Richard Wayne Penniman
aka Little Richard
circa 1950s

Those who follow the contemporary art scene and are well versed in art history know William Klein as one of the most influential American photographers to emerge in the fifties along with his contemporary Robert Frank. Famous for his unconventional fashion shoots for Vogue as well as his candid documentation of New York City street life, Klein went on to apply his photo-diary approach to Rome, Moscow and Tokyo in the sixties, all of which are available individually as photography collections. He is less well known for his idiosyncratic films (Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther, 1970) and shorts (Broadway By Light, 1958) but luckily some of his best work is available on DVD – his intimate 1969 portrait of Muhammad Ali, Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee (aka Muhammad Ali, the Greatest) and the Eclipse collection, The Delirious Fictions of William Klein that includes Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), Mr. Freedom (1969) and The Model Couple (1977). But I still want to see more of his cinema explorations made available and The Little Richard Story (1980), a West German production, is at the top of my list.

Little Richard and his fans

I first saw The Little Richard Story at the High Museum of Atlanta in the early eighties. I was expecting a personal, insider take on the rock ‘n’ roll legend in the style of the Muhammed Ali documentary but it’s more like a combination of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and a pop culture love letter/shrine to the larger-than-life personality that is Little Richard. The project started out promisingly with LR agreeing to provide full access to Klein and his crew. This was at a low point in the musician’s career and he needed a boost but he was also flip-flopping back and forth between his flamboyant diva rocker persona and his born-again alter ego.

Little Richard backstage

You never knew which one you were going to get when he turned up on television or at public appearances back then. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that he stabilized for a while and enjoyed a comeback of sorts in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), opposite Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler and Nick Nolte, all of whom had already experienced some severe career slumps of their own.

DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS, Little Richard, 1986, Buena Vista

Shortly after Klein began filming on The Little Richard Story he was faced with a daunting obstacle. His subject disappeared after filming only a few segments and was missing in action for the rest of the shoot. According to various reports, Little Richard either quit the project because Christian affiliates persuaded him not to do it or he became paranoid that he was being exploited by his managers or it was over money. Regardless of the reasons, Klein had to figure out another strategy for his film and he came up with a wildly creative solution that captures the exuberant spirit of Little Richard but also depicts a crazy quilt of American subcultures, some of which may come as a surprise to viewers.

Photographer/director William Klein

Like some of Klein’s photo studies of the marginalized, the fringe dwellers, and the outsiders in our midst, he focuses on Little Richard impersonators, hairdressers, former associates and musicians who worked with LR, record collectors, Nashville Bible publishers, and street people and local residents of Macon, Ga. (the birthplace and home of Little Richard). Add this into a mix that includes archival footage of the entertainer performing on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and clips from Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), D.A. Pennebaker’s Keep on ‘Rockin’ (1969), and The London Rock and Roll Show (1973) and you have a strange animal that not’s quite fiction and not quite documentary.

Little Richard as guest on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour circa 1971

It’s even better than I remember it. While cleaning out some VHS tapes recently, I came across a screener of The Little Richard Story and watched it again. I no longer remember how I acquired the screener but, to my knowledge, it has never been available for sale on any format in this country. That’s a shame but maybe Criterion could consider it as a future release. I suspect there are major music rights problems though because you hear snatches of most of the major hits from “Lucille” to “Tutti Frutti” to “Rip It Up” to “Slippin’ and Sliding.” If you’re looking for vintage Little Richard concert or performance footage, however, you should search elsewhere since he is barely a supporting player here.

Little Richard impersonators in William Klein’s 1980 film, The Little Richard Story.

To give you some idea of the movie’s playful, faux-mythic nature, The Little Richard Story opens with grainy footage of the legend performing and a solemn narrator stating, “We went looking for Little Richard, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll….from Macon, Georgia to Nashville to Hollywood from 1956 to 1980. We found him. We lost him. We found dozens of fake Little Richards and this is how it happened.” But other than that set-up, there is no other narration and Klein tells his story through the people he captures on film and what they say or sing.

Little Richard impersonators hope to be immortalized by director William Klein in his offbeat quasi-documentary portrait, The Little Richard Story (1980).

A sizable portion of the film is devoted to an audition for Little Richard impersonators of all shapes and sizes and talent. From filming them in sets of three against stark white studio walls or panning across a sea of hopeful faces or placing them in the back seat of an open convertible, riding through the wealthy neighborhoods of Hollywood, Klein serves up a full battalion of Little Richards that matches Spartacus’s troops in terms of allegiance and fanaticism.

The Little Richard Story is also raw, profane and unapologetically earthy in those sections of the documentary where some of Little Richard’s former employees and hometown acquaintances share colorful anecdotes about the legend’s sexual preferences. One interviewee, who claimed to be Little Richard’s chauffeur at one time, states with complete authority, “Richard was a bisexual, he wasn’t a homosexual….You could get a fine chick like Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, he’d fold back the money and you couldn’t find it with a microscope. But if he had an ugly, black, nappy-haired woman, his joint would be like a brick and he couldn’t get it down. He’d hang with her all night there, pulling on it.”

The most bizarre section of The Little Richard Story is reserved for an interlude with the Nashville couple who became Little Richard’s business partners in a line of Bibles targeted at African-Americans. The publisher, who exploited LR as a promotion pitchman for his special line, recalls, “…I had just got through designing a special bible that had the heritage of the back people…[corrects himself] Black people in front of this bible, giving their history and background and we were looking for some individuals that could help in promoting this product. And one of my men told me about Little Richard that – I’ve known him as a famous rock ‘n’ roll star but they mentioned that he was a Christian now – he’d dedicated his life to the Lord. He might be available.” Indeed, he was but only briefly. We see him endorsing the special bible in one scene and beaming beatifically with his business partners in another.

Little Richard poses with a copy of his special edition Bible and director William Klein

But it’s the publisher’s wife who is the most memorable interviewee as she takes us on a tour of their home, which has been redecorated to suit Little Richard’s tastes (according to her, he liked to stay there when he was in Nashville). It’s not exactly Graceland but it rates an A + in the kitsch department.  “We’re now in Richard’s bedroom,” reveals his proud hostess, looking a bit like Tammy Wynette circa 1976. “This is the sunken tub which Richard says he enjoys very, very much. He also has his shower beyond it and the rest of his built-ins. This area plus the rest of the bedroom cost in the area of $25,000 to decorate and furnish it. Now let’s go over to the area of Richard’s bedroom of where he sleeps….Over the bed is a shatterproof mirror that we paid approximately $1,000 for it because it creates a lot of interest by many people. In this bed Richard has spent many hours meditating, reading, taking a lot of his telephone calls and he has just thoroughly enjoyed this room.” The whole episode is like a Diane Arbus photo come to life and exerts a warped fascination. It should also be of interest to linguists.

There are plenty of other theatre-of-the-absurd moments such as the Little Richard Day picnic, organized by the Mayor of Macon in honor of their native son’s return home for his special day. Of course, he doesn’t show up so various Maconites get up and do their best or worst LR impersonation and then the Mayor takes his turn and sings, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Huh?

Little Richard performs on TV circa the early ’70s.

Klein keeps the rhythm of the film popping with a new surprise or strange revelation around every curve. His exploratory visual style is consistently intriguing to the eye, whether his camera is spying on a Little Richard clone giving directions to his backup dancers for a performance of “Ring My Bell” or wandering alongside the blind blues singer/minister Rev. Pearly Brown as he sings “It’s a Mean Old World” on the streets of Macon.

Macon street musician Rev. Pearly Brown

The Little Richard Story ends appropriately enough with the man himself preaching to the camera and signing off with a hymn, accompanied by his band to the tune of “God’s Beautiful City.” Any admirer of Klein’s work would love this film and with any luck it might surface some day for all to enjoy. In the meantime, you should seek out Klein’s Mohammad Ali: The Greatest, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? and other available work from his filmography to appreciate his unique approach to cinema.Other websites of interest:

William Klein short biography

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/william-klein?all/all/all/all/0

The New York Times film review

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C0CE0DC1138F934A35751C1A966958260

Director John Waters on Little Richard https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/nov/28/john-waters-met-little-richard

William Klein film retrospective

http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2000janfeb/klein.html

Article on William Klein

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/apr/28/william-klein-interview-sony-photography

By the mid-1980s the Italian film industry was in a state of major decline. The glory years of the fifties and sixties were now fondly remembered footnotes in the history of world cinema and even the popular film genres – giallo, poliziotteschi, spaghetti western and horror – were near the end of their heyday. There were still a few determined stragglers such as Tinto Brass with his fetish based erotica (The Key, Miranda, Snack Bar Budapest) and Enzo G. Castellari, who soldiered on with formulaic hybrids like 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Tuareg: The Desert Warrior and Striker. But the horror genre, in particular, was suffering with masters of the macabre Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento trying but failing to top past high water marks like The Beyond (1981) and Suspiria (1977). It was during this downward trend that Gianfranco Giagni made his directorial debut with The Spider Labyrinth (Italian title: Il Nido del Ragno, 1988). 

Police investigate a bizarre murder scene in the 1988 Italian horror thriller, The Spider Labyrinth.

In some ways a throwback to some of Italy’s most stylish supernatural thrillers of the seventies like Tonino Cervi’s Queens of Evil (1970) and Giorgio Ferroni’s Night of the Devils (1972), The Spider Labyrinth is an often entrancing mood piece featuring tightly paced direction, a mounting sense of menace and doom, highly atmospheric set design and lighting, an impressive ensemble cast and various narrative eccentricities that some viewers will find laughable, absurd or so bizarre that they seem to operate on the level of a fever dream.

An eerie flashback sequence featured in The Spider Labyrinth (1988), directed by Gianfranco Giagni.

The pre-film credits sequence sets the mood as two boys play a game of hide and seek in a garage-like space and one of them hides in a musty old wardrobe. When the latter is locked inside by his friend, he sees a large spider above him and freezes in fear. At first this appears to be a nightmare as our protagonist, Professor Alan Whitmore (Roland Wybenga) wakes up in bed in a cold sweat. But later in the film, a flashback reveals that the hide and seek episode was from Alan’s childhood. It is both a premonition and a prophecy of Alan’s descent into a giant rabbit hole.

Professor Alan Whitmore (Roland Wybenga, right) is sent to Budapest to find out why a renowned professor has stopped communicating with the university about his top secret research in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

The present day story begins in Dallas, Texas as Alan, a specialist in oriental languages, meets with a trio of university faculty members who convince him to travel to Budapest to meet with Professor Roth. The trio are unusually cryptic about the urgency of the trip but stress the importance of Roth’s research and entrust Alan with a sealed letter to deliver in person.

Paola Rinaldi plays Genevieve, an assistant to a famous professor, who agrees to help a visiting scholar uncover a puzzling mystery in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

When he arrives in Budapest, Alan is picked up by Genevieve (Paola Rinaldi), Roth’s voluptuous assistant, and taken to the professor’s home. There he encounters the suspicious and unwelcoming wife of Roth (Margareta von Krauss) who reluctantly allows him to see the professor for a few minutes. Roth is visibly troubled and fearful, whispering in a low voice to come back later while entrusting Alan with a black notebook. A black metal ball suddenly crashes through the window and Alan is momentarily distracted while the professor slips away unseen.

French actress Stephanie Audran plays a mysterious conceirge in the supernatural thriller, The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

We are clearly in Dario Argento territory where logic and reality are secondary or non-existent in relation to mood and atmosphere. The off-kilter ambiance continues as Genevieve accompanies Alan to his hotel, which is run by the enigmatic Mrs. Kuhn (Stephane Audran), who first appears stroking a black cat. There is also something odd and unsettling about the hotel’s clientele. From this point on, Alan is drawn into increasingly disturbing and perilous encounters in his quest to uncover the truth about Professor Roth and his confidential research.

Romanian actress Margareta von Krauss gives an appropriately over-the-top performance in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

Although The Spider Labyrinth begins as a murder mystery, it quickly evolves into a supernatural chiller. Most viewers will probably surmise where Alan’s investigation is leading but there are some genuine WTF surprises along the way such as a superhuman witch-like assassin who looks like Grace Zabriskie with really bad teeth and a truly bizarre stop-motion animation sequence (from Sergio Stivaletti). If you aren’t expecting some forgotten horror masterpiece, The Spider Labyrinth is a fun ride despite some obvious drawbacks like the awkward English dubbed dialogue or the condition of the existing film print. (You can view it on Youtube in acceptable and barely viewable versions but I hope Arrow Films or Camera Obscura will release the restored Italian version with English subtitles on Blu-Ray someday).

One of the more bizarre stop-motion animation sequences in the supernatural chiller, The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

If you are a fan of excessive horror gore and violence, you should look elsewhere. Nudity and sexual content are also relatively discreet compared to say, a director like Joe D’Amato (Beyond the Darkness, Sexy Nights of the Living Dead, Absurd). That said, there is a nude lovemaking scene involving human spider drool and an unforgettably hypnotic interlude where Genevieve undresses and presses her naked body against a full length apartment window as if taunting Alan, who lives directly across the street.

Alan (Roland Wybenga) and Genevieve (Paola Rinaldi) are swept up in a secret cult conspiracy in The Spider Labyrinth (1988), directed by Gianfranco Giagni.

Several sequences in The Spider Labyrinth evoke or pay homage to other Italian cult classics in original, non-derivative ways such as a creepy murder that would not be out of place in Suspiria. In this case, the victim wanders through a green-lit maze of billowing sheets before being attacked by clutching arms and hands armed with knives.

One of the memorable murder sequences in The Spider Labyrinth (1988) suggests the stylistic influence of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977).

The recurring metal ball that rolls into a room before something horrific occurs is like a variation on the ghostly bouncing ball from Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby…Kill! (1966) and Fellini’s “Toby Damnit” segment from Spirits of the Dead (1968). The escalating sense of paranoia and intimations of satanic cult worship are reminiscent of Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (aka They’re Coming to Get You, 1972). And some viewers have noticed connections to the work of H. P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

A subterranean spa in Budapest is one of several atmospheric settings in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

There is even one phantasmagorical scene where Alan wanders through a subterranean wasteland of rotting corpses, spider webs and putrid pools of water that might have been an inspiration for the eerie ossuary scenes in Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (Italian title: Dellamorte Dellamore, 1991).

Alan (Roland Wybenga) gets lost in a maze of streets while trying to find a Budapest antique shop in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

The Spider Labyrinth cast features an intriguing balance of seasoned professionals like Stephanie Audran (the former wife of French director Claude Chabrol) and William Berger alongside relatively unknown actors like Roland Wybenga, who only starred in three films. Wybenga makes a low-key but appealing protagonist out of a stereotype – the socially awkward but brilliant academic who is too focused on his work to see the danger signs. Paola Rinaldi is even better as the seductive and inscrutable Genevieve. Romanian actress Margareta von Krauss, on the other hand, is alternately a frost queen and a feral creature in a dual appearance performance that cannot be considered great acting on planet Earth…and this might be the tipping point for loving or hating the movie.

Margareta von Krauss is a supernatural force of evil who appears invincible in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

As for Stephanie Audran, she was enjoying international acclaim for her performance in the previous year’s Babette’s Feast (1987), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. While The Spider Labyrinth is clearly not Academy Award material, Audran is suitably compelling and ominous as a concierge with a hidden agenda. William Berger, looking like a homeless derelict, is also memorable as a stranger with a warning for Alan. Berger, of course, had a long and fruitful career in Italian genre films, appearing in such cult favorites as Gianfranco Parolini’s Sabata (1969), Mario Bava’s 5 Dolls for an August Moon (1970) and Enzo G. Castellari’s Il Giorno del Cobra (1980).

William Berger plays a street tramp who tries to warn a visiting professor to leave Budapest at once in The Spider Labyrinth (1988).

And what happened to director Gianfranco Giagni? He carved out a career primarily in Italian television as a director of such TV series as Valentina (1989) and Donna (1996). His later filmography was mainly devoted to documentaries but he did direct another feature film in 2000, Nobody’s Heart (Italian title: Nella terra di nessuno), a political drama starring Ben Gazzara. It is also worth noting that producer/writer/director Tonino Cervi (Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die!, Queens of Evil, Nest of Vipers) had a hand in the screenplay.

A scene from the supernatural thriller, The Spider Labyrinth (1988), directed by Gianfranco Giagni.

If The Spider Labyrinth had been made a decade earlier, it might be better known today but it was mostly ignored in its own country and never received theatrical distribution in the U.S. or most other countries with the exception of Japan and West Germany. But for fans of Italian horror, it is definitely worth seeking out.

The set design in The Spider Labyrinth (1988) is one of the film’s chief virtues.

Other website links of interest:

https://makeminecriterion.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/the-spider-labyrinth-gianfranco-giagni-1988/#more-4254

http://italiansociety.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/CIAC/directors/giagni_bio.htm

Despite a long and prolific career, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is more famous for being the son of the silent era superstar Douglas Fairbanks Sr., his Hollywood social connections (including ex-wife Joan Crawford) and a handful of films in which he’s overshadowed by his co-stars (Greta Garbo in A Woman of Affairs [1928], Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar [1931], Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory [1933], and Cary Grant in Gunga Din [1939]). 

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

That’s a shame because some of Fairbanks’ most interesting work as an actor can be glimpsed in some of the lesser known Pre-Code films produced by First National/Warner Bros. (Union Depot [1932], Love is a Racket [1932], The Life of Jimmy Dolan [1933]) and, in particular, one post-Code film, Success at Any Price (1934).  Even though Success at Any Price was released after the Code was in place, it remains an incisive adult drama rendered with more than a touch of cynicism and a refreshingly frank attitude toward sex in the office place. In this case the setting is a successful marketing firm whose biggest client is Glamour Cream, a cosmetic company specializing in beauty products for women. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. plays Joe Martin, an embittered young man from the wrong side of the tracks whose mobster brother was recently killed in a shootout. His reaction to the funeral, delivered like a soliloquy, sets up his character for the morality play that follows while distancing himself from his late brother’s questionable values. “ He had gold Cupids on his coffin. Ten grand, it cost. That’s what Mike got. But I’m gonna get something different. I’m gonna get what Mike was after only I’m gonna get mine, respectable. The gold and silver I’m after ain’t gonna be on my coffin.”

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. & Colleen Moore star in the 1934 Post-Code drama, Success at Any Price.

Thanks to his devoted girlfriend Sarah (Colleen Moore), who wrangles an introduction to her boss Raymond Merritt (Frank Morgan), Joe lands a job at the same company but his low paid position and menial office duties are at odds with his burning ambition to become rich and successful. He quickly becomes bored and restless and is soon fired after a confrontation with a college educated coworker named Geoffrey Halliburton (Allen Vincent) in which he speaks his mind about the company’s daily operations, all of it dictated by an autocratic mogul. Impressed with Joe’s candor and chutzpah, Merritt calls him back for a candid talk during a massage treatment later that day.

Success at Any Price (1934)
Directed by J. Walter Ruben
Shown: Frank Morgan (center), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (bottom right)

Raymond: Suppose you found yourself in a congenial job with a good future ahead of you?

Joe: I’d take it.

Raymond: How nice of you. Do you know anything about glamour cream?

Joe: Yeah, I know plenty about it. It looks like putty and it sells for $14 a jar.

Raymond: They put it on at night. It penetrates the pores of the skin. Works while they sleep.

Joe: Sounds like something for bedbugs.

Raymond: Made from the glands of fluids of real alligators. I’ve seen ‘em myself.

Joe: I wouldn’t lay that on too thick in the copy. You know no dame wants to look like an alligator.

Raymond decides to hire Joe back as a first time copywriter and puts him on his biggest account but gives him a deadline of the next morning to come up with the complete ad campaign for presentation.  The genesis of corporate expose dramas from the fifties such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Patterns, and Executive Suite can be traced back to Success and so can AMC’s Mad Men which mirrors this movie’s behind the scenes look at a big city ad agency where the sexual politics and secret agendas are no less complicated.

Genevieve Tobin & Douglas Fairbanks Jr. star in the racy melodrama, Success at Any Price (1934).

Fairbanks is always compelling, if not particularly sympathetic, as the driven protagonist whose lust for power and wealth is so strong, he loses sight of his own humanity in the process. He exhibits a rough, feral energy here and with his pencil-thin moustache, constant gum-chewing and crude grammer skills, he’s a long way from his offscreen persona as Hollywood high society. There is also some genuine sexual heat generated in his scenes with Genevieve Tobin, who plays Agnes Carter, the jaded mistress of Merritt. And it provides a sharp contrast to his more staid and almost chaste relationship with Sarah, the film’s moral center.

Success at Any Price (1934)
Directed by J. Walter Ruben with Genevieve Tobin & Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

The first meeting between Joe and Agnes crackles with electricity once he gets a whiff of her perfumed handkerchief and takes a good, long look at her for the first time. (Director J. Walter Ruben uses close-ups sparingly for the most part here but when he does, they really make an impact such as this scene where Joe appears to be devouring Agnes with his eyes.)

Joe: That lavender water sure gets my nanny.

Agnes: Take a good whiff.

Joe: Do you use it all over ya?

Agnes: Not entirely. I use other things.

Joe: I can just see ya in a hot bath of this stuff.

Agnes: That’s indecent.

Joe: I’ve heard worse.

Agnes: Tell me worse.

Success at Any Price (1934)
Directed by J. Walter Ruben
Shown: Frank Morgan, Genevieve Tobin

For a post-Code film, Success at Any Price is brimming over with sexual innuendo and racy wisecracks and the only way you’d notice it was released after the new censorship rules were in place is the film’s final two minutes [SPOILER ALERT] which leads you to the brink of tragedy and then pulls back at the last instant for a happy, unrealistic fadeout.

Though considered an A picture by RKO’s standards (this was released the same year as the studio’s Of Human Bondage, The Gay Divorcee, and The Lost Patrol), Success at Any Price has the look and feel of a Warners programmer but it stands out in several regards. One is a sharply observed screenplay which is packed with tart dialogue by Howard J. Green and John Howard Lawson, who based it on Lawson’s anti-capitalism play Success Story.

Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson

Lawson, of course, is known to most people as one of the “Hollywood Ten,” who was blacklisted by the industry in 1947 for his ties to the Communist Party. Other well known contributors to this movie include composer Max Steiner, RKO’s prolific in-house art director Van Nest Polglase and executive producer Merian C. Cooper (King Kong). But probably the biggest surprise and discovery for me besides Fairbanks’ unusually dark protagonist was Genevieve Tobin’s subtle but stunning turn as the woman who ignites Joe’s ruthlessness to succeed at any cost.

Actress Genevieve Tobin

While Tobin’s female vamp was probably the popular image of a glamorous, sexy kept woman during the Depression era, her appearance may look matronly by contemporary standards but give her a few minutes and she begins to bloom before your eyes like an exotic hotflower flower.

Not a conventional beauty, Tobin turns on the sultriness through her magnetic personality which balances a shrewd, almost mocking self-awareness with an undisguised delight at manipulating men when she’s in the mood. She also delights in flaunting her expensive clothes and access to her tycoon lover whenever she visits the office and breezes past the female office workers, reminding them of their place in the company hierarchy. She should be a despicable character – and probably would be if played by any other actress. After all, she is vain, selfish, spoiled and refuses to compromise any aspect of her high maintenance lifestyle. Yet Tobin makes her strangely likeable at times such as the scene where Merritt discovers she’s been having an affair with Joe and she candidly reveals her assessment of her new lover: “I think he’s the saddest boy in the world. He’s all twisted and funny. He wants to be a great man and he wants to be sweet.”

Success at Any Price (1934)
Directed by J. Walter Ruben
Shown: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Genevieve Tobin

The reality really hits home after Joe and Agnes tie the knot and Joe’s domestic side emerges as he presents his wife with a blueprint of their future home. Agnes’ response is brutally honest in her usual fashion:  “What is this? Grant’s tomb? Am I supposed to raise an old fashioned family? Can’t you see me with a sweet-faced brat on each arm? I like New York. I like noise. I’d die anywhere else.”

Genevieve Tobin appears in the background in this lobbycard from The Petrified Forest (1936).

I have only seen Genevieve Tobin in one other film – The Petrified Forest – and I have no recollection of her in it since I last saw it years ago but now I’m interested in seeking out other Tobin films based on her performance here. She has a strong screen presence much like Ruth Chatterton and in some ways her character in Success at Any Price is not unlike Chatterton’s self-absorbed, unfaithful wife in Dodsworth whose life consists of a hedonistic whirl of parties, night clubs, social engagements with prominent people and extramarital affairs – all of it part of the trade-off in attaching herself to a wealthy older man for whom she feels no sexual attraction.

Edward Everett Horton co-stars in the Post-Code melodrama, Success at Any Price (1934).

Success at Any Price is a film in which practically no one gets what they really want but almost everyone gets what they deserve. But if it sounds heavy-handed, it’s rendered with a light touch and there is some amusing comic relief provided by Nydia Westman as the office’s slightly ditzy receptionist (she bears some physical and comedic similarities to Una Merkel) and Edward Everett Horton as her fussy boss. When they become a romantic couple and marry, prompting their departure from the company to raise a child, Joe says to them with genuine bewilderment, “I’m surprised and pleased that the two of you can create a child between you.” Whether it’s an unintentional insult or awkwardly phrased compliment, it nevertheless mirrors our own amusement at this unlikely union, which is depicted as possibly the only happy, positive relationship in the movie.

Success at Any Price (1934)
Directed by J. Walter Ruben
Shown at right: Colleen Moore

There is also one memorable barbed exchange between Sarah and Agnes outside Joe’s office as the latter prepares to enter. It could easily have been a deleted scene straight out of Clare Boothe Luce’s supreme bitchfest, The Women (1939).

Agnes: Do you ever use this glamour cream they advertise so much?

Sarah: Yes, I’ve tried a jar of it once. It’s lovely.

Agnes: I suppose I’m afraid of getting old

Sarah (with mock surprise): Miss Carter, how could anyone ever think of YOU as being old?

Agnes: Oh, you mean where there’s no thought, there’s no wrinkle? Don’t kid me, Miss Griswold. I know your opinion of me.

Sarah: I never even bothered to have an opinion of you.

Agnes: Well, what’s your opinion of Joe Martin? I can’t help it if he makes a fuss over me. But I don’t take him seriously. He’s just the comic relief.  (In another of the movie’s few close-ups, we see Sarah’s devastated reaction to this remark).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. & Colleen Moore star in Success at Any Price (1934).

While Genevieve Tobin clearly has the more colorful and complex role in Success at Any Price, Colleen Moore makes the most of her virtuous office girl who knows how to maintain just the right balance between professionalism and sex appeal. Watch the way she handles the situation where Merritt makes a pass at her in his office and is gently rebuffed.

Raymond: You gotta give me credit. I don’t do this sort of thing often.

Sarah: Oh yes you do. I’m your secretary. I outta know.

Raymond: Well, my interest in women is just nervousness.

Sarah: Then don’t get nervous with me.

Raymond: Well, alright. I can’t help being sorry that you’re a good woman as well as a good secretary.

Colleen Moore

Moore was near the end of her screen career when she made Success at Any Price – it was her next to last film – and she was fourth billed.  Only a decade earlier, she was the epitome of jazz-age high spirits and mirth, playing a fun-loving flapper in such films as Flaming Youth (1923) and Flirting With Love (1924). By 1927, she was the top boxoffice draw in the U.S. but even though she easily made the transition to talking pictures, she retired from the screen in 1934 at the age of 35. With few exceptions, most of her movies are now out of print or not available on any format. She’s certainly one of many silent stars who deserves the sort of career retrospective that NYC’s Film Forum occasionally stages.

Colleen Moore & Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Success at Any Price (1934).

I’m not quite sure why Success at Any Price is so little known today (it’s not on DVD) and I don’t want to oversell it but I think it holds up remarkably well after 83 years and it’s still topical in its depiction of unethical behavior, corporate power plays and workers vs. management conflicts. It’s a sleeper that’s well worth discovering on your own.

Success at Any Price (1934)
Directed by J. Walter Ruben
Shown from left: Colleen Moore, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

*This is a revised and updated version of a post that originally appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog (now renamed Streamline).

Other websites of interest:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/may/08/guardianobituaries.filmnews

https://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/1993-10/hell-war-interview-douglas-fairbanks-jr

http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2016/8/12/six-degrees-of-joan-crawford-the-flapper-and-douglas-fairbanks-jr

https://www.styleforum.net/threads/douglas-fairbanks-jr-interview.380645/

http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=gds;cc=gds;rgn=main;view=text;idno=fai00031.00284.025  

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Yasmine Dahm plays Sophie, a young girl who sets off a chain of poltergeist activity in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973, aka Expulsion of the Devil).

Although Luis Bunuel never made a straight up horror film in the traditional sense, many of his movies contained elements of the horrific and the fantastical such as the “mother meat” nightmare sequence in Los Olvidados (1950), the severed, crawling hand in The Exterminating Angel (1962) or the Devil in his many disguises in the 45 minute allegory, Simon of the Desert (1965). However, Juan Luis Bunuel, the director’s son, launched his feature film career with an audacious and unsettling journey into the paranormal – Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973, aka Expulsion of the Devil) which must have made his father proud as it was brimming with the sort of anarchic disregard for the conventional and corruption of the innocent that distinguishes the master’s best films. It’s also creepy as hell.     

Of course, being the son of the celebrated, world famous director was not an advantage and the critics were decidedly mixed on Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse, which didn’t help its chances at the boxoffice and is probably why it is relatively obscure today. It was never distributed in the U.S. (though it did premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1973) and received a brief, limited release in Europe. Audiences were probably divided at the time as well; the film is too restrained and non exploitive to appeal to the hard core horror fans but also a little too quirky and genre specific for the arthouse crowd. The fact that it opened almost a full year before The Exorcist is intriguing to consider now – both feature an adolescent girl protagonist – but the two movies are poles apart in their approach, the former low budget, enigmatic and eerie, the latter a major Hollywood production with state-of-the-art special effects designed for maximum shock.

Linda Blair as the possessed Regan in The Exorcist (1973).

I first saw Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse on TCM sometime in 1999 and video taped it. I had hoped the network would rebroadcast it again but the license expired that same year and it has languished in obscurity ever since, a fact supported by the poor quality images being used to illustrate this post.

This idyllic but possibly haunted country house is the setting for Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973), directed by Juan Luis Bunuel.

The film opens on a shot of a large, rustic country mansion at the edge of an open field and nestled against a thick forest. The point of view could be an anomymous voyeur as it slowly pans around in a 360 degree circle, taking in the sights and sounds of the bucolic countryside as the classical music score conjures up a mood of pastoral beauty crossed with ominous undercurrents.

A sense of discontent and alienation affects the lives of a family living in country house in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973) starring Jean-Marc Bory (left) and Yasmine Dahm as his daughter in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973).

The fact that two of the main characters in the movie are introduced only by their voices and hands first – for an entire scene – before we can see their faces is a clear indication that Bunuel’s approach to narrative is going to be uniquely unconventional. The voices belong to Marc (Jean-Marc Bory) and his teenage daughter Sophie (Yasmine Dahm) who is drawing a sketch of the house. Then we see them outside in the field from the same vantage point of the opening shot as they discuss their new home.

Sophie: That’s odd. No two windows are alike.

Marc: I wonder when it was built.

Sophie: At least 100 years ago.

Marc: Maybe not. They built houses like this in the 1930s.

Sophie: You were born in 1935, right?

Marc: No, in 1934. At that time, people were dancing the Fox Trot in houses like this one.

Francoise Fabian & Jean-Marc Bory play the concerned parents of Yasmine Dahm in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973, aka Expulsion of the Devil).

It soon becomes apparent that Marc, an illustrator, and his wife Francoise (Francoise Fabian), a writer, have left their city life behind and have relocated to the country to start a new life with their two children, including their small son, Dominique. It is also apparent that Sophie has a close relationship with her father and is jealous of the attention he gives to his son, a situation that may well explain the strange events that follow….or not.

Yasmine Dahm plays a young girl who may or may not be possessed by something evil in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973).

The move to the country is clearly less idyllic than imagined for Francoise who finds herself doing a lot of the renovation herself, not to mention the constant cooking and cleaning. The resentment is obvious and so is the intimation that money is a concern with neither husband or wife pulling in a steady income.

The evidence on display suggests that both Marc or Francoise failed to achieve the level of success they once desired. When Sophie asks her father why he became an illustrator if he really wanted to be an engraver by profession, he tells her, “We can’t always be what we want.” Her response is, “Weren’t you good enough?,” to which he gives a weary smile, saying “I stopped thinking about it a long time ago.” (From this point on, Sophie’s response to her father’s middle age resignation could be the film’s inner demon – just a guess).

Poltergeist activity is unleashed in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973), directed by Juan Luis Bunuel.

In the very first scene where Marc and Francoise appear together, a disruptive tone is introduced which continues and is amplified through the rest of the film. The couple are squabbling while Sophie looks on and then a bizarre thing happens. A bucket of paint flips upside down on the floor, spilling its murky green contents everywhere. Francoise blames Marc who denies touching the bucket while Sophie has a giggling fit. It is just the beginning of a slow onslaught of poltergeist-like activity (or is it telekinesis?) that escalates to a climax of pure panic that I won’t reveal here.

Henri (Renato Salvatori) plays a family friend who notices a change in young Sophie’s behavior in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973), co-starring Yasmine Dahm.

Sophie comes across as a provocative, narcissistic and manipulative little nymphet in the tradition of Lolita (Yasmine Dahm was a popular French teenage model at the time and looks a little like American actress Kay Lenz). She has an sensual smile that could be interpreted as sweetly innocent or cruel and malicious and is well aware of her own budding sexuality. We notice this first by her fascination with her own image in the mirror – a disturbing scene that quickly enters horror territory when the mirror image responds differently to the beholder. And as the film progresses, Sophie becomes increasingly conscious of her desirability among the men that visit the house; first, Henri (Renato Salvatori of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Costa-Gavras’ Z), a family friend, and later a four man television production crew, who have arrived to document the peculiar happenings in the house with the blessing of the owners.

A television crew joins other members of the household to investigate the strange goings-on Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973). Gerald Depardieu (far right) plays a small supporting role.

Some reviewers have suggested that Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse is a horror allegory about female puberty and the psychic and sexual energy unleashed by it or that it could be the work of a male filmmaker expressing his fear of the opposite sex. Regardless of these interpretations, the film works best as a haunted house story but avoids most of the clichés of the genre by grounding the film in believable characters and situations.

Henri (Renato Salvatori) is attacked by kitchen appliances in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973).

When Henri is seriously injured in an unexplainable attack on him by kitchen appliances and rushed to the hospital, the family flees the house as well like most sane people would do. And when Sophie runs away from the hospital to return to the house, it is completely plausible because it has already been established that Sophie encouraged her parents to buy the mansion in the first place and that she derives some sense of entitlement from the property. Yet her explanation for her return is quite strange.

One of the cameramen asks her, “Why did you come back?”

Sophie: I have to feed my dog.

Cameraman: Your dog? You don’t have a dog.

Sophie: Of course not.

Cameraman: Then why did you say that?

Sophie: I feel better when I give reasons.

Father D’Aval (Claude Dauphin) and two of his pupils are glimpsed through a keyhole in what turns out to be a mirage in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973).

When her father shows up to take his runaway daughter home, that too feels organic to the narrative, even when they are forced to spend one more night in the house because of Marc’s after hours arrival. Also, the risk of danger seems reduced due to a full house that includes the camera crew, Father D’Aval (Claude Dauphin), a teacher, and his group of schoolchildren on an overnight camping trip who used to stay in the abandoned house on previous outings. As expected, the last night in the house becomes a terrifying rollercoaster ride – at least two people appear to die amid the mayhem – and the movie fades out on an ambiguous note that comes full circle with the opening shot.

Jean-Pierre Darras plays a television producer who has a nasty supernatural encounter in Au rendez vous de la mort joyeuse (1973).

One thing I particularly love about Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse are the minimalistic special effects which actually seem to mirror what real poltergeist or telekinetic activity might look like if recorded by hidden cameras. Not a bunch of CGI rendered happenings or 3-D overkill but just a table flying through French doors or a refrigerator sliding on its side across the floor. Bunuel also avoids gruesome shock effects but there are still some well-timed frights and nightmarish images. When Perou (Jean-Pierre Darras), the television producer, is enticed into seducing Sophie in a dark bedroom, it ends with his realization that the little girl before him is NOT Sophie. When the camera team hear his screams and come running, they find him hysterical and covered in mud or possibly manure.

Television cameramen document unexpected occurrences at a country estate in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973).

Other effects are even more minimal but just as unnerving such as a scene where one of the TV crew, Beretti (a young, skinny and bearded Gerald Depardieu), is compelled to stick his hand in a pot of boiling soup. Or a scene where two crew members see, through a keyhole in the door,  the schoolteacher in an inappropriate situation with two schoolgirls – and it turns out to be an illusion or hallucination in the minds of the beholders. Other weird visual touches include a piece of rotting rope that keeps turning up in unexpected places throughout the movie as if it has some diabolical purpose or life of its own and a scene in which Sophie tries to force two snails to mate (a homage to Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid?).

One of the many unusual images from Juan Luis Bunuel’s Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973, aka Expulsion of the Devil).

My videotaped copy of Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse appears to have come from a master badly in need of remastering; the image is soft and lacks sharpness, but one is still bewitched by the evocative cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. Cloquet photographed Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965), Roman Polanski’s version of Tess (1979) with Geoffrey Unsworth, Marguerite Duras’ Nathalie Granger (1972) and Robert Bresson’s Une Femme Douce (1969), among others.

Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet

I would love to see a DVD distributor like Criterion or Second Run DVD or Eureka! take this on as a future restoration/release project but the film has such a low profile that it’s off almost everyone’s radar. Still, it’s an impressive and spooky directorial debut for Juan Luis Bunuel who seems to be better known for La Femme aux bottes rouges (1974, aka The Woman With Red Boots) starring Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey, the supernatural tale Leonor (1975) with Liv Ullmann, Michel Piccoli, and Ornella Muti and his television work which comprises the bulk of his filmography.  I have only seen La Femme aux bottes rouges (it is still available from Pathfinder Films) but I find it less interesting and much more imitative of his father’s work than Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse. I have read favorable things about Leonor (which was once distributed by New Line Cinema) but, in general, Juan Luis Bunuel is overshadowed by his father’s reputation and that will probably never change.

Screenwriter/Director Joyce Bunuel, former wife of Juan Luis Bunuel

There are other filmmakers in the Bunuel family as well. Rafael Bunuel, who was born in 1940, has worked in film and television but is better known as a playwright and artist. Joyce Bunuel, Juan Luis’s ex-wife, continues to direct movies for television and launched her directorial debut with the 1978 feature Dirty Dishes (French title: La Jument Vapeur) starring Carole Laure as a housewife going slowly mad.

Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse, which translates as At the Meeting with Joyous Death, is a much better title than the alternate English one it was given which is completely inaccurate – Expulsion of the Devil. His Satanic Majesty is never invoked or even mentioned in Bunuel’s film and it’s pretty clear by the end of Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse that the only expulsion was the inhabitants of the house but not the strange forces within it. The movie might not have anything profound to say when all is said and done but as an entry in the haunted house/ghost story genre it rewards you with each repeated viewing and is guaranteed to haunt the back corridors of your mind long after seeing it.

A traumatized schoolgirl rages against the darkness in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973).

Other links of interest:

http://blog.case.edu/think/2014/07/28/juan_luis_buauelas_memoir_with_entries_on_famed_surrealist_filmmaker_father_luis_buauel_appears_in_new_publication_edited_by_cwru_film_researcher

https://www.juliericogallery.com/rafaelbunuelbio/

https://grunes.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/leonor-juan-luis-bunuel-1975/

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-the-phantom-of-puberty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2ju0Cf5nc (the complete film with English subtitles)

For many people the Christmas holidays wouldn’t be complete without a viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street or some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol whether it features Reginald Owen, Alastair Sims, Mr. Magoo or Bill Murray. But there’s no reason why Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940) shouldn’t become an annual seasonal favorite as well. Granted, it doesn’t take place in December, contains no wintry, snow-covered landscapes or appearances by Santa Claus but like the Frank Capra and Charles Dickens favorites it conveys the spirit of Christmas, one of selfless giving and generosity to those less fortunate than you. It also reaffirms the importance of family and friends over the materialistic traps of the world but accomplishes it with wit and high style in a breathlessly paced sixty-seven minute rollercoaster ride. 

Ellen Drew & Dick Powell play a young newlywed couple struggling with financial issues in Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940).

Beginning with the frosty title credits and frenetic opening music, we are immediately plunged into the middle of a conversation between a young couple on a rooftop overlooking New York City at night. Betty (Ellen Drew) is trying to interest her fiancee Jimmy (Dick Powell) in an affordable plan to compartmentalize a one-bedroom apartment. He can only see increased financial worries if they marry and start a family while trying to support their elderly parents. Jimmy is convinced that the only way he’ll ever break out of the working class rut is to win the $25,000 cash prize (a lot of money for 1940) in a slogan writing contest for a Coffee company. It doesn’t matter that Jimmy has a history of entering and losing contests like this. He’s convinced he has to win eventually even though Betty fears each rejection is another blow to Jimmy’s self-esteem.

Set in what appears to be an Irish tenement (every character seems to have a slight brogue), Jimmy and Betty are not much different from a lot of other young couples who are struggling for better lives. But Jimmy’s burning desire to win and Betty’s unswerving loyalty to him is so moving that we are want them to triumph over impossible odds.

Dick Powell (on phone) becomes the brunt of a practical joke run amok in Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940), co-starring Ellen Drew.

And Christmas in July sweeps us along in an exhilarating rush of events as Jimmy, who holds a lowly desk job at a coffee company, thinks he has won the grand prize in a rival coffee company’s contest. A fake telegram from Western Union sent by three co-workers as a practical joke sets in motion a scenario that results in Jimmy getting engaged, being quickly promoted to his own office and embarking on a monumental spending spree – all in the course of one day!

Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell, far right) takes his girlfriend Betty (Ellen Drew) shopping for jewelry in Christmas in July (1940), directed by Preston Sturges.

Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Sturges’s film walks a tightrope between euphoria and despair, building incredible suspense as we wait for the terrible moment when Jimmy and Betty realize they’ve been the brunt of a practical joke that went haywire. Yet the sequences of Jimmy’s uninhibited spending spree that both delight and fill us with dread are also the core of the film and demonstrate Jimmy’s true character. He becomes intoxicated by the ability to buy gifts for his hard-working mother, his future in-laws, and the less fortunate families in his neighborhood, telling Betty, “We better work up one side of the street and down the other, that way we won’t forget anybody.”

Dick Powell & Ellen Drew go on a wild spending spree in the Preston Sturges’ comedy, Christmas in July (1940).

When he and Betty arrive at the tenement with a caravan of cars bearing gifts, the resulting distribution of presents provides some of the most touching moments in the film such as a wordless shot of a young girl receiving a doll (probably the first one she’s ever been given) and her response to it is one of those little cinematic moments that you never forget.

A scene from the 1940 Preston Sturges’ comedy, Christmas in July starring Dick Powell (right) and Ellen Drew.

Sturges also invests this sequence with class and ethnic observations as the department store owner arrives with his managers to renounce Jimmy and take back the gifts. He shouts to the local Irish cop, “I want all of those people arrested,” referring to Jimmy and his neighbors. “Who do you think you are, Hitler?” the cop responds and then defends Jimmy, stating “I know that kid since he was knee-high to a cockroach. What’s he supposed to have done?” A riot ensues as the haves try to take back their merchandise from the have-nots but what’s bracing about this climatic moment is to witness the solidarity of these tenement dwellers and their fierce loyalty to one of their own.

Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) deals with a near riot situation when authorities arrive to take back Jimmy’s gifts to his tenement neighbors in Christmas in July (1940).

Christmas in July (1940) was Preston Sturges’ second feature film and was completed just before the director’s career entered the fast track to success with his subsequent feature, The Lady Eve (1941). In many ways the film shares key similarities to other Sturges’ films with its sharp satire of American materialism and its love for eccentric characters, but the tone is closer to the movies of Frank Capra and straddles a fine line between sunny optimism and hopeless pessimism.

Writer-Director Preston Sturges

Sturges began adapting Christmas in July for the screen while working on his debut feature, The Great McGinty (1940). The script was based on his original three act play, A Cup of Coffee, which was originally purchased by Universal; it was the project that first brought Sturges to Hollywood. Luckily, Paramount was able to secure the rights from their rival studio and Sturges went to work writing specific parts for his favorite characters actors, an ensemble that included William Demarest, Harry Rosenthal, Byron Fougler, Arthur Hoyt, Franklin Pangborn, Jimmy Conlin, Raymond Walburn and numerous others.

Raymond Walburn (on left) & Franklin Pangborn co-star in Christmas in July (1940), directed by Preston Sturges.

During the course of its filming, Christmas in July went from the title A Cup of Coffee to The New Yorkers to Something to Shout About before its final naming. The filming went fairly smoothly, but according to writer Rob Edelman in MaGill’s Survey of Cinema, “Paramount…went to great expense to produce a still photograph that hangs in a wall moulding in Betty Casey’s apartment. The shot is of Hester and Essex Streets circa 1900. A group in period dress (including character actors Richard Denning, William Frawley, Jean Cagney, Lillian Cornell, and Douglas Kennedy, who are not in the film) is pictured in and around a gasoline buggy. It took an entire morning to shoot and cost Paramount a day’s salary for more than a score of actors and technicians. Also, Sturges uses an Alfred Hitchcock trick when he plays a bit part in his film, as a man having his shoes shined at the beginning.”

Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell, far right) and his tenement neighbors receive an unpleasant visit from the cops in Christmas in July (1940), co-starring Ellen Drew (in mink coat).

The director did run into a little trouble with the censors at the Hays Office over some dialogue in his script of Christmas in July. They demanded that several lines be omitted or revised; “God rest his soul” (uttered in the film by an Irish mother) was changed by Code administrator Joseph I. Breen to “May his dear soul rest in peace” and “schlemiel” was substituted with “schnook” in an attempt to avoid what is now known as racial profiling. Sturges did manage to have the last laugh though. In Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges, author Donald Spoto wrote that the director managed “to retain an amusing shot in the early part of the film, an intercut from Powell and (Ellen) Drew on the rooftop to two snuggling rabbits in a corner cage. This particular visual allusion had been attempted by filmmakers and rejected by censors so often that virtually no director bothered to try to include it any longer. At the preview screening, however, someone nodded and it remained, to the censors’ later chagrin.”

Ellen Drew & Dick Powell play young lovers who become the target of a practical joke that escalates into near-disaster in Christmas in July (1940).

When Christmas in July went into general release, it was warmly received by critics and audiences alike. The Hollywood Reporter labeled it “a ten-strike for Sturges as a writer-director.” Time magazine wrote, “As director, Sturges converted this unpretentious plot into a happy, slightly noisy comedy with a Chaplinesque background of pathos….A good dramatist, Sturges kept his characters credible by the simple but neglected technique of letting them act like people.”

A frequent member of Preston Sturges’ stock company of actors, William Demarest has a colorful supporting role in Christmas in July (1940).

Christmas in July was, in many ways, a breakthrough role for Dick Powell. No longer the boyish singer/dancer of such Warner Bros. musicals as Gold Diggers of 1937 and The Singing Marine (1937) and not yet the tough, unshaven private eye of Murder, My Sweet (1944), Powell was in career limbo, struggling to redefine his screen persona when he made this. And you can see the beginnings of a new style emerging, one that balances his naive, all-American wholesomeness with bitter self-doubt and cynicism. Powell’s Jimmy MacDonald is just as memorable and iconic as James Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life and perhaps Christmas in July will one day become a Yuletide viewing favorite.

Ellen Drew & Dick Powell (center) star in one of Preston Sturges’ lesser known and underrated comedies, Christmas in July (1940).

Christmas in July was first released by Universal on DVD in November 2006 as part of the box set Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection. It was not available as a single title until May 2011 when Universal released a no-frills DVD of it under their “Cinema Classics” series which is still available from some vendors.   Other websites of interest:

Vanity Fair article on Preston Sturges

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/05/sturges-201005

Dick Powell

http://www.dickpowell.net/2012/11/biography.html

Ellen Drew obit

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/06/local/me-drew6

Trailer for the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm1vY7HRgSw

Writer/Director/Producer Peter Bogdanovich

The following conversation with Peter Bogdanovich was conducted in April 2010 just prior to the first official TCM Classic Film Festival in which the director co-hosted a screening with Vanity Fair writer David Kamp of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Bogdanovich, of course, was a close friend of Welles’ and is the creator of that indispensible interview collection, This is Orson Welles. Among other topics discussed are such films as Targets, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Saint Jack, unproduced Welles’ projects like Heart of Darkness and Welles’s obsession with fake noses. This is a revised version of the original interview that first appeared on Movie Morlocks, TCM’s official blog.  

Jeff Stafford: The Vanity Fair article that David Kamp wrote on The Magnificent Ambersons made it sound like the search for the missing footage [from the film] has pretty much been exhausted and we should give up the matter. But from your own research do you consider it a lost cause at this point?

Peter Bogdanovich: Well, I hate to say that because I still have some kind of small shard of hope that someday I’ll get a phone call that says they found it in the depths of Rio or something.

JS: Which seems like the most logical place for it. If it does exist, it would probably be there.

PB: Yes, I know Orson tried to find it for years.

An example of the superb cinematography and set design from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

JS: One of the stories that came out in the article – and maybe it’s a folk tale – but it was said the studios used to discard film footage and dump it in the ocean off of Santa Monica. And I’d heard that might have been the fate of the Ambersons footage. Was that a standard practice for studios then?

PB: Yeah, to make room for more footage.

JS: I just assumed they would burn it or something instead.  PB: They used to burn it when there was silver in it…silver nitrate. Actually Ambersons would have had silver nitrate so maybe they burned it but I had heard that Desilu Studios had dumped it sometime in the fifties. I did a lot of research myself for my book that I did on Orson and there’s an awful lot about Ambersons in there.

JS: Yes, there was something in your book This is Orson Welles that I wanted to ask you about. At one point you talk about Anne Baxter’s grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, who would come to the set occasionally and observe. I wondered if you had any further details about that or any conversations he had with Orson?

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright

PB: Well, according to Orson, Frank Lloyd Wright was horrified by the sets and said they should all be burned and Orson tried to explain that he wasn’t trying to glorify the era but that this was the authentic facsimile of how the houses were and Frank Lloyd Wright couldn’t be mollified. He thought they were so horrible.

JS: I had heard originally that Orson wanted Mary Pickford for the Dolores Costello role. What do you think it would have been like if she had been cast? Would she have been good in that part?

PB: Yeah, it would have been great.

Dolores Costello & Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

JS: I thought Dolores Costello was fine in the role….

PB: She was fine but Mary Pickford would have added an additional resonance because…people forget what a big star she was. She dwarves anybody today.

Actress/Producer Mary Pickford

JS: This was toward the end of Pickford’s career so I don’t know if she still had a large fan base. Do you think if Pickford had been cast, the film would have been more popular?

PB: Well, it would have raised the curiosity level because Dolores Costello was never a big star.

JS: Today, looking at The Magnificent Ambersons, what are your impressions? What do you think are the strengths of it based on the existing cut?

Dolores Costello (far left) and Joseph Cotten (to her right) in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

PB: The first hour is – with the exception of a few annoying, little cuts here and there and some sequences that could be missed – is pretty much the way as Orson said. It’s quite close to what he had in mind. It’s this last half hour that’s a mess.

JS: Some questions about Orson Welles’ early career. I had talked to Norman Lloyd recently and he told me that originally Orson was going to do Heart of Darkness before he did Citizen Kane and I was curious if you had ever seen the script for that?

PB: Yes.

A mockup poster for Orson Welles’ never completed project, Heart of Darkness.

JS: Was the Heart of Darkness script going to be a departure from the Joseph Conrad novel in terms of the setting and period or was Welles going to do a faithful adaptation?

PB: It was pretty faithful. The biggest trick was that he was not going to appear himself; it was going to be completely from his point of view. And the only time you see him is if there is a reflection or a mirror or something which Robert Montgomery tried with Lady in the Lake and I think rather unsuccessfully.

JS: So that whole idea must have scared RKO.

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1940)

PB: I don’t think they liked that idea on top of the fact that it was quite expensive. But there were a number of scripts that Orson almost did instead of Citizen Kane.

JS: What were some of those?

PB One was called The Smiler with the Knife. Another was called The Way to Santiago…they were both based on novels. He wanted Lucille Ball for The Smiler with the Knife and she wasn’t a big enough name. She ended up owning the studio.

Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed.

JS: Sweet revenge. What are your feelings about Orson Welles as a film actor? He made so many films for the money but I was curious what films you admired him in when he was working for other directors.

PB: Well, I think first and foremost The Third Man. It was his best performance for other directors. It remains an iconic performance and one of his best. It’s the only one he ever did without any makeup. Yeah, no fake nose.

JS: What was the deal with the fake noses?

PB: He didn’t like his nose.

Orson Welles (with fake nose) in Touch of Evil (1958).

JS: It probably looked better than the fake nose though.

PB: Well, you tell that to an actor. If they have a thing about their nose, it’s hard to make them understand.

JS: One thing I love about This is Orson Welles is that you asked him about almost every single movie he ever made and he actually commented on just about all of them. But he did make one statement which I thought was curious. You were discussing The V.I.P.s with him and he said, “My claim that I’ve never seen a film I’ve been in breaks down there because I saw The V.I.P.s – couldn’t help myself. They ran it in a plane.” I thought it interesting that he stated that he wouldn’t see himself on screen. Do you think that he was exaggerating or that that statement was true?

Orson Welles (second from right) in The V.I.P.s (1963).

PB: No, he couldn’t stand it.

JS: Even in his own films?

PB He had trouble with it. I know he didn’t like himself much. He was very self-critical.  JS: I had read where Welles had tried to buy the rights to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 after it was published and was unsuccessful. But then, ironically, he ends up being cast in one of the roles. And you interviewed him on the set of that film, correct?

PB Yes, in Guaymas, Mexico.

JS: What was that experience like for him?

Orson Welles (right) on the set of Catch-22 with director Mike Nichols.

PB: He was feeling miserable throughout. He didn’t like it. Everybody was quite deferential. And Mike [Nichols] organized an Orson Welles film festival for his arrival and Orson was horrified at things like that. It was not the way to his heart so it put him off. Also, he and Mike didn’t agree on how to interpret the character. Orson wanted to play him as so jaded that he was weak with exhaustion…from the nightmare he had been going through…where Mike wanted it more gruff and bullying and more in the McHale’s Navy-Sergeant Bilko kind of thing. Which Orson just hated. He played along with it but he didn’t like it.

JS: I haven’t seen it in years and barely remember him in it. Did you like it?

PB: It wasn’t what he wanted at all. It was pretty conventional. I saw him play it his way a couple of times and it was quite funny.

Chimes at Midnight (1965 France/Spain/Switzerland)
Directed by Orson Welles
Shown from left: Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles

JS: Of Welles’ later period from say, 1950 on what do you think is his best film?

PB: Well I think Othello and Chimes at Midnight are great and Touch of Evil is a masterpiece. I think those are the three best films of that period.

JS: On the Criterion Collection release of F for Fake is a documentary about Orson Welles that includes footage from his One Man Band project where is playing different characters and different instruments. What was that? It looked fascinating.

PB: That was basically all there was of it. It was sort of him alone, a one man show. I think it was supposed to be a television special. There was a documentary made called The One Man Band, made in Germany and Showtime bought it and ran it on their cable network and asked me to do an English version of it. And it required quite a bit of editing – I recut it and recorded a narration that I did.

JS: I’d like to ask you about some of your own films now. It must be very gratifying to see Jeff Bridges win the Best Actor Oscar after directing him in his first Oscar nominated performance in The Last Picture Show.

LAST PICTURE SHOW, THE, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, 1971

PB: Yeah, it was really nice. I was really proud of him. Very happy that he’s finally won. He’s deserved it every time. He’s a brilliant actor and I loved working with him. I’m glad he finally got recognition from his peers. It’s about time. He was really great in Crazy Heart. It’s an extraordinary performance.

JS: The other thing I think is interesting about The Last Picture Show is that it was Larry McMurtry’s first screenplay and I know that, generally speaking, they keep the world of screenwriters and novelists separate in Hollywood but you decided to use him as a screenwriter for the film. Was that a difficult thing to convince the studios to do?  PB: No, because I said I would do it with him and since he’d written the book and the dialogue in the book was virtually all of the dialogue we used, I thought that was enough to give him credit. He didn’t really write the screenplay. He would write a location and then what happens without any thoughts. We did it together. He would write a few pages and do the dialogue…mainly the dialogue…and then send it to me. Then I would sort of make it into a screenplay.

JS: Do you think he enjoyed that process?

PB: He didn’t particularly.

Larry McMurtry in his bookstore in Texas

JS: It doesn’t look like he got involved in much screenplay writing after that if you look at his filmography.

PB: Not for some time. He sort of got into later.

JS: This brings me to another screenplay adaptation that you did with writer Paul Theroux for one of my favorite movies, Saint Jack. That was another first screen credit for him as well. Was that a similar situation?

SAINT JACK, Ben Gazzara (center), 1979, (c) New World/courtesy Everett Collection

PB: You know when somebody writes a book and you base the movie on the book…I don’t know, I feel if you don’t end up using their screenplay then you should give them some credit and the truth of the matter is…Paul did write a screenplay but we didn’t use any of it. I gave him credit anyway. He wouldn’t have gotten it if it went into arbitration. But I just feel that it’s his book and we used a lot of his book and he did try to write a screenplay but it wasn’t really usable.

The screenplay on that movie was really written largely on location while we were shooting. The construction for the screenplay was one of the big things we did get from the writer, Howard Sackler. In the book the Denholm Elliott character [William Leigh] only comes to Singapore once and everything that happens in the movie happens in the first visit that he makes to Singapore…everything, everything at this one time and then he dies. So Sackler, who was a good playwright – He wrote The Great White Hope and wrote a good deal of Jaws but didn’t take credit – came up with the idea that Denholm’s character should come to Singapore three times and that would give us our three act structure. And that’s what we did. And that was the construction we used but the actual scenes, the dialogue and all that were actually written while we were there.

Peter Bogdanovich (far left) and Ben Gazzara (far right) appear in the film Saint Jack (1979), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

JS: Was that stressful to be writing it while you were on location?

PB: It became easier because we were there and in the book there was very little stuff with women. It’s a story about a pimp and hookers and there was hardly any stuff with the hookers so we did some research – Gazzara and I – and found out a lot of interesting things. In fact, some of the working girls were actually in the picture. They were wonderful.

JS: You pulled together such a great group of people for that movie – Denholm Elliott, James Villiers, Joss Ackland and, of course, Ben Gazzara, who’s just fantastic in it and even George Lazenby and yourself.

Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott (right) star in the 1979 film, Saint Jack, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

PB: Well, we got very lucky because originally I wanted Charles Grodin to play the part I played and he didn’t want to come all the way over to Singapore. So then he said, “Why don’t you play it?” and I said OK. That was a good idea. It might be fun. And Ben sort of directed me in my scenes and we needed someone to play the senator and we didn’t have a lot of money. Turned out George Lazenby was doing an episode of Hawaii Five-0 so he was halfway there because he was in Hawaii so we said, “Ok, have George come over,” and that was that. The other English actors we cast in London; it was a good cast. I’ve always been a great admirer of Denholm Elliott ever since Nothing But the Best. He’s a great, great actor. We used him again in Noises Off [1992], it was his last film.  JS: I was expecting Saint Jack to get nominated for Oscars when it came out because I thought the performances were so strong and was surprised when it was ignored. But weren’t the reviews positive from the critics in general?

PB: Yes, very positive except for The New York Times. [Vincent] Canby slept through it and when he woke up he said, “Oh, it’s a kind of Alan Ladd picture.” I mean he had no idea what it was. I was there while he slept through it. But the reviews were generally good but it wasn’t a big moneymaker. And it was also before this kind of independent movie culture was happening so it was a little bit ahead of its time. I think if Saint Jack had come out now, a few years ago or in this climate it would do much better.  JS: A few questions about What’s Up, Doc? After The Last Picture Show, you decided to do a screwball comedy, which hardly anybody in Hollywood had done for years. Was that a hard sell to the studios?

PB: It wasn’t that I wanted to do it. It just sort of happened. What actually happened was….well, it’s a long story. I’ll try to tell it shorter but my agent had gotten Steve McQueen in to see an early cut of The Last Picture Show because he was looking for a director to do The Getaway. And Steve saw the picture and loved it and asked if I would do The Getaway and I agreed to do it. Then Streisand’s agent heard that McQueen had me for his next picture so she wanted to see the picture. So she saw an early cut. It wasn’t quite finished but it was finished enough to show. It was still a work print. So she saw it and she was doing a picture for Warners called A Glimpse of Tiger and wanted me to direct that right away and I didn’t like the script. It just didn’t interest me and they wanted Barbra to do a picture.

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal star in What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy by Peter Bogdanovich.

Warners had her but they couldn’t get a director for this thing so John Calley called me over to his office – he was head of Warners at the time – and he said, “Barbra really wants to do a picture with you. We both would like to do a picture with you. Why don’t you do this picture?” And I said, “I don’t like the script John. And he said, “Well, if somebody said to you, ‘Do you want to do a picture with Barbra Streisand, would you do it?’ I said, “Yeah.” Calley: “What would you do?” Bogdanovich: “I don’t know – a screwball comedy.” He said, “Whatdaya mean, what?” Bogdanovich: “Like Bringing Up Baby. You know, square professor, crazy girl, messes up his life and she marries him or something.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you do that?” And so I said alright and he said, “Who would you get to write it?” And I said “Well, [Robert] Benton and [David] Newman worked with me at Esquire,” and he said, “Good. They just did a picture for us. Call em.” I said, “Can I produce it?,” he said sure so I left the office producing and directing Barbra Streisand’s next picture with Benton and Newman writing the script. It was as arbitrary as that.

JS: I never knew it came together like that.

The screenwriting team of David Newman (left) and Robert Benton

PB: That’s how it came together. And Bob and David said they only had three weeks because they had another assignment. I said, “Why don’t you guys come out here and we’ll hole up for three weeks. If Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht can write the scrip to Scarface in eleven days, we can get something done in three weeks.” So we did knock out a script in three weeks and it wasn’t really good enough. I did a quick pass on it that was still not good enough. But I got Ryan [O’Neal] and Barbra to sit down and read it with me and they were so busy trying to make sure that I liked them that they didn’t really notice that the script needed quite a bit of work. So they committed to it.

Then John Calley said, “Don’t you think the script needs some work,” and I said, “Yeah, definitely.” So he said, “How about Buck Henry?” and I said, “That’s a great idea,” and I met with Buck and he added some ideas and his opening line to me was, “You’re gonna hate me but I don’t think it’s complicated enough.” I said, “Do you think we need another suitcase?” and he said “Yeah,” so it went to four suitcases. So we said, what should the fourth suitcase be? – and The Pentagon Papers was all over the newspapers at the time – so we said let’s make it The Pentagon Papers. And we had somebody in the cast who looked a little like [Daniel] Ellsberg. And Buck wrote his draft based on our draft fairly quickly and we were in production before The Last Picture Show opened. We were shooting before Picture Show opened.

Kenneth Mars plays an egocentric critic modeled on John Simon in What’s Up, Doc? (1972), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

JS: So the whole film took how long from the time you actually started filming?

PB: It was scheduled for 72 days and we did it in 71.

JS: The character that Kenneth Mars plays was said to be modeled on critic John Simon, I was curious if Simon ever reviewed the film or commented on it.

Film & theater critic John Simon

PB: He wasn’t very happy. He said to me once – very viciously – (imitates his voice) “I hope the next time you use somebody to play me you get a good actor!”

JS: I love Kenneth Mars in that.

PB: Oh, Kenny is so funny. I told him to watch John Simon on The Dick Cavett Show. That’s what he came up with.

Madeline Kahn & Austin Pendleton star in the 1972 screwball comedy, What’s Up, Doc?, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

JS: Simon’s reviews always got so personal where he would stoop to criticizing someone’s physical flaws…

PB: Oh, he was awful that way.

JS: And I never really thought he was a gifted film critic.

PB: No, it always sounded like it was badly translated from the Croatian.

Madeline Kahn, in her first major film role, practically steals What’s Up, Doc? (1972) from her co-stars, Barbra Streisand & Ryan O’Neal.

JS: My favorite part of What’s Up, Doc? is Madeline Kahn. I think she’s one of the great unsung actresses of her era. And I was curious how you came to cast her because that was her first film role, right?

PB: We introduced her in the picture. She got an “Introducing Madeline Kahn” credit. I went to New York and I’m trying to remember the name of the casting woman – Nessa Hyams. She wanted me to meet a few people in New York and Madeleine was on Broadway with Danny Kaye in a musical called Side by Side, I think it was [It was actually Two by Two]. And I didn’t have time to see the musical and was only in New York two or three days and I met with Austin Pendleton and Madeline. And Madeline just came in and knocked me out. She didn’t read. We just had a talk. I just kept laughing and she said, “What are you laughing at?” I said, “You’re funny.” She didn’t know she was funny. She didn’t try to be funny. She just was funny. And we cast her from that conversation that we had.

Madeline Kahn as Trixie Delight in Paper Moon (1973), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

I was very excited about her because she has that voice and she had this kind of funny quality. And she’s great in the picture. And I did Paper Moon with her too and then we did At Long Last Love and she was great in all three.

JS: A question about Paper Moon. I always thought it was a shame that she and Tatum O’Neal had to run against each other in the Best Supporting Actress category because I thought they both deserved to win. And I felt that Tatum really should have been in the Best Actress category because she was the main actress, even if she was a child.

Tatum O’Neal as Addie in Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era tale directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

PB: They [the studio] thought that she wouldn’t win Best Actress but they thought she would win Best Supporting. You know, for an eight or nine year old, you’re too young to win Best Actress so this was just too much for them. I wasn’t involved in that maneuver but I think the studio thought better to put her up for Supporting. It was surprising this year that Christopher Plummer, who plays the lead in The Last Station, was Supporting Actor.

JS: Yes, once again. Do you think that was because they thought he had a better chance at Best Supporting Actor?

PB: Yeah, I think so.  JS: I’d like to ask a few questions about your books. Who the Hell’s In It? In the Sal Mineo chapter, there’s a mention about wanting to cast him in a film about Bugsy Siegel that Howard Sackler was going to write.

PB: Howard Sacker did write it. We were going to make it at Universal. And then he decided not to make it. It was a good script.

Warren Beatty plays gangster Bugsy Siegel in Barry Levinson’s 1991 biopic, Bugsy.

JS: So the Barry Levinson film Bugsy was not related to this project, right?

PB: Yes, it was a totally different script. The same basic idea but Howard’s script was very good.

Hollywood super agent Sue Mengers

JS: There’s another chapter on Anthony Perkins where you mention that agent Sue Mengers was the person representing you when you first started and Perkins, Anthony Newley and you were her only three clients at the time. And she was one of the few high profile female agents in Hollywood then. I was curious what enabled her to amass such a powerful client base so quickly.

PB: The success of The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?..particularly, What’s Up, Doc? Picture Show was already shot but hadn’t come out and I moved over to ICM or whatever it was called at that point. Ted Ashley was running it and [David] Begelman was representing Streisand but Sue Mengers really maneuvered the What’s Up, Doc? thing to Ryan and me and Barbra. She created that package really. And that was the second biggest grossing film of the year, you know, after The Godfather. So that was a huge thing for her and I became the hottest director in Hollywood and I signed with her so she started getting everybody in town.

The suspense thriller, The Last of Sheila (1973), features (from left to right) James Mason, Raquel Welch, Joan Hackett, Dyan Cannon and Richard Benjamin.

JS: She sounded like a real character. There’s that movie The Last of Sheila where I hear that Dyan Cannon was kind of doing an impersonation of her in the film.

PB: She was, yeah. Tony told me that. I don’t think it’s in the chapter [on Perkins] but she was doing Sue Mengers. She was a character.

Director Agnes Varda (center) stands next to Warhol star Viva on the set of the 1969 film, Lions Love.

JS: Agnes Varda. A question about her. I’ve seen Lions Love and wondered how you ended up in that.

PB I was at the bookstore when they were shooting and she said, “Would you be in it?” and I said OK.

JS: But you already knew her, right?

Larry Edmunds Bookshop in downtown Los Angeles

PB: No, I didn’t know her. I was just there. I had made one film I think and I was at Larry Edmunds bookshop quite often and she was shooting – as I remember, I’m only in it for a moment, aren’t I? I’ve never even seen it.

JS: Well, I don’t think it holds up very well but it’s totally a time capsule of Los Angeles in the late sixties.

JS: Do you still see movies in theatres or prefer to watch them at home now?

PB: Well, if I’m really interested in a movie I prefer to see it in a theatre.  JS: What do you think about the current technology where you’re able to watch a clip from Lawrence of Arabia on your iPhone or some other mobile device? In some ways, it may be a way of preserving film history with younger generations into film culture but it also seems like such a desecration at the same time. I wonder what David Lean would have to say about that?

PB: Probably swiveling in his grave. The problem is – you’ve put your finger on what the big problem is with the younger generation. The reason they don’t appreciate older films is because they never see them the right way. So they’re used to seeing them on small screens, in black and white, which sometimes is too dark for the television, sometimes the pace is too fast because everything is harder to see on TV, even with the big screen TVs. It’s not the same as seeing it on the big screen. And the fact that you can stop the film and rewind it or put a bookmark in it as though it was a book and come back and see it again the next day…All that is awful. All that goes against the experience of actually seeing the movie. If you see a movie like Avatar in that kind of way, it wouldn’t be impressive either. The older films were always meant to be seen on the big screen. Nobody thought they’d be shown on a little screen – you know, postage sized. No, I think it’s really a tragic loss for younger people to not be exposed to films in the right way. That’s why I think it’s great that TCM is doing a festival where you’re going to see those films on the big screen.

Targets (1968)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Shown: Boris Karloff, Director Peter Bogdanovich

JS: I wanted to ask you about a few earlier things you had done such as Targets because of Boris Karloff. I know you had a very rushed schedule on that and only had him for five days. But during that brief time, did you ever have an opportunity to talk to him about some of the people he worked with like James Whale or Bela Lugosi?

PB: Not really. We talked about Howard Hawks because we used a clip from The Criminal Code [in Targets that Karloff and Bogdanovich view together]….I said, “You know he really had a way with a story,” and Boris ad-libbed, “Indeed he does. He gave me my first really important part’…. And we talked about the monster. I said, “How do you feel about Frankenstein?” and he said (imitates Karloff), “The Monster?” And he felt that it had given him a niche and given him a career, really. And he was perfectly happy with it and never regretted it.  He was different than the character in the movie [Targets] who regretted a lot of crap he’d made. Boris never expressed that kind of attitude. He was a professional and he did his best with no matter what he was given to do. He was a lovely man. He worked really hard. We had very long hours. For example, we did everything with him at the drive-in [theatre] in one day and one night. I don’t know how we did all that.

JS: It must have been hard on him because he was in such poor health at the time.

PB: He was. He had emphysema and he could hardly walk because he had braces on his legs. But he was a pro, right up to the finish. He was great. He liked the script of Targets a lot, he liked me and we got along well.

Mildred Natwick and Barry Brown star in Daisy Miller (1974), co-starring Cybill Shepherd in the title role.

JS: There was one actor you used in one of your films that I had seen in only a few things, mostly on television dramas, and in Bad Company opposite Jeff Bridges – Barry Brown. And he appeared in your film, Daisy Miller. He’s someone I thought was a really good actor and promising but just a few years after Daisy Miller he seemed to fall apart and then killed himself.

PB: Well, he had a drinking problem. He was very promising and I thought he was really good in Bad Company but his drinking problem came up in Daisy Miller and got me pretty upset with him. And he had an obsession with death. He would turn to the obituaries as soon as he got a newspaper. He was a strange cat. He was very unusual. He was very right for the part in a way. He was sort of winterborn. Cybill [Shepherd] and I used to kid around and say, “Well, he IS the part.” Which wasn’t really a compliment but he was a really good actor and he’s good in the picture. It’s just that he was his own worst enemy.  JS: Are there any film festivals that you attend on a regular basis?

PB: I used to go to Telluride quite often because they’d invite me quite often. I’ve been invited to a lot of film festivals but I don’t go very often. And I’m not that keen on film festivals. There’s just too much movie talk. Of course I’ve been to lots of film festivals where there have been tributes to me but I don’t really like all that stuff.

JS: Are you working on anything right now for television or film that will be coming out soon?  PB: I’m hoping to shoot a picture this summer but there are three or four things swirling around and I’m not sure which one is going to be ready. I’ve got a comedy that I want to do very badly called Squirrels to Nuts…which, I hope is a comedy with that title. It’s kind of in the What’s Up, Doc?/They All Laughed family. It’s a screwball comedy, but it’s a little edgier because it’s about an escort.

JS: I loved They All Laughed. What a great cast. Colleen Camp and [Ben] Gazzara…it kind of reminded me of a Jacques Demy film.

They All Laughed (1981)
Directed by: Peter Bogdanovich
Shown: Dorothy Stratten, John Ritter

PB: That’s my favorite of all my films.

JS: It’s got a very European flair to it that’s just so charming. Once again, I don’t really understand why it didn’t draw a bigger audience.

PB: That was a problem because Dorothy [Stratten] was murdered and that put a pall over the picture quite a bit. And I didn’t react well so I ended up trying to distribute the film myself which was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life because I blew five million bucks and didn’t end up with the picture. You just can’t self-distribute. It doesn’t work, you just can’t do it. We opened in Westwood [in Los Angeles] and played fifteen weeks at Beverly Hills in The Music Hall..sold out performances, people loved it. And we went to the Mann Theatres to do the break and we outgrossed everybody in Westwood the first week of the release.

Peter Bogdanovich directs Audrey Hepburn in the screwball comedy, They All Laughed (1981).

But they still pulled us out because Paramount wanted the theatre for Reds. So you just can’t do it. We got screwed left, right and sideways.  I don’t mean personally screwed. It’s just business. So the picture didn’t get very good distribution but it got very good reviews. We played nineteen weeks in one theatre in Seattle.

JS: I have one last question. It’s about a role you were in. You played Bennett Cerf in Infamous, the film about Truman Capote. I was curious if you ever met Bennett Cerf and if you knew Capote?

This scene from the 2006 biopic, Infamous, about Truman Capote features Isabella Rossellini and Peter Bogdanovich as Bennett Cerf.

PB: Yeah, I knew Truman. I knew him, not well, but I’d met him a few times.  I interviewed him when I was doing a piece about Bogart for Esquire. So I met him in 1963 and In Cold Blood hadn’t quite come out yet. Then I met him over the years numerous times. There’s a funny story I heard about Truman. It’s in my diary…I kept a diary for about five years during the Targets period. And somebody asked him if he knew Peter Bogdanovich and he said, “He directed Targets. How’s that for haut courant?”

I liked him very much though he was a sad figure toward the end. I’d meet him at parties and he’d be drunk and out of his mind and making no sense at all. Bennett Cerf I never met but I saw him repeatedly on What’s My Line? When I was cast in the part and Doug [McGrath] asked me to play it, I went to the Museum of Radio and Television and looked at some What’s My Line? episodes and made some notes about him and his accent. He had a very strange accent. He had kind of a high voice, a tricky voice – because I do Jerry Lewis and I do Cary Grant but his voice readings were somewhere in between. If I went a little too far it would sound like Jerry and I would have to pull it back and it would sound like Cary so it was tricky.

A rare glimpse of Orson Welles at the grocery store with Peter Bogdanovich.

Other websites of interest:

https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/interview-peter-bogdanovich

http://www.indiewire.com/2013/11/interview-peter-bogdanovich-talks-cold-turkey-endless-frustration-of-orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-more-91435/

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/magnificent-obsession-200201

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LnuQZ6VD_Y

In its own way, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1961 directorial debut Accattone could be seen as the last gasp of the Italian neo-realism movement. It is also a remarkably self-assured first film that blends the lyrical with the sordid in its depiction of life on the outskirts of Rome where pimps, thieves and petty criminals scrounge for a living with little hope of ever escaping their dead-end existence. Based on Pasolini’s second novel, Una Vita Violenta, Accatone successfully launched Pasolini as a film director but also marked the beginning of an acting career for Franco Citti in the title role. What is most interesting is that Una Vita Violenta was again adapted for the screen under that title the following year but it is hardly ever mentioned or revived. Pasolini had no involvement with the production but it did star Franco Citti in the central role of Tommaso, a character similar to Accattone, and the two films would make a fascinating double feature in terms of their contrasting tones and directorial style. 

Accatone is a blunt and emotional diamond in the rough that channels the sacred and the profane in equal parts while Una Vita Violenta (Violent Life) is fashioned as more of a dispassionate, documentary-like depiction of grinding urban poverty and its consequences. Accattone is still readily available on DVD from Water Bearer Films (though it is sadly in need of remastering). Violent Life, however, is more elusive but nonetheless essential viewing for Pasolini completists and those interested in Italian cinema of the early sixties.  Co-directed by Paolo Heusch and Brunello Rondi, Violent Life was adapted from Pasolini’s novel by no less than five screenwriters (Ennie De Concini, Franco Brusati, Franco Solinas and the two co-directors) with dialogue contributions from Sergio Citti, brother of Franco and a close friend of Pasolini. Tommaso, the protagonist, is part of a delinquent gang (they call themselves The Californians) who thumb their nose at steady work and opt instead to survive through hustling, preying on fellow slum dwellers and picking up odd jobs from blackmarket profiteers.

Franco Citti plays a gang member from the Roman slums in Violent Life (1962), based on a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Told in an episodic fashion, we follow Tommaso (Franco Citti) as he lives for the moment with no thoughts of the future. He crashes a dance at the Communist Party Center and later participates in a brawl with anti-fascists at the local movie house. After gorging themselves on cheap wine and pizza, Tommaso and his cronies steal a car and harass young lovers in secluded parking spots. One couple, in particular, are victimized with the man being beaten and robbed and his girlfriend threatened with rape. The hoodlums eventually drive up to a gas station, kidnap the attendant, rob him and roll him down an embankment before driving off into the night. Just a typical day in the life of Tommaso and company.  Una V

Franco Citti (center) plays the ringleader of an Italian slum gang in Violent Life (1962), based on a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Violent Life is unusually eye-opening in its depiction of slum life in the post-war era when Italian society was coming apart through dissent by Mussolini sympathizers, Communist party members, hard line Catholics and the disparity between the rich, the working class and the poor. It is not surprising that both Accatone and Violent Life were attacked by government officials, the clergy and film censors since they offered such a negative and hopeless depiction of Rome’s underbelly for all the world to see. Yet Violent Life, in particular, stands as a compelling argument for social reform but also as a rare glimpse into the lower depths, as vivid and authentic as such classics as William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1950) and Hector Babanco’s Pixote (1981).

Franco Citti (far left) looks on as his friend, who was paid for the effort, serenades his girlfriend in Violent Life (1962), directed by Paolo Heusch & Brunello Rondi.

In the course of the film, even Tommaso begins to realize that his life must change if he wants a future. His luck seems to change when he meets Irene (Serena Vergano), an innocent young girl from the projects. Their romance begins with a date at the movies where Tommaso’s sexual advances are rebuffed. He is smitten nonetheless and proceeds to woo her in one of the film’s most memorable sequences. He pays his friend Carletto to get his guitar out of hock and then accompanies the guitarist/singer along with his gang to Irene’s apartment block where the entire neighborhood is serenaded. We never see Irene come to her window, nor are we even sure Tommaso and his pals are at the correct address but, for a brief moment, Tommaso’s romantic gesture is charmingly old-fashioned and sincere. Unfortunately the spell is broken when some men from the projects began demanding other songs from Carletto. When he refuses to indulge them, a fight breaks out and Tommaso, armed with a knife, stabs a man to death.  Arrested and sent to prison, Tommaso serves a two year prison sentence. When he is released, he seems determined to turn over a new leaf. He asks the local priest to help him find work and resumes his courtship with Irene, who has waited for his return. Marriage plans are discussed and Tommaso even mentions joining the Democratic party. But everything is put on hold when he is diagnosed with TB and sent to a sanatorium.

Serena Vergano & Franco Citti star in Violent Life (1962), based on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s second novel.

Tommaso’s evolution as a person is particularly striking in the second half of the film where he abstains from getting involved in an anti-government riot within the welfare hospital or notes his own estrangement from the gang as they torment an elderly beggar. Much more unexpected is a sequence set in a barren, trash-littered field where Tommaso and Irene go for a walk. He finds a flattened cardboard box and lays it on the ground for Irene. When she is hesitant to sit on it, he pulls out his handkerchief and neatly unfolds it on the cardboard for her. The courtly gesture sets the stage for what is certain to be Irene’s deflowering and impregnation – terminology that seems appropriate for Tommaso’s formal behavior – but the encounter goes in a different direction and ends in a lover’s spat about fidelity. The effect is both poignant and desolate.

Franco Citti faces his own mortaility in the 1962 film, Violent Life, based on a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Violent Life culminates in tragedy but it remains clear-eyed and unsentimental through the final fadeout. In a surprising turn of events, Tommaso risks his life to save a prostitute from her submerged house during a flash flood in the slums. The heroic act results in a recurrence of his TB but he calmly accepts his fate as his bride-to-be and former gang members leave him to his death bed. No good deed goes unpunished.

Tommaso (Franco Citti) is offended by the little beggar girl while his girffriend Irene (Serena Vergano) searches for spare change in Violent Life (1962).

It has to be said that Franco Citti’s performance in Violent Life is the driving force behind the film. Although untrained as an actor, he refused to take acting lessons as his career progressed, convinced that lessons would actually affect his performances in a negative way. Although he acted in many of Pasolini’s films, he also worked for such well regarded directors as Carlo Lizzani (Requiescat, 1967), Valerio Zurlini (Black Jesus, 1968), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, 1972), Elio Petri (Todo Modo, 1976) and Bernardo Bertolucci (Luna, 1979). Pasolini best summed up his appeal, referring to him and Anna Magnani as “sacred monsters…[they] have something so authentic and personal about them, just as if they had been taken off the street.”

Screenwriter/director Pier Paolo Pasolini in his early years

In Citti’s case, it was true. He was a working class laborer who had spent much of his youth in and out of reform schools. Yet, despite a tough and intimidating facade, Citti has a mercurial nature that can convincingly transition from rage or menace into unexpected tenderness or laughter. He has one of the great faces of Italian cinema and he manages to transform a cynical lowlife into someone worthy of redemption and even sympathy in Violent Life.  Of the two co-directors of Violent Life, Brunello Rondi is probably the more famous and is best known as a screenwriter who worked with Roberto Rossellini on such films as Europe ’51 and Escape by Night and with Fellini on La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2 and Juliet of the Spirits. Paolo Heusch, the other director, is better known for his work as a second unit director but his solo work as a director has mainly been consigned to genre films such as The Day the Sky Exploded (1958) and Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961).  Other aspects of Violent Life that deserve recognition are the subtle but evocative music score by Piero Piccioni and the appropriately bleak black and white cinematography of Armando Nannuzzi which is like an insider tour of hell and was filmed on location in various industrial communities on the outskirts of Rome. Nannuzzi is best known for Mauro Bolognini’s Bell ‘Antonio (1960), Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (1962), Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom (1963), Sergey Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) and several films by Luchino Visconti (Sandra, The Damned, Ludwig).

Franco Citti (far right) is a street thug with no future prospects in the late Italian Neo-Realism film, Una Vita Violenta (Violent Life, 1962).

Violent Life remains unavailable on any format as a domestic U.S. release but it might surface on Blu-Ray someday through Italian cinema specialists like Arrow Films or Raro Films or even Criterion. If you have an all-region player, you might be able to find a 2006 import DVD version from Minerva via Amazon or you can contact European Trash Cinema which sells a fine widescreen DVD-R copy in Italian with English subtitles.

The author of Violent Life is Pier Paolo Pasolini but he did not contribute to the screenplay or work on the 1962 film.

Other sites of interest:

https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/25530/una-vita-violenta-italian-release/

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/14/franco-citti

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/franco-citti-1935-2016

http://www.pierpaolopasolini.com/bio.htm

Now here is a curiosity that I plucked from a pile of discarded DVDs at a television station. I knew absolutely nothing about The Butterfly Ball (1977) except for the fact that I had seen it listed as a credit in Vincent Price’s filmography. So I popped it into the DVD player and immediately had a psychedelic flashback to the early seventies. The Butterfly Ball is, on the surface, a filmed rock opera that was staged at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1975 and featured an all-star cast of British musicians, a few celebrities (supermodel Twiggy and Vincent Price) and some local talent (The Trinity School of Croyden Boys Choir), performing songs and verse from a score composed by Roger Glover, best known as the bassist and songwriter/composer of Deep Purple.   

One of the many strange costumed characters who pop up in the rock opera film The Butterfly Ball (1977).

But this isn’t a straightforward concert film by any means and the performance footage is interrupted consistently throughout with flights into fantasy, Vietnam War footage, kids flying kites, people cavorting in animal costumes, a pair of dancers dressed in white gym outfits who look like they were recruited from a sex instruction video, and other ill-advised attempts to visualize the songs and lyrics. At one point, a bizarre but quite striking animation sequence is even introduced and for a few minutes it appears as if The Butterfly Ball has morphed into Yellow Submarine (1968).    Glover’s musical fantasy was based on The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, a popular picture book for children which was illustrated by Alan Aldridge with verses by William Plomer and was first published in 1973. However, the original inspiration for Aldridge and Plomer’s book was the 1802 poem of the same title by William Roscoe. Glover was an admirer of the 1973 book and, according to him, was “offered the commission to write and record an album of music based on the book for a projected animated movie.” The animated feature never became a reality but it did lead to an animated short that was created by Lee Miskin and set to “Love is All,” one of the songs in Glover’s score.   Glover had labored long and hard on composing an original score for this project and in the end a decision was made to present the work as a live concert at Royal Albert Hall, recruiting his own musical support for the event which was a benefit for the Leukemia Fund and Action Research for the Crippled Child. Glover had no say or involvement in the actual filming of the concert and concentrated instead on rehearsing and staging his score which was an artistic and critical triumph when it was finally performed. Several months later, producer/director Tony Klinger, premiered his film version of The Butterfly Ball at the Odeon cinema in Chelsea, London and Glover felt pressured to attend.

Musician Roger Glover as seen in the 1977 rock opera film, The Butterfly Ball.

You can read the entire account of his Butterfly Ball experience on his own web site (www.rogerglover.com/writings/messages-from-roger-glover/the-dvd-release-of-the-butterfly-ball-concert/) but here is what he experienced that night:  “I had no preconceptions about what it was going to be like but as it progressed I sat there cringing with embarrassment at the spectacle before me. The music was OK but the camera work, the lighting, the editing, and above all the inserts – either pseudo ballet dancers seemingly practicing their moves or people dressed as animals crawling or waddling around some desultory looking countryside – left me with a strong urge to run away and hide…Afterwards, damned by faint praise, I endured the lukewarm congratulations of my presumably equally embarrassed friends with far too many comments like, “That was …er, interesting,” as people sloped off to salvage what was left of their Chelsea evening, leaving me to… well, cry angry tears on the long, silent journey back home.”

One of the many collaborative musical happenings in the 1977 rock opera film, The Butterfly Ball.

After watching The Butterfly Ball, one can understand Glover’s embarrassment and frustrations because his score is amazingly diverse and rich, offering a wide range of musical styles – everything from boogie-woogie to reggae to power pop to full symphonic movements. It’s an ambitious and impressive achievement and deserves to be as well known as other rock operas (The Kinks’ Preservation Act I [1973], Pink Floyd’s The Wall [1979]) that followed in the wake of The Who’s Tommy. Yet in the context of this film, there are too many crazy and baffling visual distractions to focus completely on the music.  I know little about Glover’s background except for his involvement with the group Deep Purple who, during their prime, were considered pioneers in the hard rock genre along with Led Zeppelin. I never followed their music and was only aware of them through such radio hits as “Hush” (a cover of a Joe South song) in 1968 and “Smoke on the Water” (1972).  Glover had recently left Deep Purple to pursue solo projects when he became involved in The Butterfly Ball and the result is a strangely addictive score that won him new fans and is still in print.

The rock and roll group Deep Purple back in the day. Can you spot Roger Glover in the lineup?

Klinger’s approach to the film’s editing, however, is a head-scratching crazy quilt and suggests that the movie was assembled in an all-night editing session/drug party. Some of it is quite hilariously inappropriate such as the “Behind the Smile” number in which exotic dancers in weird face masks twirl around a Hindu god. And the animal costumes in particular are a sorry sight; you can’t tell half the time what sort of critter is frolicking across the screen. Other parts of it are pretentious – does this rock concert really require war atrocity footage inserted? – and some of it is fascinating in ways that have nothing to do with the original source or the music – London street scenes (look, there’s the Playboy Club circa 1975) or film homages (a graveyard scene that seems inspired by Roger Corman’s Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

Tony Ashton performs in the rock opera film The Butterfly Ball (1977).

It’s also fun to see many of the musicians in their long-haired, tie-dyed t-shirt heyday, sporting some superbad fashions.  Among them are the late Tony Ashton, having fun with a blues number on the keyboards, Eddie Jobson and John Gustafson of Roxy Music, vocalist Helen Chapelle (she appears as a background singer in the film version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), R&B singer Jimmy Helms, members of the funk-rock band Fancy, Ronnie James Dio of Rainbow and Deep Purple associates David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes.

Vincent Price is prominently billed in the rock opera The Butterfly Ball (1977) but is just a small part of this Royal Albert Hall happening.

How does Vincent Price figure into all of this? He merely sits on stage in an oversized rattan chair, occasionally reading verses from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, and looks amused by the whole thing. Price participated in this around the time he made the 1975 remake of Journey into Fear but before his late period excursion into television and appearances on “The Bionic Woman,” “The Brady Bunch Hour” and “The Love Boat.”

Twiggy is one of many guest stars featured in the rock opera The Butterfly Ball (1977).

The other big name in The Butterfly Ball is Twiggy who managed to parlay her success as a model into an acting career that began with the Ken Russell Art Deco musical The Boyfriend (1971) and includes such films as the mystery thriller W (1974), Freddie Francis’ The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and John Schlesinger’s Madame Sousatzka (1988). Looking like she stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, Twiggy gets to do a bit of singing here and she’s not half bad.

Christopher Gable and Twiggy star in the 1971 film musical, The Boy Friend, directed by Ken Russell.

In some ways it would be great to have an alternative version of The Butterfly Ball that is just a straightforward concert film despite evidence that the performance footage wasn’t shot with much imagination or style. Yet there is something almost endearing about Klinger’s peculiar creation so, in some ways, The Butterfly Ball is essential viewing for anyone interested in seventies pop culture. If you’re not…run, flee, get thee away.

Another scene from the rock opera film The Butterfly Ball (1977), directed by Tony Klinger.

To my knowledge, the film never received a theatrical release in the U.S. and it’s easy to see why – there is no frame of reference for this thing. “The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast” was not a huge cultural phenomena here like it was in England and Glover’s score would only have been familiar to his most devoted fans. Glover wrote that the movie “mercifully seemed to fade away” but to his horror, it was released on DVD by Music Video Distributors and Film Chest in 2006.  He actually mustered up the courage to watch it again and here are his parting comments on it: “From time to time I have ventured my negative feelings about it to anyone who would listen and I’m sorry (or possibly relieved) to say that those feelings of disappointment and wasted opportunity have not changed. It’s possible, if not likely, that this DVD is merely a catalog item of little or no importance in the scheme of things and therefore no effort was put into it – and I shouldn’t be complaining. Should you feel the need to investigate further then do so, but don’t expect me to be happy about it. And have some alcohol handy.”

That’s excellent advice. I took him at his word and had a good time. I suggest you do the same if you are able to get your hands on a DVD copy (You can sometimes find a used copy on Amazon).

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

Other links of interest:

http://cinemajam.com/mag/interviews/tony-klinger-2

http://www.deep-purple.net/

https://www.londonbeat-official.com/jimmy-helms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSEW_4c2o1Y

The name Gabriel Axel might not be familiar to most American moviegoers but many are familiar with his 1987 film Babette’s Feast which became a surprise art house hit and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, beating out Louis Malle’s Au Renoir les Enfants. Ironically, Axel was almost 70 and at the end of his filmmaking career when he experienced a career resurgence. But the film that is considered his first international art house breakthrough is Den Rode Kappe (1967), which was released in Europe as Hagbard and Signe and is best known under the title The Red Mantle in the U.S. The poster above with the awkwardly edited quote – and movie spoiler – from Time magazine also includes the reference “From the producers of Dear John” which means nothing to anyone today but that film was a slightly risque art film in its day (due to the nudity) and a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film of 1965 (It lost to Elmar Klosand and Jan Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street).

Based on a story from Gesta Dacorum (The History of the Danes), the first important history of Denmark by 13th century historian Saxo Grammaticus, The Red Mantle has elements of Romeo and Juliet combined with Viking mythology, heroic Danish poems and ancient blood feuds. What unfolds in an austere, briskly paced 92-minute narrative has a raw, primeval quality that transports you back to medieval Scandinavia. It begins as Hagbard (Oleg Vidov) and his two brothers ride off to avenge the death of their father, Haarund, killed in a duel with King Sigvor (Gunnar Bjornstrand). With the king in attendance, the three sons of Haarund engage in combat on horseback with Sigvor’s three sons. The king eventually calls the match a draw after witnessing Haggard spare the life of a son in combat. He also wants to stop the endless cycle of revenge and establish peace between the two feuding families.

For a brief period of time there is harmony between the two clans as Haggard and his brothers bond with Sigvor’s sons over a feast and roughhousing in a combination sauna/bathhouse (the male nudity would be verboten in an American film). But once Hagbard lays eyes on Signe (Gitte Haenning), a blonde angel who happens to be the king’s daughter, he is smitten…and doomed. Signe is promised to Hake (Henning Painer), a friend of the court, but Hildegisl (from a neighboring kingdom and played by Manfred Reddemann) plots to have Signe for himself and sets in motion a treacherous plot that bring tragedy to everyone.  The storyline has the familiarity of a classic archetype but director Axel makes it fresh and engaging with a visual approach that emphasizes the volcanic landscapes of Iceland (where it was filmed) and the physical actions and behavior of the main characters. Dialogue is used sparingly and the sound design is particularly evocative of another time with its mixture of clattering swords and armor, horses snorting and galloping, the crashing surf and discordant musical cues that utilize horns, a solo piano and male and female choruses (Per Norgaard is credited as the film’s composer with Marc Fredericks contributing musical accents on the piano).

A combat scene with graphic violence from Hagbard and Signe (aka The Red Mantle, 1967).

Visually The Red Mantle has an epic quality yet the drama remains intimate and moving. There are scenes of awe-inspiring beauty as well as sudden bursts of brutality and violence that will stay with you long after you’ve seen the film. The combat scenes, in particular, have a blunt power with beheadings, impalings and stabbings rendered quickly and as realistically as possible. A wolf hunt among the moss-covered, rocky terrain and massive caves of the countryside is enthralling and there are even brief moments of tenderness amid the harshness of the tale – an explicit but non-exploitative nude love scene between Hagbard and Signe.

Gitte Haenning and Oleg Vidov play doomed lovers in the medieval drama from Denmark, The Red Mantle (aka Hagbard and Signe, 1967).

In the lead roles, Oleg Vidov as Haggard and Gitte Haenning as Signe, are beautiful physical specimens and idyllic screen lovers – as romantic and as natural in their own way as Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey were in Franco Zeffirelli’s lush 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet. Russian actor Vidov was a major matinee idol in his native country but in the mid-eighties he immigrated to America where he found steady work in supporting roles in films (Red Heat, Jackie Chan’s First Strike) and TV series (The West Wing). He died in California at age 73.

Danish actress and singer Gitta Haenning circa 1968

Danish actress Haenning has also had a long and illustrious screen career but is probably more famous as a pop singer. The sixties were her heyday when she had top forty hits in Europe like “Tror du jag ljuger” and “Ich will ‘nen Cowboy also Mann.”

Gunnar Bjornstrand as King Sigvor (center, standing) and Eva Dahlbeck as his queen (left) are prominently featured in The Red Mantle (aka Hagbard and Signe, 1967).

More familiar to American audiences are Gunnar Bjornstrand as King Sigvor and Eva Dahlbeck as his queen. Both actors are well known for their many collaborations with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and they are both regal and vainglorious in The Red Mantle, bringing a touch of Shakespearean pathos to the proceedings. The real scene-stealer though is German actor Manfred Reddemann as Hildegisl, the despicable villain of the piece. Looking a bit like a cross between photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Udo Kier, Reddemann is effectively chilling in scenes where he bribes the elderly blind miser Bolvis (Hakan Kahnberg) with gold to spread false rumors or the sequence where he leads Hagbard into a planned death trap that ends with Hildegisl in cowardly retreat.

German actor Manfred Reddemann as he appears in the 1969 film, Battle of Britain.

If there are any problematic aspects of the film, it is the fact that most of the principal characters lack any awareness or intuition of the danger lurking in their midst and Hildegisl is such a transparent schemer that it’s hard to believe he doesn’t arouse suspicion among his hosts. But pride comes before a fall in many Shakespearean tragedies and it’s no different here as the Sigvor and Haarund clans remain blind to Hildegisl’s manipulations.

Hagbard (Oleg Vidov) with Signe (Gitte Haenning) in the background in the medieval saga, The Red Mantle (Hagbard and Signe, 1967).

The Red Mantle was well received upon its initial release in 1967. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and won a Technical Grand Prize-Special Mention. It also won a National Board of Review award in the foreign language film category. The New York Times praised the film, calling it an “extraordinary picture, joining beauty and horror in a rich, scalding eyeful and a haunting love story.” Roger Ebert also endorsed the film, calling it a “beautiful, lean, spare film, which reaches back into the legends of the past to find its strength…The plot has the simplicity of legend, as if it had been retold for many years until only the most important contours remained….The other thing that must be mentioned is the photography by Henning Bentsen. He places us so firmly in the breathtaking lonely vastness of Iceland that we can believe only heroes could inhabit this land.”  By the way, the U.S. title The Red Mantle is a reference to the colored cloak that plays a major part in the movie’s final act.

A scene from the dramatic climax from The Red Mantle (Hagbard and Signe, 1967), directed by Gabriel Axel.

Gabriel Axel was well known in Denmark as a predominantly commercial director beginning with comedies about families made for Danish television and easing into softcore entertainments like The Girls Are Willing (1958). The Red Mantle seemed like a major turning point but Axel was never able to capitalize on its success although he did achieve some notoriety with the 1968 documentary Danish Blue about Denmark’s censorship laws. He basically returned to television work and fluff like The Goldcabbage Family (1975) until his second artistic breakthrough in 1987 with Babette’s Feast, the first Danish film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Gabriel Axel in 1959. Photograph: Svend Aage Mortensen/EPA

The Red Mantle is currently unavailable in any format through any authorized distributor. I found an acceptable DVD-R copy through European Trash Cinema but this is a film that cries out for a major restoration (as you can see from the featured imagery) and needs to be seen on the widescreen. Perhaps the UK-based Second Run DVD or The Criterion Collection might consider The Red Mantle as a possible future release.  Other websites of interest:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2017/05/17/oleg-vidov-soviet-matinee-idol-defector-obituary/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriel-Axel

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/10/gabriel-axel

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hagbard-and-signe–the-red-mantle-1968

GITTE HAENNING – 60 years in music

Movies about people who murder with weapons or their bare hands are nothing out of the ordinary but what about a film where a man can kill with his voice? It might seem preposterous but The Shout (1978), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, takes this concept and turns it into something that is both plausible and unsettling.  

Based on a short story by Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius, The Shout is a visually elegant and often oblique psychodrama with a dash of surrealism and the supernatural. The film, which takes place at a cricket match on the lush grounds of an insane asylum where some of the players are inmates, relates in flashback the story of a married couple, Anthony (John Hurt) and Rachel Fielding (Susannah York), whose quiet, sedate life in the Devon countryside is interrupted by the arrival of a strange man named Crossley (Alan Bates). He invites himself to lunch one day and then stays on to dominate the couple through occult powers he has acquired while living with an aboriginal tribe in Australia.

John Hurt (background) is disturbed by his mysterious guest (Alan Bates) and his effect on his wife (Susannah York) in The Shout (1978), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

The narrator of the bizarre tale is none other than Crossley himself, who is now an inmate at the asylum and intent on recounting the recent turn of events to fellow cricket scorer Robert Graves (Tim Curry). Whether Crossley’s story is a clear reflection of his madness or the revelations of a man with truly mystical powers remains an enigma up to the end, despite some indications that he is exactly what he claims to be. Yet Skolimowski’s approach is deliberately ambiguous and one which plays mind games with the viewer while conjuring up a place and time that merges the real with the metaphysical.

Alan Bates plays a strange visitor with an expertise in aboriginal magic in The Shout (1978), based on a short story by Robert Graves.

Much ado was made about the complex and striking Dolby sound mix of The Shout prior to its release and, for those lucky enough to see it in a movie theatre, it was a marvel of aural distortion and separation, particularly in those sequences where Anthony, a composer of electronic music, was experimenting in his studio. The real showstopper though was Crossley’s deafening shout which has the power to kill and does so, striking down a farmer and his entire flock of sheep in one disturbing sequence.The Shout was the eighth feature film for Polish director Skolimowski, who became an international film festival favorite after Rysopis (aka Identification Marks: None), his debut feature in 1964 (he had previously directed several short films). In addition to Rysopis, Walkover (1965), Barrier (1966) and Le depart (1967) are considered key early achievements but his later work, when he dabbled in international productions such as The Adventures of Gerard (1970) and King, Queen, Knave (1972), an adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel starring David Niven, Gina Lollobrigida and John Moulder-Brown, has been more erratic.  There were a few extraordinary exceptions, however, such as Deep End (1971), an inspired coming-of-age tale which combined quirky black humor with obsessive sexual longing; it was poorly distributed by Paramount and overlooked at the time, though it is now considered one of Skolimowski’s most personal and innovative films.

Alan Bates plays a mystery man who may be insane or a deadly conjuror in The Shout (1978).

After more than a decade of middling success and commercial failures, the director surprised everyone with The Shout; it won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes and was his biggest critical success since le depart eleven years earlier.

One of several strange and intense sequences from the 1978 film, The Shout, starring Alan Bates (on the right).

An independent film, distributed by The Rank Organization, The Shout was distinguished by an intelligent, literate script by Skolimowski and Michael Austin, which at times exudes the sinister atmosphere of a Harold Pinter play (The Birthday Party, The Servant). It also sports an avant-garde music score composed by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford (two members of the rock group Genesis), stunning cinematography by Mike Molloy (Scandal [1989], The Hit [1984]) and an impeccable cast headed by Alan Bates, who is appropriately intense and menacing as Crossley.

Susannah York plays a married woman who falls under the spell of a mysterious visitor in The Shout (1978).

Cast in the role of the bewitched Rachel, Susannah York was already an internationally acclaimed actress for her work in such films as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? [1969] and Images [1972] but John Hurt as her baffled, rational-minded husband was just beginning to emerge as a major film actor which would be confirmed by the end of the decade in such films as Midnight Express [1978], Alien [1979] and The Elephant Man [1980].

John Hurt plays a composer of experimental music in the offbeat thriller, The Shout (1978), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

Tim Curry, trying to broaden his range after being stereotyped by fans as Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975], and Robert Stephens make the most of their small roles and, if you watch closely, you’ll notice Jim Broadbent in the cricket match scenes as an inmate who goes bonkers during the lightning storm at the climax; it was his first credited film appearance.

Robert Stephens (left) and Tim Curry co-star in Jerzy Skolimowski’s bizarre thriller, The Shout (1978).

Producer Jeremy Thomas deserves major kudos for bringing The Shout to the screen. It was only his second film production (1976’s Mad Dog Morgan starring Dennis Hopper marked his producer debut). He has since gone on to become one of the most adventurous and creative movers and shakers in independent and world cinema with a filmography that includes Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), David Cronenburg’s Naked Lunch (1991), Bob Rafelson’s Blood and Wine (1996), Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005), Wim Wender’s Pina (2011), Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and Takashi Miike’s Blade of the Immortal (2017). When The Shout was released in the U.S., it was admired by many critics and dismissed by others as pretentious. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “a vivid, piercingly loud movie as well as an almost totally incoherent one…it becomes so full of loose ends, contradictions, cryptic symbols and close-ups of objects that, at the moment, have no meaning, that one eventually tunes out of the narrative…” He did, however, find things to praise: “Charles, played by Mr. Bates with the great looney relish he brings to such roles, is brilliant.” He also noted that it “is an elegant looking movie, nicely performed.”

A mysterious stranger (Alan Bates, left) invites himself to stay with a married couple and soon exerts complete control over the wife (Susannah York) in The Shout (1978).

More positive notices were posted by Variety which called it “gripping” and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times who wrote, “What makes the movie terrifying is the way in which the outback magic is introduced so naturally into the placid fabric of village life.”

A climatic scene of chaos during a cricket match from The Shout (1978), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

The Shout had a brief run on the art house circuit in the U.S. and then disappeared but its reputation has improved considerably since that time thanks to repertory screenings and reappraisals by film scholars. Skolimowski, who also occasionally works as an actor in such films as Volker Schlondorff’s Circle of Deceit [1981] and Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls [2000], has enjoyed other critical successes since The Shout as represented by Moonlighting [1982] starring Jeremy Irons, Success Is the Best Revenge [1984] with Michael York, Anouk Aimee and John Hurt, and Cztery noce z Anna [English title, Four Nights with Anna, 2008], which won the special jury prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival and garnered three awards at the Polish Film Festival. His last film to date, 11 Minutes, is an offbeat thriller that toured the film festival circuit in 2015 but received a limited theatrical release and went directly to DVD.  To date, there have been precious few movies about people being killed by a sound although there was 1982’s The Bells (aka Murder by Phone) in which a psychopath develops a device that sends shock waves through phone lines that slay his victims with a combo of electricity and high-pitched sounds. That unintentionally funny, low-budget Canadian thriller which starred Richard Chamberlain, actually fits much better into horror movies where the phone is a conduit for evil – When a Stranger Calls, Don’t Answer the Phone, Black Christmas, 976-EVIL, Scream, One Missed Call.  The Shout remains unavailable in the U.S. in any format though you can purchase a Blu-Ray copy of it from Amazon UK if you have an all region Blu-Ray player that can handle PAL conversions. 

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

Other websites of interest:

https://www.cineaste.com/spring2016/to-be-aesthetic-and-not-boring-jerzy-skolimowski/

http://culture.pl/en/artist/jerzy-skolimowski

http://www.theskinny.co.uk/festivals/uk-festivals/jerzy-skolimowski-11-minutes-avengers

https://www.jocksandnerds.com/articles/jerzy-skolimowski

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-graves

http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/8275-REVIEW-THE-SHOUT-1978-STARRING-ALAN-BATES,-SUSANNAH-YORK-AND-JOHN-HURT,-UK-BLU-RAY-RELEASE.html

https://lilyandgeneroso4ever.com/2015/03/08/jerzy-skolimowski-directs-alan-bates-in-the-mesmerizing-1978-supernatural-thriller-the-shout/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxYYzCw8qAM

One of the great pleasures of watching Hollywood films from the early thirties is seeing a future screen icon at the dawn of his career such as Spencer Tracy in the low-budget prison comedy Up the River (1930). An added bonus is seeing another film legend, Humphrey Bogart, as Tracy’s cohort (billed fourth in the credits). Both were trying to make the transition from stage to screen along with a director – in this case, John Ford – who had recently moved from silent to sound features.   

Synopsis: Two escaped convicts, Saint Louis Spencer Tracy) and Dannemora Dan (Warren Hymer), get into a brawl and are tossed back into prison where they share a cell with Steve (Humphrey Bogart) who is serving a brief sentence for accidental manslaughter. Steve has fallen in love with Judy (Claire Luce), a female prisoner in the adjoining women’s prison; she was framed for a crime by her former boyfriend Frosby (Morgan Wallace). Steve vows to wait for Judy when he gets an early parole but finds himself blackmailed into helping Frosby with a new swindle. Saint Louis and Dan, responding to Steve’s request for help, break out of prison, put an end to Frosby’s criminal career and return to their lockup in time for the prison’s annual baseball game against Sing Sing.

Spencer Tracy (left) and Warren Hymer play escaped convicts in the prison comedy Up the River (1930), directed by John Ford.

The storyline for Up the River may not sound that promising or remarkable but this 1930 feature is historically important for several reasons. It marked the first and only time Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart appeared together. It was Tracy’s film debut and was only the second movie appearance for Bogie. More importantly, director John Ford would go on to collaborate with Tracy once again, three decades later, in 1958’s The Last Hurrah. (Tracy would also provide the narration for the 1962 epic, How the West Was Won, which featured a Civil War segment directed by Ford.)

Director John Ford

Initially Up the River was conceived as a serious prison drama and Ford was convinced he’d found the perfect actor for the lead when he attended a performance of the play The Last Mile in New York. Fox had provided Ford with theater tickets to five different plays on different nights but the director was so taken with Tracy’s performance in The Last Mile that he ended up seeing it four more times (they also met for drinks after the play at the Lambs Club, which turned into an all-night drinking spree). According to the Bill Davidson biography, Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol, “Ford took Tracy to Fox’s New York headquarters and Tracy was signed to a one-picture deal, over the protests of the casting executives who remembered Tracy’s Fox screen test, in which he had been made up as a bearded sailor who conversed in grunts. ‘Never mind,’ said Ford, ‘I want him.’ Almost as an afterthought, he also told them to sign another actor for the second role he had to fill for Up the River. He had seen this actor in the only matinee performance he had gone to that week. It was Humphrey Bogart.”

Humphrey Bogart and Claire Luce in a publicity still from the 1930 film, Up the River.

When Tracy arrived in Hollywood to make Up the River he discovered there had been a change in plans due to the recent opening of the prison drama The Big House. Ford told him, ‘Don’t worry. Because of The Big House, we’re going to make our prison picture into a comedy.’ The director wasn’t particularly upset about retooling the screenplay as a comedy because he thought Maurine Watkins’s original scenario was “just a bunch of junk.” Instead he hired comedian Bill Collier to write a new script and the result was an amusing B-movie.

circa 1933: American actor Spencer Tracy (1900 – 1967) wearing a pinstriped, double-breasted suit, holding a cane and a hat. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

According to Scott Eyman in his biography Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, Spencer Tracy “had given his word to Herman Shumlin that he’d go back to The Last Mile after he made the movie. Script problems kept putting off production, until Tracy’s contract expired. “Of course you’ll stay out here?” they asked Tracy, only to be alarmed by his answer. Ford kicked into gear and shot the picture in seventeen days so as to get Tracy back to New York as soon as possible. Ford and Tracy forged a bond, one that wasn’t shared by anybody else in the cast. “Spence was a natural as if he didn’t know a camera was there, or as if there had always been a camera when he acted before,” said Ford. “His speech was decisive. He knew a straight line from a laugh line. If he had a chance for a laugh, he played it in a way that would get it.” Ford didn’t take to many actors the way he took to Tracy. There was, for example, Humphrey Bogart, who made the mistake of calling Ford “Jack” without being invited to. Ford immediately set about humiliating him. After every take he would call out, “How does that seem to you, Mr. Bogart?”

Claire Luce and Humphrey Bogart star in the prison comedy/romance Up the River (1930), directed by John Ford.

Warren Hymer, who plays the part of Dannemora Dan, was also not given preferential treatment by Ford according to The Motion Picture Guide. “For one scene, the actor had to stand against a board while a knife thrower threw knives at him. Hymer was terrified and Ford walked up and asked him, “If I do it, will you?” Embarrassed, Hymer nodded weakly. Ford then took his place and the thrower did his business. One of the blades caught the director’s fingertip, though. Sucking the blood from his finger, Ford asked Hymer if he was ready. Although his knees were shaking, the actor managed to pull of the scene.”

Spencer Tracy and Warren Hymer play prison escapees on the lam in the comedy, Up the River (1930).

Up the River was popular with Depression era-audiences even if the critics didn’t think it was a masterpiece. The New York Times reviewer wrote, “Whatever may be one’s opinion of depicting levity in a penitentiary, this screen offering often proved to be violently funny to the thousands who filled the seats in the big theatre yesterday afternoon. It has a number of clever incidents and lines, but now and again it is more than a trifle too slow.”

Spencer Tracy bids farewell to his prison guards in the John Ford comedy, Up the River (1930).

As for Spencer Tracy, he often said Up the River was one of his most pleasant working experiences. He was less impressed, however, with the completed film. After he saw it, he stated, “I thought I was the worst actor I had ever seen on the screen. I was surprised that Ford and the Fox officials didn’t remake the picture.” (from Spencer Tracy: A Biography by James Curtis).

Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy co-star in their only film together, Up the River (1930), directed by John Ford.

During the making of Up the River Tracy and Bogart didn’t become close friends or hang out off camera. In fact, they didn’t really get to know each other well until Katharine Hepburn brought them together 21 years later after working with Bogart on The African Queen (1951). The two men liked each other immensely and often enjoyed comparing notes on their experiences in Hollywood. They remained friends until the end of Bogart’s life in January 1957.  Up the River was later remade in 1938 by director Alfred L. Werker with Preston Foster and Arthur Treacher in the roles played respectively by Tracy and Hymer and Tony Martin and Phyllis Brooks appear as the young couple helped by the convicts. Jane Darwell, a veteran of several Ford pictures, is also in the remake. For many years Up the River was rarely screened or exhibited in any venue or format until the launch of Turner Classic Movies, which has aired it occasionally. The film became available on DVD in 2007 as part of the massive Ford at Fox Collection. For those not wishing to purchase the complete box set, there was a more affordable abridged version of Ford at Fox, which packaged Up the Creek with Steamboat Around the Bend, Judge Priest, Dr. Bull, When Willie Comes Marching Home and What Price Glory.

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

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/spencer-tracy-movies-best-ultimate-12-defining-actor-katherine-hepburn-guess-who-inherit-wind-power-a7776766.html

http://www.jbkaufman.com/movie-of-the-month/river-1930

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/91465095

https://bogiefilmblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/up-the-river-1930/

https://southwestsilents.com/2013/06/05/john-ford-before-john-ford/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp50noVJQTw

The James Bond film craze of the 1960s was responsible for launching a secret agent/spy movie sub-genre that thrived for more than a decade. Some of the imitators like Our Man Flint (1966) and The Silencers (1966) even spawned mini-franchises but the majority of them were strictly B-movies with international casts and exotic locations. One of the more obscure and unusual entries is Operation Kid Brother (1967), which is an entertainingly bad knockoff and sports a genuine Sean Connery-007 connection. It stars younger sibling Neil Connery in his screen debut.   

Neil Connery, brother of Sean, and Daniela Bianchi co-star in the spy adventure Operation Kid Brother (1967, aka O.K. Connery).

Cast with Sean Connery’s co-stars from the Bond films, the film, which was released in some territories as O.K. Connery, Operation Double 007 and Secret Agent OO, is an amusing attempt to cash in on the OO7 craze with the added curiosity value of Neil trying to follow in big brother’s footsteps.  Actually, you can’t blame Neil. He wasn’t even an aspiring actor at the time. He was working as a plasterer in Edinburgh when he was invited to make a screen test by enterprising producer Dario Sabatello.

Neil Connery plays a doctor turned secret agent named Dr. Neil Connery – yes, that’s right – in Operation Kid Brother (1967), directed by Alberto De Martino.

According to the biography Sean Connery by Michael Freedland, Neil knew he got “the screen test on the strength of his brother’s reputation, but there was absolutely no reason why he couldn’t go into a film career on his own and be a success on his own…For his trouble, Neil was paid even less than Sean had received for Dr. No…Sean tried to buy all the prints [of Operation Kid Brother], but the director saw immortality at risk and refused…Neil didn’t feel all that perturbed by the affair. He went back to work as a twenty-pounds-a-week plasterer on a building site in Edinburgh and back to his council home at night. If he became a star through the film, he would be absolutely delighted, but until he was able to join the Martini set himself, he was content spending his evenings at the pub drinking Scotch and playing darts.” Operation Kid Brother went virtually unnoticed amid all of the other James Bond imitations in release in 1967 despite the Connery connection. But that wasn’t the end of Neil’s film career. He actually bounced back to co-star with George Sanders and Maurice Evans in The Body Stealers (it is also known as Thin Air), a low-budget sci-fi thriller in 1969 followed by featured roles in several British TV series. But back to Neil’s film debut.

Adolfo Celi, who menaced James Bond as archvillain Largo in Thunderball, plays a formidable foe against Neil Connery in Operation Kid Brother (1967).

Italian producer Sabatello’s eagerness to associate his project with the Bond series is beyond shameless and part of the film’s peculiar attraction. He not only recruits 007 series regulars Bernard Lee (M) and Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny) as Neil’s co-stars but also adds actors from previous Bond ventures – Anthony Dawson (of Dr. No), Daniela Bianchi (of From Russia With Love), and Adolfo Celi (of Thunderball). He even throws in a sinister female assassin named Lotte Krayendorf (played by Ana Maria Noe) who is clearly modeled on Lotte Lenya’s deadly Rosa Klebb character in From Russia With Love.

Ana Maria Noe plays the evil Lotte Krayendorf in Operation Kid Brother (1967). She is clearly modeled on Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love (1963).

The most absurd aspect of the whole enterprise is the fact that Sabatello royally bungles his casting coup of Neil Connery. We don’t even get to hear his Scottish brogue or real voice; he’s dubbed by an unidentified American actor with a flat, colorless voice. (Some sources claim Neil was unavailable to loop his dialogue due to illness). And while there is an unmistakable family resemblance to Sean, on a physical level Neil lacks his older brother’s more obvious movie star attributes. The scruffy goatee and mustache don’t help and in appearance and mannerisms he resembles Jose Ferrer in one of his more humorless roles like I Accuse!     

Dr. Neil Connery (played by Neil Connery) kicks some righteous ass in Operation Kid Brother (1967, aka O.K. Connery aka Secret Agent 00 aka Operation Double 007)

Then there is the occupation issue. Neil doesn’t even play a secret agent. He’s a plastic surgeon who gets recruited by Commander Cunningham (Bernard Lee) to help thwart Mr. Thai (Adolfo Celi) in his attempts to control the world through a device that freezes anything with moving metal parts (We are spared the intricate details of how this would work and it’s merely a Hitchcock McGuffin to keep the narrative moving forward). Luckily Dr. Connery – yes, that’s how he is addressed but more on that later – is skilled in martial arts, archery, lip reading and hypnosis. Still, he’s no secret agent and Sabatello gets extra black marks for not hiring Sean Connery’s wardrobe supervisor from the Bond films.

Max (Lois Maxwell) shows Dr. Neil Connery (played by Neil Connery) the finer points of archery in Operation Kid Brother (1967).

Poor Neil never gets an opportunity to look dashing and debonair like his super spy brother. Instead he gets to sport a boring white surgeon’s lab coat, a kilt with matching cap (it might be macho in Scotland but do you really want to see a secret agent in a kilt?), a pair of hogwashers like some hick off the set of the Hee Haw TV series and other inappropriate attire for an action-adventure hero.

Dr. Neil Connery disguised as an arab in the unintentionally hilarious Operation Kid Brother (1967), directed by Alberto De Martino.

But if Sabatello completely fails to properly exploit his new “star”  Neil Connery in Operation Kid Brother, it’s probably because he was totally preoccupied over possible law suits from the Ian Fleming estate and James Bond producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. That explains not only why you’ll never hear the name James Bond mentioned in this film but also why some of the characters played by Neil Connery and Lois Maxwell are named after themselves. Even the film’s theme song is named “OK Connery.” The Italians are crazy, no?

Anthony Dawson (center) and Adolfo Celi (right) plot to conquer the world in the James Bond wannabe, Operation Kid Brother (1967).

Still, screenwriters Paolo Levi, Stefano Canzio, Frank Walker and Stanley Wright found creative ways to get around this. Take, for example, this exchange between the two main villains Mr. Thai (Adolfo Celi) and Alpha (Anthony Dawson):

Mr. Thai (referring to Commander Cunningham): “He’s enlisted the aid of that young Scottish doctor, you know, the brother of secret agent 00….”

Alpha (interrupting him abruptly): “Yes, I’ve heard. A most disagreeable family.”

And the coy, barely disguised references never stop.   Miss Maxwell to Dr. Connery: “ Well, well, well. It looks like nobody in your family is a rank amateur, hmm?”

Or

Dr. Connery: “It’s going to blow up soon. Maybe even tomorrow. With you on board.”

Maya (Daniela Bianchi): “You read too many novels by Fleming.”

Neil Connery, brother of Sean, and former Bond girl Daniela Bianchi (From Russia with Love) star in Operation Kid Brother (1967).

It’s like we’re trapped in some weird alternate James Bond universe where some of the characters are actually the actors who play them but what’s really missing is 007 and the lavish production values that make his films such luxurious escapism. Which is not to say that Operation Kid Brother is a waste of your time. If you have a fondness for the sixties secret agent genre and anything derivative of the James Bond series, then you may find this trifle as entertaining, if not more so, than any of the O.S.S. spy series which featured such actors as Ivan Desny, Kerwin Mathews, Frederick Stafford, John Gavin and Luc Merenda in the role of Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, aka OSS 117. Of course, the best OSS 117 is Jean Dujardin, who turns the series on its head in his hilarious deadpan parodies that began with OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006). Operation Kid Brother, directed by Alberto De Martino (The Tempter, Django Shoots First, Crime Boss), is both a parody and a straightforward espionage thriller and from scene to scene, De Martino doesn’t seem to know the difference between either, resulting in a movie that never finds its tone but that’s part of the fun. The pacing never flags and there are several scenes of show-stopping silliness like one where a troupe of female spies, dressed up like saloon girls out of the American wild west, stop a convoy of MPs. They seduce and overpower them, hijack their top secret cargo and then strip down into their cat costumes (complete with facial whiskers) and make their getaway in a Las Vegas-like carnival float advertising “The Wild Pussy Club.” There is also a clever visual introduction to Celi’s Mr. Thai that opens with a movie being projected on the back of a naked woman as the camera pulls back to reveal Celi watching THAT as he’s being massaged. Such decadence!

The infamous Wild Pussy Club sequence from Operation Kid Brother (1967), directed by Alberto De Martino

The gadgetry and weaponry in Operation Kid Brother is especially laughable and includes a remote-controlled car bomb, a camera disguised as a flower in a lapel that can project wall-sized images and a knife ejector that launches blades into its victims. The music score, composed by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, is a brassy and bombastic John Barry imitation and the quirky theme song sung by Khristy has an unmistakable spaghetti western vibe which isn’t surprising since Morricone and Nicolai were doing double duty at the time, composing back to back scores for Italian-made spy thrillers and westerns.

Maya Rafis (Daniela Bianchi) changes costumes every five minutes in Operation Kid Brother (1967), the film debut of Neil Connery.

There is also plenty of eye candy on display from Daniela Bianchi, modeling an array of over-the-top outfits, and assorted international starlets such as Celi’s crew of female assistants dressed in matching sailor outfits. Best of all, Lois Maxwell gets to play a much more aggressive, take-charge version of Miss Moneypenny, emerging from tropical foliage at one point with machine-gun blazing – Go, girl!

1967’s Operation Kid Brother: Max (Lois Maxwell, background) takes charge in a role somewhat more aggressive than her role as Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Over the years, Operation Kid Brother has been ribbed mercilessly on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and generally treated like a bastard child but it’s nothing Neil Connery needs to be ashamed of. As he once told an interviewer at the time of the movie’s release, “If this film thing doesn’t happen, it won’t worry me. I’m not the worrying kind.”

Neil Connery stars in a James Bond ripoff of his own in Operation Kid Brother (1967).

Even if Operation Kid Brother was the only film he ever made, it brought Neil international exposure, however brief, which was pretty amazing when you think about it. Here he was, a working class plasterer from Edinburgh, suddenly cast in the top billed role with no acting experience in a movie build completely around him and filmed in such exotic locales as Monaco, Spain and Morocco. So what if the opportunity was due to his brother’s stardom or that he didn’t get to use his own voice in the film? Who wouldn’t jump at an opportunity like that and get paid for it besides? It must have been a stranger than fiction experience for Neil and I wonder if Edinburgh hosted a special premiere party for Neil, his family and pub mates.

Neil Connery, in his film debut, co-stars with former James Bond villain Adolfo Celi (Thunderball) in Operation Kid Brother (1967)

Operation Kid Brother is still not available on DVD though you might be able to track down old VHS copies of it. It is also available for streaming through Amazon and you can probably find the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on the internet though the original movie is a lot funnier than the wisecracks hurled at the screen by the MST3K crew.

An alternative screen title for Operation Kid Brother (1967) is O.K. Connery.

*This is an updated and revised version of a blog that originally appeared on Turner Classic Movies’ official Movie Morlocks blog (now relaunched as Streamline).  Other websites of interest:

https://www.avclub.com/sean-connerys-most-famous-role-was-once-spoofed-by-his-1820031866

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11659940/Alberto-De-Martino-film-director-obituary.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXEL6bVFQI&NR=1

A former actor from Austria turned film director, Georg Tressler is not a name familiar to most American movie fans but for German filmgoers of the fifties he created a sensation with this 1956 feature film debut, Die Halbstarken (released in the U.S. as Teenage Wolfpack). As topical, incendiary and controversial in its day as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Blackboard Jungle (1955), Die Halbstarken was a hard-hitting portrait of juvenile delinquency in post-war Germany and featured Horst Buchholz as a manipulative gang leader in a performance possibly inspired by James Dean. It was a huge hit and led Tressler to follow it up with two more youth-oriented films – Noch Minderjahrig (Under 18, 1957) and Endstation Liebe (Two Worlds, 1958). His fourth feature, Das Totenschiff (Ship of the Dead, 1959), was a complete departure from his trilogy in terms of content and was mostly ignored by critics and the public. But timing is everything and today Das Totenschiff looks like a lost classic from the pre-Berlin Wall era. And it may very well be Tressler’s finest achievement.   

A gripping tale of survival that begins as a misadventure and culminates in enslavement, degradation and murder, Das Totenschiff is based on a novel by B. Traver, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The film follows Philip Gale (Horst Buchholz), a sailor who has his money and passport stolen by a prostitute while on shore leave in Antwerp. When Gale’s ship leaves without him, he tries to find work on other vessels sailing to America but no one will hire him without identity papers. Gale is soon apprehended by the local authorities for having no ID and threatened with six months in prison. Instead, the magistrate decides to have Gale removed from his jurisdiction and escorted to the border by two policemen who give him some money for train fare to the next country.

Gale (Horst Buchholz, center), a sailor without identity papers, is escorted to the border by police in Das Totenschiff (1959), directed by Georg Tressler.

The sailor continues to travel south making one bad decision after another until he arrives at a small port in Spain. Desperate for work, he is lured into working on the Yorikke, a decrepit freighter operated by smugglers (a discovery Gale makes mid-voyage). Once aboard, he becomes a prisoner of the captain and his motley trio, forced into hard labor in the boiler room with other unfortunate misfits who have been shanghaied.

Horst Buchholz (left), Mario Adorf (center) and Helmut Schmid play mistreated crewmen trapped on a smuggler’s freighter in Das Totenschiff (Ship of the Dead, 1959).

At the time Das Totenschiff was released, the German cinema was at a crossroads. Political and social forces were having a major impact on the film industry and by mid-August of 1961, East and West Germany were divided by the Berlin Wall and its boundaries. Many films produced in West Germany after this line-in-the-sand reality were made at the recently reorganized UFA Studios (owned by the Deutsche Bank) while movies made in the Soviet controlled zone of East Germany came from DEFA, the state owned studio of the German Democratic Republic. West German studio-produced films that examined the past and the Nazi regime such as Bernhard Wicki’s anti-war drama Die Brucke (The Bridge, 1959) would soon be overshadowed by the emergence of the New German Cinema with works like Alexander Kluge’s satire of the German economic boom, Yesterday Girl (1966), and Mahlzeiten (Table for Love, 1967), Edgar Reitz’s critique of modern marriage and parenthood. Das Totenschiff may have been viewed as old-school filmmaking at the time since it was based on a literary work set in the post-WWI era but the film’s ideological slant is hiding in plain side. In fact, it could have easily been a DEFA production with its sinister and skewed portrait of “management vs. worker.”  The corrupt captain of the ship (Alf Marholm) and his cohorts are essentially criminals involved in smuggling ammunition to Africa (hidden in tins of plum butter) but also guilty of human trafficking; their crew is made up of drifters, criminals and derelicts with no working papers and therefore no rights. They are little more than slaves and their plight shares some of the thematic concerns of other works by B. Traven which depict the exploitation of the lower class and the disenfranchised. Literary critics generally regard the author’s six novel series known as ‘The Jungle Novels’ as his finest work; those novels, which include The Rebellion of the Hanged, chart the political awakening and eventual revolt of Indians working on mahogany plantations in Chiapas, Mexico.

B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in Chiapas, Mexico.

Of course, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, set in Depression-era Mexico, is the most famous of all B. Traven film adaptations but Das Totenschiff is no less powerful in its depiction of men driven to desperate circumstances and deserves to be better known. Traven, who allegedly based Das Totenschiff on his own experiences as a political activist and writer from Germany trying to flee Europe, is something of an enigma in the literary world. He revealed little about his past during his lifetime and often gave contradictory and fictitious accounts of his background, including the use of various pseudonyms such as Traven Torsvan, Hal Croves, Ret Marut and Otto Feige. During the making of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, director John Huston had planned to use Traven as a consultant on the film but the author didn’t show up as promised and sent a close acquaintance, Hal Croves, to act on his behalf. It is now generally believed that Traven and Croves were the same person.

Helmut Schmid (left) and Horst Buchholz (right) star in the gripping sea drama, Das Totenschiff aka Ship of the Dead, 1959.

B. Traven’s life would make a fascinating biopic on its own and there are several biographies of the shadowy figure available such as B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends and The Secret of Sierra Madre: The Man Who Was B. Traven. But Das Totenschiff, the novel and the film, is an excellent introduction to the writer. The film version is also noteworthy for its excellent ensemble cast headed by Horst Buchholz as the ill-fated Gale (nicknamed Pippin in the film) and several prominent German actors as his shipmates such as Martin (Helmut Schmid of The Head, A Prize of Arms and Man Called Gringo), the Hulk-like coal shoveler, and Paul (Gunter Meisner of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Agusti Villaronga’s deeply disturbing In a Glass Cage), the quiet, introspective ship trimmer who dies a hero.

Horst Buchholz plays a sailor without working papers who is about to be shanghaied in Das Totenschiff (1959).

Buchholz was on the cusp of international fame at this point in his career. He first attracted critical acclaim and acting awards for Himmel ohne Sterne (Sky Without Stars, 1955) and his roles in Tressler’s Teenage Wolfpack and Two Worlds launched his career as a German matinee idol, which he capitalized on in Confessions of Felix Krull (1957). His first English-language film, Tiger Bay (1959), co-starring Hayley Mills, made him famous in England but The Magnificent Seven (1960) established him as an international star. Strangely enough, Das Totenschiff was the last German film Buchholz would make in his native country for more than a decade (Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1963) doesn’t count since it was an American film production). The film also held no appeal for Buchholz’s female fan base since it was a gritty, harrowing drama with the star spending most of his time dressed in grimy work clothes and covered with coal dust.

Mario Adorf as Lawski, contemplates his fate on a death ship called The Yorikke in Das Totenschiff (1959).

Nevertheless, Buchholz is ideally cast as the death ship’s protagonist and takes us through Gale’s emotional and attitudinal changes from a reckless, devil-may-care drifter to a brutalized and paranoid victim of circumstances. His conflicted relationship with Lawski (Adorf), the man partially responsible for his plight, provides an intriguing secondary narrative and yields unexpected moments of humor, volatility and compassion. Adorf, 88 years old and still working as an actor, is one of the great character actors of world cinema and has appeared in such disparate films as Robert Siodmak’s The Devil Strikes at Night (1957), Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965), Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1979) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola (1981). As Lawski in Das Totenschiff, Adolf is completely convincing as a simple laborer who considers the Yorikke his true home despite its injustices and suggests he is suffering from the Stockholm syndrome.

Horst Buchholz and Elke Sommer in her screen debut star in Georg Tressler’s Das Totenschiff, 1959.

Das Totenschiff is also memorable for Elke Sommer’s brief but welcome appearance as a lonely rural teenager longing for romance with Gale. This was her film debut (she was 19 at the time) and she has a fresh, natural beauty which is completely unglamorized. That would soon change in subsequent films like Daniella by Night (1961) and Sweet Ecstasy (1962) where she was promoted as a sexy blonde siren. The brief romantic flirtation between Gale and Mylene in the film offers an idyllic respite from the ensuing darkness and claustrophobic tension that dominates the second half of the story.   A special mention must be made of Heinz Pehlke’s black and white cinematography which gives Das Totenschiff a film noir-like ambiance, particularly the interior of the Yorikke with its steamy boiler room and sweat-soaked bodies. The atmospheric music score by Roland Kovac enhances the film’s sense of doom and menace but also provides a haunting harmonica theme mirrored by Lawski who occasionally plays the mouth harp. And the forbidding production design by Emil Hasler and Walter Kutz envisions the Yorikke as a floating death trip worthy of a horror film.

The crewmen of the Yorikke risk their lives working in hazardous conditions in the 1959 drama, Das Totenschiff.

Long after Das Totenschiff is over, moments from the film are certain to replay in your memory such as the scene where Gale first arrives on the ship and sees the sign over the cabin: “Who enters here will no longer have existence; his name and soul have vanished and are gone forever.” The assault on the alcoholic first officer Statter (Dieter von Keil) – he is thrown overboard – by Dils (Werner Buttler), the captain’s lackey, and Popoff (Panos Papadopulos), the ogre-like boatswain, is especially creepy. And the frantic key sequence where the captain and his two accomplices attempt to scuttle the ship and drown the crew so they can collect the insurance money without surviving eyewitnesses has a wicked twist ending. [Spoiler alert] Perhaps most haunting of all is the final shot in the film – a bird’s eye view of Gale, the only survivor of the ship, stranded on a piece of wreckage that is floating toward an endless horizon. Unlike All is Lost (2013), the grim survival at sea drama starring Robert Redford as a seemingly doomed sailor, there is no last minute rescue or closure to this tale of woe.

Mario Adorf and Horst Buchholz (background) are shipwrecked sailors lost at sea in Das Totenschiff (1959).

I first saw Das Totenschiff at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York which was hosting a repertory series entitled German Film 1945-1960 and also included such gems as Der Racher (The Avenger, 1960), an entertaining Edgar Wallace thriller featuring a young Klaus Kinski.  To my knowledge, Das Totenschiff has never been released on any format in the U.S. but you may be able to find a German import DVD through internet dealers. I was able to find a better than average DVD-R copy of it through European Trash Cinema but if you ever have the opportunity to see it on the big screen in a revival house or museum screening, you shouldn’t pass up the opportunity. It’s a neglected masterwork from a forgotten German director, the underrated Georg Tressler.

A brief romantic moment between Elke Sommer and Horst Buchholz in the harrowing sea drama, Das Totenschiff (1959).

Other websites of interest:

http://www.wilderutopia.com/performance/literary/b-traven-an-anarchists-death-ship/

https://libcom.org/library/b-traven-anti-biography

http://j-nelson.net/2014/10/twenty-writers-b-traven-the-treasure-of-the-sierra-madre/

http://www.reddirtreport.com/rustys-reads/timeless-truths-b-travens-death-ship

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/mar/05/guardianobituaries.film

http://www.elkesommeronline.com/en/biography.htm

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/sfr/ueb/jub/gl7.html

UFA: The Fall and Rise of the 100-Year-Old Production Powerhouse

One of the amazing circus stunts featured in Frank Capra’s Rain or Shine (1930), based on the Broadway play.

1934 was the year that Frank Capra became a household name in America with his box-office and Oscar-winning smash hit, It Happened One Night. In fact, he would direct his most famous and financially successful films in the thirties with such career highpoints as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). But his filmography before 1934 is more familiar to film buffs – not the average moviegoer. Some of these films are less predictable, more adventurous and entertainingly quirky than his more famous work such as Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). Among these earlier efforts is Capra’s rarely-seen curiosity, Rain or Shine (1930), which offers a fascinating glimpse of the director coming to terms with “talkies” and his developing aesthetic after starting his career in silent films.

After the box office success of Ladies of Leisure (1930), a Barbara Stanwyck melodrama, director Frank Capra was finally deemed important enough by Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn to have his name listed on movie marquees above the title of his new picture. At the time, Capra, who already had fifteen feature films to his credit, had boasted to a friend that he could make an entertaining film out of the phone book and, for his next feature, Rain or Shine, he proved beyond a doubt that he could work wonders with the skimpiest of storylines.  Based on a 1928 hit Broadway musical of the same name by James Gleason and Maurice Marks, Rain or Shine was the story of a circus manager trying to make a success of his traveling show despite bad weather, internal saboteurs, poor business and creditors. At first Cohn had rejected the idea telling Capra, “I can’t spend that kind of dough. Musical comedies cost a fortune to produce!” Cohn, however, changed his opinion when the director told him he’d throw out the musical numbers because he wanted to buy Rain or Shine for different reasons. “We’re buying Joe Cook,” Capra told him. “He’s mad, Harry. He’s unique – the darling of the literati, of the Algonquin Round Table! Percy Hammond calls Cook ‘the funniest man in America’; Brooks Atkinson says he’s ‘one of the greatest comedians of our times!’ And we’re buying two other great comedians in Rain or Shine – Tom Howard and Dave Chasen. Rain or Shine will cost us peanuts, Harry. I’ll shoot it all in a small two-ring circus tent. No other sets. No music, no chorus dames, no Busby Berkeley, no nothing. Just wild comedy.”

Director Frank Capra in the 1930s

After Cohn agreed to the purchase, Capra hired Jo Swerling and Dorothy Howell to rewrite Rain or Shine for the screen, removing all the musical numbers as promised and expanding a romantic subplot in which the circus owner, Mary Rainey (Joan Peers), hopes to marry Bud Conway (William Collier, Jr.), a new employee whose wealthy, class-conscious parents disapprove of his current vocation.

Joe Cook and Joan Peers are part of a traveling circus during the Depression in Frank Capra’s Rain or Shine (1930).

The real focus of the film though is “Smiley” Johnson (Joe Cook), the fast-talking manager of the Greater John T. Rainey Circus and his never-ending schemes and hustles to keep the circus operational and true to its promise to offer two shows a day, rain or shine. Dalton (Alan Roscoe), the ringmaster, proves to be the villain of the piece, working secretly to foil Smiley’s efforts. Meanwhile, a befuddled investor, Amos K. Shrewsbury (Tom Howard) and Dave (Dave Chasen), a food vendor and roustabout, provide comic relief.

Dave Chasen (left), Joe Cook (center) and Tom Howard provide plenty of comic relief in the Depression era drama, Rain or Shine (1930).

Some of Rain or Shine was filmed at the Burbank, California ranch of James J. Jeffries, a former world heavyweight boxing champion who also has a cameo in the film. Acts and members of the A. W. Copeland Circus were featured as part of the supporting cast and some of the incidental and background music from the Broadway score by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen was reused for the film. Seen today, Rain or Shine is an anomaly and not typical of the Frank Capra films that would follow. More than anything it is truly a showcase for Joe Cook’s unique vaudeville talents and motor-mouth character and at times the humor is as raucous and unruly as the early Marx Brothers comedies with an emphasis on zany dialogue and wordplay. Yet you can see glimpses of Capra’s emerging populist viewpoint that would flower in Platinum Blonde (1931) and American Madness (1932).

Walter Huston (right background) addresses the crowd in Frank Capra’s American Madness (1932).

In his biography, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Joseph McBride wrote that “Rain or Shine gives mixed political signals, probably because of the clash of Capra’s fundamentally conservative attitudes with more liberal ideas that were in the air at the time. The precarious financial state of the circus echoes the state of the country, and Cook’s Smiley, the indefatigable optimist, can be seen as a Franklin Roosevelt precursor, galvanizing the demoralized troupe with his energy and courage. His black organist, Nero (Clarence Muse), plays an instrumental version of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the Broadway show’s pep tune that FDR would adopt as his theme song in the 1932 presidential campaign.”

A typical scene from the circus comedy-drama Rain or Shine (1930), directed by Frank Capra.

Easily the most memorable sequence in the film is the fiery climax when the angry circus patrons cause a riot which starts a blaze that eventually consumes the big top and reduces it to ash. Sound technician Edward Bernds later said, “Working with Frank Capra, I soon realized what a wealth of guts and daring he had! In Rain or Shine, for instance, he very casually burned down an entire circus! It was a one-shot thing. He just put enough cameras on to cover everything he wanted and he burned the whole thing down. He shot it with, as I recall, about a dozen cameras. He had guts and originality!”

Former vaudeville entertainer Joe Cook steals the spotlight in Frank Capra’s circus tale, Rain or Shine (1930).

Rain or Shine proved to be a modest success at the box office and some critics even stated that Capra had improved upon the original Broadway show, making it even funnier. The Variety reviewer wrote, “A circus story with plenty of comedy, much sightlines, a thrill or so and a real big top fire for the finale make Columbia’s Rain or Shine with Joe Cook a first run candidate. It’s a much better than average circus picture….Joe Cook’s ready reasons for anything get a laugh here whenever used, as does Cook’s mannerisms and his general work…Toward the finish the story does go a little ragged and without a smooth finish, but that doesn’t injure the whole impression.”

William Collier Jr. and Joan Peers play the young lovers in Rain or Shine (1930), a Depression era tale about a traveling circus.

Capra would move on next to Dirigible (1931), an action-adventure picture with a love triangle, but Joe Cook, the real star of Rain or Shine, never quite clicked with movie audiences like he did with theatergoers. A veteran circus performer, he made a handful of comedy shorts and features after the Capra film but was struck down by Parkinson’s disease at an early age and was forced to retire from show business in the early forties (he died in 1959).

Dalton (Alan Roscoe), the circus ringmaster, tries to bully Mary (Joan Peers), the owner of the traveling fair in Rain or Shine (1930).

As for Dave Chasen, who had appeared in numerous vaudeville shows with Cook and a few comedy shorts, he is more famous today as the restaurant owner who opened Chasen’s in Hollywood in 1936. His restaurant was particularly famous for chili, which was so loved by Elizabeth Taylor that several orders of it were flown to Rome for her during the making of Cleopatra (1963). Chasen’s was a mainstay for years and popular with such celebrities and dignitaries as Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Alfred Hitchcock and President Ronald Reagan. Chasen’s was located at 9039 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles and closed down in 1995.

Tom Howard and Louise Fazenda provide some of the more memorable comedic moments in Rain or Shine (1930), directed by Frank Capra.

For several decades Rain or Shine proved to be an elusive Capra film; it rarely aired on television and was unavailable in any format until 2012 when Sony Home Pictures Entertainment released Frank Capra: The Early Collection which included Rain or Shine and four Pre-Code films starring Barbara Stanwyck (Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden and The Bitter Tea of General Yen). To date, this is the only available option to view Rain or Shine and you have to purchase the entire DVD collection to see it. There is an upside to that because the disc also includes the international version of the film which has alternative scenes, a different ending and is semi-silent with sound effects. It is also 20 minutes shorter than the U.S. version and some Capra fans prefer this one because they feel it works better as a drama (some of the less successful comedy scenes are deleted.)  Article sources: Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success by Joseph McBride; The Name Above the Title by Frank Capra; The Films of Frank Capra by Victor Scherle, William Turner, & William O. Douglas

Other websites of interest:

http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49664

https://travsd.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/stars-of-vaudeville-110-joe-cook/

http://historicaljugglingprops.com/joe-cook/

http://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/vintage-los-angeles-the-hidden-remains-of-chasens-restaurant/

http://www.filmreference.com/Writers-and-Production-Artists-Sh-Sy/Swerling-Jo.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzhX2ejdiNY

The wondrous animated films of Hayao Miyazaki were unknown to most American moviegoers until the 1999 U.S. release of Princess Mononoke, which was released in Japan in 1997. Since then Miyazaki has become a household name thanks to the distribution of his Studio Ghibi films by Walt Disney in English-language versions and industry recognition from the Academy Awards which gave Miyazaki an honorary award in 2015. Miyazaki’s features Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and The Wind Rises (2014) have all received Oscar nominations for Best Animated Film with Spirited Away capturing the award in 2003. But not all Studio Ghibli films are directed by Miyazaki and one of the least known and most fascinating is Pom Poko (1994). Although Miyazaki served as executive producer on the film, it is directed by Isao Takahata and is highly recommended for those hungering for family-friendly anime that is off the beaten path. 

The main characters featured in Pom Poko (1994), directed by Isao Takahata, are the Tanuki, mythical creatures in Japanese folklore who are referred to as raccoon dogs in their native land.

Pom Poko combines satire, tragedy, fantasy and philosophical ponderings in equal measures, resulting in an entertaining, thought-provoking experience for children and adults alike while avoiding a formulaic happy ending that characterizes the typical Disney product. What’s it about? Well, on the surface, it’s the tale of a mythical race of raccoon dogs – called tanuki – whose habitant becomes threatened by urban development. Tanuki are popular figures in Japanese folklore but also real woodland animals in Japan and are not related to raccoons; they are in the Canidae family along with wolves and foxes.

The Tanuki are woodland animals in Japan that are closely related to wolves and foxes. They are also popular in Japanese folklore. (Photo by Stanislav Duben of Shutterstock)

It is also the intention of director Takahata that the human race be observed through the eyes of the tanuki as a way to depict the ever-widening disconnect between man and nature in contemporary Japan and the world.

Tanuki enjoy beer, fast food and other modern eating habits enjoyed by humans in Pom Poko (1994).

Despite touching on such diverse topics as eco-terrorism or species eradication, Pom Poko is frequently hilarious and rarely didactic in the way some allegories can be (Watership Down, Animal Farm). On another level the tanuki are all too human in their own behavior, reflecting all the faults of man – selfishness, laziness, procrastination, etc. – but also good qualities as well. By the way, the title refers to the sound the tanuki make when they use their bellies as drums.

A clan singalong raises the spirits in this scene from the Japanese anime, Pom Poko (1994) featuring the music of Shang Shang Typhoon.

As for the animation, the tanuki take different forms throughout the movie morphing from lifelike forest creatures to a more outre version of The Care Bears to pale, unformed bear-like clones to suspicious-looking humans. What might look unimpressive or absurd in a still from the movie takes on a much more compelling and irresistible allure in movement.

The animation design of the Takuki changes throughout Pom Poke since the creatures are shape-shifters.

Here’s the storyline in a nutshell: As urban sprawl from Tokyo threatens to destroy the woodlands surrounding the city, a group of tanuki band together to fight the human developers. Under the guidance of tanuki matriarch, Oroku Baba, the creatures hinder and frustrate the developers with their tricks and shape-shifting skills but can their magic really create a roadblock to progress?

The Tanuki take a warrior-like stance against modern development in the eco-fairy tale, Pom Poko (1994).

Takahata is not nearly as well known in the U.S. as Miyazaki though his filmography is just as impressive and a few of his films have been distributed here. The most well known are Grave of the Fireflies (1988, aka Hotaru no haka) and My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999, aka Hohokekyo tonari no Yamada-kun) and in Japan he is as popular and as revered as Miyazaki. Although some anime fans feel that Pom Poko is a highly personal film for Takahata, he voiced his own opinions about it in an interview on the GhibliWorld.com website, stating, “I really do not regard it as a personal work. Anyway, not more than my other works. However, I had often wondered about the tanuki. They are part of the Japanese ecosystem, but one does not know them anymore in their true biological surroundings. Only the folklore remained. According to traditional Japanese tales tanuki are able to transform into humans. These stories stimulated my imagination. In Japan, a lot of tanuki get killed by cars when passing roads. It was difficult to explain that when they are able to take human form. The easy way was to justify it by a loss of their ability and their knowledge. Like us, they forgot their instincts. Another reason is that the tanuki always lived close to men near the forests, which made it possible for me to approach another topic as well: the relationship between man, nature and his environment. By destroying the forests, the tanuki disappeared, just like what happened with the extension of Tokyo.”  Among the many observations made about Pom Poko by fans and critics was the fact that the tanuki resort to eco-terrorism to achieve their goal. To this point, Takahata admitted, “I did not know about this point of view. They consider the tanuki to be terrorists? But they are the victims. The film depicts a drama; it is the end of a world, the end of the tanuki world. I wanted the viewer to look from the point of view of the animals and try to make us perceive how our world appears to us seen from the outside. However, the terrorist label does not disturb me. Today, terrorists are public enemy number 1. But historically, terrorism was sometimes a mean of asking attention of the established society. This state of mind existed until in the seventies. Terrorism sometimes had the capacity to make the world or people reflect on their condition.”

The Tanuki prepare for battle in Isao Takahata’s epic anime, Pom Poko (1994).

Despite the fact that Pom Poko was the highest grossing film in Japan in 1994 and was even submitted by Japan to the Academy of Arts and Sciences as their Oscar contender (it was not chosen as one of the five finalists in the category of Best Foreign Language Film), it never found a U.S. distributor until recent years in the DVD market.

The Japanese theatrical poster for Pom Poko (1994).

Part of the reason may be due to the film’s peculiar but oddly endearing protagonists – the tanuki with their big eyes, swollen bellies and fondness for human junk food, especially tempera, popcorn and pepperoni pizza. In Japanese folklore, these woodland creatures are considered harbingers of good fortune with a mischievous side which erupts in playful pranks and the ability to change their appearances; Besides impersonating humans, they can take the form of inanimate objects like iron pots, stone Buddhas and soccer balls. In addition, the male tanuki also possess a secret talent – the ability to alter the size of their testicles which in one strategic scene can function as both a parachute and as a weapon to beat and smother their enemies.

The Tanuki possess the ability to transform into anything they want in the Japanese anime, Pom Poke (1994), directed by Isao Takahata.

This of one of the many plot details that makes you realize, even in the U.S. dubbed version, that you are not watching a Disney animated film or even one produced in this country. Of course, the shape-shifting testicles, which are referred to as “pouches” in the English language edition,  are treated in a whimsical fashion here, more as a fantasy component than an infantile schoolboy joke. But it’s also easy to see why cultural distinctions like this probably prevented Pom Poko from getting a theatrical release in America because of conservative parental groups. Take, for example, the introductory scene of the “pouch” when a tribal elder is instructing a group of young tanuki who are shown in an overhead shot, assembled on a large red square. The elder says, “Notice this fine red blanket that we are all sitting on? Wanna know what it is? My raccoon pouch (laughs). It’s 150 square feet and it retracts quite nicely. Watch.”

The infamous red carpet pouch is rolled out for young recruits to the cause in Pom Poko (1994).

Certainly a better understanding of Japanese mythology and pop culture would yield an even greater appreciation of Takahata’s film and some of the details can be puzzling to Westerners. For instance, the scene with the faceless people is based on spirits known as “Nopperabou” who pop up in Japanese tales of the supernatural. The elderly tanuki who transforms into a samurai on horseback was inspired by a 12th century story, “The Tale of Heike,” and some of the creatures that appear in the memorable monster parade sequence are straight out of traditional folklore and will be familiar to horror/fantasy film buffs who have seen the Yokai Monsters series (yes, Karakasa, the one-eyed umbrella creature, makes a brief appearance here).

A parade of spirts, monsters and strange creatures is a highlight in the Japanese animated feature, Pom Poko (1994).

The finale in which some tanuki depart for Fudaraku (Heaven) is based on the beliefs of an Old Buddhist cult which believed you could reach Nirvana by boarding a ship bound for the shores of Fudaraku. There are also numerous in-jokes involving current fads and snack foods such as the vitamin drinks the tanuki favor which are quite popular in Japan; they are offered in vending machines and offer a needed energy boost (some claim they contain aphrodisiacs) to tired workers.

Having seen the English language version of Pom Poko twice now, I plan to see the original Japanese version with English subtitles to see how it may differ, if at all. One refreshing aspect of the English version is that it isn’t one of those all-star voiceover affairs where you are distracted by the celebrity voices such as Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) in which Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall, Billy Crystal, Jean Simmons, Emily Mortimer, Blythe Danner, Jena Malone and others dubbed the original Japanese voices.

The Tanuki plot their strategy to combat human development in their woodlands in Pom Poko (1994).

The U.S. release version of Pom Poko is a much less grandiose affair in terms of Hollywood superstar vocal talent and features the voices of Jonathan Taylor (as Shokichi, probably the closest thing to a major protagonist), Maurice LaMarche (as the main narrator), Tress MacNeille (as Oroku, the matriarch raccoon), Clancy Brown (as Gonta, the angy tanuki warrior leader) and others. It also makes me wonder if some of the tunes heard in the film by the Okinawan rock group, Shang Shang Typhoon – a mixture of folk music and children’s songs – reflect different lyrics and sentiments than the Japanese version.

Isao Takahata is the animator/director of Pom Poko (1994).

Almost every online review of Pom Poko I have read has been exceedingly favorable. Only one felt that the second half suffered from slow pacing as the plot took a more depressing dramatic turn but I have to point out that the second half is the heart of the film and its emotional thrust as much as I love the humor and eccentricity of the first half. I think Tom Mes in his review on http://www.midnighteye.com identified the film’s finest quality: “Although the overall sense one gets for most of the film’s running time is of a somewhat reactionary longing for the indistinct ‘good old days’ when man and nature lived in more harmonious circumstances, this too is offset by a good dose of relativity in the final moments of the film, which paints a not altogether negative image of a compromise between the worlds of old and new. Even the tanuki themselves, though their clan-like structure and solidarity seem like glorified examples of the kind of close-knit bonds that modern humans have lost, are seen in the beginning of the film as an in-fighting bunch leading a far too luxurious life. It’s not until they are faced with the threat of a common enemy that they band together to form a tight unit. Harmony is never an absolute state, Takahata seems to say, and one must change with the times and with the situation in order to make the best out of life.”

One of the memorable sights in the supernatural parade featured in Pom Poko (1994).

So there you have it. If the films of Miyazaki have made you more curious about other Japanese anime you should seek out Pom Poko. If you like what you see, you might consider his much more harrowing but eloquent Grave of the Fireflies. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Nosaka Akiyuki, the movie is set in the final days of WWII as Japanese cities were pounded with napalm canisters by American bombers. One critic compared it to Schindler’s List, stating “It is the most profoundly human animated film I’ve ever seen,” and Roger Ebert wrote, “Yes, it’s a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.”

A scene from Isao Takahata’s powerful anime, Grave of the Fireflies (1988).

As of February 2018 Pom Poko is available as a Blu-Ray/DVD combo which includes the English-language version as well as language and subtitle options so you can view it Japanese with English subtitles.  *This is a revised and expanded version of the original blog that first appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official TCM blog which was later renamed Streamline.

Other websites of interest:

http://www.mangauk.com/interview-with-studio-ghiblis-isao-takahata/

https://jaysenheadleywrites.com/2016/08/10/vault-ghibli-introduction/

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/09/12/films/isao-takahatas-stark-world-reality/#.WqWQa62ZORs

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/takahata-isao-four-answers

https://www.alternateending.com/2010/05/studio-ghibli-pom-poko-takahata-1994.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7cowIHjCD4

Long before Michael Haneke arrived on the scene with his original 1997 version of Funny Games (1997), a highly influential and deeply disturbing home invasion thriller, there were many precursors in this unsettling genre that date all the way back to 1939 with Blind Alley and its 1948 remake The Dark Past, in which a psychopathic killer and his gang crash a private gathering at the home of a psychologist. There have been varying tonal approaches to the subject over the years; some overwrought and pretentious like 1964’s Lady in a Cage, some meticulously detailed and artfully depicted as in the Oscar-nominated In Cold Blood (1967) and some purely exploitive and sadistic such as The Strangers (2008). But one of the lesser known but most intriguingly offbeat entries is The Penthouse (1967), the directorial feature debut of British director Peter Collinson. 

Terence Morgan and Suzy Kendall play uneasy lovers in the psychological thriller, The Penthouse (1967), the debut feature film from Peter Collinson.

The film opens as Bruce (Terence Morgan), a real estate agent, and Barbara (Suzy Kendall), his mistress, share breakfast after a night at their secret love nest at the top of an unoccupied high-rise. Their world is soon turned upside down when Barbara answers the door and lets in Tom (Tony Beckley), a man who claims he is the meter man. He is quickly followed by his co-partner Dick (Norman Rodway). The couple is provoked, taunted and terrorized until their relationship to each other and their tormentors becomes more ambiguous and disorienting. The surprise arrival of a third intruder named Harry (Martine Beswick) provides a cathartic closer to the madness.

Robert Shaw plays a man visited by two intimidating strangers in The Birthday Party (1968), directed by William Friedkin and based on a play by Harold Pinter.

The Penthouse has the look and feel of a Harold Pinter play and, in fact, it was based on a play by Scott Forbes entitled The Meter Man. Pinter had certainly explored this terrain before in some of his earliest plays. Take, for example, Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957), which was adapted for the screen in 1968 and directed by William Friedkin: Two mysterious men arrive unannounced at a shabby seaside boarding house and proceed to interrogate and torment a lodger there (who doesn’t appear to know them) until they drive him to the breaking point. Disturbing and darkly humorous, the violence in Pinter’s play is purely psychological and rarely physical.

There is nothing amusing about Arno Frisch (right), who plays one of two sinister visitors in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997).

Although The Penthouse is clearly influenced by Pinter’s work, the threat of physical harm as well as the sexual tension is much more overt, resulting in something that straddles the line between arthouse thriller and trashy drive-in fare. And the fact that the home invaders in the film are creepy ciphers with no back story or rational motivation for their behavior is something that Haneke would take to extremes in both his 1997 and 2007 remake of Funny Games, which bare some similarities to The Penthouse.

Suzy Kendall, one of the bright stars of swinging London cinema in the sixties, experiences madness and catharsis in The Penthouse (1967).

Arriving toward the end of that period when films about “swinging London” were the latest craze – Morgan, Alfie, Georgy Girl, Blow-Up – The Penthouse could be viewed as a moralistic backlash against those movies and the hedonistic hipsters who populate them. Within the first five minutes of the film, the central couple, Barbara and Bruce, are established as illicit lovers. Barbara, who is your basic working class shop girl, is clearly frustrated by their sporadic trysts and Bruce, a married real estate agent, is equally wary of the “when-will-you-ask-your-wife-for-a-divorce” discussions which inevitably follow their couplings. But there is already tension in the air, established under the opening credits of The Penthouse, as two sinister looking men gaze upward at the top of a sterile new high rise, see the lights come on in the penthouse, and then with a knowing smile between them advance toward the building.

Terence Morgan stars as Bruce, a spineless real estate agent who cheats on his wife in The Penthouse (1967).

The penthouse in question turns out to belong to one of Bruce’s clients, who is on vacation in the Bahamas and Bruce is using it without his knowledge. Right from the get-go, Bruce is established as a cad. He’s unfaithful to his wife, takes advantage of his mistress and his clients and is a spineless jellyfish to boot. We know this as soon as he sends Barbara off to answer the door when an unexpected visitor comes knocking, afraid their affair will be exposed.

Tom (Tony Beckley) pretends to be a meter man so he can enter a penthouse and play sinister games with Barbara (Suzy Kendall) and her lover.

As soon as she opens the door, The Penthouse crosses over into theatre-of-the-absurd territory as first Tom, and then his partner Dick, invade the penthouse, posing as meter men who have come to take the gas reading. They end up taking more much in both physical and psychological terms, and as their mind games become increasingly sinister, the film develops a compelling claustrophobic tension between how far Tom and Dick will go and how much abuse Barbara and Bruce will take before they fight back or snap.

An alcohol-fueled evening turns into a night of ritual humiliation and soul-baring in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) starring Richard Burton (far left), Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy Dennis.

While Barbara is easily the more sympathetic member of the couple, neither character allows for easy identification because of the film’s highly stylized structure which emphasizes its stage origins. It allows us to experience the couple’s night of torment as a surreal, avant-garde happening – not hard-edged realism. Like other plays such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where souls are stripped bare and relationships built on hypocrisy crumble when forced to face the truth, this one ends with Bruce and Barbara forever changed and damaged by their ordeal, unable to face each other again. It’s as if Tom, Dick and Harry (more on “him” in a minute) were externalized versions of the couple’s worst fears come home to roost.

Barbara (Suzy Kendall) feels real menace when one of the mysterious meter men pulls a switchback in The Penthouse (1967).

The type of funny games Tom and Dick favor seem to have no rhyme or reason other then breaking down their victim’s will. When they first gain entrance to the penthouse, they start by berating Barbara (she pretends to be the actual tenant) for not knowing where the gas meter is. Bruce, who pretends to be sleeping while overhearing Barbara’s harassment, finally rouses himself for a confrontation, only to be threatened with a switchblade.

Barbara (Suzy Kendall) is forced to get drunk and then toyed with and ravaged by Dick (Norman Rodway, on left) and Tom (Tony Beckley) while her boyfriend watches helplessly in The Penthouse (1967).

Tom and Dick then bind Bruce to a chair with silk cords, spinning him around until he is completely ensnared and forced to watch while the duo force Barbara to get drunk and strip down to her underwear. And so it goes, one humiliation follows another and Bruce’s attempt to turn Dick against Tom by planting a seed of distrust between them leads nowhere. Finally the two intruders, after ravaging Barbara, pack up their things and leave the couple to sort the whole thing out.

The unexpected arrival of Harry (Martine Beswick, left) adds a new level of torment for the captives in The Penthouse (1967).

Yet, just when you think the whole ordeal is over, the games begin anew with the introduction of “Harry,” who claims she is Tom and Dick’s parole officer. Verifying that she has the two men in custody and in handcuffs in her police car, she appeals to Barbara and Bruce to see the duo one last time so that they can apologize and ask for their forgiveness. By this point in this movie, you know that Bruce and Barbara are condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and so The Penthouse comes to a close with one more round of WTF antics.

A married man and his mistress become the object of a sick parlor game in The Penthouse (1967), a psychological thriller directed by Peter Collinson.

While The Penthouse can be self-consciously arty and unapologetically sordid at times – Barbara’s transformation into a docile sex toy is helped along by John Hawksworth “blue movie” music cues– it is also compulsively watchable with a powerhouse cameo by Hammer Films sex siren Martine Beswick (Slave Girls, One Million Years B.C.) as Harry. She receives third billing but doesn’t appear until the final fifteen minutes.

Harry (Martine Beswick, on left) shows her two cohorts Tom (Tony Beckley, center) and Dick (Norman Rodway) who is the boss in The Penthouse (1967).

Beswick’s dominatrix-like presence – she arrives in male drag and soon “lets down her hair” with a wicked laugh – is as much fun as Amanda Donohoe’s camp turn in Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm (1988). In addition, the movie has some striking Pinter-like dialogue. When Bruce blurts out, “Why’d you have to do this? We haven’t done you any harm.” Tom responds, “Well, it’s not a question of that. It’s more a question of the harm you might do us.” Haneke’s dialogue in Funny Games follows the same ying-yang logic.

Bruce (Terence Morgan, left) is interrogated by two sinister intruders in The Penthouse (1967).

Tom and Dick may be absurdist creations but their enigmatic relationship remains one of The Penthouse’s most intriguing aspects. While they both have their way with Barbara, their flamboyant behavior and bitchy banter wouldn’t be out of place in The Boys in the Band. At odd moments in the narrative, Bruce and Barbara’s degradation becomes secondary to Tom and Dick’s passive/aggressive role-playing.

Two strangers pretending to be meter men gain entry to a penthouse and torment the occupants in The Penthouse (1967), directed by Peter Collinson.

There is one scene where Dick is having fun trying on Bruce’s clothes as his victims watch and Tom sarcastically comments, “Dick’s rich you see. He’s terribly rich. You should see all the clothes he’s got. I don’t know where he keeps them all.” Disgusted, Dick strips off the jacket and throws it at Tom, saying, “I think this coat will fit you better than me.” Tom then flashes him an intimate look and says, “Maybe I’ll try it on a bit later” which brings a sly grin to Dick’s face. But the game remains a secret despite occasional signs that a clue will be revealed.

Barbara (Suzy Kendall) is plied with liquor and seduced by the sinister Dick (Norman Rodway) in The Penthouse (1967), based on the play “The Meter Man.”

It’s pointless to fight a tight, airless contraption like this but there is a certain fascination in monitoring your own reaction to it. What would you do if you were in Bruce or Barbara’s situation?

Tony Beckley plays a mentally disturbed man who terrorizes a babysitter in When a Stranger Calls (1979).

Tom Beckley, the actor who plays Tom, might look familiar to you. That’s because he played the twisted psychopath who terrorized Carol Kane in When a Stranger Calls (1979), his final film before he died of cancer in 1980. He was also appropriately creepy in Robert Hartford-Davis’s The Fiend (aka Beware My Brethren, 1972) and offered memorable support in Get Carter (1971).

Norman Rodway (right) stars in the grim kitchen sink drama, Four in the Morning (1964), which featured Judi Dench in one of her first screen roles.

Norman Rodway as Dick is less familiar to American audiences since he spent most of his career working in British television but you can see him in Four in the Morning (1964), a bleak portrait of working class life, Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) and Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘isname (1967), which also starred Welles. Terence Morgan, in the role of Bruce, is also an actor who received little exposure stateside but appeared in numerous British B-movie melodramas such as The Shakedown (1959) and Tread Softly Stranger (1958) and a few A-list titles such as Alexander MacKendrick’s Mandy (1952).

Former model turned actress Suzy Kendall has appeared in such films as Psycho-Circus (1966), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Darker Than Amber (1970).

Those of you who enjoy Italian giallos and swinging sixties cinema from England need no introduction to Suzy Kendall, who first made favorable impressions in the James Bond imitation The Liquidator (1965) and To Sir, With Love (1967). Her film career has been eclectic, to say the least, and she’s appeared in a variety of genre films from the international espionage thriller Fraulein Doktor (1969) to the horror anthology Tales that Witness Madness (1973) to nunsploitation Diary of a Cloistered Nun (1973). However, it is her appearances in giallos that have earned her an international cult following for Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973) and his subsequent thriller Spasmo (1974).

Director Peter Collinson (right) enjoys a laugh on the set of The Italian Job (1969) with Michael Caine.

As for Peter Collinson, he followed up The Penthouse with Up the Junction (1968), also starring Suzy Kendall, in a working class expose that was firmly in the “Kitchen sink” school of British realism. His next film, The Long Day’s Dying (1969), a grim anti-war drama, received critical acclaim and won two awards at the San Sebastian Film Festival. But most of Collinson’s later work was ignored by the cinema intelligentsia though he is probably best known for The Italian Job (1969) starring Michael Caine. He died of cancer at the age of 44 in 1980, the year Tony Beckley died of the same disease.  The Penthouse is still not currently available on any format. I recently viewed it again on VHS from a cable TV recording in 1984 courtesy of WWOR in Secaucus, New Jersey. While the visual quality of the recording left much to be desired, this is a film with a desaturated color scheme and the dominant color is gray. The skies are gray (one of the few exterior shots shows an urban landscape dwarfed by an industrial complex where toxic clouds of smoke are billowing forth from its towers) and the interiors are gray with some black and white highlights. Here and there are shades of sickly green on the walls and furniture. And Arthur Lavis’s cinematography concentrates on eerie shadows across faces, the shiny sweat on foreheads and the low florescent lightning that emphasizes the bleak tone. All of it adds quite effectively to the movie’s sense of alienation and despair and John Hawksworth’s alternately brooding and sleazy score is the putrid icing on the poison cake.

THE PENTHOUSE, Tony Beckley, Suzy Kendall, Norman Rodway, 1967

Most American film critics ignored or dismissed The Penthouse but Roger Ebert wrote, “The Penthouse,” quite simply, is a pretty good shocker. Shockers are standard fare in the movies and always have been, but successful ones are rare. It’s a relief to find one that’s made with skill and a certain amount of intelligence. “The Penthouse” isn’t in the same class with “Psycho” (1960) but it’s in the same school.”

Suzy Kendall screams for help in The Penthouse (1967), directed by Peter Collinson.

*This is a revised and expanded version of a blog post that first appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog (later renamed Streamline).

Other websites of interest:

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/862751/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/19/archives/new-face-tony-seekley-genial-film-maniac-with-english-roots-a.html

https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/interview-with-peter-collinson

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-penthouse-1967

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

With more than 100 feature films, shorts, video and TV work to his credit, Jean-Luc Godard is surely the most audacious, groundbreaking and prolific filmmaker from his generation. Even longtime admirers and film historians have probably not seen all of his work and some of it like the political cinema he made with Jean-Pierre Gorin under the collaborative name Groupe Dziga Vertov is tough going for even the most ardent Godard completist. Weekend (1967) is generally acknowledged as the last film Godard made before heading in a more experimental, decidedly non-commercial direction which roughly stretched from 1969 until 1980 when he reemerged from the wilderness with the unexpected art house success, Sauve qui peut (Every Man for Himself). But most of the work he made during that eleven year period prior to 1980 championed social and political change through ideological scenarios and leftist diatribes that were overly cerebral and static compared to earlier career milestones like Breathless (1960), Contempt (1963) and Pierrot le Fou (1965).

Yves Montand (center in raincoat) and Jane Fonda (lower right) star in Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien (1972).

Of the films he made during the Groupe Dziga Vertov period, only Tout Va Bien (1972), which starred Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, attracted mainstream critical attention but most of the reviews at the time were indifferent or hostile to this Marxist, Bertolt Brecht-inflluenced polemic about a workers’ strike at a sausage factory. Much more interesting to me was the film he attempted to make in 1969, tentatively titled 1 AM (or One American Movie). A collaboration with cinema-verite pioneers D. A. Pennabaker and Richard Leacock, the project was abandoned after Godard lost interest during the editing phase but Pennebaker ended up completing his own version of the existing footage which he titled 1 PM (or One Parallel Movie). This is a brief history of the film’s journey from concept to screen. 

Hubert H. Humphrey (right) campaigns for President in Robert Drew’s documentary, Primary (1960).

The genesis for 1 AM can be traced back to the early 1960s when Godard first encountered such cinema verite works as Robert Drew’s Primary (1960), which followed presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey as they campaigned during the 1960 Wisconsin primary. Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles served as cinematographers on Primary with D.A. Pennebaker serving as sound recordist and sequence editor; All three would go on to become major figures in the cinema verite movement but Godard was suspicious of this new approach to documentary filmmaking. In fact, he had criticized Leacock in print on aesthetic grounds for promoting the idea that you could capture reality in the raw without acknowledging the presence of the camera or a crew. Godard also attacked Primary for its inability or disinterest in shedding light on how the U.S. political process worked.

Cinematographers Richard Leacock (left) and D.A. Pennebaker in Monterey, California circa 1967. Courtesy: D.A. Pennebaker.

Despite this, Godard remained ambivalent about the direct cinema movement and when he met Pennebaker in the early 1960s at the Cinémathèque in Paris, he proposed a potential film collaboration with Pennebaker and Leacock. “The idea was that [Godard] would go to a small town in France,” Pennebaker recalled (in D.A. Pennebaker by Keith Beattie) and he would rig it with all kind of things happening: people would fall out of windows, people would shoot other people, whatever. We would arrive one day on a bus or something with our cameras and then film whatever we saw happening around us.”

Jimi Hendrix electrifies the crowd at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, which was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker and released in 1968 as the concert film, Monterey Pop.

That project never materialized but a turning point occurred in 1968 with the release of Monterey Pop, directed and filmed by Pennebaker with contributions from Leacock, Maysles and others. This historic record of the 1967 three day concert event at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in California featuring Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others was a resounding commercial success and enabled Pennebaker and Leacock to add a distribution outlet to their production company. As a result, they acquired the U.S. rights to Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and brought him to America in 1968 to tour with the film at selected openings.

Juliet Berto plays a French student turned terrorist in Jean-Luc Godard’s absurdist political comedy, La Chinoise (1967).

It was during his U.S. visit that Godard became convinced that America was on the brink of a societal breakdown. With Pennebaker and Leacock employed as his cameramen, Godard began shooting footage for a new film tentatively titled 1 AM which would be both a portrait of contemporary America but also a meditation on documentary and fictional approaches to cinematic representations. Originally Godard planned to structure the film in ten sequences: “Five reality scenes, in which subjects recount their experiences, and five fictionalized counterparts in which actors would speak a transcript of the words spoken in the “documentary” scenes.” (from D.A. Pennebaker by Keith Beattie).

Jean-Luc Godard gives Rip Torn (off camera) instructions on what to do during a classroom visit with New York students in the film, 1 PM (shot in 1969, released in 1971).

During filming, Godard begin to deviate from his original plan by replacing some of his original interview subjects with last minute improvisations. For example, Godard initially wanted to interview a woman who worked on Wall Street as a way to critique gender and social status in a location synonymous with U.S. economic power. Instead, he chose to interview Carol Bellamy, a lawyer for the Chase Manhattan Bank, who later became problematic during the editing process. Godard also dropped the idea of interviewing a young girl on the streets of Harlem and substituted it with a sequence shot in a predominantly African-American elementary school in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of New York. Other participants/interviewees in the film included actor Rip Torn, Black Panther party member Eldridge Cleaver, poet/playwright Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), former Chicago Seven defendant/political activist Tom Hayden and members of the Jefferson Airplane. There are also lots of candid and revealing shots of Godard, chain smoking and looking high strung and intense throughout the shoot, brief cameos by Pennebaker and Leacock and fleeting glimpses of French actress Anna Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife at the time, who was relegated to the background during the filming according to Pennebaker. A new film by Michel Hazanavicius, Godard Mon Amour, covers this same time period and is based on Wiazemsky’s autobiography Un an Apres, which goes into detail about the troubled marriage of Godard and his child bride.The filmmaking process for 1 AM was dictated by Godard’s specific technical instructions to his cinematographers. “We’d have these four-hundred-foot magazines, which would be ten minutes of film,” Pennebaker said in a 2011 interview for the A.V. Club. “We would shoot them continuously; we wouldn’t stop. We would figure out a scene that we were going to cover and we would shoot four hundred feet in one continuous roll, and we would never edit it…That was the plan.”

Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Rope (1948) with James Stewart (far right), Farley Granger (far left) and John Dall.

Although it sounds like the approach Alfred Hitchcock utilized for his 1948 thriller Rope, 1 AM quickly deviated from the dictates of the ten-minute magazine format. Pennebaker discovered that simply filming an interviewee was not interesting enough to engage sustained interest and he began to capture details of the milieu such as crew members on set, random close-ups and glimpses of friends and associates watching the filming or the odd detail like two young African-American girls singing along with a tape recorder as they skip along the waterfront.  Godard began to realize that the disruptive social revolution he anticipated in America was never going to happen and he moved on to other projects with a new collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Because Pennebaker had signed a contract with PBL, a forerunner of Public Television, which had provided the funding for One A.M., the filmmakers were obliged to deliver a completed film so Godard returned to the U.S. to review the footage in March 1970. Godard later remarked, “When [Gorin and I] first arrived [and looked at the rushes] I had thought we could do two or three days’ editing and finish it, but not at all. It is two years old and completely of a different period.” (from D.A. Pennebaker by Keith Beattie).

D.A. Pennebaker in the 1960s.

1 AM was declared officially dead by Godard and Pennebaker recalled on his website phfilms.com that Godard went off with Jean-Pierre Gorin “to start a new leftist cinema and Leacock [went off] to teach at MIT. I was left to deliver something to Public Television or face severe contractual coercion. Thus, 1 AM became 1 PM (One Parallel Movie – or One Pennebaker Movie, as Jean-Luc has called it.)

Cinematographer Richard Leacock (left) with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty.

“Ricky had filmed pretty much what Godard wanted, but I was the extra camera that nobody noticed, and I filmed whatever looked interesting. So when I began putting the sequences together as Godard had suggested, I saw a lot of stuff I’d shot that hadn’t been planned, and I was soon making a film of my own. I doubt it was the film Godard had in mind when we started, but then, it seldom works out that way anyhow. I found what happened entertaining and filled with surprises. It’s some sort of history. I’m grateful to Jean-Luc, Ricky and everyone who showed up to see what would come of this crazy idea, and I am continually amazed that such a film would ever get made.”

Cinematographer/director D.A. Pennebaker captures a live performance of street musicians in Harlem in 1 PM (1971).

Pennebaker’s creation, 1 PM, remains an unclassifiable movie that is a fragmented, crazy quilt of street theater, cinema verite reportage, concert film and radical agitprop. It can be maddening and self-indulgent but also fascinating and laugh-out-loud hilarious at times. And, most of all, it is an invaluable time capsule of America in the sixties as reflected through the polarizing presences of its on-camera participants. The final sequence, in which the Jefferson Airplane performs “House at Pooneil Corners” from the rooftop of the Schuler Hotel, is a fun, impromptu musical happening which prefigures the rooftop concert captured in the closing moments of The Beatles’ 1970 film, Let It Be. We see New Yorkers on the streets, looking out of office windows and driving by in cars clearly surprised by the unannounced open air concert. Then the cops arrive to shut things down. Singer Grace Slick would later remark, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist.”

Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane give an impromptu rooftop performance in New York City in the closing moments of D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

Pennebaker opens 1 PM with this disclaimer: “This film was begun in 1968. However Godard never completed the editing of it. I have assembled the rushes of the scenes we filmed with as little editing as possible to fit the original plan. I have also added a few scenes that were really notes I filmed during the shooting. The Leroi Jones street mass was not meant as part of the film. This is not the film Jean-Luc intended as One American Movie (1 AM). Rather he called it a parallel movie (1 PM).”

Rip Torn goes Native American while spouting the political opinions of Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

Considering the circumstances surrounding 1 PM, you wouldn’t expect it to be as entertaining as it is but Rip Torn as court jester/chief provocateur is a major asset. Whether he is wandering through the woodlands in Native American garb reciting bits of Tom Hayden rhetoric or trying to provoke African-American students into attacking him verbally or physically as he struts around a classroom dressed as a Confederate soldier, Torn is an undeniably flamboyant, showboating presence. And it is fascinating to see Godard giving Torn instructions on how to deliver excerpts from some of the interviewee speeches and what Torn does with them; the elevator sequence, in particularly, has a poetic flow to it as Torn shouts out non-sequitur phrases like “The university is a supply line!,” “People in Factories!,” or “People have no respect for the people who are demanding respect!” This is street theater for the ages.

New York classroom students are both bemused and suspicious of Rip Torn as he tries to prod them into reacting against his Confederate soldier costume in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

Torn is also capable of looking foolish and self-congratulatory as when he attempts to “school” African-American students on how corporate America is their enemy; candid shots of kids in the classroom clearly indicate that most of the students are hip to Torn’s manipulations and could probably teach him a thing or two about race and discrimination. Yet, Torn remains one of the most underrated and adventurous film and stage actors of our time and some of the movies he made between 1968 through 1973 show Torn in his prime in edgy, defiantly non-Hollywood indies like Norman Mailer’s Beyond the Law (1968), Agnes Varda’s Lions Love (1969), Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart (1969), Joseph Strick’s Tropic of Cancer (1970), where Torn plays controversial author Henry Miller during his Paris heyday, and Daryl Duke’s Payday (1973), which should have garnered Torn a Best Actor Oscar nomination as a lecherous, self-destructive country singer named Maury Dann.

Country singer Maury Dann (Rip Torn) puts the moves on Rosamond (Elayne Heilveil) while his mistress Mayleen (Ahna Capri, right) watches in disbelief in Payday (1973), directed by Daryl Duke.

Around the same time, Torn’s off-screen life seemed just as volatile as some of the screen characters he played. He was originally considered for the role that eventually went to Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider but lost the part after a heated confrontation with Dennis Hopper at a New York dinner party. Hopper’s allegation that Torn pulled a knife on him during the argument was later proven false as witnesses in a court case confirmed that Hopper was the one welding the knife. Torn ended up winning the lawsuit to the tune of $475,000 with the option of taking Hopper to court for punitive damages.

Rip Torn attacks Norman Mailer in a scene from Maidstone (1970) that crosses over from acting into genuine aggression.

Torn was back in the news again for attacking Norman Mailer on screen with a torn hammer in Maidstone (1968), another homemade Mailer indie about an arthouse pornographer who runs for President of the U.S. The scene exists in the script but Torn’s frustration and anger toward director/actor Mailer during production erupts into a real on-camera fight in Maidstone that gives the movie some needed frisson in the final moments. The two men later reconciled but Torn’s persona as an unpredictable force of nature is supported by documented incidents like the above.

Director Jean-Luc Godard and Tom Hayden at a speaking event in Berkeley, California is featured in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

As for the other participants in 1 PM, Tom Hayden is probably the least engaging although his political insights ring true to the times despite the dated rhetoric. While viewing some rushes with Godard in the movie, Hayden complains that he finds the filmmaking process distracting and partly to blame for his stiff, unnatural delivery of a speech in someone’s backyard in Berkeley, California. To his surprise (and possible regret), Hayden is informed by Godard that depicting the unnatural act of filmmaking was paramount to his vision and the need to make it completely transparent to viewers.

Eldridge Cleaver (smoking) is one of the famous featured interviewees in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

Eldridge Cleaver makes a more formidable interviewee and he exudes a laid-back but obvious contempt for the filmmakers, stating that the time has come to shoot guns, not film. Cleaver cites having bad experiences with previous media representatives and says point-blank, “You’re part of that mafia…all kinds of shark and cutthroats have come here [to the projects] with their fucking cameras and broadcasters and when we see the cameras we want to kick the cat’s ass and break his camera. That is why when you started asking around about that you ran into a stone wall. We don’t like to talk to the news media anymore…but we’ll see how we come out on this, you know.” According to some sources, Cleaver, who was on bail for attempted murder, fled the U.S. just two days after this interview was shot and made his made to Algeria where he lived in exile until 1972 when he relocated to Paris. Cleaver eventually returned to the U.S. in 1977 to face the pending attempted murder charge.

Director Jean-Luc Godard is captured on film by cinematographer D.A. Pennebaker during the making of 1 AM which was retitled 1 PM and credited to Pennebaker after Godard abandoned the film.

Of all of the interviewees, Pennebaker regrets the inclusion of Carol Bellamy as the Wall Street representative. “That she ever got put into the film really enrages me, because she is absolutely unnecessary to the film. We thought any business lady would have done, but we had to have this one, and somebody gave her a contract which allowed her to censor the whole film if she doesn’t like any part.” (source: a 1970 interview with G. Roy Levin). As a result, Bellamy was able to make Pennebaker delete a portion of her interview that made her inclusion in the film particularly relevant to Godard’s original intentions. The footage that remains of her in 1 PM functions more as a throwaway joke with the lawyer making some sweeping analogies about big business: “To ignore business [in society] is like treating a man for cancer and ignoring the fact that he has heart disease…In fact, I think business will play the largest role in the development of a new and better society in this country.” Easily the most interesting aspect of the Wall Street section is the scene where Godard and his crew are stopped by a Chase Manhattan security guard who is clearly suspicious of this dapper but nervous looking Frenchman and his cameramen. Miraculously, they get clearance to shoot in the lawyer’s office (Too bad they couldn’t end up using the good stuff.)

Anne Wiazemsky makes a fleeting appearance next to her husband, Jean-Luc Godard, in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

1 PM is currently not available on any format through an authorized distributor but you can view it for free on the internet. You can also find acceptable bootlegs of the film from various sources. The film occasionally pops up at repertory screenings such as a recent February 2018 screening at NYC’s Film Forum as part of a cinema verite festival. The film is essential viewing for anyone interested in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, American in the sixties or the direct cinema (aka cinema verite) movement. Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed 1 PM as an “exemplary, fascinating, and even intermittently iconic film.”

Rip Torn gets into a police car following a confrontation at an impromptu Jefferson Airplane concert in NYC as depicted in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM (1971).

Other websites of interest:

https://phfilms.com/films/1-pm/

http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/jefferson_airplane_wakes_up_new_york_jean-luc_godard_captures_it_1968.html

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/one-p-m-all-day

http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/1pm.html 

https://strublog.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/baraka-godard-and-the-lost-films-of-newark-1-pm-1972/

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/one_american_movie_jean_luc_godards_abandoned_sixties_manifesto

http://elshaw.tripod.com/jlg/One_AM.html

Italian director Elio Petri is probably best known for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), which won the Oscar for Best Screenplay (by Petri and Ugo Pirro) in 1972. Yet, most of his other work, with the possible exception of the cult sci-fi satire The 10th Victim (1965), remains overlooked or forgotten when film historians write about the great Italian directors of the sixties and seventies. And 1968’s A Quiet Place in the Country (Un Tranquillo Posto di Campagna) is easily one of his most intriguing and visually compelling films.

Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, an off screen couple at the time, play lovers in the psychological thriller, A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), directed by Elio Petri.

Plot synopsis: Leonardo needs to get away from the hectic pace of urban Milan. A popular painter of boldly colored, wall-sized canvases, he suddenly develops an almost paralyzing anxiety over his work. Disturbing sadomasochistic nightmares and violent fantasies don’t help his condition and, with the help of his mistress/art dealer Flavia, he rents a sprawling, deserted villa in the country for a quieter work environment. At first, Leonardo feels inspired to paint again but soon becomes aware of another presence in his villa and it’s not an earthbound one. Is Leonardo losing his mind or is the villa actually haunted by the spirit of its former owner, a possessive nymphomaniac who wants the artist all to herself?

Gabriella Boccardo plays Wanda, who may be a ghost or a figment of an artist’s imagination in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), starring Franco Nero as the artist Leonardo Ferri.

A tale of mental disintegration seen from the victim’s viewpoint, A Quiet Place in the Country (1968) is an often brilliant fusion of experimental filmmaking pyrotechnics and gothic horror conventions. Made in the wake of the blockbuster musical, Camelot (1967), where Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero first met and became lovers, this further collaboration between them, directed by Elio Petri, is decidedly less conventional and almost forgotten today. The only reason it probably received distribution in an English-dubbed version in the U.S. in 1970 was due to the tabloid notoriety of Redgrave and Nero, who were living together openly and had a child together. (They eventually separated but reunited and were legally married in 2006).

A painter (Franco Nero) starts to lose his sanity and imagines his mistress (Vanessa Redgrave) is trying to control or even kill him in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968).

Unlike some of the art house bombs Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, another famous celebrity couple of the sixties, made at the height of their fame (Doctor Faustus [1967], Boom! [1968], Under Milk Wood [1972]), Redgrave and Nero’s Italian film phase consisted of outre genre films. A Quiet Place in the Country is a giallo on acid, Drop-Out (1970) is a picaresque road movie, and La Vacanza (1971) is an avant-garde historical drama; the latter two were directed by Tinto Brass, who later became infamous for directing the scandalous Caligula (1979) and other explicit erotic films like The Voyeur (1994) and Cheeky (2000).

Director Elio Petri gives Franco Nero instructions for a scene outside a villa near Padua, Italy in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968).

Using an artist as his protagonist in A Quiet Place in the Country was a logical choice for Petri because he was an avid art collector and was particularly fond of American painters and pop art – the later was an obvious influence on his futuristic view of the battle of the sexes in The 10th Victim. You can see the influence of such artists as Joe Tilson, George Segal, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and others in the unique set designs of Piero Poletto and Petri actually used American painter Jim Dine as a model for Franco Nero’s Fernando.  Dine had previously shown his work in 1964 at the Venice Biennale along with Robert Rauschenberg, Johns and Claes Oldenburg and Petri later traveled to London (where Dine was living) to meet the artist and “invited him to Cinecitta to paint around fifteen large canvases, all of which would appear in the film. Jim Dine was filmed while working so that actor Franco Nero could later replicate his gestures when portraying the film’s protagonist. Petri wanted Dine to stay in Italy to advise Nero and perhaps weigh in on some visual aspects of the film. However, the painter had to return to London for other commitments.” (from Writings on Cinema & Life: Elio Petri).

An eerie seance sequence in Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country (1968) conjures up the evil spirit of a nymphomaniac named Wanda….or does it?

On a visual level, A Quiet Place in the Country is an astonishing tour-de-force that begins with the credits, rendered like an underground film with scratched emulsion and countdown leader interspersed with quick cuts of classic and contemporary paintings. As the film progresses, Luigi Kuveiller’s cinematography reflects the erratic mood of its tormented protagonist, going from wild mood swings (a slo-mo trashing of Leonardo’s studio with buckets of paint spilled everywhere by a poltergeist) to pastoral bliss (Leonardo lying in a golden-hued farm field drinking wine and intently studying a nudie magazine).   The unsettling tone of the movie is further enhanced by Ennio Morricone’s cacophonous and nerve-jangling score that mixes industrial sounds with free-form jazz and the natural music of the countryside – flies, birds, crickets, the sound of the wind, creaking wooden doors.

Vanessa Redgrave is depicted as both seductress and victim in Elio Petri’s A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1969). Courtesy Photofest

While both Nero and Redgrave are fine in their respective roles as the disturbed artist and his jeopardized lover, the real star of A Quiet Place in the Country is the superb villa where the bulk of the disturbing narrative takes place. According to Redgrave in her autobiography, “We filmed in a huge deserted villa about twenty miles from Vicenza and Padua. Franco and I rented a wing of the Casa Veronese, a villa surrounded by a farm, from two elderly spinsters, the Misses Veronese, and we spent about two months there, in May and June 1967.” The filming of A Quiet Place in the Country was a joyful experience for them both and they were sad to leave the villa when the film was finished.

Franco Nero plays a painter who moves to a remote villa in the country that may be haunted in Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country (1968).

Although A Quiet Place in the Country was not a commercial success in Europe or the U.S. due to its refusal to follow genre expectations or resolve the film’s mysteries, it did receive several rave reviews from a handful of high profile critics such as Howard Thompson of The New York Times who wrote, “This Italian-made color film, if you stay with it on its own terms, will absolutely nail you to the seat…the picture visually hurtles and roars to a climax of complete logic and conviction, blending real and unreal images that will curl your hair. The total effect is devastating.”

Franco Nero plays a painter who is either going mad or being driven to insanity by others in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968).

If you have never seen an Elio Petri film, you might want to start with his more accessible 1965 pop art fantasy, The 10th Victim, before moving on to A Quiet Place in the Country, which is much darker in tone. But if the latter film inspires you to delve further into Petri’s filmography, you should try We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), a black comedy about the Mafia, the anti-Fascist character study Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), which many critics consider his masterpiece, Todo Modo (1976), a nightmarish political allegory, or even his earlier crime procedural drama, L’Assassino (The Assassin, 1961), in which Marcello Mastroianni plays an antique dealer who becomes a prime murder suspect.

Marcello Mastroianni plays an antique dealer who becomes caught up in a Kafka-like nightmare in Elio Petri’s The Assassin (1961).

Petri would later comment on A Quiet Place in the Country in the book, L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano: “The script of A Quiet Place in the Country dates back to ’62; I wrote it with Tonino Guerra but I could shoot it only towards the end of ’67. The reason why I defend A Quiet Place in the Country is because it is the portrait of an artist, of a middle-class intellectual and of his division. He was a middle-class artist who, as far as his expressive means were concerned, tried to upset forms and formulas and who found himself prisoner of a serial production system. Thence his escape towards the ghosts of romantic culture. The film was a criticism of the intellectual, indeed from the inside. In short, we were on the threshold of ’68 and this is my last film before Investigation [of a Citizen Above Suspicion]; that is before making films I could feel were useful to some cause.”

Director Elio Petri on the set with Franco Nero in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968).

In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Franco Nero commented on A Quiet Place in the Country: “One movie I’m particularly proud of is A Quiet Place in the Country. It was made by Elio Petri who for me was an Italian Kubrick. He only made about 10 films but they were all completely different, and so ahead of their time. For Petri I played an artist, so they put me with a young painter, who did the paintings in the film. After shooting, he asked me if I wanted to by any of them, for $10,000. In the 60s that sounded ridiculous, he was a nobody. I think I told him to fuck off. Years later, I was in New York and saw his paintings on huge billboards. His name was Jim Dine, and you can’t get a painting of his for less than $100,000 (£62,000).”

Painter Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero) throws himself into his work but will soon experience a strange sort of creative blockage in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968).

For many years A Quiet Place in the Country was a difficult film to see on any format in the U.S. except for an English-dubbed VHS version. In recent years the film has aired on Turner Classic Movies and in 2011 MGM released a Limited Edition DVD which was a handsome presentation despite a lack of DVD extras. In September 2017 Shout! Factory released the film on Blu-Ray with subtitle options and extra features including an interview with Franco Nero and audio commentary by film historian Troy Howarth. For fans of A Quiet Place in the Country, this is your best option.   Some trivia on the film: Petri’s co-screenwriter, Tonino Guerra, is one of the great Italian screenwriters of his era. He has been nominated for Best Screenplay Oscars three times for his contributions to Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) and Mario Monicelli’s Casanova 70 (1965). Other career highlights include his screenplays for Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Vittorio De Sica’s Marriage Italian Style (1964), Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983) and Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist (1988).

The legendary Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra

Some sources state that Petri had originally wanted Jack Nicholson to play the part that eventually went to Franco Nero. This was before Nicholson’s breakthrough performance in Easy Rider (1969), when he was still appearing in American International exploitation fare like Psych-Out (1967) and art house indies like Monte Hellman’s existentialist westerns, Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting (both 1966).  * This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

One of the more disturbing images from the psychological thriller, A Quiet Place in the Country (1968) directed by Elio Petri.

Other websites of interest:

http://filmint.nu

http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/issue-67-july-2013/un-tranquillo-posto-di-campagnaa-quiet-day-in-the-country/

http://klymkiwfilmcorner.blogspot.com/2012/06/a-quiet-place-in-country-review-by-greg.html

http://www.artnews.com/2018/04/20/archives-jim-dine-creating-autobiography-objects-1977/

http://www.thewildeye.co.uk/blog/performers-directors/franco-nero-interview/

There was a time during the late seventies/early eighties when John Heard seemed destined to become a major leading man on the level of William Hurt or Jeff Bridges or some other Oscar-winning actor of his generation. He was impressive in his big screen debut opposite Lindsay Crouse in Between the Lines (1977), an indie comedy-romance about the staff of an underground newspaper in Boston, and even better in such disparate roles as Jack Kerouac in Heart Beat (1980), a self-destructive Viet Nam vet in Cutter’s Way (1981) and Nastassja Kinski’s love interest in Cat People (1982). His performance in Cutter’s Way alone deserved an Oscar nomination but Heard never received any recognition from the Academy during his lifetime. He didn’t become a star either but he kept busy as one of the most in-demand character actors in film and television. Perhaps personal problems kept him from becoming an A-list actor but it was more likely the fact that he did some of his best work in movies few people saw such as Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), which still stands as my favorite John Heard performance. But there was a major obstacle to overcome in raising awareness of Chilly Scenes of Winter. 

John Heard and Mary Beth Hurt star in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), aka Head Over Heels, directed by Joan Micklin Silver.

How do you market a quirky romantic comedy about a non-glamorous, flawed yuppie couple with uninteresting jobs who live in Salt Lake City? Actually, romantic comedy is probably too deceptive a classification for this sardonic tale of a couple’s courtship and breakup, presented in flashbacks and narrated by Charles (John Heard), the jilted lover.   United Artists was indeed faced with a creative marketing challenge when they first agreed to distribute the 1979 film version of Ann Beattie’s first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter. The movie was first released under the title Head Over Heels to avoid the dreary connotations of “chilly” and “winter.” Director Joan Micklin Silver, with the studio’s encouragement, also opted for an upbeat, optimistic ending that was faithful in spirit to the fadeout of Beattie’s novel. But none of this helped the film find an audience and the reviewers who compared it unfavorably to Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen’s equally unformulaic comedy-romance, didn’t help either. So Head Over Heels was shelved until UA’s Classic division came along and decided to give it another chance in 1982.  For the re-release, UA Classics rechristened the film Chilly Scenes of Winter in acknowledgement of its literary source and to capitalize on Beattie’s rising popularity as a fiction writer; at the time, she was a regular contributor to The New Yorker with her wry short stories about middle class baby boomers. The distributor also removed the original happy ending and substituted an alternate one, which was more downbeat but true to the film’s melancholy tone and wintry look. This newly retooled version performed better at the box office than Head Over Heels and eventually turned a profit for the studio but it was hardly a mainstream film.

Mary Beth Hurt and John Heard share a fleeting romantic moment in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) aka Head Over Heels, based on the novel by Ann Beattie.

The original title of Head Over Heels suggested a possibly whimsical and intoxicating romantic affair but that wouldn’t accurately describe Charles’ condition, which is closer to a full-blown obsession with Laura (Mary Beth Hurt). By today’s standards, he would be considered a stalker. Not only does he regularly stake out Laura’s house to keep tabs on her comings and goings but he even builds a replica of it complete with doll furniture and plastic figurines as stand-ins for Laura and her family. At one point, Charles even gets himself and his roommate Sam invited to Laura’s home by her husband Ox who thinks they’re a gay couple looking to buy one of the new A-frame houses he’s selling. All of this is played for comedy which has a dark underside because Charles’s determination to win Laura back is not so much heroic as it is an obsession.

A publicity photo from Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) aka Head Over Heels with John Heard (left), Mary Beth Hurt and Peter Riegert.

As for Laura, she is clearly less than Charles’s idealized image of her and knows it; she’s an attractive but selfish and confused individual who is willing to abandon a devoted husband and young daughter so she can “find herself.” She even tells Charles at one point, “I have a realistic opinion of myself. I’m an ordinary person – I can’t live up to this thing that you have about me…In fact, I’m worse than an ordinary person since I left a perfectly decent man for no good reason.”

Mary Beth Hurt has a problem with John Heard’s idealized vision of her in the offbeat comedy-romance, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) aka Head Over Heels.

Yet it is the film’s honest, warts-and-all depiction of this seemingly mismatched duo that helps audiences to identify with Charles and Laura; their imperfections and idiosyncrasies ground them in a reality most contemporary romances lack.

Film Producer Amy Robinson circa the late 1970s.

Bringing Chilly Scenes of Winter to the screen was a slow uphill climb for Triple Play Productions which consisted of three struggling actors, Amy Robinson (Mean Streets, 1973), Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London, 1981), and Mark Metcalf (National Lampoon’s Animal House, 1978). Robinson had fallen in love with Beattie’s short story when she first read it and convinced her two partners it was perfect for their film debut as independent producers. According to an interview with Robinson in American Film magazine in September 1985, she said, “We didn’t start out thinking, How can we break into Hollywood, but, rather, How can we make this low-budget movie, Chilly Scenes of Winter? We asked a lot of nuts-and-bolts questions. We had some connections to the business, especially on the creative side, and we used them to gain relatively easy access to the people at the studios. Also, when we first went out to Hollywood, it wasn’t as though we were producers in from Tennessee, naive and empty-handed. We had a book by a rising literary star, Ann Beattie…We were in the right place at the right time…We also had Joan Micklin Silver to direct at a time when there was interest in ‘women’s films.'”

Mark Metcalf, one of the co-producers of Chilly Scenes of Winter aka Head Over Heels

Triple Play Productions opted Beattie’s novel for $2,000 versus $30,000 upon completion of the film. In their first meeting with the author who later said “It was like seeing three of my characters walk through the door,” Robinson, Griffin and Metcalf agreed to both of Beattie’s stipulations to seal the deal. Beattie wanted to appear in Chilly Scenes of Winter – she has a brief walk-on as a waitress in a coffee shop – and she wanted to meet Dean Martin, a curious request that was never fulfilled.

Griffin Dunne, co-producer of Chilly Scenes of Winter and actor (An American Werewolf in London, After Hours)

Originally playwright Michael Weller was slated to direct but after he dropped out Joan Micklin Silver, who was a huge fan of Beattie’s book, offered her services. At the time, Silver was enjoying a movie industry buzz for her recent indie feature, Between the Lines (1977). Once she was committed to the project, Triple Play approached Claire Townsend, an executive at 20th Century Fox, to acquire it. Townsend did indeed pick up Chilly Scenes of Winter and when she moved to a new position at United Artists, she took the project with her, producing and releasing it as Head Over Heels in 1979.

John Heard in Cutter’s Way (1981), directed by Ivan Passer.

A key factor in the film’s success is the casting. John Heard, who had played the lead in Silver’s Between the Lines, is alternately amusing and maddening as Charles, walking a fine line between self-deprecating humor and deep depression. Next to his fine work as an alcoholic, wounded war veteran in Cutter’s Way (1981), this might well be his most memorable performance. Matching him in an equally tricky role that requires a mixture of feistiness and vulnerability is Mary Beth Hurt who was better known as a stage actress at the time though she had received some recognition for her performances in Woody Allen’s Interiors in 1978. Today she is probably best known for her role in The World According to Garp (1982).

Peter Riegert (left) provides a scene-stealing performance in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) aka Head Over Heels.

As good as Heard and Hurt are in their scenes together, they are occasionally upstaged by some of the supporting players. Peter Riegert as Sam, Charles’ unemployed, skirt-chasing roommate, has a merciless wit and charm that steals many a scene with his deadpan zingers. Gloria Grahame is also unpredictably funny and pathetic as Charles’ mentally unbalanced mother, proving that underneath her screen image as a film noir femme fatale was a gifted comedienne struggling to break out. Triple Play producers Griffin Dunne and Mark Metcalf also turn up in amusing minor roles as the health fanatic boyfriend of Charles’s sister and Ox, Laura’s A-frame salesman husband, respectively.

Gloria Grahame plays the neurotic mother of John Heard in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1981), aka Head Over Heels.

Head Over Heels already had something of a small cult following after its initial premiere under that title in 1979 but after the 1982 re-release as Chilly Scenes of Winter, it has slowly gained a reputation as one of the most idiosyncratic and underrated indie films of the seventies. (Film critic Danny Peary devoted a chapter to it in Cult Movies 3).

John Heard gives one of his finest performances in Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), aka Head Over Heels.

For many years, Chilly Scenes of Winter was not available on any format but Twilight Time released it on Blu-Ray in February 2017 in a limited special edition that includes a commentary by Joan Micklin Silver and producer Amy Robinson. 

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

Other websites of interest:

https://bbook.com/film/joan-micklin-silver-chilly-scenes-of-winter/

http://mediafunhouse.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-leading-man-deceased-artiste-john.html

https://www.popmatters.com/living-the-blues-in-chilly-scenes-of-winter-2495395377.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/john-heard-estranged-son-died-months-actor-article-1.3351146

John Heard, ‘Home Alone’ Dad, Dies at 71

How to describe this blast of creative anarchy from 1965? Fascinating and engaging on so many levels, Man is Not a Bird (aka Covek nije tica, 1965) could be seen as a political parable or a social satire or an offbeat romantic drama or an attempt to merge documentary and fiction in some new form of Eastern European neorealism.

The storyline which involves a polluted mining town, a cheating husband, a flirtacious hairdresser, a traveling turbo engine mechanic, a near-fatal barroom brawl, a Beethoven concert, hypnotism, snake “swallowers” and other circus acts doesn’t lend itself to an easy plot description. Yet, while this might lack the taboo-smashing audaciousness of Dusan Makavejev’s more controversial work (WR: Mysteries of the Organism [1971], Sweet Movie [1974]), Man is Not a Bird is a great place for beginners to acquaint themselves with this true original from Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev, born in 1932

Thanks to the DVD release in the Eclipse line from The Criterion Collection, I was able to revisit the director’s first feature film which he made after almost a decade of documentary filmmaking. Even after 53 years, Man is Not a Bird has a fresh, raw vitality that seems at odds with the film’s grim, oppressive setting – the mining town of Bor in Southern Yugoslavia (it was filmed on location). This is a real hellhole, a place where the sun never shines through the thick factory smoke and soot that covers everything. The landscape is about as inviting as any strip-mining town in Appalachia with barren shelves of rock and dirt, scooped out by machines, surrounding the town and massive mud flats replacing forests and fields.

A rural industrial setting sets the bleak visual design of Man is Not a Bird (1965), directed by Dusan Makavejev.

In some ways, the look of the film prefigures the visual universe of Bela Tarr’s Damnation [1987] and Werckmeister Harmonies [2000] but, unlike that Hungarian filmmaker, Makavejev embues his vision with a sly, subversive wit and restless, kinetic energy. This is apparent from the very start of the film in which a hypnotist addresses an unseen audience, citing several examples of superstitious beliefs and folk remedies before declaring, “Magic is absolute nonsense. You must fight it.”

Real life hypnotist Roko Cirkovic appears in Dusan Makavejec’s Man is Not a Bird (1965).

The hypnotist, who is billed as “Roko, The Youngest Hypnotist in the Balkans” and played by the real hypnotist Roko Cirkovic, serves as a framing device who opens and closes the film and also figures prominently in the center section where his audience participation act becomes a metaphor for the movie.  There is also a second, more peripheral narrator who provides a contrasting viewpoint – a newspaper reporter whose coverage of the “news” reflects the party line and what the government sanctions as the truth. Keep in mind that Man is Not a Bird was made when Yugoslavian filmmakers and their movies were still subject to government approval and were expected to glorify the common worker with socialist-realist works that endorsed Communist Party ideologies. Luckily, things were beginning to loosen up somewhat in 1965 and Makavejev’s film would later be recognized as one of the trailblazers of the Novi film (or Open Film) movement which included fellow countrymen Aleksandar Petrovic (I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967) and Zivojin Pavlovic (The Return, 1966). It was the start of a brief but liberating period that had an undeniable impact on world cinema.

Janez Vrhovec stars as Rudinski, the main protagonist of Man is Not a Bird (1968), the directorial feature debut of Dusan Makavejev.

Man is Not a Bird serves up two storylines. In the main one, Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec), a specialist in turbo machines, arrives in Bor on special assignment and meets Rajka (Milena Dravic), a sexy blonde hairdresser who arranges for him to stay at her parents’ house. An older man and not particularly handsome or charismatic, Rudinski immediately arouses Rajka’s curiosity and romantic fantasies. Maybe it’s because he is constantly on the move, traveling from one job to the next, that he represents freedom and a possible escape from the depressed surroundings of Bor. Or maybe it’s because he’s a bit of an enigma and seemingly immune to Rajka’s charms at first, posing a challenge to her. They soon become lovers and the balance of the relationship begins to change when Rajka realizes her effect on him.

The singer Fatima captivates the working class crowd in Man is Not a Bird (1965), directed by Dusan Makevejev.

In the parallal story, Barbulovic (Stole Arandelovic), a brutish miner, is arrested for his involvement in a barroom brawl in which the singer Fatima was almost stabbed to death. After his release, he returns home to a miserable domestic life with a wife who is more a servant than a companion and constantly playing second fiddle to his mistress. These two narratives never really converge and, in fact, the second one evaporates midway through the film after Barbulovic’s wife (Eva Ras) has an eye-opening revelation after attending Roko’s illusionist show.

Man Is Not a Bird (1965 Yugoslavia) aka Covek nija tica (US release 1969)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev
Shown: Eva Ras, Boris Dvornik

And there are other story threads and incidents which actually serve a subversive purpose in Makavejev’s grand scheme such as two factory workers who steal copper wire in a visually ingenious coverup scheme, a truckdriver Romeo named Bosco (Boris Dvornik) who keeps track of his sexual conquests with notches on his steering wheel and a traveling carnival complete with hoochie-coochie dancers, contortionists, snake charmers and knife throwers.

A traveling carnival becomes a subplot in Dusan Makavejev’s Man is Not a Bird (1965), his debut feature.

The carnival sequence, in particular, conjures up the tacky glamor and tawdry appeal of sideshows in Fellini movies like Variety Lights and La Strada and is further proof that the proletariat prefers the low road instead of the high road (an orchestral performance of Beethoven music) when it comes to culture for their own edification.

The snake charmers make an impression on the audience in Man is Not a Bird (1965).

Makavejev was regarded with suspicion by the government after the release of Man is Not a Bird, which was attacked by official Yugoslav film critics as being too pessimistic, dark and obscure in terms of its political or moral message. His reputation in his own country didn’t improve with his next two movies, Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator [1967] and Innocence Unprotected [1968]. And WR: Mysteries of the Organism from 1971 made him an overnight exile. It was banned in Yugoslavia and he was forced to work in other countries such as France/Holland/Canada (Sweet Movie, 1974), Sweden (Montenegro, 1981) and Australia (The Coca-Cola Kid, 1985). Man is Not a Bird, however, is his glorious beginning, for even if the title suggests an earthbound tale of repression and thwarted dreams, the movie rises above it.

A scene from Dusan Makavejev’s Man is Not a Bird (1965), available from The Criterion Collection.

There are no rules here. Anything goes if it serves the filmmaker’s purpose. Freeze frames, cross cutting to ironic effect, unlikely juxtapositions of music and imagery, jump cuts, parallel storylines, a mix of actors and non-professionals – Man is Not a Bird has an organic and free-wheeling spirit that is clearly its own animal but also borrows freely from such different inspirations as the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Jean Rouch) and American independent filmmakers (John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke). In Makavejev’s own words: “The guerilla can use whatever weapons he likes, paving stones, fire, bullets, slogans, songs. The same with movies. We can use everything that comes to hand: fiction, documents, actualities, titles. ‘Style’ is not important. You must use surprise as a psychological weapon.”

School kids tour a bronze factory and view their future lives in Man is Not a Bird (1965), directed by Dusan Makavejev.

This approach becomes apparent in several striking scenes in Man is Not a Bird. There is a sequence where a group of school children and their guide are touring the copper factory and observing the workers. The dirty, boozing Barbulovic is singled out for praise for his physical prowess and efficiency, though we have already seen evidence of his true character earlier when he was berating and bullying his wife. Their conflict splits over into a public scene which ends up in the police station where Barbulovic admits that he gave away some of his wife’s dresses to his mistress, causing the trouble. He reasons that since the dresses were bought with his money he could give them away to whoever he wanted. This is a model example of the proletariat worker?

Rajka (Milena Dravic) has an affair with a truck driver in Dusan Makavejev’s Man is Not a Bird (1965).

In another key scene, we see Rajka, cheating on her lover Rudinski with the young truck driver. Cutting back and forth between Rajka and the trucker’s sexual tryst in the truck and Rudinski, the guest of honor at a community concert where the orchestra is playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Makavavej mischievously juxtaposes the climax of the symphony with the lovers’ mutual orgasm.

Jan (Janez Vrhovec) has a violent reaction to a government sanctioned award in Man is Not a Bird (1965).

Then there is that unforgettable moment when Rudinski realizes his award for 20 years of service to the government was an empty gesture for propaganda purposes only. Staring at his dejected face in the mirror, he savagely smashes it while a band of musicians, hired to pay tribute to him, continue to make merry music.

Jan (Janez Vrhovec) and Rajka (Milena Dravic) get to know each other in Man is Not a Bird (1965), directed by Dusan Makavejev.

One of my favorite moments in Man is Not a Bird is the first sexual encounter between Rajka and Rudinski which is framed in total darkness with stark lighting illuminating various parts of their anatomy as they become entwined. Instead of conveying intimacy, it results in a sense of alienation and anonymity while displaying a dazzling surface beauty. In contrast, Rajka, in most of her solo scenes, is eroticized by the camera – at work, walking along the street and particularly in bed, where she is glimpsed lying naked under a furry black coverlet.

Man Is Not a Bird (1965 Yugoslavia) aka Covek nija tica (US release 1969)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev
Pictured: Milena Dravic

Milena Dravic is absolutely riveting in this film and would go on to enjoy even greater exposure in Makajevec’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism. In 1980 she won a Best Supporting Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Goran Paskaljevic’s Special Treatment (aka Poseban Tretman) and she continues to work today, mostly in Serbian TV series and occasional films.

Man Is Not a Bird (1965 Yugoslavia) aka Covek nija tica (US release 1969)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev

Makavejev brings us full circle at the end of Man is Not a Bird with Rudinski returning to the road, a tiny figure dwarfed by the bleak landscape, and Roko the hypnotist delivering his final remarks: ” Hypnosis is not ordinary sleep but an induced, artificial sleep…For a man asleep can do nothing, but under hypnosis he can carry out the most complex commands, including murder.”

One of the more memorable scenes from Dusan Makavejev’s Man is Not a Bird (1965) starring Milena Dravic (left).

Yes, the Yugoslav government officials were right to worry about Makavejev. And he would continue to be a thorn in their sides for several years, using his films as liberating weapons against the tyranny of propaganda, conformity and repressive regimes. Man is Not a Bird was first released in the U.S. on VHS by Facets in 1998. In October 2009 The Criterion Collection released Man is Not a Bird on DVD as part of their no frills Eclipse Series (no supplements or Blu-Ray options) in a box set entitled Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical, Eclipse Series 18, which includes two other titles by the director (mentioned in the above article).  *This is a revised and updated version of an article that first appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official film blog for Turner Classic Movies (The blog is now rebranded as Filmstruck on Tumblr).

Other websites of interest:

https://www.thenation.com/article/last-yugoslav-dusan-makavejev/

https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/interview-with-dusan-makavejev

http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/eastern-european-cinema/makavejev/

www.brightlightsfilm.com/33/makavejev.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nyPo86QOuc