Publicity portrait of Aline MacMahon in the 1930s.

Most classic movie fans know Aline MacMahon as the wise-cracking Trixie in Gold Diggers of 1933, the devoted wife of Guy Kibbee in William Keighley’s film version of Babbitt (1934) or the victimized heiress in George B. Seitz’s Kind Lady (1935). These were stand-out roles but she was usually relegated to supporting parts, especially during her contract years at Warners Bros. With her Irish/Russian ancestry, MacMahon was not a conventional leading lady but she had an offbeat beauty that was both soulful and melancholy. These qualities, plus a steely toughness and dry sense of humor, make her performance in Heat Lightning (1934) particularly memorable. It also marked her first film in a leading role after playing character parts in 12 movies.   One of numerous B-movie programmers made quickly and inexpensively by Warner Bros. in their assembly line fashion, Heat Lightning is more ambitious and offbeat than most low-budget melodramas from that studio, introducing multiple plotlines within a brisk 64 minute running time, and boasting a vivid ensemble cast that is highlighted by Aline MacMahon’s star turn. The movie prefigures The Petrified Forest (1936) by two years with a similar setting and plot. Robert Sherwood’s play of The Petrified Forest, first performed on Broadway in 1936, takes place in a diner in a remote part of the Arizona desert where wanted criminal Duke Mantee and his cohorts show up and terrorize the diner employees and customers.

Aline MacMahon (left) and Ann Dvorak play sisters who run a motor inn/cafe/gas station in the Mojave Desert in Heat Lightning (1934).

Heat Lighting, also based on a stage play (by Leon Abrams & George Abbott), is set in the Mojave Desert and focuses on two sisters who run a café/gas station/motor court on a desolate stretch of highway. One fateful day their rest stop plays host to several unexpected overnight guests, including two bank robbers on the lam for murder.

Myra (Ann Dvorak) is pleased by the arrival of George (Preston Foster, center) and Jeff (Lyle Talbot) at their desert motor inn, unaware that they are bank robbers on the lam. (from Heat Lightning, 1934).

The trailer for Heat Lightning, which has all of the subtlety of a circus barker, proclaims: “Fifty miles from the nearest man! Two sisters in the torrid isolation of the desert. One trying to forget her past, the other trying to create one!”

Aline MacMahon plays Olga, a woman with a past in the 1934 melodrama Heat Lightning, directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

While The Petrified Forest, though equally stagebound, is the more accomplished film, Heat Lightning remains a fascinating Pre-Code oddity with a proto-feminist heroine, risqué dialogue and scenes ripe with sexual innuendo. MacMahon plays Olga, a woman with a past who has started a new life for herself in a remote prairie outpost away from the corrupting influences of the city. Determined to prevent her younger sister Myra (Ann Dvorak) from making the same mistakes she did with men, Olga only further alienates Myra by refusing to let her date.

Ann Dvorak plays the love-starved sister of Aline MacMahon, living in a remote part of the Mojave Desert in Heat Lightning (1934).

The dynamic in their relationship changes, however, with the arrival of fleeing criminals George (Preston Foster) and Jeff (Lyle Talbot), who pass themselves off as oilmen on a business trip. George is actually Olga’s former lover Jerry who is now using a pseudonym for his life of crime. It was Olga’s tumultuous relationship with this wanted killer that made her swear off men or harbor any illusions about love and marriage.

Despite her refusal to give into old feelings, Olga feels the stirring of a deep seated desire which is expressed through her slow transformation from a bandana-adorned mechanic in dirty overalls to her appearance in a dress and wearing her hair down. The change in Olga is not lost on Jerry, who decides to manipulate it to his advantage, or Myra, who quickly grasps the connection between her sister and “George” and retaliates by sneaking off with the town wastrel. It all builds to a violent climax which is both inevitable and strangely satisfying.

Glenda Farrell (left) and Ruth Donnelly play bickering traveling companions in the 1934 melodrama, Heat Lightning.

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Heat Lightning veers unevenly between drama and comedy for the duration of its running time but does provide several scene-stealing moments for its supporting cast, all of them familiar faces from the Warner Bros. stock company; Glenda Farrell and Ruth Donnelly as recent divorcees and traveling companions trade tart quips and insults with each other constantly while vying for the attentions of their chauffeur (Frank McHugh); two showgirls and their sugar daddy drop by briefly on their way to Hollywood and, at the start of the movie, Edgar Kennedy as a hen-pecked husband and Jane Darwell as his nagging wife stop for car repairs and provide a good argument against matrimony. In addition, a Mexican family arrives and camps out on the premises, providing a background musical accompaniment to the personal dramas of the motor court guests.  According to notes by the American Film Institute, the Legion of Decency added Heat Lightning to their list of banned films at the time. The same source also stated that “…the Hays Office objected to the seductions that occur in the film because they were in violation of the Production Code, particularly the scene in which “George” leaves “Olga’s” room in the morning and buttons his coat.” The Office also objected to a line of dialogue delivered by one of the showgirls to her gold-digging companion, “Say, it’s your turn to sit up front with that old thigh-pincher.” Though Heat Lightning is relatively tame compared to more racy Pre-Code titles like Baby Face (1933) and Safe in Hell (1931), it is still appropriately cynical, tough-minded and suggestive when it needs to be; it would later be remade as Highway West in 1941 starring Brenda Marshall and Arthur Kennedy.

Aline MacMahon confronts her past and present in a climatic moment in Mervyn LeRoy’s Heat Lightning (1934).

In his autobiography Take One (co-written with Dick Kleiner), Mervyn LeRoy stated that Heat Lightning “was probably the most uncomfortable film I ever made – and the least successful. Fortunately, I have never made what is commonly called a ‘bomb’ but [Heat Lightning] was the closest to being one. That was because it was shot just before I left on my honeymoon trip around the world, so I had to get it done in a hurry. The whole thing was shot in three weeks…we filmed mostly in Needles, California, where the weather was so hot we could barely breathe. Relatively few people saw it – I never have – but it made money. Not much, but something. In those days almost everything made something.”

Everett (Willard Robertson) plays a trusted friend and admirer of Olga (Aline MacMahon) in Heat Lighting (1934).

Typical of the critical reaction to Heat Lightning is this excerpt from the New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall who called it “a drab melodrama with occasional flashes of forced comedy” and went on to write that the movie “does not offer Miss MacMahon the opportunity she deserves, for although she gives a believable performance the role is not well suited to her. Aside from Olga, the part played by Miss MacMahon, the other characters seldom ring true.”

Olga (Aline MacMahon, second from left) and her sister Myra (Ann Dvorak, second from right) show two traveling companions (Glenda Farrell & Ruth Donnelly, far right) to their room in Heat Lightning (1934).

MacMahon would go on to become one of the consummate character actresses of her generation with memorable roles in 1944’s Dragon Seed (she was Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actress), Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948), Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) and Ronald Neame’s I Could Go on Singing (1963). But it is wonderful to see her in an early leading role where she is tough, vulnerable, sexy and sad in ways that were rarely attributes of her one-dimensional character parts.

George (Preston Foster) tries to charm the suspicious Olga (Aline MacMahon) in Heat Lightning (1934), directed by Mervyn Leroy.

After years of obscurity, Heat Lightning was released by the Warner Brothers Archive Collection as a no-frills DVD-R in January 2011 and that remains your best option for viewing the film.  *This is an expanded and updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other websites of interest:

https://travsd.wordpress.com/2018/05/03/aline-macmahon/

http://celluloidclub.blogspot.com/2013/09/aline-macmahon-tribute.html

http://www.moviediva.com/website/MD_root/reviewpages/MDHeatLightning.html

http://pre-code.com/heat-lightning-1934-review-with-aline-macmahon-and-ann-dvorak/

http://www.anndvorak.com/cms/biography/

https://www.vogue.com/article/at-home-in-hollywood-in-a-new-book-margaret-talbot-recalls-the-glitzy-life-of-her-father-actor-lyle-talbot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7F-bQi-j3k

Sylva Koscina and Dirk Bogarde star in Agent 8 3/4 (aka Hot Enough for June, 1964), directed by Ralph Thomas.

Not all of the spy thrillers that followed in the wake of the James Bond craze, which began in 1962 with Dr. No, were pale imitations or grade B action-adventure fare. There were exceptions in this burgeoning genre and one of the best was Agent 8 ¾ (1964, aka Hot Enough for June). Instead of relying on high tech gadgetry, special effects and slam bang action sequences, this British import took a droll, tongue-in-cheek approach to the spy genre and had fun parodying the politics of the Cold War era in its tale of an aspiring novelist being used by British Intelligence as a pawn in their spy games with Communist foes in Prague. 

The fast-paced satire begins when unemployed writer Nicholas Whistler (Dirk Bogarde) is forced to take the government job he is offered in order to keep his benefits. Colonel Cunliffe (Robert Morley), his new employer, deliberately keeps Whistler in the dark about the nature of his new work as a translator (he speaks fluent Czech) for an international glass company. Sent on assignment to Prague, he quickly learns he is being used as a courier and that his Czech guide book contains top secret information for his anonymous contact behind the Iron Curtain.

Italian promotional poster for Agent 8 3/4 aka Hot Enough for June (1964)

Once he realizes he is being used as a dispensable dupe by Colonel Cunliffe, he takes matters into his own hands and tries to make his way to the safety of the British Embassy before Simoneva (Leo McKern), head of Czech Intelligence, can capture him. Complications arise when Whistler falls in love with his alluring chauffeur Vlasta (Sylva Koscina), who turns out to be a secret agent and the daughter of Simoneva.

Sylva Koscina and Dirk Bogarde play spy games in Prague in the Cold War comedy Hot Enough for June, which was released in the U.S. as Agent 8 3/4 (1964).

Agent 8 ¾ was a joint collaboration between producer Betty Box and director Ralph Thomas; together they had worked with Dirk Bogarde as their star numerous times before on such films as Doctor at Large (1957), Campbell’s Kingdom (1957) and A Tale of Two Cities (1958). After the excellent critical notices he had received for Victim (1961) and The Servant (1963), Bogarde was becoming more particular about his film roles and he didn’t want to do Agent 8 ¾. He initially passed on the part and Tom Courtenay agreed to play the lead but then financial obligations made Bogarde change his mind.

Dirk Bogarde was initially reluctant to make a spy spoof but eventually agreed to star in Agent 8 3/4 (1964) because he needed the money.

After the first draft of the screenplay by Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler was rejected by the producers, a new screenplay by Lukas Heller (based on the novel by Lionel Davidson) was approved and production began with Bogarde reporting for work at Pinewood Studios where most of the interiors were shot. The cast and crew also traveled to Padua, Italy for some location shooting – a stand-in for Prague – since the filmmakers were not allowed to shoot in communist-controlled Czechoslovakia.

Dirk Bogarde and Sylva Koscina improve British-Czech relations in the Cold War spy spoof, Agent 8 3/4 (aka Hot Enough for June, 1964).

British critics were not very receptive to Agent 8 ¾ and felt it didn’t work as a comedy or an espionage thriller. One writer, commenting on Bogarde’s performance, wrote “He is the sort of secret agent who looks as menacing as a pop gun and probably isn’t even licensed to kill grouse.”

Dirk Bogarde (hiding in closet) tries to evade the Czech secret police led by Leo McKern (far right) in Hot Enough for June (aka Agent 8 3/4) from 1964.

Part of the disappointed expectations could be blamed on the film’s promotion which boasted the tag lines, “She’s an Eye Catcher…He’s a Spy Catcher in the Comedy of the Year!” and “He’s a Special Kind of Spy…he doesn’t know enough to come in from the cold” (an in-joke reference to John le Carre’s much more somber espionage tale, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1965).Yet Agent 8 ¾ was not a broad comedy at all but a subtle, witty look at East-West relations in the context of a secret agent satire. The cast is first rate with Robert Morley and Leo McKern in superb form and the romance between Bogarde and the sexy and delightful Sylva Koscina draws favorable comparisons to the similar themed Ninotchka (1939) with its capitalist/communist love match in the form of Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas.

Robert Morley (left) and Dirk Bogarde star in the 1964 spy comedy, Agent 8 3/4 (aka Hot Enough for June).

In the U.S. where Too Hot for June (a reference to a secret code phrase in the film) was released under the title, Agent 8 ¾, the critics were more complimentary with Variety calling it an “amiable enough spoof of espionage,” adding that, “Most of the humor comes from witty prods at the expense of the Foreign Office and the Iron Curtain Party system.” Still, the film was no box office smash but it stands out as an intelligent entertainment compared to some of the silly spy parodies that followed and it looks even better now.

Agent 8 ¾ was first released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. by VCI Entertainment in August 2011. In February 2016 the UK distributor Network released a PAL Blu-Ray version under the original title Hot Enough for June (You will need an all-region DVD to view this). Neither version offers much in the way of supplements other than the theatrical trailer and a photo gallery but it is good to see high definition transfers of this rarely screened title. * This is a revised and expanded version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other website links of interest:

https://news.expats.cz/movies-tv/15-best-hollywood-movie-shot-in-prague/

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/mar/20/guardianobituaries.filmnews

http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/sylvakoscina.html

http://discoveringdirkbogarde.blogspot.com/2009/11/hot-enough-for-june-1964.html

http://dirkbogarde.co.uk/bio/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKYj5odhIM

At the 23rd San Francisco Silent Film Festival (May 30-June 3, 2018), the Castro Theater played host to a diverse program of silent era masterpieces accompanied by live music, performed by either solo musicians, small ensembles or orchestras. Some of the new restorations screened included Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita (1923) starring Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton’s Battling Butler (1926), the 1928 version of The Man Who Laughs with Conrad Veidt and a 1929 German version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, directed by Richard Oswald. As always, the festival also unveils several lesser known titles and rarities such as a magnificent new restoration of Prapancha Pash (aka A Throw of Dice), a 1929 Indian epic produced by Himansu Rai and directed by German filmmaker Franz Osten. A key pioneer effort from the early silent years of Indian cinema, A Throw of Dice holds up beautifully after almost ninety years with its exotic mix of adventure, romance, pageantry and sensuality. And it is an excellent entry point for any silent film beginner.

But first a little background information. India’s film industry, often referred to as Bollywood, has been a major player in world cinema since 1947 when it exponentially increased movie production with influential directors such as Bimal Roy and Mehboob Khan at the helm, creating a national cinema that came to define the Bollywood archetype. But the silent era was a different story. More than eighty percent of the movies being screened in India at that time were imported from the U.S. and other countries. It wasn’t until the mid-1920s that a domestic industry really began to take shape.

Indian filmmaker Bimal Roy

A major turning point occurred in 1924 when lawyer-turner-actor Himansu Rai and playwright Niranjan Pal formed a partnership with Franz Osten to produce a film in India with financial backing from the Munich-based Emelka Film Company where Osten was a director. The collaboration was timely because Europeans, particularly in Germany, had become fascinated by Eastern religions and philosophy. German movie audiences had already been tempted by Paul Wegener’s Der Yoghi (The Yogi, 1921) and Joe May’s two-part epic Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1921), written for the screen by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou from Harbou’s own orientalist novel about the building of the Taj Mahal.  A distinct approach, however, was being offered by the Rai-Pal-Osten collaboration. Not only would their film be shot on real locations in India but it would feature an all-Indian cast and focus on Indian religious and mythological subjects. Osten would direct and his German crew would provide the technical assistance. The Light of India (1925), based on Erwin Arnold’s poem on the life of Buddha, encouraged a second collaboration also financed in Europe, Shiraz (1928), which, like The Indian Tomb, was a fictitious romance about the origins of the Taj Mahal. Their third film, A Throw of Dice (Prapancha Pash, 1929), turned out to be their biggest box-office triumph.Based on an episode in the Sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata, A Throw of Dice is the tale of two royal cousins with adjoining kingdoms. King Sohat (Himansu Rai) and King Ranjit (Charu Roy) share a love of gambling and hunting, but Sohat has ulterior motives for inviting Ranjit on a tiger safari. He wants his henchman Kirkabar (Modhu Bose) to murder Ranjit and stage it as an accident so Sohat can take control of Ranjit’s territory. Luckily, Ranjit is only wounded and can be nursed back to health by Kanwa (Sarada Gupta) and his daughter Sunita (Seeta Devi), who live in seclusion nearby. Ranjit and Sunita fall in love and plan to marry, but Sohat, smitten by Sunita’s beauty, sets in motion an insidious new plot that culminates in a fateful game of dice.

King Ranjit (Charu Roy, left) takes loaded dice from his devious cousin King Sohat (Himansu Rai) in A Throw of Dice (1929), an early Bollywood epic.

In many ways, A Throw of Dice can be seen as an early prototype of the modern-day Bollywood blockbuster, minus the musical numbers. The film has spectacle, attractive leads, and an audience-pleasing good-versus-evil story arc enlivened with romantic passion, deceit, and intrigue on a grand scale. Shot in Rajasthan, the Cecil B. DeMille- worthy production used ten thousand extras, one thousand horses, and fifty elephants from the royal houses of Jaipur, Undaipur, and Mysore. Director Osten and cinematographer Emil Schünemann took advantage of the locations to stage some memorable set pieces, for instance, the opening jungle trek with its wildlife footage of monkeys, snakes, birds, and crocodiles fleeing the sound of the approaching hunters and the full-scale armed assault on Sohat’s kingdom by Ranjit’s forces.

Numerous wild animals from the jungles of India along with a cast of thousands are featured in the 1929 epic A Throw of Dice.

Osten’s attention to visual detail is often remarkably subtle but effective in transforming inanimate objects like Ranjit’s stolen dagger and Sohat’s trick dice into supporting players in the royal drama. He skillfully uses montages to convey opulence and exoticism in two atmospheric segments that frame the wedding feast of Ranjit and Sunita. The first introduces an eccentric parade of jugglers, fire-eaters, sword swallowers, snake charmers, and other performers, while the second depicts the elaborate preparation of the main event with scores of metalworkers, weavers, florists, embroiders, and elephant-decorators frantically working in tandem.

The opulent wedding sequence in A Throw of Dice (1929) is conveyed through a montage of scenes that display the scope and detail of the festivities.

A Throw of Dice, the crowning achievement of the Rai-Pal-Osten collaboration, held the promise of continued international success for the filmmakers, but their plans were interrupted by unforeseen developments in the industry and the wider world. The arrival of talkies quickly put an end to silent filmmaking and, in a more sinister turn of events, the German film industry fell under the control of the National Socialists who preferred to make films that glorified the ideology of Nazi Germany. Rai and Pal also encountered resistance to their coproductions from the India Cinematograph Committee, which, while concerned with sensitive political and religious content, focused primarily on foreign competition to British releases, in particular from Hollywood.

A handmaiden prepares Sunita (Seeta Devi, right) for her marriage ceremony in A Throw of Dice (1929).

Despite these setbacks, Rai, Pal, and actress Devika Rani, along with director Franz Osten, went on to form Bombay Talkies in 1934. It became one of the biggest film studios in India and produced popular movies such as Achhut Kanya (1936), a social drama about caste system injustice, and the lavish romance Kangan (1939), which helped shape the coming Bollywood style. The year 1934 was also when Osten fled Germany for self-imposed exile in Mumbai, then known as Bombay. Osten was in India in 1940 when arrested by the British and sent to an internment camp, effectively ending his film work with Rai and Pal. After his release, Osten returned home to Bavaria, where he worked at brother Peter’s production company through the war then spent his final years as the director of a heath spa.

Himansu Rai stars as the treacherous King Sohat in the Indian epic, A Throw of Dice (1929), directed by Franz Osten.

For years, Himansu Rai had been overlooked as an important film pioneer in the development of Indian cinema. The recovery of this trilogy has allowed for a reevaluation of his role, as the three films demonstrate a polished technical expertise and a natural acting style that influenced future filmmakers. In his own A Throw of Dice performance, Rai depicts King Sohat’s villainy through feigned generosity and deceitful smiles rather than in melodramatic pantomime.

King Ranjit (Charu Roy, right) confronts his evil cousin King Sohat in A Throw of Dice (1929).

It is worth noting that Charu Ray, who plays the dashing King Ranjit, rarely acted in films. A Bengali painter and cartoonist, he entered the film industry as a set designer and eventually moved into the director’s chair. His 1936 feature Bangalee was greatly admired by director Satyajit Ray for its realistic depiction of the Bengali middle class and an overt avoidance of Hollywood influences. Throw of Dice lead actress Seeta Devi is a beguiling screen presence who also appeared in Light of Asia and Shiraz but had few roles in the sound era.

King Ranjit (Charu Roy) and his bride to be Sunita (Seeta Devi) enjoy the calm before the storm in the 1929 epic, A Throw of Dice.

Devika Rani must also be singled out for her contributions to the costumes and sets on A Throw of Dice. A designer for a major art studio in London, she had met Rai when he was finishing Shiraz and they soon married. They went to Germany for the final edit of A Throw of Dice and there Rani became a trainee in the Erich Pommer unit at Ufa. This period, which included working on the set of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, was instrumental in Rani’s later career not only as a top actress in Indian sound films but also an influential film producer and studio head.

The rousing climax of A Throw of Dice (1929) includes a cast of thousands filmed on location in India.

It is miraculous that A Throw of Dice exists today considering that most of the estimated thirteen-hundred silent films made in India were destroyed in film vault fires, leaving only a handful of surviving movies. At some point in 1945, all three films in the Rai-Pal-Osten trilogy were deposited at the British Film Institute where they were forgotten, until recent years when a restoration effort began in earnest to preserve them. Together, they represent a remarkable transition period when impressive technical advances and epic tales of ancient India helped lead the way to a vibrant national cinema.  

A Throw of Dice is currently available on DVD from Kino Lorber films but there is nothing to compare with seeing the film on the big screen with live musical accompaniment.

* This is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the program for the 2018 San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Kanwa (Sarada Gupta) and his daughter Sunita (Seeta Devi) decide to offer refuge and medicinal aid to a wounded king in A Throw of Dice (1929).

Other website links of interest:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/25/birth-indias-film-industry-movies-mumbai

http://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/restoring-the-romance-of-india/article19966860.ece

http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2007/08/27/a_throw_of_dice_2007_review.shtml

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/edit-page/Spare-a-thought-for-Niranjan-Pal/articleshow/13708116.cms

Lives in film no. 5 – Niranjan Pal

First, let me get this out of the way. The Bloodstained Lawn (Italian title: Il Prato macchiato di Rosso, 1973) is a haphazard mash-up of a genre film, but an entertaining one for Eurotrash completists. The English language title suggests it might be a giallo or a horror film or even a poliziotteschi (crime drama). Actually, it has some elements of those with some sci-fi flavoring added. The central premise involves a form of vampirism which is a complete departure from the old school mythology of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and much closer to the metaphorical horrors of Alain Jessua’s Shock Treatment (French title: Traitement de Choc, 1973) and Rod Hardy’s Thirst (1979). Oddly enough, director Riccardo Ghione seems much less interested in playing up the horrific aspects of the story than depicting bourgeois decadence and the exploitation of the disenfranchised as a quasi-political fantasy.

There is no need to issue spoiler alerts because Ghione reveals his hand at the beginning of The Bloodstained Lawn as we see undercover cop (Nino Castelnuovo) investigate a suspicious wine shipment. He opens a bottle and pours out, not red wine, but human blood. It seems someone is using a vineyard as a front for an illegal blood smuggling operation. Of course, it’s much worse than that and we soon learn that drifters, winos, sex workers and other people with no ties to family or friends are being lured to a villa/clinic with an offer of free room and board with no strings attached.

The unholy three from The Bloodstained Lawn (Italian Title: Il Prato macchiato di Rosso, 1973) are, from left to right, Claudio Biava, Enzo Tarascio & Marina Malfatti.

All of these “guests” are being procured for one purpose only – their blood – and the masterminds behind it are Dr. Antonio Genovese (Enzo Tarascio), his wife Nina (Marina Malfatti) and her brother Alfiero (Claudio Biava), whose role is not dissimilar to Alida Valli’s predatory medical assistant in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960). Despite recent reports of hitchhikers and other people missing in the area, Max (George Willing), a free-spirited hippie musician and his girlfriend (Daniela Caroli), accept an invitation from Alfiero to kick back and relax at the luxurious estate of his sister. After they are settled in, the couple meet the other lodgers – an alcoholic tramp (Lucio Dalla), a gypsy girl (Barbara Marzano) and a prostitute (Dominique Boschero) – but no one seems to question their hosts’ generous hospitality or even perceive that the entire setup is a bit strange.

Max (George Willing) and his girlfriend (Daniela Caroli, far right) don’t seem to detect anything strange about their host Nina (Marina Malfatti) in the oddball horror thriller, The Bloodstained Lawn (1973), directed by Riccardo Ghione.

Hiding in plain sight in the guest lounge is a metal sculpture-like object by the wall which looks look a robot with a cartoon face, vacuum cleaner tube appendages and metal incisor hands. Only Max’s girlfriend seems somewhat disturbed by its presence but this clunky-looking creation of Dr. Genovese is the film’s intended piece de resistance. When activated by the mad doctor, the vampire machine sinks its metal fangs into the victim and extracts the blood through a pump. As directed by Ghione, these sequences, which should be chilling, are as amusingly inept as Bela Lugosi wrestling with a rubber squid in the climax to Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster (1955). And that’s part of the film’s goofy appeal.

The vampire machine featured in The Bloodstained Lawn (1973) is one of the more clunky and inept gizmos to ever appear in a horror film.

We’ll never know if Ghione might have been Italy’s answer to Ed Wood since he only directed three films which were distributed theatrically in Europe and never seen in the U.S. The Bloodstained Lawn was his final effort; the other two were La rivoluzione sessuale (1968), co-scripted by Dario Argento and focusing on a sexual experiment involving the theories of Wilhelm Reich, and A cuore freddo (1971), a drama of marital discord between a bourgeois husband and his rebellious wife.  Ghione was better known in the Italian film industry as a screenwriter and/or story contributor whose credits were almost always shared with other screenwriters on undistinguished commercial fare, usually erotic dramas (1985’s Scandalous Gilda) or sex comedies (1986’s Delizia). But if The Bloodstained Lawn is representative of Ghione in the director’s chair then the following qualities define his auteur approach: languid, semi-static pacing, conspicuous repetition of musical motifs, a general failure to suspend disbelief and erratic continuity (one character is dropped from the storyline without explanation or resolution while other characters are introduced but remain nameless throughout the film like Sam’s girlfriend).

Max’s unidentified girlfriend (played by Daniela Caroli) is comforted by undercover police detective (matinee idol Nino Castelnuovo) in Riccardo Ghione’s The Bloodstained Lawn (1973).

There are also blatant gaffes, possibly due to a rushed shooting schedule and low budget, such as a scene where the door to a cold storage morgue is opened and we see one of the corpses close her eyes. And Ghione’s staging of some key would-be erotic sequences (mostly fixated on female nudity) are so awkward you can almost feel the actors’ embarrassment, particularly the sequence where Max joins his girlfriend in the shower when the water turns to wine and they grope and wallow together in the red liquid. There is also an over-the-top scene where three of the guests get drunk on champagne in a hall of distorted mirrors and strip while their hosts observe them like laboratory rats. It sounds promising in theory but comes off like a bad night at the actor’s improv.

Water turns to blood red wine in the infamous shower sequence from The Bloodstained Lawn (1973), starring George Willing and Daniela Caroli as the bathing couple.

As a result, The Bloodstained Lawn often seems like an unholy union of exploitation film and art movie pretension. Yet the film’s uncertain tone and deadpan absurdity make it both laughable and dumbfounding. And there are things to savor here for Italian cinema cultists.  Take, for instance, the music score by Teo Usuelli, a composer who has worked many times with director Marco Ferreri over the years, starting with The Conjugal Bed (1963) and continuing with The Ape Woman (1964), The Wedding March (1966), The Man with the Balloons (1968), Dillinger is Dead (1969) and others. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, you might recognize one of his most famous movie themes which was played in the background in The Big Lebowski (1998). It’s the scene where the Dude (Jeff Bridges) crashes a party thrown by pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara). The addictive, hypnotic tune featuring vocalist Edda Del ‘Orso chanting the word “sexually” over and over again was first heard in the 1972 Silvio Amadio giallo Alla ricerca del piacere (aka Amuck) and Usuelli creates a similarly propulsive, driving theme song in The Bloodstained Lawn, utilized most effectively while Alfiero is cruising for new victims. Usuelli’s score definitely perks up several inane sequences and even exudes a tongue-in-cheek quality with a sugary, bubble gum pop motif (featuring the raspy vocals of Lucio Dalla) that is used during scenes where the hippie couple frolic on the villa’s lawn or in the bucolic countryside.

An outrageous set design from The Bloodstained Lawn (1973) which seems inspired by a somewhat similar scene in Piero Schivazappa’s The Frightened Woman (1969).

The production design by Arrigo Equini has some inspired bad taste moments. One involves a tautly stretched fabric wall used as a room divider which is designed to look like an abstract female nude with a vagina-like opening in the center. Naturally the uncouth house guest Max plunges through it head first followed by the other partygoers. This set piece seems heavily influenced by similar woman’s-body-swallowing-a-man symbolism from the far superior psycho-sexual melodrama, Piero Schivazappa’s The Frightened Woman (1969) aka The Laughing Woman.

A shocking discovery is made in the basement of a vineyard owner’s villa in The Bloodstained Lawn (1973).

And the scene where the hippie couple discover previous victims of their hosts, artistically arranged as a pile of nude male and female bodies like some surreal Weegee photograph, is memorably odd.

Nino Castelnuovo (left) plays an undercover police detective in this scene from The Bloodstained Lawn (1973) featuring one of several non-professional actors from the Italian village of Castell ‘Arquato.

Another point of interest is the setting for The Bloodstained Lawn which was filmed in the quaint town of Castell ‘Arquato in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna. Ghione populated a lot of the supporting roles in his film with the local residents, especially in two scenes with Nino Castelnuovo – one in which he visits a nightclub and the other as he tours the winemaking facilities of the Genovese family, which was filmed at the Testa wine cellars.

Marina Malfatti stars as the diabolical Nina, a wealthy vineyard owner who fronts an illegal blood operation in The Bloodstained Lawn (aka Il prato macchaito di rosso, 1973).

But the real draw here is the cast starting with the iconic Marina Malfatti as the haughty Aryan mistress of the villa who, while listening to Wagner, declares, “I really love German music. It makes us feel bigger, more important. It is music, without a doubt, for a superior race.” Later in the film she rationalizes her crimes to her surviving guests: “Whenever there are wars and injured people blood is worth a lot. More than petrol or gold and it’s needed to save the lives of those who can afford it. You’ve seen my victims. Prostitutes, drunks, gypsies, drifters like you. People without roots. No one will cry for them.”

Popular Italian singer Lucio Dalla plays a homeless wino who becomes an unwitting victim of his host’s weird experiments in The Bloodstained Lawn (1973), co-starring Enzo Tarascio (right) as the demented Dr. Genovese.

What is particularly strange about The Bloodstained Lawn is how little sympathy or interest is generated by Ghione for the victims. They are a dim-witted lot, self-indulgent, lazy and opportunistic. It is almost as if the director is making a case for Nina’s master race rants.

Marina Malfatti stars in the 1972 giallo Seven Blood-Stained Orchids as pictured in this German lobbycard.

Malfatti manages to make the most of this poorly written role and convey volumes with a glance, whether it be contempt for her infantile husband or unrequited lust for her brother Alfiero. The Bloodstained Lawn was made toward the end of Malfatti’s peak years in Italian cinema and some of her best known work was already behind her including seminal giallos like The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971), Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972), All the Colors of the Dark (1972) and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972). Malfatti also appeared in some spaghetti westerns such as Gunman of One Hundred Crosses (1971) and A Noose is Waiting for You Trinity (1972).

Italian character actor Enzo Tarascio has appeared in numerous films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971).

Providing comic relief, which may or may not be intentional, is Enzo Tarascio as the highly eccentric Dr. Genovese. Sporting an ever-changing wardrobe of outrageously oversized bow ties in psychedelic or earth tone hues, Tarascio has fun with his mad scientist character, often bemoaning his wife’s indifference to his genius. “Why don’t you understand my poetic world? Science is poetry. I’m not interested in money.” The few glimpses we get of Dr. Genovese’s genius, however, suggests he is not really a scientist at all but a outre gag gift inventor. Besides the ridiculous vampire machine conception, we get brief shots of a revolving, life size human head that cackles like a witch, an inflatable, beating heart with attached blood capillaries and a mechanized grinning teeth gadget that giggles.

A close up of the absurd vampire machine from Riccardo Ghione’s The Bloodstained Lawn (1973).

Tarascio has the look of some jaded aristocrat straight out of one of Jean Rollin’s erotic vampire films but he has never appeared in one of those. Among his more famous supporting roles are Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), the Strangers-on-a-Train inspired The Designated Victim (1971), the spaghetti western Trinity is STILL My Name (1971) and the gory gallo, The Dead Are Alive (1972).

Nino Castelnuovo plays an undercover police detective who investigates a suspicious wine shipment in The Bloodstained Lawn (1973).

Nino Castelnuovo is easily the most high profile actor in the cast of The Bloodstained Lawn but his character, a police detective posing as a UNESCO agent, is relegated to a subplot and comes off as a plodding, barely competent investigator. He does arrive to save the day in a very flat, unsuspenseful climax but the role is beneath Castelnuovo’s talents and he clearly looks bored. In his early years he was quite the matinee idol and appeared in such art-house award winners like Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Les Creatures (1966). He later branched out into a variety of European genre and exploitation films such as Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (1969), The 5-Man Army (1969) and Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975).

Nino Castelnuovo co-stars with Daniele Gaubert in Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (1969).

Probably the most curious casting coup of The Bloodstained Lawn is Lucio Dalla. He was considered one of the most popular musicians/singers in Italian pop music in the second half of the 20th century reaching superstar status in the 80s. He also composed the music scores for several films including Mario Monicelli’s I Picari (1987) and winning David di Donatello awards (the Italian equivalent of the Oscar) for Borotalco (1982) – Best Music – and Il Frullo del passero (1988) – Best Song. Why he wanted to play a drunken tramp in Ghione’s film is a mystery but he treats the role as a comic stereotype. To his credit, he appears to be the only houseguest who figures out what is actually going on behind the scenes but his alcoholic state renders him useless.

Lucio Dalla, the popular Italian singer/musician, plays an alcoholic tramp in The Bloodstained Lawn (1973).

The Bloodstained Lawn was originally released on DVD on the CineKult label in 2012 under the Italian title Il prato macchiato di rosso. It is the Italian language version and may still be available through various international DVD distributors if you own an all-region DVD player. A better option is a version with English subtitles available through European Trash Cinema.  Other website links of interest:

http://www.legacy.com/ns/marina-malfatti-obituary/180271775

http://www.italymagazine.com/italy/music/sudden-death-lucio-dalla-beloved-italian-singer-songwriter

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lucio-dalla-mn0000252172/biography

https://play.google.com/store/music/artist/Teo_Usuelli?id=Andkcvk77idyahopsab5mkkzqqu&hl=en

Between 1941 and 1945 as World War II engulfed the world most major studios in Hollywood demonstrated their patriotism by producing numerous flag-waving musicals in support of the troops and to raise money for the war effort. Warner Bros. was represented by This is the Army (1943), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) and Hollywood Canteen (1944); Paramount served up Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Here Come the Waves (1944); Universal had a major hit with Buck Privates (1941) starring Abbott & Costello and The Andrew Sisters; 20^th-Century-Fox unveiled the mind-warping visual excess of Busby Berkeley’s The Gangs All Here (1943) and MGM brought their signature gloss and glamor to Thousands Cheer (1943) and Anchors Aweigh (1945). But probably one of the biggest extravaganzas of all in terms of star cameos and musical guests was Stage Door Canteen (1943), released by United Artists.  

More interesting as a time capsule than an example of great filmmaking, Stage Door Canteen (1943) provides a fascinating glimpse of the attitudes, fashions and general mood of the country during World War II. Set in the famous Stage Door Canteen in New York City which provided entertainment and social activities for servicemen prior to their embarkation for points unknown, this patriotic all-star rally is framed by a simple plot device: a female canteen worker who aspires to be an actress meets a visiting soldier who is quickly smitten with her. During the course of their rocky romance – most of which unfolds on the floor of the canteen – we are treated to a non-stop musical variety show interspersed with countless surprise guests among the canteen’s volunteer workers.  The canteen concept was originally conceived by members of the entertainment industry during the turbulent days of World War II as a community service for America’s servicemen. The Hollywood Canteen in Los Angeles was created for soldiers shipping out for service from the West coast while the Stage Door Canteen in the Big Apple served military men sailing or flying out from the East coast.  Designed as welcoming centers where servicemen could enjoy a good meal served by a celebrity, hear music from a popular band or orchestra, and dance with a famous actress, the canteens did their part to boost the morale of America’s fighting men. Often the last stateside face a soldier might see was a famous star or entertainer he met at the canteen. And Stage Door Canteen is a great snapshot of this unique soldiers’ club.

Cheryl Walker and William Terry provide the romantic subplot to the all-star musical/comedy revue, Stage Door Canteen (1943).

By today’s standards, the film is unashamedly sentimental, corny and relentlessly patriotic. The romance between the actress and the soldier isn’t very compelling and the performances by Cheryl Walker and William Terry are bland. On the other hand, the film does a great job of documenting the nightly atmosphere of the canteen; the excitement of the soldiers as they enter the club, the spontaneous interaction of men and women on the dance floor (dig that crazy jitterbugging couple!), the odd sight of a famous actor serving coffee or bussing tables.

George Raft (center, facing right) pops up in a cameo role in Stage Door Canteen (1943), directed by Frank Borzage.

Equally interesting is the way the film pays tribute to America’s war allies by staging various scenes with American soldiers interacting with their Russian, Chinese, Australian, and British counterparts. One of the more awkward sequences occurs when a group of Chinese fighter pilots are hoisted up on the shoulders of American soldiers and paraded through the canteen in a show of solidarity while the orchestra strikes up “The Chinese Fighting March” (every American orchestra knows it by heart, right?).

Merle Oberon (center) with Chinese troops and Dame May Whitty (on right) in Stage Door Canteen (1943), produced by Sol Lesser.

Just prior to this, we are witness to some comic bantering between the two groups that would now be condemned by the politically correct. For example, a U.S. serviceman says to the Chinese flyer, “Too bad we don’t have any chop suey for you Chinese boys, I reckon.” The Chinese pilot’s semi-sarcastic rebuttal is “I’m thinking of introducing chop suey to China when I get back as the latest American novelty.” And there are other unexpected but humorous culture clashes on the canteen floor.

Stage legend Katharine Cornell entertains the soldiers in the all-star musical, Stage Door Canteen (1943).

The best reason to experience all 135 minutes of Stage Door Canteen is for the staggering number of celebrities and entertainers who are paraded across the screen during the course of the film. You’ll catch glimpses of Tallulah Bankhead, George Raft, Paul Muni, Broadway theater legends Katharine Cornell,  Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Merle Oberon, Dame May Whitty, Ed Wynn, Ralph Bellamy, Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy.

Count Basie (far left) and His Orchestra with vocalist Ethel Waters are one of the musical highlights in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

But the genuine highlights include a very young Peggy Lee performing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” with Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, Ethel Waters singing “Quicksand” to the accompaniment of Count Basie and His Orchestra, rhumba king Xavier Cugat’s rendition of “She’s a Bombshell,” a classical music segment featuring violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, Gypsy Rose Lee doing a stylish striptease and a brief cameo by Harpo Marx in pursuit of a terrified hostess.

Harpo Marx shows up to chase the club hostesses in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

There are plenty of memorably odd moments as well. Ethel Merman slams home a completely forgettable tune through the sheer force of her personality while Dame Judith Anderson makes an unlikely hostess, gamely trying to convince the boys that she really isn’t like that creepy Miss Danvers from Rebecca (1940).

Katharine Hepburn gives Cheryl Walker a patriotic pep talk in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

Katharine Hepburn shows up toward the end to give a keep-a-stiff-upper-lip speech to our heartbroken heroine and there’s also a surprising “gay” moment between Franklin Pangborn and Johnny Weissmuller in the kitchen as they wash dishes. Weissmuller decides it’s too hot to work in his shirt and strips down, prompting Pangborn to glance at Weissmuller’s chest and then pound his own, imitating the famous Tarzan yell.

Franklin Pangborn (left) and screen Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller provide one of the more unexpected moments in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

Stage Door Canteen was produced by Sol Lesser for United Artists and designed as a huge benefit show, with eighty-six and a half percent of the profits going to the American Theatre Wing to establish additional canteens across the U.S. Director Frank Borzage shot half the film in New York and half in Los Angeles in order to accommodate actors who were starring in Broadway productions.

Edgar Bergen & his dummy Charlie McCarthy are one of the comic novelty acts featured in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

The film’s premise was not particularly unique, however, and Warner Brothers produced two similar features – This is the Army (1943) and Hollywood Canteen (1944) – with all proceeds going to Army relief. It is also interesting to note that among the top ten box office hits of 1943, This is the Army took the number one spot and Stage Door Canteen was ranked number five. During the 1944 Oscar race, Stage Door Canteen received two Academy Award nominations – one for Best Music Score (by Freddie Rich) and one for Best Song, “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye” (by James V. Monaco and Al Dubin). However, Ray Heindorf’s score for This is the Army captured the award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture while “You’ll Never Know” from Hello, Frisco, Hello received the Oscar for Best Song.

At some point, Stage Door Canteen lost its copyright protection and became a public domain title which explains while there have been so many VHS and DVD copies of the film made available by different distribution companies over the years. It is also difficult to find the original 132 minute version; most available copies are the edited 93-minute TV version. And like most public domain films the print and sound quality of Stage Door Canteen is passable but it could look and sound so much better if someone were willing to fund a complete restoration.  *This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin appears in an atmospheric musical sequence in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

Other website links of interest:

http://www.stagedoorcanteen.co.uk/ww2-history.html

https://variety.com/1942/film/reviews/stage-door-canteen-1200414033/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sol-Lesser

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/hollywoods-dream-factory-during-world-war-ii/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrsPsfdaS00

The Psychotronic Video Guide calls it “One of the oddest movies of the fifties,” Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide deems it a “trash classic,” and any movie buff who has ever seen it will probably concur that Shack Out on 101 (1955) is easily the nuttiest B-movie to emerge in the Cold War era when paranoia over communist infiltration provided Hollywood with a new type of villain.  

In many of these films, “The Red Menace” was a lot closer than you thought. A Marxist enemy agent could be your new husband (The Woman on Pier 13 [1949, aka I Married a Communist]), a family member (My Son John [1952]) or even an alien life form (Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956]). In Shack Out on 101, the Commie threat is represented, god forbid, by a short order cook at a greasy spoon diner. As impersonated by Lee Marvin in one of his most entertaining performances, this character, known as Slob, passes himself off as a Neanderthal knucklehead but is in reality a cunning and deadly saboteur.

Lee Marvin, ten years before his Oscar-winning Best Actor role in Cat Ballou, plays a communist spy posing as a numbshell cook in Shack Out on 101 (1955).

Barry Gifford, whose novel Wild at Heart was adapted to the screen in 1990 by David Lynch and who co-wrote the screenplay for Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), had this to say about Shack Out on 101: “It’s as if William Inge were forced by the government to rewrite some Chekhov play, but set in McCarthy-era America, and he took twenty Valium, washed them down with Old Crow, and dashed it off as the drug grabbed his brain and put him in Palookaville.”  Indeed, the main protagonists of Shack Out on 101 exist in their own tiny, claustrophobic universe, a grubby little pit stop on an isolated stretch of the Pacific coast. Like some surreal version of The Petrified Forest (1936), most of the narrative unfolds on an interior set where a mounted marlin, fishnets, portholes, a jukebox and a few barstools provide the minimalistic decor.  One of the few exterior scenes (shot on location in Malibu, California) occurs in the unusual opening scene as a sexy blonde (Terry Moore) sunbathes on the beach and suddenly finds herself in extreme lip-lock mode with a stranger (Lee Marvin). Or so it seems. What starts out looking like a potential rape becomes clumsy horseplay as we realize the wrestling couple are co-workers at a hamburger joint and the waitress Kotty is experienced in routinely rebuffing the advances of Slob, the cook.  According to several sources, the working title for the film was originally Shack Up on 101 but after lead Terry Moore allegedly complained, it was changed to Shack Out on 101.

Lee Marvin in Shack Out on 101 (1955) as Slob, a short order cook in a greasy spoon diner who is really a communist agent.

One of the more preposterous plot devices in a movie that is overflowing with them is the idea that Slob is using the diner as a front for his subversive activities, which involve stealing secret formulas from a nearby research facility. His partners in espionage include Perch (Len Lesser), a local fisherman, Professor Claude Dillon (Frank DeKova), a scientist who works at the nearby laboratory, and Professor Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a nuclear physicist turned traitor against his own country. Additional subplots involve George (Keenan Wynn), the sarcastic diner owner, his old army pal Eddie (Whit Bissell) who is still suffering post-traumatic shock from D-Day, two wisecracking truck drivers, Pepe (Donald Murphy) and Artie (Jess Barker), and Kotty, the only woman in the vicinity, who is lusted after by all the men but is only interested in Sam. Unfortunately, he appears to prefer discussing sea shells with Slob most of the time. Terry Moore, who was born Helen Koford, was under contract to 20th-Century-Fox at the time she was cast in Shack Out on 101, an Allied Artists Picture. It was a studio loanout and she was being promoted at the time as a sex symbol in the Marilyn Monroe mode. Moore is best known for her role in the RKO fantasy-adventure, Mighty Joe Young (1949). She also attracted considerable publicity for her claims that she secretly married Howard Hughes in 1949 and even though she couldn’t produce any evidence of it, the Hughes’s estate paid her a settlement in 1984.

Moore’s leading man in Shack Out, Frank Lovejoy, spent most of his film career playing detectives, reporters, soldiers and various authority figures. I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) is one of his most quintessential roles.

Keenan Wynn (left) and Lee Marvin have a weight-lifting session in the oddball B-movie Shack Out on 101 (1955.

Keenan Wynn, who had been an MGM contract player for years, quit the studio in 1954 and began freelancing in films and television, with Shack Out on 101 being one of his first movies as an independent actor.

Lee Marvin plays a dual role in Cat Ballou (1965), the film which won him a Best Actor Oscar.

As Slob, Lee Marvin was already a well-established character actor by the time he made Shack Out on 101, thanks to memorably villainous roles in The Big Heat (1953) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). He had already begun the switch to leading roles from supporting ones in 1952 with Eight Iron Men but it wasn’t until he starred in Cat Ballou (1965) and won the Best Actor Oscar that he began to command top billing.

Keenan Wynn (left) and Lee Marvin were close friends and motorcycle enthusiasts.

Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn were lifelong best friends who first met in the early fifties and shared a love for motorcycle riding after Marvin developed a taste for it while filming The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando. Shack Out on 101 was Marvin and Wynn’s first film together but they would later appear together on numerous TV programs and reunite in 1967 on the big screen in Point Blank.

Whit Bissell (right) plays a mad scientist who creates a monster (Gary Conway) in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957).

One of the most prolific character actors in Hollywood, Whit Bissell has more than 250 film and television credits including such prestigious movies as The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). While his traumatized war veteran Eddie in Shack Out is one of his more colorful performances, he is probably best known for the cult horror films, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (both 1957) and Monster on the Campus (1958).

Len Lesser plays Perch, a minor character in the commie espionage drama Shack Out on 101 (1955).

Len Lesser, who plays Slob’s partner in crime in Shack Out, is still working and is well known for his TV appearances as Gavin in Everybody Loves Raymond and as Uncle Leo on Seinfeld.

Jess Barker in happier times with his wife Susan Hayward.

Jess Barker, who appears as Artie, had just divorced his wife, actress Susan Hayward, when he made Shack Out and was involved in a bitter custody battle with her for their two sons.  The opening credits of Shack Out on 101 give a special screen credit to “A Sunday Kind of Love” (written by Barbara Belle, Louis Prima, Anita Leonard and Stan Rhodes) but it is not heard as a vocal number or in its entirety in the actual film. The few scenes where music is used usually occurs in the shack bar where a jukebox is situated. Composer Paul Dunlap is credited with these selections. A soundtrack album for the film was also released (now out of print).  When Shack Out on 101 was first released in 1955 most of the high profile critics who bothered to review it singled out Lee Marvin who was since an up-and-coming actor at the time. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “Since Edward and Mildred Dein have fashioned dialogue that is occasionally adult and funny and have the services of principals who can accentuate these humorous lines and situations, Shack Out on 101, which was unveiled at the Globe yesterday, avoids the stigma of being a sub-standard spies-vs-F. B. I. imbroglio. But Mr. Dein, who also directed this minor intrigue, has too many issues simultaneously confronting a viewer. Shack Out on 101, in short, is not only bursting at its foundation with muscle men but with romance, idealism and a smidgin of silly plotting. It is slightly diverting but it is also enough to make an observer’s head swim…Credit Lee Marvin with a polished portrayal as the tough, sinister and seemingly thick-witted cook, Terry Moore is a pleasing eyeful as the waitress who attracts all the males in the vicinity.”

Terry Moore and Lee Marvin play co-workers at a greasy spoon diner in the anti-commie drama, Shack Out on 101 (1955).

Time magazine stated that “…Lee Marvin, who is easily the most repulsive object that Hollywood has dug up in recent years, is such a skillful performer that when he starts hacking away at a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato on toast, the spectator has all the visceral sensations of watching an MVD interrogator do work on an enemy of the people.” And The Motion Picture Herald confirmed this opinion with “…Lee Marvin’s delightful portrayal of a simple-minded short order cook, who turns out to be the menace of the film…Marvin will certainly gain in importance as a marquee name with this picture.”

An oddball scene involving Whit Bissell (center) and Keenan Wynn (right) wearing snorkels in Shack Out on 101 (1955).

Hardcore fans of Shack Out on 101 are often hard-pressed to pick their favorite scene since there are so many; it’s an embarrassment of riches. Still, there are two which deserve some kind of Hall of Fame award. The one in which Sam and Kotty do some heavy pawing and kissing while discussing the Bill of Rights is a first of some kind.

Keenan Wynn (left) and Lee Marvin compare pecs and weight lifting techniques in Shack Out on 101 (1955).

Likewise, the weirdly homoerotic sequence where George and Slob strip down and work out together, comparing their pecs and then scurrying nervously for their shirts when they are interrupted by Kotty.  A low-budget release from Allied Artists, Shack Out on 101 was directed by Edward Dein from a screenplay he penned with his wife Mildred. While none of Dein’s other work approaches the eclectic nature of this, a few titles such as Curse of the Undead [1959], a horror/Western with a gunslinging vampire, and The Leech Woman [1960], with Coleen Gray as a woman who discovers the secret to eternal youth, display traces of a singular and offbeat talent.

Cinematographer Floyd Crosby

But the real star behind the camera on Shack Out on 101 is cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who won the Oscar for his first film (Tabu: A Story of the South Seas [1931]) and also lensed High Noon [1952] and countless films for American International Pictures (Attack of the Crab Monsters [1957], Pit and the Pendulum [1961], Bikini Beach [1964]). By the way, Crosby’s son is musician David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame.  The original poster for Shack Out on 101 was a no-frills affair with the boldly direct tag line – “Four men and a girl!” If I had been the marketing director on this, I would have taken a much more exploitative angle.

Meet Kotty, the blonde bombshell desired by every man.

Sam, seashell fetishist or secret agent?

See the ferocious mouth-to-mouth tug-a-war with a dirty dish towel!

Watch as scuba divers practice deep sea fishing in a truckstop bar!

Or you could try capitalizing on your name cast. “See Whit Bissell armed with a deadly harpoon gun!” “Experience Keenan Wynn and Lee Marvin’s Hot and Sweaty Workout Routine,” or “Frank Lovejoy is Back – Tougher, Braver and Smarter Than He Was in I Was a Communist for the FBI (1959).”

Who has the best legs? Terry Moore, Lee Marvin (right) or Keenan Wynn in Shack Out on 101 (1955).

Last but not least, I have to include some samples of the looney dialogue which should be an inspiration to future screenwriters:

Slob: I’ve got a good mind to drop these dishes.
George: You’ve got a good mind?
Slob: Every time I talk about the tomato you get busy.
George: The tomato’s got a name – Kotty. Everybody’s got a name.
Slob: Then how come you call me Slob when my name’s really Leo?
George: Because you look like a slob. Even when you’re clean you look dirty.

Eddie (to Sam): You know something. If you told me to jump off a building, I’d take off like a jet job.

George: Well fellows, what’ll it be?
Artie: I’ll have the Egyptian dancing girl.
Pepe: Yeah, me too.
George: Sorry, they’re out of season but how about cherry pie and coffee as if I didn’t know.

Sam: Slob’s got an eight cylinder body and a 2 cylinder mind.

Sam: Will you tell me something?
Kotty: Anything, Sam, anything.
Sam: What are the first amendments to the Constitution called?
Kotty: The Bill of Rights.
Sam: That’s right. What form of government is this?
Kotty: The best!  Slob: You smell nice, what is it?
Kotty: Soap, you should try it sometime.

Sam: The apes have taken over…while we were busy watching television and filling our freezers, they’ve come out of the jungle and moved in! And what’s worse, they’ve begun to dress like us and think like us. We’re just where we were in the beginning. The animals have begun to hunt men.”

George: It’s all a bunch of slop.
Eddie: You just finding that out? Life’s 90 percent walking through slop to get to the roses.

Eddie: How long ago was D-Day? You have a lot to be grateful for. Did’d ya ever see two guys with more holes in ’em? I still remember how choppy the channel looked through your chest.

Kotty: Funny. A truck driver with soft hands.

Eddie (to George): Even if you were Cary Grant she shouldn’t give you a second look. The whole thing is chemistry.

Slob (admiring George’s chest): Hey, that’s great. What a beautiful set of muscles.
George: How many times have I told you not to call them muscles. Ya wanna sound like an amateur? Call ’em pecs.

Slob: I don’t go for those guys at Muscle Beach. The waist is so thin there’s no room for any food.

Slob: You know what I want? A big thick neck.
George: Don’t you want a stomach like mine?
Slob: Well, I go for your triceps and your biceps. They look great. But I wouldn’t have your legs if you’d give ’em to me.

Slob (to Kotty as he and George compare legs): Which one’s got the best?
Kotty (pulling up shirt to display her legs): In this establishment, I have.

Sam: Kotty? Now what’s wrong?
Kotty: Nothing. I just don’t want to stand between you and your shells. You don’t need a woman. You should go steady with a clam. I don’t get it. A grown-up man and you still play with seashells.

Slob: You like me?
Kotty: Like I like garbage.

For years after its original release it was virtually impossible to see Shack Out on 101 except in rare TV screenings. In recent years the film has been spotted on TCM occasionally and in September 2013 Olive Films released a no-frills DVD edition which Cinesavant critic Glenn Erickson described as “a nearly spotless HD encoding of a thriller that waited until the 1980s to become a genuine cult item…The widescreen framing improves the viewing experience over un-matted flat TV prints with acres of empty space above and below the actors. Floyd Crosby’s lighting is fairly unremarkable for the earlier reels but becomes more expressive for the nighttime confrontations at the show’s finish. The sharp HD image allows one to see the goose bumps on Terry Moore’s arms when she’s lying on the beach.”

Other website links of interest:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/best-anti-communist-movies-50s/

http://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341346&p=2303736

https://people.com/archive/howard-hughes-kept-scores-of-secrets-and-terry-moore-claims-she-was-one-of-them-vol-5-no-16/

http://pointblankbook.com/pictures-from-christopher-marvin/

https://cscottrollins.blogspot.com/2012/03/bissell-that-never-sucked.html

http://www.cinematographers.nl/GreatDoPh/crosby.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX29aTlyUHo

From an early age I developed a fascination with film but it wasn’t until college when my film interests expanded beyond American cinema to include international films and more specialized genres like underground, silent, documentary and exploitation movies. A Film History 101 course at the University of Georgia, curated by a drama professor, was partly responsible for that due to his eclectic overview which sampled the early work of Sam Fuller (The Steel Helmet, Park Row), Fritz Lang silents (Die Nibelungen: Siegfried & Kriemhild’s Revenge), the roots of Neorealism (La Terra Trema) and Hollywood studio system gems (George Sidney’s Scaramouche, An Affair to Remember). What made one of the strongest impressions, however, were examples of early Soviet cinema like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. And my favorite of them all was Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (Russian title: Zemlya, 1930), the third film in a trilogy that included Zvenyhora (1928) and Arsenal (1929). 

A scene from Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), the third film in a trilogy by the Ukrainian director.

Earth was the final silent film from Ukrainian director Dovzhenko and is generally considered his greatest work and a landmark of early Soviet revolutionary cinema. The story is a simply told but lyrical celebration of life in a Ukrainian village. On the eve of collectivization in the Ukraine, a young farmer – Vasili – has a unique vision: the village council will buy a tractor to be shared among the farmers. The rich landowners – “kulaks” – are threatened by Vasili’s proposal and the idea of any sort of unity among the peasant farmers. Eventually, Vasili meets a tragic end on a moonlit night (one of the film’s most visually impressive sequences) but the dawn brings forth the promise of prosperity to the poor village.

A harvest scene from the Soviet cinema masterpiece Earth (1930) by director Aleksandr Dovzkenko.

While the idea of watching a silent film that revolves around one farmer’s campaign for a communal tractor sounds like a bad cliche of Soviet cinema, Earth is surprisingly poetic and visually astonishing at times. Renown film critic Georges Sadoul in his Dictionary of Films wrote “Though its basic story (collectivization in the Ukraine and kulak defiance) is very much set in its own time, Earth has universal themes that transcend this: the fruitfulness of the earth, its annual rebirth, life, love and death. It is Dovzhenko’s portrayal of these themes that gives Earth its moving lyrical power…..The deceptively simple photography, reducing every element to its essential meaning, has incredible beauty and brilliantly captures the sense of vast plains, fruit trees, and enormous sunflowers under an overpowering sky. And over everything lies Dovzhenko’s love for his native Ukraine.”

A masterpiece of early Soviet cinema, Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth aka Zemlya (1930) is probably the most visually stunning propaganda film ever made.

Dovzhenko later said in a 1930 interview that the reason he made Earth was because “I wanted to show the state of a Ukrainian village in 1929, that is to say, at the time it was going through an economic transformation and a mental change in the masses.” He also added that, “It is necessary to both love and hate deeply and in great measure if one’s art is not to be dogmatic and dry. I work with actors, but above all with people taken from the crowd. My material demands it. One should not be afraid of using nonprofessional actors because one should remember that everyone at least once can act out his own role on the screen.”

A scene from Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth aka Zemlya (1930), a lyrical celebration of collective farming.

When Earth first played movie houses in Russia, it quickly developed a controversial reputation, dividing critics and government officials over its merits. Those who condemned it felt that the film’s intense lyricism was politically incorrect and did not fully advance the drive for agricultural collectivization.Demian Bedny, who was officially recognized as the “Kremlin poet,” attacked the film for being overly “philosophical.” “I was stunned by [Bedny’s] attack,” Dovzhenko later wrote, “so ashamed to be seen in public, that I literally aged and turned gray overnight. It was a real emotional trauma for me. At first I wanted to die.”

Ukrainian director Aleksandr Dovzhenko (in foreground, smiling)

Stalin had stated that “for us the most important of the arts is the cinema” and he commandeered it as a propaganda tool. But if Marxists expected Earth to dramatize the economic necessity of destroying the kulak as a class, Dovzhenko’s approach avoided overt political dogma despite some satire of not just the kulak but the church. Instead, the film’s serene, meditative tone celebrated mother nature as the film’s true focus.

A grief-stricken woman rips off her clothes in a scene from Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), which was censored in some prints.

Before Earth was released abroad, Russian censors removed at least three offending sequences – the grief-stricken fiancee ripping her clothes off, a woman giving birth during a funeral, and a tractor radiator being filled with urine. Even in an edited version, however, Earth was universally praised during its premieres in Paris, Berlin and New York City. And Dovzhenko had another reason to be happy. It was during this period that he married Yulia Solntseva who would become his most important collaborator. Later, during World War II, it was reported that the Germans destroyed the negative of Earth but luckily a copy of the original release print was found and preserved. The film would eventually be cited as a major inspiration for such directors as Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov.

A scene from the Soviet era masterpiece, Earth (1930), directed by Aleksandr Dovzkenko.

Earth was available on DVD from Image Entertainment and paired with the 1937 Sergei Eisenstein short Bezhin Meadow in 2002. In 2003 Kino Video released a special DVD edition of Earth and two co-features, Vsevolod Pudovkin & Mikhail Doller’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Pudovkin & Nikolai Shpikovsky’s Chess Fever (1925). At this time, the film is not yet available on Blu-Ray but it seems like the perfect candidate for The Criterion Collection treatment.

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

Other websites of interest:

http://kinoglazonline.weebly.com/dovzhenko-aleksandr.html

http://rayuzwyshyn.net/dovzhenko/Earth.htm

http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2010/08/01/earth/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-E57eyjoao

Jean Seberg is the main focus of Philippe Garrel’s Les Hautes Solitudes (1974).

In 1974 very few people outside of France knew anything about Philippe Garrel, an experimental filmmaker who had first attracted attention in Parisian film circles with his 1964 fifteen minute short, Les Enfants Desaccordes (1964). Decidedly non-commercial, Garrel’s abstract, often autobiographical ruminations on disenfranchised youth and the vagaries of romantic love appealed to a fringe group of European cinephiles. But Les Hautes Solitudes, which was first screened in Paris in December 1974, raised Garrel’s profile considerably due to the film’s cast which included model/actress/singer Nico (formerly of The Velvet Underground) and current companion of Garrel, French stage and screen star Laurent Terzieff, the stunning Tina Aumont (daughter of Maria Montez and Jean-Pierre Aumont and, most notably, American actress Jean Seberg, who had reinvented her screen career in France with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).

Nico and her son Christian Paffgen appear in La Cicatrice Interieure (The Inner Scar, 1972), directed by Philippe Garrel.

Nico, Terzieff and Aumont had all participated in earlier Garrel works but this marked their first appearance together in his films and with the added attraction of Seberg, Les Hautes Solitudes was destined to be more than just a curiosity. Produced on a miniscule budget, Les Hautes Solitudes is now considered an early masterwork of Garrel’s and an excellent introduction to the minimalistic style of the films he made between 1964 and 1979. More importantly, the film is a fascinating time capsule that documents a period when Garrel was making intense, self-exploratory personal films with friends.

Tina Aumont, daughter of Maria Montez and Jean-Pierre Aumont, is featured in Philippe Garrel’s Les Hautes Solitudes (1974).

You can’t really classify Les Hautes Solitudes as a documentary but there are aspects of it that resemble private home movies. The film also doesn’t quite qualify as narrative fiction though there are sequences that achieve a dramatic intensity. If anything, the movie comes across like a very loose photo/model shoot crossed with a rehearsal by actors for some unspecified project. It is also completely silent and was shot on outdated black and white 35mm stock without lighting or technical assistance.

French director Philippe Garrel

That might sound like a recipe for disaster but Garrel turned his liabilities into virtues. Like the best silent films, Les Hautes Solitudes draws you into its interior world and the cinematography, much of it focusing on facial close-ups in whatever existing light was available, has a soft, velvety beauty, occasionally punctured by bursts of overexposed brightness and abrupt reel change transitions.

The album cover for Chelsea Girl, Nico’s solo album after her stint with The Velvet Underground.

The movie opens with Nico lying down near a black cloth background amid what appear to be paving stones and she is staring off camera with a vacant, wide-eyed stare. (This is actually footage Garrel shot for an earlier film with Nico and decided to incorporate it into this project).

Nico makes a brief appearance in the opening scenes of Philippe Garrel’s Les Hautes Solitudes (1974).

Those expecting the blonde chanteuse of The Velvet Underground will be surprised by her appearance here which has a spectral-like quality with her dark hair and zombie-like demeanor. The rest of what follows are brief glimpses of Laurent Terzieff, bent over in a despairing posture with his face pressed against a mirror, and tantalizing shots of Tina Aumont sprinkling water on her face and hands or toying with a switchblade. But the main focus is on Jean Seberg, who is observed in various locations (walking along a street, at a café, in a darkened room, in bed) while displaying a wide range of emotions. She occasionally interacts with Terzieff and Aumont but mostly she dominates the eighty minute running time of Les Hautes Solitudes.

Jean Seberg exhibits a wide range of emotions including exhaustion and fragility in Les Hautes Solitudes (1974), directed by Philippe Garrel.

The film was shot over a two and a half month period at Seberg’s Paris apartment so most of the interiors are in her home. At the time Seberg was married to actor/director Dennis Barry, the son of blacklisted screenwriter/director John Berry, and was at the end of her career. She would only appear in three more feature films and one short, Ballad for Billy the Kid, which she also directed. But in 1974 Seberg was still looking for a project that could challenge her as an actress and Garrel was the ideal collaborator.

Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg star in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964), one of Seberg’s finest performances.

Les Hautes Solitudes could just as easily be called the many sides of Jean Seberg since the camera captures an astonishing range of emotions and movements. It might be her greatest performance and further evidence of how her talent was mostly misused in Hollywood with the possible exception of Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964). Under Garrel’s direction, Seberg goes through a constant sea change. One second she can look exhausted and fragile, the next she is mischievous or serene. Many times she gazes directly into the camera looking at us as if trying to see what we see. The effect is mesmerizing but also emotionally devastating when her moods turn dark.

Jean Seberg in Les Hautes Solitudes (1974)

In one scene we see Seberg huddled against a door, looking like a mental patient. In another, she lies in bed in a highly agitated state, tossing and turning and unable to sleep. But the most disturbing sequence is when Seberg is sitting on the floor drinking wine and picks up what appears to be a handful of sleeping pills and swallows them. Immediately Aumont rushes into the frame and grabs Seberg and appears to discard the pills and take charge of the situation….but is it real or a performance? It’s a mini-psychodrama in a movie full of private moments that are may be re-enactments from Seberg’s own life.

French filmmaker Philippe Garrel is seen filming a scene from one of his early experimental films.

In the biography, Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story by David Richards, Garrel recalls this incident during filming. “All of a sudden I had a terrible premonition. I thought, She’s taken the real thing. I was frightened, and a chill ran down my spine. I stopped the camera and shouted, ‘Jean, what in the hell have you done?’ She looked up me, puzzled, and shouted back, ‘Merde, you’ve gone and loused up my big scene!’ She had only swallowed aspirin, but her acting was so persuasive that I was completely taken in. I repositioned the camera, and we shot the scene a second time until the film ran out. Afterward I said to myself, She’s done this before. She’s played this scene with other people.”

Maurice Garrel (far right) stars in Claude Chabrol’s The Nada Gang (1974) with Lou Castel (left) and Mariangela Melato as terrorists.

Garrel, who is the son of French character actor Maurice Garrel (The Nada Gang, Kings & Queens), remains the lone survivor of Les Hautes Solitudes. The rest of the cast is no longer with us. At the time of filming, Nico was making a comeback as a singer with the release of her album The End. She and Garrel had been together since first meeting in 1969 and had collaborated on some of his films. Unfortunately their mutual drug addiction played havoc with their professional lives and they lived a near-poverty existence in the early seventies. The couple split up in 1979, Garrel kicked his heroin habit and returned to filmmaking with a renewed focus, scoring a Cannes Film Festival award for his 1984 feature Liberte, La Nuit.

A scene from Philippe Garrel’s Liberte, la nuit (1984) starring Christine Boisson.

A major turning point for Garrel was in 1991 with the release of his semi-autobiographical drama, J’entends Plus La Guitare (aka I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar). The film was an international critical success and eventually captured the attention of U.S. film critics like Richard Brody of The New Yorker who wrote, “Garrel balances a hypnotic romanticism with the frightening lurch of unsteady emotions. Leaping effortlessly, audaciously ahead in time, the fractured form embodies Garrel’s themes: the speed of life passing, the inescapable burden of memory.”  Garrel continues to forge ahead with a new film every few years and his most recent work, L’amant d’un jour aka Lover for a Day, won the SACD (Directors’ Fortnight) prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Garrel’s son Louis is also a well-known actor and aspiring director, who first achieved notoriety for his role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) and more recently portrayed Jean-Luc Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’s Godard Mon Amour (2017), based on Anne Wiazemsky’s Un an après, her Roman a clef novel about her relationship and marriage to the legendary director.  As for the other cast members of Les Hautes Solitudes, Nico continued to soldier on with her music career after splitting from Garrel but her drug addiction took its toll on her productivity. She was actually trying to come clean while living on Ibiza in the late eighties. Unfortunately, she had a bicycling accident there in July 1988 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. There is an excellent documentary on the singer – Nico Icon, which was released in 1995 – and currently there is a new movie about the last year of her life, Nico,1988 (2017), directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli and starring Trine Dyrholm in the title role.

Tina Aumont in the mid-sixties.

The exotic and sensual Tina Aumont was also plagued by drugs and the paparazzi for her hedonistic lifestyle but you wouldn’t know it from the angelic looking creature in Les Hautes Solitudes. Yet, at the time she appeared in Garrel’s film, Aumont’s career was already on the decline. While never recognized as a great actress, she was nonetheless a memorable presence in many of her roles for famous directors such as Joseph Losey (Modesty Blaise – her film debut in 1966), Bernardo Bertolucci (Partner), Federico Fellini (Satyricon, Fellini’s Casanova) and Mauro Bolognini (The Murri Affair).

Tina Aumont appears in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Partner (1968), a free form adaption of Dostoevsky’s novel The Double.

But Aumont’s partying and love of hard drugs set her on a self-destructive path and ushered in more dubious film offers such as Tinto Brass’s notorious Nazi porn epic Salon Kitty (1976). Her career never really recovered after she was busted in Italy in 1978 for smuggling 400 grams of opium into the country via tiny Buddha statues from Thailand. She was sentenced to three years in prison but had it reduced to nine months. After that she was deported from Italy and moved to France where she made few films, mostly in minor supporting roles such as her cameo as a ghoul in Jean Rollin’s Two Orphan Vampires (1997). Aumont died in her sleep in Port-Vendres, France on October 28 2006, age 60.

Jean Seberg in Les Hautes Solitudes (1974).

Jean Seberg’s demise was even more tragic. Sometime on August 29, 1979, she climbed into the back seat of her car, parked near her Paris apartment, and took an overdose of barbiturates. Her body was found ten days later but the circumstances surrounding her death remain murky. What has emerged in recent years is evidence that the actress was being targeted by the FBI in a character assassination operation that sent gossip columnists a false story from a fictitious person with claims that Seberg was pregnant from an affair with a Black Panther member. The sad details of this calculated persecution can be found in an article from The Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/apr/22/mondaymediasection.filmnews.

French actor Laurent Terzieff in the late fifties.

The only actor in Les Hautes Solitudes whose life didn’t come to a sad end is Laurent Terzieff, who started as an assistant stage manager but eventually became an acclaimed figure in the French theater world. He first attracted major attention among filmgoers and critics for his rebellious, James Dean-like protagonist of Les Tricheurs (aka Youthful Sinners, 1958). But instead of falling into the trap of being typecast or settling for conventional leading men roles in commercial cinema, Terzieff took a risky but more rewarding career path that demonstrated his love for the avant-garde and the offbeat. Among his more famous films are Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1960), Robert Rossellini’s Vanina Vanina (1961), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Prisonniere (1968), Luis Bunuel’s The Milky Way (1969), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Detective (1985). Terzieff enjoyed a parallel career in both theater and film right up to his death at age 75 in July 2010.

Laurent Terzieff in Philippe Garrel’s Les Hautes Solitudes (1974).

In recent years Les Hautes Solitudes has shown up at various film festivals such as the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival and repertory screenings like the Metrograph in Brooklyn but the film remains unavailable from any U.S. distributor. If you own an all-region DVD player, however, you can purchase a DVD copy of Les Hautes Solitudes from the French distributor Choses Vues via Amazon or some other internet source. 

Other website links of interest:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/philippe-garrel-fugitive-variations

http://lwlies.com/articles/philippe-garrel-unsung-icon-french-new-wave/

http://thegreatrockbible.com/portfolio-item/nico-biography/

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-07-23/news/mn-6091_1_velvet-underground

http://metrograph.com/edition/article/43/i-made-a-film-with-jean-seberg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/09/05/the-jean-seberg-story/11049a35-bbdb-4aef-ab67-22d06a9e98e5/?utm_term=.0fc363093e8d

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/tina_aumont_this_beautiful_bad_girl_was_the_junkie_zelig_of_the_60s_and_70s

http://www.mudkiss.com/tinaaumont.htm

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-of-the-week-les-hautes-solitudes-philippe-garrel/

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/21/laurent-terzieff-obituary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG2bKiM0SGE

David Manners (center) turns on the charm for Ann Dvorak as Ken Murray looks on in Crooner (1932).

Thanks to Warner Archives and several other distributors there have been an astonishing number of Pre-Code films made available to classic movie fans on DVD, MOD and streaming services over the years. But not every title is available and there are still some major omissions such as A Free Soul (1931) starring Norma Shearer or The Story of Temple Drake (1933) with Miriam Hopkins. There are also lesser-known oddities awaiting discovery such as Crooner (1932), which pops up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, starring David Manners, Ann Dvorak and J. Carrol Naish and clocking in at a brisk 68 minutes, the film charts the rise and fall of Teddy Taylor (Manners), a struggling musician and his jazz band, Ted Taylor’s Collegiates. 

Teddy Taylor (David Manners with megaphone) performs with his band in Crooner (1932), a Pre-Code comedy-drama.

Crooner starts off as a rags-to-riches tale where some talented nobodies realize overnight fame after adopting a stage gimmick and then transitions into a cautionary tale about the dangers of believing your own hype. The second half, however, becomes so increasingly outlandish as Ted’s ego and narcissism rages out of control that it works best as outright parody. And the target of that parody – whether intentional or not – appears to be Rudy Vallee.

Ann Dvorak & David Manners star in Crooner (1932), directed by Lloyd Bacon.

In the film, Ted is a saxophone player and acknowledged bandleader of a swing ensemble composed of his college buddies. When his lead vocalist develops a throat problem during their current band gig, Ted is faced with a dilemma – either find a new singer immediately or the band is out of work. As the only other member of the band with a half decent voice, Ted reluctantly steps into the vocalist’s spot but his singing is thin and lacks power; the clubgoers can barely hear him. Then, a drunk (Guy Kibbee) dances past the stage and jokingly hands him a megaphone. If it was intended as an insult, it has the reverse effect on Ted who suddenly gains confidence as he is able to stylize and project his voice.

A film still from the Pre-Code comedy-drama Crooner (1932) starring David Manners (center), a singer with an adoring female fan base.

More surprising is the effect it has on women. Ted’s voice is like musical catnip. The ladies become transfixed or giddy while others crowd the bandstand – we even see Hattie McDaniel, in a bit part, emerge from the club’s kitchen and bat her eyes in ecstasy. In effect, Ted becomes the equivalent of a male siren, killing the ladies softly with his warbling.

Rudy Vallee, circa the late 1920s

Like Ted, Rudy Vallee also started his own band while attending college (at Yale) and played the saxophone (and the clarinet too). In the beginning he didn’t really want to be a singer but discovered that most club owners at that time preferred bands with vocalists over traditional instrumental groups. Reputedly his bandmates tried to discourage him from singing – his voice was thin and not distinctive – but he persisted and became an accomplished singer of ballads and love songs. After Vallee signed a record contract in 1928 and began performing on the radio and making live appearances, his popularity grew rapidly, especially among women listeners who succumbed to his suave charm and smooth delivery. At some point in the late twenties, he began using a megaphone to accent his phrasing and it became one of his trademarks.Soon Vallee was mobbed by women everywhere he performed and it was inevitable that Hollywood would come calling. In 1929 he appeared in his first feature The Vagabond Lover which helped mold the soon-to-be-stereotyped image of the crooner in movie musicals. Vallee’s singing style would soon inspire others to follow in his footsteps on screen such as Dick Powell and Bing Crosby and would endure as a trend in popular music until the forties.

Ann Dvorak is having second thoughts about her boyfriend David Manners and his music career in Crooner (1932).

Audiences of today would probably find the appeal of this music inexplicable and in the case of Crooner, it’s not only silly but cloying – which is the movie’s inside joke. Despite the fact that several of the songs in the movie are written by such famous lyricists and composers as Al Dubin, Sammy Fain, and Harry Warren and include “Three’s a Crowd,” “Banking on the Weather,”and “Sweethearts Forever”, they all end up sounding like the same song as performed by Ted. You long for some hot jazz or gutbucket blues, anything to cut through these slow tempo serenades.

David Manners fancies himself as a great opera singer in the Pre-Code satire, Crooner (1932), directed by Lloyd Bacon.

Ted becomes so enamored of himself and his newly revealed “hidden talent” that he loses all perspective on reality. He becomes convinced he’s some kind of genius, starts treating his bandmates like replaceable hired help, ignores his fiancée (the irresistible Ann Dvorak) who helped launch his career, and fancies himself a continental playboy. Crooner’s depiction of Ted’s galloping vanity is amusingly developed through incidental shots of the singer admiring himself in mirrors at home or in the ballroom until he begins to puff up like a peacock, strutting around and speaking in an affected aristocratic accent.

David Manners plays a vocalist who loses all sense of reality when he becomes popular in the Pre-Code film, Crooner (1932), co-starring Ann Dvorak.

He hires an Asian valet named Nito, starts dressing in elegant Japanese robes and peppering his speech with French phrases. And we know he’s lost his mind when he begins training as an opera singer which makes for the most painfully funny scenes in the movie. This is one arrogant pea brain whose comeuppance is richly deserved and when it comes, it’s quite satisfying, even though the movie lets him off easy in the contrived happy ending.

A conceited popular singer finally learns the truth about himself in Crooner (1932), starring David Manners & Ann Dvorak.

While Ted is an exaggerated example of someone transformed into a monster by fame (check out 1966’s The Oscar with Stephen Boyd for a more contemporary example), the parallels between this fictitious creation and Vallee are hard to ignore. At the height of his fame,Vallee was said to be hated by his musicians and staff and treated them like slaves. He often got into fistfights with photographers and hecklers in the audience and had no shame when it came to boasts: “People called me the guy with the cock in his voice. Maybe that’s why in 84 years of life I’ve been with over 145 women and girls.”  It’s “the girls” part of the quote that gives one pause…is he admitting he’s a pedophile? At any rate, Vallee’s penchant for fistfights obviously inspired the big climatic moment in Crooner when Ted gets heckled by a drunk and knocks him senseless, starting a huge brawl in the nightclub. When it’s revealed the heckler is a crippled war veteran, Ted’s stock hits rock bottom. Unlike Ted though, Vallee enjoyed a long and prosperous career as a singer AND an actor (he’s particularly delightful in Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story). Even his archaic brand of crooning was revived briefly as a camp novelty by the New Vaudeville Band, who had a Billboard top forty hit with “Winchester Cathedral” in 1966. They also appeared in the Shirley MacLaine infidelity comedy, The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (1968) and performed on the soundtrack.

Crooner is no forgotten masterpiece but it’s a lot of fun and crackles with energy and wisecracks to spare. I’ve never cared for David Manners as an actor and always found him to be a handsome but colorless leading man with precious little charisma or screen presence. How he ended up in such iconic horror classics as Dracula (1931) and The Mummy (1932) or got cast opposite such dynamic actresses as Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman [1931]) or Katharine Hepburn (A Bill of Divorcement [1932], A Woman Rebels [1936]) is a mystery because he’s rarely memorable in anything.

David Manners (center) co-stars with Dwight Frye (left) and Edward Van Sloan in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931).

Yet I actually like him in Crooner. Not because it’s a great performance but because it’s great casting. He’s much more believable playing a conceited but mediocre singer who becomes convinced of his own greatness because it’s a side of Manners we’ve always suspected. But even in this, Manners is overshadowed by Dvorak, J. Carrol Naish as the chiseling, underhanded nightclub owner, Claire Dodd (in an amusing bit as an underwhelmed sexual conquest), and Ken Murray – yes, the famous entertainer, TV star and host of “Screen Snapshots” – as Ted’s street savvy manager and romantic rival for Dvorak.

Ken Murray and Ann Dvorak co-star in Crooner (1932), directed by Lloyd Bacon.

In the end, Crooner proves you can be a minor talent and still become a superstar – if you have a gimmick. And Ted’s gimmick – the megaphone – takes on a phallic significance that far eclipses his actual gifts. He drives the women wild but that’s a pretty sad commentary in itself. At the fadeout, it’s obvious the joke is on us.

The famous vocalist and band leader Teddy Taylor (David Manners) makes a live radio appearance in Crooner (1932).

Crooner is currently unavailable on DVD or Blu-Ray but Warner Archive could possibly release it at some point as part of their Forbidden Hollywood series on DVD. In the meantime, look for it on Turner Classic Movies. *This is a revised and updated version of a blog that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the Official TCM blog (now called Streamline on Tumblr).

Other website links of interest:

http://view902.com/david-manners-nova-scotias-first-movie-star/

http://www.anndvorak.com/cms/

http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/rudy-vallee-maine-yankee-streak-french-hedonism/

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-10-13/news/mn-4711_1_ken-murray

http://pre-code.com

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

Long before it ever became available for the home video market, The Girl in Black Stockings would occasionally pop up on late night television screenings in unexpected places like Turner Classic Movies. Such a lurid, sensationalistic crime drama was a natural fit for the drive-ins of its era but it actually makes sense that TCM would air this rarely seen obscurity because The Girl in Black Stockings is a classic sleazefest and definitely several notches above the standard exploitation drive-in fare that tantalized audiences in the late fifties before the advent of more explicit films like Blood Feast (1963).

Synopsis: A maniac is on the loose at a Utah resort, murdering and then mutilating the bodies of several voluptuous young women. Who could it be? The list of suspects is endless since just about everybody at the resort appears to be ‘bent’ or psychologically damaged in some way and that includes our hero, David Hewson, a young lawyer/playboy on vacation; Edmund Parry, the hateful wheelchair-bound proprietor of the lodge; Julia Parry, Edmund’s over-protective sister; Indian Joe, the town drunk, and Frankie Pierce, a worker at the local log mill.

Sheriff Holmes (John Dehner, left) questions Edmund Parry (Ron Randell) and his sister Julia (Marie Windsor) in the seedy murder mystery, The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

For some viewers, the identity of the mysterious killer might not be as puzzling or as interesting as the oddball cast which was assembled for this low-budget indie distributed by United Artists and directed by Howard W. Koch (Big House, U.S.A., Untamed Youth, Frankenstein 1970).

A publicity still of Anne Bancroft and Lex Barker from The Girl in Black Stockings (1957), directed by Howard W. Koch.

First of all, you have Anne Bancroft in the key role of Beth, a potential victim of the roaming psycho. Admirers of Bancroft’s later work (acclaimed films such as The Miracle Worker [1962] and The Graduate [1967]) will enjoy seeing her make the most of her deceptively innocent character in this film, one of many B-movies like Gorilla at Large (1954) that convinced Bancroft to leave Hollywood and focus solely on a theater career beginning in 1958.

Mamie Van Doren makes the most of her brief screen time in The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about The Girl in Black Stockings without mentioning Mamie Van Doren, who steals every scene she is in and it’s not because of her acting. Clad in tight-fitting outfits from The Pink Poodle boutique, Mamie flaunts her body for all it’s worth in her brief scenes, prompting unwanted comments to her date from the other male clientele like, “You outta keep stuff like that under lock and key.”

Lex Barker (far left) attends to invalid Ron Randell while Marie Windsor and others look off camera in The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

Other cast members you’ll recognize include Marie Windsor, one of the great faces in film noir cinema (The Narrow Margin [1952], The Killing [1956]) and Lex Barker, a former screen Tarzan who married Lana Turner and was later outed as a rapist by her young daughter, Cheryl Crane (The ugly details are revealed in Crane’s best-selling memoir, Detour).

Character actor John Dehner (left) and former screen Tarzan Lex Barker discuss murder suspects in The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

In the role of Sheriff Jess Holmes, the prolific John Dehner (over 250 film and TV credits!) should be a familiar face to those who take notice of character actors, particularly in western TV series like Rawhide, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Wanted: Dead or Alive and films such as Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun (1958), where he played Sheriff Pat Garrett opposite Paul Newman’s Billy the Kid.

Ron Randell plays a crippled, self-loathing misogynist in The Girl with Black Stockings (1957).

Australian-born Ron Randell makes an indelible impression here as a pent-up, seething misogynist but he didn’t always play the heavy and, in some of his earliest screen roles, he was the hero (1946’s Pacific Adventure, 1947’s Bulldog Drummond at Bay, The Lone Wolf and His Lady from 1949). He is probably better known among cult B-movie fans for his roles in Omoo-Omoo the Shark God (1949), Captive Women (1952), The She-Creature (1956) and Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961). In smaller roles, look for Dan Blocker as a bartender (He played Hoss on the popular TV Western, Bonanza) and Stuart Whitman as a police officer. Even better than the oddball cast is the demented screenplay by Richard Landau which features such strange dialogue exchanges between the characters that you’ll want to replay the scenes just to make sure you heard that correctly. It’s like Mickey Spillane on acid. Consider, for example, this terse line from the investigating detective: “Somebody died last night – a dame – somebody got nervous with a knife.”

Sheriff Holmes (John Dehner, right) questions suspect Indian Joe (Larry Chance, left) about his facial wounds in The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

Then, there’s the odd clinical detail: “Those arms! Carved up like some crazy jigsaw puzzle!” And how about that nutty diner scene when Lex Barker gets philosophical with Anne Bancroft and says, “How did two people start out like we did, then get so lost? So many things seem to have gotten in the way. Worse part of it is, I don’t think it’s stopped. Well, enough about that – let’s talk about us!” The fact that hardly any relationship at all has been established between the couple when Barker makes this little speech only adds to the movie’s kookiness.

Mamie Van Doren (second from right, Diana Van der Vlis and Marie Windsor (far left) react to a corpse in The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

There’s also plenty of sick humor, like the scene where the little girl discovers a floating corpse in the swimming pool – “Look at that funny man” – only to have the coroner complete the joke with his kiss-off comment, “Got himself the start of a nice sun tan.”

Being pawed and grouped by men is an every day occurrence for Mamie Van Doren in the exploitation thriller, The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

Despite the presence of Mamie Van Doren and other Playboy pin-up wannabes, The Girl in Black Stockings also swings the other way, playing up the homoerotic overtones between some of the male characters in certain scenes. Lex Barker, who spends most of the movie lounging around in his bathing suit, not only functions as an unofficial ‘male nurse’ for invalid Edmund Parry (Ron Randell), lighting his cigarettes and hauling him in and out of his wheelchair, but also as an intimate confidante of the local sheriff (John Dehner) who tells Barker, “I guess I can let my hair down with you.”

There is something twisted and unhealthy about the relationship of Julia (Marie Windsor) and her brother Edmund (Ron Randell) in The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

It’s also hard to ignore the incestuous overtones of any scene between Parry and his possessive sister (Windsor). A favorite exchange is the one where Windsor is tending to her brother in bed and says, “Can I get you some hot milk before I leave?” His reply, delivered with venomous self-loathing: “Milk? I’d like to get so drunk I’d look in a mirror and spit at my own face!”

Anne Bancroft freaks out in front of Lex Barker in this overwrought scene from The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

Yes, The Girl in Black Stockings is everything you’d expect from a lurid murder mystery, custom made for drive-in audiences, but it’s also much more. Beautifully filmed in crisp black and white at Lake Tahoe by William Margulies with a lounge music score by Les Baxter, The Girl in Black Stockings is exploitation film-making at its finest – which means it’s degenerate, campy, irredeemably sexist, and compulsive viewing for anyone who owns a copy of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.  MGM released The Girl in Black Stockings as a DVD-R in May 2011 as part of their MGM Special Limited Edition Collection. It is a no-frills release with no extras but it should please fans of the film until an upgrade comes along.

Anne Bancroft and Lex Barker in a playful mood on the set of The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

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

Other website links of interest:

https://filmtalk.org/2017/07/28/mamie-van-doren-talking-about-marilyn-monroe-is-strange-to-me-shes-a-person-to-most-people-shes-an-idea/

https://www.tribute-to-lex-barker.net/index.php?m=s&spr=eng&sk=2&f=n&menu=bio

https://people.com/archive/cheryl-crane-lana-turners-daughter-tells-her-story-of-a-harrowing-hollywood-childhood-vol-29-no-6/

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/feb/24/guardianobituaries.filmnews

http://www.westernclippings.com/interview/mariewindsor_interview.shtml

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm7TbT4ThaQ

The idea of a nude restaurant where the clientele and wait staff are composed of various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd such as Taylor Mead and Viva wearing little more than skimpy black briefs may not sound like the most appetizing destination for dining. Yet, as a film, The Nude Restaurant (1967) is a lively, frequently hilarious and occasionally despairing communiqué from the underground for those who have always avoided or dismissed the experimental cinema of Andy Warhol as something boring and interminable based on seeing snippets of 1963’s Sleep (a 321 minute static camera study of John Giorno asleep in bed) or 1964’s Empire (a 485 minute single shot portrait of the Empire State Building from dusk until approximately 3 am) or just reading about them. 

In its own way, The Nude Restaurant is just as stripped down and minimalistic as Sleep or Empire but is animated by the eccentric personalities of Viva and her straight man, Taylor Mead, the Beat Generation darling of such underground classics as The Flower Thief (1960) and Hallelujah the Hills (1963). There is no plot, the dialogue is improvised, and the entire film takes place on one set – in this case, The Mad Hatter restaurant at 360 3rd Avenue in Manhattan. People step on each other’s lines or constantly interrupt each other with overlapping dialogue that prefigures the movies of Robert Altman.

Taylor Mead and Viva are the stars of Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967).

While Andy Warhol takes screen credit as the director of The Nude Restaurant, his function as such is merely to turn the camera on and off, stopping only to load a new film magazine into it. If Warhol seemed to have no interest in directing in the traditional sense, he always had a keen eye for objects, faces or personalities that would make fascinating cinematic subjects when the camera was running. And in Viva and Taylor Mead, he found the perfect stars for this 95-minute snapshot of the New York counterculture art scene in 1967.

Andy Warhol on the set of The Nude Restaurant (1967) with Taylor Mead and Viva.

In typical Warhol fashion, the film consists of a series of static camera set-ups in long takes. The first thirty minutes consist of a running monologue by Viva with occasional interruptions or asides by Mead as she talks about a variety of subjects from her hair to her dysfunctional upbringing to her sexual escapades. It’s a brilliantly sustained stand-up comedy routine.

I’ve always thought Viva’s blasé manner and droll sense of humor were ideally suited to parody and commenting on modern culture and she lays waste to everything here with a non-stop motormouth that switches gears in lightning speed from the mundane to the inspired to the outrageous and back again (I’ve often wondered if she was an inspiration for Sandra Bernhard’s stage persona). Her voice can be shrill and strident or affect the pretentiousness of a high society snob or someone vaguely European. Yet it’s the unpredictable rhythm of Viva’s voice that holds me as well as her raconteur’s gift for extemporaneous speaking. Some of her uninhibited stream of consciousness ramblings have been compared by some critics to Molly’s obscene soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Nude Restaurant (1967) is an ideal showcase for Viva’s eccentric talents.

Occasionally the “performance” is interrupted by Viva pausing to ask the cameraman, “Is it still running?” and almost instantaneously returning to her outlandish tales which could be autobiographical for all we know.  At one point, she glances at Mead and asks, “Getting bored?” to which he provides the deflating response, “No, I like to listen to just parts of conversations. Sometimes I follow the story. Sometimes somebody mumbling you get almost as much.”

Viva also constantly interrupts herself with satiric observations such as “Can you believe it? In 1967 we are still talking about European women vs. American women. “ Or “Why are we always talking about the hippies? Isn’t there anything more interesting? We’re beginning to sound like Newsweek. Hippiedom. Trouble in Hippiedom.”  Or on a particularly painful S&M encounter: “He gave me two whacks with this whip that were enough. Well, Christ wouldn’t have been able to stand it on the cross.”

Taylor Mead and Viva bare it all…almost in Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967).

And since this is 1967, the specter of the Vietnam War and the protest movement hangs heavy over The Nude Restaurant and constantly surfaces in the conversations as a running motif like the opening of the film where Viva discusses a recent beauty parlor mishap – “You know the scorched earth policy in Vietnam? Well, that was my hair – scorched hair policy.” If Viva has a philosophy, it might be this sentiment that emerges in one of her rants, “Whoever is over thirty years old remains imprisoned in this baggage of Freudian, European, American, feminist, heterosexual, very heterosexual culture. And as far as I’m concerned, super-heterosexuals are simply sadomasochists.”

Viva has an amusing cameo role in the Woody Allen comedy, Play It Again, Sam (1972), directed by Herbert Ross.

The fact that Viva manages to appear unselfconscious and at ease as she delivers her monologues in the nude is another amusing aspect of her performance and proves why she was one of the few Warhol superstars who made an effortless transition to Hollywood films, making a memorable impression in small roles in Midnight Cowboy (1969), Cisco Pike (1972) and Play It Again, Sam (1972), to name a few. Still, she remains an acquired taste and either you bolt at the sight and sound of her or you dig her slightly mad, eternally perturbed screen persona. Luckily, The Nude Restaurant switches gears at around the thirty minute mark – before Viva’s colorful shtick loses its edge – and introduces some other players into the mix, transitioning into a dance scene with gyrating bodies in the buff and then a very funny conversation about sex between Ingrid Superstar, Mead and Viva that begins with Mead noticing lipstick on Ingrid’s nipples.

Taylor Mead, a familiar face in underground films of the 60s, has a starring role in Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967).

Could there be a more peculiar and unlikely screen actor than Taylor Mead? Impish, childlike and guileless, Mead is often referred to as “the first underground movie star” and is certainly the antithesis of a Hollywood celebrity…but then, all of the Warhol superstars could fit the latter description. In The Nude Restaurant, Mead gets to cavort in a black bikini bottom, proudly displaying his scrawny, white, semi-hairy body topped by a slightly tanned face and a head that looks as if it belongs on a different body. He enjoys a much more playful, physical on-screen relationship with Ingrid Superstar here – we see them tickling and pinching each other – than he does with the more aloof Viva who warns Ingrid, “Don’t touch him. He might get violent and hit you in the….”

Ingrid: No, he’s so shy he couldn’t.

Viva:  Shy? You think he’s shy?

Ingrid: He’s so shy he’s afraid to be touched.

Taylor:  See, she knows.

Ingrid: I think he’s a virgin. Are you a virgin?

Taylor:  Definitely.

Viva: Like Ingrid.

Ingrid (makes the sign of someone playing the violin) Sure.

Taylor: Well, I have possibilities.

Ingrid: Of what?

Taylor: Of being a….um….non-virgin.

Ingrid: Well, who’s gonna break you in?

Taylor: Many have tried, few have succeeded.

Viva: Didn’t you say I turned you on the other day?

Taylor: I said you had possibilities. That’s what I say to them all….I think a woman’s body is very lovely.

Ingrid: Who do you like better, a man’s body or a woman’s body?

Taylor: Really, I don’t know. I’ve been digging the loneliness scene.

Ingrid: Asexual?

Taylor: What’s that?

Ingrid: That you don’t indulge. (she imitates his voice) What’s that? Just for that you get another pat.

Taylor: (he fights off her groping hands) This is getting more like a cocktail lounge than a Greenwich Village scene.

Viva: Listen, you’ve heard of pansexuality. Like TransAmerican – stops at every port.

Mead brings the topic to a screening halt after glancing down at Viva’s crotch area and says, “You’ve got straw coming out of your thing.”

Warren Beatty plays an Italian gigolo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), co-starring Vivien Leigh.

As unstructured, aimless and infantile as they seem, these dialogue exchanges offer a great deal of comic relief but also a window into Warhol’s Factory troupe at that period of time. In this way, The Nude Restaurant also serves as an anthropology study in which the behavior, ideas and appearance of a certain tribe of people is recorded and preserved for posterity. There’s a wonderful, spontaneous moment when Ingrid gushes enthusiastically about Warren Beatty, saying “I like Warren Beatty because he is so young and rich and handsome and debonair and suave and a fine actor.” Suddenly aware of what she’s just said on camera, she quickly interjects, “And I hope he never sees this picture.” She needn’t be embarrassed. After all, Beatty has had his share of screen embarrassments such as his unconvincing Italian gigolo named Paolo di Leo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961).

Viva flirts with Warhol actor Allen Midgette in The Nude Restaurant (1967).

There is an amusing sequence where Viva as the café’s waitress, tries to interest a restaurant patron, played by Allen Midgette, in ordering something. Her own delivery is oozing with sexual innuendo but Midgette remains mostly mute and almost comatose, prompting Viva to say, “Don’t fall asleep. We’re still ordering.” Nothing seems to tempt him though, even when she volunteers, “How about some Sanka? I know how to make that.” The scene reminds me of that inspired moment in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) when Naomi Watts generates some real sexual heat with Chad Everett as they run film script lines together in character for a director. The difference here is that Viva does all the emoting with the blank faced Midgette serving as little more than a boy toy prop.  Midgette had previously appeared in two Bernardo Bertolucci films, The Grim Reaper (aka La Commare Secca, 1962) and Before the Revolution (1964) but he’s not required to act here and Viva easily steals their scenes together. Midgette’s main claim to fame was impersonating Andy Warhol (with the artist’s complete complicity) on a lecture tour of several colleges before the ruse was discovered.

Warhol actor Louis Waldon appears in the 1967 film, The Nude Restaurant.

Louis Waldon (aka Jim Chisholm), the bar patron with the body painting in The Nude Restaurant, had previously appeared in Adolfas Mekas’ underground indie, The Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1965) and Joseph W. Sarno’s soft core sex drama The Love Merchant (1966). Though his role here is minor, he would become part of the Warhol entourage, winning larger parts in such films as Flesh (1968), Lonesome Cowboys (1968) and Blue Movie (1969).

Louis Waldon (right) co-stars with Joe Dallesandro in Flesh (1968), directed by Paul Morrisey.

Another Factory discovery is Julian Burroughs, who plays the drafter dodger in The Nude Restaurant and who closes the film out on a political note, which is a rarity for a Warhol film (There are two entries for Burroughs on IMDB, one which spells his name with no s on the end and the above spelling which also credits him with appearances in the New Zealand productions Goodbye Pork Pie (1981) and the TV series The Harp in the South (1987) – These are erroneous credits).

Julian Burrough plays a draft dodger in the Vietnam era underground film, The Nude Restaurant (1967), directed by Andy Warhol.

According to Steven Watson in Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, “Andrew Dungan was his real name, but he adopted the pseudonym Julian Burroughs and pretended he was William Burroughs’s son. This was not a matter of superstar renaming but one of necessity. Julian Burroughs was on the lam. Descended from a wealthy Sacramento family, he had attended Stanford as an undergraduate, been drafted and spent nine months in military training. In June 1967 he went on leave and never returned. He connected with David Harris at Sanford who was leading the war resisters’ movement. Julian Burroughs realized that he had to forge an underground identity and knew enough of William Burrough’s biography to fake it as Burroughs’s son. He came east for the March on Washington on October 21 and 22 and directly after this he hopped a ride to New York…” It was at this point that he met Warhol and Paul Morrissey walking down the street and was invited to show up at the filming of The Nude Restaurant. His part was a last minute addition but it provided an inspired if overly earnest foil for Mead’s oddball brand of comedy.   In the final scenes of the film, Mead displays a feigned interest in the handsome, young draft dodger’s cause for obvious reasons but the conversation turns comical as Mead’s political apathy is unmasked.

Julian: Would you take a deserter into your house and hide him from the law?

Taylor: Yes, I’d do anything.

Viva (in the background, yelling): Revolution is in my blood!

Julian: If I get your address I’ll tell draft dodgers and other groups that you’ll give them hospitality.

Taylor: Oh, I wouldn’t give it to just anybody.

Julian: We need people who care Taylor. We don’t want dropouts. We need people who take any interest in this society and want to change it.

Taylor: Yes, but I want someone beautiful to live with.

Julian: Well, anyone who doesn’t like war must be beautiful.

Taylor: Not necessarily.

There is something wacky and compelling about the earnestness of the young radical juxtaposed against the nervous nelly paranoia of Taylor and his refusal to give his home address because he’s convinced some people are out to get him.

Julian: People?

Taylor: Yes.

Julian: The FBI’s after me but…

Taylor: Like 15 corner boys are after me.

Julian: Corner boys?

Taylor: Yeah, a guy that gets you in a corner and beats the sh*t out of you.

Julian: You have to be beaten up once of twice before you understand what it means to fight in this…

Taylor: I’ve been in the hospital a couple of times. I’ve been in the jail nine times.

Julian: Civil rights activity?

Taylor: No, personal rights activity.

Taylor Mead and Viva are an unlikely but hilarious comedy team in Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967).

In an interview with Taylor Mead on his 80th birthday for the website PlanetGroupEntertainment, he recalled the making of The Nude Restaurant, calling it, “One of my favorite films. That was immediately after Mickey Ruskin and Andy persuaded me to come back to New York after three years in Paris and Italy. God, when I got off the plane from Paris, we did Nude Restaurant. Andy had already shot Nude Restaurant, but he wasn’t happy with it. So he had me and Viva, and I was still on my drugs from Europe…In America it’s called Quaalude…I was on it for ten, many years. And I’m still on drugs…We shot Nude Restaurant, we shot it as we shot it, because we were stoned. Unfortunately I knew Viva’s private life. Her family life. So I think she wanted to be glamorous, and her childhood, but I made her stick to the story, she was magnificent.”

Two of the more interesting actors in the films of Andy Warhol are Viva and Taylor Mead (photo from Everett Photo).

Besides the rich vein of anti-establishment humor that runs through the entirety of The Nude Restaurant is the film’s refreshingly frank and unapologetic attitude toward sexual preference and identity, regardless of the performers’ gender. Warhol, of course, capitalized on this, targeting his films at both sexploitation and gay cinemas as well as to art houses and museums. But for those men and women still living closeted lives, Warhol actors like Taylor Mead, Ondine, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling were revelations. At the same time, most of Warhol’s female superstars like Viva, Brigid Polk and Mary Woronov were usually strong, outspoken and dominant characters unlike Warhol’s male superstars who tended to be passive. To say that the films of Warhol were empowering in this respect is an understatement.  Most mainstream critics, of course, trashed The Nude Restaurant as they did most of Warhol’s experimental film work, labeling them boring, empty and repetitive. I’m firmly convinced that a lot of these reviewers never bothered to actually sit through the films they were critiquing and were instead reacting negatively to Warhol’s popularity and fame.  Take, for example, this review by critic/author Stephen Koch who writes, “People talk. One can hardly listen. Other nudes are present. Some leave. Others arrive. They talk. Watching and attending is laborious. One tries to pay attention. There are numerous shrieking in-camera jump cuts called ‘strobe cuts’…More people arrive. Others go. It is absolutely impossible to imagine how anyone could conceivably give a damn…I cannot think of a single inch of footage in Nude Restaurant that seems to me worth looking at. Watching it is rather like being present at the most boring party of one’s entire life…Oh yes, the superstars. They get on one’s nerves.” Koch’s dismissal is all attitude and no insight and makes me wonder if he was having an off day since he took the trouble to write an entire book devoted to Warhol’s cinema – Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol.

Viva and Allen Midgette get intimate in Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967).

Then there is this review in the New York Times by A.H. Weiler, that makes me wonder if he even saw the same movie:  “The first of Restaurant was filmed (in fairly good Eastmancolor) in a bathroom used by Viva, the waitress-diseuse of this study. She is a lanky, dreaming, extremely loquacious type who is quite nude throughout the formless proceedings. ‘You know, she casually remarks as a young man joins her in the tub, ‘Churchill spent eight hours a day in his bath?” Eventually,  Viva goes to work in the boite of the title…a place where nudity appears to be a must.” Either Weiler is getting Bike Boy (which also starred Viva) confused with The Nude Restaurant or he is reporting on a version that doesn’t currently exist because The Nude Restaurant I watched was not filmed in a bathroom, nor is there any scene where Viva and another man share a bath.

Edie Sedgwick (right) stars in the 1965 Andy Warhol film, Restaurant.

I can understand that there may be some confusion about what happens in The Nude Restaurant because Warhol released another film called Restaurant in 1965 that took place entirely in L’Avventura and featured Edie Sedgwick. It is also true that Warhol shot two versions of The Nude Restaurant and the original version featured an all-male cast. He shelved this all-male version (although footage from it was allegedly used in his 25 hour epic, **** (Four Stars).

Viva is the motormouth star of Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967).

The running time for The Nude Restaurant is listed as 100 minutes on IMDB but on the all region DVD copy of the film I have from Raro Video, the length is listed as 90 minutes forty seconds. I suspect from the below review in Variety that the version of The Nude Restaurant that was reviewed by critics in 1967 was later reedited: “….Warhol has a habit of adding new material to his films and subtracting some other footage while they are in the midst of their runs. He always makes sure that the running time remains the same. At show caught there was a second bathtub scene featuring a different boy as well as two other girls. This has since been replaced by an extension of the restaurant scene in which Viva describes her adventures with a most uncelibate priest.” The scene with the priest, is indeed in the copy of The Nude Restaurant I watched and probably the high point of Viva’s many ribald confessions.

Andy Warhol on the set of Lonesome Cowboys (1968).

Despite the unfavorable and confusing reviews of The Nude Restaurant recounted above, there are others besides me who find the film a good argument against the usual clichéd criticisms of Warhol’s movies such as Tim Hunter of The Harvard Crimson who ranked it as one of the best ten films of 1967 along with Joseph Losey’s Accident and Alain Resnais’s La Guerre Est Finie: “In Warhol’s films, people talk atone another, strive for self-definition and expression, and are either too emotionally bombed-out to succeed or else posses too weak a vocabulary. In his dealings with language breakdown, as well as in being prolific, Warhol is our Godard. But where Godard treats subjects with increasingly pedantic seriousness, Warhol still makes grimly hilarious comedies. It is fashionable to accuse Warhol of making identical films for fun and profit, but intelligent artists do not exist in a state of perpetual atrophy, and Warhol is no exception. Though his current style is simple, it is not simplistic, and I have yet to lose interest in a Warhol composition for as long a time as he chooses to leave it on the screen. His recent experiment with color and editing have proved his interest in his won artistic development, and his choice of actors and material proves that he even directs on occasion, turning out some of the more exciting film in recent years.”

But probably my favorite assessment of The Nude Restaurant and Warhol’s early films before Paul Morrissey became his go-to director is this tribute from Gary Indiana in the book Andy Warhol: Film Factory: “ It’s bizarre that Warhol’s films have been out of circulation for so long. Or perhaps not so bizarre. When Warhol said, in his last interview, that the films ‘are better talked about than seen,’ it occurred to me that a certain crust of the haute monde might have been less welcoming to Andy if it had been exposed to his movies. Which, I believe, compose his richest body of work. Who will ever forget Ondine, with his face buried in Joe Dallesandro’s underpants in Loves of Ondine? Or Ingrid Superstar’s recipe recitation in Bike Boy? The draft-dodger’s soliloquy, or Viva’s epic monologue in Nude Restaurant?…I haven’t seen these films in 20 years, and I remember every frame. I’ve already forgotten E.T. Warhol’s films are gloriously erotic, as sculpture is erotic. They’re honest. Pornography…is dishonest. Perfect faces on perfect bodies do not blissfully couple without any problems, in real life; they only do that in California….Sexual pleasure is immanent in the Warhol movies, a possibility; but pornographic fulfillment is always shown as a deluded ambition. Real people are too complicated. We should be wary about praise and damnation of Andy. He helped open thousands of closet doors. If the things he lent himself to in recent years fill me with distaste, I still admire the frosty slap he gave America before he became America’s favorite vanity mirror.”  Amen to that. Even though The Nude Restaurant is not currently available from any distributor in the U.S., you can still find the out-of-print Raro Film DVD of it on Amazon and other online outlets. But you will need an all-region DVD player to see it since PAL DVD conversions will not play on U.S. DVD players.

*This is an updated and revised version of a blog that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official TCM blog (now called Streamline).

Other links of interest:

http://www.moviecrazed.com/outpast/viva.html

http://planetgroupentertainment.squarespace.com/the-taylor-mead-interview

http://www.rouge.com.au/8/warhol.html

http://www.warholstars.org/andrew-dungan-julian-burroughs.html

http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/andy/warhol/can/viva14.html

http://www.madhattersaloonnyc.com/info.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1968/1/5/the-ten-best-film-of-1967/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87uqMzj3lsI

2018 is turning out to be another great year for critically acclaimed and commercially successful documentary features that might end up as Oscar nominees in that category. Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? on children’s TV host Fred Rogers, Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s RBG, a portrait of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and McQueen, and Three Identical Strangers, Tim Wardle’s disturbing odyssey of male triplets separated at birth are just a few of this year’s success stories and are still enjoying long theatrical runs in cities across the U.S. I also predict a similar enthusiastic reception for Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster’s Science Fair, an insider look at the annual Intel ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair), which attracts the most gifted science students from high schools around the world.

I have to admit I had little awareness of ISEF and their mission until I saw Science Fair. First established in 1921 under the name Science Service (it is now called the Society for Science & the Public), the organization was created to promote understanding and appreciation for the vital role science plays in our daily lives. It was in 1942 that the Society launched its first educational competition for high school seniors, the Science Talent Search. This annual event has since evolved into a high profile exposition that brings together 1,700 finalists from around the world who present their discoveries and inventions to a panel of judges with the hope of winning the prestigious Best in Fair award.

A scene from Cristina Costantini & Darren Foster’s documentary, Science Fair (2018).

On the surface, Science Fair, which is distributed by National Geographic Films, has the look and feel of a fast-paced, slickly produced made-for-TV documentary geared for younger audiences but there is much more going on here beneath the surface. Without ever addressing the current White House administration, the film manages to raise topical issues about immigration, gender equality, the environment and the future of the planet through a narrative structure that profiles several individual students and teams as well as a research teacher/coach (the formidable Dr. Serena McCalla of Long Island) and past ISEF winners like Dr. Martin Lo who immigrated from Taiwan and became a NASA Spacecraft Trajectory expert.

German teenager Ivo with his father tests his aviation invention in Science Fair (2018).

The cast of characters couldn’t be a more diverse bunch and they include Ivo, an aviation-obsessed teen from rural Germany, Anjali, a child prodigy who has built an arsenic detection device to help safeguard water distribution and Robbie, an unlikely math genius from West Virginia who has created a computer algorithm that writes rap lyrics in the style of Kanye West. But my favorite contenders are the ones that face much greater obstacles to success such as Kashfia, a shy Muslim girl in a South Dakota high school where sports reign supreme, and the team of Myllena and Gabriel from Ceara, Brazil, which is one of the poorest regions in the country and a hot spot for the Zika virus which the duo are hoping to defeat with their research. Science Fair clearly owes a debt to the structure of previous documentaries that explore competitions in subcultures such as S. R. Bindler’s Hands on a Hardbody (1997), which highlights an endurance contest in Longview, Texas where the prize is a new Nissan truck, Spellbound, Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 doc on the 1999 National Spelling Bee, and Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007), in which passionate practitioners in the art of Donkey Kong, a classic Nintendo arcade game, compete to attain the highest score of all time. While Science Fair might lack the high level of drama and suspense generated by these earlier efforts, it admittedly has a broader canvas to cover with more characters. As a result some of the featured finalists don’t get enough screen time for the viewer to get a clear impression of their personalities or talents.

Dr. Serena McCalla, a mentor to her high school science students, figures prominently in the 2018 documentary, Science Fair.

What co-directors Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster do succeed at brilliantly is submerging the viewer in a science geek culture that is rarely encountered or experienced by the average moviegoer. Yes, I remember my high school years and how the science club members were kind of nerdy and awkward and kept to themselves but in Science Fair these are the real heroes in the story.

Robby, an unlikely math wizard, is one of several teenage competitors profiled in the 2018 documentary Science Fair.

It is really quite remarkable to see some of the visionary ideas and inventions coming from these sixteen and seventeen year old kids. An electronic 3D-printed stethoscope with an online database connection that can diagnose heart abnormalities? A program that can monitor and measure human behavior and emotional imbalance based on desensitizing habits such as drinking or drug use? A vaccine that can inhibit and neutralize the spread of the Zika virus in the bloodstream?

Kashfia, a Muslim student at a South Dakota high school, is one of the underdog competitors in the 2018 documentary Science Fair.

Science Fair concludes with a postscript update on the winners and losers from the ISEF competition depicted but to be truthful, there are no real losers here. Whatever these finalists wanted for themselves – a college scholarship, job offers, international fame – the rewards they end up reaping are often priceless and in the case of Kashfia, a richly deserved vindication. The final takeaway is both uplifting and inspirational, a positive tonic for our current toxic culture. In the end, these young scientists of tomorrow might save us from ourselves.

Buster Keaton plays a hapless cowpoke who tries to save a cow named Brown Eyes from the slaughterhouse in Go West (1925).

Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary homage, The Great Buster, is scheduled to open at theaters across the country on October 5, 2018 and, perhaps it might introduce a new generation of filmgoers to the silent era legend. I would certainly recommend The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman to Keaton novices but even his less celebrated efforts are cinematic wonders brimming with visual poetry and imaginative sight gags like Go West (1925).

Released between the feature films Seven Chances (1925) and Battling Butler (1926), Go West (1925) might be the bleakest and most pathos-ridden of any Keaton production in terms of its hapless main character and the storyline. As a drama, it would be unbearable but as a comedy it has a light, deadpan grace and a beguiling theatre of the absurd quality enhanced by its stark setting; in this film, you can see why Keaton was often compared to the sort of alienated souls who populate the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett.

Friendless (Buster Keaton) flees the midwest via a freight train for greener pastures on the frontier in Go West (1925).

Here is a brief synopsis: An inept, bumbling Midwestern youth named Friendless decides he’s not cut out for big city life and sneaks aboard a freight train traveling west. After accidentally being deposited in the middle of the Arizona desert, the lad wanders into the Diamond Bar Ranch where he manages to find work as a cowpuncher. His complete lack of experience or skills make him the laughing stock of the ranch but he does form a loyal and affectionate friendship – possibly the only one in his life – with a female cow named Brown Eyes. When the latter is carted off to the slaughterhouse, Friendless follows in pursuit, inevitably coming to the rescue but also succeeding in driving the Diamond Bar’s herd to market in Los Angeles against all odds, including a shootout with rivals and a runaway train.

Buster Keaton and Kathleen Myers star in one of Keaton’s most underrated comedies, Go West (1925).

Everything Friendless attempts to do seems destined to failure in Go West. His first task on the ranch is to milk a stubborn cow which he thinks can be accomplished by simply placing a bucket under the animal and waiting for the results. Yet Friendless can be surprisingly resourceful and inventive in the face of adversity such as demonstrating a novel way to herd aggressive bulls into the pen via a matador act.

Buster Keaton plays a clueless wannabe cowboy whose best friend is a cow in Go West (1925).

Some Keaton scholars have suggested that Go West is a subtle satire of Charlie Chaplin’s approach to comedy with its tendencies toward wistfulness and sentimentality. Keaton subverts the audience’s expectations by playing everything poker-faced and avoiding the romantic clichés of the genre by having Friendless more devoted to the cow, who also appears to be the outcast of the herd, than trying to win the love of the ranch owner’s daughter (Kathleen Myers).

A romance between Friendless (Buster Keaton) and the ranch owner’s daughter (Kathleen Myers) is secondary to the cowpoke’s friendship with a cow in Go West (1925).

Keaton’s innate understanding of his craft and appeal was best expressed by James Agee when he wrote, “Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype: it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record…No other comedian could do as much with the dead pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances, how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper in granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it.”

Buster Keaton confirms his reputation as “The Great Stone Face” in a tense gambling scene with armed players in Go West (1925).

Indeed, even in the poker game sequence in Go West, where Friendless is ordered to smile by a gun-toting rival card player, he attempts to force his face into the desired expression using his hands but is not convincing. (The sequence could be a homage or parody of the famous scene in D.W. Griffith’s film Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919) when Lillian Gish tries to force herself to smile amid the most brutal circumstances).The filming of Go West was an expensive proposition for Keaton, who was a stickler for authenticity. “We shot Go West about 60 miles out of Kingman, Arizona,” the actor/director recalled. “We were really out in open country…four cameramen…electrician – generally takes about three men with him…technical man – takes a couple of dozen carpenters with him…Then we house ’em up there, see – we take tents and everything else and a portable kitchen.”

Buster Keaton plays a man named Friendless from the midwest who tries to make a new life on the prairie in Go West (1925).

But shooting on location is often no picnic and the desert heat, often reaching temperatures of 120 degrees in the sun, threatened to melt the emulsion off the film stock so the cameras had to be packed in ice. Meanwhile, Brown Eyes, the co-star of the film, went into heat, which delayed production for two weeks. She couldn’t easily be replaced due to her unique appearance and the fact that Keaton had spent ten days training her.

Buster Keaton tries to imitate the way a real cowboy walks in the silent comedy, Go West (1925), co-starring Howard Truesdale as a ranch owner.

The results were worth it though because Go West is probably Keaton’s most austere and offbeat feature film and gets better with each viewing. Film historian David Thomson calls Go West, “a masterpiece of the moving camera,” and many Keaton scholars agree that the climactic cattle drive from the train depot in Pasadena through the downtown streets of Los Angeles and into the stockyards is one of the silent comedian’s greatest sequences in his films.

Buster Keaton and a cow named Brown Eyes are the true stars of Go West (1925).

Regarding the film’s climactic stampede, Keaton later recalled, “I actually turned ’em loose here in Los Angeles in the Santa Fe depot in the freight yards, and brought ’em up Seventh Street to Broadway…And we put cowboys off every side street to stop people in automobiles from comin’ into it…I brought 300 head of steers up that street…I was in a costume place, and I saw a Devil’s suit…’Cause I was tryin’ to lead ’em towards the slaughter house, I put that suit on and I thought I’d get a funny chase sequence…But as I moved, they stopped too. They piled up on each other. They didn’t mind a stampede at all.”

A rare color photo of Buster Keaton in the 1925 silent comedy, Go West.

In this final sequence, as the cows pour into the streets and the shops along the way, you might catch a glimpse of Joe Keaton, Buster’s father, in a barber shop. According to IMDB, Keaton’s friend, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, also appears in drag in a cameo as a woman in a department store though I have yet to confirm this with my own eyes.

A scene from the underrated Buster Keaton comedy, Go West (1925).

Critics at the time were mixed in their response to Go West. The Variety reviewer complained that “The cow is the whole show,” and Mordant Hall of The New York Times wrote, “Although Buster Keaton’s new film, Go West, is somewhat lackadaisical in the introductory sequences, when the fun does start popping it is rich and uproarious, with countless novel comedy twists.” Other reviewers noted that audiences seemed to enjoy it even if it wasn’t up to the standards of such successes as Sherlock Jr. (1924). Even Keaton seemed disappointed with the final result: “Some parts I liked, but as a picture, in general, I didn’t care for it.”

Go West almost matched the box office success of Keaton’s previous release, Seven Chances, but due to the production costs of shooting on location, the profits were considerably less in comparison. Regardless, Go West enjoys a much better reputation today and was an important stepping stone to Keaton’s masterpiece the following year – The General (1926). Go West is currently available on DVD in a double feature set with Battling Butler from Kino Lorber. The disc was released in September 2011 and is still your best option for purchase until some distributor issues a restored Blu-Ray edition of the film.*This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other websites of interest:

http://www.silentfilm.org/archive/go-west

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1995/10/22/buster-keaton-seriously-funny/89a7ea31-d803-4d8d-a199-9c859e90a2fd/?utm_term=.5daf4cd88b1e

Mark Harris’s best-seller Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood pointed to 1967 as the year that the studio system crumbled and a new order emerged while Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls profiled the subsequent rise of the young turk directors in the seventies who changed cinematic conventions with their idiosyncratic films. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich are usually singled out as the prime movers and shakers by film historians of that era while the once high profile Hal Ashby is often underrated and relegated to the sidelines. Hal, Amy Scott’s new documentary on the director, is a welcome homage that attempts to elevate and restore this influential figure to his rightful place in Hollywood history. 

Left to right: Hal Ashby, Norman Jewison, Rod Steiger and producer Walter Mirisch on Oscar night displaying their awards for In the Heat of the Night (1967).

Trying to cover a director whose work spanned four decades in a ninety minute documentary would be a challenge for any director and Scott, a film editor making her directorial debut, clearly reveres her subject. But Hal feels more like a brisk, lightweight Cliffs Notes version of the director’s life and career than the in-depth portrait he deserves. For example, there is precious little about Ashby’s days as an assistant editor in the late fifties under William Wyler (The Big Country), George Stevens (The Diary of Anne Frank) and others before he hooked up with his mentor Norman Jewison beginning with The Cincinnati Kid. Despite this, Ashby fans will probably enjoy the ride and perhaps younger viewers will seek out the films that established his reputation.

Ruth Gordon, Hal Ashby and Bud Cort on the set of Harold and Maude (1971).

There are certainly things to savor such as clips from Ashby’s memorial service featuring Warren Beatty, which opens the film, and Bud Cort (“Hal loved me the best”). Behind-the-scenes footage of the director on the set of films like Harold and Maude and The Landlord are sprinkled throughout the film and such iconic industry insiders as film producer Peter Bart, Jane Fonda, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, director Norman Jewison, screenwriter Robert Towne and admirers (Judd Apatow, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne) are on hand to offer glowing appraisals and candid comments. Key scenes from Ashby’s most famous films are also well chosen and the documentary often attempts to add some context to each film with some fascinating details about what was happening on and off the set (improvisation instead of a completed script for Coming Home, weaving political and social commentary into the narrative of Shampoo, championing the use of excessive profanity in The Last Detail).

The film poster for The Landlord, a marketing campaign that Hal Ashby especially detested and wanted to change to no avail.

In terms of the presentation, Hal takes a conventional, chronological approach, mixing talking heads with photographs, film clips and sound bites. Scott does employ a few stylistic devices such as imprinting quotes from Ashby on the screen while we hear his voice commenting on his life and career but this is more of a distraction than insightful and the fact that Ashby’s written remarks are sometimes spoken by actor Ben Foster (Leave No Trace, Hell or High Water) creates a strange duality.

Photo by Columbia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock –
Hal Ashby, Otis Young, Jack Nicholson on the set of The Last Detail (Columbia Pictures).

While most of Hal is focused on the man’s gifts as an editor and director and his unique abilities to draw superb performances from his actors, it touches only briefly on his private life and difficult youth including his father’s suicide and his inability to be a dependable husband or father (He was married five times and often employed his current girlfriends on works in progress). His obsessive, workaholic personality and genuine distrust of studio bosses are also addressed in visual footnotes though Norman Jewison claims that it was he who instilled an anti-studio bias in Ashby during the early stages of their friendship.

Ann-Margret, Angelina Jolie and her real-life father Jon Voight in Lookin’ to Get Out (1982).

One touching anecdote involves Leigh MacManus, Ashby’s daughter by his first marriage to Lavon Compton. MacManus laments the fact that she rarely saw her father but she cites Lookin’ to Get Out as her favorite Ashby film, mainly for the scene where Jon Voight’s hapless, self-absorbed gambler is briefly reunited with his abandoned daughter played by Voight’s real-life six-year-old daughter Angelina Jolie, a case of art mirroring life since Voight and Jolie were for many years famously estranged as father and daughter.

Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty on the set of Shampoo (1975).

Certainly the unanswered question in Hal is what actually derailed the director’s career. After a remarkable 7-film run in the seventies from the underrated (The Landlord) to cult favorite (Harold and Maude) to the Oscar-nominated prestige of The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home and Being There, Ashby floundered in one box-office bomb after another. Although you get glimpses of the Las Vegas tragicomedy Lookin’ to Get Out and the murky crime drama, 8 Million Ways to Die, other Ashby projects are virtually ignored like Second-Hand Hearts (aka The Hamster of Happiness), The Rolling Stones’ concert film, Let’s Spend the Night Together, and the Neil Simon romantic comedy, The Slugger’s Wife.  How did Ashby go from superstar status and the giddy highs of Being There to the abject failure of Second-Hand Hearts almost overnight? I mean….what the hell happened? Yes, studio interference and Ashby’s refusal to compromise or relinquish his control over his work were factors in his rapid decline in the eighties. But he also seemed to lose his magic touch for picking material that thoroughly engaged him. Even his genius for casting the right actors seemed to fail him as in the case of the mismatched Robert Blake and Barbara Harris in Second-Hand Hearts.

Hal Ashby and Robert Blake on the set of Second-Hand Hearts (aka The Hamster of Happiness, 1981).

The toxicity of fame, erratic behavior due to escalating drug use and the pressure to turn out hits after his previous track record are all factors in Ashby’s lamentable decline but to get a better understanding of the factors that shaped Ashby as a director as well as what really happened to his career after Being There, I recommend reading Nick Dawson’s well-researched and compelling biography, Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel. It provides a much-needed accompaniment to Scott’s warm, respectful but ultimately skin deep tribute. 

When The Scarlet Empress (1934), Josef von Sternberg’s lavish historical epic starring Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great, proved to be a critical and commercial disaster for Paramount, the director realized his days were numbered at the studio. So why not go for broke in one last picture? The result was The Devil is a Woman (1935).

Josef von Sternberg & Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s

Choosing Pierre Louys’s novel La Femme et le Pantin/The Woman and the Puppet as his source material, von Sternberg announced that this would be his final film with Dietrich, ending an unofficial seven-year partnership with her.

Lionel Atwill is the easily duped victim of the scheming Marlene Dietrich in The Devil is a Woman (1935), directed by Josef von Sternberg.

While all of the seven von Sternberg-Dietrich films are essential viewing for any cinephile, most film historians and critics consider Shanghai Express (1932) the pinnacle of their partnership. But I am particularly fond of The Devil is a Woman because, of all their films, it showcases Dietrich’s most physically animated and stylized performance. The effect is both slyly amusing and blatantly artificial which is the essence of the deceitful courtesan she is portraying.

Conchita (Marlene Dietrich) in costume during a carnival in The Devil is a Woman (1935).

Initially titled Caprice Espagnole and later changed to The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the final collaboration between Dietrich and von Sternberg did nothing to turn the tide of their declining popularity. Many critics were openly hostile to the film and audiences avoided it like the plague. Yet Dietrich would often remark that it was her favorite movie “because I was most beautiful in it.” And, for von Sternberg, it was an intensely personal film, one whose central themes of romantic illusion, sexual obsession and personal degradation served as a symbolic representation of the star and director’s off-screen relationship. The storyline of The Devil Is a Woman unfolds as Don Pasqual (Lionel Atwill), an officer of the Civil Guard, tries to dissuade Antonio (Cesar Romero), a young revolutionary, from becoming involved with Concha Perez, a beautiful but heartless factory girl who makes a game of seducing and discarding her lovers. In flashback, we see how Concha transforms Don Pasqual from a respected member of the community into her willing victim – a puppet she can manipulate for her own pleasure. After subjecting Pasqual to endless ridicule and humiliation, Concha grows bored with her toy and abandons him, though not before ruining his career and reputation. This tale of woe, however, only increases Antonio’s interest in the enigmatic Concha and he soon finds himself yielding to her irresistible sexual allure.

Cesar Romero falls under the spell of a deceitful courtesan (Marlene Dietrich) in Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935).

Originally, John Dos Passos had been assigned to write the script for The Devil Is a Woman, but when he fell ill, Passos’s incomplete screenplay was given to von Sternberg’s longtime assistant, Sam Winston, who completed it. There was also a major change in the casting. Joel McCrea was first hired to play Antonio but was soon fired for insubordination.

Conchita (Marlene Dietrich) witnesses a duel between Don Pasquito (Lionel Atwill) and Antonio (Cesar Romero) in The Devil is a Woman (1935).

According to his replacement, Cesar Romero, von Sternberg was a complete tyrant on the set. In Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich by Donald Spoto, Romero said that, “..,von Sternberg made everyone’s life miserable…but he was especially mean to Dietrich. He bawled her out in front of everyone, made her repeat difficult scenes endlessly and needlessly until she just cried and cried. ‘Do it again!’ he shouted. ‘Faster!….Slower!….’ Well, he had been mad about her, after all, and now that their relationship was ending he took it out on her and everybody else.”

Marlene Dietrich as Conchita models one of Travis Banton’s flamboyant costume designs in The Devil is a Woman (1935).

The director also closely supervised every visual detail of the entire picture from the opening six-minute carnival scene to Marlene’s flamboyant costumes; he painted the sets white in order to reflect more light, and for the duel scene in the forest, he spray-painted everything with aluminum to get the desired effect.

An example of Josef von Sternberg’s extraordinary style of lighting and framing in The Devil is a Woman (1935).

It was no surprise when the Hays Office voiced their objections to The Devil Is a Woman after they saw a final cut of the film. First of all, they didn’t like the title. They also suggested a different ending, one in which Concha looks into a mirror and sees herself as “a scrawny, impoverished bag.” Luckily, those recommendations weren’t enforced, but the film did lose seventeen minutes of footage in some markets such as New York – including the musical number, “If It Isn’t Pain (Then It Isn’t Love)” – going from a running time of 93 minutes to 76. (Running times for the film continue to vary even today between 85 to 76 or 79 minutes.)The bad luck continued when critics weighed in with their reviews; typical of the majority response was this edict from The Herald Tribune – “almost devoid of dramatic substance.” The ambassador from Spain (the setting for The Devil Is a Woman), however, was quite affected by the film and proclaimed it “an insult to Spain and to the Spaniards.” He actually succeeded in getting his government to issue a warning to Paramount – unless they withdrew the film from circulation immediately, all of the studio’s pictures would be banned in Spain. Eventually, the U.S. government stepped in and ordered Paramount to destroy all prints of the film. For many years, it was believed that The Devil Is a Woman was indeed a lost film until von Sternberg’s personal copy turned up for a revival screening at the 1959 Venice Film Festival.

One of several ornate set designs from the post-carnival scene in The Devil is a Woman (1935) starring Marlene Dietrich.

Seen today, The Devil Is a Woman is the perfect summation of von Sternberg’s collaboration with Dietrich. As Conchita, Dietrich is mesmerizing as the manipulative, self-amused but ultimately inscrutable temptress. And von Sternberg’s gifts as a director were at their height, transforming a melodramatic tale into a rich exploration of the director’s personal obsessions and themes. But the film, not unlike the main character of Concha, brought nothing but bad luck to von Sternberg and his career never recovered from the failure.

Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart star in the 1939 western Destry Rides Again.

Ironically, Dietrich would experience a major career revival four years later with Destry Rides Again (1939), which lasted until her retirement from the screen, while von Sternberg’s association with the actress had the reverse effect on his career – a bitter ending so similar to many of his films like The Blue Angel, for which he had created the Dietrich persona.  The Devil Is a Woman was previously filmed in 1920 with Geraldine Farrar and also in 1929 with Conchita Montenegro. Brigitte Bardot starred in a version (The Female aka La Femme et le Pantin, 1959) and Luis Bunuel directed an inspired adaptation of the Louys novel (it was his final film) entitled That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), which had the novel idea of casting two different actresses to play Concha; her cool, manipulative side represented by Carole Bouquet and her carnal, passionate side represented by Angela Molina. The definitive performance, however, is by Dietrich, and for anyone curious about the films she made with von Sternberg, The Devil Is a Woman is highly recommended.

For many years the only option for viewing The Devil is a Woman on DVD was Universal Home Entertainment’s 2-disc set – Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection – which was released in April 2006 and also included Morocco, Blonde Venus, The Flame of New Orleans and Golden Earrings from Dietrich’s Paramount years. In November 2011, Universal finally released a single DVD-R of the film with no extras. The image quality on both releases was good but somewhat soft due to the age of the original materials. In July 2018 The Criterion Collection released Dietrich and von Sternberg in Hollywood on Blu-ray which includes six of their collaborations (The Blue Angel is not included) and a pile of invaluable extras such as a 1935 short on Dietrich and costume designer Travis Banton . To date, this is the best option for viewing The Devil is a Woman and its extraordinary visual design but if you don’t want to spring for this relatively expensive Blu-ray collection which is priced around $62 or more, you might check out the streaming app Filmstruck, which probably offers the film in its digital library. *This is an updated and revised version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Marlene Dietrich plays a deceitful temptress who enjoys toying with men in The Devil is a Woman (1935).

Other websites of interest:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/6711095/Josef-von-Sternberg-the-man-who-made-Marlene-sparkle.html

http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/sternberg/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marlene-Dietrich

https://silverscreenmodes.com/marlene-dietrich-travis-banton/

https://trailersfromhell.com/dietrich-von-sternberg-in-hollywood/

https://www.filmstruck.com/us/

The Mexican film poster for Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Some phobias, often triggered by movies, develop in childhood and stick with you for life like an overwhelming fear of circus clowns or anxiety about being alone in the dark. For me, ventriloquist dummies or anything similar to that like oversized human dolls still gives me the creeps and the horror film that best visualizes this is 1961’s Curse of the Doll People (Mexican title: Munecos Infernales, which translates roughly as “Infernal Dolls”), directed by Benito Alazraki.  

While it obviously borrows elements from Tod Browning’s The Devil Doll (1936) and Dead of Night (1945) and even throws in a ratty-looking zombie for good measure, Curse of the Doll People also looks ahead to such scary-for-their-time chillers like the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror (1975) with Karen Black being stalked by a Zuni warrior fetish doll. But the thing that places this South of the border horror in nightmare territory are the dolls themselves.

Zandor works his black magic on a doll which will soon become a pint-sized assassin in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

They don’t have demonic or monstrous faces like the Chucky Doll in Child’s Play or the title creatures in Joe Dante’s Gremlins. No, they’re more disturbing than that. Is it the immobile quality of their mask-like faces with the dead, staring eyes? Is it the fact that they look like miniaturized versions of authority figures? One could be a judge, another a doctor, another a government official. There is an inflexible grimness about them that is truly unsettling. And the way they move! Who’s behind those masks? Small children? Midgets? The manner in which the tiny assassins go about their business in Curse of the Doll People follows a relentless, repetitive pattern like a recurring nightmare that won’t go away. How would you like to wake up in the middle of the night and see one of these little fellas crawling up toward you from the foot of the bed with a long poisoned needle in hand?

These tiny terrors will sneak up on you with poisoned needles if you’re not paying attention! (from Curse of the Doll People, 1961).

The film’s plot is set in motion by four explorers secretly witnessing a voodoo ceremony in Haiti and being condemned to death by the high priest for observing the private ritual…and for stealing a stone idol from the temple. In due time, all four explorers die under mysterious circumstances, but the curse doesn’t stop there. The families of the four men are also marked for death and the killings continue, committed by insidious little doll-like men who resemble their most recent murder victims.

The evil Zandor (Quintin Bulnes) is behind a series of murders committed by tiny assassins in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Behind it all, of course, is Zandor (Quintin Bulnes), the voodoo priest, who is using mind control to manipulate the dolls (the souls of his victims are trapped inside) and he’s aided in his revenge by his zombie assistant Sabood, who makes spooky music with his flute.

Sabood waits in his coffin until summoned by his master Zandor in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

To be perfectly honest, Curse of the Doll People can be very s-l-o-w at times in its exposition and the behavior of the human protagonists is often exasperating. For instance, Linda (Elvira Quintana), the heroine, is so terrified by the sight of the dolls that she becomes paralyzed with fear, unable to move as they advance toward her. And all of the victims are so self-absorbed in their work or some activity that they never sense any danger or intrusion until the moment of attack. The little bastards might be stealthy as hell but you’d think that someone working in his office would notice one of the little buggers climbing up on a nearby chair and walking across the top of the desk toward him! But no! because this movie follows the illogical pattern of a bad dream.

Linda aka Karina (Elvira Quintana) is menaced by tiny, mind-controlled assassins in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Even if it does have pacing problems and laughable English-dubbed dialogue, Curse of the Doll People makes up for it with eerie, atmospheric art direction and odd, poetic touches like the scene with Sabood and one of the doll-men walking off into the night, hand-in-hand, after committing a murder. Or one where a doll cries out in agony to Linda to help him. There are plenty of perverse touches as well – a gruesome doll autopsy scene and one where a tiny assassin crawls into the bed of a sleeping twelve year old girl to snuggle up. Yikes!

One of the creepy little buggers featured in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Benito Alazraki was primarily a Mexican B-movie genre director churning out westerns (Pistolas Invencibles), comedies (Tan Tin y Las Modelos), crime melodramas (Lost Souls) and musicals (A Ritmo de Twist). His horror/fantasy themed films, however, are better known and deserve a chapter of their own in any history of Mexico’s golden age of horror. In addition to Curse of the Doll People are Espiritismo (1962), probably his most accomplished example of supernatural cinema, Santo Contra Los Zombies (1962) and Frankenstein El Vampiro y Compania (1962), an Abbott and Costello-like horror comedy concoction.

Linda aka Karina (Elvira Quintana) is marked for death in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Curse of the Doll People is also notable for Elvira Quintana as the main heroine Linda (she is named Karina in the Mexican version). Quintana was born in Spain but emigrated to Mexico as a political refugee after the Spanish Civil War. Besides being a knockout beauty, the actress was also a highly skilled dancer and singer and she became a major star in Mexico after the release of Bolero Inmortal (1958), a musical melodrama. Unfortunately her film career was relatively brief and she died of a cerebral embolism in 1968 at the age of 32.

Zandor (Quintin Bulnes) commands one of his homicidal minions in Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Curse of the Doll People is still available on a double feature DVD disc from BCI/Eclipse with another Mexican horror favorite, Night of the Bloody Apes (1969), which has wrestling matches, real footage of open-heart surgery, plenty of female nudity and a simian-like murderer (the result of a gorilla heart transplant) on the loose. The disc, first released in 2006, offers both a Spanish and an English-dubbed version of both films. In 2014, VCI Entertainment also released a DVD which features both the original Spanish language and the English dubbed version of Curse of the Doll People. None of the available versions offer a stellar transfer and all of them look like they were taken from a 16mm TV print so don’t expect the Arrow Films treatment for a title like this…but we can dream, can’t we?  *This is an updated and revised version of a blog that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official Turner Classic Movies blog.

Another one bites the dust thanks to the Curse of the Doll People (1961).

Other website links of interest:

https://www.mexfilmarchive.com/documents/mexican_horror_cinema.html

http://remezcla.com/lists/film/10-mexican-horror-movies-hitting-big-screen-halloween-bam/

https://horrorpedia.com/2013/03/12/the-curse-of-the-doll-people-1961-mexican-horror-film-overview/

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~dwilt/quintana.htm

The name Garry Winogrand might not be familiar to you but you have probably seen some of his most famous photographs over the years. There are his candid celebrity shots that include a young John F. Kennedy amid attendees at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles circa 1960 and Marilyn Monroe on the set of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) as she stands over a subway grate, her skirt billowing around her. More typical are his street scenes and public places portraits such as the one of a young couple frolicking in the surf at Coney Island or the acrobat caught in mid-air above the sidewalk. All of these and many more are included in a deep dive of his four-decade archive in Sasha Waters Freyer’s engrossing documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable.

Coney Island, New York, 1952 (photo by Garry Winogrand).

Produced for the American Masters series on PBS, the film is an excellent overview and critique of Winogrand’s work that compiles an impressive array of resources including audio recordings and interviews with the photographer plus personal observations from former wives, renowned peers and art critics. Often acknowledged as one of the most important American photographers of the 20^th century, Freyer’s documentary makes a good case for this while also delving into aspects of Winogrand’s workaholic nature that eventually became problematic in his final years when his work was being downgraded by art critics in comparison to his peak years in the 60s.

New York Worlds Fair 1964 (photo by Garry Winogrand).

Winogrand, who grew up in the Bronx, doesn’t fit the image of a celebrated photographer like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn and, in conversion, sounds more like a gruff New York cab driver with a from-the-gut, non-pretentious approach to his art: “You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else – and whichever is better you print.”

Apollo 11 Moon Shot, Cape Kennedy, Florida, 1969 (photo by Garry Winogrand).

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable takes a standard chronological approach to its subject but Winogrand’s rise to success from a freelance magazine photographer to being championed by John Szarkowski, MoMa’s highly influential Curator of Photography, is thrillingly documented. Eugene Atget was an early influence, particularly his 1912 photo of Parisians watching an eclipse, and Walker Evans and Robert Frank were obvious inspirations. You can easily see Evans’ penchant for pictorial detail and Frank’s gift for capturing outsiders and the marginalized in aspects of Winogrand’s work. Strangely enough, Weegee aka Arthur Fellig, is not mentioned in the documentary but surely his work, with its gritty urban subject matter, must have been an influence on Winogrand because there are photographs that reflect the same chaotic street incidents and grim urban realism that mirror Weegee’s stark crime scene images.

Los Angeles, 1964 (Photo by Garry Winogrand)

What was it that drove Winogrand to begin fervently documenting the streets of New York with his camera, often neglecting his duties as a husband and father to perfect his craft? At one point in the film, we hear Winogrand admit that through the camera lens he was trying to make sense of the human race and that perhaps he might understand why we are here or if we even deserve redemption as a species. Sentimental or nostalgic are certainly not criticisms that apply to Winogrand’s images but even in the most bleak and despairing images one feels a compassion for the subjects.

American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas, 1964 (photo by Garry Winogrand)

The documentary points to 1964 as Winogrand’s most productive year when he was shooting in Texas and California with a 35mm camera but his real emergence in the art world was probably the New Documents show at MoMA in 1967 which showcased his work alongside Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus. There is a wonderful segment in the film where we also see examples of Winogrand’s color photography but he returned to black and white film exclusively due to budgetary reasons and the convenience of faster lab processing.

Central Park Zoo, 1967 (photo by Garry Winogrand)

Freyer occasionally uses pop music to mark transitions in Winogrand’s career and as an excuse to display numerous iconic images in a music video style: Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind” represents the 50s, Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” is used for the 60s and so on. Freyer also addresses the controversies that often arose over some of Winogrand’s work such as the infamous 1967 photo of an interracial couple holding pet monkeys dressed like small children as they visited the Central Park Zoo.

An image from Garry Winogrand’s 1975 photo collection, Women Are Beautiful.

Women are Beautiful, Winogrand’s 1975 portfolio, had the misfortune to appear at a time when the feminist movement was on the rise and the work was harshly criticized in some circles as being blatantly focused on female anatomy and reflective of an old-school, male-dominated art world that was out of touch with the times. Certainly some of those photos are clear evidence of “the male gaze” but others are celebratory, even empowering in their depictions of women on the street and in private moments, removed from domestic stereotypes or male-female tableaus.

New York-1963 (photograph by Garry Winogrand, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona)

A mystery emerges in the final act of Freyer’s documentary regarding Winogrand’s declining productivity in later years. While he was always an energetic, compulsive picture taker averaging over 600 rolls of film a year, he took the time to review and edit his material, selecting the best shots. Toward the end of his life though, the picture taking became almost obsessive and he no longer seemed interested in the editing process, which explains why thousands of rolls of film that Winogrand took still remain undeveloped. Some of his peers considered it a form of artistic suicide but Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable offers some interesting theories on Winogrand’s mindset while also making a convincing argument that his later images have been unfairly underrated and are ripe for a re-evaluation. Thanks to Freyer’s thoughtful documentary, viewers will no doubt be motivated to seek out Winogrand’s work and help secure his legacy as an American original.

Albuquerque New Mexico 1957 (photo by Garry Winogrand)

Other websites of interest:

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-winogrand-garry.htm

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/garry-winogrand-garry-winogrand-behind-the-legend

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/15/-sp-garry-winogrand-genius-american-street-photography

https://www.casualphotophile.com/2017/11/04/five-favorite-photos-garry-winogrand/

The annual Virginia Film Festival (VFF) in Charlottesville recently celebrated its 31^st year of operation on Nov.1-4 and offered attendees the opportunity to select from over 150 films, many of which arrived leaden with awards and critical acclaim from previous festivals like Cannes and Telluride. Programming content focused on specific themes and topics is also part of the VFF tradition and the 2018 event included a film series on Race in America, which included the premiere of Paul Robert’s Charlotteville about the tragic events of Aug. 11 & 12, 2017, and sidebars on Orson Welles, Virginia filmmakers, American folk culture and music and a vast array of international films.  

The opening night premiere of Peter Farrelly’s Green Book was a sold-out screening and proved to be a lightweight, audience-pleasing entertainment but it could have been so much more. Set in 1962, the film follows African-American jazz pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Midwest and Deep South accompanied by his fellow musicians and chauffeur/bodyguard Tony Lip (aka Frank Anthony Vallelonga). Some critics have described this film as a racial twist on Driving Miss Daisy with Viggo Mortensen as the brash, uncouth streetwise driver from the Bronx and Mahershala Ali as his proud, erudite and uniquely talented employer. (The film title refers to a publication known as The Negro Motorist Green Book, which served as a guide to motels, restaurants and other businesses that were deemed relatively friendly to African-Americans).

Viggo Mortensen plays chauffeur/bodyguard Tony Lipp and Mahershala Ali is jazz pianist Don Shirley in Green Book (2018).

Green Book opens with the disclaimer “inspired by a true friendship” but what follows seems much more like a road movie dramedy than a realistic depiction of what really transpired between these two men, who couldn’t be more different in temperament, world view or backgrounds. Yes, there are fleeting moments of fear and anxiety as the duo encounter ugly situations in the Jim Crow South but the overall feel of the movie is warm and fuzzy with the rough edges buffed off. Both Mortensen and Ali are highly skilled, charismatic actors and they manage to make their caricatured roles engaging even if subtlety is missing in Farrelly’s broad strokes approach. A typical example involves the eating of fried chicken, which is alien to Shirley’s culinary upbringing, and he nibbles at it daintily until Tony encourages him to have at it with unrestrained gusto. This is just one of many scenes which play on racial stereotypes and is treated as a comedy routine but that’s not surprising when you realize the director is the same man who co-wrote and directed Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary with his brother Bobby.  Much more unnerving and ambitious in execution is Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx, a German/Austrian film in which Rieke (Susanne Wolff), a female doctor, departs Gibraltar on her yacht bound for Ascension Island, which is off the coast of Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean. With minimal dialogue and an emphasis on natural sound over a wall-to-wall music score, Fischer generates a slowly escalating dread as Rieke sails solo into the open sea and soon encounters a life-threatening storm. The first third of Styx is like a gender variation on All is Lost, J.C. Chandor’s one man drama in which Robert Redford found himself trapped on a sinking boat. Luckily disaster is averted but Rieke encounters a new crisis in the form of a stranded freighter carrying a large number of African refugees. Clearly her yacht is too small to rescue many shipwreck survivors and her supplies are limited so what can she do?

Susanne Wolff plays a doctor who goes on a solo yachting holiday that becomes a humanitarian crisis in Styx (2018), directed by Wolfgang Fischer.

The remainder of Styx becomes both a race against time and a portrait of personal and moral responsibility under duress. Wolff is superb as the fearless, take-charge heroine but her efforts to help the migrants are undermined by delayed responses from Coast Guard rescue operations, creating a perfect storm of dysfunction. Thought-provoking if downbeat, Fischer’s film takes an intimate, small scale approach to an international problem that offers no easy remedies for fixing.Another film featuring a strong female character who is self-sufficient and proactive is Woman at War, directed by Benedikt Erlingsoon. The film avoids easy classification and combines spy thriller elements with deadpan whimsy and surrealistic touches. Halldora Geirharosdottir is outstanding in a dual role as two twin sisters, Halla and Asa. The former is a music teacher with a secret life as an eco-terrorist, the latter is a yoga instructor who has no idea of her sister’s political agenda.

Halldora Geirharosdottir plays a fierce eco-terrorist in the quirky Icelandic film, Woman at War (2018), directed by Benedikt Erlingsson.

For most of the film, Halla wages a one-woman war against a rural aluminum factory which is polluting the environment. She disconnects power lines, topples towers and, in one awe-inspiring sequence, shoots a drone with a tethered arrow and wrestles it to the ground, stomping it to pieces. One of the oddball but appealing aspects of Woman at War revolves around Erlingsson’s unconventional integration of David Thor Jonsson’s catchy music score into the narrative. The musicians, which include a tuba player, a percussionist, a pianist/accordionist and three Icelandic folk singers, function as a sort of Greek chorus in the film, often performing in the background or foreground but seemingly invisible to everyone except possibly Halla, who appears to acknowledge them in more than one scene.

Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir), an environmental activist, is shadowed by a phantom orchestra in the offbeat Woman at War (2018), filmed in Iceland.

This stylistic device may prove to be too self-conscious and distracting for some viewers but I found it adds a quirky, lighthearted touch that prevents the film from becoming a predictable pro-environmental polemic. And the stunning volcanic landscapes of Iceland, photographed by Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson, are an added plus.  Der Mann aus Dem Eis, which is being released in the U.S. as Iceman, is an impressively mounted period piece that takes place more than 5,300 years ago. It recounts the backstory of a mummified man that was found in the Otztal Alps in 1991 and the events that led to his violent death. One novel aspect of Iceman is the dialogue, which is in Rhaetian, an extinct language that was once used in the Eastern European Alps region. There are no subtitles and none are needed to follow the stripped-down, linear narrative.

Italian actor Franco Nero makes a surprise cameo in Felix Randau’s period revenge adventure, Iceman (2017), set in Iceland.

Kelab (Jurgen Vogel), the main protagonist, goes out to forage and hunt for his family in the wilds one day but when he returns home, he discovers that his village has been attacked by invaders, an invaluable talisman (a mirrored stone) has been stolen and his family slaughtered except for his newborn child. Kelab sets out in pursuit of his enemies with baby-in-tow but leaves his offspring with a mountain couple at the midpoint before resuming his quest for vengeance.

Jurgen Vogel plays a nomadic mountaineer seeking revenge for his family’s murderers in Felix Randau’s Iceman (2017).

Life was a daily struggle to exist in pre-Roman times and Iceman drives that home in nearly every scene. Directed by Felix Randau and featuring a cameo by an unrecognizable Franco Nero, this historic reenactment is harsh and brutal but never boring and there are several dramatically effective moments such as the scene where Kelab falls through a collapsed snow-covered mountain path and has to climb out of the abyss using his ax as an ice pick. But the minimalistic approach to character development prevents easy identification or empathy with anyone in this survival-of-the-fittest universe. Despite the stunning locales and cinematography by Jakub Bejnarowicz (the movie was filmed in Germany, Austria and Italy), Iceman remains a curiously detached emotional experience that lacks resonance. Without a doubt the most original and audacious film I saw at VFF was Ali Abbasi’s Border (Swedish title: Grans). To describe it as a gender-bender police procedural drama crossed with magic realism and Nordic folklore doesn’t really do justice to the film’s shape-shifting narrative but it does prepare you for something off the beaten path. Tina (Eva Melander) is a border control agent in rural Sweden with a knack for detecting illegal activities through her sense of smell. She possesses more than just advanced olfactory senses. Her talent is almost telepathic and she can sense fear, anger, deceit and other human behaviors through her nose. This explains how she apprehends a traveller who is trying to smuggle a micro-sized pedophile sex tape across the border in his iPhone.

A pornography smuggler (left) is about to be apprehended by border guard Tina (Eva Melander, right) in Border (2018).

Just when you think Border is going to turn into a crime thriller with Tina being promoted to head investigator, the movie takes a left turn and introduces Voce (Eero Milonoff), an insect collector among other things, who piques Tina’s interest. First of all, they share similar physical characteristics – thick Cro-Magnon foreheads, a pronounced overbite, and hulking, hairy physiques. But they also share some extraordinary skills which are not typical of mere mortals. Tina and Voce become soul mates and something more but just when you think Border is becoming a romantic comedy about two bestial-looking loners who find each other, it transitions into something darker and stranger.

Vore (Eero Milonoff, left) and Tina (Eva Melander) are soul mates but outsiders in the human race in the Swedish fantasy Border (2018).

Melander and Milonoff are truly remarkable as Tina and Voce, conveying conflicted emotions and deep-rooted thoughts through facial and physical movements despite the heavy prosthetic makeup that encases their features. And Abbasi succeeds brilliantly at constantly changing the tone and direction without losing his footing and ending up with something that tries too hard to be weird. Border might not be for everyone but if you give in to its mysterious undertow you’ll be pulled along on a journey you won’t soon forget.

The opening shot of the Italian film, Dogman (2018), foretells a story that is as harsh and despairing as Gomorrah (2008), an earlier film by Matteo Garrone.

Italian director Matteo Garrone first commanded international attention with his breakthrough crime epic, Gomorrah, in 2008, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, among other awards. His two follow-up films, Reality (2012) and Tale of Tales (2015), were a complete departure from the grim seriousness of Gomorrah – the former was a satiric comedy, the latter a contemporary fairy tale – but Dogman is a return to the bleak, post-neorealism of Gomorrah. Unlike the multiply storylines and cavalcade of characters in the latter film, Garrone is working on a smaller scale here. The central focus of the story is Marcello (a moving performance by Marcello Fonte), a slight, affable, sad-eyed man who runs a dog grooming business in an economically depressed neighborhood. Simoncino (Edoardo Pesce), a former boxer turned thug, terrorizes the community and constantly bullies Marcello into aiding and abetting his criminal behavior.

Marcello (Marcello Fonte, right) is bullied by the sociopathic Simoncino (Edoardo Pesce) in Matteo Garrone’s critically acclaimed film, Dogman (2018).

We first see Marcello coerced into driving Marcello and his accomplice to a gated residence where the culprits stage a home invasion and stuff a barking dog into a freezer. Marcello returns to the scene of the crime to rescue the dog in one of many scenes that confirm his innate kindness and gentle nature but even such an easily manipulated and put-upon individual has his limits.

Marcello Forte delivers a tour-de-force performance in Matteo Garrone’s latest triumph, Dogman (2018).

Dogman gradually coalesces into a beautifully orchestrated act of comeuppance for the menacing Simoncino but the darker and more violent aspects of the story are balanced by the life-affirming moments in Marcello’s life – time spent with his beloved daughter on skin-diving vacations, perfecting the hair style for a poodle in a competitive dog show or preparing a simple meal at home and watching TV with his pet. Garrone brings all of Marcello’s suppressed emotions about his place in society and his relationship with Simoncino to the surface in an unexpectedly ironic ending, which is guaranteed to haunt viewers for a long time.  Orson Welles was alive and well, at least in spirit, at this year’s VFF and was represented by four films – a revival of F for Fake (1973), a quasi-documentary about fakes and frauds featuring art forger Elmyr de Hory and infamous biographer Clifford Irving; the premiere of The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’ uncompleted final film which he often promised would be greater than Citizen Kane; The Eyes of Orson Welles, Mark Cousins’ personal essay on the director and his career; and They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, a comprehensive documentary on the financing, making and eventual abandonment of Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind. Directed by Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is enormously entertaining but also sad and ultimately a tragedy about a great director’s final years. Packed with archival material from talk shows, news conferences, outtakes from The Other Side of the Wind and current interviews with major players from Welles’s final film (Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall, Rich Little and others), Neville’s documentary traces Wind’s production history from the beginning in 1970 to the uncompleted feature being locked up over legal and financial matters in the late seventies to Welles’ death in 1984. Aaron Wickenden and Jason Zeldes’ fast-cut, dizzying editing style approximates the frenetic pace and look of The Other Side of the Wind but it may be too much for viewers susceptible to motion sickness. Still, the documentary is essential viewing for fans of Welles and it makes an ideal companion piece to The Other Side of the Wind, which can be a bewilderingly and disorienting experience if you see it cold with little or no information about its origin or Welles’ vision for it.

Crew members set up a scene for Orson Welles’s final film epic, The Other Side of the Wind, in the documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018), directed by Morgan Neville. (Director/actor Peter Bogdanovich is on the far left and Orson Welles is far right).

Whenever the subject of screwball comedy comes up, I usually think of the same handful of titles in this short-lived movie genre which began sometime in the early thirties with such models of the form as Twentieth Century (1934) and It Happened One Night (1934) and ended sometime in the early forties between the time of Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1942) and Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).  Like the film noir genre which continues to yield overlooked gems like Crime Wave (1954) and Highway 301 (1950), many lesser known and almost forgotten entries in the screwball comedy category continue to resurface on Turner Classic Movies, reminding us that occasionally you might find a diamond in the rough. Such is the case with If You Could Only Cook (1935). 

Why this film isn’t as well known as My Man Godfrey (1936) or Nothing Sacred (1937) or other more famous screwball comedies is a bit of a mystery because it is practically note perfect from start to finish and a total delight for the duration of its brisk 72-minute running time. The storyline might not be particularly original as it trades on a class reversal/mistaken identity plot twist so popular in comedies of its era but the sharp, socially observant dialogue by Howard J. Green & Gertrude Purcell, witty performances by the ensemble cast, stylish Art Deco art direction and a Capra-like mixture of wisecracks, sentiment, romance and Depression era populism elevate If You Could Only Cook to the upper echelons of the genre.

Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall) and Joan Hawthorne (Jean Arthur) meet on a park bench and hatch an employment scheme during the Depression in If You Could Only Cook (1935), directed by William A. Seiter.

When the film opens, Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall), the head of a large automobile firm, walks out on a board of directors meeting when they reject one of his new car designs and goes to the park to gather his thoughts. Sharing a bench with a woman searching the want ads, he is mistaken for someone unemployed like her.  When Joan (Jean Arthur) proposes that they pose as a married couple and apply for a butler and maid position, Jim agrees because he wants to help her and the masquerade intrigues him.

Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur audition as butler and cook for gangster mogul Leo Carrillo (lower right) and his henchman Lionel Stander in If You Could Only Cook (1935).

The complications begin once they are hired as servants for Mike Rossini (Leo Carrillo), a notorious mobster, and have to maintain their charade of being married. Jim, of course, hides his real identity from Joan, as well including the fact that his pending marriage to Evelyn Fletcher (Frieda Inescort) is only a few days away. Anxious to play his part well, Jim even sneaks home at one point to take lessons in “butlering” from his baffled manservant Jennings (Romaine Callender).

A publicity still from William A. Seiter’s If You Could Only Cook (1935).

“You must know the master of the house like a book,” Jennings informs him, stressing “Most times sir, you’ll find it a very uninteresting and uninspired book but it’s all part of the job, sir…You must give him the impression you are hanging on every word he says, even though it is drivel.”

“Oh, is that what you do?” Buchanan asks.

“Yes, sir…I mean no sir,” Jennings quickly answers, realizing his candor has just overstepped the bounds of their master-servant relationship.

Lionel Stander (far right) provides a comic, last minute twist to the screwball comedy, If You Could Only Cook (1935).

Meanwhile, Flash (Lionel Stander), Rossini’s overly suspicious henchman, smells something funny about the whole servant arrangement and starts his own investigation of Buchanan, which brings about the topsy-turvy ending.

Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur pretend to be married servants in order to work together in If You Could Only Cook (1935).

Herbert Marshall, who always projects an elegant, sophisticated and intelligent demeanor that is the epitome of an upper class British gentleman, is allowed to loosen up in this outing. Or maybe it’s Jean Arthur who deserves the credit for drawing him out of his stereotypical mode, resulting in a much more animated and lively performance than usual. They really do make a marvelous comedy team with real chemistry between them and it makes their evolving romance something to root for.

Leo Carrillo (right) plays a gangster with a yen for gourmet cooking and Lionel Stander plays his roughneck associate in the screwball comedy, If You Could Only Cook (1935).

Almost upstaging them are Leo Carrillo and Lionel Stander who are great fun in their tongue-in-cheek impersonations of a nouveau-riche gangster and his crude, streetwise sidekick. Carrillo, in particular, is hilarious as an enthusiastic gourmet who gets wildly excited by Joan’s cooking (watch him roll those crazy eyes). “Is this Lobster Thermidor or is that Lobster Thermidor?,” he exclaims rapturously after taking a bite of Joan’s latest creation while Stander denotes his boss’s pretentiousness with the sarcastic response: “I don’t know. Is it?” Stander’s sour, disdainful personality and his disinterest in just about everything that reeks of upper class respectability makes him the ideal straight man for Carrillo’s whimsical, status-conscious racketeer.

Leo Carrillo played Pancho in the popular 1950-1956 TV series, The Cisco Kid.

Carrillo was usually stereotyped as a Latino character in films (In Caliente [1935], The Gay Desperado [1936]) and television (The Cisco Kid [1950-1956]) and often played gangsters and villains (Parachute Jumper [1933], Manhattan Merry-Go-Round [1937]) so it’s fun to see him here, playing fast and loose as this self-made “businessman” with obvious Italian roots.

A publicity still from If You Could Only Cook (1935) starring Jean Arthur and Leo Carrillo as the gangster who hires her as his cook.

Offscreen Carrillo was a man of many talents who began his career as a cartoonist at the San Francisco Examiner before turning to the stage and later movies. He was also a dedicated conservationist who served on the California Beach and Parks commission for years and eventually had a park dedicated to him for his service to the state – The Leo Carrillo State Park, off the Pacific Coast Highway, west of Malibu. It’s also interesting to note that in the context of the film If You Could Only Cook, Herbert Marshall’s Buchanan character is depicted as an automobile industry visionary but in real life Carrillo was a genuine connoisseur of cars and his customized version of a 1947 Chrysler Town and Country convertible has been featured in several photograph books.

An early publicity photo of character actor Lionel Stander

Stander, like Carrillo, was also typecast often, playing cynical urban types with shark-like instincts (The Last Gangster [1937], A Star is Born [1936] ). He gets to parody that aspect of himself here and the only times he shows any real joy or love for his work is when he’s either rushing off to shoot or kidnap somebody – all of which is played for laughs. But even if Rossini and Flash are clearly dangerous individuals if crossed, they have their soft spots and, in one of the more touching and sweetly comic scenes in If You Could Only Cook, they bail Joan out of jail for a false theft charge. As they take her home in a taxi, Rossini, who has designs on Joan, can’t resist showing her the goodbye note Jim left her when he returned to his fiancee and scheduled wedding. Heartbroken, Joan breaks down in tears. Instead of feeling vindication for their actions, both Rossini and Flash feel embarrassed by their attempts to expose Buchanan and its effect on Joan, which the camera captures in short, telling closeups.

Rossini: “Didn’t you know his racket when you married him?”

Joan: “I didn’t marry him.”

Rossini: “Well, how’d a nice girl like you get mixed up with a mug like that?”

Joan (sobbing): “He isn’t a mug.”

Rossini: “How’d he manage to sell you that bill of goods? Why did you fall for him?”

Joan mournfully says, “The Depression,” and starts bawling again, while Flash shakes his head disgustedly and mutters, “I’ve heard a lot of things blamed on the Depression.”

Leo Carrillo and Jean Arthur star in the overlooked screwball comedy If You Could Only Cook (1935), directed by William A. Seiter.

When If You Could Only Cook was released in England, it was advertised as a Frank Capra production though Capra had no connection to the film at all. It was directed by William A. Seiter (Roberta [1935], Room Service [1938]) but Harry Cohn, the studio head at Columbia, was exploiting Capra’s name erroneously as a way to market it since Capra was a household name after the runaway success of It Happened One Night. When Capra found out about this, he was outraged and filed a lawsuit against Cohn.

Columbia Studios mogul Harry Cohn (left) and director Frank Capra

To placate the director, Cohn offered Capra a percentage of the profits of If You Could Only Cook and some upcoming films that would exploit the Capra name. But the director refused and demanded a release from his contract. Feuds over the editing of Lost Horizon and Cohn’s refusal to purchase the film rights to the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play You Can’t Take It With You had soured permanently soured Capra on Columbia.

Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn (left) and the studio’s most valuable director, Frank Capra, appear with the Best Picture Oscar for You Can’t Take It With You (1938).

The lawsuit proceeded and after several months of Capra not working, it began to look like the director might win his case. Cohn paid Capra a surprise visit at his house and asked him to drop the litigation. “Damn you, Cohn,” Capra said, “You know what you’re asking me to do? Lose a year’s time, a year’s salary, ten thousand dollars in attorney’s fees, forget a year of eating my guts out, and come back to the studio as if nothing had happened. Just to save your neck. Is that what you expect me to do?”

“Yes, Frank. That’s what I’m asking you to do,” Cohn replied.

In his autobiography, The Name Above the Title, Capra admitted that he surprised himself by agreeing to Cohn’s request but the mogul then offered him an unexpected concession: “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna call my New York partners and tell ‘em to approve paying you for one of the contract pictures as if you had made it. That leaves you only two [more pictures on the contract]. I’m gonna tell ‘em to approve buying that play you’re nuts about, You Can’t Take It With You, for $200,000 – that last year I told you I wouldn’t pay two hundred G’s for the second coming.” Capra later admitted after the Cohn meeting that “disgust and admiration swirled through my head…He disarmed me with my own specialty: sentiment. Capra-corn.”

Jean Arthur plays a renowned reporter who is charged with getting the real scoop on too-good-to-be-true Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).

Even if the director had been furious at Cohn for promoting If You Could Only Cook as if it were a Capra movie, he must have seen the film because he cast Jean Arthur in his next feature Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which Arthur made directly after this. Arthur would continue to shine and steal the spotlight in such subsequent Capra productions as You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) but if you’ve never seen her in If You Could Only Cook, you’re in for a treat. The film airs occasionally on Turner Classic Movies but it is still available as one of four titles on Volume 1 of the DVD series Icons of Screwball Comedy from Columbia; the other titles include 1940’s Too Many Husbands (also starring Jean Arthur) and two Rosalind Russell comedies, My Sister Eileen (1942) and She Wouldn’t Say Yes (1945).

Herbert Marshall, Jean Arthur & Leo Carrillo make an oddball romantic triangle in the screwball comedy, If You Could Only Cook (1935).

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

Other links of interest:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-A-Seiter

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy-Awards-Crime-Films/Columbia-CAPRA-COHN-AND-THECOLUMBIA-HOUSE-STYLE.html

https://www.bestmoviesbyfarr.com/articles/jean-arthur-bio/2016/06

https://www.bestmoviesbyfarr.com/articles/jean-arthur-bio/2016/06

http://streamline.filmstruck.com/2008/08/09/too-many-husbands-and-the-code/

A young Japanese butterfly collector sees a rare species in his part of Japan in Silence Has No Wings (aka Tobenai Chinmoku, 1966), directed by Kazuo Kuroki.

What happens when you take an idea for a nature documentary short about a specific type of butterfly like the Nagasaki Swallowtail (papilla memnon) and expand it into an experimental narrative feature incorporating stylistic influences of the French New Wave with allegorical and sociological overtones? The result is Silence Has No Wings (aka Tobenai Chinmoku, 1966), a visually astonishing and rarely seen film by Japanese director Kazuo Kuroki, who began his career as an assistant director before helming several public relations and documentary shorts like Electric Rolling Stock of Toshiba (aka Toshiba Sharyo, 1958) and The Seawall (aka Kaiheki, 1959).

You could say that – on the surface – Silence Has No Wings is like a road movie but instead of a human protagonist you have an insect larva transitioning into a caterpillar and eventually a butterfly as it makes its way across Japan from Hokkaido, the northernmost of the country’s islands, to Yokohama, which is southwest of Tokyo. The movie opens and closes with a framing device that sets up the journey that is about to unfold.

A young student pursues an elusive butterfly in Kazuo Kuroki’s fascinating road trip allegory, Silence Has No Wings (1966), an overlooked Japanese masterpiece.

A pre-teen schoolboy is fascinated by the exotic butterflies he sees in a display room and he later stalks and captures a rare species in the fields. When he proudly displays the captured Swallowtail to his teacher, his discovery is received in an incredulous manner. How could the boy have come into possession of this butterfly which is native to the Southern tropics of Japan and only feeds on zabon trees (a type of Japanese citrus like grapefruit), which are unknown in Hokkaido? The teacher sends the schoolboy to an authority on butterflies who compares his Swallowtail sample to a scientific hoax, drawing parallels to the infamous case of the Piltdown Man where fossilized human remains were passed off as the bones of someone from the Paleozoic era. In frustration, the boy flees into the countryside with his specimen and encounters a mysterious woman (Mariko Kaga) in the misty underbrush. She takes him to her father, a woodcutter, who advises the schoolboy that if he truly believed his dead butterfly was once alive and could fly, he should ignore those who doubted him.

Mariko Kaga plays a recurring female muse throughout the narrative of Kazuo Kuroki’s Silence Has No Wings (1966).

It is at this point that Silence Has No Wings takes on a vignette-like approach to the narrative as it moves from city to city, adopting various genre forms (melodrama, musical, spy thriller, etc.) to tell each story with Mariko Kaga serving as the human link in each episode. Is she some sort of Japanese everywoman or a recurring motif intended to represent post-war Japan? Only director/co-writer Kazuo Kuroki knows for sure but even when some of the narrative threads become impenetrable or obtuse, Silence Has No Wings works as a haunting cinematic poem. Even audiences who normally find underground or experimental cinema boring or pretentious can enjoy Kuroki’s film as a purely sensory experience.  This is a movie you feel on a purely instinctual level thanks to the evocative soundscapes, shifting emotional tones, a poignant recurring theme song and music score by Teizo Matsumura and the stunning black and white cinematography of Tatsuo Suzuki, which goes from microscopic close-ups of larva eating zabon leaves to dramatic lighting schemes in the style of a film noir thriller.

A scene from Kazuo Kuroki’s Silence Has No Wings (1966), which was heavily influenced by the French New Wave.

Each vignette is identified by the city or region in which it takes place so you have the journey begin in Hokkaido and move to Nagasaki as the caterpillar hitches a ride on a train bound for Tokyo and ends up on a ceremonial warrior costume in Hagi. Other stops along the way include Hiroshima, Kyoto, Osaka and Yokohoma before Silence Has No Wings circles back to its origins in Hokkaido.

A scene from Kazuo Kuroki’s Silence Has No Wings (1966), which addresses the past (Hiroshima and earlier), the present and the future of Japan through an allegory about the cross country flight of a butterfly.

The Hiroshima segment is possibly the most melancholic and philosophical of the vignettes as it explores the post-WW2 traumas of that city, particularly the fate of survivors who are slowly dying from the lingering effects of the atomic bomb. Over footage of memorial lanterns floating on the river at night and pedestrians wandering the city streets you hear the voice-over of anonymous victims say, “Something’s inside our bodies to periodically bring back memories. I’m fine today but you never know when the disease will get you….You wonder when the time will come when you can honestly say it was good to be alive.”

Director Kazuo Kuroki on the set of Silence Has No Wings (aka Tobenai Chinmoku, 1966).

In an interview with Yasui Yoshio for the website Documentarists of Japan, director Kuroki discussed the origins of Silence Has No Wings. It was originally a project that was assigned by Toho studios, which had recently scored an international art house success with Woman in the Dunes (aka Suna No Onna, 1964), to documentary specialist Matsukawa Yasuo. Yasuo didn’t want to do it so he handed the screenplay for a short film entitled “The Lonesome Butterfly” to Kuroki, who was inspired to expand it into an unconventional narrative fiction with a title inspired by a line in a Federico Garcia Lorca poem.

Eiji Okada plays an entomologist who is lured into an inescapable trap in Woman in the Dunes (aka Suna No Onna, 1964), directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.

Kuroki freely admits to being influenced by the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais and it’s no surprise that Silence Has No Wings was later praised and championed in France by such influential cineastes as Marc Allégret (Blanche Fury, Lady Chatterly’s Lover), Pierre Braunberger (producer of Shoot the Piano Player, Vivre Sa Vie, Muriel) and Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinemathèque in Paris.

A scene from the Hiroshima segment of Kazuo Kuroki’s vignette-like allegory of Japan, Silence Has No Wings (1966).

In the aforementioned interview, Kuroki explains why he was attracted to Silence Has No Wings and his original intentions for the film: “I wanted to make films where the non-existent really does exist…and that’s why I focused the film on the butterfly. From one fanatic ideology centered around the Emperor to another one centered around MacArthur, that idea of our conversion to postwar democracy was represented through the butterfly. And I wanted to invest in it all the bitterness of the Showa Era (1927-1989) where a difference of a few years could mean the difference between wartime and postwar. It is about a Japan that one day will surely alter the Peace Article of its Constitution, a Japan that will again become one of a small number of military states to wage war once more. The cinematic version of this prediction was Silence Has No Wings.”

Kei Sato plays a dual role in the offbeat 1970 yakuzi thriller, Evil Spirits of Japan (aka Nippon no akuryo), directed by Kazuo Kuroki.

When Kuroki completed his film, it was scheduled for a national release in Japan. Unfortunately, once the company heads at Toho screened the movie, they decided to shelve it instead, proclaiming it “a lunatic film.” A year later, Silence Has No Wings was picked up for distribution by the Art Theatre Guild of Japan (ATG) and thanks to that organization, the film slowly acquired an international following. In recent years, Silence Has No Wings has popped up at rare repertory screenings in the U.S. such as The Japan Society in NYC but Kuroki still remains a little-known director on these shores in comparison to more famous peers like Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) and Shohei Imamura (The Insect Woman, The Battle of Narayama). That’s a shame since Kuroki’s later films were much less experimental in nature and more accessible to mainstream audiences such as his 1970 yakuza thriller Evil Spirits of Japan (aka Nippon No Akuryo) or 1974’s The Assassination of Ryoma (aka Ryoma Ansatsu), a historical drama set during the years 1836-1867); both of those were commercial successes in Japan.

Mariko Kaga plays a variety of female roles in the metaphorical road trip film, Silence Has No Wings (1966) by Japanese director Kazuo Kuroki.

Another interesting aspect of Silence Has No Wings is Kuroki’s use of Mariko Kaga in the film. Appearing in various guises throughout the film, which range from femme fatale murderess to fashion model to Kyoto temple entertainer, Kaga’s persona is as shape-shifting as the central metaphor of the larva/caterpillar/butterfly. It was certainly shrewd casting on Kuroki’s part because Kaga was a rising Japanese star at the time, having appeared in such now cult titles as Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower (1964), Ko Nakahira’s Only on Mondays (1964) and Nagisa Oshima’s Pleasures of the Flesh (1965). Kaga would go on to win awards and critical acclaim for such films as Kohei Oguri’s Muddy River (aka Doro No Kaga,1981) and Yoshihiro Fukagawa’s In His Chart (aka Kamisama No Karute, 2011) and continues to remain active in Japanese cinema today.

Mariko Kaga plays a young hellion who hooks up with ex-convict gangster Ryo Ikebe in Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower (1964).

Silence Has No Wings is not currently available on any format in the U.S. and may be missing in action for years to come unless some enterprising distributor like Arrow Films or The Criterion Collection step in to save it from oblivion. Meanwhile, you might be able to score a bootleg of it from gray market providers. It is well worth seeking out.

A young butterfly collector captures an exotic species of the insect but no one will believe he didn’t obtain it through other means in Silence Has No Wings (1966), a Japanese film by Kazuo Kuroki.

Other links of interest:

https://www.yidff.jp/docbox/18/box18-1-1-e.html

http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2011/08/17/silence-has-no-wings/

http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN19950

https://www.japansociety.org/event/silence-has-no-wings