerns. He was good at all three. And you know the funny thing is he was one of the few Hollywood directors that I’ve ever met who adored the theater because he started in the theatre.

Christopher Plummer with his swordfight coach Lena Von Martens on the set of The Fall of the Roman Empire

Interviewer: I didn’t realize that. As a director or actor?

C.P.: I think as an actor. But I didn’t mention that in my book because I wasn’t sure if he was a director or an actor but I do know that he started in the theatre as a young man.

Interviewer: I’m going to jump ahead to something more recent, your performance as 60 Minutes Reporter Mike Wallace in The Insider. Was that intimidating to play someone who is still quite active and visible in their profession and would probably see your performance?

Christopher Plummer as reporter Mike Wallace in The Insider (1999)

C.P.: Well, it was kind of dangerous and I like danger because, you know, I think you have to go in where angels fear to tread. And I met Michael and have even been interviewed by him. And I watched him when I was a youngster…and he was barely a youngster too then…as the angry young man of television. So I didn’t have to do much research because I remembered very well how his voice sounded…and how he attacked everybody and was an extraordinary, probing commentator. No, that was wonderfully challenging and greatly helped I was by Michael Mann [the director] who kept me from imitating him. He insisted that I put some of my own personality into the Mike Wallace character which is correct..because otherwise that’s just a simple imitation of the man and that’s cheap. So he guided me very well though that and I admired him. And of course my friendship began with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, both of whom I admire enormously. It goes without saying about Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, who is probably the most talented leading man that Hollywood has had in a long time.

Amanda Plummer in Rene Daalder’s Hysteria (1997)

Interviewer: In 2005 both you and your daughter Amanda were both nominated for Emmy awards in separate television productions. Have you ever worked together on stage or in film or have any plans to?

C.P.: No, we never have and I do want to very much. One avoided it for a while because it looked like we were pushing the family. You know, “Oh yes, I’ll team up with my daughter and I’ll get my grandmother to play all the other parts.” So we avoided it and I think there is a sort of shyness about being related that can sometimes interfere with your work or with your freedom in your work. But now I think I would love to and there are a couple of plays that I am very much thinking about doing with her. Because I admire her enormously. She’s a very original talent. She’s extraordinary.

Interviewer: There’s a little independent film you made in Canada in 1978 that I’m quite fond of called The Silent Partner with Elliott Gould and Susannah York. You are very frightening in that film. At the time I saw it, it seemed like Canada was developing into a very active filmmaking location with lots of directors like David Cronenberg and Darryl Duke emerging.  C.P.: Yes, The Canadian film industry was beginning. It started mostly in Montreal and the French film industry had started even before that in Montreal – the French-Canadian film industry – and they’d done some wonderful local movies which were shown in several French speaking countries such as France for example. And several of them were prize winning movies but then the English followed suit. I starred in an earlier Montreal movie, The Pyx, which I did with Karen Black. That was sort of the beginning of this new resurgence in English filmmaking. Then The Silent Partner came along several years later with Darryl Duke directing. He was a very talented director. And that script was written by our friend who is now a very big Hollywood director – Curtis Hanson. He was a very young guy then and had written a script – a really fascinating script. My wife’s idea was to put me in a Chanel dress in the last scene – that was Elaine’s idea – and I took it to Darryl and he said, “Oh, god, I don’t think our friend the writer is going to like that” but he said, “I love it” and finally I think we won both of them over. It did work. It was a great idea.

Christopher Plummer in Nabokov on Kafka (1989)

Interviewer: I’m curious if you’ve ever had the desire to direct after so many years of film and stage experience?

C.P.: I’ve sort of collaborated on some of the television productions I’ve done ,particularly one-man shows such as Nabokov…Vladimir Nabokov, a wonderful writer. I did a one-man show on him [Nabokov on Kafka, 1989) for television which I loved doing because he was such a fascinating creature. So I’ve directed a little bit and directed on stage but I would rather go on being an actor. The agony of being a movie director – I don’t envy them. I really don’t because they spend at least two years of their lives and unless you’re a hugely popular director with final cut and there are very few now that have that. You work hard and put your life into it and what happens? Some committee comes along and changes it all, particularly in the movies. And I think my god, I’m not going to do that. By the time this guy’s in his third year of being cut by a committee, I’ve made 25 plays as an actor. I mean I can work so much harder and quicker. So I modestly remain an actor.

Christopher Plummer and Heath Ledger (top) in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Interviewer: In terms of your current projects, is the new Terry Gilliam film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus completed yet?

C.P.: No, he’s waiting for all sorts of insurance problems to be cleared because of Heath Ledger’s death. And although Heath Ledger was replaced by three actors as you know – Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell – which is terrific replacing, my god, there are still some monetary problems over insurance. Otherwise, it’s almost ready to be released. And poor Terry has gone through torture.

Interviewer: He seems to go through torture on all of this movies.

Director Terry Gilliam (right) in a scene from Lost in La Mancha

C.P.: Oh, I know and I adore Terry because he has such a wild, wild imagination. And I keep saying to him, you know, it’s so much easier Terry if you just scrap the movie and make the documentary.

Interviewer: That’s what they did about his La Mancha film.

C.P.: That’s right. I loved that documentary. It was just wonderful. So that’s coming out this year. And I just finished a movie with Helen Mirren who I adore about Tolstoy and his wife [The Last Station]..and a very good script by Michael Hoffman which we made in Germany last winter and spring. That should be coming out soon and I’m looking forward to that because I think there was some depth in that and some fun. And the Tolstoys have not been written about that very much on the screen as a family. Order the television serial.

Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren in The Last Station

Interviewer: I noticed you have another new project on your slate, a film version of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.

C.P.: Yes, we did it this summer up in Stratford, Canada with a wonderful young Black actress named Nikki James who looks sixteen..just the age that Shaw imagined her to be in his play and we’re going to bring it to New York which we’re trying to negotiate right now. It’s a very funny play and a very timely one too. The references to the Egyptian takeover brings a response from the audience. You can hear them thinking “ah ha Iraq” which immediately springs to mind.  Interviewer: One last question: In terms of all the great Broadway and theatre actors you’ve known and worked with, is there one that you’d love to introduce to somebody who knew nothing about the theatre? Or more than one?

C.P.: Yes, it can’t be one. It started in France because I grew up watching French cinema and French theatre and we got a lot of French theater in Montreal you know that came over from Paris and our own French theatre. I would say one of the most exciting French actors was Pierre Brasseur. He did the most extraordinary work. If you saw him as Kean, he just electrified the house. They all had the grand manner of the theater which you don’t see anymore. And he was also marvelous in – you remember his performance in Les Enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise]? He played the great ham actor Frederick Lemaitre and wiped the floor with everybody. He was so funny. That sort of acting I would say influenced me greatly.

Pierre Brasseur as Othello in a scene from Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (1945)

Laurence Olivier, of course. When one was young one was influenced by him. Wonderful way with Shakespeare. He made it so attractive as well as Shakespearian.  And he made it attractive for the world so Shakespeare was given a huge resurgence by his movie Henry V. He influenced a huge generation of actors of which I was one. And soon you get to kick the habit and become your own master.  Even beefy old Donald Wolfit was a great King Lear. I mean I saw him on the stage and he was extraordinary. When I played King Lear many, many years later I’m afraid I stole some things from Donald Wolfit. I thought “Oh boy, I didn’t do him justice” but he was wonderful too.

Broadway actress Laurette Taylor

The people I would have loved to have seen were Laurette Taylor who I understand from everyone who worked with her that I knew was the greatest actress that America ever produced. She was so real when she came on that you thought she was giving a documentary performance. You’d thought she’d come in straight off the street. She was that real. Anthony Ross who played the gentleman caller in Tennessee Williams original production of The Glass Menagerie (of which Laurette Taylor starred in) told me that on the stage she would suddenly turn to you and say something by Tennessee Williams but say it with such reality that you thought she was speaking to you in confidence.

Interviewer: I wish we had more time to talk but I know you have another interview scheduled with NPR coming up so thank you again for your time and I hope your book is a huge success. It’s full of wonderful and amazing stories and the people you’ve known and worked with. Just remarkable!

Christopher Plummer in his Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actor role with Ewan McGregor (right) in Beginners (2010)

Since this 2008 interview, Plummer has appeared in numerous films, television projects and voice-over work including video games and documentaries. In Spite of Myself, originally published in hardback, is now available in paperback, in Kindle and an abridged audio edition. In 2012 Plummer won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Beginners as well as the Golden Globe for the same category. Other more recent films not covered in this interview include his work in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Stephen Frears’ HBO drama Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2013), Michael Radford’s Else & Fred (2014) opposite Shirley MacLaine, Peter Chelsom’s Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014) with Simon Pegg, Philip Martin’s The Forger (2014) with John Travolta, and Dan Fogelman’s Danny Collins with Al Pacino. And Plummer is still going strong with three more films in production including Atom Egoyan’s Remember co-starring Martin Landau, Bruno Ganz, Jurgen Prochnow, Kim Roberts, Henry Czerny and Dean Morris (Breaking Bad).

Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music

There is no doubt that my love of all things bizarre, unusual, and other-worldly was influenced to some degree by viewing at an early age Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, The Wolf Man, I Married a Witch, The Wizard of Oz and Walt Disney animated films such as Pinocchio and Fantasia. But Hollywood films weren’t the only ones to fire my imagination and, thanks to some adventurous distributors in the fifties and sixties, I was exposed to a number of offbeat international features that were circulated in English-dubbed versions for kiddie matinees. Some were completely re-edited for American audiences but still cast a strange spell, regardless of their quality.   

The Japanese poster for Rodan (1956)

Among these were Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus from Mexico (1959, released in the U.S. in 1960), Pietro Francisci’s Le Fatiche di Ercole from Italy (1958, released in the U.S. in 1959 as Hercules), Karel Zeman’s Vynalez zkazy from Czechslovakia (1958, released in the U.S. in 1961 as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne), Ishiro Honda’s Sora no daikaiju from Japan (1956, released in the U.S. in 1957 as Rodan) and the amazing Ilya Muromets from Russia, directed by the great Aleksandr Ptushko (1956, released in the U.S. in 1960 as The Sword and the Dragon).   According to some sources, The Sword and the Dragon was later re-released in 1964 and in some markets it was distributed as The Epic Hero and the Beast or as The Executioners. The version I saw was promoted as a Valiant Release produced by Joseph Harris and Sig Shore (of Superfly fame). But I have seen references to Roger Corman releasing an English dubbed version through Filmways, Inc. I have yet to see conclusive evidence of this but perhaps the fact that Filmways released Ptushko’s Sadko as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad in 1926 and American International released Ptushko’s Sampo in 1964 as The Day the Earth Froze accounts for this rumor.

The Americanized version of the Russian fantasy film, Sampo

I first saw The Sword and the Dragon at the Capitol Theater across from the train station on Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia. It quickly became one of my favorite theatres because of the fare: William Castle’s Zotz!, Mothra, Ski Party, Go! Go! Mania! (aka Pop Gear), Hercules and the Captive Women, House of Usher and The Horror of Party Beach…plus they sometimes showed trailers to coming attractions that weren’t really appropriate for kiddie matinees such as White Slave Ship.   From the moment The Sword and the Dragon begin to flicker on the big screen I knew I wasn’t in Richmond anymore…or anywhere familiar. This was uncharted territory. I was swept away to a strange place and time. The characters might have been speaking in English but their behavior, their dress and the events that unfolded before my eyes were unlike anything I had ever seen before. Certain images still stand out after all these years, some magical, some disturbing such as

The Wind Demon (aka Nightingale the Robber) in Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

The wind demon capable of hurricane-like gales

Vasilisa (played by Ninel Myshkova) in Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

Vasilisa, Ilya’s fiancée, weaving a magic tablecloth with help from a chorus of birds, squirrels, hedgehogs and rabbits

The incredible human mountain in Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

The human mountain formed by the forces of the barbarian warrior Kalin so he can ride his stallion to the top for a strategic viewpoint

The evil Kalin (played by Shukur Burkhanov) in Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

An endless battlefield littered with the corpses of dead soldiers

The flying, triple-headed fire-breathing dragon (a possible inspiration for Ishiro Honda’s Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster?)  The relentless destruction of wheat fields and sailing ships by the dragon’s flaming breath

Ilya (played by Boris Andreyev) battles the dragon in Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

And the giant crossbow arrow that pierces the serpent’s wing.

The giant crossbow prepares to score a bullseye in The Sword and the Dragon (1956)

Based on a popular Russian legend, Ilya Muromets was immortalized in a famous 1898 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov that positioned him between two other mythic figures from Russian folklore, Dobrynya Nikitich and Alyosha Popovich (who appear as supporting characters in The Sword and the Dragon). According to various sources, Ilya Muromets was the only fictional hero canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. According to Aleksandr Ptushko in an article on the making of the film (translated by Alan Upchurch and published in Video Watchdog No. 9/Jan. Feb. 1992), the reason he was so loved by the Russian people was “because he is a hero who comes from the people. He’s the son of peasants. But this isn’t the only reason he is loved. He embodied the conscience of our people, he was an expression of our best aspirations, hopes and deeds. Ilya is a patriot who loves his country immensely and is devoted to it.” Should America be afraid?

The Russian DVD version of Ilya Muromets

Ptushko’s film version faithfully follows the well-known exploits of this nationalist folk figure – Russia’s own superhero – from his crippling illness as a youth to his miraculous healing and acquired supernatural strength which he uses to help defend the city of Kiev from invading barbarians, identified as Tugars, and led by the demonically evil Kalin.   Like a lavishly illustrated book of fairy tales and myths come to life, The Sword and the Dragon features a color palette that varies between intense hues and muted, dreamlike tones, the set design often has a sense of scale and design that approaches the fantastic (DeMille-like crowd scenes, battles scenes that recall Sergei Einstein’s Alexander Nevsky, cavernous banquet halls and throne rooms) and the whole theatrical approach is much closer to opera than cinema.

One of the many exotic elements of Ilya Muromets (aka The Sword and the Dragon, 1956)

Of course, The Sword and the Dragon is better known today as one of the unfortunate victims of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 TV franchise where it was ridiculed in the expected style by comic host Mike Nelson and the Bots in season six (1994-1995) and, as usual, it was represented by a lousy looking English dubbed print. I admit to laughing at some of the MST 3000 presentations (The Pod People, Time of the Apes) but the novelty can wear off pretty quickly and some so-called bad movies like Village of the Giants and Kitten With a Whip are much more entertaining and funny without their wisecrack commentary. As much as I hated to see The Sword and the Dragon being ridiculed on MST 3000 – and they also trashed Ptushko’s The Day the Earth Froze and The Magic Voyage of Sinbad – I realize now that it may have revived some interest in Ptushko’s work among the viewers who were curious enough to search out the originals.

The Americanized version of the Russian film fantasy Sadko (1952, but released in 1962 in the U.S. in the edited version)

Although I haven’t seen The Sword and the Dragon since 1960, I recently viewed the Ruscico DVD of the original version again which is the recommended way to see it. Not only is it presented in the widescreen format but the language options allow you to hear it in Russian with English subtitles. And I’m happy to say the movie is still remarkable on multiple levels from the how-did-they-do-that special effects to the film’s dark, Brothers Grimm-like approach to good and evil. The violence and cruelty can at times be a little jarring. It certainly was for children in the early sixties.  By the way, Dell Comics even published a comic strip version of the movie which I still have somewhere.  Most importantly, Ilya Muromets was the first Soviet movie shot in Cinemascope and featured a four-track stereo sound mix. The film also earned a mention in Patrick Robertson’s The New Guinness Book of Movie Records for the number of horses used – 11,000 – and extras (over 106,000) and it’s all up there on the screen. It’s also not a perfect film. The episodic storyline tends to meander at times and Ilya, despite his Hercules-like strength and valor, is too stolid a hero and lacks the dynamic presence of his evil rival Kalin. Even though he is supposed to be in his early thirties when he is first introduced, Ilya looks old enough to be his own grandfather, which was a great source of amusement for MST 3000. Still, there will be some viewers, young and old, who will love being transported to the land of Nightingale the Robber (the wind demon) and Gorynych the Serpent.

When distributors Joseph Harris and Sig Shore bought the U.S. rights to Ilya Muromets, the movie was cut down from 95 to 83 minutes, given its new title, dubbed into English (with Ilya voiced by Marvin Miller and Kalin dubbed by Paul Frees) and the multi-channel soundtrack was lost. Yet, this was the version I saw and it still had a mesmerizing, exotic appeal. I would like to see it again someday to compare it against the original. And I have to say that I feel lucky to have lived at a time when exposure to films such as Ilya Muromets on the big screen – even in its crudely dubbed American version – opened up a window into international fantasy films, something that is simply not happening today in our cineplex world.

Ruscico DVD copy of Ilya Muromets (1956)

Other links of interest:

A scene from Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D00E2DB1431EF3ABC4F52DFB767838B679EDE

http://www.examiner.com/article/ilya-muromets-1956-vs-the-sword-and-the-dragon-1960

http://www.conjurecinema.com/2011/10/sword-and-dragon-aka-ilya-muromets-1956.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Muromets_(film)

http://www.swordandsorcery.org/mov-ilya.asp

http://www.mst3kinfo.com/?p=2713

Another American release version of The Sword and the Dragon (1956)

Romanian film poster of Ilya Muromets (1956, aka The Sword and the Dragon)

Anouk Aimée in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969)

Los Angeles has served as the backdrop for countless Hollywood movies but in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), the French director’s first and only American film (if you don’t count the 1984 made-for-TV movie Louisiana), the city becomes the real protagonist. With its sprawling urban landscape, oil derricks, desolate beaches and constant traffic, it  provides a vivid canvas for a contemporary love story about romantic longing, missed connections and unrealized dreams. Film writer Clare Stewart referred to the film in the film journal Senses of Cinema as “a road movie that doesn’t go anywhere” but that’s not a putdown. It’s an apt description of what Demy was trying to create here – a drifting, dreamy mood piece.  

Gary Lockwood in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969)

Covering a twenty-four hour period in the life of George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), an unemployed architect stuck in a dead end relationship with an aspiring actress (Alexandra Hay), the film tracks George’s attempt to raise enough money to prevent his car from being repossessed but switches gears when he catches sight of a strikingly beautiful woman, dressed in white, at a car lot. Intrigued, he begins to follow her around the city, eventually arriving at her place of employment, a “model shop” where men pay to photograph women in a choice of intimate settings.

Gary Lockwood cruising the secret back alleys of L.A. in Model Shop (1969).

Lola (Anouk Aimée), a recently divorced French woman with no work permit, is working there until she can raise enough money to purchase air fare back to Paris. Like two ships passing in the night, Lola and George have a brief but fateful encounter that alters their destinies in subtle but possibly profound ways.

Anouk Aimée is being shadowed by an admirer/stalker in Model Shop (1969).

Demy, who paid homage to the Hollywood musical with his award-winning The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), was offered a contract by Columbia Pictures in 1967 to make films in America. Arriving in Los Angeles with his wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda, he considered various projects before choosing Model Shop (he originally wanted to call the film, Los Angeles-1968). In the meantime, Varda filmed the short subject, Black Panthers (1968), and an experimental feature, Lions Love (1969), starring Andy Warhol actress Viva, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado, the latter two actors recruited from the Broadway musical Hair.

James Rado (left), Viva and Gerome Ragni in Agnes Varda’s Lions Love (1969).

Demy’s first choice for the lead in Model Shop was Harrison Ford (you can view snippets of his original screen test for the role on YouTube) but Columbia executives pressed the director to choose a more established actor – Gary Lockwood, who had recently appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – over the relatively unknown Ford.

Harrison Ford screen test for Model Shop (1969)

With the uncredited assistance of Carole Eastman (who often wrote under the screen name of Adrien Joyce), Demy penned the English-language screenplay, which avoids the volatile politics of the era but still captures the general sense of malaise and restlessness of the time with fleeting references to the Vietnam War and the counterculture (a rehearsal session with the rock group Spirit and George’s visit with the editor and staff members of “The Paper,” an underground publication).

The rock group Spirit is featured in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969).

Unfortunately, neither Model Shop nor Varda’s American-made films were successful with critics or at the box office and the couple soon returned to France where they resumed their solo directorial careers. Yet, in the case of Demy’s Model Shop, the movie was not a radical departure from his previous work and continued his persistent theme of the elusive nature of love and the endless quest for it.

Despite the film’s American setting, Model Shop references and incorporates characters and aspects of Demy’s earlier work beginning with his debut feature, Lola (1961), in which Anouk Aimée played the title role. Her Lola in Model Shop is clearly the same character (we see photographs of her from that 1961 film in an album at her apartment), only she is now older, divorced, and with a fourteen-year-old son awaiting her in Paris. We also learn that her companion Michel (Jacques Harden in Lola) has run off to Las Vegas with Jackie, the seductive gambler of Demy’s Bay of the Angels (1963), who was played by Jeanne Moreau. Another link to the past is provided by Lola’s comment that her American sailor friend Frankie (played by Alan Scott in Lola) has been killed in Vietnam.

Anouk Aimée in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (Gary Lockwood lurks in the background)

On both a visual and conceptual level, Model Shop is spellbinding, presenting Los Angeles as a cityscape of neon signs, billboards, Standard Oil gas stations, parking lots and people constantly in motion, driving to and fro in cars, chasing unobtainable dreams in the film capitol of the world, a place where cinematic dreams are the main export. Cinematographer Michel Hugo applies a palette of pastel colors to Los Angeles that brings a dreamlike gloss to even the pollution, industrial plants and urban sprawl of the city. The sound design of the film is equally evocative, blending the ambient hum of traffic with an eclectic mixture of music being broadcast from George’s car radio (Bach, Rimski-Korsakov, Spirit, Robert Schumann).

Gary Lockwood driving endlessly in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969)

Model Shop is much less successful in building dramatic interest in the free-form narrative and what happens to both George and Lola due to uneven performances and awkward dialogue. Gary Lockwood, 32 years old at the time of the film, seems miscast as a disenchanted 26-year-old who is too impatient and unwilling to follow the traditional career path for architects. His scenes with Alexandra Hay, playing his girlfriend Gloria, are so strained and unnatural that you can never really fully accept them as a couple who were once in love or even enjoyed a mutual sexual attraction. Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps their lack of on-screen chemistry together is meant to emphasize the fact that they’ve become complete strangers but on a dramatic level, their scenes are inert.

Gary Lockwood and Alexandra Hay in Model Shop (1969)

Even more ineffective are Lockwood’s interaction with his friend, band musician Jay Ferguson of Spirit (playing himself and not doing a very convincing job), and his occasional philosophical musings, such as his realization that he could die if he’s drafted: “I guess I never really thought about it before. Death, you know – it’s insane!” Even Anouk Aimee, who retains her elegance and an air of mystery throughout, is saddled with some pretentious dialogue and, in one scene, where she is reciting her long, personal history to George, interrupts herself by asking him, “Do I bore you?”, as if signaling the viewer to overlook the exposition in favor of the real story, which Demy has visualized perfectly.

(Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)

Model Shop was obviously not a standard commercial feature but clearly art house fare as noted by its obtuse tag line, “Maybe Tomorrow. Maybe Never. Maybe.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that it was “really quite a bad movie, but also a sometimes interesting one. You aren’t likely to forget – immediately anyway – a movie in which someone speaks of the “Baroque geometry” of Los Angeles. I know I won’t.” And Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, never a very ardent Demy supporter, wrote, “There’s something ingratiating about Demy’s romantic and lyrical approach to L.A., but his way of looking at American youth is insane…The picture is very pretty, but numbingly superficial.” Variety, on the other hand, was more perceptive, stating, “There is not much story here, but rather a revealing series of incidents that serve as a backdrop for a poetic tale of human disarray, fleeting comprehension and a surface gentleness that belies an underlying discontent and groping for meaning, love and aim by its disparate but well mimed characters.” 

Yet, despite its poor initial reception and quick fade into obscurity, Model Shop is now considered one of Demy’s finest films by contemporary film critics and admirers such as Armond White of the New York Post who wrote that “Model Shop is a post-masterpiece, elaborating Demy’s own expressive vocabulary – making his imagination real, fulfilling that now-forgotten New Wave decree that movies be taken seriously as emotion pictures…Going back to Model Shop could help modern movies rediscover love.”

Director Jacques Demy (left), cameraman on hood and Gary Lockwood on location for Model Shop (1969)

Model Shop is currently available on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as part of their branded series, “Martini Movies,” which is a laughably inept attempt to market this film. One look at some of the other titles in the “Martini Movies” franchise – Gumshoe with Albert Finney, Arch Oboler’s Five, Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana – reveals an eclectic grab bag of quirky but intriguing films that defy clear cut genre categorization or obvious marketing hooks which is why they have been lumped together as a branded collection. Of course, I am glad that Model Shop is available for Demy fans but it would have been an ideal addition to the Criterion Collection’s recent box set, The Essential Jacques Demy, which includes Lola, Bay of the Angels and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, all of which tell Lola’s story in direct and indirect ways. (For example, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), we discover through a song that Roland, a former lover (played by Marc Michel in Lola) is now a Parisian antique dealer.) Model Shop has previously aired on Turner Classic Movies and, with a little luck, it may show up again someday.

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

Director Jacques Demy and Anouk Aimée on the set of Model Shop (1969)

Other Websites of Interest:

http://nextprojection.com/2013/07/02/tiffs-bittersweet-the-joyous-cinema-of-jacques-demy-review-model-shop-1969/

http://www.postmodernjoan.com/wp02/?p=2283

http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/photos-agnes-varda-in-californialand-lacma.html

They look like women but don’t be fooled (a scene from The Cave of the Spider Women, 1927)

Surviving films from the silent era in China are rare. Destruction from wars, government censorship, neglect, and deterioration have taken a sizable toll, so the recent discovery of The Cave of the Spider Women (Pan si dong) from 1927 is a cause for celebration. Even missing its opening scene and a sequence in the middle, the film remains frenetic, pulpy entertainment that was a major commercial success and a career milestone for painter-turned-filmmaker Dan Duyu. Its appeal also stems from glamorous lead actress Yin Mingzhu, one of China’s first major stars. The film’s potent blend of costume drama, fantasy adventure, and choreographed action, as well as slapstick and irreverent sight gags have proved durable conventions in modern-day Chinese cinema.  (This article first appeared in the 2015 program for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival).

Director Dan Duyu

The celebrity couple Duyu and Mingzhu are easily the most historically important example of the burgeoning movie industry in Shanghai during the early 1920s. Duyu had already established himself as a much sought-after commercial artist, famous for his fashion drawings, advertisements, and illustrated calendars, which often depicted glamorized, modern Chinese women. His interest in photography led him to filmmaking, where he quickly became proficient in every aspect of the profession. In 1920, he launched Shanghai Yingxi (“Photoplay”) Company, which became a close-knit family operation. He hired Mingzhu (they married in 1926), his nephew Dan Erchun, and others from his circle of friends and family.

Shanghai actress Yin Mingzhu

Like Duyu, Mingzhu was greatly influenced by both Chinese and contemporary Western culture. Educated at the prestigious McTyeire School for Girls in Shanghai, she had a fondness for film stars like Alice White and a love of foreign fashion, which earned her the nickname, “Miss F.F.” Despite her mother’s opposition to her becoming an actress, Mingzhu made her film debut in Duyu’s Sea Oath (Haishi, 1921) and became a star overnight. Sea Oath (now lost) was a romantic drama whereas The Cave of the Spider Women, produced six years later, was an ambitious epic and an unprecedented box-office sensation.

The monk Xuanzang (Jiang Meikang) finds himself a prisoner in the spider women’s lair.

Based on an episode in the sixteenth century Ming Dynasty fable, Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng’en, Cave of the Spider Women follows the monk Xuanzang (Jiang Meikang) and his three guardian disciples, the Monkey King (Wu Wenchao), Pigsy (Zhou Hongquan), and Sandy (Zhan Jiali), as they embark on a quest to find some holy scriptures for Emperor Tsi Tsung. While searching for food, Xuanzang accepts the hospitality of a welcoming hostess and her coterie and enters their cave dwelling where he becomes a prisoner. Disguised in human form, the women are really flesh-eating spiders attended by their gleefully wicked servant. Other passing travelers have been cannibalized by the evil spirits, but Xuanzang is being reserved for a different fate—marriage to the spider queen. Whether this unholy union gives her immortality or special powers is unclear, but Xuanzang’s companions attempt to rescue their master before all is lost. The battle between good and arachnid quickly becomes a dizzying array of magic duels, shape-shifting deceptions, and hand-to-hand combat before a fiery resolution is reached in the manner of a serial cliffhanger.

The demon with his spider women minions in Dan Duyu’s The Cave of the Spider Women (1927)

Xuanzang may be the chief protagonist but, with his passive demeanor and delicate, androgynous beauty, he is the antithesis of an action hero. Despite his moral and spiritual strength, he lacks the skills to rescue himself. As a result, the cunning Monkey King with his bag of tricks and acrobatic prowess is much more engaging, and his doggedly faithful cohorts, Pigsy and Sandy, provide comic relief in their physical confrontations with supernatural forces. But the spider women are the star attraction. It is impossible to top the seductive appeal of Mingzhu’s villainess and her followers who make formidable femme fatales in the vampy style of Theda Bara, with the added attribute of being skilled warriors. Even if they are depicted as evil, their fierceness and physical prowess prefigure the positive role model of today’s martial arts heroine.

Pou-Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King (2014)

As the first known attempt to adapt Journey to the West or any portion of it for the cinema, The Cave of the Spider Women spurred other filmmakers to return to the Wu Cheng’en story for inspiration, including most recently for Stephen Chow and Chi-kin Kwok’s loose 2013 remake, Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, and Pou-Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King (2014), with Donnie Yen. The 1967 Shaw brothers fantasy-adventure, The Cave of the Silken Web, is probably the best-known adaptation, with its bold color schemes, set design, and choreography that resemble a Vincente Minnelli musical gone wild. But it was director Duyu who created the template that was refined and stylized by later filmmakers.

Cave of the Silken Web (1967)

The special effects, most of which are accomplished through simple camera tricks, may seem quaint by today’s standards, but they must have astonished audiences at the time, especially when the spider women revert to their original form en masse—a nightmare scenario for even the mildest arachnophobe. Under Duyu’s inspired art direction, the spider clan’s lair becomes a forbidding labyrinth of honeycombed chambers, passageways, and strategically-spun webs that do not look like a decorated studio set. There is also a pronounced eroticism in some scenes such as when Pigsy literally loses his head to two spider women who have stripped down to battle outfits exposing their bare backs, shoulders, and arms. (Some sources claim that the complete version included female nudity and an underwater swimming scene, which would have been the first of its kind in Chinese cinema.)

Cave of the Spider Women (1927)

It is obvious that a good deal of the budget went toward the costumes and pageantry in the climactic wedding ceremony sequence. Demons with grotesque faces, animal heads, or surreal headgear cavort in a celebration worthy of Hieronymus Bosch while the spider women scurry around with bejeweled hair, dressed in flowing gowns of silk and satin. Everything descends into beautifully choreographed chaos when the Monkey King leads an attack on the party and sets in motion the force of the red-tinted cleansing fire.

The monk Xuanzang (Jiang Meikang) ponders his fate in the Cave of the Spider Women (1927)

The Cave of the Spider Women was recently discovered in the National Library of Norway. While performing an inventory of their film library of nine thousand or more titles in 2011, the staff found a nitrocellulose copy of Duyu’s film, which was the first film from China to be screened in Oslo, in 1929. The original length of the film was approximately nineteen hundred meters, of which only twelve hundred have survived. Norway’s print features both Chinese and Norwegian intertitles, which some film scholars suspect were loosely translated from English intertitles created for the 1929 Norway premiere. The copy shown at the Silent Film Festival features a new translation from the original Chinese, courtesy of San Francisco’s Center for the Art of Translation.

Cave of the Spider Women (1927)

The unprecedented success of Cave of the Spider Women encouraged Duyu and Mingzhu to follow up with the sequel Xu pan si dong (a lost film) in 1929. By that time, the Chinese film industry was in a state of transition caused by the Great Depression and the rise of left-wing progressives, which resulted in the Film Censorship Act of 1931. Movies that dealt with feudal concepts like myths and the supernatural were considered frivolous and suppressed in favor of films that promoted science and contemporary Chinese life. Under these circumstances, it is a small miracle that even this one print survives of The Cave of the Spider Women. It is a significant window into one of early Chinese cinema’s most popular genres.

Warrior women in The Cave of the Silken Web (1967)

Other website links of interest:

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/30089

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/interrupted-voyages-two-rarities-at-the-san-francisco-silent-film-festival

http://www.chinesemirror.com/index/2011/09/cave-of-the-silken-web-1927.html

http://www.chinesemirror.com/index/2008/08/yin-mingzhu-pea.html

http://www.chinesemirror.com/index/2008/08/dan-duyu-sea-oath.html
http://softfilm.blogspot.com/2013/11/judy-dan-miss-hong-kong-1952.html

http://hongkongsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/09/beauty-queen-goes-to-hollywood.html

Judy Dan, daughter of director Dan Duyu & actress Yin Mingzhu, also worked in movies and TV

A scene from You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), filmed on location in New York City

Before he broke through as one of the most dynamic and successful directors of his generation in 1972 with The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola had been working his way up from the lower rungs of the film industry since the early sixties in various capacities for producer/director Roger Corman (dialogue director on Tower of London [1962], second unit director on Premature Burial [1962] and others). Although his first full-fledged directorial effort was the sexploitation comedy Tonight for Sure (1962), which was barely distributed even on the grindhouse circuit, Dementia 13 [1963], was really the first indication that Coppola had promise as a filmmaker. Made on a miniscule budget, this gothic murder mystery shot on location in Ireland was a surprisingly stylish and atmospheric genre film that was released on a double feature with Corman’s The Terror [1963]. Yet, it was Coppola’s next feature, You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), that proved to the movie industry and film critics alike that this twenty-seven year old director was already a prodigious talent.    

A basic plot description of You’re a Big Boy Now might sound like another clichéd coming-of-age movie about a young innocent learning about life and love in New York City but Coppola transforms the story into a contemporary screwball comedy with touches of bittersweet romance and audacious visual pyrotechnics; these include the long opening tracking shot through the reading room of the New York Public Library, a madcap chase through Macy’s department store shot during store hours amid the surprised shoppers and a nocturnal prowl around seedy 42nd Street.

Elizabeth Hartman walks through the reading room at the New York Public Library in the dynamic opening to You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

The project was first suggested to Coppola by up-and-coming actor Tony Bill (Come Blow Your Horn, 1963), who was a fan of the original novel, written by David Benedictus. Coppola optioned the rights to it and began writing the screenplay adaptation of You’re a Big Boy Now while he was on location in Europe for Seven Arts, collaborating with Gore Vidal and several other writers on the script for the big budget war epic, Is Paris Burning? (1966).

Actor and future producer/director Tony Bill

Independent producer Phil Feldman, a former business manager at Seven Arts, which was now merging with Warner Bros., recognized Coppola’s talent and negotiated a deal for the young filmmaker. Seven Arts would pay Coppola $8,000 to direct You’re a Big Boy Now on a twenty-nine day shooting schedule but he would receive no fee for the screenplay since he had written it on company time during his paid stint on Is Paris Burning?. Coppola rose to the challenge and was so excited to be making his own movie that he later admitted, “I would have done it for nothing.”

Peter Kastner in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), directed by Francis Ford Coppola

First, Coppola changed the original premise of David Benedictus’s novel, dropping the London setting and making the protagonist, Bernard Chanticleer, a stack boy at the New York Public Library instead of a shoe clerk. The entire focus of the movie becomes Bernard’s attempt to break away from his overbearing parents (Rip Torn, Geraldine Page) and make a life for himself in Manhattan. This is a struggle because Bernard is shy, unassertive and completely naive in the ways of the world and it doesn’t help that his egocentric father, I.H., the library’s rare book curator, undermines his confidence on the job. Even moving into his own place is inhibiting because his nosy landlady (Julie Harris) agrees to spy on him and report any “female” activity to his mom. While the adults and authority figures in Bernard’s life seem monstrous and controlling, his peers are often as alienating, offering him bad advice and competing with him under the guise of friendship. The fact that all of this is played as a theatre-of-the-absurd farce separates it from other generation gap/coming of age movies during the 1960s.

Karen Black as Amy in Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

Even though Tony Bill was hoping to play the title role of Bernard, Coppola offered him a supporting role instead and cast newcomer Peter Kastner in the lead; the Canadian actor had recently won critical acclaim for his performance in his debut film, Nobody Waved Goodbye [1964]. He also hired Karen Black (in her first major part) to play Amy, Bernard’s adoring co-worker, and managed to convince such established, well-known actors as Geraldine Page, Rip Torn and Julie Harris to accept reduced salaries; he bypassed their agents and contacted them directly. Coppola’s clever screenplay was part of the appeal; Geraldine Page admitted at the time, “I get scripts daily, but this one really made me laugh.”

Julie Harris as Miss Thing, Peter Kastner’s landlady, in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

The real casting surprise of You’re a Big Boy Now, however, was Elizabeth Hartman in the provocative role of Barbara Darling, a manipulative man-trap whose behavior would be classified as bipolar now. Hartman’s two previous films, A Patch of Blue (1965) and The Group (1966), depicted her as delicate, overly sensitive characters but Hartman creates an indelible impression here as an unfathomable actress who moonlights as a go-go dancer in a nightclub.

Elizabeth Hartman as a twisted seductress in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

Among the many obstacles Coppola encountered during the making of You’re a Big Boy Now was the refusal of officials at the New York Public Library to allow filming on the premises. They felt the movie crew would upset the daily routine of staff workers as well as public visitors but took greater offense at the suggestion that the library housed a secret vault stocked with suggestive objects d’art and erotica. In the film, Rip Torn plays Bernard’s father, I.H., the library’s self-important rare book curator who relishes his “private collection.” With the help of Mayor John Lindsay, Coppola was able to overrule the library board’s veto and secure a shooting permit.

Francis Ford Coppola (second from right) on the set of You’re a Big Boy Now with Elizabeth Hartman

Although You’re a Big Boy Now was in production at the same time as Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), the latter was released first. When Coppola’s film came along later, it was often unfairly lumped with other imitators trying to capitalize on the success of that megahit. Roger Ebert pointed out that “The Graduate is, of course, the masterpiece of the genre. But You’re a Big Boy Now is more amusing than 17 [a Danish coming-of-age film] and half a length better than the miserable Benjamin [a French costume drama about a young’s man initiation into sex].”

Elizabeth Hartman and Peter Kastner in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

According to Coppola, The Graduate was not even on his radar when he was preparing You’re a Big Boy Now. “By the time I got to make it,” he recalled, “I didn’t know whether I wanted to make it anymore. Because one of the great pities was that I had written You’re a Big Boy Now before Dick Lester’s The Knack [1965] came out and yet everyone said it was a copy. It was definitely influenced by A Hard Day’s Night [1964]. But it was all there already before I even saw A Hard Day’s Night. One of the troubles of the film business is that you’re always sort of forced to do things three years later, like with Big Boy.” 

While Coppola confessed to watching You’re a Big Boy Now in recent years and hating it, one can’t help but be impressed with the movie’s playful, freewheeling approach and willingness to experiment with a variety of stylistic devices, many of which succeed brilliantly from musical montage to overlapping dialogue to rapid editing effects to a psychedelic nightclub sequence. “You’re a Big Boy Now is a flashy movie to some extent,” Coppola admitted. “I have since been more subtle than that. But flashy films do attract attention, and that was what I wanted to do when I was making my first film for a studio.”

Elizabeth Hartman moonlights as a go-go dancer in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

In spite of Coppola’s own opinion of the film, You’re a Big Boy Now was chosen as the only U.S. entry to the Cannes film festival in 1967 where it was nominated for a Palm d’Or. It also garnered a surprise Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Geraldine Page as Bernard’s neurotic, overbearing mom. Even if the film is uneven, swinging between broad caricature and offbeat whimsicality, it provides many moments of pure pleasure with its time capsule portrait of New York City in the mid-sixties and a wickedly funny, scene stealing performance by Elizabeth Hartman in the most atypical role of her too brief career (she committed suicide in 1987).

The music score by Robert Prince and The Lovin’ Spoonful features numerous selections from the latter group which were written specifically for the movie and include “Darling Be Home Soon.” The group, which was fronted by singer/guitarist John Sebastian, was at the peak of their pop music success with three top ten singles released in 1966 – “Daydream,” “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?,” and “Summer in the City.”

Michael Dunn and Elizabeth Hartman in a German lobby card from the film

Best of all, You’re a Big Boy Now was an impressive enough calling card for Coppola that the Hollywood studios took notice. Warner Bros. offered him another directing job, the big budget musical, Finian’s Rainbow [1968] and 20th-Century-Fox employed him as screenwriter on their 1970 film biography, Patton. You’re a Big Boy Now occasionally airs on Turner Classic Movies and is also available on DVD from the Warner Archive collection in a no-frills release with image and audio in desperate need of restoration. The aspect ratio is also incorrect with obvious cropping of the widescreen format. It would be wonderful to see a proper restoration of the film with commentary from the surviving main participants which, at this point, only includes Coppola, Rip Torn, Karen Black, and Tony Bill.

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

Sources:

Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews edited by Gene D. Phillips & Rodney Hill (University Press of Mississippi)

Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola by Gene D. Phillips (University Press of Kentucky)

Peter Kastner, Karen Black and “Dog” in the Times Square finale of You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)

Other websites of interest:

http://lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2011/10/youre-big-boy-now-1966.html

http://onthesetofnewyork.com/youreabigboynow.html

Poster created for Noir City film festival, sponsored by The Film Noir Foundation

Voluptuous vixens, murderous golddiggers and greedy femme fatales were a familiar sight in B-movie melodramas of the fifties but Wicked Woman (1953) stands out from the rest of the pack. The look and feel of the movie captures the lurid quality of trashy pulp fiction covers from the same period like Tavern Girl, Passion Has Red Lips or Any Sex Will Do. Even the minimalistic, sparsely decorated sets, that represent a confined universe of dingy boarding house rooms and the neighborhood bar, exude a sleazy authenticity and sense of claustrophobia. And scheming her way through these lower depths is Beverly Michaels in the title role of Billie Nash. Blonde, statuesque and sullen, she is the quintessential hard luck tramp, moving from town to town in a futile search for a change in luck.   

Wicked Woman offers nothing particularly new or novel in its formulaic scenario but the vivid characters, hard-boiled dialogue and an almost palpable sense of despair transforms this tale of a born loser into something approaching a minor masterpiece. In its own way the film functions as an intimate window into a world most viewers luckily don’t inhabit but have seen glimpses of in real life. We may not be on skid row but we’re close enough. And at the center of it all is Beverly Michaels who is undeniably mesmerizing in a role that requires her to be in almost every scene of the film.

Richard Egan and Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman (1953)

Over the years Wicked Woman has attained a certain cult status with such diverse and ardent fans extolling its virtues as Lily Tomlin, Eddie Muller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, and movie blogger Kim Morgan who hosted a revival of the film at the 2014 Telluride Film Festival. Despite the film’s poverty row status – independent producer Edward Small made it for peanuts using only a few interior sets and some brief location photography – Wicked Woman claims an impressive cinema pedigree. It was written by the filmmaking team of Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse who collaborated on several features over a 23 year period with Greene usually producing and co-writing the screenplays with Rouse, who served as director.  Their first screenplay was The Town Went Wild (1944), a light comedy vehicle for Freddie Bartholomew and Jimmy Lydon, but Rouse and Greene really made their mark with the seminal noir story D.O.A. (1950) with Edmond O’Brien, which was remade in 1969 (as Color Me Dead) and in 1988 with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. Their first official effort as a producer/writer/director team (with contributions from Leo C. Popkin) was The Well (1951), a critically acclaimed drama about racial tensions in a small town that scored Oscar nominations for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay and Best Film Editing. They followed that with The Thief (1952), a highly unusual and innovative espionage thriller with Ray Milland that dispensed with dialogue and relied solely on visuals and sound effects to tell its story.  In addition to Wicked Woman (1953), the duo also collaborated on New York Confidential (1955), another key noir entry starring Broderick Crawford, Richard Conte and Anne Bancroft; The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), a character-driven Western pitting Glenn Ford against Broderick Crawford (It became a surprise box office hit for MGM); A House is Not a Home (1964) with Shelley Winters as real-life brothel owner Polly Adler during the Roaring Twenties; The Oscar (1966), a legendary, over-the-top camp classic with Stephen Boyd chewing the scenery as a merciless and cunning Best Actor contender; The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967), a lighthearted and underrated heist caper with a more restrained Stephen Boyd and Yvette Mimieux.

Percy Helton (far right) eyes his new boarding house neighbor (Beverly Michaels) in Wicked Woman; Richard Egan & Michaels in heat on far left

What makes Wicked Woman particularly intriguing is the fact that director Rouse would soon marry his leading lady. Like other better known director-wife collaborators such as John Cassavetes-Gena Rowlands (Faces; A Woman Under the Influence) and Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward (Rachel, Rachel; The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds) who created their own unglamorized film portraits of working class couples and rarely glimpsed loners, Rouse and Michaels could be considered prescient in this regard despite the fact that the film is their only joint effort and initially designed to play double bills at drive-ins or the less prestigious moviehouses of its era. What is surprising is how effectively Wicked Woman works as both a lurid exploitation drama and an intimate character study not unlike that 1961 sleeper, A Cold Wind in August.  It might be Michaels’ most quintessential role despite the fact that she was typecast throughout her brief film career as a tough customer. Her acting range may be limited but then the characters she played – an assortment of jailbirds, night club chippies and destitute women – were often as stereotyped as the formulaic B-movie melodramas in which she appeared. Her rare TV appearances in one-time episodes of Adventures of the Falcon, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Cheyenne didn’t depart from her usual femme fatale persona either.

Richard Egan and Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman (1953).

Michaels began her career as a model at a young age and later become one of Billy Rose’s showgirls at the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in the basement of New York’s Paramount hotel. In Hollywood, she signed with MGM and made a small but memorable debut opposite Van Heflin in East Side, West Side (1948) and appeared as an unbilled extra in Three Little Words (1950). But she found her niche after leaving MGM as the on-screen muse for low-budget auteur director Hugo Haas in two borderline noir dramas, Pickup and The Girl on the Bridge (both 1951). She once told an interviewer for The Los Angeles Times that she preferred playing characters who were “earthy or neurotic…The crazy sexy type of thing” and followed this course from Wicked Woman to Crashout (1955) as a dejected, unwed mother to a trio of prison dramas, Betrayed Women (1955), Women Without Men (1956) and Blonde Bait (1956). After this, Michaels retired to raise a family with Rouse and never returned to acting. From all reports, she had a happy marriage with Rouse that lasted until his death in 1987. Michaels lived another 20 years and died in Phoenix, Arizona in 2007.

Beverly Michaels studio portrait from the website glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com

If you’ve never seen Michaels in a film, then Wicked Woman is the best place to begin. The title credits set the tone as we see a Trailways bus traveling through a desolate desert landscape and a blonde staring forlornly out the window (The bluesy theme song is sung by jazz vocalist/African-American cowboy star Herb Jeffries). When the bus arrives at its small town destination, Billie Nash (Michaels) is officially introduced feet first as she disembarks and the camera slowly moves up her figure, clad in all white with a gold belt to accent her waist. She lights a cigarette, surveys her surroundings with world weary disdain and begins her search for cheap accommodations. It is an all too familiar routine that has become the one constant in her life.

Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman (1953).

Billie finds a room in a dreary boarding house and settles in with her portable record player, a pint of booze and an astrology magazine. Penniless, Billie turns on the charm for Charlie (Percy Helton), the boarder across the hall, who offers to share with her a steak that he cooks on a hot plate in his room. Sizing him up as a soft touch, Billie manipulates Charlie into giving her some money for a new wardrobe for job hunting and soon finds work at a dive bar run by Dora (Evelyn Scott) and her bartender husband Matt (Richard Egan). One bad decision follows another as Billie initiates a torrid love affair with Matt that runs the usual doom laden film noir route. First the couple plan to run away together to Mexico but that evolves into a murder plot to kill Dora for her money (she owns the bar). Lurking in the background, waiting for the chance to cash in on his favors to Billie is the lecherous Charlie. The finale should come as no surprise to anyone and is a true but fitting conclusion to this sleazy morality play from the lower depths.

Percy Helton plays a predatory neighbor who lusts after Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman.

When all is said and done, Billie is not so much wicked as pathetic. Her behavior, like the open and close of the movie with Billie’s arrival and departure, is cyclic. She never learns from her mistakes and is doomed to repeat them again and again on her journey to the bottom. Much worse than her is Matt who displays little moral compunction over selling Dora’s business behind her back or even agreeing to kill her. The final wrap-up when Dora and Matt are reconciled and Billie is out of the picture is like the comic fadeout to some demented sitcom with Dora and Matt laughing about the whole attempted embezzlement/affair with Billie. Screenwriters Rouse and Greene may have intended this to provide some much needed closure to their grim story but it only succeeds in exposing Matt as a dim-witted, potentially homicidal sociopath and Dora as a self-deluded alcoholic. At the end, it’s hard to tell who is headed toward the worst hell – Billie or the ill-matched and completely incompatible couple of Dora and Matt.

Richard Egan berates Beverly Michaels in a scene from Wicked Woman.

Wicked Woman is not currently available on DVD or any other format through legal channels but it occasionally pops up on Turner Classic Movies or in repertory revivals. You can also view it on YouTube.  Other Links of Interest:

http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2012/04/wicked-woman-1953.html

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/trailers-from-hell-josh-olson-on-noir-wicked-woman

https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/wicked-world/

http://www.furiouscinema.com/2015/04/beverly-michaels-stars-in-the-furious-film-noir-wicked-woman/

http://sunsetgun.typepad.com/sunsetgun/2014/09/te.html

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-04/news/mn-32900_1_russell-rouse

http://www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com/show/185/Beverly+Michaels/index.html

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/beverly-michaels-noir-attack-of-the-100-foot-hotcha 

Have you ever had a fantasy about running and programming your own repertory cinema? Any self-proclaimed film buff probably has and for me it became a slowly emerging fantasy from the time I was seven or older. Unlike those kids who wanted to be firemen, astronauts, professional athletes or other revered professions, I pictured myself as a movie theater owner who could show what I wanted and print availability or attendance was never a concern. While this fantasy faded over the years as I became aware of the realities and headaches of film distribution and theater management, the love of programming movies always stayed with me and for a brief period (Feb. 1980 – Dec. 1981), I ran an invitation only film series out of my home in Athens, Ga. on Pulaski Street that I called Secret Cinema.

Amy Vane as the hapless protagonist in Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema (1968)

The name was inspired by Paul Bartel’s 1968 short The Secret Cinema (it was later remade as an episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories series for television). In Bartel’s original version, Jane, a secretary in a New York City office, struggles through one mishap after another. From daily humiliations at the office or on the street to being abandoned by her boyfriend, her increasing paranoia leads to a startling discovery. She is being secretly filmed and her life is the subject of a comical serial, shown in weekly installments at an undisclosed location attended by her much amused friends and colleagues. One of the great movie premises of all time, The Secret Cinema doesn’t quite live up to its potential in either version but it seemed like the ideal name for a film series that was basically underground in terms of community awareness.  From the beginning, I had no illusions that Secret Cinema would make money or that it would be more than a hobby. And 16mm film rental was relatively inexpensive in the early ‘80s if you knew all of your options; my bible was the R.R. Bowker publication Feature Films: A Directory of Feature Films on 16mm and Videotape Available for Rental, Sale and Lease by James L. Limbacher. You could rent movies for a 1-2 day period for as little as $25 or less, not including shipping, from such sources as Ivy Films, Budget Films and other affordable distributors. College media centers were also a cheap source for rentals. The University of Michigan Media Resources Center, for example, had an impressive library of films for rental which would have been unaffordable from their original distributors such as New Yorker Films or Cinema 5. This was during the pre-Blockbuster video boom, of course, and my intention was to show film, not video.

The debut program of Secret Cinema and my crudely designed flyer

So I plunged into it and scheduled Secret Cinema’s first showing, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), along with the award-winning claymation short, Clay (1965) by Eliot Noyes, Jr..

Phyllis, my wife at the time, designed some of the flyers after my pitiful first attempt and we invited a group of friends to the screening. As a University of Georgia employee, I was able to borrow a 16mm projector from their media center and the theater space was our old, rambling WWII-era house in a working class neighborhood of Athens. The den, with its high ceiling and wide beige walls, was the ideal screening room space and I set up the projector in the galley kitchen at the back of the house for a good visual throw.

A scene from Eliot Noyes, Jr.’s short subject, Clay (1965)

Secret Cinema had an auspicious beginning and the novelty of it alone ensured that at least 20 or so friends showed up to experience I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Clay. The $1.50 admission I requested was never mandatory and more of a suggestion to help cover the film rentals. That was probably a good idea because several of our first time attendees would probably have asked for their money back that night. While everyone loved Noyes’ playful animated short about evolution, I quickly learned that my love of horror movies, particularly the low budget variety, was not shared by everyone except for one or two fellow film nerds. Still, there was something uniquely irresistible about seeing our den full of people gazing upon mad scientist Whit Bissell yelling at his hideous creation, “Speak! I know you have a civil tongue in your head because I sewed it back myself.”

Whit Bissell (left) and Gary Conway in the 1957 trash classic, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

Most of the dialogue was unintentionally hilarious and I especially love that final stock footage shot of an alligator in a tank chomping on some laboratory jacket (presumably Mr. Bissell) under The End credits. When the lights came up, there was faint applause and our friend Martha said, “You know, this is a great idea but next time, why don’t you show something that is actually GOOD?” Well, my intention was to show all kinds of films and that I did. But my own personal tastes would usually dictate the size of the audience as I quickly learned. Certainly I had self-serving reasons for showing some films – I simply wanted to see them. Other times I wanted to expose my friends to movies they might love and create some new cinephiles in the process.

Here are some of the highlights and low points of my Secret Cinema adventures:

I experimented with showing collections of short films. One program included George Melies’ The Conquest of the Pole (1912) and Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp (1915). Another one featured Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) and the Claes Oldenburg art short, Sort of a Commercial for an Iceberg (1969).

A scene from Georges Melies’ The Conquest of the Pole (1912)

Based on positive responses to these, I tried to offer something a little more adventurous featuring early work by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Roman Polanski and Pascal Aubier. It turned out to be one of my largest attended events with more than 30 people crammed into our den on a sweltering summer evening. Despite the humidity and heat, everyone seemed completely attentive to these imaginative mini-movies which were not as well known as the directors’ more famous features. The wild card in the bunch was Pascal Aubier’s 32 minute Monsieur Jean Claude Voucherin (1968), the most experimental of the bunch. The first half of the film, shot in a static manner with only sound effects and a fixed viewpoint, focuses on the compulsive-obsessive title character who is going through a daily desk organizing ritual of lining up sharpened pencils and arranging stacks of paper. Just when you think this exercise in minimalism is about to lose its absurdist edge, it transitions into a completely different movie, freeing this character from his office and following him into the streets as an off-kilter score kicks in on the soundtrack. The result is unexpectedly exhilarating.

A scene from Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons (1957)

It was a good warm-up for Les Mistons (1957), Truffaut’s affectionate and nostalgic paean to puberty with Bernadette Lafont as the object of desire among some schoolboys (she also appeared in Monsieur Jean Claude Voucherin). Godard’s lighthearted romantic short Tous Les Garcons S’Appellent Patrick (1959, aka All the Boys Are Called Patrick) showed us a side of the director rarely seen in his later work. And Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) was appropriately stark and surreal in contrast to the other three shorts, and introduced themes of violence, cruelty and humiliation that would figure prominently in the Polish director’s later work.

A scene from Roman Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958)

The films sparked a lot of lively discussions and comments along the lines of “Godard’s political films are unwatchable”….”Truffaut is the most sentimental of the New Wave filmmakers”…”Roman Polanski is a creepy genius,” etc.

Paula Pritchett in Jan Kadar’s mesmerizing Adrift (1971)

I also received the suggestion from more than one person that I open a repertory cinema in Athens. Funny thing is…I actually went through the motions of investigating this idea and learned that even then a repertory theatre was a costly and risky venture in Athens. The Chameleon, a local nightclub had already attempted a weekly screening series that was more eclectic than successful – screenings of Jan Kadar’s Adrift (1969) and Jess Franco’s 99 Women (1969), among others had barely lasted a year.  I had another large turnout for William Castle’s infamous thriller Homicidal (1961) and was surprised to learn that many of my friends had heard of but never seen any of Castle’s films such as House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler. Yet, despite the low budget look of the film and Castle’s unsubtle directing style, everyone seemed fascinated with the characters of Warren and Emily, a bizarre married couple who never appear together on-screen and are actually the same person. The film has an amusing sex change/Christine Jorgensen connection and builds to a creepy climax in a dark mansion. The print even included the original 60 second “fright break” gimmick that was advertised in the film’s theatrical release. In the coming weeks when I ran into people who had seen Homicidal at my house, they were still puzzling over details of Castle’s absurd, slapdash effort to imitate Hitchcock’s success with Psycho. More people actually took the farfetched premise more seriously than I ever imagined. William Castle would have been delighted.  Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974) had been an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Film and was a movie my wife wanted to see. I was curious as well about this intimate tribute to 73 year old musical conductor Antonia Brico, which was produced by singer/songwriter Judy Collins, directed by Jill Godmilow and depicted her struggle for work and recognition in a male-dominated profession. The bigger revelation, however, was the co-feature, Anthony Korner’s delightful Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (1973), which I credit with introducing me to Bollywood movies and Helen, one of its iconic stars who has appeared in over 500 features. There were plenty of tantalizing clips from some of Helen’s films interspersed with a playful behind-the-scenes interview with her as she practices yoga, puts on make-up and arranges her hair. I have since become a huge Helen fan and hardily recommend you watch her hyperactive gyrating in such eye-popping gems as Gumnaan (1965) and Teesri Manzil (1966).

Laurel and Hardy dancing to the tune of “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” in Way Out West (1937)

Most of my generation had grown up watching Laurel and Hardy comedies on television as kids so Way Out West (1937), one of the duo’s finest features, was an easy choice for an audience-pleasing program. In a movie full of iconic moments, the boys’ dance to “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” received enthusiastic applause and the scene where Stan is almost tickled to death by gold-digging saloon singer Sharon Lynn got the biggest laughs.

The Kilgore College Rangerettes are the stars of Elliott Erwitt’s subversive short, Beauty Knows No Pain (1972)

Once again, however, it was the opening short, Elliott Erwitt’s Beauty Knows No Pain (1972) that generated the most word of mouth in the ensuing weeks. People who were there that night can still quote dialogue to me from this subversive little documentary that dispensed with any voice-over narration and let the subjects speak for themselves. In this case, it was Miss Gussie Nell Davis and members of her famous dancing drill team, the Kilgore College Rangerettes. The 26 minute short depicts the events in a two-week summer camp competition in which the finalists will be inducted into the elite cheerleading corps. One of the more memorable moments was when Miss Gussie had her girls stand, legs exposed, against a prickly holly hedge without grimacing, commanding them to smile naturally, hence the title. This short generated as much, if not more, laughter than Way Out West but some film critics have pointed out more a more disturbing subtext. Amos Vogel in his landmark book Film as a Subversive Art, wrote, “…in its  portrayal of false values instilled and the over-all insipidness of an enterprise undertaken with utmost seriousness by its perpetrators – it must be read as a corrosive critique of bourgeois America…the ‘message’ resides in the visuals (and montage) and will be decoded by the viewer in accord with his own value system.”

Bill Robinson (left), Lena Horne and Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather (1943)

Stormy Weather was another high point. While this 1943 musical has a threadbare, uninspired storyline like so many Hollywood musicals of its era – singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne) refuses to give up her career to marry and settle down with fellow performer Corky Williamson (Bill Robinson) – the movie is a landmark in other ways for showcasing so many major musical legends in one movie. You can see the immortal Fats Waller on the piano performing “Ain’t Misbehavin'”, Cab Calloway is on hand to lend his unique scat singing style to “Geechy Joe,” and Lena Horne transforms the title song into a show stopping production number accompanied by the fantastic Katherine Dunham dance troupe. But it is The Nicholas Brothers who steal the film in their wild, gravity-defying leapfrog dance number down a giant staircase. The people who witnessed this the night of the screening gave the number a standing ovation and demanded that I roll the film back and play it again which, of course, I did. Most of my friends had never seen Lena Horne in a starring role either and this movie was one of her rare leading lady opportunities along with Cabin in the Sky.  By this point, Secret Cinema had a new location. I was now divorced and renting a room in the upper floor of a friend’s house on S. Pope Street though Phyllis continued to help with designing the flyers. Candle had a large, sloping backyard with an elevated screened-in porch that when covered with a king size white bed sheet made a fine outdoor screen. I would run an extension cord from the backyard toolshed and set up the projector and speakers at the bottom of the yard, projecting onto the makeshift porch screen. When weather permitted, it was the next best thing to a drive-in theater without the cars. For this program, I rented most of the titles from Kit Parker Films, a specialist in offbeat shorts and underrated B movies. Going Hollywood (1948) was in the tradition of the infamous Dogville animal shorts which were produced by Warner Bros. and still a cult sensation on TCM today. Part of the Paramount “Speaking of Animals” comedy short series, Going Hollywood features real animals with cartoon mouths speaking in human voices and cracking corny jokes. The Follies (1926) was a burlesque short (considered risqué in its day) in which a pudgy topless dancer tries to seduce the viewer with her bold shimmying.  The All-Star Bond Rally was a nostalgic 1945 time capsule hosted by Bob Hope with cameo appearances by Harpo Marx, Carmen Miranda, Bing Crosby, Harry James and His Orchestra and Frank Sinatra performing, “Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week.”

The Love Nest candy bars don’t look so appetizing when they are being prepared on the assembly line in Candy is a Health Food (1927)

The most offbeat selection of the night was Candy is a Health Food (1927), a silent promotional film for the Euclid Candy Factory in which mass produced chocolate assembled as Love Nest candy bars with peanuts added looked a lot like something else which is not so yummy…if you know what I mean. I also showed Betty in Blunderland, a classic 1935 Betty Boop cartoon, and The Philips Broadcast of 1938 was probably the first time my attendees had seen a George Pal puppetoon short with its distinctly stylized animation and glistening Gasparcolor. Almost every short was a hit, from Flop House (1932), featuring the cartoon character Scrappy to Ub Iwerks’ Merry Mannequins (1937), which was part of Iwerk’s popular Columbia “Color Rhapsodies” series. The evening ended on a joyous note with Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party (1935). Any time I could work Cab Calloway into a program, it was usually a good luck charm.  Of course, not all of the Secret Cinema events were successful in terms of attendance or execution. Some of the major disappointments include Burn Witch Burn aka Night of the Eagle (1962), which I programmed on the day after Halloween. Only my next door neighbors, Tyler and Leigh, showed up but it was still a treat. An underrated and atmospheric supernatural chiller, Burn Witch Burn has impressive special effects considering the low budget, excellent performances and an ingenious storyline (based on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife) in which a witch coven unleashes its evil on a small university campus. The scene where the stone eagle comes to life and pursues the film’s hero (Peter Wyngarde) is particularly memorable and Tyler, who was a Famous Monsters of Filmland devotee from an early age, liked it so much we watched it again the next day.

Vera Clouzot (left) and Simone Signoret prepare Paul Meurisse for a trip to the bottom of a swimming pool in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955)

I had a small gathering for Diabolique (1955) – maybe 8 people – but the problem this particular night was the projector I had borrowed from the UGA media center. There was a problem with the sound system and the dialogue sounded like people gargling underwater. Luckily, the print was in French with English subtitles so everyone could follow the storyline but not being able to clearly hear the voices of the main players – Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot and Paul Meurisse – was frustrating. Still, the dark, sinister setting of the rundown boarding school where the action takes place and a murder plot involving the cruel headmaster of the school came through with its power undiminished, especially that famous final apparition rising from the bathtub.

Donald Thompson plays himself in the landmark docudrama, The Quiet One (1948).

I could almost always count on a decent turnout for any program of shorts, but when I tried to add a feature length film to the mix, especially a documentary, the results were less predictable. And when the documentary choice dealt with serious and controversial subject matter…well, it wasn’t most people’s idea of a fun night out. I should have learned this from my earlier screening of The Quiet One (1948), Sidney Meyers’ semi-documentary account of a disturbed young African American boy and his rehabilitation at the Wiltwyck School for Boys. Co-written by James Agee, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb and Sidney Meyers and narrated by Gary Merrill, The Quiet One was more apt for a university film study class and not the regular Secret Cinema crowd who wanted to be entertained. But I had wanted to see Cinda Firestone’s documentary Attica since its initial release in 1974 and rented it thinking others might share my interest in this critically acclaimed film about the infamous Attica prison uprising in 1971; the incident ended in violence with 200 people wounded and 43 killed (including 11 hostages) in a massacre ordered by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and carried out by state troopers and National Guardsmen.

A 1974 documentary film by Cinda Firestone

Part of my interest in Attica had been sparked by Tom Wicker’s first hand account, A Time to Die; he was a New York Times reporter at the time who was requested by inmate spokesmen to come and observe the negotiations between the authorities and prisoners and report it to the world. Today, younger audiences may know Attica only from John Travolta crying out the name repeatedly with clinched fist in Saturday Night Fever (1977) in imitation of Al Pacino reciting the same mantra in 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon (The latter film was based on a real life incident in 1972 in which bank robber John Wojtowicz actually used the defiant “Attica, Attica, Attica” cheer to stir up the crowds and paint the cops as fascist oppressors). At any rate, not one person came to the Attica screening and I watched it alone in Candle’s backyard. Despite this, I was grateful to be able to see this film which never got a theatrical release in Athens. The other films in the program included Shevard Goldstein’s 7 minute tragicomedy, Krasner, Norman: Beloved Husband of Irma (1974) and Insomnie (1963), a 17-minute horror satire by French film comic Pierre Etaix, and Serbian filmmaker Aleksander Ilic’s 11 minute wildlife featurette, The Owl (1973). There are certainly worse ways to spend an evening alone.   Looking back, the Secret Cinema years marked a great period in my life when I organized regular gatherings of friends for the communal act of watching movies together, something that seems to be a lost art today as people privately stream movies on their computer or sample them in bits and pieces on digital devices. It was great fun rediscovering in a group setting certain films like the 1920 German silent The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the educational classroom favorite Dating Do’s and Don’ts (1949), and stars such as Judy Holliday; I showed two of her films, both directed by George Cukor, It Should Happen to You (1954) and The Marrying Kind (1954). I also took a certain pleasure in introducing friends to directors like Abel Gance (I showed the documentary Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite, 1963) and Peter Watkins (The War Game, 1967), a documentary-like reenactment of a future nuclear war, which I programmed with two shorts, Braverman’s Condensed Cream of Beatles (1974) and Richard Lester’s The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film (1959).

Nejla Ates, the belly dancing sensation of Turkish Delight (1949)

The final program of Secret Cinema took place on December 19, 1981 in the upstairs den of Candle’s house (I converted the small adjoining kitchen into the projection booth and hung a sheet at the far end of the room.) The lineup included Come Take a Trip on My Airship (1930), a Max and Dave Fleischer bouncing ball sing-a-long cartoon; The Little Broadcast (1942), another George Pal puppetoon musical; Turkish Delight (1949), in which Nejla Ates, accompanied by the W.W. Morrison Costa Rican Sextette, demonstrates how to belly dance; Elvis on Ed Sullivan which featured kinescopes of Presley’s original appearances on the variety show between 1955-57; Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943), a wild juke joint of a cartoon with broad caricatures by animator Bob Clampett (It was withdrawn from television distribution in 1968 for racial stereotyping with ten other WB cartoons such as Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs which became collectively known as “The Censored Eleven”); and Cavalcade of Girls (1950), a Robert Youngson newsreel about women in unlikely professions – lumberjacks, railroad conductors, aerial daredevils, etc.

The infamous Jayne Mansfield-Mickey Rooney meet-up at a Foreign Press Awards ceremony

The last short in the program had everyone howling and is one of those embarrassing live moments captured by the TV cameras long before the days of YouTube notoriety. This one enjoyed a cult reputation on the 16mm circuit for years – the 1958 Foreign Press Awards. In this excerpt, hosted by Ronald Reagan, Mickey Rooney has a close encounter with the buxom Jayne Mansfield as he accepts an award on behalf of Mexico’s famous comic, Cantinflas. At the time, I didn’t realize this would be my final Secret Cinema program but it was a fitting end to a labor of love.  (You can view the Foreign Press Awards footage at this link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDhdg0yWC2Q).

P.J. Soles (center) and The Ramones in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979)

A new work opportunity changed everything and I soon moved to Atlanta to work for Films Inc., one of the largest non-theatrical film distributors at the time (Its major competitor, Swank Pictures, is still in business). It was like being let loose in a candy store. I was given a 16mm projector and access to a warehouse packed with hundreds of movies as part of my job of renting films to colleges and universities. I was in a much better position to launch a Secret Cinema in Atlanta but instead I devoted more time to exploring the vast Films Inc. library (which included the Janus Collection) and eventually gave up the idea of running a film society since George Lafont’s The Screening Room, The Rhodes Theater (operated by Landmark Theaters at the time), the High Museum film series and other venues were doing a fine job of it. But I would still occasionally return to Athens to surprise friends with private screenings of Rock ‘n Roll High School, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Caddyshack and other often requested titles.

Billy Murray and his favorite tormentor in Caddyshack (1980)

Those were high times and I didn’t foresee how the film-going experience was going to change drastically with the arrival of home video. It pretty much put a stake in the heart of repertory cinema across the country. More people began staying home and binge-watching VHS tapes from their local video store. Today, repertory cinemas are a rarity in most major cities though New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a few others still offer a few alternative venues. Part of the problem is the increasing fragmentation of the movie-going audience due to technological advances but communal film experiences involving classic movies projected on film still occur at public events like the Telluride Film Festival and the annual TCM Classic Film Festival. Those are important events to support but I would love it even more if cinephiles took up the torch and started their own secret cinemas.  * This is a revised and updated version of a blog that was first published on the TCM Movie Morlocks website.