Helen (aka Helen Jairag Richardson Khan) is a Bollywood musical legend

The title of the 31 minute documentary Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (1973) is a homage to the Indian superstar Helen, who may possibly hold the title of the most famous and beloved of all Bollywood film legends. A nautch girl in India is one who specializes in demonstrating a wide variety of popular dances and Helen had few rivals at this as demonstrated by the remarkable range of her talent in a head-spinning array of film clips from her long career.

The famous typewriter musical number from the James Ivory/Ismail Merchant film, Bombay Talkie (1970)

Directed and narrated by Anthony Korner, this enormously entertaining portrait was written by James Ivory who had worked with Helen in the unforgettable opening sequence in Bombay Talkie (1970). In that scene, Helen, accompanied by numerous chorus girls, performs a dance on the keyboards of a giant typewriter while flirting and singing a duet with her co-star, Shashi Kapoor. While that musical number, which is being shot for the film-within-a film storyline of Bombay Talkie, marks her only appearance in the movie, it is more of a tribute to her by the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team as an iconic and enduring presence in Bollywood films.  Born on October 21, 1939 with the name Helen Jairag Richardson Khan, the dancer/actress will celebrate her 77th birthday this year. She began her career as a chorus dancer in Indian films in the early fifties but it wasn’t until 1958 that she had her first major breakthrough performing the song “Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu” in the Shakti Samanta film, Howrah Bridge. Although Helen did graduate to play leading roles in a few films, it was her work as a specialty dancer that has kept her busy for decades.  Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls intersperses numerous scenes of Helen dancing and singing (she was always dubbed by India’s most popular female playback singers) with interviews with the performer that take place in her dressing room and a limousine. At the time the documentary was produced, Helen had just celebrated the making of her 500th film, Dil Daulat Duniya (1972); she would go on to make over hundred more with her most recent credit in 2012 for Heroine.  In the course of the documentary, we learn that Helen had an American father and a Burmese mother and that the family had to flee to India during WWII when the Japanese invaded Burma. The actress doesn’t dwell on her childhood but gives you the impression it was a difficult time for the family and was probably the defining experience that made her such a tireless, hard-working performer (she often works in two long daily shifts when making pictures with only a brief break for lunch between morning and evening).  Despite the public impression of her as a glamorous star, the Helen we see at her makeup mirror applying eyeliner or adjusting a wig is a practical and unpretentious working girl who has no illusions about lasting fame. She realizes her top-billed days are numbered but admits she can probably extend her career by playing character parts or dancing in limited cameo appearances. For her retirement though she fancies the idea of operating a “groovy” boutique in the Sheraton Hotel. In contrast, the Helen we see on the screen in such Bollywood musicals as Gumnaam (1965), which was sampled in the opening credits of 2001’s Ghost World, is an exotic, alluring creature with a pulsating pelvis and the ability to change characters and costumes in the middle of hyperkinetic dance thanks to the magic of the editors.

The dancer’s mass appeal in India is best described by Robert Emmet Long in his book The Films of Merchant Ivory: “The dance numbers she performs sometimes involve melodramatic situations that may provoke a smile (in one Helen taunts a black convict locked in a cage who is driven to desperation to get at her); but one’s reactions are actually more complicated than this. Helen manages to generate a sense of excitement (at times perhaps even of danger) as the lid of Pandora’s box is opened, and the many shapes of forbidden desires and fantasy are released. Reinforced by the surging rhythms of background music, and the camera’s powerful concentration on her….Helen draws one into a dream world.”

Helen’s amazing tiki god/smokepot number in Gumnaam (1965), a wacky Bollywood ripoff of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians

If you have never seen a Bollywood musical, Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls is a wonderful introduction to the genre and one of its leading stars. You may even find yourself seeking out any Helen films that are available on DVD such as the supernatural romance Woh kaun Thi? (1964) or the delirious caper fantasy, Jewel Thief (1967). The iconic screen presence continues to delight and inspire fans and filmmakers even today. In fact, in 1999, Canadian filmmaker Eisha Marjara made an independent experimental film entitled Desperately Seeking Helen that was a highly personal account of her search in India for the famous superstar among other things.

Helen does an exotic beach sequence musical number in Gumnann (1965)

*This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.  Other links of interest:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ben-mirza/helen-bollywoods-queen-of_b_2213570.html

http://www.filmibeat.com/celebs/helen/biography.html

http://www.santabanta.com/bollywood/18638/ive-no-problems-with-the-item-no-helen-richardson-khan/

http://www.liveindia.com/salmankhan/helen.html

http://www.liveindia.com/salmankhan/helen.html

http://www.rediff.com/movies/2006/mar/29lp2.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnDZbDj1Iw8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmzETY4fNd8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80rFVTq3-I8

Maggie Smith and George Nader in the film noir, Nowhere to Go (1958)

Ealing Studios. The name conjures up memories of the great British comedies such as The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets.  Film noir, however, is not the genre that usually comes to mind although Ealing rubbed shoulders with it occasionally in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Pool of London (1951). Oddly enough, one of the studio’s final releases, Nowhere to Go (1958) was pure, unadulterated noir and a stylish, terse little thriller to boot. Sadly, it has been overlooked and unappreciated for years even though it marks the feature film debut of director Seth Holt and gave actress Maggie Smith her first major screen role.  A late entry in the noir cycle, Nowhere to Go has a cool, stylish feel to it unlike American-made noirs and seems more closely influenced in tone and visual style by the French crime films of the late fifties/early sixties such as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur and Le doulos. Like those films, trust and treachery are the ying/yang components which are put into play from the start when we are immediately pulled into an ingenious prison breakout sequence, all of it taking place without dialogue and utilizing only natural sound.

George Nader on the lam in Nowhere to Go (1958)

The film then follows the escapee, Paul Gregory (George Nader), as he makes his way from the prison yard to a hideout where he ponders the circumstances that brought him to this moment in time. In flashbacks, we see how Paul, posing as an aspiring playwright, managed to charm a wealthy widow into letting him handle the sale of her late husband’s valuable coin collection. An experienced con artist, Paul double-crosses his client, selling the collection for hard cash and depositing it in a safety lock box of which he possesses the only key. Later, when he’s picked up as the logical robbery suspect, Paul pleads guilty, thinking he’ll get off in a few months but instead, the judge decides to make an example of him and delivers a sentence of ten years.

George Nader as con artist Paul Gregory receives an unexpectedly harsh sentence in this scene from Nowhere to Go (1958)

Once Paul escapes from prison, his life takes an even more severe downward turn: his former partner Victor (Bernard Lee) steals his safety box key, most of his underworld connections shun him and he finds himself stranded without money or lodging. Soon he’s on the run again after Victor is murdered and he’s the prime suspect. Then he meets a young woman, Bridget Howard (Maggie Smith), who offers him refuge. Should he trust her and why should she take the risk?

Maggie Smith appears in her first major screen role in the film noir, Nowhere to Go (1958)

Part of the unexpected appeal of Nowhere to Go is the way it exploits in subtle ways your identification with Paul, a charming, intelligent but clearly sociopathic personality, while encouraging your growing suspicion of Bridget, the only seemingly innocent character in the story. Also, the bitterly ironic ending puts it in a class with the fateful climaxes of such cinematic gems as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Killing.

George Nader and a lifeless Bernard Lee in a scene from Nowhere to Go (1958)

The film passed unnoticed by most film critics of its day and the few that took the trouble to review it were either brain dead from viewing too many bad movies or unappreciative of a B movie which succeeded on a much higher level. Films in Review dismissed it as a “so-so suspenser…Mr. Holt’s directorial style is so terse you’d better not let your attention wander if you want to follow the none-too-probable and ever more complicated ins-and-outs.” Variety was one of the few to post a postive review proclaiming Nowhere to Go “a well-made, literate crime yarn with the usual polished stamp of the Ealing Studio…Nader’s performance is an intelligent study. Bernard Lee gives solid support…Maggie Smith provides an interesting new face and….suggests that she has a worthwhile future in pix.”

Maggie Smith and George Nader star in Nowhere to Go (1958), directed by Seth Holt

Smith, in her first major role in a movie (she had previously appeared in a bit part in 1956 in Child in the House), is superb as a lonely, sensitive rich girl who has trouble staying in school (she’s run away from five of them) and doesn’t seem to click with her own age group. This partly accounts for her empathy and willingness to help a shady character on the lam.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan and co-writer of the screenplay for Nowhere to Go (1958)

Smith was cast in the film due to the influence of drama critic Kenneth Tynan who had recently seen her perform on stage in the play Share My Lettuce and was co-writer (with director Seth Holt) of the screenplay for Nowhere to Go. Tynan, who had been a script editor at Ealing, was much more famous, influential…and controversial as a theatre critic at the Observer and literary manager of London’s prestigious Royal National Theatre. Still, he tried his hand at another screenplay many years after Nowhere to Go when he worked on the script for Roman Polanski’s version of MacBeth in 1971.

The English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (left) with his wife, Kathleen, and the Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (c), 1971. Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

A fascinating individual, Tynan deserves a blog tribute of his own if only to remind people that he was much more than the infamous creator of that once daring Broadway musical revue, Oh! Calcutta! He was highly quotable in his day and you’ve probably heard some of his witticisms such as “What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober,” or, on the subject of Roman Polanski, “The five-foot Pole you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”

Director Seth Holt (sitting, left) on the set of Nowhere to Go (1958)

Tynan was good friends with Seth Holt (he once referred to him as one of the three best conversationalists in London) and Nowhere to Go was indeed a promising debut for both of them as well as Maggie Smith. For a while, Holt’s career looked promising with features such as Scream of Fear (1961), a superior psychological thriller in the Hitchcock mode starring Susan Strasberg, and Station Six-Sahara (1962), a favorite film of director Martin Scorsese featuring Carroll Baker. Unfortunately, Holt never graduated to A-feature projects and died unexpectedly, six weeks into the shooting of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), a Hammer horror film.  But back to Nowhere to Go. Among the many pleasures of watching the film is the evocative black and white cinematography of Paul Beeson, which gives us a crook’s tour of London complete with back streets, dive bars, shabby flats and seedy neighborhoods. A downbeat mood of desolation and overwhelming loneliness is further driven home through the film’s score, composed and performed by jazz musician Dizzy Reece and his quintet. It remains the jazz trumpeter’s only film score to date. In addition, James Bond fans will get a kick out of seeing Bernard Lee – four years before his appearance as “M” in the series beginning with Dr. No (1962) – as the ruthless and completely loathsome villain of the piece.  While all of the supporting players are an integral part of Nowhere to Go‘s success, the real surprise here is George Nader as the debonair confidence man. It’s an impressive performance that goes from silky self-confidence to animal cunning to sheer desperation.

Bernard Lee (background) and George Nader in Nowhere to Go (1958)

During his Hollywood career he was rarely given the opportunity to play characters with any complexity or depth and was usually marketed as a beefcake hero in movies like Lady Godiva of Coventry (1955), The Second Greatest Sex (1955) and The Female Animal (1958). Except for the notoriously bad Robot Monster (1953) – a true guilty pleasure –  most American moviegoers are probably unfamiliar with his work, although in Europe, Nader still has a cult following due to his appearance in a series of spy thrillers as secret agent Jerry Cotton. It’s interesting to note that on the poster for Nowhere to Go the poster tag line announces “Meet a new star..tough, handsome George Nader” even though Nader was hardly a “new” star but in some ways it was a new beginning for the actor and the unofficial launch of his European career.   For many years it was rumored that Nader’s Hollywood career was sabotaged by his own studio, Universal, which felt pressure from the tabloids to expose gay actors. The story goes that the studio sacrificed Nader’s career in order to protect their major asset and boxoffice champion, Rock Hudson. The reality was that Nader and Hudson were close personal friends in real life; in fact, Nader and his longtime companion Mark Miller, Hudson’s personal secretary, were the main beneficiaries of Hudson’s estate when the actor died of AIDS in 1985.

Rock Hudson and George Nader on vacation

Nader relocated to Europe in the early sixties after a brief stint in U.S. television and he found steady work there until he was involved in a serious car accident that damaged his eye and made it impossible for him to work with bright lights on film sets. After that he turned to writing and one of his novels, Chrome (1978), a gay-themed science fiction novel with ideas possibly inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner) has earned an underground following of sorts.   Nowhere to Go is currently unavailable on any media format in the U.S. but if you have an all-region DVD player you might be able to still find a PAL DVD copy of it from Studio Canal in the UK. It also occasionally surfaces on TCM which is where I first saw it.

*This is a revised and updated version of an article that first appeared on the Movie Morlocks blog.

Other Links of interest:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/08/guardianobituaries.filmnews

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/572065/

https://newrepublic.com/article/119189/maggie-smith-my-old-lady

George Nader ends up in Nowheresville in Nowhere to Go (1958)

Anyone who is a fan of Italian giallos, European art house fare and off the grid cult films is familiar with actress Mimsy Farmer. She left Hollywood in the late sixties after her “youth exploitation” days with American International Pictures in such films as Hot Rods to Hell and Riot on Sunset Strip. Relocating to Europe, she pursued film roles there for the remainder of her career. As an actress she was rarely drawn to mainstream commercial projects and a sampling of her eclectic filmography includes such diverse titles as Barbet Schroeder’s drug addiction opus, More (1969), George Lautner’s erotic melodrama Road to Salina (1970), Dario Argento’s 1972 murder mystery Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Taviani Brothers’ critically acclaimed Allonsanfan (1974) and Serge Leroy’s survivalist thriller, La Traque (1975). But one of her most obscure and unusual roles is Fabio Carpi’s Corpo d’amore (aka Body of Love, 1972).

Mimsy Farmer is an enigmatic and beautiful desert island castaway in Corpo d’amore (1972)

Farmer has certainly carved out a niche for herself as a screen heroine who can be alternately vulnerable, adventurous, seductive and sometimes mentally unstable. Corpo d’amore, however, requires something different from Farmer which is not so much a performance as the personification of a romantic ideal for the two male protagonists, both of whom are named Giacomo.

A father (Francois Simon, left) and son (Giovanni Rosselli) become entranced with an unconscious woman (Mimsy Farmer) they discover on a beach in Corpo d’amore (1972, aka Body of Love).

Here is the setup: A professor/professional lepidopterist (one who studies butterflies) rents a villa at an remote beach resort to spend some time with his fifteen year old son whom he rarely sees. It soon becomes obvious that the pair are completely incompatible. Neither knows how to communicate with the other and part of the problem is that the father (Francois Simon) has spent most of his life absorbed in his work while his son (Giovanni Rosselli) has been farmed out to boarding schools (no mention is every made of the mother). Opting to end their vacation instead of trying to resolve their differences, they prepare to leave but stumble upon an unconscious woman (Mimsy Farmer) on the beach.

Mimsy Farmer stars as a mysterious woman who has washed up on a beach in Fabio Carpi’s Corpo d’amore (1972)

They debate over contacting the police and then decide to take the woman back to their villa so they can monitor her condition and nurse her to health. In time the woman (who is never identified by name) recovers but she speaks in a strange dialect that can’t be understood. Despite this, both father and son develop an obsession with the woman and agree to split their time with her; the son will take the “day shift” while the father claims the “night shift.” At first a rivalry develops between the two males but then they decide to work as a team with the son observing, “Together we make a normal man.” What transpires does not degenerate into a heated melodrama or a softcore menage a trois sex farce or anything approaching a conventional mainstream narrative. [Spoiler alert] There is a premeditated murder in the third act involving a stranger (Lino Capolicchio) who mysteriously turns up and can speak to Farmer in her own language but the crime is deliberately underplayed with little fanfare and is more about the murderers’ silent bond than the deed.

Lino Capolicchio and Mimsy Farmer have a short lived fling in Corpo d’amore (1972)

The bare bones premise of Corpo d’amore is simply a framework for director Fabio Carpi (who co-wrote the screenplay with Luigi Malaria) to explore several philosophical conceits such as man’s tendency to perceive women primarily as objects of desire and the inability of men to express themselves openly with each other. The movie, in other words, is European art house fare and not a genre film. It is primarily a cerebral experience where we are privy to the private thoughts of both Giacomos but the woman remains a mystery, an enigma. Is she suicidal? Is she playing a game? Why does she stay with them when she is free to go? The film’s ambiguous ending doesn’t answer any of these questions but it does suggest that father and son are both mirror reflections of each other at different stages in their life and that they actually do function better as one entity. Toward the end, the son says to his father, “We don’t even need to talk. We’re like two termites communicating telepathically.”

A father (Francois Simon, right) and son (Giovanni Rosselli) realize that their beach resort vacation is a bad idea in Corpo d’amore (1972).

Language and communication between human beings is indeed one of the movie’s central themes and it is best expressed in one scene where the older Giacomo feels free to unburden himself with Farmer because she can’t understand anything he tells her. “It can be an advantage not speaking the same language, not understanding each other,” he says. “You avoid justifications, gloomy confessions, the pitfall of regret. Besides, words are only used to fill up the silence, the fear of silence and all our other fears. We talk when we’re not really living.”

Mimsy Farmer doesn’t understand a word that Francois Simon says to her in Corpo d’amore (1972).

It is easy to see why Corpo d’amore didn’t attract much attention outside of Europe or receive a distribution deal in the U.S. because it is too slowly paced and verbose for audiences expecting a more exploitable Farmer film like Autopsy (1975) or The Black Cat (1981). The film abounds in cinematic metaphors and is closer in tone to something like Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991) or Luis Bunuel’s Tristana (1970). The closest equivalent in American cinema would be something like Robert Altman’s dreamlike 3 Women (1977) or Frank Perry’s allegorical The Swimmer (1968), and neither of those films were successful with audiences despite some rave reviews from nationally renowned critics.  

Still, Corpo d’amore is well worth seeking out for any Mimsy Farmer fan and for those who enjoy experimental, non-traditional character studies. For one thing, Farmer has rarely looked more beautiful or alluring (the stunning cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro who lensed Apocalypse Now and The Last Emperor) and she lends an unexpected ethereal quality to her character that makes you wonder if she is real or an apparition. The film’s hypnotic, dreamlike mood is further enhanced by a non-obtrusive but hauntingly effective film score that samples Bach, Paganini and Zamfir. And the pristine desert island setting serves as the perfect fantasy playground for the film’s trio. No other people appear in the film until the 45 minute mark when the father takes Farmer to dinner at a seaside restaurant.

Mimsy Farmer as an unobtainable fantasy figure in Fabio Carpi’s Corpo d’amore (1972)

Farmer’s role in the film is pure fantasy, an idealized projection of the desires of the two Giacomos, and unlike anything she’s ever done before or since. Her own thoughts on Corpo d’amore were revealed in an interview in Video Watchdog: “The director, Fabio Carpi, was from Milano. He was an intellectual, a writer, and it’s a very intellectual movie, which means, you know…who understands it? [laughs] I guess you get the idea that he was talking about a generation gap….What’s wonderful about that movie is the photography; it’s really beautiful…Nothing happens in it, but it’s pretty to look at!”  

Director Carpi has garnered many film festival honors over the years but he reminds relatively unknown on these shores. He has been much more active as a screenwriter than director, scripting more commercials offerings like Bandits in Rome (1968) starring John Cassavetes and Il Giorno del Cobra (1980), both in the Italian crime drama genre known as poliziotteschi. Of the twelve films and TV movies Carpi has directed, he is probably best known for Il Quartetto Basileus (aka The Basileus Quartet, 1983), which was a modest art house hit in the U.S. and was selected as 1984’s most foreign film by the National Board of Review.   

Corpo d’amore is currently not available as a domestic release in the U.S. but you can find an Italian import version of it through Amazon or other sellers (but you’ll need an all region DVD player to view it). The version I saw was a DVD-R from European Trash Cinema and the quality was quite good (it’s in Italian with English subtitles) so that is another option for Mimsy Farmer completists.   

Here is some intriguing behind the scenes footage of the making of Corpo d’amore –

It would be hard to find a more controversial figure in the history of space exploration than the brilliant rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun, the subject of J. Lee Thompson’s biopic, I Aim at the Stars (1960). 

The real Wernher von Braun explaining his rocket design

He was the creator of the V-2 rockets which bombarded London, causing massive death and destruction in World War II, as well as the visionary who made the Apollo project a reality for NASA. He was also a member of the Nazi party and some say a willing member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the paramilitary unit under Hitler’s command.

Curd Jurgens as scientist Wernher von Braun in the biopic, I Aim at the Stars (1960)

Von Braun was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 by U.S. President Gerald Ford. This was the man NASA proclaimed was “without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history. His crowning achievement…was to lead the development of the Saturn V booster rocket that helped land the first men on the Moon in July 1969.” Yet accusations of “war criminal” and “Nazi sympathizer” would hound Wernher von Braun to his grave. I Aim at the Stars is an attempt to present a balanced view of the complex figure in the guise of a film biography.   By the late 1950s, von Braun was hardly less than a national hero in America with his own talk show following his successful launch of the West’s first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. It was America’s competitive response to Russia’s Sputnik, a robotic spacecraft that successfully orbited the earth in October of that year. According to film scholar Steve Chibnall in his biography of J. Lee Thompson, “The US Army saw the celebration of von Braun’s achievement as a useful promotional and recruiting tool, and producer Charles H. Schneer spent two years researching the project and developing a script with Jay Dratler.”  Schneer’s own interest in sci-fi themes and space exploration is obvious from a glance at his filmography, which includes Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and First Men in the Moon (1964). The producer was also quoted in a Columbia Pictures promotional brochure for the film saying he was fascinated by how “a key scientist for the German Army during World War II [could] become one of America’s most honored citizens and a vitally valuable figure in the free world.”

Director J. Lee Thompson (right) on the set of The Guns of Navarone with Anthony Quinn

The choice of director J. Lee Thompson for the film was another matter. He had garnered considerable critical acclaim for his film Tiger Bay (1959), starring Horst Buchholz, John Mills and his young daughter Hayley in her major screen debut. Thompson, who had served during WWII as an RAF flyer, experienced the devastation caused by von Braun’s V-2 rockets firsthand but his reasons for making I Aim at the Stars were less personal and more of an intellectually curious nature: “I have always been interested in controversial subjects and I was happy to accept the challenge of making this one for it provided me with the opportunity of posing four questions of international importance:

1. What constitutes a War criminal?

2. If a country at war captures a ‘brilliant enemy scientist,’ who is guilty of inventing and using atrocity weapons – should that scientist be punished or should his brains be utilized for further scientific progress?

3. Should a Scientist be burdened with a Conscience?

4. Should a Scientist be ‘Nationalistic’?”

Curd Jurgens as German scientist Wernher von Braum in I Aim at the Stars (1960), directed by J. Lee Thompson

I Aim at the Stars was an international production for Columbia and was produced at the Bavaria Studios in Geiselgasteig, Germany. Thompson spent three months in Munich on pre-production while Schneer had story conferences with historical advisor Walt Wiesman, who had worked with von Braun in Germany; production supervisor George von Block (a former Luftwaffe pilot); Major General John Medaris, commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama; and Randy Morris, Chief of Technical Liaison at the U.S. Army Ordinance Mission at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.

Gia Scala, James Daly (center) and Curd Jurgens (far right background) star in the 1960 biopic, I Aim at the Stars

As for the casting, Curd Jurgens, one of the most internationally acclaimed German actors of his era, was the top choice to play von Braun. Australian actress Victoria Shaw landed the role of Maria, von Braun’s wife, and Herbert Lom, Adrian Hoven and Gia Scala filled out the key secondary roles. Scala, who plays Elizabeth Beyer, a spy for the Allies, would also portray an undercover turncoat in Thompson’s subsequent film, The Guns of Navarone (1961).

Curd Jurgens as scientist Wernher von Braun witnesses the effects of his V-2 missiles in I Aim at the Stars (1960)

The screenplay covers the major events in von Braun’s life up to the launch of Explorer I, including his earliest rocket experiments (one of them burns down his neighbor’s greenhouse), his appointment at the age of twenty-five as the technical director of the Peenemunde Rocket Center for the German army, his surrender to U.S. forces in 1945 and eventual transfer along with his staff to Fort Bliss, Texas. It also includes his later relocation to Huntsville, Alabama to work on nuclear ballistic missile tests and his struggle and ultimate regret at losing the first phase of the space race to the Soviet Union who got there first with the Sputnik launch.

Walt Disney & the real Wernher von Braun (right) circa 1955

As usual with screen biographies, some characters have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes or created as composites of several people as in the case of U.S. officer Major William Taggert (played by James Daly) and von Braun’s major detractor who lost his wife and child in the London blitz. Upon completion, von Braun approved the script and was “personally allowed to answer some of the charges leveled against him,” according to a Variety news item.

Curd Jurgens portrays Wernher von Braun in the biopic, I Aim at the Stars (1960)

Among the film’s many working titles were The Wernher von Braun Story, A Rocket and Four Stars and Give Me the Stars before Columbia decided to release it as I Aim at the Stars. Comedian Mort Sahl, whose opinion of von Braun was less than reverential, suggested the title be changed to I Aim at the Stars, but Sometimes I Hit London. In an attempt to lend the film some additional credibility, the movie opens with a special acknowledgment: “To the Department of Defense and particularly the Department of the Army of the United States our sincere appreciation for their cooperation and assistance during the making of the film.”

Curd Jurgens (far left) experiments with monkeys for his space exploration program in I Aim at the Stars (1960)

Like the real Wernher von Braun, controversy surrounded the theatrical release of I Aim at the Stars. It was particularly savaged by the British critics as was expected since feelings about the London blitz still ran high in the post-war years. C.A. Lejeune of the Observer wrote, “It horrifies me. In my view this is a film which ought never to have been made for the purpose of public entertainment.” Derek Hill of the Tribune observed, “Like a true clown, J. Lee Thompson has wound up the performance with the whitewash bucket on his own head.”

Herbert Lom (foreground) has a major supporting role in the 1960 biopic, I Aim at the Stars

Demonstrators passing out anti-Nazi pamphlets showed up at various screenings in London and anti-Fascists youth groups picketed the movie in other locations as well. Of course, von Braun anticipated all of this and held a press conference in Munich prior to the film’s premiere there, stating, “I have very deep and sincere regrets for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides. A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help with that war.”

Curd Jurgens (right) stars in a biography of scientist Wernher von Braun – I Aim at the Stars (1960)

I Aim at the Stars enjoyed a slightly better reception in the U.S. but critics were still divided over the movie. The New York Times noted that, “the film is conspicuously fuzzy and takes its stand on the none too certain ground that Dr. von Braun’s driving interest from boyhood was simply to develop rockets that could reach out into space.” Time magazine said “Unhappily, this cinema vehicle fails to fire. Instead, it explodes in a splatter of platitudes about the moral dereliction of the scientific community – personified in von Braun.” And Paul V. Beckley of The N.Y. Herald Tribune wrote, “As for the general tone of apology, I am personally a little fed up with this kind of thing…It would be refreshing to see a film in which a German is neither heroized nor villainized but studied with a scientific detachment. Some effort to do so is noticeable in this picture but not enough.” There were positive reviews too such as Variety which deemed the movie an “exciting, artfully constructed picture.”

The real Wernher von Braun in his youth

I Aim at the Stars is certainly a stylish film in terms of art direction and production values and boasts solid performances and a fast pace for its 107 minute running time. Oddly enough, the real von Braun was movie star handsome, a charming raconteur and all-round charismatic individual but Jurgens portrays him as a cold, emotionally remote intellectual for most of the film. While the subject matter lends it an undeniable fascination, there is also much time devoted in the film’s first half to the subplot of Anton Reger’s one-sided love affair with undercover spy Elizabeth Beyer, a situation that could be completely fabricated for dramatic effect.

Gia Scala, Curd Jurgens (center) and Herbert Lom star in I Aim at the Stars (1960)

There is also a heavy-handed emphasis on the ongoing animosity between Maj. Taggert and von Braun, who eventually debate each other on television and turn the film at times into a philosophical polemic. Nevertheless, I Aim at the Stars raises important questions about morality and ethics that most mainstream movies avoid today and it is worth seeing for anyone with an interest in von Braun’s life story.  Thompson had no regrets about making it and later said, “I knew that the British press would accuse me of making a hero out of Wernher von Braun, but what I did was, really, I told the true story, which is a fascinating one, and I Aim at the Stars is for me one of my better films.”

Curd Jurgens (center) celebrates a personal victory in I Aim at the Stars (1960)

It is interesting to note that after von Braun died in Alexandria, Virginia on June 16, 1977, the majority of his obituaries focused on his achievements in space explorations and very few even noted his Nazi party background. The Mittelwerk, the V-2 “buzz bomb” rocket factory that was instrumental in the London Blitz, and von Braun’s position of rank in the SS were never mentioned at all.

The real Wernher von Braun’s identification card

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

Other Websites of interest:

http://curdjuergens.deutsches-filminstitut.de/der-letzte-filmstar-zur-rezeption-von-curd-juergens-in-den-usa/?lang=en

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/remembering-the-nazi-scientist-who-built-the-rockets-for-apollo/254987/

http://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/vonbraun.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013521386874374.html

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E07E0DA1E31EF3ABC4851DFB667838B679EDE?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/feb/25/highereducation.news1

Kim Novak outside the dream house being designed by architect Kirk Douglas in Strangers When We Meet (1960).

It’s not unusual for pre-production publicity on a new film to revolve around the star or the director but it’s particularly rare when it focuses on a construction site. In the case of the glossy 1960 soap opera, Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine, the real star of the movie was the cliff top Bel Air home that was constructed especially for the film by architect Carl Anderson and art director Ross Bellah.  

Central to the film’s storyline, the house with the ocean view is the vision of architect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas); he is building it for successful novelist Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), who wants something different and unique. In the course of construction, Coe, who is bored with his marriage to Eve (Barbara Rush), meets and ardently pursues Maggie Gault (Kim Novak), a sexy, blonde housewife he first encounters at his son’s elementary school when they are dropping off their children. Coe’s advances are rebuffed by Maggie until she finally gives in, unable to bear any longer the strain and frustrations of a loveless marriage.

A scene from Strangers When We Meet (1960) that mirrors the alienation effect of modern life similar to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).

As Altar’s architectural wonder takes shape so do new conflicts: Larry and Maggie are torn between abandoning their marriages and families and running away together; Altar experiences mid-career panic and has second thoughts about his brilliant architect; Larry’s neighbor, Felix (Walter Matthau), detects Larry’s affair and attempts to seduce Eve when she is alone at home. Practically every relationship in Strangers When We Meet is a lost cause, but the one thing to emerge unscathed at the end is Coe’s ultra-modern dream home, perched high up in the Santa Monica mountains and glistening in the sun.

This is art director Ross Bellah’s own house design with architect Carl Anderson circa 1942 that reflects the style of the new house Kirk Douglas is building for Ernie Kovacs in Strangers When We Meet (1960).

When news of the Bel Air home’s construction was first covered by the press, Columbia studio publicists revealed that it was being built in stages for the movie Strangers When We Meet and that it would be sold after the film was completed. The more persistent rumor, however, was that the house was the future love nest for Kim Novak and her director Richard Quine, who had tried to keep their affair private for years. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons had often intimated that Novak and Quine were an item but New York Times reporter Joe Hyams out-scooped her when he dropped in unexpectedly on the set of Strangers When We Meet and asked Novak point blank, “Your honeymoon home?” Novak replied, “Stop reading the papers, Mr. Hyams. Stop listening to gossip. Richard Quine and I are having a romance; it’s as simple as that. Marriage is another matter entirely…I’m not sure I want to get married and I’m not sure it would work out for Dick and me. We have always been bothered by the undercurrent of work running through our long relationship. You know how hard that makes it, very hard.” (from Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess by Peter Harry Brown).

Kim Novak on the set of Strangers When We Meet (1960), with director Richard Quine in the background adjusting her lighting

There had always been speculation about the love life of the notoriously press-shy Novak with rumors of past affairs with Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ram Trujillo. The romance with Quine, however, was now public knowledge but on the set it had different ramifications. In her earlier years in Hollywood Novak had been a reclusive, passive presence on movie sets such as Pal Joey (1957) but now she had gained more self-confidence and was flexing her power as one of Columbia’s biggest stars.  According to Brown’s biography, “Her experience on Middle of the Night [1959] convinced her that she was an actress to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, she picked the wrong director (Quine) and the wrong star (Kirk Douglas) upon whom to vent her spleen. Technicians laughed behind their hands one afternoon when Kim seriously tried to give acting instructions to Douglas, who listened with a deadpan face. Off camera, he referred to her as the ‘broad Harry Cohn built.’ Within days, relations between the two stars became frosty and threatened to divide the company into armed camps. Kirk, usually a model of patience, began complaining about the time it took to photograph Novak from just the right angle, in just the proper light, and during just the right mood. The inference was that Quine was tilting the production heavily in favor of Kim.”

Kim Novak & Kirk Douglas star in the 1960 soap opera, Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine

In his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas recalled some of the difficulties in making Strangers When We Meet: “One morning, we were shooting a scene down at the beach. Obviously, Kim and Dick had been discussing the scene, and she was excited about a wonderful idea she had come up with. Apparently, Dick had agreed with her wholeheartedly. I listened to her argument, told her exactly why it was impossible to do the scene that way. She looked at Dick. He looked at me and said, ‘You know, Kim, he’s right.’ Kim went berserk. She ripped up the pages, started to make incoherent sounds, screamed, went nuts. It was impossible to shoot with her for the rest of the day. The next day we shot the scene the way it was written. We got through the picture, and I enjoyed working with her, although I do think that she convinced Richard to give the picture the wrong ending. The original ending in the book, very powerful, was that after our love affair had ended, Walter Matthau, who was playing a heavy, comes to pick her up in a car, and she decides what the hell, and goes off with him. Life goes on. Instead, she preferred to spurn him, pull her trench coat up around her neck, and walk off like Charlie Chaplin. I didn’t think that was the right ending, but those are the hazards of working with someone who’s romantically involved with the director.”

Kim Novak in a scene from Strangers When We Meet (1960) with art direction by Ross Bellah (working with architect Carl Anderson).

Douglas’s recollection of the original ending isn’t entirely accurate because HIS character is the one that calls off the affair and tries to make a go of it with his wife and family in Hawaii where an ambitious five-year project awaits him. The ending from Evan Hunter’s novel (he also wrote the screenplay) wouldn’t make much sense either since the Walter Matthau character was an obnoxious lech and completely inconceivable as the sort of man Maggie would gravitate toward to fulfill her emotional and sexual needs. The present ending of Strangers When We Meet actually rings true since none of the characters are able to escape their own private hells. Perhaps Novak was right to sway Quine’s opinion on the film’s conclusion. Novak “would always refer to Strangers When We Meet as ‘that great lost weekend.’ (Several years later Kim reaped revenge on her former male lead in Boys’ Night Out [1962] by having James Garner chastise a smiling friend with the lines: ‘Stop showing off your teeth. Who do you think you are? Kirk Douglas?’).”

Kirk Douglas & Kim Novak star in Richard Quine’s Strangers When We Meet (1960).

Strangers When We Meet was one of the last films Novak made for her home studio Columbia – her final film for them, The Notorious Landlady (1962), was released the following year – and it also heralded the end of her reign as a major star. She never again experienced the earlier career heights of such films as Picnic (1955) or Vertigo (1958). Douglas, of course, was still in the prime of his career and followed Strangers When We Meet with the Oscar®-winning epic, Spartacus (1960), in which he served as executive producer and star. Strangers When We Meet might not have been a happy experience for either actor and it certainly wasn’t well received by critics of its era or the public. It didn’t receive any Oscar® nominations either but, regardless of this, the film yields numerous pleasures that were overlooked at the time.

Married architect Kirk Douglas with his kids meets housewife Kim Novak and her child in Strangers When We Meet (1960).

Hipster comedian and innovative television host Ernie Kovacs provides a welcome diversion from the heavy soap opera proceedings as the popular writer who demands the appropriate house for his oversized ego. His character, a borderline lush and habitual womanizer, is a completely improbable character and seems to belong in a different movie but he is still an amusing and charismatic presence in the film. It’s a shame he didn’t get the opportunity to explore the film medium as he did television; a fatal car wreck in 1962 ended a promising career.

Architect Kirk Douglas shares his personal troubles with successful author Ernie Kovacs in Strangers When We Meet (1960).

The other great scene-stealer in Strangers When We Meet is Walter Matthau as the loathsome Felix who enjoys baiting Coe with unwanted advice about his not-so-private affair with Maggie. He’s rarely been sleazier than the scene in which he corners Eve in her home alone during a rainstorm – “Come on, Eve, I know you want to…” – and the film’s final shot of Felix shows him sharing his “wisdom” with his young son as they walk to school, observing numerous housewives along the way, “Love’em all, Brucie, love’em all!”

Walter Matthau plays a lecherous neighbor who prepares to put the moves on Barbara Rush (the wife of Kirk Douglas in Strangers When We Meet).

The film’s view of life in suburbia is also fascinating for its candor in addressing marital problems and couples who have resigned themselves to a dull existence together because they don’t have the guts or honesty to live the lives they really want. Other films from the same era such as No Down Payment (1957) also explored marital discontent in the suburbs but Strangers When We Meet stands out for its sad truths delivered within a glossy, artificial milieu.

Happy hour at the Coe household in Strangers When We Meet (1960), starring Kirk Douglas and Barbara Rush

It’s no wonder the film fared poorly with moviegoers who expected a romantic fantasy and got a dose of Jean-Paul Sartre, American-style. The film could almost pass as a Douglas Sirk melodrama on the order of All That Heaven Allows (1955) or There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) and the dialogue is just as self-conscious and ironic. In one scene, Kirk Douglas’s character admits, “I’m such a phony. I’ve got a drawer full of manufactured labels. Architect, husband, father, man. I sew them into my clothes. The suits never fit.”

Kirk Douglas & Kim Novak cheat on their spouses in the 1960 soap opera, Strangers When We Meet.

The most impressive aspects of the film, however, are Ross Bellah’s stylized art direction, the beautifully framed widescreen Technicolor cinematography of Charles Lang (he received over 18 Oscar® nominations in his career) which could be printed as stills and sold in art galleries, and the Bel Air dream house, which we are privileged to see from the laying of the foundation through its construction to its final completion as an architectural marvel…..or monstrosity, depending on your personal aesthetic.

Kirk Douglas & Walter Matthau play dissatisfied husbands in suburbia in Strangers When We Meet (1960).

Strangers When We Meet was previously released on DVD by Columbia in a widescreen print in 2005 and may still be available from some vendors. There is no information yet on its availability on Blu-Ray but it would make an ideal choice for that format.

Kirk Douglas & Kim Novak star in Strangers When We Meet (1960), directed by Richard Quine

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

Other websites of interest:

http://dearoldhollywood.blogspot.com/2009/05/strangers-when-we-meet-film-locations.html

http://mrpeelsardineliqueur.blogspot.com/2013_07_01_archive.html

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/1999/03/sammy-davis-kim-novak-dating

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/9586303/Kim-Novak-tells-all.html

(from left to right) Haydee Politoff, Ida Galli and Silvia Monti in Queens of Evil (aka La Regine, 1970)

Tales of the Devil seducing and destroying man have been a popular theme in cinema since the silent era but Queens of Evil (aka La Regine,1970) puts a new spin on the concept which departs from the more familiar treatments we’ve seen in Faust (1926), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968). It’s weird, dreamlike, sexy, ominous, often unpredictable and unintentionally funny at times (in the English dubbed version). Though often lumped in the Italian horror category, Queens of Evil, directed by Tonino Cervi, is closer to a gothic fairy tale for adults or a cautionary allegory for its era about young idealists who reject the status quo but are susceptible to corruption when their innermost desires are unleashed.   

Italian filmmaker Tonino Cervi is not well know in the U.S. but he was an important figure in Italian cinema from the fifties through the late seventies – first as a producer for such high profile talents as Bernardo Bertolucci (The Grim Reaper), Alberto Lattuada (Mafioso), Michelangelo Antonioni (Red Desert) and Francesco Rosi (The Moment of Truth) and secondly, as a screenwriter and director who gravitated toward lightweight, erotic comedies (Chi dice donna dice donna) and overheated melodramas (Nest of Vipers). Spaghetti western fans hold him in held regard for his 1968 directorial debut, Today It’s Me, Tomorrow You (aka Oggi a me…domain a the!), inspired by John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, but his follow-up effort, Queens of Evil (aka La Regine,1970), is unlike anything else he ever did and deserves to be better known. The satanic aspects of the film may have been influenced by Rosemary’s Baby but Queens of Evil also prefigures The Wicker Man (1973) and The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) in terms of sacrificial rites and secret covens.

A typically bizarre image from the dreamlike Italian horror fantasy, Queens of Evil (1970).

[Spoilers ahead!] The film begins as a road trip but soon descends into a head trip with free-spirited hippie David (Ray Lovelock) riding his motorcycle into parts unknown in the rural countryside. As darkness falls, he encounters a well dressed gentleman (Gianni Santuccio) and his luxury limo, stranded on the road with a flat tire. David offers to help and the stranger responds, “I’d offer you a hand but a year ago I sprained my back and you’d need two jacks to straighten me up again.” As David replaces the tire, the limo driver engages him in a conversation that questions his values and world view.
Man: About your hair. You look like a tramp.
David: Maybe that’s the way I want to look.
Man: But why go around looking like a tramp when you can do lots of important things that can be useful. Nowadays it’s possible with a little effort to find yourself a good position. You can get married, raise a family.
David: I don’t think I can stay faithful to one woman.
The stranger ends their conversation by saying, “You’ll realize too late that you’ve reneged on your revolutionary ideals and fallen at last as a slave to sex and therefore to the devil.”

Gianni Santuccio plays the ominous stranger David (Ray Lovelock) meets on the road at night in Queens of Evil (1970).

The stranded motorist has an ominous aura which becomes even more pronounced as their brief encounter concludes with a high speed chase/car crash. After that, the film wanders into increasingly strange territory as David meets Liv (Haydée Politoff), Samantha (Silvia Monti) and Bibiana (Ida Galli aka Ewelyn Stewart), a sister trio who live in a remote house in the forest (David compares it to “Snow White’s house” which sets up the dark fairy tale-like narrative transition). The women with their outlandish wigs, wardrobes, makeup and behavior could be exotic hookers or avant-garde performance artists or maybe witches.

(from left to right) Ida Galli, Haydee Politoff and Silvia Monti in Queens of Evil (1970)

The interior of the sisters’ house is equally bizarre like some pop art experiment gone awry with floor to ceiling portraits of the women adorning the walls and brightly colored futons and pillows covering the floors. They invite David to stay as long as he likes and he abandons his cross country motorcycle adventure to sink further and further into the hedonistic pleasures that are offered him. You know something is seriously wrong at his first breakfast with the sisters when they serve him two huge cakes – appropriate for a wedding party, not four people – and he chows down with animalistic relish.

David (Ray Lovelock) proves that hippies are slobs at the dinner table in Queens of Evil (1970).

David is soon transformed from a free-spirited drifter into a more than willing house guest. But his laid-back, idyllic existence eventually gives way to doubt and suspicions about the behavior of his hosts. In one of the film’s most atmospheric scenes, David follows the three women deep into the woods where he witnesses them perform a strange rite by firelight. Other odd occurrences include a late night visit from a mysterious male caller, a surreal lightning storm (cue the cheesy special effects), a foreboding dream sequence and the recurring motif of an owl who knows and sees all.  If Queens of Evil has a discernible flaw it is the conception of the main protagonist. On first impressions, David is likable enough but it soon becomes apparent he is about as perceptive as a fencepost and so slow in recognizing impending signs of danger that he makes the perfect victim. Perhaps it was the intention of screenwriters Raoul Katz, Antonio Troiso and director Cervi to make David a foolish and unsympathetic representation of hippie culture (it is based on a story by Benedetto Beneditti). Accepting that as the original intention, there is certainly some macabre humor to be had as we watch the sisters ensnare David in their web. But the film and the gruesome finale would have had much more impact if the audience actually had any empathy for the young drifter.

The three sisters and their house guest (Ray Lovelock) attend a strange party at a nearby castle in Queens of Evil (1970), directed by Tonino Cervi.

That said, the casting of Ray Locklove as the hapless David is more than adequate. He has a bland handsomeness comparable to Edward Albert (Butterflies Are Free) or Richard Thomas (John-Boy on the TV series The Waltons) and conveys the right mixture of naivety and cluelessness in his interactions with everyone he meets (he also performs the main theme over the opening credits). Much more compelling are the three sirens, each of whom exhibit distinctly different personalities from each other.

Ida Galli (aka Ewelyn Stewart) plays the enigmatic Bibiana in Queens of Evil (1970).

Ida Galli as Bibiana is easily the spookiest and most inscrutable. My favorite scene is when David encounters her at a table with a bowl of animal guts and some limp, furry bodies. “Those are embalming fluids,” she says matter-of-factly as David eyes her taxidermy tools. “This is my favorite hobby. I adore embalming animals. It’s like stopping….stopping time. Youth. Beauty. Forever. Don’t you find it fascinating?”

The Spanish film poster for the 1972 horror thriller Maniac Mansion, one of Evelyn Stewart’s many Italian genre films.

Most American viewers who are well versed in cult cinema and international genre films know Galli as Evelyn Stewart, an Italian actress who has appeared in numerous giallos (The Sweet Body of Deborah, The Bloodstained Butterfly), spaghetti westerns (Adios Gringo, The Unholy Four) and poliziotteschi melodramas (Syndicate Sadists, Napoli Spara!).

Silvia Monti as Samantha tempts David (Ray Lovelock) in the horror fantasy, Queens of Evil (1970).

The more overtly seductive and provocative of the three sisters is Silvia Monti as Samantha. First she taunts David by stealing his motorcycle and then she lures him into the lake for a swim and frustrates his every advance until he is in a state of total confusion. The hunter is finally captured by the game in a discreet sex-on-the-beach scene but we realize Samantha has orchestrated the entire scenario.

A swim in the lake ends in seduction in Queens of Evil (1970), starring Silvia Monti & Ray Lovelock.

The wild card in the film is French actress Haydée Politoff as Liv, who seems more innocent compared to her sisters but is eventually revealed to be quite duplicitous. Politoff has had a brief but interesting career with such highlights as the female lead in Eric Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967) plus a cameo in his Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), one of beguiling vixens in Giuliano Biagetti’s erotic thriller Interrabang (1969) and the virginal object of Paul Naschy’s affection in Dracula’s Great Love (1973).

Haydee Politoff stars as Liv in Queens of Evil (1970).

Queens of Evil is currently unavailable on any format in the U.S. or Europe through any authorized seller. Surely Arrow Films or Raro Films or some DVD/Blu-Ray distributor devoted to restoring overlooked Italian films will make this available someday. In the meantime European Trash Cinema offers a fine looking, English dubbed DVD of the film.

One of the memorable images from Tonino Cervi’s horror fantasy, Queens of Evil (1970, aka La regine).

Other websites of interest:

http://www.lovelockandload.net/blog/wordpress/?tag=ray-lovelock

Alaskan actor Ray Mala (aka Mala, on right) stars in the 1933 MGM film ESKIMO.

How many famous or highly regarded films about the Inuit culture can you name? Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is probably at the top of the list but what else? The 1955 Oscar-nominated documentary Where Mountains Float, Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1960), Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 epic, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), and Mike Magidson’s Inuk (2010) are all impressive achievements which need to be better known. But one of the most moving and evocative films is from 1933 entitled Eskimo, a word which is now an outdated and offensive reference to the Inuit and Yupik tribes who populate the Arctic Circle and northern bordering regions.  

Director W.S. Van Dyke presents Myrna Loy with a birthday cake on the set of Manhattan Melodrama (1934).

The fact that it was directed by MGM veteran W.S. Van Dyke – who helmed more than 85 features in his 25-year career hence the nickname “One Take Woody” – seems unlikely on first impressions. Van Dyke is best known for such commercial, audience-pleasing films as Manhattan Melodrama (1934), The Thin Man (1934) and San Francisco (1936) but Eskimo reflects aspects of the director’s skill at depicting exotic cultures from earlier films (The Pagan, The Cuban Love Song) and is a much more successful merger of ethnographic documentation and dramatic narrative. Here is a brief synopsis:

In the Canadian Arctic, a proud Inuit hunter known as Mala travels more than 500 miles across the frozen tundra with his wife and family. Their destination is Tjarnak where Mala plans to trade furs for man-made necessities with the captain of a whaling expedition. Eventually they reach the white man’s outpost where Mala conducts a successful trade, but the ship’s captain proves to be a treacherous character who brings nothing but misfortune, shame and tragedy to Mala and his people.   W. S. Van Dyke made a name for himself at MGM in the late twenties as a director whose forte was making dramatic adventure stories enhanced by exotic documentary footage using real locations and local natives. His 1929 feature, White Shadows in the South Seas, enjoyed considerable controversy at the time because the original director, documentarian Robert Flaherty, was fired midway through production after constantly clashing with studio executives over the film’s original intent. Van Dyke stepped in to complete the film, transforming Flaherty’s ethnographic study of the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific into a scenic melodrama about a alcoholic doctor (Monte Blue) and his love for a native girl (Raquel Torres).

Raquel Torres and Monte Blue (on ground) in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928).

Despite the on-location production problems on White Shadows in the South Seas, Van Dyke headed back to the South Seas to film The Pagan with Ramon Novarro in 1929. Then, in 1930, the director traveled with a cast and crew to Africa to shoot Trader Horn (1931) which was also plagued by bad luck and accidents; the sound equipment truck became submerged in a river, the female lead, Edwina Booth, fell ill in the tropical heat, and Harry Carey, the hero of the film, almost lost his leg to a crocodile. Van Dyke was later able to recycle some of his African jungle footage for his 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man, the first in a long line of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations starring Johnny Weissmuller.  Later that same year Van Dyke set out to make Eskimo (1933), hyped by MGM as his most ambitious project to date. It was no less arduous to film than his previous expeditions to some of the world’s most remote locales. Taking a camera crew to the northern tip of Alaska, Van Dyke arrived at his shooting location during the winter of 1932-33. Weather conditions were harsh and Van Dyke’s ship was soon rendered immobile by the heavy ice. Luckily, their guide, Peter Freuchen (his two books on Eskimo culture – Storfanger (1927) and Die Flucht ins weisse Land (1929) – served as the basis for John Lee Mahin’s screenplay), helped the crew deal with the local natives and capture some stunning landscapes and hunting footage involving walrus, caribou and a polar bear.

The film crew for W. S. Van Dyke’s Eskimo (1933).

At times Eskimo resembles a documentary with its remarkable scenes of salmon spear fishing or husky sled-teams traveling across the ice. Also adding a sense of authenticity was Van Dyke’s insistence on having all of the Inuit speak in their own dialect, which is often translated on-screen via subtitles or a narrator.

Eskimo does not open with standard movie credits. Instead, it has an introduction stating that no actors were used in the film (except for the roles of the white traders and the Royal Mounted Canadian Police). Despite Van Dyke’s claim that all of the Inuit were played by tribal people from the Arctic region, Mala and Lotus Long, cast respectively as Mala and Iva (one of Mala’s wives in the film), were actually professional actors. Mala, in fact, would go on to enjoy a successful Hollywood career, playing variations on his innocent native in Last of the Pagans (1935), Call of the Yukon (1938), and The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942).

Ray Mala aka Mala

Unfortunately, Eskimo was not a success at the box office. Perhaps moviegoers at the time didn’t have the same curiosity about the Arctic that they did about the Pacific Rim or Africa but most likely it was the depressing storyline that discouraged ticket buyers. Still, it garnered positive reviews from most critics. A typical example is this excerpt from Mordant Hall’s review in The New York Times:  “It is a remarkable film, one that often awakens wonder as to how the camera men were able to photograph some of the scenes and record the impressive sounds. The acting of the Eskimos, or their ability to do what was asked of them by the director, is really extraordinary.” The film also won an Oscar for Best Film Editing.

The White Men Cometh in Eskimo (1933)…and that’s bad news.

Though it occasionally veers off into melodramatic excess, Eskimo is an often powerful indictment of white civilization and its destructive impact on indigenous cultures. Mala’s performance as the victimized main character is genuinely heartrending and the film has a classic structure not unlike the great stage tragedies of Shakespeare. Because it was filmed prior to the enforcement of the Production Code, there is also some surprising sexual content such as the scene where Mala offers his wife (with her consent) to his white friend for the night. It is handled in a matter-of-fact, unsensationalized manner with no moralizing. More objectionable to contemporary viewers might be the footage of animal slaughter including walrus, birds and whales. It was simply a way of life and survival for the Inuit and trappers but could be viewed as the early beginnings of the whole Mondo Cane shockumentary movement.

Whale slaughter in the 1933 docu-drama Eskimo.

Eskimo was unavailable on any format in recent years until Warner Archive Collection released it as a DVD-R in July 2015.

* This is a revised and expanded version of the original article that first appeared on tcm.com

Ray Mala (left) as the title character Eskimo with his on-screen family

Other websites of interest:

https://consortiumlibrary.org/archives/Photographs/PhotoExhibits/MichaelPhilipCol.html

http://www.adn.com/film-tv/article/beloved-alaska-classic-eskimo-gets-modern-release-dvd/2015/08/15/

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1932/05/30/page/15/article/movie-group-goes-north-to-film-eskimo

https://carensclassiccinema.wordpress.com/short-reviews-2016/

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~aknomebo/Bios.htm

http://arcticiceland.is/en/frettir/261-scapula-divination-and-the-film-eskimo-at-the-university-of-akureyri

http://laelwarrenmorgan.com/eskimo-star.html

Japanese pop culture can be so crazieeee, especially as filtered through their national cinema! You already know this if you’ve seen any films by Noboru Iguchi (A Larva to Love, 2003; RoboGeisha, 2009), Gen Sekiguchi (Survive Style 5+, 2004), Sion Sono (Exte: Hair Extensions, 2007; Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, 2013), and especially Minoru Kawasaki, who likes plopping animal-suited characters into his genre films in order to mix it up with the humans who, in most cases, might be initially surprised but usually become complacent about the absurdity of the situation.

A good example of this is Kawasaki’s The Calamari Wrestler (2004) which is the sort of movie which will immediate polarize potential viewers into two camps based solely on images or clips from the film, its plot description or even the title alone. It all depends on how you feel about a movie in which a former championship wrestler-turned-squid returns to the ring to reclaim his title, win back his girlfriend who is now the fiancee of the current champion, and battle corrupt promoters and new rivals such as Squilla, the boxing shrimp.   

Ridiculous? Stupid? Infantile? Guilty as charged on some levels and some readers have already moved on to other blogs or websites. But for the more curious minded, Kawasaki’s films, despite their absurd premises, unapologetic on-the-fly production values and no-budget special effects, are on to something that resonates beyond the lowbrow humor. All of his films from The Calarmari Wrestler to Executive Koala (2005) to The World Sinks Except Japan (2006 – Great title!) to Pussy Soup (2008) poke fun at but also critique contemporary Japanese culture.

Director Minoru Kawaski is a master of silly cinema

The country seems to be having a major identity crisis, compounded by their declining importance in the world’s economy as well as the conformist nature of their society. According to 21st century films such as Bashing (2005) – Masahiro Kobayashi’s movie about a Japanese aid worker in Iraq who is kidnapped, held as a hostage and later released only to become an embarrassment and pariah in her own country – it takes guts to be an individual there and stand out from the crowd. The risks could be more than anyone anticipated and this is also a predominant theme in Kawasaki’s films where such outsiders as Executive Koala or The Calamari Wrestler are cartoonish metaphors for those who try to fit in spite of their uniqueness.

Female fans pose with Japan’s latest sports hero in The Calamari Wrestler (2004).

I have to admit that I often find Japanese pop culture baffling but I am continually drawn to their cinema which has a repulsion/attraction effect. Michael Atkinson, in an article on Minoru Kawasaki’s films on IFC.com, voiced a similar opinion when he summed up the strangeness of the country’s identity on screen, stating “…what I see flowing out of Japan triggers a flight response: the cute cult, the schoolgirl obsession, the giant-penis-monster animated porn, the apocalyptic visions, the oceans of twisted-fairy-tale manga, the deification of inexplicable toys, the combination of all of the above, and so on. It’s as if, by Western  junk-culture standards in the last three or so decades, Japan is going joyfully, helplessly insane.”

Boxing films like Rocky become fodder for director/writer Minoru Kawasaki in the demented satire The Calamari Wrestler (2004).

For proof of this, look no further than The Calamari Wrestler. Imagine Rocky with the title character played by a guy in a big ten-armed squid costume or that other fight drama classic The Harder They Fall with promoter Humphrey Bogart’s boxer wannabe portrayed by a man in a gorilla suit. While this one-joke premise might be briefly amusing to think about, not many filmmakers would be foolhardy enough to actually base a feature film on it, much less be able to sustain the viewer’s interest beyond the sixty minute mark, if even that long.

The Calamari Wrestler enjoys a romantic interlude with girlfriend Miyako (Kana Ishida).

The beauty of The Calamari Wrestler is the fact that you quickly adjust to the utterly ridiculous appearance and behavior of the title character because your attention is diverted from his “otherness’ to the fast-moving storyline that throws numerous subplots and characters into the mix.  Pretty soon you’re wondering if Miyako (Kana Ishida), the girlfriend of wrestling champ Koji Taguchi (Akira), is going to leave him for the Calamari Wrestler, the reincarnation of her former lover and ex-wrestling legend Kan-Ichi Iwata (Osamu Nishimura). And will the squid hero refuse to participate in a fixed fight arranged by the corrupt President of the Pro Wrestling League? Or will Calamari become seduced and ultimately undone by all of the media attention, groupies and public adoration he receives? Instead, you should probably be asking yourself, “Why am I watching a movie about some guy in a dumb looking rubber squid suit? You can see the zipper! Why is he wearing those ridiculous boots?” This is theatre of the absurd territory, albeit on a much sillier, slaphappy level than Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story or Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.   On one level The Calamari Wrestler could be about Japan’s need for a national hero or even superhero. In a less obvious way, the film might be a critique of what director Masahiro Kobayashi referred to as Japan’s “village mentality” in interviews about his film Bashing, which was based on a real incident, one in which an individual’s personal actions are seen as a reflection on the entire community and result in a situation where everyone feels dishonored.  Most of all though The Calamari Wrestler is a comic fantasy that parodies everything in the culture from reincarnation to athlete endorsement ads to tabloid exposes to the cliches of romantic movies (Miyako and Calamari embracing in a golden sunset accompanied by sappy soundtrack music).  And, of course, the Rocky/Karate Kid associations are unavoidable as our underdog hero longs to prove himself. “I want to be loved,” he tells the sleazy Pro Wrestling promoter. “People will love me if I win. For them, a hero is a winner.” Instead, the promoter jeers him. “Like hell you’ll be loved, you monster. Look in the mirror!” In his master plan, “The threat of nuclear weapons and terrorism and all the chaos of the today’s society can be embodied by Calamari!”

Calamari has a heart to heart talk with his pal under the polluted twilight sky.

Some of the biggest laughs in the film are generated by Calamari’s preparation for the big showdown with Squilla – a hilarious montage a la Rocky of him lifting barbells, running on a treadmill, doing situps, running along the river with his trainer – and the wrestling match between him and Octopus Man which is almost obscene in the way the blobby, rubbery bodies writhe together in an entanglement of body parts. Kawasaki and co-writer Masakazu Migita also pepper the dialogue with odd remarks or weird asides such as the Calamari Wrestler telling reporters he is from Hunza, Pakistan or having Squilla toy with our hero in the ring, promising him “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of your widowed wife,” followed by an evil laugh.

The Calamari Wrestler parodies the rituals of the ring and everything else.

Kids will love The Calamari Wrestler too (they won’t need to read subtitles to follow it) and it’s one of the rare kid friendly movies from Japan that can entertain adults too, at least those who are willing to suspend their disbelief. Yes, Miyako and Squidman do get it on in one scene but it is non-explicit and tastefully done……I can’t believe I said that but it’s true. Minoru Kawasaki’s other films since The Calamari Wrestler, however, have become progressively wilder, more unpredictable and, for some, less accessible.  I found Executive Koala to be a fascinating mess with the first third of the film a brilliant deadpan satire of Japanese corporate life. The middle section veers off abruptly into black comedy with stylized violence and gore and the final third has a whimsical tongue-in-cheek quality that includes a music video singalong that appears inspired by “The Telephone Song” in Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and the music of the B-52s. It’s schizophrenic to say the least and even when it goes off the rails, it remains strangely engrossing. The aptly titled The World Sinks Except Japan (2006) is a disaster movie parody with some wicked humor aimed at foreigners, Japanese politicians and other sacred cows but the poverty row budget (most of it takes place in a bar as the patrons witness the unfolding events) and uneven pacing prevent it from being one of Kawasaki’s best. The Rug Cop (2006) is a cop comedy starring Moto Fuyuki as a detective whose hair piece functions as a lethal flying weapon. The idea is funnier than the film which wears out its one joke premise pretty quickly but check out the trailer which is the perfect length. I’ve not seen The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008), Kawasaki’s humorous homage to Kazui Nihonmatsu’s 1967 sci-fi adventure, The X from Outer Space, or Pussy Soup ( 2008) about a cat who fails at being a supermodel like his father and becomes a ramen chef instead.  While Kawasaki’s films are sometimes hit or miss the premise is almost always delightfully demented and I wouldn’t expect anything less from a guy whose first film was about killer tofu (inspired by his love of Toho sci-fi movies).  So far Kawasaki’s films haven’t commanded much respect or attention from U.S. critics with few exceptions. In The New York Times review Jeannette Catsoulis wrote, “Goofy, bizarre, yet surprisingly coherent, The Calamari Wrestler veils sharp social commentary with irreverent humor and corny romance. The production values are erratic, the acting barely adequate, and the effects more cheesy than special – somewhere between “The Muppets” and “Godzilla” – but the film possesses a good-natured charm.”

An intensely dramatic moment…not from Executive Koala (2005).

Overall, however, Kawasaki’s work is probably considered declasse by most critics, especially compared to director peers like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose Journey to the Shore was a 2015 Cannes Film Festival winner; the film is a meditative drama about a widow whose husband turns up as a ghost after a three year disappearance and they embark on a road trip. I can only imagine what Kawasaki would do with this scenario but it’s Kurosawa who is meriting the serious attention from U. S. critics, not the maker of The Calamari Wrestler.

The Japanese poster for The Rug Cop (2006)

None of that seems to bother Kawasaki who appears to understand why he’ll never make the cover of Film Comment. In an interview on the Twitch web site, he said, “I can only make comedies. I would never be good at romantic movies where people cry and are sentimental…it’s very hard for a comedian to be silly all the time. A comedian can’t be a comedian forever. Once they become famous, they tend to become more serious like going into politics. I want to be silly for the rest of my life.” It looks like he’ll achieve that goal if he continues marching to the kooky drummer in his head. “I want to make a movie about a cat joining a professional baseball team in Japan,” he said. “The idea is…now that Ichiro and Matsui have gone to the major leagues, Japanese baseball teams are hurting. There is a Japanese proverb saying “Even a cat’s hand will do (explanation: you are so busy, you really need help and would even use a cat’s hand if you could).” So, in the movie, a cat will come rescue the team.”  Yes, something is seriously wrong in Japan.

A scene from The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008)

*This is an updated and revised version of the original blog that first appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks website.

Other website links of interest:

http://www.scifijapan.com/articles/2008/09/06/review-monster-x-strikes-back-attack-the-g8-summit/

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/138702/minoru-kawasaki-releases-outer-man-on-fearsome-kaiju/

If Lucio Fulci had only directed the 1979 cult splatterfest Zombie, he would still warrant more than a footnote in any film history of the horror genre. Obviously inspired by the success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, Fulci’s cult favorite pushed the zombie film into over-the-top excess with the famous eyeball-splinter scene and an underwater grudge match between a shark and one of the undead.

Zombie vs. Shark in Lucio Fulci’s outrageous Zombi 2 (1979)

It also launched a whole new genre in the Italian film industry which included such imitators as Cannibal Apocalypse, Nightmare City and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (all released in 1980). Fulci went on to further heights (or depths according to his detractors) with such supernatural thriller gross-outs as City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981) and The House by the Cemetery (1981). But what most Fulci fans and film buffs tend to overlook is the fact that he was once a director who could occasionally turn out a thought-provoking and artful work of cinema such as his 1969 historical drama, Beatrice Cenci.  

An alternate international poster for Beatrice Cenci (aka The Conspiracy of Torture, 1969).

Also known as The Conspiracy of Torture, a much more telling description of the tragic events depicted, Beatrice Cenci is based on the real life 16th century woman whose cruel fate is legendary in Italy. Fulci may take poetic license with some of the historic details but the overall effect is a powerful and chilling anti-clerical expose which remains timeless as a cautionary tale about corruption among the power elite.

Tomas Milian as Olimpo Calvetti being tortured in Beatrice Cenci (1969).

The film is also devoid of camp or sensationalized concessions to fans of softcore erotica or Sadian cinema unlike his later gore-drenched horror films. The torture scenes, in particular, are appropriately harrowing as they should be and not served up as ghoulish delights for grindhouse audiences as in Michael Armstrong’s Mark of the Devil (1970). In that regard you could say that the film functions as a grimly effective argument against the unconscionable and inhuman use of torture to force people to “tell the truth” or confess because it often results in false or unreliable information. Of course, in this instance Beatrice refuses to reveal anything but the lack of a confession doesn’t stop the prosecution from silencing the accused permanently.

Adrienne Larussa stars in the title role of Beatrice Cenci (1969)

What is most compelling about Beatrice Cenci is how Fulci handles the narrative, jumping back and forth in time creating a non-linear storyline where we are experiencing the events before and after they occur in such a way that actually increases the tension as we approach the dramatic highpoints of the story – the rape of Beatrice, her father’s murder and the attempts to disguise the crime as an accident.

Lucrezia Cenci (played by the actress Mavie) eyes her drugged husband Francesco (George Wilson) just prior to his murder.

The period detail, costumes and art direction are beautifully realized and Erico Menczer’s evocative color cinematography and an atmospheric score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and Silvano Spadaccino further enhance what is clearly one of Fulci’s most assured and tightly paced films.

Tomas Milian (far left) & Ignazio Spalla (far right) have appeared in several spaghetti westerns but in Beatrice Cenci they play servants who help their mistress in a murder scheme.

The film also boasts an exceptional cast and U.S. viewers will recognize many familiar character actors from other Italian and French genre films of the period such as Raymond Pellegrin (Le Deuxieme Souffle, Gang War in Naples) as Cardinal Lanciani and Ignazio Spalla (Johnny Hamlet, Sabata) as Catalano, one of Francesco Cenci’s assassins. In the title role of Beatrice is Adrienne Larussa, a strikingly beautiful American actress who mostly worked in television. She projects some of the dark allure of Barbara Steele in her role here as she transitions from helpless victim to determined avenger to a defiant prisoner whose face becomes an inscrutable mask by the end, revealing nothing under torture except pain. (Larussa’s other claim to fame is that she was formerly married to action hero Steven Seagal.)

Adrienne Larussa stars as the ill-fated Beatrice Cenci (1969), directed by Lucio Fulci

Tomas Milian, who receives second billing as Beatrice’s lover and accomplice Olimpo Calvetti, is also effectively brooding and low-key in what is essentially a supporting character role. The scenes between Milian and Larussa alternate between tenderness and ambiguity; you’ve never quite certain if Olimpo is being used by Beatrice primarily to carry out her revenge or if their romance is genuine. Considering Olimpo’s sad fate and his silence before his punishers, you have to believe his love for Beatrice was undiminished to the end but her true feelings remain a mystery.

Tomas Milian is accused of murder in Beatrice Cenci (1969) but refuses to confess under extreme torture.

Easily the most memorable performance in the film is by George Wilson as Francesco Cenci. Without descending into melodramatic theatricality, he creates a convincing portrait of a loathsome tyrant who gives free reign to his appetites and urges with no fear of the consequences. Yet he is reduced to a pitiful figure, drugged and defenseless, in the film’s crucial murder scene – a violent death scene that could rival anything in Shakespeare’s MacBeth.

Tomas Milian silences the evil Francesco Cenci (George Wilson) for good in Beatrice Cenci (1969).

In the end, Beatrice Cenci works on several levels; as a historical procedural drama, a suspense thriller about a family in crisis and as a real life horror film with a scenario that could happen today.

Several aspects of the actual Beatrice Cenci case may never be known or proven. For example, there are no accounts or real evidence that she was raped or sexually abused by her father. But for those not familiar with the story, here is a rough outline of the famous murder case.

The perverse Count Cenci (George Wilson) threatens his daughter Beatrice (Adrienne Larussa) with physical abuse in the Lucio Fulci historical drama.

Beatrice, the daughter of the wealthy and powerful landowner Francesco Cenci, sought to escape her father’s cruelty by asking the church for permission to enter a convent. Francesco’s bestial nature and general ruthlessness were well known in Rome and he was always clashing with the reigning clergy who would look the other way as long as he paid their fines which were frequent. Yet, despite the fact that he was feared and hated by nearly everyone, Francesco managed to continue his evil ways unabated.

Count Francesco Cenci (George Wilson, on right) looks down on the unfortunate victim of the count’s trained dogs in Lucio Fulci’s Beatrice Cenci.

When Francesco learned what Beatrice was trying to do, he secreted her away, along with her mother and younger brother Bernardo to one of his remote estates in the mountains. There, Beatrice was imprisoned and forced to submit to her father’s will, which included sleeping with him and being treated like a slave. In desperation, Beatrice persuaded two servants (one of whom was her lover) to help her murder Francesco. They drugged his wine and then bludgeoned him to death in his bed. His body was then thrown from the castle wall to make it look like he died in a fall.

Cardinal Lanciani (Raymond Pellegrin) is aware of Francesco Cenci’s cruelty but is paid to turn a blind eye to it in Beatrice Cenci (1969), directed by Lucio Fulci.

His death, however, was not perceived as an accident by church investigators and Beatrice, her mother Lucrezia and brother Bernardo were accused of murder and imprisoned along with Giacomo Cenci, who had previously disowned his father and was living elsewhere at the time. The two servants were also hunted down while Pope Clement VIII authorized the torture of the Cenci family in order to learn the truth. All of the accused were put to death with the exception of Bernardo who was forced to watch his family members’ executions and then condemned for life to being a galley slave.

Corrupt clergymen cavort with prostitutes in the historical melodrama Beatrice Cenci (1969).

The Pope’s interest in exposing Francesco’s death as a murder and punishing the guilty parties was merely the means to his real agenda which was coveting the property and assets of the wealthy victims. The surviving family members were the perfect scapegoats and who would dare defend them without fear of being implicated, tortured and killed as well?  

Fulci’s interpretation of the Cenci tragedy is clearly sympathetic to the ill-fated heroine and completely cynical in his depictions of the prosecuting clergy. It’s not the first time he has been openly contemptuous of the church and religious matters. In Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), one of the most eccentric and original giallos in the genre, [Spoiler alert], the village priest turns out to be the serial killer who is murdering young boys, a plot twist that ignited considerable controversy in his native Italy.

The 1941 version of Beatrice Cenci

Fulci’s Beatrice Cenci is only one of many film versions of this famous story. I’ve not seen any of the other adaptations so I can’t comment on their quality or effectiveness but they include Riccardo Freda’s Castle of the Banned Lovers (1956) with Mireille Granelli as Beatrice, Guido Brignone’s Beatrice Cenci (1941), Baldassarre Negroni’s 1926 silent version and Albert Capellani’s 1908 film short.

Adrienne Larussa as Beatrice Cenci is tortured but refuses to confess anything in Lucio Fulci’s historical crime drama.

The 1969 version of Beatrice Cenci is not currently available on DVD or Blu-Ray in the U.S. from an authorized distributor but you can view a good subtitled print of it on YouTube or purchase the English dubbed version on DVD-R from Sinister Cinema. There is also a PAL DVD version in Italian available from overseas distributors. Fulci fans who only know the director from Zombie and his other extreme horror extravaganzas will discover a much more somber and serious-minded filmmaker at work in Beatrice Cenci.

Other Links of interest:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/beatrice-cenci-haunts-rome

http://murderpedia.org/female.C/c/cenci-beatrice.htm

http://www.italianfilmreview.com/2010/08/perversion-story-beatrice-cenci-1969.html

https://kirkpatrickmission.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/beatrice-cenci-lucio-fulci1969/

http://www.dvdactive.com/reviews/dvd/beatrice-cenci-limited-edition.html

Sometimes a figure in popular music will develop a small cult following but never crack the mainstream market because their music is unclassifiable…or as some critics like to say, “ahead of their time.” But what does that mean anyway? Is it too experimental in nature or lacking an easy access point for first time listeners? Or it is simply a matter of underexposure that keeps it from becoming recognized as something truly progressive and unique? A perfect example of this is Arthur Russell, the subject of Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), an intimate and moving look at an influential figure in New York City’s music scene in the ’70s and ’80s who is finally acquiring the reputation of a musical visionary more than 30 years after his heyday.  I had never heard of Arthur Russell until 2006 when I was sampling some music and downloaded two songs (“A Little Lost” and “Treehouse”) based on a critic’s choice column in the New York Times. I was immediately struck by the music – an electric cello and a solo singer’s voice encased in an echo chamber and rendered with a crazy kind of urgency.  It was a light, ethereal and slightly plaintive voice that flowed like a direct communique from the singer’s soul coupled with his unpredictable phrasing and shifts in rhythm. Assuming Russell was some new discovery on the New York City music scene, I did an internet search and was stunned to discover that Russell had died of AIDS in 1992. “A Little Lost,” in fact, was released posthumously in 1993 on the album Another Thought (issued on Philip Glass’s Point Blank label) yet it sounded fresh and contemporary in the way any extraordinary music does the first time you hear it.   I became fascinated by his music and, in the process of discovering it, was introduced to Russell’s take on various musical genres from avant-garde experimentation to country-folk to disco to electronica; he touched on all of it, creating something new during his brief but amazingly versatile career. “Get Around to It,” “This is How We Walk on the Moon,” “You Can Make Me Feel Bad,” “Is It All Over My Face?,” “That’s Us/Wild Combination” and more are still in heavy rotation in my music library.  So who was Arthur Russell? Just your average farm boy/teenage runaway from the Midwest (He fled Oskaloosa, Iowa at the age of 18 after a repressive and unhappy high school experience). He headed for San Francisco and landed in a Buddist commune where he became an accomplished cello player after studying at both the Ali Akbar College of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Chuck and Emily Russell, the parents of musician Arthur Russell, in the 2008 documentary, Wild Combination

Of course, there was nothing really average about Russell and Wild Combination is refreshing in that it doesn’t deify the man but presents him as he was – complex, talented, possibly brilliant, a workaholic, and sometimes frustrating and difficult to deal with on a professional level. Most viewers of the film will already be rooting for Russell as the underdog most likely to succeed after witnessing high school-era photographs of him with his face erupting in a worst-case acne scenario. High school was bad enough for most of us but going through the indignity of having your face and body deeply scarred by an adolescent skin condition would put a dent in anyone’s self esteem, not to mention struggling with issues of self-identity and feeling out of sync with most of your peer group. It’s no wonder that Arthur retreated into himself, preferring to spend most of his time alone. It’s that inward reflection that would later be projected back through his music in an almost transcendental way.  Through found footage, performance clips and interviews with his family and friends, Arthur’s story becomes increasingly fascinating after he arrives in San Francisco and ends up working with Allen Ginsberg, accompanying him on cello while Ginsberg reads or sings his poems. Matt Wolf’s documentary zips through the San Francisco years quickly and a sense of mystery clings to this period in Russell’s life due to a lack of details. There are hints here and there of his developing experimentation with music such as live performances with the Angels of Light, an off shoot of the Cockettes, at the Psychedelic Venus Church in Berkeley. You can barely see Arthur in the below photo but that’s him with his cello on the far left.

Arthur Russell and his cello can barely be seen at the far left in this image of a performance by Angels of Light.

Wild Combination really begins to hum when Arthur arrives in New York City in 1973 and within a year has landed the position of director at The Kitchen, an arts collective founded in 1971 that was dedicated to presenting new video, music, dance, performance, film and literature. Over the next two decades, Arthur crosses paths and collaborates with almost every major figure in the NYC arts scene. Here are just a few: David Byrne (they were in a band together called The Flying Hearts and made an album recorded by John Hammond), Ernie Brooks of The Modern Lovers, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Philip Grass, DJ Larry Levan of the legendary Paradise Garage, French DJ Francois Kevorkian (considered one of the forefathers of “house music”), Jah Wobble (bass player for Public Limited Ltd), Bootsy Collins and avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson, their one-time collaboration on a version of Medea ended disastrously with Russell being barred from the theatre and sneaking in to try and view it from the stage rafters. It’s as if Arthur is the real role model for Woody Allen’s Zelig. He’s always at the right place at the right time in New York’s underground culture.

Ernie Brooks, former member of The Modern Lovers, is one of the interviewees in the 2008 documentary, Wild Combination.

All of this must have been more than baffling for his conservative Iowa parents who never understood their son but are obviously proud and protective of his legacy; their memories of Arthur offer some of the more poignant moments in the doc. The one person, though, who probably perceived Arthur’s unique gifts from the beginning was his longtime companion Tom Lee, who offers a candid, clear-eyed account of their life together (Lee would go to a daily job to pay the bills while Arthur would work on his music all day). It’s like a male variation on that legendary couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Lee has proven to be a much valued torchbearer of the Russell legend, saving and preserving all of Arthur’s recordings which includes hundred of hours of tape and cassettes, many of which have been recently released due to the growing Russell cult.

Musician Arthur Russell (left) and his companion Tom Lee (center) from the 2008 documentary Wild Combination.

In the liner notes to the compilation Love is Overtaking Me, Lee writes “The lyrics of Arthur’s songs often express his memories and observations combined with thoughts of love and hope. He accomplishes that with both tenderness and humor. His notebooks are filled with such phrases and ideas gleaned from his walks around NYC, bits of conversations overheard at a restaurant, kids playing on the street, catchphrases from advertisements, and dialogue from news and television programs. As they developed into songs I was always listening for those heartfelt thoughts of his. Ultimately he was trying to express just that in one of his last songs, “Love Comes Back.” He could sit for hours at the keyboard trying out different vocal combinations, gently singing…”  In David Toop’s landmark survey of ambient music, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sounds and Imaginary Worlds, the author (who appears in Wild Combination) wrote that Arthur “used sound relationships rather than electronic effects to create wonderfully strange music” and his quote from the musician reveals why the disco music Russell created was so unlike anything else heard on club dance floors. “If you try to do something different in dance music,” Russell states, “you just get branded as an eccentric. Maybe I am an eccentric, I don’t know, but it’s basically a very simple idea. I like music with no drums, too. Partly, I guess, from listening to drums so much. When you hear something with no drums it seems very exciting. I always thought that music with no drums is successive to music with drums. New music with no drums is like this future where they don’t have drums any more. In outer space, you can’t take your drums – you take your mind.”

Arthur Russell playing his cello by the lake in Iowa.

Since Arthur Russell’s death in 1992 (which the media and music industry barely noticed at the time), his legend has grown in leaps and bounds due to the wealth of great writings about his work. In Sasha Frere-Jones’ memorable 2004 essay “Let’s Go Swimming” [the title of a Russell song] for The New Yorker, he wrote, “Russell’s work is stranded between lands real and imagined: the street and the cornfield; the soft bohemian New York and the hard Studio 54 New York; the cheery bold strokes of pop and the liberating possibilities of abstract art. Arthur Russell didn’t dissolve these borders so much as wander past them, humming his own song.”  Andy Battaglia’s essay for Slate in March of 2004 was titled “Disco Fever: Arthur Russell was famous in his day; what happened?” One of the more telling paragraphs read, “Russell made disco strange but also profoundly moving. The different elements of his tracks always sound like they’re meeting for the first time, maybe without makeup and sometimes in a mood. They interact, circle around, size each other up. That habit is uncommon to the well-connected funk and soul components of aboveground disco, but it’s just as unusual in the gawky underground stuff. What makes it all go down swimmingly is the easy agitation of Russell’s musical mind. He was unusual for making dance music sound remarkably casual and organic, but he was more unusual for the way he made its working parts – bass lines and drum beats – sound so intensely personal.”   And although this PR-flavored plug from Rolling Stone might be somewhat misleading, it is a just an analogy: “If Nick Drake had lived long enough to make records with New Order, they might have sounded something like this.”  There have been regular revivals of Russell’s music since his passing in 1992. Here are just a few: The 2000 Soul Jazz compilation Disco Not Disco, a 2001 re-issue of Russell’s World of Echo and the 2004 releases, The World of Arthur Russell and Calling Out of Context. There is an excellent and thoroughly researched biography from University of East London professor Tim Lawrence entitled Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1972-92 (Duke University Press) that was published in 2009. The box set 24->24 was released in 2011 and his music figures prominently in the 2012 gay-themed indie Keep the Lights On which includes Russell’s “Your Motion Says,” “Close My Eyes” and “Goodbye Old Paint.” The Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary How to Survive a Plague spotlights “Soon to Be Innocent Fun/Let’s See,” “Keeping Up” (with Jennifer Warnes as co-vocalist), “That’s Us/Wild Combination” and the poignant “Come to Life.” And in 2014, Yep Roc released a cover compilation entitled Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell. And the revival continues so is this the third, fourth or fifth coming of Arthur Russell?

Arthur Russell in his New York studio apartment making music

If any of this article has peaked your interest in the musician/composer, then Wild Combination is the best way to experience this once unsung original from the 20th century who is still with us in sound and soul.

*This is a revised and expanded version of a post that originally appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog.

Other website of interest:

http://www.goodtohearblog.com/category/music-2/

http://www.popmatters.com/post/194075-red-hot-arthur-russell-tribute/

http://www.wonderingsound.com/red-hot-reveal-arthur-russell-tribute-featuring-robyn-hot-chip-many/

http://www.arthurrussellmovie.com/ Official movie web site

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/08/040308crmu_music

http://www.jahsonic.com/ArthurRussell.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2096948/

Some aspects of American culture make ideal targets for satirists like the media (Network, 1976) or politics (The Great McGinty, 1940) or even the American family (Lord Love a Duck, 1966). Beauty pageants, on the other hand, seem a little too easy to poke fun at but Michael Ritchie found the perfect balance of irony and empathy in his 1975 satire, Smile.   

A scene from the 1975 satire Smile, directed by Michael Ritchie

Focusing on the annual “Young American Miss” Beauty Pageant in Santa Rosa, California, Ritchie’s film charts the progress of some 25 teenage contestants over the course of several rehearsal days culminating in a final evening competition. Among the young hopefuls are Robin “Miss Antelope Valley” Gibson (Joan Prather), who is a little bewildered by the whole ordeal, Doris “Miss Anaheim” Houston (Annette O’Toole), a hardened veteran of such events, and Maria Gonzales (Maria O’Brien, daughter of Edmond O’Brien), an aggressively competitive contestant whose specialty is the flaming baton. Just as crucial to the narrative are the organizers behind the scenes, particularly “Big Bob” Freelander (Bruce Dern), who owns the town’s largest car dealership, and Brenda DiCarlo (Barbara Feldon), a former Young American Miss herself.

Barbara Feldon and Geoffrey Lewis (far right) star in Michael Ritchie’s 1975 satire, Smile

Director Ritchie’s approach to his subject matter in Smile follows the same semi-documentary approach that made his other explorations of American culture so convincingly realistic – the world of competitive sports in the 1969 ski drama, Downhill Racer, and the creation, packaging and selling of a state senator in 1972’s The Candidate. Like both those films, Smile is more interested in observing how the characters respond to and deal with competition rather than who wins or loses.

Joan Prather (left) as Robin and Annette O’Toole as Doria, rival beauty contestants in Smile (1975).

While there are plenty of humorous scenes where we do laugh at the contestants – a very bad, off key rendition of “Delta Dawn,” an impersonation of Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine creation – the director also enlists our sympathies for them through intimate scenes where they reveal their fears and skepticism. In one telling scene, Doris explains her philosophy to Robin, “Boys get money and scholarships for making a lot of touchdowns, right? Why shouldn’t a girl get one for being cute and charming?” Robin ponders this for an instant before responding, “Yeah, but maybe boys shouldn’t be getting money for making touchdowns.”

A beauty pageant hopeful faces a team of judges in the Michael Ritchie satire, Smile (1975)

Equally memorable is this opening argument between the judges that sets the tone for the entire film:

1st judge: “Packing a suitcase? What the hell kind of talent is that? I can pack a suitcase.”

2nd judge: “It’s the only thing she can do without falling off the stage.”

3rd judge: “She is cute. I kinda like the nightie joke.”

1st judge: “That’s exactly the kind of stuff they hate at the finals. They’re not looking for sex.”

2nd judge: “Everybody’s looking for sex.”

Bruce Dern (center) stars in a change of pace role – Michael Ritchie’s satire, Smile (1975)

In contrast to the often naive contestants are the jaded adult organizers and sponsors who have experienced their own share of disappointments over the years. The eternally optimistic “Big Bob” admits to his best friend Andy (Nicholas Pryor) in a rare moment of candor, “I just learned a long time ago to accept a little less from life, that’s all.” Meanwhile, his son, “Little Bob” is sneaking around taking nude snapshots of the teenage contestants to show his school friends.

Maria O’Brien as Marie, prepares for her baton specialty act in Smile (1975)

Another subplot involves Andy’s slide into alcoholism and dissatisfaction with his perfectionist wife, which reaches a black comedy climax when he puts a gun in his mouth and threatens suicide. His wife’s callous remark from the next room, “If you’re doing anything to mess up my clean rug….” prompts him to turn the gun on his real problem – a scene that prefigures the dark humor of more contemporary satires like American Beauty (1999).

Famous choreographer Michael Kidd appears in a rare movie role in Smile (1975)

One aspect of Smile that makes it particularly fascinating today is the offbeat casting: choreographer Michael Kidd in a rare film appearance as a celebrity judge, Melanie Griffith and Colleen Camp as competing contestants, the late Geoffrey Lewis (father of Juliette Lewis) as one of the organizers and, of course, Bruce Dern in a surprising change-of-pace performance from his often stereotyped roles as the heavy. Ritchie’s use of music – The Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen,” and Nat King Cole’s “Smile” – is equally inspired, often commenting on the sequence at hand.

Colleen Camp as Connie demonstrates the art of packing a suitcase in Smile (1975), directed by Michael Ritchie

In preparing for Smile, Ritchie mentioned Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (1967) as an inspiration but you can also see traces of Preston Sturges’s barbed humor in the mix as well as the model for Christopher Guest’s cult comedies (Waiting for Guffman, 1996, Best in Show, 2000), which follow a similar documentary-styled approach.

A scene of beauty contestants performing a production number from the satire Smile (1975)

Smile was well received by most critics when it opened theatrically but it sank without a trace after a week’s run in most major cities. Regardless, the film holds up surprisingly well today and is still worthy of this rave review in The New York Times by Vincent Canby: “…a rollicking satire that misses few of the obvious targets, but without dehumanizing the victims. It’s an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them…Smile, which is Mr. Ritchie’s best film to date (better than Downhill Racer and The Candidate), questions the quality of our fun, while adding to it.”

A young Melanie Griffith (center) plays a beauty pageant contestant in the 1975 satire, Smile

Smile was released on DVD in 2004 and is certainly ready for an upgrade at this point. A Blu-Ray with commentaries by most of the surviving cast members would be more than welcome.

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

Bruce Dern plays against type in one of his most overlooked films – Smile (1975), a satire by Michael Ritchie

Other websites of interest:

http://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/Interviews/Michael-Ritchie.aspx

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/apr/19/local/me-52898

http://hillplace.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-unsung-heroine-of-smile-1975.html

On the set of Smile (1975) with director Michael Ritchie (right, background) and Bruce Dern

Klaus Kinski plays an escaped mental patient in the German psychological drama/thriller, Der Rote Rausch (1962).

When did Klaus Kinski first burst upon the international film world? The evidence points to his portrayal of the obsessive Spanish expedition leader Don Lope de Aguirre in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God in 1973. He followed that with other critically praised performances in Andrzej Zulawski’s The Most Important Thing: Love (1975), Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Woyzeck (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) and even appeared in mainstream commercial fare like Billy Wilder’s Buddy, Buddy (1981) and George Roy Hill’s The Little Drummer Girl (1984). But most of Kinski’s early work from 1955’s Morituri (in an uncredited bit part) up to the ‘70s were supporting roles; some were breakout parts such as 1955’s costume drama Ludwig II: Glanz und Ende wines Konigs (he was nominated for best supporting actor in the German Film Awards) or superior genre efforts like Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western The Great Silence (1968). Still, leading roles were a rarity for Kinski but one of the early exceptions was Der Rote Rausch (1962), directed by Wolfgang Schleif.   

Part psychological drama, part thriller, the title Der Rote Rausch is roughly translated as “Red Rage” and the film is a solid showcase for Kinski’s mesmerizing screen presence and an early indication of how he would soon be typecast often in villainous, menacing or psycho roles due to his striking but unconventional facial features. At this point he had already appeared as suspicious characters in five Edgar Wallace thrillers made in Germany in the popular crime genre known as Krimi (an obvious influence on the later Italian giallo thrillers). But Der Rote Rausch takes a much more sympathetic approach to Kinski’s obviously unstable protagonist and unfolds like a dress rehearsal for more serious later work like Herzog’s Woyzeck where he plays a simple working class man who is dehumanized by the military and the medical establishment.

Klaus Kinski steals a police report on himself in the 1962 German film, Der Rote Rausch.

Under the opening credits, Kinski as Josef Stief, a mental patient, escapes from a psychiatric hospital for the insane. He flees into the countryside and is eventually seen scurrying through the marshland where he collapses from sheer exhaustion. A group of field workers on their lunch break come to his rescue, including Katrin (Brigitte Grothum), whose father owns a large working farm. Katrin at first calls out the name Martin, mistaking him for her missing husband who disappeared five years earlier. But this new arrival is clearly a stranger who tells the farmers he too is named “Martin.”  Martin is given refuge and work on the family farm. It is assumed he is a refugee fleeing persecution of some kind from somewhere over the German border. Martin’s assimilation into this small, tight-knit community is tentative at best. Despite his skills as a mechanic, he mostly remains a strange and uncommunicative outsider with his co-workers. Only Katrin and her young daughter Hanni (Christine Ratej) take an immediate liking to Martin which eventually creates complications for everyone, especially Karl (Sieghardt Rupp); he has been pressuring Katrin to marry him but his true motives may be suspect.

Klaus Kinski is a mysterious refugee and Brigitte Grothum is a farmer’s daughter who gives him refuge in Der Rote Rausch (1962).

One of the most intriguing aspects of Der Rote Rausch is how Martin’s real background and identity is slowly revealed through the character’s paranoid actions and behavior. His main concern is being identified in the local news as the escaped-mental-patient-at-large and lives in fear of being captured and sent back to his cell. A great deal of suspense is generated in the first half of the film as Martin escapes detection time and time again through his own craftiness or pure coincidence. All we really know about him comes from a brief scene with two asylum doctors after his escape where they surmise he may or may not be dangerous if left alone in the company of an attractive woman.

Two asylum doctors check on updates about their escaped patient (played by Klaus Kinski) in Der Rote Rausch (1962).

When the truth is revealed, Der Rote Rausch builds toward a tragic and borderline hysterical climax that is as reactionary as the angry villagers chasing down the Frankenstein monster with torches. [Spoiler alert] It turns out that Martin aka Josef Stief has murdered four women. The first victim became the catalyst for his homicidal behavior after she rejected Martin as a lover; she was wearing a pearl necklace and that became the trigger for the subsequent murders (the victims all wore one). That kind of cod psychology seems antiquated even by 1962 standards but Der Rote Rausch seems to come from an earlier era in terms of providing a positive and therapeutic approach to mental illness. The little we do see of conditions at the asylum (mostly through Martin’s feverish memories or delusions) show him confined to a bare room with a narrow opening in the doorway for monitoring by guards. And his abject terror of the place suggests a lot worse. Electric shock? Ice water immersions? Sadistic treatment by the staff? There is no evidence of any progressive therapy for his mental state at all.

Klaus Kinski (right) has a delusional flashback to his lockup in an insane asylum in Der Rote Rausch (1962).

The final scene in Der Rote Rausch seems to confirm that the asylum is the only logical place for someone like Martin. Yet the fact remains that the first half of the film develops him as a sympathetic and potentially productive person, only to demonize him as an incurable psychopath. Because of this, Der Rote Rausch is ultimately unsuccessful as either a psychological drama or a thriller. However, there are some compensations and the film is certainly not dull. The bleak, wintry landscape of the German countryside is an appropriately remote setting for the tragic events that unfold (cinematography by Walter Bartsch) and the brooding mood is enhanced by Hans-Martin Majewski’s atmospheric score. Brigitte Grothum makes an appealing heroine who is more earth mother than a realistic romantic partner for Martin but Marina Petrova as Anna, the local barmaid and femme fatale, easily steals her scenes as a man-hungry vixen who almost meets a well-desired fate in a key scene with Martin.

Marina Petrova plays an overly inquisitive barmaid in the psychological thriller, Der Rote Rausch (1962) starring Klaus Kinski (left).

More importantly, Der Rote Rausch confirms Kinski’s early promise as a fascinating and unpredictable actor, one who can project vulnerability and naivety one minute and pure menace the next. The scene where he entertains young Hanni with a puppet show in the barn is a radical departure from his usual scene-chewing persona in genre films like Crawlspace (1986) and highly amusing in contrast.

Martin (Klaus Kinski), an escaped mental patient, performs a puppet show for a lonely young girl in Der Rote Rausch (1962).

At the same time, the scenes toward the end when he visits the city to buy a gift for the child and has a complete mental collapse after being identified next to his wanted poster conveys a sense of real tragedy that seems to belong to a different movie. No matter what he does, Kinski commands the screen almost effortlessly and Der Rote Rausch is well worth seeing for any Klaus devotee.

The many faces of Klaus Kinski in the 1962 German film, Der Rote Rausch, directed by Wolfgang Schleif.

Currently Der Rote Rausch is not available on DVD in the U.S. from a licensed distributor. You might be able to find a German import of it but you will probably need an all-region DVD player to view it. European Trash Cinema offers a better than average DVD-R of the film that looks like it came from a commercial-free television broadcast with English subtitles in the lower frame.

As you can see this is not the raunchy 1984 comedy, Bachelor Party starring Tom Hanks and Tawny Kitaen but the 1957 drama The Bachelor Party, adapted for the screen by Paddy Chayefsky and featuring Don Murray who had just made a big splash in his feature film debut opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop that same year. Made two years after Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning breakout hit Marty, The Bachelor Party continues the author/playwright’s preoccupation with the urban male in a drama brimming with angst, alienation and other candid observations of the human condition. A comedy it is not though there are moments of idiosyncratic humor sprinkled throughout but nothing that comes close to the scathing satire of Chayefsky’s later work such as The Hospital (1971) or Network (1976).   

Synopsis: A group of bookkeepers at a New York City office attend a bachelor party for Arnold (Philip Abbott) who is more than a little apprehensive about his approaching wedding. With their co-worker Eddie (Jack Warden) organizing the festivities, the men indulge in an evening of drinking and bar-hopping before ending up at a bohemian party in Greenwich Village. As the evening drags on and the alcohol flows, the men begin to reveal their own anxieties about their lives, careers and relationships turning their celebration into a dark night of soul-searching. Charlie (Don Murray), a newlywed, already feels trapped in his marriage, compounded by the fact that his wife just learned she’s pregnant; Walter (E.G. Marshall) has just been diagnosed with asthma that will eventually prove fatal if he doesn’t change jobs and relocate his family to a healthier environment; Arnold, the groom, confesses that he is a virgin and his sexual insecurities have him rethinking his wedding plans; Eddie, the only remaining bachelor in the group, is revealed as a desperately lonely man despite his bravado and active social life.  Chayefsky had already presented The Bachelor Party to great critical acclaim on television on the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1953 with Eddie Albert in the lead. After being approached by Harold Hecht who had also produced his Oscar®-winning drama Marty along with partner Burt Lancaster, Chayefsky agreed to adapt the teleplay for the big screen. He hoped to duplicate the success of Marty which had also been based on a critically acclaimed television production. Instead of just making two characters the focus of the film as in Marty, however, Chayefsky weaves a dramatic narrative involving eight characters, though Don Murray as Charlie is clearly the film’s main protagonist.

Don Murray in The Bachelor Party (1957), directed by Delbert Man

For The Bachelor Party, Hecht and Chayefsky reassembled many of the same crew who had worked on Marty – director Delbert Mann, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, art director Ted Haworth, makeup artist Robert J. Schiffer and others. In his autobiography, Looking Back…at Live Television and Other Matters, Delbert Mann recalled that The Bachelor Party “was to be done in the same manner we had done Marty: exteriors shot in New York, the balance of the film in Hollywood, again on Stage 5 at the Goldwyn Studios. This film, which deals with a young marriage at a crisis point, provided me with one of the best ensemble casts I have ever had. Since all but two were from our live television days, it was a group of long-time friends who assembled in the small gym on the Goldwyn lot to begin rehearsals. Don Murray, one of the two actors I had not worked with previously, played Charlie…The newcomer to this New York-based group was Carolyn Jones, in the as-yet-undefined role of the girl Charlie meets at a party in Greenwich Village. The character had no name. She was called only ‘The Existentialist.'”

Don Murray and Carolyn Jones star in The Bachelor Party (1957).

The rehearsals took place over a three week period with the actors and director perfecting the performances and staging of scenes but Chayefsky and Mann were never quite satisfied with the resolution of a crucial encounter in the film – where Charlie is tempted to betray his wife in a sexual tryst with “The Existentialist.” The problem was not the scene as written but the emotional motivation for what happens. Eddie “suddenly realizes that betrayal of his marriage vows will not answer his problems. He leaves her and the party. What this moment of revelation or recognition was, Paddy and I never fully found to our satisfaction.”

Paddy Chayefsky at his typewriter circa 1950s.

Toward the end of filming, they returned to the bedroom scene between Murray and Jones after identifying the problem. “The key to Charlie’s suddenly seeing her for what she was, was not clear or precise,” Mann recalled. “We rehearsed it, we discussed the scene again and again, we improvised the moment. Exhausted, I had thrown myself down on the bed…Paddy was pacing and muttering. Suddenly he said, “I’ve got it! Lemme think about it. I’ll have it for you in the morning!” He had seen the need for the transposition of some of the girl’s lines, putting the focus on what the scene is basically all about: her sudden and unexpected release of desperation the moment he puts his arms around her. “Just say you love me…Just say you love me…You don’t have to mean it,” resisting his touch until he finally shouts violently and in anger, “I love you! I love you!’ The moment is suddenly a physical one. It was exactly the kind of almost sexual climax that had been needed. The next day, we shot the scene. It worked. Don was urgent and driven and exactly right. Carolyn was wonderful.”

Don Murray (left), Jack Warden (center) and Philip Abbott in The Bachelor Party (1957).

In an ironic twist of fate, Carolyn Jones, whose character didn’t exist in the teleplay and was added for the film, became the only actor in The Bachelor Party to be singled out for an Oscar® nomination. In fact, her nomination was the only Academy Award recognition the film would receive.

Don Murray and Patricia Smith play an anxious and insecure young married couple in The Bachelor Party (1957).

Prior to release, The Bachelor Party also attracted the attention of the National Catholic Legion of Decency which gave the film a “B” rating, adding that “only a positive conclusion averts a more stringent classification.” The filmmakers also had to appease the PCA (Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s self-censorship committee) which objected to the film’s “suggestion of abortion and the intended extramarital affair.” They defied the PCA, however, over promotional materials for the film which alluded to extramarital sex and refused to make changes, resulting in the withdrawal of the PCA seal of approval. This could have hurt the film’s box office profitability in more conservative regions but most newspapers ran the ads with the exception of a few such as The Boston Globe.

A stag party for a married man turns into a dark night of soul searching in Paddy Chayefsky’s The Bachelor Party (1957), directed by Delbert Mann.

Even if it didn’t garner as many awards as Marty, The Bachelor Party was regarded by most critics as more incisive and entertaining than the former film. Of course, there were a few dissenters such as Time magazine which wrote “…the message runs something like this: ‘Don’t cheat on your wife. Because if you do, you’ll never finish night school.’ At the risk of offending the entire prostitute population Playwright Chayefsky has come out firmly on the side of marital fidelity…(yet) genuine…insights have been skillfully translated to the screen…this is what Paddy Chayefsky truly understands…that life is really not worth living without love.” Even Chayefsky and Mann felt the film had some basic flaws which Mann later stated: “The ending is too easy, too glib. It comes off as moralizing, a pro-forma statement of the traditional values of love and marriage.”

E.G. Marshall stars as one of the not-so-happy revelers at The Bachelor Party (1957), written by Paddy Chayefsky and based on his original 1953 teleplay.

The positive reviews, however, prevailed with this posting from Archer Winston in The New York Post a typical reaction: “…The performances are highly individualized, and close to perfect…direction is the sort of artistry that can be too easily overlooked…It’s life, not art. So why give the director credit for holding up a mirror? Or, even Chayefsky? Just recollect that this sort of accident doesn’t happen except when Mann is directing [what] Chayefsky has written.”

Carolyn Jones and Don Murray in a publicity still for The Bachelor Party (1957), directed by Delbert Mann

The Bachelor Party would go on to win other awards during its theatrical run – a Best Picture nomination from the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), a Golden Palm nomination for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival – and it provided a great showcase for up and coming actors such as Don Murray, Carolyn Jones, Jack Warden and E.G. Marshall. It should also be noted that the film provided memorable opportunities for Patricia Smith (as Don Murray’s wife) and Nancy Marchand, who would confirm her acting legacy as Livia, the mother of Anthony Soprano in the popular HBO TV series, The Sopranos (1999-2007). The Bachelor Party marked the feature film debut for Marchand.

Nancy Marchand (left) makes her feature film debut in The Bachelor Party (1957), written by Paddy Chayefsky.

The Bachelor Party does not appear to be currently available on DVD or any format although there is a DVD of the original 1953 television version that aired on the Philo-Goodyear Television Playhouse.

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

Other websites of interest:

http://archives.nypl.org/the/21778

https://filmtalk.org/2014/12/11/don-murray-i-never-understood-why-marilyn-monroe-was-not-nominated-for-bus-stop/

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9802E4DC1731E33ABC4852DFB266838C649EDE

http://www.filmsdefrance.com/review/the-bachelor-party-1957.html

The Hollywood film industry is usually a few beats behind the rhythm of any new emerging counterculture and by the time they try to capitalize on it the parade has usually moved on. Duffy (1968) had the misfortune to be released in the dwindling days of the swinging sixties when the mod look of films such as Blow-Up and Kaleidoscope (both 1966) was being edged out by an rougher, less glamorous subgenre of youth oriented movies about bikers, drug dealers and rebels giving the finger to the establishment.   

James Fox and Susannah York star in the 1968 pop-art caper comedy, Duffy.

Most critics at the time were particularly unkind to Duffy, panning it as a self-indulgent, pretentious pop art disaster. In some ways you can understand their reactions even now because the movie, which is essentially a heist film, refuses to follow the conventions of the genre. Suspense or any sense of mounting tension is less important here than the mind games that the central players inflict on each other. And the stunning visual design often seems to be the intended focus of the film and not the often risible, would-be hipster dialogue which can make you winch when delivered by James Fox at his most foppish: “It’s going to be a groovy little happenin’, man!”

For some, however, Duffy is indeed a groovy little happening, a time capsule that captures the confusion and excessiveness of big budget filmmaking in the late sixties when unlikely projects like Candy and Skidoo (both 1968) got greenlighted by major studios. Yet Duffy is a genuine objet d’art, a bizarre curator’s egg that reveals a streak of decadence and perversity underneath the colorful proceedings, courtesy of screenwriters Harry Joe Brown, Jr. and Donald Cammell, whose next project would be the cult film Performance [1970] which he co-directed with Nicholas Roeg.

A robbery at sea committed by masked thieves is given a mod, sixties spin in Duffy, directed by Robert Parrish.

In an interview with author David Del Valle, Cammell once admitted that Duffy was semi-autobiographical. “It’s based on an adventure that really happened to a mate of mine, or maybe it was all my lovely group – Susie York, James Mason, James Coburn, and Willie [James] Fox. It’s not a serious movie, more of a bon bon, very carefree. Not worth discussing.”

Anita Pallenberg and director-screenwriter on the set of Performance (1970).

Despite Cammell’s dismissive comments, Duffy could possibly be seen as a revenge fantasy inspired by the screenwriter’s relationship with his father who tried to discourage Cammell from abandoning his career as a painter.   The main storyline relates an elaborate scheme between two half-brothers, Stefane (Fox) and Antony (John Alderton), who decide to steal one million pounds in bank notes from their shipping magnate father Charles (James Mason) who has disinherited them. The bank notes are being transported in a safe aboard one of Charles’s ships, the Osiris, and Stefane and Antony enlist Duffy (James Coburn), a renowned expert at carrying out successful covert operations.

James Mason (left) and James Fox (center) star in the 1968 pop art heist happening, Duffy.

Along for the ride and the money is Segolene (Susannah York), who is first introduced as Stefane’s girlfriend but soon reveals her true nature as a scheming sociopath who will bed any man who might have the inside track on the big score. When Duffy accuses her of being a slut, she takes offense, protesting “I may be a hooker. I am absolutely not a slut!” In her view, the fine distinction is that a hooker is free to choose her own destiny and customer of choice.

James Coburn & Susannah York make a groovy pair of con-artists in Duffy (1968).

When the robbery finally occurs, it isn’t the piece de resistance you’d expect for a heist film (unlike Rififi or Topkapi) but a surreal charade in which the thieves are dressed in dayglo-colored wigs, kabuki-like masks and frogman gear. They escape into the sea with the loot and then the double and triple crossings begin but in a deceptively casual way that seems perfectly right for the amoral universe in which Duffy takes place.

One of several offbeat and surreal sequences in Duffy (1968).

Allegedly, Cammell was so unhappy with the finished version of Duffy that he vowed to direct his own screenplays in the future so he could control the entire process. In hindsight, Robert Parrish does seem like a curious choice for director but he did have an eclectic filmography that includes the 1951 film noir The Mob, the underrated Western The Wonderful Country [1959] and a chic adaptation of two Irvin Shaw short stories, In the French Style [1963] starring Jean Seberg.   Duffy has a stoned-out, theatre-of-the-absurd quality in which pacing and traditional storytelling techniques seem to be missing from the mix. Music, however, is an important part of the tapestry and the score by composer/songwriter Ernie Freeman is an organ-driven psychedelic rock delight that transforms several scenes into stand-alone music videos; one in particular features James Coburn wandering through a jet set beach scene to the sounds of Lou Rawls singing “I’m Satisfied.”

James Coburn & Susannah York on the coast of Southern Spain in Duffy (1968), directed by Robert Parrish.

The making of Duffy appears to have been a lark for most of the cast and crew and who could complain when you’re on location off the coast of Southern Spain which has never looked more dazzling and beautiful in Otto Heller’s Technicolor cinematography? Heller, who lensed more than 200 features, is probably best known for The Crimson Pirate [1953], Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom [1960] and The Ipcress File [1965], for which he won a BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television Arts) award.

James Mason plays the target of a heist engineered by his two sons in Duffy (1968).

While James Coburn, Susannah York and James Fox often seem exposed and out of their comfort zone amid the surreal proceedings, James Mason seems to be enjoying himself immensely as a filthy rich aristocrat. James Coburn recalled in Sheridan Morley’s biography James Mason: Odd Man Out, “We were to do three films together, but even by the end of the third I never really knew him; the curious thing about playing a scene with James was that you’d do your bit and then wait for his reaction, which didn’t seem to come at all. Not at least until next day, when you’d see the rushes and realize that he had done it all, but so intimately that only the camera could pick it up. There was a magical thing that used to happen to his face on the screen: as he got older he got even more introspective, but he had always been the most wonderful film actor. You have only to look at Julius Caesar, where all the others are playing Shakespeare and he is playing Brutus. Unlike Niven or Granger he never really wanted to tell long anecdotes or hold people’s attention at parties. He just used to watch them all the time, as if he was about to sketch them. Sometimes, of course, that’s what he was doing.”

James Fox plays a decadent hipster who plots to rob his tycoon father in the swinging sixties caper film, Duffy.

James Fox, of course, would go on to work with his friend Donald Cammell on the latter’s next film Performance and it is interesting to see Fox’s progression as an actor from The Servant [1963], in which he plays a weak-willed young aristocrat who is manipulated by his sinister manservant, to his role as a hedonist with criminal impulses in Duffy, to his violent thug on the run in Performance. Apparently the latter film proved to be such a disturbing personal experience for him that he dropped out of the acting profession for years and didn’t return to the screen until No Longer Alone in 1978.

James Fox puts the moves on Susannah York in Duffy (1968).

Cammell also battled personal demons for many years and saw many of his film projects aborted or rejected by the studios. He finally gave up the fight in April of 1996 in Los Angeles and committed suicide by shotgun.

James Coburn amid the sun worshippers in sunny Spain in Duffy (1968).

Duffy was released as a DVD-R by SPHV (Sony Pictures Home Video) in March 2011 but has yet to surface on Blu-Ray and might not ever make the grade based on its poor performance when it was first released in 1968. TCM has shown it in the past so it might resurface again and is definitely an entertainingly peculiar time capsule.

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

Other links of interest:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/film-what-a-great-performance-1162126.html

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/02/actor-james-fox

Warren William and Marian Marsh in the Pre-Code drama, Under Eighteen (1931), directed by Archie Mayo.

One of several Pre-Code dramas helmed by Warner Bros. contract director Archie Mayo in 1931, Under Eighteen is a cautionary tale for the working girl that was lost in the shuffle of too many similar programmers released that same year. Seen today, it provides a unique window into the past when studios like Warner Bros. catered to Depression Era-audiences, particularly women, with movie plots that mirrored situations and circumstances in the lives of their audience.   

Under Eighteen opens on a hopeful note with Sophie (Anita Page) getting married to Alf (Norman Foster) and moving out of the cramped tenement apartment she shares with her sister Marge (Marian Marsh) and her mother. The mood quickly changes to despair as Marge considers her circumstances and realizes that marriage is not necessarily the answer to the grinding poverty she experiences day after day. This becomes even more pronounced when Sophie, Alf and their newborn baby move back in with them because Alf lost his job and won’t look for a new one; he keeps blowing the little money they have on billiard tournaments in bars, hoping he’ll win the big cash prize.

Anita Page and Marian Marsh star in the 1931 Pre-Code drama, Under Eighteen, directed by Archie Mayo.

The situation becomes unbearable for Sophie once she realizes she is pregnant with a second child. She begs Marge to help her raise the money for a divorce lawyer, all of which helps convince Marge that she won’t make the same mistakes. Her fiancé Jimmie (Regis Toomey), a delivery boy who aspires to start his own delivery service, wants to tie the knot and doesn’t share Marge’s dismal view of matrimony. In her opinion, “Marriage is a bunk, at least for poor people.”

Marian Marsh and Regis Toomey play a working class couple in the Depression-era drama, Under Eighteen (1931).

Soon Marge postpones her wedding plans with Jimmie and sets her sights on raising money for her sister’s divorce lawyer by using herself as collateral in a deal she proposes to Howard Raymond (Warren William), a well-known tycoon and notorious ladies’ man. Marge goes to his penthouse apartment, where a decadent rooftop party is in full swing, and begins to succumb to the inhibition-free atmosphere. When Marge and Howard finally retire to his private suite, however, their rendezvous takes a surprisingly unexpected turn.

Marian Marsh and Warren William star in the Pre-Code drama, Under Eighteen (1931).

More than anything else, Under Eighteen is an impressive showcase for Marian Marsh (best known for her role as Trilby in Svengali [1931]), who displays both fearless determination and raging self-doubt as the desperate Marge. The film builds suspense and a growing tension over what lengths Marge will go to help her sister. And it offers a grimly realistic view of the options available for women born and raised in the slums. This isn’t an escapist fantasy but the flip side of the working girls glimpsed in Gold Diggers of 1933. For most of the film, the camera captures the squalid details of tenement life: people sleeping on fire escapes on sweltering summer nights, the congested sidewalks and never-ending street traffic, the rented rooms with walls so thin you can hear the neighbors through them.  

Though not as sordid or as entertainingly racy as other Pre-Code movies such as Baby Face (1933) or Safe in Hell (1931), Under Eighteen has its share of frisky behavior and sexual innuendos, particularly during the penthouse pool party scene. Warren William, who specialized in playing lecherous employers and rich philanderers, is right in his element here. When he welcomes Marge to his alcohol-fueled roof party, he says, “Why not take off your clothes and stay awhile?” Prior to that, he is glimpsed bobbing up and down suggestively in the water with a drunken female guest on a phallic-like float so we know his intentions are strictly dishonorable.

Marian Marsh and Warren William at a wild penthouse swimming party in Under Eighteen (1931).

[SPOILER ALERT] For a Pre-Code film, Under Eighteen does have a surprisingly false and unrealistic denouement that smacks of studio compromise and Breen Office censorship. The movie, however, was actually made before the Code was strictly enforced so that was probably the result of screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Maude Fulton trying to give the movie a happy ending.  Marge emerges from Raymond’s penthouse with her virtue intact because he has a change of heart and decides to not take advantage of such a pure innocent. She now happily accepts her fate and agrees to marry Jimmie and move to New Jersey. And most astonishing of all, Alf finally wins the big billiards tournament and whisks his pregnant wife, child and mother-in-law off to Atlantic City for a vacation followed by an undeniably bright future. Audiences won’t be fooled though. We know Alf will be back to his old tricks as soon as the money runs out and that Marge will always wonder what her life would have been like if she had actually acted on her defiant promise to herself: “I’ve made up my mind that anytime I hand myself over to a man for life, it’s cash on delivery.”  Under Eighteen was released as a no-frills DVD-R by Warner Archives in April 2010. It also occasionally shows up in airings on Turner Classic Movies. 

Other websites of interest:

http://warrenwilliam.com/you-hit-me-a-little-low-warren-william-and-marian-marsh-in-under-18/

http://www.precodemisbehaving.com/2012/07/under-18-1931-film-review.html

http://joycecompton.blogspot.com/2011/04/joyce-in-under-18-1931.html

If U.S. moviegoers are familiar with the name Tinto Brass at all, it is probably due to the infamous 1979 epic Caligula which featured world renowned actors (Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, Malcolm McDowell, etc.) and hardcore sex scenes (which were later added by producer/Penthouse tycoon Bob Guccione against the wishes of Brass who disowned the film). Brass had already established himself as a master of art house erotica/perversity with 1976’s Salon Kitty about a brothel in WWII Berlin where the prostitutes were undercover spies. But after Caligula, Brass seemed much happier directing more modestly budgeted, softcore adaptations of literary works like The Key (1983, based on the novel by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki) and Paprika (1991, inspired by the novel Fanny Hill), which showcased his increasing obsession with shapely female bottoms.

In retrospect, his early career is a contemplation of the paths not taken: documentary (Ca ira, il fiume della rivolta aka Thermidor, 1964), avant-garde cinema (L’urlo aka The Howl, 1970) and eccentric genre offerings such as Col cuore in gola aka Deadly Sweet, 1967). Of the latter, Yankee (1966), the only spaghetti western ever directed by Brass, is definitely worth a look.  

Adolfo Celi & Philippe Leroy in Yankee (1966)

Synopsis: An American drifter known only as Yankee rides into a town in New Mexico that is under the control of the power mad Grand Cougar and his sadistic henchmen. Yankee’s initial attempts to form a partnership with the Grand Cougar over the heist of a U.S. gold shipment end in a power play that forces Yankee to go into hiding. A cat and mouse game ensues until a violent showdown by the river in which most of the major players lie dead.

Despite a by-the-numbers storyline and exaggerated Western stereotypes influenced by Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, Yankee stands apart from other B-movie imitations in the genre due to Brass’s directorial ingenuity. For one thing, the film is consistently arresting on a visual level (disorienting camera angles, extreme close-ups, theatrical lighting schemes, jump cuts), thanks to cinematographer Alfio Contini, who shot Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), to name just a few. Even when the pacing occasionally flags, Brass’s attention to the odd detail – a happy-go-lucky, whistling theme song in direct contrast to the grisly happenings – keeps you off balance.

Philippe Leroy is Yankee (1966), directed by Tinto Brass

The protagonist is undeniably an inscrutable figure whose motivations are never clear like Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” prototype but the similarities end there. Yankee dresses like a dandy (his oversized cowboy hat is borderline absurd) and behaves more like a professional card shark who is trying to psyche-out his opponents.  This marked a rare foray into spaghetti Westerns for French actor Philippe Leroy but he brings a deceptively light but steely quality to his character that contrasts sharply with his vainglorious nemesis, the Grand Cougar (played by Adolfo Celi, James Bond’s evil rival in Thunderball ). Although he is lean, wiry and athletic like Jean-Paul Belmondo, Leroy lacks the latter’s effortless charisma but then again, he is playing someone who is a cipher and, in the end, may be nothing more than a cunning opportunist.  Adolfo Celi, on the other hand, steals the film handily in the role of the wicked Grand Cougar whose behavior is always erratic and unpredictable. He’s also pretty handy with a whip and during one temper tantrum (after Yankee has defaced his favorite self-portrait), he yells, “I want to make myself one hundred portraits with the shreds of your skin.” Yes, when he’s bad, he’s very, very bad….and highly entertaining, especially when he’s railing against his own cretinous gang of sociopaths.

One of several visually stylish effects in Tinto Brass’s 1966 spaghetti western, Yankee.

One of them is Filosofo (Jacques Herlin), whose more appropriate name should be Nihilisto since he operates in a complete moral vacuum. He appears to be at his happiest when killing defenseless villagers and, in one scene, he tortures a scorpion by placing him a ring of fire, a grotesque image that predates a similar opening sequence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.

Mirella Martin as Rosita in Yankee (1966)

The only major female role in Yankee is a thankless one and that honor goes to Mirella Martin as Rosita, the Grand Cougar’s mistress/whore. She does get some choice lines such as “The smell of roasted meat turns me on” (uttered at a decadent banquet where Yankee, stripped and bound upside-down on an octangular wheel, is the evening’s entertainment). She is also later stripped naked and used as a lure by Yankee to draw the Grand Cougar and his men to a deserted outpost that becomes a shooting gallery. But the female nudity in this film is discreet and fleeting compared to Brass’s later slide into soft-and-hardcore exploitation.

Philippe Leroy is subjected to the ring of fire in Yankee (1966), directed by Tinto Brass.

Brass is much more generous with the violence and serves up some sadistically original set pieces such as a shoot-out in a mine where Yankee kills all of his antagonists except one whom he cripples by shooting both his arms and sending him back to his boss (and certain death) with the bodies of his dead companions loaded on horses like sacks of flour.  In past interviews, Brass has disowned Yankee, saying the film was taken away from him upon completion and re-edited against his wishes. It makes you wonder what his original cut looked like but the film, as it stands, is quite stylish and a small taste of what was to come in the more avant-garde experimentation of Nerosubianco aka Attraction (1969) and L’urio (The Howl, 1970).

Director Tinto Brass in younger days

I saw Yankee in a DVD Pal edition from Germany’s Koch Media label and it is an exceptionally eye-pleasing transfer with English subtitle options. If you have an all-region DVD player, you can still find copies of it for sale on Amazon.

Koch Media DVD of Yankee

Other websites of interest:

http://filmint.nu/?p=858

http://rjbuffalo.com/1965a-ya.html

http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/368-VENICE-FILM-FESTIVAL-JOHN-EXSHAWS-REPORT-10.html

http://sguhaneogi.blogspot.com/2009/04/filmography-of-tinto-brass.html

https://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Yankee

http://worldscinema.org/2012/04/tinto-brass-yankee-1966/

Robert Donat plays film pioneer William Friese-Greene in The Magic Box (1951), directed by John Boulting.

In the annals of forgotten inventors, unsung geniuses and visionaries who have fallen through the cracks of time, William Friese-Greene should be near the top of the list. Even though his gravestone bears the inscription, “The Inventor of Kinematography,” his reputation as an early film pioneer is still challenged by some movie scholars while others believe he was a victim of bad luck and deserved the credit and fame that others like Thomas Edison enjoy today. The Magic Box (1951), directed by John Boulting, favors the latter view and was one of the most prestigious productions of its year. It was produced exclusively for the Festival of Britain, a national exhibition that opened in London in May 1951 and marked the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition.  

William Friese-Greene, cinema inventor

Even to this day, William Friese-Greene remains a shadowy, controversial figure whose life story is often sketchy with important details lost to time. From the various books, biographies and sources quoted on the internet, here is what is known. He was born in Bristol, England in 1855. As a young man, he became a photographer’s apprentice in Bath circa 1869 and eventually opened his own studio there, later expanding his business to Brighton and London.

After his marriage to Helena Friese in 1874, he changed his birth name of William Edward Green to William Friese-Greene in honor of his wife. While in Bath, he began working with John Rudge whose experiments with magic lanterns fired his imagination and led to a collaboration on a device called a Biophantascope which projected glass plate images. Friese-Greene soon realized this was an impractical medium for projecting moving pictures and turned to oiled paper and later celluloid in 1887 as a desirable medium.

Cinema innovator William Friese-Greene and his dog

By 1889, he was working with two engineers, Frederick Varley and Mortimer Evans, on cameras that could capture four to five pictures per second. The latter invention proved unsuccessful but Friese-Greene plowed ahead, experimenting with color cinematography that resulted in his Biocolour process. Unfortunately, he became embroiled in a lawsuit brought against him by his rival G.A. Smith, the developer of Kinemacolor. He lost the case but the decision was reversed in an appeal to the House of Lords in 1914. Yet Friese-Greene wasn’t able to profit from the decision since his Biocolour process was not yet perfected. Although he spent endless hours tinkering and working on his ideas, he was a terrible businessman and often tended to forget about his family, friends, important dates or personal affairs. As a result, he was constantly in debt and his always restless, curious mind often lacked the focus to finish inventions he’d started or to patent them and renew the patents when they expired. (At one point he was imprisoned for failing to comply with the terms of his bankruptcy).

His first wife died young at age 21 in 1895 – they had a daughter – and he remarried in 1897. His second wife, Edith Harrison, bore him six sons but their life together was a series of mishaps and grinding poverty and she finally left him in 1917.

Robert Donat as obscure film pioneer William Friese-Greene in the 1951 British biopix, The Magic Box.

The first half of The Magic Box is told from Edith’s point of view and ends on the day that Friese-Greene departs for a British film industry meeting. It was there while making a speech that he became incoherent, fell over and died. Despite years of being ignored and forgotten, however, the film industry paid for his funeral (he was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London) and his monument, which credited him with being England’s first film pioneer. That claim has been debunked by many since, especially Brian Coe, curator of the Kodak Museum and author of The History of Movie Photography. At the same time, Friese-Greene had numerous defenders such as writer Ray Allister and film historian Will Day.

American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931).

One wonders what the true story really was and if Friese-Greene actually superceded the Lumiere Brothers and Thomas Edison in the invention of the motion picture camera. Allegedly, he even sent a news story on his ‘chronophotographic’ camera in the British publication Photographic News in 1890 to Edison, the year before the American inventor was credited with building the Kinetoscope. And you have to wonder about Edison.

George Melies, French film pioneer

According to Remi Fournier Lanzoni in French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present, “agents of Thomas Edison bribed a theater owner in London [in 1902] for a copy of A Trip to the Moon by George Méliés. Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New York City. Méliès received no compensation.” Méliès had been counting on taking the film to America and recoup the huge cost of it by showing it there when he discovered that Edison had already distributed it, which bankrupted Méliès. It sounds to me like Edison was a pioneer in video pirating and theft.   In all likelihood, Friese-Greene was probably ripped off and exploited by competitors in the same field all the time. In The Magic Box he always seems to be working on the next undiscovered breakthrough while others are getting credit for inventions he had already created some earlier prototype for…without receiving any recognition.

Robert Donat in the British 1951 biopix of cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene, The Magic Box.

With Robert Donat cast as William Friese-Greene and an all-star cast featuring practically every famous star and character actor working in the British film industry (with the possible exception of Alec Guinness who refused), The Magic Box was a monumental flop at the box office which was perhaps further proof of Friese-Greene’s unlucky life and legacy. This was a shame because the film stands as an impressive and often dazzling visual achievement with Jack Cardiff’s not-of-this-earth Technicolor cinematography and immaculate art direction and production design by T. Hopewell Ash and John Bryan, respectively.

A scene from John Boulting’s 1951 biopix, The Magic Box.

Many critics at the time found the movie highly romanticized and suspect as biography since it was based on Ray Allister’s non-fiction book, Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor, which was also accused of inflating the inventor’s importance and presenting unproven claims as proof.  Most film biographies, particularly Hollywood made features, have always played fast and loose with the facts so this is nothing new but The Magic Box is a special case. For one thing, it has a complex structure featuring two elaborate flashbacks, one from his second wife’s point of view and one from Friese-Greene which ends with his collapse at the aforementioned British film industry meeting in 1921. This is followed by a third viewpoint, a brief epilogue delivered by an impassive, unidentified narrator. If it’s possible for a biopic to be both highly nostaglic and relentlessly depressing at the same time, this is it.

Maria Schell and Robert Donat star in John Boulting’s 1951 film, The Magic Box.

There is an undeniable tension at work throughout The Magic Box due to a constant tonal clash from scene to scene. It makes you wonder if it was intentional on the part of director John Boulting and producer Ronald Neame. It’s as if William Alwyn’s rich, orchestral score and Jack Cardiff’s day-glo cinematography are at war with Eric Ambler’s literate, hard-edged screenplay and the subtle nuances of the performances. Yet, this strange dichotomy is what makes the movie so compelling to watch. No, the problem with The Magic Box for most people is William Friese-Greene himself, the sort of beautiful dreamer who could see what others could not. Yet he was blind to those closest to him, unintentionally causing heartbreak, despair and financial ruin due to his oblivious nature and inability to deal with the day-to-day details of real life.

Take, for example, the scene where his second wife (Margaret Johnston), finally confronts the inevitable about her lot in life. Watching her husband leave the house for another long night in his laboratory, she says (in voiceover) “That night I realized something that perhaps I had known for a quite a long time. That although we might work as usual, and plan for the day when we were going to be successful, we weren’t going to be rich. As a family, we’d be lucky if we survived.”

Robert Donat and Margaret Johnston in the tragic tale of film pioneer William Friese-Greene, The Magic Box.

Later, when she accepts the fact that the marriage is hopeless, she observes, “Nobody knows him anymore. He’s nobody that matters. Nobody cares for his opinion but Willie Friese-Greene hasn’t mattered for years. He doesn’t know that. Thinks he still belongs. I think the truth is when I met him his real life was already over. I never knew the real Willie. He was before my time.”

Even in Friese-Greene’s own flashback, he recalls how he drove his first wife to tears over his inability to keep important dates and appointments, particularly his commitment as a soloist in a local musical production; he fails to show up for the performance, of course, because he is busy conversing with a renowned inventor about movie cameras. The Magic Box might look like a romantic fantasy on the surface but with Eric Ambler’s tough-love scripting resulting in scenes like the above, it’s not a feel-good, uplifting tale of an artist’s triumph against all odds. It’s a haunting, melancholy portrait of someone who kept playing the game and losing all the while.

Robert Donat as cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene in his final days in the biopix The Magic Box (1951).

Donat, in particular, with his sad, soulful eyes and often haggard, physical appearance – even in his most upbeat, optimistic moments – is ideally cast as Friese-Greene. At the time, Donat was physically ill, having suffered from chronic asthma most of his life. By 1955 he was dependent on using oxygen whenever he worked and he died in 1958 at the age of 54.

Robert Donat (left) and Laurence Olivier in a cameo as a London bobby in The Magic Box (1951).

According to one report, Donat was given Friese-Greene’s spectacles and purse by the family for use during the shooting of the film. Maria Schell, with her delicate, luminous beauty, is fine as the ill-fated Helena and Margaret Johnston is equally memorable as his despairing second wife (she is also excellent as the malevolent sorceress in Night of the Eagle aka Burn, Witch, Burn, 1962).

Glynis Johns & Richard Attenborough play supporting roles in the British biopix, The Magic Box (1951).

Most of all, The Magic Box is a treat for any Anglophile with its amazing all-star cast that includes Richard Attenborough, Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, David Tomlinson, Janette Scott, Leo Genn, Stanley Holloway, Glynis Johns, Dennis Price, Eric Portman, Joyce Grenfell, Margaret Rutherford, Emlyn Williams and Laurence Olivier (who has an amusing cameo as a London bobby pulled off the street by the ecstatic inventor to witness the first demonstration of moving pictures). The list goes on and on.

Dennis Price, star of Kind Hearts and Coronets, makes a cameo appearance in The Magic Box, 1951.

Supposedly, Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray brothers (a pair of notorious London criminals), is an extra in the film. I also discovered that actor Richard Greene (The Little Princess, The Black Castle, The Castle of Fu Manchu and The Adventures of Robin Hood on TV) was the grandson of William Friese-Greene. Who knew?

Actor Richard Greene as a Sherwood Forest legend in the 1955 TV series, The Adventures of Robin Hood.

In the end, Friese-Greene may well have been impossible and maddening to be around despite his brilliance – you have to pity his wives and children – but there will always be a special place in my heart for the beautiful losers and unknown dreamers of this world.

The Magic Box remains unavailable on Blu-Ray or DVD in the U.S. You can stream the film on Amazon but I can’t vouch for the quality and you might find an all-region DVD-R import or gray market copy on the internet. TCM has even shown it in the past and may air it again but, at this point, The Magic Box deserves a full restoration, if only for Jack Cardiff’s luminous Technicolor cinematography.

* This is a revised and updated version of a blog that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official Turner Classic Movies blog.

Other website links of interest:

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/films/The-Magic-Box_1951

http://victorian-cinema.net/friesegreene

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/508948/

http://www.brightonfilm.com/brighton_film_people.htm

http://www.moviemoviesite.com/Years/19th%20Century/1889%20Articles/Friese-Greene%20Films%20Hyde%20Park.htm

L’insoumis (1964) aka The Unvanquished is a relatively unknown but deeply compelling and haunting French film from director Alain Cavalier that aired several years ago on TCM in an English language version titled Have I the Right to Kill? (It was originally distributed by MGM in the U.S.) Shot in glorious black and white by master cinematographer Claude Renoir, the film plays like a politically-charged film noir and it could easily be the best of Alain Delon’s early performances. In the other key role, Lea Massari, the beautiful Italian actress who is best known as the warm, charismatic mother in Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart (1971), has rarely been more appealing. 

Lea Massari and Alain Delon star in the political thriller/romantic melodrama L’Insoumis (1964).

L’insoumis is also one of the few films of Cavalier to have received distribution in America along with his more famous 1986 feature Therese, about the life of Carmelite nun St. Therese of Lisieux, which won the prestigious Golden Palm at Cannes. It also won six Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscar. On the basis of these two films alone, I think the rest of Cavalier’s work deserves further investigation. Unfortunately, his filmography is rather lean compared to other French directors of his era due to….a possible lack of opportunities?

French director Alain Cavalier

At the time L’insoumis was made, Alain Delon was probably the most popular male star in France, eclipsing even Jean-Paul Belmondo in terms of international fame. He had already appeared in such landmark critical successes as Rene Clement’s Plein soleil (1960, aka Purple Noon), Luchino Visconti’s two family-centric epics Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Il Gattopardo (1963, The Leopard) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) as well as French box-office hits such as Melodie en sous-sol (1963, aka Any Number Can Win).

Alain Delon stars in L’Insoumis (1964), directed by Alain Cavalier.

Unfortunately, L’insoumis would prove to be a bitter disappointment to Delon because of its poor reception though the reason why seems fairly obvious in hindsight. The film takes place against the backdrop of the Algerian War, which had ended just two years before and was a painful memory for most French citizens. It some ways it was comparable to America’s devisive Vietnam campaign. Part of the film’s plot, especially the first half, involves the OAS (a group that fought against Algerian independence) and their kidnapping of two people who offered aid to the other side. This was not something French moviegoers wanted to relive. After all, they had been living with the Algerian War since 1954 and wanted escapism, preferring instead to see Alain Delon in some lightweight heist film with Jean Gabin like Melodie en sous-sol, 1963) or a swashbuckling period adventure-comedy like La Tulipe noire (The Black Tulip, 1964). Another reason Delon was disappointment by the failure of L’insoumis was due to cuts imposed by French government censors, which he felt damaged the film’s original intentions and impact.

Alain Delon and Lea Massari play a couple on the run from the OAS in Alain Cavalier’s L’Insoumis (1964).

This is a shame because Delon is better than you’d ever expect in L’Insoumis. He often appeared to be playing variations of the same character in his movies – a cool, calculating opportunist with sociopathic tendencies. He conveys a predatory quality that is sometimes disguised by his handsome features. In L’Insoumis, he plays the victim and displays a vulnerability mixed with toughness that humanizes him in a way that rarely occurs in his most iconic films such as Purple Noon (1960), Le Samourai (1967), La Piscine (1969, aka The Swimming Pool).  The movie opens with Thomas (Delon) as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion whose outfit is stationed in Algeria. He soon deserts his post (during the 1961 uprising) and ends up being recruited by another deserter to assist the OAS (Secret Army Organization) in the abduction of two French professionals who are aiding the Algerian cause. In a tense sequence, Thomas helps ambush a car carrying the dignitaries and, at gunpoint, forces the two abductees into a van that carts them away to an isolated apartment where they are confined to separate cells, presumably to be tortured for information.

Lea Massari plays a lawyer kidnapped by the OAS in the political thriller L’Insoumis (aka The Unvanquished, 1964).

One of the hostages is Dominique Servet (Lea Massari), a lawyer who, along with her husband, are known for their liberal politics and humanitarian concerns. It is Delon’s job to guard the prisoners but not interact with them or offer them any comfort. The fate of these two people gnaws away at Delon and he finds himself succumbing to Dominique’s repeated pleas for something to drink or to talk through the keyhole. His fellow guard is another matter and would just as soon shoot the two hostages. The first half of the film, which sets up the captor/captive relationship between Thomas and Dominique, is chilling in its depiction of a hidden terrorist cell where deprivation and torture is the norm.

An AWOL French Foreign Legion soldier (Alain Delon) and an escaped political prisoner (Lea Massari) flee their pursuers in L’Insoumis (aka Have I the Right to Kill?).

Then, in a split second, everything changes when the other jailer discovers Thomas offering aid to Dominique and guns are drawn, bullets are fired. One man lies dead and the other releases his two prisoners and escorts them to safety. L’insoumis then becomes a noir thriller with Thomas, seriously wounded and on the run, much like Sterling Hayden’s character in The Asphalt Jungle. He makes his way back to France, where Dominique and her husband are hiding out of harm’s way. Now the situation is reversed and it’s Dominique who holds the key to Thomas’s fate. Can he trust her?

A brief moment of tenderness in the tense political thriller L’Insoumis (1964) starring Lea Massari and Alain Delon.

The second half of the movie follows the conventions of the standard chase thriller but has a deeper resonance as a fatalistic love story, one obviously doomed from the start but utterly compelling regardless. Even in the English dubbed version, Delon and Massari project an undeniable sexual chemistry together that eventually culminates in a discreet lovemaking scene that was heavily promoted on the U.S. poster (and possibly edited for U.S. audiences). In true noir style, it’s a race to the bottom but as beautifully realized as such earlier precursors of the form such as Marcel Carne’s Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se leve (1939).  What does director Alain Cavalier think about L’Insoumis or other 60s-era work like Mise a sac (Pillaged, 1967) or La Chamade (Heartbeat, 1968)? In a 2011 interview with Spanish journalist Santiago Rubin de Celis, he stated: “For me, now, they are tiresome because, watching them, I always think that I’m going to find some new things and then, after four, five minutes of the film, the mechanism of my memory starts to work and then I know by heart which shot is following this one, and which one is the next one, and the next one. So there is not a single surprise! Now I’m making films coming out of my own daily life that are unpredictable, just as my life is, and I expect the audience to be able to feel this.”

A publicity still of Alain Delon and Lea Massari in Alain Cavalier’s L’Insoumis (1964).

Sometimes a director is not always the best judge of his own work. That is up to the viewer and L’Insoumis, in my opinion, is one of the most overlooked French films of its era but I could say the same thing about Mise a sac, a tense, meticulously plotted heist thriller (based on the novel The Score by American novelist/screenwriter Richard Sale aka Donald E. Westlake) that deserves to be accorded the same respect as other superior examples of that genre such as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955).  One thing is certainly true. There are relatively few films about the Algerian War, either as the main subject or narrative subplot, so L’Insoumis is a more than worthy addition to the canon. Gillo Pontecorvo’s impassioned and controversial The Battle of Algiers (1966) is, of course, the best known and most influential of them all. Equally important but much less accessible to non-French audiences is Jean-Luc Godard’s absurdist critique, Le Petit Soldat (1960). The Algerian conflict is an all-present ghost that haunts some of the interviewees in Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s documentary Le Joli Mai (1963) and the topic would also serve as background for Frank Wisbar’s exploitation actioner Commando (1962) with Stewart Granger and Lost Command (1966), a war drama from director Mark Robson with Anthony Quinn AND Alain Delon. Probably the most acclaimed film in recent times to deal with the Algerian War is Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975), which won the Palme d’Or award at Cannes.

Alain Delon stars in Alain Cavalier’s L’Insoumis (1964).

Currently L’Insoumis is still unavailable in any format but perhaps Turner Classic Movies or their steaming co-partnership FilmStruck will program it again. You can currently view the French language version (no English subtitles) on YouTube. Meanwhile, the film lives on in the popular culture in unexpected ways. The cover of the Smith’s 1986 album, The Queen is Dead, features a still of Delon from L’Insoumis.  * This is a revised and expanded version of a blog that first appeared on Movie Morlocks, TCM’s official movie blog.

Other websites of interest:

http://www.filmsdefrance.com/review/l-insoumis-1964.html

http://cineuropa.org/ff.aspx?t=ffocusinterview&l=en&tid=2251&did=204969

http://newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/alain-cavalier.shtml

http://filmint.nu/?p=3579

http://www.filmsdefrance.com/biography/alain-delon.html

http://map.revues.org/1800

Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson have a traumatic love affair in Autumn Leaves (1956).

In 1956 directed Robert Aldrich surprised everyone by trying his hand at a “woman’s picture,” a melodramatic soap opera that on the surface appeared to be a complete departure from his previous work which included two westerns (Apache, Vera Cruz), a film noir (Kiss Me Deadly) and a drama (The Big Knife), whose emotional volatility equals the physical violence in the three preceding films. 

Autumn Leaves tells the story of Millie Wetherby (Joan Crawford), a lonely, middle-aged spinster who supports herself as a freelance typist, working out of her modest Hollywood bungalow. Except for occasional visits from her landlady (Ruth Donnelly), Millie has no social life or friends and has spent most of her years taking care of an invalid father (shown briefly in flashbacks).

Ruth Donnelly (left) and Joan Crawford are featured in a scene from Robert Aldrich’s psychological soap opera, Autumn Leaves (1956).

Suddenly a handsome stranger enters her life. They meet in a diner and Burt (Cliff Robertson), though much younger than Millie, pursues her relentlessly, eventually breaking down her distrust and fear of romantic involvement. Despite her anxiety over being hurt and later rejected by Burt, Millie reluctantly agrees to marry him and for a brief period they are happy. Soon cracks begin to show in Burt’s happy-go-lucky facade along with his constant lies about his job, his family and his past. When his former wife Virginia (Vera Miles) shows up unannounced at the door one day, Millie learns that Burt not only has a history of psychological trauma but that Virginia is romantically involved with Burt’s father (Lorne Greene).

Joan Crawford confronts her father-in-law Lorne Greene in Autumn Leaves (1956), directed by Robert Aldrich.

The path to a happy ending is increasingly rocky and involves a frightening confrontation with an unhinged Burt (wielding a typewriter as a weapon) and a period of rehabilitation in an institution before Millie and Burt can start life anew.

Cliff Robertson plays a charming younger man with a dark side who pursues Joan Crawford romantically in Autumn Leaves (1956).

In Robert Aldrich: Interviews, the director explained why he decided to make Autumn Leaves: “I guess self-survival made me do that one. People were getting pretty collective in their criticism of the violence and anger and wrath in my pictures, although these things were intentional, and I thought it was about time I made a soap opera. I was also a great fan of the Butlers – Jean Rouverol and Hugo Butler – and this was her original story.”

On the set of Autumn Leaves with Cliff Robertson (left), Joan Crawford and director Robert Aldrich.

Working with Joan Crawford, however, brought its own challenges as Aldrich quickly noted. “I admired Joan Crawford, who is a “method” actress of her own concoction, but I could not get her to be a drab ageing woman, which threw off the balance of the picture…About a week before work on the picture began, Miss Crawford wanted her own writer to come in and rewrite, which I refused to allow her to do. At two a.m. on the morning before we were due to start shooting I received a phone call saying she wouldn’t be there later that day unless her writer could attend, to which I responded that if her writer showed up we would not shoot. Looking back, I really think that’s the only way you can properly deal with Miss Crawford. The writer didn’t show up but she did, and we proceeded. But she didn’t talk to me for about four or five days. She took direction, she did what she was supposed to do, but there was no personal communication. Then one day she was doing a scene terribly effectively: I forget which one. I was really touched, and when she looked up after finishing it I tried not to be obvious in wiping away a tear. That broke the ice, and from then on we were good friends for a long time.”

Joan Crawford is troubled by her relationship with a younger man in Autumn Leaves (1956), directed by Robert Aldrich.

By 1956 Crawford was no longer the major star she had been at MGM and Warner Bros. but that didn’t stop her from behaving like a diva with most of the cast and crew. Writer Bob Sherman, who was hired as the dialogue coach on Autumn Leaves recalled meeting her for the first time in Shaun Considine’s biography, Bette & Joan: “Bob Aldrich, the director, asked me if I’d go out to Crawford’s house on a Sunday afternoon, to go over the script with her,” said Sherman. “When I got there, I was ushered through the living room, with the white couch and white pillows and white rugs. At the back of the house, two little girls dressed in their white crinoline dresses, playing with two white French poodles. Mister Pepsi-Cola [Al Steele] was standing by the Greek white pool area, with two white pool houses on each side. And then I saw Joan. She was lying on a white chaise lounge, wearing sunglasses, having a manicure and a pedicure while dictating letters to a secretary sitting on one side. She patted a chair on her other side and I sat there, reading lines to her whenever she had a moment to spare. She was playing the ‘executive-actress’ to the hilt.”

Joan Crawford invites Cliff Robertson for a swim in the ocean in Autumn Leaves (1956) featuring the famous theme song by Nat King Cole.

Even Cliff Robertson – Autumn Leaves was his first leading role after a supporting part in Picnic (1955) – was personally “auditioned” by Crawford at her home prior to filming. But he felt empathy and respect for the fiercely determined actress. In Donald’s biography Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford, Robertson says, “I think she felt fraudulent precisely because she had crossed the railroad tracks – had come up from nothing – and that therefore she felt she wasn’t the real thing because she was just ‘acting.’ But Joan was the real thing.”

Joan was equally complimentary of Robertson exclaiming he was, “stunning; very few actor could have brought that kind of credibility to such a demanding part. His mad scenes can’t be topped.”

Vera Miles (right) confronts Joan Crawford with the truth about her young, unstable husband in Autumn Leaves (1956).

As for her female co-star Vera Miles, Crawford was equally complimentary and supportive, despite her reputation for often treating younger actresses with disdain. “There is an actress in this picture, also gifted, who truly deserved a wonderful career and great parts,” told biographer Charlotte Chandler years later in Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography. “Vera Miles had the looks and she’s a real actress. She’s had a good career, but she deserved even more.”

Joan Crawford poses with a camera with famous photographer Phil Stern

After Crawford’s initial standoff with Aldrich for scriptwriters, the Autumn Leaves shoot proceeded smoothly though Joan did persist in antagonizing her director over his choice of soft drinks. He “liked to drink Coke out of a paper cup,” said photographer Phil Stern. “When he had a case of the stuff brought in, Joan had a Pepsi vending machine set up. Every time his back was turned, she used to throw out his Coke and replace it with Pepsi.” Aldrich eventually put a stop to this but Joan continued to extol the virtues of drinking Pepsi to anyone who would listen.   When Autumn Leaves was released, the critics were divided over its merits but it was a modest box office hit that scored well with mostly female moviegoers. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times was particularly uncomplimentary and set a sour note with the introductory paragraph that announced, “This dismal tale wrenched from Dr. Freud’s notebooks fluttered down at the Astor yesterday.” After laying out the basic plot, he dismissed the contributions of Aldrich, Crawford and Robertson: “The situation is valid—in its basic circumstances, anyhow—but it couldn’t have been handled less considerately or convincingly without the whole thing’s becoming utter farce. As a matter of fact, Miss Crawford’s acting often touches absurdity…Under these trying conditions, Cliff Robertson’s performance as the boy is a jumble of poignant awkwardness and embarrassing idiocies. His schizophrenic condition must adjust to the histrionic requirements of the heroine.” Crowther even manages to denigrate the popular theme song with this dismissive comment: “…at the beginning and at the end, the singer Nat (King) Cole, gives a soggy sound-track rendering of the ballad “Autumn Leaves.”

One of the more intense encounters between Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson in Robert Aldrich’s melodrama, Autumn Leaves (1956).

Autumn Leaves now stands as one of Crawford’s best films of the fifties, along with Sudden Fear (1952) and Johnny Guitar (1954), and it became a personal favorite of hers as well. She deemed it the “best older woman/younger man movie ever made,” adding, “Everything clicked on Autumn Leaves. The cast was perfect, the script was good, and I think Bob [Aldrich] handled everything well. I really think Cliff did a stupendous job; another actor might have been spitting out his lines and chewing the scenery, but he avoided that trap. I think the movie on a whole was a lot better than some of the romantic movies I did in the past…but somehow it just never became better known. It was eclipsed by the picture I did with Bette Davis.”  Autumn Leaves has clearly grown in stature over the years among film critics and admirers of Aldrich’s work. Film critic and former director of the New York Film Festival Richard Roud described it as an “extraordinary combination of domestic Guignol and elephantised soap opera” while Paul Taylor in TimeOut Film Guide describes it as “a seemingly eccentric, but in fact characteristic Aldrich film: cutting a radical cinematic swathe through weepie material.”

Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson star in a neurotic variation on the older woman-younger man romantic drama – Autumn Leaves (1956).

Probably the most perceptive critique is Dan Callahan’s for Slant magazine, which states “All of Aldrich’s early work is intriguing, but Autumn Leaves is his secret gem. It’s been passed over as camp because of its star, Joan Crawford, but Aldrich brings all his hard edges to this woman’s picture. The collision of his tough style with the soapy material makes for a film that never loses its queasy tension…The real theme of Autumn Leaves is not loneliness, but incest…If photographer Diane Arbus felt that all families are creepy, Autumn Leaves proves that such creepiness persists in the most unlikely places.”

A publicity still from Autumn Leaves (1956) starring Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson.

Autumn Leaves might not have won any Oscar nominations but Aldrich did win the Best Director award at the Berlin International Film Festival for his efforts. Unfortunately, he never was acknowledged by the Academy for any of his work but his peers, the Directors Guild of America, honored him with “Outstanding Directorial Achievement” nominations for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen.  Aldrich would follow Autumn Leaves with a return to male-oriented genre films starting with Attack (1956), a grim WWII drama – starring Jack Palance (Joan’s future co-star in Sudden Fear), Eddie Albert and Lee Marvin – which Peter Cowie praised in his film history anthology, Eighty Years of Cinema, as “a biting study of disloyalty, cowardice and incompetence.”  rom

(From left to right) Jack Palance, Buddy Ebsen and Robert Strauss star in Robert Aldrich’s WW2 drama, Attack (1956).

Additional Trivia:

Joan Crawford originally wanted Marlon Brando for the role of Burt which he refused.

The original title of the film was The Way We Are but was changed to capitalize on the success of Nat King Cole’s song, “Autumn Leaves”, the movie’s theme song.

Actress Jean Rouverol and husband screenwriter Hugo Butler were investigated by HUAC as communists during the early fifties and eventually fled to Mexico with their four children and stayed there 13 years. Robert Aldrich was one of the few directors to give them work during the Blacklist era. The couple’s co-writing credits on Autumn Leaves appear as Jack Jevne, their “front.” They would be credited with their real names on the screenplay for Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare and Butler would also pen the screenplay for Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah. *This is a revised and expanded version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other links of interest:

http://javabeanrush.blogspot.com/2015/09/autumn-leaves-1956-w-joan-crawford.html

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/autumn-leaves

https://josmarlopes.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/autumn-leaves-a-song-for-all-seasons/

http://eddieonfilm.blogspot.com/2011/09/cliff-robertson-1923-2011.html

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/sep/11/cliff-robertson-obituary

http://thehollywoodart.blogspot.com/2008/08/joan-crawford-appreciation-part-ii.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaOCyLsMW1Q

Imagine a science-fiction influenced spy thriller about humanoid assassins directed by Jess Franco with a screenplay adaptation by Jean-Claude Carrière (a frequent collaborator with Luis Bunuel), a cool jazz score by Paul Misraki (Alphaville, Le Doulos, Les Cousins) and an international cast featuring Eddie Constantine, Fernando Rey and Francoise Brion. It sounds like a film buff’s fever dream but it actually exists. Released in 1966 during the height of the James Bond craze, Cartes sur table aka Attack of the Robots is a stylish and amusing entertainment that takes a standard world domination-by-madman scenario and infuses it with a cheeky sense of humor. The film will come as a surprise to those who only associate Jess Franco with Eurotrash favorites like 99 Women (1969), Vampyros Lesbos (1971) and Wanda, the Wicked Warden (1977).

Eddie Constantine as Interpol agent Al Pereira in Jess Franco’s Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

Former blood type 0 people are turned into mind-controlled killing machines in Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

Attack of the Robots, the U.S. release title, is somewhat misleading since the bronze skin tone killers running amok in the movie are not cyborgs but human beings with type O blood who have been converted by a giant test tube-like contraption into mind-controlled hit men and women. The male victims, in particular, are quite fashionable with their black turtlenecks, dark jackets and super thick nerd glasses (they look like Henry Kissinger with a weird tan). But this is only one aspect of the narrative that revolves around retired Interpol agent Al Peterson (identified as Al Pereira in the international version and played by American born singer/actor Eddie Constantine), who finds himself forced back into the game by his former employer in order to infiltrate and destroy the sinister operations of Sir Percy (Fernando Rey) and his scheming wife Lady Cecilia (Francoise Brion).  There are other subplots which are playfully integrated into the fast-paced proceedings such as an attempt by Interpol rival Lee Wee, played by Vicente Roca, to kidnap Peterson from a casino and use him for his own purposes (Lee Wee figures prominently in the finale). Peterson also plays seductive cat-and-mouse games with Lady Cecilia and Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy), an exotic dancer/undercover agent, that confirm Peterson’s reputation as a womanizer.

Eddie Constantine & Sophie Hardy try to thwart an bizarre world domination plot in Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

In addition, Franco sprinkles the film with fun film references such as the staging of an assassination on the steps of a government palace as seen from above and is clearly a homage to a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940).

Eddie Constantine as agent Lemmy Caution in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965).

Eddie Constantine, a former protege of French singer Edith Piaf, had appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville the previous year. That film thrust him into the international limelight briefly even though he was playing a more stylized variation of detective Lemmy Caution, a pulp fiction character he embodied in a popular series of French B-movies. Alphaville for Godard was both an allegorical sci-fi film without special effects and a deadpan sendup of the American private eye genre. He dedicated the film to Monogram Pictures, the ultimate poverty row studio in Hollywood, and who better to play the B-movie hero than French icon Constantine, who found himself stereotyped in countless tough guy roles besides the Lemmy Caution series such as Jeff Gordon, Secret Agent (1963) and Nick Carter and Red Club (1965).

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, center) with fellow agent Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy) deal with a corpse in the bathtub in Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

Although Constantine is not playing Lemmy Caution in Attack of the Robots, his persona is very similar to the macho, two-fisted agent he played in such low-budget efforts like Women Are Like That (1960) and Your Turn, Darling (1963) where women and booze were his favorite distractions. Think of Attack of the Robots as a looser, more surreal variation on the Lemmy Caution formula and a visual upgrade in production values compared to that series.

One of the stylish stripclub sequences in Jess Franco’s Attack of the Robots (aka Cartes sur table, 1966).

The crisp black and white cinematography by Antonio Macasoli is an eye pleasing blend of film noir lighting and jet set ambiance. Equally appealing is the evocative score by Paul Misraki which mirrors the French nightclub jazz scene of its era with a beatnik vibe that sometimes permeates other Misraki-scored films like …And God Created Woman (Brigitte Bardot’s wild bongo drum dance). Attack of the Robots is also spiced with ingredients that would become more prominent in later Franco films such as eroticism (there are some unconventional striptease scenes, one featuring a Dixieland-jazz band), sadism (whippings, beatings and Sir Percy’s laboratory procedures) and exotic settings (the picturesque Mediterranean seaport of Alicante, Spain serves as a major backdrop).

The picturesque seaside setting of Alicante, Spain serves as a backdrop in Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

Attack of the Robots is also rife with James Bond references, both direct and indirect, from the bronzed zombies (shades of Goldfinger) to the so-called ingenious gadgets Constantine is given to use against his enemies – a gas-filled pen, exploding cigar, gloves that deliver electrical shocks and a mysterious umbrella. All of them prove to be empty props except for one.

A bronze skinned humanoid assassin has been neutralized in Attack of the Robots (1966), directed by Jess Franco.

There are a few moments when Attack of the Robots threats to segue into complete buffoonery but for the most part, Franco keeps the film balanced between a campy sense of humor and James Bond-like shenanigans with compelling action stunts and violence such as a high speed car chase on treacherous mountain roads and an impressive fight sequence in a boat house that ends with death by speargun. It also helps that Francoise Brion plays her role with deadpan seriousness which makes her cunning femme fatale the most intriguing character in the film. The actress shares some physical similarities to Francoise Dorleac (Catherine Deneuve’s sister) and her glacial beauty adds a touch of class to the proceedings. Brion had previously appeared with Constantine in Women Are Like That (1960) and Ladies’ Man (1962) and is probably best known for her work in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s I’Immortelle (1963), Yves Robert’s Very Happy Alexander (1968) and Nelly Kaplan’s Nea aka Young Emmanuelle (1976).

Francoise Brion as the alluring but deadly Lady Cecilia in Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

In contrast to Brion’s calculated deadliness, Constantine appears to be having great fun as Interpol agent Al Peterson and perhaps it’s a reaction to his much more orchestrated, blustery performance in Alphaville. He is alternately unflappable, clueless, flippant and vulnerable here in ways that make his relationship with Hardy look like some weird, high stakes Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy. Not surprisingly, Constantine would work with Franco on his next film – Residencia para sepias,1966 – in which he played a C.I.A. agent named Dan Leyton on assignment in Istanbul. It was not a popular success and remains an obscurity in the careers of both actor and director.

The diabolical Sir Percy (Fernando Rey) struggles with Interpol agent Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy) in Cartes sur table (aka Attack of the Robots, 1966).

The supporting cast of Attack of the Robots includes Franco regular Ricardo Palacios as a not-too-bright Mexican tourist who keeps showing up to give Constantine a hard time and provides unwanted and annoying comic relief. As for the great Fernando Rey – so brilliant in such Luis Bunuel films as Viridiana (1960), Tristana (1970) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) – he is mostly wasted here as the evil mastermind Sir Percy. Instead of cutting loose and having fun with this over the top character, Rey chooses to play him as an introverted, methodical and quietly insane powermonger. At least he gets a memorable sendoff in the fiery climax.

Two mind-controlled humanoids receive instructions from Lady Cecilia (Francoise Brion) as her husband Sir Percy (Fernando Rey) observes in the background in Attack of the Robots (1966), directed by Jess Franco.

Attack of the Robots is available as an English-dubbed DVD-R from Sinister Cinema but I recommend you seek out the PAL DVD from Gaumont if you have an all-region DVD player. It is presented in anamorphic widescreen which retains the film’s intended aspect ratio and is uncut, running three minutes longer than the U.S. release. It looks terrific but there is no English audio or subtitle option (The disc is in French). Still, the film is easy to follow and well worth seeing as an early effort from Jess Franco before he detoured into darker territory with films like Eugenie de Sade (1973) and The Perverse Countess (1974). 

Other websites of interest:

http://braineater.com/braindrops/?p=408

http://10kbullets.com/reviews/a/cartes-sur-table-attack-of-the-robots/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-eddie-constantine-1495185.html

Interpol agent Al Pereira (Eddie Constantine) undercovers an evil world domination plot in Cartes sur table (1966).